My personal experience with Cosima’s Spirit Drawings might be slightly different than the usual setting. When we first decided to do the drawing it was scheduled to be done during a full-moon gathering at The Centre for Sacred Arts in Cairo.
Cosima first explained the process to the women. She was then going to demonstrate the process by doing an actual ‘group’ Spirit Drawing. While the women and I sat and chatted, listening to music and interacting with each other—Cosima drew.
It was a lovely experience and the result at the end of the evening was a beautiful picture with amazing colors, which I had a strong visceral reaction to. After the event Cosima took the drawing home with her as we weren’t really sure what we were going to do with it. It was at that point, while resting in her studio, that the drawing began to take on a life of it’s own.
Images emerged. As she delineated them it became quite clear that the drawing was not so much a Spirit Drawing of the ‘group’ as it was a representation of my relationship to the Centre and the sacred circle that I created there. As she put it ‘you are not separate from the space’. Which was very true.
The illumination that I received after seeing the finished drawing was not so much about the different components contained in the drawing—they were obvious and their relationship to ’the Work’ that I was doing was very clear. The illumination came more from the realization that the Centre was a sacred space, which I held for others, almost like an extension of my own womb.
This point was very significant for me because what I am, and what I do, is to ‘hold space’ for others, for their spiritual growth using all the tools that showed themselves through the drawing. I felt this drawing clearly showed that relationship and reflected that point back to me, a point that others might see clearly but that I was not able to see in myself.
All my Work centers on the goddess Hat-hor. Her name means ‘house of Horus’, the Hero’s birthplace—the womb. This drawing allowed me to see that I was creating a womb for others, a temple—a sacred space for the goddess to emerge and be protected.
Typically the womb is a space that we as women hold deep within ourselves but we allow that space to be used by others for their growth. We may not be able to see into that space, to understand that the goddess in all her divinity is working there, but we do see the results. This drawing shows that space in its full form allowing us to glimpse the gifts the Divine Feminine has to offer us.
It was from this drawing that I could see that all the instruments were there, all I needed to do was to ‘hold the space’ and the goddess would do the work. The images in the drawing were all the things that were birthed or re-birthed in that womb, including myself.
What I have experienced with Spirit Drawings, both my own and others, is that it works very much like the Tarot producing archetypal images and colors that activate our psyche. It brings these components to the surface so that we can then look at them as an observer, outside of ourselves. It produces an outer reflection of an inner space or process. Sometimes it may just be a confirmation of what we already sense on a deeper level but cannot ‘see’ apart from ourselves—the drawing provides a useful tool to see all those unseen parts of ourselves.
Cosima is a visionary artist, and Egypt, Om el Donya (mother of the world), has provided the fertile soil for her to grow and refined this gift that lives deep inside of her. Living in Egypt amongst the neteru attunes one to the archetypal plane. Cosima’s gift is to bring that in for us to see, like a scribe translating our own inner wisdom into beautiful hieroglyphs or images on paper.
The Centre has since closed and the Spirit Drawing she made is now at home with me. Looking at it gives me the opportunity to re-mind myself of that space, a space that no longer exists in external reality but exists, as it always did, in internal space.
Leslie Zehr
Author of ‘The Al-chemia Remedies: Vibrational Essences from Egyptian Flowers and Sacred Sites’ and ‘The Alchemy of Dance: Sacred Dance as a Path to the Universal Dancer’
www.UniversalDancer.com
