Rising Silver

The Alchemy = Sublimation | Silver

What Rises

The historical alchemists gave this operation a simple description. Heat is applied to what has already been separated, and something within it lifts. Not the whole substance. Only what is light enough to rise, drawn up and away from what stays behind as residue. What ascends is caught, cooled, and gathered as something finer than what it came from.

We just finished Separatio. We sat with the pile and asked what belongs to us and what does not. Sublimatio assumes that work is done. It does not ask us to sort again. It asks what we do with the portion we kept.

The Vapor Remembers Nothing of the Ground

Vapor does not carry the shape of what it rose from. It does not remember being heavy, being buried, being mixed in with everything it was not. It only knows lightness now. This is not amnesia. It is a kind of mercy built into the process itself. What has been through calcination and dissolution and putrefaction and separation has earned the right to rise without dragging the whole weight of that history along with it.

We may find, in this moon, that something in us is finally light enough to leave the ground.

Silver Not Gold

We will meet gold later in this arc, when the Sun finally arrives and Illumination asks something different of us. This moon is not that. Silver is reflected light, not generated light. The moon rather than the sun. What rises here is not blazing. It is visible by a light source outside itself, the way starlight only reaches us because something else is burning very far away and we happen to be standing in its path.

We are not asked to become a source this moon. We are asked to become visible.

What the Pool Holds

We will spend time with Inanna again this moon, picking up a thread we left at the first gate. She went all the way down and came back with something changed in how she could look at her own reflection. A pool of still water holds an image the way memory holds a self across change, the surface calm enough to show us something true if we’re willing to look down into it rather than away.

This is where Sublimatio wants to leave us. Not lifted out of the body and into abstraction, but standing at the edge of something reflective, silver and still, willing to see what has risen in us and hold it steady long enough to know it.

The Tarot: The Star

What She Pours

She kneels at the edge of water, one knee on land and one foot submerged, and she pours. Two vessels, one silver and one gold, and from each a stream falls, one into the pool and one onto the earth beside it. She does not measure the pour. She does not stop to see if the ground needs it or the pool has room. She simply empties herself in both directions at once, and neither direction runs dry.

After Justice, this is a strange kind of relief. The Star does not calculate what belongs where. She has already been sorted. Now she gives without needing to sort the giving.

We may notice, looking at her, that there is no fear in the posture. Only bare skin, only the exposed spine, only the water finding wherever it is meant to go.

One Foot in Each World

She is naked at the edge of a pool, and she does not cover herself. This is not the same as being stripped by force the way earlier moons stripped us. This is the body simply present, unguarded because there is nothing left it needs to hide.

Above her, seven small stars circle one larger star, the same number as the gates Inanna passed through twice. Some traditions read these seven as the chakras, the body itself read as a ladder between ground and sky. We are not claiming these threads were woven on purpose. We are noticing that whenever a culture tries to describe the distance between the ground and something greater, it tends to reach for seven to measure the climb.

She is the hinge between the two worlds below her, one knee grounded and one foot wet, neither fully on land nor fully in water. This is the posture Sublimatio asks of us. Not choosing solid ground over reflection, or reflection over solid ground. Holding both at once, and finding that we can.

The bird in the tree behind her, some decks give it as an ibis, watches without disturbing anything. Witness rather than warning.

In the deck’s own order, the Star follows the Tower. Collapse, then this. We did not walk that path in a straight line, four moons and three other cards passed between our Tower and our Star. But it was in the Tower moon that we first left Inanna at her opening gate, her crown taken, no reason given. Only now, in the Star, do we return to find out what that first loss was quietly making room for. The Tower left nothing standing. What rises here is not the old structure repaired. It is something sturdier, grown in the space the collapse left behind.

Rest, then Rebuilding

Now we see our reason for our plight beyond The Tower’s collapse. Had is still stood, we would not have been able to see The Star. The beauty of The Star allows us to find renewed trust in the universe. We are given rest after we have flooded until our feet bled. Many internal resources may have likely been used up during the recent phase of destruction, and we can rebuild them in a new and stronger ways”.

DEVANY AMBER WOLFE, She Wolfe Tarot (2017)

Venus Named in Light

The eight-pointed star above the Star card’s figure is not a decorative shape. It is one of the oldest symbols we have for Venus, and in ancient Mesopotamia this same star belonged to Inanna herself, her personal mark against the sky. The goddess we have been descending and rising with all along is written into this card before we even reach her myth.

Venus carries hope in a particular way, not hope as blind optimism, but hope as the planet of relationship, of what we find worth reaching toward once we have something left to reach with. For more on this thread, see “The Shining Star of Hope” by Julie Schmidt

The Literature:

Poetry

• Mirror by Sylvia Plath

Song

Myth

In the Tower moon, we left Inanna at the first gate. Her crown was removed. She asked why. She was told the ways of the underworld are perfect and may not be questioned. We left her there, mid-descent, because that moon needed her only that far.

This moon, we return to finish what we started. Not the whole of her story, every myth carries more than one lesson can hold at once, but her rising, and what the seven gates gave back to her that they had first taken away.

THE QUEEN WHO ROSE SILVER (PDF Link)

The Ponderings:

What the Mirror Knows

Plath gives the mirror its own voice, silver and exact, no preconceptions. It becomes a lake. A woman bends over it searching for what she really is. What does our own reflection know that we have not yet asked it.

What You’ve Become

Nicks asks it plainly, not what she hoped for, only what she has become after the climb. We wonder what our own answer would be, if we let ourselves hear the question without rushing to fix it.

Where Sevens Live

Seven gates. Seven stars. Seven centers in the body some traditions map from base to crown. Where does seven already live in our own lives, without our having chosen it.