There is a rune named RIT in some rune sets and RAIDHO in others. These are words from old German tongues. It looks like an upper case R. Since English has Germanic languages in its ancestry it won’t be too surprising to note that the rune concerned has to do with both RITual and horse RIDing.
Now those of you who perform rituals, religious, spiritual, magickal, martial or mundane will probably agree that at the end of the ritual something has changed, or is supposed to have changed. The end point is not the same as the starting point. So a ritual can legitimately be considered as a journey from one place to another, or one state of consciousness to another. Like a ride on a horse.
Doing a ritual regularly works as if you rode the horse every day from one place to another. It would get used to the journey and would know every pitfall on the road. Eventually you could gallop even in the dusk, and your horse would get you easily to places that might be dangerous if you were on foot. Contemplate ritual as a journey. It is.
Many rituals concern the fours in the mundane and religious worlds. Earth, Air, Fire and Water appear symbolically in many religious rituals in some form or other. And in our mundane rituals like the morning shower, shave, breakfast, commute, we are dealing with the other big four, Matter, Energy,Space and Time. And these correlate continuously with the big three laws of the universe…Create, Sustain and Destroy. Correlate Spring, Summer, Autumn and Winter with those three and you have the twelve divisions of the Zodiac and their astrology, if you contemplate them under the right cherry tree.
Let’s continue the example on how to contemplate these matters to get some useful insights. We can leave the mundane plane for a moment to do this. Suppose like the ancient rune masters you are promoted from an ordinary mundane horse to an eight legged horse like Sleipnir, the mount of the god Odhin. This amazing animal could run on earth and water, and travel between the worlds of men and the other worlds, four legs for each different world. What then? We have an idea of what the four legs stood for, but what would the eight legs stand for?
There are eight brain centers known by experience to the ancients, and by recent research on psychedelics to science and NASA. The four in the left brain were for developing total control of a mundane life. The other four in the right brain were to change the left brain laws to allow evolution to occur. At the moment the mind is at the point of domination in the evolution of consciousness. But there is further to go, and it is beyond the mind, which when turned in on itself becomes destructive. We can see this occurring as very clever but not very wise people are destroying the very planet they need to survive. And many people are now being born with some of the right brain centers already operative, and talents previously unknown as common.
But how to use this kind of stuff practically? Good question. Discussions like this should have some use in life. Many of my readers are into metaphysics and know about these matters as principles. But how you do it is usually up to your own ingenuity once you have the knack of seeing something in both worlds at once.
Take a look at someone who does that all the time. She is Egypt’s oldest living goddess ISIS. I say living because she is still worshiped by thousands. The Fellowship of Isis is one of the more famous current Isis organizations.
Her living egregore is some 4000 years old, so contact is not hard to make, and is very fruitful. I use an ancient Egyptian prayer some thousands of years old when I do certain ritual contemplations. For a modern religious organization dedicated to Isis and the Ancient Egyptian religion, you could check Khemet.org on the web. The current Isis representative has a Masters in Egyptology, so at the very least you could pick up a few words. She won’t use the word Isis, because that is Greek. She will use Aset or Uset, as the Egyptians did.
Isis is shown in Tarot as High Priestess between the two pillars of different polarities. There's the clue about working in two worlds at once. That’s the esoteric meaning of the direction North East in Western occultism. It is between the lightest and darkest directions of the Sun in Summer and Winter, the place where both meet. The Celts call it Samhain, the day when the veil grows thin between the worlds. The Church replaced it with Hallowe’en, as they did all the other major pagan rituals of the cycle of the year. As a hint, the Fool in the accurate BOTA Tarot is looking up to the North West. He is pictured as being between the worlds and about to step into manifestation in this one.
So you Sleipnir riders need to figure out a simple technique that you can use to take any symbol and work in two worlds with it. The Emerald Tablet of Hermes tells you to separate the subtle from the gross, skilfully and with great ingenuity. This advice is from the greatest of Egyptian magicians Tehuty or Thoth, named Hermes by the Greeks. Here is a straightforward example of how to apply this alchemical ingenuity to something so obvious that most people cannot see it.
We will do it with the horse analogy again just to demonstrate that one principle can apply to everything. You will find it very useful in hundreds of situations. Apply the principle of this way of thinking to all your important symbols, and you will be able to make rituals that will automatically advance your mundane efficiency and your evolutionary status. It won’t hurt your healing abilities either.
The journey from one state of consciousness to another often occurs in magick as a journey across a bridge. The river banks are the two different states. But it is important that you come back from your journey and don’t remain in the acquired state. The object of most rituals is to bring something valuable back into the present time, not to stay in the other realms, with your deserted body here in a comatose state.
When you reached your destination on the horse of ritual you stayed for a while and then came back feeling better, or wiser. What you did could be summarized as ‘Reach and withdraw.’ So use this symbol-based insight in situations in the real world. This is like learning the basic words in a new language.
You may for example have something mundane you don’t really want to do like. Procrastination inserts itself into the situation at once. “I’ve got fill in that goddam form some time.” or “I must read that book. It’s required reading and the test is next Tuesday.” Sound familiar?
The procrastination solution is in the Bridge inspired Reach and Withdraw. Here’s how it works, and it always does. You know, even from the most elementary metaphysics that your antipathy towards the form, or the book, is totally a mental construct affecting your daily life. It manifests in avoidance behaviour as procrastination.
Put the goddam form on the table in front of you. Reach and withdraw. Pick it up with full attention. No need to read it. Pick it up as a piece of paper from an old house, or a papyrus from a mummy case, with full attention. Look at it like an artifact you’ve just picked up on Mars. Be curious about it. Put it down with full attention. Pick it up with attention and put it down with attention. Do this at least six times. Don’t forget to breathe. You could do it with an ordinary piece of paper couldn’t you? By doing this the negative energy runs off in the physical act, during the ride so to speak, and the ‘goddam form’ becomes just a piece of paper with no negative charge on it.
Do the same with the book, and you’ll be able to pick it up and read it without all the negative garbage that clung to it before the ritual. Think along these lines and you will always be able to create an on-the-spot little ritual available for any similar situation. And it will work like magick, because that’s what it is. Don’t forget, when you read the now OK book to breathe regularly and say, 'Relax, Retain' in time with the breath. Then later…'Relax, Recall,' and be surprised at how much comes back at your command.
Now that was an almost totally mundane example concerning a mental attitude to a simple material object containing a charge. But the clues from the important symbols in your life are universally applicable. Here is the same principle applied to changing the effect that an established and specific personality trait or problem has on present time.
Do this at home with some memory, habit, trait or character flaw that you don’t particularly want to keep influencing your choices in life. Read through the whole procedure before starting. Grasp the principle of the technique and you can apply it to thousands of things.
The principle is the roughly the same as before. The technique is slightly different and involves the next obvious progressive step. What you do is give full attention to the problem area, describe it to yourself, think about it, worry about it like you usually do, and then suddenly switch channels, change the focus of your attention to something else, like the view from the window, or how pretty are the patterns of colors of the books on your bookcase.
Give attention to that new focus. Describe it mentally in the present. Then suddenly switch back to the old material. Continue this process several times. What you are doing is extending your attention into an area where you are usually somewhat fixated. One of the places which, if triggered, starts you off playing the same old tape you have played many times, without changing anything. This could be actual speech or a series of linked memories. You have often heard or noticed yourself doing this about some incident in your life, or some pet peeve based on a past incident.
What happens if you keeping reaching and withdrawing from it to give sudden attention to something present time and quite different, and then returning to the old stuff, is that you recover the energy of the fixated attention. You have made a bridge from the past to present time. There is often an emotional reaction, and the old blocked energy is now in the present and available to you. And usually your point of view about some matter changes drastically in a manner that gives you choices you didn’t have before. More of the ships in your harbour become visible.
There’s a domino effect as all the pictures that were being held in place in a long series now evaporate one by one, and all the energy you were using to hold those things down in the secret chest is now available to live in the present time without programming attached.
If you do this you will find it successful. You can do it with a good friend or counselor who judges when to ‘ change the subject ‘ so to speak, and when to return to it, with words like, “How does it look now?” You could tape the message yourself too, or rig up a random timer.
These two simple techniques can deal with hundreds of situations. Check them out and realize that if you just wrote down descriptions of the beginning state and the end state, it would look as if only magick could change one into the other. And I’m not going to argue with you. Been there. Done that. Bought the tee shirt. And it fit me of course, to a tee.
