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Articles by
Richard Leviton - Part 2
The Geomantic Underpinnings of Ecology
©2003 Richard Leviton
I'd like to suggest an unconventional way of viewing ecology and practicing
environmental concern. I'll do this by way of a brief tale.
The story is told in Celtic and Western European myth of a king who was once
fabulously rich but then through receiving a seemingly incurable wound, lost his
riches. Once he presided over a flourishing, shockingly healthy landscape, but
afterwards he became wounded, his realm a wasteland. He became known as the
Wounded Fisher King, and only a Grail Knight with particular training could heal
him and thereby restore his lands to vibrant health. In most of the stories, the
Grail Knight was called either Galahad or Parsifal, and he healed the king and
the Wasteland was dissolved and the land of plenty restored.
Usually the saga of the Grail Knight, Wasteland, and Wounded Fisher King is
interpreted as something with a spiritually symbolic meaning. But it also has an
ecological dimension. What restored the land of plenty? What created the
Wasteland? How is any of this relevant to those today with an ardent desire to
practice planetary stewardship and global environmental responsibility?
The answer may be surprising. Sacred sites. We are all aware that there are
many places around the Earth that seem to have a special atmosphere, a
heightened, almost palpable, spirit of place that uplifts our mood when we
visit. I'd like to propose here that in traditional times, and to a limited
extent, even today among some native peoples on the planet, communities
understood that they lived in a landscape of sacred sites, whether as simple as
an Aboriginal water hole or as numinous as a majestic alpine snowpeak, and that
these sacred sites, and their condition, had something to do with the quality of
human life.
Even more, they appreciated that these sacred sites needed upkeep, regular
maintenance, periodic cleansing by and infusion of human energies and respectful
presence. It was the duty of the king, queen, chief shaman, wise elder, witch,
magus, or spiritual leader to make sure this happened. The wise tribal elder or
community leader knew that the health and well-being of all aspects of the
community depended on it, from agriculture to psychological balance. This
knowledge was encompassed by a word often used today: geomancy, the science,
art, and practice of Earth energies.
Elders knew the vitality of the ecosystem, the productivity of the fields and
animals, even the regularity of weather and seasonal cycles, depended on this
geomantic maintenance. Later, leaders of larger social groupings, countries,
even empires, such as the Anasazi of the American Southwest or the Zapotec of
southern Mexico, knew that many people and a vast number of acres could be held
in fruitful balance in this way, and for a long time, even centuries.
They knew that they lived in a subtle web of location and consciousness, in
which the land and its sacred places and humans with their possibilities of
higher states of awareness were two parts of an interactive, linked, and
reciprocal system-a kind of spiritual ecology, if you like. And the Rich Fisher
King (or Queen)-and I'm using the term now mostly as a symbol or generic job
description-was rich because he insured the ecological wealth of his community
by tending to its spiritual underpinnings, the network of sacred sites under his
domain. It was a spiritual task, even, some would say, somewhat of a magical
one.
Here is one way of picturing how they kept the ecology vital:
The elders, shamans, magi, wise women, priests, or spiritual leaders knew they
had an inherent connection with the spiritual worlds, and they used it. They
found a point of brilliant, absolute, and primordial starlight within
themselves, and while seated at key sacred sites in their territory, they would
invoke and enlarge this starlight until, like an exploding star, it became a
supernova and they were inside this sphere of starlight. It was starlight still,
but it had a pale blue sheen to it, like a broad sphere around their body. They
would take the bottom half of the sphere, flatten it out a bit so it resembled
what we know of as a tea saucer or shallow blue dish, and expand that to
whatever size they desired. One hundred yards, one mile, ten miles in
diamater-it was for them, working in spirit, no effort.
The blue dish was then laid out under a sacred site, and then they'd travel
to the next, and repeat the procedure. Soon they had a sacralized landscape of
pale blue dishes, made of star light, and all of them touching at the rims. Seen
from above it was like a landscape floriated in pristine morning glories. Into
each dish the spiritual worlds-the gods, angels, extraterrestrials, ancestors,
Spirit, God, whatever description was meaningful for them-poured down celestial
light, love, and higher consciousness. The dish, made of projected human
spirituality, collected and stepped down the high celestial energies and
filtered them, made them digestible, for the physical landscape.
It was like a fountain of light cascading down onto the numerous blue dishes;
once the light passed through the elders, it spilled out into the dishes, and
then the nature spirits took it into the world of minerals, rocks, plants,
trees, and animals, offering it to them like food. Nature spirits? European myth
remembers these helpers by the old names of gnomes, sylphs, salamanders, and
undines, each family of nature spirits servicing one primal element, such as
earth or air.
The Rich Fisher King knew he held the worlds together by being the
intermediary, in conjunction with his community, between the celestial or
angelic energies and the terrestrial and nature spirit, or elemental, ones. His
riches-and here it was spiritual riches, esoteric knowledge, otherworldly
contacts-were immediately transferred to his land and it flourished. All life,
from mineral to human, needs a little celestial nourishment to keep going, to
stay healthy, and to flourish. This is the spiritual underpinning of ecology,
and it's still true today.
Culturally, we don't really have a Rich Fisher King in place today. I doubt
many will argue that ecologically our environment is fast becoming a Wasteland.
It is polluted, neglected, strip-mined, clearcut, abused, taken for granted.
Some few places are protected, national parks, historic monuments, a few sacred
sites. But the rest of the planet's surface, by and large, is left to fend for
itself.
In a sense, we have all become expressions of the Wounded Fisher King, our
wound being our not remembering how to heal our physical ecology by spiritual
means. We could certainly use a Galahad or Parsifal about now.
We may legislate superfunds to clean up individual toxic lakes or dump sites,
but even this expression of environmental concern is still a far cry from the
Rich Fisher King's approach to environmentalism. Our landscapes still need a
human spiritual infusion, the rich kind that blends celestial and elemental
energies as a potent remedy against neglect, abandonment, even oblivion.
The Rich Fisher King is, after all, but a tale, you might think, and my
descriptions of angelically infused blue dishes made of stars a late night
fancy. Perhaps, but it is a tale and a fancy that has practical, immediate, and
effective applications. It was, and it can still be, and hopefully, will be, a
simple means for anyone interested in re-establishing a meaningful, even
soulful, connection with the planet or even a one acre fragment of it to do so
as soon as you wish.
10 Cool Things About Stargate SG-1
©2003 Richard Leviton
Often it seems revelations about the invisible but real worlds around us leak
through into popular culture and assume a technological guise. I'm thinking
specifically of the premise of the popular science fiction show, Stargate SG-1,
shown Fridays on the SciFi channel. Reruns are shown Monday nights. The show's
in its seventh season, and I think a lot of people like it a lot. I sure do.
The hour-long adventure show is based on the original 1994 movie, Stargate,
but the writers have taken the story much further into intriguing areas. The
technology is alien-a metal ring two stories high that when activated creates a
stable wormhole and interdimensional conduit with another stargate wormhole
somewhere else in the galaxy. You walk through the wormhole and almost
instantaneously you're transported thousands of light years away. The galaxy, it
seems, has many hundreds of these stargates on inhabited planets.
The device is operated secretly and underground by the U.S. Air Force, and
the front line team of explorers, called SG-1, find the galaxy is ruled by
psychotic, Nazi-like power-hungry creatures called Goa'uld and that galactic
politics are best understood through Egyptian mythology, as the Goa'uld are the
long-lived gods of ancient Egypt still alive and nasty in the galaxy. The
Goa'uld have formidably advanced technology, no compassion, and no sense of
humor.
Here are the 10 cool things I like about Stargate SG-1:
First, it shows you the galaxy is packed with sentient life. To wonder if
Earth-humans are alone in the galaxy becomes a ridiculous question. Here are:
humans at different stages of development; Greys (well-behaved, both
technologically and ontologically advanced and not into abductions); the Nox
(scruffy, seemingly quaint Nature-spirit types who can raise the dead, make
things invisible, and have a huge veiled spaceship defying gravity in the
clouds); the Ancients-ethereal, ascended, post-humans with bodies of light who
built the stargate network eons ago.
Second, it suggests a stance to take in the face of meeting a race of beings
superior in development, intelligence, technology, even wisdom. You know you, as
a human, are a jackanapes, but how do you keep your dignity? Colonel Jack
O'Neill, the irreverent, wise-cracking leader of the primary SG team, makes
jokes. Sees the irony and wryness in the situations. Quotes movie cliches.
Insults the Goa'uld with Hollywoodisms. Humor is wisdom in itself, and Jack
knows it.
Third, it plays with the issue of authority, when to wield it, when to give
it slack. Major General Hammond, director of the Stargate project, shows how
sometimes it is wiser and more general-like to ease up on the official protocols
and let anomalous situations and his staff proceed with a lot of lee-way.
Sometimes you'll see Hammond, who likes very tight shirts over his barrel-belly
even though one day's he bound to pop his buttons, say not Do this, but What
next? And O'Neill, his life on the line for the planet every week, knows when he
can get away with calling the benevolent Hammond My Lord, and when not.
Fourth, you see how mythology can have a practical, planet-saving role.
Daniel Jackson, Ph.D., an archeologist who figured out the Stargate dialing
codes based on Egyptian hieroglyphs, is indispensable because galactic politics
are based on Egyptian myths. I should say, Egyptian "myth," decoded,
explains galactic politics, the players, their modes of operation, enemies,
wars, betrayals.
Fifth, it presents a refreshingly original and artistically satisfying edge
where science fiction drama and existential humor meet and have lunch amicably.
Usually, in science fiction you get space opera, battles, technology, bizarre
aliens, and human heroes. It's serious, full of gravitas. Or you get whimsy and
the playful irreality of Douglas Adam's Hitchiker's Guide series. But in
Stargate SG-1 you can have both, which is a kind of nourishment to the soul.
Sixth, you get to see that Hannah Arendt was right when she said of the Nazis
that their evil was banal. The Goa'uld are shockingly powerful, but ultimately
they are stupid. They are human hosts possessed by snakes, and they spend all
their time fighting, conquering, competing, and killing. They never laugh, even
when O'Neill insouciantly throws Wizard of Oz jokes in their faces. They're
fixated on punishing human insolence, and though they can punish, in the end,
they're not worth respecting and are worth laughing at, even if you die.
Seventh, you understand something tactically important about under-advantaged
adversaries fighting behemoth military organizations. Sometimes guerilla warfare
can be very effective; maybe the fable of the diminutive David and the seemingly
invincible giant Goliath has modern cachet. Gandhi demonstrated it in
British-ruled India; maybe U.S. peace-lovers can do the same.
Eighth, moral decisions are worth something and have consequences. Teal'c is
a former Jaffa warrior; the Jaffa are the elite palace-guard for the Goa'uld
system lords, the nasty big shots who rule parts of the galaxy. He did some
terrible things under order as First Prime to Apophis, a Goa'uld who so far has
been killed twice (They resurrect themselves in gold sarcophagi). Then he
repudiated his past, betrayed Apophis, and joined the Tauri (that's us) against
him. He left behind family, friends, lifestyle, reputation, planet, for his
moral stance. That is some awakening, and Teal'c deals with its ramifications
weekly.
Ninth, gender stereotypes can be busted. Major Samantha Carter is a fabulous
melange of intellect, physical attraction, ingenuity, pluck, and charm. She is
the leading expert on wormhole astrophysics, often fixes or jerry-rigs the
Stargate when inexplicable things happen, repairs alien spaceships, almost has
romantic liaisons with alien men who ascend or get killed too soon. She has
brains, beauty, courage, humor-and the best part is that the rest of the men in
the SG units seem okay with that. "She is way smarter than us," says
O'Neill.
Tenth, it teaches us how to be comfortable with the inexplicable, with
utterly baffling situations, alien races and practices, anomalies in spacetime
and the continuity of consciousness, with strangeness, in your face awaiting a
response. It may be a quantum mirror that transports you into a parallel reality
where you were just killed; or a Groundhog Day-type time loop where six hours of
your life keep cycling around with seemingly no exit; or the time dilation
effect of a blackhole sucking up a planet, its wormhole, and your wormhole.
And eleventh (this is an extra) maybe there is a Stargate-wormhole network in
the galaxy with access points on our planet. If there is this kind of cool
smoke, maybe the fire is real, and the stargates are open. Stay tuned.
©2003 Richard Leviton
We commonly think of places like Los Angeles and New York City as fabulously
cosmopolitan, offering us a microcosm of nearly everything on the
planet-different cultures, foods, lifestyles, languages. Yet would it surprise
you to consider that in the galaxy our Earth is similarly seen as cosmopolitan?
After all, where did we all come from? As far as I can tell, none of us came
from here. We are all foreigners, emigrants-aliens and extraterrestrials. We all
came from there. According to my friends in high places, there is a greater
diversity of souls and soul origins on this planet than nearly anywhere else in
the known multi-universe. Here's the math: that's more than 18 billion galaxies.
There are two aspects to this: there is a greater diversity of souls at
different stages of development and a greater diversity of their point of
origin.
Mind you, we are not recent arrivals. This all happened long ago, many
millions of years before now. The business of point of origin is what you may
dredge up out of your own unconsciousness during regression or insight. What
kind of places? The Pleaides is a popular point of origin. This is a star
cluster of seven more or less visible stars, and another 300 estimated in the
throat of the constellation Taurus. Of course nobody comes from a star or sun,
but I'm told the Pleiadian stars have a fair number of inhabited planets in
their supervision.
The list of points of origins for human souls on Earth is extensive, but I
think you get the idea. Maybe a memory of a strange and different place may
surface in your thoughts one day, a planet you once lived on perhaps? My angelic
informants also note that before "we" started settling on Earth from
elsewhere amidst the vast congeries of other stars and planets, humanity-or the
idea for it or our deep ancestors or maybe yourself 100,000 lives ago-came from
another galaxy altogether-Andromeda.
This one should not seem too outlandish: the recent film Mission to Mars
suggests humans were seeded by a dying civilization from Mars which originally
came from another galaxy. We shouldn't build our metaphysical models from mass
culture or science fiction imaginings, but sometimes it helps.
But this is only one side of it. There are also aliens among us, all over.
As a culture, we're generally getting accustomed to the idea that we have an
energy field or aura around the body filled with lights, colors, and chakras.
Our awareness of this most often is akin to being noticing that in the next room
somebody is watching six televisions tuned variously to Animal Planet, Sci Fi
Channel, Discovery, Oprah!, Law & Order, and perhaps QVC. It's a circus out
there in the farther reaches of ourselves. It's the same with the Earth, only
its channels come from the galaxy and one could make the case the programming is
better.
Many people know the Earth's galactic TV channels as sacred sites. I like to
call the entire set-up the planet's visionary geography. Like a fourth
dimensional hologram quietly embedded in our three dimensional material reality,
the Earth's visionary geography is a wild kingdom of galactic life. There are
aliens from other stars running around all over the place in our midst.
I've made the subject seem a little flip, maybe even whimsical, but after all
it is a fairly fantastic notion to broach when the only tangible evidence is
your own eventual experience of it. There are at least three ways cosmopolitan
Earth is made possible through its visionary geography or the galactic hologram.
First, there is an interactive energy feature I call a landscape zodiac.
Picture an edited version of the galaxy, emphasizing the major constellations
and the traditional signs (constellations) of the zodiac (on the ecliptic) and
about 2,000 stars, represented in a hologram set upon a portion of the
landscape, varying in diameter from one-half to one hundred miles in diameter.
You could conceivably find the landscape touch-down point for the Pleiades, even
specific stars in it, and even more conceivably, you could interact with
Pleiadians through that conduit. Most probably the interaction would be subtle,
on a visionary or psychic level.
Second, there are close to 1,800 energy canopies called domes settled over
many of the planet's major mountain and volcanoes. The domes, though not
physically present or visible, are what makes most sacred sites sacred. They
give them a numinous quality that lifts consciousness. Each dome also
corresponds to a specific star, not by archeoastronomical alignment, but again,
by holographic co-presence. Mt. Palomar in Southern California, for example, is
the dome-star for Alnilam, the middle star in Orion's Belt. This means you could
psychically contact the energies, maybe even the presence, of beings from the
Orion system there, and they could contact you, and the planet, as well, through
there.
Third-this one is an even more direct, real-time connection with stars,
planets, and the homeland of God-knows how many "alien" civilizations.
I call them stargates, even though the term has been used often and usually to
mean something else. There are many places on the Earth where actual
transportation between Earth and other stars may be achieved. I have heard of
people and even objects being moved through these stargates in the deep past;
they are still among us, though very subtle, and twice removed from the third
dimension.
These three features were part of the planet's original design, as implicit
in its structure as a nose, elbow, and knee are for the human body. Earth was
meant to be galactically cosmopolitan from its inception, and it's never
stopped.
I know all this sounds like science fiction, and often I think I should write
science fiction rather than investigate the metaphysical curiosities of our
planet and try to persuade people these discoveries have plausibility, but no
matter.
The point is, given I am long past going off the deep end so I'll enjoy the
dip and stop worrying if you come swimming with me, through these three
geomantic features of the Earth multiple alien civilizations, representatives,
Lone Rangers, and even galactic trouble-makers-Pleaidians, Sirians, Greys,
Arcturians, all the favorites of new age fable and science fiction-can regularly
influence our life and reality and, if appropriate, interact with us at some
level.
In fact, holographically, they already live amongst us, popping into
vividness in our visionary geography if they feel like it through the landscape
zodiacs or domes, or possibly popping with more palpability through the
stargates. Which is why I can't stop chuckling when I hear a scientist earnestly
proposing the theoretical possibility of extraterrestrial life or the atheist
just as earnestly denying it. They've been here-we've been here-from the
beginning.
Remembering a Lost Love
©2003 Richard Leviton
I have a friend who is 29.9 billion years old.
Yes, that is an outrageous statement, but it's an outrageous relationship. My
friend's name is Blaise, but that's just my avuncular tag for them. My friend is
actually a group of friends, all alike. The funny thing is, you know them too.
How long can a relationship last? For as long as there is memory and
recognition. Like a wave, it can roll into and sink from acknowledgement, but
it's still always there, abiding, twinkling, ready to burst into a blazing star.
I remembered them, then forgot them, and I did this hundreds of times. I once
saw them as dancing, cavorting elephants with Fred Astaire top hats. Later I was
relieved to find that was not such an unfounded fantasy, for the Hindus see them
as an elephant god called Ganesh, remover of obstacles, and though Ganesh may
not dance at the drop of a hat, he often seems amused. At other times the Hindus
saw my friend as a vast winged bird bearing the god Vishnu through the many
realms of existence. Similarly the Persian mystics described a marvellous,
immortal bird called the Simurgh, also a transport for ecstatics.
Other times I've seen them with wings, lots of them, like huge, billowing,
silken sails, or as a circle of enhaloed humans, taller than average and quite
jovial, or as a single brilliant pinprick of light. Even more surprising, I
often saw them, in the days before I remembered and was formally reintroduced to
my long lost friends, as a pinprick of superbright light just above my belly
button-in my body, somehow. And in other people's bodies too. Everyone's.
Perhaps that shouldn't be so outlandish. The Austrian clairvoyant Rudolf
Steiner explained that the ten orders of angels all have roles in human life, in
fact, participate, even support, different aspects of human physiology and
consciousness, which means, at least mystically, if you look in the right way
you might see hosts of angels in your body, in your breathing, walking,
thinking, so why not at a point two inches above the navel and two inches
inside?
That pinprick of light is tinier than the tiniest point of light, but brighter
than anything a hundreds times that size. So bright it was, in fact, it was as
if all the stars in the galaxy had been compressed into one almost infinitesimal
point of light. Certainly a lot of angels get compressed into that pinprick,
some forty million, and change. Let's say when they're feeling expansive, they
can unfold and multiply themselves to a precise, very large number of
manifestations.
A paradoxical friend, indeed. Both angels and a star. So tiny they are
routinely overlooked, missed, unacknowledged, yet so vast they were once
described by Ezekiel as the Wheel of God, the ofan, from which the Hebrew
angelologists derived their formal name: Ofanim, the Wheels. I prefer Blaise,
and they don't mind. It's comfortably close to their essence as a blazing star.
So what do they do with themselves during the day? They help people remember.
Remember what? Who they were before the Fall. Before Eden. And they remind
people how to use that arresting memory in the physical world. They inspire,
they assist, they facilitate, they joke, they love from above. More properly, I
should say they send Love from Above, they are Love from Above.
That sounds sweet, but what's it to do with the real world? With Iraq? It's a
gentle uplifting pressure that helps you remember, and see, and to behold with
equanimity. The world is not what it seems; it is much more than its surfaces.
If the ten orders of angels have God-commissioned roles in the human form, then
why not in the world at large too, in the Earth? Of course. Why not. They do.
Remembering a lost love, for me, is the same as remembering my old friend.
And that is akin to remembering how things got here, this way. To look into the
star is to look into the history of creation, both cosmic and local. You know,
we could all be prophets, each of us an oracular seer speaking through a star.
Or thinking, or painting, or composing, or dancing, or reflecting. Or helping to
heal the Earth by helping the planet itself to remember, to wake and marvel at
the congeries of angelic hosts amidst its own thriving body.
To be almost 30 billion years old gives you perspective. A little detachment.
Patience. A desire to converse, and share. So if you happen to feel plucky and
can give yourself permission to believe any of this, even if for only a few
moments and then deeply in private, in some secret, unpublicized place within
you, then may I suggest you try smiling at this tiny pinprick of very old light
just above your navel. Just a little, sly, Mona Lisa smile. Your teeth don't
even have to show, it's that low-key of a smile. Pretend, if you wish, that you
are giving the wink to a friend, to someone once shockingly close from earliest
childhood, their existence inexplicably forgotten until this very moment when
like a snap, a brilliant tiny star pops into view within you and you're on
again.
Follow That Cow
©2003 Richard Leviton
I want to tell you about a white cow that wandered into Charlottesville.
When I saw that marvellous cow I was reminded of something D.H. Lawrence wrote
about his days in Sardinia. It was sunset and he was walking in the Sardinian
hills when he "almost ran into a grey and lonely bull, who came stepping
down-hill in his measured fashion like some god." I know a bull is not a
cow, and Lawrence's bull was grey and not white, but it was his sensing of the
unexpected divinity of the bull that caught my attention. Others over time have
had that same arresting perception, with momentous results.
In ancient Greece, Cadmus consulted the Oracle at Delphi about his future and
life purpose. There Apollo told Cadmus to follow a cow. Where it sat down, he
should found Thebes. Everything went according to plan, and Cadmus founded
Thebes in Boeotia, "Land of the Cow." Ilus was also told to follow a
cow and to found a city where it laid down on the ground. That was Troy, now in
Turkey, and originally called Illium after Ilus, its founder.
There's a third cow story I want to relate. Io was the daughter of a Greek
river god, and was turned into a cow for her own protection by Hera, queen of
the Olympians. Io was tethered at Mycenae in Greece and guarded by Argus, a
fabulous mythic being with one hundred eyes and who never slept. Except later
when Hermes lulled him into a deep drowsiness with his stories and panpipes.
So what's with the cow stories? There was never a real white cow. We must
remember Joseph Campbell's advice not to literalize spiritual metaphors. Yes,
the white cow is a metaphor. We're talking about a myth in the landscape. The
white cow is a metaphor for a star wheel in the landscape.
This is a miniature, interactive template of the major stars and
constellations of the galaxy and the signs of the zodiac imprinted on a section
of the landscape, anything from half a mile to one hundred miles wide. I say
imprinted but it's more like a hologram slightly flattened out across the land.
There are star wheels at Thebes and Mycenae in Greece, at Troy in Turkey, and
there's one in Charlottesville which is why I mention the subject.
In fact, there are more than 400 landscape zodiacs around the planet, white cows
all.
Why a cow? Think in terms of the milk. To the ancients, the cow was a symbol for
the cosmic Feminine, the mother goddess who feeds creation. The cow's milk was a
kind of celestial nourishment for all the stars, and the stars (and the rest of
existence) were sensed as progeny of this marvellous, nourishing white cow who
never ran out of milk and was an image in light herself.
Let's look at it mythically. To the ancient Hindus, the white cow was
Kama-Dhenu, the Wish Cow, the Cow of Plenty, the Wish-Fulfilling Cow born of the
Ocean of Milk. She was a miraculous treasure who fulfilled all desires.
Here's another description by way of another story. Brahma, the creator god
of Hinduism, had a daughter named Sata-Rupa, which means "she who had a
myriad of forms." He looked at her at every opportunity, all day and all
night-she was that beautiful, that enchanting. It's said he grew five heads so
he could watch her from every angle of space, every moment of time. She was his
daughter, but not the way we think of daughters. It's another metaphor.
Sata-Rupa, the daughter of a hundred forms, was the great cosmic matrix of
spacetime, full of stars and beings and life and fantastic possibilities of
experience. She was his creation, his first and only, his total creation. She
was Brahma's sphere, his spacetime filled with energy, and all he wanted to do
was observe her. Because in observing his "daughter," he would come to
know himself. Who am I? Brahma wonders. Why am I in existence?
His daughter, the fabulous milky realm of spacetime, the white cow full of
milk and forms, is the means to get an answer. She is his answer. By observing
material reality, even at this grand cosmic level, Brahma becomes self-aware.
So Brahma's "daughter," a metaphor for spacetime and its net of
stars, is a pool of knowledge, the union of power and intelligence. She is the
Flowing One, the Wandering One, the original divinity of transcendental
knowledge and speech, the container of all the worlds, a graceful woman all in
white, made of light, sitting on a lotus, the Wish Cow feeding all in Brahma's
field of dreams.
In Brahma's "daughter," that wonderful white cow, all wishes come
true. Everything is possible, all permutations likely, and most things
eventually happen. And from the "milk" of that knowledge comes
self-awareness. Now I know! declares Brahma, and the Wish Cow has fulfilled her
purpose in life.
It sounds cosmic, but it's very much down to Earth. Each of us is like
Brahma. We ask the same question, seek the same revelation. We all want to
follow that fabulous white cow, observe the created reality we live in, and find
out why it's all here and set up this way. These star wheels on the landscape
are a practical way to do all this. Think of them as dedicated, concentrated
workshops.
Over the life of the Earth, they blink on and off, are active and inactive
for a while. Remember Io, the white cow of Mycenae? When Argus' one hundred eyes
were open, the star wheel was on, the stars lit; when he went to sleep, the star
wheel became inactive, was turned off. When Argus fell asleep, Io wandered off
from Mycenae and went somewhere else. Where she laid down, another landscape
zodiac got turned on and the milk started flowing again, there.
Long ago a white cow wandered into Charlottesville. I don't know if anybody
noticed or followed her here. It was long before Jefferson's time. But she's
noticeable today, as a subtle pinwheel of stars about ten miles across the local
landscape. Anyone care to follow that cow and get some answers?
Swimming with the River Gods
©2003 Richard Leviton
I'm sitting on a rise in the woods outside Palmyra overlooking a bend in the
Fluvanna River, and I realize that if this were classical Greece in the age of
myth and fable I could reasonably expect an encounter with the Fluvanna
river-god. To be honest, right now I'd like to be swimming with the river gods.
Why not? The Trojan wanderer Aeneas, when he arrived in Italy in search of
where to found his new city to be called Rome, was greeted one night by Tiber
the river-god, appearing as an aged head amid poplar leaves, mantled in grey,
with shady reeds around him, as Virgil wrote. I am blue-green Tiber, the river
most dear to Heaven, the river-god told Aeneas, and he showed him where to
establish the White City.
Theseus, the Greek hero of Cretan labyrinth fame, luxuriated on a couch with
the river-god Achelous in his underwater residence of pumice, tufa-rock, and
conch shell ceiling, and was served lunch by barefoot river-nymphs. On another
occasion and evidently in a different mood, Heracles fought Achelous, who tried
to outwit the hero by changing shape, first a snake, then a bull. Similarly,
Achilles engaged the river-god Scamander near Troy in a prodigious battle that
took the intervention of Hephaistos the fire-god to quell.
It's not just the ancient Greeks who knew their river-gods. So did the Celts.
The Brugh na Boinne, the Hostel on the River Boyne-today it's called
Newgrange-was understood to be the residence of Boann, the river-goddess of the
Boyne, a 70-mile waterway fairly near to Dublin in Ireland. It sounds like
Newgrange was built there because that's where the river-goddess lived.
Troy was said to have been founded at the confluence of the residence of the
river-god Scamander (the main river on the Trojan plain, now in Turkey) and the
home of Idaea, the nymph of nearby Mount Ida. In fact, the myths say that Idaea
and Scamander produced a son, Teucer, who was the ancestor of the Trojan kings.
The river-god Cayster in Lydia, now Turkey, was the father of Ephesus, the
founder of the sanctuary of Artemis and the holy city called Ephesus. And
judging from Virgil's account, Rome may have been founded because of its
nearness to the river-god Tiber's residence-that place in the landscape where
the river-god may be visited. So what is a river-god then?
The Greek myths give us a clue. The river-gods are the brothers of the
river-nymphs called Oceanids. Here's how it works: Oceanus was the paramount
water-god for the Greeks, the personification of an ocean said to encircle the
Earth at its farthest edge, and he was the father, with Tethys, of 3,000
Oceanids. The story doesn't quite make sense until you adjust its locality.
Earth is usually understood to mean planet Earth, but if we interpret Earth
here as the vast cosmos, the space for all matter, gross and subtle, then
Oceanus is a vast stream encircling the cosmos like a ring. In this sense, the
whole cosmos at some level is an ocean. Mystics talk of the Sea of
Consciousness, and I like to think of Oceanus as a name for that Sea and the
3,000 Oceanids as differentiated streams of consciousness within it. Oceanus is
simply too vast to comprehend, so each Oceanid or nymph is a theme in that Sea
of Consciousness.
It gets exciting-at least for me, as I ponder river-gods and half hope to
meet the god of the Fluvanna River-when you put the two parts of the story
together. If Oceanids are aspects of the totality of consciousness above, then
their brothers, the river-gods of Earth below must be the many physical rivers
of the planet. Each river-Scamander, Tiber, Achelous, Fluvanna-is both a
physical flowing body of water and the "body" of a river-god or theme
in consciousness.
Where the river-god lives-remember Scamander at Troy, Boann at Newgrange,
Tiber near the White City, the future Rome-is where you may encounter him and,
apparently quite often where ancient settlements were made, such as Troy and
Rome, or important megalithic sites, like Newgrange.
Was Achilles really "fighting" with Scamander and Heracles with
Achelous, or were they assimilating the energies and awareness of those streams,
like a great whale swallowing an ocean current for refreshment?
Think of it on a global scale. All the Earth's rivers-Nile, Ganges,
Connecticut, Missouri, Amazon, Mississippi, Yangtze, Danube, Rhine-each
embodying an aspect of cosmic consciousness and each with its river-god, a point
of focussed awareness ready for interaction, conversation, with us. Landscapes
riddled with cosmic thoughts and themes-everywhere you swim or canoe, the
possibility of a mystical encounter with a river-god, an education, an
invitation to lounge and lunch on Achelous' underwater couches.
Think too, unfortunately, of the deplorable condition of most of the planet's
rivers today-polluted, diverted, dammed, drained, abused. We live in the
uncomfortable gap between a former belief in mythic possibilities and the
current disbelief in anything other than physical reality. Maybe a little swim
with a river-god might be just the ticket to rejuvenate our sense of the natural
world.
What might we expect from an encounter with a river-god? The Rhine river-god
brought gold to the wedding of Poseidon, Lord of the Sea, and Beroe. The Simois
river-god near Troy made ambrosia spring up for the horses of Hera, Queen of the
gods, and Pallas Athena, an Olympian, during the Trojan War.
Ganga, the goddess of the River Ganges, petitioned Brahma to allow her waters
to descend from Heaven to Earth to purify the ashes of 60,000 burnt sons of King
Sagara so as to allow them to enter Paradise. So strong was Ganga's spiritual
current that first it had to flow through Shiva's matted hair before it could
safely touch the Earth without drowning all of India.
The gift of gold, ambrosia, spiritual cleansing, information about the local
landscape, the offer to be the spirit of place for a holy site-these are some of
the many possible gifts of consciousness from the river-gods. I'll let you know
what comes of my meeting with the Fluvanna river-god when I find him.
Walking in Albion - Chronicles of Plan - Net Geomancy
Part I: Child of the Ancient Giant
©1991 Richard Leviton
As I stood on the windswept cliffs of Tintagel in northwestern Cornwall in
the middle of an English winter, Merlin said to me, "It's time to do it
again, to walk in Albion. Hatch his eggs. Unbind him. Talk to him from the
emerald. Celebrate his awakening on America's Independence Day." It was
blowing wind and rain so hard I felt if I lost my balance on this high
promontory I'd easily be blown across the sea to Wales. I was so thickly padded
in wool and down that I'd have made a handsome dirigible in my windblown sea
passage. So I envied Merlin. He didn't have "weather" where he was. I
wished he were incarnate again so we could measure our footfalls together as we
paced Tintagel headland this midday in January contemplating the future of that
ancient mythic giant, Albion.
Mythic? I used to think both Merlin and Albion were both old figures of Celtic
myth, intriguing reliquaries of a fabulous legendary past---until I realized how
integrally involved they are today in the well-being, the redemption of our host
planet Gaia and all Her residents.
Mythology always seems to lead us back into a forgotten initiatory domain, an
experiential realm shimmering with heightened reality and expectancy. As J.R.R.
Tolkien once said, ancient figures of household legend suddenly spring up from
the grass as living heroes in a time of need. Take Tintagel, fabled birthplace
of King Arthur, the once and future King, champion of the Knights of the Round
Table, and royal sponsor of the Quest for the Holy Grail. As I penetrate deeper
into the mythopoeic reality of the Celtic landscape, I realize that Arthur is
much more than a charismatic king. Arthur is a cosmic energy, an ascended master
from the constellation Great Bear, a perennial mentor both for human culture and
Gaia---for isn't the Big Dipper often called Arthur's Wain?---and that Tintagel
is the numinous point on the skin of Gaia where the Arthur light is born in each
individual who wishes it.
It isn't only the Celtic landscape that is mythopoeically alive. The entire
global skin of Gaia scintillates with an etheric geography made of the stars and
their cosmomythic portent. Some people today call Gaia's subtle spiritual
anatomy the planetary grid and speak of energy lines, power centers, and sacred
mountains. The world grid is like a planetary onion replete with dovetailing
layers, like shells of consciousness in which great supersensible events are
continually happening. In the late 1970s James Lovelock, the British atmospheric
scientist, boldly formulated the Gaia Hypothesis, asserting that the planet is a
single self-regulating homeostatic biological organism. The world grid
hypothesis develops Lovelock's model further, bringing it into the realm of
consciousness and intention.
Gaia, as we world grid proponents like to postulate, is a self-conscious
planetary being whose energetic anatomy and physiology are as complex and as
cosmically interwoven as that of the human being---as ourselves. The grid is an
energy and consciousness matrix, a net with a plan. Through Her complex grid
body---the plan of Her net ---Gaia mirrors the essential higher spiritual nature
of the human. Both mirror images of planet and human derive from the original
projection of the galaxy, which means when we describe Gaia's etheric geography
we're really modelling the galaxy on Earth. Gaia is a multidimensional hologram
of the cosmos.
The plan of the net, Merlin tells me, is conscious evolution and geomancy is
the way we help this plan-net along. Tintagel is a good place to make plans and
formulate wishes because this is where all the power of AL enters Earth from the
Great Bear. Tintagel is one of about 1750 numinous grid points around the
planet, englobed by a dome, an etheric energy canopy about five miles wide.
Domes correspond to individual stars, and Tintagel's dome is the Earth home of
the Great Bear's delta Megrez , "The Root of the Tail" in the Big
Dipper.
Domes are like huge bells of light ringing perpetually in the ethers to
enhance human consciousness. Tintagel is aflame in the tints of angels , a
magnificent rainbow kaleidoscope of cosmic and angelic energies. The tints of
angels surround the Arthur light at domed Tintagel; through their focus the
co-creative potency of AL becomes available. AL is what Al bion is made of, the
radiantly-hued love of the Great Mother Bear. AL is the power to make wishes
reality. AL is how we re-vision the world along positive lines, how we reimagine
Albion, the wished-for land. (1) Arthur is Albion's spokesman, so as grid
engineers we're all working for Arthur. "You make your sincerest wish for
Albion at Tintagel," said Merlin. "That begins to loosen his bonds of
Time."
Merlin ought to know. He's the one who bound Albion in the Pit in the first
place at the beginning of Time. Merlin was involved with the Earth long before
he gained his reputation as the magus of Arthur's Camalate. Wasn't the oldest
name for Britain Myrddin's Precinct as the Weslh remembered Merlin? The other
remarkable thing about myth and the landscape I've discovered is that when you
pull on the threads persistently enough you inevitably unravel the unwritten
history of the planet---and that's a story with many surprises. The Earth,
Merlin told me, is a designer planet made expressly for human higher conscious
evolution within matter. Gaia's energetic anatomy, which recapitulates the
spiritual structure of the galaxy, is the starwoven body of the Holy Ghost, that
first primordial cosmic human appearing in a form of light---variously called
Phanes, Adam Kadmon, the Rich Fisher King, Kronos, Saturn, Albion.
Earth history began with a sacrifice. The Holy Ghost living in eternity was
bound in matter, crucified on the cross of time and space. When Merlin bound
Kronos in the Pit, Time began on Earth. The Greek myths remember this in their
account of Zeus dispatching his castrated father Kronos into permanent guarded
exile in the golden halls of Ogygia far off in the West. William Blake also
recounted this ancient sacrifice of the Holy Ghost caught in Time in his
lamentations of the ancient giant, Albion. The holy image of Man caught in the
Time of planet Earth---that's our Albion, A Light Being In Our Neighborhood.
Albion is the collectivity of human experience over time on Gaia. Albion is
what we've made of this primordial endowment of the cosmic spirituality of the
Holy Ghost in the material context of our planet. The plan of the net in which
Albion is bound is that he should one day wed Gaia in a planetary marriage of
spirit and matter. As geomancers, our work is to facilitate the arrangements and
then serve as bridesmaid and best man, and the most astonishing news I can
report is that the wedding is slated for approximately 1999. Albion is expected
to wake up at last in an apocalyptic rush of planetary self-consciousness
joyously embracing Gaia, our bride clothed in the Sun. In a curious reversal of
relationships we as humanity give away the virginal bride, our planetary Mother.
It all starts here, at Tintagel, here in this numinous mythic British
landscape, the vestigial remains of that very old land called Hyperborea that
flourished long before even fabled Lemuria. Blake knew this: "All things
begin & end in Albion's Ancient Druid Rocky Shore," he wrote in
Jerusalem . Yet this kind of milennialist expectation isn't a matter of
pro-British sentiment; it's an evolutionary necessity based on the inherent
structure of the planet. If the Earth is the planetary embodiment of cosmic Man,
then Albion's belly button will always be found at the same place, no matter
who's occupying the land.
As Plato commented in the Timaeus , the Earth when seen from afar resembles a
ball stitched of twelve equal sections. Plato was describing the world grid. The
planet woven of twelve sections is dodecahedral, twelve-faced, and each face of
Gaia is a five-sided pentagon. Each pentagonal face is the net in which an image
of Albion is reflected, and each is under a different astrological influence in
the planetary zodiacal wheel. There are twelve reflected Albions, each a face
with a different expression, and all the faces are cast by the one Albion bound
in the Pit at the energetic center of the planet, at the heart of Gaia's grid
net. In the very old days of Hyperborea (Tolkien called this the First Age of
the Elves, the First-Born) the planet was first energized through this
particular pentagonal face, which occupies one-twelfth of the surface of Earth,
including the North Pole, Greenland, Iceland, Great Britain, Ireland, France,
Spain, and a lot of the Atlantic Ocean.
This Hyperborean face of Albion was Gaia's original umbilical cord to the
cosmos---as it still is today in the 1990s. That's why Merlin wants us to walk
in Albion, to meditatively traverse the Hyperborean landscape body of that
ancient giant bound in the Pit of Time, and to rouse him into wakefulness for
his glorious future. Albion, I keep reminding myself, is ourselves writ large in
the Earth.
Our first stop was the tiny Lincolnshire village of Tetford in the north of
England. Tetford and the neighboring villages of Somersby, Bag-Enderby, and
Maidenwell, is topped by a dome corresponding to Sadalmelik (meaning "the
Fortunate Star of the King"), the brightest star in the constellation of
Aquarius. Aquarius is the energy of the Water-Carrier now moving into planetary
and human consciousness for the coming age, emphasizing collegiality,
individuation, self-authority, freedom, expanded consciousness, world
brotherhood, cosmically rational new ideas, and the communication of these
values. Aquarius rules the human ankles, without which we couldn't walk in
Albion.
So unknown Tetford is one of Gaia's primary receptive points for this new
Aquarian energy, but that's not the whole of Tetford's secret. Albion like
humans has a progression of energy-consciousness centers in his landscape body,
what we usually call chakras. Tetford is the root chakra, the source of creative
kundalini for the once and future Albion of this Hyperborean pentagonal grid
face. And nestled like a jewel in the landscape folds of his root center under
the Tetford dome is an egg-born Golden Child.
That's why we positioned ourselves as geomantic midwives in the miniscule
parish church at Somersby at midmorning a couple days before Christmas. We were
breathing as the angels do, as Love from Above from the tiny blazing Star at the
center of our being to the massive diaphanously golden egg with its slumbering
cosmic child within. The egg is a supersensible presence almost the size of the
dome itself, which is 8 miles across. The ancient Mystery tradition called this
the Mundane Egg, and H.P. Blavatsky in The Secret Doctrine concisely summarized
the egg's esoteric attributions. The Egg was the consummate cosmogonic symbol,
representing the origin and secret of being, both human and universal. Various
solar heroes---Dionysus, Ra, Brahma, Osiris, Apollo, Phanes, Vishnu, Castor,
Pollux---emerged from the Golden Egg.
A staggering amount of mundane eggs were distributed around the etheric
landscape of Earth at the beginning of Time, Merlin told me, and many of these
still haven't been hatched. That's probably because when you hatch a golden egg
you have to be able to deal with the dragon that comes out first.
But then dealing with dragons is what a Grail Knight is trained for. I took
my sword, the insightful focus of mind wielded at the brow chakra, and gently
penetrated the eggshell. The blade's cutting edge flamed lilac with the
transmutative energy of the Christ as it touched the sleeping form of a blue
dragon. When the blade contacted the skin of this somnolent dragon, it suddenly
woke up and flushed crimson. This is the tricky part. I held the sword very
steady, breathing Love from Above to the waking passionate dragon of the lower
elemental self, the zoomorphic expression of the animal part of each of us. My
body twitched sympathetically with the dragon's own prodigious struggle and I
felt like a skewered serpent. The dragon flushed golden then crumbled like a
shattered ceramic sculpture, revealing a resplendent golden apple amongst its
glittering shards.
As that initiate hero Hercules discovered long ago, the dragon Ladon guards
the golden apples of the Hesperides, but the dragon fruits of wisdom are inside
Ladons' heart. You only get the golden apples by transmuting the dragon. I
cleaved the apple in half revealing the golden child resting wakefully in the
pentagrammic inner apple core as if in a celestial manger. This all happened
very quickly and seemed to be as large as the entire Tetford domed landscape,
but it's just another paradox of the grid which has its prime reality outside of
time and space. We grid engineers tie down the guide wires connecting the two
realms.
The child, awake and smiling, turned first into a crucifed man then a crowned
king---but I was looking ahead in time. The golden child's destiny as the
egg-born progeny of Albion is to recapitulate the five traditional Grail changes
(dragon, apple, child, crucified man, crowned king) which are stages in the
awakening of human consciousness. It turns out this sequence is identical to the
five initiations of the Christ Alice Bailey described in From Bethlehem to
Calvary , namely, birth, baptism, transfiguration, crucifixion, and ascension.
The emergence of the solar hero proceeds according to the dictates of an
archetypal etheric physiology, but the destiny of this golden child is somewhat
special. This child will receive on Gaia's behalf the consciousness influx of
the Solar Logos, which is the Christ consciousness working through the Sun as
spoken communication. As Merlin explained, the focus of the Solar Logos at this
time works through the alpha Aquarius star dome at Tetford into the being bodies
of Tetford's golden child who is awake and creatively astir within the root
chakra of the Hyperborean Albion.
Merlin grinned of course as he told me this. As a Grand Square Master from
Sirius who helped design our planet in the first place, he enjoys this kind of
complexity. For him Albion's anatomy is as obvious as a crossword puzzle. For us
it's a continuing revelation. The next morning at dawn we meditated at
Maidenwell, a lovely grassy prominence overlooking Tetford valley. Our
experience was like placing the golden infant at the breast of the Mother,
creating a geomantic tableau reminiscent of the Renaissance portraits of Madonna
and Christ Child. As none of this landscape awakening work is in any way
separate from our own attainments in consciousness, our experience cycled
continually from being the infant to being the Mother. At Maidenwell, the
unbounded, timeless clairvoyant awareness of the Mother welled as celestial
nourishment into the crown of the golden child.
We spent the remainder of the week meditating each day in nearby Lincoln
Cathedral, one of England's great Gothic churches, set prominently on a hill
overlooking the old city. Each day we drove the 20 miles from Tetford to Lincoln
knowing we were moving through a tunnel of light connecting two great centers of
awareness in this ancient landscape giant. Lincoln is also an Aquarian
consciousness point, topped with the star dome for the second brightest star in
Aquarius, Sadalsuud ("Luckiest of the Lucky"). Lincoln in the body of
our giant, Albion, is the second chakra. Our Aquarian transiting and church
sitting was in preparation for the Epiphany, that majestic annual event on
January 6 in which the Christ focusses the creative force of the Logos upon one
matrix point in the planetary grid net. This year the Epiphany would be focussed
in the British Midlands, through another unsuspected numinous point, an
unassuming stretch of wood and water between Burley and Hambledon outside the
town of Oakham in Rutland.
Burley Wood wasn't that unassuming a couple centuries ago when the
polymorphous Rosicrucian master St. Germaine inspired the local landed gentry to
carve a stately Eight Riding Tree out of the thick woods. The aristocratic
owners of Burley thought they were making an elegant 8-spoked equestrian circuit
through the Burley woods, suitable for galloping fox hunts and Sunday canters on
horseback. What they didn't know is that their forestry work made it possible
for St. Germaine and Merlin to install an astral 8-spoked lilac wheel of
transmutation in roughly the same spot. St. Germaine slipped this massive wheel
under another of those mundane solar eggs, knowing in advance that when the
Epiphany of 1991 permeated this golden egg set like a hub in the lilac wheel, it
would awaken Albion's solar plexus and umbilicus to the cosmos, and repercuss
throughout the planet. They also intended to flush the Earth grid with intense
lilac light through this wheel for the first time in 10,000 years, Merlin told
me, trying not to boast.
This wasn't precisely our cover story when we applied at the security guard's
office at Burley Mansion for permission to wander around the privately owned
Eight Riding Tree. The ownership of the wood was a little vague owing to legal
complications of bankruptcy, fraud, and imprisonment, but we obtained quizzical
permission to spend a couple hours each day in the mud, rain, and wind of Burley
dowsing, taking photographs, watching the wild boars rut for tubers, enjoying
the inimitable British scenery---or whatever it is American tourists come to
England for. Merlin, St. Germaine, and the Archangel Michael didn't apply at the
security office, advising us they already had the okay from a higher authority.
Our grid work fell into a manageable routine. At dawn midday, and dusk we
meditated at the heart of the lilac wheel, breathed Love from Above to the
Golden Child like the three magi in adoration of the Christ infant. We pacified
the irritable elemental spirits, dispatched negative thought-forms that kept
trying to bend our intentions, and made forays with Merlin into the wild
supersensible yonder. In the evenings we drank Guinness, ate quiche, talked
about Albion with our neighbors, and dried our sodden clothes by the open fire
in a lovely cottage we rented for the week. Clarissa wrote postcards to friends
back home in sunny Australia about why she came to England in the height of
winter, while Marty joked about stuffing her parka pockets with bricks to keep
from getting blown away.
As always, the Christ came like a thief in the night in a flush of
magnificent scarlet warmth. Like the Apostles of an earlier time we fell asleep
to the higher perception of this epiphanous appearance of the Logos. Of course,
you can't see the Christ anyway, because that's a mistaken anthropomorphism.
That's because the face of the Christ is your own and these days the Christ
incarnates individually in human consciousness, Merlin told us with a wink. We
expanded our individual identities to include the Burley golden child and the
lilac wheel at the belly of Albion then took the full permeation of the Epiphany
on Albion's behalf. The face of the Logos isn't necessarily some smiling,
beaded, new age pacifist type, either. The transmutative effects of Epiphany are
profound, disruptive, and sometimes rapid. Ten days later the United States went
to war with Iraq in a pentagonal grid face under the astrological influence of
Aquarius.
After Epiphany, we headed south for Avalon, one of Merlin's favorite spots on
Earth. We called in at Avalon's epicenter at Glastonbury in Somerset, one of the
leading new age mystical watering holes. We didn't find any mundane eggs in
Avalon; instead we found a landscape zodiac. Glastonbury's esoteric community
prides itself on its starwheel which is an apparent imprint on the landscape
topography of the standard features of the zodiacal constellations. Aerial
photographs and close-detail topographical maps exhibit the outlines of Taurus
and Sagittarius and the rest of the tumbling round table of zodiacal images
etched in hills and streams and hedgerows, explain the Glastonbury savants. True
enough, said Merlin, but that's only part of it. The star imprint is actually a
complete experiential hologram of the galaxy made of twelve dozen constellations
arrayed like the pith of a cleaved apple about 35 miles wide in the etheric
domain around Glastonbury.
The Glastonbury zodiac is the heart center of our Hyperborean Albion, said
Merlin, but his attention was focussed on his old haunt, Park Wood, in nearby
Butleigh. Park Wood is a modest copse of a few acres preserved in the midst of
Somerset farmland a couple miles from Glastonbury's most prominent hilltop
feature, the Tor. Park Wood marks Polaris the pole star, the axis mundi that
connects planetary and cosmic worlds at the center of the Glastonbury zodiac,
but the Wood is even more than that. It's the inner heart chakra, the
ananda-kanda , for Albion, and as such, it's the seat of the emerald, the mani
jewel in the padme lotus of the Holy Ghost---the green stone from the crown of
Lucifer.
The emerald signifies the Heart of Man, the swinging doorway into the worlds
of matter and Edenic light. The Park of the Wood is a hologram of that primal
Eden---that's the esplumoir he really disappeared into, that's the hollow hill
into which his protege in magic Nimue seduced him, Merlin explained a little
wistfully. Park Wood is also a shortcut to Shambhala if you know how to make
your moves in light---and that's exactly the kind of move that Albion
desperately requires now to wake up.
We only had one afternoon at Park Wood to make our Shambhallic connections
because we were expected further south in Dorchester at the King's Arms Hotel
for a mitzvah for Albion. Close friends from Tetford were feting us all to a
lavish weekend in celebration of our seven years of grid work on behalf of
Albion. Merlin, St. Germaine, Michael, and other angelic colleagues of
long-standing acquaintance joined us in our jubilee at Dorchester. Our time was
doubly productive of course, because Albion's throat chakra was centered just
outside the city limits at Maiden Castle, an absolutely massive three-tiered
earthwork, probably Europe's largest. Maiden Castle, said Merlin, was made that
large because it marks the grounding of the Mothership on Earth, that beneficent
panoply of the Feminine, the three archetypal aspects of the Mother of the World
as the maidenly guardians of Gaia.
Maiden Castle was topped with a dome and its extensive elevated acreage was
also the center of a modest five mile wide landscape zodiac. But what was most
palpable about the earthwork was the overwhelming presence of the Mother. Images
of the Mother no doubt vary with individuals. For me, She appeared as Leda the
Swan, mother of the egg-born solar hero Apollo, her breast aflame with the
scarlet radiance of the Christ as She sailed the infinite cosmic sea in perfect
equipoise. The Mother of the World speaks to Albion from his throat, speaking
Logos syllables of life, and She speaks to the world from Maiden Castle, too,
recreating human life and thought with maidenly words made of the power of AL .
Our moments with Leda got us in the mood for a sea voyage. The next day we
took the Brittany ferry to Roscoff in northwestern France, then drove a couple
hours south to the resort town of Karnac on the Gulf of Morbihan. It was winter,
most of Karnac was boarded up, and we were practically the only non-French
tourists in sight, but that didn't matter because we came for the stones. Karnac
is famous among megalithic enthusiasts for its five miles of stone rows,
something like 3000 standing stones, varying from two to fifteen feet high,
arranged in ten to twelve parallel rows, striding enigmatically across the
countryside. We would spend a fortnight aligning our energies with the cranial
stones of Albion's brow chakra at Karnac under the aegis of Sirius, Merlin told
us with understandable pride, being one of the original Sirian engineers who
installed Karnac's stones.
The grid engineering at Karnac is complex, Merlin warned us. First, Karnac
and environs is the site for the Sirius dome for Earth, which is about 30 miles
in diameter. Sirius is the brightest star in our galaxy and the heart of Canis
Major, the Great Dog. The Dog is a mythological big shot. In myth, the Dog is
the guardian of the zodiac, the conductor of souls through the Underworld, and
the faithful companion of all solar heroes, including Arthur. Second, a large
zodiac 44 miles in diameter is situated here, with Karnac occupying the
landscape position of Canis Major. Third, the entire stone row alignment and
Karnac zodiac mark the brow center of the Hyperborean Albion. And the whole
complex is directly connected by energy lines to Albion's crown chakra at the
cathedral city of Rennes in eastern Brittany, which also has a small zodiac.
After Merlin bound Albion in the Pit, in cooperation with other Sirians and
the angelic family called Elohim who temporarily manifested as giants, he came
to Karnac and set up 365 stones to create the cycle of Time for Earth and to
mark the nodal points within the cranium of Albion. The intention was to ground
the Mind of Sirius, which is to say, the Cosmic Logos, within Albion on behalf
of future human conscious evolution. Later they added more stones because the
mixture was too rich, and still later, French farmers hauled a lot of the stones
out of the fields because they got in the way of their potato crop.
Today even though some of the Sirian stone rows are curtailed by farmhouses,
interrupted by criss-crossing roads, generally neglected, and sometimes abused,
Karnac's cosmic cranial function is still intact, if a little sluggish. It
required fully two weeks of walking around in Albion's brains for us to
penetrate the thicker, more resistant French ethers and to come into cognition
with the Sirian mind of our ancient giant. After this, our work got serious.
But I found I couldn't get dogs and hunting out of my mind. The whole of the
Karnac stone alignment is like a living organism with progressive energy
centers. We spent several hours at the heart center meditating in the shadow of
an 18 foot tall single standing stone called Le Geant Manio set in the woods a
couple hundred yards away from the parallel stone rows. I spent some time poking
around the dense ethers with my sword then finally found an opening. I made my
way towards a golden spherical temple set atop a plateau of conifers. Inside the
temple I found a high-level meeting in progress. It's the round table of the
cosmic logos, Merlin whispered, and that big golden fellow is Sanat Kumara, the
King of Shambhala and the Cosmic Logos of Sirius. The other spiritual beings
around the table are individual solar logoi, and one of them is King Arthur,
Merlin added a little fondly. Each of them energizes a stone row at Karnac like
a chromatic chord of sound, and the whole alignment is metaphorically comparable
to a twelve-string cosmic guitar.
It was when I stepped out of Le Geant Manio and surveyed the stone phalanxes
of Karnac again that I suddenly understood what the Welsh myths meant by the
Wild Hunt and why dogs had been on my mind all day. On Samhain, the moment of
No-Time in the Celtic calendar (November 1), the abyssal cauldron of Cernwn, the
awful "smoke barrel" of infinity, opens above our world and through
this aperture storms Gwyn map Nudd and his Hounds of Hell, the red-eared,
white-skinned dogs of the apocalypse, chief among which is Gwyn's special hound,
Dormach. They basically scare everyone silly and wreak lots of havoc.
The Wild Hunt is all about the mind of Sirius. Gwyn is Sanat Kumara, the
Cosmic Logos presiding over the domain of No-Time, the time before Time began on
Earth. Dormach is his Karnac landscape dog, and the devilish hounds are the 3000
stones of knowledge, the group mind of the White Brotherhood expressed through
the Karnac alignments as a megalithic frieze of canines. The hounds are the
ferocious dogs of cosmic knowledge that tear the conditioned, time-bound mind of
we humans to shreds. Of course that's the pessimistic side of it. We could see
Gwyn and his Sirian dogs as psychopomps for an astounding, perpetual revelation.
This little insight prepared me for my descent into the Pit through the mind
of Dormach. We walked to the far end of the Karnac alignments, to an almost
completely neglected stretch of small stones in the woods called Le Petite
Menec. The brow center of Karnac's Dormach, it felt still, soft, and very
focussed. I slipped easily into a meditative awareness of the subtle environment
around me. The woods teemed with astral dogs, but one especially captured my
attention: black with foxy ears, he was a very old canine breed with an
attentive semi-human face---Dormach, presumably. A crystalline jewel was set
prominently in his brow and using my sword I penetrated this aperture and
entered his domain. Inside, Dormach flushed golden and the 3000 stones of his
landscape body hummed like a single crystal bowl. Not only the dogs of Karnac
live in Dormach's expansive body; the dogs of all the landscape zodiacs on Earth
(more than 500) reside in his Sirian being body, and these were all present with
me inside the cosmic kennel of Dormach. Dormach is the Dog of Sirius multiply
present on Earth through Karnac. Then we descended into the Pit.
A vortex cone of light like a slow-winding tornado appeared and I travelled
through it like water funneling down a sink drain. This vortex cone is actually
a more dynamic expression of one face of the dodecahedral world grid which is
made of twelve wide-mouthed spiralling cones that all taper down to meet at one
common center. This is the Pit, or the golden halls of Ogygia, if you prefer.
Lying before me bound and strapped to a massive table was the golden slumbering
figure of Albion, that ancient colossus of consciousness caught in the planetary
webs of Time. It's as if the Karnac Dog of Sirius sits at Albion's brow in the
Pit because that's where I landed in a fractal collapsing of apparent spatial
identities, spinning down vortices into larger frames of identity. Was I in the
Pit of Gaia or was this Pit in the mind of Sirius?
The ropes binding Albion were stout and tightly knotted and his body was
encased in a winding sheet like the Egyptians traditionally used for
mummification. Merlin was there and he pointed to my sword. The blade easily
sliced through the knots binding his neck, wrists, and ankles, then I delicately
sliced through the winding sheet until Albion, still somnolent, lay free upon
the table. O Albion, I exclaimed in a flush of exaltation. Now I know why Blake
so rhapsodized about you. "Thou wast to me the loveliest Son of Heaven, the
Angel of my Presence, the mildest Son of Eden," the Christ declared in
Blake's Jerusalem . This loveliest Son of Heaven was attended by his Mother,
too. The presence of the Feminine as aegis was unmistakable. She towered like a
benign Madonna over Her sleeping effulgent son. That's part of Merlin's task,
actually, making the connection between the cosmic Father at Sirius and the
cosmic Mother, establishing the line to the Mer, the Mother, the Mer-Line .
So with Merlin's help the Mer-Line was open to Albion, the resplendent image
of Man somnolent but unbound upon the table in the Pit of Gaia. With the turning
of every planetary age Albion shifted in his slumber, but he's never awakened on
Earth. But now his sleep grows ever lighter as he struggles towards
self-awareness, prying off the cobwebs of countless milennia of dreams. Albion
winked in his sleep at the Harmonic Convergence of 1987. Albion stirs in the
expectancy of a startling lucidity. We can reach him now, he can hear us in his
lightening trance state. We all have a hotline to Albion. We all must speak the
truth to him about his destiny, about what his life will be like when he wakes
up. What is Albion's destiny? Albion's destiny is precisely what we wish for
through our spoken power of AL . AL is the life blood of Albion, his once and
future beginning, and his colossal destiny is entirely contingent upon what we
say.
I walked down the huge recumbent figure and stood upon Albion's emerald
heart. The emerald is the key. This is the true, the efficacious ear trumpet
into which we must broadcast our good wishes for Albion's future. The emerald is
the planetary modem of consciousness into which we're all patched. The emerald,
or inner heart chakra, contains the jewelled altar and its wish-fulfilling tree,
and we wish upon this tree with our highest, keenest, most sincere aspirations
to communicate with the Absolute---on Albion's behalf. We've all been inside the
emerald anyway. We know the place. It's the New Jerusalem that Merlin foretold
in his Revelation when he spoke as John the Revealer. After all, Merlin wasn't
always a "pagan." The Harmonic Convergence was a global meeting inside
the one emerald of the Holy Ghost fractally multiplied around Gaia's net and
present like a master key in the chest of every woman and man alive today.
I paced contemplatively upon Albion's heart, intoning an emerald benediction.
I formulated my wishes with the breath of AL . Albion, I wish you will awaken. I
wish you a world of AL . I wish for you a bright future. I wish for you the best
there is---the limitless luxury of light. Merlin nodded approvingly. That's a
good start, he said. "But you'll need to hatch another egg over in America.
Get some more Grail Knights together. Celebrate Independence Day with a little
panache. Albion wants this new golden child of the eagle born on the 4th of
July."
(1) AL is a God-Name or mantric word from Qabala indicating the Sephira
Chesed on the Tree of Life. Chesed is about the expansiveness of Jupiter, the
abundance of the higher mind, the Olympic realm of the Masters, and the
primordial creative energy that recreates land, thought, life, and
consciousness. As such AL is the celestial seed and core of Albion which is the
collectivity of human consciousness over time expressed through the Land itself.
AL is the once and future creative energy that makes Land and Human one.
Walking in Albion - Chronicles of Plan -Net Geomancy
Part II: Child of the Maturing Eagle
©1991 Richard Leviton
From nearly the top of the fire tower at Moore's Hill in the Daughters of the
American Revolution State Forest in Goshen, in the hills of western
Massachusetts, you can see all of the Pocumtuck zodiac. I say nearly because you
can't climb to the top; it's locked, and anyway I didn't want to. It's too high
for a fire tower and makes my body tremble from its root. Merlin laughed of
course as he saw me gripping the steel railing a little too tightly after I
climbed a dozen steps. High towers never phased him. Hadn't he prophecied the
return of Arthur from the top of King Vortigern's decidedly unsteady tower long
ago on that mountain in Wales? Vertigo wasn't an issue for ethereal Merlin these
days as it was for we four grid engineers this morning. "Sink a red bolt
from your own root into the center of the Earth from here," he advised.
"You'll feel a lot more grounded."
Merlin was right. We sat on the ground at the base of the tower, closed our
eyes, and visualized that a bright crimson pillar of light ascended from the
center of the Earth up into our four-petalled root chakra at the base of the
spine. As we focussed our meditation on our exhalations this pillar or bolt
expanded radically. It felt as if we had become so large we were sitting on an
Earth no bigger than a beachball. Our individual bodies were bolted securely to
the planet. Then we drew this red bolt like an energy curtain up through our
entire body and up over the head so that our energy field was columnated by this
grounded, profoundly creative root energy. After all, the root holds both our
fears about survival and the untapped potency of kundalini. We could use this
effervescent redness to transmute those fears of incarnation. "Go on, test
it," said Merlin.
I scurried up the tower, climbing 30 steps before I realized my body wasn't
quaking in fear of the height. The red bolt had dilated my root chakra so
enormously its vortex petals were like wingnuts. I stood confidently on the
steel-girded windy prominence as if my feet were still on the ground, and
surveyed the forested hills of the Pocumtuck zodiac.
The Pocumtuck zodiac, we like to say, is our own landscape Mystery temple
rising up through and around us in an epiphany of light. This knobby land in the
Berkshire foothills used to be inhabited by the Pocumtuck Indians up until the
arrival of the aggressive European settlers in the early 17th century, so we've
borrowed their tribal name, which means "clear, open stream," in
belated recognition of the sacrality of their landscape. The Pocumtuck zodiac is
a17 mile wide etheric star imprint, a virtual image of not only the twelve signs
of the zodiac, but twelve dozen constellations scintillating behind the trees
and rocks and just beyond the ken of ordinary cognition. Mythopoeic Britain
after all doesn't have exclusive spiritual real estate rights to landscape
zodiacs. As a planet Gaia possesses over 500 landscape starwheels distributed
evenly across Her twelve geometric faces. Our work as grid engineers is to coax
these myriad stars from terrestrial dormancy to living actuality in a communal
act of temple-building---for isn't the zodiac and its stellar denizens the
Temple of Man made of the cosmos?
As we dangled our feet insouciantly over the edge of the wood-slatted
platform high up in the fire tower, I explained the context for our work to my
companions, Ellen, Theodore, and Mary. It was the 4th of July, America's
Independence Day, and Merlin had an unusual celebration in mind for us. First
let's take the broad view of things, I began. Gaia's energetic anatomy---Her net
or grid--- is twelvefold, each one-twelfth section is a pentagon, a five-sided
domain that includes large portions of land and sea, and each pentagonal face is
directly influenced and energized by one zodiacal energy. One pentagonal
face---the Hyperborean--- which includes the British Isles, Spain, France,
Greenland, Iceland, the North Pole, and a considerable portion of the Atlantic
Ocean, is under the influence today of Virgo. Virgo represents the fecundity of
the Earth Mother abundant with nourishing fruits of the harvest. A virgin
Madonna cradling the divine child, She's full of life, creativity; She's the
Grand Dame Brittania, the heavenly Queen Mum, and the essence of the Feminine.
The 25 landscape zodiacs within her pentagonal aegis are Her starry-eyed
children, little Virgo emissaries to Gaia.
By contrast the zodiacal children of the pent face overlaying most of America
are like little poisonous stingers. This adjacent pentagonal domain is under the
influence of Scorpio, which is a very tricky energy. Scorpio is the intensely
introverted energy of sex, death, transformation, and rebirth. The scorpion
stings to the death, but it's an ambivalent poison: You either die and stay
dead, or you die into a miraculous rebirth, transfiguring into the eagle, the
scorpion's true destiny, symbolically speaking. "This pent face over most
of America is most threatened," said Merlin. "It's in a Scorpionic
energy cycle which could be disastrous or transformative."
The Scorpio pent face includes urban zodiacs in Boston, Washington D.C.,
Syracuse, and Rochester, and country zodiacs in Maine, Quebec, New
Hampshire---28 in all---and this one constellated around Northampton, the home
of Smith College. Within a pent face the individual zodiacs are energetically,
serially related just like chakra centers in the subtle human organization. The
Pocumtuck zodiac is the root center for the entire Scorpio pent face, which
means a lot depends on how this root work proceeds---not to mention how we
handle the egg.
Yes, we had another golden egg on our geomantic hands. This egg was set
elegantly, if a little vulnerably, in the egg-cup of the Pocumtuck zodiac. I
invited my companions to stretch their visualizing powers a little. Think of the
cosmos as an apple; its pith is the bright compacted mass of billions of stars.
The transposition of this celestial sphere to the horizontal terrestrial
landscape is basically an engineering problem.
On Earth, the hologram of the cosmic apple is cleaved in two but the cleaver
is left in place. A landscape zodiac seen from above looks like the two halves
of an apple, each half glittering with the starry pith of either northern or
southern hemisphere constellations. In this image the cleaver is a major energy
line, a kind of archangelic superhighway of light that transits the globe
oroborically returning to its source. We call these primary energy rings
Oroboros Lines because like the mythographic serpent, its tail is in its mouth.
Oroboros Lines, of which Gaia has 15, are an integral structural aspect of the
plan-net grid, just like the landscape zodiacs. Our golden egg is perfectly
poised on this Oroboros Line which runs straight through the 20 mile long
cleavage of the two apple halves of the Pocumtuck zodiac. In fact it runs clear
around the planet and comes up behind us again here at the D.A.R. fire tower.
This was enough orientation for now. We had root work to do on this hot,
sunny, humid July morning. We clambered down the fire tower and took our
positions---to be precise, on the Oroboros Line, at the root of the golden
child, in the root zodiac of the Scorpio pentagonal face, of the plan-net of
Gaia---and upon the soft grass of Moore Hill. Then we breathed as Love from
Above to our bolts, meditated silently for a half hour, then compared notes.
Collegiality of vision and work is a hallmark of this style of grid
engineering. Nobody gets the full picture, only corroborable impressions; but
when we combine and overlap our individual insights a probable gestalt emerges
of that vast supersensible reality whose outer membrane we've tentatively
touched. That's why Arthur's Grail Knights always sat about a round table, not a
rectangular, hierarchical one, because everyone's input counted equally. Another
crucial hallmark about plan-net geomancy is that no landscape work is in any way
separate from our own spirituality. We work with a golden egg only through
personally mastering the progressive stages of initiation that awaken the golden
child. This apparently external, egg-born divine child is in essence a
holographic projection of our own inner being. So we build the temple exactly at
the rate we can build ourselves. Plan-net geomancy is the act of encompassing
the landscape in our spirituality.
As it turned out, each of our meditations had encompassed a different aspect
of the inside of this creative red root bolt. Theodore had seen the golden egg
as a light form squeezed out of the swirling energy field of the huge umbrella
dome over the Pocumtuck zodiac. At the bottom of the egg he saw a spiralling
tunnel that lead to a portal. Ellen, who found herself the human center of a
nimbus of gnomes, saw huge golden hands cupping an acqua-jade egg. "Then I
suddenly perceived a huge trembling in the ground, like an earthquake---but it
was in my body, too," Ellen remarked, as if all the old compacted debris in
her root chakra were being churned up by this new energy. Then as if to
corroborate her insight, she saw an electric fan with four red and orange blades
spiralling slowly around. Mary had a direct and visceral experience inside the
bolt, too. "After I entered the red pillar, there was a great flurry of
activity, directed by Merlin," Mary commented. "I knew it was
repairing me as red and blue spirals twined up through the bolt. I saw myself
standing huge, as if I were a single blazing star atop a red post planted at the
center of the Earth."
I knew what Mary meant. We always started our geomantic work with a strong
focus on the Star, that single blazing pinprick of absolute light at the center
of our being. For the sake of balance we breath to it as Love from Above as if
it were bodily located two inches above the belly button and an inch inside. The
Star responds favorably to loving attention; in no time, it flashes supernova,
and suddenly I'm inside the star which is itself inside the root bolt. It seemed
like a red blood clot, a swirl of crimson mist, a scarlet nebula of primordial
life energy. Then the red mists cleared, revealing the Great Bear light city of
the future, sparkling like a crystalline disc with hundreds of hexagonal facets,
like a magnificent flower on the brink of blossoming.
This was a grid engineering diagram I recognized. Dormant in the root chakra
is the fabulous kundalini energy, the inexhaustible cosmic storehouse of sheer
creative potency---the reservoir of AL . When we say AL , we're talking the
co-creative language of the Great Bear. AL is the beginning of Albion; AL
streams into Gaia through the Great Bear dome at Tintagel in Cornwall, England;
and at the root of every root, there is the Mother Bear's AL , too. When we
master the fears of incarnation we've lodged in the root, we get its implicit
cornucopia of elan vital . Administering this fecundity across the
galactic-human spectrum is the Great Bear, home of the ascended hierarchy of the
White Brotherhood whose cosmofraternal habitation was symbolized to me as this
gorgeous diamond-facetted flower at the base of the golden child's root and
beckoning optimistically to us from the future of our conscious evolution. And
administering this bearish optimism to the Earth and Her golden children is us,
Gaia's human residents.
We took our dilated roots down the Oroboros Line about five miles to O'Neill
Hill outside the little town of Williamsburg. Here we would plant the Blazing
Star at a landscape point that combined the energies of the second and third
chakras of the slumbering golden child. As we walked meditatively up the old
logging track of O'Neill, the energy felt lush, starry, and angelic, and it only
got better and richer as our individual stars went supernova inside the red root
bolt which we re-established with the entire hill inside. It was at O'Neill that
we first sensed the golden child of Pocumtuck.
Theodore was the first to comment, rousing himself from his inner
concentration with an almost beatific grin. "I had the impression of an
amniotic sack full of swirling gold and white lights. There was a trumpeting of
angels as if to say, Here comes the baby!" Theodore, who is the father of a
young girl, sent the unborn golden child within the egg "love and spiritual
nutrition." He felt his own heart suffused in a warm blush just as the
baby's heart softened from his loving attention.
Mary saw the golden, chubby "baby," too, who seemed to giggle with
delight at our intentions to midwife her incarnation into the Pocumtuck domain.
"I felt I was immersed in a mass of amniotic, amoebic fluid, all silver and
gold," said Mary. "My body got very bright, like a thousand watt light
bulb. The gnomes ran up to me, lit their torches off my flaming form, then ran
around the landscape planting them everywhere." Then she laughed. She had
asked Merlin if she could see more, see ahead into the child's future, but the
wizened old magus, garbed in a magician's cloak emblazoned with the sigils of
alchemy and astrology, showed her she was going too fast. Merlin had Mary hang
on to a rock which he swung around him like a discus on a rope so fast she
couldn't comprehend anything. "You see?" he chided her.
After Ellen's star went supernova she found herself as the central atom in a
molecular configuration of angels skewered in the gold and silver laser beam of
the Oroboros. This remarkable tableau was a mirror image of her geomantic
presence at O'Neill Hill and a personal reminder to manifest her innate star
light more often, Ellen told us.
My own experience was enigmatic. One of the grid engineering
tricks-of-the-trade Merlin taught me was to convert the supernova Star into a
shallow blue dish. When the Blazing Star flashes nova it disappears; what
remains is an endless expanse of empty pale blue. This is the purified mind
expressed etherically. The "bottom" of this blue spaciousness forms a
lightly curving blue saucer which the grid engineer slips under the particular
landscape site in question. I slipped the blue dish (my etheric consciousness)
under O'Neill Hill and lay like a supine Atlas with the weight of the world on
my chest. The dish was like a blinding white mirror. I turned myself inside out
through the phosphorescent brilliance and entered a stark black immensity on its
other side. My psychological individuality was somewhat and somewhere intact
like a hollow shell, while the rest of "me" vanished into this
nothingness. "Don't get lost in the Buddha Mind!" Merlin quipped from
the other side of the void.
For some reason landscape hearts are always guarded, defended, a little hard
to enter. The Pocumtuck child's heart chakra at Shingle Hill in Haydenville was
no exception. Access to Shingle Hill was through private property. As we trolled
along Mountain Street looking for the long dirt driveway we vaguely remembered
from a previous visit, a police cruiser pulled up alongside us. No, we didn't
have any problem, thank you officers. Outside the house at first nobody was home
and we hesitated. The minute the four of us stepped out of Ellen's Toyota, a big
black Bronco four-wheel drive pickup stormed up the driveway. No, I don't have
any problem with you folks having a quick walk around, said the young beefy man,
a little dubious in the face of our topographical maps and dowsing rods.
"But try to be out of the woods before my mother gets home," he added.
"Mom's got no property insurance for complete strangers hiking around in
her woods. And watch out for the poison ivy---it's everywhere up there."
We'd been here before a year earlier when we brought a small group to
participate in the activation of Shingle Hill as a starpoint in the
constellation of Aquarius. So as we picked our way carefully through the prickly
brambles, the proliferate poison ivy, and the swarms of hungry mosquitoes, we
appreciated the topographical elegance that the Pocumtuck's twelve-petalled
Anahata heart center was Aquarian. The physical obstacles dissolved almost
instantly in the green radiance of a stunningly spacious landscape heart.
I entered this cavernous regard, this green wide open love with which the
Pocumtuck child regards not only her zodiacal domain---but potentially all of
the Scorpio pent face, like the cosmic fetus at the end of 2001: A Space
Odyssey. The golden child expresses the unlimited, unconditional expanse of her
love through this outer heart effulgence. I linked Shingle Hill with O'Neill and
Moore Hill like stacked faces on a totem pole. Shingle Hill's green heartfulness
emerges out of the wisdom of the emptiness of the black sphere at O'Neill Hill
set inside the red pillar of organic life accessed at D.A.R.'s Moore Hill. Then
I sat silently and happily within the heart content never to move again.
Nobody spoke until we had regrouped in the car an hour later at midday.
"I saw Merlin again," exclaimed Mary. "This time he had thick
strawberry-blond hair, green eyes, and a merry twinkle. As if I were the Mother,
I held the baby to my breast and sang out loud to her, just as you heard
me." Theodore experienced a shuddering "rush of love" through his
entire being as he beheld the golden child. He recapitulated his geomantic
visualizations from the previous two hills, fusing them with the heart at
Shingle Hill. When the child asked him to play, they ran off into a waterfall
for a purificatory baptism. Ellen made an important discovery without which we
couldn't have completed our day's work. As soon as Mary spontaneously broke into
song, Ellen perceived the emerald, the child's inner heart center, the
eight-petalled Ananda-kanda just behind us at Davis Hill, from which flowed
"beautiful waves of green." We planned to get back to Davis Hill
before the day was through.
We travelled further along the Oroboros into the child's throat chakra at
Round Hill, the highest and socially swankest point in Northampton. Today the
neck of Round Hill is thoroughly braceleted with elegant old Victorian homes,
Smith College campus, and the Clarke School for the Deaf, but back in 1852 the
open view from here was evidently commanding. As local legend has it, Jenny
Lind, the internationally renowned concert singer and "Swedish
Nightingale," honeymooning here on Round Hill with her husband, was so
impressed with the quality of the view that she proclaimed Northampton "the
paradise of America." Many years earlier the Pocumtuck Indians had
registered their appreciation for the locale in a suggestive place name:
Nanotuck , which means "in the middle of the narrow river." Local
historians usually take that to mean the Connecticut River which undulates
around the edges of Northampton, but for we grid engineers that narrow river of
light has to be the Oroboros Line, that global highway of light that energizes
all of Northampton as it passes through.
The Clarke School occupies the crown of Round Hill and with such understated
irony, I thought. The throat chakra is the seat of clairaudience, of subtle
inner hearing, and here at Clarke are all these deaf children: Is it possible
that physically they can't hear our voices but clairaudiently they hear the
Music of the Spheres? There were almost no Clarke students around to ask anyway
when we took our seats under a maple tree on the edge of the quadrangle.
Rows of chairs fronted a raised platform and public address system on the
green, as if in expectation of an outdoor party. We didn't appreciate at first
that we were the expected party. The minute we folded our legs, rested our palms
in our laps, closed our eyes, and exhaled as Love from Above to the golden
child's throat, the music began---and at full throttle, as if we were in the
uninhibited throes of a Saturday night campus beer bash. It was mostly
foot-stamping John Philip Sousa band tunes and Stars and Stripes Forever, but
there was a snappy rendition of the Flying Dutchman and a brisk run-through of
the William Tell Overture . Thirty minutes later when we stood up the music
instantly stopped. We looked at one another, we looked at the mute P.A. system,
then we burst out laughing.
Mary recounted her throaty adventures first. The child's name is Elan, she
told us. She learned this when she established the Star in the child's navy blue
throat center after locating herself inside a round hall honeycombed with
diamond chambers---highly reminiscent of the Akashic Hall of Records, I thought.
"Then Merlin told me our work could be lighter . When the music started, he
turned into a clown leading a parade. He opened his mouth so wide his tonsils
and epiglottis throbbed like bleating trumpets." Merlin was dressed like
Uncle Sam, in red, white and blue, Mary continued, and his supersensible antics
were not without significance. Red is the root, the life energy; white is the
Star, our spiritual core; and blue is the spoken clarity of the throat, Mary
related. "We speak our freedom through the throat, connecting the red of
life with the white of spirit through the green of the heart. This work opens up
new expressive possibilities for everyone. And the music! Merlin said they'd
been waiting all day for us to show up so they could test their sound
system."
The music precipitated a new impression for Ellen as well. "I became the
Madonna with the golden child in my lap," she announced proudly. When the
Sousa tunes began, Ellen became the "free, magical child," with straw
hat, bare feet, and twirling baton, dancing carefree with the music. She felt
that her first four chakras swelled up into her throat which opened up like a
pale blue trumpet, a translucent bell dilating into the vastness. Theodore also
perceived his throat center as a trumpet shaped like an upturned white daffodil,
representing purity and clarity. "When that crazy music started, I saw an
eagle with white wings soaring freely. There was a great sense of freedom and
wisdom with every wingbeat."
For me Round Hill was consummately about speaking. I had to call on the
descriptive jargon of an earlier age to cast my impressions into words. The vibe
was outrageously stoned, blissful, swimming: was it me or the place? The
geomantic features of the previous four landscape chakras were implicit in me.
My attention went straight to the rich, navy blue throat sphere which emerged
from the green spaciousness of the heart. The Round Hill throat is pure
potential speech, creative vocables. The spaciousness of love in the heart moves
up through its own momentum into the throat, which is moved to speak ,
broadcasting speech in all directions.
I remembered that astounding declaration by Rudolf Steiner, the Austrian
spiritual scientist and founder of Anthroposophy, that a human speaking the
alphabet creates the etheric air-form of a complete human being. The speaking
throat, Steiner said, is a spiritually generative organ, and Round Hill, I
realized, is pregnant with speech. The blue is the round sphere encircling the
hill of the neck and throat. I waxed prophetic there on the fringes of Clarke
School for the Deaf. Speech is broadcast in all 16 directions, one direction for
each of the throat's 16 petals, the 16 vortex spins of the human round hill,
spewing forth world-recreating syllables, primogentive Logos words. Northampton,
the creative larynx for this newborn golden child of the Pocumtuck zodiac, could
become a point of origin for profound oral communication, speaking a new culture
into being within the Scorpio pentagonal face of Gaia. And when this child
speaks, Albion will be listening.
Our next stop on the Oroboros Line was Petowomachu , the Mt. Holyoke summit
house at the golden child's brow chakra and the gates of the Pocumtuck temple.
At Petowomachu two old Appalachian mountain ranges, known locally as the Mt.
Holyoke (running east-west, a geological anomaly) and Mt. Tom ridges (running
north-south), stride up to the banks of the Connecticut River which passes
through them exactly along the energized Oroboros.
A dome tops Mt. Holyoke summit and another one crowns Mt. Norwottuck (the
northernmost peak of the Mt. Tom range), and through the vesica piscis formed by
their domed etheric overlap flows the Connecticut River, that narrow river of
light. Both ranges are geomantic highspots, canopied with multiple dome caps
like a miniature Himalayan range of light. Since the 1820s one version or
another of what is today an elegant three-storied white mountain house has
graced the summit of Mt. Holyoke. For many years the Prospect House enjoyed a
regional reputation as a high-class Victorian hotel. Fortunately for us---and
Albion and Gaia, too---around 1940 the Skinner Reservation, as the site was
called, then in private but benign hands, was deeded to Massachusetts as a state
park and its unacknowledged sacrality has been preserved ever since.
Skinner Park of course is widely acknowledged as a great place for a family
picnic and lots of families were grilling steaks and setting the picnic tables
for a late holiday lunch. We found a quiet dell and sat down on the grass of
Petowomachu . I was very happy to be there because there was probably no place
on Earth that I've visited more times in this lifetime than this mountain top. I
grew up a few miles down the Oroboros Line, had come here for the traditional
holiday family barbecues, the Boy Scout hikes, the High School parties, the
autumnal hawk migrations, and in recent years a Pocumtuck Indian elder in spirit
form had introduced me to aspects of Petowomachu 's venerable geomantic past. It
had indeed been a mountain prominence of high spirituality and where the
Prospect House now stands there once stood a large stone circle. Indian
initiates had sailed in birchbark canoes through the river cleft between
Norwottuck and Petowomachu peaks into the star-spangled temple of the Pocumtuck
galaxy.
The first thing we did was to repeat all the stages of image-building from
the previous four chakral hills on the golden child's Oroboric spine. We knew
that we were visualizing an organic spiritual form into landscape life through
our ministrations in consciousness. Then we settled individually into our own
concentration, penetrating the pineal gland of Petowomachu . "My pineal
exploded into light and my body got very hot," explained Mary afterwards.
"I became the Buddha, then the mountain, then nothingness. Meanwhile the
child got up and ran, saying she would wake the adult Albion in the Pit."
Theodore tuned in to the child's brow center as well, which revealed itself to
him as an orb of light into which streamed laserlines of energizing light. The
child seemed older, perhaps seven, and was full of play and joy. "She took
me flying," said Theodore. "It was rapturous. First I felt the child's
head against my heart, then things flipped around and I was the infant cradled
in the Black Madonna's lap."
Ellen saw the golden child as if laid out in a basinet made of the blue dish
we'd installed under the entire zodiac. She brought the Star to the child's
brow, reminding us all ofTaliessin , the radiant-browed one and bardic prodigy
of old Celtic myth whom some say was none other than Merlin. "I was inside
this ball of refined golden white light, the whole star, until it
exploded," Ellen said. "Light sparks showered everywhere. Bands and
bands of spiritual beings surrounded us in all directions and dimensions. We
really had a lot of fine company."
I didn't see Ellen's angelic conclave, though I wished I had. I saw a
glistening, translucent pearl set like a precious diadem in the heart of the
Great Bear crystalline disc that I discovered inside the D.A.R. root. It's the
Pearl of Great Price, I realized, residing in the pure potentiality of AL , the
cosmic reservoir of Great Bear kundalini. Then I slipped inside the pearl. Not
today, but one day soon this faculty of insight will read out the instructions,
thoughts, and insights of the Pocumtuck golden child. When the root is secure,
clairvoyant insight unfolds. What treasures of galactic information does this
Aquarian child hold in store for the Scorpio pent face? One day she'll speak her
insights heartfully through the round hill throat suffused with Star-permeated
red life energy, I proclaimed silently. I figured Merlin would hear me and
probably chuckle at my amateurish imitation of his prophetic declamatory style.
Petowomachu clearly is a place to seed visions with stellar insight---when
the time is right. It's the doorway into the Pocumtuck zodiac, but it's also the
fontanelle hatchway out, into the great Ain Soph , the stark immensity of the
Black Madonna, the infinity of the Mother of the World, the empty Buddhic space
of the awakened one. A handful of miles further southeast down the Oroboros Line
brought us to Prospect Hill in South Hadley, a gently mounded wooded hill
overlooking the stately campus of Mt. Holyoke College, Smith's Ivy League
collegiate sister.
The drone of large jets lumbering off the runway of nearby Westover Air Force
Base in Chicopee was constantly with us as we meditated at the golden child's
crown chakra at Prospect Hill. It's hard to say how much geomantic knowledge the
military has, but Westover is right on the Pocumtuck Oroboros. In 1986 they
tried very strenuously to establish 350 microwave relay towers in a potato field
in the minimally populated hilltown of Hawley, Massachusetts. But don't let the
potatoes fool you. Hawley is domed, an opaline plan-net point on this same
Oroboros Line about 10 miles "upstream" from D.A.R., and according to
the Akashic Records, this unassuming site was once the center of an
interplanetary, interdimensional airport. From Hawley to Westover is a straight
quick shot down the Oroboros expressway. The Air Force officials claimed they
liked Hawley because of its elevation and unobstructed panoramic view.
We paid Westover no further mind. At least the bombers weren't landing on the
child's head and our weight on her fontanelle was not likely to give her
discomfort. We were as light as a skullcap. The Mother's presence, it seemed to
me, took the form of a pale turquoise yarmulke , like an inverted blue dish as
thin as eggshell worn upside down on the crown. This completed the spiritual
form of the Egg. I surveyed it as I would a detailed if exotic tableau. We'd
coaxed it from red root pillar arising from the center of the Earth through the
blue dish containing the black sphere of empty immensity expressing itself as
the green heart spaciousness moved to speech at Round Hill based on the cosmic
insight read out at the Petowomachu pineal from the Great Bear root template,
capped by the turquoise parabolic dish at the crown. You really have to talk
like Jack Kerouac spouting Dharma Bums sapphics from the fire lookout when you
try to encapsulate this multidimensional supersensible reality in the tortuous
timespace of English prose.
This was the spiritual process of the Egg, the anatomy of the golden child
experienced as activity, relationship, and process. And it's all inside this
vibrant red root pillar like some autochthonous axis mundi. The red bolt
encompasses the entire chakra column. Everything happens inside this basic life
force sheath. The whole sequence, I realized, was the continuum of my own
awareness, a process within my spiritual being bodies that I extended outwards
to include the landscape domain knowing the two, human consciousness and the
landscape, are one. And when I say I , I mean Mary, Ellen, and Theodore,
too---it's a fly's eye, a multiplicity of light receptors.
Mary's report confirmed my intuitions. "I turned into the Madonna, then
the child, then kept cycling back and forth in identity within this
relationship," she explained. Next she put Mother Earth in her heart, then
she became Gaia, then the two of them dissolved into the black peaceful
nothingness of the ineffable World Mother. "Then the gnomes gave me another
egg," Mary exclaimed laughing. The gnome egg was alabaster white with green
filigree, and she placed it in her commodious heart. Then she strolled off down
the hill to visit the immense horse barn and inadvertently spooked the stabled
mares with her spiritual charge. Meanwhile Theodore lost his head inside a tree.
After the release of an initial sensation of pressure inside his head, Theodore
saw an immaculate Tree of Life. "I felt this was my gift to the child---the
complete knowledge of the universe, total cognition of the cosmic laws." He
merged with the Tree, then his head "expanded, exploded, and became
nothing."
While the rest of us were sporting skullcaps or having our heads blown away,
Ellen was dancing with the galaxy. Her experience at Prospect Hill was a one
woman Russian ballet. It was as if her body were made of two lungs six feet high
and connected delicately at the middle. Waves of energy rolled up from the root
to the crown cascading downwards again like a waterfall to the feet, only to
rise up again to the head in a perpetual cycle.
Clairvoyants have described the pulsing auric shells of the human in a
similar fashion, likening this constant cycling of energy to the dynamic wings
of angels. The late mystical researcher Itzhak Bentov once compared the universe
to an egg whose form was maintained by the constant cycling of energy currents.
In my imagination Ellen's description suggested an anthropomorphic form of the
zodiac itself, the two halves of the cleaved cosmic apple in continuous
recreation. Ellen had become the dynamic human expression of the zodiac, the
angelic body, the Mundane Egg itself. "It didn't just stay with the
Pocumtuck zodiac, either," Ellen related. "With every cycling it took
in a bigger realm---the Earth, then the galaxy, then the universe, in
ever-widening fields."
That was as good an introduction as any to the nature of the emerald, which
was our last and penultimate stop in this Independence Day pilgrimage through
the landscape body of the Pocumtuck golden child. We drove northwest in the late
summer afternoon along the Oroboros, retracing our steps back to the inner heart
at Davis Hill, tucked quietly behind Shingle Hill in Haydenville. It took us
almost an hour to walk through the woods then up the slope of Davis Hill, and we
stopped along the way to enjoy the proliferation of ripe blackberries on its
open grassy slopes. Then we took our seats and projected the emerald into its
intended receptacle at Davis Hill. First we breathed as Love from Above to that
tiny blazing pinprick, the Star at the center of our being. When it went
supernova and we flashed into the wild blue yonder, we slipped the blue dish
under Davis. Then we visualized the six-sided green emerald as a prodigious
skyscraping cathedral set omnidirectionally in the dish. Each facet was like a
sheer pane of green light, but its solidity was an illusion. We each walked
through and entered the emerald.
The emerald is crucial in plan-net geomancy. It's also almost impossibly
complex in terms of its ramifications. The emerald's geometric aspect is a way
of modelling the electromagnetic doorway of the inner heart chakra within the
human organism. In the Western Mystery tradition, the emerald is the green stone
fallen from the crown of Lucifer; in Tibetan iconography, it's the cintamani
jewel brought to Earth in a magical cask from Sirius; and in Hindu spirituality,
it's the Heart, the primal embarkation point, either into incarnation or out
into the Absolute. The outer skin of the emerald is the Akashic Records, while
the inside affords a stunning revelation of the Mystery of the Sun. For esoteric
Christianity the emerald is the cathedral in which the miraculous inspiration of
Pentecost happens; in the Arthurian cycle, the Holy Grail appears luminous and
unfathomable upon the Round Table inside the emerald; and in Merlin's prophetic
Revelation , where the dodecahedral New Jerusalem descends from heaven like a
bride adorned for the wedding---that's the emerald, too.
Everybody has an emerald, but each of ours is a holographic projection from
the original and singular green stone. When we consciously meet within this
single emerald in a bond of fraternal love we're patched into one another the
way modems link computers. And what, really, is the emerald modem? The Heart of
the Holy Ghost unbounded by Time or Space---in planetary terms, the resurrected
Albion. At Davis Hill, then, we were patched into emeralds holographically
expressed around the planet, and beyond. We had complete access . That's why so
much depends on our taking responsibility for conscious cognition within this
God-given gift of the emerald. Hadn't Merlin told me back in France, as I stood
on Albion's majestic golden breast down in the Pit, "Talk to Albion through
his emerald. Tell him good things. Tell him AL about it."
The four of us sat at the Round Table inside the emerald. Merlin and the
Archangel Michael were present along with a lot of other familiar faces, both
human and angelic, from the supersensible hierarchy. It was unaccountably windy,
Theodore reported afterwards. It was so windy inside the emerald Theodore felt
he could hardly keep his body stable, as if he were standing on the wind-ravaged
prow of a schooner. "The wind came continuously from all sides," he
said. "There were many other grid workers and Grail Knights around the
table, and some of my spiritual teachers, too. It was a real crowd. I sent
blessings to all my benefactors and mentors. This brought tears into my eyes. It
was the first time in my life I've been able to return spiritual light to all my
teachers in gratitude for everything they did for me. I felt so grateful for all
the steps that had led me to Davis Hill and this chance to ground my spiritual
practice in the landscape, on the planet's behalf." Then he saw the Holy
Grail.
Ellen sat expectantly at the Round Table, her fingers of light resting on its
sheer marble surface. "I saw many ancient human figures, hordes of people,
many of them like Biblical prophets. I felt the wind, too, but it was like a
continuous vibrational circle moving around me." When a man in a hooded
gown approached her, Ellen asked him what she was supposed to learn here. By way
of answer he shone a spotlight straight into her head either to enlighten her or
to quell her thinking. "Then I felt encapsulated in love. What I'm supposed
to learn here is to let myself be permeated by this wonderful green love."
That's the way Mary experienced it, too. "There isn't much I can say. I had
a transmission. Of that I'm certain. Several times it seemed I fell asleep at
the Table, then woke up again without remembering what had happened. Oh yes.
There was a lot of wind, too."
On the day of Pentecost when the Apostles were "all of one accord in one
place," which is to say, inside the emerald, "suddenly there came a
sound from heaven as of a rushing mighty wind and it filled all the house where
they were sitting." In the later derivative Grail stories, Arthur's knights
were similarly visited by this anomalous spiritual wind whose gustings always
presaged the resplendent manifestation of the Grail. Wind, or vayu , is the
element of air traditionally associated with the heart chakra, but I think wind
means the "breath of the Gods," the susurrous of the Elohim, the
profound spiritual inspiration that the moment of Pentecost imparts. And often,
if not always, the air-borne transmission is just beyond our awareness, just a
little too subtle for our cognition to hold, but invariably we get the amazing
effects the next day as the influx percolates down through the denser layers of
our being. Even so, I did catch a few of Merlin's words declaimed in his
inimitable if irreverent fashion upon the Round Table.
"The emerald of the Pocumtuck child serves the eagle," Merlin said.
"This is the national figure representing the Logos of the U.S., the Word
in the landscape. It's the character of your country, which is the teacher and
the predator. It is the eye that sees far and the heart that embraces all. But
the eagle is prone to deception, and the biggest form of deception is
self-deception. It needs harmony and truth. The eagle needs self-perception,
then the eye that sees far functions from the heart. It needs purification and
transformation. Then the Scorpionic lizard transforms into the eagle. Then will
the eagle look down and form a pentagram of light as it casts its shadow over
the Earth."
But what eagle? Everybody knows the eagle is the ornithic icon of America,
the high-flying independent raptor, born free on the 4th of July. Then I
remembered there was a landscape nuance, too. Over a decade ago a Philadelphia
architect discovered the unmistakable impression of an eagle's head in the
landscape soils map of northeastern Pennsylvania. This young eagle was huge,
extending for more than 200 miles across rugged forested countryside. The
eagle's virtual image in the soils map was very different than the kind of
topological conformity we've found in landscape zodiac imprints. This eagle was
a national logo signature written into the very soil of America as a beneficent
image of a positive destiny successfully attained---an auspicious icon from our
future. For the destiny of most of continental America---including its hawkish
seat of government in zodiacal Washington, D.C.--- nesting precariously in the
Scorpio pent face of Gaia's plan-net grid, is to undergo the tumultuous
transformation in identity from the scorpion into the eagle.
So the egg-born Pocumtuck golden child will speak re-assuring wisdom words of
AL to the Pennsylvania Scorpionic eagle who will fly back along the Mer-Line to
the Hyperborean Albion slowly awakening under the aegis of Virgo. Or, coming
along the Mer-Line in the other direction, the Virgin Mother's warm regard will
superintend the dying-rebirthing scorpion in its radical life passage. Again,
it's basically a matter of spiritual engineering on a global scale. Sometimes
it's hard not to talk in what sounds like tradesman's jargon, but the simple
point is that highly significant events within the mythopoeic planetary being of
Gaia are increasingly underway as we push the membrane of the third millenium.
The only way to insure our safe passage across this problematic threshold is to
get out in the plan-net grid on some numinous hilltop and get angelic !
It was dusk when we emerged from the emerald and regrouped on the dewy grass of
Davis Hill. Fireworks from nearby Amherst were already scintillating the clear
blue evening sky. The golden child of Pocumtuck had gotten off to an auspicious
start today on America's Independence Day. The etheric outlines of the emerald
were nearly palpable before us on Davis. Its walls hummed in the wind like
tightly-stretched drum skins. In projecting the emerald we had in effect created
a marvellous musical instrument, a sound resonator, an amplifier for the music
of Gaia that was wired to 500 separate emerald speakers around the planet. It
would be a shame to leave Davis without filling the emerald with a little
mantric speech.
Merlin had just the thing for us. It struck him as so funny he couldn't even
say it with a straight face. "Like most things, it's an open secret,"
he said at last." Then he shouted: Ar-thur! then lowering his voice to a
deep chant, hum. "Do that three times, "Merlin advised. "That'll
rattle the emerald. That's the sound of the Solar Logos, the Word made flesh
through communication." We made our Ar-thur! shouts sensing this spoken
solar vibration moving in energizing waves through the entire landscape body of
the Pocumtuck golden child. Maybe it even reached the alert ears of the
Pennsylvania eagle. We didn't know. That would have to wait until our next
episode of plan-net geomancy, and what we learned would make another chronicle
of our walking in Albion.
Crossing the Threshold - Freelance Initiations Off
the Map
©1995 Richard Leviton
There is a pivotal moment in the film, Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back,
that perfectly illustrates the initiation process. The young Luke Skywalker
enters a dark cave armed only with his light sword. When he reaches its center,
he is fiercely attacked by a veiled warrior. He believes it to be Darth Vader,
the second most evil person in the empire. After hard combat, Skywalker defeats
Vader and cuts him down, but when he removes his attacker's visor, Skywalker has
a shock: it is himself he has fought. Where did Vader disappear to? He was never
there.
That's the initiation joke (and solemn truth) that his mentor, Obiwan-kenobi,
hasn't told him because he couldn't. Skywalker must see it on his own,
unprepared. Initiation is a programmed psychic shock, as Skywalker will learn in
his training to become a revered Jedi knight; it is both test and induction.
Both will gauge whether the candiate is ready to join a secret fraternity of the
accomplished, in this case, the lineage of Jedi knights. The test: can you fight
without being angry? The induction: you are your biggest enemy. Watch out for
the Darth Vader (or "the dark side of the force") within. Don't fall
for its outer projection as a supposed enemy.
Passing the test is the induction; even to take the test of initiation, you
must cross a threshold. To sustain the import of initiation, you must then
recognize a greater, broader reality and make it permanently yours. The
initiation process inducts you into this larger world, and, inducting, it gives
you its mark of recognition: you are worthy to be one among us, say the Elders.
WE MUST ALL BECOME GRAIL KNIGHTS CROSSING THE THRESHOLD
This larger world has many aspects. If you are a youth on the verge of
puberty, it is the troubling, intoxicating world of adulthood and sexuality.
Women, partly on account of menarche, and partly thanks to the immense work of
feminist cultural resuscitation of the earlier wiccan and
"pagan/Goddess" mythos, offer more reliable and systematic initiation
rituals for adolescent girls.
Initiation for girls is biologically encoded with the onset of menstruation,
but for boys an outer event has always been required to wrest them away from the
charmed virginity of childhood. Tribal male initiation rituals often involved
ritual circumcision accompanied by a bold, irrevocable severing of the boy's
ties to his mother and family. The mother, as she must, sat passively by as her
son was taken from her into the world of men.
The adult males among Australian Aborigines, for example, would induct the
boy into their particular totem clan and dreaming sites. Something of great
value must be at stake, preferably the candiate's life, for otherwise, the
initiation would lack sufficient edge to propel the candiate into a new reality.
Carlos Castaneda had to jump off a high cliff and dissolve his body into another
reality to convince his magus, Don Juan Matus, that he was a worthy apprentice.
Elders in Native American tribes sent their adolescent males into the landscape,
alone and without food or shelter. The youth was expected to have a formative
vision quest: an animal spirit or perhaps tribal ancestor would present a
symbolic vision and give him a new name worthy of adulthood.
A change of names always plays a central role in initiation rituals. Jacob,
the biblical father of the 12 tribes of Israel, was renamed Israel after
wrestling with the Elohim angel. His new name reflected his spiritual
attainment; it was a mark signifying that he had crossed a threshold and had
become half angel. Many in the new age generation in Europe and the United
States have followed the ancient Hindu, Buddhist, and Sufi traditions of taking
a new religious name to mark their initiation by a guru in that tradition. Or
perhaps you've sat nose to nose with a genuine Zen Master: there are no new
names for who is there to be named, but if you want a vivid initiation beyond
words and categories, try this one. You won't know what you just woke up to.
Once he wakes up to his soul life, every human soul has a secret name known
only to God, the person's two guardian angels, and the person himself, says
Western esoteric tradition. Meeting your soul across the spiritual threshold is
an initiation that can happen at any age. It's not always a pleasant experience.
In the old forms of esoteric Christianity and occult training, this alarming
encounter with a deeper, previously hidden part of yourself was called Meeting
the Guardian of the Threshold. The Austrian spiritual scientist Rudolf Steiner
suggested that the Guardian represents the unacknowledged astral body and
emotional nature of each human being. Imagine all of your dreams (and
nightmares) and unconscious thoughts expressed as a single being: that's the
Guardian. For many of us, this Guardian can be a lot like Darth Vader, even
worse-a world-class monster.
Until the late 20th century began deconstructing all cultural forms and
ethnic identities, traditional societies maintained their customs of supervising
the important life transitions. Boys became men, girls became wives, wives
became mothers, husbands became grandfathers-there was always an established
ritual form or cultural container to shape and guide these important, generic
initiation events. Similarly, secret societies had their established ways of
inducting new members into their way |
