This is an account of Candy Ray's six past lives, and the times in between them.
Candy Ray has been a demon daughter of Lilith, a warrior in ancient India, a sacred cat in the time of Moses, a scholar in Medieval England, a witch during the English Civil War and a Quaker in the nineteenth century era of slavery.
Her account gives a new interpretation of some events in history, and also of some stories in sacred scriptures of the East and the West.
Excerpt:
The first time I was born was as a succubus, a daughter of Lilith the dark moon. She gives birth to the succubi in a symbolic sense only, to enable them to transmigrate into her species. One time in meditation I saw a point even earlier than that, before I had ever been born, and what I saw was a wispy, wafer-thin creature that looked like a moonbeam, and in some sense WAS a moonbeam. This creature was female with long, flowing hair that constantly changed colour, and she belonged to a colony of similar lunar spirits that all lived together. It is almost impossible to imagine what an existence like that would be like, and it seems strange to me that I was lunar because my physical metabolism today is very solar. I feel widest awake at noon and most tired at midnight. But that is what I saw. My impression was that there was no conditioning: no-one had taught us that lunar meant evil or subordinate. That concept did however appear when I was born to Lilith. The Zohar describes how Lilith originated in the moon’s reluctance to diminish herself and be subordinate to the light of the sun. She is a lunar goddess, the dark aspect of the moon.
Actually Lilith has many hundreds of daughters. The nearest equivalent on Earth is ant and bee colonies in which one queen is the mother of all of them, and to a certain extent they have a collective consciousness. So I was not a princess, I was one of a species who are all sisters and all daughters of the queen. However, when I was young I didn’t see them as sisters; I saw them as hundreds of aunts who were all looking after me, all keeping me safe.
Young angels and demons belong to a vast race which is sometimes called the Deva kingdom-that is the name I like to use. This race consists of nature spirits, which feature strongly in folklore as fairies, elves and so forth, and angelic beings which belong to the same species but are more developed. The main difference between Devas and mankind is that Devas have no physical bodies and live in an astral body. They reproduce in the same way as man except that they can choose when they have children, so they have them deliberately in order to help someone to transmigrate into a new form. The females, the Devis, are only pregnant for twenty-four hours because it is symbolic, an initiation and not real birth. When the children are born they can already walk and talk.
Of course they do not need physical care in the way human children do, but they require an extended period of training. In the twentieth century I remembered my favourite ‘aunt’ Loraleen, the one who played the most part in bringing me up and training me. Her name is a variation of Lobaban, an anagram of Babalon which is sometimes used, and I believe she was the goddess-like being who appeared to John Dee. She often appears in novels and films, as many demons and angels do because they are archetypes. I once saw her on television with her correct name, but that wasn’t where I first found her name. I wrote it on a piece of paper when I was only ten years old, along with the name of another ‘aunt’ who later also appeared in fiction on television. Loraleen usually casts an enchantment on a knight or prince in her stories, and tries to take over his kingdom.
The first place where I lived was a large indoor chamber in Hell, dark and full of hard slabs of stone. I remembered it in a regression meditation. In about 2001 I used to attend a meditation group, and one week we did regression, with great success. I immediately repeated it at home, looking for Loraleen who I still loved, and that is my main source of information for this chapter. There is another source as well which I will acknowledge when I come to it.
Hell is an extreme polarity, an expression of the Pillar of Severity. I accepted it because I didn’t know anything else-I was unaware that most environments are a combination of mixed elements, not entirely positive or negative but somewhere in between. I shared the place with various exotic-looking monsters as well as my much-loved aunts. Loraleen was the one I saw as a mother and she was keeping an eye on me, but only a cursory eye because she was more interested in appearing elegant and sophisticated to the human beings she hoped to influence. I do not remember what I learnt while I was in this place, but I know that after my training I left Hell and went to Earth. I was roaming around looking for victims in some ancient civilization that looked similar to modern places, with many large buildings, and it was always bathed in brilliant sunshine. My victims were not men, they were pregnant women, and I was causing miscarriages.
This may sound horrific, but remember that being a succubus is very similar to being a germ: the harm you cause is an expression of a force of nature. Miscarriages occur naturally and sometimes prevent babies being born with deformities, and in primitive times they were not usually induced deliberately. It did look rather as if I wrenched the babies out, but I skipped past that every time during the regression and did not watch it. Most people would rather be associated with healing; however medicine is the solar side of the equation, and it has to have a lunar side as well otherwise it could not exist in our dualistic world. This is the origin of the great divide Sol and Luna in alchemy, the solar and lunar forces that lie behind material nature.
Quite early on in history human beings began to develop defences against incubi and succubi. Amber repels them, in fact when I see amber crystals or amber colour now I still feel like I am being pushed away. A common protection for mothers and babies was to write the names Sanvi, Sansavi and Semangaloff in the place where the mother and child were sleeping. Those were the three angels who tried to persuade Lilith to go back to Adam, in the Jewish legends about her. She refused to go back, and yet the names of the three angels still became a charm against her powers. Another defence that developed was the use of a talisman in the shape of a black knife. The black knife is the origin of the athame. It also explains why I was attacking pregnant women instead of raping men. I received these teachings from a male entity who is a composite form of the female Three Furies, all about the knife symbolism that is used by incubi and succubi.
Incubi play an important part in the natural world because they cause the mating seasons of animals to start. When the correct season comes an incubus approaches the animal’s nature spirit guardian and raises a black knife to show that it is now his time of ascendancy. The guardian has to relinquish power and go away until the season is over. It occurred to human magicians to make a replica knife and raise it at times when they believed they had the upper hand over the incubi and succubi. This would have to be calculated astrologically because human beings do not have mating seasons, and it would be dangerous to be wrong, but provided the dates were right they would be protected.
The symbol does not end with a black knife: it is a threefold symbol of a black blade, a green blade and a red blade. There is a connection with the original kind of electrical plugs which used to be wired red, black and green. The black blade is physical and means sexual energy. The green blade is astral and has two aspects, romantic love and selfish love, which corresponds with the astral plane being divided into Heaven and Hell. It is represented by a blade of grass. The green blade as romantic love has the power to drive Lilith away, while the green blade as selfish love expresses Lilith’s energy. A few years after I received these teachings, I found out that there is in fact a Jewish legend about a blade of grass being used as a weapon against Lilith. The red blade is mental and is more deadly than the others, for it means slander and war and is represented by a tongue.
When an animal is influenced by the black blade it makes a division of its peers into two: all those of the same sex are enemies and all those of the opposite sex are potential mates, potential lovers. The species that was formerly all one to the animal is cleaved in two by the blade. Similarly when a human being is influenced by the red blade they divide everyone into two: friends of the cause and enemies. The enemies are first slandered and criticised, and the next stage is full-scale war. Words are so important and should be guarded carefully because they are the first step in this process that leads to war. Also, if you try to live the ideal ‘make love and not war’ you will replace it very difficult, because the violent and passionate part of you would have to be squashed into one quarter of the space it occupies, the romantic half of the green blade, and it rebels against this.
Among the incubi and succubi, the red blade is associated with seniority. Loraleen’s interest in war and political power marks her out as a powerful dark goddess only a little below Lilith in status. Incubi and succubi of less power work with the green blade (their half of it), while the junior and inexperienced ones stay on the level of the black blade. I was still only the equivalent of a child and was confined to the black blade, so I wandered from place to place seeking out women who were vulnerable in a physical sense, prone to miscarriage. I wasn’t raping men because I was still too young.
For children in the Deva kingdom development is at first more rapid than that of a human being: a Deva of one or two years old is like a human of six or seven. Later it slows down, and the opposite principle applies-they grow up very slowly over a period of several hundred years. That was how long I would have wandered around the Earth looking for victims, if nothing had changed. I used to call myself Sherry Zahd, a deliberate pun on Scheherazade, the woman who got the better of her murderous husband. You may think the story of the Arabian Nights did not exist at this early period in history, but it must have done.
When I reached the equivalent of twelve or thirteen, I started to have daydreams about having relationships in the near future. This is where something went wrong, because instead of daydreaming about human men, I preferred my own species and wanted my partner to be an incubus protector who would look after me the way my aunts had done. Telepathic communication is the norm among angels, and I knew others could read my thoughts, but I was hoping to get away with it. No-one reprimanded me, but one day Lilith came to see me and announced that she was sending me to Earth. “We have to replace a large group of people to send to Earth quickly,” she said. “You will have to go because you prefer your own kind to men. It is only possible to have what you want in human life.”
There was no possibility of argument, I had to go. In a sense Lilith killed me at the age of only thirteen. It was to be a very long time before I met Lilith and her people again; I did not become a human being and immediately start having relationships with incubi. What happened was that I became only a partial human being the first time, and I did not have any sexual feelings at all because I hadn’t finished growing up. Some people dispute what I remember because they say angelic beings do not have puberty, but according to what I remember they must have something equivalent to it.
