Epiphanies of the Goddess
Ambience of the Uncanny #5
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Darling Reader,
How do you know when you’ve been witnessed, received or visited by a divine being?
There are many sorts of mystical epiphany in mythology: the gods appearing in mortal guise, non-human appearances like golden showers, dreams or vision, a disembodied voice, or through an animal counterpart, emissary or other transfiguration.
The etymology of epiphany is from late Greek epiphaneia meaning "manifestation, striking appearance, or festival held in commemoration of the appearance of a god at some particular place." An epiphany is about perception, a sudden manifestation, a display of divine being showing off as they come suddenly into view. One must eye an epiphany because these are disguised divinities to the uninitiated. When humans are the main ones receiving a visitation from the Gods it is considered an epic epiphany.
Learning of this categorization bolsters the sense of import about this moment in my life, but also about the trajectory of possibility and aspiration for someone with a Sagittarius north node.
The natural world has inspired me to write you of my recent epiphanies, so you may recall nature as sacred and alive, remember that everything is open, everything talks, and everyone has a subjectivity. You only need to listen and look.
The other morning, I heard buzzing while I was praying and at first thought it a fly, but actually it was a bee in my bedroom that did not sting me. Actually it was rather easy to place the bee back onto a purple daisy in the flowerbed of my front porch. When I realized who was responsible for the whirring, I happily wondered how they ended up inside my room. I didn’t realize that later that night I would read about the Thriae, a notably triad in Greek mythology who are bee maidens with the power of divination. This, they teach Apollo to augur by throwing stones and observing birds of omen.
Now the Thriae and their divinatory powers are distinct from those of Zeus, whose judicial, civilizing, a.k.a. colonizing power, derives from the divinatory capacity to discern right from wrong, veracity from falsehood. While that judicial power is just a morsel of Moira’s power, his mother and the goddess of the Fates, the Thriae, do not always tell you truth about the future. From the Homeric Hymns we are told:
“These are teachers of divination apart from me, the art which I practised while yet a boy following herds, though my father paid no heed to it. From their home they fly now here, now there, feeding on honey-comb and bringing all things to pass. And when they are inspired through eating yellow honey, they are willing to speak the truth; but if they be deprived of the gods' sweet food, then they speak falsely, as they swarm in and out together.” 1
Now I never fear bees, and I’d never kill one. I didn’t have honey on hand to feed it but I believe that setting it atop a blooming flower would be suffice its appetites. I divine daily and I’m consistently curious as to how and when the portent potentiates. As a seer, my livelihood depends on the acuity of my sight. When clients write to me or come up to me to tell me how eerily accurate their reading was, I’m encouraged to keep cutting my cards, to keep refining my craft.
These bee maidens taught Apollo the art of soothsaying and just the day before I had taught my students about pyromancy, teaching them to read the flame, the candle and the glass, leading them as they set up velaciónes on their respective altars. Like the honeybee, I don’t just divine, I teach divination.
But beyond offering my services to guide my students and clients on the crossroads, my ritual divination initiates me into warm embrace by a chaotic, natural world, and it is divine as it is in opposition toward the divinatory mode that is colonial and patriarchal as means of “civilizing” by the dispossession of native lands, the forcible de-indigenization of its inhabitants, and the establishment institutions which legitimize violence against women.
I spoke yesterday with Alice Sparkly Kat about decolonial divination via my new book, and someone in the audience asked what our favorite forms of divination were. Ace spoke about the I-Ching and aside from tarot, I mentioned ornithomancy, a.k.a. augury, a.k.a divination by birds. Not only because of my favorite Emily Dickinson poem, but generally, birds are always harbingers of hope for me, though of course you should pay attention to the type and number of bird, and their flight motion.
Feeling magical, sexy and like that b*tch and per my usual post class, consultation or conversation ritual, I was walking around my neighborhood in teal booty shorts and a blue body suit and adidas jacket, and out of nowhere a flock of jade parrots surround me and sing their squawking sound, as one by one they reveal themselves and its just green plumes atop green foliage as leaves fell around me. They enraptured me and ensured we had an extended moment of conference till they literally flew off into the sunset.
The Goddess of the Green
Having spent the day in conversation with a dear friend, I immediately went to share the experience with them, knowing they would appreciate and affirm the revelation I was just surely shown. They are a brilliant diviner all their own and every time we connect, realizations become possible that I’d never otherwise achieve alone. Case in point is that they immediately recognized the grace of the green flock as an epiphany of Matangi Ma, the tantric queen of outcasts.
We spoke exuberantly and for hours, sharing our respective struggles to feel seen and valued and yet deeply affirmed by each other’s witness, and an apparent testimony by a Mahavidya Mother herself.
I felt this to be a blessing of Red Tarot, of my decolonial divinatory work. In response to being outcast, the discarded and the rejected venture into the occult. These words, this work is for these pariah prophets.
In my recent Jupiter decan class, I was asked how we continue striving for liberation when all our efforts seem so inefficacious. Immediately I thought of the necessity of recycling, realizing that we have to work with what we are left with. I write much in Red Tarot about Jose Esteban Muñoz’s concept of disidentification, which for me is a maneuver in which the colonial constructs we are forced to deal with can be reworked to fashion an emergent identity-in-difference that does not elide the adverse, contrary components of any identity or ideology that arises from a history and on-going present of slavery and genocide.
Recycling is a queer ethos, it is Matangi magic that sources reverent power from what and where others are incapable of noticing, let alone respecting. Red Reading is an epistemological mode that focuses on clarifying, and empowering indigiqueer dignity, as it critiques and moves intentionally away from the confines of colonial society. Matangi Ma has power to process and overcome toxicity, poisons and impurity on all levels.
Red-crowned and lilac-crowned parrots are on the brink of extinction but like the urban detribalzied natives I discuss in the conclusion of Red Tarot, they’ve established themselves in the city, not confined to zoos but in the trees along the streets. They can adapt to urban life because of their intelligence and behavioral plasticity.
By refocusing on authenticity rather than fitting in, a deep inner vivacity arises. And then we can stop parroting hegemonic scripts given to us by normative society. We can speak for ourselves and in our tongue’s true tone. And Matangi Ma is a tantric emanation of Saraswati who opens the pathways of the esoteric power of speech, sound, song. You can strengthen divine presence in your life through the sacred sound of mantra, of prayer, of a gospel choir, listening to rain fall or the bird’s chorus as they conference.
Now I’m typically accustomed to my family of black birds that keep me vigilant as protectors of the land, and aware of an ecological transcorporeality that demands a mutual caretaking.
My women are Red, my ladies are Green, my Madonna’s are black. There are countless emanations of the Goddess that guide me on my journey and thank Ma for that. If I could, I’d fly like one of her green birds and leave my loneliness behind. I’d join a flock and finally find my own in the flight of a warm solar glow. Queered by every dimension keeps me at a peculiar crossroads, that as a child I’d felt so utterly deserted. But her birds carry away my worries. Now, more often than not I can embrace the ache of longing, while also realizing how grateful I am to have never fit in. Like I always say, it’s a good thing to fail at empire. My Mothers have gifted me a unique freedom to pursue a melody only I can make and so I sing every time I pull cards, because sound is sacred and song is an offering to the Green Goddess. And since it’s always been a private joy that permates the public, a passion that I have no ambition toward other the jubilance of catharsis, I’ll keep writing to you my little liner notes too.
p.s. speaking of musical epiphanies, Jill Scott gives us the realest revelation after bar after bar of keeping tempo with her libido that ultimately does not alone satiate her longing for love. It’s about the sensibilities of sex amidst a divorce and she’ll have you horny even as her ache hits your own heart break.
Homeric Hymn 4 to Hermes 550 ff (trans. Evelyn-White) (Greek epic C 7th to 4th B.C.)