Aries Pathworking — The Gate of Will

Find a comfortable position. Close your eyes. Take three slow breaths, with each exhale, let your body grow heavier, more settled, more still. You do not need to be anywhere else. You do not need to do anything yet. Keep your eyes closed throughout this entire working. Allow the following images to form in your mind’s eye.

You stand at the centre of an open space, encircled by a wall. The morning air is still. Around you, is the grey-stoned wall slightly higher than your body. It had twelve equal segments, each one s curtained doorway into a different current of energy in its own realm. This circular wall is your boundary. It represents edge of your sphere, the space in creation that is the boundry of your subjectivity;  your mind, your aura, everything that you are.

You are standing facing the first segment directly to the east. Beyond the wall in the east, a is a breezy meadow dotted with occsational trees, their leaves occasionally detatching and drifting slowly towards the floor. To your right in the south, beyond the wall, is a scene with a distant volcano oozing lava under a blazing sun, so warm you can feel it on the right side of your body. Behind you beyond the wall the mist from a distant lake is blowing gently into the circle, merging with the spray of a gently running fountain within the wall and you feel it’s cool moisture on your back. To your left side beyond the wall is a high cliff rising into the sky. At its base is an entrance to a cave which blows its cool earthly send into the circle which you feel as a coolness on your left side.

The stone beneath your feet is solid. You feel it. You feel your own weight upon it, the simple fact of your body, standing, present, here.

You are still facing east. You feel the circle of the sacred space around you, its twelve segments, its directions, its ancient geometry. You are at the centre. Everything radiates outward from where you stand.

The curtain before you is red — not the red of blood, but the red of the sky just before the sun breaks the horizon. A deep, charged, anticipatory red. It does not move. It simply waits.

On either side of the curtain are three shrines, are set into the brick, arranged vertically, one above the other, from the top of the wall down to waist height. Each is slightly recessed, each holds a figure. You direct your gaze at the top left and move your attention downward.

The first and highest is Mars — a powerfully built man in ancient Roman armour, deep red cloak, one hand resting on the hilt of a sheathed sword. His expression is calm and utterly resolved.

Mars

Below him is Sekhmet — a Godess with the head of a lioness, standing upright, her skin a warm golden-brown. She wears a solar disc above her head and carries a staff. Her gaze is ancient and unblinking.

Sekhmet

Below her is Hachiman; a Japanese man in traditional warrior dress, his robes formal and layered, his bearing completely still. He carries a bow. His expression is inward, composed, like someone who has already decided.

Hachiman

Then you move your attention to the right side of the curtain. Three more shrines, again arranged vertically, top to bottom.

The highest is Durga — a beautiful Indian woman with eight arms, each hand holding a different weapon or sacred object — sword, trident, discus, lotus, bow and arrow and a mace. She rides a lion. Her expression is fierce and absolutely fearless.

Durga

Below her is Thor — a large, broad-shouldered Norse man with red hair and beard, wearing a simple tunic and leather, a short iron hammer in his hand. He looks like he enjoys a fight. There is warmth in him as well as force.

Thor

Below him is Vajrapani

Vajrapani

a powerfully muscled figure, his skin deep blue, surrounded by flames, his expression wrathful. He holds a vajra  (a short sceptre with a double-ended thunderbolt head) raised in one hand. He radiates concentrated, barely-contained power.

—

You stand between the six of them.

Six faces of the same force. Six ways of understanding what it means to act from the deepest place in yourself, without hesitation, fear or retreat. To act based on your divine power, to create the contents of your mind, to choose and sustain your thoughts and feelings, to both master life and to awaken to the ultimate spiritual reality.

Can you feel one of  these figures calls to you more than the others. You don’t need to decide with your mind. You might notice you feel drawn to one at this moment. If not, the one choosing you will appear later in the journey to represent the energy you are now entering and contacting. It may even choose to show itself to you outside the scope of these six dieties. Simply trust this proces.

Now turn your attention to the curtain.

—

Above the curtain itself you see a large image, painted or woven, the colours are rich even in this dim light. A figure rendered in deep red and gold, enthroned, crowned, one hand gripping a sceptre, his gaze direct and absolute. At the corners of the throne are rams’ heads. The image has the quality of something very old and very certain, authority not claimed but simply held, the way a mountain holds its position.

Over the curtain itself, the glyph of Aries is in bright yellow. Be aware it’s symbolizes the upward thrust of a ram’s horns. Below this glyph are two more symbols. Mars, its circle and arrow. And the elemental symbol of fire — a red upward-pointing triangle, clean and absolute.

You take them in. You feel what they mean, not as concepts but as qualities in your body. Choose to feel an uplifting sense of certainty; a confidence in your own power.

Now your gaze comes down sligtly. To the left of the curtain, set into a bracket in the wall at just the right height, is a sword. It is heavy iron, black cast iron, old, unadorned. Not decorative. A working thing. You reach out and take it in your hand.

The weight of it is immediate. Real. You feel it in your wrist, your forearm, your shoulder, the full honest weight of iron. And with that weight comes something else. A sense of your own seriousness. Your own intention. This sword is not a weapon today. It is a symbol of your will, solid, directed, placed in your hand for a purpose.

You carry it with you as you pull the curtain aside to enter. The fabric is heavy under your free hand, dense, warm, the weave close. It takes a moment of sustained pressure before it yields. And then it does.

You step through.

The corridor you now enter is old brick, lit by red candles set low along the base of the walls. The flames are steady. The passage is narrow enough that you are aware of the walls on both sides.

And the smell reaches you immediately — cedar and black pepper and something drier beneath, like heated stone. It arrives before anything else. You breathe it in and it is somehow familiar.

On the walls of this corridor, images appear, one on each side, and more as you move deeper in. You don’t need to analyse them. Simply let them register.

On your left: yourself in a state of complete physical vitality. Strong, upright, fully inhabiting your body, the body that sustained will and consistent care would produce. You feel what it would be like to be that.

On your right: yourself in the midst of a daily discipline — whatever practice takes real consistency in your life, whatever habit you know would change things if you kept it without excuse. You are doing it. Not about to, not remembering having done it. You are in it, fully present, with no resistance.

Further along: yourself absorbed completely in work that matters to you, your deepest passion, whatever that is. Giving everything to it. No part of you held back. The full force of you directed at the thing that most deserves it.

As you pass each image you don’t just see it. You feel what it would be like to be that version of yourself.

And now notice how you are walking.

Your strides become long and purposeful. Your weight moves forward with each step, deliberate, unhurried, certain. This is how a person with a strong and disciplined will moves through the world. Not rushing. Not hesitating. Simply moving, with full intention, toward what they have decided.

The scent of cedar is also present and the pepper scent deepens. The candlelight steadies. Something in you is consolidating, drawing together from the scattered edges of ordinary life into something more coherent and more solid.

You emerge from the corridor.

And the world arrives all at once.

Light, the deep red-gold of a sky on the edge of dawn, not yet fully lit but charged with the certainty that light is coming. Rock underfoot, red stone, ancient, warm even now, radiating the heat it has held through the night. High ground. Open ground. The landscape stretches away in every direction, rugged and clear, nothing obscuring the horizon.

The air is dry and electric. something. The sky to the east holds a band of fierce orange light that is widening, slowly, with complete inevitability.

And you feel it, in your body before the mind catches up.

A quality of aliveness. Not excitement, which disperses, something more gathered than that. A sense of your own presence as something real and directed. The feeling of being fully awake inside yourself, fully occupying your own form, with energy to spare and a clear direction to move in.

This is will. Not the will that strains and grinds against itself. The will that has gone past effort into something cleaner, the force of you, moving in the direction of what is true for you, without apology and without hesitation.

You feel it in your chest. In your hands — and in the hand that holds the sword, you feel it most keenly of all.

You breathe in the heated stone, the electric air, the first fierce promise of the rising sun.

Then you begin to walk toward the centre of this high place. Your strides are long. Your back is straight. The sword is held at your side, its weight a reminder of everything you have chosen to carry here.

You stride forward towards an altar. It is low and cast from black iron, solid, ancient. The house the diety resides in is coverd by a red curtain and you cannot see it yet. On its base: a bowl of iron in which a flame burns without fuel, steady and self-sustaining. A ram’s horn, curved and worn smooth with age. Iron nails. A few sprigs of wormwood, their grey-green colour vivid against the dark metal.

The energy of this realm reveals itself to you as the curtain falls away in a pasing breeze falls to the floor. Maybe you saw this diety at the threshhold shrines, or maybe they are revealing themselves anew. Perhaps it is a symbol. In some cases it might be an image you are unsure of and will reflect on why this aspect of yourself chose to show itself in this form.

You step closer and feel gratitude, genuine gratitude, not performed. Gratitude that this force exists. Gratitude that it exists in you, however dormant, however obscured by the noise of ordinary life. Gratitude that it can be cultivated, directed, strengthened. That you are not fixed. That you are not finished.

Now you take the sword and you lay it across the altar. You place it in that clear space that was waiting for it.

This is your offering. Not of the object, but of what it represents: your will, offered in alignment with the deity’s pure will. Your intention placed in service of something larger than habit or fear or distraction.

The deity receives it. You feel the moment of contact, a deepening of the energy in the air, a warmth that moves through your hands and up your arms.

And now something is given back.

Understand this: you are not simply visiting a realm. You are establishing a relationship. A living connection between yourself and this force, this deity, this energy, and that does not end when the pathworking ends. You can call on this connection in your daily life. At the moments when your will falters, when doubt or fear or inertia rises in you: bring this deity’s image clearly into your mind. Hold it there with faith and with concentration. Sustain the image against whatever else tries to occupy your thoughts. And the deity will answer. The energy will move. This is what the ancients understood, and it is the truth: that a sustained, faithful mental image of a divine force, held with genuine intention, opens a channel between your life and that force.

This altar, this figure, this moment: remember it. It is yours to return to whenever you need it.

—

You are pure will. Red-gold light. Formless, directed, absolute.

And that light begins to move.

You, in this form, flow back across the landscape towards the entrance you came from, through the corridor, past the images on the walls, past the iron candles, through the heavy curtain and back out into the temple.

You are back within the great circle. The circular wall of twelve segments surrounds you, your sphere, your aura, the full boundary of everything you are. And the red-gold light, this pure will, begins to move clockwise around the inside of that wall.

Through Taurus. Through Gemini. Through Cancer. Through Leo. Through Virgo. Through Libra. Through Scorpio. Through Sagittarius. Through Capricorn. Through Aquarius. Through Pisces.

And back to Aries. The energy flows around the circle like a slow whirlwind, energising the entire space. The energy of pure will has moved through every dimension of your life, through everything that you are, everything that you contain, everything that is possible for you.

The space holds this for a moment, all twelve signs touched, the full sphere alive with this energy.

Within the circling light, a part starts to coalesce before the Aries curtain where it all began. A body of light forms and becomes you and your own consciousness also coalesces into the shape as it takes the full form of your body.

Gently. The walls around you soften and begins to face and disappear. The curtains thin. The stone beneath your feet becomes less certain. The forest to the east, the volcano to the south — all of it fades, gradually, like a dream releasing you.

And the light, instead of disappearing with the temple, contracts. Draws inward. The whole scene fades is your conscious begins to withdraw from this other realm. Eventually, all that is left is a circle of blue flaming light all around you where the wall once stood. The scene is replaced by the room or space your physical body was in when you started, and there in the room, your physical body is waiting for you. You stride over and reenter your physcal form. You mentally whisper to yourself with confidence, ‘The energy is flowing’.

The last remnent of the other word, the flaming blue light, fades away.

The energy of pure will is now present in your world. Not in a vision. Here. Around you, within you, available to you.

—

Breathe it in.

You feel your body, the weight of it, the warmth of it, the particular way it is resting right now. You feel the air in your actual room. You hear whatever sounds are present.

You bring your awareness all the way back, until you are fully here, fully yourself, fully present in this moment and this life.

When you are ready, open your eyes.

Welcome home.