The Week of the Devil

It's Friday, and the time of the Devil is now. This is the moment when we must come to terms with our own shadow. In order to grow to maturity, a human being has to learn how to repress certain impulses, but this is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, by containing, imprisoning, or bottling our wildest instincts, we prepare ourselves for civil society. On the other hand, when a deep drive is repressed for too long, it will turn against the repressed and manifest as illness - mental or physical. The repressed drives become a curse. It is as if the Djinn of our basic nature are imprisoned in a bottle - but that can only last so long. Bottles under extreme pressure are known to go off like grenades.

Your spirit bottles must be burped, periodically. Repressed impulses must be revisited and transmuted with the skills to do so. What are the skills - meditation, art, alchemy, magick. When we call our demons forth in strength we get to renegotiate the terms of their manifestation.

The tower is a bottle, and its crown is the cork. The deed is done - something has been released. It is wise to let it flow - but control the direction. Find out the name of your monster. Draw it, paint it, serenade it. Learn how to domesticate and remediate.

Your mission is to release a hang-up, addiction, phobia or trigger, and transform its energy into something different. Maybe you need to have a conversation with a snake or a spider. Maybe you need to swap a bad addiction for a good one. Maybe you need to disarm a trigger with laughter.

Here is the Bene Gesserit Litany Against Fear from Dune:

Fear is the enemy.

Fear is the little death that brings total obliteration.

I will face my fear.

I will allow it to pass over and through me.

When it has gone beyond,

I will turn the inward eye to see the path that fear has taken.

When the fear is gone, there will be nothing.

Only I will remain.

Add oil, friends.