Fatima, Portugal
Aug 2022

After feeling the nourishing, healing effects of the Goddess Mother in the form of Kali, I wanted to experience a variety of manifestations of the Goddess. Breadth-first approaches come naturally to me. If I experience something profound in one instance, a desire to attempt to recreate the same in a different yet similar setting naturally seems to arise in me. It seems to help me figure out what’s mine, what’s the other’s and what belongs to the environment. Or perhaps it’s just my Platonic obsession for abstractions.

Plato himself argued that the beauty of the abstract realm, which immeasurably exceeds that of any single particular, can and ought to kindle a passion far larger than any prompted by individual beautiful persons (fickle, imperfect creatures who cannot even be counted on to love us in return and whose beauty not only cannot compete with the transcendent sort but also is subject to the corrosive actions of time).

Goldstein, Rebecca. Incompleteness: The Proof and Paradox of Kurt Gödel (p. 63)

It seems to me that Plato experienced deep heartbreak. The kind that leaves you a bit sour. Or perhaps Rebecca did. Or the translator of the specific version of Plato’s work, that Rebecca read, did.

I was set for Granada to experience my next ISTA. An intellectual sense that I could work out some colonial trauma in a space that I typically associate with a colonize-r culture (Spain) that was colonized by Muslims combined with a crush on one of the ISTA facilitators to bring me there. Attraction has often led me in the right direction. I believe it’s because all attraction is a manifestation of the soul’s desire to merge with the All-Attractive one soul. Krishna is the Sanskrit word for the “all-attractive destination”.

The flights to Lisboa were cheaper, so I decided I’d fly in there and then journey on land to Granada. Well-travelled, cultured humans refer to Lisbon as Lisboa. So I shall call it the same :) I had mentioned my desire to experience the Goddess energies of different cultures to a friend that I made at the West African dance and drum classes in the anthroposophical community of Ghent, NY. He immediately mentioned Fatima to me. So I decided to head straight to Fatima after landing in Lisboa.

Fatima was rumored to have had visitations by the spirit of the Virgin Mary in 1917. Three shepherd children saw the spirit of the Virgin Mary under a tree. They went back and told the villagers. No one believed them. They saw her again a few times. Finally, the village took note. She described to them a cosmic phenomenon that was going to happen soon. 70,000 devout Christians showed up at the appointed time in Fatima to witness this phenomenon. It was labelled “The Miracle of the Sun”. Some saw the Sun zigzag in sky, come close, go far. Science men came in white lab coats and half-moon glasses, talked to a few of the humans declared statistical insignificance of the sample set and inconsistencies in reports and filed the phenomenon away in the large filing cabinet labelled “Scientifically Dismissed Instances of the Phenomenon of Spirits” in a basement, 6 stories deep inside the Temple of Science. They ordered a new cabinet to be set up right next to this one because this one was full now.

I went to Fatima. I attended a night mass there and couldn’t stomach a bunch of (perceptibly) disembodied men in white cloaks speaking in a solemn, orderly manner about the Virgin Mary. My experience of the Goddess involves divine, feminine Chaos. The kind of Chaos where my mind stops its feeble attempts at finding Order and just surrenders. As open as I was to experiencing variants of the Goddess, I couldn’t open my mind to this particular representation and I left midway.

At the Church in Fatima, there’s a tradition there where you offer wax objects of a body part, that is being afflicted, to a ceremonial fire so that the Virgin Mary can cure you of the affliction.

I was reminded of the Aghori Tantric ritual – शव साधना – described in Aghora, where you do penance in a graveyard to please the Goddess of the Graveyard, Smashan Tara, one of the ten Tantric Mahavidyas. Essentially a form of Shakti, the primordial divine Feminine. A sister form of Kali.

If she is pleased, she appears in the form of a wild animal. A jackal. A tiger. Then you are supposed offer her a piece of flesh and a glass of alcohol, with love. Imagine sticking to that plan when you suddenly see a tiger appear in the dead of the night in the middle of a graveyard! Hah. Anyways, if you are able to do so, then the animal morphs into Smashan Tara and she asks you for a boon. The Aghori Vimalananda offered his arm for the jackal to sink its teeth in.

Wax replicas of human body parts offered to the Virgin Mary. Body part offered to Smashan Tara.

I decided to play along and picked up a knee and a heel.

My left knee has been afflicted ever since I landed a woman I was dancing with straight onto my left hip in a grungy club in Ann Arbor, Michigan and heard the loudest pop from within my body that I’ve ever heard as I tumbled down and had to get my ACL repaired shortly thereafter. It’s never been back to the same. And my right Achilles heel has had an odd pain that I’m certain (roll your eyes at me all you want) I absorbed somatically from a human I was talking to at a Full Moon ceremony in Los Angeles, as they were describing their own right heel pain to me.

I offered the wax pieces to the ceremonial fire. And stared at the fire for a bit.

There were droves of people who had offered candles. Everything offered was a replica of a body part except for the candles. Except for the candles. The wax cylinders that were commonly referred to as “candles”. When you pop LSD, your brain’s ability to label an object really slows down. That’s why when people trip, they’ll stare at regular objects with fascination. Labelling robs us of the fascination. We can see things we’ve never seen before, if we resist the urge to label. Candles. Candles. Candles.

The candles were not just lit but also added to the ceremonial fire. Burning things in ceremonial fire is not something I typically associate with mainstream Catholic Christianity. Pagan, animist rituals on the other hand have plenty of fire play.

As the candles burned, their rigid structures softened and they went limp.

What was being offered to the Fire, tended to by the abstinence-preaching, patriarchal Church, were wax phalluses.

May the Phalluses of All who Cross Boundaries Be Cleansed by the Destructive Fire of the Goddess Mother

As I walked away from the fire and was idly waiting at an intersection, I noticed an elderly woman trip, fall and land on her left knee.

Buddhism doesn’t involve much of “asking for boons”. The Buddhist path is about doing inner work and good actions and thereby cleansing out sankharas and sowing the karmic seeds for nirvanic bliss. Unless you are looking at mainstream variants of Buddhism that are essentially Hinduism in a new mask – I’m looking at you, Thai Buddhism. Don’t @ me.

Hinduism involves a lot of rituals for doing penance for propitiating a deity and then asking them for a boon. The design challenge lies in what boon you ask for. When Vimalananda saw Smashan Tara, he asked to forever be a devotee of the Goddess Mother. There are myths of folks have asked Smashan Tara for lots of sex and she has lovingly complied, turning them into rabbits.

In Christianity, Jesus suffers for our sins. In that, he takes away the karma associated with the sins of his disciples. I don’t know how much of Islam and Judaism involves praying for a specific reason.

Are boons free? Are we sure that when we ask for something, someone else isn’t deprived of the same thing? If you knew someone else was being deprived of that thing, would you feel comfortable asking for it? Would you feel comfortable manifesting wealth in your life with your Sex Magik practice, if you knew that the Universe is taking it away from a less privileged person?

I don’t think boons are free. I apologize to the Physicist in me as I bastardize the following statement, that has been forever claimed by Science and only Science since the Scientific Enlightenment – “Energy can neither be created nor destroyed, only transferred and transformed.”

When I saw the pain on the face of that elderly woman as she nursed her left knee and needed two other humans to pick her up, I thought “Boons are not free”.

Fatima has top notch Indian food. Delicious and authentic at a restaurant named simply “Indian Tastybite”.