The third statue in this particular grouping is the Medicine or Healing Buddha Bhaisajyaguru.

Perhaps the most confusing problem in iconography is fixing the celestial being’s age. Gender is easy: most gods can have either or they can have a convenient, opposite-sex twin. What is little understood or appreciated is that divine persons grow and mature within the parameters of each individual mystic’s alchemical adventure. The divine child becomes an adult; the bride becomes a widow; the groom, a widower, and so on. One of the most frequently cited triple goddesses is, for example, Demeter whose three aspects are the maiden Persephone, the maternal Demeter, and the bony, old Hecate.

The ageing of an archetype has a curious parallel in the dreams we have of the dead. When a person is particularly close to us, especially a family member, we often dream of him throughout the years following his death as if he were at the same age he’d have been had he not died. (One mother I know whose daughter died as a toddler dreamed about her regularly, first as a school girl, then as a teenager, then as a college girl. One day she came to me with tears in her eyes. "Las night I dreamed my Patti got married," she said. "She was such a beautiful bride! She would have been twenty-four last month." I, myself, saw my dead father continue to age in my dreams. Each time he was older and a bit more frail. I actually found myself worried about him.)

Maitreya, the Mercurial child, can grow up to become a man. If fact, he can go from being a toddler, to a golden child - first a boy and then a girl, to a handsome lad, to a virile adult, and finally to a wise old man (or, curiously, in reverse order.) In other words, the archetype that is a child today, can, in the spiritual precincts of the mystic’s mind, become an erotic anima/animus (bodhisattva) figure tomorrow, and then become an avuncular senior, within the time-space of a few years.

Westerers who regard this sequence of appearances as implausible should recall that Christ’s earthly life is referenced in precisely three phases: as an infant, as an adolescent in the temple, and as an adult. Christianity’s iconography, too, accommodates divine androgyny. Consider the following passage from William Irwin Thompson’s The Time Falling Bodies Take to Light:

"The slit of the vulva appears like a wound made by a spear, and so the spear becomes a phallus. But the vulva is the magical wound that bleeds and heals itself every month, and because it bleeds in sympathy with the dark of the moon, the vulva is an expression not of physiology but of cosmology. The moon dies and is reborn; woman bleeds but does not die, and when she does not bleed for ten lunar months, she brings forth new life. It is easy to see how Paleolithic man would be in awe of woman, and how a woman’s mysteries would be at the base of a religious cosmology. We can see just how long-lived such iconology is if we stop to remember the spear that makes the wound in Christ’s side, and recall just how many medieval paintings pictured Christ exposing his wound. The labial wound in the side of Christ is an expression that the male shaman, to have magical power, must take on the power of woman. The wound that does not kill Christ is the magical labial wound, it is the seal of the resurrection and an expression of the myth of eternal recurrence. From Christ to the Fisher King of the Grail legends, the man suffering from a magical wound is no ordinary man, he is the man who has transcended the duality of sexuality, the man with a vulva, the shamanistic androgyne."

And as to the Grail legends, Percival, whose name literally means Pierce the Valley, is the innocent knight who searches for the Holy Grail (the uterine cup which caught the blood from the labial wound). Daoist literature contains numerous references to the Valley Spirit and, of course, the Mysterious Female. These are usually references to the androgynous state, the Yin and Yang Union of Opposites which must be realized in the course of the alchemical opus.

Even among experts, however, a mystic’s visionary life is often misunderstood or regarded as being somehow unique. Evelyn Underhill, an authority on the subject, comments in her classic Mysticism upon the spiritual experience of the great Catholic mystic Richard of St. Victor and, after quoting Richard’s Four Degrees of Violent Charity, adds, "... this is almost the only symbolic system bequeathed to us by the great contemplatives in which all the implications contained in the idea of the spiritual marriage have been worked out to their term. He (Richard) saw clearly that the union of the soul with its Source could not be a barren ecstasy. That was to mistake a means for an end; and to frustrate the whole intention of life, which is, on all levels, fruitful and creative. Therefore he says that in the fourth degree, the Bride who has been so greatly honoured, caught up to such unspeakable delight, sinks her own will and ‘is humiliated below herself.’ She accepts the pains and duties in the place of the raptures of love; and becomes a source, a ‘parent’ of fresh spiritual life. The Sponsa Dei develops into the Mater Divinae gratiae."

Richard of St. Victor’s mystical experiences are in no way unique. Any Siberian shaman would recognize and understand them.

Again, the persons of the Trinity are interchangeable and appear according to the spiritual phase in which they are apprehended - or care to be. The mystic’s first experience is as a bride, at which time his ego identity is subsumed (in meditation) by his bodhisattva. The next major event is his production of the divine child; and he ends the opus as the wise and solitary Prajnaparamita who merges in the Void with Amitabha’s Infinite Light of the Dharmakaya.

And finally, another difficulty we encounter in sorting out gods is the very fundamental problem of one person’s natural inability to share the "feeling-tone of spiritual experience" with other people. There can be contagion but never communication.

Just as we deplore the inexplicable emotion others feel for alien gods, we are hostile and incredulous regarding the depth of meaning that other people’s symbols can plumb. We look at the mystical hold the bull has on the Iberian psyche and think it quite extraordinary. How, we wonder, can people get so involved with an animal... how can they let it, well... inspire or excite them?

Nobody is around to remember those anxious days during the Continental Congress in Philadelphia when Benjamin Franklin most emphatically insisted that we adopt the turkey as our national bird. The bird was beneficence, itself. Turkeys fed multitudes of settlers. This was a New World bird, Franklin insisted, and its existence made possible a New World Order. But other representatives said No... they wanted the eagle. Whoever ate an eagle, countered Franklin. What did eagles ever do for us?

Yet, Franklin was fortunately overruled else we would have heard, back in l969, an astronaut’s voice announcing, "Tranquillity Base here. The Turkey has landed." No way, Jose! Eagles inspire us. They may taste lousy... though I know no one who has ever eaten one... but they are majestic. So is the Bos taurus iberius when compared to domestic cattle. The toro bravo is a magnificent beast and until such time Michael Jordan lends his considerable charisma to the Chicago Cows or the Philadelphia Turkeys play - well, we all get the picture. Some things inspire us and some just leave us cold. For just as an eagle or a wild bull may capture our imagination and emotion and hold us in a devotional bond, so do heroic archetypes create an inspirational connection and help us to rise to whatever height survival requires. The Buddha is a Prince of Peace, but since some wars must be fought, Shiva’s son, Skanda, is a god of war. Gods make us better human beings. They allow us to absorb into ourselves their heroic or majestic qualities - a true mystique of participation within the paradigm of spiritual change.

Myths of the Divine Drama are spiritual textbooks and statues are their illustrations. We read in our own language and cannot hold others to our vocabulary’s identifying nouns. Regardless of nomenclature, the mystic moves at his own private pace between lovers, spouses, parents and children. And, as regards mystical family matters, unless civilization has gone backward or forward to cloning, a divine child must still have two parents - a bodhisattva and a mortal.

And we come now to the celestial representation of that divine parent: the stars Altair and Vega; and the myth known as the Oxherder and the Spinning Maiden.