Lamp & Labyrinth: Sovereignty At The Center Of The Labyrinth

What is the Labyrinth?

Simply put, a labyrinth is all the stuff you have to get through to find empowerment and to find your potential self and sovereignty is at its center. We use the analogy of the Sovereign Seat in the center not only because we see it in our visions during rare moments in devotional practice, in acts of what Irish polytheists called Illumination. We also use this analogy because it represents a few elements at play in mysticism. Those elements are lucidity and judgement, given in these allegories as the lamp with which you light your own way to the Center.

a hedge maze photographed during the day through an iron fence — Unsplash / pixabay.com

But, the walls of the labyrinth run high and run low, the passageways are narrow at times, and wide at others parts. You’ll have beings who help you along the way or detract from progress, areas of light and of darkness, treachery and peril, and even sometimes near madness as you question every part of your worldview. The beings in the labyrinth are you because it is all you, but it is not the “you” that is your immortal soul.

So, we illuminate our many spirited nature and externalize these forces where they belong. We don’t get to be sure we’re speaking to real spirits until we’ve had practice inspiriting our psychic faculties and develop relationships with them that survive the lifespan of lies. Inside our head and outside of it, many spirits dwell. Right now you operate in the real world from one of any number of places within the labyrinth, and when you become things like a father or mother, bearing children who remind you of a younger you, you’ll find yourself circling back to your own childhood, seeing the same patterns from a wiser place.

Sometimes you get as far as you think you’ll get and end up circling back and see how far you’ve come and get emboldened to put in a good charge toward the center. And, all this from a different path and perspective. The labyrinth is not a maze, it leads in or out, toward or away from your seat of power, the Center of the Labyrinth, and your journey through it is your life.

The treasure that is found at the center of the labyrinth is Sovereignty, over oneself and ones places, taken by themselves, empowered by themselves. Sovereignty is rightly held over the land by those in power who justly inhabit it, make the land and its inhabitants their kin, and hold concern and not contempt for them. What kind of Sovereign ruler are you over your body and psyche? Do you treat yourself like beloved kin?

The Bone of your Stone and the Flesh of your Earth, aka your own body, is also land. Your body is your land and property of a type not for sale, though as it’s lord you may wish to lease it. After all, it is your spirit that inhabits it. You are the land god of your own swath of earth. Your Heart is its true ruler, married to it, feeling what impulses and biorythms we group into emotions and then into feelings. Your mind is the hearts advising draoi or wise gothi. This is the macrocosm of the self mirrored as the larger whole. The Heart is the Only Nation.

The U.S. Bill of rights isn’t something the government grants us, it is an incomplete governmental document informing future government officials of what sovereign rights the gods gave us, the sovereignty over ourselves, given to every individual agnostic of their qualities and even species. These are rights which folks enjoy naturally in societies outside of colonization without being stated or ought to at least.

But Sovereignty is more tricky than that. In my devotional UPG, The Three Queens, and some weird group of women in black that feels like her chosen are clear in their words to me that Sovereignty is a personal thing, as well as a collective thing. It has a mirror on the personal level without being something different than national sovereignty, as an eternal principle that expresses itself differently in a different context.

Without getting into other topics, the lore shows several persons of power who gain and lose their abilities, fire, magic, or have it bound by some benevolent force. Truth and Cosmic Order as Fírinne is the driving force of a Sovereign person’s Dan or destiny. Heathens may read this as Wyrd and Orlog, but it’s the same.

Why Does it Matter?

Unusually for me, I am now totes a polytheist pagan, My answer won’t satiate a skeptical or completely logical mind. I will not seek to give myself credibility through my tale of the use of skepticism to escape christian brainwashing and baggage. I will not reveal my secrets to give myself credibility on the return journey back through belief. Everyone who practices our devotional polytheism long enough will have experience with the gods. To a Devotional Polytheist of any discipline and practice, Faith is something better put toward the future of humanity and not in the very real gods.

We Are

In my Otherworldly experiences, one of the pieces of gnosis that was glaringly obvious and written everywhere is that WE ARE. Full Stop.

We are many beings carved from the Dismembered One. We are a Cosmic Giant divided into many spirits before time began going forward and backwards like a spindle unwinding both ways. And so inside this context we’re in, we’ve always been here and will continue to always be here. This place is a forgetting, a device of what Fintan mac Bochra would call the Inuin cuil or Back Brain. This forgetting is an illusion which can be shut off though a mystic practice called the Spear of Sun according to the late, but still relevant, tales referenced FINTAN MAC BÓCHRA: IRISH SYNTHETIC HISTORY REVISITED, aka FMB: ISHR. Also in the life of St. Columbia we have:

Totum totius terrae orbem, cum ambitu ociani et caeli, uno eodemque momento quasi sub uno solis radio, mirabiliter laxato mentis sinu, clare et manifestissime speculentur,

The mind’s limits being miraculously loosened, they clearly and most plainly behold the whole of the earth, together with the circuit of the ocean and the heavens, in one single moment, as if beneath a single ray of the sun.

“It seems also that the revelation experienced after the influence of the gáe gréine is similar in nature to the phenomenon of imbus gréine ‘the great knowledge of the sun’ referring mostly to poetical inspiration” – FMB: ISHR

“As J. Carey informs me, the ray that goes to the back of Fintan’s head may be connected with the statement in Cath Maighe Rath that it was specifically the loss of his inchinn cúil ‘back brain’ which gave Cenn Faelad his powers of heightened remembrance (O’Donovan 1842: 282.6).” – FMB: ISHR

Odin’s own seat of power was fully found when he went through an ego death ritual which shuts off the back brain or the brain of forgetting. The tales say he was given the runes but I’ve been through a similar rite, I know without a doubt in my mind that he remembered the runes. The inchinn cúil is also called the brain of forgetting in Why Cenn Faelad ‘lost’ his ‘Brain of Forgetting’ “. Hildegard L.C. Tristram.

Words will fail me if I continue toward that direction, the world of symbols we live in and communicate with is precisely the thing you shed to receive illumination. You cannot look at ego through ego, you cannot cease vanity through further vainity. And so you cannot see outside of the world of symbols when you think, speak, and file away nature into symbols. To receive the wisdom of the hazelnuts from the Salmon, one must see without seeing and shed all notions. One must walk around segais counterclockwise, and challenge the order. One must become an outsider in a strange land to oneself.

To do this, one must value experience over thinking, increase mindfulness and mental discipline, listen to all parts of oneself and nature; and let all reaction be chosen by us and not for us by some Tyrant Oppressor among our many spirited psyche. Entheogenic drugs such as Soma or, or a potion I personally consume, a secret recipe I call Driog, shuts this part of the brain off and activates this remembering capabilities as Ecstatic practices do. I feel like I can remember every bit of data I’ve ever perceived, not specifically, but like a circuit which leads up to gnosis. When I focus on parts of the circuit in this state, what feels like madness and my mind splitting into threads, but when I look at where they connect, the gnosis receive illuminates my being. Again words are failing me.

Ecstatic and holotropic breathing does the trick without Driog. What’s interesting is that the words spirit, inspiration, and respiration all relate to the breath and the secret to the revealing powers of chanting and breathing practices.

During one of my Driog induced visits with the Aos Sidhe, they were fairly adamant about certain things, most of which they don’t want me to share. However, I have permission to share how they feel sovereignty relates to empowerment and skill in this context.

We’re all here, we always will be, the nastier of us are just coping with their existence just like the best of us. The universe is a mathematically ordered construct with elements of injected chaotic functions. Suffering is the result of the factors, when it isn’t done to yourself by ignorance or choice. As spirits opposed to human instantiations, we are all truly of equal intellect, spirits, minds and bodies. However our instantiations in this life are for the purpose of escaping the terrible truths that come along with the release of fear Illumination brings so we can slowly adjust to them before we can receive Permanent Illumination. Shaming others is always wrong except when the bard’s blotching satires come from the hill of compassion, hospitality, and right duty. We’ll all see things from every perspective eventually and this is required for whatever we are becoming together. We die here, go there, stay there, come back. I don’t for the life of me feel right with the notion we’re all one entity seeing through one another’s eyes. Spirit reflects nature and vice versa, and though we are part of a system, we are separate.

I was in a place which was like the center of all worlds. I saw a ring of beings that a few of my friends describe, one from an NDE and another from LSD usage. Like a cut gem, each point an immortal spirit and there are 9 to the power of 9 trillion beings in this vision. Each person’s thoughts were like grooves on a record in some spacetime fabric. I can’t stand metaphysical junk and I always thought the Akashic records were bullshit. I don’t have any such tradition in my polytheism but I totally saw what I would call their homologous or analogous counterpart.

And we’re stuck judging each other fully visible until each one of us moves on and finds empowerment, or their sovereign potential self. I spoke with some very low level gods, reaching them with the help of a blue flamed woman who ascended me to their celestial realms. The discussed with me that their blessings and help are simply temporary and that transformation was the true way to receive permanent help.

So there really isn’t a point to Sovereignty that I have been shown by these beings, be they Deep Ancestors or Demi-gods or Heroes. It really seems pointless and the only reason to do it is to develop yourself. Folks who do it for ego won’t ever reach it. Folks who do it because they romanticize things will stumble upon the terrible truths that I have and go running back to the forgetting. Why do it then? We’ll be in this current emotional state we are currently in life after life, forever, in one part of nature’s bosom or another, until we do.

Another reason is to look after your tribe. If we’re all spirit which comes here to the Middle Isle or the middle world, and we’re this gem sphere thingy, those points on the gem nearest to you are your soul group. You’re closely affected by them as they are you. Becoming a spiritual leader of your soul group or tribe over and over in the pursuit of serving them is the only real reason I can see to do this work other than the impending fear of eternity.

Bottom line, the internal mind can grow toward compassion or away from it, and the fully Illuminated mind who’s found their Sovereign Seat has no choice but to see his fate wrapped up in that of every other spirit that exists. These deep bonds of connectedness between all spirits is why some of the great spiritual philosophers reduce the many spirits into one. But they’re describing the system of interlocking spirits, gods and men as having one agenda and source of mind. This is not emphasized or even included in most polytheism. I don’t think monism and polytheism are that different except for the elevation of mechanics into spirits or reduction thereof into a single mechanical legal god.

What are the Contexts of Sovereignty?

We can break any tenets, virtues, or notions down in the following categories, remembering we are using the world of symbols to navigate our brains poorly. Below we’ve briefly listed only a narrow selection topics of sovereignty grazes.

Self Context

Empowerment & Agency, Belief Cages, Internalization of bad programming, Changing the Story and Fighting the oppressive Tyrant in your psyche… you know the one. Navigating the Labyrinth in full honesty toward whatever true ends.

Clear definition of appropriateness of what others want from us, based on the standards of injury to others. A couple of examples being gay conversion therapy or being harassed or threatened not to have an abortion. If being gay or having an abortion isn’t injurious to another individual, then it isn’t appropriate for friends of family members to express their desire for you to change.

Family Context

Relationships & Consent, Production of Healthy people, personal childhood privacy, issues of abuse, the right to choose gender and be a stable developing family.