excerpted from . . .

The Shadow Tarot 

© Linda Falorio, 1995

Rising swamp-gas, distorting heat-mirages signify the tunnel's entrance which exists in the wavering interface between the worlds of inner tellurian space and stellar consciousness. Here all has been arranged for performance of the ancient Elder Rites. Trees of Darkness, cypress swamp, bayous filled with ghouls and larvae of the pit celebrate with choreiform dancing dread Odun, the African Sabbath, Saint John's Eve, while corpse candles' phosphorescent glare illumines the gate/mouth/sipapu through which Zangbeto, "people of the night," Lovecraftian transhuman horrors—the Old Ones—invade our dimension from the Other Side.

From the triple Goddess—New/Full/Dying Moon—the Great One of the Night of Time whose Saturn sickle speaks of Death came the Trees of Darkness: Tree Alphabet, language, ordering, thus begetting time, history, and genealogy, thus crystallizing ego, and ending the blissful period of timeless wavering myth.

The Moon is thus the progenitor of Time, the 37-year cycle of Her Nodes generating the Great Polar Cycle of 25,900 Earth years, creating the Precession of the Equinoxes as the North Pole points to each of seven stars, here reflected in the pool of space round which the crocodile Sebek/Set, expectantly curls, ready to devour ego into uroboric bliss. Thus the Cosmic Serpent, spiraling tail in mouth, never returning to the same point in celestial space, traces the 7-fold Star of Isis-Babalon in athetoid progression around the pole of the ecliptic. This Great Year corresponds to 5 Mayan Great Cycles, and marks Nibiru's inevitable returning.

Thus the stellar current earths in chthonian dream cells through Thantifaxath—the ego boundary, arachnoid membrane, the linking point of inner/outer, of microcosm/macrocosm, Bifrost, rainbow bridge between terrestrial and stellar currents. Crystallized in matter, the current turns upon itself, shoots up Sushumna in the spinal column, flowering into thousand-petalled Sahasrara, in the tellurian halo of Northern Lights transmitting earth rays to the stars, and bringing the New Age upon Earth: "Raise Chthulhu to the Stars!"

The sigil appears upon a diamond used to imprison souls in space, creating living zombies. Here is crystallization that is living death, dying from the inside-out, body armoring, ego-encrustation, crystallization at a too-early stage impeding further growth. For whom are zombies, but those who identifying ego with Self have forsaken childhood dreams, who have forever lost the key to Never-Never Land, that charmed inner Paradise.

MEDITATION:

The need to work with the energies of Thantifaxath may be signaled by experiencing feelings of restriction, feeling tied down, time bound, old, depressed, blind, dead. Here too, is fear: fear of voudoun, of being mounted by the Loa; fear of magickal attacks; separation anxiety. Here is fear of death, which results in leeching present moments of life and power by dwelling in a nonexistent past and projecting toward an illusionary future. In the Microcosm there is psychological de-compensation, loss of ego, while macrocosmically we find deterioration of Polar ozone that protects fragile Terra from blasting stellar rays.

Powers we may find here are the ability to cross dimensions, to bridge boundaries, to link inner and outer, to communicate with denizens of parallel worlds: fairies, yetis, elves. Here is power to understand and to use the raw energy of time inherent in its cycles, and here is the Time Lord's power to transcend its limitations, to relate to eternal NOW—no "lusting for result." Here is self-regeneration, as well as regeneration of the energy envelope of Earth, and re-greening of the planet through time-binding stellar winds into the bionic life web.