I was given the questionnaire to answer after leaving the Seatemple Inn gathering. Once I was rested, I opened the file and began to respond to it point by point.

Q. How would you define the Wunderkabinett project in your own words? Is it a physical/digital collection, an artistic concept, or something else? What inspired you to create or focus on this project?

The WK project is a vast compendium of the museum of world knowledge, collected in cabinets housed in warehouses for safe keeping in various secret locations world wide. Much like the holders of heritage seeds before GMO, these cabinets have been keepers of stored objects down through the centuries and even in prehistory. They are like museums with one particular shift – they are truly keepers of knowledge. Some of that knowledge is written but much has been placed in objects by shamans and magicians who understood the art of animating statues and using objects as tools and instruments of the divine. In the our research, this collection is considered as physical. 

It was given in many prophecies for workers to create this project, but also the HQ founders realized that many of these objects were losing their power. They explained that they had discovered an actual directed power drain, leading to entropy and loss of some of the sustaining field of human endeavour.

Their motto was: Much like the shift from hunting and gathering to agriculture, the world is again in such a shift, and to retrieve and restore even a few of these cabinets can help ensure the continuance of humankind. 

Q: Have you clarified anything regarding the “directed power drain” causing entropy? Is this due to an antagonist force or systemic decay? Is this drain a natural loss of sacred connection to objects? Or is it a literal energy siphon?

I’m still not sure. I wondered whether there was a force acting to remove the energies in these collected sacred power objects used in ritual ceremony and healing activities all down through the ages, or if the “sacrifice” of their powers once they were deployed was what the situation was all about.

I still have so many questions.

Were they draining because they were collected? or were they collected to protect against their dissolving when sacrificed? or was it set to protect all of us from their expansion together, like Pandora’s box, or were they preserved until the time they would be needed? Who manages the mysterious HQ that is organizing all of this? Are these simply natural forces that together anticipate and enable the next leap of humanity into a visionary future?

I came to a place of resolution, and abruptly ended the interview in a state of confused exhilaration.

Why did I feel that something had been stolen from me, as if the material I had gathered for HQ was just siphoned off? I may have been paranoid or mistaken. For there was no loss of energy, in fact I felt lighter than I had in years. No more carrying around these archives. I recalled an old text that indicated something similar regarding the light illuminating 30 statues. 

Each of the objects is a statue, a being or replica of a state, condition, event or influence. As they are examined, they join together in the mind, and are intertwined, in fact become open to the influence of each other. 

I began to understand as it dawned on me. I recognized that this joining happens in the mind and heart of the one examining them. 

This is why researchers were so important. How did the archivist keep all her information once the individuals who had provided it to her were no longer living? Some living part of them was present in the aggregation of the work.

It was an alchemy perhaps, or some way the ancients preserved knowledge down through the ages even in prehistory. It is described as the oral tradition but it may not actually be spoken. In fact if it is spoken it can be in a language that has been lost. Only the names of the event/entities/beings resonant in the objects are kept, and not changed. We learned that early on. Even if they are spelled oddly or seem to make no sense, these words are not to be changed. 

So we have objects that are sacred statues holding powers or beings that are seen in the human heart, in the mind’s eye, in the intuition, in the shared imaginaire. Basically, seen in the unseen. Known to the unknown and discovered by seekers, like a grail. A holder of all that was, is or will be. A sphere of being.

We bring our questions and deep metaphysical concerns about humanity to the keepers, who are symbolically identified in each of the selected objects. 

The seekers research and find the most highly charged and significant of these objects to bring to the annual gathering. This was my first, but they had been going on for centuries. 

Not necessarily physical, they were nevertheless gatherings of the wise, circles of loving wisdom, into which the objects are ceremonially carried aloft, covered in white samite, brought to sit before each of the 12 participants around the circle. Sometimes a table, sometimes a fire circle, sometimes a dance. All depending on the time and place and deep question. 

It is something to laugh about, the idea that 12 men rule the world, but there are 12 who come together not to rule but to restore, to keep, to progress. 

I reviewed it all in my memory. Not in notes but in contemplative thought.

Okay, we 12 at the Seatemple Inn sat at our banquet table, as servers poured our wine, and in the corner someone played an ancient flute (for servers and musicians have always been exempt from these numbers).  

After our entry, our items sat before each of us wrapped and together we unwrapped them. 

Their energies blended in interweaving light displays and their sounds deafened the ears. They were lifted up, and we were blasted, lost to the world, living in another bliss. 

The circle lifted to form a round portal, and inside its gyroscopic turning a large face appeared, radiating nothing but bliss and beauty. From its pursed lips a rare scent of burning herbs wafted on smoky mist. 

We fell asleep. or I thought so, yet my dream self saw us. 

She saw heads bowed down, while all were sitting upright. Some unseen hands from the mist lifted ever so gently into the base of the skull of each of us, all at the same time. Fingers like tentacles delicately pulled the spine up and out, so it laid over our backs like a braid. 

The braids were joining to each other through neural tensions, rapidly intertwining their dendrites. They began forming a basket of light. 

The intertwined light of the objects became a turning sword above the table. Right then and there, the whirling scimitar in the centre cut off all the heads. Into that basket all the heads rolled, for they were severed at the skullbase. The shared hands of the hearts reached forward to catch and hold them, then they were rolled into the centre of the basket. The heads were suns, spheres of light, caught in a basket of light. An offering, a sacrifice. The hearts now empty-handed circled the suns; the basket held it all. 

The face first became the scimitar sacrificer then a brilliant flame of truth. All the suns were singing, mouths open, eyes open, heads turning round and round, becoming solar, planetary, taking their places in their divine system as gods.

The basket widened and expanded to galactic proportions, and the central sun became black, holding space.  My dream self saw it all.

In the pupil of an eye that sees and bears light, the scimitar sang and flamed, turning and whirling, upward and vertical in the centre of that dark. 

It cannot be told. It is too terrible to be told. It is too horrible to see and know. it is sacrifice, it is fire, it is end and beginning, it is the mystery of our human life. We carry this horrible truth inside us. There are tentacles from beyond us that hold and keep us. There is a heart that holds our being until we are ready to become the planetary self we were always connected to. And we can’t tell anyone this. The minotaur at the centre of the labyrinth. amp___?

So here we see and slay that very being that has slain us. Not with a sword, but with our eye. For the eye remains single in a pyramid of love. Not physically but in soul formation  – if we dare to know this, we have to step across the bloody field. 

Someone with a mouth open laughs loudly. It was all a carnival, don’t you know? That sword is a theatrical sword. This ceremony is a projected drama. We are not killing anyone, nor are we from the inner depths. We are simply projecting one of your many tales, to frighten you, to make you revere the procedure we are now going to do. That fear labyrinth is an aspect of your humanity. Now look, all heads are still on, all spines nicely stowed within each person, all light turning benignly toward each one from the centre of the table, high up making each of us into a sort of carousel horse rider, going up and down as the table turns and as the light above turns. We are restored as puppets. It is over. The expansion and contraction is done. 

There is life and light within each of us and the theatrical displays of the magicians cannot do justice to the powerful displays of the gods themselves. In wonder we sit and contemplate within the light and power and divine providence pouring down always. Superimposed on the vision of the fountain I think I might see a shadow form of the being whose head is severed, and who is now a fountain. Then it disappears.

This is not the mystery I am seeking. This is not the mystery I am given to know. I am here as a woman in life, giving – there is a fountain of the milk of human kindness. It is simple and true. That mythic overlay of sacrifice overlooks the milk that naturally flows to sustain all life. Now we can know, not the dark mysteries of the cultish path, but the sweet love of the divine providential life. The simple life of love and being. Oh the dark is compelling when it shows up but it is just a dream.

We return eventually back to the harbour, and the hearth and the truth of being simply human. For in conjunction with all that can possibly be known is a quiet soul peace that emits its connection to the love of all life. When we state it, it sounds trite, and we yearn for adventure. But it is adventure itself that has to be sacrificed, to make way for the life that is lived in gentle simplicity in the midst of the carnival of seeming suffering and constant restless confusion. No one can soothe the soul of the lost wanderers in the labyrinth. They come to simplicity and oneness by themselves, in their own time.

—

I left the Seatemple Inn right after this. Returned home and began plans for a simpler life. Everything had been in tatters as I’d spent the past several years seeking the contents of the wunderkabinetts, and connecting with all the researchers, finding my way through light and dark, through time and space. Rising through ecstasy after ecstasy, shedding layers of pre-conceived ideas, and the stuff of life that persists through all these interchanges. Redrawing maps, hiding truth, keeping confusion as a companion. Then I knew, I had had enough. I stood at my open door. For an instant I flashed on the image of myself holding my own severed head under one arm as I crossed the threshold. Then it was gone. Now what?

The next morning I woke to see my notes, and referred them back to some of the watchword list from HQ that I had kept on my bedside for years now. 

Today’s aphorism had originally be written in French, but was translated as “See Knowledge as living, perishable rather than static.” Okay, that was good to consider, but where does that fit in the scheme of what I had just experienced in the Seatemple gathering?

 I wondered if the HQ actually followed that principle any more – they seemed to be more intent on creating their Field of Founders, and their Traditions of Understanding in the Halls of HQ, where paintings of the founders lined the walls that led to the inner doors. People had tried before to find their way into this headquarters, but only those invited few were permitted in. Instead, HQ came to us in various places around the world. and held gatherings like the Seatemple one. But I questioned if the Seatemple gathering had actually been acknowledged as an official HQ event, or if it was part of the renegade effort. 

For one thing, we had not been informed by normal channels, but were each and all taken there by secret car. Like me, when I was driven from the warehouse, drugged or hypnotised and unable to comprehend where I was being taken, or why.

Yet the hypnosis was only a ruse, something to blame the experience on if I were ever questioned. The truth was that I had been yearning for this, to be able to find my way to the others, each on their own seeking this extraordinary bliss, this devotional direction to our high field of being. 

My other clue was the presence of the founder -only one founder not the others, and the archivist who I knew was retired yet still active. I myself had been retired for years, so I understood then, that morning as I looked back on the whole thing, that I had been selected to find this out and to keep it inside myself until further notice. 

We all were keepers of the being that we were becoming, and we had to watch carefully to find our way into the true doorway. 

The objects were ruses, catalysts, decoys, instruments, and artifacts. But they were not what we were seeking or finding. They just gave us something to do, like a bit of stage business when the actor opens the drinks cabinet and pours from the selection of bottles, handing to one guest a champagne glass,  and to another, a whiskey neat. No one gets drunk here, for it is all theatre, part of the play. I recalled that I had entered this play somehow.

He handed me the glass, I took a sip, looked up, then took another as the stage began to turn, rotating to the back of the stage. The audience saw another tableau, with other actors taking their roles, laughing in a beach scene, while at the back we jumped from the rotating stage, for the quick change for next scene. I fell off the edge as it was still turning, and hit my head on the hardwood floor. The others dragged me into the wings, and I soon recovered. But it was not right yet, I recognized no one, and could not recall my role as an actor. I looked up at the stage lighting rigs and ropes and sobbed my heart out.

“It is all empty,” I cried. 

“Shush shush, people can hear you,” the others said, and one covered my mouth whispering intensely, “Shush. quiet!” 

“This was my dream, this was only a dream,” I told myself with eyes closed.

Then the gap, the widening gap, the great dark gap, the empty place, the unseen dark, the big place behind the great doorway, the transportation field, the place that disintegrates and turns all to dark. I saw it behind all the stage gear, fully visible, and once I saw it, it began to slowly, deliberately, and divinely fill with stars. First one, then another, then others, then so many more, then all starry, all alive with points of light. 

Oh come to me now/ travel to me now/ I call you now/ here we may be forever

In bliss I closed my eyes, but the stars all appeared there too, behind my eyes, even brighter, if that were possible. I heard them, tones and chords and choruses, rich and fuller than any orchestra. The face of the stars galactic all together seemed to aggregate then separate with each breath I took. 

Someone was shaking me. 

When I woke my face felt as if it were made of stars .

“You seem to have passed out,” he said. “Come, sit up, let’s get you back now.”

As I sat in the wings, a figure passed by, handing me a pink envelope, addressed to me with lavender ink. I opened it with trembling hands, and read this quote from the HQ manual:

“Activation requires personal + cosmic alignment (individual need + ancestral/astrological codes).”

“What on earth does that mean?” I thought as I snapped myself out of the dream. Back home, at my writing desk, looking at my notes, I turned over a notebook to see my name written in lavender on an empty envelope, but the message inside was not there anymore.