In light of my my recent conclusions regarding my study of ceremonial and planetary magics, it occurred to me that with the Full Moon so close (the dark and lonely hours of Wednesday night, or the dismal pre-dawn hours of Thursday morning, depending on how you experience 4am EST), this week\u2019s Day and Hour of the Moon would be a particularly auspicious for some of Lunar Work.<\/p>\n
So, as the hour of the Moon approached, I rebuilt my Yesod altar<\/a> and ground a lunar incense of calamus, eucalyptus, and myrrh (the only Lunar herbs I happened to have around the house).\u00a0 Since Gustav Holst didn\u2019t deign to write a suite for Luna or Sol, I turned to my usual Michael Harner drumming for music to guide my trance.\u00a0 When my circle was cast, I administered my flying potion(1) and donned my visionary mask.<\/p>\n I dropped into full trance almost immediately, appearing in the Garden of Malkuth<\/a>.\u00a0 For a rarity, I found the Otherworld cast in night\u2014 it\u2019s almost always daylight in my spiritual journeys\u2014with a full and glowing moon overhead.\u00a0 I called to the moon, and rose up to meet it.\u00a0 Passing through the silver disk in the sky like a portal, I found myself first flying through a vibrant purple haze, which parted to reveal the rolling mists I have always heard the astral plane described as.\u00a0 I set myself to find the Palace of the Moon (in retrospect, this was ridiculously vague), and flew through the mists.\u00a0 After a while I found myself not flying, but swimming through the mist, and then through night-dark waters.\u00a0 I swam up to the shore of a small island, cast in shadows under another full moon and clear night sky.\u00a0 A temple rose in the middle of the island, open to the air and consisting of little more than nine great free-standing columns, but I walked around the island before ascending.\u00a0 The beach was sandy, the rise covered in greenery and large rocks and bits of fallen masonry.<\/p>\n When I ascended to the temple, I found two figures there: a beautiful naked man, laying still but tumescent on a slab, and a woman in pale robes standing over him.\u00a0 Neither moved at all, even when I approached.\u00a0 Like most of the other figures I have encountered when travelling UP rather than DOWN, there was a hollow, static quality about them.<\/p>\n So I descended the stairs and set my sights on the moon above.\u00a0 Strangely, I had difficulty flying.\u00a0 I had to conjure a wind to lean into, like I did when I first learned to fly in my dreams almost ten years ago.\u00a0 Finally airborne, I flew upward into the moon.\u00a0\u00a0 This time, rather than flying through a portal, it was like a window or a door: passing through I found a new void, full of points of light linked by lines of power, but when I turned around I could see the temple and the two figures far below me, as if I were looking out of one space and into another.<\/p>\n When when my back was turned, I suddenly felt something tugging me, as if by a cord.\u00a0 I turned to look, and a vast spirit was pulling me \u201cupwards\u201d.\u00a0 In retrospect it was foolhardy, but my instinct was to trust this entity (spirit? god?)\u2014I thought it might be the god who called to me from the sky on the the night of my Dedication(2).\u00a0 I don\u2019t know if it could read my mind, or if it was just amused at the world in general, but it pulled me up to itself through a \u201chole\u201d between spaces much like the one I had just passed through, then flung me further \u201cupward\u201d into a vast and empty void.<\/p>\n The second void was very much like the one from which I had just been thrown, only it felt much larger.\u00a0 The star-like points of light were more distant and the threads between them were gossamer-fine.\u00a0 No sooner did I think to myself \u201cWhoa!\u00a0 I wonder if this is where the Masters of Outer Darkness(3) live?\u201d, then I saw a shimmer in the distance, and soon a lion-headed serpent appeared.\u00a0 I was nervous, but \u201csat\u201d cross-legged and waited for the creature to make a move.\u00a0 It approached, as did more of its kind, and began circling me\u2026 at which point I really wasn\u2019t sure what I ought to do if they did prove hostile, and the same entity which had thrown me out into that deeper void in the first place pulled me back \u201cdown\u201d in the same manner.<\/p>\n Back in the lesser void, I could feel a disturbance of some sort back in the waking world.\u00a0 Having accomplished what I\u2019d intended\u2014locating the Palace of the Moon and exploring the Realm of Yesod\/Luna\u2014I returned to my body.<\/p>\n 1 A lungful of (100% legal) blue sage this evening, instead of my usual absinthe.\u00a0 I was suffering from the delusion that I might do more homework after my trip.<\/p>\n 2 Which, pawing through my archives for a link, I still haven\u2019t written about.\u00a0 Fuck me running.<\/p>\n 3 Ever read Michael Harner?\u00a0 p. 7 of the Harper paperback 3rd Ed.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" In light of my my recent conclusions regarding my study of ceremonial and planetary magics, it occurred to me that with the Full Moon so close (the dark and lonely hours of Wednesday night, or the dismal pre-dawn hours of Thursday morning, depending on how you experience 4am EST), this week\u2019s Day and Hour of … Read More<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[5],"tags":[87,127,166],"class_list":["post-333","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-witchcraft","tag-full-moon","tag-journeywork","tag-moon"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p8kUcm-5n","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/journeythroughtheobsidiandream.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/333","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/journeythroughtheobsidiandream.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/journeythroughtheobsidiandream.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journeythroughtheobsidiandream.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journeythroughtheobsidiandream.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=333"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/journeythroughtheobsidiandream.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/333\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/journeythroughtheobsidiandream.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=333"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journeythroughtheobsidiandream.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=333"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journeythroughtheobsidiandream.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=333"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}