DEDICATION
For Laërtes—Bob Weir, having taken sweet and long care on what looks like
the “outskirts,” but is the very underlying, alive pulse; born at the bay, drawn to
ranch life so very young, and through all the currents still gently moving that
golden River to the ocean, even through his own Being,
the Weir where the Flow will breech its ancient barrier after millenniums and
the Song and eternal be heard again and flow to envelop us all
And for the alive Poetry of the Grateful Dead: Mickey Hart, Bill Kreutzmann
and Phil Lesh for that eternal structure and Rhythm, the healing vibrations,
always breaking through, and the real and abiding kindness, generosity and
wisdom that have moved the depths, together, undaunted for over fifty years
Jerry Garcia, for the spirit and notes, still very real, and that live,
Robert Hunter, Donna Godchaux, Tom Constanten,
and those who have passed but whose presences are with us still, John Perry
Barlow, Ron “Pigpen” McKernan, Keith Godchaux, Brent Mydland, Vince
Welnick
I understand what Joseph Campbell meant when he saw the Grateful Dead live
in concert and with his life-long studies the world and history over exclaimed,
“Holy God! Everyone just lost themselves in everybody else here!”
About this live, transformative epiphany Campbell stated:
“[It was the] wonderful innocence and the marvel of life when it recognizes
itself in harmony with all the others. Everyone is somehow or other at one with
everybody else . . . this is the world’s only answer to the atom bomb. The atom
bomb is based on differentiation: I-and-not-that-guy-over-there. Divisiveness is
socially based. It has nothing to do with nature at all. It is a contrivance and
here, suddenly, it fell apart” (The Mythic Dimension 185).
May the Flow now be broken open.
For a real dream born of a perfect harmony that I finally came to know in real
people, a tribe, that constantly urged me to remember and to write.
INTRODUCTION
Navajo Pattern Blanket that I crocheted for John, Alto, NM, July 2012
The Tapestry
Penelope’s completed tapestry is an of-the-essence message, a timely second arrival of the Odyssey and the overlooked, timeless and immense power of the vast and mightily moving River of golden Poetry that reveals an epiphany across millennia to this very moment about true identities. It does this in more profound ways than anyone could have imagined, besides the creators of the art: those gorgeous “perpetrators” of culture and the divine themselves, all at once loved and morbidly shut off. As one will see in this artistic and feminine message, the movements and alterations, like those of Hermes in the Homeric "Hymn to Hermes," the skeleton key left by Homer, the flipping and breaking open of worlds and the intense acts of creation are necessary at the toppling, beginnings and nurturing of new worlds—and the identities astounding. When seen in the movement of art and mythology, just like Penelope, the Apaches’ White Painted Woman and the Navajos’ Changing Woman are also at the beginning of those new worlds and creations.
I will show you each of the carefully hand-crafted and delicately placed threads. There are many and some are very, very old, coming even from pre-dynastic Egypt and the musical instruments, like the bone flute of Hohle Fels made from the wing of a griffon vulture from 40,000 years ago, the wing that created the music that was the base of civilization that “helped modern humans communicate and form tighter social bonds” (Owen). From my own hands and my own weaving I will show you how the tapestry is woven. I will show you each thread so that you have no doubt and I think you will see everything in a different light. I can do this because I know who and what I am. That sublime River is my divine and earthly inheritance. To recognize it is to internally know, then the hard work to create. That’s the river the Poet comes to know.
I can show you now that I know for certain the Poet “Odysseus” is back. The line of Hermes is back.
He and Laërtes and the others are already in the banquet hall—yes, our banquet hall.
Penelope’s tapestry points to the identity of Laërtes and from this, also to his son, Odysseus. That the intertwining is also meant to protract the necessary endurance in time for Odysseus’s unseen, covert completion (as will be realized) and also sustain and protect her place both internally and externally from an on-going egregious social misevaluation in eternal values—misjudgment, aggression and intrusion against her—until Odysseus returns, and that it is woven of and for Laërtes reveals purposes and meanings of the completed tapestry that point to the truer identities and preeminent lineage of this symbolic father and son and to the eternal, inalienable rights and reasons there is a return to Penelope and movement to freedom of expression, just as the universe does.
This revelation comes from the insight of the emblematic historically blighted fate of the matriarchal line of Odysseus’s mother, Anticlea, the granddaughter of the artistic trickster and messenger of the gods, Hermes.
Penelope’s tapestry is a symbol designed for Laërtes, Anticlea’s husband, or, in other words, the man who knew the identity of, loved and married the feminine lineage of Hermes, or representatively, the feminine line coming from the trickster artist and messenger of the gods.
Laërtes is the "father" or, as seen in transformative mythologies and rites the world over, the word signifying the giver of the natural, realized and true identity to the “son,” one giving it to the next who is ready for it, when he is ready for it. It is to the one who can prove beyond all doubt—an extraordinary feat—that he is the god’s son by what he ventures and accomplishes between the worlds, thus proving his ability to recognize the actual terms and proving his truest identity. It gets proven in his ability to “bring it back.”
Penelope’s completed tapestry, or the revelation of each strand of the Poetry and paint strokes, marks the provable terms whereby this succession must occur, shows accomplishment of this transformation of identity based on internal character and not outward appearances (such as what is popularly considered the terms of beauty, wealth or social status), and is granted only to the return of the king who, in a very different way than blindly accepted social structure, proves his claim to both the earthly and celestial thrones, although he claims only the earthly one. Penelope’s work itself holds for the moment when that lineage of Hermes is restored to power and her rightful place reclaimed.
In his book Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth and Art author Lewis Hyde demonstrates how in the Homeric "Hymn to Hermes" Hermes steals the signs, the symbols, all along his path in order to change them and to ultimately alter his own share of a divine inheritance. The hymn is part of the trail left by Homer (here to be referred to as the Poet and this including his and her lineage to our moment) to what has been surreptitiously not only accomplished in the Odyssey by Odysseus and Athena and providing the blue print as to what is done culturally by the Poet him or herself and to be done by the inheritor to finally, against all social (conditionally-learned) hostilities, arrive home, but also, as with Penelope, it is woven as the material Poetry tapestry in such a way as to masterfully and in visible form accomplish those divine things and without a doubt restore its identities and line and prove its own sublimity within its own existence and creation. It literally, in order to meet its true identities and inheritance, has to come to life. For instance, within it is its self-evident power to elevate and suspend the time it takes—the weave (whether it is Native American or ancient Grecian epic) has the power not bowed to time, no matter how many days or millennia, and to remain internally untouched from whatever threats or obstacles or the number of usurping “Suitors” or claims to or against it and her and the feminine, to arrive at this eternal kind of alive and flowing, golden wealth, the treasure trove, and to the “throne”—the highest position between the worlds of divine and form—or, in other terms, the “spiritual and governmental leader” as in a tribe—in order for this inheritance to meet its next in line intended, earned and identifiable marks. The work itself follows exactly what the transformation of the rite does. Not only does it magnificently accomplish these merely-human impossible tasks, as Hyde shows of the tricksters’ acts and works: they are also prophetic in nature. They are oracular. Not only does this prove its inherent divine nature as it directly meets its mark, it proves identity in the very process of creation. The warrior and the weaver knows who he or she is. The work allows one this eternally alive voice that comes back as if not a moment has passed. This is the true, divine inheritance of which I write.
This is a consolidation of what Athena culturally does as trickster and as the natural/supernatural combination between the natural birth/springing up of universal wisdom and consciousness and the role of the prevalent feminine image in culture along with the gifted, extraordinary, and imperative mark that Odysseus as the temporarily “nobody” Poet and Bard hits, conjointly with the intricate weaving that Penelope accomplishes even as she is found out and extremely pressured and continues in order to hold the time for the moment of recognition of identities, place and divinely-inspired and given roles, their destinies. And with this tapestry she first points to Laërtes. It comes to Laërtes on the “outskirts” who holds the line and has for his whole life and in recognizing the return of his son, helps in the taking back of the kingdom, his own kingdom, which Penelope first recognizes by her tapestry, the true king and the true line she knows will be followed because she knows he will return by knowing his inner character, his inner relation to the gods, and the path of the mythology—not that of the line of the usurpers.
The created tapestry is also the robe Penelope gives to Odysseus, giving him back his place. The revelation of the weave will “clothe” him in the returned, social role. Like on the Sistine walls, it is hers. Olympus is the divine inheritance altered and reopened, with all of its true wonders flowing back into life where it had been closed, and Ithaca the symbol of the place on earth to know it, the place where the waters arrive again as they did in the Egyptian Delta and at Crete, and where Athena is the naturally arising and powerful goddess, and even the visions of Aphrodite, who comes naturally from the ocean of Being, and Ares, the god of war, are transformed. Athena is restored in vision in this eternal breaking through, the eternal break of the waves of consciousness into the social, a new kind of warrior. Penelope—that female mirror of Laërtes—the feminine lineage that knew and loved the line of Hermes—is the one to whom it is returned, the feminine being “the one to whom it belongs,” that internal/external place of peace and bridge, the physical/metaphysical extension between the worlds, the line of knowing herself and her place that Anticlea tragically stopped knowing in not believing in Odysseus when the “ocean” seemed to not be bringing him, and the usurpers seemed to have complete control.
This “second coming” arrives at our very moment. Even the intruders “tearing down what has been made” are in the White House with an incessant need to tear down and apart, and the definition of “leader,” of a nation which should be led by the internal character of Laërtes who has remained true, most especially being like the spiritual and governmental leaders in the Native American sense, stepping between the worlds, has in vision long been subdued, the view being occluded, and the feminine as surface shell as symbol. The prevalent social values have been askew, baseless, and in chaos. They invade women's rights, Beings and bodies. They call themselves moral and "good," a claim to thought and the power of language as definitive of reality, while also laying claim to the sacred and the written text and this ownership and power based solely on outward skin color and on the money or name they have inherited without character or merit. Very few believe in the return of the Poet, the Spirit Dancer, the Coyote, let alone the power of the return of the Song. They mock his beggar clothing and beggar state. What is on the inside changes everything.
The divine qualities of the Hermes artistic trickster and the threads of the art can be historically and prophetically traced so powerfully and accurately as to aim directly to persons and places to the revelation of actual beings to be known and proven by the very defined qualities inherent in the consummate creations, and thus in the creators. The tapestry could not be produced otherwise than by the eternally-linked identity capable of both the recognition forced by Penelope’s bow challenge and the mastery of the journey and the abilities. It is not solely humanly possible as “circumstances” or serendipity (the stunning perfection of the complexity of the eternal’s weave in time) show. It takes this line, which never dies. The recognition of the creation and its descendants restore the lineage of Hermes and its feminine inheritance directly to the ones who remember and recognize themselves in Odysseus, Athena, Penelope, Laërtes, and even the hidden, horrific dangers of the unnaturally encased-born Helen, and can also prove these identities by returning to home, to Ithaca and taking back the “dining hall,” that place of communion between the worlds. The works themselves, in fact, set up an identity for Odysseus, Athena, Laërtes and Telemachus to be finally recognized when the worlds are retaken. The divine and the prophetic come to life. During this it is Penelope’s tapestry that is the weave and the key—just as Penelope has the key to open the treasure door to retrieve the ancient bow. It is the same keys that Saint Peter is said to have. She holds the key to opening the immeasurable, timeless treasure vault, and, as at the end of the Odyssey, revealing truest identities. It is Penelope that finally sees Odysseus face to face, and he reveals her true face into the radiance, into the light. It is Penelope who exposes the true nature of Helen and what has been the devious feminine symbol of askew surface values blindly causing wars and destruction for self gain by showing that Helen has no internal character and is merely a shell, a face, a product of a surface birth, an unnatural representation of what should be real on the inside.
That line of Hermes where the feminine symbolic line of Anticlea kills herself is restored by the Hermes artistic trickster, and not merely by birth into humanity, but also by inner knowing and masterful artistic feat, the true rite and ritual of alive art, that reclaims this highest order to be known on earth. The fate and power of the feminine has indeed been dismantled from culture since Greek times because she does not know who she is and because she does not know or remember her own energy or inheritance or the divine, world-altering power of the Poet (her own son) and does not believe in him enough to trust his return and the future of her own world. The feminine is the one to draw him back to life. Laërtes loved this line of the feminine, and Odysseus, Laërtes, and Athena restore it back to Penelope and with her gift they are then re-envisioned with the breaking open, and thus also flowing back to Athena and the goddesses of Olympus—Olympus, or the eternal, re-broken open to the human world—and also given back to the line of inheritance in Telemachus, who through his own actions does come to know himself and retrieves his rightly place. It is both knowing identity and treasure and this restored in the social realm through the turning over of the worlds of both the eternal and the earthly kingdoms. Telemachus sees what Odysseus has secretly accomplished. Telemachus, in fact, shows directly where the line and moment of transfer occur at Menelaus’s palace before it is even realized at home what Odysseus has clandestinely done.
It may sound unachievable—even the Suitors have thought it an impossible trick and others like Helen have thought it merely replicable, a sleight-of-hand trick of potion, story, weaving and veneer over character—but the undeniable proof is in the threads of how the golden intertwining of the human/divine are perfectly carried out. A borrowing from this, even the Hebrew Bible does not have that kind of proof of identity. Of the poetry and the transformative path, Odysseus’s arrow is aimed so well that, as Penelope knows, there will be very, very few who have the existence, the soul, character, knowledge, strength, endurance and fiercely accurate ability to hit the mark through the significant twelve axe handle rings—marking that each symbol of Olympus has been clandestinely changed by Hermes’s lineage in order to claim the inheritance and open the path of the revelation of the tapestry and robe and what has been a mystery rite labyrinth to recognize Penelope and restore her place between the worlds, the natural door: the human goddess.
This is the very literal, miraculous path demonstrated in these pages. Just as I show myself, I point to the Master Artists.
It has been a mystery rite eternally held and unknowingly participated in for the ages and the revelation only opened to those who could see, through transformation through the art and the Poetry, the face awaiting them. It is an opening to eternity. It is eternity breaking through into knowing, and then re-breaking into social consciousness and then into the structure of the culture. It allows the true heavens to flow.
Anticlea, representative of that line of feminine who should know the eternal being of herself, did not know if the artistic trickster would come again, turn over the worlds anew, and revive the powerful lineage, and thus she killed herself. Her forever-discontented spirit in giving up on the intended immense beauty is locked within the pent-up energetic churning underneath all surfaces, but this feminine is also part of the frustration spurring the resurgence of the regenerative forces of the earth and universe to come into this knowing.
Even Odysseus’s son Telemachus has not known his own identity and inheritance until now. The Arts lost their status and ability to divinely speak and became obscured to him, relying on surface when he knew he was more. The River wasn’t recognized. The ocean wasn’t traversed. There are socially-caused doubts as the Suitors claim society that must then go by their surface and empty, threatening values. Penelope, on the other hand, recognizes her eternal self and knows Odysseus’s character and eternal spirit and capabilities and knows he will return to her and change her world. She knows this because she knows it of herself and she knows the craft and the labyrinth to the feminine just as Ariadne did, leading to the revelation of the Minotaur, the monster and aberration, that has been in place of the feminine. The weave shows the thread.
That this path moves to the American Southwest is not just a cultural movement but a literal movement as well. Its zeitgeist and its prophecy have already arrived, outside of human hands, but created masterfully by them bringing the voice of the eternal into the real.
Just as this moved up from the Nile to Crete and to Greece, this path of Western culture has moved on the road West across the United States to re-burst forth at its own coast in California, first in San Francisco on the “periphery,” (the avant-garde at the leading edge of mainstream culture from the 1960s and holding until now) and then on along that shoreline to the natural birth of Athena, and on into the hub of the culture, its leading and alive nerve center: Los Angeles. Willa Cather visited the Southwest and discovered these mythologies to be alive and holding on and intimately connected to the realization of Place, and this very much an expression of the feminine, just as Place had been in Egypt, Greece, Italy and France, the very life blood of their eternal cultures. The wings of the Victory of Samothrace await in the Louvre in a museum, but she has been born on the coast. She is among us. It is for our own discovery now to know where we have arrived.
To see the continuation of the flow of those paths here, the chapters and strands I write first begin in the American Southwest where I am now writing this, where the Native American legends demonstrate the understood interconnectedness of sense of Place and the feminine and the understood necessity of the turning over of worlds, and demonstrating how these realizations naturally occurred in coming to know. The American Southwest is also the place where it is evident of the “second” arrival of Odysseus in the natural movement of the Western world towards ultimate freedom, embodiment and mastery of expression, the highest mastery a human can achieve or express—complete expression of destiny. It is America's destiny, too. It is quite evident this is what America is, most especially in the resonating wildness and freedom from here towards the realization of the Coast. It has forever been humanity's sublime goal, sought through both dreams and wars, but it is Odysseus who arrives. From here it can be seen the comparison between the Native American understanding of the warrior who comes to know his identity with the Sun and the return to the feminine in the Apache White Painted Woman and in the Navajo Changing Woman, here on this mountain where I live, in their ancient legends and ceremonials and the ancient commonalities with Odysseus, Penelope and Ithaca. Whatever the Spanish or the Catholic Church imposed upon the lands here, the Natural Cultures and the feminine were held in Place, yet always threatened. In the Native American legends there is a return to her and to Place known as “The Mountain Around Which Moving Is Done,” the center, internally and externally, in the universe and on the earth, the navel, the terrapin, the center of the guitar which resonates music, the Song of life. I begin writing and showing the weave, here at this culmination, at this coming together.
I will show you each of the carefully hand-crafted and delicately placed threads. There are many and some are very, very old, coming even from pre-dynastic Egypt and the musical instruments, like the bone flute of Hohle Fels made from the wing of a griffon vulture from 40,000 years ago, the wing that created the music that was the base of civilization that “helped modern humans communicate and form tighter social bonds” (Owen). From my own hands and my own weaving I will show you how the tapestry is woven. I will show you each thread so that you have no doubt and I think you will see everything in a different light. I can do this because I know who and what I am. That sublime River is my divine and earthly inheritance. To recognize it is to internally know, then the hard work to create. That’s the river the Poet comes to know.
I can show you now that I know for certain the Poet “Odysseus” is back. The line of Hermes is back.
He and Laërtes and the others are already in the banquet hall—yes, our banquet hall.
Penelope’s tapestry points to the identity of Laërtes and from this, also to his son, Odysseus. That the intertwining is also meant to protract the necessary endurance in time for Odysseus’s unseen, covert completion (as will be realized) and also sustain and protect her place both internally and externally from an on-going egregious social misevaluation in eternal values—misjudgment, aggression and intrusion against her—until Odysseus returns, and that it is woven of and for Laërtes reveals purposes and meanings of the completed tapestry that point to the truer identities and preeminent lineage of this symbolic father and son and to the eternal, inalienable rights and reasons there is a return to Penelope and movement to freedom of expression, just as the universe does.
This revelation comes from the insight of the emblematic historically blighted fate of the matriarchal line of Odysseus’s mother, Anticlea, the granddaughter of the artistic trickster and messenger of the gods, Hermes.
Penelope’s tapestry is a symbol designed for Laërtes, Anticlea’s husband, or, in other words, the man who knew the identity of, loved and married the feminine lineage of Hermes, or representatively, the feminine line coming from the trickster artist and messenger of the gods.
Laërtes is the "father" or, as seen in transformative mythologies and rites the world over, the word signifying the giver of the natural, realized and true identity to the “son,” one giving it to the next who is ready for it, when he is ready for it. It is to the one who can prove beyond all doubt—an extraordinary feat—that he is the god’s son by what he ventures and accomplishes between the worlds, thus proving his ability to recognize the actual terms and proving his truest identity. It gets proven in his ability to “bring it back.”
Penelope’s completed tapestry, or the revelation of each strand of the Poetry and paint strokes, marks the provable terms whereby this succession must occur, shows accomplishment of this transformation of identity based on internal character and not outward appearances (such as what is popularly considered the terms of beauty, wealth or social status), and is granted only to the return of the king who, in a very different way than blindly accepted social structure, proves his claim to both the earthly and celestial thrones, although he claims only the earthly one. Penelope’s work itself holds for the moment when that lineage of Hermes is restored to power and her rightful place reclaimed.
In his book Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth and Art author Lewis Hyde demonstrates how in the Homeric "Hymn to Hermes" Hermes steals the signs, the symbols, all along his path in order to change them and to ultimately alter his own share of a divine inheritance. The hymn is part of the trail left by Homer (here to be referred to as the Poet and this including his and her lineage to our moment) to what has been surreptitiously not only accomplished in the Odyssey by Odysseus and Athena and providing the blue print as to what is done culturally by the Poet him or herself and to be done by the inheritor to finally, against all social (conditionally-learned) hostilities, arrive home, but also, as with Penelope, it is woven as the material Poetry tapestry in such a way as to masterfully and in visible form accomplish those divine things and without a doubt restore its identities and line and prove its own sublimity within its own existence and creation. It literally, in order to meet its true identities and inheritance, has to come to life. For instance, within it is its self-evident power to elevate and suspend the time it takes—the weave (whether it is Native American or ancient Grecian epic) has the power not bowed to time, no matter how many days or millennia, and to remain internally untouched from whatever threats or obstacles or the number of usurping “Suitors” or claims to or against it and her and the feminine, to arrive at this eternal kind of alive and flowing, golden wealth, the treasure trove, and to the “throne”—the highest position between the worlds of divine and form—or, in other terms, the “spiritual and governmental leader” as in a tribe—in order for this inheritance to meet its next in line intended, earned and identifiable marks. The work itself follows exactly what the transformation of the rite does. Not only does it magnificently accomplish these merely-human impossible tasks, as Hyde shows of the tricksters’ acts and works: they are also prophetic in nature. They are oracular. Not only does this prove its inherent divine nature as it directly meets its mark, it proves identity in the very process of creation. The warrior and the weaver knows who he or she is. The work allows one this eternally alive voice that comes back as if not a moment has passed. This is the true, divine inheritance of which I write.
This is a consolidation of what Athena culturally does as trickster and as the natural/supernatural combination between the natural birth/springing up of universal wisdom and consciousness and the role of the prevalent feminine image in culture along with the gifted, extraordinary, and imperative mark that Odysseus as the temporarily “nobody” Poet and Bard hits, conjointly with the intricate weaving that Penelope accomplishes even as she is found out and extremely pressured and continues in order to hold the time for the moment of recognition of identities, place and divinely-inspired and given roles, their destinies. And with this tapestry she first points to Laërtes. It comes to Laërtes on the “outskirts” who holds the line and has for his whole life and in recognizing the return of his son, helps in the taking back of the kingdom, his own kingdom, which Penelope first recognizes by her tapestry, the true king and the true line she knows will be followed because she knows he will return by knowing his inner character, his inner relation to the gods, and the path of the mythology—not that of the line of the usurpers.
The created tapestry is also the robe Penelope gives to Odysseus, giving him back his place. The revelation of the weave will “clothe” him in the returned, social role. Like on the Sistine walls, it is hers. Olympus is the divine inheritance altered and reopened, with all of its true wonders flowing back into life where it had been closed, and Ithaca the symbol of the place on earth to know it, the place where the waters arrive again as they did in the Egyptian Delta and at Crete, and where Athena is the naturally arising and powerful goddess, and even the visions of Aphrodite, who comes naturally from the ocean of Being, and Ares, the god of war, are transformed. Athena is restored in vision in this eternal breaking through, the eternal break of the waves of consciousness into the social, a new kind of warrior. Penelope—that female mirror of Laërtes—the feminine lineage that knew and loved the line of Hermes—is the one to whom it is returned, the feminine being “the one to whom it belongs,” that internal/external place of peace and bridge, the physical/metaphysical extension between the worlds, the line of knowing herself and her place that Anticlea tragically stopped knowing in not believing in Odysseus when the “ocean” seemed to not be bringing him, and the usurpers seemed to have complete control.
This “second coming” arrives at our very moment. Even the intruders “tearing down what has been made” are in the White House with an incessant need to tear down and apart, and the definition of “leader,” of a nation which should be led by the internal character of Laërtes who has remained true, most especially being like the spiritual and governmental leaders in the Native American sense, stepping between the worlds, has in vision long been subdued, the view being occluded, and the feminine as surface shell as symbol. The prevalent social values have been askew, baseless, and in chaos. They invade women's rights, Beings and bodies. They call themselves moral and "good," a claim to thought and the power of language as definitive of reality, while also laying claim to the sacred and the written text and this ownership and power based solely on outward skin color and on the money or name they have inherited without character or merit. Very few believe in the return of the Poet, the Spirit Dancer, the Coyote, let alone the power of the return of the Song. They mock his beggar clothing and beggar state. What is on the inside changes everything.
The divine qualities of the Hermes artistic trickster and the threads of the art can be historically and prophetically traced so powerfully and accurately as to aim directly to persons and places to the revelation of actual beings to be known and proven by the very defined qualities inherent in the consummate creations, and thus in the creators. The tapestry could not be produced otherwise than by the eternally-linked identity capable of both the recognition forced by Penelope’s bow challenge and the mastery of the journey and the abilities. It is not solely humanly possible as “circumstances” or serendipity (the stunning perfection of the complexity of the eternal’s weave in time) show. It takes this line, which never dies. The recognition of the creation and its descendants restore the lineage of Hermes and its feminine inheritance directly to the ones who remember and recognize themselves in Odysseus, Athena, Penelope, Laërtes, and even the hidden, horrific dangers of the unnaturally encased-born Helen, and can also prove these identities by returning to home, to Ithaca and taking back the “dining hall,” that place of communion between the worlds. The works themselves, in fact, set up an identity for Odysseus, Athena, Laërtes and Telemachus to be finally recognized when the worlds are retaken. The divine and the prophetic come to life. During this it is Penelope’s tapestry that is the weave and the key—just as Penelope has the key to open the treasure door to retrieve the ancient bow. It is the same keys that Saint Peter is said to have. She holds the key to opening the immeasurable, timeless treasure vault, and, as at the end of the Odyssey, revealing truest identities. It is Penelope that finally sees Odysseus face to face, and he reveals her true face into the radiance, into the light. It is Penelope who exposes the true nature of Helen and what has been the devious feminine symbol of askew surface values blindly causing wars and destruction for self gain by showing that Helen has no internal character and is merely a shell, a face, a product of a surface birth, an unnatural representation of what should be real on the inside.
That line of Hermes where the feminine symbolic line of Anticlea kills herself is restored by the Hermes artistic trickster, and not merely by birth into humanity, but also by inner knowing and masterful artistic feat, the true rite and ritual of alive art, that reclaims this highest order to be known on earth. The fate and power of the feminine has indeed been dismantled from culture since Greek times because she does not know who she is and because she does not know or remember her own energy or inheritance or the divine, world-altering power of the Poet (her own son) and does not believe in him enough to trust his return and the future of her own world. The feminine is the one to draw him back to life. Laërtes loved this line of the feminine, and Odysseus, Laërtes, and Athena restore it back to Penelope and with her gift they are then re-envisioned with the breaking open, and thus also flowing back to Athena and the goddesses of Olympus—Olympus, or the eternal, re-broken open to the human world—and also given back to the line of inheritance in Telemachus, who through his own actions does come to know himself and retrieves his rightly place. It is both knowing identity and treasure and this restored in the social realm through the turning over of the worlds of both the eternal and the earthly kingdoms. Telemachus sees what Odysseus has secretly accomplished. Telemachus, in fact, shows directly where the line and moment of transfer occur at Menelaus’s palace before it is even realized at home what Odysseus has clandestinely done.
It may sound unachievable—even the Suitors have thought it an impossible trick and others like Helen have thought it merely replicable, a sleight-of-hand trick of potion, story, weaving and veneer over character—but the undeniable proof is in the threads of how the golden intertwining of the human/divine are perfectly carried out. A borrowing from this, even the Hebrew Bible does not have that kind of proof of identity. Of the poetry and the transformative path, Odysseus’s arrow is aimed so well that, as Penelope knows, there will be very, very few who have the existence, the soul, character, knowledge, strength, endurance and fiercely accurate ability to hit the mark through the significant twelve axe handle rings—marking that each symbol of Olympus has been clandestinely changed by Hermes’s lineage in order to claim the inheritance and open the path of the revelation of the tapestry and robe and what has been a mystery rite labyrinth to recognize Penelope and restore her place between the worlds, the natural door: the human goddess.
This is the very literal, miraculous path demonstrated in these pages. Just as I show myself, I point to the Master Artists.
It has been a mystery rite eternally held and unknowingly participated in for the ages and the revelation only opened to those who could see, through transformation through the art and the Poetry, the face awaiting them. It is an opening to eternity. It is eternity breaking through into knowing, and then re-breaking into social consciousness and then into the structure of the culture. It allows the true heavens to flow.
Anticlea, representative of that line of feminine who should know the eternal being of herself, did not know if the artistic trickster would come again, turn over the worlds anew, and revive the powerful lineage, and thus she killed herself. Her forever-discontented spirit in giving up on the intended immense beauty is locked within the pent-up energetic churning underneath all surfaces, but this feminine is also part of the frustration spurring the resurgence of the regenerative forces of the earth and universe to come into this knowing.
Even Odysseus’s son Telemachus has not known his own identity and inheritance until now. The Arts lost their status and ability to divinely speak and became obscured to him, relying on surface when he knew he was more. The River wasn’t recognized. The ocean wasn’t traversed. There are socially-caused doubts as the Suitors claim society that must then go by their surface and empty, threatening values. Penelope, on the other hand, recognizes her eternal self and knows Odysseus’s character and eternal spirit and capabilities and knows he will return to her and change her world. She knows this because she knows it of herself and she knows the craft and the labyrinth to the feminine just as Ariadne did, leading to the revelation of the Minotaur, the monster and aberration, that has been in place of the feminine. The weave shows the thread.
That this path moves to the American Southwest is not just a cultural movement but a literal movement as well. Its zeitgeist and its prophecy have already arrived, outside of human hands, but created masterfully by them bringing the voice of the eternal into the real.
Just as this moved up from the Nile to Crete and to Greece, this path of Western culture has moved on the road West across the United States to re-burst forth at its own coast in California, first in San Francisco on the “periphery,” (the avant-garde at the leading edge of mainstream culture from the 1960s and holding until now) and then on along that shoreline to the natural birth of Athena, and on into the hub of the culture, its leading and alive nerve center: Los Angeles. Willa Cather visited the Southwest and discovered these mythologies to be alive and holding on and intimately connected to the realization of Place, and this very much an expression of the feminine, just as Place had been in Egypt, Greece, Italy and France, the very life blood of their eternal cultures. The wings of the Victory of Samothrace await in the Louvre in a museum, but she has been born on the coast. She is among us. It is for our own discovery now to know where we have arrived.
To see the continuation of the flow of those paths here, the chapters and strands I write first begin in the American Southwest where I am now writing this, where the Native American legends demonstrate the understood interconnectedness of sense of Place and the feminine and the understood necessity of the turning over of worlds, and demonstrating how these realizations naturally occurred in coming to know. The American Southwest is also the place where it is evident of the “second” arrival of Odysseus in the natural movement of the Western world towards ultimate freedom, embodiment and mastery of expression, the highest mastery a human can achieve or express—complete expression of destiny. It is America's destiny, too. It is quite evident this is what America is, most especially in the resonating wildness and freedom from here towards the realization of the Coast. It has forever been humanity's sublime goal, sought through both dreams and wars, but it is Odysseus who arrives. From here it can be seen the comparison between the Native American understanding of the warrior who comes to know his identity with the Sun and the return to the feminine in the Apache White Painted Woman and in the Navajo Changing Woman, here on this mountain where I live, in their ancient legends and ceremonials and the ancient commonalities with Odysseus, Penelope and Ithaca. Whatever the Spanish or the Catholic Church imposed upon the lands here, the Natural Cultures and the feminine were held in Place, yet always threatened. In the Native American legends there is a return to her and to Place known as “The Mountain Around Which Moving Is Done,” the center, internally and externally, in the universe and on the earth, the navel, the terrapin, the center of the guitar which resonates music, the Song of life. I begin writing and showing the weave, here at this culmination, at this coming together.
Inn of the Mountain Gods, Mescalero Apache Reservation, Mescalero, NM
[Being out here one day I noticed that just like the ancient mythology, their Inn is inconspicuously built in the shape of an eagle flying towards the mountain peak.]
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