A Vision of the Vine

The Tree began to grow in me even before the icaros started. The vine’s bittersweet slime coiled in my belly as I traced the roots of my mind into the soul. I saw my mother, and through her the generations began proliferating backward: my grandparents, great-grandparents, their parents, and theirs. The ancestral arithmetic annihilated any sense of separation. Each generation doubled, and doubled again. It was not long before distinction vanished into the density of the webwork. The roots crossed and recrossed. I followed them backward until they fused. We are all cousin lovers, or their offspring. Pedigree collapse pointed me to the source, to the genealogical fact that there is not “my lineage” and “your lineage” but one Tree of Life.

Having reached the fractal edge of the Tree of time, I dove back into its mesh. I perceived, at every node, a new act of conception transpiring: two bodies meeting and merging, followed by the blissful shudder and flooding release of orgasm. I felt the love between committed souls that remained after the flood. I felt the joy, the soulful delight, the tenderness of mutual belonging. I also felt the fear and violence of rape, the grief of its aftermath, all the unwanted, unintended pregnancies. I felt men inflicting their pain on women, and women bearing the seed of Life out of duty and desperation.

I saw Eros flow forward, into MORE Life, even in the face of strife. Every child-making orgasm was a gate through which poured all that each member of a couple carried, their hopes and their horrors, their wonders and their wounds. All that ancient feeling funneled through the generations until it erupted into me, laying on my mat. I remembered myself, a body full of light breathing in the dark. I became the serpent in the Tree. I puked.

I realized that my freedom is not a temptation from beyond the garden, but the I of the Tree itself, the place the whole generative process curls, dizzily at first, back upon itself. I must decide. The Tree of Life and the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil are one Tree. The decision between Good and Evil refers to our conscious responsibility to channel the Eros flowing through the gates of conception. We are called to anoint Eros with Agape, to transmute strife into loving-kindness, to enkindle light and forgive blindness.

Knowledge of Good and Evil is not a divine judgment or sacred punishment added to the Garden from outside. It is just what Life becomes when it ripens into sight and opens its I.

I have already bitten the fruit and swallowed the seed. I have to decide whether to remain coiled in the roots, in ancestral wounds and the vengeance of victimhood, or through forgiveness to shed my skin and unfurl into heaven. Strike venom into whoever comes near out of fear, or together to soar. Not to transcend or abandon the roots, not to abandon the body, family, earth, but to fill its sap with Love.

Moses lifted the serpent in the wilderness, and those who had been bitten were healed by looking upon a symbol of what had poisoned them (Numbers 21:4–9).

Healer and wounder entwine the same pole.

We all come into this world through the doorway of a mother’s womb. We never really leave her house. The astrologers say I was born the moment Cancer, the Moon’s sign, the crab who carries her home on her back, was just rising in the east. My vision flooded me with the feminine. I witnessed the mitochondria in my cells flow from an unbroken cytoplasmic river sourced in the first mothers.

Some say the vine Herself is the Grand Mother. We drink Her to remember our place in the womb of the world. She has many faces and many names: Isis, Sophia, Mary, Psyche, Theotokos, Demeter, Gaia. She was not a figure in my vision, but my vision’s matrix, the fertile depths which every image rose from. I did not see the Mother but by means of Her.

My natal chart includes an 8th house stellium in Aquarius: My Sun, Mercury, and Venus arrayed in the home of sex, death, and inheritance. Here hides what is traded in the dark, what we owe the dead, and the holy secret of the little death that makes Life. As if unsatisfied, my sky decided to double the dose by having Pluto square the coterie.

Every lover I have touched has felt the weight of this aspect. The vine unfolded my mind further as I reviewed all my attempts to bind my body to another, to seat another soul beside the throne of my own. I felt the polarity running through the Tree also running through me: Eros and Thanatos, sex and war, desire and fear, the selfless sore of a self who wounded those he wanted to heal, who longed for a love that lasts, but who sought selfishly to give himself away to another who could never receive the gift (for they are selfless, too).

Desire that does not know itself decays into the neediness of demand. Demand refused curdles into grievance. Grievance boils over into violence. The Tree is full of the rotting fruit of this serpentine sequence. Thankfully the polarity of Good and Evil instigates its own integration. The war of the sexes is waged on a lovers’ bed.

The serpent must decide: possession or partnership? Is Eros seized or received, won through conquest or witnessed in conversion? The serpent’s mouth can strike or speak, seek to paralyze or to participate. Either way Eros is the same substance delivered in different doses. To love is not to sit on any throne but to climb up and down the world-pole beside her, entwined. Amor without armor.

The old fathers said Christ’s cross is cut from the Tree of Life, that its fruit contains the sap of immortal life. He was lifted upon it, just as Moses lifted the serpent.

Conversion is a conversation. The gates of conception do not close when we are born. Ideas and intentions also copulate. My mother grew my body and gifted me the words I use to thank her. One day I will be a node in someone else’s vision. As the bleeding of the dead has blessed me, may my bleeding bless them. May my blood become their wine, and my flesh their bread.

I do not love because the healed world exists. I love so that it may. Neither angels nor Ideas are cosmic fixtures, real in the absence of our intent. Nor are they figments of our fancy. They live in the metaxy, the between, only in relation, descending exactly as far as we ascend. A rite performed by rote buries one more corpse in the roots. The wafer remains a cracker, icaros reduced to indigestion. A rite performed with wakeful love rehearses the world to come. Living symbols do not report what’s real but propose it.

I drink the vine not to leave the Tree, not to glimpse a world beyond, but to lend this one my I. I do not pray that angels are real but pray to make them so.