Greetings and welcome.
Upon this page you will find decsriptions,
excerpts and links to things that I resonate to for various reasons.
Since I was eight years old, I have been graced with the presence of
a voice within the night. For the longest time, I gave this voice, this
presence no name - referring to her simply as "the Lady".
(I still do.) It is a title of reverence, not a name nor a description.
Over the years I have found and/or stumbled across other images and
descriptions of entities that I feel resonate closely to what I have
felt since the very beginning. These things have helped me (and sometimes
hindered me) in developing my own view towards what I can at times commune
with. Once finding an image to ascribe to something, sometimes it's
difficult to let that go - even when it becomes no longer necessary
to make use of that particular image.
Along the way I was also given images and/or names of my own, such as
Girreh and Iraya. I think it is these that I hold most dear. Simply
because they're personal, created by me out of my own experiences tempered
with the experiences of others who came before me.
"In the Beginning..."
It all began with a young (eight
years old) boy who suddenly, overnight, thought that he was all alone
in the world... that his entire life up to that point had been a lie.
I'm over it now, but it began with the simple fact that I found out
I was adopted (it seemed to me, at the time) accidentally. I don't mean
to belabour the point at this stage of my life, and right now it really
has no bearing on my life. But this is the only way to relate what transpired.
I was a wuss and I freaked. I thought that, suddenly, this meant that
everything I had been told up to that point was a lie. So I wound up
retreating to a very deep, dark and lonely center. It was this that
opened up unto a beauty I cannot describe even to this day.
I took to staring at the night sky, in my self-begotten misery, and
calling/crying out for something, anything to answer in a world I thought
was a distinctly un-friendly place. What happened was that the sky actually
answered!
First, as a feeling that I too was loved. A nurturing, all encompassing
bosom upon which to lay my weary head. Wave upon wave of sensation,
of the uttermost peace, would flood down from the stars and engulf me.
Solace, unconditional.
I took to doing this nightly. I had discovered a "friend",
something in this world I could rely on.
Over the years I continued this, developing an unspoken bond with that
which I considered was "eternal" and "infinite",
for the feelings in which I was embraced were never-ending and ever-present.
It was during this time that I got the first inklings of an image for
her. For a while, I had this recurring dream in which a blue-skinned
woman was standing beneath a rainbow in a night sky, beckoning to me.
In my 'teens, (as most do) I discovered the art of writing. Poetry,
at first. (I have tons of stuff I would never show anyone, except Leilah)
But this taught me one very, very important thing. If you let your mind
loose, to go on it's various ways, sooner or later it will strike home.
I discovered that "the Lady" had a voice! And this was something,
that in the rare times it occurred, was very distinct from my own voice.
Then I "discovered" Crowley.
http://www.thelema.org/aa/ccxx.html
It's a bit difficult being unbiased
about this little "tome". The truth of it is that Crowley
has been both a bane and boon in my life. This book was the first time
I had been exposed to something even remotely close to what I call "the
Lady" coming from someone else. In this sense, it will always hold
a soft spot in my heart. But it sent me off down a seven year path that
I would sometimes like to forget.
The first two chapters ring true, to me. It could be about Shiva and
Kali instead of Nuit and Hadit, it makes no difference. I've always
felt that the third chapter was, more or less, throwing Crowley a bone,
so to speak. The important bits are in the interplay between Nuit and
Hadit, ... the universal as opposed to the local approach. Personally,
I don't give a rat's ass whether Horus supplants Jesus/Osiris and then
Maat joins in later. The only thing that matters is the universal approach.
And Crowley did something towards that. He brought back the idea of
individual "Gnosis"... The idea that we all have the direct
experience of the universe, within ourselves.
This is what hit home, to me....
But it was only by following Crowley's "advice", to the letter,
that I found the next piece.....
http://www.gnosis.org/naghamm/thunder.html
You see, by following Crowley's
"advice" (that one be well versed in all religious/mythological
and even scientific backgrounds), I began to read voraciously. The link
above takes you to an obscure part of the "Nag Hammadi Library"
- a collection of early Gnostic texts.
This particular text is unique to this collection in that it is the
only one to take its own, contradictory form. Why I resonated to this
since the moment I found it is that "the lady" has spoken
to me in such ways, using the balancing of what seems to be "opposites"
to make a point. What I learned, much later on through Crowley's babblings
and my own thought was this - that such examples as what may seem to
be opposite one another (such as hot and cold, for instance) are meaningless
unless you posit a neutral, middling point to begin with.
But the above example is still, to me, an example of her voice, expressing
things in the only way we can understand - by boggling the mind to the
point of comprehension without words.
What follows is a direct quote from "The Vision and the Voice",
by Crowley. All I can say to this one is that this is what happened
to me when I was eight years old. It took me a while to work my way
through Crowley's books until I came across this, though.
"Every man that hath seen me forgetteth
me never, and I appear oftentimes in the coals of the fire, and upon
the smooth white skin of woman, and in the constancy of the waterfall,
and in the emptiness of deserts and marshes, and upon great cliffs that
look seaward; and in many strange places, where men seek me not. And
many thousand times he beholdeth me not. And at last I smite myself
into him as a vision smiteth into a stone, and whom I call must follow."
The above is what I have lived my life by. For she
has ever been within my heart. For she has never been forgotten. In
a sense, this has driven me mad, for I have always striven after that
which I cannot grasp, that which is as elusive as a breeze upon the
waters at night, which can be felt but not held. I fell in love with
a whisper, when I did not even hear what it was saying... And I have
seen her in bright sunlight, in darkened shadow, in the rainbow glimmerings
of dew upon the petals of a flower, or the strands of a spiderweb; and
I have seen her in the flight of birds, in the resonance of the surf,
and in the clouds scudding across the sky with their many colours reflected...
I have seen her within the world and within the hearts of others....
All of these moments of brief ecstasy....
Below is a link to a little tome called "31 Hymns to the Star Goddess".
The author was a disciple of Crowley, so of course his writings are
directed towards the Crowleyish conception of Nuit. But there were many
similarities to what I had felt, especially after I discovered Crowley
& the Book of the Law for myself.
http://www.hermetic.com/browe-archive/achad/misc/31hymns.htm
Following all this, I went back
to Egypt to find where Uncle Al drew some of this from. Egyptian religion
can be confusing, at times, with various gods & goddesses merging
into one another over the course of time. Below is the best page I've
found on-line which represents Nut (Nuit) in Egyptian terms.
http://touregypt.net/NUT.HTM
Then I came across the religion
of ancient Greece, most notably in Ovid's "Metamorphosis"
and Hesiod's "Theogony". I cannot find any page or pages on-line
which reproduce the full text of either of these, but the sites below
give relevant excerpts. In Greece, she was called "Nyx" -
in Rome, "Nox".
http://www.pantheon.org/mythica/articles/n/nyx.html
http://www.loggia.com/myth/nyx.html
To the Greeks, as well as the Egyptians,
the Night was a formative, primordial spirit. Not the source of all
creation, but one of the earliest of things created, from which much
else followed. One of the interesting aspects of the Greek depiction
of Night is that she gave birth to various beings without a partner.
A theme which is mirrored in the Gnostic perception of the Pistis-Sophia.
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