People often ask me about my travels in France, so I decided to write this piece for those of you who want to know.
I first found myself in Aups on a family summer holiday in around 2010 in a beautiful villa my Mother had found which was next to an crumbling Mary chapel, thick with rose bushes and a beautiful pool, archways and lavender. It was utterly stunning. Our children were little and after leaving my parents we went on to stay in a yurt place on a river bed in a gorge, and then from there we went o St Marie de la Mer. As we arrived there entire place was awash with festivities - we had completely and unexpectedly come at the very weekend of the gipsy festival and every room was booked, bulls ran down the streets, and gipsies music was everywhere. We did find a room and I had a beautiful rainbow sunset experience above the sea that night. The next morning we climbed the church to the top and my daughter fell & cut her knee. My partner went back down to get some tissue, and I sat in the top little church in front of the alter with one baby breast feeding and the other baby bleeding on her knee into my hands. It was a very bizarre experience sitting in that little chapel and something happened. I had just written a sacred birthing book, and that moment felt like an initiation of the Mother Mary awakenings I had been through in both my home births, but I still did not really know who Magdalena was. My daughter still has the scar on her knee.
Fast forward to 2018 when I was a Magdalene Priestess and had just commenced my High Priestess training and found out 6 months earlier my partner was having an affair in Canada where he was touring a show. I was called again to France by MM. So I looked into a possible weekend to stay with a spiritual guide there, with my children. A few weeks later I started to talk to an old friend L on fb who I had toured with for 2 years in a circus when I was a designer about 15 years ago, (where I met my kid’s dad). L was from Montreal by coincidence. I had not thought about him much in 15 years. We were not close, but I remember lots of things, like once there was was group of us who dashed to a store in between performing shows, and I recall standing at an aisle and he was in the doorway the other side and we caught eyes and he looked at me and I looked at him, not in a fancy way, but in a soul knowing way. That simple moment stood out so much that I wrote about it when I wrote a piece about living in a circus. He was a french mime (it turned out he was actually Spanish blood, yet had grown up between France and Canada) and he invited me to visit sometime. "Where exactly do you live L?" I wrote and the one word response "Carcasonne" changed my life. Carcasonne is in the Languedoc, exactly where MM was calling me. My ex was returning to work in Canada in just a few weeks so I would be solo parenting for some time, so it was now or never.
Taking both of us by surprise, just 2 weeks later, I bizarrely found myself alone without my children on a plane to Toulouse.
I knew I was on a tantric quest. MM had said he held a key.
When I walked through the customs gates and saw L, he had changed so much to when I remembered him. Back then when we toured in the shows, he was early 40s and I was around 28. Now I was in my 40s and he was late 50s. 15 years had passed. He had beautiful eyes with alot of stories. We walked in shy silence to his car, it was so strange to walk by a different man’s side. I asked him questions to break the silence as he drove. He talked alot and and at one point he cried. That evening he took me to the La Grotte du Limousis. The entrance was closed, but he sat and made a lovely picnic for us on a bench amongst lavender, whilst I meditated (months later we returned to visit the cave and little had I realised what I was meditating above!!! The most incredible ancient caves within!) This was the first of many many picnics to come. The next day we climbed down and sat in the most incredible waterfalls in ancient Cathar settlement and when I sat down to do priestess initiations, instead it was me who just cried, for what seemed like hours.
L is like a reclusive ‘warrior monk’, and a bit of a cool cat, quite manly with his great charismatic humour, quietly confident, sexually tantric aware, yet sensitive and emotional, so oscillating between tough and soft. He was quite political and had strong views including 'inside' knowledge about certain 'things'. He has become my guide and my lover through France for many trips to come. L has been deep into the shadow and come out the other end. He is the only person I ever met who went that deep into shadow. On the one hand I find it scary and never would have been able to go near a man with stories like this before, but on the other MM calls him to me and I see and feel the incredible depth of the light he shines, possibly even because of the dark he has been exposed to in his colourful and sometimes tragic life stories, that take him from Montreal to Mexico to the Pyrenees. I have never ever met anyone like him.
And so every 2 months in 2018 I went to France and we spent between 5 - 10 days exploring areas staying in B&Bs.
The entire journey has been led by MM. The first few nights we stayed in a lavender room and made love, and immediately after I had a vision of a shaven headed, bedraggled & battered woman standing in a boat in rags, front of a large rock in the mists. Others sat around her.
The very next day we went to Lover’s Fountain in Rennes les Bains for the first time, and as I meditated I looked up and saw the very same rock and place from my vision and realised this was of the wounded woman shamed and abused who was now rising again. A large blue butterfly just swooped out of nowhere into my 3rd eye and took her, and the words came to me “Her time has come”. On the other rock sat MM in a vortex of light.
We have returned to that spot several times now and together we have walked and visited and sat by many other places, including mostly waters and caves. I have initiated L into M reiki and held his baptism in the water. I have led him into past life regressions in trance when he has become a high priest of the book in a pyramid cave in Bosnia. We have walked up to Montsegur in the December rains with the place to ourselves and sat the same week in the sunny December Rennes les Chateaux, again with the village entirely to ourselves. This seems to happen alot, not just because I travel out of season when the children are in school, but somehow events seems to destine that I would end up in these places alone for some time. We have spent time bathing in wild waters in Provence, and later on in a sacred waterfall north of Carcasonne in the heatwaves of August.
In all of these places, L has stood and held space as I have meditated. In a hot June, he limped all the way up to the grotto of St Maximin with severe back ache and a walking stick and sat outside forever patiently occupying the gate-keeper monk after closing time (when all visitors had left), whilst I sat in self absorbed trance within.
In Fontaine de Vaucluse he kept the tour guide occupied whilst I hung back in the sacred caves and got them to myself alone; and in the darkness with my phone for light, the neolithic cave paintings lit up all around, as I recorded sounds and meditations that came through in trance. The young shy tour guide at the end asked “and your wife?” and L was simply deadpan and shrugged “yes?”…he nervously asked ”well where is she?”, “I don’t know” he said as he simply shrugged with his lovely smile.
In the church itself in St Maximin the crypt with the skull was closed due to a wedding so L stood guard, whilst again with my phone torch I crept down, to have time alone in the dark of the crypt with the skull of Mary Magdalene. In fact this has happened a few times in different places - fumbling around in the dark guided by MM in sacred places by ancient relics whilst L stood at the top of the stairs holding space believing utterly in my mad quests.
On one trip we went down to the Pyrenees to the vortex at Canigou and found some special places there before driving through hills back north, as L does not like the main roads. Making love at times on the side of the road, or stopping to swim in the mountains. Cathar monuments dotted around us.
MM has been there very step of the way.
One time it was not easy and I had a huge trigger in Eus near the Canigou mountains whilst looking for a remote church. That opened a wounding for us both, that took me time to heal and took me out of honey moon bliss. Who is this man? On the one hand he is the man of my PL regressions, the Cathar who sacrificed himself, the knight who dedicated himself to the protection of the rose, who became my lover; and the romantic in me and the soul-knowing in me saw him as as the beautiful monk in the french hills with the key. Then the red flag kicks in with little incidents that whisper from the shadows of secrets of his past as I try to read in between the lines of his colourful life stories. On the one hand I trust him like never before, then this wounding or red flag takes me into asking "is he safe?". All of this embodying the push and pull forces of new love, especially when one has been wounded deeply very recently and is in the throws of a divorce. So he holds many reflections and mirrors up to me.
But MM sweeps me up and talks with me. Trust him. Let him take your hand. We are here. And each day her energy fills me and guide us. And especially in France, I hear her so clearly all the way everywhere. We would accidentally end up in beautiful places, and then I would see the synchronicities and drop into the most holy and sacred of places that we went.
Bizarrely every time I went to France in 2018 I was on my moon time and this was wonderful birth control but also I collected my blood and did either simple, or at times intricate, ceremonies... leaving it in every sacred place as a moon Goddess blessing.
MM shows me that many of these places hold deep and sacred vortexes used as Goddess worship places in times prehistory and long long gone... They go way way back... A carved Goddess head 22,000 bc was found in one of the caves there. These places are so ancient that they make MM very recent history. And as MM guides me in her beautiful watery lavender light, I am taken deep into far more ancient shamanic Goddess temple spaces that shake and vibrated with cosmic energy.
...And so our journey together continue...and in the meantime, people often ask me where to visit in France for MM, and it is hard to know where to start.
There is of course Provence - St Maximum, St Marie de la Mer, the waters of the Camargue and other places you may message me for if required.
Then there is the Languedoc - the intiation caves, the Cathar monuments such as Montsegur or places steeped in the Magdalene mysteries such as Rennes les Chateau or the water vortexes of Lover’s Fountain and Isis chair at Rennes les Bains, the caves and castles and mountain vortex points, or places just north of Carcasonne (again message for specifics) ...
And then going down into the Pyrenees and Mount Canigou in to Spain...
Then there is the trail of the black Madonnas which I have not even commenced upon yet myself.
Because the large country is so steep in the Magdalena mysteries, from Knight’s templars, to Cathars, to the bloodlines of MM and J Christ, and way beyond into ancient Isis pagan worship sites dating pre Atlantis, it is hard to know where to start. And so I would recommend at some point you simply surrender to let MM take your hand, and you will find that the river bed you sit by or the tree you rest against is most ancient and holds all the secrets of that area. For there are no coincidences with MM and you will be exactly where you are meant to be. L & I would find ourselves staying in a dilapidated ancient Cathar abbey all to ourselves; or he would take me to a random tiny village few will visit, such as Evol near Villefranche de Conflent, and there was a church and by synchronicity we found the key holder and inside discovered we were in an 11th century monument with a panelled alter dedicated to John the Baptist which felt full of secrets and a place outside for the vicar ‘to conjure’ (command the elements in coming storms etc to ward off evil) with an ancient castle peering over it. There are so many long forgotten places of the trail, but all are steeped in magic and energy. The entire land, the caves and all the waters and all the roses there are sacred and all seems to hold her energies...
Below are a series of some very powerful transmissions made with dedication and guidance in situe, and all imbued with Her light and energy to anchor into all who listen the pure magic vibrations and frequencies of these sacred Light vortexes in South France. Made in 2018 yet transcend all time and space & so always relevant...
Blessings be to you all upon your path... Together we rise! Victory to the Light! and Praise to Divine Mother!
Ishtaaria Mashta Ka, Ishti Ka Ma, Kali Mash ti Ka, Isha La
With love, Ishtara (IshMaraMay) xx