She Was A Bee: The dance between myth and fact

There was once a temple built of beeswax and feathers.  It sat in a mountainous region near a cave where bees, or was it souls, came and went.

On looms of spirit, nymphs wove the purple threads of form, while honey pots filled, and the the divinatory bees in their maiden nature, swarmed in and out.

After some time, the Temple far below the ancient cave of mysteries, renewed itself in stone, for stone is the most lasting of substances to the mortal eye.  Yet still beneath its cool, firm walls, remained the hidden remembrance of holiness formed from bodies who fly on veiled and feathered wings.

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We are always reinventing the past.  Reweaving myth and retelling history mythically.  Borrowing from poets of old and calling them historians, we seek to divine what was.  We beg the old pages and stone tablets to reveal facts which we call truths, but is it not all part of a story ever-changing?  Are we not always dreaming and being dreamt in mythic time?

The above words are threaded together from ancient texts depicting Delphi and the Corycian cave further up the mountain from this divinatory temple complex.  It is said that the second temple of Delphi was built of beeswax and feathers.  How are we to interpret these words?  How do we make meaning of the presence of nymphs and bees in the cave above? Does it have anything to do with the priestess who offered lasting prophecy being named the Delphic Bee?

I find the further into the past I delve for truth in the form of facts, the more the certainties of what was crumble in my hands.  What we want to be there, written for all to see, is not.  The mysteries we seek, are called mysteries for a reason.  We romanticize the gleanings and glimpses.  We cast aside the story that the oracles were frothing, babbling, drug addled.  We reawaken the story of women seers, learned, and adept.  We remember that women’s spiritually has been looking for ways to remember itself.

The further I go into following the bees into antiquity,  the more my longing for the romance of it all is slowly replaced by a different, more sure-footed knowing, that places the mysteries of the ancients within the same labyrinth my feet have always been walking upon.

At what point did we decide that the historian and the artist were cut from different cloth? At what point did the historian become one who deal in reality, and the poet, one who does not?

There are truths in the poems and stories.  Deep earth, ancient selves, universal memory kind of truths.  Yet how do we draw meaning from the pin pricks of light that we glean from ancient records and art, while also appreciating that we will never truly know the past?

Why? Because history too is part of a mythic working, where poets become historians and record keepers were artisans.

Always we seek not to assume, and yet always we fill the cracks of lost history with thoughts, desires, and assumptions of our own.

Delphi is a place where prophecy was given by the Delphic bee, also known as a Pythoness, for over a thousand years.  And somehow, mixed into the cooking pot of Delphic history are our friends, the serpent and the bee.

What history tells us, is that only women gave prophecy at Delphi.  What I hear, is that once, the the hearts and minds of the people, it was believed that a woman could sit in the dark and become the voice of divine wisdom, and in this wisdom she was called Bee.  In this wisdom she was called Snake.

Meanwhile, in modern day mayhem of our fast-paced lives governed by global markets, productivity apps, and information overload, there is a European folk pathway, based in animism, that turns to the serpent and the bee as guides in the living practice of giving oracle.  Who is to say if some spark of the bee nymphs and the pythonesses did indeed find its way from antiquity to the present?  Who is to say that when we drop into the dark, and open our bodies to the magnetic earth, we might in fact, be singing the same song we have been seeking?

photos by Koa Kalish