The Magical Battle for America 7.29.18

We’ve entered Mercury Retrograde, a good time for going back and redoing things that need to be redone.  Today, we’re going to go back over a working that we first did on April 1, 2017, to cleanse our American archetypes and make them easier to use.

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Now’s probably a good time to remind everyone to check/refresh the wards on your home or wherever you do this work.  Be sure that you’re rested, grounded, and in a comfortable position.  Maybe wrap up in a blanket or cloak and grasp a stone or talisman that matters to you.  Grow your roots, send them deep into the soil, let them intertwine and grow small hairs to attach to the mycelia in your own landbase.

Breathe.

Anchor yourself firmly to your landbase.  Notice a small detail that will call you back when this working is finished.

Ground and center.  Cast a circle.

Breathe.

As you move to our American plain on the astral plane, you can see again the safe hillock where you do your work.  You can see the five giant banners, shining in the sky: Walden Pond, the Underground Railroad, the Cowboy, the Salmon, and Lady Liberty.  Do they seem more defined since we began our work? Do they have anything special to tell you this week?

For a few moments, just sit on your hillock and allow yourself to become comfortable.  This place should be feeling very real to you by now; we’ve been working together to create it for months and months.  What’s become familiar to you?  A tuft of prairie grass?  Buffalo off in the distance?  The scent of sand carried on the wind?  You’ve been involved in a months-long magical working here, joined with magic workers from across the globe.  Feel your connection to this place on the astral plane. It is always here for you, always a source of strength.

As you relax into your power, you can feel gentle rain falling on your shoulders, your face, your hair.  The sky above the prairie is a soft grey and everywhere you can hear the sound of raindrops plopping into tiny puddles, splashing off small rocks, making gentle music on your backpack, boots, cap.

The birds are silent, having gone home to their nests to shelter from the plop, plop, plop of rain upon the plain.

Breathe.

Here, you can breathe the wet air, smell the wet grass, and watch the bison move across the distance, huddled together against the rainy wet.  Here, you can feel yourself washed clean by the rain, can see the raindrops wash the prairie dust off each leaf of prairie grass, can even taste the clean rain on the tip of your tongue.

Perhaps you will duck down and settle into the small prairie sod house constructed near your hillock.  There, you will be warm, and safe, and dry.  You can breathe the woodsmoke burning in the center of the small sod house and drink hot tea from a clay cup warmed upon the stones beside the fire pit.  You can wrap a woven blanket around your shoulders and hear your own voice within the four walls of this small womb within the plain.  Whatever songs you sing will reverberate within the womb of Mother Earth.  You can feel the dark dirt beneath your buttocks and legs.  You can sense that as you are below, so it is above.

Wherever you are, please reach both backwards and forwards into time and feel the rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain washing down on America.  Go way back to the time when the prairies were covered in ocean and feel the rain slipping like love into the ocean.  For centuries.  See the  rain coalesce into glaciers and see the glaciers clean the continent, scraping back and forth.  For centuries.  Go forwards to a time when rain will fall upon your great, great, great, great, many-times great descendents.  Send them a blessing.  For centuries.

Stand under the prairie rain and ask it to clean away the stains of genocide against the First People, the stains of slavery, and of Jim Crow, and of the school to prison pipeline.  Ask the drops that fall on your face, and that stick to your eyelashes, and that sparkle in your hair to dissolve the sexism in which the nation has been bathed.  Take off your clothes, dance a dance with the thunderstorms, and ask the water to clean up America’s homophobia, xenophobia, religious intolerance.  Ask the rain to flow away the capitalist desire to despoil everything, to cut down every tree, to tear down every mountain.

Find the one American archetype that most speaks to you, examine it in the magnifying glass of a drop of American rain, and see what most needs cleansing.

I adore Thomas Jefferson’s sense of design and commitment to education, but I hate his ownership of other humans, especially Sallyh Hemmings.  I want to work with Teddy Roosevelt’s commitment to wilderness, but I hate his sexism and his slaughter of anyone who wasn’t white.  I stand upon my right to call Columbia, but I reject those who saw her as a symbol of Manifest Destiny.  Whom do you need to cleanse?  Which American archetypes could you use if only they were washed clean of their miasma? Where can you direct the rain?

Do it!

Stand up, either upon your rainy hillock or inside your warm sod house.  See again the giant banners that form a pentagram across our nation.  Are you drawn to one or another of them?  Does Walden Pond call to you or does the Cowboy?  You may want to offer incense, or to pour a blot, or to sprinkle sunflower seeds to one of the directions.

Breathe.

Slowly, come down from the hillock on the plains or your sod house and begin to walk back to your own landbase.

Open your eyes.  Rub your arms and face.  Notice the detail that you selected to call yourself back.  Drink some water.  Have something to eat if you like, maybe steaming soup from a bowl or hot bread with honey and butter.

You may want to repeat this working several times this week.  You may want to journal about it.  Are you inspired to make any art?  Perhaps you can place on your altar an image of the archetype with which you worked.  If you’re willing, please share in comments what happened and how this working went.

Picture found here.