When I sleep, I sometimes walk the Astral plane without my direct intention, and last week I had a couple of experiences in Lucifer’s Orrery, where I am apparently being instructed in aspects of sorcery. This instruction is something I requested and it’s happening semi-consciously. I thought I’d share the experiences.
Wings
As a reminder, the Orrery appears as a circular platform at the end of a stone walkway, jutting out into a blank, featureless blank space, in this case, a space representing limitless potential.
In the center of the platform is a fire pit surrounded by four elaborately carved stone heads: a bull, a goat, a ram, and a stag. From the fire pit shoots out a yellow-green stream of plasma fire shooting about ten feet into the air.
Today, the floor of the platform is surrounded in elaborately carved magickal circles and diagrams that, when I step on them, glow with the same yellow-green light as the fire.
I appear here in my idealized human form, naked except for a traditional black robe with a cowl, almost cliche Satanic robes. I carry a metal lantern with four faces: a bull, a goat, a ram, and a stag to mirror the fire pit’s construction.
As I appear here, I notice the circles light up when I step on them. I notice there’s a circle in front of each of the horned beast heads of the fire pit. I step into the circle that corresponds to the goat.
Almost immediately, a figure appears in the air of the void and approaches, a humanoid figure with tall, twisted devil’s horns, a slim non-gendered body, and bat-wings. There’s a “featurelessness” about the figure, as it doesn’t appear male or female, has no genitals, and it’s face is nearly devoid of characteristics that could identify it as an individual. I got the impression that this was purposeful, a means to conceal identity or an inexpertly done shape-shifting, as if the entity didn’t quite know how a human should appear.
He landed and folded his bat wings over his shoulders so that the finger spokes spread the webbing over his front. All at once, the wings become a black, Satanic robe with accented shoulders that were once the thumb-claws of its wings.
I understood that this being was my tutor, without being told. In fact, a while ago, I had encountered this entity before when I first started reaching out to Lucifer as a Patron. This time, however, the entity’s presence was more defined and definite.
The entity gestured and my Satanic robe flew off me. He gestured again, as if pulling at his own robe and flinging toward me. A copy of his robe did fling off himself and hit me, wrapping around me, and suddenly, anchored onto my back with a visceral click. I spread the robe into bat wings reflexively.
This was obviously a gift and an acknowledgement of my ability to do sorcery, even if I’m a novice.
This ended this particular moment and I remember waking up in the mundane world.
Experience
I have had a long-standing issue with feeling “rejected.” It’s a trigger for me, that, when I feel rejected, I tend to react very strongly emotionally. This issue dovetailed with a poor body image and my previous obesity — efforts to defend myself from being vulnerable to experiencing rejection by suitors, I basically made myself so unattractive I “pre-rejected” myself for their benefit.
After years of therapy, I still had not uncovered the root cause as to why I felt constantly rejected, why I was sensitive to experiencing any form of rejection. Why did this problem exist? What was its genesis? I felt knowing that would be the key to deconstructing it.
Cut to current times. Our country experienced an attempted coup by right-wing, socially conservative, religious zealots to stormed our Capital building with explosives and guns, intent on taking hostage the Congressmen and Senators that were in the process of certifying an free and fair election.
I experienced these events as a very real threat to my status as a citizen, my rights under the constitution, and, possibly my physical well being.
In conversations with my right-wing, socially conservative, devoutly Catholic parents, I experienced a form of rejection. They would prefer to protect the country from the spectre of “socialism” rather than even consider my well being as possibly in danger. They endorsed Republican, Fox News talking points to the detriment of their own son. Luckily they lost.
But, my mind has churned on the damage this caused me. In the middle of the night, my thoughts roiled with processing the emotional hit and with attempting to come up with an acceptable response that didn’t over- or under-react.
Amidst this, I found myself in the Orrery again, in the presence of the entity and the flame font. With much preamble, my tutor reached into the flaming font and pulled out a glowing rock, a coal that was still burning.
“Sorcery comes from our experience,” he said, showing me the rock. I understood immediately because this rock was essentially a part of me. This was my experience of the rejection by my parents. “From our experience, our thoughts derive,” he continued, “Our thoughts bend reality.”
To demonstrate, he turned the coal this way and that. Almost invisibly, very subtly, I saw ripple effects coming off of the coal, shaping, bending the immediate reality around it. I knew this was the basest, least powerful form of said bending of reality and that much more could be done.
I also knew — very suddenly — that the coal of experience was always informing my thoughts and always bending reality around it passively. We all do sorcery — bend the world around our experience — passively every day.
Knowing this, the lesson ended and I woke up. But, I realized very suddenly that I had been rejected by my parents passively my entire life. From the perennial anger and brooding of my father who never liked having kids, to my mother’s constantly placating of him as the authority in the house, to their conservative, sex-negative world views, to their political leanings….all of it exiled me from feeling accepted — and thus, acceptable — to them.
I wrote this rejection as a fundamental thread into my worldview and it became an experience around which 50-something years of living revolved around.
This experience colored my thoughts and bent reality to fulfill the expectation. I felt unacceptable, so I became unacceptable. I felt rejected, so I rejected myself for others.
Where does this go from here? It’s hard to say because I’m still processing the lesson and still developing a game plan on how to handle it on a day-to-day level. A lot of habits have to be changed. A lot of self-care needs to be enacted. A lot of cognitive changes need to be made.
But, I have the answer, finally.
