by Salicrow
Chazut loved power. When she watched me from the mirror, I saw how she gazed into my eyes. She/I was fascinated by their steel blue color, seeing it as a sign of magical prowess. I shared thoughts between selves and lifetimes as I stood in the mirror watching. I saw her, and she saw me, but we were both “I.” It was an all-time mind-fuck.
Even now when I think about past lives and parallel lives, my brain can hurt in the figuring. There are places where lifetimes overlap with each other and their patterns are woven together. It is in these lifetimes that we can encounter ourselves as a dualistic being.
One night while having sex, my kundalini opened. It was as if I had taken LSD. The rhythm of our bodies rocked me as if I was on a ship, sending me further and further into my mind. My mind spun outward, expanding. I was stepping out of a bath, being anointed by servants and prepared for ceremony. I was in a temple, holding as much energy as I had ever held before, both in my altered state and in my current physical body.
As I stood there I held out my arms, and my body filled with ecstatic energy. I felt like a phoenix, the light of the sun pouring out of me. I began to tone, to sing with magical intent. In the power within my voice, as I sang in the temple as Chazut, my Sali physical body rode out the pleasure of orgasm. Never had I experienced something so powerful and pleasurable at once.
As my memories opened, I grew more acquainted with Chazut’s life story. I had lived in Alexandria during the time when the library burned. Shrines of power devoted to the Egyptian gods were waning, and the modern world, the world of Rome, was intruding and taking over. I didn’t want to let go of the old ways, but my lover, my brother, my partner did. I recognized him as Noel and also realized that we had been separated from each other for many lifetimes. I also knew that something terrible had transpired between us.
As I experienced my past life unfolding before my eyes, I shared the details with Noel. It rang true; he sensed it deep in his bones. I progressed through the memories, pulling up details. A Roman woman, a woman of power, wanted me to teach her my magic. She was haughty, selfish, and petty. I found her repulsive, and I hated the way she acted around my brother/lover Noel. Her name escapes me to this day in a way that feels like it was burned from my memory banks. Perhaps it has to do with the power of the word. Perhaps I cannot remember her name from that life so that I can never speak it again, because the pain she inflicted was so profound.
In the end, my refusal to leave the old ways behind and Noel’s desire to move into a time of less magic severed us. He was swayed by the temptations of the Roman woman, and he traveled with her to Rome. I was hurt and outraged. I could not believe he had left me behind, even though life at my side offered him nothing. I would never marry and have children as Chazut. My life had been dedicated to the temple, my womb sealed with a cabochon of lapis lazuli to convert my fertile energy to the spiritual arts.
I don’t remember much of the time between Noel leaving Egypt and my eventual arrival in Rome, but Rome held such a bitter taste for me that I still wrinkle my nose when I say the city’s name. I had been invited there by the very woman who had sought me out as a teacher, who took my lover from me, flattered him, and offered him glory in a life of military service and battle he found appealing. I agreed to go to Rome out of pride. I didn’t want to appear as if she had taken anything from me that I still wanted. I was showing her that she was free to have my leftovers, if she chose.
My fatal flaw in that lifetime—a love of power and attachment to ego—has kept me in check in this lifetime too, reminding me that my gifts are concentrated in the spiritual arts. I am not particularly fast or strong, nor am I a genius. This awareness, born of Chazut’s mistakes, is connected to me in this lifetime so I do not repeat the same mistakes.
I went to the Colosseum as this lady’s guest, even though I thought gladiator games were barbaric. Battle for amusement was beneath me. I sat beside her, feeling trapped. The air was stifling, and my dress clung to my body, damp with a light sweat. I did not like her; I did not trust her; I knew she wanted me to give in to her desires. I felt she held little natural ability for magic and that any effort to teach her would be a waste. Her smug mannerisms made me uncomfortable and left me with a sour feeling in my mouth.
I remembered these events sequentially as I lay by myself on my bed in the middle of the day, having been prompted to do journey work by a familiar tired feeling and a rhythmical swaying of my body. While lying there, I began to cry, as I had done when I was Chazut. We were connected through our higher self. I sat beside the Roman lady, feeling the fear welling up in Chazut’s body. Sali lay crying as Chazut sat perfectly still, her countenance a mask of control, power, and beauty. Her face was framed by black hair, elaborately plaited and bedecked with jewels.
Even if I hadn’t been in the presence of that woman, I would have felt uncomfortable. I hated the Romans and what they stood for; I hated that they were overrunning my world, pushing my gods into irrelevance and burying my magic in the sands. The sensation of unease I felt as Chazut, and the tears that ran down my cheeks as Sali, told me something terrible was coming—something that scared me on a soul level.
As I sat focusing on composure, prisoners slated for execution were released into the arena. They were to fight to the death, although it had become common practice to let them live if the fight was good. After all, you didn’t want to do away with good entertainment.
As the prisoners walked into the Colosseum, the crowd roared, and I felt a sudden satisfaction come over my hostess. I looked onto the ground below me and saw my lover standing among the condemned. As Sali, lying on my bed between worlds, I shook with my sobbing. As Chazut, I sat perfectly still, careful to not give any signs of weakness. I did not blink excessively. My eyes did not well up with tears. I did not beg my hostess to stop this foolishness. I was frozen between fear and ego, and ego was demanding I take no action.
I watched as the battle played out in front of me, sending my energy as support, hoping to sway the outcome of the fight. Deep inside, in the place of my higher self, in the place of remembering, I knew the outcome. My love was defeated, but he lived. I prayed that the hand that wielded death would be stayed. But it was not. The judge looked to my hostess, who nodded her head once, indicating that the execution should continue.
I watched in horror as the love of my life was beheaded before my eyes. I did nothing. I did not scream, I did not wail, I did not shed a single tear as Chazut. As Sali I wailed and keened, my body howling with the pain of the memory, the agony in my life as Sali braided to my life as Chazut like a fine cord.
I left Rome without giving my hostess the satisfaction of knowing she had affected me in any way. I sent word that the body should be returned to Egypt where it could be properly taken care of. My request was denied. When I returned home, the power of rage filled me.
40
Finding My Voice
Throughout my journey as Chazut, one thing stood out. Chazut—a siren, a sorceress, a channel of the divine—could call her gifts powerfully and hold onto boundless energy through her voice. If Chazut could do such things, and I was Chazut, then Sali should be able to do such things too.
Ironically, my voice opened while I was working on one of my coven sisters, a woman with whom I was not particularly close. Our workings together had always been remote, connected more through mutual friends than through any bond of our own. I found her difficult, abrasive, and judgmental. When I treated her for the first time, my vision cleared, and I saw before me, lying on my table, the source of my pain. My coven sister in this life was the unnamed Roman woman in the past life. I had once lashed out at her with the force of a sandstorm obsessed with vengeance.
As she lay on my table and the story played out, I found forgiveness. I realized that we had come into this incarnation together so we could begin our healing process. She was vulnerable on my table, and her display of trust filled me with remorse.
As I moved her energy, I heard chakra-balancing
music playing in the room and found my chest filling with energy and the desire to sing. I began toning the names of Reiki symbols, elongating their vowel sounds. I sang from my soul. I drew on the power of Prema symbols. I worked with Gnosa and Shanti in order to connect with my higher self and release karmic debt. I worked with Zonar to weave lifetimes together. I toned and traveled with my mind’s eye as I worked on her physical body.
I knew how the story had ended, for I had followed it to completion during one of my earlier journeys. It did not end with the beheading of my love. The execution in the Colosseum had simply been a marker, a halfway point. What followed the execution contained my disgrace.
Looking at and processing my narcissism—my shame when I sat emotionless, shedding not a tear, as the one I loved most was beheaded in front of my eyes—was excruciating. I could relate to the pride of Chazut, and I recognized the calculated plotting that ran behind her emotionless eyes. It was like examining possibilities I held within myself. I could understand her plotting, her actions, and her decision not to show weakness.
By witnessing the mistakes I’d made as Chazut, I was reminding myself to keep my mind in check and not to let ego run the show. I was also being shown that revenge does not serve us on a soul level. When you seek retribution through cruelty, you distort your soul. Nothing will come of it but future pain.
My cold, motionless state in the Colosseum was monumental, for it separated the strands of fate that connected Noel and me. This life we have together now is the first we have shared since our separation that day. My shame and his hurt severed our threads, and our souls chose to step away from one another.
As I worked on my coven mate, my nemesis from my life as Chazut, and I began to keen and chant the Reiki symbols, my kundalini awakened and my chest cavity filled with energy. I did not shake, as I had the first time I experienced my kundalini opening; instead my body swayed slightly, undulating with the power that coursed through me. I felt as if I was holding onto waking reality by a strand. As I worked on her, I was healing a tremendous, ancient karmic wound, one that would take many lifetimes to fully be expiated. But it was a beginning, and it was potent. A heavy spell had been lifted from my soul. I knew that I would use my voice again and that I had retrieved a great treasure from my past.
Interestingly enough, Noel’s reaction to my toning was to be repulsed. It made him uneasy, and he wanted to leave the room. I understood his response. I knew that my voice was triggering the wounding of that lifetime and the damage done by Chazut. His response came before I shared with him that I had pulled this ability forward from the life we’d shared in Egypt.
As a psychic I have done many past-life readings for people. Time and again I have witnessed people suffering with anxiety around wounds they received in prior lifetimes. These feelings are usually connected to trauma, as the soul remembers the wound and wants to prevent it from happening again.
After returning home from Rome, I left the traditional temples, the ones that had homogenized into acceptable forms for a society that was becoming more and more Roman. I went looking for those that practiced the old ways, the hidden ways, the ways that understood the need for revenge. I will not say I found darkness or evil, but I did learn a way of magic that was rawer and less refined, that allowed me to open myself to the emotional storm brewing inside of me.
I experienced this both as Chazut and as Sali. Whenever I thought of my time with the dark Egyptian cult, I saw the same symbol I knew I would find someday as Sali when it presented itself to me in the waking world.
A few years later, I found that symbol in a bookstore in Salem, Massachusetts. I walked directly over to a book on a shelf and bought it. I did not browse; nor did I know I was looking for anything. The book was Seidways, a manual of rune magick and visualization by Jan Fries. It addressed trance meditation through shaking and ecstatic dance. Much of what the author talked about was familiar to me. I had experienced this work before, and I held memories of the practice from my current life and from lifetimes past.
Halfway through the book, I found the symbol that I had forgotten I was looking for, the rune that connected me to Chazut. It was associated with the Zar, a healing cult prolific throughout Africa and the Middle East for centuries. The Zar worked deeply with possession, dance, and music as a means of releasing demons and evil spirits. The leader of the Zar must be a skilled vocal musician who knows the songs, tones, and vibrations of spirits, demons, and djinn.
When Chazut chose to embed herself in the world of spirit possession, she believed she was strong enough to control the spirits and they would do as she willed. I have memories of my time with the cult, flashes of rooms filled with the smoke of frankincense, people dancing, singing, and calling out the spirits. I was a natural at that work.
My next memories are of full possession, something I engaged in willingly. I had decided it was time to take my revenge on a woman I saw as evil, a woman who had slain my love, making up lies to set the scene in motion—a cruel woman who gained personal satisfaction from the death and torture of those who displeased her.
I watched Chazut from the vantage point of higher self as she called out to the spirits of the djinn, commanding them to serve her as she sent them to the mind of her enemy. I was mortified, shocked, and wan with fear. I knew what came next, my mind rushing ahead of the scene I was reviving. I screamed in her head as her higher self, begging her not to persist. But she did not hear me, the voice of her conscience.
Chazut plagued her enemy with an army of djinn. Her goal was to haunt her enemy and push her to the brink of sanity. She used her voice to remain in control. She believed she would be able to pull the djinn back when her enemy was mentally defeated, but she was wrong. She was emotionally unanchored. Her rage, sorrow, and shame were like an untended wound; they festered. She lost control. Her body went into shock. She slipped into such a deep trance that she could not be woken. As Chazut lay unconscious, I saw her body lying before me and the workings of her mind.
The body was still, but the mind was like a maelstrom. Djinn should be taken seriously. All dealings with them are binding contracts; you must be careful what you say and do, for they will bend any situation to their advantage. Still, I don’t believe that all djinn are evil. Like humans, they are complex; some are kind and helpful, some are not. Chazut was not seeking the aid of those with high moral caliber.
She had lost her mind to them. Possessed by djinn, she raged in her sorrow. Adrift in the world of spirit, she howled and wailed like a banshee. The only thought she held onto was destroying the Roman woman as she directed her sorrow, funneling it into a whirlwind and sending the full blow of its emotional power at her target.
Through the veil of spirit, I watched the Roman woman fall to her knees sobbing. She struggled to take breaths between her cries. In the room around her, the shadows were filled with djinn whispering her darkest, dirtiest secrets at her. Djinn filled her mind with the ghosts of all whom she had wronged. They prodded, enticed, and urged her to her death.
Chazut had gone too far; she was lost to her body, to her identity, to the waking world. She was pain and rage. She was not even satisfied when her enemy fell. She still hurt. The only satisfaction she got was in the sheer amount of power she was releasing. The more energy she sucked into herself, the less she felt her own pain. As she raged in her mind, the winds picked up and the sky darkened. She was calling a storm.
This part of the memory was most complex for me. I felt disassociated from Chazut’s actions; I knew that the cataclysmic debt she was creating was not mine. I was the witness, the “me” that learned from the mistakes of the other. I was the redeemer, the one who would heal the trauma she created. Yet she was me, and I was her, which meant I had done this.
I hesitate to write this part because it’s so raw, even almost fifteen years later. I’ve struggled to accept that I could ever do such a thing. The multiple perspectives and personae I experienced while viewing the memory helped me make sense of
it all. In seeing where I/she went wrong, I was taught never to do it again.
I watched from my outside perspective as Chazut lay on a bed in a temple. I recognized the two men standing over her body: her father, Hanut, and another of the temple’s healers, one she had worked with many times and considered a friend. They were holding a yellow and black striped snake over her body. It was an asp, the Egyptian cobra.
I knew instantly what they intended, my mind remembering it before the vision could be played out. Hanut said, “It will either kill her, or the poison will shock her back into her body.” He placed the asp’s mouth on the base of Chazut’s ankle. The snake’s bite shocked Chazut out of her trance. She awoke, barely alive, and stilled, unable to see, hear, or feel spirit. She awoke, broken, to the realization of all she had done.
Is all this true? Did it really happen? Readers can ask that question until the end of time, and it doesn’t matter, for it has no answer. The experience was real. It happened in some manner, whether it was in Egypt or an Egypt-like place in another galaxy or dimension. Noel and I, Chazut and the Roman woman, my coven mate, were all true, vibrating figures of a reality in play over lifetimes of spirit and soul discovery. So the story is true, Egyptian or not. What was Egypt anyway but scrolls and images we inherit blindly, and artifacts in the sand?
41
Kundalini Rising
I was losing track of time, and time was losing track of me. I would spend what seemed like lifetimes visiting past incarnations, while mere hours went by in the waking world. My energetic body was reacting. I was becoming more sensitive and aware.
Sometimes the voices of the dead would be so loud that I had to struggle to keep them out. I remember lying on my bed one day and closing my eyes. I had lost my center. I felt bombarded from all sides by layers of voices I heard at different levels of clarity. Closing my eyes was a last-ditch attempt to close out them out, to not hear. What was I thinking? How could closing my eyes turn down the volume of voices?