Walking the Cross
The Sites, Their Significance, and the Inner Prayer They Mirror
We approach this map through the outer pilgrimage as a mirror of the inner one. Each place we go reflects a movement already happening inside us. To walk the cross is to manifest the prayer: to plant a seed of new awareness and walk it, gate by gate, until it takes form in our bodies and in the world.
The prayer
Both a guide to the real places we are going, and a map of the inner movement each one mirrors. Our pilgrimage may be exactly that, the outer and the inner laid over each other. We travel to real places with real histories, and those places turn out to mirror something we are also walking within. We may let the two inform each other. We stand at the site and we learn what it is, and we let it show us the gate it opens inside us. What vibrates from within.
The map is the Feminine Cross, drawn from the oldest sacred geometry: the circle, the triangle, the cross, the spiral, the golden ratio, the vesica piscis, and the flower of life. The same forms the body is built from, the same forms that open a flower.
It has three parts, and so does our journey:
- The Triangle (Gateways 1, 2, 3). We plant and form the seed of the prayer. These are the three powers of manifestation: iccha, the will that intends; jnana, the knowing that sees; kriya, the power that acts and transforms. In me they are the Maiden, the Mother/Lover, the Crone. In you, my love, the Page, the Lover/Father, the Sage.
- The Wheel (Gateways 4, 5, 6, 7). We ground the prayer into the four elements and four directions: Earth, Water, Fire, Air. Here the intention becomes embodied, walked through the ancestral land and up the mountain.
- The Centre (Gateway 8). Sacred Union. The prayer made flesh, where the two of us who walked it become one.
We each walk it in our own way. My path is Shakti, the rising current, the one who moves and creates. Yours is Shiva, the descending awareness, the one who witnesses and grounds. I rise; you receive. I move; you hold. At each gate the same door opens onto two seats, and the pilgrimage is the place those two seats meet.
The gates come round more than once. This is the way of the spiral, of Shiva's eye: the swirling centre that is the third eye, wisdom, intuition, and inner sight. The spiral is the golden ratio, the flow of life, birth, death, and rebirth, and in many lands it wards off the evil eye, the bad dream, the cold energy that would turn us from the path. So some gates return in different places, and each return goes deeper, the way a seed puts down roots. The sand dollar holds this inside itself — five-petalled, radiant from a single centre, a gift from the Sirens, washed up from the deep.
our prayer
A space to write the prayer we carry, before we begin. Spoken in the present, as I am. We return to it at the centre, in Rome, and see what it has become.
My prayer:
Your prayer:
The Triangle · Gateways 1–3
Planting and forming the seed of the prayer
Aug 9 · Gateway 1 — The Maiden / The Page · iccha, the will
The Amalfi Coast — arrival, the sea, the intention
We begin here, my love, where the land meets the sea the Sirens sang from. Today nothing is asked of us except to arrive, and to want clearly. The first gateway is the beginning, the seed, the original yes, new awareness before the mind has shaped it. This is iccha, the will that intends, the first stirring of desire that starts everything. In me it wakes as the Maiden, innocence as the willingness to begin. In you it wakes as the Page, the one who kneels and says teach me, who does not yet need to know.
So we plant the seed. In the tradition it is called a sankalpa, a vow planted in the field of being, spoken in the present, as I am. The soul tends to remember what it already is, and the body reorganises around that remembering. Let us sit with the sea in view and each find the longing beneath all our other longings, and name it simply. That seed is the prayer the whole pilgrimage will carry. What am I here to begin? What does my deepest longing call itself when I say it as I am? And thus the seed is planted.
The myth, the place, the meaning. These rocks below us are the Sirenuse, the islands of the Sirens. Their song was knowledge: they knew everything that happens on the earth, and they sang it to every soul that passed. One of the three, Parthenope, threw herself into the sea when Odysseus sailed by unmoved, and the waves carried her body to the shore where Naples now stands, so the city took her name. The Maiden's gate is the first sound of the feminine voice over the water, the desire that calls a soul out of its sleep and toward the journey. And Mary herself comes from mar, the sea. If the Son is the sun, then she, the ocean, is the first to bear witness to the rising light, the first to hold the dawn on her water. What we long for here is the seed everything else will grow from.
A reading — the nymph Amalfi. They say Hercules loved a nymph named Amalfi. When she died, his grief was so great that he searched the whole earth for the most beautiful place to lay her, and he found this coast, and buried her here, and gave the town her name. So the most beautiful coast in the world was born from a god's love and a god's grief, a woman laid into the land. We arrive into a place that was, from its first telling, a beloved laid to rest in beauty.
Aug 10 · Gateway 2 — The Mother/Lover / The Lover & Father · jnana, the knowing
The Path of the Gods — walking the high coast together
Today we walk the high path between the sky and the sea. The walking is the practice. We feel the feet on the stone, the heat, the breath, each other moving alongside. The second gateway sustains what the first began. It is jnana, knowing, the kind that comes through union and devotion more than through the head. In me it holds two faces made one, the Mother who nourishes and the Lover who is wild with devotion. In you, the Lover, the fire of eros, and the Father, the one who learns to stay and hold what the fire awakens. Your warmth keeps the staying from going cold; your ground keeps the fire from burning the house down.
Here we learn to stay present in pleasure and in effort without leaving, you becoming the steady ground I can move around, me free to move. What are we sustaining between us, and did we choose it? Where do I leave, in body or attention, when staying is asked of me?
The myth, the place, the meaning. This is the Path of the Gods, and it carries its name from an old story: when Odysseus sailed beneath these cliffs and the Sirens sang to pull him down, the gods came along this high ridge, descending from the heights to the sea, and the path they walked was left in the rock. The Sirens themselves were the companions of Persephone. When Hades took her down into the underworld, the gods gave them wings to search the whole earth for her, and they came to rest on these cliffs, turning their grief into song. So the bright high path already carries a descent and a loss inside it, love and sorrow braided together. The Mother-Lover's gate is exactly this, the love that nourishes and the love that aches, held as one. To walk it side by side is to sustain the prayer we planted, and to learn the devotion that stays.
Aug 11 · Gateway 3 — The Crone / The Sage · kriya, the transforming power
Lake Avernus & the Sibyl's Grotto — the oracle, the release, the dream
Today we go down. The third gateway is dissolution, and it is kriya, the power that transforms by clearing the ground, because nothing new can take form while the old is still standing in its place. In me this is the Crone, the dark Mother who holds the grief and the rage the lighter Mother cannot, the serpent who sheds her skin, the no that protects the yes. In you it is the Sage, the one who has surrendered the kingdom and stopped needing to win, the witness who remains when everything that can be released has been released.
Lets each name what we are ready to let dissolve, the identity or grief or story standing in the way of the prayer we planted. The oracle gives nothing new; it shows us what we already know once the noise is gone.
The dream incubation. This is the gate of the Sibyl, so this is where we sleep with our question and let her answer in a dream. The old pilgrims did the same: they came to the oracle, made an offering, asked one thing, and slept in the sacred place to receive the god in the night. We do it her way. At dusk, bring a small offering to the dark water, a little wine, a flower, a few words. Speak one question, the real one, and let it go quiet. Then sleep with one hand on the lower belly and one on the heart, the question held in the space between. In the morning, before we move, we lie still and ask: what came in the night? The Sibyl's truth was only ever received from her living voice, so we listen for the voice that rises from our own depths. What am I still holding that has already ended? What does the oracle in me say when I stop arguing with it?
The myth, the place, the meaning. Lake Avernus is the mouth of the underworld. Birds that flew across it fell dead from the breath of the water, so the Greeks called it Aornos, the birdless place. Here Aeneas went down to the dead, and the Cumaean Sibyl led him, the prophetess who served Apollo and Hecate at once, the light and the dark, the one who could pass between the worlds. To go down was easy; the labour was the return, and the Sibyl gave him the golden bough, sacred to Proserpina, the token that let him enter the dark and come back. The descent is easy; the labour is the return.
A reading — the Sibyl who asked to die. Apollo loved the Sibyl and offered her anything she desired. She gathered a handful of sand and asked for as many years of life as the grains in her hand, but she forgot to ask for lasting youth, and so she withered through the centuries until her body was almost nothing and only her voice remained. The story is told that in her old age she hung in a jar at Cumae, and when the children asked her, Sibyl, what do you want?, she answered, I want to die. She is the one who has lived long enough to want only release, the Crone who knows that letting go is the gift. We come to her to learn the same: what in us has lived past its time, and longs to be let go.
The Wheel · Gateways 4–7
Grounding the prayer into the four directions
The Triangle forms the seed. The Wheel plants it in the earth and walks it through the elements, so it becomes embodied, lived in the body and the land. Earth in the south, Water in the east, Fire in the west, Air in the north. I inhabit and rise through each element; you ground and witness within it. We walk it as the land allows, and we come back to Earth a second time, because the blood asks us to.
Aug 12 · Gateway 4 — Earth, the South
The New Moon — the ancestors
Tonight, on the dark of the moon, we turn toward the ancestors, and we receive what the dream began to show us. The fourth gateway is the ground itself, the body, the lineage, the first direction of the Wheel. Its goddess is Pachamama, the Earth, and she is the Black Madonna we have been coming to know, the dark Mother who is also the dark soil. Here the prayer stops being an idea and enters the blood. For you, my love, this is the descent made literal, awareness sinking out of the head, down through the heart, into the belly and the feet, until your presence reaches the floor and others can rest near it without knowing why.
We retreat the way the dark moon asks, slow and quiet, and we listen. We carry the dream from the Sibyl's night into this one, and we call on the ancestors by name, asking them what they want to pass on. What am I carrying that belongs to my line and not to me? What do they want to pass on, and what wants to end with me?
The myth, the place, the meaning. Beside Avernus stood the oracle of the dead, where the living came to summon the spirits and ask them what was to come. On the dark of the moon the veil between the living and the dead is at its thinnest. The Earth gate is the ancestors and the body that remembers them. The egg that became me was already formed inside my mother while she was still inside her own mother: I was carried three generations deep before I drew a breath, and so are my children, and so are yours. The prayer roots here, in the blood, in the line, in the ground that holds the dead and feeds the living.
Aug 13 · Gateway 7 — Water, the East
The Coast of the Gods & Santa Maria dell'Isola — the sea, surrender
We drive south at dawn and meet the sea by boat. The seventh gateway is Water, the east, the dreaming and the intuition. Water carries the memory of all things and softens the boundary between waking and knowing. I have always been the oracle; the priestess at Delphi sat over sacred waters and the message came up through her body. For you, water may teach surrender, the strength that can look like letting go. Here we give the prayer to the living current.
We let the body into the water. We float, we breathe, we let the breath find its own current. Whatever rises, we let it stay unnamed and let it move through us the way a wave moves through the ocean, which holds the wave and stays whole. This is the element of feeling and of dreams, so we let ourselves feel without fixing. What am I refusing to feel? What would happen if I stopped steering for a while?
The myth, the place, the meaning. At Hipponion on this coast stood a great sanctuary of Persephone, Queen of the Dead. In a grave there a thin leaf of gold was buried with the dead, inscribed with directions for the soul through the underworld: do not drink at the first spring, go on to the Lake of Memory, and say I am a child of Earth and starry Heaven. The dark Madonna of Tropea came to her island the way the goddess always comes, across the sea, the sea-mother under one more veil. Water is the dreaming gate, the oracle, memory itself. Here the soul is given to the current and learns the way of remembering.
Aug 14 · Gateway 4 again — Earth, deepened
Oppido Mamertina & Seminara — the ancestral village, the dark Madonna, the Giants
We come back to Earth. Yesterday the ancestors were a feeling, and today they have a village, a face, a Madonna that my blood has wept to. This is my beloved Nonna's birth ground. The prayer roots into a particular lineage, a particular land. And the spiral shows itself: the dark Mother we met at Avernus is here again in the wood of Seminara's Madonna. The Crone of the Triangle and the Earth of the Wheel meet in her, the same Mother met more deeply.
We make an offering to the land, a little water poured, the names of our dead spoken aloud. We walk the village as descendants, the ones the ground has been waiting for. My work here is to let the blood remember. What in me comes straight from this place? What did my ancestors carry that I am here to lay down? To lay to rest
The myth, the place, the meaning. Oppido sits in the foothills of the Aspromonte, the wild mountain at the toe of Italy, and it stood almost on the heart of the great earthquake of 1783 that tore up the whole land and was raised again. At Seminara the dark Madonna of the Poor is carried out, and before her dance two giants, Grifone the Saracen warrior and Mata the woman he loved, the first father and mother of the town. Mata wears the crown of towers, the very crown of Cybele the Great Mother, the goddess who guards the walls of the city. The Black Madonna of this land is the Great Mother in a darker veil. Here the prayer takes the face of my own blood.
A testimony to my beloved Nonna Grace. The only true words that come through is thank you. I love and cherish you. Although your body may be layed to rest, i am here to return you back home so you may rest a peace fully, all that was unspoken, unfinished unlived. Your name, Maria, your heart Grace, your womb love. Rest in peace.
Aug 15 · Gateway 5 — Fire, the West
Ferragosto & the Assumption — the height of summer, my birthday
Today the prayer turns. Until now it has gone down and in; today it begins to rise. The fifth gateway is Fire, the west, sacred heat and creative force. This is tapas, the heat that forges longing into purpose, and darshan, the fire of sight, the gaze that recognises the divine in another and says I see you, I see myself in you. Fire is sexuality become sacred, the passion between us as a creative power, the flame we tend together. Here the prayer becomes radiant, and after the grief of the descent I am allowed to shine.
This is also my birthday, and it means something. I was born on Ferragosto, the feast of the Mother taken up into glory, and my day falls on the gate of fire, of radiance and of being seen, on the hinge where the whole pilgrimage turns from descent to ascent. The land is already celebrating the Mother lifted into light. consumed in the fire of love and devotion.
We let the day be bright, and we let the fireworks become part of the prayer. We gaze at the flame and let it steady us, then turn the gaze to each other and let it be darshan, seeing and being seen without flinching. The fire we make between us is sacred sexuality, the meeting of two flames into one. Where have I dimmed my fire to keep others comfortable? What does the fire between us want to create?
The myth, the place, the meaning. On the thirteenth of August the women of old walked to the lake of Nemi by torchlight, the lake they called Diana's Mirror, and asked the goddess for children and for a safe home. Two nights later, on the fifteenth, the Mother is taken up into heaven, body and soul, lifted whole into the light. This was always the feast of the Mother at the height of summer, the fire of the year at its peak. The Fire gate is the gate of being seen and of creating. To be born on this day is to be born on the day of the Mother's glory.
Therefore my life is symbolic of honouring and upholding the Mothers glory, forever and ever. May I be consumed in her light, the most beautiful and pure radiant light.
Aug 16 · Earth again — grounding into the mountain
Toward Montevergine — arrival, rest before the height
We drive north out of Calabria, up into the Partenio mountains, to a house at the foot of the climb. Earth comes round a third time now, as the ground beneath the mountain we are about to ascend. After the underworld, the blood, the water, and the fire, the prayer settles back into the body before it rises. This is the quiet earth of arrival, feet on new ground, the long breath before the climb. Yesturday the acent was symoblic, the death to be rebourn, today is the crossing point. Rest belongs to the work, the pause where what has moved sinks in and takes root. What in me wants simply to arrive, and to rest, before the last ascent?
The myth, the place, the meaning. The mountain ahead of us is Monte Partenio, and its name carries the parthenos, the Virgin, the maiden goddess. This is a holy mountain, and it has always been one. On its summit the Great Mother Cybele was honoured long before the Madonna took the throne, and the people of the Middle Ages called it the mountain of Virgil, believing the poet had worked his magic here and made a secret garden among its rocks. Springs rise out of its sides, and eagles ride its winds. A hermit named William came to its heights around the year 1118, seeking the hardest solitude he could find, and built the first small church, and the mountain has drawn pilgrims up its flank ever since. It is a place chosen, again and again across the centuries, as a stair between the earth and the sky. Before any ascent the pilgrim grounds and rests, because the seed sinks into the dark before it rises into the light.
Aug 17 · Gateway 6 — Air, the North
Montevergine & Mamma Schiavona — the ascent, the witness
Today is the acent, we climb. The sixth gateway is Air, the north, clarity and individuation, the work of becoming wholly ourselves. Its practice is the witness: the smoke rises and passes, and we are the ones who watch it. Thoughts and feelings rise and pass, and the one who sees them remains. This is your seat above all, my love, the still point that holds the whole wheel, and it is my clarity that no longer needs the world's approval to know what is true. The climb itself is the teaching, the prayer earned with the body, the shoes left behind.
We climb, if we can, on foot. We let the legs burn and the mind go quiet. At the top we meet the dark Mother of the mountain, and she is the Black Madonna again, met now at the height of a climb. She was always the mountain too. Who am I when no one is watching? What have I been carrying that I can set down before her?
The myth, the place, the meaning. On the summit of Partenio, where Cybele the Great Mother was once honoured, the Black Madonna now reigns, and the people call her Mamma Schiavona, the dark Mother who grants everything and forgives everything. For four hundred years the femminielli of Naples, the city's gender-crossing ones, have climbed this mountain to her, dancing the tammurriata. She once saved two lovers left to freeze on this mountain, melting the ice and breaking their chains, because she is the Mother of everyone the world below casts out. Pilgrims leave their shoes at the chapel on the path and finish the climb barefoot. The Air gate is the gate of the witness and of becoming wholly oneself. Here the prayer is earned with the body and set down before her.
The Centre · Gateway 8
The prayer made flesh
Aug 18–19 · Gateway 8 — Sacred Union
Rome — where the Great Mother and the Queen of Heaven share one ground
The eighth gateway is the centre where all the arms of the cross meet. Here my prayer and your prayer unite. Where two circles overlap, the vesica piscis opens, the almond of light that is the womb of all sacred space, the third that is born of two, the holy trinity, the mother and father, the sun and moon unite creating the holy spirit, the sacred trinity. the manifestation of the triangle, the first petal of the flower of life. Our life becomes a flower. This is Sacred Union, where Shakti rises and Shiva descends and they meet in the heart. The loop of the ankh is the vessel, the cross beneath is the pillar, and where they meet is life. This is the prayer made flesh. Everything since the first day has been moving here: the seed we planted at the Maiden's gate, cleared at the Crone's, grounded through the Wheel, now recognised as one. Here the split things are remembered as one, the lover and the beloved, the descent and the ascent, the Goddess and the Madonna, you and me.
We walk the old ground as a pair, and we let the two of us be the ankh, two made one. We return to the seed we planted on the first day and see what it has become. Where are the two in us still kept apart, and what would it take to let them meet?
The myth, the place, the meaning. Rome brought the Great Mother here from Phrygia as a black stone fallen from the sky, and set her on the Palatine; her shrine on the Vatican hill stood where Saint Peter's now stands. Isis was worshipped in this city as the one goddess of ten thousand names, the Mother behind Cybele and Minerva and Venus and Ceres and Proserpina. In the Forum a flame tended by virgins was the goddess herself, and while it burned, Rome stood. Every one of them became the Madonna: the temple of all the gods became her church, the citadel of Juno became the Altar of Heaven where a Sibyl showed the emperor a vision of the Virgin, and the dark icon called the Salvation of the Roman People is carried through the streets to this day. One Mother, many veils, one ground. The eighth gate is the union of all of it, Shakti risen and Shiva descended, met in the heart. The ankh is the two made one.
Aug 20 · The return
Flight home — carrying the prayer into the life
The descent was easy. The labour was always the return. We carry the prayer home now as something planted, that will keep growing underground in its own time. Let what changed reveal itself slowly. The walk goes on in the life, and the life is where the prayer finishes being made flesh.
Beloved Divine Mother, bear witness to this remembering. Jai Ma.