Turning Things Around: The Inner Tarot Revolution Chapter 38
The 11th Hour
I am absolutely reeling at the moment, my mind in a frenzy of sifting and sorting as a million and one little details click into place. All of it was triggered when I set out to do the research connected with this chapter’s Sun Card. I know I say this a lot, but the timing of it all is rather perfect: This is the second-to-the-last chapter of this series, and the combination of cards for this chapter has put the entirety of the series—and all of the experiences I’ve documented herein—into perspective. I am very glad these cards fell when they did and could not have asked for a better outcome.
I’m not sure which two cards will show up for the 39th and final chapter. Since they’re the only two cards left in the tarot deck, I would theoretically know what they are by the process of elimination if I had a perfect memory, but there are a lot of cards in a tarot deck, and alas, I’m not sure. Regardless, I have a very strong feeling that this chapter will be the perfect climax for Turning Things Around: The Inner Tarot Revolution, with the final chapter serving as a nice, easy “post-script,” a gentle formality that will top the whole thing off and bring some much-needed closure to what has often been something of a bleeding psychic wound. I’ll be so glad to have this all done and over with. Those who have followed along from the beginning can probably understand why that is; for my newer readers, this post will sum it all up nicely.
As you’ll understand by the time this post is done, it’s all pretty intense, and at the moment, I am fighting back tears.
This morning, my Google Photo app reminded me that today is the two-year anniversary of the afternoon that a friend of mine accompanied me to Psychopathia Sexualis, an exhibition of the artwork of Austin Osman Spare at Iceberg Projects in Chicago. As the name of the exhibition implies, the sketches were all highly sexual in nature, an orgiastic flurry of wanton hedonism peopled by satyrs with grotesquely large sexual organs and the like.
The friend was someone I knew all the way from my days of working for The Theosophical Society in America. It’s been a while, but I wrote about him a few times here at Dark Twins, including some of the earlier posts in this series. At some point not long after starting my writing here, I ended my friendship with him. This outing to see Spare’s work was the last time I hung out with him in person…which is actually kind of ironic considering the direction things ended up taking.
Why did I end my friendship with him? That gets a little complicated, but the short answer is this: For a time, I thought he was fucking my partner, Veronica, and that both of them were using cryptic innuendo to rub it in my face. This will make more sense as I continue, but the allusion here is to a theme that has run through this entire series and even some other series that I have been seriously downplaying ever since I rebooted Dark Twins. Like I said above, it’s very weird that this is all coming full circle now, of all times, right here at the end of this series. That’s especially true since Shadow work has rested at the heart of this series the entire time, and the better part of the Shadow work I designed this tarot working to do revolves around the associated issues raised by this little trip down memory lane. The way it all lines up with this chapter’s cards is…simultaneously awe-inspiring and just plain fucked up.
The open and festering wounds surrounding the deterioration of this friendship go all the way back to the second post I wrote here at Dark Twins, which contains several veiled messages to my friend, who at that time, was on the mailing list for this Substack: United We Stand. In fact, even the title of the post itself held such a message, along the lines of asserting that Veronica and I are loyal to one another and that he couldn’t get between us. I added a caption to the Featured Image for that post reading, “While this image is not Copyrighted, I cannot recommend strongly enough that you do not steal it.” That was meant to be a warning to him against trying to steal Veronica from me.
I’ve made consistent references of late to my “unstable state of mind” when starting this site, and this is largely what I was referring to. What was going on? Why was I so paranoid? Where were all of these ideas coming from?
Back in Chapter 36, I briefly mentioned carrying trauma surrounding sexual abuse in my family, which directly preceded the beginnings of my work for The Theosophical Society in America. As I suggested, it was one of the main drivers behind the way I threw myself into my work there. I began volunteering for them as a way to get out of my house on a regular basis, and when they offered me my first full-time, salaried position, I was sure to take it because that’s how I was able to afford to support myself for the first time ever, and to make sure I never had to go back to that house again.
When I first started writing Dark Twins, I was just beginning to deal with that trauma in therapy for the first time. It had haunted me and dominated my life from the depths of my subconscious mind for nearly two decades, and I was just beginning to bring it all up to the surface. In fact, before I started writing this series, I had written most of another series that I’ve been keeping under wraps ever since rebooting this site:
Head Over Heels, a six-part series where I told the story of the abuse in great detail.
There were two main reasons I did so:
The most obvious reason is that it was one of the major ways I processed the trauma that I had just freshly dug up in therapy. Writing is very powerful for helping us move our traumatic experiences out of our bodies where they’ve been stored. In fact, it works much better than talking about it in therapy, which can actually be counterproductive. When we talk about our trauma, we are doing little more than bringing it back to the surface to re-live it in a way that only reinforces it and can even make it worse. Writing about it involves entirely different circuits in the brain, however, and when we write about our trauma as opposed to talking about it, we are actually processing it.
I also discussed some really strange spiritual phenomena that I associate closely with the trauma. It wasn’t long after the abuse began that I had my first instances of sleep paralysis. I even cracked open the seal, in one of the posts, on the idea that something happens during sexual trauma that renders the victim somehow more sensitive to certain paranormal or psychic phenomena—as if certain kinds of damage to our nervous system cause the “veil” between worlds to tear open or something. How literal vs. purely subjective and experiential this is, I wasn’t really sure.
In fact, because of the way this all lined up in my life, it left a lot of room for doubt about just what I was really going through. In the year or two before I started working through that trauma, I’d been living in a synchronistic nightmare that I have generally regarded, in retrospect, as my own messy Crossing of the Abyss. However, as I began to deal with my trauma, I sometimes doubted whether that was really the case. What if none of the synchronicity was spiritual at all or had anything to do with such a lofty mystical rite of passage? What if it was all just my trauma acting up? What if I was making a complete asshole out of myself by mistaking symptoms of trauma for something spiritually profound?
Of course, there was also a third option:
Maybe it was both.
I’m not sure what to say about such “delusions” at this point. I’m not sure if it’s worth belaboring the details. Of course, I surely was confused and paranoid to some degree; my therapist told me to expect as much. I talked to him about some of the paranoid ideation I was having, and he told me it was all very normal for someone processing sexual trauma. Sexual trauma damages us in some very deep, primal ways that threaten our sense of survival. At the time this was all going on, Veronica had moved down here to Texas very suddenly, leaving me in Chicago, and her departure wasn’t on the best of terms. It was sudden, and the way she insisted on handling it (to just leave Chicago right away and have me follow her to Texas several months later) did a lot to damage my trust in her. On top of the newly-exposed trauma I had just begun to bring up to the surface, I’ve had Borderline Personality Disorder for years, which often manifests as abandonment issues. Her sudden departure accompanied with a very firm unwillingness to even put it up for discussion had deeply triggered that, and rather than being at all sympathetic about it, her response amounted to accusing me of being out-of-line for feeling the way I did. I tried very hard to explain all of this to her, but she didn’t want to hear any of it. I felt absolutely gutted, crushed, and even betrayed, and while she’s grown to empathize a bit more with how my BPD and trauma play out in my life, I don’t think she’ll ever understand how that all made me feel. But the bottom line is that it hurt so much that, in the months to come, it was not hard at all for me to imagine she might be very intentionally and sadistically hurting me even more by doing things like having an affair with my best friend and dropping sly little hints right in front of my face just to twist the knife a little.
And at the same time—I swear it—a lot of the strange coincidences I had already been experiencing for over a year began to coalesce around my trauma in such a way as to seemingly confirm such deep fears. At any rate, the kind of stuff I was imagining was…pretty out there. I started to think V knew my friend even longer than she’d known me, and that both of them were involved in some shady stuff connected with the Esoteric School that hides within the Theosophical Society’s power structures; that all along, one of the big secrets of the E.S. was that they held tantric sexual rites on the grounds of the T.S., and that Veronica participated in them along with people I thought were my friends. It got real weird.
Trauma can explain why I interpreted it all the way I did, but it can’t explain the fact that a lot of the synchronicities were happening. It was intense and a lot of it was a blur, so I can’t recall details to corroborate that, but even though I am in a much more stable place today, I still maintain that something very strange was going on in those days. It wasn’t all in my head. Reality itself was, to some extent, shifting to reflect what was going on in my head. I think some readers who have experienced similar phenomena will understand where I’m coming from. For those who haven’t, nothing I can say will convince them until they see such territory for themselves. That’s okay; I was in the same boat once upon a time.
If we persist long enough, there comes a point in our spiritual journey where a great many phenomena that we read about are seen to have been much more literal than we had previously imagined. There are such things as I never really believed in for most of my life…until I saw them for myself.
Let’s do cards.
Top/Sun Card
Finally.
I have been waiting, and waiting, and waiting for this card to come up. Honestly, various aspects of the symbolism and meaning surrounding this card have been on my mind the entire time I’ve been writing this series, and even long before that. In fact, as I began to develop an appreciation for the breathtaking reliability of kairos throughout this tarot working—the tendency of cards to turn up at the most perfect and meaningful of moments all along the way—I’ve been looking forward to this card’s appearance, and always felt that its arrival was going to be deeply momentous.
I am not disappointed.
Various aspects of this card’s symbolism appear all throughout my writing here at Dark Twins, spanning events that go back to times long before I began writing this blog. Some of them have been major themes throughout much of my life. The prevalence of symbols related to this card is to be expected, since one of the major themes of Dark Twins involves the Crossing of the Abyss—and its aftermath—and the connections between this card and the Abyss are endless. As a matter of fact, this card is attributed to Path 19, linking the sephiroth of Geburah and Chesed, which is the path that cuts clear across the Tree of Life at the very edge of the Abyss itself. It’s almost like the “limbo stick” that every mystic traveler must duck under in order to enter the Abyss.
Both of the pen names/magic(k)al “masks” that I write under here are associated with this card, which depicts the Goddess Babalon sitting astride The Great Beast: “Gogo Bordello” corresponds with The Whore of Babylon, while “Dan de Lyons” represents her abominable steed.
Here’s the perfect example of the kind of synchronicity I was describing in the intro section, the kind that can’t just be me projecting my own trauma onto life events:
Remember, as I said, one of the main purposes of this whole series was to do Shadow work, especially in the wake of dealing with my sexual trauma. The name I gave to the opening post of this series was The Super Bowl Halftime Game. I can’t even remember exactly why I named it that, except that I knew Veronica would be coming up to Chicago from Texas for the Super Bowl party at her parents’ house, and given the tension between us that I described above, I think I was anticipating that things would get dicey. Anyway, I wrote that opening post a whole week before the Super Bowl itself.
And what happened at halftime during the Super Bowl that year?
Rihanna’s halftime show.
She came out onto the stage decked out in red, like some kind of Scarlet Woman (a clear Babalon symbol)…and furthermore, she announced her pregnancy, which strikes a highly resonant chord with the symbolism of Babalon as the Mother of Abominations; after crossing the Abyss, the adept passes into the Sephirah of Binah, the “womb” of the Great Mother, and becomes a “Babe of The Abyss.”
It was too fucking weird. Like I said, you can’t make this shit up.
This card ties into key moments of my initiatory journey in all sorts of ways.
First, of course, there’s the sexual abuse that preceded my Theosophical career—and the culmination of that, of course, was my departure to Norway, which (I can admit now) wasn’t just about some romantic story of moving across the world for the sake of love, but was also largely driven by the need to flee from the consequences of my trauma.
In Norway, I performed the self-Initiation that included the designing of the VSigil; as I wrote in the account of that ritual (which you can read in the post Ten Years Gone), the culmination of the rite was the charging of the VSigil through sex magic(k)—and obviously, this card is highly sexual in nature.
The Hebrew letter associated with this card is Teth, which means “serpent”—and as you can see from the image above, while the original VSigil was composed of a simple S-shaped curve, I eventually stylized that part of the sigil as a snake. The intention behind doing so was to invoke much the same symbolism.
Of course, this card is the Thoth tarot version of the card known in more traditional tarot decks as Strength, which depicts a woman subduing a lion. This card has always been a visual allegory for the mastery of “the serpent power” or “kundalini;” that’s essentially what the lion in the traditional version of the card has always symbolized. While many people think that Aleister Crowley’s depiction of Babalon in this card was an innovation, the truth is that even in the traditional versions of the card, the woman was always an initiatic blind for the Whore of Babylon; Crowley just made it all the more explicit by more clearly depicting the “lion” in the card as the seven-headed Beast of Revelation. He changed the title from “Strength” to “Lust” because he felt that title better communicated the meaning of the card.
Of course, I didn’t know this about the symbolism of the card when, in 2013—soon after leaving Norway in the wake of my separation with my first wife—I went to see a “massage therapist” who decided to make our session an act of sex magic(k). I told this story in Honor Among Thieves, but my session fell on her birthday, and so I made her a birthday card using my own B.O.T.A. Strength card. I used it not only because she was a Leo and that’s the card’s Zodiacal attribution, but also with conscious intent involving the kundalini symbolism. I didn’t realize the woman on the card was literally the Whore of Babylon, along with what that might imply about the “massage therapist” herself—but I imagine she did know about that symbolism, because before the session was over, she had ordered me my first copy of the Thoth tarot deck. It is thanks to her that I first connected with this deck, and as such, she also deeply informed this entire series. I of course thought of her when I shuffled the deck during the opening of this working. I still wonder if the connection to this card had anything to do with her intentions in tipping me off about the Thoth tarot.
Anywho…
…years later, when I decided to tangle with the demon Vine (see My Cousin Vine), I suspected the spirit might have origins related to this card; he’s an anthropomorphic lion holding a serpent for a spear, so it seems like a pretty straightforward connection to make. I had also linked him with Mithras, but then again, even Mithraic symbolism has a lot of overlap with this card, so it all comes full circle anyhow.
Speaking of “full circle,” I also note that at the center of the VSigil is an 8-spoked wheel, which ties it to the goddess Ishtar—and Babalon in this card is analogous to the very same goddess. I never noticed this until tonight, but there are similar little wheel-like, spoked rosettes scattered throughout the background of Lust.
Anyway, as I mentioned above, the eruption of sexual trauma into my psyche has been a long-running theme here at Dark Twins, and that has sparked some shame on a couple of different levels:
It’s a difficult thing to open up about so publicly in any case, so there’s that.
As I’ve said, the way my trauma informed and colored many of the strange experiences I’ve had has led me to question whether my experiences were “spiritual” at all, and whether or not I did, in fact, cross the Abyss.
But like I said, it could be both…and in fact, I’ve felt that way ever since it all started. Now I can get a bit more specific about that.
According to Paul Foster Case in Thirty-Two Paths of Wisdom:
Those who follow the Way of Liberation effect changes in their subconsciousness. These changes are symbolized by Key 8 (Key 11) (Strength) and produce at the same time the result shown in Key 16 (The Tower).
And of course, as those familiar with the symbolism of The Tower know, the “result” referred to here is the destruction of the ego. When one Crosses the Abyss, that is essentially the process one undergoes: Ego dissolution.
There are many misconceptions about just what this means and what it entails. There is a lot of seemingly conflicting literature about it, but this mainly goes to show the limitations of language; once a person has experienced it, they can better see how many different sources are describing the same thing in different terms. Part of the problem is that the process is so complex and there is so much going on at once that it simply defies all description. In linear language, one is forced to address but one facet of the experience at a time and this is where much of the trouble starts.
At any rate, this process can go well, or it can go very, very wrong. One point of shame for me is that my case is a perfect illustration of some of the things that can go wrong. Within established, traditional esoteric systems, there are time-tested processes meant to prepare a person for this experience, which, in that context, is typically done in a willed, disciplined way. There is a meaningful, deliberate order to these things. In Qabalistic systems, for example, a person ascends up the Tree of Life sephirah by sephirah, from Malkuth up to Kether, one after the other. Along the way, there are all sorts of practices associated with each sphere, all meant to build the aspirant up in various ways to prepare them for what comes next.
I did not follow such a path, and for this reason, I know that many would look down on me as a disgrace and a bad example.
At any rate, for one example, there’s the way Soror Nema describes all of this in Maat Magick: A Guide to Self-Initiation. According to her system, long before an initiate approaches the Abyss—all the way down in the sephirah of Tiphareth (associated with the Sun, and also with lions—there is in fact a lot of recurring symbolism between Tiphareth and Path 19 of Lust/Leo/Teth that links Geburah to Chesed, which makes this all pretty interesting to me given my experiences)—one deals with “the Forgotten Ones:”
The next stage is the return to Level 9 and your Astral Temple for the invocation of the Forgotten Ones. These are entities of the astral planes that are rooted in the pre-cerebral brain; they are the survival urges that have been layered over by the higher functions of intellect and logic. The Forgotten Ones include, but are not limited to, the instincts of hunger, sex, fight-or-flight, clanning, communication, curiosity, altruism and religion, all those imperatives of actions ensuring survival of self, offspring, and species.
p. 47
This is analogous to what one is doing in The Sacred Magic of Abramelin The Mage, where, after successfully invoking the Holy Guardian Angel, one next evokes and binds the demonic hierarchies to prevent them from interfering in the work. Nema goes on later in the chapter on Level 6 (Tiphareth) to say as much. All of these are different ways of saying the same thing; however, when you read it in Nema’s language, you realize that a big part of what this is referring to involves trauma: In other words, if you’ve got unresolved trauma at this stage of Initiatic development, going any farther is extremely risky and ill-advised.
And the harrowing experiences I have documented here are the reason why.
Upon Crossing the Abyss, the ego is largely broken down; the “shell” that once protected it and kept it intact is dissolved, at which point one’s sense of self is rendered highly permeable to various influences; in the best possible case, this mainly involves deeply archetypal material. The “Sea of Binah” is a poetic way of describing what Jung termed the Collective Unconscious. Once you’ve been in the Abyss, you know from experience how very real such a thing is, and you will laugh at skeptical atheists who so confidently and adamantly deny its existence.
However, if you haven’t dealt with your “demons”—including your traumas—being inundated by the material of the Collective Unconscious will be the least of your worries. The first thing that will overtake your mind and your sense of self will be the phantoms of your unresolved trauma.
They are formidable and compelling, and under these unique circumstances, they can easily win the struggle for your very existence. In the event this occurs, you may never regain control of your life. You may never recover the integrity of your consciousness.
I am positive this is what happened to me, and that I barely made it across.
It’s easy to read literature about Initiation—especially older literature—and get some farfetched ideas about what happens next. What does a person who has shed their ego do after that? What is that even like?
The reality is less drastic than it sounds; in order to continue functioning at all on the material plane, everyone still needs some solid core of selfhood to anchor one’s conscious experience. However, after offering up “the Blood of the Saints”—the more limited, personal attachments and fetters—and opening the self to incorporate the essence of godhead from beyond the Abyss, one’s sense of self is much less limited and much more expansive. It will never be the same again, and the concerns that preoccupied the old, smaller self seem petty and insignificant by comparison. The new self experiences the world in ways the old self could scarcely imagine. One still has a self, but one is most assuredly not the same person they were before entering the Abyss.
From Ziegler in Tarot: Mirror of the Soul: Handbook for the Aleister Crowley Tarot:
The woman’s head is turned completely toward the urn of fire. She is totally absorbed in the energy of transformation inherent in any total and conscious surrender. This is the secret of Tantra, the awareness which perceives the fullness of each moment and accepts all of life, rejecting nothing.
Lust reveals its valuable creative potential only when fully tasted, savored and drunk in. Only then can it be understood and be implemented in your own process of becoming aware. The way to the light passes through all aspects of darkness.
p. 38
Shadow Card
So, how was Lust for a crescendo? Didn’t I say this post would be a suitable climax? I covered some pretty heavy turf in my Sun Card, and now the Shadow Card comes to ground some of the heady territory from Lust in a way that, for me especially, uniquely mirrors the aftermath. It’s also interesting to me how well this card pairs with Lust. With all of Lust’s sexual overtones, it’s interesting to see a peacock on this card, for the beautiful tail feathers of the peacock are known for the role they play in mate selection; legend has it that peacock feathers are a sign that swingers use to identify themselves in a coded way. The similarity also extends to a fairly literal visual level: Lust shows Babalon riding atop the Great Beast and reaching up for the Holy Grail, and likewise, the Knight of Cups rides atop Pegasus and upholds a chalice decorated with the crab motif of Cancer.
Elementally, the Knight of Cups is Fire (Knight) of Water (Cups), which makes it a complement to the Queen of Wands (Water of Fire)—my Court Card by decan, based on my date of birth.
Interestingly, this card is Veronica’s Court Card by decan, based on her date of birth—something I just learned. It’s yet another neat little way in which we appear to mirror one another. Another one is that I was born at midnight, while she was born at noon.
There’s one pretty interesting way in which the interpretation of this card closely reflects my situation, especially with regard to the opening theme of this post, having to do with friendships that I ended. It renders this card’s appearance in my Shadow stack rather fitting. I’ll let Gerd Ziegler elaborate:
The Knight of Cups has large wings with which he soars on his powerful white horse. He wears green armor, and the cup in his outstretched right hand contains Cancer, the Crab. The water sign Cancer can refer to familiar relationships. But here the idea of family must be enlarged to include also any chosen relationships, especially those with spiritual connections (or spiritual communities).
p. 71
As my journey across the Abyss unfolded, I grew much less outgoing, especially when it comes to maintaining substantive one-on-one connections with others. Very few of my friendships survived at all, and among those few who are left, I don’t keep in touch regularly on an individual basis. To some extent, I’ve learned, this is normal for any Crossing of the Abyss, but given the traumas I brought with me into the experience without clearing them first, the experience took a much deeper toll on me.
However, I also feel that for me, this was one aspect of my offering “the Blood of the Saints:” My main personal relationships from my life before were among the things I shed in Da’ath.
I described the paranoia I held regarding some of my friends, but in retrospect, I feel strongly that there was more to that than fearfully burning my bridges with them in the wake of my trauma. There are some concrete spiritual realities that come sharply into focus during such an experience, and as I’ve described in previous posts, throughout these experiences, there were periods when I was deeply in touch with the Prince of Darkness. Looking back, I am firm in my view that there were certain influences that the Prince of Darkness wanted swept from my life, and my remaining friends from The Theosophical Society were among them.
The culture surrounding The Theosophical Society is interesting. I’ve described it here and there, especially recently in Chapter 36: Truly hardcore Theosophists can be rather pious in their dedication to principles such as devotion to The Masters and spiritual selflessness, and let us remember also that the term “Left Hand Path” was first popularized in Western occultism by Madame Blavatsky. To Theosophists, “Left Hand Path” is basically a slur. To them, the term denotes people who are simply evil, through and through. Of course, the modern meaning of the term is different from this, although even with a more accurate understanding of how people voluntarily use the term to describe themselves these days, most serious Theosophists would still find the LHP distasteful.
However, so far as I knew, the friend I went with to see Spare’s artwork wasn’t like them. He wasn’t a dedicated Theosophist himself; his mother was, and he worked for the T.S. mostly out of convenience. He broke almost all of their rules, and is in many ways a very free-spirited person. He indulges in many activities and pleasures that hardcore Theosophists would consider to be definite vices, and that had actually been a major part of how we bonded over the years. The fact that he invited me to see Austin Osman Spare’s artwork should say it all. Theosophists believe the practice of ritual magic(k) is dangerous at best, and most think it’s flat-out immoral—but this friend encouraged my magic(k)al dabblings. He even once told me he thought I should offer magic(k) classes as a way to make money (I told him he overestimated my knowledge of such things).
While he himself wasn’t a dedicated Theosophist, he was married to one (last I heard—though they were separated and getting ready to divorce near the end of our friendship)—and not just any Theosophist, but a pretty well-known and respected one, looked up to by many. As one might guess, this in fact became one of the main points of tension in their own relationship. I was amazed they got along at all, to be honest. But I digress; I mainly mention this because I think it helps to explain what comes next.
To highlight how Theosophists can be, his wife had forbidden him to hang out with me. When we went to that exhibit, it was only because his relationship with her had already mostly deteriorated; in previous times, he had to hang out with me in secret when we met up at all. I’m telling you, in Theosophical circles, my name is now mud. I’m a “fallen one.”
Anyway, despite all we had in common, my friend—for whatever reason—seemed to draw a line at condoning my Left Hand Path involvement. Even though he didn’t really buy most of what Theosophy had to say, he apparently did put stock in their opinion about the Left Hand Path, and also seemed not to understand what the modern Left Hand Path actually entails. He just never could separate the concept from the stories he’d heard from his wife and others. He still hung out with me, but every now and then he’d question me about the Left Hand Path in a hesitant sort of way, and I remember one time when he got flustered and flat-out said to me, “Why don’t you drop all that Left Hand Path stuff, get rid of your magic(k) stuff, and start practicing loving kindness meditation?” He said it with impatience and disdain, like it was something he’d been holding his tongue about for a long time.
And it was clear: He simply didn’t accept me for who I was. I think he was hoping on some level I’d come back to “the light side” and go back to being the Theosophically “respectable” person I once was.
It wasn’t happening. I’m pretty deep into my own path, you know what I mean? Jesus. I’ve got a Word. You don’t just “drop that stuff” and “start practicing loving kindness meditation instead” (not that I actually think there’s something wrong with loving kindness meditation).
Similarly, we had a mutual friend who, at one point, came to me asking for my help and advice. He was having some personal problems—a few pertaining to his mental health—and he wanted me to help him by teaching him some magic(k). One of the things I was going to teach him was the Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram. Based on the criteria he described to me, I suggested we work with the book Energy Magick of the Vampyre by Don Webb, but he recoiled from it. I could hear the nervousness in his voice when he declined; he didn’t want to be involved with it because of the association with the Left Hand Path.
I didn’t want to be a jerk. I know just because someone asks you for help doesn’t mean they necessarily have to take your word as gospel. But he did ask me for help, and rejected my advice for reasons I know were dogmatic and superstitious. I knew what kind of stuff he was into, and I knew that if not for the fact that this book could be described with the term “Left Hand Path,” he would most likely have resonated with the practices and such. So here again, I had someone claiming to be my friend while being pretty judgmental about something that reflected a pretty deep aspect of who I am as a person.
All of this prejudice coming from people who were supposed to be my friends—on the basis of spiritual dogmas—was too much. That’s completely aside from the ways in which, for me, Theosophical culture is a reminder of a traumatic time in my life that I was trying to move past, and it just seemed clear: It was time to set some boundaries between myself and people who opposed my spiritual alignment on principle.
Honestly, for me, this became connected with the present “Spiritual War.” I don’t have beef with anyone who doesn’t have beef with me; they drew the line in the sand. However, once it was drawn, it was drawn.
This is the Aeon of Horus. Some shit like this is going to happen. They made their choice, and I’ve made mine.
While I certainly had my reasons for ending these Theosophical friendships, other situations are a bit less clear and in many cases, I’ve simply pushed away pretty much everyone whom I felt might have a hard time understanding what I’ve been through in the past few years. In some cases, I feel guilty because of the…”complications” of my particular process; I wonder if I would have gone to such extremes of isolation if I had done this all “the right way.” In most cases, I feel like a clean break is the best way to move forward, because I’m simply not the same person I used to be anyway. It’s hard for me not to compare my own journey to what I imagine the journeys of others might have been like, and to think to myself, “I bet so-and-so didn’t push all their friends away and become a recluse like me.” But I had a lot on my plate to deal with, and regardless of what might have been: What’s done is done.
What I do know is that I have some decisions to make pretty soon. After dealing with all sorts of uncertainty as to the exact nature of what I’ve gone through, I’m no longer in any doubt: I knew what I was going through as soon as it started happening and it just took me all this time to fully ease into accepting it. Since I’ve mostly come out of the experience, I’ve shored up my research about it, and I have nothing to prove to anyone.
I know what I know.
The question is: What now?
I have pressed my way through this series (and covering my developing understanding of the Word of Hermekate in tandem) because the proverbial ball has still been up in the air and there really wasn’t any other viable choice. There was a reason I started the process of documenting this stuff, and so there was no good reason to stop no matter how uncomfortable it became. Now, however, that work is coming to a close—and given the “irregular” nature of the process I’ve been through, I’m not really sure how much help I can be for others beyond the documentation I’ve done here; it serves some unique purposes as a glimpse for others into what this territory can entail, in ways that, it seems, most other authors are highly hesitant to shed so much light on. I presume they have their reasons and often wonder if I haven’t made a big mistake by allowing others such a glimpse into what I’ve experienced.
For example, Marco Visconti has made interesting and worthy points in posts like Why I Really Don’t Want To Hear About Your Mystical Experiences. I can see how sharing such things can indeed be a distraction, or even misleading to others; I know full well (and have stated many times throughout this work) that everyone’s experience is bound to vary and to be unique. In fact, that’s one of the main reasons I’ve felt moved to share and document my experiences. I want to show people that their experiences don’t have to look like Aleister Crowley’s and that their own experiences just might be valid. One reason for this is because of just how much doubt I’ve dealt with because of how different my experiences have been from everything I’ve read. In sharing my own journey, I hope to relieve others of some of their own doubts in case they happen to be going through something similar. However, I also know this means people who read about my experiences might end up expecting theirs to be the same: I risk inadvertently causing more of the very problem I’m trying to help others avoid. It’s a pickle. All of this makes me think to myself that this may be exactly why the authors I look up to don’t get very specific about their personal experiences.
And so maybe I have missed the point entirely?
There are other problems being so open can cause. I can attest that having shared my experiences has contributed to a sense of alienation. People might think I’m bragging, or even if they don’t, they might feel like I’m somehow setting myself apart from them or something. It’s kind of hard to avoid implications like that. And that’s not very cool. That’s not what I’m after at all.
Since I didn’t do this “by the book,” I don’t necessarily think I’d be of much value in actually guiding others. However, that could be largely a matter of self-doubt.
There’s one thing I do know: Fully recovering from a journey across the Abyss takes time. That’s something I’ve experienced, and I was heartened recently when I read just that in Maat Magick. In the chapter about Level 3 (Binah), Nema writes about how the layers of Self gradually coalesce around the Nothing at the core of one’s Being:
Around these layers the levels of density re-form in their progressive order, then the whole of your reconstituted psychic self slides into your physical body and clicks into place. The time that it takes to reassemble varies—more than weeks, less than years.
p. 77
That squares with my reality, and reading that made me feel less alone, and less like some kind of failure. My “re-assembly” has been ongoing for close to a year and while it isn’t complete, it is moving along at an ever-growing pace.
I do think that the energy I’ve been putting into writing about it all has slowed the process down for myself, and that’s one reason I’ve been pressing myself to finish this series lately. I need a well-deserved time-out to finish breaking my new self in.
What will happen next?
Who knows?
All I know is that I can’t wait to write the last post in this series and close this chapter of my life. I won’t be able to fully embrace whatever the next phase holds until that’s done.