The Scattering

Isis and Osiris and the 8th Principle of the Oscillation of Magic

captionPainted relief of Osiris and Isis in Temple of Seti I at Abydos...

Some say they were in love with each other from the beginning, Isis and Osiris, brother and sister. Nestled together in the dark womb of their mother, the sky goddess Nut, who had mated with Geb, the earth god, they had no idea they weren’t one. There were actually four children within Nut’s womb, another brother and sister, Set and Nephthys, and all four children were descended from Atum, the creator god who gave birth to their parents Geb and Nut. Imagine you are each one of these children.

But first let me say that love in this story, perhaps, didn’t mean quite the same thing as it does in our time. It wasn’t a Hallmark greeting card kind of event. Nobody gave each other roses and chocolates. I guess you could say it was more of a kind of knowing. This person is my other half. Without them I am only half myself. You could also say love had nothing to do with another person. Love was not something outside of one’s self, and that something, when fully embodied, resulted in a knowing that one was an aspect of Atum, the creator god. Seen this way, love was a contribution far greater than devotion to another, though the path to embodying it could certainly include what we know as romantic love. I’m talking about aloha mā, self-reflective love, a phrase I use often in The Corpus Callosum Chronicles. (Because I want to keep this narrative flowing, for more details, please read through the archives or ask me a question in the comments.)

So, yes, maybe Isis and Osiris were in love since they floated together in Nut’s womb, brother and sister, but don’t be confused by the incestuous overtones. Yes, pharaohs in Ancient Egypt did marry their sisters, which was definitely not good for their bloodlines, but the story of Isis and Osiris is not one of retribution for breaking a taboo. It’s the story of one soul fully embodied in two forms, a female and male body, and what happens when two completely evolved beings unite in a marriage that gives birth to something greater than themselves.

That makes it sound easy. It’s not. First comes the scattering.

I am going to make this personal now and reveal that the last month has been very difficult for me. Many situations in my life that are not in alignment with my holistic self are either screaming to be relieved of their distortions (through my physical health), or have actually blown up. I got fired from my job for advocating for myself in an attempt to create a work space that was in alignment with my ‘unihipili’s nourishment.

By that I mean one that was paying me properly according to my rights as a worker under the law, but also one that was in alignment with my internal feminine and masculine, known in Hawaiian culture as the ‘unihipili and the ‘uhane. Over the past three months in the Aloha Mā Congress, I have come into a deep personal gnosis of these centers. First, through learning the name of my ‘unihipili through tapping into her physical essence, then asking her what nourished and harmed her. Through that, I created her prayer, which served as an introduction to my ‘uhane.

The ‘unihipili, as the leader, gives directions to the hero, the ‘uhane, whose job is to take her instructions into the world and create. Most of us are so out of touch with our leader we are not giving any instructions at all, leaving the ‘uhane, who must take action as the hero, to create without instructions. No wonder so many of our individual lives feel off, and our collective culture so hollow.

Once I learned the materials of my ‘uhane through meditation, which revealed his doctrine, without trying, I was delivered into the holistic, known in Hawaiian as the aumākua, an androgynous consciousness that represents the union between feminine and masculine whose essence is true affluence, or flow. However, first the scattering had to occur, the destruction of all parts inhibiting this flow, hence me getting fired from a job that was a violation of the prayer of my ‘unihipili, and why I’m on my way to a cardiologist this afternoon to get some machine strapped to my body that’s going to monitor my irregularly beating heart for the next 4 days.

What is the scattering?

In this whole series, The Art of Spell-Casting, I’ve been exploring how the scientific definitions of the 7 properties of light correspond to the 9 properties of the oscillation of magic according to Heka, as an offering to how this knowledge can assist poets in particular, but that actually applies to all artists, to create poems and works of art that are grounded in a formula in alignment with cosmic law that has the potential to re-enchant a disenchanted world. If you don’t think you’re an artist and this essay isn’t for you, release that thought. Every human being is an artist. Some of the greatest humans I know are what I’d call artists of life. Many are poor and unrecognized and genuinely what you might call down and out, but they are creating their lives in the moment because they have remained true to themselves without conforming to a culture that would rather have them stay quiet and comfortable than brilliant. Hats off to them.

Back to us. Or at least me. Maybe you are one of those artists of life who’s never conformed. If so, thank you. You probably don’t need to read this essay, unless you want to know that someone sees the greatness of your soul.

These words are for those of us who are disenchanted and feel there is no way out of this culture of competition and war that is engulfing our planet. The ship is going down and we all know it.

But what if we started singing as it sinks? And what if those songs were spells that actually tapped into the oscillation of magic that corresponds, minus 2 properties, with the properties of light? (The two properties science is missing are Revelation and Completion. For now, I will let you reflect on that, but will offer my opinion on why at the end of this series. Feel free to speculate yourself in the comments.)

Would our songs then become enchantments to ensure the legacy humans have been entrusted with transmitting to the next world that will rise up after this one has drowned?

And what is that legacy? Love.

It’s hard to imagine that love doesn’t exist everywhere in the universe, but it doesn’t, or at least not the awareness of it.

I understand that. I have experienced this amnesia. You probably have, too. That is why we need the scattering, the rending apart in order to rebuild.

Science defines the property of light known as scattering as the way light behaves when it interacts with a medium that contains particles, or with the boundary between mediums where defects or structures are present.

Mū Hawaiian magic, Heka, says scattering is the realm of fractals and replication. In the oscillation of magic, scattering is how we make our contribution.

Combining science and Heka, we can conclude that our contribution, the very reason we incarnate on earth, requires us to break into as many pieces as we need to in order to be fully available for spirit to flow through us. Only then can we be reassembled as a holistic entity where all parts recognize they are essential to integrity of being.

Life scatters us, breaks us down, and if we stick with the process until it’s complete, if we don’t slip back into amnesia or remain in the land of the disenchanted ruled by King Despair and Queen Cynicism, we start to realize we are constantly breaking down and reforming. There is no end to it. And that we have some agency in this process. Yes, everything is constantly breaking down and reforming, but we can participate in the process. That’s what spells are for. That’s what art, the kind of art I revere, does.

The realization that nothing is ever secure or stable can be shattering if you are looking through the world through nihilist-tinted glasses, but if you change to kaleidoscope lenses, you realize that you still exist within the endless breakdown and rebirth, not as a body or a personality, but as a fractal, an endlessly repeating pattern where every part, no matter how zoomed in or out, looks similar to the whole.

When you, yourself, become the fractal, your poems, your paintings and songs, contribute to the patterns that create our life on Earth and beyond, and like I said, although my focus in this series has been on helping artists in the creative process, what I’m really saying applies to everyone. You are the artist of your own life. Make it a contribution that will be a gift for others by allowing yourself to be scattered until there is nothing left of the you that stopped believing magic could really change the world. The only way is through.

I began today with Isis and Osiris, because their story demonstrates this process. Let’s finish with it.

There were four children in Nut’s womb, as we learned. Isis and Osiris grew up, married, and Osiris became the first pharaoh, ruling Egypt with Isis at his side. All agreed that he was a good ruler.

Set, his brother was jealous. I’m sure you know the feeling. Envy at your golden boy brother who gets to be god of fertility and agriculture and ma’at, the natural order of the universe. And if that’s not enough, he get to marry the most beautiful girl in school who turns out to be the goddess of healing, birth, and magic, while you end up being the god of war, chaos and storms. That’s Set and it’s no fun. Not to say everyone experiencing envy turns into a murderer, which is what Set did to Osiris, dismembering his body and scattering it all across Egypt.

At this point in the story, I’d like you to remember what I asked in the beginning of this essay: all these characters are living inside you. You are Osiris. You are Isis. You are Set, and you are Nephthys, goddess of funerary rites, death, night, and temple service, and the other child from Nut’s womb who’s about to play her part in this story.

Set becomes pharaoh after killing his brother. Isis, grief-stricken, travels across the land with Nephthys. They gather up all the scattered parts in every region of Egypt until they’ve found them all. (In some versions they can’t find his penis and Isis makes one for him. Make of that what you will.) Some other compadres—Thoth, associated with esoteric knowledge, and Anubis, god of embalming and funerary rites, lend their skills, and together the four of them reassemble the body of Osiris and bring him back to life.

With Osiris restored to the realm of the living, he now becomes a god of resurrection, and Isis conceives a child with him, Horus, who goes on to become the true king of Egypt. Osiris, however, can’t remain in the land of the living and moves on without resisting to duat, the Egyptian underworld where he becomes the Lord of the Dead.

But this story is not really about Osiris, at least not for me. This story is about all the questions it makes me ask, like, what makes Osiris more “true” a king than Set?

Here’s what I think. It’s not birthright, the way we measure kingship in our time. Do you really think King Charles of England deserves to sit on a throne because Queen Elizabeth was his mother? I mean, really? Kingship, in this way, is a result of the amnesia that afflicts most of us on this planet, and from my viewpoint, this amnesia isn’t getting us anywhere I want to go, or where I want any of us to go. Competition, scarcity, violence, subjugation, empire: I say no.

When we awaken from this amnesia, we realize Horus is the true king because he’s the result of the union between a fully realized feminine and masculine embodied in his parents Isis and Osiris. He has been delivered unto kingship by this union.

Now imagine this whole process is happening inside you. You are Horus and you are the true king because you are the result of the marriage of your own ‘unihipili and “uhane. Horus is the evidence of the aumākua. Yes, he is a deity, but what if deities are nothing more than aspects of ourselves we’ve outsourced to others instead of realizing we contain these energies within ourselves?

And that is where I’ll leave this story on the 8th part of the oscillation of magic.

I am still in the scattering, but I can feel my parts reassembling. How about you? Are you allowing yourself to be scattered so you can make your contribution, or are you holding onto the riverbank out of fear you’ll drown? If so, I get it. I’ve been scattered many times before and it is terrifying if you don’t understand its purpose. Even then, it can be terrifying, and I’ll admit right now I am feeling pretty shaky, though nowhere near the despair and hopelessness I’ve experienced my other rounds.

All I can tell you, is that I’ve been scattered many times, and I’ve reassembled, each time with more ability to cope when the next breakdown/breakthough comes around.

This time I’m going to stay with that grit, the boundary between mediums where defects in my structure present themselves, and pray that I’m strong enough to allow the process to complete. This time I’m not going to freeze or numb out. Anyone with me? Titration is the key to walking back up from the Underworld instead of crawling on bloody knees. Remember what Mary Oliver said in her poem “Wild Geese.”

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.

And finally, I’d like to note that the symbol for The Corpus Callosum Chronicles is the Eye of Horus, which I chose simply because I’ve always been drawn to it. I had no idea that it was a visual representation of the aumākua, the result of the unification of masculine and feminine, which is the point of this project, and also more than that. It’s my kiakahi, my purpose, why I’m here on Earth. To enchant. To break the chains of amnesia. To help you remember your own spells.

Kō aloha lā ea

Concentrate on love by way of the light