Athena Chapter 2: Introduction: Valhalla, the Golden Apples of the Sun

"Vala of the Pole Star" by Olivia Robertson

Fellowship of Isis Liturgy

By

Olivia Robertson

Athena - Arcadian Awakening

2. Valhalla: the Golden Apples of the Sun

Introduction

When we were very young, in a country town in England – Reigate – my brother Lawrence and I would try and stop time. We could not understand where yesterday had gone to. Can you yourself? What was living reality, a place where you hurt yourself, were happy, read your comic “Tiger Tim’s Weekly”– suddenly became a pale grey nothingness, ‘yesterday’. Grown-ups did not seem to worry. We did mind. So we determined to stop time by remembering a string of happenings “now” and keep them from turning into ‘yesterday’. Some of the list I do remember! It began: “I remember a man on a bicycle wearing a straw hat. I remember a little girl in a blue bonnet. I remember a stone called Tommy.” But it was no good. Rather like reciting a creed in church, it was a string of words, but where was the man in a straw hat?

We thought of watching water flow past us in a stream, and try and follow a floating straw. No use. The straw was real in NOW – and then was lost in ‘yesterday’. Grown-ups kept collections of photos of people in ancient uniforms, huge hats – long skirts, and blank-faced children now all lost in time.

There were accounts of heaven if you behaved and hell if you didn’t. But no-one had actually been there.

As I grew up I learnt there were some people who had been there – and come back. This behaviour was regarded as an unhealthy occupation, reserved for Saints, lunatics and imposters. And it was this hard core of fear and therefore rejection that interested me as I grew up.

You see nearly everybody was dead. A long line of Kings, Queens, the great and the good or bad – and un-numbered people commemorated statistically on cenotaphs and churchyards. I imagined a milling crowd of ghosts which I was told were hallucinations or undesirable residents, mainly in old country houses, including ours. I noticed such family ghosts with their portraits were accepted as a social asset: “Sir Humphrey appears in this passage every November.”

To curb any investigation by amateurs, dealings with Spirits were the correct task of priests and gurus. Such experts were usually dead for hundred of years. Hence their information was coded and infallible.

Why not become a modern expert? It is possible now because one is not in danger of hanging or burning for heresy. But new scientific attitude had a more insidious weapon to prevent illicit ventures into other dimensions. Ridicule. Disbelief. This could destroy one’s reputation. Even then a woman had to preserve her “Virtue”, a man, “Sanity.” So the whole field of greater reality was left to mystics in the East, Psychics in the West. Many seekers found safety in Societies and Secret Orders.

Now my brother and I inherited the Norse ability in both the mystic and psychic field. Our family came from the Orkney Islands and were connected with Iceland. We teamed up with Pamela Barclay whom Lawrence married, and she had the same North Scottish heritage. As she pointed out, Orcadians were that bit weirder!

I discovered a way in which I could share my own intuitive experience without being labelled (very) eccentric. It was through inducing trance in others. At first I could only get people into a deep state where they could describe what was happening, but later remember nothing. This to me was wrong. We should be equals in trance with the operator. The companion on Shamanic journeys should direct their own adventures. We all have such free will in every-day living. I give one of my favourite examples.

A Catholic and a Theosophist, Richard, came to me one Good Friday for a trance session. In doing so, he had missed his Catholic ceremony of “Tenebrae”, where candles were ritually extinguished to commemorate the crucifixion. At the beginning of his journey I was faced with the tradition that “right” is good; “left,” bad. Richard was on a horse, in armour as Crusader. He had to choose between going left, down into darkness, or to go upwards on the right, to the Light. I was aware that most guides would recommend the Right-hand Path of Light. But instead I gave no guidance. He had to choose.

He chose the Left-hand Path. Down and down he went, past rocky fissures into the depths. And there, in the shadow of a great rock, he came upon a small chapel. He took off his helmet and entered. It was the beginning of the Ceremony for Good Friday, “Tenebrae”. And he had to kneel throughout until its completion. And so had I *****

This introduced to me the whole range of reincarnation experiences through trance. I found that the nearest and most real level was that connected with meeting spirits – family, friends, guides. I believe spiritualist mediums should be greatly respected for their moral courage in really helping people in face of unfair prejudice.

The next sphere involves reincarnation experiences in trance, and usually comes through creating a psychic doorway – a mirror – a dark passage. This is consoling for us, to see “Black Holes,” mighty or tiny, not as terrifying phenomena, swallowing stars like oysters, but as a honeycomb of connecting passages, leading through vortices to various levels of consciousness.

The highest level in trance comes through the seeker seeing a light, usually in the sky, and gives the traveller enjoyable angelic visitation. Very often the adventurer remembers nothing of this, or translates the narration given in trance to earthly images. Living lights are seen as flowers, a constellation as “cherry tart!”

Suddenly the legend of Freya’s “Apples of Heaven”, the “Peaches of Immortality” of Kwan Yin, legends of a magical tree bearing celestial fruit come to life. We have within ourselves the tree of life and the fruits are developing within us. In living time all is everywhere and forever – the past is alive and so is the future. It is we who are stuck in Now. We follow one single time-line. But as we evolve, we find we are part of an intricate pattern of resplendent beauty that involves all that is, not a discriminatory selection of the “righteous,” nor rejection of anything, we can alchemically restore what is lost.

So we do not have to be imprisoned in time thinking we were Akhenaton, Nefertiti or Cleopatra. We do not have to settle as “Julius Caesars”, “Napoleons” or “Mary Queen of Scots.” People are deluded, vain nobodies giving themselves status n the next world because they lack it in this one? No. But such dreamers have instead been projected into living dramas created by the Creators for our benefit. We all act in perennial Mysteries. We join Creators when we tell a good story. TV Presenters, Religious Visionaries, a small child describing a Dragon – are not liars. They are Creators. They are giving local colour to the cosmic reality from which they have been projected by the Deities, to find individuality through experience. Boys find nobility as King Arthur or Robin Hood, girls compassion as Kwan Yin – and as we increase in skills we become a Dostoyevski or a James Joyce. We learn to include the people around us, and rather than in celebrities, see the glory concealed by shabby T-shirts and denims.

Valhalla, home of the Goddess Vala, Queen of Spirits, has plenty of room in her realm, Asgard. We are there already, but have lost our way in many projections in time. But as we make the way of return, let us bring with us tales of glorious adventures, through which we discover our own originality. Being a Creator is hard but worth it.

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