Nostradamus

"With a name so timid will she be brought forth
That the three sisters will have the name of destiny;
Then she will lead a great people by tongue and deed,
More than any other will she have fame and renown.

Nostradamus, Century 1:76


Notes:

Three sisters: Mahakali, Mahalakshmi, Mahasaraswati
(alternatively the three nadis of the subtle system)

a great people: the Sahaja yogis

The World's Mother

Two Callings (1904)

And then the great voice rang out to the sun,
And all my terror left me, all my shame,
While every dream of joy from earliest youth
Came back and lived!—that joy unhoped was truth,
All joy, all hope, all truth, all peace grew one,
Life opened clear, and Love? Love was its name!

So when the great word ‘Mother!’ rang once more,
I saw at last its meaning and its place;
Not the blind passion of the brooding past,
But Mother - the World's Mother - come at last,
To love as she had never loved before
-To feed and guard and teach the human race.

The world was full of music clear and high!
The world was full of light! The world was free!
And I? Awake at last, in joy untold,
Saw Love and Duty broad as life unrolled—
Wide as the earth—unbounded as the sky—
Home was the World-—the World was Home to me!

Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860-1935)

Source: Gilman, The Home, its work and influence (New York: Charlton, 1910), p.xi, but written earlier, probably in 1904.
Thanks to Graham Brown for alerting me to this writer.

Woman-Saviour

The Woman-power (1842)

Woman-Saviour now we muster
To await thy advent sure,
In the cluster of thy lustre,
Come and leave the earth no more?
Then before thy gentle look,
Swords shall quail and warriors fail,
And the spear, a shepherd’s crook,
Shall adorn the daisied dale.
Woman-power! Incarnate love!
Human Goddess come and be,
If the Bridegroom’s tears can move,
Bride unto Humanity.
Thou alone of all can save us
Let us be what thou would have us!

John Goodwyn Barmby (1820-1881) in his younger years was involved in several short-lived attempts at communal living, first in France and then in England, particularly after his marriage to Catherine (1817?-1853). They founded and ran the Communist Church [Commune-ist] in London (1841-1849), but met with derision from their contemporaries.

Goodwyn Barmby wrote to a friend in the early 1840s:

But the Free Woman who shall give the womanly tone to the entire globe is not yet manifested.

Catherine Watkins Barmby in her pioneering feminist pamphlet, The demand for the emancipation of women (1843), insisted that

We have the priest, we therefore demand the priestess, the
Woman teacher of the word, the woman apostle of God’s law!

For further info see Barbara Taylor, Eve and the New Jerusalem: socialism and feminism in the nineteenth century (London: Virago Press, 1983). Catherine Barmby is regarded these days as an early feminist, and you'll see why when you read her 1843 pamphlet, ‘The demand for the emancipation of woman, politically and socially’, a fascimile of which is in Taylor's book. Its also on the web:
http://www.binghamton.edu/womhist/awrm/doc9.htm
Barbara Taylor's recent article on Catherine Barmby in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography is good too.
I have a section on Goodwyn Barmby and William Blake in my book, The Wisdom Tradition.

Perhaps we shall witness

Perhaps we shall witness at the end of history, as in its beginning, a Feminine World Age; perhaps woman will once more redeem herself and man from his mania of destruction.


Otfried Eberz (1878-1958), Vom Aufgang und Niedergang des mannlichen Weltalters (The Rise and Fall of Male Supremacy)(1929-31)
(English translation by Susanne Schaup)

There is joy enough

C.S. Lewis (1898-1963)

The Great Divorce: a dream (1946), pp97-99:

The reason why I asked if there were another river was this. All down one long aisle of the forest the undersides of the leafy branches had begun to tremble with dancing light; and on earth I knew nothing so likely to produce this appearance as the reflected lights cast upward by moving water. A few moments later I realised my mistake. Some kind of procession was approaching us, and the light came from the persons who composed it.

First came bright Spirits, not the Spirits of men, who danced and scattered flowers - soundlessly falling, lightly drifting flowers, though by the standards of the ghost-world each petal would have weighed a hundredweight and their fall would have been the crashing of boulders. Then, on the left and right, at each side of the forest avenue, came youthful shapes, boys on one hand, and girls on the other. If I could remember their singing and write down the notes, no man who reads that score would ever grow sick or old. Between them went musicians: and after these a lady in whose honour all this was being done. …

‘And who are all these young men and women on each side?’
‘They are her sons and daughters.’
‘She must have had a very large family, Sir.’
‘Every young man or boy that met her became her son – even if it was only the boy that brought the meat to her back door. Every girl that met her was her daughter.’
‘Isn’t that a bit hard on their own parents?’
‘No. There are those that steal other people’s children. But her motherhood was of a different kind. Those on whom it fell went back to their natural parents loving them more. …
‘Every beast and bird that came near her had its place in her love. In her they became themselves. And now the abundance of life she has in Christ from the Father flows over into them.’

I looked at my teacher in amazement.

‘Yes’, he said, ‘It is like when you throw a stone into a pool, and the concentric waves spread out further and further. Who knows where it will end? Redeemed humanity is still young, it has hardly come to its full strength. But already there is joy enough in the little finger of a great saint such as yonder lady to waken all the dead things of the universe into life’.