Disclaimer: if you haven't read the first part of this series, or even if you have, allow me to remind you that this is entirely UPG and I am not making any claims of scholarship. Your mileage may vary.
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Now comes the part that everyone loves to wax philosophical on: the shadows. Plural, because there are two, and it was that revelation which finally snapped all the pieces into place for me. While the Khaibit is clearly represented as a shadow even in ancient times, the exact nature of the Sahu is less clear. I have seen it translated in many ways, often as the “astral body”, and the word is sometimes used interchangeably with Khat in ancient sources. It wasn’t until I asked the Nisut (AUS) about souls in general that I got my first indication that there was more to it: she described the Khaibit as the shadow cast by the body, and the Sahu as “the shadow that your ba casts in the unseen world”.
Now, I’ve seen her contradict that statement elsewhere, and I’m sure I’m reading more into it than she personally intended me to, so I’m still going to count what follows as my UPG, while crediting Hemet (AUS) with the origination of the idea—in other words, I mean to give credit where credit is due without claiming that any of this comes directly from her (because it most certainly doesn’t...I took that single phrase and ran with it).
First, let us get past the part that is difficult for those of us who came into the faith from western occultism: the shadows are not “dark”, “negative”, or “repressed” parts of ourselves. In fact, you can take what you know of the Jungian concept of the shadow self and toss it out the window because I’m not even going to touch on it. Plainly and simply, the “shadow self”, to my thinking, would be that place where the Ka and Ba overlap and when neither wants to claim what is left between after asserting themselves… and it would have nothing to do with the actual shadows I’m talking about here.
Our shadows are representational of the effect of our existence. They are not “souls” in the same sense as the Ba and Ka and Khat—they are not even as close to soul-hood as the Ib—but rather, they are the result of having a Khat and a Ba in a world that interacts with us as we interact with it. They are symbolic of our ability and capacity to act on the seen and unseen worlds.
The daytime sun shines upon our Khat and a shadow is cast onto the ground. That is our most passive and inescapable action on the physical world. Our ability to cast a shadow means we have the ability to use the Khat to perform physical actions, to interact with the seen.
By the same token, the mysterious midnight sun shines upon the Ba and a shadow is cast on the other world, which is the most passive expression of the our inherent ability to use the Ba to perform actions on and interact with the unseen. It also brings to light something which I hadn’t considered before: we cannot avoid the unseen. We are present in it just as we are present in the seen world. To a degree, we can choose not to act in the unseen, but we cannot avoid casting a shadow there.
That blurs the line between the two worlds, and I know that might be uncomfortable for some, but there is a good reason to pay attention to the shadows even if the ramification of their existence is unsettling: there are recorded heka that effect the shadow(s). If one follows the line of thinking presented above, such heka involving the removal or damage of one shadow or the other would carry with it the sinister implication of seriously injuring one’s ability to act on the world. Protective heka in this regard serves to preserve one’s efficacy as part of the existent. Serious stuff.
Though it would be misleading to not mention here that the shadows alone, as representational (possibly semi-literal) concepts of capacity for action, do not constitute the actions themselves. For it is not only through the shadows that actions are enacted, the shadows merely represent the possibility of action and the effect of existing even when one does not intentionally act. The force of energy and will behind actual actions, seen or unseen, stems from the divine spark left in each of us after the act of our creation—the Sekhem which infuses us and gives our shadows meaning. It can almost be said of the Sekhem that it is the literal light which casts our shadows, for without that vital force of life energy, we would be unable to act in any capacity.
[Note: I will not speak too much on Sekhem aside from that, mainly because I am still learning about it and not comfortable making to many definite statements. I may revisit the idea later when I have had more time to experience and work with it.]
Yet, there is also another level of the shadows beyond being our means of interacting with existence: they are also the means through which existence interacts with us. In that way, they additionally function like gateways, two way valves in a sense, which allow us to be experienced by the world even as we experience it. But to understand that concept, we will have to take a detour and go down the rabbit hole that is phenomenology. For a more elegant explanation than I could manage on my own, I turn to David Abrahms, a philosopher and ecologist, who devotes a significant section of his book, The Spell of the Sensual, to describing how phenomenologists describe a living being interacting with its environment and the hidden reciprocity in that interaction:
“He calls attention to the obvious but easily overlooked fact that my hand is able to touch things only because my hand is itself a touchable thing, and thus is entirely a part of the tactile world that it explores…To touch the coarse skin of a tree is thus, at the same time, to experience one’s own tactility, to feel oneself touched by the tree.”
Just as the hand does not feel but for being touched, we do not act in existence but for being acted upon by it. Unfortunately this where my rational mind bends slightly to match the pace of my knowing and I fear that beyond this, I am somewhat less coherent. I will say this of what I learned on that mental road: to reach us in the fortress which is our Khat/Ka/Ib/Ba complex, those who lack a Khat—which is to say, the denizens of the unseen world—must approach us through the personage of our Ba (which alone, is aware of them) and the means of doing so is to tap through the Sahu. For even when the Ba dwells firmly inside our Khat during the day, it continues to cast its shadow on the unseen perpetually simply because it exists.
I have discovered other implications in this, but I freely admit that they are pure conjecture. As an example: it stands to reason that any form of possession by spirits (since the idea is fresh in my mind after reading the Filan/Kaldera book) would naturally come in through the Ba via the Shau, and likely has gaining some control over the Khaibit of the person as its goal. OBEs would, if one takes them at face value, translate into these terms as a temporary separation of the Ba/Sahu from the Khat/Ka(Ib)/Khaibit, with the Sekhem acting as tether. I could go on, but you probably have a good enough idea of what I mean by now. If nothing else, through this exercise I have at least gained a useful set of terminologies for consistently describing the things I encounter when doing mystical work.
And there you have it: the mysterious shadows explained. :) Next time, I will summarize and tie everything to the image I posted at the start of this. I will also demo and provide instructions for an interesting tarot exercise which I developed in conjunction with this project.
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