Series
This post forms part of an ongoing series:
(This post)
(Future posts)
Introduction
This article starts touching on the second of four visions I experienced in December 2020. This vision describes an intermediate stage in the Hero’s Journey where the initiate encounters the Goddess. This event has a personal meaning for me as I immediately recognized the Goddess as being the same entity I have encountered in the past when taking psychedelics.
This struck me as fascinating, and foreshadowed the fact that the Goddess would become a regular presence in my life. This is in fact literally what is promised in the Hero’s Journey. The classic journey indicates the Goddess will provide a boon to the Hero, who must bring it down from the Heavens to share with the world below. And after all, what better gift is there than the divine presence of the Goddess herself.
The Goddess concerned here has been described as the ‘unified totality of all ideas of the Divine Feminine’. Aleister Crowley describes her as the primordial Power that pervades reality, the guide and womb of All, for she has ‘yielded herself up to everything that liveth, and hath become a partaker in its mystery. And because she hath made her self the servant of each, therefore is she become the mistress of all’.
The road to the Goddess becoming a regular presence in my life, rather than just a chance encounter was a difficult one, and is a theme I’ll touch on in my next article. This vision describes the start of this process, which will be examined further in this article, with the parallel effect in my real life detailed at the end.
Recap from the first vision
The first vision described the start of the initiate’s journey towards the Goddess. The vision describes undergoing a process of judgment, before being allowed to see the reality of what is termed the Midnight Mystery. This judgment process essentially involved entering an incubation where my old self would be extinguished, and only my ‘heart as light as a feather’ would remain.
Upon completing this process, I was provided a glimpse of the Midnight Mystery, wherein it felt a new world was revealed to me, and I was bathed in the baptismal primordial waters of creation. This was also represented in the vision as ‘a mass of lizards’ teeming in the darkness that await release within the heart. The dark, barren nature of what was seen indicate a hidden state of latency and potential that reside within our Self and awaits expression.
By bearing witness to this mystery, the initiate is commonly understood to be changed irrevocably, signifying a readiness to bear it into existence. The initial state of the mystery is hidden, but by art it can be transmuted into a manifest state. As will be seen, this mystery - the primordial waters, our hidden essence that resides within the heart - is one and the same with the Goddess.
The mystery
A black cube lays upon an obelisk ..
I open the cube to find translucent marble
Which also opens
Revealing a soft white light that emerges from it
A precious jewel
A healing light that glows with a motherly presence ..
That holds all knowledge worth knowing in the physical world
The light dissolves into stardust ..
The second vision kicks off by expanding on the mystery revealed from the first. The above passage indicates a completed process, whereby the initiate has penetrated into the depths of his heart, symbolized by the black cube, to unlock the essence within. The mystery is represented as a precious jewel, or as Jung puts it the ‘treasure hard to attain’.
What was originally understood to be an impersonal essence - barren and primordial waters - is now revealed to share in the essence of the Goddess, a soft light glowing with a motherly presence. It is further indicated this light holds a key to ‘all knowledge worth knowing in the physical world’. This hints where we are eventually heading on this journey. While the vision currently depicts a far-off landscape in the heavens, this passage indicates the mystery is capable of bridging the gap between heaven and earth, providing a conviction on real world matters once the boon is born into existence.
The Goddess
A nurturing presence bathed in moonlight
A guardian with the face of a beautiful motherly woman..
A caring presence I've seen many times
Who wishes the best for me
Offering sweet words of love and understanding
When all I see is absence and blackness ..
She tells me she is Wisdom ..
She tells me she appears when all seems lost ..
She tells me she is the Sky Goddess .. that glory awaits ..
My heart is open and attuned
To exercise Divine Power and Spirit
The Goddess appears in the vision using classic symbology, bathing the initiate in moonlight upon a great sea. These ideas evoke Binah, the womb of the Universal Mother that gives shape to the Spirit of God. She mentions she is the Sky Goddess, alluding to the Egyptian goddess Nuit and the Greek goddess Hera, who unique among almost all the religions represented the upper Sky aspect as feminine.
Her representation as Wisdom indicates she is the final step of human knowledge, the end result of Understanding. In classic mythology, it is the feminine aspect that participates with humanity, acting as the guide, or the soul of humanity. She is present to guide us through the darkness, when we become deluded or lose our way. And she is similarly the authority that bestows initiation once wisdom has been attained. As indicated earlier, by witnessing the mystery she has deemed me ready to bear her boon in my heart to exercise her ‘Divine Power and Spirit’.
The Ruby
The precious jewel appears once more
Centered in my heart
A ruby
An indestructible jewel that emits Fire
That shines with the Fire of the ancestors ..
The union of heart and mind ..
No other glamor can.. distract from its Light
And once revealed is the Only Light I ever need Follow..
The Goddess in the Heavens, as Nuit or Hera, can be understood as a Divine feminine principle. The Goddess is the principle of infinite space wherein new forms and ideas are able to gestate, but being an ideal principle, she is unmanifest herself. Providing the Ruby to the initiate allows her to bestow an individual manifestation of herself, particular to each initiate, and is the means by which the initiate comes into communion with her. One might even imagine another initiate receiving some other symbolic boon, perhaps a seedling or mineral.
It is through the medium of this boon that the Goddess acts as a guide for the initiate. By attending to the urgings of the Goddess, the initiate cultivates her essence and allows it to grow within the heart. The alchemists couched this process in terms of a tree analogy. The trials I would soon undergo is termed the ‘nigredo’, and is essentially the seed or the fecund black earth that is cultivated to grow the Tree of Creation within and bear fruit.
The ruby burns with the ‘Fire of the ancestors’, exercising a fascination that through cultivation will come to shine brighter. In time it will represent an assurance and conviction that can be relied on, and whose devotion means that it’ll provide all the guidance needed to move forward in the world.
Real life parallel
The events from the vision revealed so far represent a progression in growth, developed through a regular spiritual practice. This growth is enabled through regular meditation, which helps to cultivate a space wherein the unconscious, or what may be understood from the vision as the Goddess, can enter into communion with me. This might take place through dreams, or synchronistic events or dramas in my life, which I might then make sense of in order to come to a new insight or realization, thereby deepening my relationship with the Goddess.
It’s also important to note that it’s only in hindsight that the meaning of these events start to gain clarity. Only now with a more developed understanding, and with the benefit of other events that have happened since that present a more complete picture, can I look back and see clearly the influence of the Goddess in my life. At the time, this was seen less clearly, and appeared instead to be a series of fortunate events that I felt like I was being guided down.
The most significant parallel in how this vision manifested in my life was in relation to my career. I mentioned in my previous article how I was keen to change job roles, and underwent a job search for some time. Around the time the initial vision concluded, I was offered an opportunity from a client who were keen to bring me onboard. This felt analogous to meeting the Goddess where ‘everything was falling into place’ and that I was ‘being taken care of’. For a brief period, there was an intense burst of optimism from this sense of communion, wherein it felt like a great weight had been lifted from my shoulders, and I directed my energy to new hobbies, a new diet and new exercise routines.
This optimism however would prove to be short lived. The crash down to earth resulted from commencing the role, and finding it would not quite match up to what I was hoping for. This would induce the commonly documented experience of entering ‘the Abyss’ wherein it would seem the Goddess had abandoned me, and everything that had previously seemed to bear fruit would come to dry up. The answer to this dilemma will be documented in the next article. It would involve developing on the false understanding that the ‘divine’ can only be found in the far off Heavens, and coming to see it is found in the prison of our darkest, most chthonic being as well.