The Hermetic Wild Child
On July 13th 2021, Venus and Mars made love in Sekhmet’s lair and conceived the hermetic wild child in the solar winds.* As I real-eyes this new archetype within myself, he/she/me becomes more stable and begins to show up in other people, if they resonate with this energy.
I saw this male aspect quite clearly in our friend Marcus as he approached, loaded with blackberries: Wow, you look like the wild man of the woods!
Time stood still and reality shifted. Just after that Dean and I began to explore the possibility of inviting a spring to come to an area where two small ferns have sprouted. We had to cut down a couple of acres of pines after the fire and we want to regenerate it with a mix of native woodland and other trees and shrubs, chosen for their fragrance and beauty. It’s a big job. Daunting. We need to clear pine branches and lay out paths and the brambles are making a rapid return, guarding the soil from erosion. A source of water in the area would really help the new trees when we start planting in late autumn. With the hermetic wild child providing inner guidance, we found two underground streams, with young oaks already a meter high along its pathway.
The hermetic wild child comes into being through the balancing of the male and female polarities within oneself at a threshold moment within the cosmos. I’ve been moving towards this for quite a while, it is the path of the heart, but it surprized me when it happened. The sun emitted an x-class flare on the 3rd July and it pushed me into an altered state of consciousness, so much so that on the 5th and 6th of July, I was in what I called the ‘death trance’. I had no desire for anything and I wasn’t troubled by it. I told Dean that I hadn’t expected to come of the wheel this way at this time, but so be it. That night the Kalki Avatar appeared in a dream, he’d actually come into my awareness a few weeks earlier, but I take particular notice of my dreams. The death trance began to fade, some of my energy and appetites returned and I waited.
The morning after Venus and Mars danced together, I woke up with the awareness that I did not trust my own masculine polarity, my animus! That was a kick in the guts. I had thought that I had valued my masculine aspects and drive, but apparently when put to the test, this was not true. I spent much of 2020 withholding Shakti from Dean, as he was in the throes of real-eyesing the corrupted masculine patterns within himself and I did not trust him with it. I didn’t hide this from him; I told him that I had no choice as he was on a destructive path and I was worried about the damage he might do. This took a lot of my energy and I thought it was the only option I had. Of course, the truth of the situation was that we were mirroring the same imbalance to each other, the lack of trust of the feminine for the masculine, because this is what wanted to come into consciousness, what we needed to see with our real eyes. The shock of the fire burned off our blinders as it melted our hearts.
Looking at Mars and Venus in the sky with my real eyes, was like so staring hard through curtained windows, so that the curtains disappear. It knocked me off-balance several times – I thought there might have been an earthquake. I refocused on Mars: what is Mars doing? Who or what is Mars?
It turns out that Mars as the god of war is yet another case of stolen gods.
The arch strategy of the archontic predators and their agents is to blind us to ourselves and the Nature Powers within us, to deceive us into using these powers (which they don’t have) to serve their agenda. The Nature Powers used to be referred to as gods and goddesses, then archetypes and now they are more or less neutered into instincts and objects. There are as many gods as there are ideas and skills, as the masculine polarity gives us the power of original thought, but for us in our world, there is only one goddess, Our Divine Mother the Earth, who has many forms and is all form. The Nature powers are greater than us, but they are also us, as the Aeons designed us to be in continuous resonance with their self-generative abilities, enabling us to generate and regenerate ourselves.
The divine endowments hidden by the ‘planet’ Mars include the ability of the human genomic plasm to be able to feed and nurture itself and protect its sources of nourishment, in whatever planetary environment it might land. According to various sources, Mars is said to rule either the root chakra and the survival instincts or the solar plexus chakra and personal power and it could be that both views are correct. In pre-Copernican astronomy, Mars was recognized as an entity that could be used for harmful purposes.
This ‘idea’ correlates with hexagram 27 in the I Ching, the corners of the mouth, providing nourishment, or the magic tortoise that needs no earthly nourishment, but can feed itself on air. “Instead, however, it too moves toward the general source of nourishment and wants to be fed with the rest. This is contemptible and disastrous.”
2 + 7 = 9, the number allocated to the celestial object that we refer to as Mars.
Is Mars a planet? Yes and no, a luminary for sure. I see it it as a kind of lens, filter and mirror, a frequency relay station and also a sentient being. The martial qualities we see in the red disc are our own aggressive tendencies amplified and reflected back at us, over-shadowing other gifts of destiny streamed to us from the stars and the Galactic Centre. Mars amplifies our ability to ‘lock-on’ to any goal or target. The ability to nourish ourselves has been twisted into an all-consuming hunger that can never be satisfied because of this interference. (As I finished this paragraph I heard a crow cawing and went out just in time to see it pick a pear from the pear tree and fly off with it, confirmation of this point for me. Augury. Mars.)
This hunger is known in many cultures and is depicted in such imagery as the ouroboros. The hunger itself is not intrinsically evil, but it has been pushed out of balance with Nature and this has led men to rape the countryside to build and feed unnecessary power structures and cities, in the ancient world as today. This cycle is coming to an end, regardless of what we do or don’t do. However, the velocity and ferocity of the collapse is dependent upon our participation in the creation of a new cycle, one does not happen independently of the other. To bring in a way of life that is in balance with Nature, we must rekindle our relationships with the Nature Powers.
Mars tells the story of the founding of Rome and the birth of the Roman Empire, but the back story is about how the power that protects the forest, our source of food and nourishment for millenia, was exploited and transformed into a god of war and agriculture and identified with a celestial object.
In Italy and France and the Celtic lands, Silvanus and Sucellos respectively, were personifications of this divine protective power. We know of the existence of Sucellos and Silvanus because there are statues, inscriptions and references to them.
He is thought to have been popular with peasants, as a guardian of uncultivated land, boundary areas, hunting and subsistence farming. Inscriptions have been found near mines, which is taken as evidence of an Underworld connection. One way that scholars and researchers explore the lineage of deities is by comparing their paraphernalia; Sucellos carries a mallet that links him to Thor, but he is also found carrying a sickle. They both had dogs, which links them to Cernunnos and leads to Pan, the Green Man etc. They are all interconnected because they are all external expressions of the Nature Powers endowed in us, that we call upon at various times without real-eyesing that we are calling upon ourselves…..instead deluding ourselves into powerlessness.
The ceaselessly ravenous Roman Empire needed to feed its armies. Peasants were drafted and their relationships with the Nature Powers exploited. As country folk called upon their familiar deities to protect them in their services to the state, they also changed the roles and functions of the Nature Powers themselves and the priests and agents of Rome used this to their advantage. Ordinary humans transformed the green man of the woods, envisioned as Sucellos and Silvanus into Mars, god of war and agriculture, for the benefit of the Roman Empire, over an extended time period without real-eyesing what they were doing.
“Silvanus, half-enclosed in a sacred ash-tree,
and supreme guardian of this high garden,
we gratefully dedicate this poem to you
for that (you watch over) us through the fields and Alpine mountains
and among the guests of your fragrant grove,
while I administer the law and carry out the business of the Cæsars
with your protecting favour.
Bring me and mine safely back to Rome
and grant that we may tend the Italian countryside under your guardianship;
then shall I consecrate (to you) a thousand great trees.”
T. Pomponius Victor, imperial procurator (hymn dedicated at Axima in the Alpes Graiæ)
Source: http://www.deomercurio.be/en/silvano.htm
The Empire continues to exploit our powers and our ignorance to this day. Elon Musk’s trips to Mars, what do you think that is about?
In the moment that I real-eyesed Marcus Sucellos, with his staff and his pot of blackberries, I saw beyond the filter of Mars to the protective power of the wild spaces themselves. What I have been preparing myself for happened suddenly, cracked armour fell away and the sacred marriage of alchemical transformation took place in my heart. The Hermetic Wild Child was conceived within myself. Reality has shifted around me, new vistas arising. This has been a most intimate journey, but the Hermetic Wild Child is not me or mine, it is an archetype here for anyone to real-eyes for themselves.
And Mars? Another perspective. You are, as always, free to choose.
The card I drew from the Wildwood Tarot on the New Moon, July 9th.
*Thank you Tara Green of taratarot.com for the prompt on this hot date.
St John's Wort: Blood from the Sun
