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Arcanum Festival
It was 3:00 A.M. on a winter night, as the villagers wound through the forest and up the hill. The snow was thick and the night was clear. The new moon was due to rise in a few minutes. It was a festival of the King of Swords, not exactly major arcana, but almost as important. Mars and Uranus were moving into square and a new moon was due to rise. Explosive tempers! Explosive changes! All sublimated and made vicarious by the festival, but what fascinating trips! The children especially loved it, while some of the old women muttered nervously. The initiates of Tumo hopped and skipped stark naked in the cold. Everyone else was bundled up. The villagers were talking and laughing, and waving their torches, for mechanical or synthetic objects were forbidden in the sacred place. Some of the ordinary folk were smoking hash, those who had taken the LSD sacrament. The initiates did not touch it, striding along rather proudly, thinking of their role to play in the coming events.
When the village was established, hundreds of years ago, sensitives had found the sacred upwelling of the dragon current. It was feeble and fitful, and unknown to the ignorant materialists of the world-machine. But the sensitives had restored the harmony of the surroundings, and clarified and strengthened the flow, and the village was established nearby.
As the wound up the hill, suddenly the initiates rang the handballs in unison. This sacred spot on a Mercury ley, so they had built a magic square of Mercury on top, with the handbells tuned to each string. The wind answered, and blew fitfully through the magic square, setting up its eerie harmonies. The trees sighed and bowed. The children shivered with delight. A deep sense of harmony with the universe prevailed.
On top of the artificial hill in the shape of a bird, something resembling a flame could be seen. The adepts were already there in the center of it, deep in trance, breathing rhythmically, soaking up prana and maintaining a warm dry area on the flat top of the hill. The villagers now began to sing a new mantra of the King of Swords. The complex Pythagorean, polyphonic, polyrhythmic harmonies rose, met, danced, clashed, setting up strange resonances in the magic square of Mercury, high overhead on poles.
As each villager reached the top, he danced quickly through the mandala of life, done in mosaic tile on the surface. Quickly or slowly, straight or circular, down the four spines and back to the beginning, passing the torch on to the next celebrant, and moving down around the outer perimeter of the mandala. Soul-twins danced it together. Sometimes three or four whirled through together doing whatever they felt. The strangely modulating harmonies continued. This was the prelude to each festival.
When everyone was seated in rows around the Mandala, a great silence descended. The adepts took their places at special spots on the mandala, while initiates sat in the first row. Now the common folk puffed deeply on the hash or humijo. There before them arose a gigantic figure of the King of Swords, created by the adepts but seen by all. He raised his terrible sword high and vanished. Instantly, they were plunged into the maelstrom. No longer observers, but participants...in violent changes. Universe collapsed and exploded. Colliding galaxies, imploding suns, rains of fire, colliding continents, exploding planets. They witnessed and participated in rivers of blood and mountains of waters, colossal hurricanes. The witnessed-participated in treachery and violence, despair and revenge. The saw-felt themselves killing and being killed, both oppressor and oppressed. Past and future alike were one. It was never the same twice. The collective unconscious of all of them was involved. The adepts maintained a certain detachment and control.
Dawn. The new moon was high and waxing. Swift Mars was past the peak of square with Uranus. Streaks of gray and rose in the East and a darker purple in the West. The villagers were coming out of trance, while the adepts maintained their vigil, their rhythmic breathing; the flame-like covering over all of them sank lower. The birds twittered and went about their business. The villagers got up, stretched, began to talk and laugh and the younger ones skylarked in the snow. The initiates began to show off, levitating and doing acrobatics in the air. The adepts practiced apporting themselves out into space, momentarily, or zipping along from sacred spot to sacred spot, along the Mercury ley, momentarily trading places with other adepts on the Kyilkhors (Mandalas to the common folk).
The people went back to the village, to sleep. Some stayed up and went to work on various handicrafts, or studies, or meditations. A few went to the mandala temple in the village, and sat quietly in its peaceful interior, enjoying the graceful spires and catenaries and pointed arches in crystalline fiberglass. Stained glass windows of the twelve signs graced its twelve sides, while around the walkway were all the keys of the Tarot. There was a basin of water, symbolic of Brahman, in the center.
By noon, the buzzing of machines and the shouts from the practice fields signified a return to regular routine for the village.
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