Tag Archives: Enochian magick

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The Visions of DEO, MAZ and LIT (Aethyrs 7 through 5)

The visions of the aethyrs are becoming subtler, harder to attain, and yet – surprisingly – more mundane and personal, as I approach the end of this five-year working. (Or has it been even longer?)

The Vision of DEO (Aethyr 7)

I’d not had a lucid dream in ages, so this working was an experiment: I opened the temple with the Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram; read the Enochian Call of the Aethyrs and opened Aethyr 7, reciting the names of the governors; and then, without banishing, I then went straight to bed. I had decided that whatever occurred between opening the aethyr and rising in the morning, I would accept as the vision of DEO.

Waiting to fall asleep, a spirit in the form of a young boy came and asked questions. ‘How do you open an Enochian aethyr?’ he kept pestering me. Earlier in the evening, whilst performing other operations, I had sensed a presence behind me, but it had not identified itself. I had banished afterwards, even though the working hadn’t required it. I wondered now if the young boy were that same spirit returning. There was something vexatious in his questions – because if he were a spirit of the aethyrs, why was he so interested in knowing how to open one? And besides, the spirits were there to answer my questions.

Eventually sleep came. The weather was breezy. Something, somewhere, made a slight, intermittent bumping sound that kept me partially awake throughout the night. Maybe this accounted for the paucity of dreams, yet it also provoked a consistent emotional state: not quite anxiety, but certainly a suspicious watchfulness that endured whilst the aethyr was open, and which I decided was one of its attributes.

At 4.19am I woke, got up, and sat in meditation until 5.10. I saw a headless being, composed of white, squirming limbs. Apart from the wind, the night was quiet, and I was reminded of my stint last year in the haunted prison cell. Fear took hold, several times. Watching the fear and its sources, at one point I entered a state where the presence of my mind was the cause of its fear. The mind was frightened just by the weird, ghostly fact of itself. My surprise that such a state could exist immediately put an end to it.

Usually, getting up to meditate and then going back to bed is my sure-fire method for obtaining a lucid dream. I lay on my back (another lucidity aid) but finally turned on my side and slept.

I was in my parents’ old house, sleeping in the room I’d had as a small child. Fra X was staying as a guest, asleep in a room upstairs (although, in actuality, there is no room above). Fra X liked listening to show tunes when he rose in the mornings, and it seemed I heard these, but soon the music stopped and Fra X had still not appeared.

[I hate show tunes. I were asked to nominate someone whose lifestyle was completely at odds with ordinary, family life, then I might nominate Fra X.]

It was still dark, and in the meantime I heard my father get up for work. As he moved about, making his breakfast to the news on the radio, it struck me how agile he sounded. ‘His hip must be better,’ I thought.

[The sounds of my father in the morning are memories from childhood. His bad hip is a reference to the present. By confusing the sequence of time, the past is enlisted to heal the present.]

Then I heard my mother get up and leave the house. I was curious and anxious where she might have gone. I found her at the bus station, waiting with a group of characters from my home town, looking the way they’d appeared in the 1970s. Sitting nearby was my grandmother with her next-door neighbour. This puzzled me, because I knew they were both dead. I missed an opportunity to become lucid at this point, yet they all looked so happy, chatting together whilst waiting, and having reassured myself my mother was okay I decided to leave them all to it. ‘You are all far too early in the morning for me!’ I laughed, and walked away.

Bus Queue

A bus queue in Bedford, 1970. An image of the afterlife?

['Waiting for a bus' can feel like 'forever', and here is used to symbolise eternity. 'You are all too early' is a reversal of how the people waiting are actually 'late' – in the alternative sense of 'dead'. I am anxious for my mother because really I am afraid that she will die. I am able to reassure myself that it is not she who is dead but the others, and – anyway – they are all having a nice time, but evidently this is a fragile reassurance.]

Later, my sister came to visit. Fra X was still upstairs, but that was fine. If he ever got up and came down, it would be great to see him.

[Again, this rings false. If Fra X is the 'anti-family' then when he 'gets up', the family ceases to be.]

I had an electronic gadget that made quiet but distracting sounds – such as the noise of squelching food. I demonstrated it to my sister, at first without telling her. It drove her nuts. She couldn’t fathom where the noises were coming from. But when I showed her the device she found it very funny. She said it was exactly the kind of thing she supposed I would have.

[When we were kids, my sister was a noisy eater – which used to drive me nuts! The animosity of our childhood is forgotten here, the roles reversed, and the source of annoyance made into a toy, a novelty, that is a source of humour.]

Then there was a tiny, enclosed space, perhaps underground. As I was squeezing into this space, our long-dead family cat squeezed past me and ahead. My face was buried in the warmth of her fur, so what might have been a horribly claustrophobic episode was instead reassuring.

['Underground' suggests a grave. The family cat is buried in the garden. Regressive sexual imagery is combined with the deathly connotations. 'Cat' = 'pussy'. I'm pressing my face into the entrance of the womb! As a strategy for escaping death and separation, this is obviously rather flawed.]

The Vision of MAZ (Aethyr 6)

I am walking in a windy place with a childhood friend, thinking, ‘It would really impress him if I could fly.’ Realising that I am dreaming, I conclude: ‘Why not?’ And I do. But then I wonder, ‘Is there enough time to scry an aethyr?’

The state has become unstable, but I concentrate and it becomes more steady, and I state my intention: ‘I wish to enter MAZ, the sixth aethyr!’ Indeed, I state this so powerfully and clearly that I’m sure I’ve spoken it aloud in my sleep. The lucidity begins to fade again, but I reinvigorate it by spinning around and around.

I am on a mattress without blankets in a room that reminds me of my sister’s room in my parents’ old house, except it has an exceedingly high ceiling. My girlfriend is asleep next to me, and next to her is an identical aspect of herself, with a scarlet pentagram on her forehead at the third eye. She says something, which I do not remember and may not have been verbal anyway, but I recognise who she is: the part of my girlfriend that is childlike, mystical, and loving towards everyone.

[The amalgam of sister's room and partner suggests (again) the mystical sister, soror mystica, a personification of the male alchemist's 'female half' who assist in his quest. The pentagram is a symbol of earth and humanity. 'Scarlet' recalls the 'Scarlet Woman', the shakti, or tantric partner. The magickal practice of placing symbols on the forehead of the partner, charging them as sigils through orgasm during lovemaking, is also suggested here.]

Shakti

'He meets his shakti Tuesdays, / Down the launderette. / They go behind the driers / And invoke Baphomet.'

At the foot of a mattress, high up against the wall on a ladder, a large naked man is fixing a red cube to the wall. ‘Who’s in charge?’ I call up to him. He laughs, but not derisively. ‘You’ll never see him around here,’ he says.

[Red cube: another symbol of earth and matter.]

There was a second part to this vision, which has faded from memory, in which it now seems that I did see and meet who was in charge. But whether there were images and I have lost them, and that’s why only the purport of it remains, I can no longer tell. Yet I know that the person in charge gave me something. Because he was angelic it was something very subtle and fine, so he showed me how to mix it with what is gross and disgusting, in order to make it usable in everyday experience.

[This suggests the magickal techniques of tantra and the Left Hand Path.]

Earlier I’d dreamt non-lucidly that Edgar Allan Poe decided to take his own life. He rode on his beloved horse to the edge of a cliff, then took out a handgun, intending to blow out his brains. It was the horse that swayed him. Poe couldn’t bear the thought that his horse might come to harm, and – realising a source of genuine love in his life – the urge to commit suicide faded. Instead he went home, and dined alone with gusto on a meal of roasted rats.

[Poe's lack of love contrasts with the compassionate nature of the mystical sister. The horse represents the bodily or animal nature of the rider. What we might have here is a view of the Right Hand Path from the perspective of the Left. Poe's 'spiritual practice' is to blow out his brains, rather than to use his connection with the 'horse'. The rat traditionally symbolises observation and intelligence – mental awareness, rather than bodily. In Poe's story 'The Pit and the Pendulum', the narrator is tortured by the Inquisition, but escapes after rats gnaw through the ropes that constrain him. The rat, in this instance, is perhaps a symbol of 'liberation by mental means'. Poe, of course, was an intensely cerebral character.]

The Pit And The Pendulum

'They swarmed upon me in ever-accumulating heaps...' Illustration for The Pit and the Pendulum by Byam Shaw, 1909.

And so the person in charge mixed the subtle thing he gave me with cooked, minced rats. And although Poe ate with relish what was actually disgusting, the mixture of the subtle thing and the rats was really quite palatable. Only when I thought of the ingredients did I feel disgust, but then only weakly, because it came from thinking and was not a bodily reaction.

[This suggests a way forward in my current practice.]

With this second scene, if there ever really was one, the vision ended.

The Vision of LIT (Aethyr 5)

I’m at a magickal moot. There’s a theatre performance, and also we’re all doing our rituals on the stage. There’s a large, dark guy who’s in an aggressive mood and keeps shoving me. I get angry and we start to fight, but we’ve only shoved each other a few times before the magickal brothers and sisters crowd in and calm us down.

[Are my magickal brethren really doing me a favour by preventing the fight between me and my shadow?]

It’s dawn and I want some breakfast, so I step outside and discover I’m in the main street of my home town. Mum and Dad aren’t far, but I doubt they’ll have the kind of breakfast I need. I could just buy a cup of tea, but realise I have no money. Then I remember there is both breakfast and tea back at the moot. It has begun to rain, so I decide to run back to where I came. A feeling of discontent arises at that thought and, noticing it, I also become aware that – anyway – I’m dreaming.

[The moot hasn't taken me far from home, but I seem to realise that it's still where I'm more likely to find appropriate 'food'.]

I look up at the sky and ask to enter LIT, the fifth aethyr. My words sound slurred, so I say it again. Beautiful coloured lights appear, swirling above me. When I look back to earth it’s as if my gaze drags the colours down – the lampposts and houses are festooned with bright decorations made of organic stuff, circular membranes of vivid colour. Everywhere I look more of the stuff appears, but I decide it’s all a bit ‘trippy’, so I head into the town centre to find something interesting.

Where the roads meet is a small café, which somehow I know offers divination. The sign above the window reads QUILITY FRINDS. The premises are very small: candlelit tables for two crammed closely together. At each table sits a woman, waiting for a customer. They are mostly quite short in stature, homely looking, with their hair tied up as if they really were workers in a café or bakery.

[QUILITY FRINDS ('QUALITY FRIENDS'?) = 75 = Five-Pointed Star.]

One of the women with her back to me turns around, sees me, and seems to take an instant dislike. ‘I’m sorry, but I won’t be able to help you,’ she says. But on my left is a woman who looks more friendly. She’s inside a kiosk, and it takes her a while to squeeze out. Another woman occupies the chair where I am supposed to sit. She squeezes out also, to share the seat with the woman from the kiosk. As it turns out, the second woman does most of the talking. The woman from the kiosk merely nods and says a few words.

‘Can you give me some information about the fifth aethyr?’

Quility Frinds

Next time you're in a lucid dream, visit QUILITY FRINDS. (Hopefully, their cakes are better than their divination.)

‘Well, yes,’ the second woman says, ‘although there are certain things about it we’re not permitted to tell. And anything I do say, you mustn’t take as an official representation. There are lots of beings here, so it’s just my view.’

‘Okay, that’s fine. What can you tell me?’

‘Something’s going to happen, but I’m not allowed to reveal it. It’s not good and it’ll come about on November 16th.’

Of course, on hearing this, I was determined to squeeze more details out of her.

‘Is it to do with my family or with health issues?’

‘No. Nothing like that.’ She sighs, and seems to give in. ‘It’s a bit of a rip-off, really. You’ll buy something and it’ll turn out not to be worth it.’

‘But hang on,’ I realise, ‘where I’ve come from, it’s November 21st. The 16th has already passed.’

[I had got up to meditate shortly before going back to bed and obtaining the vision. I had noticed the date whilst setting the alarm for the end of the meditation.]

The two women stare at each other as if this were entirely unexpected. ‘Then you’ll be able to look back and work out what it is,’ the first woman responds.

This seems to have broken our concentration – theirs, and also mine, because at this point the vision breaks up and fades.

[Looking back to November 16th, I have so far found nothing to support or illuminate this retrospective 'prediction'.]

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The Vision of ZID (Aethyr 8)

I am in my parents’ garden when I realise that I am dreaming, so I call to the sky for admittance to the aethyr. The scene fades. I wake. But afterwards appears a vast and sunlit white building. As I watch, scratched into the concrete of its walls, writing appears: numbers, fractions, percentages – all seemingly being added together. It is a vastly long sum, tending towards a single, simple result.

The Writing on the Wall

Belshazzar falls victim to the Divine Tagger. (Rembrandt, c.1635.)

[This recalls 'The Writing on the Wall', Daniel 5: 1-31. In the Old Testament story, the writing is in Aramaic, mene, mene, tekel upharsin, which is sometimes translated as 'number, number, weight, division', curiously echoed here by the 'numbers, fractions and percentages'. Daniel interprets this as a forewarning of the demise of King Belshazzar. The last part of the vision, below, perhaps provides a clue as to whose demise is being foretold here. 'Sum' is also 'I am', in Latin. The God of Daniel was He who identified Himself to Moses as 'I am that I am', Exodus 3: 14.]

And then I am inside the building, which is an enormous office, filled with storage areas, equipment, desks and workstations, with all the usual internal systems of electrics, plumbing and air-conditioning that such buildings have. But I am looking down on this through a skylight, and it is apparent how without its skylight this building has no order or structure at all. It would be a meaningless jumble. For this is a new generation of vast buildings that are defined by their skylight. In the future, the skylight will always come first and the rest will follow.

skylight

A skylight, whereby into a building is admitted the Celestial.

[A building or house is a common symbol for the mind-body, but this is a mind-body defined by its 'skylight', a hole in its roof. This appears to be a symbol for the apprehension of emptiness; it is nothingness, a void, that lends this building its sense of structure. That more buildings like this one will appear in the future seems to suggest that more and more people will arrive at an apprehension of emptiness.]

Then I become aware that English is dying out, replaced by the language of invaders who will one day conquer and enslave the country. It will be such a long process that they have started now, before the invasion takes place. Once the replacement of English is complete, only then will the actual invasion come.

[The concern shifts from mind, perhaps, to speech. Indeed, in the next part of the vision, the focus shifts again to the appearance of the body and its deeds. So we are being led through the three vajras of Tibetan Buddhism: mind, speech and body. In terms of speech, the implication here seems to be that realisation (the 'invasion') comes about only after changes in speech have taken place – almost unconsciously, it seems. The imagery of invasion is curious, however. It does not seem beneficent.]

And now I am at a Halloween party and someone is dressed as the character Worf. Someone else is dressed as Gary Numan, and I think how it should have been me. Then I spot Larry Hagman, who played J.R. in Dallas. He winks at me, and this tells me he really is Hagman – not just someone in a J.R. Costume. I weigh up the idea of congratulating Hagman on his costume, pretending that I’m convinced it must be a costume because I know that Larry Hagman is dead. But really, I know full well he’s alive. This might be a good Halloween joke – yet, thinking it over, I conclude that it would be impolite, in slightly bad taste, and it might even frighten Hagman.

Where, but at the Halloween party we call 'the human personality' would you find these three oddballs together?

[The 'Halloween party' is the everyday psychological self, and the characters are traditional aspects of that self: Worf is the id or shadow; Numan is the ego ideal or ideal ego ('it should have been me'); and Hagman is the ego. But Hagman, as the ego, is in a peculiar dead-alive state. Many people might indeed be uncertain whether, in real life, Hagman is still above ground. (He is.) So is the 'ego' alive here, or not? Is it 'real' or just a costume? In fact, the ego is both real and alive. Yet although it's Halloween, and darkly humorous pranks are the sort of thing one does at this time of year, the decision taken is not to entertain the prospect of the ego's death, because the ego itself might get offended or frightened. As this advice appears to originate from 'outside' the personality, it might be worth following... But for the life of me, I can't think of a good reason why – it is a Halloween party, after all...]

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The Vision of ZIP (Aethyr 9)

I am having a non-lucid dream that my bed is in the office at my place of work. I have an appointment with Sally, to train her in some software I have written. She turns out to be quite personable, but I realise I’m wearing only pyjamas and wonder if they’re clean. I mention this to Sally but she just climbs into my bed, readying herself for the training. I take this to mean that she doesn’t mind and she is trying to put me at ease by being informal too.

[Neurotic stuff. 'Sally' suggests 'Aunt Sally': a figure intentionally placed to divert attention from a more pertinent issue.]

I go downstairs to fetch something. A voiceover explains how my room was designed to embrace contrasting varieties of space. ‘There is the cave,’ the voice says, which is where my old bed is located, where I tend not to sleep any more, ‘and there is also the promontory,’ the voice continues, which is the bed in which I sleep most often these days.

['Downstairs', 'cave': these suggest the unconscious. I have been recovering from a prolonged period of illness, during which I slept in a different bed ('the old bed'). Since starting to recover, feelings of depression caused me to look up Hamlet's speech 'What a piece of work is man' (Act II, Scene II), which includes the words: 'this goodly frame the Earth, seems to me a sterile promontory.' The 'old bed' is illness; the 'new bed' is depression.]

Just for fun I go into the cave. I’m not entirely sure there isn’t a stranger sleeping there. When I reach out, it seems a hand grasps mine, but it isn’t clear whether this is really happening. This ambiguity alerts me that I’m dreaming, so I demand admittance to the 9th Aethyr, ZIP. It isn’t granted at once. I repeat the request: ‘In the name of the governors of the aethyr,’ I add, wishing that I’d taken the trouble to learn the governors’ names. But then the lucid state approaches; the scene changes and the vision begins.

[I've wondered whether, magically speaking, my scrying of the tenth aethyr may have played a part in falling ill. Here we see that escaping from or confronting the grip of illness is what leads to the opening of the ninth aethyr.]

I am looking up at the ceiling of a high room, like the classrooms I remember from early childhood. There is a picture stuck to the ceiling. The writing is upside-down, so I turn myself around, and read something like: ‘WOO! WONKY DUNKY!’ Beneath this are cartoon drawings of myself with absurd expressions on my face: amazement, bewilderment, consternation.

A red telephone box. Loved by nostalgic Brits and archangels.

[Mockery of my depression and self-pity.]

I go to the window. Outside, small children in school uniforms coloured white, red and black are at recess, playing on the grass among wooden benches. Examining the scene, I think: ‘Well, this is not so different from what is outside my room in reality.’ But that’s not true. Looking again, now on the right is shining, calm blue sea. On the left, the lawns of a cliff-top give way to a seafront road with traffic and shops. The children have gone and before me now is a steep, grassy mound: ancient earthworks.

[There is subtle imagery concerning mortality here. In Iron John, Robert Bly proposes a highly condensed model of human development based upon the colours red (passion), white (obedience) and black (ironic transcendence of rules). Men, Bly argues, typically develop from red to white to black; women from white to red to black. These colours together therefore suggest human life in its entirety. There are also quiet echoes here of Emily Dickinson's poem, 'Because I could not stop for death': 'We passed a school, where children strove / At recess in the ring... We paused before a house that seemed / A swelling of the ground...' The seaside also suggests death: the place where rivers meet the ocean; the locality that people retire to when they are old.]

Alan is with me. We are both standing at the large window, looking out. I am very attentive, keen to soak up every detail of the vision.

An old man approaches the window, jeering. He waves his fist then turns and walks away.

The Archangel Michael, by Guido Reni (1636). The hexagram and the colour red are among his traditional attributes.

[The old man is perhaps Father Time, the Grim Reaper, Cronos. He is upset, as if he has been dislodged or forced to move on by the figure that subsequently appears.]

Stepping out from one of those classic, old red telephone boxes, another man approaches. He is old, but there is something young and alert in his eyes. He wears a medallion, which is not entirely clear, but seems to be a hexagram. Alan and I ask him questions, but he either ignores them or gives equivocal responses. Then I ask him an innocent, chatty question about how he likes to spend his time. ‘I keep coming back to earth to collect mink,’ he says.

[The telephone box suggests communication. The archangel whose symbol is the hexagram is Michael, the protector of the righteous and defeater of the Antichrist. According to Rudolf Steiner, Michael is the spirit that presides over our current era, which began in 1879 and will end around 2199. The mission of Michael is to elevate human beings to a new level of understanding, defeating the Ahrimanic forces of materialism that currently hold sway.]

A mink. WTF?! (I know enough about minks now to identify this as a European mink.)

This reveals that he is not an earthly being, and that he is drawn here by a specific desire he finds hard to resist. I repeat his words back to him, and can tell from his expression that he knows he has said too much. He gives a smirk and a shrug, and walks away. As the vision fades I realise that this is all I’m going to get.

[Despite my best efforts, I haven't found a satisfactory interpretation of Michael's comments about mink. It remains pleasingly weird and ambiguous.]

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The Vision of ZAX (Aethyr 10)

I am walking on grass, approaching the house where I go on retreat, and I’m full of joy to be back. The feeling that I have come home is so strong that I become conscious. There is a huge field, ringed by trees. I call up at the sky, ‘I wish to scry ZAX, the tenth aethyr!’

[The field ringed by trees is an exaggerated version of a part of the local recreation ground where I played as a child, which often features in my dreams as a backdrop to soaring emotion.]

I am fully aware, however, that this aethyr is accursed and inhabited by the demon Choronzon.

The scenery wavers and distorts. The trees shrink and assumed stunted shapes. I am not at the retreat centre after all, but back at university as an undergraduate.

Gormogon

Gormogon - the mysterious serial-killer from the third season of the TV series, 'Bones'.

Then I wake up and lie in stillness, watching my mind. I wonder if I’ll re-enter the dream, but instead I enter a state where there is no thought, only bodily sensations. Then I see an image of my body under the bedclothes, but still there is no thought and no vision. Slowly, another state takes over that provides the vision. It is not lucid, but not entirely non-lucid. I am not conscious, yet somehow I know that the things before me are symbolic.

[Perhaps I was dreaming that I was having a vision. In which case, both the scenes and their interpretation within the vision are dreams. My undergraduate years were generally an unhappy and difficult phase.]

So here I am, not on retreat but a student again. It is impossible to remember the order in which things appeared in the vision. It was not so much a narrative, but more like an awareness that certain things were the case.

My girlfriend from university, L., is still here, just the same, so I enter back into a relationship with her. I’m older and more experienced, so none of the things that were so embarrassing back then are a problem. We have sex over and over, yet the relationship somehow still returns to its old, negative groove. I hardly notice it at first, but then I realise that although she has an orgasm every time, I never do. But she keeps me bound to her with promises of satisfactions that never arrive. There is only her tiny student room, and the two of us in it, and the realisation I never receive anything from her – not even conversation.

[Choronzon has manifested as an ex-girlfriend! L. herself, of course, is simply a woman, and there neither was nor is anything inherently demonic about her. Choronzon's presence, however, is betrayed by the sluggish ignorance, dragging me into the past, even as it seems that my problems are resolved and the circumstances are changed. But just because issues are fixed that were a problem back then, that's no good reason to return to the past, nor a guarantee that the past could have turned out differently. Luckily, I seem to realise this in the vision...]

Once, I thought we were out on a date, but L. has joined the student branch of the Nazi party. What I thought was an outing turns into a flash mob, in which she and her Nazi friends line up in the street to sing ‘Radio Ga Ga’ by Queen, doing the movements, hitting the chest with the right fist twice, then raising the arm in a Nazi salute.

Queen, Radio Ga Ga

Queen performing in the video of 'Radio Ga Ga' (1984). Trying not to look like Nazis.

['Radio Ga Ga' was a 1984 hit by Queen. The video featured the band saluting a crowd dressed in white uniforms, but the salute consisted of holding the arms up in a wide V, fists clenched, then clapping the hands twice over the head. L. was not a Nazi, yet she was certainly a Tory – but, hey, this is the second half of the eighties we're talking about...]

I play along, but I can’t coordinate my movements to the song. Yet surprisingly, neither can the Nazis. They are very inexperienced.

[The banality of evil.]

There is a pond in the woods near the campus, a dangerous place, into which many had fallen and some had drowned. But now a strong metallic netting, so fine it is almost invisible, has been stretched over the pond and has made it safe. I realise that this is a metaphor for the Abyss. ‘What a squalid image,’ I think.

[Parochial, yes. But if something is parochial then that's because it is familiar. If the Abyss is just a pond then it has become known and made safe.]

Then there is something else, which is the hardest of all to remember, but it must be important because it sends L. livid with rage. It is told to me by an adrogynous magician, old and wise, who comes in especially to pass on the information.

[A message from the Holy Guardian Angel.]

I hardly understand what it means, and much less why it has such an unexpected effect on L. But it goes something like this: that there was a man we all knew some time ago, who was rather naive and easily-led, and became obsessed with a serial-killer called ‘Gormogon’. He decided to take ‘Gormogon’ as his name, and kept it even after he’d realised the error he’d made in falling under this person’s influence.

['Gormogon' (= 50 = 'abomination', 'infinite') is indeed the name of a serial-killer in the third season of the TV series Bones. He leads astray one of the main characters, called Zack (ZAX?), and persuades him to commit a murder. The Gormogons were also an obscure 18th century society whose aims are historically uncertain, but who seem to have been dedicated to undermining and ridiculing the Freemasons.]

But now it transpires that this man had a daughter, or a wife, who for a long time had forgotten her identity, but who was a victim of his evil actions during the time he was under the influence of the serial-killer Gormogon. Now, the magician tells me, this woman has realised who she is, and is coming to terms with her ordeal.

[This daughter / wife is the soror mystica, or 'mystical sister'. The male alchemist unites with this personification of his 'female half' and together they seek the Philosopher's Stone. In more neutral language, this represents the realisation that the part of the mind that looks for truth (the alchemist), and the part of the mind that is revealed by the looking (his mystical sister), are fundamentally joined. Separate, both remain unaware of their true nature. Together, they realise they are fundamentally joined and can then grasp something far deeper than both of them.]

mutus_liber

The alchemist and his soror mystica collect the morning dew. (Mutus Liber, France, 1677.)

What has particularly impressed the magician who is telling me this story, which surprises me, but which absolutely outrages and disgusts L., is that this woman too has decided to take the name of Gormogon as her own.

[L. was an easy symbol for Choronzon to assume, because there are loose ends from that relationship still hanging painfully around in my mind. These are emotional hooks that could easily drag me backwards. Gormogon, perhaps, represents chaos magick and its institutions. Both the alchemist and his sister have realised that Gormogon was an error that kept them from the Stone, and yet Gormogon was also what brought them together. In the same way they have both retained Gormogon's name, I've retained my allegiance to magick. I renounced my attachment to L., because it wasn't truly worked through, and so Choronzon was able to drag me right back there in the vision. So what really pisses off L. / Choronzon about the man and the woman retaining their 'Gormogon' link is that they can't be haunted and confused by something they're not pretending has died to them.]

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The Vision of ICH (Aethyr 11)

I was walking a complex route to another part of the city when I realised I was dreaming, so I cried up at the sky: ‘I wish to scry the eleventh aethyr, ICH!’

I didn’t wake, but carried on with my journey, noticing that the route now seemed to be trending downwards. There was a series of forbidding-looking buildings, vast and ruinous, including a domed structure, like a mosque or a derelict gasometer. A spiral staircase led down into the dark. I followed it, until I began to think: ‘Well, no harm can come to me, so why don’t I just do it?’ I threw myself into the central well of blackness, but instead of falling I hung in space, consciousness suspended. I’m not sure if it was a jhanic state, or if I lost self-awareness, but after a time it became boring so I willed myself back to the stairs and climbed outside.

Alan was there, yet although I didn’t explicitly acknowledge it couldn’t really be him, nevertheless in what followed I took care not to listen too much to what he said, nor let him follow his own lines of questioning with the spirit that was about to appear. We found a grassy area between the buildings and sat chatting until a gangly young man hurried towards us and sat down.

gasometer

A beautiful Viennese gasometer.

‘What’s your name?’ I asked.

He muttered something that began with ‘H’.

‘Was that Hyperion?’ ['Hyperion' = 56 = Choronzon.]

‘If that’s what you want it to be then that’s what it is,’ he remarked grumpily.

Maybe something went wrong at this point. I recollect talking for a long time with Hyperion, but I remember hardly anything. Something tells me Hyperion himself may be responsible for this. I think we may have argued and actually come to blows. What I definitely recall is becoming thoroughly sick of him and deciding to banish.

‘I’m not leaving,’ was his response.

‘That’s not because you can refuse to,’ I pointed out, ‘but because you didn’t give me your true name. So tell me now: what is it?’

‘Hincapie,’ he admitted. ['Hincapie' = 47 = 'Man of Earth'.]

On confessing this, his appearance changed. He wasn’t quite so tall, although he retained the same basic features, hair and clothes. We continued talking, but – again – it feels as if something has been erased. The gist of Hincapie’s talk, however, was that everything humans do is incorrect or inferior. His whining diatribe quickly became tedious again.

In my dreams throughout that night I repeatedly felt hungry, and had frequently dreamt I was eating. Alan and I had some chocolate that we proceeded to share. I offered some to Hincapie, and he complained how poor it tasted. But then it struck me he was simply complaining too much. I took the flesh of his face between my thumb and forefinger and gave his cheek a tug.

‘I realise what’s happening,’ I told him. ‘You just love humans and our food so much you can’t keep away from us.’

This pierced Hincapie to his roots. No matter if he’d managed to mislead us or erase parts of the conversation, it felt like I’d discovered the truth of him. It seemed he didn’t want to part with what he told us next.

‘There are lots of spirits like that throughout the aethyrs,’ he said. ‘Many are the ghosts of shoes.’

George Hincapie

The spirit didn't look completely unlike professional US cyclist George Hincapie.

It never occurred to me that objects intimately connected with humans might take on a spiritual dimension by association, but Hincapie had revealed that many spirits are like this. Their nature is petty, circumscribed, because it depends entirely upon human beings, and so the understanding of these spirits cannot penetrate beyond or even as far as everyday human consciousness. Or is it just a mocking pun? Are ‘the ghosts of shoes’ really just ‘lost soles’?

The vision ended at this point.

I’ve debated whether this vision is legitimate. I’m not convinced this vision isn’t an instance of false lucidity – i.e. merely dreaming, unconsciously, that one is lucid. One of the ways to spot the difference between true and false lucidity is the presence of ‘day’s residues’ in the dream. This was Sigmund Freud’s term for elements appearing in a dream that are obviously based on experiences from the preceding day. A dream from the unconscious consists of a large proportion of day’s residues (because our consciousness, during sleep, has no other material to work with). A lucid dream doesn’t, because it constructs itself instead from the idea that one is awake.

In the vision, I could indeed easily identify a lot of day’s residues. For instance, during the day my partner had remarked that if she had a lucid dream, then she would use it to eat chocolate all night; an episode of Doctor Who I had watched earlier in the evening involved a race of aliens that could erase memories of themselves from human perception; and I had also watched an episode of the drama series Afterlife, which included a scene where a psychic medium, in order to keep persecutory spirits at bay, occupied herself with re-organising her shoes.

However, I’ve come to the conclusion that a vision arises from the intention to have a vision, and that the state in which the vision is received – whether it’s the waking state, a naturally or chemically-induced trance, a lucid-dream or a false lucid-dream – doesn’t matter; it’s simply the means of manifestation.

Looking up the English Qaballah equivalents for ‘Hyperion’ (Choronzon) and ‘Hincapie’ (Man of Earth) seems to have provided further validation. The next aethyr up is No. 10, which, according to tradition, crosses the Abyss and is home to the demon Choronzon. Perhaps the influence of No. 10 is already being felt in Nos. 12 and 11!

Certainly, I ran into some further spooky overspill, talking with my mother. ‘I had such a weird dream on Saturday night,’ she mentioned. This was the same night that I scried the aethyr. My mum hadn’t been able to sleep, so she’d tried meditating in bed. ‘I found myself in something like a dream, only it was real,’ my Mum explained. ‘I got out of bed and went downstairs, and found you in the kitchen making toast. You kept saying you felt really, really hungry.’

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The Vision of LOE (Aethyr 12)

I am looking through a window at the rain. Realising I am dreaming, I haul myself through the glass and shout the evocation at the sky: ‘I wish to scry LOE, Aethyr Twelve!’

I feel my body dissolve and I wake. But I sense the lucid state is still close, so I make myself still and re-enter. It’s the same place: an urban garden between derelict buildings. A man wheeling a bicycle comes towards me. He is wearing yellow waterproofs and looks an earthy type, like a gardener. I ask him where I can obtain the vision. He mumbles something about telling me later. No joy there, so I walk on.

[The figure of the man reminds me of the sinister stranger in 'The Two Faces of Evil', an episode of Hammer House of Horror first broadcast in 1980, which scared me rotten when I was a kid. That yellow mac should have set alarm bells ringing! The story also includes a 'doppleganger' theme.]

The Two Faces Of Evil

Scary yellow-macked stranger from the Hammer House of Horror TV series (1980).

Set into the side of one of the derelict buildings is a stone cat. It can move, but only across the walls. I watch for a while, wondering if it is really an independent creature or only a part of the building.

[Maybe this is a missed signal concerning the dream state itself. A lucid dream feels real because we can differentiate our surroundings from our consciousness of them. But of course this is an illusion, because the surroundings are an aspect of our consciousness with no material basis. In a lucid dream we are all like the stone cat: we appear to ourselves independent, but the 'self' is really only a part of the 'building' of our dream.]

I wake up, but the lucidity is still at hand, so I re-enter and am in my parents’ garden at night. I look into the sky and ask the Enochian angels to come down. They don’t, but their celestial city appears in the sky, glowing and distant. Nothing else happens so I decide I must travel upwards. I launch myself into flight and discover their city is a huge, metallic structure, bristling with towers and buildings, riddled with interior chambers.

[Unlike the other Enochian visions, there is a sense that I am taking or hunting for the vision, rather than receiving or accepting it. Does being in the lucid state make this inevitable?]

I fly at random towards a spiky part of the structure that looks like the crown on the Statute of Liberty. Inside is someone’s room. I sense I must work out whose room it is and this person’s function.

On the desk and on shelves around the room are ceramic ornaments. All are variations on the basic form of a pair of fishes. ‘Pisces,’ I realise. A small yellow card has suddenly appeared on one of the shelves with the word ‘AUTHOR’ scrawled on it. From this I realise that I am being watched and that someone is feeding me clues, or perhaps trying to manipulate me. It’s clear I am being prompted to conclude that the man who works in this room is a writer, and that the ‘ornaments’ are a metaphor to describe the kind of writer he is.

[The symbolism of Pisces is two fishes, usually swimming in opposite directions, their mouths joined by a silver cord. The upper fish represents spirit (or 'the astral'), and the lower, the soul (or 'the etheric'). Spirit is independent of matter, but soul is strongly influenced by it. The Piscean is someone who is habitually detached from the material world, but struggles with the duality of soul and spirit instead. Note how the card is yellow, like the yellow mac. Perhaps a warning signal, the way that red objects function as warning signals in the film The Sixth Sense (1999).]

Pisces

The symbol of Pisces, from a woodcut made in 1451.

There is a large mirror in the room and I go to look at myself. I am wearing a striped, light-grey, buttoned-up shirt. My hair is greyer in the reflection than it is in waking life.

[The suggestion is that the author who inhabits this room is me.]

There was perhaps more at this point, but I seem to have forgotten it. Things take a darker turn. The next I remember, I am lying at night in a bedroom with a large window. A ghost is known sometimes to appear on the window’s other side. But sometimes the window is a mirror. I look at my reflection again. Sometimes my image is single and sometimes multiple. Some of the multiple images of myself appear in a way that seems manic or insane.

[In 'The Two Faces of Evil' the stranger in the yellow mac attacks a family in their car, causing an accident. When the mother of the family awakes she discovers the maniac is physically identical to her husband. One of them is dead – but is it really her husband who has survived? In my experience, the multiplication of the self is generally a regressive and paranoid manoeuvre, and is unlikely to have a happy outcome.]

When I ask for more information, suddenly me and my reflections find ourselves saying uncontrollably, explosively, the word ‘BARGAIN’. It is very physical and sends spasms through me each time I say it. There is something not healthy about this word, but it also has useful powers: to connect, jolt and make physical.

[Very much descending into the etheric here. BARGAIN = 34 = vision, pleasure, beautiful, destroy.]

I lie down again and look at the window, again sensing that a ghost may come. There is a human skeleton in the room made from hard plastic. It doesn’t seem to be alive, but somehow looks friendly. Then it falls down suddenly across me in the bed.

It starts to move. Its head is near my crotch. It becomes warm and heavy and I sense a strong female presence. I am being suffocated, my energy slowly but aggressively being sapped. I realise this is a succuba attack. I fend it off with pentagrams. But I wake up shocked, because nothing like this ever happened to me before in an Enochian vision.

succuba

Succubas, I think, don't look quite like this, but can de-spunk you just as thoroughly as if they did.

[I've evidently descended at this point to such a shitty level of consciousness that I'm attracting attention from the nasty etheric spirits that inhabit it.]

The vision seems to have ended, but I am still in the remnants of the lucid state. I am in an astral version of my actual room. I perform a full, astral Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram, but have a difficult job turning around in my astral body to do the four quarters. In the state I am in, it seems impossible to attain a representation of physically turning around.

[In short, it would appear that remaining in the lucid state is not the best way to receive an Enochian vision, because it puts us in a position of having to find, seek out or force the vision, rather than receiving it from the angels in the usual way. In the lucid state there is a diminished sense of the vision as a 'message', and an increased sense of undergoing it as a direct 'experience'. This could be compared to people who confuse the significance of a spiritual experience with the experience itself, and come away with a mistaken idea that (for example) enlightenment means being in a constant, blissed-out state. However, there's a strong sense of something trying to warn and guide me during the vision, whose message (despite the way I ignored it at the time) I can perhaps take away as the significance of this aethyr.]

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The Vision of ZIM (Aethyr 13)

It takes a long time before I find the lucid state, but finally I’m in my parents’ house, looking out through the window of my old bedroom, and I realise I must be dreaming. ‘I wish to scry the thirteenth aethyr, ZIM,’ I shout, and push myself through the window, which feels mushy like jelly. It takes some effort but I make it through and fall onto the lawn. I look up at the sky, then feel myself dissolve and wake.

ozymandias

Ozymandias, a.k.a. Ramses II. This British Museum statue is thought to have inspired Shelley's sonnet.

For a while, only shapes. Then a large book placed on top of a boulder. A sense that the truth is written in this book. I lie down and about my body, white rock forms. When I move again, the crust of rock around me shatters and falls. Then I begin to shrink, and only now realise that formerly I was of a gigantic size. Back to normal, I find myself in a ruined city made from chunks of masonry formed by my body.

['Two vast and trunkless legs of stone...' The monumental limbs remind me of Shelley's 'Ozymandias'. The name comes from the translation into Greek of the throne name of Ramses II, User maat Re, Setep en Re, which could be translated into English as 'Ra's powerful law, beloved of Ra'. The book of truth on the boulder recalls the stone tablets revealed to Moses by Yahweh (Exodus 24: 12). Indeed, Ramses II is a likely candidate for the pharaoh of Exodus, who oppressed the Israelites. So we have the stone of a tyrant (Ramses) contrasted here with the stone of a prophet (Moses). The masonry is formed from my gigantic body. It's as if I were being shown how an over-inflated view of self produces calamity, decay and oppression of truth.]

Shiva

Bull? Check! Tiger skin? Check! Trident? Check! Shiva, innit.

A spirit, TAMYIMS, shows me images of trash celebrity culture. Then a god comes, who sweeps all the trash and trivia away. At first he takes the form of a bull. Then he becomes a cartoon tiger, like Tony the Tiger on a Frosties cereal packet. He holds a trident. He reveals that a book has been painstakingly put together by his devotees and it is hidden in an empty house in Eire, one of those thousands which, due to the economic crisis, no one can currently live in or sell.

[TAMYIMS = 28 = 'culture', 'analysis'. The god is Shiva. He takes possession of the bull, Nandi, as his mount. The tiger represents lust; Shiva is seated on a tiger skin to symbolise his conquest of lust. The trident is his symbol of sovereignty, its points representing the three gunas: creation, preservation and destruction. The book compiled by his devotees is a striking contrast to the book on the rock: it has no single author; it's contemporary; and it is hidden in a place where no one wants to live.]

The god has scratched the number 71 onto glass with his claws. His devotees now depart the mundane world by entering into torrents of water and swimming free. Onto the water is written the name BALLS, in tiny letters, many times over. One man is not swimming with the devotees, but sinks beneath the surface and is gone. I hear the words: ‘Twenty-five years of demand against responsibility.’

Ed Balls in 1986

Ed Balls at a party during the Thatcher era. (Only n-n-n-n-nineteen, bless him.)

[71 = 'Ra Hoor Khuit' (see below). BALLS = 10 = 'babe'. Ed Balls is the current UK Shadow Chancellor for the Labour Party. He was born the same year as myself. 'Twenty-five years ago' was 1986, the height of the Thatcher boom years, when Ed Balls was photographed at a student party dressed as a Nazi officer. 'Written on water' is a poetic commonplace for a reputation that will not last. The origin of the phrase is from Beaumont and Fletcher: 'All your better deeds shall be in water writ, but this in marble' (Philaster, 1611), which suggests that our dubious actions are set in 'stone', but our best ones are in 'water'. The words heard sound to me like a valid critique of every government since 1986 – and for the foreseeable future, no doubt.]

We are all of us in the water, some moving freely and some sinking. The water is suspended in nothingness, like a galaxy made of liquid. From its underside, the water puts out tendrils, Y-shaped in a three-dimensional way that reminds me of the shape of a wineglass. Many of these structures emerge, but there is a sense that this is only a temporary, desperate measure for the galaxy to sustain itself and it must surely fail.

[Water is more free than stone, but in water there is the possibility of sinking. Indeed, the water itself seems in danger of sinking and must put out tendrils to support itself. Everything seems precarious and ultimately doomed.]

The Aeon

The Crowley-Harris Thoth Tarot. XX: The Aeon. Hoor Pa Kraat is centre, foreground. Ra Hoor Khuit is centre, background, seated.

A non-lucid dream from the night before re-surfaces: a French woman, who says she is anti-German. I ask her how a position like that could possibly make sense. It’s not as if she could remove Germany! But she seems to think that, somehow, this is possible. Then a German man who happens to be listening admits that Germans are often prejudiced against certain parts of Holland, so he can partially understand the Frenchwoman’s position. For my part, I confess that I’m not a fan of French culture, but it would be absurd of me to advocate the removal of France. ‘We can simply allow the spread of the English language to do the job,’ I add.

[A return to the theme of 'sweeping away' culture: only a god, Shiva, can accomplish this. In the human realm the idea makes little sense and cannot truly be achieved by force. The only way to change culture on a human level is through further cultural processes: e.g. the spread of the English language within French culture. A god can place himself outside this process, maybe, but human beings cannot.]

At some point during the vision a symbol appeared for the tiger-god’s purge of culture. It looked like ’52′ or ’5A’.

[52 = 'Hoor Pa Kraat'. The symbol for Shiva's 'purge of culture', then, would seem to be the god Horus, or Heru Ra Ha. Crowley writes: 'A double god; his extraverted form is Ra Hoor Khuit; and his passive or introverted form Hoor Pa Kraat' (The Book of Thoth, 'XX. The Aeon'). The symbol for Shiva's purge, then, is 52 = 'Hoor Pa Kraat'; his message scratched on glass is 71 = 'Ra Hoor Khuit'; both are complementary aspects of Heru-ra-ha = 44 = 'key of it all', 'prophet', 'disappear'. My stab at an interpretation of the whole vision is as follows. The process of enlightenment is the escape from 'stone' into 'water' through becoming a devotee of Shiva (meditation, enlightenment). This sweeps away what is decadent within culture, but only on an absolute level. The vision is a reminder (or warning, perhaps, because even when in water there is still the risk of sinking) that cultural change on the human level only comes about through itself – i.e. culture changes by cultural means. This process of this cultural change of culture is represented by the Thelemic deity, Heru Ra Ha.]

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The Rite of Morpheus and the Powerlessness of Prophecy

The Rite of Morpheus

I took three dessert spoons of valerian root and added them to one and a half litres of filtered, boiling water. Covering the pot, I kept it at a rolling boil for twenty minutes, with the window open and the extractor fan running because valerian badly stinks. Next I added three dessert spoons of passion flower and three of mugwort leaf, boiled the lot for a further five minutes, then switched off the heat and let the mixture cool for a couple of hours. Finally, I decanted the liquid and threw away the solids. The potion was a sacrament for Morpheus, the Greek god of dreams.

Morpheus, Iris and Phantasos

Morpheus, with his consort Iris and his little brother, Phantasos.

We sat in a circle. In the centre, the bottle of potion and a picture of a poppy, an emblem of Morpheus. There were two other pictures: one of a piece of horn, the other of a piece of ivory. I shuffled these face-downwards until I no longer knew which was which and placed one in a corner of the room, and the other in a parallel corner. Seated, we chanted the name of Morpheus freestyle for a few minutes, then I raised the bottle of potion as the signal to begin and everyone fell silent.

Morpheus, god of dreams, son of Hypnos and Erebus, eldest brother of Phobetor and Phantasos, nephew of Hades, I invoke you! I ask you to join us this evening and accept this sacrament of herbs sacred to you: valerian root, passion flower and mugwort leaf. I ask that in return you send us great and wonderful dreams. Amazing visions! Life-changing pictures that will transform our lives for the better. Morpheus, hear me, accept our offering and send us all great dreams this night!

Cups were passed around the circle, the bottle uncorked, and everyone swigged a share of the black, bitter liquid. Then we lay on our backs in silence and closed our eyes. We each visualised the feeling of falling backwards into infinite blackness: that queasy, sinking feeling in the pit of the stomach as balance and bearings are lost; the sensation of flailing limbs.

After some minutes, as the priest of Morpheus, I approached each prone figure in turn and swathed a thick cloth about their eyes. ‘Rise now.’ I helped them to their feet with eyes still covered. ‘Through which gate will you return, right or left?’ I asked. They indicated with a gesture or a word and I led them in the chosen direction, to one of the corners in which lay the face-down picture of either the horn or the ivory. Then I uncovered their eyes with the words, ‘So depart back to wakefulness through the gate you have chosen.’

For the Greeks, dreams were either prophetic in nature or deceptive. Prophetic dreams were literal and clear. Deceptive dreams weren’t necessarily false, but the figurative or indirect means by which they revealed their truth could lead people astray. Prophetic dreams were sent by the gods through a gate made of horn. The deceptive dreams came via a gate of ivory.

When everyone was roused from the visualisation, and had made their blind choice of a gate – including me – then two groups of roughly equal numbers stood in parallel corners of the room. Finally we turned over the pictures in each corner, to discover which group would receive prophetic dreams that night through the gate of horn, and which would dream deceptively via the gate of ivory.

I had chosen horn.

Koala and baby

It's game over for these cuties. Allegedly.

More people attended the ritual than expected, so the doses of potion were only symbolic. I didn’t notice much effect, except, as I fell asleep that night, some striking hypnagogics. It was as if one part of the visual field was detached and insisted on resolving into two living creatures that roved around one another. Throughout that night’s dreams I felt tight and stressful, but this might easily have been my state of mind rather than an effect of the potion. There was not a sniff of lucidity throughout the whole night, yet I passed through many non-lucid dreams, and the receiving of the dreams became itself their theme. It felt constantly as if I were reviewing what had been dreamt so far, scanning it for significance. But what I actually woke with the next morning was a short message from Alex. He had sent me the pointing-out instructions for perfect enlightenment, but they had been posted onto a staff intranet and edited so many times that they were garbled and had lost their poetry. They read: ‘(1) Be aware, all of the time; and (2) There is nothing to understand.’

I also woke with the certain knowledge that koalas will become extinct. The species has passed a tipping-point and there is no turning back. These animals will vanish from the world.

The Powerlessness of Prophecy

The Morpheus rite took place on February 18th. A day or so before I had scryed Aethyr 14, UTI. After the ritual, when I came to write it up, I found the latter part of the vision rather ominious, in which a siren sounds and I find myself wondering whether it indicates an impending nuclear apocalypse or flood. On February 21st I mailed a copy of the vision to Alan, to see what he made of it. He skyped me immediately and told of how his dream following the Morpheus rite involved nuclear incidents, disasters and floods.

The next day (22nd) I received a message from one of the participants in the rite, Frater D, complaining of the potion’s effects on his dreams:

Thermonuclear and flooding. Airbursts over the oceans to deliberately cause tsunami. Massive environmental consequence. I saw the whole thing from a mountain hideout… Intense, reality unfolding in real time as directed by my will; me making a terrible mess of things, and trying to rectify the previous unfoldings, whilst simultaneously the weather was responding in real-time to my moods. A head fuck of the highest order.

On the 23rd I received a weird pingback on this blog from someone insisting that a nuclear war would start in 2011, and who seemed to think my article on Entrances to Hell was proof. A synchronistic can of worms seemed to be opening. All these connections to floods and nuclear explosions were becoming hard to ignore. I emailed all the participants in the Morpheus rite and, without giving them details, encouraged them to share whatever dreams they had. The results were disappointingly random. It made me realise how a synchronicity is something that happens; you don’t force it. If you try to force it, you may end up destroying it.

Unbeknownst to me, Alan had decided on a more magically sensible channel of investigation. He asked Ona and Alex if they would do some astral work to determine what this cluster of linked dreams might indicate.

On February 23rd and 24th, Ona’s visions included the following:

[A] goddess manifests, enormous, pale, dark-haired her white skirts cover the world, billowing like waves, a soft sweet breeze in their movement, cleansing, destroying, not cruel, rather impartial… [Blue beings] are worshipping her, calling her, enacting her cleansing, which is purifying and draining, destructive and renewing at the same time. the destruction and cruelty is without ill-intention, simply what must be… An abandoned wooden ship, corpses floating in the water. I sit in meditation on the deck of the ship. It sinks slowly into the water. The water is foul and full of trash.

Japan 2011 Tsunami

Japan tsunami 2011.

On February 25th, Alex reported:

I then see an angel called Chirspa, with two large golden wings. I ask him to grant me a vision that may shed light on the visions of my colleagues… He tells me to walk further down the hallway. There, I see a dark pit. I can see fire at the bottom. Being asked to jump, I dive into this abyssal pit to find myself on a beach. There, I see a gigantic wave rushing towards me, like an incredible tsunami. The wave blows everything away, including a large city.

Fukushima explosion

Hydrogen explosion at Fukushima nuclear power station.

Things fell quiet after this, to the extent that a familiar feeling began to creep over me: wondering whether I’d missed the point or failed to follow through on something that a vision or magical working had been trying to show me. But then, on March 11th, arrived news of the earthquake and tsunami in Japan, which put these visions in a horribly clear context. The nuclear theme of the visions now seems related to the ongoing emergency at the Fukushima reactor, suggesting perhaps that the outcome might be graver than the authorities are currently encouraging people to believe.

nuclear incident

Let's hope it's not really as bad as this certainly looks.

Terrible, heartbreaking images continue to stream from Japan, far worse than any of our visions for their being materially real. No doubt, stories will emerge of amazing psychic ‘predictions’ of the catastrophe. I don’t regard the details related here in that light. Perhaps this episode suggests that some events are so psychically impactful they send out ‘fore-echoes’ before they hit. My view is that what we experienced was a synchronicity, which has everything to do with a sense of interconnectedness and meaning, but presents nothing in terms of specific information or predictive power.

I would rather reserve claims of ‘prediction’ for those who understand what they see and act on it to save lives. Retrospective prophets, such as me, must live with the powerlessness that overwhelms everyone in the face of a tragedy on this scale.

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The Vision of UTI (Aethyr 14)

The lucid dreaming state arrives and I’m in a school. There are children everywhere, so I take the nearest exit to find a private space. It’s a fine, sunny day. Schoolgirls surround me. They know what I’m doing and jokingly try to distract me by jostling and shouting. But I look to the sky and shout, ‘Please admit me to Aethyr 14, UTI!’

Once more, I am lifted, dissolve and awake.

I lie in bed waiting for the vision, but I fall asleep and a non-lucid dream begins. I am in a room within a school – perhaps the same school as earlier. This is where I am to receive the vision, but it is a slow, laborious process. The first part of the vision has something to do with my ex-girlfriend. She walks into the room and proceeds to tell me what she thinks it means. I retort, ‘Listen, I know all about dreams.’ She says, ‘Yes, but my dreams are very rare.’

Sophia by Raphael. Ceiling fresco from the Stanza della Segnatura in the Vatican.

[The lover or partner represents Sophia or truth. The philosopher is literally 'the lover of truth'. My ex insisting that her dreams are rare is an indication that this is a dream of Sophia, a dream of truth.]

Next, my current partner comes in and gives me her take on what my ex just said. I can no longer remember specifically what either of them told me – only that, as insights go, they were very down-to-earth. Part of it concerned my attraction to my ex, which (when she came in) she revealed was based on a narcissistic fantasy to do with fulfilling a role that her present partner cannot. But when my current girlfriend came in, she punctured this interpretation as well, but on an even higher level.

[Before I became interested in magick and spirituality I was a student of psychoanalysis. The down-to-earth truth of psychoanalysis is represented here by my ex, who has been superseded by magick and enlightenment, represented by my current partner.]

I persist with the work of having this vision. Further parts painfully emerge. I am writing them down on a scrap of paper, but people keep tearing off strips for their own use.

Alan comes in. He has a hostage situation to deal with. An American ex-military man has taken a student hostage in a corner of the room. The man is no terrorist, but is making a stand on patriotic principles. He sits with a rifle pointed at the student, who is a geeky-looking character of perhaps doctoral age. The student smiles in a know-all, ironic way that does not arouse my sympathy.

'Don't make me meditate, else the babe gets it!'

[In one of the earliest aethyrs we scried together, Alan was advised by a spirit that he was in fact in the 14th Aethyr, and indeed – here he is! Alan is a guru and helps people become enlightened. In this sense he helps people negotiate freedom from their egos, the 'hostage-taker' represented by the American. The ego is not 'bad' or 'foreign', but is simply doing what it thinks is right. 'Making a stand' represents dualistic thinking. Many of Alan's students happen to be American. I am not drawn to teaching in the way that Alan is, which is perhaps why the 'student' appears so unattractive.]

I realise that part of the vision is a dream I had earlier, of stepping into some prefab buildings and discovering inside all the great and good of the city. They were quaffing champagne whilst watching their livestock give birth. This was an annual celebration to which only the wealthy were invited. A local councillor saw me and called my name. ‘Hello,’ she said, but it was apparent from her tone that she was telling me to leave quietly and at once. I pretended that I was one of the staff, by helpfully carrying outside a couple of foals. Then I decided to carry out a couple of handfuls of baby rabbits.

[The wealthy and powerful have control over the production of life, but no direct contact with it. They own the animals and derive financial value from them, but it is the staff who connect with and assist the animals. It would seem here that wealth and power consist not in having contact with or true ownership of life, but in having the influence to deny contact to others, or to change the nature of that connection into a question of financial value.]

I return to wondering why the American would risk his life for such an unprepossessing person as the student. But that’s Alan’s problem, I decide, noticing how much difficulty he is having talking the American out of the situation.

Gas is pumped into the room and the American falls asleep. A long time passes, until, Alan explains, ‘There is literally only one calorie left in his body.’ This means the American will no longer have strength to lift the rifle. Yet although he looks thin and starved, somehow he manages it. He laughs at Alan, who doesn’t seem at all discouraged, but tries another tack in his negotiations.

[Teaching enlightenment is a tiresome process of weakening the ego. Evidently, Alan has the patience to teach it. My sympathies lie more with the hostage-taker than the hostage.]

Back to the vision: I am writing down tables of symbols. One is a table of Enochian spirits. The other is a table of words that can be used for divination. The names of the spirits begin mostly with E. I think I see EXARP among them. In the divination table the words begin mostly with M. One is MANU. Another is MANGO. I think to myself how this is the advantage of the non-lucid state: I can directly receive information such as this. But I am already wondering how I will remember it all when I have woken.

King Manu (and friends) saved from the deluge by Vishnu as a great big fish.

[EXARP is the spirit of Air that governs the entire tablet of Air in Enochian magick. Manu in Hindu mythology was the progenitor of humanity, and is also a title bestowed upon the first ever king, and upon subsequent rulers or law-givers of specific aeons, each aeon referred to as a Manvantara (or 'life-span of a Manu'). MANGO = 23 = king = life = house. So the table of E-names seems to contain names of rulers of elements; the M-table seems to contain names of rulers of mankind. The rune MANNAZ (pronounced as an 'M') has the symbolic meaning of 'humanity' or 'the social order'. The runes also offer a possible combination of the two: EHWAZ is written as 'M' but pronounced as 'E'. It has the symbolic meaning of transportation, progress and change for the better.]

The information is useful in any case, because Alan, as he continues his negotiations, comes over to consult the divination table so he can plan accordingly. I really must make sure I get these tables down, so we can use them when we’re awake. But Alan keeps tearing off scraps of the paper, which isn’t helping.

[The M table would seem to contain information concerning aeonics and the relative dimension of truth. The E is spiritual and non-human. M and E is, of course, 'ME'. Perhaps this is pointing to the union of the relative and the spiritual in some sense.]

ME: Mannaz and Ehwaz.

A siren sounds ominously, as if a nuclear attack were underway or the end of the world. Lots of male students pile into the room with their teacher. The siren means that they must take shelter. I decide it can’t be as serious as it sounds – perhaps it’s simply raining outside. Alan seems to have decided this too. But the room is too crowded now for the hostage crisis to seem important, and Alan hardly seems to be working on it any more anyway. Then I notice the paper I am writing on includes simply the remains of an old game of squares.

The teacher of the students leans over and inspects the game, occasionally adding a line or tearing off further strips from my notes. He’s going to show his students a film of a football match. I think, ‘Fine. I’m not the least interested in football, so it won’t distract me.’

[The vision ends on what might seem an ominous note. Manu, the first king of Hindu mythology, saved the human race from a deluge, having recognised a warning given to him by a fish (Lord Matsya, an avatar of Vishnu) whose life he spared. We are not shown here why the students must come inside but, if it were raining, could this be a warning of a deluge? For Alan to have given up working with individual students ('the hostage crisis no longer seems important') something drastic must have happened. Likewise, the tables that the vision gave me have also evaporated and have turned into an 'old game of squares'. A two-sided game suggests dualism. The teacher insists on trying to perpetuate this game, although it is clearly already over. He also shows a film of a game to his students, which to me is obviously a distraction and a waste of time.]

The vision ends with the sensation of the slow, difficult process by which it has been attained.

by

Scrying Enochian Aethyrs in the Lucid Dreaming State

‘By doing certain things certain results will follow,’ wrote Aleister Crowley. Makes sense. But what are the parameters for ‘doing certain things’? For instance, to scry the Enochian aethyrs one recites the Nineteenth Enochian Call. But what is ‘reciting the Nineteenth Enochian Call’? And what happens if we decide not to bother?

I tried an experiment. I scryed an Enochian aethyr in the lucid dreaming state (building on work recorded here previously, evoking goetic demons during that state). I’m far from a master at lucid dreaming and, having decided to make the experiment, I was caught off-guard when a lucid dream came along that very night.

I was in open fields on a bright spring day. It seemed that I was conscious, so I tested this by deciding to wander along a particular track. After I was certain I could do as I wished, I remembered my intention from the day before to scry an aethyr. I had forgotten to check which aethyr was next or its name. But I decided to see if I could wing it anyway, so I imagined a printed copy in my hand of the Nineteenth Enochian Call – and, lo, there it was. I held this up to the sky and the gaze of the angels: ‘Here’s the Nineteenth Call. Please open the next aethyr for me!’ But although I sensed a presence, there was nothing doing.

Maybe for someone else it might have worked, but – even at the time – it felt like I’d decided I had to know the name and number of the aethyr before I could gain access.

The next night I was wandering the city, looking for a landmark so I could gain my bearings, when it dawned on me that I was dreaming and conscious. So I turned a corner into a street that was suddenly quiet. It was lined on both sides my low-roofed modern housing, and looked at the same time strange yet achingly familiar. I had to stare straight upwards to find some sky, which was blue with fluffy clouds. Merely by thinking about it, I could feel the copy of the Enochian Call in my hand. I lifted it up to the sky and shouted, ‘Madriatz!‘ – the first word of the Call, and just about the only one I remember. Then I said, ‘I wish to be granted admittance to Aethyr Fifteen, named OXO!’

A large bird was flying past, high above. I wondered if it might head down toward me, but instead I felt my body dissolving into bliss. Then I was lifted up from the ground and into the sky. I was melting. I stayed calm and maintained concentration, but the lucid state fell apart. I was awake, but lying with my eyes shut and motionless in bed. There was no sense of failure, however, so instead of waking up I took this state of consciousness as the basis for the vision.

It wasn’t a state so very different from that I usually enter when doing this work in the usual way with Alan. Yet I noticed that sometimes the flow of images in my mind would be broken into by a sudden rush of remembered material from the non-lucid dreams I’d had during the night. Because I’d only just woken, these still felt very close to the surface of awareness. Not all the dreams that I could remember came rushing back – only certain parts of certain ones, which now felt oddly significant, as if they’d been inserted into my dreams on purpose.

In effect, I was using the hypnopompic state for the vision. This is the name for the boundary state between dreams and waking (in contrast to the hypnagogic state, which is the transition between waking and dreams). Apart from the interruptions of dream material described above, the quality of the vision was more or less the same as in the waking state, including narrative imagery and various flavours of samadhi.

The biggest difference in using this method was the opportunity the lucid dream state offers to skip the full recitation of the Nineteenth Enochian Call. In the waking state, the recitation seems to perform the purpose of inducing a mild trance state to facilitate the vision. In the lucid state we are already knowingly submerged in a world of images, so this hardly seems necessary.

Some magical purists may raise an eyebrow at this method, but I’m disposed to regard it as completely legitimate. In the lucid dream state, our consciousness is active on the etheric and astral levels. ‘By doing certain things certain results will follow.’ In the waking, physical world, ‘doing certain things’ means manipulating material objects or making audible sounds. But at the etheric and astral levels these are simply not available to us. On the etheric level we can manipulate images and forms in order to ‘do certain things’; on the astral level we need only suppose or postulate ‘things’ in order for them to be ‘done’. So, by supposing that presentation of an image of the Nineteenth Call to the angels is adequate to access the aethyr, and using the lucid dreaming state to construct that etheric image, the invocation was successfully performed.

It ‘failed’ the first time (or, rather, an image of failure was the result) because I had already postulated to myself that not knowing the name and number of the aethyr was insufficient. (If I’d had my wits about me, I could merely have asked the angels to tell me the name and number in the lucid dream state!) It’s interesting to note that I completely forgot about vibrating the names of the Governors, which is supposed to follow the recitation of the Call. Lucky for me that I did, otherwise I might have invented yet another reason for the invocation not to work.