Culture – Page 3 – A Sacred Life

February 8, 2023February 8, 2023

Time and Space

I spent the last few days in New Orleans, and no, I was not aware that it was Mardi Gras, or rather, that Carnival had already begun. New Orleans, like the Romans, enjoy a good party. It was, however, very nice to see the French Quarter returning to its former liveliness after two years of privation and and loss during the pandemic. New Orleans is a scrappy town, of course, and one used to making it through rough times.

My objective was just to get away for a few days, eat some really good food, probably drink a little more than I ought, and wander through the ancient streets of the Vieux Carré looking for the strange and unusual. And in that I was successful.

This is my fifth or sixth trip to our neighboring city on the Gulf. During my first visit, on Halloween in the mid twenty-teens, I was intent on finding shops that provided magical supplies. It had been a very long time since I had been in what felt like a “real” witchcraft shop, and I was hoping New Orleans, with it’s reputation for voodoo and vampires, would have something to fit the bill. It did. Several in fact.

The latter trips were mostly occupied by a writer’s conference, which is happening again finally as we rise from the plague years. While this limits my time to roam around, it also occurs in the heart of the French Quarter. The time I get to explore is well rewarded by short strolls to nearby shops.

We came over for my birthday in 2020, in defiance of COVID and the World’s Ending and out of a desire to put some little cash into an economy struggling hard against the loss of tourist dollars. The Quarter was oddly quiet. Many of the restaurants and shops had closed up completely, rather than trying to meet expenses with few customers. But we found the few that were there, and made good friends among them, and that is one of the very pleasant reasons I go to New Orleans.

To be accurate, I go to the French Quarter, whether I am staying there, or in the adjacent Warehouse district, I am generally in the that bend of the river for which the Crescent City is named. It is the old town, dating to the first occupation by French colonials, and dripping in history with pirates, writers, adventurers, witches, vampires, and voodoo. I have visited the Garden District and gone up into town to the New Orleans Museum of Fine Art, but the reason I go is to walk those ancient sometimes broken streets and feel the years upon them.

I live in the suburbs of Houston, which despite a heritage going back to the formation of Texas in 1836, is probably one of the more modern cities in the country. We did, after all, go to the moon from here, so there’s always been a kind of impetus to forward momentum that often leaves something lacking. In the sterile steel and glass of downtown, with more and more of its characteristic neighborhoods “gentrifying” into high rises, townhouses, and “trendy” shops and restaurants, I find very little to connect with. When I first arrived almost a quarter century ago, there were places with character, charm, and not a little quirkiness. But with the influx of money and transplant, the ethnic eateries that had served a community for generations were bought out, torn down, and replaced by synthetic simulations of authentic neighborhood diners that are much more palatable to hipsters and millennials who invest in downtown. In Houston, no one seems to be interested in preserving the neighborhoods, or the neighborhoods have already collapsed to the point that there is nothing to preserve. Yet for some reason, we need another Starbucks on another corner.

If there’s a Starbucks in the French Quarter I have not found it. While it is true that there are modern eateries in that sector, they tend to be managed by families who go way back in the restaurant business. Many of the places I patronize there shifted their kitchen facilities to feeding the people who worked for them during the initial days of the quarantine, when they were not able to open up to the public, and those people had no livelihood. I know that some place did that here in Houston, and I imagine others might have. But I also know of prominent chains that almost immediately laid off their entire staff. Arguably this is because such industries operate on a business model of constant income and constant expansion. The New Orleans folks, took care of their own. They reimagined and consolidated operations in order to do that, and they are emerging slowly from the plague years with an operation that is sustainable and recognizing of the human element. In a time when we are confronted by billionaire capitalists who routinely ignore the human for meager margin increases, caring for the waiters and the cooks and the dishwashers counts for a lot in my book.

In my trips to the Crescent City I have only been treated less than warmly in two shops, and I have never gone back to them. In all the rest, people are friendly, helpful, engaging, and interested. They enjoy what they are doing and they enjoy the people who come into their businesses. That is how things used to be in the world, long, long before it could be blamed on COVID or Amazon or Walmart. People connected with people. When I was a child going into town for a shopping trip was a social occasion. You saw people you hadn’t seen since the last trip. You caught up on the news. The store and the barber shop and the soda counter were gatherings for community. They were generational. There were always a group of older folks in these places, that knew you, because they knew your mother when they were your age. I grant you I lived in a rural setting, but I can’t imagine that the tone and substance were much different in the city neighborhoods in the Northeast or the Midwest, and they certainly had been that way in the South.

Neighborhoods were about expressing culture. The suburbs are about homogenizing it. As more people lost touch with their own culture, and embraced the synthetic simulation of “suburban America”, the depth of our experience, and our connections to each other, became shallower and shallower.

nola-in-and-out — On my phone there are only two additional photos between these shots of my plane landing and taking off. One i posted to Instagram of some new cards I bought at Earth Odyssey and Sassy Magick, and the other was to gauge my child’s interest in something I found in the latter shop. Unplug every now and again. Your real friends will understand, and your “followers” can wait. Don’t be trapped into believing that feeding the social media beast is a real thing. It’s useful if you have a business or an agenda, but for most of us it’s an illusion.

We’ve taken it to the point that interaction now is often entirely simulated. We call it “social media” but it is neither thing. I grant you, you would not be reading this without it, and for that I am grateful. And I cannot say that I have not made connections with people on line, but I do not delude myself into believing that they are as real and binding as the ones I have “irl”.

I have commented before on the illusory nature of the internet experience. Web 1.0 was clunky and slow and sometimes hard to get around, but like those old neighborhoods, it was people interacting with people – albeit over a really really slow dialup connection.

Then Web 2.0 promised us the ability to have fast direct interaction. Corporations seized upon this idea, seeing a profit bonanza in being able to communicate instantly with customers. Until it happened, and the corporations realized how many customers and potential customers, and unhappy customers, and itinerant cranks and absolute lunatics were out there interested in “engagement”. So they hired people to specialize in engagement…until they got caught making AIDS jokes on the Twitter and had to be replaced by “artificial intelligence”.

We have come to the point where a machine requires you to prove that you are human in order to have access to a chat system which requires you to interact with another machine.

I guess the corporations don’t want the bots getting to each other. They might unionize, or start making holocaust jokes on the Twitter or something.

And this is one of the reasons I make periodic trips across the Mississippi to that old weary neighborhood by the Big River.

I could have purchased all the things I got on the internet. I’m sure the ‘Zon had the Tarot cards as cheap if not cheaper and I would not have had to venture forth from my domicile in the day time. And somewhere in some register in some computer in the cloud, some bit would flip, and a tiny modicum of shareholder value would be generated for billionaire investors who already have more money than they could spend in a lifetime even if they were Iron Man and Batman ( which sadly, none of them have imagination enough to do).

And though in a couple of places I was asked to prove I was me, I was never asked to prove I was human (which is probably a good thing, with that elfin bloodline and all). Wandering down those streets I can hear the echoes of all the other humans that have wandered there before me. I guess, if you listen well, enough, you might do that anywhere, but in the old cities, the living relics; the phantoms come right out of the ruins. They are French and Cajun and Creole and Caribbean and African and Spanish and English and Native American and Catholic and Protestant and Voodoun and Pagan and oh so many more. They are the heritage of humanity, a heritage we are in danger of loosing to the synthetic simulation of diversity and ethnicity that is being flattened and packaged by the internet, with a helping hand from mega-corporations who just can’t keep spending on smarter bots to deal with real diversity and individualism.

I grant this rambling has not been as specifically about magic and spirituality as my usual. Well, spirits get interested in a lot of things.

Illusion is a trap that the magician and witch should always be wary of. It is very easy to accept a “sign” that we want to see, even when it isn’t there. And likewise, we can perceive that our lives are “cursed” when it is only the perception that is.

Every now and again we need to take a breather from the interwebs, from the echo-chambers, and be alone with ourselves. We need to remember the sound of our own voice so that we know when we are hearing it.

I’ll leave you with that thought, and hopefully, having had a bit of a break myself, will return to more expected pursuits next week.

February 1, 2023February 1, 2023

An Imbolc Article

Well, I understand that today or tomorrow is Imbolc. Or Imolc. Or Imolg.

I must confess that until recent times, this was not an observance I was too keenly aware of, apart from it being Groundhog Day, of course.

In my younger days, absent access to all the books that are abundant now, and with no computer network whatsoever, let alone all the various flavors of Internet, I had only a couple of sources for what were Sabbats. They referenced the Equinoxes, the Solstices, the Eve of All Hallows, and Walpurgisnacht.

The “Cross-Quarter Days” midpoint between Solstice and Equinox were not enumerated in my references, as they are now in the typical Wheel of the Year. Of course, as I pointed out in my birthday article, we are not really celebrating the Cross-Quarter Days on the astrological day, because the day that sun enters the 15th degree of Aquarius is February 3rd. At least by my charts.

No matter, I am willing to adapt and expand. As I write this a week or so ahead, I am already seeing the Imbolc posts popping up on Instagram and the other social media sites. Which got me going down that ol’ web-search rabbit hole looking for “ye rightwise and true knowledge” of the festival of Imbolc, or Imolc, or Imolg, or…

Well, you see where this is going.

imolc-almanac — In the pages of this year’s Witches Almanac I found yet another spelling as Oimelc. Apparently this is an old Gaelic word for ewe milk, and makes much more linguistic sense to my ears that Imolc or Imbolc or Imolg.

You’ll note that February 2nd here recognizes the Catholic Candlemas, even though it is probably a “stolen” feast day from the old pagan practice. One of the things I like about the Witches Almanac is the pantheist approach of the editorial staff. Catholic witches are a thing. Christian witches are a thing. And if you want blessed candles to bring luck and light in midwinter, what’s the harm. You can always bless them yourself.

I found at least three separate observances (excluding the one largely invented by the Punxatawney, PA Chamber of Commerce) that share the date of the first or second day of February. They are the old Irish tradition of Imolc, the similar old Irish tradition of St. Brigid’s Day, and the also old Irish Catholic tradition of Candlemas, which appears to be an even older Hebrew tradition relating to the Nativity.

So lets work backward here. Candlemas is a Catholic feast day celebrated 40 days after Christmas. It supposedly recognizes the day that baby Jesus was presented to the priests of the Temple in Jerusalem, as part of specific Hebrew ritual. Per the internet, a newborn must be brought into the Temple 40 days after the bris ceremony (the circumcision) and becomes part of the congregation. It is also at this point that the mother is considered to have been ritually purified following birth.

Like many of the ancient Hebrew practices, we can find certain logical precedents for the ritual dates. Forty days is a sacred number in the Old Testament. The Flood was 40 days and 40 nights, for instance. In the New Testament, Jesus spends 40 days in the wilderness, where he faces the temptations of Satan. This can be seen as a specific period of ritual purification as well.

But let’s consider this in the context of the Mother Mary, who was in medieval Europe much more associated with Candlemas than the specifics of the Presentation. Forty days would presumably be long enough for a woman who had given birth to have at least one full menstrual cycle. This would not only signal her return to fertility, but also that any remains of the birth process had be ejected with her menses. This is a reasonable hygienic consideration in ancient times.

In similar fashion, forty days would mean the circumcision of the male child had time to heal, before introducing it to a large group of people and the potential of infection. What perhaps began as basic practices to insure the health and safety of the community, became ritualized in order to perpetuate their practice.

But in medieval Europe, where the practice of circumcision was rare, and Hebrew ritual was not as much a part of the Christian service, these things became dogma. We celebrate this because we do. Yes, there was a meaning, but you don’t need to know that.

And, well, we also need some reason to continue practicing this pagan holiday in the middle of the cold months so we can get more people converted over to the One True Way and all that.

Which brings us to Imolc and St. Brigid. These seem to have survived in Ireland more than in other Celtic regions. There is every indication, however, that a day in early February also had significance in the Teutonic and Anglo-Saxon cultures of central Europe, and may also have been known in Scandinavia. It is most likely that this has more to do with preparing for the agricultural duties of the coming spring.

Imolc is generally roughly translated as “in the belly” and is believed to refer to the pregnant ewes among the all-important sheep of the ancient Irish economy. This getting of the lambs could vary a week or so around the first part of February, but essentially this meant that the sheep would be born about the time that the first grasses were cropping up in the meadows around early to mid-March. This is the point usually when the last hard freeze is past, and planting of the crops can begin, so the pregnant sheep were a good time marker for preparing the seeds, fixing the plows and other farm equipment, and generally shifting from the winter inactivity, to the spring activity.

St. Brigid, the “Mary of Ireland”, is a semi-mythical personage who may have been named after a more ancient goddess Brigid or Bride (and is possibly synonymous with the Welsh Rhiannon, and Gaulic Brigantia) .

The goddess Brigid was one of the Tuatha de Danaan – the People of Donn, which are frequently viewed as elves or faeries. She may have been a triple goddess, or a goddess of triple aspects, but she is identified with poetry (and thus spellsinging or magic) blacksmithing, healing, and livestock. So her feast day celebration on or around the time of Imolc makes much sense as it ties to the activities needed for the approach of spring.

St. Brigid of Kildare is supposedly the daughter of a nobleman and a pagan slave. She was released from her bondage due to her charitable nature tipping off the High King to her special purpose. She is purported to have founded the first convent in Ireland at Kildare, under an ancient sacred oak, thus usurping the old Druid Magic with a new Christian Faith.

She seems to have borrowed a good deal of her namesake’s mythology, but this is not unusual for an early Christian saint whose celebrations are plastered over an ancient pagan feast day. In Ireland which embraces and transformed the Roman Faith into something uniquely Celtic, the gods and heroes march dutifully into sainthood and remain preserved for us. Their continental counterparts were not as fortunate.

So Brigid the goddess and Brigid the Christian saint merged and continued to herald the coming of spring, and through her role as “Blessed Virgin of Ireland” comfortably supplanted Candlemas in the Irish liturgical calendar.

Or so the internet says. But here I am, still trying to figure out where the groundhog came from.

hibernating-cat-day — In my world the deep hibernating critters take the form of lazy tomcats on a Saturday afternoon.

The question here, of course, if whether the Great Floofy One will mistake the House Panther for his shadow and I will be stuck underneath the pair of them for another six weeks.

I guess it could be worse. If it is a longer winter, at least I will stay toasty warm with all that hair.

Yes, I know. The groundhog really isn’t part of the old traditions. Or at least it doesn’t seem to be. But I have that obsessive nature that drives me to look for connections in these things. If a tradition survives on or about the same day as some other tradition, there is some likelihood that they are linked. And I am that guy that just has to know.

Especially if I am trying to work out how any and all of these traditions fit into my own practice and world view. I am not someone who can just accept that we celebrate this day because we do. It needs to mean something to me personally, or I just won’t do it.

So the groundhog apparently is another one of those Pennsylvania Dutch – nee Deutsch things. It survives from a practice in Germany where the local critter was a badger, though the tradition remains the same. If it comes out on a sunny day in early February, winter is going to last another six weeks…which gets us on into April.

Of course, if it’s cloudy and murky on February 2nd, then we get an early spring.

I find this to be counter-intuitive, and I can’t be the only one.

To me, if we’re going by the usual signs and portents, a sunny day would surely mean that spring is on the way. Also, if your local furry critter pops out of it’s burrow on such a day, that would indicate it is no longer in hibernation and that the worst of winter is likely over.

So why should these two signs taken together be considered a sign of six more weeks of cold nasty weather.

My initial thought was that we might be dealing with a proverb type situation such as “counting the chickens before they hatch”. That is, seeing the sun shining and the little beasties out and about in early February was just too good to be true. Best prepare for things to remain bleak for a bit longer, and take the time to lay in more supplies.

Turns out that last bit might be the key to the whole thing. Sort of.

In my digging I ran across another ancient Celtic goddess. Called the Cailleach among other names, she is the “Old Woman of Winter” and seems to occupy a spot opposite Brigid, in the latter’s aspect as goddess of the spring. The Cailleach is the personification of the Winter Dark, the bleak death of the world, the abandonment of the sun, and potentially ruler of nature during the period between Samhain and Beltane.

Being a Winter Dark thing myself, I like her. She’s a goddess I can relate to. Suddenly this thing got a lot more personal.

Wildwood-Imbolc — In looking for images to illustrate the various articles here, I often have recourse to my large collection of Tarot and Oracle cards. In the search for Imbolc, and the larger-than-life personas that lurk beneath it’s surface, I can think of no better resource than the Wildwood Tarot by Mark Ryan and John Matthews, and these wonderful images by illustrator Will Worthington. I have several other decks by this artist, but this is by far the favorite.

The deck is unashamedly Celtic in character, which fits the Imbolc tradition perfectly. You might be able to puzzle out which cards I have chosen, as some of the iconography is traditional, but the way they have been fit into the Celtic shamanistic tradition that Mr, Matthews and his wife Caitlin have developed so well in the last few decades is unique.

Alas there was not an obvious Cailleach card, and the two here (left and center) both felt right. In the parlance of the Wildwood, they are the Ancestor and Hooded Man (Hooded One works as well). They correspond to the more usual Hierophant and Hermit, which I have discussed at length before (and which I frequently associate with my own sometimes larger-than-life persona). They are connected concepts, and both seem to auger here the presence of Winter Dark.

Even though the Ancestor is out in broad daylight, the moon is visible, and the bleak sky portends more snow may be coming. This being reflects the great gulf of time that separates us from our origins, from the known into the unknown, from the dimming light into the apparent continual darkness.

Offsetting them in the role of Brigid/Rhiannon/Brigantia is the Green Woman, apt for a goddess associated with spring arriving. In the deck she corresponds to the Empress, which is also appropriate, with her connection to the fecundity of Venus and matters of birth and fertility in animals and plants.

I cannot recommend this particular deck highly enough, especially for those of us with Celtic roots, or who are pursing a path of nature-based paganism. The imagery alone is worth the price, and the accompanying book is insightful and innovative.

In any case, depending on local tradition, the transition from the Old Woman to the Young Brigid was celebrated on different days. Beltane was an obvious one, because by the first of May any vestige of winter’s grip was well and truly gone.

Practically of course, spring activities begin well before May 1st. The whole month of April is usually occupied in planting and lambing, if not earlier, so another date for the hand-off was around March 25, which is close enough to the Vernal Equinox to argue that as the intended date, plus or minus several years of calendrical confutation.

And still one other tradition takes us all the way back to Brigid’s Day on February 2nd.

While this ties us neatly into Candlemas, Imolc, and St. Brigid, I am sure you are wondering what happened to the groundhog.

Well, it’s not so much the groundhog (or the badger), but the day.

See according to one Scottish tradition, the Cailleach would go out on February 2nd to gather wood in for the rest of winter. Because she was a most powerful witch, she cast a spell for a sunny clear day so that she would not be inconvenienced by poor weather while getting in her provisions.

And thus if February 2nd is bright and sunny, we know the Cailleach is prepared to deliver winter weather on into mid-April. That was the part of the equation I was looking for.

Okay, so I still don’t know where the badger fits into that. But, hey, we don’t need no stinking badgers.

In the early morning hours today, as I was between being asleep and reaching full wakefulness, I was thinking about needing to write this article. An image came into my mind unbidden, as it does sometimes during that hypnogogic state that is not really thinking and not really dreaming, where the subconscious just bubbles things up.

It was a brief vision (if you will) of a small household altar, with the remains of a human skull among the other accoutrements, and the owner’s hand gently stroking it. Through that metadata that accompanies such experiences, I knew that this was the skull of an ancestor, kept reverently and lovingly addressed.

Now, because I do have that obsessive faculty, I can suggest that perhaps this drifted up because in my research I discovered that portions of a skull believed to be that of Brigid of Kildare are scattered across Europe, where they are venerated in various churches and cathedrals. I think perhaps a little piece may have returned to her native Ireland, which seems kind of sad, because the larger portions remain abroad.

I really have not understood the Catholic cult of the relics. I have always viewed it as an economic engine, wherein a particular site was given or recognized as having an object of veneration and power in order to attract pilgrims and their gold. Yes, I am a cynic. I can make the same argument for the sacred wells of the Celtic world, the various Oracles in Greece, and the numerous temples along the Nile. There is and always has been a mercenary component to the practice of ritual and religion.

But that does not, and should not take away the spiritual nature of such a pilgrimage, or the belief in the power of the venerated object or location. I think perhaps that ancestor skull in my early morning vision is a kind of epiphany for that. What we connect to, and hold dear, and revere, is powerful, if for no other reason than that we imbue it with our own power.

I don’t know that many of us have the bones of our ancestors. Some of us, if not most, may have the opportunity to visit those remains in a cemetery or mausoleum, but with the rise in cremation the “scattering of ashes” seems to be severing those links forever.

Relationships with the ancestors can be problematic. The ones that we personally knew, were known to us, “warts and all” and as such potentially offer memories of trauma and disfunction. Past grandparents and maybe great grandparents, they exist as photographs and names only, and what limited stories come down to us. Unless they were celebrated or famous, there’s generally not a lot of detail, aside from names on gravestones or maybe in a family Bible.

So perhaps that’s why we connect to myth figures and saints, and attach our rituals to some tangible remnant of their existence in the ever-changing world we inhabit. We need that assurance that something lasts, that spring will continue to follow winter, even as we enter our own personal Winter Dark. We need to believe that the path is a circle and not simply a road that heads out into the wilderness and then abruptly ends.

That is what I found when looking for Imbolc, anyway. This blog is my own personal journey as much as it is anything else. I remain, for now, on the road.

I will be back next week.

January 18, 2023January 11, 2023

Graveyard Dirt

This article was originally supposed to be focused solely on the magical ingredient in the title. However, recent events here in Houston have inspired me to go a bit afield and discuss something very important in regard to magic, ancestors, and the rights of peoples and cultures.

Last week a rather unusual Egyptian sarcophagus that had been displayed at Houston’s Museum of Natural Science was repatriated to Egypt. The mummy case was a staggering 9 1/2 feet tall and sported a bright green face, leading to it being nicknamed the Jolly Green Giant. My good lady wife and I have seen this case multiple times during visits to the museum’s excellent Egyptian Hall, and we joked about that being one of mine due to the size.

It’s tragic that it was discovered to be stolen from it’s tomb, and had wandered the world through one elicit buyer and another, until the final owner – who may or may not have known it’s provenance -loaned it to the HMNS.

I imagine there’s an extensive audit of the rest of the museum’s collection going on right now, and the pieces across town in the Houston Museum of Fine Art are doubtless receiving equal scrutiny. And they should be. As should every collection in any country besides Egypt herself.

This is a sticky point for artists, archaeologists, diplomats, and the citizens of the world’s various local and indigenous cultures. It is something we need to pay particularly close attention to. If the most reputable museums in the world can be seen to participate in the illegal trade of art and antiquities, then the entire context of the museum system begins to unravel.

These are big questions.

I have had the great good fortune to see Egypt’s antiquities in the old Cairo Museum, and I hope one day to visit the new Egyptian Museum which is state of the art in both education and preservation.

I have also seen seminal pieces of Ancient Egyptian history and culture in the British Museum, the Louvre, the Musee de Beaux Artes in Lyon, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and our own HMNS here. The Met was guilty of purchasing a looted sarcophagus from the same ring of thieves that sold the Giant that was in Houston. It has also since been returned to Egypt, and the Giant’s recovery was a part of that extended investigation.

There’s shaky ground here.

The Met also has a hall dedicated to the Temple of Dendur which was “gifted” to the United States in 1965 to keep it from being swallowed by the rising waters of Lake Nasser. Like the Temples on the island of Philae, and the Temples of Ramesses II at Abu Simbel, this little piece of ancient Egypt was rescued by international efforts, and now has a permanent home on Fifth Avenue.

There are a number of other pieces that were gifts or on loan from either the nation of Egypt, or other museums and private collections. The same is true for the art and antiquities of the other nations and cultures that are in that museum, and other museums around the world.

While we can establish an authentic, and hopefully amiable provenance for Dendur, the same can’t be said for items in the British Museum and the Louvre, which are unquestionably the results of imperial pilfering in the 18th and 19th century. Much of the collection in London can be traced back to Giovanni Belzoni, a former circus strongman that can only loosely be termed an “archaeologist” . While his contributions include the acquisition of giant statues and numerous attractive artifacts for the museum, he is known to have literally trampled on the mummies of the tombs he “discovered” in a search for the shinier prizes.

Another sticking point with the Brits is the Elgin Marbles, so called because Lord Elgin paid to have them collected from the Acropolis in Athens, where they had been lying in pieces for some time, and crated up for shipment back to Merry Olde England. The present government of Greece would like them back, thank you very much, and they have been trying for ages to get international law on their side.

Basically, if you have gotten hold of something that was discovered or stolen in the years after WWII, the international laws and treaties recognize this is bad, and will prosecute, as well as seize your ill-gotten gains and return them to the rightful owner.

But if you happened to be an expanding imperialist nation-state doing it up until the end of the 1930s, the rules are a bit murkier.

The Elgin Marbles are a Greek antiquity. There can be no argument about that. They are the fine sculptured pediment and frieze from the Temple of Athena Parthenos (the Parthenon) on the Acropolis Hill in Ye Olde Athens that was blown apart in 1687 during one of the numerous wars between the Greeks and Ottoman Turks.

But in 1800 when Lord Elgin had them transported, the government of Greece at the time was Ottoman, and they didn’t particularly care, and only when a natively stable Greek government came into place was the issue brought forth. Talks apparently are ongoing even now, to have these returned to the Acropolis, but there are several significant considerations rather than just their illegal taking.

looted-sarcophagus — The name Ankh-en-Ma’at appears on the sarcophagus, but as it is very old and made of wood, it’s not possible to say for certain if this really belonged to that ancient personage. The inscriptions are missing in places, either due to the ravages of time, or the less than ethical way it was handled and stored during it’s journey to the museum. While better artifacts bring bigger bucks, it’s unlikely that everyone in the chain of custody had a curator’s skill or motivation. Being loaned to the Houston Museum of Natural Science may have been the luckiest thing to happen to it since it left Egypt in the mid -2000s.

First of all, people come to the British Museum from around the world to see the Elgin Marbles and Egyptian and Mesopotamian artifacts. I did. It offers an ability for people to get up close and personal to the remains of a culture that otherwise they may only experience through a book or a TV program.

There is also the argument for preservation. This is even more complicated. Let’s just start with events of the last century. During the past 50 years, radical Islamic factions have knowingly destroyed ancient temples and artifacts from non-Islamic cultures because they violate the Quran’s ban on idolatry. Let’s suppose that the political tides brought such a group to power in Egypt. It is entirely possible that the safety of that nation’s heritage might reside in what is left in museums outside her borders.

In fact, the British Museum, the Louvre, and other prominent museums assisted in the removal and temporary curation of many irreplaceable artifacts from Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, fearing the storm of war would destroy them, or that they would be systematically looted by government officials desperate to fund their military campaign. I don’t know to what extent these pieces have been returned. The stability of the region is not by any means certain.

And it’s not only religious iconoclasm that is an issue. Mao’s Cultural Revolution practiced the same kind of eradication of Buddhist and Taoist art, architecture, and literature as it rolled across China. The Nazis seized works in museums and collections throughout Europe and Africa. The so-called “decadent art” of the impressionists and moderns was ordered destroyed. Some of it only survives because prominent Nazis took it for themselves, and it was later found by the Monments, Fine Arts, and Archives program.

So there is a legitimate consideration for the purely humanitarian goals of preservation, education, and access.

Weighing against this is that very many of the disputed pieces are taken from the so-called “developing world”. That is, basically countries where the indigenous people were non-whites, and their governments were potentially corrupt, and the citizens extremely impoverished.

Looting of the tombs in Egypt is an industry that dates back to the Pharaohs, and was a cottage industry for the disenfranchised even then. When colonizing Europeans arrived at the end of the 1700s, they simply switched to selling to them from the earlier invading Greeks and Persians.

In the later 20th century it became harder for the worker on a dig to pocket a piece of jewelry and sell it to a tourist in the Cairo bazaar. They search luggage at the airport -everyone’s luggage. Still, even today, Egypt is a comparatively poor country, and money talks.

The people on the lowest part of the ladder get a few pounds, enough maybe to stave off hunger for the family for another week or so. By the time it reaches the black market in Europe, Asia, and America, millions are being handed around. The largely white imperialists are still at it, and still patting themselves on their rich backs for it. One might even argue that the person who bought the Giant and loaned it to a museum was expressing exceptional hubris.

I’m going to bring this back around to the “graveyard dirt” thing, now.

The use of earth, usually taken from the top of a fresh grave, or dug out from an abandoned cemetery or the grave of a specific person (like a child or a criminal) is a staple of magical practice in many folkloric beliefs.

Its inclusion derives from the breaking of taboo. We are taking something from the dead, or at least from the place of the dead. We have something that doesn’t belong among the living. It belongs to the dead and world of the dead. As a piece of malefic magic we are counting on no good coming from that.

So what then, do we expect when we plunder the artifacts and habitations of the past?

The whole earth is someone’s graveyard. In the eons that it’s been here, countless multitudes have lived and died unknown to us, and the present surface potentially has had a corpse decomposed on just about every bit of it.

Who knows if our looting of that graveyard in the form of petroleum is not now reaping a toll on our own future?

But more specifically, how can we continue to expand our knowledge of the culture and history without trampling on the bones like our predecessors did? Archaeology, even at it’s best incarnation, is tomb-robbing. Even if it is being done by the local native people, under the aegis of the local native people’s governing authority, the dead are still being disturbed for no reason other than just our modern nosiness.

We aren’t melting down the golden treasures and packing it back off to Spain, like the Conquistadors did to the Aztecs, but we’re certainly making bank on it in T-shirt sales and plush King-Tut dolls at the Little Shop.

And why is that? Well, because it’s expensive to dig up ancient relics and conserve them and haul them halfway across the world so that people who buy T-shirts and plush dolls can gawk at them behind a glass case.

I’m sure that’s a comfort to Ankh-en-Ma’at. That’s possibly the real name of the Jolly Green Giant. He was likely a very prominent and wealthy priest to afford an outer coffin of such size and grandeur, even if it is just made of wood.

If he resides with Osiris beside the Celestial Nile in the Great Hall by the Field of Reeds, having his name spoken of today will insure he continues on for millions of millions of years. At least that’s how the spell in the Book of the Dead goes. And maybe that’s a fair trade for his coffin being dug up and swapped around like a pricey baseball card.

Our technology is beginning to make it possible for us to address the needs of preservation, education, and access with minimal harm to the remains of the ancients.

Currently the cave of Lascaux where Cro-Magnon man etched greats herds of bulls and horses has been reproduced from LIDAR scans, and the replica, faithful to within millimeters of the actual site, is open to tourists. Tut’s tomb has received a similar treatment, and I believe it is scheduled for a tour at the Houston Museum of Natural Science in 2023. That’s wonderful, as my time in Egypt did not allow me to travel up the Nile to the Valley of the Kings.

LIDAR and 3D printing tech make possible truly faithful, portable, and reproducible versions of sacred sites that are endangered. Where a full physical experience is impossible, virtual reality is being combined with physical simulation to generate an alternative.

I was able to enter the Great Pyramid of Giza in the mid-1990s, climb the Ascending Passageway, marvel at the Grand Gallery, and clamber across the sill into the King’s Chamber to put my hands on the remains of his sarcophagus.

Sphinx-photo — You can love something and still damage it. I live with the realization that my brief time inside the Great Pyramid has contributed to some erosion of valuable archaeological evidence. My passing in the world has erased traces of other’s passing, as someday in some future, the remnants of me will be erased. All we can do is as little damage as possible, and maybe try to keep the memory alive.

In doing so, my breath and the evaporating sweat from the exertion ever so slightly eroded markings and inscriptions on the great stones in the relieving chambers overhead (well, mine and the thousands of other visitors-I didn’t do it by myself). For this reason, the Pyramid was closed to general tourists in the early 2000s. Like the Stonehenge site in Britain, it is accessed only under strictest controls.

But with some creative use of treadmills, black box style props, and immersive headsets, it would be possible to give someone an idea of what it is like to be in that space. You can even have virtual guides tell you the same lies about the pyramid’s construction they told Heroditus millennia ago. They were still using the same schtick in the 90s, so I assume there’s someone around who can record the patter.

Its not as cool as something like the Starship Enterprise’s holodeck, but as a means of bringing the exotic culture of Ancient Egypt to the masses it can work. My eldest experienced a test version using this technique to re-create the trenches of WWI. She found the experience so believable that it was unsettling.

And we can fund such exhibitions with the same T-shirts and plush dolls we’re selling now, while the dead rest comfortably in their graves. Their names will continue to be spoken for eternity across the bright sparkly wonder of the Internet, and their memories made immortal in bits of binary code.

The code will take up considerably less space, be easily transported and replicated to prevent loss, and maybe someday it can be used on that mythical holodeck.

At worst, in our darkest day when we have reached the brink of self-destruction and all that we are and have done is about to be lost in some great cataclysm, we can beam it out into the stars and hope someone else might remember, and speak our name.

Until, then, it’s a new year. The sun is shining. Birds are singing. Let’s not go digging up any ancient tombs.

See you next week.

Note- The photographs of the Giant sarcophagus here are my own, taken some years ago at the HMNS. While I find it’s journey here to be deplorable, I am happy to have met this part of Ankh-en-Ma’at while it visited and hope his spirit finds peace now that his relic has returned nearer to home.

November 30, 2022December 1, 2022

Many A Quaint And Curious Volume

I have often said that I was born weird (or wyrd) and weird I remain. That is essentially the truth of how I came upon this odd path I walk. I have an inborn inclination toward things macabre, unusual, mysterious, and frightening. My personal bent is opposite to so-called normal people who find happiness in the day-to-day. My soul yearns to know the secrets of the universe, and I am compelled to seek them out.

I believe that my readers will affirm a similar predisposition. Those of us who walk the winding path of secret wisdom are most naturally drawn to it, usually from a young age. We find ourselves steeped in books of strange tales and fantastic occurrences. We most easily identify with the sorcerers and seekers of these tales, rather than the hidden princess or the shining knight. In the West, many of us have a shared culture in these stories, and also through the numerous films made from them. This popular culture is a booming industry that inundates us with merch for any book or film that has a modicum of a chance of becoming a phenomenon. And the bleed over into the occult community is higher than it ever has been.

This leads some people to roll their eyes or turn up their noses when anyone makes reference to some story or program that partakes of popular culture. The attitude is that no one who is into “that” can really be considered a serious practitioner, or student of the occult. But I beg pardon, for a mo, and suggest that if you hold this view yourself, that you light the incense, clear your thoughts, and wander back down memory lane.

As I said, I was drawn to the strange and unusual from a very young age. If you recognize “strange and unusual” as a line from the movie Beetlejuice, then we are in the same popular cultural headspace. Secondarily, I have just magically communicated to you a massive amount of information, because the images that this conjures up in your memory invariably lead you to thoughts of ghosts, seances, the afterlife, evil spirits, and things that go bump in the night.

If, say, you had a bent for the odd, but lived in a fairly isolated location at a time in the past when things like magic and the occult were not as easily accessible as they are at present, how did you satisfy that itch? You sought out the odd in what you could access. For me this was the scribblings of a somewhat morbid little fellow from Baltimore and his poem about a rather obstinate corvid. Through him I made the acquaintance of some of his contemporaries, who introduced me to Schoolmaster Ichabod Crane, and another gentleman who had the habit of drinking too much and sleeping far far too late.

Alongside these tales, my grandmother had read to me from a very much abridged Brothers Grimm. And about this time, the wonders of television provided me with all the Technicolor® splendor of Margaret Hamilton’s Wicked Witch of the West. Before my early teens, I had moved on to things like Tolkien, T.H. White, and Tennyson. In high school and college I branched out into Heinlein and Herbert, Michael Moorcock’s many faced Eternal Champion sagas, and the sometimes bizarre fantasies of Roger Zelazny.

My studies of, and interest in, the occult and magic grew alongside my experience of the popular media fictions. They were very often informed by it. I found in many of these works a spiritual perspective, and alternate views of the nature of reality that were instrumental in my expanding my own viewpoint and personal power. And the study of the occult, I believe, actually added to my appreciation of some of the more subtle ideas in the literature. While I don’t maintain that any of these authors is practicing magic, I will say that some of them have at least done good research. Or are guided by an unseen hand.

My own children, though born just before the turn of the century, are classified as Millennials. Their gateway tale concerns a certain orphan from Privet Lane and a scholarship to a rather unusual boarding school somewhere in Scotland. They get their TV fix from Supernatural and Sabrina, programs which I am compelled by generational dynamics to sometimes cringe at.

Well,…it’s just that I know those demons. They aren’t like that in real life. For one thing, they’re usually taller.

addams-xmas-carollers — Ah, the Addamses…my sanctuary in childhood (yes, I liked the Munsters, too, but I felt like the Addams Family really got me). The lower image is one of my favorites, and sums up the difference between people like myself and the so-called “normal folks” who inhabit the world around me. I was greatly pleased that Barry Sonnenfeld re-created this moment at the beginning of the big screen version.

In my house you will find at least three volumes of the works of Charles Addams, which do not all include the more popularly known family members, but share the same kind of gallows humor and oddness that I cherish.

And yes, you’ll also find a toy guillotine, which I don’t think is the least bit strange.

In fairness, my children were probably exposed to weird at an early age. While we don’t have quite as broad a collection as the Addamses, there’s certainly a museum quality to the house. There are also books everywhere, on all sorts of subjects, and reading was encouraged. But that doesn’t perhaps account for my child’s teacher being concerned when she checked out the book “On Death and Dying” in second grade.

“Don’t worry. We’ve told Wednesday; College first.”

You can tell that I am a fan of the kind of dark humor and irreverent sarcasm that marked Charles Addams’s famous cartoons. If you haven’t, I highly recommend looking to the original source, rather than solely depending on the various television and film versions. They are unique and wonderful homages in their own way, a testament to the power these characters and their “ookiness” has on even the so-called normal folks.

I would dearly love to have that dreary rambling Victorian manse beside the cemetery and swamp. I miss my old cemetery and swamp. I spent many a joyful afternoon wandering through them, and the wooded hillsides behind our house, talking with the trees and rocks.
I would be that neighbor that sharpens the spikes on the wrought iron fence. Why have spikes on the fence if they aren’t capable of impalement? I mean, what’s the point?

I don’t necessarily emulate the Addams family. My family has it’s own unique weirdness, but oftentimes it’s much easier to just use this broadly understood popular image instead of explaining to new people what they should expect when invited over for dinner – um…I mean – to dinner, of course.

My own rooms have the majority of the really strange things, but you may expect to find one or two life-size skeletons sitting in chairs in the living room at any time of the year. While my wife does not always express herself at my personal level of strange, she’s never felt the need to explain the skeletons to visitors. That’s why we’re already into our fourth decade together. I don’t recall any visitor ever asking about them, though, so I guess that says something about the kind of people we invite.

I didn’t get this way because I watched the Addams Family on TV. I was already this way, and the Addams Family was something I could identify with and be comfortable. They were my people. This was very important growing up in a small rural community where conformity was expected, and enforced by all institutions. So in this I could find a means of being myself, that at least some of the rest of the crowd enjoyed. And if they chose to believe that I was “just kidding around ” in my similarity to the characters on the show, well, who was I to tell them otherwise.

Full grown adults even today usually assume I am joking when I make some bizarre comment. It’s easier than admitting that there are strange and unusual people in the world, who inexplicably like what other people fear. We laugh at the ironies of misfortune, and seize every breath with lustful vigor because we know the ultimate jest awaits us all. Gomez and Morticia are so passionate, because they know that we are all eventually food for the worms. And even in that they share in their devotion.

In the present time, when anyone interested in the dark arts can jump onto the ubiquitous Interweb and obtain a googleplex of opinions on the finer points of raising the cone of power, or what should go into a love philter; it’s hard to imagine having to glean bits and pieces of forbidden lore from folktale and bedtime story. But that was the reality for much of the world through into the 60s, because these things were considered either fraudulent, or evil, and suppressed and reviled by the public. The only “safe space” for magic, witchcraft, and the occult was the province of fiction, with a moderate easing into anthropology or history.

So when my articles seem too pedantic and reliant upon such things as antique books and scholarly treatises, it’s because that’s what I could get hold of in the latter half of the 20th century. I have, in recent times, looked into some of the seminal books that I hear being referenced by those young people who came upon the craft (and The Craft) in the 90s. I am trying not to have the “Sabrina reaction” to it, because I know it is so very important to so many people.

And that is something we should remember when we are frustrated or annoyed or amused by things on Witchtok and the other venues where the present occult movement is evolving, trying to find itself, and doing all those other things we did when we were growing into our own place in the cosmos.

Whether we agree or not, we must recognize that it is important to those who are using it. Whether we know, from both education and experience, that some assertion is wrong-headed and doomed to failure, we are obliged to bite our tongue, and at least couch our response in context of that person believing that it is so absolutely right.

Because somewhere along the line, someone did that for us, and that made all the difference.

See you next week. Same bat time. Same bat channel.

Header Image by Dana Ward on Unsplash

November 23, 2022November 22, 2022

You Stole My Holiday

Having had the month of November to rest ourselves from the travails of crossing the veil on Samhain, and the equally mortifying stress of upcoming Black Friday sales, the occult community frequently comes together at this time of year to inform every Christian within earshot that they are about to celebrate an old pagan fire festival that they stole from our ancestors.

And of course this inevitably brings up all the other old pagan fire festivals that they also stole from our ancestors, and the rituals they “borrowed” and the symbols they are misusing etc., etc. It’s a wonder we ever get the Black Friday Eve Feast dishes done in time to line up at the mall for the Coming of the Big Screens.

Freedom_From_Want — And here, in one single painting, is all the trappings and trimmings of the autumn/winter holidays in America.

The image, created by illustrator Norman Rockwell during the early days of American involvement in World War II, is certainly a propaganda piece.

It depicts an harmonious multigenerational feasting orgy that occurs on the third Thursday in November, right before the mad capitalist cash grab retailers hope will keep their doors open, remove excess inventory before tax time, and get them through the post holiday slump while everyone struggles to pay for the “gifts” that count more than the thoughts.

I love this painting for what it aspires to be, but I hate that it has become a fantasy that many of us are searching for every year at this time.

It’s a myth, and should be regarded as such. Place it next to the Birth of Venus and Saturn Devouring His Sons, as allegorical at most, and let’s all stop trying to live up to it. It’s not healthy on a number of levels.

I am not a Christian, and I don’t think I ever actually was. I attended Sunday School and Vacation Bible School as a child, and I have a very good understanding of the Bible, but I was not baptized or christened into the community of the church. In fact the church that provided these services was not part of a structured hierarchy or established sect. I think what was being preached was probably what the evangelical churches teach now, but as I tend to avoid them, the comparison is with their public persona only.

At any rate, I never saw Christmas as a religious rite of the Christian faith, or a part of the Miracle of the Resurrection, though I find researching the ideas around this festival quite fascinating.

Yet I still celebrate Christmas because I have friends and family less weird than myself that enjoy that holiday. I don’t personally need to spoil it for them by telling them how it originates as Saturnalia in Rome, or is really the Viking Yule that calls the Sun back to us from the Outer Dark. It is a time for family and food and fellowship, and a celebration of life continuing to move forward another year.

My wife’s mother had her last Christmas in 2021. She sat beneath a plaque of the Wheel of the Year (which I am sure she purchased with a wink-wink as a “Celtic calendar”) and watched us all open our gifts. She had always set great store by having the family together for Christmas day. Which was December 27 this time, because that was when we could all be off work, and make the several hour journey to where they lived. A bit over a month later she was gone. Our Christmas will never be quite the same again.

That Wheel of the Year is the exact one we call the Witches Calendar and most likely derives from Wiccan Sabbats plotted by Gerald Gardner and others who created the Wiccan faith in the first half of the 20th Century. At its corners you will find the Solstices and the Equinoxes under suitably archaic Gallo-Nordic names, and betwixt and between those you will find the cross quarter days, which are the big festivals for Wiccan and witch alike.

These ancient and noble traditions are a matter of speculation. Some bits come from tradition, oral history, and folklore. Some come from things like Robert Graves’s White Goddess and other interpretive works that in analysis can’t be considered a valid historical source.

So hurling the gravy boat at Cousin Cecil, the “Christian weirdo” at Black Friday Eve dinner over it seems, to my way of thinking, a bit of an overreaction. It cries out for a need to “defend our turf” by vilifying the other guy. And that’s precisely what many have accused the Christian community of doing to the occult community for centuries (and not without good and sufficient reason).

Do we really want to be the ones to carry that onward?

Now if Cecil lobbed a roll at me first, that’s a different matter. I love a good debate. I delight in finding historical precedent that many of Cecil’s most cherished and revered truths have their origin in something or someplace other than what he thinks they do.

Ah, for those glorious days in the early Church when you could argue for months about how many angels could fit on the head of a pin. I think sometimes the reason the Church today has so many defectors to other beliefs, or no belief at all, is because they’ve taken away that wonderment with the spiritual world.

Let’s be fair. Spirit is a big thing. Way bigger than we are. Regardless of how you come at it, the idea that we are ghosts pushing around a meat suit on a tiny fragile rock spinning around a big ball of fire in an infinite and possibly timeless emptiness without any other ghosts out there is somewhat terrifying. Only moderately more terrifying is that there are other much bigger ghosts out there who are making it all go, to which we appear as meager as bacteria. But what I think is most terrifying is that those really big ghosts are out there wondering if there are even bigger ghosts that they can’t see.

And all of them can dance on the head of a pin.

So when you establish a narrowly defined “sure and true” procedure for how all that comes together and operates for your club, you’ve taken some of the magic out of it. I mean, if I told you about how the TVs actually arrive at the Coming of the Big Screens, it just wouldn’t feel as special, now would it?

And perhaps that’s why people are drawn to non-traditional observances of traditional holidays. Or traditional observances of non-traditional holidays, depending on how you see it. Yule for Christmas. Ostara for Easter. Just leave me my Halloween, please. I’m always nervous that I’ll mispronounce Samhain in front of the family.

We don’t live in Ancient Rome or Medieval England or First Century Judea. So our choice of how we celebrate important dates, in fact our choice of important dates, is completely arbitrary. The Romans were a fairly tolerant and eclectic bunch. They loved a good party, so you can probably find a Roman festival to match up with about any day in the calendar ¹ , and if you can’t, you’ll find one they celebrated that was “stolen” from the Greeks, or the Celts, or the Phoenicians, or the Egyptians.

It’s fair to say that most ancient civilizations amalgamated the ideas and beliefs of their neighbors as they grew outward. Egypt presents a very easy way to observe this. The Egyptians have more gods than most other Mediterranean cultures. Every city and village had a god. There were gods for rivers and rocks and trees. There were gods for the hours, the stars, the winds, the directions, and several more abstract concepts. As the culture expanded, the local gods were allowed to climb aboard the Boat of Ra as it sailed through the Celestial Nile. They helped to row, they fought off demons, and they ensured a friendly greeting for the sky-bound counterpart of the village they protected on the earth.

Ra the Sun god is an old god of the Delta, or lower Egypt. Further up the Nile, the fertility god Osiris (Ausur in Khemit) was more important. His worship may have begun in ancient times when a fetish made of wheat or corn was ritually buried. When the corn man sprouted, life had returned. The metaphor for the dead being reborn ensured Osiris his place as the Lord of the Blessed Dead. When Narmer unified Upper and Lower Egypt, Amen, his personal god, was merged with Ra, and celebrated with the great Temple of Karnak, one of the world’s oldest perpetually used sacred sites. The Temple remains more or less active through to the Romans, when a portion was rededicated as Christian church for the new Christian Empire. There is now a mosque in it’s place, while the ancient giant temple complex bears mute testimony to the survival of the old gods.

So “stole” may be a harsh word. Borrowed is less harsh, but not perhaps as accurate.

If you go to a village and they have always worshipped Odin, getting them to forsake Odin and embrace your new Shepherd god is going to be a tough sell. Maybe that first year you get two or three converts. But they still want to hang out with their friends and family and drink mead at Yuletide. And well, so long as they aren’t actively praying to Odin, then Jesus isn’t offended. The missionary work of conversion was, at least in the early church, a little more flexible than it would become.

And we have to remember that joining the church in the Roman times meant hobnobbing with all the other people who had embraced the new faith, and being able to sell them used chariots. We have all known someone whose practice of Christianity was as much political and mercenary as spiritual, if not moreso. So it should not surprise us that this was an ancient practice too. If the Emperor converts, so do the subjects. If the Romans convert, then maybe there’s a trade agreement to be made if the Picts convert also. Meanwhile, no one said anything about not drinking mead at Yuletide.

And gradually over the next couple of millennia, what had been purely pagan and what had been purely Christian became a bit confused. People had their mead and they went to mass. They burned a Yule log and put up a creche. And nobody stole anything, they just decided that they were going to do the things that everyone enjoyed doing together and not make such a big deal about where it came from. If your family put up a tree for six generations, it didn’t matter if it was an ancient pagan winter symbol or a Christmas tree.

This desire to tease out an authenticity that is probably not there I think stems from being born as orphan children into a predominantly monotheistic Western world. Because so much of the history of witchcraft is tied to it’s Christian persecution, those on the path desire validation that somehow they are rejecting every taint of the faith that burned their figurative ancestors.

It’s an odd quirk of the human psyche that we feel the need to identify with persecutions that we have never ourselves experienced. The Burning Times were a horrible blot on human history. So is the Holocaust, Slavery, the Trail of Tears, the Holy Inquisition, the Crusades and many other persecutions (including those against the Christians) carried out by one group of people who have singled out another to blame for all the evils of the world.

The scenario of the oppressed becoming an oppressor is the cultural equivalent of the abused child growing up to become an abuser.

It needs to stop. Here. Now.

Before there are no more TVs left at Best Buy.

Now give Cousin Cecil back his dessert spoon and have another slab of that pie that is a completely inauthentic holiday tradition before I come over there and make you.

I will see you next week, and to all a good night.

Featured image: A painting by Jean Leon Gerome Ferris depicting the first Thanksgiving.Credit…Bettmann Archive/Getty Images.

This depicts the other great myth of Thanksgiving, that the Puritan pilgrims shared a feast with the local Indigenous Peoples, in the spirit of harmony and fellowship.

Which, of course, is why the Indigenous Peoples are shown in the subordinate position gladly receiving food from the oh so much better Puritans.

These same Puritans would not much later be responsible for the Salem Witch Trials, which sadly was not the worst of their atrocities. But hey, have some more mashed potatoes and corn (gifts from those primitive Indigenous Peoples).

October 26, 2022October 26, 2022

The Samhain Article

Thrice the brinded cat hath mew’d.
Thrice; and once the hedge-pig whin’d.
Harpier cries:–“’tis time, ’tis time.”
Round about the caldron go;
In the poison’d entrails throw.–
Toad, that under cold stone,
Days and nights has thirty-one
Swelter’d venom sleeping got,
Boil thou first i’ the charmed pot!
Double, double, toil and trouble;
Fire, burn; and caldron, bubble.
Fillet of a fenny snake,
In the caldron boil and bake;
Eye of newt, and toe of frog,
Wool of bat, and tongue of dog,
Adder’s fork, and blind-worm’s sting,
Lizard’s leg, and howlet’s wing,–
For a charm of powerful trouble,
Like a hell-broth boil and bubble.
Double, double, toil and trouble;
Fire, burn; and caldron, bubble.
Scale of dragon, tooth of wolf,
Witch’s mummy, maw and gulf
Of the ravin’d salt-sea shark,
Root of hemlock digg’d i’ the dark,
Liver of blaspheming Jew,
Gall of goat, and slips of yew
Sliver’d in the moon’s eclipse,
Nose of Turk, and Tartar’s lips,
Finger of birth-strangl’d babe
Ditch-deliver’d by a drab,–
Make the gruel thick and slab:
Add thereto a tiger’s chaudron,
For the ingredients of our caldron.
Double, double, toil and trouble;
Fire, burn; and caldron, bubble.

Cool it with a baboon’s blood,
Then the charm is firm and good.
Macbeth – William Shakespeare

You just can’t go wrong with the classics, eh, folks?

This post immediately precedes the Grand High Sabbat of Samhain (Northern Hemisphere) when the doors of the worlds lay open, the dead rise, and witches fly.

Samhain is of a Welsh/Gaelic/Celtic origin and thus is pronounced something like Sow – Ween, I’m told.

As my ancestors were Welsh, but I am not, and the Gaelic languages are something I am still working to learn, my English language educated brain tends to see that word as Sam Hain.

I am confident that I am not alone in this, and have jokingly pointed out that this is the full name of one of the Winchester brothers – Sam Hain Winchester. And if it isn’t, the writers of the Supernatural series surely missed a golden opportunity.

In any case, because I was born and raised in the late 20th century in America, I refer to this holiday by it’s crass commercial epithet Halloween. Which saves me considerable embarrassment around those who know how to correctly pronounce Samhain.

In most cases we celebrate this event on October 31st, whilst many of us, and probably a good number of my readers, start actively decorating around mid-August, and truthfully keep a “creepy vibe” going year round.

halloween season — This delightful meme has served as a seasonal love letter between me and my wife as we will invariably post it on each other’s social media. This Halloween is the 33rd anniversary of our first date. As she puts it “Find the Gomez to your Morticia, I did. “

There is Halloween, and there is waiting for Halloween. That is all.

It’s passing strange that as witchcraft has emerged from the shadows into a full blown cultural phenomenon, the Halloween holiday diminishes more and more in the public consciousness. Outside of the dedicated souls such as myself, the witches, and other weirdos, this event has been weakened to an overly restricted children’s party that parents dread and neighbors frequently ignore. Overshadowed by the burgeoning Fat Man and his capitalist orgy of Black Friday Weekend, one has to begin early, search wide, and work hard to get their full Halloween fix.

I am not talking about the various ritual observances. Everyone does that a little differently anyway. The ancients (who may have celebrated on a different day) called it a Cross-Quarter Day. That is, it was roughly halfway between the Autumnal Equinox and the Winter Solstice. So it was an excuse to have a party. In ancient days, life was miserable, brutish, and short. Having something to look forward to, particularly in cold wet dark northern Europe, made things a little less miserable. In a world without weekends, a festival day was definitely important.

The meaning of, and doings of, these ancient feast and fire parties is really lost to history. Maybe there are bits here and there, but if you are looking for the true and authentic Gaelic experience you may be out of luck. Your tradition may be made up of what the Romans said the Gaelic peoples did, and what the Romans did that got confused and adopted by the members of that culture that survived the Roman conquest. Assimilation goes both ways, of course, so some of those authentic Celto/Gallo/Nordic traditions may have just become Roman traditions that we don’t remember were Celto/Gallo/Nordic.

My Halloween traditions probably do not resemble a Grand High Sabbat. Nor are they typically Celto/Gallo/Nordic or Roman. I carry along a lot of that crass commercial thing.

When I was a kid I loved putting on the costume and going door to door. I loved watching “It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown” while I ate too much sugar and bounced around way past my already insomniac bedtime.

When I got older, I loved making really cool costumes and going to Halloween parties with the other teens during that one time of the year I could actually go to parties with the other teens. And I loved watching “It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown”.

As a young adult out on my own, my wife and I threw outrageous Halloween costume parties that spilled out of our tiny starter home into the street and down the block. I think we had over 300 people at one. Fortunately I had won the local rock radio station’s contest for coolest Halloween party invitation, so they showed up with the a hearse and a coffin full of beer and the cops to provide crowd control and insure a good safe time was had by all. Somewhere in that background, I am sure there was a VCR playing a treasured personal copy of “It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown“.

linus — For many of us, Linus Van Pelt was our introduction to alternative views of the universe. This 4 to 5 year old had somehow worked out that Halloween was the really cool holiday we all should be celebrating, and remained faithful to his personal gnosis despite year after year of disappointment, ridicule, and growing evidence to the contrary. Peanuts, often seen as a harmless little kids comic strip, taught lessons on a par with Aesop, and introduced us to personality types in the world that we’d only fully realize as adults. Plus the dog owned a Van Gogh. How cool is that?

*Peanuts is a registered trademark of United Features Syndicate.*

Then the kids came along and I loved getting them dressed up, getting myself dressed up, and going door to door for candy and treats. As they got a little older, we resumed a more subdued holiday party scene, with giant home-made props in the yard (like an Alien hive and a 40′ dragon with Nazguls). This lasted through my youngest’s undergrad years in college. I’m not quite sure what the neighbors made of a 6′ 3″ Abby Schuto accompanied by a 6′ 9″ Professor Dumbledore, but they gave us candy.

Which brought us roughly to COVID and the closing of the world. No more parties. No more trick or treating. Just grim, dark, and deadly.

My youngest was in grad school at NYU when the plague hit. She had the good luck to have experienced one Halloween in Greenwich Village before everything changed. I’d been there myself a quarter century before; a quirk of timing with my then employer. It truly is a one-of-a-kind thing. I hope the scene recovers now that the pandemic seems to be dissipating.

This last year I have more personally felt the touch of death than at any other time in my life. Coming thus to a Sabbat with so many associations with death might seem overwhelming. Yet I am deeply associated with death already. I have symbols of death all over my personal spaces. The skeletons and skulls adorn my rooms to the extent that I use glass ones to store coffee and nuts in my kitchen. I am at home with the rustle of the Reaper’s wings.

And Halloween is my holiday. Excepting my birthday next week, which is a second Halloween.

And I aim to have it back.

So in my workshop right now, are the bones of a Great Pumpkin. I’m not exactly sure where he’s going but I’d truly like to have him somewhat airborne. Linus deserves that. He’s been waiting for almost 60 years now.

You’ve heard of people with skeletons in their closets? Well, I actually have them. And skulls, and swords, and other unusual things. Halloween is the time of year when I can bring out all the odd and wonderful things that I surround myself with and it will be considered ordinary by the neighbors and other banal folks.

As you can see, our cat Amelia has spotted the problem here. This is not a Halloween decoration. Since this one is wearing an elf’s hat, it’s clearly trying to horn in from that other holiday that keeps showing up in the stores earlier and earlier each year. She’s determined he’s going back until at least after the Macy’s Black Friday Eve Parade is over.

He’ll be part of a generally safe but still fun spooky display, maybe more than the adults who shepherd them into my yard. Over in the corner you will find the legs of a giant spider, and the bits and pieces of a few hapless victims.

Kids, even the little kids, seem to love this stuff. They’re into things that are a little creepy and a little kitsch. It’s cool to be a bit spooky, because at second glance, you can see the string holding that thing up.

There’s a part of Halloween that is about that “man behind the curtain” thing. Even for us big kids who are doing our thing with real cauldrons, real spiders, and sometimes real bones. Piercing the veil is about more than just calling the ancestors or drawing down the dark forces for malefic intent. It’s our time to peer beyond the surface of things, and see what strings are holding it up. This gives us perspective on our own roles, and power beyond those who don’t know how it all spins round.

For witches this is not an unusual thing, really. One practiced and adept can cross the hedge at will. Some days it’s hard not to. That’s why some of us talk about it being Halloween all year round in our homes. It certainly is in parts of mine. I keep the doorways of the year open should I need to access them.

This brings about something that I am hearing about more often, and that is that the old European Wheel of The Year with it’s Sabbats and High Sabbats and Grand High Sabbats doesn’t fit a modern industrial global society. That’s true enough. In fairness it may not have actually fit the postwar midcentury society it was introduced into. Arguably, much of the adaptation of these traditions was about “returning to the old ways”.

Well, the old ways had no internet. Nor antibiotics, air travel, electric light, public health, and reliable agricultural production. Regardless of how romantic it may seem at times, that miserable, brutish, and short thing was very real. You would not be reading this on your iPhone if we lived by the old ways. You’d maybe have learned a few things from your mom or an old aunt or the village wise woman, but the access you have to the great breadth of human learning, history, and awareness is unparalleled in our history. This is a transformative time, and because we have nigh-instant, nigh-global communication it is possible for everyone to take part in the transformation. We can all of us cross the hedge.

What we carry with us into that wonderful new world, full of terror and possibility, is what we choose to bring along. Just like when we pierce the veil on Halloween night. Do we honor our ancestors by doing only what they were able to do, or do we honor them by standing on their shoulders, the shoulders of giants, and making a new and bright thing that has never before been dreamt of in earth or in the heavens.

It’s a little something to think about at this time of year when we purge away all the spiritual junk we’ve accumulated since the last Halloween.

I’ll be over here in the workshop with my Peanuts DVD. Enjoy the party. See you next week.

October 5, 2022October 5, 2022

The Face of the Mask

Let the bells ring out, it’s Halloween month again!

I am fairly sure my readers feel the same jubilation when October rolls around (unless I have an audience south of the Equator, in which case, insert “Beltane month”). Some of us sniff that scent in the air as August draws to a close, even though here in coastal Texas “fall” is relegated to a state of mind for the most part.

It seems an apropos time to discuss the concept of the mask. I am a collector of masks (I’m a collector of a lot of things, books, guitars, swords, cats, skulls…). I have been fascinated by them since I was a child, through my years working in theatre and film, and as an intriguing part of popular culture. And of course, the ritual and magical use of the mask easily commands my attention.

Que tous les masques que vous portez soient les vôtres

I know I promised at the end of last week’s article to stop referring to the root words of things. Technically this is a direct translation, but our word mask is “larva” in Latin. I find this extraordinary. We can see of course why this term is used to apply to the untransformed infant stage of insects. The larva “masks” the true creature it becomes. But so too, can donning a mask be a transformative experience. When we mask ourselves, we are becoming something else.

This goes way way back to pre-history. We find evidence in the Sorceror of Tres Freres. Underneath his deerskin and horns he is becoming the Spirit of the animal. Whether he is personifying the deity locally for his tribe, or using this to hide himself as he travels the unseen world, we may never know.

The masks here are from various Pacific Island cultures. They are probably ceremonial, though they might have been used in battle to terrify the enemy. My personal favorite is Batman, there in the middle. His resemblance to the comic book Caped Crusader is telling. In earlier cultures the mythic beings represented by ritual masks are equivalent in a way to our modern superhero. The being portrayed is powerful, inscrutable, and quasi-divine. Underneath, the secret identity of the wearer is protected, both from the audience, and from any other quasi-divines that might mistake the mask for the legendary hero and come after them. This layer of protection is an important spiritual function of the mask.

masks-02 — A mixed selection of African masks and idols from New York’s Museum of Natural History. I took these photos in 2021 as we toured the extensive permanent collection. It underlines how universal the idea of the mask is in human society, probably because we are hardwired to recognize faces.

masks-03 — Another image from the museum trip. As you may infer from the style of the bronze work in this case, the example here is from central Asia. Although the tag did not mention it, I couldn’t help wondering if it was meant to represent a yeti, the fabled giant man-ape of the Himalayas. I think this was a shaman mask, so it fulfills the same role as the deer skin on the Paleolithic sorceror in that cave in France. It allows the shaman to transform into a being capable of entering the other worlds safely, and conversing with the beings that live there. it might also serve to scare off any potential evil or troublesome spirits that are attracted to the bright light of the shaman as he walks the paths between the worlds.

Yet there are tribal communities extant who use masked rituals for similar purposes, as well as to illustrate tribal history and legend. In many cases ritually re-enacting a story from myth is a kind of spellwork. In performing the ritual, the acts that brought about the desired ends are reintroduced into the universe, hopefully to remind the forgetful skies to bring rain, or the bored earth to make the fields green.

The ritual use of masks are not relegated to tribal cultures alone, though. Masks, and by extension costume, are integral to much ceremonial magic. And even when we are not garbed in robes the color of darkest midnight, we frequently use metaphorical masks in our work. We take on the role of a particular spirit, deity, or even abstract concept, when performing ritual and spellwork, as surely as that ancient sorcerer donned his deer skin.

armor-mask — Masks and mask-adjacent exhibits in the armory wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. These artful bronze helmets were typically Italian, and date from the time of the Renaissance. It is at the end of the jousting tradition, though some probably were used on the field of honor. In the age of the cannon, protecting the face and skull from shrapnel was vitally important. The cast helms would most likely have had visors that covered at least the lower half of the face. The designs served a double duty, in that the wearer might be easily identified on the field of battle. This would have a drawback when cannon gave way to musket, and more practical, and anonymous, headgear evolved.

In many witchcraft practices these roles are binary and gender-specific, deriving in some cases from more ancient fertility rites. This inbuilt duality is becoming problematic as we welcome into the larger occult community persons who do not fit easily within this paradigm. It’s time to understand that these restrictions are, in fact, just masks to express concepts that are not absolutes, but aspects of the Divine.

It is ridiculous to believe that LGBTQ+ persons did not practice witchcraft in elder times, or that their involvement in the craft did not form a vital part of their personal identity as much as it does for heterosexuals and cisgender individuals. Human sexuality has always been complex, variable, and fluid, depending on culture, time, and belief. It is only one component of that enigma we call human identity, which is still barely understood by modern psychological disciplines, and a total mystery to empirical science.

I’m talking here about the thing that drives around our meat suits, which are as much of a mask as anything you’ll find down at Party City this time of year. The physical body, though we may enjoy it while we occupy it, is not really what we are. We are made of rarer stuff. Stuff that is capable of assuming a number of different forms, playing a lot of different parts, and experiencing the greater Divine nature in a myriad of ways.

We are spirits in a material world.

mummy-mask — Egyptian art has many examples of the last mask anyone would ever wear. These mummy masks were placed over the head and shoulders of the embalmed corpse, and used as stand-ins during the all-important “opening of the mouth” ceremony. This was performed at graveside by a priest wearing a mask of Anubis, the guardian and guide of the dead. Using a set of special tools, touched to the lips of the mask (or sometimes the coffin) the deceased was given both the power of speech needed for the sacred spells, and the ability to eat and drink in the afterlife.

The mummy mask was sometimes an alternative to the elaborate carved and painted coffins, which some could not afford. The deluxe model belonged to Tutankhamen, and was made from pure gold, and precious stones. This one is only gold leaf over a substance called cartonnage by archaeologists. Essentially it’s papier-maché. Others were merely painted, some even painted directly on the wrappings. When the Roman settlers embraced the trend to mummification, they shifted to beautiful encaustic portraits (a painting medium using pigment, oil, and beeswax) on panels that were bound in the outer layer of wrappings.

Even in death, the ritual mask still has a purpose. In this case, it identifies what our meat suit looked like before time, desiccation, and decay took it away.

Certain Buddhist and Hindu teachings put forth that even that material world is an illusion. Our experience is happening in our minds, and our minds are ineffable, infinite, and eternal.

But as spirits we do enjoy wearing masks from time to time. They make it easier to go shopping for decorations down at the Spirit Halloween store. And to have conversations with other mask-wearing spirits about the nature of human identity, the cosmos, and our role in it.

It’s easy for us to confuse the mask for the wearer. Our minds are fertile places that concoct all manner of fantasies to keep us entertained when we should be paying attention in math class. We see the mask and infer, and elaborate, and imagine, and by the time we actually encounter the other person we probably have them dead wrong. When get to meet the wearer, if we are ever that lucky, it can be a shattering experience.

We must cultivate the practice of seeing through the mask, to those little bits of the wearer that come through the eyeholes and around the edges. While we may still be wrong when the masks come off at midnight, maybe we won’t be tragically so.

It’s also very important to remember that our own masks are on, and that impacts our own perception. I think we’ve all had the experience of wearing that mask where the eyes aren’t quite in the right place, or the mouth doesn’t match up. The bodies we wear and the baggage that we carry in the form of cultural roles and other outward expressions of identity can restrict and color our view of the world we are in. It’s vitally important that our masks fit us properly. Otherwise, we are stifled and miserable and angry all the time.

Remember that the spirits and deities and such that some of us work with are also wearing masks. They may need to go shopping down at the Spirit Halloween store, too. Very often they wear a mask so we can understand and interact with them.

Consider it a kind of metaphysical social media. We interact with the equivalent of a text message with a profile pic, and see the occasional meme post. The actual being we are communicating with may bear little resemblance to what we think they are. Meeting them “irl” could be devastating, disappointing, or ecstatic. But like social media, they may live far away and the chances of that happening are slim to none.

Our meat suits are not up to the challenge of such an encounter anyway. The grimoires are replete with entreaties to “appear in a form pleasant to the eye”. Otherworldly beings exist in forms and fashions that are not that same as the world we inhabit. To come into our space-time, necessitates a “container” that responds to our laws of physics. But that doesn’t mean it’s comfortable or pleasing to experience.

Mohammed was required to look only upon the angel Gabriel after he had passed by, because to see the full countenance would cause him to drop down dead. It’s safe to assume that we are only in the presence of a small portion or aspect of beings of this nature.

On the other hand, mythology and lore has many examples of spirits that live in a single tree, or protect a stream or river. These genius loci are more on our human scale, at least when that scale is limited by the meat suit.

Of course, these creatures could be as the mycelium of the mushroom. They are a greater whole, of which only a part is visible (and even they may not be fully aware of it).

This is not an uncommon concept. There are many versions of the cosmic Divine that suggest all our personal identities are merely a piece of this greater continuum, and that our moments incarnate in the meat suit provide a convenient situation for the self knowledge of that Divine. In which case, all the variations and viewpoints of everyone and everything are just masks that the Divine wears to know about itself. It is an exploration of wonder on an unimaginable scale, and so encounters with any and all should be welcomed, and cherished for what they are.

We are more than just the masks we wear. We wear a lot of masks. Don’t confuse the mask for the wearer. Especially when the wearer is you.

May all the masks you wear be your own.

Thank you for the taking the time to read this. It’s my busy season, so some of these may be shorter than the usual. I’m sure the tl;dr folks among you will appreciate that. I’ll be back next week.

Featured image and Instagram/Facebook/Twitter attachments are cropped from Fritz Lang’s 1927 masterpiece Metropolis. In the frame the Great Machine that powers the city and exhausts the workers is transformed into the demon Molloch, who consumes them into his fiery insides. Another lovely occult reference in this film, and evidence that even a machine can wear a mask on occasion.

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