My experience of Black Mother has tended to knock me down, pull me down, feel overwhelming. Calling Black Mother also triggered one of my first possessory trances, though I feel these trances have mostly been light ones.
In appearance, Black Mother resembled a very attractive woman, an actress who caught my attention a while back, but Black Mother often steps forth clad in vine (or roots) and earth or in rich robes of dark earth colors.
I invoke by the Wyrms that Are Wise.
Black Mother, Môr-Rîn,[1]
Wyrms that Are Wise in the Coiling Roots of the World,
Black Mother,
Dragon of the Mountains and Caverns,
Black Mother,
Queen of Wisdom and Passion,
May I know your presence and blessing once again,
In this time and place,
In my life, my dreams, my work, my art.
Black Mother,
I welcome you.
I will make this call using a flat stone I found in a long-dry creek bed that, in its Otherworldly reflection, seems to be the corpse of an ancient dragon/serpent/wyrm or a many-colored temple/shrine others have built up around the wyrm. I probably would have used an old holey stone I found in another long-dry creek bed, but I lost that relic in one of the desperate and chaotic moves of earlier days.
For me, the middle part of the call is where I will start feeling her, and the experience has varied. Sometimes, I just feel overwhelmed, like I’m reconnecting, plugging back into a vast root system or web or network or some other metaphor for interconnectedness. Other times, it’s felt like I’m being weighed down by gravity and roots pulling me down into the earth. And sometimes, it’s rather easy but refreshing. I suspect it depends on how abstracted and how disconnected I’ve allowed myself to get.
Black Mother is royal but sensual and powerful. She is the Queen of Wisdom and Passion, and both of those traits stem from the interconnectedness of things—root systems, webs, networks of all kinds, rhizomatic organization, etc.—I find wisdom is recognizing and realizing how things work together, depend on each other. I feel passion in part through my connections with others, with the world, with nature, with parts of myself. Black Mother also points to the earthing, the worlding, the grounding of ourselves, bringing things and ideas and the potentiality of the Otherworlds into actuality in this (or other) worlds. Other than dark caverns extending into shadow, one recurring image for me when working with Black Mother is of a massive labyrinth, maze, knotwork, mandala pattern, and I occupy a small portion of that pattern—weaving self and experience even as my weaving connects in with, well, everything else. Black Mother is not about isolation—none of the Guardians are—and Black Mother helps ground the rest of my work with the Guardians and about myself.
From Black Mother, I will move on to Zenith, to Heaven Shiner. My general experience is that the Elemental Guardians tend to be (more) distinct from me, but the Guardians who follow (especially Heaven Shiner and Fire in the Earth) tend to point me at aspects of self that have to come together if I’m going to work on integration and self-possession. These intelligences tend to blur and mingle together far more with my own, at least compared to the Elemental Guardians. Mind you, as Star Seeker has noted to me, the Guardians reflect those aspects of me which are already like the Guardians themselves, so my experience of the Guardians already partakes in this mingling.
For my tool for Heaven Shiner, I have a shard, a splinter of a tree itself splintered and felled by lightning. I wield it like a wand. In appearance, Heaven Shiner has often remained abstract, a massive draconic presence above in the heavens and constellations, but that has shifted over time into a swell of starlight that pours into me, breathes into me, or that wells up from within me. “Starlight” has been a recurring visual motif.
I invoke by the Wyrms that Are Wise.
Heaven Shiner,
Wyrms that Are Wise in the Constellations Turning Above,
Heaven Shiner,
Dragon of the Astral Airts, _____’s[2] Breath,
Heaven Shiner,
Lord of TTG,[3]
May I know your presence and blessing once again,
In this time and place,
In my life, my dreams, my work, my art.
Heaven Shiner,
I welcome you.
Heaven Shiner has often left me reeling, or bowed, or otherwise “seething.” Heaven Shiner has been a variable presence, as well, depending on what I needed at the time. Heaven Shiner represents or points to a connection towards my wholeness beyond the Present, towards past and future lifetimes, and towards God-Self. Water Maker guides me to embracing and immersing myself in my wholeness in the search for stillness, towards Love and Power. The Water Maker experience of that Wholeness emphasizes my life here. I think Heaven Shiner points towards a broader, more cosmic Wholeness, beyond this incarnation and into my potential incarnations. I suspect Heaven Shiner points to how the God Self can reach down into individual lives (or is descending down into individual lives), and, conversely, how I can reach up towards those possibilities myself.
Okay, let me be honest: I remain fuzzy on Heaven Shiner. Looking back at what I’ve posted here, you can see many of my early impressions here. Over time, the experience of Heaven Shiner has softened, and it has often seemed more like I am descending into myself here, though not as Elaith/God Self descending. Before this development, Heaven Shiner’s early demeanor tended to be stern and removed, coming out of a context I had less context or connection to. The astronomical associations of Heaven Shiner also put me in the mind of the suggestiveness of the constellations and stars above us in the dark night sky. The awe and wonder and imaginary potential of the heavens are very much a part of Heaven Shiner’s experience.
I haven’t had the conversations with Heaven Shiner that I’ve had with the other Guardians. I’ve had far more conversations with Fire in the Earth, but my experience with her has also changed in the last several months to something closer to Heaven Shiner now.
In the next part, I move on to Fire in the Earth and Center. At some point, I also want to say something about what the Guardians have done for and with me.
[1] Earth/Shadow/Dark-Crowned
[2] Insert your own name for the Totality of Everything: the Star Goddess, however you wish to name Hir.
[3] Insert your own name for your experience of harmony, power, potentiality, imaginative virtuality, peace, self-possession, trans-incarnational awareness of the Higher Worlds.
Image: Reading the Night Sky; Is There Love in Space, by Dean Kavanagh