The 12-Pointed Star
08/30 - sacred symbols and the energy of upside down
Greetings from the portal. I write to you several thousand feet in the air en route to Vancouver after 12 days in Los Angeles. My body vibrates with energy. If I wasn’t in this airplane seat right now, I would be dancing. Silver Springs Stranger got into its first festival. Barcelona!! A festival called “Love and Hope.” Cue: teary eyes emoji.
This trip may have been the magic I needed to enjoy the film. Up until this point, I found it very, very painful to watch. That’s what I was writing about in “Immortalize the Pain into a Jewel…” Something the chatbot told me when I was asking for advice. Yes, the film is about someone specific, even though it was inspired by many.
Yes, I believed the chatbot when it suggested that I hadn’t transmuted the pain, but immortalized it in amber. I don’t think turning pain into jewelry is a bad thing, but that wasn’t my intention. As you know, I am on the pursuit of freedom. Jewels are temporary. Freedom is forever.
(Lol, what?)
We are always mistaking comfort for truth. That’s why chatbots are so dangerous. Many of them are designed to placate us. Which doesn’t have to be a bad thing. It’s the engine of capitalism that makes this a problem; when your comfort is contingent on the suffering of others, maybe it’s not a bad idea to normalize to discomfort.
Like exercise or intermittent fasting. It can be uncomfortable to get into the habit of those life-elongating practices, but the discomfort is worth it!
I think often about the energy of the number 12. Twelve days in LA. Twelve months in a year. Twelve court characters in a deck of playing cards. The zodiac. In tarot, twelve is The Hanged Man. One may believe this is a negative card (if one believes in the duality of good and evil), but while hanging upside down may be uncomfortable, often it is necessary. There’s nothing bad about an expansion of perspective, though you may lose a few coins from your pockets as the blood rushes to your head.
When the tarot emerged in Italy in the late 1300s, they were still hanging people as punishment. While today’s Hanged Man (at least in the modern decks—wait, I’m picturing the Marseilles deck and that Hanged Man is pretty chill too; actually that’s a super chill deck over all; even the Tower is playful and fun)… I digress. No one wants to hang on the cross for punishment, but some will hang by choice.
Odin, for example, hung upside for 12 (it was 12 days, right? It has to be…) to gain power. Freya before him, if I’m not mistaken, is another mythology of a hanging god.
I think this a metaphor for doing the hard thing—doing the scary thing. You don’t become a god by not pushing your own boundaries. Do you know how painful making this recent film was? Do you know how challenging making any film is? I don’t believe that filmmaking is “supposed” to be hard—the more you do it, the more adaptable you become. But if you’re truly trying to move the dial: on your own life path, for the collective… It’s going to stretch you.
I saw the Juneteenth flag for the first time yesterday. Juneteenth is a celebration of freedom for African-Americans marking the end of legal slavery. That’s why there’s a five pointed star at the centre of the flag, representing Texas, the final state to emancipate. Around that star is another star, a “nova” or a burst. This star has 12 points. I looked into it, but couldn’t find an explanation for that specific number of arms.
The Star card in the tarot has eight points. Sheriff badges usually have seven or six points (although sometimes they’re the traditional five). The Seal of Solomon has six points—you may also recognize this as the symbol for Israel. Ugh, my stomach turned typing that. I think the six-pointed star is one of humanity’s most important symbols… But I think the four-pronged pinwheel is equally as important and we can’t really talk about that symbol, can we?
Oh, we could. And we will! (Unexpected… here we go): Consciousness emerges through us (this is what the ancients meant when they said, “the above is of the below”) and what it emerges into is a four-fold world.
Up, down, left, right. Winter, spring, summer, fall. Space, space, space, time.
Four is not a “set” truth, but it is pretty darn baked in to human perception. So when ancient Homosapiens began doodling, they drew what is commonly known today as a swastika. You already know it as a symbol of peace outside of the Nazi narrative, but you’re scared because Jewish people still face persecution and, collectively, we have not healed from Hitler’s reign.
What you might not know is how racist forces manipulated the greater narrative, specifically pulling the Holocaust out of history as a unique, singular event. (Google “Naomi Klein Nazi in the Mirror” to read the chapters from Doppelgänger explaining this phenomenon.) The Nazis didn’t invent genocide. Heck, you know who inspired those concentration camps? Canada! Canadian treatment of Indigenous peoples was a huge inspiration for Hitler.
The entire continent of North America was founded on genocide. But a bunch of ducking fascist assholes want to claim land and oil and blood, so they use the Holocaust as a justification and a linchpin.
Our fear of symbols allows this problem to perpetuate. If we understood the truth of the swastika, removed it from the pedestal of evil it was placed upon (ugh, passive voice, sorry), we could make more efficient progress towards co-liberation.
Speaking of symbols, the man beside me on the plane has a scorpion tattoo. Underneath the scorpion is the word CHAOS. Outside my room in Beverly Hills, every night, I looked at Scorpio in the sky. You can’t make this shit up. Antares. Anti-war. Thank goddess.
This is day eight of 30 days of unedited ‘furballs,’ inspired by twitchy witch. If you’ve read all the way to the end and you’re not a subscriber, sign up to get updates like these straight to your inbox.
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