Peregrine Moon

Learning of Fear: 20 Sept 2005

I continue my inner work session about fear. I begin with the gesture and sigil to establish my connection, and see what unfolds from there.

At the edge of this thicket is a stand of fir trees stretching back toward rocky hills. The air is colder here than near the river. When Baeth left me I stayed near the river, watching the moonset in the water's ripples. A Luna moth flew past my face and fluttered into this valley. I left the stream's side and began walking back toward it. When my guide left I did not see the direction that he walked. My heart tells me to follow this direction.

I see a pale glimmer in a hut's window. Night is clarifying: I could never have spotted it in daylight. Night reveals the subtle as the day's gross details retreat. I have never learned to trust this darker sense. Perhaps I can do so now.

Learning of Fear: 18 Sept 2005

It has been years since I last entered any real inner dialogue. I kneel before my altar this warm September evening. I just created a sigil and a gesture to prepare myself for inner work. I make that sign now and I hold in my mind that sigil.

I resist the temptation to attempt to resume any imagery from my past work. Rather I open through my mind's eye to the outside, with September clouds hiding a Full Moon almost at harvest-time. The crickets chirp in an unstable rhythm. My breathing follows their unsteady beat.

Pathworking revisited

Patrick Dunn's Postmodern Magic inspired me to return to my pathworking roots. Pathworking - what I all inner work - begins by creating a quiet, receptive place and then introducing an evocative image. It's not the same as guided visualization, where you play back a series of images that someone has scripted in advance. Rather, when you do pathworking you jump into an image and follow where it leads. Image is somewhat misleading, though. It's not just visual imagery that's key. Effective pathworking engages the inner correspondent of each of the senses to create a fully realized inner world. From that vitally charged point the image - the world - takes you somewhere.

I'd been doing pathworking for five years before I knew anyone else had a name for it. Jungian analysis call it Active Imagination. Pathworking often relates to a series of guided meditations on the twenty-two paths in the Kabbalistic Tree of Life. Meditators who use the Tarot associate each of these paths with one of the Major Arcana. You begin pathworking on the Tarot by holding the image of one of the Major Arcana as the seed image of the meditation.

I'm not as drawn to meditation on the Tarot as I am about evoking the worlds inside my head independent of any particular external form. One part of my inner work that Dunn underscores is the importance of developing relationships with inner teachers and power animals. During the 80's created several inner worlds and explored them deeply over a period of years. Each of these worlds contained teachers who gave me a tremendous leg up on my inner development. I also became attached to several inner figures who represented the magical lover that I sought unsuccessfully on the physical plane.

Along the way I developed my own strange way of logging the images that come up during these voyages. I can type at a great rate with my eyes closed. I started to use laptops during my meditations. As I float into my inner world I type keywords and phrases that help me recall the sequence of images and events. I edit these logs into my own journal.

When I began to live alone again in the early 90's I plunged into an intense exploration of Enochian magical using pathworking. The process took me several years. When I finished I stopped doing pathworking completely. Any attempt to rekindle the work failed. Partly I stopped because I realized I'd never meet my life partner as long as I distracted myself internally.

John and I've been together for ten years now. I'm not seeking anyone inside. But Dunn's book propelled me to do a little pathworking. While I have hundreds of pages of logs from my inner voyages I've rarely let anyone look at them. I think it's time for me to open my new work. I'll be posting my pathworking voyages at irregular intervals. Please click on the Pathworking category link to see what I've been up to. And take a voyage of your own...