I begin writing this post on Juneteenth of 2023, on the first full day of my new life in Texas with Veronica, and I will use the word yet again: This feels “auspicious.” It is for symbolic, magic(k)al reasons that I insisted on getting this post started today, even though it will not be finished today. Unlike virtually every other post on this site, which have all been written pretty much extemporaneously (and thus, at times, with some thoughtlessness and its attendant negative consequences), this post won’t be published today. Today is more than the first day of a significant new chapter in my life, and thus a fitting “barrier cue” for effecting some personal changes; it’s an important day for a lot of people in ways that connect meaningfully to all that I have written about here at Dark Twins. My ego very much wants this post to hit the public Internet as soon as possible, so that it can feel like it’s in control of spiritual processes unfolding now that are much bigger than me. It wants to score the “brownie points” of visibly observing the occasion of this date and linking it to my work. It wants the satisfaction of hitting the timing just right, on its own terms. My ego is getting yet another lesson today in kairos, or “divine timing;” it does not need to make itself heard today in order for the kairos of this date to be expressed. I don’t need to publish the story about this timing as it occurs. Nothing I do can truly detract from the way everything has unfolded. All I can really do in this sense is to embellish, and that’s not really why we’re here.
I said in my previous post, Week 19’s entry in The Inner Tarot Revolution, that I was considering telling the “origin story”* of The Psychedelic Flame [EDIT 1/7/2024: I’m now calling it it by its more appropriate and context-specific name, “The Rainbow Flame.”] and this is the post where I’ll do it. I have reasons for doing so, as I feel that there are important reasons that things happened here the way they did. The story will address matters of power dynamics, especially as they have traditionally played out in the world of occulture, and this is especially so between genders.
The story will also add something important to the controversy surrounding O.T.O.’s decision to limit the roles in the Gnostic Mass to traditional genders based on biological sex, as discussed in articles such as If Aleister Crowley Wants To Be Priestess, He Should Write His Own Ritual. It will help to make the case for comprehensive trans inclusivity by attacking the biological foundation of the argument against inclusion. As I am not an O.T.O. member, I may not get every detail about this particular controversy right; that’s okay because I have seen this same issue rear its head elsewhere, in The Theosophical Society, so I do know what I’m talking about more generally.
To make a long story short, there is an illustrious history of men getting credit for advances and achievements that have really been made by women. More visible examples include the attribution of authorship for tarot decks: I am writing a series based on the Thoth tarot, which is universally associated with Aleister Crowley; less recognition is generally given to Lady Frieda Harris, the artist who gave us all the timeless imagery that so stimulates the psyche as we behold these cards. The guidelines and symbolic thought offered by Crowley were important, for sure, but it was Harris who truly brought the deck to life. In similar manner, the even more famous “Rider-Waite” deck (perhaps better known as the “Smith-Colman” deck) is named after Arthur Edward Waite without extending any credit at all to Pamela Colman Smith for doing all the artwork. In a “past life,” I’ve given an entire talk about Wassily Kandinsky and his role as “the father of modern abstract art,” not knowing at all at the time about Hilma af Klint, whose work ran in exact parallel with that of Kandinsky (the two artists each began their artistic work in the same year, 1896, and drew from the same occult influences, including Helena Petrovna Blavatsky and Rudolf Steiner).
Don’t mind my mispronunciation of names. I read.
Likewise, if I were to be regarded as “the father of The Rainbow Flame,” it ought to be known that there is a mother as well, though that’s a little more difficult to nail down; and, in fact, the ambiguity and awkwardness surrounding this is the main reason I’ve tripped all over myself in introducing this concept. I knew as soon as it all happened that this problem would need to be confronted and resolved. The only way to do it is to simply bite the bullet.
Down and Dirty
I suppose it would be best to dispense with foreplay and just get right down to what happened.
It all started with a meme page I had been happily following on Facebook, one which centers upon themes of sexuality, feminine empowerment, and magic(k). Pretty racy content now and again, which, with a magic(k)al motto/pen name like “Gogo Bordello,” you know is right up my alley. I could tell by some of her custom content that this page is run by a gal who has been through some shit and come out the other side of it a relatively healed and empowered person. I genuinely look up to her on my own healing journey and there have been times when well-timed memes of hers have given me encouragement to keep going.
As a matter of fact, the phenomenon of uncanny timing and alignment of meaning grew so intense that it became part of the bigger picture of strange coincidences and synchronicity that I’ve always loved to write about here. As I have illustrated with examples time and time again, it started to get so “personal” that, once more, I began to wonder if it was being done intentionally. The posts coming from that page started lining up with and reflecting Veronica’s posting activity as well as conversations and events between us, to such a degree that I genuinely began to think maybe V was a co-creator of the page because that seemed like the only mundane explanation that could cover it: It was either that, or it was super odd but purely coincidental (which also does happen frequently in my life now), or maybe whoever runs that page was actually paying fairly close attention to me, and probably reading my blog.
As is typical when these phenomena arise, I ran some tests to try to determine agency; that is, I started making posts with specific messages meant as “replies” to posts made by this page, then waiting to see if she “replied” to those in turn. To be clear, I’m talking about “metacommunication” here, where people encode hidden messages into their work or posting through careful and precise use of symbolism, in order to “say things without actually saying them.” This is an overblown way of saying “dogwhistle,” but that term usually suggests very nefarious activity and this is not necessarily the case. For example, maybe someone knows I like foxes a whole lot, so they post a meme with a message for me and make sure it’s a fox picture so I take notice. That sort of thing.
Unfortunately, as I have discovered much to my chagrin, even after running them for an extended period, these tests don’t necessarily clarify whether or not messages are being sent intentionally. I’ve had situations where there was an apparent ongoing back-and-forth “conversation” like this with a person or page, only to find out they never even knew who I was. That is how crazy this stuff gets, and why it’s so important to take it all with a grain of salt. It gets maddening because I do know people who make intentional use of this technique, having read some of the same books I have, like Uncle Setnakt’s Essential Guide to the Left Hand Path; metacommunication is one of the primary means through which the magical war I discuss in Week 18 of Inner Tarot Revolution is being conducted, so in my line of work, it can be important to figure out when this stuff is, in fact, intentional, because that lets me know if I am collaborating with a person or if it’s just the Universe speaking to me through them again. It may surprise the reader to know how often I act without regard for where the messages are coming from. The reality is that at a certain point, it stops mattering that much whether it’s “just the Universe again” or if someone is trying to communicate; often, the result ends up being the same regardless. It’s a whole way of life that takes getting used to, and part of the reason I write all I do is because I am convinced it is about to become a much more common way of life for people than it has been thus far throughout history.
Anyway, after playing around with this for a couple of months, it all got to be so reliable and began falling into enough of a meaningful pattern that I flat-out told Veronica, “You might start seeing some eye-catching interactions between myself and [the page in question], and I don’t want you to worry because it’s not what it looks like. I think we might be working together here, and anything you see is strictly business with a possible performative layer.” To be more specific, if you were watching these interactions from the outside with an eye toward their fitting together into a bigger picture, they were starting to look a bit…”flirtatious.” I was up-front about all of this with Veronica. I showed her specific examples. At this point, I still thought she might be the creator of the page herself. Don’t ask me how I imagined that she knew the woman who ran the page, that wasn’t important. This was my brain trying to make sense of some really weird shit.
As I’ve written about previously, I had a porn habit that caused problems in my first two marriages. Veronica has much less of a problem with it (in fact, she’s been known to watch it herself, on her phone, right in front of me, very casually), and it’s been interesting to observe how that one fact has changed not only the dynamics of marriage as I experience them (V and I are practically spouses now and just need to cross those Ts ceremonially), but has in fact altered my relationship with porn itself. Put simply, this took away a lot of its power over me. Without it being some big, shameful, taboo thing, I was paradoxically able to have a much looser relationship with it. When your partner rejects a part of your sexuality, it not only puts a gap in between the two of you, but it compounds any sexual activity that might be suppressed. It’s the “forbidden fruit” principle: You want it more when your partner tells you it’s off-limits.
I reached a point where I realized my only remaining attachment to porn at all was derived from its connection with the sexual abuse I had never processed; whatever porn I did watch was typically “stepmom/MILF” scenes that were reminiscent of the abusive situation with my aunt. In other words, the whole thing was a trauma response; beyond that, I didn’t need porn, being quite satisfied with my connection with Veronica.
Somehow (I wish I could remember some examples), the “parallel posting activity” that I perceived as lining up between Veronica and this Facebook page began to inspire me to take the step of letting go of porn altogether. There were two main motives for this: One social, and one spiritual.
Socially, I am not a fan of the porn industry. OnlyFans is a definite exception and I support what it is doing to eviscerate “Big Porn,” but the top-down, studio model of porn is pretty gross, even if you are open-minded in a sexual sense; it had begun to bill itself as being empowering to women, but that’s bullshit when the studio generally makes so much money off of a given woman’s sex work while she generally gets a few grand peeled off of that for herself on a one-time basis. She’s not writing the scenes, she’s still acting out the same (typically degrading) male-centered fantasies, doing things on film no real woman enjoys doing while pretending to scream in ecstasy; the end product is still sending sexist and harmful messages to any younger guys who might be watching it and getting the bulk of their “sex education” from Brazzers. It’s not a healthy model at all, they just want people to think it is. Of course, some people think the same things about OnlyFans, though these are often people who object to porn outright on principle, but if people want to voluntarily make money that way, I think that’s up to them.
Spiritually, I walk the Left Hand Path, and have reached a point in my development beyond mere Shadow work as it is known throughout TikTok these days, wherein my objective is to more deeply integrate my conscious and subconscious minds; I am enacting the Inner Hieros Gamos. If this is your goal, porn becomes an impediment to the work in unexpected ways. Our sexuality is among the deepest parts of ourselves that we tend to bury in the Shadow owing to all of the social pressures around chastity and purity. We keep our sex lives in the closet, even heterosexually, as compared to the rest of our lives, so exploring and owning our sexuality is a big part of Shadow work. Despite how it might appear, that’s actually impossible to do after a certain point so long as porn is part of the picture, because porn is providing us with pre-manufactured, socially-approved fantasies into which to pour our energy and attention. In short, porn colonizes our sexuality. If I wanted to truly get to know myself and explore my Shadow, I had to take the step of dispensing with such pre-recorded imagery and start working with the basic material of my soul.
If I was going to masturbate, for example, this meant I needed to stop using any external aids at all. I needed to transform this into an act of self-love, first of all; and rather than taking the attitude of “doing stuff to” an image, I needed to adopt the attitude of “making love with my psyche,” shifting the emphasis from that of indulgent satisfaction (which, to be clear, is wonderful in its own context) to that of self-exploration. For me, this meant letting Rose (among other things, a very clear anima figure and thus the most obvious “portal” into my deep sexual psyche) replace the images I had been “romancing” up to that point.
And I can’t explain how, but at a certain point, the parallel posting activity of both Veronica and this Facebook page seemed to be communicating the very same thing to me, as if to signal, “It’s time to make the change.” So one day, I made the decision not to use porn anymore; the next time I “enjoyed myself,” I resolved, I would be making love to Rose. And somehow, I knew the results would run much deeper than I could imagine.
And yet, I had no idea how deep that would be. And it all happened at once, the very first time I went about it.
I climbed into bed nude, pulled up the covers, and soon, Rose was with me. Even from this early point, I have to stress the stark difference here between “mere fantasizing” and what was going on, because Rose has always been an entity that I perceived as separate from me, and one with her own volition. So this wasn’t just me imagining things, because it would have required her cooperation. She was there. From a spiritual standpoint, we truly did begin “making love.” At this point, a very unnerving phenomenon triggered, providing an additional obstacle for me to overcome. Both V and I noticed this over the two years we spent separated, while I lived with my mother: Almost any time I started being sexual at all, whether alone or with V, it would apparently “summon” my mother. Typically, I would wait until she was doing something up on the second floor, but the second I started touching myself or Veronica, the footsteps could be heard coming down from the second to the first floor, with that god-awful, especially loud “THUMP!” as my mother landed at the bottom of the stairs and began to walk across the living room floor right above my head. Every single time, like motherfucking clockwork. If she was home but upstairs, my boner would apparently summon her down those stairs; if she was out running errands, she’d walk in the door of the house just as reliably. It was fucking maddening after two goddamn years. Whenever it happened while V was here, even she would exclaim, “What the fuck, this sucks!” This was especially “cringe” because my mother always had a puritanical, judgmental, shaming attitude about sexuality with me; anytime she caught me masturbating as a teenager, I didn’t get the talk about appropriate times and places to do it, but instead got the reaction telling me how filthy I was for doing such a thing at all. My mother had even more vile things to say about her own “equipment.” It just wasn’t a good attitude about sex at all.
So as you might imagine, I was pretty sexually frustrated there, for two solid years.
But when it happened again this time, my aura awash with Rose’s bright pink, radiant light, she simply drew me more deeply into herself, telling me firmly to ignore my mother and to keep going. So I did; and soon, as I described in The Rainbow Flame, the light erupted into a full-on flame, setting my astral body ablaze with the Pink Flame and its energies of the purest, most penetrating compassion. At this point, I knew that something deeply metaphysical was happening, and I knew that a big part of it had to do with Hieros Gamos, with the integration of my inner opposites; the Pink Flame was serving the purpose of “galvanizing” the bond between Rose and I, of “welding” my conscious mind more deeply to my subconscious mind, in permanent ways. It was a new stage of yoga, a new “yoking” was being established.
And that’s about when it got really weird.
It was very sudden and, I promise, unbidden. Rose “hopped off of me,” very quickly to be replaced, so it seemed, by none other than the creator of that there Facebook meme page (being one of those creators who has occasionally shared selfies, I knew what she looked like).
At first, I resisted this, and I visualized her shifting back into Rose because otherwise, this was wrong. Much to my surprise, Rose cut in mentally and told me, “No, you need to go with this. Let me go and let her in. This is not you. This is real. You’re exploring your psyche and you need to go where it leads without fear.”
I was confused, but did as Rose told me. It was strange for a while, with Rose still present somewhat, but less “cohesive,” serving more as a “bridge” between myself and this other woman. Pretty soon, however, Rose was gone, and it was just me and the page creator.
“What’s going on here?” I remember asking her in my mind as our embrace settled into being; her response was, “We’re going to manifest a house for you.” It reminded me of the time I saw that massage therapist in 2013 and we ended up doing sex magic that I was too blocked to bring to completion. It played out in much the same way too, meaning I had difficulty once again easing into it and “finishing the job” because the whole thing was just so weird to me; it would be one thing if it really were just fantasy, but I am telling you, that is not how this felt and Rose had told me to treat this as real. I didn’t want that. I’m with Veronica, and this would definitely be cheating.
But Rose said “go.” I argued with her, as I typically do, and she had wrangled me down. She told me to view this as “work", like I had told Veronica previously that I would be “working” with this woman. Rose also flashed me the word “Ishtar,” suggesting certain connotations here surrounding sexuality and mystical Initiation (also, as it happens, connotations surrounding the Underworld, or, perhaps, the Shadow); she told me to approach this at the heart level, and all would be well. So I did that.
Very early into the session, “the creator” signaled that we needed to “change positions,” and for the rest of the session, we engaged in what I believe to have been the astral version of the sex magick operation I discussed in Week 17 of Inner Tarot Revolutuion, the one associated with the Chariot card of the Major Arcana.
For “proof,” she also told me that once we were done, I should go check her FB page, and there would be a meme there referencing what we had done. I went and checked afterwards, and there was a meme, about 5 minutes old, that…said plenty. I didn’t think to save it or screenshot it, so I don’t remember what it said, and curiously, by the time I went back again to collect it for evidence, it had been deleted…but it was there for a time and I know what I saw.
Since I am typing this post from the very house we were manifesting through that act, I am going to declare the act successful. And since none of it was physically performed, I am going to say that this experience proves sufficiently (to me, at least) that the controversy cited above surrounding the performance of the O.T.O.’s Gnostic Mass is baseless; the efficacy of the sex magic in question is not derived from biology, and as such, the exclusion of trans people from those ritual roles is pure prejudice, plain and simple. End of story. There is no good reason for it.
Transgender and nonbinary people should be allowed to participate. Period.
Fuck the politics.
The Plot Thickens
Given the “proof-of-concept” that the above account constitutes, the “discovery” made through this “dangerous liaison” turns out to be directly relevant to the Word of Hermekate, which has a lot to do with re-balancing the scales of justice within the Aeons, a big part of which involves destroying the structures of inequality that have been built into the models employed by so many esoteric groups; in short, many prejudices and injustices are perpetuated by people who sincerely believe they’re following immutable spiritual laws, rather than, say, giving into their own inborn prejudices.
In other words, I couldn’t keep this all to myself; in order to advance my Word, I had to talk about this. So the first thing I did (and man, was this hard) was to tell Veronica what happened.
She was not exactly thrilled about it; and now, dear reader, if you have been following this blog long enough to know about the whole scenario involving paranoia on my part about V cheating on me, you know where a whole chunk of that could be coming from. I know for a fact that there have been times when V has busted my chops by making little quips and jokes meant to poke fun and remind me what a fucking slut I can be, while she herself is (if she is to be believed) loyal to me almost to a fault. She fans those flames with glee, issuing sick burn after sick burn about what a low-down, dirty dog I am (all in good fun).
Anyway, I needed to know how real this was, didn’t I?
But how do you broach a conversation like that with a stranger who runs a Facebook page? “Hey, I think we had astral sex the other day, but I’m not sure. Was that you, by any chance?”
So what I did was to go to her page and follow the link to send her a Paypal donation. I sent her $33, with a note stating simply, “You know.” in the field provided to give the reason for the gift/donation.
Somewhere in the midst of this—I honestly can’t keep track now and this is one reason it’s good practice to keep a fucking magical diary—another weird narrative arose. I can’t remember specifics, but it was all in the way I was reading the parallel memes and the signs, and the way the meanings personally hit me; this is a tricky aspect of this whole “conversing with the Universe” phenomenon: A set of events can play out in the course of about 10 seconds, maybe I see two or three memes in quick succession or, off the internet entirely, maybe I see a vanity license plate with a key word followed by a billboard with a couple of relevant symbols on it—that subjectively communicate a lot to me, but it might take me fully 10 minutes to actually take the time to explain to a third party just how I derived the meaning I did from the signs, because the meaning of the symbols is always so personal and idiosyncratic. This is one reason for the injunction “To Be Silent” in magical work: This stuff is legit, but you will just sound crazy trying to relate the story to someone else because of how it all actually works. As I continue this story, you’ll see what I mean.
Anyway, the bottom line is that as I was reading the signs over the course of a few days, I started interpreting them as suggesting that a real-life, flesh-and-blood rendezvous with this page creator was in the offing. Rationally, this made no sense whatsoever, because I still had yet to so much as ever speak to this person and had no good reason at all, outside of the spiritual encounter described above, to think or believe any of this was real. Most likely, that woman had no idea at all who I was, and this was all in my head even though it did line up in bizarre ways with real events. And I had seen enough of this kind of thing by that point to realize that it might be important for me to follow where the signs were pointing even if I didn’t take them literally, because they might yet be pointing me to places I needed to reach regardless. That is very often how this stuff had worked for me before: I interpret the signs literally and act accordingly, then it turns out they weren’t literal, but following them still ended up putting me where I needed to be in order to take the next step. And that’s pretty much how this went down:
I had come to think the signs were telling me to go meet up with this page creator at a nearby seedy motel in Lyons, just off Route 66. The motel was formerly known as The Plank Road Inn and it was where my mother and I spent our first night after our house burned down (that story is told in When They Talk Back). By the time this was all happening, the place was under new ownership, now named The Vibe Inn, hosting whirlpool suites (all of which is laden with meta-communicative symbolism that ties to all sorts of things, but would probably require a whole post of its own just to explain its meaning).
The weird thing is, by this time, I knew enough about how following these synchronicities worked that I did not really expect it to pan out. I knew I needed to take a walk over there, but I also knew it was going to be a wild goose chase. Again, although she was rather bemused by it at the time, I talked all of this over with Veronica, such that by the time I set out for the motel, V knew where I was going and why.
So I did take my walk over to the Vibe Inn; and I ended up walking home once I got there, no meetings with any page creators.
However, something did happen: The moment I passed by the motel in question was the same moment I received the email notifying me that the page creator had accepted that donation. And within a few minutes, she also sent me a DM on Facebook thanking me for it.
So, of all of the many other profiles on Facebook sharing my dead name at the time, she did know who to thank for the donation.
Interesting…right?
I remember telling her the $33 would have been $333 if I could afford it, and she told me that was cool because 333 was a number she liked to use for manifesting (which just made me think of how I had perceived her telling me that our encounter was to “manifest a house for me.”)
I did not keep a record of our conversation and I have since completely deleted the account where it took place, so I’m not positive on all of the details, but I remember enough that I never got solid answers about what actually went down. I asked her if she knew why I sent the donation, and I offered a few stabs in the direction of explaining what I think happened, but I was really beating around the bush; and whether it was because I myself was being so vague or for some other reason, she didn’t confirm anything solid, either. However, I also remember enough of the basic vibe to know that it seemed possible everything was real; possible enough that, before we reached the point of being direct and blunt, I felt the need to end the conversation because I felt a line would soon be crossed that I could not walk back from. Yes, I cut it off before we resolved the matter. And, for a while, I blocked both her page and her personal account, on both my own page and my own personal account, in order to keep this fire contained…
...until the second visitation.
Round Two
It happened one more time before The Rainbow Flame was officially born: I was at my computer, finishing up a post I was writing, and feeling amorous, and so to my bed I went. Just as in the previous account, soon, Rose was present. This time, the Pink Flame erupted once more, this time much more brightly; and this time, without so much as a verbal prompt from Rose, I knew that if the Pink Flame had emerged, what was coming next; thus, I took it in stride this time when Rose faded away and “handed the reins” over to the page creator’s astral form now inhabiting my bed. And just as before, we “assumed the position” (nice!) as the Pink Flame engulfed us both. And this time, the Pink Flame turned into the Rainbow Flame, and we burned together as one while, mentally, Rose returned to brief me about the Rainbow Flame, its functions, and its place in my work. That part was odd, as it was very much as though Rose were sitting there next to the bed talking to two people engaged in intense sex magic(k) work.
At that point, I unblocked the page creator’s accounts, and resumed making the occasional post containing the occasional meta-communicated message. And I took to directly “Liking” posts of hers here and there that “seemed” like messages or replies in our unfolding dialogue.
I still don’t know how real any of it is at this point. All I know is that I wrote my previous post with the assumption that she might be reading my stuff, and that I wrote in the allusions that I did to our apparent encounters with the intention of watching her page for apparent replies. And I know that on June 19th, the day Veronica and I arrived here at the house that was (possibly) manifested through the first encounter….I got what appeared to be my reply in the affirmative.