Topic: Magick & Spirituality

It was on a dark street corner. The location was well hidden and shadowed by shuttered auto body shops and factories. I looked to my right and left before entering the gloomy stairwell. It wasn’t because I feared police surveillance in this unlikely spot, but I wanted to make sure I had the right address which I’d scribbled down after a long series of phone calls.

Humanity's path towards retrieving the Mayan calendar system really started with the Harmonic Convergence, August 16-17, 1987, when large numbers of people in the West turned out for a spiritual celebration. Although, it was not recognized at the time, this celebration had the distinction of falling on the first two days of a traditional Mayan tzolkin (260-day) round, such as befits a new beginning. Although he was not alone, José Argüelles was the main promoter of the event and in the seminal The Mayan Factor outlined several important ideas that would later be instrumental for elucidating the meaning of the Mayan calendar system. Among many other things, he emphasized the non-physical nature of the Mayan calendar system: "Naturally, most Mayan scholars are puzzled by what appears to be the use of 260- and 360-unit 'calendar' cycles that do not correspond in any precise way to perceivable astronomical or organic planetary cycles." Although both Frank Waters and Peter Balin some ten years earlier had suggested that the Mayan calendar system had a real relevance for the spiritual evolution of mankind, Argüelles brought this insight to a much higher level. The contours of a cosmic plan became visible.

Franz Anton Mesmer called it "magnetism;" Baron Karl Von Reichenbach named it "odic force;" Sigmund Freud observed it in human emotions and labeled it "libido;" Wilhelm Reich used the term "Orgone Energy;" Mechanistic scientists in the 17th through 19th centuries used many of its qualities in the element of ether, and the mystics embraced other aspects of "life force" within the concept of god. Throughout human history life force has received many names: In the east it was called Prana, (India), Qi (China), Ki (Japan), Mana (Hawaii), and Od (in the West).

The Oneness Celebration of June 6-8 this year takes place at an amazing gathering of energies in the Mayan calendar. In the age old Tzolkin calendar that has been used without interruption by the Mayan people for some 2500 years it falls on the days 4 Ahau, 5 Imix and 6 Ik, which are most commonly translated into English as 4 Light, 5 Alligator and 6 Wind. It is now timely to take a look at these energies in order to understand the nature of the possibilities that they will open up to mankind.

The Heart of Darkness: A Journey to the Dark Heart of the Empire

The day was as grey as a bureaucrat's soul. Fat Tuesday, the last day of Madi Gras, the pre-lent pagan hold-over of a festival in Latin countries, and in neo-classical Protestant Washington, the dark heart of the Empire, it was cold, rainy, grim and without the slightest glimmer of hope, cheer, colour or festivities. In the Washington of the New Pax Americana, it is always Ash Wednesday...

When most people think about the Tarot they think about fortune tellers. Indeed, the Tarot deck has become so associated with the art of divination, the peering into the future in an attempt to see what waits around the next bend, that most people don't know that the cards have another purpose.

The purpose of this article is to describe the role of the Oneness Celebration at the Venus transit on June 8, 2004 in its larger context. This will clearly be the "astronomical event of the year". To begin with, a Venus transit is an astronomical event where the planet Venus passes between the Earth and the sun - a sort of eclipse. Venus transits lasts for 6-7 hours and come in pairs separated by exactly 8 earth years minus two days. As far as human measures go such pairs of transits occur only rarely. Below is a list of the years of the most recent occurrences, where the second transit in the pair is given within parentheses:

It was hot that November and the sand glowed in the noonday sun like burnished grains of glory. The shadows hid in the shade, grey and faint, and the light moved in waves of heat shimmer and bounced in vicious glares from chunks of Old Kingdom white limestone. The old pyramid hunkered in the brightness like a stone wedding cake stripped of its icing, and the drift dunes and mounds of half exposed ruins added a somber sense of permanence. The ancient City of the Dead seemed even more impressive in the flood of light, looking as if a dream had materialized from the otherworldly glare, then melted and fell apart.

Tolkien's Invocation of the Star Goddess

Close onto forty years ago when I discovered Tolkien's magical trilogy, The Lord of the Rings, it was a vastly different world. Magic was rather thin on the ground in those days, what with the Cold War, Civil Rights struggles and the growing Vietnam conflict. It was a mean, hard reality and one didn't have to look far to find the Black Gates of Mordor or examples of the still surviving spirits of Sauron and Saruman.

In the depths of my soul lives a great sadness. It is the sadness of so many unfulfilled dreams and lost lives. It is the desolation of the many times that I and those close to me have chosen fear over fulfillment, ignorance over awareness, or thinking over feeling. And yet I know in my heart that this sadness was the result of choice - the decision to choose fear over life. These decisions have brought grief, crisis and desperation into my life and the lives of those close to me. How can this be? Why do we allow these things to occur?