Remembering the oracular way
*ecosystems of knowing*
Greetings from the Hedge! Casey Zabala here, resident hedge-rider, intuitive witch, artist & author, sharing my divinations and musings for living a magical life during these precarious times.
As promised, an introduction to oracular consciousness, and a plea for us to return to an ensouled relationship with our planet, the otherworld of spirits, and each other. As we enter a new era of relating, my dream is to reconnect the oracles to their places of power, and to collaboratively recenter our soul back into the Earth. Let me know if this dream resonates.
Learn more about my practice, and book a session here.
“The future has an ancient heart” - Carlo Levi
Imagine, for a moment, that rather than feeling isolated in your uncertainty, that you had access to well worn paths, paths of inspiration, poetry, action and deep witnessing from the cosmos. Oracular consciousness illuminates these paths, paths that have been traveled by countless pilgrims before you. It is time for us to gather up our uncertainties and travel back to an ancient oracular center to ask for guidance in our time of need…
Ancient paths to wisdom ~
We have been journeying for days on dusty rocky slopes gaining elevation on the sacred mountain. Along with our curiosity, we carry gifts for the temple guardians. A goat trudges alongside us, its bell keeping time with each step. We finally reach the temple complex, in awe of the panoramic view of the mountain range, honeyed by the evening light. The smell of burning laurel leaves mixes with an unplaceable sweet fragrance, wafting up from the springs meandering through the many stone temples. You have arrived at the center of the world, the omphalos, and you will be able to connect with the Pythia to receive your guidance in the morning…
There is no doubt about it, we are moving through a dark night of our collective soul. The chaos is quickening and the world splintering into greater fractals of disaster, as harsh realities and incredible atrocities flood our experience. And in this darkest moment we are tasked with calling forth a new dawn, new ways to relate, to care for each other, to survive - and many communities are already doing so. During these troubling times, spirit provides invaluable guidance in our world building and world healing practices, if we are willing and able to listen.
Now it is your turn to consult the oracle. You have made your offerings to the temple guardians and are now being led into the central temple, the aduton. There, in the dimly lit room, the Pythia awaits you, seated on a three legged tripod over a small crack in the Earth. The sweet fragrance has intensified, and your heart rate drops. Your question is delivered, and you wait in silence until the Pythia speaks… you watch a wave of motion moves through her body, from her legs to her lips, and when she speaks she sounds like a hive of bees as she chants a lyrical riddle back to you.…
When we travel back to a time when oracles were consulted as a course of everyday life, we find an ecosystem of meaningful relationship and connection. The oracle is tended by community, inspired by the Earth’s essences, and in relationship to the spirits they channel as well as the pilgrim asking for their guidance. There, in a dusty dark temple complex, we might recover the archetypes, spirits, and forms of relation which might support us as we navigate great destruction, and cultivate our rebirth. These oracular centers steeped in myth and tradition (of which there were many all over the world) are where we will find healing keys for integrating lost aspects of our collective psyche. Keys that unlock belonging, connection with the other (unseen / spiritual) world, and access to a living relationship with the natural world.
Oracles are ecosystems ~
Our future rebirth requires a massive collaboration of interdisciplinary healers, artists, activists, organizers, teachers, and seers. Multi-passionate, multi-faithed, multi-hyphenate doers and believers. Together we are resuscitating the “ancient heart” of our future, a heart that reveres natural cycles, that honors many wisdom ways, and honors death and dying as an integral step in a healthy evolutionary process. Our archetypal guides, as we co-create our future, are Plutonic and primordial; the soul of the world, or anima mundi, our ancestors, guides and gods, and the oracles who receive, channel, and disseminate these spirits’ wisdom.
“Spiritual knowing is a participatory event: It can involve the creative participation of not only our minds, but also our hearts, bodies, souls, and most vital essence. Furthermore, spiritual energies are not confined to our inner world, but can also flow out of relationships, communities, and even places.” Jorge N. Ferrer. Revisioning Transpersonal Theory : A Participatory Vision of Human Spirituality.
As a student of the oracular and a practitioner of divination, I have experienced how moments of oracular consciousness can break through the spell of the materialist paradigm. Oracles have the ability to peel back the veil of disenchantment, to tap us into a far older paradigm where our individual psyches were embedded into the cosmos, inseparable from the soul of the world. Tuning into oracular consciousness offers us modern individuals an ancestral and ensouled perspective while we collectively navigate our current planetary crisis. Imagine gaining direct access to the world’s heartbeat, being a channel for otherworldly wisdom, and stitching the worlds meaningfully back together again. This is a quest for actualization beyond our egos, the task of relocating spirit in the material world.
Our crisis is collective, so our solutions must be a woven tapestry of healing measures, interconnected. Now more than ever, we must leave no stone unturned in our quest to engage with the struggle that we face as planetary citizens. Some of us must journey back to the ancient center of the world, to a time when oracular consciousness permeated daily life, to resurrect valuable forms of knowing.
Participating in oracular consciousness is no passive or receptive vehicle to new awareness. Oracular comes from the Greek root: orare, which means to pray or to speak. Central to oracular consciousness is communication, or an exchange of ideas between oracle and channeled being, and the receiver of the messages. In order to activate oracular consciousness we must remember how to communicate with elements of the natural world, the land, animals, ancestors, and planetary archetypes. How might one go about opening this line of communication? Begin to listen to the birdsong with your whole body. Notice the music of water whenever it is singing. Become conscious of the subtle language of your home, its creaks, groans, sighs... Everything is speaking to us, all the time.
One way we can enter into oracular awareness is through mythological histories, which offer us the participatory language and landscape of the ancestors, those peoples who had not yet fully separated from nature. Mythical history connects us to those who read the night sky for direction, consulted the flight patterns of birds for daily wisdom, and read the wind whistling through the trees. For our ancient ancestors, this sort of conscious participation with the Earth was a way of life, woven into lineage through their mythology. Oracular consciousness requires that we once again embed ourselves into the macrocosm of the cosmos in such a way that we are aware of how inseparable we truly are. Just as there are many diverse oracular traditions, there are many ways to connect with the wisdom of the oracle, whether you are channeling wisdom, or receiving it.
Our current modern paradigm has become untethered from its soul source, the anima mundi. The anima mundi is the ensouled presence and intelligence of Earth; this soul presence is not only located in the natural world, but is also located within us. If we are to tap into healing solutions to humanity’s current destructive trajectory, we must reconnect with this inter-being intelligence, soul intelligence. This is our greatest spiritual task, to recognize and acknowledge the spiritual wisdom all around us. Once we begin to reconnect with the spiritual energy of the world around us, we open up lines of creative communication.
Honoring non-human intelligence ~
By reconnecting with the consciousness of our ancient ancestors through the oracles, we trigger a deep remembrance of the language and spirit of the anima mundi, as well as pathways of communing with the archetypes around and within us. Through oracular consciousness we can forge and renew pathways of communication with the intelligence of the Earth itself.
In this quest for reconnection with the Earth’s soul, we must honor our Earth as evolving, regenerative, and able to both destroy as well as create. In our modern mechanistic schema, we believe that we can rationalize and understand the inner workings of our world and therefore control it – and this is pure hubris. In an extreme expression of this, we have created new modes of “intelligence” that are completely untethered from biology, ecology, and soul in the form of AI. How can this artificial intelligence solve the world’s most pressing problems, when it is so alien to them? Worse still, AI perpetuates the language and impulse of extraction which is leading to our ultimate demise.
Collectively, we have forgotten that we exist as a community member within a conscious ecosystem, teeming with other forms of consciousness, organic cycles of evolution, and mysteries beyond our human perceptions. Our “human” intelligence, intuition, and spirituality is not created or nurtured in isolation. Oracles and oracular consciousness plugs us back into a meaningful matrix of wisdom, wisdom that is collective, rooted in systems of reciprocity, and informed by life’s natural mysterious cycles. Oracles throughout time have been a bridge to those mysteries and cycles. Oracles are a bridge to the otherworld, the Plutonic realms, straddling the threshold of the living and the dead. For example, oracles at Delphi practiced a deep form of spirit communion with the Earth and the Pythia (chthonic serpent), the guardian at the threshold of life and death. The powerful wisdom of the oracles is rooted in their connection with what is unknowable and captivated humans for millennia; the mysteries of death, life, and rebirth.
The oracles are returning, as more of us understand that we are stewarding the death of one world, and the birth of another. As we navigate apocalyptic territory, it is more prudent than ever to understand the importance of endings. Capitalism is a lie, endless progress is impossible. Now we must return to the reality of death and inevitable decay, as processes to honor, revere, and turn to in times of trouble. The oracles can show us the way. Oracular consciousness teaches us the rituals and shows us how to dance with the greatest mysteries in order to shepherd forth renewal.
I have so much more to share about oracular ways… I will be returning with oracular myths, cultures, poetry, and methodologies to support us all as we reconnect with the anima mundi, and usher forth a new worlds into being. Please send me your curiosities and questions regarding this topic. I’d love to hear from you.
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