SUBLUNAR SPACE - berlin

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'.

Spirits of Berlin

2018-04-21T12:00:00+02:00

Psychogeography

Imagine Berlin. Imagine a city of fragments and ghosts. Imagine a metropolis which inspired countless artists and witnessed uncountable murders. Imagine a laboratory of ideas, the fount of both the brightest and darkest designs of history’s most bloody century. Imagine the most arrogant capital of Europe devastated by Allied bombs then divided. Imagine it reunited and reborn as one of the creative centres of the world. (Rory Maclean "Berlin: Imagine a City")

I live in Berlin for almost two decades now. It's the place I call home - my freely chosen Zuhause, not the Heimat where I was born. Besides enjoying the obvious perks of living in a European capital city, Berlin has always felt to me like I belong here. It has given me subtle weird and at the same time beautiful tingles from the first day of my arrival: uncanny feelings of nostalgia I only know from some of my dreams and a permanent sense of out-of-time-and-place-ness that I very much resonate with.

I live in Berlin. [...] it is different from anywhere else. But I cannot quite express that difference, that otherness, in words yet. (Nooteboom "Roads to Berlin")

In the past I have always explained away the strangeness with the unique historical impacts of two World Wars and a Cold War that one encounters almost on every street corner, but since I started travelling my path of enchantment, I've wanted to dig deeper into the metaphysical heart of this city - to find the Spiritus Loci.

Berlin is the city of the negative space, the space where something is not, the bombed-out-of-existence, the closed-off, the mysteriously forbidden. The symbol of this is the bullet holes that you can see so often, small indentations, places where stone or brick should be, but where they are conspicuous by their absence, just as people are absent from closed metro stations. (Nooteboom "Roads to Berlin")

The twentieth century has had such a harsh impact on Berlin that it becomes difficult - almost impossible - to look beyond the trauma, to get a larger historical perspective, to try to grasp a more macroscopic image of Berlin's soul from the times before the death and destruction.

He did not have the same feeling in France, in Italy, or in his own country. Those places had enough past, but somehow it had transformed more or less organically into a present. Here, the transition was not complete. The past had become stuck, bogged down, coagulated, curdled, been torn away. But it was still there. Perhaps it was just waiting. (Nooteboom "Roads to Berlin")

Obviously Berlin is haunted with ghosts - eerily silent ghosts. I didn't want to look for those, they are everywhere anyway. I wanted to find the spirit of the city itself.

In his books, Gordon White writes about the importance of a city's river spirit:

[T]he story is always the same because river spirits are always the same: How long have we been here? Who came before? Where did they go? Who or what answered their night prayers, and at what cost? Civilisation is the tobacco of river spirits. They seem to crave it, to will it into being up and down their banks, even though the relationship appears damaging over the long term. (Gordon White "Star.Ships: A Prehistory of the Spirits")

In our local monthly meetup of Berlin based witches & wizards we've also discussed this topic and it inspired me to look for folklore and myths about Berlin's Spree river to find clues about the nature of it's inhabiting spirit. I started digging into German online sources, looking as far back as the very beginnings of the history of Berlin:

Prehistory

In pre-christian times the area of Berlin had been visited by Germanic as well as Slavic tribes. Although the Germans had been here first, almost all of their tribes had settled here just temporarily on their way further South during the great migration periods in the 5th until the 7th century. The Wends, a Slavic people coming from the East, settled in the area but mostly in the South of Brandenburg along the Spree. They had established and defended themselves against German re-conquest until the end of the first millennium. A second and larger germanisation attempt in the 13th century was successful, the Slavic rulers were defeated and their people were slowly assimilated. Of course history was way more complicated than that, but this is the very short summary. Their legacy are names of places (like Berlin), the Sorbic language spoken by a minority in the East of Germany, and lots of interesting folklore.

All through the timeline I could not find any relevant myths and legends regarding the Spree river from the close proximity area of Berlin, I guess because Berlin had no real significance until the beginning of the era of long distance trade with ships during the Middle Ages when it became a real city.

The Nix of the Spree

So I followed the Spree upriver looking for hints and I found a whole treasure of legends from the Spreewald area, where the river splits into numerous creeks and canals surrounding marshes and swamps. The other place that offers legends surrounding the river is from Lausitz (Lusatia) further upriver towards the Czech border.

Besides very interesting local legends about the Serpent King, the little dragon Plon, the funny Lutki gnomes and the midday woman, who likes to kill everyone who works at noon instead of taking a break, I found tales of the spirit of the river in the form of the Nyks!

The Nix or Nyks, also called Wodny Muž or Vodnik is a quite moody merman shaped trickster daimon. There are many legends of mermen and mermaids across Celtic, German and Slavic lore, also very often called Nix or Nök but the Spreewald one seems to be especially peculiar.

In his evil or grumpy version he is depicted as having a fish or toad like appearance or of a water corpse. He likes to sit on the banks of the river and scare or even kill children with a club or pull people into the water who are not paying attention or who are mindlessly picking water lilies. He is responsible and feared for causing floods, especially during spring time. The Nyks is said to have beautiful daughters (Nixen) that lure young men into the waters.

When he is in a good mood he appears as a rich farmer, fisherman or a well dressed groom (of "Mother Spree"). He likes to dress in red or wear a green jacket and he is known to help poor fishermen. The Nyks has quite mercurial features as he likes to trade on the market square and play cards and drink in taverns. He can be recognized by his coat having a wet seam and because he never touches cards with a cross (clubs). He likes to loiter around the riverbanks smoking his pipe. Fishermen ask him for help by placing a pinch of tobacco in the water and saying, "Here's your tobacco, Lord Vodník, now give me a fish."

(The Nök, a similar spirit of the Karpfenteich pond in Berlin Treptow)

Being a mercurial trickster it becomes clear why he likes the presence of creatives and entrepreneurs, artisans and merchants. The city is crowded with mercurial people and is a hub of globetrotters and travellers. The creative scene and nightlife are well known around the globe. The open-mindedness is nothing new: it probably peaked in the roaring 1920s and was already present in different ways even before that under Frederick the Great and Frederick William despite their military fetish.

The Black God

It made me wonder about the dark and malefic aspects Berlin certainly has. The constant re-occurring Martian obsession with order, control and militarism, fascism, xenophobia, the omnipresent scars and absences, the borderlines, the dragging stubbornness.

I stumbled upon several references to another myth surrounding the Spree - also further South near today's Bautzen: When the Wends ruled the region, apparently there had been a cult-statue of a god called Flins, Flynz or Flinc who loomed over a steep gorge of the Spree that flows like a wild river until this spot, after which it becomes silent, deep and slow. The icon is described as a bearded skeleton-like figure wearing a long coat, holding a burning bowl in his right hand and having a lion on his left shoulder - other sources describe him as standing next to a lion, being made from gold, holding a spear in one hand and holding up a cauldron over his other shoulder that started steaming when this war-god called his people to battle.

Sounds very Saturnian to me!

There are legends of caves around the gorge where his priests dwelled and about human sacrifices to him. When the Germans conquered and christianised the area, the icon was pushed down the cliff into the roaring Spree. People have tried to dive for it and there seem to be legends about underwater gold treasures and the Flins seems to demand more and more human sacrifices as people disappeared in the waters of the Spree.

It has been speculated that the Flins is no other than the notorious West Slavic black god called Chernobog or Diabol about whom much has been speculated but little can be said definitively.

So assuming the Flins was an animate icon of the West Slavic black god whose veneration for appeasement had suddenly ceased after christian conquest and he was forced into the Spree, it seems obvious that he haunts the river ever since and emanates his Saturnine influences into it. Combine that with the darker aspects of a mercurial spirit Nix and it becomes uncanny that the people in the largest city on the river's banks became obsessed with war and death, and had the world's most famous border-wall cutting right through the heart of the city - a border between people, countries, ideologies, worldviews. And before all that happened, the city was even the home of an occult Saturnian brotherhood.

Not that I want to blame all evil on the river, but he might certainly have had some influence.

Spirits of Berlin

Although the Nix seems at a first glance to not be specifically Berlin related, he is the spirit of the Spree that flows through Berlin. On top of that he seems to also be possessed by a restless black god who occasionally demands sacrifices. It's about time the Nix and the Flins get the recognition they deserve as spirits of place with influence on this city and time for us to try to connect with them.

How does a fish see the river it is swimming in? It cannot leave the water to gain distance or perspective. Something like that is happening in Berlin. Everything is flowing. (Nooteboom "Roads to Berlin")

I live in the area of Kreuzberg, near the Landwehrkanal, a canal connected to the Spree through a series of locks. The banks of the canal host farmers markets twice a week and occasionally flea-markets. The area is also popular for its abundance of bars and clubs - all places I can imagine the Nyks haunting regularly.

I walk along the canal every morning during my strolls with my daughter and I cross its bridges several times a day running chores, so I decided to start trying to hook up with grumpy old Nyx through offerings.

Judging from the folklore, appropriate offerings to him seem to be tobacco or a handful of earth or toasted bread. I assume he would also not deny strong alcohol. Protection from him can be achieved by wearing a cross.

Now I always try to bring some tobacco or bread along with me when I know that I'll be crossing or walking along the canal to offer it to the Spree spirit. I have asked for a few little general favors, like to bring luck. I have not had clear and obvious communication with him, but I hope that will be established soon. He is known to be stubborn, but so am I.

(I found a "7 of Clubs" card and burned it as an offering to the Nix)

I also started including the Flins into my Saturday routine of praying to Kronos and perhaps start thinking about offerings to him too - although plenty of forces from Berlin seem to have provided more than enough human sacrifices during the 20th century to keep him pleased for a while, right? Let's hope so...

Quotes taken from:

Nooteboom, Cees (2013 [2009]), Roads to Berlin: Detours and Riddles in the Lands and History of Germany. Trans. Laura Watkinson. London: MacLehose Press.

found mainly in:

Böttcher, Hannah (2016), Sydney and Berlin Cities of Silence and Absence - A psychogeographical reading of contemporary non-fiction texts, PhD thesis.