December 13, 2022
Just when I thought things couldn’t get any weirder…
This morning, I meditated and didn’t want to get drawn into anything but found myself called back to the same snowy cliff as the day before when I met the one I refer to as the Raven King. The cliff was the same, still snow-covered. I was still facing the Raven King’s castle on the other side of a long bridge. I could tell that he was observing me, assessing me in some way.
I was standing in the midst of a rocky mountain chain. Mountains stretched on either side of me and everything was shrouded in greyish white darkness. Gradually, though, the clouds began to lighten and soon the sun broke through the far horizon. Its light revealed a vast ocean to the east. The mountains rose up from the ocean. The sunlight shone yellow and orange upon the cliffs and turned the still ocean waters liquid gold.
The sun pulled me away from the cliff, transporting me to the frozen shore of the ocean. The beach was a rocky strand. The water was deep blue and black. I stood there, shivering in the cold, for a long time until I spied a spectral boat floating toward me from across the sea. Its timbers were waterlogged and encrusted with barnacles. Skeletons of dead sailors littered its deck. It was clearly a shipwreck exhumed from the depths. I knew I was intended to board the ship and I did so. As I stepped on board, a giant sea monster rose from the depths of the sea, rearing its great head and breathing frosty spume down upon me.
I should note that the Woman in White appeared beside me when I stepped aboard the craft. Her presence made clear the reason that I had been called here.
I knew the monster did not intend to harm me. Further, I could tell that he was somehow related to the Raven King; they were brothers. As I realized this, the sea monster became a man with blue and grey skin and wearing a long, bluish-grey robe. He stood before me on the deck of the ghost ship. At his feet lay the body of a young girl. It was clear she had drowned in the ocean.
I looked down upon her, feeling deep sadness. I had no idea how long ago she had died but I mourned the fact that her parents never found her body and may never have known what happened to her. I knew that the sea monster god had brought me to her for the usual reason–to help retrieve her soul so she could continue her journey–but what I didn’t realize at the time was that there was an ulterior motive. I would soon learn what that was.
Finding the girl proved easy but not without complication. I was propelled down into the bluest depths of the ocean, home to any number of fantastical creatures. The girl’s soul was encapsulated within a cocoon of deep blue. I reached through it to retrieve her, holding her ‘body’ against my own and crying. She warmed in my grasp, coming alive.
At the same time, I realized we were not alone. There was a long-haired goddess of the sea floating before us. She looked as you might expect such a goddess to look: Scaled like a mermaid, beautiful, haughty and deadly. She was not pleased with me and demanded something in exchange for the girl’s soul.
At this point, I kind of began to suspect that I’d been set up by the Raven King and his brother and they were using me as a pawn in a game with this goddess, their sister. They knew that she would not let me go without something in return. Of course, the only thing I could offer was my own soul. I offered it to her willingly, knowing that it was a low stakes bargain. My soul belongs only to the Divine and to no one else; it could never be different. Even so, I was willing to reside in this deep blue ocean with the goddess if that was what she wanted.
She consented to the trade and allowed the soul of the young girl to depart, swimming back to the surface where I knew that she would be guided by the Woman in White on the next phase of her journey. This left me with the temperamental goddess. I confessed to her that I found her tedious. I have no interest in the machinations of the old gods. If she was going to use me as a tool in some way to get back at her brothers, I didn’t care.
She found me to be a very curious thing and couldn’t stop examining me. She knew that my origin was similar to her, being the child of the old gods, but she also knew that I was now different. She wanted to know why. I told her it was because I had been born (several times) as a human and had lived–and still lived at least for now–in the physical world. I explained that this was the only way for our kind to grow and change and evolve.
Knowing that she was haughty and proud, I told her that to do so she would need to suffer great indignity because life as a mortal in a physical body was not easy. There were no gods in the physical world, although the Divine was everywhere hiding in plain sight. There are no secrets in the Imaginal so I could read her mind as easily as she read my own. I understood that my presence there had been planned by her brothers as a move in a long game of back and forth between the siblings. They were curious about this ‘new’ thing, this becoming human. They had brought me here to show her close up what being human does to us, how it changes us, how it makes us more real even as it causes us untold suffering.
She was intrigued and also not thoroughly convinced.
Am I to believe that I’m one of the few children of the old gods who have become human? Maybe many of us have but only a few of us have returned again to show our siblings the results? Not that there is any end result, of course. But this being human is an invitation by the Divine to evolve, to grow, to develop and to change.
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