SUBLUNAR SPACE - hero's quest

Call of the Siren

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

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

The Other Lady

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

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

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

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

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

Chasing the Star

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Meet me on Mount Carmel

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

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

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

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

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

Magical Materialism

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

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

Kyrie Iesou Christe, eleison me

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dark Night of the Soul

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

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

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

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

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

Thus Spoke the Goddesses

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

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

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

Into the Abyss

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

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

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

Tikkun Atzmi

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

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

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

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

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

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

Solve et Coagula

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

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

Covid Circumnavigation

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

v1.1

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

Traversing the Underworld

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

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

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

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

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

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

All Too Human

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

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

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

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

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

Revelations

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Baal's Fort

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

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

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

The Black God

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

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

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

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

Limits

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

Structural Faults:

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

Halting the Doomsday Machine:

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

Templexity

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

Melting Time:

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

The Fact of Death:

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

Confinement

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

Capacity for Interiority:

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

Collapse

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

Darker Capitalism:

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

Future Calamities:

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

Maladjusted to Normality:

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

Intentions

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

Meaningful Response:

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

Fanciful Ideas:

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

Imagine Another World:

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

Resilience:

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

Lessons

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

Transformation:

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

Bewildering Ambiguity:

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

Traces

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

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

Across the Ocean

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

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

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

Reflections

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

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

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

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

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

Rest in Peace

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

Canary Capricorn

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

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

Escaping Winter

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

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

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

Baal's Portal

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

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

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

Horned Gods

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

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

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

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

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

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

Transience

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

It didn't.

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

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

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

Temporality

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

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

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

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

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

Calling Qaftsiel

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cold and dry in the head. Capricorn season.

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

Olympus Mons

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

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

Titanic Origins

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Squares and Mercenaries

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Check this website for more information

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

Mons Omnium Sanctorum

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Olympic Alchemy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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