Billy Joel’s debut album, ancient Mayan initiation, and a dream of the God-Woman.
Last week, I was out for a hike with my dog, on what was decidedly the coldest day yet of the season. Walking through the woods in the below-freezing temperatures, I was visited by a memory from the winter months during my years in high school. I was on my school swim team, and because there was no pool in our district, we practiced at a neighboring school district. Practices started at 5:30 AM, and each day when practice was over, I would walk from the pool building to the car of a friend who would drive me to school, my chin-length hair still wet from showering. If the temperature was below freezing - like it was during the hike that sparked this memory - my hair would freeze and become like icicles hanging off my head.
Thinking about driving to and from swim practice brought up another memory, which was that, after I was able to drive myself to practice, my favorite album to listen to on the way there was Cold Spring Harbor, the debut album recorded by Billy Joel. A day or two after my hike last week, I decided to listen to the album while I was doing dishes. Any time I hear the frenetic piano introduction of the song, “Everybody Loves You Now”, I’m right back in the driver’s seat of my family’s sky-blue ‘92 Mercury Sable, 16 years old, shivering ecstatically as I speed along back roads in January’s early-morning darkness to get to practice on time. This day last week was no different. However, it was a different song that had made me freeze in place this time, just as I was in the middle of putting a clean casserole dish back in the cabinet.
The song’s title is “Falling of the Rain”, and on the original recording, it was the last song on the album's A-side. The song is written kind of like a fairytale; it starts with the line, “Long, long ago in the land of misty satin dreams,” and then introduces the listener to three different characters. The first is a man who paints all day long, inspired by the rich natural setting - the mountains and forests - where his house is situated. The second character is a young girl who sings joyfully as she roams through the woods and meadows. The third character is a boy who’s standing up on a hill over what I imagine to be the scene where the other two are, but rather than looking out over the landscape, he’s looking at the ground. Each of the characters has a particular relationship with the rain; specifically, while the girl is unbothered by walking in the rain and glad for the rain as it falls on her face, the boy and the man are both strangely and sadly untouched by and unaware of the rain’s falling to Earth.
I had stopped dead in the middle of what I was doing, casserole dish in hand, because, as I sang the final stanza of the song, I was struck with recognition of a profound psychological and spiritual phenomenon encoded in song’s final stanza - a phenomenon that I have been slowly coming to understand in a very personal way over the last two years or so. I’ll get to the last stanza in a moment; first I want to share another story that made that moment of recognition in my kitchen as weighty as it was.
Recently, I finished a book called Long Life, Honey in the Heart by Martin Prechtel. The book tells of Prechtel’s assimilation and initiation into the ancient traditions of an in-tact Mayan culture, referred to by outsiders as the Tzutujil, in a village seated beside a mountain lake in Guatemala. It so happened that, after his own initiation into life as a village adult, he was called upon to be the chief of the initiation process during which adolescent boys - generally between the ages of 14 and 19 - are educated in the ways of adulthood and endeavor to encounter their own deepest part of themselves; in other words, they are forming a relationship with their own soul. According to the Mayan cosmology described by Prechtel, the soul of a boy or a man is actually a woman - a personal goddess soul-bride who is only a fragment of the great goddess responsible for bringing the world back into blossoming life each year at the start of spring.
During the initiation for which Prechtel was responsible as chief, the young initiates made a long and dangerous journey down into the lowlands that abut the mountainous region of the village. Mythologically, the trek is a journey into the underworld where each initiate courts the Lord of Death with beautiful words, convincing him to release their soul-brides who had been taken into the realm of Death at the onset of adolescence. In Tzutujil society, this ritual reconnection with the soul-bride is a non-negotiable prerequisite to a man’s marriage with a human woman. Should he not be initiated, never find the god-woman within himself, he will expect his wife to be that god-woman - which of course she isn’t - and this will cause all sorts of problems for themselves and their future children.
Just as an aside, I can’t overstate the enormity of beauty and richness I experienced as I took in this book. I’m humbled just to know the story, and it is with great care and (I hope) very light footfalls that I endeavor to recount even this small piece of it. Truly a revelation of the sacred, the tale is written with beautiful language that drips with sticky, gorgeous words and phrases. I’m now rereading parts of the book after listening to it first on audiobook, which I highly recommend because you can hear the original language of the Mayan people spoken by the author who is fluent, plus, as he’s reading the book, he sings music that was played during the village rituals and makes his own commentary not found in the text.
Those familiar with Jungian psychology may already see the Jungian notion of the anima - the soul-woman found within every man - reflected in the Tzutujil concept of the soul-bride. In my own reckoning, the anima is a spiritual companion, guide, and confidant. She is a source of vital life energy and abundance; the force that brings continuous renewal to a man’s life, like the bursting forth of spring each year.
Back now the Billy Joel song.
There’s a trick that music theorists sometimes use in analyzing a composition based on the concept of the Golden Ratio, the mathematical proportion found in the geometry of sea shells, flower blossoms, and great works of art. When expressed as a decimal, the Golden Ratio is an irrational number that music theorists often reduce to 0.61 or 61%. The trick of analysis is to look at the part of a composition that is 61% of the way through, and it’s not uncommon to find a musical or lyrical turning point of which the rest of the piece or song then serves as a consequence. 61% of the way through “Falling of the Rain” is when we learn about the boy on the hill, and the consequence of his situation is the song’s final stanza, when we finally learn the relationship between the three characters - the man, the girl, and the boy. The final stanza goes like this: “And so the boy becomes the man who sits and paints all day, but the girl with the braids in her hair has gone away.”
At least one music reviewer has asserted that this song is an allegory for Joel's obsession with music keeping him from finding true romance - the man obsessed with his art, oblivious to the joyful girl who was there but now isn’t. I’m sure this could be true, but I’m also imagining another layer to the song’s meaning. Earlier this year, in Episode 20 of the podcast, I dug into the imagery of another Billy Joel song, “River of Dreams”, from his final studio album of all new music. In that episode, I mention how, in an interview, Joel asserted that, years later, he still doesn’t really know what all the imagery in the song means; it just came to him, and he submitted to turning it into a song. I wonder if something similar has happened with “Falling of the Rain”.
As I already mentioned, the song comes across like a fairytale. The renowned mythologist, Michael Meade, once said that the wisdom in a story - like a fairytale - can be found in the details, and the details at the Golden Section of this song (61% of the way through) have to do with the boy on the hill, and they might tell us something about why the glad singing girl isn’t anywhere to be found at the end of the song. The boy is described as a “fool” who is “filled with hopeless dreams”; he is located “high upon a hill”, and his characteristic action is to wait; and though he waits, we are told that he “will not see the falling of the rain”.
The image of a boy high upon a hill suggests someone who is ready for initiation. For example, the boys in the Tzutujil village, at the culmination of their initiation, traveled down into the lowlands from the mountainous region above in order to court death and recover their soul-brides. Being that Joel calls the boy in the song a fool, I am also reminded of an image from the ancient wisdom system of the tarot: the most recognized image on the Fool card is of a young man setting out on a journey. He is walking along a high cliff, and unlike the boy in the song, he isn’t waiting but moving along with exuberance, his gaze upon the sky above. This fool doesn’t see that he is about to fall off the cliff, a likelihood that seems disastrous on the surface, but when read symbolically, can be seen as the beginning of his initiation.
The boy in Joel’s song remains uninitiated. He waits, but he will not see the rain. In contemporary society, we talk about rainy days as times of bad news or bad luck, or times of general glumness. But the girl in the song, who is obviously the character with the greatest amount of vitality and energy, doesn’t mind the rain. To have the rain fall on her face is like experiencing the fullness of life - all of life’s joys and life’s sorrows - something that neither the boy nor the man can truly experience without being in relationship with the girl. This condition of the boy waiting on the hill reminds me of the common expression “living in the Ivory Tower”, in other words remaining locked up in mental theories and concepts without ever coming down into reality. It may seem more comfortable to stay out of the rain, but as Prechtel wrote, humans don’t exist in this world to be comfortable; we are here to be beautiful.
In writing about the importance of the Tzutujil initiation, Prechtel also explains that a boy who never travels into the underworld to complete his courtship death and be reunited with his soul-bride will, in effect, spend the rest of his life courting death, either through self-destructive behavior or behavior that brings harm to others - or both. Those familiar with Billy Joel’s biography know that, a year before releasing Cold Spring Harbor, he had experienced a profound period of depression and had been hospitalized after a suicide attempt. Several other songs on the album express feelings of monotony and futility, and there are many other images of the singer waiting for a woman to come into his life who can transform his condition into one of health and richness.
Joel was 22 years of age when Cold Spring Harbor was released. When I think back on the same period in my own life, having been wooed by a decade of romantic movies and love songs, I, too, spent my late teens, most of my 20s, and even the first part of my 30s expecting a relationship with an ideal woman to resolve all my woes - or to put it another way, to shelter me from rainy days. When I was 22, I was in a relationship that I thought would fulfill those expectations, but I was hounded by a recurring fantasy that there was some other, more ideal woman “out there” waiting for me - I almost felt like I could picture her. It was a fantasy that ultimately sabotaged that relationship.
Almost 15 years later, with plenty of relationship strife in the interim, I responded to a perennial feeling that there was something inside me that was failing to come to life, and devised a way to explore my own inner world through mythic imagination. A few weeks into the process, I had a dream in which I was introduced by the leader of a street-savvy band of young men to a woman wearing a bright red dress. The whole scene took place in a dingy, underground men’s restroom and was full of images associated with initiation. That dream occurred two years ago, but I continue to interact with the woman in the red dress through a personal meditation practice which has been nothing short of life-changing.
There are countless reasons why men today would never come to know their Soul-Bride. And what happens when they don’t? As Prechtel explains, they disparage their partners for not being goddesses, or they “marry their mother” (as we like to say) in an effort to remain comfortable and cared for; they may scroll incessantly through pages of pornography or dating profiles, or engage in acts of infidelity large and small as a replacement for seeking out their Soul-Bride within themselves; perhaps worst of all, they could end up sadly surrendering to a dried up sort of inner life that slowly becomes something of an eternal winter, with the life-giving rain and the fruit-bearing spring nowhere to be seen on the horizon.
Beyond the personal dynamics resulting from this lack of inner connection, other more broad-reaching questions begged to be asked. What happens when such uninitiated men are the ones making major decisions in our institutions? Spiritually speaking, we get a mainstream male-depicted monotheism that, through centuries of reformation, has moved further and further away from any acknowledgement of the Divine as having a feminine dimension. We get colonialism and imperialism that wipes out indigenous cultures. We get industrialism that exploits the riches of the Earth. We get societal institutions shaped by an obsession with economic comfort and political grandiosity. And we get whole communities of people who lean on drugs, alcohol, shopping, and junk food as means for coping with an inner hollowness that we intuitively know might otherwise be filled with a blossoming, flowering sense of beauty and wonder.
To be clear, I don’t want to suggest that this psycho-spiritual phenomenon is a singular solution to all the world’s problems, nor the only way for a man, or woman, or anyone else to reach a place of self-knowledge, self-sovereignty, and inner vitality. But as my own experience seems to be just a fractal of a potentially universal phenomenon, I feel compelled to share.
It’s nearly winter now, the time of year when (as the old stories tell) the Goddess of the flowering Earth goes into the Underworld to be with the Lord of the Dead. Following our own ancestral traditions, my family just brought our Christmas tree into our home, and we’ve been decorating this week. Many candidates have been offered as possible predecessors to the modern tradition of the Christmas tree, but I like to think of it as a way to remember the evergreen abundance of Nature during a time when visible evidence of life in the natural world is scarce. And now I’m reminded once more of my chilly hike last week: I’ve always enjoyed a good hike, but recently, I’ve been especially appreciative of my time in the woods, and I’m privileged to be able to make a little time for it most days, as a chance to meditate on the Earth as life-giving Mother - even when it’s below freezing outside.
NOTES
“Falling of the Rain” by Billy Joel
Long Life, Honey in the Heart by Martín Prechtel
Review of Cold Spring Harbor