In the Norse legends, the god Odin had an eight-legged horse known as Sleipnir – the shining one. This eight-legged horse can also be equated with the spider, which weaves the web of serpents – serpent energies associated with wave phenomena and the earth’s electromagnetic lines of force that connect everything together – incredibly symbolised as the omphalos used by the Pythoness (python-snake) at Delphi. It is upon this ‘spider horse’ or ‘horse serpent,’ that the shaman rides, and by doing so he ‘trembles the web.’ This web can be seen as a grid – now called the morphogenetic grid.
The grid pattern is often depicted in ancient rock paintings as being associated with the state of trance. Some rock carvings will show a line of horseshoe or horse hoof prints alongside lines of snaking, serpent energies, as found at Newgrange in Ireland. These carvings indicate the underlying energy grid. We will often find these carved stones placed on the energy lines and find that the menhir complexes such as Stonehenge and Newgrange are often built upon the powerpoints where these lines converge.
As for the shaman who could see these energy lines, the grid form is often seen as a precursor to more complex information patterns – i.e., manifested forms of energy which the shaman would experience as the underlying matrix of other reality domains.
Here’s an extract from Shamanism and the Mystery Lines by Paul Devereux:
‘The Club des Haschichins, which had members such as Baudelaire, Balzac and Victor Hugo, was formed in the nineteenth century to study the effects of cannabis. Their reports repeatedly refer to colourful, vivid images comprised of wheels, whirlpools, spirals and rainbows at certain stages of trance. In 1888, P. Max. Simon studied the imagery of schizophrenic hallucinations and discovered repeated emphasis on ‘spider’s webs,’ ropes and meshes. These changed constantly into one another as in cannabis – and other drug visions.’
While doing research into these visual forms back in 1926 to 1966, Heinrich Kluver under the influence of Mescaline (a drug) and with his eyes closed, experienced seeing geometric patterns. Sometime later, when he had his eyes opened, he found that wherever he looked it was virtually “impossible for him to look at the walls without seeing them covered with visionary phenomena.” These images which he saw, he later identified as having four main forms. He called these basic images ‘Form Constants.’
These four ‘form constants’ were:
1. Lattice and similar forms – i.e., honeycombed, grid, grating, filigree.
2. Web.
3. Tunnel or similar forms – i.e., funnel, alley, cone.
4. Spiral.