SUBLUNAR SPACE - Journal

The Bitter Last Spoonful

2026-05-14T12:00:00+02:00

A complicated but sincere eulogy for chaos magician Gordon White.

Gordon White died yesterday while traveling in Peru. The surprising news hit me a bit more than I'd like to admit.

May the gods have mercy and bless his soul and ease the grief for his family and friends.

I fell out with him five years ago, when conspiracy peddling, doom-mongering, and anti-scientific charlatanry had taken over much of his intellectual output and Rune Soup turned more and more into a sect. Whatever came after reached me only from a distance and through the social media grapevine, as he seemed to have completed his transformation into a full-blown "Alex Jones of occulture", an online army of cultists included.

Much as his early departure from this realm surprised me, on second thought, it didn't really. With his Goldilocks approach to "shamanism" and healing traditions, and skepticism of medicine in general, he was practically courting disaster. Let alone the years he spent bullying entities for which he had neither sufficient understanding nor respect.

Rest in Peace

That said, I genuinely wish him a safe journey into whatever comes next, and I'm willing to give him the benefit of the doubt as to how much of what he put into the world in the last years came from his own heart, and how much came from forces that had taken hold of him.

I definitely owe Gordon thanks for all the inspiration, brilliant ideas, and sharp hot takes. My ventures into magic and animist ways of seeing the world would probably never have happened if my cynical atheist old self hadn't discovered and become obsessed with his podcast and writings back in the 2010s.

Through Rune Soup and Gordon's idea of "finding the others," I was fortunate to make a number of meaningful connections and dear friendships with likeminded fellow seekers and disillusioned Ex-Soupies, for which I'm deeply grateful.

O Lords, may his troubled soul rest in peace through your mercy. Amen

Hodie Hodie

2025-07-27T20:00:00+02:00

Here is a brief report of a just recently remembered impromptu act of magic I did during a very difficult itme two years ago with my six‑year‑old daughter that took effect instantly.

Vogon Territory

Mid October 2023. A week after the horrific events of October 7¹. Early morning.

My current temporary resident visa for Israel was due to expire three weeks later and we had an appointment with the immigration office scheduled for that date to extend it. Due to the complete chaos, the war that had just broken out, and the state of emergency a lot of the public administration was on hold and most branches closed.

My wife T had the wild idea to just drive there today to be there when it opened and ask them if we could just do it. This was an unthinkable request even during normal operational capacity and always required a scheduled appointment and hours of waiting. Research and anecdotes of other citizens backed this up.

On top of that, Middle Eastern civil clerks value their momentary moods way more than regulations or streamlined process, so any interaction with them is always a gamble. It's a pain to deal with Vogons² anywhere, but here they come with an attitude 🤌🏽.

But we tried anyway - mainly to have more flexibility in being able to re-enter the country in case we needed to escape the war for a few weeks rather sooner than later (problems I never imagined having to deal with).

I started thinking about how to nudge this improbable task magically to our favour. There was no time to do any ritual nor cast sigils, or anything else, but I remembered St. Expedite, the expert in "no time for..." cases.

I whispered a quick made up prayer before getting in the car and felt like a total imposter.

After a frustrating morning rush hour drive, we climbed the perpetually broken escalator of the run down shopping center that hosts the immigration office and stepped into the spacious lobby, its marble-and-nicotine color palette stretching beneath high ceilings. The queue was already quite long. My daughter E and I sat down on some chairs in a corner while my wife T waited in line.

A Centurion's Cogency

E had a little sketchbook with her and asked me what to draw. She was bored. I suddenly had an idea: "draw a Roman soldier with a palm branch in one hand and a cross in the other!" She found it an oddly specific request but happily started sketching. We refined it by adding a crow and having him say "Hodie!" and I explained to E that this guy might help us get a visa extension today.

She looked at me skeptically and asked me how. So I quickly briefed her that this was a way to do magic and that we needed to pretend that we already had success - so much that we would really believe it!

I asked her to imagine St. Expedite flying through the room and whispering into the bouncer's ear to let us in and to the clerk inside to give us a visa. So we did.

When we saw that T was at the front of the line and the grumpy security officer was about to address her. E and I both whispered "Hodie!" three times.

They exchanged a few sentences, the guy nodded and T looked over with a surprised look, waving us to come.

Inside we immediately got called to some clerk's desk and I had my renewed visa around 20 minutes later!

T was shocked how all of this was possible and I told her on the way back to the car that we might have just had some divine intervention from a Christian saint.

E was super excited that she did some REAL MAGIC and of course wanted to do more!

The Art of the Deal

Expeditus always acts swiftly but legend says you can boost his efficiency when there's something in it for him. He's modest though and responds best to public praise. What has worked for me is posting his icon on socials online along with a prayer.

Here are the posts I published on Instagram after both times Saint Expedite had helped me:

On October 7, 2023, Hamas and other Palestinian militant groups launched coordinated armed incursions from the Gaza Strip into the Gaza envelope of southern Israel, the first large-scale invasion of Israeli territory since the 1948 Arab–Israeli War. In total, 1,195 people were killed and the attack initiated the ongoing Gaza war. ↩
In Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy the Vogons are an alien race from the planet Vogsphere who are employed as the galactic government's bureaucrats. More info on this fandom wiki page ↩

Sublunar Sublimity

2025-06-23T15:30:00+02:00

In this essay, I want to unpack the personal gnosis that emerged from my initiation into the sphere of the Moon in early 2021 — partly to make sense of the waves this experience set in motion over the past few years, and partly to share my notes with others who may find echoes of their own path. The insights that surfaced don't immediately align neatly with the Moon's typical associations, and I believe they offer a perspective worth exploring.

Lunatic Fringe

When I did my lunar initiation I lived in a house that was basically a row of caves carved into the basalt rock in the arid and rural volcanic slopes in the South of Tenerife. Sleeping in a cave gives you a very different quality and depth of sleep and in my case resulted in very vivid dreams.

During that time I was researching and practicing the Gateway Experience¹ developed by the Monroe Institute through a series of guided audio sessions called Hemi-Sync Tapes that helps practitioners enter altered states of consciousness through a technique using binaural beats to synchronize brain hemispheres. The tapes aim to facilitate out-of-body experiences, deep meditation, enhanced focus, and exploration of non-physical realms by progressively training the mind to enter expanded states of awareness. Every day I tried to get into an altered state by following the guided meditations on the first tape, with varying and overall unsatisfactory results.

Part of the reason why I wanted to initiate into the sphere of the moon at this point was the expectation of improving my research experience. I remembered reading that this initiation had helped other seekers improve their clairvoyant faculties, scrying abilities, and general intuitive skills.

What unfolded instead was a mirror turned inward, revealing a completely hidden terrain I didn't yet have a name for.

I performed the initiation ritual in something of a rush, with only about 15 minutes of preparation after a stressful morning running errands across half the island and just before a friend was due to visit. For suffumigation, I chose the local herb incienso (Artemisia canariensis), which grows abundantly in this part of the island and whose scent helped calm me. What stood out and had not occurred with any of the other Seven Spheres except Helios was a vivid inner image: an angelic being, seated in a contemplative pose, holding a long staff in one hand, with a large cape, shawl, or flowing fabric billowing behind him in the wind.

A few hours after my ritual, I had more friends over for barbecue and beers. Normally I slip easily into the role of the attentive host, managing the atmosphere and keeping things flowing. But something had shifted. My attention turned inward — or rather, toward one person in particular, let's call her M. I became acutely aware of M.'s rising discomfort, not just observing it but feeling it with an unfamiliar intensity. I couldn't perform my usual role. It was as if the ritual had altered my consciousness.

M., with her sun, and ascendant in Cancer, quite literally embodies lunar energy. That evening, it felt like I was seeing the world through her eyes — emotionally attuned, sensitive to atmosphere, and unwilling to override what felt wrong. When she unexpectedly ended the night by asking everyone to go home — calmly, and clearly — I was stunned. It completely broke the flow of social expectations, but it also felt right and necessary.

A memory surfaced: years ago, during a loud and boozy birthday dinner with a former partner's family, I had suddenly quietly disassociated, then got up and walked straight out into the night, completely overwhelmed. I hadn't thought of that moment in years, but now it returned with new clarity.

After sharing this with M. in the conversations that followed, we began speaking more openly about how we move through the world — about forgetfulness, fractured attention, procrastination, sensory overwhelm.

In the following weeks, I found myself diving into a series of rabbit holes — reading, researching, listening, watching — anything that could help me make sense of what was stirring inside me. Each discovery peeled back another layer of my past. I began revisiting old memories, moments I had long tucked away or brushed off, and saw them in an entirely new light. What once seemed like personal failings or quirks, of which some I had learned to mask, now began to take on a different shape — patterns, signs, clues that had been there all my life without me realizing it.

What had begun as an external initiation was becoming an inward unveiling. Maybe this wasn't just empathy. Maybe it was recognition of something completely new. I started to suspect that I have what the world of mental health professionals calls "ADHD", perhaps even with traces of "Autism".

I have struggled in the last years with associating the intense transformation of my self-perception with the Lunar initiation because of the lack of classic lunar archetypes. It initially felt coincidental and totally unrelated. Instead of unlocking psychic abilities or dream visions in the way I had hoped for, it seemed to draw me into something far subtler — into the realm of perception itself.

That's when I turned to astrology.

Drawing Down the Moon

In Hellenistic astrology, the Moon is closely related to sleep, dreams, and the imaginal realm — acting as a mirror or mediator and the ruler of the dream-state, which is fluid, symbolic, and emotionally charged.

The Greek Titan goddess Selene (Luna) embodies the orb of the moon and its constant change. She is the sister of the sun, Helios and the dawn, Eos. Her great love is the beautiful human shepherd prince Endymion who was granted eternal youth and immortality by Zeus and placed in a state of eternal slumber. His heavenly bride consorts with him every night.²

It is important to understand that being the planet closest to Earth the ancients also saw the Moon as much more tied with one's physical incarnation and physical body as opposed to one's mental or spiritual body. It governs moisture, change, and rhythm — all qualities tied to biological cycles.

This primal physicality is reflected in another lunar goddess often syncretized with Selene: Artemis, embodying the skill of hunting, wild animals, and the hostility of wilderness itself. She is an independent free woman who does not need any partner and is one of the three Greek goddesses over whom Aphrodite has no power. Surrounded by her nymphs she delights in hunting and punishes harshly those who cross her.³

The Moon represents the hardcoded unconscious assumptions we've carried since the beginning — deeply rooted attitudes absorbed from our parents, inherited instinctual tendencies, and, most significantly, psychological patterns shaped by our earliest childhood experiences, both nurturing and wounding.

The action of the Moon tends to be unconscious. Either it is part of the structure of the self that has not been examined (though it influences our thinking and perception every minute of the day), or it relates to experiences that were very early, even prenatal, and which are therefore not conscious.⁶

In my chart, these aspects are amplified by the Moon being placed in her domicile in Cancer and in the fourth house — the Hypogeion, or "under the earth." This position anchors her influence deep in the foundations of life: ancestry, home, and inner identity.

Being the lowest of the celestial spheres the Moon is also seen as a transmitter of images from the divine or astral realms above to the human soul in the sublunar realms below.

This aspect of existing in and being able to pass through different realms is best personified by the third great Hellenic Moon goddess Hecate, associated with crossroads, night, magic, witchcraft, and the underworld. She is also often syncretized with Selene, especially in Helleno-Kemetic magical texts.

Hecate is widely accepted as a goddess of the fringes, ambivalent and polymorphous in essence, evading conventional boundaries and clear definition. She is generally represented as three-formed, triple-bodied, or triple-faced, having one head of a dog, one of a serpent, and one of a horse. In other representations, her animal heads include those of a cow and a boar. Hecate is associated with borders, thresholds, crossroads, the 'between' and, by extension, realms outside or beyond the world of the living.⁴

The astrological associations of the Moon are informed by the mythological narratives of the goddesses embodied by the planet. Studying them helped me contextualize my initiatory experience with lunar archetypes and better understand their relation to a way of being in the world that is commonly labeled as 'neurodivergent'.

Masks of Selene

Regina nemorum, sola quae montes colis et una solis montibus coleris dea, conuerte tristes ominum in melius minas. O magna siluas inter et lucos dea, clarumque caeli sidus et noctis decus, cuius relucet mundus alterna uice, Hecate triformis, en ades coeptis fauens.⁷

Though often rather seen as a tale of desire and longing, the myth of Selene and Endymion also speaks to the discovery of love, beauty, and meaning in quiet presence, receptive stillness, and the liminal space of dreams and inward journeys. It resonates with my life-long tendency to introversion, quietly indulging in and getting a lot of joy out of my own weird special interests.

The goddess Artemis embodies a refusal to conform to social norms of affection, gender roles, or civility. Her fierceness and autonomy resonate with my own experiences of emotional intensity that defies domestication. I have always had a strong urge for autonomy and fierce resistance to normative social rules, often to my disadvantage but always with a strong inner feeling of satisfaction.

Her dominion over crossroads, thresholds, and liminal spaces makes Hecate the most potent archetype for neurodivergent experience. Her triple form not only alludes to the concept of masking⁵ but resists categorization and reflects a consciousness that is multifaceted, paradoxical, and attuned to multiple realities at once. As a goddess of liminality she dwells at the edges of normative perception, navigating unseen paths, and inhabiting states that are neither one thing nor another.

In many ways, I recognize myself in this archetype. I adapt easily to changing environments and enjoy moving fluidly between different social circles. I either daydream or hyperfocus. I am drawn to cutting edge novelty, yet desperately haunted by overwhelming nostalgia, often drifting between realms — caught in the tides of past and future. My fascination with liminal spaces and fringe ideas now finds full expression in the weird magical journey I'm walking today.

All three lunar goddesses clearly resonate with different aspects of neurodivergence — one through introversion and fluid states of consciousness, the other through non-normative sovereignty and instinct, and the third through liminality, and a polymorphous identity.

Looking back, I see now that the Moon initiation absolutely nailed it.

Lunar Landing

My newly awakened Lunar awareness didn't give me the clarity I thought I was seeking — it gave me something subtler, and ultimately more profound: a new way of seeing.

What I once labeled as weakness or failure now feels more like a shifting tide — the ebb and flow of focus, energy, connection, and presence. Traits I had spent years trying to correct or conceal now appear as signatures of lunar archetypes: sensitivity to mood, to memory, to atmosphere; a porousness to the inner and outer worlds alike.

This new awareness doesn't erase the past, but it allows me to feel it differently — to inhabit it with more softness and more nuance. It also won't change the future. This isn't resolution — the Moon doesn't resolve. It constantly moves, reflects, transforms.

But it provides light in the darkness — enough to navigate by.

CIA Document: Document and Analysis of the Gateway Process ↩
Information about Selene on theoi.com ↩
Information about Artemis on theoi.com ↩
Information about Hecate on theoi.com ↩
Article on Masking by the UK's National Autistic Society ↩
Hand, Robert. Horoscope symbols. Schiffer+ ORM, 1997. pg. 52 ↩
"O queen of the groves (Artemis), thou who in solitude lovest thy mountain-haunts, and who upon the solitary mountains art alone held holy, change for the better these dark, ill-omened threats. O great goddess of the woods and groves, bright orb of heaven (Selene), glory of the night, by whose changing beams the universe shines clear, O three-formed Hecate, lo, thou art at hand, favouring our undertaking." Seneca, Phaedra 406 ff (trans. Miller) (Roman tragedy C1st A.D.) ↩

Call of the Siren

2025-06-11T19:30:00+02:00

From the banks of a canal in Berlin where I first gave offerings to an unseen current, through Tenerife's black-lava crucible where I was broken and re-forged, to the fragrant slopes of Mount Carmel I now roam, this essay tries to make sense of the occult aspects of migration. It pulls on the threads of personal metamorphosis, aquatic star goddesses who kept surfacing along the way, and the realization that landscape can replace ritual.

The Other Lady

In retrospect I can't help but acknowledge that my relocation two years ago feels like it was a logical continuation of some kind of magical pilgrimage. What had started as a devotional routine to the river spirit of Berlin years ago has in fact been a slow and steady accumulation of Saturnian forces that eventually culminated in taking the pandemic as a doorway out of a stale life. Following the lure of the dark god I took my family and journeyed to Tenerife just to have my continental ego shattered on his black lava anvil in the middle of the Atlantic ocean. Ore smelted under the watchful eyes of various divine feminine hypostases, and forged into a more brittle yet purer neurodivergent me.

Saturn's syncretized Phoenician form of Baal-Hammon is physically present on every inch of the Canarian isle itself, from the black cliffs across the pine forests to the bleak volcanic mountain tops. His female consort Tanit materializes as the local divine mother, the Virgin of Candelaria, with whom I had formed a relationship throughout the years that could be described as 'disorganized attachment'¹: a deep desire for connection, yet at the same time, fearing it. The Blessed Virgin of Candelaria has accompanied me as a protective spirit since my introduction to her in 2018 and especially during my three year ritual journey of planetary self-initiation.

Looking back at that time of living on Tenerife I find it compelling that the other great Mother Mary that is fiercely venerated by the locals, especially in the town Puerto de la Cruz I lived in for two years — is La Virgen del Carmen, Stella Maris — the star of the sea, protectress of seafarers and fishermen². Just like with La Virgen de la Candelaria, her local cult carries undercurrents that feel deeply pagan.

Every year on Tuesday before her feast day on the 16th of July her statue is taken out of the local shrine at the church of Matriz de Nuestra Señora de la Peña de Francia and carried to the port in a procession. Sweets and chocolate are distributed among the tens of thousands of spectators who came to attend from across the Canary islands and beyond. The brotherhood of fishermen and sailors chant "La Salve Marinera"³ and the icon is carried out into the ocean on a boat and sometimes accompanied by other decorated vessels. She is then returned to the land and brought back to her shrine in another large procession that ends with fireworks.

Both the ritual of her death and rebirth like return from the sea and her association with the 'Star of the Sea' strongly resonate with the star and sea imagery of an older goddess with vast popularity: Aphrodite/Venus. The goddess born from the foam of the sea⁴, Aphrodite also bears the title of Ourania (Οὐρανία = heavenly) or "Queen of Heaven", and is associated with "spiritual love". It is mirrored in the symbol most strongly associated with Our Lady of Mount Carmel: the brown scapular⁵, a wearable devotional item signifying spiritual commitment. To top it off, both are strongly associated with the "morning star"⁶ — one manifests as the bright planet Venus, the other is venerated as "Stella Maris" — the star of the sea.

Chasing the Star

In late 2021 I briefly lived in shared house in the town of La Orotava just above Puerto de la Cruz. It was here in this room that I felt compelled to perform my initiation into the planetary mysteries of Venus. One of the reasons for this was the very curious coincidence that my furnished room had a large tapestry above the bed: a very unique artistic rendition⁷ of the 17th Major Arcana Tarot card "The Star"⁸. It shows a nude woman emerging out of a body of water that is up to her waist, raising both hands up in a praising gesture towards a radiant star surrounded by constellations. In the water in front of her is a pink lotus flower. Among some magical symbols next to her is the astrological symbol of Venus. It was the most venusian version of the Star card I had ever come across. As a bonus it has the number 80 on it which I immediately interpreted as matching my birth year.

In most Tarot decks the depicted star on the Star card has eight points. This calls into mind a very old iconic Mesopotamian symbol: the eight pointed Star of Ishtar⁹ specifically associated with the planet Venus.

In scholarly circles it is widely believed¹⁰¹¹ that Aphrodite is a later syncretic form of this exact same ancient Near Eastern goddess Ishtar (also known as Astarte, ʿAttart, or Innana). They share many syncretisms, even more so in her popular form as Aphrodite Pandemos (Πάνδημος = common to all the people), namely sexuality, procreation, beauty, and sensual pleasures (aspects that Our Lady of Mount Carmel is clearly missing for very uniquely Catholic reasons 😹).

What Astarte does have very much in common with our Blessed Virgin of Mount Carmel though, is her geographic place of origin: the Levant. The earliest record of Astarte is from the 3rd millennium BC kingdom of Ebla¹² southwest of today's Syrian city of Aleppo. Although her cult spread across Syria, Canaan, Cyprus, coastal Palestine and even parts of Egypt, the major centers of her worship during the Iron Age were the Phoenician city-states of Sidon, Tyre, and Byblos (all in today's Lebanon).

Our Lady of Mount Carmel was conceived as the "Lady of the Place" by Christian hermits who lived on the Carmel hills in the North of Israel and later formed the Carmelite Order and the Stella Maris Monastery¹³ overlooking the city of Haifa. It was on this same hill that according to scripture the Abrahamic prophet and wizard Elijah¹⁴ had dwelled in a cave and famously challenged and defeated the local prophets of Ba'al and Astarte in a magical battle. The Bible doesn't explicitly mention Astarte in this context but instead another related goddess:

Now summon all Israel to meet me on Mount Carmel, along with the four hundred and fifty prophets of Baal and four hundred prophets of Asherah who eat at Jezebel's table.²³

Often falsely conflated with Astarte the other great Levantine goddess Asherah¹⁵ is more of a primordial mother of the gods and a nature and fertility goddess, but with deep connections to the sea as her son is Yam, the sea itself and her epithet is "Lady of the Sea". Her cult was widespread throughout ancient Israel and there are even controversial traces of her being considered the consort of the Hebrew god YHVH¹⁶ himself. Our Lady of Mount Carmel obviously also syncretizes many of Asherah's aspects which ties her even stronger to the sacred geography of the mountain range.

One of the surprising results of my Venus ritual had been an immediate and growing appreciation of someone I did not expect at all in such a Hermetic framework: Jesus Christ. I was puzzled by it back then, but now, after unraveling all the above mentioned intertwined threads of the divine feminine it makes a lot of sense: channeling Venus in my local Canarian context at the time inevitably resonated with the Blessed Virgin of Mount Carmel in all of her syncretic aspects.

But the surprise connection runs even deeper. The morning star is not only the celestial body of Aphrodite and Astarte, but also one of the self-designations Jesus uses:

I am the root, the descendant of David — the bright morning star.²⁴

This Venusian current runs even earlier into the Christian story than most of us realize. According to some astronomical studies¹⁷, the Star of Bethlehem itself may have been the bright heliacal rising of Venus precisely on the day of the Jewish New Year (the day ancient Israel and Mesopotamia celebrated the enthronement of the king). This celestial occurrence matches the moment of September 1st, 2 BCE at 4:30 a.m. local time in Bethlehem. If this reading holds any truth, it means that Venus not only marks the Christ's spiritual identity but also quite literally signaled his earthly arrival.

Meet me on Mount Carmel

Looking back I see my Venus initiation the pivot point of my personal process of transformation and physical relocation. It was at this moment that the forces of Saturn passed the baton of my destiny on to Venusian ones. In the same way I had followed the former from Berlin to the Canary island of Tenerife I would now follow the latter from her remote Canarian shrine to her original stomping grounds: Mount Carmel.

That's exactly where my family and I moved to in early 2023: a small rural village situated on the actual Carmel mountain range just south of Haifa — into a half abandoned house of my wife's long deceased grandparents. The area is much greener, quieter and more provincial than the hectic urban center of the country where most people live. Most of Israel's Arab citizens live up here¹⁸ and coexistence is a daily lived reality. Of course that doesn't mean it's easy and chill, but those terms don't apply to the Middle East anyway.

I have begun to love Haifa. It's a weird and confusing place with neighborhoods sprinkled among hilltops, glued to the side of the mountain, tucked into canyons and valleys and crammed between the steep cliffs and the sea. It's easy to get lost and navigating the ups and downs constantly messes up your internal map of the place. The tragic normality of ongoing missile or drone incursion threats led to a semi-permanent jamming of the GPS signal in various neighborhoods¹⁹, so in many places the internal map and analog navigation is all you have. Getting lost is a feature of the place. Wherever I go I encounter Orthodox Jews, Christian Arabs, Druze, Ahmadi Arabs, Ba'hais, secular Russians, American expats, punks, drunks, surfers, hippies, and hipsters that work in IT. It's a crazy, exhausting, beautiful mix.

It is telling that one of Haifa's neighborhoods right by the sea that is frequented by surfers has the name Bat Galim²⁰ ("daughter of the waves") and that a certain beach in Kyriat Yam in the city's north is repeatedly haunted by mermaid sightings²¹ ²². This is sea goddess territory.

I remember a few months back I finally visited the Stella Maris monastery, excited to form a relationship with the famous Lady of this place but then found that I was not really able to vibe with her despite (or maybe because of?) the meaning-laden holiness of this landscape. I felt weirdly disconnected, not really able to relate. It just felt a bit awkward. What was happening? Probably oversaturation.

Magical Materialism

What I mostly enjoy is my new hermit life with long walks alone on the vast and empty sand beaches, through the olive groves near our village, or the wild bushland and forests of the Carmel. It has become my daily spiritual practice and self-care routine. It amuses me now that in the very secular Berlin I used to have a fairly regular ritual habit with daily planetary prayers and monthly headless rites but since I am here in the literal "Holy Land" — one of the most excessively religious places in the world — my need for any kind of ritual habit has completely faded.

On some days when I am out and about and I feel that my mind wanders off too far into the realms of mundane monkey anxieties I resort to cycling my favorite mantra borrowed from the Hesychasts that always manages to pull me back into the present:

Kyrie Iesou Christe, eleison me

(Reciting the beginning up to the comma inhaling, and the end exhaling.)

I feel like I lost my need to shift to an imaginal ceremonial mindset to fulfill my own spiritual yearnings. It feels like pretentious cosplay to me now. Oversaturation. I remember that some mystical traditions — Gnostic, Sufi, and Eastern Orthodox among them — suggest that the true original sin was not disobedience, but distraction: the moment humanity fell out of direct presence and into fragmentation of attention. Rather than a single act, the Fall is seen as a loss of unified awareness of the Divine, a collapse into mental chatter and separation. As a neurodivergent, this is a topic I am painfully aware of.

Each morning the Carmel wind reminds me that geography can be liturgy. The thyme-scented air and the dusty light are my incense. Drifting through landscape is prayer. You just have to pay attention.

Here I wear no scapular but the salt on my skin, and it is enough.

The pilgrimage continues where it began: a body besides water. Each wave on the beach of Carmel is the same murky Berlin current, the same Atlantic surge on black lava cliffs — the siren never stopped luring me "home" — only changed shoreline.

Attachment Project Blog article on Avoidant Attachment Style ↩
Our Lady of Mount Carmel on Wikipedia ↩
The hymn "La Salve Marinera" with lyrics and translation ↩
Aphrodite's birth myth on Theoi ↩
Info on the Brown Scapular from Sisters of Carmel ↩
Wikipedia article on the planet Venus in different cultures ↩
Full Samiramay Tarot Deck (digital) on Vera Petruk's page ↩
Weird Studies podcast episode on The Star card ↩
Star of Ishtar Wikipedia article ↩
Info on Ištar and Aphrodite at the Melammu Project ↩
Sugimoto, David T. Transformation of a Goddess: Ishtar-Astarte-Aphrodite. Vol. 263. Academic Press/Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2014. Archive ↩
Archi, Alfonso. Ebla and its archives: Texts, history, and society. de Gruyter, 2015. ↩
Official Website of the Stella Maris monastery ↩
Mary and Elijah on the Carmelites website ↩
The Goddess Asherah: Queen of Heaven, Mother of Creation by Deanna Riddick on Medium ↩
Smith, Mark S. "God male and female in the Old Testament: Yahweh and his “Asherah”." Theological Studies 48.2 (1987): 333-340. ↩
The Star of Bethlehem from an astronomical and astrological perspective by Dieter Koch, Astrodienst ↩
Arab citizens of Israel Wikipedia article ↩
Why GPS can't find you in Haifa — article on GLOBES ↩
Wikipedia page of Bat Galim ↩
Jerusalem Post article from August 11, 2009 about mermaid sightings ↩
ynet article NBC: Kiryat Yam mermaid might be real from April 5, 2010 ↩
1 Kings 18:19 ↩
Revelation 22:16 ↩

Dark Night of the Soul

2023-07-10T19:30:00+02:00

This is the most difficult article I've written so far. I have less mental capacities to write than I used to and so much has happened since we set sails to our escape journey at the end of 2020. Little did I know that it would turn into a real odyssey.

I have written extensively about some of my experiences of planetary self-initiation in the past but I have come to realize that the further I progessed through the spheres the more meaningful and personal they became. It feels almost inappropriate to make all the details public here, due to their very personal nature and because they coincided with a difficult period of depression and crisis that took quite some time and effort to get out of. But I will try to briefly touch on them because they might actually be the most important magical experiences of my life.

The last time I had been through a similar personal upheaval and depression was over a decade ago around the time of my Saturn Return (while being completely ignorant of that concept). Back then I managed to shed several layers of self-perceived expectations and societal pressure that had kept my authentic self in confinement and came out of it feeling more like a grownup than before.

This time it was different. Not only in terms of the darkness and confusion I had to push through, as well as the mind-blowing levels of self-realization, but especially due to the magnitude of traumatizing fallout that directly influenced my immediate family. It's one thing to live through a period of depression by yourself, but when you are embedded in a family unit and have responsibilities as a spouse and parent, it is impossible to protect your loved ones from getting hurt.

Thus Spoke the Goddesses

Past planetary initiations had taught me about my relationship with my parents and the need for personal sovereignty (Jupiter), about the temporality of life and nonlinearity of time (Saturn), the art of war and listening to my instincts (Mars). They were all mind-blowing and exciting. In contrast, the initiations of the feminine planets I went through while living on the Canary Island of Tenerife turned out to be deeply soul shattering.

I had been especially looking forward to my Lunar initiation ritual, naively hoping it would help me get more lucid dreams or better psychic skills. Instead, the luminary goddess made me realize that significant parts of my past life had been a self-deceptive lie and that I actually tick all the boxes of an ADHD diagnosis while leaning heavily into the Autism spectrum. How's that for a surprise?

Facing Venus was something I had been scared of ever since starting the 7 spheres cycle, mainly due to the frightening experiences my mage friend Aaron of Charm the Water had gone through but I had to eventually do it and the ritual timing coincided with a very difficult relationship crisis. With equal intensity to her lunar kin the goddess of love and beauty made me ask myself very uncomfortable questions about my interpersonal experiences and abilities that both directly tied into my newly discovered neurodiversity. On the upside - and very weird for a pagan goddess - my venusian initiation resulted in a sudden felt sense of closeness to - wait for it - I still can't really comprehend it: Jesus Christ.

Into the Abyss

So here I was, displaced on a volcanic saturnian island in the middle of the Atlantic. Grappling with mental health issues, questioning my whole past life, having lost my career and general faith in humanity during a raging pandemic, having no friends and a shattered marriage apparently wasn't enough: I conducted Covid-19 during a short trip to Romania and infected my family when I returned. It hit us hard. My wife the hardest. I don't know how we all managed to not lose our minds completely and I really have problems recalling memories of that time. It was grim.

Three months after having officially recovered from Covid-19 I almost drowned from attempting to swim in the sea. My physical condition was at its worst ever, I could barely breathe and it all really bummed me out. When Russia invaded Ukraine at the end of February 2022 it was the cherry on the despair cake and I lost it. I drifted off into a serious depression of which I barely recall anything besides fractions of images. I was suffering heavy post-Covid symptoms, overwhelming fatigue, a brainfog so intense I was unable to read or write properly.

In the months that followed, my wife - who miraculously hadn't left me - somehow managed to drag us all off the island and we spent several weeks traveling. We met my parents on their holidays on the neighbor island of Fuerteventura, we also traveled all our former homes, reconnecting with family and friends and it felt like collecting long forgotten shards of my soul.

Tikkun Atzmi

I wandered the endless white beaches of Fuerteventura, drowning in nostalgia from childhood vacation memories, reliving the bliss of those magical times, letting months of stuck tears flow.

I walked the streets of Berlin with a never before encountered intense sense of placeness. I ritually visited every house and neighborhood I had lived in for the past 20 years. I was overwhelmed by forgotten memories, almost breaking down on several occasions, finding myself crying, finally integrating grief and loss of past failed relationships and old friends.

I wandered through the forests around my hometown, in awe of the intensity of how much 'home' this place felt, reconnecting with my parents and friends from teenage times. We ended up spending several weeks in Heidelberg and I couldn't shake the feeling that immersing myself in this ancestral place contributed a lot to my recovery. I finished the seven Spheres with Mercury at his temple on the same mountain I had started the planetary journey three years earlier.

It was during that time that we decided to close this weird liminal chapter of our life and leave Tenerife for good. What had started as a hopeful and optimistic escape had turned out to be a dark underworld journey in the middle of a tropical paradise. And like every heroes journey it felt crucial to finish it properly and to return home. But what does 'home' even mean when you are a mixed background family? This had been one of our primary discussions in the last two years: where is our home? Where do we want to live? Where is our 'Ithaka' to return to?

We stayed on the island for just a few more weeks, wrapping up our life there and eventuall left the same way we had arrived - by land and sea - like Odysseus.

We arrived back in our old home of Berlin and rediscovered all of our belongings we had left behind two years before. Everything felt eerily familiar yet foreign and distant. In an almost manic tour de force we managed to get rid of the majority of our stuff, renovate the old flat and sublet it to a friend of ours - all within a month - and we took off to open a new chapter in a new place - yet another chapter of uncertainty but with ancestral ties: my wife's homeland, the holy land, Israel.

Solve et Coagula

I am still in the midst of an ongoing and probably never-ending process of re-framing and integrating my own past, re-adjusting my life to my newly realized neurodiversity and attempting to put it all into context. It's been a wild ride so far. My (also neurodiverse) wife and I have managed to reconcile and rebuild trust and are working through a ton of past baggage, both individual and common. Meanwhile I got the diagnosis of a liver condition resulting in raised cholesterole levels that might be the result of genetic disposition and long-covid. I take medication for that and since doing so I have been feeling much better physically. Also my brainfog has lifted to the point where I can read books again and write a few paragraphs of text. Overall I am hopeful and positive about the future and despite the intensity of dark experiences during the last two years I am grateful and in awe about the deep transformations I am going through. Jung called the process 'individuation', alchemists called it 'Magnum Opus', the 'Great Work' and now I know that 'great' refers to the incomprehensible heaviness of the 'work', the sacrifices and traumas one can endure on the way to a more authentic self.

I thank the planetary spirits, the gods and the theotokos for heeding my calls and pushing me through this magical adventure, the labyrinth of self-discovery that without proper divine help has the potential to merely become what's commonly referred to as 'midlife crisis'.

Covid Circumnavigation

2021-05-25T22:00:00+02:00

v1.1

This article is both, a brief report of our escape trip from Berlin to the Canary Islands by road and ship, and my personal animist take on the Covid-19 pandemic.

Traversing the Underworld

After what had felt like half an eternity of preparations without end in sight, renovating the van, getting rid of clutter, packing needed luggage, preparing our apartment for a sublet, on a Monday afternoon in November we finally found ourselves in the fully packed Ford Transit doomsday escape vehicle hitting the road, weeks behind schedule and full of anxiety considering the rumors of road blocks and checkpoints in fully locked down France and daily changing regional travel restrictions in Spain.

During our preparations we had always imagined our departure as a heroic and relieving moment of excitement, driving through the autumn sun in a cloud of goldy yellow leaves towards freedom. Instead we crawled slowly through the late afternoon rush-hour traffic, it was already getting dark and a few spots of pink dusk sunlight peeked through the otherwise grey November sky. When we finally left the vast metropolitan area of Berlin we found ourselves on a crowded highway full of trucks in complete darkness and it started to rain. We were all unnerved and tired. But also kind of proud that we were actually doing it.

Galloping across the globe like a horseman of the Apocalypse, flanked by locust plagues in Africa and rumours of Armageddon, the virus forced us from our workplaces and shopping malls into our homes. Factories closed down almost overnight. Flights were grounded. City streets are almost deserted. School is cancelled, along with exams. As a psychedelic rabbi put it, referring to the 24-hour Sabbath prohibition on travelling, operating switches or carrying objects — “The whole world is finally getting Shabbos”. ³

It took us one and a half days to drive through Germany past Kassel, and Frankfurt, the Schwarzwald almost all the way down to the corner where Germany, Switzerland and France meet. From there we crossed into France without experiencing any of the feared border controls, drove via the beautiful city of Orange in the Provence and then to St. Girons in the hills of Occitania. Some acquaintances of ours had moved there in 2016 fulfilling their dream. They treated us with good food, wine, great conversations, and plenty of play time for our daughter with their 6 and 8 years old kids. We really enjoyed the hospitality and sleeping in a real bed in a real house and not in our crammed camper.

The next day we drove further westwards towards the Atlantic ocean, the silhouettes of the Pyrenees always to our left. Only the slightly different design of the road signs made us realize that we had entered Spain at some point. Again: No borders, no police, nobody to stop us. After a mind-bending and dizzying drive through the tunnels and viaducts across steep valleys of the Spanish part of the Basque Country the landscape suddenly changed. We were overwhelmed by the sheer amount of blue sky arching across the rolling plains of Castile y Leon. It was the meaning of freedom poured into the shape of landscape. We found ourselves a camp spot on a small hill between the towns of Palencia and Valladolid. The sky was tinted orange and the wind smelled like Pine and Thyme.

The last stretch also went smoothly towards the South into Andalucia and we arrived in Sevilla where we spent the night parked up in the middle of the city. The next morning my wife had a kind of crisis. Our plan was that she and our daughter would take an airplane to the Canary Islands and I would follow a few days later with our van on the ferry. We both knew she was prone to sea-sickness and our plan was to make this final part of the trip as easy as possible. But now she feared being so far away from me for almost a week and risks of me not being able to travel at all during these crazy times of daily changing travel restrictions. We discussed it thoroughly, went through all alternative options and decided to stick with the original plan. After a quick breakfast we drove to the airport and said goodbye. I was very anxious. She was very anxious. Now it really did feel like some crazy escape trip. But we parted ways and they entered the airport.

All Too Human

Since the pandemic had hit us right after our return from Tenerife at the end of last winter I have come full circle about what to think and believe about this biopolitical dystopia we are living through right now. From initial panic to hypochondria, subsequent denial and conspiracy delirium, I have now arrived at a position of detached and sober skepticism mixed with animist awe. The former is not skepticism about the reality of the pandemic, but about the conspiracy hysteria around it. About the latter I will speak more further down the article.

After having dragged myself out of the conspiracy swamp and cut the Kool-Soup I am now actually pretty much on par with Naomi Klein's cynical but on-point assessment:

search for the term “global reset” and you will be bombarded with breathless “exposés” of a secret globalist cabal, headed by [WEF founder Klaus] Schwab and Bill Gates, that is using the state of shock created by the coronavirus (which is probably itself a “hoax”) to turn the world into a high-tech dictatorship that will take away your freedom forever: a green / socialist / Venezuela / Soros / forced vaccine dictatorship if the Reset exposé is coming from the far right, and a Big Pharma / GMO / biometric implants / 5G / robot dog / forced vaccine dictatorship if the exposé hails from the far left. Confused? That’s not on you. Less a conspiracy theory than a conspiracy smoothie, the Great Reset has managed to mash up every freakout happening on the internet — left and right, true-ish, and off-the-wall — into one inchoate meta-scream about the unbearable nature of pandemic life under voracious capitalism.

Back in June, the World Economic Forum, best known for its annual Davos summit, kicked off a lunge for organizational relevance [...]. The effort was called the Great Website — I mean the Great Reset. And through articles, videos, webinars, podcasts, and a book by WEF founder Klaus Schwab, it provided a coronavirus-themed rebranding of all the things Davos does anyway, now hastily repackaged as a blueprint for reviving the global economy post-pandemic by “seeking a better form of capitalism.” [...] the Great Reset encompasses some good stuff that won’t happen and some bad stuff that certainly will and, frankly, nothing out of the ordinary in our era of “green” billionaires readying rockets for Mars. Indeed, anyone with even a cursory knowledge of Davos speak, and the number of times it has attempted to rebrand capitalism as a slightly buggy poverty alleviation and ecological restoration program, will recognize the vintage champagne in this online carafe. ⁴

So, no I don't think any of the lockdowns, the travel restrictions, or the vaccine race are really that out of the ordinary in Capitalist Realism. When you take a close look it is merely humans trying to pretend they are still under control or alternatively pretending that other hidden human forces must be, because the alternative is too horrifying to bare in the late anthropocene: that the more than human world is real and wild and refuses to be tamed and compartmentalized.

Revelations

After having dropped T and E off at Sevilla airport I filled up the Transit and drove onto the highway towards Huelva in the morning sun, lots of worries and thoughts in my head. But besides that I was also really looking forward to having a few days break before the ferry ride, just by myself on the beach.

I exited the A-49 onto the A-483 to take a detour along the Andalucian coastline and I don't remember exactly where it was but the next song that played on the radio was David Bowie's epic track Heroes. I had never really been a fan of Bowie's but I sang along, feeling my body relax and my worries faint. At one point into the second or third verse when the reverb in Bowie's vocals kicked in...

...out of the blue I burst out in tears. Not just a bit, but really I hadn't cried like this for years. Streams and streams of tears ran down my face as I now almost yelled the lyrics...

We can beat them, for ever and ever. Oh we can be Heroes, just for one day

It was a profound moment... a real hero's journey moment. I somehow felt physically relieved and at the same time utterly overcome by despair and almost unbearable nostalgia. The song faded out and into the French 80s hit Voyage, Voyage by Desireless. The last time I had heard this song was probably as a child, decades ago. It had no meaning to me, but the nostalgia and synchronicity with this very moment were so overwhelming, my tears kept flowing...

Au dessus des vieux volcans, Glissent des ailes sous les tapis du vent, Voyage, voyage. Éternellement.

De nuages en marécages, De vent d'Espagne en pluie d'équateur. Voyage, voyage.

Vole dans les hauteurs, Au dessus des capitales, Des idées fatales, Regardent l'océan.⁵

I almost had to stop the car as I could barely see the road ahead, my eyes soaked in tears. I was shaking from head to toes and sobbing like a child. What was happening? I only realized this later but this seemingly endless liminal and timeless moment was an epiphany and a turning point.

I guess I cried out of relief and happiness that we had actually managed to do this wild trip, and had managed to come this far despite alleged travel bans. Happy that we would not have to spend the cold and long winter in locked down Berlin, stuck in a too small apartment with a curious and constantly bored child craving connection with other children while us parents would be overwhelmend and overstimulated, for months.

I also cried out of relief that the last intense months of emotional stress and growing, unexplainable paranoia, was hopefully over now. Relief also about the intense car trip with endless hours of driving we had put ourselves through in the last week having finally ended...but deep down this was not really all...

I recognized an overwhelming feeling of grief and loss and couldn't shake off a heavy, almost crushing nostalgia. It felt like the end of the world. And now thinking back, that was exactly it. A world had in fact ended.

Not only had my 15 years long career in the event business been completely wiped out from one day to another due to the pandemic, also our crypto-bourgeois dream of a worry-free world for our daughter's fundamentally important first couple of years seemed now gone.

Having survived and overcome the past ever-returning economic crises of the last decade had me left a bit proud about my ability to adapt and react, but this was different. It wasn't your run-of-the-mill capitalist crisis...

...it was as if an alien xenomorph agent had forced itself into our lives in the shape of a coronavirus. It had come to infect and disrupt, spread and colonize, not caring about our human civilizatorial constructs and narratives, our hierarchies, our inequality, our achievements, our battles, our complex social orders. No, it came through the microbial, sub-cellular back-door we had obviously overlooked for a century.

What was mostly stunning to me was that besides the threat to our biological integrity the virus had an even more disruptive effect onto our psychological integrity on a mass scale. It was not only a virus that on an individual level specialized in attacking out respiratory systems, but on a macro-level even more devastatingly attacking our collective mind.

The collapse of the planetary body is the consequence of a biological virus that provokes a (not so) lethal affection, but mainly it is the effect of a viral agent whose action is unknown: neither the immune system nor medical science know anything about the agent. The unknown stops the machine, the biological agent turns into an info-virus, and the info-virus unchains a psychotic reaction. ⁶

Fear, paranoia, despair everywhere. Even more than the fragility of our bodies the virus had revealed the fragility of our health system, our economic system, our civilization as a whole. The capitalist machine reacted with the same knee-jerk panic as the individualized objects within it.

The virus became most of all the great revealer of the reality of our existence underneath the layers and layers of narratives we mistake for the real.

The real is an altogether different matter than the possible, without any possible communication or mediation between the two. What lies outside possibility or beyond the range of possibilities – literally, the im-possible, or the event – is real, because the procedure whereby we fabricate the possible out of the real is always incomplete and deficient and falls short of the real. ⁷

Baal's Fort

After a stop by the sheer endless Andalucian beach I eventually arrived in the port city of Huelva in the estuary formed by the confluence of the Odiel and Tinto rivers. The city outskirts are dominated by dystopian and futuristic petrol industrial architecture and when you drive into the city you pass by a giant statue of a hooded figure leaning on a Tau cross looking out onto the sea. Apparently Christoph Columbus. Curious about the history of the city I did some research and was surprised:

The river mouth settlement dates back to 1200 BC when the Phoenicians called it "Un'u Ba'l" - Baal's Fort, due to a large black rock peninsula known since ancient times as "Saturn's Rock", now called "Monte Negro" which apparently served as an altar to their god Baal Melqart. The Romans later had a shrine to Persephone there. A holy site of chthonic deities. In Moorish times the new rulers erected a monastery for Muslim monks there, who were trained for battle. Later the knights Templar and then the Franciscans took over, also training their monks in weaponry. They founded the still existing Friary of La Rábida in the 13th century. And apparently Columbus stayed here before "discovering" the Americas. It was here where he managed to secure the money to pay for his trip. A shrine for a dark colonizing spirit.

From a magical point of view I found it weird but also very exciting that this ancient Saturnian port city is the one that connects the Saturnian island of Tenerife by ship route. Especially after all that happened on the island last year this city felt like a huge puzzle piece falling into place.

The Black God

The Covid-19 pandemic had gained global traction when Saturn had entered his sidereal home-sign of Capricorn last year. What a synchronicity! Wasn't he known to be the revealer of hard truths? Wasn't Saturn also associated with epidemics and diseases, especially respiratory ones? Wait a second...

This synchronicity has haunted me for the last few months and I attempted several tries to write this article about it. I wanted to take a step back and take a comparative look at the astrological significance of Saturn and the disruptions the virus had brought into our world.

Instead of trying to formulate all the thoughts and ideas about this synchronicity I decided that instead I will quote in length from an article on Saturn in Capricorn written the astrologist Austin Coppock in 2017 and alternate his quotes with memorable qoutes from articles I have read and bookmarked throughout the last year.

Take it as some kind of Remix if you will. A remix of other people's published thoughts about the pandemic that deeply resonated with me. Their formulations are better than I could ever write so why not just quote them, right?

Limits

Just as Saturn is the limit of the visible solar system, Saturn is concerned with boundaries and borders. A wall both encloses and excludes, separating one space from another and limiting interaction between the two. There is thus a strong architectural element to Saturn which extends to all constructed systems, including human hierarchies and institutions. Saturn’s position in a natal chart yields information about how well a person does with structure, as well as how they react to, and wield, authority. ²

Structural Faults:

If Covid-19 were spreading across a stable and resilient world, its impact could be abrupt but contained. Leaders would consult together; economies disrupted temporarily; people would make do for a while with changed circumstances—and then, after the shock, look forward to getting back to normal. That’s not, however, the world in which we live. Instead, this coronavirus is revealing the structural faults of a system that have been papered over for decades as they’ve been steadily worsening. Gaping economic inequalities, rampant ecological destruction, and pervasive political corruption are all results of unbalanced systems relying on each other to remain precariously poised. Now, as one system destabilizes, expect others to tumble down in tandem in a cascade known by researchers as “synchronous failure.” ⁸

Halting the Doomsday Machine:

It has mocked immigration controls, biometrics, digital surveillance and every other kind of data analytics, and struck hardest — thus far — in the richest, most powerful nations of the world, bringing the engine of capitalism to a juddering halt. Temporarily perhaps, but at least long enough for us to examine its parts, make an assessment and decide whether we want to help fix it, or look for a better engine. Whatever it is, coronavirus has made the mighty kneel and brought the world to a halt like nothing else could. Our minds are still racing back and forth, longing for a return to “normality”, trying to stitch our future to our past and refusing to acknowledge the rupture. But the rupture exists. And in the midst of this terrible despair, it offers us a chance to rethink the doomsday machine we have built for ourselves. Nothing could be worse than a return to normality. ⁹

Templexity

Being so slow, Saturn is also more concerned with time than the other planets. Saturn highlights the way it changes things, and separates the enduring from the fleeting. For living beings, time always leads to death, another fundamental Saturn theme. Relationships with the past and the dead are thus well within the Saturnian sphere. Saturn’s slow progression also illustrates the laws of cause and effect — how actions, over time, create reality. ²

Melting Time:

time itself has felt different this year, our relationship with it altered significantly by the pandemic. Whatever comfort we once derived from considering the past is gone. Now it’s a stark reminder of all that we had, all that we took for granted, and what we must still reckon with — that our future is not likely to look like what we’re used to. Meanwhile, our hours and days dissolve together into some nebulous glob of experience. While time may run on a larger scale around us, we still live in our own intimate worlds. That dislocation in time has become a part of our running discourse, inspiring memes and jokes about not knowing what day it is. They drive home the fact that we’re all truly experiencing the same phenomenon — a sort of time melt. ¹⁰

The Fact of Death:

our relationship with death also radically changed in the mid-20th century. Until this period, when hospices and convalescence homes became common, people generally died in their homes among family, and children observed the process. Today, we are shielded from the most fundamental fact of life, which is death, and the tragic paradox of this self-deception is that we have been going about business as usual during a mass extinction. ¹¹

Confinement

Saturn is the Greater Malefic in astrology, as it brings deprivation, fear, excessive cold, brittle-ness, depression, confinement and exclusion. Yet Saturn also teaches the virtues of patience, discipline, endurance and duty, and shows us how to maintain glacial calm in even the worst conditions. ²

Capacity for Interiority:

An extended self-quarantine resembles, in many aspects, any religious-minded circumscribing of the daily round—a meditation retreat, a monastic cloister, a ritual purification. There is the same restraining force, liminal and protean, keeping one within the enclosure—not quite mandatory, not quite voluntary, but a volatile mixture of superego, conformity, altruism, and the anxiety of social sanction. There is the withdrawal from social life, the distillation of most personal interaction to the telegrammatic and unavoidable. There is the ascendance of repetition—the same cycle of meals, the same rooms, the same window, the same orbit of light from that window. [...] And alongside this radical shift in scale, there emerges a deepening capacity for interiority, as if cloud cover had burned off a valley floor, revealing in sharpness each tiny aspect of the scene, diorama-like. It becomes easier and more natural to follow internal trains of thought; the inner monologue grows louder, more assertive; and the inner vision vivifies, leaning asymptotically toward eruption, tangibility. It is a paradoxical state, both heightened and diminished, murky and transparent, ¹²

Collapse

Saturn’s time in Capricorn has often coincided with tectonic shifts to the landscape of human reality. While such transitions are necessary and sometimes favorable, they are nonetheless jarring. They make old maps unusable, and deny the comfort of the familiar. When the world a person expects no longer fits the reality they encounter, they are left without a guidance system for action. When a situation calls for action, but there is no framework for it, anxiety results. Anxiety, when sufficiently magnified, becomes panic. [...] Saturn’s time in Capricorn offers us a chance to fortify what we would see endure. Become both the architect and the brick-layer, and build cathedrals to honor and protect what we hold most dear. The cold eye which Saturn points at rickety buildings and unstable systems is also a gift, as it allows us to see what must inevitably collapse and extricate ourselves from it. ²

Darker Capitalism:

At present, the rising pandemic of fear is more dangerous than the virus itself. The apocalyptic imagery in the media hides the deepening relationship between the far-right and the capitalist economy. And in the same way that a virus needs a living cell to replicate, so will capitalism adapt to the new biopolitics of the 21st century. Coronavirus has already impacted on the global economy, but it won’t stop the never-ending circulation and accumulation of capital. If anything, we might soon be facing a darker, and even more dangerous form of capitalism, one that relies on the stronger control and purification of populations. ¹³

Future Calamities:

The coronavirus has enormous revelatory power. All at once, it has disclosed issues of social justice and biopolitics, biodiversity and violence, scientific research and global economy. This power, however, involves a risk: focusing exclusively on the virus, people (and governments) might end up neglecting other key issues, first of all climate change. This is a risk that we cannot afford: the coronavirus, in fact, is not the ultimate catastrophe but one chapter in a bigger narrative of interconnected phenomena. It’s crucial to find a way to see the current emergency while also minding the future calamities that are incubating in our present. ¹⁴

Maladjusted to Normality:

The pandemic broke open public discourse around issues that were either typically sidestepped — mental health struggles, for instance — or accepted with little resistance, like the rigidity of the modern workday. Will returning to normal life mean sweeping these hard conversations back under the rug? Martin Luther King Jr. once said, “There are some things within our social order to which I am proud to be maladjusted and to which I call upon you to be maladjusted.” The people I heard from expressed the concern that the world would quickly readjust to an unjust normal. Several people told me they feel the pandemic has left them with PTSD, while others said it exacerbated preexisting conditions like depression. But an undercurrent in the responses was the idea that the pandemic was a seismic event that made it socially permissible to foreground mental health and self-care — something that wasn’t necessarily true before Covid-19 came along. If there’s one message that emerged most clearly from the reader responses, it’s this: A lot of people are really, really over being at the office from 9 to 5. The pandemic has proven that remote work is totally feasible for many jobs, validating people’s suspicions that our standard model of office work is arbitrary, unnecessarily taxing, and ultimately exploitative, sometimes forcing people to choose between their well-being and their career. ¹⁵

Intentions

Capricorn is of the Cardinal mode, linking it to initiation and creation — the beginning phase of story-arcs. It is thus the sign where the Earth is reshaped in accord with intention. Mud becomes brick, and bricks become houses. The wet clay, patterned with intention, becomes sculpture. Capricorn’s essential dynamic is thus the imposition of pattern onto substance in conformity with will. [...] In Capricorn, Saturn wears no disguise, but presents himself in an archetypal fashion. He is Father Time, the Grim Reaper, the Grand Architect, and the Old Teacher.²

Meaningful Response:

the coronavirus pandemic offers us an opportunity to reveal the dynamics of exploitation underlying our neoliberal present – as well as a chance to expose its falsehoods and shortcomings. A meaningful pandemic response, our death toll proves, is one that is not subject exclusively to the demands of capital. ¹⁶

Fanciful Ideas:

Covid-19 has blown the Overton window wide open. In just a few weeks, we’ve seen political and economic ideas seriously discussed that had previously been dismissed as fanciful or utterly unacceptable: universal basic income, government intervention to house the homeless, and state surveillance on individual activity, to name just a few. ⁸

Imagine Another World:

Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next. We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it. ⁹

Resilience:

Veils are falling in this apocalyptic moment revealing cracks in the brickwork of the structures of power, revealing grown men and women at computers trading futures that offer us nothing. The suppressed and the marginalised are empowered in such moments. Established dogmas are abandoned. In a few short weeks, C-19 has forced parliament to guarantee universal basic income, find shelter for homeless people and invest generously in public health merely just to maintain a façade of decency — policies that socialists have been energetically failing to achieve for decades. Now is the moment to develop new templates, as a T-cell endlessly recombines lengths of code into configurations ready for any pathogen it might encounter. As with COVID-19, this could be a matter of survival. Shorter supply chains, local solidarity and an economy geared towards resilience rather than profit margins might help us endure whatever the Angel of Death sends next — as there is every chance that COVID-19 is the first of many challenges creeping over the horizon. ¹¹

Lessons

Saturn in Capricorn also brings the opportunity to become patient and enduring, to learn how to see things in a wider context. It offers us the opportunity to look through the eyes of time. Bad days, even bad years, disappear when set against the backdrop of an entire lifetime. That larger awareness of time puts things in their proper place, keeping high and low points from distorting our perceptions and expectations. The same awareness of time not only grants us greater preserverence and patience on a personal level, it also allows us to watch history unfold without feeling the fight-or-flight adrenal response which social media and the 24-hour news cycle are designed to evoke and exploit, tempting panic. It also grants us the opportunity to recover and digest our own history on a familial, cultural and global level. Those who learn from history have the chance to change the future, and those who commune with their ancestors have the chance to make sure that what is valuable is passed on, and that worn-out patterns are laid to final rest. ²

Transformation:

I have never been through a civilisation-wide transformation before, and neither have you; we are in uncharted waters together. There is a war taking place in heaven concerning the soul of humanity, and it will be fought in each person’s heart, every day, without rest, and into the foreseeable future. I have no choice but to sound metaphysical and religious, because this is where the psyche goes when it enters the liminal. ¹⁷

Bewildering Ambiguity:

Luminous Beauty in the midst of shuddering terror. Interpersonal solidarity—layer upon tearful layer of empathy for one another—in the midst of enforced solitude and loneliness. The paradoxical, ambiguous nature of this moment is so confounding, so bewildering! I mean, how excellent that our arrogant species receives this collective slap-in-the-face reality check, waking us two-leggeds up to the simple truth that we are not at all in control, have never really been in control, that we live at the behest of powers—of a complex interplay of powers—far beyond our ability to fully fathom, to predict, or to steer. What hubris to have imagined we could do whatever we want with this exquisitely interwoven wonder of a world! And yet how awful that this lesson must come at the expense of so many unsuspecting human lives, so many innocent souls now shivering with fever and fright as they struggle to draw breath. ¹⁸

Traces

Since March 2019 when the severe respiratory syndrome of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) was announced, many radiologic manifestations of COVID-19 have been reported.

We have encountered a unique CT appearance of COVID-19 pneumonitis in a 24-year-old man. This finding is not a halo or reverse halo sign as might be expected in these organizing pneumonias. Figure demonstrates focal core opacity and two ring-like opacities immediately around it as in the “rings of Saturn”. ¹⁹

Across the Ocean

Four days later on November 24 I finally embarked the ferry very fittingly named "Hypatia of Alexandria" after a famous neoplatonic pagan philosopher. The trip from the Spanish mainland towards the Canary Islands was very long, and very smooth and very boring. Was it two or three days? I don't remember. I had lost my sense of time in the last year and riding a ship across seemingly endless waters didn't really help grasp any sense of time and place anyway.

At some point it was night and the sea became more and more unsettled. It was windy outside. At a speed of around 15 knots against strong winds the ferry bravely wrested mile by mile from the churning sea. We were delayed by three hours. Finally I could already see the black silhouette of the magical Anaga mountains against the dramatically moonlit sky and behind it the flickering orange city lights of Santa Cruz de Tenerife.

After disembarking in pouring rain and driving on the completely empty highway to Puerto de La Cruz I surprisingly ran out of fuel. I mean really. The display dropped from fifty to zero. Stuttering engine and everything. My luck that the highway goes downhill for 15km before my destination. I literally rolled into town and took the wrong way into a roundabout to make it to a random gas station on the final drop. Then off to our new temporary home. Off to bed. Finally.

Reflections

At the end of this crazy year all that remains is awe. The mighty Saturnian demon we in our secular ignorance simply had named "Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2" had brought death, disease and most of all: revelation. Like the grim reaper the alien virus has shown us the brittleness of our human civilization, pointed directly at the exploitative machinery of Capitalism and how it is in fact not what we are to believe it is: an omnipotent, all-encompassing and abstract cybernetic control system that we will never be able to overcome, but a ridiculous scheme of exploitation run by humans with money and power on the backs of humans without money and without power.

We realize that the world is really run by nurses, caregivers, essentially: workers. The ruling classes so often subsummized under the term "Empire" have done everything in their power to keep up an image of being in control, enforced unprecedented means of biopolitical power over the populations and transferred several GDP-worths of money to the medical industrial complex for creating vaccinations to ensure that we will be able to get "back to normal" as quickly as possible, which obviously means to go back to normal speed of accumulating surplus value more than anything else.

The conspiracy theories around the pandemic also all point into this very same direction: someone must be pulling the strings. Coincidence? I doubt it. There is a great fear among "Empire" that now enough people will realize the nakedness of their emperors and choose to live a life on their own terms and under their own sovereignty.

In my opinion the pandemic has been a global event of mass initiation. It came with a gigantic death toll and mid- to long-term effects we are yet to see play out. But I feel confident that the outcome will be a positive transformation if we try to not close the veil again that the virus has lifted for us, but instead pay attention to what is important and necessary. For ouselves and the planet as a whole.

Before these effects will fully unfold let us pay respect to the brave warriors who fought and still fight for the lives of the affected victims of the virus and most of all to the too many of us who have lost their lives.

Rest in Peace

Nostra Damus del Monte "Dark Angel" 2019 ↩
Austin Coppock. Saturn in Capricorn. 19 December 2017. ↩↩↩↩↩↩
Danny Nemu. And then came the virus (1/3): The Nematode Awakens. March 31, 2020. ↩
Naomi Klein. The Great Reset Conspiracy Smoothie. The Intercept. December 8, 2020. ↩
"Above the ancient volcanoes, Slide your wings under the carpet of the wind, Travel, travel, eternally. Of clouds in swamps, Of wind in Spain in the rain from Ecuador, Travel, travel, Fly to the highest heights, Above the capitals, fatal ideas, Look at the ocean" ↩
Franco 'Bifo' Berardi. Bifo - Diary of the psycho-deflation. Verso Books Blog. 18 March 2020 ↩
Ayache, Elie. The Medium of Contingency: An Inverse View of the Market. Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. pg. 20 ↩
Jeremy Lent. Coronavirus Spells the End of the Neoliberal Era. What’s Next?. Patterns of Meaning. 2 April 2020. ↩↩
Arundhati Roy. The pandemic is a portal. Financial Times. April 3 2020. ↩↩
Shannon Stirone. 2020 was a time warp. Vox.com. Dec 22, 2020 ↩
Danny Nemu. And then came the virus (2/3): Crisis. Medium. 7 April 2020. ↩↩
Matt Levin. Quarantine Reads: ‘The Waves’. The Paris Review. March 17 2020. ↩
Srecko Horvat. Why the coronavirus presents a global political danger. New Statesman. 19 February 2020. ↩
Serenella Iovino. Hyperobject COVID-19. Cambridge Blog. 14 May 2020. ↩
Sigal Samuel. We shouldn’t go back to “normal.” Normal wasn’t good enough.. Vox.com. 12 May 2021. ↩
Ali Rıza Taşkale. Britain’s ‘Herd Immunity’ Disaster Was Neoliberalism in Action. Tribune Magazine. 27 January 2021. ↩
Zachary Stein. Covid 19: A War Broke Out in Heaven. What is Emerging. 26 March 2020. ↩
David Abram. In the Ground of our Unknowing. Emergence Magazine. 7 April 2020. ↩
“Rings of Saturn” appearance: a unique finding in a case of COVID-19 pneumonitis. Diagnostic and Interventional Radiology. 14 January 2021 ↩

To Ram Through

2021-05-02T16:30:00+02:00

This is a half a year late quick report of personal gnosis that followed my initiation into the sphere of Mars right before he went retrograde in August 2020. I learned about the art of war, energy management, and to follow my instincts.

I admit it wasn't the best Astrological election to do my initiation into the sphere of Mars on Tuesday, August 18th. Mars was squaring Saturn, but also in a trine with a combust Mercury. But it was a New Moon and Aries was rising during the hour of Mars. I followed my intuition and just did it. My tropical sun-sign is Aries, so is my sidereal ascendant as well as my Lot of Daemon. So far, martian space weather has been mostly auspicious in my life.

I got myself into the right mood by listening to some war-glorifying electronic anthems from the local anti-german subculture, like "Alles musz in Flammen stehen" ("Everything must be in flames") by Das Flug, or Björn Peng's "We Do" and the theme of one of my favourite post-apocalyptic b-movies "Hardware". As soundtrack for the initiation itself I chose an organ arrangement of Gustav Holst's "Mars. Bringer of War".

My libation of choice was a deep port wine and I was excited to fumigate some of the Canarian dragonblood I had harvested on Tenerife some years ago. I decorated the altar with my taiji practice broadsword and a selection of corresponding Tarot cards: Ace of Wands, The Chariot, The Tower, ...The Force? I hesitated with the latter because it represents a more feminine yin form of martian energy but it made me think of Athena, the sister of Ares, symbolizing a more disciplined, strategic side of war. I wasn't sure about it, so I put it back into the card box.

Utilizing my Psithemius table of practice the invocation of Samael went smoothly. Like in my first use of the device for my solar initiation I got visual feedback again this time: the silhouette of a staff or spear wielding man appeared in front of my inner eye while gazing into the crystal.

Getting Things Done

I did not expect to have instant effects from the ritual, but already from the next day I had a burst of energy that lasted for a good week. I followed an urge to clear out our basement, a project I had successfully postponed over and over for months already. I also finally felt very motivated to start working on renovating our newly purchased transporter to turn it into a campervan. I worked on it almost every day.

A few days later things got weird. At 5 in the morning I was woken up by an obnoxious digital sounding noise. It came from my phone that was charging in the kitchen. It was an alarm. But the phone showed no indicator, no snooze button, no sign of the usual alarm interface. It stopped when I hit the volume down button. Then I saw that the phone was actually set to fully silent - even the alarms. It shouldn't have made any sound. Weird! When I went back to bed, slightly confused and annoyed, my daughter E suddenly started to giggle and cackle in her sleep. It creeped the hell out of me. Later that day I was sitting on the couch in our living room and opened a letter from the Police. Allegedly I had bumped into someone's car while pulling out of a parking lot. I was devastated and scared of the legal consequences. Suddenly my daughter came to me with a proud face to show me something she had done. I almost fell off the couch...

She handed me the Force card of my tarot deck, cleanly cut into two halves and the rounded corners clipped off. I should have known better but instead I yelled at her and she started crying. Of course she didn't know or understand what she had done. I was confused. I clearly remember having put this card back into its box. How did she get it? And how come it was the exact one I had so hesitated with? It struck me like an answer: "No, not this card is not Mars!"

And in combination with the letter from the Police! Samael clearly teaching some lessons here. I guessed this was about obedience, honoring rules and questioning my relationship with authorities. Things I have always had difficulties with.

The Art of War

The core martian teachings unfolded in the following weeks. But due to privacy concerns regarding a client I work as a consultant for I cannot go into any of the juicy details. All I can vaguely disclose is they had experienced an internal breach of trust that resulted in a power struggle destabilizing the whole company. Suddenly and out of nowhere my technical expertise was needed, but in more ways than anticipated. I found myself placed in the role of a war-general: assuming and predicting the next steps of the enemy and working on strategies to anticipate them.

My bursts of energy of the first week after the rite had been focused on my own personal projects, random and not very controled. Now I learned that directing martian energies towards a greater goal beyond mere personal gain and satisfaction seems to exponentially amplify them. My martial personality traits bloomed as never before and I felt contented to a whole new level.

This chapter lasted almost the whole Mars retrograde phase but ended in a glorious victory. The internal enemy was defeated, their actions repelled and retaliated. I was high from pride, the client both as surprised by my skills as I was and very satisfied by my work. Soon after, we agreed on a long term commitment. I felt very lucky, because the pandemic had killed my 15 year career from one day to another and I really needed a new job anyway.

Ovine Instincts

The other "thing" that happened in the aftermath of my Mars initiation was more of a process than an event. It started out as just a subtle but then day after day increasing irrational feeling of panic and looming danger. I got very anxious about it but at the same time it also felt eerily familiar.

In the the last decade I have already learned to trust my general instincts and gut feelings about life decisions more than my rational faculties. Ever since treading an enchanted path I tend to attribute this subtle "knowing" to my "higher self", "daimon", or my "guardian angel". When I found out that the planetary ruler of my astrological lot of daimon (Aries) is Mars I wasn't surprised at all. This intuitive force has always felt that way to me.

The growing anxiety felt exactly like that. Almost animal-like. An ovine precognition of imminent danger. And it was clearly related to the pandemic. Day after day I felt a stronger urge that we must escape Berlin as fast as possible, or else...

I talked to my wife about it and she trusted me. We came up with a crazy plan. Our initial incentive to buy a van and convert it into a camper was to travel France, Spain, and Portugal. We even did a test camping trip through the South of Germany in July and really loved it. Well, then pandemic related travel restrictions were put in place, so we had to ditch that whole idea. Now it was back on the table, but modified. Not "travel" but "escape".

At this point we didn't really know what to escape from but we knew where to: The Canary Islands.

That in itself seemed quite crazy: drive to an archipelago off the coast of Morocco, almost 4000km away, by car?! Mars didn't think it was crazy, so that's what we ended up doing...but that's going to be the content of another article.

Postscriptum

The police sent a letter a few weeks later that the case was dropped. And eventually also my intuition was right. After we left Berlin, lockdown measures got implemented, all childcare and schools closed. Most flights cancelled. Travel restricted. We would have been stuck in a locked down metropolis during a cold and dark winter with a bored and anxious child without kindergarten to go to and without friends to meet. Thanks to Mars we avoided a mental health crisis.

Restless Liburnian Spirits

2020-08-21T21:00:00+02:00

On the Croatian island of Pag, four years ago today was my serpent dream that I often refer to as my "switch" event that broke my materialist mindset. Retrospectively I have to admit it already had started a bit before that, but nevertheless it is safe to say that this day played a central role in my magical coming of age.

In summary it was a nightmare turned lucid, a dream nested within a dream, with a fuzzy threshold to wake reality, out-of-body elements and most importantly it had a meaningful symbolic climax: I was shown a shield emblazoned with a vivid red serpent on fire, staring at me.

This serpent has haunted me for weeks and inspired many in-depth research rabbit holes into at that point rather unknown fields of occult knowledge. I started practicing kundalini yoga, meditation, got eventually hooked on the western esoteric traditions and especially their Helleno-Kemetic sources.

On this same day a year later I found myself standing on the highest mountain of the island of Pag, reciting my first Headless Rite, Greek hymns to Agathosdaimon and invoking the Four Kings and initiating myself from freshman armchair magician to fully operand sorcerer.

Fast forward yet another year, again on Pag, I obsessively hunted down the remains of an altar in honor of the local pagan serpentine goddess Heia, syncretized with the Roman goddess Bona Dea.

My job at a local electronic music festival reoccurred annually, so last year at the same time I was also on Pag. I celebrated my magical anniversary and revisited some of my favorite places, but most importantly I made real-life contact with a woman who used to work at the local archeological museum. I had already emailed her the year before, asking for help in my research on the altar.

I visited her in her garden and she was happy to give me a lot of hints what other interesting places to visit on the island. Unfortunately it was the second last day of my stay so I only managed to visit one of them: a newly discovered ruin of a church on a nearby hill.

After I had left Pag we stayed in touch and things got a bit weird. She turned out to be a spiritually minded, magically interested and quirky witch type lady with shadow people and ghost encounters and I felt comfortable enough to disclose my whole magical journey that was so intimately connected to this island. She seemed genuinely excited about it and had some very interesting things to say about the house I had had my serpent dream at three years before:

Several years ago the owner of the house, who runs a construction company, took a few fine stone ornaments from a wall next to the smaller church here in town. The entire square was an enormous basilica with water well, inside walls and so on. Behind the church a famous reliqary from the 4th century was found and some other precious and rare findings. On the right of the basilica there was a graveyard. Now, there were some wild building interventions around those walls and this guy took away some tombstones!! I remember wanting those stones here in our museum but he secretly took them away in the dark of the night and under protection of our local sheriff mayor so I couldn't do anything but alert the Conservation institute. But they also didn't do anything.

This blew my mind. The construction tycoon had stolen sacred stone ornaments from a graveyard and used them to decorate the house he rented out to tourists and in which I stayed every year. The same house I woke up in when I had my weird dream!

One of the main features of the local archeological museum is the entrance to an underground Roman acqueduct entirely carved in stone by hand and over 1 kilometer long with an average width of 60 centimeters. The lady had another story to share that stuck with me:

I used to close the museum and go into the aqueduct as far as I could. The air begins to get fouler the deeper you go inside. It was always interesting to go forward but getting back was kind of creepy. It alway felt as if a Roman cohort was breathing down my neck!

It inspired me to think that maybe the football-armored zombies from my dream might actually have been Roman soldiers misinterpreted by my subconscious.

Anyway, Pag is surely haunted. I am sad that due to the Corona restrictions my annually recurring job got cancelled for this year. This is the first in seven years I can't be there. It would have been nice to celebrate my magical anniversary and to catch up with my new friend and listen to some more of her stories. Coincidentally (or not) she wrote me this week inviting me and my family to come visit, but unfortunately that collides with our plans for this year.

So visiting an ancient and enchanted olive grove from antiquity and hearing the story about the local priest with stigmata who could bilocate will have to wait until some other day.

I will be back for sure. Maybe next year? Just the gods know.

Canary Capricorn

2020-03-02T20:45:00+01:00

This is a detailed report of strange days full of pine tree portals, morning glory vines, tachycardia, synchronicities and personal gnosis that preceded (or retroactively followed) my initiation into the sphere of Saturn during a vacation with my wife and daughter on the Canary Island of Tenerife.

Escaping Winter

In the last years the time after Christmas has always been quite a downer. Berlin falls into a mode of total greyness that just makes you want to hibernate. Usually my freelance economy is also hibernating during that time when there are no jobs around. For this year my partner T. and I decided to escape this misery and booked vacations on my beloved Canary archipelago - first a couple of days on the chthonic gods' black rock altar manifested as the island of Lanzarote and then three weeks on the sacred island of Tenerife. We prepared for relaxed weeks, but ended up in wonderland...

A few days after we arrived on Tenerife things became very strange. It all started on a Wednesday, two days after we arrived by sea with a ferry from Lanzarote. The trip between the islands was beautiful but also wavy and quite long. All tired and unnerved from the journey we arrived at a small and quite cold little hut in the mountains of La Esperanza. The hut was cute but had no heating, just a malfunctioning fireside. That Wednesday we all decided to go for a walk in the forest which according to the map was only minutes away. Remembering the ancient pine trees we had visited last time we came to this island, I let my offline-map-app Osmand show me all points of interest of the "tree" category and chose the closest one to our house.

Ten minutes later we found ourselves in a stunningly beautiful forest of mostly pine trees with eucalyptus groves and small leaved shrubbery on hilly ground covered in an endless carpet of pine needles. The walk was very soothing and gave us back a sense of peace of mind. We eventually arrived at our waypoint marker: a really creepy and old pine tree that must have barely survived a wildfire. Its trunk was hollowed out and from the remaining black bark dripped thousands of threads of golden resin. The bottom part of the trunk was so thoroughly burnt from all sides it created a hole you could see through to the other side, large enough for a person to crawl through.

Baal's Portal

Well, that's what we did, jokingly calling it a "gateway to another dimension". First I, then my wife T. and a bit more hesitantly, my 3 years old daughter E. stepped through the tree trunk. It was fun! Before leaving I decided I wanted a branch from the tree to keep as a magic wand because maybe the old pine had been struck by lightning which is supposed to be the perfect magically charged wood for wands. I circled the tree four times and threw a small log at one of the branches that broke off. The branch was not as straight as I had hoped for but was a bit crooked like a sickle, but I kept it anyway.

We walked a bit further, had a small picnic and started our way back to the car. Making our way through a bushy and narrow path downhill my daughter started to get a bit tired and bored and made up one of her roleplaying games. She declared: "I am Juno now! You have to call me Juno, OK?” I smiled and nodded and we continued our descent. Suddenly I remembered that the ancient mother goddess who was venerated by the aboriginal population of the Canarian archipelago and who had been syncretized into the Catholic patron saint Nuestra Señora de la Candelaria was assumed to have been the Catharginian goddess Tanit, whom the Romans dubbed "Juno Caelestis." What a curious synchronicity!

In the following night I had a strange dream involving a village road that we needed to urgently pass through and that it had something to do with Saturn. We needed to pick up a brown rental car of the type "Reverend" and it was a brown SUV stretch-limousine. The pick-up location was at a wide sandy beach and there were plenty of people wearing suits wildly racing stretch-limousines across the sand and performing wheelies and other tricks. It was loud and stormy. I looked along the beach and saw a body of a woman lying face down in the wet sand, white roaring waves breaking violently around her. Suddenly a humanoid giant emerged out of the whitewater and carefully picked up the body. The woman was was my wife! I ran to the giant as fast as I could. T. was confused but seemed fine. I thanked the giant and suddenly had a moment of realization. I looked at her, saying "If they are on our side, this must be really important!" Then I woke up.

Horned Gods

I obsessively thought about the "Saturn" part all day long. I just couldn't shake it off. In the evening I did a search for "Saturn" in my collected research documents folder on my computer related to myths and archaeological findings of the Canary Islands and found an interesting paper¹ I had not read yet. It was about a curious theory that the Canaries must have been visited by Christian missionaries before the official arrival of the Spanish conquerors in the late 14th century, because the aboriginal population mainly venerated a heavenly creator god and his holy mother when encountered. The author found this a too curious coincidence and looked into what numinous creatures local folklore had declared "devils" like in so many other Christianized areas of Europe where the previous pagan gods were either syncretized into Saints or declared evil demons. He found matching stories about "wooly goat or sheep like creatures" with "red eyes" an on one island a "wooly black haired man" who were usually appeased on mountain tops with offerings of milk and butter. The author's theory was that this was probably their god before they started believing in a transcendental heavenly father. He related the goaty god to Baal-Hammon, who was the other prime deity next to Tanit worshipped in Catharge and throughout many areas of North Africa, primarily by Berber tribes. In the paper¹ it was mentioned that the Romans saw in Baal-Hammon a form of Saturn.¹

Mind blown, I went to bed and thought a lot about everything I had learned. Then it dawned on me: Saturn! Kronos! Baal-Hammon! My dream and the forest walk suddenly made sense in an uncanny way. The pine tree is considered a Saturnian creature. The branch I had broken off: it looked like a scythe! My daughter suddenly coming up with the name "Juno". Tanit!

The next days were weirdly interwoven with synchronicities. I felt strangely disconnected from life and seemed to experience everything from a weird observer perspective. I obsessively started to think about doing a ritual for Saturn or Baal-Hammon. Maybe using the Trithemius method from "Seven Spheres"? I didn't have my "table of practice" with me. I would need to make one. I needed materials, incenses, candles, corresponding plants... The moment I had just finished this last thought I just finished parking our car next to a park in the city of La Laguna and almost fell into a gigantic hedge completely overgrown by purple Morning Glory vines. There it is! A Saturnian plant! We walked through the city and past a large mural sculpture made from plastic trash. It was a black crow! A Saturnian animal! Needless to say that I noticed SUVs everywhere we drove to, all in this weird brown color like the one in my dream.

One afternoon we took a walk along the large meadows surrounding the little house we had rented for our vacation. Suddenly a large flock of sheep entered our neighboring field with their archaic looking shepherd and his dogs. Half of the livestock were sheep, the other half a strange looking breed of black and very wooly goats with very long corkscrew-like horns. "Baal-Hammon" I thought. The "wooly goat god" of the Canaries. Also "Capricorn" popped into my mind. Of course. The sun just entered the sidereal zodiac sign of Capricorn, home of the planet Saturn who would also join his sign in the upcoming days. This was too much!

At night I couldn't sleep well. Something really bothered me. It was the fact that the Catharginian cults of Tanit and Baal-Hammon were tightly connected to human sacrifice, specifically child sacrifice. Followers had allegedly offered their firstborns to their gods, unless the whole story was just Greek, Jewish and later Christian propaganda. Nobody really knows. But it bothered me a lot, being a father and all. I did not want to go that path of syncretizing Saturn with Baal-Hammon. It just felt: wrong! In the night I had a nightmare of which the only image I remembered upon waking in panic was holding the limp body of my daughter in my hands.

Another evening my wife and I had a long and serious talk about our current life. It was a talk that had been long overdue. About our financial situation. About our job situation and occupational outlooks. About the lack of overview over our assets. About living from day to day, the lack of perspective and planning. About stability and getting our shit together. It was good. We also had more and more serious talks about what we want in our life. About where we want to live our life. About how much we loved it here and whether we want to stay in Berlin or relocate to the Canary Islands. A once wild dream suddenly became a concrete topic that needed attention, consideration, planning. Saturn in Capricorn. It all felt appropriate and weirdly controlled, as if external forces made us finally have these talks.

Transience

I felt very light-headed and dizzy one early evening and went to bed earlier than usual. I felt weirdly sick. My body was completely exhausted, but my mind was highly alert. I took this as an opportunity to try to induce "sleep paralysis" and attempt and out of body experience. It didn't fully work. I was able to shift my awareness around in the room and even push it outside of the house, but wasn't sure how much of it was just vivid imagination. It was a strange evening and I had feverish repetitive dreams that night without actually having a fever. The following evening our daughter seemed extraordinarily restless and crazy. Even for a three and a half year old. She was clumsy and whiny and when my wife took her on her lap to comfort her she suddenly said: "her heart seems very fast!". I put my ear on our daughter's chest and counted. 22 in 6 seconds. Holy Shit. A heart rate of 220 beats per minute! We calmed her down and went to bed, hoping for her pulse to slow down during her sleep.

It didn't.

The next day we rushed to the hospital. The closest one was the University Hospital Nuestra Señora de la Candelaria. How appropriate, I thought. We were treated nicely and with patience, although the emergency ward was completely overcrowded and in chaos. Nobody spoke English or German, yet we managed with my very limited Spanish. The very young doctors in the pediatric section did an electrocardiogram and gave our little one a shot of adenosine. A heart reset. It stops the heart for a moment. It is a very scary thought. But it works. It did work. Her little heart reset to normal speed and we were very relieved. She was very scared and confused. Poor thing.

Apparently she had relapsed into a fairly common heart condition she had as a small baby which she was supposed to be cured from a long time ago. During the next 6 hours staying in the hospital for observation so many things went through my mind. About parenthood and responsibility. About not taking things for granted. About more awareness of risks. About protecting my child better from insensible doctors. About fear of loss and parental anxieties. It was hell. But my daughter loved it. So much attention and hours of cartoons.

Eventually we could go home. When I left the building to get our car I saw a rainbow in the sky above the city. Problem was that I couldn't find our car anymore. Where had I parked it? I randomly walked up and down the small roads around the hospital. They all looked the same. Then I saw the rainbow again, at the end of a small street. I took a turn and walked towards it to get a better look and suddenly there it was in front of me: our car!

Temporality

That evening I was scared to the bones. Baal-Hammon. Saturn. Child sacrifice. A moment of death before the heart resets. My nightmare of holding my limp daughter. It was way too much. I wanted it all to stop. I suddenly felt almost compelled to do a ritual. Not to start something, but to stop it. The next day I gave my wife a day off to recover from the stress and I took my daughter to Puerto de la Cruz, to do something nice, buy her ice-cream, visit some playground. The secondary objective was to go to the local Esoteric shop and a paper shop to buy ritual accessories. A quartz crystal. Storax incense. Black paper. Silver pen. It had to be done.

At some pont it hit me! Saturn! Father of time! Of course! I realized that everything that happened in the last days had the strange taste of initiation to it. I remembered the Jovial initiation I did last year. The feeling of outside perspective on my own life. The sparks of inspiration. The lessons and emotions. All the weird synchronicities that happened after I initiated into the sphere of Jupiter. This was the same but different. Why did all of this happen BEFORE my initiation ritual and not AFTER? Why? Because Saturn rules time! He can do whatever the fuck he wants with it. Why not reverse it and let the initiation ritual ripple into the past instead of the future, or why not both ways? It was crystal clear to me now that I had to do the ritual as soon as possible. I decided to do it on the 25th of January. New Moon in sidereal Capricorn, sun also, and Saturn just entering his home sign too. Plus it was a Saturday. Perfect space weather. I asked my Tarot whether it was a good election and what to expect.

To my defense: it wasn't just me who felt this omnipresent looming weirdness. T. felt it too. Ever since we crawled through that creepy tree, she said. Oh god, that tree. It was true. Like another dimension! We decided that we needed to go back and crawl through it again – this time from the other side! And we were not joking.

On Friday and especially on Saturday I felt awful. Very depressed and sad for no apparent reason, anxious and clumsy and very snappy. Tired and unnerved we barely managed to go back to the tree, but we did. It had to be done. I circled it four times, this time clockwise, and all three of us climbed back through the gaping hole in the charred trunk.

We suddenly felt very relieved and strangely happy and walked back to the car.

Calling Qaftsiel

In the evening I packed all my ritual accessories I had gathered and prepared in the days before and got into the car around sunset. I drove down the village road to a hedge I had spotted before. Overgrown by Morning Glory! I harvested a few vines with the purple flowers and hit the road uphill towards the mountain. It was pitch black as I drove up the serpentine roads through the forest. After cancelling a hike up to the mountain top due to the darkness and also deciding not to use a cave near the road due to unbearable urine stench I spontaneously opted for a manmade cave I had marked on my phone-map a few days before. It was just off an easy to find hiking path and should be doable even in the darkness.

I was a bit scared walking through the forest at night but I felt excitement and an urge to push through with the plan. I climbed down a steep hill into a small valley in total darkness, slipping on the pine needles and mossy rocks. My phone reception went dead. I should have left my coordinates. Fuck it. Let's do it. I eventually found the cave! It was a small horizontal mine shaft from old attempts to dig a tunnel for water. There are thousands of these on the island. This one was around a meter in diameter and just two meters deep into the rock. But it was dry and clean and fortunately too inaccessible to be used as a toilet. It was perfect!

I set up my altar and table of practice, decorated it with the flowers and checked the time. Almost an hour left until the appropriate planetary hour of Saturn. I crawled back out and sat down on a rock. I closed the flashlight and looked around. Complete darkness. Complete silence. Just the wind in the treetops and omg, the stars!

I was mesmerized by the beauty of the night-sky. The Pleiades were right above my head and I saw a satellite pass by when I looked up. I stared into the sky for a long time lying on my back enjoying each moment that seemed like eternity. Then it was time for the ritual.

It took quite a while. I started with the day's prayer of my ongoing novena to La Virgen de La Candelaria and did a full Headless Rite following my usual new moon routine. The cave filled up with the incense smoke and hummed in resonance with the frequency of my voice while I recited the prayers of the Seven Spheres protocol. I was an amazing feeling.

After I was done I had such an intense feeling of relief and peace of mind that I got high from it. Absolute Clarity.

I somehow made it back to the car and drove home. The remaining days on the island were dominated by peacefulness and joy. Hardly have I felt so happy and clear minded. My family too.

Cold and dry in the head. Capricorn season.

Wipf, Karl A. "Der sogenannte Hochgottglaube der Altkanarier." Almogaren 15 (1984): 45-76. ↩↩↩

Daimonic Scrabble

2019-05-01T22:00:00+02:00

A confusing article I wanted to get out on Mayday. I will probably elaborate further in the near future

"The bird rights its way out of the egg. The egg is the world. Who would be born must first destroy a world. The bird flies to God. That God's name is Abraxas." [1]

On Mayday two years ago during a holiday in the French Provence with extended family I had a strange dream in which a scar faced demon gave me three words:

GOD ANKHOR SOLEX

I did not know what to make of it and these words puzzled me for a long time.

The meaning of God was self-evident. I suddenly understood Ankhor ("Horus Lives") during a walk with my daughter two months after. But Solex remained an unsolvable riddle...until exactly two months ago.

I was hanging out in the Charm the Water Discord chat and someone there was trying to figure out the meaning of a word he got in a dream. I was reminded of my aforementioned dream. Aaron suggested to use gematria and I checked the isopsephic (Greek gematria) value of the Greek spelling of SOLEX: ΣΟΛΕΞ.

It is 365!

My mind was blown and a lot of associations rushed through my head. Obviously, 365 days of a solar year, but specifically 365 is also the isopsephic value of one of the most powerful magical names: the seven lettered ΑΒΡΑΣΑΞ or ΑΒΡΑΞΑΣ! The megas archon and ruler of the 365 spheres of the Gnostic Basilides, the "the power above all, and First Principle" according to Epiphanius.

Many things have been written about Abrasax (I recommend this and that), but the most significant piece I found was by Carl Gustav Jung in his neo-gnostic work "Septem Sermones ad Mortuos":

"Hear Ye: I begin with nothing. Nothing is the same as fullness. In the endless state fullness is the same as emptiness. The Nothing is both empty and full. One may just as well state some other thing about the Nothing, namely that it is white or that it is black or that it exists or that it exists not. That which is endless and eternal has no qualities, because it has all qualities.

The Nothing, or fullness, is called by us the PLEROMA. In it thinking and being cease, because the eternal is without qualities. In it there is no one, for if anyone were, he would be differentiated from the Pleroma and would possess qualities which would distinguish him from the Pleroma." [...]

"There is a God about whom you know nothing, because men have forgotten him. We call him by his name: ABRAXAS. He is less definite than God or Devil. In order to distinguish God from him we call God HELIOS, or the Sun.

Abraxas is activity; nothing can resist him but the unreal, and thus his active being freely unfolds. The unreal is not, and therefore cannot truly resist. Abraxas stands above the sun and above the devil. He is the unlikely likely one, who is powerful in the realm of unreality. If the Pleroma were capable of having a being, Abraxas would be its manifestation." [2]

Abrasax is the all-uniting god, he is above the benevolent god and the malevolent devil, beyond concepts like morality, sin, good, and evil. In a most Jungian psychoanalytical sense he represents the Principium Individuationis, the individuation of a subject in reconciliation with its own shadow.

Hermann Hesse used this neo-Gnostic Jungian image of Abrasax in his coming-of-age (auto-)biography "Demian" where the protagonist Sinclair chases after the meaning of a god named "Abraxas". (This was one of my favourite books as a teenager, but I completely forgot that Abrasax was part of it)

A powerful paragraph in the book that makes this Jungian understanding of the god very clear is the following:

"You consider yourself odd at times, you accuse yourself of taking a road different from most people. You have to unlearn that. Gaze into the fire, into the clouds, and as soon as the inner voices begin to speak, surrender to them, don't ask first whether it's permitted or would please your teachers or father, or some god. You will ruin yourself if you do that. That way you will become earthbound, a vegetable. Sinclair, our god's name is Abraxas and he is God and Satan and he contains both the luminous and the dark world. Abraxas does not take exception to any of your thoughts, any of your dreams. Never forget that. But he will leave you once you've become blameless and normal. Then he will leave you and look for a different vessel in which to brew his thoughts." [1]

I admit, it might seem quite a stretch to claim that SOLEX equals ABRASAX just based on the isopsephic value they share, but let me add a few more pieces of the puzzle. Take the recent synchronicities and adventures following my initiation into the sphere of Jupiter and the fact that the word ANKHOR as "Horus lives" was also significant during another synchro-mystical visit to my hometown.

My ongoing individuation, current readjustment of my relationship to my parents and also my progressing magical journey are all tightly tied together.

In some of the old Gnostic texts Abrasax was seen less as "god above god" but more as a powerful "archon", ranking even below the demiurge Yaldabaoth. Initially the two different concepts seem to contradict each other and are very confusing, but when you try to leave dualistic thinking and rational logic behind and view everything from further above, when you "squint down" onto it - to borrow a Gordonism - from a more irrational, magical "daimonic perspective", these contradictions slowly dissolve and metaphysical borders can get blurry.

Two years ago, when I received the three words, I was confused and I agonized over their meaning. I wanted to know the one real message that was encrypted. After waking from the dream I did not even remember if the second word was ANKHOR or rather ANCHOR, it could even have been ARCHON. Today I do not even want to sharpen the blurriness anymore. Why not take all of them?

It is the same with SOLEX. Yes, it has a strong connection to ABRASAX. But it also contains SOL, the sun; and EX, Latin for "out". But that seems to be precisely why I received SOLEX and not ABRASAX. Because it is "all of the above":

GOD, ANCHOR, ARCHON, HORUS LIVES, SUN OUT, ABRASAX, 365

It was a daimonic message, not a rational one. It makes sense to me now. It is full of Christian, Gnostic, and Egyptian meaning. I can't really explain why in a way it makes sense. It just does. It's beautiful. And it took two years to reach this point. Individuation. Embracing the blurriness.

Happy Beltane!

Olympus Mons

2019-04-22T18:00:00+02:00

This is a detailed report of synchronicities and personal gnosis that followed my initiation into the sphere of Jupiter during a one week trip to the area of my hometown in the South of Germany. I experienced Jovial energies during a stroll through the city, another evening I received a symbolic gift, and a few days later I found myself on a nightly quest through the forest of an enchanted mountain.

Titanic Origins

The day after my initiation into the sphere of Jupiter I had to travel to Mannheim for a job. I stayed in a shabby hotel in Ludwigshafen, the other part of the twin city across the Rhine river. Let's be honest, Ludwigshafen ain't pretty. It is mainly known for hosting the chemical industry giant BASF and the city is dominated by a dystopian industrial landscape. BASF was a co-founder of the notorious "IG Farben" conglomerate responsible for Zyklon B (the gas used in the concentration camps), and other chemical research during the Nazi war effort.

Obviously Ludwigshafen was razed to the ground by Allied bombers during the Second World War and you can still feel it. In the shadows of industrial chimneys the cityscape consists of rectangular 60s and 70s buildings that had seen better days and everything looks somehow moldy and rotten and uninviting.

I walked around the inner city and I could not stop thinking about how Saturnian everything felt. I walked past a yellow brick building hosting a high school and the sculpture that adorned its front was a black metal object with sharp edges depicting Prometheus after his fall. What an odd choice for an educational building. What a strange coincidence walking through a Saturnian place after a Jupiter initiation and seeing Prometheus, who had betrayed both, first his Titan kin Saturn by siding with the Olympians around Zeus in the Titanomachy and then his king Zeus, to bring fire to his beloved humans.

I entered a very depressing shopping mall that maybe had its golden days some time during the early 80s and been in decline ever since. I had to find a shop to buy a cable. It made me chuckle to find a branch of the consumer electronics chain "Saturn" while I was thinking about Prometheus and the Titanomachy. In front of it was a giant Transformers robot statue, a metal "Titan". Wondering if all of this was already meant for me to think about or if I am just a mythology nerd I wandered through the shop and found my cable.

When I left the mall I walked by a stand of Germany's far right wing party AfD which was depressing but suited the overall atmosphere of this abomination of a place. I walked down the wide pedestrian shopping mile that looks exactly the same in every average German city, flanked by generic mobile phone and fast food stores - here it was just a little bit more rotten than elsewhere. I was hungry, but nothing looked inviting. I had known that Ludwigshafen was notoriously unappealing, but not expected to be dragged down into such a depression. I just wanted to go back to my hotel.

On the way back along the shopping mile the grey Saturnian vibes surrounding everything suddenly got shattered by the piercing sounds of a Zurna (Middle Eastern woodwind instrument that sounds a bit like an oboe or bagpipe) and a Davul bass drum. Shivers went down my spine and I intuitively followed the music. On the next street corner was a crowd of people dressed in festive clothes and I realized it was a Middle Eastern or Turkish wedding. Some of the young men started dancing and the music became louder. It caused tears to well in my eyes and I felt like a blanket of lead was suddenly lifted off me. The depressed feeling that had dominated my stay in this city had vanished immediately and even the overcast sky was suddenly flooded by sunlight and patches of bright blue sky.

Now I was completely certain: Kingship and betrayal, Zeus' Titanic ancestry, family gatherings, weddings, music and dance; Spirits of the Sphere of Jove were teaching me about their powers and energies!

Here's a YouTube video I found that captures the same vibes quite well:

Squares and Mercenaries

After my job I travelled to my hometown Heidelberg which is just a few kilometers away from Mannheim. My wife T. and daughter E. came down from Berlin by train to meet me there and we wanted to spend a week with my sister and my parents. At past visits we usually stayed at my parents house, but this time we had booked an AirBnB for five of the seven days.

The AirBnB was a small one room studio apartment, so when T. took E. to bed around 7 p.m. I went outside for a stroll in the neighborhood. It was unknown to me because it was just recently built and used to be a freight trainyard and industrial area back in the days when I had still lived in the city. I aimlessly strolled along a shallow water canal with inviting benches and I sat down on one, enjoying the evening air. I noticed something lying beside me and picked it up. It was a cardboard box with a board game in it, labelled "Go für Anfänger" ("Go for beginners"). I was excited! Go, the "Chinese Chess"! I took it with me and continued walking until I reached a small bridge. I crossed it and wandered down a small road with modern duplex style family apartment buildings that reminded me a bit of suburban Tel Aviv. The street ends at an intersection with a paved pedestrian and bicycle road along pasture and farmland. I looked into the distance across a green field and noticed three strange looking shapes moving slowly across. It realized they were three very large birds, three storks! I stared at them and a thought popped up in my head: black and white like the Go game.

At that moment it hit me again: I was meant to find the game. It's Jupiter again! A quick online search on my phone confirmed what I had already anticipated: storks are associated with Jupiter. Chess too. I went back to our apartment and started researching about Go. The name is derived from the Japanese name igo, which is derived from its Chinese name weiqi, which roughly translates as "board game of surrounding". It is a 3,000+ years old abstract strategy game for two players and the goal of the game is to surround more territory than the opponent. In antiquity it was considered one of the four essential arts of the cultured Chinese aristocrats besides mastering a string instrument, calligraphy, and painting.

"The board has to be square, for it signifies the Earth, and its right angles signify uprightness. The pieces of the two sides are yellow and black; this difference signifies the Yin and the Yang; scattered in groups all over the board, they represent the heavenly bodies. These significances being manifest, it is up to the players to make the moves, and this is connected with kingship. Following what the rules permit, both opponents are subject to them; this is the rigor of the Tao." - Pan Ku, 1st century historian

I unpacked the game and noticed that instead of the standard 19x19 line grid, this one had just 9x9. Go boards have 4 to 9 decorative dots on symmetrically chosen line intersections. They help you not get lost between all the lines and intersections and have other minor functions in variants of the game. This board had four dots and I immediately noticed that the dots form a large square of four by four small squares - like the kamea of Jupiter! That made me pay more attention to the empty squares instead of the grid of lines around them and I noticed that the whole board has 8 by 8 squares, like a chess or checker-board. With the black and white pebbles one could even play checkers on this board! I found this similarity curious and I dove into the rabbit hole of the history of checkers - and it suddenly all started to make even more sense:

Long before Chess or Checkers existed, the ancient Greeks used to play a popular game called "Petteia" which Plato claimed originated in Egypt. It was played with black and white pebbles on a board divided in squares, mostly 8 by 8. The exact rules are unknown, but it was about capturing the opponent by surrounding them. It very likely survived into the Roman Empire under the name of "Ludus Latrunculorum" or "Latrunculi": "The Game of Mercenaries." Based on various mentions of the game throughout the history of the Roman Empire, various attempts to reconstruct the detailed rules have been made, but the most accurate reconstruction was made by Ulrich Schädler in 1994:

The game is for 2 players. Before the game begins the players decide how many pieces each of them is going to have. The allowed range is 16-24 pieces per player. The pieces start off the board. The first turn is decided by lot, such as toss of a coin. Then, each player takes a turn to place one piece onto any empty square on the board. Once all of the pieces have been placed, the players take turns to move their pieces. Pieces can be moved horizontally and vertically to any adjacent square. A piece can jump over another piece of either color, if the square behind the piece being jumped over is unoccupied. Several jumps can be made in one move, just like in checkers. A player can trap enemy pieces between two of their own pieces. A trapped piece cannot be moved, but stays on the board. Once an enemy’s piece became trapped, on their next turn, the player can capture it and remove it off the board, as long as both pieces that are trapping it are still free and did not become trapped themselves on the opponents following move. Once a piece is removed off the board it does not return into the game. If the opponent surrounded one of the enemy pieces trapping their trapped piece, then theirs is made free, where as the enemy trapped piece becomes trapped. A player can move their own piece between two enemy pieces only if by doing such a move will trap one of the enemy pieces. Such a move is called Suicide. The player who remains only with one piece on the board loses the game.

Check this website for more information

Go and Petteia. Games of strategy, conquest, kingship, capture and expansion. Game as cultural art for pleasure, leisure, and fun. Thanks for this gift, Jove! It is not only a clear pointer for me to act more strategically in my life, but I also already have a ton of ideas of how to apply concepts and elements of "Latrunculi" in magical operations and sigil creation.

Mons Omnium Sanctorum

Thursday evening I spontaneously decided to go for a hike to release some of the tensions that usually build up when hanging out with my folks. I had an urge to just enjoy nature and connect with some spirits of place of my hometown. I wanted it to be a bit adventurous, so I chose to walk up to the top of Heiligenberg ("Holy Mountain"), a 449 meters high hill on the opposite river-side of the Königstuhl ("king's chair") that rises above Heidelberg's old town.

Heiligenberg is a special place. It is a quite high elevation from which you can look far across the Rhine valley and parts of the Neckar valley. It was inhabited since the Neolithic era and Celts had built a double walled fort around its peaks around 500 BC. During the Roman era the hill was a sacred precinct with a North-facing temple to Mercury on its summit. Archeological finds include votive stones with Latin inscriptions to Mercurius Cimbrianus, "Mercury of the Cimbri",suggesting a place of worship of the Germanic god Wodan, who was identified with Mercury by interpretatio romana. In the 9th century a church dedicated to the Archangel Michael was built on top of the Roman temple, incorporating its rocks and it was expanded to a monastery in 1023. There is a second smaller monastery of St. Stephan below the peak from aorund the same era and next to that is the infamous Heidenloch ("heathen hole"), a pit 55 meters deep, of unknown age and purpose. It has been suggested that it is a Roman well or cistern, but most likely it had some kind of cultic function.

During his travels along the Rhine river in the mid 19th century, Victor Hugo even visited the Heiligenberg and the Heidenloch. I found out about this after my journey and I added some quotes of his report, because he describes the aura of the place in a very fitting way.

During the Third Reich, a Thingstätte ("Thing place") open-air theatre was constructed on the Heiligenberg for propaganda and cultural events. In my teenage years I remember that it was a tradition to celebrate the night before Mayday, Walpurgisnacht or "witches night" by getting drunk on the river beach and then hiking up to the Thingstätte with thousands of other people and partying all night with giant bonfires and drumming sounds. It was always a quite psychedelic experience that felt very pagan and it was the "largest inofficial event of the year" in Heidelberg.

I left our AirBnB around 8pm and took a tram to where I knew a hiking path to the mountain begins. The sun was about to set when I walked up the forest route. I walked quickly because I wanted to reach the top before complete darkness. It did not work out quite as I thought. It got dark fast and I soon noticed that I was a city guy now. Every tiny shuffling or cracking sound in the trees and bushes around me freaked me out a bit, not knowing if it came from a mouse, bunny, a boar, or worse.

I had left the town about noon by a path known as the Philosopher's Walk, which leads nobody knows where, as befits a philosopher's walk, — I found myself in a small valley; and after exploring it leisurely for awhile, I set to work climbing the side of a steep hill by one of those old paths one often finds in this region, — staircases paved with stone, one might truly call them. Twilight was slowly settling down upon the valley behind me, and as I turned when about midway up the ascent I beheld one of those weird, evening landscapes in which the mountains that border the horizon remind one of a long procession of immense snails, and the mist-veiled rivers and streams the silver track they leave behind them. --Victor Hugo

My first destination was the "Bittersbrunnen", a very ancient spring that had already served the Celtic settlers as a water source in the fifth century BC. It was night when I reached it and the moon shone brightly from above. The spring had been covered by erosion for centuries, but was restored in 1980 and stabilized by a stone construction, a small tunnel and a basin. I recited Eliphas Levi's "Prayer of the Undines" and left an offering of a handful of almonds I had taken with me as a snack. I wanted to take some of the spring water with me, but I did not want to sacrifice my bottle of drinking water for it. The almonds I had brought were kept in a glass jar, so I decided to use that and poured all the remaining almonds into my backpack and filled the jar with water from the rock basin of the spring. I noticed that the lid of the jar did not fit tightly enough and leaked water, so I could not put it into my backpack but had to carry it in my hand. It was a bit annoying, but worked.

Around 15 minutes later I reached the summit and I could already see the black silhouettes of one of the monastery's ruined towers through the trees. When I reached the St. Michael's ruins the starry sky and bright moon were overwhelming. It was a very magical atmosphere. I climbed the tower and looked around. I could see city lights of towns all around and gazed forever at the night sky, enjoying the moment.

From the broad summit, covered with a thin growth of heather and pitilessly swept by the wind, the country below looked, not like a landscape, but like a huge, nearly round geographical map similar to that which Christ must have beheld when Satan took him up into a mountain to show him all the kingdoms of the earth. --Victor Hugo

Then I walked over to the remains of the ancient Roman temple, faced North and recited the Orphic Hymns to the ruler of the day: Zeus, and to Hermes, the ruler of this place. I closed with a short prayer to Wotan and did a cycle of Qi Gong exercises and a meditation. I took a thin branch of a hazel tree that grows in the middle of the old monastery as a souvenir and apologized to and thanked the spirits of place for this memorable visit up here.

I left the sacred site and checked the map on my phone to orient myself and to find the shortest and easiest to walk path downhill. It was around 10pm and pitch black and I wanted to go home as quickly as possible. The fastest way was via the Thingstätte open air theatre, so I walked down the giant stairs facing the rocky stage area and memories of my teenage times popped up in my mind: my first ever high from some dubious legal ecstasy herb mix with 17 up here during Walpurgisnacht had definetly been a night to remember. How old I've become so quickly. Right below the Thingstätte is a small restaurant that was just in the process of closing and at a spring fountain next to it I refilled my drinking water bottle, put a jacket on and reorganized my backpack a bit for the hike down.

I walked down the paved mountain road that connects the restaurant to civilization and passed by the ruins of St. Stephan's monastery. I wanted to pay a quick visit to the Heidenloch before descending, so I walked over to the small circular hut that houses the ominous pit. I spontaneously decided to recite the Orphic Hymn to Hermes Chthonios because it felt appropriate and I threw some almonds down into the depths as an offering to whoever dwells here. The pit is covered by a metal grill and fine wire-mesh to keep people from falling down there or dropping their trash into it, but the mesh was wide enough for almonds to pass through. I listened to them falling and bouncing off the walls on their way down. The sounds seemed to not stop, just fade out very slowly. It was mesmerizing.

It was only an old cistern perhaps, but the hour, the place, and the moonlight imparted a strange weirdness to this mysterious chamber buried in the ground with only the sky for a roof. What can it be? Pushing aside the tall weeds and briers with my cane, I seize hold of a young sapling, and leaning over the side of the opening, peer eagerly down into the depths below. Just then I hear a sad and quavering voice behind me distinctly utter the word "Heidenloch." [...] I turn, but no human being is visible. Though I know very little German, the meaning of this term is familiar to me. It means the pagans' dungeon. I turn, but no human being is visible. The soft sighing of the wind is the only sound I hear. [...] I confess that I remained gazing down into the pagans' dungeon a long time, imagining it the empty tomb of some giant, perhaps, or a temple of the Druids, or the reservoir of some ancient convent, or even the site of a demolished gibbet whose grim sides had been sprinkled with human blood or piled high with lifeless bodies. --Victor Hugo

When I collected my stuff to go I almost kicked the glass jar with the spring water I had collected earlier and I left the hut to finally head home. It suddenly felt colder than before and there was also strong wind blowing through the treetops. Time to get going. I checked my phone again to make sure I would take the right path and suddenly my phone just turned off. I could not turn it back on as if the batteries had just died. It was weird because I knew I must have had at least 20% of power left when I last checked 10 minutes earlier. Fortunately I had my little yellow wand flashlight with me and I searched the side of the road for the beginning of the footpath I had wanted to take. But I could not find it.

I freaked out. No map, unexpected stormy weather coming up, no idea where to go. I oriented myself towards the city lights of Heidelberg, took my flashlight and just walked straight through the forest that wasn't very bushy and fairly easy to cross in this part of the hill. I reached a wide footpath and turned left walking parallel to the river. I remembered that a lot of paths follow around the hill and lead downwards in a zigzag fashion, so I just kept going. I noticed that I suddenly couldn't see very well anymore. It seemed like the air had become very dense and opaque, as if there was fog. I kept walking for 15 minutes but there was no path leading down, no curve, nothing. I decided to walk back into the other direction. I felt lost and scared. Was all this a result of me stirring up things in the creepy Heidenloch? Why did my phone die? Why is there suddenly fog and wind although it was clear sky before? Am I getting superstitious and paranoid?

I finally reached a crossroads with directions carved into a large rock. The arrows were not very clear, so I decided intuitively which way to go. It seemed to get darker and I could barely see anything but at least I got used to all the animal sounds around me by now without freaking out. I found another sign pointing to "Hirschgasse" ("Buck's alley") and I faintly remembered that name. It might be the small alley with stairs that lead down to the old bridge that crosses the river to Heidelberg. I followed the sign. What felt like an hour later I finally reached a paved footpath that led straight downhill. I followed it, but it dawned on me that Hirschgasse was not what I had thought it was. I saw streetlights and houses but I came out at the wrong end of the city on the wrong side of the hill. I didn't care, I was back in civilization!

I left the tree-branch I had used as a hiking stick at a crossroads, thanking it for its help, and walked towards the river. Under the streetlight I noticed something floating in the spring water glass jar I was still carrying in my left hand. It was a leaf. I opened the jar and took the leaf out, thinking it was a good idea to not drink the water on my way down. Then I noticed that there was something else floating in the jar. I held it up to the light and looked more closely. I almost dropped it when I saw two small creatures floating in it, with arms and legs, and fins and long tails. What the hell? I had accidentally taken two amphibian larvae with me from the ancient Bittersbrunnen spring! What did it mean? Was I supposed to take them home with me?

I walked by the Neckar river towards the old town of Heidelberg, pondering about what to do now. There was no way for me to take these creatures back to Berlin! When I reached the Old Bridge and walked across towards the town's gate I stopped and did an impromptu prayer to the river spirit. I told him I cannot take these water creatures with me and that I will give them into his care. I asked him to protect them, let them grow and show them the world downstream. I opened the jar and flung the contents down the bridge into the waters of the Neckar. I felt sad about losing the ancient spring-water I had so carefully carried down Heiligenberg. I had wanted to use it for magical operations. But I also felt somehow relieved and liberated. It was a curious emotion and I walked through the city gates and greeted the "Brückenaffe" ("bridge monkey"), a little bronze sculpture of a baboon like monkey holding a mirror towards the spectator. It made me chuckle. Yes, I am such a fool!

I bought myself a Kebab and walked through the old town to Bismarckplatz where I luckily caught the last tram to where our AirBnB was at and I arrived home safely around midnight. What a trip!

Olympic Alchemy

Before my initiation into the sphere of Jupiter I had expected mainly that I might learn lessons about earthly manifestations, material wealth, something I have never been good at, or about the expansion of my own sovereignty in terms of my life as a freelancer and entrepreneur. I was surprised that the main topic that suddenly unfolded was about very personal family matters.

Sachiel had pointed me to some quite painful issues regarding my relationship to my parents that I had assumed were resolved a long time ago. But they were not and they bubbled up again. I did not get into details in my report due to their private nature. All I can reveal is that it was an unpleasant confrontation in several episodes and I was not able to reconcile with them about fundamental elements of my life and our relationship - but eventually that was perhaps the quintessence of the Jovial teachings: Zeus had Titan parents and he had to defeat them to gain sovereignty and the throne of the world!

My afternoon in Ludwigshafen had presented me with the Saturnian melancholy and depression, suddenly broken apart by Jovial optimism, joy of music and dance, and the founding of a new sovereign family all represented by the image of a Middle Eastern wedding.

I was gifted a board-game of strategy and conquest, expansion and sovereignty that immediately sparked a ton of ideas and interpretations without even having played it yet. There will be a lot of things to unpack from this in the future for sure, and food for thought about my role in the world and my approach to life. I am excited to embrace it.

My nightly pilgrimage to the holy mountain of my birthplace unexpectedly turned into a small "Hero's Quest" that reconnected me with the spirit of place. I visited and honored the god who was once worshipped at this place and when I recited the hymns to Zeus and Hermes I realized that they both are parts of Wotan's nature (Jovial and Mercurial). I was illuminated and left in awe by the moon and the stars above and haunted and cursed by dark forces from the below. I had unknowingly (unconsciously) carried two amphibian larvae in my hand from an ancient source in a dark forest up to the summit and all the way down to the valley where I became conscious of their existence and flung them into the raging waters of the river of my hometown. Right after that, a monkey showed me a mirror and mocked me a fool. That whole evening is already so dense with potential meaning to unravel, it will take a while to fully comprehend.

What seems to have shifted in my consciousness after my initiation ritual is the constant feeling of having been taken out of 3D reality and forced to become an observer of my own life. I've had this feeling occasionally every since I started practicing rituals, but now it feels like I levelled up and can't stop seeing everything from that perspective. It does not mean that I have difficulties being present in the moments of my life - quite the opposite actually. It was rather a shift in general awareness of life itself.

Another very profound difference is that now - especially after my nightly journey - it feels validated to me that my own mind and objective consensus reality are not two separate worlds, but rather different points of one spectrum. It has become difficult to separate my mind from a dark forest with a bottomless pit and ruined monasteries. As above, so below.

A smaller yet peculiar observation is that from the beginning of my preparations and research for the Seven Spheres initiation I had noticed a recurring synchronicity: Almost 70% of the time I looked at my phone throughout the day to check the time, it presented me some kind of interesting number combination. Double numbers, like 14:14 or 21:21, mirrored ones, like 12:21 or 15:51, as well as triplets or quadruplets, like 23:33 or 11:11. After the initiation, the probability of those has risen to over 90%. Now I am actually surprised when it does not happen.

The night after my journey to Heiligenberg I had an intense and vivid nightmare in which I was haunted by a demon named Samael. I bound and defeated him, but it triggered some interesting synchronicities I will get into in a future post. But besides that, I have a hunch that my next initiation will probably be into the sphere of Mars.

(Victor Hugo's quotes taken from an English translation of his travel report "Le Rhin")

Mermaids and Disk-Headed Gods

2019-01-17T20:00:00+01:00

This article is about a powerful synchronicity I had at the end of December. If you find hearing about other people's synchronicities equally boring to having to listen to their dreams, just stop here. If you find such things weirdly interesting or at least entertaining, feel free to read on...

When we became parents a bit over two years ago, the lives of my wife T. and I have changed dramatically. Procrastination has been wiped out completely and quiet moments have become rare treasures. Before, we used to watch several movies a week, now it has become one movie a week, often even less. We have no TV and no Netflix or similar subscriptions and I usually get to choose what we watch, simply because I am a bit less exhausted than T. and I still manage to somehow search and organize a movie.

On December 30th we found a moment of quiet time to watch something, but I was too tired to come up with anything and let T. choose a flick. She said she wanted to see "Mermaids" with Cher from 1990 again because she liked it as a teenager. I had never watched this movie, I like Cher, mermaids keep popping up in my life, so I was into it!

Laptop on our bed, earbuds plugged, I had no idea what kind of synchro-mystical rollercoaster-ride this seemingly innocent "girl flick" would turn out to be...

Mermaids

Here's a quick summary of the movie's setting and plot, without spoilers:

Rachel Flax, played by Cher, is a self-obsessed, freedom-loving, and hopelessly promiscuous mother of two girls, Charlotte and Kate. Her relationships seem to always end in a disaster after which she packs her daughters and her belongings to move to a far away city to start a new life. We learn about this ongoing pattern from the narrator of the movie: the older teenage daughter Charlotte, who is obsessed with Catholicism despite the family being Jewish. Her smaller sister Kate is a talented swimming athlete and collects many prizes for it. We also learn that Kate's father was a one-night-stand and Rachel refuses to talk about Charlotte's dad, who stole her favourite car. The movie portraits the family trying to build a new life in a town near Boston. Rachel jumping into yet another relationship with a local shoe shop owner and Charlotte is fighting an inner struggle between her plans to become a Catholic nun and hopelessly falling in love with the local church bell ringer and school bus driver Joe. Yadda, yadda, yadda, Hollywood family-comedy love-drama unfolding...

(more on Wikipedia)

Magical Research

Ridiculously cheesy, huh? Yep... To understand why this movie had an impact on me, first a bit of background information without getting too deep into details:

In the last year I have been immersed in collaborative research on the "Decans" of the Ptolemaic Era of Egypt, a period during which these ancient asterism deities of fate became attached to the Ecliptic and turned into rulers over 10° segments of the Zodiac. The most famous asterisms of the ancient Decans are Sirius (Sothis) and several stars that make up Orion (Sah). Sothis was one of the many forms of the goddess Isis and Sah was connected to Osiris.

Besides the ongoing Decan research I was also currently reading Al Cummins' "Book of the Magi" and looking into cited source material, because I wanted to produce some talismans and materia magica related to the Three Magi. Their feast day of Epiphany was coming up and I found out that it coincided not only with a New Moon and a Solar Eclipse near the South Node, but also with the sun entering the sidereal Egyptian Decan of Kenmu known to the Greek as Kommes, who was depicted as an anthropomorphic god with a golden disk instead of a head. He is often referred to as being "headless", what intrigued me due to my other ongoing research on "headlessness" and the Headless Rite. In addition, the South Node in Vedic Mythology is associated with the headless god Ketu, whose severed head is living on as his brother Rahu, the North Node.

Synchronicities

Literally the first image of the movie, before the opening title, is a depiction of the asterism of Orion. It turns into an animation of stars forming the letter O of the word ORION, the production company of the movie. Not only Decan-related, but also the three stars on Orion's belt have been referred to as "The Three Kings". It made me smile, thinking "Oh what a funny coincidence..."

Not only have I always had a crush on Winona Ryder, who plays the wannabe Catholic nun Charlotte, but I felt uncannily awkward about certain parallels of her weird spiritual obsessions despite bein born into a different faith. I sometimes find myself in a somewhat similar position, being born Protestant, raised agnostic, now husband to a Jewish wife and technically also father of a Jewish daughter, but dabbling in Catholic folk-magic, having the Blessed Virgin of Candelaria on my altar and working with the Three Magi among other Saints.

Anyways, just a few minutes into the movie came this scene that made me jump up from bed, mouth and eyes wide open:

Scene description: Charlotte finds a photo of her father in one of her Catholic hymn-books on the page of "Holy, Holy, Holy, Lord Almighty". It is a black and white photo that is torn at the top, it depicts a man leaning at the front-grill of his 1950s Dodge car, wearing shiny two-tone wingtip leather shoes. The head of the man is missing, because the photo is torn. The Wyoming state license-plate of the car says 25-1836. The image zooms in and fades, it turns into a childhood memory of Charlotte: we can see a Solar Eclipse, then we see Charlotte, around 4 years old, looking straight into the sun. Hands of a man appear, putting darkened paper-glasses on her eyes, saying: "Honey, it's an eclipse. Put these on." - The camera takes her perspective, looking at the black silhouette of the man against the solar eclipse. His head appears as the eclipsing disk of the sun. She puts her hands up against the sun and looks down to the man's shoes. We see the same shoes as on the photo. The memory fades and Charlotte's narrator voice says "One day he'll come back. I just hope he can find us." She talks about her worries and starts praying. We see her close the door of her bedroom and kneeling down in front of a small altar depicting a nativity scene featuring the Virgin Mary, baby Jesus, and figurines that could be Magi as well as shepherds.

Now, what are the chances that among the very few movies I have time to watch nowadays I get to see one a week before Epiphany coinciding with a Solar eclipse and the headless or disk-headed Decan, with an obviously symbolic scene like this:

A girl looks into a Solar Eclipse, her hands raised in a posture that is uncannily reminiscent of the Egyptian adoration gesture (see below), looking at a solar-disk-headed man - and all that after finding a headless photograph of a man in front of a car with the numbers 18 and 36 featured on the license-plate (The disk-headed Decan Kenmu is the 18th of 36 Decans) in a hymn-book on the page of "Holy, Holy, Holy, Lord Almighty" after which we see the Virgin Mary and The Magi?

Paralyzed from this synchro-mystical punch into my face I managed to watch the rest of the movie which kept being littered with smaller synchronicities, like Rachel reclining on a sofa dressed like an Egyptian pharaoh or goddess; Charlotte mentioning Saint Margaret of Antioch, about whom I had thought and read about just the day before; Charlotte getting bored of Catholicism at some point after cognitive dissonance with her growing sexual desires and turning towards Greek Mythology; and so on and so forth.

Oh, and the title "Mermaids": it has really nothing to do with the movie's story at all, besides maybe Kate's swimming obsession and a scene where Rachel is dressed as a mermaid for a costume-party. But it had meaning for me personally, not only because my sun-sign is Pisces, but also due to some random uncanny mermaid encounters in both, dreams and everyday life I've had throughout the whole last year. The most profound one was during last year's Venus Retrograde period in which I visited Warsaw. The city's mythological icon is a fierce mermaid depicted on two statues that I both visited and did some spirit-of-place rituals at. The whole visit culminated in a series of synchronicities and some important realizations about my relationship to myself and my body which eventually led to a new spiritual side-path: Tai Chi and Chi Gung.

I also looked into the lyrics of the hymn in Charlotte's book and found two small things:

"Early in the morning our song shall rise to Thee." - the Decan stars are counted when they rise heliacally, meaning together with the sun in the morning.
"All the saints adore Thee, casting down their golden crowns around the glassy sea;" - Saints with golden crowns? Like the Three Magi?

Aftermath

Did I overreact? Am I turning insane or maybe just a bit paranoid? I don't know...I still get goosebumps thinking about this movie. After a successful Epiphany dedicated to the Three Magi I immediately dove into research on disk-headed Egyptian gods, especially in relation to Osiris. I've had this in the back of my head and briefly touched on the subject before, but had kind of forgotten about it. Well not anymore...and of course not surprisingly at all after "Mermaids": I stumbled upon some really interesting stuff that ties my two ongoing research projects on the Decans and The Headless One together. I am still in the process of putting all that into a text which will eventually become a future article.

After all I asked my wife T. why she had wanted to see this specific movie and she admitted that she does not know. Apparently it just popped up in her mind after she had forgotten about it since her teenage years. Funny coincidence indeed...

Nematodal Nightmares

2018-10-28T12:30:00+01:00

I stumbled over a note in my favorite writing tool the other day. It is a report on a dream I had around February or March of this year. It was the second weirdest dream experience I've ever head besides the one that started my path of re-enchantment. What struck me now was that in retrospect it has some elements in it that could almost have been pre-cognitive. I am sticking with 'almost' because they are also quite 'archetypical' nightmarish themes.

Anyways, if you are like me and find it boring and meaningless to listen to other people's dream reports, stop right here. If you are into stories of semi-lucid dreams with sleep paralysis and where the borders to the awake state dissolve in an uncanny way, read on.

I am sitting at a kitchen table in some place, looking at my phone. It looks like an old 90s phone with greenish LCD display, but it has smartphone features. I realize that whatever I look at on the phone disappears. The letters of text disappear one by one. Suddenly I receive a text message with a threat. I don't recall what it said. I am checking the phone's task manager that shows me all open apps. There is an unknown task I cannot remove.

On the kitchen table in front of me I suddenly see disgusting worms appear whose skin is so transparent that you can see the red blood inside of them. I kill one of them with my hand. I kill several of them, anxious and disgusted.

I receive a text message telling me how many worms I have killed and the question why not dare try to get rid of all of them? Checking the task manager again I notice that the annoyingly persistent app is called "NematOne".

I am in a larger room with my family. My cat starts behaving weirdly and is very aggressive. The room feels strange as if something evil is present. My wife T. also behaves strangely and her voice is different than usual. I ask her if she feels like she is getting possessed or losing control. She looks at me, nodding and saying "yes".

I want to do the headless rite but I realize I forgot all the words. Instead I imagine having the "voice of god" and I put all my energy into this intention and start yelling "Dybbuk Tse!" (Hebrew exorcism "!דִבּוּק צא" for "Evil spirit go out!") with a roaring and echoing voice and it seems to have an effect. I continue doing it with more and more effort and the evil presence seems to retreat.

I ask T. if it helped but she says she doesn't think so, "because of the black matter at the ceiling". I look up and there is a lump of what looks like a nest made of black spiderwebs on the ceiling, oozing a black substance.

I freak out and my dream becomes lucid and I instantly notice that this place does not look at all like our apartment and that we should leave A.S.A.P! There's one of the creepy worms on the floor. It scares me and suddenly it turns into a mouse that runs off. Did I do this? The cat immediately chases after the mouse.

The room turned into an unusually long hallway which we are walking through. There are a lot of doors on both sides and we are heading towards the exit all the way at the end of it. Hearing a strange buzzing sound from behind I turn around and see a black mantis or locust like insect jumping and flying towards me. It lands on the floor right next to me and I call the cat to take care of it. The creature takes another leap into the direction to which we are trying to walk, trying to outrun us but the cat is after it.

I enter a room through one of the doors on the right side of the hallway and it's the bathroom in the house I grew up in. My daughter E. is standing in the shower and her skin is rainbow colored and she has a really evil look on her face. It completely freaks me out and I think this dream is too weird and I want to wake up.

I open my eyes, but I am completely paralyzed and I feel that something pulls me back into the dream. I panic and try harder to wake up. I open my eyes again, I can even see the light coming through the window curtains in our bedroom and I can feel my head resting on the pillow, but I have the sensation of being very forcefully pulled down from behind towards the mattress. Completely unable to resist it I drop back into the dream.

I am in the hallway again. I tell T. that we need to get out of here but that I am unable to wake up. I try to open my eyes again, but the pull is still there.

T. is there in the hallway with our daughter who now looks normal, but the feeling of evil in the room is still present. T. asks me "what is her birthday?". I reply "what? why?". She says "if you remember her birthday, it means you are not dreaming". I try to remember her birthday. Numbers get all juggled up in my head and I can't grasp any date in my mind. It seems to slip away. I manage to concentrate very hard. Slowly and with a lot of effort digits appear and fall into place. I got it!

I open my eyes and I can still feel the pull, but I am forcing myself to move, to roll over, to really wake up. It seems to work. Still feeling unusually numb I am finally awake, my daughter's birthday clearly in my mind.

I dared to use the term 'precognitive' in my introduction because of the feeling of being in a semi-familiar place that is not home and an evil presence that haunts it. Exactly like the story of our recent move to a new home that was haunted by a "poltergeist". Also the presence of the worms reminded me of a recent ongoing issue that our daughter was suffering from a parasitic nematode infection for a few weeks which always gave me the creeps thinking about it.

Ghostbusting

2018-10-26T21:00:00+02:00

Aqueous Luck

In the last few months I noticed an increase in general luck in my life. It's mostly small things like new checkout lines opening in the supermarket when I approach them, or being offered to skip the cue at the airport check-in, my daughter finding money bills in the park, stuff like that. I am not sure what the cause for it is, as I several ongoing small rituals that I regularly practice, but I am mainly suspecting the regular offerings to the river spirit. I usually offer consecrated tobacco or dry bread to him and simply ask for luck.

The most outstanding and mind-blowing incident of luck was the whole story around moving to a new apartment at the end of August of this year.

I've been living in the same house in a lovely street full of trees next to a park in the heart of Berlin for the last seven years. My former "apartment" that I have lived in until August consisted of two old adjacent ground-floor shops. I had used them in different configurations as office space, living space, co-working space, second hand clothes shop. My girlfriend moved in with me a few years ago, we got married soon after, and two years ago our daughter E. was born. Suddenly the beloved "interesting apartment" had become a challenge because it didn't really suit the lifestyle of our small family anymore.

Anyways, out of the blue, around the middle of June I got a visit from two ladies of the property management company. They came to offer me a deal: if I would agree to cancel my business rental contract and leave one of the two shops they would offer me another apartment in the same house in exchange. The other flat was perfectly sized for our new little family, with a real private rental contract with all the benefits of legal protection of tenants and rent control, no questions asked about any financial securities from our side, and a rent that is way below the average of this neighborhood that is a hotspot of gentrification struggle. We could not believe our luck.

Uninvited Flatmate

But soon after we moved in, things started getting a bit edgy. Our cat didn't like the place at all, behaved very anxious and was outside most of the time, but he's a cat, so we were kind of expecting weird behavior from him. After a week my wife T. started having strange rage attacks and nervous breakdowns almost on a daily basis. I also felt unusually aggressive and snappy and without any of my usual patience. Little E. was restless and took hours to fall asleep. In addition, our renovation attempts kept failing in absurd ways. Screws kept falling back out of the wall and curtain rails would fall off the ceiling. Tools would get lost or stopped functioning. I almost killed myself with exposed electricity cables in an indescribably clumsy accident. One evening when T. and I were not snapping at each other in unprecedented irrational fights I joked that maybe the new place is haunted. Well, as it turned out, the joke was on us.

T. revealed to me that her attacks almost felt like she was not herself - more like "possessed". It dawned on us that our issues were not only results of being overtired parents trying to turn the new apartment into an inhabitable home, but might actually be related to a presence that did not like us! Poltergeist activity!

Was this the price for the luck we've had? A magical test?

The next morning I went straight to the organic supermarket a few blocks down the road and bought camphor, as suggested by my mage friend Ricardo who is more into the Eastern esoteric traditions where this method is used to cleanse. I did as instructed and put small pieces of the intense smelling substance into the four corners of the house.

The same evening E. fell asleep peacefully after 20 minutes and also T. had not felt so relieved for days. We keep an old radio running in the bedroom, tuned between stations so it produces white noise, which helps our little daughter to sleep better. T. always stays in bed with E. until she sleeps. She texted me the good news while I was in my office downstairs. I wrote back that maybe it was because of the "spiritual cleansing".

The moment T. had read my message she heard the radio making sudden evil grunting sounds that scared her a lot and that she had never heard before! Damn! Another proof of an uninvited etherial flat-mate ...and that the camphor didn't work well enough to drive it away.

Full Latin

I consulted with Ricardo about what to do about this problem and he advised to "go full Latin". He suggested a protocol that included a few Catholic prayers and an exorcism and I spiced it up with some more witchy additions. Below is the full list of operations I performed.

Although eventually it worked and the "ghost" vanished, it didn't leave without yet another prank which was also his creepiest:

T. told me that while she was in the bathroom and brushed her teeth she had the sudden feeling that the door opened behind her. She turned her head but the door was still closed. So she continued to brush her teeth and then felt that someone pulled her hair from behind! She turned around: nothing!

Ghostbusting Protocol

Place peanut sized chunks of camphor in the four corners of the house/room. It evaporates quite quickly, so you need to replace it every other day.
Soak some mugwort in hot water and let it get cold. Do a quick consecration with your intent on invoking the plant spirit to assist you with its cleansing powers. Sift out the leafy bits and fill the water into a pump spray bottle. Turn the bottle to fine mist spray mode and spray every room, going around the house from room to room in a counterclockwise movement until you are back where you started.
Make up an introductory prayer to the Blessed Virgin Mary to assist you in driving out the unwanted forces from your home that haunt you and your family.
Prayer "August Queen of Heaven":

August Queen of Heaven,
sovereign queen of Angels,
you who at the beginning
received from God
the power and the mission to crush the head of Satan,
we beseech you humbly,
send your holy legions so that,
on your orders and by your power,
they will track down demons,
fight them everywhere,
curb their audacity and plunge them into the abyss.

Who can be compared to God?
Oh good and tender Mother,
you will always be our love and our hope.

Oh divine Mother,
send the Holy Angels and Archangels to defend me
and to keep the cruel enemy far from me.

Holy Angels and Archangels defend us,
protect us.

Amen.
The 1902 short form of the exorcism formula and prayer to the Archangel St. Michael from the Rituale Romanum:

In name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.

St. Michael the Archangel, illustrious leader of the heavenly army, defend us in the battle against principalities and powers, against the rulers of the world of darkness and the spirit of wickedness in high places.

Come to the rescue of mankind, whom God has made in His own image and likeness, and purchased from Satan's tyranny at so great a price. Holy Church venerates you as her patron and guardian. The Lord has entrusted to you the task of leading the souls of the redeemed to heavenly blessedness. Entreat the Lord of peace to cast Satan down under our feet, so as to keep him from further holding man captive and doing harm to the Church. Carry our prayers up to God's throne, that the mercy of the Lord may quickly come and lay hold of the beast, the serpent of old, Satan and his demons, casting him in chains into the abyss, so that he can no longer seduce the nations. Amen
The Latin version for even more oomph:

In nomine Patris, et Filii et Spiritus Sancti.
Sancte Michaël Archangele,
defende nos in proelio;
contra nequitiam et insidias diaboli esto praesidium.
Imperet illi Deus,
supplices deprecamur: tuque,
Princeps militiae caelestis,
Satanam aliosque spiritus malignos,
qui ad perditionem animarum pervagantur in mundo,
divina virtute in infernum detrude.
Amen.
Thank the Blessed Virgin Mary and the Archangel for their assistance.
Draw crosses with Holy Oil on all doors of the rooms.
Here is a modified and shortened version of the Stele of Jeu for the purpose of driving out the evil forces from my home:

I invoke you, headleess one, awesome and invisible God who dwells in the void of emptiness.
You who created the Earth and the Heavens,
You who created the Night and the Day,
You who created the Darkness and the Light.
You are Osoronnophris, whom no one has ever seen.
You are Iabas; you are Iapos.
You have distinguished the Just from the Unjust.
You have made the Female and the Male.
You have made the Seed and the Fruit.
You have made men Love and Hate one another.
Arbathiaō reibet athelebersēth ara blatha albeu ebenphchi chitasgoē ib aōth iaō
Hear me and turn away the uninvited spirit from these rooms.
Arogogorobraō sochou modoriō phalarchaō ooo
Deliver this place from the spirit that restrains my family and me.
Roubriaō mari ōdam baabna baōth ass adōnai aphniaō ithōlēth abrasax aēoōu
Mighty headless one, deliver this home from the evil spirit.
Mabarraiō ioēl kotha athorēbalō abraōth
Deliver this place from the spirit that restrains my family and me.
Aōth abaōth basym isak sabaōth iaō
Repeat the mugwort water spraying described above while saying your intent of cleansing the space from all unwanted spirits.
Replace the evaporated camphor in the upcoming weeks.

The hair-pulling prank was the last weird thing that happened. After that we were left alone. Our moods went up significantly, our patience and general wellbeing also. The cat was finally relaxed and started trying out different sleeping spots in all of the rooms as he used to do in our old home. It almost felt like someone had exchanged the whole atmosphere of our home. It felt clean.

Because this presence had heavily affected my whole family I chose the nuclear solution, so I am not sure which step exactly did it in the end. You might want to choose a more selective approach by starting simple (mugwort, camphor) and waiting for a result, then calling for air support (prayers, holy oil), if that doesn't work dropping the Mother of All Bombs aka. the Blessed Virgin, and if the presence is still around, finally going full WMD (St. Michael, Headless One).

Thanks again Ricardo for the Catholic weaponry and overall support through the whole process and to my cat C. for being such a reliable bio-sensor and familiar in this and the other world.

Altar of the Serpent Goddess

2018-08-25T19:30:00+02:00

Yet again, this year I returned to the rocky island of Pag to do the same job as in the last years. I was quite excited to come back to celebrate my two year serpent dream anniversary and one incredible year of invincibility. Before my trip I started doing a bit of research about the antiquity of Pag with the intention of finding some kind of mythological or historical thread to pull on in order to tip my hat to an older spirit of place in the course of ritually celebrating my magical birthday.

Well, I had barely touched the first thread I could find and a whole spaghetti bowl of delicious mess of myth and enchantment landed in my lap!

Serpent Goddess

I found out that in pre-Roman times the island of Pag was inhabited by a tribe of the Illyrian people called "Liburnians" that lived along the Adriatic sea and was well known for their seafaring skills.

At the more spiritual level Illyrians were certainly much taken with the force of spells or the evil eye. Pliny’s story that there were among Illyrians those ‘who could gaze with the evil eye, cast a spell and even kill someone’ is repeated in the following century by Aldus Gellius in his compendium of table-talk among Roman intellectuals. (1)

Not much is known about their pantheon, mostly because it consisted mainly of very regional deities with changing names, almost all of them female! The only mention of names of their deities are from Roman Empire period monuments, some with interpretatio Romana.

there are two main features associated with Liburnian deities: the absolute predominance of female gods, and the lack of iconographic expression. It is as if Liburnian deities did not have an anthropomorphic character (2)

But besides plenty of depictions of a prominent solar cult in the North of Liburnia there is one other powerful symbol that is found on altars and other votive objects dedicated to their female deities:

The most significant indigenous symbol in Illyria-Dalmatia is the serpent. [...] Although the serpent is often considered a male symbol of chthonic character, the presence of the serpents in the cultic iconography related to the Illyrian female goddess should not be underestimated. (3)

Wow! Goddesses in the shape of serpents! I knew I was on the right track...

I dug deeper into finding some more information on the mentioned Roman monuments to see whether something related to Pag would come up. And it did...

A fully preserved sacrificial altar dedicated to a Liburnian deity was actually found on the island, erected by the Roman noblewoman Calpurnia in honor of the local goddess Heia syncretized with the Roman goddess Bona Dea!

I couldn't believe this series of synchronicities with my own serpentine obsession and my quite fresh connection to The Mother Goddess, all tying in with the place where all of this started! It might be connected to having just finished another novena to Our Lady of Candelaria ending on her feast day a week before...it felt like I was being directed to something.

Journey to Cissa

Anyways, excited about all my findings I travelled to Pag - mainly for my job - but now I even ended up with a mission for my magical anniversary: to acknowledge and to thank the local goddess Heia and the spirits of this place.

In the last years I always had rented a scooter to explore the island but this time my work schedule was tighter so I didn't find the time to do that and the range of accessible places to do a ritual was quite limited.

I remembered an old ruin near the villge of Caska reachable by foot in under an hour. Coincidentally the same village is also the location of most of the findings of Roman architecture and objects. Back in the days, the island of Pag was called Cissa or Gissa after this exact Roman settlement of the same name.

Caska itself is a very tiny village and is mainly consisting of tourist apartment houses along a road to the town of Metajna. According to the tourist brochure (4) several Roman artefacts were discovered there as well as a necropolis next to the sea. The ruins above the town are actually of a Roman fortress from Byzantine times that hosted a church dedicated to the patron of Pag: St. George (aha, the serpent slayer!).

Perfect! I planned to do a little hike to Caska to check out the necropolis and some excavations and to do a small ritual inside the old church of St. George.

I found it a bit confusing why there are not more remains of ancient Cissa itself if it was apparently such an important Roman outpost that gave the whole island its name. I found the answer in the same tourist guide (4): apparently the city had disappeared!

Inspired by the multitude of archaeological finds along the coastline and in the shallow waters of the cove, legends about the dramatic sinking of the famous and rich city of Kisa were passed down orally in the Novalja area for centuries. The most frequently told story was about two sisters, the good sister Bona and the evil sister Mala, and about the angel sent by God to find one good human being among the evil, corrupt population of Kisa. The angel found Bona and ordered her to flee the city, which forever disappeared into the sea in a terrible earthquake as she fled.

In the second version of the legend, the good sister with her beautiful, healthy children lived in dire poverty, while the evil sister with her pale, sickly children swam in a sea of riches. When the good sister asked her evil sister for help one day, she was rudely refused. God was greatly angered and in retribution sank the entire city, sheltering the good sister and her children on the hill top Sv. Juraj (St. George) beforehand. (4)

On Tuesday the 21st of August - my magic anniversary - I left Novalja around two in the afternoon and walked along the little road to Caska and up the hill to the Byzantine ruins. In contrast to my last year's self-initiation I wanted to keep it simple this time, but to honour my personal tradition of new beginnings happening on this island I also planned to try something new: shamanic journeying!

I sat down in the middle of the church remains, gave some offerings of spring-water, frankincense and mugwort from back home to my regulars, the genii loci and my ancestors and was grateful for being back on Pag. Then I plugged into my iPod and played the classic Michael Harner journeying drumming track. I closed my eyes and off I went...

...it was my first attempt of consciously visiting the underworld and unfortunately it didn't really work out. I was in a deep meditative state where I couldn't feel my body anymore and all kinds of thoughts and ideas meandered through my consciousness but it wasn't a journey. But it was all fine, I didn't have any expectations.

...half an hour later I opened my eyes and right in front of my face was a shiny black giant cicada humming around a small purple flower that grew in one of the cracks of the ancient rocks. My first thought was "oh a scarab!". It was a beautiful moment.

I walked down to Caska and along the rocky beach to a small watchtower that had been used by tuna-fishermen for centuries. I also found the remains of the "necropolis" which was a bit odd because it was right at the beach next to countless half-naked young people listening to loud music, getting sunburnt and sleeping off their hangovers from the hard party nights on this party island. I continued back to Novalja taking a small detour through one of the few beautiful pine forests.

Augusta Triumphalis

On the next day I felt a bit anxious and disappointed. Not only did my journeying attempt not really work out, but also the contrast between a rich and spiritual Roman past and today's hyper-mundane tourism-for-profit reality everywhere on the island left me a bit depressed. This did not feel like a proper anniversary at all! I needed to do something else!

The moment this thought had formed in my head I knew immediately what my goal was: to find the altar to the local serpentine goddess Heia!

I opened my laptop and connected to the awfully slow internet the tourist apartment provided and went through my sources again: what was this altar all about, who was this noblewoman Calpurnia and where in Cissa/Caska did she live?

Located somewhere in the Caska area was the estate of the well-known Roman senatorial family Calpurnii Pisones, which is indicated by the ruins of three sacrificial altars erected by Calpurnia, the daughter of Lucius Calpurnius Piso Caesoninus, Roman Consul in the year 1 B.C., and the granddaughter of Gnaeus Calpurnius Piso, Roman Consul in 23 B.C. When Calpurnia lived in Caska, her family was experiencing difficult times: in 19 B.C. her uncle was accused of murdering the young and favorite Germanicus (the nephew of the emperor Tiberius and brother of the emperor Claudius), which ended in his suicide during the court procedure in 20 B.C. Calpurnia’s father also committed suicide in 24 B.C., during rigged court proceedings for supposedly insulting the emperor. After this the family’s situation stabilized and things turned for the better. (4)

Very exciting! A haunted, decadent, Roman city that sunk after a haunted and probably decadent, Roman senatorial family had lived there!

One interesting aspect of this specific altar is that it is dedicated to the local Liburnian goddess Heia (Eia, Heja, Eja) syncretized with the Roman women-only mystery cult goddess Bona Dea whose real name was secret but assumed to be Fauna, the shy and secretive wife of Faunus. It is intriguing because Faunus and Pan are tightly connected to the god Silvanus (also Dionysus/Sabazius) who was also prominently venerated throughout Illyria. Plus, Bona Dea is usually depicted with a serpent wrapped around her arm (Asclepius connection of healing) and surrounded by serpents. Her temples were known to have hosted numerous living serpents (5). It makes a lot of sense to see her as interpretatio Romana of a local Liburnian goddess Heia.

I went through several sources on Roman votive monuments and Liburnian deities that had lists of altars and other artifacts found along the Adriatic coast to find out more about the specific altar, especially about it's current location.

One Croatian list noted the altar was found in Caska/Gramače and is stored at the Stomorica collection in Novalja, another one (5) claimed that the altar was found in a "vinyard of doctor R. Palčič" in Caska and the tourist catalog (4) only said it was "found in Gramače", which is a completely different village than Caska.

I concluded that it was probably not anymore where it was found, so most likely it must be at the aforementioned Stomorica collection, a small museum of Roman artefacts in the city center of Novalja. I went there straightaway. It was just a 10 minutes walk but closed when I arrived, so I went to the small cathedral instead and also took a look at some ancient mosaics around the corner. On the way back to my apartment I noticed the museum was open now (the church visit had paid off!). It was one room with shards of Roman pottery, some gravestones and rusty coins and pieces of different altars. I asked the lady at the entrance if she could tell me where I could find the "large Calpurnia altar" and she looked at me as if I had just ordered a Hamburger and fries. She did not know anything aside from selling tickets and postcards, so I left disappointed.

Back home I sent an email to the museum asking for more information about the altar, without expecting to ever get an answer. Then I looked into my sources again. If it's not in the local museum, perhaps it is still where it was found? I spent a few hours scanning the satellite view of Google maps, comparing them to archeological sketches from other sources, and virtually driving along Google Street View, peeking into peoples virtual gardens. I started getting a bit obsessed about this mission (what Mars retrograde energies can do to an person with ascendant Mars and martian personal daimon!) Must. Find. It.

I decided to do this detective work in a more logical and structured way and thought about just taking the handful of clear information I had at hand and see what to conclude from them:

a hand-drawn sketch of the altar itself
the dimensions of the altar
found in either Caska or Gramače
a few blurry photos from the tourist catalog that show a rock that might be the altar

The rock that can be seen on the photos looks a lot like the hand-drawn sketch and the photos also show an architectural structure right next to the rock, an L-shaped wall with a hole/window. In the background you can see the sea and some reddish roofs of modern houses.

It must be in a town or next to at least two houses
It must be on a clearing where the sea is visible
It must be either near Caska or Gramače

I took another tour across and over the island via Google maps, scanning for small L-shaped structures in close proximity to houses. After an hour of doing that I gave up. It was pointless.

I went back to staring at the photos. I suddenly remembered the incredible crowdsourced forensics work of bellingcat and how they could locate objects from photos based on the background landscape. Let's try this again, Mars whispered into my ear.

I looked at the photo backgrounds again, beyond the bushes and houses. I noticed the hillscape you can see beyond the sea. From Pag you can see the hills on the mainland on one side and a few more islands on the other side. Also it has long stretching coves and bays on the island itself, so it should be possible to find a place with this view.

I jumped back into the virtual Google car and drove up to Gramače first, trying to find a spot where you can see the sea from the road. I looked south-west but aside from a small island on the horizon there was no such view in this direction. I looked down the other side towards the mainland. It looked a bit like on the photo but not really. The mountains were much higher.

Then it suddenly struck me: The hill on the left side of the photo could actually be Sveti Vid, the highest mountain on the island of Pag which I had climbed for my initiation ritual last year and the lower bits on the right could be the beaches of Zrće! In that case it must be taken in or near Caska.

I "drove" to Caska and peeked towards the sea. Yess, very possible!.

The next day I walked to Caska again. The landscape from the photos was burned into my brain in all pixelated details so I was able to compare it in real-time walking the main road of Caska. I peeked up and down, left and right, trying to find hints of white rock walls near houses with similar roof-shapes as on the photos. I felt like Indiana Jones.

Then I saw it! Down very close to the beach, behind a field of very dry looking vines. There was a wall that had a hole in it. I walked down towards it and noticed that it was located in a private garden next to a very modern looking house. It's too late now to respect properties, Mars whispered. So I jumped into it and there it was! A beautiful white limestone altar, exactly the shape of the one from the sketch!

(Coordinates: 44.550010, 14.919650)

I felt a moment of joy and peace, sat down, offered again frankincense, spring water and mugwort from home and did a stuttery impromptu prayer of gratitude and devotion, and reciting the inscription of the altar:

Bonae Deae Dominae Heiae Augustae Triumphali terrae marisque Dominatrici Conservatrici mentiumque bonarum ac remediorum Potenti Deae Bene Iudicanti

(Bona Dea Domina Heia Augusta Triumphalis, the Mistress of land and sea, the Protectress, the Mistress of wisdom and medicine, the Goddess of right judgement)

This felt right. This felt good. I was satisfied. Mission accomplished. Something clicked. It almost felt like a cycle was over, an open circle closed, or a spiral turned once. I still need to find out what this actually means.

Update 28/08/2018

I was surprised to find an email in my inbox - from the director of the local museum in Novalja herself, confirming that the altar is located in a private garden in Caska and clearing up the confusion about Gramače. Apparently "gramače" is a Croatian name for a certain stone formation found in this area, but in publications it apparently got confused with the settlement of the same name north of Novalja. She also said she will send me a brochure of epigraphic monuments on the island and that there are some new things showing up:

The first inhabited part of the island is the hill Košljun, close to Caska and on the way to ferry. There you could still found interesting parts of pottery, mosaics on the floor of what seems to be a small church, graves, remnants of the fortress wall and much more. Actually it is being explored as we speak. The archaeologists usually come before and after the tourist season and they are there right now.

(1) Wilkes, John. The Illyrians. Wiley-Blackwell, 1995.

(2) Matijašić, Robert. "The iconography of indigenous cults in northern Liburnia." Akti VIII. međunarodnog kolokvija o problemima rimskog provincijalnog umjetničkog stvaralaštva. Goledn Marketing, Tehnička knjiga, 2005.

(3) Prusac, Marina. "Hybrid Deities in South Dalmatia."

(4) Caska Cove Brochure

(5) Brouwer, Hendrik HJ. Bona Dea. Vol. 127. Brill, 1989.

Routines in Theurgy

2017-11-28T20:00:00+01:00

As an almost full-time father of a now one year old child my spare time for enchantment is quite limited. The only thing I manage to routinely do is a daily adoration of the day's ruling planetary spirit. I have formed a habit of doing early morning walks with my daughter through a lovely park nearby and mostly they happen around sunrise. The park has a small hill at one end of it that I have chosen as my temple for the daily visits. Since June of this year I've visited the hill almost every day and recited the daily Planetary Prayer from the Hygromanteia. (My daughter started to say "Amen" right when it's appropriate, in sync with me, it's freaky!)

The other routine I have is a monthly run of the Stele of Jeu aka Headless Rite around every New Moon when the illumination is just after 0% and it just starts waxing again. It feels like a great starting point for the upcoming month's endeavors, and so far it has served me well. I also try to do this on the same hill, depending on the time of the day and how much privacy I will potentially have up there.

I started to dislike the commanding tone of the Planetary Prayers and how the planets are being subdued in the name of god and I switched to the Orphic Hymns two week ago. It makes a huge difference for me! I feel more connected to the planets than before, and I have the feeling that I am being increasingly noticed by them too.

Especially in the last two weeks since the last New Moon some things have happened that seem like "results" without me even having specifically asked for them. I got four freelance job offers within a couple of days after months of really almost nothing going on, also my relationship has improved, my general mood too.

Yesterday, after having finished my hymn to Selene and closed the widdershins circumambulation of the temple mound, on the way down I found a little yellow children's torch. Instant synchronicity! Just the night before, in bed I had read one of Uncle Chuckie's e-books on Psionics in which he talks about how he's always had a problem with having to imagine a beam of light coming out of his magic wand when using it in ritual and eventually ditching it for a torchlight. This idea resonated with me and I intended to imitate it one day, turned around in bed and fell asleep. And the next morning I find one on my temple mound! Well, here's my new wand! And its brand is "Brainstorm Ltd" (online research revealed that it's actually a toy photo projector that projects images up to one meter wide onto walls and ceilings!) I was puzzled by my find and on the way home through the park my daughter pointed to something on a park-bench. I looked and it was a kids drawing block, soaking wet from rain. I picked it up and opened it and on the first page someone had written "Each takes what he needs" and drawn a heart below it.

Alright then, thanks universe!

Tail of the Dragon

2017-09-01T19:30:00+02:00

I returned to the Croatian island of Pag for a job - exactly one year after my serpent dream that sent me on this journey of enchantment. I was very excited, because I had decided to celebrate this anniversary with a series of self initiation rituals during the New Moon that was also a solar eclipse. In the weeks prior to this trip I had researched, translated and practiced a number of magical texts and constructed two rituals to be done. One in the waning phase of the New Moon, the other one in the waxing phase.

Monday

I chose the hour of Mercury on the day of the Moon as the beginning of the ritual and it's end in the following hour of the Moon. The location was to be the highest elevation point on the island, a hill called Sveti Vid (Saint Vitus) with a small church ruin on the top and a cement pillar next to it, marking the summit.

After approximately 20 hours of fasting and a short ritual shower at home I took a rented scooter to Kolan, the village next to the hill, and hiked for around an hour ascending across rocky desert and under burning hot August sun until I reached the summit. I encountered a large group of German teenagers and several tourists up there and I patiently waited until they finally left and had descended far enough for me to have enough privacy for my ritual.

First I drew the seals of the Four Kings to the corresponding sides of the pillar, lit a stick of frankincense in front of the wooden virgin Mary statue inside the abandoned chapel and then I circled the whole summit area clockwise, drawing an "astral" circle around it while simply banishing by repeatedly chanting "Hekas, Hekas, Este Bebeloi!"

Then I did a consecration spell for this created circular temple and to the spirit of fire (incense) and opened the ritual with planetary prayers to the Moon and to Mercury and then followed up by reciting the Orphic hymns to Selene (moon), Helios (sun) and Protogonos (connects to the Headless One quite nicely).

Now came the main part: the Headless Rite (Gordon White's Chaos Protocols version). I lit another stick of incense and as the six names to be spoken towards North I used the Ephesia Grammata, as they seemed more powerful to me than the classic choice of names and due to their meaning that seemed fitting to this day of the solar eclipse. I transitioned directly into the invocation of the Four Kings with offerings of rum and pieces of my burek lunch to the corresponding directions.

At this point I took a break and wandered around in silence and contemplation. I felt the sun burning from above and wind in my hair and was filled with a feeling of excitement and empowerment. There was a small bird of prey circling around the summit. I like to think it was a swift.

I closed with praises and thanks ("license of departure") addressed to each of the Four Kings and to whatever spirits present and sat down in the shade on the northern side of the chapel to enjoy my lunch.

The descend was more difficult than expected, because the sun was shining directly into my face and I was overwhelmed by a feeling of exhaustion. When I arrived back home I noticed my face and especially nose were quite sunburnt.

Tuesday

This time I did another hike into a small valley that I had already discovered the year before. Today I was a bit smarter than yesterday and wore a linen shirt as a kufiya over my head to have better protection from the sun. In the beautiful valley I chose a distinguished rock formation as my temple, climbed it, lit a stick of frankincense and did a very simple consecration and banishing spell. As this ritual was meant to take place in honour of Mars, the ruler of my zodiac sun sign as well as of the day and hour of my birth I chose also the hour of Mars on this Martian day.

I opened with the planetary prayer to Mars and two Orphic hymns to Ares and then proceeded with the lengthy but very powerful instruction for recitation of the heptagram (PGM XIII, 762ff), followed up by the Headless Rite, again using the Ephesia Grammata as the six names formula. After some moments of meditation I left the temple space without any closure and hiked back to the road where my scooter was waiting.

Thursday

I have this job on Pag every year, so I've had the chance in the past to explore the island thoroughly. My favorite spot is a very rocky desert area in the northeast and I went hiking there a few times. Last year I wanted to find out more about this area and I researched a bit online. I was utterly terrified to find out that this exact spot used to be the site of a concentration camp during the time Croatia was a Nazi puppet state ruled by the fascist revolutionary organisation "Ustaše". A couple of thousand Jews, Serbs and antifascists have been murdered there and thrown into the sea or buried under the rocks. The most appaling part about this is that there is not a single sign or piece of information about this on the island itself, nobody wants to talk about it or simply denies it has ever happened. This has caused me several sleepless nights throughout the last year and I wanted to visit the dead on this visit to spend some time with them in contemplation and remembrance.

To reach the area where the "Slana" camp used to be you have to take a boat across Pag bay or hike for one to two hours from the village of Metajna across undeveloped rocky wasteland. I did the latter and in the August heat this was a quite demanding task. When I had eventually made it to Slana bay, I walked by a handful of tourists on the beach who had arrived by boat, enjoying themselves while giving me a strange look, obviously surprised to see me arrive on foot covered in my kufiya. I continued uphill to the valley where the camps used to be.

Someone had erected a wooden cross near the site, without any sign. I don't remember having seen it last year. I walked up to it and lit an incense stick, poured a bit of the spring water I had brought as an offering near the base of the cross and spontaneously recited the Lord's Prayer (something I haven't uttered since my confirmation in early teenage years) in honour of the Serbs and antifascists who had been murdered here.

A bit downhill from the cross, I could see a little thorny tree sticking out of the dry rocks. I walked towards it and it was some kind of thistle, maybe half a meter high. It made me smile - such a rugged and courageous plant. It seemed very appropriate as a symbol of life in all this barren rocky wasteland with it's hidden history of torture and death, so I decided to sit down next to it. I said a prayer for the ancestors and mighty dead and added some impromptu things I wanted to say. I emptied the remaining spring water at the base of the bush, as an offering to all the Jews who had suffered and been killed here and I put one of those "eternal" candles used on cemeteries next to it in memory of all the victims of this valley.

Usually there is a lot of wind blowing through the valley carrying all kinds of sounds with it, of jet-skis and the techno party-boats, bird- and sheep-sounds. But the moment after I prayed next to the thorny bush, the whole valley suddenly seemed to have become dead silent for a couple of endless seconds. It gave me shivers and I had the strange feeling of being "watched".

The hike back to Metajna went faster than expected and I drove back home, completely exhausted.

UPG Notes:

Besides feeling "empowered" and "magicky" during the rituals on Monday and Tuesday I didn't have any direct "results" from doing them. Actually, I didn't even expect any, since my work in Croatia was in the context of a multiday electronic music event each night from 11 until 6 followed by short and not too good stretches of almost dreamless sleep, which is not really the best mental or "spiritual" condition to be in. In addition I didn't feel fully comfortable doing the ritual on top of Sveti Vid mountain, because I was constantly paranoid that tourists might pop up any second.

One thing I noticed though, already from Monday evening on throughout the whole week was that people suddenly seemed way more "courteous" towards me than usual. I consider myself a relatively shy person that likes to be more in the background of things, so I noticed it quite immediately that my "popularity" was higher than usual. Not sure if that's just a psychological side-effect of feeling more "empowered" or of the rituals themselves.

The most spiritually intense moment of this trip was that very quiet and dense moment at Slana bay after my offerings and prayer.

I will patiently wait and see if there will be any events or experiences that I can trace back to these rituals. Solar eclipses are supposed to have an astrological "afterglow" of around 6 months, so I am not in a hurry.

Ankhor

2017-07-30T18:00:00+02:00

I walked home from the pediatrician with my daughter today and I had a sudden realization.

In the face of the feverish headless Horus vision from last week one of the words of the scarred French demon from my other dream suddenly falls into place: it wasn't ARCHON or ANCHOR.

It must have been ANKHOR, ANKH HOR, ˁnḫ ḥr, ancient Egyptian for "Horus Lives"

(A quick online search revealed that there even was a person of that name

Opus Apus

2017-07-26T18:00:00+02:00

I was visiting my parents over the weekend in my hometown together with my wife and daughter for my mom's birthday. We spent the afternoon doing a picnic at a beautiful green clearing on one of the foresty hills just out of town and had an extended dinner out on the terrace at my parents house. Right after dinner my dad got stung into his upper lip by a wasp while taking a sip of his wine. It was the first time in the 74 years of his life that he got stung by an insect. But this was just the beginning of weirdness to come.

The next morning dad asked me to come to the street in front of the house with him. He found a bird in the middle of the road that looked hurt and he didn't know what to do with it. It was quite small, a bit larger than a sparrow and with a tiny hooked beak like of an owl. I gently took the animal with a paper towel and brought it to our back yard for further investigation. According to its beak shape, feather color and surprisingly short legs it was a young swift (apus apus). I called an animal rescue number and did a bit of online research and found out that swifts are a type of bird of prey that spends most of its life in the air - up to ten months straight. Their legs are too short for them to be able to easily take off from the ground. Dad kept telling me to put it back to the street "because it will die anyway" which I refused to do and I waited for my sister to arrive and fed some water to the poor bird.

After some more phone-calls to vets by my sister (it was Sunday and no animal shelter was open) and attempts to feed it some flies and more water we put the swift into a cardboard box and put it in a dark and quiet place. My sister had arranged to bring it to some "lady specialized in caring for wild birds" in the evening.

In the early afternoon we all went for a walk into the forest up on the hill in walking distance from where my parents live. I felt oddly anxious when we left the house and my skin felt weirdly sensitive but i didn't worry too much about it. We reached the top of the hill where the forest opens up to beautiful farmland with a few grazing cows and ancient apple and pear trees. I had instant memories of feeding white horses with clover and fruits as a child. We walked past a group of young cows and a beautiful bull with a ring through his nose. I had never noticed cows can be so beautiful.

As we started heading back downhill I started to feel weak and lightheaded and I had to sit down several times to not faint. I told the others I needed a moment alone and they continued walking home. I sat on a bench next to the footpath and closed my eyes. The sound of wind rustling the leaves in the trees was quite meditative and I felt like my head wad humming from the inside and I became a bit dizzy. I slowly walked back home thinking that I'd need to do something about my blood pressure.

At home I had a coffee and a piece of cake and felt slightly better until a sudden very heavy tiredness overcame me and forced me to lie down. That's when I felt the fever taking over.

In a half awake and half asleep state, feeling hot blood pumping through my head the nightmarish visions crept in from the edges. Scenes of a medieval dungeon that seemed too familiar.

As a child around seven or eight years old I remember I watched a TV show that had caught my attention randomly zapping around after school. It was a story in a medieval setting told from the point of view of a prisoner in a dungeon. He gets visited by a guard handing him food and another time by a priest praying with him. He is being told that he will be picked up at six o'clock. In the last scene the church bells toll six and the narrator is being dragged through the dungeon hallway into the open where an executioner with an axe is waiting on a scaffold. Screaming and fighting he is beimg decapitated — all shown from his point of view.

I was terrified by what I had watched and quite traumatised. For a quite long time (years?) I had an irrational fear of "six o'clock" to a point where I didn't want to go to bed or be awake or wake up around that time. Fortunately this obsessive anxiety faded in my early teens. I never thought about it again for decades until now…

…lying in bed, shaken by waves of fever, I had a vision of this last scene from my childhood nightmare. I was being dragged through the same hallway and half awake I heard the church bells through the window toll six o'clock for real and I was in a raging fear. I cringed, sweating in my bed as I was dragged up to the scaffold where the executioner was waiting. My visions slowed down and started looping repetitively. A staccato of images, the axe being raised. I screamed in my dream and as the images repeated themselves faster and faster to an infinitely blurry freeze-frame the fear suddenly faded and I knew I had to let go. I knew I had to give in and embrace death. It was an almost joyful moment of peace and as I was losing my head the vision suddenly changed and I saw a bird of prey rising up in slow motion. It was a swift spreading its wings, gliding towards me, staring me in the eyes. I felt blissful and I heard and saw the words around me:

I AM HORUS!

…I heard the front door of the house slam shut and woke up. I was sweating. I knew immediately that my sister had just left the house with the cardboard box sheltering the swift bird to bring him to the animal lady. The last sound of the church bells faded and I sat in bed feeling nothing but awe. Horus? Why Horus?

Sceptical sidenote:

I have been researching about "Akephalos" in the "Stele of Jeu" text from the PGM V some weeks ago and what it has to do with Osiris (but no mention of Horus). And yes there is a sub-species of Apus Apus called "Apus Horus" but I didn't read much into it until after this experience because it seemed irrelevant at that point for my research about helping the poor bird. Was it all my fever boiled brain wildly associating things as the clock tolled six? (although i didn't know it was six until after the dream)

Synchronicities:

reading later about Apus Horus revealed that it doesn't build its own nest but dwells in nests built by bee-eaters!
reading later about the Osiris myth revealed that after Set killed and dismembered Osiris and after Osiris came back to life with the help of Isis to create their son Horus he went to the underworld forever. But he appears in this world in different forms. One of them is a young bull.
the night after this experience I had fever with crazy dreams too. But nothing even close to the visions before. The next morning I felt very good but I suddenly strained my neck and was suffering a lot of pain in the back of my neck for two days.
I later learned by coincidence that the day I had this vision was the 23rd of July, which marks this year's heliacal rise of Sirius. In Ancient Egypt this event marked the start of a new 360 days long year after five epigomenal days of celebrations of the birth of Nut's children Osiris, Set, Horus the Elder, Isis and Nephthys.

Ochre Archons

2017-05-12T18:00:00+02:00

My extended family who lives scattered across Germany and partially in France had a holiday gathering in a small medieval town in the Provence last spring. We were 13 people who stayed in a large three floor holiday house with swimming pool and mountain view. We went for hikes and sightseeing trips and had amazing food.

But we had a small poltergeist problem. I was the only one who heard it and of course nobody really believed me. It usually happened in the middle of the night when everyone was asleep. The sound of small feet in sandals or loose leather shoes dragging along the floor and something else being dragged behind, maybe a rope or chain or something like that. I woke up and heard the footsteps right above my head. My wife, daughter and I were sleeping on the ground floor and the room above was part of the livingroom and part of the kitchen.

The first night I didn't think much of it because the house was full of people and someone probably got hungry in the middle of the night. The only weird thing was the dragging sound.

The next morning I asked everyone about it but nobody admitted the nocturnal trip to the kitchen.

The next nights I could hear it again, sometimes just a few steps, at other times it went on for a few minutes and one time I could even hear chairs being moved.

Again, nobody heard anything, nobody did anything. There was a theory that it might be the next door neighbor, but I didn't think so because the sounds clearly came from above.

Oh and we had those occasional power failures where a safety fuse snapped and needed to be switched on again. This happened everyday too. But it was an old house and we had electric heaters that might have pulled too much power. Who knows.

One night I had a vivid dream of which I unfortunately forgot almost everything except a bald demon with a heavily scarred face who gave me three words, spoken and written. With every word the scars on his lips morphed into the shape of the spoken word itself. The words were:

GOD ANCHOR SOLEX

When I woke up I wrote them down immediately but as it is with rapidly fading dream memories sometimes, the words became blurry and I am not sure anymore if the second word was ANCHOR or ANKOR or ARCHON or ARKON.

I have been wondering about this message ever since and what it's supposed to mean.

GOD is quite clear. SOLEX is a famous French motorized bicycle company. Unlikely that it's important. It could also be made up from SOL the sun and LEX the law. Or EX as in "out of". Or backwards for XELOS (ZELOS?). The ARCHON ZELOS? But my brain tells me it was ANCHOR. It is yet to be decyphered. Any hints are highly appreciated.

(the demon looked a bit similar to this face)

Another notable incident from this trip was a hike I did with my baby daughter. I had her strapped onto my chest and I had planned to do a 90min hike around the forest near the village. Unfortunately we got lost in the middle of the forest in an area that consisted of steep hills with canyons and caves made of soft red sand baked together. The ancient Romans had already dug up the sand in this area for producing ochre tints for coloring fabrics. The disorientation did not only add almost another hour to our hike but I also saw strange demonic carvings in some parts of the valleys and even a creepy fetish sculpture with a sheep's skull.

There was also supposed to be an ancient Roman altar somewhere around the village dedicated to Mercury. But I never found it.

The Serpent Seal

2017-05-01T18:00:00+02:00

Last August I went on a business trip together with my friend and colleague J. and in the first evening we were invited to a dinner buffet by our customer where we enjoyed great seafood and white wine.

Back at the studio apartment where we stayed J. went straight to bed but I felt slightly tipsy from the wine and spent another hour playing around with my portable audio synthesizer before going to bed. My small room had just a queen size bed, a small table and a closet and there was this weird little door next to the table that led to a dark and empty but quite large storage space behind the wall. Somehow it made me a bit anxious and I put the table in front of the door and went to sleep.

I had an amazingly vivid dream in the morning. I was chased by a group of Zombies in full American football armour and I was with a friend trying to figure out what to do. There was a barbecue grill and we decided to throw lance sized meat skewers at the attackers. Suddenly my friend transformed into a zombie too and started throwing skewers at me. The football zombies learned from him and also attacked me with the skewers I had thrown at them. At this point my dream became lucid and I was able to stop the time in a Matrix like effect and the skewers stopped in front of me in mid-air.

The scenery changed to a dark solemn room made of stone, kind of like in a medieval castle and in a dramatic light and soundscape I was presented a large iron shield with an emblem on it that was alive and moved. It was a large red serpent ablaze in flames, rising up in a double S shape staring at me with bright red eyes. The only feeling I had at this moment was that this was of incredibly great importance.

(sketch i drew right after waking up)

Suddenly I was in my hometown on the street and I could see the football zombies again, still far away but heading towards me. There were also three yound midget girls in dresses with creepy faces that came towards me. I freaked out when I realized I no longer had control over this dream and I wanted to wake up.

I jumped up in bed, happy that it had just been a bad dream and while details from it were already rapidly fading from my memory I saw the serpent shield before my inner eye, clear and bright. I got up from bed and stumbled out into the hallway heading towards the bathroom. I walked by J.'s door that was open a crack and I could catch a glimpse of her foot sticking out of her bed. I opened the door to the bathroom and went inside. I locked the door and when I turned back around towards the toilet it was gone.

Instead there was a staircase leading downwards. I was shocked and slowly aproached the stairs that went in a right angle spiralling down in a square like manner. I slowly walked down the steps and it was quite dark. I waited until my eyes adapted to the twilight and I saw a large hallway of some kind of abandoned floor in the building. There were a lot of spiderwebs and everything covered under thick layers of dust and rubble. I saw a stray cat or rat rushing by. Then I noticed a strange movement in the shadow and saw what looked like reflection of light in a pair of dark eyes. I freaked out and realized that nothing of this made any sense and that I was still stuck in a dream. I really wanted to wake up.

I opened my eyes and I was still lying in bed. But I couldn't move. I was completely paralyzed. Panic. I could see myself lie in bed unable to move.

But I was still down there on this creepy staircase in the dark and the eyes were gone. Shit. Panic. I ran upstairs back to the light into the bathroom. I jumped through the hallway into my bedroom.

I woke up so quickly I almost fell out of bed. My heart was racing. Am I awake? I was able to move normally. I sat on the edge of my bed trying to make any sense of what had just happened and I was very thirsty. I got up and went out into the hallway heading towards the bathroom. I walked by J.'s door that was open a crack and I could catch a glimpse of her foot sticking out of her bed. Oh my god I thought. Total déjà-vu. I opened the door to the bathroom and everything seemed normal. I sat down on the toilet and drank a lot of water from the tap and when I closed ny eyes I could see the shield with the fiery serpent seal.

Sceptical sidenote:

there was wine involved and the strange small door and the liminal space behind probably influenced my dream. Our apartment was across two floors with steep stairs leading from the kitchen and livingroom up to another floor with bath and bedrooms. Also I think I remember I saw a dead lizard or snake on the side of the road the day before. That doesn't explain why the serpent in my dream was burning though and why it was so out of context of the rest of my dream. But it was a dream, so I guess anything is possible. But the sleep paralysis and dream in a dream with out of body sensation couln't have been just from the wine. Otherwise I definetly would want to buy some bottles of that.