This 3-card spread symbolizes the alchemical energy written into this blog.

Herne the Hunter spoke:

“There is a greater darkness than the one we fight. It is the darkness of the soul that has lost its way. The war we fight is not against powers and principalities, it is against chaos and despair. Greater than the death of flesh is the death of hope; the death of dreams. Against this peril we can never surrender. The future is all around us, waiting in moments of transition, to be born in moments of revelation. No one knows the shape of that future, or where it will take us. We know only that it is always born in pain.”

This quote from the fictional Book of G’Quan is a rendering of St. Paul’s warning to the Ephesians about the “powers that dominate the world of darkness.” Both G’Quan’s words and Paul’s converge to render an important point: spiritual warfare is waged on an Earthly battlefield. It is therefore best talked about using the language of human emotions, e.g. hate and fear, love and hope, good and evil, light and dark. Spiritual warfare writ large is always waged between groups of human combatants, as influenced by their own angels and demons, as we shall see.

What is “the storm?” The storm is pure chaos – the absence of order. And the storm is upon us.

Spiritual people are already familiar with this storm, for every awakened or enlightened individual has experienced a storm within themselves and to some degree overcame it. But there always remains yet another hill to climb. They have experienced backsliding and recovery (falling down and then getting back up) that eventually led them to even greater knowledge and self-awareness – the measuring sticks of spiritual growth.

I hasten to note the armies of the awakened – the Children of Light – are those whose lives have not been subsumed by dark chaotic powers. The Children of Light wear the true “breastplates of righteousness.” Extreme Wokeness, as touted today, defines an angry, ego-dependent affliction that seeks to impose commonly held opinions, values and beliefs on everyone else. Extreme Wokeness is spiritual self-awareness drowned in chains of pride, delusion and group think. The ideology of Wokeness is the antithesis of Awakened.

There is an oft-quoted aphorism from The Emerald Tablet: “As above, so below.” The Emerald Tablet is part of the Hermetica, an ancient and revered document about magic. The quote points to the interconnectedness of all things, particularly between the sacred and profane; Heaven and Earth, angels and demons. But this interconnectedness is interactive and reciprocal; it is equally correct to say, “As  below, so above.” In fact, the original Hermetic passage underscores this balance. Each dimension – “above and below” – is a dynamic (ever changing) reflection of the other. As human consciousness evolves, human history is recorded and order proceeds from chaos (Genesis).

The chaos we experience today in America and throughout the developed world are the birth pangs of a new paradigm. In our Chrysalis companion book, we mentioned a new paradigm a dozen or more times. It shone like a beacon on the distant horizon when we designed the Chrysalis architecture 10 years ago. What does this new paradigm look like? That will be the focus of our next blog featuring Ariadne, the Celtic Goddess of the Gates of Time. However, I tell you now that the new paradigm does not look like downtown Seattle. It does not celebrate anarchy and lawlessness. It does not invoke a Marxist revolution or some New World Order obsessed with “correct speech and correct thought.” Not even close.

Tarot is a tool for spiritual formation and trans-formation. Chrysalis Tarot’s schema was built upon the foundations of an ever evolving connection between our world and the Otherworld. The “Otherworld,” as Chrysalis calls it, goes by many names: the Akashic Field, Zero Point Energy, the Vacuum, the Aether and, yes, Heaven. Succinctly and scientifically put, the Otherworld is a quantized system comprised of generative nodes of electromagnetic energy/information comprising a constant feedback loop with individual human consciousness and the Collective Unconscious, a Jungian term. It is a stratified system with a superior node  we call God.

This is science, not science fiction. “You are the surface on which the universe encodes information… you give the universe the surface to grow and learn.” – Nassim Haramein

© Toney Brooks, 2020