It has been several weeks since I dedicated myself to exploring the sphere of Mercury on my admittedly stolen and shamelessly bastardized Tree of Life. I paid for my insolence by having several comforting lies taken from me and many uncomfortable truths revealed.
Chief among those falsehoods was the idea that all that happens in my life are not connected as a rule, and unfortunate happenstance at best. It appears that way because I had willfully blinded myself to the connections. That way, I also blind myself to the responsibility of doing something about it.
Instead, I am reminded that I am the same standing up as I am sitting down, and just because I use one set of tools while doing one thing, and another set of tools while doing another thing, I am still me.
Being the point of commonality in my life means I have to take ownership of being that pivot point. Either I could continue to cry about things happening to me, or I could use my skills of fuckery and shenaniganing to tweak things for my better.
I identified more of my weaknesses and was forced to acknowledge a skill I had previously filed as “unimportant” and “unattainable” is actually quite vital to me. So no more bitching about how easy it is for other people. I have to start honing it just the same.
But just when I became settled in Mercury’s classroom, he asked me one simple question.
“Does Jehovah still hold the Sun from you?”
What you may not know, or may have forgotten in bliss, is once upon a time, I was a very much hardcore Fundamentalist Christian. (Read: Heavily involved in a mentally and financially damaging cult.) I left the membership behind, but it has taken years to extricate and banish or destroy the internalized thinking that was forced into me. One of those self-destructive thoughts was the notion that I am unclean by nature of birth to the point where anything bright, white, and shiny would turn away from me.
My dark skin was proof of an unclean bloodline, and that I darkened under the Sun wasn’t a result of evolutionary adaptation. But that the Sun was revealing my unclean nature by showing the shadows of my soul.
(Why yes, it is 2015, why do you ask?)
On the surface, I knew it to be bullshit. Intellectually, I rejected it. But when emotionally vulnerable, I caught myself turning away from bright light sources and thinking it was because I was not capable of looking upon the pure and the true, not because some jackass thought it would be fun to replace a 40W bulb with a 120W without telling me. (Asshole.)
These past few months in Mercury’s classroom was physically spent driving to and from work, facing the sun going both ways in the morning and the evening. The day before he asked that question, I drove through a thick fog bank that cleared just as my car was directly facing the sun. Bright and warm beams fell upon my face in personal welcome. As I smiled to feel the morning embrace, I realized a thing.
“No. Jehovah no longer holds the Sun from me. I have no fear anymore.”
“Good. Because your time with me is done. For now. Go to the Sun.”
When Jupiter had me driving him through my perceived Tree of Life, we stopped at Mar’s realm, at Venus’, and at Mercury’s, before returning to his. But he had me drive an unmapped detour around the Sun’s. At the time, I didn’t understand why.
Now I do.
I would not have been able to sit in that realm without all of the cult baggage literally obscuring my sight. I still regarded the Sun as Jehovah’s property, then.
But not now.
It is only Jehovah’s if I’m in his paradigm. Without context, it is a material object, a great ball of compressed hydrogen in a runaway nuclear fusion reaction. It only takes on context when I change how I am viewing it.
Mercury said to go to the Sun. Okay. What Major Arcana card represents the path from Hod to Tiphareth?
The Devil. Representation of the astrological sign of Capricorn, and the Hebrew letter Ayin, meaning “Eye”.
… Well, fuck me.
Wait. Better not say that too loudly.
I have some homework to do before I set out. I’ve spent a long time living and hiding in shadows, and now I have to walk out under the unblinking Eye of God.
Shit.