SUBLUNAR SPACE - fuerteventura

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 Achinet

2018-06-09T20:00:00+02:00

Islas Canarias

My parents have been in love with the Canary Islands since they first visited together in 1977. My father had already explored its largest island, Tenerife in 1972. Back then it was just the beginning of tourism there and most of the infrastructure was in a quite desolate state after Franco's rule. It was a time where just a few people visited, also because of a political independence struggle involving terrorist attacks. In the early 1980s Spain eventually granted autonomy status to the archipelago and tourism started booming.

From 1977 until today my parents visit their favourite of the islands, Fuerteventura, at least once a year, so since I was born in 1980 until I was 16 I also naturally came with them.

The white beaches contrasted with jagged black lava cliffs, the untamed Atlantic ocean, colourful but bleak basalt deserts and the neverending strong wind feel like a second home to me and this is such a strong feeling that I really start missing the place if I don't visit regularly myself.

After having started this journey of expanding my mindspace into the realms of spirituality and enchantment and thinking in a more and more animist way, exploring and conceptualizing spirits of place and their influence on and coexistence with us, I have instinctively also begun to wrap my head around the Canaries and the fixed place they inhabit in my heart.

So, this year our summer vacation destination was chosen to be Tenerife, the largest and most populated of the seven islands, as well as most diverse in its landscape, history and lore around its spirits and gods. This two weeks long holiday with my wife and my daughter was not only for exploration, recreation and relaxation, but also a kind of pilgrimage to the ocean bathed lava rock archipelago inside myself, to meet the archetypal mother goddess.

To fully understand what I mean by that and to get a glimpse of the magic that I experience wherever I am on the islands, let's go back in history and put some light on the world of the native human and nonhuman inhabitants of the archipelago before it became a Spanish colony...

The Guanches

According to the latest findings, the Canary Islands have been inhabited by humans dating back to the 6th century BC. The indigenous people is commonly called The Guanches, although strictly speaking this term just refers to the inhabitants of the island of Tenerife in their own language (Guan = people, Chinet = name of the Island of Tenerife).

Academia and the internet are full of wild speculations around the origin of this race, ranging from "Celtic seafarers", to "White Aryan survivors of Atlantis", but if we can trust materialist science for a moment, mitochondrial DNA analyses confirmed a North West African origin for their ancestors, related to the Amazigh, or their more known name: Berbers.

A more recent term used in Spanish for the natives of the Canary Islands and for their language is insulo-amazigh ("island Berbers").

Records by the first missionaries and later conquerors describe the aboriginal inhabitants to have been a simple and primitive race of sheep-herders who lived in caves and had no knowledge of seafaring. Of course seen through the Catholic Spanish imperialist eyes this description does not surprise.

The Guanches had a political system of hereditary autocracy on some islands, on others it was elective. There seemed to have been almost an 'over-governance' considering the size of the islands and their populations (Star.Ships hypothesis, anyone? (2)). When the Castilians arrived in Tenerife for example, it was divided into nine small kingdoms (menceyatos), each ruled by a king or Mencey.

I won't go into more details about the Guanche civilisation itself, since much can be found about them online, but instead cover their spirituality a bit:

Canarian Spirits

(Guanche names of deities and spirits given in their Spanish writing and thus also pronunciation)

Their Supreme Creator God was Achaman ("the skies"), and besides him they venerated the sun deity Magec or Mageb, possibly a goddess ("mother of brightness") and the moon god Achuguayo ("father of time"). The sun as a goddess and her consort moon as an old man ruling over time also seem to have been widespread among other neolithic Berber people around North Africa. In Guanche cosmology the world was held together by an Axis Mundi, some pillar-shaped rocks were venerated on all of the islands, but it mainly manifested as the 3718 meters high volcano mountain on Teneriffa, the Teide. According to their legends, Achaman's black adversary Guayota ("the destroyer") once captured and kidnapped Magec, locked her into the volcano and turned the world into darkness. The people then prayed to Achaman for help and he rescued Magec and in turn imprisoned Guayota in the volcano where he is ever since, continuing trying to influence the world commanding his evil spirits, who appear sometimes as black wooly dogs with red eyes, the Tibicenas. (1)

A belief the insulo-amazigh also shared with continental Kabyle berbers was that through a series of specific places: cracks in the ground, caves, certain trees, and so on, evil forces from the netherworld could manifest, which often had to be counteracted. In order to do so, magical objects were placed into or close to these gateways. Many of these talismanic items have been discovered everywhere in the islands, mostly ceramics of diverse morphology, objects for domestic use, often very small in size. In North Africa, women go to these places and hide talismans, draw sigils or utter invocations to neutralize the evil, or ask favors from the "geniuses" or spirits. It is assumed that the Guanches had similar rituals to counteract the Tibicena demons or request help of their benevolent counterparts, the Maxios, guardians and spirits of specific places, who often also became helpful domestic spirits. (1)

It is unclear what the Guanches belief of an afterlife was. Some of the missionaries reported Guanche myths that evildoers would be imprisoned in the Teide volcano. When members of the nobility or higher classes died they were mummified in a complicated process and believed to become gods. They were placed into sacred caves and communicated with by sleeping next to their bodies and have their spirits visit in dreams. (1)

Missing Links

One of the many unsolved mysteries of the Canaries are the step-pyramids found in different places, most prominently in Güímar on Tenerife. The famous Danish anthropologist Thor Heyerdahl was so impressed by them that he spent the rest of his life on the island. He claims that they must be the missing link between the pyramids of Egypt and the ones in Middle and South America. Most of academia doesn't believe in his theory and claim that the pyramids on the Canaries are "simply rock piles". I think the truth probably lies somewhere closer to Heyerdahl's hypothesis, because they have precise east-west alignments and look a lot like ritual places, although they look way less symmetrical and are much smaller than the step-pyramids in the Americas.

The Guanches apparently could read and write. Many petroglyphs could be found on rocks across all islands, some using a variant of the very intriguing Tifinagh alphabet still used by Berbers today, but most of them using a system of rune-like letters probably distant relatives of the Phoenician alphabet. German researchers have collected petroglyphs from Mahorata (Fuerteventure and Lanzarote) of the so-called Sinicava type in the early 1990s and afro-philologist Gerhard Böhm (3) matched them with the existing Canarian phonemes and came up with a translation of the letters that can be written from left-to-right or right-to-left:

A, Â/E/O, I/J, U/W, T/D, DH, K, GH, Q, P, F, L, R, S/SH

In total not much could be preserved and reported of the old insulo-amazigh culture and knowledge, because in cases where they did not Christianize and assimilate to the Spanish overlords, they got either killed or sold as slaves to more distant colonies. Nevertheless, until today many of their traditions seem to live on as hidden undercurrents and in between the lines of mainstream culture. A few years ago a neopagan recronstructivist Church of the Guanche People was founded as a cult of the ancient goddess Chaxiraxi.

Chaxiraxi

The biggest spiritual impact on the Guanches happened a few decades before the Spanish arrived. If you like the idea of a "spirit on a mission" it also marked the survival of their own gods into syncretization with Christianity: The Blessed Virgin of Candelaria. You can read all about her history and how to connect with her in my next post:

Diosa Madre Chaxiraxi

Suffumigation

In some of the aforementioned excavated ceramic bowls used for offerings and as protection against evil spirits some remains of ashes were found and analyzed (1). They resulted from burning a mixture of different endemic herbs found on the island. Here is the full list of the found herbs, in case you visit the place and want to recreate a magical Guanche incense yourself, like I did:

If that is too complicated to obtain, then you can also use the plant with the obvious local name Incienso (Artemisia thuscula), a Canarian variant of mugwort with a strong and distinct Anise smell that surrounds you everywhere you go on the island, at least at the end of May when I visited. It has been and is still used as a popular incense.

Bibliography

(1) Tejera Gaspar, Antonio. "La religión de los guanches : mitos, ritos y leyendas". Ediciones Idea, 2011

(2) White, Gordon. Star.Ships: A Prehistory of the Spirits. Scarlet Imprint / Bibliothèque Rouge. Kindle Edition.

(3) Böhm, Gerhard. "Sprache und Geschichte im Kanarischen Archipel", "Bd. 2. Sprachdenkmäler: Punisch und Berberisch: Kanarisch". AFRO-PUB, 1996.