Yesterday morning, Sunday, (I wrote this a few years ago) I was listening to the Radio 4 church service (not something I often listen to, but it was an impulse I followed). The teaching was ‘The loaves and the Fishes’. You know, the one where Jesus miraculously fed the 5.000 people with only 5 loaves and 2 fishes after the death of his friend and teacher John the Baptist? Finishing up a beading project, the fact struck me that people never question this story. They relate it as though it is an absolute truth. But to me, they are missing an important point. Jesus was a spiritual teacher, teaching people something important. There was a deeper meaning to this story.

People, such as Dr Marcellino D’Ambrosio,  have looked into certain Judaic meanings behind the symbolism, such as the five loaves representing the Mosaic teachings in the Torah. There are 5 books in the Torah.  So perhaps, on one level, Jesus was expanding on the teachings and inner story of Moses, who was also a prophet, and a teacher.

But he was also quoted as saying that he was the ‘Bread of Life’. To my mind, this was a misinterpretation. He was also known as the ‘Water of Life’ which felt more appropriate. Could he be both bread and water? All spiritual nourishment? To many he was/is, but I have experienced a completely different awareness of what the bread represents. Over the past twenty years of doing energy healing, at many sacred sites around the world, I have found that the Bread represents the Bread of the Mother, of the earth.

My first experience of this came in 2006, in Cumbria, at a stone circle complex in the Broomrigg Plantation. One of my psychic gifts is the ability to tap into ancient knowledge and experience it in the present. It is psychometry; I suppose. Tapping into objects or places and opening doorways into past lives.

On this occasion, standing on an ancient stone which had once formed part of a stone circle, I went back to the Bronze Age and found myself watching an ancient winter solstice ritual. Within the circle, a priest stood, and around the inside of the circle also stood containers of wheat which had been harvested the previous autumn. A priestess, who personified Artemis (I was a little surprised at that) drew down the energy of the sun and brought it into the earth, which opened like a womb to accept the solar energy. This fertilised a giant ovum and filled the womb with golden light. The priest had strewn wheat grains around the inside of the circle petitioning the Goddess Artemis, within whose hands he had placed a sheaf of corn. As this happened, the wheat in the containers was also ‘charged’, which effectively imbued the seeds with life, so that when they planted them again in the spring the resulting crop would be abundant. At the end of the ritual, the priest sprinkled water around the inside of the circle, because, without rain, the wheat could not grow.

Once the ‘ritual’ was complete, some of the grain was taken from the containers, ground into flour and made into bread. Each household in the tribe was given a portion of this ‘charged’ bread in order to bring fertility to the entire tribe over the coming year. Everyone was equal and everyone was fed. No-one was left out.

This experience prompted many questions. Over the past few years, some of these questions have found answers. I had, on occasion, to travel back to Ireland for Catholic funerals or memorial services, and noticed during the consecration of the bread and wine, during Mass, that all the energy from ‘Above’ seemed to charge the wine but not the bread. I also thought it was significant that only the priest drank the wine, (things have changed since then!) thereby gaining the benefit of its charged energy. But the communication wafers, the Bread/Body of Christ had no energy and yet this was distributed to the people during the Mass. I found this very interesting Why was the bread not ‘charged’, and why was it only the priest who benefited from the spiritual energy which should have been shared? I wondered if it was to do with power dynamics within the early church? Communion is such an important part of the Catholic Mass ritual and I can remember, as a child, taking communion seriously, believing that I was eating part of Jesus’ body. When it stuck to the roof of my mouth and broke, and I tried to remove it with my tongue, it was a serious disaster. Jesus was real to me and I thought I was breaking him apart.

The word communion signifies a joining, a sharing of energy, but there was no energy in this communion. It was rice paper, nothing more. For years, I had wondered why this was (I only rarely have communion now. If I feel an impulse, I will take it, even though I know it contains nothing). However, this year, I experienced another teaching, through ‘psychic time-travel’, that explained more of the mystery. It was in St. Dogmaels’ Abbey in Wales, near Cardigan Bay and I was doing my usual energy work, as I do in many churches, (both ancient and those still in use), when I felt an impulse to stop at a point which was below ground level. In the past, the altar of the church would have stood above this room and as I stood in the centre of this ‘cellar’ I felt a powerful female earth energy, like a vortex. It was still active, and very strong. When I stood in it, I ‘saw’ a monk standing in front of the altar in the room above me. He was consecrating the wine and the bread, but as he focused on the bread, which was a round loaf, he drew the energy of this vortex into the bread, spiritualising it with the female energy of the Earth, the Mother. Next, he drew down the energy of the sun and consecrated the wine with that energy, the Male fertilising principle! Finally I understood! Somewhere along the line, this connection and honouring of the role of Mother Earth, in sacred ritual, had been lost.

The Abbey itself was built in the 12th Century and is a Trionian Abbey, founded by monks from France who were dissatisfied with the way things were going in the French Monasteries. They wanted to get back to a simpler way of living, and of serving. But they also knew that the balance depended on honouring both Mother and Father.

At one point during this exploration through time, I was also given the understanding of the Holy Trinity: The Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. The Father is obvious; he is the male principle, Solar, Christ Light. The Holy Spirit is the Mother, the Female principle: the Earth; and the son, is the priest /medium. The Son of both Mother and Father is the priest; he is the medium between the two; the one who can work with both energies and who is trained to materialise these energies in the bread and wine, thereby bringing succour to the community through their distribution. What is missing here, of course, is the female representative, the priestess. But, at least they still knew what they were doing, even though they were using both energies in a less earth-focused way than our ancestors at Broomrigg had done.

But, what I still did not know, was when this understanding disappeared. Perhaps during the dissolution of the monasteries, when the Divine Feminine, through Mary, was removed from the collective consciousness? Perhaps that understanding will come later.

So, back to the loaves and the fishes. Jesus (or someone) was trying to teach about the balance between the Masculine and the Feminine. The bread of Life comes from the earth, from the Mother. The fish is a male symbol, and one which I also have experienced in the course of my work, and which I know to be a symbol of life in the Ancient Solar priesthoods of Egypt, Greece and Western Europe. The symbol of Christianity is the Fish. The fish swims in water; water is life. The fish is a symbol for the fertility that comes from water, the abundance of a masculine god.  

Jesus was teaching the multitudes about Honouring the Mother and Father, just as the commandments told them to. Not just your physical, earthly Mother and father, but all of life through the Earth Mother and Solar Father. I believe the story tells us that nourishment comes from Mother and Father. What comes from the sky is Masculine, sun and rain, which fertilises the earth, the feminine, so that all her people can live. You cannot exist without both. What can you create with sun alone? Without the mixture of earth, what is it? If you honour both, you can feed thousands.

Maybe we need to get back to that. We need to relearn these ways of thinking about the earth, or Gaia, and her relationship with the Father, in order for us to live sustainable and fulfilling lives. It’s really not that hard. We just have to change our core beliefs. It might take years but at least the world of the future will be one worth living in again! And I wonder what would happen if we started to do these rituals in the way they were intended? That would be an interesting experiment.

PS. When I was in the Hare Krsnas, back in the seventies in Dublin, they cooked their food and blessed it before sharing it with people so that everyone could eat the sacred prasadam of the god of love, Krishna. Even one meal was enough to give you Krsna’s mercy. Blessing food is an ancient tradition.

A more modern story is the story of the foundation of Findhorn, one of my favourites.