Category: History

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Graveyard Dirt

Looted Sarcophagus Side View

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

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

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

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

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

These are big questions.

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

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

There’s shaky ground here.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

See you next week.

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

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So It Is Written

Tarot Shelf Three

I was pleased this year that a big part of my holiday haul were several new Tarot and Oracle decks. I possibly have suggested that I might have a bit of a Tarot problem (not enough shelving to begin with) , but if a deck presents me with attractive artwork that resonates with my personal tastes, I will likely eventually add it to my collection.

On the other hand, if the artwork doesn’t speak to me, then I will leave it, regardless of how popular it is. For example, my only version of the Tarot of Marseilles is a digital one on my phone and tablet, because frankly I think these cards are butt ugly. I realize that they are the final form of many copies of copies made from woodcut blocks, to meet the demands of Tarot players from the Renaissance onward, and that there ancillary use for divination was not considered of prime importance to the printer.

tarot-shelf-one
tarot-shelf-two
I may have mentioned before I have a Tarot problem. Chiefly, the problem is not nearly enough shelf space. In addition to the header image on the page, these represent my displayed Tarot and oracle card collection, though there are lot hidden in the back and some that I have lost the boxes long ago that reside in other less graphicly blandished containers in other parts of the library. And over the holiday I added at least 11 more. Well, there was a full moon and a year end discount at the used bookstore and I was more or less unsupervised.

Yet because this deck forms a very important link between the elaborate Italian decks like the Visconti-Sforza Tarot and the modern ones which were typified by the Rider-Waite-Smith, I reluctantly got the Android version from the Fool’s Dog. I cannot warm up to these cards so they will not serve me to read. A paper copy might be something I should have, but so far they are priced highly (to my mind) for something that was never in copyright, and should be available in discount versions. For now, the scanned images suffice for my research work.

For me personally reading the Tarot, or using it for meditation or inspiration or spellcraft, is unequivocally tied to my experience of the images. I am an artist. I experience the universe through the visual faculty foremost. This may mean that with a particular deck, my mental impression of the card does not match the usual and customary interpretation. As I looked through a number of the new decks, and looked for the familiar signposts that I admit to having learned in my early days, I got to pondering that whole proposition.

That is, here we have an image, more than likely only about a century old, that has been presented as a definite indicator of a particular idea.

Because Waite said it did. Because he read it from Levi. Levi read Etteilla who probably was extrapolating from Court de Gebelin. Each of these scholars added their own esoteric bent to the tradition, which has no exact reliable origin.

Levi-hierophant
Levi the Heirophant – The Keeper of the Keys to the Secrets. While his magnum opus Dogma et Rituel de la Huate Magie, gives us his interpretations of the Major Arcana. One has to delve into his History of Magic to find reference to the lesser cards, and it is buried among a broadly racist discussion of the use of Tarot by the Romani.

As I haven’t a French edition of the latter tome, I can’t say to what extent this coloring of the Bohemian Nomads, as they are called, comes from Waite as translator, but sadly misogyny, racism, and classism permeate the writings of the 19th and early 20th century occult authors.

This has made the grains of wisdom in such works hard to access, and put off many more modern readers entirely. It’s important to remember to cast such figures and their respective works in the context of their age, and not our own. In a hundred years, we may be seen as utter barbarians.

Many attribute it toward Egypt, but even this is massively miscast (aside from being plain wrong). Crowley’s “Book of Thoth” is more connected with Levi’s “Book of Hermes” and both thereby associate the “Divine Wisdom” with Hermes Trismegistus and the so-called “Emerald Tablet” of the alchemists.

The Emerald Tablet entered European thinking in the Middle Ages through Moorish Spain, and is more than likely a grimoire based upon Greek texts surviving in the Islamic world. So in such a way it does come from Egypt, but not in the way most suppose.

Nor does the confutation of the racial slur “gypsy” with both cartomancy and that ancient land have any basis in fact. The Romani people, we now know, descend from the Indus River valley rather than the Nile one.

But still such stories persist. I trace that to the invention of Curtis Siodmak and the iconic performance of Maria Ouspenskaya in 1941’s The Wolf Man. This one film gives us the archtype of the wizened kerchiefed Fortune Teller with her crystal ball, pronouncing doom to the hero. She was so powerful in the part that she returned for the sequel Frankenstein Meets The Wolfman in 1943.

Whether Ouspenksaya’s character derives from an actual tradition is hard to say. The Wolf Man series were at the tail end of Universal’s golden age of monster movies. Her purpose in the film is expository.

In previous movies the actor Edward Von Sloan would have given us the dire warnings in the guise of Dr. Van Helsing (Dracula) , Dr. Waldman (Frankenstein) , or Dr. Muller (The Mummy). But in 1941 and 1943 the character of “Herr Doktor” was not a type American audiences found comfortable anymore, so the pseudo-Slavic Madame Maleva took up the reins of the person “in the know”.

By the way, the Wolf Man is where we first hear popularly about the Pentagram being a “mark of the devil”. But fundamental Christianity firmly latched onto it as such. Especially since Anton LeVey uses an “inverted” pentagram as the symbol on the Satanic bible. The evil Satanic he-goat fits right into it.

Except it’s not the Satanic he-goat. It’s something called Baphomet, which was imagined by Eliphas Levi. The same Levi who gave us the roots of our modern Tarot meanings. Baphomet is a composite creature, similar to many in alchemical artwork, that incorporates symbols to express certain esoteric teachings. It has been confused with Kernnunos, and Pan, and of course the “Black Goat” in medieval witch-hunting texts. If it has a real progenitor it’s the old Egyptian generative god Khnum.

But the name Baphomet is murky too. It comes from the trials (under torture) of the Knights Templar, to describe a “head” they supposedly worshipped in secret conclaves when they had denounced Christ and trampled upon the cross. The actuality of this Head of Baphomet is by no means an established fact either. Some researchers have put forth that the head is either the folded up Shroud of Turin or a similar sacred cloth called the Mandilion or the Veronica. There is as much proof for that as for the theory that the Templars were secret converts to Islam, and that Baphomet was a mis-recording of Mohamet. Ultimately, like many “confessions” brought about by the insidious methods of the Inquisition, we don’t even really know if Baphomet was simply made up by ecclesiastical authorities who needed a convenient heresy.

In any case, it’s not the Devil, nor does it have any real connection to any devil, demon, or malefic spirit the Christian establishment has seen as persecutorial throughout it’s multiple millennia. But the impression persists. Because somewhere at some time some one wrote it down, and then it became “truth”.

Just like the meanings of the Tarot cards.

Prior to our Good Lady Pixie’s renditions, the 40 pip cards of the Minor Arcana were simply counters, much as any modern deck of “playing cards”.

two-tarot-chests
two-tarot-cups
two-tarot-swords
A Tale of Two Tarots. On the left is my 50 year old Hoi Poloi variation of the RWS deck, and on the right, the delightfully dark Deviant Moon Tarot. I’ve picked a few cards from each deck as an example of why the images are -to me at least- as important, if not more important, than the text of accepted meanings.

In the first instance our Four of Cups seems to share a common theme – that of satiation, sufficiency, and the need to reject excess. Yet in the Deviant Moon, there’s a touch of deviltry, or at least pique, as the figure casually flicks away the fourth chalice. Or does she drop it in a daydream. Her face (so like a Venetian carnival mask) seems to stare far away, unconcerned, or even unaware, that she has lost one of the cups.

Below is the well known Two of Swords, which often indicates an approaching danger to which the figure is blind to. It speaks of ill preparedness, isolation, and disengagement. Yet the Deviant Moon variant shows us an ettin-like creature, two heads, opposite each other, able to see, but locking in a perpetual struggle for dominance. The design plays off of the Gemini nature of the Deuce. Here the twins are merged. It speaks more to us of inner conflict, indecision, and stagnation. In a way it is not entirely different than the other card’s usual meaning, but yet the journey we take is a fresh one.

Joseph Campbell argues that the suits were symbols of the four estates of the Medieval world. The Wands were the Peasantry, the people working the land. The Swords, were the Nobility, deriving from their historical roles as professional soldiers. The Cups were the Clergy, symbolized by the Holy Cup of the Eucharist, and finally the Merchants were associated with the Coin of the realm.

It’s a pretty picture that would seem to fit, and as Campbell is such a revered source on so many ideas about our human mythology it can be difficult to question. But the connection of the suits with the Elements is equally as strong, and the origin of these cards in Islam, which was not arranged in exactly the same social order, calls it into suspicion. Many sources see the playing card as coming from China, where paper and printing were more extant than in Europe, and traveling with spice, cloth, and secret wisdom, along the Silk Road.

In any case they hit Venice in the 1200s and evolved into the more elaborate trick-taking game of Tarrochi. At this point the simple pips were joined by face cards, and a variable group of special point cards that we now call the Major Arcana.

It is the Major Arcana that Levi gives us values for, connecting it with the Mystic Qabbalah through the ability to give each card a corresponding Hebrew letter. This may be entirely arbitrary. It may be just another attempt to find “ancient wisdom” in something that was never meant to contain it. So there’s something of a good argument that the divinatory cards are only the Major Arcana, and the rest were just along for the ride.

tarot-books
The actual number of Tarot books I own is small and recent in comparison to the card decks (excluding the books that came with the decks).

The Connolly and Crowley are among the first. The Connolly was a gift with my RWS deck that didn’t have a book. Though well regarded it is a bit Judeo-Christian oriented for my tastes. Such were the times. The Crowley is a recent replacement of a stolen copy, though it is the same late 70s edition.

Wedged between in the dark there is a copy of Waite’s Pictorial Key to the Tarot, now available cheaply as a public domain reprint.

The rest are some recommended by other writers on the occult, and with the Encyclopedia of Ancient and Forbidden Knowledge, and the Tarot Volume of the Taschen Library of Esoterica, make up the total texts I have on the subject.

I may add one or two more in future,; Dion Fortune, most likely. But a vast majority of texts out there are parroting each other, or one of these, or worse are making bad renditions of Levi’s problematic texts.

On the other hand, there’s a good tradition for using general pip and face playing cards for divinatory purpose, completely separate from the Tarot. Folklorist and podcaster Corey Hutcheson in his book 54 Devils gives us a glimpse into these practices, as well as touching briefly on the Lenormand Oracle, a strange hybrid of playing card and image reading supposedly developed by Marie Adelaide Lenormand, a cartomancer during the late 18th and early 19th centuries.

But because the images in the RWS deck give us mnemonic clues to the meanings associated with the Minor Arcana – meanings which may have been a general oral tradition prior to Waite – they’ve become one of the more successful versions of Tarot, and probably the most used for inspiration and elaboration by 20th and 21st century artists and cartomancers.

Which begs the question, if the images and the interpretations are exact from Levi and Waite – why on earth are there so many Tarot decks out there. I have a collection topping 50 and it’s only a fraction of what is available in the mass market. With the RWS falling into public domain a few years ago, Pamela Smith’s icons are showing up everywhere, and clones of her deck can be found on discount store shelves for under $10.

And I strongly feel it is her deck. Like many people today, I fully recognize that the expansion of Tarot as an art form and divinatory practice is largely due to the artwork she created, rather than the interpreted writings of Levi and Waite.

Those writings may not fully hold up to close scrutiny. Through the artwork – which though more than a century old still fascinates and inspires, we can find new vistas, insights, and interlinking interpretations that makes the cartomancer’s art and skill paramount to any dusty old tome.

Because, to borrow from Doc Brown, your future isn’t written yet. No one’s is.

And on that thought I will ask you to come back next week and be a part of my future. As always, thank you for reading to the end.

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The Solstice Article

Solstice2022

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nature will consume us.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Many A Quaint And Curious Volume

Antique Books

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

books-and-more-books

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

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

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

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

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

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

Header Image by Dana Ward on Unsplash

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You Stole My Holiday

Pilgrims

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It needs to stop. Here. Now.

Before there are no more TVs left at Best Buy.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The Knowing of Things

Books

I take pride in my personal library and the collections of my lifetime. I thankfully found a mate who is as passionate about the written word, and the horizons that it offers, and we have spent several decades together acquiring books and documents on the widest range of subjects, in addition to my personal texts on matters occult.

I have also discovered many great resources on line, including Academia.org, Archive.org, Sacred-Texts.com, and the Open Library. Through these sites and others I have greatly expanded my resources on the strange and unusual. There is even an Android app that collects various esoteric texts so I can continue my studies when traveling without my paper books.

The collection includes a few books from the late 18th and the 19th centuries, facsimile editions of books going back to the days of the Pharaohs, and many books penned in the last couple of decades.

Every now and again I will be reading through something and will have the sensation that what I read is just not accurate.

This then sends me dragging out multiple volumes in search of where I might have run across the contrary information. Sometimes, that’s a short search. There are those texts where the author, for one reason or another, diverts from what is recorded in five or six other books I have.

But now and again, I can’t locate the source. I just know. I know with absolute certainty, that what I am reading is not right.

Even if those other five or six books agree with it. What I know as different must be so.

This is defined in the contemporary occult community with the nifty anagram UPG – Unverifiable Personal Gnosis.

There seems to be a lot of it going around.

There’s no denying that there is a hefty profit-motive in offering new material or alternative interpretations in a marketplace with a growing demand. And I would dismiss it as making things up completely for reasons of pure greed if I had not had this experience myself.

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Would you trust this person to tell you the secrets of the universe? While it’s fair to say that they have whispered in the ears of princes and potentates, when it comes down to it, what do they know that makes their ideas any better than your own. And for that matter, what does anyone know?

There’s a lot of things taken for granted, revered as wise, ancient, traditional, mythical and even divine, but at some point someone has told that to someone else, and it became “truth”.

For instance, the conventional widespread correspondences of the Four Elements with the Four Directions is that Fire is South, Air is North, Water in the West, and Earth is left to the East. There’s apparently some variations, but this seems to jibe with the Northern Hemisphere Anglo-saxon witchcraft texts.

But I personally put Fire in the East and Earth in the South.

I have a couple of really good reasons.

I think the traditional Fire/South connection is because generally speaking it gets warmer as you go closer to the Equator. (I did see one blog that flips the attribution of Fire to North for the Southern Hemisphere, which would argue for this principle).

But, well, If Fire is South, then Water, the opposite of Fire, has to be North. Water is the opposite of Fire. Look at the standard glyph for it. Fire is an upward pointing triangle, and water is downward pointing. And how do we put out fires?

If I am looking at a conventional compass rose, North is “up”. The Air is also up, and the ground. that is Earth, is below us, so it seems better suited to South. Also, look at those glyphs again. Air is the cloud over the mountaintop. Earth is the cave below ground.

So we have fire and water to contend with, and that seems arbitrary, but hear me out. I put Fire in the East as the Rising Sun. The sunrise being also the metaphor for Creation, it embodies that Fire element exceptionally well, to my way of thinking.

This leaves Water to the West by default, but also not really. I see water as the endless River of Time, so it stretches out infinitely after the Sun has set.

The Sunrise/Sunset metaphors along with the River are probably subconsciously synthesized out of my many years of fascination with the Black Land of Egypt.

The Egyptian creation myth is that before time, there was an endless Celestial Nile Flood. When this flood receded, there was a mound of earth, upon which a single lotus grew. When the flower opened, Ra rose and began the first day.

In my head I connect up the dots. The flood is Water, The mound is Earth, The lotus is Air (scent, work with me, here) and Ra – the Sun, is Fire. At any rate that primal Moment is most probably the impetus for my association of the Fire element with Sunrise and the East.

But most of the texts say I am wrong, and that’s okay. I will go on doing it my way, because that works for me. While my above reasoned method comes from a cognizant exploration of why I believe this way, I cannot tell you at what point these ideas took root in my brain. They are the product of some inscrutable mental alchemy. I could just as easily say that it came to me in a dream.

That’s been a viable method of personal revelation for ages. Indeed, the shaman goes on such dream voyages to bring back word from the spirit world to the world of humans. There are magic texts that frequently tell of studying divine or sacred books while in dreams, or visions or when travelling the astral plane.

To sit with elders of the gentle race
This world has seldom seen
They talk of days for which they sit and wait
All will be revealed

Talk in song from tongues of lilting grace
Sounds caress my ear
And not a word I heard could I relate
The story was quite clear

Kashmir – Robert Plant, Jimmy Page, John Bonham

The Revelation of Saint John in the Christian Bible speaks of being shown multiple books, some of which were “eaten up and were bitter in my mouth” and some which even though shown to John by the angel, were forbidden to speak about. So, like the Book of Seven Thunders, mystics and magicians throughout history have perhaps kept much of their personal gnosis to themselves.

This then comes back around to the unverifiable part. In fairness, most magic is unverifiable in the strictest scientific sense. Spirit, animal magnetism, vril, and orgone are all things proposed to exist and work in the world, but cannot be proven reliably by external observable phenomenon.

zodiac
Trusting in your stars goes back to the earliest human civilizations. Claudius Ptolemy started the modern fashion for it when he translated together a number of ancient texts in the Library of Alexandria. His “Four Books” was extremely influential on all that came afterward, so whether it was the Greeks or the Persians, or the Egyptians or the Chaldeans who put those odd creatures up in the night sky is hard to say.

Castor and Pollux, the Twins are part of Graeco-Roman mythology. On the other hand, Antares, at the heart of Scorpio, has been a significant star to Middle Eastern peoples since before the Greeks sailed for Troy. How much Ptolemy translated and how me he intuited is not known. Since modern astrology “works” based in a good part on his principles, one might argue his instincts were correct.

Yes, your horoscope may be especially on point today. Possibly Mercury retrograde is what caused you to misspell the title in that Powerpoint you just showed to the partners. Maybe Great Aunt Sadie did give you the winning Lotto numbers. But these connections are being made by you, by your belief. They exist in your head.

And that’s kind of the point.

In Catholicism, the Mystery of the Eucharist is believed to transform the symbolic Wafer and Wine into the Actual Blood and Body of Christ, and by this act of Communion, the individual is elevated to the Divine, capable of transcending the physical death.

This ritual is no less magical than calling upon the Spirit of Agiel to bless your Saturnine talisman. The extent to which it is seen as purely symbolic or truly miraculous will vary from individual to individual. If you believe you are partaking in the Divine, then you probably are. If you see the ritual as a weekly re-commitment to leading a life according to certain rules and principals, then that works as well.

In the end every spiritual experience is personal because that is where we experience it. If we were experiencing something external, quantifiable, and easily agreed upon, there’d be no need for the hundreds of religions and thousands of explanations, commentaries, apologies, and other desiderata that constitute our perceptions of the more subtle world.

Now, should you feel that Hekate has given you the Secret Keys, and want to rush right out and let the world know, I suggest you expect resistance. As the saying goes, a prophet is not welcome in his own country. There are a lot of reasons for that. Belief is security. Knowing that what you’ve always been told is the One True Way is a very safe place. You can easily dismiss what doesn’t fit and live your life free of conflict and complication.

Of course, in believing in our own UPG we have taken that same step. All the rest of the world be damned. I know what is going on!

Maybe you do. Maybe those Secret Keys are the new Light and the new Way but don’t expect the world to genuflect and sit listening. What we study now, is the result of ages past. Someone in a cave long ago had a dream, and told someone else, who told someone else. who told someone else.

Like the prison grapevine in Johnny Dangerously, the story of what the dreamer saw changed slightly every time it got passed on. Eventually the key parts were what was remembered. Other dreamers would see something like it, or some part of it, and add back into the story what they saw.

When we get to Ur and Eridu, some of this starts to get written down. It gets mixed in with folk tales about the exploits of ancestral heroes, It becomes religion. And then the people who have the religion get conquered, or have a famine, or a great flood, or get smashed by a meteor, and it becomes a broken memory, told by survivors, to people who never dreamed the dream. The old religion becomes unorthodox, heretical, and occult. Sometimes it’s even considered evil. One people’s gods are frequently a later people’s devils.

Hekate may have come from a group of people living in the southwestern part of what is now Turkey called the Carians.1 The Doctor Who episode “Shakespeare Code” references an alien species called Carrionites that inspired the Bard to write the Witches in the Scottish Play. I wonder if the word derived from the Carian people, but I’m not sure the writers were that literate. She was amalgamated into the Greek Pantheon in various ways, depending on the time period, but all were supernatural in origin. She was not originally a chthonic goddess, and seems to have only connected that way in her assisting Demeter in searching the underworld for Persephone. This is how she acquired the torch symbol. She is at some point connected to the crossroads, and dogs and snakes and death and witchcraft, but these associations may have had little to do with her original form in the country of her birth.

So if you are stirring the hell-broth one night and she shows up at your door, it is entirely possible that the being you entertain may bear little or no resemblance to a three-faced torch-carrying corpse woman. And in that case, any tips she may give your regarding Secret Keys over a steaming mug of hell-broth may not be in line with the thousands of years of lore every other person knows about Hekate.

For example, I call her Heh-cut, not e-Kaht-ae. The latter would be the actual Greek pronunciation, I’m told. My version is more in line with the one Shakespeare used, and what I learned in reading Macbeth in high school, before I was acquainted with her life outside the theatre.

Now if I am in conversation with educated persons who know the Greek form, I am likely to consciously use that form (presuming we’re only on the first round of hell-broth anyway). I don’t want to be thought some sort of rube.

I will say e-Khat-ae. I am still going to hear “Heh-cut” in my head. Old habits die hard.

Were I to work with her directly in my practice, rather than just in research, I would not only make sure I had the right form, but also all the proper additional titles and honorifics. Everyone likes to have their name gotten right. That’s only politeness. But it’s still hard to break that old habit of mentally pronouncing it the other way.

And there’s actually a fair argument that if Hecate showed up to all those folks summoning her from the Renaissance to the modern period whence her True Name came back into vogue, then Heh-cut is just as workable. In fact, that old sympathetic magic principle about the power of names might imply that she’d prefer to be called Heh-cut since that doesn’t have the same binding power as the True Name.

Alternatively, the spirits that showed up in response to that name might be minions, shades, projections, or the astral equivalent of a voice mail tree. If you don’t say the right words, then you don’t get the full and majestic presence. She is off hanging out where everybody knows her name.

If that is her real name. She could have changed it for show business. People do.

For that matter, she could be a Hekate impersonator.

butterflyidream
The bright quicksilver medium of thought and imagination defy all attempts at quantification. If we in our minds eye are capable of perceiving it, then it is real. To make it tangible and shareable and agreeable to the “real” world is redundant, as we are experiencing the real world inside our minds in the first place. We can argue metrics all we want, but the only frame of reference that any of us can prove is our own internal self-knowledge. Cogito ergo sum. I think therefore I am. The rest of the universe is the creation of our perceptions. If we alter the perceptions, we alter the universe.

It’s never as easy as it used to be in the old days. The grimoire’s of yore didn’t invest a whole lot of time in existential questions. They were concerned with which planetary intelligence could compel a shade to reveal the location of buried treasure. Just in case Aunt Sadie’s Powerball numbers don’t come through.

We are not living in Ancient Egypt or Greece, the Roman Empire, the Middle Ages, or the Renaissance. We are a century divorced from those troublesome Victorians and their legacy up to the Second World War. For that matter, we are divided from the “age of Aquarius” occultists of the 60s and 70s (though I personally retain much of their influence).

We are living in a global instant information society, with diverse cultural perspectives, massive social change, and telescopes out beyond the moon looking back into time itself. Our present mysticism exists in a world where science says none of it is real, but offers no alternative that is palatable. Yes, this happens because this happens because this happens and there’s always a reason even if we don’t know the reason. Yet humanity finds this to be an empty plate and wants something more.

Science deals with the physical and is pretty good at it, as far as that goes. It’s given us an end to smallpox and economical air travel and Zoom meetings.

The human consciousness is not a physical phenomenon. It doesn’t have a spectra that can be measured. It obeys no laws of thermodynamics, gravity, or electromagnetism. It exists without explanation, manifest as electrical pulses in a chemical soup in the middle of our skulls. We can mechanically replace most of the other functions of the human body. Yet, we cannot concoct that exotic hell-broth and shoot a spark through it and get a mind.

Science is stumped. There’s a gap between the electrochemical reaction and the wonder of thought. And in that gap there is a potential for things which neither science or the mind can easily express. This is where we go, torch in hand, into the underworld, trying to find some answer for how it all works, and what it all means.

tree-moonlight
Mystery is one of the things that make life worth living. If we had it all figured out, what would be the point. Personally I think whatever initial spark fueled the existing of all potential possibilities, it was driven be a need to ponder them. At times such complexities cause the head to hurt, and on rare nights, when the moon swells full and the wind whispers and the stars are just right, we may make a momentary and life-altering connection with that spark. And then we have to re-inhabit our difficult little meat suits and struggle to put words to an experience that defies all language.

It is the lonely nature of personal consciousness that we make this journey in isolation. What we find, and what we are able to bring back, is for our eyes and ears alone. We will struggle to share that with anyone else, because they will not have shared the experience. At best, what we will offer will be symbol, and metaphor. We may give others enough to find a trail, but it will always lead them to a different place because they are the ones walking it.

You can tell them what you know, but they won’t understand it the way you know it. We may be spiritual beings having a physical experience, but that physical experience is a very confining one. So don’t worry too much if when you read something it doesn’t seem right. That just means you need to start thinking about it more complexly rather than just accepting that is how things are. In the end, you may find that you were totally wrong. You may find that everyone else is totally wrong. And you may stumble across a third alternative that is wholly shining and new. What you do with that knowledge is your choice alone.

Thank you for enduring another week’s attempt at expressing those things that I know but can’t transfer telepathically to everyone in the world. It’s probably better that way. I’m fairly weird on the inside. Please come again next week.

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The Samhain Article

Samhain


Thrice the brinded cat hath mew’d.

Thrice; and once the hedge-pig whin’d.

Harpier cries:–“’tis time, ’tis time.”

Round about the caldron go;
In the poison’d entrails throw.–
Toad, that under cold stone,
Days and nights has thirty-one
Swelter’d venom sleeping got,
Boil thou first i’ the charmed pot!

Double, double, toil and trouble;
Fire, burn; and caldron, bubble.

Fillet of a fenny snake,
In the caldron boil and bake;
Eye of newt, and toe of frog,
Wool of bat, and tongue of dog,
Adder’s fork, and blind-worm’s sting,
Lizard’s leg, and howlet’s wing,–
For a charm of powerful trouble,
Like a hell-broth boil and bubble.

Double, double, toil and trouble;
Fire, burn; and caldron, bubble.

Scale of dragon, tooth of wolf,
Witch’s mummy, maw and gulf
Of the ravin’d salt-sea shark,
Root of hemlock digg’d i’ the dark,
Liver of blaspheming Jew,
Gall of goat, and slips of yew
Sliver’d in the moon’s eclipse,
Nose of Turk, and Tartar’s lips,
Finger of birth-strangl’d babe
Ditch-deliver’d by a drab,–
Make the gruel thick and slab:
Add thereto a tiger’s chaudron,
For the ingredients of our caldron.

Double, double, toil and trouble;
Fire, burn; and caldron, bubble.

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

Macbeth – William Shakespeare

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Peanuts is a registered trademark of United Features Syndicate.

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

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

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

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

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

And I aim to have it back.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The Face of the Mask

Mask Of Mollock

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

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

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

Que tous les masques que vous portez soient les vôtres

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

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

masks
The masks here are from various Pacific Island cultures. They are probably ceremonial, though they might have been used in battle to terrify the enemy. My personal favorite is Batman, there in the middle. His resemblance to the comic book Caped Crusader is telling. In earlier cultures the mythic beings represented by ritual masks are equivalent in a way to our modern superhero. The being portrayed is powerful, inscrutable, and quasi-divine. Underneath, the secret identity of the wearer is protected, both from the audience, and from any other quasi-divines that might mistake the mask for the legendary hero and come after them. This layer of protection is an important spiritual function of the mask.
masks-02
A mixed selection of African masks and idols from New York’s Museum of Natural History. I took these photos in 2021 as we toured the extensive permanent collection. It underlines how universal the idea of the mask is in human society, probably because we are hardwired to recognize faces.
masks-03
Another image from the museum trip. As you may infer from the style of the bronze work in this case, the example here is from central Asia. Although the tag did not mention it, I couldn’t help wondering if it was meant to represent a yeti, the fabled giant man-ape of the Himalayas. I think this was a shaman mask, so it fulfills the same role as the deer skin on the Paleolithic sorceror in that cave in France. It allows the shaman to transform into a being capable of entering the other worlds safely, and conversing with the beings that live there. it might also serve to scare off any potential evil or troublesome spirits that are attracted to the bright light of the shaman as he walks the paths between the worlds.

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

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

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

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

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

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

We are spirits in a material world.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

May all the masks you wear be your own.

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

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

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Twisting and Turning

Twisting And Turning

‘Twas brillig and the slithy toves
did gyre and gimble in the wabe.
All mimsy were the borogroves
and the mome raths outgrebe.

—Jabberwocky – Lewis Carroll

Language is a defining mark of humanity. Chimpanzees and bonobos use tools. Ants and bees build communities. But speaking is the one trait that separates us from the rest of the terrestrial animals on the planet.1 The ability of cetacen species like dolphins and whales to communicate linguistically is still a much debated topic. Whether their keening songs represent a language or are simply instinctive vocalizations remains unknown. For perspective, I recommend you read Roger Zelazny’s My Name is Legion. While the work is science fiction, one of the stories in the anthology poses an interesting idea about species communication.

Language has allowed us to rise to the point where we can manipulate the planet in ways unimaginable. We transmit our memory and our understanding from generation to generation through the spoken and written word. This innovation enables us to reach back thousands of years into the collective human experience. Without language, these memories would disappear, as Bladerunner’s Roy Batty puts it, like tears in rain.

Yet we waste this vital resource constantly, talking about the weather, nattering about the latest celebrity scandal, or arguing over politics on social media. We spend it away without thought or appreciation, without any idea of how important it is.

If you’ve been following this site for a while, you already know that I refuse to write to a fifth grade reading level. I think the vast majority of people who are interested in the kinds of strange things I write about are generally more intelligent than that. So give yourself a pat on the back if you don’t care for the fine art of small talk.

The place where I come from
is a small town
They think so small;
They use small words.

—Big Time – Peter Gabriel

It’s a sad fact that sometimes just the possession of a large vocabulary has marked some for derision, isolation, and harassment by the general population. “Nerd”, “brainiac”, and even “professor” were meant as hurtful and derogatory in my youth and I am sure my experience is not singular. The root of this, of course, is that if one does not understand the words I am using, it tends to make them feel like they might not be so bright. No one likes to feel dumb, so why not respond with hurtful bullying. Brute force, verbally or otherwise, is far easier than looking things up in the dictionary.

I did, and still do, follow that latter route. Words are a fascination to me, and if I discover a new word I will delve deep until I ascertain it’s meaning. When I was in elementary school a millennia ago, we were taught how words were formed. We explored the entire dictionary entry of a word, including it’s origins in Aulde Anglish Old French, Latin, Greek, and a few that were more exotic. From this practice I could begin to construct words, and to greet new words with familiar endings and openings ( called suffixes and prefixes officially) with some knowledge of what they were about. This is vastly helpful in learning new and complex things.

wall-o-books
“In the beginning was the Word” is a phrase out ye aulde King James Bible. That book, and hundreds of others, have been used as source material when constructing magical spells and incantations. The Psalms feature prominently in some of the folk magic of my native Appalachians and practices from the American South. These probably migrated from Protestant England.

The Hebrew Torah and the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet are believed by Kabbalists to hold the secrets of the Cosmos. Indeed, the letters are believed to be capable of making reality all by themselves. One can find this in the cautionary tale of the Golem, a man of clay who was inscribed with the word “Truth”. When the creature began doing damage, the letter Aleph was rubbed out, changing the word to “Dead”. While this may not strictly be Kabbalistic magic, the folklore partakes of the idea of the power of the letters as archetypes of the energies of creation.
Many ancient cultures had similar beliefs. Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs that showed snakes, scorpions, or other baneful creatures were often “killed” by being incomplete or broken, so as to prevent the creature “coming to life” and doing magical harm.

Photo by Dana Ward on Unsplash

For instance. logos, from the Greek, is the basis of the suffix -ology. The -ology suffix generally is taken to mean “the scientific study of”. So you could take a word, and add -ology to the end, and you made a new word that was the scientific study of whatever that root word was.

My youngest collects a series of books that begin publishing in their childhood using this principle. The first, I believe, was printed in England, and called Dragonology. It was followed shortly by Egyptology (ironically, actually the scientific study of Ancient Egypt), and the race was on.

Now, those of us who spent far too many hours of our youth perusing the entries in the great big Webster’s dictionary at the library (I now own four) are quick to point out that the scientific study of dragons is more properly Draconology, or possibly Dracology, because the word dragon comes from Old French, that borrowed if from the Latin Draconem (or draco) who stole it from the Greek drakon, which was a sea serpent, and not a dragon at all.

However, these beasts were also known by the term Vermis, from which comes our modern English Worm (after taking a trip through Germany and France, of course). Vermis was applicable to snakes which the ancients did not separate from worms of the more earthly sort. This is why cadaver art and dans macabre images frequently show serpents entwined and emerging from corpses. So when you find translation of Aulde Anglish sagas about slaying dragons where they call it “an old worm” you now know how that happens.

We also get our modern word vermin from the root vermis, and this has broadened to a generic class of undesired pests and parasites. In the dialect of my Appalachian homeland and the various child dialects of the American West, the word has become “varmint”. If you are unfamiliar with the term, I recommend reviewing the Bugs Bunny/Yosemite Sam Warner cartoons, where Sam drops it about every three seconds.

In my herbals, I find the word frequently attached to the suffix -fuge. This ending derives from the Latin fugus – to fly, or put to flight. Thus a vermifuge, is an herb or compound that drives worms from the digestive tract. I’m not sure it would deter a dragon, though, unless you planted an awful lot of it.

The vermifuge always gets me thinking of febrifuge, which is an herb or compound that gets rid of fevers (febris – Latin: fever). And so on and so forth. In this way I learned herbology. Herbology is the scientific study of herbal medicine, as opposed to botany, which is a generic subset of biology that focuses on the scientific study of plants.

Botany is one of those words that defy the structure we rely on. It comes from the ancient Greek botane, which is basically “plant”. Now why should the study of plants not be called botanology? I have no answer for you. Perhaps the Greeks used that word, but the French didn’t, and we English speakers stole the French word.

One of the other words that “break” our neat system is astronomy. Astronomy is the scientific study of stars (from the Greek astronimos – literally “star-arranging”). Astronomy and astrology were once the same thing. It was the same thing when the Greeks used astronomy, and when the Romans borrowed both words. It was only in the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance that the two started to divide. Astrology went forward as a means of viewing the star arrangements as indicative of events in the world, and astronomy evolved to mean studying the mechanisms where these star arrangements came to be.

It’s interesting that the seminal texts of both sciences were written by the same person, Claudius Ptolemy of Alexandria. I’ve mentioned him before and with reason.

Ptolemy’s Tetrabiblos (tetra – Greek: four / biblos – Greek: book) is the basis of Western astrology as we know it today. He was consolidating and editing the various texts from the Library of Alexandria, some of which went back to original sources in ancient Babylon, Chaldea, and Akkad. And those were probably based on Sumerian and older traditions, possibly, going back to the earliest human impressions of the night sky. This is just one example of how language can transcend our long long tenure on the planet.

On the other hand, Ptolemy’s book on astronomy, called now the Almagest (an Arabic corruption of the Greek megiste: greatest) was instrumental in suppressing things like the idea of a spherical earth that orbited with other planets around the sun.

The original name in Greek was Mathematike Syntaxis is a bit more accurate, and terribly similar to the Principia Mathematica of Sir Isaac Newton which ultimately replaced it as the “correct” explanation of planetary motion.

The Almagest asserted that the earth was a more or less flat and finite object in the middle of the universe, the Center of All Creation, with the Sun, the Moon, the Planets, the Stars, the Orders of the Angels, and God Almighty in His Heaven circling above (in roughly that order).

As this model was amenable to both Medieval Christianity and Islam, it was given support over other radical ideas like that of Aristarchus who had proven the earth was round, and calculated it’s size very accurately around the same time as Ptolemy was editing these works.

With the Renaissance and discovery of sea routes to Asia and then the Americas, the Almagest became a volume of quaint and curious lore to be found in the libraries of esotericists, collectors, and cranks (I have a pdf copy from here.) The Americas, were named by the Italian cartographer who drew up the first charts for Christopher Columbus. He was called Amerigo Vespucci and was happy to name an entire hemisphere after himself. That may not have been his actual intention, but other swathes of Terra Incognita ( Latin: Land Unknown) kept the names as the maps expanded and they became Terra Cognita. Personally I prefer those spaces on the edge, past Terra Incognita, with the admonishment: Hic sunt dracones!

“Here there be dragons!”

And just like that, I’ve circled back around. And this is theme of this week’s article. Our mastery of words, and the capacity we have to manipulate them gives up power in the universe. The words we use mark us out among others. The way we use words gives us the power over others. We can lead. We can wound. We can poison. We can heal. We can inspire.

The importance of the word and language is buried deep in our human history. It is that oldest form of sympathetic magic. The name of a thing is the thing. That is the same as the image of the thing. If you know the name, you can affect the thing.

And by this you can name things for which there isn’t an image, like the wind, or a spirit. You can call upon the slyphs of the breeze, and the angry heart of the hurakan (native Taino name for “evil wind spirit” from whence comes “hurricane”). You can anthropomorphize the seasons and the days and such things to make it easier to communicate with them. We can speak to the genius loci (genius – Latin: attendant or guardian spirit / loci – Latin: place) and ask permission or at least detente (French from Latin: to relax or loosen) when we perform our rituals. In doing so, we may teach them the words to lend their voices to the process, and we may learn some words from them.

Jabberwocky
Jabberwocky is called by many a “nonsense poem” , meaning that it’s simply a collection of words that rhyme without any real meaning. According to the Wikipedia article however: “Linguist Peter Lucas believes the “nonsense” term is inaccurate. The poem relies on a distortion of sense rather than “non-sense”, allowing the reader to infer meaning and therefore engage with narrative while lexical allusions swim under the surface of the poem.” In other words, because Carroll uses the framework of English grammar, we can read the poem and “see” the creatures in it. While I typically prefer other sources to Wikipedia, the section of the article on the “definition” of some of the words is quite entertaining.

I started out with Lewis Carroll because I have always loved the linguistic twisting of that poem. There’s a lot of magic hidden in Lewis Carroll, though I am not sure if he even knew it. A little girl follows a person sized, waistcoat-wearing rabbit down a hole in a hedge. Such a creature is called a Púca in Welsh tradition. It is a mischievous spirit related to the Fae. Certainly Alice’s trip into the earth is not so different than many other Celtic tales of visiting the world of the Tuatha De Danann. Alice returns to the Wonderland by passing through to the other side of the mirror. These are all found in folklore tales about witchcraft and faeries. It is perhaps why his works are so frequently classed with the tales of the Brothers Grimm.

But what he does with Jabberwocky is simply marvelous. He takes an algebraic approach to words. That is, if one follows the proper order of operations – in this case, English grammar, any n can be inserted into the formula and the equation still solved.

“‘Twas brilliant and the slimy toads
did gyre and gambol in the wave.”

This “translation” as it were is something I discovered in a literature treatise some years ago, but the lesson is profound. Words can be changed at will and if you still follow the rules of grammar the statement is readable. Here, in a poem it also needs to rhyme, which is easier if you can make up the word, especially if oranges are involved.

But the fact that it is a poem gives us a clue that “outgrebe” is pronounced with the last syllable as “A” rather than “E” in order to rhyme with “wabe”.

Unless of course, those words have an additional syllable and are pronounced out – gre – bE and wa – bE, which is perfectly possible. In this case the final -bE rhymes. 2 Any good poet will tell you, having the same sound rhyme is lazy writing, so I’m going with wAbe and outgrAbe. The ghost of Lewis Carroll can sue me if I’m wrong.

Does all this linguistic and grammatic gymnastic make your head hurt? Try reading a Medieval grimoire sometime. The tenets of Qabbalah have evolved from the practice of rearranging Hebrew letters to make new words, and then contemplating those words to discover hidden truths. Angelic magic is full of words and symbols that twist and turn. The famous Sator magic square reads the same up and down and left to right; and right to left bottom to top.

In this flexibility and agility with language and writing we can find a metaphor for the fluidity of reality itself. Even in modern quantum science, the observation of a phenomena is considered the cause of it’s existence. In quantum terms, every particle is moving at an unknown speed through an unknown point in space. It is only when we seek to measure it’s location or speed that it really is there. Add to that, the uncertainty principle, – a concept that says we can either know where it is at any point, or how fast it is moving at any point, but never both, and you start dancing through the hedge after that rabbit.

In this flaky quantum multiverse (yes, since the particle can be anywhere at any time until someone somewhere sees it, the “other” places and times can be seen by other someones in other somewheres and make other universes) tiny tiny little particles act freaky all the time. But as they lump together and get bigger and bigger and turn into protons and neutrons and electrons and atoms and molecules and cruise ships and nebulae and galaxies they start to behave more in line with Mr. Newton’s rules in the Principia. There are some important modifications from Mr. Einstein’s Relativity (General and Special) and much more work done since then, but essentially the bigger it gets, the harder it becomes to influence it. At least when you are bound by those pesky laws of physics in normal space-time.

But the mind is not bound by that. Science really can’t determine if the mind is even part of that. The mind can travel back into our past, replay events, re-see and re-hear experiences that were a long time ago. We can hear music. We can remember speech. Though these events once had a physicality they are now stored in a form that is not physical, in a much more confined space (if we accept that the mind and brain are co-resident), and capable of immediate recollection.

But the mind can also experience things that were never real. We call it imagination, but our brains can present us with pasts we did not ever live through, futures which are yet to be, and worlds we can only dream of far across the great expanse of night. And these are equally accessible as the memories of our “real world”, perhaps even moreso.

Well, of course, but that’s “all in your head”. To make things happen in the real world you get bound by physics. I’m not sure about that.

Mozart was really good at making the music he heard in his head come out into the world. Shakespeare did the same for words, as did Carroll. Many words we use today were just invented by them (and other’s of course) to fill a need, or make a cunning rhyme.

For instance, if you’ve ever found something so funny it made you chortle, you owe it to Lewis Carroll. He made up the word “chortled” in Jabberwocky, though others deconstructed it to be a contraction of “chuckled” and “snorted”. As Jabberwocky employs a number of onomatopoeia – words that are made up to represent a sound – like galumphing, burbling, and whiffling, chortling is likely meant to represent a deep rumbling laugh, rather than the laugh-snort that sends your coffee across your phone screen. 3Again, the ghost of Lewis Carroll can haunt me if I err.

There’s a frequent meme that translates the word “abracadabra” as “What I say I make.” While my research indicates that “abracadabra” is probably a corruption, mispronunciation, or pun relating to the Gnostic deity named Abraxas (the X is pronounced as K) , the idea comes from a long belief in the power of the spoken word to make things happen. J.K. Rowling takes the sounds and gives them a Latinesque twist to create the Avada Kedavra death curse, working in a pun on cadaver in the process.

abracapocus
That “wascawy wabbit” has a bit of fun with magic words in the Warner cartoon “Hocus-Pocus Hare” using abracadabra, hocus pocus, hocus-cadabra, abracapocus, walla walla, and ultimately newport news. He starts by finding the book of Magic Words and Phrases on the shelf in the guest room of the nefarious Count, who suffers mightily at the utterance of the mashed up incantations. While hilarious, the principle of turning and twisting words and phrases, particularly rhyming and alliterative ones, is common to the craft of spellwork. There’s a reason they call it a spell.

Abracadabra can almost always be found in close proximity to hocus-pocus (believed to be a derivation of the blessing Hoc est corpus meum). That these rhyming words make no real sense is not relevant. We like the way they sound. They are music to the ear and quicksilver on the tongue. They’re also mnemonic (Greek mnemon – mindful). A lot of spells use rhyming and poesy to make them easier to remember. Most of us, even if pressed to do so, might not be able to remember a famous speech or quotation, but we routinely sing along to hundreds, if not thousands, of performances by our favorite bands. Small wonder that our words enchantment and incantation share the Latin root “cantare” for “sing”. This is inherent in the Welsh Bard, and the Greek Chorus. They had the power to charm the spirit, even if the spirit were just sitting there in the audience in their meat suits.

Language and it’s use to charm and enspell is a fascinating and potentially endless subject of examination. I have gone on much longer here than many of my other articles. If you have had the stamina and resolve to reach here to the end, I greatly appreciate it. For the TL;DR version, words are cool, and you can make things happen with them. Especially when you make them from scratch.

Please join me again next week, where I cannot promise to be less loquacious (loqui Latin talk), but will at least remove the parentheticals.

SirJohn Tenniel’s woodcut of the Jabberwock from Alice Through the Looking Glass is public domain. The still from Hocus-Pocus Hare is copyrighted by Time-Warner, and is employed under the Fair Use doctrine. The header image was provided by Patrick Tomasso on Unsplash. The thumbnail image for social media was provided by Pierre Bamin on Unsplash. Unsplash is a free resource for bloggers and artists when photographers offer royalty free content for use.

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Keep It Secret

Keep It Secret

Discretion is traditionally considered the better part of valor. Valor, however, is not something we use in common parlance, at least not in the New Millennium (more’s the pity).

Keeping one’s trap shut is frequently recommended, however, especially when it comes to things occult. Occult, after all, means hidden. This tradition was still largely extant in my youth. That was not so much due to oaths of silence, but to prevent the perception that one was some kind of kook. In the twenty-twenties, however, out and proud witchcraft screams across social media, into the mainstream shops, and horribly inaccurate television and film narratives.

I’m not entirely sure that’s a good thing.

Let’s scrape aside for a moment the Hollywood version of things. Let’s remove the layer upon layer of mass market paperbacks, most generated to cash in on a trend, and some not even written by human beings. Let’s try for a moment to encounter witchcraft, magic, and the occult without the glare of Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok (and Tumblr and Twitter and Toto too.)

What are we actually left with? What is the nature of occult practice today, without all the external public glitz and glamour?

I personally suspect that the circle is drawn considerably smaller. I am not opening the debate about what constitutes “a real witch” on ye olde Internet. I’m simply saying that a lot of what is out there is surface, and that the number who are swimming in deeper waters is more limited.

It’s fairly evident to me that occultists of my age are somewhat rare on the interwebs. I don’t think it’s because we made inadvisable pacts with infernal forces and were carried off at an untimely age to serve our nefarious masters.

Nor do I believe it likely that we are generationally impaired when it comes to technology. If you can tease out the important threads from a Medieval grimoire, I’m pretty sure you can handle tweeting from your mobile device.

It’s probably because that most of us are going on our merry way, hobnobbing with our brother wizards as per usual, without making a big thing out of it. We still ascribe to those old habits of long hours of hard studying, nigh scientific experimentation, and keeping the results of our efforts restricted to a close circle of intimates.

There are some things that I am never going to tell anyone.

I am bound by no oath. I am not a member of any secret society or tradition.

But there are still some things that I am never going to tell anyone.

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In the older days, before mobile device cameras, social media, and widespread surveillance technology, it was a good deal easier to be anonymous. Yet sometimes people were still brave or foolish enough to pose for group photos before the evening séance in the cemetery. Necromancy isn’t what it used to be.

I’ve been exploring a number of Tibetan traditions in the last year or so. I’ve been aware of them since I was a child, I think, but for many reasons these never seemed to “fit” my experience of the cosmos, until recently.

I’m one that generally bridles at the idea of the guru. in fairness, this is a response to the often poorly expressed and sometimes exploited image of the guru in the West. Looking up the term in Sanskrit, it translates generally to “one worthy of honor”.

Doesn’t say teacher, though that is implied. Doesn’t say holy one, mentor, buddha, etc. Just simply one worthy of honor.

I can get behind that idea.

I’ve met a number of people in life that I considered worthy of honor. Generally they had some impact on my way of thinking, or acting, or the choices I made in life as a consequence of meeting them. Very few of these encounters were with formal teachers, in a specific discipline or in an academic or meditative setting. Quite to the contrary, my experience with formal instruction was often frustrating and fruitless.

But still, in my late fifties, I was finding more and more connections with these old beliefs from the Himalayas and surrounding areas. Now, I have no intention of selling all that I own and joining a Tibetan monastery. For one thing, my wife would not be at all pleased with it, and I am rather fond of her. But the study of these ideas is accessible via the Internet, so I have the option of learning from home.

Or so I thought. Many of the texts I have read (and in fairness, they’re not a lot), make reference to an initiation ceremony of sorts, and of the need for direct instruction.

Now why would this be so? Isn’t the whole idea of Enlightenment as something that happens to one upon the spiritual path? Now there are gatekeepers to Nirvana?

Well, in a way yes. There are at least guides. There are people who have trod the path ahead of you, and know where you are liable to slip and fall. It is out of a concern for your safety that they offer the warning.

But sometimes the warning is insufficient. Sometimes, we are not able to hear the warning or understand it.

Let’s assume we are walking a terrestrial path in the woods. It twists and turns, and rambles over rough ground. Just up ahead, behind a bend in the road, there’s a hungry bear. If you have reached the bend in the road, you can see the bear, and see a path that will take you well clear of it.

But from where you are, you can’t see the bear waiting for you.

The person ahead can see it, tell you that it is there, and prepare you to react properly to it.

This is the idea of guru.

Someone doesn’t need to have made it to the end of the path. They just need to be far enough ahead of you to be helpful. The best teachers are themselves perpetual students.

But those who are further ahead on the path, realize that you not only don’t know about the bear, you don’t necessarily know what a bear is, or why it is dangerous. It is kinder for them to say, “You must wait here.” or “You must go that way”, than terrifying you with the idea that there’s a hungry bear in the woods waiting to eat you. Then you are only going to be worried about the bear. You’ll constantly be looking for the bear, and miss all the other wonderful and exciting things along the path.

Plus, you’ll probably never work up the courage to step off that path and go wandering in the woods.

The person ahead of you hopes that someday you will stand at that bend in the road, and gently beckon backward to those behind you and say “Here, come this way”. They will help you where they can, but they know that you still might be eaten by the bear. This is because no matter how much they may provide by way of instruction, there is always some things you must experience yourself in order to fully understand them.

see-no-hear-no-speak-no
Occult societies, cults, covens, and lodges often exact oaths of secrecy as part of the initiation into the group. Hand in hand with this are often tiers of adepts or degrees, which have boundaries of similar secret oaths. The purpose is not to limit the lower orders, but rather to manage the information that they must process. It is analogous to assembly instructions. The procedure on the fifth page makes no sense without completion of the steps on the previous four pages. You may look at the instructions, but you will probably misunderstand them.

Now since I am not going to Tibet anytime soon, I have to look at other ways to get around that bear. These may be “wrong” in the sense that they will lead me down paths that wind and twist and meet dead ends, forcing me to go back and find a better way. But I believe there is more than one way around the bear. After all, someone had to figure out how to get past it to begin with, so just because one way may be best, or easier, it doesn’t mean it’s the only way. Sometimes it’s not the best or easiest for the person making the journey.

The occult nature of occult studies in the West, was largely induced by the need to avoid the ecclesiastic and civil authorities who had enacted penalties for such practices. If you poke into the dark corners of the late Middle Ages you can find that the fear of the Holy Mother Church for the other Abrahamic religions may have led to any texts written in Hebrew or Arabic being considered books of Black Magic.

While in the Moorish kingdom of Cordoba, Jews were tolerated and allowed to live more or less normal lives, the rest of Europe considered them heretics. 1One of the ingredients in the witches brew from Shakespeare is “liver of blaspheming Jew”. While modern eyes see this as a gross anti-semitism, the Christian world of the 15th and 16th century regarded the Jewish denial of the Christ as the Messiah as strongest heresy. The Inquisition’s torture chambers were filled with more Jews than apostate Catholics, witches, and other “deviants”. Driven underground during the Reconquista, the Jews, remaining Muslims, and their libraries, may have been the impetus for the rumored Black School of Toledo. This establishment, supposedly in a system of caves and caverns north of the city, was the top wizard school of the age. Like Hogwart’s though, it didn’t really exist.

There were, of course, a great number of actual magical texts that came through the Moorish kingdom into Europe. One of the most famous is the Picatrix, a 12th century Latin translation of the 10th century Islamic Ghayat al-Hakim.

The Arabic name translates roughly to “The Goal of the Sage”. It is an encyclopedic reference on various spells, potions, rituals, enchantments, talismans, and conjurations. The bones of this likely filtered down into works by Paracelsus and Agrippa, and were known to people like John Dee, Francis Bacon, Michel de Notre Dame, and later occult researchers of the Renaissance and Baroque periods through their work. it is not impossible that much of the ceremonial magic practiced today has roots in the Ghayat al-Hakim.

The Greek Magical Papyri also made their way into Europe by way of Islam, either through Spain or via the Silk Road. Practices and belief from as far away as China made that journey, and were synthesized, augmented, and mutated all along the way westward. The “Black Magic” being suppressed by the church was a complicated polyglot of folk-belief, surviving ancient practices, and the influence of esoteric concepts from Africa, Arabia, and Asia.

Growing hand in hand with the secular humanism of the Renaissance, occult ideas were mutated again into being Christian magic and Holy Alchemy. The reasoning was simple and convenient. The “spirits” which could include angels, demons, djinn, efrit, fae, nature spirits, the dead, and the old gods, had all be made by the Lord God Jehovah who had given Man dominion over all things way back in the Book of Genesis. Ergo, Man could dominate those beings, and use them as he saw fit, like some supernatural twenty-mule team. At least, that’s how it looked on paper.

In reality, if one were well-heeled and well-placed, dabbling in sorcery was an accepted hobby. Divination and necromancy were supported by an elite looking for financial or political advantage. Alchemy offered both immortality and tremendous wealth, so it is not surprising that even kings funded these obscure experiments.

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The Book of Shadows or grimoire is a fixture of magic practice in fact and fiction. Authentic sorcery manuals in the West are largely from the Middle Ages and later. While there were a few real ones, others were forged by ecclesiastical authorities as “evidence” in the witch persecution. The “Devil’s Book” was manufactured to convict accused witches, along with forged pacts and other ephemera.

The Victorian lodge magicians set a great store by grimoires and their black books. Traditional witches prior to Wicca likely passed down most of what they knew by oral tradition, or at most a recipe book of herbal cures, and potions.

Much as been made of the odd symbology that surrounds alchemy. These images were a kind of secret code, to keep the unwise from finding the Philosopher’s Stone and using it for impure purpose. The adept -as the alchemists were fond of calling themselves – was able to decipher the code into a kind of manufacturing process, aimed at creating the Stone and/or the Elixir of Life. Some texts say the Stone makes the Elixir. Some say the Elixir may be boiled away to make the Stone. The Stone, of course, turned lead in to gold, which was the primary goal of the investors. Immortality would be a great bonus, but immortality without the money to enjoy it was a non-starter.

Many researchers today think that the alchemical manuscripts were obfuscating a philosophical journey, whereby the individual purified their own soul and consciousness, thereby earning eternal life (spiritually or physically is not clear, though there are legends of those who attained to great old age through the process).

This brought to my mind some of those Tibetan concepts I have been working with. The mandalas and related imagery are often confusing. In some cases they would appear terrifying and even pornographic to Western eyes. Yet I understand these to be a complex symbolic language, aimed at teaching key points that aid in spiritual growth.

Sound familiar?

I obtained a copy of the Bardo Thodol when I was in my teens. This is known by the more popular title of the Tibetan Book of the Dead. It’s been a while since I read it, but I do recall it was about giving instructions so that the soul could be purified, and escape the endless cycle of physical reincarnation. If that wasn’t possible, then the goal was to find a new body which would be best suited to educate you for the next round. Because at birth, we tend to forget those things we learned in the previous life, and only by transcending the illusion of physicality can we reach those other memories.

Buddha said “We have all lived a thousand lifetimes. I remember all of them and you remember only this one. ” Consider that for a moment. Think about all the things that your current life experience has been. You hopefully have had joy and love. But we all have experienced pain and loss. Now multiply those memories by ten, or a hundred, or a thousand. Can you conceive of the joy you could feel if you accessed that? Can you imagine the pain of all those memories; the lost loved ones, the disappointments, the fear.

That’s the hungry bear waiting out there in the woods.

Realizing that this is not about balancing the good against the bad, or joy over the pain, is not something we typically do in the West. Duality is a big part of our nature, and it goes very far back. The nature of Other is built into our experience of the Universe. To be able to recognize the Universe is to acknowledge the Other. Yet all things are either Other or us, and as we are Other to the Other, it’s all the same thing. The forms and shapes are just paint and wallpaper on the real nature of the Cosmos.

Grasping that inside a human brain is nigh impossible. It’s hard to say if the Buddhas of Eastern thought actually attained it in physical form, or transcended, and having transcended, chose to return to their bodies to function as guides and teachers. 2There may be parallels in the Christian story of Jesus.

Having transcended the physical, it’s insubstantiality is understood. It is not real. Changing it is like switching channels. Not happy with your job? Click. Looking for a better apartment.? Click. Want to move that mountain range? Click.

Which is precisely why such capacities have been kept from the unwise, the untrained, and the uninitiated. That sort of thing could be very dangerous. We can’t have people going around and moving mountains. Think of the consequences.

Thing is, when you can move a mountain, you realize that you need not do it. There’s no reason. It’s just a mountain. There’s more important things you can put your power toward.

But I can’t tell you about that.

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The Hermit is an archetype of the individual journey toward spiritual awareness. It’s a reference to the monastic existence, withdrawal from the world, and focus on quiet contemplation. Yet this symbol also stands on a great height, and shines his light before him.

Absent a view of the world around him, we may suppose he is holding the light to beckon others coming up the mountain. But he may also be holding a lamp unto his feet. The enigma of the Hermit reminds us that the path is potentially treacherous, even when we think we know it.

I appreciate your reading about what I could put into words, and of course, hope that it gave you some measure of perspective. The Hermit’s light shines through a crack in the lantern. The full force of it’s brightness is blinding.

And you don’t want to go wandering around blinded. There’s a hungry bear out there.

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