Queen of Swords

On Thursday I had a fascinating experience with shifting energy in my body, one that led to a couple of important insights.

I was home sick that day, after Wolfling had the flu for three days and I spent most of the earliest hours of the morning awake, in a mild fever, and fraught with fear and pessimism about my ability to provide for myself and my child in the years to come. I got up sometime after 9am, twiddled around the computer for a while, then took some aspirin and went back to bed. I didn't fall asleep, but eventually the headache which had plagued me all morning subsided.

I lay there in bed and realized that my energy was too jangled to sleep. I called on LM, and he helped me "comb out" the tangles -- but then I realized that it felt like my center was full of the energetic equivalent of pus. I had the unusual desire to take a spiritual knife to the place and lance myself, letting all the nastiness drain away.

Hmmm. . . . just now remembering that it's only been a few week since I felt like I was putting my guts back into that space. Maybe this is an indication of a need for additional healing around that process. . .

My phone beeped, and I found a site notification from a friend, A, asking if I was alright, because he hadn't seen me online for a while. I decided I might as well get up. I logged into chat, and one of the first things he said was that it felt to him as if I was "filled with miasma" -- which startled me. He then strongly suggested that I do a full-day cleanse.

( Cut for your friends page )

Then I called my teacher to tell her about the experience. We agreed that this is pretty firm support for the hypothesis that I have some kind of binding that's trying to keep me from this particular aspect of my work. We don't know where it comes from, but a past-life situation seems the most likely, that someone -- whether myself or someone(s) else -- at some point decided that it was not desireable to have me practicing ceremonial magic.

I'm intrigued and curious about the possibilities, but I'm not going to spend much energy worrying about when/why/how. My immediate task is to continue to do the work of facing my internal obstacles as they arise. When I flail and growl and get upset, they get stronger. When I sit quietly and look them in the eye, they slink away.

The challenge is remembering to stop and look them in the eye rather than muscling my way through or allowing avoidance patterns to take over.

One of the concepts that fascinated me the most during my graduate studies in comparative religion was that adherents of different religions inhabited different conceptual worlds or cosmos. How time is perceived and experienced subjectively is one of the key elements of those differing cosmologies. The classic example is that Christian time is linear, moving from creation through the birth, death and resurrection of Christ, and ending in an Apocalypse. A human being gets one birth and death as Creation progresses toward the Second Coming. Time as I've usually seen it in Pagan belief tends to be perceived as cyclical, with creation/birth-maturation-death-rebirth conceived of as ongoing cycle, even for humanity.

One of the holes in my religious knowledge is Egyptian myth and spirituality. I have enough of a familiarity to not be completely lost when a reference is made, but no expertise to speak of. The Passion of Isis and Osiris is already helping with that, and one of the fascinating insights of the early part of the book is the ancient Egyptian concept of time.

As Sir Alan Gardiner noted in his Egyptian Grammar, the ancient Egyptians had only two verb tenses. These revealed the singleness of an event or its repetition -- they recognized only the "present" or the "eternal present." Although the "present" could have happened today or yesterday, the significant distinction in the two verb tenses was revealed in a difference in whether perceived events occurred in man's time or in the gods' time.

The dual notion of time permeated all of Egyptian life. The mud brick and thatch houses of the people were temporary affairs, never meant to last, for the Nile floods came annually and washed everything away. But the houses of the gods, the temples, were built of stone. They were to last for eternity, the lifetime of a neter.

This is fascinating to me just in itself -- but beyond that, it strikes a chord with what I experienced of Isis yesterday.

( Putting the rest of this behind a cut, because I'm not quite as sure about it as when I started the post. I'd be very interested in the impressions of my friends who know far more about these gods and their calendars than I do. )

Over the past year or so I've frequently found that when I attempt a new magical technique, or have certain kinds of otherworldy encounters with energy, I have distinct sensations in different parts of my head. Sometimes there's a sense of swelling/pressure, as if my 'mind' is literally expanding. Sometimes it's a pain, as if something is trying to open.

I've felt wedges of energy pushing into the top of my head, bands circling my head in various places, holes being bored from the inside out or outside in, as if to allow pressure to escape. Last night, there was a line of pressure/light pain horizontally across the full width of my forehead, as if the top of my head should be able to open like a lid.

These sensations usually are not accompanied by any kind of straining on my part. Usually I've been in a relaxed meditative state. There have never been any lingering after-effects, and they usually do not repeat the next time I encounter that same energy.

It's as if some part of me has to be opened or stretched when encountering new forms of energy -- or new ways of working with familiar energy -- but once that has happened future exposures occur without any sensation.

I'd be interested in hearing if others have similiar experiences.

On the last day of the "Watcher on the Threshold" phase, I did the deepest meditation I had in weeks. During most of this time, I had been too distracted and/or distant -- or too frightened of what I might encounter -- to go inward to any significant degree. Facing the inner darkness was important.

I was so deep that I began to feel as if my spirit might be able to leave my body. This happens sometimes, but usually all that happens is that I feel part of my energy rise a little above and beyond certain parts of my body. I've tried to slip free to do astral travel, but it's never worked.

This time there was a difference. I've been wanting to recover past life memories, something I've only done once before -- and that had been initiated and protected by LM in a very intense intimate situation.

Sitting there alone in my rocking chair, I used the sense of my energy being free of my body to take myself even further inward. Eventually it felt as if I was swimming in a kind of in-between place. I shaped the intention of moving backward in time, and created a deliberate swimming motion to reinforce it.

Eventually I saw a large round copper or bronze brooch, the kind used to fasten a cloak. I focused on the brooch and tried to let the surrounding details surface. It seemed to work. Eventually I saw myself looking down at the brooch as it held a length of heavy maroon cloth around my shoulders. Then I saw the man who had given it to me as a courtship gift, and his smiling explanation that now I would be able to have my hands free instead of needing to hold my cloak in place. I had the impression that my family was not well off, and we would never have had the money for even a simple ornament like this one. We walked together. He asked if I would marry him, and I said yes. Then I saw him asking my father's permission. My father was confused. Why would a man of his stature want to marry his daughter, who had so little to bring him? His answer is something I'm keeping private.

The events are so romantic it's easy to doubt they are an actual memory. Or maybe some is real and some not. But when it was time to come back, it was very hard to pull out of the vision. Usually I can snap out of things, but I had to exert a considerable amount of will to pull free from wherever I was, and it was hard to swim back to the present. I had to call on my inner gatekeeper for help, and he closed the door very quickly behind me. There was no sense of threat, just inertia.

Authentic past life memory?
Unproven.
But a fascinating experience, and -- as LM used to say -- "It's a good story."

It's always interesting to me what constitutes a "nightmare". I think a nightmare is not about whether or not the dream images are explicitly scary, but how it makes you feel. I've had dreams that could have been nightmares, but felt more like satisfying adventures. And I've had dreams with non-scary images that left me with a pounding heart and my light turned on for the rest of the night.

Last night was unsettling. Readers of my primary journal know that Friday night and Saturday morning were very hard for me as I continued to process LM's death (May 31st). I had a nice afternoon and evening with a friend, but when I went to bed around 10:30 I was very tired and feeling very, very lonely. Going to sleep was made more difficult by the fact that I kept hearing what I thought could be sounds of someone trying to get into the house: like a key in my front door, or rattling that could be my garage door. Each time it proved to be nothing, but it left me edgy.

( Read more... )

Last night, after a sequence of events I am not sharing publically, my extremely potent stone knife ended up broken off at the hilt. I knew that I needed to take it with me to the island today and bury it, even before getting confirmation from one of my teacher's inner contacts.

So I wrapped both pieces of the knife -- blade and hilt -- in a black cloth and put it in the carry-on bag I was using to carry my magical items. I put the bag in the trunk of my car and hit the road.

When I reached the island, I figured I would take the pieces to the Earth Sanctuary tomorrow and bury them near one of the paths. But as I was driving north, I suddenly saw Newman Road and knew that was the turn-off and I needed to take it now.

I didn't go to the labyrinth or the dolman, but took the bundle and a bottle of water and headed up the trail. Before I left the parking lot, I told the spirits of the place what I needed to do, asked permission to leave the pieces of the knife there, and felt assured that it would be okay.

At first I wasn't sure it was actually going to work. There hasn't been a lot of rain, and the ground was dry and I didn't have anything to dig with. Also, there's a lot of underbrush along the path, and I didn't want to go crashing through it. After a while I found a small but sturdy stick and received permission to use it as a digging stick, so I took it with me.

Finally I found the spot: a tree with raised roots, under which an oval stone had been deliberately placed. The ground in front of it was thick with pine needles, and the green plants near it were widely-spaced enough to allow for digging. I asked the tree for permission to leave the knife there, and received it.

The ground was loose and rich and moved easily in response to my digging stick -- but I had neglected to ask the permission of the guardians of the tree: the nettles which clustered and twined between path and trunk. They left me a rash on my right forearm (my first nettle stings) to remind me not to slight the smaller plants in the future.

I dug a hole the unwrapped the bundle. To my surprise, only the haft was there. The blade (which I think I had wrapped first/deepest) was gone.

I spent a few moments going WTF?? then proceeded with the ritual. I blessed the water in my bottle, asking blessings for the knife, the spirit of the knife, and those whose hands had crafted it, then poured it over the haft. I spread the earth over the hole and it didn't look like anything had been disturbed. I gave the rest of the water to the nettles.

All along the path back, I looked to see if the blade had slipped out of the bundle, but never found it. It wasn't in the trunk of my car, nor in the carry-on. I've looked on the floor of my bedroom since coming home and haven't seen it.

I have my suspicions about what may have happened to it, but they defy the usual expectations of natural law.