The Necessary Tower

I spent much of yesterday ISO the Tower that showed up in my reading for the day. I told myself I would embrace it, given the chance.

I have an almost unlimited appetite for Towers and Aeons and indications that radical transformation is on the way. I am always looking for (r)evolution. Give me some moldavite and and initiatory vision and a new metaphor for death and rebirth any day. Let's fuck shit up. Let's burn it down.

Eventually, so goes the theory, one of these Big Bad Fundamental Shifts will leave me with something that's you know, actually workable. Something that I can poke and tweak into the life/mind/paradigm I want.


Eventually, one might hope, one of these psychic exorcisms will, you know, accomplish anything at all. There are so many more, that aren't written about here. My inner temple is, more often than not, a violent place. I've slain demons and eaten their hearts. I've burned them alive and grown trees out of their buried ashes. I've been flayed and burned and buried and trapped and cleansed and healed and reborn.

It's kind of the constant theme.

It's just than none of those experiences ever really change anything.

This is a not a lead-in that's going to say, "Last night was different." As far as I can tell, nothing is really ever different. None of these things will take the 9 of Swords out of the deck. Claiming that there's going to be any actual change from the work I did last night feels naive and kind of pathetic.

Of course, the alternative is further descent into debilitating nihilism.

Not sure which is preferable anymore. I will say, though, that despite evidence below to the contrary, all of the nasty terrible things are still in my brain, and I haven't the faintest idea how to dispose of them.

Anyway, back to the Tower, yeah?

It's getting to be late and I've seen no Towers about. Nothing too strange has happened. Perhaps it's magick time. I did some divination. I didn't write down the cards. It was clear to me, at the time, in that conversational way of dealing with a deck that involves laying 30 cards in no pattern at all until you feel like you've got a pretty good sense, at least emotionally/energetically, of where your energies ought to go.

Reading Austin Coppock's column earlier this week had given me some inspiration on the type of work I wanted to do. I had some limitations that forced me to scale back my initial fantasies - lack of access to a decent place to have a fire, and a bit of aversion to working with blood. (We'll get to that post another day - let's just say that binding yourself is not nearly as good of an idea as it seems when you're 16.)  But the general idea of reworking old stories into new ones appealed to me.

I figured I'd do a little visionary work in order to narrow my focus and get some guidance, then come back up, work out an intention, and set it off one way or the other. I thought it would end up being about school, mostly.

I started with a basic trance, a visit to my inner temple space, meeting with a guide. Not the guide I'd thought I would meet there, honestly. I was expecting someone a bit scarier than D, who is the horned guide with a tendency to push me out of trees and trick me into staying in trance far longer than I should.

He also taught me to fly. Again, another story.br />
He shooed away a couple of other guides who seemed to have words for me, led me to the river. The bloodletting happened here, writing on my body with blood, and rinsing it off.

Over and over again. Sentences. Paragraphs. Stories. Write. Rinse. Write. Rinse. It seemed to go on forever. I felt, when it was over, mostly empty, but amazingly high. I can't remember them all. There were, easy estimate, hundreds.

Stories so deeply buried that I'd forgotten about them. Stories I hadn't thought about since I was a young child. Some of them, not quite verbal. Pictures. Feelings.

Finally I couldn't think of anything else. I couldn't think of anything more. I came back - sort of - enough to grab my knife and a candle and follow the rest of the instructions D had given me.

I had been very clearly instructed to pin down my goals. Things I've been dancing around, toying with, debating. Big things. Really big things. Draw a picture of it.


I am not an artist. But that isn't really what he meant. What he meant, apparently, was to carve a series of abstract and mostly automatic images into the candle, and charge it with a pretty serious invocation/request for assistance from anyone who felt like listening.

I was pretty far gone. There was very little sense of me actually doing most of the candle-carving bit. There were some decisions - quick, specific. Some things were written over and over again, over and across and into everything. Some things were summed up in simple images. A world tree. A staircase. A book. And people everywhere.

When it was finished, it was finished. I called, in a mostly nonverbal way, on the guides and spirits and helpers and benevolent forces that have any interest in this process. It's cheap, but I love phrasing invocations this way. (That's another blog post. I am developing quite a list here.)

If you're there, and you want to help, and you can; if you're one of the ones who's been sitting and waiting for me to get on board with some of this shit: this is it. Let's do it. Push.


And I lit it.

And I was nowhere near being in the world, or grounded, or even in any way back. And I didn't remember how, had to ask for help, was high as shit for the next few hours.

That's pretty much it. I'd love to go through this and edit it and make it sound a little more coherent, but I don't have the energy.

Can I blame that on being hungover from last night?