Bitter Herbs - the Five of Swords

Easter has come and gone and my blog has been buried in the ground. Lent almost kills me. Every year I forget how hard it is, and every year it T-bones my life. When I used to be a bona fide practicing Christian there was a context for it. I could engage in the cleansing, penitential cycle of the season and come up fresh after the Easter vigil. So am I saying that I’m a survivor/refugee from the Christian church? I don’t think so. I think that the Lent cycle is inscribed in our culture, and I’m not sure that the Christian church is the original author of fasting and cleansing after a long winter. I have strenuously non-Christian friends who work every year with a spiritual coach and engage in what they call a ‘cleanse’. Cleansing what? How many people do you know who do ‘cleanses’ these days? The just went to California to do a new ‘cleanse’. They just read a book about a revolutionary ‘cleanse’. They’re heading off to a retreat to do a ‘cleanse’. How did they come to get so dirty in the first place?

During the Passover meal Jews eat bitter herbs. It’s become symbolic, but I’d think they go back a long time to a spring cleanse. Many animals eat certain plants in the spring to clear their bodies from built up toxins after a winter of careful (if any) metabolizing of food.

The forty days of fasting and the self-examination of Lent are, I think, a response to long confinement, short rations, sluggish metabolization, and claustrophobia. The Christian story takes it to a different level, and along comes John the Baptist saying “You must change your life; you must clean out your inner life to be ready for the New Thing.”

These images are old. They are stained glass windows we have made to look at the Sun. The light will always be conditioned by the window it comes through. And we can’t see the sun without a window, so there will always be a dynamic relationship between the window and the sun, but always the sun is the same one.

The Lent window says “Get ready for the Light. You’ve been living in the dark and you need to clean up inside and outside. When the Light comes you don’t want to be heavy with winter sludge. You’re going to do it anyway, so why not do it in a conscious way?”

For purification, you’d look for the Fives on the Tree of Life. The Five of Swords will certainly tear away illusions and mistakes and cricks in your energy – a bit of etheric Rolfing. The old five-petalled Rose is here, but you have to put your hand through the thorns to reach Her – she will accept no less. Like the Prince in the story you must get through the thorns to find the sleeping Princess.

Green blade rising - the Page of Pentacles

“Now the green blade rises
From the buried grain.
Love that in the darkness
Many days hath lain.

Love comes again,
That in the earth hath been
Love will come again
Like grass that springeth green.”

Medieval Easter carol.

This is the month of the Great Turning, as the earth one more time starts to lean its head into the sun. Once again we pass out of darkness (we of the northern hemisphere, that is).

The spring goddess Eostyr walks out again, and where her bare feet touch the snow snowdrops bloom, and where her hair brushes the trees as she dances green mists of buds begin.

It hurts, the spring. For many people spring, not winter, is the hardest time of the year. Dare we hope again? Can we stand the joy of the returning light when we know it’s not here for keeps? Easier maybe to stay furled in the seed-case and die in the earth than once again to reach up with all our fibres, all our hopes, into the light.

It’s also the time of year when the two great spiritual traditions that have formed our western culture hold hands (though they won’t always admit it). Easter and Passover are one and the same festival. Moses led the Jews out of darkness and slavery on the night of the Passover, when a lamb’s blood was used for protection. Jesus came to Jerusalem to celebrate the Passover, and died during the festival, and is often called the Lamb of God. These are one and the same thing, and their timing is calibrated by the Moon.

And behind them one can see the Great Dance. The Earth leans again towards the light, once again we come out of the dark, and the Moon tells us when to plant.

You might look for Eostyr in the Page of Pentacles, sometimes called the Rose of Isis. The Page of Pentacles is the endpoint of manifestation, the place where the cycle ends and earth ones again becomes fire. Just before it does, if you look with your magic eyes, you’ll see a rose, the Rose, growing in the garden of Persephone, half in the light, half in the dark.