Shamanic Dismemberment- An Answer

"What's the difference between a "shamanic dismemberment", and a "more" typical person who is completely destroying and rebuilding their life?" asks my friend David over at SA-Essay.

I'm glad he didn't say 'normal' person, at least.

A Shamanic Dismemberment for a member of a traditional or indigenous society, where Shamanism is still a part of everyday life is of course anticipated by the initiate. In that way we can say that it is a consciously undertaken process.

Most of us in the civilised world however are so messed up that we have disconnected from our roots, and the roots of all Life on the planet. Therefore we do not often consciously seek a Shamanic Initiation, let alone anticipate the Dismemberment which precedes it.

I know I certainly didn't. That is to say, my little-self ego had no idea of what I was going through. That my relationship with alcohol and drugs had become deadly was symbolic of my relationship to life and to the planet which sustains it. I was nearly dead several times during the process - but  it is certain that had I not been Dismembered I would not now be here talking to you.

I now know that some part of myself - the larger part which can indeed call itself God - was aware of everything as it happened and also before it happened.

But my Dismemberment was not made with the agreement and knowledge of my ego, my 'present' self. It couldn't have been,as there was no way in hell that the selfish, stupid,civilisation-raddled person who was me at that stage could understand anything which was not to its own immediate survival.

 And yet, it allowed itself to be destroyed, for the birth of the authentic self.

I'm  saying that only looking back on the process can most of us understand what has happened to us. It may be that we deliberately give meaning to something which otherwise would seem ugly, nightmarish and without a shred of worth to the wider world. We create the Dismemberment in retrospect by the meaning we endow it with - and this by the way we live our lives thereafter and the amount of conscious awakening we strive for.

Not everyone calls this a Shamanic Dismemberment, either. A Conversion, Salvation, Hitting Rock Bottom, The Dark Night of the Soul - these are all good names for it. But in this case, a Shaman arose from the destruction of the outer shell and not, for example, a Born Again Christian or a reformed alcoholic, and so I call it a Shamanic Dismemberment.

One life may not be all important in the grander scheme of things...or is it?

It's more than possible that Life needs every single organism which is capable of transcending the hypnotised state of modern life to do so. This is a time of some urgency, after all, when we decide as a collective whether to carry Life forward or to end it all here. Guess which decision I made?

Pic: Lexie Sundell

Shamanic Dismemberment

Back in the bosom of the corporate world, shiny and bright in a new year.
My head , however, in a different space altogether.
I'm putting this down here mostly for my own purposes, in case I begin to doubt that I have actually undergone a shamanic dismemberment.

Lying in the basement of a hospital with a suitcase, semi-conscious. Being found by a hospital orderly and admitted.
For days, lying in the hospital bed ,with the guard rails up, in my own blood and my own waste products.
The bizarre products of my dying brain: a panoramic replay of my life thus far, visions of people living and dead,a disorientation not only of time-space but of the senses, a kind of synesthesia.
For days being unable to walk or hold a cup.
The inside of the psychiatric wing of the hospital.
Sleeping on the actual pavements of Hillbrow, in daylight and at night.
Sleeping on somebody's front lawn where I was dumped after being raped.
Having the pitiful few contents of my suitcase which were worth anything stolen from me.
Sleeping in some good stranger's house, for a few hours.
Sleeping on a hard bench in a police station.
Queuing for bread and soup at the Salvation Army. Scrubbing floors and washing dishes for my keep.
What it feels like to be suddenly alone, cut off from family and friends alike.
What it feels like to be dying.
What this city looks like from underneath.
What it feels like to be raped.
What it feels like to be threatened with a gun.
What it feels like to have no home.
Realising that there is great violence and horror in people's dealings one with another.
Realising that there are good kind people in this world.
Finding the man who is my life partner today at this homeless shelter.

PS Some great art including the post-header, here

Initiation and Society

Christina Pratt has an episode up of her podcast "Why Shamanism Now?" which, in my opinion, says some very important things about the culture we live in, and its pathologies.

Christina addresses the fact that we, on the whole, have no system of initiation to take us from childhood to adulthood, and that as a result our humanity is ailing.

Being a Shaman and having gone through my own initiatory experience, I appreciate her points.

Most  indigenous  cultures had the transition of a child into an adult well covered, and given the attention it really needs. According to Shamanic tradition, the child must die to itself in order to free the soul to follow its life purpose. When this is not done - for how many children are put through an initiatory experience these days? - the adults which result are incomplete, stunted in their souls' growth, and often pretty sick. These adults then form the body of a civilisation which, no surprise, is ill to its very core.

I can relate. I never let go of my child self until the age of 39, when I was forced to by undergoing my own Shamanic Dismemberment. Although I had born a child myself and had taken an occult "initiation", as well as having been married twice, I was still  not separated from my parents.
The very real threat of physical, spiritual and soul-level death which my dismemberment presented me with was necessary before I could start to awaken into adulthood.
It was the trauma which has marked me the most deeply in all of my life, and which opened up the connection to the spiritual world which an adult human being must have - although, slow learner that I am, I consider myself still in the very early stages of my education.

But how many people have reached that point? And I'm agreeing here with Christina's summation that the New Age platitude that 'life initiates everyone' is way too soft for the purposes we're talking about here - which are the awakening and formation of an adult member of society, together with the child ego death which must precede it.
Not enough.

Even given the fact that a soul who is destined for the Shamanic path needs must undergo a more rigorous initiation than, say, a welder or a plumber - the test must be potentially more lethal to create a Shaman - I still see very, very few people around me who have really been transitioned from their childhood to their adulthood. And that's frightening, for who are our leaders, then, if not a bunch of overgrown children, still intent on blaming external factors and other people for their shortcomings, and casting a covetous eye on power and wealth for the sake of power and wealth alone? Who are our doctors, teachers and lawmakers, if not folks co-dependent on other people for their wholeness, as a child upon her parents?

The picture is grim and scary. I have to say right now that I know precious few adults in real life.
I am learning to become one: how about you?

Endarkment

"It takes a stomach that has been trained by years and years of abuse by chemicals that would make your average tough man cry". Says Kay , talking of ayahuasca and shamanic experience today.

Hey – I have just such a stomach, you know –cast iron, impervious to huge quantities of chemicals through long abuse. But I don’t need the ayahuasca experience, either – I’ve already had it.

It seems we once lived in a better balance with such entheogens, and used them as aides to exploring our conscious interaction with the universe.

Today we use them as entertainment. Pah.

The making of a Shaman is always accompanied by a death and rebirth sequence, which may or may not include sacred dismemberment along the way, but which always results in a creature newly made in some way; whether recompiled from the inside out or the outside in seems to be a matter of cultural taste.

Here in South Africa, young black males are anxious to undergo the symbolic death and rebirth of traditional initiation which includes being cast out upon the wilderness in all one’s nakedness and being re-assimilated into the tribe through the surrogate womb of a blanket –all presided over by the male tutor of course, and naturally unavailable to females.

My own Shamanic death and rebirth I’ve outlined in an earlier post, and it certainly involved dismemberment of my soul. The re-memberment has been slower and is ongoing.

Meanwhile, Mahud has been looking into some aspects of dismemberment as a sacrament.

Osiris is the deity form who springs immediately to mind of course-his dispersal into fourteen pieces being highly symbolic of the lunar/solar mythology as well as outlining very clearly the role of sacrificial totem – a role played out by Dumuzi, Attis, Dionysus, Appolonius, Bran/Brun and the Christ in various cultures and times.

They delineate a possible path in each of our lives- showing us one of the ways we may take to complete our soul journeys in this incarnation.
This is an important role of myth –the stories we tell ourselves to help our re-membering.

I am profoundly appreciative of the fact that I was allowed to do this, this time around. It has dilated my eyes- as Pratchett says of the dark, it is then that “..our eyes open wider”.

I bless my endarkment, then, as a route to understanding the nature of the light.

Back In The Slightly Realer World

As some of you might have inferred, my son contacted me a little while ago.
We had been estranged for 11 years - he was taken away from me, rightfully I have to say, when I lost the rest of my family, and all my worldly goods, and my sanity, and a roof over my head, and very nearly my life. That this period was an agonising death and rebirth experience, often referred to as a Shamanic Dismemberment, is neither here nor there for this post .

I joined up on Facebook as Shevek seems to keep a regular network of connections over there - not too many, to his credit, but at the time he wasn't on the wider web- and FB only through his cellphone- so it was a great way to keep in contact with him.

So Shevek was the primary reason I had a Facebook account. If it could have stayed there, it might have been well and good. But I soon found myself being friended by people I didn't know from a bar of soap, being cajoled into using apps I shouldn't touch with a bargepole and joining groups which, frankly, should know better than to not only stick their heads above the parapet but to wave their flags around wildly as well.

A week or so ago I finally had enough and deactivated my account, after mailing my important friends about my decision. I just couldn't take the attention-deficit inane chatter any longer.

So I've more time to mull things over, to myself, here on this blog, which has always struck me as a richer, more organic way to belong to the Gaian Polity. I also feel vastly relieved. There are, as far as I'm concerned, angelic modes of communication on the web: blogs, focused and well-run discussion groups, the occasional outstanding lecture on video. But the demonic realm is well represented in all its distracting, confounding noise as well: FB, Twitter and other superficial networking systems. Which, as far as I'm concerned, I'm well out of.


Pic: Some games graphics work by Shevek

Vitam Edoceo Vitam

"Life teaches Life - We are a glance in a great eye watching "
Over ten years ago, my Shamanic Dismemberment featured a total absence of non-human animals, which is pretty unusual for this event. But listening to Terence McKenna on the subject of imagination, and a colleague's recounting of the morning's experience, have got me thinking about the reasons for this, and several other disfunctionalities of my life so far.

The colleague had related how she was made late to work yesterday by a Dachshund following her out of the gate - she had thought for a split second, deciding whether to be a heartless sod or to help the little animal. Most people in this culture would have gone for heartless sod - not that they'd think about it that way, as we're expert in rationalising our actions, whatever they may be. I know I am.

My family of origin was perhaps typical upper middle class of the last century. We weren't taught to be ruthless and selfish, as such, but the lessons which would have taught me that humankind is not the only animal worth considering on the planet were, frankly, missing.

"Life teaches life - through every mind the seed is passing"

But some seeds fall on barren soil.
I had to be taught that there is other life upon the earth which is every bit as deserving of consideration as the human form - perhaps more so.

Terence McKenna doesn't seem to have absorbed this too well. A head case himself, he allowed that non human animals probably have their own language, but were not on the same level as humans in this regard. He spoke with plants, yes, and some of his teachings in this regard are powerful indeed. Terence was known for advocating the view point that anyone, however hopeless a materialist, would, if he ate the mushroom,'meet his maker', which I find both amusing and very deeply true.
But what he failed to understand is that it is not necessary to ingest an entheogen to enter into communication with it.

A few years ago, I had a dream in which the plant Coltsfoot presented itself to me by name. Less than ten days later I was bedridden with the first case of bronchitis I had ever experienced.

Certainly, the fact that Coltsfoot is sovereign against bronchial inflammation might have been known to me, somewhere in my subconscious. I was well-versed in the magical properties of many plants but not the healing aspects - and I'd certainly never made use of this one before, either.The fact that I couldn't have known of my impending illness, however, puts a different spin on the whole experience.And of course the conversation has not stopped there - plants now regularly have something to say to me, both in dreams and in waking reality.

Yes, plants do have a faculty for communication with humans - something I now know but didn't ten years ago.

"Four billion years of evolution - A lifespan's the froth on windswept tide Peel off the fears and savage delusions / savaged illusions - And wave after wave of the old gods die"

Many people, human and otherwise, have been teaching me. A slow learner but a fairly thorough one, I can now pay tribute to some of those who have helped me along the way, and who continue to do so.

The plant 'kingdom', of course.

Also my partner, a man of few words,who shows through his actions that swerving for birds and stopping to attend a dying cat on the road is not remarkable, but rather what the human animal should be doing as a matter of course.

My canine friends all - Charybdys, Chippy and Bart all three of whom are now romping in Summerland; and Scylla their sister/mother who survived the traumatic holocaust of her kin, and of course Taranis, the 7 month old puppy who can knock a full grown human woman off her feet with his enthusiastic play.

Sparrows and Pied Crows teach me - and I, networking my mind, am attempting to learn from them.

Salamanders and bees in the garden also speak - and I listen.

Derrick Jensen and the people who stand beside him.

Friends, colleagues, voices on the wind and on the 'net.

Christopher Bingham and Gaia Consort.

I conspire with you to educate myself. Eventually.

"Deep in the seed that moves between us
The shape of the meaning as cells combine
The weave of the dream before we see it
Leaves trace elements of your hand in mine"


Pic: Coltsfoot.
Words: Chris Bingham
Struggling Articulation: my own

Four Dimensional Torus

I'm a big fan of T Thorn Coyle's work. I completely get the woman, even though I don't know her personally - what she writes resonates harmonically with me.

So, I've been reading her latest offering, Kissing the Limitless, with a great deal of Joy. Some of the exercises have been of tremendous help, as I feel that I'm working along with someone whose mind works just a little bit like mine.

Despite a zero intake of any drugs or alcohol over the last ten years, still it is that I have a psychedelic mind - it was probably rewired during my Shamanic Dismemberment - and I truly don't have any need to ingest consciousness altering substances. Mind does pretty well all by itself, thank you.

Well, I was sitting in meditation last night, breathing into the still place in the pit of my belly, as Thorn recommends, when I noticed Ajna waving a paw for attention. Shifting my awareness from my second chakra to my sixth, I discovered there, too, a deeply quiet, focused point in mySelf. I split my awareness between the two points, breathing deeply and slowly,and..brought...them..together.

A black Rose blossomed before my inner vision, opening a tunnel of connection as the two points merged.

Pretty much like folding the tesseract. Bring one three dimensional point into congruence with the other, and a four dimensional object appears.

This four dimensional being is now composed of two Still Points: one deeply connected to the World Soul, the other to the God Soul of the Cosmos. The Divine Twins, if you like, co-creating the Peacock, which is a new thing altogether.

Also like the two poles of any duality - one end introverted, nurturing and earth-infused, the other intellectual, spiritual in an outward sense, seeing the dance of energy around all of creation.When the two merge, kiss, the extra dimensionality creates a much more profound way of viewing the All.

Thorn says:

But the Divine Twins dance everywhere. The Twin Pillars vibrate up and down, within and without, the entire process of the universe. We are that process, just as galaxies are that process, just as neurons are that process, just as bees and irises and squirrels are that process.

We Are That Process.

How Very Samhain

I stepped out onto the road outside my house this morning at 4:30 am, only to find that most of it had become invisible. Most unusually for this time of year, we were blanketed in a thick mist - verging on fog.
How very Samhain, I think sourly.

Most of my Samhain preparations this year have been taking place on a sub- or un- conscious level. I only remembered yesterday that I had no black candles -shock, horror - and I'll only start on the seasonal incense tomorrow. Well, I've taken 3 days off work, so there should be plenty of time. But it's pretty unlike me to be so externally unprepared. Nice symbolism by this morning's fog, I guess.

From my partner making a deep, deep firepit in the back yard and insisting on baking a chocolate cake, to being handed a German flag to fly on our bakkie yesterday, all has however conspired on the inside to get me ready for this most wonderful time of year.

I have been observing smoke-black curlicues playing in the corner of the room while sitting at my altar, and have put out my hands behind me to urge along the shadow forms which have been dogging my steps the past three days.

For unlike most of my compatriots, I wait to observe Samhain - wait until the sun is at the halfway mark between Solstice and Equinox, by which time just about all the Ancestors have been called, all the pushings-aside of the Veil been achieved. And the land is redolent with the feel of old and new hauntings.

This year, a new evocation of memory has come to call upon my collective. He was my grandfather von Banning while he was alive, and he died when I was 5 years old, to the traumatic grief of my normally self-contained and calm mother.
He was also, just like me, an alcoholic.

I can clearly see the possible dangers to myself, here - the absorption of one whose darkside was so like my own. But a wonderful teacher he could be, especially if he and I agree that the vehicle of my Shamanic Dismemberment holds nothing more than toxins for my body, now - there is nothing more to be gained from it, but an abiding and far-reaching lesson.

Yet still my inner cauldron balks, a little, at accepting this Ancestor in particular. And so I start to weave the protections around me:

Hecate, guard Thou my Spirit. Anubis, guard Thou the other side of my Spirit.

John Ramsay Anderson Senior, guard Thou my Soul. Yvonne Mavis Banning, guard Thou the other side of my Soul.

Pied Crow, guard Thou my Body. Black Panther, guard Thou the other side of my Body.

And so, Welcome, Ernst von Banning, this Samhain tide; this time of the Great Exhalation. At last.

Indestructible

Who are you?

A question dropped, like some passing thought of needing raspberry jam when you're picking up bread and milk, into last week's assignment over at the Derrick Jensen forums.

It's such a bloody good question, and like all such, almost impossible to answer coherently.

For many of us, a sense of who we are is bound up, to put it simplistically, in a kind of list of likes and dislikes, hitched to a family tree or friend-and-acquaintance map.

I was the daughter of two scientists. I like science. I was a sister to a corporate attorney, and mother to a strange and talented young man. I liked science fiction - specific authors - and motorcycles and physics and astronomy. I had an outline of an idea of who my ancestors were, so I was a descendant as well.

In being all these things, I was a miserable failure.

How many of us here today owe a great chunk of their sense of identity to a football club, a political party, or even the country in which they live?

Brand loyalty is not who you are, but it seems to pass as such in this culture.

A recent study appears to show that we really don't know why we make these choices which define our lives. You may show a preference for brand A, for example, and the fiendish scientists will instead insist that you said brand B - and you will go on to not only believe them, but to defend the choice which you really didn't make in the first place.

Our sense of self is so very ephemeral.

It is easily broken, too. Ten years ago, my who-I-am was so scattered and weak that it dissolved almost completely, in a process I can recognise today as a Shamanic Dismemberment, but which at the time I only perceived as dying. I think that my soul (to use an old-fashioned word) would not, if my body had had to fail at that point, have survived in any way intact.

Western culture's emphasis on individuation is probably largely to blame, of course. We're all encouraged to define ourselves as individuals different from each other - and different from the rest of the living world, too.

This is a huge mistake. I find that my identification with the land, with every form of life and some forms which we do not yet define as life, has strengthened my soul to the point where it is now nigh indestructible.

I have a deep and abiding knowledge that whatever becomes of my body, I cannot be harmed. The thing which is me, you see, has developed so many connections - and continues to deepen and broaden those connections - with the entirety of the living cosmos, that nothing can now make it disappear. Nothing.

I am not only a part of the All - and my soul arises from my body which is constructed from the All - but I contain the All. Even though I don't yet know how to access its entirety, it is there. Inviolate and whole.

The path away from individuation, with its silly emphasis on preferences and fleeting likes and dislikes, seems a sure way to have a vulnerable soul, a soul which can be killed.

Developing roots and connections to everything else, paradoxically, creates something so strong that you will know that it can never die.

You just know what I'm going to say next, don't you?

Yes. Thou art god.

Pic: Fractal Effervescence (2006), David April

Le Bois Sacre

A friend of mine is celebrating six years of sobriety tomorrow.

I have no idea if she attends AA meetings, but for myself - and I suspect for many an addict -they just never did work sufficiently to put me in that place where I could achieve consistent freedom from alcohol.

Today I'm looking back down 14 years of continuous, wonderful, almost unbelievable lack of dependence on either alcohol or tranquilisers. I still sometimes dream of how it was, and I wake up terrified. Lest I forget.

I was quite surprised this week to find myself watching an episode of Law & Order - Special Victims Unit. Surprised to be watching the gods-damned telly, for sure (especially a series dedicated to murder porn in which the victims are nearly always women), but more surprised to find that the episode contained a strong endorsement for Ibogaine as a substance-abuse treatment.

Iboga - used by the Bwiti and NeoBwiti people of West Africa for ages as an initiatory drug - is found chiefly in the roots of 3 plants, 2 of which(Tabernanthe Iboga and Voacanga Africana) are found only in Africa, while the third (Tabernaemontana) flourishes as far afield as Australia.

It is quite usual for a heroin addict to break her dependency on opiates after a single-dose treatment of Ibogaine; something almost unheard of in drug rehabilitation. No scary and life-threatening withdrawals either.

This plant ally seems to work by kicking the addict gently out of her well-worn groove of substance abuse. It confers a heightened ability for introverted insight, the process sounding a little like a near death experience. Or a Shamanic Dismemberment, which I understand is its usual application in Africa.

So, all the nations of the world have picked up on this wonderful medicine and are using it to break the chains of heroin dependence throughout their lands, no?

No, of course not. In the US, Australia,Sweden,Denmark, Poland, Belgium, France and Switzerland it is a schedule I drug, tightly controlled, and even growing the plants turns one into a criminal automatically. Notice that those countries are among those with the highest level of tragedy concerning Heroin abuse.

I see that we apparently boast an Iboga treatment centre in the Western Cape in this country, though. I wonder if it's still a going concern? That would be something  - for all our violence and extreme forms of patriarchal woman abuse - of which we could be very proud.

Pic: le bois sacre, or Tabernanthe Iboga, courtesy of the vaults at Erowid

Sistrum of Isis Is Heard

So, just as I was enjoying the clean, slightly windswept, grass-crunchy Winter in Joburg -and being just two weeks from Mid Winter's day, hearing already the sistrum rattles of Isis calling Osiris back to the world- we got hit by a very unusual thunder storm.

The wind started getting up around 9:30-ish in the evening, as the Moon crossed into Virgo. The loud rattling of the bedroom windows and the metallic thumping back and forth of the 6 ft high steel gate which divides the garden woke me up several times. And then the dogs were in the bedroom, wanting to go out to relieve themselves. As I tried to get back to sleep, the room was lit brightly by the first flash of lightning, followed of course by the roll of the first clap of thunder. Not much sleep was had, in the end, and the dreams were as bizarre as this completely out-of-time bit of weather.

A couple of months ago, I heard Christina talk about the lack of initiation for adults in today's world, and how this could help explain the broken society we live in. For broken it is – beyond the ability of simple meditation techniques to fix, I'm afraid, and beyond all the green-toilet-paper-buying, electricity-saving, recycling actions of the good folk to remedy.

The good folk themselves, meanwhile, are more and more closely resembling children: spoiled, selfish, ego-driven children whose first thought is not of the beautiful world in which we live, or the beautiful souls of various species who share it with us, but of themselves, their wants and needs and desires and bugger the consequences. Just as long as the ego is sated and satisfied, never mind the deeper, more poignant connections with All of Life.

And the reason may very well be something as apparently simple as lack of initiation into adulthood.

I don't mean that everyone should undergo a full Shamanic Dismemberment as I have had, of course: the world would soon be awash in pain and tears if we all had to travel that path. But there is indeed meat for some and milk for others – and most of us are being fed neither, spiritually speaking.

Pic: my west altar

Boudicea

I had a dream last night which, it seems to me, delved into both the highly personal and the more specific.

It left me shaking but at the same time, relieved. Some light had been thrown onto my own history, as well as some of Our history as a primate growing into consciousness.

The dream went like this:

I lived in a house on a street. It was a small house, but big enough for my needs, and the needs of my family who lived with me. There was a garden out front, neighbours across the street, and dogs running around between yard and house. I loved that house in which I lived with my family. There were also maids in the kitchen, and in the front room, two aquaria containing tropical fish, which I kept forgetting to feed – still, those fish thrived.

One day, my father came home from the hospital where he had been for a long time. Almost immediately, he set about putting up Christmas trees by the front fence. A neighbour’s boy came to remove them, but I argued with him-although those trees, with their Christian iconography, made me angry. Nevertheless, the trees were removed. My father started talking about selling the house. I made no immediate answer, as the family were setting out to go to work and we all climbed into the car. My Mom drove us, but I suddenly remembered that I had left my lunch tin back at the house. I got out of the car, expecting it to wait for me, but it drove away.

I returned to the house, realising that I would have to take a day off work now – my Mom had abandoned me, and so had the rest of my family. I lay down for a sleep, while the maids worked cheerfully on in the kitchen. When I awoke, my family were back, and I remembered my Dad’s talk of selling the house. I flew into a rage at him, even as I noted that he was fully twice my size. It came over me at that point, for the first time, that I was the legal owner of this house. That I was paying for it on a regular basis, and that when I had finished paying, it would be wholly mine. Not my father’s, or my brother’s, or my mother’s, who had apparently abandoned me. Mine.

The enraged Terri was also the suddenly enlightened Terri. The one who realised, at last, that there are things in this incarnation for which you take ownership. And also that there was aid all around me –from the maids in the kitchen to the free-roaming canines to the neglected fish in the aquaria – which I had totally failed to recognise.

I awoke with the ownership of my house resounding in my heart, and felt a direct link to my shamanic dismemberment, the start of my awakening in this dream of life.

The tale is told, then, of parts of my personal journey – yet also, I started to see, parts of Our journey as embodied beings at the same time. I was filled with wonder.

As the saying goes, she who can receive it, let her then receive it.

Pic: Queen Boudicca by John Oupie

Inequality

The partial solar eclipse on Monday has been a shower of blessings. With a Natal Saturn firmly ensconced in Capricorn - which is my third house - I am unusually prey to limiting fears in the realm of external relationships. Getting along with myself - fine. After, that is, many years and a Shamanic Dismemberment. Getting along with, effectively communicating with, the rest of humanity - well, it takes a bit more work.

So this eclipse, occurring as it did at 14 degrees Capricorn, in effect acted as a release valve on many external bonds and limits. The governors are off, or starting to be, and I can feel a marvelous tide of release crossing the face I show to the world. Physical ailments, too, have started to heal.It's not a fast process - when was anything Saturnian speedy?- but the gravitas is quite large.

So, I was leaning over the smokers' balcony, puffing on a new nanotek cigarette (lovely - not only do they leave less mess, I'm smoking fewer of them, which was a bit unexpected), watching the building staff washing the 2-story-high plate windows using three mop-handles stuck together from a rickety perch on a tall ladder, and wondering why the hel I get paid so much more than they do.

Basically, I sit in front of a computer all day, knitting my right and left hemispheres together to turn out problem-solving computer code, all the while listening to Christopher Bingham and Sue Tinney or Pandemonaeon on my iPod, with coffee, tea and more rusks than I can throw at a taxi driver close at hand. For this I get reimbursed quite adequately. But those guys on the swaying ladder, washing cliff-sized windows with a home-made squeezy mop: how much do they take home to their families?
This is hardly a revolutionary thought, but I reckon they exchange far more energy than do I for their daily bread. And so do security guards, miners, and road sweepers.

Do you think we've got our economy arse-about-face?

Fermentation

I first took this Alchemical quiz about four years ago.

The result, according to that quiz, was that I was then at the stage of Conjunction.
It was, I thought,a fairly accurate representation of the place I stood in at that time.

Rediscovering the Alchemy Lab last week, I re-took the test, and obtained the result of Fermentation, which is the next step in the Alchemical process.

According to the Emerald Tablet, during Fermentation, we raise consciousness from the darkness of the animal body through personal meditation and planetary evolution. "Separate the Earth from Fire," it tells us, "the subtle from the gross, gently and with great Ingenuity."

I find this to be a very accurate representation of my situation in Time and Space right now - for the last couple of months, in fact.

The four or five years preceding this have been characterised by a growing rapport with Death, to the point where I was wholly comfortable with my own passing; so much so, that I twice (once about 18 months ago, and once just last week) was aware of an imminent arrival of Death Herself (the Ultimate Woman) for the collection of...me, myself.

The intimation of my own death was so strong last week that I felt sure I was ready to go. But that was not how it fell out. Instead, it was a transition from the Dark Night that I was feeling, up ahead.

Held fast in the Earth for the last couple of years, slumbering lightly yet tossing and turning in the nightmare of the fight against the Wetiko culture, the product of my Conjunction was laid in the soil, thrashing out and raking it in fury every so often.
When the Death transition came, it was not a mortal passing, but a spiritual one - possibly because I have already experienced the Shamanic Dismemberment - and the start of the enlightenment of the Fermentation process has begun.

 It's still just a glimmer, but it ties into my feelings of having travelled backwards to a place of greater simplicity, of cleaner joy.

 It is the re-admission of the Above into the putrefied vessel of the Below which produces the golden seepage from the corpse.

 It is a wonderous scent from heaven and a flaming of many colours and varied visions. It is a re-establishment of healthier sleeping patterns (which had gone badly awry the last few years) and a re-awakening of appreciation of beauty above as well as below.

It is the Change which I felt coming and which I misinterpreted as my own personal End.
It is a re-imagining of the aspects of Soul.
It is a re-appreciation of the human, here among the animals of the Earth.

It is, in short, the bubbling, fizzing Fermentation of my Self.
Gently.

54 Year Anniversary Post

February 8th, and apart from being 2 days after my beautiful son's birthday, my parents would now have been married for 54 years.

The emotion I felt this morning in the pre-dawn, travelling to work, was like treacle - heavy, sweet and a little nauseating. My parents had, on the whole, a good marriage. My Dad's family - fully Scots, and - dare I say it? - somewhat inbred, were not ecstatic at his union with my exotic, not-quite-purely European-looking Mum. Today, it's the provenance of my Mum's family which has cost me the most effort but also provided the greatest rewards, in dialoguing with my Ancestors.

Mum, with her dead-straight brown hair and hazel eyes, would probably have been labelled Cape Malay by race-obsessed South Africans of today, but allowed as "White" by the politics of those times. She was also small and slight. One of my brother's 9-year-old school friends hit the nail on the head when he told us "Your Mum looks like a China-woman".

Yet my brother and I were, willy-nilly, raised and encultured as European, despite the hardy strain of out-breeding our mother inevitably brought to the McKay-Anderson clan.

The marriage of my mother and my father seems, today, almost fairytale-like: that is, sweet, romantic and with a grisly twist. Those two genuinely loved each other, and loved each other unto death. Dad experienced the horror of his beloved's living death to Alzheimer's, and nursed her until her soul fully fled her body. It was an unbelievably dark time, those last few years - a time in which my own soul up and left, too, in fragments, culminating in the deeply instructive shamanic dismemberment about a year after Mum's final departure.

For all that my father, my son and myself suffered during those latter years, there is a pink sentimental aura over most of the 40-odd years I was privileged to share my parents' lives, around the edges.

Every year on his birthday, my Mum would make for Dad his favourite confection - lemon meringue pie - and every year, on her birthday, he would strive as men do to find some suitably pleasing present (this, for a woman who cared little for jewelry, cosmetics or perfumes) and accompany it with a card assuring his 'kitten' of his undying love.

Of course, I was merely an outside witness to this love - this love which has deeply influenced my own take on what that most essential of human emotions means - but I nevertheless feel honoured and a little better than I could otherwise have been for having experienced it.

Happy Anniversary, John Ramsay Anderson and Yvonne Mavis Banning. I trust fully that your story continues outside of this mortal plane.

Invoked

For years after my Shamanic dismemberment, I suffered deeply frightening dreams of Big Cats: cats trying to harm my son, and I being unable to protect him, and cats directly threatening me myself.

The aura of menace these powerful creatures stalked within was enough to wake me, screaming, in the middle of the night.
And then, I claimed them.
Specifically, I claimed the Black Panther, as my shadow totem.

The ferocity of Black Panther, the deeply emotional nature of this powerhouse of a cat, are qualities deeply involved in all my most buried - and usually most harmful - attributes and practices. Claiming them, owning them, has begun to bring these characteristics to the consciousness, becoming acknowledged within the totality of who I really am, and have always been, since before Time exploded.

This weekend I have taken time out to deliberately invoke Black Panther into my daylight, or top-consciousness. She has been called forth from around the area of the third chakra where she normally resides and encouraged to show herself. Right now, anything emanating from or transferring into Me is having to pass through Black Panther. And I'm learning much.

I Chose This

Well, this is an unusual space for me to be in - not that I never get depressed, but that it happens so rarely that I forget each time how to handle it.

Like a swiftly drawn curtain of rough hemp, the disconnection settles into my soul. I suddenly find myself surrounded by complete idiots - heedless, thoughtless, conscious-less avatars of the mediocre culture which anchors humankind. At such a time, I find any number of life forms better company than my own race - plant people, bird people, dog people - all appear possessed of an understanding and a light which outstrips, not just my human kins', but my own feeble luminosity as well.

Ah, the dark and dreadful caverns of despair! How Gothic and melodramatic I do sound.

Yet I must remember, when my spirit shrinks into the lightless holes which are all I see, that I chose this. Not just within the spacetime frame of one human incarnation, but long before and after this life, I actually selected these conditions for mySelf, in this interval.

And really, how bad is it after all? I have gifted myself with a greater than normal human intelligence in this lifetime, and a potential for understanding which  - to be baldly honest - I see in very few of my 'peers'. I have come through the dismemberment of a Shamanic initiation, this time around, and learned so much through pain and death that I am, most of the time, a very happy and contented - ofttimes even ecstatic - little ego-self indeed.

And here, as the sun sets a couple of weeks before an equinox, wrapped in the love of my landbase, the care of my Ancestors, the benison of the Deities and the exuberance of my nonhuman companions: here, I whine about my self-imposed isolation, and feel depressed that no human within hailing distance of my physical aura has an inkling of understanding. How self absorbed. How silly. How downright un bloody grateful.

Ah yes - that's better. A swift kick to my own arse from my own dear Self has done the trick, again.

Pic: The Hermit by KKL