Transforming Curse Into Blessing

י"ט תשרי התשס"ט
Blodlessing 20

The Old Ways, Transforming Curse Into Blessing

The eighth shaman stone in my Temple Collection is a tektite. Among the driest rocks on earth, "with an average water content of 0.005%", yet thought to have been formed in underwater craters through meteor impact, it shamanically represents the Ancestral Well of Knowledge and Transforming Curse into Blessing.

Oddly, all week I have been planning to write of my eighth stone today, and yesterday evening, my mother obtained a DVD to watch over the weekend. That video was The Ring. In the video is a well exactly like the one pictured for the chapter on this shaman stone in my book.

At the end of the film, the main female character who ultimately survives her viewing of the film's "video curse", in trying to figure out how to save her son from the curse when others have perished, she asks herself the question with respect to another viewer of the video who failed to survive - "what did I do that he didn't do?" She realizes that she had made a copy of the video.

She had made a copy. Interesting. Kabbalistically, making a copy is a function of Atik Yomin:

The term Atik Yomin, "the Ancient of Days," implies absolute transcendence in relation to "the days of the world," the normative consciousness of created reality. The word Atik in addition to "ancient" means "to copy." It is the Divine power "to copy" a higher reality or world onto a lower. Thus, the Atik of a world serves as a totally superconscious DNA-like code to copy higher reality onto lower.

Catrin James (Doorways to the Otherworld) writes of Ancestral Knowledge of the Old Ways which is borne in the blood:

(He) was born with knowledge of the old highways and byways, the mountain routes, that these were in his blood too. He did not need to learn them, he had inherited them, he already knew them. I remember in my own childhood too, old women with herbal knowledge. They said that they too did not need to learn, they had been born with it. "In the Blood."

We inherit much more than just the colour of our eyes, or whether we are tall or short, and so on and so forth. We inherit the dreams and memories of which I speak, we inherit gifts, which may go far beyond mundane gifts or even creative gifts, they may be gifts of the soul, like how to calm a storm or still the seas.

The synchronicity of the DVD showing up with its well symbolism just as I prepared to write of the Ancestral Well of Knowledge shaman stone clearly informs me that I and my stone have surely tapped into this magical-mystical reservoir, from where the power to make a copy of the higher reality and to project it onto the lower reality dwells. Knowledge of the Old Ways lives in my Blood and has surely been resurrected in my life. What an absolute treasure for me me as I near the holy day of Simchat Torah and the sabbat of Samhain!

With ancestral knowledge a theme of this entry, using a design based upon those from medieval Celtic tradition, shown (one closed atop one open) is the handmade grey leather pouch in which my shaman stones are kept. It's 17" wide when open, 8" wide when closed, and has matching drawstring soutache cording. In Celtic tradition, this is called a Crane bag, and appears in a Welsh myth of Ceridwen, one of my primary magical Patronesses. Crane bags are similar to Native American medicine bags and an Irish version of the Holy Grail - both of these traditions are also among my ancestral inheritances as is the Jewish tradition of transforming curse into blessing. All come together with perfect peace in my practice.