the third world is a name supplied top down to this unconsulted billions of people. since most third world nations are informed of ‘god’s will’ with the imposition of the bible along with the bible-based calendar with its week based on how long ‘god’ took to make the earth – all of which only makes sense if there’s plenty of creationistic context to sustain it – i’m talking high psychological impact – looming lllaaaaaaaarrrrrrrgggggggggggggggge in the sparse contexts available to many conquest-shocked, culturally devastated third world peoples whose whole world has gone! is the information that ‘god’ is intending to destroy catastrophically one third of all that dwells in the air, water and on the land. from magical perspectives, which are persistent there, it looks a lot like we’re trying to fulfill bible prophecy, and i’m not just talking about the compulsory pollution of ‘third-world’ environments. right or wrong, it scares some – uh – ‘third-world’ people when they finally discover that that’s what they’re being called.

these peoples were not all organised into political units you’d call ‘countries’, any more than Europe was before the rise of nation states a mere two or three centuries ago – that was done to them, or strenuous and exhausting attempts are being made to do it to them. there’s a sense in which the third world is being forced to develop countries at all, even without thinking yet about what those countries are supposed to be developing.  and what are they developing? ‘western’ technology, ‘western’ medical, educational and religious systems, ‘western’ commerce and social organisation, profound culture shock and crippling debt.

were they not ‘developing’ before westernisation? they’ve been evolving as long, and arguably, while you’re developing technology, your spirituality and philosophy go to hell in the proverbial. in comparison, for example, with aboriginal dream-time theory as developed over thousands of years by low-tech philosophers and cosmologists and yes, shamans, star-walking wizards and deep sorceresses, the inflated superstition that passes for book-based religion in our culture, compelling everyone who is possessed by it to try to annihilate every other religion, denouncing the earth-loving religions as ‘of the devil’ is worse than underdeveloped, it’s like a huge tumour.

close to our noble natures,

taking easily our instruction

from mother-mind,

whether through birds’ beaks

and elves’ mouths,

and incidental ogham in the brittle sticks

and prickles of the thorn,

or through well-worn domesday tomes,

gnomes traditions,

paleolithic spells,

and the wisdom of the well,

or through high flying on swift winds

of wonder and amazement

in the sky cathedral

of the many minds

to hear the majestic choirs of

gaia’s cerebral mind

in meditation and in ritual

and in flight,

wild we live as druids

close to our tribal natures,

talking easily our inner vision

in town and forest still.

i am drawing again light from the pallouring sky
having drunk all night its darkness and the aeons-long light of stars.
the moon’s milk is in my veins.

o sun, our star, i am breathing your flowing fire,
i am kindling my morning fires,
your flames begin to glow in all the industrious atoms of my leaves.

the air is sweetened and the earth and sky and i we mingle our breaths
i am breathed through with life.

from the sky and the earth i draw water
in water all songs lunar are sung and celestial vistas flash
of those in their spinning of wisdoms i am made mindful.

i am also a fountain, yes, of living waters
in me is an ocean
and the sky is alive with my waters also.

no thing lives that has not drunk of me.

i nudge my mouthing root into the mother mud.
from crystals, stone and earth she brews for me by miracles
my nourishment of molecules and minerals and metals
which were forged in stars, and i am full of stars.

i am made equally of quiet yet shining fire
fanned by the breath of the brightening sky
the jewels of life are a-blaze in my slow, in my cool, green flame.

amid the climbing water of my fountain
in my sky full of celestial water
in my clamouring atoms
in my billion-crucibled leaves
in the push of my sugared sap
in the quickening and slowing of my seed-mothering flower and
in the more than muscular swell of my branch and root

all things transmute
in me
all things transmute

The archetypes preserved in folklore are interactive – do we need their power in our lives? They represent real people who lived in or before the middle ages, or during the renaissance or thereabouts. Our genetic inheritance comes from a population which not only included them, but fore-grounded them in story and song. The genes that determine our natures were hammered on the forges of their zeitgeist, just as we now find ourselves fine-tuning them in our 21st century interpersonal dramas. The crone of the middle ages incubated the spirituality of the crone of today, just as we are now shaping the nature of crones to come. It helps Gaia if we maintain the continuity of such evolutions – it’s a way of helping to repair the web of race memory, making subtle psychic connections between our times, allowing healing as in the repairing of damaged nerves.

Our ancestors had their own rightful place in the nasty past and are now fading from memory, while we live in the enlightened here and now, consciously working towards an ideal future. Shouldn’t we be imagining new role-models based on current experience? In the late 20th century, feminist scholars deeply explored the range of stereotypes generated by our culture, in the mass media, pop culture and in the popular imagination – many of these made use of carl jung’s work on archetypes and the collective unconscious. They found themselves awed at the power of the archetype as the shapers of society, of society’s response to individuals and their expectations of people who fall under their spell.

Some archetypes are distorted, like caricatures. They seem to exert a distortive power over the personality they misrepresent and over social situations involving them. Persistent images of independent old women have come down to us from a time when few people enjoyed long lives, and those who did were skinny, bent and rickety, with voices as croaky as that of the pet raven on their shoulder. Their faces are sometimes depicted as resembling death’s heads, the skull all but visible beneath the skin – and indeed, they seem close to death. It is this image of the crone that people fear.

The focus is not always on her decrepitude. In many folk tales the crone presents the symbolic gifts at rites of passage, and there’s usually nothing said of her other than that she is an old woman with high standing in the palace – at a time when a palace might be anything from a small populous city with a king and queen in residence to a lonely roadside cottage in the woods with a skeleton staff of one. This one is the dominant image in folk memory, and she still fascinates us. We continually create her anew, complete with rickets, toothlessness, croaky voice, distaff in hand and pet raven, but active pagans are more likely to up-grade her in the light of many generations of further evolution to a healthy, motivated, energised elder, rich in experience, a veteran of a lifetime of good living and ready for decades more of useful, dedicated work and enthusiastic participation in life.

Actors justly fear ‘type-casting’. It exerts metaphysical, magical power that can lock them into expected patterns of limited and inappropriate character-acting, stifling their creativity and limiting their opportunities for advance. So powerful are stereo-types, often unrecognised though held in the popular imagination by most people, that the second wave feminists of the 1970s called upon the image-makers of our culture, the educators, mass media, and the general population, to revise our fixed notions about old women, to take a reality check, to close the sizable gap between what old women, for example, really are and what most people think we are, how we are represented in the media and how this affects us. This radical rethink resulted in broad changes to our culture which now offers enhanced life experience for all older people.

As the mass media is now aware, if the general populace regards old women as typically sick, requiring full-time nursing care, headed for Alzheimer’s and kept alive by up to 20 different kinds of designer drugs, they can magically swing it that way. Advertising exploits this power for profit. We can wield it for the good of all. If we foreground the increasing sanity surrounding aging in current medical research, and focus on the many fit healthy role-models we see all around us, we can adjust our image towards the reality and thus connect more effectively with the beauty and blessing of old age, the value of the contribution of the aged to our culture and the special gifts and talents and sweet rewards that come with the wisdom of years. Then we can begin to shift them towards our own consciously crafted ideals. Thus we get magical control of our own evolution. Learning to use this awesome evolutionary force, this ‘force that through the green fuse drives the flower’ consciously, we avoid being distorted into creating dysfunctional social situations that plague life today.

We can learn from the archetypes, recognising their flaws in us and filtering them out, selectively inheriting their goodness, tweaking their spiritual ‘software’ creatively, participating in the crafting of the archetypes themselves. They aid us in discovering, cultivating and co-creating our own identities. The extent to which we resemble the archetype in question determines how much our spirit resonates with hers – or his in the case of a male. We can consciously avoid resembling an undesirable norm, the wicked witch who explodes in a jealous rage for example, while adopting features of the desired types, such as the chivalrous youth who marries the princess.

Through the evolving crone archetype women maintain continuum between ourselves and the old women of the past, receiving from them the power of their enchantment, and giving to them the blessing of their descendants. But be warned: when we conjure the crone from within our own beings, we might find ourselves with a friendly raven on our shoulder after all!

crone with crow

The Ritual
In preparation: crown (wrapped) and gifts are placed on central altar or other convenient surface in full view of all.

Rituallist: I proclaim the Rite of the The Spiral of Life
for the croning of vyvyan ogma wyverne,
companion of the order of bards, ovates and druids
in the cooringal groveof.
I give vyvyan greetings.
Saturn has twice returned to where it
was at the time of your birth.
You have turned fifty eight.
You have been a maiden,
and you have been a matron,
and now you are ready to become a crone.

Birch Spirit as Birth Guardian: As a spirit unborn you called together
father and mother, bodies and souls,
ancestors, past lives, dreamings, pathways:
you grew brand new from a single cell.
On a sunny day in spring,
you entered through the womb of life
into the arms of family love,
you entered the universe of human experience,
of perception and understanding,
you entered the succession of seasons,
of the circles and spirals of time and event
and you became a human child,
growing stronger every day.

East: As a bird in the wood,
around and around you flew,
you wove wakes in the shining air,
in the radiant peace of the east.
From the family to the greater community
you learned the established practices of our culture,
you took up the symbols of holiness and power,
you drank the nectar, spoke the ancient vows,
submitted to the curses of life, blessed the blessings
and learned to love the law,
and so became a maiden, fit for life.

North: As a flame in the fire
you went to work with a will
embraced the fuel, did the magical work of transformation
in the joyful peace of the North.
In the great crescendo of life
of culture and community, of work and of play,
as part of the vital fabric of earthly reality
there you matured, suffered, triumphed,
learned much, taught much, erred and sinned
and yet still loved goodness and just laws.

West: As a fish in the flood, questing,
you navigate instinctively.
you dream the mystic visions of the waters
in the deep inner peace of the west.
Now let the harvest be abundant,
as it ripens from the seeds and flowers
of your childhood and youth.
Since quiet questing, patient industry
and the simple prayer
of a steady mind with a good conscience
are the rich rewards of a life lived truthfully
and humbly in search of health and wisdom.

South: As a clod of clay, flesh of the earth,
you will come to know and cherish
the solid logic in the forms and forces of reality
in the still, silent peace of the South.
Now as your material body ages,
you will have learnt the hard lessons,
won the difficult harvests, stored the gains
and gathered the bountiful rewards
of living upon the material planet
as a material being. You will age,
you will approach death itself as we all must.
Yet you will not fear this death in its time,
knowing that it is the doorway to new lives.

Yew Spirit – the Death Guardian: From the earth came your body,
from the unknown came your soul,
and finally they will return,
replete with each other’s imprint,
your soul to the unknown, your body to the earth,
the memory of you to the mythos
of the ancestors, or to oblivion
in a world that keeps on turning
through the cycle of the seasons
and the spinning spirals of the day.

Rituallist: As a maiden you learned to be useful.
As a matron you worked in the world.
As the crone you will share your wisdom
bringing understanding to the world
and foresight to the young.
(picks up crown)
This croning is the crowning of your life.
Perhaps the words are related –
older women once wore crowns
though they were not queens.
(placing crown on w’s head)
Yet, within the circle of this crown
you are queen of your own dominions,
as every woman is when she is croned.
You are queen of your own soul
queen of your own mind
queen of your own experience.
autonomous, empowered and free.

wyverne: I am grateful to the guardians of birth
who helped me into this world.
I remember with affection and something more
the children with whom I played
and the teachers who gave me my lessons
while I was a growing girl.
I am grateful to them all.
I am also grateful
to the friends of my adolescence
and those who prepared me for adult life.
My family, friends and teachers
both human and other,
animals and angels
and the beings of all worlds.
And my co-workers, comrades-at-arms
my fellow humans, I am grateful
to have been so blessed and so sustained
through hard times and good
in so many ways by so many.
(praying)
Gaia, you have been good to me
Given me more than you’re able to give others.
I go forward with a right good will
in trust and affection with you
to bring help to the hurt,
provisions to the needy
healing to the sick
wisdom to the bewildered
and comfort to the weary
in the best way I can till I can do no more.

To you who have spoken the ritual words for me,
and to you have listened, I am especially grateful,
because you are here to revive that consciousness
of magic, and the ritual response that sanctifies
the stages of my life as they ought to be sanctified,
without which life is less.

For this reason I ask each of you to accept this gift.
(goes round circle then returns to centre)

I came into this circle today a matron
a maturing woman with a lot of memories
and I’ll leave it a crone, autonomous and free.

All: (return to places ready to resume ceremony)

The Axis Mundi. As a culture, we have come adrift of our souls and their truths and have often sacrificed our precious memories just to retrieve some semblance of contact with these truths through myths. In Druidry, the search for the Mabon is sometimes undertaken as a personal soul-retrieval quest. Magical, esoteric and mystery schools have many allegorical systems related to this notion. A good understanding of the Axis Mundi is very helpful in the quest. The Axis Mundi is a central feature of shamanic magic, and can be used as a basis for effective world magic and personal and community magic in the twenty first century. An integral part of the planet with corresponding energy structures in every human being, it regulates the multitudes of magically dynamic interfaces within our beings. When left to itself, unmanaged, it is like a garden of weeds – good in itself, a viable default, but not very purposeful. It can maintain a healthy ecosystem if all goes well. If anything goes wrong in or around it, everything is affected and may get unbalanced, sick and unsightly. Similarly, when the magic of one’s personal Axis Mundi is unmanaged it’s okay as long as no serious stress or other problems occur, but under stress may succumb to disorder which could result in disease or problems in relationships or other difficulties in life. While the church suppressed magic, the neglect of this vital axis has contributed to the sickness, fear, crime, corruption and disorder that are out of control in our world today. Conscious, mindful management of our magic then should surely be undertaken. The difference between trained magicians and ‘muggleses’ is not that one is more magical than the other, it is that we magicians undertake the conscious creative management of our magic, while the ‘muggleses’ let theirs run amok.

What is the Axis Mundi? ‘Axis’ is latin for ‘a straight line passing through the centre of a wheel or sphere’ and ‘mundi’  means ‘of the world.’ according to geographers the earth’s axis is the central column of the vortex of its spinning. It has a north and south pole corresponding to the poles of the associated electro-magnetic field. Esotericists extend this meaning to any conceivable straight path through the earth passing through its centre, but without the vortex created by the spin. Anything vertical is aligned to a section of the Axis Mundi. When the human animal first learned to stand erect, s/he became a tiny section of an Axis Mundi such, as previously only upright beings such as trees, owls and kangaroos had ever been before. Thus through myriad naturally occurring axes, Gaia nourishes, organises and manages the metaphysical environment in which she is forming her internal ‘organs’, ranging from the vast spheres of the material, etheric and other planes, to their ecosystems and the individual rocks, crystals, plants or animals within them. This she does naturally, through trees and mountains and structures we can’t perceive yet, and she works also through human beings specialised for the role, eg shamans, magicians, sorcerers, druids, witches, priests etc. These bring all kinds of essential magic into the social, ecological, political and spiritual environments of our world. The Axis Mundi is imagined or represented as providing resonance-transmitting connections between any given world axis and/or the individual’s own personal axis. Sometimes an intervening device such as a totem pole, world tree (the many-tiered Christmas tree, for example), house pole or other is used. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axis_mundi I’m planning a complete temple incorporating the bardic circle and the Axis Mundi. Via natural correspondences which I shall describe later, this combination can permit beautiful magic for the earth, helping to regulate vital functions as basic and necessary to planetary health as the circulation of the blood is to a mammal. I want to show that this theory is sustainable and that it provides us with a workable handle on reality through which we can perform good, healthy, much needed, druidic magic for our planet. It’s hard work and there are frustrations and even dangers. Our guides are many and though most are relatively enlightened, they are fraught people in a tense planet and some are, well, edgy at times. If your foot strays from the virtue path, you may be berated and even denied access until you get back on track – and you may have to win a few points sometimes. Independent magicians can prosper, but life is a lot easier if you are working through a well-regulated programme such as OBOD or similar, where the guardians of the grove are guaranteed to be helpful, good-humoured and savvy. As a druid, for example, if you remain true to the grail tradition of virtue without thought of personal reward, you become very useful to the planet, and the personal rewards go without saying. Gaia is a living creature. Most people are by now familiar with the idea that our planet is a living, vital, sentient, intelligent, multi-dimensional, many-gendered, many-dreaminged cosmic being, not just a dead rock with people on it. Perhaps she is a witch, a goddess, a magical intelligence of great power and beauty, a powerful celestial being. Or perhaps she’s just a dim glimmer, a tiny waif just coming into being among kindly or hostile others.

1^st visualisation. A glance at these links will be good preparation: http://www.Gaiafoundation.org/content/Gaia-mythology http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structure_of_the_Earth Imagine that you are a vast, celestial god, holding Gaia’s material body in the palm of your hand as if she were a fragile egg. The familiar hard, stony sphere is thinly surrounded by her many-layered atmosphere, which is tenuous at the outer extremes, so it as if you held a skinless soap bubble that floats upon your hand. Perhaps she resembles a transparent, softly layered fruit with a large, wet stone within. Imagine the consistency of that tenuous atmosphere surrounding the thin, rhythmically pulsating hydrosphere, which covers only two thirds of the lithosphere – the part we know best, living as we do on its surface, though we can’t penetrate its tough, rocky shell very deeply yet. We know very little beyond what it takes to recognise and use resources for our evolving civilisations. Zooming out once again, see our young planet as a multi-dimensional conscious being in her own right. This aliveness and responsivity must be kept in mind while imagining our Axis Mundi. Let’s now return her to her place in the sky, orbiting her smallish yellow sun. Before we leave her, there’s one more thing to consider: I don’t only focus on my innards, so it’s reasonable to imagine that Gaia doesn’t focus only on hers either, but participates in all kinds of energetic and magical exchanges with other celestial bodies and no doubt with entities beyond our ken. These exchanges resonate in the Axis Mundi, where the resonances are moderated and managed and some are mindfully conditioned for us by Gaia and mediated to us as we attune our personal axis to hers – just as we process our experiences in our brains. These processes happen naturally, even while we sleep, and they often permeate our dreams, fantasies and fictions, and inspire our science and philosophy, but Gaia needs her magicians and shamans to wake up and get to work consciously optimising them for the good of all beings. We’ll come back to this visualisation later.

That other ‘world wide web’. We know that the visible world hosts a vast and intricate network of biologically living beings, the biome, or web of life, consisting of a myriad of highly diverse species from tiny microbes to great whales each with its own vast array of specialisations. Crystals too are on a continuum with life-forms, so the mineral kingdom is also vibrant with purpose and functional too. Along with the spheres of atmosphere, oceans and earth, together they all, or rather we all, comprise the visible planet’s livingness, her vital, sentient, richness of conscious experience. Information of all kinds flows through all manner of channels and networks to co-ordinate all life systems harmoniously – via our senses, for example, through chemical exchanges – even within each other’s bodies, as it’s also the world-wide food-web. Each little being’s experience involves myriad, minute exchanges with a vast array of other beings in the web of life. This networking is managed by the forces that regulate global ecology so that it contributes harmoniously if possible to the whole experience of the material world – just as my conscious experience is constituted from the pooled experience of all my cells, organised and managed by my metabolism and interpreted selectively through my brain. We are Gaia’s cells. As ‘cells’ of Gaia, we are much more freely motile than most of the cells within our own bodies. Unlike many of her own biota Gaia as a celestial being is not freely motile, but in her fixed orbit within the solar system, which together with the amazing myriads of celestial bodies surrounding her, comprise the galaxy – in all its living, sentient, intelligent , passionate complexity. The more we appreciate this, the more encouragement we get from the guardians of the Axis Mundi, and the better our magic will be.

Gaia is multi-dimensional. Throughout history in all cultures, seers, shamans and highly trained adepts have glimpsed other dimensions of our planet – parallel universes and non-material extensions of this one, beyond most peoples’ sight, yet just as real and richly detailed, and sometimes deeply interpenetrating with ours – the faerie realms, spirit worlds, and all manner of mysterious ‘other-worlds’. Differing now from western scientific theory, Gaia appears to be a young planet, not yet fulfilled. Many moons have fallen and many have yet to fall. Humans have evolved between moon-falls, and our present moon will fall millions of years from now, and merge her evolution with earth’s. (This is a New-Age idea that was circulating during the 1970s and 80s, but I can’t now find a reference to it. – can anyone help?)

The holographic planet. http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=59223213350926692 We’ve looked at Gaia’s many concentric spheres. According to esoteric belief, our planet manifests on seven levels of radiance, so each of these has richly detailed, vitally alive, astral and ethereal counterparts and more, which sometimes interpenetrate through nexuses what we can learn to control via the Axis Mundi. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_rays These interact something like the layers of different tissues in an evolving embryo or like the ‘shells’ of higher and higher energies surrounding an atom. The denser darker energies form the more concentrated spheres within while the lighter more expansive ones spread further outwards, forming the outer spheres. It’s a scientific fact that their perceived attributes are mentally constructed from data such as sensory stimuli interpreted within the brain. ‘Greenness’ for example, is not ‘real’, the radiances interpreted as green are. What this implies is that as a species we are tuned into our earthly reality as if to a one-channel virtual-reality holographic television broadcast. But evidence is mounting that Gaia is broadcasting on several wavelengths, and as we awaken more senses, we begin pick up traces of the broadcasts on some of the other channels – we access the parallel worlds. If so, as the poet says, we’re ‘looking through a glass onion’, with each layer of the onion a different world. For Gaia, these worlds function something like elaborate lenses – incorporating vast systems of highly specialised filters, selectors, censors and interpreters, busily engaged in organising, processing and distributing of all the myriad effects coming in and all those going out from the centre, in a continuous interchange – like billions of conversations all happening at once – a kind of Jacob’s ladder with the angels constantly ascending and descending. Concentricity,  diversity, reciprocity – Gaia radiant with life, drinking in and deeply appreciating the radiances of the sky…

The holographic human. In many esoteric systems we learn to feel out to the edges of our own personal bodily energy field, a spheroid envelope of subtle energy surrounding us, containing our material bodies, our light bodies and the many subtle bodies known to seers. Our material bodies are thus like the core of an apple embedded within an extra-dimensional, vital and dynamic apple matrix, or the embryo in an otherwise invisible egg. This egg-shaped body can be compared to the earth itself, in that it comprises several concentric layers, though not spheres, each containing its own bodily form, nested like Russian dolls. Most of us have heard of the astral body, or the etheric body, the light body, and so on, which might be described as perhaps virtually concentric with the material body.  In this correlation between Gaia’s body and the human body, we have the basis of one sort of sympathetic world axis magic, via a meditation which brings our personal axis into sympathetic accord with that of the earth itself in a conscious, purposeful way. The correspondences I find are my own work, although informed from many sources, and no one has to take them as text-book fact. The greatest value comes from mapping your own axis as you learn your way around it by using it yourself. A well-managed Axis Mundi can be like a probe, sensing these other wavelengths and beginning to explore them. So how do we go about imagining one?

The spectra. Many of the radiant energies of our planet are manifest as spectra. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electromagnetic_spectrum For example light manifests as the spectrum of colour. It appears as three effulgences with yellow as a central well-spring, which you might cautiously think of as ‘yang’, with red as a more introvert, and perhaps ‘yin’, intensity on one side, and blue, also ‘yin’ but different, as another on the other side. These overlap forming the neutral orange and green between them and purple at, enigmatically, the end of the visible spectrum, where there is no visible red to blend with – yet it is blended as if side by side, as a glance at an artist’s colour wheel will show. The six tertiary colours are thus a further rational division, though others are possible. Three primaries, three secondaries and six tertiaries – twelve altogether. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visible_spectrum This is paralleled in the sound spectrum, where red, yellow and blue correspond to the do, mi, and so of the tonic solfa scale. These three are perceived as dominant tones, with re, fa and la corresponding to the secondary colours, orange, green and violet, while the flats and sharps and, anomalously, ti correspond to the six tertiary colours. That also makes twelve. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musical_scale Some healers correlate the chakras with the colours and tones of these spectra. If the energy levels of the planetary spheres are also dominated by this pattern of manifestation, as some mystics think they are, theoretically, there should be twelve spheres ultimately, each with its own tone and vibrational range co-resonant with the wavelengths of the light and sound spectra. It’s difficult to prove this, so we’re working with a theory, based largely on psychic experience, some of it my own, not on proven fact. Nevertheless it enables us to build magical systems that work. Our planet is apparently young, and some of these spheres are not yet formed. Indications are that there may be seven of them now as, since newton described it, the western mind has for a long time had an otherwise irrational fixation on the seven-hued rainbow, although there is no scientific basis for that number, and also the same irrational fixation on the seven notes of the tonic scale. The note ti corresponds to the tertiary colour indigo, and both are tertiary divisions anomalously included with the primaries and secondaries. Both these fixations seem to be culture-specific, as indeed is the perception of dominant colours and tones at those precise wavelengths. Something in us wants newton’s ‘error’ preserved there. Myth and truth often don’t coincide and where they clash, there lies hidden magic. Errors of the intellect are often truths of the soul – that’s why we so often prefer them. Perhaps it’s in response to subconscious knowledge of a major happening at that wavelength, currently culminating in the much publicised ‘indigo’ generation. http://www.indigochild.com/  

2^nd visualisation: the other worlds. For now, let’s go back to the visualisation in the second paragraph. Once again see Gaia as a living creature in the palm of your hand but this time imagine you see her with seven concentric spheres all surrounded with their atmospheres etc, each one a different reality invisible to each other but clearly visible to you. You will observed that the inner planets are saturated with the very fine substances of the outer ones while dense substances of the inner spheres do not extend to the outer ones. Now imagine peering into the transparent spheres and seeing other spheres beginning to form. There’s one within the first, just a tenuous mist perhaps, or just flashes of light or colour. It’s for you to imagine, and trust Gaia to perfect your vision. There’s another between the first and second, and between the second and third, and so on, like the flats and sharps in the musical scale or tertiary colours not yet clearly distinguishable in a rainbow. The inner spheres correspond to the redder, slower end of the light spectrum and to the lower notes of the musical scale. This is a starting point in imagining the Axis Mundi. So this is the theoretical model I work with – worlds within worlds. We don’t know much about the other-worlds directly, but through the literature of mythology, history, esoterica, legend, folk-lore, fantasy, religion and pop culture, we play with ideas freighted with their inspirations. Trusting these sources, and our emerging instinct and skill, ideally working with a bardic circle, via the Axis Mundi, we can negotiate useful, flexible, user-friendly interfaces with willing other-world beings. This in turn helps us to map the axis rationally and systematically for maximum effectiveness and safety, for world magic, community healing, personal empowerment and much more. My own rather eclectic selection of identifiers – and it’s a grab-bag of them I’m showing here – are drawn from reading, meditation and personal experience, is not necessarily going to resemble anyone else’s, and anyway is not static, being updated continually, but I’ll share it with you as an example of what one druid has done with it.

Twelve worlds. While I keep in mind that each sphere is as detailed and species rich as ours, I am focusing mostly on the tiny portion of the sphere’s total experience that is relevant to humanity. I’m sharing only some of my broad ideas, which may serve as starting points for others as long as they feel free to disagree as new evidence comes to them as they become adept. I certainly often find cherished notions of mine needing revision and it’s important to stay flexible enough to allow your guides to draw you in through your increasingly accurately informed sense of each sphere towards their reality – or not as the case may be. Human evolution is very various, but in many cases the further out they are, the more the humans of an outer sphere long for incarnation on the inner spheres, and vice versa. The evolution of souls generated on an outer sphere consists of achieving enough rapport with an inner sphere to incarnate there and to continue in this way until they have covered them all, and reached the centre and completed their earthly human body. Souls generated in the inner planets are immersed in all the radiances and need to incarnate successively further out until they form their celestial bodies as citizens of the galaxy. Then they have many options for further evolution as cosmic beings in their own right, true daughters and sons of our mother planet and father sky. My Axis Mundi is based on twelve energy levels and at each one I am cultivating pleasurable relationships with guides and guardians.

the spectrum of light correlates to the spectra of sound, the spectra of earth vibrations and of those of a human being.

Starting with the innermost:

Magenta Chaos, the fertile womb: watery, octopus dreaming. Here we have the generation of the forms, qualities and logistics of life, a consensus of all her beings, types, totems etc, a controlled effulgence. Under ‘cosmic law’: fertilising it, there’s a royal court there and a full complement of courtiers – the famed and feared rex mundi to administer this law. This deep deep awareness in our planet corresponds to the human ‘id’. The akashic records are kept here. It is attuned to the embryo and foetus and the age of invertebrates. It corresponds to the mammalian reproductive system.

Red In the Greek myths Tartarus is the deepest underworld. For me it is dark, rocky and cool, laced with cold streams, and has a stark and sparse fauna and flora including many large, slow amphibians and several human types, including titan-like people, cosmic elves, totemic beings and spirit people. They are gigantic. They appear as large as a full-screen close-up face image on a cinema screen, but are dark shadowy grey phantasmic images, not very frightening when you see them. Aboriginal dream-time spirits are accessed there via corroboree. Druids should note that the digeridoo is playd like a dord. It may be used to evoke resonances of this kind.

3. Scarlet Still in formation. Scarlet is associated in my mind with bardry, tarot, military tattoos, pageantry and spectacular display, equestrianism, haute couture, sexual display and courtship, sophisticated horticulture and some of the more elaborate forms of art, culture and civilisation. This sphere resonates strongly with the old ‘Conan the Barbarian’ comics. Gripping narrative is generated here, to harness the passions and power of the great arch-warriors and the fierce Gaian women and civilise them. It is attuned to the age of dinosaurs, and childhood.

Orange Hades, traditionally situated below earth, is a fairly civilised place where certain of the heroic dead of our world have honour and privilege after leaving this life. Ethics, wealth and politics are major foci. They have fertile lands with very large birds and mammals like bison, ravens and wolves and, and gigantic people. They are sometimes at war with us, so bring your best peace process and be prepared to be held off until they no longer fear you. It is attuned to the Paleolithic era of humanity, and puberty.

Buff  This is the underworld celtic fairies inhabit, along with many other undocumented races. Described in the folklore as relatively recent the Celtic component is only the tip of the ice-berg. The fay of England’s hollow hills, the brownies etc and people transferring through their deaths from many earthly nations and equal numbers from hades are building this world. They maintain mostly friendly and often very affectionate relations with their parent worlds through loved ones they knew there. They know us well, and they’re easy to reach with music and song, as they are well described in Celtic lore. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aos_S%C3%AD  It corresponds to the Neolithic era, adolescence, cottage industries, home comforts, crafts, trades and small farming. The people there are very proud of its scholars with their libraries of cherished ancient tomes, including traditions of magic. It is attuned to wild creatures. Exhilarating to work with, often hilarious with the joy of breakthrough, these are bursting with love for us!

Yellow Earth, this apparent world and all its associated fairy worlds (plant spirits, gnomes, pixies – earth kin’s as good a name as any) – of which we are of course, but one, and while yellow is at the centre of the spectrum we’re not necessarily more focal than the others, just closer to and dealing more immediately with a source. Pan prevails here. It is (for us) the here and now and attuned to domestic cattle and machinery, toys, cybernetics, cyber-beings and the flower of youth. Technology and scientific knowledge are major foci, with plenty of magic, fantasy and exuberance to bring it all to life.

Olive The blessed dead from ww1 are here. This is a new world coming into being, populated by men and woman who have crawled out of their battle field corpses and bombed cities and farms and built a life in the battle-scarred reflection of this world.  The astral sphere also, we know not with what convulsions of their equally populous world, supplied many souls to this world. Peaceful recruitment through afterlife is still happening worldwide. They are peace-makers, sworn never to forget the horror of war. They communicate easily through séance. This sphere is attuned to agricultural crops, and is forward looking.  They know and understand trauma. Attuning to them may be accompanied with waves of emotion, even tears. They love us. They know better than we do how necessary it is to care about the worlds either side of us as well as our own. We have to wake up and put an end to the planetary nightmare of war.

Green Esotericists call this the astral, where séances often speak from. Traditionally it’s one of the easiest other-worlds to communicate with, but be sure of your guides. They’re like us – some are sometimes not ethical. Calling them all ‘good neighbours’ offers the right sort of magic to the kindly ones among them, and does neither harm nor good to the nasties. But trusting too soon is counter-indicated. They maintain a fairly organic sort of pervasive civil service. Politics is their focus and they are constantly fighting crime and corruption. Green supplies its own remedies as priorities consistent with healthy living are established, and corruption is being built out there as it is here. It is attuned to herbs, the age of reason, and the near future as a goal.

Aqua Very new. Its formation is connected with the the Age of Aquarius and the birthing of plastics and synthetics into the world. Remember in the sixties the generation of people called the ‘plastic’ people? And then dolls like Barbie and her kin, and the Brats, by means of which Gaia enchants children into feeding their specific magic into this new Aquarian world. Altruism is a focus, along with identifying and solving problems, game-playing, fantasy and creative role-playing. Attuned to fungi, parenthood and creative play, and the future as a continuum. Their dance is very dynamic – lots of fun, but there’s also wisdom in it.

Blue This is the aerial sphere. Sylphs, flying fairies, aerial beings are at home here and they also host various fairies and extra-terrestrials. They send us poets (eg shelley) and singers and philosophers with their ideals of personal beauty and grace. They are time travellers, philosophers, and scientific – indeed, futuristic, having been there. It is attuned to tiny birds like swifts and swallows, critters like squirrels and other rapid, flighty things, responsible maturity, spirituality (think jazz and the blues) and peace.

Indigo This is the ethereal planet, the home of the beings of light, wizards, magicians, host to an array of extra-terrestrials. Our light bodies are often here, because Druidry and other formal magical systems have groves, temples and schools here. Working with mystery schools and esoteric systems etc they are actively seeking our sphere’s magicians to connect with them, and they frequently form marriages with willing earthly adepts. This is where the ‘indigo children’ currently incarnating on earth are from. http://www.crystalinks.com/ets.html Magic mirrors, crystal balls and pyramids attract them. They are disarming, charming, funny and friendly people, a little shorter than we are. There are time lords there, like those in Doctor Who, or Star Wars.  They inspire a lot of popular science fiction, such as Star Trek and the Harry Potter series.

Violet Celestial beings such as angels, certain saints, some gods (although there are gods on all levels), and many much venerated identities associated with the highest, saintliest wisdoms are found here. The sacred grove operates here, and so does the papacy, the churches and the high spirituality of other cultures. It is accessible through our highest religious feelings, and deals with the sacred, the highest ideals and the most refined aesthetic. They guide us with great love and kindness and high authority. They incarnate on earth sometimes to assist intra-planetary evolution as well as to enhance their own experience. All these spheres are constantly inter-acting, exchanging souls, wisdom, power and all sorts of qualities and changing each other in a constant lively radiant bustle of change and growth and renewal. The whole is a planet, our matrix, our mother. Worldwide, millions of pagans are proving that she can be invoked as a loving mother who will guide her druids on our quest for wisdom, love and power, because she does want powerful magicians to help her to bring all the spheres into conscious harmonious accord.  

Building the world tree. It helps the magic if I attune to the aerial plane through valid, magically activated symbols, such as runes and sigils, numbers, zodiac signs, the tarot etc. Although individuality is the key-note, some of the most potent activation is achieved by the collective consciousness, the result of the magical intentions of many serious minded magicians who more or less agree on the basic elements of the symbol’s meaning or the rune’s enchantment. It’s not essential but it’s helpful to use the basic magical lore that other magicians are developing as a resource for all. It works best if you stay conscious of why you use the focalisers you use and why you enchant or interpret them the way you do, and why you charm them the way you do. Be aware also that they are charming you! Exploring your own reasoning can make you much more aware of the validity of your own awakening magical mind. Crystals, pictures, the tarot, words, ideas, animal names or images, fur, hair or feathers, shells or whatever has meaning for you can also be used. These can be worn, placed on an altar, or glued to an Axis Mundi painted on a wall, or they can decorate a tree, a wand or pole. Here are some correspondences I’m working with, which might seem reasonable to you:  

Attuning. As a preliminary step to attuning, first cast a circle and do the light body exercise. Then remember the poet Amergin, who respectfully addressed the god of the land he was entering as a matter of courtesy. It is respectful to invoke Gaia formally and ask for her consent, and for her guidance and protection on the path. It makes sense to me also to invoke Rex Mundi, the ‘world king’ in some traditions – seen as a quintessential male human, while Gaia is a myriad-formed planet. Later you’ll meet your guides – the gwersi teach good ways of doing this, through guided visualisation for example.  This itself is good magic, so I do it often. Wearing formal regalia is helpful, as it has meaning for the guides you will attract to you and can incorporate psychic protection such as runes, wands, herbs or crystals. For example, the old ‘ban the bomb’ insignia on the sleeve of my sixties duffle coat draws to me my beatnik soul group, who have places I can reach in Hades where they are honoured for their work for human rights. Playing a Celtic harp brings the indigo wizards. Dancing or playing jigs brings in the underworld fairies.

Meditating.  I once came across a guided meditation, in a book about vision no longer in print, but typical of its kind – it involved inventing a tall building with seven floors each representing a colour of the rainbow. A shiny silver escalator carried the meditator in imagination from the lowest, i.e., red, floor, to the highest, i.e., violet, floor. There the meditator was asked to imagine items of the colour of each floor: a red table and chairs on the red, red walls, red door frames and doors, red curtains, red carpet on the floor etc. There was an orange piano and an orange book shelf full of orange books on the next floor, which had orange walls, carpets, curtains, an orange bowl of oranges etc., and so on up to violet.   This meditation innocently uses the Axis Mundi in a simple, powerful way. Expanding the spectrum to the twelve colours I work with, and thus inventing twelve floors for my house, I then, instead of inventing objects, invite nwyfre to flow from the floor I’m on into my stream of consciousness as a stream of intelligible data or text, where it inspires dreams, insights and purposes compatible with Gaia’s intentions for me. With patience and humility, it’s possible to learn to read more detail in this nwyfre, as its impressions flow from the world through this axis to our life field through our own personal axis. This requires the kind of psychic ability that can be developed by exercise, meditation and yoga – the light body exercise given in the gwersi is a basic essential for this development, with parallels in many similar disciplines of psychic awakening.   In my experience, the more I attempt this, the more conspicuous I am to the guardians and guides and the more I am assisted to quite sophisticated exchanges across these interfaces made in my imagination with reference to the Axis Mundi. Error-prone at first, practice makes perfect, and as years pass, I get reliable information, allowing me the be aware of short forays under safe conditions into the worlds below and the worlds above.

Blessings on your magic!

wyverne  

a antive black waiting there in ambush did give our tyrant his mortal stroke

here’s my newest mp3. it’s an iconic australian song. every schoolchild learns it. it is historical in every sense of the word.

you can read about it here: http://folkstream.com/061.html . you’ll find the lyrics here too, with minor differences.

i hope you enjoy it.
wyverne /|\

well, wherever i went, i wasn’t long without a guitar, even if a very cheap, old, battered guitar, but it liked me and we sang a lot of songs together, around camp-fires or alone if there was no-one else willing. now it seems there’s a folk revival happening, coming out of the celtic one. the people seem to listen here, then there, and they listened to celtic music and now they want to hear other folk music again. and they’ve got a whole generation of seasoned backyard bards to contribute, who’ve listened since the heady days of protest and acid rock to steele-eye span, the fureys, the celtic singers, and more, and absorbed naturally without any ambition beyond backyard acclaim for being able to play at all, half a lifetime of influences, songs, styles and subtleties that imbue their singing without them being at all articulate about it or even knowing that that’s what’s happening till they stop and think. that’s a lot of magic herbs into the cauldron, and there’s bound to be exciting things coming out of it. lacking confidence a bit, acutely conscious of flaws and faults, i do belong to that generation of folksinger and that genre. people are beginning to respond well to me and my newest guitar, not such a battered one nowadays. perhaps i can be among the ones who make a contribution.