Sixth Sunday in Alchymical Time: Maritime Sunday

                

They that go down to the sea in ships, that do business in great waters;
These see the works of the Lord, and his wonders in the deep.
For he commandeth, and raiseth the stormy wind, which lifteth up the waves thereof.
They mount up to the heaven, they go down again to the depths: their soul is melted because of trouble.
They reel to and fro, and stagger like a drunken man, and are at their wit's end.
Then they cry unto the Lord in their trouble, and he bringeth them out of their distresses.
He maketh the storm a calm, so that the waves thereof are still.

Psalm 107. 23-29

Maritime Sunday is the time when we celebrate and contemplate one of the biggest mysteries yet, the Sixth Alchymical Mystery, which is the Sea and all it holds.  All it holds includes the many faces of She who watches over it and lives in it, Tethys, Yemaya, Maristella, Our Lady of the Seas, Our Lady of the Lakes, the Lady of the Lake. And this involves the contemplation and reverence of all the many ways in which the sea exists for us, all of the seas and oceans, the depths of them, rivers even, especially, for me the great lakes and that great lake by which I live, Michigan.

But the seas, the deep waters exist also in metaphor and in spirit and in fundamental archetypes. The Sea is the waters under which we are emmersed for baptism and spiritual cleansing, , for initiations, the witchly borderline we cross when making the circle boundaries and doing spiritual travels, and the sea is the sea of life on which we sail with its beauties but also its uncertain depths. The sea is even the very sea of space in which our planet, a blue island is floating. 

The sea is in our blood which is made of salt and water, and water we need to continually sustain us. The sea is our mother from which all live came and we can never live without that water. It must always be flowing through us. Hence in the blessing of the altar we say, "Blessed art thou, water, without which we would not be." The waves of our hearing, of electricity, the higher and stranger waves of sense perception, connection, magic, are all echoed in the waves of seas. 

                                                                 Our Lady of the Seas

Mami Wata is the Woman of the Seas, the myster of the mermaid, which is a famous story among northern European pirates, but which is central to mythologies over the world. Mami Wata is the forebearer of Yemaya and the Caribbean Lady of the Sea and the first and foremost of the fishtailed Sea Maidens.  She is, in Voudou, La Sirene, and indeed the Greek Sirens and the Germain Lorelai as well as the East Anglian river maids are her cousins. That the beautiful sea is inhabited and guarded by these ladies as strange and inviting and as dangerous as the waters, is another mystery. Their enchanting faces and torsoes speak of longing and desire, but their fish tails remind us that they are beyond the human. These embodiments of the power of water, we humbly remember and beseech.

                                                     Tethys Our Lady of the Deep 

Tethys is the Lady of the Deep, and her depths are not salty. How we have interpreted Greek myth is strange for her partner is Okeanos, from whom we get the word ocean, but the original ocean was a band of fresh water that encircled the earth and Tethys was the font of fresh water. Her daughters, the Okeanids were goddesses of springs and rivers, and the Nephaeli, the goddesses of clouds who nourished the earth. Her depths are not the bottom of the sea. Her depths are the absoluteness of water and nourishment, the source of all purification, all initiation and all life.