Another Round of Flashbacks

* Detailed instructions for making comments are in “News Items.”

* Beltane, is, of course, tomorrow. And Walpurgisnacht is tonight. I’ve written about both in prior posts.

https://ritualabuse.wordpress.com/2017/04/20/walpurgisnacht/

https://ritualabuse.wordpress.com/2013/04/28/beltane/

I hope you all can stay safe over these hard, hard days, and that you can find ways to comfort yourselves. None of this was your fault. By the very fact of your reading this blog, you are working to heal yourself from the wounds they inflicted on you. And, in healing yourself, you are part of the growing movement to fight ritual abuse throughout the world. Perhaps this realization will be an additional comfort to you.

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Last Saturday I shared at my support group that I felt very spacey, like I was not myself. Like I didn’t really have a self. And that I felt ineffective and inferior. It is really annoying to try to do much of anything feeling that way.

It was suggested that I was dissociating and that maybe a memory was trying to come up. Then they gave me some loving reminders that I had, indeed, done a fair amount in my life, and that I was not sitting alone in the house watching TV or staring out the window all day. I still was doing things, maybe not as many as twenty years ago, but still a fair amount.

Lo and behold, a memory did surface. It was prompted by this chiropractic journey I am on. The brain is part of the body. and the mind seems to be part of the brain (most days!)  It is therefore no surprise that bodywork of any kind can bring up all sorts of things.

I’ll share some examples. Be aware that they are a little more graphic than usual.

Once a bodyworker commented on rigidity in my neck. I asked what caused it. She replied, “Trauma. Trauma usually before the age of two.” And I, who at the moment believed that everything started when I was four, sobbed for the rest of the session.

Another time I was taking a Feldenkrais class. and we were working on one large mat. Some movement, I forget exactly what it was, triggered me. I had an image of myself, naked, with other naked children, lying on the floor in a grid pattern. Somebody made the sign of the cross on my stomach and said the words to the effect of, “In the name of Satan, we offer this child to you.” I was sure they were going to stab me and kill me. Again, I sobbed and shook through the rest of the class.

Once again, healing bodywork reminds me that the mind and the body are one and that they can trigger each other. The movement of my body triggers a memory stored in my mind. Other times, the mind triggers body memories – it works both ways.

We are given exercises to do at home every day. Thirty repetitions, which I consider a lot. One of the ones I am working on now consists of sitting up tall in a chair, raising my hands in a T-position (hands in the air as if I were signaling “I surrender,”) opening my chest, and tipping my head back until I can feel the skin on the front of my neck stretch. It’s a very vulnerable position.

I saw myself naked in that same position. I felt a knife at my throat. A man said, “If you talk about this, we will kill you.” And then I felt something warm, the way blood is warm and sticky, along the length of the knife. I don’t know how old I was, but my thinking was sophisticated enough to realize after a few minutes that I was not bleeding to death. I assumed they had made a superficial cut. I expected a scar, but there wasn’t one.

Later I got a second image of me in that position. This time my eyes were shut. The man said, “If you tell, we will stab your eyes.” And the tip of the knife gently touched first one and then the other eyelid.

These flashbacks don’t consume me like the early ones did. I know through and through that they are flashbacks, and I am firmly in the present once the image has surfaced. I take care of myself by telling myself that I am at home, nobody else is there, that my home is beautiful and filled with things I have chosen. I am flooded with feelings of gratitude for being able to choose whatever I want, anything and everything. Food, reading material, projects, friends, furniture, clothes, everything. This is true freedom!

I am reminded of the end of a poem (Out of the Cult) I wrote and posted here.

then oh!
on the horizon
sunflowers, rivers. green hills, sun and sand, soaring gulls, deer,
rabbits, suburbs and suburbs of warm homes, laughter, dancing,
song, beds and food and drink
a plentitude, a plentitude

It was a long road, but I got here.

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Upcoming Holidays

April
4/30 Walpurgisnacht/May Eve
May
5/1 Beltane
5/12 Mothers’ Day
5/18 Full moon
5/27 Memorial Day
June
6/9 – 6/10 Pentecost
6/16 Father’s Day
6/17 Full moon
6/20 Corpus Christi/Feast of the Body of Christ
6/21 Summer solstice
6/23 Midsummer’s Eve
6/24 St John’s Day
July
7/2 Total solar eclipse. Visible in parts of South America
7/4 Fourth of July/ US Independence Day
7/16 Full moon
July 16 – 17 Partial lunar eclipse. Visible in South America, Africa, most of Europe and Asia, Australia, and New Zealand.
7/25 St. James’ Day/Festival of the Horned God

Dates Important to Nazi and Neo-Nazi groups
4/30 Anniversary of Hitler’s death
5/1 – 5/2 Yom HaShoah (Holocaust Memorial Day)
5/7 – 5/8 Yom HaZikaron (Memorial Day, Day of Remembrance)
5/8 – 5/9 Yom HaAtzma´ut (Israeli Independence Day)
5/8 V-E Day (Victory in Europe, WW2)
5/18 Armed Forces Day (?)
(NOTE: Not all groups meet on Jewish holidays. Some groups also mark Candlemas, Beltane, Lammas, Halloween, the solstices and the equinoxes)

Walpurgisnacht

Up-Coming Holidays
4/30  Walpurgisnacht/May Eve
5/1  Beltane/May Day/ Labour Day in Europe  
7/4  Fourth of July/US Independence Day
7/8  Full Moon

7/14  Bastille Day (?)

7/24  Pioneer Day (Mormon)

7/25  St. James’ Day/Festival of the Horned God
Important dates in Nazi groups
4/30  Anniversary of Hitler’s death
5/1  Beltane/May Day/
7/29 Hitler proclaimed leader of the Nazi party

There are a lot of Saints’ days on the Satanic calendar. I’ve tried to research them a couple of times and not found out much, if anything. This time I got enough information to write a post about Walpurga. for whom Walpurgisnacht is named.

Most of what I learned was on the New Advent’s Catholic Encyclopedia http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/15526b.htm
Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walpurgis_Night and a post on the Alabama Media Group’s site by Beverley Crider on what appears to be a series of articles titled “Strange Alabama.” http://blog.al.com/strange-alabama/2013/04/the_other_halloween.html

Celebration of May Eve in Pre-Christian Times
Gaelic people celebrated Beltane, a fertility festival, on May 1. It is exactly six months from Samhain, which marks the beginning of the New Year.  Hibernating animals are now up and about and the seeds that lay dormant in the soil waiting for the days to lengthen once again have become healthy little plants. It’s time to think of making the next generation.

Back then, April 30, the eve of Beltane, was called May Eve. The veil between the world of the living and the world of the dead became thin and the dead came to visit the living (just like on Halloween.) It was an excellent time to ask their help in forecasting the future and in bringing good fortune to all things living – crops and animals as well as humans.

On May Eve home fires were extinguished and bonfires were lit. People stayed up all night and danced in the fields to ensure the crops’ fertility or went “a-maying” into the woods to ensure their own. At sunrise, home fires were lit from the sacred bonfires and then there were games and feasting.

In Germany, April 30 was known as Hexennacht, a night when witches gathered on a tall mountain. The bonfires helped keep them away from the people celebrating. As the centuries passed, the witches got more and more malevolent.

Today, May Eve is called Walpurgisnacht or Hexennacht in Germany. In Holland it is also Heksennacht. It is called  Valborgsmässoafton  in Swedish, Vappu in Finland, Volbriöö in Estonian, Valpurgijos naktis in Lithuanian, Valpurģu nakts or Valpurģi in Latvian, and čarodějnice and Valpuržina noc in Czech.

Where Walpurgisnacht Came From
When Christianity was introduced into these lands, the old feast days were renamed and celebrated with Christian meaning. Often the old ways could be seen underneath the Christian beliefs. May Eve became the feast of Saint Walpurga.

Walpurga was born around 710 AD in Devonshire, England. Her father and brothers went off on a pilgrimage when she was eleven, leaving her at a convent that her brother had founded. She joined the order and stayed 26 years. Scholarship standards were very high: so high so that she later wrote two books about her brothers, “St. Winibald’s Life” and an account in Latin of St. Willibald’s travels in Palestine. She’s considered the first female author of England and of Germany.

Her uncle, Boniface, was a missionary in Germany who established many monasteries and convents throughout the country. In 748 he called for English nuns, including Walpuga, to join him as missionaries. On the voyage from England to Germany, a terrible storm arose. Walpurga knelt on the deck and prayed, the storm lifted, and the seas became calm. This is why she is the patron saint of  sailors.

In  751, she was appointed abbess of the women’s monastery at Heidenheim in southern Germany, where she died on February 25, 777. Her feast day is February 25;  May 1 is the day she was canonized, in about 870. Her body was moved to a church in Eichstaett and in the process it was discovered that the remains secreted a holy oil, which was distributed to pilgrims. The oil was said to ward off or cure physical and spiritual diseases.

 Walpurgisnacht Today
I can’t see much in the life of St Walpurga to carry over into present-day Satanic May Eve. Perhaps her piety, gentleness, learning, and wisdom are perverted, but that does not ring a bell for me. Perhaps only the name was borrowed to mask and keep secret the activities of that night.

A fertility festival, however, easily lends itself to a Satanic orgy, gang rapes, and bestiality. and the creation of special children. In some cults it is believed that children conceived on Walpurgsnacht or Beltane are “Satan’s spawn” and will hold high office when adult. These babies will be due a little after Candlemass, and it is easy to induce them so that they are born on that day.

In any event, it is a horrible night.

Beltane

In the Celtic calendar, Beltane (May Day) and Samhaim (Halloween) divide the year in half and are the two most important holidays. Beltane marked the start of summer –­ the day the cattle were brought to their summer pastures. It was a time of rejoicing and unrestrained sexuality, whether between the god and the goddess or between mere humans. The sexual imagery of the joyously decorated Maypole being thrust into mother earth is pretty clear.

The Celts counted days from sundown to sundown, not dawn to dawn as we do, which probably explains why so many of us have a harder time the eve of a holiday than on the holiday itself. The ceremonies started on May Eve with the extinguishing of all fires and the lighting of bonfires by the Druid priests. People stayed up all night and danced in the fields to ensure the crops’ fertility or went “a-maying” into the woods to ensure their own. At sunrise, home fires were lit from the sacred bonfire and then there were games and feasting.

Beltane (Beltaine, Belltaine, Bealtaine, Beltain, Beltine, Bealteine, Bealtuinn, Boaldyn), means “god’s fire,” and Bel, the sun god, is related linguistically to Belinos, Balor, Belenus, and Baal. The actual astrological date varies, like the solstices and equinoxes, and is usually around May 5. If Beltane is celebrated then, it is usually called “Old Beltane.”

The Saxons named May Eve after Walpurga, the goddess of May. The Church transformed this goddess into St. Walpurga, and thus we have Walpurgisnacht. They also substituted the cross for the maypole, renamed May Day Roodmas (rood means cross), and kept some of the traditions by having the congregation go into the fields after mass. The priest lit a fire and blessed the fields and the animals.

The Romans had a very similar three-day festival from dusk on April 28 through May first called Floriala, the Feast of Flowers. It seems that almost all ancient civilizations have a sexuality festival near the beginning of summer.