Introducing Calendar and Grail
The Calendar is Mayan and the Grail Holy. I had no idea there could be a link between them up to 2005, when I retired from the university system with a view to doing more necessary work. I moved to the West of Ireland for this and lived in a house overlooking the Atlantic. I was joined there by a newly beloved woman who introduced me to the Calendar. The house was glass-fronted so our days were filled with shifting light and Big Sky, mirrored by the ocean’s changing moods. At night, strong waves lashed into our sleep, penetrating the cliff face before rising through strong foundations into our souls.
One result was many dreams. During the spring of 2006 I recorded scores over a two month period. Intuiting their significance, I spent whole days working with these stories from my nights: enacting and integrating them. By June my soul had been radically transformed and the Grail had emerged as a central symbol of spiritual union. I had also completed the first draft of a book called Dreaming the Soul Alive. The pattern of this inner work was reflected in my outer relationship as I fell more in love with Christa, who was also transforming rapidly. We conceived the project of a sacred marriage, inner and outer, within and between, witnessed by sea and sky.
My mother died in August. I stayed close to her in Dublin over her last weeks of intensive care and then longer to clear the house I had grown up in. This also was a time of deep change and integration, after months of dream work and dream writing. I returned to Connemara in mid-September, parentless, my Heart thrown open, and resumed my love for Christa, who had returned to Germany briefly after the funeral. Our work of sacred marrying deepened and a new phase opened in our lives. I felt myself at last grown-up, poised on an uncertain edge between existence and something greater, in search of a truer relationship with the Mother- and Father-ness of things.
Immersed in a world of archetypes, I discovered how inner processes of sacred marrying bring forward Divine Father and Mother powers in the soul, equipping it to re-parent orphaned parts until, finally, the image of a Divine Child arises and with it intimations of spiritual adulthood and fully human being. This became the focus of new work as we deepened in love and moved up the coast to Mayo in early 2007. The intensity of our lives grew stronger there. Located between a sacred mountain to the South and a churning ocean to our North, I was returned to ancient practices of prayer and Earth-healing.
Our loving encountered grave challenges: Christa was assailed by visions of rape and sexual atrocity from a deep past; I experienced complementary visions of military violence (torture, massacres, pillage). We took pains to integrate these Shadow traces, which threatened to shatter the process of our sacred marrying. Then, in spring 2007, I had the inner experience of a Mayan elder calling me. We had already planned to visit Sweden in June for a Calendar-related event. There I met a renowned author, Carl Calleman, who provided contact details and a trip to Guatemala was arranged for November.
We returned to Germany, where I read Calleman’s The Mayan Calendar and the Transformation of Consciousness. Its account of a series of 9 ‘Underworlds’ tending towards apotheosis in ‘2012’ literally blew my mind when – meditating before an image of the Jaguar Temple at Tikal – my crown chakra erupted like a volcano, opening my skull to the stars. At the same time, the Temple’s ‘Holy of Holies,’ a stone chamber built over a 9-stepped pyramid that represents 9 stages in a process of cosmic evolution, also had its head blown open. Flames belched out, and thick smoke, evidently by way of purging a dark period of frenzied human sacrifice that accompanied the decline of classical Mayan civilisation in the 9th century.
The image cleared then and light poured in, a new order of communion having been established. I felt similarly released in the temple of my body. All boded well and we looked forward to our adventure in November. In August Christa was diagnosed with a lethal cancer. I joined her in Germany for a cycle of spiritual healing that was followed by orthodox treatment. She showed great courage and resilience through a series of extreme challenges. By mid-October it was clear that she would recover, but not quickly enough to visit Guatemala. Thus I went alone on the journey described in I.1.
By January 2008, Christa had regained her strength. We made a number of sacred journeys over that year to Ancient Egypt, French Polynesia, Cathar France, Arab Spain and Aztec Mexico, moving also between Germany and Ireland. Our work of sacred marrying blossomed through this time and I created a Sacred Play (in Story, Magic, Music, Dream and Dance) called The Goddess Rising: Sexual Healing and the Return of the Female Christ to honour my beloved’s return to life. This was presented in April 2009. In August 2009 the cancer also returned, more aggressive than before. Christa was adamant.
She said that she was tired, that it was time to stop struggling and that she would decline treatment. I rallied in support but prayed secretly for a miracle, unable to allow the inspiration that had come upon her. She passed in late September. Her funeral happened on a day we had been due to leave for Hawaii. I felt shattered, as if my soul had been ravaged and Heart ripped out. All that remained was a sickening ache. I returned to Ireland and plunged into an abyss of conscious grieving, having no alternative. All my trajectories had been radically shared; now they felt irreparably broken.
In January 2010 I went on a Vision Quest to the Sahara, in search of new direction. There the image of a Divine Child was conceived in my Heart as a fruit of all that marrying. Returning home, from nowhere, I wrote a series of articles about the Grail and the nature of our human questing for it. With this, mysteriously, a passionate interest in the Calendar also revived. For the next two years I lived alone, reclusively almost, feeling endlessly inspired and devastated by turn as I created a series of Sacred Plays to facilitate the coming Shift of ‘2012,’ which I anticipated as apocalypse in the sense of revelation more than cataclysm.
My grief transmuted into a Passion that continues through this writing. At that time, it expressed via work of inner sacred marrying and the series of Calendar-based Plays. Then, after a third year alone, I met a new partner. This allowed sacred marrying to resume outwardly as well. The Plays had culminated on October 28, 2011 – the true date, according to Calleman – of a Shift that had become associated via Mayan lore with the ‘iconic’ December 21, 2012. I participated radically in a 28/10 event and, as a result, came to intuit hidden links between the Calendar and Grail traditions. That link is profound, non-obvious and the core of this work.
It can’t be declared in advance but I can offer preliminary indications: I see the Mayan Calendar as sacred because it charts the unfolding of Consciousness across evolution, history, space and time. I see the Grail as an image of the Unity from and towards which such unfolding proceeds. The Calendar suggests movement, change, becoming and the Grail a Constant that is at once Origin and Goal, an image of transcendent but also generative Be-ing. What is the relationship between this Unity that unfolds and the Unity in which all unfolding happens?
Always a Quest arises, intent on re-turning to Origin and knowing the place for a first time. This pattern applied also to my drafts, the revising of which proved to be a journey in itself, one that helped me intuit a mystically coordinated process of movement from relatively implicate to explicate states that characterises Life, Consciousness and, via processes of existence, Be-ing itself. That said, the substance of a journey is in the journeying. Its value can’t be conveyed by any preface, implying that every ‘text’ must come fully into its moment in order to be fully given.
[Reviewing that last, seemingly obscure sentence reminds me of why I needed to wait until now (March 2026) to share work that in some cases goes back half a lifetime. The reason is that I was never present enough to see what was always going on; couldn’t see the pattern that was unfolding piecemeal over time. I daresay that this is true for most of us on many invisible levels. Our moments are never fully realised, nor we in them. I once thought of myself as a particular ‘line of articulation’ in the overall Word of God. Perhaps that is where the ‘text’ image above came from. In any case, I had intuited my delayed arrival at various points before but now, with Kaleshwar’s help, am learning that every experience is or can be an awakening experience, including all episodes cited in a fictional autobiography that began my conscious spiritual life. None of these was fully lived in its hour of first occurrence or remembering. For that reason, all continue to pay awareness forward in endless streams of soul-opening that lovingly attend every new dawning of eternal Now.]
[From Tantra of the New Grail, volume 1 of The Calendar and the Grail, available under ‘Books.’
