Hermetic visit

beyond the endless horizontal surface of madness

Hermes visited me as I laid down to sleep one night this summer. He arrived in a flurry of color in my mind, waiting for me to notice. I wanted to sleep. He wanted to chat. What to do. I remembered the story of a spirit visiting Jung in his office as he tried to work.¹ Jung didn’t want to give the spirit exactly what it wanted right away; he knew that to do this would mean the spirit would sink back into unconscious without Jung being able to understand why it had come. He knew that to ignore the spirit would be to miss the import of the visitation, as well. A middle way through indulgence and avoidance: Jung allowed a golden dot from his notes fly up into the spirit’s eye. He entreated the spirit to talk to him a while before he removed the dot. In this way, he was able to receive a codex from the spirit for the meaning of the hieroglyphs that he had encountered in his research a few days before. What did the spirit receive from Jung? Attention, conversation, the acknowledgement of a reality much beyond the constraints of what the scientist in Jung would have wanted to allow.

I have been struck, in my re-entry to Jung’s work, with the Black Books and Liber Novus at the center of that work, at the place where the personal makes contact with the universal, where subjective meets objective, and how this meeting point is nothing less than the mystery of magical reality. I’ve spent much of my life brushing off visitations by gods, spirits, other beings as exhaustion, PTSD, strange psychology, pathology, cancer, postpartum motherhood, what have you. So when Hermes came the other night, I was primed to do that same old move: the shrug in my mind and body, the careful elaboration of borders so as not to risk a break from a consensus reality that, however harrowing or banal in its appearance, is something I more or less know how to navigate. But I couldn’t go to sleep, and as the god deliberated in gold, speed, a relativization of time and space in my mind, I felt a strange flash of fear, an upswelling of anxiety about my son, Theo. From Hermes: The God seemed to want me to say something about death. At that exact moment, Theo entered our bedroom. “Mom,” he said to me, “I can’t sleep! I’m scared!”

Normally, when my kid and I have a shared emotional experience, and it’s a bad or scary one, I try to be so carefully rational about it as way “to travel through it.” Don’t acknowledge any of the things that come up in my line of work as a tarot reader or astrologer, nothing psychic nothing slippery. Don’t even get into projective identification or projection or anything psychological, at all. Protect the soul by keeping known boundaries intact. As if I could control these boundaries all on my own. As if this was sane. But on this summer night, I finally said, “Ok, Hermes, you’re here.” Theo needed words about Death. The mother of a friend of his, our closest neighbor from school, died suddenly and tragically in May. “I’m afraid of my life, Mom,” Theo said to me. “What do you mean?” I asked. “I’m afraid of you dying,” he said. I didn’t have the right words. But I did have the God of Words, and so the God of Words offered truth to my son, when I didn’t have it to give. When I had thought any acknowledgment of God or Death or anything beyond “go to sleep, everything is fine!” was, if not a categorically bad idea, then much beyond my capacity at the moment. But Theo went to sleep well after our conversation, and Hermes went quiet as I blew out the candle by the bookshelves, and we had real conversations the next day about what’s been bothering Theo, insteading of the normal six-year-old shutdowns and actings-out. It turns out my idea of “traveling through” moments that feel insane or difficult in my mind, in my life, was actively indulging in a drama of avoiding relationships with the gods just because the situation or my state of mind seemed dissuasive to me.

It’s been repeated so often since Jung’s initial conception of it so as to become trite, never mind castigated and picked apart by our favorite writers and intellectuals over the years: When the Gods show up and aren’t acknowledged or met as such, they come out sideways, slant, as pathology, illness, madness. As Jane Clapp so wonderfully emphasized recently, this doesn’t mean we try to cultivate relationships with them, never mind with their Shadows, to “purify ourselves.” But recognizing images of divinity when they come to me has, indeed, been one way that I have refrained from skating on endless horizontal surfaces of madness, too.

Join me for workshop on the Minor Arcana

What

Minor Secrets: The Vertical Axis and Cosmology of the Minor Cards of the Tarot will run for six weeks, beginning on Wednesday, August 5 and ending Saturday, September 12.

When

We’ll meet every Wednesday evening at 7 pm ET for 90-minute lectures diving deep into the Minor Arcana as living symbols in support of and supported by your personal horoscopes and the Kabbalah and every Saturday morning at 9 am ET for querent sessions, where students have the opportunity to ask questions about their own charts, tarot cards, or anything else that falls within the realm of esoteric, literary, divinatory, occult, or spiritual study.

Other Details

I cap these classes at 14 students to maintain an intimate cohort of spiritual friends. They’ve been such a source of joy, warmth, learning, and camaraderie during these dark times! Please join us! All lectures and sessions are recorded; asynchronous learning and students welcome.

A community Discord will be maintained to foster connections, conversation about daily tarot draws and esoteric study, and other class details.

Cost

The cost is $300, but if you feel called to the class and need a discount or some other kind of arrangement or work-trade, please email me at cameronscottsteele AT gmail DOT com.

Astro Notes

The New Moon in Cancer was conjunct retrograde Mercury in the sign of the Scarab on Tuesday evening, initiating us into two weeks of visitation by larger forces than we’re used to, indeed, as this week sees Jupiter perfect an opposition to Pluto, which activates the wider synergy between the outer, transpersonal planets of Pluto, Neptune, and Uranus. So Jupiter in Leo, as the embodiment of the Good Teacher, opposes the Underworld myth of Pluto and the Goddess in the sign of the Water Bearer. This, in turn, pulls on and sets aquiver the contact between these Underworld churnings, Neptune as how one faces illness or else finds ecstasy in the Aries part of the chart, and Uranus as the breakthrough-breakdown matrix in Gemini. What can I say about any of this? Too often astrologers lean into the impossible good or the impossible bad with the outer planets. I like to look at the myths associated with each of these, and to think about which part in each myth I seem to be living, how that story has an opportunity to change. Jupiter brings up our relationship to exoteric teaching, and how wisdom comes through in the sign of fixed fired, the Mithraic or Lion-headed god Aion. Pluto necessitates a deep look at the story of the Underworld Goddesses. How does Kore become Persephone become Queen of the Dead? Why does Inanna go down to meet Ereshkugil? What in your life shows up as illness or madness, in part, because you refuse to honor how these gods or archetypes or myths are being played out in it? Neptune can be gotten at, best of all, I think, through Liz Greene’s book The Astrological Neptune and the Quest for Redemption, and Uranus is approached through a consideration of Prometheus. Right now, with Chiron newly in Taurus, I think its fruitful and important to consider the relationship between Chiron and Uranus in myth, and how we see that play out in the areas of our chart where Taurus and Gemini are. These two are next to each other so they make contact but don’t “witness each other,” but understanding how these areas of life nevertheless necessarily lead one into the other is quite important! Does the wound lead to freedom? Does the punishment of seeking freedom lead to to the wound? What is beyond both of these questions? Sending love!

I’m happy to pull a card for you for the New Moon in Cancer. Post your question and your rising sign below. I’ll answer your question with a tarot card from the Thoth deck on Friday and Saturday this week.

A visitation by the Piney River.

1. You can most easily find this account in Sonu Shamdasani’s introduction to The Red Book: A Reader’s Edition.