I don't know if I have it in me to write this out. Every word...feels so heavy. And this healing process has been so dark and twisty, and taken so many years, that I don't think I have the bandwidth to write it all out.
A while back, I talked about Hekate Agia, who sanctifies and protects holy ground. I also talked about my repeated experiences of soul-rape, a sin so dark that I can't describe it.
I was guilted into self-abnegation my whole life, including around the area of my religious beliefs as a Hindu. When I was introduced to Western Paganism many years ago, that helped a lot to decolonize my mind and release pointless shame. But even then, especially because of the supernatural/occult abuse I was enduring, a part of my brain was programmed to endlessly self-flagellate. To numb out. To deny my pain and to deny my ancestors' pain, but only ever protect the abuser's feelings.
When Hekate warned me about racism and told me that my temple had been desecrated, I assumed She was talking about the many layers of my subtle body (which have indeed been desecrated). I was confused by the racism warnings She was giving me too...because again, I had been programmed to deny my own feelings, blame myself for everything, and protect the abuser's feelings.
It was really hard for me to see this, until I spent the past two years experiencing not only increasingly obvious racism (and no, not just from white people), but also what I was forced to realize was Hinduphobia - a word I have tried to pretend doesn't exist.
I don't want to get into it because I hate talking about politics, and anyway the underlying spiritual issues are extremely complex. I generally consider all the main political talking points & positions of mainstream discussion to be an illusion.
Even what I'm saying here in this blog post - even these truths are so paradoxical and complex that I keep having to stop myself from adding, "suppressed Underworld energies are erupting and I don't believe in false binaries". (See this post I made earlier.)
Long story short: when my ancestral connection to Kali suddenly opened up on a new level, it was like a horror movie was being revealed behind a hypnotically pretty Disney story.
I had lied to myself so epically, based on emotional numbness and spiritual blindness, that the level at which I had mindfucked myself due to cultural amnesia was SHOCKING.
I am Telugu and my family were vassals under the Nizam of Hyderabad. I was so Stockholm-Syndromed that I felt protective of the Nizam's legacy, was sure my ancestors were happy under him, and even wondered if the Nizam's Turkish connection had anything to do with the Goddess Hekate coming into my life. (It is truly insane that this thought even occurred to me. Truly. Fucking. Insane.)
There was a slow, horrifying reveal of how the Nizam really treated Telugu people, a suppressed story that I was not aware about.
More horrifying stories came to my awareness. Stories of colonial trauma under Muslim rule that had been erased from history or whitewashed. Stories where the crimes committed by Muslim invaders were erased and then projected onto upper caste Hindus.
Total. Distortions.
In India there is an entire set of highly rated history books and standard textbooks (some by authors that I was told to read when I was in school) that have perpetuated myths, inversions, erasure, and slander, whitewashing and erasing the atrocities of Islamic invaders and transferring all of their disowned deeds onto the people they colonized.
It took me like 6 months or something to watch a film from 2022 called "The Kashmir Files" because I was so fucking triggered and brainwashed (just like the main character in that movie).
My instinct told me to watch that movie. Ganesha PUSHED me to watch that movie. Kali Amma had to repeatedly encourage me that it was safe to watch that movie. Dhumavati appeared in my dreams and told me that I did not know the truth about my ancestors. I received encouragement to watch the movie from the Divine Mother of Kashmir (beloved Sharada) and from Hinglaj Mata of Sindh. I also kept getting prodded to read the full history of Guru Tegh Bahadur (the ninth Guru of the Sikhs) - a history I had forgotten due to my long imprisonment in the Underworld.
Yet for months and months, I could not get past the first 15-20 minutes of this movie.
When I finally watched "The Kashmir Files" all the way to the end, it was like a mental cage had shattered and so had my heart. And I was gripped with horror when I realized that, had the Nizam of Hyderabad managed to separate from independent India as he wanted to (...that same Nizam who I dreamily believed was "cosmopolitan" and linked to the Titan Queen Hekate, WHAT THE FUCK), his regime would have done the exact same thing to Telugu country as what the invaders did to the Kashmiri Pandits.
And to think, I actually wondered if the Nizam of Hyderabad had some unconscious/ancestral connection to Hekate just because of the Turkish thing, when literally Hekate Agia is the guardian of holy temple ground and the Nizam was a defiler of holy temple ground.
When the truth is, Turkey is nothing but Islam-colonized Greece, like how Pakistan is nothing but Islam-colonized India.
My Stockholm Syndrome had left me MINDFUCKED.
But it wasn't just my Stockholm Syndrome, it was societal, it was mass denial. I had been under so much spiritual attack, trapped in the Underworld as a civilizational scapegoat (and I'm not the only one who has been a sin-eater for Omelas, there are others), that the normalized abuse and normalized torture I have endured ultimately left me blind blind blind motherfucking blind to the depth of the inversion that I have been trapped in.
When the horrific torture I have endured has been normalized by everyone in my reality, how could I see past a structure of rape consciousness while I was trapped in it? How could I have seen that the historical ransacking and RAPE of Hindu temples (and Pagan temples from other cultures) was what happened to my own soul?
I kept researching. More and more hidden truths opened up. Stories that originated in old Hindu kingdoms had been stolen, cloaked in Mughal culture, and re-packaged to erase their original identity. Hindu temples had been ransacked and defiled according to a specific magical pattern (this is hidden by the way, not told openly by any historian) that exactly matched my direct experiences of soul-rape.
I am not ready to describe any of this in detail.
And once again, everything that I have said is much more complicated than it sounds - the karmic patterns and ancestral karmas that I have unearthed, going through this, are mind-boggling. Which is why this so hard to talk about.
To be clear, I don't and never will hate Islam or any other religion. This discovery of Islam's colonizer brutality is actually heartbreaking for me, because I was raised to be secular and have always loved and defended Islamic culture. But the fact is that Islamic invaders into India fully intended to exterminate us exactly as the Native Americans were genocided in the Americas. Exactly like how Hitler intended to exterminate the Jews (and like how the Palestinians intend to exterminate the Jews).
The rape of Hindu temples was the rape of a civilization and the rape of my soul. It dismembered Sati's body all over again.
It also created Abuse Consciousness in the minds of people (formerly Hindu, Buddhist, Sikh, or Jain) who were brutally converted to Islam or Christianity under threat and torture, and that has created intergenerational trauma in their descendants that they aren't aware of.
It led to a lot of distortions in mainstream Hindu culture, which I am still untangling myself from.
And I finally understood why the resurrection of Rama's temple in Ayodhya in January last year happened in a synchronized way with my first steps into freedom, my initial curse-breaking process. I understood why a lot of things, including spiritual things, happened the way they did. Lord Rama and I were being resurrected together. Lord Rama and I were coming home from exile together.
And even that was such a shocking journey of reclamation - being able to let go of stupid, pointless guilt where I allowed the colonizer to feel like a victim and made myself, the victim, feel like a colonizer.
As a child, when I timidly piped up and said the Babri Masjid never should have been built on the site of Rama's temple, I was viciously shut down. I learned to shut up, doubt myself, and absorb the projections of my abusers.
It also exacerbated my disconnection from the Earth and my disconnection from Rama. So reclaiming Rama has been a very shocking part of this whole process.
This has happened in tandem with devastating realizations about my biological family members and the patterns of abuse, betrayal, and horrifying evil that I have experienced. And a devastating healing process with my Twin too. It is all connected to the horrors and evils of colonizer mentality - not only what Europeans did to my ancestors, but also what Muslim invaders did to my ancestors.
And it goes further...into how Hindus carried this abuse to other Hindus, including what my family did to me through multiple lifetimes of scapegoat abuse and murder.
The. Wound. Goes. Deep.
It has been normalized exactly the way the horrific torture I've gone through has been normalized.
I never wanted any of this to be true.
Here are some books I read, because they explain the trauma better and frankly, just writing this blog post was exhausting.
There are other books like this. I'm too exhausted to read them, but thankfully a lot of authors are popping up now who are decolonizing the story of India.
To say that this has been painful to accept is an understatement.