Tracks In The Witchwood

A Provenance Charm Forbidding Nightmares

2011-08-26T11:44:00.000-07:00

This work is Lunar in nature, bolstered by the Saturnian sub-current. On a night of the moon's greatest majesty, toast the Mare-Queen of Night with a Red Meal boasting wine that has been adulterated with a philtre of moon-infused well or spring water, a pinch of dried peppers, and a decoction of mugwort. Have on hand three small measures of dried or fresh mugwort, verbena, and rue, and a black cord or string, and a piece of black or red linen to bind them up in. The charm follows.

* * *

The Son of Light grasps the key
That lays open every portal that can be;
From She Whom All Fear has the Master won it;
So in his celebrated name I pray:

Let the portal to the dark unseen be open
To the door of night and dream-
Keep that way open for me until I return safely.
Good Master and Lord of Spirits,
Open that way for me.

In your revealing name I call to the below,
To those powers that run like horses in night:
To the realm most deep, provenance of life,
With the good favors of Aquilo,
Of Septentrio and Cautus I make this conjury,
And with the notice of their good grooms-
You, Supernas, you, Boreas,
And Thrascias, and Gallicus,
You Circius, and Cotus also,
And all of the winds of the Valley of the Nadir:
Chasm of the Hag and her Groomsman Death.

These powers I name and gather to me,
With the knowledge that they hear all-
Say the weirds of the dark winds, "we hear thee."

Winds of spirit, carry my words to the Mistress of Dreams,
The Great Mare of Night herself,
The White Horse, terror of the living and the dead.
I plead and petition Her most wretchedly,
To forbid her servants from tormenting ____
With their nightly rades and terrible visions.

And you wicked powers, wild and unjust,
Who in delight may torment _____
In the same manner, and in the lonely night,
In the name of She before whom all Daimons tremble,
I sternly forbid you entry to the mind and soul of ____
The green and dark pastures of his/her mind
Must remain untrampled by you,
For as long as the pleasure of the Queen may be.

In the name of the Mugwort-wight,
The weird of the moon,
In the name of stormy weird Verbena,
And the wierd of Rue,
And in the name of She who is greater
Than all who course in the Unseen,
I tie up this charm and secure its power,
The power to forbid nightmare and night terror:
May its potency endure for moons ten and three,
Or till the coming of the day.

Such are my words,
Such as these are the Master's words,
And this the consummation of my spell.

* * *

Hail Antonia Gavilan, Queen of Spirits!

2011-08-13T01:50:00.000-07:00

Hail Antonia Gavilan, Queen of Spirits!

Robin Artisson's Considered Response to the Reuters Wiccans who Complained that True Blood was "Giving Witchcraft a Bad Name."

Also Entitled
"A Popular TV Show Finally Depicts Sorcerers and Witches Properly."

By Robin Artisson

True Blood Rocks, Bigger Than Ever- So Why The Long Faces, Fangbangers?

Just the other day, I was preparing to write an article about how great the current season of True Blood is. I was going to talk about how realistic and powerful their portrayal of the 16th century necromancer- Antonia Gavilan- was, and how delightfully flaky and fun (and realistic) their depiction of Wiccans was. The degree to which the lead Wiccan character in the show, a medium named Marnie, is so weird and conflicted lends to her character a realistic feel of the strife encountered by legitimate mediums who lack formal understanding or even the needful culturally-encapsulated training to handle such a gift.

But my plan was cut short. It was cut short by a very undiscriminating media outlet, who allied themselves with a team of publicity hungry Wiccans, to criticize the portrayal of witches in True Blood. What are the chances? Robin Artisson is appreciating what might be the first real legitimate mass-media portrayal of a powerful sorceress on television, a necromancer from the 16th century, and Wiccans somewhere (ever media-hungry for the sexy scandal spotlight) are squealing against it! Their complaint? That Antonia, the Necromancer portrayed on True Blood, is "giving Witchcraft a bad name."

So, I had to sit down and write this response, a response to the Wiccans who were interviewed by Reuters and to Christopher Penczak who (not surprisingly) joined them in defending their fully unhistorical and inauthentic modern version of "witchcraft", and to set the record straight on why Antonia- the Necromancer from True Blood- is the best thing that the public has ever seen, when it comes to understanding the truth about historical Sorcery, and the men and women who engaged it.

But something deeper motivated this response- two things, really; my own experience with the hidden core of that particular strain of historical sorcery (and the extreme states of mind tied to it) that has come down to us under the title of "witchcraft", and the most fundamental, intolerable reality of the new-age movement as a whole: the way that it has pathologized all (so-called) “negative” emotions, creating a false and bloated over-focus on "positivity"... and the further way that its resultant lack of wholeness has led its proponents to distort the historical realities of actual sorcery, and the humans that worked it and experienced it throughout time.

You Give Love... A Bad Name

To hear these Wiccans talk- and talk they do, in the Reuters story that you can read here and in countless places on and offline- any witch who tries to get revenge on others, who tries to harm others, "isn't a real witch"- and are giving "witchcraft" a "bad name".

To begin with, no one except “rede beating” Wiccans, in my way of seeing, are giving witchcraft a "bad name". To end with, does it strike anyone else as telling that these Wiccans are using the same logic that fundamentalist Christians (and most Christians generally) use anytime they want to distance themselves from the very real harmful actions that Christians have performed against others throughout history? The oft-repeated assertion that the Christians who were crusaders or inquisitors or witch-hunters "weren't real Christians?"

The new age discomfort with witches being portrayed as fully human, and having the full range of human emotions (negative or positive, however hopelessly simplistic and subjective those terms may be), is fully isomorphic to the Christian discomfort with Christians also being fully human and therefore capable of kindly AND foul acts.

Let me say it up front: a person expressing anger, vengefulness, or hate doesn't cease being a sorcerer or a sorceress anymore than the same kind of behavior stops a person from being Christian. It doesn't give "sorcery" or "witchcraft" a bad name. It merely presents a reality that we must all accept, and a reality that we have for too long (whether new-ager, new-age "Wiccan", Christian, or secularist) denied- that every human being is a full vessel of every possible state of mind, every emotion, and that Nature designed us this way for a good reason.

They deny the more subtle truth that the key to our own personal and collective peace and wisdom isn't drawing a dividing line down the middle of that vessel and ignoring one side, but drinking the whole thing down, and learning to wisely integrate what is there into the omnipresent wholeness which is found in the world and in every person. Easy to say, but hard to do! But without trying, no peace in the future for us is possible.

Nothing Less Than Wholeness

Nothing less than the truth about us will ever serve to heal what divisions slice deeply into the blood and body of this world and our cultures. New-agers help to create those divisions by continuing- ironically- the same "witch hunt" started by Christians- except now, the witches are "negative" emotions which must be "banished" or driven from the body as visualized dark clouds, and replaced with visualized "white light" that enters you and "heals" you.

This isn't healing; this is amputating half of our own humanity and our natural power. And the result is just what you see, everyday (if you pay attention)- New-ager media clowns that try to pass themselves off as hippie love-lords in public, but who, in their private circles, are power-hungry, controlling, tyrannical, sexually depraved, and petty. Many of them even succeed at gradually becoming open egomaniacs in public, but they don't tend to last very long after that point.

In the integration that I spoke of above, the powers that dwell in us which may have the propensity to encourage us to act unwisely, are held safely amid the power of all the others, and we find the truth behind that hideously-abused and overused word: balance. I prefer the terms "conscious completion" or "wisdom recognizing wholeness", or perhaps even “the grail”- but even our beloved Arthurian legends have largely become a new-age flophouse.

Only a person who accepts- fully accepts- and integrates their propensity to harm or be unwise, alongside their propensity to be kindly or loving, can ever be whole, or free- or genuinely "moral" in a sense that transcends localized codes of morality.

That person can be more like Nature Herself- able to wield, without obstruction, the powers of Giving and Taking, when necessity calls for them, and able to spread love- or vengeance- when it is proper to do so. And yes, despite the new-age propaganda that may preach otherwise, there is a time and a place for love and for strife, for creating and destroying. When we frame it in terms of "self-defense", the idea of killing another suddenly seems so rational and normal, if regrettable. But when we talk about using something as natural (though rare) as sorcery to defend oneself, or to right a legitimate wrong, suddenly it seems so diabolical.

And why? Because, from the highest levels, people are taught to be afraid of themselves and the power that potentially lurks in nearly everyone- and they are taught to doubt that the divine force in their own person could ever be a vessel of wisdom, guidance or justice. Most people are taught to look to the powerful institutions that exist in the world for the resolution to these sorts of issues, institutions that purport to answer those "big questions" with the pre-fabricated, shallow, and half-wise answers they've peddled for so long.

The voice of real, natural wisdom is silent; in its place the rote words of dusty pages fall into the uncreative minds of the sheep-herding priests and preachers (themselves also victims of this system) who are content to herd all that searching human potential, and to aid their institutions in vampirically feeding off of the mass anxiety and mass longing that they hold the shepherd's crook over. No member of such institutions can start the walk towards being a real, whole human; fear closes that door. For reasons of fearful "piety" and contrived "holiness", they will remain half-humans, forever, the victims of the real vampires that no show is ever made about.

In some cases, a few rare cases, people should be afraid of what lurks within us. In a world of wholeness, as in the world of nature itself, fear can be a helpful reaction. Wisdom might be defined (further) as knowing when to let fear teach you a lesson.

One of the problems I am addressing today stems from a dullness inherent in our culture. It begins when you have new-agers buying wholesale into hopelessly naive and unrealistic (and anti-natural) codes of morality which come (in essence) from the same churches they tend to avoid or claim to present an alternative to- codes which, for whatever reason, they MUST believe once informed the ancient strains of witchcraft and sorcery which they so unsuccessfully look to as spiritual ancestors.

But more on that in a moment. Let's go to True Blood now, and to the complaints against it, complaints registered by two (before now) unknown spokespersons for modern "witchcraft": A person going by the new-age "craft name" "Taarna RavenHawk", one calling herself "Elaanie Stormbender", and the man who may be the first contender for crown-prince of the new age "magickal" world, the celebrity Wiccan/magician Christopher Penczak.

Reuters Finds Some "Real Witches"- Really?

The Reuters story (which I hope you have read) begins by letting us know that "real witches" are upset about the portrayal of the behavior of Antonia Gavilan, the Necromancer-Spirit who possesses a lead Wiccan character in this season of True Blood. They are as upset by the Wiccan- Marnie Stonebrook- "letting herself become possessed", as they are with the depictions of the ancient sorceress Antonia's vengeance against vampires in the world of True Blood.

The "real witches" on Reuters say that Antonia's deadly vengeance, gained through sorcerous working, is giving "witchcraft" a bad name. They discuss how expert "witches" are at "controlling and banishing" spirits, and how a (presumably) "real" witch you might find today (maybe themselves and their fellows) would never let some spirit or spirits just arbitrarily use their mind and bodies. Mr. Penczak "had concerns about Marnie's negative impact on the overall reputation of witches." Penczak waxes a bit poetic about the "witches" out there that get "good training" and how they "usually learn to balance that with discipline, strength and focus."

Terrible Powers, where shall I start? Reuters didn't find "real witches". They found three new-agers- Wiccans- who have co-opted the title "witch" and layered it on top of their personal mixtures of modern new-age hodge podge. What are these "witches" really doing at heart? They are misrepresenting historical forms of sorcery and spirit-contact, to defend themselves and what they do (and what they choose to call themselves) from the fearful reactions of their neighbors who may not understand their strange choice in names or spiritual practices.

They are, in fact, revising history to suit them and their personal religious industries, and calm down their neighbors. They are fighting a war for positive public opinion, and the truths of history are always the first casualty of that war.

They are attempting (with the help of Reuters) to make people believe that "witchcraft" was always about being in control, being careful, avoiding the extremes of hate or vengeance, "harming none", being prepared to banish after invoking, having discipline, strength, focus- and most importantly, never tampering with "forces beyond their control." Truly?

To suggest that historical forms of witchcraft might have included dangerous, mysterious or uncontrollable elements would be a pretty scandalous thing to suggest (and bad for public relations with the neighbors), even though most people who study worldwide forms of witchcraft and sorcery, especially those extant forms that still deal largely with possession by spirits, know that they actually do include disturbing traditional elements that would terrify our expert Wiccans. Our experts apparently want the “witch” title, and the power it still commands in the unconscious layer of the western psyche, but none of the truly powerful, sometimes dark history that comes with it. That part, they want forgotten.

Our experts want to be as non-threatening to their neighbors as they can, and truly, who could blame them? But I feel I must suggest that what their neighbors need to know isn't that historical witchcraft really was “all lovely”- all those neighbors need to know is that what our Wiccan friends are doing isn't historical witchcraft; it is, instead, a new-age brew of goodness, peace, pop-culture cabbalism, light, so-called "shamanism", ceremonial magic, and karma, which couldn't harm anyone, at any time, ever- unless you consider massive confusion to be "harm".

Mission accomplished! The neighbors are satisfied, and we never needed to re-write history and dumb-down the public further to get our restful sleep at night.

Arcana Mundi: Obtain it, Keep it Secret, Keep it Safe

I have to wonder if Penczak or RavenHawk, or Stormbender, have ever cracked open a book by Georg Luck, entitled "Arcana Mundi: Magic and the Occult in the Greek and Roman World." If they had, they would find the most accessible, scholarly-well done, and enthralling revelation of what we really do know about Witches and Witchcraft, and Necromancy, and Divination, Daimonism, Trance-Possession, and Sorcery from Classical Antiquity. And if you read this wonderful book, which should be on everyone's shelf, you'll see something very enlightening: The makers of True Blood have created in Antonia Gavilan the most realistic depiction of a Necromancer ever seen on television.

Far from misrepresenting historical necromantic sorcery, Antonia embodies it. Women (and men) like her once really existed. They commanded the shades of the dead, made them give omens, divinations, and do favors for them- they threatened them, cajoled them, offered to them, seduced them, and held power over them. It doesn't sound pretty from a Christian or white-light New Ager perspective, but it is the historical fact of the matter.

And modern necromancers who work outside of the new-age current still have a fraction of the power of those authentic traditions available to them. Yes, they exist. Yes, I've known them. And yes, if Penczak or RavenHawk, or Stormbender ever had to talk to them too, they'd likely run away screaming, and (I fear) never laugh at anything, ever again.

I’m not exaggerating much there, for real necromantic practitioners have put their minds and bodies in touch with the supreme Saturnian current at a profound level- the same current that carries us all away at death, and thus, their very minds and personalities resonate with a fatalism and dark wisdom that most cannot handle in its pure form today. To Christians, a meeting with such a person is a meeting with pure "evil"- for in their way of seeing, death and sin or evil are practically synonymous. For most new-agers, a meeting with such a person would likely seem very "negative" or oppressive.

What's even more impressive is the way the very bodies of legitimate necromancers react to that Saturnian current- the one I've known became (as I call her) "the only real goth": always pale without the need for makeup, gaunt without the need for a daily cup of vinegar, and barely existing in any traditionally healthy, vital sense. She became some shade of the world of the dead herself, walking in this one.

If she was depressed, it wasn't because she was "emo" in any way; it was for the reason that she drank from the deepest cup of the Underworld, and most people who see the truth beyond appearances- as only the power of Death can reveal it- find the time to be a little depressed, alongside whatever strange joy they may gain from it.

My hat off to my Necromancer associate- the most powerful one I ever knew- she keeps a real and important part of human history alive in her own person (ironically!) And we need their unique "other side" perspective to stay in a real, powerful balanced perspective ourselves. If you haven’t already, obtain a copy of “Arcana Mundi”- to the properly prepared mind, it can plant the seeds of legitimate tradition, and cause the birth in you of something far beyond anything “Wicca” may offer today.

True Blood’s Necromancer

Antonia the Necromancer is a spirit, who was murdered (burned to death) in the 1500's by vampires, after they raped her, no less. She used her magic to destroy the vampires who colluded in her arrest, rape, and murder- and now that she has inhabited the body of the mostly witless, somewhat sad Wiccan character Marnie, she is using her necromantic sorcery to drive away vampires.

Is this a bad thing? Not at all. In the mythology of the television show True Blood, vampires are blights on nature- not good things. They are impulsive, very powerful, very violent, and almost entirely inhuman. They look upon living humans as little more than insects. As with all modern vampire literature, a few vampires either attempt to hold on to their humanity, somehow, or demonstrate that some shred of humanity still exists in them, at times. But this is the exception, not the rule.

The show’s vampires are not safe creatures to have around. They cannot be restrained by human law enforcement. They can move faster than humans can see; they can overpower anyone they like; they can do what they want, really- only a single vampiric organization attempts to restrain them, in the name of "mainstreaming" or assimilating into the mortal world. But as the show has amply demonstrated, they fail at that enough for humans to really worry- and the way things are presented, humans should worry.

Antonia's necromantic magic affects Vampires because they too, are dead. Antonia herself calls them "unconsecrated walking corpses"- and she's right. They are. She can accelerate in them the natural decomposition that they evade by stealing blood and life from living beings. Vampires are not heroes in a show like True Blood- and rightly so! I think the portrayal of Vampires (fictional though they are) is actually rather mature for mass media. Vampires don't exist in the physical, Anne-Ricey sense that True Blood feeds to us, but if they did, Antonia's powers would affect them just as is presented, at least if historical necromantic theories held true.

Antonia has a right to her vengeance. The vampires that raped and murdered her likely found her in 16th century Spain acting as a medium for people in the cities or countryside- an ancient vocation all over Pagan Europe, and into the Christian period, in places. Those vampires had infiltrated the Church and were abusing that power; they were cruel and (if we follow the lead of the show) likely responsible for a lot of people being burned to death, whether they were legitimate Necromancers or not. Vampires in the show are (rightly) afraid of Necromancers because they know that Necromancers can control them.

Antonia isn't evil to take her vengeance. She is acting, in a way, as the immune system of both Nature (hurrying walking corpses back into the ground where they belong) and a protector of human society- a society (as she points out) which is comprised of true immortals. Vampires, she says in a memorable scene, are not immortal; they are just much harder to kill. Human spirits, however, are immortal, as she has proven by surviving her death on the spiritual plane and passing through time, to manifest herself again.

Human society cannot survive with a supernatural society of vampires dwelling within it; the dark hints of True Blood, and the novels upon which the show is based, show that Vampires as a whole will always be manipulative, passion-driven killers. But unlike humans, many of whom can be described the same way, vampires have almost godlike power to work their will on anyone they choose.

Throughout the season, Antonia has protected innocent humans- Wiccans, in this case- from vampire attacks, using Marnie the medium as a vessel to drive away threats that certainly would have brought about dead Wiccans. Antonia isn't a “bad guy.” She (technically) is the antagonist of this season, but things are not so black-and-white. She seeks righteous vengeance against blighted creatures who don't have the same claim on life that human beings have. And nothing in her character, and nothing she does gives “witches” a bad name, nor diminishes their reputation.

If Wicca presents "witchcraft" as a weak, new-agey thing normally singled out for various degrees of ridicule in the mainstream, Antonia- even as a fictional character- brings a sense of austerity, danger, and old traditional respect back to sorcery, even her necromantic variety. She presents an alternative image of the sorcerously empowered human being, one that we've been lacking for a long time.

True Blood’s Wiccans

The most realistic depiction of the modern occult world on True Blood is the depiction of Wiccans. Marnie (at least before she was possessed by Antonia) leads an embarrassingly realistic coven of Wiccans, out of a metaphysical/new age store in Shreveport, Louisiana. I've seen countless "circles" just like them- and they are accurate down to the jewelry, the props, the chants, the books, the absurd "thank Goddess" exclamations, and their intolerable propensity to mistake magic with "religion".

Marnie angrily responds throughout the show about the Vampires who attacked them, saying that they are innocent Wiccans who were just trying to practice their "religion". But we've seen no religion- just circles, hand-holding, chanting, and glee when they manage to make a dead bird come back to life for a few seconds, or manage to channel the spirit of a deceased person through Marnie.

This isn’t religion, really; this is a low-grade form of new-age sorcery, and the only reason it works as well as it does is because it's a TV show. In real life you wouldn't find the circles or chants doing anything except causing some excited talk about people "feeling" this or that, and well, maybe one person (usually the high priestess) claiming to be "possessed" by "the Goddess"- and occasionally, a "high priest" claiming to embody their mysterious "God".

On my occasions of attendance, no "possessed" Wiccan priest or priestess every said or told me anything (or anyone else there anything) that didn't sound like something a sweet grandma wouldn't say, or a pop-culture psychology book ("Don't be afraid to be yourself!" "Find the love in you!" "Accept your power" "Forgive yourself for what you've done, for I love thee" and dozens of other equally-as-deep messages from the "Gods"). The rest of the time, it was the expected drama, petty games, "great rite" sex, and new-age positivity affirmations.

That's where this all begins and ends. I hate to sound cruel- but my intention isn't cruelty. My intention is honesty to my own experience, and to the experiences many others have shared with me, and honesty to the historical traditions of Sorcery that modern day new-agers either ignore or misrepresent, ostensibly to create in themselves an appearance of traditional legitimacy which their new "magickal arts" don't actually give them, and to give themselves a non-threatening appearance to outsiders. The “craft of the witch” in the old days was always counter-cultural and “outsider”; the craft of Wicca today is very much a social religion, intending itself to be at home peacefully among everyone. This is both a defining and a redefining distinction which is all-important.

I am doubly certain that the majority of people involved in all this new-age business aren't bad people. I know what they thirst for- the promises of the hidden reaches of sorcery and historical witchcraft- but despite the fact that Wiccans use the title "witch" like its going out of style, they do not offer the gateway to what witchcraft was, in historical reality.

They embrace Wicca- a modern synthesis of occult ideas, tied together with modern ritual and modern poetry- not historical witchcraft. They offer (generally speaking) "visualization" training, positive thinking, modern occult self-help science, some Eastern Karma notions, a reincarnation belief, and a moral code that is powerful and simple. All of this is free (at least on the surface) from the absolutist codes of Christianity. And all of that ain't nothin'- it's quite useful and soothing in the lives of many lost souls these days. And truly, all that positive thinking and visualization could even cause minor positive changes in a person, so it ain’t all a waste of time, either. But historical Witchcraft it is not.

The Witchcraft That Was

Witchcraft, in that historical sense, is about allying with (and sometimes taming) powerful spirits- nonhuman persons- from the Unseen world (familiars) and utilizing fair partnership with them to gain power; it is about detaching the consciousness from the body and plumbing the depths of the Underworld and the Unseen world for vision, wisdom, insight, and many other sorcerous goals. It is disturbing, exhilarating, and ultimately, it leaves one wondering about many things. It puts people face to face with something infinite and unexplainable, and makes them comfortable with uncertainty. It makes iron-hard souls that fear cannot rake away, eventually. It reveals Fate’s reality, and it sometimes brings about the early deaths of its participants.

Most importantly, it keys a person in, intuitively, to a perennial aesthetic that feeds the hungry soul of people forced to embrace the spiritual aesthetic of aridity and desert-dwelling frenzy and monotheism brought by Christianity to Europe. The Witch as I mean it is a dweller in the dark bog and broad forests of Old Europe, not some bearded Hebrew patriarch with his cloth-draped women and their camel train.

The Witch is legend; she is the vessel and the oracle of the long-faded wisdom of the Pagan world, transmitted in many strange ways; she is the human image of the primordial mysticism of the ancient Indo-Europeans, and perhaps even the pre-Indo Europeans. She is the human who can become a ghost and then human again. She knows the secrets of the dead. She changes her shape at will. She knows the properties of the growing things of the ground. She is grandmother to all our faery tales and folk-ballads. She is our culture soul’s sorcerous form. She is good and she is evil, and she is beyond good and evil. She is always with us.

What bothers me is just that people tend to find Wicca first (due to the neon-light blinking sign that they’ve set up in our cultural consciousness) and then they stop with Wicca, never questioning what came before, or what might be deeper. Maybe it shouldn't bother me; maybe it's a good thing, because to this day, and after meeting countless Wiccans, I've known maybe two that I thought had the mental fortitude to handle what really lay below the surface of things.

New Age, The Media, and the Destruction of the Occult Heritage of the West

And all of this might be tolerable, and even expected, if the media wouldn't get involved. For me, the occult heritage of the west is a horribly neglected (and very vital) chapter of our common history. So much of what was once important, sacred, or precious passed into the "hidden" side of things, there to be interacted with by occultists and occult luminaries from the great ages before this one.

Occultists in the real historical sense became secret guardians of real treasures from the past. To see the occult world- historical and modern- being represented by new agers, people who lack the simple wisdom to understand the necessity of wholeness, and people who participate unconsciously in the pathologizing of entire segments of human experience, is unconscionable. And to watch Reuters setting up "experts" like this is another nail in the coffin of our true occult heritage.

These Wiccans may not realize it, but the historical occult world didn't share their moral thinking or their pop-psychological shipwreck; and living occultists who draw upon those historical traditions still do not. And yet, if I tried to tell this to my own neighbor who might have read this Reuters story, what then? "Hey Robin! Ain't you one of dem "RavenHawk" people? You do dat "wicca"?" "Why no, Joe, you can't trust the news... they found a bunch of people who have nothing to do with me or "witchcraft" as I know it, and let them speak for me and those like me. Sorry about that. Try to see past the news, Joe."

But Joe can't see past the news. Few these days can.

And history? How many times do I have to hear Wiccans who really still believe (somehow) that "nine million" Wiccans died in the "burning times"? And _every one_ of the brain trusts who still buys this modern myth will tell you that those (mostly) female witches were led to their burning stake with nothing but "perfect love" in their eyes and hearts for their tormentors.

An entire history- an entire human history- of witchcraft has been quite literally whitewashed away under the choking light of "positivity". Witches in the past- real witches- would have hexed the life from your bones had you tried to come into their little neighborhoods and arrest their people or themselves, or their families, or for many other reasons. And thank the Powers for that- sorcery was one of the few ways common people really had of striking back at oppressive authorities, in some of the old days.

No one "bided the Wiccan rede." Not before Gardner, his Rosicrucian Co-Mason pals, and Doreen whipped that (admittedly nice) turn of phrase up. People who survived (and some who died) bided the "hex the shite out of you" rede. That's life. That's reality. Not for no reason does the legend of the witch include the hexing witch. It isn't just propaganda! Real sorcery doesn't come with some ingrained "moral code". It relies on individual humans for that, and well, as they say... "it takes all types."

And a character like Antonia Gavilan is one of the types it takes. She reminds us of our humanity, even in the house of real Sorcery. And she demonstrates real power- what some are capable of. Real power is always a little disturbing; in the same way that the roar of a mighty thunderstorm may make you a little unsettled, a little humbled, this is just its nature.

Love and Hate: the Occult Truth too Awful to Hear (for most)

This brings us back to where we started- my little talk on wholeness, and the new-age discomfort with so-called "negative" emotions. Read on carefully, and quote me on this all you like: now, I'll give you the little gem that your patience in reading my response/rant has earned you.

Love and Hate are not a conflicting “positive and negative” duality. We only say that, and unthinkingly believe that, because we are taught to love love, and hate hate. The reality is this: Love and Hate, if separated from one another and isolated from one another, make no sense. In isolation from each other, neither makes any sense.

This is because Love and Hate are the front and back of the same powerful, unseen hand. If they are given the honor of their natural co-existence, and both accepted, and allowed to speak with their own voice, then suddenly, they both make sense. They help to explain one another. They complete one another, without becoming one another. Then, they can both be known for what they truly are. When one really knows what love is, and what hate is, then (and only then) can one make a true moral choice between them.

If Love and Hate are not known for what they truly are, then what they appear to be really will possess a person- and people quite often become puppets for "hate", to the detriment of themselves and others; and they often believe themselves living for "love", while hurting themselves and others around them, all in love's name. They always find ways to explain away the pain caused by both, and ignore the deeper issue of unwisdom and fragmentation of understanding.

I like to think of it as a scalpel; a single tool which can cut out a tumor, thus saving a life, or stab someone to death. If you didn't know the harming power of a scalpel, you might unthinkingly stab people to death. If you didn't know the helping power of it, you'd never be able to do surgery with it. Yet, surgery relies on sublimated harm, just as love actually does rely on sublimated hate. Anyone who's ever felt love turn into sudden hate for a former intimate partner already knows how close the two are.

Many people can’t abide by this; they demand loudly “how dare you imply that the generous and soul-fulfilling love I have for my children is only a hairsbreadth from hating them!” To be clear, it is. Love and Hate are polarities of the same intense power- what drives your true and intense love as a caring parent is the same wind that drives the intense hate of the fanatic or the racist. But how it is polarized, integrated, and expressed makes all the difference.

The wise must simply never lose sight (as the half-wise do) of the fact that this polarity isn’t as wide a distance as one may feel it to be, nor is it as far apart as we may want it to be. Part of moving towards wholeness or completion involves passing through that uncomfortable region of initiation that turns the most fundamental things we’ve thought and felt all our lives upside down, and makes us see and think in new ways.

Love and Hate are the same intense emotion (perhaps the most intense we can feel!) simply turned to the left, or turned to the right. You can be pushed to the left forever, or to the right forever, or you can take the rare “third road” and seek the power of the whole, where you actually possess the power of both. Then you can love or hate consciously, without breaking your soul on their sharp, dangerous curves, or becoming their fool victim. Such a person loves beyond the ordinary sense of love, and can hate beyond the ordinary sense of hate. They can unite what needs uniting, and break apart what needs breaking apart. This saintly and rare person is both wicked and pure, pure like the Gods.

A cursory reading of the words of many First Nations mystics will reveal that such beliefs as I have presented here regarding Love and Hate- or other dualities, like "good" and "evil"- are not uncommon in the First World. The Minneconja Sioux Wicasa Wakan (holy man) Lame Deer (in his book "Lame Deer, Seeker of Visions") spends a good deal of time discussing how all things, humans and Gods, are "good and bad" at the same time- and how the most sacred powers (even Nature itself) are both of everything. Love and hate, good and bad, in his worldview of wholeness, are both "wakan" or sacred- a teaching carried on by the informants of Walker, as well. This isn't to say that the sacredness of "hate" or "bad" makes it utterly desirable to have around all the time- only that Lame Deer and his people were wise enough to understand a deeper picture for these natural aspects of human existence, and the existence of the world. By having such a deeper view, they engaged the "good" and the "bad" in a different, wiser, more balanced way.

Some people reading all this will be bothered by it. Good! If it lacked the power to disturb, it wouldn't be channeling the core of truth that it is attached to by these insufficient words. Some will read this and immediately begin working out a counter-argument to protect the sanctity of love, and banish the hatefulness of hate. Others will just roll their eyes (they’re probably my favorite team) and others will just nod knowingly.

Such is the way of it. Antonia Gavilan, as a fictional character, may not be a wise enough woman to have found or realized the secret truth to Love and Hate that unites them and transforms them. She may be just a hateful, spiteful bitch who happens to also be a powerful necromancer.

That's fine. Many powerful sorcerers in the past (or present), male or female, may have become hateful or spiteful, just as Christians have, Muslims have, or Secularists have. That's every bit as human as becoming a loving, kind person. If we could just magically wave a wand and banish the hate, the possibility of love would go with it. And then, we'd be zombies without emotions, fully bereft of the vitality of emotional intensity, all without romance or tears or the roar of wrath… and the world's completeness would be impossible.

When you see it this way, and further, when you experience it this way, Love and Hate cease to be shackles, and become allies to you. Both become sources of real strength- for this “enlightened love” and “enlightened hate” far outstrip polarized love and polarized hate. They feel the same, in most ways, but neither are as limited or as dangerously unstable as their polarized twins.

Calling Antonia’s vengeance “unbecoming a witch” is just another polarized reaction, another expression of our habit of loving love and hating hate. It simplifies her, and her arts, and this world and all the people in it into a moronic lump that has no relationship to or bearing on reality. The best thing about Antonia is her humanity, with all its bumps and lumps (and occasional vicious curses.) In the same way that the ancients could relate to the Gods precisely because the Gods were portrayed as occasional victims of infatuation, desire, and anger, Antonia is also reachable by everyone. We understand her. That is its own power.

One More Thing... Why Not Give Up on "Witch"?

Yeah yeah, I always hear people tell me that the word "witch" is a laughing stock word, something that will never be anything other than a diabolical cesspool of christian propaganda, or a new-age joke. So why not change the language? Give it up?

The term "witch" refers to a region of the Western/Indo-European consciousness which, for whatever historical reasons (and there are many) has survived into our modern day loaded with power. Sure, most of that power is tied into sensationalism and smacks of villainy, but there is something standing behind it- the legitimate image of the hedge-crossing, boundary-crossing sorcerer/sorceress who once interacted with the underworld and other more-or-less frightening or forbidden reaches of this reality, for the purposes of power-gaining, divination, and wisdom.

The word "witch" itself drips with a power that nearly everyone feels on the gut level, and it is constellated with many images that themselves maintain an archetypal association with legitimate objective unseen powers. As much as it seems like we should just cut all ties with this word, those who deal with the extraordinary reaches of consciousness in the western context cannot simply do it.

This word alone, almost, has the necessary "hint of darkness" but also the necessary "aura of power" that makes it among the most ambiguous (and therefore really powerful) words. It is precisely the scandal that it causes in most minds that empowers it. And as I said, behind its complexity is something legitimate- not servants of Satan mind you, and certainly not servants of a smiling, shiny caveman mother Goddess, but something far more sublime and deep.

Behind it, deeply, you will find the "Haljoruna", the women (and men) knowledgeable in Hel's mysteries. And they are objective powers that still exist, and still follow all descendants of the Indo-Europeans around, everywhere we go. This is what "witch" really means when you go back to the roots of the language- "rouser of spirits" from the Proto-Germanic word *wikkjaZ, which is another way of saying "Helrunar"- a name for the persons knowledgeable in the mysteries of Hel, or the Underworld. The "Helrunar" are the actual historical figures standing behind the distant personage of the "witch"- men and women able to draw upon the deepest of places for power.

This is the darkest core of our real heritage. And we cannot shake it, and really, we shouldn't want to- some of us are tied to it by Fate, compelled by it. And the world itself needs it, in some secret way at least, or such a thing could not be to begin with. Veritas Vincit!

A New Season of True Bleeding

2011-06-26T15:12:00.000-07:00

Ah yes... the new season of True Blood begins tonight. Is there a seer out there who can tame the powers needed to tell me if they'll be able to recover from their miserable third season?

Even ratcheting up the sex and violence- which they did nicely in season 3- couldn't spare them from lame story lines, needless character assassinations, and more insufferable Anna Paquin as Sookie. I'm certain that Madame Paquin is a gifted actress well suited for other roles, but I've always felt that her casting as Sookie was a mistake on the part of the casting team.

The added touch of the Wiccan who showed up at the end of season 3 and performed the worst pennyroyal tea administration ever seen was just the new-age icing on the cake: and she had to have been the most realistic depiction of a Wiccan yet seen on television. (Her invocation of the "Goddess" was majestic- up to and including her "Okay, she's here!" announcement after glancing up into the air above her circle.)

I think I speak for everyone when I say: Eric, grow the long hair back and stop getting skinnier... Pam, please get your lesbian on more... Jessica, please get more camera time and less clothing on... Lafayette, you are awesome and you need to become the main character, not whiny annoying Sookie. And if your brujo boyfriend has any power, make sure you learn from him. And Sam: please stop being a douche and turning out to be a killer with a bad temper. We know you're really a nice guy, no matter how much the writers want to add a ridiculous "dark" dimension to your character which is totally unnecessary.

The Second season was probably the best, so long as you could ignore the shameless and inaccurate equating of Dionysos with Satan. Beyond that, superb. Good and realistic characterization of fundy Christians. Good show, really. I hope it gets good again.

Being from South Louisiana, it is impossible for me to avoid watching- and critiquing- a show like True Blood. I'd watch it just for the artful opening sequence, if nothing else, which captures the delirium of my homeland quite well. I have always watched the show hoping for a more "in the right spirit" depiction of southern occultism, but always been dissatisfied. Naturally, it being television, I never expected an overly accurate depiction. But as an occultist, it is my duty to examine all angles of popular culture for traces of the Old Sorceries and Old Practices when they arise, for arise they do, in surprising ways.

True Blood as a whole is, in my opinion, a good show. I like the blend of grit and humor and sex and the supernatural- and I've always loved Vampires and shape-changing things. Perhaps it is the distant blood of the Balkans in me; whatever the case may be, the swamps of Louisiana are a good place for sweltering mysticism and blood drinking, even today: if the mosquitoes don't get you, creepy rednecks or black worshipers of snake gods will- or maybe just teams of idiot libertarians who are all in denial about being republicans.

Sadly, the fictional town of "Bon Temps" is set in North Louisiana, not south, where it properly belongs. There are no Cajun-seeming enclaves of Spanish moss and good old fashioned southern hospitality between Monroe and Ruston. Charlaine Harris is certainly using her imagination big time there- trust me, as someone sentenced by Fate to spend a lot of time in Monroe, you would be more likely to find redneck, Budweiser-swilling werewolves, actual vampires, and cheesy dancy fairies in North Louisiana, than you would a town like Bon Temps.

All is well. All is as it should be. Join me in watching the beginning of Season 4 tonight, as we go into our new season which (from what I understand) will have "real" witches as the main bad guys- and dark powers preserve us, Harry Potter's aunt from the HP movies plays the lead witch. Aunt Petunia's gone to the dark side! I hope she can overcome the Petunia thing, to give us a good villainess.

Spell of the Crossroads

2011-06-06T18:58:00.000-07:00

Spirits of this place, weirds of needled pine, of stout oak, weirds of ragged grass, of wild onion, of nettle, of dandelion; weird of the seven-sharp holly, weird of the brown rot mask that hides a black soul, weird of the choking wet heat that rakes fingers into every space, weird of the buried stones, weird of the iron spikes, weird of the screeching locust swarm, weirds of the twilight birdsong, weird of the water trickle, All you indwellers of this lonely place, the strength of the mighty God's blessing be yours, as my words speak it so!

The Master of the Word is present in this spell spoken for you, made potent with the warmth of my breath and my very life! Know that His power swiftly accomplishes what my words declare. Here is the Water of Life, and the white milk of the nourishing cow, poured into the land for your increase.

By your leave, let it be that I pass through your tangle of bodies and shapes unseen! Faces in the ground and wood, move aside, give way, and part the hedge for me, beyond which lies that Hallowed and secret place where the Road to the North crosses the Road to the West- the radiant and dark heart of all places, which touches all lands seen and unseen and joins them together in fateful union. There at the crossed roads, I will make petition to the Master who has flown on the road of the Sun to his invisible throne at the crossing of every forest, road, hamlet, bog and meadow.

Cunning Master, Oldest Thing in the Land, Clever One that moves to the ends of the Earth and back again with the ease of thought, you guard the gate marked with your own sign, admitting whom you will. Open the Door to All Places for me, and let that door close when it must again. Master with two faces, Master who holds the keys, Master of spirits, herald of Great Majesty, open the Door to All Places for me! Between the country of living men and the country of dead men, let me know the true gate and the true crossing in my soul, and let my fetch move like a luminous moth through the eternity beyond.

You are the utterance of these words, Master; I celebrate your invisible fire in me, and my flesh thrives with your secret life. You indwell this very breath! So let these words pass the Crossroads on the witch-wind and reach those powers that my heart desires! In the Name of the Old Trinity, So mote it be.

Some Myths Die, But Myth Never Dies

2011-06-05T14:59:00.001-07:00

The Onion- America's finest (and most humorous fictional) news source recently published an article entitled "Church Canceled Due To Lack of God." As funny as the story was, it got me thinking about the collapse of modern organized and revealed religions in the west, and the need for a mythical life in us, despite the failure of certain myths and the organizations that calcified them to death.

I think that churches are emptying not because "god" isn't real, but because "god" isn't what people have been taught to think it is. They are falling apart on the weight of their myths- the particular myths embraced by Christianity are heavy and clunky and can't hold up to modern scrutiny. Of course, I think myths are generated in every era- a "myth" here being a story we tell ourselves to explain things. Atheists particularly hate the word "myth" because they think it just means "made up and fake", but as any student of actual mythology (or analytical psychology) will tell you, "myth" has more functions than just empty explanations, and they are more than just stories told in the pre-scientific world.

So, for me, "myth" almost never means "fake", however, SOME myths have outlived their usefulness- assuming they ever had any- and crashed and burned in the modern world. The myths of Christianity are perfect examples. The sad thing is this- ancient people were not just ignorant primitives. The human psyche has not changed that much in 100,000 years. The contents of our psyches, the focus of certain aspects of the psyche- those things have changed. But the innate intelligence, adaptability, and perceptiveness of humanity has remained constant.

New bodies of knowledge have been created, but the psyche of man has remained the same- and the psyche has a myth-creating function, because the psyche is itself a mythical force, a story-generating power that is part of the larger story of "mankind". I think ancient people understood that greater powers were part of our world, and part of us. There is nothing "out there" that isn't "in here"- this universe is a whole, not shattered, sundered parts. It is one great event, and our psyches are just the medium by which we receive this universe in symbolic form. Our languages, for instance, are another expression of the symbol-creating function and the assignment of meaning to sounds and signs.

The ancient peoples knew that there was a massive, deep, dark depth to everything; they knew that life and intelligence was not limited to just themselves. They expressed these half-conscious insights in many forms, and certain "myths" arose to suit that expression. The problem is that the mythical function of the psyche has to alter itself to suit the changing of the world and the changing of the psyche, which are two events that might be seen as a singular event with two ranges of intimacy, at least from our perspective. When organized, revealed religions "locked their canons", they froze their myths and refused to evolve.

This is the real reason why they are rightly scorned as false today. Their conception of "god" is meaningless outside of the original culture that manifested it, though the power that was interacting with that culture likely was an autonomous collective of force that really affected those people, and defined their character, as they went on to define its character. But was a single culture's notion of "god" the absolute? Of course not. It was an event of power- full of the predictable errors and terrors that come with humanity- unique to a certain time and place. The only relevance it has to us now is as a warning, and a guide on the path of avoiding the dangers of absolutizing moments long past. The powers of our Ancestors, and of our time and place are still working in conjunction, this very moment- and waiting for the Seers among us to recognize what power means today.

This universe holds more for us than we can realize at this point, and only the hints that come in non-intellectual dreams, visions, and intuitions still remain- in that dim way- to alert us to the fact of the mysterious vastness that exists. It's fashionable these days to worship at the feet of the Gods of Rationality- the pantheon led by Sagan and his fellows- and to dismiss the non-rational and the non-intellectual as so much background noise, but I think this is just as big an imbalance as existed when we killed people like Sagan, and floated in defiance of the intellectual.

I side with Jung in his insistence that rationalism and doctrinairism are the diseases of our time. His full and superb quote (from "Memories, Dreams, and Reflections") reads:

"Critical rationalism has apparently eliminated, along with so many other mythic conceptions, the idea of life after death. This could only have happened because nowadays most people identify themselves almost exclusively with their consciousness, and imagine that they are only what they know about themselves. Yet anyone with even a smattering of psychology can see how limited this knowledge is. Rationalism and doctrinairism are the diseases of our time; they pretend to have all the answers. But a great deal will yet be discovered which our present limited view would have ruled out as impossible."

He goes on to say:

"We cannot visualize another world ruled by quite other laws, the reason being that we live in a specific world which has helped to shape our minds and establish our basic psychic conditions. We are strictly limited by our innate structure and therefore bound by our whole being and thinking to this world of ours. Mythic man, to be sure, demands a "going beyond all that", but scientific man cannot permit this. To the intellect, all my mythologizing is futile speculation. To the emotions, however, it is a healing and valid activity; it gives existence to a glamour which we would not like to do without. Nor is there any good reason why we should."

On the question of the myths of life beyond what we call "death", the Master Jung waxes even more powerfully. He says

"...Naturally, such reasoning does not apply to everyone. There are people who feel no craving for immortality, and who shudder at the thought of sitting on a cloud and playing the harp for ten thousand years! There are also quite a few who have been so buffeted by life, or feel such disgust for their own existence, that they far prefer absolute cessation to continuance. But in the majority of cases the question of immortality is so urgent, so immediate, and also so ineradicable that we must make an effort to form some sort of view about it. But how?

My hypothesis is that we can do so with the aid of hints sent to us from the unconscious- in dreams, for example. Usually we dismiss these hints because we are convinced that the question is not susceptible to answer. In response to this understandable skepticism, I suggest the following considerations. If there is something we cannot know, we must necessarily abandon it as an intellectual problem. For example, I do not know for what reason the universe has come into being, and shall never know. Therefore I must drop this question as a scientific or intellectual problem. But if an idea about it is offered to me- in dreams or in mythic traditions- I ought to take note of it. I even out to build up a conception on the basis of such hints, even though it will forever remain a hypothesis which I know cannot be proved.

A man should be able to say he has done his best to form a conception of life after death, or to create some image of it- even if he must confess his failure. Not to have done so is a vital loss. For the question that is posed to him is the age-old heritage of humanity: an archetype, rich in secret life, which seeks to add itself to our own individual life in order to make it whole. Reason sets the boundaries far too narrowly for us, and would have us accept only the known- and that too with limitations- and live within a known framework, just as if we were sure how far life actually extends. As a matter of fact, day after day we life far beyond the bounds of our consciousness; without our knowledge, the life of the unconscious is also going on within us.

The more the critical reason dominates, the more impoverished life becomes; but the more of the unconscious, and the more of myth we are capable of making conscious, the more of life we integrate. Overvalued reason has this in common with political absolutism: under its dominion, the individual is pauperized."

Amor Fati

2011-05-08T22:24:00.001-07:00

"My formula for greatness in a human being is amor fati: that one wants nothing to be different, not forward, not backward, not in all eternity. Not to merely bear what is necessary, still less conceal it—all idealism is mendaciousness in the face of what is necessary—but to love it."

-Friedrich Nietzsche
I do believe in Love, in more than one way, and love in a spiritual aspect. Of course, as the Master Jung said, people focus on Love's gentle side without realizing that Love is terrible, too. That's the catch. I do believe in something beyond my true conception, beyond the conception or grasp of this ego-center that I am floating amid my Self with, like a raft on a great, immense dark ocean. From this narrow perspective, little really makes sense. It is the messages coming from the dark- chief of which come to me through folklore and myth- that gives me an inkling of the true Powers and Purpose behind things, if those unsatisfactory words may be used.

I think we're all in a big story, to be honest. I think the chief quality of the world or cosmos, the chief reality of reality, is a mythical one, a matrix that generates stories, through which profundity becomes real. Words have that kind of sorcery. I don't think it's all "fair" in any given story, but in the meta-story, something sublime and unknown is happening which moves as close as our understanding ever will get to love- and it's a kind of love that puts everything in harmony, no matter what has gone before or what will come ahead. We have a place we can each accept with peace, with reverence, joy, trepidation, and even a wise fear- and embracing the story of Cosmos (and the older story of Chaos) is the best way to settle all these affairs of the confused heart.

I know some of the Great Powers, the great characters in this story of Cosmos. The Ancestors rightly worshiped them as Gods. I know one of the chief storytellers, that Clever spirit that gave us words, and made all this real in a new way. And I know that together, all powers- including us- line up in a synchronistic harmony that overpowers the senses and over-floods the reason. I would never call that a "God", for devotion to Gods is another matter, but that great Self of which I am speaking, and of which Jung spoke, only speaks and reveals itself in the tiny crack of intuition, or the single moment of sublimity that you gain when the deep meaning of an old tale comes to you. What is this unguessable space that contains everything, and by which everything seems influenced to come to pass? Fate, Old Fate, nothing but Fate and Her Mystery. Nothing can be said about it more.

But I can call it something else- this is the spirit of peace, the door to the best wisdom. Making things too focused on "love" in some "we humans are special above all" sort of way just confuses love with ego. No need for that. We need to be the part of the story that we are. We are Fate's protagonists and antagonists, Her children, Her monsters, Her heroes, and Her own deepest satisfaction.

* * *

Homosexuality and Integral Traditionalism: A First Response

2011-04-23T17:07:00.000-07:00

As a break from my usual reading and pondering, I have been studying another form of traditionalism- NOT traditional sorcery or witchcraft, but a minority intellectual movement of Neoplatonic Western thinkers that have evolved a loose perspective referred to as "Integral Traditionalism". And what a vibrant, violent time in my head it has been! I've recently been perusing the works of M. Ali Lakhani, Frithjof Schuon, and Rene Guenon, and while I've enjoyed some of their clarity of writing and thinking, and certainly enjoyed some aspects of their aesthetics, I've also begun to consider some of the aspects of their thinking that I personally consider flawed.

Since reading Lakhani, I've begun to understand now, in ways I never did before, why these traditionalists- and why exoteric mainstream religionists, who are so closely aligned to them, in form if not in depth or essence- are offended by homosexuality so much, or why they refuse to allow homosexuality a place in this world without adding a note of criticism to the very notion.

I've decided to make a few open responses, over time, to the traditionalist camp, in the hopes that they or others may help me to see what I am not seeing- if indeed I am the blind one. Who is lacking clarity of vision in some of these cases is far from certain.

Here is my first reaction to some of Lakhani's considered opinions about "traditional understandings of sexuality", specifically his contentions about homosexuality. After reading and pondering, I think the fact that homosexual human beings exist at all is a direct threat to the entire philosophical foundation of integral traditionalism, and to the "Perennial Wisdom Tradition" or "Perennial Philosophy" throughout the last 1700 years of Western history.

I would like to present a touch of background, to help make my points. In the integral traditionalist worldview, male and female are not just designations given to surface gender differences. That male and female creatures exist here in the formal world is an "echo" of spiritual and eternal principles in the divine world. That male and female creatures here can mate and produce new life is a literal "image" of a deeper divine reality.

To these traditionalist thinkers, sexuality has an unavoidable sacred role, function, and purpose because human sexuality is (or should be) a re-creation of a divine unity that exists above. In the mind of the traditionalist, "God" or the "First Principle" has a feminine and a masculine nature within itself- it is a divine androgyne. That union within itself makes it able to "pour forth" all things. Creation, to these thinkers, is an outpouring of goodness and power, driven by a divine fertilization from within the divine itself.

A man and woman who unite sexually in a sacred manner are re-creating and re-enacting the divine wholeness, the divine androgyny, and can have a "paradisal vision" of the unity that existed before the breaking apart of things, or before things came to be in "two-ness".

Thus, sexuality in the human world (like everything else) is supposed to follow in accord with deeper principles, which are eternal. To "do it" differently is to go against universal principles, and to create disharmony. And this (obviously) means that homosexual humans (male or female) are running contrary to the eternal principles, but so are 'straight' men and women who use sexuality in a non-sacred way, for instance, just using sex for egoistic and physical pleasure.

This "misuse" of sex is the equivalent of not appreciating a great work of art for the art it is, but instead, tearing off a piece of the corner of the canvas upon which it is painted to use it as toilet paper (to make a humorous example). However much you appreciate the convenience of the toilet paper and enjoy being clean thanks to it, you're really missing the greater point of the majesty of the art you're ignoring.

Traditionalists believe that homosexuals are doing something specifically contrary to the eternal principles- they are isolating themselves. You see, "complementarity" is the term used to describe how male and female forces are intended from eternity to "work" in this world. Male and female are intended to complement one another, and in the complementary relationship, fulfill one another- and ideally, to bring forth new life. For two men (or women) to have sex, totally excluding anything female (or male), is to isolate one principle from the other, so it is a denial of both complementarity and unity, and ultimately, a denial of new life.

But here's where the problem begins. The Traditionalist view is easy to understand. But if what they say is true, then homosexuality shouldn't exist at all- and yet, it does. You can say that people are just making a choice to selfishly move against universal principles instead of in accord with them, but anyone who really examines this issue can see that this is not the case, with the vast majority (if not all) of true "homosexuals".

Just on the personal level, I've interviewed quite a few homosexual men and women, and they have all- in full isolation from one another- confided in me that their own sexual urges were not consciously chosen by them; they can recall, far back into their youths, feeling sexual attraction for members of the same sex, long before they knew anything at all about "homosexuality" or "heterosexuality". They also display some characteristics that would appear to be physiological in conjunction with their status as "homosexual", though that rule is far from perfect. Like "heterosexual" people, homosexual individuals cannot be stereotyped away.

The fact remains- homosexuals are no more "choosing" to feel as they feel, than I am choosing to feel attracted to women. This presents an extreme dilemma to the traditionalist. And it gets deeper. Members of close to 1500 different animal species (from primates to gut worms) have been observed engaging in acts of "homosexual" behavior, with almost 500 of them demonstrating it regularly. And what's more, many animals do (contrary to popular belief) engage in non-procreative sex. (I give a link below to a report on a study entitled "Same-sex sexual behavior and Evolution", a recent study published in the Journal Trends in Ecology and Evolution" which may interest some.)

Traditionalists of all varieties say that humans, being humans, have choices that animals don't have, to behave wrongly in the face of cosmic principles. But they can't claim that animals are choosing to 'sin' or act against the cosmos- by definition, in the traditionalist camp even, animals are not in the same moral category as humans; they are fully incapable of 'sin', incapable of doing anything other than behaving according to nature, to instinct. And if nature itself is driving them to homosexual carrying-on, then the dilemma of the traditionalist rises to the level of a crisis.

Apparently, if "Nature is good", and "Nature is the great teacher"- if Nature is the first revelation of God's goodness, perfection, and omnipotence- as so many Traditionalists claim, then she's teaching a lesson that's contradicting their Neo-platonic preaching. Clearly, simply following their logic, there must be a possibility that there is a "homosexual" eternal principle somewhere out there, too, manifesting itself in this formal world just like every other principle.

As strange or humorous as that might sound (and as infuriating as it might be to traditionalists) this is a possibility that they have not considered (presumably) due to the particular constraints they have accepted on their own thinking. Should I blame the Supreme Principle, or human traditionalists for this seeming error? I would tend towards the humans, myself, just to preserve their own claims about the Supreme!

Bear in mind that I'm only speaking in terms of possibility here for the "homosexual principle"; I am not even convinced myself that "eternal principles" in the sense they mean exist at all. But that is a debate for another time. It does seem odd to me, however, that "The Supreme Principle" is happily and eagerly declared to be the source of all things, but when it comes to homosexuality, suddenly, there is a refusal to connect the two in any way. Before I proclaim this a flat failure of traditional metaphysics, I will say that it is more likely an unconscious obedience to dominant strains of Western religious and cultural idiosyncrasies, the matrix of which we more often see expressed as "conservative thinking".

And now we have arrived at the rub- that homosexual humans or animals exist is more than just a challenge to Traditionalist dogma; it is a form of death to their cause and philosophy. And this is why, I think, throughout recent history (history dominated by traditionalist views at the level of religious and political authority), homosexuality among humans has been ignored, murdered, denied, and blamed on "immoral but fully free and reasoned choices by humans" to sin against the cosmic order, or in every other way blamed on anything but the "transcendent reality".

To be charitable, it should be noted that M. Ali Lakhani, the gentleman and Integral Traditionalist whose essay entitled "Toward a Traditional Understanding of Sexuality" I read to write this response, did point to the fact that Integral Traditionalists do not favor violence or persecution to homosexuals for any reason. He says that "tradition demands tolerance, rooted in compassion." Sadly, the austerity and dignity of his traditional talk, in this age or any other, has seldom manifested such an outcome.

* * *

Link to Journal Article Review: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/06/090616122106.htm

The Cavalcade

2011-01-25T10:28:00.000-08:00

Themes explored herein:

1. White-hot nightmares birth a sorcerous cosmology
2. Poetic meditation
3. Automatic writing and inspiration
4. Key Concept: the world of balladry encodes lost maps of worldview and wisdom
5. Key: Prophecy as a recounting of the past
6. Key: Power songs for the Fetch
7. Key: The Devil and the Iron Queen’s Litany
8. Key: The souls of the departed as leaves in a book of Man
9. The essence of traditional witchcraft

* * *

The Cavalcade
These Thoughts Are Not Your Own

I. The warp and weft of shapely dark force

Choking darkness, alluring vision- old beams frame it; flesh weighs it down, the cold burns it, the sun warms it, the laughter of children at last gives it a joy. The world, vast and ancient, is all of it; it is a stone, a lonely wood, a dense fog. Man is a lot of a thousand lots, countless unseen lots, a power among many. Man is pursued by loss, fallen by obscurity, blind with eyes open, due to fearful doubt. Man is a home of happiness in flesh, invisible made visible, vitality collected, a swirl in endless watercourse. Man is not alone. The Cavalcade has no origin or reason. The Cavalcade excludes none.

Man is one that has walked on the loam and moss, the grit and dirt, bled on it, laughed on it, clutched at it, wept on it, dropped sweat upon it, lifted wood, stone and metal upon it, delved within it. Man was in deep darkness; man was in mist, man was in the invisible; man was in the dusk world, man was near to truth. Man has wandered to himself. Man has reached for glory and forbidden things. Man has leapt the boundaries that should not be leapt. He has dared and died. Man is another knot in the fateful threadwork of the unfathomed.

Man is not alone; man cannot see what he ought to see. Man's eyes are few among many. The world is full of eyes. Man's world is not empty; man is sibling to rock, to trunk, to grassy clump, to scouring wind, to hissing brook, to bubble and foam, to deep wells, to ancient hills, to soaking rain, to light above clouds, to the people of the grave country's dim bottom.

Man's pride is his undoing. Man sees so little, but is seen by so much. He sees halls and abbeys of wood and stone, but halls a hundred times great built of sorcerous dark and undying light spread out unfathomed. Man's kings and queens tromp in the mud and cut at flesh, but Lords and Ladies of fearful majesty tower above the greatest of them.

For each form seen by damp eye orbs, a delirious and eldritch cavalcade of forms are conjoined; man believes rightly in haunts and fiends; rightly fearful of waste and wood is man if wisdom is wise. Life is in no place a narrow trickle in a narrow gorge; it fills all spaces and wears innumerable masks, more than blades of grass or grains of silt. Every portion of every beast is a magic charm, a magic in the soul; under the flesh and hair, scale and hide, is one flesh and luminosity. Beast and man, in the grave-pit, you will see that boundaries fall away there.

As one is given egress to the cavalcade, one shrinks away, declining in size, one among infinitude. Infinitely smaller, then larger, then smaller again, then naught. One learns of truth by losing the vastness of mountains, the lumbering flesh- the lowly ant is gigantic to the speckling weird, and so very tiny to man, who is a fragment of a germ in the vast apron of the Iron Queen of ice and mountain and night. She is scarcely knowable, and yet she is there. Better to feel like a man feels than to try too much, and better you celebrate her as world and cold sky than seek her bone-circled seat.

In the paving of the elfin roads through the hollow, in the houses of the Indwellers, Man is but a stone or a weed; in their cups of intoxicating brew he is a bubble or foam. In their ballads he is a dim, needful shadow and a helper at the birthing bed, though in his legends they are godly and immortal, deceptive and cruel, helpful and hurtful. They drink blood on the side of burial hills; they take bowls of cream, and take they the newborn unwarded and unguarded.

The Cavalcade goes on, led by the Elf-Knight; know that he is the porter between the hard world and a soft and beautiful place: golden-lit, greenly treed; from that place a road extends to every point and everywhere. There are others in his train; more others than can be named. They have a place in the warp and weft of shapely dark force that comprises the world; their allotments are as right as the mountains that break the world and the trees that drink water from the soil.

Where each droplet of rain falls is its allotted place, and so the Cavalcade's knaves and lords, beasts and fair maids, ladies and shadows, turf-dwellers and indwellers, hungry monsters and sleeping ones all live out their allotted place, as time wends to strange time and then, naught. And then, the shrieking Cavalcade. Under your feet, what chief wears the goat-crown? Who peers through the dark of your home when all sleep, seeing to its neatness and preservation from weird forces?

It is beyond the gallows; it is full, that Unseen; as full as the world of clouds and shadow and dark brown earth; it allows for no truth in emptiness, nor truth in nothingness- it breaks in a man's mind like light in mist; It makes a halo that recounts songs and describes legends. Man lives despite his will to perish, or his bile or sorrow; alone, he only breathes sorrow. But he lives because life is legend. Life is allotment, it is story, it is sorcery. Denial and dullness make it duration, but still it weaves a spell unawares, a dweomer that carves graves out of the ground and opens another door to life. Come what may, graves are carved and life whispers needle-like from the waters of the depths to seek sunlight.

They seek wooded lands, they seek caves and gorges, they seek river-sides, they seek marshes, they seek clouds and drizzle. They find themselves amid thundering herds of horned creatures, amid ragged antlers, near the darting fertile hare and the lurking barking fox, amid the shrieking frenzy of the twisted and goatish people that haunt distant hills; they find themselves killing and living, bleeding and growing, smoothing stones, chipping stones, crushing stones, piling wood, binding wood, splitting wood, heating rocks, heating metal, binding grasses, slicing at grasses, swaddling children, drinking water, burying the stiffened dead, and gazing at the sky amid the smells of forestland.

There is sorcery there, too; they never fail to know it. They will submit to no conqueror; they will live their lives amid thick scented fields and golden pastures. The bodaich goats will lurk in the shadows beyond their fence-lines; the ghosts of ancients and ancestors will trod their roads and hear their shots. They will have memory in song.

II. The company of white deer and white hares

The Elf-queen rides her great white horse. She is in the company of white deer and white hares, of serving maids and men; She is the royal indweller of the hungry and generous land, and enormous spaces into which dirt and dust may fall and vanish forever are her true mantle and body. Elfin mistress green and white, green and dark, white and white, red and white, she is young and very ancient. Her language is memory, madness so old, but completion without a sound or a symbol. She dissolves the dead in a water that turns to life-giving breast milk.

Her people were once dead, yet they live; they have sloped heads like stones, eyes like berries, breath like breezes, laughter like crows, skin like stream-wet sand, bodies like ghosts, worlds like visions in the night, and yearnings that mortals sometimes share. Their Lordly king is so broad and handsome, so full of strength; the King and Queen's tables are always full of generous portions of fruit and meat, of honey and finest breads. Great and hairy cows cry out and make their frightful noises in the Elf-king’s mighty herd. Look into the hollow places of the earth for their pleasant and darksome land. Look to the bloodstained stone-side and hillside for their old feasting tables. Look to your own hide and innards for their portal and resounding gulf.

The Elf-Queen's charnel house has the tooth of fire and tooth of ice inside; it has the scale and measure of justice within, boiling in the soul that spread blood and broken blades on guarded boundaries and sacred ground. To live straining greedily at the edges of life’s allotments is wickedness; to walk unbidden across is wickedness; to trample forbidden roots, runners, and blooms is wickedness; to take and take again is wickedness; to have not cleverness nor poem to repay transgression is wickedness; the heart speaks with the voice of vengeance; it knows the lots; vengeance comes furious from the deep to restore the heart and the air to silence. Vengeance comes as the women of the invisible.

They are furious, and terrible, long-haired and silent, tearful and hidden, swift and fierce; they will strike the flesh, whip the flesh, send the blows of woeful fate onto a man or woman's hide, into their minds, and into the soul that fades. They are fate's women, keepers of our lives and fortunes, and the same to all in the Cavalcade. Gigantic were their ancestresses, gigantic are they in generosity and wrath. They have the allotment-sticks, carved with necessity, carved with what will, what ought, what should and what shall. They charge a fine in blood or breath for that precious knowledge. They fill every air, break every peace lotted to fail, and fill every house lotted to full.

They move stone to stone, stream course to stream course, star track to star track, fire-flown spark to night above, the screams of bairns they urge on, and the moans of the violently slain. They have no origin but origin itself; they have pale white skin and coal dark eyes, seeing beyond seeing, cruel beyond cruel, sheltering beyond sheltering, giving beyond giving. The elfin knight-lord leads them; cavalier, twirling wand, taming his gray horse, making visions, deceiving eyes, calling away, working baleness, working peace, striking at will, striking at all in unguessable order. He leads hunters; he leads the wild rout, he leads the winds and the storms. It is he the winds all fear; his magic has made men and women to love one another and hate one another.

He bruises the flesh, he bites the flesh, he ravishes and comforts, he shrinks the eyes in laughter. He takes wine with the devil in the mirror. His great art was known to you when last you sat overlooking the beauty of the land and felt a brief moment of peace, and when you last wove or cut, dited or pressed, recited or sang, built or plowed, worked sorcery or planned a cunning strategy. When you have boiled worts and simples, pulled the wild onion, whittled the twig and root, or made the circle of pale flour, you have done his art, which is Man’s art, too.

Don't you see them there, the majesty and the mighty of the mighty and ancient? What sun ever moved through the sky not the eye-bright gem of the fiery one? What moon ever waxed or waned without imparting the salty secrets of mineral and blood and of birth in caves? The dead that way go. Above and below, the dead that way go. She is the phantom sun. Can love tie a few together, such that death will not sever them? Yes, the bond of souls can remain so good, for as many ages as the wish may be good. The divisions of hate can remain just the same.

A fire glows on the open land under a dark sky, and for miles it is seen- what it fails to illuminate lights it instead: great dark, the entity night, the entity sun with its ancient cross, which every evil hates; the entity moon and sea, the old woman, the young woman, the elfin people, the devil's hoof-prints, the layers of devouring things, the wolf headed people, the splendorous people with light in their brows, the jester dead in the dusk-world, sliding below waters, sliding into mirrors or caves into the sky of stars, the circles of huts and dwellings that sank down under the ground, the cities of shining gems and living beams, the wildness of raw, red things and sheltering dead trees, the long line of each family's deceased, moving into the distance, ever living. All of these are the lights of the ember nights.

They all see the lonely flame under the night sky. Ages come and go. Many walk the earth, many walk below. Many walk above. Ages and ages blow away like fluttering seeds. Fire is the fullness, it is the gateway of all gone before and forgotten charms. It is the eye of the unseen. It cooks food, and devours flesh and straw, too.

Hear the anger of those who will not slip away into the unknown, the punished and goblin dead who rage at the breath of life, the transformed dead who were ensnared by sorcery, the curses of the unjust, the groaning and roaring of giants in the ground, the triumphs of the virtuous that make a road of fame, rising up, until that light is extinguished by inexorable time; the greatness of the breath and emotion that fills the bellows of man’s history entire- all just one breath among numberless winds and words and irruptions that sail in gusts of thousands and thousands through the darkness of not knowing, through the gap of unlit being. Incomprehensible is that darkness- the truth that may cease.

III. Days and ages fell by

It is too big for you, as small as you are. Be that immensity, that expanse, but doing so will kill you. The Cavalcade will rush you to death. It is a kindly death that makes two lives where once was one, and those two describe a greater One.

Tangled up, tangled foot, tangled hand, tangled heart, you might fight to escape, but only love that endures the blows of fate without care can embrace the beloved. And that love is hard, cold, joyful, deadly, fecund, and alien to men. But it is theirs too, once they stir to wake from their long dream of nets and boats, of fish and bread, of honors and yellow gold. Sometimes a curse awakens them; sometimes a blessing. Sometimes the savage hunt stalks them; sometimes the killer comes on cold wind. They are queens of maleficia, ladies of benediction, who love and kill and go out to see what they shall see. They are master-men, journey-men, who notch the lots on wood and triangle and watch the red and blue birds prance on ground and branch. None may choose how they feel nor love.

The only power you ever had, once the long wandering to yourself began, was the breast of a mother, the warmth of kin, the satisfaction of a meal from the kettle, the laughter of those close, a story well-recounted, the joy of children, the dark scented land and rainy sky, the warming sun, the goodness of restful sleep, the fleshful fire of carnal congress. This was allotted and good. The world knew it good; it was good. Days and ages fell by, and the hungry entity burrowed into your skull, and the fearful one, and the indolent one, and the terrible one, and one land's grain and beasts and leafy blooms was no longer enough. Good was no longer enough.

Strangers came from east and west, from south more and more- old seasons failed. Things were forgotten that were precious to memory. The distant horizon hummed with strange voices, and malevolent spirits came among you, given leave to wander by your doubts and forgetfulness. The adamantine tower fell dark. Fate scourged you. Wisdom failed you. Summer was not enough. Spring was not enough. Autumn was not enough. Winter did not make you cease, but weep for green fields. You can be a friend to nothing as you are, nor will the Cavalcade's fairest and greatest be kindly to you. Would that they even notice you, but for some vagrant urge of fate! For it is you that must rise up now, from beneath notice. Let good be enough for the corpse and the Cavalcade home to the fetch.

Look at your poor hands! Look at your poor soul, the food you eat in all its sameness, the weak words you speak so often to those you see- is this where your contentment lies? Those who course in your fear and frustrations will circle you like a bird of red prey, and you will eat one another's flesh; you will feed yourself your own flesh and grow mad. You will try to accomplish what only the mad undertake- to steal, unthinking, the crowns of a thousand unseen rulers, fairer than you, wiser than you, and you will receive only their arrows. Your kingdom may be vast in your fantasies, built on ash and wind, but you will be its only subject. Unless you do penance, you will perish.

You do not feel it, but the Cavalcade is the world's great soul, the world's great spell, full of every glory. To not know your place within it, to not hear it, to not see it, to not believe it, to live in fear of it, to call it unknown, to hate it, to think it nonsense, is to be who you are, a man and hopeless. To know and accept your place in the endless cast of lots, to hear it, to see it, to believe it, to live in fear and wonder of it, to know it nearby, to refuse to love it or hate it, to think it the supreme reason, to give corpse and fetch to it, to fall into it, to emerge from it, is to be both man and rider in the Cavalcade unseen. It is beautiful where you are, it is terrifying where you are, no matter the way you sleep or ride.

When will you stride up to the secret that only the wind can teach your flesh? When will you open the portals in your head and eyes, in the palms of your hands and in the soft flesh of your breasts, and take the mark pressed by the cruel hook and blade? When will you push the burning coal down into your chest, into the center of your belly, and down further, to the limits of desire? When will you be a firefly glowing in the deepest cavern? When will you ungrasp the cold and hot iron you hold so fiercely, and know the unfettering? When will you surrender to the Cavalcade? Until Twelfth Night, they will rule you.

No man nor inscribed page can deliver you this promise of sudden and blinding flight, of blasting power, of spinning in the winds and clouds, of knowing death’s course, of knowing fate, of intimacy with the dead, only that book called the Book of the World contains this, and the Elf-knight and the elfin court holds the great key to the opening of that gramarye. Their mighty jester the Devil will seize you by the hair and turn your head to face the way. Suffering shows the way. When will you know the promise and goodness of the world of grasses and grey skies?

Pale wandering hag, Old Woman, Cavalcade’s undying mother, even your form is indistinct; a lit bonfire, distant songs, teeth of ice, horrid blue skin, ancient ice-wall, torn land, water and ice-furrowed land, falling stones, screaming geese, naked bodies, boiling fat, warm, running blood, substances of the world, vital breath, deep satisfaction, sinking down, the ache in the body, the long night, long darkness, loss, newness, forgetting, memory, passion and the spark in the innards that urges to distant lands- but that is just man's story; your story is not told in such ways, but can't fail to be the secret language of languages.

The animals speak it; the owl before your dwelling-door in the deep speaks it; even the rocks in the ground speak it. The bones of the dead are its letters. The cold spaces of night are the leaves upon which the women write the letters of lives. That is your gown, your apron, your body, your spirit, Old Woman. You mutter in dawn before the light softens the sky. You keep the wild beasts in the soul and in the valleys and on mountain-sides. Deer are your sheep and cattle. Man is not alone.

The eagle rises up to see the light that warms all people. The hateful are defeated. The hopeful learn to abandon hope and enjoy truth instead. The sun moves on, silent and bright. The moon glares pale. The white triangle is illumined and familiars move through the thread that passes through the middle of the chest. Human land, human forest, human sky, human Cavalcade, fiendish non-human world, great world, your great force, this great force, now open, open, open, and be full, then let burst the skin-hide straining at the fullness and be fetched away to naught but one and all.

The brothers and sisters of the Cavalcade, the shimmering ones, half living and half not living, partners to the fateful hosts of women, slayers of innocence, avengers of foulness, driven mad by wisdom, they meet in dreams. You will not go to those dreams; they will come to you, but you must go to them as well.

In the Court of the Pumpkin-King

2010-11-01T13:48:00.001-07:00

IN THE COURT OF THE PUMPKIN KING

Copyright © 2010 by Robin Artisson

* * *

They have sent me on a journey, but they have not shown me the way; no map have I, no inkling of the landscape beyond the misty border. What I find in me is a voice of silence, in the depths of me, that urges me on, forever on. I came to a township full of men and women, and their frightened children, and when I asked my way, all they could bring forth were crumbling maps, breaking to dust and ash with age. They knew not; I knew not; despite their protestations I had to go on.

Not knowing became my greatest strength; what had bedeviled me with doubt became my surest teacher, as I moved through the shroud of indistinct mist and form. My teacher lectured and taught with leading questions, showed me glories and mayhems, the very best and utter worst that people and things could be, and always left me yearning to hear and see more. I began to realize, as I walked over field after field made quiet by wet and decaying leaves, that I was more than a lost learner; I had another role to play in this strange world.

Somehow, the world needed this long walk through ruined streets, trackless forests, and sweet-rot scented fallow fields. Every now and again, the dark landscape would open, and I would see greenery and smell the scents of herbs, bread baking, and again see the sun. There, arrayed in the midst of all this, was a house, as white as fresh snow, with people and children running and walking to and fro. Each family I met this way was happy to see me, once they got over their wonder at my appearance, and when I left each, I took something away which I could never put to phrase.

I left something, too- no person would walk or run the same way again after my coming and leaving. I would always move on, further into darkness, and soon, I began to hear (as I had heard so often) the moans and pitiful cries of other people, trudging in the waste. I seldom crossed their paths directly, but the few times I did, I saw their ruined bodies, pale skin, and sorrow-overflowing eyes. They wanted the green under the sun, but they had been turned out, as I had been, and sent wandering. They wanted what they couldn't have anymore.

I just stared at the first of these beings that I encountered, somewhat frightened, but after a time, I began to try to console them by telling them to keep walking on- that they had a road, like I did. Sometimes they stared at me with anger or confusion; other times, they just faded away. And I walked on.

Now, the time came when I knew that my journey was a prelude to a celebration. I didn't know why, but the dark land and the hoarse voices of crows in the distance began to seem delightful to me; even though the only towns or villages I came across now had been long abandoned and given over to vines and weeds, I could sense the former joy that had snaked around those walls and windows, everywhere I went. Where had it gone? Where were all the people? They were sent on, like me, but at a much earlier time. The landscape itself was just that, I reasoned- a massive collection of corpses: the corpses of former lives.

The people had left their things to vanish back into the ground; their homes to become skeletons, and their own souls to fall into the deep and into shadow. But shadow was not my foe; in its cool and invigorating embrace, nothing could chase me to my own hurt or harm ever again. To go on was freedom; to be able to find sun-break, green fields, ruined buildings, the face of a broken doll on the ground (once beloved by a young girl much like my own beloved girls) and to watch the moon fly on her great arc every night- it was the essence of poetry spread before me and inside me like the royal cloak of the Gods.

Now, I came into the land of the King of Pumpkins, his knotty and bulging orange head struck up high on a scaffolding of jagged thorn-wood. Around him, the gourd-people lit bonfires of bone- bones collected from ages of the world long past. As each bone burned, it sang a song- more of a groaning noise, I say- and imparted to the king the collected essence of that life, all its wisdom, joy, and sorrow. He became wise on his throne of thorn-wood, and his massive head split down the front, making the smile of all times and places.

The gourd people were happy to see me; they were happy that I could see them. I joined them in many rounds of the drink they distilled out of mud and tears, and listened to many of the bone-songs that the fires made. I heard the voices of men and women who had seen the world change and change again- I heard the voice of the man who first crushed grapes to make the wine that would ease the sadness of those who knew its mystery; I heard the voice of a woman who had collected the knotted umbilical cords of 300 children she had helped to deliver, and wrapped them around a bough of wood- a bough full of life-magic for her ancient people, who were all bones now.

I heard stories that no collection of mythology would ever recount, lost before the first book was ever dreamed of. I heard about how the sky had become a bull and fought a giant with a head of fire for the safety of the alder tree, and after he slew the monster, gave its fire to the tree for safe-keeping. I heard about three stars that came to the earth and convinced the Indweller in the Ground to make the first human children- so that they could hear from above the music that only beings from the ground could make.

The misshapen gourd people were not alone with their grinning king and their muddy, tearful drink; among them strode smooth-limbed women that appeared to be human from the front, but whose backs were hollow, and full of the droning noise of bees and birds. These strange women were wantons, each and every one; they only wanted to love and be loved, for as long as the fires of life burned. And those fires would never stop burning.

I ran over the King Pumpkin's fields, until his fires became like a constellation in the distant darkness, and I went on. I went on, sure that no one had passed this way yet, but I could see faint tracks that told me others had. The only unexplored place, I began to realize, was my own wonder at the strange world. This sense of wonder was the only eternally new thing that existed, or ever would exist, and then, something of the purpose of my long wandering became clear to me.

I figured that one day the gourd people would collect my bones, and burn them for their king's pleasure. I only hoped for one thing- I hoped to the earth and sky that my sense of wonder would go on, beyond my bones. And this blazing hope, this prayer before all powers, provoked a reaction from even further within me. One of the strange beings that I had long forgotten about, but who had been near me before my journey began, appeared.

I thought that this entity was a man at first, but it seemed it had a beauty that only a woman's form could answer for. Then, I realized, that my visitor was not male or female, and it mattered not. A sudden wind stirred up and poured leaves all over my visitor, and then, from the north, a cloud of rooks, all screaming in unison, covered him. When the commotion died down, all that was left was a young boy with a tranquil face who took my hand in his and walked on with me.

"Before you were, wonder was", he said. "It is amazing, profoundly so, and that is all. This wonder has no name; this amazement has no poem that can cope with its strength. It only has life to move through. As it goes, more and more go with it. The infinitude of which I speak is mother to Gods and men, blade of pains and sorrows, healing hand to the same. To this wonder alone belongs religion. There is no end to the shapes it will assume; no end at all. Do not try to enumerate those shapes; you will fail. Succeed instead at celebrating each one that you encounter, and you will know the all. Be blessed to celebrate with all your kin the goodness of it."

And then, he was gone. I too, went onward through the fields of Hallows.

The Witching Beauty: A Hidden Message of Hallows

2010-10-20T17:08:00.000-07:00

I've said it a dozen plus a hundred times, but I never get tired of saying it: the Hallows season is my favorite season. Every day for me is Halloween, in a deep sense; when part of you- the Other self of you- is awake and living in your awareness, and when it interacts with the human persona who must struggle on this side of the Hedge, you never feel fully comfortable in the glare of the sun. You don't feel fully comfortable with the green and gold of summer, or the office politics, or the cheers of sports fans, or the drone of a television somewhere. It's not until the Great Dark rises in might, and Her emissaries begin flying to and fro in Autumn, that my "season of strength" wakes me up, and makes me feel truly whole.

The Old Way is quite an equalizer among human "spiritual paths"- though it is more of a forest than a path. The Otherness belongs to no one, and to everyone. The only difference between people that you'll find metaphysically important is the degree to which one or the other is aware of the Otherness, and the degree to which they fear it. As a Witch, as a Hedge-Crosser, it is my task to sing the praises of the Dark spaces that seldom feel the light of human conscious awareness. My songs of praise are not all happy songs; the Dark, the Unseen, contains its share of troubling and disturbing things.

Which makes it not much different from the Light, and what is Seen. So why the fear? Because it is home to entities that we don't get to encounter often (if ever) in our sun-draped world. More than that, it is home to everything we don't want to admit to ourselves, about ourselves. It is home to every thing that any person- or any society- ever saw fit to forget.

That we may have forgotten something crucial is more than just a fear, it's a certainty. Forgetting what we never should have forgotten is one of the only real spiritual crimes of any gravity; it is the world-killing sin of the soul and spirit that the true poetry of the world should be halved and thirded in the darkness of oblivion. Because of it, waterfalls of tears were shed this very day, all over the world.

Every year, in my beloved Autumn, when I take to carving gourds and pumpkins, I feel the Oldest Things in the Land stirring stronger than they did before. Two possibilities exist, from my way of seeing: I'm getting more powerful in my ability to engage the sight, or I'm getting closer to dying. Freedom, I say, is being comfortable with any outcome. If I get stronger, so be it. If I get weaker, so be it. If I die (an eventuality at any rate) so be it. I don't imagine what I'll see, at my Death-omen and on my Ghost-road will be too shocking, and this is due to my familiarity with those bizarre and powerful places won from hedge-crossing for years.

The Nature of life beyond the Hedge is such that there are never enough years. Something "over there" can always shock me, and anyone. But I'm at peace with that, too- It's always so vast seeming; I fear some of the things I've seen, but I fear what I've not seen more, like most people. The answer to this quandary is not to try and see everything- an impossibility (in one sense) given the grand design and vast reaches of this world and the Unseen world.

The answer is to escape from wanting to see anything in particular, and to tame the mind so that it doesn't get shocked, regardless of what it sees. There is nothing that will cross before these eyes that is alien to the Great Dark or this Green World. If the world is comfortable with everything, then so must I be- I, a part of this Land, sprung from this Land, due to rot under this Land, one day.

And this season is the time to think about the Rotting Hosts, the throngs of spirits and powers submerged in the Below. They aren't going to be submerged for much longer; in fact, if you know the secret of the Trance, the secret to accessing the Deep World through the flesh of the body itself, you already know how the rotting people aren't terribly far from you to begin with; (terribly close is a better term).

But it isn't terrible. It's the other natural side of life, to be "dead" (so-called). Just as the other side of waking each day is a set number of hours sleeping in the bizarre reaches of the dreamscape, so the other side of life is a phantasmagoria adrift in the most unpredictable sea of forces- the Unseen- a sea which always vitalizes this world and acts as the cauldron from which all good and necessary things come. Get comfortable in your skin, in your life, in your death. What greater gift is there of this season, but peace? Death is a welcome passage to peace, because death makes things whole. Why believe that? Because death is necessary. Necessity is the mother of Wholeness, a Whole thing Herself.

This is an Esoteric Public Service Message delivered to you, from your good fiend Robin, busy hacking away at his new batch of pumpkins, about to boil yams and saffron rice, about to drain a mug of dark ale over a fine roasted bird of some variety. The sky's getting dark. The mornings, evenings, and nights are blessed with a cloak of delicious cold. The trees are raining leaves. When things begin to die, they show a particular sort of beauty that youthful vitality cannot match. This is the beauty of the wise- the witching-beauty, as it were.

People all over this small and foolish town are hanging out horrible scarecrows and dummies of grinning skeletons with scythes- they are hanging big fake black spiders from trees, draping everything with cobwebs, putting out pumpkins, fake tombstones... I appreciate those who get into the spirit of this season. That spirit, however, is far from a quaint and materialistic American shopping spree. That spirit is the spirit that stands behind the true Witching Way.

Fool Pastors and irritating, ignorant "preachers" all over in the deep south denounce Halloween for its pre-Christian connections. They do it here, in my town. Considering the code and veil of fear that covers them, they are right to do so- they feel it; this is more than just another useless, baseless, false thing for them to "preach" about. This is one of the few times a year when the power of something sublime and even ominous comes up from the Great Dark, and raps on the outer doors of the conscious awareness of most people. Even the most dulled simpletons of the world can sometimes feel it, due to its great power. Humans have felt it and loved it and feared it and basked in it since time immemorial.

To it, they gave harvest fruits, to it, they attributed the passage of the dead, coming close. And they were right to do so. Death is the great equalizer, the great revealer of Truth. Truth is the last thing Pastor Smith wants; he doesn't want it in his life, and he certainly doesn't want it near his congregation. He has that "truth" issue covered already with his bible and his churchianity. Anything from the Outside now poses a threat to their contrived and flimsy stability.

And thus it must be. Two choices remain: ride the horse of contrived and flimsy stability all the way to death's dark forest-door, and let the Bone Man tear it out from under you and blast your sanity into dust (and your memories into oblivion) with the Great Revelation, or get that business out of the way now, by sinking down into the newly fallowed earth and becoming a denizen of a world that is not your human own. Die a little before you die; let yourself be Other. Let the Other come; it wants to; if you're sometimes aware of the nostalgia and longing for something you can't identify, the unrest, the draw and allure of the mysterious, chances are, it's "rapping at your chamber door." Open the door. Be free of death's terrors while you still have the chance.

Or maybe not, maybe you won't. Who knows. Maybe this is talk best left to Witch-folk sitting around their Fall fires. I know that surrender to the Other is best done on the wings of sleep; sleep is the nightly rehearsal for death that we all undergo, mostly without realizing we're doing it. Let yourself go into the world. Don't intellectualize it; go on the level of feeling. This red and brown and orange-leaved season is scouring the earth clean of summer's gritty sweat, peeling off a layer of life-force that once covered the deep with impetuosity. Something we all fear, and desire, is getting closer. This is an invitation to natural wisdom, to the Witch-gnosis, to the thing that might complete you.

Or it might ruin you. Again, who knows. I do know that if Fate has preconfigured you to meet the Other, it's going to happen, one way or the other. I know she speaks her strange will through the flesh, heart, desires, and intuition. So start listening. Maybe the best place to start is in the flesh over your own bones, before you sink through the earth's flesh.

Dress up this Hallows. Despise the forces of fear that would take the Hallows from Hallowmas and call it "harvest festival"- this foolishness is just one more attempt to sanitize power and freedom from the world, another attempt to blot out wisdom. Resist. Dress up. Become the Other, in whatever ghoulish or humorous or beautiful form you see fit. Feast. Open your heart to the Powers that flood through the Land and come up from the Deep. For the truly wise, or those suited for wisdom, Autumn is an intimation of a curious immortality.

"Harvest festival", indeed! A harvest of souls, perhaps, and a harvest of entities from the Otherness, some helpful, some longing, some lost, some malevolent... Alas, what use wisdom if it profits not the wise? So profit from this: the only protection you'll need in this season is a black and wild heart. Are you just too lovely and good-hearted to let go and reverse yourself? To be unrestrained? To be daring if you are too cautious? To be a prankster if you normally weep a little for the victims of nasty jokes? Fine, fine. But know this: malevolent things, should one cross your path, will recognize you. Become like them, even a little, and you might pass by unnoticed. Taking the mask of misrule onto yourself in the Hallows is more than just fun and liberating for the stifling persona we have to wear at other times; it's also protective, a camouflage for the spirit-world.

If one of those malevolent things you come across is a human, well, thank the unwisdom of this world that helped them along the path of malevolence. My own personal seasonal malevolence is an act of power, a witching, not a permanent, year-round thing. Actually, I've extended "seasonal malevolence" to include the better part of about half the year, leaving a little malevolence in the bag for when I need it the rest of the time. But I'm sleeping most of the "rest of the time", so that little goblin-seed that I keep is just enough for the dreams of next Hallowmas.

Join me in writing letters to the Hallowed Dead. Use this old charm: Split an apple in two, and write a letter to that dead one you wish to communicate with on a small round of parchment, using Saturnian ink mingled with a dab of blood- then put it between the apple-halves and spear the halves “back into whole” with long, sharpened thin stakes of some Saturnian wood. Bury these messages in a ground that also has graves dug in it- or bury them under the roots of the Elder, the Apple, the Thorn, the Yew, or the Cypress. Thus, the deed is done. And this isn’t just a Hallows letter-writing; do it year-round, if you will.

Happy Hallows Season to my compatriots and kin, all over the world: and especially to the Communion of the Great Dark, my brothers and sisters in the seeding. Be Whole, all of you.

Our Master Has Carried Us To The Edge

2010-07-04T09:46:00.000-07:00

Our Master Has Carried Us To The Edge:
The Spirit of the Sabbat in Traditional Witchcraft

By Robin Artisson
Copyright © 2010

* * *

"Fall fires burn 'neath black twisted boughs
Sacrifice to above;
Smoke swirling quickly towards misting clouds
Offering of this blood;
Into the flames and without shame
Consumed with howls and screams...
Pumpkins grin in their despair
On All Hallows Eve."

-Type O Negative, All Hallows Eve

Hallows: The Oldest Poetry Enacted

All Hallows Eve has come. The timeless turning of the Sky has whirled and rushed, creaked and groaned, and finally aligned with a hallowed doorway of Sabbat embedded in the great whiteness and darkness behind it. The day begins to fade; a long Owl-light heralds the hidden season of mists, the ancient winter, the carnival of misrule. Shadows grow lengthy; the sun turns red and then black, and the air is dark. The screaming of insects, the sound of the bullbat, the barks and growls of creatures unseen all begin to permeate the nighted woodlands. The air is chilly, but that cold isn't only the weather; it is the cold of Elfhame seeping out into the human world.

Bull's noon comes; then the hours of utter dark. Slowly, along dirt lanes grown cold and abandoned by mortals uneasily asleep in their simple beds, the sound of light footsteps can be heard. The rustle of leaves and the snap of twigs echoes in the haunted forests of the Hallowed Eve; and then, through the cobweb of branches, a golden light shines: a balefire has been lit, and another, and yet another- on an ancient hill which has overlooked the lonely fields around it for countless centuries, a strange pale light flickers. The Secret Lord's kingdom is a kingdom of ghostly flame and shadow; the night of this world is his dominion's day.

The Witch-people, native to the Great Dark, have filtered out from their villages and townships, casting off the flimsy masks and names they wear and use to mingle with mortal men from day to day, and assuming their true names and shapes. Some have come flying; liberated from the repressive boundaries of walls and damnable bells, of town squares and clocks, of mindless tasks repeated day to day- they are now loosed and free. Some come prancing in secret joy down hidden tracks, some on the roads. They gather together, small groups all, in their traditional places far from the sight of other groups, and they pile high the Hallows fires.

At the Sabbat-moot, they are not the people their neighbors know; here, under the black sky, on the black earth, before the blazing altar of ancient flame, they are the undying race of the Master Spirit, the children of the White Beast, the children of the generous and devouring Land, the undying double-faced Matriarch. They are the gleeful and terrifying offspring of the Great Dark, the infinite and mysterious origin of all beings, a Perpetual Parent who has no body, no head, no name, only a strange hidden motion and a Fateful presence lost in silence and stillness.

Many of these gathered Witches may not consciously grasp these facts; it is the very old times, after all- most only know this: they have gathered like those before them did, for the great Sabbat-fire, the great golden doorway to the Unseen, and for the Master's presence. Tonight, he may come. One nature calls to another alike- a refulgent and subtle being like the Master is closest to Fire; in the Fire of the earth and wood, he may borrow a form and come among his throng, for the brief theophany, the brief moment of sight, vision, union, and awe. He may appear in their minds, every bit as radiant; whatever happens, the glowing fire will unite earth and sky and place each of the Witch-folk on the edge of something vast and powerful, for all fiery maws are contact points between what is seen and unseen.

And now, sacrifice is made to the fire; perhaps a lamb, a sheep, a goat, or fowl; warm blood is smeared on hands and faces, a red baptism in the essence of life itself. The fire consumes the body of the sacrifice, transmuting it to the extremely subtle condition, giving passage and shining gateway from the coarse to the very subtle, from visible to invisible. The hungry fire is now sated a bit, but never enough- the appetite of the flame is never satisfied. The void beyond the world of visible things forever gives and takes, never ceasing. The fire is made sacred by sacrifice.

Now, in rings around their great and ancient fire, the intensity of the rite grows higher; shouts and curses, invocations and petitions all are sent from the hearts and throats of the witches into the flames, all to be drawn away into the immaterium; and from the flames, the essence of their word-framed desires will rise up with the shower of sparks, coiling away from the Sabbat-stead and into the nighted world. These "words of will" have become transformed into magical servitors, shards of intention, snaking to and fro through the many layers of reality, through flame and air, between earth and stars. They move like quicksilver; they penetrate wood, stone, water, and flesh.

What is prayed to the fire, what is given to the fire, becomes a part of the world in a new and powerful way. That power is increased in the boiling bone and flesh lurking at the heart of the pyre; that power is increased by the unseen but sensed presence of the Grand Master of the Sabbat. He hears his children, his increase, his servants.

The heat of the fire is the heat of spirit; it makes a ring of warmth- a true magical circle- with a cold, dark infinite world surrounding it. That warmth is mingled with the warmth created by the bodies of the throng. Together in that warmth and light, the Witch-covenant is re-formed; in the shared blood of sacrifice, in the shared warmth, in the physical touch of hands, in their shared allegiance to Powers unseen, the witch-covenant is made anew at each Sabbat. It is regenerated, made stronger. It all flows together- on the "river bank" of fire, at the point of contact between one world and another, the otherworldly bodies of the Craft-kin also draw close.

Immortal things come close to mortal things, and as the Witches move in a great anti-sunwise circle around their fire, darting faster and faster, simultaneously sinking lower and climbing higher, a golden and dark moment dawns in which nothing divides the living from the dead. Surrender into the limitless rushes through; all else becomes irrelevant.

Some time later, the gathering eats and drinks, speaking amongst themselves, bonding with others of like mind, sharing their hopes and joys of release from the ordinary and the profane. How terrible to imagine that for most, All Hallows Eve was just another night spent in fitful sleep! For the Masters and Mistresses of the Art, Sabbat-days are just the edge of the iceberg; in Old Puck's black hide, where they will faithfully entrust their secret hearts, they know that they shall grow in might and cunning and soon, every day and every night and every moment will be like the Sabbat.

Until that time, dawn's approach signals the return of the profane, a dim and pale mask at first, but gradually redder and redder over the following nights until the world's turning has moved on again. The witch-self must take shelter from the sun; it is a being of the Great Dark. Until the Great Dark and the Sun have merged together in the mind and body of the Witch-being, She must do the White dance of Night and the Red dance of Day, flying to the Sabbat, and leaping back across the hedge to the world of church-bells, thatched roofs, paved roads, ticking clocks, and plowed fields.

The Goat is in the Details

The previous narrative, describing a traditional witch's Sabbat, is not based on fantasy, but on details culled from numerous primary historical sources. Most importantly, it is based on a deeper ritual pattern of religious and magical/mystical experience which is nigh universal to Europe and Asia. It is based on the testimony of traditional witches who have preserved something of the Old Art into the modern day- though truly, even without their living testimony, the vision of the Sabbat could have been dimensioned: the golden fire in the dark, the blood sacrifice, the circular motion about a sacred center, the lifting up and sending of prayers and petitions and curses. Nothing about the true Sabbat or Hallowed Gathering is mysterious to human nature or history, or out of keeping with the nature of nature herself.

Even the act of separating oneself from the order of community, to move into a wild or liminal place, outside of the boundaries of "civilization", to commune there with the strange powers "over the hedge"- this spiritual and actual journey into the "other" world is part of the entire universal process of going into the unknown to seek wholeness and ascended wisdom, and to achieve a regeneration of order. In this case, as in the case of all secret spiritual gatherings, it is the regeneration of the Coven-order, of the Witching Covenant's luminous group-soul destroyed symbolically in the sacrifice, and rebirthed through the heat of the Season's fire and the mingled vigor of the throng.

The sacrifice is death; crisis; guilt; shared guilt and a shared opening of the abyss of death. Life stands precariously on the edge of death; to see it enacted only drives the point home: we will all come to the same or a similar doom one day. To see it turn luminous, to see it consumed by fire, changed into power, warming the gathering, becoming something new- that is to see life re-affirmed. To bathe in the blood, lick it, drink it, that is to see death change into life.

Every new order is established by the destruction of an old order. Death begins everything. There is no infant come into the world without a death before it; the oldest magic works on similar principles, as well as the pulse of the heartbeat of a witch-covenant. The life-blood of sacrifice provides power and sacredness to the central Sabbat-pyre itself. Opening the abyss of death opens a door to the Unseen world; this primal fact, born in the first sacred sacrifice-killing (that of the Hunted Victim, slain so that humans could eat and live) has been known deep in the flesh and bone of humanity since the time before time.

And thus the Golden Throne of the Master is made; it is a sacred time, it is a throng of Witches gathered to some secret place outside of the order of the human world; it is anticipation, it is fire, blood, flesh-to-flesh contact, excitement and shouts, the feeling of warmth and heat on the face and hands, the sound of night-birds and insects, the sight of turning stars, staring from the cloak of night. This ritual is ancient; this ritual has been with humankind, in some form, since the beginning of their cultural time. Once, entire communities shared in this rite, in their own way; after the coming of the Great Unwisdom, this rite faded from view, until only those in touch with the Old Way still seek it out in the dark.

Those who partake in the True Sabbat on All Hallows, on Walpurgis, on Lammas and Candlemas, are they whose contact with the subtle world will be established and gradually grow stronger. Real occult power is not simple, logical, or even very conscious; it begins as a dark seed, buried deep in the flesh and mind, and the "Secret Sun" of the Sabbat Fire begins the process of its germination. It is drawn out from human men and women by the magnetic pull of the blood-soaked pyre and the shouts and screams and joys of fellow men and women that join together as one body, on the Hidden Seasons.

That transformation is as inevitable as a regular seed lurking in the ground that the sun and rain will tease forth; but it is a transformation of another octave, of a different (yet similar) nature. And that transformation begins deep within, changes deep within, before bursting forth consciously. Before it emerges in the conscious mind, it renovates the world of dreams; it opens the subtle stream of intuition, and it alters the flow of power in the mind and body. It brings a man or woman into contact with the dimensionless and the unseen.

And chief among the "dimensionless and unseen" powers is the Master himself. He is most easily summoned and met at any place which is not "here nor there"- the bank of a river, a crossroads or field-boundary at twilight, or the odd region between waking and sleep. But the side of a roaring fire is another boundary place, because the fire is a gateway into the Great Whiteness and Darkness beyond. All who have danced about a fire, or sat and gazed into its depths, already know that it is hypnotic, entrancing, and powerful; few have used its serpentine heat to its fullest potential, however.

The Sabbat must, at heart, be about coming into the presence of the Master, or it is all for naught, for his spirit, intention, and power is one that seeks to guide humans into the same state that he perpetually enjoys. He is more than the guide and teacher of Witches and Mystics; he is the full realization of their awakened and infinite state, in the shape of a golden being. In such a state, form is no longer an issue; the Master can be whoever or whatever he likes- even a blazing fire.

One will always know the Master when he is present; his company and manifestations, regardless of how subtle, are very apparent. He is the Master of Infinity, but he is also the generous granter of wishes, the ward of the lives of his followers, the giver of bounty in many ways. He is kindly, but deceitful and unpredictable at times, and he expects the Witch-folk to remember his presence and his great work. He expects the Sabbat fires to be lit. He gives perfect and powerful returns on what is offered to him; he never fails to see all that occurs, and he never forgets a favor or a foul.

The Simplest Power is the Mightiest Power

Here then, at the heart of all simplicity, is the secret of the True Sabbat; most today would have liked to hear that there was more detail, more ritual, more poetry, but there is not, and there never was a need for it. The poetry of the Sabbat is the best poetry of all, the most sacred, the most powerful- it is poetry in motion, in manifest action, in the swirling rush of emotion and heat. It is the poetry of spirit, manifest in fires and screams and warm blood, and the ecstatic vision of the Master himself. From this point, any elaboration is just moving further away from the pure Sabbat.

But the Master is never alone; the Unseen world doesn't come in shards, but in wholeness. Behind the night sky, behind fire, witches, master, and stars, is the Yawning Darkness of the Great Ur, the void of creation, the Fateful womb-mystery that everything comes from. It is the infinity beyond and within all, a thing without "above" or "below". This mystery is the most unknown of things, for it cannot be known with thoughts and ideas, only experienced.

And it is this experience that the Master mediates, to those who can go far enough, and release themselves from the things they place above them, and below them. The Master is a minister of Fate; a mediator of experience that resolves each seeming part of the Whole back to its infinite origin. This is the goal- for humans to find a way to resolve themselves back to the mystery of infinity that is their ultimate origin. This is the resolution and restoration of the wandering child to the Greatest of Mothers; This is salvation in the only true sense. A Witch for whom the aspect of infinity comes in the mind first, and the forms of the body and world come second, the two always yet being One, is truly a Master of the Art.

There, in the swirl of sparks from the fire, the cackles of glee and crackles from the wood, the entirety of things comes to join with the throng: the dead of the past, the wandering spirit-bodies of the living dreaming, and the fetch-bodies of the gathered witches. There, at the Sabbat, spirits of trees, the Land, ancient hills, and tormented dead flit and fly through; there, strange powers without names or origins that a human mind could fathom may appear and cause a phantasmagoria of strange visions. All seek their recognition and a portion of offering.

And for all this, the simplicity of the entire process stands out- it is a gathering of Witches about a fire, speaking and shouting their prayers and intentions and spells to the flame, circling about it, opening minds and hearts to the Unseen, letting go, becoming free, losing their personal boundaries and merging together into the sacred time of the season and the infinite world. It all coalesces into the form of the Master. His Lady will appear with him, at times; so many things may come or go, take possession of the flow of the gathering, or join it; one never can tell, and one need not tell- the true Sabbat cannot be planned in detail. The simplest of things and plans are the best; the simplest powers are the mightiest.

Don't ever doubt the effectiveness of this sort of "simple" magic; a group of men and women, united in blood and shared food, drink, sacrifice, and allegiance, united in share faith and hopes and dreams- all of them together, touching hands, gazing eye to eye, before a blazing fire that contains all of the reaches of infinity within it, on a powerful and sacred night- their words focused and screamed and spoken and sung and whispered into that focus of flame will affect the world; it will most certainly affect things in a darkly deep way. And the Master, if he takes a liking to them because of their cleverness, Art, and devotion, will see it so. A single man or woman might howl before a similar fire, with reasonable expectation of an effect in this world or the unseen world in line with their own personal power and favor.

The Clan of Witches that flies together, dies together; together they dissolve and are reborn on each Sabbat-gathering. They can forge bonds that last a human lifetime, and easily last far, far beyond the human lifetime. This is the truth, ancient and inexhaustible- the union of souls and spirits easily and greatly outlasts the union of flesh, and indeed, may seek the flesh together, later.

Take the time to look around you, one day, and take note of the people that appear in your life and seem to last there, seem to stay near you for years and years; there may be more than just mundane reasons why. Look at those whom love has delivered close to you, and do not imagine that this is a random thing. Death sends us all to the Great Dark; bonds of love and mysticism can join us together there, too.

For those serious men and women who wish to engage the True Sabbat, as a way of creating bonds with other Witch-folk and the Master, and the Throng of the Invisibles, this revelation of the true Sabbat-Pattern is all that they shall ever need. What details follow from these basics are simply organic particularities that will arise in every different location and among all different groups of people; the beating heart will and must remain the same. Continuity is important; continuity of regular Sabbat-fires and location- the fires should be made, as often as possible, on the same spot, the same gathering place that becomes Covenstead to the throng.

Today, the spilling of blood from a living creature can (and unless the coven members all live on subsistence farms, should) be replaced by many offerings; a shared cup of very dark, thick wine is the classic replacement for the blood of the sacrifice; the vessel is lifted in Old Nick’s name, hallowed to his spirit, and its contents must be smeared on the faces of each person and each must share a drink from the cup, before its remains are cast on the fire.

Other offerings can be added- red bread, dipped in the wine and eaten, before the rest is cast into the flames; even straw animals, created for the occasion, doused in the red wine (symbolically dripping with blood) and cast onto the flames. What is most important is that something representing blood and/or flesh be smeared onto every participant, and then consumed somehow by every participant, and then burned in the fire as a "uniting offering" to the Great Unseen.

A Coven might do well, then, to keep a Covenant Cup or Vessel around, for their shared drinking and anointing and pouring. That vessel itself comes to represent the body of the old living sacrifice, containing blood. It becomes the cup of death and life. The male leader of the Coven should keep a Mask of the Master, and wear it around the fires- like attracts like, after all, and the Master-Spirit and a Mask do have some similarities, to the inspired mind and in the mysterious world.

For those who, for various reasons, cannot attend such a traditional Sabbat as described here, or will not, the opening narrative of this piece can be used as the basis for an oneiric working, an empowered visualization, lying in torpor at midnight on the various powerful nights, and aligning the subtle mind to the current of the Master. Spiritual development from such a meditative visualization is guaranteed, if one's heart is given wholly to the Witch-sire.

Book Announcement

2010-05-05T16:32:00.000-07:00

Book Announcement: To Be Released by Pendraig Publishing on Midsummer 2010:

“THE RESURRECTION OF THE MEADOW”

A Grimoire by Robin Artisson, occult writer of note, Hedge-crosser, wortcunning Doctor of Fayerie spirits, and loyalist of the Undying Court and its Queen.

"The Resurrection of the Meadow" is described by the author as "A Record of Thirteen Occult Formulas & Charms of Art with Purport & A Sealing Conjuration & their many useful Sorcerous Permutations, Writ & Gathered on Walpurgis Night 2010, For those Inquisitive Adepts who walk The despised path of True Sorcery, The long-dimmed radiance of the Ancient Gold of the Wise."

Found within this full, self-contained working grimoire is a system of sorcery relying on the ancient spiritual aesthetic of the Faery-Faith and the Metaphysics of Elfhame- interaction with the Unseen world through the vehicle of the spirit-forms or the fetch-bodies of non-human persons that are merged with the land around us. Steeped in folklore and a much older form of deep ecology, it is a powerful work of Art for the discerning occultist.

The grimoire contains, among other things, full instructions for sealing and protecting the "Meadow" or sanctified outdoors locations, the "Feery Feast", the manifesting of the powerful "Weird of the Cairn", the creation of sacred interaction-points with the "Convocation of the Meadow" or Land-spirits, various Crossings, arboreal workings for harvesting and gathering sorcerous components from tree and plant weirds, charms of increase and fertility, and the creation of the fearful "White Mommet" for works of sympathetic magic. Also included are detailed instructions for creating "sorcerous concentration" or opening the "Senses of Luminosity", and the use of the "Nine Doors Under the Hill" charm for projecting the personal fetch-body into the Unseen.

* * *

For those of you looking for a tiny preview, look at the post below this one, which contains a poem entitled (like the book from which it is drawn) "The Resurrection of the Meadow." That poem is from my new book. I hope you all enjoy it as much as I enjoyed creating it.

Of The Resurrection of the Meadow

2010-05-03T13:15:00.000-07:00

* * *

In times of ancient Elder, ancient Apple-Thorn,

Ancient May & ancient November,

& forgotten ages all wither’d before,

Times of dreaming when They of Old walk’d without sin,

& th’ tongues of beasts were intelligible to men,

Th’ great & cunning seeds were scatter’d

& won purchase in ev'ry hollow to which men gather’d;

For They of Old could speak to wood or water

& th’ sun & moon traced a living course.

With wood & water & Weird un-split

Tree-mask’d Gods strode among us then;

Fire blazed wi’ open mouth of prophecy,

Serpents coil'd round th’ gleeful wedding-bed,

& feastful hobbs lurk’d in coals of th’ hearth,

They of Old trod th’ deep & forest deep again.

Th’ fire in th’ meadow was a bridge of light

Where Heaven did descend to Earth's delight;

& th’ tribute of flesh & tithe in blood

Was wash’d away in th’ world's blissful flood.

What but baleful turning stars could condemn it so

To hell & fearful plague, th' power then

& th’ wisdom inscrib’d in th' healer's art,

& th’ notch on th’ flying arrow

& th’ charm on th’ swinging scythe-blade

& th’ diviner's clever heart?

Th’ treasure-horde of old is more than mere gold

It is th’ art that constrains th’ rain to speak again

It is th’ art that pries open th’ hidden eyes

It is th’ art that makes bloom th’ rot-dead tree

& leaps th’ Hedge that never dies.

For we men of late walk th’ dying way

& th' world declines to shadow day by day

Th’ sepulchral song is all we pray,

& from towers grim declare it a hymn of bliss.

By th’ green & ebon Tree of Light

In whose branches th’ world is hung a-right,

& th’ ghostly hint of forgotten sights-

We must gamble death to emerge quick again.

Dust & bare is th’ hope of th’ penitent;

& scarce more hope in th’ words of sages:

It is shelter of wisdom & brave blood shall win

Th’ prize of th’ witch'd world, th’ mystic,

Th’ world reborn, th’ feery tree & hill,

Th’ resurrection of th’ meadow, th’ death of sin,

& all foulness be consum’d in th’ just wrath of ages.

So let ride th’ kingly steed of th’ Antler-crown’d Lord

King of th’ pale men, king of th’ slain,

King of th’ brown earth where old treasures lay

King of th’ fresh furrow, king of th’ ancient wood,

King of th’ white horn that calls th’ feery rade.

Let that rage-turn’d-hunt ride forth as before,

To th’ glory of memory & th’ winning of lore.

* * *

Out from the Depths: Walpurgis Night and Beltane Morning

2010-05-01T17:22:00.000-07:00

The greatness and sacredness of Walpurgis and Beltane flood the world with power- and fills the soul of the wise man or woman who can receive it consciously with great joy. That flood of life, the fresh pulsing life-force and the closeness of the Great Otherness, transcends the human ability to capture with words or poetry. This is as it should be; such a powerful time, in common with any great power, must remain secluded within its own nature if it will wield the power necessary to be called “great”.

Familiarity breeds contempt; were the highest mysteries and powers so easy to capture with simple words or expressions, we'd hardly praise them so, or long for them. So, the real mystery of this season largely eludes us; but its influence is everywhere apparent, even for those who have fallen into the shadows of sense and can feel very little.

It is that influence- the mighty Fetch of the Sacred Time- that we yearn for and revel in when the sky and earth are right. The Fetch of the Sacred Time of Walpurgis Night and the following sacred morning and day of Beltane tells two stories, and could doubtless tell more, should we listen properly- all great powers are also story-tellers. Their first stories were the expressions of power that human souls refined into “myth”.

The two stories of any sacred time come to us simultaneously; one story describes and demonstrates the arising of a mighty Cycle of power, captured in the easy terms of serial moments that seem to tell a linear tale; the other story tells a tale of something timeless, something that doesn’t come or go because it never began and won’t end. Beltane, the feast of Bright Fire, is for us a human-recognized time of the triumph of Seelie Light and the passage of Nature’s governance from the powers of death to those of life.

To use the powerful language of metaphor, it is within this sublime time that the Year-Crown changes hands, transforming itself from a crown of antlers inset with hail-stones, into a crown of emeralds entwined with rose. It is the marriage feast of heaven and earth; it is the “Mass of the Rood”, for it celebrates an older summer shift than the solstice. I sometimes liken it to an “inner summer”, as opposed to the outward summer-shift of June.

We can watch the year turn from light to dark, watch the serial wheel of time- as it appears to us- shifting and creaking in its ancient turning. Beltane is a single point on that wheel. When we are immersed in the story of the turning, we experience things as they come, in a procession of worldly and otherworldly might.

When we are immersed in the other story, however, that secret “evergreen” theme that lays beneath the first, then we live in a perpetual Beltane- or a perpetual Winter-fast, or a perpetual Autumn. It can seem to be all of those things, or none of them. For truly, the powers that are expressed to us in serial time are not thin, temporary powers, but avatars of deathless things that don’t pass away. But they do wear a mask- a mask of temporary power, not unlike each living being who must one day die.

Perhaps it is our lack of wisdom that makes us enjoy the first story in such a persistent way; few of us can really live in the perpetual “Dusk World” of the deeper story for any length of time- though one part of us lives in it, forever. That part, our undying Fetch, immortal twin to these mortal beings, enjoys the strangeness of Allness and perpetuity. To bridge these two together, to go beyond division: that is the work of the wise, and the work of a lifetime. Who can say? Perhaps it is the work of far more than just that. But whenever this division is transcended, time truly stops. It is replaced by what was always there: the Secret Theme of creation.

For my part, I do not believe that it is any lack of wisdom on our part that forced one story to become necessary over another. I think that if such a wisdom is lacking, and if it plays a role in the dominant sorts of perceptions that must rule over humanity at this time, it was necessary that it be this way. It may be that accepting necessity is the first key to transcending this perceptual state; those who rage against it without accepting it are very likely only creating the “energy of resistance” which in turn reinforces the condition.

Two stories, but one theme- two halves of this being, but one mortal and the other immortal- this brings us to the depths of our being, of the mystery of all of us. It is to that mystery that I wish now to speak.

Behind the house where I live, deep in the forest, there is a garden, and that garden has a sacred Apple tree at its center. This tree is the cultic center of my spiritual life, and that of my family. It is where we meet the unseen; where what is known and what is unknown come together as one. In the ground of that garden are graves, the resting places of the earthy remains of animals we have loved and who were also members of our family. To be buried near the roots of an Apple tree, as sacred folklore has demonstrated, is to enter easily into the undying state.

But a ground full of graves is a sacred ground; a place where a passage has occurred between something that was immortal and something that learned to be mortal. Human or animal or plant, it really makes no difference, although the characters of these beings have an influence over the aura that grows in the place- as though the remains of the dead are seeds that can, over time, give rise to unseen copses of power and presence.

The dead have gone to the roots of everything, even us. At the full depth of your being is the resting place of all this world’s dead, and perhaps the dead of places yet unimagined. The “roots of a human being” is a mysterious place that, up till now, few of us have given much thought to. But when the eldritch, penetrating force of Walpurgis strikes like lightening through the twilight-crack of timeless time, a door to depth is laid open.

We don’t live in the depths. Our true life is in the depths, but we don’t tend to live there, in our unwisdom. You can examine your own body to see how this is the case, every day. You feel your heart beat, and you know that all over in your flesh, many metabolic and catabolic realities, transformations, and workings are taking place- thousands of them, all outside of your direct awareness. You don’t “make yourself breathe”- breath flows through you. You don’t force your heart to beat; it just beats. There is an involuntary quality about nearly all of your bodily operations of life.

And, when we become aware of that spontaneous, involuntary quality, we perceive it as something alien. It’s something “being done to us”- something happening “outside of our power”- for “we” are merely the observers of all this activity. We are its puppets. Now, your personal thoughts, memories, hopes, all the things you yearn for- you're pretty sure those are “yours”. And because you sense it that way, you say “this is what I am; this is who I am.”

When the doors to the depths are laid open, however, a new vision for life is available. Now, you may see, as I have seen standing before that sacred Apple tree, that the deepest parts of your being- your roots- are breathing you. They are beating your heart. Your beating heart isn't being inflicted upon you; it is you. It is part of you as a total and deep entity.

All of these “involuntary” processes that you don’t identify with are still “you”- the depths of your being is expressing itself in all these ways. What you experience as involuntary is very much voluntary in another manner- the deepest force of a person is doing all these things, willing them to happen, willing its bodily expression in every way imaginable. And it isn’t stopping with your body; its presence extends far from those other boundaries we set up between ourselves and “others” or the world "outside" of us.

Most people feel that heart beating away, without their permission, and imagine that one day, the wretched thing may suddenly stop, killing them. On that sad day, should it come, they won't want it to stop; it wouldn't be something they'd choose; but insofar as they see the heartbeat as a blind, involuntary process, that is all they can see. That heart-attack is "killing them"- something is being done "to them". But when you look deeper, that is not the only way to experience or interpret what is occurring. Perhaps something wiser and deeper in us withdraws from this life when it knows the moment is right. Whatever the case, we are not aliens from what our depths are doing; that is us, in the most authentic sense of the word.

This is a great gift- to see these depths. Before I saw them, when I prayed, it was my mouth and mind and head praying. But now, it is the depths of me that I let my awareness fly back to, to bring forth from below a great prayer that “reaches” those unseen powers to whom I pray with great ease- it reaches them because it never left those depths that they call home.

The greatest depths of all are source to everything. Nature wasn’t created; it grew from the depths, naturally, spontaneously, and we, too, arose from that deep. That deep, Mother to us all, tears the simple brain to shreds when it tries to capture her with too many words or dried-straw ideas. But her power is ours and everything else’s- everyone’s and no-ones, for no one owns power. We are power. There is a subtle but important difference.

That power, and the power of the mighty King of Life who crashes with his Hunt through between twilight on this season, has filled the world with everything you know, and everything you think you are. When a person can reach the depths, they can see these beautiful and terrible beings, and all of the other Lords and Ladies of the Courts unseen that populate the interior of life. And that vision- the supreme vision of the Old Way- changes everything in a mortal’s mind, forever.

Beltane is a time when the Feeorin People “change their residences”, go a-hunting, or otherwise perceptually move- the Great Otherness boils with a sort of activity-cycle that it doesn’t always appear to have, at least, not in the first story. Since the two stories are inseparable, truly, it behooves us, on Walpurgis Night, to sweep out our hearths, set things neatly away, and leave fresh water on the stove or hearth, along with a bowl of milk and some bread or cakes, for guests we may receive in the unseen.

The Old Ways teach that if they don’t find those simple gifts, they may take their own style of vengeance for the sin of broken hospitality. In the Great Otherness, hospitality and generosity are two of the most esteemed virtues, and humans gain the favor of the unseen- or lose it- quite often if they honor or violate this ancient and universal expectation.

At my hearth, in the darkness of Walpurgis before the dawn, that washing-water and milk and bread was placed out. And before it, a great feast was made for the Queen and the King of powers unseen. There, by candle-light (each of those candles made, by Art, into doorways leading into the unseen) I presided over a simple wooden bowl of brown bread and green earthenware cup of milk, placed in a triangle of pale flour.

About that triangle danced the signs of the feast- the white hare, the bronze, human-headed knife of the ancient sacrifice, and the head of the goat, the Hobb-Master that leads the way down the trods into the unseen world. In my mind and body, the Cross of Light and Shadow in equilibrium; on my head, the left hand sign; in my bones and sinews the potency of the Huntsman and the Plow-Man; in my heart, a salute for the Queen of Elfhame, on her white horse, draped in white linen, the Queen of Roses and the Queen of Bones.

Rosemary, Cinquefoil, and Verbena were given as offerings to the coals burning at hand; the smoke of those wort-weirds, sacred gifts, drifted about and changed the atmosphere of the room. That feast, filled with the potency of the unseen, is the finest meal you will ever place on your tongue, or destroy with teeth; it unites the feaster with the Luminous People, and the ruling courts of the Dusk-World. It makes the two into one.

Two stories become one; the story of me, the master of a house, making the ancient feast on behalf of his beloved family, and the story of a spirit- a mystery outside of time- whom Fate declared should will from his depths for a dream of blood and bone, for a life under the sky and trees of this world, for its own inscrutable reasons. I don’t have to know why, rationally, to appreciate the beauty and power of it, or to have peace. It is that peace I wish to you and all people. When we have passed back into the depths, to be again with the Dusk-people, may that peace follow us there, too.

Those gifts of my Walpurgis-supper were sent to the roots of the sacred Apple tree that night, and I watched Beltane’s sunrise with great tranquility. Today, under the shroud of clouds and the heady humidity, white cloth strips were tied to the branches of our sacred tree, each a prayer and a gift. It was no simple, shallow man that tied the strips of cloth; what did the tying began in the depths of me. Thus, they were tied with power.

Few things make my heart as joyful as seeing a sacred tree draped with cloth-strips of worship, of petition, of hope, and of happiness. To see it in the green, thick, bee-haunted garden, surrounded by trackless black and dark green woods, it makes the depths of me smile. The joyful heart is the true and deepest meaning of “faery favor”- of the love and favor of powers unseen. Making the proper offerings at the proper times is part of a timeless tradition of human piety, one that we of the Old Ways should never neglect. Our “good neighbors” are timeless; we must be as un-forgetting as they.

Tonight, the great bright fire will burn; may the deep and undying fire of which it is a reflection burn warmly in me, and in you, and in all those you love, protecting us all from whatever harmful powers may lurk in this season, and empowering us to good fortune until winter comes again.

RA

Postscript: There are those who make quite an ado about the fact that, perceptually speaking, while it is Beltane on one side of the world, it is Samhain on another. “How”, they ask rather reasonably, “can you think that Beltane in the northern hemisphere is the triumph of the forces of life, in some grandiose way, when just a few thousand miles south, on one tiny planet in a vast universe, the exact opposite powers are holding sway?” To these fine people, it appears that the ancient Ancestors were, in their primitive way, unaware that on the other side of the planet, winter wasn’t ending, and in fact, was just beginning. The answer to this modern quandary is quite simple- the real triumph of life, like the triumph of death, is a timeless, perpetual matter.

When the perpetual triumph of life in the second story “breaks through” into our conscious lives, it does so when the cycles of the first story make the conditions proper for it to do so. That’s why we say that “time” is a mask for something timeless; the perpetual theme of life- mysterious and beyond words though it may be- is aligned, in serial time, to light and warmth. Whenever it is light and warm, and summer’s crown-date arrives for a people anywhere, the timeless essence of that can finally manifest through it, however briefly. For those people, in that place, life is triumphant; the depths are opened for a taste of the beyond. For people not in that place, surrounded by conditions that prevent the experience, it is not so- but then, life goes on. Their “time” comes.

While I celebrate Beltane now, my dear friends on the other side of the world are basking in Samhain- and vice versa come later in my year, and theirs. However, the timeless perspective doesn’t care about months- when I celebrate Beltane today, and, six months from now, when they celebrate it, it is always the same perpetual mystery that we are both experiencing, and, from the perspective of the Otherness, it is as though we are celebrating it at the same time, the same moment. The “crossing over” of two stories is always the answer to this mystery.

The Light From the East: A Detailed Response to Pope Benedict's Easter Vigil Homily

2010-04-06T17:59:00.000-07:00

It has long been my contention that our dominant "ways of seeing" in the West are fundamentally flawed. When I say "ways of seeing", I mean more than just religion- though I have focused on religion more than any other perspective, because I believe that religion defines a culture at the deepest level. But the vast majority of people in the West have "flawed sight" with more than just religious eyes; even in the secular world, I believe, most people look outside of themselves and see only a material world, lacking a deep and important spiritual reality; they see and think only in terms of material comfort and the accumulation of material goods. This sort of flawed seeing is not the focus of my present letter. Again, as in the past, I must focus on the distortions of dominant mainstream religious thinking today, and I will turn to the Catholic Church for my discussion.

The present Pope of the Catholic Church, Benedict, gave an Easter vigil homily that is available online. I read it carefully several times because this holy day- Easter- more than any other sums up so much of the core of the Catholic and general Christian faith. A learned theologian like the Pope certainly didn't disappoint me; the homily was a very concise explication of the basics of the Christian faith and worldview. And he also- quite without meaning to- gave a concise layout of the problems with the dominant Western religion.

This religion- Christianity- has shaped the fortunes and destiny of the West for a very long time. Even with the rebirth of Pagan learning, artistic expression, science, and humanism that came about due to the Renaissance, Christianity remained and still remains the religion of the masses, and it still informed the actions, plans, and social realities of many generations. It was the "tablet of fate" that the shape of things today was inscribed upon.

For most irreligious people today, especially those who have no understanding of history, the enormous influence of Christianity (both Catholic and otherwise) is hard to see or believe. Irreligious people believe that they can simply ignore Christianity and that this path of ignoring it neutralizes its power; but long before they existed, Christianity was shaping many things about their lives and their world. Ignoring the impact of the Christian past leads to a lack of understanding of our present. Even in our more secular times, Christian forces exert a powerful tug on politics, and color the undercurrent of morality and supernaturalism prevalent in popular culture.

That the majority of people in the West don't really care about the despoiling of the world, the destruction or marginalization of non-Christian or non-Western cultures, the importance of true secular equality for all people of any sexual orientation, religious preference, or the like- all of these realities are clear and explainable. They are explained by the omnipresence of Biblical thinking and morality.

Christianity, both past and present, is decidedly against the animistic worldview; it rejects the notion that humans are equal to plants, animals, and the forces of the natural world; it rejects as immoral any society's move towards giving full liberty to same-sex couples, it furiously disapproved of the establishment of social equality for women, and up until the last century, was completely condescending towards non-Christian cultures, approving of and eagerly participating in the destruction of native cultures through their "conversion" to Christianity- which included the dismantling of their traditional languages, ancient belief systems, and unique customs.

Despite the Catholic Church's recent half-hearted move towards an environmental awareness of types, the Christian worldview, since day one, has been one that devalues this world, and all non-Christian cultures in it. This world, in their thinking, is flawed by sin; it is darkened, it is harsh, and poisoned. It will pass away- in a supernatural destruction- and be re-made anew and perfect. Thus, there is no real motivation at all to consider the sacredness of the world as it is, right now; no need to save a sinking ship.

No amount of apologetic talk can hide the fact that the Christian religious drama pridefully and unwisely places human beings as the pinnacles of creation- it considers humans to be the unique beings who are alone made in the sacred image, and for whom all the world was made. This bone-chilling anthropocentrism alone has been, and continues to be, responsible for the wholesale destruction of countless irreplaceable species of animals- our fellow travelers through billions of years of evolution and the sacred unfolding of nature.

Such a religion- and the people it consciously and unconsciously shapes- is like a tumor growing on the world-organism. Its symptoms are ignorance, a lack of care for the wholeness of things, a lack of understanding of the human place amid the sacred unfolding of life. The inaction of such humans, their tampering, their greed and exploitation (justified by the underlying anthropocentrism of the religion) and their firm, unwise sense of exceptionalism, has led to nearly all of the destructive cultural movements and events we've witnessed in the last 1700 years.

The unrestrained growth of population- urged on by the bible's flowery "be fruitful and multiply" ethic, and coupled with the Church's unrelenting war against any sort of birth control, has driven the world to extreme danger. It can only make sense from their religious perspective; for people who believe they are exceptional, god-like, and chosen, creating more humans for god's kingdom is the highest duty. Placing every inch of the land and soil and beasts under the yoke of control is their divine right; the destruction of heathen people who don't know the "truth" about god and man is their imperative, justified again by their scriptures and traditions.

What arises from the ashes of such heartless and perilous distortions of man's true place in this world is one thing, above all: the idea that man is above nature, not a part of it. He is separate, isolated, superior, and yet, owing to the fact that he must live and die, he is cursed by it. Nature, as the Genesis story tells us, is hostile to man ever since his "fall". Death was never "natural"- man, in the Christian way of thinking, was made immortal, but his "fall" cursed him to death. Disease, hardship, death- these are not "natural", but consequences of sin. Point for point, every experience that nature shapes in us that reveals to us the truth of our natural mortality is rejected by Christians as against the true way of things. Man is no longer only separate from Nature in the Christian understanding, but Nature is itself flawed into doing things to man that were never meant to be done- like stinging him with thorns or killing him with diseases.

And Pope Benedict began his homily on the Easter vigil with just this point. He begins by saying:

"Dear Brothers and Sisters, An ancient Jewish legend from the apocryphal book “The life of Adam and Eve” recounts that, in his final illness, Adam sent his son Seth together with Eve into the region of Paradise to fetch the oil of mercy, so that he could be anointed with it and healed. The two of them went in search of the tree of life, and after much praying and weeping on their part, the Archangel Michael appeared to them, and told them they would not obtain the oil of the tree of mercy and that Adam would have to die. Subsequently, Christian readers added a word of consolation to the Archangel’s message, to the effect that after 5,500 years the loving King, Christ, would come, the Son of God who would anoint all those who believe in him with the oil of his mercy. “The oil of mercy from eternity to eternity will be given to those who are reborn of water and the Holy Spirit. Then the Son of God, Christ, abounding in love, will descend into the depths of the earth and will lead your father into Paradise, to the tree of mercy.” This legend lays bare the whole of humanity’s anguish at the destiny of illness, pain and death that has been imposed upon us."

As strange as it may seem, "Illness, pain, and death", for the last 2000 years in the West, have not been seen as simple, natural aspects of the unfolding of sacred nature itself, but as aspects of a curse that has been "imposed on us". This word- "imposed"- is very telling. "We" (mankind collectively) are separate from the rest of reality, and something was forced or imposed on us from without. Entire books could be written on this simple and disastrous "way of seeing"- the ultimate alienation of humanity from its own natural existence, a natural existence which primal peoples all over the world have seen as sacred and beautiful in its own right, even with the inclusion of suffering and death. In such an alienation as we have lived under for so long, it is no surprise that our world flounders now in such a state of crisis.

Until we have learned to "return" to the world, to accept our place in it, and to accept that pain and death are simple, natural, and normal aspects of our lives here, we are doomed to repeat our scandalous past of denial, exploitation, and all of the crimes committed against the world and others in the name of spiritual elitism and human exceptionalism. If there were an "oil of mercy" that mankind badly needed to find, it would be an oil that opened their eyes to the deep beauty and appropriateness of their place in their natural home- here, our earth- and their place of equality within the family of sacred life. The only curse that causes man to suffer from the natural aspects of his condition is the firm belief that he is better than his animal body, that he is wrongfully suffering from the various ills that pain him, and that he is somehow above all this.

Let me state this clearly and with all the conviction I can muster- The only "flaw" in this sacred system of life of which we are all a part is the heartfelt belief, held by so many, that there is a flaw. All is working out, unfolding, as it must. Suffering and death are included in that, as much as joy and life. It is all just as it should be. It is not the result of a mistake or a sin.

Despite the fact that the "Holy Father" teaches, in keeping with the constant tradition of his church, that death is unnatural, a curse foisted upon man, in the very next paragraph of his homily, he ironically points out how necessary it is:

Man’s resistance to death becomes evident: somewhere – people have constantly thought – there must be some cure for death. Sooner or later it should be possible to find the remedy not only for this or that illness, but for our ultimate destiny – for death itself. Surely the medicine of immortality must exist. Today too, the search for a source of healing continues. Modern medical science strives, if not exactly to exclude death, at least to eliminate as many as possible of its causes, to postpone it further and further, to prolong life more and more. But let us reflect for a moment: what would it really be like if we were to succeed, perhaps not in excluding death totally, but in postponing it indefinitely, in reaching an age of several hundred years? Would that be a good thing? Humanity would become extraordinarily old, there would be no more room for youth. Capacity for innovation would die, and endless life would be no paradise, if anything a condemnation."

To be fair, Benedict goes on to state that the real "cure for death" cannot be a prolonging of the mortal life, but a transformation of the inner life, the sort of transformation that makes a person fit for "eternity"- a life that doesn't really "begin in fullness" until death. This, once again, brings us to one of the most devastating aspects of Christianity- the constant insistence that life on earth is limited and miserable, and that the "true life" only begins (for those blessed in association with Christ) after death. Religions that reject the world must of necessity reject the idea of a happy, satisfactory life in the world. Focusing constantly on the uncertainties and perceived insufficiencies of life "here", they keep people longing, in an escapist way, for the painless and pleasurable eternity to follow.

With this sort of fundamentally flawed thinking necessarily arises the persecution of flesh- every aspect of the natural life on earth becomes a twist of the evil serpent- beginning with (and pretty much ending with) the powerful and natural fact of sexuality. The Catholic Church- and one of its most influential writers, Augustine- is single-handedly responsible for the great guilt and scandal which surrounds sexuality in the modern day, and in countless ages before.

The Church's discomfort and mistrust of sex was and is so great, that sexual contact became the factor that transmitted "original sin" to newborn children. In the church's eyes, children are born innately flawed with sin. They are born deserving- as Augustine said- of whatever deformations, diseases, or defects they might evidence, for, again, (following Augustine's fine, twisted logic) God is all-just, and would not allow for babies to be born in such a way if it were not just that they be born so. It is because they are born sinful that such maladies can justly afflict them, in other words. God wouldn't allow it if babies were born innocent of sin.

Such monstrous thinking, given to us by a man made into a "saint" by the Church, is the legacy that shaped so much of who and what we are as a society. Today, we may rightly gasp at such callousness, at such clear stupid rejection of the nature of nature, but for 1500 years, Augustine's words were held up as sacred and beyond contestation.

The Pope continues his homily by talking about the nature of the "transformation" that takes place at Baptism- or which, he says, begins to take place- and culminates in the full sacramental life of his church, a transformation which makes a person worthy to stand "clothed in light" among the angels or sacred beings of God's presence. It's funny that the Pope should use these metaphors, and then go on, as he does, to completely reveal his own ignorance of Pagan religions and the initiations and "transformations" bestowed by Pagan mystery cults in the past- for Benedict displays the typical lack of understanding and what amounts to a complete historical re-writing of the realities of the Pagan past that his church has preached and promulgated since its inception.

But then, his church had to re-write history; they had to mis-frame and distort the realities of the Pagan past, if they were to justify their assault on history, their co-opting of culture and society and the spiritual destiny of the same.

Benedict says:

How does this transformation of the old life come about, so as to give birth to the new life that knows no death? Once again, an ancient Jewish text can help us form an idea of the mysterious process that begins in us at baptism. There it is recounted how the patriarch Enoch was taken up to the throne of God. But he was filled with fear in the presence of the glorious angelic powers, and in his human weakness he could not contemplate the face of God. “Then God said to Michael,” to quote from the book of Enoch, “‘Take Enoch and remove his earthly clothing. Anoint him with sweet oil and vest him in the robes of glory!’ And Michael took off my garments, anointed me with sweet oil, and this oil was more than a radiant light … its splendor was like the rays of the sun. When I looked at myself, I saw that I was like one of the glorious beings.”

Precisely this – being reclothed in the new garment of God – is what happens in baptism, so the Christian faith tells us. To be sure, this changing of garments is something that continues for the whole of life. What happens in baptism is the beginning of a process that embraces the whole of our life – it makes us fit for eternity, in such a way that, robed in the garment of light of Jesus Christ, we can appear before the face of God and live with him for ever.

Would such talk have really surprised the people of the Ancient world? The Roman writer Apuleius, himself an initiate of several Pagan mystery cults, including the Cults of Isis and Osiris, described his experience of his initiations in his book "The Golden Ass". He writes:

"Listen then, but believe; for what I tell you is the truth. I came to the boundary of death and after treading Proserpine's threshold, I returned having traversed all the elements; at midnight I saw the sun shining with brilliant light; I approached the Gods below and the Gods above face to face and worshiped them in their actual presence... Morning came, and, the ceremonies dutifully performed, I came forth, attired in the twelve robes of my consecration, a truly mystical dress, but nothing prevents me from mentioning it since a great many people were there and saw it at the time. For in the very heart of the sacred temple, before the statue of the Goddess, a wooden platform had been set up, on which I took my stand as bidden. I was a striking sight, since though my dress was only of fine linen it was colorfully embroidered, and from my shoulders there fell behind me to my ankles a costly cloak. Wherever you looked, I was decorated all over with pictures of multicolored animals: here Indian serpents, there Hyperborean griffins with bird-like wings, creatures of another world. This is what initiates call an Olympian robe. In my right hand I held a flaming torch and my head was encircled with a beautiful crown of palm, its bright leaves projecting like rays. Equipped thus in the image of the Sun I stood like a statue while the curtains were pulled back...."

Apuleius' description of both mystery initiations, and the light, sun, enlightenment, and illumination symbolism involved, is common in the descriptions of many mystery cults. Even the most well-known cult at Eleusis involved a "beatific vision" of light in darkness, from the best reports we have. It also, in keeping with both the mysteries of Isis, and others, involved giving the new initiate a lit torch, symbolizing the new light and life that had begun. They all involved the removal of old clothing and placing on new clothes. The mysteries of the Pagan world, as artfully explained by Burkert and Kerenyi, revealed to the initiates their place with the Gods, as one of their number- they revealed the "light" which was mankind's true and deepest nature.

Pope Benedict goes on to describe the rather beautiful and simple ancient Christian ritual of baptism. Pay careful attention to the details, but also to what Christians were expected to renounce:

"In the early Church, the one to be baptized turned towards the west, the symbol of darkness, sunset, death and hence the dominion of sin. The one to be baptized turned in that direction and pronounced a threefold “no”: to the devil, to his pomp and to sin. The strange word “pomp”, that is to say the devil’s glamour, referred to the splendor of the ancient cult of the gods and of the ancient theatre, in which it was considered entertaining to watch people being torn limb from limb by wild beasts. What was being renounced was a type of culture that ensnared man in the adoration of power, in the world of greed, in lies, in cruelty.

It was an act of liberation from the imposition of a form of life that was presented as pleasure and yet hastened the destruction of all that was best in man. This renunciation – albeit in less dramatic form – remains an essential part of baptism today. We remove the “old garments”, which we cannot wear in God’s presence. Or better put: we begin to remove them. This renunciation is actually a promise in which we hold out our hand to Christ, so that he may guide us and reclothe us. What these “garments” are that we take off, what the promise is that we make, becomes clear when we see in the fifth chapter of the Letter to the Galatians what Paul calls “works of the flesh” – a term that refers precisely to the old garments that we remove. Paul designates them thus: “fornication, impurity, licentiousness, idolatry, sorcery, enmity, strife, jealousy, anger, selfishness, dissension, party spirit, envy, drunkenness, carousing and the like” (Gal 5:19ff.). These are the garments that we remove: the garments of death.

Then, in the practice of the early Church, the one to be baptized turned towards the east – the symbol of light, the symbol of the newly rising sun of history, the symbol of Christ. The candidate for baptism determines the new direction of his life: faith in the Trinitarian God to whom he entrusts himself. Thus it is God who clothes us in the garment of light, the garment of life. Paul calls these new “garments” “fruits of the spirit”, and he describes them as follows: “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control” (Gal 5:22).

In the early Church, the candidate for baptism was then truly stripped of his garments. He descended into the baptismal font and was immersed three times – a symbol of death that expresses all the radicality of this removal and change of garments. His former death-bound life the candidate consigns to death with Christ, and he lets himself be drawn up by and with Christ into the new life that transforms him for eternity. Then, emerging from the waters of baptism the neophytes were clothed in the white garment, the garment of God’s light, and they received the lighted candle as a sign of the new life in the light that God himself had lit within them. They knew that they had received the medicine of immortality, which was fully realized at the moment of receiving holy communion. In this sacrament we receive the body of the risen Lord and we ourselves are drawn into this body, firmly held by the One who has conquered death and who carries us through death."

Re-writing history is old news for the Catholic Church. But to see this learned theologian, who must be at least somewhat learned in history, associating the ancient "Cult of the Gods" and the ancient "theatre" with death-spectacles and people "being torn from limb to limb by wild beasts" is disheartening; does his flock even care at all about the truth that neither the Cults of the Gods, nor the theatre of those days were involved with people being executed in the spectacles of the Roman Coliseum?

That early Christians were expected to reject the Cult of the Gods is easy enough to understand, though it was, even then, based on foolish nonsense. But the theatre? The "pomp of Satan"? The Christian rejection of the world didn't begin in hate for their place in the natural order of things, but in the rejection of high culture and the civilization to which they owed- and to which we owe- so much. The ancient theatre was one of the most powerful expressions of human culture, poetic art, and sacred display. To it, our own dramatic and artistic institutions owe so much.

And the cults of the Gods in Greece and Rome at the time of Christian conversions did not involve human sacrifice of any kind; to stain one's hands with the blood of humans was among the acts that required great rites of purification so that a person could be allowed to attend sacrifices lawfully again, in Greek and Roman religion- at least according to Burkert, and to other scholars. The Pope is conflating spectacles of execution and sports with Pagan religion, in an attempt to sweep under the rug the beautiful spiritual/cultural legacies that his church became powerful for effacing. He's over-simplifying, and being dishonest on many levels.

As Christian leaders have always done, he is dismissing the entire wealth of cultural beauty and wisdom that was contained in the Pagan world, confident that it can be safely ignored in the light of his new religion and privileged "higher" perspective. Few things are more pernicious in my eyes than the conceit of the modern day that tells us that we are wiser now than people ever have been, and ignores the past as brutal, barbaric, or worth sweeping away. But we are not the judges of our ancestors; they are our judges. And admitting this requires a humility and a wisdom that neither the Pope nor his flock can manage to open themselves to.

Benedict is also suggesting, again in keeping with his tradition, that ancient Pagan religions didn't already promulgate virtues; I can assure him and anyone else that “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control” didn't begin with Christianity. Perusing the writings of Stoic Pagans like Marcus Aurelius demonstrates how these virtues were held in high esteem by many non-Christians.

It has already been demonstrated, through simple comparison, how the Christian ritual of baptism appears to draw many elements from the common materia and vocabulary of ancient mystery cult initiations. Christianity’s claim to uniqueness is a long dead topic, but something else emerges in the Pope's description of the ancient baptism that merits attention: the idea of the fresh start, or the rebirth.

I can believe that many disenfranchised people- and perhaps others, for other reasons- in the time of the later Roman empire were looking for a way to simplify their lives and to live up to the promises and ideals of the great philosophers. The Roman Emperors of those times had become decadent; the cults of the city had become very numerous and a proliferation of Gods and myths could well confuse the simpler-minded people who might have lived then.

Overall, those stuck in poverty and low on the social ladder could easily evolve a sense that "something was terribly wrong" with their society- and the Christian initiation gave them a clean, easy break from it all- to turn their back, spiritually and mentally, on the confusion, chaos, and actual social injustices that did exist, and live for simple, good principles, all with the promise of eternal life (itself a real treasure, considering the topic of the afterlife was discussed little or at all with any certainty back then). It is easy to see why some would be attracted to Christianity.

The trouble begins when the religion itself wasn't content to re-orient lives to good ends or virtues; it could not allow for the culture that came before it, nor the religions that it sprang from and borrowed from, to continue to exist. It wasn't enough to "re-orient" oneself to virtue through Christian initiation; one had to believe that no other organization or god or temple could suffice to do the same for others, and one had to aid the faithful in overturning those others. This attitude was born in blood; it went on to shed blood; and it still sheds blood in places, and in many ways. Other religions like it- chiefly Islam- still shed red rivers of blood in their single-minded war on diversity and liberty, and they do it eagerly, possessed of the same exceptionalist and elitist madness that tore the unfolding of our Western cultures into shreds.

I think there is a natural human desire for a "fresh start", for a spiritual cleansing or re-orientation, at times of crisis or confusion. But I also know that Christianity wasn't the first religion to offer such a thing, and didn't end up being the last. Even the Pope's well-stated lines regarding the eating of the body of Jesus and the immortality it brought sounds suspiciously similar to the eating of the flesh of Dionysos, and the immortality his own initiates believed it brought.

People are always talking about what made Christianity "stand out" from the other cults of the ancient world. The answer is simple. They alone had the stated intention to destroy all others, and the will to do it. First, they cast their own flesh on the machinery of Rome, intentionally breaking blasphemy laws and laws against sedition, generating crowds of martyrs- and all the notoriety and power that brings- then they undermined the machinery of government, finally taking the mantle of the persecuted and laying it on the shoulders of Pagans, while they took for themselves the mantle of the persecutor. History records the entire bloody mess- whatever sympathy Christians think that they are owed for the fact that Christians once died in the jaws of lions is long lost owing to the record of blood and atrocity unleashed on the Pagan world by Christian leaders and rulers afterwards.

While I can admit that it was inevitable that a movement of "renewal" would have been called into being by the excesses of the late Roman Empire, I cannot say enough how lamentable it is that such a renewal should have included the harmful stories, myths, and doctrines that were promulgated by the church. Together, I believe they have done more harm to our world than the Pagan world had ever done before- or would have done since, had the Pagan world been allowed to persist.

The time of the Spring Equinox- the resurrection of the powers of life in the greenery of nature- is a universal time of joy that all people can lay claim to. People from all over the world, in many ways, have celebrated it. It is my hope that one day we will all be free of the terrors that arose 2000 years ago with the first Christian churches, and the terrors that arose 1400 years ago with the violence of Islam, and that we will all be part of that universal spirit of natural belonging, free of organized religions that teach harmful and hateful stories of human exceptionalism and spiritual elitism.

The Spirits of Haiti

2010-01-16T01:38:00.000-08:00

A tragedy of unthinkable magnitude has overwhelmed the poor island nation of Haiti, as every world-aware person has seen through the news. The loss of life and destruction is beyond imagination for people who live in nations that can afford decent infrastructure and code-built buildings. It's beyond the ken of nearly everyone who will be reading this blog post. It is a shock to the subtle web of connections that unites us all, knowingly or unknowingly, to those suffering people in Haiti, and to suffering people everywhere.

It's just in our human nature to help others, and in our nature to be thankful for our own fortunes, to be filled with joy at our own survival. But I've seen too much "us and them" thinking, all my life, especially with respect to disasters. I'm one of the "lucky" ones, as we are called; I live in one of the few nations on the planet where disasters strike with less frequency, one of the nations best equipped to deal with disasters.

What happened to Haiti wasn't just an earthquake. People are dying at the very same moment I'm typing these words not just because of an earthquake, but because their country can't build buildings safely enough, can't get clean water and medical aid and communications from place to place quickly enough, and can't keep social order easily enough. This disaster is multi-layered.

But most people just see it on the news, then change the channel. We're all part of this world. Even though my ceiling didn't collapse on me, and even though my children weren't killed by falling rubble, and even though clean, cold water runs straight from my tap in great abundance, I am not a "lucky one" who is far away from this. My body may be far from it, but my mind and spirit are involved, just like every other human being on this planet. It cannot be otherwise; the spirit of us far exceeds the simple boundaries of flesh that we ignorantly label as "the limits of my being". A human tragedy anywhere is my tragedy, and yours.

Maybe if everyone, all my life, hadn't told me "we're the lucky ones!" when something bad happened somewhere else in the world, I might have come to this conclusion earlier. Now, rage and grief and pain and terror fills the air in some other place, far to the south of me, and the air drinks it up. The sky drinks it up, the earth absorbs it. More of the human experience is pouring into the environment, integrating, and the world is remembering. This is my legacy, your legacy, everyone's legacy.

We have to drop these ideas of "lucky". It's fortunate that my house isn't destroyed, sure, but it isn't fortunate that my stability and all the fine distractions I have help keep me trapped in a cycle of self-interest, a cycle that makes disasters on TV and the internet just more morbid curiosities to be glimpsed from a secure distance. I want to help every Haitian parent who, like me, loves their children more than anything, and who have suffered the cruelest loss imaginable to a parent. But I feel so helpless.

And this feeling unites me, again, to the bulk of humanity who view this tragedy with shock and awe. Here is our human experience. And I wish I could say that was all; but no... among us, the most wicked of our number have raised their burned-out voices, voices that have croaked out so much filth in the past, and accused the Haitians of bringing this tragedy upon themselves because of the "satanic rites" of their ancestors. Pat Robertson, a man whose unutterable foulness has cost him his meaningful participation in the sacredness of human warmth, love, and life, has yet again gone on television and mingled his hate and ignorance with a discourse that should be focusing on compassion, sorrow, resolve, and help.

He does it for publicity; the media eagerly gives it to him. He did it on 9/11; he did it during Katrina; he'll do it again and again until his body dies. His soul and the principle that united him to mankind once has long ago fled. The most perniciously wicked of the protestant or Catholic flock- missionaries- have long tormented Haiti with their folk and native-culture destroying nonsense, their complete, disrespectful ignorance of Haitian Vodou and other native beliefs, and their spiritual condescension and imperialism.

Now, they'll line up in greater numbers, seeking to cash in on the natural grief and shock that follows any natural catastrophe. They'll answer Pat Robertson's call to save Haiti from the devil- but what Haiti needs is salvation from white Christians, most especially the ignorant protestant fools who pile there in narcissistic droves. No amount of "aid" they give to Haitians- or anyone else- is worth it, if the cost means alienating people from their native spiritual paths and their native cultures.

Let me set the record straight, although to be very certain, Jason over at The Wild Hunt has already set it straight: Haitian Vodou is not devilry or satanism. The brave ancestors who delivered the Haitians from slavery didn't make deals with any devil in return for victory; they prayed to the spirits of their ancestors and the Gods of their people in Africa. And they won. Vodou is good for Haiti, and for the world. It is one of the last remaining animistic faiths on the planet that has a presence in the midst of the materialistic and monotheistic west. It is a treasure to be preserved.

Does this earthquake have anything to do with Vodou? No, not at all. If we were to look for spiritual flaws in Haitian native spirituality to explain natural disasters, we would be forced as well to look to spiritual flaws in American or European Christianity, as well; no amount of Christiantiy, of any brand, has prevented even a single horrible disaster from befalling Americans or Europeans.

If Christians wish to ask where the Lwa were during Haiti's recent disaster, we have to ask where God and Jesus were during 9/11 or during Hurricane Katrina. We have to ask where God and Jesus were when the Oklahoma City bombing destroyed the lives of toddlers and infants in a daycare center in the federal building that was targeted.

Pat Robertson says that the Haitians brought this on themselves. He said that Katrina was also divine punishment. What did the toddlers in Oklahoma City do, to bring that on themselves? Perhaps I should email him and ask.

We can put aside God and Jesus, in the same place we put aside all wishful thinking. But spirits are another matter- the Lwa of Haiti are, unlike the inventions of churches, real spiritual forces, real non-human persons who exist and have a real relationship to human beings all over this world, and to many lands. Like the Gods of Old Europe, they cannot and do not control Fate, and do not fully control the tapestry of Nature, which is Fate's loom. Spiritual powers must bow to the great unfolding of events, as well. They are like humans in that way. They suffer their own tragedies, and they can suffer alongside us, and with us.

That's where the Lwa are now, suffering with their people. Perhaps they help now in their own powerful way. I have to believe that they have seen these sorts of tragedies many times, and have always helped in what ways they could. Perhaps in older times, people more in touch with the spiritual world could have seen a tragedy like this coming, but now, thanks in large part to spirit-denying and spirit-hating Christianity, the air is obscured with fear and ignorance.

The loom of Fate being what it is, some things in the unfolding of events are structured such that they cannot be known. These times, and events like these, test us, make us reconsider what is real and worthwhile. Perhaps the good that will come of this more than justifies what appears now. I hope so, and I believe so.

But there's more. In my estimation, it is not healthy or wise for millions of people to live jam-packed into crowded urban areas. It never has been and it never will be. If the population of Haiti- or anywhere that ever suffered a great flood or earthquake- was smaller and more spread out, such a disaster never would have reached these epic, shocking proportions.

What sort of unwisdom has gripped the world, that has forced people into overwhelmingly urban lifestyles, replete with over-stimulation of population growth, even in the most desperate of situations, and forced them into reliance not on natural wisdom, but the dullness of spiritual and political bureaucracies?

The answer is simple: organized religions that teach the myth of human exceptionalism and deny the animistic worldview, and the imperialistic, domineering governments they helped to create and support. Take that however you like. We're all victims of it, and the Haitians are with us, on the victims list. None of the victims of this earthquake chose to build a massive city on or near a fault-line. Those plans were laid out long before their births. This is another mundane factor that adds to this tragedy, and which is the fault of no one.

* * *
Haiti needs its spirits now. It needs to take shelter in living spiritual powers that are part of the land and people. It needs pride and hope for healing. It needs to see that other human beings are in heartfelt solidarity with it. It needs to build a better future from this tragedy. All tragedies are opportunities for better futures. The ways they have been thinking before can be changed now; how they have thought and acted before, influenced in unhealthy ways by unwise powers- this has gotten them nowhere. To repeat the mistakes of the past would only lay the groundwork for future catastrophes to have equally as horrendous impact.

I love the native, animistic spirituality of the Haitians. I respect it, admire it, and hope that it undergoes a new revival now that the world is having many myths about it dispelled through media scrutiny. I hope that churches in Haiti lose membership, now that the people can see that no God is looking out for them, with the power to control natural forces- if he is, he is surely not worth their worship; after all, putting aside the innocent men, women, and children who were wiped out in less than a minute, "God" also either destroyed, or allowed to be destroyed, the great Cathedral of Port-au-Prince, and saw to the death of the Archbishop of Haiti.

Only one religion for humans- the religion of spirits- can stand up in times of tragedy like this. The spirits didn't cause this; they must dwell among natural powers, too, and cannot redirect some things. They can only help as far as they are able, like human beings can only help as far as they are able. Spirits are parts of this unpredictable system, just like humans. That's solid. That's a faith you can trust. No one is to blame for this earthquake; it is part of the natural shifting of forces. There is no divine punishment here. There is no guilt here. There is only the natural indifference of energy and grinding tectonic plates.

And, amid the strange and sometimes dangerous weave of reality, exist we humans and the beings in the unseen world, and all the other living powers seen and unseen. Here we are, all together, none more fortunate or less fortunate, none better or worse, save those whose ignorance has led them into soul-extinguishing depths of evil and unnatural disconnection.

We're all in this together. We are our best strength, together.

There is no "one God beyond all Gods" or "one real God" who will lift a finger to stop tragedy or alleviate it, as disasters like this prove. We humans cannot and must not put our responsibility to being together, helping together, and fighting together for a better day, in the hands of an imaginary being.

Those who must pray for extraordinary help, should ask the unseen powers that swirl, even now, around these tragedies. They may be able to help. Beyond that, every human must look to their own innate personal force and to whatever love they feel for others and this world. That's all, and that has to be enough. A person can do no more, and the universe never expects a part of itself to do more than it was shaped capable of. We have to find peace in that.

We must not judge tragedies as though they were the work of a big, angry being in the sky; we must not judge other humans on the basis of their tragedies. We have to judge them on the basis of our shared humanity. To fail in this would be to fail in everything that is meaningful or proper to humanity.

May the Lwa bless Haiti and all people who suffer. May Haiti recover from this tragedy and have a better future. May my sorrowing heart find peace. May my own heart explode and turn to ash if it can spare even one Haitian mother the terror and despair of a dead or missing child. May my heart perish in that same way if it can spare any human mother, anywhere, that same pain. May every parent who has had to see their children slain or killed one day know the peace of communion with those children again, in the reaches of life beyond this one.

I am not a "lucky one." I'm a human, connected to every other human that lives. That makes me lucky and unlucky- for I share the fortunes and luck of human beings out there, and the misfortunes of humans out there. In times of tragedy such as this, let the deep parts of me that I do not know reach back and help alleviate the suffering of others. Whatever hidden powers or graces I have, let them leave now and fly swiftly to the aid of others who need it. If they never come back, let them outlive me in their good work.

Hail and Merry Yuletide Misrule: The "Bust a Nut" Sorcerous Working

2009-12-14T18:19:00.000-08:00

Just in time for the Holy Yuletide season, I have come to share this tiny, fun sorcerous technique of aggression sublimation in a brotherly spirit of help and cheer. This little working is easy to use, and very effective on many psychic levels.

I am a great fan of walnuts- they are my favorite nuts- and this time of year seems to bring them out in huge bags at the market. I always keep a bag around the house, and an earthenware bowl piled high. I have this big black stone that I keep near the bowl (I can never seem to keep up with nutcrackers) and so I use that stone to smash the nuts open.

Living in the world that we do, any person of even partial world-awareness will become familiar with the countless people that they just don't want to be around, or even to share their world with. You know the types- those strange people who think that anyone but them is destined for an eternal hell; those oddballs who think that birth control is somehow evil, and feel the need to stop people in other countries who badly need it from getting it by subscribing to "abstinence only" programs, thus directly creating death and misery from thousands of more transmissions of STD's and thousands and millions more unwanted pregnancies.

You know them! Remember those odd people who think that it's okay to immigrate into prosperous Western countries from eastern toilets and take advantage of Western liberties, while seeking to overthrow those same liberties? Or those famous, bizarre people who think that there's somehow really only one God, and that thousands of years of animistic and polytheistic civilizations before ours were hopelessly misguided, superstitious and demonic? Stop grinning- YOU KNOW who I'm talking about. You've seen them all over.

Open your heart, now, in the spirit of this season, and embrace the troubles these people bring to us all. Really see the misery that they author. That human misery is your misery, too.

The Yuletide always brings the very best of these nithing fools out, for most of the people you don't want anywhere near you or your family will tend to get on TV or in the local papers screaming about "Keeping Christ in Christmas" or some such. While we're bringing trees into our houses and continuing on our ancient tree-worship, eating the traditional Yule-boar in the form of a Ham, and waiting for a generous and jolly miracle man (who flies through the air all around the world drawn by animals, has elf-helpers, and comes from the cold north) and other such ancient Christian practices and beliefs, let's take time to realize how irrelevant our Heathen ancestors are to this time.

As these frustrations and special holiday joys build, we may reach a point where we need a little release. And this, my friends in the Dark Season, is why Wyrd the Mighty, working hand-in-hand with Great Nature, gave us walnuts!

The next time you realize just how much you wish Eastern extremists didn't exist, or Western fundies (or the patriarchal, woman-repressing, gay-hating, and plurality-denying philosophies that made these people possible in the first place) or the next time you have to endure Republicans on the television set, or even certain Democrats, or the scores of other people that make you ashamed to be human, get a walnut and your own big stone.

Place the walnut on the table before you on a wooden cutting board carved well with signs of wrath and chastisement, and visualize that knobby brown thing not as a walnut, but the head of one of these people who have worked so hard to spoil your world and destroy the sense, reason, and joy that is natural to mankind. You have to slip into the role here, get into the visualization of it.

I find that it helps if you imagine the (presumably confused) new "face" on the walnut-head looking around in a slightly disoriented way, before fear of you- standing over it with a stone- creeps into its wide little eyes. Oh, the helplessness of the little demon tumor!

Then smash the hell out of it with your stone. Smack it a few times; get pieces of shell flying across the table. That's not walnut shell! It's skull fragment! Freshly flown, warm with life fading! Funny thing- a walnut's insides (the delicious part you eat) looks squiggly and sorta like a brain. I like to give a good cackle of laughter when I'm done, and sometimes while I'm smashing away- it's good to slip into the mirth of this time of year.

You can feel free to embellish this minor little Holiday technique all you like- some people (like myself) sometimes make a small container of ember-hallowed water with a pinch of salt, and baptize the little walnut-heads in the name of the person or group they are intending to smash the life out of, before they proceed to the gnashing, cackling, and crushing. A little ceremony never hurt this seasonal fun!

The final part of the operation is, of course, to consume the brains of your defeated foes. This is important, as you absorb their power into yourself. No longer can they use it to unsettle and punish our world under the force of their thoughtless ignorance; now, it passes into you, in a gore-smeared Yuletide feast of busted nuts, so that you can transmute it into the simple goodness and peace that our world really desires. Sorcery can be so very uplifting, if one simply understands the beauty and simplicity of the entire process. The power of the Yuletide season helps in these sorts of workings.

I now make this small working of Mirth and Misrule my gift, in this hallowed time, to you. I share it with my children on these silent and holy nights; I hope you will pass it on to yours.

A very glad Yule-tide to you all, and lasting woe betide those whose faces or group-spirit you conjure into the Walnuts from the nut-brown bowl this night!

Sincerely, Your RA

Cold, Hard World: Spiritual Maturity in our Personal Paths

2009-12-04T21:48:00.000-08:00

If your religious journey begins with unrealistic beliefs and expectations, it will end in disillusionment. The end is always in the beginning, and the beginning at the end. It has been pointed out how delicate a time a beginning truly is- and today, in our world of recently liberated people striking out onto new spiritual paths, beginnings are a very important matter.

How it begins says everything about how it ends. I don't guess many people want to hear this, because many had difficulties at the start of their path. But new beginnings are always in the sieve of possibilities. Don't cling to a doomed path; the beginning will reveal to you something about the end.

These sentences are a strange way to start a letter about realistic spirituality, but crucial to my later point. Those of us who have embarked on the "lesser known" paths through the forest of spiritual experience- which is the forest of life- have to watch ourselves and our paths carefully. We have all seen how the people on the "well known" paths fare in this world- we have all seen disillusionment, and probably felt it ourselves. But did we ever really question why so many people end up being disappointed or put into intolerable quandaries after faithfully following their religions?

I've been doing a lot of thinking and reading and walking about in this late fall. It's gotten very cold, and we are expecting our first real snow tomorrow evening. It's below freezing every night, and has been for weeks. There have been flurries of snow, and ice on the roads. The glorious colorful blaze of the autumn leaves is gone now, and, aside from the evergreens, everything is straw or brown. The world is turning harsh- your hands go numb if you don't wear gloves outside; your body begins to shiver and feel weak at times. The sun vanishes by 4 PM every day, leaving behind an impenetrable darkness in the countryside where I live. There's less light, less activity, and just... quiet.

The entire environment lends itself to the sort of pondering I've been doing. I've studied a lot of religious, down to very exacting details. I've chosen for myself the religious path that I felt most drawn to, and I have excelled in its power, gained a lot from its poetic story for this world. But I have encountered, in this land, the most recent "round" of stories from an ancient people that I have found, and a people to whom I am ancestrally related- the Mi'kmaq. I have no intention of seeking out some membership in the Mi'kmaq community; the collection of their sacred stories and essays on their worldview which I have collected, is blessing enough for me.

Before I came to this home, I had never even thought twice about the Mi'kmaq. I certainly knew nothing of their ancient beliefs. But in the time I have studied it, I have discovered so much wisdom and power, it seems that my journey here was intended for deeper reasons. By studying the organic ways and perspectives of these great people, I have seen finally why my religious life turned out the way it did. I know why I was attracted to organic polytheistic and animistic religions.

I would say that the spirit in me was comfortable with nothing else. But I can bring it up a detail level- the spirit in me couldn't accept that the entire world and universe was really all about human beings, and that an omnibenevolent, omnipotent power was "holding us all in his hands."

I have come to see now, clearer than I ever have, the flaw in the thinking of the Christians and monotheists who truly think that the "all good, all powerful" man-god will protect them and make everything perfect one day in the future. Before now, this idea had just seemed like fanciful wishful thinking; but now I know how wishful it really is.

I recently acquired a superb book by Professor Mary Lefkowitz, called "Greek Gods, Human Lives: What We Can Learn from Myths." It is an excellent overview of what the ancient Greek and Romans believed about the Gods, and what their religion told them about human life, and the relationship of the Gods to humans. Like any classicist worth the name, Lefkowitz points out that the ancient Polytheists didn't live in a world that contained any religious guarantees.

That's right- the Gods lived their Godly lives, and mortals lived their lives, and sometimes- just sometimes- the two overlapped. The Gods on Olympus dwelled in pleasure and peace; to take a human form and come to this earth, in response to a prayer from a favored mortal, or to take some direct action in the unfolding of things, was not a very common event. Humans could give gifts to the Gods that the Gods would be grateful for- but even if a God favored a certain person or group, there was no guarantee that this God could spare them suffering; one God's will could be contravened by the will of a more powerful God, and then, despite the care the original God felt for others, nothing could be done. There were simply no guarantees. There was a good bit of certainty that the Gods would reciprocate to the worshipers what gifts were given, but the reciprocation wasn't an exact science, either.

Humans died and didn't go happily among the Gods, at least not in Greek and Roman belief; they went to a shadowy, quiet underworld. Some there might be blessed to be happy, and some cursed to be miserable because of extraordinarily wicked deeds in life, but in general, the mighty and the lowly went to the same dark rest. That's that. That's it. And for millennia, people were content to believe these things. Humans were promised nothing in particular by the Gods; humans were very much left to their own devices. What they discovered was that their greatest strength was each other- humans had to rely on one another greatly in those days. Your family was your best strength and your greatest comfort.

Christians today scratch their heads at this and wonder why anyone would want to see the world in such a way. Why give up the comfort of the all-powerful loving God that cares about each person, individually, and who will put all evil to rights one day?

The answer to them is simple- no one who believed as the Greeks believed was "giving up anything", because such a God doesn't exist. That's not how reality works. Such beliefs in cosmic omnibenevolence are as much wishful thinking now as they were when Christianity first spread out across the ancient world. And the attestation of many ancient peoples- beginning with the Polytheists of old Europe- reveals that the worldview of "no guarantees" was once the nearly universal worldview of the organic spiritual world. I can understand how the "everything's going to be okay" story could be an attractive sell to the sentimental or dull people of ancient times (or today) but enough is enough!

I had to stop, freezing in the cold in these long evenings, and look at it directly, perhaps for the very first time. None of my Pagan European Ancestors ever said "The Gods will make it all okay." In fact, my northern Ancestors had Gods who perished eventually, struggling at the end of the world-cycle with the forces of destruction- forces who won the last battle and ended all things.

For the Greeks and Romans, the Gods led separate lives that didn't include, as their first priority, the well-being of each individual human, or sometimes, large groups of humans. The Mi'kmaq native peoples had a worldview of "power" in which the world was seen as a great mass of constantly transforming power- precisely the same as the Wyrd of the Heathens- forces interacting and changing and transforming, eternally.

Within that kaleidoscope of power, some patterns of power gained consciousness and became "persons"- humans were just one. Animals were others; spirits were others; there were many non-human persons. But within this system, even though it was all sprung from a "greatest power" called Ukji Mn'Tu, there were no "guarantees" of how life was going to be for anyone. Spirits could befriend humans, and humans spirits; but spirits were neither "good" nor "evil", but both, just like humans. Mood and circumstances could lead any sort of person, human or otherwise, to act in a destructive or selfish way at certain times, and in a benevolent way at others. The "highest power" was a mysterious abstraction, who certainly didn't act as a doting, protective parent to human beings.

Like the Greeks and other people of Old Europe, the Mi'kmaq found their greatest solace and benefit in one another, in bonds of clan and family. But humans had to face a hard truth- the central truth that I have come to embrace as key to a mature spirituality- that we are not guaranteed anything by life or by the sacred powers that co-exist with us in this amazing world.

Christians love to tell me how satisfied and safe they are with Jesus and their God. And for all their reports of protection and divine security, these people regularly lose jobs, live paycheck to paycheck, succumb to serious health problems, get into car wrecks, lose relatives and friends to accidents, crimes, or diseases, and are crushed by death and loss in other ways. From top to bottom, being Christian apparently spares no one from the same sufferings that non-Christians have to endure. The only difference is that Christians mindlessly drone on, seemingly in denial, about how powerful and good their great benefactor is.

Some would say that was an endearing portrait of "faith". But I see it now, clearer than ever, for what I believe it is: people sticking their head in the sand and living in denial. They don't want to face the hard truth that the ancients knew: you aren't in the hands of a great universal power that's watching out for you, and despite your cherished hope and belief to the contrary, you never were. And the more you try to live in a religious path that teaches this dream, the faster you are heading for disillusionment.

Because when your world is in the hands of the all-good, all-powerful whatever, then that car accident that killed your toddler was somehow part of this being's "plan", and this being (like it or not) allowed it to happen. This being that you loved so much took all of your joy from you, and all you can do is sit quietly, crushed in grief, forbidden from questioning it. You will simply have to be like Job, and make a great showing of your faith, hoping to at least squeeze some eternal reward out of the bad situation. Those who do question it enough- and have the courage to see clearly- tend to jump ship and "lose their faith".

The "prayer of protest" which is allowed in Judaism has no place in Christianity or Islam. That's because the Jews have at least one salient fact about "God" right- even though they foolishly believe that God is the greatest and in charge of the whole universe, they also admit that he's an ass at times, and isn't nice all the time, and that's just his prerogative as the supreme being. And his followers can wail and whine at him if they want; so long as people follow his laws, they don't have to like him.

That's actually quite mature of Jews, in my opinion. The point is that they have a place in their spirituality for humans to complain to heaven, to rebuke even God for his unfairness or harshness. Jews certainly spared their "God" no shortage of harsh words as he watched, unmoved, while millions of his chosen people were gassed and burned to ash by the Third Reich.

Beneath their maturity lies a deeper, more primordial vision: the vision that never put a single "God" in charge of all things to begin with. If your helping spirits and household Gods don't have complete charge over the universe, then when tragedy strikes, you don't have to lose your religion. The spirits that care about you can mourn with you, or help you some other way. The world is just hard like that, unpredictable, and not even spirits can stop some things; and even spirits can die or be transformed away from their condition, and into something else. The world is always changing.

Our Buddhist cousins have evolved a worldview that is every bit as mature as what I have been discussing, and it goes back 2500 years. Even though the many worlds of the Buddhists are inhabited by countless Buddhas and Bodhisattvas- universally compassionate and loving beings with miraculous powers, not a single "enlightened" being can save a human from their own karma, the consequences of their own thoughts and actions. The world is full of enlightened beings, but the help they offer suffering mortals is through teaching them how to see themselves and the world properly to escape suffering. But mortals must do it for themselves, must apply the teachings. Buddhas can't spare mortals from house fires or tsunamis. Buddhas can't fix the stock market.

When mortals purify their minds sufficiently, they can sometimes "see" the awakened, compassionate beings (the Buddhas), and understand something of how these beings try to help. But in the end, the Buddhists have no "great God" in charge of the universe; refreshingly, they are a non-theistic world religion.

In Buddhist thinking, nothing is in charge of everything. There are simply many classes of sentient beings, and awakened beings, all interacting and changing and transforming within the inter-connected web of reality. There are no guarantees in this world of "Samsara"- the world inhabited by beings who are not enlightened; Buddha himself described this condition as unreliable and unsatisfactory. And- no surprise- Buddha believed that many Gods did exist, but like the Pagan Europeans, he believed that these Gods were not all-powerful, and had to exist as victims of the greater system, just like mortals. Gods could sometimes interfere in mortal lives, but Gods, in the end, had their own lives to lead.

* * *
The nicest people have to suffer the most awful fates. This is a simple fact of life, as true now as it was when the world was young. There are many ways to react to this fact that no one can deny- you can imagine that it's all "really okay" and that a big all-powerful good guy is really secretly behind it all, or you can see that nothing but countless powers shifting and combining is behind it all. You can see that in the web of causality, the web of power, there are no guessable guarantees, with one possible exception: the bonds of affection that can arise between human beings, and help us endure through this amazing, open, and boundless world of possibility. And sadly, even those bonds can suffer and fail at times. But they are, I think, all we can really put our deepest and best trust in.

I believe in Gods, of course. I believe in spirits or non-human persons that co-exist with us in this great world, seen and unseen. But like my ancestors, I know for a fact that I can't trust my entire well-being to Gods or spirits. I know that I can befriend them, or at least offer my friendship; I know that I can trust in the benevolence of Gods, and the friendship of certain spirits, but not much beyond that. Even the Gods must bow to the weaving of Fate. I can believe that things are working out as they have to, but I also know that, in the fateful sense, "working out as it has to" doesn't mean "in a way that I like it."

I don't have any doubt that some Pagans- like some Native Americans- believed that a sort of "divine justice" existed. We know that such a concept did exist; mortals could not violate the "order" of things- the Rta of the Vedas, without repercussions. But then, neither could Gods. I'm not talking punishment after death, or for eternity; usually the sort of punishment that comes from violating the Cosmic Order comes in terms of a ruined life. It could be "after death", but these sorts of stories become diffuse, strange, and even speculative. Again, there are no guarantees.

That seems so desolate when you compare it to the shining, optimistic story of churches, but ask yourself: which story seems to coincide with the evidence of your senses? I've not seen one shred of evidence- nor felt a shred of evidence- that a great storyteller with wonderful intentions was controlling my world. I have sensed the darksome power of Fate straining behind the threads of reality, and felt the touch of spirits interfering here and there, but never have I encountered anything that would lead me to believe that "the Good God" was in charge. The universe may be set on a fated course for a doom one day, but there is no "plan" for us all. There is only power and the shifting of power, and sentience seeking to know itself within the kaleidoscope, and to live the best it can.

And indeed, as the ancients told us, the Gods themselves are subject to Fate, and fatal, blind Necessity. What's a person to do? It's smart to offer friendship to the other powerful beings that co-exist with us. That's "Pagan common sense." But the real thrust of the ancient organic worldviews generally would seem to be this: don't have great expectations; don't make great plans. Live and love generously here and now, make bonds, don't assume anything about the future. Be flexible. Lean on your fellow humans for aid and comfort, and be a helper yourself. Don't think that you can control everything, or that spirits or Gods can.

Live with the dignity that is native to the human being, for as long as you can, or as long as it is useful to the greater good of your folk. Like the animists of this world, asking a God or a spirit for healing is fine and well; you might get it. But finding a human being who had acquired the power of healing was a far better bet. And yet, even powerful people couldn't heal everything. Live well with your own kind. Cultivate the joy that it was possible for humans to have.

I think that in doing so, we'll find the treasure that truly belongs to humans- and it isn't an eternal life with a God, but a deep satisfaction with our capability to love and be loved, and to work with others for good ends. Who knows what will become of us when the kaleidoscope of power shifts- as all kaleidoscopes do- a "shifting" we call "death". Like the array of colors and shapes in the kaleidoscope, we will change, and remain a part of the web of power, as perhaps we have always been a part of it.

But in what condition, what world, who can say? From day to day, hour to hour, century to century, who can say what will be? Maybe these questions aren't so important. The questions we ask about our lives here and now are, in my way of thinking, the truly important ones. In my way of thinking, "death" is not the greatest issue at all. Living wisely is.

If your religious path begins with wishful thinking about the world, it will end poorly. Don't plant the seeds of absurd optimism early on. Don't live in the world like the world was made for you, or like you are an exceptional part of the world, above its natural cycles and disasters. You aren't. We are conscious parts of a whole, and that whole doesn't show a great preference for us, and nor should it. A deeper pattern is playing out. With us in this situation are Gods, spirits, and other sentient powers, who have themselves learned to endure and thrive in their own great ways. We can learn a lot from them.

Plant seeds of acceptance for the great mystery that faces us all, whatever the form it will take. Plant seeds of real affection for those that have been placed closest to you, and those you meet and recognize a kindred soul in.

We may worry about the premature deaths of our loved ones, but in the shifting of power, we are not the authors of their lives or deaths. We can only offer them our one guarantee: that we will love them and protect them as much as we are able, as far as we are able. That's all anyone can do. If you can't have peace with that, you should take a long look at yourself and your thinking about the world.

These are all good seeds. These sorts of seeds planted at the beginning of any life-path, I believe, will take a person all the way to peace.

* * *
Ruth Holmes Whitehead, the great teacher and expert on Mi'kmaq culture whose books have changed my life so much, makes a statement in her book "Tales from the Six Worlds" that sums up what the Mi'kmaq people felt was the real point and purpose of a wise human life- something that we could focus our energy and attention on, that would serve us always. Want something to invest your time into? What could be so valuable in an unpredictable, dangerous, and beautiful world like this one?

The acquisition of power, that's what. Whitehead writes:

"Because of this aspect that nearly everything in the six worlds- including the geography- can change both its shape and its mind, the universe is unpredictable, unreliable in a European sense. So how do humans and other Persons survive when nothing is necessarily as it seems? They survive by accumulating Power of their own, the ability to change their shapes and modes as circumstances require. This is such an important tenet that almost every story of the People has Power as its central theme: how to acquire it, how to use it, how to lose it, and the consequences attendant on all of the above."

Becoming a shape-shifter, gaining the power to change your own mind and even form to cope with the constant changes of the world- that was the point. Being flexible, in the most powerful sense imaginable, was what led a person to do well in this world, and even in death- for the most powerful Persons in Mi'kmaq stories are able to maintain their power and reconstitute themselves even after death.

And it all comes from being able to accept whatever arises and to shift oneself appropriately to match it, to deal with it. I cover this spiritual aspect of "Shape Shifting" in the textbook of Witchcraft I wrote entitled "The Horn of Evenwood"- not for no reason was the Master of Witches believed to be a great shape-shifter himself! For he is one of the spiritual powers- a non-human Person- who teaches the primordial wisdom that can even overcome death.

On a mundane level, the power of shape-shifting begins with being brave and flexible in your thinking about things in this world. It means being open-minded and not fooled by "everything is going to be alright" stories. It means being responsive to whatever arises in your experience, and not in denial about things that arise and bother you or offend you. May we all internalize this ageless wisdom, and overcome the traps of wishful thinking. May we all engage a mature spirituality, and live well.

The Season of Memory

2009-12-03T22:16:00.000-08:00

A Witchwalk Through the Sacred Season of the Yuletide

* * *
There is snow falling, and a bright, large moon riding across the sky between great continents of cloud. When a man stands outside on the dark ground, on pale fields of snow glowing in moonlight, it's like standing in a dream. Shadows are never more black, and moonlight never more radiant, than when it becomes trapped in web-works of ice and shines out in a pale radiance.

The most powerful part of any walk in the winter night, to me, is the sight of houses from a distance- they are dark, too, but their windows glow in the most inviting orange and gold hue. Each of them is a warm center of life, their walls holding back the life-withering cold and ice. In a sea of freezing power, these ships of glowing life drift in place- seen from the shadowed sky, they would make the dark landscape seem aglow with golden stars.

All around me, in the village, in the woods, in the countryside, are islands of golden warmth, each of them the hearth of a family surviving another winter. Human life is persistent; its allies in the struggle for life are likewise persistent- fire, masonry, beams of wood, stone, and ingenious contraptions of wire and pipe that bring water and electricity in through the worst storms. We are enduring beings. We have endured countless winters.

From one window, a cat peers out at me. That tabby-colored cat sits in pure bliss, legs tucked under his furry chest, eyes narrowed into that tranquil meditative relaxation that cats seem to specialize in. The cat dozes in the warmth, totally unconcerned about the falling flakes of ice and snow that cascade down in front of its face just inches on the other side of glass. How many other cats, throughout the ages, have sheltered next to the warm fires of their masters in this time? That cat is a fellow traveler through time and history with me. I'm glad to see him so warm.

There are candles and wreathes and colored lights dancing about in places. The Winter Solstice time is here, and in the middle of all this frozen desolation, people are preparing to celebrate something as old as humanity itself. Most don't have any clue how far back it goes- most wouldn't think of it as going back before the birthday of Jesus, but these same people drag trees into their homes in this season, keeping alive a Heathen tree worship that certainly pre-dated the Nazarene by a great distance in time.

The name given to the supposed Galilean miracle-worker- "Christ"- has come to dominate what people in the west call this season of ancient power- Christmas- and the "advent" so awaited by the traditional faithful is nothing more than the appearance of this miraculous child. But older names for this time lurk below the surface, known to all who "Toll the ancient Yuletide carol."

* * *
When I stand in the cold and dark of the Yuletide, I always become introspective about the vastness of history and the chasm of eternity that yawns behind it. This time of year, more than most, sends my mind and imagination on a journey through the story of the West. That story begins in places that most people would shrug off as fiction more than fact, but fact it is- every bit of it. If you could have seen it, you would see more golden circles of fire glowing on snow under the veil of night- because ages ago, in the coldest and most distant of places, that's where the ancestors lived and held back the cold and dark.

They had tents, lodges, roundhouses, and villages, all glowing with healthy blazes that were beacons of survival in the frost-gripped world. They wandered a world that was not conveniently mapped out for them or easy to conceive of by whirling a plastic globe around. To the north was mountain; the east, forest; to the west rolling hills and valleys, and south, more forest, stretching as far as the eye could see. The life-giving flow of a river cut through nearby, and the Goddess of that river provided much for them. What was beyond what the eye could see? They didn't know. They would discover what; they were brave and always on the move. Where did the river come from? Who were the other people, the strangers, stalking through the forests south?

The ice and snow that blanketed their world, it was not just the predictable result of a meteorologists' report; it was magical power. It was the footprints of giants, the breath of giants, covering the world with their brutal power. It was power from a world of ice which lay far beyond, and the one day, they knew, the powers of light and life would shift and banish those cold powers, at least for a time. There was a struggle in the cosmos about them, which paralleled their struggle right here in the village or camp- to enclose themselves with safe circles of fire and strong men and women, safe in the sacred enclosure of kin.

There was nothing in the world that didn't hold some fascination, for all of it was mystical or magical power of a kind. For these people, the presence of something mystical or magical wasn't such a shock; they lived in a world full of Gods, a world full of powers. Some powers were human and animal; others were immensely greater. All were part of a web of power which excluded nothing. There were magical treasures, things humans could create or obtain, which granted safety or skill or power to their owners or their groups. There were places of power in the landscape to be found, the work of previous hands, either lost groups of human beings or perhaps the Giants themselves.

It sounds like high fantasy, but it is reality, plain and simple. This is our origin. Not just these people or their technologies, but their worldviews- their belief in the awesome sacred powers which surrounded them. When we forget these people, or consign them to a realm of fantasy, we forget so much about who we are. For who we are is partly determined by who we were- and in fact, I might say, the very best parts of us owe so much to who we were.

If we want to know where we are "going", as a culture, as massive groups of people whose bloodlines run back to those distant times, we have to look back to the ancients, for the clues to our final destination are found in our beginnings. The end is always present at the beginning, and the beginning at the end, because life and causality finally and ultimately describes a great circle of power. We aren't in an "open ended" universe, and we never were. We are enclosed in power and destiny, though it is a vision so massive as to seem quite bottomless to the person who lacks the poetic vision to really look.

My journey continues, through more dark trees and snow-covered fields, down the course of great rivers, to a southern sea that encloses the reaches of many glittering ancient civilizations. People here placed stone upon stone and raised monuments of awesome power. Here, they raised temples and gleaming cities by the water-lanes of commerce. Here, they forged ideas of philosophy that transcended their own concerns and attempted to embrace the entirety of things. Here, the Gods still lived and still joined with mortal men in the great work of destiny.

* * *
For countless generations, these societies- so different from the people of the Northern fires, and yet, so similar in other ways- wore out their Fated time, and achieved reaches of glory which have still not been matched by our vain modern day. Something of the old mysticism from time's first human dawn still lived in these ancient cities and cyclopean temples. Among the Romans, the great reign of king Saturn the Sower was commemorated in the darkness of December; the rites and celebrations of the Saturnalia were simultaneous to the joyous birth of the Persian savior Mithras. Life wasn't just enduring; it was being reborn, a new golden age was being celebrated, at the deep of winter.

These rites were half civilized and half barbaric- at times wild, orgiastic, yet solemn and profound at other times. Don't mistake me- the barbarism was found in the solemnity, not the celebration, for only people out of touch with the sacredness of the wild ever innovate the technologies and social systems that truly harm this world. But the ancient struggle of the wild and the structured pranced on in its mesmerizing leaps then, as it does now.

These Pagan people are my Ancestors, and yours. They are who we were, and in so many ways still are. I embrace them, all of them, and I love them. I appreciate their wisdom, their aesthetics, and I know their hopes in dreams by having a long look at my own. Without these great and brave people, nothing we have now would exist; not this language, this computer that I am staring at as I type, not our social values of democracy and humanitarianism, of liberty and scientific inquiry, our spirit of philosophy and our very souls. The very glass I lifted to toast with tonight, under a fresh sprig of mistletoe, was raised first by the Northern people from whom I gain this flesh and blood.

My journey has to take a dark turn now; the ragged ruins of the world around me still have some of the old wisdom glowing in them, like heat and light in the embers that remain after a majestic building is burned down. And the edifice of the ancient world's true life was burned down by fear and ignorance. Let us never forget the awful power of these twin forces- ever more devastating than any modern nuclear weapon, more pervasive than any political unrest. The precious Gods that once wandered with the Ancestors through the same snow that is under my feet, and who were once praised in temples of great majesty, were once abandoned by Kings and people of power, and gradually, by the commoners that followed them. Not everyone left the Gods behind, but many did, and soon, it was the sword that assured that only one way of believing would be allowed.

This shift wasn't simple, nor fast, nor did it reflect only a drama in the human mind; the world fell to ruins around it. Rome was undermined by it; Rome burned to the ground over it. The next fifteen hundred years are called "Dark Ages"- and not for no reason. The lamps of Greek learning were dark. Civilization's order collapsed. Literacy was lost. Ancient cultural arts and achievements were lost. The great spirit of the Northern folk was torn from the land itself and crowded into dirty villages and towns and cities, and into churches, whose harsh bells drove the spirits of the land away in disgust and fear.

There was no more magic to be found in the landscape or the mountains or in the worlds of Gods; that magic was categorized as satanic trickery and a snare of diabolism. No longer could the sun or moon or stars, or wells or groves of trees be a merging point for human souls to enjoy their connection with the sacred All; now, Popes wrote documents containing the penalties for those who enjoyed these ages-old activities.

* * *
When I look at the crosses on the church buildings near me, I see the cruelty of these ages staring back at me. I see the cross of ignorance, which has crucified countless people of my blood and of the same legacy as me. I see the old solar Gods, blazing out from their own ancient crosses, and even bloody dead Gods from Pagan times who emerged from their own deaths to the great joy of their followers, now sunk low while Jesus reigns from on high, morally pure, ready to judge the quick and the dead.

I see the continuation of the most distant and degenerate form of Roman Paganism in those churches. I see great hopes for eternal happiness, and I see despair. I see ages of ancient power echoing in the cross, that old power forming a great austere background of force that informs the entire edifice of Christianity, but which is ignored fully by the faithful themselves. That power, they reason, is God; that power is the Holy Spirit. A rather simplistic final product for so many centuries of hope and fear, of blood and conquest, of dead Gods and risen Gods, of decadent Roman courts and of dark incense-filled temples and churches covered with colorful mosaics.

Christians have never been free of the Saturnian Pagan Yuletide. Their savior gained a birthday on the winter solstice, taking for his company an ancient cavalcade of divine figures; Christians were latecomers to the ancient power of the season. But they joined, and added a new dimension to it. That dimension is, to me, the least of all; it is the least wise, the least compelling, and the most superficial. But it is the most pronounced, today- especially when you walk through the snowy village in your head, like I am now.

I see the nativity scene, complete with big plastic camels poking up with their humps out of the snow. Camels in the snow- Semitic shepherds and Persian astrologers huddled around a plastic manger, covered in snow, in a northern forest, in the front yard of a family whose surname is "Bachmeier"- as Teutonic a surname as you can get. There you have it. While the sacred Yule-season of their ancestors is glowing in power around them, the Bachmeiers place faded plastic statues of Near-Eastern goat herders and Persians and camels in their yard, and pray to an ancient Hebrew man, and the ancient God of Israel- who was never worshiped in a Yule or a Saturnalia.

Does Father Bachmeier know about Sigurd and Sigrdrifa, or Arminius? Does he know about Jolnir or the Disir of this time? Does he know what the "Weihnachten" really stands for? Or does he really sit around singing about Angels and Bethlehem and Jerusalem? We have truly lost our souls when a person even needs to ask these sorts of questions. We have lost our true senses. Thank the Gods for remaining with us through these dark times. Gods, we are coming home- but excuse us; some of us have lost the way. They'll take a little longer getting there. We know you understand, and remain with us anyway.

* * *
There is something about the West- our great spirit, our great contribution to the world- which is tied into our theism. We've always believed in Gods. Recently, we've betrayed the living Gods for the spiteful Monotheism of the ancient Hebrews, but as I said before- just wait. The end is in the beginning. The Gods are not gone, nor done with us, nor we with them. We are going through a painful growing phase. We are the ones that changed, and not so long ago, all things considered.

But something around us isn't changing. This snow- this night- it is the same. Night is night, in any age. Her darkness has touched the face of every human being that has ever lived. The same water that fell as ice onto the ancients melted and rose again to freeze again and fall onto me, now. Nature, majestic Nature, She is forever young and forever ancient. She is something we all have in common. She has seen many religions come and go, many civilizations rise and fall. She is common grave-mound and tomb to us all, and to all things. She is common mother to us all. Want a truly enduring religion? Worship her. In her is the essence of all religions arisen before or arisen recently. She is the true Godhead of creation and destruction. In her, all things come to pass. In her, all things are made new.

We Westerners are "Godists" if there ever were any. While the highest philosophical ponderings of the East lead people away from God or Gods, we hang on to our "big man in the sky". I hang on to my ancestors' "big men and women in the sky and under the earth", but that's just me and a few others like me. And I am, of course, risking the comical here- the Gods aren't men and women. Something about the spirit of the West is found in theism, found in our own belief that one day, we have to journey beyond this world to face a mystery.

For some, that mystery is in judgment. They will die and cross the final veil hoping for their heavenly retirement plans to be cashed in, and fearing that perhaps they won't be. It will be for the judge to say, after all. For others, that "final" mystery is another long journey to be back again at the beginning, and among the people of the beginning- the ancestors. And from there? Who can say?

But I can say one thing- the dead are not gone, not taken from this world, and nor is there an escape from the world. The supreme selfishness, the supreme lack of wisdom of any religion would be in how it teaches escapism of the soul or spirit. I will be dead and yet alive in the land, in the rivers, in the mounds, in the sky, in the winds. I know this, because I've seen it. I will be present to this collection of sacred powers then for the same reason I am now- because there is no other place to be. In the enclosure of life, of power, this is it. See the snow with your earthly eyes; see the trees; when you are dead, and seeing in a new way, they will still be there and so will you, though how it will seem to you then, only the dead can know.

* * *
I'm walking now, in my head, remembering a real walk through snow; I know that my journey is ongoing and won't end, ever. I'm moving through the forest now like the ancestors, and remembering them in the season of memory, the great Yule season.

While my Christian neighbors are singing happy birthday to Jesus, I will be sitting around a fire with the Ancestresses, with the Yule-father and his host, with my family and with the giants of the great cold. A collection of sacred kindreds is precisely what this season is- along with any other season, truth be known. But this sublime cold and dark cracks open a special kind of perception for those who can brave it long enough. In this darkness, we can really go back to the beginning. And we must go back to the beginning if we want to complete our circle and be whole.

My Yule-wish for all of Europe's sons and daughters- and truly, anyone else- is this: do not live on the "timeline" of the soteriologist- live in the natural circle of power which no God can create. This world did not "begin" one day at the whim of a creator, and will not "end" just as quickly; it is not an arrow-shot story with a single conclusion, but a woven circularity of eternity that has no ending. I want you all to be whole, complete, and joyful.

Your completion is not found in Judeo-christian triumphalist religious fictions, but in this very snow, this very world, in the spirits of those who came before you and who believed in the Gods. Do not isolate yourself behind the walls of churches; let the world become your temple, as it was for your ancestors. Reject the lies of human exceptionalism, and take your place as equal kin to the land and the wild beasts and the Gods.

Understand that the womb is the most sacred thing, and that our Greatest Grandmothers are the beings to whom we owe all of this. If you discover a religion blaming women for the downfall of the world, or crushing women underfoot- commanding them to subservience or silence- reject it as an enemy of the common sacred life that we all share.

Our ancestor-women were not weak women, second to men: they were women of power; seeresses, valkyries, spear-disir, women who ruled as queens, women who raised children in brutal and dangerous circumstances, who held the keys to our homes and hearths, and who remembered our sacred stories and passed down rare wisdom through many generations. They wove the threads of our Fates as certainly as they wove the sails on the ships that carried our ancestors to glory and renown, or as certainly as they wove the linens and wools that our people wore to survive in the cold and weather.

As dark irony would have it, even the Abrahamic barbarians owe their entire existence to the women they accuse of mothering sin and death, and whom they punish for leading men astray to sin with lust. For the women in those faiths, trapped without choice, or simply ignorant of the great legacy to which they belong, I wish for freedom and justice.

For those women outside of that bondage, I wish them the strength to remain outside of it, and raise strong daughters and sons like themselves, to make our new Pagan future a great one. May the strength of our woman-kind make us whole and strong, now, as always.

Hushe and Baloo: Protecting Children from the Weird Otherness

2009-10-20T19:17:00.000-07:00

Are children, both the newly-born and toddlers, in some sort of danger from the Unseen world, simply by virtue of surviving their births? The testament of the ancients, as it has passed to us in the fund of folklore, would say "yes". A mountain of folklore from Northern and Western Europe deal with the pervasive fear experienced by mothers and the folk of previous centuries regarding "changelings" and the common theme of "stolen children"- and the many traditional steps taken to shield children from the dangers of the unseen and supernatural.

People have struggled to come to grips with these strange beliefs in many ways. The simplest modern explanation would have us believe that "changeling" stories were vibrant folkloric expressions of a very real sort of loss- the common deaths of children at a very early age, rooted in a time when infant and toddler mortality was very high. Perhaps, it is reasoned, parents might prefer to imagine their dead children were in reality "taken" and still alive in some fashion, while the corpse they were burying was merely a copy.

If this was the case- and I don't believe it was- it certainly wouldn't belong to the realm of superstition, but to the common comfort sought by every Christian mother who ever lost a small child, in any age (including this one): the idea that her lost child lives on in heaven, while the earthly body is only a "shell" to be buried. One cannot look at changeling lore and not see the common themes: another world to which children are taken, and the meaningless or fake wooden copy left behind.

But changeling stories have another, more disturbing element, especially in Irish folklore: the idea that the child has been exchanged with a living being, a faery which takes the form of the child and continues to live as the child. Many charms and rituals exist for forcing the faery-people to return the actual child and take back the changeling. Some of those charms include nothing more than forcing the changeling to reveal its true nature by allowing it to see something it finds amazing or ludicrous, after which it cannot hold back from revealing its preternatural intelligence by expressing its wonder or making a comment- such as the boiling of water or beer inside of egg-shells.

The act of displaying its Otherworldly nature is enough to force it to leave or be banished, with the hopeful instant return of the original child.

This is an element of changeling mythos that brings us into a new realm of mystical speculation. Clearly, we aren't dealing with death in some folkloric way, but with the loss of a child to a supernatural "other". For all practical purposes, the "child" is still there, kicking, eating, squawking, and seeming innocent (even if changeling babies were rumored to eat voraciously and seldom be satisfied, and never gain weight) but the parents suspect that something is "wrong" with their child, to the point of believing that they no longer are in possession of their child.

Sadly, some charms to force the faery-people to return the original child required the "changeling" baby to be tormented or tortured in some way- and I have heard that deaths of the suspected changelings sometimes occurred in the rural places.

These sorts of legends beg for an elucidation that goes beyond the simple dismissal of the modern day researchers who are all too quick to say "ignorant superstition" and leave it at that. It is my contention that the ancients felt that ominous, weird forces did threaten "new" children, and there is a very easy-to-understand reason why. A "new" child isn't a "new" thing at all, but, in line with the ancient beliefs, a continuance of a being or entity of some sort (a spirit) from the unseen that has come into this world through the event of birth.

That "new" child is simultaneously a new member of a human community, but an ageless member of the oldest community of all: the community of spiritual forces that we are all a part of. As we have worn out our lives in this world, we have forgotten our more ancient connections with the powers of the Unseen world; I believe that we will recall those connections, on some level, when we all must return to that state at death.

But the ancients clearly believed that something needed to be done to truly separate a child from the grip of the unseen, as soon as it was born- and the Pagan rites of baptism, the "sprinkling with water" of both the ancient Druids and the ancient Teutons, is the primary example of the use of water to magically separate a newborn from the grip of the unseen, and differentiate it fully into a "worldly" state. That names were bestowed during these sorts of rites is also easy to understand; to name something or someone is to bestow on it a status in this world, in the order of our minds and communities. A "naming" is an act of will that differentiates something from the mysterious background-reality out of which all things come, and gives it an identity.

This sort of naming gives a sort of protection. The ritual of baptism utilizes water, which was itself seen as symbolic of the "primal, watery layers" of the ultimate origins of things- the Bog-Weird, the murk or the "primordial ooze" that some say was the true origin of physical life in this world. The water is a symbol of the dark depths of unconsciousness, the murky depths of the originating unseen, and Fate. If the bright flame of fire is the light of this world, the dark waters are symbols of the other. To sprinkle or baptize a child with water is a symbolic re-exposure to the unseen, so that the child can be then named and re-integrated formally into this world, as the unseen watches.

It is no mistake that so many of the ancients of Europe believed that death was marked by the soul's passage over a watery boundary- it had a correlation to the passage over water into this world in the first place- passage through the physical watery fluid of the womb, and the following "sprinkling" of the consecrating waters over the infant. The Christian rite of baptism neatly replaced the "water sprinkling" rite of the ancients, and continued to uphold this ancient logic.

Apparently, the "connections" we have in the Unseen world are not always so eager to give us up to our fateful journey (through conception and birth) into the world of men and women, and, it was believed, the strange forces that lingered near children might try to steal them back, or cause tragic accidents or sickness to kill them, thereby getting them back again. Alwyn and Brinley Rees, in their indispensable work "Celtic Heritage" report:

"In the west of Ireland to the present day, a newborn child is palpably within the grip of unseen forces, and precautions have to be taken lest it be born away by the fairies. It will be remembered that it was a supernatural claw that snatched Pryderi from his mother's side. The danger of abduction is greatly reduced by baptism, and the child is sometimes given a temporary name, or a lay baptism is resorted to, to protect it until a proper ceremony can be arranged. Baptism is also widely believed to be efficacious in restoring a child to health, that is, in preventing it from slipping back into the unseen world. By being returned through water to the world beyond, and brought back again by the proper ritual, the child is separated more completely from its uncanny associations with the unseen world. From now on, its relations with that world will be channeled through the proper rites" (p. 242-243.)

There is an interesting relationship to the newborn and its unseen "other"- for, as I have covered in great detail in my many writings concerning Witchcraft, the Witch- a human man or woman who intentionally "crosses the boundary" between this world and the unseen, does so through relationship with a familiar power from the "other side" which is precisely that "Other". The Witch cultivates, as an adult, the "uncanny associations" that the Rees mention, and which children come into this world still strongly in the grip of. Baptism rites, either Pagan or Christian, are attempts to "de-witch" or "un-witch" a child, so that it can safely and more easily develop into a worldly life.

It may be strange to imagine the Unseen powers trying to "reclaim" a newborn; but when one examines the opposite extreme, the end of life, it is easy to understand. When our loved ones die, we normally don't want to let them go- if we could do some ritual that would literally pull them back from the Unseen, mysterious condition they have gone into, many would certainly do it. Would we be so different from those mysterious forces that may mourn a friend or comrade of theirs departing from the unseen to become integrated into this world of materiality, and who are using their power to bring that comrade "home"? The point, I think, is that transitions are never easy, on either end of life's spectrum, because the fact of parting is a tearful occasion. But for the order of things to work, we must integrate successfully, and transition successfully, as dignified beings.

The Rees go on to say:

"If we are right in interpreting the changeling as a personification of the otherworldly side of a human child's nature, these tales may refer to a pre-Christian rite analogous to baptism, whereby the human child itself was ritually "expelled" or "exposed" so as to separate it from the supernatural and save it from being possessed by its mysterious "other" self" (p. 243).

The Folklore Society of Great Britain, in 1894, put out their Folk-Lore, A Quarterly Review of Myth, Tradition, Institution and Custom. All of their works are treasure-troves of folkloric insight into the strange metaphysics of the Unseen; this edition contained many treasures, including a Scottish lullaby-poem, discovered in 1801 scrawled on the fly-leaf of a book, in the "thin, sharp-pointed handwriting used by ladies at the beginning of the century", but which probably belonged to the last century.

Some unknown Scottish mother had penned this lullaby for her child. I will give the Lullaby as it was written, and then give a modern transliteration of it, for those who may not be quite so up on their comprehension of the rich local, dialectical terminology and word-usages of that age:

"The Boomen and Maukins are scourin the steep,
The puir wee bit mousie's nae mair at her ease,
For the howlet is scrieghin amang the lane trees,
But ye'll sleep my luvelie, Hushe, Hushe and baloo,
And I'll keep the Boomen frae medlin wi' you.
Wheesh there, Wullie Moolie, Hushe, Hushe noo my pet,
Hear, Hear how he's jinglin the hesp o' the yett,
He'll be here in a jiffie, Hushe, Hushe now my dear,
For queyt sleepin babies he winnae come near,
Gae 'wa ugly Wullie, my bairnie I'll keep,
Ye dinna tak wee yins wha'll cuddle and sleep,
Na! Hushe and baloo babie, Hushe and baloo,
There s nae Wullie Moolie sall ever get you."

"Boomen" are supernatural creatures, like goblins or bogles; Maukins- malkins- are witches in cat or hare form. The "Wullie Moolie" would appear to be a booman of its own, but a very particular type: a "wooly earthy" thing ("mool" means earth)- either a spiritual presence known well in this woman's part of Scotland, or something more ancient/sinister; the devil himself? It would appear to be a chthonic, hairy thing, and the Devil gets that appearance often enough. Whatever it is, it, like the boomen and witches (all representing the powers of the unseen world) are a threat to young children.

In modern English:

"The boomen and maukins are scouring the hills, (or countryside)
The poor, tiny mouse is no more at her ease,
For the owl is screeching among the trees of the lane,
But you'll sleep my lovely, hush, hush and easily sleep,
And I'll keep the boomen from meddling with you.
Shush there, Wullie Moolie, hush, hush now my pet,
Hear, hear how he's jingling the clasp of the gate,
He'll be here in a jiffy, hush, hush now my dear,
For quiet, sleeping babies he won't come near.
Go away, ugly Wullie, my baby I'll keep,
You don't take small babies who'll cuddle and sleep.
Now! Hush and easily sleep, baby, hush and easy sleep,
There's no Wullie Moolie shall ever get you."

I think this rare bit of folklore encompasses more than just a woman's heart-felt lullaby; it can also be read as a protection charm. The dangers of the world around are reflected in the animal kingdom- the night is dangerous even for the poor mouse who is terrified by the screeches of owls. That same night has bogles and witches "scouring"- looking for something? But this child will sleep, and it appears that sleeping and being quiet is the best protection from the "Wullie Moolie"- for it is attracted by cries in the night. One can easily divine one of the earliest kinds of protection for children from this- certainly the earliest pre-cultural humans risked being found by night-predators because of the cries of their infants.

Being quiet in the dangerous darkness would just seem to be common sense. No Scottish woman from the late 1700's would have had any knowledge of pre-cultural humanity cowering in the jungles, hoping that tigers or lions (quite wooly or furry things themselves) didn't find them in the night. But human beings are not designed to be nocturnal; we, like all diurnal creatures who are naturally helpless or less capable in the dark know instinctively how to hide and be quiet. I think it is hard-wired into us to both fear the dark and to not move around or make much noise in it, in the same way that baby chicks come forth from the womb naturally afraid of the shadows of predator birds that they have never seen.

If any of these ancient, instinctual/intuitive impulses had anything to do with this lullaby, they were fully unconscious on the mother's part. But these unconscious powers don't stay down in the dark; they emerge in surprising other ways. I'm not at all suggesting that boomen and maukins are just "folkloric symbols" for unconscious fears born in pre-cultural predation; I know that some people have advanced this theory, but I don't agree. I think that the deep, watery chasm of inherited biological experience that layers deep in our humanity does contain ancient fears, but they are only a part of a bigger story. Entities like Boomen and Maukins are quite real in their own right, and belong to that shadowy, unseen world that the "primal wilderness darkness" is only a single historical manifestation of.

And children, as we have seen, are more vulnerable to them, for many reasons. May the wisdom of the old people help us to understand these mysteries and thereby help our young ones on their journeys through life.

The Village, or, The Pendulum of Souls

2009-10-16T12:15:00.000-07:00

Good day, friends:

I have just completed a writing project regarding New England Witchery, which includes a detailed study of the metaphysics of Hedge or Boundary-crossing, and a complete system of Sigil-based sorcery and hexing. I have made the entire project available online, and can be viewed by clicking Here.

I hope that you enjoy this Hallows gift from me to you and yours.

RA

WEIKERIE: The True Story of Witchcraft, Then and Now

2009-08-13T17:14:00.001-07:00

In the mists of the most ancient of days, our first ancestors lived on broad, expansive grasslands with endless stretches of rivers and dark stands of forest scattered about. Distant mountains rose up to clouds, and frost-bringing winds scoured the ground and trees in winter. We don't know where they came from originally, but when they first expressed their primordial cultural yearnings with invention and imagination, binding themselves together into cohesive and related groups through the powers of language-sorcery and artifice-art, they were east of Europe, in the trans-Eurasian steppes, near the great inland Caspian sea, and in the environs of the Don and Dneiper rivers.

It really doesn't matter where they were; the world at that time was nothing like it is now. No one lived then who had a vision of a blue globe glowing in the black void of space; no one lived then who knew every mountain chain and what lay beyond every ocean. No one had even the first idea of the many different sorts of people or civilizations that might be encountered if they traveled far enough in any direction. What "world" means to us now is nothing like what it meant to them.

These ancestors were wise in other ways; they lived on the soil, under the sky, with an infinite omnidirectional power of multi-faceted life and mystery stretching away from them: the mystery of the ancestral land. It was linked, harmonically, to the mystery of the glowing stars in the freezing night, whose shapes traced out destiny. This was the foretime of our ancestors; animals spoke, all things possessed strange powers, and Gods and demons walked the earth and fought for supremacy amid the majestic forces of nature's great body. The dead were not severed away and gone; they dwelled in the land, as part of it; they interacted with the living in regular ways and following hidden cycles of the dusk-world.

As our people wandered and spread out into the unknown, they came to know of the other peoples they encountered; and they knew, after a course of countless centuries of mystical connection, even deeper lores about the land and sky which they had organically learned through spectral intercourse with the spirit world: that intensely mysterious "other side" of life, reached through extraordinary states of conscious awareness. They knew what they needed to know then about the luminous ruling powers- strange divine entities- that ruled the plains of the heavens, and they knew, from an even earlier date, about the spirits that appeared as plants and animals, and about the spirits of the dead, in the gaping darkness of the world below.

They knew about primal forces that were divine, who were so old as to be nameless, but still potent- the dark female spirit who through the noose of death around the dying and bound all things with Fate beneath the grave, and who drew souls to birth from the black waters below; they knew about the entity who emerged from the deepest places of the soul as a mighty, antlered being, with a potent and erect phallus, master of serpents and beasts; they knew about the whirling, rushing, windy inspirer of rage and ecstasy; they knew the land itself as a feminine entity of titanic, giving and taking power, mother to all that lived.

They knew of malevolent entities, enemies of the bright powers and some, very ancient, dwelling serpent-like in the land and waters, corrupting and consuming, hording and destroying with disease and cold and fire. They saw the struggles of the spirit world, mimicking the struggles of the earthly world, the numinal and phenomenal fully inter-connected, within each realm and between them, across the misty border of twilight-states. They saw the great cycles of space, time, sun, moon, birth, life, season, and death, endlessly whirling within the spindle of unguessable Fate and her pale handmaidens.

Among these men and women, our greatest grandmothers and grandfathers, as among all people in the ancient world, there arose a segment of spiritual workers who had the prerequisite strangeness about them, the cunning or bravery or unexplainable warping of mind, body, or soul which gave them access to the unseen. This special quality made them capable of channeling the mysteries of the unseen world, with all its living powers and bizarre, ancient entities, into the frame of reference of the common man or woman gathered around the night-time fires. They were practitioners of a series of related-though-broad spiritual esoteric sciences and practices, giving them the power to interact with unseen powers, speak to the dead, divine and prophesize, propitiate spirits, and move in spiritual journeys beyond the boundaries of the body, into the whiteness and darkness beyond sense and easy conception.

These men and women- the first sorcerers of these ancients- were parts of a cultural phenomenon captured distantly by the ancient word WEIK- "that which regards sorcery and religious matters". One etymological branch of that old word, WIK, pertains to the "sacred", the "holy", and the act of consecrating and even sacrificing. From WEIK, through its branch of WIH, we gain "guile" and "craftiness"- and seership, the person of the seer or prophet, and the sorcerer. We gain WEID, WID and WIT, "to see" and "to know"- two functions that are always connected in the ancient root-languages; from WEIK, finally, we gain WIKKE and WIKKERIE- and finally, down through the corridors of time's mutations of language, we gain "Witch."

WEIK might be called the "religion of the sorcerers", but to those ancients, religion and sorcery were not yet evolved so far apart as to be seen as radically different or opposed to one another. Today, most see the two institutions of sorcery and religion as diametrically placed across a spectrum from one another; in reality, anciently, a more holistic view likely existed, displaying the mysteries of the holy and terrifying Unseen World as an integral part of what they experienced as "this world"- such that interaction with the unseen powers was as much an interaction with the deep places of the self as with the deep places of the world. Interacting with "them" was both religious and sorcerous- intended to bring about needful ends.

Most of us know where this true story of these ancient people goes: vast gulfs of time rise up and they break apart, migrate, wander, and enter into the group-story of other branches of the human family, always taking their related but mutating languages and sacred cultural root-concepts with them. They begin to take on different surface identities, drawn from changes in language that naturally occur when they integrate foreign languages they discovered, and they changed in response to the different lands they came to inhabit, coming to know new powers, civilizations, and mysteries. Their wise people laid down the seeds that would become what we call "myths" today; in some places, they lifted glittering cities to the sky and tamed the seas, empires rose and conquered and fell, and in others, they lived among forests and valleys in small groups and villages, maintaining a thriving and ancient tradition of storytelling and vibrant expressions of poetic art.

As time passed, "religion" and "sorcery" did drift apart into two separate-seeming phenomena; temples and state religions and priesthoods arose, and practitioners of the far-flung arts of WEIK dwindled into an indistinct group of practitioners of the spirit-art, in dozens of unique local forms, sometimes they were respected, in other places and times were seen with ambivalent eyes, and in others, with some fear or hostility. As ages passed, one thing remained the same: the Unseen World never lost its ability to confuse, frighten, or cause wonder. It was never explained away. It still has not been; and I contend that it never will be.

Ages changed and changed again, and a world like the one we know now began to take shape. The rather flimsy story of "history" became more and more codified as a tool of the powerful, and the spiritual destiny of all people in the west fell into the lap of the conquering monotheistic Catholic faith. With that institution arose a Europe which began to organize itself into the national groupings we know now; and in that recent chapter of civilization's story, the stories of Gods, spirits, witches, and the world of the foretime have all become dim, shallow curiosities to most, and academic stock found on the dusty shelves of libraries and universities. Within those bits and pieces of the cultural past one may find just hints of the great world that once existed; one may also find keys to the doors that lead deep into the past, to the feet of the men and women who practiced WEIKERIE- the elder "craft" of the cunning and wise, those who see and know in ways that others cannot or will not.

Even in this world, this electron-haunted, mass-media linked world of consumers and bright lights, the strange powers that gathered behind the men and women of the WEIK still exist; as old as the desert sands or the steppe winds, as old as the lineage of oaks or ravens, the strangeness of the Unseen is still there.

In the Middle Ages, the potent echoes of Weikerie still glanced about the forests and village corners; to the laps of the healers, herbalists, hedge-sorcerers, craft-keepers and storytellers fell the ancient inheritance of the preternatural legacy of the foretime, though it was not (by this time) received in some directly “transmitted” form from other people; it came in a more profound way, as a part of the natural and innate metaphysic of the souls of people descended from the ancestors who knew WEIK, and from spirits. As the hateful "enlightenment" came, with its new sorcery of science and soul-choking materialistic empiricism, even those final bearers of the wisdom of the ancient world dwindled into caricatures encircled by mocking overtones of "superstition."

Today, the notion of the religions and magical systems of the past as "absurd" and "superstitiously ignorant" still informs the minds of most so-called "educated" people- but the presence of WEIK is far from dead or stamped out. Like the Unseen World of which it is a part, it is forever dynamic and able to morph and transform and hide and appear, revealing itself even today in what times and places it will. The chief "place" it reveals itself, in forms sometimes ancient and sometimes unique to the modern day, is in the minds of men and women who bear the spiritual mark and developmental disposition required to make a fertile manifesting ground for it. Through those minds, minds that become bridges and gates, blade-edge bridges and doors of dream and nightmare, the oldest of stories is still playing out, still shaping the destinies of individuals and groups, and through them, the world, in subtle ways of connection.

WEIK, in its most ancient root-form, was certainly what we might describe as "necromantic", "land-centered", "mantic" in the sense of "divinatory", and even "shamanic", to coin an academic phrase appropriated from a people of distant Siberia. If we are to take the reports of sorcery throughout the ages as partial evidence for the shape of the distant "magical seeds", we can say that WEIK dealt with the transformation of the mind and perceptions into shapes that could perceive the unseen; it dealt with the idea of journey through the skies and through night in a spirit-form or subtle body that could change its shape, and ride with spirits in the liberation of flight; it dealt with communication with the dead and the elfin spirits of the land, the "waihts" or "ansu" or the "people" under the hills- whether they be natural hills or burial mounds.

It dealt with propitiating nature-spirits that inhabited (and still inhabit) the natural world; it dealt with trance-delirium for the purpose of prophecy. It dealt with curses and cures for diseases; it dealt with deception of the senses and control of the faculties of others. It dealt with herb lore and wortcunning, the use of sacred intoxicants, and of mystical influence over the weather and beasts.

Within WEIK was certainly a notion of immortal spirit-bodies that survived the grave, and of transformations that could overcome the living and the dead in the post-mortem state, and how spirits could be bound, released, or accessed. Within it was a notion of rebirth for some, by mysterious means, and a notion of deadly, fatal consequence, binding all beings based on their deeds and Fate. There was a notion, as old as the Ancients themselves, of the birth and death and regeneration of the cosmos, which each individual life microcosmically demonstrated in its own birth, life, and death.

There was a notion of the transformative turning and binding that held all things together, and made all things- entities of any kind, no matter whether they appeared as human, plant, mineral, animal, or otherwise- actually and sympathetically connected and able to affect one another.

What is one to make of such things? What we must concern ourselves with most is the impact of WEIK's undying legacy on the modern world which it exerts through each of us- we who have felt an attraction to the unknown and occult and the religious or spiritual experiences of the very old times. For some of us, that strange fascination will lead them to the altars of the Old Gods; for a small percentage, it will lead to the door of sorcery in the most authentic sense. The map of that journey leads through many houses and countries, and has many dead ends.

Some despair and never finish the journey. Others, however, find their way to the house of the Binding Weird-Lady and her pale women who weave the Fate of the world, and in the forested hollows of the Antler-crowned king. For some, it leads to the subversive, soul-shattering, soul-stealing and soul-reshaping initiations of the Master of Sorcery, who still leads covens here and there through the back roads of our towns and troubled woods. The dance of the "feery folk" is still going on, following the same ring that it followed when our ancestors first challenged the new world with their bravery and grasp for the extraordinary.

What these people find is more than just the timeless houses of ancient Gods or spirits. They find undimensioned reaches of the self "opened" and new capacities of thinking and experiencing unsealed, just as vibrant and alive as they were in ages past. The sorcerer of today and the sorcerer of ages ago both transcend "religion" and "magic" as a false division; they find the fullness of the human metaphysical potential, the true meaning of "spiritual ecology", and they find the true poetry of life.

The path of Weikerie is not about rebirthing "old religions" into the modern day, though that may be an aspect of it; it would be more accurate to describe it as the ongoing relationship of timeless entities and powers with the modern day, through the minds and bodies of living people. Weikerie's touch is melded seamlessly with the modern day, in surprising ways, but it is still different, ancient and new at once, and mystically potent.

The oldest powers- even those once worshiped as Gods- are still here, and by this distant age, their truest and oldest names have all but passed away into myth and forgetfulness; but their images still emerge from within the deepest places of the folk of WEIK; the spinning grand-crone, the blood-drinking woman of skulls, the phallic antlered man, the entity of light and raging force of insight, the spirit of the storm, the bodies of light in the ground, the fruitful and perilous earth-mother, the women in the wells and waters, the serpent-monsters and theriomorphs in the deep places, the hosts of the heavens and hells.

These images are not just phantasmagoria from a forgotten age; they are the avatars of real potencies that forever live in the out-weaving of the universal pattern. We, too, as human beings live in them and interact with them, forever. It matters not how much we have forgotten our place in things, and our place in the ancient tree of spectral inter-relation. The universe whirls on regardless, to our detriment if we remain forgetful. These images and forces live in us- all of us- at the deepest levels, and no matter of a few thousand years of following the creed of an alien religion and metaphysic can spare us the destiny-patterns set down by uncountable millennia of ancestral expression. When we rediscover the power of WEIK, we rediscover who and what we really are- because this story I've been telling isn't fiction. It's reality; it was real; these grandmothers and grandfathers were real, and these beliefs were held by more of our ancestors than not.

We are those grandmothers and grandfathers, living now- spirit-bodies passed down through timeless spheres of experience, swam back to a human experience, all human bloodlines still bound by the patterns of ritual and culture and belief of the past, and shaped by true sorcerous workings of magnitudes that even myths today cannot adequately express. Their poetry was ours; their sorcery is ours, too. What sorcery channeled then is what it channels now- something trans-cultural and far beyond the human range of full comprehension; in real sorcery is a freedom from any limitation imposed by cultural boundary or twist of moral or politics. It is an encounter with the most authentic, timeless forces and powers, as they exist in the bodies and minds of men and women- and when taken far enough, sorcery is the final and ultimate transformation of a person's destiny.

A Sabbatical Hodge Podge

2009-06-18T13:39:00.000-07:00

A Sabbatical Hodge Podge: The Problems of the Eightfold Sabbat System

Why Your Eightfold Sabbat System of Worship is Killing the Spirit of Genuine Paganism- and the Witchcraft That Sometimes Lives Inside It.

Copyright © 2009 by Robin Artisson
http://www.robinartisson.com

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Beating a Well-Known Horse

It has become the mainstream currency of neo-Pagans everywhere to follow the calendrical observations of the "eightfold sabbat" year. Even though I feel like I'm beating a well-known horse by saying this, those eight sabbats are (beginning with the darkest) Yule, Imbolg, Eostre, Beltane, Midsummer, Lammas, Mabon (or the Autumn Equinox), and Samhain. Four are equinoxes and solstices; the other four are (today) positioned directly between the four solar events, and called “cross-quarters.”

Ever since my first days being cognizant of neo-Pagan religions, I've had issues with this system, and those issues turned into a full-blown illness when I did the research behind the creation of the Eightfold Sabbat system. I won't do like I normally do and write eighteen paragraphs before I get to my actual point. I'll just say it: the system, as it is, is unforgivably new-agey and invented.

Now, let me unpack what I just said. Let me start by saying "hey guys- if you like your eight sabbats, then by all means, keep celebrating them." But don't walk around thinking that you're doing anything remotely similar to Pagans from pre-christian times. These eight "sabbats" were assembled by Gardner and team for you, about 60 or so years ago. He was inspired by many then-available sources, chiefly his pals in the revivalist Druid movement- a movement that is far more Christian than Pagan, and whose luminary members and founders were always church-attending men.

The eight sabbats, as they stand, are a hodge-podge of Germanic and Celtic holy days. Before I unpack this, let me say that "Germanic" and "Celtic" are not words that refer to unitary, singular cultural traditions, but very, very broad terms that refer to linguistically-related tribes and nations of people which numbered in the hundreds. The chances that all Germanic Pagans, everywhere and at all times, kept some sacred "wheel" of rituals every year are so tiny as to be negligible. The very same thing goes for the many peoples that we now call "Celtic".

The Summer Begins Twice This Year

There is no doubt in anyone's mind that many Germanic peoples saw the Yule-tide as a very sacred time. There is no doubt that Beltaine in Ireland was a sacred time for the peoples of that Island, at least around the time of the visits of the probably fictional "St. Patrick." We do know that, historically, SOME Celtic and Germanic peoples celebrated these seasons: we know that there was a Lugh's Commemoration Fair, a Lughnassadh, in ancient Ireland, and a shadow of a cognate in Christian times. We know that Midsummer stands tall in the folkloric memory of Germanic-descended people. A few other notable nights and seasons stand out. For instance- we know that the Romans, in all places where Roman culture was strongly spread, celebrated Saturnalia around the time of the Winter Solstice- just like the Germanic Yule.

But when you look at history more soberly, you will discover quickly that taking the Celtic Beltaine, and putting it on a calendar with a Germanic Midsummer or Yule leads to the creation of a calendar that is neither historical, culturally accurate, nor very respectful to the broad ancestral metaphysics of either culture-group. Beltaine, the celebration of Bel's summer fire, seen as a great fertility drama by most neo-Pagans today, stands as the crown of the neo-Pagan conception of the "Celtic Summer": to follow it with the equivalent Germanic "First of Summer" festival- Midsummer- is nothing short of redundant.

One culture-group, at certain times and in certain places, had their summer's beginning on Beltaine, and the other, at Midsummer. These were different cultures with many different ideals, different Gods, and different destinies. They blended together eventually, sure- but they maintain, even now, their own unique treasures to offer, and they can't offer those without people who respect them enough to approach them on their own merits. Celebrating Samhain, followed by Yule- two prominent festivals that include the return of the dead kindreds or ancestors to dwell with the living- is also a bit redundant; your ancestral dead are probably annoyed by being moved twice in the space of seven weeks.

Now, if you're an "eight wheeler", and unless you're claiming to follow a "Celtic-Germanic" Pagan reconstructionist path, what are you really doing? And why on earth would you invent a modern "Myth cycle" with oak kings and holly kings and Persephones and Ishtars, to follow the eight hodge-podge sabbats, as though the ancients believed in any way similarly?

People are passing off "Paganism" (and worse yet, "witchcraft") as gleeful talks about "The God" (that annoying nobody-everybody God of Wiccans) getting married on Beltaine, and reaching the "height of his power" on Midsummer, and blah blah snore- people, please- spare my poor heart. We're better than this. We don't have to "invent forward"- we can "go back" and see what is still there, written for us in the sacred seasons and in the land. We can "go into" the land around us, and see more. What we'll see is important because it's what the ancients saw, before they began doing the things that we eagerly seek out ourselves now.

Each of these sacred seasons that people toss around, within the context of its own generalized cultural group, has its own mythology- it does not "link" to others with invented neo-Pagan Godforms. Every season and time contains its own mythology, its own sacred powers, its own moods and forces. They are universes all their own, not just steps on a stone-lined path.

I know some of you have heard this sort of rant before. Many of you have not, or have and don't care. I care about getting to the real treasures that have come down to us from the past, and I know for a fact that over-inventing modern contexts and overlays for the treasures of the past is the fastest way to obscure the power and wisdom that is sitting right there, calmly and simply, waiting for people to live it again.

Lugh’s Festival Has Nothing To Do With Anglo-Saxon Loaves

When we examine the origins of these "solar" holy days and festivals, like Yule and Midsummer, even a fool can see that they were inspired by ancient people watching the sun's apparent motions in the sky, and what impact that had on earthly life and weather. When we examine the origins of agrarian festivals and culturally-encapsulated festivals like Lughnassadh or Beltaine, we can see that they were not solar; they were not timed to equinoxes and solstices; they were cultural relics of the many Celtic peoples- particularly the ancient Irish- and they have their origins in the mythical life of those people.

The very widespread Celtic God Lugus, in his Irish hypostasis of Lugh, declares a time of mourning and of competition and games for his foster-mother, who gave her life for the people of a particular region of Ireland, and thus was the mythical origin of Lughnassadh, the commemoration that was established by Lugh.

This is not a universal Pagan holy day. It belonged (and in a sense, still belongs) to a specific culture. The Anglo-Saxon harvest rites of Lammas are not the same thing as Lughnassadh. They are not a "Germanic equivalent"- the Germanic peoples who came to settle in England had no equivalent to Lugh's ordered commemoration event. And they might have been as confused as I am about people leaping all over a disordered year with all these various "holy days" dragged together and forced on one another, as though there was some secret universal pattern to them.

We have no evidence that all Celts or all Germans in every Celtic or German community followed a "four-fold" year. In fact, we don't have a single historical record saying that anyone in Northern Europe "came together this many times a year on these days" for this or that sacred day or ritual. What we do have, however is the common sense to study the everyday lives of these various peoples, and, by adding an understanding of how central nature and the land were to Pagan religions all over Europe (and the rest of the world) we can reconstruct a more sensible vision of what their years might have been like.

To begin with, when you rely on herds and crops for your very life, weather-cycles become very important. But weather-patterns are not everywhere the same: what is a killing cold in England is a balmy day on the shores of the Mediterranean. It was the cold that may have threatened life in the north, but it was drought and heat that threatened life in the Mediterranean world. Their planting seasons and growing seasons were different. What they grew was different. What they hunted, fished, and herded was different, all over. Gods and spirits associated with these animals, crops, and weather were different. They were not all faces of "one divinity" or even two, or three, or ten. They were countless, and unique to each community. The Goddess of the Land was not even called by the same name everywhere, even within cultural boundaries.

This is the key issue: how unique genuine Pagan religion was to each community, or tribe, or grouping of people. Neo-paganism destroys the very fabric of the traditional Pagan vision by trying to bang together a "sacred year", without recourse to the context of small village and community life in ancient times, and even in recent times. There was no internet; no phones; various practices and customs sprang up all over the world, in response to the unique environmental and spiritual conditions of many places, without the other places even knowing about them or understanding them. We are speaking of a non-standardized, totally decentralized way of approaching the natural spirituality of life.

A Hammer Hallows Our Fields… A Penis Hallows Yours

What genuine Pagan people living in a village somewhere in the middle of the woods and fields in the middle of Ancient Germany would have "done" for their community "calendar" is radically different from what Pagans on the top of Norway would have done, or Pagans in Iceland, or Pagans in Britain, or Pagans in Rome. Their local weather- and thus the start of their "harvest" season, would have been different from Pagans in other parts of Europe. What local land-spirits and powers were unique to their community would have been the ones receiving their harvest or planting sacrifices. What larger "Gods" or "Goddesses" they culturally believed in would have been invoked in various ways, but probably not in the same ways, or at the same times, as the Germanic peoples just a hundred miles away, in another part of that same region.

Iceland is a good example: the God that most of the farmers of Iceland prayed to for the well-being of their crops was Thor. He was the God that sent rain and fertilized fields. In southern Sweden, the God farmers traditionally relied on the most was Frey or Ing, for the same goals: fertility and well-being for the land. And beyond these national Gods, whose names were known generally by all Swedes or Icelanders, were the local divinities and land-spirits that only the people in those communities knew and sacrificed to. Those local powers had every bit of say over what grew in their land. They were a crucial part of the old Heathen religious complexes.

Roman and Greek sacred days and seasons were and are radically different from Northern European ones. I don't need to bother going into the very well-known Roman calendar and pointing out how it bears no resemblance at all to anything the Northern Peoples were doing, with almost one exception: Saturnalia coincides in a general way with the Yule-time, and has similar themes. But this can be explained in various ways. It is not an outgrowth of a universal "Pagan year wheel".

Gerald Gardner and the Wiccans (as said before) working in tandem with their Revivalist Druid friends (those Druids who believed in the Helio-Arkite pseudo-pagan christian mythology) gave us the "eightfold sabbat" system. And before you think I'm just against it full stop, let me say a few things that are good about it.

Gardner, like all of the people of Britain now, was a mix of ancient native British and Germanic bloodlines. One might make a case that all Europeans from Northern and Northwestern Europe (as well as Spain and Italy) have Germanic in them, considering it was the German people who migrated to all these places, conquered them (yes, even conquered Spain and Italy- the Visigoths settled Spain and the Ostrogoths ruled Italy, bringing their Gods, culture, and having sex with the local women) and created the "Europe" we know now.

By making a "half kinda-Celtic and half sorta-Germanic" Calendar for his vision of a new Witchcraft, Gardner was in a way being true to his mixed-blood roots. And, for a time, all over Europe, Celtic peoples did celebrate their own local holidays alongside Germanic settlers who followed their own ways. Thus, the folkloric and historical tradition will mention "Lammas" and "Midsummer" alongside things like "Samhain"- but the chances of some small tradition of "witches", the likes of which Gardner claimed to meet, following a clockwork calendar of four Celtic and four Germanic holidays are nil and none.

The Witch of That Small Village… Somewhere Out There…

The local witch of later times, after the names "Celtic" and "Germanic" meant little and national names like "English" or "French" were in place, would certainly have gone to the harvest festivals or his or her community. That festival may have coincided with some more ancient Pagan festival, but it was no longer the same. Some of the same powers may have been there- some of the same impulses, and even some of the same practices (big bonfires, corn dollies, feasting, or what have you) but this is not an instance of "survival" of Pagan rites. Our fictional witch may, in fact, be the only person at the harvest fair that still senses the older powers and spirits of the time- I would hope they would- but again, we are a very long distance from an ancient "Lugh's Commemoration" to the local "St. Agatha's Harvest Home".

That witch might have recognized the power of these times- for they all have power- and used them, as I do myself in my own life, to assay trance work and wisdom-gaining workings. But then, all times have their own power- not just special days. I think that the folk-calendar, which does in fact contain a hodge-podge of older-rooted holy days from different cultures, has its own unique wisdom. But there was no one "folk calendar" for all of Europe. Not now, and not ever. And it certainly didn't contain a "wrap-around story" that told of the progress of some singular Goddess or God.

This modern attempt to bolster Gardner's calendar with new mythology is forlorn, because it is miles from the Land itself, from the unique spirit of unique places. The "witchcraft"- the native sorcery- of European folk-customs, ancient Pagan spirits, folk-beliefs, and the whole mystical spirit of ancient Europe as it came into the modern day, it will flee before people that automatically ignore the individual sacred lands and places, the subtle messages of individual customs or lores, in favor of some "over-arching" new Pagan calendar that sweeps up the biggest chunks of history, and sweeps away the divine, mystical details.

Gerald was, in his own way (along with those pseudo-Druids) among the first Pagan reconstructionists. And that's good. Without meaning to do so, they certainly inspired a lot of research into the Pagan origins of certain times. But in doing so, they obscured the power of local, land-based rituals, rites, and yearly observations, and how important those are to people today who are fortunate enough to take part in them, and how important they were to the ancients.

Paganism was never meant to be a centralized religion with a liturgical year, like the Catholic year or the Jewish calendar. It was meant to communicate something of the uniqueness of each and every stand of trees, field, or corner of the woods. It was meant to engage every person who lives on a land, grows their own food, or sees their own local wildlife. It was meant to be an expression of each individual's life and land, and their family, and their community. This is what organic religion is. This is why the Gods are not all "one"- they are there, in the land, hills, and mountains of many lands, and in the group-soul of many people, following them on their long migrations. They are in the storms, the skies, and the seas. They are living out their ageless lives alongside human beings, being met by humans everywhere humans go.

Pope Cernunnos

It seems to me that too many neo-Pagans don't see how similar they've become to Christianity or Islam or Judaism: they rush to ram all their Gods into "one", so as to keep some ridiculous claim on a monotheistic-ish seeming religion, in what can be described as nothing short of a fear of true Polytheism- for centuries, Polytheism has been excoriated by Monotheism as ignorant and chaotic, and these lessons have been entrenched in our cultures, in our scholarly fields, and in our basic thinking.

Many of our "New Pagans" don't seem to have the depth or the courage to challenge the Monotheistic claim that Monotheism is just better or "makes more sense". It makes no sense to place all of the rich treasures of human spirituality, all of the unique spirits of places, and all of the unique cultural Gods of the past into an immense blender and make a horrid sludge out of it, all in the name of being able to tell disapproving Christians "well, we all worship the same God, just under different names and facets..." And they've come up with a liturgical calendar, complete with "colors" for the different seasons and precise days of worship, precisely like the Roman Catholic liturgical year.

The more one thinks on it, the more disgusting and shallow it becomes. It is a betrayal of the very essence of organic, traditional Paganism. I don't need Christian approval, and I don't have to be a sorta-monotheist to be taken seriously in a philosophical debate. I don't have to debate at all; I only need to know the closeness of the sacred powers, wherever I am. I need to bond with them and live in peace and harmony with them. That is what Pagans did. That is what "Pagans" worth the name still do.

I don't need a calendar created by Popes to tell me when "Beltaine" is. I can see the bluebells come to the trees, see the bloom of hawthorn, and know that my Summer-fire festival's time is here for me and for mine. They may bloom early one year; they may bloom later- but that's fine. It's the sacred power of the Earth itself telling me that it's time to celebrate. This custom, incidentally- of waiting to see the Hawthorn flowers- is not my invention. I wish I could be so rustic and deep sounding. It was an old custom from some parts of England and Ireland.

Pagans don't need "books on sabbats" to tell them how to worship. They need the sacred book that the ancients had: the Land itself. The Land at YOUR house will show you its own seasons. People need to pay attention to that, if they want to "celebrate the cycles of nature". People claim that the point of "celebrating the cycles of nature" is to gain "balance". I disagree. Balance comes from being part of a place, part of a family, part of a community, part of a vision of life that gives you peace. The seasons cycle around that, through that- but the balance, the "Frith" as many ancient Heathens called it, comes from belonging. You belong to a place, first, then it teaches you about its moods and seasons. By honoring those moods and seasons, you honor it and yourself, because you've become a part of it. The land and the people are one.

Even A Broken Clock Is Right Twice A Day: Let’s Go Deeper

I said that I'd say more than one good thing about the neo-Pagan calendar cycle, right? I did... and, well, I suppose I'd rather see people doing something unforgivably new-agey, and getting excited about the moon or the sun or racked-up Pagan holidays, than getting excited about Jesus and the twelve apostles. At least neo-Paganism is a move back to the sober sanity of nature, and away from the invented "triumphalist" linear story of "sin and salvation" with its absurd notion of "time beginning" and "time ending" at the hands of the ancient Hebrew God. I'd rather a modern story that excited people about nature's sacred powers, than an ancient one that excites people about physically crawling out of their graves one day to go to heaven and watch as most everyone else goes to hell forever. There's just no competition in my mind.

So, thanks to Gerald. But we can't stay right where Gerald or anyone else started people off. We have to use our hearts and reason and go deeper. Unless we all want to be content allowing "Paganism" to be perceived as a bunch of new-agers tossing together Greek and Roman Gods alongside caricatures of Norse and Celtic ones, (and a few Hindu divinities tossed in, alongside some Semitic ones, all slammed into a "one god and one goddess" duo-theism/bad monotheism) and ignoring local lands, powers, and folklore, and then worshiping on "Sabbats" that are blends of Germanic and Celtic holy days, all tied up with a big ribbon of radical liberalism and eco-feminism, we have to go deeper.

Trance-Work of the Three Forked Tongues

2009-06-15T18:10:00.000-07:00

The Art requires command of extraordinary states of conscious awareness. The head-body complex- that natural state of conscious waking, locked in the head-eye-ear consciousness- is one of three complexes that stand like markers on a road that regresses to totality or wholeness. Three states of conscious awareness concern us here- the common consciousness of the head-body complex; the "feeling consciousness" of the soul which is half-awake in the average man, woman, or child, and the "heart consciousness" of the utter depth, which is dark and hidden in most.

From the perspective of one layer of consciousness, any of those deeper appear to be subtle, irrational, or simply absent or draped in darkness. Thus, from the perspective of the head-body consciousness, the feeling consciousness is wordless and strange, though active in an intuitive manner which grants the conscious person emotional textures, though without a seeming rational pattern or explanation. One merely "feels" a certain way, and sometimes a connection can seem apparent between forces operating in the apparently "objective" world and the feeling; at other times, the feelings simply arise.

From the perspective of the head-body complex, the heart's deep messages are absent. One may speak of "feeling with their heart" or "knowing in their heart", but this is poetic license to describe a decision or way of believing that is in line with no other evidence beyond a deeply held intuition. In this sense, the heart-consciousness may in fact be manifesting something to the feeling consciousness, which is struggling to do its best to transmit that message, and being interpreted in various ways by the most coarse, everyday consciousness, beset as it is with years of rationalizing and perilous, linear "educational" perspectives that have been forced upon it. The explanation that emerges for the entire chain of experience is normally a sad explanation, indeed, as is any explanation of the ultimate "meaning" of the entire experience.

A sublime trance and wisdom-gate exists for the opening in any man or woman who can regress from the head-body complex to the feeling region of the chest, and beyond that, into the boundless deep of the heart-field: a field whose very infinitesimal edge seems to touch the physical organ of the heart in the middle-body, and then extends far beyond the body, reaching out to touch all the invisible.

The process is as simple as it is powerful, and it draws on the tongue of the serpent, and can be increased threefold in strength if the rattle of his tail is used.

Fill a hollow gourd with some pebbles, and, if possible, the vertebrae of a serpent, dried well. Do not kill a serpent to attain them; you must find it deceased already. Seal the gourd and form from it a rattle. Any rattle constructed by you, from any simple material will do. This rattle is not needed for this work, but it increases its strength.

To begin, situate yourself calmly and in a lonely, quiet place. Quietly enter into the full use of your eyes, ears, and senses- the portals of the head-body consciousness. Let yourself fully enter into whatever you are hearing and seeing and feeling on your skin. Spit once and take a deep breath, and assay the serpent's hiss, by releasing the breath slowly and steadily through your teeth, making a faint whistling noise. As you do this, shake the rattle, if you are utilizing one, as though it were the warning-rattle of a serpent about to strike. Shake it sparingly, rapidly, suddenly, alarmingly- but never too much. As you are making this serpentine music, do not neglect the fact that your ears are hearing it, and immerse yourself in the sound fully. If your eyes remain open, immerse yourself in whatever you see. Be as present as you can be with the gifts of your head and body senses.

When the breath runs out, fall silent. If you feel that you have "entered into" your coarse experiences fully, then proceed. If not, undergo another cycle. There is nothing you need do except be fully present with what already effortlessly presents itself.

When you are ready to go one level deeper, bring your mind's focus to your chest, the place where you feel- the chest, and further down, the stomach. In both of these places you feel the swelling of pride, of joy, the gut-wrench of sorrow or hurt, the burn of panic, of humiliation. The chest primarily, and the stomach secondarily, are the houses of the feeling-sense consciousness.

You may give yourself leave now to withdraw from the eyes and ears and focus on the chest and stomach- and as you begin another long hiss, and perhaps rattle, now enter totally into whatever you happen to be feeling.

The final cycle of regression on the back of the sound of the hiss and rattle is from the feeling consciousness-realm to the heart-reality. Just as you gave yourself leave to regress a bit from the eyes and ears to the feeling region, now give a similar leave to sink below the place of feeling, to the purity and aerial-seeming freedom of the heart: an immense space that has no boundaries, somewhere indeterminately "deeper" in you and then beyond you. A hiss and the rattle may flow you deep into it, as well. Release yourself to it.

In that third space, greater than all, you have arrived at a subtle but clear space that is your own interweaving point with every other spiritual power. It is through this strange void that the messages from the boundless approach and begin to move through our three levels, to arrive in the coarse mind quite disfigured by the common man and woman's conscious and unconscious preconcieved notions. It is through this deathless void that spirits swim and dwell, and through this place that they may speak to us, and we to them- with the language of the same void, which is something more essential than feeling. It is, in essence, a wordless communication, a "suddenly knowing all that the spirit was intending to communicate", while "suddenly expressing all that you intended to express back, without words or thoughts, all at once."

This void is the very veil of Fate, the closest approximation that our humanity can create with our minds to the incomprehensible and non-corporeal reality of the grand mystery: a dazzling and sable midnight though without darkness, stretching without effort to all times and places and powers, silent and clear, free and vibrant, darksome and mind-withering, timeless and deathless. It would seem to be what so many people half-sense and call "God".

Our experience of the heart-space is our own personal window into the weird-world of the intangible, that well of potencies that has no bottom or boundaries. It is the source of dreams, though how we experience dreams is skewed and transformed from their original luminous nature, into objects, thoughts, and images that we impute reality and meaning to.

The most cunning will discover that they feel a certain different manner when resting in the third space; most will discover that resting in it for very long is difficult. As one drifts in and out of touch with it's subtle mystery, one may "bring themselves back down" by walking through the three regions quickly: re-immerse oneself in the eye and ear, then the feeling, and then back down and within to the silent, expansive space of heart. One must bend the will to it, but never too hard. To sink within, to the weird-space that borders both the heart and every other reality, is neither easy nor difficult.

When in contact with the heart-consciousness, with the weird-space, one may speak invocations with the mouth, and "feel" their impact rippling out into the unseen and filling up the world around them. Of course, one will hear with the ears, and feel with the chest and belly, and interpret the feelings with the common mind; but some third thing- some deeper aspect of the human man or woman- will know the difference, as a partial experience of the heart-field will echo into the person with a strange "contact" that cannot truly be explained well.

However, the cunning witch or sorcerer will know that they are "there": having an experience that is part place and part placeless; they will know “in their hearts” that they have made this regression and contact, and their feelings and even their outer senses may shift and verify this, in various ways.

One may also speak invocations in the manner of the "ghost language"- speak them with the mouth, but then "regress" them to the chest and belly, "saying" them only with feelings, before regressing them a final time, allowing them to be communicated into the great void-space without words or feelings; merely willing that the essence of the invocation be manifested all at once, fully, perfectly, in the great "totality". The feeling consciousness will report when this has occurred- One will feel, in a wordless way, that the invocatory message has "filled up the seen and the unseen"- the message itself becoming as large as the universe, its essence becoming one with all things. The most powerful invocations are done in this manner.

Apotrapaic Charms

2009-06-07T21:05:00.000-07:00

Witch bottle sketch by Rima

A fine selection of apotrapaic charms never hurt anyone- and indeed, these have saved and spared many from much harm. Be cunning and well in all you do.

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Rowan and Oak Crosses

Either of these two woods are excellent apotrapaic powers. Forming their well-harvested branches into equal-armed crosses, bound by red thread, makes a time-honored charm against the encroachment of evil forces into a home in which they are hung. A ritual area can be protected with them, as well. I find that attaching bells to them adds a further element of protection.

"Well-harvested" in the context that I have used it means "gathered with honor done to the tree-weird at the proper time and with proper offerings, and taken in such a manner as to disallow the twig or branch to touch the ground." If you are aware of which current of power the tree-weird participates in, you will already know what day is needed to approach it for gathering some of its parts. The tying is the key- with the red thread dipped in a good boiling brew of oak shavings and leaves and a single solar herb- like cedar. It is to "HIM" that the Rowan or Oak crosses are devoted- the great and awe-full father-weird of the sky and ruler among spirits and weirds. A small cross like this can be made for personal wearing around the neck.

OAK BEAMS FOR A TIMBER WALL
OVER WHICH EVIL CANNOT CALL
OR SLINK OR LEAP OR FLY OR FALL
HARD WOOD AND WICKED BANE
HE WILL NOT BREAK NOR BLEED,
NOR GIVE NOR WANE,
AND HOLD THIS HOME HIS HOLY FANE
AND RED THREAD BINDS HIM TWO BY TWO
A CROSS OF THE SKY, GOODNESS TRUE
IN THE NAME OF HIM, UNSPEAKABLE.
NO WICKEDNESS SHALL ENDURE OR BIND
IN THE PRESENCE OF THIS FOURFOLD SIGN.

Mandrake

By far the most complicated and powerful of all anti-evil charms, particularly for the home. A complete treatment of the mystical botany and science of the Mandrake is found in my work "The Horn of Evenwood".

Fire Seed Water

Take a kettle of spring water, and into it add a few drops of water from a sacred spring. Failing this, natural, running water from a river or stream will suffice. Kindle a fire in the name of the great howling and raging spirit of the wilderness, overlooking the fire with an antlered skull or the horned skull of a cow or some large bovine. The fire has to be "red"- a bloody portion of meat has to be burned into it as an offering to the great raging and antlered spirit that protects wild places. Failing that, a bit of your own blood soaked into a ball of flour and water will have to do.

Make the fire with oak and holly wood, and make it rage. Ask the wild king, as the face of his skull glows golden in the fire light, to manifest the power of his fear and terror in the flames- so that any evil spirit or power would flee from it, or from anything touched by it. When the fire dies down, select three good sized coals, still glowing hot, and drop them one at a time into the kettle of water. The water, after this, is hallowed and powerful for protection, and for averting evil powers. Sprinkle it on yourself and around your home or places of ritual work.

FEAR LIVES FOR THE FOES OF THE WOOD
A NIGHTMARE FORM OF HOOF AND HOOD
AND WRAITH-ARROWS DEADLY.
HE IS THE WAILER, LOUDER THAN WIND
THE ROARER, TERROR TO SEND
TO THE ENEMIES OF THE LAND.
BLOOD-SOAKED LOCKS AND BOW OF BONE
A FLESHY CLOAK WITH TENDONS SEWN
AND HOUNDS OF SAVAGE RED,
BRING YOUR DARK GRACES ON THE HEAD
OF THIS GROWING FIRE WEIRD
AND IN THE SHIMMER, IN THE GLARE
FIX WITHIN YOUR HORRID STARE
WHICH WICKED POWERS CANNOT STAND:
AND ALL THAT ARE BURNED BY THIS FIRE
LET YOUR POWER ON THEM RETIRE
AND REMAIN FOREVER.

Sage and Sweetgrass

The ancient peoples of the Americas have used these two herbs since time immemorial for their specific powers- the smoke of burned sage destroys the presence of evil, either spirits or enchantments, and purifies an area. Sweetgrass burned after it attracts the good Sacred Powers that mean well to humankind. No ritual is necessary, in the strict sense of the word, but one must be polite and thankful to the weirds of these two herbs, or you can be certain they won't help as much as they could.

Salt

Spreading lines of salt across the bottoms of windowpanes and thresholds is a time-honored method of protecting the house from the passage of evil entities; it still works today as much as it ever did, so long as the salt is enchanted sufficiently with the will of a person to cleanse it of spiritual pollutants, and to mark it with a will to protect.

CREATURE OF STINGING EARTH, SALT SO PURE
THROUGH AGES IN EARTH YOU HAVE ENDURED
TO COME INTO THE LIGHT OF DAY.
LIFE AND GOD, CLEAN AND WHITE
OF SEA AND CAVERN DEEP ALIKE
BE FREE OF WHAT DAIMONS RESTRAIN YOU
IN THE NAMES OF INDARA AND THRICE-GREAT TAS
AND FREE FROM ANY POWER THAT MAY CONSTRAIN YOU
FROM YOUR GREATEST MIGHT.
AND JOIN THAT MIGHTY WILL NOW TO ME:
BE A FAITHFUL WARD AGAINST ILL WEIRDS
AGAINST HARMFUL WIGHTS OR FOE ALIKE
WHETHER FROM SEA OR LAKE OR SKY OR VALLEY
OR FOREST OR FIELD OR RIVER OR STREAM
IN THE NAMES OF EDRIC AND GODDA.

Flour and Bread

Bread pulled into many small pieces is a common protecting agent in the Faery tradition of Ireland and Britain- if you make a circle of flour, and place the small pieces of bread all over in the circle, it is bound with the same protecting power as a circle of salt.

Witch Bottle

A classic which never gets old- the Witch Bottle is one of the ultimate shielding charms, particularly against hostile spells hurled by sorcerously-inclined opponents, but also against the powers of hostile weirds. The idea of the witch bottle is to create a sorcerous doppleganger of yourself, such that magical forces seek it out instead of you. What it finds is a sharp, deadly welcome- a bottle full of broken glass, nails, needles, and thorns.

A glass jar or bottle of some kind must be found, and in it placed many broken shards of glass, rusty nails, pins and needles, and thorns- and then, on top of them, enough of your blood, spittle, and urine to finish filling the bottle up. It must be sealed with wax over the cork or lid. The bottle must be sorcerously "named" after you in a rite- and buried somewhere secret. So long as it stays buried and full of the liquid, you will have splendid protection from hostile weird-powers.

BOTTLE OF BITTER BRINE, LIFE OF MINE
NOW RESONATE WITH ME, FOR ALL EYES TO SEE
FOR HOSTILE EYES MAY SEEK THEE.
TAKE THEM TO YOURSELF, AND BE THOU ME
AND FROM WITHIN YOU GIVE THEM THEIR REWARD:
THRICE PIERCED BY DARKLING NAIL
THRICE CUT BY JAGGED GLASS
BUTCHERED BY HARSHNESS WITHOUT FAIL
PIERCED BY NEEDLES, A BITING FLAIL
AND REDUCED TO NOTHINGNESS.
IF SOME POWER CAUGHT BY YOU
SHOULD SURVIVE YOUR SAVAGE, BITTER BREW
LET IT FLY BACK HOME TO ITS MASTER'S HAND
AND INFLICT ON HIM WHAT THEY HAD PLANNED
WHEN THEY SOUGHT ME OUT AT FIRST.

Not Awake, Not Asleep: Opening the Faery Portal Trance

2009-05-21T00:21:00.000-07:00

NOT AWAKE, NOT ASLEEP
Opening the Faery Portal Trance

A discussion regarding extraordinary states of awareness within the stream of traditional witchcraft and postmodern or revivalist sorcery

By Robin Artisson
Copyright © 2009

* * *

PART I: The Bridge Between Night and Day

"Aloneness haunts. The crack of the sky.
A primordial thing
Where blurred vision first cleared its way
Into an ancient eye.
The first vacant look, the first stirring
Mingling night and day."

-Peter Makem

Concerning the Necessity of Trance, and its Dangers

Since my learning, and since the time of my formal writing, I have always emphasized the need for modern traditional witches and sorcerers working within the streams of European mystical "craft" (pre and post-Christian) to master the trance state.

I have held to my position that no authentic work can be claimed without mastery of altered states of consciousness, those states to which a "trance" is the bridge. I have claimed this for one very important reason: while I believe that chants, charms, conjuries, and incantations have their own force and effectiveness when said even outside of a trance, by one who emanates the proper personal magnetism and power, the internal, subtle effect of these things- their great ambiance and hidden aspects- are missed without the trance.

Why is it so important to experience the inner side of things? Because we cannot gauge the true efficacy of our work without the "other side" of the experience, but more importantly, we cannot gain the spiritual transformation that any work of Art promises without it. The cunning witch or sorcerer gains something very tangible from experiencing the hidden flashes and waves of force that accompany a true work of art- they gain something akin to faith in their art. They grow in true certainty of their craft, and this is worth the reading of a thousand grimoires from ages past.

But trance- the passageway to another state of mind and being- is not without dangers, as I have long endeavored to warn my reading audience. It is one matter to point out how trance opens us to the massive whirls and eddies of the unseen world, and all of its unpredictability; it is something else to point out something more immediate: it gives men and women access to the antechambers of the unconscious, places where the half-forgotten and repressed materials of the mind reside, pulsing potently under their own perceptual cobwebs and dust-piles.

In my work with my clients, I often encounter those who balk at the idea of facing what things have become stored unconsciously deep within themselves- a dark shirking of responsibility, indeed, for what we conceal inside ourselves, from ourselves, almost always holds the keys to our own destruction- and, for those bold enough, our salvation. A mind is truly a terrible thing to waste, and wasted it is when it becomes dominated by unconscious material and powers which, like a primordial sludge, begins to give birth to sentient things, demons and tormentors that cobweb the insides of dreams and the underside of waking with their own tyrannical limitations.

Eventually they burst forth- sending their hosts to a madhouse, or to a grave. If you keep a "full house" as it were, and refuse to deal with it and its inhabitants as the essential man or woman should, and if you should be lucky enough to make it to a natural death uninspired by your own personal hidden unseelie court deep within, then you have escaped little: death will be the time of their ascension, and you can look forward to your journey into the Great Incomprehensible being accompanied by terrors you'll have spent a lifetime trying to deny or ignore.

Such a journey, in which rose-petals will become rose-thorns, might be thought of as its own sort of hell, as there will be no one there to spare you by waking you to physical sense again- the body will lie inert in its lasting sleep, and there will be no escape for the wandering mindstream. I can imagine, in my own disturbed thinking, those poor and tormented souls taking their desperate shelter in dark and deep places, trapped for awfulness-knows how long as the phantoms summoned scritching and tittering by more than one hero or sorcerer from history and legend. Those who can only whisper long to shout.

This would be an ignominious end for those who would style themselves either as "human" in the best sense of the word, or "wise" or "cunning"- so if you consider yourself to be a member of the spirit-rade of our Master or the Lady, or of Dame Dark and her Devil, don't lead yourself to such an experience. Shock the deep mind with the glare of the eye of wisdom and awaken; Learn to use the trance to gain access to what is ever-present, and forever intimate, but often unseen. This goes for our own hidden kingdoms within, as well as the omnipresent force of the unseen world.

Like with so many other things, the bridge that leads to danger also leads to salvation; the hand that blesses can also curse. What comes to pass is determined by the heart that walks the path, and the heart that rules the hand.

Concerning the Word "Trance"

The Random House Dictionary clears up any ambiguity regarding the word "trance". Here are given its five definitions, and its origins, according to that work:

TRANCE

1. a half-conscious state, seemingly between sleeping and waking, in which ability to function voluntarily may be suspended.

2. a dazed or bewildered condition.

3. a state of complete mental absorption or deep musing.

4. an unconscious, cataleptic, or hypnotic condition.

5. Spiritualism. a temporary state in which a medium, with suspension of personal consciousness, is controlled by an intelligence from without and used as a means of communication, as from the dead.

Origin: 1300–50; ME traunce, state of extreme dread, swoon, dazed state; MF transe, lit., passage (from life to death), deriv. of transir, to go across, pass over; Latin trānsīre, equiv. to trāns- trans- + īre, to go.

This fine definition, I think, covers it all nicely. The first definition is the focus of the present treatise; I shall make little mention the others, though much could be said for them. They are another story, for another night. The first usage says "a half-conscious state"- and while this is fine enough, it is clumsy, for language loses the power to grasp the full reality of the trance. It is, however, "between sleeping and waking"- a finer turn of phrase the author of the definition could not have used.

What does it mean to be neither awake nor asleep? Few can say, for in that marvelous and hidden place, language breaks apart. But this is a state that all people- and all beings that must sleep- venture through every time they lie down to rest. For a subtle moment, passing all too quickly for most- a "moment" called by me the "thirteenth hour"- all minds travel down from waking, to sleep, crossing the region of the between, the twilight region of the trance. To learn and halt the downward sinking, and remain suspended in that great space, which opens itself upon every other space in reality, is the essence of the trance-art.

The origins of the word "trance" are interesting- it begins with the “traunce” being good for a swoon of dread, for those who see what lies on the other side! But the trance, as it points out, is a "passage"- as from life to death- or a "passing over"- how perfect! Trance is a passage, from one state to another, whether it be from the day of waking to the night of sleep, or from life to death. We know this place- all of us know it. Few have taken the time to consider it as an alternative to simply being awake or asleep.

Trance is a bridge between two states, and to "build that bridge" with conscious attention and will is the key and the goal. I shall give the pass-keys to such a feat; in so doing, I become a Pontifex for those who take my advice- a "bridge builder". Such is my vocation and duty to the souls of the Hollow Hill Fellowship, my friends all over the world, and those of the Hethite strain of Craft- that covenant of souls to whom I owe so much.

Let your bridge be built; become the builder. Your hidden world awaits, on your own far shore- but the hidden dimension of all worlds also awaits, if you can negotiate with your own internal guardians for entry. Those who know me well will pardon the humor, but there is a real troll under most bridges, and it will take more than simply ignoring this troll to gain your own passage to authenticity as a person, and as a sorcerer or witch. It will take bravery, will, and cunning.

PART II: The New Sorcery of Modernity

"Modern man is ancient as the hills.
Neither science nor philosophy
Can temper his extremity.
He returns, he always returns,
The distant prodigal,
The stranger at the door.
Death welcomes him.
Death loves him."

-Peter Makem

The Lost World and the Modern World

I have always looked to the primal wisdom of the peoples of the "first world"- those native peoples who, even into our recent centuries, have maintained powerful strains of living sorcery. I have devoured (in the manner of a good white male spiritual imperialist) many of the texts recounting their wisdom, their cultures, and their native beliefs. I always choose to focus upon the words of their shamans, sorcerers, and specialists at healing and altered states, and upon their mythologies, for without understanding their mythologies, one cannot grasp the secrets to their trance-work.

The secrets are all there- primal peoples do not "hide" things as we Westerners assume; we project our own paranoia and silly obsession with occult secrets onto them. If it is a secret these peoples have, it is the simplest and best secret of all: if one must "hide" something, the most sublime things are best hidden in plain sight. The simplicity with which native informants speak hides a great complexity of thinking and spiritual experience. It is we Westerners, again, which shun simplicity and seek over-complexity, to the point that we invent nonsensical twists of word and argument, forever missing what stands naked and obvious.

I shall say it now, as I have said before, many times: true magical treasures- the real treasures- all contain within their magic a unique failsafe: they cannot be found if they are looked for. When you stop looking, you gain them instantly, for real magic is not apart from "everyday" things. The trance is a real magical treasure that shuns the seeking eye; true Wisdom is another. If you must "look" outside of yourself for these things, they will never be found, for you convince yourself in the looking that you don't have them, and thus, so long as you maintain this stance, you never will.

One cannot "out think" the real magic of the world- you cannot choose to "stop looking" or pretend not to look, for this is another form of looking, and the oldest powers cannot be so fooled. The only fools so created are those who try such lame things. We may all be fools from time to time, but a real fool is only someone who cannot recognize other fools. Recognize your own folly, and you take a step towards power. Honesty and self-awareness become the sorcerer's real tools.

With Ease For the Children of the Forest

While reading the excellent ethnographic works of James Walker, (the only white man to ever be given the title "Wicasa Wakan" or "Holy Man" by the Lakota Sioux), I was struck by the power of the words given to him by his informants, all of them holy men of the Lakota Sioux, and most of them shamans (or Wicasa Wakans) who were privy to the inner workings of Lakota religion. They speak of spirits and the supernatural world often, in a way that matches well what we know of many other first-nation peoples.

I've long known that the "secret" to trance lied in simple features of worldview- why can the "white man" not hear the words of the trees in a forest? One famous native American character from cinema insisted that "white man had forgotten how to listen". To this, after all my years of research, I must say- it may be true that white people have forgotten how to listen, but the forgetting happened a long time before now. Most white people now have never known- and not just white people, but people from all over the modern world.

Why have we never known? Because modernism and modern worldviews are power-stories: they are spells, workings of intense force, and all of them are laced with assumptions about reality that become entrenched in the minds of young people at a very early age. Our ears are battered from day one by the sounds of machines and cars and the horrid sound of television commercials and the mainstream mind-garbage television shows that the majority of people watch; we hear the terrible noises of industry and smell the awful stench of modernity, every day of our lives. Our counterparts in the deep Amazon and in the few other "virgin" places of the world hear what? The songs of birds, the sound of wind, the sound of crackling fires and human voices. They hear the cries of animals and the crash of falling trees or waves on the ocean.

Why do I make such an issue of this? Because I know that this parade of sounds not only shapes the neurological architecture of the brain in certain ways, but it transforms the mindstream in ways that give a wholly different perspective on the world, whether we would have it or not. Another two decades of Western "education" will finish the job that the cantankerous noise of our "civilization" has begun- we will send our children forth into the world looking for numbers, formulae, theories, and money-making ingenuity, and caring little for the subtle and beautiful powers that flow around us like rivers. We will care even less for the darker powers that take root in us every day and grow in the fertile press of our ignorance of spiritual matters.

When a few of the children of such a civilization finally feel and see the spiritual wasteland that they inhabit, they may long and ache for another way of seeing, another way of being. They may sense the Otherworld, the promise of magic or the unseen, but will be constantly frustrated at finding it. The ranges of awareness and consciousness they need are not gone, for they cannot be destroyed, but too much contrary force and assumption has been planted in them to ever hope to gain the trance with the ease of the people in the first nations or the primal world.

Old Puck's Laughter

It's frustrating to consider, but old Puck was right to laugh at the people of the Old World, when they sold their souls away to the new sorcerers who brought them the new spells of modernity. There is much to be recommended in a world of aspirin and air-conditioning, a world where babies and their mothers don't die nearly as much in childbirth and where tumors can be cut out of ailing people, but there is a downside to our brilliant avoidance of death: we get to die in other ways, in ways far more ominous than any rotting body.

The death of loneliness is our real death: people today have many miraculous devices to put between them and actually looking into the eyes of other people, and hearing their words. A web of light connects us all, and yet, my clientele overflows with people in the chasms of depression regarding their sense of being cut off from others, not being able to communicate with others, and feeling as though no one understands their most essential dreams, wants, needs, and desires. We've sold the cow of life, the warmth of breath, for synthetic milk and fake leather.

Those who have no belief in a life beyond this one cling with terror to this life, even while despising it at times; they eagerly justify every miraculous invention of the modern day, regardless of its negative impact on humanity and this world. If there were a such thing as an "untrance"- a reversal of trance, a reversal of the passage between two states, and a solidification into a state of constant focus on the material and the passionless, stale fear of existing, these modernists can be said to have mastered it. Their sorcery is the sorcery of despair and shallowness, and (as we have seen) it is a potent sorcery, indeed, for now it, more than any other sorcery, commands the fate of the world. Or so it would appear.

I am not suggesting that you take a club to your "modern devices", nor that you shun sensible medical treatments; technological artifice is a venerable and useful part of human beings, though it appears that our technological advancements have outstripped our humanity, and grown beyond whatever fund of wisdom we once commanded. This imbalance inhibits us when we attempt to approach the true "Old Ways" across the bridge of trance. It walls us off from the preternatural world, from the direct experience of the sacred, unfiltered by presumption and expectation.

This "barrier of hateful modernity" can be overcome, but not without enormous effort. I am not certain that it can truly be overcome by Westerners who are not born with a special predisposition towards preternaturalism and mystical endeavor. Some sorcerous blood runs in us yet! But the sleeping serpent of that magic doesn't sleep in quiet: it sleeps in noise, and is (in a reversal) stirred to wakefulness by silence- by a return to the primal sounds that once filled our ears, before our modern walls of noise came to disturb us into slumber.

Thus, a good preparation for the quest of the trance is to remove oneself to a place where only natural sounds- sounds not produced by machinery- can be heard, and staying in that place for as long as one can. The "silence of nature" is actually quite full of noise- it includes birdsong and wind; it includes creaking trees and the like. Anyone who has ever taken a lengthy, lonely vigil away from cities and crowds of people, and heard nothing but their own voice for many days or weeks, alongside the sounds of nature, knows that after a while, when a strange longing and loneliness for the familiar passes, a new "space of mind" opens up- and a peace settles with it.

It is this silence that is the great teacher of shamans worldwide, as recorded by Michael Harner from his informants, and it- nature's true voice- is the teacher of all the cunning, if they know how to hear the silence.

PART III: Not Awake, Not Asleep: An Outline of Praxis

"Consciousness has broken open
The ethereal veins
Where caribou trek north to give birth,
Where salmon glide the Bann,
Where starlings wheel and turn in the rains
To their blind voyage south.

Consciousness has taken rafter
And roof down, and the wall
Laid flat and all opened to the sky.
Sleep along might restore
Paths and patterns, routes invisible
To the conscious eye."

-Peter Makem

The Blade-Edge Bridge in Twilight

Trance is the pass-way, the bridge or portal to an unseen world. This trance, the veritable "faery portal" of legend, is a work of consciousness that begins in a prone position, in a secret place, but, after it is mastered, begins to "travel" with the master or mistress, and live with them and in them in everyday "waking life". It is a mastery of the "third estate", the third way of being, between sleeping and waking, in the perpetual twilight of the mind, which is a distant glimmer of the finest point of all people, the deathless spirit.

There are two halves of this work of trance, two realities that must be considered. The first layers of the process will take a man or woman into a space wherein the sights and sounds of their own minds will be broadcast in a state that is neither fully conscious nor fully unconscious. The first powers, sights, sounds, and emotions to appear begin in the "recent" memory and begin to proceed apace to the deeper reaches of memory, and finally to the unconscious.

This great wall of experience must be passed- it is an enormous hedge or tablet of personal force or "personal vibration" that has to be negotiated. Those who are daily living in stressful situations, those who sleep not enough, or who experience prolonged frustrations or difficulties will find this part of the work- the first bridge- very difficult. Any untamed mind will be like a leaping stallion, so very hard to handle or control, and indeed, "control" reveals itself for the illusion it is. The mind at the opening stages of the work is more like a slippery eel or fish, forever struggling out of grasp and back into the deep rush and confusion of murky water.

This work must be performed in as private and quiet a setting as possible, at least initially. The face should be washed with water from a sacred well or spring, and the bridge-builder should lie comfortably flat on their back, but never so comfortably that one would regularly sleep in such a position or upon such a place.

This work cannot be done if the mind and body are tired, so do not attempt it; the best results may occur earlier in the day, after one has awoken well refreshed. A dark cloth should be (at the beginning stages) wrapped about the eyes. When lying prone, washed and blindfolded, take four deep breaths, and then begin the simplest of all chants, within the mind, and, if one desires, at a low whisper:

"NOT AWAKE, NOT ASLEEP"

Relax and let yourself begin to withdraw your mind or awareness from its contact with the senses of the body; feel as though you are sinking down to sleep- let the "sink" begin, but go slowly. The act of willing oneself to "withdraw from contact with the senses" is a difficult task- you must will your awareness to turn away from the inputs of the sense-portals, but you must know that, unless you lose consciousness fully, such a task is truly impossible. Thus, withdrawing from the senses means willing the inner awareness to turn away from the senses, to scorn their inputs, but always accepting that inputs will still remain, will still be with you.

You will discover that scorning the sense-portals yields something interesting- it does, if done correctly, instantly cause a person to turn the arrow of awareness inward somehow, building an "inward focus". It is a strange but mystically sensible state of "two-beingness"- to turn away from the senses, yet still be experiencing sensations, sights, and sounds.

It must be tried to be understood. At any rate, do not try too hard; withdraw from sense input without trying to ignore it too hard, and just relax. Sink a little, and truly let yourself realize and believe- truly believe- that you are no longer "awake"- and indeed, by lying still in the quiet and dark and relaxing, and sinking down a bit, turning one's inner attention away from sounds and sensations, one truly is no longer "purely awake". But one is also not purely asleep yet, either; the very fact that the droning words, softly in the mind "Not Awake, Not Asleep" are whispering through you is evidence- you are consciously willing to keep this chant going.

Now, let the other voices chant it with you. As the sound of the whispering continues to permeate your consciousness on its slow descent, imagine what it would sound like if dozens of other men and women were whispering the key words, "Not Awake, Not Asleep". Let yourself drift with them.

Let yourself become precisely what the words are describing- neither asleep, nor awake. It is easy to realize that you are no longer purely awake; it is exciting to realize that you aren't purely awake anymore, yet, you are still conscious of your chant and thus not asleep in oblivion.

A Fabulous and Formless Darkness

When you penetrate "one level down"- feel a tangible shift towards relaxation and the inviting embrace of a nap or sleep, you will know that you have made great progress. But here, caution and wits must reign- you cannot ever allow yourself to become comfortable with "slipping down". You cannot go all the way to the country of sleep and dreams. You cannot fall asleep, for if you do, you have missed the trance and the working ends in failure. When you feel a "warm, comfortable shift", be alarmed and rouse your mind to re-focus on the words of the key chant. Keep repeating them.

In the chant, is a safety net; you will discover that soon, as you keep yourself on the "middle" of the road, the road between the peaks of waking and the chasms of sleep, and as you enter into the "not awake or asleep" state, songs, conversations, memories, words, sounds, and every other distraction begins to fly through your head. They may begin to come in large numbers, and the chant may temporarily go out of your head, to be replaced by such "mind noise"- but if you are willful enough, the chant will return. You will recall it and begin chanting it again, thus breaking up the thick, tired, distracting cloud of thoughts and memories.

This is the first layer, the first barrier thorns: and if you can feel it like a thick cloud, a confusion and a sleep, a fabulous and formless darkness that tries to rob your work from you, you are making progress. Here and now, you must keep a cool focus on the key-chant, and on creating the state (in that strange, effortless effort sort of way) which truly is neither awake nor asleep- trust in the words and your mind! Your mind will respond to the words; it will become "not awake, not asleep", so long as you focus yourself thus.

You are taking the reigns of the inner horses of the mind and holding them, with will and repeated, whispered inner command, between the region of wakefulness and oblivion. You are holding the middle course, and staying focused on your goal by saying the four key words over and over again. The untamed aspects of the mind will rush out to contest your way- but your will must be stronger. Over-exerting the will to defeat the mind will only cause the distractions to become stronger and eject you from the work. Will must be used calmly and coolly, without strain.

I find that this state comes quickly, if I go into it properly prepared and with the needed energy. This trance state is subtle; You know that you are in it, but it may take days or weeks to really integrate your "knowing" such that you become clearly conscious of your condition- though this "clear consciousness" is not the consciousness of pure wakefulness. No, it has become something else entirely. And in this state, any feat of mind is possible, any motion in the unseen world- one becomes truly unfettered in this state.

Because you are not awake fully, you are not bound by physics and the limits of perception. Because you are not asleep fully, you are not bound to mindlessness and unconsciousness. Desire and imagination become your new wings with which to fly, your new guides, the new powers that will light the way on to wherever you are intending to go. Where your desire can reach, you can reach, and without much time or effort, at all. What imagination can illuminate, you can experience.

When you have mastered this trance to the point that your mind is no longer a murky bog of watery thoughts and dreams and half-forgotten images, you are ready for the next step, which is into another world, beyond space and time. But the "harrowing of the personal hell" is not easy; a lifetime of dark subject matter, sensation, and experience has filled the mind and gives it an inertia that is hard to overcome.

But a few sessions a week, perhaps one short session a day, of trying to edge down into the "between state" and remaining clearly conscious there, while dispassionately observing the coming and going of hidden, unconscious and half-conscious material, has the marvelous impact of cleansing the mind and making safe one's own personal darkness. It has a way of preparing the ancient inner eyes to open more often and with greater power. Success is, of course, not guaranteed, but those who are shod by Fate for the Road of Initiation will succeed.

Road Maps to Faery

When the portal is ready, you will know it. I suggest eighteen months of work, at minimum, before you are ready for a road map that will take you beyond the immediate clarity of trance and into transpersonal regions beyond the typical understanding of “mind”- though nothing is beyond the fullness of what we truly are. When you are ready, you will find that the folk tradition provides the needed maps- the ancient works hid nothing from anyone. It is only we who assume that the truest and best secrets are hiding.

Begin with the map given below: it is only one map from a very old tradition, but there are many more to be found. May the old powers make safe your darkness.

I.

ENCIRCLED WHITE AND WITH THE LAMP-LIGHT OF SPIRIT
I SPEAK WORDS OF ART THAT EMBODY MY WILL:
MY WILL TO THE STARS AND SHADOW-DRAPED SKY,
TO THE FIELD AND WOOD, AND STARING MOON:

OPEN THE DOORWAY BELOW, AND GIVE ME ENTER
AND SAFE RETURN AGAIN.
WITH HAZEL-STAFF AND HEARTH STONE,
ONE TO GO FORTH AND ONE TO COME HOME,
I STRIDE FORTH INTO THE OTHERNESS.

II.

SEW THE THREAD, MAKE THE STITCH
UPON IT PLACE PITCH AND KNOCK WITHIN YOUR NAILS!
ACCUSER SHADOW, WALK THE WAY WITH ME
THOUGH I SHALL GO MY WAY JOYFULLY;
FATE'S GREAT SPINDLE I TRUST TO POINT ME RIGHT
IN SORROWFUL DAY OR PERILOUS NIGHT.
AND WITH CUNNING,
THE DARKEST NIGHT IS AS DAY DAWNING.

III.

THE VILLAGES OF THE WASTE ARE SMALL:
THEIR TRADESMEN SMILE, THEIR WIVES CARRY WATER,
THEIR PEOPLE GO ON UNCOVERED FEET.
I WHO WEAVE AND STITCH,
AND YOU WHO MAKE THE ARMOR OF THE HEEL,
TO THE FOREST WE GO, WHICH SUN CANNOT FILL,
BEYOND WHICH LIES THE GLEAMING CITY OF A KING.

IV.

HERE THE FOREST OF SHADE BEGINS
PENETRATED BY TWO ROADS, A FORK AND FEARFUL DOUBT
THE HIGH ROAD DEMANDS SEVEN DAYS,
THE LOW ROAD ONLY TWO
WHICH SHALL BE WHICH? WHAT SHALL WE DO?
WE HAVE NO GUIDANCE SAVE TRUST IN DAME FATE
ACCUSER SHADE, CARRY SEVEN DAYS' BREAD
AND I SHALL CARRY ONLY TWO
INTO THE FOREST WE GO.

V.

THE TORMENT OF HUNGER STALKS ME
AND THE ACCUSER SHADE MOCKS ME
OFFERING TO PRESERVE ME ONLY TO BLIND ME
SUCH A FATE TO ALL WHO GIVE SOUL AWAY TO DESPAIR!
BUT THE FOREST HAS ENDED, GIVEN WAY TO EMERALD FIELDS
AND IN THE DISTANCE, A HUNDRED-TOWERED CITY.
BETWEEN THE FOREST AND THE CITY, A GALLOWS POLE
AND ON THE GIBBET THE CORPSES OF TWO HANGED MEN
WHO WHISPER THE SECRETS OF THE DEAD WHEN THE MOON IS HIGH.
THERE WITH THEM, ON THEIR TANGLED HEADS, PERCH TWO CROWS
WHO WATCH ALL PASS WITH THE BALEFUL GLARE OF FATE.
THERE IS A JUSTICE WHICH SEES ALL,
AND WAITS TO STRIKE ON BLACK WINGS.

VI.

FOAL OF BROWN AND WHITE, RUN STRONG AND FREE
MY HAND IS THE HAND THAT RELEASES THEE:
MOTHER DUCK, QUEEN OF PONDS AND LAKES
YOUR TWELVE YOUNG I WILL NEVER TAKE.
QUEEN BEE, YOUR HIVE WILL DRIP SWEET AND GOLD
WITH THE HONEY THAT WOULD RESTORE ME
BUT I PASS IT BY LEST IT OFFEND THEE!
BOG-KING, MARSH-KING, COUSIN LONG-LEG AND SACRED
I SPARE YOUR NECK, MASTER OF THE SKY
NONE SHALL SLAY YOU AND ESCAPE THE BLIGHT OF FATE.
FOR MY REGARD, REMEMBER ME, AND LEND YOUR POWERS FAIRLY.

VII.

A KING'S COMMAND SENDS ME FORTH
MY LASTING DEATH SHOULD I FAIL:
MOTHER DUCK AND TWELVE FAITHFUL KIN,
FROM THE BOTTOM OF FAERY'S WATER RAISE THE CROWN
THAT I REQUIRE, ANCIENT AND LOST.
QUEEN BEE, MAKE THE ENTIRE WORLD FROM WAX
MISS NOT A MOTE OR A MARK.
HORSE OF BROWN AND WHITE, GALLOP ROUND THRICE
AND WITH YOUR HOOVES STRIKE,
MAKE THE WATER BENEATH THE EARTH RISE TO THE SKY
A FOUNTAIN THAT WILL EVEN SOOTHE THE DEAD.
COUSIN LONG-LEGS, SACRED WHITE WING,
TAKE FROM THE DEEP POND A PRINCELY CHILD,
AND THROUGH THE SKY DELIVER HIM
TO THE DAUGHTER OF THE KING.

VIII.

HORSE AND DUCK, BEE AND STORK,
FOREST AND GIBBET AND CITY GATE,
DARK TREES AND ROADS THAT FORK,
ACCUSER SHADE AND KINGLY COURT,
I AM THE ONE WHO WEAVES AND CHARMS
WHO CRAFTS AND JOURNEYS BETWEEN THE ARMS OF DAY AND NIGHT.
CROWS OF THE DEAD, SEE ME PASS,
BLIGHTS AND WEIRDS OF HUNGER AND PAIN,
PRINCESS OF THE SIDHE, AWAITING YOUR MATE,
ALL THE POWERS OF FORCE AND OF FATE,
PRESERVE ME NOW; THE CHILD COMES.

XI.

ACCUSER FLEE, CAST AWAY ARE THEE,
DOWN BY THE GIBBET YOU WILL FALL:
THE CROWS WILL TAKE YOUR EYES, AND THE FOREST SWALLOW YOU.
NEVER AGAIN WILL THEY HEAR OF YOU,
AND I WILL WEAR THE CROWN.

Sundown Door: Opening The Way to the Sky

2009-05-02T11:57:00.000-07:00

The Path to the Star-Throne of the Lady

Old Man Who Lives In The Stones: I sense the longing in your soul and the triumph of the evil powers. Chaos and madness reign where once the deer was hunted and the fire of people was joy for all. Listen, way-watcher and way-maker and I will show you the old magic that summons the vision you need. To see is not enough, but it may be all that you are to have. Suffering men and women, I and those others like me have become ageless spirits, like unto those which we sought aid from when we lived in the boundaries of flesh. I see so far and so much, I know the good and the evil. I see so many men and women lost, and terrible powers running free. I know that nothing ever ends and things will be well, but great is the need for men to embrace their task. Men alone complete what begins unseen. The great unseen alone completes men.

Arrow-maker: You have all that you need, save one thing: you do not know what to tell the Lady when you meet Her, the words that say what so many have forgotten, and without which, no peace or health is possible. The Lady is the earth, source of every life and goodness, source of every food and healing herb, life's faithful sustainer. You must recognize Her for this. That is all. Her true worship is recognition.

Old Man Who Lives In The Stones: Here is how the magic is made. The earth powers and the growing powers will show you the place. The sun rises and sets in a straight line over the place; at its middle point are two trees standing near one another- they form a passage-way. The sun passes between them and goes below far beyond them; you can see its red death from between them.

Take a staff of ash or oak and etch upon it a horse and a rider, and set it up far to the east of the two trees, but always between them. Pour from it a line of water, running between the trees, the length of twenty men- and where it ends, build a fire of wood from the land all around. Kindle the fire as the sun is sinking and walk back to the horseman's pole. Pour honey, milk, and blood into the ground in a pit dug before the pole. Say the words:

Wisdom spirit, gallop and trot to me!
Into my hand place the key.
Life spirit, give your offerings,
And we will rightfully repay.
Fate spirit, bind unending as you will,
But spare me wisdom.

Walk backwards on the water-trail for the space of five men, never taking your eyes off the horseman's pole, and look beyond, to the dark eastern horizon. See there a man on horseback, watching. Send him a voice:

Master of tree weird, Master of earth weird,
Riding between day and night and through the dreams of man
Leaper over ditch and mound, river and wood
Holder of the secret key, ride forth and appear!
Not above nor below, not there, not here
But in the knowledge clear of woman and man.
Come with wind! Come invisible if you will,
Come with the people of the storm.

Turn around and fix your eyes on the fire in the twilight. Walk towards the two trees, with your palms towards the ground. Walk along the water-trail you have made; do not ever leave it. Speak:

Fate-weaver's strands, binding grove and well
Pond and tree, fire and circling rock
Not by hands nor words is Fate woven
But by the Woman with star-filled eyes
And her great field of darkness.
World of nine times and nine deeps,
Where weirds hide their truthful shapes,
And life and death struggle forever:
Let summer fade and winter win,
Let winter break and summer grow,
Always the ebb and the flow.
In that turning, let light increase
Let the power collect in me, rising without end.
Amid the darkness of unseen things,
The Master rides with his rade
Let him bring the key of life and death.

Arrow Maker: As you reach the trees, turn around and face the pole. It will be gone; in its place, you will see the Horseman. He will ride forth with great might and come to a circling halt before you. He will reach down and hand you the Key of life and death- an arrow. Etched on it will be many strange signs, but you need not worry as to their meanings. Bend your neck to him and say "I honor the Lady and the Old World". He will nod and ride away to the east. You will turn and hurl the arrow between the two trees, towards the fire, but it will not land before you; it will vanish as it passes between the trees.

This is a sign that the Sundown Door is opened. You will place your hand over your heart and commend yourself to the Lady and step through the two trees, but as you pass through, watching your fire, the twilight will vanish, to be replaced by a night full of stars. The fire will still be there, glaring through the darkness, and it will seem further away than it was before. The two trees will no longer be to your left and right; instead, a man and a woman, naked and covered with dark markings, will be standing- they are the weirds of the tree and the dead. They will walk you towards the fire, which is on a land-rise. When you reach it, you will pass the fire by a few paces, and hear the voices of many people in the valley below.

Under the bright stars, and with the full moon overhead, you will see many smaller fires below you, and distantly. The shapes of men and women will be next to them; they are the ancients, still worshiping the stars by building fires on earth to match their places in the night sky. Look up; you will see the arrangements of the stars in the sky have been recreated on the earth with the fires of the earth. The people are gazing up, making their songs. You have forgotten what shapes the stars made- the hunters, the beasts they chased, the heroes who killed monsters. Before you on the ground, in the star-fires, is the Lady's bower. Above you is Her bower. Behind you, the ghost-fire you kindled is the pole star come to earth.

Walk away from your fire. Walk down into the dark valley, and pass the other star-fires. The people there will not turn to see you; you are a spirit to them. They will continue to adore the stars. You will walk to the center of the Lady's bower, and before you, out of the darkness, will come bounding a great and majestic red deer. She will stop before you and gaze at you with the most ancient eyes. She waits.

You must bend your knee to her and tell her that you recognize her as the source of life. You must say it with your heart. You must withhold nothing. She will nod her head back and a blessing will enter you. Then, the red deer will turn into a great deer of wood and straw. She will burst into flames, and the fire will rage bright; hundreds of sparks will fly upwards, seeking the stars. That is how the stars came to be in the sky.

Old Man Who Lives In The Stones: You will reach out and seize one of the sparks, and it will carry you upwards like a glowing moth into the sky. You will be lifted upwards by the spark, into the darkness between the many brilliant white stars, all of which will turn into men and women, all standing on a field of utter darkness- the ground which is the sky. They are white-skinned, draped in white animal skins, all facing towards a larger light, which you could not see from the earth. In that light, on a great chair of silvery and white, sits the Lady, whose earth-form you just met and honored in Her form of the red deer. Through it, you and She have both transformed upwards, and you can come into the presence of Her starry-form, Her true shape.

From above She sees all. From far beyond Her light, in the darkness, is the sound of the weaving of eternity. Her people are gathered around Her seat, and She smiles in recognition at you. She is the source of all life, and She has revealed Herself to you as best a mortal man can receive Her.

Arrow Maker: I am there, in Her court of stars, and so is the Old Man Who Lives In The Stones. So are all of us who once lived on the earth, and whose ghosts stay bound to the earth. We are here, above, too. The Horseman is here, too- see: he is the Son of Light. The great Life Spirit is here, too- everywhere. We are all Fate; no power is excluded. But the source of it all is the Lady, she is the power of powers, the fiery spirit of fires, the source of the many waters.

To live perpetually among the stars of the sky is not difficult; the key to this place is knowing the source of all things and recognizing it, withholding nothing. Those who forget their true source are capable of every evil; they become the servants of the evil powers that tear the world and life down to the murky clot of water, blood, earth and salt in which it began. They reduce things to their roots. They do this by making incomplete that which should be complete; their words are evil, and their dreams are evil.

They follow a road that is broad and dark- you must follow the narrow road of the water that passes between the two trees, for those trees are life and death. It is a road full of the redness of blessings, the blessings of the deer that the ancients hunted, and which sustained them. The earth sustained them, because they recognized it and loved it. The sky sustained them and the stars- we, the stars- sustained them. They knew harmony then and now, for true harmony is beginningless and endless. They knew how all things have many shapes, how trees and stones spoke like people and could look like people. They knew the old magic.

Old Man Who Lives In The Stones: Take this harmony, offered to you now- look at Her, on Her throne: She beckons. Two lives for you begin today, a life above and below, which are the same life.

Before you came here, only the earth and the underworld were in your range of power; now, the stars, earth, and underworld are; the star-court has become your new earth, and the earth of old is now your underworld, and you will see its many lost souls and dangers, all in a new light. And below that? In the darker, deeper underworld? There is no deeper; if you were to return to earth, and go below, you would find yourself here again, in the stars.

For you, the dark underworld's once dim and terrifying shapes have become stars! That dark source below- mother source of waters- has become the bright throne! Know that they were always stars; it was a dark dream that led you to believe otherwise, a dark dream that is also among the Fateful powers. Embrace the joy you feel now. There is a joy at the heart of Fate, a crystalline body of indestructible life for all.

In joy, one day in your life below, commit your body and soul to the ground. Should you go onto a pyre, the sparks will carry you back here, instantly. Should you go into the mound, you will merge as we did and become a phantom bound for countless millennia, at least from the reckoning of mortal men and women who still wander the earth and eat meat and bread. For you, time will cease. You can teach those few who may speak to you to find their way to the sundown door, or show them what other things Fate asks you to tell them.

But your spirit will still be here, as well as below. Your spirit will no longer sleep in the wholeness of the sky, sleeping here as many others do; it is awake now for all time.

Look at the Lady; She is calling you to come before Her. There is someone she wishes you to meet. What remains of your mind of earth and water and air is about to become whole.

The Boast of the Hidden People

2009-04-27T16:21:00.001-07:00

Seek our liches in wood or grit or down in trickling dark,
In sparrow or buck or silvery fish, you'll find us never and naught;
Our fetches are clear, like unto wind, though never one and same;
We are the earthy darkling things, waned ancient 'afore men came.

On windswept lands and seven hills our crowns of old were raised,
On every tree we perched a-guard; on every tump our fires blazed!
In the lowest dale beneath our halls, whispering life took form;
We saw the sun make all things new, from every fort on every morn.

The world gapes bare, but just for you: bright air is still our home;
With Night our matron, Cunning our king, and trickery our song.
We are stealing cold and taking rot, the imps of nightly dread;
We are fluttering birds, May-warm breeze, by fearful offerings fed.