Leonardo Da Vinci - Vergine delle Rocce (Louvre), 1483 and 1486

A Meditation on the prophecy of Death by Water

Inspired by: T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land

---

I spy with my little eye

God is water.
Water giveth life and it taketh it away. Drowned in sorrow.

The child we were sits on the rocks, a hard place, and the devil's cup is dark and burned. She awaits the parent within. To be born out of a cloud of cream, in the bosom of a friend.

As you swirl down the drain, you run towards a greater ocean, perhaps to be reborn again in the blubbing of a fish.

The Nacre Sailor

Fortunes told rule the future. The clairvoyante (and/or trickster) Madame Sosostris determines the drowned Phoenician’s fate by his hard, bad-luck opalescent eyes. They will not let the light in. Heavy hearted thus, laminated by viscous water, layer upon nacre layer, the silica encased by the calcium carbonate, the sailor falls overboard. She banishes his soul to the dark cave of the head, strapped to the wall, facing the shadows.

Love, will you sail across the water...?

Addendum pearl:

A head full of sand. We have brain-sand in the Pineal gland - (which produces hormones that relate to light, e.g. melatonin). Aka epiphysis, or third-eye, this gland may be likened to a pinecone, but also a pearl, which is nothing more than a build-up of earth binding elements around the foreign body: the spirit that slipped into the shell of life. We have clad our true self thus, slow and heavy, moist and dim in a world of unconsciousness.

The Belladonna

The belle of the ball. Some liken her to a sfumato madonna, others think of the atropine that makes her a wide-eyed spell-binding temptress. The virgin and the whore. The guardian of the eternally femine, restraining the prophecy of death by means of birth.

Addendum atropine:

Atropine comes from the baneful nightshade, and is used to dilate the pupil, making the pinhole of perception a black hole of desire (used by Renaissance women to allure the opposite sex. What makes big black eyes so attractive?).

The plant, the deadly nightshade, is not a lover of bright sunshine. Its flowers are purple and even its leaves have a violet haze. Its scent is sharp and spicy. It’s fleshy rootstock is a picture for excess bloodflow pressing up against the periphery, flooding organs, over- exciting the nervous system.

The solanacea family is greedy for evolution, to be tiger bright and serpent ready, with fangs and stripes and flickering tounge and flashing eyes. Bite lightly into your tomato!

Highly toxic, but when prepared homeopathically, the alkaloid signature of the root relaxes the sentient body, thereby relieving cramps, spasm’s and pain. It can heal (onset) glaucoma, reincorporating the hardened deposits into the flow of animation (astrality).

The world needs to get into a warm bath to remedy its anxiety and hysteria. In her yearning Gaia is drawn and halved by the sun and the core; Man must find the warmth in his own blood, a circuit for manned horses and their chariots of Krishna fire.

---

Pamela Eakins, “Tarot of the Spirit”, Samuel Weiser,Maine, 1992

The man with three staves:

Eliot finds this card to predict famine and drought in the land, and should the future be restrained then it will indeed fail to inundate with the day-spring of youth: the creative power of love.

There is a more promising side to this card. The holy Trinity is the triangle of perception: tat vam asi, I and I make three. The sleeping bee in the palm of your hand. It is the conception in trusting ecstasy. After the consuming fire, the consummation, comes the immaculate gestation. Summum bonum.

The Mother’s womb is dark and comforting. Here our firey will is contained. We rest in the magenta stillness of the subconscious, waiting for the birth of light. In trust, in surrender to the pangs of promise. Resistance is rejection, the opposite of love (the water music of life).

Leave the skull on the hill, at the foot of the cross you bore, as you move into transfiguration. Manifest, a diamond spirit, translucent in all its facets. Renew the skin you live in; nurse the bites; bury the bones; receive the light.

I initially found this image at a comprehensive tarot deck website but it turns out this artist is also a Steemian these days: reinhard-schmid.

You may meet a one-eyed merchant from Symrna. Beware: an immoral and greedy person. And watch out for the man carrying some unknown object behind his back. A bunch of fleurs du mal?
Then there are men who think in solutions, doing time.
Like the hanged man in the revivifying pose. Portal to respiritualisation. Struck by lightning, the falling of bridges, the toppling from the Tower.
Wheeeee! A merry-go-round.

The wheels on the bus go round and round. Turn, turn, turn ...

I just had to let it go