German author Ernst Junger’s 1951 book, The Forest Passage, a paean to the path of resistance in a mechanized world, has inspired both radicals and reactionaries.
Among the tome’s profound pronouncements is the assertion that in the modern world each person faces the choice between having a destiny or being a number—be it Social Security number, credit score, IP address or anything else the Leviathan, as he terms it, can use to classify as one of the soulless masses.
Those disinclined to choose being a number must therefore opt for having a destiny. But how does one discover this destiny, let alone begin to manifest it?
One starts by facing the Seven Governors.
A recurring motif in ancient myths involves the shedding of seven garments: Istar discards one each time she passes through a gate in the underworld, while Salome performs her dance of the seven veils, which are removed one by one.
Likewise, a recently discovered third-century Hermetic doctrine, entitled “Discourse on the Eighth and Ninth,” speaks of the celestial sphere beyond the Seven Governors, the point at which all earthly bonds have been severed. The divine realm only begins with the “fixed stars,” or 12 houses of the zodiac.
The solar system—with its seven visible bodies corresponding to seven metals, not to mention the seven chakras and seven colors dispersed by the light of the sun—is geocentric, and the planets are not so much deities as powers that can unconsciously rule love lives, as with Venus, or fill one with either apathy or rage, as with Mars, until one has seized magnetic control over these seven metals and bent them to serve rather than rule. Hence the vital importance of knowing one’s astrological chart.
The zodiac is the true realm of the gods, and where human destinies are written. But the past two centuries of materialism and scientific reason have obfuscated the inner life where destiny is divined. It’s almost like an end-times conspiracy, the closing of a cosmic cycle in which souls become numbers in a regression to mass collectivism—precisely what the Leviathan wants.
Rising from the undifferentiated underworld to claim sovereignty over one’s own being has been the foundation of the hero myth and the struggle for individual consciousness from the beginning of time.
In meditative states in which the ego is transcended, one’s voice resounds on the vault of heaven, returning in flashes of insight from the fixed stars that seek to reveal one’s destiny in the sphere of life in which it is meant to unfold.
