The Fall: A Daily Death Ritual
The Hero’s Journey is famous for its echo in stories and our personal lives, but there are so many more archetypical blueprints for telling and living out a story.
Currently, we are in the Pluto Return of the United States. This transit is associated with the fall of an empire. As such, it is useful to look at the story of The Fall and what we can learn from it.
The Fall is a part of our history and a part of our consciousness. This archetypical story is the DNA of many Western culture talesand beyond. The fall of Lucifer created Satan, the fall of Man created sin, the fall of the Tower of Babel created languages, and so on.
What has been more evident to me as I pursue the research and meditate with the energy is that the downward part of this narrative is not the entire story. A major part of The Fall is the journey upward.
While we have the term “Dark Night of the Soul” for disconnection from Source, we lack language for the other end of the spectrum of connection: When we are so obsessed and craving of the divine experience that it harms us.
So, if we are to speak of The Fall of the United States, we wouldn’t just talk about the right to free speech and protest being snatched out from under us. We would also talk about the journey from the inception of the checks and balances system to now.
Either by hubris or by divine designation, we have to get high up in order to fall. The irony and the ultimate lesson of these stories is that we crave going higher. We crave the power, the next rung up the latter, and the warmness of the Sun on our skin.
We are Hermes not taking notice of the wax wings because we are, in our minds, above it. Once we get started toward Heaven, it is hard to remember we are human. But even royalty has a chamber pot.
The Hot Heat of Falling
The inspiration for this research was born in my growing relationship with Mercury, a planet and deity I adore.
In my ritual, I was shown a vision of Hermes, the Greek “version” of Mercury, going closer and closer to the Sun and feeling the wax of their wings dripping away. I resonate with that feeling... Just a little closer, I might be able to feel something or see something no human has lived to speak of.
In connection with this vision was a story that I has just learned on Magic of the Spheres (incredible podcast, I highly recommend) about Semele. Semele’s lesser known story is about desiring to see Zeus, her lover, with the lights on. Though she knows it will combust her, she wants to see God.
Not just feel it, see it. Not just trust it, experience it.
Now, most people would not consider Hermes to be a deity associated with The Fall. The biblical Fall of Man as taken the top bill. Lucifer has lore in which he is the most incredible musician, and Hermes is coincidentally the inventor of the Lyre. Lucifer, the angel that fell.
There are many “fallen angels” and Aspects of God on Earth in the spiritual history of humans.
All of these “fall” stories involve a trickster element and turning of reality on it’s head. They represent connections between Heaven and Earth and tell the story of the relationship of the two.
If you have psychic visions, you may know that they can feel like dreams. In front of me is the picture of The Fall of Hermes and yet my interpretation is The Rapture of Semele. This is what invited me to explore the connection more.
In Magic of the Spheres, the host spoke about this desire to be consumed by the truth of the spirit world. Some of us seek and seek until it takes over our lives.
Some of us fall victim to spiritual psychoses; Some of us find a cult or church that tears our life apart; Some of us simply lose sight of the material world and can’t ever return. Some of us peer into the darkness and see horrific paranormal entities looking back at us, an experience we cannot forget that changes our perception of reality forever.
As we start talking about Spiritual Ego and Ego Death, I find it important to consider that there is a Fall Story in all of us individually as well as culturally.
As I started to follow this thread of thinking in ritual and in writing, it brought up an issue of spiritual materialism I have had stuck in my teeth for years.
The Golden Calf of Binary
The fucking gender binary.
There are two polarities or “binaries” in the universe that create our experience of reality. The 0 and the 1. Chaos and Order.
Colonization notoriously desired to remove Chaos as an option entirely, revering Order for it’s ability to meet our needs and follow our desires more freely. My belief is that this split between Chaos and Order came before even the popularized practice of Imperialism. In fact, The Bible tells the story of Chaos being suppressed for Order to take its place when God spoke light into darkness. Even further when Christ came to challenge Order as a means of connecting to Source and was crucified. The victory of Order was won.
The real kicker is that through the iterations of this story in which Order “reigns” over Chaos, the concept of gender began to be projected. Most of us know by now that gender, race, and class are all created as forms of control.
Both Order and Chaos have shadows. The shadow of Order is oppressive, controlling, and lacks free will. It is in the shadow of Order that we are watching the Pluto return implode into reality.
This is why trying to have Sovereignty in the United States breeds so much cognitive dissonance and identity politics. We are in a Nation built on Colonization, a force that robs people of their self determination, while espousing the ethics of freedom. The original peoples of Turtle Island still experience violence to this day. There is no freedom with borders, war, and a servant class of wage slaves. There is no freedom when land, water, and the air is privatized.
We are experiencing the absolute limits of Order and watching the ways it can fail when it banishes Chaos entirely. The darkness and light need each other. When we call dark “bad” and light “good,” we create an imbalance inside and around us.
The Patriarchy
I live in the Southern United States, where I witness people united in their hate for gender expansiveness. I see before my eyes the same behaviors that made genocide and colonization possible for so long.
While many have heard of Zeitgeist and Manufactured Consent, they fail to see how it relates to them beyond economics and voting. Beliefs can be implanted. Actions can be controlled. Any citizen can be turned into a soldier with the correct amount of manipulation.
When I envision The Fall of the United States, I see a tower built of men’s bodies. Generation after generation, we turned innocent little boys into oppressors. We gave them instructions for violence. We let them kill and die for any number of lies, the most tragic of which is the weakness of women.
We were all told this tower of hurt and dead men would bring us closer to God if we climbed to the top. If we participated, our husbands and sons might pull us up there. If we play along, we might be able to get a glimpse before the carnage takes us.
Despite its perfect esoteric architecture, this tower of bodies could only make it so long before its decay sent it falling. And all of us that enjoy the view from the top will soon be in the same boat as everybody else: In a pile of corpses.
