SUBLUNAR SPACE - jupiter

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'.

Daimonic Scrabble

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

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

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

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

GOD ANKHOR SOLEX

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

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

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

It is 365!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Happy Beltane!

Olympus Mons

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

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

Titanic Origins

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Squares and Mercenaries

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Check this website for more information

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

Mons Omnium Sanctorum

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Olympic Alchemy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Into the Spheres

2019-04-18T14:00:00+02:00

Trying Trithemius

I have to admit my guilt of initial skepticism towards Rufus Opus' "Seven Spheres" from an ignorant armchair magician's perspective. The magical system seemed too "watered down" in comparison with the original framework laid out by Trithemius in "Drawing Spirits into Crystals" and other modern interpretations of it, like Frater Ashen Chassan's outstanding work.

My mind was changed by listening to the lovely Charm the Water podcast and following the reports of incredible synchronicites and life-changing events that unfolded around Aaron and Kelly's lives around each of the planetary initiation rituals. It has been on my bucket list ever since and a few weeks ago I finally managed to plunge into the first sphere.

How Aaron diverged from RO's original ritual order and timing resonated very much with me. The schedule in Seven Spheres seems quite tight and the order of planets to initiate into very strategic. Aaron approached it in a more organic way by following his intuition to tell him which planet to reach out to next and to let much more time pass after each ritual. It allowed him to fully experience each unfolding of planetary enchantment without hurry.

I knew that I wanted to initiate into the sphere of Jupiter first, because he rules my sun sign (Pisces) and I wanted to do it around my birthday at the end of March. I elected April 4 for the ritual, a Thursday, in the evening hour of Jupiter. The space weather seemed auspicious: the Sun and Moon were in Pisces, Jupiter himself at home in Sagittarius, and visited in his sign also by grumpy old wizard Saturn.

Allowing myself some artistic freedom constructing the required Trithemian table of practice, I followed Ashen Chassan's lead (backed up by Peterson and Stratton-Kent) and used the names of the Four Kings instead of the Archangels. Instead of the Gothic Latin names of the planetary angels RO uses and Chassan's classic Hebrew version which both are quite difficult to draw due to the calligraphic serifs I followed the layout by Polyphanes and used the Celestial Hebrew typeface popularized by Agrippa. Here is the final design I went with:

Dialing Sachiel

I painted it onto a wooden plate using black permanent marker and some minor decorations in gold and silver. The crystal is a scrying glass sphere I bought in my local New Age shop together with two royal blue candles, corresponding with Jupiter. For the required lamen and seals I used cardboard in the same color. Following Chassan I placed the altar towards Southwest and I intuitively turned the table of practice so the Four Kings would point into their respective cardinal directions. As suffumigation I went with a delicious combination of aloe- and cedar-wood. I quit smoking three years ago so I skipped the cigar smoke offering part, but I adorned the altar with some dried laurel leaves from the kitchen and an olive branch I had taken from a small tree that was next to the altar of Bona Dea Heia Augusta that I found during an obsessive quest in Croatia last summer. The alcohol offering of choice was a glass of my favorite Scotch Whisky Glenmorangie and as music I first played "Ode to Joy" and then a compilation of loungy Austrian jazz that seemed appropriate.

My preferred ritual language is German, so I had to translate the prayers from English first. You can find the translations here.

Despite neither seeing anything appear in the crystal, nor feeling any Angelic presence, I followed through with the whole ritual, confident that it would take some time for the effects of the initiation to unfold in the next days and weeks - and boy, did they unfold...read on

Ankle of God?

2017-06-15T18:00:00+02:00

When I translated the planetary prayers from the English translation of the Harleianus 5596 manuscript (Hygromanteia) by Marathakis into German for my personal use I stumbled over this peculiar expression in the prayer to Jupiter:

I conjure you, most valorous and most beneficial Jupiter, by the immeasurable ankle of god.

Marathakis seems to have been puzzled by this too as he added a footnote claiming that it must have been a corrupted text because he could not find any other reference to this 'ankle of god'.

Digging a bit around myself I came to a different conclusion. The Greek word for 'ankle' is αστράγαλος and the term might actually refer to a game of chance similar to dice popular in ancient Greece and elsewhere that was played with ankle bones:

Knucklebones (astragali), were an essential part of many ancient games: αστραγαλισμοσ was played using four astragali with different values on each side […] πευτελιξοι was played with five astragali, simultaneously thrown into the air to be caught on the back of the hand. Natural knucklebone was usually cut down, grinded, drilled and filled with lead. (source)