Songs of One Breath is a weekly online space with Jilani Cordelia Prescott to explore the direct, joyful experience of mysticism through practice. Each Friday she shares chants, mantra, breath practices and body prayer drawn from a range of traditions, offered as grounding, comfort, and a pathway of the heart toward deeper connection and spiritual freedom. You are warmly invited to join live on Zoom (or via Facebook Live) at 2.30pm London time, and it is free. If you enjoy the class or the podcast, and would like to support Jilani’s work, donations are welcome via PayPal.
The Mother Womb Creates the Human
(Babylonian-Assyrian – approximately 2nd millennium BCE)
(From Neil Douglas-Klotz – Desert Wisdom)
“From what is small and fragile
let abundance and power come:
let humanity take on the consciousness
of the whole creation
and be absorbed by this task.”
So spoke the Great Ones.
shining centers of awareness,
the original archetypes of existence,
in the primordial beginning.
From the energising dark waves
they summoned the Great One (Inanna)
in the form of
the Mother, Wise Mami—
she whose name means
the one who responds to cries:
“You are the Mother-Womb,
radiant source of warmth and life,
the one from whose depths
humanity may arise.
Create this unique form
as a spiral of life into matter—
one force of its being always leaving,
the other always returning home,
the tension balanced
by the awareness of the void.
“Create humanity as a thin veil
that shrouds the Universal Reality.
Let its purpose spread open and fertile
like a fresh field to be plowed.
Let it embrace the empty core of Being
covered in layers of activity
like an onion’s skin.”
Then the Great One in the form of Nintu—
she who bears all new generations,
preserver of the chain of being—
told the other shining archetypes:
“From my essence comes everything
that helps the cosmos unfold.
So let lullu — this new spiral being — appear!
Let the universe develop through its efforts!
Let this new human being be
formed form the earth
and enlivened with blood!”
Then Enki,
The “I Am” compressed into form,
the archetype of being made manifest,
suggested to the others:
“In the month when the land is cleansed,
when it returns to healing emptiness,
when the earth’s beings
see the fruits of their labor
and feel the mother’s support underneath,
let them kill one of us holy ones,
shining centres of awareness,
mythic shells of life energy,
and let us all be cleansed thereby.
“With the flesh and blood of the divine
let the Great One, also called Ninhursag —
she who expands the circle of illuminated being —
mix and mingle the clay of the earth.
Let both the worlds—
shining-waved and particle-formed—
be forever changed by
this new mixture—
the human being.
And we shall hear its tale unfold
from ages to ages.”
Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;
To bend with apples the moss’d cottage-trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
For summer has o’er-brimm’d their clammy cells.
(From ‘To Autumn’ by John Keats)