The Starry Cave

Ifá is a faith that venerates the morning dew – because the dew is soft and invisible and in secret ways fertilizes the greenwood with the elixirs of night, because it is in the night Onile (the spirit of Earth)seeks her rejuvenation and brings forth all possibility under the rays of the Sun. Ifá sees the world as a marketplace, a place where transactions occur, where all possibility gathers into opportunity taken or lost. The marketplace is made up of the 256 cosmic vibrations called odu – or more correctly, omo odu – which are manifested fractals of light in meeting with darkness. These vibrations give identity and substance to all things that are and can possibly become. Ifá speaks of the beauty of diversity and the possibility of harmonious gatherings – but in this we also have the possibility of feud, war and misunderstandings. A feud occurs when one substance experiences a collision with another substance – in this lies a failure to see landscape and horizon and in

“Desires and greeds will leave you The moment you are dead Your beloved will not be with you Even for a moment. Destiny will take you To your grave Insects will come to you In darkness. Your wealth and fames Will leave you in a second When you are dead All will forget you finally. “ Devil Poet Greed or avarice was together with envy and pride considered most grave of the cardinal sins in Dante’s The Divine Comedy, where he in canto VII in ‘Inferno’ sees the greedy ones as turbulent waves of desire and longing that remains unfulfilled and in a state of constant frustration. Dante saw this sin as particularly bad because of the inclination within and the consequences of greed. The inclination is one solely focused upon the temporal and the wealth possible to accumulate in the restricted material realm. For Dante this would be a beastly being, a being with no connection with mind/nous – someone who had cultivated the downward inclinations o

“The soul, being created prone to Love, is drawn at once to all that pleases it, as soon as pleasure summons it to move. From that which really is, your apprehension extracts a form which unfolds within you; that form thereby attracts the mind’s attention, Then if the mind, so drawn, is drawn to it, that summoning force is Love; and thus within you, through pleasure, a new natural bond is knit” - Purg, XVIII Ciardi, 16-270 Sloth is recognized by a failure to utilize ones gifts and talents, it is about forcing others to do ones own work and to reduce oneself to mere existence where one turns into a burden for all – even for one self. It is a sad condition where disbelief has entered the person’s life and generates carelessness and fits of despair. Laziness has generated the illusion of being a captive in an impossible complication. But there is no such thing as impossible complications, just situations scaled in degrees of difficulty.   The sluggish one is

“Cerberus, cruel monster, fierce and strange, Through his wide threefold throat, barks as a dog Over the multitude immersed beneath. His eyes glare crimson, black his unctuous beard, His belly large, and claw'd the hands, with which He tears the spirits, flays them, and their limbs Piecemeal disports.” -        Dante; Circle 3 Canto 6 Gluttony is the opposite of temperance and is a vice caused by an affliction of Venus and Moon that take the form of overindulgence and selfishness. Commonly it refers to excess of food and drink leading to another sin, sloth or laziness that in turn opens for a general neglect of soul, body and mind that is replaced by an insatiable and constant hunger. This is why Dante places Cerberus here, the guardian of the circles that lead to more grave sins, a gluttonous monster, representing the beastly nature of black appetites.  It is a warning that one might risk to lose ones divine mind and succumb ones soul to the realm of th