LadyHawke:
The
Union of Opposites, Gemini & The Lovers
If I had to pick an archetypal embodiment of
Gemini, it would be the Bards, those
ancient and modern storytellers and wisdom-keepers who inspire their people with
imagination and hope. Bards understand
what people are going through - they create, paint, dance and communicate what
they see through stories and songs to help people connect to the great Mystery
of Life. This is Gemini’s soul task – to
experience, learn, remember and share cultural wisdom. The Beatles are modern Bards, passing along to
the rest of us music and stories which embodied the new vision of life we were
exploring in the 60s. They gave us a new
template for life.
What happens when our collective wisdom no
longer serves life? What happens when
there is a split between our beliefs and our actions? That’s when Bards and their stories become
important. They take us to the
archetypal realms, to the rich storehouse of ancient wisdom that can help us
accept and embody our individual purpose and power.
Something new arises. A new perspective achieved. Growth.
Consciousness.
The
Sign of Gemini
The sign of Gemini, the divine and mortal
Twins, not only speaks to how we learn and perceive the world, but also
symbolizes our dualistic world, the 0’s and 1’s of our binary code. Our fifteen billion year old universe gave
rise to the dualities of life and so we perceive things through the lens of day
and night, sun and moon, good and evil, life and death, conscious and
unconscious, right and left, male and female.
In Tarot, Gemini is represented by
the major arcana card, The Lovers. When we look at the possible meanings of the Lovers, they all hint at the union of opposites, the great alchemical
transformation which gives rise to the Self, the Divine consciousness within
us. Gemini and The Lovers seek
synthesis, combining the head and the heart, feeling and intellect. And they represent male and female coming
together as two equal, complementary and yet opposite energies. And of course, this bond includes sexuality,
which is the most intimate form of bond between these opposites. What forms the real bond, though, is Love,
the divine connector.
Unfortunately, patriarchy through
its religious institutions has marginalized the truth of love at the same time
as it has glorified it. How can it be
otherwise when the only god-image we are allowed is masculine? Our old patriarchal paradigm of partnership
is innately imbalanced, giving greater weight to masculine, rational, solar
consciousness than to feminine, imaginative, lunar consciousness. Love and relationship are the most sacred
experiences of Life, and yet as we see in the myth of Psyche and Eros,
we are most often left to stumble into love without any real knowledge of how
to act and what it means. Our world is
sorely in need of a new paradigm of partnership, an equal and balanced union of
masculine and feminine consciousness, of left and right brains, and of men and women.
This imbalance between the sexes and modes of consciousness has
given rise to a dominator mentality, regarding life and love. Raine Eisler’s Sacred Pleasure: Sex, Myth
and the Politics of the Body, lays
out how important it is to understand the way society uses pain or pleasure to
motivate human behavior, which determines how it evolves. Traditional Christian imagery, which is the
basis of western civilization, sacralizes pain rather than pleasure, especially
in choosing Christ Crucified rather than the Risen Christ as their central god-image. Women’s bodies and sexuality have been
demonized by Christianity and therefore rigidly controlled. And so, we have a society where there is
mistrust between men and women and control issues in our sexual relationships because
of this longstanding religious mistrust.
Ms. Eisler speaks about two different models
of sexuality, the dominator model and the partnership model. In the dominator model, men dominate women
and other men through fear and force.
They equate sexuality and pleasure with pain and domination – i.e., violence
and pornography – and block the natural bonding that the giving and receiving
of sexual pleasure brings. The
partnership model is based on equality between all people, but especially between
men and women, and the bonding through sexual pleasure is held sacred.
When men and women work together, nothing can
stop us. But we’ve been separated for a
long time now by religious belief, domination and violence, genetic inheritance
and soul history. The power generated in
equal measure by masculine and feminine spirit can enliven the re-birth process
we so desperately need for ourselves and our world. Conscious women and men working together can
re-birth the world.
So for Gemini’s movie theme of the union of
opposites, we’ll let the story of LadyHawke
enchant our minds and open our hearts to the possibility of breaking this
ancient curse between the sexes and reclaiming the most powerful gift of life –
LOVE.
LadyHawke
Richard Donner’s 1985 film LadyHawke speaks to this theme of the degrading
of love and the violence and separation it causes before we can achieve the
ultimate re-union of Love. Patriarchy
has not been kind to Love, giving it hypocritical lip service, but degrading
and prostituting it to serve the needs of the system rather than the flowering
of the individual soul. We cannot grow
into our wholeness without learning the lessons of love. It’s part of our DNA, and the most beautiful
gift of Spirit in our sojourn here on Earth.
The ways of love are many. They include the ways we connect through the
heart to children, parents, siblings, family, friends, lovers, communities, the
world, art, ideas, Nature, visions, stories. Love fills us with pleasure and pain in equal
measure, but always teaches us lessons.
So never let a chance to love slip you by! There’s always a gift and a sacrifice
involved. So let’s see how these themes
play out in our tale of cursed lovers.
LadyHawke is a story of two lovers who are cursed by a
powerful bishop because the woman, Isabeau, does not love him, but loves
Navarre, the captain of the guard of Aquila.
The curse the bishop casts is heartbreaking: by day, Isabeau is a hawk and at night she
resumes her human shape; Navarre keeps his human form by day and at night he
becomes a wolf. They are cursed to be
separated forever. Then one day, a young
thief becomes Navarre’s companion and their fate starts to change. Gaston becomes their go-between, bringing them
hope in their darkness. And with the
help of the priest who unknowingly betrayed their love, a way out of the curse
is found. During a solar eclipse, a day without night and a night without day,
a time between times, they can both stand before the bishop and break the
curse. It is during solar eclipses that
old patterns of behavior and thought can be broken, and psychic structures
hidden in the unconscious can take on new life. LadyHawke is a reminder that
the cosmos supports love and can break the spell old ideas and beliefs hold over
us that no longer serve life.
LadyHawke is a magical story about the Mind’s ability
to overcome the ancient ‘curse’ of our religious beliefs and the ultimate
triumph of Love. There are four main
characters that drive the story: the Bishop who curses, the lovers who bear the
curse, and the trickster who comes along and changes their story. While dogma has cursed lovers with separation
and denial, the fresh, original Mind/Heart brings them together again.
The
Dogma of Disconnection
The Church as embodied by the Bishop (a wonderfully evil John Wood) is
hypocritical, refined, all-powerful, lustful and authoritarian, vindictive and
cowardly. He represents the dogma of both
church and state, the dominator mentality that believes it has a divine right
to whatever it wants. This Bishop
thinks he loves Isabeau, but when she refuses his love, he would
rather see her dead or cursed than to see her be happy with someone else. This is the selfishness of dominator love –
the beloved becomes a possession. To
oppose the Bishop’s will is to court disaster, for he is willing to use all the
power at his disposal to keep the lovers apart; he’s even willing to use the sinful (for his Church) tool of magic to
achieve his revenge. However, when he
curses the lovers to take on the form of animals, Nature herself ultimately
opens the door to the possibility of breaking the curse.
In the same vein, this month’s Gemini solar
eclipse opens the door to our own transformation. The solar eclipse blocks our ego
consciousness (sun), so new archetypal possibilities (moon) can take root within
our psyches. One task all of us share for this lifetime is
to break the chains of violence and possessiveness that is patriarchy’s
response to sexuality and love. Heal
your own inner Lover by breaking the old spell at the eclipse.
The
Trickster Mind
Opposing the Bishop/Church is our little
thief, Phillipe Gaston, aka the Mouse (a delightful Matthew Broderick). Over against official dogma is set the
inquisitive and questing mind that nothing can imprison. This young man embodies the qualities of
Hermes the Thief, the ancient messenger god who, under his guise of Mercury,
rules over Gemini. Gaston frequently
talks with God, using Him as therapist and spiritual director, promising to
change his ways as he escapes through a drainpipe from the inescapable prison
of Aquila or when he sees something his rational mind can’t comprehend. Uniting both common sense and spiritual
insight is the goal of the Gemini mind. Gaston’s communication with Spirit takes a
turn when he meets the monk Imperius, the priest who foolishly told the Bishop
of the lovers’ intentions. The guilt of
having been the cause of the curse drives Imperius to find a way to break it. When the lovers refuse to believe the traitor
priest, Gaston takes up his cause and uses Imperius’ knowledge to help them
break the curse.
Gaston
is the trickster mind which looks outside the box to previously disregarded or
forbidden knowledge which can be used to unite these lost lovers, bringing
messages of hope and eventual redemption. He brings a new awareness and
consciousness to the lovers, who have been isolated from community and in exile
from each other. Through him, they start
to communicate and once again see the possibility of re-uniting.
Gaston’s Mouse totem gives him the ability to
focus and pay attention to details. This
attention to detail is Hermes’ gift to thieves.
And these details help break the curse in the end, because it looks at
the parameters of the curse and finds out that it can only be broken when
there’s a day without night and a night
without day – the magical time between times of a solar eclipse, when the
conscious authority of ego and culture is overwhelmed by the needs of the
psyche and wholeness.
The
Lovers and the Curse
Etienne Navarre (a dashing Rutger Hauer) is
the captain of the guard in Aquila, the region the Bishop rules. Isabeau (a haunting Michelle Pfeiffer) is a
beautiful young woman whom the Bishop lusts after. After Isabeau confesses her love for Navarre
to Imperius (a marvelous Leo McKern) in confession, he in turn drunkenly
reveals their secret to the Bishop. Here
is the dilemma our religious institutions create – on the one hand, the
authority of the Church wants to possess all beauty and goodness for
itself. All love must be directed to
these religious beliefs, making human love secondary to a supposed love of God. On the other hand, the Church itself values
marriage, but only on its terms. The
idea that all marriage must be sanctioned by religious dogma is hypocritical,
especially in light of the revelations of priestly pedophilia. The Bishop, who is supposed to be celibate, lusts
after women and feels it’s his right to possess them as his handmaidens. This kind of spiritual hypocrisy leads to the
separation of lovers rather than to their love’s fulfillment. The
Church has fostered suspicion and misunderstanding between men and women and we
see this today in the many marriages that end in nasty, resentful divorces,
rather than with understanding and compassion.
We often don’t realize how our unconscious
beliefs shape our lives, especially our beliefs about partnership and marriage. While we give lip service to equality, many
men still believe it is their right to dominate their family and abuse their
wives because it is sanctioned by their religion. And women add pain and bitterness to the mix
when they don’t know how to stand up for themselves and meet their partners as
equals. Our culture is so unbalanced
because of religious beliefs that said women are irrelevant except as helpmates
to their husbands. And this led to the
devaluation of feminine consciousness, the right-brained consciousness of
connection, imagination and soul. While
we might not consciously think this, our unconscious motivations are often
still unchanged.
We can see these cursed lovers as symbols of the left and right
brains. The left brain is a scientist and
a mathematician. It is the brain that
looks for the familiar, that categorizes, that is linear, analytical,
strategic. It’s the practical, realistic,
in control part of the brain. It is a master
of words and language. The right brain
is a free spirit, seeing connections with others and spirit. It is creativity and passion, sensuality and
movement. It takes joy in vivid colors,
art and poetry. It is the source of imagination and heart. We
need the higher Mind (the neocortex) to unite these separate sides of
ourselves.
With Navarre
and Isabeau, the curse separates them into Hawk and Wolf. These totem animals are wonderful expressions
of the left and right brains as well as the innate gifts of men and women. Let’s take a look at their symbolic meaning.
The beautiful
Isabeau is human at night, the realm of the feminine Moon. She becomes conscious under the moonlight.
Feminine consciousness has been repressed in patriarchy and so it is most
often unconscious. It comes to us
through dreams and visions and feelings and imagination. So Isabeau learns to live in the darkness of
this kind of consciousness. By day, she
is a hawk. Hawks are strong totems,
keen-eyed and swift. They are the messengers
of spirit and vision. Hawk’s power puts us in touch with kundalini
energies that can open us to higher psychic awareness. Hawk can help us balance this life energy so
that we can achieve beauty and harmony and discover our life’s purpose. Hawk brings messages from our soul, which is
Spirit incarnate, so we can use our creative energies to manifest our destined
purpose. Hawk stimulates this kundalini
energy, giving us greater physical, mental, emotional and spiritual energy to
use in our lives. It urges us to stretch
our imaginations beyond cultural expectations. Hawk catalyzes us with hope and
new ideas. This powerful totem symbolizes
the ability to connect our human consciousness with spiritual awareness. And this is the innate power of feminine
consciousness that women have been denied by patriarchy. Women can bring this night vision into the light of day as the wisdom we need to heal
the world.1
Navarre is
everything we would expect in a knight.
He is dashing, brave, powerful and protective. And he’s got a magnificent horse! He loves and yearns for his Beloved. He follows the hawk and protects her. But he also despairs more than Isabeau,
because he is human in the daytime reality of the Sun. He can only see what is in front of him, and
that is the reality of never breaking the curse. That’s why he wants to go kill
the Bishop and die himself. He has lost his vision and his hope. He has lost Isabeau.
But at night,
under the Moon, he becomes a wolf. In
his nighttime shape, he reverts to the animal that is most often misunderstood
and reviled. Wolves have gotten a bad
rap from humans. We send people out in
helicopters to kill them in the snows and think it is a worthy occupation. While our stories about them are full of terror
and cold-blooded violence, they are really the exact opposite of how our
stories depict them. Rarely, unless they
are wounded or starving, will a wolf attack a human being.
Wolves are
friendly, social and highly intelligent. They can even be joyful! They are loyal to their families and packs and
live by defined rules and rituals. There are alpha males and females who rule the pack, and every wolf has a
place and function in the hierarchy of the pack. There is a balanced mix of alpha authority
and democracy in the pack, which makes their way of life flexible. They rarely fight, going out of their way to
avoid one. Through glances, growls and
postures, they assert dominance and keep the peace. They use a complex body language to
communicate with each other as well as their famous howls and growls. They have strong senses of smell and hearing.
They are attuned to the particulars of their world.
Wolves are
the wild spirits of the animal world, which is why our culture fears them. If we were all free to be our wild selves, we
could not be controlled by religions, governments or corporations. That
freedom, though, comes through discipline and a sense of order. Wolves offer us an image of the right kind of
rituals that shape a good life.2
One thing
that wolves share with hawks is that they mate for life. As Navarre stays to
Gaston, he didn’t even leave us that. We could say that wolves love, because they deal
with their pups with affection and playfulness.
They protect their families and share in taking care of them. If only our society had these qualities, our
divorced couples and their extended families would take better care of their
own children.
Navarre’s wolf
totem is a wonderful symbol for our left brain.
Their intelligence, their ability to form emotional attachments, their
rituals and sense of discipline and order reflect the left brain at its
best. And they are wonderful examples
for men, because we need men to be the loyal, loving, joyful and disciplined
protectors of life.
Dreams of Separation
So many
people today find themselves divorced from a person they thought they loved. While baby-boomers have led the way with
their longing for soul-mates, our children have looked for both independence
and transformation from their partnerships.
So many of us have only found disappointment. But how can we really find soul-mates and
freedom and equality in partnership when we haven’t had those types of
partnerships in the past, either our own past lives or our family history? We have to work on healing the male-female
relationship before our yearnings for a true soul-mate can be realized. We too, have to break the curse.
When my own
marriage was starting to break apart, I had a dream that was very telling. I am in
a beautiful green meadow filled with people I know. I find out that I have to sacrifice myself
for them. I am to be be-headed. I accept this as my fate and go around saying
goodbye to everyone. Some of them
lovingly hug me; some tell me I don’t have to do it. My mom begs me not to do it. When I come to my husband, he is lying on a
Roman-style couch and he ignores me. I
go and kneel down and a man with a black mask over his head comes and swings an
ax. Next thing I know I am standing and
a round object comes flying into my hands and I wake up.
This dream
marked an acceptance of the dissolution of my marriage. That divorce ended up being what I needed to
grow into myself, although it was a long, hard lesson. But I had to accept that I couldn’t find
myself within the marriage – my husband had already gone away. He no longer cherished or wanted to protect
me. This is unfortunately the case in
many marriages. But perhaps Spirit
needed women to learn to survive on our own so we could become the equals of
our men, while men needed to continue the search for their Beloved until they
could become the loving protectors they are meant to be.
I hope you
take this chance to watch this movie and let the story sink in. LadyHawke
is an archetypal tale of the power of the Mind and of Love to break the curse
our unbalanced religious beliefs have caste upon relationships between men and
women and masculine and feminine consciousness. We can use the power of this story to help us
meet this month’s solar eclipse in Gemini with the strength and purpose to
release old perceptions and categories about relationships and let the power of
Love through the power of the Mind awaken us to new possibilities. It is time to unite the opposites, both
within and without. We need men and
women working together, using their own specific gifts in freedom and joy, to
change our world.
And so the
tale ends . . . to be continued.
Cathy Pagano
Footnotes:
1.
Ted
Andrews, Animal Speak: The Spiritual & Magical Powers of Creatures Great
& Small.
(Woodbury,
MN: Llewellyn Publications, 2008). Pp. 152-155.
2.
Ibid.
pp. 323-325.
