Star Woman in Love (20 page)

Men and women in white coats worked diligently at their assays, checking results and entering them in their log books. Due to the highly confidential nature of the study they were carrying out, the Director and the Research Committee had decided that the experiment should not take place in their laboratories in Switzerland, but at the secret location deep in the Parisian catacombs, in an area so long closed-off that it had become forgotten. No government was informed. The very best scientists from all around the world were recruited to offer their skills to the project. They each signed a one-year contract with a special clause. To ensure the confidentiality of the study, they all had to agree to undergo neurological laser therapy at the end of their tenure. The procedure ensured that any memory associated with this experiment would be wiped away.

Marion was the only person among them who would be working throughout the project up to its completion. Her credentials were impeccable: she was married to the Director of Three-D Pharmaceuticals. Her colleagues didn’t know and she would never let it transpire either. Marion and Bob Harker had been married for over thirty years. She was in her late sixties but looked half her age. She didn’t know her husband’s actual age. He said he had stopped counting when he got bored. The truth was a secret he had shared with her, and which she would keep until she died. Robert Harker was immortal. She had married the devil. He was the real thing. Her first reaction had been one of deep terror. In the end she came to consider meeting him as the best event in her life.

Robert was involved in many activities, from medical research to financial investment. He was also the founder of the Hypnosis Centre on the Boulevard du Montparnasse. It had opened at the height of the student revolution, in the early part of 1968. A regular figure on the student barricades, Harker had attracted a significant number of followers. He was looking for candidates who wanted to learn how to expand their minds and reach higher levels of awareness. Many artists, musicians and poets of the time started to attend his workshops in Montparnasse. Rumours of his immortality had started to circulate then.

Once a promising research fellow at the prestigious Santé Research Institute, Marion’s path had crossed with Robert’s on campus in 1968. She’d never seen such an attractive man before. Everything about him oozed charisma: his voice, his mannerisms, the way he swept his chin-length fringe from his face. He looked like a Victorian character: like Hanno from the Buddenbrooks, or Dorian Gray of the famous picture fame. As with all women wooed by him, she too fell in love the minute her eyes met his. He loved her too, in his own liberal way. She had that quality he most admired in people: intelligence. Beauty wasn’t as important. It could be recreated through surgical procedures. That had been the case with Marion and many of Robert’s closest female friends. Intelligence, however, and at the level with which she was endowed, could not be solely reproduced at will.

Robert wanted to create an immortal human by chemical processes. Marion’s pioneering knowledge of cloning techniques in plants and animals were her ticket to his heart. Thirty odd years on, the two were still the best of partners. Like all couples, they were trying for a baby. But not in an ordinary way. They wanted an immortal baby. This would take some serious work. Marion applied herself in the lab with religious discipline. After many years of research, they were finally making some headway.

The experiment concerned tissue cloning. Initially, the research team’s efforts concentrated simply on deriving a population of cells from a single cell. Success rates had exceeded their wildest expectations, so attempts were made at reproductive cloning through somatic cell nuclear transfer. The purpose of their research was very specific: cloning that one particular individual who had obsessed Harker for the past twenty odd years.

Marion approached the microscope and looked at the Life Force working its magic on the assay. The cells were unscathed and healthy.

“Let me see, Francois. Yes, these cells are perfect. They are alive and reproducing. Monsieur Harker was right: immortality is contained in this DNA. Onto the next step now: reproductive human cloning.”

______________

Hill of Tara, 31 October 1995

“Come over this way, Oscar! Through the gate, birthday boy! Catch me if you can!”

You were still taking stuff out of the car boot. I was already darting up the ancient hill. Holding a picnic basket and a guitar, with a woollen blanket thrown on your arm, you turned and called out to me.

“I’m going to get you, Miss Morgante, and when I find you I don’t know what I’m going to do to you...”

“Oh, but I do!”

The sun would hold out for another couple of hours or so. We needed to hurry up, and start a bonfire before darkness descended at around five. It was the height of our love and magic accompanied us in its trail. We’d wrapped up in padded jackets and hats. The sky was clear and blue. It looked just like any other autumn day in the countryside. But it wasn’t so. It was your thirtieth birthday and the eve of Samhain, the night when the boundaries between the plane of ordinary life and the Otherworld would blur. The vastness of the land around us was closing in to embrace and sustain us. We were regular visitors after all. We were welcome there. I walked past St. Patrick’s Statue and reached the wall around the church built in his memory. Crows were flying over me. Among them, the Morrígan, the mythical phantom queen, was greeting her warrior girl.

The sun kept shining its timid last rays through passing clouds but the moon had already appeared. That year we had promised we would spend that special night at the ancient seat of the High Kings of Ireland. Friends were to join us later for your birthday celebrations and a feast around the bonfire. We were expecting ghostly visitors to turn up too: the place is a portal for time travellers, after all. The two of us, together, could use this portal, despite the fact that our ability to work with our Light-Bodies was far from accomplished back then. But being in love as we were, our hearts were always showered in the Light of our souls, and our love was guiding us to follow the Plan, which was good. By then you understood that our relationship stood for something higher and deeper than just the intimate bond as man and woman that we shared. There was great purpose to all of our actions.

You caught up with me and grabbed me while I was trying to climb the wall around the graveyard of St. Patrick’s Church. The crows cackled loud in the trees above us as you helped me get past the wall and into the cemetery. We walked straight to the slab with the famous symbol. The Sheela-na-gig carving seemed to be smiling at us. The wear and tear of time had left its mark on her, as little was visible of her former features and her characteristic exaggerated vulva. She looked more like an alien than the image of the Divine Feminine Principle. Standing as we were opposite that primordial mark of power, we embodied the meaning of the symbol.

The Sheela-na-gig was there to shelter those who were treading on sacred ground with their hearts set on rightful intentions. We put our left hands on the carving, yours on top of mine, and felt a deep connection with the ancestors of your land who had first invoked her protection. It was both a gesture of blessing and a means of securing identification by the spirits who presided over the site. The crows stopped their cries. The sun shone briefly brighter through the foliage. Our consciousness expanded in preparation of the events that would unfold that night. We had been accepted into the sacred realm of Dreamtime Ireland.

The Dreamtime is the Time of Creation, a liminal dimension in the betwixt and between where the boundaries dividing thought and form are hazy, and everything is possible. It is the quantum field of physics, the subatomic level of possibility. It’s the space of potentiality populated by mythological creatures, archetypes, totems, spirit guides and ancestors. Artists get regular glimpses into this realm. And so do madmen. You were attuned to this realm from an early age. At first it scared you and cost you your stays in a mental hospital as a child, but with time you developed the ability to enter this dimension at will, understand the messages it wanted to convey through you, and learned to communicate these symbols through your art work.

The mind-set of the West had little time for this area of cognition. So, as an adult your curiosity for your experiences in this dimension brought you to study the teachings of more traditional cultures. In your early twenties, you sought and found acceptance into the Earth’s ancient wisdom traditions: from the Australian Outback and Native American reservations, to the Toltec monuments in Mexico and the sacred sites of your own country. When you met me, you were already an accomplished shaman who was conversant with Ireland’s sacred lore and who could travel across realms of reality.

I didn’t quite agree with your use of consciousness-altering drugs as a method to access particular realities. I preferred techniques that involved the use of meditation, breathing, drumming and sacred dancing to achieve a state of mind capable of embracing the more ethereal realms of the Dreamtime. I showed you that these methods directly complemented a mind focused on the power of its soul, on the Soul Flame burning in one’s heart. You took my suggestions on board. ‘Mind over matter’ was our tenet, and together we would do things others thought were impossible.

In Irish mythology the Dreamtime is commonly known as the Otherworld, the land of the Faery Folk. It’s a dimension that connects and sometimes overlaps with the normal world of third-dimensional reality. The night of Samhain, at the start of the Celtic year, is the time to stop and listen to the ancestors and hear the wisdom of the Otherworld. People like you who were born on Samhain have the ‘sight’. They can see the world of spirits and very often can be healers. Under the trees in the graveyard I stopped to gaze at the beautiful man I was blessed to have as my spiritual as well as physical companion. I always delighted to see how completely at ease you felt at Tara. That day your eyes were more focused and intense than usual. Tara was home to you. You had been there many times before, over many lifetimes. Now it was welcoming you back.

We left the graveyard behind us and continued along the well-trodden path among the meadows. The entrance to the Mound of the Hostages was locked. The doorway is framed with standing stones and faces directly east. This alignment allows for the rising sun to shine down the passageway and illuminate the chamber at the feast of Imbolc, the beginning of spring. The sun also illuminates the chamber on Samhain, the cross-quarter day between the Autumn Equinox and the Winter Solstice, which signals the end of the Light-half of the Celtic year. We climbed to the top of the Mound and stood there with our backs to the west and our arms wide open, feeling the alignment of the forces that it marks. You lit some sage leaves and smudged the site, offering thanks to the ancestors who guarded it. I made a circle of rose quartzes to mark the sacred space, and drew a sign in the air. The portal opened.

A rustling of wings came from behind us, from the West. The first visitor had arrived, followed by her entourage. We turned around to see Queen Danu, one of my archetypes in Ireland. Behind her, faery helpers were carrying the trail of her sky-blue dress. These faery folk lived under the Royal Hill of Tara and were always happy to be given the opportunity to serve their gods and to interact with humans. Danu had long blond tresses and deep blue eyes. Her traits were delicate and Nordic. She was a healer, a teacher and the Queen of the Tuatha Dé Danann who came to Ireland in the fifth wave of invasions.

These tall, magical Beings of Light now dwell in the dimension inside the “hollow hills”, a parallel dimension coinciding with the deepest recesses of our subconscious. Towering over all human beings in stature and beauty, and mighty as they are in their deportment, these faeries look completely different from the little winged creatures described in Victorian times. Some of them like to spend some time on the Earth. Indeed, I recognised my ‘student’ Tage De Vries in Danu’s entourage. It was through him that the Faeries had first made contact with me two years previously, the day after you and I had first made love.

“Greetings, Twins,” the Queen said.

“Greetings, Danu, welcome to our world,” we said in unison.

The colours of the surrounds were crisp and alive. The clouds parted and another goddess appeared: Queen Medb riding a winged horse. She stopped and stared fiercely at us, enveloped by rays of Light that made her look even more remarkable. Her eyes were green like my own, and sparkled in acknowledgment of her protégée. Her long fiery locks and ornate green gown were flying in the wind. She cut a fine figure and her bearing was truly majestic. Her dress revealed a body whose femininity was exuberant and irresistible. According to Irish mythology, no king could rule in Connaught unless he was married to Medb. She held the key to the sovereignty in her very person.

She nodded at us. “Cassandra, Oscar.”

“Medb,” we said.

Then the smell of incense filled the air, announcing the presence of yet another goddess, Bríd, who appeared with the customary tongue of fire dancing on the palms of her cupped hands. She was the keeper of the Flame, the Light of Creation on Earth, which human beings must remember in order to develop into their angelic selves, the fire divinity of intuition who protects poetry and the crafts, unity, childbirth and healing. I have a special bond with her because we come from the same Venusian stock.

“Blessings, dear ones,” she said in her melodious tones.