The Green Pulse Oracle
Frequently
people ask me what I’ve been doing.
Well, one of the projects I’ve been helping my friend Jo Carson to brew
is a new oracular system that’s never been seen before. The late Fred Adams, founder of a
religion he called Feraferia, chose
Jo as his literary executor, and I must say it’s a testament to his foresight
that he selected Jo; she’s taken his entire archives, which are extensive, and
has been working on bringing his teachings alive and making them available to
others beyond the Southern California birthplace of Feraferia.
For readers
who may not know of Fred, he had a visionary experience of what he called the
Goddess in 1956, and thereafter dedicated the rest of his life to bringing
awareness of Her into the contemporary world. He formally introduced the religion he called Feraferia in
1967. Its symbol is the Phytala.
The periodical that he published
and illustrated he named Korythalia,
describing Feraferia thusly:
Feraferia is a Pagan fellowship for the
erotic celebration of Wilderness Mysteries with Faerie style and grace, and for
the lyrical unification of ecology, mythology, and sacrament. In such play-love-work may women and men
be reunited with Great Nature, each other, and their own beings...
Beginning circa
1970, Fred began amalgamating his understandings of various writings,
divinatory systems, and symbols into his own unique set of symbols. Drawing from the Tarot, the Celtic Ogham
alphabet, the Chinese I Ching, astrology, and especially the Tree Alphabet
Calendar as articulated by Robert Graves.
Originally called the Axerian Hieroglyphs by Fred, this nature-based
system is now called The Green Pulse Oracle, the phrase “Her green pulse” taken
from one of Fred’s poems.
In an effort
to make Fred’s research available to the public, Jo has taken these massive
amounts of notes, diagrams, marginalia, and such and synthesized them into the
more accessible form of this Green Pulse Oracle.
We felt we
needed something tangible to use in divination. Jo and her artist husband, John
Reed, began by creating a set of cards, pictured below.
The idea is
that they can be consulted, like the Tarot, the Ogham, or the I Ching, to help
people get a sense of the forces and influences at play in a given situation.
John Reed
then undertook the task of turning the symbols into three-dimensional markers. First he began making prints of real
leaves to use as markers, with the leaf pattern on the reverse and the glyph on
the front. They were pretty, but
didn’t lay flat and were made of fired clay, which would have been heavy,
easily breakable or chippable, and difficult to manufacture on any scale beyond
an individual custom-made set.
Still, the
leaf shape appealed to us and was in concordance with a system based on
trees. John experimented with thin
pieces of wood, cut into a vesica piscis
(Latin “bladder of a fish”) shape.
This shape carries many associations in sacred geometry, including the
union of male and female, and the vagina, and is said to be a “source of
immense power and energy.” As Jo
said, “We liked the idea of calling the markers ‘Leaves,’ since the system is
based on the Tree Alphabet Calendar.”
In the photo
above, you can see the wax version, prepared for using on ceramic markers,
featuring the glyph called Ailm.
“Ailm” correlates with the Water
element, the Moon Tarot card, the Silver Fir, Palm or Elm tree, birth and
cosmic stimulus, the number one, the vowel A, Winter Solstice and Yule, and
with the ocean deeps.
The second
marker is a wooden “leaf” with the Ailm
glyph burned into it. The
following leaves show test versions of the Feraferia Phytala design that will
be on the reverse of all the leaves.
An
explanatory book, featuring lots of Fred’s artwork, will accompany The Green
Pulse Oracle.
The work of
correlating Fred’s voluminous writings and notes, and fortifying it with
independent research, is tremendous.
Jo is doing the heavy lifting while I am serving as consulting
editor. I find this project
fascinating and engrossing, and I’m delighted to be in on the ground floor, as
it were, in creating a brand new oracular system.
