All Text, Music, and Illustrations, including Paintings, Photographs, and 3D models, Copyright © 2022 by Jim Robbins.
Fairy Lanterns and Wood Stars
THE HOLY SPIRIT AND DISASTER CAPITALISM
Once, in a vision I was strolling in a soft-blue monk's habit on a stone path through an enclosed garden. In the distance I could see a stone statue, which I suspected was religious in nature. As I approached, I saw a statue of Jesus on the cross, and I knelt down, but when I looked up, to my surprise, the statue had transformed into the Virgin Mary.
This vision occurred while some friends and I were “chakra toning,” a New Age technique for stimulating the energy centers of the aura; in other words, we sang or hummed the musical note associated with each primary chakra for an extended period without stopping, from the root chakra to the crown, a total of seven in all. The toning session begins with the note corresponding to the lowest chakra and proceeds up the scale without interruption to the highest chakra. By the sixth note, after humming nonstop for about thirty minutes, I had achieved an altered state of consciousness through hyperventilation.
I was surprised by the vision for several reasons. First of all, I have never worshiped Christian icons, and before then I had mainly experienced visions of symbols associated with the Tree of Life, the sacred glyph of the mystical Qabalah. Even more surprising to me, in the vision I was a monk in a monastery garden. I had entertained the idea of becoming a pagan priest but never a Christian monk. Moreover, I was wearing a hooded robe of the purist soft blue, which both intrigued and confused me, because I thought that monks only wore black or brown or white robes. Before then, I had never imagined kneeling myself before the Virgin Mary or any other feminine deity, an act which I interpreted as a show of willingness to sacrifice myself in some way. The very act of becoming a monk, of course, requires sacrificing a worldly life for a spiritual one. Donning the robes proclaims detachment from the ornaments and distractions of the world.
I told my friends about the vision but soon forgot it since the symbolism seemed boringly conventional. At the time, I did not know enough about the complex symbolism of the Tree of Life in the Western esoteric spiritual tradition to truly understand the vision. Finally, after many spiritual experiences and over ten years of study, the meaning of the vision, which is more Qabalistic than I had initially imagined, has grown much clearer.
Without even knowing it, for most of my life, I have manifested the archetypal energies of the Goddess, no matter the circumstances. In the vision, I was worshiping the celestial Goddess, the feminine principle of creation, and revealing my devotion to Her. Though strange, the vision seemed appropriate to me because of my devotion to the arts and the natural world from childhood on, but the vision revealed a deeper level of meaning that can only be understood in the context of the Tree of Life.
There is an old saying in the Mysteries: “All the Gods are one God, and all the Goddesses are one Goddess, and there is but one true initiator.” In terms of the Tree of Life, that means that the feminine principle shows up as different Goddesses on different levels, or “paths.”
The Tree of Life reveals the evolution of the cosmos from the finest spiritual energy to the densest physical manifestation through ten primary states of being known as Emanations, or Sephiroth in Hebrew. Each Emanation within the cosmos emerged from the previous state of being and eventually emanated the next. The first three states contain the basic principles of creation, for instance the duality of the masculine and feminine states and the existence of unity within multiplicity, but remain outside of manifestation. The Virgin Mary is symbolically associated with the third Emanation on the Tree of Life known as Understanding, in a dimension above the Abyss.
The celestial Virgin, the archetypal feminine principle above manifestation, therefore experiences immaculate conception, and gives birth to a savior God, the “Son” of the Trinity manifested on this plane. Understanding, the Emanation of the celestial Virgin, is the primal womb of manifestation from which all form originates, hence its association with Saturn, with stone, and with the sea. The third Emanation, though outside creation, ushers in the lord of all terrors. The word Mary comes from the Hebrew word marah, “bitter” or “bitterness.” The great sea of evolving life is bitter: Whatever is born must die.
The feminine principle, as I mentioned, is associated with other Goddesses on different paths on the Tree, most notably with Victory, the seventh Emanation ruled by Venus—the sphere of nature, beauty and the arts. I was born under the sign of Aquarius, which on the Tree links the Emanation of the Moon known as the Foundation with the Emanation of Victory, each of which emphasizes different aspects of the Goddess.
In my vision, though, I was worshiping the celestial Goddess. I had already manifested the energy of Venus through my art and adored Demeter through my love of nature. I had experienced the energy of the Moon through meditation and the arts and had worked for Ma'at through my efforts for truth and justice. In terms of the Tree of Life, the vision made perfect sense: I have sacrificed my personality to manifest the energies of the Goddess in different ways.
Several connecting paths on the Tree of Life, including the Path of Gimel, the Path of Daleth, the Path of Teth, the Path of Lamed, and the Path of Tau, also reflect aspects of the Goddess, so the adventurer on the Tree of Life has the opportunity to meet the Goddess at many points on the spiritual journey. In the archetypal hero's journey, the meeting with the Goddess represents a stage in the adventure when a person experiences a relationship that has the power and significance of an all encompassing, unconditional love. Also known as the sacred marriage, the union of opposites, the “meeting” may take place on a purely psychological level, representing the unification of the self during which the hero begins to see himself in harmony with all creation.
A psychic, about a year before my vision, told me that my aura is soft blue, which may partially explain why in the vision the monk's habit is blue. Renditions of Mary portray the Queen of Heaven and Earth and the Great Sea in blue also. My monk's garb in the vision is, on one level, an emblem of my adoration for the Goddess. Pure, soft blue is also associated with the spiritual level in Wisdom, the sphere of dynamic, masculine energy opposite Understanding; in that way my vision symbolically connects the primarily masculine energy of the celestial God with the energy of the celestial Goddess.
According to Dion Fortune, an authority on the modern Qabalah, the bible, which is essentially a Qabalistic book, contains God-names that pertain to the different Emanations on the Tree of Life (1). For instance, all references to the Father concern the manifestation of the Source known as Jehovah in the Emanation of Wisdom; all references to the Son apply to Beauty, the Christ-center; and all references to the Holy Ghost, the feminine principle within the trinity, correspond to Yesod, the Foundation, the Emanation associated with the Moon. From the Foundation evolved the Kingdom, the physical plane. The Holy Ghost attracts archetypal spiritual forces like a magnet to the Kingdom, the material world. The dance of the Gods, feminine and masculine, is the dance of the archetypal energies of one Source through different dimensions of the cosmos, energies which ultimately manifest in the physical realm.
The paths of the Goddess bring peace and harmony and a sense of oneness with all creation. Only after I started meditating and envisioning spiritual symbols did I realize that the feminine force goes by different names, World Soul, Holy Spirit, Goddess, and that one aim of occult spirituality is to contact this great force and experience its powerful influence—and also contact through its influence other great forces that in Christianity go by the name of the Son and the Father of the trinity.
Recently I experienced an epiphany about why, during an extended period of meditation, I had a vision of a golden, equal-armed cross. In the vision, the golden cross floated in a deep, blue sky, and at each end of the cross an angel hovered, each angel in a colored robe, one yellow, one red, one blue and one white. This was one in a series of visions of archetypal symbols, all of which, I eventually discovered, are associated with the Tree of Life, the great composite symbol of the mystical Qabalah. As I have mentioned before, the visions came as a total surprise: Before I began meditating at the age of forty-two, I was oblivious to spiritual symbolism in general, so the full meaning of the symbols that I have envisioned has sometimes taken me a long time to understand.
According to Dion Fortune, the brilliant 20th Century Qabalist, Beauty, or Tiphareth in Hebrew, is a point of transition or transmutation between the planes of form and formlessness, and the Foundation, or Yesod in Hebrew, is a subtle plane of form directly “above” the physical plane.
Even though I was unaware of it at the time, the vision of the equal-armed cross and the angels revealed the basic structure for rituals that involve the spiritual energies of the Holy Ghost and the four archangels representing the elements that form the background energies of manifestation, the basic structure, in other words, of the banishing and invoking rituals used by occult lodges. Since her book is so dense that at first it seems written in code, it has taken me years to unpack the meaning of Fortune's Mystical Qabalah. In what first seemed to me merely a passing remark, Fortune mentions that the occult lodges worship the Holy Ghost, associated with Yesod, the Foundation, from which the physical universe emanated (2). In a previous section, Fortune reveals that the Holy Ghost is the feminine aspect of the trinity (3).
These two key points have profound implications for Christianity and society as a whole. One of the goals of personal mysticism is communication with the Holy Guardian Angel, or higher self, which is connected to the divine core of being and transcends space and time. The mystic, as Fortune points out, begins in the humble manger, not on the Mount (4), so the first communications from the higher self come through Yesod, the Foundation, the state of being associated with the Holy Ghost and the feminine principle of creation, in visions of archetypal symbols and voices. The composite symbol of the Tree of Life itself, which represents the unseen forces in the collective consciousness of humanity, is a gift from Yesod, the subtle realm that reveals spiritual principle through symbolic form.
Higher psychism is the domain of the Son, Tiphareth, the Christ center: The subconscious mind, in other words, first accesses spiritual principle through archetypes and symbols in Yesod, the subtle plane of form above the physical plane. Beauty, the Christ center, is the sphere of the Sun, of blinding illumination, where form dissolves in light. Only after shaking free from the physical plane and making initial contact with the Foundation and experiencing spiritual principle through visions of symbols can the mind begin to make sense of illuminations from the higher planes. The mind slowly builds, piece by piece, an inner temple with symbols representing spiritual principle, which makes comprehensible the experiences of illumination and exultation that swing the mind beyond the Foundation into the blinding sphere of the Son, the center of cosmic equilibrium, harmonizing love and spiritual inebriation.
According to Fortune,
Illumination consists in the introduction of the mind to a higher mode of consciousness than that which is built up out of sensory experience.... Unless, however the new mode of consciousness is connected up with the old and translated into terms of finite thought, it remains as a flash of light so brilliant that it blinds. We do not see by means of the ray of light that shines upon us, but by means of the amount of that ray which is reflected from objects of our own dimension upon which it lights. Unless there are ideas in our minds which are illuminated by this higher mode of consciousness, our minds are merely overwhelmed, and the darkness is more intense to our eyes after that blinding experience of a high mode of consciousness than it was before. In fact, we do not so much change gear as throw the engine of our mind out of gear altogether. This, for the most part, is what so-called illumination amounts to. There is enough of a flash to convince us of the reality of superphysical existence, but not enough to teach us anything of its nature. (5)
Before I knew the Tree of Life even existed, I had during meditation envisioned many of its symbols. Eventually I realized that these symbols have enabled me to translate spiritual principle into “terms of finite thought” so that illumination would not merely blind me. The symbols reveal not only spiritual principle but, in one instance at least, the basic structure of practical magic that connects the practitioner with powerful subtle forces, such as the Holy Ghost and the Son of the trinity as well as Archangels and Gods and Goddesses fashioned by the human mind to represent unseen subtle forces throughout the ages. Contemplation of the paths of the Tarot on the Tree of Life and of the symbolic representations of the Gods is an effective way of translating spiritual experience into comprehensible ideas.
The Annunciation, on one level, symbolically suggests this process. The Annunciation is the announcement by the Archangel Gabriel to the Virgin Mary that she would conceive the Son of God. Gabriel told Mary to name her son Yeheshua, meaning "YHWH is salvation.” The Archangel Gabriel in the Qabalah is assigned to the Foundation, the sphere of the Holy Spirit: Through the feminine principle, the first conception of the Son—the recognition of the higher self—occurs. The higher self then can link up with the macrocosm, the cosmic consciousness of the Father. In fact, the God name of Beauty is “Eloah va Daath,” which can be translated as “God manifested in the mind.” The feminine principle, the Holy Ghost, elevates the mind into the superphysical, into this greater illumination.
As Fortune points out, through the type of consciousness associated with the Foundation, “mystical experience gradually builds up a body of images and ideas that are lit up and made visible when illuminations take place” (6). In order to build this temple of images, symbols, and ideas illuminated by higher modes of consciousness, the mind must be open to spiritual influences, which requires a passivity and a receptiveness associated with the feminine Holy Ghost and the Foundation. One must go deep into the subconscious mind, below worries and desires and fears and frustrations, to experience the astral treasures with the psychic senses. Spiritual development, instead of just being a series of magnesium flashes of illumination and exaltation, is a gradual expansion of the mind, a process that is mapped out by the Tree of Life.
Before I began having visions, I was a materialist, believing that only the physical universe exists. To understand my visions, however, I was forced to expand my idea of the cosmos. I had also experienced accurate premonitions and intuitions which revealed that some part of my psyche can transcend my brain and physical senses, but I had simply forgotten or dismissed them—until I began having the visions. When I started piecing the moments of illumination together, I discovered that it is helpful to think of the cosmos as consisting of many types of energy in one vast fabric, from the finest spiritual vibrations to the grossest physical matter, and that as an extension of the cosmos, my being also contains those energies, hence the paranormal experiences of nonlocal consciousness that have occasionally surprised me over the years. At the “higher” end, the energies are formless, evolving into planes of form, the physical universe being the plane of densest matter. We experience “nonphysical” or subtle planes of form in the imagination when we dream at night or daydream or have visions of symbols. When we simply know something is true through intuition, consciousness is operating on a higher, formless plane, rising from Beauty, the sphere of the Son, to Wisdom, the sphere of the Father, and in the Book of Creation, the Sefer Yetzirah, Wisdom and the Crown are equal.
Immersing myself in nature, the realm of the Goddess, is one way that I began to open myself to the Holy Spirit and the illuminations of higher consciousness, at first unknowingly, then intentionally. The beta mode of consciousness, the dominant mental state in this highly competitive society, allows intense focus on the external world but blocks access to subtle spiritual influences, which is why for me at least there will always tend to be a basic conflict between the driving forces of capitalism and the subtle forces of the spiritual dimensions, why, in fact, I lived forty years in a spiritual desert. The affairs of business channel the mind away from spiritual frequencies. In a predominantly masculine, patriarchal, capitalistic culture, a barrier remains: Attaining Christ consciousness requires receptiveness and a fair amount of passivity, both qualities associated with the feminine.
Dion Fortune states that a religion without the Goddess is halfway to atheism. In the Qabalah, the masculine and the feminine as well as the physical and the spiritual are polarities that allow the One to manifest as the Many. To vilify, exploit, or misuse the physical or the feminine is to blaspheme the Source of all creation. By demonizing feminine, passive, receptive states of the mind, patriarchal religions and societies block access to the Holy Ghost, thereby effectively establishing a barrier to the other forces of the trinity. One can experience the illuminations of the Son, the Christ force, but cannot fully understand them without experiencing the feminine state of the Holy Ghost in the Foundation—and, let us remember, the Son shows us the Father. Perhaps that is why so many Christians love the Virgin Mary and Saint Francis of Assisi, the great soul who loved all creatures, who empathized so much with the Christ and the suffering of humanity that he experienced the stigmata.
One of the places where I have often experienced the Holy Spirit is the San Joaquin River Gorge, an ecosystem that was almost destroyed by a dam at Temperance Flat. In an example of an economic development described by Naomi Klein as “disaster capitalism,” which results in a redistribution of wealth from the public sphere into private hands (7), farmers in the San Joaquin Valley used the drought as a way to “take” public lands for private benefit even though a large percentage of the water created by a new reservoir would go to water-guzzling crops such as almonds in a semi-arid region (the biggest crop in the San Joaquin Valley is almonds, and each almond takes over a gallon of water to produce), as well as to other commodity crops and fodder crops that have no business being grown in a desert. For ensconced private interests, a dam would save the economy because those with wealth, land, and the means of production would have the opportunity to continue business as usual. If the dam had been approved, the private interests who benefit would not have been required to replace unique public land with another public park or to compensate the public in any meaningful way for the loss of land, nor would those private interests be forced to change their unsustainable practices (8).
The bottom line of capitalism dominates. Based on my experience in the political realm, I've discovered that the public's opportunity to connect with the spiritual forces within nature is rarely, if ever (I am tempted to say “never”), a concern to those with power and money or to the politicians they influence. Approval of the dam would simply be one more example of how capitalism effectively blocks connection between the individual and the Holy Spirit, and by extension with the Son and the Father, revealing once again a basic conflict between Christianity and capitalism.
The feminine brings forth physical life, and since whatever is born must die, the feminine also ushers in the King of Terrors. Physical life is corruptible, always subject to the vagaries of time and the infirmities of sickness and old age. But to the Qabalist, “the natural is but the dense aspect of the spiritual”(9), the outer robe of concealment that covers the inner robe of glory. All life, including plants and insects and reptiles and animals, is spirit manifested in matter. Everything dies but rises through regeneration. Spiritual beings exist everywhere around us in physical forms that sometimes ravish us, sometimes amuse us, sometimes repulse us, sometimes terrify us. The false dichotomy that presents physical energy as impure and spiritual energy as pure suggests that at the heart of patriarchy is the fear of the subtle emotional, sexual, psychic and spiritual power of women, a fear that has manifested throughout the centuries as witch hunts and as an emotional disconnection from the Holy Ghost.
In the Tarot, the equal-armed cross, which is called by initiates the Cross of Nature and represents power in equilibrium is included in cards that represent aspects of the Holy Spirit: Judgement, the Ace of Cups, and The High Priestess. In the Tarot, color has great symbolic significance. In the Ace of Cups the cross is black, in Judgement red, in The High Priestess white. In the symbol system of the Tree of Life, the black equal-armed cross is associated with Malkuth, the Kingdom, or physical universe; the red in Judgement symbolizes compassion, which is linked through the Archangel Gabriel with the Foundation; the white in The High Priestess is associated with the unity and the spiritual laws of the supernal Emanations above the Abyss. The gold equal-armed cross, which appeared in my vision but does not appear in the Tarot, is symbolically associated with Beauty, since gold, representing the incorruptibility of the spirit, is the color associated with the Sun, the Christ-center. In my vision, the golden equal-armed cross links the Son with the Holy Spirit.
In the Tarot card Judgement, the Archangel Gabriel, who is associated with the Foundation and the Holy Ghost, blows a trumpet to awaken souls in their tombs, and the souls arise in gray, etheric bodies. These souls heed the trumpet call with psychic senses, not physical senses, and rise in exultation. In two other Tarot cards with Archangels, Temperance and The Lovers, each Archangel represents a higher mode of consciousness linked with the higher self. In Judgement, the Archangel Gabriel suggests an individual's encounter with the Holy Ghost and the superphysical nature of the psyche, which as I discovered can lead to a reassessment of the nature of existence.
In the symbol of Venus, the circle on top of an equal-armed cross reveals the perfection of the spirit above the elements in equilibrium. In the Ace of Cups, on the other hand, the equal-armed cross within a circle is being carried by the dove into the cup of manifestation: The Holy Spirit brings the black, equal-armed cross within the pure, white circle to the realms of form where the spiritual and the physical coalesce. In this way also, the Holy Spirit conceives the higher self in the planes of form, resulting in the integration of the psyche.
On the path of The High Priestess, the soul is confronted by the feminine principle on a higher arc on a path that crosses the Abyss between the planes of form and the supernal planes of formlessness. Here the equal-armed cross is white, representing unity, in opposition to the black cross of Malkuth, the Kingdom, the white cross suggesting the logic of unity, which is very different from the logic of the physical world, suggesting that the logic resulting in harmony within higher modes of consciousness is also very different from the logic of brain consciousness and the lower personality dealing with the exigencies of physical existence. Spirit can bring the soul into balance in a way that the lower personality doesn't expect or even understand at first. As in the Tarot card The Lovers, the masculine aspect of the psyche looks to the receptive feminine aspect in order to know the higher self, which is very different from the belief systems of societies with long, embedded attitudes of patriarchy.
Several times recently during invoking rituals, I have experienced a vision of the jewel in the lotus, representing the spiritual energies of the Source which come down the planes through the primary chakras to the earth. The vision emphasizes for me that the Supreme Invoking Ritual of the Pentagram, combined with the Middle Pillar Exercise, brings spiritual energy into the mind and manifests it in the world here and now. These visions stem from the equal-armed cross, associated with the Holy Ghost and the elements in equilibrium. I am living proof that, with an openness to the feminine aspects of the psyche and the cosmos, and with a little effort, a dedicated person can bring powerfully transformative spiritual energies into his or her sphere of influence.
(1) Fortune, Dion. The Mystical Qabalah. (London: Society of Inner Light, 1998) 179.
(2) Ibid.
(3) Ibid,, 47
(4) Ibid., 180
(5) Ibid.
(6) Ibid.
(7) http://www.naomiklein.org/shock-doctrine
(8) http://www.cheatsheet.com/business/3-disheartening-truths-about-americas-commodity-crops.html/?a=viewall
(9) Fortune, Dion. The Mystical Qabalah. (London: Society of Inner Light, 1998) 194.
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