In the Hall of Mirrors

In the Hall of Mirrors of the grand temple, I figured out something about my spirit body I had been wrong about — or at least incompletely right about — for a long time.

The intro tour through the underground temples was a very active experience for me. I had a lot of moments colliding with spirits there, more than fits in this entry. What I want to focus on is the one with the snakes.

The way I understand it now: a version of my spirit body has always been made of these small white serpents. Not all of it. A version of it. Which I think is actually true for most people too — there are versions of their spirit body, all in different places in time and space, and they are not all running the same protocol. I think we don’t realize how close we are to them until we’re in a space that truly unlocks the door for us.

I have had an awareness of my own astral body for a long time. I think I was likely aware to a degree as a child, but in my teens I started to have these profoundly uncomfortable astral travel sessions as a response to regular bouts of sleep paralysis. I would be trying to wake up, trying to move my body, when all at once I was hovering above it in a state of panic. These experiences lessened as I got older, but they still occur when I am sleeping in very active spirit places.

When you are in your raw spirit body, at least for me, emotions start to crackle and spit, and action isn’t slowed by your physical form. It’s easy to fling yourself forward through time and space as an astral being, simply by willing it — and we so often forget that our most negative emotions — anger, fear, anxiety and despair — are tied to impulses. As an astral body, those impulses can propel you forward before you even realize it.

Anyway, back to the tour. The guides led us through the temples one at a time. All of the temples have musical instruments, and the Hall of Mirrors is the one where they ring a gong. What struck me was that the rest of the temple spirits were constantly moving around. The Hall of Mirrors was different. It was almost empty, very quiet and calm, which surprised me. I think the mirrors hold them at arm’s length. Layers of mirrors do that.

They sat us in front of the mirror and rang the gong. First I looked at myself with my regular eyes. Then I looked again, this time with my andeöga — the spirit-eye, the way I see into the third space that lives next to imagination but is not imagination itself. The broader faculty is what I call my andesyn, the spirit seeing. I know some people who are able to access theirs, but not everyone. And for some it takes a lot of practice to differentiate between imagination and andesyn.

And there in the mirror, with my andesyn, I saw them. Dozens of small white serpents, crawling across my reflection, falling away from my body in slow ribbons, reaching out toward me through the glass. Then I began to feel them on me. Cool, slight weight, sliding along my arms and shoulders. Had they been there the whole time?

I should mention I have a complicated relationship with snakes. I love reptiles; I have several. I owned a yellow and white ball python as a pet years ago. A different snake bit me during a rehabilitation scenario much later, and I had not been able to handle snakes for a long time after. The fear I developed was so deep-set that I ended up finding a new home for my personal snake — I couldn’t hold him anymore to check on his body or see how he was doing. I had accepted the fact that snakes were something my body was too afraid of. The irony is not lost on me.

I carried the experience in the Hall of Mirrors with me, but I had no idea how much it would follow me past the meditation.

With the healer

After the temple I went to see a healer. She works with spiraled instruments revived from an older tradition — small coiled pieces that hold and channel energy in ways modern science does not quite have language for. They are worth taking seriously even if they sound dubious to people who have not encountered them. I have had a lot of body and spirit healing sessions in my life. I am not unfamiliar with energy work. This experience was much different — like someone adjusted the dial on an old radio and a song that sounded tinny and distant before suddenly came in clear and bright.

In the healing session there were beings around me. Faceless, large. They reminded me of something I had encountered once before — at a Bronze Age carving site deep in Västra Götaland, very off the beaten path: a massive being, also faceless. The ones at the grand temple were similar in quality, similarly alien, but much more active. The carving-site one had been slower, older, less curious. These were more — I want to say practiced with modern humans. Beyond the resemblance, both classes of spirit were wholly invested in the work they existed to serve.

The faceless spirits started pulling these black slug-like things out of me. I had no idea what they were at first. I came to understand later that they were the old bodies of the spirit snakes. The tired ones, the stagnant ones, burnt out and gunked up by decades of misuse and emotional upheaval. They had been in me my whole life and I had never seen them. The faceless beings removed them with the care and technical nature of a group of surgeons. Then I watched them begin to replace them with new snakes — pearlescent, wriggling, alive. The andelindormar. The breath-serpents, the spirit-serpents.

My body filled up with them. The whole astral layer of me was re-composed out of these tiny serpents. That is the only way to say it.

They began moving in unison. Like extensions of one mind, which I suppose they are — they are me. I realized I had some control over their movement, though it took serious concentration. I came to understand that I could send some of them out into the world like a vård, to retrieve things for me. I also realized I could splinter parts of my spirit and ride them through the worlds. The riding is harder, and I will come back to it in another entry.

Holding them

The main thing I learned about controlling them is this. You do not need full control of the whole body, every single serpent at once. That was my assumption going in, and it is wrong.

A thing I deal with in my own life is being scattered and emotional. It throws me off course quickly, and it gets more dangerous the more in touch with my internal power I become. People don’t always realize the power they’ve awakened in themselves does not shut off when they fall into a chaotic state. It just begins affecting things they did not intend. Inadvertent influence — which can warp situations in front of a person, kill opportunities they did not know were on the table.

The andelindormar, my name for the spirit snakes, are subject to my emotions. Just like the astral body propels forward on a hair trigger when it’s disconnected from the physical, so is an andelindorm agitated by the same quality of thought and emotion. They are my energy in serpent form, so of course they are sensitive to me. When I am upset they thrash, spill out, lose their smooth coordination. This is also, I think, how they degrade into the stagnant slug-bodies the beings pulled out during the healing — decades of upset accumulating into them, wearing out their forms, or maybe times where they were frozen or tangled and lacking nourishment.

What I came to figure out — and I tested this several times — is that you do not need to manage them individually. You cut a box around a portion of them, and you work with all of them at once in the box. If you can calm the snakes inside the box, visually or mentally, the rest follow. Whatever applies inside the box applies to the whole. It takes full attention. Half-attention will not hold it, at least not in the beginning. I presume, like most magical techniques, the more practice, the more it becomes second nature.

A few other things I noticed. With grounding and focus, the andelindormar can move fast enough to create a kind of armor — scales and speed dissolving into a pearlescent shell, almost as if they have stopped existing and left a hide behind. But I cannot hold it when I am emotionally disrupted. So it is armor that still needs work.