Running to the Sabbat

The man stood just outside the circle, blowing a silver summoning-horn as the priestess chanted the Call to the Sabbat from the other side.

I looked outside and, seeing the Imbolc Circle forming, grabbed up my sistrum, staff and a small drum, running to the Sabbat.

I woke up still dancing deosil in the Circle.

Everything conspires, right now, to herald the arrival of Spring. People seem to be going out of their way to tell me of their local trees in bud, or the sudden visibility of a bird, or the moisture-rich scent in the early morning.

Imbolc, that Cross-Quarter Sabbat hanging exactly between the Winter Solstice and the Vernal Equinox, will take place this year in the late afternoon of Saturday, 7th August. Leo Sun, and Cancer Moon, for me.

This year, I will be celebrating out of doors - and more joyously, I think, than for many a Sabbat past.

Still a Little Hard of Hearing, My Boy

I dreamt that I held a mangled and dying Chippy in my arms last night.

He was still breathing, and I hugged him carefully.

He was trying to tell me something, but as yet it is not clear what that message was. In time, it will unfold, as will many things.

The huge Aquarius Moon this morning is setting in a fragranced cloud of oncoming Spring - and my Spirit bows its head in homage.

This is for you, my boy Chippy, and for all our loving and beloved canine companions, wherever, whenever.

Justice

At 17:10 local time today, Saturn moves into Libra for a few years. I feel grounded, calm, completely free of fear, and confident. Grandfather is illuminating the sign of Justice - which is, interestingly, also my (and Warren's) twelfth house.

See Her there, upon Her throne; sword in right hand, uplifted, scales in the left hand, balanced. Right foot forward, dressed in red and gold. This is also an image of Hecate which I treasure.

The harsh lessons of Saturn in Virgo have come to an end. Now we move into the balancing resulting from the learning. You will not be forsaken, for Her sword and Her Scales have vindicated you.

"The Seven Selves"

by Kahlil Gibran


"In the stillest hour of the night, as I lay half asleep, my seven selves sat together and thus conversed in whisper:

First Self: Here, in this madman, I have dwelt all these years, with naught to do but renew his pain by day and recreate his sorrow by night. I can bear my fate no longer, and now I rebel.

Second Self: Yours is a better lot than mine, brother, for it is given to me to be this madman's joyous self. I laugh his laughter and sing his happy hours, and with thrice winged feet I dance his brighter thoughts. It is I that would rebel against my weary existence.

Third Self: And what of me, the love-ridden self, the flaming brand of wild passion and fantastic desires? It is I the love-sick self who would rebel against this madman.

Fourth Self: I, amongst you all, am the most miserable, for naught was given me but odious hatred and destructive loathing. It is I, the tempest-like self, the one born in the black caves of Hell, who would protest against serving this madman.

Fifth Self: Nay, it is I, the thinking self, the fanciful self, the self of hunger and thirst, the one doomed to wander without rest in search of unknown things and things not yet created; it is I, not you, who would rebel.

Sixth Self: And I, the working self, the pitiful labourer, who, with patient hands, and longing eyes, fashion the days into images and give the formless elements new and eternal forms-it is I, the solitary one, who would rebel against this restless madman.

Seventh Self: How strange that you all would rebel against this man, because each and every one of you has a preordained fate to fulfil. Ah! could I but be like one of you, a self with a determined lot! But I have none, I am the do-nothing self, the one who sits in the dumb, empty nowhere and nowhen, while you are busy re-creating life. Is it you or I, neighbours, who should rebel?

When the seventh self thus spake the other six selves looked with pity upon him but said nothing more; and as the night grew deeper one after the other went to sleep enfolded with a new and happy submission.

But the seventh self remained watching and gazing at nothingness, which is behind all things."


Deep Namaste to Coyote Prime for this

Amazing Sleepwalkers and a Welcome Home

I stood below the front door to my soul-house, just by the jetted fountains now in full play, and looked up at the entrance. The door stood open, naturally, so I mounted the steps and went on in.
 From underfoot blossomed a riot of new colour, and sun through the fanlight lit up the normally bare white entranceway. The escalators were running, up and down, and that pulse of Love which tells you that you belong here was palpable in the air.

I must have fallen asleep at that point, for I don't recall any more, but it was good to be back at the old place. In contrast, this morning I had to deal with a couple of cases of severe mall-maze, which has shaken my tuning off a bit.

Warren and I were out, to fill up our stove's gas bottle (surprise! It can't be done on a Sunday) and to buy a new black ink cartridge for the ten-year-old printer we still insist on using at home - you know, the one for which Linux doesn't have a codex.

The store called Game is situated in the middle of the Northgate Mall,and it was here that we reckoned our chances were best for getting the cartridge at just-below a breathtakingly high price.
The better-quality cartridge on offer was the same price as a new printer, so we opted for the one of lesser ink quality. But we found we couldn't remove it from its hanging rack, as it was locked in there. Looking around, we coaxed a sleepy-eyed sales assistant to give us the goods so that we could pay for it and get out of the damned mall. I must mention here that Warren was dressed in the same clothes he'd had on yesterday, was unshaven and tired after a week fielding a new position at his work. Myself, I had wet hair which was tangling badly, and while it didn't bother me too much in the dry Highveld air, I did notice a propensity in myself for stalking like a large, black predatory feline when forced into the Mall Position.

The assistant wrote out a slip for the cost of the cartridge and told us to pay at the teller in the department - the only teller I might add. She was already serving a man perhaps ten years my senior, whose seemingly endless stream of electronic purchases was being paid for, an item at a time, with different credit cards. His movements were mushily slow, and looking at his face, I caught a look of utter blank vacuousness there. The teller, apparently in sympathy, was going about her job in matching slow motion.

I laid the slip down on a stack of Special!! Offer!! Bargains!! and walked out of the shop.
Ten minutes later we had purchased the same item from Pick 'n Pay without the benefit of the mall-mazed humans.

Perhaps, one day, I will not have such a short-fused temper on me when dealing with my fellows in commercial situations. But I wouldn't want to bet much money on it.

Photo: A Zombie in a Shopping Mall, How Unusual!

Embedded

One of the lovely things about Joburg is, as you barrel down the highway at 5 in the morning, headed for the pretentious and poorly constructed office park you work in, you can still see vast swathes of sky, unto the horizon in places.
And at 5 in the morning in mid-July, it is still pitch dark - and so you can see the stars, or as much of them as pervasive light pollution will allow.

Orion is sprawled along the eastern join of earth and sky, reclining on his massive side, while Sirius shines clear just beneath him.

The heliacal rising of Sirius, I think. Come down to us, the concept has, from a culture which was so embedded in the river Nile that its well being was inseparable from that venerable flow of water. The Egyptian year would start around now, just before the rising of the Nile's waters in fecundity.

The Khoisan marked this rising of the brightest star just before the sun, too - but being hunter-gatherers, they had perhaps a broader view of its provenance. They believed it was an eye. An eye, perhaps, of the Old One - grandmother of us all, a Being beyond time and space, whose only ingress into the terrestrial plane was the glinting of her astral eye.

The Egyptians, you see - they were embedded, the Khoisan not so much. Yet which people loved the land the better?

I am daily surrounded by folks whose greatest thoughts are linked to their desires to own. Cars, large houses, electronic gadgetry...other people. They have lost something so precious, so core to their well being, that their lives are an endless round of trying to make up the loss, to plug the gap, to avoid the roaring abyss. And so vast sums of money are thrown at automobiles which cost more than my house, at changing the wardrobe to keep up with the fickle dictates of fashion, at flimsy goods of metal and poison which somehow, they believe, add stature to the person who possesses them.

This is a form of being embedded, too - a form lethal to soul and spirit. As we are all contractions of energy in the fabric of the All, so are most wealthy people contractions of greed, and hunger, and soul-thirsting of which they are all but unconscious. And among the wealthy I include, of course, myself. For the contractions in the ether, the knots in the fabric, are constructed of material possessions as well as consciousness. And those of us who share 90 percent of all the wealth on the material plane comprise less than 5 percent of the populace of the planet.

It's not working so well. So, as I watch the smoke from my cigarette coil and expand its way out of the car, I find myself wishing my spirit would also rise, break these chains of density, and find its way back into the vastness from which it arose once - and will again, and will again. Until we learn how to untie these knots in the fabric of the Real.

Photo found at photo.com

A Blog By Nabokov?

I write like
Vladimir Nabokov

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

Pointy Hat Tip to the Goddess Echidne

Extinction Spirals

Every 27 Million years, according to this research, life on this planet gets kind of wiped out.

Between 10 percent to over 60 percent of all species' population goes extinct on what looks like a regular basis. Just think on it. Makes our local space-and-time rages against the Machine look sort of pathetic, eh?

Well, not really. I'm used to thinking in terms of huge numbers of years as well as great distance - I've been thinking as an astronomer since I was about six years old, I reckon - but that doesn't stop me from wanting to fight for Life right here and right now, as well. Maybe it's what we are supposed to be doing, in this spatio-temporal knot.

But apart from the sheer gall of it, I was awestruck by the number attached to this periodicity. 27 Million years. If we deal in base 10, then a Million is a significant and handy chunk of time. But 27? That's 3 to the third power, or three to the power of itself. A canny and holy number all by itself.

As to what's causing this - hel, how should I know? Perhaps it's in the nature of time itself, to form a spiral of repeating spatio-temporal events, acausal. Perhaps that's just, in other words, what time does.

We have about 16 Million years, it appears, to work it out. This time around, at any rate.

We Don't Sleep We Just Kill Machines

Resident AntiHero, new website. Free music. Much awesomeness.

Hecate's Night Four: Bring On the Captain

Well, we know who the evil scientist who stole my brain was, don't we?

It was myself, an earlier model of course.

Raised by scientist parents, for most of my life I couldn't see anything which held more worthiness than the hard sciences. And so I, the stereotypical over-achiever, became the physicist, the astronomer.

This actually set me back in some respects by years and years. I put it down to being a slow learner, but even all that time of looking for materialist explanations which followed the rules of logic hasn't totally convinced me that the answers can't be found there, sooner or later.

And so it is that post rational thinking sometimes has to completely ambush me, as it did last night.

I sit before my eastern altar facing a white-painted wall, two tall golden candles between me and the plastered screen upon which the flame shadows play. Right before my eyes, it is the perfect setting for an image of a woman with her arms outstretched, each hand bearing a candle like a flaming torch...

...and on Her brow, the crescent moon. And at Her heels, companion dogs.

Tears of awe actually coursed down my face.

But then, I never claimed to be immune to the scorn of Captain Obvious.

Hecate's Night Three: Thou Art That

Sitting facing West this time, my partner early slumbering with a nagging cold, I sat peering into the black mirror of my soul on no-thought . And as She appeared before me again, taking form from the formless, coming into time from the timeless, She put back her cowl.

The eyes looking back into mine spanned at least an aeon - between the time when She was first formed a deity and now, the passage of the age of heroes in between us, the dusty way of the insanity of civilisation's road lying between the then and the now like a thorny, angry barrier which we nevertheless transcended as we realised each other.

She me, and me She. Through all the march of madness in between: the rise of Zeus and the Coming of the King, over and over, through the first stirrings of agriculture and the rise of the Machine. From a place in spacetime now known as Turkey to the southern tip of Africa. We had found each other again - or more accurately, we had never really lost each other.

This mistress deity-form is older than the Hellenes, older than the goat-herders. Perhaps She was witness to the building of Gobekli Tepe. I can almost bring forth that memory.
She has certainly seen the insanity of Man, and all our thoughtless graspings and aggrandisements. Yet She abides still, and I in Her, as She in Me.

The descent of consciousness into matter is well within Her domain - yet standing outside of it She has not the comprehension of the mortal of time and space and density. This is part of what I can share with Her: the longing of the creator to truly experience the creation by encasing herself within it. The gift of the human to the gods is merely this - and yet it is a gift so prized that deities seek it from us across all eternity.

This holy earthly plane with all its sorrows and bliss. The song of the Pied Wagtail encapsulates it in a single liquid burst, that which the gods themselves hunger after: Thou art that, and ever have been.

Hecate's Night Two - No Cosmic Parent

So I light the candles and sit for the second night of coming home again to Hecate.

Each element responds to my call in lively manner: the Air swirling in great clouds from the East, the Fire leaping in a pyramidal flame from the North, the Water rising serenely from the West and the Earth rolling densely into the circle from the South.

I feel a powerful tug through my base chakra, and realise that the moon is almost directly beneath me, where I sit right now. The Taurean moon.

Fire flickers now upon the altar from two slender golden candles which illuminate the crystal bowl of water and the silver-shod bowl of salt. Ethereal light picks out the chasings on the silver goblet on its dish, sitting front and centre...and I drop further into the gravitational pull of the earth and moon.

Rising before me, She appears once more with Her cowled head silhouetted against the moon. I bask in Her presence and She in mine.

For this is no childish dependency faith, this homage to the Lady. This is closer to a meeting of two parts of the whole. A fusion of holons, an acknowledgement of completion, one with the other.
I do not truly seek a heavenly - or an Earthly - Mother, a cosmic parent is something the entire human race should have long outgrown.

She does not compel, nor rigorously instruct. There are no sacrifices at Her hall, save those of the give and take of two pieces of the earth, two waves upon the ocean, two atoms within the molecule.

The gods are that part of Us which creates - and in creating, deconstructs and destroys, as well. We are neither less than they are nor greater. We are each as necessary as the wind upon the vocal chords of the Singer - we are complimentary parts of the whole song.


Hecate pic found here, unfortunately.

Mistress Haloed By The Moon

Oh my Lady, how I have missed bathing in the moonlight of Your presence!

Mine is an experiential 'religion'- if I don't know the answer, I set out to experience it. And so it has been, for the past few months, that I have learned that it is indeed possible to transcend the ego. I have glimpsed the reality of the Ground of All Being -both beginning and ending point, the place from which we arose and to which we dissolve eventually - and sat timeless in meditation without, or even outside of, Time.

These things I have done and seen and felt, and I know that they Are. But oh, my Lady, how I long now to be in Your embrace.

My Earth soul is and has always been a child of Hecate. The great mistress of the crossroads, of changing and endings, and thus beginnings. The lady of the dogs, the one haloed in the full moon, bearing the crescent on Her brow.

Pic: Hecate by Tellaine

Cancer Sun, Aquarius Moon, and a Coronal Mass Ejection

..rows of women - all the same woman - in a toilet stall with trailing electrode-type wires streaming down from their bodies. Draining the so-called toxins from them. But it wasn't working. The same row of women - all the same woman - walking towards me, frowning. Whatever it was they were being treated for, it was not working at all.

A warehouse, and people. A piano, and a man in a green sequined waistcoat to play it.
Black silk overshirts and floral skirts. Too many clothes. There's my son, over there.

Taking a young woman by the shoulders, saying "Look at me. I am 50 years old" , trying to convince her I meant no harm.
After the geomagnetic storm, the dreams were queued.

And before that, head on my hands, smoking, looking out of the back door at threadbare trees and a clean evening sky: feeling my soul become the soul of the world. Myself in every form of life- every human, good and evil and indifferent; every bird exalting that god is not dead upon the sky; every blind worm, every diatom crusting the ocean, every dying whale, each carbon molecule....darting, now burrowing, now linking and reforming the flesh of the All.
And turning the inward glance - a quiescent cinnabar ocean, just barely remembering that I was once a woman.

The coronal mass ejection - the same solar upheaval responsible for Northern Lights and Coronae Australis - crackles across the Earth's magnetic field, effectively stopping all dreams, all intuitions.
Until it passes, and those images which have lain in wait for hours come streaming through.