Finding The Dog Star in the Chapel Perilous
Trying not to lose my mind as I navigate this strange landscape
In yesterday's post documenting my third pathworking experience, I was presented with a star which spoke to me and dropped some cryptic shit on me peppered with strange pronouns.
"We are one and all. You are us and and we are you. This is our judgement. Visit us again. Find us in your waking sky. We will signal to you. Give us a name."
Since my embrace of the occult, I've been fascinated with UFOs, extraterrestrial intelligence and their overlap with the spiritual. I'm always looking at the sky and I suspect that visitation from outside intelligences be they from an actual physical place in the universe or otherwise, is why magicians and holy men of the past spent a lot of time looking at the sky, assigning significance to the movement of celestial bodies. Jacques Vallee and J. Allen Hynek have some interesting ideas on this phenomena in their book, The Edge of Reality.
The pathworkings so far have dramatic peaks and valleys in their narrative. There are hot spots and cold spots. In the earth pathworking, I am confronted with powerful transformative moments where psychic centers bloom and I see myself in previous lifetimes. In the fire pathworking, I split into my Bardonian male and female aspects in order to suss out some new personal issues to work out and then I enter a massive library where I communed with the stone head of Robert Anton Wilson, who also plays a role in this post. But each pathworking has what I consider weak spots and upon meditation, those weak spots yielded more insights than I first gave them credit for. In this particular instance, the death and rebirth moment on the fire path didn't come with the punch that the rest of the experience had. It should have been a much more powerful experience but it was mostly characterized by fear. The release was joyful, for sure, but the received insight from the star just didn't hit like the rest of the attention points. Or so I thought.
Last night I'm leaving a late work function. It's a little after 8pm and being as we're creeping closer to the summer, dusk is hitting later and later. It was late dusk at this time. Not fully night time but definitely dark enough to qualify. As I walk along the sidewalk, a light in the sky grabs my attention and I'm pulled back to this moment where my astral body floats in space, hearing the strange message from the star.
"Find us," It said, "We'll signal to you."
Was this the signal? I look around for surrounding stars and it's just not dark enough for them to stand out in the night sky yet but this one star was really breaking through in a big way. I bust out my phone and fire up the stargazing app and as it loads I think to myself that I'm probably looking at the planet Venus because that planet tends to really break through. It's like that X-Files episode when the Jesse Ventura Man In Black explains to Rocky Crickensen that the planet Venus is most often mistaken for UFOs because of how brightly it shines and how large it appears in our sky. It's total bullshit, but I can see where skeptics and debunkers can get caught up in that thought.
The app finally loads and, in fact, I'm looking at the planet Venus. Bummer. But hey! I'm walking along and notice another star, this time way more likely to be an actual star and so I bust out my phone and identify it as Sirius. Cute, but I immediately dismiss this as more noise in the signal because of my previous brush with The Chapel Perilous. Until later on that night as I'm reading Cosmic Trigger by the aforementioned Robert Anton Wilson. Sirius plays a big role in the weird proceedings and a passage mentioning Sirius not only sticks out as I read it but practically punches me in the nose with revelation. This is the signal.
Wilson is where I got this notion of The Chapel Perilous. It's why I keep mentioning it. In Grail legend, another topic that I'm deeply fascinated by, The Chapel Perilous is a building or an enclosure where the virtuous hero finds themselves trapped and seduced. See: Castle Anthrax and the trial of Brave Sir Galahad in Monty Python and The Holy Grail. On the other hand, in the Wilsonian context, The Chapel Perilous is a state of mind, often encountered by freshly awakening minds, where the subject can't tell if they're being aided by the unseen forces of the universe or if they're imagining things. You need to learn the distinction because sometimes a cigar is just a cigar and not every little synchronicity is a coded message from The Secret Chiefs. You can seriously drive yourself nuts seeing meaning in the sometimes meaningless.
For instance: Since I began reading Cosmic Trigger, I've been reminded of Wilson's obsession with the number 23 and what do I find in my Twitter feed this morning? This crazy shit! Yes, I realize that bonkers Christian apocalypse nuts have been trumpeting the end of the world for as long as there have been Christians but there it is! Dire warnings of final ascension attached to the sacred Discordian number 23. What am I supposed to make of this?
But I digress.
Sirius
Sirius is actually a binary star system. The big bright star is Sirius A. Sirius B, it's companion, is the tiny White Dwarf at the dog's lifted paw in the screenshot. There's a significance to this fact. See, Sirius B wasn't formally discovered until 1862 by astronomer, Alvan Graham Clark but the Dogon tribes of Mali had been talking about not just Sirius's tiny companion but also the 50 year orbit cycle of Sirius forever. What's more, they've spoken of a third star in the system for as long and the theory wasn't put forth in the west until 1894 with serious research being pursued since 1995 when modern astronomical instruments were put to the test. This theme is central to Robert Temple's book, The Sirius Mystery, and has a through-line which drives through Cosmic Trigger as well as my own pathworking. Is it likely that Wilson's book influenced my experience with Sirius in the Astral? Sure. But is it also possible that this strange, byzantine confluence of events drove me to find this point so that I might finally catch a glimpse of the intelligence from Sirius? Well, here we are. Again. In The Chapel Perilous.
I may as well add some fuel to the paranoid fire before I go. This image of Sirius B, taken with an X-ray telescope has a strange characteristic to it. There's a lot of noise in this photo, for sure, but the flare at the one o'clock position in the image, between the two top-most rays, would appear to be none other than the Hebrew letter Yod.
From: Walking Kabbalah
The Yod represents the Creator, the single point from which all of creation emerges, and the Unity within multiplicity. It is the foundation of all foundations, the hidden Divine spark which causes everything to be.
You can interpret that a lot of ways. In scientific terms, the point seems to indicate the singularity from which everything sprung. The Big Bang, if you will. Or you can interpret it as I do. The Yod off the one o'clock point from Sirius B is the point from which life on Earth sprang. That is the place in the galaxy where the DNA which led to complex life forms on this planet came from.