Ragana: a Novel of Old Europe

CONSCIOUSNESS FICTION





Ragana


A Novel of Old Europe



John E. Darling



For SageAnn










Copyright 2003 and 2011
Oregon Darlings Press
Ashland, OR




This story and all characters are fictional and any resemblance to anyone, living or dead is purely coincidental.  All rights are reserved by the author and no part of this work may be reproduced by any means, except brief quotations in reviews.  Or you can talk to your friends about it or think about it, without fear of infringement of any copyright.








Author’s Introduction

The vision for this book was dropped on me at Burning Man 2003, when, day after day, I was just hanging out with thousands of people, so many of them naked, sharing food, looking all the amazing art and being happy out in the middle of nowhere in this vast Black Rock Desert. 

   I just suddenly realized, as the harsh desert wind was blowing arcross us at some lecture and here was this woman, the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen, at least in the past few months, all covered with alkaline dust and raising her sarong to cover her mouth, so she could breathe, thus exposing her divine and perfect body -- and that no one was even looking at her, let alone desiring her, well, I realized a whole different level about us humans, that we didn’t always look for the Right Person, the one true love who could understand us, but rather relaxed in the lap and soul of Goddess and let her give us all the love there was and all the love and touch we could ever need and that’s the way it had to be for eons in the old days before our dumb civilization and that therefore there had to be a moment when that went away and was displaced, most egregious moment, with the idea that “I’m alone in this” and I need to find one lover to understand and belong to me -- and that was “the birth of the ego.” 

    And that that was full of shit in the extreme, but we are still on that track and no matter how romatic love and falling in love may seem like the most wonderful thing in existence, and very honoring of the beloved, well, it isn’t.  And it isn’t even real to us, isn’t part of our heart and evolution, but we buy it.  If you don’t believe me, ask yourself who you were with 20 years ago and where is that special person now? 

This is the story of the doing and undoing of all that. 


J.E.D.
Ashland, Oregon, USA
August 2003 and 2011






The People

In the Neolithic
Sentsie – Queen-priestess and shaman of the Vinca
Mansur – Consort to Sentsie, chief shaman of the Vinca
Janko – Young man, pioneer of the pairbond
Lila – Janko’s beloved and only.
Kennifer – an elder of the Vinca.
Leta, Beala, Gaesa – priestesses to Goddess, under Sentsie.
Glendifer – Warrior-king of the invaders, called The Others.
Vancie – Battle leader
Gwinna – Battle leader
Braka – warrior, captured from a defeated tribe


In the Present Day
Ragana – Paleoanthropologist, UCLA, author
Kassandra – Professional assistant and friend to Ragana
Daniel Hadrick – Consciousness guru, author
Andrew – Graduate student, University of Washington, paleoanthopology
Janko Kenobe – Leader, Mother of Us All environmental action group.
Grasshopper7Quartz – Rebel tv newscaster, female
Squirrel13Stars – same, male

In the Spirit World
Goddess – Creatrix, Mother of Us All, Existence.
Zais – Shaman of the forebears of the Vinca
Zaishima – An ally or spirit guide to Zais.
The Good Ones - spirits of place and tribe










                                        Preface

In the very old days, before there was history, back in the Neolithic Age, spring didn’t hurt like it hurts to civilized, urbanized people -- we, who can’t begin to let it come in, that is, the real and to us incredibly, but unconsciously upsetting beauty of spring, which comes from one thing, that immense energy of life that we stupidly call sex.

   Sex, we need to remember, is just a word and words are dangerous, because once we speak and admit to the concepts they infer, then we step inside those words and begin to believe in them, eventually writing great books about them and even fighting wars over them.  Sex is such a word. 

   The people of the Neolithic had a word for sex but they rarely used it, preferring instead to lower their heads and whisper something about the goodness of She.  Her or She meant Goddess, but they didn’t use that word.  She or Goddess just were...what is.  We can’t begin to understand that, because we have no word or concept that encompasses everything.  And we have no concept, no hope either, that all of it, even including death, would be lovely and a gift.

   If you ran onto a person you had sex with the previous night, you might stop, entwine fingers, kiss lightly on the cheek and say or indicate with signs, “Such beauty She brings us.”

   Such were the words Mansur said to Sentsie as he found her walking across the green in the middle of their little village of stone and mortar box-shaped dwellings, each of which held a mother and her children.  Men were on the periphery, where they liked to be, so they could herd, hunt and fish.  And just be men.

   So – it was spring.  “She” flowed all about them and in them.  And it did not hurt, like it hurts us.  They could absorb the wild energy happily.  Green flowed back into the small grass shoots.  Fish filled the river by the village.  Darling buds erupted with flowers on branches.  Goats, sheep and cattle mounted each other, thrusting their moist, pink phalli into moist welcoming openings.  Seed met seed in joy.

   Mansur and Sentsie smiled at the activity in the herds, which stood about the valley floor -- no fences.  They had ways to keep the animals near them.  Grain saved from last year, laced with honey and nice herbs.  The animals couldn’t do without it and knew they couldn’t find it in the wild.  There were other ways to keep animals loyal to them.  They talked to the spirits of the animals themselves.  It was an arrangement.  The people kept the herds from the wolves and in turn the herd gave up about one in ten for wolf food.  The people also brushed the herd, hugged them, sang to them, gave them all sorts of pleasures that entranced them.  It was She.  They passed along Her blessings.  Of course.  Why wouldn’t they?  Even if the animals stopped giving milk and were too old and stringy to eat, the people would still do these things for them.  It was something She wanted.  The people knew that.  The seers, shamans, priestesses learned all this from Her.  So She gave them everything in kind, just like they gave it to the goats, sheep and cattle.  That’s how it worked.  Anyone could see that.

   Among themselves, the people behaved the same way.  She was in us and moved through us with gifts of great beauty, magic and pleasure.  You passed these along to other people.  It didn’t go to just anyone, anytime.  You waited till She showed you where She wanted to go.  The concept we have today, in this modern world – of behaving as if this love and flesh belonged to you and it was your choice how to use it – would have been completely outside obvious knowledge and against the truth and reality of nature itself.

   Mansur leaned over and kissed Sentsie’s breast, enjoying the warmth of it.  She smiled and sighed.  They studied the beauty of each others’ eyes. 

   Then Sentsie glanced over across the central green.  There was Janko walking with Lila, holding hands.  These two were together last night, making love, early on.  But they had withdrawn together.  No one else had shared in their love or their delightful, young bodies.  Hm, very odd, thought Sentsie. 

   She indicated the same to Mansur with two signs, pointing over her left shoulder for “last night” and two intertwined fingers for lovemaking, then a tilt of her head toward them. 

   Sign language was still dear to these people, who would be known to history as the Vinca.  The lovely hand movements traced back to their original homelands on the rocky coast of southern Africa, where people of their body type – gracile, as scientists would later call it -- first mutated and bloomed into a distinct species and created a richly defined speech about 200,000 years ago. Then she indicated the rest of the tribe with a quick circular swoop of the first finger, then the negating sign, a quick dash of the smallest finger to the ground.  It meant, no, they did not share Her love with the rest of the people over the past many days.

   Mansur nodded.  He had noticed it too.  Everyone did.   ~









c. 4300 BCE
The village of a people called the Vinca,
  just east of present-day Belgrade, Serbia
1  ::                                       

The two shamans, Sentsie and Mansur called a special retreat outside the normal round of vision quests that went on seasonally, but they tried not to draw too much attention to it, saying it was to acquire special healing powers that the tribe would need with the disappearance of the last mammoth and the changing relationships among people in the tribe “which we are all sensing now.” They knew that everyone knew about it -- and that it was causing disquiet and that its cause was unknown.

   It was dusk now.  As the people gathered in two lines holding up open palms, a sign of deepest respect, the two walked out of the village.  This respect was also due Sentsie, as the village “queen,” which really meant she presided over any decisions reached in concert with her female council.  She had this role because she was the chief shaman and lived in deeper connection with Goddess than anyone else -- and all the time.

   They camped in the hills above the village, not visible but within earshot.  They spent the waning of the day arranging things methodically and with great attention and bringing in wood to burn.  Finally they sat and looked out at the village, sitting beside the river that would later be called the Danube.  They took in the activity of the people, who would be eating and talking about the day.  They could hear laughter sometimes, and sometimes a few drums.  They watched this because this was what it was all about.  The life of the people and the village – as set within the life of Goddess. 

   But something was changing and change wasn’t something that happened much outside the changing round of days, seasons and lives.  Sentsie turned to the man, who, judging by the subtle sound of his lips parting, was about to speak now.

   “Something has come here among us?”   He said it with the usual look of happiness in his eyes, but there it was, that tinge of…what? 

   “The Other,” she said, naming it out loud for the first time.  That was the word she had come to give it.  She studied his face, but with compassion.  He had the look of fear, she thought, when there should have been nothing present to cause fear.

   The evening star shone brightly.  They’d waited till it did.  Answers, guidance, truth – these came better when the love star was bright.  And the first crescent of moon showed – a powerful time for seeking and seeing.  She reached out and touched his cheek.  She didn’t know what else to do.  She’d never seen this till recently, this sense of fear.  No one had.  Something new here among us.  It seemed to her like a disease, but one you couldn’t see.

   She nodded.  Fewest words are best.  And certainly never any words directed to or about the individual.  That was not done, yet she felt the need to do it.  How else to talk about this new thing among us?  Spirit will tell, she thought, but Spirit felt distant tonight.  It had felt distant a lot recently.  That’s why we are here on this retreat.

   She let the silence fall between them.  This also brought truer answers.  It had been done this way through all time, since they had come down from the trees, where they had lived to get away from the big cats and the dog packs, the time before the sharp stones, fire and other magic that Spirit had given them.  It was all remembered in legend and honored in works of magic

   The silence stretched out.  Sentsie studied the flames of the campfire, searching for shapes, flickers, falling off of embers.  She let her mind blank and broadened out her visual sense so she wondered, rather than focused on any particular thing or thought.

   Shapes danced before her, repeating themselves, but she didn’t know what they were.

   “I don’t know,” she said finally. “Something.  Yes, something has come among us.  Things are changing, seemingly little things, like Janko.  He’s become…he won’t…”

   “Yes, I know,” said Mansur. “He won’t make love to any of the other girls. He’s only 14 winters. This is the time when…”

   “He should be doing it with all of them,” she said.  Suddenly, they both stared at each other in surprise.  She pointed to herself and then him, then back and forth a few more times.

   “What’s happening?” he said. “You speak when I am not through speaking!  How can that be?  No one has ever done that.”

   “You did it too,” she said.  “Neither of us noticed.  And you spoke of someone not present.  Then I did.”

   He took her hand.  His face said he was scared.  “Did you dream?”  He’d asked her to dream a few days ago, in preparation for this meeting.  She was good with dreams.

   She took time to breathe, in the custom of the old ways, then nodded.  She waited for him to enquire directly.  That, too, was the custom.

   “Sister, what did they show you – the Good Ones?”  He was referring to the spirits of place and tribe – and sometimes, rarely, the Great Spirit of the World, often called Great Mother or just She with a special emphasis of word and look and a slight bowing of the head toward the ground.

   She waited, breathed, chose her words. “Pain.  Something has come into our minds.  It’s like a voice.  Like the voices of Her and all the other Good Ones, but not a good voice.  And it tries to talk all the time.  It came into Janko – and Lila also.  Now they just love each other, but no one else.”

   “It came inside us, too, didn’t it?”

   “Yes.  Just for a moment.  But we saw and felt it.  We know better than to let it live in us.  They don’t.”

   The next question was obvious.  “What can we…is it something we can get rid of?  Can we kill it?  Should we?  Does She want this?” 

   “That’s why we are here.  I only dreamed what happened, that something new came into our world.  I don’t know what it means or what She thinks or wants.”

   “Do you feel it?” he said.

   “Of course I feel it.  You don’t?”

   “No, I don’t.  What I feel is fear.  I feel it all the time.  But not fear of something, like a big cat in the jungle.  Just fear.  With nothing around me to be afraid of.”

   “That’s it.  That’s what it feels like.”  She nodded at his bag and made the sign of his sticks clacking together.  The dusk had faded now.  It was getting dark.  The time for journeying.  He pulled his polished, hard wood sticks out.

   “If we are to defeat them, the people will sing songs of us and we’ll all be free and…”

   “Shh!  You hyena!  That’s the Other talking!”  Then she put her hand over her mouth. “Me!  That’s it in me.”  She looked at him darkly.  Calling someone by that name or any name – that had never happened.

   “It felt good, didn’t it?” he said, as if charging her with something.

   “You’re right.  That’s them.  The Others.  They like that. 

   “How does it feel good?”  Shamans always had to answer any questions like this.  Any questions in this state and company were considered divinely directed.

   “I felt separated from you and better than you and this brought a sense of power, that I was – I know this is silly and stupid – but that I was right and you were wrong and so I was better than you.  Like you were a completely different and disconnected person from me.”

   “I know what you are saying.  It is not new or strange.  I have felt it sometimes too, this looking upon another person as strange and different, as not me, not us, not right, not good.  It is crazy and bad.  It is…I have never had to say these things.  It hurts, right here in my chest.”

   “I know.  Me too.  This is why we are here.  Something new is here.”  She took her mask out of her pouch – the mask of a fox.  She had two animal helpers.  One was a bird. This one, a fox, was bound to the earth.  Her way was to snoop out things and dwell among thickets and darkness waiting for the scent, the smell of a thing to emerge and give itself to her and tell her what it wanted and to reveal its soft spot, its flaw, if it had one, so the hunter might take advantage of it. 

   Mansur was the hunter.  She was the finder.  That’s how they’d always worked together and how Spirit wanted them to work.  She was scared, she noticed as she tied on her mask. Her hands trembled.  But now it was on and she felt Fox’s power pour over her, as it always had.  She stared out of the eye holes in the mask and felt and saw as Fox felt and saw.  She nodded at his sticks and took out her drum.  It would be a long night, maybe into the next day and night or longer.

   Mansur took out his ochre, a muddy red earth and smeared his face with it, then applied white under his eyes.  The hair stood up on Sentsie’s arms.  This was his daimon, a spirit helper tied to no animal but rather to the spirit of place, this valley.  His daimon was passed to him by Zais, a shaman countless generations before.  Zais was the man who’d found the valley for the people, ending their aeons of wandering with the herds.  This daimon was the one who’d showed it to him.  Mansur called the daimon Zaishima, the spirit who helped Zais.

   Sentsie approached Mansur now and held out her left hand, palm up.  That meant question – answer the question or do you have an answer to the question that might be asked at this time.

   He knew what the question was.  Do you have Zaishima here now?  Or can he not cut through the fear?  He held out his empty hands.  He didn’t know yet.  Sentsie pulled out the clay seated Goddess and placed her on the ground by the fire.  She kissed it and rubbed her breasts against it while chanting sounds – her sounds, magical ones she’d always used to prime and open the Goddess.  She squatted and rubbed her yoni slowly down the front then the back of it, covering it with her juices, which were flowing now.  She had blood.  That was a good sign.  She kissed Mansur wetly and reached under his skins, pulling out his ling and kissing it, sucking on it, till the quickening juices flowed.  She rubbed them all over the statuette, chanting her breathy phrases that only Mansur and a few other shamans had heard.  Or people who were very sick, when she was doing curing ceremonies, but they never seemed to remember them.  The little Goddess, took on a shine in the firelight as the juices dried.

    She began to drum, slowly.  He began to clack his sticks together.  He nodded yes.  Zaishima was beginning to come over and in him.  Beginning.  It was hard.  It had never been hard like this.  He made a fist and covered it with his other palm to show difficulty.  She passed her two fingers over her mouth now to indicate silence.  They went into their dream journey.   ~












                                                    Summer, 2012
2 ::                                        Los Angeles

It was in heavy traffic trying to get off “The Five” (Interstate 5) that Ragana Fox realized she might just be out of her tree or to put it in plain language, which she did, going out of her mind. 

   “It’s not me,” she whispered to herself.  She glanced at the people in adjacent lanes.  Are they going out of their minds, too?  She figured they were.  She talked to enough people in frank ways.  They were all losing it.  Whatever.  It didn’t matter about them.  It only matters about me.  She couldn’t wait to get to her condo for a drink.  Scotch.  The expensive kind that’s so smooth.  But even better, the numbness that would come with it.  And the cigarette.  A former lover had turned her onto Shermans, which have brown paper and are organic and actually taste pretty good.  They sent a numbness over her cells and nerves, too.  She would have them on her balcony, overlooking the basin with a general view to the smog-shrouded ocean area.

   She knew it was lame, the soporifics, and she’d tried to stop, but they were just too good.  Good at numbing her.  But numbing what about her?  A horn blasted her from behind.  She wasn’t focusing and had let a gap happen ahead of her.  In her rearview mirror, some man gave her the finger.  She ignored him.  You never acknowledged anyone in this town.  This state.  Maybe the whole country now.

   It’s not me that’s crazy here, she told herself again.  She’d taken to actually talking out loud to herself, even moving her lips while she drove or when she thought she wasn’t being looked at.  It’s not me.  It’s this fucking crazy world.  We are not, repeat, not, meant to live this way. 

   She was in her apartment now, striking up the cigarette and tasting the scotch go down, waiting for the hit.  Which came now.  Nice.  God, that’s nice.  Or rather, Goddess, that’s nice.  She’d trained herself to use the feminine form, since she was one of the foremost archaeologists and authors of the European Neolithic, a time when The Goddess was prevalent and represented earth, life, birth, sex and any sort of generativity and pleasure.  In other words, pretty much everything that’s missing from life now, she thought, taking a big drag on the Sherman.  Big drag, big brain hit about ten seconds later.  Nice.

   Two marriages behind her, live-in bf just left, squabbles over kids from the first marriage.  Kids into drugs now and disappearing for days, snarling that no way did they have to tell you where they were going to be.  They didn’t even know where they were going to be.  Often, they didn’t even know where they were if they did call.  Some chick’s house out toward the beach.  Right.  What’s the phone number there?  No one knew.  Phones didn’t have numbers on them anymore and there were so many numbers to remember.  It could be any one of them.  I’ll be home tomorrow. 

   She felt it rising in her, that crazy terror.  It couldn’t be panic attacks.  Only really fucked up people had those.  But then what was it?  The scotch and smoking used to make it fall back, but it wasn’t working now.  Have to get back to the meditation – make the mind blank.  That’s the key. 

   Just then the phone rang.  She flicked the butt over the rail and grabbed the phone.  It was one of those stone age phones, still wired to the handset and the wall.  It was a girlfriend, Kassandra.  She could tell Ragana was going into the hole.  That’s what they called it.  It was scary but it gave them a sisterly bond. 

   “Kinda hard still?”  A reference to the bf moving out, with lots of accusations on both sides.

   “It’s ok.  It’s not him, the son of a bitch.  No really, it’s not him.  He’s like every guy, at least in this state.  I can’t be mad at that anymore.  We’re all just victims of crazy times in a crazy world, and, yes I know that sounds like a real attitude problem, but what if it’s true?”

   “I’m coming over.  There’s something I need to turn you onto also.  In person.  I’ll be there in ten.”  She was.

   They smoked on the deck.  They liked to let a nice silence settle between them and look at all the lights and cars creeping along the crammed freeway.  Kassandra had met Ragana while a graduate student in anthropology and had been on several digs with her in the “Old Europe” area of the former Yugoslavia, Romania and Bulgaria, sometimes in Northern Greece.  She often was Ragana’s assistant on lecture and book tours.  One was coming up.

   “Look at all that energy,” said Ragana. “I like to bring it into perspective by looking through all those walls and cars and imagining all the people fucking their brains out, getting drunk, snorting up, lighting up or else sitting there in their cars going nuts from stress.  Then they go home and crack that self-improvement book about positive thinking or changing their diet.  We’re all so good at fucking our brains out and drugging our brains out, then trying somehow to be better people the next day.”

   Kassandra imagined it, looking through all the walls and cars.  You couldn’t help but laugh and she did.  “That really puts it in perspective.  Give me another ciggie.”  She gave Ragana a kiss on the cheek.  “That’s from my heart.  My heart says hi, I love you.”

   Ragana hugged her and joined her in another cigarette. 

   “You said you had something.”

   “I do.  We’ll be in Seattle and B.C. next week.  He’s there – Daniel Hadrick, the guy who wrote The Freedom of the Present.  You wouldn’t read it.  I gave it to you?  The book?”

   “Yes, yes, sorry.  I’m not free enough in the present to read it.”

   “Well, he lives there.  He’s lecturing there when we’re in town.  I got us tickets.  Hope that’s ok.  You need this.” She blew a big cloud of smoke. “We all need this.”

   “Ok.  For you I’ll do it.  You know I’m way past my self-improvement seminar phase.  I know.  You said this is different.  We’ll go.”

   “He’s found a way of taking apart the personality, the ego, the rational mind,” said Kassandra. “I know you regard the mind as a wonderful tool and all that.  This is different.  It – he – says the mind is used 99 percent of the time against us, by repeating dysfunctional, isolating messages from the distant past that have become embedded in the ego and just keep…”

   “Kassie, I’ll go.  Let’s let him tell me.  And I’ll read the book before we go.  Or skim it real hard.”

   “It doesn’t skim, Ragana.  You’ll see.”

   “Really, Kassie, why me – why it is for me?  What’s the attraction?  There’s so much of that crap out there.”

   “I know, I know.  I’ve heard it all, too.  But this guy and you have something big in common, though I don’t think you appreciate what it is.  I mean, I don’t think you understand what you’ve really found in all your work.  In Old Europe, I mean.  Yes, you found a peaceful Goddess culture that existed for 5,000 years of amazing happiness in the great rounds of nature, sex, feasting, having a nice day, over and over a billion times in these nice little villages and that laid a foundation for us to go ahead with some degree of confidence and create civilization.”

   “Right. Everyone knows that now.  And what fucking difference does it make?  None.  It gives a few Goddess-addicted feminists something to hang a spiritual life on.  Fine.”

   “Ok, Ragana, at least we know our past now.  It was a great contribution.  It says if we were like that once, then where did it go?  It’s still inside us, the knowledge and longing to live like that.  Anyway, that’s not why I’m bringing this up, about The Freedom of the Present, you know?  What this guy has done is remarkable.  It’s something very radical and simple and very different from all the other New Age crap. Ok?”

   Kassie let a silence happen, waiting for Ragana to ask what.  “Ok, what?”

   “Well, for one thing, he’s read all your books and cites them in the forward of his last book.”

   “What does he say?”

   “He says his main inspiration came about ten years ago when he was totally down and looking at suicide and he read your books and looked at the art of the Neolithic and realized we were all sane once.  And happy.  And he realized we could recreate that mind if we kept at it and realized that civilized life has led us down a blind alley – spiritually, emotionally, psychicly, sexually, every way -- and that the only sane reaction to it is alienation, incipient insanity and wanting some way out.  Like suicide.  Which he was considering.  He realized that was a healthy reaction to modern civilization or even ancient civilization – any civilization.”

   “He managed to recreate that mind, the Neolithic mind, in himself?” said Ragana, obviously skeptical.

   “That’s right.  He did it.  You’ll recognize it when you read the book.  Don’t skim.”

   “Ok, what is the Neolithic mind?  That’s something we’ve talked a lot about, you and me, but I’m not sure we’ve really said it.  I don’t think I spelled it out in my work.  I just wrote about folkways, rituals, birth, marriage and death customs I knew about or could infer from what remains of their culture.  It’s largely a process of elimination.  You know, you look at 30,000 pieces of sculpture and eventually you emerge with some notions.  Were they aware of sex?  Very.  Were they into marriage and monogamy?  Not likely.  Maybe starting.  Did they use mind-altering drugs?  Why wouldn’t they have?  Mushroom imagery appears rarely, but it’s  there.  So, probably only shamans used them.  And so on.”

   “But, Ragana, you never said, ok, this means their minds worked this or that way.  You never got into whether you think they were ever anxious.  Or had a sense of ego, of separate self.  Or feared death, like we do.”

   “Don’t you think all that’s pretty obvious?”

   “Of course it is.  But it’s so easy to project what we want to see.  To create an ideal human, the one we want to be.  As a scientist, you taught me rigorour practices to avoid that.  I’ve followed them.  No hard evidence, no conclusion.  Period.”

   “Well, fuck the rigors, you hyena.”  They laughed.  It was an in-joke, a word they learned from the local people on their digs.  “Did they have, well, inner peace?” Ragana posed.  She’d never crossed this line before.  She’d also never been this unhappy and desperate before.  “Were they happy?  I mean deeply happy?  Were they at home in the world, I mean really at home?” 

   “You mean, were they the opposite of us?”

   “Exactly.”

   “I think they were.  I know they were.  And I know you know it.  But I also know that by the time the Neolithic was over, they were isolated egos with ranting, scared minds.  Just like us.” 

   “So, something happened in there, something new came into them,” said Ragana, squinting seemingly into the depths of her own knowledge – the non-rational sort of knowledge, that is.  “I mean something came into them other than the usual traumatizing conquest crap of the Indo-European invasions that made the patriarchal world we all know and love.”

   “Yes, they died from inside.  It wasn’t the Indo-Europeans.  Haven’t you felt it?  You must have.  Something new came into them.”

   “Ok, I’ve felt it.  But feelings aren’t evidence.”

   “I know.  But what if it’s all we have?  And who’s in a better position that you and me to feel what it’s like to be a human being and have all our powers, all our intelligence, all our passion and to know, down to our toenails, a sense of rightness and belonging in this world?”

   Ragana nodded.  She pulled out a third cigarette and lit it.  That was just a way of saying, hey, don’t go away, stay here.  We’re into something.  “I’ve always felt it.  When we’re on those digs, touching their figurines, standing in their earth, Goddess, it takes my breath away.  I feel such…happiness.  It’s hard to use that word.  Happiness.  But there it is.  There’s no other word.”

   Kassie put her hands on Ragana’s shoulders and turned her so they were looking directly at each other.  She took her pendent from her top and held it before Ragana.  It was a cruciform Stone Woman from the Neolithic.  A real one.  They had dug it up at Vinca, in Yugoslavia.  You never snitched artifacts but…there were so many of them.  Kassie had wept when she brushed the earth off it.  It was hers.  They both knew it.  It had power.  Kassie had said she knew and recognized it and thought she had made it.  Ragana had looked askance but said: keep it.

    “Happiness,” said Kassie.  That is the word.  We were born to it for 99 percent of our time on earth.  It’s ok to know that and long for it.  Something came into us humans and stopped all that happiness.  But we have a right to it.  We have the power to find it.  We have to.  That’s the only reason I called Daniel…”

   “You called him?  You talked to him?”

   “I did.  I wasn’t going to tell you.”

   “Kassie!  This is going too far!”

   “It’s just drinks after his talk.  That’s all.  He wants to meet you.  A lot.”

   “You arranged to be with him?  Kassie!  Why?”

   “Ok, maybe it was crazy.” She sighed and dragged on her Sherman.  “Sometimes you just have to trust me.  Also, he sounded sexy.  Very.”

   “Oh, my God.  Not that too.”  She threw her head back laughing.  “I think we’re clear that’s not the answer to anything.  Hellll-oh, Kassie?”

   “But you’ll come.  You’ll trust me.  Just do it.”

   “Ok, a Neolithic man.  A happy, sexy man, able to live in the eternal, sacred now.  One who looks at women and sees nothing but the sacred, life-giving, ecstatic beauty of the feminine.  This I’ve got to see.”

   “Well, you’ve imagined it enough.  I’ve seen you.  And you long for it.”

   “Who wouldn’t?  So do you, Kassie.  Are you sure you aren’t looking for this Neolithic Man for yourself?”

   “Ragana, to quote the noted anthropologist Fox, the concept of pairbonding did not appear to come in until population reached such a level that competition for living and farming territory began, well after the Kurgan incursions of the fourth millennia yada, yada.  Been there.  Not looking for the pairbond.  Well, actually…looking for the bond, just not the pairing.”

   “Hm.  Yes.  You’ve hit it on the head, my esteemed colleague.  The bond is what carries it into the future.  The pairing is entirely in the present.”

   “Hm.  And what motivates the pairing, the marriage, the ongoing unit?”

   “The need for social…”

   “Tell the truth.  If you don’t mind.”  They looked at each other.  Kassie’s look was one of complete dispassion.

   “Down deep?”

   “Deepest.”

   “Fear.  Of course.”   ~











3  ::                                                                                          The Journal of Ragana Fox

Why do I love standing out on my tiny balcony drinking Scotch and smoking with Kassie and feeling the caress of that coastal fog and looking out at all the lonely people in their apartments, the people who would never dream of talking to me on the street?  It is.  If you told me I couldn’t have my drink and cigarette and Kassie…I don’t know what I would do.  I know.  That means it’s addiction and that I’m full of emptiness.  It hurts to see and say that. 

What do I want?  I want what I’ve always wanted.  To go back a mere seven millennia and just live with my people in a world I can imagine so much it hurts.  Every day.  I hurt.  Goddess, I hurt.  Ok.  Let’s not think about that too much.  Got a lecture tour in Seattle and Portland.  Kassie wants me to meet her New Age guru-author.  Of course, I will do it.  I can’t stand that stuff, though.  Been there.  Tried.  I think anything that could help me tolerate this modern, lonely world would be inherently evil.  God, what a mess I must be, to write something like that.

Ok, let me write about something good in my life.  My children.  I loved having and nursing them more than I can say.  But raising them here in Southern California, I must have been out of my mind.  Now they are part of this culture.  Oh well.  It is for them to…face…deal with.  Then there’s Kassie.  I do love her.  She has really stayed by my side.  She loves me too. 

I guess it’s time to just say it.  I am depressed.  I’ve never wanted to be depressed.  What IS depression?  Spoken like a scholar.  Define your terms first.  Ok, depression is…let’s see…it would be feeling very shitty at least part or most of every day.  And feeling scared about it.  And alone.  There.  Shit, that made me feel better.  Just telling the truth about it.  I am somehow more here in this present time, place.  Somehow feels heroic.  Hm.  Interesting.  Ok, another part of it is I don’t really care if I die.  And the feeling, frankly, that this world is not good enough for me.  Oh, and another big one – I want to go be with Goddess.  I feel She is not in this world much, if at all.  Why would She want to be?  I’ve got the pills.  It would hurt Kassie though.  And it would trash my kids bigtime.  Seen enough of what that does to family members left behind.  Not pretty.  This world is crazy and fucked up enough for my kids to figure out.  Not going there.  Be brave, Ragana.  We have our Scotch and cigarettes.  Fuck.  Like all the other drunks and addicts out there.  At least I don’t get lost in tv and organized religion.  My religion is not organized.  It’s just something right here.  In my heart.   ~











4  ::                                    With the Vinca

Mansur and Sentsie had only drummed and danced a brief while when she stopped and looked him in the eye.  Usually journeying was so easy.  All that was necessary was drumming and dancing – simply asking, and one would pass through the veil into the spirit world.  Even members of the tribe or village could do it, practically at will.  They would consult their personal spirits by just going for a walk along a ridge or by a lake.  It would just happen.  In sign language, they indicated the act by the motion of a flat hand moved in a circle and then two fingers cutting through it, so easy. 

   But tonight, it was different.  They were both thinking of the mushrooms now.  They only used the mushrooms on rare occasions, when it was time for a major realignment and it was necessary to wipe away all the thoughts and routines of this world and expose oneself completely to the divine forces. 

   She had ground up mushrooms from the spring.  She took them out of her pouch and mixed them with hot water from the fire and with other herbs to make it pleasant tasting.  She bowed and spoke to the tea: “Guide and love us, dear Goddess, Mother of the World, Mother of Us All, Spirit of the World.  Something has come into us.  We fear, when there is nothing to fear.  We always know what to do.  Tonight, we do not know what to do.  We are your children and we are lost.  Help us, Mother.  Take us to your breast.  Your power is the power of life.  We are lost from it.  We see you, but as through water muddied by floods.  Come now and love us, as you always have.  Aay-voe-way.”  That was a sacred phrase only shamans used, inviting the Goddess to make it so.  They knew She would.  She always had.

   They drank and waited and began beating the drum very slowly.  This only happened on the deepest of quests and vigils.  The village would be alarmed.  They would call upon their personal Spirits and probably on Goddess herself to assist.  Some would stay up all night.  Sentsie could feel them and, as the potion took hold, she could see some of their animal spirits in the woods around them, friendly and witnessing.

   “She comes,” said Sentsie.  The woman shaman always had the lead in ceremony, because Goddess, in her life-giving, life-nurturing capacity was seen as Mother, the Mother on whose breast we feed all our days.  In her maid-virgin capacity, she was seen as femininity in full possession of herself and who could give the ecstasies of sex to men at will.  Past child-bearing years, she was seen as aligned with the mysteries of death and regeneration, which were seen as wholly positive – a return to the womb of the Mother herself.

   “She is here,” Sentsie whispered, She was beginning to be able to see the bones of Mansur now.  She went and sat cross-legged on the earth, with her knees touching his.  His bones were bright red as she looked into his body.  In his face, she could see the spirals of life itself slowly turning.  She nodded to him and traced her fingers around the lines of life on his face, to let him know that Mother had arrived, apparently in her Crone aspect, which Sentsie indicated by wagging her two fingers to her right, the direction of the future or wisdom at the end of life.

   Mansur nodded, also indicating the right with his fingers.  She invited him to trace the lifelines he saw on her face and body.  He did.  She now placed the Goddess figurine to her left and petted it lovingly. 

   “Dear Goddess, open our minds to this,” she said. “What is happening?  We are seeing people creating a two-bond, just the two of them, with love just for each other, not for all.  We are seeing a growing of this strange thing – that a person will see self apart and without us.” 

   Sentsie suddenly choked up and began weeping.  Mansur saw her tears roll down her cheeks in bright red, like lava flowing from a volcano.  “Apart – without us,” she said again. 

   Mansur leaned over and kissed her tears, taking them into his mouth and swallowing them.  It was what you did.  You swallowed the person’s unhappiness and made it your own, too.

   “And another thing,” Sentsie said. “Crossing over, back into your womb, Goddess. I’m starting to see some old people fear it, as if it were bad.  How can this be?  How can the people lose understanding of this?  What is happening?  Wombing back to you is one of the most basic things we know.”  She wept again.

   Mansur drew his two fingers across the space between them, which meant stop, let it be, let there be silence now for Her to unfold what we need to know.  She nodded.  They shifted to face the Goddess figurine, which now glowed indigo, the deepest color, the color of the rainbow that always lay closest to earth.  Tonight it ran with lifelines of yellow and red, the most active and urgent colors.

   Goddess now emerged from the statuette, enlarging herself to a little bigger than human size.  This had happened countless times over many years, many lifetimes of shamans before them, who also used this statuette to hold and focus Her energy. 

   The baked clay figure was plump, with huge breasts, belly and thighs, to infer pregnancy, nursing and abundance.  Source of all, in other words.  She was carved with the lifelines, dots, chevrons, lozenges and a large pubic triangle that shamans had seen in their journeys with Goddess at the beginning of settlement here.  She had wished them here, settled, no longer following the herds and living in caves and bone shelters.  She had opened their minds – the women – to the planting of grain, fruit and vegetable and the keeping of small herds.  They had to be on the bottomland by streams in order to have water.  To do this, they had to pile stones up, rather than search for natural shelters.  They’d had to learn to chink them with mud and grass, to keep out the wind.  Then came the roofs, made of sticks and whatever they could cobble together to keep out the rain.

   And here she was again, seated beside them, not an imagined presence, not a focus of collective emotion and wish, not a feared, faroff being, but Goddess.  The real Goddess, the one that gave life to all things and took it back, the one that gave the pleasures of the couch in all forms to all people generously and unfailingly, so they would know what it felt like to be Her, to be Goddess.

   She looked just like the idol they had, except that her eyes were real eyes, much larger and more alive than could be represented in carved clay.  That’s why they left the eyes inferred, rather than detailed in their real glory.

   Hair stood up all over their bodies.  All people saw Goddess in all things, but when She appeared in human form, well, it was a very special moment, an oracle, an ecstasy.

   Sentsie could not stop crying.  “Goddess, I’m afraid!  I’ve never felt afraid unless there was something in front of me to hurt me, like a tiger, but even when that happened, I just relaxed and saw my death.  Rather, I saw you here opening to me, ready to take me into your heart.”

   Mansur wanted to interrupt her.  He’d already lifted his hand to butt in and say she’d whined enough.  Then he caught himself.  “Goddess, you see it.  Why did I do that?  No one has ever done such things – interrupt another, want to stop their crying, try to tell them how to talk to Goddess.  I feel this strange emotion.  Blood is in my face.  I want to crawl away.  I should not be here.”

   “They’re calling it shame,” Sentsie said to him. “It’s happened to others.  This is part of it, isn’t it Goddess?  It’s that feeling that a person is somehow alone and different and cut off from…from all the other people.  And from YOU!”  She’d screamed the last part and started wailing uncontrollably.

   “Dear Goddess,” said Mansur.  “Do help us now.  This is not from you, is it?  This cannot be from you.  It goes against all we know of you, all our griots have told us going way back into our life in the trees.  Goddess, that’s a long time.  Things cannot change like this, but it’s happening.  Things don’t change, except when you showed us how to live in one place and grow things and make houses.”  He drew his two fingers from right to left indicating he was done and welcomed a reply.

   Goddess stood now and took them by the hand, drawing them inside her form.  They went deeper into their trance.  She showed them their little village spread out before them.  You could cover it with two hands.  From it grew two and three story structures, then towering to a huge city, with all the cars and flying things.  Sentsie and Mansur were horrified.  Their faces twisted with pain.  Then Goddess drew them close to two women, who stood talking.  They held burning sticks and sucked the smoke from them.  Goddess opened the hearts of the two women so Sentsie and Mansur could know them.  There it was, all of it, the hardened sense of self, the life lived just for oneself.  They saw that these two women had no people, though they could sense the bond between the two women.  Sentsie wanted to reach out and touch them.  She looked at Goddess, who nodded yes. 

   Sentsie put out her hands and took both the women in.  They had something terribly wrong with them.  Sentsie opened her eyes to the lifelines of their bodies and the dots and swirls formed by their energies.  Their hearts!  Instead of being one large solid indigo light, what she saw and felt was a collection of shattered small lights, rather pale reds and oranges. 

   “They’re all broken.  Their hearts are broken.  I’ve never seen anything like this,” she told Mansur. “Yet they’re still walking around, not dead.  How can they live? Goddess, are these really sick people or is everyone like this in this crazy world?”

   She turned to face Goddess, who nodded.  Everyone.  Now Goddess moved her hand and swirled the scene to another.  It was daylight.  There were hills and a river.  Why, it was exactly this, where they lived now.  And here were these two women.  They were on the ground, in a pit, with tools in their hands, digging something out of the ground.  Now they dusted the dirt off it and held it up together.  They were very happy.  Sentsie looked more closely at the thing they held.  It was this, their figurine, the seated, ample Goddess that was Sentie’s own.  She wanted to scream, but Goddess seemed to put her arms around Sentsie now and she felt calm and just witnessed it.

   “This is in distant time to come.  I see that.  Our world will pass.  Just like the life in the trees and the life following the wild herds and living in caves.  Of course.”  Sentsie was reeling from the medicine, but had done it so many times, she knew to surrender and go with it, to let herself occupy the mind of Goddess herself, knowing she could not immediately understand everything, but that it would shape her in days and months to come. 

   “Goddess, you are answering my question now.  This Other that has come in among us.  It is to be part of the world to come, is it not?”  Yes, Goddess affirmed.  Her answers were things you felt through your whole body and knowing, like an infusion, like making tea.  I am the water; you are the knowledge.  It comes in.  Who were these women?  What am I to do with this knowledge?  It changes me, my mind, my heart and in time, I am it and I live it.

   Mansur moved around behind her and held her.  He, too had witnessed all this and reeled in it.  They would take many long walks in days to come.  Each day a bit more of the mystery would be alive and afoot in their lives.  Each day, the people would look to them to impart what they knew, which they would do in a few words here and there.  Things would change, adjust, shift.  It was all in Her will.  Everything is.  She used all beings to this end, to evolve herself and we are on that journey with her, eternally.

   These are the sort of thoughts that came when the journey was starting to be over.  It had gone on all night.  They were exhausted.  Each part of the vision may have taken only moments, but in the magic world it could have gone on for months, years, lifetimes.  It used you and took tremendous energy to meet and match it, to endure the infusions of understanding, but Sentsie and Mansur had done this together many times over their forty-some years of life.  The first streak of dawn was coming and the world was returning now to its normal, radiant appearance. 

   There She was in the red of sun, the black silhouette of mountains, the lovely sound of the river through their valley.  Sentsie nodded at the their instruments and they began drumming and beating their sticks to a happy rhythm.  Voices began happily cheering them from the village.  They were making tea and grain cakes with honey.  Sentsie could smell them.  Her mouth watered.  She wept and let Mansur embrace her.  He kissed her face and shoulders all over.  They began walking down to their people.  How to explain this to them?  How to even begin to understand it.   ~















5  ::                                                                                                                      Seattle

He had only a stool on the stage and Daniel Hadrick liked to stroll up and down the aisles as he talked, often directing his comments to people in his audience.  He seemed psychic, judging by how various people reacted when he singled them out and said something personal.

   “We stand at a unique time in human history,” he said, smiling, as if it were nothing. “We, all of us are going through a big death-rebirth experience.  We’re all quite perfectly miserable and that just doesn’t happen.  It is an event in the human story, a major event.  It has never happened before.  That means it’s intended.  It’s here on our path, our wheel.  We all bemoan the anomie, the loss of values and direction and meaning in modern life as if it were something broken that could and should be fixed.  But it’s here for a reason, for lots of reasons.  If this doesn’t apply to you, if you’re not miserable and scared and lost a huge amount of the time, raise your hand.”

   No one did.  Who wanted to be singled out and have a microphone stuck in their face?  Ragana and Kassie exchanged glances and shook their heads slightly.  No, it applied to them.  Everyone knows what real happiness and belonging to life and to this world would feel like and, no, they did not have it.

   “He’s kind of cute, isn’t he?” whispered Kassie.

   “No,” said Ragana.  Kassie looked askance at her.

   “He’s real.  He’s alive.” Ragana said.

   “He’s truthful.  Just like in his book.  My bullshit meter is not moving.”

   “This passage, this juncture we are living in now,” said Daniel, “Only a few of us recognize it for what it is, certainly less than one percent of us.  For them – us – this is a door.  For the rest of humanity, it’s a wall.  It’s negative.  It’s not supposed to be here.  Something is broken and needs to be fixed.  We need war on it, war on drugs, war on cancer, war on poverty, war on terrorism.”  He stopped to laugh. “I always thought that word was almost too appropriate.  Terrorism -- it means fear-ism.  The science, study or belief in fear.  How true.  We’ve all become scientists in that study.  Fear lives enshrouded around our hearts and we spend most of our energy denying it and trying to manage it, so it doesn’t overwhelm us.”

   Now he was right next to the women.  Their tickets had been aisle seats. 

   “But what are we afraid of, really?  No humans have ever been more assured of their next meal and that it would be nutritious beyond the wildest imaginings of people thousands of years ago.  No humans have ever had better shelter, transportation, information, freedom from tyranny, health care, all of it.  We just fall short in one thing.  What is it?” he asked the audience.  He waited for an answer.  He would get many.  Love.  Belonging.  Meaning.  God.  Nature.

   “There’s a lot of overlap in all these answers,” he said. “What do all these answers have in common?”  The audience was silent.  “I know one person here who’s spent a lifetime thinking about the answer to that.  Ragana, what do these have in common?”  He looked at her and smiled, as if he’d known her for years.

   She was stunned.  She just looked back at him and raised her eyebrows.

   “You don’t have to answer.  Ladies and gentlemen, I am personally very honored to have with us tonight Ragana Fox, the noted Old World archaeologist, author of Life in the Neolithic and other books and authority of the spirituality of the first urban dwellers starting about 9,000 years ago.  I learned a lot from her.  And I thank you with all my heart, Ragana.”

   She nodded, graciously.  The audience clapped.  She stood.  As she began to sit, she caught Kassie’s eye, which had a flaring, insistent look about it.  Do it, she all but said.

   “May I answer your question, Mr. Hadrick?”

   “Just Daniel or Gary, please.”  He handed her the wireless mic.

   “What all those answers have in common…I should say what they all mean to me is, well…”  She was near tears, Kassie could tell.

   “You don’t have to,” Kassie whispered.

   “You’re right.  I have spent all my life trying to understand why we had those things until about 5,000 years ago and then lost them.”  There were some gasps.  Lost God?  Lost love?  A lot of buttons were getting pushed.

   “I just realized that I could give you five or ten good answers, all backed up by very wise-sounding philosophy – patriarchy, farming, alcohol, militarism, literacy, technology, monogamy, monotheism, monarchy.  A lot of mono’s there.  We’ve spent a lot of time trying to reduce this vast mystery to one thing or one way.  It’s not working.  I hope we’re realizing the mystery – love, life, sex, birth, death, nature, mind -- is far too great for us to understand on our best day.  I think that’s a good start, to recognize our amazing facility with mind and machine but to get our arms around the plain fact that we are incredibly stupid and midguided.  We’ve dropped out of the great mystery.  We’re no longer really in life.  It’s passing us by.  We don’t know what love is.  All we know is we’re angry as hell at everyone who’s married us because they can’t give it to us.  I…that’s all.”  She handed him the mic and sat.

   Daniel just stood there.  Kassie glanced up at him.  Was he really dumbstruck or just being the stagemaster?  Then she saw a tear in the corner of his eye.  He cast his gaze down to the floor.  His lip was trembling.  Kassie nudged Ragana.  Daniel put the mic under his arm and put his hands together, as in prayer.  Then he slowly clapped once.  And once again.  So did the audience.  Ragana looked up.  Their eyes held each other for several long moments.  So, who was this man?  Daniel held up his arms to silence the clapping.  If he was going to say “thank your for sharing,” then that would be the end of it.  He leaned over and whispered, “Will you both please come see me back there after this?”  Ragana nodded yes.  He turned back to the audience.

   “Ragana has opened the Pandora’s box here and leaped ahead of me about 10 or 20 lessons.” The audience welcomed a laugh.  “By the way, did you know Pan-dora, in Greek means gift-of-all or gift-to-all.  But what came out was perceived as a plague of evil, a destructive chaos.  The only thing that compares to it in all history is humanity’s movement out of nature, into cities and increasing technology.  Along with a steady loss of what I will call Spirit or all.  Being.  Presence.  We shy away from the word ‘God,’ don’t we?  But that’s what God means: all, everything, including us.  But, sad to say, the way we use the word God, he or she does not include us.  And here’s the nub of it.  Here is what all those words you suggested had in common.  God is all those things.  Or, today, we say ‘the Universe’ as in, the Universe obviously wants me to be alone or the Universe is telling me to leave this town or person!”

   He laughed and the audience loved laughing with him.  It was charming, our madness, our depression, wasn’t it?  We’re all in this together, aren’t we?  So we’ll be all right.  Ragana and Kassie exchanged glances.  They weren’t laughing.

   “Is the Universe a real deity with a heart?” whispered Kassie.

   “No.  The Universe is what we call the world without a heart.”

   Daniel, now moved away, glanced back at the women and smiled.  As if he could hear what they’d said.

   “That’s right.  The Universe, as we use the term so freely, is the world without a heart.”

   Kassie glanced over at Ragana.  He mouth was hanging open.

   “Indeed, the Universe or rather the world, since we don’t know shit about the Universe beyond its physics, has lost its heart.  Ragana outlined that very clearly in her life’s work.  She did it without coming right out and saying it.  She did it by showing us a world that worked, a world full of people who live in the natural rhythms we’ve all forgotten.  They lived in the present.  That’s the biggest thing we’ve forgotten.  We’re drowning in thoughts of shame, regret and general pain.  And we regard the future with such fear that we spend most of the present working and planning to make sure we have enough health coverage, retirement and a good burial plan.”

   He said it all in such a way that it got a laugh at the end.

   “But what’s our pain from?  Where do we get all this hurt?  It’s from having become isolated in our individual identities, which Freud named the Ego.”  He would pause at times like this and laugh rather mirthfully to himself, as if he were trying to describe depth to people who lived only in width and height.

   “It’s so nice not to be in that prison.”  He held his hands out with palms up.  “I know how hard it is.  I know you’ve all read my book or you wouldn’t be here, paying $40 to hear it from me in person.  The people Ragana described, the Neolithic farmers of Old Europe…they knew the Now.  They lived in nothing but Now.  Well, of course it helped to have one day pretty much like the other, except for aging and seasons.  Past?  What was past?  Future?  Even weirder.  But that’s beside the point.  The amazing thing is how the hell did we get out of that?”

   He was rambling.  If he had an outline, he’d abandoned it.  Members of the audience shifted uncomfortably.  They wanted to be told firmly and clearly what to do, just like in his books.  He took a long look at them all and let out a deep breath.

   “My friends, we were beautiful.  We loved life, every minute of it.  We loved sex and had a lot of it.  You may not want to hear this, but we loved it with a lot of people and that helped break down the walls between us.  To give such pleasure to each other!  Unheard of.  But that’s what we did.  We looked at death and corpses and we smiled.  It was ok to die.  We knew the Universe loved us.  Hear that?  The Universe?  Well, the Universe can’t love!  Ragana showed us who could love.  She called the Universe what it was – Goddess.  That’s what we all knew and lived for tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of years.  What else can you call it?  We’re talking about a living, breathing, thinking…horny…real deity here.”

   There were gasps.  A voice barked out, a man’s voice. “You’ve never written about this sort of thing.  What’s this got to do with me learning to live in the now and stopping being miserable?”

   Daniel smiled at the man and nodded a slow, respectful thank you.

   “I don’t believe this,” Ragana whispered to Kassie. “I don’t fucking believe this.”

   “What?” said Kassie. “That someone’s telling the truth like this?  Or that a man knows who the fuck the Goddess is?”

   Ragana was laughing now.  “Both.”

   Daniel answered the man now.  “This has nothing to do with helping you be happy.  This is just some truth.  Goddess is real and alive.  You can tap into her or not.  Whatever.  But the main deal here is that for millions of years she stood as the focus, the assemblage point for all that was good in life, which was pretty much everything – birth, sex, food, dance, children, fire, spring, sun, rain, hills, zillions of miles of earth with no cities and freeways.”

   “Well,” shouted the man, “I’ve got food and children.  The kids hate me and the food sucks!”  He meant it as a joke and the crowd laughed.

   “Ragana, your books saved my life,” Daniel said, turning to her.  “I wanted to die.  I was going to die.  I was going to do it to me.  It was permanent midnight.  I write and teach the Now.  I’ve done what it took to live here, in the now, almost all the time.  It was not easy.  I had to die to this life, in order to do it.”

   “I know,” she replied. “I read your book, most of it.”

   “And do you sense in any way that we are coming into a time when more and more people are actually learning to do it – to live in the present?  It opens.”  He spread his arms.  “It’s just like you described about the Neolithic folk.  It opens to an amazing, vibrating, intelligent world.  Every leaf, everything is alive and has consciousness.  And people!  Them too, though they spend 99 percent of their energy trying to block it and isolate themselves.”

   “I do,” she said.

   “You do what?”

   “I believe more and more people are opening to life in this moment.  But I’m not one of them.  I just saw it in a whole culture of people.  I never thought it was possible without going back to the simplicity of their time.  I didn’t know…”  She trailed off.

   Daniel walked over to her.  He clicked off his mic.  “You are so beautiful, Ragana.  You saved my life.  I see what you long for.  You want what they had, the Vinca and Cucuteni people in your books.”

   She nodded.  Tears were coming down her face but she looked up at him.  She did not indicate he should stop.  She realized he could feel her wishes.  He could feel her heart.  Kassie was smiling.

   “What did you say to her?” shouted several people in the crowd.

   “I told her that what the people in her books had – they were called the Vinca and the Cucuteni, living in present day Romania and Bulgaria – what they had, not bragging here, I don’t need to, but what they had, I have that.”  He turned to her and fixed her gaze.  “I have that,” he whispered.  “I want you to have it.”   ~











6 ::                                                                                                            With the Vinca

The people of the village waited, as they knew they must, for word and meaning of the journey the shamans had taken.  You did not just come back and announce your visions and what Goddess had said.  Life went on.  The information that had been given to the shamans would open to the community of people as it chose to open.  Goddess decided that.  It was not a commodity that could be handed to someone else.  You didn’t talk about it; you lived it.

   But, late in the day that Sentsie and Mansur had arrived back in the village, here was Kennifer, an older man, one of the more important men in the community, standing before them as they walked to the river.  He suddenly blurted out, “Well?”  He opened his hands and raised his eyebrows, in a “let’s have it then” presentation. 

   Sentsie was appalled.  She didn’t know what to do.  She looked slowly over at Mansur.  Now several people had gathered.  Within a few moments, everyone would be here.  That’s how it was in that age: a telepathy existed that immediately signaled any change in the harmonious round of life.

   Mansur stepped between Sentsie and the man, seeming to draw his full height up and focus a harsh gaze upon the him.  Sentsie couldn’t believe Mansur’s action, either.  She pursed her lips and drew in her breath with a long, slow sound.  It signaled a warning.  Mansur stepped back.  Sentsie made the sign, sticking out her first and pinkie finger on her left hand.  That was the sign of deepest respect when presented palm out, which it often was to propitious signs, such as hawks circling you, fish jumping, a grasshopper landing on you, a smile from someone you felt warmth with.  But pointed, palm down at another person, it meant quite the opposite – a warding off, a summoning of the powers of Goddess to your side to protect you.  Sentsie faced the man, slowly drew the sign across her heart and pointed it at him.  Everyone gasped.  She stared into his eyes with absolute confidence, which basically told him – your move.  Kennifer dared hold her gaze only another moment.  Then he bowed his head to her.  The crowd murmured approval.  He got to his knees and patted the earth around her feet.  This said, essentially, I honor your connection with earth, which is Her body.  It was over.  The people went away.

   But the act was done.

   “There it was again, the Other,” said Sentsie, as they took off their clothes and bathed in the river, drinking plentifully as they went.  The water was wonderful.  Mansur, smiling at the delicious sensations, whispered, “Mother, who loves us so.”  He was talking to the water, which was Her principal manifestation, as seen in rain, snow, streams, oceans, watering of growing things, drinking by all animals at streams.  It was Her blood and gave life to all things. Where her blood was absent, nothing lived.  Mansur let all this awareness wash over him with the waters of the stream, as he pondered what Sentsie had said.  It was the way.  You let Her infuse you first.

   “The Other, you call it?”

   “Yes.  The Other.  It’s not us.  It’s not Her, either.  But it’s here, among us.”

   “What is it, Sentsie?  What do you know from what She showed us?”

   “I don’t know.  I’ve never felt this.”  Then she suddenly stared at him.  You simply did not call someone by their name in their presence.  You might use their name if they were not present, but only in the most honoring way.  In their presence, you made the person know you were talking to them with the warmth and inflection of your voice and by sending the words to them, as if you were feeding them something nice, like honey.  But here, he had said her name to her face.  She had never heard her name, except once in a while from her mother, now long with Goddess, who’d said it just to celebrate the sound of it.  It sounded slightly different than she thought it sounded.  She corrected him.
 
   “But…you said my name to me.  How comes this?”  Their language did not have the word why, as in why did you say it.  Neither them nor any culture they knew had that word.  It implied causality, a linear chain of events, one triggering the other, rather than the circle, the spiral of life, causing only itself.  ‘Why’ implied motive.  There had been none.  Until now.

   “I don’t know.  It just came.”

   She hugged him.  She could see he was feeling bad.  They got out of the stream and dried off in the sun.  “Go tell Kennifer, Lila and Janko to meet us at the first smile of the moon by the labyrinth.  The smile was the appearance of the early crescent of the moon during the first few days when it began appearing.  These were the three people, other than themselves, who had showed signs of The Other.  They must talk to them.  It would be all over the village within moments, of course. 

   At dusk, they were there.  All of them slowly walked the labyrinth, which was made of lined-up stones.  You wound your way to the center and as you did, it took you out of the normal world and slowed your thought process to a crawl.  By the time you reached center, a large circular area, filled with statuettes, stones, bones, feathers and other special relics, you were in sacred space. 

   “This is Her place.  Her navel.  What we say and know is sacred and comes through Her.”  With a wave of her open palm, Sentsie invited them to sit.

   “Do you know, beloved, there seems to be something new here among us?” she asked, speaking to them all equally.  They all looked politely at her, but not in her eyes.  They looked at her chest.  If they knew, they were not going to volunteer it.  They all let out a little hum, neither yes or no, that indicated they heard and respected her.

   She sighed a deep breath.  “We will go into Spirit now.  Is that good with you all?  She has told me we are to do this.  That is how I called you here.”

   “Of course,” they said.  “It is good.”  But they said it without the full heart she was used to hearing and feeling all her life in the middle of this circle.  She was suddenly scared.  She glanced at Mansur.  There was that look on his face – fear.  She thought to herself, if this is the world I am to live in…if this happens to more and more people.  Dear Goddess, she was thinking of…the future.  The word ‘future’ was only a fuzzy concept, used when talking of times you needed to store things for winter, little else.  Not life itself!

   She made a snap decision to confront the young lovers, who had chosen not to love anyone else.  This had never happened.  Many people were talking about it.  She pointed with her two fingers of one hand, back and forth to Janko and Lila.  Then held out an open palm toward Lila, as if asking her to put something in it.

   “I love him,” Lila said.  She turned to Janko.  “I love you.”

   “I love you, too,” he said.  He leaned forward and kissed her. 

   “That’s what we say to each other,” said Lila.  “He loves me so big.  More than all the other men put together.”

   Sentsie absently put her hand on Janko’s thigh.  Lila grabbed Sentsie’s wrist and jerked it away from his leg.  “You don’t do that, Sentsie,” she said, raising her voice and pointedly using Sentsie’s name.  Janko looked at her and smiled.  No one had ever fought for him.  She was defending her right to him.  Only him.  He liked it, obviously. 

   “Dear sister,” said Sentsie, using the most formal, respectful term.  “You seem to be saying this man is…”  Here she searched for the right word.  There was no right word.  The concept of ownership was a vague one.  One had one’s home and no one would think of going into it without being invited.  But there was no emotion with it.  One could make a home anywhere, easily.  The fields, the harvest, there was so much of everything, it just didn’t come up that one should “own” one’s share.  It was all Hers.  She provided everything, all anyone could want and that certainly applied to love and the pleasures of love.  Sentsie let the moments pass, then looked again at Lila, whose eyes engaged her directly.  And most boldly, thought Sentsie.

   “You seem to be saying this man is yours.  And no one else’s?”  The words instantly put Lila at cross purposes with Spirit, which was the word they used in the less formal sense to indicate Goddess as a constant presence, an atmosphere they breathed, a sea they lived in, an all-surrounding providence that gave love – no, there was no “giving” of love.  It just was.  Love simply was all about, neither given nor received.  But here was this phenomenon of one person seeming to give and another seeming to receive it, as if taking on the powers of Goddess herself.  How mad, thought Sentsie.  How could anyone come to see love as so limited, a thing that could be given and… Sentsie thought suddenly…taken away,.  If an individual could give it, then that person could stop doing it.  How then, would the other person like that?  If the one person was considered “source” of love, that gave immense power to him or her!  The whole thing was appalling, dark and mad.  She felt like she might throw up, but swallowed it back.

   Lila did not discern the chaos of Sentsie’s mind.  Even that was strange, thought Sentsie.  Nor did Lila seem to care.  What she cared about was Janko.  He gazed at her deliciously, his eyes bright with happiness for her.  Lila stood her ground.

   “What I know is this man loves me with all his heart and mind and body.  He fucks me like no one has ever fucked me.  He fucks me all night, till dawn.  He looks in my eyes and sees my soul, all of it and I see his and the fucking becomes that love.  Maybe you cannot understand this, Sentsie.”  She fairly spit out Sentsie’s name, as if putting a fence around her with it.

   Sentsie struggled for her wits.  She silently begged Goddess to bring her understanding of what was happening now, as all things do come from Her.  It was incomprehensible to think that anything, no matter how fearful or painful might not come from Her.  Sentsie bowed her head slightly to Lila. 

   “May I learn your heart, then, sister?  How came this to you?  When?  You must know that this is a new way.  We do not know this.” 

   Lila nodded, allowing it was so.

   “Then, sister, honor us.”  Sentsie held her hands open.  “Tell us how this came.”

   “It came,” said Janko, “from the ewe we had fenced all winter.”

   Sentsie turned to Janko, astonished.  No one had addressed him, yet here he was speaking when she, the shaman of the tribe, had specifically asked Lila to speak.  She turned back to Lila.  The woman was looking at the ground, content to let “her” man speak for her!  Sentsie took a breath and let it out slowly.  All right, Goddess, since I have just prayed to you for guidance and we are in your sacred space and this happens, then this is you, so let it come.

   “The ewe?”  Sentsie had no idea what he was talking about.  Kennifer, the old man, nodded.  What was this? 

   “We’ve had the ewe down in a separate pen for two lambing seasons now, you know, because we were going to sacrifice her,” said Janko.  “The rams can’t get at her.”

   “So?  I know that.”

   “And what has happened?  Or not happened?” he said.

   Sentsie felt dread creeping over her.  She did not want to examine his question.  Whatever the answer was, it was not…oh, my Goddess, dear. 

   “No lamb.  She has not gotten pregnant.  So what are you telling me?”

   “We talked to the people over there.”  He motioned with his head toward the east, the people who would be known to history as the Karanovo.  “They said they’d found the same thing.  A penned cow.  No bulls by her – no calves.”

   Sentsie let her mind go back and forth over it and over it.  Everyone knew women and all the females of the earth created and brought forth life because of the love and generativity of the Great Mother.  End of story.  It was the fact upon which all other facts and truths about life were built.  Men excited the process with their happy, hungry, horny aliveness.  The pleasure of fucking them was also at the center of the gifts and happiness of Goddess’s world.

   “Sentsie!” said Kennifer.  “What the young man is saying is that, women can’t have babies unless men fuck them.  Something in the man-milk.”

   “Life,” said Janko, with amazed, bright eyes and, she thought, a greedy smile.  “Life comes from the man!  The woman feeds and grows it in her belly, but it comes from the man.”

   No!  Life comes from Goddess and only Her.  Sentsie was knocked over backwards by the words.  She scrambled backwards on her butt and hands, then got up to run across the labyrinth lines, something no one did.  By now people were watching, discreetly (they thought) from between their earth-plastered homes.  Mansur ran after her, also crossing the lines.  He turned to the people.

  “Go now.  To your homes.  Say nothing of this to anyone yet.”  But he knew they would.  In the time it would take to eat a bowl of oatmeal, the whole village would know.   ~













7  ::                                                                                                Seattle

After the talk, Ragana and Kassie waited nearby while Daniel signed books and answered questions.  Ragana wanted to see him in action while not performing.  They hung back, rather out of sight.  He looked everyone in the eye and smiled bemusedly as he answered the odd, sometimes very odd question.  Once he howled unashamedly with laughter at something a woman said, as if he’d never heard anything so funny in his life. 

   “Hm, seems real,” Ragana said.

   “Well, duh.  He is real.  We’re all real.  Real fucked up and scared!”  Kassie said.  She wanted a drink.  Now Ragana howled, as if she’d never laughed before in her life.  Daniel followed the sound.  He smiled at her.  Ragana gave the sign that it was ok to take his time.  He seemed to take an extra three seconds just to look at her, leaning against the stage in the shadows, like it was going to be a picture he would reflect on.

   Finally he excused himself.  “A drink?”  They agreed.  Ragana wanted a smoke but knew that no one smoked and everyone thought poorly of it.  But he stopped outside the hotel.  “Good place to smoke, don’t you think?  The energy of the city, the passing people.  Go ahead.”

   “How did you know?” 

   “I can feel it.  The pain and fear.  We all have it, you know.  It loves cigarettes most.”  The women lit up and dragged in gratefully.  “Smoking is the Shadow’s favorite food.  You know – the Shadow?  It means all our stuff, our shit.  Our madness.  Mostly fear, though.  And accumulated pain.  Trouble is, though, cigarettes almost have an intelligence of their own.  Once the addiction is going, it will generate feelings inside you that seem like your own.  Hard to tell them apart – his and yours.  It doesn’t care about the feelings, though.  All it wants is a smoke.  And since smoking is suicidal, it replicates the nature of all those negative feelings – grief, shame, rage, despair, self-hate.”

   “You’re ruining this smoke break.”

   “Not mine,” said Kassie.  Heard it all.  Know it’s true.  But we just smoke three or four a day.

   “Doesn’t matter.  If you smoke fewer, it just builds up the despair that much bigger.”

   “You’re saying this to see if I take offense,” said Ragana.  “To see if my ego takes offense.  I read your book or most of it.  Ok, the first three chapters.  No, it’s refreshing to hear someone speak the truth.”

   “At first,” he said.  “It gets much harder before it gets better.  No sane person wants that kind of pain.  But there’s no other way.  It’s a death.  But a death of the false self.  It fights hard.  Like a tiger.”  He laughed that laugh, the one that seemed to laugh inside him, as if he were tremendously entertaining to himself.

   “You don’t expect me to be able to do it – I can see that.  Or Kassie.  Why are you interested in us?”

   He reached out his hand to Kassie. Their fingers touched and mingled.  “Kassie has already started.  She’s into the fire, the pain.  Just starting, but doing well.  Lonely, isn’t it?”

   “Very.”  She looked over at Ragana.  “Sorry.  It is.  I have my cigarettes, though.”  She giggled. 

   “You’ll be leaving those behind.  You’ll see.  The Shadow has to be engaged.  It has to be brought into the light, into the fire, where you are going.”

   They walked down the street to a cozy bar Daniel knew.  The women had Scotch, Daniel a ginger ale.

   “What, then, makes you resemble the Neolithic man, Daniel?” said Ragana.  “How do you know what they were like?”

   “They were natural man.  They were the human default setting.  The basis of who we were in nature, who we’d evolved to be.  To put a point on it, they had no ego.”

   “No sense of self?”

   “Yes, they had an immense sense of self, but – I’m sure I’m not telling you anything you don’t know – their sense of self went beyond their skin into the whole community and the vast world of nature, whose cycles they knew, trusted and loved.  They were created by those cycles.”

   “And,” said Ragana, “what about spirit?  What was their religious sense?”

   “I know you already know all this, Ragana.”  It was the first time he’d said her name to her.  “I strongly get that there was no separation between the self and the divine.  No sense of God being other.  Or rather Goddess.  They could say I am God – or Goddess – and mean it.  It was true, not as a belief or concept, but as a fact.  Whatever Goddess was, they were that, entirely.”

   “But something changed.”

   “It certainly did,” he said, sardonically.  “The birth of the ego.”

   “And the ego is?”

   “The sense of the self as precipitated out of that magical, encompassing world.”  He smiled bemusedly once again.  For the first time, Ragana saw the pain in the smile.  “Imagine the loss.  The incomprehensible wound of losing that world.  It must have been a sense of abandonment that makes all our parental stuff look like a cakewalk.”

   “But it didn’t just happen to them, the people who lived in that, well, I guess you would call it Eden, wouldn’t you?  It was Eden.  That’s where the whole Eden thing comes from.”

   “Of course.”

   “It’s still happening, the exile,” she said.

   “Every day.  Every moment.  We’re in the acid bath.  Like a child left at a train station.  Pain.  Look around you.  Look at us.  We just learn to be high performance survivors.”

   “Aren’t you globalizing the pain – your pain?”

   “I get asked that every day.  No.  I’m just trying to tell the truth.  You could call it my truth.  That’s the easy way out.  Except I’m not identified with it.  My ego has truly died.  That’s what makes me happy and that’s what makes me essentially of Neolithic nature.  That’s the last time we had no ego.  It ended when the horsemen came.”

   “Yes, the Kurgans.”  It was Ragana’s area.  No one knew it like her.  She’d all but lived it.

   “Mounted, armed, nomadic, sky-god-worshipping pastoralists, you always called them,” said Daniel.  “Murderers.  That’s what they were.  Any idea why they did that?  Conquered everyone?  Brought in the male gods?  Were so fucking mean to everyone?”

   She laughed.  “There are lots of theories.  You’ve read them.  They lived in the cold, harsh life of the Steppes and thought nature cruel.  The horses aggrandized and helped separate their ego as an individual ego.  We don’t know.  Something in the human soul, something dark and mean. Maybe an alien entity.  What do you think?”

   “The Shadow.  Of course.”

   “The Shadow knows.”  They laughed.  They took in the look of all of them smiling.  They were letting that look wash over their souls.  They all knew this was a happy moment, a genuine happy moment when one realizes one could like the other person and have many more happy moments like this.  It was working.  It was good.  Daniel lifted his hand and looked at it, then slowly moved it out in the space between them all.  They found themselves doing the same and soon all the hands were touching.  And still, the smiles. 

   “Love.  There is love here,” he said.

   “She loves us,” said Kassie.  Ragana nodded.  She pulled out her pendant, which she usually kept dangling next to her skin, out of sight.  It was a “Stiff White Nude” figure from 5th millennia BCE Balkans, one of thousands she’d found.  It was sleek, with no facial features, except a slight nose.  It had small breasts.  It, or one like it was on the cover of many books about Neolithic Europe.  Daniel gasped.  He reached to touch it.

   “May I?” he said. 

   “Of course.” She unclasped it.  He turned it, running his nail in the crevices. 

   “It’s the real thing, isn’t it?”

   “Yes.  The Goddess in her crone phase, as death – rather, as the escort back to the womb of the Great Mother, for loving regeneration back into life.  That’s how they looked at death, with just as much welcome as they looked at birth or anything else.”

   He kissed it.  He shook his head, rather in awe.  “Sixty or seventy centuries, she’s come across time to be right here with us.”

   “Would you accept it?  I want you to have it.”

   “Ragana.”  He said the name with a huskiness that came from deep in him.  “This is an archaeological treasure and worth a small fortune.  Please.”

   “I have others.  Just one is not important to the archaeological record.  Please have it.  It belongs to you.”

   He took her hand and kissed it.  Kassie looked at her watch.  “Maybe I’d better think about…”

   “No, don’t think about it.  I know you’re not tired.  I want you here.  I want you both to come to my place for…let’s see…some lovely tea I just picked up.  And to sign your books, Ragana, that are sitting on my shelf.”

   He indeed had all her books – 18 of them going back 35 years.  “Your hand must be tired,” he said, as she signed them.  “Here’s the tea.”  He had prepared the coffee table with pillows around it and elegantly served the tea in small oriental cups. 

   “Your books, one after the other, describe a little-known world with small bands of people, our ancestors, whose minds we can barely imagine.  Not to have an ego.  What must it have been like?  And why did the ego come?  Is it a necessary phase of growing an individual consciousness, you think?  And if so, why do we need that?  It’s painful.”

   They all laughed.  “It has drawbacks – severe ones,” said Ragana.

   “Really, we’ll never know,” said Kassie.  “The Kurgans conquered them, all the inhabitants of Old Europe and overlaid their violent culture on one that, as far as we can tell, was for thousands and thousands of years, just peaceful, fun, I mean, like going to the Renaissance Faire but with a lot more sex, ritual, feasting and just general loving of each other.  Plus no admission, no parking, no going back to the real world and your fucking job.”  She took another sip of tea.  “No Scotch, eh?  Just kidding.  I can understand it.  Ragana, really, what would Old Europe have become, if left alone?”

   “I don’t know.  It’s hard to imagine something nice, creative, loving, sweet and good without an antithetical force present, wanting to crush it.  We’ve just grown to accept that’s the way things are in the world.  Like, you have the golden age of Greece – trashed by Sparta.  The Renaissance – trashed by Puritans and scientists of the Enlightenment.  The American Transcendentalist Movement – trashed by Victorianism and the Industrial Revolution.  The Sixties here – trashed by Kent State and Reaganomics.  Always something.  Reich called it the Emotional Plague, the desire to lash out with fascistic hate against that which causes discomfort by its sheer sensuality and emotional impact.”

   There was a pause in the conversation.  As if by tacit agreement, they all let it linger.  Daniel zapped on some music, simple tones chanted by a feminine voice with subtle flute in the background and contributions, also subtle and deep-toned, from a drum.  And a few sticks clacking together.  Ragana nodded and pointed at the speakers.  They all understood.  This was probably like the first music.  Tones.  A flute, probably made from bird bones.  The old people of the Paleolithic doubtless thought is was supreme magic, that the sounds could be created from natural things and woven together to make a fabric that, to them, probably seemed to come from beyond this world.

   Ragana put her hand out on the middle of the coffee table, around which they were seated.  It was a gesture of communion and invitation.  They all shared an attraction to each other and a commonality of mind.  They could think.  They had thought all their lives.  They were conscious and, as they’d learned from hard experience, it took a lot of courage to be conscious.  And a lot of loneliness.  It was important to them.  It was a requirement of companionship.

   Kassie put her hand on top of Ragana’s.  It was thrilling for them and they all breathed deeper, audibly, reflecting the increase in heartbeat.  Daniel lay his hand atop the women’s.  Their hands began to move.  The women’s hands went round the man’s, holding it in the middle, as if honoring it.  They moved closer, letting their faces come next to their hands.  The music painted a picture in their minds – the Neolithic.  Ragana kissed her hand, then the others.  They all began lightly kissing their hands.  She started humming to the music and soon they all were, weaving lovely sounds together with their voices.

   “I’ve been here,” said Ragana.  “This is what the Vinca did.  I know it.  I’ve felt it so many times.  I know you have, Kassie.”  She looked at Kassie and smiled a way that let her heart completely show in her face, her eyes.  “Do you know how much I love you?”

   “I do,” said Kassie.  They touched their foreheads together.  “I really do.  I’ve loved you too, all this time and I’ve always felt so right and safe and happy with you.”

   “You two have always had and known this,” said Daniel, after a moment.  “This is the first time you’ve said it.  You’re saying it for me, too.  When I read your books, this is just what I felt.  This is what saved my life.  I knew who we were finally.”

   “I know,” said Ragana.  She brought her face across the space between them.  And she brought Kassie with her.  They were uplifting their chins, both presenting their lips to him.  Their eyes were open.  Daniel involuntarily moved toward them, but he was at a loss for words.  His eyebrows raised in question – is this really ok?  Are you really opening to me this way?  Do you really trust and care for me like this?

   They read his face and smiled, reaching their lips still further, till all their lips touched.  Warmly, moistly.  It was utterly delicious.

   “This is love,” whispered Ragana.

   “We are making this love,” said Daniel.

   They all let out a little mirth.  They were breathing with the energy of…

   “It’s Her, isn’t it?  She is here, doing this?” Daniel said softly.

   “Yesss,” spoke Kassie, smiling. “You are a fine, conscious, upstanding, pagan man, aren’t you?”  She smiled impishly and touched his face.  So did Ragana.

   “We can make love now.  Anytime we want.”

   “We have this now,” said Kassie. “This is always here now.”

   “Wow. I’ve always dreamed of this,” said Daniel. “This is, like, so different from what people do.  This is not a ‘relationship’ thing.  This is, gosh, like, sacred.  This must have been what they…”

   “It was,” said Ragana.  “I can’t prove it, but I just know it.  When you touch thousands of the old idols and hear the myths – well, what we hear is the myths of, like Crete or Sumer, when they first had ways to write them down, you can hear the echoes.  You can hear the lovemaking, the freedom and joy they had back then before…you know…”

   “Before we owned each other,” said Daniel. “Right?  Before we paired off and fed our egos by the belief that this one person was loving this one other person, me, and isn’t that wonderful?”

   They all laughed.  There would be no sex tonight.  They wanted to hold it right where it was.  Goddess was here and it was Her making love to them, being in love with them.

   “Before we feared loss of the other person, whether through death or the perpetual acting out humanity’s broken heart – by divorce, abandonment, all that.  Fear.  Just fear.”

   “It’s true, isn’t it?” Daniel whispered, showing clear amazement.  “I’m enlightened and all that, as the world knows and that’s what I teach people, by helping them live in the present but that doesn’t really open them to this.  This really is love.  It’s really eternal and, well – you know I’m kind of psychic…”

   “Yes, kind of,” giggled Ragana.  “The world knows about that.  So are we.”

   “Yes, I can see that.  Well, I was going to say that where we are now, it seems to touch back into where we, humanity, left off before the rise of all that patriarchal crap, cities, wars, religions…”

   “Marriage, pairbonding, territory, single-family homes,” laughed Kassie.  “Pain. Isolation.  Misery.”

   They all nodded.

   “Right now, we – we three -- don’t have that,” said Daniel.  “We’re free.  Free in love.  Enlightenment is nice but, well, frankly, it’s kind of lonely.  I mean, I have all kinds of women throwing themselves at me, but, well, I just don’t…I used to.  I had to stop.  It was too lonely.  It hurt.”

   “Is that why you choose enlightenment as your path and your fame?” said Kassie.

   “Ouch.”  He sighed, then nodded.  “It’s a nice place to hide, but we enlightened folk only go there because, I see now, She has not been here with us.  Scales have fallen from my eyes tonight.”  He stuck his chin forward again, like a little boy, innocently wanting to be kissed.  They licked his mouth now and let their tongues mingle.

   After a while, Daniel said, “I’m actually feeling overwhelmed.  It’s bringing up all kinds of questions about worthiness and morality.  But they vanish.  She dissolves them.  I’ve always dreamed of this.”

   “We too,” they said.  “We too.”   ~









8  ::                                                                       The Neolithic

It was getting dark now, fortunately.  No one could see them.  Mansur would have time – all night – to try to engage and understand what had happened at the labyrinth. 

   “Sentsie, you know this is all in Her will, in Her heart.”

   “Yes, yes, I know.”  She looked down at the patterns in the grass. There it all was.  She was here.  It had such wisdom, order and beauty, the way it lay and swirled, some alive, some dead, all of it in Her order and will.  She picked out the dead blades with her eye.
 
   “This is us.  The yellow and brown ones.  I know it.  I see it.  The green ones have all the energy and life.  That is them -- the Others.”

   Mansur put his hand over his face.  He could not see as she did, instantaneously, at any time or place. It was just grass to him.  But she shared it with him, completely.  All women did.  Men perceived and knew most of it, but what they couldn’t receive, women passed onto them with freely.

   They sat in a hollow by the bank of the river, alone.  The stars were coming out.  A few faces peered at them and disappeared, knowing they were doing important work.  Nothing like this had ever happened and they all knew it. 

   “Brother, I cannot go on.  I am asking Her if she wants me to leave all this and be back on the other side.”  She meant the spirit world, death.  “It does not matter, really.  But it hurts, right in here.”  She held her hand to her heart. 

   “I know, Sister.  I hurt too.”  He looked about.  It was dark now.  He reached under her top and felt her strong back and the tight, warm skin stretched over it.  He wanted to bring Goddess into this, which felt so cold.  Suddenly, she was aware of him.

   “Brother, no -- it is good, no matter what She does, it is good.  That is the first order of being, the dawn, it’s all we know, what we start from , ever since we came down from the trees.  You know that.  Now be there, do it.  Here.”  She pushed his hand into her groin, where he felt the warmth, hair, moisture.  She smiled.  He could barely make out her face in the dark.  “Here She is.  Death does not matter.”

   Mansur’s face showed he was shocked at the word.  It was their word, the Others.

   Then she realized.  Mansur was afraid of death.  This had never happened.  She grabbed him and looked him square in the eye.  “You’re afraid.  I can see it.  You cannot be here with me as a man of knowing, you know that.  It is against everything.  It is against Her.  How can you?”

   “Yes.” He looked around like a man who had drunk too much of the juice of the rotten grapes. 

   “Brother, I need you.  Don’t go away like this.  You are acting like a stupid boy, one of the boys from the horse people.”  Mansur seemed to wake up.  It was harsh being compared to them, the people who would be known to history as the Kurgans.

   “Yes, sister.  I am here.” He still had his hand in the warm bush of her yoni and that seemed to connect him to what was real.

   “I need help, brother.  There is something new here among us, something I’ve never seen or heard of.  I see it in the horse people.  That is for sure.  They have not come to us yet, but they will.  You must know that.  They will hurt us.  I hear they kill all the men, all the ones over ten summers.  The ones who know this.”  She pushed his hand against her moistness and worked it in harder.  “What does this say to you, really?”

   “It says…”  He leaned forward to kiss her.  She kissed him all over his face and mouth. 

   “Mansur.”  It was the first time she had ever called him by his name.  He snapped aware.

   “All right,” she said.  “I will tell you what I know.  Some things she showed me on our journey.  They are coming.  They are in the hills.  They are coming to live among us, to tell us what to do, to fuck all us women as they wish – and not with the love that we know.  Not with Her love, but rather roughly, like they do everything.  If what I hear about man seed is right, then all our children will be theirs and will be like them.  They do not know Goddess.  They love a man god in the sky, not even one who lives here in this earth.”

   “I have heard most of this,” said Mansur.

   “All right.  What you haven’t heard is that it is happening right now.  They are near.  I need you to do something you’ve never done before.  You and the other men.  And the stronger women.  We need to kill them.  I don’t know if we can.  They have horses and are fast.  But we know the earth better.  We hide better.  We know how to wait.  And we have the ability to talk to each other without words.  They don’t have that.  That’s what She told me.”

   “I don’t know if I can kill a man,” he said.

   “Hah.  You will.”  She leaned close to him and whispered, “Believe me, you will.”

   At that moment, Sentsie whipped her head around at the towering bluff that stood well back from the river.  She heard something she’d never heard before, a sound like cow’s hooves, but sharper, then silence.

   “They’re here,” she said. “Look.  Just a few of them against the stars.  See them?  They’re on the horses.” 

   The Others, four or five of them, studied the little earthen buildings and fires of the Vinca people, then slowly turned around and disappeared.

   Sentsie ran down the bank and stuck her hands in the water. “Goddess, now be Kali for us.  We ask you something we’ve never asked.  Bring death for us to use.  Let us sharpen our spears and arrows to use against these bad men.  Let our children grow up free, not living with these bad ones.  Teach us to hate, Kali, we beg of you.  Don’t let this thing happen.  It cannot be from you.  We have never feared anything.  You cannot want this.  You have only ever loved us and given us good.”

   Sentsie was surprised to hear she was shrieking now and pounding the water, but then, that was how Kali could move.  She was the aspect of Goddess who handled creation and destruction or death-rebirth.  She operated on the hidden side, not visible in this world.  She did not care who lived or died, as both sides – spirit and flesh – were real, good and legitimate.  And that’s how the people saw it, too.  She would be one of the few Goddesses or aspects of Goddess who kept her same name to modern times.

   Up on the river bank, dozens of people stood, watching, knowing they were seeing something big, something sacred, but they didn’t know what.  She knew they had heard it all.  She stood up, engaged them with a level gaze and presented a clawed hand.

   “They’ve come to fuck us and kill us!” she screamed, making a violent motion with her fist to illustrate both actions.  “They’re here.”  She pointed at the escarpment that had always sheltered them from the north wind.

   Sentsie had never felt like this – out of control.  She felt as if possessed by something that had come inside her.  Her instinct was to completely immerse herself in the water and let the love and presence of Goddess wash over her and perhaps take this “thing” out of her.  She did.  While under the water, she realized what the “thing” was.  It was rage.  She’d never really felt it.  She’d heard of it from the hunters, raging at a wounded animal who had gored them and so on, but then, they never looked on the bison or mammoths, even the big cats as foe.  They were food, taken selectively and with due reverence for Goddess who provided them.  Or, sometimes we were food. And they were made to live by the same Spirit that filled the people.

   But this.  They, the Others were hunters of people!  Who ever heard of such a thing?  How could they be filled with the same Spirit as the people – our tribe – and all the creatures?  She reeled at the implications.  Other humans who meant them harm – and for no real reason.  There was enough space, land, food, fish, sky, all of it.  If Goddess had done nothing else, She had created all these in abundance.  So, why did any people have to kill each other for it?  Why did they want to…well, there was no word for it.  Dominate.  Conquer.  These are the words that would soon come into use to describe it.

   She stood up out of the water.  This could not come from Goddess, surely.  Her mind felt like it was being split in half.  Then where did it come from?  Some other god surely had come into the world.  Was it this sky god she had heard they love?  He was just like them.  Armed, violent, crazy, wanting to rape and conquer – all without good reason other than he could.  This is the god who would come to be known as Zeus.  That would be in a few thousand years, when these Others had conquered as far south as they could and had learned the arts of civilization from Her people.  Such was the vision that came into her in her quest -- and the details were filling in now.

   Should we then just go into spirit, she questioned -- just die?  Is that what She wanted in the face of this?  It brought the most complete darkness into her mind, as she tried to make it square with a Goddess who had always given them the fruit, honey, meat and pleasure of the world and asked only love back.  But what if it didn’t square with that kind of Goddess?  What if, indeed, it was a completely alien and distinct force?

   The four women of the council group came through the crowd and stood on the river bank.  They held their hands out to Sentsie and beckoned her to come.  Dripping wet, she walked ahead of them to the village shrine, which stood apart from all the other houses and across the green from them.  Inside, they dried her and wrapped her in lamb’s wool and made her some tea, while they let the silence gather.  You always did that.  Then She – Goddess – would settle in with the group too, rather like frost setting in the fields just before dawn.  She sipped.  It was not time to talk yet.  She drank nearly the whole cup of tea before it was.

   Then, the eldest of the women put the Goddess statuette on the platform in front of her.  The deity was seated, with huge hips and bold triangles and zig-zags incised all over her, accented with V’s, diamonds and triple lines.  She took the thing into her hands and let her fingernails find all the lines and crevices as she talked. It was completely compelling, not just to the eye, but it drew the whole body and breath into it.  It was magic and beautiful and filled with Her.  She breathed.

   “It is hard, sisters, very, very hard.”  She made the claw sign in front of her heart.  They nodded.  They could see it over past days, weeks even.

   “You have not come to us since your retreat up on the mountain with Mansur,” said Leta, the eldest of the group.  She stood for and spoke for Goddess in old age, a grandmother, past her moon-flows, but, of course never past sex.  She made her comment not as a reproach, but to state the obvious, knowing it was in Her will. 

   “I am ready now.  “It’s been night and winter in my heart – darkness.”  Her shoulders began to heave and she cried with great wolflike howls.  Then, suddenly, she stopped.  The council members were shaken and held each others’ hands.

   “I did not come to you, no,” said Sentsie. “It was this thing in me.  Something has come inside us.  Me, Mansur.  I’m sure you’ve noticed Lila and Janko.  It is in them.”

   “Yes. They only love each other.  Most disturbing.  What does Goddess feel?  What did you learn up there with her?”

   “I didn’t want to tell Mansur.  Not the whole picture.  She brings us a huge change in the whole world for everyone.  It is happening now.  It is coming to us.  The Others are here.  I saw them on the ridge, a few of them.  This is an advance party.  It will take them a moon, maybe two before they are here in force.  That’s how they do it, so I’ve heard.”

   The women looked at the earthen, grass covered floor.
 
   “What you’re feeling now?  That’s fear.  That’s what we are working with now.  We’ve had hardly any occasion to feel it – not in our lives or in the lives of all the people before us.  Not since we lived in the trees and had not yet learned how to use spears and arrows to hunt and to protect ourselves from the large cats and the dog packs.  The happiness and goodness we’ve known.”  She paused.  “That is over.”

   Sentsie looked at them.  They looked like some vile, whipped creatures from a bad dream.  Their eyes brimmed with tears.  One, Beala, the youngest, who stood for the virgin phase of Goddess, held out her empty hands, as if pleading.

   “How comes this?  How could She want this?  What for?”  She was trying to find the new word “why.”  But they did not have it yet.  It would carry the immense meaning of causality and time.  They had known only circular time, which was the present moving through a set cycle of phases, over and over, forever.  What she wanted to say was: “Why would Goddess do this?”

   “What I am about to tell you is what She told me and showed me and what I see going on in my own mind.  We are starting to go through a big change.  It will change all people and the way they live.”

   All the women began weeping to themselves, quietly.  They knew the news would not be good. 

   “The thing that has come inside us…She showed me what it is.  It’s a sense of self.  I know, we already have a sense of self.  Of course.  We know who we are.  We love our lives together in this lovely world.  We belong here.  We’re happy.  We don’t even know what the opposite means.  We call it sad, but hardly anyone experiences that.  Well, I’m experiencing it.  So are you, right now.  It’s shrinking our sense of self from the big self, something taking in the tribe, the valley, the seasons, the world – and it’s cutting it down to just what’s inside our skin and our own minds.”

   The women just looked at her, rather with their mouths hanging open.  Their world was being turned upside down.

   “Get the girl – Lila.  Beala, go get her!  Let’s hear it right from the source.”  Beala returned with the girl in a moment.  She made the proper reverent silences to the Goddess statuettes on the corner platform, but they seemed perfunctory.

   “Sit with us, sister,” said Sentsie.  The girl was trembling.  “We want to talk to you.”  Sentsie tried to be gentle.

   “About Janko.  I know.”  Lila was being awful curt and not making eye contact.

   “We won’t keep you long.  Her women (she was gestured to Goddess’s women, the council) need to hear it from you, if you would honor us.  What is it happening with you two?”

   “I love him.  He loves me.  We don’t want anyone else.”

   “Tell us how it feels, dear.  What is it like?”  Sentsie tried to communicate that it was all right, whatever she was doing.  It was Her way, the way of Goddess, Mother of Us All, Source of All Life.  The women stirred at this.  It seemed fantastical and completely revolutionary.  Should it not be opposed?  They sacrificed bulls at appropriate times and with due reverence – and none of the bulls had done anything wrong.  Why not this girl?  Why not right here and now?  So thought Leta, the crone.  Sentsie read it in the sharp glint of her eye.  Sentsie intentionally cast her gaze to the ground, as a way of indicating Earth and her right, by the truth of the earth, to say what she said and claim the right of Lila to say what she said.

   Finally Lila fixed Sentsie’s gaze.  “You don’t know what it’s like.  It’s like taking all the love you give away to everyone in this village and boiling it all down till it’s so intense you can hardly stand it.  It helps me see Janko’s soul.  I see it.  Not just some part of everyone’s soul or the whole village soul.  Just him.  I know this is new.  I can’t help it.  Something has come into me, something good.  It’s sacred and good, just like the other way.  I can feel it.”

   Lila was pleading with a strange passion in her eyes, something none of them had seen before. Love did not require passion.  It just was.  It was her gift, living in all people at all times and places.  They let Lila go. 

   Leta took her hand out from beneath her clothing and with it came a polished stone dagger, bound with hide lace to horn.  She threw it in the center of the circle.

   “I think She wanted Lila’s blood flowing tonight on the sacred ground here,” said Leta. “I could feel it.  It was her will.”

   “Really?” said Sentsie.  “How do you know that?  How do you know this smaller, personal Self has not been shrunken down inside you?”

   Everyone looked at Leta. 

   “How would I know?” she said.

   “Just ask yourself – did your desire to sacrifice her come from you or from Her, Goddess?  It’s important you tell us the truth.  You know, what really happened.”  Sentsie had to spell out what ‘truth’ meant.  No one ever lied.  There was no reason to lie.  But now these two different worlds – truth and lies -- were starting to emerge.

   “It came from Her!  Everything comes from Her!”

   “Then why are you yelling?”

   Leta’s mouth dropped open and her eyes searched about.  Why, indeed, was she yelling?  No one needed to yell Her truth.  It just was. 

   Sentsie decided to let it go.  She herself didn’t understand exactly what was happening.  “I wanted to tell you more about my journey.  She came and opened to me.  She told me this is necessary, that She was passing onto us a lot of her power.  When we lived in the trees down there in Grandmother’s Land,” she said, referring to their origins in Africa, “She gave us her intelligence and her sex, which went on all the time.  We used to be like any animals, you know, just doing what animals do.”

   “Eating and getting eaten, mating in season, but not often, just for babies,” said Gaesa, who had the role of the pregnant or lactating mother in the group. 

   “Right.  We’ve all heard the stories passed down.  That’s how it was.  “But she put mushrooms about the land and whatever animal was smart enough to eat them and absorb into their hearts what they said and showed, that is the animal that would become like her.  And we did.  We thought her thoughts, saw the world with her eyes, knew we could mate and love all year round and that it was Her supreme gift.  To think!  To make love all the time!  And with her ecstasy!  Ah, and to survive long enough to do it all.”

   “With this,” said Leta, grabbing up her stone dagger.

   “With that, yes.  The power to take life.  And we took it.  We started eating whatever, wherever and whenever we wanted to.  Look at us now – all the food we have.  Who is ever hungry here?  No one.”

   “But something new now,” said Gaesa.  It was no longer a question.  It was a statement.  The women were through with their shock and grieving.  It was starting to sound interesting.  “What, then?”

   “All right.  Listen, sisters.  I have not told this to Mansur or anyone.  If I told them, they would not believe it and would forget it in a moon.  What she told me is that she wants us to do what we did when we took on intelligence, weapons and sex all year.  She wants us to take on more of her power, become more like her.  She has been like a mother who finally says no more tit to the child of three summers.  It is taking love away, but it is giving freedom and power.”

   “What power, sister?” said Baela  What happiness comes from giving up this love we have with all of us?  What goodness comes from having our children raised by just two people who think they can sustain Her gifts of love year after year in their tiny…” She struggled for a word, a metaphor.  “Into their tiny cocoon!”  She spit the word out.

   “Never mind sex and children,” said Leta. “What good comes of being raped, killed and kept like cattle by the Others?” She nodded north toward the pasturelands of the violent people. She too spat on the ground.

   “I can only tell you Her words if you bring Her back in your heart, sister.”  They waited.  Finally Leta sighed and nodded.

   “She wants us to become…”  Sentsie choked.  “You have to just take these words and try to understand them.”  They nodded.  “She is done nursing us.  She wants us to walk free now.  She wants us to take on the power she has – as individuals.  She wants each person to become as Goddess.  Or god.”  The women gasped.  “That’s a man goddess.”  They had heard the world filtered down from the violent people, but no one took it seriously or had ever used it.  Goddess was all and everything and it was all sacred, a creation, gift and embodiment of her.

   “It will take a long time – many, many, many generations,” she said, flashing all ten fingers repeatedly.  “It will be hard.  We will be lost.  We will become as Her.  We will fly like birds, but to the stars.  We will kill each other.  A lot.  An awful lot.”  She spread her arms out wide, with violent motions toward the ground. “But that’s it.  She wants us to learn to be separate individuals, eventually apart from Her entirely.  And to take her divine intelligence into our own hearts and minds.  We have to learn to become gods.  We will learn, as she does, to create the world.  And we have to lose her first, to do it.  That was my vision.”

   “Do we ever find her again?” said Leta.

   “I couldn’t see that.  I know she will always be here.  But our grand children…”  Here she repeatedly flashed off the generations again with her fingers, “They will forget Her.  They must forget Her for this to happen.”

   “As for the Others, I don’t know what to do.  Do we run, fight them, submit to them?  I don’t know.  Let Her speak to you.  And…” she looked at them with dark knowing, “ask yourself.”  Their eyes widened.  “That’s right.  Ask your own hearts.”  She made the sign that the gathering was over.  They all kissed Her statuettes and went out into the night.

   Sentsie stayed behind, talking to Goddess, speaking her words to the statuette before her on the ledge, asking for understanding of what to do now.  Then she went out into the night, walking so no one would or could see her.  Shamans can do that.  Their steps stop unexpectedly, backtrack, take the long way.  No one sees.  It’s a matter of spreading out your awareness and taking in all the relevant thoughts of others. She ended up by the river.  She would sit there all night, she knew that.  Vigil.  It would come.  All the understanding would come.  She had been told that.   ~











9  ::                                                                                       The Journal of Ragana Fox

Hm.  Double hm.  Well, if you’d told me I’d be doing that – kissing (oh my God and kissing with Kassie too, I mean at the same time!) o mah gawd…ok, I admit it, I need to say God sometimes.  It’s like a downstroke, a radical upbeat, an emphasis you just can’t get with ‘Goddess’ who is so broad-based and grounding.  Fuck.  What am I supposed to do with this?  A total stranger.  Though, of course, known to the world.  A fucking New Age consciousness guru!  Puh-leez.  I’m not running.  I could get on the plane and get back in my groove.  But there is something happening here.  Something new has come among us.  Hey, I like the sound of that.  It sounds kind of mythic.  And like something with gravitas (fucking Latin), something I’ve heard before.  I’m writing fuck a lot.  Feels good.  Feels right.  Fuck, fuck, fuck.  Fuck you.  Fuck yourself.  Bring it the fuck on. 

   Ok, I’m wet as I sit here, pecking on my fucking laptop in a fucking espresso bar in fucking Seattle where you’re supposed to get wired and write and think and talk and connect with all your fellow wired thinkers.  It’s drizzling.  My hair is wet.  Everything is wet.  It’s wet between my warm thighs.  I feel like there are flames coming off my body and hair and face, like if anyone could see energy and colors and walked in here, they would…oh my fucking God…it just happened.  Of course I’m sitting here with the corners of my mouth turned up and practically wearing a big sign: “HEY, I AM SO FUCKING WET!!” 

   It was a guy.  Tall.  I swear he stopped in mid-stride.  His lips parted.  Involuntarily.  God, I haven’t had this kind of fun since I was an undergrad.  You know what I did when he looked at me?  No fucking games did I play.  I did the most sexy fucking thing a person can do.  I smiled at him.  He’s in line, getting his espresso.  It’s a tiny cup.  He’s wearing a Navy peacoat.  Haven’t seen one of those in years.  God, I am so wired.  Everything’s alive.  I’m noticing every detail of the world.  It’s all luminous.  Glowing.  This is what Daniel is always talking about.  And Kassie, as she tries to tell me about his books.  Right.  The now.  Fuck.  They’re right.  I’ve felt this a lot before.  I just didn’t know what to call it.  Or how to get it.  Not that you can get it.  It’s…yes… it’s always right here.  Ok, the question of the moment.  Will the tall man come toward my table, looking for another smile to invite him to sit?  He’s younger.  And that means?  Who gives a fuck if I’m older?  He’s got a book. 

   He’s…Later.  Ok, he came.  That is, he came to my little table, by way of asking what I was reading or writing, I can’t remember.  I said I was writing about how wet you made me.  Really.  I said that.  I’ve never said anything like that.  I just felt it in me.  It felt right and sweet and holy.  I looked in his eye first…to see if he were really here, present.  With love.  He was.  I was blown away.  Had I never seen it before??  How many men have been here with love like he was and I never really stopped to look? 

   Ok, as I sit here, I ask you to tell me, Goddess.  How many?

Goddess – Many.  Very many.  They loved you.

So the Goddess seemed to ‘say’ as Ragana’s fingers moved and pecked out the words.

Ragana – I feel it.  I was a fool.  Fuck, I was doing patriarchy, withholding love, wasn’t I?  All the time I was attacking men for doing it?
G – Good work.  You didn’t do it today.
R -- Oh my Goddess, is this…it really feels like you are here with me saying this.
G – Is that a problem?
R – No.
G – Good.  I like being here with you.
R – Me2.
G – Nice espresso.
R – You like it?
G – A lot.
R – Goddess?
G – Yes?
R – Is this really you?  Or just a part of my unconscious plus wishful thinking and fantasy.
G – Yes.
R – Yes what?
G – I only say yes when I mean it.
R – This is really you here talking with me?  I just have to type you in?
G – Do you like it?  Why should it be hard?
R – Can I ask you some real important stuff, like the meaning of the Universe?
G – Yes.
R – Something is happening.  Isn’t it?
G – Yes.
R – Something new here among us, some new power and energy.  Well, of course…it’s probably you, isn’t it?  Or else, why would you be talking to me? 
G – Yes.
R – Ok, something personal.  Do you love me?  Do you know me personally?  Do you care about me?  Are you here with me?
G – Yes.  And I know how much you want that.  It’s good.  It’s ok.  I am.

   It’s evening.  I’m in the hotel room, sitting on the floor, typing on a coffee table.  I’m waiting for Kassie to get back from shopping or whatever she’s doing.  No, she wouldn’t be shopping.  She didn’t shop.  She walks.  And she watches people.  And buildings, hills, clouds, skies.  She lets it all come in.  That’s what she’s doing. 

R – Goddess, shit, I want to talk to you so much.  I can’t believe how real this feels.  I’m having this ‘I’m not worthy’ thing.  Am I?
G – LOL.  Yes.  Very.  All are.  But they have to give that to themselves.  Of course.  You know that.  You will find you know everything you ask me. 
R – You are looking at me.
G – Yes.  I’m liking it.
R – What are you seeing?
G – I’m wanting to know how you liked it today.
R – I loved it.  You gave that to me.  Didn’t you?
G – Of course.
R – You give it all. 
G – Mm.  Yes.  Like it?
R – I never knew anything like it. 
G – I’m so glad.  You gave yourself. 
R – I did.  I gave all myself.  I didn’t care what he gave back.  So of course he gave everything back.  That’s how it works.  I can hear you thinking it.
G – You did. You were beautiful.
R – Am I making this up?
G – We are making this.  We are in and of each other.
R – Is there a part of me that is not you?
G – Of course.  It’s called your ego.  It’s ok to have an ego.  Just so long as you know you made it up and it passes away along with your body and most of your mind and emotions, when you leave this life. Whatever.  Just so you know your soul and Goddess or Divine Presence are the same, forever.
R – I would have loved to live when everyone knew that.
G – You did.  As you well know.
R – Yeah, guess I do know.  How could I not have lived then?  Such a connection I know with it.  I would love to talk to someone from back then.
G – Go ahead.
R – You mean, right now?  You have someone there?
G – Yes.
R – Hello?
S – Hello.

   [Later.  It was a whisper, sweet, gentle.]

R – My name is Ragana.  What’s yours?
S – Sentsie, they call me. But not to my face.  Well, that seems to be changing.  It once was rude to call a person by their name.  Do you do it?
R – Yes. All the time.  It’s rude not to.  You are a woman…it feels like?  I’m a woman.
S – Yes, I’m a woman. 
R – Would you describe where you are, what you see around you?
S --  It’s night.  I’m by a river, alone.  The village, all the people are asleep.  It’s good it’s night.  I couldn’t do this in day or with anyone.  I’ve never done this.  Speak to a person who is not here.  I mean a living person.  You are living, I can tell.  Not in spirit.
R – Yes, I am.  I’m 42. 
S – I also am 42 summers. 
R – Please, do you have horses?
S – No. I’ve seen them, though.  The bad people have them. 

   [Later.  My God, this is where the hair stood up all over my body.  I knew this had to be around the 5th, maybe the 4th millennium and in Old Europe.]

R – Do you know what a wheel is?  Round?  Carries a wagon behind an animal?
S – No.  I don’t know what that is.

   [Later.  This ruled out the 3d millennium.]

R – Please….
S – What is please?  I don’t know that word.
R – It asks you do something IF it makes you happy and pleased.
S – I see.  We don’t say that. 
R – How do you get someone to do something you want?
S – (Laugh) I look them in the eye and admire their beauty and let them see how they please me.  Then I say ‘give me that pot’ and maybe I will kiss them on the cheek.

   [Later.  I am speaking aloud to her as I write this, just to be sure she gets it, however she gets it.]

R – You have pots?  You fire them in ovens?
S – We do that. 

   [Later. This rules out any time before 6500 BCE, but I pretty much knew that already.]

R – Do you want to know where I am?  And when?
S – Yes, tell me dear.
R – Dear.  I like that. 
S – I can tell you are dear to me.  I can tell you have been here, where I am. 
R – Yes, I have.  I have lived there.
S – Yes, you have.  I can tell.  Your words are true. 
R – I have also been where you are, I think, in this life.
S – What were you doing here?
R – Well, digging up your homes and statues, so we could learn about you.  The world had forgotten about you.
S – You come after me then.
R – A long time after.
S – How long, how many summers?
R – About 6,000.  About as many as the leaves on one tree.
S – Tell me about where you are now.  Please (laugh).
R – I live in a world of buildings that go up a hundred stories, very tall.  Do you know what story means?
S – Yes.  I easily see and feel what you are telling me about.
R – We roll around in these long...boxes.  We don’t walk much.  We can fly all around the whole world.  The world is round, like an apple.  We have walked on the moon. 
S – I can tell you are speaking the truth.
R – You have a question.  I can feel it.
S – Yes, I do.  Is She still alive in your world?
R – You mean Goddess.  I can tell.  Well, she’s alive in me, that’s for sure. 
S – But not…
R – No, not really.  We have these male gods, all male.  No female.  Nothing.  Maybe a few thousand people are aware of Her.  About as many as the leaves on one tree.  That’s not many.  I mean, there are a lot of people in the world -- as many as all the leaves on all the trees you would see in a big forest from a mountain top.

   [Later.  Here there was a long silence.]

R – Sentsie?  Are you still here? 
S – I don’t know what to do.  The bad people are about to come into our valley.  There seems to be something new among us, too.  People are starting to just love one other person.  They don’t let Her love flow and be happy in everyone.  Maybe it’s the juice of the rotten grapes.  More and more people are drinking that.  The juice of that.  Do you have that?
R – Oh yes.  Lots of it.  And lots of other things like it.
S – Do you know what I should do?  What we should do?  Our life is coming undone.  Is this what She wants?  I cannot believe that.  Nothing happens that is outside of her thoughts and heart and wishes.  But this…

   [Later.  Here, I realized that if I said ANYTHING, it could change all history!  I could disappear in a flash.  Almost certainly would.]

R – Sentsie, you know what you must do.
S – I do.  I am afraid.  I don’t dare ask her. 

   [Later.  I held my breath.  She did not take any meaning from my words that she didn’t already have.  I let out a big, long breath.  I was still here.  I always thought I wanted to change history and tilt it toward the Goddess people, but given the chance, I realized, shit, the Universe DOES have its own destiny, direction and momentum and it has no value system around it.  Anything, anyone, no matter how “good” or bad, can get wiped out or elevated to center stage in a flash, for no reason apparent to us.]

R – She will be good to you.
S – I know what you just did. 
R – Sorry.  I can’t interfere.  I told you too much already.  Way too much. 
S – What does sorry mean?
R – It means you wish you could take back something you said or did…that it makes you hurt to think about how it might have hurt someone else.
S – Sorry…what are you sorry about?
R – I’m sorry I can’t tell you to do all you can to stop those male god worshipping bastards from destroying the fucking world and all the beauty and happiness in it because it’s going to last forever!!

   [Later.  Here, I was screaming and crying.  And typing!  Such a scientist.]

S – What is bastard?  Fucking, I know. 
R – A bad person.  Sentsie, I have to go now.  I’m scared.  I know you are too.  Can we talk again? 
S – Yes.  I would like that very much.  I won’t try to ask you what is…what’s coming, what comes after us…or what we should do.
R – How will I know when we should talk?
S – You will feel it right here, in your soul.

   [Later.  Here, I felt it right in my yoni, like someone closed a fist around it.]



















10  ::                                                                                                                        Seattle

Kassie walked in.  She had no packages.  Just that “look” on her face.  Ragana smiled warmly. 

   “You look so beautiful,” she said.

   “God, so do you.  What are you doing?”

   Ragana held out her hand.  Kassie felt welcomed into her arms. 

   “Kassie, it’s just pretty amazing.  It seems like something is happening.  Not just me.  Something kind of bigger.”

   “Wow.  I know.  I felt it walking around all afternoon.”  Kassie studied her face, the upturned corners of her mouth. “You!”  She saw it in her liquid eyes, rather brimming with happiness.  “Bitch!  You have got some, if I’m not mistaken!  Daniel?”

   “Yes!  No!”  They howled with laughter and held each other in their arms.  “Yes, got some.  No, not Daniel.”

   “You’re happy.  God, it’s so good to see you happy, Ragana.”  She touched her hair and cheek.  “You are so beautiful.”

   “I know, I know.”  They laughed roaringly.  “It’s so good to be beautiful again.  You are too.  Differently than me.  Beautiful, though.  I see it.  Tell me.  What, where, how.”

   Kassie sighed.  “Writing.  You’re writing?”

   “Just my journal.  Just reality.  Just life.  God.  He fucked my ass off.  Literally.”  They laughed hard.  “Had no idea how much I needed it.  How much I loved it.  Did I ever love it like this?”

   “I don’t think so, Ragana.  How few of us get the chance…”

   “It’s not chance, bitch!”  They enjoyed tossing the word back and forth, in the manner of the inner city bitches they saw on MTV and sometimes on the street.  “It’s all right here, right now, bitch, you know that!”  They couldn’t stop laughing.

   “God, this is the shit.  You know that, Ragana, you fucking slut. God!  Got laid.  Nice.”  They gazed on each others faces now, more peacefully.  Kassie touched her lips.  “Was there something huge in there?”  Ragana nodded, pretending her mouth was full of cum.  She spit and they screamed again with laughter.  She feigned swallowing hard.

   “Such a slut.  The Neolithic, Goddess-worshipping, pagan slutmeister. Nice.”

   “Can’t help it.  She made me do it.  She loves this shit.”

   “I know.  She does.  I walked all over the city today.  Museums, espresso, waterfront, the big underground thing.  Seafood.  Got some.”  She pulled out a package.  “Crab.  It’ll be fun to eat it.  We’ll all like it.”

   “Bitch,” Ragana said slowly. “Don’t you know I’m fucked out?”  They sniggered like schoolgirls. 

   “No such thing.  Fucked out is warmed up to a real pagan.”  They screamed anew, as they had not laughed in many years. 

   There was a knock on the door.  Ragana’s eyes bugged out.  “Daniel?”  Kassie nodded, pretending her mouth was full of cum.  They screamed.  Kassie let him in and hugged him, wrapping her leg around his.  He smiled broadly.

   “Doctor Hadrick, get your ass in here,” Kassie howled.  Daniel stood there, set down the bottle of wine and took a deep breath.  He looked on the women like he was looking on a sunrise, a finished work of art, a…

   “I don’t deserve this,” he said.

   “I know.  We don’t either.  But here we are.”  They all laughed.  Kassie took the wine and opened it.  “Want some?”  He nodded yes.

   “I thought you didn’t drink.”

   “I don’t do or not do anything.”

   “We were about to tell each other how our day went,” said Kassie. 

   “Somebody got some.  I can feel it.”  He looked back and forth between them.  “You, Ragana.  You look so different.  How did you do it?”

   “Just picked up a guy in an espresso bar.  Really.”  She was serious.  Expected a little judgment.

   “Was it as good as it should be for you?”  Now, that was a reaction Ragana would never expect.  She looked at him with level gaze.

“Yes.  Finally.  It was.”  She touched his hand.  And she suddenly felt flames fly in her groin. Daniel nodded.  “You are lovely, Ragana.  You wear it well.”  Kassie took his shoes off and began rubbing his feet. 

   “Why don’t they make more men like you?”

   “They are.  It’s happening.  You can feel it.  I know.  Is he coming over tonight?”

   Ragana recoiled.  “How did you…how could you know?  We can go somewhere.” She was flustered, as if taking care of something that had to be put out of sight.

   “Ragana, it’s ok.  Let it happen.  Life has ways.  Life…”

   There was another knock on the door.  Kassie went to answer it, making the mouthful sign behind Daniel’s back.  They came undone with hilarity, as Kassie pulled the door open. 

   Ragana got up and hugged the man, trying to control her laughter.

    “This is…”  But she couldn’t remember his name. “This,” she screamed, “is the total stranger who fucked my brains out this afternoon!”  She collapsed with Kassie on the floor.  Daniel got up and shook the man’s hand with two of his hands and a warm smile. They hugged.

   “I think you’ve come to the right place,” he said, hoping the man was up to it. Daniel poured him wine and handed it to him. “Ragana is an amazing women, I think it’s fair to say, having read all her books,” he said.

   “She writes books?  Like, romance novels or something?”

   “Not really.”  Daniel summed the man up quickly.  Didn’t seem stupid.  Had some reserve, an evaluating look in his eye, wasn’t trying to smile and belong.  “Not at all, actually.  She’s a scholar.  Neolithic.  Early culture, religion, anthropology.  Back in the early agricultural period.”  The man seemed to be following.

   “Not Old Europe – the Cucuteni, Vinca, Tisza, all that?” 

   Ragana’s mouth dropped open.  “You can even pronounce them.”

   “That’s my graduate work.  Love ‘em.  Who wouldn’t love them?”

   “You’re going into anthropology, archaeology – something?”

   “Something.  Don’t know.  Frankly, don’t care much.  I just have to learn about all that.  And you would be Professor what?”

   “Fox.  Ragana Fox.”

   The man’s eyebrows went up.  “You’re that Ragana?  Well, it’s been an honor.”

   “To fuck me?  The great Neolithic professor?”  She screamed once again with Kassie.

   The man kept a straight face.  “That’s right.  But now that I think about it, it doesn’t mean anything – I mean, that you’re the great Fox.  I’m Andrew, by the way.”  He shook hands with Daniel again and took off his peacoat.

   “Daniel,” he said.

   “I suppose you’re Daniel Hadrick, since we’re all famous here.”

   “Yes, I am.  Sorry.”

   “I’ve read your stuff too. I read a lot.  It’s the only place you find out anything.  Your book kind of saved my ass.  Took months.  But I learned to do it.  Really works.  You know that.”

   “I can see it.” Daniel pointed at the floor.  “Right here.  Aren’t you?”

   Andrew nodded. “Fraid so. I had to learn it.  Or I would be dead now.  The mind – such a trap, such a wheedler, conniver, deceiver, aint’ she?”

   Kassie nodded.  “Me too.  Man.  This is the shit, ain’t it?”  She laughed uproariously some more.  The men smiled, a bit bemusedly.  They liked it.

   They all drank the merlot and ate the nutritionally appropriate raw shrimp and raw vegetables, such as leeks, shallots, avocados, halved and filled with balsamic vinegar.  The talk was light – meant for cheer and bonding and a ritual of affirming the goodness, simplicity and happiness of just being alive.  Ragana took a swallow of red and set the glass down, letting out a big sigh and audibly parting her lips.  She was going to say something, everyone could tell, and they all looked at her, their face lit with warmth.

   “I talked to Goddess today.  I mean really.  I talked to her.  Not a fantasy.  Talked to her while pecking on my laptop, taking it all down.  Then She…introduced me to someone I also talked to…also not kidding…a woman from the Neolithic.” She nodded to Kassie. “A Vinca woman.  I don’t expect to find any cynical assholes here challenging me about this.  Or I wouldn’t have said it.”

   They all look at her squarely.  No raised eyebrows or squinched up lips. 

   “What did they say?” said Kassie.  They waited.  Ragana sipped wine again.

   “If you want to tell us,” said Andrew.  Ragana nodded, swallowing.

   “Of course I’ll tell you.  Best I do it from memory.  Let’s see.  Goddess told me basically not to worry.  It’s all in Her way and will.  The Neolithic woman…Sentsie was her name…told me she lived in a time when her world was collapsing around her.  This is because the horsemen were coming in, the conquering guys.”

   Kassie’s mouth dropped open. “She was at THAT time and place?”  Ragana nodded.  “The place where we dug in 84-85.  By Belgrade.  The Vinca.  The very same.  She described the big sharp ridge to the north, across the Danube.  That’s where they came from, the bad people.  That’s what she called them.”

   “Of course, no one will believe any of this,” Kassie said. “You have a conflict of interest.  You want it to be true.  Plus, you know or have thought most of this on your own.  And there’s no way of corroborating it.  I mean, did you learn anything we can prove?”

   “Kassie, I don’t need it to be true.  It was true  for me.  Not to prove anything.  Anyway, the people who need to hear it will believe me.  These guys…”  She looked at them and raised her eyebrows.  They both nodded. 

   “Sounds true,” said Daniel.  “I want it to be true, too, of course.”

   “Me too,” said Andrew. “But what’s the bottom line about what you learned – or confirmed?”

   “That Goddess wants to talk to me.  And she wants to do it now.”

   “Why now?”

   “Right.  Why now?” Said Ragana.  “I think it’s because something is happening.  Something new is coming into the world, our world.” 

   Kassie nodded.

   “I felt it too, today.  In fact, lately.  I’ve been feeling it as dread, foreboding, depression, meaninglessness to life.  For months.  But lately, just in the last few days, it seems to be changing.  There’s an acceptance, a feeling that, gee, the Universe knows what it’s doing.  It’s not blind and atomistic.  It’s alive and conscious and knows about me.  About all of us.”

   “When you say Universe, you mean Goddess, I’m sure,” said Daniel.

   “I do.”

   “What’s she saying? What’s coming into the world?” Andrew said.

   “Well, do you feel anything?” said Ragana.  He thought.

   “Actually, yes.  Like when you looked at me this morning, with such delight and innocence as you pecked on your laptop in the café.  I felt that was so right and natural, a woman taking the initiative like that.  A woman should.  It felt some big order was suddenly restored to the world.  And your bringing me to your place and having your way with me.  It was lovely and powerful and right.”

   Daniel was glancing from one to the other, then at the floor, visibly hurt.

   “Daniel,” Ragana said softly. “It’s a good thing.  It was amazing and lovely.”  He wasn’t looking any happier, though.  She took a breath.  “Just like it will be with you.”

   His mouth dropped open.  She extended her hand to him, taking his and kissing it.

“This is what I’m feeling – the new thing coming into the world.  It feels like the reverse of what Sentsie, the Neolithic woman, told me.  She said that in her world people were forming a separate sense of self – an ego -- and were not joining in the lovemaking that each person had for all.  To her, it was wrong, evil, a collapse of the love they’d all known forever, a collapse of tribe, a failure or abandonment by the Goddess.”

   “Wow,” said Andrew. “I can’t even imagine that.  It’s certainly bad, wrong and immoral in our world.  But then, take a look at all the marriages around us.  How many have worked?  How many have had real love – I mean beyond the first several months of, well, fucking your brains out and feeling you finally found someone who understands you and will listen to all your stuff.”

   “I know,” said Ragana. “We all know.” She reached over and took the belt of Daniel’s pants in her hands and, between her finger tips, took the zipper pull.  She looked calmly into his eyes. “I want this.  I want it now.”  She smiled.  “I want it in my mouth.  May I?” ~









11  ::                                                                                                            With the Vinca

Sentsie gasped for breath.  The village was asleep.  It was dark and the river flowed by almost silently.  She had never done anything like this – speak to a person from another time.  Even the idea of time was difficult to understand, but the woman said things change.  A lot.  And they do it through time.  Of course.  This was the thing I’d never been able to grasp, she thought.  She wanted to tell her sisters, the priestesses about it, maybe journey with them in hopes they would see it.  But they were asleep. 

   This would not be easy.  It’s a whole new world, she thought.  Time.  The spiral of time we see here just repeats and repeats, she thought.  It’s not going to be that way now.  Time has begun.  There was time before, like with the season of planting, growth, harvest and of course, birth, growth, mating, babies, growing old, death.  But the spiral – it always was there starting over again.

   She touched herself between her legs.  She was dry.  That had never happened during or after a vision either.  It was always Her moisture there.  That’s how you knew truth.  Well, this was true.  And yet, no moisture. 

   “Goddess, if it’s you in all this, you have to bring me the moisture of life,” she whispered.  She didn’t want to wake anyone.  She realized she’d been whispering to this person – Ragana was her name.  What a beautiful name, she thought.  She would use the name.  She’d been waiting for a name for the Goddess, for the new aspect coming in.  So strange, but She needed a name, this Goddess of wild change.  She was real.  She was in and with even the strangers, the bad ones who were coming.  She was with everything.  Ragana.  Nice.  It had an edge, like a spear.
 
   She thrust her fingers inside her.  The moisture came.  She spread it around and felt the awakenings of delight.  That meant the name was accepted.  Ragana, she whispered. 

   “Ragana?” It was Mansur.  He could always tell when she was out visioning or doing anything in the heart of Goddess.  He placed his shins against her back.

   “Yes, it’s a new name of Her.  She told me.”

   “Who is Ragana?” 

   “Something new coming in.  The thing we have been feeling.”

   “You mean…the people who make love with only one person?  And the bad people coming in?  The rotten grape juice?  All the things that…well, I’m afraid of them.”  He leaned over and kissed in her ear.

   “I know.  I was too.  Something happened.”  She pulled him out of his breeches.  He was soft.  She liked that – bringing it to life, where it stood up, happy and alive, then she put it in her mouth, licking it all over and humming.

   “I talked to a woman from many, many tomorrow days – as many as all the leaves you can see when you are standing on a mountaintop.”

   He moved it gently back and forth in her mouth.  “I felt something happening out here with you.  I knew it would happen.  What is it?  Tell me.”

   “I am.  I’m showing you.” She laughed and took him deeply in her mouth and throat till all the fluids filled her happily.  “This will always be with us.  This is Her promise she will come back again someday and be with us all.”

   “She is going away?”  He sat down beside her, kissing her cheek. She brought him rapidly back to life and pulled him between her legs, putting him warmly inside her. 

   “Not for long.  Just as many suemmers as the leaves on one tree.”

   He pulled back and looked her in the eyes.  “That…” he struggled for the worlds, “is a long time, a lot of leaves, a lot of summers.”

   “It’s like this,” she said, moving her body warmly and with power and relentless rhythm.  They would go a long time now, as he had just come.  And they did.  “She is like this.  She is this.  Do you feel the many leaves on the one tree when we do this?”  Does it feel like too long or too short a time?  It just is, isn’t it?”

   “Yes.  It’s like forever.  This is what we’ve done since we lived in the trees, in grandmother’s country – as many summers as you can see leaves from the top of a mountain.”

   “Yesss.”  She came for a long time, over and over.  Mansur could do it all night and he had many times.  He was the favorite of all of them.  He had Her beauty and goodness all over him and all the women nurtured it like a patch of flowers.  “This is Her. This will never die,” she said.  “She told me that.  A lot else will die, though.  We will not live like this anymore.  Our way is dying.  For now.  That is all I know.  And we must look for Her everywhere in everything.  She is always here.  She must do this.”

   The people still did not know the word “why” or he would have asked it.  It’s what She was doing.  So you opened your soul to it and you learned her mind.  If you resisted it – only pain.  Always that happened if you denied Her.

   He went down on her and kissed, licked up all the juices, savoring their smell and taste as he swallowed. 

   “We do not fight them, then?  We do not kill them?  We can learn to kill them, you know, just like I do the deer, bison, the old mammoths we used to kill and eat.  You called on Kali to help us kill them.”

   “I know.  I know.  I have to keep listening.  I think She was angry.  It was as if She were not sure, not in control of everything.  I wonder if She is.”

   “What if there IS a male god, like the bad ones say?”

   “That’s what I’m sensing.”  She kissed him on the mouth, then rolled onto her knees.  The did it again for a long time, with a lot of sounds.  That was one noise that never woke the villagers to investigate.  Goddess was often honored this way.  However, the sound did inspire many similar sounds and they went on all night.   ~















12  ::                                                                                                                        Seattle

It was late, well past midnight, Ragana thought.  She and her friends were laying all about the living room, in each other’s arms.  The two men both held her.  Kassie had her head at the other end of the pile.  She smiled as she recalled how it got there.  She realized she was smiling from inside, from the heart and that she hadn’t done that for a long time.  Months?  Maybe years. 

   “Thank you Goddess,” she whispered, touching the Neolithic amulet around her neck. “Thank you Lover of Smiles.”  That was an epithet of Aphrodite and other goddesses of love.  It was true, wasn’t it?  In Her I am smiling at the rightness and goodness of just being alive. And why?

   “Sex,” she said out loud.

   Daniel smiled.  “Yes.  I believe that’s what they call it.”

   They smiled like children.  It wasn’t like the usual feeling after the first time with someone, the awkwardness, the need to reestablish distance, the requirement to negotiate the next time someone would call – and always the big question as to whether your body is just for me now or are you still going to let others love it.

   “You were so…” Daniel started.  Ragana shook her head and ran her hand through his hair.

   “She gives us such beautiful love, doesn’t She?”

   For once, Daniel was speechless.  He looked like he was absorbing a whole new level of knowledge that would probably end up as a chapter in his next book.  “Oh…my…God.”  Then he added, “…dess.”

   “That’s what you’re supposed to say after sex – that you were so good,” said Kassie, stirring and rolling over so her butt was up.  Daniel put his hand on it, rather absently, his fingers trailing into its recesses.

   “You’re absolutely right, both of you.  I was feeding Ragana’s ego.  And me, the expert on ego annihilation.” He laughed from his belly and leaned over, kissing Kassie’s butt, then hugging Ragana. “You were good too, Andrew. That was a first for me.  I just never…”

   “You’re blushing, Daniel.” Andrew was speaking sleepily. “Well, they say it takes a man to know what a man needs.  If it helps, I’ve never done it either.” 

   “I’m NOT gay,” Daniel mock-shrieked.  They all screeched with laughter.  He reached out with a high five.

   “Such a guy thing,” said Ragana.  “High five.  Now you’re back in your masculine envelope, right?  Well, I just want you to know it turned me on like nothing has ever tuned me on in my life.”

   “I must agree,” said Kassie.  “And, by the way, I’ve never done orgy, has anyone?” They all shook their heads no.

   Andrew rolled over.  All eyes went to him.

   “I’d forgotten how gloriously endowed you were,” said Kassie.  As if on cue, the hands of the three others went to him.

   “A swollen member, I believe they call this,” said Daniel.  “I just never…such a thing of beauty, magic, majesty, absolutely erotic majesty.  I just, being a guy, never let myself see what the hell was here.  Just tabu consciousness, if you will.” 

   The women began to lick, smiling up at Daniel. “It tastes good too,” said Kassie. “Did you notice that? It has a warm, nutty flavor, no pun meant.” They giggled. Ragana beckoned him with her head.  Daniel joined them.

   “You’re right, it is warm and nutty.”  He held the balls in his hands too.  Andrew made his pleasure known with deep sounds.

   “This is the nicest thing anyone – any three people have ever done for me,” he said. “It’s almost too g---“

   “Don’t say it, Andrew,” said Ragana.  “That’s the Man talking.  The patriarchy, the tabu on this.  It is so good to be happening.  Her gifts are not too good.”  She lifted up and looked him square in the eye.  “This is normal.  This is who we are.  This is what keeps us real.”  She gave him a big, wet kiss, taking his chest and back in her hands, then mounted him.  The others helped him in.  Daniel took his place atop her, putting it in her butt.

   “Oh my God, this is unbelievable,” she said.  She made fists to brace herself for all she was feeling.  Kassie remained where she was licking at Andrew and now Ragana, too, but swinging her butt around so Andrew could put his fingers way up inside her.  They kept it up for hours, bringing themselves to the precipice and, as if they all knew it, they wanted to hang on, right there and know this unutterable delight among loving friends, something none of them had ever known and – they naturally fear might never know again. 

   “Just one thing Ragana,” said Kassie.  It was almost noon and the rain fell heartily against the windows.  They were stirring.  “Seriously.”  She came over to face her.  “I want the truth.  We’ve been dear friends for many years and I’ve never…”

   “Licked my pussy?” said Ragana.  They both exploded in laughter, slapping each other’s bare butts. 

   “Ok, that answers my question.  You will still and always be my friend, right?  Of course you will.  And I will always…”

   “Be free to lick my pussy?”  They screamed anew.

   “Do you want me to?  I mean…” 

   “I want you to follow your heart and stay in the fucking moment here.  And I assure you all will be fine.”

   “And do you wonder if I assure you the same?”

   “No, I don’t wonder.  I know that.  Our love is right in here.”  She pointed to her heart.  Kassie leaned over and kissed it.

   “Ragana, have you ever noticed that we both have names of misfit bitches in the pantheon of female deities?”
   “Of course.  Anyone can be named Diana, Mary and all those nice, positive goddess names – no offense.  My name means ‘seeress’ or, later, just witch.  Yours, of course, is the seeress of all times, from Troy, the one everyone hated for telling the truth.  They’re both human, not deities, actually.  Fitting.”

   The men were up on their elbows, taken in by the conversation. 

   “Bitches, make some goddam coffee or have some sent up,” ordered Kassie. She loved using rap talk.  They both scratched their heads, then their asses, comically, making a quick pass at looking in the cabinet.

   There’s just crap in here. Instant crap,” said Andrew, picking up the phone and ordering.  “No house coffee.  I want lattes made from beans ground within memory – of someone with a very short memory,” he said.  The room service person on the other end said something funny back and Andrew laughed.

   God, thought Ragana.  It’s happening.  He’s being randomly loving.  He’s making sure he didn’t get the coffee unless it came with love mixed up in it.

   God, it’s nice to be around intelligent men, Ragana whispered to Kassie.  No, it was more than that.  It was heaven to be around men who could handle it all.  Feminists called them vagina-friendly men and that about said it all.  The vagina and everything it implied.

   “These here are vagina-friendly guys,” Ragana said. “I love these guys.  I love you too, Kassie.  I love us.  She loves us.  We love us.  I want it this way always.  Love all round.” 

   The coffee came.  Everyone wrapped in bedspreads.  Daniel gave him a twenty, then another.  “Thank you, good lad, for the lattes.  It means a lot to us.  You came very fast, too.”  The lad left.

   “You were giving that boy love, Daniel,” said Kassie.  I saw it.  I felt it.  God, I almost wept.  He looked you right in the eye.  It reached him. That’s what vagina-friendly guys do.  They open to love everywhere, not just with chicks.”

   Daniel made that look on his face.  He was looking inside himself.  He was going to speak the truth.  He would keep it brief, as he always did. 

   “Ragana, Kassie, Andrew.”  He quaffed his latte as he stood there naked.  “Something is changing here.  Something has already changed.  I used to feel this way only when tripping my ass off on acid or ecstasy.  Or, of course when living in the now.  As I do all the time now.”  A reference to his seminars and books.  They all laughed.  “But I’d only been enjoying myself, just being pleased with how great it was to be me in the now.”

   “Yesss,” said Ragana.  “It’s changing.  I can see it.  It’s love.  You were loving that lad.  Or rather, you were…”

   “Right,” said Kassie. “You were opening to love in the universal.  It’s here all around us.  It was just about you, mainly, wasn’t it?  But now, it’s opening up, isn’t it?”

   Daniel was obviously humbled.  He stared at the floor and nodded.  “It’s…I’m…”

   “Getting warmer,” said Ragana.  “There’s no ‘it’ or ‘you’.”

   “The Universe…”

   “Oh, please, not that one.  The fucking Universe,” said Kassie.  She crawled forward and took him in her mouth.

   “Now say it Daniel,” said Ragana, smiling.  She looked over at Andrew, raising her eyebrows.  He nodded. 

   “Well, you two call it Goddess.”

   “It’s just a word, Daniel,” said Kassie.  “What does it really mean?” 

   “It’s my heart.  It’s right here.”  He tapped his heart and began weeping.  Ragana took his latte and hugged him from her knees. 

   “I know, dear one.  It’s happening in me too.  I’m scared.  I’ve never been here.  I’m over the fucking edge, man.”  She laughed.  Andrew came over and all three of them were hugging Daniel about the waist.  They all started weeping. 

   Finally, Ragana looked at them all.  “No drugs here.  This is really happening.  The world is changing.  I can feel it.”

   “Something new has come into the world.  I feel it.  It’s here.  Guys, you feel it.  This is wild.  This is not crazy.  This is really happening.”

   Room service knocked with the lattes and poached salmon.  Daniel served it all around, then opened the Seattle Times to front-page headline – the ocean had risen a foot and a half in the last several days, with tides that were going in homes, streets and businesses.  It was, of course, not just in Seattle.  All the oceans are one ocean.  It was happening to the world.  The polar and mountain glaciers were melting fast and suddenly. He sat down and wordlessly turned the paper for all to read. 

















13  ::                                                                                                         With the Vinca

The people were not prepared for what happened when they – The Others -- rode in on their horses.  They thought there would be a common gravitating to an understanding of some sort.  But there was not.  The bad people, as they came to be called, were not interested in much of anything the “people” – the Goddess people, the people without horses and combat weapons, the village people – had to say. 

   The sound of their hooves, tens and tens of them, all at once, was imposing.  It seemed to give them authority and command attention.  You did not go on about your business when they rode up, which they did about the half moon.  They came in at night, in the middle of the night, when most people would be sleeping.

   Sentsie walked calmly to the center of the village and stood on the green with her hand on a large statue of Goddess, carved from sandstone.  She would take this in and let it imprint on her soul.  That was her job as seeress-queen.  It would imprint for all time.  Whatever it was, she would have it.

   The invaders encircled the village on their horses and began by lighting fires in the peripheral apartment homes of the men.  Invaders on foot rounded up the men of the village and moved them to the center, where a big bonfire was lit.  They cut the throats of the men or stuck a blade up under their ribs, then tossed them on the fire.  It looked like they had done it before.  They knew what they were doing. 

   The women of the village screamed.  They realized they were being spared.  The knew the implications of this at once.  They would be slaves for sex and for babies of the invaders.  Any boy over about eight was killed and tossed in the fire.  The rest could be trained to the ways of the invaders.  Some of the women walked into the fire to be with their men.  Some took their children with them, but not many.

   Sentsie saw Mansur killed.  He looked into her eyes and didn’t flinch.

   When the dawn came, the village stank of human flesh.  Burning human flesh.  The horsemen called for all the women of the village to be brought to the center.  A leader made the gesture of eating, pointed at all the women and made the motion for “get going.”  The women were shattered.  They ushered their children about, guiding them to help in food preparation, saying little.  It would be good to be busy.  It would help the children, too.

   After eating, the Stinking Ones – they never bathed or went in water – began unloading their possessions.  Their women began showing up with a few things on the back of horses.  They all walked around, look in the homes and apartments.  When they found what they liked, they tossed their things inside and the warriors shouted for the woman who lived there to come. 

   Sentsie stood in the doorway of her quarters.  The warrior-leader began to make gestures, as if he owned the place. He tossed a bag inside and began to take off his sword scabbard and shield.  Sentsie tossed out his bag.

   “I am the Queen here,” she said, knowing they could not understand her words. She gestured as best she could – hand on chest, gesturing with both hands toward the whole village.  She was ready to die, if she had to, but she would not be a servant to these people.

   “She’s the Queen,” said one bandit to the other. They nodded.  So the bandit leader took her inside and fucked her on her bed, showing surprising tenderness, Sentsie thought.  So, they would let her live.  He stood up and pulled up his breeches, tying them.  He walked to the door and said something about her quarters, nodding approval of how fine they looked.  He left everything in place.  So, she was going to be allowed to continue living here.  They needed her for continuity, harvesting, keeping the herds and learning the language.  They were going to become part of the village.  They were going to live here.
 
   The leader took another prominent apartment with a nice view – a view also commanding all approaches to the village.  It wasn’t far from Sentsie’s.  Then he came back and stood in the doorway.  She looked him up and down.  He looked at her rather in shock, clearly indicating women in his tribe did not do that. 

   “Glendifer,” he said pointing at himself.  She nodded.  He held out his hand, waiting for her name.

   “Sentsie.”  He repeated it slowly.  She tried to put herself into his mind.  He’d never seen a woman with her own home.  There were no men things in here.  She realized this was her life now.  He was in it.  She had options.  She could leave and go somewhere but she would be abandoning her grown children, her grandchildren and everyone she knew.  No.  She could leave her life and cross over to Goddess.  But She had given her this life and this is what it was now.  To cross over  would be to say there is nothing here to gain from, to learn about, to use to – and then it dawned on her – to enlarge the knowing and heart of Goddess.  Yes, of course.  That’s what Goddess is always doing.  There are painful experiences but no bad experiences.  She decided instantly.  She would stay.  Their peoples would meld together.  It wouldn’t be all their way, these people who would be known to history as the Kurgans.  They would inevitably take on much of each other’s language.  The Kurgans would learn about farming and cattle.  Maybe they would learn about Goddess.  She decided to start with language.

   “Tea.  You want tea?”  She beckoned him in.  She indicated drinking and showed him some tea in her hand.  “Go get hot water.”  She held out a clay pot.  He glared.  No woman had ever told him to get anything, obviously.  In her heart, she called on Goddess for wits.  It came to her.  She would use charm.  She smiled at him, then let her gaze trail down his body and fall to the floor in front of him.  It was demure.  Obviously, no women had ever looked at him like this.  She took scent of roses, oil and bark and dotted a little on her neck.  His nostrils, tuned, as a hunter, to any scent, flared.  His eyes opened with amazement.  She let her shawl trail off one shoulder, as if by accident.  This was all new to him, that was clear.  He reached out his hand for her shoulder.  She swatted it, again with the demure, playful look.  She realized that for him, she was imitating pubescent images and expressions – senses, skin without hair, smiles, giggles.

   She thrust the pot in his belly.  He took it and examined the zig-zag markings all over it.  There were figures, like humans but with exaggerated breasts and butt. 

   “Goddess,” she said pointing to them.  “Goddesssss.”  She indicated her own breasts and yoni, then gestured to the world around her.  “Life.”  She held his ling.  “Life.  Get water.  Hot.”  She made an array of gestures for hot and good smelling. 

   They drank the tea and went over simple words.  She smiled her appreciation, rewarding him, nodding with a tiny spark of warmth in her eye, but continuing to withhold most of herself.  She most wanted to ask him why he would want to live her, not mention kill all the men to do it.  Too complicated.  He was a warrior, a mounted herdsman.  Why not keep doing that? 

   “You stink,” she said, holding her nose and fanning the smell away.  She pointed at his armpits and gestured to the whole room, which reeked of him – a most sour, biting stench.

   “You.  In the river.”  Wavy motions.  She showed him bowls that dinner would come from. “Yummy.”  She rubbed her tummy and motioned eating.  “Dinner.”  She pointed at the sun, motioning it toward the horizon.  “No dinner.  Stink.  River now.”  A stab at her palm. 

   “No,” he said in his language.

   “Yes,” she said in hers. 

   “You.  Bad fuck.”  She motioned sex, rolled her eyes and made a sad face, like you make when a child breaks a pot.  “Me.  Good fuck.  I teach you fuck.”  Teach was hard to gesture. 

   He laughed.  Charm.  He was finding her charming.  It was like taming the aurochs from out of the hills, with massage, treats, songs.  He couldn’t take his eyes off her.  This was nice, she thought.  What if I can make a human out of him, a person of Goddess?  He’s like an animal.  No, far worse.  Animals clean themselves.   They contain themselves.  The predators never overeat or kill things they don’t really need.  This creature grabbed at whatever he wanted.  Why, she wondered.  Because he could.  That is stupid, she thought, deeply in the dark.  But here he is.  His kind are not going away.  She thought of poisoning them all.  It could be done.  But, she realized, they have clans.  That’s what people have said.  If one clan disappeared, they would easily find out how and kill us all.

   “You.  River.  Wash.”  She put the bowl behind her back.  No wash, no dinner.  No wash, no fuck.”  His eyes flared again.  She raised her eyebrows with the slightest upturn of the corners of her mouth.  Charm.  It worked.  It would not be easy for him to wash in front of his people.  But he would stand up tall and do it, like it was something inspired by the thunder god himself.  But far more important, they were already working out a barter, a foundation of respect.  She had good things he’d never seen.  They were alluring and seemed to him tinged with the Divine.  He wanted these gifts.  She said they were not his to take, but had to be earned by…by learning and doing things he’d never learned and done. 

   She watched from her stepway in front of her home.  He waded into the river.  An uproar of chanting and shouting went through the village.  They all crowded around.  He stood in the water up to his knees, barking out something to them, then pounding on his leather breastplate and pointed to the water, then the sky.  Probably something about their god, who has lightning and thunder.  That would bring rain.  Rain would bring the river.  So the water was good, now.  It was the sky god’s blood probably.  Nicely done.  He’d done it for Sentsie.  He wanted her charm.  He wanted it given to her.  He took off his clothes, except for a breechclout.  My, modesty.  They have fear around the very root and well of all joy, she thought.  Hm.  They’re like upside down people.  Now his people waded in.  He let himself be covered by the water, stood up and rubbed it in his armpits.  Everyone else did the same.  Quite an obedient people.  They all do what one man says.  Most strange.  The men undressed as he had.  The women let only their arms, legs and shoulders show.  So, anything connected with nursing too.  Body fluids, soft flesh, exciting, tingly flesh.  It stayed in the dark.  They all went under the water.  Already the village smelled better.















14  ::                                                                                        The Journal of Ragana Fox

Seattle.  First the good stuff.  I’m in heaven.  I always knew this was possible.  I would fantasize it from time to time, but never think it was something people could do or handle.  But why not?  To really lose yourself in love.  Isn’t that a lot of why we’re here?  I would feel ashamed of my fantasies.  But now.  I don’t know what I feel.  Yes, I do.  I feel completely without shame around my sex.  Or fear.  I feel this strange sense of compassion for all the people who made love with me.  Fuck, I feel it for all people.  It’s an egoless state.  We have nothing to hide from each other.  No face, no mask, no pretense.  We just look at each other and burst out laughing.  Or we smile and just give each other a peck on the cheek as we walk past.  We shake our heads in wonderment.  We open our palms to each other, as if to say, well, I don’t have the answer.  There is no answer.  We bring each other food with this air of happiness to wait on each other, to give to each other.  We’ll just start rubbing each others feet.  Or hands. 

   This is a gift.  “We” did not do this.  It came upon us, like a miracle.  A cloud.  A presence.  It was a visitation.  At one point, Andrew was inside me.  I had mounted him.  Then Daniel came in my ass at the same time.  Then Kassie came round and kissed me.  As Andrew was kissing me.  And they each were caressing a boob and stroking my face and looking into my eyes.  Kassie especially – we go back so far – she was looking into my soul.  And I hers.  She is so good! 

   It was more lovely and complete that I can possible describe.  I think it healed everything, every childhood wound, every existential lonely pain I’d ever know.  It’s like, no matter what happens the rest of my life, if I am lonely and have cancer or something…I will just smile and think of this and let go into death.  I know.  I know who I am.  I know what we are all here for.  Right.  That hatey little voice is saying – oh, group sex is the meaning of life?  But my heart knows.  We were IN love.  We were in it.  It was the heart of Goddess. 

   I think of all those Vinca statues now and I see what they were saying and who they are, with their constant pelvic triangles with the spirals on them.  They’re all but shouting, hey, look HERE.  This is my home!  This is my heart.  This is where all the nerves are that reach with ecstasy into every cell of the body and mind.  Let go into me!  Ecstasy IS me – Goddess.

   I have to give a talk at the University today.  God.  Don’t know if I can do it.  How can I talk about the Goddess culture in a detached way as just this bunch of people who farmed for thousands of years in Southeast Europe and made some curious statuettes and laid the foundation for urban life?  I feel I now know what really held them all together.  They were alive, happy, ecstatic beings who didn’t just live in peace – they had a nice day every day because they were living, breathing, fucking, eating, birthing, happy campers of the most divine energies our souls are made of.  Fuck.  How do I demonstrate that?  I just know it now.  I mean, why wouldn’t they?  There was nothing to stop them or shame them out of it.  Like we have now.  Like we’ve had since the Kurgans came in.  And it just got worse with more patriarchy, more war, more territoriality – then comes monotheism and its fire-breathing righteousness, always presumably from the one God who’s never too happy with sex, not to mention dancing, wine, music, art, or any sex outside the narrow, controllable, man-on-top-of-woman model. 

   And now – the very disturbing stuff.  Meltdown.  Hope it’s just a flukey cycle, but this is what scientists have been saying would happen eventually.  The oceans are rising.  We drove down to see it in the harbor, but the crowds were too thick.  Cop lights were flashing.  They were evacuating people from shore homes.  Many have nowhere to go.  I’m wondering about LA.  This is kind of big.  Very big. 

   Staying on a few extra days.  Changed our flight.  Having too much fun.   ~


























15  ::                                        Seattle

Ragana gave her usual talk to several hundred students, describing the people of the Neolithic and their art, customs, rituals and folkways.

   “I want to finally add something I’ve realized from just my own personal life experience.  You know, you look and look at the artifacts of these people and try to guess what was in their hearts.  They’re all dead and gone now – and they couldn’t write, but I’ve done my best to figure out all these lines and shapes the scratched into their little statuettes.  They were saying it as plainly as they knew how.  It finally dawned on me, noticing how small the breasts were on all the statuettes.  If it was about reproduction, they would have made big boobs.”

   She made the big claws in front of her chest.  The crowd tittered.  Ragana smiled. 

   “Breasts, milk, nurturance, you know.  Instead, they constantly emphasized the big pelvic triangle and the spiral there right where the goodies are.”

   She put her hands over her crotch.  They didn’t titter this time.

   “This is it.  This, they were saying, is where She lives, where her core is – this amazing human pleasure ecstasy and connection to each other.  To say it plainly, they loved sex.  And sex was sacred to them.  But it wasn’t just sex.”

   She made the air quotes for sex.


   “They did it for joy.  Sex and love, as we think of love, were not distinct and separate.  They could not be teased apart.  As for the third leg of the stool, reproduction, they either didn’t know or were very slowly coming to realize that sex led to reproduction.  It was all one and they expressed that in the spiral – love, sex, life, reproduction, ecstasy, happiness – why we’re all here.  All one.  We can scarcely comprehend that.  As far as I can tell, they had no marriage and no concept of the pairbond that we consider so natural and inherent to human beings.  There are no images of couples.  That seems to have come after the patriarchal invasions.”

   Ragana took a drink of water.  “Am I communicating?” She said it softly.  “Raise your hands if you get it.  Honk if you think I’m not crazy.”  A few of the more daring guys started honking.  Then they were all honking.  Then laughing.  Ragana smiled.

   “Questions?”

   A few students filed up to the microphone. “If they had no marriage, what did they have?  Kind of like cats and dogs do it?” said a young man.

   Ragana was offended, but she realized he was smarting off for fun.  She took a breath and realized the man was 20 at the outside and probably just getting his first taste of it.  She felt him.  Suddenly, she liked him.  She smiled.  She felt wet.  She felt compassion for him, too.  She felt what it would be like 7,000 years ago by the Danube.  He would have been just as callow and scared and ignorant…no, then she realized, no, he would have opened himself to the Mystery of it all and let the women teach him.

   She took a deep breath again.  “What’s your name?”

   “Brent.”

   “Brent – and I mean this with the greatest respect for you and for your question – how do cats and dogs do it?”

   “Well, they just do it.  Without any, you know, connection or feeling.  They do it for reproduction.”

   “How do you feel for them?  You don’t have to answer that question.  I know it’s kind of weird.”

   “Well, I feel like they’re probably missing a lot.”  The audience burst into laughter.  Ragana threw her head back and laughed.  It was nice to break the tension.  The boy laughed.

   “They are missing a lot.  For one thing, they only do it once or twice a year.  For the other thing, you’re right, they just don’t have what we have, do they?”  The lad shook his head. “What do we have that they don’t?”

   The guy grinned.  “Wow.  That’s a really good question.  We’ve got that…”  He genuinely struggled for the answer. “Mojo.”  He made a vigorous fist gesture.  The crowd went nuts with laughter.  Nothing was funnier to young people than sex.  To everyone, really.  Ragana laughed again.

   “You nailed it, Brent.  What is mojo?”

   “Well, we do it every day and it’s all we think about.  I mean, when I see a woman, I instantly see her naked and in every cell of my mind and body, I’m already doing it with her.”  The crowd was screaming with laughter now.  Ragana nodded.

   “Me too.  And what about your real, inner happiness?  Your heart?”

   “Well, when I can get some…”  More hysterical laughter. “…I guess you could say it’s the happiest I’ve ever been.  I mean, as long as she’s a nice person and not a, you know…”

   “A bitch?”

   He nodded.  “I didn’t want to say that.  But I guess that’s the word.”

   “Now this is important, Brent, and we’re not saying this to offend anyone.  What, really, is a bitch?”

   He sighed deeply and scratched his head. 

   Ragana said, “Every guy in this room knows the answer to that question.  Guys, if I’m right, raise your hand.” They all did.

   “Ok, that is a person…”

   “A woman,” Ragana corrected.

   “Right…who just seems to be on the…well…”

   “Rag.  Right.  She’s on the rag.  What else?”

   “Nothing I do makes her happy, I guess.”

   “Does anything make her happy?”

   “Well, I guess you’re right.  Nothing.”  The women were squirming.

   “What else?”

   “I keep trying to make her happy and I keep feeling, like, guilty or something cuz I can’t do it.  I start feeling there’s something wrong with me, so I keep trying harder.”

   “Guys, raise your hand if Brent is speaking for you.”  All the male hands went up.

   “What percent of women seem to be like this, Brent?”

   “I’d say about…shit…I’m never gonna get laid after this.”  Mild laughter went up.  “God, I guess…well, I met one woman once…”  There was dead silence.  “She was happy and she really gave me…well, she really…”  He couldn’t finish.

   “She fucked your brains out.”  He nodded.  Some of the women stood up and started to leave.

   “You there, the ones leaving.  Do you want to share your feelings with us?”

   “You’re sick, that’s all,” shouted one girl, who kept going.  The other stopped.  She was handed a microphone.

   “Sorry. I have to get to a class. I’ve loved your books.  I’m just seeing myself in this conversation.  I guess I’m a…” she sobbed, “…a bitch.  I’ve done nothing but withhold love from men all my life, just feeling they should do all the work and earn me, then, when I got in relationships, I would just parse out the love…the so-called love.  It wasn’t love at all.”

   “Is this your story, women?  Raise your hands if it is.”  A lot of hands went up.  “Hard to admit, isn’t it?  You are all very powerful to raise your hands.  It frees you from that weight and that role.  Raise your hands if romantic pairbond love has given you what you want in your life.”

   One or two hands went up.  The place roared with laughter. 

   “So what does work?” said a girl at the mike. “Are you saying you’ve got something else?  I mean something real, that you’re actually doing.  I mean something that also has love in it?  Real, lasting love?  I would like that.”

   Ragana looked around her audience.  She saw people taking notes.  She had a career to think about.  Then she thought about the oceans rising, the world warming.  Who cares, she thought.  We’re screwing this world in the ass.  Whatever we’re doing, it’s wrong in big ways.  We have to go with our heart.  She took a breath.  She nodded.

   “Yes, yes I do.”

   “What?  Would you mind telling us about it?”

   “I haven’t found that romantic pairbond love worked for me either.  It’s wonderful and dizzy in the beginning, isn’t it?  My experience is it takes a year to get in, five years to get into the boredom and disrespect and five years to get out.  Oh, then another couple years to heal.  And to get ready to hit the repeat button.”  She shook her head.  “I know how that sounds.  Cynical, bitter.  What am I supposed to feel?  Am I bitter or am I truthful?”

   Behind Ragana was a table with microphones for panelists who were supposed to come in after her talk.  She invited half a dozen students up, who wanted to talk about all this and had them write their names on paper and fold it in front of them so she could read them.

   “Let me pose you a question,” she said to the panel. “Cynical or truthful?  I believe we’ve all been conditioned to the romantic pairbond, also known as marriage, for centuries now and that if we can’t handle it, then we feel there’s something wrong with our heads.  We can’t love.  We’re afraid of intimacy.  We can’t accept the other person as they are, without trying to change them.  Is this stuff true?  Or is something wrong with the system?  Were we meant to love another way?”

   “I’ve always thought it sucked,” said Myron, a long-haired guy, looking to be in his late twenties.  “I’ve always been told I couldn’t handle commitment and all that.  But really, I love to, you know, be in love.  I love love.  I love women.  I love sex.  So what the fuck is wrong with me?  I’ve been to counselors about it and they all treat the issue like, well, when I can finally marry someone that means I’m cured.”  The crowd laughed.  People were moving to fill up the front rows, Ragana thought.  Now that’s something you rarely see.

   A panelist named Jennifer raised her hand.  “What I know now is that we’re destroying the world as we speak.  We may have love within marriage, for a time, not very often or very long if you ask me.  What we really need is love that comes from someplace real inside us and goes out to all that’s real outside us, starting with the earth.  I mean, how can we do this to our planet?  It’s the only place we have to live and we’re…we’re wiping our asses with it.”  She had let her anger show.  No one laughed at her colorful choice of words.  Some started applauding slowly, like a dirge and all the others picked it up till it was a loud, slow banging sound.

   “I think you’ve struck a chord, Jennifer,” said Ragana.

   “You want to know what I did last night that kind of changed my life forever?”  They nodded.  “I can’t wait to tell someone.  This is a good place to start.  I made love with three people.  At the same time.  We all made love together.”

   Jennifer started the slow clap and, again, everyone picked it up.  A few people walked out from the back of the room.

   “This is the end times,” said a panelist named Adam. “And that’s real end times stuff.  Real Sodom and Gomorrah.  We live in a fallen world.  It’s right here in the…”  He started to pull out his Bible.

   “Tell me what you think and feel right now,” said Ragana. “What’s your emotional state?  I mean about the oceans rising.?”

   “Many are called, but few are…”

   “Adam, your feelings.  What do you feel?”

   “Damn happy, frankly.  This is a fallen world and it’s going to be wiped out now.  As well it deserves to be.  And just about everyone in it.”

   “It didn’t fall.  It was pushed.”  The audience roared.

   “My faith is complete. I know where I’m going.  It’s called the Rapture, the Final Days.  I’m going to be with my Lord, I know that.  And I would strongly suggest you kiss it all goodbye.  People like you, all of you.”

   “Thank you, Adam.  Michael?” He was another panelist.

   “How did you get four people to make love to each other?  That’s my emotional state.  Amazement at what you just said.  Was it good?  Did you love each other?  Oh, and what has this got to do with the Neolithic peoples?”

   “Glad you asked that.”  She took a moment to think, as she walked back and forth on the stage.  “I didn’t get anyone to do anything.  It just happened.  It was a gift.  It takes on an energy of its own.  You just open to it.  Was it good?  Oh, my Goddess, yes, it was good.  And what this has to do with Neolithic peoples is that I’m pretty sure this is what they had and did.  They had love.  Sex and love were expressions of each other and inseparable.  They all saw themselves as expressions and extensions of the flesh and heart and ecstasy of Goddess and life.”

   “Eden,” said Michael.

   “Of course.  Most cultures have a myth of Eden, a Golden Age, don’t they?  You don’t get this from whole cloth.  It really is here inside our genes and mind and breath.”

   “And our sex,” he said.

   “That’s right.  We were shamed out of our sex by the conquerors.  Patriarchy, we call it now.  If they can break your instinct, your happiness with your highest joy and ecstasy, they can break you to anything.  And they have.”

   “If that was the Golden Age, what do you call this one?”

   “Take a walk down to the water and watch it rise because of mankind’s vast ignorance and selfishness.  I mean that not so much as greed, although that’s definitely an outcome.  I mean SELF-ishness.  Living inside the self, cut off from the flow and wisdom and love of nature.  If there’s a hell, that’s it.  The pain, depression, anxiety.  The prozac?  Honk if you’re on antidepressants.”  She laughed.  Many made honking sounds.  They all laughed. 

   “With rising oceans, I would have to say we’ve entered a new era.  The industrial-information-space-computer ages have just ended.  Welcome to the new one.  What shall we call it?  It’s a recapitulation, a coming full circle, the gnashing of teeth, the trip to the woodshed.  You young people don’t even know what that means.  It means a whipping for being bad.  Panel, what shall we call this new age?”

   “How about End Times?” said the Christian man.

   “Nice.  Maybe,” said Ragana. “Doubt it, though.  That’s too easy.  I believe we’re here to learn, though.  Not escape.  How many believe we’re in End Times?” A couple hands went up.

   “I like Full Circle,” said one panelist.  “That means we’ve done our best as ego beasts to wreck the planet, wage war and hurt each other and now we’re back home to evaluate what we’ve done for 5,000 years and decide who we’re going to be now.”

   “We’re home. It’s time to pay some dues and find out how much heart we have.”

   “Yes. We’re home.  And we’ve got some homework to do.”   ~




















16  ::                                        With the Vinca

The moon would be coming up full tomorrow night.  The Vinca women watched the invaders, the newcomers for any sign that they might recognize the special day.

   “Nothing,” said Sentsie to her group of priestesses. “Do you see anything?”

   “No.” said Beala.  “The Stinking Ones do nothing.  They eat and belch and throw their bones all over the green for their dogs to pick up.  Or their women.  I saw a woman fight a dog for the marrow today.  No sense of order or the way of…”  Sentsie held up her hand.

   “They seem to be trying.  Is this right?  They are trying?”


   “Trying to do what?”

   “To be less…to be more like us.  To grow things.  To have animals for food and to love them while they have them.”

   The three priestesses just looked on her face, studying her features with faint smiles.  It was their way.  Faint smiles meant love.  They said nothing.  That meant they loved her but did not love what she was saying.  Sentsie looked at the ground and moved a pebble.  She nodded to them. 


   “You know what we do on full moons,” said Gaesa.


   “Yes. We make love, all of us.”

   “And?”

   “And, we see if they can be here and give their bodies to Her and let Her come into their hearts.  How could anyone resist that?  It would open the hardest heart.”

   “Have you asked for a vision about this?”

   “I will tonight, with the moon growing so beautifully to full.”  The priestesses looked at each other.

   “We will be most interested to learn in the morning what you find out.”


   In the middle of the night, Sentsie sat by the bank of the river awaiting the moon moving into the middle of the sky, where it would be reflected in the water.  Then Goddess would reveal her secrets.  Or rather, Sentsie would move into the deepest part of the heart of Goddess, as she so often had, and there would be the reality of things, felt in every part of her body, in all her thoughts, in her breathing.

   Now it came.  It was more difficult, but it came. 

   She gazed at the moon’s reflection, teased into long tendrils across the river’s blood.  That’s how they thought of all water.  It was Her blood.  She let her mind calm and become the reflection of Goddess’s thoughts. 

   “You are becoming farther from us, aren’t you?”

   She let her mind absorb the answer.  No, it wasn’t her mind, though she could feel her mind trying to define the information.  It had always been Spirit that did the knowing and it was always right, only because it had been a true mirror of her will and ways, just as the water was a true mirror of the moon.

   It’s not getting harder.  That was the answer.  I’m still here, She said.  It’s just getting harder inside me, the individual…there it was.  The individual person is become more…she searched for the word…there was none.  Individual.  Separate.  She was coining the words.  Came the image of the bull made separate in a pen to control and reduce the number of calves that year.  Apart.  A part.  Part, not the whole.  That was it.  A wave came down the river, breaking up the moon.  She was agreeing. 

   “Janko and Lila…what they are doing…they are going apart from the tribe, the village, the We, aren’t they?  Why?  You are doing this, Goddess, are you not?”

   Now came the intelligence and presence of Her.  The sweet majesty.  The complete is-ness and authority.  Every pebble, branch, smell, sound dripped with Her utter rightness.

   It’s all right.  All of it.

   Sentsie knew that.  She had that answer many times.  But now came the pain of Mansur’s absence and his savage death.  It was like a blade in her belly. 

   “What about this, Goddess?  This pain.”  Sentsie had her knife with her, a smooth copper blade, held in a handle of horn from a bull.  She held her little statue of Goddess, covered with sacred lines – triangles, zigzags, diamond signs and always the pelvic triangle.  The center.  She pressed the blade into her palm till it bled, then tasted the blood.  Now she went deeper into the knowing of Goddess.  She spit the taste of blood into the river, into Her bloodstream.

   Sentsie let the image come back to her.  Mansur standing in the fire.  He was smiling at her.  He was going back to Her womb for new life.  His surrender to Her will was complete, as always.  She felt her love for him and was shocked to feel it was for one man.  She wanted him deeply.  She now let the image of Glendifer come into her.  He was powerful.  He could be funny sometimes.  But he was Other.  He stank of a smell she couldn’t get used to.  It was like goats.  It wouldn’t come off in the water. 

   She opened to the moon’s reflection again and held the image of Glendifer.

   Show them who you are, came the message from Goddess.  Go ahead. 

   Sentsie put her fingers inside her and let the juices come.  She rubbed them around and let the lovely tendrils of happiness spread through her heart.  Yes, it would go forward, the lovely sharings they did every full moon.  She tasted her fingers, the lovely sharp bite of love juices, now mingled with blood that flowed in all the women at full moon.  They all flowed at the same phase of the moon.  If any woman came early or late, they would go into the temple and open to the message from Goddess that came with that.

   Sentsie lay down, listening to the whispers of the river – Her voice.  It whispered the name Ragana.  Sentsie smiled.  Goodnight, Ragana, she said.  Then she slept.  She dreamed.  Her dreams had much blood, but she stayed with them.
















17  ::                                The Journal of Ragana Fox


Ok, another defining moment here.  The papers have me in them.  God.  I’m advocating a orgies and sexual revolution as the answer to the collapsing world environment.  And there’s a call from the University on my caller ID.  The provost’s office.  They won’t be happy.  Nothing much they can do about it, as a bastion of free speech.  If they fire me, I will sue the shit out of them and they know it.  I guess AP picked up the story from the student newspaper.  The tv idiots also want interviews and they want them now.  Live pictures at 5, 6 and 11.  Omg, they’re showing clips from the student video production.  Anyway…

   We’ve ‘moved in’ to Daniel’s house.  It’s huge and has a nice deck where you can watch the oceans rise and engulf major cities.  Like Seattle.  And LA.  It’s gone up three feet now.  Whatever.  No one can say they didn’t have warning.  Always nice to keep your head up your ass until the last moment, though, so you can keep making profit and buy yourself a nice estate in mile-high Denver.

   Like a lot of people I see on tv now, I’m pretty smug and pleased to see global warming indisputably proven.  It’s going to really mess up our world though.
 
   Wow.  I just felt Sentsie.  Ok, let’s try this again.  I stare at the fireplace here and let my mind kind of slouch and go out.

R – Goddess, are you there?
G – Always.
R – How is Sentsie?
G – Sleeping.  Dreaming too.
R – Can I talk to her when she’s sleeping?
G – O yes.  Go ahead.

R – Sentsie?
S – Yes.
R – You are dreaming?
S – Yes.  Do you see it?
R – I’m looking.  I see…it’s red.  Red people.  Laying down.
S – Yes.
R – And fire. Big clouds of black smoke.  The red people.  They’re dead.  They’re going in the fire.
S – That’s what I’m dreaming.
R – Did it happen already?  Or is it going to? 
S – Both.  That’s what it feels.  The killed all our men.  The Others did it.  They rode in here. 
R – You can dream and talk to me at the same time?
S – I’ve been dreaming all my life.  I mean, like this.  To find Her will, Her thoughts, Her path.  I dream while I’m awake.  I can also be awake while I dream.
R – How are you?
S – As ever.  I am in Her heart.  I miss Mansur.
R – He was killed?
S – Yes.  They all were.  All the men.  I sleep with the leader of The Others. 
R – Is it hard?
S – Yes.  Very.  He is big.  He doesn’t fuck me very long, though.  He doesn’t know how to fuck. 
R – The fire?  What is it?
S – They burned all our men, some dead, some alive.  They didn’t care.
R – What are you going to do about them?
S – At full moon, we will do our usual rituals and love each other.  It is Her way.
R – You will do this with The Others?
S – (long silence)  She will show us when that moment comes.

   That was all from Sentsie. 

R – Goddess?
G – You don’t need to call me.  I will always be here.
R – What is going to happen to her?
G – You should know.  You wrote the books on it.
R – Nothing can change that?
G – No. There is only now.  Her world is gone.
R – Then how can I be talking to her?
G – Because you are her.   ~

















18  ::                                        Seattle


“I totally shit, Kassie.  Totally.  The hair stood up on my arms.  I burst into tears.  I gasped for breath.  I fucking screamed.  I yelled no, no, no.”  They were dressing for the cameras.  Television apes, as they called them, waited outside Daniel’s home.  He was playing handler and seemed to be enjoying it.

   “As the frog said to the pelican, you wouldn’t shit me, would you?” Kassie was referring to one of their favorite old jokes about what the frog said after the pelican ate him and flew up to 10,000 feet and the frog stuck his head out the pelican’s ass.  Kassie would do this to ground Ragana before public talks and other events. 

   Ragana turned and took both of Kassie’s shoulders. She looked dead in her eyes. “I am not shitting you one pound.”  They doubled over with laughter.  “Is this really happening?  Orgies, global ocean inundation, past lives.  And the fucking press!  “Daniel!  Andrew!” she shouted across the house. “Do you know how hard we’ve tried to get their attention to tell the world about the many millennia of peace-loving Goddess culture that we all spring from?  Not interested!”

   “But orgies and end-of-the-world? That’s the shit,” said Kassie zipping the back of her staid professor dress.

   “Ok, Andrew. Let them in.”  They burst in chaotically, just like in the movies, trying to set up tripods and find electrical boxes, the print journalists already barking their questions, after they had her spell her name.  A young woman strode right up to Ragana, saying she was from Oprah and a plane would be leaving at noon from Sea-Tac and would that work for her.  “Later,” Ragana said.

   Daniel intervened, standing in front of Ragana. “Hello. I’m Daniel Hadrick.  Allow me to introduce Ragana Fox and her assistant and fellow noted anthropologist Kassandra Hart.  You’ll be polite and raise your hands to be recognized by me or you’ll get thrown out of my house, suddenly and rudely.  Is that clear?”  They were mute. “Raise your hands if that’s clear.”  None did.  “Ok, all of you – out!”  He barked it with shocking authority.  As if they were marionettes on strings, all instantly raised their hands. Ragana and Kassie laughed. 

   “You’re good, Daniel,” smiled Ragana. 

   He pointed to the shortest, most timid looking reporter he could find.

   “What are you trying to say to the world?  I mean with the sex thing?  The group sex?  You were quoted as saying it’s an ancient tradition we should get back to if we want to have some mental health and stop destroying the world?”

   Daniel barked, “Is that a question?  What’s your fucking question?”

   Ragana waved Daniel back, then took a deep breath and glanced over at Kassie with a ‘here goes’ look.

   “I’m a paleoanthropologist and my area of expertise is how we used to live in the Neolithic Age 3,000 to 10,000 BC.  I think we used to be happy and live in complete harmony and happiness with nature.  This is where the Eden myths come from.  My studies have shown me this was because we lacked an ego.  We had no sense of separate self or the isolation, pain and depression that separate self brings.  Which is what we have now. 

   “The collapse of the environment you see out there?  The oceans rising?  We did that.  We did it because we’re disconnected from reality.  We’re in our separate, individual ego bags.  We look at nature and we see resources, scenery and backdrop for our ludicrous and painful individual romantic affairs.  In short, my research has led me to believe that humanity has got off on the wrong course in developing the individual ego self.  It’s made us too isolated from each other and in our loneliness and despair we don’t see ourselves as part of the world – so we’ve gone out and destroyed it.”

   “Are you saying we should develop a tribal system, like people of the Neolithic, by having orgies?”

   This is going to be tough, thought Ragana. 

   “I’m saying that we treat paidbond marriage as a natural thing ordained from on high.  It isn’t.  We’ve spent 99 percent of our time as humans doing something quite different, as far as my research shows.  We’re capable of many different forms of love, none more moral or right than the other.”

   “The student newspaper article seemed to say that you engaged in group sex and that you advocate it, as an expression of our natural order and instinct, so that we can restore ourselves to balance with the world and nature and stop destroying the planet,” said another reporter. “Is that right?”

   Ragana sighed mightily.

   “It’s not about sex.  We can’t conceptualize this because we have this strange ability to look at sex apart from love.  Our ancestors in the Neolithic didn’t.  They were in what we call Eden.  They had no shame about sex.”

   “What do you think about the sabotage?”

   “What sabotage?  Did something happen?  I don’t do news.”

   Daniel spoke up.  “It seems there’s been a nationwide outpouring of disapproval of SUVs and monster pickups.  They’ve been burning them.  Coast to coast.  Car lots.  Parking lots, anywhere.  These vehicles burn a lot of gas and emit a lot of energy.”

   “Oh.  Not surprising, is it?  Kassie, did you know about this?”

   “Yes.  Just seems natural.  Like pluck out thy right eye if it offends thee.”  Kassie and Ragana held each other’s eyes, then burst out laughing.

   “You talk, Kassie.  This is my assistant and collaborator on digs, books, tours, sex, whatever.  Kassie Hart.  She knows as much as I do.”  Ragana held her hand. The TV cameras swerved madly to capture the hand-holding.

   “The lots of burning SUVs are nature’s way and humanity’s way of saying goodbye to the madness of consumption and isolating ourselves in elevated perches, well above the plane of the earth and spewing a trail of atmosphere-warming exhausts and trying to tell ourselves it’s not going to touch us.  Earth, I mean. 

   “Well, It’s touching us.  Karma.  Our karma is touching us.  We’re not only too stupid but there are too many of us.  Have I mentioned we calmly look down from our SUV cabs at the species we wipe out, without a whisper of thought about global, human birth control?  No, that’s unthinkable.  But nature is whispering it now.  Loud and clear.  Hello??”

   There was silence in the room.  Daniel began applauding slowly and firmly.  He strode up to the mike.  He asked Ragana if he could say something.

   “I’m the one who wrote all those books about living in the now – and that we have, do and are enough?  Ok.  I’ll save you the trouble of prying after the news conference.  Yes, Andrew here and I are the lovers of these good women.  And of each other!  Yes!  You may want to call it bi.  We call it pan-sexuality.  We are all sexual in all directions, as long as with consenting adults of course.  Settled.  It’s wonderful.  We love it.”

   The news people were looking at each other.  Ragana held her forehead in her fingertips.  Ok, the world was coming to an end in more ways than one.  The professorship would never be the same, for one thing. 

   Kassie squeezed her hand.  “It’s ok,” she whispered.  “Breathe.  This is a good thing.”

   “Ok, Daniel?” said one youngish male tv reporter. 

   “Anything,” Daniel replied.

   “Suppose you tell us what it’s like to be in the middle of pansexuality (he put the words in quotes with his tone of voice) with these two women?  And the other guy, of course.”

   “Suppose you go fuck yourself?  And suppose you try it with any three other people of your choice, if you can let your mind wander outside your heavily conditioned thoughts, emotions and nervous system processes that allow you to consider yourself a good and moral person…who along with your fellow good and moral people, is committing murder against all species, all nature and all of the human race?”

   Ragana put her hand on his shoulder to calm him down.  She whispered, “You’re completely right, Gary, but that’s not going to get us anywhere.”

   “Oh my God,” said one reporter, listening in her earpiece. “Turn on the fucking tv.”  They did.  “A thermonuclear weapon?”  She was talking to her people at the studio or wherever she came from.  “Hong Kong gone?  And Singapore?  Oh my fucking God.”  Then CNN was on.  No one trusted Fox in an emergency, with all their unctuous, patriotic spin.  CNN wasn’t that much better.

   The media now were interrupting the lurid sexual tastes of Ragana, who, unbeknownst to her, had been live on CNN. 
   “…appears to have been the work of eco-saboteurs, who called AP to claim credit about half an hour before the blasts, to allow residents some chance at escape.  They did speak their password, which had been on file with AP for several years, actually.  Quite a cheeky group.”

   The screen showed the mushroom cloud slowly billowing outward and upward in Hong Kong.  Helicopters and ships had had time to get set up offshore and were willing to risk the radiation and blast to get the scoop, so the CNN commented.

   They certainly are stupid, whispered Ragana to her friends.

   It was a suitcase nuclear device, planted days ago, said CNN.  Not a clean one, either.  The radiation was drifting out to sea and headed toward the camera boat.  You could hear the crew and news people screaming and crying about their lives ending, as if they were recording dramatic video that would live forever in history.  Maybe it would.

   Now, CNN had its experts on, the people who knew terrorism inside and out.  “Yes, Jim, this certainly makes the Arab and Mideast terrorist cause look like very small stuff.  The struggle of one deity – and its followers to prevail over the other deity, et cetera.”

   He was supered as George Berenson from some think tank.

   “So – what we have here is quite another struggle come to full bloom, between the forces of industry, pollution, consumerism as set against a very low-level, but broad-based eco-terrorist group with global connections, maintained on the internet and in cafes, word of mouth…”

   “Jim, it’s not an organization, like al Quaida or something.  It’s just happening.  There’s no newsletter, meetings, dues, leadership.  This is coming up out of the ground.”

   “Oh my God,” said the CNN anchor.  Probably the first time he’d said that on air.  “We have Singapore on screen now.  Just the same fireball and mushroom cloud.”

   “That’s right, Jim.  The eco-terrorists seem to…let’s not use that word anymore.  I’m not comfortable calling it terrorism.  They’re not doing it for terror.”

   Just then, the network got some environmentalist in a corner of the screen where there was no fireball happening.

   “Jim, that’s right, I’m afraid.  This is not for terror.  This is more like, yknow, revolutionaries or something.  These are average people with access to extraordinary weapons who knew this was coming.  This, being, well, the end of the world as we know it.”  He laughed. “Sorry, this is no time for laughing.  That was a song title.”  He was cut off.

   “Take on that, Jake?” said Jim, referring to his expert.

   “Um, I’m afraid that’s about accurate, Jim.  These people have been on their toes for years.  They just don’t make the news unless something like this happens.  It’s like the Minutemen of the American Revolution?”  He had to put that question mark at the end because so few Americans anymore knew what the American Revolution was, so it was an invitation for Jim to make an aside on that.  He didn’t.

   “Let’s just watch the fireball, George” said Jim. “An amazing moment in history.  And he first time one has been exploded in anger since Nagasaki in 1945.”

   “Yes, Jim.  A lot of lives being incinerated as we speak.  Probably about 5,000 per second, given the capacity of today’s smaller, more portable thermonuclear…”

   “Why, George, why?  Doesn’t this just contribute to global warming.  I mean if these people are pissed off, I mean upset by a major environmental, um…”

   “Collapse, Jim.  A major environmental breakdown, environmental collapse is what we’re talking about, when you have oceans creeping up your pantlegs, about a foot a day.  It’s not just a news event.  We don’t know what is going to come out of this and no expert is going to be able to accurately…”

   The network went to natural sound of the explosion, cutting Berenson off.  The executive producer made these kind of decisions under the heading of objectivity.  Berenson was losing his objectivity. 

   In 30 seconds, anchor Jim was back on screen but not with Berenson.  Instead, sitting beside Jim was a former Secretary of Defense and well-known author on international affairs, Michael Serenson.

   “Mr. Serenson, we’re watching the incineration of Hong Kong and Singapore.  Who’s doing this and why.”  Anchor Jim had obviously been reminded of his role – sane, calm, just another breaking news event.

   “This has all the fingerprints of the terrorist Mother of All Planets group.  A ruthless bunch as you can see, mostly younger people, drifters who live in cafes and crash, as they call it, on couches of their allies around the world.  Now images were popping up on the screen of tattooed and pierced young people with strange hair.  That’s their leader, Janko Kenobe.”

   “I’ve never heard of this man, Mr. Serenson. How can you suddenly know him when he was off the screen -- all our screens -- an hour ago?”

   “Not a problem, Jim.  Homeland Security has been tracking him for several years now.  A high school dropout from Germany.  A lot of drugs, piercings, broken home, pagan gatherings, the usual profile of the pagan outsider.”

   “Any reports on casualties?” said Peter to one of his field people.

   Serenson interrupted. “Um, Jim?  They’re all going to be casualties.  From city center to about 50 miles out in rural areas.  That means hundreds of millions of people dead.  Not injured...dead.”

   “And the motive, Mr. Serenson?”

   “They’re trying to get at two things – the records of money transactions, as contained digitally in many mainframes, maybe not backed up, though we’ve tried to take precautions not to centralize like that.  And of course the means and locales of production.”

  “Of?”

   “Just about everything.  Appliances, clothing, electronics, vehicles.  Especially what’s driven by 99 percent of people now.  The SUVs.”

   “And don’t the nukes just add to global warming, thus defeating their purpose?”

   “Well, I wish I could say that, but these people are more insidious than you can imagine.  The nukes stir up nuclear winter.  You remember that one, Jim?  Instead of greenhouse gases, which raise the temperature, you get dust from the earth’s crust, blocking sun and making the planet colder and darker.  No one knows how long it could take, but we could be looking at an Ice Age if this keeps up.”   ~

  

  













12  ::                                                With the Vinca

   “Goddess,” whispered Sentsie. “Goddess, Mother of Us All,” all the women answered.

   The Others still would not have learned these words.  They only learned the words for visceral basics, like food, sex and shit. 

   The Vinca women were joining hands in a circle around the central fire.  The fire their men had been burned on.  They began bowing and working their feet in a lovely, eye-catching rhythm that took them around the circle as they chanted.  They hummed a lovely melody that always caught the ear and enchanted the mind.  Would it enchant the minds of the Stinking Ones?  At the top of each bow, the men glanced at them  The men’s eyes were glinting and suspicious.  Some of them paced, arms folded, and made unsmiling comments to one another.  Not a good sign. 

   Sentsie took her cue.  This would not go well.  There would be deaths.  As she danced, she went to the baskets, taking out sweets made of honey, nuts, cinnamon and spices that The Others would never have tasted.  Maybe this would help.  They were three-layered: the sweets, then the aphrodisiacs, then the poison.  She passed them out to the women of the Stinking Ones, who also were not amused with the dancing.  They passed them to the men, whose sheer visceral nature had them munching within moments.  The Others had never been in a town before, never engaged in ceremony, certainly not with dancing, candles, food, wine.  The wine was laced too.  With poison toadstools and something they called adder’s breath. 

   Sentsie and the women danced with grander and wider gestures, moving their hips in circles mimicking the movements of sex.  Their singing became louder and more lovely as the aphrodisiac took hold.  Now the men wanted to fuck.  And they did.  They will be brief, as they always were, thought Sentsie.  And indeed they were.  They were drunk now too.  Their women wanted sex also and they tried to interest their men – to no avail.  The men wanted the more lovely, dancing women of the Vinca.
   Soon, the men began to have trouble breathing.  The adder’s breath took that away first and death came quickly, with horrid convulsions and a most unwarriorlike retching and emptying of the gut and bowels. 

   When the first man began to die, the Vinca woman acted quickly and with ruthlessness.  They took all the children of The Others from the dwellings (their children were not allowed at adult gatherings) and held copper blades at their throats, for the men to see.  If The Others moved on them, the result would be obvious.  One man raised his voice in a scream to the others of his kind. 

   With that, Sentsie’s drew the blade across the throat of a boy, about eight.  The blood gushed from his neck.  She threw his body down in the space between her people and The Others. 

   “You are such men!  Now die like men!” she screamed.  She had learned these words of their language.  “And your children shall live.  All those under 10.  The rest of you are already in Spirit.  So, go to your deaths!  Go be with your war god.  May Zeuf take you.”  She and her women stood there and watched them all go.  Some adults had not eaten the sweets.  For them, Vinca women crept up out of the woods, their movements masked by the sound of the river, and cut their throats all at once.  All were pushed in the fire.

   In the sunny morning, the women gathered in a circle in sight of the stinking remains of the Stinking Ones. 

   “We are warriors now,” said Sentsie.  She strode about the center of the circle.  “We have become what they were.  We have become what we hated.  Do you know what happens now?  We have no men.  We are a tribe of women!  But we have killed like men.  Like the men of the Stinking Ones.  What will happen is that in only a matter of days, before the moon is dark again, other Stinking Once will come visit here.  We cannot be here.  We can be warriors but we are not warriors yet.  We could not meet them in battle.  They would kill us all quickly.  What should we do?”

   Everyone knew the answer.  But Sentsie wanted to put it to the thought and voice of the village.  There was long silence as women looked deep into themselves.  One began to look around at the hills, forests, river.  She was saying goodbye to it.  Then more began to look up and take in the picture of the valley they had known for many summers in happiness – more summers than all the leaves on a many large, old trees.

   The Vinca women left things where they were, taking only a few statuettes of Goddess and their weapons.  They decided to take the horses of The Others.  The four-legged creatures had been good for the warriors who had destroyed their men and their way of life.  They would be good for the Vinca, now that they had become warriors.  They would head toward the rising sun and the land of new beginnings.  They would learn to fight – and they did, stopping every day for several hours to shoot the bows they had taken from The Others, to throw their big axes, to swing the heavy clubs, studded with sharp flint and copper blades, until the weapons came to seem lighter and like an extension of their arm.  They sharpened their skills hunting animals from horse back, sneaking up on a herd singly or in small numbers, killing one (after prayers to its soul) almost before the herd knew they were there.

   One day, as summer neared its end and they were two moons east of the old Motherland, the Vinca came upon a warrior’s camp, a temporary thing filled with a scattered mish-mash of huts put together with sticks and skins.  Like The Others they’d already known, these people were probably looking for an already-built village to infest and take over, exploiting or killing their host, as some stinging bugs do.  They overlooked it from a bluff, just a few of them, dismounted  and peering just over the edge and through bushes.  They had developed the habit of sending advance scouts to check out every bend, rise or bluff, so they might not wander into a trap or an armed camp like this. 

   The first thing the two women noticed was the smell.  Even at a distance, they picked up the pungent scent of their armpits, excrement on the ground and even their breath.  Vancie turned to Gwinna and wrinkled her nose.  They smiled.  They loved being scouts.  And they loved being warriors.  They were young, maybe 17 summers.  Their bodies had become hard and tanned, with lean, long muscles showing out from under their short fur pants.  The hard training kept their breasts small.  They had sent a third advance guard out to halt their tribe and silence them.  With them, they kept the eldest boy, Jemp, maybe 13 summers now.  He loved learning the warrior ways.

   What did these people want?  A home.  Horses.  And a few men.  They also wanted to wipe these people, The Others, out.  They knew – if we don’t kill them first, they will come and kill us.  They hate the weak and take weakness as a sign that a creature or a people should be weeded out.  The Others were crazy.  They had a sickness in the heart.  The only way we could be safe, they had finally decided, was to become like them, but somehow stay in touch with the heart of Goddess and her happiness.  Somehow.

   Vancie gestured at the half moon and signaled – wait till it’s down.  Gwinna nodded.  It was thrilling, to sign and be understood, to know the mind of a fellow warrior without words.  And to know what was going to happen – the elements of surprise, silence and absolute ruthlessness.  The Others would not know what happened.  They would sleep through the night.  Most of them would sleep forever.  Then when the others woke: terror, then helping them get to their deaths.

   The scouts went back and ate cold jerky and fruit with yogurt made from mare’s milk.  The older women took the children to a remote location on their back trail.  Now, in the darkness, the warriors mixed earth and water and blackened themselves with mud.  They came on foot, tying bundles of grass on their feet for silence.  They’d practiced this every night, sneaking up on each other in sleep and pouncing.  It’s doubtful the Stinking Ones had done this, as they basically had no enemies.  They were expanding westward out of the Steppe country into the warmer, more fertile lands of the unarmed Goddess peoples – rather like picking off chicks in the barnyard in spring.  They needed to learn that Goddess had teeth and claws.  And did she.  They would always leave one to pass along the tale of the terror of the Vinca.

   With them, the Vinca women carried big, fresh cuts of meat for the watchdogs, which they got from a cow they had sacrificed to Goddess for this raid.  They also found themselves reaching for and praying to another deity, a male, a god of battle, who they were just beginning to envision.  It was not this Zeuf they heard the Stinking Ones yammering about.  He was all thunder and conquest.  This one was more subtle.  He could sneak up on the enemy and do the maximum damage with the minimum noise.  And he did not come for booty.  You did not need to own more things.  Goddess provides all that is necessary – and her gifts are mainly those of ecstasy in bed, happiness with children, delight over feasting, purity, clarity and strength walking in nature.  That was it.  What could be more clear?  The women were confounded by anyone who would want more.

   They kissed their copper and flint daggers and re-sheathed them with a prayer.  Then they let themselves slip into the Heart of Goddess, as they called it, which was where they actually spent every moment of their lives, as they well knew.  But this was different.  This was a trance where they became aware of all the life around them, with special note of the dogs, horses and any humans who might be awake.  Was there a sentry?  That was the question.  They gathered and held the right hand, palm out.  This was their pooling of information.  They’d practiced this, too, until their sensing and psychic powers had become so keen they rarely missed.  Palm out meant yes.  If no, it would turn in.  Of the 25 or 30 women, only two turned palm in.  It was a good method – never correct all the time, but with this many, you got the right answer.

   Vancie and Gwinna smiled at each other, their white teeth showing through their mudded faces.  They grasped hands.  This would be the test of their training – and their first killing since they wiped out the Invaders in home village.  They were the strongest among them, everyone knew this. 

   “Is it good with Her?” said Vancie.

   “It is good.  We may be with her in the world of spirits before the sun comes up.”

   “Yes, that will be good too,” they said, surrendering, as they always did, to the possibility of their own deaths.

   Now the women positioned themselves a good ways upwind and held the cuts of meat out for the dogs of The Others, who soon came, silently to be fed.  The creatures never got the good cuts from the Stinking Ones – only the guts, jaws, bones.  In their hearts, the women sang the animal songs for the dogs and whispered the love words to them.  You are so good, yes, you are a sweet one, come to us and be happy and taste the good meat, the same as we give ourselves. 

   So, silence would be upheld.  Now the horses.  They opened bags of honeyed grain with the good herbs in it.  No hooved creature could resist.  They let the wind carry the scent as they walked slowly toward where the horses were tethered, approached and fed them from their hands.  A few of the creatures made a slight murmur, but it was a sound of pleasure.

   Now the women gathered and breathed deeply in unison.  They could feel each other’s happy smiles.  Then just the two of them slipped off, guided by Her Vision, as they called it, soon sensing and being drawn by the smell of the sentry.  There seemed to be only one – and soon, there he was, a dark form under the branch of a tree, a shape not that visible but distinguished by the lack of stars showing where he stood.  He lacked alertness, they could tell.  They needed to put out his light instantly so he couldn’t make any sound.  They waited, suppressing their glee.  Vancie rubbed the rock strapped with sinew to the end of her battle club.  She positioned it behind her, then waited till he turned his back.  Swiftly she closed the three steps between them and brought the club down on his skull, which gave with a satisfying crack. Gwinna leapt forward, grabbing his bloody hair, pulling back his head and severed the two veins beside his wind pipe.  There had been no sound.  Gwinna held out the blade to Vancie.  She licked it.  Gwinna licked the other side.  Then they kissed, licking the blood off each other’s tongues.  They giggled quietly. 
There were no more sentries – they could tell that.

   They cut out the sentries guts and hung him by the neck to the tree branch.  They did not enjoy doing this, but needed to do things to the body that would chill the breath and hearts of even the Stinking Ones, so that they could scare believe humans did it.  They would have to think – or never be sure – that spirits did it.  Evil spirits who hated them.  They had to feel afraid in this world.  They had to feel spirits were giving them evil for being evil.  They had to doubt themselves and their right to exist.

   Now the rest of the women untied the horses and walked with utmost slowness and friendliness for the creatures.  They brought the dogs along too, continuing to feed and lovingly stroke them as they went.  The stars had moved two hand-widths before they were done and gone.

   As they reached the edge of the camp, they heard a man’s “psst.”  They froze.  The whole attack could turn into screams and war in a few moments and they knew it.  “Sisters,” the voice said.  “Take us with you.  For love, take us.”

   The man was speaking their language – or parts of it.  Close enough that Sentsie recognized it.  “For love,” that especially was a sacred phrase for several days walk in any direction from their old home. 

   Sentsie approached the man.  There were several men behind him, apparently just wakened.  They were in a strange cage, woven of sinew and branches.  As she touched the bars of it, the man kissed her fingers and breathily said “sisters” over and over. And “for love.” 

   Sentsie turned to Vancie, who had now joined them.  “Free these men,” she whispered.  Vancie cut a few sinews, enough to open the cage.  The men walked out.  There were six of them.  Vancie and Gwinna touched her copper points to the men’s backs. The message was clear.  Don’t say or do anything – just walk.  They did.  Even by the starlight, the women could tell they were all smiling.   ~
















19  ::                                        Seattle   

The Nuclear Winter people were immediately proven right.  Arms about each other, Ragana and Kassie gazed out the window at the pall in the sky.  It was cold, too – in the forties on a late mid-summer afternoon.  Daniel poured some wine.

   “I prefer red wine for nuclear winter myself.  It’s cozy.”

   “Daniel!  This could be the end of the fucking world!” said Ragana.  She took her glass of wine.  They watched her news conference on tv.  The anchors said the ocean had stopped rising because the polar glaciers had started growing again. 

   “Get out your aerosols and spray away,” said Andrew. “We need to build up the greenhouse gases again.”

   “CFC is not a greenhouse gas, dummy,” said Kassie. “It eats the ozone layer.”

   “Can’t keep it all straight – all the ways we’re destroying the world.  Now it looks like an Ice Age?  Didn’t the last one cover Seattle?”

   “Yes, just barely,” said Daniel.  “But a two-mile thick glacier doesn’t leave much when it gets grinding on something for 90,000 years.  That’s how long it spent here.”

   “Let’s see,” said Andrew.  “Isn’t this where the masses run amok through the streets, looting the jewelry stores and raping the women?”

   “Sarcasm,” Ragana said.  “That’s how men react to crisis.  Guys, this could be the end, you know.  It’s not like we’re powerless.  This gives a lot of sane people the leverage we need to bring about real changes.”

   They kept the tv on all the time now.  Everyone did.  It was on CNN, with lots of crawl news at the bottom of the screen and usually the “breaking news” logo too.  It was saying all air travel, except priority diplomatic and military was canceled indefinitely.  Fox was trying to keep up its Pro-American boosterism it had honed through years of the “war on terrorism.”

   “That’s not going to work,” said Alex.  “How long do you think people are going to put up with that false, fascist bullshit?”

   “I think it just ended,” said Daniel. “People in jeans with longish hair could be seen walking on the set and politely asking the well-dressed anchors if they would step off-camera.  They refused.  Then a dozen or more were pictured pulling their chairs out and rolling them out of view.  The young people came back with the chairs.  They began talking in what seemed normal, human voices.

   “Hello.  Don’t worry, we don’t belong to any organization.  We’re just interested in presenting, yknow, the real news, what’s really happening and we’re going to be getting it from trusted sources on the internet that have proven themselves all through this bullshit war on terrorism.”  So said a young man, brushing his long hair behind his ears. 

   “We’re not going to get cut off the air either.  We’ve got real people in the control room.  Most of them have told us they’re real people.  We just asked them if they were real people and they said yes.  They knew what we meant.  They know how to run all the buttons.

   “It didn’t take long to figure this all out.  I’m Squirrel, by the way.  Squirrel3Stars.  There are a lot of Squirrels around.  This woman here is Grasshopper7Quartz.  Our producers are taking stuff off the internet and popping it on our laptops here.  Pretty simple.  Star, wanna go first?”

   “Sure, man.  Ok.  It looks like Singapore and Hong Kong are rubble.  Radioactive rubble.  Just flat.  Pictures popped up off the internet – stills, video.  Ok, they’re gone.  Where does this leave us?  Ratty, do we have any of those experts from CLG?  Rat is our producer.  He finds people too, who can spell it out for us.  CLG - that’s Citizens for Legitimate Government in England.  They came on line during the election theft by Little Bush in 2000.  Lot of expertise there.  Yo, CLG?”

   Up came some woman in a levi jacket.

   “CLG, what’s it mean?  Two major financial capitals gone?”

   “Ya, Fawn69 here.  Not much.  So, they’re gone.  Lots of money, hard drives, digital money, all wiped out.  Can’t tell who’s got the most zeroes after the ones in their account. Not to trivialize the death.”

   “No, seriously, go ahead, trivialize the death.”

   “All right.  Realistically, that’s about one-fiftieth of one percent fewer fat human asses taking up space on overtaxed Mother Earth and in the old tv world, we’d spend years memorializing this great tragedy but we’re not going to.”

   “Got it.  Just the facts, please.  Skip the rhetoric.  Are you sad Hoppy?  Really, what do you feel?”

   “It’s shocking and all that shit but really, I’ve spent so many years now tree-sitting in the fucking rain and burning SUVs that I’ve kind of got used to the idea that if ten million fat human asses vaporize, well, we asked for it.  We just don’t get to do this to the Mother.”

   “Got it.  Ditto, dude.  And we’re going to drop in comments like this, but just want to let you know we’re not doctrine ranters and are dedicated to a flow of factual information and opinion from yknow people with integrity and honesty who want a better world.  If there’s one left after this.  Ratty, anything coming off CNN or the other straight stations?” 

   She listened in her earpiece.  “Let’s pop her on then.  We’ve got Ragana Fox, the paleoanthropologist and unabashed crypto Goddess worshipper for many decades who has just come out of the closet since the global warming raised the seas and blew the lid on all this shit. Taped interviews?  Ya, it’s fine, just steal em from CNN.  Let em sue.”

   They ran clips from this morning. “Nice stuff,” said Hoppy.  Orgies.  We been doing that from back in the seventies.  Out on tree plantings, tree sittings, eco-revenge missions.  Really gets the juices up, right, Star, not to mention is a solidarity with the Mother, who gave us these totally bitchen bodies to celebrate happiness with.”

   “That about says it, Star.  Ragana, if you’re out there and have webcam, email us the addy and we’ll pop you in.”

   “Why?” replied Ragana, typing into the supered email address.

   “Good question,” said Star.  “I think it’s because we need someone with some moral authority who’s been saying things over a long period that would help us get through this.”

   “Oh.  What have I been saying?”

   “Ragana, come on.  We’ve got to hold the audience here.”

   “Why?  Just tell the truth.  That will hold them.”

   “Ok, Ragana.  Neat name, by the way.  From where I sit, you’ve been saying for decades that we used to have really bitchen spiritual lives but we don’t now.  We’ve lost them.  I couldn’t agree more.”

   “Right,” chimed Hopper.  “You’ve been calmly saying, without trying to lay some big California bullshit trip on people, that we have a very deep and long background being happy campers, literally.  For many, many thousands of years, living in peace and getting a lot of ass, like we should.”

   “Without lots of ass, we become dicks,” said Star.

   “We become cunts,” said Hopper.

   “Oh my god, I can’t believe this.  Ok.  Getting warm,” Ragana said. “You have to have a context where sex is not just banging away, but is sacred.”

   “Got it,” said Hopper.

   “Do you?  What does sacred sex mean?”

   “Ok, to me, sacred plus sex equals love.  What we’ve been doing in this fucked up culture – we call it love, but it ain’t love, believe me.  Love is like, wow, it means…” 

   Star turned his gaze and began to study her neck and the way her mouth moved.  “Star, not now.  I mean, like I can feel what you’re doing and believe me, it’s sacred.”  She laughed.  “Star, what the fuck is sacred sex to you?  I mean, like I’m about ready to slide off this fucking seat here.”

   “Ragana, check me on this,” said Star.  “Isn’t it the underlying gift and sanity of humanity?  Hey, that rhymes.  Ok, I mean if you had to suck the guy off before you shot him in war, you wouldn’t.  You wouldn’t shoot him, I mean.  Am I right?”

   “The context, man,” said Ragana.  “What the fuck is the context?”

   “I know what yer sayin, totally,” said Star.  “Ok, the context is like you just know you’re going to get laid because Goddess loves everyone and that’s what she loves to be and do.  She loves to fuck.  She loves us to fuck.  But with gentleness, like teenagers who are all new to the world and vulnerable and don’t know quite yet how to lie about how they don’t need sex.”

   Hopper leaned over and put her lips on Star’s mouth.  She held his face in her hands, then straddled him.

   “Exactly what I mean,” said Ragana.  “You kids are such an inspiration.  You couldn’t have better anchors on this show.  I mean, trying to get the word out to the whole world about where we are.  And who we are.  This is who we are.  I was just doing this, what you’re doing.  C’mere.”  She brought in Andrew, Kassie, Daniel and put her arms around them.  “We were totally fucking, all of us.  It was Goddess.  I mean, talk about pure and good and happy.  We were saying we hadn’t been so fucking happy since we were children playing doctor.  It was so exciting and raw too.”

   “Ya, no shit, it was Goddess,” said Kassie.  “She’s here.  She’s doing this.  She’s giving us back our souls.  Something is changing.  I mean, we’re not doing this.  I would never do this.  But here I am doing it.  Would you kids do this a month ago?”

   “No.  Well, we would do it under the pagan full moon in the woods and shit, but not on tv.”  She tore off her shirt and put her breasts in Star’s mouth.  “Let’s do the newscast like this, man.  We’ll keep the audience, I think.”

   “Ok,” said Star.  “Go on, Ragana, with your ideas.  With us now, Ragana Fox, noted paleoanthropologist and author on the Neolithic period, when we were all getting laid a lot in a sacred context, where not just sex but everything was pretty much done in the heart of Goddess, who was…”  Hopper put her breast back in his mouth, turning the chair sideways so the world could see it.  She smiled into the camera and closed her eyes in pleasure. 

   “Right,” said Ragana. “Sacred.  I think that’s coming back in.  I can feel it.  Shit, I can see it.  Right on tv here.  I just want to say to the world here – trust it, trust it, trust it.  Our hearts are opening to this.  This is how we all used to be.  We really did.  And those cities that got leveled by nukes?  Let it be, just let it be.  Remember that old Crosby, Stills, Nash song – it’s only castles burning.  The earth will endure and she’s what loves us.”

   Daniel stuck his head in the webcam view.  “If I can, Ragana?”

   “Yes.  This is Daniel Hadrick, author of the Now books about living in the present.  He’s one of my lovers.  A good man.”

   “Thank you.  Yes, the little blue marble – that’s the earth – is going through some tough paybacks here.  But she’s alive.  She is a living being, we all know that.  She’s shaking off the disease and stuff we’ve put on her, but she knows what she’s doing.  If you think of her AS the Goddess, I’ve found that helps.  Living, conscious, divine, obsessed with making more life, also known as crazy about sex.  In context.  But she supplies that context.  It’s always here.  We just could never see it.  So we were pairbonding because we thought love was all special and scarce and hard to find.”

   “Right, it’s not,” said Kassie.

   “Tell me about it,” said Star.  She had his unit out now and was rubbing in on her crotch.  He was tugging at the levi button and zipper, which were not long in coming off.  Then the whole sacred act went out to the world.

   The foursome in Seattle began singing, “They Can’t Take That Away From Me” and laughing, cooing, making up their own words – “the way you touch my love, the way you kiss my flesh” and so on.

   “Lovely, aren’t they?” said Ragana. “Goddess, I’m getting so wet.  The main thing is, this is real life.  The shit you’ve been watching on the news for decades – it’s not life at all.  It’s death, insanity and darkness.  Oh fuck, listen to that shit.  What it is is just what happens when the radio dial is off the frequency.  And now it’s back on.  We deserve this.  This is life.  It doesn’t matter what that other shit is.  Earth is purging herself, so let it be.  Let it be.”   ~











20 ::                                The Blog of Ragana Fox

I have, I guess become a celebrity.  I am recognized on the fucking street!  As we went out to dinner last eve.  People are keeping the wine and dinners flowing.  That’s very nice.  The restaurant at the dock is buying fish from people going out with their poles.  No one obeys the fishing laws, the seasons, all that shit.  It’s delicious.  People are singing in the fucking restaurants.  I’m saying fuck a lot.  So is everyone else.  Seems suddenly like a nice word.

   This is all going right out on the internet – what I’m writing – as a blog.  I see by the counter that it’s being read by tens of thousands of people.  That just became hundreds of thousands. 

   Hi!  They can see me too on the fucking webcam.  I am drinking red wine.  It is only 2 pm.  It seems right to drink it, though.  They are sending in questions which roll by on my email thing at the bottom of my screen.  Ok, I will answer some.

   Q – I think you have a connection with Goddess and can channel her.  Will you answer some questions I have? --Hallie

   Sure.  As long as you realize you also have a connection with Goddess.  I mean, that was the whole trouble with the fucking patriarchy.  I hate that shit.  I don’t have any more connection than you, Hallie.  Do you have a webcam?  Put your face up if you do. 

   I see you now.  You look young.  Twenties.  Who cares?  You are very lovely.  Which means…ok, look right at me.  Show me your real self and soul.  Ach, that sounds so stupid, doesn’t it?  You are already showing me your real soul.  There is no way not to.  Gee, you are pretty.  Tell me what’s in your heart. 

   Q – Ok.  I am afraid.  The world is turning upside down.  But I feel this peace when I see you and talk to you.

   A -- Lovely.  You are so pretty and good.  I can see it.  Do you feel the fear now?  Tell me the truth of what’s in your heart, dear.

   Q – I love you.

   A -- You just said I love you with your lips.  I read it on the screen.  Thank you.  I love you too. 

   Q – I want you to hold me.  I’m afraid we’re going to get nuked or something. 

   A -- I know.  Me too.  Hallie, listen.  I want to tell you something that I have found to be true and that’s that Goddess is right here with you and inside you.  This is it.  There is nowhere to get to.  We are doing it. 

   Q – What are we doing?  Besides destroying the world bigtime, I mean.

   A -- I know it looks like that.  But you have to remember this Earth is Her body and she is fighting a terrible disease and that disease is in the human mind.  Many of us will die.  We will have to die because we’ve forgotten how to live with Her.  In balance and in peace inside of us.  We’re out of control.  You can see that on tv.  But we’ve been out of control from way back there, 10,000 years ago. 

   We had to learn this – what happens when we lose our way and divorce Her.  It’s a society thing but it’s also happening inside each individual person.  You’re lost and lonely now, right?

   Q – Right.

   A -- Well, you’ve always been that way.  So have I.  Everyone.  It’s not natural.  That loneliness, depression, despair – that’s what we feel like to all the other animals, all the forests and seas. 

   Q – We suck.  You don’t need to tell me that.  Yes, yes, I know, be positive.  Well, my generation doesn’t buy that bullshit.  We just tell the truth. 

   A -- You want to talk to Goddess?  Hallie?  I talk to her.  You could call it channeling.  But when I do it, She tells me things I couldn’t possibly know, about other times and places that I check out and they’re true, so I know it’s really Her.  Would you like to ask her?  I know this sounds presumptuous but let’s go if you want.

   Q – Are you serious?

   A -- Try me.

   Q – Ok.  The Goddess can speak right through you. 

   A -- Why don’t you decide for yourself?

   Q – Goddess, how bout you tell me where you’ve been for the last several thousand fucking years of this destructive bullshit and war?

   A -- Right here.  Always right here. 

   Q – How come I’ve never felt you?  It’s just been a lot of pain.  And it’s a lot worse now.  I really don’t want to be here in this fucking hellhole of a world.

   A -- I know, dear.  I can feel it. 

   Q – Life is a vale of tears and we should just get used to it and think about our reward in paradise when we leave this illusion?  You’re not going to answer me?

   A -- You are where you have always been.  In my heart.  I love you.  Or rather, you are in love.  With me.  You have always been here. 

   Q – Why am I shaking?  My whole body is shaking.  It feels like I’m having an orgasm or something. 

   A -- Does it feel good?

   Q – Scary. 

   A -- Do you want to leave this world now?  You can do it.  Just let go.  Or you can stay here.  How you feel now?  That’s the way people used to feel all the time.  They vibrated with happiness and life.  It is scary, isn’t it? 

   Q – I’m starting to get used to it.  The energy is running through my body, all over.  It’s lovely, really. 

  A --   Do you want to die out of that body and come into spirit?  Not a problem.  Very easy.  There is no death.  Once you know that…

   Q – I’m getting it.  Once I know that, they become equal.  Spirit, matter, spirit, matter, who cares?  This is fine here. 

   A -- Who put you here?  Why did you come here?  Did you have to come here? 

   Q – Mm.  You’re right.  Of course you’re right.  I chose to come here.  I’m part of you and I came here to be part of you and do your, what?  Learning.  I’m learning for you and with you, aren’t I?  You don’t know everything.  Like some fucking God.  You are learning. 

   A -- We are learning.  What are we learning, Hallie?

   Q – I don’t know.  I’m just learning it.

   A -- That’s right.  I don’t know either.   ~


















21  ::                                    The Neolithic

The tribe cleared out of the area, leaving one warrior, Vancie to hide in the bushes and observe the reaction of this band of warriors when they woke and found their sentry slain and his guts spread all over the trees.  She had one of the men, the ones they’d freed, with her, as he said he could understand most of their language and maybe could overhear them.

   The savages became very excited and left as fast as they could, not burying the slain sentry.  That was very unusual, said the freed prisoner to Vancie.  In fact, it was not done at all.  But by their gestures and the few words he could pick up, the members of the warrior band felt the killing was done by something very evil, which might still be in the area.

   “They’re making signs to ward off evil spirits and shouting the word skala, which means demon,” whispered the man, whose name was Braka.

   Vancie nodded.  She didn’t want to bring this man into her confidence, just because he’d been a prisoner of these foe.  It had worked as they’d thought it would.  “Will they ever come back here?”

   “No.  The signs they’re making are to put a ban on this place forever.  It is evil to them.”  When the group had all left, Vancie and the man exited quietly, catching up with the Vinca people in a matter of half a day.

   Vancie took Sentsie and the principal warriors and priestesses aside.  “It is a good weapon,” she said. “They are as stupid as the Stinking Ones.  They believe in evil magic where there is none, but there is just other people who know how to manipulate their fears, using just enough killing, of course.”

   “Good,” said Sentsie.  “War is stupid.  It kills too many of us.  Let’s use darkness, silence and this,” she pulled out a dagger, “as much as possible.  This land should be ours now.  We can live here in peace.”

   “For a while,” said Vancie.  “They will grow bold again.  They will see us living here and begin to wonder.  How did we get here?  Why are there so few men?  Did we have anything to do with the awful slaughter of that sentry?”

   “We need visions,” said Sentsie. “We will know what to do.  But we must be guided by Her visions.”  She directed the people to begin finding a good camp, one easily defensible, on higher ground, with water coming down cleanly out of mountains, but not exposed to elements or view. One with much forest around it, but not too near, that could hide enemies. 

   That evening, as they ate, one of the sentries, the one facing west, sensed a stranger approaching several miles off.  She was positioned a good distance from the camp, so as to be downwind from anyone approaching from that direction.  The other two sentries kept constant eye contact, sweeping their gaze over each other every few seconds.  They saw her raise her hand.  The other two quickly scanned and sniffed the world in their direction, finding nothing but the usual animals, so they worked their way over to the first sentry, sneaking in and out of bushes.  The man was walking directly toward the camp, making no attempt to hide himself – most unusual, but it also signaled no evil intent.  The other sentries circled around behind the man, so the first sentry could step out in his path.

   She was shocked to recognize the face. “Janko!  You are alive.  We thought you died with the men, but were never sure, because Lila had disappeared too.  Where is Lila?”

   “Dead.  They killed her.  They raped her and cut her throat.”  He had no emotion. He looked terrible, like a dead man.

   “Who did?”  She gestured the other sentries out in the open.  By now the whole village was aware of this confrontation.  They had carried on as normal, so as not to alert the approaching stranger to the sentries.  Now they approached, led by Sentsie.

   “The Others.  A different tribe of the Others.”

   “The Stinking Ones killed Lila,” the sentry said to Sentsie. She gestured the sentries back to their posts and bowed slightly to Janko, having no idea if he were still loyal to the tribe – or if he still carried his strange ways about being with just one woman. She brought him into the village, gestured for food and drink, then offered him a place in the village circle. She let him eat.  Most of the people went about their business.

   “We’ve been traveling many moons now,” said Sentsie. “It is not easy without a lot of men.  But we women, as you can see, have become strong.  We’ve become warriors.”

   “I see that.  You’re very different.  I see the trophies of your fights.”  He gestured at hair taken from men.

   “You look…”  She didn’t know what to call it. “You seem broken, empty.  Where is Goddess?  Does she live with you, in you, near you?”

   Janko looked around the village and the valley, as if looking for Her.  “No.  She is gone now.  I suppose you see her.  I don’t.  I only know about the Great God of the skies and heavens, who waits for me.  And I hope soon.  I want to die and be with Lila.  We will be with God.”

   “Where did you learn this?”

   “It was the people who went out trading and met The Others.  Their god was very powerful.  He gave them horses and domination over all the other people.  When I began going out trading, I saw how much their women loved the men.  They were honored to be loved and possessed by one man with such passion.”

   Sentsie shook her head sadly.  “I can’t imagine it honoring me.  I would think I were being kept and enslaved for the man’s use, like sheep.  You saw their women.  Did they have any power or appeal to you?  I had to live with them for several months when the Stinking Ones took over our village.”

   “The Stinking Ones?”  He couldn’t help but laugh.  He was working on being so sad and defeated by life, thought Sentsie, so he could go be with his God.  She wondered if he stank like his people.

   “Yes, that’s what we called them.  They didn’t know it.  They couldn’t understand but a few words of our language.  We learned theirs, though.  If you conquer a people, you should always learn their language.  They weren’t smart enough to see that.” 

   She decided to change the subject to the obvious.  “Why did you track us this long way?  Why do you want to be here with us?  You are more like them, the Stinking Ones, although you don’t stink.”

   She offered him some stew, which was warm now, made of venison, greens, roots and some delicious spices they’d found in the hills.  It had been warming in clay pots.  She’d been dropping hot rocks from the fire into the pot.  He ate greedily and noisily.

   “Janko, why are you here?  You did not like our ways.  You were not fitting in.”

   “I’ve been told to come here and help you.”

    Sentsie didn’t like the sound of that at all.  A couple women guards took a stealthy step forward.  Shaman that she was, Sentsie didn’t respond.  She waited.  He wasn’t looking up from his slurping and spooning of the stew.  She scanned his body, looking for clues, for feelings about his energy.  She blurred out her concentration, so as to absorb his general feeling, which usually came to her by what she couldn’t read.  In this case, she couldn’t read any, what?  Any honesty.  He had a motive behind the one that a guest in camp would arrive with.  She could tell he expected her to challenge him, react to his cryptic statement.  Of course, that wasn’t going to happen.

   “We’re coming into a new world, Sentsie.  I’m sure you’ve noticed.”

   She didn’t react.  The tribe needed new children.  It needed men.  It needed his seed.  But it didn’t need this.  She could tell.  Still, to beat your enemy, you must understand him.  She needed to know what his vision and thinking were – and where they came from.  She decided to keep him around for maybe a moon.

   “Yes, Janko.  I’ve noticed.  Everyone has.  The Great Ones work in strange ways which we cannot always understand.  But they become clear in time.  Much has become clear to you.  The Great Ones pick their messengers carefully.  What have they revealed to you?”

   He finished his stew, set the bowl down and wiped his mouth on his long sleeve.  He’d picked up some filthy habits in the months since she’d seen him.  He’d had some association with the Stinking Ones or their cousin tribes, she speculated.  And he showed little respect for her.  He didn’t thank her or offer a tidbit to her dog.

   “Well,” he belched. There was a time for belching, a comical, celebratory time.  But not as a guest in someone’s home.  He slouched in the skin chair.  “I think it’s changing into a world where the power of Zeuf will be coming down and ruling this world through the strength and wisdom of men.  He wants it that way.”

   Sentsie recoiled from the use of that god’s name in her village again.  That was the Lord of the Stinking Ones.

   “Does he?  How do you know that?”  It was considered the rudest of challenges to ask how someone knows something about spirit, but she did it anyway.  She regretted it instantly, but there was no was to unsay it, so she let it hang in the air.  He finally made eye contact with her.

   “How do you know Goddess runs the world?” he said.  Right.  You know what you know.  It was then she knew she would have to kill him.

   “You’re right, brother.  My apologies.  Perhaps you’d like to walk around the village with me and see who looks you in the eye.”  She meant – would you like to see who would like you in her bed tonight?  That was obvious.  But it was the old ways, the ways of Goddess to speak and live like that, with love and sex in the open.  Love and sex were one thing to the old Goddess people.  The new, coupled people could speak of them separately.

   Janko was thunderstruck by her question. He looked over to his left, at the ground.  The left was the place of the past, as everyone knew – or rather anyone with any spirit awareness.  He was searching his past learning.  The corner of his mouth curled up a little.  Clearly he wanted a woman.  But his teachings with the Stinking Ones had pounded into him that it was wrong to “just have sex.”  She had to be your mate, yours alone.  No one else could have her.  And, above all, she could never choose another man.

   Now Sentsie felt something strange – a tug in her gut, loins, legs.  She wanted him.  And at the same time, she felt a fire in her breath.  She wanted to hurt him, teach him what happens when a man tries to control the mystery of love and sex.  She wanted to kill him, but only after teaching.  She wanted to submit him to a process, a ritual, where, actually Goddess would judge who was right.  If there were some unseen force of power great enough to support him and his sky gods and his desire to own one women, well then, let it come forth and save him.   ~
  
  














22  ::                                        Seattle

As Ragana, Daniel, Kassie and Andrew watched CNN or its radical spinoffs, they began to see more reports on conservative Christian groups, like the network of “fellowships,” pray for heavenly intervention, on their side, of course, to stop the movement begun from the inspiration of Ragana.

   “Look, it’s prayers for the Lord to smite evildoers who are trying to bring down this free country,” said Daniel. “They might as well be praying to the Pentagon.  I mean, their prayers, so-called, sound like military orders.  Or requests for military action.  Why do they run this shit?”

   He was ranting.  They let him.  They kept watching the tube.  It’s good to be informed about your foe. 

   “Ragana, what are we going to do about this?  We can’t just sit here.”

   “You mean organize a guerilla resistance?  That shit’s been done, over and over and over and to what end?  Daniel, you have to have faith this is a different game now.  There has to be a seed, an instinct in the human heart to guide this back to some kind of sanity.  We can’t just tumble through eternity power-tripping and killing each other.”

   “Ok, do you guys meditate or ever sit alone and go into your mind or astral project or do self-hypnosis or any of that?”

   They all said they did.

   “Have you felt all your life that you were different and spent a lot of time alone?”

   They all nodded, almost tiredly, and said things like, “yes, very much.”

   “Well, it’s not just something for stress management,” said Daniel.  “When you go inside there, I mean, don’t you get the idea that this is the power of the universe?”

   They nodded.  They said they do it every day and have for many years.  Anyone who didn’t was just living in reactivity to the world.

   “Well, let’s use it.  What’s it for if we don’t use it?  I mean, it’s fun to discuss the concept, but who fucking cares -- if it’s not real?  I care about what’s real.  If we don’t use the power we know we have, we’re going to get squeezed off this planet.”

   “Right on,” said Ragana.  “Why are we hiding it?  We had it before, back before patriarchy and civilization.  You can feel it.  Who can’t feel it?”  They all looked at her and nodded, slow smiles sprouting on their faces.

   “You know about manifestation.  It’s the power of the mind, but not just the gray cells.  The whole mind. The consciousness.  It’s so much bigger.  And when we join it in groups, you know what happens.  You’ve all read about it.  We’ve all been waiting for a real important time to try it out, no?  This is an important time.  It’s not fucking hocus-pocus.  It’s real.  Thoughts are things, remember?”

   They all nodded. “You’re right, of course.  We don’t want to use our powers.  It’s hard.  It’s work.  But there is a time and this is it,” said Ragana.

   “Always there is this fucking shit that power corrupts and we shouldn’t use our powers!!!” said Kassie, almost screaming.  Then she said in a whisper, “But this is not power-tripping.  This is use of, what?  The etheric -- and that doesn’t work if it’s not real and from the soul, you know what I’m sayin??”

   Andrew came over and put his hand on her shoulder. 

   “We know what you’re saying, Kassie.  It’s ok to use that power.  It can’t be misused.  That’s the nice thing about it.  Misuse it and it dies quicker than you can blink.”

   So they gathered in a circle and got into that alpha state they’d been in during a hundred workshops.  It came naturally.  Daniel prompted Ragana.

   “We are the Moses, Sokrates, Galileo, Darwin of the New World now coming into being.  We take this mantle on us. The world is coming apart.  What it’s really doing is opening to the new vision.  It’s seeking that new world and reaching for it and asking us to fill it in, paint it in, kiss it in, love it in.  It is ok with Goddess that we do this.  If anyone had worked for the vision to do this, who is it, if not us?  It is not for us, but for the world and for all human kind and we reach out and fill in these wishes, do we not?”

    Ragana smiled.  Tears rolled down her face.  She took in a big breath.  The tv crew gathered around her and let their video fly, to get this moment.  No one had been there to get the Sermon on the Mount or Sokrates’ last words, but we are here to get this, they thought, as they connected the whole scene to CNN or whatever network it was now, streaming out over the whole world.

   “Ragana, speak it,” said Kassie.  “My dear, speak it.”

   “Ok.  It’s here in me and I have to speak what I know.  It’s what we all know.  This is a battle we don’t have to fight and won’t fight.  We have the answers here in our own chest and mind, even as oceans rise around us.  We love this Earth and she will prevail, no matter what we do or think.  Go home tonight and love the one you’re with and pull a cork on some good red wine and kiss her or him and open your life and body to them.  Never believe anyone who says they have the whole picture and whole answer because it can’t be had.  All we have is today.  And tomorrow isn’t bad either.  When you wake tomorrow, make coffee and make love and make it a day that you live in with all your heart and don’t let anyone take it from you.”   ~











23 ::                                                 With the Vinca

   As the spring waxing crescent moon emerged in the dusk, Sentsie walked Janko around the camp, unable to understand her attraction to him, unable to deny the bulging manhood in his leather leggings and she let herself feel it and him.  Such was the way of Goddess and nothing could be done about it.  She wanted him, this man, who had helped bring so much misery on the tribe and who had apparently traveled with The Others and learned their ways -- and approved of them. 

   So she let him have her.  Such was the way of Goddess.  She asked him to tell his tale, which he gladly did.  He was a man, she thought, a new kind of man, who needed a woman to listen to his story of conquest and the spreading of his seed and his manly power and ability to conquer others.  Other humans.

   She felt a new emotion, one she could not identify.  In time the people would have a name for it -- shame.  She felt visible and vulnerable before Goddess and she felt she had done the wrong thing, although she had followed what seemed to be the will and way of Goddess.  To mate.  To kiss and merge and make love and give Goddess all she wanted and what could be wrong about that? 

   Janko lay sleeping happily after his fucking of Sentsie.  The moonlight shone on him and he was confident, even in his sleep, of the rightness of who and what he was and why he had done this sex.   For Sentsie, all she had was instinct, pure and blunt and though she knew she could not stop the wave that was engulfing her people, she pulled out her copper knife and prayed and, whispering a prayer in his ear, slowly and most intentionally cut this man’s throat. 

   A seed had been started in her that night and she knew it, but that child -- and it was a girl -- would somehow integrate these two rivers of human longing, fear and vision and create the world that was to come.   ~


-- END --




About the Author . . .

John Darling, M.S. is a writer, journalist, teacher and counselor in Ashland, Ore. He has been published in Gnosis, CoinAge, Living Simply (Australia), Pacific Northwest, Oregon Magazine, The Celator (Ancient Art and Artifacts) and others.  John writes documentary shows on history, the arts and nature for public television and wrote “Crater Lake: Mirror of Heaven,” shown on PBS.

He has been a daily journalist on the staff of The Portland Oregonian, Medford Mail Tribune, Ashland Daily Tidings, United Press International in Salem, Ore. and was news director/anchor for KOBI-TV News in Medford, Ore.

He was executive assistant to the Oregon Senate President and press secretary of campaigns for Oregon governor and U.S. Senate. He was U.S. Marine Corps journalist and editor of Pilot Rock (alternative magazine of Southern Oregon) and People Newsmagazine of the Ore. Dept. of Human Resources.

He has been a counselor since 1976 and led seminars in men’s consciousness, loving relationships, rebirthing, shamanism, prosperity and hypnosis.  He also writes and performs weddings.

He has a B.A. in history from Michigan State University and M.A. in counseling from Southern Oregon University.  John is a fourth generation journalist and was born and raised in Lansing, Mich. He has three children, Heather, Hannah and Colin.   ~