Mary M. & All the Buried Voices
CHAPTER 123
Mary M. & ALL THE BURIED VOICES
The story for the new moon time:
November 13 – November 26
MOON DETAILS:
New Moon
20°44′ Scorpio
Nov. 13, 2023
4:37 AM EST
I’m sitting on the couch when suddenly, I choke on my own saliva. I begin coughing like crazy, gasping for air, wondering, How the heck does this even happen?
But at the same time, I am not surprised. Even as I type, I feel the sensation of an invisible rope around my neck. My skin feels like its burning.
My entire life, my voice has been fighting to survive.
I don’t mean metaphorically — though, sure — but I mean literally, physically.
A trail of maladies has been stifling my voice from the moment I was born: It started with infant acid reflux as my dad playfully tossed me in the air. Then came the development of nodules on my vocal cords just as I was learning to speak. Vocal cord dysfunction when I was seventeen. Mysterious white sores lining the inside of my mouth and throat at eighteen. Nightly teeth grinding, gastroesophageal reflux, three small (thankfully benign) growths on my thyroid — that small butterfly-shaped gland at the front of my neck — and sometimes, I think I must have been hanged in all my past lives to still feel the noose around my neck. Or, I’m just living in a patriarchy.
☆
Ah-ah-ah, ah-ah-ah,
Ah-ah-ah, ah-ah-ah,
Ah-ah-ah, the voice sang in my head, a familiar song from a childhood tale. I recognized it right away: The Little Mermaid.
As the song played, I saw in my mind the moment when Ariel’s voice returns to her and she can sing again.
I told a friend about it, how I’d been hearing the song off and on ever since the eclipses started on October 14, and she passed me a video she’d stumbled upon years earlier.
I pressed play only to hear a story starting the same way that many of my own stories start — with a woman, suddenly becoming very very sleepy, having to lie down, and then, having a vision.
This woman’s vision was about, of all things, The Little Mermaid.
My curiosity was piqued. I listened to the whole thing. I absorbed her theory: The Little Mermaid is about a spell breaking. Not so much the spell on Ariel, but the spell on Eric, the prince.
For when Ariel’s voice returns, the prince snaps out of it, and the masculine comes to see and love the full feminine expression that has for so long, as Carl Jung suggested, been buried in our collective unconscious, tucked away and hidden like the Gospel of Mary. Its first six pages torn from any known record so as to be lost to the world forever.
Apparently, many people believe that The Little Mermaid is actually an allegory for the story of Mary Magdalene. In the movie, a painting of Mary even lives under the sea, hidden in Ariel’s collection of human artifacts.
The mention of the name — Mary M. — makes an image flash in my mind. I’d seen it just one day earlier when scrolling back through old photos, and now, it’s emblazoned there:
The book was a gift. It arrived in the mail the morning I woke from a dream telling me, We must go back. We must return to the temple.
I didn’t know it was coming, but there it was, in a folded brown box, on May 18, 2021.
I read the first forty-two pages then, but I never got any farther than that. For the next two years, I kept the book wrapped in a silk cloth, hidden on a shelf in my closet.
Why a silk cloth? Why hidden? I didn’t know. I only knew that I felt strangely compelled to cover it between readings, that I couldn’t comfortably rest it on my nightstand or anywhere else in plain sight. But what I couldn’t have known then (because I just learned it now) is that this strange behavior of mine was oddly reminiscent of how the Gospel of Mary was first found in Egypt in 1896: wrapped in feathers, tucked in a niche in a wall.
After I hid the book away, I stopped thinking about it, but now, here it was, coming up again.
I finished listening to the video my friend sent and returned to the episode of TV I’d been watching. Before I hit play, I noticed the words “Nag Hammadi is Where They Found the Gnostic Gospels” in the upper-right corner of my TV screen.
I could hardly believe it. What were the odds? This wasn’t some spiritual programming. This was a random old episode of Gilmore Girls. I recently started rewatching the series, and somehow, of all 153 episodes, I happened to be on this episode at this exact moment in time — the episode titled “Nag Hammadi is Where They Found the Gnostic Gospels” — and that struck me as weird. Weirder than weird because…isn’t the Gospel of Mary one of the gnostic gospels?!
I rushed to the shelf in my closet and unwrapped the book. I started back on page one because I didn’t trust my memory, but yes, yes, I was right: the book opens with a whole description of the gnostic gospels, the discovery of the Berlin Codex (aka the Gospel of Mary), and then, the stockpile of ancient texts buried in a jar, discovered in Nag Hammadi, forty-nine years later.
“No copies of the Gospel of Mary were found among the preserved texts at Nag Hammadi. However, the two texts that were found within the Berlin Codex rolled up with the Gospel of Mary appeared among the mass findings of manuscripts...
These texts discovered at Nag Hammadi were collectively referred to as the ‘Gnostic Gospels,’ because they focused on gnosis, which is a Greek term meaning self-knowledge, or more specifically, the knowledge that comes from direct experience...
[And all of] these texts, including the Gospel of Mary, are evidence of the various forms of Christianities that existed before the 4th century when the current form of the bible was codified...[And] this is what these ancient texts prove; there were many threads of Christianity in the wake of Christ. And one of those threads...believed women were as worthy as men to teach, and lead the church.”
But of course, that wasn’t the form of Christianity that took hold, spread its tentacles out like Ursula across the earth.
I mention Ursula because in The Little Mermaid, she is the one who casts the spell. The traditional Christian image of a crowned, radiating heart hovers above Ursula’s cauldron as she explains the spell to Ariel and convinces her that “it won’t cost much, just your voice.”
And I can’t help but think that that’s what every woman who has ever followed a patriarchal Christianity — or a patriarchal anything — has chosen to sacrifice.
Ariel closes her eyes and looks away, practically wincing, as she signs the agreement and the spell is cast.
☆
I wake in the morning and my throat still hurts from last night’s bizarre choking incident. I cough repeatedly throughout the day, like my body’s still trying to clear whatever’s there.
I search my journal for “The Little Mermaid” — to make sure I’m getting the details of this story right — and what’s this?
An entry from June 14:
“Natalie Merchant has a new album. Apparently she lost the ability to sing after a surgery but then got her voice back?! Second article I’ve read this week about a singer who lost their voice and got it back. I mention this to a friend, and she adds: 'Also the little mermaid!!' referencing the fact that the Disney live-action was just released.”
June 14. I see the date and realize: That was just four days before the Gemini new moon, and the Gemini full moon is coming on…November 27. It’s the full moon part of the moon cycle that’s starting now — on November 13. It’s all connected.
And as I write this story — in the span of just twenty-four hours — one friend unexpectedly sends me an interview she just had published. Its headline includes the phrase: FINDS VOICE. Another friend randomly sends me an article from the NY Times about unopened letters from the 18th century — all written by women. Their wax seals have finally been cracked. Their words released. And yet another friend texts me about a witch trial in a show she’s watching, tells me the woman who gets hanged reminds her of me. (None of these friends know what I’m writing about.)
Something is happening. Something is spinning. Something is cracking open, like Ursula’s shell necklace, broken in pieces at Ariel’s feet. Her voice released in a golden glow of light, a shining orb that finds its home back where it started, in the body of a woman.
☆
On November 13, the moon goes dark. No longer feels the pressure to reflect the sun back to everyone, and for a moment, it gets to just be — a broken piece of the earth, pushed out into space, hovering in the dark peace of being, just being.
This happens monthly of course, with every new moon, but this time, the sun and moon aren’t just aligned with each other, they’re conjunct the planet Mars and the asteroids Klytia and Kalliope.
Given what I’m about to share, you might think that I already knew all this before I heard Ariel singing, before I decided to write about the reclaimed voice, but I didn’t. I had yet to see the asteroids Klytia and Kalliope marked on a map. Had yet to know their true meaning.
Calliope (sometimes with a C, sometimes a K) means “beautiful-voice” in Greek.
And Klytia — of all things — is derived from the Greek verb meaning to hear, to understand.
Because it’s not enough just to speak. We weren’t given these beautiful voices simply to make sound. We were given them to communicate. To speak and be heard.
☆
Another song starts playing in my mind. It goes like this:
All these lines across my face
Tell you the story of who I am
So many stories of where I’ve been
But these stories don’t mean anything
When you’ve got no one to tell them too
And the lines of this story don’t just draw a path between the moon, the sun, Mars, Kalliope, and Klytia. They are also circling the planet Mercury, aka the planet named after the Roman god of communication.
On this new moon, Mercury is conjunct the asteroid Kassandra, named after the ancient prophetess whom no one believed when she said Troy will fall. She’s being carried home on Mercury’s winged heels towards the asteroid Adeona, named after the goddess of safe returns.
During this time, it’s like all the words crawling across your heart, all the words no one believed — maybe not even yourself — are finally heard. They are escaping from that buried place inside you and soaring where ears can hear and eyes can see, and you are not alone. We are not alone.
We all have buried pieces. Parts of our story that have been shamed to silence. Mostly subconsciously. Often explicitly. It seems no one is immune. Even the bride of Christ was burned from the record for nearly two thousand years, and there’s much we can learn from her story.
On this moon, the planet Saturn (the teacher) is perfectly conjunct the asteroids Magdalena and Helenos. Magdalena like Magdalene and Helenos as in, Cassandra’s brother. The prophet who, unlike his sister, was believed.
What would we learn if we listened now? What words are ready to be spoken and heard and believed?
I let my fingers slip between the pages of a book I still have never read. I press them open to a place I’ve never seen. My fingers land, touching the start of a paragraph on page 177:
“What’s so profound about Mary is that the ‘yes’ she said to that surge of light that came in the form of an angel within her, a yes that she never uttered outside of her, became one of the greatest expansions of love in the history of religions.”
So, for this new moon time, carrying us from November 13 to November 26, preparing us for the full moon on November 27 (and yet another one on April 23):
May you say yes to the light inside you. May love expand inside you. May your one true voice return to you. May every buried word move through you, and may each and every one of them be heard. May we all be heard. May we all be heard. Amen.
☆
To be continued…
LONG STORY SHORT
During this Scorpio new moon time, which takes us from November 13 to November 26, buried words are returned to you. Parts of your story are spoken and shared without shame. YOU ARE HEARD. This moon is like a portal to the past. It’s as if the past is being held in a glowing light that never judges and only ever loves. Let this period carry you home to yourself and the buried treasure of your story. Let yourself listen well — to yourself, to others, to God. Let yourself become like this glowing light, and hold it all. Hear it all. And from this love, move towards what’s next.
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