On this Vesak Day, May 5th, I cannot help but meditate on the bee and the lotus.
Significantly, the Pollen Path reveres this Buddha Moon, as the Flower Moon.
The surge of fertility in the land offers great bounty for the bee.
In the hive, it is a time of great growth and transformation.
The queen is at her most productive.
Many eggs are being laid.
This is the brood cycle.
Sisters identify new eggs to make into princesses who will enable the colony to reproduce, to swarm.
One will become two, or maybe three or four.
Such is the nature of ambitious colonies.
The chosen grubs have their cells perfumed with Melissa (Nasanov) and are gorged with royal jelly.
No longer the same as the rest of the hive, these pampered creatures grow differently to their brothers and sisters. Their cells betray how much larger they are than the others and spur out from the honeycomb like acorns jutting from the wax.
When this insect hatches, she will be larger, darker, look more like a roach than a bee, and will be able to live for extended lengths of time.
Her role is of sexual servant. Soaring towards the sun she mates with hundreds of drones, collecting as much sperm as she can, that she will transform into fertilized eggs, sisters, to become her new community’s workforce.
The rest of her days will be spent in darkness, concealed, and cared for by her daughters.
The ancients believed this hypersexual female should be revered.
Priestesses of the Sicilian Aphrodite of Eryx served the goddess in a temple, perched high upon the rocks, the first thing sailors saw as they rounded the Horn of Africa was Mount Erucina.
One by one, seamen offered themselves to the goddess, as the men took turns to climb the enormous rocks to perform rites with the heiro doulai – the sexual servants of Aphrodite and to honour her with honeycomb which was her fetish. These priestesses of the goddess of love and sex were known as the “Jerodoulai” and as Melissa.
I wonder when a mated queen can live to up to five years, and a sister’s life can be measured to around five weeks, do the insects consider her immortal?
Is she goddess to them, surrounded by her attendants The Charites, who bathe and feed her?
Aphrodite, the dark side of Venus,
The ancient Rose line...Innana, Ishtar, Isis, Astarte,Ashera, Aphrodite, Venus...
Magdalena?
All brought to mind, manifest as Scorpio full moon…sacred sexuality held taboo deep in our patriarchally conditioned minds.
Back in the hive…
Surrounding the queen, at the flower moon, there are thousands of other larvae ready to undergo transformation into their most flourished time of life.
Parcelled like mummies, no longer nymphs, nature prepares them for apotheosis. Transforming them into airborne deities capable of virgin births and alchemists of the food of the gods.
Wekemedia
The flower moon, the Scorpio moon…plunging the watery depths, the tightening and constricting time.
The cocoon. The time between death and rebirth.
The liminal dream space where one is pregnant with possibilities yet also inept to do anything at all.
Confined in a place where we are two things but also neither.
Not quite living. Not quite dead.
The dark space, the womb, the tomb…
Eternal moments where metamorphosis is surely taking place, but its beauty is not yet visible.
The other space, outside of ourselves, that we meet when we turn inwards.
Potential bursting to get out, raging, bubbling, simmering,
decaying us into substanceless ooze
So we can find our wings and serve Persephone,
Ambassador for mortals in this shadowy realm.
Mistress of the underworld, they say.
Goddess of Spring, the time of rebirth and renewal.
They call her Melitodes, the honeyed one, this Maiden.
Daughter of the goddess of the Harvest, Demeter, the Kore.
So know this…
Melissa priestesses stand ready.
Worker sisters standing vigil as you transform and emerge from your nectar’d cells.
To teach you how to serve the hive, the queen, the goddess and the Polis, your community at large.
So long as pollen continues to come in, their factory of golden goodness will continue.
Creating the food of the goddess and teaching women how to soar.
Bee-coming the lotus flower of Isis, possessing the soul of Osiris, the bee.
Controlling their inner necktaries, mistresses of their own laboratories, Melissae are.
Flowing with the moon, they are both flow-ers and the irreplaceable part of the flower.
Working with music, scent, and discipline, we set our thoughts towards the purpose we have been given,
So that we too can transform into the lotus and channel that we are destined to bee-come
Why not join me on a Melissa Moonbathe? Tonight with Clary Sage
Incidentally, my book Meeting The Melissae, The Ancient Greek Bee Shamanesses of Demeter is now on Presale