SUBLUNAR SPACE - ancestors

Olympus Mons

2019-04-22T18:00:00+03:00

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")

Dawn of the Dead

2019-02-13T19:40:00+02:00

Death Cycles

At my morning walks along the canal this last week it has already become apparent that the winter is slowly fading and the sun is growing in strength. Nevertheless the all encompassing greyness and hardly visible but relentless February rain is just occasionally broken apart by blue sky and sunlight. From Capricorn to Aquarius, Saturn rules this time of the year and it seems appropriate. Before All Saints and All Souls got shifted towards the end of the year, the ancient Romans celebrated Parentalia during mid February - starting today and lasting for nine days of remembering and communing with the spirits of the dead ancestors.

To me it feels like a nice framing of time to connect with the dead in November and then again in February - almost like two twilight moments like dusk and dawn with the winter solstice at its darkest midpoint. It is the twilight between the world of the living and the world of the dead, liminal periods where the two realms bleed into each other and where it seems more easy and appropriate to have interactions between the two.

Magician and blogger BJ Swain has a brilliant chapter about ancestor work in his highly recommended book "Living Spirits". He touches on concepts and beliefs from the Kongo and how traditions there understand and conceptualize life and death. I found it very enlightening because it ties in with what I wrote in the previous paragraph about the worlds of life and death mirroring the daily and yearly solar cycle and puts in words what I could only describe as a feeling until now: the Dikènga cosmogram. It serves as a fundamental law of the universe and is especially suited to describe a cyclic relationship between the living and the dead. It also struck me as heavily resonating with ancient Egyptian cosmology:

Coded as a cross, a quartered circle or diamond, a seashell spiral, or a special cross with solar emblems at each ending - the sign of the four moments of the sun is the Kongo emblem of spiritual continuity and renaissance par excellence. [...] The horizontal line indicates the divide between the world of the living and the world of the dead. It also indicates the divide between night and day. The circles at each quarter point can indicate the sun, or they can indicate moments in the life and death cycle. This cycle is characterized not simply by each step feeding the next step until we return to where we begin, but also by the idea that life and death reflect each other. So when we are born into the world of the living we die from the world of the dead and vice versa. When the Sun is at noon in the world of the living it is midnight in the world of the dead. We do not simply exist in a step by step cycle but in a symbiotic reflection, where what occurs for us is coordinated with what occurs for them, and what occurs for them predicts what occurs for us and so forth. [1]

I dove deeper into the fascinating Dikènga rabbit-hole and found this description of the concept as a whole:

the stage known as Musoni is the stage of the conception of ideas, human beings, and ail things conceivable. Musoni corresponds to when the sun is at midnight and is represented by a yellow color. Although the sun has set and therefore cannot be seen directly by the observer, it is understood to still exist. Similarly, when a person dies, he/she is understood to still exist in the same fundamental way as the human being is conceived of as ntângu a môyo 'a living sun' (Fu-Kiau 1994: 26).' By the same token, matter is not created or destroyed - it simply changes form. [...] After Musoni, the next stage is Kola, illustrated in Black, which represents birth, sunrise, and [...] the beginning of the story. Next, Tukula, associated with the color red, represents the sun at noon. It corresponds to the highest point in a person’s life [...]. The next stage is Luvèmba, shown in a grey color. This represents sunset. This is the stage of the transformation that occurs when a person passes on. However, in the Afrikan worldview, this is not truly the end. Indeed, Fu-Kiau asserts that “Dying is not an end. Dying for the Kongo is just going on vacation” (Fu-Kiau 2001b). The underlying concept is articulated in the proverb "tufwanga mu soba — we die in order to undergo change" (Fu-Kiau 1994: 27) Luvèmba is where the story comes to its closing formula but continues to exist in other forms. [2]

Croissants, Coins, and Crows

The Romans celebrated Parentalia not only at home but visited the family tombs in the liminal space just outside of the cities to commune with their ancestors and bring them offerings of flower-garlands, wheat, salt, wine-soaked bread and violets. I really resonate with this practice and especially during these periods of the year really would like to do similar rites. But today not many of us still live in the same place where our ancestors were buried and we do not have a ritual space to be near to their physical remains. For me it is the same. I live around 700km away from my grandparents graves and I only have very few chances to "visit them."

But I discovered a magical solution to the problem - or it was rather Saturn who sent a cold black spark of inspiration that led me to a solution. But first let's rewind a bit...

It was during a visit in my hometown around Christmas two years ago. I was on the way to visit my sister at her home to have breakfast together. Before, I wanted to buy some croissants and other delicacies at a French bakery around the corner of where she lives. Upon entering I checked my wallet to see if I had enough cash. In my usual early morning pre-breakfast clumsiness I managed to drop a handful of coins on the street right in front of the bakery. Mumbling curses I managed to pick most of them up and realized that among them were also three Chinese coins that I occasionally used for I Ching divination. There were only two of them on the pavement and I crawled around looking for the third one. Then I saw the gully...

Pointing my phone's flashlight into the shaft while dodging confused customers who tried to enter the bakery I spotted the lost coin. It was lying on a layer of rotten leaves that had clogged the shaft, just a few centimeters below the gully's opening. The slots on the lid were too narrow to put my finger through so I decided to try again on my way back after breakfast.

Two hours later I returned, confident of victory, armed with a magnet, a string, and a coat hanger made of wire. The first blowback was to find out that the damn coin did not stick to the magnet, so I tried it with the coat hanger. I got more frowns and suspicious looks from bakery customers and owner, crawling around on the floor poking around in the gully.

Eventually...instead of managing to stick the end of the wire through the coin's square hole, I poked a hole into the layer of leaves and the coin dropped right through it and disappeared in the darkness.

I chuckled when I looked up, still on my knees - because the bakery's entrance had a little black iron crow as decoration of their doorstep - and they had dressed it with a red scarf and a Santa hat for the Christmas season. It seemed to mock me - I guess I deserved it.

Graveyeard Wormholes

I don't remember if it was on the same day or a day after, but in the afternoon I walked through my favourite cemetery that I use as a shortcut on my way from my parents house to the inner city. Some of my relatives from my mother's side are buried there, so I decided to visit their grave. When I walked past the beautiful crematorium building in the middle of the cemetery that was built in the late 1900s and looks like an antique temple I was suddenly struck with an insight and a plan:

Today was Saturday, the day of Saturn. The crow in front of the bakery: a Saturnian animal. It all suddenly made sense to me now and I instantly knew what to do: I remembered that had wanted to collect earth from my ancestors graves for some time already and I also remembered that in the African American Hoodoo Rootwork tradition you offer coins to the spirits in exchange for graveyard dirt. In this particular moment these two thoughts developed into a magical idea...

I walked to the crematorium because I remembered the beautiful mosaic of a skull and a sand clock it has on the floor of the front gable. I placed my remaining Chinese coins on the mosaic, recited the Orphic hymn to Kronos and did an impromptu request to Saturn to cleanse the coins of all previous influences. Then I asked him to aid me in fusing all of my Chinese coins together to one etherically interconnected network of magical tokens that by themselves should act as portals to exchange magical energies with each other across the network. I waited for a moment and recollected the coins.

After I went to the grave of my grandparents and uncle, recited a requiem prayer and asked for permission to take some dirt. I placed one of the freshly created Saturnian portal coins into the earth and told my ancestors that through this object we will be connected with each other beyond space and time.

A few days later I did the same at the grave of my father's parents on a different cemetery and also at the grave of our old neighbors who were close to my heart because they were also like grandparents to me when I was a child.

Back home in Berlin I placed all the collected earth from the graves into a beautiful glass container and put another of the Saturnian coins on top of it. This acts as a proxy or portal to the physical graves of my ancestors and when I want to give offerings to them I pour libations over the coin or wave it through incense smoke and imagine how the offering's energies travel across the etheric network and reach their graves. I also imagine the portals to be open for exchange and meditate on this image while communing with my ancestors spirits.

Feel free to use this idea yourself and see if it helps you to be closer to your ancestors if you whish so. It certainly helps me. I can also imagine that instead of coins you could use a rock or other item broken into pieces or make up a batch of tokens with the same sigil on it.

Spirit Communion

The general protocol that I have currently settled with for my own practice of communing with my ancestors is mainly based on the ritual outlined in this highly recommended Sphere & Sundry article, but also heavily inspired by a Shinto ritual that I love for its powerful minimalism. I combined the two and I work with Tehuti as psychopomp, because I already had a relationship with this god through my Tarot practice.

The full protocol is suitable for first contact or special occasions and can be easily simplified for more casual subsequent communication. The calls to the ancestors in the ritual outlined below are a spin-off from a general prayer to the ancestors that I wrote a while ago and which I frequently use in other ritual settings:

You ancestors who came before me. I call you. Mothers and fathers, sisters and brothers, daughters and sons. All you, from whose community I came forth, whose blood flows through my veins, whose traces and memories I carry within me. With deep compassion, I think of your sufferings and your pains, through which you had to go on your life's path. With gratitude and love I think of your struggles, your dreams, your achievements, your courage and your strength. May your blessing and guidance bring out the best in me, for the benefit of all, whom I may meet in this life. Amen.

Full Ritual

Preliminaries

Ritual bath
Anoint with oil
Light candles
Light general incense (Frankincense)
Place a bowl of Natron or Butsudan ash powder in the center of the altar

Orphic Hymns

I prefer to do this rite during planetary hours that combine the hour and day of Mercury and Saturn. Hour of Mercury on Saturdays or hour of Saturn on Wednesdays. I start with the Orphic hymn of whoever rules the day, then the one of whoever rules the hour. For Mercury I use the hymn to Hermes Chthonios. You can find different versions of the Orphic Hymns. The recent translation by Patrick Dunn flow very well in English. Or use the free ones you can find here. For best pronunciation in Greek check Susan Chang's amazing video. Light Storax / Benzoin incense before you start. One for Mercury, one for Saturn.

Prayer to Tehuti

Burn some Egyptian papyrus or Kyphi incense and give an offering of Natron.
Pray the Hymn to Tehuti down to "Who enters duat, knows those in it"
Call to Tehuti:

Tehuti, I call you! Thrice greatest Tehuti, scribe of Ra, Silver Aton, leader of souls in the hereafter. I invoke you in your great, divine names: ALIPS, THABLIPS, STSILIPS, GAGARPAOTHAR, THANASIMA, QHAH, ORTHOMENKHROÔN, BALSA, ALABAKHABEL [4], Come to me here and now to this place that will serve as a meeting place for myself and my ancestors, guardians, and leaders who now dwell in the afterlife, whose blood runs through me, and all whose spirits have helped shape me.

Thrice greatest Tehuti, I humbly ask you to aid me as a messenger and as a light for those I seek. Open the veil between this world and the hereafter. Find my ancestors and make sure they receive my words, gifts and intentions.

Thrice greatest Tehuti, accept these offerings of smoke, light, water, food and wine. Accept them in gratitude for your help, and please spread them to the dead I call and invite them to attend and see to it that no uninvited intruder comes to this place.

Be praised, oh Thrice greatest Tehuti, forecaster of the future, notary of Ra!

Peret kheru ta, heneket, khau kau apedu, khut nebet noferet wabet ankhet netjer im. [5]

Offerings to the Dead

Place all offerings on the table, smudge them with incense.
Place a lit stick of incense into the bowl of Natron, a bit to the rear right of its center. This is for all women in your bloodline.

I call you: mothers and grandmothers, sisters and cousins, daughters and granddaughters. All you women, from whose community I came forth, whose blood flows through my veins, whose traces and memories I carry within me. With deep compassion, I think of your sufferings and your pains, through which you had to go on your life's path. With gratitude and love I think of your struggles, your dreams, your achievements, your courage and your strength. Come to this altar in your honor and accept my offerings, giving thanks for the sacrifices you made for our family. Accept these gifts, along with my gratitude and love.

Place another lit stick of incense into the bowl of Natron, a bit to the rear left of its center. This is for all men in your bloodline.

I call you: fathers and grandfathers, brothers and cousins, sons and grandsons. All you men, from whose community I came forth, whose blood flows through my veins, whose traces and memories I carry within me. With deep compassion, I think of your sufferings and your pains, through which you had to go on your life's path. With gratitude and love I think of your struggles, your dreams, your achievements, your courage and your strength. Come to this altar in your honor and accept my offerings, giving thanks for the sacrifices you made for our family. Accept these gifts, along with my gratitude and love.

Place a third lit stick of incense into the bowl of Natron, a bit to the front of its center, so all three sticks shape a triangle. This is for the lost and forgotten ones of your bloodline and the ones who are not genetically related to you, yet important.

I call you: all you forgotten dead, you unborn dead, you who died as children. I also call you, all you friends and acquaintances, and all those who have stood with and helped my family and me, whose influences and benevolence I carry within me. Come also to this altar in your honor and accept my offerings, giving thanks for the sacrifices you made for our family. Accept these gifts, along with my gratitude and love.

(Optionally, call the mighty dead.

I call you: you inspiring ancestors, you artists and magicians, poets and thinkers, you role models who have given your lifeblood for the benefit of all, you mighty forefathers, who have made this world a better one before your transition to the next world. With gratitude and love I think of your struggles, your dreams, your achievements, your courage and your strength. They live in me and flow through my veins, they inspire my existence and from them I draw strength. I thank you from the bottom of my heart. Accept these gifts, along with my gratitude and love.)

If it is the first time you do this ritual, I recommend to say something about the collected earth and the Saturnian tokens:

Dear grandparents and dear uncle (or whose graves are connected with each other through the token network), through this earth and through the tokens, which are consecrated by Saturn and connected to each other beyond distance, I can always be close to your graves. All of you other ancestors, I ask you to acknowledge this earth as symbol also for the earth of your graves and to recognize the network of tokens also as a symbol of our inseparable connection.

Play music, commune with the present spirits, have a party, do whatever you want to do.

Closing the Space

Thank you all, my ancestors who have appeared. May your blessing and guidance bring out the best in me, for the benefit of all, whom I may meet in this life. I thank you from the bottom of my heart. I hereby grant you a license to depart. Return to your resting places and do not stay in this house. But come back soon when I call you. My love and gratitude are always with you!

Thrice greatest Tehuti, make sure that all the souls called here today find their way and return to their resting places and close the veil again between this world and the hereafter. This ritual is closed.

Requiem

O Lord, grant all eternal rest. And let eternal light shine on each of them. May the souls of the ancestors rest in peace through Your mercy. Amen

Family Troubles

I know that it can be difficult to connect with the own dead relatives, be it because some of them have been abusive towards members of the family and caused traumata and grief, or because they would not have agreed with their descendants life-style, beliefs, sexuality, identification, etc. or vice versa. You can find important thoughts about these issues in the linked Sphere & Sundry article above or in BJ Swain's book, and many other places, but my own are as follows:

First of all nobody has to talk to the ancestors, there are other ways of getting help from the dead. A good example would be working with the "Lost Souls" in "purgatory", as I recently heard and read about in this great article by Agostino Taumaturgo or in the pure Shinto way. You can also tie Catholicism and pagan Roman rites together and do a kind of Parentalia Novena.

An important point that made a huge difference for me was involving a psychopomp in aiding to make contact with the dead. You can ask them to filter out unwanted ancestors, either by explicitly naming them or by asking him to not let the ones come who are not comfortable supporting your current life, or something along those lines. You can also ask them specifically to invite only your magically operand ancestors, or the artists among them, or the queer ones, and so on. Use them as a bouncer to your party.

Incarnations

Coming back to the "Saturnian coins": I came across an article on Gnome School that had a quote from a book by Henry Rogers about very intriguing objects that I can very well imagine being used for such an "etheric network":

From the period 8500-3000 OLD, a large number of artefacts known as tokens have been found. There are small clay objects of simple geometric shapes: spheres, cones, tetrahydra, cylinders, disks, lens-shaped disks, etc. tokens of this period are known as plain tokens. They are associated with the beginnings of agriculture [and] were used for record keeping… some have been found stored inside sealed, hollow clay balls forming envelopes around the tokens… these envelopes represented a way of safegaurding the record of the contract. If there was a disagreement, the envelope could be broken, and the evidence of the tokens would be inside. [3]

This magical network concept lends itself also to many other potential magical applications. Some research revealed that it is apparently also nothing really new. The famous DKMU "Ellis" aka. "Linking Sigil" and Chaos Magick 101's Sigil Matrix followed a similar line of thought. My plan is to further explore this technology of linking talismanic tokens to each other.

(1) Swain, BJ. Living Spirits: A Guide to Magic in a World of Spirits. Independently published. 2018
(2) Kambon, Ọbádélé. "Akan Ananse stories, Yorùbá Ìjàpá tales, and the Dikènga theory: worldview and structure." Contemporary Journal of African Studies 4.2 (2017): 1-36.
(3) Rogers, Henry. Writing systems: A linguistic approach. Oxford: Blackwell, 2005.
(4) translation from demotic spells with secret names of Tehuti from Louvre E 3229 papyrus (Betz PDM lxi. 63-78 and PDM Suppl. 149—62) found in: Betz, Hans Dieter, ed. The Greek magical papyri in translation, including the Demotic spells. Vol. 1. University of Chicago Press, 1996. pg. 288 and 328.
(5) Common Egyptian offering formula. It translates to: "A voice offering of bread, beer, a thousand of beef and fowl, and every good and pure thing on which a god lives"