The Starry Cave

In order to start working with Quimbanda it is useful to make an effort to know your personal spirits and those spirits benign towards you. This knowledge is commonly revealed in a gira or session at the intervention of a Tata or Yaya that is already in connection with their guardian spirits able to see and discern the spirits that gravitates towards a given person. It is my belief that these spirits seen by the Tata or Yaya during a consult, session or gira are spirits that was with the person in question from birth, that the Exus and Pomba Giras in their capacity of being guardians of places of power will also guard our soul as a place of power. These personal spirits do reflect in the mirror of the soul, hence one’s Exu and Pomba Gira is often referred to as a Tata and a Yaya, given the bond between  spirit guardians and the soul awaiting this knowledge. We might see this as a way of understanding from where we are coming, as our personal spirits do reflect facets an...

“I don’t want it, you don’t want it. Let us leave wickedness to walk alone” -                          - Ifá proverb Opinions, they be informed or not, makes part of the human interaction and we tend to share these opinions in the shape of advices and counsel if it is warranted or called for or not. An opinion is little more than a conjecture, a judgment, a synthesis of what is observed leading to a form of belief. Hence an opinion should never be presented to state truth, but be presented in the spirit of sharing, to avoid the act of stating truisms. None of us owns the truth and the truth will always look cross-eyed to any interpretation of what it might be. We have all witnessed the atheist argument against the believer’s belief in a God, the battle between creationism and evolution and the polemic presented against opposing points of views aiming towards affirming objective truths...

Initiation begun and broken, initiation done ineffective and initiation denied have one phenomenon in common, the rise of the Fools of Mercury. With this term I do have in mind the beginning of the arcana major of the tarot, known as the fool, as I have in mind the virtue of Mercury as a go between, bridge, linguist, falsifier and turncoat as much as his capacity of guiding the psychopomps and being the ruler of the intellect. We also know that Mercury tends to be “bad with bad and good with good” as stated by the astrologer William Lilly in his Christian Astrology . The air of the charlatans are readily available to embrace the ‘Fools of Mercury’, but before going to that direction let us take these matters step by step by step and start with an initiation being received and then broken. Simplified we can say there are two factors that are in play; the personal and the collective. We need to address some varieties of this situation to illustrate the differences so we can arriv...

“if the medicine is bitter, know this bitterness holds the power of healing and when you are tempted to scapegoat don’t forget that you can always become the goat. ” NdMF So there you are, you have broken with your family, your order or esteemed group of fellow seekers of whatever pursuit. You have seen your masters falling and your link severed or you have been cast out and exiled from what you held dear and vital to your life. If you find yourself in this situation you are always left with some soul search to do – and I really mean soul search – because I have not here in mind matters of classic abuse, it be of power, position of desire, in a twain stream. I have in mind the situation itself, void for these forms of disgrace. This usually invites the feeling of another form of abuse, emotional and/or spiritual. No matter the reasons, the Now should be in focus. I am speaking of the condition where you are ‘left out’, no matter the reason and what it causes in the one that...