Vincent Bridges

Steve’s Initiatory Experience with the Djed:

a brief introduction by Vincent Bridges

I have always found Steve’s astral adventures to be quite fascinating even when I may question the historicity of his encounters. Archetypes are not historical figures but their remnants or residue lingering in the collective unconscious. Steve has peopled his inner life with spiritual forces that have direct validity for his psyche and how it connects to the myth of our country and our time. This is quite admirable, on the whole…

The occult history of the American Revolution has yet to be written, and when it is one may hope that the point is made that “Mason” is as loose a term in relation to spiritual connection and initiation as “Sufi” is the Islamic world. There was indeed a preponderance of “Masons” involved on both sides of the conflict (Washington, Lafayette and Cornwallis all belonged to the same regimental lodge), but the current that informed the deeper matters, such as the alignments in Washington City, the District of Columbia, was only superficially “Masonic.”

The three intellects most involved with the spiritual meaning of America were Washington, Jefferson and Franklin, an example of the wide range of “Masons” at the time. Washington was the Master Mason of the Alexandria 22 lodge, chartered as a Scottish Rite, Royal Arch Temple in the tradition of the French lodges founded by the Chevalier Ramsey. This branch can only be called illuminationist, and its practices and initiations, spiritually, would be more along the lines of what today would be called ceremonial magick. Washington would have felt right at home in a Golden Dawn Temple circa 1900.

Jefferson never officially became a “Mason,” but was involved with some very “Illuminationist” groups in France in the 1780s. We may think of him as the very bright but un-initiated enlightenment era intellect. As such he went his own way, absorbing the various spiritual influences that came his way and creating his “religion” as he went along. Jefferson was most influenced, at this level, by Franklin.

Benjamin Franklin is the complete enlightenment era scientist/philosopher, the man who harnessed lightning, as he was known in London in the 1770s. His connections cover almost all the basics of the occult underground of his era, from Dashwood and the Hellfire Club to the radical Jacobins of pre-revolutionary France. Franklin, much like Dee two hundred years earlier, stood at the juncture of science and philosophy.

All three saw “America” as a kind of magickal future for the human race, when the archetypes that had been mediated by King and Church would be democratically available to all citizens. This would in fact create, if successful, a kind of psychic protection against “tyranny.” No king or demagogue could grab the symbolic current of a freely archetypal democracy and make it subservient to his will.

To that end, the goddess Columbia was created. The creation of a divine archetype is a very high-level magickal affair that is not undertaken lightly. Yet, that’s just what these three magicians, with help from a few others, actually did.

In the late 18th and early 19th century, a stream of images crystallized the goddess form into “Columbia.” The ideas that animated her can best be seen by her attributes, that is the objects or symbols that are displayed with her. She is most often shown with an eagle, broken chains and pottery, a cornucopia, images of George Washington, a laurel wreath, a liberty pole and cap, a liberty tree, an olive branch, a rattlesnake, a shield and a stone tablet. The statue of Columbia behind the speaker’s chair in the house of representatives is a fine example. In this one we see the Eagle, and on the other side a snake coiled around a Greek column.

Columbia is not a Greek or Roman goddess, although she borrowed a few attributes when she needed them, but a consciously created god-form archetype inserted into the mass consciousness of the country at its founding. She now stands, 19 feet tall, atop the Capital dome gazing to the west toward the Djed/obelisk of the Washington Monument. Perhaps, as Steve’s vision suggests, she was designed to be activated at just this moment in time. Ovason’s book on Washington has some very suggestive evidence thatpoints toward that conclusion and Steve’s astral experience helps us see that the Washington Djed/obelisk is a connection point to the larger issue of cosmic timing.

Steve’s experience, his astral journey to the center of the galaxy, is an advanced initiatory experience along the lines of what the western mystery schools call The Adam Kadmon, or the experience of the cosmic man. Most of us would go through the Trapizeum pyramid of stars in Orion rather than make the leap with the reincarnating dead all the way to galactic center, but Steve is the adventurous type.

The torch metaphor represents the ancient wisdom connection of that initiatory experience, lit by Steve‚Ä¢s anima and hidden in a concept where the dark forces are forbidden to look. Once the treasure is discovered, then it can be used. Awakening Columbia is bringing the sleeping goddess to life, Sleeping Beauty in mythic politics. Once the torch is passed to her, she utters the magick phrase, “Lux et Libertas ad Omnium,” coded into her by the magicians of the Illuminist lodges 200+ years ago.

Curiously enough, we know, from the corner stone ceremony of the University of North Carolina in 1793, that the group of Freemasons with which Washington worked used this as a password and the keynote of their philosophy. This phrase goes to the heart of my earlier comments on a magickal democracy where the archetypes are available to all. A nation of enlightened citizens would in fact be proof against all forms of tyranny and manipulation.

Light and Liberty to All should be our new mantra, and it should infuse all our realities. If it does, then the goddess Columbia, Lady Liberty herself, will truly have awakened.

THE
PYRAMID
OF THE
FIFTEEN AMERICAN STATES.NO more let barbarous MEMPHIS boast
Huge structures rear’d by servile hands ‚Äî
A nation on the Atlantic coast
Fetter’d no more in foreign bands,
A nobler PYRAMID displays
Than Egypt’s marble e’er could raise.
COLUMBIA’s sons, to extend the fame
Of their bold deeds to future years
No marble from the quarry claim,
But, soaring to the starry spheres,
Materials seek in Jove’s blue sky
To endure when brass and marble die!

Arriv’d among the shining host,
Fearless, the proud invaders spoil
From countless gems, in ?¶ther lost,
THESE STARS, to crown their mighty toil:
To heaven a PYRAMID they rear
And point the summit with a star.

Old wasteful TIME! though still you gain
Dominion o’er the brazen tower,
On THIS your teeth shall gnaw in vain,
Finding its strength beyond their power:
While kindred stars in ?¶ther glow,
THIS PYRAMID WILL SHINE BELOW!

Philip Freneau