Spirit Guides & Contacting Spirit
I suppose it was around this time last year that, bright eyed and optimistic, I plotted a course forward for the year 2020. And then 2020 happened in fullness. All of it. Merciless and cruel, it ruthlessly shred any hope I had for using my gift of spirit to hunt Forteana and thwart the Black Lodge's attempts to solidify its grasp on this plane existence.
2020 wasn't all doom and gloom, though. Sure, I never got to dig deep into the muddy flats of the Hockomock Swamp or survey the innermost landscape of the Bennington Triangle but those places and their intrinsic cosmic horror aren't going anywhere and I suppose that as soon as some sort of stability, any sort, really, returns to the world so that going outside doesn't feel like such an irresponsible and dangerous thing, I'll go to those places and gaze into the abyss.
Look at this mother fucker over here. Won't tangle with devils because he might get Covid!
But I found another spiritual point of interest on my personal trek of enlightenment: I started regularly attending mass with the Apostolic Johannite Church, currently presided over by Father Tony Silva at Saint Sarah The Egyptian's parrish. We do it over Zoom. Raised and confirmed Catholic, it feels very familiar to me. I also took a deep dive into tarot with a friend of our family and ended up doing a lot of spirit guide work that led to some very interesting results. Undeniable and repeatable results followed as the cards landed. And where my plans for last year were big and bombastic, this year's plan is far smaller and quieter.
So, take a look at this little guy here. The Page of Pentacles. He holds a scroll and a halo of light radiates from his head. In my work, he has come to represent a particular spirit guide with a really fascinating story. This is about to get cringey, I apologize in advance, but back in the day, long ago in the mists of history, 1977, they ran a TV miniseries based on Alex Haley's book Roots. If you're unaware, the story tells the tale of Kunta Kintae, a Gambian teenager kidnapped and sold for slavery in America. Nearly everyone in America watched it, including my parents. When this aired, I wouldn't quite have been two years old and as my mom tells the story, I pointed at the TV screen as Roots played and announced, "That's my little brother Steve," indicating one of the black cast-members. By my mother's recollection, this is the first appearance of an imaginary friend but I have no memory of any imaginary friends and this is about the only appearance that Steve made in my life. This would normally indicate that it was just one of those fucked up things little kids do, apropos of nothing, but this story tends to get told often and a certain emphasis is placed on the real nature of Steve, no matter who's telling it. However, in a lot of past-life work I've done, there are numerous indicators that prior to this one, I was likely a black man that played some role with Black Panther Party, likely in Chicago with Marxist politics.
Any fellow weirdo with kids will tell you that little kids do this shit all the time and that it actually means something. Kids have a capacity for wild imagination and being that imagination is the playground of spirit, there's something very real about the places and people that they conjure up. Do a little meditation on any imaginary friends you may have had as a child. Throw some cards, ask some questions and see what comes back. These guardian spirits, dismissed as imaginary friends, are still hanging around you and are desperately trying to be noticed.
Anyway. Steve. The Page of Pentacles is a being that I've come to call Steve. Weird name for a spirit guide but what are you gonna do? We've interviewed Steve a couple of times and, independently of one another, came to very similar conclusions:
Steve has never lived.
Steve has likely been with me for a very long time.
Steve stores data between incarnations.
At a certain point in the cycle of incarnation, I realized that the endless loss of wisdom from lifetime to lifetime was a pain in the ass and likely created Steve as a sort of repository for the collected wisdom of ages. What Steve does is meet up with me on the road to reincarnation. I dump all the collected knowledge of the life I just left to him and move on to the next, undergoing the mind-wipe that comes with it and at some point in the next lifetime, that little lightbulb of enlightenment goes off and Steve reaches out to me, hopefully, re-uploading everything I left behind in lives past, rinse and repeat. He's a sort of Bardo hack, of my own making.
So, this year's goal is to do the research and the work to connect to Steve. Here's what I have to go on.
Steve is represented by the suit of Pentacles. He's the Earth of the Earth, right? Strange suit for a being of pure spirit but that's not quite the right way to look at him. Pentacles represent the fourth world of creation in Kabbalah, Assiah. Assiah is the place where spirit and matter meet for a single fleeting moment. And then we have these notes from Crowley's Book of Thoth:
She is consequently on the brink of transfiguration.
...her sceptre descends into the earth. There its head becomes a diamond, the precious stone of Kether, thus symbolizing the birth of the highest and purest light in the deepest and darkest of the Elements.
She bears within her body the secret of the future.
Let every student of this Essay, and of this book of Tahuti, this living Book that guides man through all Time, and leads him to Eternity at every page, hold fast this simplest, most far-reaching Doctrine in his heart and mind, inflaming the inmost of His Being, that he also, having explored each recess of the Universe, may therein find the Light of Truth, so come to the Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel, and accomplish the Great Work, attain the Summum Bonum, true Wisdom and perfect Happiness!
You can see where this is going, right? The Page of Pentacles above is from The Night Sun tarot, a deck that is as serious as a heart attack and never steers me wrong in matters of spirit. But for the sake of my magical explorations I'm going to use the Thoth Princess of Disks because of its incredibly rich symbolism and Hermetic attributes.
To get the Crowley experience when it comes to this deck and myriad meanings, you have to crack, like, a half dozen of his books and spend all your time cross-referencing the manuscripts. So I'm going to cheat, just a bit, and refer to Lon Milo DuQuette's absolutely crucial breakdown of the deck, Understanding Aleister Crowley's Thoth Tarot. DuQuette gets to the meat of the deck about half way through the book. The first half is a digest on Crowley, Kabbalah, Thelema, and the endgame of the Western Esoteric Tradition: Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel. It is just not possible to use the Thoth Tarot to its fullest without at least a high-level understanding of these concepts.
DuQuette's breakdown of the Princess of Disks makes a lot of hay about her importance in the deck, an endless cycle of descent and ascent. She is us. We're the flashpoint for the ultimate manifestation of creation but also the beginning of the rise back to the godhead. So, with all this in mind, Steve comes to represent a signal to return.
Refer back to that spread I posted above. We found it on some Pinterest board and it turned out to be pretty solid for relaying information to and from the unseen. The topmost card is representative of their personality. The original spread plays with the idea that the spirit guide is some kind of ghost that hangs around but come on... This one is repped by the High Priestess: Secrets, hidden knowledge. She's typically pictured sitting in front of the First Temple. She holds a scroll, like the kid on the Page of Pentacles card. Basically, everything I covered above.
The second card covers his purpose, which I've already covered. The third, though. It's always interesting when Death shows up in a reading. There's lots of cards in the deck about change but none are as significant as Death. This card falls in the spot where the spread asks what I can be doing to help Steve. In this case, purge the stagnant, keep changing and get back to work. My occult experience thus far has been one of fits and starts. I do well to go hard and consistent for about a month before something derails me and I spend months thinking about getting back to work without actually getting back to work. The fourth card is where things get interesting. How do we work together? How do I recognize/honor your presnce: 2 of cups. But the symbols on this card go beyond the fixed meanings. The symbols are far more fluid here. There's an exhange of energy around the heart, the heart chakra. He needs me to reach out to him and the way I do it is through the heart chakra. Poke Runyon mapped the chakras to the Tree of Life in his book, The Book of Solomon's Magic and the heart chakra maps to the sixth sephira, Tiphareth. Tiphareth links to Netzach by way of the path repped by the Death card.
At least one of the answers I'm looking for lies on that path. The key is there, a major data dump waiting for me from Steve. All the secrets learned from every lifetime before me.
I'm not exactly sure where Steve falls into my personal cosmology, but I've been chasing something since I was about 18. I can't be sure that Steve is that thing but something deep within me has been signaling its existence to everyone with the eyes to see it. I've been unable to contact it directly and there's a great possibility that what I'm talking about here is Steve. I've long suspected that this thing I'm chasing is my Holy Guardian Angel but I may be wrong on that front. Only way to find out is to get down to some meditation, ritual, prayer, and research. More to come as things develop.