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Hashtag Occultartist

Hashtag Occultartist

Sing O muse of the wrathful Achilles, Peleus’s son
Who brought much woe upon the Achaens

The Illiad – Homer

Given the brevity and inconsistency of recent posts, I am this morning again in possession (for the moment) of inspiration for something a bit more long form.

In truth, last week I had gotten busy in the studio and had resolved to just skip posting on Sunday, but I saw that my interview on Your Average Witch Podcast was going to be released, and of course it would be bad form to ghost on that.

So I cobbled some pics from the phone and posted a bit of something. I feel less than satisfied about that, but it’s again that struggle between the time to do the work, and the time to talk about doing the work. And doing the work needs to become my priority.

Finding the balance is an ongoing task, but then there is that return of the inspiration that fueled the first year of articles, and the rewards of writing as an artistic work in itself.

So this is why I began with the opening line from Homer. His second great epic, The Odyssey (which may have come first in a very Hollywood prequel fashion) opens with:

Tell me O Muse, of that man of great resourcefulness,
who wandered wide and long after ruining the sacred citadel of Troy.

The Odyssey – Homer

From both of these (and there are so many translations, but these are paraphrased to mine own sensibilities) it’s clear that the blind poet, if he actually existed as a person, felt the need to invoke a deity to begin his works.

To the modern mind, this is simply the blandishment of poesy, oft copied by the modern romantic odist. Yet to the ancient Greek, and certainly to his audience, this was a very real and clearly magico-spiritual invocation.

Mandala Wip
This piece in progress betrays it’s more esoteric origins. The idea came to me while I was working with the Hindu/Buddhist objects known as Vajra (Sanskrit), or Dorje (Tibetan). These are a stylized representation of the the Thunderbolt of Indra, and might be considered analogous to both the Thunderbolt of Zeus and the powers inherent in the Merkaba shape and the Chariot Tarot card. It is an expression of will or force,

When I obtained the objects, there were two version, one that had the “claw” shape on either end, which is the more usual, I believe, and one that had four such “heads” in the shape of an equilateral cross. In my earliest working with them, I found that putting the two ended one across the four ended one seemed to generate a natural jolt, so this variation came about. The next logical extension was to put it over a hexagon (and this then also connects it to the merkaba shape). From there ideas for representing it two-dimensionally began to flow into my mind.

Several additional images sprang from this, so I believe that the “jolt” I speak of has definitely opened me up to something, and I’m going to run with that. If the end images find an audience, then that’s great, but one does not create a mandala to sell it. The purpose of the mandala is in the creation.


At very least, the invocation of Calliope (muse of epic poetry) would be equivalent to the modern “break a leg” used by actors in the theater to warn off a bad performance. That still, is a summoning of spiritual intervention or influence in the forthcoming endeavor. It is a summoning that Homer in his recitations would have felt necessary, and one his listening audience would see as supremely important.

Angering the gods, after all, was what the whole Illiad and Odyssey thing was about. Acknowledging their role, then, in the performance of the work, was necessary, especially if one was to get their cooperation for tomorrow’s matinee show.

The artist, poet, and musician in our modern times use the muse euphemistically to mean that spark of idea that comes from seemingly nowhere, that informs the work, and provides an energy and mood that makes the creation of art a joyous and uplifting thing.

Working without the muse, is to descend into the mundane and commercial and technical.

It bogs down progress. It leadens the spirit. The end result, while perhaps technically correct and adequate – possibly even superior in its way, is never as alive as that work produced through the hands of inspired spirit.

In the quickly composed article of last week, I alluded to working on two different projects. One was a life painting which provided a number of challenges and rewards, but might hardly be called “muse-inspired” That is, the work was essentially a response to the scene before me, and the artistry was in how I would translate that scene to the paper, given the tools available. It is not without joy, mind you, and it is intuitive as well as technical, but it comes from a place very much extant and “real”.

The second piece, underway in the studio, while appearing to be more rigidly technical, is actually the piece that is more inspired from spiritual or preternatural source. It is a painting that has no external analog, and it something that grew from working with certain symbolic tools from Hinduism and Tibetan Shamanism, and Buddhism.

I acquired the tools as my interest in some of the various esoteric teachings of these related cultures attracted my attention in recent years. But the inspiration is not from any of those teachings. It was a flash, and then that flash expanded, and then the image formed in my consciousness. I sat about trying to bring it into greater focus mentally, and then eventually began to construct it with a sketch and then that sketch became a blueprint -a very structured drawing that would allow me to express this image on canvas as I had conceived it.

This path to the thing is by no means as clear and relatable as the one people who were walking past my table at the restaurant looking at the painting of the street scene could easily make out.

And this is the nature of the muse moment. It is that quicksilver revelation that may only be experienced directly, that words fall short of describing. Like the climax of the passions, even the tongues of poets strain to convey the full transport of it.

And this got me to thinking about the experience referred to in todays occult world as Unverifiable Personal Gnosis, or UPG. The thing that we “know” or are given to know that hasn’t come to us through teaching or tradition or externally demonstrable scientific proof.

We simply know.

UPG is a hot-button topic in discussions of magic. In a world dripping with Tik Tok hot takes on so many ideas and traditions, anyone asserting personal revelation as a key to their practice is almost immediately going to be the subject of skepticism, scorn and ridicule.

But the artist’s muse is exactly that experience. It is the thing that comes from nowhere, that we just know to be right. We are moved to create by it, we are almost compelled to get it out on paper or canvas or into clay before we lose that brief spark.

Frontispiece 1989 Sketchbook
The artist in their youth is generally more open to exploring methods and imagery that go against convention. Subject that are taboo are not so for them, in fact, seeking out these edgier contexts may be a goal in itself.

As time passes, however, one may find themselves pushed into a kind of conformity, whether this is to bring about a desired commercial success or because they become used to working in a place of comfort. Perfection may not be the enemy of good, but every artist has a near perfect image in their mind when inspired. That this perfect image may not be executed due to limitations of skill, media, or even mood, brings about a paralysis. The dread of being frustrated bars action. Like writer’s block, the canvas sits empty, or the artist produces only what they are comfortable doing.

It’s a hard-learned lesson that the making of the work is the reward. How the world will react is out of the control of the maker. If the end result is satisfying, or even elating, then this is an added boon. If the anticipated frustration wins out, the final piece is not up to the intent of the artist, or is rejected by audience and critic, then this will either inform the artist to improve, or to change their approach.

To do otherwise is to stagnate, and eventually decay and be replaced by those willing to keep striving.

As an occultist and an artist, my muse moments are frequently indistinguishable from the UPG.

Frequently the creation of the art is a means through which the esoteric and often obscure message of the UPG sheds itself of the dross brought across from the other side, and becomes full-fledged and full formed in my consciousness.

Sometimes the thing comes clear to begin with, and the execution of the artwork is the goal of process. It is a magical construction that has some sort of purpose.

Perhaps it is for me personally.

Perhaps it is an homage or gift to a particular spirit (consider it like a magical commission to paint a portrait).

Perhaps it is destined to hang on a museum wall in some distant future when I am gone to dust, and pass along it’s true message to a lucky soul who will know how to make use of it.

To be fair, I am not often sure of that purpose, even when the bell rings loudly and the image is fully formed and yelling at me to paint it.

As an artist who draws upon dream imagery and such subconscious inspiration as this, I may often be employing symbols from many cultural and magical systems. I do not see this as an exploitation, because I am responding to the voice of the muse. It is what is being sung to me. I am one who believes that all these various cultural and magical systems are the shared heritage of a human race, and that they all developed from the same source so long ago that we do not fully understand how or why they came about.

Human beings make art. Human beings practice magic.

Other animals use tools and mourn their dead and have complex social structures for the getting of food and the rearing of young and protection of the social group.

But it is our relationship with the muse that began our great journey as a species out of that plain, to an awareness of our cosmos, and hopefully a dawning understanding of the importance of that journey. After eons of exploitation of the Mother of Us All, we have reached a point where our population is threatening to alter the nature of the planet in ways that may not be recoverable.

Looking for a purely technical solution does not really appear to be working. There is a deplorable tendency for such advances to be held and hoarded by the few elites, who will use to add even more pieces of silver to their burgeoning coffers. Even if this were not the case, having such solutions adopted across cultural boundaries with very different ideas of the nature of our cosmic experience is difficult.

Fear and ignorance are at least as much a barrier to solving our looming ecological crises as greed and avarice.

The occult community is not free of these issues. In many ways what I have observed on social media in the last year or so is a microcosm of these larger issues. People fixate on dogma. People separate over traditions. People argue trivialities. All the while asserting, ironically, that they are building a future free from these trappings of the patriarchal capitalistic monotheist religions that “stole” their traditions.

As the late great Jimmy Buffet puts it, “It ain’t that simple.”

Opening ourselves can be a difficult process. We are creatures of both habit and environment. We may have been brought up to believe in one thing, and even if we later rebel or refuse or escape from it, the influence of it is permanently there. This is the same for society as a whole as it is for the individual. Thus the systemic change necessary in the widely variable human culture, nuanced by thousands of years of tradition, lore, and history, and hemmed in by very different economic realities, is not something that has a simple, immediate or even generational solution.

I’m old enough to remember when the hippies were going to change the world. Peace and Love for everybody regardless of anything that was different.

Some things did change. Some things that changed only appeared to change. And still other things were simply sweep under a convenient rug in a “developing nation” where the self-righteous no longer had to smell it.

Thus conveniently removed, such distasteful things as slave labor, environmental pollution and unbelievably unsafe workplaces were pronounced “fixed” and convenient and cheap production went on to fuel the fortunes of tech billionaires and global corporate e-tailers.

The new awareness of a new generation that these old things didn’t actually get fixed is much the basis of the widening gap between those hippies (now designated “boomers” in the most derogatory way possibly). my own generation who were basically let run feral for a couple decades as said boomers grasped at a fading youth, and the “millennial” (also a derogatory designation) , Gen Z, and whatever the newest group are being grouped as.

The generation gap was a thing invented in the 1960s, and wow, retro again today. This may be the first time in our history as a species we’ve had so many generations around to be blaming each other for whatever great ill and frustration confronts them.

I knew one of my great grandmothers. She was born in 1895. In her lifetime we advanced from the steam locomotive to having people land on the moon. In my lifetime, we’ve gone to a permanent human presence off the planet, in orbit, capable of phoning home to anyplace in the world. We have a global community with near instantaneous communication, and it is no longer possible for iniquity and injustice to hide in the dark. But somehow they still manage to do so.

Somewhere there’s a war going on. Somewhere there’s always a war going in. Somewhere hate is driving action. Villages are burning. People are dying. Somewhere someone is making bank on that. This is the human condition as it was since we came down out of the trees, and began struggling for finite resources on a small rock in the middle of a great big inhospitable nothingness.

We haven’t managed to fix that. Even in the utopian futures imagined by the science fiction fabulists, there is inevitably an “enemy” somewhere out there, who threatens the stability and peace of the protagonist society. That’s a construct, to illustrate the desired state of moral superiority in no longer being like said enemy.

I’ve been a believer in the brighter future of the Star Trek TV show since I first encountered in the late 60s and early 70s. Yet the first iteration had enemies that bore perhaps too close a resemblance to current foes of the American state. It’s hard to look at the “grand vision” and not see a certain jingoism. But it is a thing of it’s time. To hide the dialogs about war, bigotry, and other social issues, the producers had to provide the type of adversarial adventure that would get sponsors to pay because viewers tuned in. Later versions of the show attempted to show a rehabilitation of the relationship between those enemies (as foretold in earlier episodes). But that only meant that new enemies were discovered or invented that echoed the changing geopolitical climate.

Put most simply, we don’t even seem to be able to imagine a future where we won’t have someone somewhere at war for something.

That’s a frightening and profoundly disheartening thought.

Normal Odd
When I transitioned from the generally free environment of academia into the results-oriented cash-driven world of gainfully employed adult, I gradually reduced the number of really strange and unusual pieces I produced. Such that I did make, were themselves a more pedestrian type of thing, geared toward illustration of popular science fiction or fantasy, and while technically very professional, they weren’t terribly imaginative or inspired. And along the way there were a lot of pieces that were certainly more “normal” being produced, because that was feeding my family.

Of course that is also frustrating, and leads to dissatisfaction with one’s position and one’s life, and can feed back around into other aspects of one’s life and relationships. Creative people, whether they are painters or writers or musicians or inventors or motivators, have an almost physiological need to harken to the call of the muse. When they are stifled in this process, whether through their job or their personal life, they will suffer at a very deep level, sometimes without even realizing it.

That I am capable of creating things that are arcane, odd, eerie, and disturbing, while at the same time able to produce mainstream mass market traditional imagery, and enjoy doing both, is testament to a long life of contemplating that issue. If someone is attracted to the one, but the other causes them to not buy my work, that’s fine. I really don’t want my work owned by someone like that. And it doesn’t matter if the potential buyer wants the creepy stuff but is put off by the normal stuff, or vise versa. If they are unable to enjoy the image they are attracted to because my other works are upsetting to them, then again, I’d rather not have them owning either work.

Both come from the same head, heart, and hand. I have nothing to prove. This is my time to make the work for me. If you like it, great. If you don’t, well, that’s about you.

And perhaps it is the frustrated musings of an aging artist, who sees the ticking away of the days, and the accompanying difficulty of making the work, particularly at a time when the voice of the muse may be coming clearer than it ever has.

I celebrate that I am lucky enough to have reached the age when I can contemplate making work simply to please my own soul. That is not to say that I haven’t, and didn’t have opportunities to make works of this kind over the years. But in those years between the experimental freedom of youth and the late stage of a career, there is first and foremost the need to make a living.

Providing food, shelter, care, and comfort for oneself and one’s chosen family is no sin. We can wrangle with the moral implications of the few super rich occupying the highest echelons, and the disparity between our relative comfort in the Western World, at least if we are part of a particular ethnic background. But to be alive is to have certain real needs, and these are not met by wishful thinking, or philosophical stance.

I have made art for myself. I have made art for others. And I have made art for money.

I will make art for myself. I hope to make art for others. And I have no doubt that I will make art for money.

This is neither selling out nor compromising my artistic integrity. There is still joy in the creation of subject matter that has a more “commercial value” even if that is not where the muse sings loudest to me. On the other hand, my willingness to see that experience as joyful, as valuable, as something that helps me grow, has been rewarded by a flood of visions and ideas that are fresh, and freely given. I am encouraged to conceive of works that in earlier parts of my life I would have found strange, or uncomfortable. I have broadened my own thinking of what the moniker of “occult artist” might include, and feel like I have passed the secret door to a whole new cave of wonders.

And in receiving these new songs, I feel that many things I’d once have considered “too far out there” may actually also have “commercial value”.

The frustration, of course, is having so much I want to do, and struggling still for the time to do it. The mundane and necessary business of business that puts food on the table, a roof over my head, meds in the cabinet, savings in the retirement fund, and keeps my cats in the manner to which they’ve become accustomed still takes priority over my desire to execute the next grand idea.

So I beg indulgence, O Muse, that you have patience. Do not withdraw from me because you mistake my need for the daily bread an indifference to your gift. Understand my struggle to sip the nectar of your song at the end of an exhausting day in “the real world”.

I know that your cup holds restoration and healing. Were that I had strength but to bring it to my lips.

You’ll no doubt notice that this article has returned to the previous Wednesday at 5:00 PM Central Time live date. That was working. The reschedule was not. If it’s not broke…

The muse responsible for these articles seems to be cooperating again, in concert with her sister more involved with the visual and plastic arts (or they may be one and the same). If such favor holds, I’ll be here 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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Queen Of The Night

The Witch

Tomorrow is one of the dates celebrated as Hecate’s Night, so this, I suppose, is Hecate’s Night Eve.

My own relationship with the Goddess of the Witches is a complicated one. But then my relationships with most of the gods and spirits is complicated, because relationships are complicated. They form organically, and grow, or die, over time.

As Hecate comes ostensibly to us out of Greek mythology, she was never top of mind for me when I was younger. Of course, I read the stories, knew the names of the gods and heroes, and how they equated to the Roman names that cropped up in astrology, astronomy, and on the various NASA programs. But I was, and remain, deeply involved in the culture of Ancient Egypt.

Hecate nevertheless made herself present in my life some years ago, as muse if nothing else. She inspired a painting I made for, and I believe still belongs to, a young witch of my acquaintance.

Witchpainting
She is formed out of the moonlight and the mist
Whispered wind in barren trees
The distant baying of hounds
Cold and fear
Staring out of the grave.

We referred to her simply as “The Witch” or the “The Witch Painting”. It was a singular work, one of those portraits where the eyes follow you around the room. The affect was accidental, or at least synchronistic, as by intention and artifice I have not been able to reproduce it. There are no photos in my possession of this painting. This was made in the days of analog, when you had to shoot with film, develop and print same, and there was a cost associated that a young “starving artist” could not support for a mere work of vanity and friendship.

But the image remains more or less in my brain, and I have made a couple of stabs at reproducing it since, though I fully doubt the power imbued in that original will ever occupy a later copy, nor should it, and I am okay with that.

Over the intervening years, however, I have come to know that this painting was a votive or shrine or altar to Hecate. It’s a portrait of her, or at least of the aspect of her she showed me those years ago in the student ‘s studio. It does not have the usual trappings, but there is no doubt in my mind that she is connected with it. and to a lesser extent, the one’s I have made later for my own collection.

Because of that I have dug a little deeper into her background and found that she is not Greek, but probably imported from Anatolia, and like the Titans she is frequently grouped with, represents the beliefs of a much older culture, with closer connections to creative chaos than the Olympian soap opera. I try not to bring these things up. Everyone has family drama, and frankly, her background is none of my business. Think about it. If you were being summoned by some sorceror, would you want to be reminded of all the crap that you had to deal with growing up? I certainly wouldn’t. And it certainly wouldn’t incline me toward granting any potential boons.

We all have a right to our private lives, the gods no less than anyone else.

Some may think my regarding the gods and spirits with such familiarity is out of keeping with their status. Yet I would counter that this is simply the way I have come to know them, and interact with them. I do not find it useful, practical, or realistic to regard them as some distant entity residing in a crumbling ruin in a far away land. I would think the gods have moved on, or rather, that their presence has shifted to other focal points.

Look at it logically. Imagine you are a small business with a few loyal employees providing a valid service for the community. But due to changes of fortune, you start losing customers. People stop dropping in. You can’t really afford to keep your staff on, or even maintain the property.

Would you hang around there moping for an eon or two, or would you go look for greener pastures?

Yes, clearly there are spirits that haunt certain places, and I have no doubt that if you found a temple dedicated to Hecate that you might have a good chance of drawing her attention by performing an ancient secret ritual. Who doesn’t like a bit of nostalgia now and again.

But the gods (and other spirits) as we encounter them, thrive on, or at least enjoy, our interaction. So they are going to go where that interaction is, even if it’s a blasted heath in Medieval Scotland.

Thing is, though the Bard’s story was set in an earlier period, he was doubtless drawing on knowledge (or at least awareness) of the contemporary regard for Hecate as a goddess of witches, commander of lesser shades and spirits, and an excellent necromancer in her own right. While Dr. Dee and other “scholarly mages” were summoning angels to compel the denizens of the graveyard to divulge cosmic secrets and the locations of any nearby buried treasure, the common folk had recourse to witches, and the witches were clearly still worshipping Hecate.

If you are looking for specifics as to the nature of that worship, you’ll have to find it elsewhere. I understand that there’s a feast or supper traditional to the Hecate’s Night commemoration, but I have little details. The Wyrd Sisters cooked up that hell-broth we all know so well, but free-range newts are so hard to find these days, let alone fenny snake filet. They don’t even carry it at Whole Foods.

I am not a petitioner of Hecate. I was given a gift by her many years ago, and that was to paint a version of her portrait to give as a gift to another witch. Like a post hypnotic suggestion, it is only through many intervening years that I have been able to realize that it was Hecate. And it is thus entirely possible that it is only now that I should consider approaching her again.

And this brings up that question of familiarity. As I have reached this awareness of the goddess, I have gone looking for authentic sources on her nature and proper conduct of rituals. Like much of modern magic, and particularly as AI and search-engine based texts are being used to feed the new market, it is virtually impossible to look to any of these sources and be comfortable that they have a true historical or even moderately well researched link to the actual fact of how this goddess was worshipped, or even understood, in antiquity.

This can be extremely frustrating for those, either novice or seasoned practicioner, seeking to expand their awareness and connect with any spirit or god. There are a number of current practices regarding the Egyptian gods that I personally cannot connect with, both because of my awareness of the history of the worship of those gods, and because of my familiarity with those spirits through years of interaction in my own way.

Jason Miller in his Consorting with Spirits and other works suggests that one should most probably approach a spirit or god using the methods that have come down to us from elder times. I don’t disagree with him entirely about that. The reasoning he expresses is that these beings are very different in nature than us, and dwell, or at least exist primarily in some kind of space-time dimension that is separate from ours. These continua operate under a different kind of physics, and thus respond to manipulation in different ways than our own dimensional space. Chanting a spell from Ancient Greece may be an entirely viable method of manipulating the dimensional boundaries between our existence and theirs, and making possible a wee crack in the door.

On the other hand, Miller himself admits to having encountered Hecate in a charnel ground in Asia, while pursuing a study of Buddhism. This argues two points. First, the gods and spirits are not bound by our ordinary space, and may manifest as it pleases them. They don’t necessarily need their temple or an idol to inhabit, or even a ritual to be performed. They exist wherever and whenever they want to.

Secondarily, the spirits can choose to interact with humans the same way humans choose to interact with a spirit. They can, and do, decide to introduce themselves to persons who have made no attempt to propitiate them or even get their attention. And in those situations, the usual rules may be suspended, or at least flexed a bit.

Aside from Zeus notorious philandering, the Greek myths are replete with stories of one or another of the Olympians favoring or aiding mere mortals for their own reasons. The capriciousness of many of these encounters is often given as the impetus for a war or an adventure that widens the myth cycle.

Older gods out of Egypt and Mesopotamia are a bit more aloof. These cultures had a very strict caste system and the gods were at the top of it. While they might deign to aid a king, high-priest, or upper-class born hero, their connection to the peasantry was only a trickle-down. The gods smiled upon Pharaoh, because he was one of their own. Pharaoh smiled upon the people and that was enough.

This didn’t keep the common folk from going and making offerings in the temple, or praying (after a fashion) to the gods for help, but this was through the mechanism of the priesthood; a method later adopted by the Christian theocracy. These were political and economic strategies rather than an intersession from deity.

For now, I am still pursuing knowledge of Hecate, and weighing the sources accordingly. I am not much for predestined outcomes, but my conception of the world of gods and spirits includes the existence of very different timescales, and that “future” and “past” are not necessarily as fixed in these other worlds as they are in ours. The perception I have of the time since I made this portrait and my present interest in learning more about the sitter, may only be moments to her.

In any case, I wish to all, especially the good lady herself, a most respectful and propitious Hecate’s night, and hope she notes the tip-tapping of my keyboard as I write. I’d happily buy her dinner for the peace that painting continues to bring me.

I’ll be back next week.

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Another Trip Around The Sun

Astrolabe

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Life is a constant mystery.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Because I am always asking myself that question.

“What if you’re wrong?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yet the history of visual and plastic arts gives us a number of examples of intentional manipulation of our perception of space time. If one looks at the conventions of Ancient Egyptian art, we are confronted with figures who have heads, hands, and legs and feet in profile, but torsos and hips portrayed frontally. It’s clear, however, from their sculpture work that they not only understood, but mastered depictions of three-dimensions. The deliberate choice to create such distorted flat images in two-dimensions derived from their concepts of the nature of things. They had to include, as much as possible, a clear picture in two dimensions, of the three-dimensional form, otherwise the gods and spirits might not recognize it, and the magic would fail to work.
Starchart02

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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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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 Fool That Follows Us

Agents Of Fortune

This summer’s exercise in the exploration of the Major Arcana of the Rider Waite Smith Tarot began with a different intention and expectation than what it ultimately ended up being. I don’t consider this a failure on my part, either from an editorial standpoint, or in terms of the material presented. This is exactly what working with the Tarot is about.

Tarot is a mnemonic device. At it’s heart, it’s a set of images that are supposed to remind us of a set of predetermined meanings. And, of course, it is is that. But if that is all that it is, then everyone could understand and use these cards. In fact, this process could be fully automated and presented as a handy phone app. And it has been. Yet much like the auto-horoscope apps, this recitation of rote meanings only appears inciteful through coincidence, and the wishful thinking of the user. That is, it’s ability to access the ethereal and the subconscious is an illusion.

To really reach beyond, we have to become a part of the process ourselves. The cards are reminders, certainly, but they are also stimuli. Yes, the Fool may indicate new beginnings, naivete, or poor decisions (depending on whose book you read). But perhaps that moment of stepping off the cliff is what sets our imagination on it’s journey. If we become too involved with the “accepted” meaning of the card, we are locking ourselves off from other paths it might set us on.

This is just as valid a consideration when looking upon the cards as the “hero’s journey” or some other hidden initiatory message. While I do not discount this idea, adherence to that as an absolute and total meaning of the cards is limiting in aspect.

The point is that one must remain open to where the card directs the mind, rather than rushing toward a conventional interpretation. It may not even be the Fool that starts that inspiration. It may be the scarlet color of the tunic, or the angle of staff used to carry the pack. Or it may be the little dog that follows him.

If you follow my Instagram account, you are acquainted with the clips from the cards I have used to announce each week’s installment. I have accumulated them in the photo below. In preparing these, my intent was to find some piece of Pamela Smith’s images that would be unique, possibly iconic, but also not necessarily the obvious emblem of each card. In doing so, I hoped to express that same idea that the card as it is generally experienced may be refreshed by approaching it from a different angle.

major-arcana-icons
The Instagram clips from the article series. What do these snippets say to you? What do you think made me pick them?

The RWS have been around for over a century now. The fact that the designs are now in public domain mean that they are appearing everywhere from t-shirts to coffee mugs. The decks themselves are being reissued by multiple publishers who are recoloring and re-embellishing the old line work. They come in iridescent and hologram finishes, gilded or silvered on black and blue, and a wide range of color variations.

The result of this is that we are so inundated with the form of the images that we are becoming jaded. They are commonplace. Like the pentagram, the triple moon, and the Eye of Horus, our reaction to their sacred and special nature are growing weaker because of overexposure.

This is also a bane for the experienced reader, who, like myself, have been looking at these cards for years and years and almost immediately getting a one or two phrase “shorthand” meaning. I think this is one reason why we collect decks. Even though we go back to our favorites, the ability to access fresh and variant versions of the Tarot iconography can shake up our complacent reaction to the cards. It’s like hearing the same symphony played by a different orchestra, or arranged by a different conductor. Yes they are all Mozart, but perhaps in this version a passage ordinarily favoring strings has been given over to the woodwinds. The notes are the same notes, but played on a different instrument. This creates a different experience of the symphony, and evokes a different response in our minds.

So too is our experience of the RWS style deck interpreted by a different artist. And this gives us an opportunity to imagine and intuit different messages. It changes the nature of the narrative. By this process we may internalize some of these responses, and then when we return to that original deck, we have a different context for that card when it comes up.

There is inherent in this approach the potential stigma of the Unverifiable Personal Gnosis. This is the thing that you know you know, because you know. And frequently in modern discussions of magical practice, the “UPG” is somewhat frowned upon. I hope through the explorations of the cards these last several weeks, I have demonstrated that very much of the supposed “secret teachings” are the UPG of persons from the 18th and 19th century, frequently being legitimized as “ancient and forbidden knowledge” through spurious attributions to the Romani people and the Ancient Egyptians, among others.

The works I have cited in these articles are but a few of the many many texts on Tarot. They are in my personal library, and I am certain that they, along with some other texts I own on cartomancy, have an influence on my personal understanding of the cards. I will say that I agree in parts with these works, and I disagree on the whole. Many texts are in conflict, and this is not unique to the discipline of Tarot. The shelves of astrology texts I possess are at odds in terms of both interpretations and mechanisms.

Additionally, there has been and continues to be an impetus to merge other mantic arts like astrology and numerology, and other magical systems, like gematria, Kabbala, and angel magic with Tarot, and to establish some longstanding heritage for this fusion. If we pare away the legends and find a solid historical narrative for the Tarot – as I believe Paul Huson has done in his Mystical Origins of the Tarot, then we have to discard or at least degrade the majority of these pedigrees. Yet without a secret mystical tradition, the combination of the cards – as a visual magical tool – is still a valid method. There is, of course, some belief that the “true occult teaching” would be needed for such to work, but it truly depends on one’s approach.

There is some context that certain of the Tarot were used both for beneficent and baneful magic as early as the 17th century, and probably as soon as these cards were available. The basic doctrine of sympathies applied here, and of course still does. If you want to call the Devil, there’s the Devil card for that. If you dabble with love spells, the Lovers is an obvious choice, but there’s also the Two of Cups, or the Four of Wands. The imagery works regardless of “system” and truly needs no ancient occult connection to be effective. If we lock ourselves into such systems of thinking about the cards, we are also limiting our ability to access unexpected revelations from the cards themselves.

Shortly after finishing last week’s article I saw a posting by Psychic Witch author Mat Auryn. He suggested that on the Five of Wands, the staffs seem to just fail to make a pentagram. He further goes on to say that the persons wielding the staff’s then may be seen to represent the elements, where the one is the spotted tunic is Quintessence, or Spirit, and that he has purposely withdrawn his staff to “break” the natural shape of the pentagram. This is an intriguing insight. Generally speaking the usual meaning here is conflict or disorder. Yet with this approach, we can go further to express that when Spirit or Intelligence is extracted from its natural place within the elemental system, things tend to fall apart. We are presented with a metaphor of the world in chaos, or a person in chaos, rather than an external and literal conflict.

Expanding on this insight, I went back and looked at that card. It is also possible to contextualize as the five persons are about to form the pentagram We can here almost reverse the usual meaning of conflict and see the Five of Wands as an emblem of cooperation and common goals. Is this just wishful thinking? A complete personal rewrite of the meaning that for ages has been the same thing? Probably. But does that mean that either approach is wrong? No.

It is ultimately the impression of the card that we form as it gets turned over and laid down that is the meaning of the card. The key is to train ourselves to respond freshly to that impression rather than hammering the card into a pre-defined message, which completely ignores what our subconscious is trying to tell us.

I hope the last few weeks exercises have inspired you to look at the RWS and it’s related kin in a new light. Beyond that, an active awareness of all the images and impressions we are fed daily can expand our lives, our knowledge, and our ability to affect the world around us.

I’ll be back next week with new topics. As much as I have enjoyed this journey, I need now to step away from it and reset my thinking to write more extemporaneously as I was prior to April. We’ll see where it takes us.

Thank you for your continued patronage.

Featured image and Instagram pic clipped from the Blue Oyster Cult album Agents of Fortune. Artwork is by Lynn Curlee.

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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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Light Unchallenged

Sun

All Hail the Coming of The Sun King!

Well, not me, thank you. I am a Creature of the Winter Dark, and the exultation of the primary luminary in his sign of Leo is not a comfort here in Texas with another week of 100°+ temps. The Sun is one of my least favorite cards. It’s certainly in the bottom five. I frequently avoid incarnations and avatars of the Sun in various mythologies. Save for it’s placement in my natal chart (only a couple of hours before dipping peacefully below the horizon) I do my best to avoid it. But here we are, and I shall try to assay it as best I can, though I shan’t say it will be without bias. No reading ever is.

sun-rws-tarot
Bit over the top, this one. But that is in keeping with the reverence for the top luminary.

Card XIX The Sun is characterized by a large solar disk, with 12 straight rays (assuming one behind the Roman numeral as logical) and 12 wavy rays. Beneath it in the background is a row of sunflowers planted behind a garden wall. In front of the wall there is a white horse. On his back is a nude child, crowned with a ring of smaller sunflowers and a red feather in the center. The child holds a great red banner.

The imagery here appears to be the more straightforward of almost any Tarot card. The rays can be taken to represent the hours of the day and the wavy rays those of the night (of which the Sun still holds sway). Alternatively, the rays can represent the signs of the Zodiac and the wavy rays the Houses, which are dependent upon the Rising Line. This meridian, most important in astrological calculations, is essentially the horizon at the time of birth. Since this is also a factor of the hour and moment, the Sun may be said to also control where the Houses are laid out. Equal Houses in a perfect system are synonymous with the signs, but because the Sun travels sign to sign over the space of about 30 days, and house to house in a period of twenty-four hours, there is likely to always be some variation. If a latitude driven House system like Placidus is used, then there is even more to take into consideration, but it is the Sun as arbiter of the hour that determines the Ascendant, and the Ascendant that determines the Houses. Since it is the Houses that are used to express good or ill omen of planetary placement and aspect, the Sun’s influence here may be as important, if not more important, than the Sun sign alone.

Sun signs are what most people who look at the daily horoscope are aware of. The Sun, as the biggest brightest and fastest moving object in our skies, has taken the lion’s share of the astrological celebrity. And lion’s share is appropriately given to him, as he is ruler of the Sign of Leo, that brightest and hottest season, following just after the Summer Solstice. The Moon, as his opposite, second largest, and second fastest, was given dominion over neighboring Cancer, preceding the Solstice, and expressed as water. Water as opposite the Sun’s fire makes a more complete analogy.

From these, then, the ancient Chaldees put the remaining five visible “wanderers” in charge of the chart in opposing pairs, starting with Mercury holding Gemini and Virgo, Venus with Taurus and Libra, Mars ruling the notorious Aries and Scorpio, Jupiter the burgeoning Pisces and Sagittarius, and finally old dark Saturn having sway over the cold winter signs of Capricorn and Aquarius. Comparatively recent discoveries of additional planets have necessitated given them rulership of signs in ways that seem most suitable, so the dark deep waters of Scorpio have been assigned to Pluto surrounded by his river Styx, Neptune rules the seas that Pisces swims in, and dreaming Uranus presides over Aquarian skies.

It is however the annual solar visit into each sign that gave us that popular Seventies singles scene question: “Hey, baby, what’s your sign?”. The Sun being biggest and brightest and fastest was given greatest influence in determining which characteristics would most mark an individual’s personality, or at least, their Leo-ness. The big and bold and egocentric and externalized aspects of ourselves are, like the bright Sun, and the charging Lion, what we see in ourselves and in others. The Moon, by contrast, governing the nightly tides, is equated to our tendency for emotional passions, thus our Moon Sign, is more frequently associated with our subconscious selves. Rounding out the top three is the Rising Sign, which is that sign where the Ascendant is placed, the sign on our “dawn” horizon at the hour of our birth. This is influential, in that it defines the First House, and the First House is the house of our ego, our self-image, and often our selfishness. Awareness of Sun, Moon, and Rising is becoming more common in the casual astrology follower these days, and are at least helpful if one doesn’t grasp the complex webs of planets, houses, aspects, rulerships, exaltations, detriments, falls, decans, parts, etc, that go into a full chart workup.

But what does all this astrology have to do with the Tarot card? Well, again, my approach to the Sun as a card is somewhat ambivalent. I think it’s a showy one-note card that just comes in bringing cheery good fortune and positive vibes and is very much often read like the Sun sign in a natal chart. That is, much more importance is given to its appearance than to the rest of the chart, or the rest of the Tarot spread itself.

sun-tarot-Marseille
This sample from the Tarot of Marseilles shows a French preference for two children playing in the sunlight. This variation is not unique, though there are a number of interpretations to it’s meaning. Some say it represents a young couple – or marriage – one of the potential inferences of this card. Alternatively the pair are the offspring of a successful domestic life, which is by extension the same thing. Others may see them as the denizens of the Tower, reborn in the full light of the New Dawn. I can find some other potential sources for them, though perhaps not so likely ones. Levi acknowledges them, as does Waite, but both elect for the version with a single child, and Waite goes further to prefer the single child on the spotless white horse. Through this we may be meant to associate the radiant Sun with the Christ Child.

The “arrival of Baby New Year” artwork smacks of the Baroque style of France’s Sun King Louis XIV. Now don’t get me wrong. I love Baroque art, but I am also conscious of the egotism involved. This is, after all, the man who, when told his plans for the palace at Versailles would bankrupt the state, replied “L’etat c’est moi.” – “I am the state.” While his great-great-great-grandson would lose it all (including his head) late, Louis XIV influence on the world and history was certainly worthy of the title he bestowed upon himself. Part of his propaganda was indulging a neo-pagan cult of Apollo, with him as the dutifully Catholic, but also fully mythical embodiment of the solar deity. The art and decoration of his palaces are resplendent with scenes of Greek myth, frequently erotic (and even pornographic) depictions of the Sun- centered sagas.

Which is why it’s curious to find that on the quintessential French Tarot decks, there are two children on this card. Most obviously when we find two of anything we expect an allusion to Gemini. Yet Gemini and the Sun are hardly related, as we’ve already expressed. The Sun rules Leo, little Mercury is charged with authority over Gemini. So who are these two, who often show up as cherubs in the iconography of other decks? There are perhaps a couple of candidates.

Let’s go with a French intrigue first. During the reign of the Sun King, a warrant was issued for one Eustache Dauger. Dauger was held in prison for the rest of his life, dying in the infamous Bastille. In this time he was the responsibility of a single jailer. This unusual arrangement has lead to much speculation, and expounded upon by the misreporting by the salacious minded Voltaire, that Dauger had been sentenced to wear an iron mask, forever obscuring his identity. It was also Voltaire who suggested that this person was an older bastard son of the previous king, and thus a longshot contender for the throne. Alexander Dumas, who penned The Man in the Iron Mask based on Dauger, makes him a moments older legitimate twin, whose existence must be kept secret by the usurper Louis. So perhaps these two children are a bit of naughty French parody that came at a later time (since during the reign of Louis XIV and indeed his successors, such a comment would send one to the Bastille or the guillotine.).

Another possible origin for the two children is an artistic theme quite common in Renaissance and later art associating the infant John the Baptist and the Christ Child. John, as the predecessor and prophet of Jesus, is a significant figure in the Gospels. John was an older cousin, according to the lore. When he was executed by Herod for preaching against him and the Roman occupation, Jesus moved up in prominence. It was fashionable in many works of religious art to show the two children together, often in the company of their mothers. Leonardo painted at least two such works, and the dual children on the Marseilles card always get me thinking of them.

The-Virgin-of-the-Rocks
Leonardo’s Virgin of the Rocks. This is the version that is in the National Gallery in London. There’s another one in the Louvre that is somewhat different. It is generally acknowledged that this version may have been finished by apprentices, or later altered. In the Louvre version, the angel is pointing toward the Christ Child, here signified by the cross on his shoulder. The other infant is John the Baptist, his cousin and predecessor. The pointed finger as a symbol of the presence of the Divine is a common feature in Leonardo’s works. The French version is missing the cross, and the halos on the children, and the “modesty cloth” on the Christ Child. These alterations to the London version suggest a later “correction” by the church rather than a contemporary alteration to the painting by Leonardo’s helpers. The two children may be a possible source for the dual infants in some versions of the Sun Tarot.

The single child on the white horse is almost certainly a metaphor for the Christ, with his far too large red banner symbolizing the blood sacrifice that is reputed to save all of humanity. Confuting the Sun and the Son was useful in converting early pagans, and adopting some of the heliocal energies and attributions with the growing Christian cult. It’s important to remember that early Roman versions of Christ were not the bearded dark man we tend to view as Jesus today. Roman Jesus was Roman, often depicted as the Shepherd, clean-shaven, and light-haired or sometimes blonde. The infant in the Sun card is much more a remnant of that tradition, which is quasi-pagan, than of the later Gothic faith. This may be why I tend to bridle at the imagery of this card, which -at least artistically- doesn’t fit well with the style of the rest of the deck. I have no doubt that it was executed by Smith. Her definitive squiggle is buried down in the stones of the wall on the right. But it’s depiction is anachronistic in an otherwise congruous deck. It looks more like a Tiffany window than a Gothic icon. To me it just seems all too showy.

That is the nature of the Sun though. In hottest August, when all the summer’s growth has ripened and the true bounty of the earth has burst forth, we are perhaps able to appreciate this boisterous celebrant trump. If we are able to divorce it from the rather ham-handed Christian symbolism, and look at it rather as a pagan Sun that is part of the pagan celestial triad of Star-Moon-Sun, then it’s munificence and fertility might be felt as meant, and the traditional associations of fruition allowed to radiate out into the cards of the surrounding reading.

Two cards remain in the Major Arcana, styled XX-Judgement (sic) and XXI, The World. For many these last two complete the Tarot Journey begun with our ambling Fool about to walk off the cliff. Within them are the bones of their ancestors, and both artistically and oracularly they present a number of problems for the modern non-Christian reader. But I hope I am able to provide some incite into how I have worked around these shortcomings when using the traditional Rider-Waite-Smith deck.

As for this week’s trump, my best effort was to take it as astrologically as possible, because again, I just don’t like it.

We all have our favorites, and our non-favorites. We must be aware how that colors the story we tell to the client, or to ourselves, when either of those come up in the reading.

Until next week, thank you for your continued interest.

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