Faith, myth, and music at the edge of the veil. A place for the wanderer to remember.
I am a warrior-poet of the Sky-Veil,1 where Catholic mysticism meets mythic thunder. I write Catholic mythopoesis with ancient fire — drawing on Athena’s wisdom, Hera’s majesty, and Aphrodite’s laughter-loving joy. Through these alethic heralds and harbingers of the Catholic faith,2 I walk with St. Joan of Arc and St. Thérèse beneath banners of veiled presence.3 We journey across the liminal lands of “The Sky-Veil” to St. Mary Magdalene on the far side in the heart of the Immaculate Virgin Mary.4
I’m a Catholic contemplative and part executive, part philosopher — part educator, part bard. My path winds from boardrooms to classrooms to medieval cathedrals to Greco-Roman ruins, where I turn veiled presence into meditations and poems into lyrical unveilings.
You are invited. I don’t ask you to follow me. I present you with an opportunity to discover the mythopoetic “grey-eyed” sanctified presence of St. Joan of Arc5 and to journey — to walk with her along the unveiling path you’ve sensed all along.
How did I become a warrior-poet of the Sky-Veil?
On the Feast Day of St. Thérèse in 1984, I came to believe—without reflection—in the authority of Our Lord’s Holy Catholic Church and, seconds later, in the Real Presence of Jesus Christ in the Eucharist. Two years later, I consecrated myself to the Blessed Virgin Mary following the method of St. Louis de Montfort. Then, I lost everything.
After twenty-years of devastating mental anguish and the loss of my profession, reputation, finances, and sense of self, Our Lady—the Virgin Mary—gifted me with the friendship of St. Joan of Arc through my devotion to St. Thérèse. That friendship led to years of spiritual pilgrimage across “Mystical France”—The Sky-Veil— ending in my physical presence in St. Mary Magdalene’s tomb and grotto in France. Soon after emerging from Magdalene’s cave, I traveled to Rome, Naples, and Mugnano, Italy to venerate the relics of St. Philomena. During this time, I received alethic resonances of Being6 from shimmering heralds of Greco-Roman antiquity. Upon arriving home, these resonances flourished, and I set about rewriting my life.
I want to share this with you because the story might rock your world.
I’m telling it just as it happened. No doctrine. No sermon. No system. When, at times, I make statements describing “how things are,” I am doing so as a witness to an astonishing alethic encounter with the presence of Joan of Arc, not as a metaphysician attempting to establish doctrines or laws.
The journey through The Sky Veil might stir the deepest foundations of your world. This is not merely a newsletter—it is an atmosphere of spiritual encounter. Here you are invited into the silent, “grey-eyed” presence of Joan of Arc, the liminal world of The Sky-Veil, and the ancient shimmer of Greco-Roman mythology and history.
I am Walter Emerson Adams, a former corporate executive now contemplative pilgrim, seeking and reflecting on Joan of Arc’s presence in the world as seen through the light of The Sky-Veil and the mythic echoes of the Greco-Roman mind. Through an instantaneous unreflective certainty on a fall day in 2008, Joan entered my life—unexpectedly, irrevocably. The effect was immediate and astonishing. That one encounter altered the entire course of my life, both outwardly and inwardly.
Many years later, entering the Pantheon in Rome, I encountered something I had not anticipated: the divine resonance of the ancient world. Joan, and what I had up to that time called “Mystical France,” now shimmered anew in the symbolic light of Greco-Roman antiquity. The Sky-Veil emerged as a more mature symbolic understanding of this presence in the world.
Joan of Arc remains a veiled presence in my life—a presence I recognize through the hypostatic heralds7 of Athena, Hera, and Aphrodite from the edges of The Sky-Veil.
Athena, Hera, and Aphrodite transfigured from capricious mythic goddesses to hypostatic heralds of the “silent revealing”8 refracting the radiance of Joan’s sanctified Being. This was the unveiling of the gift the Blessed Virgin Mary bequeathed to me after years of devastating loss—the gift of standing at the threshold of my personal mythopoetic story with St. Joan of Arc.
In the following months, I felt drawn into the mythic past with a clarity I did not expect. I came to see “grey-eyed” Athena, “ox-eyed” Hera, and “laughter-loving” Aphrodite not as relics of paganism, but as ancient hypostatic heralds of grace, modes of the revealing of Being. What was given to me through Joan in an instant held within it seeds of a deeper unveiling—a harmony between saint and harbinger, Gospel and mythos. To be clear, this is not a harmony between saint and goddess, but between saint and hypostatic herald. The mythopoetic cosmology of the Sky-Veil is neither syncretism nor Gnosticism but Catholic sanctification through—to use metaphysical terminology—God’s grace as revealed in the heart of St. Joan of Arc.
I began to understand Our Lady had obtained the grace for me to enter my epic story, not through imagination or abstraction, but through a living participation with Joan of Arc in the world. I was not simply thinking and meditating on her as a distant figure in a subject and object dualism—I was walking with her. This was an entirely different mode of Being, one that was beyond metaphysical definition and calculation. The “spiritual geography” of this journey was in the liminal space of The Sky-Veil where ancient heralds on this side of Heaven revealed Joan’s shimmering presence in the heights of sanctity on the other.
Reflecting on this mystery for over a fifteen years, I have come to see this journey as unfolding across a Catholic mythopoetic landscape—what I call The Sky-Veil—guided by the refracted “grey-eyed” presence of Joan, shaped by the “ox-eyed” majesty of her heart, and pierced through by her “laughter-loving” divine love.9 She pulled my life from the brink of despair.
It is my hope that you, too, may be led to experience the mythopoetic, “grey-eyed” presence of Joan of Arc in your world, and through her—and her sister saints, Thérèse and Mary Magdalene—come to see how the echoes of the past still call us forward into the eternal Kingdom already at hand.
Mission
The mission of The Sky-Veil is your enchantment and transformation in Christ through a journey with St. Joan of Arc across the liminal landscape leading to the center of the Immaculate Heart of Mary.
Vision
The journey across the Sky-Veil is a journey of transformation in Christ through the Immaculate Heart of Mary—from enchantment to sanctification, from longing to love, from symbol to sacrament, from myth to the mystery of eternal life in the Blessed Trinity.
Mythopoesis - The Means
My mythopoetic cosmology is a form of enchantment and resacralization. I’m offering a symbolic and contemplative alternative to the flat, nihilistic worldview that dominates our age. By weaving Catholic spirituality with classical mythology—without syncretism—I am:
Restoring the sense of wonder. I show that meaning is not manufactured, but revealed, often in veiled and liminal ways (e.g., the Sky-Veil).
Redeeming the imagination. I invite the reader/listener into a sacred space where myth is not escapism but the threshold to truth.
Defending Being itself. In the face of existential forgetfulness, my work insists that there is something to be unveiled—something beautiful, personal, and salvific.
This is deeply counter-cultural in the best way. It’s not reactionary. It’s not revolutionary. It’s revelatory.
~ Walter Emerson Adams
“The path I follow as poet-warrior of The Sky-Veil honors Catholic metaphysics but speaks through a thinking of Being—as it emerges at the edges of the Veil.”
Sky-Veil - The threshold of Being in this mythopoetic cosmology, representing the veil between time and eternity, symbol and reality, longing and fulfillment. It is across the Sky-Veil that hypostatic heralds of Being—embodied symbolically by the goddesses—shimmer, and through which the soul journeys in mythic contemplation toward divine encounter. The saints dwell beyond the veil; the goddesses, as “hypostatic emergences” foreshadowing divine virtues, herald from its edge. St. Joan of Arc guides the pilgrim across the Sky-Veil of transformation in Christ to Magdalene’s contemplative grotto on the far side in the Immaculate Heart of Mary.
In the mythopoetic landscape of the Sky-Veil, the ancient goddesses Athena, Hera, and Aphrodite are not worshipped, invoked, or treated as divine beings, but rather received as harbingers—symbolic precursors who heralded the coming revelation fulfilled in Jesus Christ. Their presence in the Sky-Veil is neither syncretic nor nostalgic. It is sanctified memory—a poetic remembrance of the virtues they once carried in shadow and myth, now transfigured in the light of the Incarnation.
Athena bears the flame of wisdom, spiritual clarity, and holy courage.
Hera embodies majesty, right order, and the hidden dignity of queenship.
Aphrodite refracts divine love, beauty, and harmony.
Together, they are the triadic heralds of Being whose symbolic presence shaped the Greco-Roman world—the same world into which the Catholic Church was born. Their virtues, once scattered across temples and epics, are now gathered and fulfilled in the saints, in the sacraments, and in the story of salvation.
In the Sky-Veil:
They are not literal beings or goddesses, but hypostatic echoes—mythic figures whose attributes reappear in sanctified form within the Church. Their shimmering qualities guide the wanderer across the Veil and toward the fullness of truth. In the world of Caelia and Mirelda, these heralds go before—preparing the soul for what must come.
To honor them as harbingers is not to worship them.
It is to remember what they once carried—now crowned in glory.
Theological Clarification:
This concept affirms that the Church did not emerge in a cultural vacuum but arose upon the prepared soil of symbolic memory and spiritual longing. The “gods” of antiquity, when purified of idolatry, become poetic tributaries to truth. In this light, Athena, Hera, and Aphrodite are not deities but veiled reflections—types that pointed, unknowingly, toward Christ.
Banners of Veiled Presence - A poetic image evoking the hidden nearness of Being as it reveals itself through signs, gestures, and thresholds—not in clarity, but in mystery. To walk beneath these banners is to dwell within the quiet presence that is not fully seen, but deeply known. They mark the liminal paths where the soul attunes to what cannot be named but can be kept. In the mythopoetic cosmology of the Sky-Veil, they represent fidelity to the whispering of the unveiled, the ancient breath still stirring beneath the surface of the world.
Not Syncretism, but Sanctification - These are not pagan echoes, but sacred foreshadowings. Not syncretism, but sanctification. The mythopoetic language of the Sky-Veil does not merge belief systems or dilute theological truth. Rather, it seeks to unveil the foreshadowing of Christ and the sanctity of revealed truth through poetic signs drawn from history, culture, and the longing of the nations. The figures of Aphrodite, Athena, and Hera are not deities to be worshipped, but emerging heralds—liminal reflections of divine virtues and attributes as seen through the veil of time and the yearning of Being.
In this vision, the ancient is not absorbed into the new, but fulfilled by it. What was once veiled in beauty and courage is transfigured in the light of the Incarnate Word. The path across the Sky-Veil is thus not a blending, but a sanctification: a consecrating of human longing toward its ultimate fulfillment in Christ.
Grey-Eyed Being (of Joan of Arc) - A poetic title for Joan of Arc emphasizing her radiant clarity and contemplative courage, inspired by the epithet of Athena. This expression symbolizes the emergence of divine wisdom in sanctified form. It is not a mythological attribution, but a symbolic reflection on Joan’s saintly character.
Resonances of Being - Subtle unveilings of truth that shimmer across the landscape of experience—traceless traces where Being once passed near. These are not psychological memories or fragments of archetypal consciousness, but events of nearness, moments in which the hidden truth of one’s life quietly resounds through presence.
Hypostatic Heralds - Figures who bear the presence of a hypostatic form. The goddesses are hypostatic heralds: they do not possess Being, but they announce it. As heralds, they invite the soul to a deeper contemplation of divine attributes. They are real in their effect and presence, though not personal subjects or metaphysical beings.
Silent Revealing - A moment of alethic unveiling in which truth does not arrive through declaration, logic, or argument—but through presence, gesture, and stillness. It is not announced; it is recognized. The silent revealing is how Being steps forward—unforced, unspoken, yet undeniably there.
Ox-Eyed and Laughter-Loving (of Joan of Arc) - Companion titles to the Grey-Eyed Being, these refer respectively to Joan’s majesty (from Hera) and divine joy (from Aphrodite). Each expresses a facet of her sanctity using the language of archetypal resonance. They are mythopoetic symbols of the fulfillment of ancient longing in the soul of a saint
