Nature – A Sacred Life

November 22, 2023November 22, 2023

Eat, Drink, And Be Merry

…or Pippin. Or Frodo or Sam or Bilbo for that matter. It’s all about the eating.

This week in the Unites States, we celebrate the Feast of Thanksgiving.

At least we used to.

Now we tend to celebrate the Feast of Black Friday, unless we decided to go camp out at the Big Buy to watch the Coming of Big Screens, but I went into that last year.

This year, I want to talk about feasting as ritual, about food as sacrament, and about communal eating as an ancient and vital expression of humanity.

The irony that you may be reading this on small personal communication device while ignoring all the other people sitting at the table with their own small personal communication devices texting Uncle Sal to pass the gravy is not lost on me.

Nor should it be on you.

We are self-isolating at a terrifying rate, mistaking “social media” for human contact, and it most certainly is not.

Unfortunately, this illusion is compounded by the fact that social media is where many of us have “found our tribe”.

Those of us who are patently and professionally strange and unusual are very often lonesome in our IRL world. It depends on where one lives, of course, but locating a number of like-minded weirdos to hang out with is problematic for a great number of people.

At the same time, we are very often required, by family, job, and community, to mask ourselves to a greater or lesser extent. This is why the online “witch community” calls to so many of us. At least there, we can let our freak flags fly proudly, and the rest of the world be damned.

It’s a welcome relief from a cold, cruel world of boring and unimaginative people who are far more interested in small talk. And I certainly despise small talk.

If you want to talk about the weather, well, okay.

Let’s talk about rainmaking. Get me going about what kind of spells are best for thunderstorms. I’ll talk to you about tying winds in knots so ancient sailors would never sit becalmed (a very real fear).

Conversely, I’m more than happy to discuss potential cloud seeding techniques, or the implications of weather control on an already overburdened climate system.

But please don’t…don’t EVER…just talk about the weather.

People do. I know that.

Once upon a time this was actually an important conversation.

That was back when we farmed for our food, instead of having it delivered in a pre-packaged form that comes with instructions for the machines to cook it for us. I’m just waiting for the pre-holiday ad blitz that has that “smart” toaster oven prepping dinner for the eighteen plus kith and kin that are coming to your house this year. I’m sure it’ll be a great Pre-Black Friday Black Friday Sale Doorbuster.

But in those farming food days when reaching a consensus on whether or not it was going to be a dry spring actually meant something, getting together to share food, drink, and human companionship overrode the frequent dysfunctional disagreement, and, in a few cases, meant we got to spend time with “Weird Aunt Sadie” or “Odd Cousin Tim” who were into the same strange stuff that we were.

Feast Pic — The Cornucopia or Horn of Plenty used to be a common autumnal symbol in my youth. I’m not sure if they still have it on the bulletin board where the first graders proudly display their “turkey” drawn from outstretched fingers. I have noticed that it has largely disappeared from seasonal marketing in recent times, de-emphasizing the communal eating as part of the holiday celebration, in favor of a decidedly non-communal weekend shopping frenzy.

While I can understand that the Mad Men and Women plotting the means of best separating us from our hard-earned dollars are eschewing such images in favor of a newly body-conscious population, fear of upsetting those with eating disorders, and dissociating from the stress of preparing a big feast for all the kinfolk in the tri-state area- I can’t help but wonder if they’ve thrown the gravy out with the bath-water.

And long before the third Thursday in November was enshrined as the beginning of the holiday shopping season, and the absolute myth of those witch-burning colonial religious fanatics sitting down to harmoniously break bread in the spirit of brotherhood with the native peoples whose land they were polluting, there were seasonal feasts among families, and villages and tribes.

This is true of all cultures, though for many of us who were inculcated to that very very White Anglo-Saxon Protestant version of the Plymouth colony as being central to the founding of America (spoiler alert – it wasn’t ) our awareness of such feasting is often limited to the various European traditions.

Feasting is not just a winter sport, of course. There are spring feasts and summer feasts, and harvest feasts, all serving the vital purpose of consuming the hopefully surplus bounty of nature’s rhythms at those various times, whilst engendering a spirit of community and cooperation, and affording Oog and Groont a day or two off from the flint mines.

In the Winter Dark, however, this need to join together for shared resources becomes especially vital, particularly in the Northern climes where the growing season ends around mid August, and stores of preserved foods might be wearing thin.

Remember too that in such months, many people were cooped up in their houses. The cattle or sheep or goats weren’t grazing in the fields. Much of the wild game was already bedded down in their dens, so hunting was infrequent, and such other activities that could be performed in the late autumn and early winter were done during the shorter daylight hours, when the meager sunshine was warming. After dark, temperatures dropped and non-hibernating predators like wolves were roaming in search of their own feasts.

Once all the baskets had been woven, and the nets mended, and the swords honed and oiled, and the other tasks suitable for internal pursuits were completed (and in primitive times there were a lot more of them) there is no question that folk eventually tired of each other’s company.

We use the term “cabin fever” today to reflect this general malaise with idle hands and close quarters, and the natural sort of bleak outlook that comes with shorter days and longer nights. The medical term “seasonal affective disorder” which I’m sure took a committee of several prominent psychiatric professionals to anagram to SAD is used to describe a kind of depression or nervousness that affects some during the winter, compounded, of course, by the dread of the impending “holiday season”.

This is largely because, in my view, we have lost touch with the aspects of that series of communal feasts and celebratory rites that serve as a tonic to the body, and a boost to the spirit.

Coming together in the dark times was beneficial. Some people may have had a better harvest, or may have been better at hunting or putting up and preserving food. The winter feast insured that those who did not have such arbitrary luck might still get a slightly fuller belly and larder for a short time. This meant that the blacksmith or the boatwright or the village wise ones who still performed a valid function need not starve to death in the middle of winter.

But it also was an occasion to let off steam, for drinking and wrestling and telling tales and singing songs and generally getting a break from the long cold nights in the family hovel with none but the spouse and several younglings to give company.

We’ve replaced that these days with slipping into a food coma whilst watching considerably over-valued surrogates engage in competitive events like the Big Game from the comfort of our straining recliners. Our fattened asses need not worry about the privation of our ancestors, unless, of course, there’s a hole in the tent the spouse is using to camp out for a slightly bigger Big Screen to watch said Big Game.

Meanwhile we are simultaneously swiping through our social media on the smaller small screen so we’re absolutely certain we didn’t miss out on any extra-special super-duper post-Black Friday pre-Cyber Monday, door-busting door-buster deal-a-reenos. And ignoring pretty much everyone around us. So the pressure valves are gummed up with anti-social social media, constant consumerism, and way too many carbs. T

he carbs were always more prevalent than protein in the winter. And they do make us fat and happy. They increase the amount of stored calories on our bodies, and such satiation brings a pleasant sensation that may help alleviate the SADs.

But the folks in ancient times weren’t going to go sit in front of more screens after the long weekend, and be basically torpid.

They were going to burn off that fat in the leaner times of the winter, or work it off come spring when the fields greened up and fjords thawed out and the hard scrabble work of hard scrabble existence was going to be done.

Our modern technological society has little of that, and replaces it with the onslaught of advertising for stationary bikes and health club memberships, which statistically will also be idled by mid-March. Not because the spring thaw has pulled our Big Butts out of the recliner to go outside and burn off the fat, but because being fat and happy is just a lot easier than getting on that bike. Even if we are now paying a monthly subscription to have a “personal coach” scream at us (and a few thousand other personally coached people) to get up and do it.

The food of the ancestors was not laced with extenders, emulsifiers, preservatives, additives, artificial flavorings and colors, and Things-Never-Meant-To-Be-Let-Alone-Meant-To-Be-Eaten. In the efforts to make food more accessible, the engines of a capitalist economy got focused on making food more profitable. The extended shelf life meant that less of the produced goods got chucked out because of the natural process of decomposition. The longer a loaf of bread lasts, the more can be sold. But why stop there, when you can make twice the loaf out of half the flour by adding <insert barely pronounceable chemical compound here>?

As I have gotten older, and as I have been exploring how my spiritual journey bleeds over into more mundane parts of my life, the need to reduce the amount of this commercially produced chemical garbage in my diet has become more important.

As an example, I have stopped eating that Big Bag O’ Chips, but I still enjoy the clean carbs of potatoes- even fried potatoes – in reasonable moderation. Even when I add butter, bacon, cheese, and sour cream to my baked potato, I am still taking in cleaner and less artificial carbs than comes out of the factory-processed Big Bag O’ snacks.

And lets be honest. A Big Bag O’ snack is basically one of three or four grains and or potato starch, modified with various un-food additives to change the shape, color, texture, smell, and taste.

That’s basically what they do to make Purina Dog Chow, so think about that before loading up at the Big Screen Big Game Big Bag O’ Black Friday sale.

I have found that after several months of avoiding processed foods, and this includes drive-thru fast-food, and quick service restaurants, I don’t really crave them anymore. I had a bag of chips at lunch the other day for the first time in a couple of years and I didn’t even finish it…and it was the extra small bag you get with lunch. So I begin to wonder if all these “extras” added to the people chow products don’t also included compounds that promote an addictive response.

By the way, a lot of the processed food processors are owned by Big Tobacco, an industry with a history of using additives to make their product more addictive. But I’m sure there’s no connection. I mean, the government wouldn’t allow it, right? Like they did with nicotine for several decades. Because, money.

So, before I ride off into the sunset for a long weekend that I hope will be restful, restorative, and creative, I gently suggest that you might put the phone on mute, at least during the meal, and enjoy the benefits of a clean communal feast, without the urge to go shopping, or hole up in the kitchen the entire time to avoid those judgy relatives. I have them too. They are a pain in the ass. But it’s a temporary thing, and you may find that one or two of them might just be a little weirder than you remember.

And for those that aren’t, just load them up on potatoes and gravy and wait until they pass out on the couch and you can change the channel to something other than that stupid football game.

I’ll be back next week.

Featured Image Photo by Spencer Davis on Unsplash
Main Photo by Brooke Lark on Unsplash
Instagram Post Photo by Alexis Fauvet on Unsplash

November 8, 2023November 8, 2023

Another Trip Around The Sun

So yesterday was another birthday. I am now officially in my late 50s. While that is hardly old, I think it is, with a few exceptions, at least a decade on from most of my readership.

And that’s okay. I don’t build relationships around age. I build relationships around personalities. If you are interesting, and I like you, then I will make an effort to get to know you, regardless of your age or other physical factors. These are, after all, transitory, and probably illusional anyway.

My physical manifestation has been experiencing linear time for almost three score years. My mind goes further back. Way back. Back well before back. infinitely back if I squint hard enough.

And so, I believe, does everyone else’s, though most get hung up on that linear time, physicality, and other limitations. Letting go is difficult. Letting go is scary. Because, there is a very real danger that once you make that trip, you won’t ever come back.

Entering an altered state of consciousness that transcends time and space effectively dissolves one’s physicality.

Our attachment to the meat suit means it is very very difficult to reach a point where we aren’t wondering if the meat suit is sitting somewhere, in a quasi-vegetative state, slowly ceasing to function, to the horror and sorrow of all the other meat suits who were also attached to it.

There are, in fact, accounts of monks and hermits in many faiths to whom this actually happened. Their spirits roamed beyond the limitations of the world around them, but their physical bodies starved to death.

Which of course brings about the question as to whether or not the freedom of the spirit was the necessary death of the physical host. Is the dissolution of the physical experienced by the total awareness of the spiritual ultimately only possible by breaking that bond and letting the physical cease to function?

And if the limitations of the physical are only illusions, then why does it matter? Why do we worry about what happens to that meat suit?

And why do we put up with the aches and pains and longings and hungers and frustrations and limitations of the meat suit as it starts to wear out? Each day I feel more and more the weight of the years on this physical form, so why, if we know that the ultimate expression of self is in a dissolved spirit where all are one and one are all, do we continue to return to the burden of physicality and temporality?

Life is a constant mystery.

Instruments — A selection of instruments for measuring space and time. The armillary, on the far left, is designed to plot one’s position on the earth at a certain point in time. This was done by sighting for a particular star and then rotating the rings round till things lined up properly. Armillaries weren’t usually thought of as portable instruments. That is, they were usually something kept at home and used from that location. They show up frequently in depictions of astronomers, astrologers, alchemists, and the smart set from the Renaissance onward.

The middle image is of a modern orrery. An orrery is the forerunner of the planetarium, and is a cunning clockwork device that simulates the relative motion of the earth and moon, and sometimes other planets, around the sun. Orreries came about after Copernicus succeeded in replacing Ptolemy’s earth-centered universe with a sun-centered system, although astrologers continued to use the geo-centric model, and still do today, when calculating aspects and planetary influences.

The instrument on the right is a more or less modern device called a sextant. This is because the curved piece on the bottom represents 60 degrees of arc (30 degrees to each side of the center position). A similar instrument called a quadrant represented an arc of 90 degrees, but as it offered no great advantage in navigations, the larger size was quickly dropped for the improved model. The principles of the sextant derive from the more ancient astrolabe, but essentially involve calculating one’s position in space by using the angle of sun or a star at a certain time of day. The sextant can also be used horizontally to measure angles between points in the distance, and through the use of trigonometry, calculate range to one of the points.

The accuracy of these antique analog instruments varied by manufacturer and user, but a quality device in the hands of an experienced user would be comparable to a modern GPS locator, at least for purposes of general navigation.

Even in those moments when I can take my mind way back before way back before before, there is still some mystery to work out.

We are responsible to ourselves, to the nature of life itself, to keep poking at that mystery.

We should never take anything at face value. We should always wonder. We should always question. We should always wonder if the reality that we are experiencing is the final and ultimate one. Because if one is an illusion, then there is always and ever the possibility that all are.

I have been something of a cynic since childhood. A cynic is different than a skeptic. The skeptic says, “I don’t necessarily believe this, but if you have proof, I am open to changing my mind.” A cynic says, “I don’t necessarily believe this, and I need to see the proof of your proof. Which I also may not believe.”

If I look up the definition of cynic on the various web resources, it’s been boiled down to a general distrust of people’s motives and/or a school of Greek philosophy that was based on the rejection of convention or societal norms in favor of harmony with the cosmos. I’m not entirely sure I agree with either definition, which, of course, is the cynical point of view.

Of course, if you dig into it, skepticism is also a philosophical concept, based on the idea that we cannot know some things.

So for the skeptic, “It’s a mystery.” is sufficient explanation.

For the cynic “But is it a mystery?” is the more apt question. Why do we accept this is an answer? Is it impossible to know the answer? If I say I do know the answer, should I be believed?

I have spent the majority of my life in pursuit of wisdom, knowledge, and insight. Yet for every guru or teacher or prophet or messiah or philosopher or iconoclast, I am always asking “but what if you’re wrong?”

Because I am always asking myself that question.

“What if you’re wrong?”

This is not the same as the apostate or heretic, who doubts their resolve against the dogma of their former faith. It is not the fear of those who, upon hearing the soft tread of the psychopomp approaching, strive to find some peace of mind in the shadow of impending demise.

It is a simple, semi-scientific, quest for error.

I bought off on scientific method early on. It appealed to my sense of logic and reason. I’m not sure it even gets taught in the schools today, so I’ll cover it briefly here.

Theorize. Test the theory. Observe the results. Refine the theory. Repeat as necessary.

Theorize is that part where we all go “this is the way things are”.

Test the theory is that part where some go “but is this the way things are?”.

Observe the results is something like “no, this is not the way things are”.

And finally we come to “Oh, so this is how things are”.

But life is a constant mystery. We have to keep running the loop. We must repeat as necessary. And it is always necessary.

Starchart01 — Expressions of space and time vary greatly in human experience. We live in a four-dimensional space time that consists of up-down/left-right/forward-back/and past/future. Yet as humans we are able to conceptualize these dimensions and abstract them into three and two dimensional versions, and still work out what they mean.

A sculpture represents a specific moment. That is, it has the dimensions of up-down/left-right/ and forward-back, but within itself there is no past-future. It is a fixed point in time, that occupies space. Ironically, because all sculptures as we experience them exist in that four dimensional space-time, it is a representation of a fixed point in time that is moving through time.

Two-dimensional images abstract this even further. They represent our mental experience of four dimensions frozen at one point, and then flattened out. They no longer contain the dimensions of forward-back and past-future, but our minds are able to accept this because we innately learn how to abstract four dimensions to two as our brains grow. We have a further complexity in that we are able to perceive two dimensional images that contain representations of three dimensions (see below) and two-dimensional images that represent two dimensions. This was a conundrum explored by the Cubist and Surrealist movements in art, and ultimately gave rise to non-representational art in the mid-twentieth century.

Yet the history of visual and plastic arts gives us a number of examples of intentional manipulation of our perception of space time. If one looks at the conventions of Ancient Egyptian art, we are confronted with figures who have heads, hands, and legs and feet in profile, but torsos and hips portrayed frontally. It’s clear, however, from their sculpture work that they not only understood, but mastered depictions of three-dimensions. The deliberate choice to create such distorted flat images in two-dimensions derived from their concepts of the nature of things. They had to include, as much as possible, a clear picture in two dimensions, of the three-dimensional form, otherwise the gods and spirits might not recognize it, and the magic would fail to work.

Science and spirituality would both have you believe that they are mutually exclusive disciplines, but this is an erroneous idea. To paraphrase from Pauley Perrette’s character on NCIS “I believe in magic, prayer and logic equally”. Arthur C. Clarke, who was both a famous science fiction author and inventor of the geosynchronous satellite, gives us “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”. And for me, the one thing that I think both science and spiritualism should have in common is that desire to always question the status quo.

Time and space have changed significantly since I was a child. Our understanding of modern physics today embraces concepts that were considered in the realm of science fiction when I was growing up. This is because the more we learn about the nature of the observable physical universe, the more we are forced to alter the accepted viewpoint, and in some cases, to admit an as-yet-unknown nature which is not quantifiable using the current means.

Isaac Newton had to invent calculus in order to express his understanding of the nature of space and time. Modern physicists have expanded on his work, but we may require another watershed like Principia Mathematica or the General and Special Theory of Relativity to leap past our present limits.

Most people work their way through the world without an awareness of even the basics of Newtonian physics, to say nothing of the implications of quantum uncertainty and the potential of multiple universes with alternate timelines. Gravity is a literal fact. It does what it does, and keeps us all from sliding off into space, and that’s a good thing.

Yet the complex interaction of gravitational forces alone that make possible our habitation of this little rock are staggering to ponder. We are all of us pulled toward the center of the Earth. Yet we are also pulled toward the Moon as it slowly circles the earth overhead. Both Earth and Moon are drawn inward toward a massive star we call the Sun. It is only the speed at which we travel around it, and occasional tugs from other planets in orbit, the smaller one’s due to their distance, and the larger ones due to their size, that keeps us from spiraling in and melting.

Our meat suits have evolved to live in this soup of interlocking forces that move the universe on a cosmic scale. The invisible engine of gravity moves the stars in the heavens, and causes them to be born and to die. It whirls the galaxies together, in orbits around great dark objects of such unbelievable size that space is curved toward the infinite, and light itself cannot escape. It is a truly amazing and terrifying cosmos we inhabit.

Before Mr. Newton and the Enlightenment, the operation of this system was bound by the works of Claudius Ptolemy, a researcher and encyclopedist at the library of Alexandria in the first century AD.

His Four Books provides the basis for Western astrology, and his Mathematic Systems was the astronomical text that taught how to plot the movements of the stars. Like Newton, he wrote the math text to explain the apparent motion of the heavens. Unlike his latter day counterpart, though, his interest in that motion was for the use of astrological horoscopy.

Astrology, and most likely the mathematical models necessary to support it, was practiced as a science by the ancient Chaldeans, and probably older civilizations. There are increasing numbers of discoveries that stone-age peoples were observing and possibly recording the passage of time using the positions of celestial objects around the world.

Stonehenge is probably the most famous such site, but there are a number in the Americas, and recently many more have been found in Asia and Africa, so there is some reason to believe that humans marked time and specifically events like the solstices and the equinoxes at a very early point in our development, and that we used similar methods regardless of geography.

We might expect that the reason is simply agricultural. When one is dependent upon the crops, one should probably know when to plant and when to harvest, and a solar observatory is a more accurate means of working out that information than a tally stick or other similar counting mechanism.

Yet these constructions, some of which obviously required a lot of people and sometimes centuries to build, seem a bit over the top for this purpose alone.

Evidence supports that Stonehenge actually began as a wood-henge (and Woodhenge is also a nearby site) that was modified repeatedly over a span of several hundred years. So a simpler, and certainly easier to build version was sufficient. We can speculate that stones were later involved, because they would be more permanent and lower maintenance.

But that only explains the small stone circle, at least as far as practical function is concerned.

To harness the labor and skills necessary to bring the great big stones that make up the final stage, you really have to be looking at more than just keep track of time for the harvest. Recent discoveries at Stonehenge, and at places like Gobekli Tepe in Turkey, suggest that perhaps it was the other way around.

Both sites appear to have been places where large groups of more or less nomadic stone-age tribes would gather at specific times, and have large festivals. Theoretically such festivals included a lot of eating and drinking, and logically might also involve trading, cultural exchange, marriages and betrothals, etc. before the crowd sobered up and went back to their usual ranges.

The desire to support these occasional meetings may have led to increased domestication of both animals and plants, in order to meet the demand for annual or semi-annual feasts.
As we now know these supposedly “primitive” people were gathering at pre-appointed times, we have to consider that they had a fairly good command of both time and space outside of the calendrical functions of the solar sites themselves.

That is, a tribe needed to know how many days (or thereabouts) it would take for them to travel from their usual stomping grounds to the ceremonial center. They then would need to be able to subtract those days from the date of the meeting, say, the Summer Solstice, in order to know when to leave so they could be there on time.

While it’s hardly rocket science, it does mean that at least some members of the tribe both had the necessary information, and could keep track of the passage of days, without the need of a Stonehenge type calendar. While one might argue that the numerous other stone circles and semi-circles around the world were local “clocks” there’s a bit of problem.

Solar calendars like Stonehenge are “set” according to equinoxes and solstices. If your travel time from the local clock, in say, Northern Scotland, to Stonehenge, takes about three months, then you can leave on the equinox and arrive on the solstice and reasonably expect to get back on the next equinox. But, aside from the issues this brings up with planting, harvesting, etc. in a fixed agrarian society, it’s also just not right.

According to internet mapping software, one can walk from Inverness to Stonehenge in around 8 days. Now presuming one is not actually constantly walking, and is possibly also bringing along slower moving livestock, a more reasonable journey is probably about a fortnight. So one would need to know about two to three weeks before the Summer Solstice that they needed to pack up and head south.

On the other hand, we might look at the equinox to solstice ratio as indicative of seasonal migration, where both people and animals left the colder northern climate for a more favorable winter on the Salisbury plain, and returning to the fields in Scotland just about the time the spring grazing was beginning.

So many of the ancient magical dates revolve around the agricultural imperative that it’s impossible to say which came first, the farm or the festival? But if people are migrating to festivals rather than fields, then we have to admit the possibility of early calendar devices being accessible to stone-age peoples without being locations in a landscape.

Tools similar to quadrants are known to have existed in Ancient Mesopotamia. The exact date of their invention is unknown. These devices are designed to work out the position of the stars above the horizon, and thus can be used to calculate both location and time of the day as well as the day of the year.

Prior to the global positioning system, a variation of this technology, the sextant, was used for the same purpose.

In the Middle Ages a very complex version called an astrolabe was probably developed in China, and made it’s way westward along the Silk Road, which the development of the astrolabe made possible. In later times, as the Muslim culture spread out across northern Africa, this amazing device took on more significance in that it could be used to determine the location of Mecca and calculate the proper times to stop for prayer.

Astrolabes, quadrants, and sextants all operate on measuring the angles of the sun or other fixed celestial point, in relation to an horizon. The astrolabe uses a full circle, while a quadrant and sextant use a fourth and a sixth, or 90 and 60 degrees of arc, respectively. The accuracy of these analog devices when used by a skilled technician is comparable to computers and GPS systems. Manned space craft in Earth’s orbit still carry a sextant.

I obviously have a fascination with the mechanics of the planets and stars. In a quantum multiverse, where nothing is ever in the same place at the same time ever, it seems to me difficult to casually dismiss that unique moment into which we are all born as an irrelevance.

As we draw near to, and enter into our birth date, even though it is not the same as it was when were were born, the nearer factors, that gravity of the Earth, Moon, Sun, and planets, swirls similarly around us. All our local planets inhabit the gravity well of the Sun, so it is not surprising that our Solar Return augurs importantly. Our Moon signs, though the Moon is smaller even than the Earth, derive from a much closer relationship with her forces. The meat suits evolved to have about the same amount of water in them as the Earth does on it, so the effects of the Moon on tides cannot easily be dismissed.

Astrology, astronomy, and the human need to quantify time and space are as ancient as our brains. If we limit ourselves to the scientific only, and suggest that the spirit is a quirk of evolutionary mutation, present only between the fertilization of the gamete and the end of respiration, we are still faced with the question of how that consciousness comes to be, and what it’s purpose is, because it simply can’t be explained as an adaptation to environmental survival. Self-awareness might argue somewhat of an advantage. Language and the ability to pass on information, certainly is a powerful survival factor. But the bees have that and they’re not doing so well.

It’s fascinating to think, though, that the bee language, and the information system that affords them an evolutionary advantage, appears to be related to navigating based on the position of the Sun. So our own connection to space and time may be as integral. We may be drawn to the sky because somewhere back in our evolution, we had a built-in orientation to the positions of the celestial objects.

Ignoring that because “astrology is a pseudoscience” is not to our advantage in our journey of self-discovery as a species.

As always, I question everything. I recommend it as a way of living. It can take a lot of time and energy, but you may find it worth the extra effort.

I’ll return next week, after few more days around the Sun.

September 20, 2023October 18, 2023

To Every Purpose Under Heaven

I was looking for a topic for this week as I made my way into the office this morning. Shifting gears back from having the security of the next Tarot trump has been a bit more difficult than I thought, especially when it coincided with the Labor Day Weekend, short weeks, impending projects, new arrivals in the household (furry ones) and healthy doses of Mercury retrograde impacting technology and logistics on a grand scale.

A rested mind (and I am truly a mind in need of a rest) might find fertile options blooming forth in everyday encounters. This was much what I was doing last year, and I am confident I can wiggle back to it, especially if I get that rest I am talking about. This however is the start of my busy season, so resting never quite seems to actually arrive.

Ultimately it is the season that impressed itself on my this morning. As I drove down from suburbia to the quasi-industrial area of my day job, I noticed subtle, but apparent, changes in the leaves.

The Texas coastal plains lack that broad biodiversity of New England’s deciduous forests. And here along the Gulf, winter is more of a quaint notion (usually) than real alteration of the environment. Nevertheless, there are signs that in some of the trees the sap is beginning to retreat, and the leaves are going from green to yellow, and thence to less brilliant russets or scarlets, before dropping off.

I had always thought this transformation was a factor of temperature, but following one of the hottest summers on record, our descent into September has only meant a grudging movement from the 100s to the upper 90s daily. While it’s a drop, and for those of us living down here almost a cold snap, it certainly shouldn’t trigger any biological processes. So I started wondering what the trees knew that we didn’t , and how it might be that they knew this.

According to the U.S. Forest Service (and presumably they checked with the trees) the trigger is not temperature but light. The length of daylight, which gradually lessens from the Summer Solstice down to the Autumnal Equinox (in a few days), impacts the production of the green chlorophyll in the leaves. Chlorophyll is that magic substance that binds the carbon in carbon dioxide with the hydrogen in water to create simple sugars. These chemical factories are what make plants food for animals, and they are solar powered. So when there is less sunlight, there is less chlorophyll, and the leaves start making other chemical which produce the different colors.

So basically, we have the changing colors in the trees because the nights are getting longer. Trees are astronomically controlled. This all seems very logical and sensibly scientific once you know, but ponder for a moment how many billions of years were involved in coming to this very efficient arrangement. The trees that will wow tourists in Vermont and New Hampshire began as simple one-celled organisms untold ages ago. Some of them drifted nearer the top of an ancient sea, and through a quirk of chemistry started to make the green pigment that sucked carbon dioxide out of the air. These basic creatures are still with us in the form of algae, though they can form much more complex systems now like kelp.

Their contribution in removing the carbon dioxide and releasing the free oxygen made it possible for other little critters to survive. These eventually became the proto-animals, similar to jellies that inhabit our oceans. The jellies developed specialized cell structures, and mutated to become corals and anemones and worms and mollusks and so on an so forth until we arrived to marvel at the changing of the leaves.

So despite shifts in climate, weather patterns, pollution, deforestation, wildfires and all the thousand natural shocks that forests are heir to, the trees keep looking to the sky, and repeating this ancient cycle of growth, death, and rebirth as the planet wobbles around the sun each year.

There’s a comfort to that. This cycle is something it may be very hard for humans to break. Despite all the abuses we heap upon Mother Earth we have, as yet, been unable to stop the sun from shining.

There are, however, other things that can. Some of them are right here on the planet, and some of them come from out there in the dark.

human skull tree — The “Descent of Man” from the little monkey like creature at the bottom center to the homo sapiens skull at upper left. Evolution has made a lot of wrong turns and dead ends with the homonids, up to the couple of chaps to our immediate right, representing Heidelburg and Neanderthal Man. Heidelburg Man was discovered a little later than his more well known cousin, and the differences are slight. It was this species that we most associate with “cavemen” though they could has easily have been tribal nomads like the indigenous peoples of many places today. His ability to exploit his environment was not as efficient as that of his successor. He made and used tools, but he didn’t seem to be interested in innovation. Good enough was good enough for the Neanderthal, which is why the more successful Cro-Magnon ultimately replaced him in the Stone Age landscape. Modern studies suggest that Neanderthals merged into our DNA, rather than becoming completely extinct, but they may be considered another casualty of human domination of the environment.

On the earth, the effect of large volcanic eruptions putting tons and tones of dust and ash up into the atmosphere have documented effects on the cycle of seasons. It is not just a drop in ambient temperature, as the scattered debris bounces light and heat back into space. It is that drop in light that tells the trees that winter is coming, that has a significant effect.

Likewise, the earth and rock and water vapor thrown up into the air by an asteroid collision can create periods of false winter that last for years or even decades. We believe that some of these events may have ended the age of dinosaurs, because the abundant plant life that made big heavy herbivores possible simply failed to wake up. Without the big heavy herbivores, the big heavy carnivores starved, and the mode of life became smaller and more efficient. Life mutated away from scales and feathers and eggs as dominant to fur and skin and wombs.

As the debris gradually dropped back down to earth from these events, the green plants bounced back, and ultimately big life forms were again fashionable, though the early mammals never got back to dinosaur scale. The few remaining giants we have are small (for the most part) in comparison to their ancestors. The elephant is impressive, but not so much as the great wooly mammoth. The grizzly and polar bears are certainly terrible to us, but the cave bears that stalked our ancestors were bigger still. It’s fairly clear, then, that the conditions conducive to big herbivores and big carnivores are starting to shrink again, without drastic events like super volcanoes and asteroids collisions.

The new force eradicating the green biomass is human expansion. On my drive to work daily I see another area that was forested clear cut to put in another subdivision, or worse, a complex of warehouses and industrial spaces.

The creatures on the right plagued our ancestors, but already they were starting to diminish. You can see that the cave bear and saber-toothed cat were not much larger than there modern counterparts. The person standing at the edge of the picture is average sized for a modern human, and possibly a bit bigger than the people who ran from these predators. Yet neither of them were more than a mouthful for the giant Tyrannosaurus Rex on the left. While the pictures are not exactly to scale, they are close. The big predator had six inch teeth in an eight foot skull, and by all accounts was a formidable killing machine. The earth ceased to be able to sustain such monsters long ago, when geologic upheaval and meteor impacts caused major shifts in the amount of sunlight. A dimmer world was a browner world, and the lush forests and grasslands that fed these amazing creatures went away, never to return.

This latter exploitation is most harmful, because it produces acres and acres on non-permeable asphalt, concrete or hardpacked stone. The monster facilities now ring the city of Houston and show no signs of stopping.

Where once rain fell onto upper leaves, then lower leaves, then a floor of fallen leaves and decomposing wood, before percolating into soil, it now splatters across indifferent silica, before being rapidly funneled into gutters and sewers that fill the bayous faster than the grade can drain it. This results in increased flooding. To combat this, the watercourses are dredged, speeding up the removal of nutrient rich soils, and increasing the speed in which industrial and agricultural run-off are reaching the oceans.

houston view 1984-2023 — The browning of Earth. These photos represent the greater Houston Texas area in 1984 and today. You can easily see how much more of the countryside is covered in concrete and asphalt.

cairo 1984-2016 view — Development may be even rapider in the “developing world” which is not as restricted by environmental laws as the United States. This is Cairo, the largest city in Africa. 1984 is on the left and 2016 is on the right. For scale, the small whitish area on the far left near the bottom is the pyramids.

vegas 1984-2023 view — Development in marginal environments causes an even greater strain of the ecosystem. Las Vegas has grown by almost 400% in the last twenty years. Notice how as the city has become larger, the nearby lakes, that made such an oasis in the harsh desert possible, have dwindled. In addition to limiting water available to meet the needs of the city, the lower water levels threaten to fall below the intakes for the power plants, meaning that someday soon, Las Vegas may be left in the dark.

In the suburban developments, the same thing occurs on a smaller scale, but it is no less harmful. Lawns and landscaping introduce an artificial ecosystem that must be maintained artificially, with pesticides and fertilizers and forced watering.

Human populations continue to grow and place more demands for food and housing and rapid Amazon delivery that drives this destructive cycle. The pandemic has massively altered our distribution model in the United States and the net result are these massive storage facilities “convenient” to the neighborhoods that spread outward from every city and town.

We are browning the planet with our building. It is not enough to blame fossil fuel use and the automobile for this rapidly growing issue. All these fields of concrete reflect heat. These human-made deserts are orders of magnitude warmer than a surrounding woodland or grassland would be. The heat impacts the ability for rain to fall. It is causing local climate change and may be responsible for the record highs we are all experiencing this summer.

I don’t have a simple solution. I know that there is not a simple solution, and that is what is holding us back from working on more complex ones. “Going green” involves changing our human mindset, globally, as a species, and I am not sure that is possible. We are wired by evolution to be acquisitive. We are built to consume resources and driven to become better at it because back in the days when Oog and Groont came down from the trees that was what kept us alive.

Such acquisitiveness and the unchecked growth it creates frequently has caused the periodic collapse of social orders. Civilizations rise and fall, and much can be attributed to the overextension of the natural resources that such populations require to be sustainable.

But we are now approaching a truly global civilization, and the limits of the planet to sustain it are finite. We can’t simply expand, like the old empires did. There is no where left for us to go, realistically. The sky is our limit. Even if we dream of colonizing the planets and moons of our local star system, the resources required have to come from this already overburdened planet we inhabit.

There are two outcomes to this situation.

We can, as a species, learn to live more responsibly with the planet we inhabit. This requires a fundamental chain in our habits, our politics, and certainly our economics. I don’t know that this will happen in my lifetime, even though I expect my lifetime to be longer than my ancestors. The pace of changing our ways compared to the pace at which those ways threaten to destroy us is not an optimistic picture.

Which is the second outcome. We fail as a species. Humanity dies out, like the dinosaurs, leaving behind maybe a few bones to be dug up in a hundred million years by whatever creatures evolve to replace us. It’s our species that is under the greatest threat from the mass extinction event we are feeding. We may not be the sole cause, but we are certainly a major contributing factor.

But when we are gone, there is every chance that the crud we have pumped into the air and water and the earth will eventually settle out, be buried deep, and the trees will start their cycle again.

It’s not about us.

I’ll be back next week.

April 19, 2023April 18, 2023

Venus Enthroned

Before I leap into this week’s card completely, I want to mention a couple of points that didn’t make it into last week’s article, but are relevant to cover before going forward.

First, you may have noticed that I haven’t said anything about reverses, that is, the meanings I read when the card is drawn upside down. While these are considered traditional, not every historical source on Tarot has used them, so I think there’s probably a fair argument that “traditional” use is not absolute.

Thing is, several of the decks I own have a card back design that is clearly oriented to up or down, so when I read from those decks, I know whether the card I will draw is a reverse or not, before I draw it. To me, this seems a problem, it prejudices my opinion of what that card will mean even before I draw it. No, it ought not to, but in my own experience it does. Your mileage may vary.

But further, to get a reverse, one must intentionally shuffle the deck such that some cards are turned up and some down. The issue with that is that in a general randomization, you are going to get stacks of reverses coming together. Again, this may just be me, but I purposely re-sort my decks at the end of a reading, to the usual order that I use. From my years of using the cards, this is the Majors, then the Wands, Cups, Swords, and Pentacles, all going from Ace to King. So because of this practice, a whole lot of shuffling is required to get reversed cards that occur individually. While it’s certainly not impossible, it’s just not as likely to get that outcome, and so I am back to having a lot of reversed cards in a row.

In many of the little books that come in the card box, reverses are dealt with as simple opposites. If the Two of Cups is interpreted as romantic love, then the reverse is read as a break-up or divorce looming. But the whole point I have been making is that the cards are to be intuitively read in context, and eyeing the reverse as a simple negation is hardly adequate. As astrologers will tell you about retrograde motion, the interpretation is that the usual meaning may be reduce, impeded, or frustrated, again, depending on context.

In going forward I will probably not spend any more time on reverse meanings than I have previously. I think the astute person who chooses to utilize some of my interpretations in their own exploration can glean what opposites or limitations should apply if these cards come up upside down in their reading. It may also be instructive to consider the earlier, less lofty meanings of the card images in that. It is possible and certainly applicable to perceive the previous three cards as an Idiot, a Con Man, and a Heretic if reversed, or ill-aspected by other cards in the reading.

My second point is to re-emphasize that I tend to regard the first three cards as representative of cerebral or spiritual natures, which may be described in terms of the “That Which Is Above” of Hermetic tradition. As we begin with the Empress card, we are entering into “That Which Is Below”. This is the world of the physical, the manifest, and the incarnate. These cards are both the way the non-corporeal natures of the “Above” show themselves in the perceived reality, and the reflection of those natures.

tarot-as-above-so-below — This arrangement can be a reading in itself, or it can be used as a prototype spread. The Fool, The Magician, and Priestess represent the “Above” of Hermetic teachings, that which is supernatural, divine, astral, etc. The Empress, Emperor, and Hierophant are their Counterparts in the physical world “Below”. If you take the essences of these cards, as they are positioned and opposed/reflected in this context, as signifiers, then cards drawn and placed on these positions can be read in those contexts. For example, the card in the Fool’s place represents new beginnings, first purposes, raw talent, unmoderated energy, etc.

In the years I have been working I have often used the cards to determine how I read the cards. That is, I might deal out a certain number, read those and then deal out again but use the first round to determine how the second round should be seen. This is not the same as the “clarification” where a card is drawn and the next card is drawn to amplify or elaborate. In this case, the meaning of the first card and its position are seen as the modifier to how the meaning of the second card is read. The first card’s meaning is a context, rather than a meaning to be further defined. I don’t know if anyone else has used this method. I am constantly exploring new ways to look at the cards.

I’d like to tell you that I have puzzled out how each successive set of three cards in the Major Arcana work in this interrelationship, but I confess that such a solution still eludes me, if it exists at all. There is a curious little mathematical trick in the Major Arcana, in that the numbers assigned to each card, when they are viewed in successive sets of three, are numerologically resolvable to the number 3.

That is:

The Fool 0 + The Magician 1 + The Priestess 2 = 3

And

The Empress 3 + The Emperor 4 + The Hierophant 5 = 12 and 1+2 =3.

Likewise

The Lovers 6 + The Chariot 7 + Strength 8 = 21 and 2+1 =3

And

The Hermit 9 + The Wheel 10 + Justice 11 = 30 and 3+0 = 3

From here on it continues, though it takes a few more steps

The Hanged Man 12 + Death 13 + Temperance 14 = 39 and 3 +9 =12 and 1+2 = 3

The same applies for the next three

The Devil 15 + The Tower 16 + The Star 17 = 48 > 12 >3

And the next

The Moon 18 + The Sun 19 + Judgment 20 = 57 > 12 > 3

And the final card is

The World 21 and 2+1 = 3.

It’s a nifty trick. I wish I could tell you that there is some hidden meaning here, but I continue to look for it. Beyond looking at the first two sets and their more or less obvious relationship, I can’t use this power of three to logically connect the meanings of the cards split thusly, aside from perhaps ascribing that the World, by itself, holds the same value as each set, and that is rather tidy. Yet my awareness of this strange little numerical quirk always crops up when I contemplate the cards, so perhaps there is something to it after all. I do not ascribe any secret and intentional message lost in the sands of time, but just that like all synchronicities and patterns, meanings may be derived.

This pattern, of course, exists separate from Tarot. If you take the numbers 0 through 21, and split them at every three steps, you get this outcome. It is just that it works exactly on the number of Major Arcana cards that I find rather intriguing. Again, it may have no more real relation than Levi tying the 22 Hebrew characters to these cards. But people use that system daily, so please feel free to adapt or ignore as you see fit.

Alright, enough to the sidebar, let’s get to this week’s card, The Empress.

Empress_RWS_Tarot — Smith has given us a sensual feast for the eyes with this card. There is much to explore beyond what I have written about. Foremost is that the openness of the card’s character invite us to go wandering in the woods behind her, an activity I always heartily endorse.

In the RWS deck she is show reclining on a couch in the middle of a field of wheat. Behind her is a stand of trees, which may be an orchard. A stream flows from it to pool just behind the dais her couch is upon. She wears a white robe with pomegranates on it, She is crowned with a tiara of six pointed stars, and holds aloft in her right hand a scepter topped with a large golden orb. Beside her couch, and possibly part of its carving is a tilted heart with the symbol for Venus upon it. The circular part of the symbol is filled with green. A variation of the Venus symbol is worked into a motif at the back of the couch (it may be intended as wicker work or filigree) and there are opulent cushions and throws upon it that she lays upon. The sky in this image is yellow, like that of the Magician card.

The yellow sky is also shared with the Fool card, and appears on four other cards in the Major Arcana. To the extent that these are intentional selections and not just the choices made by the printer from available inks is hard to say. Yet the spaces in each of the cards can be read as symbolic, and there is therefore no reason to ignore the color choice. If it was made by Ms. Smith or the printing house, is irrelevant. If intended, then we can say perhaps a meaning was intended. If coincidental, then we can, like the number sequence and indeed the random draw of the cards themselves, consider it a means of working into the inscrutable mystery being revealed by an unseen force.

In this instance, I make note of the connection of this color with the Magician card, in his rose garden. This is a cue to my earlier statement about reflection and manifestation. The Magician is reflected in the Empress. She is the avatar of Venus, Aphrodite, and Demeter. She is fertility and fecundity, bringing forth abundance and ripeness from the earth and all those things which live and grow upon it. It is she who is the physical representation of the Fool’s divine force, channeled through the Magician’s directed will.

For those more technically included, consider the photographic negative (you younger folks may have to go look that one up. As a photographer whose career and training began with these now “retro” tools, it is a logical and apt metaphor). It is opposite, and potentially unrecognizable. Yet when placed into the enlarger, and light projected through it onto the photopaper below, it yields an opposite and clear image. So I am comfortable applying the reflection/opposition principle here when I connect the Above to the Below. Additionally, we can view the Empress as the feminine aspects of the Magician. In a way, her sensuous nature completes and mollifies the severe and somewhat barren nature of the symbol of willful action.

This of course, does not limit her to being simply the worldly emanation of the will. That would disregard the value of the physical manifest existence. This is often a trap of the spiritual path. Many “seekers” have adopted the philosophy of self-denial, asceticism, and celibacy as the appropriate path to the divine. The whole argument that we must shed our attachment to the mortal world and its pleasures is a tenet of many religions and teachings.

Yet this begs the question as to what the purpose of a physical experience is in the first place. If the spiritual is the only truth, and rising to being solely spiritual is the aim of existence, why is there a physicality at all. If spirit exists before and after mortality, as many faiths teach, then why are we making a side trip. If we are divinity descended into flesh so that we can ascend back to the divine, this seems a futile waste of time.

The answer is usually a pat “because we must learn X” by being incarnated. I think that’s a bit too simplistic, and it also is often used as an excuse for all manner of evil and suffering in the world. We have to be hurt and abused because we must learn X. We make war and destruction on our fellow humans because someone must learn X. Your mother or your sister had to die of cancer because you must learn X. It’s all so you can return to the nature of pure spirit as –what — a better spirit? Were you a bit of a daft spirit before, and spending three score and ten repeatedly having your heart broken and stubbing your toe is going to fix all that?

I don’t buy that one. Sorry. Probably why I don’t fit in with most of the regular philosophical circles.

Now, I am not here to say that the Hedonist philosophy is the one true way either, but I think one of the big lessons we can get from the Empress card is that we are supposed to enjoy the experience of being incarnate. For every time we stub our toe, there’s all those times where we got to eat birthday cake.

Potentially a non-corporeal spirit can’t experience that luscious chocolate frosting, or at least not in the same way that a messy meat suit with taste buds can. For all the limitations and fragilities inherent in life in the meat suit, there are just some things that our ghost selves don’t enjoy in the same way. If this were not the actual case then it would not be so hard to give it all up.

The Hindu and Buddhist beliefs tell us that our spirits suffer because we cannot dissolve that longing for the physical. I say that our spirits naturally have a physical existence. It’s not a larval stage. It’s not preparing us for “the next life”. Our meatiness is part of our life. We may even cycle between being meat and not-meat throughout eternity.

Empress-triptych — A Triple Empress, if you will, and purposefully drawing on the Maiden-Mother-Crone architype. Three different artists give related, but not entirely similar treatments to the physical attributes of this card’s natural realm.

The leftmost from Stephanie Law’s Shadowscapes Tarot gives us all the joy and exuberance of Springtime with it’s potential for life and growth. Law cleverly paints it in the colors of autumn though, reminding us that these abundances are as mortal as our ability to enjoy them, and yet, they are part of a never ending cycle.

The middle piece I have drawn from Cirro Marchetti’s Legacy of the Divine deck. Here the Empress’s belly swells with the new life witihin, and she is attended by many emblems of fruitfulness and fertility. In one of my own attempts at this card, I also chose to depict the Empress with child, and yet still she is sensuous to us.

The final image is drawn from the Tarot of the Hidden Realm, which as you may guess from the title, is very Faery-forward. The artist is Julie Jeffrey, and has given us a copper-haired harvest queen the equal of Demeter or Ceres. The fruits of the Empress’s impressive garden are wasted if we do not pick them. That is their purpose and that is our purpose.

The Empress is the embrace of that physical world. She is warmth and sunshine on our face. She is the smell of the flowers in the field. She is the hum of the bees, and the chirping of the birds, and the babbling of the brook. She is the touch of a lover’s hand, the look in the lover’s eyes. While it may be true that when we return to the spirit form, we become one with that lover in a way that our bodies may not ever be able to, it is the delicate separation of those bodies, the appreciation of Other, that cannot be felt when the soul merges on a higher plane. That itself is worth something. That itself is why we physically incarnate.

While the emblem on the Empress’s couch (or throne, as it could be such in an Etrurian or Graeco-Roman style) is commonly that used astrologically for the planet Venus, and more modernly for the female, it is also an Egyptian Ankh. The ankh is supposed to have derived from the a stylization of a sandal strap, but it’s meaning is Life Itself. It is universally carried by the gods. It is showered down upon people in painting after painting. It is given by the gods to the deceased in the afterlife, so that they may enjoy an eternity of sensual pleasures in the Field of Reeds as the the Boat of Ra passes by. To me this further enforces the view of the Empress as that principle of Life Itself growing, renewing, and everlasting in the world around us.

Her spring brings forth life giving waters for the forests and fields. The wheat is perpetually golden, ripe and ready to harvest, there is no famine here. Yet this is not Eden. This garden she resides in is far more practical. It is the province of the Gatherer in our most ancient “Hunter-Gatherer” ecology. These plants growing in abundance are yet to be tamed and tilled in even rows. There is an antiquity here, almost as old as the caves, before the structure inherent in domestic horticulture caused her to fade into the background. She is here in the center of it all, to be marveled at, adored, and loved for all these gifts.

On her crown are twelve stars, and I think this is clearly the “stars” of the zodiac. The great gold orb on her scepter is the Sun, showing how it travels across these as the year passes. It is through this that all seasons, Spring, Summer, Fall, and Winter are realized in the physical world. In her garden there is something she does in each of them, to prepare for the next. She is not passing time, but the eternal cycle of life, the eternal promise of abundance, the never ending presence of manifestation. She is the embodiment of continuance.

Her left hand rests upon her knee, and we can see here the echo of the Magician’s stance, even to including the scepter. By this she fully claims her dominion of the physical world of the senses. She ordains what is to be through her will. We are subject to that will, we are dependent upon it, and therefore must pay obeisance to her. By contrast though, her manner is relaxed and open. She does not stand proudly by the Table of the Elements, but greets us languidly from her couch. She does not interpose herself in front of us in challenge, but invites us to come join her in this wonderful place she has built around her. The pomegranates are not an abstracted decoration on the banner behind her, but part of her personal garb. She bids us welcome, and insists that we should walk through her garden.

In this she is a stark contrast to the next card we will explore, that of the Emperor. I’ll be back in a week with that one. I sincerely hope you are enjoying these articles on the Major Arcana, their histories, and my own take on the cards. Your patronage is always appreciated. If you find them enjoyable, please share with a friend who may be likewise entertained.

December 21, 2022December 21, 2022

The Solstice Article

I’ve been trying to place these articles just ahead of the major Sabbats and Esbats but today we have the great good fortune to land smack dab in the middle of the Winter Solstice, longest night of the year, and the time when all good ancient pagans lit great big campfires to bid the sun return.

The date is so significant that many ancient peoples around the world built stone calendars that marked the sunrise or sunset. Stonehenge is probably the more famous, but there’s one in Machu Picchu high in the Andes. As far as we know these two cultures were not friends on Facebook. If we discount that they both learned the ritual requirements from some long lost mother civilization like Atlantis, Mu, or Lemuria (and I tend to), we begin to see that the shortest day held special importance throughout human memory. And this means that it probably was known and marked as far back as our time in the cave.

If you’ve been reading my articles for a while, you know there’s ample evidence that we observed and understood the cycles of the earth and sky in at least the time of Cro-Magnon man if not earlier. My first awareness of this came when I discovered the so-called Venus of Laussell while studying early human art in college. The horn she holds has 13 marks, equivalent to 13 lunar months in a solar year. This interpretation comes from my awareness of magical practice and symbology, and you may not find a similar viewpoint expressed by art historians or anthropologists. But these articles are aimed at an audience interested in exploring the possible roots of magical practice in humanity, so we’ll go with that.

It’s actually not too much of a stretch. When you are utterly and completely dependent upon the raw, wild, scary, indifferent, and dangerous Nature around you for your very survival, you need to become an expert on that Nature. And since you don’t have the distraction of social media, cable TV, or the mall, you actually have time to observe Nature and operate in the context of it.

Winter Solstice 2022 — The chart for the moment of the Cusp of Capricorn, which is astrologically the Solstice. This is for my location in the environs of Houston, Texas, so time and space (at least as far as the placement of the Primary Directions and the Houses go) will vary depending on your place in the universe.

I think it fitting that the transition here is from the Mutable Fire of Sagittarius to the Cardinal Earth of Capricorn. We have a metaphor for the Solar deity descending into the Underworld, at the nadir of it’s annual journey. Here it will become transformed to rise again. From this time the hours of daylight grow, until they peek on the opposite side of the Zodiac, between Cancer and Leo. Thus the Great Spring of Water gives way to the Establishing Summer Fire, and the Throne of the Sun.

According to the Chaldees, who charted these stars well before the discovery of the outer planets of Uranus, Neptune and Pluto (only a little over a hundred years ago), both Sagittarius and Capricorn were ruled by old Saturn, that Elder Chaos of the Outer Dark. I know the moderns associate Saturn with rigidity and institutional convention, mainly due to a symbolic connection with antiquity. His reputation as devourer of his children speaks to an angrier and darker memory, one pondered on cold winter nights when fires were lit on hill tops to bid the Sun return.

I see a number of articles and documentaries discussing this idea these days. We modern humans see ourselves as distinct and separate from nature (small n intentional) and therefore seek to dominate, control, plunder, monetize, and ultimately consume it. I don’t disagree with this assessment of our present culture, and I think it is the root of many of the major problems we face as a species.

We have recently reached over 8 billion in population. I think that is astounding and terrifying. There are probably not 8 billion of any other species on this planet. If there are, they are only an insect or a microbe or possibly a virus. In any case, there are not 8 billion of any species with an effective lifespan of nearly a century crawling around, making even more of itself on a world that is finite, under stress, and starting to fight back.

The simple fact is that, regardless of our vast technological civilization, the almost instantaneous hyperknowledge of the Internet, and global interconnectivity, Nature, with a capital N, will eventually consume us.

I don’t believe we can go back to the garden, regardless of how charming that idea may be. If you are reading this, you are consuming fossil fuels, heavy metals, rare earths, and quite probably whole nations of slave labor. And so am I while I write. We cannot simply turn off the switch, dump it all into the river (more than we already are) and “live in harmony with Nature”. As soon as our big brains figured out that they were bigger, we have been on this unbroken path toward dominance or oblivion.

We have evidence of mass extinctions occurring multiple times on this planet. Whole ecosystems have died off, and only a handful of surviving creatures were left to carry on, evolve, and occupy the altered world left unto them. So will it be with humanity. Even if we correct our course, even if we find a way to stop hewing at Mother Earth with mad blind abandon, our brief light might still go out.

Meteors whiz by every day with the potential to not only end civilization, but wipe out most, if not all life on this tiny blue world. Multiple supervolcano sites around the world seem poised to erupt, blackening our skies and shutting off the all important sunlight. The recent global pandemic is hardly as horrific as the Influenza Epidemic of a century ago, and both of them pale in comparison to the Black Death of the Middle Ages, but we shouldn’t pat ourselves too well on the back for “fixing it”.

In Nature, when a population exceeds the ability of it’s environment to support it, that species experiences a die-off. Nature always wins.

Nature will go on without air conditioning, high-speed rail, or interstate commerce. We will not.

Nature will consume us.

This fundamental truth was closer to our ancestors who looked upon the Winter Solstice with great dread that the growing night would go on forever. They did not “live in harmony” with Nature. They had no choice. They could not ideate that their little fire might someday embrace the secrets of the atom, or the great furnace at the heart of that waning sun. All they could do was hope that the spirit up there in that pale orange ball might see a kinship in the bonfire, and once more come back.

And to insure it did come back they learned to count the days and mark the movement of the sun and moon and stars around the sky. They needed to know when to light the fires, and when to make the sacrifices, and when to call the magic.

SmartSelect_20221220_132139_Armillary Sphere — I wanted to use a screenshot of my armillary sphere app to illustrate the Solstice, but discovered that the makers apparently copied the band of the Ecliptic from an antique original that was made before the advent of the Gregorian calendar. Thus the Solstice on the 21st of December is past the Cusp of Capricorn, and off by about 12 days.

On the right is a more modern system, used by photographers and filmmakers to forecast the placement of the sun (and moon) for a given location at a particular point in time. While the goal is different, the idea is the same as the ancient instrument.

Like the Zodiac in the first picture above, these are calibrated for my location. Were I located on the equator, the systems would show the sun moving overhead from East to West at the Equinoxes. At the Summer Solstice, the Sun would arc over about 23.4 degrees to the North, and at the Winter Solstice would be inclined southward by the same amount, due to the tilting of our planets axis during the year.

If I stood at 23.4 degrees North at the Summer Solstice, I would see the Sun directly overhead at noon. But any further north, like the roughly 30 degrees I currently inhabit, and I will always see it trending toward the southern sky. In winter it will not come up very high because of this, which is why in farther northern locations the days appear to get shorter. In extremes near the poles the sun never rises above that southern horizon in winter.

The lines on the globe where the sun appears to reach the limits of it’s travel north and south with the seasons are called the Tropic of Cancer (and the Summer Solstice is the Cancer/Leo Cusp) and the Tropic of Capricorn (Sagittarius/Capricorn Cusp in Winter). Summer and winter as seasons are arbitrary, of course, depending on whether you live north or south of the equator. But within the “tropics” the sun stays more or less direct year round, generating the high temperatures associated with those areas.

The movement of the earth betwixt and between the two Tropics is the origin of tropical cyclones, which distribute heat around the planet and make it livable. Current theories suggest that we are tampering with this system by our use of fossil fuels, altering the mean temperature of the planet and causing shifts in the thermal regulation patterns that are impacting climates worldwide.

From this simple need not to starve and freeze to death, magic arose among humans, and ritual grew to religion, and religion built temples and ziggurats and pyramids and civilizations. We have good evidence now from places like Stonehenge and Gobekli Tepi that these early ceremonial centers may actually have fostered the need for domestication of grain crops and food animals, simply to insure that the ritual feast was supplied to keep the sun from going out.

It’s ironic that the cooperation required to propagate a Solstice ritual might have led to our current culture of conspicuous consumption that threatens to plunge us all into perpetual night. Our leap from 7 billion humans to 8 billion took only a few years. That is untenable, regardless of our technological breakthroughs. We simply cannot sustain this rate of growth. The inevitable outcomes is war, famine, pestilence, and death. Those harbingers of the end times from the Biblical Revelation are the natural consequence of too many of us on a world with finite resources and a long regeneration cycle.

We can’t go back, but we absolutely have to go forward as better stewards of this planet. We must all realize that simply because a few nations have “cleaned up” their industrial pollution, they have done so by moving it elsewhere. The toxicity associated with American industrialization prior to the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts of fifty years ago is now spreading across Asia because their hunger for growth easily dominates “environmental concerns” just as it once did in the U.S.

We need a greater cooperation, and a greater awareness, than even “green” movements are giving us. We need first and foremost to find reliable renewable energy sources that do not rely on consumption of resources and creation of toxic waste products. Secondarily, however, we need to find a means of creating all the devices and equipment we demand to live our modern lifestyle, that also do not rely upon consumption of resources and creation of toxic waste products.

Kat Borealis in her podcast offered the phrase “If it cannot be farmed, it must be mined”. This is a real assessment of our modern culture. Whatever we do not grow is taken from the planet below us, whether by drilling, mining or other extraction. Computers, so central to 21st century life, are composed of petrochemicals, metals, and minerals. There is no part of the laptop I am typing on that has a living renewable source. It presently cannot be “farmed”, so how do we address the desire to remain technological and interconnected if we have to drag every such device from the womb of the earth for an ever increasing number of people? Recycling of such things in the present state is minimal in comparison to the demand for new ones, and the planned obsolescence of aging tech. And the parts that are going into the landfill can be among the worst sort of environmental toxins.

Our demand for “clean water” drives us to package it in an unimaginable amount of cheap plastic. Despite it being recyclable, in theory, our oceans are teaming with these disposable nightmares. The action of sun and water on these things eventually erode them into microplastics, which are now considered a major threat to all life on the planet as they are being consumed by the edible fish that sustain a number of Earth’s populations.

My point is that we are, in a real sense, experiencing that longest night in terms of our tenure on this planet. We have a choice now, to light the bonfire to call back the springtime and growth, and abundance for all life on this world, or we can let it all slip away into the permanent night.

I look forward to trying to light the fire in my corner of the world, and invite you back next week. Thank you for your attention. I hope it counts for something.

November 16, 2022November 16, 2022

A Brief Correspondence Course

It occurs to me that the pun in the title of this week’s article is completely lost on a couple of generations accustomed to Google, Wikipedia, and Youtube as the source of all knowledge. By way of explanation, back in Ye Olden Days, ere the Internet was a one-lane goat track, and the Elves still appeared right out there in broad daylight, one might pursue educational endeavors by means of the postal mail service. The back and forth epistles between student and teacher made up said correspondence,

That’s okay, I’m sure nobody gets all of Gandalf’s jokes either.

However, it is the backing and forthing that are important, particularly in the art of spell casting. This is the root of sympathetic magic, which is one of the oldest, if not the oldest, of magical practices.

There are three important tentpoles to remember in sympathetic magic.

The image of the thing is the thing.

The name of the thing is the thing.

The thing that is like the thing is the thing.

Number three is the Doctrine of Sympathies or Correspondences.

If a stone is deep red it connects to blood. If a flower looks like an eye it’s connected to the vision (both spiritual and mundane). If the leaves are dark we consider it saturnine. Pick up any spell book from the Greek Magical Papyri to the latest Witchcraft for Real Idiots on the ‘Zon and you’ll likely find at least one table of correspondences. There are even magic texts that are nothing but correspondences.

There are astronomical correspondences that match the planets to metals, stones, plants, parts of the body, colors of the spectrum, and hours of the day. Astrology is perhaps an early archetype of the use of correspondences. The nature of the animal applied to the constellation is used to express how those born with the sun in that sign are inclined. The facets of a person’s life are divided into houses, which “naturally” align with the nature of these signs, Then the nature of the planets may be interpreted as to how they react with the sign and the house, and in aspect with other planets.

Much work has been done with astrological correspondences to the Tarot, so that reading the cards can incorporate the heavenly influences as well as the imagery on the cards themselves. Of course the Tarot are also intimately connected with the letters of the Hebrew alphabet, and with numbers, and the four elements, and the core tools of the witch’s practice- wand/staff/broom/torch; cup/cauldron/well; sword/knife/pin/needle; and stone/coin/hearth/tomb. It is probably because Tarot has become so ubiquitous, due to it’s simple operation and portability, that all these additional connections are grafted on. They are not, perhaps, inherent to the Tarot itself.

Tarot and Astrology are interlinked in most modern magical systems. There are traditional associations of the cards with specific planets, signs, and houses that allow the interpretation of the cards as astrological and vice versa. In the use of cards as symbols in spellcraft, these traditional correspondences may be called upon.

For example, Gemini is most usually connected with The Lovers, the seventh card in the RWS deck. This sees the two figures, as Gemini.

There are however, four other serviceable cards in the deck. The Deuce of Cups is seen as a “Lover type” card, and we have the inclusion of the serpent staff of Hermes/Mercury, ruler of Gemini.

The Deuce of Swords might be more beneficial to break up a romance. or perhaps break a contract or get out of a legal problem. These are the purview of Gemini /Mercury, and this Sword card always reminds me of Blind Justice (especially since in RWS, the Justice card is not blind).

Gemini also covers short travel, and the Deuce of Wands and of Pentacles have travel motifs. Although the long journey typically associated with sea-borne imagery is usually Sagittarius, Gemini/Mercury is involved with commercial ventures. Balancing your checkbook whilst your freight is on stormy seas applies.

While the idea of correspondence is nothing new, there are new correspondences. Much of the attachment to Tarot is perhaps a century and a half old or less. There’s good evidence that they were used for “fortune telling” back in the 1400s but the layers of esoteric synthesis started in France with Eliphas Levi. The same can be said for other correspondences you might find in all those spellbooks.

In pre-historic times, the use of herbal medication was a necessity. If something looked like a particular part of the body, then it could be used to treat ailments of that part. However, as Freud pointed out, sometimes a cigar was just a cigar. If the medicine worked, it was used again and again. If it didn’t it was likely forgotten, ignored, or left out of the oral tradition. This would not preclude it from being “rediscovered” by successive generations who might add it back to the pharmacopeia for a while. This methodology was followed up until relatively modern times.

The same practice was used for the medicinal/magical use of stones, jewels, crystals, and the like. The ancient Romans dissolved pearls in vinegar and chugged it down to give them a pearlescent complexion. Whether it worked or not is questionable. Pearls being largely calcium carbonate with trace compounds, it was probably equivalent to quaffing chalk, and may have made their bones and teeth stronger. But being wealthy enough to drink a pearl milkshake on a regular basis may have been more of an attraction than milky smooth skin. The apothecaries of the ancient and Medieval times were no less mercenary than their modern counterparts.

Mandrake has long been a witch herb. These images from a Medieval Herbal show lore that has been unchanged for ages.

The mandrake was supposed to cry out when pulled from the earth, and it’s scream would either cause madness or death. So the enterprising apothecary simply tied a dog to the plant, and then called the dog from out of earshot. It’s not clear whether the dog went mad or died, but in the Middle Ages dogs were not accorded the value they are now.

Mandrake roots came in male and female versions, and were selected for a specific purpose accordingly. Most texts considered the undivided root as male, and a root with a fork as female. The drawing here is probably wrong, as it appears to depict two different plant species. It was copied to several herbals of the time.

And certainly this contributed to adding to the lists of exotic, rare, and hard to come by ingredients that fleshed out correspondence tables throughout history. Chinese herbals call for bits of dragons, unicorns, and other mythical creatures. Sadly these were – and still are – often substituted by parts from rare and endangered terrestrial animals like the rhinoceros, whale, and condor.

In fact, the idea of correspondences makes substitution an “ethical” option for the harried apothecary. If this rock looks like that rock, or this bone looks like that bone, then they are, for most intents and purposes – the same. This obviously can – and did – have tragic consequences, as many herbs and plants are not only not interchangeable, but can be outright deadly.

Because medical/recreational use of certain compounds is hardly a new thing, it’s important to recognize that the use of something in witchcraft might be the same as it was in folk medicine. In so many societies magic and medicine were interchangeable, and this has only changed in the last 150 years or so. At the height of the Enlightenment, when the scientific method was about to burst onto the scene, people were still being bled and purged to remove “ill humours” that were the cause of their diseases. Opium, cannabis, and coca were used as anesthetics and soporifics into the early 20th century, and their chemically synthesized children are still with us today.

So called “flying ointments” often partake of a number of herbs which create euphoria or somatic states, and many of the ingredients are those old Saturnine herbs, the nightshades. Containing potent alkaloids, plants like Atropa Belladonna, Hyoscyamus Niger, Datura Stramonium, and of course, Mandragora Officanarum have been the companions of witches since time immemorial. These are highly dangerous toxic plants that have a real potential to kill. Yet they are closely related to other nightshade plants like the potato, tomato, bell and chili peppers, which we consume as part of an ordinary diet.

Tobacco is also part of this family, and has long had sacred use among Indigenous Peoples of the Western Hemisphere. It was readily adapted by witchcraft and voodoo in the aftermath of the discovery of the New World by European colonials. Like many magical herbs, it’s sacred use in moderate amounts might be deemed safe, but in mundane and constant consumption leads to a pernicious addiction and a plethora of health problems (I am a former smoker – I know of which I speak).

candle-color — Color is a common feature of correspondence, and one usually easy to work out. Red is associated with the blood, the heart, and love. Purple, the color of royalty, often connects with Jupiter, King of the Gods. Yellow represents the Sun and is used in solar magic. Black is color of death, the deep night, and in post Christian Europe, evil spirits that dwell there.

Color magic often employs candles, and much has been made of having the proper color of candle for the spell. Given that coloring candles is a fairly modern technique, and that witches historically would not only have made do with the tallow and beeswax they had, and would not have usually advertised a spell by showy ingredients, you are probably safe with plain old white candles. Personally, I have a number of faux candles in various colors that I use interchangeably with actual ones. The LED candles are safe for my cats, vegan friendly, and reusable.

So were the ancient sorcerors just bombed out of their gourd all the time? It’s possible. There is some good evidence to that theory. Also, if your job is to have visions for the tribe, and eating the little white berries gives you visions, you’re likely to be eating a lot of the little white berries. If your job is to hunt the mastadon, it’s probably not the greatest idea. (Seriously, though. Don’t eat the little white berries. They’re very bad for you.)

The sacred nature of altered states of consciousness is fairly accepted in some cultures, as are things like mental illness, and even what we used to call mental retardation. People who were “different” in the way they spoke and acted were assumed to be in touch with the spirit world, and cared for and respected. Other cultures, of course, see such things as evil. Joan of Arc was probably schizophrenic or suffering from a brain lesion. She was sent by God to the French, and burned by the English as a witch.

Correspondences change similarly from culture to culture and place to place. If you are perusing that Chinese herbal you’ll find a lot of dragon bones (possibly ground fossils, or crocodile or snake bones), ginseng, and mushrooms. A European grimoire might place greater emphasis on precious stones or metals, and the Arabs would favor much incense and spices that were native or common in their lands. These were all compiled as part of an industrial mechanism that fed both the magic and medical practices of the culture. While there is probably some folklore to a lot of it, there was clearly money to be made by padding the lists.

I personally don’t make much of correspondences. I’ll consider astrological metals if I am working on an amulet, but given the price of gold and silver these days, I’m not likely to be petitioning the Sun and the Moon. Since petitioning the Sun and the Moon might be beneficial, though, maybe I ought to consider a way to get around that pesky high-dollar metal thing.

magic-stones — We all love the shiny rocks, don’t we? Crystal and stone correspondences are some of the most common we hear about. They are regarded as “birthstones” so can be astrologically attached. They have associations with the Chakras (usually based on color), planets, and various “vibrations” that may be traditional folklore or modern myth.
The pieces in the image above are (Clockwise from top) amethyst- quartz contaminated with iron, rutilated quartz with bits of a greenish tourmaline crystal, fluorite, amethyst again, and iron pyrite, or Fool’s gold.

This is a crystalline formation of iron and sulfur, bonded at the molecular level. It doesn’t have the malleability and ductility of true gold, so it probably didn’t substitute for it in all those solar amulets. On the other hand, being made of iron and sulfur, it can serve as well for Mars and Ares, or Vulcan, lord of the forge, or even Infernal association.

How about aluminum instead of silver? It’s a shiny white metal. It’s relatively cheap (compared to silver) easier to get, and – hey – it was actually used to go to the moon. There’s aluminum that we left behind on the moon right now, in fact. Would the Angel of the Moon accept aluminum instead of silver in my mystic moon amulet? Well, probably not if one goes with the strictest rules of the grimoire. But I am fairly sure that gold and silver were just as hard to come by in the days before alchemy, so I’m not at all sure that the Angel of the Moon didn’t accept the equivalent of a wooden nickel.

Alchemy, of course, changed everything because you could make all the gold you wanted. I hear you snickering in the back there. There actually is a chemical trick, doable with the technology of the time, which has the appearance of turning a piece of metal into gold. It’s a kind of simple electroplating, and for a short period of time (perhaps time to pass it off to an irate landlord) it would pass most Medieval tests for being gold.

So again, how many of the spells in the old grimoires actually used gold and silver and rubies and emeralds is open to question. I think potentially a lot of them employed early synthetics made by the alchemists. And if it was good enough for the Angel of the Moon in 1278, it’s good enough now. Scribing the spell with a shiny metallic marker might horrify some working in “high magic” and I can’t guarantee your results, but it has worked for me on occasion.

Substitutions can be made. Instead of silver you might use a silver coin, like a nickel or a quarter (if you’re in the US). These were originally struck from silver, but now operate as symbolically so. There’s no reason the correspondence between a modern silver colored coin and an antique silver coin can’t extend to the correspondence between that silver coin and the Angel of the Moon.

The working witches of yore didn’t have access to all the shiny stuff you can get shipped from the ‘Zon. They were frequently on the down low to begin with, so having a bunch of shiny stuff around the hut probably alarmed the local populace who sent out the torch and pitchfork memo. To the extent that an herb or a stone or a piece of red thread worked, they kept it, maybe in secret. But I don’t believe any of them looked up a table of correspondences and said “Well, we can’t fly to the Sabbat, tonight, we’re out of eye of newt.”

Because any fool knows you need wool of bat for a flying potion. Duh.

I hope you found this diversion diverting. I will be back again next week with more windmills to tilt at.

September 21, 2022September 20, 2022

The Equinox

Twice in a solar year, due to a quirk of astral mechanics, the rotational axis of the Earth aligns straight up and down with regard to our path around the sun. These days are called by the old Latin term equinox, because the hours of the night and the day are roughly equal. From thence the spinning top we live on continues to wobble over until one of the solstices, at which point it reverses.

This is handy, as if our poles keeled over further it would result in one half of the planet being constantly exposed to the sun and the other half enduring a perpetual frozen night. If such a cataclysm was gradual enough, species might evolve that could live in the “twilight zone” around the equator, where the oblique rays of sunlight could be similar to northern Alaska in summertime.

Our ancestors seemed keenly aware of this horrible potential. As the days shortened in the northern hemisphere (as they soon will be doing), they conceived great fire festivals, to push back the cold and the dark, and remind the sun through their earthly bonfires, that we were still down here, and still interested.

When enough generations had passed, it became fairly well accepted that the sun was going to come back in the springtime. By modern reckoning, Spring starts on the date of the Vernal Equinox, when the sun transits from Pisces into Aries. This perhaps is an accurate date if you live at the latitude of central Europe, as much human population did in the Neolithic. This was important for settled agrarian societies, that had become dependent on domesticated crops. “Spring” was when it was safe to plant, because the likelihood of damaging winter frosts was over.

But further south in Egypt, the beginning of the agricultural year was the annual flooding of the Nile, which happens about mid-August. The Nile flood is the result of torrential rains down in Africa. The rainy season was presaged to the Egyptian by the rising of the star Sirius in the southeastern sky. This visibility of the Canopus constellation is also occasioned by our wobbly world and it’s eccentricity.

During the period the Nile was in flood, the general populace that were usually engaged in farming were put to work as unskilled labor in various public building projects such as the erection of pyramids, obelisks, and temples, the majority of which were focused on keeping the sun spinning round the Earth in it’s usual happy way. This was an expression of “Ma’at” or “Truth” which has a very different meaning in ancient Egypt than in our present day.

Truth to the Egyptian was cosmic Law. It was the nature of things the way they were ordained, written down in the secret language of hieroglyphs by ibis-headed Tehuti for all eternity. Ma’at is symbolized by a single feather, both in texts and iconography, unless She appears as human goddess with the feather on her head. ¹ Ma’at is perhaps most famously known to Western eyes as the feather on the balance in the Weighing of the Heart ritual from the Egyptian Book of the Dead. This image is the source of our “scales of justice” and related imagery.

To the Egyptian way of thinking, the “Truth” that rested in the heart of the deceased was more about these cosmic rules than whether or not they had prevaricated. There was a long list called “The Negative Confessions” that the dead person was supposed to recite prior to, or during, the weighing of the heart. These were a recitation of wrong things that the deceased hadn’t done.

Again, for the purposes of the ritual, it didn’t matter whether or not the mummy had actually done them, it was important to say that it hadn’t. There’s also a handy little rubric, usually inscribed on a basalt scarab placed over the heart during the wrapping process, that admonishes the heart not to betray them, to keep silent if they had broken the rules. Obviously our modern ideas of Justice and Law differ.

ChichenItzaEquinox — The building called El Castillo at Chichen Itza is an example of astronomically tuned architecture. A temple to the Mayan god Kukulkan, the predecessor of the Aztec Quetzelcoatl or Plumed Serpent, this structure does a magic trick on the Equinox. The corners of the building cast the shadow of an undulating snake along the side of the steps, which moves slowly as the sun travels across the sky. To the ancient people this kind of display was proof of the presence of their deity, and affirmation that he had ordained another year for the world.

For the ancients, though, the doctrine of sympathy meant that the image of a thing was connected to the thing itself. So if you said you weren’t guilty, then you magically became not guilty (I’m certain there are number of persons incarcerated who wish that had worked). It was important to keep the universe in balance. Otherwise the world might flop over and the sandstorms of Set/Sutekh would overwhelm all civilization. Better to build another pyramid or temple to make sure the sun god stays happy.

Or maybe there’s more to it. We first have records of the famed obelisks being used for astronomical purpose by Aristarchus of Samos at the library of Alexandria. It’s entirely possible, given phenomena we can still observe, that the Egyptian temple and funerary architecture were astronomically aligned. This should not surprise us. In the late Stone Age and early Bronze age architecture was one of the few methods of accurately telling time.

Solar, lunar, and astronomical alignments are not a feature of Egyptian culture alone. Stonehenge and similar megalithic sites are fairly well understood as calendars. Mesoamerican pyramids and structures throughout Asia and Africa have solstice “clocks” built into them. Often these take the form of a slot or window, that shines light into a particular niche or area on the day of the winter solstice.

The equinoxes are a consequence of the solstices. If the planet didn’t reach over to the extremes at the beginning of Cancer and Capricorn, it wouldn’t have these crossing points. The equinoxes form a 90 degree angle to the solstices, so the year gets divided into four quarters, which are subdivided into three astrological signs.

As noted, the Vernal Equinox is the beginning of Aries. The Autumnal one, the beginning of Libra. As our trip around the sun is a tad over the 360 days that the Chaldees worked out (and applied to the Zodiac as degrees), these celestial events wander between the 21st to 23rd of March, June, September, and December. If you have an ephemeris handy (you don’t?) you can extrapolate the transit of the Sun into the relevant sign and plot it on your own calendar. There are at least a couple of occult almanacs that will give you the information, and the mundane Farmers’ Almanac will reference them as the beginnings of the seasons.

SmartSelect_20220919_112052_Armillary Sphere — I’ve always been fascinated with astronomical, mathematical, and navigational instruments. A working armillary sphere is rather expensive (don’t even get me started on the cost of the astrolabes). You’ve probably seen “prop” versions at a number of department stores and garden centers, but these are usually fixed pieces of metal that at best might be spun around to point north. These screen shots from the virtual one on my phone show the Autumnal Equinox and the Winter Solstice. The slanted band on these showing the month and sign is the apparent path of the sun from the earth. It’s really the earth and us that are slanted, but in the geocentric cosmology of the armillary, we are the fixed point. If you’ve dabbled at all with astrology you know that the Equinox is at the beginning of Libra and that the Solstice signals the start of Capricorn. Alas the more scientifically inclined authors of this app are using a sidereal zodiac, which is based on the positions of the constellations as the actually are, whereas Western Astrology uses a tropical zodiac that places a perfect 90 degree division between the Equinoxes and Solstices. Projected onto the earth the highest and lowest points of the suns travel give us the Tropics of Capricorn and Cancer, Depending on time of year, the sun is more or less directly overhead at midday between these points. Further north or south, and the sun never which actually comes directly overhead.

The quarter points also define the Cardinal signs, one for each element. Aries is fire, of course, and Cancer is water. Libra is the cardinal air sign, and Capricorn, represents earth. The next sign around in each quarter is a Fixed sign, Taurus/Earth; Leo/Fire; Scorpio/Water; and Aquarius/Air. The last sign in each quarter is the Mutable sign, signifying the nature of that sign’s character transitioning back toward the Cardinal. These are Gemini/Air; Virgo/Earth; Sagittarius/Fire; and finally Pisces/Water.

The Cardinal is an emergent energy. It has great force, and may be viewed as archtypical of the elemental nature of the sign. Planets on cardinal points influence powerfully, but sometimes in a raw or brutal way. Subtlety and sophistication may be lacking. This is good to keep in mind when picking times for planetary workings, or elemental based magic.

Magical timing and the use of astrology in ritual, derives from centuries of tradition. Much of it may have passed into Medieval texts with no real understanding of the ancient rationale. There are a number of examples where these correspondences were copied unquestioned into modern ritual manuals, and passed into present day with even less connection to the rudimentary ideas of relating magic to the greater state of the universe.

The approach of “scribe an amulet of bronze with this sigil in the hour of Venus” is, to my mind, far less efficacious, and less personal, than working out how the skies will aid your goal. There are apps aplenty to cast horoscopes and tally the planetary hours (I have several ). If you’re old school, or just want to understand the bones of the thing, you can use a paper ephmeris² to work out when the planets, signs and elements bode well for your venture. If I’m planning something especially complex, I will spot check the software results with paper calculus, and possibly even personal observation (saving pennies for that working astrolabe).

Even if you don’t want to go that extreme, understanding the why of the ritual holidays, whether we call them sabbats, or equinoxes, or the first day of fall, is, to my way of thinking, integral to the idea of a nature-adjacent lifestyle. Nature, after all, includes the sun, moon, stars, galaxies, and all the great big unknowns out there in the sky. ³

sundial — A sun dial seems to be a fairly straightforward gadget. In fact, you can make one by poking a stick in the ground and seeing where the shadow falls. But there’s more to it that that. This little brass number – which I keep in a room with drawn curtains – has a means to tilt the surface based on latitude. I have mine set to around 30 degrees north, roughly the same as the Great Pyramid of Giza. There’s also a compass in the base to determine which way is north (since you are trying to maximize East-West exposure). There are also leveling feet if one is on uneven ground, though there’s not a level bubble, so I’m not sure what use they are. The sun dial has evolved significantly from the stick in the ground. There are some that have a figure-eight still grid laid out, to account for the variances in solar position due to the wobble of the earth’s axis.

I hope this has given you some things to think about when you see these days cycling around on that Witches’ Calendar plaque above the altar. I find the movements of the heavens fascinating, as they do affect how we live down here on earth. These wiggles of the planet give us the seasons, spawn hurricanes, monsoons, and typhoons, and control the hibernation of animals and plants. We are here because of it.

I’ll be back next week with other reflections. Thank you for reading.

September 7, 2022September 7, 2022

The Taste of Ashes

Fear is the mind-killer.
—Dune – Frank Herbert

I grew up in a temperate climate, and by this first week of September the signs of arriving autumn were well and truly underway. The family garden had largely been harvested. Dry brown cornstalks rattled in the morning breezes, waiting my scythe to fell them. The trees were already starting to color, and soon would burst forth in a final glory before dropping their leaves in advance of the coming winter.

Despite having lived longer in semi-arid and semi-tropical parts of Texas, where no such natural alchemies occur, my brain has not rewired the calendar of childhood. When August ends, my mind turns to thoughts of fall, dimming days, longer nights, and the inevitable grip of the Winter Dark.

September is also a frequent metaphor for those of us looking at our later years. Careers are winding down; children are raised and gone. A few pleasant years of retirement ahead, and then that inevitable long slumber, our own encounter with final darkness of the human experience. Hence this time of year my thoughts turn toward contemplation on endings, and the melancholia that attends such.

You’ve been warned.

When one is younger, the fact that we are all marching toward that same destiny is hardly noticed by most. As teenagers we are invincible and immortal, and even into our 40s and early 50s we may still occupy our minds with the daily grind. What is being ground away is pushed deep down from our consciousness. When we start seeing 60 on the horizon, though, the ticking of that clock becomes much louder. Despite encouragement from Blue Oyster Cult, we all still fear the Reaper.

This fear is hard wired in us. It’s deep down in our anatomy in a place fittingly at the bottom of our brain called the amygdala. These nerve clusters are considered to be essential for our experience of the emotions of fear, anxiety, and aggression. It is the center of the “fight or flight” response. Fear and hatred are interlinked at a cellular level.

The amygdala and it’s connected processes are sometimes referred to as our “reptile brain”. These are the parts of the brain that respond instinctually, to carry out the primary purpose of the organism, survival. There are few commands in this primitive part of our brain.

Eat. Mate. Repeat if necessary.

Presumably this is the wiring of all those nifty Cretaceous critters that you see when you go to Jurassic Park (because Cretaceous Park wouldn’t fit on the sign, I guess). They’re Eaters who want to make baby Eaters. They do that and keep doing it until a bigger Eater swoops in and eats them.

This is the whole reason for fight or flight. The Eater had to determine (and very quickly) whether or not the thing confronting it was predator, prey, or mate, and consequently whether to try it’s luck or run away like a bunch of English knights from a vicious rabbit.

Since there were only three options, the wiring didn’t need to be too complex. A basic pattern of friendly, not friendly, and edible was put together, probably based on the pheromones in scent, and things went merrily onward until an asteroid hit the planet.

With most of the Eaters now extinct, evolution filled the gap with mammals. Mammals are also Eaters, but they are a bit more sophisticated about it. What existed of the amygdala in the reptile brain, started wiring into other areas of the mammalian brain. It formed more complicated relationships that included support for nurturing, community, and hierarchy. These structures were necessary for insuring the safety and survival of the young, which were born largely unfinished. The weeks, months, and sometimes years needed for a mammal offspring to reach adulthood and begin it’s role eating and mating compelled this adaptation.

Fast forward a few million years and one uppity group of mammals started doing things like using tools, and maybe even fire, and we got the primate brain. I don’t make a distinction between primate brain and human brain. There’s ample evidence that while we have some significant increase in size and capacity, we aren’t always using it any better, and sometimes not nearly as well.

But primate brain seems to have one major distinction over the basic mammal brain, and that is an awareness of death. That is, when comparing something like a pride of lions, and a colony of chimpanzees, a death in the group is responded to in very different ways.

Chimps are known to mourn, or at least appear to mourn the loss of one of their members. They experience grief in a way at least similar to our own.

Lions, while the Discovery Channel might narrate otherwise, seem less attached. A couple of nose nudges, and then the pride moves on. Sorry, Disney.

Velociraptors, of course, would just eat the dead one. There’s no code for friendly but dead. The default is edible.

The cults of death are as diverse as they are common. Ritual and taboo have evolved around the basic necessity of insuring that the decomposition of our mortal remains occurs in a safe manner for our food supply and watershed. In elder days it was also handy to keep predators from sniffing around the cave or village. From this the physical and metaphysical lands of the dead were born, and remain with us tens of millennia later.

We start to see “human” behavior regarding death in the species called Neanderthals. These homonids are the first indications we have of intentional burial. The finds also often include personal artifacts.

While it is tempting to believe that early humans included these as tribute or memento, it is more likely they were simply taboo. The resources required to fashion a stone axe or arrowhead tend to preclude it being buried as an offering to the ancestor, at least at this point in our pre-history.

But if it were the possession of someone who suddenly stopped walking, talking, and breathing, that might not be something you wanted to keep around. It could potentially be the thing that stopped them walking, talking, and breathing, so best to leave it behind in the grave.

Burial originally might simply have been a means of keeping predators from being attracted to the rest of the group. Of equal value would be insuring that the process of decomposition occurred out of sight, and any possible contamination (physical or spiritual) was contained. We dispose of our dead today for similar reasons, so it’s not hard to imagine that being how it started.

The awareness of death, and the absolute inevitability of death, sends all kinds of messages down to that reptile brain. After all, it’s purpose is to survive.

Eat or be eaten.

So far, however, nobody has been able to get away from that biggest Eater of all.

The Grim Reaper.

Our rational primate brain would rather just avoid the subject, and engage in things like small talk, online gaming, and whatever the hell reality TV is about.

The mammal brain admits that apparently death happens, but there’s a really nice cool water hole over there.

Meanwhile the reptile brain sits down there at the bottom of our consciousness screaming day and night, “YOU FOOLS! WHY DON’T YOU DO SOMETHING? FIGHT! RUN! SOMETHING?”

It’s that downstairs neighbor tapping on the ceiling with a broom while the mammals and primates are having a loud party upstairs.

It’s the Serpent in Eden, and it’s terrifyingly real.

We have no control over the situation. We may live to well over 100 years in peaceful health, and harmony. We could step in front of a bus in the morning.

From the moment that we first experience the loss of another’s life, we are unable to ever go back. We know now.

We have left the Garden.

The terror and pain are real and immediate. Grief and mourning are the process whereby we convince ourselves that despite what just happened, the rest of the world is spinning onward with general indifference.

As cold as that may sound, it’s what we need to be able to get up and go out in the morning, without spending every moment wondering and waiting who will be next to go. And whether it might be us.

And you run, and you run to catch up with the sun but it’s sinking
Racing around to come up behind you again
The sun is the same in a relative way but you’re older
Shorter of breath and one day closer to death
—Time – Roger Waters / David Gilmour / Nick Mason / Richard Wright

Some people seem more attuned to dealing with the idea of mortality than others. I place myself in that group. I surround myself with emblems of death. Skulls and skeletons decorate my home and my wardrobe. I visit cemeteries and battlefields and charnel grounds. I listen to the unquiet dead whispering on that autumn breeze. ” Come away. Come away…”

Yes, of course, I’m a fan of Poe. Even named one of my children Raven.

But there are lot of writers and artists and musicians and entertainers that seem to enjoy this spiraling dance with death and things macabre. Horror and fear are big industries in the part of the world where it can be purchased as entertainment. I think perhaps that the numbers of people who are comfortable, if not chummy, with human mortality is less in the parts of the world where sudden horrible death is a daily occurrence, I can’t believe that there are not some who still walk that path with Thanatos.

anubis — Anubis and I are old friends. In some ways meeting him, in a photo in an old library book, started me on the path I now walk. We were finally able to connect “in person” when I visited the Cairo Museum in the mid 1990s. I have seen many cult images of the deity, and have a few myself, but for some reason I feel this one from the celebrated treasury of Tutankhamen is the one he lives in.

I don’t have any idea why I am that way. We lived next to a large cemetery that started out as just family, but had expanded through marriages and kinships to a broader community. My grandmother oversaw the maintenance. In my teens and twenties, I was hired as caretaker, but I often accompanied her and my great-grandmother (when she was still able) down to the graveyard. My grandmother knew who all the dead people were. Even if she had not met them, she knew them because they had been the mothers and fathers and brothers and sisters of people she did know. It was a small community, and everyone knew everyone. Even the dead.

I did not get the chance to visit it when I was last there, and it would be about 20 years since, but I wager I could still tell you who was who, and how they were “kin” to one another, and maybe where they lived and what they did for a living. The oldest resident I know was corporal in George Washington’s army. My grandmother and great-grandmother have since moved in. They may be the last generation of my family to take up residence. My own parents have decided on cremation, and I doubt my brother’s line will be much different. As noted, I live in a far away world now.

I suppose they will miss me. The dead, I mean.

Cemeteries can be beautiful peaceful places for reflection and contemplation, as well as warehouse for human remains. But in a world bursting at the seams with living humans demanding resources, the real estate can be a little wasteful. And filling the ground with metal and plastic boxes holding chemically preserved bodies is not really green.

nebkhet — Like the jackal associated with Anubis, the vulture of Nebkhet is something we associate with death and dying in our modern world. The Ancient Egyptians saw these creatures as protective. Since they were so closely associated with death, surely evil spirits and the like would be frightened away by them.
Some cultures practice “sky burial” where the vulture and other carrion birds do what they do to the remains of the deceased, thus taking their mortal coil on to the heavens. The process is both natural and sanitary, if horrifying to modern Western eyes.

The most interesting final disposition I have heard about is a company that will mix your cremated remains with potting soil, and then plant you with a seedling. You get to go back to the earth and come back as the tree of your choice.

I’m not sure what the regulatory agencies (and you would not believe the number of government agencies at multiple levels that have their fingers in the death pie) have determined regarding the potential “public health issues” of this kind of thing. To my mind if your ashes can be dumped in a field, scattered in the ocean or thrown to the wind off a tall building, you can damned well be a shade tree in suburbia.

Now, if I go that route, I know I am going to be that gnarled ancient oak way back in the forest that the animals avoid and nothing grows near. That would be so cool.

The hard thing about being comfortable with death, dying, and the post-death experience is deciding which way to go. I mean, if I’m honest, I want a pyramid. However, looking into the costs of even a small one is discouraging. Maybe I can donate myself to science and pick one of those teams that is always trying to recreate how the Egyptians did it for the History Channel.

Being intimately connected with the family plots, I had sort of just assumed that someday I would have a little piece of the field there. But time passes and things change, and you start thinking odd thoughts as you get older.

Part of the cemetery thing means having perpetual ownership. In other words, when the subdivision moves in, they best not be moving my final resting place. And woe be unto you if you do that Poltergeist thing and just move the headstones, cause I am definitely going to haunt those people. Honestly I will haunt anyone there anyway. I’m just that petty.

But, my kids have no real connection to that place. And if I were in the ground there, they’d either feel obliged to visit a place they hate, or they’d never show up at all. Just like I don’t.

I have deep love and appreciation for my grandmother, but I never visit her grave. I just don’t feel that it matters. The paths I have walked in my life cause me to wonder whether it matters where or what is done with your mortal coil once you have shuffled it off. Spoiler alert – it doesn’t.

If we believe that we are spirits or souls or energy forms that are driving around in our meat puppets for three score and ten, then what becomes of those meat puppets is entirely irrelevant.

Excluding true atheists, everyone has some belief in life after death, and if you don’t, then you aren’t really going to be upset much.

How that life after death turns out is not known. It’s fair to say that someone will have gotten it wrong. Maybe everyone.

That’s an exciting thought.

owlsong — **Owlsong**

Dawn rises.
Cool mists cling to the forest floor
A lone voice proclaims
It is not quite through with the night.

Death and witches seem to go hand in hand. The stories are universally grim (and Grimm). Witches were purveyors of poisons, casters of curses, and throwers of bones. The spirits that attended them could just as well be your departed Aunt Fannie as Buen or Baelzebuth. Witches routinely caused the death of livestock, villagers, and crops. They were a living harbinger of death in whatever community they inhabited.

I often wonder if Baba Yaga was just an old woman who had the same fascination with mortality that I have had all my life. The accumulation of bones and apparent indifference to death may have led to tales of cannibalism that feature in her story as well as others. I’ve never eaten anyone, but I’d be perfectly okay with the loud neighbor kids thinking I might. Keeps them off the lawn.

Other people, of course, can’t help but hear that screaming amygdala and yelling back “shutupshutupshutup!” Death is never discussed, never thought of, and avoided whenever possible. Grieving for them is harder and longer, because the event is shattering. The screaming reptile brain is shouting “I told you so!” and that is never productive.

If you are a person upset by this article, I expect that you may have already hit the back button and ducked out. I really would have liked for you to have read it. On the other hand, if you are part of that group of crazy kids who hang out with Anubis, can’t wait for Halloween, and really understand that the profound truth is that the mystery beyond death is where we’re all headed, then thank you for reading this. I know it’s not as directly witchy as the usual, but when you reach my age, you may find that it’s important to face this kind of thing, and realize that the clock will run out.

Addendum — I try to write my blog several weeks ahead. This was originally penned in late June or early July, because in truth, I think “Autumn thoughts” all year round.

A week ago, my father died.

I am fairly sure at the time that I wrote this, I was thinking about this inevitability, even though at that point he had not been diagnosed as terminal. The timing is neither ironic nor really unexpected. Part of being strange and unusual is living a bit out of sync with linear time, and accepting the insights that this brings.

I am confident that he is no longer in pain. I feel that he is both at peace, and has achieved some manner of perspective that will aid his spiritual path in the future.

My view of the cosmos assumes that future, for him and for all of us, so I don’t mourn in the fashion of my ancestors or my immediate family.

I add this epilogue as an observation and affirmation of the rest of the article. To borrow from Gandalf, Death is just another journey, one that we all must take.

July 6, 2022July 6, 2022

It’s Full of Stars

This morning, when you got up, everything you saw, touched, heard, tasted, and smelled was made of tiny atoms that were formed in the dark fiery heart of a giant dying star untold billions of years ago.

Those atoms are clouds of circling particles, that are made up of clouds of circling particles, that are probably also made of clouds of circling particles over and over and over.

It’s turtles all the way down.

The particles aren’t really particles. They’re packets of energy, moving through space, in ways that cause invisible forces to shape the nature of space to create our ordinary visible world.

This is not magic. This is science. At least, this is among the leading current theories on the nature of the universe.

So if you have someone giving you a hard time about believing in invisible spirits that influence your life and alter your destiny, ask them to show you a box of gravity.

There is nothing new under the sun. Or in it. Although the sun itself is reckoned to be about 4.6 billion years old, it too, is made from the bones of dead worlds. We’re all in someone’s afterlife here.

And around that other sun, the mother sun, that gave birth to us all, there may have spun many worlds as well. And on the surfaces of those worlds may have been water, and oxygen, and amino acids and condominiums and car parks.

We’ll never meet them. We’ll never know how they felt or the songs they sang or if they cried when it rained. Because they’ve all gone down to dust and the dust has come back up as us.

Cosmic time can kick you for a loop.

On the left is one of countless galaxies visible to the instruments of modern technology. It represents billions of billions of billions of worlds, each possibly full of richly diverse life forms that are similar to, and vastly different, from what has grown on our little speck of damp rock circling an unspectacular star in a quiet backwater of our own galaxy. The lovely spiral arms bely a terrible secret. At the heart of most galaxies, we think, is a monsterous black hole, swallowing entire star systems into an impenetrable void. One theory holds that our entire universe will eventually end up in such a state, when the energy of the Big Bang is no longer able to withstand the inward pull of gravity. The opposite fate is just as terrifying; a future where every particle of every particle drifts so far apart that no energy remains at all, and the rest is darkness.

This is the much shown Hubble Deep Field image. This shows galaxies upon galaxies upon galaxies (many of which may already be extinct, since the light left them before the dinosaurs were born). Each galaxy may be like the one above, with untold numbers of life-creating planets. And this represents a part of the sky equal to the size of a tennis ball viewed at the other end of a football field. There are roughly 24 million times more galaxies than the 3000 or so here.

For example, the vast majority of humanity has lived and died in the last 30,000 years or so. Of them, we remember the names of princes and potentates, and a few laureates, visionaries, and healers.

And that’s it.

The further back we go, the fewer we can name. Past about 7000 years or so, it’s totally anonymous. They may have been called Gilgamesh or Noah or Hermes or Lucifer but that’s what we called them later. No one really knows their names, and their stories are doubtless confused and embellished.

We don’t know the name of that Sorceror on the wall of Troi Freres, or the artisan that lavished so much time and care on shaping the tiny Venus of Willendorf. The builders of Catal Huyuk and Gobekli Tepe are abstractions. We know only the little that remains. A few bones, some stone tools, and then oblivion.

Back along that path the family turns into the ancestors, and the ancestors into the legends, and the legends into the myths. And past the myths, we are going out beyond Saturn, beyond the old Titans, into the realm of the outer dark.

It’s a cold, dark, and largely empty universe that might as well be infinite because we can’t really work out how to get outside it.

Science can’t even agree on that. So far theories suggest three possible outcomes.

It’s either an expanding universe that will keep expanding until everything is so far away from everything that all those particles of particles of particles cease to glow with any residual spark and the entire thing becomes nothing.

Or it’s a collapsing universe that expands just so far before the gravity within it starts to overcome the initial energy of its creation and everything falls back down into itself, crushed into an infinitely dense and infinitely tiny dot. Again, essentially nothing.

And some argue that it’s an oscillating universe where cycles of expansion and contraction go on and on and on forever, where each previous universe is erased from existence by being crushed into a point so dense and so small that it erupts into the next one.

Does any of this sound a tad magical to you? Mythical at the very least? There’s a few similar stories in old Sanskrit. The kalachakra, or Time Wheel, oscillates universes that are born, grow old, and die, just as humans do, and as with humans, the universe is reborn into the next order of life.

And that one about the universe suddenly springing into existence in a flash of light. . . well, the scientists call that the Big Bang. You can find it Genesis if you read carefully.

The world was without form, and void, and darkness was on the face of the deep.

Let there be light.

This is about energy expanding into the void of space.

What the Kabbalah expresses as emanations of the divine into the material; the bolt of lightning comes down through the realms of the Tree of Life to illuminate the mundane worlds.

This action was a conscious withdrawing of the Divine Intelligence to create something that was Other than itself.

The light was divided from the darkness.

The Divine Intelligence created the universe in order to know itself.

And the morning and the evening were the first day.

Time started. And we’ve been trying to understand it ever since.

In this image by Stonehenge Dronescapes Photography shared on Facebook, we can see the sky as our ancient ancestors experienced it. Without the light pollution of modern industrialization, or even the fire that kept predators away at night, the universe we inhabit is very much present. It is not hard to imagine seeing Indra dancing above the horizon, or the plumed serpent Quetzlcoatl rising up into the night sky. Now we are only able to experience such awe in places like the deep desert, where technology doesn’t intrude.

An artificial starscape is projected on the ceiling of the Gobekli Tepe museum. This site in modern-day Turkey is possibly 7000 years older than the megaliths at Stonehenge, but seems to have some similar purpose as both temple and timepiece. Much recent archaeology suggests that multitudes gathered at this site over a period of 1500 years, to feast, trade, and get intoxicated. The remains of ancient beer is found here among the animal bones, suggesting that the fermentation of grain was a key part of the site’s activity. One theory has been put forth that this desire for mind-altering grog is what led to domestication of grains, and not the other way around. Fascinating if true, it makes our remote ancestors need to travel inwardly as well as outwardly of far greater significance that was once believed.

That’s why we watched the stars on cloudless nights when we huddled around the fire, and named those stars after things in our world. We noticed the ones that were wanderers and called them planets.

We used them to tell us when it was time to move south because the winter was coming. We used them to show us where south was. When we started to domesticate plants and animals we used them to tell us when to plant, when it was birthing season, and when we should harvest.

We built places like Stonehenge and the Sunwheel and the temples of Meso-America and pyramids of Egypt to connect with this fundamental understanding of space-time. Religion and ritual are built around propitious times and locations.

We do things when the stars are right.

We mark out our year by equinoxes and solstices and dot the in-between times with feast days derived from lunar phases and tallied days. We divide our time by months that were once moons, and split them up by days defined by the seven planets of the ancient Chaldees. We live in a modern digital scientific world and modern science basically proves that those ancient Chaldees had it on the ball.

So when your scientist buddy scoffs at you discussing energy work, you might remind them that all matter is energy, that the universe is teeming with light, and that energy can be manipulated to create various effects. They might choose to use a high voltage magnetic field rather than an incantation. The only difference here is that their “spell” is supported by modern convention and belief, just as a few hundred years ago, yours would have been.

In the 1600s, everyone believed that magic existed and did things, even if they didn’t really understand it. It was potentially dangerous, maybe evil, and could be used effectively only by those who knew how.

In the 1800s the same things could have been said about steam engines and electricity.

The 20th Century applied these ideas to the power of the atom.

All are ways of describing how the universe works, and harnessing that natural energy that is everywhere. We don’t know where it came from, or how it got here, but it’s here, and we are affected by it.

We are made of it. We can’t help but be affected by it.

Let’s consider that our scientific universe of space-time is spinning and whirling and oscillating along like mad. Yes, the planets circle the sun, but the sun is spinning around the galaxy, and the galaxy is whizzing across the universe, and the universe is doing whatever it is the universe is doing. So relative to where we are here on Mother Earth, it might look like we see the sun going up and down in about the same places, and those places wiggle ever so slightly between Midsummer and Midwinter, and the planets and the stars overhead seem to repeat their familiar patterns.

But this is all relative to our viewpoint. Which is what Einstein was telling us about the universe. What we see isn’t what is. It’s what was, a moment or so ago, when the light of whatever happened left the place it happened and headed toward us. So for the moon that’s only a few seconds. For Mars, it appears to be where it was a couple of minutes ago.

The sun itself is about 8 minutes back in time. If it went out right now, we wouldn’t know it for eight whole minutes. If we were on Pluto, we wouldn’t see that final sunset for over four and a half hours.

So we really are time travelers in this fixed formal digital modern magicless universe. We see the stars as they were years and decades and centuries and millennia and eons ago.

The universe we look at each night was gone before we were even born.

We, our children, grandchildren, the human species, and even the earth itself, may be gone before the light of some of those stars, as they are now, ever reaches this spot.

But it’s safe to say that whether it’s the universe of the past we see, or the universe of the present that we never will, each moment in time describes a unique and never repeated structure of the energy within the universe. Now is now. The instant before was different, and the instant after will be different, and it keeps on going and going.

Even on a summer night on a quiet suburban street, we are still drawn to look up and marvel at the heavens above us. In such a scenario, the best we can hope for is the changing face of the moon, a few of the brighter planets, and a handful of the most prominent constellations on a very clear night, and away from the glare of street lamps and house windows. We know instinctively that there is something out there that we are a part of, even if our technological conveniences have blinded us to seeing it.

This is one of the reasons I find some merit in the practice of astrology. Granted, the most usual natal charts are based on the relative local positions of the planets, asteroids, and some calculated points derived from these, as seen overhead (or below the horizon) at the time of your birth.

Plug that into the context that a constantly spinning, whirling, whizzing, evolving universe is never in the same place at the same time ever, and each human lifetime can be seen as a change in the fabric of the universe. When you are born, you alter the nature of all that is by your presence. Surely an event of such significance participates in something of that greater universe.

The light from the sun and moon reach us first, and then all the planets. So applying their energy, their influence, most directly, seems only logical.

The background stars, which form the signs of the Zodiac, and to some extent rule the houses, take a lot longer.

By virtue of that, they are only slightly changed from when Claudius Ptolemy charted their positions in Roman Alexandria, using data compiled by those witty Chaldees a few thousand years earlier.

The energy we receive now, may only have left some of those stars when the Chaldeans named them, or when Ptolemy charted them. That energy is consistent, and thus the attributes we ascribe to it is consistent. At least for as long as I will be drawing up horoscopes anyway.

As Above, So Below! I acquired this polished orb of ocean jasper because it immediately reminded me of the storms that churn across the surface clouds of our largest planetary neighbor. The stone sphere is some two inches or so. Jupiter is 1000 times larger than the entire Earth. Our planet would fit across it’s famous Great Red Spot. The most easily seen feature on Jupiter’s surface was possibly discovered by Galileo Galilee in the 1600s. It’s a hurricane that potentially has been going for 400 years or more. Despite it’s horrifying size, Jupiter is made of mostly “air”, a swirling miasma of hydrocarbons, floating above seas of liquid methane. It may be much bigger than the little stone sphere, but the sphere is more solid. For comparison, Great Jupiter would fit inside the sun as many times as our Earth fits inside Jupiter. There are millions of stars in the galaxy that are 1000 times bigger than the sun.

But if I were standing beneath the red rays of far Antares, and looking up through Scorpio’s claws toward our tiny pale sun, I would have a very different universe. I might have two moons in the sky at night, or seven. My longer year would be punctuated by their movements, forward and back (with multiple moons you get retrograde). The names I would give to the stars and the pictures I would draw between them would be what my remote ancestors had seen when they set by the fires in front of their caves, and began trying to work out how to manage the energy that was teeming through the universe.

Because that’s what living beings do.

The Divine Intelligence created the Universe to Know Itself.

We all participate in that. We are all bright sparks of that limitless eternal energy.

That’s why we’re here.

Thank you for reading to the end. I hope you found it enjoyable. These are the things I think of when in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes, the market is down, inflation is up, and Monday lies too closely ahead. It is, I think, helpful to remember that we are all part of something much brighter than the dust and bones around us.

Space images are courtesy National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) unless otherwise noted.

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