A wild UPG appears! (Sulis and water deities in general)

[Sophia C]

More and more, I've been feeling that it's always like that. That each person is where he or she is supposed to be spiritually right now, and it's something no one ever needs to worry about.

 
That is very wise.

[Tana]

I call it "divine fluidity." My favorite Chinese poet, Li Ho, said "the gods are here, forever present between somewhere and nowhere."

I like that!

And I just found - coincidence or not? - this:

The Goddess by Carl Jung

“The goddess is in my thinking, in the movement of the spiral.
Like so many things in nature (plants, the seasons, the moon)
the goddess moves in the darkness as much as in the light.
She lives in the present and evaluates the moment.
What is right today may be wrong tomorrow.
She lives by the spirit, not by the law.
She demands constant awareness and spontaneity.
She loves the potential in things; the possibilities
in the growing plant, the growing child,
the growing hopes and dreams.
She trusts life, trusts change, trusts love
and holds nothing static.
She loves and lets go.
She loves with her whole being.
So that vulnerability becomes her greatest strength.
What for those who do not love her is contradiction,
for those who do love her becomes paradox.”

[Sophia C]

((hugs)), if hugs are OK by you.  I've only got the tiniest glimpse of this stuff, and it was kind of by accident.  To be honest I feel like a complete noob who's stumbled across Big Shiny accidentally and I'm not sure I was even supposed to.  Most of my thoughts on this are only semi-coherent and a bit self-contradictory, and it's quite humbling to be sharing this thread with a lot of folks who are more across the lore, more experienced and more confident at this sort of thing, and who generally appear to have a clue what they're talking about  (unlike me).   And I include you in those wise, knowledgeable folk.  Your PBP posts are thoughtful and clever and make my brain hurt, in a good way.

In the interests of being honest, here's how the 'I stumbled into this by accident' happened:

Over the years I've tried off and on to visit what a tarot teacher many years ago called "The Library".  (I think there was a thread about it here recently??)  Basically it's a big metaphysical Amazon Warehouse where you can look up anything and everything.  In the class where we were taught about it, we'd do a guided meditation to 'go' there and everyone else would come back with these amazing insights into their cards and reality, and I'd get nothing but boredom and an itchy nose.  Just couldn't get into the brain-space for it at all.  Decided it was all a big con.

But just recently, I may - may - have managed to actually get into The Library.  While I've had the vague feeling that there was something more and bigger to Sulis for quite a while, a lot of the more specific stuff I mentioned back in the OP was gleaned from, or worked out since, that visit to The Library.

Like I said, I may have stumbled blindly into something by accident.  That's the story of my life, really.  

 
Thank you! And don't we all stumble upon these things by accident, one way or the other? I don't there's any 'not supposed to' - to echo what Gilbride said to me. Also, I'm interested in the concept of the Library - that's got some fascinating possibilities.

[Arcadia]

I also think we should take a good, hard look at the possibility that our constellation includes deities usually identified as "male". F'ex, I hope it's not sacrilege to suggest that Apollo might be part of this.


~ Aster

 
Not sacrilege for me... Apollo has always appeared to me as female, so much so, that it took me 10 years to realise that 'she' was Apollo all along.

I have wanted for so long to share this, but I have never heard of anyone referring to Apollo's feminine side. I'm still nervous someone will turn around and scold me.

This thread has sparked a lot of light bulbs for me and then you mentioned Apollo may be connected in some way and I had to say something.

I am always guarded about sharing upg, I'm not so good at expressing it and it often comes out wrong and people can misunderstand where I am coming from.

If this in any way makes any sense to anyone, there is more I would like to share about this, if I can get it out of my head in a coherent manner.

[Tana]

I have wanted for so long to share this, but I have never heard of anyone referring to Apollo's feminine side. I'm still nervous someone will turn around and scold me.

Don't worry. As long as you don't state your UPG as The Truth (tm) you're pretty safe.

Gender is a very limiting concept.
Even for humans, how could it apply to gods and be not even more limiting?

The Lady of the Star is not a she, nor a he.
Even if the energy I perceive is female.

Tho' my Lord's energy is definitely male, a god is not a man or a women, but a god.
And what a god is - well, we could ponder that question for the rest of our life and still wouldn't know.

I think we need to accept that our perception is one thing, but that this perception does not make the thing, we see/feel/hear only this small part we can see/feel/hear.

[Gilbride]

The Lady of the Star is not a she, nor a he. Even if the energy I perceive is female.

Yes. I think we experience divine energies that we think of as masculine or feminine, but the "thing in itself" is beyond our comprehension and not limited by a binary set of options. And I'm okay with that; I don't feel the need to correct myself for thinking of the "Brighid energy" as feminine even if I intellectually accept that She is not limited by my cultural conditioning.

[Aster Breo]

I am always guarded about sharing upg, I'm not so good at expressing it and it often comes out wrong and people can misunderstand where I am coming from.

If this in any way makes any sense to anyone, there is more I would like to share about this, if I can get it out of my head in a coherent manner.

I, for one, would be very interested in your thoughts about any of this.  TBH, I'd never actually articulated that idea about Apollo before, even to myself.  But something about this thread reminded me of a tiny (and also huge) experience I had with someone I thought, at the time, was Apollo.  But this was many years ago, before I'd learned much at all -- and before I'd "found" Brighid.  So, I sort of told myself I was imagining things (even though I had a photograph of the sun dogs that accompanied the event), and swept it under my brain's rug.  Where it stayed until now.

I hope you will share your UPG and your musings here.  I strongly believe that the only way we can even approach understanding about something like this is if we stop censoring ourselves and trust others to respect our ideas.

No one of us has all the pieces.  We need each other.

[Fausta]

Very interesting.  I'd really like to learn more about Her!

 
She's referred to as Sun in this online edition of Kalevala in Engish, just put Sun in your browser's search. There's only a short mention there, I'm afraid.

However, I'll pop downstairs to see if any of our books mention her, as we do have a couple of books on Finnish mythology, even though we don't belong to them.

[Shine]

I think we made only one mistake back then: we took the whole momentum and the sharing to closed parts of the fora and the groups. I am convinced that this was, what finally killed the whole thing.

Yes. So we can keep this open to all who are interested in the Lady? I was so sad when the thread on the old board petered out and everything moved to private space.

To see a similar thing happening again now, convinces me, that the Lady once again reaches out to Her own, because she wants us to 'see' Her. And in 'seeing' Her to understand how vast and intangible she is.

Wherever we are, whoever we worship, and from wherever those deities come from, she can reach out to us all.

[Darkhawk]

The real question is, was I truly mistaken or was I just too lazy to look it up and knew someone would come along and correct me?

....I'll show myself out.

 
Aahz's Law: The best way to get information on Usenet is not to ask a question, but to post the wrong information.

[Vale]

Yes. So we can keep this open to all who are interested in the Lady? I was so sad when the thread on the old board petered out and everything moved to private space.

.

My problem though is that this is just too public a venue for me to be prepared to share much  - this thread is already second from the top in a search for Sulis UPG and I'm just not comfortable  sharing intensely personal experiences with the whole internet.

[Shine]

My problem though is that this is just too public a venue for me to be prepared to share much  - this thread is already second from the top in a search for Sulis UPG and I'm just not comfortable  sharing intensely personal experiences with the whole internet.

 
I agree that there are probably certain UPGs that are too personal to share with the entire internet or even those that are too personal to share with anyone at all. For example, I haven't shared everything about Bast--and, in all likelihood, never will. Some of the mystery leaks out of the Mystery when you talk about everything.

But there are some UPGs that some of us might feel comfortable sharing. So, I think perhaps this thread is reasonably good enough for that purpose. I hope you don't feel like you're pressured to share anything and everything if you don't want to, because I don't think that's the idea behind this discussion.

Would you feel better if the discussion was happening on a private Cauldron board? Just curious, because it seems like some aspects of this discussion could happen on the Mystery Builders SIG (I'm sure someone will correct me if that's not true), which is a board visible only to members of the Cauldron.

[Vale]

Would you feel better if the discussion was happening on a private Cauldron board? Just curious, because it seems like some aspects of this discussion could happen on the Mystery Builders SIG (I'm sure someone will correct me if that's not true), which is a board visible only to members of the Cauldron.

 
I don't necessarily have a problem in sharing but I do like to know who I'm sharing with!  - so yes I'd be a lot happier on an un-indexed  forum. It doesn't have to be a closed group, just not visible to the entire internet for ever and a day!

[Aster Breo]

Would you feel better if the discussion was happening on a private Cauldron board? Just curious, because it seems like some aspects of this discussion could happen on the Mystery Builders SIG (I'm sure someone will correct me if that's not true), which is a board visible only to members of the Cauldron.

Great idea!

I don't see any reason we couldn't move this discussion to that SIG.

[Tana]

Great idea!

I don't see any reason we couldn't move this discussion to that SIG.

Agreed. Seems like a good way to handle this.