Second Arcanum
Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll 17
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“I am. That I am.” The Lady Racheal’s azure irises shine with glittering lustre. While she stares into the dark pits of Lord Kha-Aan’s shadowed eye sockets, gossamer faeries and scintillating sprites slip betwixt worlds. Barely perceivable transparencies wink in and out of Racheal’s reality, darting and shifting into glowing fey forms of otherworldly phosphorescence.
A baker’s dozen of sparkling shapes revolve around the Baronet’s lanky form, twisting through slowly ascending spirals to frame his abruptly serious countenance with colourful phantasms, lustrous winged forms performing dances of disorderly lustiness. An archetypal faerie winks at the priestess, and Racheal returns the gesture as Kha-Aan’s impassive glare fixes upon her.
“Awa Ken!” the tribal liege-lord intones, and the answering cry is joined by all present; “Awa Ken, Mon Ken,” they announce in unified voice, greeting their new High Priestess with the standard rite of reply. The hall is bedecked in magical banners and arcane symbols mark the quarters of the circle with geometric flags of elemental Tattvas; the windows have been covered with batik hangings bearing complicated oriental mandalas, psychedelic op-art patterns and the sophisticated complexities of ancient Buddhist yantras.
Racheal’s fingers entwine with those of her loving Prince Ram’s as she breaks contact with their lord’s rock-steady stare. She’d been expecting Kha-Aan to wink through the levelled scope of his gun barrel stare, or otherwise reveal a glimmer of his usually cavalier demeanour; but his face remains impassive in the flickering light.
The Court of Centraxis is arrayed around the hall, dressed in the various colour schemes of their respective roles as they stand in a circle and link hands in the wavering candlelight. A wave of relief passes through Racheal at the sight of her familiar friends and compatriots and she’s suffused with the combined bond of their familial sense of belonging. Their welcome enfolds her so securely that the tripping girl’s customary aloof disdain melts away like the beeswax candles flickering at the cardinal points of the overheated chamber.
After the multiple shocks of her soul-searing experiences during the previous unending night, the tribal priestess had been half expecting something similarly challenging or untoward to occur during her long-heralded Centraxian initiation ceremony. The fact that her tribal sisters and brothers seem to be relatively fully clothed beneath their colourful robes dispels the nagging fears that had earlier clawed at her hallucinogen-primed mind, when the trip had been coming on in waves of helpless giggles befouled with eddies of ruthless self-criticism and undertows of fearful paranoia. Ram’s hand squeezes around hers in a familiar affirming gesture, which the priestess also interprets as a subtle signal to follow his lead.
The witch girl’s lover guides the pre-initiate to her appointed place in the olibanum-infused longhall; its cluttered extremities are occluded by the fragrant mist rising from the brass censer at the Fire Quarter of their broad magic circle. The Lady Racheal usually experiences a rush of confidence-inspiring grandeur when she scents the cloying fragrance of frankincense, hearkening back to a few bygone Sundays in her churchgoing infancy. The Wiccan priestess has discovered that the solar odour’s cleansing presence invariably induces a presentiment of pre-ordained success in any venture, magical or otherwise. She exhales a hearty sigh of relief before inhaling a lungful of the white mist which fills the impromptu temple, and tastes wood smoke, beeswax and hashish admixed within the aromatic vapours of the low lying cloud.
The magical court of transincarnate Centraxians glows with a pale bluish sheen in Racheal’s Clearlight-dazed sight, a pulsating azure aura that expands and contracts around their befogged forms as their outlines wobble and warp in her vision. The clan forms a tighter ring as the tribal shaman leads the newest member of the court thrice around their elemental circle, promenading in a widdershins spiral that leads all the way from the central axis to the living rim of colourfully dressed figures. All remain silent; almost all reveal a smile within the shadowed enclosures of capacious hoods or high collars when the lovers pass before them.
Ram’yana precedes his paramour back toward the circle’s middle to meet the Na-Baron at the central axis. Kha-Aan is erect and unmoving, appearing paper-thin and uncharacteristically pale as a sheet in the enveloping mantle of his black velvet cloak. His eyes are deep, black, inexorably swirling vortexes, fixed and fixated points around which the entire circle appears to slowly revolve as Racheal’s lover begins his unrehearsed response.
The Hierophants voice pours into the circle as a vibrantly booming wave that resounds from the hidden boundaries of the chamber; “We rise from this planetary plane to regard our images in the mirror-maze of Yesod,” the shaman informs his liege. “The Court is moot halfway ’tween Earth and the Sun…” Lord Kha-Aan nods as he intones in ritualistic reply; “’neath the amber glow of the Central Axis.”
“So mote it be,” Ram’yana agrees and the entire court echoes the arcane verbal seal. The shaman nods to their liege and leads the priestess toward a large rectangular mirror which has been erected before the smouldering coals of the longhall’s fireplace. As he guides her to a gold-trimmed, finely embroidered and red-tasselled cushion set before the looking glass, Racheal’s eyes drift upward to the spiral-horned ram’s skill hanging from the brickwork above the mantel. She returns its hollow-socketed yet strangely suggestive stare while the ring of her fellows unlinks their joined hands to surround the space before the mirror, crowding for vantage in an encircling crescent.
Her lover is cloaked in green crushed velvet that conceals most of the princely raiment which Racheal had earlier wrapped around his slim body in the sanctuary of their bed chamber. Shades of deeper green, royal purple and jet black gleam from the finery shining through gaps in Ram’s hooded robe; the hues of his Trump gleam within his aura as Racheal blinks away an unbidden sheen of salty water. She’d dressed her lover in various versions of his current ensemble while they’d waited for the trip to come on, dawdling together while they drifted into the trip.
The barefoot priestess is garbed in her own Trump’s shades of white-trimmed blue and lavender; a long silver edged blue hooded cloak largely covers an azure microminiskirt and equally revealing jacket. Racheal is still unsure of the precise nature of her initiation ritual. While the seconds had ticked over with exhaustingly torpid repetitiveness, she’d persuaded Ram’yana to trim her pubic hair to while away the endless tides of time - which stretched space beyond its familiar contours and further warped her morphing awareness as
Her prince had been more than happy to accede to her request, and she’d endured the tickling rasp of a cold steel razor while her lover had spread her most sensitive skin with gentle fingertips and slid the sharp metal around the margins of her loins - his features contorted by grimaces of nervy cautious restraint mingled with barely restrained desire - while geological ages crawled by in the comfort of their bedroom. Now the silken inner fabric of her brief skirt feels uncommonly arousing against her nearly nude loins.
“Douse the quarters and bring forth the candle-lamp,” commands the Lord Kha-Aan; Fifi L’Amoure the Lady Ringell approaches with a two foot-long cylinder of hashish-infused and incense-laced beeswax; she holds a much slimmer flaming candle in her other hand. The tribal Empress presents the thick tower to the Hierophant with a solemn curtsey as all the other candles are extinguished. The cloaked form of Vostra rings a small silver bell partially concealed within the black folds of his robe, as the Lady Ringell lights the ritual candle with the long golden taper.
The room shimmers around Prince Ram’yana as he accepts the flickering candle with a nod to Lady Ringell. She returns his unwavering solemnity with unalloyed Cheshire cat grin while her indigo irises spiral round within artfully daubed twin Eyes of Horus, whose glossy crushed malachite lines and spiralling curlicues descend across her floridly beaming round cheeks. The Initiate of the Dawn of Ra nods at her erstwhile lover - the younger neophyte prince and Centraxian Hierophant - before turning the spotlight of her dimpled smile on his dazzled and dazzling betrothed.
With low bow and a lacy flourish of crystal-braced wrists the Empress entreats the Lady Racheal to take her seat. She pats the comfortable scarlet cushion when the priestess hesitates, watching a clustering horde of swooping dragons displace a darting pod of purple dolphins within the tasselled pillow’s intricate embroidery. Racheal sweeps her cloak backward and the bat-winged reptiles veer away as she settles cross-legged upon the cushion and faces her reflection in the magic mirror.
The priestess’s brows knit together within her hood when she regards her image in the large sheet of silvered glass. The mirror’s coating and frame are painted with powdered admixture of the seven sacred metals; a tenebrous glitter surrounds the cloaked figure which mimics her incipient frown through the looking glass.
Without the slightest warning, Racheal’s aplomb shatters into a webbing of spidery threads when the mirror explodes around her. The glimmering shards become a swirling mass of faeries, sprites and gremlins, which circle her fracturing self image with the sparkling light of their dancing flight as her fragmented being flows back and melds into a formless glowing form.
Her eyes adjust to the throbbing bedazzlement of the hallucinogenic rite. She feels the presence of her beloved beside her and sees the outline of his glowing reflection settle beside hers in the world beyond the plane of the mirror’s pane. Ram’yana seats himself beside his mate, holding the candle before him; the artistic young witch watches patterns dance across their faces whilst Day-glo veins and geometric symbols throb inside their transparing skins. “Khabs Am Pekht…” The boom of the shaman’s voice belies his youth as it resonates inside her skull.
“Konx Om Pax...” Kha-Aan’s voice is followed by a susurrus of activity when the flame of the candle appears to grow brighter, lengthening into a tapering point at the distilled cyclonic core of the court’s expectancy. Racheal’s peripheral vision is filled with intricate branching lines, expanding and contracting with every breath. She’s vaguely aware of the crescent of bodies moving closer, surrounding High Priest and Priestess in the wavering semi-darkness; she sees shadowy faces swimming behind her reflection and swarming across the delineaments of her skull, and her brow lights with the flare of a thousand suns.
A multisensory vision of encircling black-cowled magi returns to stun the Lady Racheal, freezing her marrow with the chilling imperative of its startling lucidity. She relives afresh the suffocating scene that surrounded her during the previous night, vividly superimposed on the smiling circlet of her Centraxian peers – which transforms into a clustered masque of the rawest emotions and desires. Their features swirl and shift into demoniac grotesqueries and angelically baroque symmetries as Racheal’s eyes flicker from side to side in the arcane candlelight.
Her hand falls to her prince’s knee and the satisfyingly familiar warmth of his slender body anchors her to the momentous moment of her initiation. Count Marco’s mask of ribald glee transforms into his usual beard-rimmed smile as he looms over her shoulder and into the light, and Lady Stardew’s grimly disapproving sneer becomes an encouraging look of expectant concentration. The tribal princess stares at her own pretty face and prepossessing expression in the magic mirror, ignoring the priestess entirely.
Maybe it was acid they slipped into me last night, Racheal tentatively decides as the ram’s skull mounted on the wall above the mirror is fleshed out with a white woolly lining that covers its yellowing bony surfaces with a coating of wintry snow; strangely slitted hourglass-shaped pupils stare down from bony sockets, dripping an ectoplasmic libation of musically-scented blessings that penetrate partway into the priestess’s prescient soul. It felt just like this…
Twin nimbuses surround the doppelganger candle that Ram’yana and his inverted self hold before them, the steady flame ringed by a rainbow of strangely altered colours in the realm beyond the mirror. Yet it seems my tolerance isn’t too high after all… Unless I took far too much… The priestess is suddenly filled with an awareness of the various bodies pressing behind and beside her and the flavours of their emotions and thoughts become embedded in her enflamed consciousness. Racheal understands that everyone else in the longhall temple is at least as tripped out as she. If the trip is still coming on, what will it be like when it’s all the way here?
Ram’s palm falls against the bared flesh of Racheal’s inner thigh and her wandering mind returns to the approximate locus of her body. She feels a vague discomfort in the pit of her stomach as she stares at her lover in the mirror and watches his sensuous lips slip apart. “Look into thine self,” he says with a smile, and his teeth gleam with greenish phosphorescence while his canines extend into long pointy fangs. Racheal shivers against his corporeal ribcage and the illusion is dispelled as she follows his advice; she stares into her own reflection and her lover’s vampiric fangs disappear as a violet glow encompasses his brow.
“Look deep into the central axis behind thine eyes,” he advises as his hand lifts from her thigh. He gently pulls the cowl of her robe from her hair, releasing a surprisingly long golden flow that cascades down around her mirrored face. The shaman raises the candle aloft and intones the beginnings of an age-old spell with a piercing high-pitched cry; “Atoh…”
Racheal immediately recognises the invocation – the first syllables of the magical balancing rite known as the Kabalistic Cross. The candle’s flame trails a cometary tail, oozing from a hazy ball of light which glows above Ram’s head; he brings the flame down and it hovers before his solar plexus when the candle’s base touches the floor. “Malkuth…” The word vibrates through the temple with such deep intonation that it drills down into the fabric of the world and resounds through Racheal’s bones. The colours of the high priest’s raiment melt into a multi-hued vessel filled with earthen shades, a segmented sphere of complementary elements glowing at the place where the base of his spine meets the rug-covered floorboards.
A trail of light forms a faintly glowing pillar between the spheres and the glowing light at Ram’s crown intensifies as he moves the candle upward and to his left. A scarlet glow appears about the small flickering fire, centred upon the shaman’s shoulder. Guttural syllables vibrate through Racheal’s body and her heart pounds in her breast while primordial phonemes slicker silently through her mouth in time with the high priest’s evocative invocation; “U’G’vurah…”
As the candle shifts beneath Ram’s proud chin, a bar of light extends to his right and a blue glow surrounds his other shoulder as he pronounces the ancient conjuration; “U’G’dulah”. A glowing cross of light grows within his aura as the contrasting energies of the sephira of the Tree of Life blend into two crossing polarised beams, a set of scales balanced in a harmonious conjunction of opposites.
When the aromatic candle shifts back to Ram’s solar plexus the nimbus around its flame is suffused with a golden amber glow. “Le Olam…” he sings in an arpeggio of seven pentatonic notes while the warm golden cloud swells to fill the circle; then “Ah… men…” in deeply intoned final paired syllables of uncommonly common power. A pregnant stillness fills the temple with a peaceful field that encompasses the circle to its extremities and beyond, charged with the common wealth of feeling and combining expectations of all present.
Racheal ponders the reality of her visions as she stares into her reflection. Am I seeing the Sephira and their colours because I know what to expect? They seem so vivid and dimensional… and my eyes are so dark, bottomless black pits with salamanders swimming in faraway depths… While his bewitching betrothed sinks into her doppelganger the shaman begins to circle her face with the candle, and sparkling white fiery trails encircle her morphing visage in a frame of liquid flame. Ram’s forearm flashes past her eyes once in each revolution, a slow strobe of momentary darkness that repeatedly splits her vision into a reeling film of flickering animated frames.
The Lady Racheal’s eyeballs glimmer with a rotating reflection turning within a reflection that swirls round and about and around. Curvaceous shadows slip and whirl across the planes and curves of her flushed pale face and the hazy aura of her wavy blonde mane frames the subtly altering mask of her features. Angular cheekbones, determined jaw and lofty brow create swirling patterns of light and darkness that swarm across symmetrical substrates of gristle and bone; a skull clothed in monochrome harlequin shades, smiling at the grim jest of fresh resurrection.
As the tripping teen stares into the fixated pools of her socketed eyes, a rippling sea of colours surrounds her head and hypnotic patterns ripple across her face to leap the gap between the priestess and her magical young lover. She sees the bony cage of her skull glowing whitely beneath transparent skin, sheathed in a complex network of translucent muscles and tenuous tendons. The death mask grins back at the artistic young witch while the tenuous flame goes round and around, and the rising breeze of a collective gasp splashes through the composite reality of the tribe’s unified psychedelic experience.
Rotating shadows conceal and reveal a plethora of differing faces and agendas hidden within the attractive appearances of Racheal’s comely visage. A series of distinct personalities begins to glance back from the ring of fire glowing betwixt this the world and that - or those - of the looking glass; staring and peering, feeling and reacting to the attractive focus of massed concentration. Stardew gasps a garbled imprecation, giving vent to the emotions filling the wider circle as a plethora of identities begin to appear in Racheal’s face and aura, revealed in the rotating light of the beeswax candle.
“Fuck!” As the princess’s gasp snickers through Racheal’s eardrums an overlay of differing faces and personalities – or different incarnations of the same identity – fill her expanding second sight, threatening to overwhelm the girl’s self-possession with a horde of converging personas. The candle suddenly halts its spin above her brow, and she stares at a slightly older woman whose icy eyes are no more than glittering points of light within gaunt shadowed sockets. “I am the source,” the shaman intones. Before she can fully focus on the image, Ram’yana shifts the candle until her features are lit from below – and a wise young child stares back at the priestess with utterly entranced and trusting absorption. “I am the seed.”
The light source shifts to the left, and another face regards her from the bony carapace that girdles the central point of Racheal’s consciousness; a snarling amazon warrior whose unwavering regard is imbued with undeniable power and fury - and a disquieting frisson of feral menace. “I feel the need.” When the shaman moves the candle past her watering eyes the right side of her face shines in a different light, revealing a jovial personality with compassionate and corpulent features. “I conjure it.”
Racheal keeps her eyes fixed and unblinking all the while, and waves of nameless swimming colours sear her eyeballs as the images flicker and twist. “So be it,” Ram’yana murmurs, and a semblance of the self-image which Racheal holds dearest and nearest to her heart rises to reveal itself within the translucent surface of her skin.
“We are all comprised of many beings,” the shaman declares as the spinning flame resumes its revelatory revolutions. His voice rumbles through the floorboards and vibrates up Racheal’s spine while a score of differing personalities stare back from the world beyond the looking glass. “Out of many, one – and out of one, many.” The candle reverses direction and a new series of identities is revealed in a dizzying rush as hot droplets of beeswax splash onto Racheal’s naked calves and thighs. There! When the candle suddenly stops moving just beside her right temple, Racheal hears Ram’s silent exclamation as surely as if it had been voiced in her ear.
A supremely confident young woman returns Racheal’s intensely focused regard. She sees her true self looking back at her from within her own familiar face, and is stunned into awed silence, amazed at the beautiful creature she sees smiling at her from within. The sheer grace and presence of the woman is remarkable to behold, and Kha-Aan’s warning rumble silences the rush of whispers and murmurs that suddenly fills the chamber. It’s me… as I know myself to be, inside…
As she stares at the inspiring image, her body is surrounded by a shimmering outline that resolves into a wide green plain extending to the horizon, broken only by a circle of standing stones. She sits within a pebble-outlined circle set in a swathe of short-cropped grass, staring back at herself from another time and place.
The priestess is garbed in a jerkin and skirt of blue-dyed hide, stitched together with pale leather thongings. Her hair is a platinum cascade that vies for brilliance with glittering icefields and patches of snow, dotting the rolling meadow surrounding her small stone circle on a bare and rocky hillock. She smiles at herself in recognition and a sense of utter relief and exultation fills the Lady Racheal as a fully formed eye extrudes from the core of her mind and erupts from her brow, illuminating the worlds with an inner limitless splendour.
A thoroughly empowering glow erases all her previous discomfort and concerns, and a jolt passes up the priestess’s spine to electrify flesh and nerves and blood and muscle while her aura flares into a tall blue flame which extends toward eternity. “Behold,” her magical lover announces as a matching eye flares open in the marrow of his brow, “Thou art Divine – Triumphal High Priestess and Oracular Seer of the Court of the Central Axis. Awa Ken, and so mote it be.”
“Awa Ken, and so mote it be.” An echoing chorus fills the longhall as Racheal feels the ancient archetypal priestess pass through the looking glass and enter her vibrant young body, filling her being with an electrifying rush of self-confirming ecstasy that thrills through her veins and sends jolts and rushes through her entire being. Her blasted-open eyes witness a writhing, twisting, blinding aurora that flares through the temple like a multidimensional uplifting spiral staircase of primal DNA – the helically mingling wills of a transincarnate entity which dwells within the entire tribe, and exists to fulfil the ongoing communion which has birthed it into the living world. “Centraxis…” Racheal breathes.
The priestess knows she’s home at long last – all the way home into the light, after a long and lonely dark night of the soul that she thought would never end. At the selfsame moment she’s filled with a viscerally kinaesthetic awareness of that other life and personality which shine and shimmer through the looking glass gate, and feels part of her self entering the world of the stony circle, sliding into place within an encircling range of precipitous icecaps.
‘We share these worlds together…’ Even as the thought echoes through the expanding spaces of Racheal’s mind, she’s aware of another presence staring through the looking glass, examining the tableau of the longhall through her multiplying senses. ‘…a sisterhood of stewardship…’ Her expanded new eye begins to glow more brightly within the pulsing lobes of her forehead, and as she absorbs the statement’s undeniable factuality Racheal begins to question whether the thought is her own.
She momentarily wonders which of the witches in the mirror is her truest self, before she abandons all caution and fully accepts the other presence that she senses lurking alongside her in the cavern of her cranium. She accepts the guiding voice that whispers familiar assurances into her mind as an unforeseen benison of her new tribal role - a guardian spirit that Racheal’s shamanic soul has craved since birth.
“So mote it be,” the twinned souls repeat through the High Priestess’s full pink lips, and the Lady Racheal feels the other’s thoughts overlain upon her own – a being who revels inside her and exults in a surprisingly vivid sensation of long-sought release. As she stares at her face in the looking glass the unmistakable form of a glowing Third Eye is emblazoned upon her brow.
Music erupts into the longhall and the familiar riff is greeted with collective approval; the pounding beat of Iron Butterfly’s Inna Gunna Davida fills the void beneath a swelling eructation of giddy merriment as the celebratory tribe of Centraxians greets their new Second Arcanum, the High Priestess Racheal – who turns from her candlelit reflection to meet the smiling emerald eyes of her beloved High Priest.
Ram’s brow glows with the same blue-on-pink aura as her own, a shining oval surrounding a wide open and translucent Third Eye. “Awa Ken, my love,” he says before their lips drift together.
A True Story
- R.A.
Images – author’s
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* Brain Damage lyrics by Roger Waters (&Pink Floyd)
+ Gloria lyrics – The Doors, Jim Morrison
* Psychedelic Prayers C 1966 by Timothy Leary, Academy Editions
*
Further true tales of the Prince of Centraxis -
See Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll Part 1
Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll Part 2 -Free World
Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll Part 3 -Stretching the Envelope
Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll Part 4 - Home to Roost
Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll Part 5 - Could It Be Any Body?
Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll Part 6 - Free Lovers
Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll Part 7 - Wild Widow's Son
Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll Part 8 - Womanimals
Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll Part 9 - Incautious Wishes
Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll Part 10 - Freedom of Choice
Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll Part 11 – Smuggled Desires
Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll Part 12 – Love the One
Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll Part 13 - Open Secrets
Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll Part 14 – Between Initiations
Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll Part 15 – Promethean Preparations
Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll Part 16 – Through the Looking Glass
Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll Part 17 – Second Arcanum
Adder Ladies and the Dawn of Ra Part 1 - Doves and Serpents
The Shaman of Centraxis Part 1 - The Whole is Greater
Psychedelic Water Part 1 – Fractal Rainbow
And for further enlightenment see
The New Illuminati - http://newilluminati.blog-city.com/
The author’s images and art - Imagine Nation
The Her(m)etic Hermit http://hermetic.blog.com/
Save the World from RamPage - http://www.geocities.com/r_ayana
This material is published under Creative Commons Copyright – reproduction for non-profit use is permitted & encouraged, if you give attribution to the work & author - and please include a (preferably active) link to the original along with this notice. Feel free to make non-commercial hard (printed) or software copies or mirror sites - you never know how long something will stay glued to the web – but remember attribution! If you like what you see, please send a small donation or leave a comment – and thanks for reading this far…
The Prince of Centraxis – http://centraxis.blogspot.com
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Please add your perspective to the collective mind NOW! - Prince Ram'yana