#8 GODS: ST GERMAIN AS MYTH AND LEGEND

Over five years of asking questions to discover who St Germain was I uncovered about five hundred lives associated with him and about two hundred and fifty lives associated with Mary.

Most of these lives were experienced in India, the Middle East and Europe, not because St Germain only incarnated there, but because of the limitations of the historical record and the limitations of my Judeo-Christian education. To discover what characteristics his lives had in common, to map their spiritual DNA, I was directed not to the present or the immediate past, but back into the mists of myths and legends. It seemed that the qualities that St Germain had within him were externalised across many lives but they could most clearly be understood by returning to mystical heroes who demonstrated clearly his character traits.

Many people today feel a need for mythical beings and their legends more than before as an alternative to our hyper-realistic or purely scientific stories. Those stories explain how we come to be, who we are and why we feel the way we do. On the other hand, myths help us understand truths, which we cannot grasp rationally.

Legends are not supposed to be history or science, they are not supposed to be factual, they are instead supposed to show us archetypes of men and women and through them teach us how to be human.

But who are these heroes and heroines? Where do they come from and what was their purpose? Are legends silly stories that our ancestors told one another or could their stories be encoded with truth and the source of historical and scientific data?

The Gatekeeper made it clear to me that to understand a master you first had to understand the characteristics of certain legendary beings. “To understand St Germain, put your pragmatic, rational mind in a small chest, lock it and hand it to me,” the Gatekeeper advised, “You must explore your own collective unconscious and the mythology of Europe so that you can understand the master energy. Three archetypes in particular will help us understand St Germain: Pan, Loki, and Eros. St Germain is benign mischief, luck and lust. These are the clues to him. Once you have understood them, I will give you more about him before we explore Mary’s three archetypes.” [Litchfield, 2003].

What I understood the Gatekeeper to be saying was that these legendary beings, together with the characteristics attributed to them in the stories of their exploits, bore a symbolic relationship to the actual characteristics St Germain demonstrated in his earthly lives. Therefore, through pursuing the three legendary beings of Pan, Loki and Eros it would lead me to understand them first as heroes, then lead me to a greater understanding of St Germain’s individual lives together with the consistent personality traits and aptitudes he demonstrated life after life. While I did not realize it at the time, this approach would become very important. It would be my modus operandi for slowly piecing together the complete picture of St Germain's and Mary’s contribution to humanity and the qualities and characteristics of their soul family would show in their lives.

Delving into the netherworld of Egyptian, Greek, Roman and Norse legends, Pan, Loki and Eros emerge as flawed characters. But because they do not offer a complete picture of St Germain, it would became necessary to search further.

PAN

Pan is multi-dimensional. There are at least three kinds of Pan: the Greek pastoral god who is the lord of nature and the personification of evil. The way Pan’s persona shifts from good to bad is similar to the changes, that occur in Loki and Eros. Pan, the son of Hermes, is the Greek pastoral god of fertility and forests. He is shown as a leering, ugly man with horns, beard and goat’s ears and feet. Most stories about him deal with his amorous affairs where he is vigorous and lustful, inhabiting hills, caves and lonely country places to play on his pipe. Pan can make humans stampede in panic or terror. Like a shepherd, he sleeps at noon and dislikes being disturbed. He embodies the forces of nature while his sensual nature and his earthy qualities derive from his earlier form as Dionysus, the god who gave humans both the vine and its wine. It will be the Dionysian rituals which will give birth eventually to performing arts in the dramas of tragedy and comedy.

“There is part of Pan,” the Gatekeeper explained, “which is typical of St Germain. He is the dancer, the Boetican image of Pan, playing pipes and dancing on little goat feet. He has the rutting sexuality of a male goat. Look for those lives of his where those characteristics are

pre-eminent.” [Lichfield, 2004]

As I scanned the master list of St Germain’s lives, which had grown for the original eleven lives to over five hundred I could see him as legendary dancers, as Anna Pavlova, Rudolph Nureyev, and the Australian, Robert Helpmann and as Hollywood stars Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly. In other lives he was a legendary seducer as Casanova, Julius Caesar or Errol Flynn or as the god Krishna with his alleged fourteen thousand wives.

But there is a second dimension of Pan where he is the god of all nature’s spirits. Sometimes those who are clairvoyant and who work in gardens closely with nature, like Eileen Caddy from Findhorn, Scotland claim to have seen this Pan. They describe him as exceptionally tall, over twenty-five feet, having shaggy legs with cloven hooves and holding panpipes.

Pan, according to the Gatekeeper, directs all the angels, devas and earth spirits on Earth in their work of building and protecting animals, plants and minerals, ensuring that the blueprint of God’s design for creation is exactly followed and that it is only allowed to be modified, in an evolutionary sense, to ensure the survival of some species.

Pan prefers to be known as the Lord of the Bush in Australia, the Lord of the Woodlands in America and Europe and the Lord of the Jungle in tropical countries. He is present in most cultures as a rural entity, joyful and playful, helping bountiful harvests and nature to renew itself.

St Germain expressed those aspects of himself when he had lives as the biblical hero Noah, the American Johnny Appleseed, the British folk hero Robin Hood and the Celtic spirit of the forest, the Green Man.

As Noah he would save seeds as well as animals to repopulate a drowned world after the flood when later as Jethro Tull he would invent a plough to increase the bounty of the harvest.

St Germain consistently chooses lives that have to do with seeds and grains, as Luther Burbank, the Californian horticulturalist who improved many varieties of food crops and as William Farrer, the Australian who improved the quality of wheat. He loves wine, and as Noah he is the first person in Western history to be described as a drunk. Later, he will own a large proportion of Italy’s vineyards as the Roman philosopher, Seneca, while as the French monk, Dom Perignon, he will invent champagne.

It will be some time in the Middle Ages, when people had forgotten the Greek and Roman joy of knowing Pan celebrated in Virgil’s Georgics, that they start to associate the name of the demon with him. The horned and cloven-hoofed joyous god takes on another form becoming the personification of evil, as Satan. This third dimension of Pan is the dark side expressed in the excesses of wantonness, of alcohol, sex and drugs which almost extinguish his vast creative genius. King Charles II, Rudolf Nureyev and Lord Byron are typical examples of St Germain’s lives of excesses.

Pan shares some characteristics with another Greek god: Apollo, who was the inspiration of prophetesses. Pan’s sacred place was at Mount Election in Greece, while Apollo’s was at Delphi.

But Pan in many ways is the antithesis of Apollo; Pan is farmyard crude, rough as guts, compared to Apollo’s urbane culture and sophistication. Pan could be like the plain speaking, homespun President Harry Truman compared to his diplomatic and sophisticated Secretary of State, Dean Acheson, both of whom were aspects of St Germain.

LOKI

Loki, on the other hand, was always the personification of trouble; he is the mischief-maker of the Norse and Germanic gods, and the ultimate paradox.

The son of two giants, Loki becomes a member of the band of gods, the Aesir, when Odin, the chief god, makes him his blood brother. Therefore, although he is regarded as a god, because of his adoption by Odin, he still remains an outsider.

He is promiscuous. By his faithful wife Sigyn he has two sons while by his mistress, he fathers three monsters; a serpent, who will drown Thor in his venom, a wolf who will swallow Odin, and Hel, who ruled the hall of the dead and whose hospitality extends to giving guests drinking horns of urine. In addition, Loki has sexual dalliances with at least five other goddesses.

Loki is also the father of strife, a trickster who is crafty and malicious, fickle and false, clever, cunning and guileful, but ultimately heroic. When Loki enters a story the tempo increases, the interest builds. He is a complex character who transgresses every boundary by changing his shape to a horse, or a falcon or a fly. Over time, his character changes as Pan’s character changes and increases in its maliciousness. This, some scholars argue, could have been the result of the spread of Christianity in Scandinavia and the resulting demonization of his role because Loki changes from being a mere liar and prankster into being a spiteful and eventually malevolent figure, a Satan. He follows the same demonization as Pan.

In the end, Loki causes the death of the wisest of all the Gods, Baldur, who was the beautiful, and just son of Odin and his wife, Frigg. He deceives the blind Hodir, who hurls mistletoe at Baldur and kills him. Loki is hunted down, bound to a rock by the entrails of his son and a snake is fastened above him to drop venom onto his face. His loving wife, Sigyn, catches the poison in a bowl saving him from death. But when the bowl fills, she must carry it away to empty, causing the falling venom to splash onto his face. Then Loki will writhe in torment and earthquakes will shake the land. Loki will to stay bound until all fettered creatures: all slaves are freed at the end of the world.

St Germain is the trickster, the liar, the wizard of guileful words; his lives reverberate with those characteristics as the trickster magicians Aaron and Merlin, as the wizards of guileful words Dante and Cicero and as the malevolent liar, Josef Goebbels. But he is also the liberator of fettered creatures as the anti-slavery campaigner William Wilberforce and the American Abolitionist William Floyd Harrison and the African-American escaped slave, Frederick Douglas.

EROS

The third legendary figure who reflected St Germain was Eros. Eros, according to Plato (In Symposium), was the first of the Greek Gods, a divinity of love who is both male and female. He is physically small, with wings and carries a bow and arrow. Over the years, he shrinks to almost child-like proportions until by the time of the Roman Pantheon he has become a tiny cherub, Cupid. As Eros he plays at the feet of Aphrodite, the Goddess of Love, and mischievously helps her seduce men and women into embarrassing affairs. One of his most sensational exploits is the seduction of Helen, the Queen of Sparta, wife of King Menelaus, on behalf of Paris, a Prince of Troy. This escapade leads to the decade long, destructive Trojan War.

St Germain is often of a dubious sexuality, both male and female and frequently he is bisexual: as Byron, Degas or Dumas père. As a promiscuous seducer, he is without equal: Casanova, Vivaldi and Walter Raleigh, are examples.

It is easy to see the deceiver, the magician and the trickster in some of St Germain’s lives and acknowledge him as both the greatest seducer in history and the world’s most sublime dancer but, there is far more to him than this capriciousness. Most lives of St Germain do not reflect the characteristics of Pan, Loki, or Eros. Most importantly, there were the great medical scientists, the diplomats, saints, prophets, chemists, architects, composers, travellers, navigators, philosophers, lawyers, statesmen and the sublime poets… Then there was the adventurer, the man who sailed off the edge of maps to explore new worlds… how could this multiplicity of talent be captured by Pan, Loki and Eros?

“Who else could St Germain be, you ask?” the Gatekeeper interrupted, “When you visited Apollo’s temple at Delphi, what did you discover?” Meditating there in his sanctuary, I heard beautiful music which I immediately associated with Raphael the Archangel. But why would he be in Apollo’s sanctuary?

“As you look again at Apollo’s characteristics, who else, do they seem to fit?”

“Some of them fit both, St Germain and the Archangel Raphael,” I replied.

“Therefore, we may assume there is a close relationship which draws them together.” (Litchfield, 2004)