The Sanctuary
🜁 ☽ 🜄Background by Arnold Bocklin
Time to rest
Welcome to the Sanctuary. Before you enter, you may wish to
- Listen to soothing tones, such as the aeolian wind harp, in the sky or chapel voices
- Wash your hands and face in a bowl of water. If you like, take a peaceful bath.
- Tidy your space, and put on fresh, unfussy clothes
- Be apart from the world
Visiting the Sanctuary
Those dwelling in the Sanctuary are engaged in calligraphy, chant and song, tending gardens of healing herbs, studying and archiving texts. They are Loremasters, Hermits, and Holy People.
Travellers find their way to Sanctuary when all hope seems lost, to retreat and renew. Some never return, drawn into its stillness and becoming careless of an outer world. Others come purposefully to seek its lessons:
- Study breathing, energy work, and meditation for calmness and balance
- Work with pure energy and magic in the abstract
- Develop clear-seeing and clear-hearing and dreaming
- Make the kind of circle that has a firm barrier to keep things out, and blank-sheet emptiness within
- Learn to read the stars and listen on winds
- Come to a place of inner tranquility
- Become a healer
Exploring
Here, it is always velvet night-time - and yet never dark. Time does not touch it. Nowhere is exactly indoors or outdoors, for the gardens are still and all is in its place, and the halls open to the sky and air; soft rain is never cold; brooks meander, well behaved. The air is cool, but never unpleasantly so: it is refreshing and elevating. You sense the winds, yet they leave you unmoved.
The foods at the Sanctuary are light, as insubstantial as the air: fresh water, clear teas of herbs, lush salads and cool, refreshing soups.
Study the Mysteries
There are many mysteries hidden in the Fen - in each, a way to learn what is unspoken and unseen. But the Sanctuary is most associated with 'divination' for the lessons of the Sanctuary are the wisdom to interpret, the patience to accept, the sense of pure self that lets you know what is and is not you, and so get out of the way to understand - an inner place and time for clear-seeing.
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Vision beyond the Veil
Would you like to seek wisdom within the Sanctuary? You will see three images. To interpret them is your task. You may see places, guardians, guides, objects, moods or ideas. They might form a story of three stages; a trio of a hope, a process and a future; two people and what passes between; or perhaps you will leave it open, and understand them as you see them.
If you would like to ponder your vision at length, ensure you screencap the insubstantial shadows revealed to you, as once you leave the hidden spring you will be unable to return. If the image seems incomplete, click below to see it fully sized.
Yes, I will look into the pool
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{Note! The oracle draws from images present in the gallery. I do not yet know how to pair the random images with metadata stored in the gallery about the identity of the artists. Your patience is greatly appreciated. If you search in the gallery for a particular work, the information will likely be there.}
Under the moon
The Sanctury is formed from Lunar ideas of selfhood, seclusion, hermitude, control.
The Sanctuary is an otherworldly place outside the everyday - and it may be more or less magical. It can be like a monastery, library or university cloisters; or it can be an elven-home, or a place of pure spirit.
In contrast to the Solar, which is about society and others, the Sanctuary is where we go to shut off outer noise, worldly responsibilities and know the self. Too much can become amoral, cold and unempathetic, grandiose, too-turned-away, theoretical, abstract or insubstantial - imagine a researcher who neglects his housework for the family, or a holy person who thinks only of solving poverty through scripture and the stars. And yet self-knowledge, inner balance, and a sense of looking beyond the veil of earthly things are needed too, to take back into life. And everybody needs a moment of quiet, from time to time.
The Sanctuary, too, stands in contrast to the Stellar - for it too can be loud, chaotic, seductive, all-encompassing, dragging and devouring. It is a place of retreat, a place which asserts the individual is in absolute control over spirit, life and the things of creation. The Sanctuary is what we create in the traditional occult and neo-pagan 'circle', which is cleansed and safe. It is as slender as silver fruit-knife that refuses, the gentle breath on the feather which works as a whirlwind to repel what is not needed. Too much of this can be unacknowledged arrogance, for there are things greater than this in the world - more mighty than man, that cannot be tamed with holy water and a pure white light; and besides, there are many places you cannot get to by turning further inside. But done wisely and well, it can get you a fair distance.