Three Symbols of a Lived Magickal Practice

There is a kind of knowledge that arrives not through study but through rupture. It announces itself in the wrong voice at the wrong hour: in my own sudden fury in a Perugian church, fury I could not account for and barely remembered afterwards; in the repeated intrusion of an inexplicable bird into two decades of dreams; in the granite silhouette of an Alpine peak that refused to remain merely a mountain. My ongoing body of esoteric writing and visual art, spread across three related texts produced between 2009 and 2025, constitutes a record of precisely this kind of knowledge: knowledge received before it was sought, metabolised slowly, and understood only in retrospect.

The three texts in question, A Conversation with Zophiel (2020, first composed December 2009), Mountains: A Solitary Journey (2020), and The Red Bird: A Personal Journey Through Ancient Egyptian Symbolism and Spiritual Transformation (2025), are not a planned trilogy. They are posts on my personal blog at natclegg.com, occasional meditations, records of encounters that preceded their own interpretation. Yet read together they reveal three interlocking symbols, each one a different register of the same underlying process: the encounter between an individual consciousness and forces that exceed and inform it. Those three symbols are Zophiel, the angelic intelligence who arrived as storm and rage; Monviso, the Italian Alpine peak that has come to hold the psychological meaning of the Self; and the Red Bird, the avian image whose significance twenty years of dreaming could not resolve until Egyptian soul cosmology supplied the frame. Each is considered in turn below, and what their convergence reveals about the nature of a lived Magickal practice is examined throughout.

Zophiel: The Intelligence Who Arrives in Rage

Before the Umbrian week gave the encounter its name, the angelic current had been active in my Italian life for some years. Early sketches from this period, part of the extended Zophiel record at natclegg.com, document figures that arrived without invitation and resisted conventional interpretation: forms encountered in the compressed darkness of ancient buried sites, where the stone walls press in and the distance between the living visitor and whatever persists in the rock becomes, momentarily, uncertain. A recurring dream from the same period compounds the impression. In it, angels moved in formation rather than singly, spiralling together as a coherent body of intelligence rather than as individual beings, the collective motion carrying an authority that no solitary figure could have sustained. These were not the celestial messengers of religious convention, purposive and individually addressed. They were a current, a weather system of non-human consciousness, making themselves known through the body of the dreamer before any conceptual framework was available to receive what they carried. The Umbrian crystallisation of June 2009 was, in this light, not a rupture from nowhere but the moment at which something long assembling finally announced its name.

The account of what happened in Umbria was written not by me but by my wife, Lenni, who narrated events she had observed during a week-long stay at a stone-carving retreat in the Umbrian countryside. Published as part of A Conversation with Zophiel at natclegg.com in September 2020, it is the account of a witness rather than a subject: she watched my behaviour shift, night by night, with the cool attention of someone who had read Traugott Oesterreich’s Possession: Demonical and Other and was now measuring what she saw against his taxonomy. Oesterreich, a German philosopher writing in the early twentieth century, had described three indicators of possession: a change in physiognomy, a change in voice, and a change in personality expressed through the utterances of another entity (Oesterreich, 1930). Lenni found all three, in various degrees, over the course of that week.

The events themselves form a sequence that moves from the domestic and almost comic to the genuinely unnerving. I asked Lenni, sleeping beside me, who she was, in the night, with no memory of it by morning. A conversation followed in which I spoke a name that was not hers in a tone that was not my own. The brief electrical summer storms of central Italy were persistent at this time, anomalous weather that kept the stone carvers aware of what was possible in the fields. There was then the emotional eruption in the Church of San Ercolano in Perugia, where I suddenly began shouting what I described as denunciations, and said afterwards only that the feeling had come through my eyes. Finally, the name Zophiel was discovered written large on the studio floor alongside other symbols and sigils I did not understand, with me asleep beside it and no explanation available when I woke other than that I had needed to be able to stand on the name.

A fellow guest at the sculpture retreat, an American counsellor named Alan, asked me directly whether I knew the name of my spirit guide. The answer came without preparation: Zophiel, I thought, and possibly Barachiel. Neither name was familiar to me or to Lenni at the time. The research we undertook on returning home produced a complex and sometimes contradictory set of attributions, as research into angelic nomenclature tends to do. What we found for Zophiel, variously rendered as Zaphiel, Iofiel, Zaphkiel, and Jophiel depending on the source and period, included the following: he is associated in the Kabbalah with the sphere of Binah and therefore with understanding, restriction, and the intelligence of deep pattern; Paracelsus names him as the Intelligence of Jupiter; he is associated with illumination and with artists; in Solomonic rites he appears as a name invoked by the master of the art; and as Zaapiel, derived from the Hebrew za’ap meaning storm, rage, or anger, he is the angel of storms (Davidson, 1967). A note on Barachiel, the second name that appeared alongside Zophiel: the research traced multiple variant spellings, including Barakel, Baraqiel, and Barbiel, and records both his role as one of the seven archangels and his Enochian identity as one of the Grigori, the Watchers who taught humanity astrology. Some sources give Barachiel as specifically the guardian of lightning and blessings, with the name meaning “lightning of God,” a meaning that sits alongside the meteorological violence of that Umbrian week in a way that is difficult to dismiss as coincidence.

Rage as Revelation

The convergence of these attributions with what happened in Umbria is striking enough to deserve attention. The storm that attended the week was anomalous. The eruption in the church had the quality of a rage that did not belong to my ordinary personality, that came through me rather than from me. The discovery of the name on the studio floor suggests a compulsion to establish relationship, to ground the encounter in something physical and nameable. The Kabbalistic attribution to Binah, sphere of the deep feminine, of sorrow, of understanding that is inseparable from limitation, sits oddly but coherently alongside the role of the artist and the capacity for creative illumination. Zophiel is not a gentle guide. He is an intelligence whose method of introduction is disturbance.

This is worth pausing over, because the Western esoteric tradition, particularly in its more popular contemporary forms, has tended to sanitise the encounter with non-human intelligences into something reassuringly therapeutic. Guides are benevolent; angels are helpful; the spirit world is inclined to be kind. Lenni’s account, written while she was studying Oesterreich and therefore had both a sceptical framework and a sympathetic one available simultaneously, suggests something considerably less comfortable. The entity who arrived in Umbria used my body as an instrument for experiences I had not chosen and could not fully recall. The question of whether this constitutes obsession, possession, or inspired contact, in Oesterreich’s terminology a transient derangement of the psychic balance, is one the text deliberately leaves open. What it does not leave open is that something happened, and that what happened was formative.

A visionary experience from this same Italian period illuminates what kind of intelligence is at work. In what I describe as a vision of two adjacent rooms, the divine presented itself in two irreconcilable forms. In the first room stood a figure of perfect beauty: radiant, composed, serene in the manner that religious iconography has always preferred, untouchable in precisely the way that keeps the divine safely remote from ordinary life. In the second room was something more demanding: a face that carried everything human beings find difficult in themselves, the contradictions and imperfections and mortal urgencies that theology has historically worked to exclude from any account of the sacred. This, in the vision, was the true god. The figure of impossible beauty was the false god, the consoling image rather than the living reality. The god that contained the human was more real than the god purged of it. In Jungian terms the experience maps directly onto the understanding of the Self as a totality that does not discriminate between the acceptable and the shadow: the archetype holds the beautiful and the difficult together because it is precisely their integration, not their separation, that constitutes wholeness. What the vision does that theoretical argument cannot is to make this distinction felt rather than merely understood. The false god offers comfort at the cost of truth; the true god demands the capacity to remain in the room with what one finds hardest to accept in oneself.

On reflection, the angel of devotional iconography, radiant and composed and unthreatening, is a relatively late aesthetic invention. In the scriptural literature it displaces, the angel arrives as something that overwhelms rather than reassures; its first necessity is to tell the witness not to be afraid. That instruction is theologically significant: the consoling figure is the same false god the vision identifies, the image that flatters the senses precisely because it asks nothing of them. Pseudo-Dionysius argues in the Celestial Hierarchy that the higher the angelic order, the less it resembles anything the human eye could find beautiful; seraphim are closer to consuming fire than to any anthropomorphic form. The Gnostic tradition makes the same argument from a different angle: the beautiful god is the Demiurge, whose aesthetic mastery marks him as secondary and false, while the true God remains hidden and formless. The two rooms of the vision could be structurally Gnostic in precisely this way. The angel who wrestles with Jacob through the night injures him, refuses to name itself, and gives its blessing only at the point of exhaustion. Divine intelligence, on this account, does not present itself in forms designed to be acceptable; the true encounter is the one that demands everything and resembles nothing the beholder was prepared to find.

The following are original notes from my dream diary, beginning in 2007. Extended versions of much of this material, with accompanying images, are published within the Zophiel posts at natclegg.com and form part of the ongoing record at houseofzophiel.com.

Meetings with God

We were moving house, or rather buildings. It was a very large building, and lots of people were involved moving furniture in pieces, lots of skips and containers. People were placing planks of wood on and between the furniture pieces in the skips and containers, lots of noise and activity. After some time, I grew bored of this and wandered the long empty corridors. These corridors reminded me of school corridors.

Sometime later, someone calm, a middle-aged woman who reminded me of a friend, showed me into a room. It was a small white room. Something odd happened at this point, because I was aware that I was having this experience of the room twice, like in one of those split-screen 1970s French films. One experience was real, one fake. In the real experience I saw a head suspended, floating in front of one of the blank walls. It shone. It was beautiful; opalescent light emanated from it without obscuring any detail. It was a weathered face, warts and all. It was God.

I was stunned by this and the realisation that it was God. I slid down the wall in amazement. The woman was there too. I felt I needed explanation and beckoned her over, but she remained by the door smiling with knowingness. The head and face were animated and smiling. He was talking to me, lots of words and expressions. I could not hear any sound. The meaning was: it’s okay. I was stunned for a couple of days after this, very withdrawn.

Meaningful Dreaming: Shadows, Memories of Places Unknown

There has been a catalogue of dreams along this path that I perceive as parts of the journey’s pattern, clues that frame the dialogue with Zophiel. The dream places carry a background, Zophiel’s environment, structures that frame an unlived experience brought into my psyche.

The Parallel Rooms

I was in a hotel with Lenni, I think in the United States. I had to go to our room for some reason. When I entered the room, I found some presents on the floor. I did not open them and left. Shortly afterwards I returned; the presents were not there. I felt confused. I walked out of the room and walked up and down the corridor to see if I had made a mistake about which room was mine. I walked back in. It had presents. I walked out again. This time I only saw two doors. They were next to each other and were identical. I walked into both; each was identical apart from one having a bathroom and chamber, and the other not. I then became obsessed with looking at the doors. After some time I realised that the two rooms were one, one with gifts one without, depending on how and when it was entered. Double entrances, double rooms. The shape of the doors reminded me of buildings: Egyptian, Babylonian, Mayan temples.

So is there somewhere with a double identical building chamber that holds gifts for us? One barren, one resplendent, protected by absence, revealed by what? Also, something about light: metaphysical or other. Light can conceal information; darkness can reveal information.

Treasures Revealed

I remember a big mansion house, lots of grand staircases and rooms. The ceilings were extremely high, painted in a medieval style of patterned pinks and reds with a buttress structure like a tithe barn. There were great black and white storks flying gracefully back and forth. This happened only when I looked; others could not see them. I was watching some trees being cut down on a ridge outside one of the grand windows. Lenni was upset about this. I tried to explain it was necessary but felt bad all the same.

I had allowed two small groups to excavate on the site. One group had found a book outside. It was bound and clad in some dull silver metal. The design on the covering was tooled, divided into quarters. Each quarter displayed a design of magical symbols and sigils from a different culture; three quarters were from Egypt, Celtic, and Sumerian traditions, and the fourth quarter displayed symbols from somewhere I did not know. They appeared alien, otherworldly. The book was very old.

The excavators were surprised at my knowledge. I did not open the book but I knew that I understood it. As I walked away from the group I knew that their finding it was safe. Something then caught my eye. Jutting out of the corner of some broken floor boards was the corner of a metal-clad book. I knew this was the one. From this point onwards I knew that this place cloaked other artefacts. Shortly after this I went to Cyprus and saw some metal and gold-clad bibles in the icon museum in Nicosia, beautiful designs in quarters embellished with images of the seraphim.

Dream State Coordinates

I was aware that Lenni was very far away in another part of the dream space. To comprehend where this was involved understanding a complex, peculiar mathematical equation, which I could write down. This was because it was about shapes, geometrical space. The top left of the space was something like an idea of the corner of the mind, like a blueprint in white lines and shapes, silvery, light forming in different parts. This had sound.

Cave

In the cave I could see a row of royal beings sitting on thrones; they had a stately presence. I noticed that their eyes seemed engaging, piercing, magnetic and somewhat frightening; they kept my attention. I was drawn to one figure’s eyes. She seemed female. These eyes were green, stunning. The face was wrapped in folds of something that could be wrapped when necessary. A sensation of a race of primitive people who worshipped these cat people became apparent. I saw some primitive sketches, rough line-figure depictions of them on the cave walls.

Double Head (2006)

I was dreaming of a walk through the city, Turin. I passed a large fountain and there, sitting on the edge, was a large double human-headed fish-tailed creature. The faces were similar to baby dolls’ heads; they were shiny, glazed but animated. I could not hear their voices. I was aware that no one else could see them. I just stood and stared. Later, thinking about this, I became aware of the Nommo, Sirian amphibious beings and gods described as the first living beings created by Amma, the sky god and creator of the universe. These were amphibious beings sent to Earth from the Sirius star system for the benefit of humankind. They look like Merfolk: mermaids and mermen. They are described as Masters of the Water, the Monitors, the Teachers or Instructors, Saviours, and Spiritual Guardians. Later, I discovered that the fountain was indeed in Turin in Piazza Solferino. The Fontana Angelica holds symbolism related to esoteric and occult themes: at the base of the statue, two children are depicted, the lower one offering a fish to the other, whose hairstyle and sun-like form suggest pagan worship. The Christian symbol of the fish, donated by a figure positioned lower down, implies a religion subservient to something higher and elevated. The lamb, both a pagan and religious symbol, represents a connection between these two beliefs.

Citadel

It was the end of the world. I had just finished completing the buildings and everyone was leaving. The original use for the buildings was now no longer; people had forgotten and did not know. There was a feeling of something called “the watching hour,” a time when people would once again know. People knew that things like money were meaningless and worthless; survival was living in groups, bartering for what they needed. At the Watching Hour I witnessed people group together, forming their clans. This was a silent process, perhaps ritual. There was no feeling of hysteria; everyone knew what to do although they did not know why. There was lots of traffic lying around, things being abandoned. Lenni was also there; I knew we would meet up later. It was also time for us to leave the citadel before others came looking for sanctuary.

Angel Wars

I was standing on a high ridge with, I think, two others, looking down at a scene below. We were tall, wearing dark velvety cloaks and garments patterned with dark colours that could only be seen up close. From a distance they appeared very dark. The colours emanated from some kind of hidden things inside the cloth; they looked like jewels that moved independently.

We were observing a great launch of beings, thousands of them. The beings were below, bronze and glowing as one. They moved along a jetty that protruded out from a cliff face; there was something military about this. The jetty was made of some polished marble-like stone, in the shape of an arrow, coming out of a cave mouth in the wall of the cliff, also very high up. Far below, I think, there was water, sea, lots of it.

The beings were angels; they moved as one, emerging from the cave mouth in the shape of a great bird. The head was a little dragon-like. Then it launched itself. I did not expect what happened next. The launch manifested itself as a complete fragmentation of the thousands of angels. They burst forth like shards of light and notes and harmonies of a beautiful crescendo of sound at the same time. The sound and light were one and the same. My presence there was because I had some duty to perform. Even though I was watching as some type of official, I knew that I could not show any emotion about the launch. It was very powerful.

God’s Tomb: Dreaming Beneath the Sand

The following reflections were first written for the post Zophiel: Working with the Intangible at natclegg.com in August 2020, and form the most sustained attempt in that body of work to articulate what the buried-temple dreams are actually doing. A transforming stillness. The Tomb as generator, not repository. The sand that covers is not the enemy of what lies beneath. These are notes towards understanding what it means to dream of hidden temples, and what the wave pattern has to do with it.

Red Lands

There is a painting that keeps returning. Red Lands. The placement of God’s Tomb. A place of sanctuary and decay, the two conditions wound together as they always are, inseparable from one another.

The Red Lands, Deshret, in Egyptian understanding, was the desert that lay beyond the cultivated margin of the Nile valley: hostile, dry, belonging to Set. And yet something is placed there with great intention. Not abandoned. Interred. Sanctuary and decay are not opposites in this framework. They describe the same condition at different points in time, or perhaps the same condition viewed from different angles of approach.

Gold is inert. It does not react. It does not combine with other substances. Its electrons are in a stable, balanced configuration and so it remains entire, unchanged, apparently passive. I have said elsewhere that God has stopped. Not ended, not destroyed, but stopped in the way that a thing may stop and still remain completely itself. Something held in a state of preserved stillness, which is different from death, though it resembles death from the outside. The resemblance is superficial. The outside is not the inside.

The Temple and the Red Bird: A Hymn Constructed from a Vision

This House causing Light

Open the gate for me

So that I can enter here

This tomb of God

This House of the Red Bird

What is most striking about this is the conjunction of light and tomb. A house that causes light. Not a house lit from outside, not full of light brought in from elsewhere, but a house that produces it; that is its function. The Tomb is generative. Something is occurring in the stillness. The gate that is to be opened is not an entrance to an ending. It is an entrance to a continuation, an ongoing process that required concealment in order to proceed.

This is what I dream about. Not the excavation, not the discovery moment. The knowing that it is there, under things.

Sand and What It Covers

There are temples known to exist that have not been found. This is not a mystical claim; it is an archaeological one. The desert covers, and what the desert covers is held. Sand is not destruction. Sand is slow time. It is the medium that preserves what it surrounds.

I have dreamed of a temple beneath the sand more than once. Not always the same temple. What is consistent is the knowledge: that particular quality of certainty that arrives in a dream before the images form, that something is beneath the surface and that it is intact. Not ruined. Not waiting to be found in the manner of an archaeological site. Present in its own right. Functioning, perhaps, in the way that zero-point energy functions: the lowest possible energy state, and still fluctuating, still real, still doing something.

The sand in these dreams is not difficult. It is not an obstacle to be removed. It is a medium of relationship in the same way that water is a medium of relationship between shores. Sand is made of ancient things, each grain a reduced form of something once much larger: stone, shell, mineral formation. The sand that covers the temple was once something that held a different kind of shape. Now it holds a shifting, provisional, responsive shape, one that fits itself to whatever it surrounds. It is not a hostile medium. It is a generous one. It is doing something specific when it covers a sacred place, and that thing is not burial in the sense of ending.

The Sumerians knew something about this. The construction of É-ninnu: the foundation pegs driven in, the bricks given birth amid cries, anointed with oil and cedar essence. A temple built with that degree of intention does not simply cease when it is no longer visible. The É, the house, the big house, the place of the city’s archives and governance, the midpoint. This was never merely architecture. The word carried the weight of a container for something that did not stop when the building did.

Wave Patterns

A wave does not stay in one place. It passes through a medium and the medium itself does not travel with it. This is worth holding for a moment. The wave and the medium are not the same thing, though you cannot have one without the other. What is transmitted through the medium is not the medium itself but a pattern. An organised disturbance. The disturbance carries information and the information is real regardless of whether it is being received.

The hidden temple, the buried Tomb, the resting God: these are not passive things. They emit. Whether or not there is anyone receiving the transmission seems almost beside the point, though of course it is not beside the point at all. It is the entire point.

The standing wave is the image I keep returning to here. A wave in which the positions of maximum and minimum oscillation are fixed, do not move. There is motion and stillness simultaneously present in the same structure. The node is still. The antinode is in maximum movement. Both are part of the same pattern, which cannot exist without both. This seems to me to be an image of what the Tomb is. The motion is inside the stillness. The energy is held in a particular configuration that appears, from most angles, to be simply quiescent. Appearing quiescent is not the same as being quiescent.

Zero-point energy is the lowest possible energy that a quantum mechanical system may have. Unlike in classical mechanics, quantum systems constantly fluctuate in their lowest energy state. These fluctuating zero-point fields lead to a kind of reintroduction of an aether in physics, since some systems can detect the existence of this energy. In the spiritual, transpersonal, and Magickal world, the zero-point is a gathering and a source of possibilities. The fluctuation is not random noise. It is the ground state of everything. The Tomb at zero-point is the Tomb as it actually is.

Hidden Places

The quality of a hidden place is different from the quality of a lost place. Something lost is simply not where it was expected to be. Something hidden is precisely where it is, and its location is maintained by intention, or by the logic of the thing itself, or by some convergence of conditions that amounts to the same thing as intention even if no single intelligence directed it.

I am not convinced these temples are hidden from us particularly. I think they exist in a register that is not the default register of moving through a day. The zero-point is always there. The fluctuation is always occurring. The buried temple continues its function regardless of whether anyone is above it or aware of it. What changes when we become aware of it is ourselves. There is something about dreaming that lowers the ambient noise enough to receive something at this frequency. This is not mysticism in the sense of vagueness. I mean something quite specific: that certain conditions permit reception of something that is being continuously transmitted, and dreaming is one of those conditions, and the threshold between waking and sleep is another, and certain spaces are a third.

Gilgamesh at the mountain gate, in the darkness between the scorpion-guardians and the garden on the other side, travelling twelve leagues through absolute dark before the light of morning: this is not mythological decoration. It is a phenomenology. The crossing of the null point requires the passage through the void between the two states. The double room has a threshold and the threshold is its own space.

What Calls from Under Things

The wave pattern is not metaphor, or it is metaphor of the most precise kind, which is the kind that points to something actual. There is a frequency. It does not announce itself. It does not require acknowledgement to continue. But there is a state of being in which it can be attended to, and this attending changes nothing about the source and everything about the one attending.

The Red Bird is part of this. My guide leads always towards something that is already there, not towards a revelation but towards a presence that was present before I arrived. I arrive. The place is already itself. What changes in the arrival is my relationship to what is there, and perhaps that relationship is itself part of what the hidden place is for. We are not incidental to the function of the Tomb. The Tomb requires the one who stands before the gate, requires the asking for entry, requires the hymn.

This House causing Light. Open the gate for me. The gate opens not because the asker is worthy but because the asking is part of the structure. The wave requires the medium. The medium is moved by the wave. Neither is primary. This is the relationship. God’s Tomb is not a place of mourning. It is a place of very specific, very protected, very ancient work. The light it causes is a function of the place, not an attribute of the visitor. The sand above it is doing exactly what sand is supposed to do. The wave below it is doing exactly what a standing wave in a ground state does.

The dreams keep coming. There is more to find there.

Monviso: The Mountain as Self, the Geometry of the Summit

The second symbol is topographic. Monviso, the highest peak of the Cottian Alps at 3,841 metres, rises from the Piedmontese landscape near the French border and is visible on clear days from Turin, where I have lived since 2004. It is an isolated massif, notably distinct in profile from the surrounding ridges, which makes it a natural object of contemplative attention. The blog post Mountains: A Solitary Journey, published at natclegg.com in September 2020, is the sparest of the three texts, almost entirely given over to a sustained quotation from Jung’s Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious on the psychological meaning of the mountain, with my own voice entering through a single framing sentence: my mountain is Viso, the Self in transformation and extension of who I am becoming, consciously and subconsciously.

The Jungian passage I select is one of Jung’s more comprehensive descriptions of the Self archetype: a transpersonal power that transcends the ego, encompassing both the experienceable and the not yet experienced, appearing in dreams and myths as the supraordinate personality, and empirically presenting as a play of light and shadow unified into a totality that contains the opposites (Jung, 1959). The mountain, in this framework, is not merely a metaphor for ambition or difficulty in the secular sense. It is a symbol of the psyche’s own deepest structure, the place where consciousness discovers that what it thought was its ceiling is only the beginning of a larger ascent. Jung also cites the I Ching on the mountain as a goal of pilgrimage, and quotes the twelfth-century theologian Richard of St Victor, prior of the Abbey of Saint-Victor in Paris: do you wish to see the transfigured Christ? Ascend that mountain and learn to know yourself.

What the text performs through its sparseness is a kind of argument by juxtaposition. Rather than explaining what Monviso means to me, I place myself beside Jung’s description and let the alignment speak. The mountain is mine; it is also a universal symbol; these two facts do not contradict each other but are precisely what the Jungian framework would predict. The individual encounter with the archetype is always both personal and transpersonal simultaneously. The peak I look at from Turin is not merely a geographical fact but a living image of the Self in its quality of being simultaneously known and inexhaustible.

Scribblings and Paintings and the Alpine Interior

This becomes clearer when the Mountain text is read alongside the biographical context of the practice. Having studied at Bath Academy of Art before training as a hypno-psychotherapist and completing a doctorate in the use of creativity in coaching, the practice of visual art, the psychological training, and the ongoing Magickal engagement are not separate activities but aspects of a single orientation. Monviso enters the work directly: images of the peak appear in paintings that use geological and alchemical symbolism interchangeably, treating the mineral processes of rock formation as analogues for psychological and spiritual transformation. When the Mountain post labels one photograph of the peak Monviso: Alchemical Transformation, it is not using alchemical as a loose intensifier but as a precise description of the kind of change it represents: slow, governed by heat and pressure, invisible from outside until the moment of completion.

The word solitary in the title of the Mountain post deserves attention. Solitary not merely as a description of how one climbs or contemplates a mountain, but as a quality of the work itself. The encounter with the Self, in Jungian terms, is necessarily a solo undertaking, not because community or relationship is unimportant but because the deep interior cannot be reached by proxy. The mountain enforces this. You cannot have someone else ascend it on your behalf and receive the view. The Magickal practice, as these three texts together demonstrate, is always in this sense solitary even when it is populated with entities, guided by angelic intelligences, and expressed in art that others receive and respond to.

The Red Bird: Akh in Formation, Twenty Years of Dreaming

The longest and most analytically developed of the three texts, The Red Bird, opens with a period rather than an event: twenty years of the symbol’s appearance in dreams and meditations, frustratingly resistant to resolution. Whilst the manuscript itself remains unpublished, the visual and conceptual framing for it is carried across both natclegg.com and the dedicated Red Bird pages at houseofzophiel.com. The breakthrough came through reading Dr Bob Plimer’s Egyptian Trilogy, specifically The Flesh of Re (Plimer, 2019), a work on Egyptian afterlife cosmology that supplied the conceptual vocabulary the dream-image had been waiting for. The Red Bird, I concluded, is a symbol of the Akh: the transfigured soul, the form of consciousness that has successfully navigated the territory of transformation and emerged capable of functioning in both the mortal and divine registers simultaneously. It is possible that this carries a residue of my work with Lenni over the years, which gave opportunities to visit ancient Egyptian sites and temples.

What is worth noting before turning to the Egyptological framework is that the Red Bird had been operating functionally as a totem long before it was understood as one. Totemic traditions across cultures share a core structure: a consecrated animal form that does not belong to the individual who bears it but works on behalf of that individual, encoding identity, relation to the sacred, and a continuity of meaning that outlasts any single conscious engagement with the image (Eliade, 1964). The practitioner does not choose the totem; the totem chooses the practitioner, and its significance cannot be arrived at by decision or assigned by methodology. I did not select a red bird from a catalogue of available emblems and assign it the work of psychological transformation. It appeared, returned, refused to leave, and accumulated meaning through the sheer insistence of its recurrence across two decades. That the Egyptian interpretive framework eventually supplied the language for what the bird had been doing all along is not, in this reading, a conclusion but a recognition: the Akh had been sending its dispatches in its own register, and patience had at last been rewarded with the translator.

The Egyptological material I draw on is substantial. The Akh, a term that the Egyptologist Mark Smith describes as the transfigured soul that has successfully navigated the afterlife and become an entity capable of interacting with both the divine and the living, is one of the principal components of the Egyptian understanding of the person, alongside the Ba, the unique individual personality, and the Ka, the vital animating force (Smith, 2017). The Akh is not a state the living person possesses but one they work towards and may, through spiritual practice and the navigation of death’s territory, achieve. Its connection to the Amduat, the great illustrated text of the twelve hours of the sun god Ra’s nocturnal journey through the underworld, is that the Amduat provides the map for this transformation: it is a navigational document as much as a theological one (Hornung, 1999).

Thelema, Egypt, and the Stellar Individual

In The Red Bird I make an explicit connection between the Egyptian Akh and Aleister Crowley’s Thelemic declaration that every man is a star (Crowley, 1909). The connection holds: the stellar individual of Thelema and the transfigured Akh who shines among the stars of the Egyptian afterlife are cognate ideas, both asserting an essential luminosity in the individual soul that survives and transcends ordinary mortal conditions. The four-part schema I propose, Star, Akh, Magick, Individual, reads as a framework for understanding the Red Bird as the personal sigil of this process: the symbol that encodes, in one compressed avian image, the trajectory of a specific soul’s movement from stellar origin through Magickal work towards transfigured individual realisation. Liber AL vel Legis at I:3 carries the passage: we are all free, all independent, all shining gloriously, each one a radiant world.

Sokar, Nehebkau, and the Problem of the Soul’s Fragmentation

Two further Egyptian figures receive extended treatment in The Red Bird: Sokar and Nehebkau. Sokar is the funerary god of the Memphite necropolis at Saqqara, presiding over the dead and associated with the preservation of the body and the geography of the Duat (Taylor, 2001). I connect him with the Opening of the Mouth ceremony, though this association requires slight qualification: the Opening of the Mouth is a ritual with deep roots in Ptah’s cult at Memphis, performed by priests to restore the deceased’s senses for the afterlife, and whilst Sokar’s funerary domain makes him adjacent to such rites, the ceremony is more precisely associated with Anubis and Ptah in its primary textual references (Wilkinson, 2003). The connection I draw between Sokar’s role as fashioner of silver objects and the alchemical symbolism of the lunar metal is, however, an authentic and resonant piece of cross-traditional thinking. It may indeed point to the influence of fallen angels on humankind, as with the Watcher legends; the cherubim as serpent teacher springs to mind.

Nehebkau, the primordial snake deity whose name means “he who brings together the kas” or “he who nourishes the kas,” functions here as the symbol of soul integration: the force that gathers the Ba, Ka, and Akh into a unified post-mortem consciousness. This reading is well grounded: Nehebkau appears in the Pyramid Texts and later funerary literature as a deity who confers protection and completion, whose serpent nature encodes both the chthonic underworld dimension and the capacity for renewal through shedding (Wilkinson, 2003). My extension of this into a broader comparative framework, connecting Nehebkau to the Ouroboros, the Caduceus of Hermes, and Quetzalcoatl as variants of the serpent-bird unification symbol, is interpretatively generous but not unreasonable within the tradition of comparative religious thought associated with Eliade and Campbell.

The Art as Embodiment: Making the Invisible Legible

It would be a misreading of my practice to treat the written texts as the primary record and the paintings as illustration. The art is where the encounters are first metabolised. Long before the Zophiel account was written and published on my blog at natclegg.com, long before the Egyptian framework supplied the language for the Red Bird, and long before the Mountain text found its Jungian quotation, the material was being worked through in paint. I describe a “transforming download of shimmering light that illuminates the inner essence of perception and realisation,” entering through what I call the Kapala, the cranial grail, the point of enlightenment and translation into energy (Clegg, 2020c). That description is not the beginning of the process but a retrospective account of something already visible in the paintings. The light arrives first in the image; the language follows.

The House of Zophiel website at houseofzophiel.com, which functions as the public face of the broader practice and community Lenni and I have built, organises the work into precisely the three categories the texts describe: Zophiel and Barakiel, The Red Bird, and The Spiritual Mountain and Angel. This is not a coincidence of navigation but a recognition that the art itself is structured around the same triadic framework. The three symbols are not subjects the paintings illustrate; they are the conditions under which the paintings exist at all.

The Paintings of Zophiel

Three works named explicitly in the blog post Zophiel: Working with the Intangible (natclegg.com, August 2020) carry the mark of the angelic encounter most directly. Red Lands, subtitled “the placement of God’s Tomb; the place of sanctuary and decay,” together with the painting God’s Tomb and the Red Bird (2025), places the tomb at the centre of a landscape whose ochres and earth tones carry both the geological quality of the Italian landscape and the solar-chthonic colour register of Egyptian funerary art. There is no comfortable middle distance in this work: the viewer is placed inside the sanctuary rather than outside it, which is itself a function of Zophiel’s method of initiation. The intelligence does not invite from a distance; it places you where you already are. Anointed, described as exploring “ancient acts, new behaviours; transient connections,” holds a similar threshold quality: the anointing gesture belongs to ritual traditions that long predate any religion, and the painting refuses to locate it in any single one. True Light, described as “accepting the download, the point of realisation,” is perhaps the most direct representation of what I describe as the Zophiel experience: the moment at which the angelic energy ceases to be disturbance and becomes understanding, when what felt like seizure resolves into illumination.

The angelic attributions of Zophiel in the Kabbalistic tradition, as the angel of Binah and therefore of creative understanding and depth of pattern, and in the tradition of Paracelsus as the Intelligence of Jupiter and patron of artists, are not incidental background to the paintings but their operating conditions. John Milton, in Paradise Lost, names the same intelligence as Zephiel, a variant spelling, and describes him as “of Cherubim the swiftest wing,” the scout who flies back with urgent news from the forward position of the battle (Milton, 1667, Book VI). That quality, the fastest intelligence, the one who arrives before the news it carries is expected, is present in the paintings in their refusal to resolve. They do not offer conclusions; they carry dispatches. The paintings Morning Star and Janax are messengers from the angelic space carrying vibrations of invoked dialogue, giving voice to the unspeakable. My doctoral thesis demonstrates this in its research into creativity as a conduit between the unconscious and conscious mind (Clegg, 2024).

The Monviso Series and the Mountain as Process

The Monviso paintings, which I describe as representations of “the mountain that emanates the grand presence,” constitute the most sustained single body of work across the practice, and their accumulation over more than a decade corresponds to Jung’s understanding of individuation as a spiral rather than a linear process (Clegg, 2020c). Each painting returns to the same geological fact: the same massif rising from the Cottian Alps near the French border, visible from Turin on clear days, and finds it different. This is not because the mountain changes but because the perceiver does. The Monviso works in this sense are a kind of long diary, each entry made under the same light but carrying a different relationship to the archetype they are tracking.

The houseofzophiel.com page presenting the Monviso paintings in sequence makes visible something that any single image cannot: the persistence of specific formal choices across the series. There is the presence of a circle or disc, often read as sun or moon or both simultaneously; a vertical axis that divides or connects registers of the composition; a colour range that moves between the mineral (grey stone, ochre earth) and the luminous (gold, the particular blue of an Alpine sky). I have spoken about how light conceals and darkness conceals, how light and dark forms both carry a dialogue of the spoken and unspoken, the human condition and that outside us which informs. These are not stylistic mannerisms but visual equivalents of the Jungian language in the written descriptions. The circle is the Self as totality symbol. The vertical axis is the connection between the conscious and the unconscious. The mineral and the luminous are the play of shadow and light through which the archetype makes itself known. The Kant quotation on the houseofzophiel.com artist page, evoking awe and wonder as the condition of being terrified and curious simultaneously, is a close description of what standing before these works feels like.

A further dimension of the circle motif has become apparent since 2024, drawing the mountain work into unexpected dialogue with the Egyptian thread running through the Red Bird material. Amun, whose name translates as the hidden one, occupies a singular position in Egyptian theology: he is not a deity among the other deities but the concealed source from which all divine manifestation proceeds, the invisible breath within the visible forms, whose nature was held to be inaccessible even to the other gods (Hornung, 1982). In the New Kingdom synthesis that produced the composite figure of Amun-Ra, the solar disc was understood as the body of the god, but the animating principle behind the sun’s capacity to give life was Amun himself: prior, unnamed in his fullness, older than every form through which divinity became knowable. He is the god behind the god. The circle in the Monviso paintings, poised between sun and moon, held simultaneously in light and dark, has carried this resonance without the theological vocabulary previously being available to name it. The light and dark source is not only the Self as Jungian totality symbol; it is also the hidden primordial from which every visible divine form derives and to which it returns. This reading connects the mountain work back to the vision of the two rooms with a legibility that was not previously available: the beautiful god of the first room as solar manifestation, the radiant and named and therefore manageable face of the divine; the true god of the second room, carrying everything human beings find difficult to receive, as the Amun-principle, the unsanitised hidden source that does not resolve into comfort, that by its nature refuses the face one can adore at a comfortable distance. The circle in the paintings was always the older god. It simply waited to be recognised as such.

The Red Bird in Form

What is particularly significant about the Red Bird’s presence in the visual work is that it precedes the Egyptian interpretive framework by years. Long before Plimer supplied the vocabulary of the Akh, the bird was forming through drawing: iterative attempts to catch something that was present in the dreams but kept escaping fixed representation, each sketch arriving at a form that felt simultaneously new and already known. The process was less like invention than like recollection, less like the generation of an image than the successive clarification of one. This is consistent with the Jungian account of archetypal images as contents that the psyche discovers rather than creates, and consistent too with the totemic understanding already noted: the totem form is not manufactured by the individual consciousness but emerges into it from a deeper layer of psychological and transpersonal reality. I had no knowledge at the time that what I was drawing corresponded to any established tradition of sacred bird imagery. The drawings were acts of listening as much as acts of making. The bird was being heard before it was being named.

The Red Bird appears in the visual work in several registers simultaneously. In paint, it is most fully present in the image reproduced at the opening of the 2025 article and carried on the Red Bird pages at houseofzophiel.com: the photograph of a small scarlet bird perched on what appears to be an Egyptian tomb ledge flanked by ceremonial vessels, which I title The Tomb of God. The photograph is a composite in a quite literal sense: the bird is real, the tomb context is real, but their conjunction is constructed, which is precisely the point. The Red Bird as Akh does not arrive from the past; it is composed in the present from the available materials of memory, dream, and material encounter. Beyond painting, the Red Bird symbol and the related Zophiel and Barachiel attributions find expression in the jewellery and metalwork that form another strand of the practice. Zophiel’s Kabbalistic and astrological associations, as the Intelligence of Jupiter and the angel connected with metals and gemstones through Barachiel’s guardianship of productive mines, are not coincidentally aligned with work in precious metals and stones. The alchemical tradition understood metalwork as a spiritual practice, the transformation of raw ore into refined form as an analogue of psychic transformation. My jewellery and sculpture, noted in the original Zophiel account as the detail that struck Lenni when she researched the attribution of artists and metal workers to the Zophiel current, carries this understanding into physical form.

The House of Zophiel practice pages at houseofzophiel.com also present visual seals associated with Zophiel and Barachiel, worked designs in which the two angelic presences are rendered as interlocking geometric and symbolic forms. The two entities “appear in many seals as part of the whole meaning of influencing forces” (Clegg, 2020c). Seals in the grimoire tradition are not merely emblems but operative instruments, forms that concentrate and direct the energy of the intelligence they represent. Their appearance in the visual practice places the art explicitly within a working Magickal framework rather than a purely contemplative or expressive one.

The House of Zophiel: Practice as Community

The House of Zophiel at houseofzophiel.com extends the personal practice into a shared one. As described on the site, it is a meeting space for people interested in the esoteric, the creative, and the occult, one that does not ascribe to any particular worldview but encourages exploration, debate, respectful exchange, and a critical mind (House of Zophiel, n.d.). This is a philosophically specific stance: it refuses the doctrinal closure that characterises most established esoteric organisations while maintaining rigorous engagement with primary sources and historical material. The courses offered, which have included programmes on the Elder Futhark, tarot, the Rites of Hekate, Austin Osman Spare, and the Sola Busca tarot, as well as events at the Glastonbury Occult Conference and the forthcoming Pandaemonium UK gathering, reflect the same range of reference visible in the written and painted work: historically grounded, comparatively minded, and practically oriented.

What the House of Zophiel makes clear is that the three symbols under discussion are not purely private accumulations. They are live enough to generate a community of practice around them, a pedagogy, a body of collaborative artistic work involving associated artists including Cobweb Meyers, Laura Jeacock, and Bethan Briggs-Miller among others, and an ongoing public engagement with the questions they raise. The art is the point of public transmission for what the written texts map as private encounter. It is where Zophiel’s illumination becomes available to others, where the mountain’s archetype can be entered by those who have not stood before the actual peak, and where the Red Bird can alight in someone else’s consciousness without requiring their own twenty years of dreaming.

The Three Symbols in Relation

Considered separately, each of these three symbols, Zophiel, Monviso, and the Red Bird, is a substantial object of Magickal and psychological attention. Considered together they form something more structured: a map of a single process viewed from three different angles. The extended record of that process, in text, image, and commentary, is distributed across natclegg.com and houseofzophiel.com, the two sites together constituting an ongoing public archive of the practice rather than a finished monument to it.

Zophiel represents the encounter with the non-human intelligence as initiatory rupture: something that arrives before it is invited, that uses the practitioner’s body and voice and emotional range as an instrument, and that leaves traces of itself in ways the practitioner has not chosen but cannot deny. The storm, the rage, the name on the floor are not symbols in the literary sense; they are events. They constitute the moment of contact from which everything else proceeds. In the traditional understanding of Magickal initiation, this kind of involuntary encounter, where the intelligence finds the practitioner rather than the reverse, carries particular weight precisely because it cannot be attributed to self-suggestion or studied intention.

Monviso represents the sustained interior work that follows such an encounter: the long contemplation of the Self in its most demanding form, the archetype that contains both what is known and what is not yet known about one’s own nature. The mountain does not change; the perceiver’s relationship to it does. The repeated returns to the image of the peak in painting and writing suggest an iterative process of individuation, in the Jungian sense: not a single achieved transformation but a spiral engagement with the same essential question from different levels of understanding. That this work finds expression in physical art, in paint and stone and metal, is not incidental but necessary. The mountain is material; the engagement with it must also be material if it is to be complete.

The Red Bird completes the triad by providing the symbol that integrates the encounter and the sustained work into a single image of destination. The Akh is what the soul is working towards; the Red Bird is the personal form of that aspiration. Its twenty-year gestation is not accidental in this reading but necessary: the symbol arrived when it needed to arrive, carried the meaning it needed to carry, and waited for the conceptual framework that would allow it to be understood. Egyptian soul-cosmology, filtered through Plimer’s Egyptian Trilogy, provided that framework. The Red Bird is not a message delivered; it is a message being slowly decoded.

What the three texts together reveal is something that formal Magickal training often struggles to articulate: that the most significant Magickal encounters in a practitioner’s life are rarely those they planned. Zophiel was not summoned in a ritual circle with the appropriate preparations; he arrived in a Tuscan farmhouse and an Umbrian church and a studio in the early hours. Monviso was not chosen as a symbol through any methodological process; it was simply there, visible from the city where I had made my life, insisting on its psychological significance. The Red Bird was not selected from a catalogue of avian symbols and assigned to its function; it appeared, repeatedly, and waited.

What Does Not Wait for Invitation

A personal Magickal practice of the kind these texts record is distinguishable from a merely private one by its relationship to tradition. The encounters are personal; the frameworks brought to bear on understanding them are not. Oesterreich, Jung, the Kabbalah, the Egyptian Duat texts, the Thelemic corpus, Eliade: these are not decorative references but working intellectual tools through which experience that would otherwise remain inchoate is given shape and meaning. The encounter with Zophiel means more, not less, because his Kabbalistic attribution to Binah and his Paracelsian identification as the Intelligence of Jupiter supply a map of what kind of intelligence he is and what relationship with him might involve. The mountain means more because Jung’s account of the mountain as the Self archetype places a specific and luminous piece of Alpine granite within the largest possible psychological context. The Red Bird means more because the Egyptian understanding of the Akh describes the quality of transfiguration that the symbol had been pointing towards for twenty years without yet having a name.

That is what tradition is for. Not to replace the encounter, but to make it legible. What these three symbols, taken together, suggest is that the encounter has a consistency across time and register that is not the product of wishful thinking: the same intelligence expressed in storm and rage in Umbria in 2009 is the same intelligence associated with artists and illumination in the Kabbalah and with the stormy genius of Binah. The mountain that holds the Self in its granite permanence is the same mountain that Richard of St Victor told his students to ascend if they wished to know themselves. The Red Bird that perches at the end of its long gestation is the Akh arriving in its chosen form, the transfigured soul recognising its own image at last.

Twenty years is not a long time, measured against the traditions these symbols draw on. It is exactly the right amount of time.

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