A Case Study on the Geomantic Joys

[Over at conjunctio, tunesmyth asked if I could put together a couple case studies for my experimentation with the geomantic joys. This is one of those. It ended up running rather long, so I am posting it on my own diary for reference and linking to it from over there.]

I cast geomantic charts for each day, month, and year, so I can know what to expect. On August 18th, I received the above daily chart. You can see that I've made various annotations to it: the lines connecting the houses follow my (rather idiosyncratic) method of casting charts, and the asterisks in the third and eleventh houses indicate that those figures are rejoicing (that is, are of double signification). This latter is what I've been testing lately, with success.

I'd like to draw particular attention to Via (one of the two figures of the moon, representing transformation) rejoicing in the third (the moon's house, representing impressionability) in company with the fourth (home), and occupying the fifth (sexuality and children) and seventh (my wife). The moon, being the planet of motherhood, rejoicing and occupying the houses of sexuality and my wife, is pretty obviously suggestive that she's pregnant, yes? What's more, she casts daily Tarot readings, and every card in her spread for the day had a moon in it.

Now, we're not trying to have another child—her and my health, while generally improving, is not very good, and we already have a frenetic Gemini keeping us more than busy—but, well, these things happen! So a few days later, I cast a chart, asking "Is my wife pregnant?" I received the following chart:

Now, I wasn't sure if this chart was supposed to perfect between the first and the fifth or the seventh and the fifth, but it turns out it doesn't matter, since it perfects both ways. But this is a very "yes, but..." sort of reading: the quesited is sorrowful Tristitia, and also occupies the eighth house (death). I wasn't quite sure what to make of that—Rubeus in the first (me) and ninth (divination), after all—but decided to wait and see. After all, we'd know for sure soon enough!

As it turns out, my wife did a Tarot reading as well about whether she was pregnant, and also got a "yes, but..." reading, with the "but" being Death. She was upset about it, though, and so she didn't tell me about the reading until just now as I was writing this up!

In the coming weeks, we noticed my wife's body starting to get the sorts of changes a newly pregnant woman's does, and figured we should start to prepare for another little one. Despite all this, though, my wife eventually got her period, making sense of our readings: she was indeed pregnant, but it didn't take. Disappointing though this was, recall my original chart had Laetitia rejoicing: when I've seen this, it's always meant spiritual insight, and this has indeed been a growing and learning experience.

It's perhaps just as well: the due date would have been the day of next May's lunar eclipse, which is rather ominous!

An Uncanny Experience

A bit over a month ago, I had a strange dream.

I was walking through a forested campsite, the kind you see in state parks all over New York. It was getting on towards evening. As I walked past a picnic table, I noticed it had what appeared to be a typeset page torn from an encyclopedia on it. I picked it up, and read, Benevolent and malevolent beings come into existence in pairs, and so every benevolent spirit has it's matching malevolent spirit, and vice versa. If one finds oneself so afflicted by a malevolent spirit, if one reaches out to its matching benevolent spirit, the two will recombine and cease to be. Suddenly, night fell, and I heard a howl. I started running, and sure enough I was soon being chased by a wolflike creature: I couldn't see it, but I could hear its heavy paws on the dirt, feel its hot breath on my back. Thinking of the page, I mentally called out to the wolf's mirror-being and poof!—the wolf disappeared and I awoke.

Now, to be clear, the encyclopedia entry is just science fiction: spirits don't appear and disappear like sentient particles and anti-particles. (At least, I'm pretty sure they don't: it fits with no metaphysics of which I'm aware, and anyway my divinations on the topic have all said it's just dream-logic.) But the basic idea of reaching out to a benevolent being to counter a malevolent one stuck with me. Different kinds of beings exist at different levels of consciousness: the states of love, hope, joy, and so on mix with the states of fear, uncertainty, doubt, and so on about as well as oil and water. If you can raise your consciousness, beings of lower states can't touch you.

"Raising one's state of consciousness" isn't exactly an easy thing to do, but as a mystic, it's something I've been practicing for nearly a decade now. I can't say how, exactly, it works, but I know what it feels like and it's something I regularly practice during prayer. (If I'm honest, I'm certain my deity's doing most of the work, pulling me up much like I hoist my daughter onto my shoulders. Even so, it's an exhausting state to maintain for long!)

Anyway, I wrote this all down in my diary, figured it was interesting if abstract, and filed it away. I didn't think I'd ever have occasion to give it a try—but so I did!

Last night, I got up in the middle of the night last night to go to the bathroom, and when I came back into the bedroom, I had a feeling of something terrible watching me from the closet. The door was open, which was a little odd since I keep it closed, so I went over to close the door and I felt something of a horrible malice leering out at me from the darkness. I could almost see hungry eyes peering at me, long limbs hunched as if ready to pounce. I closed the door—this took some effort as my every reaction was to "get away"—and got back into bed. It wasn't long before I felt the malevolent energy stalking over to the bed from the closet.

I remembered the dream I had, and the theorizing I had done around it, so I immediately began to pray and trying to raise my mental state to where it is when I meet my deity. This got quite a response: my deity said, Hang on, and waves of rage poured from the whatever-it-was, and I felt—literally felt, with my physical senses and not my spiritual ones—a violent and bitter tempest rage around me, but I felt safe and serene in the eye of the storm. It took effort to keep my mind focused on love and not fear—I'm naturally a very fearful person—but I held on to the mental state as best I could. After a minute or two, the wind subsided and the rage stalked away. As it did, I heard my deity say, Good. Remember that trick, and I drifted back to sleep.

What's further interesting is that this whole thing was presaged in my daily geomantic reading:

Notice the Rubeus (malice) in the eighth (spirits) and eleventh (benefactors), crossed with Acquisitio (plenty) in the ninth (dreams, specialized knowledge) and right witness (me). I've seen "crossings" like that a few times, and they usually seem to indicate a contest of sorts. I have a number of examples among my notes; someday when I have more time, I'll need to go back over them and see if I can pull a theory together about them.

Anyway, this was a very strange experience to me. Prior to this, every spirit I've encountered has either been at best quite friendly, or at worst playfully neutral. It just goes to show, there really are monsters out there, and yes, sometimes they creep out of closets.