Category: Culture

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Waste Not

Waste Not

Another Earth Day has come and gone. This seems to have passed with little hooplah or recognition, but then I have made the choice to no longer look at the majority of the media, so it may be a skewed observation.

The witch accounts I tend to follow on the socials mostly mentioned it. But witches live with the Earth daily, or so we say. I actually was quite displeased with myself when considering that point.

I was taking the trash out, which in itself is a problem. It is a consequence of living in the burbs, I know, in that all our waste products have to go into some sort of managed system to keep down the potential of contagion when so many people “decide” to live so closely together.

But it got me thinking.

We’re an empty nest. Our children have grown to the point of moving out, so it is just myself, my wife, and currently five rather overindulged felines. Our neighborhood homeowner’s association dues cover trash pickup twice weekly. In actual fact, I take the trash out to the curb for pickup maybe 4.25 times per month. That is, once a week, but not always twice a week.

But I am still taking the trash out. Trash is still being generated at a rate that requires I remove it from my property at least weekly. I really need to consider doing better than that.

When I was a child back in the hills of Eastern Kentucky, we did not live in a suburb with HOA dues and regular trash pickup. I am not sure if that has changed since I left. I know a lot of “services” have been imposed by the local municipality that now technically has expanded to include the smallish plot on which I was raised.

But in those days, we did not seem to be creating as much garbage from a family of four with an extended family group of seven, three or four dogs, and a multitude of cats, and from time to time a hog or two.

In the first place, we lived a more frugal lifestyle. Not out of choice, but purely from necessity. Food waste was a rare thing. You ate leftovers until they were gone, and you took care to keep them from being spoiled before you could eat them. Anything that was marginal or did not reheat well, probably supplemented the diet of the aforesaid dogs, cats, and especially the hogs. Hogs are a natural disposal for organic waste products, and they appear to like it.

So this then leaves other kinds of waste products, which cannot be consumed or composted (which was another thing typically done, though we didn’t call it that).

Forty or so years ago, much of what currently comes in “recyclable” plastic was dispensed in glass bottles.

Tended Garden
Tending to our own is one step in making the Earth better all around. We can protest and complain all day long but without our own direct action, it’s not going to change.

Soft drinks and some alcoholic beverages were sold in glass bottles that required a “deposit”. Because glass was so durable, and so easy to sanitize and reuse, manufacturers actually wanted you to bring them back so they could refill them. Hence, if you didn’t bring back that 8 bottle carton of empty Coke bottles, you were charged and additional fee for the new ones. Typically this was a nickel a bottle when I was a child.

There was a secondary consideration here, in that if you brought back bottles you could get that five cents, so people frequently patrolled public areas looking for bottles that were littering roadsides and parks.

But cheap, “recyclable” polymer bottles replaced the glass market, because profitability. Sell big two and three liter bottles of soft drinks in a giant plastic jug. No more broken glass bottles that might cut people. But fast dispensing, quick consuming sugar loaded goodness in simply plastic jugs, which could be “recycled”.

The trouble with that, of course, is that now one was recycling. Recycling of plastics was hardly an option in a great number of American communities when the plastic overtook the glass which was being reclaimed, reused, recycled, and disposed of using an industry that went back hundreds of years.

But the corporations were making more money and generating better stockholder value and onward we went.

About the same time, the brown paper grocery bag that was the default from about the mid-twentieth century began to disappear in favor of the flimsy plastic “t-shirt” bags now prevalent in every grocery store that “reminds you to bring your reusable bags”. I think Aldi, Trader Joes, and a few places like Whole Foods or Sprouts are still offering the paper bags as an option.

The plain brown unadorned paper bag had a multitude of uses. It was never thrown away. It was used to carry things. It was used to wrap packages. It was used stop up drafts in the windows in winter. It was also used as a trash bag for those things which could not be consumed or composted or were recycled reused glass.

But plastic was quicker and cheaper and no one cared about how many sea turtles it was going to strangle because, hey, it could be recycled. Somewhere. In some big city. Maybe.

I don’t know about the big cities in the 70s and 80s because I didn’t live in them. Country folk had their own means of recycling glass and plastic that didn’t have deposit cash incentives. They reused them. They used them most often to store those leftovers mentioned earlier. They became useful containers around the house for non-food items. Jars were frequently used for buttons and screws and nuts and bolts. Plastic bowls and tubs were used for paint, or other materials, when not storing food. The big plastic gallon jugs that milk came in were cleaned and used to store water, or other drinks. They’d often be frozen in summer and taken out in the mornings to the fields, so that as the day went on they’d naturally thaw and become cold water to drink.

Aluminum was typically collected and taken for recycling because, like the soda bottles, it was a source of supplemental income, as it is today for some people.

This basically leaves behind paper waste that cannot be reused (and we reused a lot) and non-aluminum food storage – a.k.a. the “tin can”. There was a minimal amount of polystyrene foam waste from meat packing as well. The paper waste and the polyfoam, along with some plastic that was “used” up made it’s way to a burn pile or burn barrel once every couple of weeks.

Yes, I know this is hardly eco-friendly or carbon neutral, but remember it’s still a lot less than is being produced by slash and burn agriculture and other industrial processes. And in colder months said burning was frequently in the fireplace or heat stove, and used to reduce consumption of fossil fuel-based electrical energy.

The waste of metal can packaging was also somewhat minimal, because a lot of the things that came in tin cans, like vegetables, we grew ourselves. And we preserved them ourselves, in glass jars, that were reused from the previous year’s “canning”. So only a few things came in tin cans, namely coffee, tinned fish like salmon, and potted meat (SPAM). And coffee cans, like the empty butter bowls and jelly jars, were put to new use for storage.

In the end, we went to the “city dump” maybe twice a year, with that stuff that we simply could not find a use for, or dispose of ourselves.

Wood, stone, building materials, cloth, furniture, crockery, china, and “yard waste” were all reused, recycled, or consumed. None of that went to the dump. Even pieces of glass and ceramics were frequently just broken up and buried somewhere on the family property, or used as infill with masonry.

I can’t burn trash in my neighborhood. Officially anyway. A backyard “firepit” can cover a multitude of sins, but even then it’s not practical. So much of what comes into our houses, like the plastic bottles and plastic bags, is designed for hauling back off to a “landfill” or other type of industrial waste disposal facility.

In fact, the high price I pay for trash pickup does not include recycling, though incorporated urban areas and some suburban ones have it required. I do recycle. But it must be an active choice, that requires me to separate, collect and then deliver that material personally to the facility, because the contracted garbage service doesn’t do it.

And I save and reuse paper and plastic bags, bowls, boxes, bottles, and other paper as much as I can. I try to repurpose things like packing foam and other persistent environmental pollutants into art pieces or film props, or something that has some intrinsic value that will keep it out of the landfill or the ocean for as long as possible.

But I am still very disappointed in myself for producing the amount of waste that I do. Particularly because I had a childhood where I learned better. That can’t be said of everyone. Not everyone knows how, and to our great disgrace, we are not teaching it to people.

The Western World encourages conspicuous consumption, planned obsolescence, and easy disposability. At the same time we were preaching cleaning the environment and conserving energy, we were making it all the more attractive to just have someone else deal with it. We created a waste disposal industry, and we are still not properly regulating or monitoring it. We find frequent incidence of “recycling” being just dumped into the landfill. Landfills themselves have been found to contaminate water supplies and localities in ways we have not envisioned, and have not legislated for. Our oceans, and apparently all of us, have some measure of microplastic contamination.

Reversal may not be entirely possible. We may be at a tipping point with hydrocarbons in the atmosphere and pollutants in the water cycle that our planet is fundamentally changed forever.

This should concern us. But only because of our self interest in human survival.

Earth has fundamentally changed a number of times. Species have become extinct. Climates have radically altered. A myriad of known and unknown naturally occurring disasters have pocked the surface of the planet for billions of years. Such changes are actually the “nature” we self-righteously proclaim we are trying to preserve.

But what we are most concerned with is the status quo. Even if we leave the billions of dollars out of the conversation, even if we don’t consider the sheer inconvenience of having sea levels rise and our air conditioning bills soar and barely enough land and water on the planet left to feed our overgrown population, our focus is in keeping things the way they are.

And that’s not how the system actually works. Which is why everything we seem to be doing appears to be failing. We just don’t get it.

It’s not about us. It’s not even about the panda or the polar bear or the tiger or the elephant. It’s about the Earth.

Shadowscapes World Card
The world will carry on without us. She’ll miss us no less than she does the dinosaurs, or the wooly mammoth. We’re temporary. World Card from Shadowscapes Tarot by Stephanie Law.

And she’s going to do what she wants to do.

Till next week.

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Eat, Drink, And Be Merry

Feast

…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

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Ghosts and Goblins

Lab 2023

So, as noted previously, this week’s article is going to be a photo dump of the installed props I’ve been working on since around August.

I am usually exhausted after mounting this project, and this year is no exception. Secondarily, last night was Halloween, Samhain, or Beltane south of the equator, so for all of us with a witchy bent, it’s a super busy time.

In just under a week it will be my birthday, and perhaps I will wax eloquently about the passing of the years or perhaps I will rage against the dying of the light. In either case, I hope you will be satisfied with a handful of pictures. The gremlins, or goblins, or some malefic bunch of pranksters conspired to make this year’s installation exceedingly problematic. I don’t think that I will be doing this next year in the same venue. But my house is probably going to be the creepiest one in the neighborhood…well, on the outside for a change.

Witchs Kitchen
Seer
Mummys Tomb
Pirate 2023

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My House Is A Museum

Castles

If you’ve been following along, I suppose you’ve noticed a theme going on here. A theme song, in fact. I’m sure you know the words. All the best weirdos do. An appreciation for re-runs of this odd ball 60s sitcom, and the various alternate versions featuring those strange people from the pen of cartoonist Charles Addams is something that runs somewhat commonly through witchy people of my acquaintance. To my mind is a part of the modern “witch aesthetic” that we hear bandied about online. But I’m sure there are some who are oh-so-serious as to debate that assessment.

I’ve written at length about the Addams family before, and am trying not to repeat myself overmuch in this series of articles. Yet the world is cyclic, and ideas come back around. Just like Halloween. That’s actually somewhat comfortable, and really somewhat necessary.

If we as a species could get everything right the first time through, we’d have all attained NIrvana and moved on to whatever challenges await us at that next plateau which is probably not the final state either. Or as surely as the oscillation model of the universe, we are disturbed and distributed out of that state to try and learn again.

Point being, things do repeat, they give us the opportunity to relearn, to renew, to grow and expand, and to re-experience, both good and bad. Re-experience and remembering is an important human activity, because we gear a lot of our lives toward it. We have our favorite foods, our favorite books, our favorite movies and TV shows, and all the assorted knick-knacks that go with them, so that we can treasure them repeatedly. It gives us a fixed point in an ever-evolving cosmos that can be awfully awfully big and awfully awfully indifferent and cruel.

So, yes, my house is a museum of my own life experiences, the things I have liked enough to collect over the years, and the things that I want to keep around me that probably have zero practical purpose.

Swords
Someday we’ll have a house where we can duel in the library again. Proper swordplay really requires vaulted ceilings. Yes, of course we could use the yard, but that seems awfully bourgeois.

Like a set of china my great grandmother acquired with S&H Green Stamps back in 40s. For those who have no idea what I am talking about, savings stamps were the precursor to airline miles or credit card cash back. They were typically given out by service stations (what you’d call a gas station now) as a premium when people made a fuel purchase. If you saved enough of them, by pasting them into a booklet they’d give you, then you could purchase items from a catalog provided by the stamp company. In this way, consumers could acquire things for which their ordinary cash flow was insufficient, without needing to qualify for a credit card or payment program, which in the elder days were much harder to get.

The practice of thrift – as it was known – was more fundamental to the middle and working classes in American society until around the 1980s. Saving more than spending was the way of things, because ultimately you’d need to get something that cost a lot, and financing was not something easily accessible to those who really needed it more than the Vanderbilts and Pierpoint Morgans.

It wasn’t just cash, of course, it was all the stuff. In my grandmother’s house were at least five complete bedroom sets, multiple tables, chests, cabinets, sideboards, buffets, sets of dishes, pots, pans, pickling crocks, butter churns, cake stands, and untold numbers of mason jars. Huge steamer trunks, ironically owned by people who had never seen an ocean until late in life, held quilts, blankets, and bedspreads, extra pillows and linens, and a variety of old clothes. There were baby cribs and high chairs. There were old toys and a few books, and a dark floorless attic where one might find the discarded wonders of a bygone age (or a Ouija board everyone swears was never in the house).

These were not collected as ostentation, or any sign of wealth or prestige. They had nothing to do with desire, nor were they a sign of a hoarding malediction. These things had accumulated into this house (and a thousand others like it across mid-century rural America) because they had been saved for the future. Because someday, somebody might need them. There would be children. There would be weddings and new households and grandchildren, and those people would need these things because they would not have them. They’d need them until they got enough S&H Green Stamps of their own to get things, and then they’d pass them on to their children and their grandchildren.

By the time we reached the 1970s, though, it became much easier for an emerging rural middle class to acquire new things. That set of old china became a revered heirloom rather than a practical useful item. It was only used on special occasions when all the family was back together for the holidays. And of course it was never used at the kid’s table, because heaven forbid we might chip one of these quasi-antique plates that, since Granny was no longer with us, had taken on a sacred nature.

So by the time my grandmother passed away, and her children were tasked with parsing out the collections of several human lifetimes, the china came to me, where it sits, sadly, in the top of a cabinet, unused, for fear that it’s age means it contained toxic lead in the glaze. In all likelihood, food will never touch it again.

Meanwhile, my generation has replaced our more disposable mid-century hand-me-downs several times, passed on to our own adult children mismatched sets of melamine and discount store china that survived from our earlier days, and are now faced with the daunting task of a looming inheritance of such things as soup tureens and sideboards that no longer serve our lifestyles or really that of anyone living below the millionaire line.

When my wife and I were younger, we entertained with the finest of plasticware and paper plates. Our peers, there for chips and dips and beer and wine, were content with that, since they did that at their own homes. “Charcuterie” often came on their own plastic presentation trays from the grocery, and being the thrifty sort, we washed those and reused them.

When children came along the inherent need for durability and practicality relegated the china and crystal to the domain of locked display cabinets, and very rare use from time to time. As the children got older more practical but “nicer” pieces were acquired, that suit personal tastes and sensibilities, and are easier and less expensive to replace should a guest have a bit too much wine and tip the glass over.

Now the children have moved out to an apartment, and considerably less space for such things, and their careers and lifestyle choices mean that they may always live in an apartment or condo with limited space and need for soup tureens and sideboards and quasi-antique possibly toxic china that will never be used. Their own personal museums reflect their tastes and time, and so these “old things” no longer live as part of the family, as they really should, and have become part of a memory that we can’t easily let go of.

So while this article may serve to educate the docent who will eventually conduct a tour of my unused kitchen for posterity, it probably seems very far afield from ideas esoteric and occult. I’m coming to that.

Samhain in the Celtic tradition is the end of the year fire festival which closes out the living growing world of the Summer and prepares us all for the coming of the Winter Dark, with its unwelcome reminders of death and privation. It was against such death and privation that my ancestors, and possibly your own accumulated these “useless things” from one generation to the next. They were never really meant to become relics, but they almost always do. They end up being the things of the dead people that we keep around so that we remember those dead people.

I have mentioned in earlier articles and discussions with people online, that I don’t actively practice “veneration of the ancestors”. But I still keep Granny’s gas-station stamp china around. The history of these basically worthless objects, as I have shared it with you here, reminds me of the person that she was, the life that she lived, and the community of others who shared that culture, going back to when they came across the ocean from the poverty of Wales, and Scotland, and Ireland, many with just the clothes on their backs.

Paintings
Like most museums there are more pieces in our collection than can be properly displayed at any one time. This is especially true because the proper placement, care, and conservation of art pieces is not really the purpose of the average suburban home. One must carefully consider things like exposure to light, humidity, air currents, and other key factors in order to make sure you are not unduly harming something, even if it is not a rare piece by a famous artist.

This doesn’t even begin to take into account the problems in storing and displaying cursed objects, enchanted amulets, and other such items that museums have to contend with. So far most of the dead things in my collection seem content to remain silent, or at least, to only prank when they are lacking attention.

The day after the Celtic Samhain is celebrated as Dios de Los Muertos by the Latin American culture. The Day of the Dead is an overt veneration of the ancestors and festooned with feasting and music and bright colors and sugar skulls. We get more of it here in Texas than perhaps people do in the center of the country, though the Latin population has been expanding from the border for years. I think about the people pressed at that border now, with only the clothes on their backs, seeking some future they can only imagine. I think of the children and grandchildren that someday may look back to them on the Day of the Dead, and point to a plate or a bowl up on the top shelf of a locked cupboard and tell their stories, and remind themselves of the people that they were.

It is important to participate in these cycles. We none of us get to stick around here forever, and when we go, we don’t come back in that same way ever again. What is left behind, be it memory or relic, is important, not just to us but to the memory of us that it will carry into the future. The old plate speaks for us when we cannot speak for ourselves. That’s why we don’t get rid of them. That’s why we try to hold on.

Eventually the memories will change. My children have dim memories of my grandmothers, not nearly so vivid as the one’s I have of my Granny. And my children will probably not have children of their own, and that is okay too. That means that someday, someone may find a box of old plates at an estate sale, and take them to some new life.

Even if, in the end, they become nameless broken sherds in a trash dump, some future archaeologist may haul them into a museum and say, “look, this is what people in the middle 20th century used to eat on”, and there will still be some memory that we were here at all.

We all of us live in a big house on a little rock in space, and that house is our museum. It is our collective memory and the repository of the remains of every one of us that has ever lived. Time rolls out into the past in an unfathomably long scroll, predating our history, our pre-history, and even our being. It encompasses so many cycles of beings that we only comprehend the briefest bits, the tiny parts that through quirks of nature, have survived as reminders of other orders of beings that have lived before us. The time of the dinosaurs is so long ago, that it is conceivable at least one sentient advanced civilization might have arisen, flourished, and disappeared into dust, without leaving any tangible sign of their existence. It is entirely possible that in that vast ocean of years, a civilization could have arisen to leave the earth, and travel out into the stars, by some method we would not even now be able to understand. It is equally possible that such a race survived on a distant world and that because the time between us and them is so vast, they have evolved beyond anything that they or we would imagine came from this lonely little pebble.

The cycles keep turning. We are not the first to imagine and fear that “the end of time is nigh”. We can look into the recorded history and find this sentiment almost constantly plaguing the currently extant culture. It seems that our individual mortality predisposes us to think in terms of the mortality of culture, civilization, or way of life.

In truth, such things are very fragile. Lines shift on the map. The world I was born into is not the world we live in now, nor will the world I leave behind be the world as it is today. I am not always happy with this fact, but the awareness of it as an absolute is helpful in dealing with that discontentment.

All we may do is plant the seeds for tomorrow, and hope that they take some root. How they grow, and indeed, what they will grow into, is beyond our petty power to manage. If we live true to our natures, then perhaps our memories will be honored by those who come after us.

If not, at least the broken pieces may sit in a display case, and remind others how foolish and selfish we were way back when.

I am returning to my prop work now, and will be back in a week with perhaps lighter fare.

A bit of a housekeeping note. Owing to the changes made at the former Twitter, I have pulled the plug on the automatic update to that website. Since apparently my “interaction” doesn’t satisfy the New World Order’s standards for actually sharing my content, there is no point in continuing to post there. If you were someone who actually looked for the link on that platform, well, I invite you to visit my Instagram or the Facebook page for the reminder, or simply come by here Wednesday’s after 5PM US Central Time.

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Mysterious And Spooky

Mysterious And Spoolky

Having assayed the Threads platform for a bit, I am still not quite sure what my longtime involvement will be there. It waffles from intriguing forum for meeting new contacts to colossal time waster, and not much between. I trust human toxicity and the inevitable need to monetize the platform will make the decision for me soon, particularly with elections coming up.

Be that as it may, one of the most frequent “QT with your answers” themes for October is to list your go-to movies for the season.

Since last week I mentioned my deep interest and ambitions in the film business, I suppose this is as good a time as any to delve into my personal favorites, and why they are so, and maybe connect that up a bit with the usual themes of magic and the occult. I mean, should be easy, right?

In last week’s article I made a distinction between horror movies, monster movies, and slasher movies. This is how I personally break down the overall “spooky weird” film category, and I’ll explain why, but I will say that I don’t know of any official scholarly or critical school of thought to support it. There is overlap. There’s a lot of overlap. But this is how my brain splits them up, and so for purposes of analysis and discussion, we’ll use it, since this is my bully-pulpit. You won’t find it on Siskel and Ebert, or Joe Bob’s Drive-In or Elvira’s Movie Macabre, though I respect and have watched all those sources.

So, first, horror movies. Well, sort of. That term was first applied (and perhaps still is) largely to the genre of films made at Universal in the 1930s and 40s, beginning with the Tod Browning Bela Lugosi Dracula. This, was based on the play version authorized by Stoker’s estate, also starring Lugosi. Following Dracula, director James Whale made Frankenstein and Bride of Frankenstein, both freely adapted from Mary Shelley’s work, which is possibly the oldest science-fiction novel. Then followed Boris Karloff in the original Mummy.

Well, sorry, I classify these as monster movies. The antagonist is a fantastical creature of some kind – vampire, golem, mummy, werewolf, gill-man, alien, giant bug, or city-stomping atomic monster. The plots are not generally complex (though many remakes attempt to be) and in the end, kindly old Dr. Exposition Character triumphs over the critter through his superior esoteric knowledge. It does vary as the offending critter gets bigger through the threat of nuclear radiation, but still, it’s hardly psychologically thrilling. It’s a good popcorn flick.

So what then do I call a horror movie? Well, something that’s really unsettling. Yes, the antagonist can still be a supernatural entity. They frequently are, but what it is, and how it works, inspires genuine fear. It has to literally keep me up at night, or at least, make me turn more lights on in the house.

Exorcist
Blatty’s book was big in the 70s and quickly made into a hit film. The Oesterreich text, which claims to be used to “scourge the devil” in the movie is a paperback release following banking on that popularity. The text itself is just a skosh younger than me, being printed in January of 1966. It’s dry reading, but if you are interested, there’s a lot of good documentation on beliefs and practices around the world involving the displacement of a personality by another entity. It’s pricey, but you may be able to find it used like I did.

Many of the cases it documents as possession might today be considered schizophrenia, or other forms of delusion or mental illness. As science took hold of medicine, supernatural agencies were relegated to the realm of the non-such. My college psych professor had a good sense of humor about it. The multiple choice question about what modern psychiatric and psychologic practice use as a standard reference text included the Maleus Maleficarum (seen next to the Possession text on my shelf). While the correct answer is the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, DSM for short, there was a time in history where the Maleus was the defacto means of determining if someone was a witch or under the influence of infernal forces. It’s a fair point to make that at the time I studied psychology in the 1970s and 80s, the extant version of the DSM including homosexuality and transexual behaviors as mental illnesses. The previous version, only updated in the mid-60s, give us the words imbecile, moron, and idiot to refer to persons with mental disability impacting the “standard” IQ.

I had though Oesterreich included the exorcism text in the book, but I couldn’t locate it easily this morning. If you are looking for a copy, for whatever reason, it’s in Volume 2 of the Roman Ritual.

The banner entry in this category is 1973’s The Exorcist, based on William Peter Blatty’s equally unsettling book and directed by the late William Friedkin. And yes, when I went back and read the novel, already having seen this movie, I did turn more lights on. The movie itself is very stylized, and as such has been copied in a number of other such films, and TV shows, including several weeks where Diedre Hall’s character Marlena Evans was possessed on the venerable Days of Our Lives soap opera. A fourth sequel is being released this Halloween season, with some of the original actors in supporting parts, and what appear to be very inventive effects. The trailers seem to remain somewhat faithful to what made the original so unnerving.

Faith, of course, is central to the movie. It concerns the possession of a young girl by Satan (at least that’s the initial story) and subsequent attempts by her formerly Catholic now atheist mother to obtain the Rite of Exorcism. One of the best things about this movie is that it shows the rational scientific approach to explaining Regan’s symptoms, and includes the Catholic Church’s policy to not sanction an exorcism until all potential medical and psychiatric origins have been ruled out.

Ultimately the Church banned this movie for good Catholics, citing a number of things that they found more offensive than the Devil himself. But at least at some point there must have been a consultant available. Blatty was on set and his research is impeccable, so perhaps that accounts for it, rather than involvement by the Vatican. But the ritual is fairly authentic based on my own research.

The chief origin for the plot was an exorcism sanctioned by the Vatican in the 1950s in St. Louis. It is believed to have been one of the last official such rites performed, as mental illness became better understood and the use of anti-psychotics allowed many of the symptoms of demonic possession to be treated clinically. But evangelicals have been known to perform brutal exorcisms on the mentally ill, children, and homosexuals or other “deviants” up to recent times.

I always found it curious that in medieval and Renaissance times, when the practice of psychiatry didn’t exist, that witches were not treated by exorcism, rather than being tortured and murdered. If one believed that an evil spirit could take over someone and make them do bad things, why was the witch not extended this mercy? The Church, and the Reformation both saw witches as willing participants, rather than hapless victims, so the ritual to drive out the unclean spirit was ineffective. But mightn’t a few of the thousands who were burned alive have been “under the influence”? Apparently no one considered the question.

On the subject of the Devil, I’ll mention two other 70s era horror movies that scared the hell out of me in my younger days – while at the same time, motivating me toward more research into esoteric knowledge. The first is The Omen, concerning the birth of Satan’s child as foretold in Revelations. This movie sparked the whole 666 thing, at least as it was applied in the late 70s and early 80s and alluded to every politico and would be dictator faster than you can say “Prophecies of Nostradamus”. And of course the need for the mass media market to wrap post-Christian quasi-political ecstatic prophecy with ancient Judaic traditions, evangelical political ambition, and obscure medieval French poetry made for a heady mix. Still, the original movie has some genuinely creepy moments and the internal religio-magic system is rather unique.

A less successful piece was The Sentinel, in the vein of Rosemary’s Baby (which is also a wonderful horror movie on its own) concerning the gateway to Hell being in an apartment of an old Brooklyn brownstone. What elevates this is the portrayal by aging veteran horror actor John Caradine as the devil’s doorman.

The chiefly disturbing thing about these movies, and why I call them horror films, is that the dark forces, to paraphrase young Wednesday Addams, look just like everyone else. They are the evil that walks among us in our modern world, and certainly as many were set in the decaying and corrupt New York City of the late seventies, you can read them as social commentary, or at least a psychological attempt to grapple with the modern world not turning out to be the expected Utopia of the flower children.

I’ll backtrack to the monster movies now, and say that my favorites are tied for first. They are the original Boris Karloff version of The Mummy and the 1953 Godzilla, King of The Monsters which is the American release of Toho Studio’s post-war epic Gojira.

Themummy
This relief sculpture version of the lobby poster of The Mummy features billing of Karloff the Uncanny. This traded on the previous year’s success of Frankenstein and Bride of Frankenstein. It was also how he was billed in the film’s credits, though later movies would go back to using his full stage name of Boris Karloff. The actor’s name was really William Henry Pratt, not a terribly frightening moniker, so it was modified for the genre to sound more or less Slavic. His frequent co-star and competitor Bela Lugosi was an Hungarian actor named Aristad Olt. His stage name was perhaps easier to pronounce for the majority of movie goers in the 30s.

The man named Im-ho-tep in real life was a fascinating person, if what was attributed to him is even partially true. He is the inventor of the pyramid, creating the Step Pyramid of Saqqara for his pharaoh Djoser as the first stone building in human history. Additionally, he was considered a great magician and healer, and later would be elevated to demi-god status as patron of physicians. His shrines and temples at Saqqara are found to have hundreds of mummified ibises, the sacred bird of Tehuti, or Thoth, so this is certainly where the “Scroll of Thoth” came about in the movie. The basis for it, as well as the images shown on it, are from the Papyrus of Ani in the collection of the British Museum. We know it better as the Egyptian Book of the Dead. Ironically it is, in fact, a long elaborate magical text for bringing the dead back to life, or at least for insuring that the part of the soul, which the Egyptians called the ka, that represented ourselves was able to re-inhabit his mummy and speak the important spells to reach the paradise of the afterlife.

The chief difference between the Japanese movie and the one I first saw (and I have them both now) is that the US release wraps the Japanese film with about twenty minutes of footage with actor Raymond Burr, who would shortly become famous as Perry Mason. These scenes were shot with a handful of Asian actors in a hotel in San Francisco, and serve to frame the action of the rest of the movie with it’s poorly dubbed scenes. Burr, as Steve Martin (and I always wondered if Steve Martin got his name from that) is an American reporter in Tokyo when the monster rises.

The atomic creature is presented as a mutation of dinosaurs, brought about by American H-bomb tests. Now universally seen as a metaphor for the horror visited on Japan by the only atomic weapons ever used in wartime (and against a civilian population), the truly terrible nature of Godzilla’s destructiveness is not as clear in the US version, and with reason. The movie was scarcely seven years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and in the early days of the US-Soviet atomic cold war. Many Americans did not wish to be reminded of the impact of those events. Many Japanese were still living who could not forget.

Godzilla was successful on both continents and spawned a number of sequels. Going into the 50s, Japan’s relationship with the monster became less clear, and it evolved into a sometimes threat/sometimes champion taking on a host of other giant monsters from pre-history, myth, and outer-space. Rebooted several times it currently is franchised with modern CGI in four US made versions, and is likely to spawn a few more. They just keep coming back.

The Karloff Mummy differs from it’s several sequels in that it is the only version where the mummy is seen out of his wrappings and up to no good. The priest Imhotep (an actual historical personage- in fact the first person other than a king we know from history) was sentenced to be mummified alive for the transgression of attempting to raise the Pharaoh’s daughter from the dead. She and the priest had been romantically linked, but the act was sacrilege. So Imhotep was sentenced to the long dirt nap, and to stop such future sacrilege the magical Scroll of Thoth was buried along with him.

Naturally, when everyone was digging up everyone in the twenties in the name of archaeology, someone opens Imhotep’s tomb, and of course, reads from the scroll.

Rather than being blasted to dust by Isis for such an act, the hapless digger is simply driven mad when he sees the mummy of Imhotep get up and walk away -taking the scroll with him.

Years pass and the mummy directs the son of the man who dug him up to the tomb of his girlfriend, with the intention of summoning her spirit so that they can live forever as decaying corpses. The hitch is that her spirit has been reincarnated in a modern woman, who in the space of a few scenes falls madly in love with the young archaeologist. Imhotep employs his ancient magical powers to draw her away, but she rejects him when he suggests that she needs to die and be embalmed for them to be together eternally. She pleads to Isis, who this time obliges with a handy lightning bolt obliterating Imhotep and the scroll.

It’s a neat movie, with a limited plot, and very little accuracy in terms of Egyptian myth or history, but it did instill in me a deep desire to explore Egyptology and Egyptian magic that remains with me to this day. In the final analysis, the story is simply Dracula, but set in Egypt, and Dr. Van Helsing is transformed into Professor Mueller, in the person of actor Edward Von Sloan who plays both. He also shows up a the “men should not meddle in such things” Dr. Waldman in Frankenstein. Typecasting in the Universal monster flicks insured the audience got the shorthand and didn’t spend a lot of time trying to figure out who was who.

A multitude of sequels followed, lifting the forbidden love and buried alive portions to the mummy of Kharis, who was reanimated through the use of the secret herbal Tanna leaves by a succession of dedicated priests, who at the end of each movie somehow became less dedicated and more self-serving.

Remakes abound. The Hammer one is fairly faithful to the original plot. The Universal one with Brendan Frazier is highly enjoyable and if anything far less historically and mythically accurate than the Karloff one. I try not to let it bother me. But like Godzilla, the old monsters keep coming back.

Which brings us round to the slasher movies. These are based upon the precept of violent dismemberment frequently including on-screen gore. The original, was Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho. It’s still my favorite. It is derived from a Robert Bloch story, which is itself supposed to be based on a serial murderer in the Midwest.

There is actually very little gore and violence on-screen in Psycho. It’s implied, and very well. But that’s Hitchcock. Hitchcock was a true genius.

The next prominent slasher film got past implied violence. It was the Texas Chainsaw Massacre. It also was based on a true incident of serial murder, dismemberment, necrophilia, and grave robbing. in rural Wisconsin.

Then John Carpenter made Halloween and the world changed.

Slasher
“OMG, there’s ROMAINE EVERYWHERE!”

Anyone interested in seeing more vegan friendly slasher movies?

Before Hollywood became all activist, much of the blood and guts you’d find in your typical slasher flick was actual blood and guts, collected cheap down at the local slaughterhouse, and liberally slopped around the set. I’m sure there are probably still indie or low-budget genre movies that still use it, but most major productions have replaced the real things with silicon and latex organs. In addition to being PETA/ASPCA and animal friendly, they’re certain more sanitary. They tend to be rather durable. Once the fluids and semi-fluids are washed off, and the phony parts dried and stored properly, they can be used repeatedly on different shoots and different productions.

Real offal had a short and stinky “life” span, though it did have the advantage of drawing real flies (there’s now a special syrup used by the fly wranglers for that. Yes there are fly wranglers. Sit through the credits sometime) ,

Blood and ichor have been replaced by ecofriendly plant-based alternatives. My own first forays were with the tried and true corn syrup and food coloring, but now you can get stage blood that is glycerin based from a cup size all the way up to a 50 gallon drum.

For semi-fluids methyl-cellulose comes in powder form to mix to the consistency required, from slippery and slimy up to full goo blob. This translucent wood pulp material stands in for everything from saliva to alien ooze.

If you can’t track down methhyl-cel, you can use plain ol’ unflavored gelatin. Ooze level depends on the amount of water and the time you boil it. However, if you are vegan, I will tell you that it is an animal product, so consult your local stage supply or the interwebs for sources more to your liking.

Fun fact, in case you didn’t know, the blood in famous shower scene in Psycho is really just chocolate syrup. Stage blood options that were available didn’t keep their consistency and color when swirling toward the drain, so Hitch substituted a can of Hershey’s. It worked far better on the black and white film than the red colored “blood”.

The use of a spray painted Captain Kirk mask on the killer, and the eerie synthesize soundtrack were dictated by the miniscule budget rather than a planned aesthetic. Yet these enhanced the film toward cult status, and spawned a host of imitators. The unkillable Mike Myers of Halloween became the unkillable Jason Vorhees in the Friday the 13th franchise, and any self-respecting holiday that didn’t have an associated slasher flick attached dared not show its face.

In the midst of the copy-cats, Nightmare On Elm Street introduced us to the evil ghost of a child molester who was taking his revenge by killing teenagers in their dreams. Deriving from the urban legend that dying in a dream will really kill you, the pock-faced knife-fingered pursued teenager after teenager as they slept. The imagery was often inventive, and for a while, I had some interest in the genre again, but ultimately even these evolved into self parody, with Freddie Versus Jason, and Friday the 13th Jason in Space.

I’ve never been a great fan of slashers. I saw a lot of them when I was working part-time as a projectionist at the local theater, and they were all basically clones. Escaped lunatic takes vengeance on unwitting victims who are in the wrong place at the wrong time, usually trying to sneak some quick sex, which triggers said lunatic. Freddy Kruger was the first original thing to come along, and it quickly reverted to formula.

Like the Universal flicks of the 30s and 40s, or the giant monster and alien movies of the 50s and 60s, the formula was an effective means of promoting the content to a public who wanted to know what they were getting. These were never meant to be serious fare, at least not in the U. S. More thoughtful and more artful treatments don’t always find an audience and disappear into obscurity.

One of the more imaginative examples of this is The Hunger starring Catherine Deneuve, rising engeneue Susan Sarandon, and rock superstar David Bowie. As a trio of vampires, they stalk the New York singles scene at the height of the disco era, dealing with the problems of immortality and not-so-eternal youth. It features some outstanding makeup work by the late great Dick Smith, and gives us vampires without fangs. It’s a very chic and stylistic work, and still one of my favorites. It’s possible to see it metaphorical, or at least partially inspired, by the nascent AIDS epidemic, but I may be way off base with the producer’s intentions there. It was not as commercially successful as other fare that featured thinner plots and larger cup sizes.

So, if you’re waiting on that hellbroth to cool, or Instacart is slow in delivering your eye of newt, pop up some corn, grab the remote, and go browsing through the back stacks on the streaming service of your choice. I think all these goodies can be found out there somewhere, including other outre works that defy simpler classification like the original Suspiria and The Wicker Man as well as Viy, a 1967 Soviet-made horror film that evokes all sorts of dark Slavic imagery. ‘Tis the season, after all.

In the meantime, I am back to the lab to paint more eyeballs, and stitch electrodes into hearts in preparation for the big day. See you all next week.

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We’re Creepy and We’re Kooky

Skullsies

Me: “Did I give you my bucket of mold foam? I need to make a tongue.”

My eldest: “And that’s not even the strangest thing you’ve ever said to me.”

October’s here! Octobers here! Let the Halloweening begin!

headz
So many head jokes, so little time. The North Pole has nothing on my workshop when preparations begin for haunted house displays and Halloween setups. Bits and pieces of a lifetime’s worth of being strange are everywhere. Hopefully, by mid-month these will have found some sort of cohesive design. It’s on paper at the moment, but it never ends up being exactly like the sketch. The final outcome is whatever I put together on the night of.

Some of us, of course, have been haunting the stores since the first of the “Code Orange” notices started hitting in early August, because, alas, our supreme holiday is all too quickly submerged by the massive decoration onslaught brought about by the Fat Man and his shopping frenzy. We have but a brief twilight to get our loot and get back to the tower before sunrise, and the mad season of fourth quarter profit-taking begins.

Now before we veer too far afield, I will state here and now for the record that I am a legitimate occultist and practicioner of the arcane arts. I have been since I was about seven years old and got my first deck of Tarot, and I started reading in astrology very soon after that.

But I am also a huge fan of the trappings of the Halloween season (call it Samhain if you prefer) and I don’t think I am alone among my witchy peers. It’s just that for us the season is year round. We like to decorate our homes with skulls and cauldrons and black candles and spell books, because, well, they aren’t decorations.

We are the real deal. We live like this all the time.

But at Halloween, we can A) do it and appear to just be part of the rest of the general public ( for whatever that is worth) and B) this allows us to TURN IT UP TO ELEVEN!!

Clever Kim at Your Average Witch Podcast has frequently posed the interview question: “Do you think someone is born a witch?” or words to that effect. I am personally inclined to think the answer is a qualified ‘yes”.

I don’t mean this in the sense of so-called “hereditary witches” though there certainly are witches born into witch families who, like Jews born into Jewish families and Muslims born into Muslim families, etc. who will have this as the de facto lifestyle at birth.

brainz
I’ve been saving this brain for a special occasion. And I managed to snag the last bag of eyeballs at Dollar Tree so I got that goin’ for me. The bones of this particular skele will be transformed into the Mummy of Al Nofal, denizen of the legendary Black Pyramid. He’s the chap I needed to make the tongue for.

Surprisingly this brain, much nicer than the ones I have found at the usual stores, is not a Halloween prop. I’ve had it in my weird stuff collection for ages. It was given out by now defunct Novell Corporation at the turn of the century as a marketing gimmick. It’s getting a repaint and some electrodes, and who knows what else.

The eyeballs are a completely different project.

But I think that those of us who end up following that left-hand path tend toward a certain state of mind. We are ourselves, as the phrase turns, strange and unusual.

We tend to be interested, and from the earliest years, in the macabre, the dark, the bizarre.

We don’t shiver when we pass the graveyard. If the gate is open we are likely to wander in, and spend long hours reading the stones.

Rainy days, and thunderstorms refresh our souls, and thrill our hearts.

Black is our favorite color.

We talk to animals.

We talk to things.

We have piles of strange rocks, feathers, bones, hides, and stuff in jars.

We read Poe and Lovecraft and King and Koontz.

We like horror movies. We like monster movies. We like slasher movies.

We know the words to the Addams Family theme song by heart.

And all of this before ever cracking a spell book or hearing the word coven.

Now, the current mass media market fascination with the bankability of occult subjects has made it more likely that young weirdos will discover and explore witchcraft at an earlier point that I did in my day.

I was certainly an exception in my generation, coming from a generally Christian community, with no real family history of occult practice. At least not in the overt public way that many people now avow their witchiness.

Growing up in rural Appalachia, the existence of witches was a very real and widely accepted thing. Charms and omens and dowsing and herbal medicine were practiced by most folks regardless of their stated religion. These practices came with them from Ireland and Scotland and Wales, and from the Indigenous People their ancestors lived among and intermarried with. What will now be called witchcraft by academic folklorists, publicly self-identified witches, and the media market, have roots in pagan practices going back into dimmest antiquity. They have been carried forward because they still serve some vital purpose in the societies which use them, and even as those societies slip away from “useless superstition” the practices are being reclaimed by newly minted witches.

But in that community I was branded as “odd” and worse. I was naturally inclined to go beyond the practices that were, while “witchy” perceived as normal for the community, into the more complex and esoteric.

Much of that occurred when I reached college, because I then had the opportunity to access books on the subject, and I was able to encounter others who held similar interests.

The head of the theater costume shop was a witch and astrologer. Copies of astrology texts sat next to her pattern books on the shelf in the shop, and she had a powerful gift for sussing out your essential nature when she knew your birthday. I tended then, as I do now, to work more with the cards than the stars, but she kindled my interest in going deeper. Though I don’t know that she had a Slavic bone in her body, she is always the image I see when someone mentions Baba Yaga.

Theater was my first attempt at find a way of going to work in the movie business. Specifically, I wanted to be a makeup artist, to create those wonderful monsters that flowed from the studios of Jack Pierce, Dick Smith, John Chambers, and Rick Baker, among many others. Where I could afford to attend college at the time, live theater was the nearest option to that career.

heartz
When people say “Have a heart” and I reply “I do. I keep it in a jar on my desk” you can see that I am being completely sincere. The little piles of chaos that emerge as I work make for some interesting compositions. Extra points if you spotted the Grateful Dead album under the Jack-O-Lantern. It’s not just mood music for Halloween, it was there on the desk when I started getting things out of their storage bins.

In a few weeks I’ll share how these turned out, though in all honesty, some may not. It’s not a structured process. I have ideas, I gather raw material, pre-made props, and a lot of upcycled paper, cardboard, and styrofoam trash and see what comes out at the end. Duct tape and hot glue bind the universe together, at least for run of show. After that, it becomes parts for next year.

My interest in the monster movies fueled my creativity. I had started making costumes and effects and working with models and animation as a pre-teen. The alchemy of latex and spirit gum and silicone and mask grease and nose putty is similar in ways to a witch’s brew, Through it we transform ourselves into others, beasts and beings, just as surely as a glamour spell.

Glamours as magic are frequently described in conjunction with the use of make-up, which in the lingo of theater tech is called “basic corrective”. That is, when anyone goes out on stage, besides the makeup that would be used for creating or enforcing a character, there’s make-up that just makes you look your best. Maybe it’s to get rid of the bags under your eyes from the celebration on opening night. Maybe it’s to make your nose a little less prominent.

So we learned this from the first. We’d make ourselves up and go about our daily business to see if such effects made any difference in how people reacted, and indeed in how we felt. So this is very much what the glamour spell is selling. I’d take it further, wandering around the campus and going to the local hangouts as John Lennon, and other real people. It was an excuse to indulge the natural interest in costume and disguise that otherwise had to wait for the Halloween holiday.

I am still very much about the movie thing. In the many years that have passed I have self-studied, and worked a number of small personal projects. I continue to write scripts and screenplays, most orbiting the occult sensibilities that I enjoy watching in other works. Production of such is frequently cost-prohibitive, but maybe someday, when I am a bit less involved in the day job (retirement is not something I really think will ever happen) that may change. In the meantime, I seize every opportunity to play in that sandbox.

And Halloween is one that comes around every autumn. So while I certainly do treat this time of year with the reverence for the spiritual nature that its history deserves, I also spend a great deal of time in my workshop banging out new props and scenes for my own enjoyment, and hopefully the enjoyment of a small audience of visitors to both home and the haunted venues I have been lucky enough to work with in the last few years.

If you come to my house from August into November you are likely to find skulls lying about, and possibly a whole fully-dressed skeleton sitting in the library or by the bar. While the majority of the props and pieces are ultimately stored for the rest of the year, my bony companions have a permanent home in my studio, along with the “real” paraphernalia of an occult lifestyle. Depending on where I will set up my Halloween displays, some of those items will get intermixed with the heavily modified store-bought variety. I try not to let the cursed amulet fall into the wrong hands. However amusing that would be for me personally.

Truthfully, the creation of my Halloween props is very much a magical act, and they are certainly endowed with magical power. My art is that way to begin with, and in terms of making something that is supposed to connect with that “spooky vibe” people go seeking around the end of the October is going to be even moreso. Coming from my head and my hands and my heart, charged with my joy and imagination, it can be aught else.

So for the month ahead, expect that I will be showing off some of these creations, and the process whereby I make them, here on the blog. If you feel that this is too much a diversion from the usual oh-so-serious tone applied to discussions of magic and the occult, particularly around the time of year most often associated with it, I invite you to take a break and tend to your own cauldron. I assure you as my birthday approaches and we delve into the Deep Water of the Winter Dark there will be more than enough seriousness to go around.

In the meantime, turn on your favorite version of the Addams Family (they all have a unique flavor and I enjoy them all), get out the pumpkin carving kit, and shake the moths out of that old witch costume you used to wear just for parties.

It’s Halloween.



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Time Traveling

Timetravel

Owing to my Good Lady Wife’s completing certification last week at the National Fire Academy, we found ourselves in the vicinity of Gettysburg for the weekend.

For the record, we are history nerds. We have the shirts and the hats that say that. And we enjoy a bit of time travel now and again, as a break from the multifarious pressures that come with the responsibilities of our day jobs. So we had booked ourselves a lodging at an antebellum bed and breakfast for a couple of days wandering about the various historical landscapes.

I know when I was a student in school, the battle that took place in this area on the first few days of July 1863 was taught as a very significant event. That was some time ago, and our schools keep adjusting what is historically important. Perhaps that’s as it should be.

I am a great believer that history should not be presented with blinders on. Nor should it be controlled and coerced into serving any particular agenda.

Things happen. We all experience things happening. We are all traveling through time at the pace of now becoming next, and now became then, in exactly the same unrelenting instant.

And what we experience, and how we react to it, and how we remember it is an absolutely personal thing. So it is safe to say that we may view any event we directly experience very differently than another person who experienced it with us.

This is part of the otherness that defines our human existence. It’s a consequence of being part of a universe that wants to know itself and all it’s potential selves. We can only hold that passing moment in memory, and memory is purely internal.

The American Civil War, and the slice of it that is the Battle of Gettysburg, is one of those things that has so much impact that it’s still being “contextualized” over 160 years later.

As a proper history nerd I try to follow two basic tenets.

Firstly, information should be analyzed to the extent that any bias that is likely to exist can be excised from the data itself.

That is, if you know one account was written by a Northern Abolitionist and another by a Southern Slave Holder, the information needs to get pared down to times, quantities, etc. Certainly the perspective can and should be accessed, to give us all some idea of the human experiences and ideas involved, but it’s not history, it’s the way the author viewed history at the time.

Which brings us to the second rule, people in history cannot, and should not, be judged or understood by the modern views we now hold.

Our present sensibilities are vastly different from the combatants of the American Civil War, from the Spanish Conquistadors, from the Roman Centurions, or any other person that has lived in a different period of time. Social media is rife with commentary about the differences between “Boomers”, “Gen X”, “Millennials”, and “Gen Z” and this is just among generations that we’re born since the Second World War. How then do we have the hubris to presume we “understand” the motivation of an Antebellum population?

This is why I prefer time travel to historical research. As the Doctor has said, we time travelers point and laugh at archaeologists.

Time travel is not an easy thing to do, of course. Absent a flux capacitor, temporal rotor, or warp drive, you really are tasked with finding someplace where the forces that perpetuate the illusion of linear time are relatively weak. These are becoming harder and harder to find in a modern global world interconnected with telecommunications equipment. But you can find them. And you can learn to ignore the distractions that can remind one of calendar dates and modern tech.

Find the ghosts can help.

I’m still not sure personally if ghosts aren’t simply other time travelers. Certainly we have the stories of ghosts that echo the horrible circumstances of their deaths. To the spiritualist and medium these sad beings remain because of the trauma they experienced, leaving a permanent imprint, or the presence of an unquiet spirit.

But there are lot of ghosts who simply are seen engaged in the normal activities of their life, or perhaps engaged in an emotionally intense event, like a pitched battle. In these cases, it is not impossible that we are simply peering past the walls of linear time and viewing the events that are happening just over there in the cosmic everpresent.

Several of the ghosts I have run into in my life look just like regular people. They don’t look “dead”, still have their heads and hands and aren’t bleeding profusely. As they walk past, some of them nod and smile, just as we would if we met in the hallway or on the street inside the same space-time.

They’re just slightly outside that space-time, and as such these moments can be brief and end abruptly. Almost as soon as one perceives the true nature of the encounter, one turns to look again and they’re gone.

We understand about as little of the true nature of time and space as we do the nature our own spirits. The tangibility of the meat suit, and the apparently “real” material world it inhabits, is, even to modern physics, not an entirely absolute thing. Physicality as we experience it may simply be another illusion, a limitation our our perception of the universe around us.

Time and space in our dreams is nothing like what we live in daily. It is non-linear, it is certainly non-physical, and frequently defies logical causality. Imagination is as ephemeral, so it’s a very difficult proposition to prove that the existence of the mind is bounded by the physical world and the apparent flow of linear time.

If you’re not a history nerd, it may surprise you to learn that the Spiritualist movement has it’s roots in the period following the American Civil War and in Europe following the Crimean War a couple of decades later. In both cases, there was an horrific loss of life on a scale not experienced before. Many of the dead were lost far from home, sometimes interred in mass graves with few markers. And still others were listed as “missing” which means the bodies were never identified.

In the era before modern embalming had become viable, there simply was no way to ever bring these dead men home. Such methods as existed (and they were largely experimental) were open only to the rich, who had not lost their wealth to the fortunes of war.

This left loved ones with no sense of closure. Spiritualism, with the trappings of the séance, table turning, spirit trumpets and talking boards offered mourning survivors a solace that they did not find in traditional religion. With the belief that the dead could be contacted, a wider acceptance that they remained in semi-tangible form as visible ghosts became more and more prevalent. Soon, spirits and ghosts began to expand beyond the shades of those passed on to include the shades of things that had never been alive.

The “ghost” of Abraham Lincoln’s funeral train is a widespread story across the parts of the country where his final journey passed on the way from Washington, D.C. to Illinois. Even for the animist, it’s hard to expect that the locomotive and cars that made that journey are spending eternity repeating the trip, particularly since the ghost of Lincoln himself rarely features in the stories.

We can accept that this is a mass delusion, of course. We can say that the trauma of the war and the culmination of that in the assassination of the President created a national myth that caused people to see that ghost train.

Or we can suggest that this same trauma has weakened the walls of space-time in some locales, and that we are still seeing the train as it passed on that fateful trek.

The same may be said for the phantom patrols and the ghost battles and other hauntings reported at Gettysburg and other battlegrounds of the American Civil War. It is not an exclusive experience to that event, either. I had a friend tell me they had a similar response to the battlefield of Culloden, in Scotland.

When we spill that much blood and pain and hate, it may not be possible to close the wounds for a very long time.

Culloden was the end of the Jacobite Rebellion. Gettysburg, though the war would continue for almost another two years, would signal the ultimate defeat of the Confederacy. In fact, there is one moment that historians will point to as the turning point in the war. That is what is known as Pickett’s Charge.

On July 3rd, after two days of battle with territory changing hands several times, it looked as though the Army of Northern Virginia under Robert E. Lee had the upper hand. There were still a handful of entrenched positions held by the Federal troops, but if they were broken, and put to retreat, Lee would command the supply lines that fed into Washington, D.C. and capturing the United States capital would have been much more likley.

If that had happened, the Confederate States of America might have continued to exist for some time, been recognized as a legitimate entity by other world governments, and institutionalized African slavery continued for some time, financed by the desire to feed cotton into the burgeoning mills of the awakening Industrial Revolution.

Alternatively, the area of North America between Mexico and Canada might have splintered into a number of small nations similar to Europe. The Westward Expansion that followed the Civil War would not have occurred as it did, and the vast wealth of natural resources would not be harnessed under a single banner, but squandered and fought over for decades. Alliances and pacts like those that precipitated World War I in Europe would surely have similarly volatile results in the Western Hemisphere, and the Twentieth Century could easily have been marked by constant international warfare with very little progress.

I’m sure some of us could argue that the Twentieth Century was marked by constant international warfare, and frankly we don’t seem to be making much headway in the Twenty-first, but we sew the seeds and see what will sprout in the future. Time travel doesn’t always help us see what’s coming. Because it’s complicated.

On July 3rd, 1863, General Pickett ordered his men forward against the enemy line, to “take the Yankee position” at a place called the Angle. To get there, they had to run down a rise across open territory, cross over a fence, a ditch, a road, and a stone wall, before reaching the enemy position.

If you stand on that terrain today, you wonder at what possessed them to attempt something like this. It’s clearly suicidal. It was a really bad idea. The commanding officers should have known that. They may have known it, but they chose to ignore it.

picketts-charge
This low spot on the battlefield is where Pickett’s men met the Northern line, sword to throat and bayonet to belly, while minié balls and grapeshot whizzed around them like buzzing flies.

The din of battle is long gone, and as one descends into this shallow depression, it becomes eerily quiet. The birds stop singing. The crickets don’t chirp. There is nothing but the whisper of a lonely wind. The walls of time grow thin here. The land still weeps, despite more than a century and a half is past.

When Lincoln said those gathered to dedicate the cemetery located nearby had not the power to consecrate this land as deeply as those who died upon it, he may have peered behind the veil of time, and felt this long lasting scar. The Lincolns were early believers in Spiritualism, having lost a child at an early age. In 1865 the President related a dream where the boy took him through the White House to show Lincoln himself lying in a casket. He would be dead within a few weeks from a bullet to the brain.

We can analyze this and say it was the bravado of a Southern Empire drunk on it’s success and resting against the wealth brought to it by the subjugation of other human beings. We can assign a reliance on military training referencing the Napoleonic Wars as recent to Lee and his generals as we are to Viet Nam. Pickett, who survived the slaughter, responded when asked about why it failed said “I believe the Yankees had something to do with it.”

Not far from this site is a farm owned by former U.S. President Eisenhower. The period of the Eisenhower presidency is a source of much nostalgia in this country. During this time the more or less intact U.S. industrial complex was tasked with rebuilding both Allied and defeated nations. The economic growth was unparalleled, and propelled the U. S. A. to the top of the world scene, challenged only by an injured but pragmatic Soviet Union.

Eisenhower, before becoming president, was Supreme Commander of Allied Forces in the European Theater of Operations. He is widely considered to be the primary architect of the June 6, 1944 invasion of Europe commonly called D-Day.

I did not have the opportunity to see the beaches when I was in Normandy back in the 1990s. I was there on business, and never got that far west. But I am familiar with what was called the Atlantic Wall.

I can only imagine Eisenhower and his advisors looking at the obstacles they faced. They had to land on an open beach, covered by machine gun and artillery placements, a vast trench and tunnel network, barbed wire, land mines, and heavy concrete obstacles. Should they survive that they had to get up cliffs in some cases, and then take those fortified positions.

If the assault failed, if they didn’t clear the beaches before sundown and make it possible to bring ashore more troops and tanks and supplies, then they might never be able to break the Nazi grip on Europe. The horror and oppression of the Third Reich and the Holocaust would remain unchallenged. The Allied Nations ultimately might fail, and certainly could not maintain against it.

It was going to be a bloody violent action, and there was only a slim chance of success.

But in the end, there was no other option open to Eisenhower, so he made the decision to order the attack.

The same way Pickett sent his men down that hill toward the Northern lines.

In the end, the outcome of both battles was the better one for humanity. The oppressor lost.

The failure of Pickett’s charge was the end for the South. They withdrew on the Fourth of July, and essentially remained on the run back to Virginia, where they were ultimately forced to surrender in 1865.

The Confederate States of America ceased to be a nation, and was subject to re-admission to the United States of America. As a consequence, Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, made in January 1863 before Gettysburg, served as the impetus for the 13th Amendment which actually abolished the slave trade in the U.S.

That’s the short version we got in grade school. Over the years I have learned about martial law being declared in New York City to put down draft riots, the fact that the Emancipation Proclamation only applied to the states that were no longer under Lincoln’s control, and numerous instances of political compromise and military ambition that may have prolonged the conflict and increased the suffering.

This is not to say that the cause was not just and right. But we are harming our ability to learn from history by oversimplifying it. We encourage the growth of falsehoods that become rallying points for bad ideas. We tend to learn to put things in binary terms. Black and White. Us and Them.

That never ends well.

gubment-cow
After the pronounced weight of the battlefield, it was an amusing irony to find that the cows on Eisenhower’s farm were obediently standing in the same location as the guide map showed them.

The period of his presidency is looked back upon as a time of relative order and stability, but beneath the surface the Cold War and the turmoil of the 1960s seethed and bubbled, waiting only for a spark to set it off.

In only a few years the world would come the closest it ever has to an all out nuclear war, and another U. S, President would be assassinated as he drove through the streets of Dallas.

Well behaved cows aside, we are always just one second away from collapse. Physicists say that holding the universe together uses more energy than letting it fall apart. We see the falling apart -entropy- as the arrow of forward time. This is one of the reasons that modern science initially spurned the idea of time travel. It takes more energy to reverse things than there is in the universe, so you can never go back.

However, “back” and “forward” are potentially the limitations of our perception, much like our inability to see wavelengths of light in the infrared and ultraviolet with our poorly evolved meatsuit eyes. Everything exists in the now, but our wee brains can’t take it all in. We have developed a kind of psychosis to shield us from the incomprehensible everpresent, and that is this notion of unidirectional linear time.

Which is why I prefer to time travel. I hope that this little trip has been entertaining to you. I understand it may be a bit heavier fare than you expected, but we are descending down into that Winter Dark, when thoughts of death and doom are closer to the surface, and it is never a bad thing to remember how close we are to the footsteps of chaos.

The American Civil War did not begin with the attack on Fort Sumter. It did not begin with the election of Lincoln, or numerous political appeasements from the beginning of the 19th Century. In some sense the Civil War began with the inclusion of institutionalized slavery in the Constitution. But it is our own long history of barbarity that fuels it, and that has sadly not been resolved.

As I have traveled across the country in the last few months I have seen and heard much to indicate that we are by no means safe from repeating the mistakes of the Confederacy or the Third Reich, or the myriad tyrannies and oppressions that mark our human history. The path forward is never straight, and sometimes it goes through dark territory. Choosing to ignore that creates a certainty that we will stumble upon it.

Back next week.

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To Every Purpose Under Heaven

Human Skill Tree

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.

predators
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.

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The Long Road

Lion Pipe

…some of it’s magic, and some of it’s tragic, but I had a good life all the way

He Went To Paris – Jimmy Buffet

This was supposed to be a short article. It’s a short week in the US due to the Labor Day holiday, and that means cramming a lot more into less time. Also, I spent a good part of the last week driving (40 hours in the vehicle according to the travel clock) across the country, and that is more exhausting than it used to be.

I set out from South Texas to Middle Tennessee, and after a few days there on business, pressed north and east to my birthplace in the hills of Eastern Kentucky.

It’s been a little over a year since my father passed from cancer. I ended up going through his things with my mother and brother, as people do. This had not been my plan, but it’s a part of the rituals of life we all are connected together by.

I have said before that I am not close to my “blood” family, preferring the company of my chosen family instead. I don’t know that this is unusual, but society seems to make a bigger deal of it than is healthy. There is no great reason for this disconnect other than that we simply have very little in common, and that has been the case as long as I can remember.

I have always had a wandering spirit and inquisitive mind, and have never been satisfied to make small talk and keep up with what was happening with the neighbors. My youngest says that I am a changeling, which is as fair an explanation as any for my unusual outlook and vast difference of personality from my parents, sibling, and much of the rest of that community. I was born weird. I remain so. I am both contented with, and proud of, my weirdness.

Yet we ofttimes find ourselves attached in ways we were not aware of, or expecting. This was one of those times. Long trips can bring about a sense of melancholy. Hours spent watching the miles go by invites contemplation of the world passing outside the windows. Or at least it does for this wandering spirit and inquisitive mind. The trip from Texas to Kentucky was not a new one, though I have made it infrequently. But such journey’s stir memories. Most recently I had made this trip to see my father after his cancer diagnosis. Before that I had driven up to attend the funeral of my high school art teacher. Both trips had impacts. Both trips came up in my mind as I drew nearer to the mountains.

And the mountains themselves had an effect on me. I do miss them. I do not deny a deep connection to the rocks and the trees and the hills, even though the negative aspects of culture are still abhorrent to me. It is a constant source of conflict that I want the broader perspective of life near the big city, but long for the solitude and freedom of wandering in the woods. I have still not resolved that, and I don’t know that I will. But it was nice to feel the energy of that earth under my wheels. And it was nice to feel the energy of my current home and the familiar spirits around it as I returned.

bill-monroe
At the side of Nashville’s Ryman Auditorium, the original home of the Grand Ol’ Opry, are statues of some of the pioneers of country music. This one, with it’s own historical marker, represents Mr. Bill Monroe. Mr. Monroe was a native of Kentucky like me, and is remembered as the Father of Bluegrass, a musical style that merged the Celtic traditional reels and laments with Southern gospels and other influences. Bluegrass was undoubtedly the forerunner of country music, and country music was at least a god parent of rock and roll and all that came after it. It is right and fitting that Mr. Monroe is honored in this way, but I actually knew him as a human being. When I was younger, he and several other prominent “country legends” still played Saturday nights in small venues, school gyms, and country fairs. It is strange to encounter someone you knew while they lived as monument.

This unquiet nature within us is part of the human condition, I think. We are only able to realize our identity when confronted with otherness, and otherness always creates tension. Even among loved ones, and in families. We are all seeking to impose our identities on the world around us, and that perforce means coming up against the walls of other’s identities.

I spend a lot of time in my own head, obviously. I think that anyone who has the weird bent probably does. Being content to look upon things as being “just because” or even worse “God’s plan” is not within us. It leaves a bad taste in our mouths. I bristle at the scent of anything mildly dogmatic.

And on this journey, I was confronted so many times with such dogmatic thinking. People knew–knew without question– exactly how I should feel, and exactly why I felt that way, and expected quiescent cooperation in their version of my reality. This after several decades of my obvious and overt weirdness, and vocal proclamation that my viewpoint was not so, and would never be so, and that my viewpoint was not wrong, only different.

If anyone out there knows the frustration of someone trying to fix you, you have my sympathies. Remaining genteel and cordial in such situations is exhausting. I think this is much truer than that I put a lot of miles under me.

There certainly were positive aspects to the visit. I managed to see some people I had not seen in years, and enjoyed a brief time in their company where my longtime oddness was accepted unchallenged. And I spent much time in contemplation.

My father’s death did have an impact on me, even though we did not always get along. For my part I tried to make him understand that I was just never going to be who he thought I was, or should be, and I hope that was enough. I did not expect to cure a half-century of mixed emotions in a few hours, and I am not sure that “cure” is the right word. This constant idea that we need to “heal” ourselves seems a New Age dogma that I don’t want to participate in. I am the sum total of my experiences. I am the shards of memory that I have of those experiences, good and bad. And so is everyone else.

I do understand, from the many years I have read psychology and psychiatry texts, that some emotions and traumas can be debilitating. They can cause people to be “broken” and unable to live fulfilling lives.

I began this journey through psychology because of my father. It was his first major in college, and I was exposed to the books and materials at an early age. The same is true for the art that I have always pursued as my own refuge, and will hopefully make a full time career in coming years.

It took a year, and this journey, and going through the relics of his life, to make these things, and other positive memories, what come up more often when I think of him. This was not the first reaction that I had just after he passed. So perhaps there is some “healing” to that, but maybe not. In either case it is an organic thing that comes from time and experience and memory, and not a goal to be pursued by some externalized ritual.

At least not in my viewpoint, and your mileage may vary. I ran across a comment on social media a few weeks ago regarding the “ancestors”. It smelled of New Age pablum and a healthy dose of cultural appropriation, as do many such comments on social media in the esoteric topics.

I personally do not maintain an altar of the ancestors or perform rituals related to such belief. To me it feels like I am stealing from indigenous cultures to begin with, even though “we all have ancestors”. That is true, of course, but of the ancestors I know, there is always the layers of emotional baggage that comes from living life with them, and dealing with that otherness I described above. Good and bad, we’ve all got it. Some of it is worse than others, but our memories of these people color our thinking about them.

There’s a context that one cannot think of something without immediately bringing to mind it’s opposite. So for every pleasant and positive memory, there’s another less comforting one lurking out there. The trick, of course, is to reach the point where the better ones can outweigh the rest in the final analysis. And that’s a process that I don’t think comes from a ritualized veneration. Again, your mileage may vary.

brass rubbing
This brass rubbing is one of several in our collection, now grown by some we retrieved from storage in Kentucky. They had been in my wife’s grandmother’s house, and store since she passed away some years ago. They are important in some ways because the practice is now largely prohibited (in order to preserve the brasses) and because they were made by my wife and her mother and sisters in England. So there is both human history and personal history here. I hope that I have instilled in my children enough respect for the legacy of humanity that such things will have value to them when I am long gone from the world. But in the end, things only have the value we give them. These have no actual purpose.


The ancestors that I didn’t know, or knew only by abstraction, through the honeyed (or not) memories of others who did know them are not altogether real to me. I don’t feel connected, beyond the basic awareness that we share genetic material.

Yes I am, because they were.

But I honestly doubt that any of them thought of me with any kind of depth of perspective. They were simply too busy trying to survive in a hard scrabble world.

Don’t get me wrong. I respect the idea of the ancestors, and I am aware of some bits and pieces of the history that go around them (good and bad).

But our family line was far from landed gentry. There’s a general understanding that at least one branch were brought to the Colonies as indentured servants acquired from debtor’s prisons. They escaped the tobacco plantations of Virginia by crossing the Appalachians and settling on the frontier. There was some intermarriage with the native peoples, Cherokee, I’m told. But there’s precious little documentation to any of this, as it’s very long ago and, well, the names may have been changed to protect the guilty.

Certainly one can find our various family names in the northern parts of Wales even today. There’s a great likelihood that my people came from there, excepting the one’s who were already here. We have no great immigrant story of entering through Ellis Island or achieving wealth and fame from humble roots in the tenements of New York.

Many of the people who came west from Virginia and the Carolinas remained in the mountains, and their insular culture continues to the present day. Life was not easy. Living off the land was simply the nature of things, and continued well into the 20th century. We hunted and trapped and grew much of what we needed, and the grocery store was simply a subsidy to that old way of doing things. My parents were born into a world without electricity or running water or air conditioning or refrigeration. My children were born into the era of worldwide communication and instant internet presence.

I wonder what the ancestors would make of all that? I’m not sure they’d consider it progress.

mural plaque
My own monument in metal. Some 35 years ago I painted a wall in what was then the extension campus of Morehead State University. The building changed hands a couple of times, and I had assumed the work had been painted over or the wall removed during a remodel. Recently friends made me aware of it’s survival .

Last Friday I stopped by to try and get a decent photo without the glare on the plexiglass. I suppose there’s some irony in that attempts to protect it end up making it nigh impossible to experience without reflections from the long windows and overhead fluorescents. Such is the price of fame I suppose.

The receptionist at the medical clinic that now occupies the building was perplexed at my efforts to get a photo. She seemed even more incredulous to learn that I was the actual artist.

I have become to that community a name on a wall, without context save to the remaining locals who “knew me when I was alive.” Like Mr. Monroe and the man whose bones rest under that brass in England, I am a disconnected memory of someone you may have once heard about. There’s a certain peace in that, really.

Sitting with my old friend last Saturday night and covering all the many things that had passed in the great gap of time since we were last in the same room, I mentioned casually that I expected with modern medical advancements and trying to live healthier that I would make it into my 130s.

He responded that even at 130 it will be too short a life.

In the end we are the coalescence of some ineffable energy that struts our brief span, and then disburses. What remains of us in this world is the memory of us, in the minds of the others, who will pass on some smaller version of that memory to people as yet unborn, until the sparks get smaller and smaller.

I did say that such journey’s make us melancholy. But that should also remind us to live while we are living. With that thought I will thank you for enduring my ramblings and invite you to return next week when hopefully my perspectives will be less personal and more profound.

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Returning to the Earth

World

And I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth were passed away, and there was no more sea.

Revelations Chapter 21, Verse 1 – King James Bible

I’ll leave you a moment to contemplate the irony that the above quote is being used to introduce Card XXI. If you have read last week’s article, you no doubt picked up on my fascination with the last book in the Christian Bible. I am not Christian by any means, but I was raised in a community that was tacitly Christian, and even the non-church going folk were believers. It was also an insular community which did not place a great deal of value on scholarly pursuits, so outside of an old tattered copy of Grimm’s Fairy Tales, some Childcraft Encyclopedias my parents bought on payments, and a handful of comic books, the Bible was the only available reading material for much of my youth.

Revelations was also the most magical and mystical of the books, with things like dragons and monsters and beasts full of eyes with six wings and horses with peoples heads, scorpion’s tails, and lion’s teeth. Certain more interesting for a young person with a penchant for weird than all that begatting stuff.

And as noted in last week’s article, the World is not what it started out to be.

world-RWS-tarot
The last of the Major Arcana, at least according to the order that Mr, Arthur Edward Waite puts them in.

The World is represented as a nude woman, with a sash winding around her. She holds a wand or scepter or baton in either hand. She appears inside an oval or ellipse that may be made of laurel leaves, like the traditional Roman crown of honor and victory. In the corners of the card, inside clouds, are the heads of a person, and eagle, a bull, and a lion. The background of the card is blue. There is no visible land or water.

Typically this card is seen as attainment, completion, or totality. Lately it has also come to be associated with Mother Nature, or Mother Earth, as the New Age, pagan, witchcraft and occult communities become more aware and concerned with the conditions on the planet, and the impact our tenancy is having on it. Yet neither of these associations is in keeping with the original images to be found on the earlier versions of these cards.

In the Visconti Sforza deck, we find this card represented by two cherubs or children (such as the missing twins from the Marseilles version of the Sun card) who hold up an orb containing a castle. This castle represents the City of Holy Jerusalem, which is said in verse 2 of Revelation 21 to descend from out of heaven to signal the new Utopian world following the trials of the End Times. Holy Jerusalem, and it’s measurements, worked out by mystics and bible scholars in the early Christian centuries, serves as the basis for the Gothic cathedral, and the numerous mystic, magical, and masonic rituals and traditions associated with those buildings. It’s also where we get the gold-paved streets and gates of pearl that are frequently assigned to heaven itself by modern evangelicals.

heavenly jerusalem
The “New Heaven and New Earth” as envisioned in early Renaissance Tarot. This pair of cherubs may have been the source for some Marseilles decks that have two children below the Sun. On those cards the glory of the “New Jerusalem” is replaced by the face of the solar deity. That this is not a Sun card is evidenced by the fact that the Visconti-Sforza Sun is a single cloud-mounted cherub holding aloft the red head of Helios. This card then must be the World, since no other trump is missed. It actually makes a good deal of sense that this follows the Last Judgement scenario, since this is the timeline of the Revelations narrative.

As a sequel to the Judgement Card this makes far more sense than a more or less pagan lady in the altogether. This is especially so if Huson’s theories about some of the Tarot imagery coming from the early Christian mystery plays. These were designed to teach biblical truth to a largely illiterate population. As such, many of them were made much more elaborate so as to be engaging and memorable. Even then, the movie was often much flashier than the book.

Huson also relates a version of the World where it is not our Gaia-esque figure here, but Christ himself. In fact, the image he offers I recall from my art history class as Christ Pantocrator, which is “Christ, King of the World”. This also would seem to be a more apt follower to the apocalyptic Judgement card.

Pantocrator is very frequently shown inside a mandorla, which is the official term for the elliptical or oval shape represented in RWS as a laurel wreath. The mandorla is an artistic convention, used to express a sacred or otherworldly space. It is frequently occupied by Christ, or the Mother Mary, or God Almighty, and often includes a company of angels, holy personages, and other important people, like the heads of the local church, nobles and chieftains, and particularly people who paid the painter.

mandorla-triptych
A trio of holy personages emerging from that rather odd looking shape called a mandorla. The leftmost is obviously not Christian, but it is not certain whether this usage came from exposure to the Christian model or vice-versa. 6

The center piece is Christ Pantocrator, from a Byzantine gospel book. You’ll no doubt recognize the sacred animals that appear in the Wheel and the World cards. Here they represent the four authors of the Gospel, but their origin is in the Old Testament, and in Revelations. The attribution of this specific meaning is part of the writing of the early church fathers, who struggled with a need to define what these strange images were. Later occultists would give them astrological attachments, or perhaps they rediscovered those that had been purloined by the church.

In any case the four beings of the corners are common to both the Asia image on the left, and that of the Virgin on the right. In the case of the Virgin and Child the mandorla itself is made of circling angelic beings identified as either cherubim or seraphim. These also stem from the vision of Ezekiel.

Regardless of it’s origins the mandorla represents a gap between our cosmos and the divine one. It is worth considering this when looking upon the visage of the World in the final Tarot trump.

Mandorlas seem to make their way into religious art from icons found in the Eastern Church, which were inspired by Byzantine mosaics. But we can also find mandorlas in the arts of Arabia, India, and China, so it is entirely possible they made their way to Europe on the Silk Road from Asia roots.

They might best be described a visual depiction of a rift in space. The inference is universally that we are seeing something not in this world.

Our idea of the “aura” may stem from these depictions. They are sometimes multi-hued or rainbow colored. That this spectral effect is the product of the spatial separation versus and emanation from the beings inside it is not certain. Persons having such encounters even today are not clear on the experience, but the descriptions seem to be close to this phenomenon.

This shouldn’t be confused with the idea of the mandala, although, as another mystical visualization, there is some common ground. The purpose of the mandala is to serve as an aid to meditation and understanding by depicting a spiritual realm as a sacred space. The space is typically centered on the deity or deities to whom the mandala is dedicated. Moving outward from that center we may find subordinate deities, associated deities, avatars, aspects, even depictions of demons and enemy beings trampled or defeated. The space is frequently divided into quarters, and there are things like gates and guard houses, populated by protective spirits, the whole making up a personal microcosm for the deity that is his or her place of power. In the making of the mandala the artist is meditating on the various principles involved in each depiction, and when finished, if permanent, then others can make this same mystical journey.

Let’s consider the more elaborate of the Christian mandorlas in a similar vein, with depictions of the various orders of angels, then a ring of saints and martyrs, then important personages perhaps living at the time of the creation of the piece. There are striking similarities, and while the idea of meditation is very different in East and West, it may be said that the Christian image does evoke a similar inward journey.

I’ll digress a bit further here and look at the similarity between these art objects and the sacred sand paintings of the American Southwest indigenous peoples. These share much in common with the mandala. They use a very symbolic language to represent gods and demi-gods and sacred narrative. Like some the Buddhist mandalas, these are also meant to be temporary constructions, destroyed once the magic is made, to prevent contamination by malevolent spirits.

We might further include the various Meso-American “calendar wheels” in this discussion, though their abstraction makes them a bit less directly so. Yet they do express a means of defining the cosmos, and that is in keeping with the ideology in the World card. And it underscores the importance we ought to ascribe to it, whether we come to it from a neo-pagan ecological perspective or an antique Judeo-Christian one.

Those four critters in the corners we’ve seen before. They are in the corners of the Wheel Of Fortune. As noted in the article for that card, they come from biblical sources, firstly the “living beings” in Ezekiel’s vision. In John’s Revelation they are referred to as the four beasts that surround the heavenly throne (though he gives them a lot more eyes). This is further testament to their origin as surrounding an image of a male Christ rather than a female Gaia.

In church dogma they are representative of the authors of the Four Gospels. But they are also astrologically Aquarius (human), Scorpio (eagle), Taurus (bull) and Leo (lion). Thus they are also then equal to Air, Water, Earth, and Fire, and subsequently to the suits of Swords, Cups, Pentacles, and Wands. They can also be seen as the Four Winds, Four Directions, Four Archangels, etc. depending on which system you want to employ them in. Very versatile these critters.

world-cosmic-tarot
In the Cosmic Tarot we are presented with an image very similar to the one Pamela Colman Smith has created. Yet there is an exoticism, and possibly also an eroticism, in how the figure of the earth is represented. This seems certainly more accessible than the woman in the RWS version.
world-hidden-realm-tarot
The Tarot of the Hidden Realm gives us Mother Earth in a verdant green with all her bounty exploding forth from her. The Gospel animals are gone, as they were never part of Faerie, and we are left with lushness and perhaps even lustiness.
world-shadowscapes-tarot
Stephanie Law’s magnificent Shadowscapes Tarot echoes the Hidden Realm in a number of ways. Her World though, is a regal queen, garbed in mystery, and keeping her own counsels.
world-wildwood-tarot
Finally, the Wildwood Tarot, with it’s Celtic shamanism, gives us the World Tree. I’m a tad concerned about calling this a “Celtic” ideation. Yggdrasil is a Norse concept. It seems a bit clumsily borrowed here to present an idea of the universal ideal, or knowledge, or spirit, when perhaps there are better more truly Celtic symbols that might be used.

With Tarot, one is always walking a balance between the work of the artist and interpreter, and what the actual images on the cards bring to mind. This quasi-intuitive approach provides for an infinite number of narratives when we lay the cards out. But we must remember how much our reactions, conscious or otherwise, may color that narrative. It is the fine line between, what are the cards telling us, and what are we telling the cards.

Let’s drop back and look at them elementally though. As in the Four Elements of Air, Water, Earth, and Fire. In the center then, our figure of “the World” becomes by extension Quintessence – The Fifth Element. This element is styled as “Spirit” and this then tells us that the World, inside its sacred space is Spirit. It is not the mundane. It is not the physical, but it is that which transcends the physical. It is infinite, and eternal. It is everything and the nothing by which everything comes into existence. It is time and it is timeless.

This idea is hardly diminished if we look backward to the depiction of this as a Utopian paradise that comes after “the first heaven and the first earth were passed away” or even if it comes to us as a patriarchal and somewhat authoritarian depiction of the “King of the World”. We may still find here Ma’at, that cosmic truth and order that is nature itself.

As I noted in the discussion of the visionary portions of Revelations, the descriptions of things speak of a person’s struggling to share a deeply changed perception of the nature of reality with someone who has not had that experience, using the limitations of our linguistic structure. And further these may be couched in the concepts of the time they were written. Yet within them is a kind of ecstasy that they deeply want to share, but are frustrated in doing so. We are left with the imperfect version, with wild symbols, and tyrannical avatars, disturbingly violent depictions, and in some cases overt pornography. When these broken shadows are encountered by the less enlightened, misinterpretation is inevitable, and fear and hatred may be the result. It is the lack of the complete understanding of the experience, of the true nature of the cosmos we inhabit, of it’s existence beyond the physical corporeal and provable, that engenders otherness, and from otherness stems iniquity, envy, and apprehension.

The physical world, with it’s greed and privation, it’s war, famine, pestilence, and death, are the result of its own incomplete state. Where the spirit prevails, peace and harmony are possible. Where a greater vision is encompassed, happiness naturally ensues. Yet the limitation of the physical, the dependence upon finite resources, on structure and ego, continue to create such otherness, and disturb such natural order.

The physicists call this entropy. It is the tendency of the universe to fall apart. In a physical world, more energy is required to keep order. Chaos is easier. The End of Time is marked by everything becoming so broken and so far apart that there is simply not enough energy left to put it back together into any sort of ordered form. Like Humpty Dumpty, our universe has taken a great fall.

Yet physics also says energy can neither be created or destroyed, only moved from point to point. So in that end, at the Great Dark Silence that awaits, there must still be that same energy that was there.

That energy is the Quintessence. It is the Spirit. The actual living thing that brought about the Cosmos in order to know itself. And that cannot be destroyed. The World is, and was, and will be.

Next week I will have one more article in respect to the Major Arcana. I have enjoyed this exploration. I must admit it has led me down some rabbit holes that even I did not expect. I hope they were not too obscure. And if they were, well, we occultists are by definition in the obscurity busy.

Please join me next time.

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