The UnderWorld Initiation,

The Crossroads and the Rivers of Tears and Blood Revisited

R J Stewart © 2004

Prefatory note to the reader:  This essay deals with only one branch of the UnderWorld Initiation, that of the Scottish faery tradition. There are other branches, ranging from those of the classical ancient Mediterranean world, to Northern European, to the shamanistic traditions. They all share certain themes, motifs, and magical concepts in common.

I have not peppered this article with extensive academic style footnotes and references.  If you intend detailed research, you can find footnotes and references aplenty in the books or websites that I cite below

The UnderWorld Initiation

Back in the late 1970’s I wrote a book entitled The UnderWorld Initiation^[i] . It was not intended for publication, and was circulated privately to a small network of friends and fellow workers of magic. Gareth Knight, however, suggested to Aquarian Press (always honest Aquarian, like all publishers) that they might print it, and by the mid to late1980’s the book had gone through several editions and changes of cover, and has remained in print in various incarnations to this day. It led to subsequent books: Earth Light, Power Within the Land^[ii], and The Well of Light, written and published between 1985 and 2004. All of these books describe methods, experiences, and metaphysical patterns, founded on the simple ideas of a) exploring and respecting ancestral tradition, and b) enacting its content in practical magic.

The idea of intentionally and consciously entering the UnderWorld through visionary or ritual methods, and then communing with the occupants therein, was by no means widespread in paganism and magic up to the early 1980’s.  Indeed, it was shunned and repudiated, and we will return to some aspects of this repudiation later in this article. Very few, if any, of the older generation who were my teachers used such methods. I say this with respect, for without their mentorship, I would not have been able to explore as I have. Each generation finds the magic that is needful for its time, place, and transformation.

Nowadays, to my mixed pleasure and chagrin, I find material from my UnderWorld books appearing in many places and claimed as “traditional” material; I receive letters or emails from strange persons claiming to have learned it all from their grandmothers or that they have been teaching it for 30 years but only just read it in Earth Light last week. In an age of rank commercialism, such people often have an angle, but others are truly inspired and resonate with the older traditions. Perhaps the most bizarre example is that one of my original UnderWorld visualization texts, provably published some years ago, is quoted without acknowledgement in an expensive course on aromatherapy! Things have certainly changed since I laboured over that old typewriter and produced that clunky book.

Prior to The UnderWorld Initiation there seemed to be very few themes on folkloric UnderWorld magic in general use in the magical or spiritual revival: today they are substantially more widespread. Not, I hasten to add, because of this one book, or because of subsequent expositions in some of my later books, but because that first book was part of a greater shift of consciousness.

I claim ownership of my own texts and teaching methods, but only the ancestors own the traditions.

This shift of consciousness to which I refer is, in part, our liberation from the suppression and conditioning of the Christian and post-Christian modernist programs. But it is also, and this is more significant, the sign of a greater change, whereby older traditions of magic are gradually coming back in new and potent forms.

What are we, as humans?

There is a core idea in all faery/UnderWorld/ Earth based spirituality, which I would like to state. It is so obvious, so factual, so directly undeniable and self evident, yet it is so easily forgotten. It is this:

We have no life without our planet Earth. This essential earthliness is the Foundation described in traditional Qabalah and in Renaissance theosophy and magic, and in the bardic magical cosmology of the medieval Merlin texts. Nowadays we find that the Foundation is loosely described as the Moon, lunar, or subconscious realm in popular books on Qabalah and magic, but this is inaccurate. Strictly the Foundation is the Earth and Moon joined, cohabiting, and resonating together; the Moon orbits and weaves a sphere around Earth, and thus they are really a coherent entity. The Earth is inside the Moon, if you but pause to think about it. Everything that we experience, everything that we are, our entire consciousness and energy is within the vast consciousness and energy field of the combined, interacting, Earth and Moon. This statement is neither "occultism" nor speculation, it is a material fact. The combined forces, the sphere of Earth and Moon, include and enfold all planetary consciousness, which is that of countless trillions of living creatures from microbes to whales. Every thought, every impulse that you have, is within the field of many other living beings... both physical and, according to the ancestral traditions, metaphysical.

So how did we end up with dogmatic religions and spirituality that reject and deny the very essence of our being? No need to answer.

The key to UnderWorld spirituality is to consciously acknowledge where we are and what we are. When we do this, we discover how to break down the conditioned barriers of human limited awareness, blinkered, straight-jacketed, and cruelly mute. The methods for this cleansing are preserved in folkloric traditional magic...our task is not merely to research this and restate it, but to experience it, to do it, as contemporary people. In this sense we are not individuals seeking the monstrous ego- beast of “self development”, but we stand for humanity, acting for those who cannot yet act for themselves, seeing for those that cannot yet see, speaking to spiritual worlds for those that do not yet have a voice.

By “folkloric traditional magic” I mean those anonymous methods and practices and images that have been handed down in oral tradition through the centuries. At certain times these have been preserved in threshold texts that offer us evidence of continuity of the old traditions^[iii]. Much of this material involves going down into, and passing through, the body of the land, thereby entering a metaphysical realm and encountering its inhabitants; we find such motifs very widespread, from ancient classical temple traditions to modern folktales. This is, in short, the transformative process that I entitled, back in 1978, The UnderWorld Initiation.

The entire sacromagical process of the UnderWorld can be summarized very simply: go there and participate. Both the methodology and the road map for this are clearly defined in tradition, and the rest of this article is a short and reasonably simple outline of those definitions. They involve, but are by no means limited to the following: The Crossroads, the Two Rivers, the UnderWorld Tree, and the Return.

Beginning and Ending at the Crossroads

First and last, in all spiritual magic, we have the idea of the Crossroads. Traditionally this must be a physical crossroads…modern magicians, pagans, occultists, place far too much emphasis on magic “in the mind”, a problem that has been created by the materialist science of psychology. In old fashioned magic you could not go to the Crossroads of spirit until you had been to the physical crossroads and worked with the allies, cousins, co-walkers that met you there. This is the core of the old faery tradition…a rather frightening and cathartic tradition that bears no relationship to the contemporary cutsie-pie nonsense that we see so widely touted in recent books, New Age art, and on the Internet. The faery allies, cousins, and co-walkers are frightening, cathartic, loving and ecstatic…but frightening and cathartic first.

The Crossroads^[iv] is used in traditional magic for meeting the faery races, the ancestors, and the spiritual forces of our living planet. The outer Crossroads, usually experienced at midnight, is always mirrored by an inner crossroads. But you cannot substitute the outer experience with an inner fantasy: the crossroads must be a real experience. The inner crossroads arises, of course, whenever we have life-crises. In old fashioned magic, you “got it all out” at the physical crossroads, intentionally, willingly, albeit fearfully. If we really do this, wholeheartedly, we gradually lose our fear, and have less difficulty with our inner crossroads. This is not, I hasten to add, materialist psychology, but the practical and highly effective magical and spiritual psychology of the older traditions. When it comes to understanding of consciousness, 19^th and 20^th century materialist psychology has tried to re-invent the wheel…resulting in a model that is horribly incomplete and inadequate by comparison to the psychology of the perennial spiritual traditions.

But when you are at the Crossroads, you do not Get It All Out alone…the cathartic transactions involve the presence of, and communion with, spirit beings. These take many forms: the genii loci, the traditional allies cousins and co-walkers of the faery realm, the ancestors, the older gods and goddesses, the titan or giant beings that embody the consciousness and energy of huge geomantic or telluric zones, and so forth. After the catharsis, we are able to discover the Other Crossroads. Not as some imaginary exercise or associative meandering under the cunning skill of a well-paid therapist, but as a potent reality into which we enter fully, openly, and with no thought of holding back.

The Crossroads in the UnderWorld

The faery tradition stipulates, and offers, that we have to go the physical crossroads to meet our terrifying and loving allies, who bring us into a clearer sense of the land, the ocean, the planet, thereby removing our human shackles, and opening us to our true power and place on Earth.

The UnderWorld Crossroads is then open to us, and this is the realm of Prophecy. The basic map for this is clearly described in the Scottish traditional ballad of Thomas Rhymer.  Indeed, you only need two ballads to encompass, and practice the entire faery and UnderWorld tradition: Thomas Rhymer and Tam Lin. So throw away those dreary R J Stewart books now!

In the UnderWorld, the Crossroads is where potentials come together, and a locus from which potentials emerge. Thomas is shown a Tree growing at the Crossroads, by his initiatrix, the Queen of Elfland. We will return to this Tree shortly. It is this source of potentials, experienced at the Crossroads, which brings, for us as humans, prophecy. Thomas Rhymer serves in the UnderWorld for seven years, after which is given gifts…one of these is the tongue that cannot lie. The historical Thomas of Erceldoune or Earlston, by the way, made many accurate local predictions, most of which came about after his death in the 13^th century. His influence is found, curiously, in Shakespeare’s Macbeth, written in 1606 some 250 or more years after the death of Thomas Earlston^[v] .

Whereas the manifest crossroads is an embodiment, on the earth, of the Four Directions of East, South, West and North, the UnderWorld crossroads is an embodiment of directions of consciousness. Furthermore, it is an embodiment of the collectives, or streams, or hyper-organisms of specific orders of life on Earth. These are: Human (including ancestors), Faery, and Living Creature (including all non-human organic life forms).

“Wait” I hear you shout…“that is only Three Roads!”  Indeed so…the Crossroads in the UnderWorld has only three branches. On the surface, the crossroads arises because of the poles of North and South, and the rotation of the planet that generates our subjective ideas of East and West (sunrise and sunset). This gives us four directions: two are objective (North and South) and two are subjective (East and West). Plus, of course, the essential Above and Below, created in our consciousness by the power of gravity. In truth there is no Above, only around, or enfolding the planet, and likewise there is no Below, but only within the planet.

If you are serious about your magical work, you can bring profound changes of awareness by working with these ideas of Around and Within, rather than Above and Below. When I use Above and Below in my own work, I conceive of them, always, as being around the planet and within the planet. This helps to dispose of our conditioned naïve dualism, inherited willy nilly from Christian suppression.

In the UnderWorld, as we know from tradition, sunrise and sunset do not occur. This is true, of course, in a physical sense beneath the earth. But we are taught that there is, traditionally, star light, and earth light; that same light described by the Scottish witch Isobel Gowdie who, dear soul, told her prosecutors that she had traveled to a radiant place in the centre of the earth, where she dined with the faery king and queen.  This light, either of mysterious stars or issuing directly out of the earth, is also described in many faery tales and legends concerning the UnderWorld and Faery Realm.

Thus the four roads, defining a relationship of space, time, and movement (planetary poles, rotation, and resulting day, night, and seasons) become three roads of consciousness in the UnderWorld. Let us now briefly examine these Roads:

In the ballad of Thomas Rhymer, our traditional example of faery initiation and exposition, they are called the Path of Wickedness, the Path of Righteousness, and the Path to Elfland. The Roads are further defined as the Broad Way, the Narrow Way, and the Bonny Middle Way.

In an esoteric sense they represent 1 Humanity 2 Living Creatures 3 Faery races, as paths or modes or collectives of consciousness. 

1 Wickedness or worldliness is typical to humanity…today we would surely call it modernism. No other order of life on Earth has this. This is the broad and easy way of least resistance, least effort, and, most of all, least responsibility. Cut to the chase, gimme the cash, to hell with the long term effects.

2 Righteousness or Innocence is typical to all living creatures…they have no sense of so-called “sin” or wickedness. Please remember that our source ballad for the tradition stems from the medieval period, and therefore adjust your perceptions accordingly! This Path is described as being beset with thorns and briars, because it is so difficult for humans. But, as you all know from faery tales and legends, living creatures pass in and out of the Thorny Way easily…that is why we work with them as magical allies, for they can go where we may not. At least, not as isolated humans bound by time. The connections between Thorns and Innocence were incorporated early into Christian iconography and myth, deriving directly from pagan tradition.

3 The Path to Elfland is also called the Bonny Middle Way. Not, I should add, in the sense of equilibrium ( or in today’s prescription culture perhaps we might say equi-Valium), but in the sense that it passes in-between the two extreme paths, and leads to another realm of consciousness and being;  the Faery Realm, Elfland, the place of Earth Light.

These Three Roads provide clues to a process of magical transformation and spiritual maturity which I have termed, in several publications, the Threefold Alliance, a process whereby a complete being on Earth is a harmonious fusion of Human, Living Creature and Faery. The isolated human, bootstrapping himself/herself into superior awareness is a monster…the superman of Nietzsche or the superhuman Masters of occult fiction. Indeed, it is this very foul concept of human superiority that has led us to this 21^st century of pollution, disease, failing resources, and an abused and depleted planet that cannot, and will not, support us for much longer.

Of course, Thomas and the Queen have come down a path, from the outer Scotland to the UnderWorld, to reach the Triple Crossroads, so a fussy person could well argue that this is a fourth way. As indeed it is…the way through the UnderWorld that leaves human time-bound consciousness behind. It is the Dissolving Way, for as you travel it, it vanishes behind you. When you return, within the transformed prophetic consciousness of the Threefold Alliance, you return by a Shortened Way, for you are no longer bound by time and space as you were before.

The Rivers of Blood and Tears

To reach the Crossroads Thomas and the Queen of Elfland pass into a mountain (in Scotland this is identified with the Eildon Hills in the Lowlands). From there they wade through rivers of blood and tears. In some versions of the ballad, the Queen says that all the blood shed Above flows down into the UnderWorld, as do all the tears shed Above.

This is of great interest and potential to anyone seeking to understand and practice transformative UnderWorld/Faery magic. Let us explore it further, for it does not appear gratuitously in the folkloric ballad…it has ancient precedents.

The two rivers are described as being of blood and tears…blood and water, bodily fluids. They are, of course, the red and white colors of ancestral magical tradition, the third traditional color being black, or sometimes green.

The Thomas Rhymer material can be dated historically to source texts, and a historical person, Thomas himself, in the 13^th century. There is a long Romance poem that describes the UnderWorld journey in medieval English, attributed to Thomas^[vi]. We must be clear, however, that the poetic and prophetic historical texts by Thomas Earlston, Lord Learmont, are not within the genus of traditional folkloric ballads describing an UnderWorld Initiation by the Faery Queen. Such folkloric ballads were preserved in oral tradition in Scotland, along with a group of stories about Thomas, well into the 20^th century. They were sung and told by people who had no knowledge of medieval literature, and, in many cases, could not read or write. Somehow, an oral anonymous initiatory tradition has survived independently of literature, though attached, significantly, to a historical person.

The red and white rivers are found in other sources, of course. If we hop gracefully back in time to the 12^th century, we find these red and white powers described in another invaluable source text, the Welsh (bardic) Prophecies of Merlin, set into Latin by Geoffrey of Monmouth, but deriving from oral Welsh tradition. The boy Merlin (not the wise old man, who is a product of modern fiction) has a vision of two dragons, Red and White. They rise up from a lake hidden in a cavern beneath a mountain, and fight. Thereafter, the power of their interaction gives rise to the future history of Britain, which the boy Merlin perceives (while weeping the tears of prophecy) and then recites. It concludes with a cosmic apocalyptic vision that seems to synchronize with the first third of this century, the 21^st CE. (Remember to stick a note on your computer screen…apocalypse coming soon!).

Setting aside the Prophecies, which I have discussed in Merlin, The Prophetic Vision and Mystic Life^[vii], the significant content for us, in this article, is that of the Red and White Dragons. They embody interaction, polarity, and powers that arise from the UnderWorld, to the surface, thereby causing changes.

We sense a connection to the Rivers of Blood and Tears, to the red and white colors, to polarity perhaps, but what is it?

For the answer we can skip gracefully to a much earlier source text, that of Plato’s Republic^[viii]. This contains one of the most significant initiatory and metaphysical expositions of the Western spiritual traditions. It is often called the legend of Er the Arminian, or Er, son of Arminius. Er dies, as it seems, and just as his body is about to be burned on the funeral pyre, he awakens, and tells everyone about his experiences in the realms between death and rebirth. This is a remarkable text and shame on you if you have not read it and meditated upon it! As an aside, it describes, in just one part, the proportional orbits of the planets so accurately that Johannes Kepler (1571-1630) used it as the basis for his astronomical calculations. But we are concerned with something else, which I will paraphrase here, for sake of brevity.

Plato describes two streams of souls, one stream descending from the stars, another arising from the Earth. They pass through the UnderWorld, and they intersect at the entrance thereto, in certain caverns, where they dialogue with one another. An ascending stream of souls (today we might say of consciousness) and a descending stream.

So we have: rivers of blood and tears  in the hollow hills (folkloric faery tradition), red and white dragons in the hollow mountain of Dinas Emrys  (Welsh bardic tradition), and ascending and descending rivers of souls that pass through the UnderWorld, and reach to the cosmos, in Plato’s initiatory exposition, the story of Er (The Republic).  These are all presentations, in tradition, of what Dion Fortune once termed the Involutionary and Evolutionary waves or streams^[ix]. This concept is found in several places in Dion Fortune’s writings, and, of course, in the lectures of Rudolph Steiner.  It did not originate with Steiner, however, and we must remember that the older traditions have taught it, in various forms, for thousands of years. Each generation makes its own definition or exposition, but the roots are deep within the perennial wisdom tradition.

One streams flows into the planet, one stream flows out. We might think, in modern terms, that these are the metaphysical equivalents of the forces radiated out and in, between Earth, the Solar System, and the cosmos.  The folkloric traditions assert that we can initiate change within ourselves by encountering these forces directly in the UnderWorld. Plato asserts that they are essential to the processes of death and rebirth, and are part of a cosmic movement that is held within the solar system.

Just like Thomas Rhymer, or the prophetic child Merlin, we have to wade through these two rivers, to be permeated by the power of these two dragons, to come into a transformed awareness. Plato describes the cosmic or long path…that of many cycles of lives. Merlin describes how the forces create what we think of as “history” through complex interactions in the surface world, while the faery tradition reminds us that the power flows in our blood and bodily fluids. Cosmic forces, collective interactions, and individual sexuality and fertility. The Rivers of Blood and Seed, Red and White.

The Tree of Life in the UnderWorld

As mentioned above, in the ballad of Thomas Rhymer, the Queen of Elfland reveals a tree to Thomas Rhymer. It grows, according to tradition, at the centre of the Crossroads in the UnderWorld. She tells him that all the plagues of the world above (in some versions, all the plagues of Hell) are in the fruit of this tree. Thomas is expressly forbidden to pick this fruit. Hmm…sounds familiar, does it not?

This brief but telling reference in Scottish faery tradition is paralleled by many traditions worldwide, including esoteric themes such as the legend of the Garden of Eden and the Tree of Knowledge, and the redemptive story of the Tree of Life and the Ship of Solomon found in certain medieval Grail texts[x].

In most modern texts on Qabalah, in English, and dating from the 19^th century to the present day, we find that the Tree of Life has, apparently, no roots. Or if it does have roots, they are called the “Negative Shells“ , and are bad, bad, bad, and you must have nothing to do with them! This is similar, is it not, to the prohibition uttered in the ancient Scottish ballad?  When something is tabooed, for no apparent reason, be suspicious of the reasons for its taboo.

Of course, in 19^th and 20^th century occultism the reason for the taboo is simple (and, to be fair, understandable) ignorance, with one writer copying from the other, labouring under Christian sexual suppression.  Eventually we reach modern neo-occult journalism, where anyone can cut and paste anything into a book without understanding or practicing it. Entire publishing houses thrive on such impoverished journalism, though we must all pay lip-service to the idea that this is a good thing, as it supposedly expands the collective awareness of spirituality.

As syphilitic addicted Freud proposed long ago, it is, at least superficially, all about sex. But unlike the prurient interest of the early psychologists, or the self-indulgent pseudo-liberation of popularized so-called “tantra” (only vaguely connected with the many and varied tantric traditions of the East) we are interested here in the sexual forces as sacred transformative and magical powers. The roots of the Tree of Life are in the UnderWorld, just as the roots of trees in nature are in the sacred earth. The prohibition regarding roots, in Qabalistic tradition, arises from a secret (oral) teaching that the root forces may aroused through sexual union, or, more accurately, by methods that are similar to sexual union, or which result in the radiance of subtle forces such as those triggered by sexual union.

By the time the text-snipping journalistic modern writers get hold of this idea of the roots of the Tree of Life, and its hidden nourishment in the UnderWorld, they do not have access to the oral tradition, still found in highly secretive Jewish mystical practices. Furthermore the 19^th century occultists, from whom most modern writers copy, were deeply ingrained with the childish, but powerful, notion that the UnderWorld (Hell) is evil, so any UnderWorld part of the Tree of Life must be bad for you. Just as sex is bad, evil, wicked, and so forth. Conclusion?  Repudiate all Roots. Ho Hum, we say. Let not the evil carrot or turnip turn you aside from sanctimony.

During the Crossroads phase of the UnderWorld Initiation, the Faery Queen shows Thomas a Tree, and tells him that the fruit is poisonous, containing the plagues of the upper world, or of Hell. There follows a curious episode in which she gives him bread and wine, and he lays his head in her lap. Those of you who have read Shakespeare’s Hamlet (the mad dialogues with Ophelia) will remember that this is a sexual euphemism. Only at the foot of the UnderWorld Tree, only after partaking of bread and wine, and only after laying his head in the lap of the Queen of Elfland, is Thomas shown the vision of the Crossroads, and the way to Elfland.

Bread and wine are the transmuted substances of the fruit, of plants, and (as we all know from both ancient pagan and less ancient Christian tradition) are the body and blood…think of the two rivers, two dragons, and two streams of souls. Blood and Water, Blood and Seed.

While it is indeed possible to understand such motifs as deriving from a physical sexual magic, we must remember that this is about union between human and nonhuman beings. It is sex Jim, but not as we know it. It may seem like sex to the modern, post-Christian, individual human, but to the other orders of spiritual life, such as the faery races, it is communication, exchange, transformation. Which is, of course, what sex should be; communication, radiant with love.

The Return and the Future

UnderWorld spirituality is not an escapist path. Just as Thomas returns to the mortal world after seven years in Elfland, so does the UnderWorld initiate return to the responsibilities of the surface life. Not as a slave, but as a free man or woman.

The return path is a Shortened Way…leading directly from the transformative realms of the UnderWorld to the outer or surface consciousness. Thomas does not retrace his steps and undo the wonders that he has experienced: he comes back as a prophet, with the tongue that cannot lie, and is shod and cloaked in green, the color of Nature.

What could be more appropriate for us, now, than to go to the Crossroads, to wade the rivers of Blood and Tears, and sleep to gain visions of truth at the foot of the UnderWorld Tree, living as we do in a world that is under threat of destruction by humanity hell-bent upon the rank path of Wickedness?

Near the beginning of this article, I wrote that the Crossroads come first and last. Indeed so, at birth and at death, and in processes of magical and spiritual transformation. This 21^st century is a crossroads time for humanity. Only by renewing our conscious participation in the living foundation of Earth will we be able find the way, the path, the next journey.

R J Stewart © June 2004.

R J Stewart is a Scottish author, composer, musician, currently living in northern California. In 1997 he was admitted to the USA as a “resident alien of extraordinary ability”, a legal status conferred only on those with outstanding achievements in the arts or sciences. He is the author of 41 books, and has composed and recorded for film, theatre, and television. See the Stewart websites: www.dreampower.com and www.rjstewart.net. Please Note: he is not the R J Stewart who produces the television series Zena, Warrior Princess. Do not send scripts (Sorry).