The Old Aeon
We've just laid my Father-in-Law to rest and laying in bed that same night I realized something.
I'm so done with the Old Aeon.
I’ve always kinda just smiled and nodded at Crowley's changing of the guard as chronicled in his received Book of the Law (Liber Al Vel Legis) when I first heard it. I mean, everyone thinks they are alive during a miraculous time. After all, when we thought 2016-2019 was "interesting" (I’m in the USA), just look at 2020 come in to really outdo anything the 20th century could cook up. May our children’s lives be peaceful and unremarkably kind.
I recently took an online class with the ever delightful and accessible Lon Milo Duquette in an attempt to wrap my head around the Thoth tarot. I can’t read it anywhere near the level and speed of my other decks but I did spend some quality time with the cards and have begun to learn the rhythms of their thoughts. While I was supposed to be looking at other cards along with the class, I was stunned to notice an in-your-face similarity between two cards. More informed about how painstaking Frieda Lady Harris and Aleister Crowley creation process was, I knew this was no coincidence.
The two cards are my 2019 stalker the Emperor and The Hanged Man, which I could have sworn Crowley wanted to cut from the deck. Where did I read this? If I ever figure it out and defeat sheer laziness, I’ll link it here.
Crowley Harris Thoth Tarot: (Left) The Emperor, (Right) The Hanged Man
My mind coughed up these two cards as I drifted in a space between sleep and trance chatting with the spirit of my Father-in-Law. (Just go with me on this, I’m sure we’ll circle back to this sort of thing another time.) He and I came eye to eye, then forehead to forehead, grinning at each other in a way that would have never happened in life. I saw the outer shell of his heart, a smooth rock of opaque purple. Underneath though, a whole world of emotion, thought, curiosity, and desires. He wasn’t a witty or emotionally available man, a product of the age of “good providers,” strict authoritarian discipline, and a learned love language of service and hospitality. Also, I would be amiss to not mention he was also a racist who had begun changing his mind. Our relationship was hard won on both sides and has lasting impact and lingering effects for good and ill.
But in our moment together, I began to see him more clearly. He hadn’t seemed like a whole person in my perspective, a product of a different time and different lens. The curiosity and emotions were a jumbled swirl of immature energies, vibrant and pulsing deep within. I asked, “Did you close up when you were very young? Did you lock it all up in order to do what you were taught and believed to be right? To survive? To thrive for your family?”
There was an energetic sigh and the image released.
I drifted again, about to wrap it up for the evening and my Meditation playlist on Spotify shifted to the epic O Fortuna by Carl Orff and a new vision arose of its own accord. I was dashing through a forest perched along the top of a craggy mountaintop and leapt from its pale grey heights, sprouting wings, turning first into a crow, then a massive eagle.
These were not my normal forms, ah, I was going to Work.
(Just go with me, here. Pretend this is all normal.)
I flew a while over another darkened landscape. Before my senses could mark it, I dipped to snatch a soul from its flesh…
Ah ha, it is Morrighan Work tonight, a small voice thought.
But this being wouldn't be parted, felt tethered even as it still moved forward at speed. My powerful taloned feet held the masculine form by the shoulders, arms limp, body muscled and strong, skin dark like red cedar, like baked clay mixed with fertile earth. It wouldn't go, it wouldn't loosen its hold on the Earth.
Fine.
I burst into a hundred shadows and drifted along the path we traveled. I felt each footfall in the center of each of my shadow selves, felt the weight and fullness of deep forest all around us. A stag. No longer a bipedal man, the form I had come for was a huge buck, each step trudging and slow… heading towards its inevitable and chosen death. I felt the sorrow and gratitude and suffering ahead.
It was then the two tarot cards flashed in my mind. I kept wanting to share my observations in the last month, let my intellect dance along the form and witty fancy of my “discovery.” But I didn't.
And now I know why.
The Mystery hidden in plain sight can be told a hundred ways and never be fully understood. It must be experienced.
I make sense of the world by crashing things known and unknown against one another, so If I may, please permit me another metaphor.
My Father-in Law smoked pipes. My husband was looking at one this week, full of gunk and carbonized to the point of completely clogging up the airflow. His dad had taken a drill to it, bored out a drill bit sized hole just big enough to keep smoking it.
He was a man of surface conversations, practically no humor, daily drinking, and zero emotional intimacy with his children. Our chat tonight showed me this was his solution for the unbearable weight placed upon him. It was his only acceptable pathway towards what had been required of him in his world: Mastery of work, discipline, warfare, and death. He wasn't trained for peace, fatherhood, or retirement. How could he even access it? There was no where left unhardened to breathe into it.
Being a Black woman who this same man previously hated and currently navigating yet another national (international!) discussion of police brutality, Black death, and “I can’t breathe,” the irony is not lost on me.*
Ye gods.
I'm so fucking done with the old Aeon.
May the world we’re building today allow the masculine in all of us to finally breathe freely.
*This piece was written in May and June 2020, the deaths of Aubrey Ahmaud and George Floyd a fresh hot flash on the ‘racial’ inequity front here in these glorious United States of America. In case you were curious, Black Lives Matter. #blacklivesmatter
