Posted by I channeled this from Ariadne a while ago and sat on it, for reasons that will become apparent, no doubt, when you read it. A stupendous amount of synchronicity and much nudging prompts me to publish it today.
All things end.
Everything you have ever accomplished and everything you will ever build is destined to be destroyed.
The temples you build will some day be ruins. The stories you write will be eaten by the sun.
One thing alone will remain: the souls of the people you wronged or did right by.
The mountains are temporary. The sea is temporary. The sky is temporary.
Culture, religion, politics? Like the batting of an eyelash.
Your sins against the powerless are eternal. The people you stepped on to accomplish your empty, temporary aims will remember you forever, even if not by face or name.
Tell me again how the ends justify the means! Tell me more about how the people you hurt in your path to building your ephemeral empires are ‘collateral damage.’
You are like children with guns. You have power. Oh yes, you have power. All the power in the world can’t accomplish goodness unless you know what goodness is.
And you don’t. And you think no one can stop you.
Dear idiots with political, mystical and magical power who are hurting my dear ones:
I am coming for you.
Like the butterfly’s wings that flap up
a monsoon half a world away.I am coming for you.
Have fun with your little sandcastles while you may, Ozymandias.
Magick From Scratch 
Nice.
I think the Western Mystery Tradition is lacking accounts of channelling and astral visions. Keep up the Great Work.
Thanks to thinkers like Diana Paxton, it is becoming pretty common amongst Devotional Polytheists. Here is my question: what specific role do you think channeling and astral visions have in the Great Work?
I’ve found that my accumulated astral visions and experiences have actually helped me become a calmer and less anxious person by virtue of having to confront my issues in the dreaming / visions / whatever the otherworlds are. I’ve also expanded my conceptions on what love is. *shrugs* It’s good for individual learning since one’s dreams/visions are tailored for one’s own understanding. I’ve found your channelings and Cara Freyasdaughters channeling encouraging, thought-provoking, and often leading me to a better understanding of Deity (as well as helping introduce me to Ariadne and Hermes btw).
For example: Devotional Polytheists use channelled messages to improve their understanding of who the gods are and what they want, which in turn aids their devotional aim of sussing out what pleases the deity. If we take the great work as “before all things, the creation of man by himself, that is to say, the full and entire conquest of his faculties and his future; it is especially the perfect emancipation of his will.” How does this piece fit in?
Though it’s pretty clear that nothing could please this Lady more than scores and scores of humans with emancipated will….
Hi Blogos,
Are you familiar with the writings of Dion Fortune? Lots of “accounts of channeling and astral visions” there. She was quite possibly the most significant anglophone in the Western Esoteric Tradition in the 20th century.
I read this when I woke and I have been thinking about Ariadne’s words since I got up. So can the harm we cause to nameless others for the temporary aim of resources–i.e. sweatshop clothing and electronics made by the poor–result in sin? Is litter a sin that clings to a soul after a lifetime is done? Or the garbage patches in the oceans! Are those collective sins? Does that harm cling after one life? What about the ongoing colonization and settling of non-natives on Turtle Island/North America? Can there be sin attached to genuine ignorance?
Ariadne’s desire to come to the defense of the powerless heartens me so much. Not many Powers have told me about their social justice passions. When Poseidon noted I was studying environmental issues at Queen Guinevere’s request, He sent me a dream where He gave me a tour of the ocean and the dream ended with Himself taking a dismayed/pissed picture of Himself on an iphone with a dead whale in the background. Oh and one time, Freyja told me that as a colonizing deity, She wouldn’t try to revive the land on this continent. And! Loki has raged to me about psychiatrists being awful. Hmm, okay, more deities than I thought have Told me stuff. Cool.
*strokes chin and thinks really loudly* what do my other deities care about? :O
Thanks for the thinky-thoughts, Thenea.
Yay, thinky-thoughts!
Ariadne has blown in and wants to say the following to you, about that:
– Enslaving people in sweatshops is bullshit. Please do buy fair-trade instead. Buying fair trade preferentially will tilt the scales, making being fair also more profitable. But really, you aren’t to blame for their decision to use human beings as a commodity in the first place. They are the ones with money and power. And in many cases, humans who work in sweatshops like Walmart in the US can only afford to live if they buy things cheaply made in sweatshops abroad. The blame does not rest on the poor. The blame rests on the people who have more money than they know what to do with and are victimizing people, robbing them of the power to choose better actions. Poverty is not a choice made by the poor individual. It is a choice made by others, and it robs people of their freedom to choose a better moral action in some instances. Since their choice was taken away, the sin rests on the person who took it. IE, the slave-wage employer. Also, fuck retail businesses who pay minimum wage, fuck politicians who have not made minimum wage a living wage, and fuck people who support those politicians.
– You should take care of the environment, especially since pollution impacts the poor disproportionately. Making small children breathe dirty air because you don’t believe that climate change has a human cause is absurd. Who made these choices, and who is making them? The more power you directly have over the situation, the greater your share in the blame. If you didn’t cause the problem, but nonetheless strive to fix it, great merit is yours.
– The people who handed out diseased blankets to innocent traders, shot fathers and mothers, sons and daughters, brothers and sisters, and left survivors grieving over untimely deaths in the name of soil and profit will bear the weight of that sin until they have made restitution to the souls whom they have wronged. The people who are, today, trying to do much the same to the survivors — setting up liquor stores just outside their reservations, forcing them to acculturate to European ways while making a mockery of their customs, shrinking their wealth, their power, their property, their right to self-govern — These bear the exact same sin as the ones who took the land in the first place. Likewise, the forces that conquered Crete, desecrated their gods, destroyed their culture, bear the same sin. The modern day residents of Crete are blameless. The modern day people who had no choice about where they were born, most of whom do not have the social or fiscal mobility to be anywhere else, cannot be held accountable. Empires rise, empires fall. It is how we treat the living, not how the dead treated the dead while they yet lived, which should concern us.
– Agreed, Loki, psychiatrists can be awful. But they can also be great healers for people in distress. Reducing the stigma for those suffering with psychiatric disorders and alleviating their very real distress are not things that are opposed to one another… at least on paper.
Whew… ok, now that that’s over. I was thinking about doing a meme-series on social justice for the various gods. Each of the gods I work with has a social justice aim. Hermes has eighty social justice aims, but seems most concerned with the poor and the homeless. Hephaestos is burning about ableism, Athena wants to smash racism, Zeus wants to drop-kick political corruption, Hera is on about marriage equality (duh– she feels like people are taking money out of her pocket), Ares is enraged about the way veterans are treated, Artemis is the environmentalist, and the list goes on.
Lightbulbs are going off in my brain! Things make so much more sense now. I really appreciate that She took time out of Her day to clarify social justice and sin. Thank you, Ariadne, thank you Thenea.
Loki’s comment was in a particular context of some psychiatrists being abusive and refusing trans people service. He was telling me, if I recall correctly, that He refused to out Himself any longer to psychiatrists due to the abuse He’s faced, saying He’d rather casually commit murder instead. I’ve been profoundly lucky in finding psychologists and psychiatrists who supported my transition.
Oh please do make such posts!! That’d be awesome. (I’m suddenly wondering if Apollo gets irked over the price of art supplies. Or more likely the accessibility of art, and who is *allowed* the time and money to make it. Or maybe He gets pissed at how you need a law degree to understand justice systems, idk. I’m gonna stop, because I could wonder loudly in your comment section for awhile. And I probably will in potential future posts!)
Ah, I see. Ariadne’s spouse is a deity of madness, and so she sees a lot of people she loves suffer with mental diseases and get some pretty shitty treatment. It’s another of her hot-button issues.
If you have lots of ideas about how Polytheistic deities relate to modern social justice issues, making memes about it is a great idea for you, too. Loki’s particular axe might be a really good starting place.
Good point, I forgot She is married to Dionysios. >.<
I could do this yeah! Good point.
That’s almost exactly how She sounds to me, too; but I think you’re hearing Her much more clearly than I am presently. Thank you for all of this.
Are you sure She’s not Nemesis in disguise? Would you ask Her for me if what my Purpose is has any thing to do with the monsoon She speaks of – although I would term it a typhoon or a ChangeWind. And, please, what is this ‘Great Work’ you speak of?
I can see where she might come to resemble Nemesis in an age such as ours. She’s a goddess of freedom, and seeing freedom destroyed, desecrated, undervalued, or stolen makes her… angry in ways which our meager spoken languages have no words to describe.
I will ask for you about your purpose. She’s like the wind. She blows in and rants, or maybe dances, or tells off all the entities standing around me, cutting into them with the most insightful insults you could imagine, then blows out again.
When she blows in next, I’ll ask.
The Great Work is what Thelemites, Hermeticists and Alchemists term the end-goal of their practice. It means something slightly different in each of these contexts, but it is essentially the practitioner freeing themselves of various things so as to see themselves more clearly, and thereby to take true command of their own will. Thelemites emphasize “Knowledge and Conversation with the Holy Guardian Angel” — Similar, in some ways, I guess, to what I describe as the “Mythic Self” in some of my writings. Hermeticists view it more as re-creating yourself in the image of the perfected human. The Alchemy definition is something slightly more like extensive purification, until you get back to the One Substance out of which all things are made, or, if you prefer, the refinement of a thing, or a person, until nothing is left but their essential nature, the latter of which is a much more Polytheist take.
Reblogged this on Journey to the stars and commented:
i love to read about Her on here.
Thanks for the clarification. Sounds like the work of many lifetimes. And thanks, too, for speaking to Ariadne. Training the clergy to destroy the constructs might be touchy since they might have a hard time differentiating between it and the deity. And also a certain hesitancy to attack something that feels/looks like their god. But it certainly is needed and would free up the gods from having to do it.
“Sounds like the work of many lifetimes” — Yes, and in fact a common belief in these circles is that people reincarnate to continue the Great Work.
I asked Ariadne about your Purpose, but she made sort of… a face… and then I got kind of a weird answer…
“It used to be that when social awareness and the ability to discern right from wrong grew, people would change their myths to support that awareness. It’s so true that modern Anthropologists rely on mythology to tell us what ancient peoples valued.
Nothing will be whole until mythology becomes mutable again.”
Maybe that is the thing you are doing most closely related to her plan…?
Mythology is beginning to mutate as we speak. Neil Gaiman’s AMERICAN GODS was just green-lit as a TV series on Starz. The stories of how the Gods from elsewhere have a difficult time on American soil. I highly recommend the novel as well.
I was braced for her trademark insults which didn’t happen. Whew! I’m only helping to lay the foundation right now and it’s a thing that takes time. There’s time to write new myths that reflect the ideals we now espoused before the foundation is complete. I’m not a writer – I’m sure you can tell that. It will be for those who can write to work with their priestesses/priests to get the myths told. Yeah, if it’s kind of weird or complicated, it’s for me. I think all the Powers know about it – and know more than I do – even though I’m the one laboring in the field.
This definitely reminds me of the Norse concept of luck, hamingja, which is sort of like the typical karma deal, you know good usually equals bad and so on so forth. But, with hamingja, the luck carries on, through descendants or even reincarnation, right. So, this kind of goes along with how this is one of those things that really don’t end, as these actions that run parallel with luck, don’t end with you. They carry on through bloodlines, and I would suppose that it even counts in a community sense, and even if you think of bloodlines alone, we are all distantly related, and as a species, we are all held responsible. Which this goes hand-in-hand with the bigger things, like scumming up nature, and things like genocide. The massive things.
And even with the small, it does build and it is remembered, and I would have to believe that that would be paid for at some point in time, as nothing is truly free.
Just a few thoughts that I thought I would contribute.
Sorry if some of this was already said, I skipped most of the text wall while I had my train of thought and inspiration, so I am catching up now and will most likely understand any references to the discussion.
”Here is my question: what specific role do you think channeling and astral visions have in the Great Work?”
Well I am a Qabalist and an Alchemist so my answer will come from that perspective:
Channelling, Theurgy or anything that brings the divine into manifestation on the material plane, or allows divine energies to manifest is part of the way in which we connect the above with the below. Similarly any work on the astral plane is the mirror opposite instead of bringing it down, we go up.
Unification (of the ”one thing”) is the way in which ”the repair of the world” happens – as a Qabalist I believe that the world is effectively ”shattered” (shevirat ha kelim) so any attempts at unification are attempts at repair, just like mending a vase. There is a force inherent in the shattered world that wants to either a) keep it fragmented and/or b) destroy it completely so while recognizing that we have to resist that force (or rather the excesses of it) we some how have to integrate it back in as without it we would lack complete unification – this force is referred to as the Sitra Achra.
Anyway I digress – the specific role is that they are fundamental components of what we do in order to bring about unification both in the individual and in the world at large. I felt that your experiences were similar to the way I relate to deities in the astral and I liked it and wanted to encourage it. I didn’t know the practise was becoming widespread in your circle as I am from a different one. That’s good news though. I look forward to reading more.
Reblogged this on opalescentmidnight and commented:
This is dark, but sobering and great to hear. I especially love that last line. 😉 Thank you for sharing this!