Revelation and the Salmon of Wisdom
The Initiation of Light Continues
First, The Good News
Before I dive into this week’s essay, here’s the good news. I have a live event this coming Friday, April 18th in Kealakekua. I’ll be telling one of my favorite stories, the Pursuit of Dermot and Grainne.
And I am launching the first group odyssey of my online mythic rites of passage mentorship, The Coracle, on May 18th. The Coracle is a process I developed carried on myth and Mū Hawaiian magic. The first part, a 5-week journey, is called The Journey of Safety and Belonging. I am happy to discuss if this is right for you if you feel called and there are a lot of details on my website, so have a look! Tickets for live event are also available there.
Last weekend, I was blessed to be a guest speaker in Ke’oni Hanalei’s 4-part virtual series, The Hala. Ke’oni is of Mū Hawaiian lineage and has generously been sharing this almost forgotten culture’s wisdom online for the past few years. In this particular workshop, he’s breaking down his interpretation of the Paiwa Heka, the nine principles of Mū Hawaiian magic, as they correspond to the properties of light, emphasizing how the omission of the first and the last (the alpha and the omega) is keeping humanity stuck in time because we have no reference point from which to pass through the initiatory journey of light to complete the human event.
Because of this, we are on a trajectory toward failing the task we humans been charged with, the reason we were created and planted on Earth in the first place, the transfer of love to the next universe. If this sounds intriguing, you can still sign up. You’ll get replays of the first two parts and will be able to join the next two ceremonies live. Click on this link to join us.
We are here on Ki, Earth, because, according to the Mū doctrines as shared by Ke’oni, the he’e (octopus) successfully completed its mission of transferring electricity from the last universe, Mārāna, into this one. Thank you, He’e! Because of you we get to participate in the electrical experience of life in a human body.
I sing the body electric,
The armies of those I love engirth me and I engirth them,
They will not let me off till I go with them, respond to them,
And discorrupt them, and charge them full with the charge of the soul.
Was it doubted that those who corrupt their own bodies conceal themselves?
And if those who defile the living are as bad as they who defile the dead?
And if the body does not do fully as much as the soul?
And if the body were not the soul, what is the soul?
—from Leaves of Grass, Walt Whitman
Although Whitman’s 19th century diction may take some deciphering for the modern reader, I think what he’s expressing here is an intuitive understanding that implicitly includes the missing first and last principles. As a mystic and poet, he understood the alpha and the omega.
Thinking about Whitman got me to wondering when the properties of light were discovered. Through my research, I learned that they were identified and labeled as scientific principles by Isaac Newton in the 17th century. Why did he leave out Revelation and Completion? The conspiracy-minded might think he did and plotted with the Freemasons to keep this information from the common man. Maybe that’s true, but I don’t think he omitted them. He didn’t record them, because he literally couldn’t see them.
It may be a simplification, but my take is that his powers of observation had been reduced because they were shaped by the Enlightenment, who valued reason, individualism, and skepticism over intuition, collaboration/union, and faith. If Newton had been a science in the 12th century instead of the 17th, there’s a good chance his instruments might have been able to detect the alpha and the omega, as the Medieval worldview was still holistic enough to be able to perceive them. (If they’d had the instruments, which I guess is a Catch-22. They needed to be of a certain mindset to develop them, which they weren’t, which has a lot to say about how we outsource our intuition and innate knowing of the cosmos to technology when you think about it.)
Not that the Enlightenment was all bad. I see it as a response to the suppression of individual choice and identity by adhering to the precepts of corrupt institutions like the Roman Catholic Church who manipulated the common people through superstition, subservience, and blind faith to tradition with the threat of hell and damnation. Why? Same reason they are doing it today. It’s a reliable way to maintain power over. A fearful and subservient populace means full coffers for the Vatican and today’s mega-corporations who employ the same ideas and techniques to manipulate us through media and advertising.
Seen this way, logic, individualism, and skepticism are heroic. People are encouraged to use their minds to reason instead of blindly following whatever the authorities like the Church are telling them. I, a lover of wonder, am a strong believer in skepticism. It’s a tool I use to search for my blind spots. Whenever I am too eager to believe something that doesn’t feel quite right, I call on skepticism to ignite my power to reason. I learned to do this, by the way, because I was too trusting. Skepticism has been a quality that has led me to being the heroic creator of my own points of view, so I’m not ready to totally dismiss it.
Historically, skepticism has led to progress. The Protestant Reformation is a good example. A skeptical Martin Luther, outraged by the abuses of the Catholic Church, nailed his 95 Theses on a door in Wittenberg and gave permission for others to question the Church’s authority. Protestantism embraced and individual relationship with God, a positive step in human development I’d say, unmediated through priests and the Pope, but there were still a lot of rules believers had to follow if they wanted social acceptance. Not following those rules led to results as extreme as some of those meted out by the Catholic Church like the witch burnings that exterminated millions of women.
The problem with skepticism is you always have to be skeptical of the next thing. It’s not something you want to build a worldview on if you’re interested in transferring the legacy of love to the next universe. A task like that is also a calling, and requires a holistic worldview in which both hemispheres of the brain are contributing their unique qualities. A world built on skepticism is a world that dismisses what neuroscientist and philosopher Ian MacGilchrist has called “the Master,” the right brain. Instead, the perpetual skeptic’s ability to perceive is stunted by his inability to move beyond the parameters of the left brain’s ability, and even more stunted by the inability to see he is deluded in thinking the left is the more powerful hemisphere. As MacGilchrist shares in exhilarating and satisfying detail in The Master and his Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, the right brain is the master, while the left hemisphere is its servant.
At the risk of over-simplification, in our time the pendulum has swung too far to the left hemisphere. Before the Enlightenment, it was too far right. Faith, a quality of the imagination located in the right hemisphere, was used to manipulate people. Because we’ve swung so far left, we are at risk of going extinct.
But things are changing. I know a lot of people who believe in magic, not out of faith, but because they experience it.
Magic hasn’t gone anywhere all these years of materialism. Magic is in light itself, and the way to retrieve our ability to perceive it is by reorienting ourselves to the first of the missing principles, Revelation. (An idea gleaned from Ke’oni Hanalei.)
So what is Revelation?
Traced back to its root, the word revelation comes from the Latin word “revelatio,” meaning disclosure or unveiling, which connects it to the Greek word “apokalypsis,” which in our time is commonly viewed as the imminent destruction of civilization.
Many of us are first exposed to the word through the Bible, in which we find the Book of Revelation, a symbolic prophecy revealed to the Apostle John that, as our culture increases in density due to an unwavering belief in materialism, many have come to view as literal, a prophecy of the end times.
Those getting ready for the Rapture today may not realize others have thought they were the chosen ones before them. Doomsday cults have been around since the inception of Christianity. This has gone so far that today, the Christian Nationalists have managed to infiltrate the United States government. Maybe the people in actual government roles don’t believe what they are preaching, but their followers do, and without the followers, the shepherds have no one to herd.
This is one of those good uses of skepticism I was talking about. People thought the world was going to end with Y2K in 1999, just like they thought it would end in 999 when that millennium turned, unable to connect that the calendar by which they were ruling their lives was invented by the Catholic Church as an instrument of control, making the turn of centuries, totally arbitrary. Sure, numerology is a thing. I believe in sacred geometry, but those are shapes found in nature, not numbers that divide time into points. Most likely, things occur on specific dates, because enough of us believe they will, not because the numbers themselves are inherently powerful, at least not dates numbered in the Gregorian calendar.
You may disagree with me, and that’s ok. I’m not trying to change anyone’s mind about what they believe anymore. I’ve done my time arguing with overly literal conspiracy theorists, who I now tend to view with compassion because so many seem to have undergone shock traumas at some point in their lives, that has often led to addiction. Conspiracies are a great way to not be here, they vault you out of the body that has suffered with an idea that explains everything. No more having to wrestle with the soul’s needs, or look at all that pain. Believing in conspiracies, is a colonization of the mind, which at this point has happened to everyone alive on Earth who has been in contact with Western Civilization. I choose compassion over derision, because I’ve been there. I’ve believed crazy things, made stupid decisions, been addicted and abused myself. So I have compassion, but that doesn’t mean I choose to stay in those stories when I’m exposed to them. Like a stream, I flow around the rock that won’t budge and look for softer banks to carve out new bends in the river, encouraging the neural pathways in my brain, and hopefully my readers, to follow to more fertile and generative thought-streams.
So what is Revelation?
In the Bible, in Revelation 1, John tells us Christ said to him, “I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end, saith the lord, which is, and which was, and which is to come…I am he that liveth, and was dead, and behold, am alive forevermore, Amen; and have the keys of hell and of death.”
Further on in Revelation 2, Christ says, “These things saith he that hold the seven stars in his right hand, who walketh in the midst of the seven golden candlesticks.”
The number seven repeats throughout the twenty-two Revelations. In addition to stars and candlesticks, we hear of seven churches, seven plagues, and seven angels.
The number seven is spiritually significant in many cultures. The seven chakras of yoga comes to mind. I know I came across a book somewhere in my reading travels tracing the Book of Revelation as a journey through the chakras that lead to enlightenment. Fascinating. But what is Revelation?
In the Sumerian Descent of Inanna, the earliest known epic in Western Civilization, Inanna, Queen of Heaven, must pass through seven gates on her way to the Underworld, where she is reborn and returns as the Queen of Heaven and Earth. Seven is a number of initiation.
But what happens when an initiation is missing the alpha and the omega? What happens where there is no true beginning?
We can never complete, which is what’s been happening to humans for millennia who have been passing through seven gates, instead of the nine that actually lead to the full-spectrum consciousness that would result in the Hala, the cessation of time, the necessary condition for us to transfer humanity’s potential legacy of love into the next universe.
Let me repeat. Light is the medium for the initiation. We must pass through all of its nine properties, physically and spiritually, in order to fulfill our collective legacy as humans.
I mentioned earlier I’m not here to convert anyone. Everything I write, I do for love. These days, without urgency, though in my youth I was certainly filled with apocalyptic fervor. As I healed and integrated my various personal and ancestral traumas, the urgency dissipated. I would love for us to complete our legacy, but now I know love will not go extinct, even if we do.
I share because it’s my kuleana (responsibility to others and the land). I share because I can. How my words are received by humans doesn’t matter any more. I’m ok if they fall on deaf ears, blind eyes, and angry hearts. My loyalty is to the widest community possible, so I write for those who can, or want to see, and hear and wonder, about the alpha and omega, because the land asks me to. I am part of its dreaming and have committed my life, the body electric that the land gave me through the vehicles of my parents, to doing what I can to contribute to transferring love wherever I can.
Which leads me back to ask, for at least the third time, maybe the fourth, because like the fairy tales, or any Kumu tells us, you have to ask at least three times to show your commitment to the question before you are ready to receive an answer, what is Revelation?
Ke’oni Hanalei speaks of it as a black hole, and invites us to tune into the gravitational pull of our own black hole, centered in the physical heart, in order to reorient to our alpha. Although I didn’t understand it at the time, this is what happened to me in my first of two ayahuasca ceremonies (the only two) I underwent in 2008. (I went back a second time to prove to myself I could overcome my terror at being ejected from time and space during the first one.)
It’s taken me 17 years to understand what happened, which in the cosmic scheme is nothing, but in human terms has seemed like a long time! Seen this way, these past 17 years, I’ve been reorienting to my own gravitational field, redefining myself as my omega, the reference point of my life. I’m able to reduce it to such a simple statement now, because I know it’s true. I don’t need metaphors anymore to unveil it, but in the name of beauty and connection, I will certainly still use them, although I balk at the word “use,” with its mercenary and heartless connotations. I will create with them is better. Or I’ll collaborate.
So what is Revelation?
As I’ve been in this process of allowing the properties of light to reveal themselves to me, I’ve noticed how they appear in fairy tales and myths, in particular stories of initiation. Next post I’ll share the portion of the Old German tale Iron John, that I shared with the Hala community last weekend as my contribution to defining Reflection.
But first, we need to try to understand Revelation, which is difficult, because it rides the border between the unmanifest and the manifest. It’s almost beyond words, but not quite. There are some stories that hint at it, approaching it indirectly, which is the best way to approach something holy.
Before Revelation, in many mythologies, there was nothing. Darkness. The metaphor we use to describe the absence of light. The Kumulipo, a Hawaiian genealogical chant that traces one family lineage back to the beginning of creation, begins with Pō, darkness. Greek mythology says that Chaos, an unmanifest deity, gave birth to the elemental gods Gaia, Nyx, and Eros, (Earth, Night, and Desire), who gave birth to a succession of gods and goddesses who progressively became more like humans, ending with Jesus Christ himself, an actual human who walked the Earth in recorded historical time who was called the Son of God, and the Son of Man. by his followers.
In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.
And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.
And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.
And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness.
Revelation is the first moment light appears out of darkness. It only happened once, but it’s still happening. Revelation is a miracle. Revelation contains all that we can’t see as long as we are in a human body moving through time, and is also the key that will carry us through the door to move beyond time. It’s a paradox and can’t really be understood with thoughts. It’s one of those Emily Dickinson kind of truths, the kind that has to be told slant, which is what I”m going to do now because I’m really tired of all these ideas, although I have found the writing of them exhilarating. Because so many of us these days have lost the ability to understand poetry, sometimes I just have to write an essay and do some explaining. Consider it my kuleana and either thank the Earth for telling me to do it, or roll your eyes and say, “Enough, already. Get to the story!”
The story I’m going to share is the next one in another series I’ve been working on here on The Corpus Callosum Chronicles. In sharing it, I happily merge “To Live in Growing Orbits” with this series, “The Initiation of Light.”
As Martin Shaw says, shall we go?
(I’ll answer for all of us.)
Let’s go!
The Salmon of Wisdom
There were rumors we began with a flood.
I bet you haven’t heard that. We Irish came to this land on the same flood that Noah saved us from with his ark, marching the animals on two-by-two until the water subsided. But despite what we like to think, we Irish aren’t special. You’ll find the same story in many places around the world. Cities destroyed by water. Crops wiped out, trees pulled up by the roots to float until they sank, for there was no shore to receive them. I’m sure you’ve all heard how Noah and his family survived, drifting on the ark until they got a sign from a white dove that land had returned, the olive branch and the rainbow, covenant of God’s promise to look after us.
How did this come to be? The Irish tracing their lineage back to Noah? Well then, let me enlighten you with the story. It’s a strange one that I, too, had a hard time believing at first.
As I was told, when Noah denied his own son Bith a place on the Ark, along with his companions Fintan MacBochra and Ladra, and his own granddaughter Cesair, the plucky lass took charge. Cesair built three more arks and promised safe transport to them all if they would acknowledge her leadership. As the waters rose, the small band gathered others left behind by Noah, and made their way to Inis Fail, the Promised Land—Eire—Erin—Ireland.”
Seven soggy years later, one ship finally reached dry ground. Only Fintan, Bith, Ladra, Cesair, and fifty women survived. On land, they divided themselves up into three groups, one man to each. Cesair, having eyes for Fintan, joined his group, but when the other two men died, her love took on a burden she wasn’t expecting. It was up to her and Fintan to populate Inis Fail.
Now this may have been a dream come true for some men, but Fintan quaked at the thought of being responsible for populating the Promised Land! Perhaps he was more of a hermit than a lover. Alas—he fled.
Brokenhearted, Cesair died soon after. All the women but warrior Banba were swept away by the Flood, leaving Fintan and Banba as the only humans left in Ireland, and that wasn’t the case for long. Tossed on the wild waters, Fintan discovered his powers as a shapeshifter. To survive he became a salmon, biding his time beneath the churning surface until the waters receded.
When land appeared again, the waters shaped themselves into bodies of water. One of those limbs was the River Boyne, which Fintan discovered, and with the instinct spawned in his silvery flesh he powered his way upstream all the way to a pool ringed by nine hazel trees. Nine nuts grew on each tree that contained all the world’s knowledge. One by one the nuts fell into Fintan’s fish lips, traveling down his gullet to his belly. Lo and behold, they tinged his scales with all the colors of the rainbow. He had swallowed the light. And that is how he became known as the Salmon of Wisdom.
I’m Finn MacCool, by the way. I haven’t properly introduced myself. You may have heard of me, though my name is not as renowned as it once was when I led the Fianna, my great band of wild-living warriors—oh how we danced and fought and loved this island—but I’m getting away with myself. Tends to happen when you get older. The mind wanders to better days, or at least the glory days when we all answered the horn’s call and rode out onto the mountain to hunt deer in the deep glades where ferns released the wisdom of our primal ancestors into the air on gold spores.
I learned some of that wisdom just by galloping through them, but I was too young to recognize it at the time. And the deer, what can I say? I loved her—but that is another story, which I’ll tell you if you really want to hear it, if you’ll come with me to another time and place where you may not hear what happened to the Salmon of Wisdom. No? You want to focus on one story? Well, that’s your choice then, but I must say it’s often the journey where the wisdom is gleaned, not the destination. Still, I aim to please so I will stay focused. It seems people in your time best understand a story that moves from A to Z without detours, so I’ll make this relatable and not take you on a wild Irish ramble into the mystic. You’ve got Van Morrison for that, anyway.
I was born to Cumhaill and Murna, whose father Tadg (my grandfather) was so irate he killed my father and probably would have killed me if my mother had not fled. She and my aunt Bodmhall raised me on the mountainside.
Bodmhall was a trainer of warriors. She actually trained many of the boys that grew up to join the Fianna, and she taught me the martial arts of Ireland. My mother was a deer woman, and from her I learned to run with the deer and to listen in all directions while standing still. Some say my mother could even become a deer, but I never saw that. To me, she was a human mother and I loved her. She called me Deimne, Little Stag, and there was nothing I loved more in the world than to curl up with her in a grove to shelter from the bright sunlight, walking out through the dusk into starlit fields of hay and meadowsweet.
Sooner than my mother wanted, I was faster than the deer, and soon enough my grandfather had heard of me and my mother living on the mountainside and determined to kill us. It broke my mother’s heart, but she dressed me in rags and sent me off with a band of traveling bards. We sang our way across the ley lines of Ireland, in and out of many households. The bards called me Finn because I was so fair that I shone even when the sun didn’t, which is still the case often in Ireland, though who knows what will happen with global warming.
Eventually, my time with the wandering minstrels came to an end. They were talking about sailing across the great ocean in coracles and I knew I wasn’t ready for that, so when they offered to escort me to a great druid master who lived in the woods near the River Boyne, I didn’t say no.
Finnegas was his name, a man of deep wisdom, who wanted even more. Obsessed with what he didn’t know, my new master spent hours fishing in the River Boyne, hoping to catch the famed Salmon of Wisdom, Fintan, who had eaten the nuts from the Tree of Life and knew everything there was to know in the world because he’d swallowed the light.
For a boy, life with Finnegas was grand. We lived in the woods with no one to tell us what to do or where to be. He taught me all the druid lore, the ballads and spells and stories, and I learned even more from the woods themselves. Often we would sit together on the banks of the Boyne reciting poetry while Finnegas dropped his line into the pool in the hopes of catching Fintan.
And then it happened—a mighty tug on the pole—and Finnegas leaping to his feet, straining with all his might to reel the catch in. With glee he hollered, “My boy! It’s Fintan, himself! At last! Oh, glory!”
Beads of sweat poured down his forehead as he put his whole being into reeling that fish in, and when we could see it just beneath the water’s surface—the rainbow flash—well I’ll tell you, I’ve never seen the like before or after.
“You did it, Finnegas!” I yelped with delight, leaning toward the old man to help him haul the great Fintan onto the bank.
“Back off. I’ve got it,” Finnegas commanded. I let him do the work himself. It was his catch and he was rightly proud of it.
I have to say I was a bit sad watching Fintan gasp on the grass next to our fire pit. Finnegas was blowing on an ember to get the flames going so he could roast and eat this wisest of beasts. He would be the greatest bard ever. What epics he would compose! The very trees trembled in jubilation.
My master laid the fire, stacking kindling on the red coals and then adding larger logs. As the flames flickered and leapt into life I was watching the salmon and something occurred I’ve never forgotten in all my adventures with the Fianna—I met the eye of the Salmon of Wisdom just before it glazed over. Let me tell you, I’ll never forget it. I was there when the rainbow left his scales, shifting right before my eyes to a dull, flat gray like a poisoned well. I watched magic leave the world. I watched possibilities shrink.
But Finnegas was going to eat it and the magic would be restored! I was delighted for my teacher and helped him blow on the flames until the fire was roaring, rip rap. “Thank you, Finn. You’re a good boy,” Finnegas told me. My heart swelled with pride.
“There, just so. The coals are ready.” He looked up at me. “Though I find myself exhausted after my exertions. I need to lie down and restore myself. Would you turn the spit while I rest? I’ll eat the salmon when I awake.”
And that’s how it happened. I swear, I had the best intentions.
Finnegas propped himself against an oak. “Wake me when it’s ready, boy. And don’t eat even one bite!”
As he drifted off, I sat by the fire watching the fish with a falcon’s intensity. I wanted it to be perfect for my master. I watched the skin crackle and fat drip into the flames with a sizzle. I tried to forget the loss of the rainbow and how the salmon’s eye had met mine, but I couldn’t, and maybe that’s why when the fish was done and I called out to Finnegas to rouse him—“Dinner!” I couldn’t forget that rainbow, and maybe that’s why when I noticed a blister bubbling on the fish’s roasting skin I couldn’t resist popping it with my thumb, which caused my own thumb to blister. Without thinking I sucked on it, and my spontaneous act of self-soothing changed the course of history, for all the salmon’s knowledge entered into me.
Finnegas saw it at once, of course. I stood before him holding up the fish for him to eat and I looked nothing like the reckless boy who’d been following him about the woods all these years. Unbelievably, considering I’d ruined his life’s dream, Finnegas forgave me and told me I may as well eat the rest of the fish. He was a wise man and knew my heart was innocent.
Destiny had shown her hand to us that day in the woods and he would not resist it. I didn’t either. He told me to suck my thumb whenever I needed an answer to a problem and I still do, even in my old age. He also told me that water drunk from my cupped hands could save a life. That will come into play in another story, but we’re not ready yet for that one. We still have a long way to go and the direction is down. If your knees quake when you hear that, be strengthened by the knowledge I am with you.
Was it fair I received the knowledge of the world Finnegas had yearned for these many years? No, but that’s not the way destiny works. I went on to become the leader of the Fianna and have had a life full of adventures. I’ve entered many stories and left a hundred more, and now I’m leaving this one for you to take up and tell. I encourage you to do right by my story, and to remember life isn’t always fair, but justice will find you. It may not come down from a court, but life will have its way with you, and in the long run, that is justice. I know because I’ve lived through many other stories besides this one, where I was a young and green boy who sucked his thumb and gained the knowledge of the world that made me a great leader, but none of that protected me from a broken heart. Would you like to hear that story? Not today. I find myself tired after my exertions. I think I’ll lie down and rest. Perhaps when I awake, refreshed, I’ll share my story of heartbreak. In the meantime, get some rest yourselves, my fellow travelers. Destiny always finds us, if not in this world, then the next.
There’s nothing really left to say after that besides see you wherever we end up, friends. And if you, like me, are one of the privileged who has choices, I suggest we enjoy the ride. If not, my heart goes out to you. May you receive my words as a drink of life-sustaining water in your time of thirst.
Want to hear more about Finn MacCool? Join me and Elle Luna this Friday, April 18th, in Kealakekua, for a telling of the Pursuit of Dermot and Grainne. Tickets can be found on my website:
Myth Medicine: The Pursuit of Dermot and Grainne
If you’ve made it this far in this essay and you live in the U.S., I have four copies of my book, Piko: A Return to the Dreaming, that were slightly damaged in shipping. As a reward for your enthusiasm or perseverance, I would love to send you a copy for free. Sorry, I can’t afford the international shipping at the moment, so this offer is for those with a U.S. address. The first four to reply to this email or message me through the button below will get one. Don’t forget to send me your address!
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Finally, if you are interested in mentorship with me, I am launching the first part of The Coracle, the Journey of Safety and Belonging, as a group odyssey, beginning May 18th. Details can be found on my website.
Kō aloha lā ea
Concentrate on love by way of the light
Indeed, destiny always finds us ... is not always fair.
Thanks once again for your life-sustaining waters 😊