Good Vibrations

Okay, I finally found something else that made me vibrate.

If you’ll recall, I was wondering ... okay, more like agonizing ... over the problem I was having with the voice of l’uno e solo making me vibrate.  I’d never physically felt anything like that before, and felt bothered, bewitched and bewildered by the whole experience.  Another synchronicity – because I have been looking around for the emerald merkaba ring I was given during my initiation, I came across the cd “Merkaba of Sound” by Jonathan Goldman.  Stuck it in the cd player and ... you guessed it!  Vibrations galore!  The effect was sort of mesmerizing.  That alone was so unsettling, I decided not to listen to it until I was actually meditating – if it did what it is supposed to do – I probably needed to be actually in a position where I could learn something from the experience.  More on that in a minute.

Now, I have a few unsettling issues with Goldman himself:  reading the booklet, he credited Drumvalo Melchizedek with teaching him about the phi-oriented counter-rotating star tetrahedron being synonymous with the term merkaba.  I’ve read about Melchizidek.  Not at all sure I trust the guy, or maybe that’s just me – too many distasteful and unpleasant complaints cropping up about him.  But just trying to learn about phi (The Golden Ratio) (as opposed to pi) was something of a challenge for the mathematics-challenged.

Source:  http://www.sacred-art.org/product/blue-merkaba/

Here’s my next question I’ll probably never know the answer to:  why did Piero’s voice cause the same vibrations as the “Merkaba of Sound”?  According to this description, Goldman uses “resonance of the divine name as well as an intoned sound as well as incorporating phi as a sonic ratio to create a new experience in sacred vibrations.”  (And no, I have no idea what means, really.  Just that it made me vibrate, just as Piero’s voice did, the first time I heard it.)  Sooo – Piero’s voice also incorporates phi as a sonic ratio??  And his brother has an ouroboros tattoo?  Interesting brothers, those Barone boys.

While looking “merkaba” up, I ran across the world’s weirdest website, “Human Angels”, full of people announcing they were human angels – the traditional concept of “angels” being the sort whom one would assume were relatively intelligent beings – in unintelligible sentences chock full of misspellings and other idiocy.  Can’t find that website again, as I closed it with an expression of utter disgust on my face, but found another example of merkaba-related lunacy:

“Dear children of light, we come to you yet again with another upgrade for the heart center of your being. We ask you allow the emerald green energies to enter you hear center ...”

Source:  http://sacredascensionmerkaba.wordpress.com/2013/07/17/next-72-hours-3-days-emerald-green-heart-code-upgrade-716-719-1000-p-m-us-est-1001-p-m-us-est-pleiades-high-council/

Yeah, you read that right.  Upgrade?  “Enter you hear center”?  What the heck is a “hear center”?  Is that my ear?  I’m supposed to allow “emerald green energies” to slide down my ear canal?  After that, I’m thinking that maybe they should forget sliding down my ear canal (all together now:  “Ewwww ...”) and instead open an elementary school for self-proclaimed “Human Angels” who never made it out of third grade.  You’re telling me this woman is supposedly channeling higher beings – who never heard of “spell check” or “dictionaries” – or even proof-reading?

And you know me:  the minute you hit me with the smarmy, “Dear children ...” of anything – light or otherwise – I’m outa there.  Legitimate deities know me better than that.  Neither Sekhmet or Thoth said anything even remotely like that.  In fact – now that I think about it – neither one of them said anything at all – they communicated with actions, which were unmistakable, and thoughts.

Another one:  Merkaba.org.  Here’s their pitch:

“We are now teaching our ancient wisdom and techniques in a new way using modern words and examples in a series of downloadable recordings and CDs. Our wisdom and techniques when fully taught in the proper way, 5,000 years ago, required 14 years of daily classes for graduation.”

Uh huh.  Their ancient wisdom.  Raises the point:  if they’re channeling anything – which is highly unlikely already – it would simply be “wisdom” – present tense – not “ancient” wisdom.  Isn’t time an artificial construct?  “Ancient” already presupposes a distance in time, and a separation based on that distance.  The beings supposedly being channeled are distant from themselves?

As for the “14 years of daily classes 5000 years ago”, since there are no papyri or hieroglyphics actually covering any such teaching, we’re supposed to buy their knowledge of a “proper way of teaching” from 5,000 years ago?  I don’t think so.  Especially when they’re charging $105.00 for one cd.

Source:  http://www.merkaba.org/basicadvancednew.html

I dunno – here’s my alternative:  try contacting Thoth yourself – he’s infinitely more knowledgeable, he actually WAS as present 5000 years ago as he is today, and he isn’t holding out his hand for your credit card.  My initiation was awesome, life-changing – and oh yes, while I paid for the classes, the initiation was free of charge.

Clarification:  I have no issue with legitimate teachers charging for their time and experience.  But using  the classes I’m attending as an example, if they hadn’t produced tangible results for me, I would certainly not consider giving them a dime for the second year.  And not once did the instructor make a ridiculous claim like that or I would have looked at her in disbelief with both eyebrows raised up to my hairline.

So while I did find a few useful things about the merkaba (and believe me when I tell you THAT website I cited wasn’t one of them), I wasn’t able to find a replica of the ring I was given during my initiation – although I would imagine it would be enormously expensive if I did.  I also  looked up the properties of emeralds:  “a stone of inspiration and infinite patience”, “the stone of successful love”, “eliminates negativity”, “can heal negative emotions” – I can see why they gave me the ring!  The emerald was surrounded by diamonds - one of the diamond properties: “protection against cell phones”!!!  Quick – give me more diamonds!!
 
Meanwhile, Mr. Signpost tweeted, apropos of I don’t know what exactly,  “You are going places you never imagined. Time to get excited about the future.”  Well, actually, HE was in my future, and as for excited ... truthfully, stomach-churning was more like it.  But before showing up in class with mascara running down my face from another crying jag, I thought I’d get the trip down first, and took a practice run to Salem and back.

Utter nightmare.  Route 114 was having construction done and provided a completely unmarked detour; I was in a fury at the abysmally-run State of Massachusetts again before I even got there.

Salem, Massachusetts has to be the most claustrophobic place on earth ... street signs are erratic, street names don’t match maps and their appallingly miniscule streets are one-way and the width of a sidewalk.  In short, an utter nightmare getting there, locating the place where the class was to be held, and getting back out again.  Coming home I suffered through the unmarked detour again and then sat in traffic on Route 1 because the town of Topsfield had decided to have a fair that backed up one of the most heavily trafficked roads in the country for miles – and then some guy driving a mail truck had decided to have an accident at the same spot.  Nearly four hours for a trip that should have taken me 40 minutes.

Thank goodness Mr. Signpost cancelled – I was seriously thinking of doing the same thing after that experience.

On top of everything else, I’m coming down with a cold – and many thanks to the woman on the Newburyport line who coughed all over me last week.

Not that I’m all that concerned about either one, but there are two killer viruses racing around the globe right now, killing people, and we still have women going to work, taking trains, taking subways, all the while toxic as hell, spewing germs all over the place.  The coughers, sneezers, saliva-spewing narcissistic cows wandering around in public killing people are ALWAYS women, I have no idea why.  When they’re not microwaving you with their psychological and emotional addiction to their cell phones, they’re spewing killer viruses all over you.  Reason for the next mass extinction of a species on the planet earth?  WOMEN!!!  (You heard it here first, folks.  And just because I am one doesn’t mean I don’t fully appreciate the utter narcissistic lunacy of my own gender.)


Interestingly enough:  it was a woman exiting her car in the Market Basket parking lot in Seabrook who was wearing a flimsy hospital mask over her mouth and nose, as though she expected to get infected by the Ebola virus in Seabrook, New Hampshire.  I just stared at her in astonishment.

Lastly, I’ve been reading Aleister Crowley’s The Book of Thoth.  Amazing book.  And the first time I’ve had a question answered about the Kabbalah, to wit:  if the concept predates Abraham, which it sounds like it does, why are Hebrew letters involved in the discussion at all?  Shouldn’t we be discussing Phoenician, Sumerian or Egyptian hieroglyphics instead of Hebrew letters?  Crowley had something of the same issue – although you can’t really count up the numerical value of hieroglyphics, can you?  My personal issue on the subject is that something in me objected to employing a letter-counting analysis of a thoroughly distasteful monotheistic and patriarchal suppressive belief system that generated the two awful others:  christianity and islam to be specific.  Crowley’s discussion of the tarot deck he and Freda Harris created is so dense and instructive I’ve been making it through only a page or two a day, but it’s utterly fascinating.

The Great Dreaming Tea Experiment

Happy Terminalia.

Well, actually, Terminalia was the 23rd; but I wasn’t online that day. So ... HAPPY TERMINALIA!!!

Back on 07 February 2011, I decided to change my religion to a perpetual worship of Terminus, the God of Boundaries. I announced that the "credo which must appear on the holiday cards which I fully expected my friends and relations to send me each February 23rd (and I’m still waiting): "Concedo nulli". Translation: "I yield to nobody". Each year I preach a sermon to the masses: ‘I VANT TO BE ALOOOOONNNNE!!"

It’s something akin to the official holiday of anti-social, grouchy people like me, who set wide and rigid boundaries around themselves. Love it!!

I’m continuing to read The Plant Spirit Familiar, becoming more and more engrossed with it. I wonder if the entire "wicca" century wasn’t really just an opening door for those of us who are intent on pushing wiccan boundaries back towards truth, angrily and forcefully, if necessary. I was screeching (a few entries ago) about defiantly forbidding the fear-filled beliefs of monotheism to infect our teachings; to question everything; to make certain we knew that our sources weren’t demonized now because christians had infected it with their intense fear of sexuality first.

Penczak has another version of that urge to push back against contemporary wicca: "As witches we are growing away from the model of using plants and tools of all sorts, back to an animistic wisdom, where everything is a potential partner, an ally, a familiar spirit, not a tool." (p. 281)

Considering how long most of us have suffered under others clinging to the (erroneous) belief that human beings are superior to every other living being on the planet – and that includes the planet herself, not just plants, animals, rocks, earth, fire and water … and every other type of resource! - I loved this concise summation of the way things should be.

I am teaching myself the principle behind the Doctrine of Signatures … I am astounded at everything I’m learning about natural spirits. Learned the coven of the guy who wrote it – a literal paragon of non-judgmental virtue, unlike a mess of other people I could name (like me) - isn’t that far away: just past the Methuen border into New Hampshire, in SALEM! (HAHAHA!)

Sorry, the irony of that never fails to hit me in the head. Slightly less than a year ago I was curled up in a fetal position, sucking my thumb and whimpering, "I will never ever EVER go back to Salem!!" – forgetting there were more "Salem’s" than just the Massachusetts one. And so here I am, thinking, "Hmm. I should go to Salem."

So here’s the first recipe I’m going to try: Scullcap. Hops. Valerian. Poppy seeds.

Fine. It WOULD sound disgusting, unless I quickly clear up three misconceptions: a scullcap is not a SKULLcap, we are not going to murder the Yalie valedictorian and chop him into bite-size meaty bits and make a stew out of him, "hops" doesn’t mean "beer" in this context and yes, you can visualize the Wicked Witch of the West crooning, "Poppies! That will put them to sleep! Sleeeeeep," while gleefully waving her mortar and pestle around, red smoke spewing everywhere. Yeah, like THAT happens every time I crush herbs. Red smoke spewing everywhere ... blinding and choking the winged monkeys. Poor li’l guys.

The recipe is for Dreaming Tea, but appears in the book after instructions for both water infusions and decoctions. My first question: so which is it? Do I infuse? Do I ... er ... decoct? Well, here’s my opinion: no time like the present to learn by experience. First step was to order the ingredients, none of which I had on hand, not even the poppy seeds. Here’s hoping the scullcap, hops, valerian and poppy seeds arrive sometime this week. And then I get to figure out what happens after I drink it.
Lastly, I finally had to come to terms with the fact that Massachusetts – despite its horrible history in Salem – still enjoys making life difficult for its witches – athames are illegal here, for some reason no one can explain to me. You can buy KNIVES all over the place, single sided and double sided, but you can’t sell athames here. So here’s my silver athame. It started out its life as a silver letter opener; now its a consecrated athame.

More later.

The One Place I Can't Go

Stitched the interfacing, finished assembling a heavy bookcase I purchased at Walmarts using incomprehensible instructions, started shampooing the living room carpet. In a bit of a better mood, even though I was back to digging stuff out of my toolbox(es): Phillips head screwdriver, straight edge screwdriver, hammer. Last time I used these I was searching for a soul mate by furnishing the bedroom, as I recall. Immediately had to put the whole soul mate search thing on hold while I tried to heal from the injuries inflicted by a fool in a jeep trying to get to a (wait for it): funeral, which he felt it necessary to drive to at the speed of light. Heh. And we can all see how well I healed from that.

Mr. Signpost again reminded me of the more familiar signs of the Summer Solstice: the Holly King taking over from the Oak King. There is actually a park celebration here in the Andovers today where they replace the Oak King banner with a Holly King banner and then tell the story of the Oak and Holly Kings. They also rent out kayaks and paddle boats on the pond, and I'm reminded of Greenwood Lake, and how badly I wanted to do that.

In any event, Damien's version is much better than being chased naked through a dark forest and bleeding out through my dead feet (see last entry). Although I'm not sure how much safer that version of searching for a soul mate is, compared to setting little pieces of paper on fire in my apartment without a fire extinguisher nearby.

Well, I got off my lazy butt and looked it up: Damien switched over to Twitter on May 7th - and rather calmly as a matter of fact (as you'll recall, I had assumed he did it a tad more dramatically, an entry or so ago) - which is about the time I was beginning to really suffer from the pain in my forehead and had stopped posting blog entries for a while.  And of course I missed it, being as miserable as I was at the time. I enjoyed reading his past tweets the same way I enjoyed reading his journal, and found a few other semi-coincidences between his tweets and my blog:

Me, on 9 October 2011
Back many, many years ago I had started a Day Book. There is (or was) a witchy little shop I loved, on East 9th Street in the Village, Enchantments, where I went through Wicca 101. Another reason why, when I read about Damien, I thought, "Thank goodness I lived in New York", where they tend not to arrest you and throw you on Death Row for going to Wicca 101 classes.

If you ever find the store, not only is it the best-smelling store on the planet, they have the coolest stone carving of the "Green Man" hanging from the wall in the back of their tiny garden; something you never expect to find in lower Manhattan.

Damien, on 27 May 2012
Today I paid a visit to Enchantments. It's one of the more well known magick and meditation supply stores in NYC. Herbs,incense,books,etc.

I don't consider this a genuine (and startling) "coincidence", as I did when I found him next to Sekhmet. THAT was so unexpected, I'm still struggling with that one. This, no. We're both Wicca; that we both visited Enchantments doesn't seem all that much of a coincidence. I just smiled when I read the entry.  The "coincidence", such as it was: the reason I re-opened the Daybook I'd started during those classes - and actually started in the backyard garden of Enchantments under the watchful eye of the Green Man or Horned God on the wall - was because of Damien's prison journal, which I'd found so inspirational.


Last coincidence I'll mention. Salem. I'd thought he had just visited Salem. Now after reading all of his tweets and slowly catching up on what he's been up to, I realize he's moving there.  Another gloomy reaction; the sonnet cycle went up another notch.


The One Place
Packing up and moving so I hear: Salem, Mass.
I know my way to Salem in the dark; trust me.
I’ve been there, I know the jogs in the road, I see
the signs, I remember the smells and the hourglass;
the grains of sand slipping through, how I was aghast
to realize in Salem, what a chance I’d been
given and how, in Salem, I’d let it slip free.
I hear her name and turn quick away, let her pass.

And yet. Salem is where I hear you choose to go,
"I belong there", you say. I’m sure you’re right. And yet,
I feel a surge of grief rising; I won’t forget
where you are as I learn at your feet all you know.
Right below my surface, slithering in protest:
the one place you are is the one place I can’t go.

20 June 2012
©Snake's Trail, 2012, all rights reserved

Damien Echols is moving 30 minutes away from me. The one place I can't go back to. Ever. I'm not sure why that bothered me so much - even if I loved the place as much as he did, I doubt I would have ever gone there just because he was there. But I do remember thinking it would be a fun place to go to on Halloween, though - once. No more. So ... an odd coincidence: he's moving to the one place I can't go to without ripping my heart and guts out all over the sidewalk. I don't know what that meant - such an almost deliberately odd coincidence, if you could call it that.

At least in New York I always knew he was safe. Moving to this state - I don't feel that way anymore, but I'm sure that has more to do with me than anything else.

The Demon of North Andover

It was the first day of my long-awaited vacation when I encountered this demon. I had so many things on my pre-holiday checklist I wanted to get a good start on everything and I started about 11 in the morning at the Stop n' Shop on Route 114 in North Andover. To my surprise, everyone else had decided the same thing - the store was pretty well packed. When I'd collected everything, I got in line; I was third. At the end of this line was me. Directly ahead of me was a woman of about 60. Directly ahead of her was an ice cold soccer mom with two loud children who were old enough to know better, but didn't. She was laying out her food on the conveyer belt while her children punched each other and squashed candy bars in the line rack. She never even glanced at them, even as they pushed each other into the cart of the woman behind them, nearly upending her twice. Possibly the demon was busy trying to think of the most effective way of killing the people behind her.

I still hadn't realized that this woman was a demon - I was thumbing through a magazine I'd picked up. But I looked up at her third or fourth loud sneeze and uncovered whooping cough, which she was using to spray all of the food on the conveyor belt - hers and the items of the woman behind her. The 60-year old woman, who had just had her own cart shoved into her midsection twice by the demon's spawn, finally felt compelled to say something.

"Excuse me," she said, "But would you mind covering your mouth? You're sneezing all over everyone's food."

The demon turned and faced the line of us behind her. She had one of those sharp, ugly, faces sculpted by women who believe that exercising themselves into bony cords and angles made them attractive. I swear I had seen her jogging determinedly along one of the town's major roadways in the dark, ignoring all of the motorists who had to swerve around her at the last minute, cursing her idiotic stupidity for not once considering using reflectors. Now she turned and faced all of us with red, glowing eyes. Spittle pooled at the corner of her mouth. Apparently, this demon took exception to being asked to show some holiday compassion for shoppers behind her. I hadn't noticed that an elderly couple had gotten in line behind me with only a few items in their cart.

The demon took a deep breath, opened her mouth as wide as she could and, deliberately, maliciously sneezed all over all of us: the woman behind her, me, the couple behind me, and a child of another woman who was standing to the side of his mother in the next queue over. We all backed up in the shock of it, feeling her spit all over our faces, our hands, our food, in our eyes, ears, nose, mouth. It was the one of the most disgusting acts of virulent hostility I'd ever seen. I mean, who DOES that? No human being does that. Who deliberately infects elderly people, for godssake, knowing full well that she could be handing them their death sentence? Nazis? Violent criminals? Demon soccer moms from North Andover, Massachusetts?

And who decides that the perfect way to spend time when you're sick and infectious is at a supermarket, sneezing and coughing on everyone else's food? Did she honestly think this made her some sort of Santa Madonna Martyr Mommie worthy of a Hallmark Parade and a Mommie Crown on Mother's Day?  But that was the demon's lesson on how to respond to people who have asked you - quite politely, I thought - to cover your mouth when you sneeze - as though she should have been inside of the store in the first place. And she did it while her spawn watched, so the good townsfolk might want to think twice about the North Andover school system, with this demon's spawn on the class rosters.

Within 48 hours I had bronchial pneumonia and was in the emergency room of a nearby hospital, with an oxygen mask over my face. They told me later I had been a lovely shade of blue when my physician sent me over to them in an ambulance. I couldn't breathe; and my chest was rattling like a gourd every time I breathed. I had such a high fever that I was drifting in and out of dreams that made me believe I was dying. The evil Soccer Mom of North Andover appeared in those dreams on two separate occasions as a full fledged demon, so that is how I think of her. I missed Christmas, I missed New Year's Eve. I missed my entire vacation. It has been 13 days since she did her foul deed, and I'm still hearing that dry chest rattle every time I inhale.

I don't even want to know what happened to the 60-year woman ahead of me, or the elderly couple behind me - the demon was so virulent I doubt any of them survived it.

Originally published:  Jan. 2nd, 2008 at 2:08 AM