Pisces: Dreams, Magic and Imagination
Pisces secrets and Star lore pt 2 1/2 (excerpt from forthcoming book)
Sleep and dreams often play a significant role in dimensions of magic and the supernatural. Sleep and dreams correspond to both the Moon (the night light) and Pisces, the dreamer and the dream.
Similarly Moon and water each corresponds to aspects of the sea, Pisces it’s endless breadth and fathomless depths and the Moon rules the flux and reflux of tides. This link to sleep and dreams is underscored in the Major Arcana where we find The Moon card to correspond to Zodiacal Pisces. This Tarot card is sometimes associated with the nature of sleep and the unreason of dreams.
This is underscored again with the Moon cards link to the letter Q. Q or Qoph in Hebrew, means the “back of the head” where we find the Occipital lobe of the brain and in it’s mesh of neurons and pathways we find the primary visual cortex where eyesight is made, all of this is the Piscean quality of the visual faculties of dream and second sight. Old crow had intuited rightly when he regarded it as the “connected to the potencies of the cerebelum” well before we understood it’s nature in sleep and dreams.
and for this reason the Crowley & Frieda Harris deck we see the Moon card displays curving lines looking remarkably, perhaps intentionally, like readings on an EEG or electrocephlogram which measures REM during dreaming sleep.
INSIGHT
In a way, all sight is “second sight” in that what our eyes witness is translated into ‘data’ or impressions within the mind. Everything we see, which is really a tiny fragment of the light spectrum, is really in our heads.
Traditionally it is Aries who rules the Head and Pisces, the feet (not brains) however this tangental connection to the occipital lobe suggests that there is reason to believe that it does also perhaps also corresponds to the Pineal gland. Also known as the third-eye of the philosophers this eye, when opened, can perceive the subtle realms of spirit and astral denziens lurking amongst us. The reasoning of Pisces association with the pineal gland is that one of it’s additional functions is the production of melatonin which causes sleepiness and dreams.
The pineal gland is also functional in the production of sex hormones returning us to one of Pisces prime identities: Aphrodite and Eros, who bring the “sleep of reason” that is erotic trance and the sexual waters in which sperm and egg unite before the child is formed and born in the following sign of Aries.
The egyptian eye of horus or Eye Of Ra appears to be carefully designed after the physical brain centering on the pineal gland as the pupil and it is here, at the seat of the soul where the mind imagines. Imagination itself is the Christ consciousness, according to new-thought pioneer Neville Goddard.
In fact, the whole story of Christ and his crucifixion contain subtle invocations of the brain and skull which house the gland and it’s imaginative powers. In example Christ was crucified at Golgotha, which means “Skull” and Christ’s cross was between two Thieves, the implication being the thieves are the eyes whose greed for experience ends in death while the true eye, the eye of providence, sits between them as The Christ. These and other secret doctrines were known to the architects of Rome who display conspicuous and unexplained pinecone symbology sometimes in monolithic size.
Contrary to the collapsing paradigm of fundamental materialism, the imagination not an empty non-thing, it is a power of creation and a power for which magic is impotent and directionless without. Alchemist and astrologer Paracelsus called the imagination the “inner firmament” and believed it to be a power so great it was capable of both healing and harming, even killing.
It was this ambiguity that concerned keepers of these arts and lore and encouraged them to keep many secrets so that the powers did not fall into evil hands. The notions of Paracelsus preceeded that of poet and Golden Dawn allumni W.B. Yeats who also believed, like the later Godard, that
“whatever we build in the imagination will accomplish itself in the circumstances of our lives”.