Thoughts on Rahu
Correct, this is not an image of Rahu, but of Lord Narasimha on Bhaktapur Darbar square. Maybe read on for a while, it will all make sense in the end…
Now is the time to pay what’s due, to settle the bills and face the future without guilt. I am not making a financial statement here – although in some cases that could become a grim reality as well. First and foremost, I am talking about the lives we lead and the way we relate to the world. In short, I am talking about how we show up.
Sometimes, more than other times, we are thrust into the face of violence. Then we come to stand eye to eye with it. With war and injustice, with deep cuts and great losses. With sharp cracks in our biographies. With ruptures so radical that we cannot see any new shoots, any fresh green springing up from them. All they appear to us at that moment is an end without any beginning. A looping, spiralling descent. A loss without replacement. A shattering of our bodymind into incompleteness. Such are the days we are in right now, and such are the days to come.
Now what do we do about this as magicians? Of course we can make astrological calculations, know Rahu’s trajectory as Peter Jenx announced it so well in his recent ThelemaNow! interview. We can don talismans and have our amulets touched by protective spirits, carrying their presence and sparks within us. These are all good things for a mage to do when war is coming. But there are other things as well. More important things, I’d wager, and certainly more painful things.
What I am thinking of here specifically is to become Pluto, to become Saturn, to become Mars upon ourselves.
See, anything that is meant to happen to you over the coming 12 months will materialise one way or another. So now is our time to take charge, and to decide in which way exactly we want these changes to materialise for us. It is no longer a matter of whether but of how.
To take such painful actions, I want to offer a few points for your consideration. Then I’ll share some personal perspective on them.
Start by looking at all elements of unease in your current life. Think of these as suspicious patches on otherwise beautiful skin. (Skin cancer can appear small and inconspicuous on the outside, and already have over- grown large parts of the tissue under the skin.) When you examine the body of your life as it stands today, where does sadness or anger reside? Even harder to spot: where have you turned numb to experiences that otherwise would make you sore? Make a list of what you find initially.
Depending on how many elements of unease you captured, bring them down to the most important ones. For these I suggest to do either one or all of the following three things.
(A) Faced with this source of unease in your life, ask yourself: Where will you be in a year if you stay on your current path of experience? How much suffering, pain and fear is on the horizon if you do not change a thing? How far can you open your eyes to what will happen anyway? Then ask yourself, could this painful process be accelerated? Could this pain be drunk in one gulp instead of one drop a day? If my body has to experience this wounding anyway, how can I stop resisting it and make myself an ally of the forces of fate at work here?
(B) Then do the obvious thing. Get your favourite method of divination to work and ask Show me the fate pattern [X] is fulfilling in my life over the next 12 months? Personally, I am using Josephine McCarthy’s LXXXI Magician’s Deck for important readings such as these. (The companion book can be downloaded for free here; the simplest layout is the Tree of Life, described on pages 148-152.) If you have used a divinatory deck, take a photo of the spread you received. Research the cards individually in their position as well as in relation to each other. If you are unsure about any meaning, find someone who has more experience than you in this practice. As a rule of thumb, if the results do not surprise you, you probably aren’t reading them right.
(C) Lastly, in my book Holy Daimon (Scarlet Imprint, 2023) I describe a practice of singing to the planetary spirits. Only once you have identified your elements of unease and understand more about their relation to your fate pattern, I suggest to engage in this practice. In the appropriate setting, call for the planets to appear before you individually, sing to them, and allow yourself to stand naked in their piercing presence. Don’t hide, but step forward into the light of the force that is at work on you anyway. See what you learn from them: How does your current state, your present life look through the lens of these planets? What do they aim to reveal, to cut away, or to battle against? What can you do to become an ally to their endeavours, not subject or opponent.
Please know, I am offering these steps not from a place of mastery or accomplishment, but quite the opposite. I did not do enough of the above over recent years. And so recently Mars blew his horn of attack, Saturn brought down his sickle, and Pluto pulled back the cloth from the rot. These are ugly moments, we live through. These are moments in which we are left with nothing but courage.
When I was in my own version of this moment a few weeks ago, I was sitting alone on the waiting bench of a large hospital at 6am. My operation was the first of the day; soon I would be picked up, taken to a room to undress, put on support stockings and a gown, and lay on the disinfected hospital bed. Then I would be pushed down long corridors, naked under the blankets, past walls of white paint and steel, to the operating theatre where I would be placed into the hands of the doctors. They would joke about the amount of anaesthetic they would need for my large body, while all I could think about was how I was going to come out of this ordeal as a person foreign to myself. Here is what I wrote in my diary while waiting on that hospital bench at dawn:
So here am I. Taming my body. Holding it in a safe space. Holding it from the instinct of leaning in. Into the fear that losing its integrity is death. That sharing its space with needles, knives, tongs and doctor’s hands must be an attack, and not the beginning of healing. The trick, it seems, is to get the body to pull down all its organic defences. It doesn't work for long of course. So I feel my torso’s muscle tighten and relax them again. I feel my heart quiver and relax it again. I feel my breath go shallow, and relax it again. How much effort it can be, not to do something. To withstand the in- stincts of carnal integrity and defence. To sit in any place as if it was home. Home. Right here, right now.
What a great place to train oneself in the experience of Otherness. Friendship comes to mind; as the reverse of Otherness. What if my body could sense this house, this vast hospital with its long white corridors as a place of friendship? For a moment, let’s imagine it filled with people of good intent, with spirits of good intent, embalmed in a day breaking with good intent. – All fantasy is the mother of drama. Because it runs on images born by our carnal gut. Fantasy is the imagination of animals.
In the hands of a friend my body can be soft. Tender. Smooth. In the hands of a friend it doesn’t need to imitate bark or stone or howling dogs... Here, right now, I can be soft. In fact, it is very recommendable to be soft when the needle sinks in, the knife cuts and the glove pulls. Sail softly through this storm, like a small wave rolling, like a pebble in its tidal dance on the ocean floor. Be soft now, as if in the hands of a friend.
I look back to this moment now and see so much beauty coming out of so much fear. Every initiation requires an ordeal, Harper Feist recently said to me. But then how much ordeal do we all experience without any initiation to follow? How much senseless, aimless, raw, brutal horror surrounds us because we cannot see ourselves from the perspective of Pluto, Saturn or Mars? Because we choose to participate in the game called humanity from a participatory and not a divine perspective.
The horror, the pain, the ordeal will remain, of course. A scar is a scar is a scar. Just like roses, our wounds have no deeper meaning at the moment they are cut. But how we weave ourselves together again afterwards is entirely our choice. We are both Victor von Frankenstein and his monster in one, Rabbi Löw and his golem, Faust and homunculus bound together into one body.
As someone said to me recently, rare are the people who run towards danger, not away from it. And yet, at times like these, with Rahu on his merciless path, we do well to run towards our fears, not away from them. We do well not to circle around our blind spots, but to plunge headlong into them. We do well to consider that we may have far less to lose than we think, and it might be taken anyway.
So, I propose to be hopeless in a good way, my friend. To be merciless in a true way. To be brutal in a gentle way. To be all in and then to lie tender in the hands of the gods, my friend.
