Saturn/Libra Invocation

Saturn and Libra

1:18 AM 10/25/2009

Saturn is in the final degree of Virgo, trine Moon in Capricorn. Moon is exactly square Mercury in Libra.

This invocation was intense. I felt the scales fall from my eyes in a way I'm not sure how to describe; I feel the deeper meaning of things is available to my consciousness in an everyday way. It is emotional. We had just watched Hellraiser, and though the movie was cheesy I think that was part of it.

We also did the pressing of our first batch of wine today. The wild yeast batch is very sour. The rest I'm a bit worried about; some was good, but of the three batches one smelled a little strange; it ended up getting mixed with the others because we were putting all three in two carboys. I hope we haven't ruined the whole experiment - the odd smell was like rubber, and then like dark beer. Meanwhile, I've been drying out some of the wine grapes, preparing to calcine them.

I have been thinking about the nature of the spirits of trial, who torture the impure with their own vices until they are cleansed by pain and confrontation. I've also been thinking about the need for a person who wishes to save the world to understand that world on its own terms - the nature of the people and the forces in it. Can it be done? I almost understand the need to face darkness, pain and evil, to have no guide but our inner sun, to be abandoned and without rescue in this place. When we wish to know what we do not know, we accept that this revelation will *not* be what we wish to know, it will be whatever actually is; and because we do not belong there, it will hurt us. To gain understanding we must go where we are strangers, and to really understand we must experience immersion in it; and this is incarnation. If we could stop when we began to suffer, we would learn nothing. This curiosity that we have about things better left alone makes all of us Pandoras, especially magicians. We dare assume the risk; and then it must run its course. We will not know what it means while it is happening. We survive by changing who we are. The trial is always fatal to who we were; but someone may survive, and that person will be who we make ourselves into by sheer force of will. And will that person be converted into a denizen of the place where he arrived a stranger, or will he overcome it after discerning the machinery behind the illusion? We can all swallow the lethal draft and forget who we were when we decided to come, accepting the land as our home and becoming enslaved by its ways. The change is not always for the better; to challenge the unknown may be the way of the hero, but the way is narrow.