My early twenties is a blur, I had made it through college, depressed but still kicking, and had gone into software business. After six years spent in what I saw as a boring, yet lucrative office job, I was left with a yearning for meaning.
Unease inside me eventually pushed me to travel and try to find it by experience leading one and a half years spent carving a path through South America and Europe, going into East Asia and Australia.
It is funny, when I had finally made it back home, to the States, and specifically to my parents’ living room couch, It was almost as if nothing had changed, my true calling had not called at me, and I had uncovered nothing tremendous about myself or the world in the road. I learnt a lot, and experienced a lot, but the yearning inside me had not left its hold in my heart.
Funny… that night, before all this happened, I remember watching my sister and her best friend talking about horoscopes and tarot cards, wishing I could believe in the divine and the otherworldly as much as they did, and that if I had, perhaps there, I could have found meaning.
Oh, how I was wrong.
I was shaken out of my thoughts by my sister hitting my arm, “Hey dork, why are you so grumpy?” She asked, grinning like a maniac, I blinked and smiled back, despite our differences, Tara had always been a grounding influence on me.
“Hey”, Clarissa, my sister’s best friend, said, “I am sure David is just missing the road.” I shook my head, “Not particularly…” I admitted, “Travelling can be nice but it can also be very tiring, and besides… It is not like I found… I don’t know.”
Tara raised an eyebrow, “What? Is this the whole meaning of life thing again?” I rolled my eyes, “I know it sounds stupid, Tar’, ugh– maybe you have a point, maybe it is stupid.” I said, looking at the Tarot deck in the desk, “But you know, we all seem to look for some sort of higher purpose, either on the road or by some other means.”
Tara caught my eyeline, and just as she was about to comment, Clarissa intervened, “Relax, Tar’, David has a point, meaning of life isn’t dumb, it is an important question.” Tara rolled her eyes, though I could see an affection there too, “Of course you think that, I bet you would travel too, given the chance…” her eyes suddenly perked up, “Wait! Clarissa, do the Traveller’s Luck!”
Clarissa looked down, uneasy, and I cleared my throat “the Traveller’s Luck? What is that?” and though I had tried to keep the scepticism out from my tone, from the look of Clarissa’s face, I could tell that I had failed.
“Cosmos offers many ways of travel, Traveller’s Luck is a special ritual designed to lead the participant into a Astral Travel state upon their sleep into a special location.” I blinked and cleared my throat, “I am sorry, I suppose I am just… not really into that stuff. More of a science guy.”
Tara hit my arm again, “You idiot, Clarissa is a psychology major, she is as science minded as you are” Clarissa simply smirked, “I am just open to understanding the nature of our reality through the human psyche, and what we call magic is just the manipulation of the said psyche in a condensed manner, magic is not that differen than science.” When I looked at her with a blank expression, she tried another approach. “Consider your hands.” she said, I looked at my hands, “My hands?”
Clarissa nodded and put her own hands on the table, “Imagine a colony of ants live on top of this table. Ants can’t really see, but they sure are receptive to the environment around them, they would know something is on the table, right?.”
“Sure…” I said, unsure where she was going with this.
“Now, some of the ants will find my right hand first, and others will find my left, both of these groups will decide to follow the hands they found first in the search to grasp this new phenomena, me, that they have encountered and eventually reach to a destination.” She raised her right hand, “My right hand, and the path it follows is the Scientific path.” Then she raised her left, “The left hand path, meanwhile, is… Emotions. Feelings, the Mind.” Then she grasped both of her hands in her chest, “But the body they belong and lead to, the phenomena which the ants strive to understand, the truth, is the same. No matter the path we choose, we are all seeking the truth.”
“But that is just a metaphor” I countered, “It isn’t fact.” Clarissa nodded, “Not directly, no, but magic, as I said, is just the exploration of the human psyche. Ever since the Socrates claimed that ideas had a plane of existence of their own, essentially, the idea that the human psyche has a corporal manifestation of some sort somewhere, groups of philosophers, scientists and magicians have tried to interact with it.”
She continued, clearly passionate, “As experiments are an ordered way to explore and affect the physical plane which we live in, rituals are but an ordered way to affect the ideal plane where the whole of the human psyche resides. Works of Jung and Socretes are not too far off, and neither are too distant to the works of Alexander Crowley if you are willing to broaden your mind.”
I nodded. Though not totally convinced, I could see what she meant by broadening my mind, and by that point I was willing to try something new, I had to admit that I had seen and felt weird stuff in my travels, and though I had brushed them off then… I was perhaps ready for a new approach… “If I was interested in the Traveller’s Lock–” “–Luck” Tara corrected, “Yes, right, Traveller’s Luck, what would that entail?”
Clarissa took the tarot deck to her hand, “Traveller’s Luck is a ritual that opens up the latent ability each human possesses, namely, to enter and sense the Ideal Plane in its pure form. It allows you to travel to a specific, but random, destination in the Ideal Plane, and it achieves this by Major Arcana.” I blinked, “Tarot?” She smirked, “A subsection of Tarot, namely, the twenty-one named cards.” She saw my sceptic look and smiled, “I can see that you are sceptical, and I understand, Major Arcana’s role here is important because most humans believe it possesses psychic abilities, remember what I told you about the ideal plane, it doesn’t matter that it possesses any inherent abilities at all, what matters is…”
“…That people believe that it does.” I completed her, Clarissa nodded, “Yes. Moreover, shapes and forms of the Major Arcana allows us to direct your journey to specific points, to narrow the space of possibilities down. This is done by drawing three cards. Each answers a question regarding your journey. When, Where and How.”
I nodded, but Clarissa’s face turned solemn, “David, please understand that if you try this, you will have to travel to your destination. When the designated time comes, the winds of your dreams will carry there, and though I have not experienced a negative event myself, there is a lot of randomness here, do you understand what I am saying?” I looked at her, “But I can’t, like, be harmed in this ‘Ideal Plane’, right? It can only be harmed in the Physical one.” Clarissa shook her head, “You can’t be physically harmed in the Ideal Plane, but hurt comes in many shapes or forms. So if you are unsure, do not go down this path.”
I looked at Clarissa, and I looked at my sister. I would like to say that I had thought about it seriously, that I had believed and internalised what Clarissa said and gave my decision through understanding. But that would be lie. I was playing a game then, I was playing along, and I think even Tara was playing along, neither of us understood the gravity of what Clarissa said, and besides, I didn’t want to look scared in front of my little sister, so I told Clarissa to go ahead.
She drew a card, placing it upside down, “First, When. When will your journey occur? Obviously it will occur during sleep but this card determines the precise conditions the night of your travel must meet in order for your journey to take place.”
Then, she drew the second card: “Where. Where will you travel? It isn’t like the human subconsciousness is a charted place, so this is just a general theme, we cannot know the exact location before you experience it.”
Finally she drew the third card “And third, How. How will you come back once you are there? This card shows how your dream will end, think of it as a warning to make you better prepared.”
With all cards placed upside down, my anticipation rose, terror started to climb through my neck, and the gravity of the situation started to weigh on me. After a minute or so of silence Clarissa told me that I needed to flip the cards myself. Mumbling an apology, I flipped the first card.
“Ah, the moon.” Clarissa started to comment, “This means that your trip will take place the first time you sleep under a full moon. I believe the next one is just a few days later. I think this is a good omen, full moon is believed to have strong ties to the spiritual, and as per the nature of the Ideal Plane, your trip will be much more vivid and powerful as a result.”
I flipped the second card, to this one she looked perplexed, “the Emperor. Huh.” I looked at her questioningly “Well, it is just… No one I have ever talked to mentioned this card being drawn in this content so… Although tarot-wise the Emperor is associated with authority and ego, I am not clear on its meaning as a destination, but we will see.”
I nodded before flipping the third and final card only to meet with the face of a skeletal figure riding a horse, “Oh.” Was her reply, “That is the Death…” I must have looked terrified as even Tara tried to comfort me, “I mean, it means death in a dream so, surely you fell from a height in a dream before, don’t be too anxious.” Embarrassed, I went on the defensive “I am not anxious, it is just a game anyway.”
It was true that I wasn’t anxious, I was terrified, and if Clarissa was hurt by my juvenile words, she didn’t show, she only said to me that my sister was right and that death doesn’t always mean death before ushering us to calm down and continue to watch Netflix.
Now, did I really focus on the show that night? Not really. Did I check the date of the next full moon and found out it was just two nights away much to my dismay? Yes. But did I believe Clarissa that night? I don’t think so. A part of me knew there was something larger at play, and I was terrified, but I was still not fully on board with the idea.
The rest of the night went through without any anomalies, except when, while I was coming back from the toilet, I overheard Tara and Clarissa speak in hushed tones about not frightening me as being more relaxed would yield a better chance of survival… My sister treated me much more kindly for the next few days, and I suspect that was the reason.
First sign that something was different was the Tug. I don’t know how else to explain it but immediately after the seance I started to feel this pull, this tug towards… not towards a direction I can explain, but towards sideways, as if I had let this invisible hand lead me, I would be yanked sideways through reality itself, and pass to… somewhere, nowhere?
The night of the full moon, I remember vaguely that I tried not to sleep, but failed and passed out anyway.
I could immediately tell that something was wrong as I had found myself outside of not just my body, but any body. I wasn’t floating per se, as that word implied some sort of physical feeling, it was more like I existed outside any conceivable physical position, my surroundings dictated not by physical directions, but by feelings, ideas and insights, and my vision full of colours, vibrant and beautiful. Later, much later, I would come to suspect that this “false-vision” was my mind trying to interpret my surroundings, drawing the ideas into a blank canvas in my eye.
An intense feeling of being transported, of being swept away by the winds of my dream overtook me and as emotions changed more rapidly I came to the realisation that I was speeding through this weird space of emotions and premonitions further and further away from where I started, each moment further away from any sort of familiarity, colours around me changing to evermore violent hues of purple and finally giving away to darkness as my mind simply lost the ability to make sense of things even in metaphors.
I started to feel, then, presences, moving beside me, things outside of my understanding passing through this realm, going on their daily “lives” completely oblivious to this… this ant, going through a path towards something more.
Three things told me that I was approaching my destination. First, the colours were starting to reappear, somewhere on the horizon, a streak of yellow had appeared and it was becoming larger and larger with my every moment.
Second, the mess of feeling and emotions I was feeling which was my primary way to perceive this world had started to stabilise. Bundle of emotions had cleared out and become focused into singular emotions and intensified into visions of anger, frustration, rot and despair filling my mind.
And third, and perhaps the worst of it all, I was feeling so many presences around, as if I was standing on some sort of hall, as I tried to make sense of it, the words “Throne Room” invaded my mind. I knew then, that I was standing in a throne room of something immensely powerful.
My whole vision was filled with yellow, different hues of yellow, yes, signifying multiple entities, distinct but still bound to a core idea. That core idea was the one dominating them all, a hue of yellow so disgusting, so rotten, so sure of itself, an abomination that radiated visions of disease and torture. I realised then and there what the Where Card meant.
I was looking at the Emperor.
And the Emperor was looking at me.
But moments after I thought he was looking at me, I would realise I was wrong, that he was not looking at me yet. For when he realised I was standing there, in his throne room, at the heart of his domain, he turned to me and looked into my soul and it burned.
Oh God how it burned.
The visions I saw were nothing compared to this. These “things” I felt… They weren’t visions, they weren’t feelings; these were ideas, pure and violent. I no longer saw things rotting, I knew Rot. I no longer felt despair, I was Despair, I no longer heard sounds of torment, I have become Torment.
And I felt, as my last moments approached, this being infiltrating my existence, taking apart the filaments that made me, destroying the very idea of me, imprinting the word STAGNATION onto my soul, and I knew that this wouldn’t be death.
I knew I would never wake up.
I knew the name Golden King, but before I could embrace it, his attention was captured by a violent array of colours in the distance, the Golden King’s will turned towards a disturbance in the horizon, one that I couldn’t see, but feel through his outstretched hands, a violent array of colours, Magenta and Blue had broken through fields of yellow, and mounted a desperate charge through his domain.
Anger rose inside him, and his grasp on me weakened as colours around me reoriented and shifted, able to move again for the first time after my arrival at his throne room, I willed myself to get away, and tried to slip past the now disorderly and distracted hues of yellow, but as they rearranged themselves and shifted, I was thrown across the throne room and outside a crack of colours I flew, and I fell.
And fell.
And…
… I woke up. Alive, breathing and corporal, terrified, battered and traumatised.
But alive.
Very next day, I left the country, never to return. I cut all ties to my sister, refused to explain the rift between us to my parents, and tried very hard not to think about what happened that night.
But years of therapy and denial did not help one simple fact. The Golden King’s tug still existed. Whatever he had imprinted on my sould still persisted. And even after all these years, every full moon I wonder, shall I see the Emperor again? And if so… will he see me once more?