The Alive Convergence of 500 and 700 Year Phenomenal Art Anniversaries

2020 is the 700th Anniversary of the completion of the Divine Comedy, one of the world’s most transformative texts, and which set off the Italian Renaissance known to the master artists as the revelation of Dante’s illumination through Beatrice, a female human, and not a figment of the Church’s narrative (borrowing ancient symbols and mythology) and along with that, its control over the female body and her eternal spirit.  In a coming together of phenomenal anniversaries, Beatrice passed on 8 June in 1290, Kanye West’s birthdate in ’77--the year of the 500th anniversary of the completion of the Chapel itself. In 2009, at the beginning of this 700 year anniversary of the writing (begun in 1308), Kanye stood up for Beyoncé and her expression.  1508 is when Michelangelo started painting the Sistine Ceiling, which I show revelations of in Coyote Weaves a Song. 

But this coming together strangely goes far back for me.  As from 1290 when Beatrice passed, 1990 was thirty years before the completion of the Divine Comedy. But that year, thirty years ago, in 1990, the 700th anniversary of Beatrice’s passing, the band Pantera released the song “Cemetery Gates” after I wrote the lead singer, Phil Anselmo a poem.  I never asked about the connection. In 1989, directly proceeding this song, at 19, I experienced an unwanted sexual encounter--a crime exactly like what John Mayer would be falsely publicly accused of in 2010 in public manipulation in song by Taylor Swift, but actually happened to me. 

At that time in 1989 was the first of two appearances of the destructive “whore,” “at the tree” as in the Divine Comedy--but mine occurring around U2’s Joshua Tree. As I show in the upcoming tapestry Writing from the Rite, in 1989 a female had intervened in-between the writing of that poetry by pursuing a relationship with Phil.  Then in 2010, when in response to Taylor’s unwanted advances, John stated in the 4 February 2010 Rolling Stone that he was looking for the “Joshua Tree of vaginas,” implying that he “still hadn’t found what [he] was looking for.” As I had already experienced in 1989, here again was was another forced intervention. Now, strangely, at this time of revelation in 2020 of what has been happening as shown in the Tapestries, these planetary alignments leading into 2020 and this 700th anniversary, were last this way in Capricorn at the exact moment in 1285 when Dante would have come to know Beatrice in person--and become illumined by her and inspire all the art to follow.

An excerpt from Writing from the Rite:

"At that time, when I was 19, from about the age of 15 and 16, I had been frequenting a place called Joe’s Garage in Fort Worth, Texas, for live music, and there I had watched the band Pantera when they were just starting out with adding the lead singer, Phil Anselmo. There were nights when there were less than ten people in the place and the guitarist Darrell Abbott would stand on our table and play right above us as if we were the arena. My brother and I would go because he loved to watch Darrell, a phenomenal guitar player. I was taken with Phil Anselmo’s passion (not to mention physique and voice). Me being so young (and being with my brother), Phil only paid slight attention to me early on. He walked up to me once and looked at a belt I was wearing that I had wrapped around my leg before going up around the waist. It was quite suggestive of things (even though I was completely inexperienced, as Hendrix would say).

I saw Pantera a lot of weekends through these years, my brother is a guitarist, and music being the center. By the time I was 18-19, Phil asked a friend of mine named Homer (also as the name of the bard of the epics) about me. But by that time, girls were flocking to him, and the crowds were thick. Instead of just taking him up on an offer of what I was sure would be a one-night stand, I instead wrote to him; I was in my dark Sylvia Plath phase, as my senior English teacher put it on some of my work that year. I sent Phil poems, something about relationships after death, and pictures (me with an electric guitar in one I remember--I could play Danzig’s “Mother” with the lyrics, "And if you wanna find hell with me/I can show you what it's like," strangely like Beatrice's descending to Virgil) in a Valentine’s heart box, which instead of being full of chocolates, I put razor blades. (I never thought I’d have to admit to this.) His reaction was to tell my friend Homer he was freaked out, as I had sent them anonymously, even though there was a picture, and so I admitted to it, so as not to scare him. I definitely wanted something of a deeper connection than just having sex with him. Following that, that year, 1989-1990, Phil and others wrote the song “Cemetery Gates,” (unbeknownst on the exact 700th anniversary of Beatrice’s passing in 1290) to which I recognized what I thought was an answer to what I wrote him, but I never asked, and this was at their release of Cowboys from Hell, and they were already moving on into larger scale touring.

I also saw them at a club in Dallas called Trees many times, a place where John would later play after I had moved to Southwest Texas.  (I traveled back several times, like to Deep Ellum in Dallas, and many times to Austin.)  At this very time of “Cemetery Gates,” in 1989, there was another complication that proved to be ominous of that moment and of the future and what would happen a second time to me (like Beatrice tells Dante in the Divine Comedy, what happens with “the whore” two times at the tree, and revealing structural fraud). My brother’s girlfriend of several years decided she wanted to hook up sexually with Phil, our friend Homer set it up, and she went through with it, even dropping out of college with all of us and taking a job as a stripper to make the move to Fort Worth. And so it was Homer, like the epics, who was the strange go-between of both this female taking that path to pursue Phil and me going home. To make matters worse, in 1989 I had a forced, unwanted sexual encounter in front of other people with one of Phil’s lately-come-around “friends.” I told the guy no and that I wanted to go outside but he forced the issue. I was a 19 year old virgin, very inexperienced, and did not expect the worst of people. It was the end of what I knew of Phil. Because of that, later John’s song including the lyrics, “I don’t hit on 19” were deeply meaningful, along with his careful nature. What actually happened to me at 19 was what John later was wrongly publicly shamed for by Taylor Swift, and did not do.

Furthermore, the girl who did this in 1989 was from Eastland, TX, the place where SRV had lived briefly, up the road from where I had lived, and the place where I won the talent competition on piano when I was 15 and 16. While her “whorish” act altered the path and I never saw Phil again, the unseen path was already playing out in importance with John and his desire to come to Texas because of SRV. Also when I was sixteen U2 was recording Joshua Tree, and those are the lyrics I would first recognize from John when he said in Rolling Stone, “I’m looking for the Joshua Tree of vaginas,” meaning, as I discovered when I walked into a little store after a hike contemplating it and the song began to play, he 'still hadn’t found what [he’s] looking for.'

Taylor Swift, like I had experienced in 1989 was hard on putting herself out for John and forcing the issue, but she having the means and platform to humiliate him for avoiding her. What was also surprising to me is that these two females in my experience were very physically similar. When it happened with Taylor I knew had seen it before and was amazed to be reminded: scraggly blonde hair, large breasts on an otherwise uncurvaceous body, short fingers, performing for money and attention, and all of this somehow being about music, something I believed in, had spent my life with and around, and which I could not understand, and this in 1989, the year Taylor was born, the year I graduated from high school and turned 19 the next month.

Beatrice passed in 1290. The Divine Comedy was completed in 1320, thirty years after her transition. “Cemetery Gates” was in 1990. In 2020, it has been 30 years. Because of U2’s Joshua Tree at the time I was in high school and many years later finding John’s words in January 2010, the “I still haven’t found what I’m looking for” deeply resonated with me. I knew the feeling, had given it my life. It wasn’t until later I realized he was also stating that who was trying to force him at that moment to have a public relationship wasn’t what he wanted--a choice that should have been his. Thus, Taylor was the second appearance for me at the “tree,” inserting herself, and very similar to which Beatrice speaks to Dante about at the end of Canto XXXII. John’s wording was also humorous because of the 'Joshua Tree of vaginas.' It is a tree, the juniper, in the 'desert' of New Mexico in Cather’s novel Death Comes for the Archbishop that first leads the Archbishop to the river to witness the first suggestion of the embodiment of the feminine divine. Overlooking my front door here is a juniper tree." 

This planetary realignment began in 2008 with Pluto’s death and rebirth energy moving into Capricorn along with the expansive, dreaming nature of Jupiter, just as this story too unfolds beginning in 2008 (on the 500 anniversary of starting the Sistine Ceiling and the 700 year anniversary of starting the Divine Comedy) with the guardians Rachel (as in the Hebrew Bible) (Jennifer Aniston) and Alicia Keys, a dynamic, black oracle voice--women who knew and know John’s value, heart, and Being, but whose voices were ignored for hostile headlines that tear down and sell--exactly Taylor’s sales and headlines plan, yet mimicking, feigned, and covered by a false “Instagram-Like Life.”   2008 was the year I wrote the character with wings and registered her in January 2009 and this all began.  In February 2008 I was visiting the oldest church in the United States in Santa Fe where I would discover the miracles of the Willa Cather's novel in the coming years . . . the happenings and convergence are extraordinary.

The last time Saturn and Pluto were conjunct in an air sign, according to astrologer Pam Gregory, as they are on 12 January 2020, was during the economic build-up leading [to the Renaissance] and through the religious Reformation, an upheaval like our own and come to be revealed through the art. Additionally, since 1810 the conjuctions have been in earth signs, and since then, there has been evident over-fixation on surface things and materialism, the surface “3D” world, as Pam Gregory explains, and so prevalent in what is happening. While surfaces and social-conditioning to keep honoring the same over and over and blocking all else have been deceiving, the true revelation is at the hands of the art and its masterful, world-transformative lineage alive once again.