Doves and Serpents
Adder Ladies and the Dawn of Ra
Part 1
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In those hirsute days the men lived with ‘ladies’, not girlfriends. ‘Wives’ and ‘husbands’ were terms definitely out of fashion, gauchely incorrect in the nascent era of rampant feminism. ‘Ladies’ would soon be seen as a term complicit in the repressive sexism of the class system, and ‘woman’ eventually became the correct mode of address - after a series of tortuous passages through such alternatives as ‘wimmin’, ‘wombin’, ‘sisters’ and many other words not containing the syllable ‘men’.
‘Girl’ was as uncool as ‘chick’ was outré, except in surfing circles. All these terms jostled on the wave of free love that swept the mystified world into a chaotic maelstrom of adolescent rebellion. It was an era when many in the West were young and free enough to employ their time exploring the meaning of existence - and having unimaginably good fun. It was an era unlike most of the times before or since; but the best is always yet to come...
A major part of the rites of passage in the decade that time forgot involved negotiating a mindfield of consciousness expanding or soul numbing drugs – grass, hash, smack, speed, D.M.T., opium, various prescription and over-the-counter brands of sleeping pills and hypnotic nostrums, mescaline, psilocybin – and of course, the supreme trip itself – L.S.D.. The ascendancy of nerve-numbing sex and dance drugs like cocaine and ecstasy was yet to arrive.
Meanwhile, back behind the leading edge, the silent majority went to work and paid their mortgages, keeping their heads down and not rocking the boat. Men were the breadwinners and their wives were housebound and insecure, often unable to own property of their own and viewed as the property of their husbands. Separation and divorce were social stigmata matched only by the illegitimacy of an unwed birth. A husband beating his wife was seen as normal, if unfortunate, behaviour. Children were hit with sticks and leather straps as a matter of course, and were subject to ongoing brutality and sexual interference that was widely ignored. Men beat each other up all the time in streets and pubs; it was ‘normal’ in a culture bred for war.
Almost everyone was half drunk half the time – if they weren’t totally tanked. Most people drank like Russians, in the fevered years of the cold war. No-one knew when the end would come, but everyone knew it could come at any time. It was the Twentieth Century.
Into this strange tangled time the Centraxians emerged – a tribe of transcarnate adventurers who assembled into an interlocking web of kindred spirits in the freebooting realm of the wild Western World. They were young artists and actors, bikers and hippies, students and anarchists united in deploring the feudal ‘civilization’ foisted on them by their self-blinded elders. They revelled in the exploration of new ways and realms that were occulted by the blinkers holding the ‘straights’ in thrall, in their workadaydream half-lives in office orifices and fucked factories.
Using magical techniques spoon-fed to them by renegades from established and Ancient Orders with obscure agendas, the Centraxians learned to invoke higher levels of being, bootstrapping their awareness to become greater than the sum of their constituents. They absorbed other perspectives and identities into themselves, and in the process they learned that possession is nine-tenths of the lore. They created a medieval Court of Peers on the brink of the Third Millennium, a tribe of equals recognising each other’s inherent nobility – where rank had no privilege and hierarchy was a dirty word.
The tribe united as a living deck of cards, each embodying the meaning implicit in a Trump or Court card; the Centraxians were an incarnate Tarot deck, hosts to formidable archetypes. Each had a specific role (or roles) within the tribe, and wore personal colours, tattoos and heraldic devices symbolising their distinct and self confident personas. They lived and travelled as a group; semi-nomads who made their way from place to base, party to party, protest to gathering.
There were a lot of parties and festivals and gigs and happenings and street rallies to attend in that fun-filled era - but most people worked, consumed, reproduced and died without going to any of them. Most people were shell-shocked survivors of Depression and wars, embedded in a simulacrum of life on endless, pointless treadmills. Most people used alcohol or mind-numbing meaningless labour to sedate and salve their damaged minds and soiled souls – and made a virtue of it, foisting their own passionless, humdrum existence upon their harried, beaten and abused children. Most people missed out on the one-time passing parade of the Psychedelic Revolution, the Dawning of the Age of Aquarius, the acid, the love-ins, the yoga and meditation, the protests and the festivals - and spent the rest of their lives regretting, denying or pretending to celebrate the fact.
It was one generation to midnight at the end of the Millennium.
Lady Racheal was an Artist from a line of artists, possessed of a gift of accurate visualisation and a steady hand that transmitted her inner eye’s dreams to canvas in lovingly contoured, fully realised illuminations. She was the High Priestess of the tribe, given to visions and dreams, portents and omens. Most of the time, she and her Prince Ram’yana - the young tribal Hierophant - lived together in various places around the country; wherever she went, Racheal set up her easel and oils. Works in progress piled up alongside empty wine bottles around the skirting boards of their rooms, in a succession of unusually well-appointed squats, remote rollicking farm houses and refitted rustic barns.
They enjoyed the never-ending entertainments of life in the communal houses shared by the tribe, where they kept semi-permanent quarters they returned to between sojourns and festivals. The Centraxians tended to hang together, even hitchhiking in serried groups strung out along the endless highways of the Great Southland, to reassemble at prearranged rendezvous points and bases.
Everywhere you went in those days, in every town and in every Kombi van that stopped to give you a ride, there were hippies offering joints and places to stay with no strings attached – and there was usually a great meal (brown rice and veges, man) and a smoke or three waiting when you arrived at their weirdly individualistic hand-built home or dome. Life and love were free and easy.
Certain books seemed to be waiting wherever you went. One particularly thick tome was called ‘Seed’ – a hand-printed, hand-penned volume on strange non-conformist paper, produced in
Another book that lay around everywhere was Wilhelm’s I Ching – The Book of Changes - usually occupying pride of place and stored in conjunction with divination tools - time-eroded Chinese square-holed coins, or, for the more avant-garde and elaborately minded, half a hundred dried sticks made from the stalks of yarrow. Everyone drank herbal teas in alternative circles, and kept a range on hand if they wanted to be part of the New Age – mints and rose hip, chamomile and rue, dandelion and liquorice root and a cornucopia of lesser-known flavourful medicinal remedies, tonics and aphrodisiacs. Some people grew their own, including marijuana and poppies - and even yarrow.
The I Ching was used early and often by a vast host of people, who used it to divine everything from which shirt or skirt to wear, to deciding whether to dodge the draft or fight in
The Taoist Book of Changes was a trusted prognosticator in the Court of Centraxis. No major decision was made without a tribal council first consulting the tome, usually cast by or in the presence of the shaman Ram’yana. As High Priestess, the Lady Racheal customarily consulted the cards as well. She preferred the archetypal simplicity of the Rider deck that emerged from a branch of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn; her beau used the Thoth deck produced under the direction of Aleister Crowley by the talented Lady Frieda Harris, a darker, deeper set than the two dimensional Christianised forms of the more popular and well-known images.
One fine spring day the Priestess and the Priest decided to fission apart from the tribe and rent a place together - just the two of them. The decision was run past the Ching first, of course, and subject to much soul-searching and Tarot consultation as well. Many good reasons underpinned their departure from the walled compound of the tribe’s base in the
The young couple found an apartment by the harbour in an upmarket backwater, with a sunroom studio a few paces from the seawall. Yachts and ferries sailed by and the
The first day and night they made love continually in every room, on any furniture or flooring available, abandoning themselves to the searing heat coursing through their teenage bodies.
They began on an antique Persian rug, spread out on the polished pinewood planks of the loungeroom floor. Tongues wetted furry mammalian pelts with enthusiastic laving as they supped on familiar flavours, whetting their appetites for the inevitable plunging rush into the heart of all mysteries. They had all the time in the world.
Next they sampled the benefits of the deep clawfoot cast iron bathtub in the tiled Art Deco bathroom, splashing a flood of bubbly froth out of the white enamelled tub in their exuberant celebration of squeaky-clean steaming flesh. They rode the smooth-planked kitchen table and the deep-set Deco lounge chairs, drowning out the creaking timbers with their cries.
They shielded their new neighbours from the tumult of their wild eruptions with speakers pumping out the fantastic weavings of Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, Jimi Hendrix and a host of other choirs of angelic bards. Priest and priestess both regarded dancing as an unnecessary allegory for the real thing and bypassed the customary dance floor courtship rituals of the age. The black vinyl disks spun thirty three and a third times a minute and the minutes grew to hours of inspiration for the lovers to dance to – horizontally, vertically and at every angle between.
They braced themselves against the painted walls, Racheal’s pale back plastered to the smooth surfaces with her aromatic perspiration as she groaned and screamed in ecstasy, hanging on her young man’s every move. They tested the strength of the low furnishings in the rug-strewn parlour and consecrated the noisy brass bed in their high-ceilinged chamber - when they noticed the smothered flare of incandescence as their new neighbours peeked at them through thick velvet curtains.
The young lovers were careless and carefree, naked and shameless as cats in their candlelit strivings on the sultry summer night. They’d blithely assigned the procurement of curtains and blinds to a later time. Racheal was used to being watched, accustomed to losing herself in a roomful of partying people. She climbed atop her prince and artfully displayed her charms to the strangers without a shred of inhibition, proudly exposing her perfect body to the twin silhouettes in the window across the way. She slowly gorged herself on Ram’yana, twisting and writhing and falling to press herself full-length against him. Her sleek platinum hair and long-fingered hands flowed across the smooth surfaces of his skin as all her lips engulfed him.
The witch girl had come a long way since she first encountered the Centraxians, utterly transformed from the shy wallflower who’d been intrigued by the outrageous antics and free love displayed by the effusive tribe. In an era when the dream of controllable fertility appeared to have been fulfilled, when all diseases seemed curable, there was no conceivable reason to maintain the guilt-begrimed travesty of sexuality practised by millennia of insecure superstitious cavemen and their old wives.
The light went out in the bedroom next door and the dark silhouettes resolved into a young Asian woman outlined in moonlight and a taller man, standing behind her in shadow. The curtains had been pulled aside.
At first the lovers pretended to be unaware of the excited voyeurs, who were riveted and entranced by their brazen performance. Unperturbed by the observers, they soon forgot that they were there; the universe was circumscribed by the skein of their auras and the melding of their membranes. When Racheal’s frenzy showed Ram she was about to come screaming in their new bed for the first time, he rapidly lifted and lowered his bride with a sure and familiar grip, his spidery fingers spread around her taut flanks. She groaned and clenched and screwed herself around, turning beneath him and swinging him atop her, pivoting around the fulcra of their loins.
The priestess raised her long legs high and wide, squeezing his undulating waist in her steaming vice and their tension reached immanent transcendence; then her heels came down and bored into his buttocks, plunging her enraptured captive all the way into her core. Her face buried in his long dark locks, her teeth gripped his throat as he obeyed the irresistible urgings of her musculature. It was around the two thousandth time that Racheal had screamed and writhed around Ram’yana’s unearthly white body; they never tired of it.
They were honestly, naively, achingly, tenderly, lustily in love.
The lovers lay inside each other’s orbit, drifting in sated Satori as their breaths subsided. Then, while their minds drifted, their bodies began to gently kiss and caress in their absence. After an immeasurable time they returned to their joined flesh as the tempo of their movements increased, rocking to the rhythm of Derek and the Dominoes; the album repeated automatically and their bodies followed suit.
It wasn’t long before the Oriental woman and her beau across the suburban chasm joined in the honeymoon spirit. Inspired to their own personal party, they turned away from the window and lit a dim, low candle. They began to dance and stroke each other, kissing and stripping the clothes from their slim, well-matched bodies in the semi-darkness. A flickering yellow sheen swam across the room and ignited the young woman’s silken body into a glowing flare of yellow and umber as the balding man sank to his knees before her. His chest and arms were thatched with thickly matted dark hair and the woman seemed diminutive against his bulky frame.
Her moans rose above Electric Ladyland to echo into the bedchamber of the Centraxians, drawing their attention to the couple now framed in the stage of their window. Ram’yana and Racheal idly watched as they continued making love; the man stood up with the girl wrapped around his face, her surprisingly slim thighs athwart his shoulders and her fingers grasping the hair at the back of his head. His hands roved between her boyish derriere and her girlish teats and back again. She climbed down his trunk and worked herself down and around upon him, childlike against his massive body. Then the diminutive Asian lay back and dangled from his grasp, with her mouth open wide and her dark hair brushing the floor, the slits of her eyes glittering in the candlelight.
At first it seemed to the Centraxians that the neighbours had forgotten the young couple while the man carried the tiny woman around the room, her slim limbs wrapped around his hairy torso. Then they changed positions and Asian and Caucasian eyes stared and squeezed shut and flared open through the window on the other side of the path that ran between the brick buildings. The stranger stood behind his gasping female while her shimmering black waterfall of hair flew around them in a spiralling spray.
Then the woman gasped and moaned deliriously, with her face pressed distortedly against the window as the man groaned with surprising restraint, bucking up into her in a spasm of unrelenting thrusts. Her eyes flashed open and locked with Ram’yana’s through the glass as she was smeared up and down the windowpane, and the prince’s movements quickened and deepened within his priestess bride in response.
Oriental eyes rolled back into their sockets and the couple slipped from view while the young lovers continued to climb inside each other’s limbs and loins and skins. When Priestess and Priest tired of the bedroom they stood spooning in front of the harbour in the streaming moonlight, Ram’yana’s hands fondling Racheal’s full milky breasts as he moved through her. They gasped and gazed through glazed eyes and brine-rimed glass at the brassy lights of the city, wavering in the wakes ploughing through the salty water.
As dawn began to tint the hazy sky above the cityscape with mauve and lavender haze, Ram’yana drew his lightly bristled cheek from beside his beloved’s smooth cheekbone and she twisted about to face him. One of Racheal’s long legs arced around acrobatically, wrapping around his waist to ensure they remained conjoined and her sky-blue eyes glittered up at him, half veiled behind blond strands and tresses. Her features were flushed and her lips slightly swollen with fulfilled passion as she gently raked his smooth chest with her tumescent pink nipples. A corner of her lips arced upward and her tongue painted a streak from his Adam’s apple to his ear.
“I love you.”
“All my love.”
viola squealed out the frenetic melodies of Curved Air’s Air Conditioning as sunlight filtered through the palms and overhanging eaves. Houseflies circled the white paper lantern globe hanging above the big brass bed where the lovers entwined, embedded together beneath Ram’s green velvet cloak.
“I can hardly believe it’s just us,” Racheal breathed into her young man’s chest. The unmistakeable beginnings of chest hair circled his nipples in thin dark haloes, matted into lambent swirls by her wetly wandering tongue.
“Justice?” Ram’yana stretched and sighed, sloughing off the golden afterglow of the supine morn as her lips traced a path down his taut belly. “Or mercy?”
“I’ll show you no mercy, my mmm…”
“Aah….”
It was another hour before they spoke intelligibly. “Betwixt Justice and Mercy lies the heart, my true love, my wise dove, my subtle serpent…” Racheal whispered as she lay beneath him, half pressed into the mattress as he suspended his upper body above her. Their noses almost touched and her fragrant breath washed over him.
“Charmed, I’m sure…” The serpent pulsated, making her gasp.
“How do you do that without moving?”
“…and the heart never lies. Feel its beat inside the pulse?”
“Oh, yes, between just us and my sea!”
“Twin hearts…”
“Beating as one…” Their breath commingled within their breasts. The shorthand of their words was silenced again, the facile sweet nothings a wholly inadequate accompaniment to the illustrious mysteries of Tantra. The lovers had been almost literally inseparable night and day for two years; the patina of their unending loving desire still gleamed, unmarred by the glorious (and occasionally traumatic) phantasmagoria of their intimately shared experience. Words were a minor impediment to their synchrony of emphatic telempathy.
The sun rose a little higher. Distant traffic smeared through their mutual absorption, echoing a humming reminder of the bustling hive that was booming into activity, just across the deeply flooded river valley of the renowned harbour. Kookaburras laughed to one another and a ferry horn sounded warning to a screaming speedboat. Racheal smoked a cigarette – a
He thought she was sleeping until the words seeped from her lips. “Ramses,” she said, “my love…” Her white teeth bit down on her lower lip. “I… There’s something I need to ask you.” He turned to stroke her wrist, his fingers feathering up her pale freckly arm and alighting upon her firm breast. “I need to know…” Her speech was halting, drawn out in fits and starts, and her shaman prince gently caressed her shoulders and neck to ease the sudden tension blossoming in his young Lady. He waited patiently as the words assembled themselves within her long lovely throat, that he kissed to help bring them forth.
“Do you remember what happened… when we went away to Narrow Neck?”
“Remember? Of course…” The sudden juxtaposition of her slim throat with the narrow peninsula of land thrusting out into the deep
Racheal turned to him and her eyes glittered aquamarine as she seemed to search his face for some deeper meaning than that evident in his words. “You remember everything?” Her piercing gaze penetrated his post-coital bliss and a rush of images flowed through his mind – the trek from the nearest railway station, walking past the antique tourist attractions, through thinning suburbs and gnarled mountaintop gum trees to the edge of the wilderness. Their sweaty hands were clasped together in the heat as they shouldered their heavy packs of provisions and camping gear, searching for a campsite; the sudden vistas of deep gorges and crumbled cliffsides, dark maws of unreachable caverns beckoning from beneath unscaleable synclines in the brilliant sunshine; strangely wind-carved stone transformed into sentient sentinels by the bright shifting daylight and dancing into spirit forms in the amber beeswax candlelight; the welcome discovery of a series of utterly private and comfortable caves opening off a long shelf of bright yellow stone, nestled beneath the summit of the peninsula.
He recalled their bemused satisfaction at discovering a functioning water tap protruding from the stone a couple of hundred paces from their love nest, somehow left behind in full working order by the builders of a large dam-fed water pipe that passed up over the peninsula and down the other side. He saw the series of rusting ladders set into wide clefts and chimneys in his mind’s eye, experienced the thrill of descending to the floor of the valley on the unsafe swaying metal and abseiling together down the last stretches of rock to the gently flowing streams beneath the unbroken canopy of gums and giant tree ferns.
He relived the long climbs back up the chimneys after expeditions in the upper reaches of the valley’s tributaries - and the longer passionate sessions with Racheal on the smooth sunwarm stone, making love all night on the edge of eternity, were vividly etched into his body, heart and soul. The scent of eucalypt and scrubby hard brushwood burning in their primitive rock oven came back to him in a rush, mingled with the scorch of baked vegetables and the sweet patchouli oil ornamenting his Lady’s native fragrance.
He smiled anew at the sudden pride he’d seen swelling in his mate at being caught in flagrante delicto by a surprised and surprising troupe of sweaty teenage schoolgirls in their clean regimental skirts and shady hats. Racheal turned herself around upon him to present the most intimate view possible to the wide-eyed Catholic girls, who were transfixed by the sight of beautiful longhaired hippies mating in the bright sunshine - until their startled teachers noticed and hurriedly shepherded the leering, wide-eyed and appreciative girls away.
Her provocative exhibition had turned him on even more than the naïve, engorgeous girls standing around them, with their smoothly sun-bronzed athletic thighs protruding from short plaid skirts; some obviously wished they were in Racheal’s place and their presence had added a rush of enthusiasm to the lovers’ well-oiled motions. The straight young suburbanites were the same age as the naked Centraxians, yet the gulf between their experiences was as vast as the vista forming a backdrop to their amorous embrace.
The heat of the flames on their naked flesh in the long loving nights came back to him, and the small clay figures they made and entombed in crevices and cavelets on the brink of the abyss, guardian spirits slowly baking to fruition in the warm darkness. And he remembered the square of silver bearing the Seal of Hermes Trismegistus that was ensconced with one of the guardians, still attached to the leather thronging torn from his neck when he had fashioned a better crafted, more accurate replacement.
He was reminded of the light plane that roared a mere handful of yards above them as they lay upon the summit, appearing from nowhere and speedily disappearing over the brim of Narrow Neck –they thought in Imperial yards in those days, a measurement descending to them from beyond the mists of Babylon’s graceful gardens; a few hundred yards from their cave they had discovered the strangely fenced-off zone at the edge of the cliff…
How could he forget Racheal’s pale lithe body painted with tan ochre stripes, dancing for him in the moonlight? How could he fail to remember the times they’d truly come to know each other deeply, truly, reverently? His memory was prodigious, semi-legendary; he was Random Access Memory incarnate.
And yet… something else was shining in Racheal’s mind as her eyes bored into him, recalling his awareness to the living reality of her firm, warm thigh as it stretched across his reawakening tumescence. As they lay together on the banks of the flooded river valley, on the shores of a safe harbour in the vast
“You don’t remember, do you?” The words came from her lips in a spurting rush, more a plea than a question. The shaman found himself on the brink of some indefinably portentous moment as her intense gaze wavered amid the mystifying swell of salty teardrops welling beneath her lashes. He wrapped his arms around her and she sank against his chest, waves of platinum spilling across his belly and covering her face. “I thought… maybe… you’d remember after all.”
As he caressed Racheal’s long spine and heaving ribcage, the meaning of her words continued to elude him. He puzzled over them for long moments as he ran his fingers through her hair and lifted her face to his. Then he lightly kissed her tears away and felt the rush of her unaccountable emotions pour into him as the saltiness dissolved against his tongue.
He tasted fear.
- R.A.
Images – author’s
See
Further True Tales from the Prince of Centraxis -
Adder Ladies and the Dawn of Ra Part 1 - Doves and Serpents
Nesting Urge – Adder Ladies and the Dawn of Ra Part 2
See White Bird Must Fly – Adder Ladies and the Dawn of Ra Part 3
Which Craft – Adder Ladies and the Dawn of Ra Part 4
Black Dog – Adder Ladies and the Dawn of Ra Part 5
Mandrake & the Magician – Adder Ladies and the Dawn of Ra Part 6 Watching the Watcher – Adder Ladies and the Dawn of Ra Part 7 Promises & Compromises - Adder Ladies & the Dawn of Ra 8 The Invisible Great Divide - Adder Ladies & the Dawn of Ra 9 Circles Within Circles - Adder Ladies & the Dawn of Ra 10 Three Flaming Arrows - Adder Ladies & the Dawn of Ra 11 Round Peg, Square Hole - Adder Ladies & the Dawn of Ra 12 Monkey Business - Adder Ladies & the Dawn of Ra 13
The Blue Pill - Adder Ladies & the Dawn of Ra 14 Crossed Swords - Adder Ladies & the Dawn of Ra 15
Power Corrupts - Adder Ladies & the Dawn of Ra 16
Rogue Phantoms - Adder Ladies & the Dawn of Ra 17 Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll Part 1 Psychedelic Water Part 1 - Fractal Rainbow The Shaman of Centraxis Part 1 - The Whole is Greater
And see -
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Please add your perspective to the collective mind NOW! - Prince Ram'yana