Judgement - XX

Once upon a time, I had returned home from a failed attempt at relocating to Arizona to homestead and change my career. It was about a year or two later, and I was poor, depressed, and feeling like I didn't have much to offer the world. Or if I did, the world wasn't particularly inclined to reward me for it. I decided that I was going to eat psychedelic mushrooms as a sacrament in a ritual context. My objective was to identify a direction in which to move forward and to galvanize my focus, intention, and will power from that point onward. I knew I wanted to provide stability for my family and that I needed to increase my earning potential severalfold to do that. But how? And even if I knew how, I was feeling thoroughly beaten down and demoralized by life. Where would I find the strength? I needed help.

So I had my intention. From there, I observed a special diet consisting exclusively of fresh, whole foods. I omitted any added salt, sugar, and steered clear of fatty foods. I abstained from indulging in any sort of sexual outlet for two weeks, and I spent as much time in meditation and contemplation as I was able. I decided to go the Terence McKenna route and consume "Five dry grams in silent darkness." In retrospect, maybe the guy who was scared off of mushrooms for life from a bad trip is not the one to take advice from on that subject. 

I picked my mushrooms fresh and, while I wasn't familiar enough at the time to know which one it resembled off the top of my head, it occurred to me that the cluster I picked in preparation for my upcoming ritual resembled a letter of the Hebrew alphabet. I also knew that each Major Arcana Tarot key corresponds to a letter of the Hebrew alphabet. I looked up the subject and found that my cluster of mushrooms looked exactly like the letter "Shin," which is a pictogram of a tooth(sometimes said to be a serpent's specifically). 

Credit: Linda Feinberg

It corresponds to Judgement, the 20th trump of the Major Arcana. The card depicts the Archangel Gabriel blowing his horn on the day of final judgement. Earthside, the scene depicts a family of three blue corpses rising from the dead, apparently ready to ascend to Heaven. Arms outstretched, they seem super pumped about the rapture, as they begin their ascent from their caskets, which are seen floating on water. In the background there is another family of three in the same position. Originally, Judgement was designated as the trump corresponding to the element of Fire. More recently, the newly discovered planet, Pluto, bearing the Roman name for the god and ruler of the underworld, was attributed a correspondence to this card as well. As a path on the Kabbalistic Tree of Life, it connects the Sephira, Hod, to Malkuth.

Before we get too far into our story, let's take a moment to appreciate how the mushroom itself is a prime embodiment of the archetype that Judgement represents. Below is an excerpt from an unpublished essay I wrote some time ago called High Yoga: Soma, God, the Guru, and the Inquisition of our Era:

The renowned Permaculture educator, Geoff Lawton, once said that fungi are the teeth of the forest. Moribund timbers are divested of their form and identity, reduced to their base organic components by the ever-advancing mastication of mycelium. And so the dead live again. Wielding the powers of life and death, the mushroom embodies the themes of the Hindu Triumvirate of Shiva, Brahma, and Vishnu, who are eternally engaged in the cycle of destroying, re-creating, and sustaining the universe.

Death and rebirth. Apotheosis. Cyclical creation, sustenance, and dissolution. Chewing, digesting, fertilizing. Composting. These are the themes that Judgement orients us toward. The experience that I am sharing here is chock full of these themes, which is why I'm re-telling it here. Picking them out might be a good exercise in flexing your Tarot muscle.

When the mushrooms started to kick in, I was walking on the beach of the Strait of Juan de Fuca. I rushed back to my campsite and started building a fire. By the time it was built, I was tripping hard, but I still wanted to recite some mantras. I started with a Vedic hymn called the Ganapati Atharvashirsha, a mandala dedicated to Lord Ganesha. I had originally intended to recite the Pavamana Suktam, a hymn to the plant/god/psychoactive substance, Soma, of the Veda. But that proved too difficult. Night had fully set in by this point and there were a LOT of spiders running out of the logs I was throwing on the fire. It was all too much for me, and my wife and I retreated to our tent. She was on the same trip as I was, and it wasn't a pleasant one. It wasn't long before it became hard to move. As I laid there and went further and further into the depths of my mind, I became more and more inert outwardly, until I was completely paralyzed. 

I tripped HARD for a solid eight hours. Somewhere deep inside of my psyche I was in a watery hell of my own making. In the external world, it was cold and damp. The ocean soundscape, its waves, orca calls, and blasting fog horns permeated and colored my inner space. It was boundless. Like the crashing surf that inundated my auditory faculty, my awareness was inundated by every character flaw and failing as a person of integrity, no matter how exaggerated. The overall tone of the message the mushrooms were imparting was that of an overbearingly strict father figure. I recalled all of the times that I joked that I was eating my children as I mock-bit their fat little arms and cheeks, now suddenly horrified at the prospect. Why did it feel so real? How much power do our words have? Then I found myself to be a member of the infamous Donner Party, starved to the point of actual cannibalism. The details weren't deeply relived, but my sense of identification with the taboo and the people involved was complete and intense. 

Goya - Saturn Eating His Son

I phased out of that reality and returned to a sense of floating in a deep, wet ocean of Chaos, memories of every shortcoming bombarding me from every direction. I tried to lean in and embrace the lesson; to surrender to the experience. I wasn't only confronted with my own misdeeds, but I was forced to see and feel from the perspective of the perpetrator of every type of crime against humanity; every act that I despised or held judgement toward. I was awful. I was the lowest of the low. I was the murderer, the rapist, the breaker of every taboo. I felt nothing but guilt, shame, and regret. I was horrified by myself. But I did my best to embrace it as if there were some special lesson for me in this experience. 

My sense of self dilated and my frame of reference expanded. I was the God Shiva, in whose radiant but terrible dancing form all events and characters, no matter how angelic or devilish are contained. I was filled with bliss and in awe of myself. I felt my actual hair (I had very much at the time) sprawled out on the floor of my tent and said, "I have really great hair." My wife ran her fingers through it and said, "You REALLY DO!" I closed my eyes and saw myself as an ethereal dancing Shiva, the iconic Nataraj. My wild dreadlocks, shimmering with the light of the galaxies and constellations nested within them, flew out in every direction, to the very ends of time and space. In that moment, I knew my wife to be the embodiment of the Goddess Kali. I bowed inwardly to her as such. Why didn't I treat her as if she were That all of the time? "Stupid piece of shit!" I told myself. Then I was a worm. I oscillated back and forth between identifying with the highest of the high and the lowest of the low, between extremes of bliss alternating with anxiety and being all knotted up, over and over again.

What I logically and rationally know to have been campers at the site across the trail from mine was a group of mermaids in my mind. Bastard mermaids. Their rambunctious laughter and merry-making mocked my pain and anguish. It was an affront to my very existence. It was pure torture. In keeping with the prevailing sentiment of the night, I was deeply ashamed of the unnameable curses I directed toward them, as I continued to do so, unable to stop. Then they burst out into a kind of folksy, indie-sounding song. Harmonizing voices rang out full and clear, with an acoustic guitar for accompaniment. The definition of beauty and sweetness. They were angels all along and I had been wrong to malign them. I was instantly transported into a state of bliss, gratitude, and worship. 

Gradually the effects wore off and I regained my ability to move to the extent that I was able to find my way out of the tent, with much difficulty, and to the nearest bathroom to take an emergency shit. The next day I was still weak. I ate some fish tacos and had a beer as soon as I had the opportunity. I still felt awful, and so did my stomach, for another two or three weeks. But I had a sense of momentum that had eluded me for years. Initially, I started looking into med school, and I immediately got a temp job as a stepping stone. But I got a job as a carpenter kind of as an accident and sort of liked it. Then I learned what kind of money I could be making as a union carpenter and went that route instead. Within a year I was closing on a beautiful house. I was tenacious, focused, and confident. It was nothing short of a miracle.

Judgement is a lot of things. But you could sum it all up in one word if you wanted to. Namely, rebirth. My mushroom ritual had me live this theme out mentally and emotionally in so many different ways, at so many different orders of magnitude. Somehow, although I don't quite know how, this helped me to embody the transformation I had set my sights on prior to the experience. And it also helped me to understand this card better than I ever had before. I hope you've found it as enlightening as I did, hopefully without the trauma that accompanied my experience.

Additionally, although it is already implicit in the above story, I believe there is a special interrelationship between Saturn (aka Kali) and Pluto (aka Shiva) and between the elements of Fire and Water. I don't want to take up any more space in this entry, but it seems like it might be fruitful to highlight this point for the sake of those who are inclined to follow this line of inquiry.

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