I’ll admit to having a few fluffy bunny tendencies. In fact one of my major life totems is rabbits, so I might even construe an accusation of fluffy bunny as a compliment. Bunnies have taught me a lot about life.
As a rule however I don’t feel it necessary to claim to be magical to everyone I meet in hopes of impressing them with my witchy-ness; I figure if they need to know they will find out soon enough. Maybe my favourite fashion colour scheme of black on black will give me away.
To be sure there are fluffy bunnies of the innocuous sort, and there is even a checklist you can use to see if you fit this category. Then there are the really fluffy bunnies, those that exemplify a more sinister definition of fluffy bunnyism.
Overcompensating?
I went into a new crystal and gem shop in the local mall one day to look for a specific stone. The store lady was in there walking around and around the counters smoking up the place with sage to the point it almost triggered an asthma attack. She wanted way too much money for simple shiny rock tumbles so I left, just thankful that I managed to get out without having a choking fit.
I had to wonder though what was she thinking doing a smudge ritual and smoking out customers in the middle of the store in the middle of the day? All I could figure was that if she did it after hours then no one would see her and see how pagan-y she was being and want to buy her overpriced mystical gemstones. To be fair, maybe a really stinky customer had been in there before me.
Willow: Talk. All talk. ‘Blah, blah, Gaia. Blah, blah, moon. Menstrual life-force power thingy.’
Buffy: No actual witches in your witch group?
Willow: No. Bunch of wanna blessed-be’s. Nowadays every girl with a henna tattoo and a spice rack thinks she’s a sister to the dark ones.
Lack of Consideration
Another time recently I received an invitation to a Meetup group of witches and pagans in my local area. One of their upcoming events was getting together to “paint hawthorne trees.” I truly love the hawthorne and went to a lot of trouble some years ago to find some for my own yard. The beautiful hawthorne is also a Beltaine tree and is said to attract faeries.
The thing is, there was no mention of asking these magical trees’ permission first before a cadre of 20 or 30 people descended on them with paints in hand, looking to connect with nature spirits. I was a bit concerned too that once I started pricking my finger with a thorn in order to offer a blood sacrifice to Brigid I might upset some of those who only came for the tea and crumpets. Just as well I’m a solitary, I suppose.
Authenticity
I’m sure these folks mean well but somehow it comes across in my mind as lacking authenticity. Some people give us real fluffy bunnies a bad name. I write here often about kindness, something that could be interpreted as a fluffy bunny tendency, at least according to the checklist. I put some of my own Faerie philosophy developed over 20 years of study into a humorous article and there were one or two who missed the point I’m afraid. Apparently, I do not take my Faerie Faith seriously enough.
All that aside, I still do love Tinkerbell and Winnie the Pooh, and I think that sometimes the most profound wisdom can be found in children’s literature. For example when Piglet asks:
“Supposing a tree fell down, Pooh, when we were underneath it?”
“Supposing it didn’t,” said Pooh after careful thought.
Sounds very Zen to me, a concept worthy of meditation.
Faeries come in all shapes, sizes, and temperaments, and to assign this or that motive or attribute to all faeries seems a contradiction of their natures. It is the same with witches. I happen to love bunnies, but bunnies have big, sharp teeth, they aren’t afraid of anything, and they know when discretion is the better part of valour. They are certainly fecund to a fault.
On our paths to enlightenment and learning, we follow our own way, let our hearts lead us balanced by good judgement, and try not to step in anything along the way. There are obvious examples we might do better to avoid such as those above, but I do think we must also be careful of the labels we use to define and dismiss others, and the labels we use to set others above ourselves (and vice versa).
Perhaps we stray only when we start to take ourselves too seriously and become convinced of our own magical importance, forgetting that the simplest act of kindness can be most magical indeed in its transformative power. Wisdom and magic are not proprietary and can be found in the most unlikely places, perhaps not so much sometimes in the places they are most loudly proclaimed to be.
In the end I don’t particularly care for white lights (I happen to prefer the dark), and I believe there can be more real magic in an interesting stick picked up while walking than in a mass produced, store-bought crystal wand. However, between faeries and bunnies and thinking that kindness is never a bad thing, and even indulging in a little basic flower and candle magic from time to time, perhaps I am a bit fluffy after all. That’s okay. With the astounding things I’ve seen and learned from this magical life, somehow I can’t see that as altogether a bad thing.
Once, when I was very young, I was paging through a book, and saw in it a line drawing of Khnum, potter god and creator, as he crafted body and soul on his wheel. I remember thinking of how kind he looked, and how friendly.
When I got older, I was sure it had been in the Dover edition of the Budge translation of The Book of the Dead, snagged off my father’s shelves as I did every so often, but I looked through it over and over again, and I never found that drawing. It was as if it had vanished entirely from the only place I could think it might have been.
I wonder sometimes what it was I saw, and where. But I’ve often said, in the years since I became Kemetic, that Khnum was the first god I ever loved.
Originally published in “Handbook for Traveling, pt.1 Lower Egypt, with the Fayum and the peninsula of Sinai”, by Karl Baedeker, Leipsic, 1885. p. 129., distributed from Travelers in the Middle East Archive (TIMEA)
Khnum is, like all Egyptian deities, a god of many nuances, and linked into the cycles of (re-)creation. He guarded the gates to the underworld through which the Nile emerged, and thus was responsible for releasing the flood. Upon his wheel he made the bodies of kings, and their kau to match, out of Nile silt, and I once came across a scrap of story (modern or ancient I don’t know) that said he set a wheel in the uterus, so that others might do the same. A myth has him as the sole male attendant at a birth, among a company of midwifing goddesses. Some stories name him as the father of Ra, and others place him as one of the guardians of the sun barque on its night journey.
He is a creator.
I would say that being a creator is one of the primary traits of a god of Egypt. Not just in the sense of creating the cosmos, though a large number of the Powers are credited with that in one form or another, but in the sense that things must be brought into being, maintained, upheld, and this is the role of a god. (And here is a clue as to the complex nuances around Set, who went through cycles of honor and vilification; he creates change, and change in a heavily traditional, very ordered society is essentially the same as destruction. Which is not the same as uncreation – which he vehemently opposes – but it is still not an easy thing to bear.)
The gods Seth (left) and Horus (right) adoring Ramesses in the small temple at Abu Simbel, Chip Dawes, public domain
I do love these images of Set and Heru, though, the ones that show the two of them crowning or supporting the king: the change, the individual might, that Set embodies, balanced off against the continuity and collective potency of rulership and the polity that rests within Heru. There are others in the same genre, the two of them binding together plants or otherwise linking and balancing supposed opposing forces or regionally distinct icons.
The gods, the ancient Egyptians believed, were fed upon ma’at. And ma’at is a complicated concept, difficult to translate: the one-word translations for it include truth, and justice, and balance, and order, and harmony, and law. But ma’at was their food, sustaining them, nurturing them, and human offering of ma’at enabled the cycles of reciprocity that maintained the condition under which ma’at could be found.
And ma’at was established, maintained, and flowed forth from the moment of creation. It is coterminous with the act of creation, and the act of re-creation, of returning to the beginning, is a process of creating, restoring, and promoting ma’at.
There are times that everything seems too much. There’s a lot of that lately.
But I keep coming back around to re-creation. Not just every dawn, though every dawn is the archetypal re-creation in Egyptian thought.
But the urge to create, to make the world, to reshape the world towards justice/order/truth/harmony/that ineffable thing that one points at and says, “That, there, that ineffable thing is what feeds the divine”, that’s a guiding holiness.
In the velvet darkness between the worlds, a welcoming light shines bright and steady. Here Brigid tends Her holy well and sacred flame, offering up their life-transforming magic that grants the gifts of healing, inspiration and wisdom for those who seek Her guidance. She does not call us to Her side, for She knows that we will find Her when the time is ripe.
As Nature shifts from the dark dormancy of Winter to the life-inducing powers of the strengthening sun that herald the approach of Spring, our desire for the spring of new possibilities and the end of the long winter of our soul drives us to Brigid’s doorstep. Our mind turns to the seeds of our beauty and wounding, sourced from our Deep Self and life story, that hold the next pieces of our pathwork, and our soul turns to Brigid’s loving, gracious presence and Her tremendous powers that can make our life anew.
Trust these powerful hungers and impulses stirring within you. Trust that life-transforming change is possible, and that Brigid can help you in this essential soul work. Trust that your shining inner light is kin to Her shining light, and in the spirit of this kinship you will find your way to Her realm between the worlds.
When you reach the threshold of Brigid’s realm, you’ll discover a thick oak door with an ancient key, greened by age and the elements – the key of conscious choice. Your soul desire has led you to Brigid, now you must consciously choose to turn the key, knowing that to stand before this mighty, generous Goddess is to commit yourself to Her healing ways. And once you have made this commitment, it is not easily unmade; when you open the door that connects you to Brigid, it can never truly be shut again.
As you step over the threshold, Brigid welcomes you with a warm, captivating smile, Her cheeks flushed slightly with the heat of Her forge. She is breathtaking to behold, with long, fiery red tresses, creamy white skin, and a tall, slender form draped in a dark green mantle. Though Her beauty is as bright as the flames She tends, it is the palpable presence of Her love and kindness that is your strongest impression of Her.
Both the flames and Brigid’s radiance seep through your flesh, swiftly thawing the frozen places in your heart. When you look into Her startling green eyes, you see the life you are longing for reflected in their soulful depth, and Her desire to help make your dreams come true. You do not need to speak these things to Brigid, She already knows you, inside and out, deep and true.
“Let us see what hidden knowledge and healing visions await you at this time of Imbolc,” She says.
With Her long, expressive fingers, Brigid beckons you to a shallow, black stone bowl filled with the waters of Her holy well. She directs your gaze to its still, flat surface, illuminated by the flickering lights of Her sacred flame.
Images arise in a swift procession from the close-up and intimate of your life to the wide-scope of the greater world. Brigid’s scrying waters do not spare you from the ugly and the painful. You are shown the hurt places inside of you and their symbiotic expression in your outer existence, and then, broader still, to the same patterns that exist in human society.
“These images tell the one story of the seed of your wounding,” Brigid says, “What is inside is outside, and what is outside is inside; your inner world reveals itself in your outer existence, and your personal life is both trapped within the strictures of collective reality and you help re-create this reality with your day-to-day choices and actions.”
Brigid passes Her hands over the basin’s surface and new images appear, this time offering a mélange of the beautiful and inspiring, again drawing both on your personal life and the greater world. Some of the images you recognize from your current existence and others feel achingly familiar, like a longed-for possibility that has yet to take form.
“These images tell the one story of the seed of your beauty,” Brigid says, “Just as with your wounding, what is inside and outside both inform and infuse the other. By the beauty and goodness of individuals, the beauty and goodness of human society emerges.”
With a swirling motion of her fingertips, Brigid activates Her holy water’s visionary magic one last time. The previous images blend and merge, entwining the stories of your beauty and wounding, both in their personal and collective manifestations. And you see, from the depth of your being, that your beauty and wounding are mirrors of the same thing; there is really only one story, the story of your life, woven from all that you are, and all that you’ve ever experienced, defined and constrained within the matrix of collective reality.
Together you step away from the scrying bowl. Brigid turns to face you and says, “Everything has a place and purpose, even the most painful and challenging of these images. Life, with its joys and sorrows, is the crucible of your spiritual healing and evolution. You would not be who you are now, standing here with me on the cusp of your greater becoming, within having gone through these trials and experiences. Great beauty and power are forged from great wounding and suffering, tempered by a wisdom, love and compassion that a life fully embraced, in its light and shadow, can grant you.
“My scrying bowl has revealed to you the seeds and stories that are the makings of the new beginning ready to emerge from within you. They are the raw materials that will drive the healing pathwork that is before you now.
“You must tend these seeds in preparation for your springtime of new growth. Your life is their soil, your love their water, and your conscious awareness their sunshine. With proper care, they will show you the way of your healing and transformation, and your path forward to the life of soul you are longing for.
“Are you ready to take this next crucial step on your journey of soul? Will you commit yourself to the sacred task of tending your seeds of beauty and wounding, and letting them guide you in your pathwork?”
Think hard before you answer Brigid, for this is a special, powerful kind of commitment — a vow spoken before Her sacred forge, where the old is made anew. She will hold you to this commitment, and your life will be forever changed.
With a simple “yes”, you bind yourself to Brigid.
“So it is chosen, so it will be,” She says.
Three times Her hammer strikes Her anvil, hard steel against hard steel, ringing your vow outward into the listening Universe.
Then Brigid kisses your brow and presses Her palm against your solar plexus. A warm, swirling energy passes between you, and you sense the visions of Her scrying waters now alive and brewing in your belly center. She smiles one last smile, filling the space and your heart with Her radiance, and then She is gone.
Yet Her kiss remains, a token that She will never leave your side. The visioning magic of this Imbolc eve will bring you the healing, inspiration and wisdom you need to tend your seeds of beauty and wounding. As you tend your seeds, discovering and embracing their place and purpose on your journey of soul, Brigid tends them with you, coaxing out their healing and creative impulses. And as you shift and grow, bringing positive change to your life and the greater world, Her joy shines down on you, filling you up with the bright flame of Her nourishing love.
This has been an excerpt from Path of She Book of Sabbats: A Journey of Soul Across the Seasons, now available on Amazon and iBooks. Visit the Path Store for details.
The Path of She is published on alternate Saturdays; follow it via RSS or e-mail! If you like Karen’s work, like her page on Facebook or maybe buy her book, Tale of the Lost Daughter, a fictional spiritual adventure into the life-changing world of magic and the sacred feminine.
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(Disclaimer: Freya has many facets; She is not only a love goddess. In this article, however, I focus on her Love and Beauty aspect. Also, my guess is that other goddesses with a Love and Beauty aspect have a similar effect.)
A good friend who belongs to the Morrígan and I had a conversation a few years ago, back when we were first sharing about our experiences with our deities. As one who is a daughter of the Morrígan the way that I am the daughter of Freya, she shared with me a lot about how the Morrígan works in the lives of those She chooses. The bulk of our conversation that day centered around how scary it could be to work for the Morrígan and some of the intense work that She puts many of her people through. I stated that my Goddess can be just as scary. Battle crow that she was, she was skeptical, so I explained.
People who don’t love themselves, or feel they aren’t worthy of love, are pretty unprepared for a meeting with Freya. If given half a chance, She will let them see themselves the way that She sees them. She makes them realize that they are beautiful and loved. This challenges some of the most deeply-held beliefs that people have about themselves: That they are not beautiful, and never will be. That no one loves them and never will. That love is conditional and only perfect people get it. That, for whatever reason, they are just not worthy of being loved.
Surprisingly enough, being shown that they are beautiful and loved often shatters people’s self-image in a pretty major way. In my opinion, it is one of the scariest things that She does.
Even before I officially became one of Her priestesses, I sometimes had the ability to channel the pure love and acceptance that She gives. I usually shared this love on a one-to-one basis, either in divination or trance, and the result was often the same each time: man or woman, young or old, close friend or stranger, they cried–sometimes surreptitiously , sometimes blatantly bawling their hearts out. It worried me at first, but now I’ve come to accept that this is just a normal reaction to a meeting with Her.
Now, when I am trancing Her (or even just channeling some of Her energy), I pretty much except that I’ll be dealing with tears from at least one person there at some point. It’s just part and parcel of what Freya priestesses do. If people allow themselves to feel Her energy and are open to what She has to convey, they cry. (Hel, I cry too, sometimes—but usually only when She leaves.)
If you’ve never experienced a meeting with a Freya (or any other Love goddess, probably), let me explain.
Imagine, if you can, that you are standing in a room with the most beautiful entity you’ve ever met. She is powerful, charismatic, and magnetic. She brims over with a lust for life and all of the pleasures to be found in it. She notices you. Every ounce of Her considerable beauty, charm, and attention gets focused on you, and She has decided that you are the most beautiful, valuable person to ever walk the face of this earth. You have not done anything to earn this adoration; it just is. She does not just tell you any of this; you feel this to be true. It hits your soul and you can’t deny it. If you are at all open to the experience, you cannot escape this intense, visceral, unequivocal understanding. It bypasses your rational mind and goes directly to your gut.
That’s the crux of it, really. Freya doesn’t bother with explanations. She doesn’t to try to convince you on some kind of an intellectual level that this is true. She doesn’t gather proof and present a budget-line analysis of your gifts and your flaws. She bypasses that justification crap and goes straight to the heart of the matter: You exist, you are beautiful, and you are loved. (Not “worthy of love”; actually loved.)
Many people do fight it, in my experience. It’s can be too overwhelming. Experiencing that level of emotion and cognitive dissonance can be a challenge for many people in even the best of circumstances. But if even a smidgen of that understanding seeps in, people can’t help but to be affected by it. Then the priest/esses, to the extent that we can, help people pick up the pieces of their personal walls and make sure they are ready to go back into the real world–protected, again, but having experienced that they are beautiful and loved.
In some ways, it’s a blessing that I get to be one of the people who help facilitate this experience. It’s a high to be ridden by Freya and experience the bubble of love and deep intimacy that She creates. I’ve also been on the receiving end and had some of the same soul-shattering experiences as those I help. However, the side effects of the experience can be hard for me, too. I often come down from that session crying my eyes out. Whatever level of this Love that the others feel through me, having Her inside me and feeling that love saturate me–quite literally–has to be ten times stronger. And when it goes away, it can be like being transported to a desolate Arctic outpost in winter. It’s the downside of this work. It’s useful work and I like to do it, but not unlike when Wolverine draws his claws, each time I do it, it hurts me as well.
I can sympathize with the people she talks to. Yes, She makes us cry. But sometimes that’s exactly what we needed to do.
Jean Noblet Marseille Tarot, reconstructed by Jean-Claude Flornoy (Photo: Camelia Elias)
How do you survive your nightmares? The nightmare of Trump, for some, or a recurrent nightmare, disclosing your deepest fears and concerns?
In my work I also do dream readings. I’ve started the year with quite a few of them. This made me think that perhaps we tend to dream more intensely when we are at the crossroads, or crossing thresholds in our lives.
As most readers of this column know now, I use the Tarot to question everything. I put this on my Zen inclination that calls for investigating into what arises, yet, unlike in Zen meditation where I tend towards no question, or identification with the object, with the cards I go to a different beyond.
This is the storyworld. I like stories. And stories arise out of questions. The best stories arise out of curiosity and a willingness to know what happens in our encounters with others, people, nature, animals, spirits, and the like. So I am curious about my dreams when these encounters take the form of the fantastic.
Here is an example of how I spin narratives off my dream world and what I get out of. For a few totally whacked dreams, one lucid, you’re welcome to check my dream tag on my website. You will be entertained. I promise.
Let me show you what I do when I have a dream whose message – if I need one – I wove into the images of the tarot.
The dream world
What I do first is recount the dream in as many details as I can. Then I break the dream down into its major components. I create a sequence of important scenes. For each scene I then pull a card from the Tarot’s major arcana. I create sets of two cards that I then read en bloc.
If I need advice, I then shuffle the cards again, and use the efficient 5-card layout ‘Do and Don’t.’
The mistress and her ring
3 nights ago I had a very clear dream. The night before I watched the film about Jung and Freud, A Dangerous Method, all about a failed love affair and friendship. If you’ve seen this film, you will recognize how it colors my dream below, but my dream is still of my mind’s concoction, and hence it has value all its own.
I number each significant sequences in the dream according to temporal chronology. Here it goes:
(1) I am at a conference, roaming about in the coffee break in the main hall.
(2) I see a tall man seated in a chair. In my dream I recognize him as a friend. I hurry to go over to him.
(3) While still seated, the man gives me a prolonged hug. This occurs to me is odd. When he releases his grip, he gives me another tight hug, which begins to make me feel uncomfortable.
(4) The reason for the experienced unease has to do with feeling my partner, who is also at the conference, watching with exasperation, as if anticipating work on this man: ‘Is she going to read cards again?’ – there is no conference I ever go to in real life without reading cards for all the scientists I know, or who show an interest.
(5) I ask the man, ‘are you all right’, and he says, ‘no,’ shaking his head vigorously. He tells me what’s wrong, that he made a big ring for his mistress, Esther, and now he regrets having promised it to her. He doesn’t want to give her the ring, but the mistress insists that she must have it.
Now he is torn. He tells me the price: 2.2 million. I say, ‘that’s a lot of money for a diamond ring,’ assuming it’s a diamond ring, and then he retorts: ‘Well, I’m a lot richer than you and your partner.’ I find this statement odd, and wonder where it comes from.
(6) Instead of pursuing the malice, I ask the man instead: ‘How does your wife feel about all this?’ He remains silent.
(7) My sister then appears out of the blue, and she shows me the ring. Surprise, surprise. It’s not a diamond ring. It has a granite stone, very large, and cut in rectangular form. One of the 4 ‘clasps’ holding the stone is broken, and my sister is trying to fix it. I have faith in her, as she has a knack for fixing everything in real life too. But she fails.
(8) I look behind me at man again, and wonder to myself. What is there to do about someone’s regret or ambivalence? I feel like telling the man that if he doesn’t want to give his mistress the ring, then he shouldn’t, and that’s that.
(9) Instead, I suggest that I read his cards. I take out my pack, and fiddle with them while I’m also drinking coffee, and I manage to spill the coffee on the cards causing me to feel irritation. As I try to wipe off the liquid, being thankful that only the margins got stained, I notice the bottom card: It’s the Hanged Man.
I wake up.
Dream reality
As you can see, this dream is not only coherent, but also filled with emotions, ranging from despair to anxiety and the desire to do something. The general feeling is, however, one of helplessness.
Let’s put down some cards, to see what we can make of this, apart from offering a standard dream interpretation, which can be summed up along these lines, if Freud were to have a say in it: Someone married the wrong person, putting a ring on her finger that should have belonged to another lover.
Because the dream woman is impossible, the ring in the dream is one that spells out ‘solid house’, not ‘brilliant cutter’. Guilt ensues, and the dream picks up on this reversal: The mistress cannot have the expensive ring, other than by proxy, because, by law, it belongs to the wife, who, however, gets the lesser thing. And that’s regretful. A classic. In this dream it comes out entangled.
I find that ‘laws’ are very interesting in dreams, and the way in which we give ourselves permission or not to pursue something comes to the conscious surface in very interesting ways.
But let’s get back to the cards, and see what they have to say, and get a sense of how we disentangle what is at stake here.
I’ll give a short interpretation of each card, as it connects to each of the 9 scenes. I repeat the gist of each scene for the sake of maintaining attention and coherence.
Jean Noblet Marseille Tarot, reconstructed by Jean-Claude Flornoy (Photo: Camelia Elias)
I’m at a conference. Justice.
This is self-evident. Ideally, we go to conferences to learn. The fact that we are with Justice here allows us to extend our interpretation to the idea that truth should have priority over knowledge, which is not always the case at conferences. What I take from this card, then, is that in dreams the possibility to learn truth and not just acquire knowledge is higher than in conscious states. Right. I could think about this one alone for some time to come…
I see a seated man. Magician.
In the pack I use here, the Jean Noblet Marseille tarot, the Magician is standing. In the first Tarots that we know of, for example the Visconti-Sforza pack, the Magician is seated. But still, a Magician is a magician, a con artist; young and virile, and full of ideas, turning the impossible into the possible. But do we trust him? He seduces us with his skills, and we go with the enchantment. Perhaps the alternative realities that the Magician creates are good enough. Yet he looks as Justice, with an understandable apprehension: You don’t fuck with Justice.
Prolonged hugs. The Hermit.
A hermit takes his time. Even in an embrace, he’s probably thinking of something else, unless he is the Zen kind, in which case, he’ll give you a hug full of presence. Yet a certain weariness is felt. The Hermit lacks the Magician’s vitality. What does his cloak hide? One tends to be fascinated with a monk’s body under his robes and wraps.
My partner is impatient. Judgment.
We are certainly in a public space. Every move and gesture is potentially watched, and hence interpreted and misinterpreted. Gossip can travel around faster than the angel can blow his trumpet. What are we all afraid of? What will be disclosed? And why does this academic always have to read the cards for the sceptics? It’s not sure that enlightenment is on their agenda. Let alone truth.
Esther’s granite ring. The Moon.
Who is Esther? Someone who fascinates, like the Moon does. Or the wife herself. You never know with the Moon. Why can’t she have the ring? The presumption is that an expensive ring like that can only be a diamond ring. Its durability is something you cannot argue with.
But what is the man really afraid of? That Esther will put a spell on him, appearing in his nightmares if he fails to give her that ring? Is Esther really the wife the man didn’t want to get, but ended up with? ‘Here’s a granite stone for you. I gave the diamond ring to another, the one I lost my heart to.’ Freud would say yes.
The Moon discloses the deepest fears. And desires. What you see is precisely not what you get. The man made the ring for his mistress, and now he has second thoughts. Why? The Moon maintains her mysteries. You can ask all the questions in the world. The Moon will not disclose any answers you can use. It will only stir your madness. Mixing things up, messing with reversals and reflective mirroring.
The wife. The Lovers.
The wife knows. She knows about her husband. Well, as they say, a woman always knows. When a man is caught between two women, what is there to do? You can’t fix his ambivalence. The wife knows that her man has his eyes on another. Her hand on his heart, flashing her own diamond, perhaps (or was it granite?) makes a claim: ‘You’re mine.’
But that statement is a gestural statement that only discloses her desire for union. But how does this union manifest on the reciprocal level? As a broken heart? Anxiety? ‘What it I’m not the one?’ As claims in the name of law? ‘I took you as my husband in the eyes of witnesses.’ But is that enough if you’re emotionally invested and expect the same, and if you identify with these emotions? Most people do. It’s hard to maintain a Zen mind about everything. Nasty business, the Lovers business.
My sister appears. The Wheel of Fortune.
So, the ring is not a diamond ring, but granite. It needs fixing too. Whoa. What does this mean? What does granite have that a diamond doesn’t? For once, it lacks the shining brilliance, especially if it’s cut. Granite lacks internal structures. It’s hard and rough. It’s massive. You can build pyramids with it, tall columns and monoliths. Your house is made of granite.
Granite is impressive, where a diamond is merely a cliché for the durability of marriage contracts. What a joke, no? I know many women who keep the precious rock after discarding the husbands. What is all that about? Why not see beyond the cliché? But how many do it?
Granite is solid and stolid, yet forgetting that it goes around in a ring or a wheel that spells out change. You can read these changes on the surface of granite. A diamond ring stays the same, but isn’t this also an illusion? Not even diamonds can escape the Wheel of Time.
And yet. A diamond ring bedazzles. It’s your house of cards, yet made of steel and glass. It can cut itself. It’s the ultimate weapon. But why can’t we see it in the dream?
The diamond ring only exists in perception. What we see in the dream is only the granite. What happened to the diamond ring? It’s certainly there, on a plane that is not articulated concretely. The ring intended for Esther is made of granite. But she is not the wife in the dream, the one with the house that the granite contributes to. Does the wife have the diamond in real life, if there is a wife for this man? If yes, what’s it to her, beyond flashing it to the public?
How can you fix the ambivalence? The Devil
You can’t. Ambivalence is a nasty demon. This one or that one? Which one to choose? The Devil is a higher order Lovers card. Higher in the sense that’s it’s nastier. You can’t get out of your attachment to your ambivalence. That would require a clear mind and vision. The Devil’s job is to convince you that you have no alternative. You are caught. Or the other is caught. Or you are both caught in you attachment: yours to your desire to help, his to his complacency.
I take out the cards to read them. Force.
In the dream, after the coffee stains, the Hanged Man appears. Here we get the card of force. What is this woman trying to overcome? What is the beast she’s struggling with?
Against the background of the image of the Hanged Man, which for me spells out regret, there’s not much you can do. The Hanged Man has no agency, hence the regret. The only thing you can do is to accept your resistance to regretting the situation, and get on with the program.
You feel like telling yourself to put it down. Put your monolith down. Yours and the other’s. What’s the purpose of holding on to rings, diamond or granite? Not even reading the cards can help you. You can struggle with what is hanged in you, but what is the purpose of that struggle?
How can you help someone who has regrets? In my ‘Cards and Zen’ work with people, called Nonreading, I just tell them to put it all down. The cards are good at spelling out a method, and a way of going about it, so that ‘putting it all down’ does not appear as a grand abstract, or a grand cliché. It works wonders.
Course of action
As you can see, one can go on with a dream reading. A dream is both a complex world, but also very simple and straightforward.
If a course of action is desired after having an interesting dream, what you can do is proceed to laying down more cards, taking your point of departure in the question that begs itself, here, ‘How can this situation be helped?’, maintaing some distance.
Or if you want to be more involved, then, how can you help someone who has regrets? Including your own?
The general function of the cards on the table is precisely to raise your awareness about what’s happening, how you feel about it, and why it’s a good idea to think of ways of detaching.
For this I do a 5-card reading.
Let me give a quick example in conclusion.
The cards on the horizontal axis tell us something about the situation outside of the dream world. The card on top gives advice for a concrete plan of action. The card at bottom tells us what to avoid.
Jean Noblet Marseille Tarot, reconstructed by Jean-Claude Flornoy (Photo: Camelia Elias)
Justice, The Devil, The Pope
A process of seeing and confronting the demons has started. Mainly through spiritual guidance. What the Popes of the world are known for, when they are also competent, is giving you pointed out instruction. Not in the sense of telling you what to do. No one wants to be told what to do.
The smart spiritual counselors will know better than to tell you what to do. They will point you in the right direction so that you can make your own realizations. But digging into your unconscious is still something you have to do to begin with. Are you able to distance yourself first from whatever confronts you, and apply some discernment in the face of the illusion of ‘no alternative’? A tough one.
Recognizing the demons of attachment is a process that you do with your self, with no one else involved. You are alone. You are always alone. Get that through your head. No one else can see your truth. Only you can. That’s why the Pope here is not turned towards your inner demons. He is turned towards the possibilities that come after making some realizations. He points to the future, however uncertain that always is.
Hence the advice here is to take action in your own hands. Imperially.
The card in the position of DO is the Emperor. Make a plan and follow it through. Make that appointment with the higher lama, or teacher. Sit and listen. Imperially.
When the Emperor is smart, he realizes that his power and sovereignty is in acknowledging the ones he rules over. Listen to them.
What is a good idea to avoid is making drastic decisions of the kind that makes ultimate pronouncements: ‘Off with his head’ is not a good idea here, as it will accomplish nothing but spilled blood. Not all sacrifices require blood.
The card in the position of DON’T is Death. Don’t do Death. Don’t kill it.
Given the Pope in the picture, the only thing we can take from here is the fact that there’s a teaching in it. The situation can be helped by seeing it as a real and truthful opportunity for learning how to confront attachment and ambivalence; how to gain vision and wisdom in the middle of bondage.
You can exorcise your demons by taking your meditation to a higher level. You learn a lesson, you teach it to others.
In the context of my dream, as it was flavored by watching a film featuring titans of psychoanalytical thinking and practice, whose work I’m familiar with, I’d say that what the cards call for here, is not deconstructing the past, the focus of psychoanalysis (Justice is a woman of method), but rather of confronting present illusions (Justice + The Devil).
I like it that the cards suggest what I started out with musing about, my Zen inclination: ‘Go Zen. Befriend your demons and learn to recognize their nature. Control your mind.’ Controlling your mind has little to do with the past. It has to do with the present.
The dream itself has reflective content, as there are moments in it that are explicitly cognitive, not just emotionally felt: ’How can I help?’, is in itself a selfless attitude, already disclosing the capacity to detach. so, detach. Put it down.
From a storytelling point of view, what can I say? Are you still reading? If you are, then it’s because you found this captivating. There is no greater gift than the gift of sharing captivating stories with others. Thank you.
Enjoy your dreams.
♠
More dream work and other cartomantic activities? Stay in the loop, or browse my webpage for concrete counselling sessions. A brand new course in advanced readings, Radiant Readings, will open for registration on February 3.
In a previous column, I described the links between an early work of Aleister Crowey’s, White Stains, and the Decadent movement of the late nineteenth-century. Indeed, there are many connections between Crowley’s early poetry and social milieu and literary Decadence. Many people would probably consider Crowley the epitome of a fin de siècle Decadent figure: the Great Beast, the Wickedest Man in the World, writer of erotic poetry and practitioner of strange magicks, translator of Baudelaire, disciple of Swinburne and unveiler of the tomb of Oscar Wilde. Yet there are also areas in which Crowley’s work and philosophy are not at all Decadent, according to the notion of Decadence meant by the literary term.
Hargrave Jennings: A Source of Crowley’s Sex Magick
Crowley’s understanding of sex and sex magic is one of these areas. Crowley, of course, received his early magical training in the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn—but, although sometimes a controversial issue, it is generally agreed that the classical version of the Order did not contain any form of sex magical teachings, either in theory or in practice. Crowley developed his ideas about sex through personal inclination, reaction to his puritanical Victorian Protestant upbringing, and his later involvement with Ordo Templi Orientis.
A modern cover of a book by Hargrave Jennings, epitomizing his usual topic: phallic worship.
Crowley was also heavily indebted to the curious work of Hargrave Jennings, an esoteric philosopher and scholar of religion who is considered a saint in Crowley’s Ecclesia Gnostica Catholica. Jennings’ The Rosicrucians, Their Rites and Mysteries is included on the A∴A∴ reading list. As Tau Apiryon explains,
The theory of Rosicrucianism set forth in The Rosicrucians revolves around a belief that all religions originated in the primitive worship of the principle of Light or Fire as the animating force of the universe, which is represented by the sun in the heavens and by the phallus in the physical world.
Many of Jennings’ ideas on sexuality, Rosicrucianism, and phallic worship made their way into Crowley’s Thelemic religious system, overlaid with Golden Dawn-inspired Egyptian Godforms and Neo-Buddhist philosophical ideas. Anyone even remotely acquainted with Thelemic doctrine or the Creed of Ecclesia Gnostica Catholica can see the resemblance between Jennings’ explication of phallicism and Crowley’s cosmology: the notion of the sun as the primary object of cult worship, and the phallus as “the sole viceregent of the Sun upon Earth,” the representative of the “creative and life-giving Fire as it manifests itself in living beings who dwell on the surface of this planet.”
Helena and Tau Apiryon are careful to note that it is not exactly the literal, physical penis that is meant by the use of “Phalle” in rituals like the Gnostic Mass and the Star Ruby: “the name ‘PHALLUS’ or ‘PHALLE’ should not be confused with the word ‘penis,’ although the penis does serve as an ancient, yet imperfect, symbol for the PHALLUS.”
According to them, phallicism in this usage “does not refer to penis-worship, but to the worship of the Generative Power—a Power which dwells in sexually mature individuals of both sexes.” This idea is verified in Jocelyn Godwin’s account of Jennings in The Theosophical Enlightenment, who, according to Godwin, used the term “phallicism” to refer to the worship of both the cosmic phallus and the yoni of female polarity. Godwin concludes,
[Jennings’] theory of sexual symbolism as the place where all religions and mythologies unite has the natural corollary that human sexual intercourse, along with the parts of the body concerned, is nothing shameful or indecent, but a replication in the microcosm of the macrocosmic act. (Godwin, 272)
Again, the parallels here with Thelemic doctrine should be obvious: the sex act as a microcosmic image of the primary macrocosmic act, described by Crowley as the interplay of Nuit and Hadit, the constant copulation of the Star-Goddess of infinite space with no circumference with the infinitely concentrated point—an ecstatic cosmogonic act which produces manifest reality. As Crowley rhapsodizes in Liber Aleph: “All is a never ending Play of Love wherein our Lady Nuit and her Lord Hadit rejoice.”
Helena and Tau Apiryon conclude their discussion of the CHAOS article of the Creed of Ecclesia Gnostica Catholica by quoting a line of Crowley’s cited by Israel Regardie in his The Eye in the Triangle: “When you have proved that God is merely a name for the sex instinct, it appears to me not far to the perception that the sex instinct is God.” It is likely that Hargrave Jennings would agree.
Univocal Phallicism vs. Analogical Mysticism
Of course, mainstream scholars and occult historians, such as A.E. Waite, wholly rejected Jennings’ theories, either because of their questionable historicity, or out of a sense of Victorian “decency.” Even with the caveat that phallicism of this sort does not refer to simple “penis-worship” but a more sophisticated understanding of the cosmic generative power, Jennings and Crowley elevate human sexuality to a degree of importance that is very different than the understanding of sexuality professed by mainstream Christianity and other exoteric religions.
Theologically speaking, Jennings and Crowley’s phallicism can be categorized as a univocal understanding of language and ontology. Univocity of being refers to the concept that words describing the properties of God mean the same thing when applied to created objects such as people or things, even if the degree meant is vastly different. In other words, if I describe my cat Laylah as good, this is the exact same sort of goodness as I mean when I describe God as good—it’s just that God is good to a much higher degree than my cat (Laylah might disagree with this assessment).
Phallicism proposes that the constant sexual interplay of polarized cosmic forces—Nuit and Hadit, to use Crowley’s terms—produces manifest reality, and that this interplay is sexual in the same sense as intercourse between two human beings is sexual—just to a vastly different degree. This is why the Sun, the solar representative of this interplay, is worthy of adoration, and why the phallus, or the generative power “which dwells in sexually mature individuals of both sexes,” is the “vicegerent of the Sun upon Earth.” This is also why physical sex magick is an integral part of Crowley’s program for personal spiritual attainment, and why he can make seemingly bizarre statements such as “The industrial use of Semen will revolutionize human society” (diary entry 8 August 1923).
Or, to quote a contemporary source on the Thelemic system, David Shoemaker–in his Living Thelema–proclaims that “the divine and the ecstatic are one“; the practice of sex magick is described as a “gradual process … of identifying sexual ecstasy with divinity itself and, conversely, identifying divinity with ecstasy” (ch. 14).
Of course, the univocity of being is a doctrinal truth for many late medieval nominalist thinkers, and is usually adhered to by Calvinist Protestant theologians—which might account for its ready acceptance by a figure like Crowley, who grew up in a thoroughly Calvinist religious context.
Yet it is not the traditional doctrine of many forms of mystical Christianity, especially of the Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, or Anglo-Catholic varieties. These traditions instead emphasize the analogy of being—the notion that when I say my cat is good, it is only an analogous statement to the statement that God is “good.” In other words, God’s goodness is not only a matter of degree; since God is transcendent, human concepts like goodness can only ever analogously apply to God, and the opposite statement—God is not good—must be equally true. This is the basis for the negative theology of thinkers like Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, whose The Mystical Theology lies in the background of a vast amount of medieval and modern Christian mystical thinking.
The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa, a sculpture by Gian Lorenzo Bernini.
Sacred sexuality is a core element in the spirituality of many Christian mystics, stemming from an allegorical reading of the Biblical Song of Songs as a description of the mystical marriage between the Bridegroom, Jesus Christ, and the Bride, the Church or the soul of the individual Christian. Figures like St. Teresa of Ávila experienced this union in highly physical, even sexual forms, as a kind of religious ecstasy. Examples of this phenomenon could (and do!) fill whole tomes with rhapsodic language just as orgasmic as the richly sensual verses of The Book of the Law.
But the distinction between analogy of being and univocity of being is very important, in order to avoid reductive conflations of different religious and mystical traditions (a sadly common mistake among many in the occult community). The ecstasy of a Christian mystic experiencing union with God finds a valuable analogy—the symbol par excellence, really—in the example of human sexual union. But it is not the same thing. This is not a matter of degree, but a matter of kind—the ecstasy of a mystic is a different kind of ecstasy altogether from human sexuality, which serves as an analogy that must eventually be transcended.
Sexuality and Decadence
What does all of this have to do with the Decadent Movement? There is a “critical difference” between human sexuality and divine union, and for Christians this is a necessary truth to understand. As queer theologian Elizabeth Stuart explains, human sexuality cannot hold “the divine without remainder.” For all of their exquisite failures, the Decadents understood this truth, and Crowley did not. The Decadent obsession with sexuality always included an air of decay, an “exquisite appreciation of pain, exquisite thrills of anguish, exquisite adoration of suffering … a double ‘passion,’ the sentiment of repentant yearning and the sentiment of rebellious sin,” to use the words of Lionel Johnson. The Decadent careened from the brothel to the confessional, from the music hall to morning Mass. Johnson’s “To a Passionist” dramatizes the Decadent spiritual dilemma in poetic form:
Clad in a vestment wrought with passion-flowers;
Celebrant of one Passion ; called by name
Passionist: is thy world, one world with ours?
Thine, a like heart? Thy very soul, the same?
Thou pleadest an eternal sorrow: we
Praise the still changing beauty of this earth.
Passionate good and evil, thou dost see:
Our eyes behold the dreams of death and birth …
Canst thou be right? Is thine the very truth?
Stands then our life in so forlorn a state?
Nay, but thou wrongest us: thou wrong’st our youth,
Who dost our happiness compassionate.
And yet! and yet! O royal Calvary!
Whence divine sorrow triumphed through years past:
Could ages bow before mere memory?
Those passion-flowers must blossom, to the last.
Many Decadents, even those who identified in ways we would today label queer or kinky, converted to strict forms of Roman or Anglo-Catholicism, a phenomenon documented by Ellis Hanson in his groundbreaking study, Decadence and Catholicism. This is because “Decadent writing is often a literature of Christian conversion, but a conversion that never ends, a continual flux of religious sensations and insights alternating with pangs of profanity and doubt” (10). The religious Decadent “oscillated between extremes of shame and grace, sexual indulgence and extreme piety, re-enacting his conversion over and over again in a Christian narrative of sin and redemption” (12). Decadents found Catholicism to be “the odd disruption, the hysterical symptom, the mystical effusion, the medieval spectacle, the last hope of paganism, in an age of Victorian puritanism, Enlightenment rationalism, and bourgeois materialism … [the Decadents] found in the Church a volatile eroticism that was not necessarily an affront to Catholic belief” (Hanson, 26).
Oscillating between extremes of shame and grace: St. Augustine under the pear tree.
Karmen MacKendrick, in her work Counterpleasures, also describes such a “volatile eroticism” in the context of Catholic belief through her examination of the late ancient ascetic movement, which she compares to modern-day BDSM and the literary work of the Marquis de Sade. In her essay “Carthage Didn’t Burn Hot Enough,” a queer theological reading of St. Augustine of Hippo’s Confessions, MacKendrick explains that Augustine did not convert to Christianity in order to escape erotic love, but because human erotic love wasn’t hot enough. One metaphor used by Augustine was that, while, say, a strip-tease given by a human being has to come to an end, God’s sensual unveiling continues forever, as even those who have attained the Beatific Vision can never reach complete union with the transcendent, ineffable Godhead. The mystic experiencing divine ecstasy is consumed in a conflagration that never ends.
MacKendrick writes, “Full comprehension—of God or by God—is loss of distinction, fire to the point of melting-into” (216). So far, this has a lot in common with many statements on divine union in Liber AL: “There is the dissolution, and eternal ecstasy in the kisses of Nu” (II.44). Crowley would utilize the techniques of sex magick to achieve such ecstasy. Yet Augustine’s understanding of mystical union is analogical, not univocal—it ultimately must transcend human sexual union, which remains, as the Decadents understood, under a “double passion” of repentant yearning and rebellious sin, not divine fulfillment. For, as MacKendrick explains,
Only God even holds—or, as I suspect, is—the promise of burning that hot, a promise that never precisely defines what it offers, made in the constant uprising of desire. The problem with Carthage [Augustine’s home town, and the site of his early sexual exploits] is not, was never, that it burns. Nor is it that its burning is a distraction from higher pursuits. Carthage simply did not burn hot enough; all of the desires aroused there can be satisfied, and Augustine is not after satisfaction. He would burn with the seraphim, until his very self has been fully, unspeakably, burned out. (217)
A Volatile Eroticism
God is not merely a name for the sex instinct, as Crowley suggested, and the human sex instinct is not God. God transcends all names. At the risk of relying too heavily on clips from HBO’s Decadent new series, The Young Pope, this distinction is succinctly (and amusingly) summarized in a conversation between Jude Law’s Pope and his favorite novelist, who asks how a celibate Catholic priest can live without human sexuality, the subject of all of his novels. The Pope answers that “The wise ones long ago understood the degree to which sex as a source of pleasure is overvalued in our society.” When the novelist quips, “Your Holiness, with a few words you have just razed to the ground three-quarters of my literary production. I’ve almost always written about sex as the motor that drives the world,” the Pope responds, “And you were right—but you don’t write about motors that purr, you write about motors that break down continuously …”
The eros of God is a motor that purrs. The Decadents, like the ancient ascetics, might have guiltily obsessed over sex but they knew that it was a decaying flower, beautiful in its season but destined to decompose. In Oscar Wilde’s “The Young King,” the regal aesthete of the title learns to replace the fleeting pleasures of earthly luxuries—mired as they are with decay and sin—with the transcendent pleasures of heavenly virtue, which are altogether beautiful in a way that could never be matched by the former.
The Decadents did likewise with human sexuality; Crowley did not. While the Decadents came to an analogical understanding of eros—which required accepting a transcendent, theistic notion of Deity—Crowley remained with a one-track understanding of union. To declare that “There is no god but man” is not only to diminish God, but to relegate man to lesser pleasures and consummations. And the Decadent does not settle for anything but the highest of ecstasies.
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If you enjoyed this article, check out my new personal blog, The Light Invisible, for more pieces on Christian esotericism.
Every potions master begins somewhere—I started just jumping in. Early successes led me along my own path of experimentation. Knowing that with enough trial and error I could make liquid magic kept me passionate along the way. From humble beginnings of messes, spills and burns, now I can spend an afternoon designing a recipe, try it, adjust and have something ready to use for my magical needs–be it protection, romance, strength, enjoyment, frenzy or power.
Photo by the author
Killing Perfection
Getting started with alchemy intimidated me. There was thousands of dollars of equipment, dozens of charts for timing and proper preparations. It just did not seem possible to make a potion without everything just right. None of my friends were potion makers and I had no idea how to begin. Alchemy is about the pursuit of perfection, but the first step towards perfection is practice! I finally realized I would never have a potion if I let fear of messing up keep me from trying. When I let go of perfection as a goal and put pursuit as the goal instead I started making progress.
Magic Making Mistakes
My first potions were mixes of coffee grounds, wine, dyes, spices and resins. I had no idea what I was doing other than some questionable recipes I printed off the internet. My basement lab was littered with mason jars of failed mixes, bottles, stained coffee filters, and funnels. But when I was done, I had magical inks and I could write my recipes with a quill on parchment with a potion I had made. Now if only I had made a cleaning potion while I was at it!
Practice Makes Progress
Once my first attempts at magic inks were used up, I knew what wasn’t working: the liquid was too thin and didn’t dry fast enough so it bled and smeared. So I researched how to thicken it and learned about using cornstarch or Gum Arabic. I bought a little bottle of Gum Arabic at the store and it just globbed up in the mix and I had to filter it out! So I had to keep looking. Eventually I learned to grind my own Gum Arabic and figured out what solvents to dissolve it with. Before I knew it I had an ink recipe that people wanted to buy and buy again.
Is A Recipe Ever Finished?
Even if you finally find the perfect mix of ingredients, magical charms and the right kind of jar or bottle for your potion (yes I even had trouble with jars!) an ingredient in your recipe may become rare or unavailable. I use less of certain resins now because they are threatened or endangered and I supplemented with roots or saps I can grow or source locally.
Customizing to “Perfection”
Potion recipes will never be set in stone because your life will always call for new magical means and goals. If I am working with salal/pokeberry because it grows in a waste space by my work, making an ink from it will vary from an ink I make from oak gall, lampblack or dragon blood. If I need a romance ink for a love letter, the addition of rosewater could thin the mix and make it take longer to dry if I don’t adjust with a stronger alcohol and more plant dye material. Be sure to be flexible in your recipes so that they serve your current needs.
Trying Gives Experience
If I had never tried to make a potion from coffee grounds and wine, I wouldn’t know today about solvents, resins, jars and bottles, mordents, dye plants and I would not have my own inkspell system of magic. If you jump in now on something you want to learn, be it potion making or another type of magic you will be leagues further than if you never tried.
Beginning Now
Use my recipe card below for making your own magical ink at home with household ingredients from the grocery store. The way I learned, Bat’s Blood Ink is blue. “Blood” inks usually have dragon’s blood resin, but it is over harvested and threatened, so I save it for the retd ink of its namesake.
Click for a larger version
As Bat’s Blood Ink is used for protective magic, I select ingredients based upon: the blue being traditional to repel the evil eye, iron being martial, and wine being the blood of the land in a sense. In hoodoo tradition, blue for waters and baths is obtained with laundry bluing which is colloidal iron so I adapted it to the ink. Cornstarch is a thickener that most people have in their house.
Check out my Patreon Potions Maker class to learn more about potions like magical honey meads and mystical wines.
New Years is a time that many of us make resolutions to change over the next year. Personally, I wait a couple weeks before deciding on a resolution and then I do not make a big deal out of it. Statistically, we all are abysmally bad at actually succeeding at resolutions. For the magician, a failure to complete a resolution weakens our hold over our own internal issues. The failure is a breakdown of will and we have to realize that we have been set up to fail at New Year’s resolutions. These self-promises are a great illumination for all self work but apply equally to our ritual work to get tangible things in our life. In both cases, we make some huge mistakes.
Spellwork
Many people look to spellwork to just fix their life. Spellwork can produce weird results. Of course I know magic is real, but if you are not in the frame of availability, your enchantment probably will fail. Resolutions and big spells often require the universe or us to move mountains. Let’s first admit that the universe might not be in the mood to move for us that far and often times, we would rather just rest.
Most people see spellwork as seeking results. We cast, we insert energy, we expect results. The process is not unlike a vending machine? Except spellwork never quite works this way. Resolutions are similarly doomed for similar reasons. We puff up our chest decide, I need to change and make a resolution to change. Whether or not we vocalize this resolution in the poetry of spellwork, or the announcement on facebook does not matter. In the new year, let’s leave the idea that spellwork is like a vending machine and the making of resolutions behind us.
In both cases we want results, but what we need to embrace is process. The idea to embrace a self change is a tremendously courageous decision and if you have made a decision like this, I applaud you. What happens if we choose not to see these results by a certain time and instead adopt and accept a process? All of a sudden, we are on this achievable road.
The Process
One of the “secrets” chaos magicians and magicians tend to embrace about spellwork is an almost identical commitment to process. Have you heard the good word of “have no desire of result”, or how about “do everything in the physical world as well as the spellwork.” Successful spells even for results act on the caster as well as the universe. If the caster has a process of real world results, the spellwork guides, reflects and is manifested by the process the magician embraces to create the life changes. The energy is there and as I said, I believe in the magic, but the process allows the changes to occur much faster especially if the enchantment is for a large change.
Now a process can affects multiple areas of life. The physical environment must change, routines and habits will alter, the size of the change occurs incrementally and organically, and we can “adopt the first stage” of a process with minimal effort. Some of the best spellwork in fact may just give us the energy and luck to get some early wins at the right time to make the process seem infinitely worthwhile. Believe me, if your magic does this and nothing else, you can probably succeed at anything.
So what does a process possibly inspired by spellcraft look like, what qualities does the successful processes have in common?
For me there are several aspects of a life-changing process:
Starts small with changes that are easy to implement. For example, a health change might be to simply journal food intake. Trust me, I know that is in itself hard and when I do enchantments for health before starting, objectively, I know how much more inspired and energy I have to have in order to keep up with this.
Incrementally and constantly improving. Perhaps the goal is better financial security, and the first step was tracking, then the next step might be to cut ONE unneeded expense and move forward.
Little Victories add up fast; after one success is mastered, move forward to the next incremental change.
Data Driven, and inherently results driven (at achievable scales); e.g., journal and document each change.
Strong Commitment to the process, i.e. you have to want to keep going.
Lends itself to Strong Narratives. A process is a journey and such a journey lends itself to spiritual metaphors. In fact, any change of note, is a hero’s journey of sort.
I know some of you will strongly object to the idea that spellwork often times initiates a process in the magician because it demystifies magic and sounds like I am saying this is all in your head. I won’t say that the process is wholly in your mind, but I will say a whole bunch of transformations that occur for successful magic do happen in the mind. The best and most successful spellcraft causes the magician to adopt the process automatically, with ease, and without effort. Since the energy is so compelling that they just follow the new pattern without conscious knowledge at the same time luck just comes their way.
Take for instance money spells. Sure people might just get money, but more often than not they do a money spell and then do more marketing and the marketing is just tweaked differently ( even asking for money on facebook is a type of marketing btw). Say the spell manifests as a promotion. Even if the spell affected your supervisor to give you the promotion, there is still a dance back and forth where you are convincing them, you are worth more and can handle more. That happens as a process.
Do a spell for a new lover, and then you just happen to be more vivacious and friendly when you go out? Not strong enough for you to notice, but others do? Does this sound so far fetched? Now each time anyone goes out in a vivacious manner and are rewarded for it, they are more likely to repeat those behaviors. One or two big successes leads toward movement of a personality in this direction. More and more successes happen, and all of a sudden a new love appears like magic. Doesn’t this example sound like a process?
If you can throw yourself into a process of continual improvement relating to the spellwork you cast, you can give yourself a strong advantage for your spellwork to manifest and help you stick with the process. Now you are rolling with the spellwork. And, the truly miraculous? Well, it is merely down the road.
Author’s Note:
Starting out on the journey of a desired major life change? Need some help working on that process or spellwork to pull it all together. Andrieh has multiple years experience not only as a powerful and success sorcerer, but an effective life coach and businessman. Together we can make those changes that you have tasted, envisioned, felt, talked about and even saw into reality. I bet, you can almost sense the energy coming in. Let’s get you on that road and create that synergy between the magic and your process. Interested? Book a session now.
Nature’s most perfect food, it is called, and this is true for baby mammals. It is also not a bad choice while suffering hypoglycemia. Think of all the yummy things made with it, including butter, hard and soft cheese, yogurt and everybody’s favorite, ice cream. Milk is good food.
Imbolc means ‘In the belly’ and Oimelc means ‘Ewes milk’ and it is sort of pronounced that way, too. After owning dairy goats I realized there is a season to milk, and a reason it owns a place on the Wheel of the Year. You don’t learn that growing up in the land of the supermarket with year-round bananas, apples, and oranges. There’s a lot of things about dairy you learn by having even a few goats.
Imagine yourself ten – twenty – thirty thousand years ago. Fit and strong you may be, but without electricity, refrigeration, or even domesticated animals, winter was brutal. There is no cheese, or the sun is still low and cold permeates all.
Snow or slush everywhere and almost no food to be gathered for the family who is hungry every day. It is the same at this time every turning and this moon is called Bone Moon (by some). Your family are not the only hungry ones, and every predator is on the hunt. The quiet of snowfall hides almost every sound.
A lowing in the distance – hush – it means a cow has dropped her calf, somewhere. She is in milk and calling rings the dinner bell. The trick is to sneak up on a wild cow in milk, one of Nature’s meanest animals, part her from her calf, then work the shaman’s magick needed to take the milk from her… before the other predators get there.
This is not likely to succeed, so however did it happen?
I hypothesize that the people who went to the trouble of inventing written language did so that the ancient legends could be shared without the unavoidable vulnerabilities of oral traditions whose compendiums were lost because, sadly, it died with them. The earliest stories we do have, in written form, come from ancient Sumeria, and hearken to this early era, at the hungry time. I will tell the story, but warn you now: the hero dies in the end.
He must.
The Story of Dumuzi
Our story happens long ago in the days that the Gods walked on the Earth among men—when they felt like mingling– or to receive the daily offerings of food, freshly gathered dainties and delicacies. Nuts and fruits and glorious honey. Meat, the flesh of hunted animals roasted in offering at the altar. Every day, all brought by human helpers, a group on the burgeoning edge between innocence and civilization. Innocence in chains.
For a while there was enough food for everyone, Gods and man to thrive alike. This is a fertile planet, after all. Some of the people were charming, delightful in their personalities and appearance, and often these would be chosen as a special servants to the Gods, a God or Goddess in particular, favored as a pet of sorts. But the people did what people do and soon there were too many.
A servant, or even a pet, can become a beloved member of the family, in time, and such was the case when the Goddess Inanna saw the mortal man Dumuzi. He would be hers, and this was not a question of probabilities for the Goddess, used as she was to gaining her will.
And in this time the people, their servants grew hungry, and even the Gods themselves came close to feeling the terrible pangs, especially at this Bone Moon season, this yearly moon of storm and cutting wind. The Goddess remembered her home, far, far away, recalling two of her favorite and most useful animals who gave food to the people of the place. The Goddess devised a plan that would gain all her desires and sweet talked her way into approval from the council.
Inanna stole away with Dumuzi, mere mortal though he was. He was beautiful in her eyes, and after many weary miles the Goddess and Dumuzi came to the land of her birth. Yes, the Gods are born, and even die after many many human lifetimes, but that story is for another time.
In the Land of Inanna’s Birth
In the land of Inanna’s birth, there Dumuzi was introduced to the magickal animals: sheep and goats, Inanna’s favorites — both happy and helpful to men and women in the most peculiar ways. He was entranced watching them at play. Inanna promised to teach him their ways. She would give these animals unto his care, and he, Dumuzi would become a god among men for the knowledge of these animals and secrets of their maintenance she, the Goddess would impart to him.
He did not realize how long it would take. Introduced so newly to the animals of his charge, indeed he was charmed by them and took no thought to the passing hours and seasons of study as he learned the secrets of livestock husbandry, herd maintenance, gestational cycles, dairy and fiber production, and cheese making. As he learned all this, his love for the Goddess grew, as did hers for him.
So, by the time they returned to the land of men with the gifts of milk, butter, cheese, wool and tasty (easy) meat all wrapped up in the package of these two animals, by the time Dumuzi had learned all the secrets and by the time the Goddess Inanna and Dumuzi love for each other had grown itself to epic proportion, worthy of the ancient Song of Songs. After all this time, they returned to discover it had been many human lifetimes since they left.
Dumuzi’s Return
In the eyes of the people, Dumuzi must therefore now be almost a god, too. How else could he live so long, and be the beloved of Inanna–mother Goddess who gave the gifts of agriculture and civilization itself with these two small animal herds. There was no reason for the people to go hungry. And, Dumuzi would be here to teach them the secrets.
And so he did, and for seven years the people did learn. Herds were pastured, fields planted and harvested, cheese and all the rest were made while all the other secrets learned were passed down. But, something in Dumuzi changed when he returned to the land of his birth. Because of the words of the people and Inanna’s love for him, his head grew big and pride filled the space. He forgot that he began a humble young man when the Goddess found him, and Inanna had given him everything, including his illustrious position among the people.
Dumuzi grew bolder in his discontent, and allowed his eyes to wander from the graces of the Goddess. This was too much. And you know how the story ends… but why?
I will tell you this, in many an ancient tale, the secrets are hidden in the telling. Did you know for instance, that sheep and goats have a viable livestock life cycle of about seven years, after that and you can’t count on too much production value in dairy, fiber, or even as stud. So, his sacrifice after that time makes more sense in this way.
It also gives us a “truthy” reminder of the solemnity that also accompanies great gifts. And, again is shown in the microcosm of the yearly cycle.
Milk
You know that milk is what baby goats, sheep, cows and other mammals drink until they are weaned, to eat solid food. You may also surmise that this is a lot of work for the mother animal, producing the nourishment for her quickly growing offspring, who arrive from one to four at a time.
So, the basic necessities of herd management require the female goats, cows, and sheep to rest their bodies for a bit. At least to make sure that you are not milking a doe, ewe, or heifer who is also very pregnant.
During this break in time it is- you guessed it – also the dead of winter seasonally. Not a good time to lose the fantastic, reliable food source the clan has depended upon for 9 months. Fortunately, for the clan at least, the necessity of yearly breeding to “freshen” the does, provides each time from one to four additional members of the herd.
No one can increase a herd exponentially for long, these animals eat too much for that! So, as a dairy livestock owner, each season you are faced with the heart-wrenching decision of who among the females will stay to breed and milk, and who among the males might be a lucky buck. The rest are destined to become tasty tender meat for the table, and you try not to think about it for a moment or two.
Because now, there is milk again. And meat for the table. The yearly gift and annual sacrifice, reminders of the hungry times and gratitude of our current conveniences.
A photo of our last lucky buck– little Dumuzi, at play. / Photograph by Anne Duthers
[Editor’s Note: It is with a heavy heart and a fond farewell that we bid adieu to Anne and her column, Adventures in Wortcunning. Thank you, Anne, for your wonderful stories and for sharing your garden with us.]
I’ve long been an advocate of making use of what we have at hand when it comes to both spirituality and magic. Some of this is purely practical and some of it is rooted in esoteric theory. The two work together though and strengthen each other, making it important for us to connect to our local resources. We grow best where we have the deepest and strongest roots.
An apple tree in Connecticut, M Daimler 2012
On the purely practical level using what we have around us, both in our magic and spiritual practice, is the most pragmatic option. It’s a lot more cost effective to use what you have on hand than to be paying for expensive imported items, when that’s an option.* It’s also a lot faster and easier to use what’s around you than to search for specific things that have to be found or ordered. When I need stones or crystals I look to the earth I live on and the rivers, streams, and ocean nearby. When I need shells I go to the shoreline. When I need herbs or parts of trees I look at the land around me and see what’s there to work with. Whereas most spells in modern books give a person a list of ingredients to assemble to achieve a goal, I start by thinking of what my goal is and looking at what I have on hand – or can find around – that can be used to get that result.
In traditional Irish folk magic, and by extension the Irish-American folk magic that I practice, when charms or spells require ingredients it’s usually either things that are already commonly found nearby or things that are more general than specific. Herbal charms are based on herbs that grow wild or can be grown in gardens, not on exotic things that must be bought or ordered. Everything around me has a use and a purpose in my magic, and I have never had a need that I could not meet with an herb, stone, or tree at hand. Ivy, Clover, Yarrow, Rose, these are some of my go-to herbs. And in my case where I live, Raspberry, Nightshade, and Honeysuckle as well. My local trees, the Maple, Witch-hazel, Cedar, as well as my Birch, Hawthorn, Oak, and Ash lend themselves to my magic when needed. Stones have uses based in their color, where they are found, or in some few cases by what mineral they are. The wild earth is my first resource for supplies, before I resort to anything else.
Rose Hips, M Daimler, 2013
From an esoteric perspective there’s an advantage to connecting to the magic of the place we’re in as well. First of all we’re working with a magical energy based in the living world around us, not in places that we may have no connection to at all. There is some argument for having tokens and material from a place we have a spiritual connection with*, and that’s another issue, but having crystals and herbs we don’t even know the sources of are something else. It’s not that they won’t work, of course, just that what comes from the land around us is stronger and not only, in my experience, works better magically but also has the added benefit of increasing our connection to where we are. These things help us get in sync with the magical and spiritual tides of the place we live in.
Secondly there’s a lot of power in connecting to spirits of place and to the spirits of the land where we are, and in my experience working respectfully with the materials of the earth around us aids in that connection. It teaches us to understand what’s around us but it also perforce connects us to the energy and spirit of the land. People who want to work with the Good Neighbors [read: fairies] are best to start with their house spirits and with the spirits of the land around them, in their yard, in their neighborhood, in the places they frequent outside their home. Whether you live in an urban or rural area the spirits are there and the possibility of connecting is there. Learning to work with local materials is a good first step.
Henbane and wormwood, image copyright M. Daimler 2016
The only time in my opinion that it’s not an option is if you’re making an offering to a deity or spirit that has a specific requirement, or if you’re doing something – magically or spiritually – that is specific to the point that it doesn’t allow substitution. If you feel like the Morrigan absolutely has to have dragon’s blood incense, or a spirit you are dealing with wants frankincense, or you’re working in a system that explicitly says you must use whatever to accomplish your purpose, then by all means go with that. Sometimes deities and spirits like to challenge us by asking for specific things I think to make us prove we will put in some effort for them. There are also a very few cases where there may be a specific stone or herb that just can’t be substituted effectively, and in that case as well you want to go with what is going to work best.
I like the pretty, fancy things as much as the next person. But I also like magic that works and works well. I like magic and spirituality that is always at my fingertips and is woven thoroughly into my life and the world around me. Working with my landscape, with herbs, trees, stones, and materials from the place I live connects me strongly to the energy and spirits of this place. And I truly believe my witchcraft and my spirituality is stronger for it.
* I will say here that an exception to this entire argument is if your whole spirituality is based on not connecting to where you are but to someplace entirely other. In that case you would want to have as many things from that place as possible for all the same reasons I’m outlining here. (back)
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