Twin
double-spirals, eyes of the Maori death-goddess Hinenuitepo, "Great
Lady of the Night who sends the Spirit North across the ocean," mark the
entrance to the Tunnel of Zamradiel, that dark abyss from which No-Man
returns. Hung from its sigil are the Lovers, priest and priestess of the Double Current,
Androgyne and Gyander, who are about to undergo the Ordeal of the Abyss.
Holding no part
of passion back in fear, holding no part of themselves aloof from their experience, they
have emptied the last drops of blood into the Cup and hang like rotting meat
upon a peg in the dark caverns of the primal dark goddess, Ereshkigal, who
lies in waiting deep within the bowels of the earth. Here, the Lovers await the Beast of
Other Dimensions, the Eater of Lost Souls, the Scavenger, who devours the
last vestiges of human consciousness as they plunge into the black Abyss.
The Cup,
fashioned from a skull of archaic Homo Sapiens, dates from about 250,000 to 500,000
years before the present era, marking that time when Stellar races first
came upon the nascent earth. The skull rests upon the sigil of that most ancient and
puissant priestess of Voudoun, Ayizan, who is here invoked for inspiration
and protection during the dread Sabbath over which Choronzon—barrer of the way into the City of the Pyramids— presides. Into the
skull-cup drips distillations of the secret caverns of the earth; it is the "black
wine of the moon" distilled from the body of the priestess, which in this
Tunnel takes the form of an hallucinogenic absinthe, that will induce
oracular voicings in the language of "before being born, and after dying."
Below, the priest/priestess
of the Bultu cult, having unsealed spectral atavisms by the power of the
drums to snare the mind in their dark rhythms, and to disintegrate the boundaries of
ordinary ego-consciousness, has assumed the were-mask of the Spectral Hyena. Fusing the
twin serpents OB and OD, merged with the beast within, s/he
awaits the Spectral Beast, the Other, the Demon Lover, with trembling
fear and heightened expectation.
MEDITATION:
The need
to work with the energies of the Tunnel of Zamradiel may be signaled by
over-identification with one's sexual morphology, accompanied by an inability, and/or
unwillingness to understand alternative sexualities. There may be a paralyzing fear of
ego-death, fear of the dark, or fear of the unknown within, which in some cases manifests
as the terrifying voicings of alalia. Here, in this 17th Tunnel
of Zamradiel, we find the fearful clinging to solar-phallic consciousness that
typifies 20th Century chauvinism.
The powers
associated with this Tunnel include communion with remote strata of human consciousness,
with the accompnaying ability of trance-channeling. Here we also find the ability to
combine male and female within oneself, to reunite with one's lost half, "the lost
lover," to reintegrate the Animus/Anima, and to seduce the Nahual
into sensible appearance, all while embracing the transpersonal Shadow.
Here is the power to distill the healing elixir, the Philosopher's Stone,
the fountain of youth through the Taoist practice of "self-cultivation."
Here one finds one's Voice through transcendence of the narrow personal
ego, and the transcosmic dissolution of the boundaries of the soul, whose ultimate
expression is Infinite Love. Here is evolution of consciousness through
re-connection of the bicameral circuit, with the ability to spiral from remote pre-human
consciousness into far-flung future hyper-expansion of mind-power and awareness.
