The Inner Temple

A Redeemed Contemplative Religious Practice for the People of Ahmbren

This page contains something of a spoiler in that it reveals the end state of the world and Ahmbren’s relationship to our own world of Eden at the end of The Last World, the conclusion of the second trilogy, “The God Who Lived” and the series finale.

The Ahmbren Chronicles, in addition to being a story about people and their relationships, is a story about people and their understanding of the greater spiritual truths of the world. To tell this story, the Ahmbren cosmology is built on my own lived experiences at various times in my life with Catholic Christianity, Hermetic Kabbalah, Wicca, and skeptical atheism. So, in the creative writing process, as the characters discovered an unfolding of these ideas in their own world, I also worked through a crystallization of these concepts, free to bring the four perspectives together in a fictional setting where real-world cultural baggage didn’t cause them to clash with each other.

In Ahmbren, the world’s religion/mythological understanding evolved with a tear down of the Old Gods at the climax of The Tides of Artalon, the conclusion of the first trilogy, “When Dragons Die.” At the end of that story, the heroes ushered in a new age where gods weren’t present and mortalkind was left to build their own world, for better or worse. In the follow-on years, however, Meara was revealed not only to be an incarnation of Keruhn, but of the ultimate Divine Child sent by the creator Mother Goddess to save the last living world. The appendix of this book briefly discusses the new spiritual practice, less based in magic and more focused on inner contemplation. This kind of spirituality worked for people like Fernwalker, who had been a skeptic all her life. She could contemplate the Goddess within consecrated space without having to make declarative statement about such belief to the outside world. It prevented the formation of a new imperial religion, and made no demands for conversion.

From The Last World, Appendix, The Inner Temple:

After Fernwalker’s return to the world from the Garden, Ahmbren helped her enter into spiritual practice that brought her to the Mother, and into communion with Meara, the incarnation of the Mother as Joy.

Fernwalker’s fundamental personality was one of rationality. In a magical world such as Ahmbren, she had no problem knowing that magic existed. Ordered magic, composed of the four elements.

The world-soul taught her to meditate and journey inward in a contemplative magical practice. This kind of magic was different from the spells of witches and wizards. It was inward focused, and its fruits were transformational. It was a deliberate process of ritualized meditation and inward pathworking.

The outer temple consisted of four Watchtowers, presences of the elements set at the compass points: Light in the East, Life in the North, Time in the South, and Dark in the West. Called in that order, the sequence opened Fernwalker’s mind to the transformative mystery of living in the outer world: the soul initiates and emerges from Light as its own spark; then, it takes on form through birth in Life; then, it changes and transforms through acts of becoming in the space that Time makes for it, some changes for growth and some leaving scars; and finally, the soul comes to rest in the Dark, where the changes are integrated, some with joy, and some with forgiveness, and all with acceptance. Here in Eden, each of these Watchtowers are governed by the four Bridgekeepers: Arda, Aradma, Tiberan, and Anuit. But in Ahmbren, the spirit of the Champion, Naiadne, lives as a luminary in the Communion of Souls, and Fernwalker communed with her sister at each of these quarters. And in the center of the Outer Temple’s circle was Lunarin reborn, the lunar goddess acting as a guide and bridge towards the Inner Temple.

Fernwalker had no problem with this Outer Temple. These were the elements of Order. But to cross the bridge with Lunarin into the Inner Temple of Mystery, which she had all her life understood as the word “Chaos,” was altogether another thing. She remained a skeptic in her heart, and it was too easy to break resonance with disbelief.

The world-soul helped her understand the magical principal of active belief when in the subjective experience of the temple, and when outside of the temple, she had to neither proclaim nor deny the temple’s objective reality. The magic held potency when she stepped into the circle, and treated the spirits of Chaos, of the inner Mystery, as if they were real. And when she stepped out of the circle, she assented to their reality as possibility, putting belief in them without asserting. It became a process of gnosis within the temple, and agnostic acceptance outside the temple.

This temple was not a physical place. It was a surreality within her own heart, found through meditation, poetry, dreams, and feelings. Once she made the transition into the acceptance of Mystery, she journeyed inward and found that the Inner Temple was the Garden of Ahmbren itself. Only this one was the Garden of Fernwalker, within the center of her heart, with its own Tree of Living and Tree of Knowing.

Here she met seven companions and guides. These were the Liminal Spirits, called such because they arose as emergent personalities in the liminal space where a particular ray of the Cosmic Mother’s love intersected with the edge of her own psyche.

Lunarin took her place as the Liminal Spirit of Becoming. And in the temple, arrayed as a six-petaled golden rose, Fernwalker would meet five other Liminal Spirits: Discernment, Love, Power, Mercy, and Silence, which stood as the veil that preserved the deeper Mystery. On the paths between them, between Love and Power, in the Temple’s very heart, the center of the golden rose and the central point between the other six, was the Liminal Spirit of Joy.

It was here where Fernwalker bloomed in the Temple, taking her place as Joy in Aspiration. And she did this by calling out to Meara, Joy in Incarnation. By clinging to Meara, the incarnate Logos of the Mother, Fernwalker could bring the light of Joy into the other Spirits even though she was still on the journey herself. And when they were all united in song, and offered up to the Mother, Fernwalker would return through the Outer Temple and back into the world of Ahmbren, transformed by communion with the Mother through her Daughter and the spirits that arose from her Love.

Bringing the fruits of the temple back into the world was, the world-soul instructed, crucial. It was not enough to learn to feel compassion in the Temple. One had to be compassionate to others out in the world.

More specifically, Fernwalker learned that Faith, Hope, and Love are not mere teachings of the Light, nor are they concepts, nor spirits. They are metaphysical forces of a gravitational nature, that keeps a soul oriented towards and in orbit around the sacred Mystery, the Mother. They allow the soul to move through the world and find their purpose, and become an expression of the Mother’s love to others. Conversely, the inner work also made her more aware of and able to diffuse the opposite centrifugal forces of Fear, Despair, and Hatred. These, when unchecked, threaten to pull every soul out of orbit and into the outer void of madness and disintegration.

This Inner Temple was shared and spread through Meara’s church. Most people observed the outer forms and did not spend much time in contemplation, but those of mystical inclination found their own inner temples, their own inner gardens. They met Naiadne at the Watchtowers, and they met Lunarin at the center… and then they discovered their own personal companions, their own Liminal Spirits, each with their own names.

These mystics experienced firsthand the mystery taught in Aradma’s and Meara’s lifetimes: that the purpose of Life is Joy, and the purpose of Joy is Life. But they also unfolded into the second mystery revealed by Meara in the Garden:

The purpose of Time is Becoming, and the purpose of Becoming is Time.

And so the story always continues, life always unfolds in becoming, through time, for joy. And although the story continues, here ends this accounting of The Ahmbren Chronicles.