The Brigit and Magdalene Flame. Spring 2023. Part one. RC Church of St Edward the Confessor.

February 1, 2023February 12, 2023 / Ann Murphy / Leave a comment

31^st January 2023

I’ve been working with small churches for the past two weeks, connecting them with the Spring Brigit flame and the Magdalene flame energy.

Catholic Church of St Edward the Confessor.

The first work was in the Church of St. Edward the Confessor, a small Catholic place near what used to be Otterbourne Manor (the place still exists but is diminished in size). I had been driving one of my daughters to work in Chandler’s Ford for a couple of weeks and had passed the church on my way there. On my first drive, I noticed a Brigit flame in the building and wondered about it, but did nothing. I thought it meant there was already one there. Later, driving to my father’s, via Sparsholt, I passed the little church of St Stephen and saw a magenta flame there. Again, I thought it meant there was already one there, so I ignored it, wondering instead who might have planted it.

On the way back from another Chandler’s Ford journey, a full bladder forced me to stop in the church of St. Edward the Confessor to wait until the traffic subsided and to find a toilet. Inside, the church is quite modern, having been built in the early twentieth century. As I approached the table altar, behind which is a striking stained-glass window, I saw, with my inner eye, hands place a large, wide shallow bowl on the altar. It reminded me of the fire bowls they use outside in Egypt, to keep warm in winter. In the bowl was a small orange flame and I had the impulse to blow energy which ignited it so that it rose to the ceiling.

I next saw the Was-sceptre symbol anchor the flame into the lava layer below the earth’s crust. The upper part of the symbol went into the sky and there was a date palm behind the altar to which it connected. In the ancient Middle East, the Date palm was seen as the tree of the Goddess, the dates her fruit, the only food in an otherwise arid desert. I have worked with palm trees while living in Egypt and anchored many energetic palm trees, especially where people live at subsistence level. The feeling then was that the people would always be fed from the fruits of the Goddess. They would not starve but would have what they needed. (The palm tree, in ancient Assyrian religion represented the connection between heaven and earth and was sacred to the Goddess Ishtar. The Goddess, in her many guises, is often depicted as residing in a tree, giving her ‘fruits’ freely).

The Palm means Life. Pure and simple. Especially in dry times.

While I was in Luxor, I read a theory that the Was-sceptre represented a giraffe. The bottom of the symbol represents the cloven hoofs of the giraffe, which are quite dainty, while the hook at the top, represents the head. The ‘foot’ of the sceptre touched the earth, while the ‘head’ could reach up to the heights and get the fruits from the tall palms. It was a medium between the food of the Goddess and earth. The symbol, in mythology, is associated with the god Set, who is the god of the hot, dry desert, an arid place where there are few resources. It is a staff of power, wielded by the priests. It symbolises the power to bring the Food of Heaven to earth and only those who could act as mediums between divinity and humanity could use it.

Other theories abound around the meaning of the symbol, of course, but in the course of my work, the Was-sceptre is always used to anchor flames deep beneath the earth’s mantle, and to anchor the flame to a higher level of the earth’s energy field. The sceptre itself is a strong ‘holding’, a rod of power, a connector. It keeps the energies stable, and in place, because the flame is an active energy.

So why was an Irish Goddess flame of Brigit being anchored by the use of Egyptian symbols in a small Catholic church in Chandler’s Ford? As I tuned in, I tried to sense what it might mean. What came back was something about the origins of Christianity being from the Middle East. Jesus was born there, after all. There was something about reconnecting the energies of this church to its origins, reconnecting it to its roots in Jerusalem. There was something about the original, unsullied beliefs around the goddess being brought back to common consciousness. That the Divine Feminine was once an equal partner to the Divine Masculine, each one valued for its gifts.

This was a small community church, albeit well used, and the hub of the Catholic community, yet it was the start of a series of connections between other, smaller, churches, all of Saxon origin and mainly Church of England. I was raised a Catholic, and attended a convent until I was ten years old, going to mass every Sunday, which I hated. But out of choice, I also went to the evening devotions. This I loved. There was a sense of ancientness here, between the incense filling the church and the hymns reminding me of ‘Faith of our fathers’, my favourite hymn. All those dungeons, fires and swords! back then, I felt very connected to an energy that seemed far removed from the God we were being taught about in school and at Sunday mass.

When we relocated from the country to Dublin, I was educated in a private, protestant school and lost that religious connection but I loved the school, nonetheless. It was child-centred, as opposed to God-centred. Now, between the two educations, I had a fairly good idea of the difference between them and how it made me feel.

Years later, living in the UK and at an Initiation workshop in Glastonbury, myself and another attendee decided that, rather than go to the Goddess rituals that everyone else was attending, we would go to the local Catholic church where they were having a healing service. This was a new experience for me and a reminder of an older one. As I watched the Catholic ritual of communion and wine, in my eyes, the priests were enacting an ancient Egyptian ritual. The roots of these rituals came from the temples of Egypt. The woman who had come with me had seen the same thing, which was amazing to me. Even more interesting was that I could see the effect that the ritual was having on the wine, but also saw that it had no effect on the bread. And yet, at that time, only the priest drank the wine. Now, of course, it is different and everyone gets both. However, the bread is still nothing but bread, but the wine is charged with energy.

But that experiment taught me that the Catholic ritual was a very ancient, energetic process, with a deeper connection to a ‘Mother’. Yet it was the Spring Flame of Brigit being anchored here, in Chandler’s Ford, Brigit herself being a Goddess who became a Catholic saint. She wasn’t destroyed by the religion but rather incorporated into it. She is also a goddess of light and fertility, the returning sun after a dark winter.

I thought I was finished here, so went to look for a loo. When I came back, I was ‘instructed’ to do more so I stood in front of the altar again. This time, a magenta channel of the Magdalene descended with a small magenta flame inside. It reached to the floor and high into the sky, a veritable pillar of fire. Again, I felt the impulse to blow and when I did the magenta flame expanded until it filled the channel. I was given a portion of this flame to transport somewhere else. I already guessed that it was for St Stephen’s church in Sparsholt.

On my way out, I found the holy water font and blessed myself with it. On impulse, before I left my house that morning, I had applied holy water I had gotten from Arundel cathedral last year. This is another ritual that we have forgotten the original purpose of: the application of holy water in an equal-armed cross as you enter a sacred space. This entering ritual was to open the energy-field for the ensuing ceremony. The energies generated by the Mass fed you, energetically. After the ritual Mass, on leaving the building, you then applied holy water again, this time to seal the energy-field so that all the energies you absorbed would be retained, much like sealing the energy-field with the raku symbol after passing a Reiki attunement. Originally, the Mass was an attunement, but not in the way we pass attunements today. In the original Usui Reiki system, Mikao Usui ‘attuned’ his students every time they met. He shared the energy with them by sharing his own reiki-field. They sat in that energy for the duration of the meeting, their fields open and receptive. In the original Catholic Mass, this was the way it was done too. The energy of the ritual was shared and absorbed. It was a ‘communion’, a sharing; an attunement. However, after the Synod of Whitby, that all began to change, Celtic Christianity, with all its blend of Christian and Celtic beliefs, was replaced by Roman rites and rituals… and control.

Having written this, but not yet posted it, I was with my father when the local village magazine came. Inside was a list of ceremonies for Lent, one being an ‘Ashing Communion’. This is where they put ash on your forehead, again in an equal-armed cross. (That cross signifies equilibrium). I wondered what the ash meant. The palm used in Palm Sunday is burnt and applied to the forehead. In Roman times, penitents wore ashes and sackcloth to repent for their sins. Now, everyone is a sinner, by all accounts. BUT it was the palm, and again, we come back to the pagan origins of Christianity, which feel far more real to me. The palm, sacred to the Goddess, is still being used in Christian religions, which has to be a good thing.

I’ve put the link at the bottom of this page so if you want to visit the church and partake of the energies there, feel free.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faith_of_Our_Fathers_(hymn)

Naqada Culture

https://www.bbc.co.uk/religion/religions/christianity/saints/edward.shtml

https://www.stswithunwellsparish.org.uk/sted

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synod_of_Whitby

Durrington Walls and the Cuckoo Stone.

January 14, 2022January 13, 2022 / Ann Murphy / Leave a comment

On the 2nd of January, we felt an impulse to drive to Durrington Walls, near Stonehenge. It was our first trip to do energy-work in months and it felt really good to connect to the ancestors again. I had been weighed down by the darkness of winter, and the constant rain, and felt permanently rooted in modern life and its stresses having been in the UK for far longer than originally intended. As result, I had lost my focus, so the trip to Durrington felt like a positive step and as we drove there, feeling the intention, I remembered how much I loved doing this work.

When we arrived, we walked into the henge, looking with archaeological eyes at how the settlement had been constructed. We then tried to find the site of the two circles that originally lay within it. It felt very Avebury-ish and we thought about how close the settlement had been built to the river Avon that passed just below.

Having spent time discussing the possible thinking of the original settlers, we wandered back, but as I crossed what would have been one of the entranceways to the river, I felt the urge to connect. In my mind, I raised my arms to the sun, or to where the sun would have been, had it been a cloudless day. (I am far too self-conscious to do physical arm-raising in public so I see myself doing it in my mind). I raised up and connected to the sun. As I did so, two ancient people, one male, one female, appeared. The man held a brown book which he handed to me. It felt like a bible, and he explained that it was the spiritual and historical beliefs of his people; the two being connected, just like the Old Testament is both the history, and spiritual beliefs, of the Israelites.

I began to get an understanding of what had brought these people here and why they had left. I was told that they had originally come from the north – it felt like Orkney – and they came to create a new colony down south, where they had people they were connected to. They had been told that it was warm here and that the land was fertile, good for crop growing. This felt like the beginnings of agriculture when they were learning how to work with the fertility in the landscape in a new way. At first, it was good, and they were successful enough but then the climate changed. It became wetter and there was less sun to ripen the corn.

The bad weather continued for several years and they could not survive, forcing them to go back to an older way of life – more a foraging and hunting lifestyle. There was a feeling, that in their fear, they focussed more on learning how to work with the earth’s energy-field, and the serpent lines, and less on the more physical aspects of survival. In the past, hunting and gathering had been their way. It was a shamanic way of living. In order to survive, rituals were performed before the hunt, rituals that connected them to the essence of the animal, ensuring the creature’s participation in the hunt. They had no real control over the animals. All they could do was connect with their essence, communicating on subtle levels their intention and need to feed themselves. We are familiar with the Nat. American way of life. Our ancestors were no different.

Transitioning to agriculture took a long time. Not only were they learning how to farm, and how to tame animals that originally roamed free, they were also learning how to work with the earth’s forces differently. It was an entirely new world for them.

However, the efforts of the early people of Durrington Walls were not successful. With the change in weather patterns, food supplies ran out and their people dwindled in number until eventually, they decided to return to where they had come from. They knew there would be food there. Fish was always plentiful, as were mammals, so they had to go backwards for a time. This feels like an important message for us in our time too. Climates have cycles, they change. We are currently in one such change. There may come a time when we too have to go ‘backwards’ for a time, back to an older way of doing things. But it is a temporary going backwards. Things will move forward again and things will progress.

Some of the tribe did not want to return, telling the others that if they only waited the weather would get better. But they did not know how long it would remain like this so they opted to leave. Before they left, before it got too bad, they had tried to improve the fertility of the soil by working energetically in the landscape but all their work was for nothing. They spent too much time doing that without realising that they could not control the world’s weather pattern changes. They could only improve the earth’s fertility in the soil. (This also answered a question I have had for years! You can improve the soil and growing conditions but not the global weather).

After receiving this information, which continued coming in as we walked and explored, we next made our way to The Cuckoo Stone. Before we had left the house, we had been instructed to take a bottle of water to make an essence and as soon as we got to the stone, ( which I never knew about), I understood why.

Our first impulse was to walk three times around it sun-wise, (clockwise). This meant that it was a masculine sun-stone. (At feminine sites, you usually walk anti-clockwise. When you walk around a stone, or site, it energetically opens it, creating a doorway into its energies and functions.) Walking around this stone made me feel dizzy on the third pass, which I thought I was imagining, until Chris said it was making him dizzy too. It’s always good to have confirmation. Again, this dizziness is something I have experienced before at the stones at Avebury. Years ago, a friend and I were at that circle. It was my first visit, and I felt so excited to be there having wanted to see it since I was a teenager in Dublin watching Children of the Stones on TV. Coming close to the circle at Avebury then was like coming home after many years away.

At that time, my friend and I walked around the stones but experienced a dizziness as we did so. It was as if each stone was a battery with both positive/negative energies. Each stone too was either male or female making a huge force-field around the circle. The entire Avebury complex was a giant male-female balancing in the landscape.

This Cuckoo stone also had a magnetic field, even though it no longer occupied the same site it had originally, and was only half the size of what it once had been. But it was close enough.

Once we had activated the stone, we sat on it and tuned in. Almost immediately, we saw a youngish woman with dark, curly hair and wearing a band of flowers around her head. Behind her stood a male priest dressed in a creamy white robe. He was older than her and seemed to be her mentor. He remained behind her while she carried out the ritual. This felt to be a later time than had our previous Durrington information.

While we sat on the stone it was as if we were both the stone, and ourselves. The young woman placed a garland of flowers around our shoulders but she was really dressing the stone, just as they still do in Ireland at holy wells. The ritual was to welcome the sun from the east after the long winter. It was an acknowledgement of the life it brings and in recognition of the stone and its importance to the vitality that flowed from the sun, through the stone, and into the earth’s energy-circuit. The couple placed the garlands facing Woodhenge, where the sun came up, but we did not feel that Woodhenge was significant to the ritual. Chris was aware of a Mayday reference to this too, so perhaps the stone was dressed at more than one time of year.

West Kennet Long Barrow. What our Long Barrow might have looked like.

Once they had finished at the stone, I saw the woman, followed by the priest, carrying a shallow, pottery, bowl of water with flowers in it, over to where the Neolithic long barrow once stood, meters away from the them. The bowl had been at the foot of the monolith while she did the ritual dressing and the water in the bowl was charged by stone and sun. The barrow was still there in their time and we could see it’s energy clearly. The woman laid the bowl at the entrance, as a gift to the ancestors and an acknowledgement to them. Their line of kinship was still intact and important. If it hadn’t been for the lessons learned by their ancestors, these people would not have survived and thrived, so they offered their gratitude. Death and life were One, the two sides of life. The ancestors still lived, but in another form, their presence still recognised.

(This reminded me of the St. Mullin’s Pattern when I was young. At the feast day of St. Moling, all the locals from local towns came to the ruins of St. Moling’s monastery and his holy well. Traditionally, the people walked three times around the well, sun-wise – called ‘Doing the Rounds’ – in their bare feet. They then dressed the graves of their family; ancestors who had been buried there for generations, and some more recently. There were certain other traditions associated with the day, namely that of spending a number of hours in the only pub in St. Mullins and spending money on the stalls. The water of the holy well was reputed to cure all manner of illnesses and everyone in my town had a bottle).

Next we were instructed to make the essence. I put the bottle on the stone and saw the dark-haired woman place a garland of flowers around it, as if the bottle of water was also the stone. Next, to my surprise, she put a fat earthworm in it then told me to close the bottle quickly. The worm had to do with the fertility of the soil as though there had to be a combination of both energy-work and physical work to ensure fertility. Energy alone cannot grow things.

Next, we were told to bring some of that blessed water to the site of the long barrow. As we walked towards it, I felt a sudden powerful flowing in of energy that made my whole body tingle. I love that feeling! I poured the water onto where the barrow once stood, connecting to the ancestors and sending our gratitude to them and once we were finished we began to walk back to the car, towards Woodhenge. As I did, I became aware of an image of the long Barrow behind me and I stopped walking. It was as if we were walking out of the darkness of the winter/death and into the light of a new phase and I had to walk with that intention.

It was a very welcome ending to a very satisfying day’s work.

Magdalene Down Male Mysteries

April 25, 2021April 24, 2021 / Ann Murphy / 1 Comment

After our first day’s information about the Female Mysteries of Spring, we went back the following week to learn about the Male Mysteries.

This time we stood on the second largest barrow, where we had seen the Elder the previous week. As soon as we tuned in, he appeared and he instructed us to sit.

I felt as though I was in a class, as it would have been held centuries ago, but I was male. There were five or six of us being trained. The elder explained about our role in the Spring festival. We were a new cohort, and this was the start of our training. The Elder would instruct us on how to serve the Mother, both in what we did, as priests in training, and for the rest of our lives. What we were being shown was male priest training, rather than simply something for the festival rituals.

He explained that male fertility was connected to the waterways: the rivers and to the sea. I saw the Itchen river in my mind, running around he base of St. Catherine’s hill. As we were being shown the connection between the river and the hill, an image of Silbury Hill, near Avebury, with the water all around the base, popped into my head. I wondered if, in ancient times, the waters also rose at certain times of the year and flooded around the base of St. Catherine’s; the mound a pregnant belly that emerged from the waters of life.

Water carries fertility, like seminal fluid carries sperm. This is how they understood it. Because many female fertility sites were connected with waterways i.e., Stonehenge, Stanton Drew, etc., it fell to men to hold the energy of water-fertility. They were the active principle and the female was the receptive.

The Elder, having explained about the importance of water to these young men, then went on in a more serious tone. He handed each one a rounded, river pebble. He told them that the water had shaped these stones, tumbled and smoothed them over many years. The water had the power to shape the hardest material, BUT, the stone was of the earth and the river ran THROUGH the earth. The water, on its own, was simply water. The Mother, Earth, was the channel/river-bed through which the water ran, it ran through her body. She was the foundation of all.

This teaching was to curb feelings of power the young men might harbour, believing that because they held the power to fertilise, this meant they were more powerful than the earth itself.

At that point, to continue the lesson, the Elder told us all that we would now go to the other side of the hill, but to bring our stone with us. This was a couple of miles across the land for them, but necessitated a car-ride for us. From last week, we knew the men had their training by the river and that by the time of the Spring rites, they would proceed from there to the top of St. Catherine’s.

We drove around to the other side of Winchester, and tried to find a car-parking space close to the river. That proved tricky, as now everyone goes for coffee and a walk beside the canal! Because we could not find a space, we went to the water-meadows at. St Cross Hospital, where we had access to the river. This was better as it was the more natural part of the river; the part currently flowing alongside St. Catherine’s Hill is the navigation canal built in the late 17th Century.

We stood by the river bank and waited for the Elder to tell us what to do. We still held the stone. Because the Elder was not physically real, the stone he gave us wasn’t either. But, I had one in my pocket I had picked up somewhere. I’m always picking up stones! It didn’t have to be physical, of course, but it made it feel more real.

Itchen River, St. Cross Hospital, Winchester.

Standing by the river’s edge, the Elder told us that we had to throw this stone into the water. But, in throwing it in, we were handing over our ego, or sense of power and personal Will to the Mother. We were acknowledging that we, as men, served her. We were not master over her. In order to serve, we had to let go of all our attachments to power over others, over the tribe, over the land. We were making a commitment to serve her as she wished to be served.

It was a very solemn, and thought-provoking exercise. If we, as young priests were unable to let go of our male ego, our need for control, then we would be unable to serve in a fertility capacity and therefore would not be able to officiate at the Sacred Fertility Rituals, such as the Spring rites.

Because I was, effectively, a young man in this experience, I felt the seriousness of what I was doing and when I felt I was ready to give up my need for control and power, I threw my stone into the water, giving it back to the Mother, from whence it came. I accepted that she was more important than me and that I willingly sacrificed my need for power and control.

I was aware of the other young men in my group. Some were reluctant to let go, not fully understanding how it would impact on their lives. They were not ready. Some might never be and would go on to do other work within the tribes. But, for those, who were not quite ready, they would be given the chance to continue their training and repeat the exercise the following year. But that also meant, they could not be chosen to be a candidate in the current year’s Spring Festival. There was no judgement around this from the Elder, as they were only human and he understood the challenge of the sacrifice.

This experience, and the previous week’s one, was an amazing glimpse into how our ancestors worked with the very potent Spring fertility rites. The exercise, by the river and on the barrows, was quite a powerful one for the young men; the fear of letting go of personal power was palpable.

By contrast, the women’s rites felt free and joyful. There was such excitement and light-heartedness as they began the rites. But the men’s seemed quite serious, as if they had more to learn, more to let go of. But all were young. From late teens to early twenties. An appropriate age for Spring.

Next week, we’ll be up on St. Catherine’s Hill. It’s the culmination of the Spring festivities, the joining of the male and female energies, the festival that ensures fertility for the coming year. I am looking forward to seeing what we experience then. All we have to do is avoid the coffee-crowds.

Channelling. The ancient paths…15/8/12

May 22, 2015May 5, 2015 / Ann Murphy / Leave a comment

Micheldever Woods in the Spring.

Ancient footsteps fall flat upon the modern world, the shoes no longer fit.

Ancient pathways lay untrodden whilst modern man whistles by on wheels, the paths forgotten.

The waters glisten, yet are quiet, the sounds of oars upon wood a forgotten memory. The creak and groan of planks as they move through the water, no longer heard. All is fibreglass and steel…man’s creations.

Abandoned Fishing Boat in Wexford.

The sounds of the woods, an axe’s fall, an arrows whistle, gone now. Only the sound of gunshots crack and roar through the trees.

Time passes by but slowly now, Giant Elk bellows…a distant memory.

Micheldever Woods in Spring.

It seems so long ago and yet it was only yesterday. A yesterday which is still with us…in our minds. For all of human history lies here, hidden in the depths of the mind where no time exists.

All human knowledge resides here. Nothing is truly forgotten, it only appears so.

But how do we access this knowledge, this not-so-forgotten history?

Let us see…you could contact the ancestors, the Ancient Ones, those who still inhabit the dimensions of human memory.

Or…you could travel the ancient pathways and wear the old shoes and thereby allow your mind to bring to the fore long forgotten memories and skills. You see how easy it is?

The tea House of Brandon Dale. My Magical Place when I was a child.

Try it now and discover for yourself how humanity has moved through the ages and how he has forgotten himself in the process. When you have ‘remembered’, bring it back to life and then you will see how to move into the future.