My favorite dead poet showed me around a magic cottage he said was on the fourth level of the astral plane. He let me handle an azurite crystal and recommended that I should use one for scrying in the spirit vision as he and his Mystery associates did. Back in the ordinary world, I could not find an azurite crystal that matched his, though I can create one in meditation and use it as a spyglass, a laser pointer, or a transporter. I was inspired to return to the primal art of divination by rock reading and to embark on new expeditions to worlds we can find inside a stone. Here is a little more of the story, playing across many years.
Twenty years ago, in the Library of the House of Time, a place in the Real World beyond consensual hallucination, a dead poet called me to climb a steep spiral staircase I had not noticed before. When I reached the top, he transported both of us to a different locale: a pleasant country cottage. Flower beds bordered the path. From the window of his study, I could look out over changing landscapes, including the Byzantium and Renaissance Italy of his poems. He showed me secret journals and held up a marvelous deep blue crystal.
“The azurite crystal,” he specified. He urged me to use it to open the third eye fully and see what I most needed to see. I had the impression that the crystal is not only a spyglass but a transporter. It can carry the user – if he is prepared and ready – as far as the Blue Star.
Yeats explained that his magic cottage is on the fourth level of the astral plane. That did not sound high enough, in terms of the Theosophers' atlases of astral and causal planes. But it is the poet's place and I must assume that he knows his own address.
After this encounter, I wanted an azurite spyglass. A gemmologist friend doused some of my blue fire by telling me that it is almost impossibe to find an azurite crystal as large as the one in Yeats's fist. I settled for a chunk of azurite stone, the size of a shooter marble but rough. The stone was held precious by both Egypt and Ireland; the Egyptians crushed it to make the blue pigment with which they colored the skin of gods and kings; the scribes who made the Book of Kells used powdered azurite to paint capital letters. This is the blue of deities and of royalty.
If I unfocus my eyes and look at it close up, my blue stone becomes a mountain range, with a glacier or cool river of lighter blue falling down its slopes and a great open-mouthed fish in its waters. There is something of the lemniscate, the infinity sign, in the general shape. As I let my imagination loose as a leopard in this world, I see intricate knotty designs, pictographs, giant faces. A great beast with open jaws, a low brow, a great sloping muzzle. It could be a bear, or a boar, but when I see it in profile, it looks most like a lion
I am shocked to find a face within the face. This is definitely human, and it is the face of a king. Strong and stern face, long-nosed, piercing dark eyes, slightly slanting, a short beard. Above his head, crenellations that suggest a crown. Is he the master of the Beast, or does the Beast have his head?
I turn the stone and it shows me a second face, that might be at home on Easter Island. Another turn reveals a bird-woman, with heron legs and a beak.
I contemplate the Beast who holds the head of a king as Yama holds the Wheel of Life on the walls of Buddhist temples. My mind turns, like the wheel, to another life and another journey.
Before Yeats called to me from the turning stair, I made an expedition to a site in the Real World we call the Cave of the Ancestors. I found the opening I needed behind the hard spray of a waterfall. I searched rock paintings for messages. I was called by the glow of light from a standing stone to brave a mess of black adders. The stone became translucent, showing me the figure of a man who was desperate for help. Bearded and crowned, torn and bleeding, he was ready to destroy himself if his appeal to another time and another world went unheard. Something gave me the courage to drop my body and track him through the electric blue light inside the stone into his broken kingdom, to do battle with a dark power.
Now I am holding another world between my thumb and forefinger. There are endless worlds, as Vasistha taught Rama. Any number may be found inside a stone.
No comments:
Post a Comment