The Hedge Druid

Posts Tagged ‘temple’

As I come to write this blog post my random musical playlist has picked Led Zeppelin’s “In My Time Of Dying“. This turns out to be directly relevant to this post! Have a listen to get you in the mood for this post.

Relevant because the topic of this post – The Death of the Old Gods – is something that Kal and I uncovered as we explored the last site on the slopes of Delphi’s glorious temple complex. The main road into Delphi splits the sites into two parts – those above (governed by paid access) and those below. There is also a sacred site on the road itself and I’ll describe that too soon.

Defining Thought Forms

Let me start by first talking about Thought Forms. These are energetic constructions made by the imagination and intention of human beings. We create pictures of something, then we feed this image with subtle energy by re-imagining it. We give it power by imagining that it has power. If the idea gains wider popularity, then other people can also begin to shape and feed energy into this imaginative construction. At some point in this process the energy levels are such that the thought form can actually evolve, can gain independence, intelligence, and can begin to act by its own intention. Sounds mad, huh? Sure does, but this process is how we have constructed most of our ancient and modern deities, mythological and modern heroes and folkloric figures.

The Old Gods were propelled by these elements:-

1. human’s thoughts of their image, including being realised into art
2. the number of thoughts that sustained them – whether by devotion, need, or curiosity
3. focal points where this energy was collected, promoted and sustained, e.g. temples or shrines

I could go much deeper into those elements – psychology of the archetypes, the differences between ritual and intent, the idea of earth energies being used to retain thought form energy – each of these topics is an article in itself. At the moment let’s take these as read, and consider some information about how the old gods are destroyed, which is the aspect that we discovered at Delphi.

Choose Your Weapon

If there are things in the modern world that kill off the old gods they are surely these:

• Wi-fi signals – omnipresent radiation that combats subtle energy. Part of a technological replacement of the unseen forces within Nature.
• Health and Safety – the New Gods, who decree that we should cordon off most of our ancient sites and birthrights
• Apathy and Indifference – old gods with new faces. They re-direct attention and remove thought from the process. They seek the dissolution of intent.
• Repatriation - the re-dedication to another religion, and the consequent loss of hard-earned knowledge.
• Physical neglect – letting the ancient sites become dilapidated  or “modernising” them, constructing over them, using inappropriate materials which do not have the same energy-retentive capabilities.

As I go through this post I will try to provide you with some evidence for how these things dull our connectivity with the ancient thought-forms that grew up around the Old Gods. Of course, many of the Old Gods have been replaced by New Gods, so should we care? Well, only in the sense that we have invested a great deal of psychic energy into the Old Gods, and we’d be wasting a lot of stored knowledge and subtle energy if we let them fade away to nothing. Very few people care about this. It may or may not be an issue – I’m too small to be able to hold the bigger picture in my head, but I just want to make the point as I go along about what I think is happening with the Old Gods, and to describe some of the ways in which we are killing them, or rather, letting them die.

See now, that even in the town of Delphi, that once mighty sacred place, how the Old Gods are stripped bare and left to wither. Here is a tale of woe and sadness. Brace yourself!

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In a book called “The Dance of the Dragon” Hamish Miller demarcated one of the very long ley lines that spans at least part of the way around the Earth, and possibly beyond (it’s hard to dowse in a sailing boat). He called the long ley line that he found The Apollo-Athena Line. He claimed it extended from Skellig St.Michael in Ireland to Armageddon in Turkey, and possibly beyond that. This stuck in my mind when I was a budding dowser, entranced by the notion of leys.

I never really imagined that I would actually find myself at one of the points along this Apollo-Athena line (I have a very limited imagination). Yet, after Kal had achieved everything he had wanted from the one sunny day we would get in Delphi we did find ourselves with a bit of spare time before the last rays disappeared. I turned my attentions to the secondary aspects of my visit – to see whether this fabled line actually existed at this site, and if so, what its qualities might be. I didn’t intend to trace the line as Miller had done, just to sample it and see if he was talking rot or not. Everything, no matter how holy, is open to testing.

It didn’t take long for me to use the dowsing rods to locate the approximate position of the fabled ley. I was led up the concrete ramp, back towards Museum of Delphi. Further down the path towards the entrance to the temple complex the rods began to splay apart indicating they had reached a boundary point – the outer edge of an energy line. Seeing as I had asked for the Apollo-Athena Line I checked to see if that was indeed what I had found.

I used the rods to get a direction of flow – South East, pointing down the valley away from the temple complex. Judging by where I was standing it looked like the line actually missed most of the important sites on the hillside above, possibly just clipping the western edges of the stadium above. Odd.Where I picked it up it was going through a stone bowl artefact full of water, which I thought was a nice touch.

Bearing of the Apollo-Athena ley line at Delphi

The ley was pretty standard when measured. It was 22 steps wide – a measurement I have made at many national and international ley sites. Remembering the drawing of the rough direction of the ley I imagined that it confirmed pretty closely to the North-West to South-East direction of flow.

So much for its standardisation. There was, however, a curious anomaly associated with this famous ley line. A curious distortion.

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This is a follow-on post from the Black Altar at Karnak Temple post that I did recently. In this post I recount the last thirty minutes of my free ‘un-guided’ time in which I did a little more dowsing for some of the features of the temple. Little did I know that things were about to get weird.

Meeting with the Spirit of Place

I asked if there was a Spirit of Place in the Karnak Temple and the dowsing rods suggested there was. I asked them to take me to it and they were kind enough to oblige. Sometimes being a stranger in a strange land is a useful disguise and I felt no feelings of cultural weirdness about walking around the temple grounds with a copper rod directing my path, despite the curious stares from just about every single tourist in the place. Sometimes it’s liberating to be a stranger.

I was led back to the end of the Hypostyle Hall – a room of some 134 massive columns one of whose ends marked the third pylon. At a small gap in the main path through the temple the dowsing rods swung off to circle around a small roughly circular pile of insignificant looking small blocks of stone. This, apparently, was the resting place of the Spirit of Place. Time to learn a little more about what this spirit was, so I did my usual preparations – I protected myself, put my rods away, and began to connect in to the energy field of the spirit upon whose place I was standing.

Spirit of Place located outside Hypostyle at Karnak

I felt a connection with something, something powerful. I re-doubled my protection, and then introduced myself to the spirit using my druid name and then asked if this spirit was prepared to give me a name. I waited in silence and a name soon emerged loud and proud – “Tutmosis III“. I am not an Egyptian history scholar. At school my preference was for studying the Greek and Roman mythologies, rather than the Egyptian. Even in my magic research I have largely avoided the subject. I don’t know why. To top it all off, I had been pretty much ignoring the guide as he did his tour today because the heat was baking my noodle, frankly! I had had several days of being crammed with lists of Pharaonic lineages and stories about this and that god. Therefore I recognised the name – he was one of the pharaohs – but I had no context in which to place him.

The Gigantic Pharoah and the Supermassive Druid

My ignorance seemed to be interpreted as a lack of respect. No sooner had I connected than Tutmosis was keen to demonstrate the enormity of his powers. Within me I felt a rush of magical energy and suddenly the life-sized image I had of the pharaoh was now gigantic, towering over me as though I were an ant to a human! I saw him laugh at me, drunk with the feeling of power and might.

I think I was supposed to have been over-awed. I think I was supposed to have been frightened. Certainly it made me jump – like someone slamming a door behind you when you didn’t expect it. He was trying to show me who I was dealing with. Well, two could play at that game! I acknowledged his gigantic size, and then summoned as much magical energy as I could, pushing my aura and size upwards with all my power. Now I was as big to him as he had been to me seconds ago. I looked down on him from way above, my head just below the clouds and I laughed at him like a god in Olympus. I quickly re-sized myself and he did the same. He looked at me and acknowledged that his stunt now seemed foolish. I was on a level playing field, I felt. Perhaps now we could begin to talk?

Tutmosis is an angry spirit. As I was tuned into his feeling he was exuding rage . I asked why he was so angry and my eyes were directed to look at the passing human traffic trampling around the ancient monument. I guess many of us were transgressing on areas that old Tut considered were too holy for our un-pious persons. I understood – I had seen the same thing with other Spirits of Place in my own lands.

Serpent Power

I made the angry pharaoh an offer – I would upload to him my stories of place and experience, and in return I asked if he had any gems of knowledge that I didn’t already know about. What he showed me made me think. He showed me the power of the serpent energy coming out of the forehead of the Pharaohs via a golden crown. The serpent acted like an antennae or focal point for energy coming into and going out of the ‘third-eye’ chakra.

Now I would need to do some reading and some experimentation to determine exactly what this means – whether it is symbolic or actual in effect?

In later reading I found out some important things about Tutmosis III. He was responsible for the building of the Hypostyle column room outside of which I had found his spirit of place. He was also responsible for the sixth and “seventh” pylons in the temple – the bits the included the small temple with the black granite altar! Wow – suddenly things were beginning to make sense, and the sense of dark magic that I had felt from him, and his antics, suddenly seemed quite consistent with the historical records.

This is the end of the events in Egypt. I was there for Beltane and managed to do some work at Dendara Temple, but that’s not blog-worthy. It’s time to move on to my experiences in Ireland.

Gwas.

Karnak Temple

Karnak temple is only a few miles outside of Luxor. The temple is connected to Luxor temple via a row of hundreds of carved sphinxes – nothing like the size of the famous Giza sphinx, but with each one being at least man-sized or slightly larger that makes for one hell of an impressive sight when you see them lined up in a vast avenue. There is a dowsable energy ley line linking the two temples of Karnak and Luxor along which the sphinxes are placed.

Talking of impressive, the Karnak temple complex covers a vast area in itself. With several generations of pharaoh adding their own impressive extensions to the original temple there ended up being six distinct “pylons” or gates before an invasion of Persians then Romans put a stop to the proceedings. In addition to the huge main area dedicated to Amun-Re (the Precinct of Amun-Re), there are smaller satellite temples dedicated to the female deity Mut, and their son Montu. This makes the place sound quite simple – in fact it is incredibly complex having been presided over the at least thirty pharaohs.

View along the main Karnak temple aisle

The Aura of the Scarab Statue

The final touch is the inclusion of a sacred lake, and a scarab beetle statue which has a myth attached to it concerning it being a wishing status. The idea is to walk around the statue seven times in an anti-clockwise direction and your wish will come true.

I started the dowsing in the middle of a crowd of tourists at the scarab beetle statue. M wanted to walk around the scarab, so I let her. She was the only one doing this at first, but within two circles she was being joined by others who were copying the idea. By the fourth time around she had about 20 people circling around with her! I began to dowse when she started the perambulation. Was she generating any energy doing this, I wondered. She was, it seemed. I took a reading of the aura of the statue at that point. It was about ten feet wide.

As she continued to circle and more people joined her I could feel the aura expanding. I kept taking readings all the way through her walk. The aura seemed to be expanding faster than I could take dowsing readings! The more people that joined in, the faster the aura expended. Soon I had to stop at the lake that was 20 feet away because the aura was heading out into the water! She came back to join me. I didn’t ask what she’d wished for. It was for her to find out if such ideas came true.

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