Gifts of the Goddess

Published in the anthology, "Isis Rising: The Goddess in the New Aeon," 2000, p.9, this piece recounts three intriguing dreams, encounters with Isis, the beloved ancient Egyptian goddess, She of Ten Thousand Names. This is an original piece written and read by Charles Elliott/Beautyseer. Text follows:
Gifts of the Goddess
Five days after full moon wonder at winter solstice,
nights grow shorter, Luna wanes to a sidewise smile.
On this night the Great Goddess Isis – whom I love –
wraps me in her wings, brings me three things, gifts
to puzzle over: lettuce; an ounce of iron filings;
a shiny copper plate.

The lettuce a gift of love – I’d like to think – in poverty
and illness, sustaining through my salad days,
an ancient aphrodisiac given by the ethereal She to whom
I spill the essence of my longings in a spiral of divine desire,
to her moon pledge daughters yet unborn.

Iron, the most common and useful metallic element,
strongly magnetic, promotes the strength and endurance
of “men of iron,” promises protection, longevity.
Also facilitates the lion’s courage, the kind
of persistence and emotional balance I now need.
Sprinkled on a sheet of paper, may also map
hidden force lines of magnetic attraction.

Ancient Egyptians associated copper,
a brighter metallic element, with the fertility
and frank sexuality of Isis. Fashioned
into a beautiful plastron, it is molded with full,
feminine breasts in the traditional manner
of portraits of nurturing pharaohs of old,
as if to say She knows my succoring nature
is as giving as the bounteous Nile.
Or is this metal symbolic of my wife, Joanne, who
attracts energy? A kind of living anti-armor
not meant to shield me but to connect me,
facilitate the flow of heart energy to and from
my anahata, the vital center of this
electrical magician’s corporeal self, whence
flow currents of compassion, altruism, all
the passions of unconditional love, Her Milk
of Human Kindness? But I cannot read
the message clearly engraved upon this breastplate,
the ancient hieroglyphs of the Goddess
of the Milky Way.

Then, the next night – six days past the solstice –
Isis asks me to ponder: “Who are you when you get
to Joshua Tree?” Expecting to still be me, instead see
a lone man bereft in the cold, desolate magnificence
of the darkened desert monument, the cobra rising
within me. Then I know that I am: me and not-me;
me and the tree and the not-tree with branches
opened wide to the moon. In the desert, I am: the wind
and the stillness; a grain of sand and the dominant
right hand that lets it slip through my fingers;
an embracing continuity of moonlight. Son and mother
encoiled again in one body; a moonshadow stretched
in the night, crossing a living landscape that is anything
but empty. A shade within shadow, ready
for new beginnings, aching with anticipation
of full moonrise.

Seven days after the season turns, Her wisdom
is even more directly expressed in a new dream.
“You need to step aside,” She whispers gently,
soft breath upon my ear as She caresses my hair,
“to let yourself go by.”