The Susquehanna River August 13th, 2011 6:23 AM

The Lion's Gate

In August there is an alignment between the sun (in Leo) and the star Sirius which is the brightest star in the sky. The alignment occurs from July 28 to Aug. 12ish—but August 8th is considered the energetic peak.

Called the Lion’s Gate, the 8th of August is thought to be a good day for any kind of manifestation work. This is a relatively new idea, but for me the numbers work.

Given my weakness for ancient culture and the goddess Inanna, eights always resonate. I like August 8th (8/8) and I like 8/8/2026 = 8+8+2+2+6=26 = 8 even better.

So last night, I did some manifestation work and made a sigil. Today I will probably make another. But there is more to Sirius than a single date and I thought it might be nice to share bits and pieces of an older post I wrote on this topic.

About Sirius

In the northern hemisphere Sirius is obscured by the rising sun through the long hot days of summer. In mid August it reappears in the morning skies. In the ambient light of a modern world, jaded by the glare of artificial light, we can all too easily overlook the stars, even our brightest. 

In ancient Egypt however things were very different. Back then, the day when Sirius rose just before the sun signaled the time when the Nile began to flood and the start of the Egyptian agricultural calendar. 

Like many of the stars, Sirius was personified by a goddess. Her name was Sopdet and and she was an important goddess of the Old Kingdom, serving as a guide to dead pharaohs journeying through the underworld.

Which reminds me of other goddesses, especially Inanna and her descent.

Sirius is a bright white star with a hint of blue. When the air is unsteady, or when the star itself is low to the horizon as it is now, it appears to radiate an entire spectrum of color. In mid-northern latitudes Sirius may be seen on August 12th, just before sunrise. 

And there was a time, when I was always there to greet it. I’ve shared a post about the first time, I met Sirius below.

The Susquehanna River August 13th, 2011 6:23 AM

I got to the river just before the sun crested, compass in hand to observe the southeast sky but saw no sign of the Dog Star. According to various internet sources Sirius was due to return to Northern skies today. Ancient people were very precise in their observations of the heavens. The internet, it seems, is not. But that was all right. Seeing the sun rise over the mountains was worth getting up for.

There is a resonant energy to the world just before dawn and there was a time when I used to get up at five o'clock in the morning just to feel the hum. On the way home from the river today, I remembered that time. I remembered how I used to sit in the kitchen and drink black coffee and write straight through until sunrise. 

I lived in the city then but I could see the better part of eastern sky above the vacant lot outside my back door. I got early up to write and see the sun come up almost every morning. In many ways, that apartment was my first real home and I made the most of it.

On the way back from the river this morning, I thought that I could do that here, too, if I wanted. Sirius is with us for a while now. And if I get the timing right, I should be able to catch it on some other morning.

The Present Day

Home Altar 1

Home Altar 2

 
Discovering Sigil Magic

I got interested in sigil magic in a roundabout way.

It began last month when I attended the Hay House Writers’ Workshop. On Day 3 of the online conference, Colette Baron Reid was a featured speaker. As part of her presentation she led us in an exercise to connect us with the spirit of our book.

We were told to get a piece of paper, and were led in a meditation. Then Colette asked us to make a dot on a piece of paper, ask the spirit of our book a question and draw whatever we saw or felt.

I was working on The Spirit Dream then and I knew that book had a spirit—a real one, or as real as these things get. So I asked my question.

What do you want for this book?

I didn’t hear anything. But I did see something—which happens rarely due to my aphantasia.

An 8 pointed star.

A symbol I associate with the spirit of dream.

I take symbols seriously because I believe that they’re how spirit talks to us. So the star meant something too me and the fact that I saw it meant something, too.

Though I was not clear on the details.

What Happened Next

I followed Colette’s instructions, drawing the 8 pointed star, enclosing it within rectangle and then drawing waves of energy emanating out into the ether—not even knowing that I had drawn my first sigil.

And while I didn't get an immediate answer to my question, answers did come.

By the time the workshop ended, I knew that I needed to put the source of my project first.

Not long after, I had a clear insight into what the spirit of my book really wanted.

To be heard.

So I started publishing it to my AuDHD Author Substack where it would be free to read.

And with that decided, I decided to explore the process Colette had given us.

I bought her book, The Art of Manifesting, and did some online reading about drawing and intention setting.

And that's how I found out about sigil magic.

What is a Sigil?

Just to be clear, Sigil magic doesn’t have to be some dark Seal of Solomon kind of thing. In it’s modern applications, in fact, it’s really just another way of manifesting.

I know that manifesting is controversial and my feelings about it are mixed. I was a critic of The Secret and I think New Thought is simplistic, at best. But this feels different.

In contemporary practice, a sigil is created from a statement of intent. All you have to do is formulate your intention, write it down, cross out the repeating letters and create a design from the letters that are left. This provides a symbol or focus point that you empower and release.

Sigils are popular in chaos magic, which teaches that there is no single way to empower a sigil. As in other forms of magic, a practitioner can choose whatever energy they want. Personal intent. Deities. Spirits. Sacred places. Ritual. Correspondences. Creative imagination.

The list goes on which is why sigil magic is sometimes considered gray. But it doesn’t have to be.

People have been using sigils in the form of amulets and talismans since Sumer and probably before. The 8 pointed star I drew is a symbol of Inanna, who I’ve associated with the spirit of my dream.

In ancient Sumer the 8 pointed star was used in amulets of Inanna. This is what convinced me that sigil magic is something I want to explore.

These are the books I’m working with:

• The Art of Manifesting: A Meditative Drawing Practice to Rewire Your Brain and Create Your Reality by Colette Baron Reid
• Practical Sigil Magic: Creating Personal Symbols for Success by Frater UD
• Condensed Chaos: An Introduction to Chaos Magic by Phil Hine
• Learn to Read Ancient Sumerian by Joshua Bowen and Megan Lewis

Ur-Nammu dedication tablet for the Temple of Inanna in Uruk (public domain)

Photo by Jr Korpa on Unsplash

📖 The Backstory 

I started this blog in 2010. 

Three years after my life imploded. Deep in what I would later learn was autistic burnout. A state that was the inevitable result of a lifetime spent pretending to be someone I wasn’t.

This was not my first experience of burnout, named or not, and I knew what to do with it. I returned to the spiritual and creative interests I’d left behind years earlier.

I did yoga. I wrote stories. I went back to school for graphic design. I read mythology and literature and vampire stories. I got a job at our local paper.

But it wasn’t enough money, and I had kids to think of. So I went back to my old life. And this time, when I burnt out I sought help and was immediately misdiagnosed with bipolar disorder.

Heavily medicated and unable to engage with the things that I loved, I sunk into a deep depression. And then I had a dream.

🌙 The Dream

The dream was unlike any dream I’d ever had before. It was complex and vivid and remarkably coherent. It was so numinous and beautiful I knew it came from somewhere else—somewhere not-me.

I called it the Spirit Dream. And while I had no idea what to do with it things were different in its wake. I had other unusual dreams. I had spiritual experiences. I noticed synchronicities I could not dismiss.

Nobody in my day to day life understood what was happening to me then, or cared, so I started The Mystic Review because I needed a place where I could make sense of my experience.

I blogged my way through the New Age, Spiritualism, earth-based practices, and everything in between. I loved everything I was doing but I did it too hard. Things went wrong. I got burnt out again. I went back to the church.

I set The Mystic Review to private. I stopped writing down my dreams. When something seemed synchronistic, I dismissed it.

Until I couldn’t.

Because spirit wasn’t done with me yet.

✨ What Happened

In 2022 I was diagnosed with autism. In 2023 I hit a wall with my writing and took my first parapsychology course.

I began my first Substack newsletter, Writing on the Spectrum, in 2023 in an attempt to make sense of my autism and later ADHD diagnoses.

In 2024, I returned to dreamwork. Later that same year, I discovered Carl Gustav Jung. Synchronistically.

I saw the Spirit Dream in a whole new way—and I knew it was time to come back here to The Mystic Review.

I set the blog to public. I republished many of my old posts. And I started sharing some of those posts to substack at Writing on the Spectrum.

I finished a novel in 2025 and started another. And in between I wrote a neurodivergent spiritual memoir I called The Spirit Dream.

In 2026 I finished my paranormal romance novel and the memoir.

📝 What I’m Writing Now

With two books finished, I was interested in learning more about publishing so I took a workshop through Hay House. On day 3 of the workshop  Colette Baron Reid led us in a connect-with-the-spirit-of-your book meditation. I saw an 8 pointed star—a symbol I strongly associated with the spirit of the spirit dream.

I had been going back and forth on what to do with the memoir, knowing it probably wouldn’t get read on Amazon. The meditation brought me back to source and source seemed to be saying what the spirit of my book really wants is to be heard.

So I started serializing it to Writing on the Spectrum.

Then I started thinking about what The Mystic Review might want. And my intuition was that it would like its own space on Substack. So that’s what I’m doing.

The Mystic Review will continue here at this URL indefinitely, but all of the content will also be availble in the Mystic Review Newsletter. 

You can sign up for it here:

Photo by Content Pixie on Unsplash

Energy and Associations 

There a lot of different ways to read the minor arcana in tarot, but the framework that works best for me is based on the elements.

I have been reading tarot since I was 13. I find it helpful to journal on my readings. This gives me a chance to reflect on the cards and whatever situation I’m reading on.

As an AuDHDer with alexithymia I find tarot, journaling and dreamwork especially helpful. Not the kind of tarot where you throw down cards hoping for a glimpse of what’s coming. The kind where you write and reflect and arrive at something new.

To me the elements can provide a good starting point (for the minors).

Swords

Air | Winter

• Current of divine / archetypal inspiration 
• Human intellect and insights
• Clarity
• Thinking and reasoning
• Overthinking and anxiety

Cups

In this video I share bit about the concept of the map maker in dreams and spiritual experience. I talk about why I think that sharing these experiences matter.

The video shares a recent experience triggered by somebody else’s dream. Whether you consider this second-hand dream guidance or a synchronicity, I think it says something about what is available to us.

I also talk about my nonfiction project which is a part AuDHD memoir and part spiritual journey. Probably the most interesting thing about all of this, is how it helped guide me back to that project.

I think that matters.

Thank you for watching!

To follow me on YouTube, please visit: https://www.youtube.com/@MysticReview

To sign up for my newsletter, please go to https://barbaragraver.substack.com/ (if you just want to see the site just click through the signup)

Photo by Corbin Mathias on Unsplash

 The Video

 A short video about new content on metaphysics and ancient mysteries:

Photo by Josh Rangel on Unsplash

What are the astrological ages?

 Approximately every 2160 years, on the first day of spring, the sun rises in a new sign. This is the beginning of a new astrological age. 

The astrological ages or World Ages move backward through the zodiac.  

The Age of Taurus is estimated at 4300-2150 BCE. It included the Bronze Age, the invention of writing, the Near Eastern bull cults, and civilizations like Sumer, Ancient Egypt, and the Indus Valley.

Aries (circa 2150 BCE-1 CE) was the beginning of the Iron Age. It saw the rise and fall of several ancient cultures including the Akkadian Empire, Vedic India, and Ancient Greece.

The Age of Pisces began on or around 1 CE. It encompasses the rise of the Roman Empire and the West, Christianity, the Inquisition, colonialism, and two World Wars. 

While none of these ranges are exact, the Age of Aquarius is expected to begin on or around 2160. It is predicted to be a time of increased communication, innovation, and humanitarianism. 

I studied astrology and became fascinated by the astrological world ages. To me, this aspect of astrology was more interesting than any individual horoscope. 

So when I saw that my Jungian Dream School instructors had made a video on the Age of Aquarius, I was excited. After watching the video I felt called to learn more about Jung and the Astrological Ages.

Jung and the Astrological Ages

In watching the video, I learned that Jung believed that the astrological ages influenced the collective. He saw the passing age of Pisces as a time of dissolution. He believed that the old energies would diminish and that new energies would be activated in the coming Age of Aquarius. 

Jung wrote about the Age of Pisces and the influence of Christianity in Aion, which I am currently reading. To him, the psychological self was a totality that "must by definition include the light and dark aspects." 

Christianity, in the Age of Pisces, didn't allow for that.

In Aion, Jung talks about the issue with seeing Christ as unadulterated light. For Christians, God couldn't be a paradox. He had to be summun bonum (ultimate good). This caused the early Church Fathers to call evil an absence of good (a concept called privatio boni) because there is nothing of God in it.

Deviation from perceived good could not be tolerated in the heyday of the Christian age. Laws rigidly divided acceptable conduct from what couldn’t be tolerated. In some instances that worked. In others it was cruel and unnecessary.

The Dream School video

In the video, my Dream School instructors shared Jung’s believe that bringing the entire self into consciousness is superior to killing the bad and vanquishing it into hell. 

I think that's because vanquishing darkness doesn't actually work.

This was one of the problems I had with Christian morality. Extolling virtue and denying vice works for some people but not all. And I don't think it's the best way to deal with things from a psychological perspective, either. 

Dictating a moral code based on dualistic ideas about right and wrong isn’t necessarily effective. In the video, one of my instructors, Jungian Analyst Joseph Lee suggested that the Aquarian Age might bring about a new ethic based on how the self responds to our actions.

This would call for a morality based on dreams and inner work that connects us with self, instead of blind allegiance to religious law.

Joseph went on to point out that this is an individual approach to ethics. It allows for variation and may require a different kind of tolerance. It asks to accept that not everyone will be on the same page.

The Age of Aquarius is expected to be innovative, communicative, and diverse. I think we are already seeing that. But as my instructors pointed out World Ages don't go quietly--making the current upheaval largely reactive.

What this means to me

Jung witnessed two World Wars in the course of his lifetime. He had personal visions of Europe covered in blood and, ultimately, as a site of great desolation. He felt that the only real chance for humanity was for individuals to do the inner work that releases shadow and connects with the self. 

Whether this will actually happen in the Age of Aquarius is yet to be determined, but it gives me hope.

_____________

I'm going to be learning more about this topic, so if you're interested please check back or sign up for The Mystic Review newsletter @ MysticReview.substack.com!

You can watch the Dream School Age of Aquarius video in this post: MysticReview.com/2026/04/dreams-tarot-and-age-of-aquarius

This post is about my renewed commitment to the blog and the dreams and synchronicities that influenced me. 

Dream Guidance

For reference: I spent the last couple of weeks working on a romance novel based on a short story I wrote some time ago. There were issues with the story and, for a time, it consumed most of my attention. I put my metaphysical writing and interests on hold during this period.

Last week, I had a dream that seemed to speak to this. The dream began in a lovely old-fashioned red and gold lobby. I was attending an event, even though I felt drawn to different event at another location. There was a scheduling issue, so I’d chosen the event/program featured in the dream. When I reached the auditorium I learned that the event I had chosen was about weddings or wedding planning.

There were other characters, conversations, and indications that the wedding event was fluff and not a good fit for me but I didn't leave. Throughout the dream, a feeling persisted—I would have rather been somewhere else.

Two nights ago, I dreamt I was sitting down with an assistant who had been inattentive in the past. I ask her to begin with my day book, looking for conflicts. I feel that she should pay special attention to the energy. In the dream, the energy I mention has a magical feel to it. It is significant and alluring.

The wedding in dream one put me in mind of the romance novel. The scheduling issue in dream one suggests that time is an issue. It occurs to me that I can only choose one.

The assistant in dream two hasn't done a good job but I'm giving her another chance. Scheduling conflicts and a kind of magical energy are key.

My Reaction

Dream one seemed to indicate a core conflict around my personal focus. There is the suggestion that I am focusing wrongly and that time is limited. The color red featured in the lobby reminds me of the alchemical process and the potential for transformation. 

As a result of this dream, I decided to give myself time away from the romance writing. Almost immediately, a feeling of enthusiasm for metaphysical writing poured in.

I decided to be more involved here with the blog and felt good about doing that. Still I wondered if I was being reactive. That was when I had the second dream which seemed like a variation on a theme.

In Waking Life

I felt that this idea was being reinforced in my waking life, too.

The last few weeks have been hard everyone in our family has been sick. Because I have family members with serious health problems, illness always reminds me that nothing about the future is guaranteed. When my dog Luna, became ill with hemorrhagic vomiting and had to be treated at the animal emergency something shifted for me. I started to think about what matters and what does not. Thoughts about life purpose and the limitations of time occurred to me.

And other events in my waking life seemed to expand on this.

A video by tarot reader Julie Poole talked about purging to make way for the new energies. A This Jungian Life video talked about Carl Jung and the Age of Aquarius. Points made about duality and Christianity and the Age of Pisces reinforced some of my old ideas.

I realized that I was still clinging to some of my old programming.

Old programming had a lot to do with my decision to put The Mystic Review on hold in 2017 at the height of its popularity. A family member had come close to death. I was scared. Returning to the Church felt safe. As time passed however, it began to feel restrictive. The Catholic approach to elevating virtue and repressing vice didn't work for me. Shadow spilled into my fiction writing. Eventually I began to question.

I took classes at Rhine Institute. I connected with Jung. I returned to the blog.

All of that happened in 2024. But I didn't fully commit the blog and everything that goes along with it then. Now, I have.

I hope it will be of interest to others!

My Full Moon Tarot Reading

This is my full moon tarot reading on home / family (row 1, bottom), my media (row 2) and return to the blog, and my nonfiction writing (row 3) and related new ideas. 

Note the position of Temperance (which I associate with Aquarius). This card reflects points made in the This Jungian Life video about the tension of the opposites. I will dive a bit deeper into the Age of Aquarius material (and this reading) in my next post. 

The Videos

I found both these videos resonant. The Age of Aquarius video is produced by the Jungian analysts who teach the Dream School course I'm studying. The tarot video is by a reader I like.

The Aquarius video was especially helpful for me because it aligns with my own thinking about organized religion and where I'm at now.