The Harrowing of Logan Circle

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One

The full moon hung low in the southeast, shining pale and thin through the smog and the city lights, as we drove up Thirteenth Street and circled, widdershins as all traffic must, the local heart of darkness, a portal to the realm of shells, the Qlipot of the Kabbalists, and the antechamber of the undead. Think of it as Hell’s bus station, where the doomed go to wait for the Grim Reaper to catch up with his to-do list.

Every city of any size or history has such a place. They are not that hard to find, just follow the doomed, you know those invisible people found in any large city who seem to inhabit the cracks of our world, just follow them, the old lady eating cat food, the wino with a bottle and blanket, the tin foil man and the rest, and sooner or later, you’ll find the place.

In the District of Columbia, in Washington and L’Enfant’s Federal City, the place is Logan Circle. Now, if you look up Logan Circle in the guidebook, you find the very picture of High Victorian quaintness, a tree-shaded circle with a bronze statue, streets fronted with respectable Richardsonian Gothic, towers and turrets of course, along side something from the French Second Empire and even a New Orleans touch of grandeur, topped off by the Victorian Gothic of Mt. Olivet’s church on Vermont Avenue. Fashionable Washington gravitated there a few years after the Civil War and for a generation it was the center of style in a sleepy southern town. By the time President McKinley dedicated a statue to Major General John A. Logan in 1891 in what was then Iowa Circle, the neighborhood’s glory days were almost over.

As the old money and new rich alike moved west toward DuPont Circle and Massachusetts Avenue, now “Embassy Row,” the complexion of the neighborhood changed, literally. By the turn of the 20th century, it was the center of black Washington, socially, politically and intellectually. In the 1930s, as Depression era Washington rebuilt itself, Logan Circle, as it was renamed, remained quaintly conservative and Victorian, and, as the last of the original black families died out or went broke, it slowly became the most stylish, architecturally speaking, slum in the District.

And so it remained through out the 1960s, 70s and 80s, protected by its atmosphere of faded elegance and its artistic decay from the worst depredations of urban renewal, until gentrification set in the 1990s. Rents soared and the artists and marginal types moved on toward the north and east. Restoration gave the neighborhood a glossy look in spots and the new Bed and Breakfast places around the circle cater to rich European tourists looking for a slice of the real Washington.

Part of that real Washington is the collection of human debris that, day or night, haunts the circle around the heroic figure of General Logan. The doomed are drawn to the spot by something more than open space and easy access; there is an intangible vibration, a sort of exhalation of despair, that pulls them, moth-like, toward the gloomy circle of trees and the giant bronze General. Since the late 1950s, according to the police reports in the Washington Post, Logan Circle has been a hot spot for violence, drug dealing, homeless loitering, sudden death of somewhat natural causes and so on. Even a decade of serious up scaling in the neighborhood has done little to change things. The doomed just keep on coming.

There is a reason why, but the answer is deeply metaphysical, going back directly to the original plan for the new Federal City. In Pierre L’Enfant’s esoteric design, this obscure point was the defining location of its several overlapping geometries. As Washington City grew out toward the circle, its importance in the pattern was heightened. By its very nature, however, that influence was dark indeed.

In the spring and summer of 1791, as Pierre L’Enfant and the two surveyors, Andrew Ellicott and Benjamin Banneker, measured and laid out the original design, the significance of the place that would become Logan Circle must have been apparent. It was a low rise, with good site lines to south, from the southeast to the southwest, where L’Enfant envisioned the Federal City rising from the marshes. L’Enfant marked a low mound, thought to be a burial mound from the local Indian village near present Foggy Bottom, as his survey point and shot his lines for the complex geometry of the President’s House and Capital from that spot. The Federal City was anchored, its size and relationships, its ratios and distances, determined by reference to the key point, Logan Circle.

L’Enfant’s complete design is too vast to sum up briefly, but the importance of Logan Circle is easy to spot on any map of Washington. Looking north from the White House, the official 1818 map (see below) shows a clearly delineated triangle with one point at the White House, the second at DuPont Circle and the third at Logan Circle. The side of this triangle that runs from Logan Circle to the White House also forms one side of a pentagon. One this is noticed, it is hard not to see a much larger pentagram/pentagon anchored on the White House as the spirit point, and with Logan Circle at the earth point.

Article Continues After Illustrations

This larger pentagon/pentagram is unfinished, missing one line on both -gram and -gon, and is slightly distorted, as if tilted up toward the White House. This was done by design, as L’Enfant was trying to depict on the ground a complex piece of sacred geometry involving the collapse of an eight-sided figure, as in either the cube or the octahedron, through a phi ratio dimensional wrap point determined by stacking 4D pentatopes at precise angles. The White House Pentagram/Pentagon is tilted to fit the dimensional overlap, and everything, the phi rectangles and angles of the Capital Hill cube/square as well as the White House Pents, were measured and determined by reference to that small mound at what would become Logan Circle.

In the early years of the 19th century, the area, known then as Blodget’s Wilderness, remained as woodland with a few farms scattered around. The Civil War transformed it, and filled it with refugees, mostly escaped slaves after 1862, vagabonds and camp followers. The clearing near the small mound was used throughout the war as an execution spot. Hundreds of suspected spies, deserters and condemned traitors went to the gallows or the firing squad in the gloomy grove. The post-war builders and fashionable promoters soon forgot, but something of that darkness remained, contained and amplified by the Victorian Gothic quality of the neighborhood, and anchored solidly by the huge bronze monument to the glories of War.

And this was our destination for the full lunar eclipse, the Black Moon. In the ancient traditions, a special use was made of an eclipse period. A modern occultist, Mark Hedsel as reported by David Ovason (Fred Gettings) in The Zelator, described it this way:

"The ancients built their stone circles to enable them to use darkness for specific purposes. They knew that during an eclipse, when the Moon is thrown into darkness, the effect of the Moon is, to some extent, weakened. At such times, certain diabolical and evil influences, which have been built up in the aura of the Earth, can escape. It is as though a safety valve has been opened in the skies, pouring into the cosmos down the dark tunnel of the Black Moon, which hangs in the shadow of the earth. This Black Moon -- the moon of the snake-infested Hecate in the ancient mythology -- is quite different from the Lighted Moon."

So that was our task; to sit in the heart of darkness and hold open the escape valve while all the old built up psychic gunk drained off into the vacuum of deep space. No problem, right?

©Copyright 2005 by AlternativeApproaches.com

Two

We drove around the circle a few times, and ended up parking a block off 13th on a quiet side street. The air felt crisp, leaves rustled, Halloween decorations blinked and booed tastefully from brownstone steps and tiny front yard gardens, someone practiced at a small baby grand piano in a second floor bay-windowed room; the neighborhood was quiet, modestly up scale in an artistic fashion.

All that changed as we worked our way across the constant counter-clockwise flow of traffic and energy to the circle itself. Surrounded by old growth trees, some of which had been there as long as the neighborhood itself, the circle had an air of gloom and stagnation that deepened as one approached the inner circle. The geometry was curious, as we knew from the map work, but in person it had that oddly eldritch quality of making a kind of nonsense sensible. Four paths, placed not quite on the directions, organized the seven different streets feeding into the circle. The place wobbled strangely, as if tilting to the south, which is actually downhill. In the center, an iron fence enclosed roughly a thirty yards in diameter circle, inside of which, sitting oddly off angle to the directional paths, was a huge, over 20 feet tall, bronze statue. It was radiating a sort of pale glimmer, like decay lit phosphorescence.

“Okay,” I said to Frater M., “I have a very bad feeling about this, it must be the place…”

Frater M. snorted and shrugged, shoving his hands deeper into the pockets of his peacoat. “What have we got to be worried about? We look like one of two things: hit men or vice squad. Nobody up here is gonna hassle either of those…” We were dressed in black - I had my Eye of Ra/Stargate bill cap on - so I could see his point. Under the circumstances, we cast a very dark light ourselves, like two fallen angels slumming in the overlap zone between outright damnation and purgatorial pay back, the crack of the doomed, you might say...

But that wasn’t why we were there; we were on a mission. For the larger working, involving plans laid by Washington and L’Enfant over 200 years ago, to succeed, this point must be banished and nothing but the purest most neutral energy must be allowed to flow through this point in the future. But most important of all, all of the negativity accumulated on the spot and through out the local grid pattern must be banished through the spot. This, as you might think, was a tricky technical problem.

Usually, a banishing pentagram works well for clearing out astral space and breaks up most astral critters and shells. The banishing elemental hexagrams break up the psychic residue and other physical/emotional debris. For most things, these are quite enough to do the job. Here, however, something different was called for.

Without belaboring the metaphysics of the hyper-dimensional geometry involved, what was required was a banishing unicursal hexagram, or rather a form of the hexagram in which the lineal figure can be drawn in a single continuous line. Done properly, this creates a vast, infinite in terms of space/time, polarizing filter, a broadband/narrow frequency ring pass not. Also, rather than just blocking and bouncing back, this boundary or membrane actually transforms the in-coming energy into its basic, unformatted constituent parts. Needless to say, something so potent must be used carefully and correctly.

The plan was not to change the way Logan circle worked, but to change the way the flow of energy through it was processed. First banish and transform the accumulated psychic gunk, then, through a natural result of the rest of the working, the point itself would shift from its present elemental quality of earth to its complement, spirit. This shift would in turn change the balance of elemental energies across the hidden pentagram/pentagon, making the White House the Fire/Light position.

In meditating on all the plans and the geometry, I found that this shift was implicit in the basic arrangement of L’Enfant. When we look at the 1818 map, the most recognizable portions of the pentagram are outlined by the Logan Circle relationships. Looking closer, I noticed that the gap missing in the pentagram, between Logan Circle and Washington Circle, blocked invoking and banishing along the pentagram only if they were considered the earth/spirit line. Why would just that line be broken, and the other four clearly delineated?

So, I thought, if L’Enfant went to so much trouble, including cutting off the fifth line at the point where it completes the inner pentagon, then he must have had a very good reason, one based on the geometry of the larger grid. Logan Circle was the point where the two plans intersected, and looking at the larger and more complex geometry of the unfolded octahedron and its use to shift between dimensional patterns, I finally saw it: The direction of the tilt on the pentagon/pentagram, toward the White House or toward Logan Circle, determined the direction of the dimensional flow. Tilt toward the White House and the flow is from lower to higher dimensions; tilt toward Logan Circle, and the flow is from higher to lower.

Holy Chao, I thought, this is the big secret to the whole magilla! The default mode is tilted toward the White House, hence the soul sucking quality at Logan Circle, but a group of adepts, who were aware of the pattern and its geometry, could activate the command structure, focused on Logan Circle, and reverse the flow. It was possible, just barely possible, that such an operation had not occurred to the other side. If you liked the input of fear and despair, needed it in fact, then why would you even entertain the idea of reversing the flow? The Darknews doesn’t need any more Light or Hope, that’s obvious. So, perhaps the very idea had not even been considered, the weak spot in the whole structure completely over looked.

“Well, if this works, I said to myself, “then it’s going to be very good for the property values of the neighborhood…”

“The neighborhood looks great,” Frater M. replied, “but what are we going to do now?”

© Copyright 2005 Vincent Bridges

COMING SOON - PART THREE>

©Copyright 2005 by AlternativeApproaches.com

About the author: Vincent Bridges is a historian, shamanic therapist, and author who has written extensively on gnosticism, alchemy, and unsolved enigmas. He lives in North Carolina. He is co-author, with Jay Weidner, of The Mysteries of the Great Cross of Hendaye The Mysteries of the Great Cross of Hendaye reveals one of Western occultism's deepest secrets: The alchemical transformation of base metal into gold is also the transformation of the current Iron Age into the Golden Age. Based on the work of the enigmatic 20th-century alchemist Fulcanelli, the book illustrates how the greatest alchemical secret is that of time itself and that coded into an obscure monument in the Basque country of southwestern France - the cross in the town square of Hendaye - is the imminent date of the apocalypse. The authors' explorations of this symbolism lead them from the cross of Hendaye in the Pyrenees, and the Gothic cathedrals of Europe, to ancient Egypt, the secret origins of Atlantis in Peru, and finally to the hidden kingdom of Shamballah to reveal that we are indeed living in a "fatal season" and that this season is intimately connected to our solar system's alignment with the galactic center. You can order now from Amazon.com.