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SAVING THE EMPRESS

TRASCENDENT FEMININE DEVOTIONAL MANIFESTO

translated by Giulia Lenti

I need a Temple.
But I have not yet been granted the permission to build it: I had to transgress this bureaucracy.

I want to welcome you into my Temple. But I should tell you that my means ours, and that what is sacred in me does not belong to me, except for the short stretch separating us from the Temple. In fact, in the Temple, I am no one. And that’s the first relief.

The Temple is the antidote to the presumption of a structure that we might consider essential to the construction of the daily functioning, but whose degeneration - illusory and perverse – hinders human individual development. Human being is here considered in its multiple complexity endowed with a dark core, which like a black hole is unfathomable by objective measuring instruments.

In the Temple, this mystery is the object of contemplation. Perceiving it we arrange ourselves as on the bank of a source too deep for the eye to catch a glimpse of the bottom. If we lean over the water, it takes us back to our own image in the form of a renewed enigma.

But it would be naïve to deny the flair of male-structured architecture: a powerful Emperor, resolute in showing himself capable of building a productive world that supports at all costs the material reality on which its prestige depends. Who would ever dare to distrust his ruler? It is with lucidity and precision that the necessary violence is planned and the due restraining bars installed.

At the court of this devotionless Emperor, Temple making is not only inadvisable but even dangerous, since the foundations of the imperial palace are built, and constantly renovated, on the suppression of every real mystery. Without mystery, in fact, the Temple is just another structure of containment and organization in the form of a substitute for spirituality.

The integration of the authentic mystery is hindered by every border of the structure. The humble acceptance of the mystery would light up the relativity of order and of male-structured hierarchies. It is the exile of the mystery that legitimizes the worst violence: the spiritual one. The systematic suppression of spiritual dignity reduces the development of the individual to a process of adaptation, the attainment of which, with the beginning of adult and (re)productive life, coincides with the end of growth, the acceptance of being equal to oneself, waiting for the material degeneration that leads to death.

Spiritual violence stands as a premise, a condition that easily legitimizes every subsequent form of violence and abuse of power perpetrated within the structure.

Trained to please the institutional authority: education is the slaughterhouse responsible for cutting off any perception of mystery – so vibrant, during childhood! – reducing it to a reject.

The baby faces its growth measuring itself with a training program that proposes the noble purpose of educating it to life: but the traced path is devoid of those authentic initiations that would prepare it to a full encounter with existence.

We get used to constantly providing a didactic demonstration of profit, punctuated by the rhythm of competition, that is measuring oneself with parameters established from the outside, to the extent of which the Other is nothing but an antagonist whose value threatens the demonstration of our own. Breeding of subjects, workers, consumers who disown death, removing it from conscious activity and from the perception of life, conceived as a material good whose enjoyment must be extended, regardless of its quality and the perception of its meaning. For this removal, death takes revenge on the life from which it was exiled: it becomes an unconceivable distressing end, legitimizing constant fear and an ethical-moral distortion justified by the imperative of survival.

Thus the devotionless Emperor provides the comforting protocol, the antidote to the fear of feeling consumed, terminated, infected, contaminated by the very core of life: by its unpredictable transformation, by its constant and manifold flowering.

Deprived of intimacy with our death, we are deprived of the freedom to choose our life, unable to develop that strength of mind that can be translated into inner freedom. On the contrary, driven by fear of mortal truth, we prefer to be weak, being satisfied with a mere substitute for authentic individual freedom: superficial and ideological individualists incapable of becoming individuals.

How to re-establish a contact with that disturbing individual strength? In the Temple, childhood is metaphysical beginning, residual contact with the whole and lost truth, legendary source of the unrepeatable fairy tale that sees us protagonists but that we forgot to perform, deeming it devoid of advantage and utility. We refuse to be embodied myth, living symbol of the vital expression that demands to be staged. It is in childhood that we cherish the certainty of having been willed by existence.

In childhood we felt the anguish of darkness and infinity, we survived the separation from that original source in which everything was us, and we were everything.

Being born, giving up that unity, couldn’t have been easy.

To be born again, a re-birth: to die again, and then, finally, to live.

It is with this purpose that the entrance of the Temple, otherwise sealed, opens wide.

In the center of the Temple, sitting on her throne, the Empress, ignored, gives birth to our present. She stands between us and our return to her night womb, what we believe to be the end.

It is in the drapes that envelops its inconceivable features that the transcendent feminine performs its continuous miracle.

The existent, mixed with the ingredients provided by the recipes established by nature, appears to us in the form of life and death, intertwined by a logic that we can partially deduce and define, with the illusion of knowing how to dominate it.

As we reach the Empress, and face her night death counterpart, our development resumes: it returns to her decrepit childlike hands.

We get kneaded again, diluted in the water of that dark and dangerous source that recomposes the design of a face marked by human experience.

Initiated into her mystery, which is ours, we can return to reflect ourselves in that black water, otherwise terrifying, and shatter the image of our reflection. To be no one again. And with what relief! Now we can dare, and dip our fingers to grab those shining and repulsive treasures that await us, and drag them out of the water that hid and preserved them.

These treasures have always belonged to us, but we must learn how to use them.

Every treasure is a fragment of that transcendent-feminine reduced and diluted for us to be bearable. A disproportionate fragment could overwhelm us, kill us. With these treasures we can compose our sacred text. A worthy trousseau to restore our lost spiritual dignity.

Every inspired form is composed brandishing the scepter of this trousseau. Image, sound, word, action in the world: clinging to our perception, they hurl us elsewhere, where the source flows, wetting the skin that we thought to be dry.

Where are we ending up hurled: it can be a terrifying dilemma. It happens when the Empress appears in her night dress, threatening to deny – after swallowing us up – to return us to the present.

It is then that the structure of the devote Emperor should provide its foothold.

Structure ourselves with devotion to the mystery we embody: this is the condition of balance that opens the doors of the Temple, so that anyone can be welcomed without any danger.

In the symbolic image, devoted to the feminine-transcendent, I seek access to this unprecedented and terrifying balance.

By composing the material form that transcends itself and hurls me into the Temple, I feel the meaning of my existence, and the beauty of my mortality.

Saving the Empress is taking responsibility for a destiny that only emerges if traced by our individual and mortal sign, vulnerable, allowing no delegation.



Rada Koželj

14th of November 2021