Why the Worlds Break Open on the Feminine and Determining Details of the Sacred Trickster

I write about these topics throughout the books and journal articles on BSW, and this is a small overview.

In putting together all the pieces of a lifetime of what would make the cultural difference and coming to write Coyote Weaves a Song, I discovered that the Coyote trickster’s (as well as the Native American’s White Painted Spirit Dancer’s) breaking open of the worlds--both human culture and the divine realm--opens the cultural flood directly on the feminine.  I pieced this together from reading many authors, many years of Joseph Campbell who was a dear friend of the Grateful Dead, and what I knew of the feminine in culture, and then by studying the characteristics of the trickster.  It began to landslide when I saw that the reason Anglo culture did not celebrate the trickster as most other cultures do (something I had been contemplating since teaching folklore in the early 2000s), is based on an enforced monotheistic world view. 

Another reason it erupts on the female in culture is because “she,” the female, is always more than one, and she cannot be "the one" because there is other than her, obviously, and this opens everything, "other," along with her, if she exists, which also means anything other, including race, gender, or genderlessness, age, or ageless: nothing is not opened by opening otherness.  In our binary language, as I write on the BSW article, "She is Many," she is “not he,” and she is therefore already two because male exists as primary in the English language and thought, a point feminist authors have made about writing the female.

Even feminine in other languages is removed in translation, as in die Sonne, the feminine Sun in the German language. "She" is also two because of her Being and being the doorway to eternity: the original Being and embodiment of the universe, universal spirit and body. (This is one topic I was writing to John Mayer about on a Tumblr blog to him beginning in April 2010, which Taylor Swift pried into and endeavored to sell as her own persona.  I had been on this path for many years, and writing to him was also like letting this valve off.  I wrote to him that it was like the unbinding of the character with wings that I had been writing.  I was on the path to coming into full view of understanding the power of Being and working my way there.  It was writing to another brilliant mind and it was and is vastly exciting to communicate with his masterful genius and careful, painstaking, cultural experience and insight.)  

The feminine can never be “the one” as there is in the structure of misogynistic and racist patriarchy that seeks to eliminate all other than itself for illusory power and control (and therefore also a closed and guarded divine--religion and the "door to heaven" is formidably guarded and has been for millennia, for example, hence the Reformation).  The patriarch creates only its own image--the image, for instance, white male created of himself in a white male god in order to punish (as narcissists do in “Look What You Made Me Do”), and to dominate.  There is no higher good there.  As Dante shows in his Inferno, it is never ending circles of punishment coming from the enslaved brain.  

Instead, every life form is part of the One. For a female to try to be “the one,” eliminating anything “other,” which is done out of ego (and not Being) and which only knows separation, she would be keeping the suffering, killing, and pain of racism, misogyny, and patriarchy of millennia, the pain of separation and domination of form in place in order to climb that hierarchy for only herself and to appear powerful based on a feeling of emptiness and rage inside (while the worlds are actually quietly broken open by others and particularly not done through contention.) While declaring war, what the ego does automatically whenever it is pricked (as Eckhart Tolle shows), the ego "she" is yet actually also powerless as conflict is giving one’s internal power away, as well as causing suffering for others. This holds true even if on the surface she lies about her intent as she separates and depends on conflict, and "throws 'the blacks' and 'gays' a bone" after it is very safe culturally to do so, after the coyotes have already made their unseen, unnoticed, unalarming cultural moves, doing what is real.  Oxymoronically, this one "she" is dependent for power on those unknowingly willing to enter the unending cycles of conflict with her.  It is a social disorder just beginning in itself to overflow in revelation as commentators notice narcissists have become their leaders. Internally powerless and believing conflict and drama as reality (when it is actually dysfunctional behavior patterns of the ego), this one ego "she" eliminating down to herself can never actually complete the “story,” as trapped patterns do not and cannot ever end on their own.  Pent up tensions stay pent up and they continue to lash out.

Powerfully, Being is not dependent upon anything. It is powerful as the universe and as creation and life is eternally powerful. Being is What Is. In Oneness, there is no separation or conflict, only consciousness, which dwells in all things, a universe vibrant and alive and bursting to creativity.  It moves towards new, dynamic expression of creation the more aware consciousness grows. It knows itself and does not need to inflict pain.

And so to importantly spot the difference between the Trickster (the destructor, creator and nurturer of worlds, of which Yahweh is an example according to mythologist Joseph Campbell), and the common criminal breaking laws with no concern for others, can be clearly seen even besides the criminal’s dependence on conflict and its ingrained, socially-taught morality (”goodness”) of killing and causing suffering, and its very limited heroics that actually causes the demise of a culture.  (Cultures thousands of years old were built on poetry.)  As author Lewis Hyde explains in his book Trickster Makes This World, the Trickster, instead, is actually involved with the sacred and with the actual prophetic.  As I was writing Coyote and saw that the Siren Song can only see the past, and I knew that the song of the oracle, of Penelope was literally telling the future, in other words, the Odyssey is prophetic, I could already see the very truth of the oracle/Sibyl stepping down with her book from the Sistine Ceiling right at the high altar.  Then, too, the prophets mixed with the sibyls on the ceiling showed what was holding to the past, and what would break it open:  Jacob's literal prophecy at the entrance of the Chapel.

When it comes to our culture it is vastly important to be able to see the difference, siren or oracle.  One traps you, one tells you what will happen based on Being.  It is like being able to visit the Oracle of Apollo and be told what will open the world immensely, beyond imagination.  And so as a mere criminal and impersonator of oracles, and desperately trying to trap "Odysseus" to the past just as the Iliad song does, Taylor Swift unabashedly attempts to take the place of true Song, of true artists, and of the sacred, yet through ego only temporarily, illusory blocking it by appearances only. (It is no wonder, war in the Iliad has been erroneously celebrated as the basis of Western culture for millennia because it has not been seen.  Only scholars noticed recently that it is told by a Siren.  But the master artists I write of in Coyote knew it.) 

As Penelope states of Helen at the culmination of recognition of true Beings in the Odyssey, Helen could not “see” what would happen. It is the one and only overt condemnation of Helen throughout the epics (other than her lies are pointed out as she tries to put poison in the stories at the dinner table), and this final recognition--awareness--is pointed out directly from the weaver and the "bobbin" of the oracle Song itself: Penelope. 

The criminal Donald Trump appears to act on behalf of the “sacred,” but it is for him and his criminal co-conspirators and dependents what is only deemed “holy” in only being white male in their own minds, and not in reality, as life and the universe are more aware and sacred. Theirs is a claiming of the divine through ego, which is only narcissism, while eliminating the feminine, the races, and Nature herself.  It is blatantly obscene to be able to view that the cosmos, thus far, has revealed only one planet with trees and nature and oceans and life, and yet they piss on it as their toilet.  That is ego.  And, as scholars have pointed out for decades, what they do to nature they have also done to the feminine.  As an errant, closed symbol, Melania Trump (unaware of her own Being) marrying and staying with him is misleading and harmful to the public in that she appears to be the feminine symbol beside him, when clearly she is there for surface things in status, fame, and money, even if she is not aware enough of what life IS.  Her values are scarily vapid.  What does that make of America, then?  America is a baby nation compared to the world's surviving ancient civilizations, and so far it has slaughtered millions and raped an entire continent beyond recognition in only about 300 years.  These socially-accepted, even venerated conditions are Sirens in the head that keep everyone, including themselves, in endless suffering, conflict, and destruction while life suffers.  Suffering is then deemed holy because Jesus Christ, a confined symbol, even confined away from his own truth, suffers, while he tried over and over to get the people to see that they don't need to suffer. Mother Teresa herself even propagated suffering instead of healing and growth to life. It was her level of awareness.  It was that which she was made a symbol. And so culture and its dangerous, unopened symbols continue to navigate with this culture’s Siren’s voice from the Iliad, Achilles and Helen to the end, taking everyone down with them while around, out here, between the worlds, reality begins to break through and awareness grows, and the symbols, as Beatrice beckons, are illumined.