The 29th Path to Netzach
And so ends the first four pathworkings on my way to first degree initiation. This afternoon's descent takes me into the watery depths of the 29th path from Malkuth to Netzach. Without a doubt, this was the most gruelling, most challenging of the four paths that I've worked thus far.
I hate the entire notion of the Trigger Warning but...
This one gets real dark and I feel obliged to offer a tigger warning.
Environmental observations:
Time: Approximately 12:30pm
Phase of the moon: Waxing crescent in Taurus
Other notes: This time I got the tarot card right. I set up meditation space accordingly. I am accompanied by a selenite wand and a chunk of raw amethyst on the table in front of me. I also burned a blend of Copal Resin, Frankincense, and Angel Root incense in the censer and propped up the 18th trump of The Tarot, The Moon, against a cup (symbolic of the element of water).
I began the session with my usual LBRP and Kabbalistic Cross, lit the incense, and then settled in for several minutes of silent meditation before starting the pathworking. At first I felt like I rushed the meditation. I didn't spend as much time as I usually do even though today I was in no particular rush. Interesting observation about the incense: In it's raw form, after I've ground it to a fine powder, it's a pale golden color similar to the drug DMT and the smoke that rises from it has a sort of yellow quality to it but today there was a distinct pink color to the smoke rising out of the censer.
My worries were for nothing. Once the guided meditation began and I started to give myself over to the hypnosis I fell right into it. As the countdown began, the area in my vision surrounding the soul door became hazy and by the time the countdown was over, my astral body leapt forth and dove right through the soul door.
The tarot trump representing the 29th path is The Moon, a card which haunts me along with The High Priestess. As soon as I hit the path, I find out precisely what it is about this card that defines the path. This was a challenging one that hit me from angles that I wasn't expecting. As soon as I dropped through the door and into the astral, I fling myself out of the sky and into the dark ocean below. I was expecting to come down on solid ground but instead fell deep into the sea. I could see the moon's distorted reflection on the surface above me and when I finally get my bearings and realize what's happening, I find that I'm floating in a warm sea, surrounded by a colorful coral reef. The reef winds in every direction. There are peaks and valleys and the occasional cave. Colorful tropical fish dart in and out of the seascape and from all sides I catch glimpses of larger beings which seem to hang in the shadows, inspecting me, waiting for me to act.
As I explore, I notice that they're emerging from the reef. Some come out closer to me. They're the Undines, spirits of the water element; mermaids, basically.
One of them, a beautiful woman with pearlescent skin swims along with me and explains the significance of this place.
Everyone dumps their garbage in the sea because it sinks to the bottom and you can't see it anymore. But what usually ends up happening? It either floats back up or drifts until it washes ashore. Nothing stays hidden forever. Down here, this is where you find out who you really are. You think you've pushed all this trash down but there's also treasure down here. You have to dig it up and drag it to the surface.
In time, we part and I swim to the surface and hitch a ride on a sea-borne chariot pulled by dolphins. I climb on and sit in asana while they draw me toward the shore of a frightening, mountainous island silhouetted against the moonlight. In order to go ashore I must first pass between the a tall gateway constructed of a statue of a wolf and a jackal. Once at the shore, I stumble through the surf until I cross the beach to a dense jungle. To either side of me, this jungle wall seems to stretch out to the horizon and so it seems that there is only one way to go: through.
I struggle against the dense growth, which gradually transforms to rot until I punch through and reach a clearing of tall grass and a sunken temple at the center. It sinks into the landscape on an angle and from where I stand there doesn't seem to be a entrance. It's just a tall wall, lined with elaborate carvings.
I've been here before. Like my other pathworkings, this building featured in a previous trip to the astral, going back to the landscape of my mother's music therapy session, which seems to factor into all of these pathworkings by featuring piece of that landscape in this Kabbalistic landscape. I'm going to have to tell her about this. In that adventure, this fortress sat black and heavy in the middle of a grassy plain. There was no entrance except for a single window in the ceiling that opened into pitch blackness revealing nothing to me. That building also featured ghastly carving around its outsides.
The carvings on this fortress are even more terrible. It's a single, continuous mural carved into the black stone depicting genocide, rape, torture, dismemberment, and war. The victims are all plainly visible, but the faces of the perpetrators are all turned away from me.
In time, I find an entrance to the fortress. An archway is sunken low into the soil and to pass through I must get down and crawl through the dirt. Once inside I'm confronted with a startling and conflicting vision. A tall statue stands at the center of the fortress. The silver moonlight shines through a single opening in the ceiling, shining directly down onto an elaborate statue of The Dark Mother, Kali Maa.
Kali and I have a complicated relationship. Her appearance is terrifying. Her skin is dark, almost black, and she wears skulls and severed arms but at the same time, she is most often portrayed as a demon killer and there is a strange sexual allure to her terrible power. Yes, she destroys, but she really gives it to those who deserve it. She stands triumphant over the body of her lover, Shiva, but he's not necessarily dead. In most portrayals, he is content to lay there in submission. These two are like shadow versions of Baal and Astarte. But for all her terror, I find myself captured by her terrible allure. You could say that I'm in love with her. I even carry her around with me on my messenger bag.
The burning glow of her stare pulls me under her power and I'm unable to resist her revelation. The scenery around me gives way and seems to fold away, revealing the worst place on earth that I could ever find myself. It's a place that I've fantasized about dousing with kerosene and setting fire to, then salting the earth where the ashes lay so that no harm can ever land on anyone in that place ever again. It is a place which represents pure evil to me. I am three years old again and I am seated on the workbench in my grandfather's basement. The scene does not play out like a movie, though. Rather, it seems to play like being trapped in a three dimensional photo. I'm frozen in place, looking out the small basement window to my right and he is in front of me, in that horrible pose, ruining my life before it has a chance to start. Somewhere, off in the distance, I can hear someone screaming and it eventually dawns on me that I am the one screaming but no sound is actually coming out of me. It is entirely contained.
I snap back to the astral.
Kali looms over me. I seem to be held in her first. My astral being is rigid and immobile and I feel as though I'm being squeezed. Her voice reverberates through my entire being, deep and Indian accented.
I know you and I know that you want to strip the flesh from that man's bones so that you can hear his screams. He shouldn't have been given the full life that he led. I agree. Time was not kind to him but it still wasn't enough to balance the scales. You wanted to watch him die while he begged you for his pathetic life but you must understand and you must learn to accept this: He is mine now and your time has passed. They kept it from you and that's not fair but nothing you do in this life will make it right and if you insist on beating his corpse then that road will lead you back to ruin and I will come for you. Please don't make me come for you.
Her hold over me fades and I stumble back toward the low arch. I turn and see that awful mural of horror carved into the inside of the fortress as well as it is on the outside but now I can see the faces. Many of them are world leaders of the past. I see Pol Pot and Josef Stalin. Hitler is there, as is Ronald Reagan. Men are blown to pieces by German artillery at the Somme. Their dismembered body parts gradually blend into a pile of skulls and artillery shells. American cavalry marches the tribal natives to their death. Chairman Mao stands on high as millions of Chinese die of starvation beneath him. Many faces I don't recognize but many I do and they're the same awful face of my grandfather. But even worse than that and these other terrible men is the discovery of my own face among the atrocities. I can't look away from it and my heart seems to struggle to beat against the horror in my chest. I apathetically stand off to the side, looking up and away as all this goes on around me, as a woman directly behind me is simultaneously raped and murdered by men that I don't recognize.
My sin is worse than mere apathy. It's true cowardice and fear. It's years of bottling up the feelings that came from those horrible moments in that basement and burying them deep in my internal ocean. It's a legacy of freezing up in the face of confrontations big and small and letting it all happen to me and those around me while I grit my teeth through the worst of things and wait for it to pass. It's freezing up and looking away like I did on the bench that day but now it's years later and I still look away and ignore it even though I could have spoken up and helped myself or someone else who was being made a victim. I pound my fists against the stone representation of myself and look for something around me to scratch it off with but nothing comes. I resign, helpless again, and eventually move out of this temple of horror and back to the jungle which eventually breaks and gives way to a crescent lagoon of glowing white sand. I feel filthy from my time in the temple with The Dark Mother and wade into the water but after some distance I see a glow under the water a ways out.
Swimming toward the glow, I duck under the waves and find a bed of oysters, each bearing a perfect, glowing pearl. Each one of them seems to give off a pleasant hum and each hum combines to make a perfect major chord harmony which seems to wash away the actual dirt and rot of the jungle as well as the sickened feeling that I brought out of that experience with me. These pearls, each one of them, is a piece of the heavenly fire that lives inside each one of us but these are perfect and untouched. These are unborn souls. Their glow and the singing begin to overwhelm me but not in an unpleasant way. Their presence is refreshing and it dawns on me that each one of us at our most fundamental level is a being of perfect love. The human world heaps its trash on us and ruins that but our default state is an innocent and powerful love that fulfills and repairs and it lives at the core of us. No matter how much shit falls on us and seems to ruin or corrupt us, at the core of our being is this perfect love and no matter how broken we become, we can always reach in and pull that out.
I am not the damage that my grandfather left with me. I am angry at his memory, for sure. And I am angry at the people that I suspect knew and covered it up and one day I'll learn to let that anger go and merge completely with the glowing love at the center of my spirit but right now knowing that this beautiful perfection lives within me is enough to lift my own spirit out of the dark place that it just went to.
When I surface from the oyster bed, I find that my dolphin chariot has returned and once again I climb aboard and sit in meditation as the dolphins drive me to another island. This one, however, has none of that dread and horror about it. From my chariot I can see the beauty of sprawling gardens which seem to glow in the moonlight and a tall open-air temple with a bronze dome. I stumble ashore and make my way through the beauty of the island to the temple at its center and once inside I am speechless once again. I part the jeweled curtain at the archway nearest me and enter. Censers and sticks of incense smolder lazily and gauzy curtains hang here and there, with comfortable seating and pillows arranged here and there for meditation. But at the center of the temple sits a massive statue of a woman I immediately recognize in two ways.
This is clearly the goddess Astarte, a being of pure love and protection. A divine representation of the perfect pearl of love that lives in all of us.
Her representation in this place is identical to that of my wife.
She sits in asana in a waist-deep pool of water, seemingly lost in meditation but my presence seems to stir the statue. At each chakra position on the statue is a lotus flower with the appropriate number of petals and at the center of each flower is a gleaming jewel of the appropriate color. These jewels come alive as the statue seems to stir and her eyes open slowly, looking directly at or into me. She comes to life and cups her hands in front of her, beckoning me to climb on without a word, which I do. She raises me up past each of the first three chakras, spiritual centers which I have already worked with and levels me at the fourth, her heart chakra. It opens and inside the jewel I can see what seems to be a small and comfortable meditation chamber similar to the layout around me but rather than a statue of Astarte, there is a statue of myself holding a smaller representation of Astarte. My astral consciousness is pulled into the statue of me and I find myself in contact with little Astarte. Her voice is heavenly, a harmony of many voices in the same major chord harmony as the pearls and she asks,
How far away lie the stars within?
She sits in the palms of my hands, seemingly awaiting an answer but in this moment I have none and it troubles me. My consciousness seems to snap back to my astral form, outside of the statue. There is a gentle smile on her face and she slowly lowers me to the floor. I am left with the feeling that not understanding in the moment is fine but that this is a mystery that I'll have to contemplate in meditation in the coming days.
She returns to her position in meditation and the life seems to leave the statue. Once again, I'm alone in her space.
This is more or the less the end of the pathworking. I make my way back to the soul door and float back to the material world where my resting body awaits the return of my astral form. Rather than in past pathworkings, where my astral form seems to hate the necessity of return, this time it can't wait to get away from this dark place and return to my body. Once the two forms have linked back up and the meditation ends, I open my eyes and find myself fully in the physical once again. My body is sore from tension and there is moisture and dry patches on my face. While away, my physical body was reacting to the astral stress, it seems, and I was crying. I was not expecting this outcome at all. This experience ended on a very pleasant and positive note but the path to get there was fraught with horror and challenge. I was faced with parts of myself that I thought I had dealt with in therapy, but which still seem to be in there, under my personal ocean and I still have some work left to do. This was truly that journey through the Sphinx that I had been seeing in my tarot draws of the past. The Moon has been following me in my personal readings, constantly reminding me to deal with my shit. It was extraordinarily powerful but doesn't quite feel like an exorcism. I am simply aware of what's in those depths now and now have to find a way to deal with them in a healthy way that shakes off the trash of the physical and leaves only that perfect love.
I spend the rest of the day an emotional wreck, exhausted from this experience.
The mystery of the goddess
It's important to note now that I have spent time considering Astarte's question.
How far away lie the stars within?
And it's interesting because stars have been featuring heavily in recent work.
I'm not a fan of Aleister Crowley. I know a bit about his life and I understand the impact of his particular philosophy on magic, or magick, as Crowley would spell it. It's huge. The man is to magic what Newton was to mathematics. But I think the guy was a manipulative sociopath that had a tendency to ruin the lives of everyone in his orbit, not to mention his own. Left Hand Path philosophies rub me the wrong way and if you take a good look at the folks most closely identified with that approach to magic, you realize that assuming godhood never really ended well for those parties involved. Jack Parsons was blown to smithereens in his laboratory, Victor Neuberg was emotionally ruined by his experience with Crowley in Algiers and during their doomed Paris Working. Crowley, himself, died a broke dope fiend, a pathetic footnote in his own epic tale of Theosophical conquest. Austin Spare had the good sense to get the fuck away from Crowley. The only person who seemed to stay in orbit around Crowley but still escape the pull of his awful gravity was Israel Regardie.
But I'm getting away from my point.
In Crowley's central book, Liber al vel Legis, The Book of the Law, he states in Chapter 1:3 (or, rather Aiwass states through Crowley):
Every man and woman is a star
Seven simple words carry so much meaning. And so it is in spite of my personal feeling about Aleister Crowley that I have to acknowledge his wisdom. Again, in Liber AL, 2:7, Crowley states, speaking as Hadit:
I am the flame that burns in every heart of man, and in the core of every star. I am Life, and the giver of Life, yet therefore is the knowledge of me the knowledge of death.
This is heavy shit and plays a huge role in fleshing out the concept of as above, so below and as Poke Runyon tends to say in some of the OTA materials, as within, so without. The idea here is that there is God above us and God within us and that in a way, we're the same thing at the same time. This is exemplified in a symbol found on the Death card in the Thoth tarot deck. You see death extending for eternity, spiraling into an infinity of lives simultaneously. Because of our human concept of time, those of us that believe in reincarnation tend to see our lives as a sequence of lives, one spawned after the other, taking place in the same reality as the last. This one right now. But the likelier answer is far more abstract. Each of our lives are fractals. We live them simultaneously and at the center of each one is the star of the divine and the star within ourselves, both linked. The lower a reflection of the higher. It's like my meeting with the Goddess. She lifts me to her heart chakra, which opens and inside of this divine being, I see myself as the divine being holding a smaller version of her and I'm sure that she could look into my divine heart chakra and see a smaller version of herself holding an even smaller version of me and so on and so forth. Fractals.
So when Astarte asks how far lie the stars within, I can only interpret this as her asking me if I plan on reaching in and touching that pearl of perfect love and Will. Do you plan on knowing yourself? I mean truly knowing yourself. The OTA has a magical phrase, a sort of not-so-secret handshake,
Nosce te ipsum, tu es Deus
Know yourself, you are God
This skirts dangerously close to Left Hand Path territory but The Great Work is all about climbing that tree of life and rejoining our spark of the divine with the greater divine. That whole of everything. To do that, you need to get a grip on all that shit that the material world heaps on you and dig through it to find that pearl of perfection. The Undines said this at the beginning of the pathwork. Everyone dumps their crap in the ocean to get rid of it but at the bottom of that ocean is the core of your perfect Will and it's a treasure that you need to look within and find. I had to push through some seriously unpleasant shit to get there but I do believe that I'm part of the way there.