May 4, 2005

"…2005 is a time of much practice with the arts of magic, my days filled with constant divinations and regular rituals to the moon.  My connection with the deva leads me into a wonderland of shifting realities in communion with the lands.  Yet all is not easeful as I am challenged by a broken magician, triggering a resurgence of the old wound and my response to feeling attacked …"

My studies at the Academy continue as we go deeper, advancing from the normal deck of playing cards to the Rider-Wait tarot. Here, LeFaye shares the mechanics of her technique of using three decks in conjunction to divine the substance of a circumstance.

As a general rule, we would combine the Rider-Wait with the Druid Animal Oracle and the Healing with the Faeries deck by Doreen Virtue.

Such were times of great effort and education, where we would practice the arts of divination as they channeled through LeFaye and the Watery style of her teaching.  Seen from the underlands of the Mythica, it was my initial studying of the Practice of Magic.

As a trio, Lady Ash, Cassandra and I continued to meet weekly, studying the arts of Divination and the magic of the Moon with LeFaye, either at the Academy as it existed in Tahoe City or atop Echo Summit in the southern territories of the lake.

Beyond the regular time of our agreed-upon sharing, I would spend endless hours with LeFaye, sharing and discussing the magic with the only being I’d met who could really meet me in those realms. Regularly, I would cross the stream behind her house that led to the faerie roads, running and playing amongst the great granite stones of the summit with the two wolfhounds that were always by her side.

I had created myself a journal of magic, weaving together the teachings with the elements and the colors of the rainbow, developing my own language

My studies at the Academy continue as we go deeper, advancing from the normal deck of playing cards to the Rider-Wait tarot. Here, LeFaye shares the mechanics of her technique of using three decks in conjunction to divine the substance of a circumstance.

As a general rule, we would combine the Rider-Wait with the Druid Animal Oracle and the Healing with the Faeries deck by Doreen Virtue.

Such were times of great effort and education, where we would practice the arts of divination as they channeled through LeFaye and the Watery style of her teaching.

As a trio, Lady Ash, Cassandra and I continued to meet weekly, studying the arts of Divination and the magic of the Moon with LeFaye, either at the Academy as it existed in Tahoe City or atop Echo Summit in the southern territories of the lake.

Beyond the regular time of our agreed-upon sharing, I would spend endless hours with LeFaye, sharing and discussing the magic with the only being I’d met who could really meet me in those realms. Regularly, I would cross the stream behind her house that led to the faerie roads, running and playing amongst the great granite stones of the summit with the two wolfhounds that were always by her side.

When we first started studying the arts of divination, LeFaye showed us how to use a regular deck of cards, explaining that this was the place from which the tarot first evolved.  Here I learned how the progression of the numbers on the cards was associated with the progression through the human experience itself …

Water Magic in the Mountains

"The Puppy Run"

During my time at the Academy, one of my greatest joys was running through the forest with the wolf-hounds Mesoon and Tonkay, shadow-furred allies who were my close friends and confidants.

We would play a game we called the ‘Puppy Run’, where we’d discover an endless training ground of earth connection provided by the deva of the mountain

There was something so primal about my sojourns into the faerie woods behind the Academy.  Here, I would leap from rock to rock, feeling the angles and the gravities of the movement as I ran and rushed about with the wolfhounds.  I would play games with the deva, envisioning that the ground was lava, and I could only step upon the rocks or on a stick (but only for a moment before it sank into the lava), exploring my own playground of relationship.

It was a deeply shamanic experience.  One where the intelligences of the deva played out in graduated levels of difficulty, transmitting ideas to me about how I could work with the land in any number of ways, where I danced in a sacred dialogue with the elements of the world.

There was a significance to the mountaintop in the human world as well, for a great trail moved through it from settlers of the past.  There were places, locations closer to the trail itself where I would find bits of metal, rusted chunks of ancient machineries and the lingering voices of travelers long-since departed.

The forest was my teacher then, inspiring an altered state of consciousness where every rock, every branch and leaf was informing me, laying out a landscape of shamanic relationship as a kind of living training ground for my magics.

Lightning and Time

Divination comes to me again through the lightning and the water ….

STRUGGLING WITH THE EARTH PLANE

Unable to work straps on a backpack, difficulty with cooking, difficulty with understanding repetition, no sense of self care, lots and lots of difficulties within a cacaphony of overwhelm

Candles & the Moon

As a newcomer to this plane of existence, the Academy represented my coming to understanding as to the nature of Nature, herself.  Here, I learned about the cycles of this world, about the way in which the seasons of life circled around again and again, forming the basis of the mortal plane itself.

It was a very elemental form.  One which used the most basic of elements, dancing with the cycles of the Moon to bring our intentions into fruition.

From now, it is challenging to describe how the process of my integration was at the Academy.  The ways in which I came to recognize my own savant nature, to find resonance in the mystical arts amidst a hail of tumultuous emotions and incomprehension, where my shape continued to shift from one realm and another.

I realized there were layers to it, and that the gravity-point that i'd felt so many years ago of the self itself was the architectural basis for the layers.  At the deepest level of things that I could perceive, things were made of vibrational colors, textures which embodied the earth, air, water and fire existing in space.  These things combined together, underlying the archetypes we were learning in the tarot that related to the human journey itself.  Yet these themselves were related to that singularity, to the gravity of the self around which the divinations revolved.

The systems of divination changed, channeling through the minds of the people from various cultures and traditions across the Ages of the world.  Yet beneath all of these impermanent forms there was a constant, a sense that they were all ways of interpreting the field which lay beneath the forms, a thing that was the substrata of divination itself.

Characters

Cassandra Banks

Evon Eisenberg