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The Dove in the Stone
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All our readers know that the dove is a bird sacred to Sophia. Mary of Magdala, who married Jesus at the wedding of Cana, came from a village that was famous for its doves. These birds were used by the hundreds of thousands in Temple rituals, and Magdala was the village that bred them. It was so wealthy that its taxes had to be taken to the Temple in ox carts.
The Holy Spirit, to the first Christians, was feminine in nature and symbolized by a dove. And in the Mystery School of Bethany, when Jesus was the Master, Mary Magdalene was his feminine counterpart. The great cathedrals of France that were built by the Templars and Companions were dedicated to this Mary.
The Celtic Christians retained more of the original teachings of Jesus than the Roman Church. In fact, many of the Roman hierarchy considered Saint Patrick to be a heretic. He, like Saint Columba managed to build on the older faith without seeing any need to destroy it. And it was Columba who came with the requisite twelve disciples to the island of Iona off Scotland.
Coincidentally, perhaps, Columba is Latin for dove, and Iona is also Hebrew for dove. When Jesus called Peter, 'son of Jonas' it could have meant 'son of the dove.' Columba arrived at this utterly magical place on the Eve of Pentecost, May 12, 563 the day of the ascent of the Holy Spirit in the Christian calendar...symbolized by a dove. Another coincidence.
There is a sweet and wonderful book about the discovery of Sophia on this magical island in the Hebrides. Its title is The Dove in the Stone. Finding the Dove in the Stone is a way of expressing what we do when we see the spiritual Sophia in the material world.
The author, Alice Howell was into her seventies when she wrote the book. She is a Jungian analyst and has written wisely about the feminine aspect of the psyche before. But in this book she produces another Annam Cara.
By the time she was twelve she had been to over thirty countries and her world was one of cavernous railway stations, sleeping on trains like the Orient Express, with the current nurse or governor. Sometimes her mother was away, sometimes her father. She was often by herself in hotels in foreign lands before the days of radio or television.
Her mother realized the stress and suggested that she build a place in her own inner realms where they could always be together. The young girl took to the idea at once and soon had access to a wonderful 'imaginary' land full of all sorts of marvelous creatures and patently
real to her.
Years later as an analyst she realized that is was easy for her as a child to log onto the numinous world of the archetypes, the primordial images of the unconscious. It resonated too with the Buddhist concept of Land of Pure Bliss. So for some years she would get on the little train in her
imagination and travel to this land of such supernal beauty that as a widely traveled adult she knew could not exist.
One day in her mid-forties she was living in Long Island and looking through a book of pictures, and there it was, in the Hebrides, a group of islands off the northwest coast of Scotland, a place she had never been to. Her chances of going there were nil, she thought, so she did what humans do: thought she would be disappointed if she could go, and anyway she had
four small children and a husband and not much money. She dismissed the idea.
Then the goddess took a hand, and a lady appeared on the doorstep to look at her husband's art, and asked if there was a picture of St. Martin's cross on Iona, or what could she find out about it. Alice looked it up, and read about Columba and Iona. As she put it, "deep inner bells began ringing," and she knew she wanted to go there and sometime she would.
Shortly after that, a friend of hers died and left her enough money to go to Iona with two of her children. And it was identical to the place of the inner realms of her childhood. In the book she describes how she was led to pick up a stone from the sill of the chapel in Iona, and after some interesting psychic adventures took it into the Great Pyramid.
Later, on a Mediterranean cruise she met the seventy year old man she would marry in her seventies. In the book she takes him to Iona on her eleventh trip, and introduces him to its wonders. His own bright and inquiring mind adds to her own deep perceptions of how the goddess Sophia can be found everywhere in the mundane world if you know how to look. And this most beautiful book tells you how to look.
The lady herself is not only a professional analyst of Jung's school but also followed in his footsteps by using astrology as a tool to perceive spiritual insights. I have a built-in awareness of some of what she says because my own heart was left behind when I had to leave Paradise, which to my young self was a special place in Wales. Tros y môr y mae fy nghalon. (Across the sea is my heart.) The very name Iona used to bring tears to my eyes when I repeated it gently to myself. It was many years later when I learned that IAO was the mantra of Sophia, and that I was repeating her sacred triplet of vowels.
To those of you who are rock and crystal enthusiasts I will point out that Iona is made of a rock that is different from the mainland. It is the oldest rock on Earth and contains the memories of everything that has happened, to those with the necessary spiritual keys.
I cannot pull out one thing from the book to share, because this is right brained stuff, it's all one piece, and analysis doesn't work. There is spirituality of a high order here, and every devotee of the Lady Sophia will find her, and her sense of humor. in every page. Read it if you can. The book is published by the Theosophical Printing House.
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