Theme: Magicians Reporting for Duty

Week 30: What happens when the Minotaur heals?

Beautiful Magicians,

What happens when the Minotaur heals?

Have you ever asked yourself this question? Or even thought about it? Do you even know who the Minotaur is? Or why he needs to, or wants to, heal? Or why his healing might matter to you? (hint: it does)

In thirty years of deep soul writing, Minotaur never surfaced on the page, not even as I watched my husband disintegrate from a creative genius to an angry, abusive, scary man. At the time, I didn’t connect the dots from my husband’s implosion in the 21st century back to the Greek story of the Minotaur.

Nor did the Minotaur surface when “Beloved Vibration of Sophia!” exploded onto the page on December 26, 2014, and my hand refused to write the word “god.” The male god I had taken for granted since childhood was gone. And could not be summoned up again.

Because suddenly my body was filled with pulsating energy of the sacred feminine. The Goddess Herself. And She fit in my body! This was a radical feeling. And a radical knowing, not of an idea but of the living reality that the female is primordial.

My whole world turned upside down that day.

And I began, what is now twelve years and counting of intense exploration into the horrors that patriarchy has inflicted on our world, our sense of the sacred, our religions, our governments, and our relationships.

Those horrors gelled into the Five Crimes of Patriarchy: theft, silencing, rape, greed, murder. Crimes that we are now healing in The Song of the Morning of the World prayer practice.

Still, in all that time, I didn’t notice the Minotaur waiting for me. It was only last fall when Cathy Stevens Pratt and I created the sixth Witch Sequence intensive on Reverence and Devotion, that the Minotaur finally got my attention.

Here’s what happened.

We knew we couldn’t learn anything about reverence or devotion from any religion or culture created under patriarchy. So we skipped over the last five thousand years of patriarchal control and started our intensive visiting Minoan Crete where humans lived in peace for almost four thousand years.

Try to imagine a world with no weapons, no gods, no armies, no wars, no kings, no conquered peoples, no rape, no slavery. The anthropological record recounts a world filled with creativity, reverence for animals and plants, music, dancing, and men and women leaping over bulls. Bulls were everywhere in their art, their ceremonial tools, and their sacred games.

But that’s Minoan Crete. Peaceful Crete.

Once patriarchy arrived, the story changed. The British archeologists who explored the ruins, assumed that the cultural center at Knossos, which was larger than Buckingham Palace, had to be the palace of a king.

And a horror story of a myth had to follow. King Minos is imagined to have been the king of Crete and lived in the palace. Minos, we are told, had a wife who was so enamored of a white bull that she built a contraption to mate with him and birthed a Minotaur, half man, half beast. A creature so horrible, he had to be locked in the dark in a labyrinth under the palace where he was fed seven boys and seven girls once a year.

A total horror, right?

As with all mythical stories under patriarchy, everything is upside down. The feminine is subverted from the revered primordial source of life to little more than sexual chattel.

We know this story.

But what about the harm done to men under patriarchy? What can the original Minotaur teach us about the holy masculine?

For that we have to leap past the story of the wounded Minotaur suffering in the dark in his labyrinthine lair and meet the original Minotaur dancing joyously across the Upper Paleolithic cave walls painted in 13,000-12,000 BCE, long before any humans made up any ideas about angry gods with all their laws and rules and punishments.

Here he is dancing in the Trois Freres caves amid countless other animals celebrating the fertility of spring.

Is he too hard to find? Here's a closeup.

Just imagine the creative intelligence of the women and men painting in the dark.

We fell in love with the Minotaur in ART 6 (which is available OnDemand if you wish to fall in love with him too) and watched in wonder as he morphed into the central character in Praying in the Dark: How Visionaries Pray in a Time of Collapse.

This new rosary is completely untethered from any patriarchal religion, so we turned to the Minotaur for guidance on how to craft prayers that heal the masculine. We’ve spent years healing the feminine. But what about the masculine?

We can see how wounded the masculine is. How can we pray to heal the masculine?

For this Cathy turned to Tony Goncalves, who had profound dreams and shamanic experiences with the Minotaur during ART 6.

Before they met to start working on the prayers, Cathy sent Tony a long email with her thoughts on the Minotaur. She labeled it:

What happens when the Minotaur heals?

Here’s how Cathy's email began. Read this slowly. Holding each idea in your heart for a moment before reading the next line. Notice what surfaces for you.

“I didn’t know the Minotaur needed healing. Patriarchy and capitalism are in the air we breathe and it shaped my wee mind for decades. The minotaur of the King Minos story is a beast, condemned to wander lost and alone in the darkness of the underground labyrinth. This is a story created to keep you in line.

I posit that the Minotaur is our trapped Divine Masculine. This is the man who is pushed so far into the corner he has no choice but to bare his teeth. This is a man whose creativity has been stolen and replaced with shoulds, deadlines, quotas and victory at all cost. This is a man who is utterly alone. He cannot ask for help. He cannot soften to heal his wounds. 

Forces outside require that he must do battle to prove he is worthy over and over and over. Modern media reminds him he must lack all emotions but anger. Sports reminds him to sacrifice his health to fit in. 

If a Minotaur (modern man) breaks ranks, he is called in front of the council of toxic modern warring masculinity. They scold, belittle and crush using words, fists, boots and weapons. The minotaur’s sovereignty has been deleted. The minotaur (modern man) turns from his own heart and is forced TO JOIN the mob.”

I gasped in recognition reading this. Did you?

For the next several weeks, I’m going to write about healing the sacred masculine. I’ll share more from Cathy and Tony, including Tony’s brilliant analysis of the seven attributes of the healed masculine and how Cathy and he created the Strength and Compassion couplets. Those couplets are the heart of the new rosary practice. As we pray the couplets, we are all stunned by their power to heal the masculine that lives in everyone.

Cathy and Tony and I, and everyone in Praying in the Dark is overwhelmed with love for the original masculine, the masculine that lives in sacred joyful partnership with the primordial feminine.

This is the world we are praying to create. 

Life is fragile, handle with reverence
and sacred prayer that heals the masculine

Janet

PS: ART 6 is available OnDemand

Praying in the Dark is now closed for registrations. It will be available OnDemand in a few weeks.

Cathy and Tony and I are working on Praying in the Dark Part 2 coming mid-September.

if you have questions, write to me at janet@janetconner.com

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