Tolkien as the Great Map

The Time that is to Come

So many who have come before us have tapped deeply into what it is that we face in the times that are to come.

Joseph Campbell through his work with parallel myth gave us the understanding that dreaming the world into being happens through these meaningful stories, rituals, and initiations that plant the seeds for our life to flourish into full bloom.

Rudolf Steiner and his creation of anthroposophy, Waldorf education and biodynamic farming gave us the tools to act as a bridge towards the conception of a new paradigm that works as the remedy for the rise of Ahrimanic force.

Terence McKenna through his work with the expansion of consciousness and piercing the veil gave us knowledge to assist in opening the mind through psychoactive plant medicine to begin to personally conceive of the realities that we must face.

But it was JRR Tolkien who transmitted these truths into a profound and digestible mythology, one which is both ancient, and new, a template of understanding which may be taken as a psychic road map to assist us in understanding what is needed in our personal and cultural development to address the core issues of our time.

The Lord of the Rings Trilogy and the accompanying story of The Hobbit give us this clear understanding, if only we may have the insight to translate these forces into the reality of our world.

We understand through the Tolkien mythologies that evil in this world is very real.

Evil is defined by its anti-human and anti-divine properties, perfectly set forth through Sauron, an ancient and mechanical force, a fallen spirit that has moved quietly through time and history.

This force goes unnoticed by most, even the greatest of seers have experienced a blindness to its reality, exemplified through Gandalf, who himself has wandered the world for millennia. It is not until the 9th hour that he realizes that this force has been on the rise in monumental and terrible ways, moving against the natural goodness of our earth, manipulating genetics and tampering with crossbreeding his army of darkness, all while playing god.

This is a transhuman force, woven together through ancient sorcery a dark mythology with machine like precision.

The enemy of this force is nature itself.

It is the ancient trees and the goodness in every human heart, it is the simplicity of a life born from sweetness and softness, from love and care for our neighbors and gardens and natural human development so exemplified through the Hobbit. It is also a love of the numinous and sacred energies which move down through the ages, connecting us to the etheric templates so exemplified by the Elves.

What we can understand about this force from the Tolkien template is that it weaves itself through every heart, and may capture every soul. From Boromir to Gollum, and particularly for those most tied to earth and its wealth and riches, as are the dwarves, each of us must personally guard against this force.

Like Galadriel, each of us will face a moment in time where we are given the option to take up a ring of power, and each of us must refuse it, and walk quietly away.

This is what we call a great initiation.

We must fall from our mountain, meet the dweller at the threshold, as Gandalf did, fight the impulses laid bear through its monstrous arrival, and rise in the purity of our heart to begin to stand for what is true and good and right in our world.

It is an inner affair, appearing as the great outward battle led by the Theoden and the return of the one King, Aragorn, destined to sit again upon a throne of light.

We also begin to understand through the trilogy that this light itself works in mysterious ways, and when we humbly ask for help, that help arrives. It arrives in the form of Shadowfax, the horse of horses, wild, free, a chariot of love and courage and profound beauty.

It arrives in the awakening of the ancient trees, the great beings who have beared witness to our transgressions, the ones as angels who hold the network of middle earth in her roots.

But help also arrives in Gollum, confused and demented and lost as he is, a slave to the forces of the ring, a slave to the transhuman mind, battling his own inner demons, moved by this great power that he wants only to hoard for himself, alone in a desolate world of unknowing.

And Gollum is the one who is used to ultimately destroy the talisman.

Yes, the divine works in mysterious ways, indeed.

We should not forget this wisdom…

How many of us move with Gollum in the heart?

How many hoard the wealth and power in ignorance of a greater natural beauty?

How many listen to the whisperings of worm tongue, and are poisoned by their own sickness?

The story has not fully played out in our time.

We are here to live through at least some small part of it.

The rise of the machine of darkness has not reached its pinnacle.

Oh, but it is coming.

It is coming through our online devices, through the dawn of artificial intelligence, and through dark sorcerers working across the ages to bring its power into full being.

It is coming through our refusal to digest our own ancestral trauma, it is coming through our refusal to see the growing evils of our time, which are not new, but are invigorated as they lay in waiting for us to turn the other direction, and pretend that they do not exist, and pretend that they are not injecting us, spraying us, poisoning us through a thousand artificial mechanisms that dull our senses, that cap our intuition, and that fundamentally disconnect us from our higher purposes.

What player will you embody?

What part will you fulfill?

What dream seed will you contribute to?

What horrors will you condone?

No, the story is not finished yet, and the story is ours to discern, to work through, to awaken within us.

All the while, the serpent rises…