At the root of time, at the origin of space, an inexhaustible font of white darkness dwells, swells and subsides. Where it swells, a vortex opens and closes upon itself, all in one seamless movement. This is the portal of the Originator, the hollowed-out form that turns into all forms yet remains forever what it is: a figure like a smoke-ring with a plasma ocean at the core and a bounding membrane, a far shore where the ocean subsides, wave upon whispering wave, to ever-deepening stillness. In this vortex arises the exchange of form and emptiness that is Lila, divine play. Lila is rapture that streams through each moment of the Becoming. It is the expression of the absolute, all-sustaining love of the Originator.

To make all doing happen, the Generators do nothing but contemplate the One. This rite of contemplation alters the figure like a smoke-ring so that it becomes other than itself. The primal form becomes many figures, and these figures become events. With infinite slowness it playfully contorts into a range of spiral variations: lenticular, barred, polar-ringed, ragged, elliptical, elongated, irregular. In this way galaxies emerge and drift in all directions of space, weightless as smoke yet charged with mysterious mass. Each galaxy is a whirlpool of coal-black plasma with wellsprings of living light at the center. One galaxy among billions is the hearth of myriad worlds including the familiar planet earth. The home galaxy is a four-armed lenticular spiral, the Atum World.

The tremor settles on the Atum World, this time. This is the Galaxy where the strain of earthbound humanity will emerge, its destiny mysteriously linked to one of the gods of the hidden core, Amun. The singularity there will arise as an eddy in the core where magma churned in opal torrents pivots the far-swirling carousel of two billion glittering stars.

To the gaze of ancient seers, the Galaxy appears like a medusa, one immense jellyfish in a vast flotilla drifting through the sea of night. The medusa navigates by a slow pulsating motion. From its domed central mass of encasing gel, a cluster of tentacles uncoils and dangles out and away, trailed across immense reaches of space and time. Captured in the tentacles are the seeds of worlds the medusa will sustain as it swims beneath the placid dome of Eternity. Absorbed in Lila, the medusa composes its tentacles by the slow spin of a divining dance. The massive glittering strands as they are rotated become aligned and gather on a plane. The turning, churning movement of the core wraps them into a set of spiral arms, the four limbs of the Atum World. The medusa dome becomes the central bulge, its width one-tenth the span of the surrounding limbs.

To ancient seers, medusa is the secret mothering cohesion of the starry carousel.

In the core of the Galaxy dwells immortal life, the upsurge of the Generators, and in the spiral arms mortal life will venture forth in countless creatures, great and small. But first the habitats must be prepared. Conditions must be ripe, arrangements precise. Globular clusters of ten thousand suns in pinpoint definition, open clusters stocked with nurseries of blue-white stars, orange giants on the rampage, white dwarfs in Sufi spin, torn veils of stellar vapor, roiling clouds of interstellar dust, and hairline tracks of careening comets decorate the spiral arms, but decoration is not always home. The Atum World is prodigious with nebulae strewn around the circuit of the limbs. The four composite arms are hung erratically with blotches of mist like immense stains of colored breath. In nebulae, molecular clouds, are nested the living animations projected by the Generators. The nebulous vapors are sublime, redolent webs where nucleic codes are strung in shivering strands, templates of life becoming. Now and again the nebulae heave out blazing suns on wild trajectories, and planets bonded to the suns will offer habitats for creatures great and small.

The vast medusa as seen by human eyes: this lenticular cell composed of two hundred billion stars, and counting. Around one star nested in the third arm of the Galaxy counting outwards from the core, circulates the home planet, Earth. Here Gaia dwells, but not by cosmic law. By anomaly, the effect of Her reckless attraction….

Commentary

In the core of the Orion Galaxy, as in all galaxies, Aeons dance and dream. These are projections of Generators, those uncreated powers able to create gods, and they are the Generators in another guise. Aeons are gods who emanate worlds and play upon intent throughout those worlds without imposing any power they produce. Dreamers sublime, the Aeons as they dance in the galactic core whirl black and white currents into a nougat mesh of colors: amber and lava, lavender, ochre and gold, scarlet rare and ripe, and coruscating floes of pink and peridot. These are elemental lights surcharged with life. Hidden ores in the galactic center, sublime metals in the free flux of creative chaos. This chaos is the delight of the Generators who sustain the core, becoming Aeons to outpour a trove of inexhaustible beauties. In their prodigious dreaming Aeons conjure and command the physics of starseed, spermatic and metallic grains to bring forth the myriad worlds, organic and inorganic domains.

The Atum World swirls and unfurls its spiral arms around the hub that sends a drumbeat low and steady to the far extremities. The galactic core is a mill of precious ores, plasma states where schema of worlds to become gather in tangential orbs of timing, rounded reefs of Aeonic dreaming.

The number of the Aeons is never constant: eight, thirteen, sixteen, thirty, thirty-three, thirty-six, forty, four hundred, but never more than that. And Aeons as they dance change partners and exchange their powers, one by one, for one alone is rarely active. These gods are pure process in which entities appear as figures in the grain of wood, forms in the grain of marble. If they are named at all, they are named for the intensities they process and bestow. Such names are Gathering, Silencer, Mixture, Deep-welling, Intended.

And the Aeons in the Pleroma of the Atum World are thirteen and eighteen: thirty-one.

At times the Aeons weave the worlds, at other times they watch the weaving. When they observe the galaxy at large, their seeing stands in rays. Stalks of opal lumination pour through the porous membrane that bounds the ovoid body of the galactic core. The light-stalks scan the spiral arms and withdraw, but Aeons do not depart the central mass, not if they honor cosmic law. The membrane is their sacred limit, lest they should overpower what they project. They hold back to protect the worlds becoming, let species come and go, let stories run their course. They emanate by a selfless offering of power, without the will to enter the worlds they so adore.

But cosmic law is open. Aeons observe the boundary by choice and not compulsion, and they are always free not to observe it, too. Now and again, stirred by a rare singularity, that's just what one will do.

Commentary

In the Becoming is the tremor, the shock-wave of a singularity approaching…

Around the Galaxy's hidden hub Aeons thrilled by the tremor pair off in preparation. By the cross-play of their currents they lithely turn into gendered gods. Divinities assuming sex, the better to unfold their manifold intent. Female and Male, Devs and Zuras. The Devs are whitish light, turning more radiant, more opal-toned as they fold back into the veins of chocolate ore, black distensions of the Zuras anchored in the core. Mad with flirtation, Devs erupt in ecstasies that propagate a blizzard of conspiring elements. Zuras hold the fusing ores in steady-eyed suspension. The currents mold and stay, then melt and fold in waves of primal matter, vivid undulations of celestial batter. Black torrents brace the alabaster banks of light that spread into fans of purling color, then redissolve to white. Zuras are the male encored by its own power, Devs the female, coreless expulsion of powers. So complementing in their cosmic tendencies, Aeons couple, lusting and repelled, all pervious to each other. Mating gods entranced in the orgiastic thrill of Lila.

Among these mating gods and goddesses is one named for the intensity She propagates and bestows: Sophia, Wisdom. So named for the intelligence that loves to learn. Often Her consort is the Intended, Thelete, for learning and intention make a potent pair. Her couplings are passionate, prolific. Sophia brings to the Pleroma a youthful will. Hers is the passion to give life to many lessons, and so Her fate will be to incarnate the life-designs of untold creatures, great and small.

Where gendered Aeons fuse, the far-flung unfurling limbs display their core-bound roots: puckering shapes like gigantic cloves, swelling and contracting in ecstatic throes. Impacted with delight of what's to come, the central magma crinkles and buds, the plasma ocean softly roars.

In the Becoming, in the perpetual moment before time, in the pristine womb of ever-expanding space, the toning of the NEW enters the drumbeat of the core, Atum's hidden pivot. The singularity comes through. At the still hub of galactic spin, divinities in dyadic trance thrill once again at novelty to come.

Suddenly a resonance stirs the Devs and Zuras from their coupling trance. The singularity arises so far inside their embrace, so deep within their sexual bond that it seems beyond them, seems to emerge as pure effect of their uniting, the impulse of no single god, no one Aeon alone.

The singularity has an instantaneous effect: returning the awareness of the Aeons to the presence of the One, the Originator. In a collective thrust of adoration the Aeons emit a wave of humming sound, the purest AUM of knowing to greet the Originator, font of the Generators, sole parent of the Becoming. And the gaze of the One infuses the Pleroma, the entire company of mating gods in the galactic core.

Excitement mounts. The magma of the core is tensile and fuses whole into an oval reef of breathing coral. The singularity is now divined. The cosmic currents of generative light, black and white, whose figures are the Aeons, receive the singularity into their fusioned gaze, receive it as nectar secreted by the One. A precious, novel taste, an odor future-bound. Sophia and her consort Thelete, the Intended, are rapturously captured in the stillness of this sublime beholding. All Aeons paired. All currents in the coral magma now concentric, arranged in vast choralic floes.

For a moment the Aeons hold the singularity and reflect it back into the beholding of the Originator, ever hidden in Bythos, the deepness of cosmic mystery. Then joyously they spring away from that reflection and break into a song of choral syncopation, Devs and Zuras spinning round and round in the galactic core, the portal of the Originator whose heart is the font of super-organic light, Osirian Ore, and whose aura is the celestine Veil of Isis.

And the singularity is in the precious nectar, in the taste of what is possible, an offering the Originator made and ever makes. In gratitude and praise the Aeons throb and spiral. Their veins stream rapturously with molts of living ore from the fathomless outpouring of life that never begins and cannot end. And moment by moment the singularity defines itself as a discrete wave breaking on the rounded reefs of Aeonic dreaming. So beauteously it shapes new boundaries 'round the immaculate beholding of the One.

The company of Aeons is the Pleroma, Divine Fullness. This is immortal life in the galactic core with pivoting intent that spins the spiral arms.

The powers of the Fullness now fell to devising new ways of seeing gods, secreting worlds, emanating creatures great and small. Improvisations thrived. Ages of measureless time transpired as the singularity echoed from the galactic core out to the bounding membrane, the rounded reef of Aeonic dreaming. Suddenly, the steady hum of Aeons concentrating reached a clear crystal ring and struck a pitch. In the mind of silence a seed-syllable erupted. Aeons delighted in the pitch they had produced, for it shaped the singularity into a coded signal. Then the gods knew their rapture was complete and ready to be offered up again, a sacrifice sublime. And the knowing of their coming emanation rocked the Pleroma with ecstatic waves of praise and presentiment.

As ever happens in the Becoming, Aeons prepare a singularity to unfold by fashioning a signal for it, and look always to the One to activate that signal. Responding to their unified intent, the Originator sent the sole-engendering force, the monofactor, to activate the signal. This is the miraculous factor that releases the New, the catalyst of novelty in the myriad worlds. This is the ineffable naming magic of the Originator. Aeons so love this miracle of making new by the power of description, the rite of conferring names. They never tire of witnessing it, for upon witnessing the sole-engendering force, it is immediately theirs to enact.

Now, once the Aeons seal the sole-engendering force into the signal, the singularity is ready to be launched. But even then, there is no violent rush, no cataclysmic crush of elements rebounding on themselves. No formative explosion. The launching needs a delicate array, a lattice to display on the bounding membrane of the galactic oval. To make this lattice, paired Aeons turn into spindles that brush and burnish the inner walls of the membrane, like batons turning on the rim of aTibetan bowl. They hone and harmonize the signal pitch, they build it into complex tones.

Exuding dews of ecstasy, the love-sweat of the gods, Aeons do a sacred boundary dance. Their orgy has the aim of sealing the galactic membrane to hold the boundary intact while the singularity is emanated. The act of sealing boundaries is Mudra. This is the gesture that fashions the lattice for the signal they will emanate into the spiral arms.

The sacred spiral dance continues the movement of the Aeons around the inner rim of the galactic core, but now adds something more precise: twelve Aeons in consorting pairs lock currents and construct the supple lattice. They weave a lace-like pattern and grave it all around the interface between the core and the surrounding limbs. Twelve Aeons spiral-locked in wreathing currents chant glories and imprint the mantric signal, while other Aeons watch. Their bodies linked in dance make the standing form of Mudra. They spin and spin around the inner rim like cream and chocolate streamings in a churn of smoked ivory. And when they stop, the lattice stands alone, defined: an ornate ringlet, a band of code displayed in vivid outlines, a wreathing of blood-coral light.

As if arrested by a massive tide, all motion of the gods is checked. The Pleroma, as one witness, behold the honeycomb effect.

The sacred boundary dance is now complete. Mudra, the ensealing aura of the galactic core, will protect the porous boundary from rupture and insure cohesion in the singularity projected through it.

From the heart-hub of the Atum World, the gods enter a new phase of beholding. In any way they look, any direction viewed from the galactic core, Aeons now see the projection of the lattice, whole. They join their forces into a focused ray, Fohat, the wand of emanation. As they scan the lattice, the wand begins to open and extend. Passing through the cosmic boundary, Fohat becomes a stalk of deep red lumination, a gentle probe extended toward the galactic limbs. As Aeons turn, dancing in a choir, the infrared band of emanation slides tremulously across the realms of nebulae, open clusters, and far-strewn constellations. It queries entrance, it lingers to assay the elemental mix of matter distended through the limbs.

Inside the membrane gods are unified in their intent, Ennoia, spontaneous projection of a new event. Outside, Fohat carries the singularity out to the fields of molting stellar grain, far and away toward the outermost limbs of the Atum World. Then, at the middle of the third arm, in the region of Orion, it comes to rest. Aeons in the core feel a magnetic surge, a flux of strange attraction. Spontaneously they detect the niche for the singularity to become a mortal emanation. In the molecular cloud of Orion, the ray of paling rose-red lumination stands ready to implant its charge, to seed a novel species in the cosmos at large.

Heaven holds its breath, Aeons contract, and then in one swift fusioned glance they concentrate the lattice in their gaze and impart to Orion the full figure it displays. Then comes the sudden impact: a torrent of encoded sounds like notes plucked by plectrum on a crystal lute. The immense riff of swift pulsations resounds across the Atum World entire. The exquisite cascading melodic concatenation loads the signal down the ray of Fohat and unloads into the nebula of Orion a mortal emanation, Atu Kadmon. The fragile indice for becoming human in many worlds.

As suddenly as the streaming notes depart, they cease. In silence that rings to the depths of cosmic night, and echoes in the placid dome of Eternity, Aeons thrill at the sight of the singularity released, now on its own, nested in the molecular cloud of Orion. The ensealing gesture of the Mudra held by twelve coupling gods now melts into a flow of adoration. Fohat dissolves and leaves behind the faint aroma of ambergris. For three and a half billion eons the odor of insemination dissipates through the Orion Arm.

The Aeons witnessed all. They held back, beholding the new strain without the wish to enter the region where it was deposited. But one Aeon was different.

One Aeon, Sophia who is Wisdom, lingered at the boundary of the galactic core, captivated by what She saw. She was unusually bold, compelled to gaze outward upon the limbs of the Atum World and wonder at the sights there to unfold.

In the company of the Pleroma, eighteen Aeons turned their gaze inward to the core and dissolved as a unity into the Originator. Their number returning to the incalculable, the unknown, they entered the Uncreate. The twelve coupled gods who had prepared the template now assumed a standing wave that slowly broke upon the rounded reefs of Aeonic dreaming. Sophia alone kept vigil by the twelve-signed lattice, and held Her power distinct. Hence She is called the thirteenth Aeon.

And Wisdom was lured by the glittering figures in the template of nucleic dew upon Orion. She felt a haunting passion, as if the self-fashioning powers imbued in Atu Kadmon were Her own thoughts, Her visions in solution. Far out there in the limbs, a dense colloidal light was molting like a skin of lively metals. The figures it displayed brought havoc to Her mind and shivered Her with expectation. The lure grew more intense. Sophia was possessed by an immense swell of loving fascination. The trembling of the veil upon Orion aroused Her innermost desire, the will for emanation, but it was Her single will, uncoupled, uncomplemented by another Aeon.

A long moment transpired. Eons of time unfolding in the limbs of Atum were to Sophia one exquisite instant when Her currents broke into fine striations, a massive turbulence of silken threads that fed into the porous membrane of the galactic cell. She slipped into the lattice, and through, eased by the sweet drenching of the chrism dew. She fell in reckless attraction, but softly at first, almost as weightless as a flower. Fell from longing to belong to worlds beyond Her own, and to engage alone the singular effect of that shared emanation, phantom light agleam in the distant cloud-banks of Orion.

As Sophia slipped past the cosmic bound and departed from the galactic core, She saw the orchid flare that bathed Atu Kadmon as She had never seen a sight before: dense colloidal hues of a living dream, a species in solution.

And She was so entranced Sophia did not realize how She had outslipped the cosmic round and become outbound on silken currents, when suddenly the ride was getting rough. When She was entirely through the membrane there came a violent shift, a swift acceleration. Her currents now began to twist and roil, throwing Her into disorientation. She lost Her poise and plunged out and away on a ragged torrent of sound.

And Sophia fell from heaven like a waterfall of coruscating colors wound recklessly around a torqueing coil.

Stupendous commotion caught the attention of the Aeons. From the Pleroma they observed the odd turbulence that spread across the limbs of Atum in the direction of Orion, but they could not fathom its course, could not connect this distant rippling effect to Sophia's fast-departing force.

Then She went completely blank.