ATHENA CONSULTS THE ORACLE OF LEICHHARDT AUSTRALIA

 A new Athena is emerging from the rubble of her former persona. Leaving justice and the arts behind she is  experiencing  the arts of witty discourse, sensuality, healing, and JOY. 

Aphrodite eat your heart out.  

And as for Odysseus she is sick of trying to guide him on  his tiresome journey home to Ithaca. 

‘Why don’t you just stay another seven years with that vacuous bloody goddess Circe,’ she yells at him. 

She wants to leave dark Greek tragedies behind and  hone her comic skills by reading the black humour of Ronald Dahl and Aristophanes (an ancient Greek poet and playwrite). 

And how did she leave all this behind her?                          

The Oracle of Delphi Sat Here

She consulted not the Oracle of Delphi  

but a modern Healer and Oracle 

located in the heart of Italian Leichhardt. 

Deep into her obsessions and tragedies she woke one morning hardly able to move. Should she consult one of her learned psychics or medics? They were too far away and she was bored with their endless dancing around her, too afraid to offend the mighty Athena. 

She had the card of a massage therapist, an expert in some sort of esoteric Tibetan Reiki, 

no doubt preceding the era when she reigned supreme. 

She struggled down the street and demanded an audience. 

He emerged from his cave with the deep ringing of Tibetan bells following him. 

She looked up from the seat she had managed to fall into, her eyes lifting from his strong legs to his crotch, torso and noble head to make eye contact. He looked deep into her psyche, commanded her to stand, took her by the hand and led her into his cave. 

As she sat on the bench he still held her hands and her gaze. She looked back without averting her eyes- after all she was the Warrior Goddess of Ancient Greece. 

‘You are a powerful woman but your grief and fears are splitting you apart. Your body can’t support you and is as twisted as your mind.’ 

She nodded. Why had no-one said this to her before? She told him her body story but he saw into her soul and her ancestry. 

Lying on the bench his skilful strong hands untwisted her  as the aromatic perfumes and the resonant sounds of  his bells cleared her mind of all the mean-spirited, fearful and doubting self talk that was consuming her. 

She floated somewhere between Elysium and Hades 

Santorini Greece

her powers becoming concentrated into the gift 

this beautiful Apollo was bestowing upon her. 

No-one had dared to touch her or speak to her like this before. 

She would have cut them down with her sword or

thumped them with her aegis if they had.

She bravely submitted to the pain of the untwisting as she told him of her great rage that had entered some large black and white birds attacking a man and his son in a nearby park, but sparing her and her female descendants. 

He did not think this strange and understood her panic. She wept and wept  her fears and griefs away. 

She returned to him later in the week laughing, muscles sore, but untwisted in both body and mind. 

He greeted her as he greeted all came into his cave, regardless of gender, race, age, sexual orientation or physical condition, with the  respectful affection of his warm embrace. He is able to contact each person’s fears and self-loathing and convert it into joy as they lie suspended from their woes, learning to become free and fully alive again. His wicked sense of humour is unleashed if you are up for it or he is as gentle as a lamb. When Athena thanked him for his help he told her it was she who had done the healing.

His cave is dark, warm and safe full of the most gorgeous smells and sounds but it is Apollo himself, the proud joyous Oracle of Leichhardt who heals all who enter there in with the spirit of healing in their hearts.

Athens Greece

BLACK ATHENAS IN THE DESERT AMPHITHEATRE

Amphitheatre At Delphi

 

I was not sitting in  the carved seats of the Amphitheatre of Delphi 

 I sat in mortal form wearing boots, pants, and my trusty Akubra helmet 

with my goat’s skin backpack on the seat beside me.                     

I looked down at the depths of   a valley which was carpeted 

with spiky green  spinifex. 

I wondered how I came to be so far from my ancestral home 

in this vast southern continent.  

Long before the Bronze age of Homer this land was inhabited by 

some of the first peoples of the earth  

The splintered steps and paths of the   Amphitheatre  were not carved by the artisan slaves of Delphi but 

 by the elements and violent actions of the earth                

Desert Amphitheatre Ormiston Gorge

 

millions of years before my father Zeus was conceived. 

As I sat here I watched  a ghostly platform 

rising in front of me. 

Instead of Pan pipes playing in the background 

I could hear the sound of rushing water at the bottom of the Ormiston Gorge. 

And then out of the mists of antiquity figures of the Gods and Heroes appeared before me. 

Odysseus, Hermes, Apollo, Persephone, Aphrodite, Achilles, Poseidon, Calypso, Pericles, Eros, Heracles and more. Then I saw Athena the Warrior Goddess with helmet, robe, aegis and spear. 

I looked behind me and on the top of the gorge I could see a group of black women gathering. They were singing in language more like a wailing, a kind of continuous cooing with edges of joy shining through the power of their song. 

They were doing what they had always done like their mothers and grandmothers before them through the long sorry story of the last 200 years. I, Athena, so far from my Temple in Delphi stood to salute these Black Athenas. 

The sky opened above and  I saw not my father Zeus but Gaia,  the Earth Mother who possessed the secrets of the Fates and whose Oracles and Secret Places were older and more powerful than those of Apollo and other male deities….. 

This was why I was here in this extraordinary place to meet the powerful descendants of these women, traditional owners and custodians of the land  like Mavis pictured here with her beautiful baby Tyrene. 

WHEN WATER IS YOUR ONLY FRIEND

I was back  swimming at Bronte,  my helmet, aegis and spear

safely stashed away and there was no sign of the Adonis

who had hovered so beautifully before me the last time I was here.

An ageing Adonis so thin he looked like a giant stick insect

slowly descended the steps into the pool,

his eyes masked with tiny round black glasses.

He fell thankfully into the water and looked back at two near naked shapely nymphs who were behind him squealing about the cold.

‘It’s wonderful,’ he said in a shaky voice. And so was he.

For I saw him as he used to be. Champion runner,  mighty oracle, someone whose opinion was once sought.

Now the water is his only friend, and as he stood in the sun before he submerged himself 

I had a glimpse of the god he once was.