Depth Magic

Photo by Rhett Wesley on Unsplash

A meditative practice – like yoga or mindfulness, can free us from our inner restrictions. The peace that this praxis brings gives us pleasure, power and expansion from confinement. These little daily rituals enable us to cultivate our own internal drive and energies for self-transformation. We can shapeshift our state. We can alter our awareness, our ‘reality’. We can become psychonauts and travel as shamans with the dead or beyond the stars, without even getting-up off our lockdown couches. By embracing the esoteric and deeper systems of learning, we can travel space and time without ever leaving home. Magic, gardening, yoga, depth psychology (archetypal soul care) are paths to guide our spiritual journey. As we embark like voyagers on quests for deep meaning, we become interstellar. Between Israel Regardie’s two pillars of Severity and Mercy we take the path. Like gnostic pilgrims protected only by Uriel’s flaming sword and Gabriel’s shield of light we descend to fight our dragons. When we re-emerge out of the cave after the ordeal, our bounty is healing salvation, it’s recognition of the forces of bliss in the Universe, of abundance, authentic expression, of new ambitions, new plant medicine guides, gratitude for simple infinite resource, appreciation of our individual wholeness yet deep interconnection at a systemic planetary level.

We face the demons, beyond our own selfishness, maintaining our cognitive sovereignty and forming new neurological connections as paths for us to traverse. And we need those new pathways to journey on more urgently than ever. Our cognitive bias that things would always be the same (tomorrow as today, today much like yesterday etc) has been obliterated in one COVID swoop. The pandemic is an invitation to re-assess. It’s disruption pipping our very fabric of ‘reality’ reveals behind the chaos a possible new order emerging, a better way to be as a society and species. An opportunity to rescue ecology and ecosystems, to rediscover old values, to salvage hope and resuscitate integrity, to reignite localism and empower challenge to authoritative powerbases.

The Capricorn goat is a’going, the Piscean waters are a’ flowing, the Aquarian winds a’blowing, as we all collectively shift to air. Looking deep into the future what will this next two centuries bring for our children and their descendants? How could they transcend boundaries and embody ‘new normal’ and ‘reimagined’ dwelling? For my family I breathe into you fire from my belly, air from my lungs, water from my soul and earth from underneath where I stand. I conjure for all beings, health. I cleanse and banish, I centre, I clean our space from which to play the cards of our hand dealt. It’s Tarot-Poker time upon us. Put your cards on the table and deal in. The stakes have never been higher.

Oh great Hygeia goddess of health and wellness, oh goddess Hestia of hearth and home and good father Asclepius the healer medicine man – grant that our lives be clean, remedied, sickness-free, lovingly domestic and protected under your guardianship and care.

Here’s to the sacred, to the above which is like the below, and to the below that is like the above. Here is a toast to miracles and meaning, to a well regulated life, to mages, to reverence for God and all spiritual forces at play, here is to kindness always, to courtesy, to relinquishment of attachments that no longer serve us, to awe of all beings. Here is to carving pillars from air, to membranes in the fabric of the cosmos that shimmer and ripple. Here is to what tessellates and vibrates and oscillates. Here is to human will and Will. Here is to patterns of light and nature. Here is to my dreams and projections, to integrating and overcoming demons within, here is to applied Jungian individuation.

A tip of the hat to a probabilistic universe over a deterministic one. An invocations of the Titans of old, a nod to the great physician (and by duality, the great plague-sender) Apollo’s art. Sit by my altar Hermes Trismegistus and Abraham of Worms. Turn the cards for the Pentacle, the Cup, the Sword and the Wand. The Empress is here. She is intoxicating, floral, fragrant and beautiful. 

She is Venus Aphrodite, Hecate, Artemis and Isis. She is sweet balsam, herby smoke, she is roots and mosses underfoot, she is bitters and sweet spices, she is woody and citrus, she is stimulating and relaxing, she is musky and pungent, she is gummy yet fluid delight. She burns, she protects, she infuses, she massages always ails with her ointment of love. She is the healer. Today, tomorrow, yesterday and through all time, she heals and cares and she nurses through night and day. Gaia’s nurse, our nurse. Recuperate under her majesty and mothering.