Auntie Matter (aka Sondra Slade) is a percussionist/musician and multi-disciplinary mystic, and founder of the tantric chant band Axis Mundi, and is involved with producing world music events in the San Francisco Bay area.
The collection of odes and invocations in this self-published booklet are a mixture of pantheism, earth spirituality, eastern mysticism, and global consciousness with a sprinkle of quarky science thrown in for fun. They are intended for use in rituals and gatherings to “expand the field of unity consciousness” of participants.
The poems evoke a great deal of imagery and do give the feeling of global influences all melted together into a creative mental thinking pot. You can’t really say it’s outside of the box because thinking like this was never inside the box in the first place. The “Ode to the Moon” includes the lines:
Your willing sacrificial body
Stood as sentry and shielded Earth
Absorbing countless blows on her behalf –
One so fierce and deep
It rang you like a bell.
As you can see, celestial geology is blended in with mythic bits, and tantric mind expansion theories are blended with multi-cultural religious references, and amazingly, it works. The author uses a fairly consistent poem form through the nine pieces in the booklet. Since she’s a percussionist, there’s a strongly rhythmic feel to the words when read aloud. There are invocations for the solstices and equinox, and for the moon. More unusual content includes the Tara Invocation, Invocation to Raise Power (great for group use), The Shift 2012, The Rising, and Isis and Osiris – The Search for Wholeness.
This is a phat-skinny booklet for those seeking additional original poetic material for their group rituals or private meditations. Reading these odes really does shift the mind into an alternate dimension. If you’re tired of the same old tumpity-tump Wiccan blah-blah, try out Auntie Matter’s odes for a refreshing change. Just make sure you can get back to Planet Earth when you’re finished.
~review by Elizabeth Hazel
Author: Auntie Matter (Sondra Slade)
Hand Crafted Edition, April 2011
14 pages
NOTE: This is a living docukment, and the latest version has several new invocations added (to Tara, The Living Universe, and Emergence)
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