Earthing the Tunnels of Set

Linda Falorio© Linda Falorio 1989

Incense of Abramelin billowed from the brazier in thick ropes of pungent smoke, creating of our simple hill top camp in the wilderness of central Ohio the precinct of an ancient temple, deepening the night with a familiar aura of sacredness. Lightning flashed on the near horizon. Howling, drumming, chanting from the distant bonfire drifted to us, evoked that strangely chthonic, highly charged emotional atmosphere so characteristic of Lammas — Feast of Set — celebration of the heliacal rising of the Dog-Star Sothis-Sirius.

The rite to be performed by candlelight within the confines of this our temple was designed to ride upon these waves of force, to catch the shrieking currents raised in smoke and flame, in pouring, sooted sweat and breathless dancing; to propel us into strange dimensions, and catalyze our Wills.

Anxiety, the rising nervous expectation that always heralds the imminence of those extra-dimensional forces we would that night invoke, and the ultimate power of our magick, signaled our beginning the elaborate web of tantra, woven of souls, lives, bodies, and raw energy of flesh and mind-stuff. At that point of ecstasy which rides the very edge of consciousness, like reckless cliff-divers, we flung ourselves into those nether-dimensions where there are no paths, but only gateways; our souls propelled into a viscous darkness in which we found ourselves embedded, and through which flowed to us all images, all emotions, all things existent that had ever been or might come to be in some far and unknown future.

Thus we began our exploration/reification of the Sethian Tunnels, that dark repository of primordial instincts, of root primitive atavisms, of alien awarenesses, and strange adumbrations of far future selves. Filled with terror, filled with power, this is our fearful birth right. Unacknowledged and unclaimed, it is yet full of lethal fascination, for in backward turning ever lies the possibility of becoming "other" — more than human.

We threw ourselves into exploration of the Nightside of consciousness, eager to experience the backside of the Tree of Life, to crawl into those interdimensional wormholes that undermine prosaic Dayside reality. The Tunnels of Set: "a network of dream cells in the subconscious mind," reached by projecting consciousness through Daäth, "the gateway of the manifestation of non-manifestation" (Kenneth Grant, Nightside of Eden). Daäth, false Sephira, throat chakra, connected weirdly to the "lower throat" — phallus/kteis — glyphed by Yesod. In our subsequent workings, this identity-polarity returned again and yet again to our awarenesses, assuming considerable importance in the efficacy of our tantras.

Leapers together of the nether regions of the Tree, we would agree by gut reaction on which Tunnel to explore. Sona N'yl would then begin to paint the Tunnel's yantra. Arctor would vibrate its mantra over and over within his mind in the joined ecstasy of tantra. And we waited for the power to come through, surrendering ego-control to an inherent, inescapable factor of unpredictability. Some Tunnels came through like lightning, others had to be coddled and coaxed. Polarities were reversed, so that while Sona N'yl qabalized and read like mad, Arctor patiently allowed himself to become the vehicle of magnetizing and earthing the force. Tantra was practiced on all possible levels. Each thought, act, event, image, emotion, person, situation presented to awareness, whether spiritual or mundane, global or highly personal, became part of that tunnel's hell broth.

We found it necessary to acquire a house to give privacy and clear access to earth energies, and access to the stars — a house which later revealed itself to be a launching point for interstellar/trans-dimensional travelers, the Moa of long lost Lemuria. Dagdagiel induced us to gorge on oysters to get into the proper spirit; and for Zamradiel, we crawled deep into an ancient initiatory cave, equipped with flashlights and hardhats. We were introduced to the deep mysteries of Taoist "dual cultivation" with Saksaksalim; while certain bisexual aspects of A'ano'nin brought us Maya Xenophilous Dorje-Cat, a true hermaphrodite (hermaphrocat?), possessing both male and female generative organs.

Tzuflifu brought a worldwide drought and heat wave. The very day it was "deactivated" and Malkunofat begun, there were torrential rains and floods. Rajneeshpuram fell when we worked Uriens. No one within our circle was immune, one friend landing the role of "Miguel" in George Romero's Day of the Dead when we worked Thantifaxath. While Hemethterith brought astrology clients flocking to the door.

To short-circuit dayside linear consciousness and left-brain structuring of the experiment, no formal journals were kept, nor are there records of the random order in which the Tunnels were explored, as one by one the Tunnel reifications emerged upon their canvases by the hand of Sona N'yl, eventually to be reproduced in card format as The Shadow Tarot. When the Tunnels (and explorers) had been exhausted, a chapbook was compiled as a verbal travelogue, describing the scenery and landscape of the psychic spaces previously little explored, mapping cogent symbols, suggesting formulae to work, and powers to be gained, and warning of symptoms of unbalanced energies relating to each Tunnel's psychic web.

We found power in the realm of the Ancient Ones, those great cosmological beings existent before time, who yet lurk in those interdimensional spaces between universes, waiting for the call to their awakening, ready to devour. By accessing, and redefining within our human psyches these remote geographies of the Soul, we found power to remake ourselves. We emerged from 55 months of tunneling laden with treasures, found ourselves more rich than when first we embarked upon these nether explorations.

Yet each individual leaves their own unique footprint in the desert sands of the Abyss, in their crossing to the City of the Pyramids under the Night of Pan. And so there are many Tunnel images yet to be earthed, more maps, new angles, fresh descriptions of the psychic space yet to be wrought before we, the human race, succeed in bringing about a willed mutation of the species that will propel us to the Comity of Stars.

"For [man] is of the Blood of the Ancient Ones, but has the Spirit of the Elder Gods breathed into him . . . and this is the War which shall be always fought, . . . for the World is unnatural. When the Great KUTULU rises up and greets the Stars, then the War will be over, and the World be One." (Abdul Alhazred, in Simon's Necronomicon)

"IA! IA! CTHULHU FHTAGN!" Raise Chthulhu to the Stars!

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A Brief Note on The Problems of "Evil" and The "Darkside"

Fred Fowler© Fred Fowler

Definitely getting tired of hearing and reading the satanic, evil, and darkside connections which are simply not there in my experience. The relationships are hard to grasp, and even more difficult to explain. I know of very few who even have tried to unravel them.

Comments re Jung, re the magazine Gnosis' issue on "the Dark", and re the movie, "Forbidden Planet", shared with me by a magickian whose group was at that time working with The Shadow Tarot, via the records of their magickal workings, touched for me my own efforts to conceptualize the darkside. The following comments, then, are not based solely on the manuscript of their group workings, but also on my own intellectual efforts, and importantly on my reaction to a number of recent attempts to characterize darkside energies and associations.

Aside, for a moment. "Demons" dwell not at the gate, but in the tunnels themselves. Certainly, it may be something like being overpowered, or dismembered, if the intrepid magician launches across the abyss with personality intact. You need not rely on Grant's stuff for accounts of this; a guardian metaphor has been a popular one back into medieval times. One must keep in mind that the "door" is Daäth, in the middle of the desert of Set. A tricky Sephira, (if one at all — cf. Ben Rowe's work on the subject), but the location seems clear enough. It's a hard subject, but suffice it to say that from my experience no encounter with tunnel dwellers can occur until the magician (or what is left of hir after the personality is stripped away) is in the tunnel. Also, these tunnels, or "wormholes", don't operate in Euclidean space. There is no way to do any peering or looking down the tunnel from some point of entrance. Not only does "down" get hard to figure (and not just as opposed to "up") but these tunnels are in no way viewable like a hallway. Each twists and turns (to use Euclidean framing for convenience) in unique and obscure ways. I found, during the workings with L, that "I" was quite suddenly in a tunnel once having prepared for it, without any remembered sensation of entering.

Jung's "shadow" is perhaps the closest cognate to the darkside in the psychological literature. But, it is far too personal (regardless of Jung's "archetypes" construct), or individual to capture what I mean by the darkside — too tied to personality. Tho' a person(ality) might travel in the tunnels of set, this is perhaps ill advised — as mentioned above.

"Forbidden Planet" (a favorite of mine) speaks about Freud's "id", a more incomplete conception than Jung's — and harder to connect directly to the dark (even though Freud's "id" is hidden, or occult). The "Gnosis" issue had some interesting stuff, but also approached the dark with what I feel are some serious misconceptions. Disturbing to me, directly stated in a good bit of the growing "darkside" literature, is this idea of equating evil with the dark. More serious is the developing view of the darkside as a repository or inventory (a kind of warehouse?) of all the bad shit of our humankind species: the darkside as resident by human impulses and actions to rape, murder, and whatever else we 20th century people think is nasty stuff to do or even to think about. Perhaps it's Christianity (?) mixed up with some pop psychology and magical thinking (no "k")?

For the record: for L and me there is not a thing satanic or evil in the darkside. Such constructs simply have no meaning in this realm. They are strictly dayside, strictly human, and for me strictly bullshit. Oh yes, the USA produced over 20,000 murders last year, countless rapes, and even more countless acts of senseless and sick brutality. How many were killed, and continue to die, in Iraq, S. Africa, Liberia, El Salvador, Guatemala, etc., etc.? I could tell you how many children were abused, that 20% plus of children in this country live in poverty, but I think my point is clear. All of this horror exists in this dayside, human world. In my view, the recognition of all this is so threatening to personality integrity that few are even willing to see it, open their eyes and hearts and minds to their own stink and meanness as a race/species of the dayside world.

Why do magick? Escape is a viable answer. But not enough for us. How do the darkside and the Shadow Tarot fit into all this? If the bad shit people want to attribute to the darkside really "belongs" to the dayside/lightside, then why are they trying to assign it to the dark? As I said, all this mayhem is unacceptable at the most basic psychical level, especially to sensitive types. (Police, and others, in order to survive, must numb themselves to a point where it is acceptable.) Perhaps this is where psychological theories can help our understanding.

In psychoanalytic theory, that in oneself which is unacceptable (urge to kill, for example) is "projected" onto something perceived as other, or not self. Another person, or a conceptual construct such as Satan, are likely targets of the projection. For Freud and followers this projection is preceded by "repression" of the bad stuff by the "ego defenses", back into the "subconscious" which is hidden from view. Here, then, we can see a source of possible confusion. Both Freud's "subconscious" (as a repository) and his "id" (as a source of bad stuff) are hidden from light, or our conscious mind, just as is the darkside under normal circumstances. It may be possible to confuse the dark tunnels of Set with the Freudian "subconscious".

Jung expands in a way on Freud by positing "collective unconscious", the "shadow" being in many ways the personal, particular part of the unconscious. His Analytic Psychology had as its stated aim the reintegration of the "shadow" into the whole personality. Again, this is subsumed under our conception of dayside personality. Some are more fully integrated than others, but still all the "shadow/unconscious/id/subconscious" stuff belongs to the dayside personality, or at least to the human self.

Our darkside, KG's "Nightside of Eden", are distinctly not-human (naught-human?) realms of experience, and are not tied to any conception of person or personality. However, the personal and/or species denial of these darkside realms and energies, over many years and generations, has cut us off as persons and as a species from darkside things. We, then, can't use these spaces or tunnels and their entities and energies in our personal or species lives. The dark has many tools, lying dormant, to help us personally even though they are not "from us" or "of us" (like are Freud's "id", and Jung's "shadow").

Anais Nin, in Seduction of the Minotaur, describes how the darkside can work. The story is of a woman on a journey of self discovery which takes her to Mexico. As she returns on an airplane she has the following experience, elucidating not only how the darkside can work for us, but also something of the relationship of the personal ("the Minotaur") to the impersonal or transpersonal dark: "Lillian was journeying homeward. The detours of the labyrinth did not expose disillusion, but unexplored dimensions. Archeologists of the soul never returned empty handed. Lillian had felt the existence of the labyrinth beneath her feet like the excavated passageways under Mexico City, but she had feared entering it and meeting the Minotaur who would devour her. Yet now that she had come face to face with it, the Minotaur resembled someone she knew. It was not a monster. It was a reflection on a mirror, a masked woman, Lillian herself, the hidden masked part of herself unknown to her, who had ruled her acts. She extended her hand toward this tyrant who could no longer harm her. It lay upon the mirror of the plane's round portholes, traveling through the clouds, a fleeting face, her own. Clear and definable only when darkness came [emphasis added]."

The collective loss of these tools, L and I believe, is largely responsible for our species' inability to deal with all that bad shit which is a part of us, from us, of us. Thus, the conception of the darkside goes well beyond anything in modern psychological theory, including ego psychologies, systems theories, physiological psychology, etc.

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Thee Web

A seven-position spread for working with the Shadow Tarot.

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