“About Wandering Stars”

Why Egypt?

“Why Egypt? - Part 2”

The Short Answer:

While Part 1 objectively discussed the high technology, both materially and spiritually, of the ancient Egyptians, and its relevance to us collectively today, Part 2 of the question “Why Egypt” is purely personal and subjective; so when pressed to condense the answer down into a single sentence, I’d simply have to say: I visited Egypt on a spiritual vision quest.

To explain a bit further: The “Neteru” - meaning “divinities", were personified as various mostly human god-forms by the ancient Egyptians, who viewed them as preterhuman energy-intelligences representing the primal or archetypal principles and forces of the universe, the natural world, and human beings - both physically and psychologically. In essence, I went there to meet them. Alan Watts puts it well:

Accordingly, I have forged a connection with several of these Neteru over the course of over 40 years (and, I am quite sure, in past incarnations). They have been, just as they remain, an undeniable inspirational and spiritual presence in my life. We shared that connection decades before I finally stepped foot onto the Egyptian sand, and I went there because of that connection. I booked the trip, my first to an overseas foreign country, traveling alone, expressly to meet with them one-on-one on their hallowed ground - and reverently entered their sacred spaces to learn from them there. I returned with the prizes that they gave me and I very much wish to share them with others; so, above all else, that’s Why - Egypt.

While there, I found out firsthand, as do so many others who have visited, how powerful the well-preserved remains of ancient Egyptian art and architecture still are, resonating deeply on psychological, emotional, and spiritual levels after so many thousands of years gone by. Through the truly ingenious use of material, scale, proportion, harmony, and symbolism, each temple, tomb, and statue impresses an indelible effect on the human psyche, even in ruin. And these evoke, and even invoke for some, the living Presence of the ancient Egyptian Neteru, whose homes they were, and still are. I can’t begin to list the synchronicities that occurred with the events leading up to, during, and after my trip in a brief paragraph - I can only attribute them to their preternatural influence. Wandering Stars is the result. And that’s Why - Egypt, too.

I’ll aim to begin uploading a photographic chronicle of my Egyptian experience on a separate page called “Welcome to Egypt”, which only documents my first day there right now. My deeply resounding experiences there, the friends I met and learned from, and the fascinating discoveries and realizations in the temple ruins inexorably led me to create reproductions of the fabled ancient Egyptian temple incense - Kepu - also called Kapet or Kyphi - as well as their so-called Seven Sacred Oils - the Merhet - based upon the most up to date archaeological translations of the hieroglyphic inscriptions carved upon the temple walls. The result of over 4 years of research, acquisition of rare ingredients, and learning fragrance alchemy is now shared in limited quantities through my “The Egyptian - Sacred Scents” store, which is the retail “business” part of what Wandering Stars is all about. And that’s Why - Egypt as well.

The Back Story…

Of course, there’s a story behind how this came to be… a long one - a lifetime chain of events that all pointed my spiritual compass toward ancient Egypt. Over the years, friends that have heard snippets have suggested that I write it all down, so I guess this is as good a place as any to try, if not the perfect place. I’ll do my best to break it down into bite-sized chunks - but it is an admittedly long read. I did insert a few nice pictures in it though, for some added interest.

It’s not a biography, by any stretch, but in some ways it is, being a skeletal outline of my spiritual journey - with a touch of human interest thrown in for good measure - a long and winding road that eventually led me to enter the ruins of the sacred temples of ancient Egypt. Thankfully, I have to leave much to the reader’s imagination and intuition. There won’t be very much of anything in detail or personal, except in regards to a major life change, or where I met someone important to the story. It does, however, give a fairly complete rundown of a few of the most notable personalities, authors, and teachers, and the books, traditions, spiritual revelations, and downloads that stand out in my recollections of the process. Each played a crucial role in the development of the spiritual philosophy and practices here at Wandering Stars, and lead me unerringly to the sacred ground of Egypt.

All in all, I believe that sharing this information is only fair to those who come here, entrusting and sharing with me such a private and deeply personal thing as their spiritual work. You deserve to know exactly where I am coming from, both philosophically and spiritually; that is, only if you wish to, of course! I guarantee a lovely surprise ending if you stick with me until then…

So if your attention span is sturdy, and there’s a will, pull up a chair for a spell. Otherwise - simply refer back to the foregoing paragraphs… and please feel free to move on to explore the rest of the Wandering Stars website.

{Note: Some of the terms or names and groups I will be mentioning will likely sound foreign to your ears - I can only encourage research over lengthy explanations or numbered footnotes.}

“Why Egypt? Part 2”

The Long Answer:

I’ll preface by saying that, of the various spiritual traditions discussed in the following paragraphs, we can be certain that all of them can trace their lineages back to one of four earthly locations: ancient Egypt, India, China, and Mesoamerica. I contend that all of these received their core wisdom traditions from the Old Ones whose global civilizations collapsed due to geological and climatic cataclysms between the end of the last ice age and 4,000 BCE. The Wandering Stars practices comprise a synthesis of all four of these root traditions, with special emphasis, of course, on the oldest, the Egyptian, the fountainhead of the Western Esoteric Traditions.

The following explains how this came to be.

When I First Met Anubis

As for Egypt, it all started when I attended the traveling Tutankhamun exhibit that visited Seattle in July of 1978. I was 24, and I had just recently moved there from Boise, Idaho, joining my first rock band as a singer later that winter (quite a year for me in retrospect). Before then, like most of you, I knew precious little about Egypt. While I was certainly curious, Egypt never crossed my radar really, besides the occasional National Geographic articles. The Tutankhamun artifacts on display simply mesmerized me, particularly the delicately carved and inscribed calcite oil and unguent jars, some with the residue of the contents still visible after over 3,300 years gone by.

The now familiar solid gold mask of Tutankhamun was definitely the show stopper, but for me, the twin Anubis/Imiut fetishes - easily the strangest pair of objects found in ancient Egypt - were far more evocative, suggesting a very alien and ancient culture indeed. They seemed to speak to me, in the language of symbolism, of a deep mystery - and caused the strangest feelings to well up in me when I gazed at them. And it was literally love at first sight when my eyes fell upon the face of the graceful gilded statue of Selket, the scorpion goddess, just the size of a small child.

But the artifact that made the greatest impact on me was the black and gilt statue of Anpu, whom the Greeks called Anubis, the canine god-form who was the protector and guide of the dead into the Duat, the underworld/afterlife. It was discovered facing those who might stand in the entryway into the secondary chamber - like a sentinel - guarding the golden shrine pictured above that held the four canopic jars containing the pharaoh’s organs. Behind him, this shrine was surrounded on its four sides by the goddess Selket and her three other sister companions Isis, Nephthys and Neith - their arms open in a gesture of protection, their heads turned to one side, as if they had just spied you. Upon entering, it would have been Selket who turned her head to you first.

Standing there, with the crowd milling around me barely taking a moment to look at them, I was enthralled with these beautifully crafted statues, so far from home in space and time, and well - it moved me very deeply. I’ve had a lifelong love of Egyptian art and lore ever since. I bought the coffee table book sold at the exhibition gift shop kiosk, and found a great old copy of E. Wallis Budge’s The Mummy (an academic work, not the horror story) in a nearby used bookstore, both of which filled me in on lots of the details once I got back home.

Never having been particularly liquid financially, nor a world traveler at all, I’d never in a million years have predicted that I would eventually find myself in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, face to face with the self-same statue of Anpu once again, almost exactly 40 years later. I even visited Tutankhamun’s beautiful tomb at the Valley of the Kings, where these incredible objects sat undisturbed, except for by an occasional earthquake, for over three millennia.

Author Carlos Castaneda’s shaman benefactor, Don Juan, suggested that gazing at ancient artifacts is a portal into their world, and can trap you there… now I know that is indeed true. I never really did come back.

Standing there overlooking the Giza plateau at sunrise on the Spring Equinox of 2018, my last day in Egypt before my flight back home early the next morning, I was filled with awe and reverence for the long journey it took from that day in Seattle to arrive at that hallowed place, at that specific space in time. More importantly, I was and am beyond grateful to the Neteru, most especially Anpu, who was always right there beside me, opening the way, looking out for me, showing me many wonderful things!

Early Influences:

I was raised in Eastern Idaho, amid a small, predominantly white Christian community, mostly Latter-day Saints, in the 1960s. My non-religious mother allowed me to get baptized in the Mormon church at the tender age of eight, out of peer pressure from my friends and their parents more than any religious interest on my part. I soon became generally well-acquainted with Christian dogma and doctrine, along with the New Testament gospels. I left the LDS church behind forever soon after, however, as there were several features of their practice that had made me very uncomfortable as a preadolescent.

In February of 1966, just before my 12th birthday, my mother had a near-death experience in a skiing accident on Mt. Baldy at the Sun Valley ski resort, and it changed her, and those around her as well - both for good and ill. It wasn’t easy for her after that in conservative Mormon Eastern Idaho, and her total turn-around of world view, coupled with my subsequent run-ins with local law enforcement over controlled substances, ultimately led to a divorce, leaving my materialistic stepfather scratching his head five years later.

I remember too, that shortly thereafter the same year John Lennon was raked over the coals for his quite honest offhand quip that the Beatles were more popular than Jesus, which wasn’t the arrogant claim imagined by the Christian Right, but rather was an offhand private comment taken out of context by a reporter - but it did reveal his insightful and refreshingly candid social awareness. The Beatles had just released their album Revolver, with one of the first overtly psychedelic recordings of the time - “Tomorrow Never Knows”. I watched in horror as some of the kids I knew were forced by their parents to burn their Beatles records and paraphernalia in a heap in front of their LDS church. It reminded me of stories I had read and accompanying photos about Nazi book burnings in a Time-Life book about WWII. It scared the shit out of me and cemented my already incipient disdain for Christianity.

Speaking of books, there were always plenty laying around mom’s house then, and I was lucky to become acquainted with some great ones - the most memorable being Khalil Gibran’s The Prophet, Cosmic Consciousness by Richard Bucke, Psycho-Cybernetics by Maxwell Maltz, H. Spencer Lewis’ Mansions of the Soul and Herman Hesse’s Siddhartha, Damien and Steppenwolf - all classics now in the huge field of alternative spirituality. The synergy of these two events, and the content of these books, were galvanizing.

My mom was also the one who introduced me to Astrology, being the first to tell me I was Pisces - a mystical dreamer, she said - which totally captured my imagination. I used to paint the astrological symbols on flat rocks, selling them as paperweights in her little gift shop. On one of her buying trips, she picked up my first Tarot deck, Ettiella’s, which I found fascinating, though incomprehensible.

After all of this, I had no reason to doubt that her near-death experience was very real, and not just a hallucinatory artifact of a dying brain, as medical science would have it. Through its aftereffects on both of our lives, almost by osmosis, I was introduced to alternative spirituality, and also to my own spirituality in the process. Thus it was that my mom profoundly molded my adolescent paradigm in no small way, a fact for which I am eternally grateful, besides her still being my sweet, supportive and loving mother - not to mention being a valued critic of my writing skills.

Acid, The Eastern Traditions, Alternative Spirituality

A decade before the Tutankhamun experience, being a free-spirited teenager, I began experimenting with cannabis and the psychedelics - LSD, mescaline, and psilocybin - along with a smattering of Hindu philosophy, meditation, anointing ourselves with patchouli oil and burning lots of incense and joints with my “hippie” friends. Like a sizable number of other adolescents in the Western world, we were totally taken up by the spiritual current generated by the hippie counter-culture, the hazy Summer of Love in 1967, The Beatles, and their giggling guru Maharishi Mahesh Yogi.

I distinctly remember somebody passing around a new copy of Aleister Crowley’s The Book of Thoth at a party, and the hippie girl who owned it did Tarot readings with the accompanying deck of cards, which I also recall gazing at for half the night after taking mescaline, to a soundtrack of George Harrison’s “Within You - Without You”, played over and over, from the Sgt. Pepper album by the Beatles.

I must mention here that, were it not for the book The Psychedelic Experience: A Manual Based on The Tibetan Book of the Dead, I may have gone off the rails during a few high-dosage episodes. Written by the Harvard LSD gurus Timothy Leary, Ralph Metzger, and Richard Alpert, this book emphasized the vital importance of set and setting to the psychedelic experience, and it played a huge part in my taking psychedelics seriously, and seriously taking psychedelics, during my turbulent high school years of Nixon, Vietnam, and Kent State, influencing my personal spiritual growth indelibly as a result.

Without a doubt, these were bona fide mystical enlightenment experiences for me, both psychologically and in spirit. I am forever grateful to that kind-hearted hippie girl who carried that book around in her big carpet bag, letting me borrow it (the book, not the bag) from time to time. Her name was Johnny Sue “Strawberry” Fields, and she would read softly out loud from the book to help her friends “maintain” during bad trips. She was a saint.

A few years before, his and Leary’s Harvard careers having been destroyed by Nixon’s drug war, Alpert went to India to seek answers, where he met his beloved guru Neem Karoli Baba (lovingly referred to as Maharaji by his chelas), who named him Ram Dass - meaning “servant of the god-form Ram”.

One of my favorite of his stories was when Maharaji bid Ram Dass to show him the “medicine” - LSD - and promptly took a full 500 microgram dose, with absolutely no apparent effect on him. A year later, Ram Dass wondered, to himself mind you, if the guru had actually taken the pills, and of course, Maharaji once again bid him to show him the “medicine”. This time, taking the bottle himself and making it obvious that he had ingested the tablets by chewing them with his mouth open, dramatically smacking his lips so that the matter could be clearly seen, Maharaji took a truly heroic dose of over 1000 micrograms. He freaked Ram Dass out briefly by feigning to be crazy, then his eyes sparkled and he laughed and acted as if nothing were out of the ordinary. I am convinced that he certainly did experience the effects, but that, being a fully realized being, it never knocked him off his centered stillness.

Maharaji later said that “these things” (psychedelics - we might assume them to be mushrooms) used to be prevalent back in India’s history, purportedly giving the sadhus, or uneducated holy men, siddhis (magical powers), but that when they stopped growing naturally, the yogis found other methods, so they don’t use them anymore. Ram Dass’s appointed teacher, assigned to him by Maharaji, said that while the psychedelics aren’t necessary for sadhus, they are like Jesus to materialistic western society, bringing an awakening to the people in a material form, as that is what materialistic people can relate most to. Amen to that.

Afterwards, Ram Dass came back to the states, started lecturing and published his definitive book Be Here Now in 1971. And he still partook of psychedelics as sacrament. He became my favorite teacher during my senior year of high school, and I still love him, his work, and that book. Despite suffering a stroke and being in his late 80’s, he still lectured and gave interviews and oversaw his Seva foundation until his passing/westing December 22, 2019.

The concepts, philosophies and practices of Majaraji’s brand of Hinduism, as ably taught by Ram Dass, became firmly embedded in my psyche during this period, as was a deep respect for the psychological and spiritual power of meditation and diet - coupled with psychedelics - and the even stronger power of true self-realization, which came to me only in brief glimpses for many years.

Carlos Castaneda

Then, fresh out of Idaho Falls High School in the summer of 1972, a buddy showed me a book that his older brother was reading, The Teachings of Don Juan, a Yaqui Way of Knowledge by Carlos Castaneda. It intrigued me so much that I soon went to the local bookstore and bought a new paperback for myself. Being involved with psychedelics throughout my high school years, this book helped me to put their use into perspective as useful implements used to “wake up” the sorcerer’s apprentice, or to seek a particular vision, eventually becoming not particularly necessary after that. Even so, the books take psychedelics on full force, with an engaging Mexican shamanic tradition that’s as much foreign and fantastic as it is inherently useful.

Much like The Psychedelic Experience, Castaneda suggested practical spiritual purposes behind the ingestion of entheogens, a practice broadly lumped now with shamanism in general, which all share core teachings involving psychedelic power plants. Carlos’ benefactor, the “sorcerer” Don Juan, described his teachings simultaneously as being “the Path of the Warrior”, “the Path to Freedom” and “the Path with a Heart” - teaching that our own death is our “Truest Advisor” as well as our “Definitive Act” - and these ideas appealed greatly to me. In this way, most of his practical knowledge transcended the use of psychedelics entirely. I ended up reading every one of Castaneda’s twelve mind-bending and empowering books over the ensuing years, as they were available, up until 1999, with his final two books, The Active Side of Infinity and The Wheel of Time, published after succumbing to cancer on April 27, 1998.

I was not particularly disciplined, but I found myself eagerly following many of Don Juan’s practical techniques (dreaming, recapitulation, magical passes) on-and-off all those years, sometimes joined by like-minded friends, and saw definite progress with my overall feeling of well-being and view on life when I did. I also experienced very real results in my dreaming, meditations, and vision quests with psychedelic power plants when I applied the methodology offered in the books. I now view these practices as a form of shamanic sacred science, or spiritual technology, and not just far-out stories, that are of real value in today’s technological society, which is mostly disconnected from nature.

I won’t approach the polemics leveled against him that he was no anthropologist and had made it all up. I can only reply that it would be quite an achievement if he had.

While Don Carlos Wested in 1998, I still regard him as present in my life as my most beloved and influential teacher. His deeply moving and superbly crafted tales of power, and the very practical teachings of the inscrutable Yaqui Indian sorcerer, Don Juan Matus, formed the essential core of my personal spiritual work from 1972 on and are still an integral part of my practice today.

Astrology and Tarot

Just prior to the Tutankhamun exhibition, in the winter of 1977, I was tutored over the course of several weeks in Astrology and casting horoscopes, as well as working with the Tarot, by my dear friend Guy Carson, an accomplished astrologer and card reader in Boise, after having finally given in to my pestering him with requests for years. In retrospect it was no coincidence that, once I began approaching those two disciplines seriously, ancient Egypt would inevitably start revealing itself, one way or another. And it did - first within the the symbolism of the Tarot, then the Tutankhamun show, and fifteen years later in a much more profound way with Thelema, culminating in my trip to Egypt. I now view this time in-between as a period of “preparing the soil” as it were, for the planting of the ancient Egyptian “seed”.

I dove into Astrology with a passion when I lived in Seattle, studying whatever books on it I could get my hands on. Of all of these, one stood out for me: The Astrologer’s Handbook by Frances Sakoian and Louis S. Acker, originally published in 1973. This guide to Astrology puts emphasis on the natal horoscope as a study of the aspirant’s spiritual evolution, metempsychosis and karma - as a way to self-knowledge rather than merely a fortune telling device (the same being true for the Tarot, I might add). It is the one Astrology book that has stayed close to me all these years, and is the only one I recommend to those who wish to learn the language of Astrology.

Astrology and Tarot readings became an avocation for me - soon I started making a little income on the side casting natal horoscopes for friends, and for strangers too on referrals. Computers weren’t in everybody’s hands back then, so people who were interested depended entirely upon the astrologer’s skill set for accurate calculations of Sun, Moon and Rising signs, using an ephemeris, a calculator, and a pencil with a good eraser. It was a great way to learn, as I am sure most astrologers worth their salt do, by jumping in with both feet first. At this time I used the ubiquitous Rider Tarot deck, and along with Tarot readings I threw the I Ching, further developing my intuition in the process as the years passed. With the I Ching I came to learn about the Tao, thereby cementing my connection with the fourth geographic spiritual center of the globe.

My Dark Night of the Soul

In 1985, stress with developments in my music career and day job, a failed first marriage, and my recently broken heart from a love affair, coupled with a bout with Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD syndrome, caused by a lack of natural sunlight), led me into a deep depression. After a particularly bad day at work, I decided, in my diminished mental state, that it would be best for me to simply end it all right then and there. So I bought a fifth of Kessler whiskey, went home, and poured a hot bath. I then downed what was left of a bottle of painkillers from the dentist, got into the tub, and proceeded to down the whiskey. It was the end of my Saturn Return cycle, and I knew it.

I can now somewhat recall a delirious conversation I had then with my deceased father, who had abandoned my mom, my sister, and I, later committing suicide himself in 1965. I angrily told him that he had taught me well, and that now I was coming to join him in hell. Just then I realized how ludicrous and truly unkind what I had just done was, not only to my loved ones but to him as well. And, at that very same moment, a familiar quiet voice in my head told me that I absolutely must stay alive, to find the strength to get up out of the tub and call 911… and quite miraculously, somehow I did. I hadn’t even given a thought to it that night, but when I woke up the next day, strapped down in a hospital bed - it was an epiphany, and a reprieve - and no kidding, it was Easter Sunday morning.

Obviously, I survived and later began visiting a nice psychologist with very thick glasses and no chin, who pronounced me bipolar and prescribed Lithium. It was awful - this powerful psycho-pharmaceutical flattened and dulled all the lows and highs of my previously creative life. I desperately needed a second opinion, and fortunately found a doctor at Swedish Hospital who diagnosed my condition as SADS, not bipolar, and prescribed vitamin D and B complex, and UV lights - that or moving to a sunnier climate. At first, I chose the former, but finally went with the latter, and the mental fog finally began to lift. As you might imagine, the experience forever changed me… I am so grateful for that still-small voice, and for the inner strength, I managed to muster that night - a truly fierce, detached, and impersonal Will to live.

Later in October, my mom booked some small cabins on a bluff overlooking the Pacific Ocean at Kalaloch Lodge in the rainforest of Washington’s Olympic Peninsula for a family gathering. On our morning walk down to the beach, I spied some fairy rings of small liberty cap mushrooms and collected some in a sandwich bag. After showing them to her, she asked if I thought it was safe for her to take some too, and of course I jumped at the chance, telling her that they weren’t usually very strong, so sure why not? I gave her 5 and I took 10.

I was totally taken by surprise when their effects came on fast and heavy, far more powerful than I had anticipated. My mom and I subsequently shared an amazing day there together on that wild wind-swept beach. It was a life-changing and cathartic experience for us both, strengthening our bond, and our self-realization, like never before. Few are they, one might suppose, who are given an opportunity for an experience like that with a beloved parent in this life, or in many lifetimes. What a true blessing that was. Once again, it seems in retrospect, with both this and my own near-death experience, Anubis had truly “opened the way”, and coming across those mushrooms along the path to the beach was truly a movement of spirit.

After this return to the psychedelic experience after a lapse of well over a decade, I felt a sense of joy and well-being begin to creep into my psyche once again - testimony to what psychologists and behavior therapists are beginning to finally take advantage of today.

California - Here I Come!

Securing a job as an engineer in an ex-bandmate’s recording studio, I moved from Seattle to Sacramento in 1988, basically on doctor’s orders, to get out of the Puget Sound gloom and rain, and into the California sunshine. Feeling much, much better soon after that, it wasn’t long before I put together another rock band. I met some delightful individuals in the Midtown circle of musicians and artists, many being ex-pats from the Bay area. Eventually, the subject of mysticism came up, and along with it, Astrology and Tarot, so I once again started doing charts and card readings for my new friends.

Within a few months of moving there, intending to move on further south to LA to further my musical career, I met a beautiful red-haired Scorpio girl at a “girls-only” party that a friend and I had crashed, and wow, she really liked me. That changed my plans permanently. We immediately fell in love and formed a partnership that lasted nearly twenty years. Of course, we didn’t know then that she would become my future wife and mother of my son ten years later. She was by my side as this story unfolded from this point, and always supported my esoteric spiritual pursuits, being totally fine at the time (I think) with the frequent rituals and incense fuming in the living room at night - and listening to all of my stories, although she never really got very much into the occult herself. She was also a saint, though we have since grown apart on several important levels.

One of my new Sacramento friends was the amazing poly-rhythmic drummer in the band, a handsome Egyptian college student from Cairo named Ahmed Azzam, whose face was distinctly reminiscent of the golden mask of Tutankhamun. Once he caught wind of my love for ancient Egypt, he regaled me with the wonders of his country, including telling me all about the incredible Valley Temple ruins next to the Sphinx, and how it was constructed of blocks weighing up to 200 tons that curved around corners. I could scarcely believe it at the time, but it turned out to be absolutely true. I can still hear his smooth Arabic-accented voice telling me “You simply must go, Shane!” I wish I could find him now to tell him that I did. I’ve certainly tried…

Having taken a sabbatical from taking psychedelics after that powerful mushroom trip with my mom, I began partaking in psychedelics every once in a while with my newfound friends, finding great power, especially when tripping on mushrooms at Big Sur. It was here, on another windswept stony beach, that I came face to face with what the Greeks call one’s inner Daemon or Genius, what the Western esotericists call the Holy Guardian Angel. I was familiar with her voice from my teenage acid trips, associating her ongoing monologue with the spirit of LSD. But here she was in all her full visual glory - sounding like a bullroarer and glittering in the wind and clouds and setting sun. I picked up an odd rock she pointed out to me on the beach, almost too big to carry comfortably, and carried it with me for the rest of the journey. I will keep it as a talisman until the day I die...

Another fellow that I met at this time whom I only remember as “Hippie Chris”, who lived up fully to his patchouli-drenched nickname, asked me if, being an astrologer and card reader, I was familiar with the Qabalah or the Qabalistic writings of Aleister Crowley. Remembering The Book of Thoth from 20 years prior, I replied, kind of sheepishly, that I had heard of them, and he immediately handed me a book - “The Mystical Qabalah” by Dion Fortune. He told me to pass it on when I was finished, which I did, and have done with several copies of it since then. He added, “When you’re done with this, get yourself a copy of Crowley’s 777”, which I would later do.

That was the summer of 1992, and inspired by the veritable revelations of The Mystical Qabalah, I reverently entered a small incense-smoke-filled occult bookstore called The Tree of Life, just a block away from my tiny studio apartment. There I purchased my first - and only - ceremonial Tarot deck. Produced by the Builders Of The Adytum, this black and white deck is printed on card stock and requires the new owner to color each one by hand in accordance with particular instructions in the accompanying little booklet with Qabalistic correspondences enclosed in the box. This is still my most beloved Tarot deck, though I only use it for instruction, path-working and rituals, not card readings. The Tree of Life store subsequently became my go-to resource for incense, statues, candles, and books for a decade until they closed their doors permanently in 2002.

Together, The Mystical Qabalah and the BOTA Tarot deck - with it’s little booklet, changed everything for me, tying Astrology, Tarot and Numerology all together under the one aegis of the Qabalah and it’s Tree of Life glyph. I was astounded to discover that the Major Arcana of the Tarot describe the paths connecting the Spheres or Sephiroth on the Tree of Life - I felt like I had been plugged into a high voltage electrical outlet of ancient spiritual wisdom - and while it was predominantly Hebrew based, some of it was clearly Egyptian at the core. After this, I immediately sought out Qabalah-based mystical initiatic orders, what are often called the Western Mystery Traditions or Western Esoteric Traditions, et al - which wasn’t so easy in those primitive days with no internet.

Thanks to some advertisements in Gnosis Magazine, I eventually wound up connecting with both H. Spencer Lewis’ Rosicrucian AMORC in San Jose (whose book “Mansions of the Soul” was in my mom’s library and is now in mine), whose Egyptian Museum in San Jose has one of the finest collection of artifacts in the United States, and with Paul Foster Case’s Builders Of The Adytum in Los Angeles. Soon thereafter I began corresponding with them and receiving their knowledge papers and self-initiations by mail. I was finally told by both about a year later that if I wished to go any further, it would require an in-person initiation, to which I eventually responded with cold feet.

These two are really great organizations run by very nice folks, but the hierarchic “churchy” vibe and their rituals just weren’t right for me - I could almost hear the voice of Don Juan laughingly mock me for considering it. But they both did emphasize the Egyptian roots of their teachings, and I learned a lot from them about the methods of Ceremonial Magic and Qabalistic pathworking and the power of ritual through their publications and following their instructions. Of course, I highly recommend a visit to the Rosicrucian Egyptian Museum and grounds if you ever get near San Jose.

Also in 1992, I purchased a new 6th edition of “The Order of the Golden Dawn” by Israel Regardie (who was Aleister Crowley’s secretary for a while, Crowley being initiated into the G:.D:. in 1898). This fat book includes much of the old order’s methodology, initiation rituals, and knowledge lectures, prominently featuring the Egyptian Neteru, particularly Isis, Apophis, and Osiris - and their connection with the Gnostic IAO. I dug into it voraciously and immediately began integrating the teachings into my own budding personal practices.

The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, founded by the prominent British Freemason William Wynn Wescott in 1888, and guided under the leadership of Samuel Liddell ‘MacGregor’ Mathers, was the seminal English-speaking offshoot of both the Masonic and Rosicrucian currents, with many notable members such as William Butler Yeats, Arthur Edward Waite, Violet Firth (Dion Fortune), and Bram Stoker, among others from the creatives class of British society at that time. In fact, all three of these organizations, the AMORC, the BOTA and the G:.D:., claim Hermetic/Gnostic/Rosicrucian ties, basing their teachings and grades on the Qabalah, and to a greater or lesser degree, the Egyptian god-forms and mysteries. Basing my own work now upon these teachings, I could feel a strong current building.

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky and The Secret Doctrine

It was also at this time that Helena Petrovna Blavatsky’s “The Secret Doctrine” literally dropped into my lap at Beers Books in October 1992. We’ve all heard those stories before of course, but, quite honestly, this really did happen to me too.

Back story: when going to art school at Boise State in 1976, I met a fellow who always dressed in black who, upon hearing me speak of Castaneda, would engage me in conversations on mysticism, Theosophy in particular, the tradition founded by Blavatsky. The last time I saw him. he was moving to India and was selling his books, having a box of them in his car that he wanted to show me. I looked through them but didn’t buy anything, although now I wish I could have handed him some cash and bought the whole box.

On top of the stack was a copy of The Secret Doctrine, face down, with the famous picture of HPB on the paper dust jacket, gazing deeply into the camera and looking back at me with those incredible liquid eyes of hers. He said “That’s a really good one there. I highly recommend it.” I declined, however, being a chronically underfunded art student at the time, and perhaps a bit put off by the “culty” feel I got from the fellow - so immersed as I was in freewheeling Castaneda at the time, and he clearly being a rather serious Theosophist on a mission to India.

So, when someone on the other side of the bookshelf pushed a book in, and The Secret Doctrine Volume I popped out and into my lap, it was definitely worth noting! I bought the two virtually unused volumes for a song - $3.00 each still penciled in my copies, a centennial facsimile edition published in 1988 - the year I moved to Sacramento. With both this two-edition book and the formation of the Golden Dawn happening a century earlier in the mercurial year 1888, I snapped them up, with enough cash left over for some coffee next door.

Based primarily upon what she called “The Dzyan Stanzas” an ancient writing she claimed was “received” from discarnate adepts, the two volumes are literally brimming with esoteric knowledge and symbolism - what she referred to as “The Mystery Language of the Ancients”. The writings include her emphasis on the great cycles of the Yugas, of the precession of the equinoxes, descriptions of the periodic shifting of the earth’s poles and axis, continental drift and tectonic plates, and a great cataclysm causing the destruction of an advanced civilization around the time of the end of the last ice age. These were truly revolutionary ideas for 1888, a century ahead of their time, which were then ridiculed by the regular academic authorities; and yet they have all subsequently been proven to be quite accurate by contemporary 21st-century science.

I recall reading her dissertation on the zodiac on the astronomical ceilings of Hathor’s temple at Dendera, little knowing then that I would one day lay beneath the same circular star map myself in the small rooftop chapel 26 years later. I was officially drilling deep down into the occult at this point, and relishing every new revelation, deeper understanding,, and download, which began coming in, fast and heavy, with the indescribable compendium of knowledge and wisdom in TSD. The more you know, the deeper you go, and with that I can only add - just get the books and try to read them; and while so doing, marvel at the fact that HPB, as she liked to be called, had no translator nor editors, and English was not her native tongue.

I contacted her organization, The Theosophical Society, and started receiving their periodical publications including Gnosis Magazine, a period of intense study for me.

The Egyptian Neteru and Law of Thelema

I was first formally introduced to group ceremonial magic and three Egytian Neteru, around the equinox in March of 1993, after attending a Sunday morning Portico meeting at a large Midtown craftsman-style house in Sacramento that served as the Lodge for a Gnostic group called Ordo Sanctus Gnosis. The Portico meetings were free knowledge lectures given by the leader of the group, calling himself Malachi - who at the time took the title Tau Tahuti (Tau being the title of Gnostic priests and Tahuti or Djehuty being the Egyptian name of the god form Thoth - the often mispronounced Greek spelling of the name). The Priestess of the group, who first told me about the open Portico meetings, being the owner of The Tree of Life store mentioned earlier, went by the name Neith (the Egyptian goddess called “The Weaver” or “The Shooter”).

The vibe was very good, there was no cultish or churchy feel here, and no dunning me for money at all, but rather there were several spiritual currents represented by the group’s members that were heartily encouraged - Egyptian, Rosicrucian, Hindu, Tibetan Buddhist, Theosophical and even Sumerian traditions. After a few visits, I finally asked Neith about the Egyptian Neteru statues in the alcoves and their images hanging on the walls in the meeting area. Her response was life-changing.

She informed me that, since the O.S.G. had begun working with the spiritual path known as Thelema, the group had been practicing a form of ceremonial magic called theurgy (a word that was new to me) with the Egyptian Neteru god forms - with powerful results. She told me that Thelema was a Greek word used in ancient Alexandria in Egypt, meaning higher, divine or pure Will, and is a tradition incorporating three particular Egyptian god-forms, begun by Aleister Crowley in the early 1900’s. She went on to say that Thelema was based upon The Book of the Law, which was allegedly received by him in trance in Cairo, in April of 1904 - the most famous of its aphorisms being the familiar “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law. Love is the law, love under will.”, spoken by the sky goddess Nuit. The god-forms of Aleister Crowley’s The Book of the Law, also known as Liber AL vel Legis (or simply Liber Legis), are Nuit the star goddess, Hadit the winged disk, and Ra Hoor Khuit, the mid-day form of the solar god Ra, depicted as hawk-headed like Horus.

I had to know more!

And so she suggested I borrow one of the copies of Crowley’s “The Equinox of the Gods” from their Lodge library, in which Crowley relates the whole story of its reception, from the Golden Dawn to his visit to Egypt on honeymoon, including of how an ancient Egyptian funereal artifact from the tomb of a priest, called the Stele’ of Revealing (see The Stele of Ankh-af-na-Khonsu for more information). First encountered by Crowley and his wife Rose in the Egyptian Museum, the stele’ served as the primary catalyst for the reception. I found it all incredibly fascinating, but had no idea just how fascinating until I read the book.

It wasn’t long before I purchased my own copy of Liber AL vel Legis at Beers Books, then located across the street from Capitol Park, where I immediately took it and sat down on the lawn facing West and an old fir tree in the shade of a circle of other large trees, lit a stick of Nag Champa incense, and read it aloud quietly to myself, precisely at noon. Coincidentally, the State of California Parks Department wound up installing a concrete circle with a four-armed cross on that exact spot as a flower bed some many years later; in fact, it was still there last time I looked, a rather portentous thing indeed for those familiar with the contents of Liber Legis and the passage “this circle squared” with this very symbol - the Egyptian hieroglyph for a city or a crossroads - just another one of the many synchronicities that have been pouring in since my first reading the book. Among them was that the Greek word Thelema has the numerological number value of 93, and is referred to as the 93 Current by it’s adherents. It was Earth Day, 1993.

I was first struck by the fact that the three primary speakers in the book, Nuit, Hadit and Ra Hoor Khuit, were actual Egyptian god-forms or Neteru, albeit with interestingly modified spellings incorporating the word IT, distinct personalities who used some obviously Egyptian words that I did not then understand. Some of it struck me as simply beautiful, profound, and true, some of it was incomprehensible, some of it held clear Qabalistic puzzles, and some of it seemed downright repugnant. There was no doubt in my mind while reading it that this was a bonafide transmission from ancient Egyptian energy intelligences, and not simply a product of Crowley’s conscious intellect, as I was prejudiced to think at first. It was a most direct knowing - Gnosis if you will - accompanied by a shiver up my spine. Each of the three Neteru have vastly different attitudes and particular emotions are triggered be each in each chapter - I cannot begin to describe the influx of energy I received, and the AHA! moments I had, as do some others, with the first reading.

I count myself fortunate now in not having much in the way of negative opinions and myth-information thrust upon me to color my approach to Aleister Crowley. I never really had a chance to read the bad press before being exposed to his writings, and they were sublime, particularly “The Book of the Law” and “The Book of Lies”, both filled with brilliant apocryphal and riddle-like verse and poetry, even including a few rituals. If I had been poisoned against him without first reading his books myself, I might have wound up never knowing the rich legacy of his spiritually and philosophically uplifting, if not divinely inspired, writing. After getting to know his punctilious writing style well, it became even more apparent to me than ever that Liber Al Vel Legis, or at least most of it, did not come from his mind alone, but rather came through it.

(For more information about Crowley and links to .pdf files of the three chapters of The Book of the Law, visit my article About Thelema.)

The following year with the O.S.G. sparking powerful spiritual realizations, with Malachi’s informative and inspiring weekly Portico lectures, mostly pertaining to Qabalah and Pathwork on the Tree of Life, and the group’s coffee clatches on the front or back porches afterward. And there were the ceremonies they kindly allowed me to be present for - performed in the large upstairs Lodge temple - the most memorable one for me being the Feast for the Equinox of the Gods on the Spring Equinox of 1994. That summer comet Shoemaker-Levy broke into 22 pieces and slammed into Jupiter, bringing an influx of fresh fire from outside the solar system. Let those with ears to hear and eyes to see do so.

I was initiated into the O.S.G. a few days after the Fall Equinox of that year, accompanied by a simple ceremonial reading of Chapter 1 of Liber Legis by a lone priest calling himself Kau Mu (I know) in the portico of the Lodge’s temple. He did not know, because he had not bothered asking, that my link with the Egyptian trinity of Nuit, Hadit, and Ra Hoor Khuit, had already been forged well over a year before, on Earth Day of 1993, and this only by virtue of my prior conversations with Neith - High Priestess of the Lodge. But this was how it was done in the Lodge, and I was quite fine with it.

A few months after this initiation ceremony, I eventually stopped attending the O.S.G. meetings - something had definitely shifted and changed in me and the group after that, and I could sense something had broken loose within the Order’s dynamic as well. The following year the Lodge house was sold, with several of the group’s statues and other regalia offered for sale in the Tree of Life store, seven years before finally going out of business. The group had clearly parted ways, for reasons I could only guess at. I never asked and they never offered. Of these items, I bought a very old bronze or copper alloy Shiva-Lingha and a black painted concrete statue of the Egyptian cat goddess Bastet, who stands guard outside the Wandering Stars cottage today - both being talismanic “touch stones” from those halcyon days.

I still drive by that house now and again when I am in Sacramento, and gaze longingly at it, remembering the powerful experiences and revelations of that time in the Lodge, with all of those beautiful spiritual beings who were truly my brothers and sisters in Kemetic Thelema. Each time I do, I send them all my most heartfelt love and gratitude.

From then on I maintained a continuum of magickal practice - Qabalistic path work, ceremony, ritual, and theurgy - coupled with fairly regular meditation, yoga, lucid dreaming, and intermittent psychedelic vision quests. The expansion of my awareness into deeper spiritual self-realizations and the consistent discoveries of occult teachings was rapid and quite literally head-spinning and life-changing.

The English Cabala - 111

In January 1995, while performing Thelema-based ceremonial Qabalistic Path work on the 11th Path The Fool, a break-though vision occurred, and a message was received and written down that took my work into a radically new direction and down a deep rabbit hole of study, contemplation, and writing. It involved the discovery of a Key in The Book of the Law to establish an English Qabalah, based upon English precedent and numerology. It reads”:

“Thou shalt obtain the order & value of the English Alphabet; thou shalt find new symbols to attribute them unto.” Liber Legis II:55

The “order & value” answer came to me simply as 1=A=0.

This in turn led to my meeting, quite by chance, and having several subsequent visits with, a Sacramento occult writer named David Allen Hulse, an author who had just had his encyclopedic volume The Key of it All - Book One: The Eastern Mysteries published by Llewellyn that year. In his second volume, he offered an English Qabalah with the standard order and value used in numerology. We wound up discussing and sharing many ideas concerning Thelema, The Book of the Law, and an English Qabalah, coinciding with the publication of his next volume Book Two: The Western Mysteries, in which he presented his serial A=1 cipher for English, with tons of fascinating correspondences This lead to my own research working with the message I had received from a mysterious source associated with The Fool Tarot card I spoke of earlier.

David would later distance himself from Thelema and Crowley, and we ended up losing touch until only just recently via Facebook, but between the influence of the OSG introducing me to Thelema, and his incredible work, with the title The Key of It All taken directly from The Book of Law (a title he would later drop in lieu of The Eastern and Western Mysteries respectively), I dove in headfirst and didn’t come up for air for 3 years. For the full rundown of this very influential (though not essential) side story, you can visit The English Cabala - 111.

My World Changes

Later, in October of 1997, my girlfriend Felice let me know that her pregnancy test was positive and that she was one month along. We married right away - on Samhain - Halloween day - in accordance with the pagan tradition so that our departed loved ones might “attend”.

A later ultrasound showed I was soon to be the proud father of a son and he was born the following year in May. My whole world changed that day, an experience to which many parents can also attest.

The year 1998, shortly before the birth of my son, saw me wrapping up my work as quickly as possible in anticipation of the initiation I considered to be the “Householder” of the Vedic traditions, or “Man of Earth” grade, spoken of in Liber Legis. This corresponds directly, as many Egyptian teachings do, to the Hindu stricture that a man or woman must be a householder or wife, and a father or a mother, raising their children to adulthood before they may be accepted as chelas or students under a guru. And so, come hell or high water, I intended to do so to the best of my ability.

I calculated my son’s natal horoscope to get an overview, and accordingly, I was quite grateful for Astrology as a tool to help prepare me to deal with his sometimes willful and stubborn Taurus nature, as well as to help me gain a deeper understanding of some of his drives and motivations, and most importantly, some understanding of his True Will. All in all, I believe it was a valuable asset to my being a more mindful parent than I would have been without it.

As a part of this wrapping-up process, I published my first web page called Aeonic.’. Annunciation.’., which formerly announced the 1=A=0 cipher and The English Cabala - 111 online, and gave a listing of what I then called “Qabalistic and Thelemic Proofs” including a handful of bitmap images I made and still use today, along with a copy of the message I had written down that I entitled The Book of the Holy Fool. At this point, I was planning on being done with it, though I continued working on my as-yet unfinished manuscript expounding the whole system.

This web presence put me in touch with many fellow Thelemites in email groups, some supportive, others not so, as well as the proponents of several other solutions to the “order & value” English Cabala puzzle, most notably Jake Stratton Kent, who worked with the New Aeon English Qabalah first discovered by Jim Lees in Great Britain. The NAEQ would subsequently be accepted by the O.T.O. as their “official” “order & value”. We had some great discussions that helped me formulate my own presentations, though unsurprisingly, neither of us bought into each other’s ciphers whatsoever.

In January of 1999, myself and a few of the friends that I had met through my web page and e-mail/web forums, discussed starting an online teaching order based upon the Egyptian Law of Thelema and The English Cabala - 111, and began working on the documents for it. Several students became involved with us for a year after that, and I kept these documents for a rainy day, the order being called the Servorum Stellae et Serpente, the Servants of the Star and the Snake. However, the stress and time constraints in my now very busy family and business life finally forced me to reduce and then finally shut down these websites and forums a year later in 2000. I lost touch with most of these online friends soon after, most of whom I only knew by their magickal mottoes and mostly now-defunct e-mail addresses. Perhaps some will see my website here and contact me again. I would like that very much.

Y2K and Beyond

At the turn of the New Millennium, having become a new father and husband, with down payment assistance from my wife’s grandmother, we bought a home in Yuba City and I started up my own aquarium business. I fell from my work on The English Cabala - 111, and my library and magickal regalia all ended up in boxes gathering dust in the garage for several years as I focused on supporting my family and running my business - again, in what I felt to be the grade of Man of Earth. Even so, I continued to maintain some connections during this time, performed Liber Resh and Will, and still honored some of the “Feast” days of Thelema; albeit surreptitiously, it being understandably hard to find much time or privacy - even for meditation, much less ritual or ceremony.

Even though my actual spiritual practice was running on empty during this period of my life, I feel so deeply fortunate to have been honored and blessed with the spiritually enriching life experiences of fatherhood, my marriage, working together on our sweet home, running a new business and most especially the opportunity and challenge of raising our beautiful son, who is my real success story in life.

During this period, when I wasn’t really seeking, my sister Patti (who was much involved with Zen Buddhism at the time) introduced me to some collected writings of Ken Wilber, most notably “The Spectrum of Consciousness” and “Sex, Ecology, and Spirituality”. Founder of the Integral Institute and writer on transpersonal psychology as well as his own integral theory, Wilber champions a systematic philosophy that suggests a workable “integrated” synthesis of all human spiritual knowledge and experience. The foundation seemed to lie in his interpretation of the ideas posited by behavioral psychologists such as Clare Danes concerning the states and ascending developmental stages of consciousness, which appeared to be analogous to the seven Chakras of the Hindu systems.

In his philosophy, the mystical traditions of the world provide access to, and knowledge of, a transcendental reality that is perennial, being essentially the same template throughout all times and cultures. His conception posits that a human being is not really playing with a full deck unless they can integrate all of what he calls the Four Quadrants (Interior, Exterior, Individual, and Collective), and the One-Two-Three (described as First, Second and Third Person) connection with God into their awareness and being. This is when the power of Theurgy became apparent to me, not as something muzzy and mystical, but as a technology that works - from Communion to Union to Identity.

These ideas were another Aha! moment for me, explaining so much about human psychology and personalities, as well as our spiritual points of view or perspectives - not to mention Qabalistic and Thelema cosmology - and I wound up integrating these into my Astrological inquiries and meditation practices with great results. His discussion of the differences between the five States of consciousness that overlay all of the Stages of spiritual growth and awareness as they relate to the Seven Chakras was particularly notable - one can experience any or all five States at any Stage of development. States and Stages are generally confused with each other by spiritual teachers and practitioners, and so this idea clarified much for my own practice as well and serves as one of my primary teaching and meditation tools today.

In January of 2004, I discovered that Tau Malachi of the O.S.G. had a reformed a small group in Nevada City called the Sophian Fellowship - an initiatic order based upon the esoteric Hebrew Kabbalah and the Gnostic Christian mysteries of Sophia as “Kallah, the Bride” - Mary Magdalene on the physical plane of the Qabalistic Malkuth. I had just read Elaine Pagels’ “Gnostic Gospels”, also recommended to me by my sister, and was pretty excited about it, and began an earnest study of the Gnostic manuscripts themselves, a few of which turned out to clearly be Qabalistic initiation texts.

It was “coincidentally” at this time that Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code was published and raised quite a stir, and renewed interest in Mary Magdalene. I researched and read whatever I could find about her… though much of it seemed more romance/mystery novel rather than based on any serious academic study or scholarship. After my research I came to find out that little of Dan Brown’s claims about Mary held much water factually and historically; but there was much substantial material to be found in the Gnostic Gospels, particularly The Gospel of Mary. It was during this period that I compiled much of the information in my article here, The Woman With The Alabaster Jar.

I immediately recognized that the divine feminine of the Gnostic Sophia, the Kabbalist’s Shekinah and Mary appeared to have a clear connection with the Egyptian Canaanite’s goddess/priestess cult of Qetesh - or Qadesh (Hebrew for “Holy”) - identified by her Hebrew worshipers as Yahweh’s consort Asherah. Both bore the Egyptian goddess Hathor’s horned disc crown and distinctive curled hairstyle as often did Isis. I also saw the connection with the symbolism of The Priestess of the Tarot, and so, after the time I spent in Tarot path work study with the O.S.G., I was deeply interested in what Tau Malachi’s take might be.

I soon started driving up the hill from Yuba City every Sunday, looking forward to his Portico meetings again. I even dragged Felice and Spencer up there to meet him once. Malachi is a very engaging teacher and speaker, often telling stories about his own teachers and the Gnostic/Rosicrucian lineage of the O.S.G., even back in 1993, so I always enjoyed his thought-provoking talks immensely - they sometimes delightfully reminded me of the teachings of Don Juan.

I was also thrilled to see that he had published some successful books, most especially his “The Gnostic Gospel of St. Thomas”, “St. Mary Magdalene” and “Gnosis of the Cosmic Christ”, all wonderful expositions of his Sophian Gnostic current. Signed copies still sit on my bookshelves, as references and talismans.

But alas, I was also disappointed to find that he, like David Hulse, had distanced himself from Thelema and particularly Crowley on his Gnostic path, having left them, as he said, for “another mistress” and “mother tongue”- a return to the old Hebrew traditions. Ultimately we had a falling out over another misunderstanding when he finally suggested we contemplate the “Qlippoth” that had come between us, and that I might consider leaving the “shell” of “do what thou wilt” Thelema behind. And with that, we sadly parted ways.

Thus, the two primary forces who brought me into Thelema in the first place - first Malachi’s O.S.G. introducing me to The Book of the Law, and then Hulse’s “The Key of It All” leading me to the discovery of the cipher 1=A=0, ten years prior, both of them subsequently dropping Thelema like a hot potato - well, it was definitely a powerful and challenging catharsis for me, to say the very least.

I realize now that neither of them had forged the same strong theurgic link with the Egyptian Neteru (such as Neith did), and I had been erroneously assuming that they had. It was disappointing, for sure, but it certainly doesn’t diminish for me in any way their stellar work and publications or their very positive knowledge transmissions and influence. They, like so many other leaders in the Western Mystery Traditions, while having achieved an advanced personal “cosmic address”, as it were, simply had to base their writing and teaching career decision upon mass appeal and public opinion.

The unfortunate tabloid press and myth-information that continues today surrounding Aleister Crowley and the awful white-nationalist/neo-nazi cultures which have begun to embrace him - and yes, his undeniable misdeeds and those of some of his dubious heirs, is simply just too much karmic baggage for most. But Thelema was never just about Crowley or the “goth” or “alternative scene”, or the A.’.A.’. or O.T.O. for me. Rather it was always about the Egyptian Neteru, and The Book of the Law - and therein lies a critical difference.

I still have high regard for both Malachi and Hulse as fellow Light Bearers, and as my two great teachers on this physical plane. These experiences also showed me that the Light of my abiding love of Liber Al vel Legis and the Egyptian Neteru is clear and adamant. I have no regrets. I love both men as brothers. Through them, I truly believe that the Neteru had tested my resolve - I wrestled with angels and walked away a stronger man and a more fiercely dedicated Thelemite for it.

After my separation from my wife and subsequent divorce in 2008, I set up an altar with a small copy of the Stele’ of Revealing encased in glass, and began meditating and observing the daily Liber Resh rituals, the Lunar and Solar high days and the Feasts of Thelema once again. It was a slow return, however - the links were rusty. I moved back into and continued raising my son in the house in Yuba City; and as I reconnected, I also rekindled my spiritual inner light, which had grown a bit dim over the past years. This helped me through one of the most difficult times, as well as fruitful, times of my life.

I soon began singing and playing in bands again, and subsequently met the last great love of my life, LeAnn, who is also a singer. In 2016, after my son had turned 18 and had moved to Chico to go to college, Felice and I sold the house and I relocated to Chico to be near both LeAnn and him. Here I have met so many wonderful new friends, musicians, artists, and all-around beautiful souls - so very much like my beloved Midtown Sacramento in the late 80s and early 90s. It was a veritable renaissance and rebirth for me, at this later juncture of my life.

Egypt!

Early in 2018, I came across a book about the mysteries of ancient Egypt on Kindle, originally published by the Theosophical publisher Quest in 1979, by John Anthony West entitled “Serpent In The Sky”. I had never heard of it before, and was pleasantly surprised by the occult spirituality of the viewpoints offered throughout, complete with a listing of the esoteric meanings of the numbers - essentially Qabalistic Numerology. The book offers an outstanding and quite refreshing symbolic spiritual reinterpretation of the ancient Egyptian civilization, architecture, religion, technology and science - in contrast to dry-bone two-dimensional academia.

In essence, it serves as West’s exposition on Symbolist Egypt and the Egyptian Sacred Sciences, as described by R. A. Schwaller de Lubicz - the noted Theosophist, alchemist, mystic, initiate and scholar - in his monumental, if not utterly overwhelming, Le Temple de l'homme - The Temple of Man, condensed as The Temple In Man, both published in 1949.

These books demonstrate the deeper symbolic meaning behind the art and architecture of the temples of ancient Egypt, particularly Luxor temple, with clear hallmarks of the core initiatic framework of the Western Mystery Traditions, accompanied by sacred geometry such as the Golden Section, which academics still incorrectly attribute to the later Greeks.

Taking his cue from an obscure statement by deLubicz in his “Sacred Science - The King of Pharaonic Theocracy”, John Anthony West, after conscripting the Boston University professor/geologist Robert Schoch to fly with him to Cairo to investigate, discovered that the Great Sphinx and it’s enclosure are undeniably water weathered. This huge discovery at least doubles, if not triples, the age assigned to it by Egyptologists, since rain hasn’t fallen on the Giza plateau in the required amounts for several thousand years. (See Why Egypt? Part 1).

You might remember, or even watched, the NBC special from 1993 (!) that John co-produced and hosted based upon the result of that research, the controversial The Mystery Of The Sphinx, which goes into it all in some detail. West also made a two part series with Chance Gardner called Magical Egypt, which condensed some of the most salient of deLubicz’s revolutionary discoveries and ideas, both being available on YouTube. Unfortunately, while the first few episodes are pretty great, the subsequent series episodes are too far outside the pale as far I am concerned, and I really can’t recommend them, though there is some fascinating material in there. Meanwhile, videos of John Anthony West are all over YouTube now, including tours of a few of the Egyptian temples, as John hosted many group excursions to Egypt over the years. Thanks to John, I was caught up in the magickal current of Egypt once again.

Just as Theosophy founder Blavatsky and Thelema founder Crowley had a marked influence on me and my love of Egypt, so did John find the same influences from Theosophist Schwaller de Lubisc and the Russian mystic G.I. Gurdjieff, a spiritual teacher in the 1920’s and 30’s. Gurdjieff taught that most humans do not possess a unified consciousness, living their lives in a state of hypnotic "waking sleep", and that it is possible for them to awaken to a higher state of consciousness and achieve full human potential. Gurdjieff described a method attempting to do so, calling the discipline "The Work" or "the System". According to his principles and instructions, Gurdjieff's method for awakening one's consciousness unites the methods of the fakir, monk, and yogi, and thus he referred to it as the "Fourth Way".

I had studied a bit of Gurdjieff’s philosophies myself through the writings of his protege’ P.D. Ouspensky while sitting in Seattle coffeehouses, and thus, I truly felt I had found a kindred spirit in John Anthony West, and wondered what he would have thought of Crowley and Liber Legis, or if he was even aware of them.

A Moment of Clarity:

Shortly after having begun reading “Serpent in the Sky”, I was driving along the freeway, and narrowly missed involvement in a nasty accident between my pickup, a semi truck, and a sports car that cut me off while I was traveling at 75 mph. After skidding off to the side of the road and stopping there in a cloud of dust, the question hit me: If I was sitting there bleeding out and dying, what would be my greatest regret? The immediate thought, of all things, was that I never visited Egypt! (thus, the bigger answer to the “Why Egypt?” question.)

I have lived a full, happy and relatively healthy life, full of incredible experiences, love and all the sweet earthly pleasures of life. I raised a son into a fine young man, I run my own small businesses and have fairly successfully lived out my dream of singing in bands. I have the precious love of a sweet beautiful woman and wonderful friends. What was lacking? My only thought at that moment was Egypt - likely thanks to John Anthony West’s book and video lectures, which were all still reverberating in my head, along with my already abiding love of the Neteru of Liber Legis.

Immediately thereafter, I made reservations to be there for the Spring Equinox, the Feast day called the Equinox of the Gods in The Book of the Law. I’ll never forget sitting there with my laptop and asking LeAnn and her then young son Joseph if I should actually do it and push the “BOOK IT” button. They both excitedly shouted “yes!”, and that was that - I let Joseph push “enter” and bing! ... I was officially going to Egypt!

I did not know it then, but on that very same evening at 9:40 p.m. John Anthony West passed away - succumbing to pneumonia related to cancer he was battling. I only found out about his death upon my return home from our beloved Egypt. It was yet another in a long string of synchronicities related to Egypt, and I was totally taken aback by it when I found out. What it suggested was so … well, of course, there are no coincidences.

Soon after booking the flight, I purchased a copy of John’s outstanding guidebook “The Traveler’s Key to Ancient Egypt”, and booked daily personal auto tours to visit all of the major temples I could within driving vicinity of Cairo and especially Luxor, where the lions share of the temple ruins and tombs reside. It was to be just me, my guide, and a driver. And when I arrived, I was actually shocked at how deserted most of the sites were… I had them almost all to myself, along with my guides Hammada, Omar, and Mazen, along with a few guards. Omar often remarked on how fortunate we were that there were no crowds, kindly joking out of nowhere that “Anubis must be opening the way”.

John was right on when said that each temple has its own harmonic vibration, its own feel, and personality, that matches perfectly the particular god-form it once served as an earthly home for. More importantly, each temple has its own information download, both through the art and inscriptions, and the architecture itself, expressly designed by the ancient Egyptian master builders to resonate at particular frequencies in order to stir the human heart and spirit, not only of those performing the rituals inside the sanctuaries where the Neteru reside, but of those gathered outside in the Hypostyle halls and the courtyards as well.

While there I saw images of Nuit carved upon the chapel and great hall ceilings, Hadit upon the lintels over every doorway, and I stood alone in the sanctuary of Ra Harakhty at Abydos, with bas-relief carvings of the great Egyptian Neteru, with the pharaoh Seti I making offerings of sacred perfumed oils, unguents, and incense, and I felt their palpable Presence. (See my article “Welcome to Egypt!” where I will be posting photos and tales of my travels there.)

The gods were literally upon me. And Anpu showed me the Way…

… and John was right there by my side in spirit.

And so, I found myself at Giza, in the dark before dawn, on a balcony of a deserted, but very nice hotel restaurant overlooking the plateau. They weren’t open yet, but the kitchen workers offered me and my guide Mazen some strong hot coffee. It was chilly, and a breeze came up, some dogs barked in the distance and the little birds began chirping, and then it all died down just before sunrise. Grey turning to pink light brought the massive bulk of the Great Pyramid into view out of the darkness, golden-amber light illuminating the amazing scene that lay before me.

I managed a brief video clip of the moment to share with anyone who has gotten thus far…

As I turned and faced East towards the sprawling city of Cairo to adore the rising sun, my gentle guide Mazen touched my shoulder and softly said “Your friend is watching with you”, and pointed down to the gated Sphinx entrance below. There, also facing due East, was an Egyptian feral dog, on its haunches. I then snapped the photos below:

We watched the sunrise together in silence, just us three, no one else to be seen anywhere around, as the sun rose above the horizon over Cairo. As I raised my arms to the sky in adoration of it all, Mazen kindly captured this powerful moment on my phone camera, which I used as the main photo for this story, and for the video clip above.

As we left the hotel and passed by the gate to the Sphinx enclosure where the dog had been, we saw that it was still there, but had turned around and was facing West gazing at the Sphinx and Khafre’s pyramid. The dog was sitting prone on its belly, just like the Sphinx, and just like the Anubis statue I first laid eyes upon 40 years before, its ears upright and alert. Again, without a single human soul nearby. I sank to my knees in utter humility and snapped the photo below before we left.

Omar and Mazen were both absolutely correct. Anpu - Anubis, and/or his twin Wepwawet, was, and is still, opening the way, looking out for me, and showing me amazing things, wonderful things…

… and has been ever since my first encounter with him in Seattle in 1978.

I also know now, beyond any shadow of a doubt, that the Egyptian Neteru are very real, and that they want to be Remembered by us. Whenever someone comes to their ancient homes, their temple sanctuaries, and communes with them there, they will invariably show themselves - and their appreciation, one way or another - and in amazing ways, just as Aleister and Rose discovered on the Equinox of the Gods in 1904.

All in all, Egypt was the ultimate destination of my lifelong journey - and the beginning of a new one…

And that… and this, my dear friends, is Why - Egypt!

in Ma’at,

Shane

Why Egypt? Part 2 - photographs and text © Shane Clayton / Wandering Stars Publishing 2022, except where noted

All Rights Reserved

Wandering Stars is dedicated to expounding the Sacred Science of Ancient Egypt

In memory and in honor of John Anthony West

Born July 9, 1932 - Wested February 6, 2018

AUM