‘Please!’ I say. ‘Remove the crown from my head! I no longer want to be the torturer and the tortured! Take it off! Take it off!’ ‘I cannot,’ she says. ‘You have to remove your crown yourself.’ ‘But how?’ I protest. ‘I have no awareness of it. I don’t know where I end and it begins.’

Mike Russell, Nothing Is Strange

Hermetic quote Russell Strange crown

Consider also:

  1. “As new energy and expanded awareness is experienced and increasingly rooted to daily life, the ego and all that it has built up begins to feel threatened. The new ways of living, feeling, praying, loving, and being are so different, even if in reality they are only minor initiations so to speak, from the ego’s perspective, they might as well be an intrapsychic coup d’etat!”
  2. “Love brought a garland to my feet to-day Offering to crown my head withal, and said: ‘The year is young, it is the time of May, Autumn is distant, and the winter, dead’ And would therewith my brows have garlanded But that I asked him ‘Is not this a fire To burn the scorched brain through my maddened head? Thou has a guerdon, is it not for hire?'”
  3. “However that may be, I was able to walk out in a scarlet-and-gold robe with a jeweled crown on my head without attracting any attention. They could not see me.”
  4. “Thy death shall be the seal of the promise of our age-long love. Hast thou not striven to the inmost in thee? Death is the crown of all. Harden! Hold up thyself! Lift thine head! breathe not so deep — die!”
  5. “IN middle music of Apollo’s corn She stood, the reaper, challenging a kiss; The lips of her were fresher than the morn, The perfume of her skin was ambergris; The sun had kissed her body into brown; Ripe breasts thrown forward to the summer breeze; Warm tints of red lead fancy to the crown, Her coils of chestnut, in abundant ease, That bound the stately head. What joy of youth Lifted her nostril to respire the wind? What pride of being? What triumphal truth Acclaimed her queen to her imperial mind?”