In meditation, in my own personal inner landscape, Cernunnos most often finds me in the Forest of the Horned God; he emerges from a patch of dappled sunlight like something hidden in a puzzle-picture, his twisted horns reaching up among the tree branches, tall and dark, with twinkling eyes. Last October I begged him for guidance with my finances — I was at my wit’s end. Things were only getting worse and worse, with no end in sight.
“Are you expressing your will?” he asked.
I was caught off guard. “What do you mean?”
“Well, what does money do?” he said. “It lets you do what you want, yes? It allows your will to be carried out. It allows your will to be expressed.”
“But I don’t have any money.”
“Do you believe in magic? Do you believe in the Law of Attraction?”
“I — well, yes,” I said. “Mostly.”
“Then you alone are responsible for the amount of money that you have. You’ve made yourself broke.”
“It wasn’t on purpose!”
“Nevertheless. You’ve effectively made it very difficult for your will to be expressed. You’ve prevented yourself from acting freely. You’ve hamstrung yourself.”
“I have?”
“Money can be thought of as a measure of the extent to which you believe your own will should be carried out. The more money you have, the more confidence you have that what you want should be manifested. If you don’t have much money, you must not believe that what you personally want is important. You’ve made it difficult to express your free will. You’re sabotaging yourself.”
“But why?…”
I got no answer then, and I still have no answer — and still no money.
What Do You Want?
Personal free will has always been at the center of Cernunnos’s message for me; he told me once that the exercise of free will is the surest, fastest path to growth. But these days it seems like all my guides have been harping on the theme. Beings like Apollo and Bel, who have given me excellent and specific advice in the past, are refusing to give me any guidance beyond, “What do you want? Make it happen.”
I even spoke with Loki about this a couple of months ago, in a meditation session I’m not keen to repeat soon. Loki and Sleipnir appeared together by a waterfall deep in the Forest of the Horned God, surrounded by white flowers. Sleipnir, Odin’s six-legged horse, is one of Loki’s sons, and Loki was grooming him. I asked if he had any messages or guidance for me, and he laughed unpleasantly.
“What is it you want?” he said.
I stammered something about wanting to improve my health and my finances.
“Look at you,” he spat, “sniveling there. You want something? You go get it! This reality is nothing more than a mirror. It shows you what’s inside yourself. If you don’t like it, you change it. Stupid!”
His eyes flashed. “You’re the driver here. You’re incompetent and ignorant, but you’re the driver. This world is nothing but a great big wish-fulfillment device. It’s a genie waiting on your every whim. If you give it wishy-washy wants, you get a wishy-washy world. Command it! Grab it!”
He laughed again. “Now go away.”
A great big wish-fulfillment device? A genie? Is this possible? Is this true?
Do What You Wish
This is the lesson; this is what all the guides have said, for months, again and again. And it’s finally started to sink in. I’ve realized I’m not going to get a lot more guidance until or unless I understand that I’ve got to carve my own path. Reality is a reflection, and I can mold it. (I am molding it — whether I mean to or not — there is no choice in the matter.) I’ve got to learn to consciously control it. There’s no other way forward.
It takes constant practice. And it ain’t easy.
Dollars and Pounds
I’ve been struggling with my weight and my finances for a long time, and I’m finally coming to realize that they are excellent teachers of this kind of lesson. Both issues are directly related to my own personal will.
The situation with money is very direct. Your money, as Cernunnos said, is just a reflection of your ability at intention manifestation. It’s a measure of your skill with the Law of Attraction. If you want to learn how to manifest, one obvious way to practice is to try growing your bank account.
Weight control is a more interesting case. These days, everyone knows how to lose weight and be healthy: eat more vegetables, and exercise more. The difficulty of the matter is not what to do, but carrying through with it — actually doing it. It requires self-mastery. Notice it does not require willpower — willpower peters out in a few days or a week at most, you can’t sustain a diet long enough on that. Instead, it requires the ability to control your own desires — to make yourself want those vegetables and that exercise, purely and completely, with no inner conflict or struggle.
And this kind of self-mastery is essential for the Law of Attraction, as well. If you can turn aside sweet snacks and desserts day after day, if you can consciously establish a new set of habits, if you can change your own thoughts and desires to this extent, then you can do anything with intention manifestation. It’s an excellent training ground.
So far my success has been limited. I’ve been able to do simple quick things like locate parking spaces, make traffic lights change, and find exact change in my wallet when I exit a parking garage. More significantly, I have defused stressful situations and altered relationship dynamics. I am still working on my weight and my finances, and there’s not much movement yet; these are, I think, ingrained habits of thought and emotion that take a lot of time and effort to uproot. It is hard to work with situations where I’m working against very basic, long-standing beliefs of mine. It’s hard to maintain my intentions at high levels to achieve long-term goals. Sometimes it’s hard just to remember to try intention manifestation instead of banging my head against the wall. But the more I do it, the easier it gets.
The Worm Ouroboros
In The Neverending Story, the hero Bastian can make wishes as he travels through Fantastica, and his wishes are always granted. However, each time he makes a wish, he loses a memory. Gradually his character is destroyed, and he descends into selfishness and self-centeredness. But he cannot stop wishing — he cannot control his own desires — and he continues to wish, continues to lose himself, until at last he has no identity at all, not even a name. Michael Ende describes the process so vividly, it’s enough to put you off fiction entirely, for fear you’ll stumble into Fantastica one day.
And it’s a process that rings true. Intention manifestation is a kind of wishing that, when done consistently, is also self-transformation. And you really are destroying yourself: you are consciously destroying parts of yourself that you no longer want. And at the same time, you are creating new parts of yourself. You consciously, carefully, quietly create new feelings, new emotions, and new expectations; and reality is recreated to reflect the new You.
Hanging From the World Tree
One final vision. I am climbing Yggdrasil, slowly, laboriously. It is difficult, because I am climbing the trunk, and it is very think. It’s more like climbing a wall than a tree.
I am up very high. The landscape below is blue with haze and distance. The mountains are like rumples in a blue-green forest blanket. The ocean reflects the sun, and is too bright to look at directly. I am high enough that the sky around me is black with hard bright stars. But I don’t spend a lot of time looking at the view; I focus on placing my feet and hands carefully as I climb.
Far below me, the trunk of Yggdrasil splits into dozens of roots. Far above me, the trunk splits into dozens of branches.
At last I reach a branching. I choose one: the choice is entirely mine. I start climbing along the branch. I focus on placing my feet and hands carefully as I climb.
And when I look around again, I see that the branch has become the trunk; the trunk I was on has become one of the roots; and far above me, the trunk splits into dozens of branches…
Druid Journal 
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