K is for Klein Onion

A Klein Bottle is a sort of object where what is "inside" and what is "outside" is topologically ambiguous, a 'three-dimensional' equivalent of the 'two-dimensional' Möbius strip.

A lot of the stuff I do is kind of like that, only with onions - where I have no idea which layer - if any - is "inside" and which is "outside", and suspect the overall question of being kind of fundamentally meaningless.

It goes something like this:

I do some research and come up with a notion. I wind up doing more research around it, digging at it in pieces. I have a wacky brain-connection like arc lightning connecting that thing with something else. I look into the something else. That process winds up connecting me to a mystical experience. The mystical experience appears to point to a third thing, which, although it's kind of weird, I wind up researching. That research winds up pointing at the original notion, often in such a way that I suspect that the third thing may actually have been the first thing, or have developed in symbiosis with the first thing, or ....

Anyway. You can come in at any point on this or a more complicated loop and it all winds up being the same - there are pieces of lore, random connections, and genuine spiritual experiences that intermesh in weirdly consistent ways. And then I go take those meshworks and show them to other people because - hey - just because I think it makes sense doesn't mean shit, but then the other people go, "Oh. Shit. Right," and run away to suddenly do new things, which means I think that it all makes sense outside my head. Which can be a little scary.

But that's the interesting thing, the way everything is interconnected.

The one that got me pondering the Klein Onion went something like this (a bit more UPG than the usual one, but the stuff that's more lore-based is waaaay too personal right now):

I'm doing research on the Night Journey in various forms (the Amduat, the Book of Nut, etc.)

Which got me pondering the nature of the Tree Goddess (a form of Nut, Hetharu, or I believe occasionally Aset, but in materials I've come across usually Nut or Hetharu).

Chatted with a friend about the Tree Goddess, mentioned a few things, got a detailed blat of feedback about stuff that exactly matched things that I didn't say. Huh. Well. That's interesting.

So, okay, I've done Axis Mundi stuff lately, and what pagan hasn't stumbled across one goddamn tree meditation or another, right? What can I do to explore this more thoroughly, especially as this is a theophany of my patron?

Shit, I wrote another goddamn tree meditation.

Well, let's work with that. And explore more of it.

Well, the Nut/Geb polarity always has a solid erotic zing to it, but that's in Their myths - that They were so into being together that They had to be forcibly separated, after all.

... wait a second. Hetharu is often paired with Heru - it's in the names after all - which is another consort relationship, and Heru as a sky power is very ... there ought to be a branch-level erotic connection.

(Did I just find an MFM threesome in my mysticism? This is the point at which I took a break to laugh like a drain.)

Okay, so how the fuck do I deal with the branch-level eroticism? Root to earth is easy, all the twining of tree through the dark moist richness of the ground, and the tendency of growing things to be phallic in their reaching for the sky.

... shit. My head is full of stars, that's some of my d/s kink, isn't it. And thus the eroticism is that cosmic world-spanning thing, and it's threaded through with power and ...

... uh-huh. Hetharu/Heru is reigning king and queen, no wonder it's threaded through with power.

... and of course Heru is the ruler of Malkuth, the seen world, the entire visible cosmos as made fully manifest (which was the end product of another completely different branch of crackpot mysticism involving the kabbalah, which I almost never play with at all)

... but the Geb/Nut pairing is the first manifestation of the non-theoretical (if we're still playing kabbalah, which I wasn't when I did this but hey it's sequitur to writing this post and adds another layer for the bloody onion...)

... more precisely, Heru is said to inhabit the throne of Geb, the pharaonic/kingly seat of Egypt. While Wesir, Heru's father, is the deceased king from which Heru inherits, that is the throne of His father.

At which point I commented to a different friend about all this, and she said that it all sounded kind of dynastic, at which point I said something along the lines of, "Gee. The dynastic power flows through the Goddess who is responsible for feeding the glorified dead and allowing them to rest in Her branches when they return to the living land." Because it's all about ka-energy in the end.

Which is back to the beginning, in so many different ways.

H is for Heart

Yeah, okay, back to the pagan blog project. I'll see if I can do a bit of catching up. Unfortunately, the post I had drafted at one point seems to have vanished from my hard drive, so I'll have to do some rebuilding....

Both of my primary religions have symbolism that orbits around the heart. When I talk about this, I am talking about one or the other or both without differentiating, so you get to sort it out if you wanna.

Heart as true nature, heart as moral centre, heart as direct connection with divinity. These all exist: to be in accord with one's heart is to be in accord with divine will, to be doing what is right in the world, to operate from a place of truth and simplicity.

This is a goal. It is not a place that we actually live, except in moments of perfect alignment, perfect purity; it is a place to strive towards, and to experience like we experience creative flow. Perhaps we can't live there all the time, like creative flow - maybe we need the other times to achieve something meaningful. I don't know.

But there is this deep, primal need in most people, to hear the truth of the heart. That still small voice of the conscience, perhaps, or the thing that drives connection, right action, right being, right living. It doesn't matter what the trappings are on that; there is "I did not put in their hearts to do evil" in an old Egyptian texts, after all.

It is worth being careful, though. It is too easy to bury the still small voice, the soft murmurings of the heart, under other things, and claim that those are the voice of the heart. Fear is one; hunger, another, things that reside in the pit of the stomach, up against the places where we assimilate our power. We want, and we want what we want to be pure; we fear, and we want what we fear to be impure.

The heart doesn't always back us up on that kind of thing. H is also for hubris, I suppose.

Gah

Apparently Blogger went and rearranged all my crap while I wasn't paying attention, and now I have comment moderation that I never noticed existed that's been shuffling things sideways, and I can't figure out how to do the compose post thing properly anymore because it's a giant mess. Bleah!