Jailbreaking the Fall

Jailbreaking the Fall

Eriol

I also can’t help but think with aboriginal and other indigenous perspectives on the importance of ceremony to keep our world co-created properly, restored and regenerated through cyclical, intentional, active linking of our world with the Dreaming. We have made the world and ourselves improper “talismans,” or have tried to sever ourselves from the heavens. We are out of or apart from ceremony and Law, distanced from the Dreaming. JMR may present this cosmology through the motifs of angels and demons, but that’s just one cultural perspective on our “fallen” status.

Above and Below need to be linked, and they need to be linked often.

Nor is the solution Neoplatonic vertical hierarchicalizing. While JMR argues that the stars and star magic must always be mediated through the intervening celestial spheres, the Egyptians and other cultures have often bypassed that “intervening mechanism,” to borrow from Gordon White. Indeed, this is even the point of Star.Ships: the better you mirror or match Earth to the heavens, the better your magic and other shit gets.

Nor is what I’m seeing in any of this a “ceremonial magic” thing, or theurgical, or anything of the kind. Nor is witchcraft just an “earth religion” or even “dirt magic”—it’s a herbroots (rather than grassroots) survival of that hermetic and stellar-terrestrial-chthonic worldview, for Above and Below come together. Angels, faeries, trees, roots, stones, stars, and more are all dancing together with us. Or, witches shouldn’t constrain their imaginal engagement to “only” the earth. Many witches have been opening their perspectives to the heavens and to the chthonic skies below with dancing minds. Or, I would say, the Moon may be the vessel through which that magic pours down into our world, but the heavens are forests and countries stretching all about us, through which the Moon (and Sun) journey on their courses. Nor am I describing necessarily “astrological magic” as we typically conceive it, but that can certainly play a part.

The incarnate human body is perhaps the initial meeting point between Above and Below, the mirror place between them. As we build ourselves out into the cosmos, like a tree or a rhizome, the mirror or intersection between Above and Below remains the body, later the corpse, but with time and deeper forms of life, we learn to have that cosmic body, to make our bodies sprout forth through all trees, or to rise rhizomatically through images and forms throughout Creation, and more. And after a point, an indefinite point, we can learn to make most anything a surface through which we can rise. “It’s just forms,” even as I suspect that we will move further, or grow further, beyond whatever our “human” consciousnesses had been.