08 Jan Your Name is Your Destiny, Six Mysteries
In Ancient Greek mythology, the Fates, also known as the three Moirai sisters, Clotho (the spinner), Lachesis (the allotter) and Atropos (the unturnable), spun, wove, and bound off the tapestry of each soul’s incarnation, determining the quality and length of every life.
In the 21st century we might agree that the outcome of our lives are impacted by a combination of factors including personal will, chance, grace and/or karma. Of the predetermined forces shaping our lives, one’s name has considerable influence. A given name can be considered an oracle providing guidance, or a piece of the puzzle of the Great Mystery. To engage in this inquiry is to tug on the threads of the cloth, revealing intricate connections.
Last spring, in an interview between my local yoga teacher in Boulder, Colorado, Jeanie Manchester, and her sister, Susan Manchester, a shamanic healer who has trained extensively with Malidoma Somé, Susan shared a belief from Somé’s community in Burkina Fasso that there is divinatory guidance in our given names, “your name is your destiny.” For this six-day novena contribution I will be sharing the mysteries – the joys, sorrows, and miracles – of my names.
Joyous Mysteries
I confess that I’ve never loved my full birth name, Mary Catherine Brooks. The whole and its parts have never felt like a well-fitting garment, but rather a bland embroidery kit pattern of a pious lady. The seeming Christian religiosity of my name does not accurately represent being born to two incompatible hippies endeavoring to escape their conventional families of origin by hiding out in a Hindu cult in San Francisco in the late 1970s. The seeming formality of my name does not honestly depict a childhood plagued by emotional, financial, and housing insecurities. However, in certain contexts and company, my name has been an advantageous disguise, obscuring an unusual background behind a fine brocade.
As a child, through college, I went by the name Catie. After graduating with an art degree, I went to live with my uncle Gabriel and his family for a few months in Paris while I undertook two professional apprenticeships in printmaking studios there. In the ateliers of masters, soaked in the corrosive chemistry of etching and lithography, turning huge press wheels, I felt I was undergoing personal alchemy. I hoped a transformation was underway that would further transport me from my difficult past. It was in this period in Paris that I decided to begin to use my full middle name, Catherine.
With the insistence of my aunt whom I was staying with in France, I summoned the courage to cold call the best printmaking studio in the U.S. and ask for a job. When the receptionist picked up the phone and I wanted to get through to the director, I surprised myself when spontaneously I put on an aire of confidence and asked to speak to her, saying briskly, “This is Catherine Brooks calling from Paris.” My call was transferred without further questions. After a warm conversation with the founder, Kathan Brown, about my studio experience and her press she invited me to visit when I returned to the States. Then, before we ended the call, she said in an awed tone, “I’ve been receiving mail for Catherine Brooks for years…”
A few months later I went to San Francisco, the city where I was born and lived until age two, to interview at Crown Point Press. I was greeted by the downer and her staff as if it were already predetermined that I would join them. Indeed, I already had a staff mailbox cubby with mail in it addressed to me. The Fates – or maybe the spiritual force of three generations of maternal grandparents buried in the dirt of the Bay Area called me back, by name.
Our Lady Speaks: March 4, 2017
“You should know that each human life is like a jigsaw puzzle with many pieces and no picture on the box. The picture is there in the pieces and how they fit together, but you will not know ahead of time what that picture will be.
“Some people take the pieces from their box and imagine the picture they wish their life to have. They look at other people’s pictures and try to imitate them. But the pieces in each box form a picture that is unique. That picture may share some features with other pictures, but still it remains completely distinct.
“Your lives can only rightly be assembled with love. It is love that draws the pieces of your lives together that belong to one another, and it is that mutual belonging, spread across the length and breadth of a life, that makes a picture of that life. All lives are coherent and meaningful, all lives are beautiful and of value—provided only that their pieces are assembled with love.
“Honestly, some boxes arrive in this world thoroughly shaken with the pieces all separated from one another. Such lives are challenging and sometimes hard. But the work of building them is satisfying and deeply meaningful to those who give themselves fully to that work. Other boxes arrive with some or even many pieces joined together, and in such cases the work is already far along. It may still be difficult to complete the picture, but there is a feeling of great joy and anticipation that accompanies that work.
“Know that I see the pictures for all lives and turn to me for help with your own. I promise you that your box has been packed diligently and correctly, with foresight and wisdom and love. Whatever you may sometimes fear to the contrary, there are no ‘missing pieces’ in your life.”
Sorrowful Mysteries
My family name, Brooks, has always grieved me. For years I considered changing my last name to reflect my vocation, like the Smiths and Bakers of the past. Yet, when I had the opportunity to change my family name through marriage, I decided to keep my maiden name rather than disappear into a new clan.
I have few memories of the man whose name I bear, my paternal grandfather Herbert Brooks. On my twelfth birthday he mailed me a card with a check for $20 enclosed and a handwritten message saying that he was saving the rest of his money for my younger brother and male cousin. He seemed to believe that money, not love, was all that children want from grandparents. The rejection stung my young heart. I made a few attempts to reconnect, but I never heard from him again. My father tried to explain his father’s unkind behavior by providing his own experiences of paternal abandonment while his father lived overseas during most of my dad’s childhood. If I wanted to know more, I might discover that this is a Brooks patriarchal pattern. After all, my own father decided to “relinquish householder responsibilities” (as supposedly the Buddha had done, he justified) to free himself up for a spiritual awakening which left my father living in a van for over twenty years, homeless to this day.
My father’s two sisters, who he doesn’t speak with on account of alleged abuses by them and their mother, have shared with me just a few details of our Brooks ancestry. A DNA test revealed that my aunts and my father are 80% English with a smattering of Welsh, Irish and Scottish. This data reinforced the family pride that our ancestors were passengers on the Mayflower ship and some of the first “settlers” in the U.S.
Author, trauma specialist and somatic abolitionist, Resmaa Menakem has written, “During the Middle Ages in Europe, torture, mutilation, and other forms of savagery, particularly on women, were seen as normal aspects of life. Public executions were literally a spectator sport. As a result, when European “settlers” first came to this country centuries ago, they brought a millennium of inter-generational and historical trauma with them, possibly stored in the cells of their bodies.” We know what followed the arrival of Europeans to the Americas, their embodied traumas were unleashed upon the land and the bodies of indigenous peoples.
I can vividly imagine the hardships my ancestors likely have endured and the horrors they might have inflicted over generations and centuries. In my family name and in the cells of my body are held the sorrows of genocide, slavery, and racism. I don’t bypass, I wade through the morass and follow the Brooks downstream. Diving into deep time, I find the folk who lived by the streams—the brooks—hundreds, thousands of years ago. There I claim the water itself as my original kin.
Our Lady Speaks: February 19, 2018
“There are mountains behind you and mountains before you, but you need neither return to your former heights nor seek further heights to come. Rather, follow the valley, just as the water does, and let the river lead the way.
“How is it that you have forgotten the wisdom of water and the guidance that water gave you in finding your way? You thought that by bending the rivers to your will, and by harnessing the power of water as it fell, that you could have its power and exercise its subtle wisdom and claim them as your own. You must know that you belong to the water and with the water, rather than the other way around.
“Water is not your resource but your lover. You must repent and seek Her forgiveness and return to following her way. Of all the elements, it is She who first will guide you, and carry you, and bear you up, and return you to the land from which you came.”
Glorious Mysteries
My mother’s oppressive Catholic upbringing and two years of Catholic high school really put me at odds with my first name, Mary. I couldn’t identify with “Mary Meek and Mild,” her muted, diluted character and the Christian obsession with her virginal purity. When Clark Strand, author of The Way of the Rose, took the tape off Our Lady’s mouth and The Way of the Rose prayer community amplified her voice, my reluctance about Mary was transformed into a new understanding of her timeless depth. I now know that the myths which have been cast upon Mary the Mother of Jesus are both as young and misogynistic as patriarchy itself and they are also even more ancient and poetic than Inanna and her sacred sexual rites. Mother Mary is an avatar of the Great Goddess.
Syncretizations of goddesses over millennia illustrate the Glorious Mysteries of the soul’s renewal, call it resurrection or reincarnation. Just as the Earth’s epochs are evident in geological strata, the long story of the Great Mother is a composite of goddesses across time. So are each of us, her children, an amalgamation of other lifetimes, current life experiences and genetic information.
While participating in Perdita’s Take Back the Magic ancestor worship workshops, I had an experience of free falling through every antecedent womb of my maternal ancestry until I landed in the womb of the Earth. I also discovered a great-great-grandmother with a name like mine, Catherine Mary Rock. When I pray to my beloved dead and say I my g-g-grandmother’s name I visualize her as a hand-carved, palm-sized stone ancestor doll. She is my umbilical cord to the old lands of Ireland and to prehistoric rock kin.
In one of Perdita’s lessons, she directed us to find a saint to work with. As a prompt to get us started in a search for our “Big Dead,” as she calls the saints, she told us that given names, birthdays and feast days hold magical clues and guidance. Perdita’s instructions echoed some wisdom distilled from Malidoma Somé’s village which I’d heard months before. “Your name is your destiny” whispered through my mind again. Recognizing the synchronicity of hearing the same message from two sources within a few months, I chose to read about saints with my name. Researching Saint Catherine of Alexandria, I made an astounding discovery. One theory about the origin of her name – my name – Catherine, is that the etymology comes from “Hecate,” Titaness of antiquity with dominion over land, sea, and sky. In the excavation of my name, I found the Goddess Herself.
“You have been given a way to call My name, and you must believe that I come when I am called. I am never far away.”
Joyous Mysteries
The Rosary begins with Archangel Gabriel inviting Maiden Mary to become initiated in the Great Mysteries of sex, birth, death, and renewal. The first rite of the initiate is to claim her joy, the pleasure of seeding and birthing new creation. She says yes.
Those who pray the rosary and have walked the well-trodden path of the Mysteries know what is to come of Mary’s joy. While pregnant with my son, my second child, I agonized endlessly about having a boy. I complained to anyone who would listen that I had always dreamed of having two girls, that there weren’t any good ‘boy names,’ and I couldn’t stand baby ‘boy’ fashions printed with dinosaurs and cars. Later I would discover that under these petty concerns lurked unconscious fear.
My son, who was conceived on July 22, the Feast Day of Mary Magdalene, would be born on Palm Sunday the following spring. Historically, Jesus returns to Jerusalem on this day to lead demonstrations protesting Roman imperial control over state and temple. He was executed five days later.
We hold trauma in our bodies. As I held my boy in my womb I began to panic. Would this baby die on the day he was born, as my mother’s son had? Would my son eventually reject and abandon me like my father did? Would this boy love me, then leave me, as so many lovers had done? Would my child bear the burdens of so-called men’s oppression? Would he be forced to compete and fight and maybe even go to war? Would he, too, be torn from his mother’s arms and sacrificed?
My second childbirth I labored calmly and naturally for seven hours, then delivered my boy into the world at dawn. I chose joy and all my fears dissolved into love. Holding him in my arms was an unexpected souls’ reunion. I would be told later by an intuitive that he and I had been very close in a past life and that we had been unexpectedly separated and subsequently spent lifetimes longing for each other. With my son in my arms, a deep, gnawing longing that I had always known in this lifetime was gone.
When we brought our baby boy home, we were faced with the challenge of naming him. What name could possibly wrap him in protective magic and keep him safe from toxic masculinity? We chose to wrap him in the mantle of the Mother and give him her name, my name, Marin, the Bulgarian masculine form of Mary, which also means “the sea.”
Sorrowful Mysteries
In cultures with patrilineal naming conventions mothers and grandmothers are lost to their descendants after only a few generations. When family names disappear, clues about ethnicity, livelihood, familial interconnection, and place of origin also vanish. The web of life itself collapses into the grids of patriarchy. Without knowing our great-grandmother’s names, how can we call upon them to support us from the other side? And, after we have passed, what will become of our memory among the living if our names are no longer uttered?
In Bulgaria, where my husband is from, patronymic naming is standard. I’ve been told that when a baby is born there that the parents typically only choose the child’s first name. The default of the system is to assign the father’s first name for the child’s middle name; the child also receives his last name automatically. As an example, my husband’s first name is Georgi and because his father has the same first name, my husband’s full name is Georgi Georgiev Ivanov. The English equivalent would be “George, son of George, son of John.” No mention of any mother.
When I was pregnant with our first child, our daughter, I knew exactly what she would look like – olive skin with wild curls and deep, dark eyes; I knew her character – both fluid and feisty; and I knew her name – Roza Sofia. Around the intuition we built reason. We announced to his family that we were naming her “Rose” in Bulgarian to honor his mother and paternal grandmother who both have “flower names,” Kameliya (Camellia) and Tsvetana (Flower). Her second name, we rationalized, was selected to honor the patroness of the city where Georgi grew up, Saint Sofia.
In our culture, obsessed with youth, motherhood means death of the maiden fetish. With a baby in my arms, I became an anonymous, unseen body. Adding to the feeling of translucency, my daughter didn’t look like me and her name was entirely ethnically Bulgarian, without any reference to me or my heritage. The quicksand of matrilineal disappearance began to devour me.
In the spring after Roza was born, we took her to Bulgaria to meet her grandparents. There, Palm Sunday is called Tsvetnitsa which means “Flower Day” and it is the Feast Day of everyone named after a flower, plant, or tree. For the celebration we brought the flower kin together: Roza, Kameliya and Tsvetana. My daughter was joyfully woven into the family garland, and yet I was not part of the posy.
Glorious Mysteries
When we brought our son home from the hospital, he was still a nameless child. We were given a two-week extension by the hospital administrator and when she called to follow up about making his birth certificate, we told her his name was Marin Miro, meaning in Bulgarian “Son of Mary/Sea, Peace,” with initials M.M., a nod to his conception on the Feast Day of Mary Magdalene. At the time I was not thoroughly convinced that that was the best name for him, but I had run out of time.
When I was pregnant with him, my husband and I had a mutual wish to honor my deceased mother and her French heritage with our son’s name, as we had honored Georgi’s Bulgarian family with our daughter’s name. Somehow both of our kids ended up with 100% Bulgarian names. I wanted representation in the family I created.
As our son’s second birthday approaches in the middle of April, we have finally come up with a satisfying combination of names for him. Using that format of our daughter’s name as a starting point I created a formula for honoring, (1) ancestors, (2) land, (3) mother, and (4) father.
(1) Just as Roza was given a flower name to create a tradition based on her paternal grandmother’s and great-grandmother’s names, we are giving our son a name from my ancestry, my mother’s brother’s name (also her French grandfather’s name), Gabriel. (2) Just as Roza’s second name is Sofia, the city of her father’s birth, our son’s second name will be Francis, the patron saint of the city where I was born, San Francisco. (3) Both children will bear a version of my first name, Mary, (Maria/Marin) as their third name. (4) And they will both have their father’s family name.
Each name is a spell. We are casting a charm of protection for our children through their names by weaving ancestors, saints, places of origin and both mother and father. We are giving them roots. Our children will not need to look further than their own names to know that they stand upon the “Pillar of Saints.” They will know where they come from and whom they come from, even while climate disruption, migration and late-stage capitalism threaten to displace us all from our homes and each other.
This week we took paperwork to the county court to legally change both of our children’s names. In the season of rebirth, I welcome my children, Roza Sofia Maria Ivanova and Gabriel Francis Marin Ivanov, into their new names and I also welcome back the old ones who are watching over them.
Your Name is Your Destiny, Six Mysteries By Catherine Brooks, 2021