Holy Mountain Prayer Card

These Holy Mountain Spiritual Temple prayer cards have been on my want-to-make list for more than a year, and it feels surreal to behold them.

These cards are intended for contemplation and meditation. They feature metallic silver embossed fronts and come laminated and dressed in one of my Temple formulas. 

The front features the complete Holy Mountain banner - and the back, for the first time, reveals the mysteries of each symbol.

I had to keep it short to fit it on the card; here's the full revelation:

The Sun, Moon, Saturn and Mercury are represented by the Roman numerals around the outside - these form the warp and weft of our perspective: in one dimension, the Sun and Moon - the singular and the multiple; in the other Saturn and Mercury - the absolute boundary and the absolute transcendence.

The Hebrew letters from the top going thru the owl into the scythe are aleph, mem and tav. aleph indicates the beginning (it's the first letter), tav is the end (it's the last letter), men is the middle letter. as a word, aleph mem tet spells emet - truth - but just the last two letters (written in black) spell met - death. This speaks of the three forces - creation, growth + death, and reminds us that the nature of creation is infinitely alive and new and yet the nature of growth is towards death. We partake of them in equal measure.

The mem is set into the owl - the Egyptian hieroglyphic for this 'm' sound is an owl. This reminds us that the spiritual technologies Moses instituted among the Hebrews were the same ones he was initiated into in Egypt - that the use of magic, and especially the relationship between life, death, and rebirth were keenly understood and that such mysteries are hidden in plain sight in every aspect of our world.

The owl is symbolically linked to the passage of the soul from life to death and death to life - similarly, the letter mem signifies water, which we conceive of as a membrane that connects the worlds of the living and the dead.

The owl is perched atop the scythe - the mortal boundary - the inevitable result of having a life measured in a finite amount of moments. The soul transcends the finitude (the owl is above the scythe), as is the infinite source of all (the radiant aleph at the top). but human experience is within it.

At the top left in the mortal realm (that is, under the scythe) we have the hexagram with the cross. This is a symbol that signifies our place as humans: the hexagram depicts the interlocking of celestial and terrestrial forces that define our reality - the cross depicts both our intersection of material + spiritual life, and the cycles that result from that intersectional existence.

Beneath the star is the hourglass - the allotted lifespan we each have. When it starts (the top), the only thing we are guaranteed is Death. By our deeds (the two drops symbolize our medicine and our poison), we make our Holy Mountain  (which ultimately equals no more or less than our best Death).

To the right, the sword descends, with the name of the Archangel Michael. It is under the scythe - because this is the action of the divine and celestial realm IN the mortal realm - it is the action of righteousness that brings energy from the eternal into the mortal. It is the higher part of humanity brought into expression. The sword decapitates the serpent, which enwraps the sword. The serpent is the lower part of humanity brought into expression. The severing of the head reveals the two drops - the medicine and the poison - that results from that interplay.