I've always been a big fan of the Headless Rite.

I fell in love with it the first time I saw it, and after all these years, my feelings about it haven't changed.

So when I read the "Becoming Invincible" chapter in Chaos Protocols, where Gordon White suggests a version of the Headless Rite followed by an invocation of the Four Kings, I -like so many others- instantly wanted to try it. However -for one reason or another- the time was never right. So yesterday -months after reading the book- I finally managed to perform the rite.

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The rite itself went great and the presence of the Four Kings was quite stronger than I expected. What was interesting though was the dream that followed it:

I don't remember what happened before this part, but I suddenly became lucid and realized that I am somewhere in the astral. I looked around me and realized that I was in The Street of the Gods.

For those of you who don't know, The Street of the Gods is a street in the Nightside, a fictional inner city area of London created by author Simon R. Green.

In the words of John Taylor (the series' protagonist), the Nightside is "a place where dreams come true and nightmares come alive. Where one can buy anything, often at the price of your soul... or someone else's. Where the music never stops and the fun never ends". It is a place where magic and technology coexist, where you can find all kinds of goods and beings from alternate timelines and other dimensions, where timeslips appear and disappear and where the forces from Above and Below cannot directly interfere. And where pretty much everything wants to kill you, most likely in ways more terrible than you could ever imagine.

The Street of the Gods is a street in the Nightside where all the gods and their temples exist. The street is populated mostly by beings from the beginning of creation as well as beings from alternate timelines, other planets or from the far future, that walked into a timeslip and ended up in the Nightside, and are now presenting themselves as gods to gain followers. The only real church Nightside has (St Jude's) isn't on the Street of the Gods because it's the real thing; a place where one can ask questions and get answers from the creator of everything.

So back to last night:

I found myself walking down the Street of the Gods, together with a few other people (though "people" is probably the wrong word; they were spirits that had assumed human form). I don't remember what they looked like exactly, but I think one of them was either Paimon, or was telling me something about Paimon.

Anyway, as we were walking down the Street of the Gods, he suddenly stopped and I stopped too.

He looked at me and said:

"Do you realize that all the gods and spirits you pray to, the ones you trust and depend on, they are like the gods in this street? Some of them are con men, tricksters who are trying to gain something from you or trick you into giving them something they want. Others are beings from far-away worlds, other dimensions, or from the distant past or far future, who present themselves as gods because they look so different from you and they know that humans are always so willing to throw themselves at their feet, to worship anything that looks even remotely more powerful than they are. Ever-willing to give up sovereignty in exchange for being saved.

Some of them are actually move evolved, closer to enlightenment than you, and genuinely want to help people. But they are not gods. Don't you see? Despite all their powers, they don't have a clue who God is. They understand the physical laws of the universe much better and that's how they are able to do things that look like miracles to you. But the truth is that none of them knows more about who or what created the universe than you do".

I looked at him.

"I know", I told him. He looked at me, confused.

"If you know, then why do you do it? How can you be ok with it, knowing they are not truly gods? I don't understand!"

"Because I don't worship them", I told him. He looked at me thoughtfully.

"Now that I understand", he said.

And I woke up.

 

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