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Andrew Jones, Of Her, 2006, digital
androidjones.com
CoSM Journal V
contents:
1-6 Chartres Cathedral: Jim Garrison & Zachariah Gregory
7-12 Human Anatomical Dissection: A,A & Z Grey
13-16 Electric Sheep: Spot Dravesv
17-18 Illuminated landscapes: Peter Terezakis
19-26 Egyptian Mysteries:
Nicki Scully & Starwolf
27-32 Burning Man:
Daniel Pinchbeck & A. Leo Nash
34-38 Bartering with the Gods:
Alex Stark
39-41 Letter to a Student:
Jason Louv
42-44 Damanhur
Esperide Ananas
45-49 Ritual theater:
Eve Bradford
5o-54 The Prayformace
of S.K.Thoth
55 Personal Ritual
Denny Daikeler
56 The art of L. Caruana
57-58 Blair Blake
59-62 Confessions of a Live Painter:
Andrew Jones
63-64 Crystal and Spore
66 -68 Eggs on End: Donna Henes
69-72 The Thoth Tarot:
Aleister Crowley & Lady Freida Harris
73 - 74 Of Thee I Sing: Brett Bevel
75-76 Sukaya: Wear your prayers
77-80 CoSM Fire
81-85 Liminal Village 2006: Naasko Wripple
86-90 Set and Setting: Kevin Sachs
91-94 Intergalactic Accelerators: Bryan DeFlores
95-98 The art of Ann McCoy
Ritual & Mystery Schools
Published by
Cosm Press
Chief Editors:
Alex Grey, Allyson Grey
Creative Directors,
Graphic Design,
Production
Marisa Scirocco, Eli Morgan­
­
Advertising:
Marisa Scirocco, Eli Morgan
Contributing Artists:
Alex Grey
Allyson Grey
Derick Ion
Eli Morgan
Gizem Bacaz
Jeffery Howel
Kris Waldherr
Kyle Hailey
Marisa Scirocco
A.Leo Nash
Orata
Sijay James
Susana Bates
­William Radacinski
Zachariah Gregory
Zena Grey
Contributing Writers:
Alex Grey
Allyson Grey
Alex Stark
Andrew Jones
Ann McCoy
Bryan Deflores
Brett Bevel
Daniel Pinchbeck
Denny Daikeler
Eli Morgan
Esperide Ananas
Eve Bradford
Jason Louv
Jim Garrison
Julie Van Amerongen Kevin Sachs
Linda Star Wolf
Nicki Scully
Peter Terezakis
S.K. Thoth
Spot Draves
St. Even
Zachariah Gregory
Zena Grey
CoSM Press
542 W. 27­­­t h Street,
Fourth Floor
New York, NY 10001
Contributing Editor:
Bethany Morgan
Web Master:
Peter Terezakis
­­­­
Mac Technical
Director
Joe Saponare
Cover:
Chartres Cathedral,
photo by Jeff Saward
Back Cover: ­
Burnt Offering, performance
by Alex Grey 1983
This Page:
Living Cross, performance by
Alex and Allyson Grey, 1983
Website: www.cosm.org
Email: [email protected]
CoSM Journal, published by the Chapel of Sacred Mirrors, provides a forum for the emergence of Visionary
Culture. CoSM Journal shares with it’s readers the work and stories of artists, thinkers, and community builders who are dedicated to transformative living, and committed to the integration of
wisdom and the arts. CoSM Journal is offered to inform, connect, and inspire this evolving global awareness.
The Chapel of Sacred Mirrors (CoSM), located at 542 W. 27th St., 4th floor, is a sanctuary in New York City
for contemplation and a center for events encouraging the creative spirit.
The Sacred Mirrors, on display in the Chapel, are a series of paintings that allow us to see ourselves and each
other as reflections of the divine. CoSM provides a public exhibition of the Sacred Mirrors and the most outstanding works of mystical art by Alex Grey. The Chapel of Sacred Mirrors is a 501(c)(3) organization, supported
solely by charitable donations from the community. If you would like to make a contribution to the Chapel of
Sacred Mirrors, please send checks to
COSM, London Terrace, PO box 20668, New York, NY 10011
or make donations on-line at www.cosm.org.
All known societies perform rituals. Ceremonial acts, whether prescribed by tradition or
decreed by a religion, are behaviors or actions that have symbolic value. Rituals are performed by
individuals alone or by a community. Some rituals comply with religious obligations and satisfy the
emotional needs of practitioners. Rituals can strengthen the bonds of the community, demonstrate
respect or submission, and are often performed to obtain acceptance. Schools, clubs, political groups
and the justice system are all chock full of rituals. Even shaking hands or greeting a person with
“hello” are rituals so common that they could be overlooked as belonging to that category.
A mystery school has been defined as “a university of the soul.” To those that pursue mastery, a
curriculum that includes rituals, practices, exercises and initiations, can reveal mysteries of the inner
nature of humanity and its surroundings. Understanding this inner nature leads to an intimate
relationship with divinity. Through self-discipline and devotion, the mystery school student merges
with an inner God. An esoteric school can empower the seeker to recognize their inherent wisdom
and self-guidance system. For those aspiring for greater clarity and personal awareness in their life,
a mystery school can be a highly spiritual training.
The Islamic ritual of prayer five times daily came from a transmission to Mohammed from Allah.
The Koran teaches that Allah originally instructed Mohammed to have the people pray fifty times
each day, but an apparition of Moses conversed with Mohammed and convinced him to appeal to
the Almighty claiming that people would never be willing to pray so often daily. After extensive
negotiations, Allah approved five daily prayer rituals.
Jews wear boxes on their foreheads and wrists when they pray. Catholics confess to an anonymous person behind a screen and repeat ritual prayers to cleanse their wrongdoings. The Buddhists
Vajrayana tradition advises the practitioner to regard daily cleaning activities, actions that could be
performed unconsciously or obligatorily, such as doing the dishes, to be given symbolic density as
ritual purification of a mandala of the deities.
We ourselves have engaged in rituals both traditional and self-made. We’ve walked on hot coals,
gone on pilgrimages, attended retreats and religious ceremonies, and participated in many cultural
traditions both spiritual and secular. Socially prescribed behavior resulted in a lovely wedding thirty
years ago where Alex broke a glass under foot as was the custom of Allyson’s Jewish ancestors
through time immemorial. Mazel tov. By practicing the ancient tradition of walking the labyrinth
at Chartres Cathedral, we connected to beings nearly a thousand years ago who had followed the
exact same path. We participated in traditions designed by the Damanhurians, who refer to ritual
as a technology for uniting humanity with spiritual forces, and whose ceremonies in recent decades
have served as portals to inner realms. Numerous performances of our own creation, such as circling
a prayer wheel, prostrating before the Goddess, lying motionless in a bed of roses and apples, etc.,
have served as rites in our self-styled mystery school.
Contemporary spiritual leaders have brought ancient mysteries into contemporary focus.
The Masonic and Hermetic traditions including the Order of the Golden Dawn and the
Rosicrucians, and modern day consciousness researchers and leaders such as Jean Houston, and
Jim Garrison of Wisdom University have all resurrected the ancient modality of Mystery Schools
as a context for the path to enlightenment. The function of a mystery school is anamnesis, a term
coined by Socrates meaning the remembering of our timeless divine nature which we have forgotten. Socrates, who participated in the Eleusinian Mystery School, a cult known to have used a
psychedelic inebriant, called the Kykeon, taught that the soul is immortal, being repeatedly
incarnated, and that knowledge actually dwells in the soul from eternity, but is forgotten in the shock
of birth. Seen through the proper lens, any activity, either mundane or glorified, could be performed
passionately as a ritual enacted for the recall or realization of our already awakened God-self.
Love,
Alex and Allyson
New Chartres School
by Jim Garrison
Wisdom University is pleased to announce
the establishment of the New Chartres
School, building upon and reinterpreting the
mystery school that flourished in Chartres,
France a thousand years ago and out of
which the great Chartres Cathedral,
called the “Mother Cathedral,” was
built. The School is intended as a
gathering point for the larger wisdom
community and as a symbolic way of
both expressing the essence of what
the university represents and the
future direction to which the university is committed.Chartres has been
a focal point for the mysteries of
healing and birth as well as a center
where the divine feminine has been
reverenced since the Druids first
consecrated the site over 3,000
years ago.
By the time of
Fulbertus and his School two
thousand years later, Chartres
was a recognized locus of
powerful healing, artistic and
creative energies, and the adoration of the feminine. The
Cathedral that was erected
by the School stands unsurpassed in its beauty and
grace. It is the Taj Mahal
of the West, dedicated as
the Taj Mahal was, to
adoration of the feminine.
The great mythologist
Joseph Campbell called
Chartres the “womb of
the world.”
We are convening the New Chartres School and
inviting the larger wisdom community to participate
because we believe there is a need for people of good
will to come together and engage in an initiation
process drawing for its inspiration on a wisdom
school that was established in times very
similar to our own and which can
therefore inform us in addressing our challenges today. As
Bernard of Chartres said,
“We are dwarfs carried on
the shoulders of giants.”
It is humbling to know,
for instance, that what
we consider our modern
notion of “Liberal Arts”
was a term actually used
by the founders of the
Chartres School a thousand years ago. In a time
of crisis in education the
world over, it is salutary
to look back and revisit the
original meanings and intentions of such a term. We also
discuss “world citizenship” as
if that is something that pertains only to our modern world.
Yet the founders of the Chartres
School saw world citizenship as
the goal of their Liberal Arts curriculum. For them, true education was
based on understanding the mysteries of personal and social transformation, expressed through the subtleties of
alchemy, music and sacred art.
Because one of the principle aims of that original
School was to cultivate world citizenship, our New
Chartres School will place a special emphasis on the wisdom aspect of a
specific tradition, beginning with Sufism (2006), Kabalism (2007), Christian
medieval mysticism (2008), Vedic mysticism (2009), Shamanism (2010),
Tibetan Buddhist mysticism (2011) and integral mysticism (2012).
The Chartres School was dedicated to birthing the divine human through adoration of the divine feminine. This belief was memorialized in stone and glassp.2
in the sweeping Gothic architecture of the Cathedral, which they viewed as a
form of sacred writing. No one has ever been buried
in the Cathedral. It is completely dedicated
to the theme of birthing and renewal.
Over 400 images of the feminine grace
its walls and stained glass windows,
almost all in some act of birthing.
The Seven Liberal Arts developed by Fulbertus and the original
Chartres School were comprised
of a theme of basic instruction,
a guiding planet, and a historical personage who represented that particular stage of learning. What Wisdom University
has developed is seven intensives
which are based on the seven liberal
arts but which are adapted to the challenges of the twenty first century. What will be
different are the themes, the participants, the books, the sites. What
remains the same is the commitment to learning through an
initiatory engagement with the
mysteries of transformation.
We envision a similar seven
stage
initiatory
process
reworked as Seven Intensives.
They will be based on the
Seven Liberal Arts but reinterpreted in our modern context.
Each Intensive will consist of
seven days of instruction and
learning. Our New School
was inaugurated in Chartres
July 2-7, 2006 with a panoply
of teachers, including Alex
and Allyson Grey who teach
through Wisdom University
and are part of the core faculty
in Chartres.­
An historian, author and foreign policy organizer, Jim Garrison received a Master Degree in
world religions from Harvard Divinity School, and a PhD in Philosophical Theology from
Cambridge University. Garrison became President of Wisdom University in 2005 after
serving as President of the State of the World Forum which he founded in partnership with
President Mikhail Gorbachev and Senator Alan Cranston. Organizations founded and
directed by Garrison include the Radiation and Health Information Service, the Christic
Institute, Esalen Institute’s Soviet-American Exchange Program, the International Foreign
Policy Institute, and the Gorbachev Foundation/USA­­. www.wisdomuniversity.org
p.3
p.4
Chartres Cathedral
Drawings and poetry by Zachariah Gregory
Spiritual experience of a lifetime.
Surrounded by Spirits, tall and swift,
Brought instantaneous, uncontrollable weeping,
A subtle and causal energy baptism,
A bath of love and ecstasy.
Voices whispered, “You are here. You created this.”
A woman, clear and direct, asked,
“Are you ready to walk the labyrinth?”
Fearing the power of transformation.
Certain that it meant nothing,
My first foot set on the pattern of stone.
A choir of thirty angels erupted through.
Stripped of pain and blockage.
Sacraments would become my nourishment,
Energy directed toward art
And the Glory of the Great God.
Supreme grace, recognizing my history
with the Cathedral,
Offered dispensation, absolution, exceptions,
Permission from the Divine Feminine,
To view, draw, photograph, and experience
with respect.
All evening sketching buttresses.
Climbing high on the scaffold,
Eye level with the center of the moon tower,
As far back as the cross of the cross,
High enough to watch the Sun God set
As he has for 1000 years plus.
Breaking bread,
Saying prayers for health, continuing
prosperity and vision
For loved ones and
The Chapel of Sacred Mirrors.
The Cathedral crawled with tessellating
spotted vesicas,
Fusing me with psychedelic colored sculpture
In meditation and shamanic practice,
Releasing mysterious sounds.
The Heavens shimmered
And the moon flew through the sky,
Opening to the Truth of God.
Zachariah Gregory is a New York based artist born in
California. A painter and premier tattoo artist, Zachariah
is an artist assistant to Alex Grey and staff member of
the Chapel of Sacred Mirrors. PerceptionRising.com
p.5
p.6
Dissecting table as Meditation cushion. The act of disassembling a
human body can have psychic repercussions that benefit from a spiritual
perspective. While carving away a human skin pelt and many pounds of
connective and fatty tissue, I would think that I am cutting away my
attachment to my body, or I am performing an outer Chod practice in a
modern charnal ground –­­getting your mind to leave your body and cutting
away the skull cap, hacking up and brewing one’s own body parts to serve the
Buddha, the deities, demons and dakinis. No. I’m an artist obsessed with
anatomy. Allyson and I joined Zena, our daughter, on her return visit to Gil
Hedley’s “Human Anatomical Dissection” class, a 6-day course that takes
the participant through the psychic layers of dissociation around Death and to the Core
of Wonders that is human anatomy.
We cut, meditated, and drew.
p.7
When we see any other being we “model” them, we “mirror” them and see how we
relate to them – how I relate to you. There are not many people that you skin with
a scalpel. There are not many people from whose body cavities you scoop the intestinal bouquet into the air. It is a rarified privilege, a holy unfolding, unpacking and
undoing, an unraveling of the biggest mystery school and most amazing architecture
I’ve ever visited. The human body of the donor, I don’t know his name, but I
drew his body in many stages of undoing and my identity
unraveled in the process.
The skin peeled off the scalpel like the rind of an orange. The white of the orange is
the superficial fascia that blankets the form entirely. The superficial fascia is oogly,
runny, smelly, slimy, globular, yellow, red, green, would make excellent fuel. The
eyeball did not “pop” out by any means. It had to be carved out. Inside the eyeball
is a small white disc and gray, sticky goo. Teasing out the muscles of the hand and
around every finger laid bare strong, white fibers clinging tightly to the bone.
Deep psychotherapy and inter-reflection. Like walking a labyrinth, oneself
is revealed to oneself. Every dissectionist is a leader, a negotiator, a strategist. Interpersonal skills are challenged. Practicing non-attachment, revealing
ego, judgement, and self revelation.
A family retreat shared with twenty-two
other somanauts, journeying through an
intense six-day mystery school. Our
community for the duration experienced
this teaching together and were deepened. Tenderest of all is the memory of
this sacred week spent with Alex and
Zena. How lucky to have two such
powerful people to share pilgrimage. ­- Allyson Grey
­- Alex Grey
p.9
p.10
Maybe the reason I’m so reticent to
document verbally any part of my
experience is because I feel that an
interaction with something so divinely
honest is beyond words, or mine at least.
Through six days, I was constantly being
pulled between a feeling of innate smallness by being but a minuscule part of such a
complex unfathomable force, and this other
sense of almost godliness to be able to
entirely excavate and unravel an object in it’s
most honest state. But overall the sense of
diminutiveness overrides because you see how
little one can actually ever know about another
human being without physically inhabiting that
person. In the end, I walk away with a feeling
of universal unknowing, and I find comfort in
that. You think about all the ubiquitous
questions the average human must ask
himself: “why am I here?”, “why do we
die/why are we born?”, et cetera. When
we ask ourselves these questions we
almost inherently know we will never
find the answers to them, yet we
persist until the day we die. By
dissecting a cadaver[s], I find myself
closer to a feeling of wonderment
for everything. And a feeling of
closeness to every thing around me
because of that same universal
cluelessness we all share.
­- Zena Grey
Eyeball by Allyson Grey
Eyeball by Alex Grey
Eyeball by Zena Grey
For more information about the
dissection workshops of Gil Hedley, Ph.D., go to
somanautics.com ­& integralanatomy.com
p.12
Electric Sheep: Spot Draves
p.13
p.14
Electric Sheep is a free, open source screen saver run by thousands of people all over
the world. It can be installed on any ordinary PC or Mac. When these computers
“sleep,” the screen saver comes on and the computers communicate with each other
by the internet to share the work of creating morphing abstract animations known as
“sheep.” The result is a collective “android dream,” an homage to Philip K. Dick’s
novels Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep.
Anyone watching one of these computers may vote for their favorite animations
using the keyboard. The more popular sheep live longer and reproduce according
to a genetic algorithm with mutation and cross-over. Hence the flock evolves
to please its global audience. You can also design your own sheep and submit them
to the gene pool.
Electric Sheep realizes the collective dream of sleeping computers from all over the
internet. It’s a distributed screen-saver that harnesses idle computers into a render
farm with the purpose of animating and evolving artificial life-forms. All the software
is open source and users may participate in the network freely and anonymously.
Anyone can download and install it. When their computer is idle and goes to sleep,
the sheep animations appear, and in parallel the computer goes to work creating new
sheep and sharing its results with all other users.
Each sheep is about 4 seconds long. Its shape, motion, and color are specified by a
genetic code, a long string of numbers. If a user sees a sheep they like, they may press
the up arrow key to vote for it. Sheep that receive more votes live longer and are more
likely to reproduce. These votes form a fitness function for the aesthetic evolution of
the flock. Users can also download software to manually design genomes and post
them to the server where they join the flock.­
I believe the free flow of code is an increasingly important social and artistic force.
The proliferation of powerful computers with high-bandwidth network connections
forms the substrate of an expanding universe. The electric sheep, and we their
shepherds, are colonizing this new frontier.
-Spot
Scott Draves a.k.a. Spot is a video and software artist
residing in New York City and San Francisco. He is the
creator of the Fractal Flame algorithm, the Bomb visual-musical
instrument, and the Electric Sheep distributed screen-saver. All of
Draves’ software artworks are released as open source and distributed free on the internet. His award-winning work has appeared in
Wired Magazine, the Prix Ars Electronica, the O’Reilly Emerging
Technology Conference, and on the dance-floor at the Sonar festival
in Barcelona. He projects live video for underground parties and
at clubs, and self-publishes SPOTWORKS, a DVD of abstract
animation synchronized with electronic music. His current project is
Dreams in High Fidelity, a painting that evolves, and is installed in
the lobby of Google’s headquarters.
p.15
p.16
Peter Terezakis – Illuminated landscapes
Since their 1996 genesis in Pennsylvania’s countryside, Peter Terezakis has set his evening-length kinetic light installations in remarkable vistas across Europe, the United
States, and Mexico. After moving to San Diego in 2001, he has made these monthly
light installations coincident with CoSM’s Full Moon events as a way to maintain
rapport with friends far away, while exploring the extents of a developing a ritual
practice that has become his means of spiritual engagement. p.17
Whether experienced in Vlad the Impaler’s Romanian castle, on the heady playa at
Burning Man, or at the abandoned landscape of the Salton Sea, the shifting volumes
of light alter perception of physical space and evoke a sense of movement beneath the
vault of heaven.
Evocative images and videos from the work can be viewed at terezakis.com.
p.18
An abbreviated excerpt from Shamanic Mysteries of Egypt
Consider
the possibility
that we on planet Earth
are part of a dream, an
experiment in consciousness
that was seeded on this planet
eons ago. We are all subject
to the natural cycles of life,
and the consequences of our
choices. Currently, we have
entered adolescence replete with a
seemingly hormonal lust to become
adult gods before we have the spiritual maturity and skill to take full
responsibility for our actions and the
technological advancements that threaten
our extinction. We’re like teenagers playing
chicken with the family car. The results
are and can be devastating. As we take
stock of our collective situation, we realize
that nothing short of a quantum leap in
consciousness and awareness will be sufficient to turn this run-away car around.
In the Age that we are entering,
every person must regain his or her
sovereignty, and in so doing become
as a Pharaoh. The days of charismatic
leaders and saviors are over; no one is
going to rescue us from the mess we
have created. Each of us must step up
to the plate and re-member ourselves,
and our sacred purpose for being here
on the planet, now.
p.19
photo by Eli Morgan. Egypt 1995
p.20
In Old Kingdom Egypt, the pharaoh held the power
for the entire empire. He was initiated into the highest
levels of a sophisticated shamanic/mystical tradition
that placed him on equal footing with the gods. In order to
sustain his vigor and power he had to periodically renew
his connection with the neteru, the gods who are the spiritual source of vitality and wisdom. Details of the rites of the
renewal of the King can be found in texts carved into interior pyramid walls, such as those within the Pyramid of Unas at Sakkara.
They describe in great detail the Sed Festival and accompanying
rites for the jubilee that was celebrated each 30 years of the pharaoh’s reign (although these rites were usually practiced more frequently). Undergoing rigorous initiations and rituals, the pharaoh
entered other dimensions of spirit in order to refresh his connections
to source in communion with the gods. Through these rites he also
renewed his body, including all the organs, and especially the heart.
Many of the venerable traditional spiritual paths of various
cultures on our planet take years to learn, are restricted, and
are inaccessible to most people. Others ceased to grow and
atrophied as a result of rigid fundamentalism. New mystery
schools are surfacing to assist us in our modern world. In order
for us to perpetuate our existence and quality of life, we may
need to adapt in order to survive in the poisoned world we have
created. Evolution is a slow process, and we simply don’t have
time. New iterations of shamanic initiations such as those given
to pharaohs of old may provide the boost that we require.
Ancient Egyptian adepts left maps for us, some written on papyri
and some carved in stone and intended to defy time. Some are hidden,
waiting for their perfect time of discovery like termas in the Tibetan
tradition, treasures that contain enigmatic teachings that, with
appropriate interpretation and guidance, can help us restore our selves
and our world. If we can read them with the eyes of the heart, we may be
able to find our way.
Anubis is the ‘Opener of the Way,’ the psychopomp who is known to be the
shaman priest who presides over the rites of the renewal of the heart. In the
following abbreviated excerpt from my new book co-authored with Linda Star
Wolf, Shamanic Mysteries of Egypt, Awakening the Healing Power of the Heart,
Anubis gives us a glimpse of the possibilities of modern iterations of ancient rites.
I have merged two chapters here, and edited them to provide a “stand-alone”
experience of Anubis and his father, Osiris.
p.21
Abbreviated and merged excerpt from Chapter 12, Anubis, and Chapter 13, Osiris:
Anubis, the heart/mind priest who presides over these shamanic mysteries
of ancient Egypt teaches is to perceive love, life, and death from a new
perspective, and walk between the worlds of life and death. . . . Life is
light condensed into thick, dense form, with the molecules pulled in close
and tight. Death is the vast space in between the molecules. Both are
illusions once you fully comprehend their nature and the ease with
which we can move from one to the other and back.
The image of Anubis appears turned upside down like the image of
the Hanged Man in the Tarot, conveying the message of changing your point of view. In helping us to see things from a different
perspective, Anubis teaches us compassion for our own journeys
as embodied humans. He lures us into death, and lovingly
presents us to his father, Osiris. He introduces us to the
promise of what will come when we die, and the knowledge that
there is a renewal/resurrection.
­­­
The Osiris mysteries are at the forefront of the search for
comprehension of the questions that compel us to grow and
evolve. His is everyone’s story, and in Egypt it was the goal of
every person to become and awaken as Osiris. It is by our inevitable journey through the dark mysteries of the time of the missing
sun, the dark hours of the night and the unknown, that we are
re-membered and are conjoined once again with the neterworld of consciousness and divinity.
We hold the seeds for the future world. It is in our
death, in our willingness to surrender our old
form that we give birth to future generations.
It is out of our demise—our death and
disappointments—that we get the choice
to either awaken or stay asleep. Death is
a temporary immersion into a divine,
blissful energy state, not a boring,
blissful place of eternal harps.
The heaven or nirvana one
seeks is not a sacred place,
rather it is a sacred intelligence, in which we are
form, or formless.
p.22
Journey with Anubis and Osiris
­
Prepare sacred space. Ground and center. Find and
kindle your heart flame with love . . . Breathe the heart
breath, inhaling simultaneously from Earth and Sky, feeding
your heart flame and exhaling radiant light out into the world.
. . . In the light of your heart flame, you find yourself in Egypt, at
the edge of the Nile. . . .
On the shore there is a large tree with twisting branches. One branch
is leaning out over the Nile, and from it, Anubis is hanging upside down
with his head only a foot above the water, in deep meditation. He looks
like a mummy with a golden rope around both his feet. His arms are crossed
over his chest. As you come to this place you are struck by this image; it’s as
if he is in the womb, or incubating somehow, or as if he is a great yogi in deep
meditation awaiting the answer to some important mystery.
As if in response to his receptivity, the Nile says, “I am the reflection of the
Milky Way. I am the mirror of galactic center. Just as all the cosmic material is
swirling in the Milky Way and you reside there as your star self. Here, beneath
my surface, are all of the primal elements that are needed to become human.
This is where human beings were born, in my waters. I am the reflection.
I am the Duat. Some know me as the Underworld, but the truth is,
I am the inner world, for you were born within my arms, within
my body. You become part of me as you walk to the shoreline
S i t
now, ready to offer Anubis your intention to learn what
facing the
he has to teach you about surrender. . . .”
river and ponder Anubis, and
the concept of surrender he is so eloquently expressing to you. Take
as long as you need to fathom
what it might be like to face
letting go in this way. . . . [Long
pause.] Suddenly the golden
chord turns into a golden snake.
It uncurls itself from around
Anubis’s holy feet. He is Jesus.
He is Kuan Yin. He is you, we.
He is every god/goddess that has
become human. When the snake
has loosened its hold, Anubis
drops sleekly into the water. He
doesn’t even make a splash as he
disappears from view. . . .
“I vision quested in this cave overnight in order to receive initiations that are in the Shamanic
Mysteries of Egypt. I believe it is a shaman’s cave used by the ancient people whose hand-
At this
moment you must
trust in that which you cannot see.
Go to your mind’s eye and ask yourself the question,
“Can I trust in that which I know but do not see?” Sit with this koan
by the river’s edge and meditate upon it to see what comes. . . . [Pause.]
After sitting in this reflective place of the heart/mind, take a deep breath. Put your
feet in the water. Know that you, too, are entering more deeply into the sacredness of
becoming fully human. . . . [Pause. . . )
Imagine yourself now as Anubis, hanging from the tamarisk tree over the waters
of the Nile. . . .Take the time to feel yourself enter absolute peace of mind and
stillness— a tranquil state of full surrender. You hang there as the sun rises and
sets, as the winds blow, as the rain falls, as the moon goes through its phases. In the
dimension of the neter-world, this will take as long as it takes. (Long pause. . .)
As Anubis, you take the plunge into the Underworld to meet Osiris and your death.
Surrender yourself completely. . . . Let yourself fall into the deep waters. . . . Let
yourself die to all that has been. . . . [Long pause.]
Within the absolute peace of your experience, eventually you will become reoriented
and will notice that there is a cave beneath the waters under the earth. Its entrance
is the portal through which you pass in order to join Osiris in the depths of the Duat
(the tomb/womb). . . . When you enter the cave beneath the waters, you see him,
looking at you with his bright blue compassionate eyes as he embraces you briefly
and you let go into his watery arms. . . . [Pause.] Magically, you feel yourself being
lifted back to the surface and gently returned to your position upon the welcoming
earth beside the water. Lie down beside the river and put your ear against the earth
with your eyes closed. You may feel a strong sense of longing as you listen for
Osiris. Listen. . . . His message is stirring beneath the earth. Allow it to come into
your being as it stirs you and stirs your heart. . . . [Pause.] Feel the transmutation as
the seeds of the future that have been gestating inside your heart now
begin to sprout. . . .
prints are found on its walls. Tools found nearby are 6500 to 7000 years old in what was then a
verdant region with lions and antelopes. It is now a remote, roadless desert in western Egypt.”
-NS
­­­
Perceive the seedlings as they send down their tiny roots. . . .
The roots spread down through your heart, down through your
body and through your legs and feet. . . . They spread out through
your arms and your hands. . . . They come out of your fingertips
and your toes and reach deep down into the earth so that they
continue to be nurtured from this rich Underworld energy. . .
Simultaneously feel the tiny sprouts emerging from your heart as
if they were a bouquet of flowers planted upon the earth of your
being, like the lotus that grows from the mud and the waters, or
a rose bush climbing. . . . You can see all of the wildflowers in the
mountains growing and generating out from your heart, and from
all across the top of your body, and spreading onto the land. . . .
There are water lilies and lotuses blooming over the water, and
all the plants that grow around the marshlands and the wetlands.
. . Forests spring up from the mountains, and flowers fill the
valleys. . . . Fruit trees bloom. . . . Butterflies and hummingbirds,
the bees, and all the birds emerge. . . . The great cornucopia of life
in its myriad of forms springs forth as the insatiable urge toward
life responds. . . . Nothing can hold it back.
Continue to contemplate these images of renewal and
awakening. [Long pause.]
When you are ready and the feeling of completion is upon you,
slowly open your eyes and see the beauty that surrounds you.
Ground and center. Express your gratitude to Osiris and Anubis
for these teachings. With a deep inner knowing, continue to contemplate the mysteries of transmutation from death to life and
rebirth. . . . Take some time to journal before you return to your
daily activities.
p.25
Book illustrations by Kris Waldherr
­­­­­
Shamanic Journeys offers travel services and work to build healing
and spiritual communities throughout the world. Nicki Scully is
the primary guide to an extra-ordinary world of spiritual tours,
both to sacred power sites and within the inner planes. Nicki also
offers seminars on the Egyptian Mysteries, Alchemical Healing,
metaphysics, and related healing arts designed to achieve planetary healing through personal transformation. Nicki’s new book,
Shamanic Mysteries of Egypt, Awakening the Healing Power
of the Heart is co-authored with Linda Star Wolf. This fresh
interpretation of the ancient Egyptian mysteries unites the heart
and mind to help us remember our true nature as divine humans
with sacred purpose. It guides readers through shamanic portals
of death, rebirth, and illumination and gives us powerful tools for
transformation. There are rituals, meditations, and rites of passage to help us meet our personal and planetary challenges with
more grace, wisdom, and love. This is a book to be experienced as
well as read. www.shamanicjourneys.com
Linda Star Wolf is the founding Director of Venus Rising
Institute for Shamanic Healing Arts and Creator of the
Shamanic Breathwork™ Process. Star Wolf has facilitated
groups and served as a guide to individuals moving through the
full spectrum of spiritual initiations, including addiction, mental illness, shamanic life changes and spiritual transformation.
shamanicbreathwork.org
p.26
Burning Man: Art in the Desert
Introduction by Daniel Pinchbeck photos by A. Leo Nash
excerpted from Burning Man: Art in the Desert by A. Leo Nash
W
hen I recall my visits to Burning Man, my mind fills with arcing
lasers and multicolored blinking lights, hallucinatory sunrises, hordes of costumed
revelers dancing in the dust, and the enormous bonfires that consume the hand-built
sculptures and structures at the end of the week. Burning Man is over-stimulation and cacophonous saturation, where the rhythm of your pulse syncs with the
electronic beats that pound 24/7, and sleep is an enemy to be conquered. Who can
bear to sleep when so much is happening at every moment, and the promise of so
much more is forever held out? At the very instant that you finally lay your weary
head down to rest, you can guarantee that somewhere on the Playa a Felliniesque
marching band is leading a parade of anarchic booty-shakers into the void, the next
great D.J. is spinning her first legendary set from a booth designed to evoke the
fishtail curves of an alien spacecraft, an occult ritual is honoring Isis or Baphomet
with opulent sincerity and evocative gestures, a Tesla coil is firing lightning bolts
at the stars, while a gorgeously tattooed and wickedly grinning couple display their
pole-dancing prowess, and an absinthe bar is just opening its doors.
Burning Man gives Attention Deficit Disorder a good name. And yet,
along with its madcap circus swirls and dazzling displays of human invention, there
are other layers and dimensions to the Burning Man experience – moments when
the vast silence of the Black Rock Desert (a prehistoric dry lake bed with no natural
plant or animal life) and its majestic harshness sweep over you; moments of Zenlike
stillness and existential purity; moments when there is nothing but you and the
dust. Every year, some of my best times are my quietest ones – bicycling past some
spindly sculptural artifact designed to jangle softly as the wind blows through it, or
passing a sleeping couple in fuzzy rave clothes, tangled together on a sofa left at the
periphery fence, facing a vast expanse of emptiness.
Revealing that unexpected underside of Black Rock City, A. Leo Nash’s
photographs use the subtle tones of black and white to capture the silence and
stillness that hides within the noise. They also isolate elements of a new formal vocabulary – jagged, raggedy, Krazy Kat meets Mad Max in a
post-Duchamp Pepperland – that has emerged from fifteen years
of experiment in the Nevada wasteland. This aesthetic collages natural forms with fragments of the old industrial
culture, welded and repurposed into sinuous and scaled
expressions of what the psychedelic philosopher
Terence McKenna liked to call “the Archaic
Revival,” the melding of our post-modern
techno-culture with ancient myth and
tribal ceremony.
p.27
p.28
Temple of Honor Minarets (2003)
Artists: David Best and the Temple Crew
In an age when handicra has been exiled to the margins, Burning Man
revives something akin to the lost craft traditions and guilds of the Middle Ages
– its art collectives, dreadlocked welders, sculptors, and technical experts have
apprenticed themselves in the use of fire, steel, plastic, concrete, EL wire, electricity,
and wind to create extraordinary spectacles. These artisans return year after year
to hone their skills and push the envelope a little further. As a repeat visitor, it is a
privilege to witness the evolution of groups like the Flaming Lotus Girls. A women’s
art collective, they upstage their own creations annually, from vertical flamethrowers
to crashed steel phoenixes, to 2005’s giant serpent coiled around its egg, breathing fire
and swiveling its endearingly menacing head via hydraulics.
The photographs collected in Burning Man: Art In the Desert wed the
aesthetic of Bernd and Hilla Becher, the German photographer couple who found an
accidental aesthetic wonderland of theme and variation in rusted water towers and
other relics of industrial consciousness that reveal a peculiar and startling poignancy when isolated from the surrounding landscape, to the imagination of Dr. Seuss,
spewing ever-new creative possibilities.
­­­
In Nash’s images, one also catches wisps
of Robert Frank, ­whose secretive portraits of lyrical desolation revealed the cruel
illusion of the American Dream. Nash has taken a minimalist approach to a
maximalist event, isolating a tonal poetry of sculptural forms in a vast, open
landscape. His book is a loving tribute to the art of Burning Man, the central focus of
the festival, though the deliciously hedonistic decadence often gets more ink.
There are subcategories of images in Nash’s work, such as those that
focus on vehicles, from mobile piano bars to transmuted bicycles and rocket cars, to
ineffable creations such as the one built by Michael Christian, memorialized
in Nebulous Entity (1998). As Carl Jung has discussed, the vehicles that carry
dreamers through their dreams indicate the different levels of velocity and selfconfidence with which they traverse the collective unconscious. The “art cars”
constructed for Burning Man open new realms of possibility for future dreamers.
Christian’s tentacled, semi-reptilian Entity appears in Nash’s image ready to rove
toward new vistas of imaginative crossover.
What Burning Man calls for, above all, is openness to transformation
and wonder. My first visit to the festival permanently changed my idea of art, as
well as expanding my belief in human possibility. Although I had written about
contemporary art for years, I felt distanced from it, uneasily following the
increasingly academic extension of movements such as pop and conceptual art that
had once seemed radical and subversive. Burning Man gave me a wider context for
considering creativity –­ in a sense, the greatest work of art at Black Rock City is
the entire metropolis, the container of the event, with its circular urban plan and
centralized avenues and zany street names, plus the self-organizing support
structures, from volunteer rangers to lamplighters. The sculptural aesthetic of
Burning Man mixes late-1960s land art, pop, surrealism, and conceptualism into
a new form, adding, as well, an extraordinary sense of scale that creates a unique
context for experiencing the work that appears there.
Many of Nash’s images ­– which are both “art about art” and works of art in
themselves – do a wonderful job of capturing that sense of scale. Part of what makes
the event feel explicitly American is its pioneering optimism and faith in the human
imagination to match any natural wonder. A picture such as “Anno Domino”
2000 AD2K contrasts a blown-up version of a modest game against distant
mountains and far-flung clouds. Other images play with representation in
classic deconstructive fashion - in one, a puppet-stage window opens onto
a vast dusty expanse; in another, a billboard of photographs of the ocean
conceal the desert just behind them.
It may be that the art of Burning Man is the new “movement”
that European and American contemporary art cognoscenti always
pretend they are looking for, changing the rules of creativity for a
new generation, but happening under their noses. Post-Burning
Man, I find I am less enthusiastic about art as the ego expression
of the individual genius, but more fascinated in art as the juncture
between the individual and the larger group. On the Playa, art
serves as an instrument for meshing together the community,
offering them a medium for discovery, for playing and praying,
as well as a lens for seeing themselves. It extends the notion of
conceptual and performance art to a wider field of human activity, recalling the surrealist doctrine that there should, truly, be no
distinction between art and life. When this distinction disappears,
product becomes process – and, appropriately, Nash takes a special
pleasure in photographing artworks under construction or deconstruction, or hovering somewhere inbetween.
When art and life merge, clock time disappears and we plunge into
the ecstatic, a temporality of the Archaic Revival, recovering an original
relationship to the cosmos. Before history and culture, before bureaucracy
and work, before cell phones and laptops, time was cyclical and circular.
Aboriginals in Australia believe that every day is the “first day,” the primordial beginning of time and being, and their art and ceremonies help to maintain the
creation in its proper order. For such tribal nomadic peoples, there never was a “fall
of man” into a degraded state. Their initiatory culture is a means of accessing the
higher vibrational frequencies of the Dreamtime, the ever-present origin of the Gods
and the Ancestors, which is hidden within the illusory density of the physical world.
The tens of thousands who make the annual pilgrimage to the Black
Rock Desert are seeking initiation into the perpetual present, utilizing the rusting
and groaning artifacts of our over-reaching industrial civilization to access what
is beyond time and the machine. According to prophecy, some Native American
cultures believe this era to be the time of “dreaming the world awake,” when our
post-modern secular world steps through the veil of matter, fusing modalities of
science and spirit to discover the infinite other worlds that lie within and without.
Eventually, Burning Man may reveal itself as more than an eccentric expression of
an old and new counterculture, but a harbinger of a new way of being. Only time will
tell. At the moment, it is – as we are – a work in progress.
Nash’s images offer an open-sky poetry of forms and fragments, a set of
secretive hints that reveal by concealing. Naturally, they have a different valence for
Burning Man veterans, who view them through the context of their own experiences
and perceptions, than for the art world spectator, who can appreciate their formal
elegance from a safer aesthetic distance. Nash has made his own thirteen-year desert
pilgrimage and come back with talismans that will help to bridge the cultural divide
between the art world cognoscenti, with their studied ironies, and those who are
compelled to unlock “the doors of perception” in their pursuit of a new iconic order.
p.31
Daniel Pinchbeck is the author
of Breaking Open the Head:
A Psychedelic Journey into
the Heart of Contemporary
Shamanism and 2012: The
Return of Quetzalcoatl. He
lives in New York.
A. Leo Nash is a photographer
whose work has been widely
exhibited. He is a creative participant at Burning Man and
collaborates with the artists
whose work he documents. He
lives in Oakland, Califonia.
Published by
Harry N. Abrams, Inc.
www.hnabooks.com
Rime of the Ancient Mariner (2003)
Artists: The La Contessa Crew
Uchronia at Dawn (2006)
Artists: Jan Kriekels, Arne Quinze, and crew
p.32
Among the Quechua Indians of Peru, Bolivia, and Ecuador,
a despacho ceremony is the centerpiece of a complex spiritual
and ritual heritage. Despacho ceremonies are performed to promote health, well-being and prosperity, or when calamity or
misfortune befalls the client. Despachos are also used to
thank for special events, to celebrate good luck, or to help
the soul of a deceased person journey into the beyond.
Despachos are performed to promote fertility in fields
and herds, to cure illness, or to undo harm or witchcraft. On very special occasions, despachos are also
performed when larger cultural or ecological
events threaten the entire community.
This precious full-color hardcover, meticulously
designed by the artists of CoSM Press, is a
remembrance of the exquisite Chapel of Sacred
Mirrors in New York City. CoSM leads
the reader on a guided tour through each magical
room in vivid detail, revealing the symbols and
meaning of every work of art in the Chapel.
140 pages, 5.3 x 7.5 in., $20
Available for sale at CoSM shop
cosm.org • alexgrey.com
Also Available from CoSM Press:
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TEMPLES of HUMANKIND
In the exciting art book, DAMANHUR: Temples of
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five-story underground maze of sacred halls built inside a
mountain, and kept secret for more than twenty years from
even their closest neighbors. Begun in 1977 in the Italian
Alps, the Temples of Damanhur were inspired by the vision
of spiritual leader Oberto Airaudi, also known as Falco.
Artists and artisans excavated and built this subterranean
sacred space, which is at last showcased in 204 exquisite
color photographs throughout this 10.5 x 13.75 inch, 122 page
book. Foreword by Alex Grey. $50.00 USD
Order from www.CoSM.org
The specialists who perform such ceremonies
are known as Pampa Altomisayoc, which
translates roughly as “high priests of the
ordinary realm,” the work “pampa”
referring both to the level ground of
agriculture as well as to the ordinary world of mortals. Over 200
different types of despachos have
been recorded, depending on the
results desired. In general terms, a
despacho is understood as a request
for good fortune, its name derived from
the Spanish word for missive, message,
or care package. This implies that the
ritualist is “sending a message” to the
realm of spirit in which a particular
outcome is being promoted.
photography by Eli Morgan. Peru 2007
Mauro 0f Qosqo
p.34
Depending on the purpose, a despacho may require the presence of the client,
an extended family, or the entire community. Despachos can be performed
by individual Altomisayocs, or by teams of altomisayocs, often paired into
male and female quadrilles.
The end product of a despacho ceremony is a graphic mandala made of a
wide assortment of natural and man-made products: seeds and vegetables,
gems and minerals, incenses, animal products, and man-made symbols that
may depict or symbolize the desired result. In all cases, however, the intent
is symbolic and metaphysical, and the understanding is that a despacho
allows the client or the community to request a result from the realm of spiritual power. Consequently, despachos are typically addressed to the larger
forces of nature: Pachamama (Mother Earth), Apukuna (mountain spirits),
Chaskakuna (the stars), Inti (the sun), and so on.
In addition, despachos can also be performed as a form of Ayni or
reciprocity with the universe. The concept of Ayni is central to Andean
shamanism and is based on a mutual dependency between humans,
nature, and spiritual forces. Ayni brings balance into our lives and creates
relationship between our secular and sacred worlds. Andean metaphysics
postulates that human health and well-being depend on balanced reciprocity
between all elements of life. Therefore, when soliciting a particular outcome
through a despacho, our obligation is not to pray or request for a particular
result, but rather to provide beauty, power and energy in the form of a graphic
mandala which can then be “exchanged” or bartered for the desired result.
p.35
p.36
When working with a despacho, the Altomisayoc is accessing the nonordinary dimensions of reality, the ultimate source of all things. In fact, though the
contents of the despacho may have symbolic significance, the intent of its creators
transcends any literal or symbolic content, directly accessing archetypal and energetic forces. Don Manuel Q’espi, an elder of the Q’ero tribe, spoke of despachos in this
way:
“The despacho is a gift – a giving back of what we receive everyday in our lives. We
seek, through the despacho ceremony, to bridge the ordinary and non-ordinary realms;
to establish new patterns of relationships and possibility. The despacho places us in
right relationship, right Ayni, with Pachamama and all of her manifestations.”
In order to create a despacho, the Altomisayoc must perfect a specific shamanistic
maneuver, the harmonization and balancing of three “bands” or levels of consciousness: yankay, the physical universe, yachay, the spiritual or wisdom realm, and
munay, the feeling or heart center. By integrating these qualities with personal intent,
the group intent, and gratitude to the earth and nature, which supports all of the
community’s endeavors, the despacho re-harmonizes and balances the community
into a single energetic body in which the luminous fibers which connect us all are
reaffirmed and strengthened.
p.37
The despacho contains symbols of everything: the elements, the
four directions, weather, clouds, mountains, rainbows, the fruits
of human labor, emotions, ideas, and so on. When the offering is
complete, the entire assemblage is folded, tied and wrapped in a
sacred weaving. It is then offered to the forces of nature either
by burning, burying, or by casting into water. The energy of
collective intention captured and contained in the despacho
is thus released into the universe, where its message of reciprocity and gratitude can reach the most appropriate agent for
manifestation. The result is renewed harmony and balance in
ordinary life.
Alex Stark is an internationally recognized consultant, advisor, and
teacher on issues of creativity, efficiency, and design. A graduate of
Yale University School of Architecture, he is a practitioner of Feng
Shui and European Geomancy. He advises on issues of design and
placement for residential, commercial, institutional, and industrial
facilities, urban settlements, health care facilities, and on issues of
institutional and personal transformation. Alex is CoSM’s resident
Shaman and initiated CoSM’s monthly full moon gatherings.
p.38
Letter to a Student on the Day
of Enrollment
in the Academy
by Jason Louv
Dear Student,
We commend you for your decision to enroll in our deeducational program at our Academy. We recognize that you
have a choice when seeking alternative education, and are
sure we will live up to your expectations.
Choosing to remove yourself from the normal course of
human life is no small matter. Though we celebrate your
clear passion to learn, your acumen in finding our school and
your exemplary performance on your entrance exams, we
remind you that the illusory nature of the world is maintained
wholly by, and for, the best interests of those who dwell in it,
yourself included. Upon graduation from the Academy, you
will be required to return to, and make your own way in, the
world. With degree in hand, however, we are confident that
you will more easily find your way to a successful life and
will be able to compete with the best in today’s marketplace.
Your classes will begin on Monday. Please find enclosed a
short prospectus of the work you will be expected to complete
in preparation for obtaining a degree. While other institutions
you may have been involved with during the time you have
so far elapsed on this planet—schools, family, peer groups,
government, religions, media—have been established in order
to educate you, at the Academy we are concerned with your
de-education and the reversal of that which you have learned
and experienced up to this point. We are licensed (by the
highest authorities) to use a wide array of the most modern
and scientifically advanced methods currently extant in order
to achieve this.
(Please also find attached a waiver form clearing us of any
legal responsibility for your physical, emotional or karmic
welfare during your time at our school. You will be required to
sign and bring this form with you on your first day of class.)
During their de-education and de-testing, students
will be required to pursue proficiency in identifying, and
demonstrating the illusory nature of, thirty-six principles or
veils which separate them from the infinite.
p.39
Initial study and experimentation will be conducted upon
the constitution of matter and the physical world. In your
worldly, exoteric education you will have hopefully gained
at least a passing knowledge of physics and be aware of the
superstring or M-theory that the universe is composed,
at base, of vibrations of tiny, supersymmetric strings.
However, a­­t our Academy you will be introduced to the
five esoteric principles—earth, water, air, fire and space—
which exist behind the vibration of matter and from
which all matter is constituted and patterned. Through
practical, hands-on classroom experimentation with the
manipulation of these principles via meditation and ritual,
students will soon be able to demonstrate the illusory and
arbitrarily malleable nature of matter to their, and their
instructors’, full satisfaction.
The next stage of the work will be conducted within the
student’s perceptual and mental faculties themselves, in
which the false identification with a further eighteen veils
of illusion dwelling therein will be removed from each
student. The first five—smelling, tasting, seeing,
touching and hearing—constitute each student’s
perceptions, and instructors are well-trained to practically demonstrate the extreme limitations of the senses
in relaying any legitimate data whatsoever. Directly
thereafter, the five subtle elements of smell, taste, sight,
texture and sound themselves will be demonstrated
as illusions, in and of themselves. Once the false
identification with perceptions and perceivables is
removed, so will each student’s false identification with
their actions. Here the student’s powers of speech,
grasping, moving, speaking and procreation will be shown
to have no agency or origination whatsoever in anything
approximating the student’s true self and to be, at this
stage, a distraction from that true self.
We warn in advance that during this stage the student
will likely experience extreme disorientation and agitation
as the faculties of perception and action they previously
identified as belonging to them and constituting them
as individuals are disproved as being anything but a
flickering picture show projected on the movie screen of
the mind. We remind you, however, that we are certified professionals and you need have no fear, for we will
quickly proceed to assist you in the reversal of the next
underlying principles. These are the mind’s constructed
image of the “world,” the mind’s constructed image of
the “self,” and the entire illusory proceedings of the vast
drama your mind constructs for you from your unreal
perceptions of unreal things.
Having completed the lessons of the external departments and gone completely inward, the student will soon
see that the “world” is an interplay between the false
belief that anything exists separately from the self and the
p.40
false belief that the self exists as separate from anything. Lessons
will immediately commence on identifying, and decommissioning,
the function of consciousness which maintains the sense of a limited, rather than an infinite and immortal, self.
Before considering removing this function of consciousness,
students are asked to take note that it is maintained for the exact
same reason that moviegoers pretend not to know if the hero will
or will not defuse the bomb and get the girl in the end, even if
everybody knows deep down that that’s what happens every time.
There are five forces of limitation which maintain the illusion of the
“self.” These are the illusions of limited ability, limited understanding, limited willpower, the illusion of linear time and the illusion of
singular locality.
Beyond this veil of limitation dwell the three functions of divinity—the power to create, the awareness of creation and the will to
create itself—and divinity itself, that is, the interplay of unlimited
consciousness and unlimited creation, both of which themselves
emanate from the Absolute.
We refer to this as the Principal’s Office, and it is here that we will
completely turn off the mind itself.
Having gained a better and more comprehensive grasp of the workings of the universe, students are of course free—even encouraged—
to reconstitute the thirty-six veils of illusion we will have at this
point trained them to identify and remove, and return to their worldly vocation along with the gift of identification with true reality.
Particularly motivated students, of course, will be pleased to know
that completion of our program will open wholly new higher education opportunities and career options previously unavailable or even
previously hidden to them. Our careers department will be more
than pleased to assist you in finding a new track should you choose.
Please make sure you’ve enjoyed a good night’s rest before reporting
to your first class on Monday. Should you be successful in your
studies, and with a bit of luck, it may be the last sleep you ever get.
Fiat Lux,
_______ __________, Ph. D.
Vice Chancellor, Admissions
Jason Louv is a New York based writer and editor. He is the editor of
Generation Hex, the influential anthology on next generation magicians,
and Ultraculture Journal, an downloadable book collection of “the most
volatile and direct magickal writing currently available in the English language.”
www.ultraculture.org
The Rite of the Oracle of
DAMANHUR
by Esperide Ananas
­
In June 2007 a group of pilgrims from the Chapel
of Sacred Mirrors and Wisdom University spent
a week visiting Damanhur. We attended and
participated in Damanhurian rituals and learned some
of the traditions that were reborn in the valley of the Alps
over the past 30 years, traditions based on ancient customs
well studied by the spiritual people of Damanhur. On the
rainy full moon night, we sat in the outdoor Amphitheater,
huddled under our umbrellas, watching the pageant of
colorful robes, dancers, drummers, and priests that spoke
poetry of another language and another world. Rain or shine,
snow or ice, Damanhurians light the fire that honors the
fullness of the moon. While the full moon ceremony that
birthed our Chapel of Sacred Mirrors, carried on in New
York City, led by our own wonderful priestesses, we took a
teaching under the same moon a half a world away.
– Alex and Allyson Grey
Since 1987, the Rite of the Oracle, one of the most important
celebrations in Damanhur, has taken place every month at
the full moon. The public phase in the Open Temple is the
culmination of profound and attentive ritual work, carried
out by the members of the Way of the Oracle throughout the
previous lunar month.
The Damanhurian Oracle is not a person but a group of divine
Forces, including all the Oracles of ancient times. Integrated
with new Forces of the third millennium, they can once again
perform their role in guiding humanity. The Forces of the
Oracle do not only provide answers and directions, they also
interact with all the possible branches of time, moving events
so that they become the most propitious for spiritual evolution at many levels – for those receiving an Answer, those
participating in the Ritual and for the whole People of
Damanhur. During the ritual a window of spiritual light opens
and everybody present can contact the divine dimension.
Women on the Amphitheater stage are priestesses celebrating
the Ritual. In accordance with ancient tradition, they are called
Pythies. The Ritual opens with offerings to the divine through
the vehicle of Fire. Offerings are from individuals, groups, and
members of the Way of the Oracle and other spiritual “Ways”
of Damanhur. Last to present their offerings are the King
Guides, spiritual navigators of the Federation, who accompany
with a prayer of propitiation for the whole people.
p.42
Two priestesses illustrate the ritual, in Italian and English, and indicate the magical
instruments. Before the entrance of the Pythies into the Temple, a prayer is read and
repeated by everyone present.
(May the millenary ritual of the Oracle, source
of joy, light and inspiration give us the ability
Il rito millenario dell’Oracolo,
to receive insight. May it reinforce the sacred
fonte di gioia, luce e ispirazione
bond, that links the divine forces to humankind
doni capacità di leggere i segni
unfolding through the spiritual channel of this
e rinforzi il sacro legame
precious divine presence.)
espresso nel canale spirituale
che unisce le Forze Divine all’umanità.
The drumming then starts, while the dancers of the Way of the Oracle trace, with
their movements, prayers and propitiations which accompany the whole ritual. In
this phase, the Pythies wear pointed silver hats representing their contact with the
moon and the function of the priestesses as antennas of communication with the
divine. For all participants, this is a time of silence, insight and inner contact with
the realm of the sacred.
In the next phase, those who had previously requested a Response are accompanied
onto the stage to receive their answer. As the ritual work for the compilation of a
Response requires time and care, answers are given to questions which have been
previously submitted in writing one or more months before the ritual. Recipients
of the Response hold a lit candle in their hands, representing spiritual fire. They
stand inside a circle subtly traced with a special magical instrument, which makes it
easier for divine attention to focus on them. The Response is written on a chestnut
leaf and, before being given to the recipient, it is read by a Priestess. In this phase
she wears a veil on her face to underline the impersonality of the answer: the Pythia
is a vehicle for the answer of the Divine Forces of the Oracle. The sound of her voice
is covered by music, so that only the recipient of the Response can hear it.
Once all personal Responses have been given, Sirena Ninfea, head of the Way of
the Oracle, reads an answer that gives directions for Damanhur and the Spiritual
People. At the end of the text, Sirena pronounces the ritual formula: Spoken, forgotten, to underline her function as a pure channel transmitting the messages of Divine
Forces, received and elaborated in the previous month. The Response is therefore not
given in writing, but it is customary that the participants to the Ritual write it down
so that it can be published in Damanhur¹s paper (Qdq) the following day. In this
way it can also become a theme for meditation for those not present at the Ritual.
At the end of the ceremony, the Priestesses salute the Divine Forces in front of
the Sacred Fire and then leave the stage. Before leaving the Open Temple, all
participants repeat the following prayer:
E’ nutrimento spirituale
l’aver partecipato al sacro Rito Oracolare.
Ciascuno porti nel mondo
la forza d’amore
di questa preziosa presenza divina.
(It is a spiritual nourishment, to have shared
the sacred ritual of the Oracle. May everybody bring to the world the force of love of this
precious divine presence.) Enjoy the Ritual,
NEFTJ SAT ET The Way of the Oracle
HOW TO REQUEST A RESPONSE
The Oracle of Damanhur can be consulted by all those who wish to take
advantage of this possibility for human and spiritual growth. Individuals and
groups from all over the world have requested a response as a precious source of
inspiration and insight. If you wish to consult the Oracle, please contact Gazza
Solidago at the Welcome Center, tel. +39 0124.512205, [email protected].
The question must be written very clearly, and addressed to the Oracle
of Damanhur. Please include a recent photograph of yourself and all the
information necessary to understand the context of your question.
Specify also your full birth name, and date and place of birth. The
request is to be sealed inside an envelope, on which should be
written: To the Oracle of Damanhur.
The date and time of delivery are also to be clearly indicated on the
envelope. It is from this moment that events will start to move in
the direction of evolution requested by the person, and clues or hints
will start to appear that make it possible to understand the correct
course of action. To deliver the request, follow the directions that
Gazza will give you. It is customary to include an offering which will
be used to support the functions and the sacred spaces in which the
quest for the Response takes place.
The Response will be ready after one or more lunar months. Gazza
will inform you in due course so that you can be present at the
ritual. In case it is not possible for you to come to Damanhur to
deliver your question, you can discuss with Gazza delivering it by
mail or email. In order to receive the Response and enjoy its full
ritual and energetic transmission, it is essential to go to Damanhur
and participate in the Rite of the Oracle. Only in cases of extreme
need is it possible to designate a person to receive it on your behalf.
Esperide Ananas led the press
campaign to save the Temples of
Humankind at Damanhur, an Italian
intentional community, and has been
their International Ambassador for
ten years. Author of Damanhur,
the Temples of Humankind, published by CoSM Press, she recently
co-authored two graphic novels on
the history of Damanhur. Fluent in
five languages, Ananas also works for
a British consulting company, dedicated to bringing the arts, creativity
and an ethical vision into the world of
business and government.
p.44
JOURNEY: Ritual Theater
Performed at SYNERGENESIS 3 SF, CA :
Nov. 18, 2006
p.45
Photos by Kyle Hailey at Syneregenisis 2006: wetribe.com
p.46
Journey
An open letter of process and intention
written by Eve Bradford
In a time severely lacking in both initiatory rites of passage
and artistic expression that is political and mystical, we
three, the Moirae, have been called by our secret names
into a mysterious journey. We have been called by a silent
voice to allow the divine source to speak through us in
the form of these offerings, combining ritual, movement,
adornment, poetry, music and storytelling to create a
collective experience of applicable potency and humble
empowerment. The story of this collective and of the work
we are doing as ritualists, performers and culture crafters
is one steeped in the intuitive magic and collaborative
spirit of west coast visionary culture.
To tell the story of Journey, a ritualized
theatrical journey of the Fool upon the Tree
of Life, traveling through the major arcana
of the Tarot deck, is also to tell the story of
one current within a growing subculture of
the west coast of North America. This
community is highly nomadic, collaborating
across continents on a wide variety of art,
design, performance, writing and new media
projects, drawing from a wide variety of
ancient wisdom traditions and contemporary
technologies. Journey was created over the
course of a year, in Bali, British Colombia
and San Francisco with much of the collaborative process happening via the internet.
Much of how the script came into being
was deeply connected to our own personal
evolutions and ritual work. One of the
main attributes of ritual theater, (or as it is
sometimes called, prayerformance) is that
rather than simply playing a role, each
performer is called to channel an archetypal energy that is both necessary for the
piece and deeply relevant to his/her own
personal psycho-spiritual work at the time
of the process. Time and time again, above
and beyond anything we could have known
consciously, the piece that each performer
is holding is exactly the medicine needed at
that moment in their lives.
Creating this work was not like creating any
sort of traditional theatre piece. Growing
out of work we three had already done
with the Tree of Life in previous
performances, we began scripting in Bali,
where all three of us were working on other
creative projects. Over the next several
months the script was sent back and forth between us as we traversed the globe, our
selves evolving along with the storyline, continually revealing the interpenetration of
our own personal journeys and the medicine of the work coming through.
Journey: ritual theater
co-created by: Isis, Eve and Raven
stage manager: CeLena deLphi
visuals: onbeyond metamedia
Cast:
Madeleina
Sasha Rose
Kathryn June
Audette Sophia
Ginn
Pema Keystarra
Natalia Price
Anahata
Lynzee Dava Lynx
Ben
Nikila Badua
Dee
Paradox Pollack
Nonny P
Tarran the Tailor
Marisa Scirocco
Isis Indriya
Raven
Eve LadyApples
Jody Starfish
Ananya
Tenley
Mitchel
Georgia Varaday
Eli Morgan
Destino
Micah
La Laurrien
Isaac Rappaport
Jessica Bottomly
Kyrian
Prayformance of
Interview by Julie Van Amerongen “If my karma is good, then I will die well. ‘Dying well’ means that I will die
the way I intend - doing my death dance.
My prayformance is my death dance.” – S.K. THOTH
You never forget the first time you experience S.K. Thoth. Costumed
like an ancient Greek superhero, complete with loincloth and a red feathered headdress, he is a striking sight to behold. Then he opens his mouth
and begins to sing in his three range operatic voice, with a violin on his
shoulder, dancing like a man possessed by something otherworldly,
stomping rhythms with
his heeled sandals and
belled ankles making
an indelible impression in your mind. We three, the Moirae; Raven, Isis,
Eve offer our profound thanks to
all who have participated thus far
in the realization of this vision.
We joyfully anticipate its further
unfolding, and the keys that it holds
for our collective evolution. At its
core, this work is a call to action, an
invitation to step into your power
and craft a sustainable, abundant
reality through the full realization
of your unique offering.
If you feel called to support the manifestation of this vision,
please contact [email protected]
photos by Susana Bates
p.50
Thoth calls this expression “prayformance” in which he presents his “solopera,” a
multi-disciplined and multi-media performance piece, drawing on the mythological
world of the Festad about which he has been writing since he was a child. The story
of his life was made into an Oscar-winning documentary film. In what ways has your life changed as a result of the documentary film win and your
appearance at the Academy Awards? I stopped getting harassed by a certain police officer on a regular basis named Officer
Joe. Officer Joe would interrupt my prayformances in the Angel Tunnel and force me
to pack up my things which he had no right to do. When Sarah (Kernochan, director)
was shooting the film, his behavior was caught on film. After I came back from the
Academy Awards, he was unusually friendly and chatty. He congratulated me for
the Academy Award and asked if he was in the film, afraid everybody had seen him
harassing me. Officer Joe has since stopped bothering me. The majority of your prayformances are in Central Park. Why have you chosen this
route, as opposed to more traditional music venues? Is it a challenge to build a loyal
audience because of the large number of tourists in the park? I will go anywhere to prayform if my work is welcomed. That said, I have chosen
tunnels in Central Park to prayform because they have beautiful acoustics; much
better than “traditional music venues” which have been gutted to make way for the
loud amplified music revolution. The Angel Tunnel or Trefoil Arch offers me the best
opportunity to fully express my work daily and provides me with a small amount of
money from donations. Additionally, I have yet to find a “traditional music venue”
that is fully open to my work. For a street performer, it is a challenge to build a loyal
audience or fan base. p.51
The language your songs are written in is one of your own creation. What is it like
singing in a language foreign to the people who hear you?
It is liberating! When someone sings in English those who don’t understand English
are left out. In my case, everyone is equally left out. Music, not words, is the
universal language of the soul. Your outward appearance is intentionally colorful. What do you intend
people to infer from your costume and what kinds of reactions do you get? People’s main reaction to my costume is that they want to know what I’m wearing
under my loin cloth. I don’t concern myself with what people infer from my costume.
My intention is to be true to the costuming of Nular-in - the heroic hermaphrodite
and narrator of my solopera “THE HERMA: The Life and Land of Nular-in.” I noticed that you write performance notes with both hands creating a
mirror image simultaneously. Describe what’s going on there. I use both hands with everything, switching hands to do simple or complex tasks like
throwing a ball, cutting food, shaving, eating, etc.... I also play the violin left and
right. Writing with both hands reminds me that one of my many practices during a
prayformance is to seek to maintain balance - be neither yin nor yang but be the orb
that embraces both. You have a new CD coming out. What can we expect to hear?
“Space Gypsies” is my first CD since releasing the entire solopera. It is a collaboration with my friend Rhan Wilson. We took formerly recorded tracks from the 1990’s
and updated them with new material. The result is a tonal adventure similar to something Maurice Ravel might have done. It is the first time I have been overdubbed
singing with myself. You can hear some of it here: www.altared.com/space_gypsies Where do you see yourself in five years? I will either be prayforming or dead; and my life’s work “The Festad an encyclopedia of an imaginary world, “ which will be finished yet incomplete at my
death, will be further developed.
L. Caruana
G n o stic pa in ter
I am the True Vine, the Aya Huasca, the Vine of the Dead.
2006, 40 x 70, oil in 5 part medium
I remember that, not long ago, I was one with the all. But, one day, I fell from the divine light
and became a faint spark in the dark swirling abyss. The next thing I knew, I was staring at the
front door - that’s my earliest childhood memory. I was now ‘me’. Then, at university, I realized
the Gnostics were right after all: ‘you have gone astray!’ they cried. ‘Find the way back!’ I left
Toronto and started wandering. First Western Europe, then Eastern. A year in Vienna, to study
painting. Two years in Malta, to find my roots (I didn’t). Three years in Munich, where my
painting became a doorway to the divine light. A year in Monaco, to apprentice under Ernst
Fuchs, who taught me how to swim in the luminous waters surrounding that divine light. I
kept wandering - Egypt, India, Mexico and Tibet. Along the way, I learned to ‘enter through
the image’. Enigmatic icons from my dreams and entheogenic experiences became so many passageways out of here. Now, after living in Paris for several years, I drink a coffee every morning
at the local brasserie and feel very French. I have a French wife, even a French cat. So I plant
myself before my French easel and start painting. Soon I find myself swimming once more in the
luminous waters. A door opens and, the next thing I know, I’m gazing with uncomprehending
clarity at the divine light. Then, I remember...
L. Caruana is the author of numerous books on occult thought and imagery including
The Visionary Art Manifesto and currently edits The Visionary Revue: the On-line Journal
of Visionary Art.
p.55
Ave Aum Ave - The Face of Kali, 2004, 50 x 80, oil in 5 part medium
LCaruana.com
VisionaryRevue.com
p.56
Blair MacKenzie Blake graduated from Miskatonic University in the 1970s, which
inspired him to become a professional mysteryologist. As the founding member of the experimental magick-oriented P.U.P. Lodge, Mr. Blake has been studying, practicing, and writing about the western esoteric tradition for over twenty years. More recently, he has been
focusing his attention on the neurochemical basis of successful magickal workings (and
paranormal activity in general). Through a careful examination of cryptic references in occult
literature and grail iconography, he suggests that the psychic transmutation of the alchemical opus is actually facilitated by a post-mortem endogenous substance that he describes as
“the Residuum of Paradise” (called by others “The Philosopher’s Stone”). Incorporating a
magical vocabulary and Nightside symbolism, his first book, IJYNX, a collection of occult
prose-poems, attempts to convey the ritually-machined ecstatic states that allow one access
to hyper-dimensions of consciousness and encounters with trans-mundane entities. He is
currently one of the contributing authors of an anthology entitled “Dark Lore – Volume One”,
and is simultaneously working on several books with occult themes. For nearly 8 years he
has been the writer/content manager for Toolband.com, ToolArmy.com and DannyCarey.
org. A classically trained musician (and card-carrying psychonaut in the 1970s) he was the
co-writer of the prog rock rhapsody Assault on Merryland by “Surprise”, and also appeared on
the Butcher CD Auricle as a songwriter, keyboardist, and wordsmith. Mr. Blake is an avid
collector of antiquarian books (specializing in the occult), and is a well-traveled, non-apologist
ufologist. The self-described heathen near-Vegan resides in Los Angeles, but spends much of
his time in the state of Texas, where he brakes for armadillos, barbecue shacks, and anomalous
black aeroforms (that he doesn’t shoot at).
p.57
p.58
Andrew Jones
Confessions of a live painter
One of the most important functions of an artist is to capture
a reflection of the contemporized world around him. All my life I have
spent in the pursuit of this goal, from studying the intricate insertion and
exertion points of cadavers in medical school to the temperature change
and color variations of a Colorado sunrise in winter. Upon reviewing the
years of discipline and dedication I have put forth in my path, one trait
seemed to resonate throughout the work: isolation. Even though my goals
were to recapitulate a living world around me, I often found myself alone
and in a quiet place of solitude while creating my work. Over the years
I have noticed the almost double life I lead between my time enjoying
and living life and the isolated manner in which I chose to concentrate
to record it.
Being a child and a product of a heavily synthetic culture and era I have
been dedicating a large portion of my creative energy to the digital realm
of manifesting images. I have found no faster, efficient and more verbose
tool to transcribe my creativity and energy into images than the use
of a computer, digital painting package and pressure sensitive digital
drawing tablet. At its core, digital art is the manipulation of light and
energy. I have often found the medium similar to the electrical impulses
of thoughts and dreams.
My live painting consists of a laptop supported on a tripod and oversized,
modified digital drawing tables. I use a program called Corel painter X to
create the image and multiple projectors to display the image to the audience. I find it most helpful to begin the
live paintings with no sketches or intentions, just a blank canvas and a willing
and open heart. This gives spirit more of
an opportunity to work through me.
p.59
Andrew Jones, Of Her, 2006, digital
This paradigm and mythology I had
been subscribing to over the years ended
the day I fastened a guitar strap to
my 12 x 19 inch wacom digital art tablet, and recklessly jumped onboard the
Bassnectar bus for a west coast live
painting tour across North America.
p.60
Over the course of a few days I traded the comfort of my
quiet art studio for a spot on stage, within a synesthesia of music and sound, thousands of dancing screaming people and bass so thick you can feel it rattle
up your spine. Live painting is an altered state of
consciousness which can make you so present there
is no time for second guessing. It’s like surfing a
tsunami of energy. Live painting is a performance
art and the crowd is an integral aspect of the
finished piece. Over the past few months I have
had the opportunity to create live paintings for
Random Rab, Edit and the Glitch Mob, Rabbit
and the Moon, Sphongle and the honor of painting alongside Alex Grey at an Entheocentic Salon
at CoSM in New York City.
At the onset of my career as a digital live painter it was
my goal to create images from my imagination that would strike
a cord of beauty with the audience. Since its inception it has evolved with a
completely new intention. The underground music culture is complimented
by its underground spirituality. For many of the people, these events are
their church, their dances are their prayers to the creator. As I witness Bassnectars dj Lorin manipulating the music, I see him as
nothing short of a modern day wizard . His music is like
an alchemy that resonates out of the applied speakers and sub woofers into the minds and hearts
of thousands of open vessels. The energy they receive from the music is then
converted to movement and dance.
Digital live painting at events
and festivals has completely
eclipsed my creative career.
I have set my intentions
to visual record and
communicate the energy and power of this
movement. My next
adventure will bring
me on a live painting
tour across Japan, Asia
and Europe’s Glade
festival, and then to
burning man. It is work that
needs to be done and the work
that I know in my heart I was
born to do.
-Andrew Jones
p.61
Andrew Jones, DMT Bitch, 2006, digital
WWW.ANDROIDJONES.COM
p.62
http://www.crystalandspore.com
p.63
Denny Daikeler
EGGS ON END:
STANDING ON CEREMONY
By Donna Henes, Urban Shaman
For the past 35 years, I have served as urban
shaman, celebration artist and unofficial
“Commissioner of Public Spirit” of New
York City, producing countless public
participatory events and ceremonies in
parks, plazas, museums, hospitals, institutions of learning, correctional facilities and
the streets in over 100 cities and 9 countries.
Why practice a daily remembrance? In our lifetime there are so many events that tradition ritualizes. Birth/baptism,
marriage, death. These are precious observances, but personal ritual can remind
us that life is sacred, precious, momentous. A new paradigm now begs the
inner guru, the Self-Authority, which may reject the prescription and rote of
traditional religious rituals. Our own creation of physical observance through
ritual can remind us of what we cherish. Morning rituals, such as a daily reading, a meditation, a prayer, or a visualization, are profound ways to start your day that will affect your life. A practice
of mindfulness could be as simple as deciding to touch your heart everytime you
leave home as a way to bless your journey and to honor an outing with clarity
and dignity. Intentionality and personal expression can deepen your powers of
observance and heighten your creativity as you design your personal ritual. Ritual
power objects, incense, a rose quartz heart or crystals, a sacred book or journal, an
altar on a window sill or a special place in your home that you often pass can take
you to the depth of a moment, or a feeling of gratitude. A commemorative candle
can be a symbol of burning away something you want to release. Watching a
flower float down stream could symbolize forward movement in some aspect of
your life. Dancing in moonlight while holding an intention firmly in your mind
might be a ritual of freedom and joy. A ritual can be complicated or simple. Daily practice heightens your awareness
and brings you back to the “now” in the hectic world in which we live, grounding
you, renewing your commitment. So, chant, dance, pray and allow daily
practices to become the tools that connect you to yourself, to the Divine within,
and with the incredible dance of life. Interior designer, author, speaker, and workshop facilitator, Reverend Denny Daikeler
has incorporated spirituality and environmental psychology into her interior design
process or over 20 years. Featured in magazines as diverse as Cosmopolitan, Wall Street
Journal and Visions, Denny brings transformation through interior design.
She shares her journey in her recent book, What Color is Your Slipcover: How
Discovering Your Design Personality Can Help You Create the Home of Your
Dreams (Rodale Press, 2004). dennydaikeler.com
As shaman, I create contemporary ritual for
my community, which is all of humanity.
I catalyze, organize, instigate, innovate,
and de-mystified creative interaction,
celebration and communion. I facilitate
non-threatening, trance-formative interrelationships that are spiritually charged,
stimulating and safe, providing a visceral
sense of cosmic interconnectivity.
A majority of the population dwells in
sprawling, paved, loud, light-polluted megalopolises, disenfranchised from
a natural world in the process of
disappearing. Living in the solar system,
we are upside down, rotating and revolving,
spinning through space at a terrific speed,
with patterns from which we are usually
detached. To save our planet from ourselves
we must begin with conscious connectedness to our planet.
Guiding the sky show, I keep track of the
seasons and cycles, and share enthusiastic awe and abiding love of this, our
vastly complex universe. The first
day of summer! The longest day
of the year! The shortest day of
the year! We can’t see the moon
but it’s still there! The moon is
full! The moon is covering the
sun! Yo! The sun is covering
the moon! Stop! Look! Listen!
Puzzle! Respond! Respect!
Revere! Rejoice! Involve!
Evolve!
p.66
CELESTIALLY AUSPICIOUS OCCASIONS serve as milestones with which
to measure our macro/micro cosmic movements. By noting these times, we associate
and participate in the planetary cycle of our solar system, seasons of the year and of
our lives.
In pre-revolutionary China, it was customary to stand eggs on their end on the first
day of spring to guarantee good luck for the entire year. I demonstrated this for the
first time at 6:50 a.m on the spring equinox in 1976. A photo of our eggs standing
against a brilliantly lit skyscraper background appeared in the New York Times after
our demonstration the following year. It has been by far my most popular work. The
eggs have been covered and carried by every major television, radio, and wire service
network in the world. It is incalculable just how many millions of people have been
exposed to and inspired by this delightful demonstration of astronomy, turned on by
this silly science tidbit. Just seeing this phenomenon happen on TV or reading about
it in a magazine sparks a zestful curiosity and appreciation of the mysteries of nature.
The ceremony has developed, trance-forming a secular public place into a sacred
space. Scientific and mythic information sheets are handed out along with jelly eggs.
Flares are lit to denote the number of days, weeks, months in a year. An orange
laundry basket containing 360 eggs is passed among the crowd. Together, we all
hold them up in the air, pledging to walk on the earth as if we were walking on eggs.
Promising
anew, to honor the season and protect our fragile yet resilient planet
home.
p.67
Counting down the minutes to the equinox, we stand our
eggs in unison in salute to spring.
The image and experience, of eggs standing upright
touches people in a very deep place, accessing rare
emotions, eliciting a connection with the timeless. Feeling
the yolk shifting inside to find its perfect point of balance
is like holding the entire universe in the palm of your hand.
The excitement is profound and never forgotten. I receive
notes, clippings, testimonials, feedback and photos from
those who stand with friends, family, eggs standing on
book shelves, kitchen tables, driveways, on a boat in the
Caribbean, by kids, astronomers, physicists, and pet cats.
Coming at the first moment of spring, the standing egg
is the symbol of a new season, the birth of new life, a
vernal fertility rite, a perennial celebration of the return
of green and growth and light after the dark winter. Like
the buds, the birds, of early spring, we, too, are renewed,
refreshed, energetic, recharged with optimistic resolve,
and a new understanding of the real world.
p.68
A Brief History of the Thoth Tarot
by Aleister Crowley and Lady Frieda Harris
Written by William Breeze and published in The Magical Link
According to many authorities, the Tarot first appeared in Europe in the 15th
Century, Italy, but is generally believed to have an Oriental origin. Many students, including Aleister Crowley, attribute the ultimate origin of the Tarot to the
Egyptians, terming it the Book of Thoth.
Thoth, God inventor of writing and Magick, is the Egyptian counterpart to the
Greek god Mercury, or Hermes Trismegistus, the semi-mythical classical author
whose works, whether spurious or genuine, fueled the Italian Renaissance and
neo-platonic wisdom literature being published by the earliest Italian printing press.
Printing became sacred to Thoth, as an extension of writing and the first European
Tarot Trumps appeared at the court of a Medici prince.
Many present day Tarot cards retain strong marks of Medieval and Renaissance
Europe, utilizing images of and feudal aristocracy, Christian symbolism, and
symbolism expressing of the collective unconscious of the period. The Trump XIII,
“Death”, for example, pictures the skeletal Reaper with his scythe, a familiar figure
to plague-ridden Europe.
The exact Qabalistic attributions of the Tarot Cards were, according to Crowley,
among the most closely guarded magical secrets of the turn of the century. To
initiates, the Tarot represents redemption and union with Godhead. The Trumps, or
lead cards, are more than mere divination tools to foretell events. They correspond to
“paths” of the Qabalistic Tree of Life that are glyphs of the actual steps on the path.
Making the keys to occult knowledge generally accessible to all was a lifetime
commitment for Aleister Crowley. He reasoned that since the real secret is known
through direct experience, and direct experience is archived through individual merit
and effort, the “secret” was not in jeopardy. To paraphrase Crowley, an Arcanum
that can be revealed is not an Arcanum.
The art of making, using and interpreting the 78 cards of the Tarot was one of the
subjects taught in the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. Soon after joining the
Golden Dawn, Crowley received the secret lecture on the Tarot, sometimes entitled
Book T, which gave the Initiated interpretation of the cards.
By 1909, schism fragmented the Order of the Golden Dawn, and Crowley felt
obligated to publish the previously secret Golden Dawn Tarot attributions in his
reference book Liber 777, and later in The Equinox, his magical journal.
Crowley used the Tarot as the basis of many of his writings. He expressed
dissatisfaction with all available Tarot cards and always wanted to design a Tarot
deck based on his own interpretations. Living in London in 1937, Crowley was
introduced to Lady Frieda Harris, an accomplished artist and wife of a British
Parliamentarian.
p.69
Although Harris claimed no knowledge of Tarot, Crowley suggested that they
collaborate on producing a new pack. Harris who became Crowley’s private
student, was admitted to the Ordo Templi Orientis, and took the magical name
Soro Tzaba.
p.70
Crowley soon realized that the Equinox
designs were “artistically impracticable,” and Harris suggested that she and
Crowley create together a completely new Tarot, with an accompanying
book. From 1938 to 1942, the Thoth Tarot
gradually came into being. Due to war
conditions in London and the difficulty
of travel, Crowley wrote in London, and
Harris painted in the countryside, rarely meeting and communicated through
mail. Harris prepared watercolors of the
cards from Crowley’s rough sketches and
descriptions, some cards repainted five or
six times. While it was true that Harris
never mastered the Tarot as a discipline,
something she would freely acknowledge,
her artist vision gave the paintings their
intense vitality.
Published by the Ordo Templi Orientis
in 1944, Crowley and Harris released
the Book of Thoth as a limited edition of
200 numbered copies, under Crowley’s
magical name, The Master Therion.
Only eight cards were produced in color,
the rest in black and white. The full color
Thoth Deck remained unpublished for
many years.
Crowley intended that the Thoth Tarot
serve as a Magical Atlas and Guide
to the Universe for this modern Aeon
of Horus, a time of self-realization and
growing awareness of the spiritual. He
wrote, “To me this Work on the Tarot
is an Encyclopedia of all serious ‘occult’
philosophy. It is a standard Book of
Reference, which will determine the
entire course of mystical and magical
thought for the next 2,000 years.” With
help from Lady Frieda Harris, Crowley
created a profound and enduring work of
undeniable beauty.
WILLIAM BREEZE is a musician and a
scholar of magical arts. He is the editor
of numerous works including The Equinox,
Volume III, Number 10, The Equinox of the
Gods, Magick: Liber ABA: Book 4, The
General Principles of Astrology.
p.71
p.72
Of Thee I Sing
by Brett Bevel
Into the abyss of me
let’s go!
Into the syringe
of blood whirling
where I sold
the plasma of myself
like pints of beer
Into screams at night
where my lungs shattered
into glass
and became the collective consciousness
of white suburban self hate
Into Nestle candy bars of soylent green
recycled death of African children
who had no milk to drink when their
mothers tits went dry from American
baby formula substitute of genetics
Into pale laughter and Playboy
airbrushed teenage fantasy worlds
where Ms Pac-Man ate my enemies
and no one wept for the ants, spiders,
moths and lizards tortured
by the hands of an angry child
Into glue testosterone and battleships
made of plastic…just like my own
parents and credit card plastic Gods
unto which we gave and suffered
until there was nothing left of us
damned into an ever increasing interest
rate on our own sins
Into a mythology of serial killers
Charlie Manson Christmas Special
television emptiness snarled upon us
by the teeth of the Neilson ratings
Into cartoon heroes and cereal box
friendships where I made it with
Captain Crunch, and Tony the Tiger is
a drag queen and the Silly Rabbit is just
a pimp selling kiddie porn
saying “tricks are for kids.”
Into fast cars with wheels of karma
that shred our old friends into paper doll
corpses linked hand in hand as if to
carry flowers from prom to
graduation to funeral
p.73
Into ladybug hypnotists
who dance naked and taught us to sing
to the many colored cats
singing hundred dollar high notes like
sopranos who carve operas on their
thighs with tattoos and swallow
every note of every song
of every man weeping
Into drums of Hopi and Navajo
fry bread where the tears of the land
are wrapped in uranium
then buried in the colon of America
of thee I sing
of thee who wanted to be an artist
learned the art of fear
wearing mask upon mask
until their own face became like
aluminum foil
of thee who knew no language of the
trees and gave their allegiance to
concrete and asphalt and an eternity of
napkins with which to cover their eyes
from the holocaust of Earth
of thee who erases their own name
constantly on the blackboard of
childhood memory where the teacher
told them to write ten thousand
times per day
“I do not exist
I do not exist
I do not exist”
of thee who chants and sits and prays
wanting only to ask out loud:
Is there anyone who really sees me?
Sweet nirvana
you will never rain upon those of us
who cannot say exactly who we are
and exactly where we come from
Into the purgatory of me
let’s go!
Where I crucified my teddy bear
to create a God
who could understand children
Into long drives
that revealed to me
the poem of many
the working broken poem of America
into café after cafe
of coffee colored words
where I dove into an ocean of underpants
and sweet tears
Where the scars of my childhood are
portals into unnamed universes
Into my perfect name
let’s go!
where I am the verb “to be”
the word of myself growing
a sound uttered off a tongue
worshiped holy
into subway conversations
on the meaning of post-Colonialism
where she tore down the anti-abortion
pamphlets glued to the train walls inside
our consciousness
and I am that I am
the bliss between
the letters of my own history
and I am that I am
Hare Me Hare Me
Me Me Hare Hare
parting the Red Sea of my illusions
born again baptized preaching
sermons of poetry
chanting: gate gate paragate parasvam
gate bodhi svaha
where all acts of love and pleasure
are my rituals
of thee I sing
Jehova, Aloha, Va’daath,
Ram, Ram, Ram, Ram
Sa Sekhem Sahu
Into LSD hashish methadone highs
that made our skulls
porous enough to question
and stupid enough to kill ourselves
into being broke starving dishwashers
who ate macaroni and cheese
until Kraft was written on our
stomach walls
who busted up openly to forever:
“I am nothing but a poem in the mouth of
the universe swimming among spit and
curses and song”
who say that tips are spit
spelled backwards
in the eyes of those who question
the menu of life
of thee I sing
who sweat blood stigmata after alcohol
then saw the beard of Jesus
between her legs
Into the Divine of me
let’s go!
Come into me!
Om into me!
I am the Alpha and Omega of me
where all the colors of all my actions
are absorbed
I am the speed of my own light
I am the ultimate law
in the universe of my own experience
and know
that God-dess
has been with me from the beginning
and is that
which is attained
at the end
of
desire
Brett Bevell is the author of the illustrated poetry book America Needs A Buddhist President (White
Cloud Press, 2004), a poem which initially aired nationwide on NPR’s “All Things Considered.” Bevell’s
poetry has receiving wide critical acclaim from authors including Anne Waldmen, Rha Goddess, and John
Perkins, A widely published poet, Bevell’s work was featured in Earth First Journal, Publishers Weekly,
and the Buddhist magazine Tricycle. Brett has electrified audiences around the world with his masterful
live oral recitations, and has often been compared to the late poet Allen Ginsberg. Brett is a frequent guest
artist at COSM’s Full Moon Gatherings.
p.74
Influenced
by of North and
South Native American cultures, as well as Spanish and Western motifs, Sukaya
brings together primal elements of Shipibo embroidery, Alpaca, feathers, domestic animal skins, denim,
and leather.
Founded by Paola Saavdra and Eli Morgan in 2007,
Sukaya came about through a shared fascination in textile design being
a spiritual art.
Connecting with the Shipibo community,
and studying the textile designs of the
Andes, Morgan and Saavdra realized
the protective power of those fabrics.
“You can wear your
prayers, we see our
clothing as spirit
armor. Everyday
is a
ritual when you
dress, Sukaya
believes that the
power of this ritual
should amplify the
spirit, call upon
archetypes and
protect both physically
and spiritually.”
p.75
Working directly with the shamans and
textile artisan of Peru, many of the custom
designs have prayers of protection woven in to them.
“For instance, many of
the Shipibo patterns are
maps of the cosmos,
wearing them guide
and comfort. We are
not asking any one
to believe in anything. However
most would
agree that
Fashion is there
to empower.
One of the
things that is
missing from
modern life is
a sense of ritual, we want to
bring that into
peoples lives
every day.”
p.76
For three years the CoSM community has gathered one night in July under the stars to
celebrate creativity, divinity and summer. The traditional all-night fire circle includes
watching the sun go down, sitting and dancing around a blazing fire, offering and
receiving songs and stories, rhythms and rhymes, recollecting and connecting with
one of the most ancient of all human ritual practices. In remembrance of Pagan nature
worship, which includes all the elements of nature, CoSM Fire has become a tradition of coalescing like-minds for the purpose of visioning the Chapel and rallying the
community around that goal.
The spectacular fire ceremony this year was choreographed by Brian James and the
illustrious troup, Phantomime. Acting out in costume and fire dancing implements, the
minstrels interpreted a few key Alex Grey performances. “The Beast” was portrayed
by camouflaged dancers and a huge spider’s web grid of fire. Mournful TOOL music
blasted, as soldier fire dancers fell to the ground. Replacing the battlefield with an
awesome positive and creative energy, completely naked lovers held a fiery eight-foot
infinity band between them and later dancers brought forth a giant flaming CoSM Eye
of Spirit. Performers reconnected with the tribe back at the bon fire, where over twenty
individuals stepped forward one at a time to recite from memory profound passages
from “The Mission of Art”, an honor that will be held dear in our hearts.
Thanks goes to Imani, shaman and wizard extraordinaire, and her collaborative
team, who support the evolution of consciousness, through art, drumming, dance and
community, one fire at a time.
p.77
p.78
There is a mystery school that will meet you at the edge of the forest, or in the middle of the city. It is a place where you will meet conscious collaborators who gather
at a sacred fire. Whether a cauldron with candles, or a 10 foot tall bonfire, these
rituals provide a portal to your center and tend to the fire of your soul.
There are artists, musicians, seekers and shamans who support this mystery, yet no
one person will tell you they are the master or mistress of this ceremony. Instead you
will find a kindred tribe, of old and new friends, seeking to instigate and co-create a
journey that navigates the realms of intuition, music, dance, collaborative art and
healing.
With an honoring and deep respect for the integrity of the ancient ways of the shaman, and an inclusive vision of who we are today, these rituals of sacred drumming,
dance and collaborative art embrace the practices and passions of tradition and
improvisation. We connect with each other and the sacred fire to blend the best of
our resources and skills to honor the sacred in all life.
The environments of the drum and dance rituals at CoSM are designed by
Mz. imani and a team of rotating artists. Our goal is to transcend ordinary reality,
by taking the blank canvas of open space to co- create a temporary temple of transformation. We offer the rhythms of our drums, the songs and poems of our hearts
and the knowledge of our souls to help the heart of humanity heal, One Fire At A
Time. When the dawn breaks and the sun rises, the mystery becomes a memory that
lives on and leaves our lives forever changed.
Mz. imani
A visionary vocalist, inspirational drummer, and sacred alchemist, Mz. imani blends respect
for the laws of nature with deep faith in spirit’s desire for humanity to live in peace. This
combination co-creates harmony, the essential gold alchemists have sought through the ages.
She is the lead instigator of Conscious Collaborations, a production team that sponsors
All Night Fire Circle events and local drum and dance events to help the heart of humanity
heal, one fire at a time. CoSM’s Full Moon Gatherings have been blessed with Mz. Imani’s
initiation of ceremony and drum and dance.
p.79
p.80
by Naasko Wripple
Held every two years
under the August full moon
in Portugal’s sun-drenched
countryside, the Boom Festival
is a renowned multicultural
gathering of the global psy-trance
community. Attracting over 20,000
people, the Boom is a major destination on
the world festival circuit bringing together a rich and colorful mix of people from around
the planet. Over its 10 years it has called people from all walks of life to immerse
themselves in a cutting edge visionary environment for 6 days and 5 nights of music,
dance, art and culture. Focused on the dynamic intersection of consciousness and
community, the festival acts as creative hub of radical transformation existing beyond
the confines of everyday life. As an enclave of the free, the festival occurs between
the folds of conventional time-space in what Hakim Bey has called a temporary
autonomous zone, or ‘TAZ’. Aligned with the full moon cycle, the Boom represents
a contemporary ritual gathering of a non-local network of scattered trance tribes. As
one of those ever-shifting cultural power spots around the world the festival grounds
have, over the years, brought tens of thousands of people together to dance, live and
share in the spirit of global unity. Having taken innovative steps to enhance the
festival experience each edition, the Boom has promoted a path of conscious evolution by providing an alternative area for those seeking to broaden their horizons
beyond the trance.
Located on the edge of the dance floor, the Liminal Village has grown as a core
area of the Boom Festival since 2002. Offering a interactive space for the expanded
mind to return to ground, the Village consists of an integrated curriculum of holistic
workshops and feature presentations in addition to several interconnected zones.
With an extensive visionary art gallery, healing sanctuary, cinema, gardens and
various installations, this area evolved over 2004 and 2006 to become a kind of
global interface for exploring the contours of a new world.
p.81
Stemming from the Latin word limen, meaning ‘a threshold’,
the term liminal refers to “a state or place characterized by
ambiguity, openness, and a sense of being in between.­­”
The theories of anthropologist Victor Turner and
others use liminality to describe the quality of
the second stage of a ritual or rite of passage
whereby the participant undergoes
a transformation of
some kind. The liminal, in
this respect, is a realm where
one’s sense of identity dissolves,
suspending one’s normal limits of thought, self-understanding and behavior. It is here where the way opens to a new level in one’s being.
Following from this basis, the Liminal Village project extends the concept of
liminality and applies it within a contemporary multimedia setting. As a gateway
to a new dimension in the human story, the Liminal Village is an interstitial locus
of transformative art and culture amidst the festival’s layout. Catering to the mind,
body and spirit, it is a type of neo-shamanic medicine space providing a supportive,
multi-faceted context in which to understand and integrate the perennial visionary
experience. Inspired by Fraser Clark’s Shamanarchy Experiments of the mid-90’s
underground club Megatripolis, the Liminal Village works with both the archaic and
the novel, reaching far into the past and simultaneously forward into the future in
an attempt to chart a course through the present. In these times of unprecedented
planetary chaos, the Liminal Village, in anticipation of an immanent paradigm shift,
has taken a collaborative and cooperative approach for re-orienting the collective
compass towards a more harmonious and sustainable future. Proposing evolution
over revolution, this open-source space was designed with several access points to
enhance its transformative potential.
In 2004 the Liminal Village built upon the framework established in 2002 and
took shape as a sentient environment for a global community on the edge of an
increasingly unfamiliar world. Seeking to implement a holistic educational and
enlivening program, the Liminal Village created an interactive, multi-sensory zone
for personal reflection, cultural realignment and spiritual recalibration. Central to
the grounds were the main workshop/presentation venue and the visionary art gallery.
The periphery consisted of a healing area, the MAPS CosmiKiva Sanctuary and a
Planetary Art Network dome. Hosting several thousand visitors throughout the
4 day program, the Liminal Village held space for several ritual activities including
geomantic setting of the space, an earth medicine/crystal burial ceremony, and a
variety of workshops in such areas as shamanic drumming/totem animal visioning;
ritual theatre; ecstatic dance; meditation; visionary art; mask making; and yoga.
Laying the foundation for a non-linear, open-ended ritual space, many of initial ideas
explored this year would come to be developed for the next incarnation of the project
2 years later.
p.82
In 2006 the Liminal Village expanded upon the sentient environment concept
and increased the collaborative dynamic by several degrees from the previous
year. Drawing on central themes of sustainability, contemporary spirituality and
emergent mythology, the project this year was the largest and most comprehensive
installation to date. Built on the direct input from well over 100 people representing
over 20 different countries, it became an potent epicenter of intercultural exchange.
Over the course of the festival, the main venue - a stunning 400 square meter
bamboo temple of Balinese design - hosted 36 skill-building daily workshops, 8
evening presentations and a full program of eye-opening films and documentaries each night. Dubbed the ‘Omniplex’, this expansive solar and wind powered
structure was aligned harmonically within the festival grounds according to feng
shui principles and was grounded via crystal grid work. In turn, it provided an
inspiring place of refuge from the intensity of the festival vortex. Featuring a
spectacular wooden carving of the mythical entity Garuda, several ornately woven
carpets from Turkey, and intergalactic decor by Xavi, the Omniplex came to
life with an opening prayer and ceremony lead by the visiting group of Balinese
artisan-builders. Assuming the dimensions of a planetary temple for many different cultures and traditions, it also had the honor of hosting a special presentation
by the Shipibo curandero/vegetalista Guillermo Arevalo. Known popularly via
Jan Kounen’s film ‘Renegade’ but more importantly through his shamanic work,
Guillermo joined us directly from the Peruvian Amazon to share his insights and
experiences as a traditional ayahuasquero. Offering an icaro of blessing to the
spirits of the land his presence brought an old-world magic to the entire festival.
Working the intention of creating a sacred space within the festival layout, each
component of the Liminal Village contained an inherent metaphysical underpinning
which worked synergistically with the others to amplify the overall resonance of the
zone. The Solar Healing Matrix, built on sacred geometrical proportions, was a
hands-on sanctuary which brought together an international team of over 25 certified
therapists providing treatments of several rejuvenating modalities. Adjacent to
this
elegant
structure,
the
Inner
Visions
Gallery
contained an
extensive exhibit of over
50 pieces of visionary art
on display from around
the world. Accessed
via the DiMethyl
p.83
Temple entrance portal, the octagonal gallery was arranged around a central obelisk
installation designed and constructed by Carey Thompson (above). Towering above
the gallery tents it was a kind of psycho-cosmic device using art and architechture for
transmitting a higher vibration of universal creative energy. Connecting these
two zones with the Omniplex, the Temple Gardens were an interactive series of
pathways, gardens and land art installations which brought together Zen-style
gardening with practical permaculture techniques. Complete with a pond, solar
powered fountain, tri-lingual signs and over 50 types of plants, trees and shrubs,
the Temple Gardens illustrated the relationship between nature and culture while
demonstrating an integrated, ground-level approach to growing food, conserving
resources and cycling energy.
With a focus on the edges where multimedia becomes metamedia, the Liminal
Village is an experiential immersion in a realm of possibility. Seeking to actualize the evolutionary potential within the global trance network, it has endeavored
to gather those who share a common vision for the future. Choosing magic over
politics, the aim has been on building community with others of like mind and heart
around the world in an attempt to reconnect ourselves at a more fundamental level.
p.84
By providing a number of perspectives from which to look out upon the changing
world, the Liminal Village sets up a collaborative space for a confluence of ideas and
techniques relevant a new kind of social paradigm. In an increasingly mediated and
disconnected environment, the Liminal Village utilizes expanded states of consciousness as an adaptive strategy for plugging back into the Gaian matrix and catalyzing
a shift into the next phase of our collective evolution.
Both the Boom Festival and, to a lesser extent the Liminal Village, are a
manifestation of a world-wide network of creative people and organizations
working cooperatively towards a new planetary culture. As a shimmering node in the
net, the Boom has been a mystical interstitial zone for a wired community to link up
and directly participate in a transformative convergence of mythic proportions. By
implementing an open-source strategy the Boom Festival, like many other gatherings
of its kind, have been portals revealing the edge of one world and the beginning of the
next. Adopting an ‘act global - think local’ approach it encourages its participants
to return home to continue the inspired trajectory of creating conscious community
within their respective locales.
Currently in the planning stages for summer 2008, the Boom Festival is building
upon the overwhelmingly positive results of last year. Stay tuned for the 10 year
Boom Festival book and accompanying DVD of Boom ‘06.
Since 2002 the list of previous presenters in this project has grown to include;
Alex Grey, Erik Davis, Jon Hanna, Zoe 7, Wilbert Alix, Charles Hayes, Robert
Venosa, Martina Hoffmann, Dr. Luis Eduardo Luna, Jenny Pell, Guillermo Arevalo
Graham Hancock, Daniel Pinchbeck, Mark Heley and Crystal and Spore.
Over the years the Liminal Village art gallery has
featured the work of the following artists;
Luke Brown
Andy Thomas (Android)
Robert Venosa
Martina Hoffmann
Vibrata Chromodoris
Tina Zimmermann
Xavi
Carey Thompson
For more info visit
www.boomfestival.org
Cover art for Liminal Village
Booklet ‘Pathways’ featuring
art by Andy Thomas aka
Backround art for this article was designed by Sijay James
and Marisa Scirocco using art from Luke Brown, Martina
Hoffmann and Robert Venosa..
Founder of Invisible Productions Naasko has produced the Liminal Village and Dynamic
Mythologies Tent at the Boom Festival in Portugal since 2002. Working collaboratively
with several visionaries over the years he has been on core production teams at many events
and festivals along the West Coast and internationally. Currently living in the mountains
of BC he is a long time DJ, A&R for Native State Records and label manager for Interchill
Records. For more info contact: [email protected]
p.85
In this article I explore the techniques of
psychedelic psychotherapy as it was practiced
in the United States and Europe in the 1950’s,
1960’s, and early 1970’s, and as described by Stanislav
Grof and Myron Stoloroff, two pioneers of psychedelic
psychotherapy research.
BASIC PRINCIPLES
Stanislav Grof described psychedelics as “unspecific
amplifiers” of the human psyche, as substances which bring
to the surface or amplify unconscious processes of the mind.
The strategy of psychedelic therapy is for the therapy client
to allow unconscious material to emerge, and to fully experience it until there is a breakthrough and release. Unconscious
material can be blissful or terrifying or anywhere in between.
To best facilitate the emergence, engagement and integration
of this material, it is important for the client to feel safe and
supported. The keys to establishing safety and support are
“SET and SETTING”.
“Set” is the inner landscape one brings to a psychedelic
session. It includes the client’s psychological background and
mental health, spiritual orientation, preconceived notions,
expectations, how much work one has done on oneself, and the
intention one brings to the work. “Setting” refers to the physical environment in which the therapeutic session is held – the
beauty, comfort, cleanliness of the place, the people who
will be attending to the client during the journey, the music
that is used, etc. If psychedelics are unspecific amplifiers
of unconscious mental and emotional processes, then the
therapeutic potential of the experience depends strongly on the “Set and Setting” – the “container” for the
experience. The container of “Set and Setting”
provides the safety to call forth and engage
unconscious material.
Psychedelic therapy consists of three
separate parts ­
– preparation,
experience and integration.
p.86
PREPARATION
According to Grof, the preparation involves a series of interviews between
therapist and client. In the interviews, they discuss whatever issues the client
wishes to work with in the session. Importantly, the interviews also allow
the therapist to describe to the client the nature of the experience, the types
of experiences that might come up, and the general strategy for working
with them: keeping the attention focused internally, and allowing the
experiences to emerge, intensify and to reach a breakthrough or release
point. The client is encouraged to let go and surrender into whatever
material emerges. The interviews also allow the therapist and client
to develop trust and a good rapport ­­– essential to establishing the
safety that is so important on the journey.
The preparation period is also a time for the therapist and client
to make a “contract” for the session. The contract ensures the
integrity of the process and the safety of both the therapist
and client. It defines the therapist’s role as “sitter” and
establishes what the client wants and doesn’t want from
the sitter during the session.
Before the session begins, the client can perform
ritual practices to help engender trust in her deepest
self and higher power. Myron Stoloroff, in his book The
Secret Chief Revealed, recounts that the late Leo Zeff, an
underground psychedelic therapist, had his clients recite the
following prayer before the session:
Lord, I know not what I ought to
ask of thee; Thou only knowest
what I need; Thou lovest me better
than I know how to love myself.
O father, give to thy child that
which he himself knows not how to
ask. I dare not ask either for
crosses or for consolations; I simply
present myself before thee, I open
my heart to thee. Behold my needs which
I know not myself; see and
do according to thy tender mercy.
Smite, or heal; depress me or raise
me up; I adore all thy purposes
without knowing them; I am silent;
I offer myself in sacrifice; I yield
myself to thee: I would have no
other desire than to accomplish
thy will. Teach me to pray. Pray
thyself in me. AMEN
– Francois de Salignac Fenelon
p.87
EXPERIENCE
The second part of the psychedelic therapy session is the psychedelic
experience itself. The most important principal for the experience is
that the client’s attention be turned inward while the medicine’s
effect is strongest.
Stan Grof has said, “Internalized sessions are generally
much more profound and less confusing; they are conducive to a better integration of the experience. The basic
safety rule for psychedelic sessions is that all of the
material which has been released from the
unconscious has to be faced, fully experienced,
and integrated. This condition is not met
in externalized sessions, where various
sensory distractions interfere with the
awareness of the inner process.”
Internalized focus also helps the client “own” the material that arises in
the session. When material emerges
from the psyche, the client should recognize the material as her own. An outward
focus during a session makes it likely that,
as material arises, the client will project it
and attribute it to “others” in the immediate environment, thus potentially making the
material more difficult to work with.
The facility for the session should be “comfortable,
well appointed, quiet, and free from distractions,”
says Stoloroff in his excellent article, A Protocol for a
Sacramental Service. It should be tastefully decorated,
with beautiful art objects. Grof also emphasizes that
the client should work in an environment where she has
“unlimited full freedom of expression.” There should be
a high quality music system. Finally, there should be rest
rooms easily accessible, tissues nearby, and blankets, pillows
and drinking water at hand.
During the session the client lies down, wears eyeshades, and
listens to music. This internalized part of the session typically
lasts until the effects of the medicine have passed their peak and
begin to subside.
All psychedelic therapy involves the use of a sitter. The sitter is
usually the therapist, but doesn’t have to be. The sitter is at the
service of the client, but is otherwise as unobtrusive as possible. The
sitter’s role is mostly passive. His job is to ensure the safety and comfort
of the client.
p.88
Early in the session the sitter periodically checks in with the client on the pharmacological action of the medicine. After that,
his job is to be present and attentive and be available if the
client needs a tissue, some water, or to be escorted to the
rest room. If the client is moving around vigorously in the
session, the sitter makes sure the space around is
clear of obstructions. Verbal interaction is kept to a
minimum. The sitter does not interfere except
at the request of the client, unless there is a
safety issue. With a sitter, the client can let go
fully into her experience.
INTEGRATION
When the client feels a sense of completion
for the session and is ready to return to
the outer world again, the therapist/sitter
helps her re-orient herself. This is the
beginning of the integration phase of the
session.
At this point, various integrative
activities are introduced. Artistic or creative expression is used here. The client
can draw, paint, do collage, sculpt, play
music or dance. Journaling, poetry writing or quiet reading from the great spiritual traditions of the world might occur
at this time. The goal of these activities
is to help the client ground herself after the
session and to translate the experiences from
nonordinary reality into the world of ordinary
reality and thus allow the insights gained to
last and become part of the client’s everyday life.
Integrative activities do not end after the session. Typically, several follow-up sessions between
therapist and client are scheduled. In these sessions,
strategies for carrying insights and breakthroughs into
the client’s day-to-day life are discussed. Most therapists
consider the integrative phase of the work to be the
most important.
p.89
It has been observed that modern western culture lacks rituals aimed at
invoking the wisdom of nonordinary reality. Psychedelic therapy, as
developed between the 1950’s and early 1970’s developed protocols
of “set and setting” to facilitate safe and productive healing journeys into the unknown recesses of the psyche. These protocols
were the beginnings of systems of modern western rituals
and they were still evolving when psychedelic therapy was
unfortunately halted due to legal prohibitions in the early
1970’s. Perhaps we can hope as psychedelic research
resumes again, that our society, so devoid of the
meaningful rituals for exploring consciousness and
healing in nonordinary states that have existed
throughout history in many cultures, will again
make progress towards evolving such rituals.
©2007 by Kevin Sachs, Ph.D. All rights reserved.
Kevin Sachs, Ph.D. teaches accounting at Hofstra
University. He apprentices with a shamanic practitioner and is currently enrolled in Grof Transpersonal
Training to certify as a Holotropic Breathwork™
practitioner. He calls himself “econoshamanic” to
honor the two sides of his life – the rational accountant and the shaman – and to hold space for their
integration. He is married and has three incredible
feline teachers.
REFERENCES:
Bache, Christopher, Dark Night, Early Dawn, State
University of New York Press, 2000.
Grof, Stanislav, The Adventure of Self-Discovery, State
University of New York Press, 1988
Grof, Stanislav, LSD Psychotherapy, MAPS, 2001
Stoloroff, Myron, “A Protocol for a Sacramental Service,” in
Roberts, T.B. (ed.), Psychoactive Sacramentals: Essays on Entheogens
and Religion, Council on Spiritual Practices, 2001.
Stoloroff, Myron, The Secret Chief Revealed, MAPS, 2004
p.90­­
Bryan de Flores
Intergalactic Accelerators
Art is said to be the souls attempt to express the mysteries of life,
awakening us to an eternal reality beyond our circumscribed world. It
is an agent of change for the artist and for those who are touched by
his work. On December 4th 1996, Bryan de Flores experienced a
dramatic shift in consciousness resulting in a change of lifestyle,
work and location. His destiny and spiritual purpose was
revealed and artistic talents from previous interplanetary
incarnations were activated. He was guided to move from
Southern California to Sedona, Arizona to begin his
life’s work illustrating images from the divine Blueprint.
These extraordinary multidimensional images are
accelerators to prepare humanity for the prophesied
shift into a 7th Golden Age, the Age of Aquarius.
His beautiful drawings contain ancient and
interplanetary scripts and symbols, which are
universal and personal keys to forgotten memories
and advanced knowledge.
Bryan
has
created
thousands
of
transformational templates whose content and
style continually evolve as his consciousness
expands. He has become what his art evokes.
His expressed commitment is to dissolve limitations and to awaken and inspire those souls who
are to be healers, teachers and wayshowers, for the
next octave of our existence. He now travels extensively and transmits a body of teachings based on ancient
Mystery School practices for the evolution of the soul and the
physical manifestation of Christ Consciousness. He states, “
Our planet and all who inhabit it are destined to ascend into the 5th
dimension of time/space and create a 7th Golden Age as our global
reality.”
p.91
These images are created using the new interdimensional
‘acceleration’ drawing technology. The originals are all hand-drawn
on 19 x 25” paper using Prismacolor pencils and metallic markers.
These channeled art pieces or ‘accelerators’ are created within minutes and are energetically infused with many levels of information
and etheric templates. The ‘accelerators’ operate at subtle levels of
consciousness, reactivating the “empowerment program’ of our true
nature while dissolving old patterns and thought-forms no longer
in alignment with our highest good. The titles and descriptions
are guidelines to assist in attuning to the energies of each image.
However, they are only one small interpretation of these multi-layered
drawings. The accelerators can be used in a variety of ways and will
adapt and synchronize to your intent and vibration. The images will
begin transmitting their frequencies as soon as they are in your energy
field. Each accelerator you add to your collection will diversify and
upgrade your ­frequency.
I AM GOD!
Be still and know that I am God! activates the power of awakening
as a co-creator and galactic human. It contains the Guardian Master
Codes of creation, assisting in the manifestation of ones destiny within the
Divine Plan, promotes focus and clarity, giving one a sense of purpose and
direction in life. Other multidimensional aspects of this image can be
accessed through toning and by placing crystals on the images lower
key symbols, connected to the Delphic Oracles and Elysium.
p.92
p.93
PHYSICAL AKASHIC RECORD BUILDING
MISSION ACCOMPLISHED!
Linked to Sirius and the Rainbow Warriors, this image was made manifest through millions of spirals of high-frequency energy emanating from
the 2nd octave of the 5th dimension; it holds the new planetary grid-work
for Earth’s final ascension activation and new cosmic orientation; this
Akashic Record building contains the blueprints for all of Earth’s new
Golden Cities and sacred structures, as well as the new 5D grid systems.
Connected to the Celestial Hierarchy and the Ashtar Command;
allows one to telepathically ‘tap’ the planetary grid and retrieve
information regarding their past lives and integrate new options
relating to their current mission; represents a completed cycle, the
Alpha and the Omega; holds the codes which will trigger the etheric
reconstruction of Earth for the 7th Golden Age; activates cellularmemory of rebirth and the truth of Ascension!
lightquest-intl.com
p.94
Art from Dreams: Ann McCoy
Black Madonna of Einsiedeln, 1993, 9 x 14 feet, pencil on paper on canvas.
p.95
p.96
Lunar Birth, 2001, 9 x 14 feet, colored pencils, graphite, and watercolor, with
iridescent acrylic paint, on photographic paper mounted on canvas.
A recent book by art historian James Elkins entitled The Strange Place of Religion in
Contemporary Art groups the work of Ann McCoy and Alex Grey under the heading: New Religious Movements. Both Grey and McCoy are considered by Elkins to
be “outsider artists” whose work embraces spirituality sincerely rather than cynically,
an attitude often considered taboo in today’s art world. McCoy stated in a letter to
James Elkins, “My whole life I thought the purpose of life was the journey of the soul
and that to map this journey was one of the purposes of art.”
Ann McCoy has studied comparative religion and alchemy for over twenty-five
years. In Zurich, she worked with C.G. Jung’s heir Dr. C.A. Meier doing analysis and studies in alchemy. Her father’s profession as a chemist influenced many
childhood dreams, which represented alchemical themes. In Jungian analysis, Ann
learned alchemical symbolism related to the incarnation of spirit into matter, and the
transformation of the soul.
Ann’s artwork comes directly from her dreams, which she records, later grouping the
images into her giant complex color pencil drawings. In an organic and synchronistic process, a drawing may change over time due to other dreams. An alchemical
worldview involving the integration of opposites, considered by the artist to be
more relevant in our age than ever, has given rise to her written modern
alchemical fairy tales.
At MicroCoSM Gallery, Ann McCoy will exhibit her great alchemical work called
“The Rubedo.” McCoy describes the Rubedo as “the red process,” where blood,
associated with spirit, returns to art. Ann clarifies, “When you drink the blood of
Christ, you drink the spirit of Christ.” It is the artist’s intention to reclaim the
passion that “has been drained from religion in our rational era.”
www.annmccoy.com
p.98
Through ecstatic dance and enthralling
rhythms, we are able to bypass the
limitations of the ego and connect
to the heart; spirit in motion!
By engaging the body through
movement, entering with ritual intention, we dance our
power, unlock & liberate our
dreams into action!
w w w. s h a m a n i c j o u r n e y s . c o m
Descended from a long line of spiritual healers, Parashakti moved from her
native Jerusalem to the United States
to pursue her life long exploration of
the healing art of Dance and Ritual.
Parashakti, a certified yoga instructor
had the honor of receiving teachings
from Swami Sachidananda, founder of
Integral Yoga, while she lived at their
ashram in NYC and Virginia. Her yogic
lifestyle led her to the study of Native
American healing arts with the Shoshone and
Lakota Indians. Inspired by the wisdom of her
elders and her native roots, she developed a
unique form of movement called the Dance of
Liberation. Through the integration of dance,
yoga, ritual, shamanic journeying, hands on
healing, live drumming, global music,
Dance of Liberation
heals and frees physical, mental, emotional
and spiritual blockages.
She has worked with over
10,000 dancers from around
the world and leads workshops, trainings and retreats at
the world’s leading holistic
centers. In her private practice as a
Shamanic practitioner, Parashakti
has developed her own healing
modalities that assist clients with
various emotional issues and life
threatening diseases.
PARASHAKTI
DANCE OF LIBERATION FACILITATOR
SHAMANIC HEALING PRACTITIONER
dreamthebiggestdream.com
www.Parashakti.org
www.Jivamuktiyoga.com
Private Shamanic Healings: 646.415.7553
THE VISIONARY
ACCOUNTANT, LLC
Accounting, financial and management services
for non-profits, artists, & healing professionals
www.sacredlight.to
Kevin D. Sachs, Ph.D.
www.braindrops.com
718-751-6181
[email protected]
www.lightscience.ca
www.elfintome.com
www.zyzzazonemusic.com
The Ritual and Mystery Schools edition of CoSM Journal has been an
initiation for us. As we report, design and edit these stories, we are infused
with the wisdom and knowledge shared with us by each participant and
writer. This issue is a reflection of our experiences of the past year and we
are excited to share all that has occurred and is occurring with the growing
CoSM community. We are blessed to know so many incredible artists,
healers, and conscious collaborators ­– and for those of you we have not
met, we look forward to connecting. Thank you once again for reading
CoSM Journal. Please continue to share your dreams and visions.
See you next time!
Eli Morgan & Marisa Scirocco
[email protected]
www.delisiart.com
[email protected]
2007