Magic – A Sacred Life

May 29, 2024May 29, 2024

Fire, Acid, and Poison

Last September, my Good Lady Wife added two foundling kittens to our pride of house lions. They were lately born when she discovered them, but now they are old enough to be integrated with the rest (two of which are elderly) on a more or less permanent basis.

There’s an old adage about the curiosity of cats, and the potential outcome of same. So we spend a good deal of time telling them to get down, get off that, don’t bite that, etc. In the hope that eventually they’ll either learn it’s not safe, or simply tire of being yelled at about it.

The little princess though, has decided that I am her people, and that she must at all times accompany me in whatever I do. This includes, according to her anyway, my time in the studio. I have explained to her why this is a bad idea, using exactly the words of the title, but she seems unconvinced as to my sincerity, and remains intent on exploring the obvious cave of wonders I am keeping hidden behind that door.

See Below — We’re very interested in what you have to say here.

There is indeed fire. In addition to two actual high-temperature torches, there are several soldering irons, at least a pair of wood burners, and at any given moment there will be incense and/or candles burning.

As to acid I keep several kinds. Some for metal work, some for printmaking, and some for the odd mad scientist experiment and/or old school film photography.

And under the heading of poison, I have quite a selection. There are alcohols, acetones, ammonias, caustics, coal tars, cements, latexes, polymers, binders, adhesives, pigments, dyes, and inks, not counting things that come premade that most people would recognize as paints. I even have the alchemical standbys of several small vials of quicksilver and a large golden hunk of pure brimstone. ( and never you mind what for).

There’s various powders that are bad for the lungs and/or toxic if not deadly when improperly handled. A large number of the containers are marked with “Highly Flammable” and “Use With Adequate Ventilation” and a few that require protective gear.

And on top of that are the other “odd” things which may include crystals and oils and “organic materials” that should only be rarely touched and never tasted.

So in short everything that would delight and entice a curious kitten into a grand but all too brief adventure. Hence the door to the studio stays closed.

I have started to think more and more about the quantities of very bad things that I have amassed in the name of art. And aside from a few things that are just “vibe” in the space, the majority of this collection is for the making of art of various sorts. In my career as an artist I have thankfully seen a shift into less toxic, less carcinogenic, and more environmentally and even vegan friendly materials. But in some cases there’s just no substitute for the bottle of danger ketchup.

I am now old enough to be sensible regarding handling these materials. When I was in my twenties in art school, I would routinely eat, drink, and smoke in front of the easel. As with many artists, the paintbrush was conveniently held in my mouth when both hands were needed. There is no doubt I ingested paint that included some dangerous heavy metals, and toxic pigments. To the extent that I absorbed enough of this to do permanent harm is anyone’s guess. I don’t have the symptoms of heavy metal poisoning that may have been responsible for some of Van Gogh’s insanity (or at least exacerbated it). But then it’s hard to say whether my present weirdness is some lasting legacy of eating cadmium and snorting turpentine in the early 1980s. Among other things.

Part of this new awareness has been a deep dive into the formulation of various artistic materials, as well as into their history. I am looking to find means of producing works of longevity, while at the same time minimizing exposure to material that may decrease my own.

At basis, most art materials consist of two or three components. The first is pigment, the thing that actually makes the color. Next is the binder, what causes the pigment to stick to the paper, canvas, panel, wall, or boulder. Finally, for some there is a solvent or diluent, that makes it possible to mix the binder and pigment into a form that can be easily applied, but which will later on be permanent.

Depending on your pigment, there may be some toxicity issues. Natural “earths”, organic plant pigments, and synthetic industrial colorants can contain chemicals that are inimical to the meat suit. The cadmium and cobalt colors are becoming harder to get and then only at a premium. This reflects as much the rarity of the compound as it does the environmental hazards in handling and preparing them.

Binders, on the other hand, seem less of a problem, unless you are allergic to latex. Synthetic polymers are being substituted for natural gums and resins, and beeswax is being eschewed to make vegan friendly materials. The downside, though, is that synthetics are inevitably petroleum distillates or by-products of the petrochemical industries. As such they carry along the same downsides as any fossil fuel: environmental pollution and resource depletion.

The solvents are frequently the most dangerous part of the mix. The oldest of these is probably turpentine, made by distillation of pine resins. In combination with certain other plant and nut oils, this chemical makes a painting medium that allows dry pigments and powdered resin binders to be spread by a brush, and to achieve a hard cure. “Mineral spirits” another euphemism for petroleum distillates, is a more modern second, and then special preparations like alcohol and acetone round out the gamut. Because they are designed to break down or at least liquify the organic matter of the binder, and then to cure by oxidation or evaporation, the volatile organic compounds given off by these solvents are a big problem in the artist’s studio as well as the general environment.

Smokey Montage — What is it you have there? Can I see it? I’d really like to see that? Can I?

Forty years ago, the detail of this wasn’t part of a general art education. There were vent hoods over the acid vats, and crossed bones over the poisonous cocktails, and in some spaces no smoking signs, but getting deeply into both the chemistry and operation of what made a paint was not part of the curriculum unless you were taking a special course in grad school (or were a chemistry major looking to score a job with Dow or Dupont).

In fairness, most of the students in my painting classes had little interest in that level of detail, and I probably would not have either, except that I was always trying to paint on things that weren’t meant to be painted on. This encouraged a broader understanding of the various compounds available, but no necessarily the awareness of what they were made from, or how they worked. Over the years a large number of these compounds have left the market, because they were toxic. An example of this is the so-called “magic marker”

Magic Markers — If you have ever used these you may be old enough for Medicare now, and you may need it for the damage they caused to your liver.

This term is frequently applied to any sort of felt tipped ink pen used for drawing or coloring. But the original trademark was a clunky combination of a metal ink cannister and screw on cap with the felt wick. These were developed about mid-century and aimed initially at illustrators and layout artists. The Madison Avenue advertising industry used them to produce brightly colored idea studies in rapid fashion.

The chief drawback of these was that the ink solvent was xylene or toluene. While not fully proven carcinogenic, these were linked to birth defects, liver and brain damage, and frequently caused dizziness, headaches, and disorientation. These were the same compounds used in the “airplane glue” the kids of the 70s were huffing to get high. So this should explain a bit about some of the advertising you saw created in the latter half of the twentieth century.

Most felt markers since the 1990s use an alcohol or water base, but the adult coloring craze and the demand for low-cost materials means possible importation from less regulated overseas manufacturers. I have sets of “professional” alcohol markers, and I have “discount” alcohol markers, and while I’m not sure that the cheaper ones are using something as toxic as toluene or xylene, they’re definitely more pungent and powerful in a closed room than the high end ones.

I wonder how many ancient shamans scarred, marred, and potentially ended themselves trying to find the exact combination bear fat, beeswax, bird egg and berry juice would render the perfect bison on that cave wall. I’m sure there had to be a number of disastrous failures before time honored formulae were able to be passed down to the apprentice and the acolyte. Such knowledge was magical and sacred, and conveyed powers which were beyond that of the rest of the tribe.

Throughout our history the connection of art and ritual is constantly reinforced. Art as ornament, until the most modern of times, still carried some sacredness or symbolic cachet. Likewise the making of such art was closely guarded, practiced by specialist like the scribes of Egypt and the masons of the Medieval Gothic. We can analyze and dissect and understand their methods and materials now in a more democratic sense, but in doing so, we have left the sacredness behind.

Most of the artists I went to school with simply wanted to know what combination of A and B was required to get their paint to flow smoothly and dry quickly (or slowly) or be thinner or thicker. The “why” of it was on no interest to them. I see a great deal of this echoed in much of the magical community, looking for a “practical” approach, like a cook book, and speaking of “theory” with the same derisive nostril as a third grader might speak of “math”.

The one without the other certainly is functional. A list of things to get, step by step instructions, and what to do if you catch the curtain on fire, and that’s all. But what if that doesn’t work. What if you prefer pecans instead of walnuts in the brownie? Is it a simple matter just to substitute one for the other?

There are those who would argue that, but I’m not sold on the concept as a universal truth.

There are oil paints. There are water-based paints. There are now some paints that can be mixed with oil or water. But not all of the water-based paints can be used with the oil based paints and vice versa. Luckily, these are labeled relatively clearly down at the art store.

But this is not the same with everything, and not the same with spell work.

For instance, there is a thing called an oil pastel. Presumably, this is because it was devised to create the same kind of immediacy and painterly approach that chalk pastels were used for, but without the crumbliness and dust. All well and good.

Chalk pastels are made by taking color pigment, fine kaolin clay, and enough binder to get them to stick together and to the paper. As a consequence they are quiet fragile and dusty and require applying a “fixative” of some sort to the finished work to glue it down. Prior to our modern aerosol cans this was done by atomizing a dilution of water and gum arabic or rabbit skin glue onto the work.

So around the turn of the century pigments mixed with wax instead of clay came about, and these were softened with “mineral spirits”. Labeled “oil” pastels because they contained a petroleum based solvent.

Now the natural inclination is to think that oil pastels and oil paints are fully compatible, and that one could use the stubby little crayons as a perfect means of drawing your composition under your painting.

It turns out that this is a really bad idea, because unlike the linseed or walnut oils commonly used for oil paint, the petroleum oil in the pastel never actually “dries”. So the oil pastel oil will dissolve the oil paint oil, or at very least make it tend to slide off the drawing.

Mixed Media — Despite similar names, shapes and brands, these things are all very different chemically and do not always play well together. Substitution, co-mingling, and the mixing of media requires a deeper understanding of how they interact, how to coax their cooperation, and how to insure that the final work not only meets expectation but also creates a lasting result. This is analogous to spell crafting from scratch. You have to know about all the pieces or the results can range from failure to outright disaster. At very least you may have to start over, and at worse, something may spontaneously combust (it happens).

This is further confused by the fact that you can use turpentine and oil painting mediums to “paint” with oil pastels and achieve a limited chemical curing that makes them behave more like oil paint and be less subject to surface damage.

Then there’s the oil stick, which is really oil paint in a stick form, not to be confused with oil pastels.

Making these work together harmoniously is a job in itself, and only achievable if one has a really deep understanding of not just the how but the why.

Making them work, and making them archival, so that an art collector or museum can expect the value of the piece will be protected in the long term, is an even more complicated task, with additional layers of chemicals and processes arcane and obtuse.

I view the process of “deep magic” with a similar eye. And I use that term to distinguish from the archaic and elitist notions of “high” and “low” magic. Practical magic, is by definition intended for general purposes to get things done. I use it. I have great respect for it. It works.

But it’s closer to a sketch than an oil painting. And there’s nothing wrong with that. There’s no need to take the time and effort and complicated process of making an oil painting when a sketch will do.

There are a lot of how-to books that take the approach of a cookbook. This is the same for art as it is for spell craft. There are a few that take it to the next level, where there’s a bit more said about the bits and pieces and putting them together. But in the end you probably won’t find a single art book that gives you the how and the why at that level of detail, and you aren’t likely to find a spell book that will either.

At least I haven’t. I’ve had to go put the pieces together from a lot of different places, and I’ve had to grow the knowledge to know when what I find is potentially useful, and when it’s purely selling something.

I hope you have found this rambling potentially useful. It is last minute due to the demands recurring ill weather on the Gulf Coast is imposing from my day job, and thus there are fewer images here than usual.

Perhaps next week we can get back to a better balance. Thank you for reading to the end.

May 22, 2024May 22, 2024

The Need To Be Invisible

My artistic journey began hand-in-hand with my magical journey in very early childhood. When one is still forming their awareness of the world, and learning to separate self from other, the distinctions of time, space, reality, and the imagined are not as clearly cut as we often pretend they are in later life.

That’s certainly evident when we examine so many of the classic works of children’s literature, like the work’s of Roald Dahl, Lewis Carrol, A.A. Milne, J.M. Barry, and Dr. Seuss. These stories delight in taking liberties with our grasp on the “real world” and frequently draw the attention of artists and illustrators who want to play in those fertile grounds.

Along with these and a tattered copy of Grimm’s, my youthful creativity found equal inspiration in film and television, and often did not distinguish the blossoming of science fiction with the actual events of America’s voyages to the moon in the late 1960s and early 1970s, There was frequently cross-over by artists depicting both the real and historical, and the futuristic and fantastical. I quickly became a fan of the works of Chesley Bonestell, Robert McCall, John Berkey, and Syd Mead.

I answered the siren call of comic books at about the same time, and through experimental graphics works by such masters as Jack Kirby and Jim Steranko, I was introduced to the artistic movement of surrealism. Likewise, the bizarre and fanciful art direction of people like Maurice Noble, Chuck Jones, and Bob Clampett on the Warner Brothers cartoons immersed my malleable mind in the distortions one might encounter in the works of Salvador Dali and Joan Miro.

It was about the time I entered high school and had my first formal art classes that I became aware of the work of Belgian surrealist Rene Magritte, and this was through the now defunct Omni Magazine. His most famous pieces, produced mostly in the 1960s, became widely seen and copied in popular culture about this time. The so-called “Man in the Bowler Hat” or “Man Who Isn’t There” inspired several interpretations on book and album covers, music videos, and poster art. In those days I just felt that his work was “cool to look at” but like Dali and other surrealist painters, the depth of their messages escaped me.

Not A Pipe — This is possibly Magritte’s most famous work, at least in artists’ circles. For those who are deficient en français, the inscription reads “This is not a pipe.”

It is, in fact, a painting of a pipe. For that matter, it is a digital image reproduction of a photograph of a painting of a pipe. It should not be surprising then, to discover that the name of this painting is “The Treachery of Images”. It basically states what we all know, or at least think we know, that the image of a thing is not the thing itself. In doing so, it plays with that old human conception that lies at the root of all sympathetic magic. The image of the thing is somehow equal to the thing, while clearly, in our “reality” it isn’t. It’s just a picture of the thing. Yet we accept that the images of things are the things, at least in some way, as the basis of our communication of that shared reality.

As I get older (and weirder) my appreciation for Magritte and the other surrealists has grown, and the inspiration they provide both for my artwork and my thinking about life, the universe, and everything is much more profound.

A couple of week’s ago I took a long weekend in one of my favorite getaway spots, to celebrate my 34th wedding anniversary. In that time, inasmuch as possible and practical, I “unplugged” from the interwebs, and particularly social media.

This necessary disconnect was both to spend more time and attention on my Good Lady Wife, but also to simply clear my mind from the kind of artificial experience that most of us take as “reality” in the early 21st Century.

“Social media” is a skosh over two decades old. According to the Google AI now summarizing what it thinks it found on the Internet, the ancestor of all, the original MySpace went live in 2003, with Fascistbook and Twaddle following a few years afterward.

Like many interweb startups, MySpace collapsed and vaporized, to be replaced by Web 2.0-A type networks that somehow inexplicably found a way to keep tweaking the algorithm so that everyone kept coming back.

But this means that for the last 20 years or so, we’ve been living “online” instead of “irl” and this has changed our perception of reality and how we operate within it.

Social media engineers bank on the “fear of missing out”. What did you not see in your feed? Which messages of vital importance and life changing wisdom has the algorithm buried during the 0.087 seconds that you weren’t scrolling through, that you will never ever ever see again? Unless, it goes viral and becomes that cat meme. Or the one with the girlfriend. Or Batman abusing Robin.

If you are the same vintage (and now apparently the term vintage is also important) as I am, you can remember the world pre-social. I even predate the interwebs themselves. Consider the implication of how human beings function with each other that this thing has wrought.

While I am thrilled to find a bully pulpit for my lunatic ravings, and hopefully a viable market for weird art, I am a pre-net dinosaur and remember how different things were, and actually still are.

“In real life”, aside from immediate family, and perhaps a few neighbors and co-workers, we generally were not, and actually are not, in constant contact with all that many people we know. Our friends often live at some distance, and we see them when we visit them, they visit us, or we make arrangements to meet somewhere to do something.

Yet life “online” asserts the principle that we should be constantly inveigled with each other, to the point that every action online gets copied to everyone in our friends list. Whenever we like, everyone knows we liked. When we know someone, everyone knows we know someone. And they should know them too. Everything about us is assumed to be of interest and equally interesting to everyone we know.

This is not socializing. Socializing was based on choice. This is marketing. The sheer amount of unconnected and uninteresting goods and services that have gained some tenuous status of being liked or looked at by a friend of a friend of a friend that dumps into my feed daily inspires me to disconnect and distance.

Friends, we are not supposed to be this connected. There’s supposed to be distance. There’s supposed to be mystery. Sometimes we need to be invisible.

Magritte’s “The Blank Signature” plays with our perception of space and reality. It’s exceptionally powerful because our brains are wired to fill in the parts of the image that aren’t there, and make assumptions about the “depth” of the space.

Though, again, we are looking at a flat surface that represents the illusion of depth using changes in tonal value and color. Like the false pipe, this image deceives us into thinking we see the invisible parts of the horse and rider, and that they are properly imposed across the background.

A further magic here, though, is that we think we are seeing more “wrong” than their actually is. We mentally “feel” the horse and rider are cut up into several strips, but it is really only just behind the neck, and the imposition of the background tree behind the rider that creates this effect.

What we see is what we think we see. The visible is no less an illusion than the invisible.

Invisibility seems an especially important trait for wielders of magical secrets. Merlin and Gandalf frequently disappear for weeks, months, and even years. The Wyrd Sisters of the Scottish play show up as required to further the plot, but seem to hold no permanent space in relation to the world inhabited by Macbeth and his cronies. Faerie godmothers, woodland witches, and sea sorceresses are not usually to be found wandered down the village high street. Their remoteness and difficulty in contacting marks them as creatures to be sought only in cases of direst need, or greatest peril, because they do not care to be disturbed.

There is a two-fold nature to this. In dealing with the “invisible world” one must have some bit of a toe on the threshold. The beings we frequently truck with “not of this earth” don’t have Linked In Profiles and pages on Facebook. They are not to be summoned on TikTok.

I do enjoy sharing the dark humor of fellow witches and weirdos. And there is knowledge to be passed, in quiet conversation and private chat, but perhaps not in the repeated meme. But we must also remember the old adage – “to know, to dare, to keep silent”.

There are those people who still, even in the early 21st Century, look upon the occult and those involved with it as Servants of the Devil^TM (and some are, willingly and with full knowledge) and seek to “save souls” or suppress difference, whichever is easier. There are people who will use politics and bigotry to that end, exploiting the frequently misguided, and perhaps not terribly intelligent mob. This has always been the case.

This is also why the ancient practices were kept secret, even in societies where the working of wonders was accepted and appreciated. Those who did such working were a people apart, and spent much time “away” from the rest of their culture. They would go on spirit quests, or seek the gods on mountaintops or celebrate mysteries in darkened sanctums of ancient temples. They were not posting thrice daily on YouTube.

Magritte’s Decalamonia is one of several paintings with a similar symbolism. This one, and “The Pilgrim” are often reimagined by other creatives to show an empty suit, a so-called “invisible man” though he never specifically painted that image.

These views of clouded vistas and other landscapes, framed by the shape of the ubiquitous middle class mid-century European man in a bowler hat recur through his art. The critics, and perhaps Magritte himself, would suggest this is a dreamscape, but it augers to me that our external reality is entirely framed by our own minds. Ironically we are always separated from it, because we are we and it is Other. So we only have the internal world, and it creates our impression of the external one, which we can’t truly verify.

My approach to the internet, as my approach to the blog and social media, is not “content-based”. I encounter people, through serendipity for the most part, and build relationships with those people. In that context, I probably interact more with them than I do with people “irl” outside of my wife, children, and cats. But then I am something of a an old hermit.

It is difficult to say if these relationships are any more or less illusory than “irl” relationships that require meeting in person and doing activities that are mutually enjoyable. We are all aware of the isolated nature of being, and the extent to which an online person is any more forthcoming or presenting themselves authentically compared to an “irl” person is debatable. But the machinery of the interwebs tends toward surface more than substance.

In order to continue to connect with persons we like, we have to engage, and deliver “content” that the algorithm favors. This is opposite to “irl”, where we have some measure of control over the interaction. We can call our friend up, go have dinner, see a show, play a sport, take a trip, or otherwise engage without the intermediary interference of the algorithm.

So by the nature of thing, the personae we present online are skewed to favor engagement, even if that’s not our general intention. And consequently the algorithm demands that we are online as much as we possible can be. This is anathema to the old wizard going out and wandering the woods and speaking to the trees and rocks (who do not have Threads accounts…so far.).

I personally find this condition to be ultimately unhealthy and eventually intellectually and creatively stifling. Your mileage may vary,

In the few months that I took off from blogging earlier, I found new ideas emerging and I have since entered a period of artistic creativity and energy that I haven’t felt in ages.

Where it leads, I cannot say. I am still working out the need to “engage” sufficiently to find a market for the work. Although I get tremendous joy and satisfaction from the process, the mortgage company will not accept my joy and satisfaction as monthly payment, no matter how tremendous it is.

In any case, I recommend that all of us who walk a creative or strange and unusual path practice a healthy introspection and cultivate self-awareness of how the interweb is affecting our practice and our identity.

The people who want you to believe that you can’t be invisible from time to time are doing it because they are selling your visibility -like magic beans- to the advertisers who don’t understand how to reach people in any human way.

I’ll continue to be visible each week, at least for now, unless something is out of my control. I appreciate the interest you have taken in my words to read all the way down here.

May 8, 2024May 8, 2024

More And Less

As a child in the 70s, particularly one with an artistic bent, there was nothing quite so cool as the big 64 color box of Crayola crayons.

Yes, there was probably some sort of status symbolism attached to it. It was not, despite what one might think, accessible to people at all income levels.

At least, that was what my parents frequently told me, and I accept that to have been the case. The big box (with that ever so cool built in crayon sharpener) was a rare gift, one that only came every few years. It had to be shared with my brother, and frequently with cousins and other visiting children, who invariably would break the crayons, lose them, and possibly eat them.

Leaving me with a less than pristine complete set, which caused me no end of frustration. Imagine how one might feel if the neighbor borrowed the Mercedes and returned it dented, with a broken windshield and missing fender. It was that big a deal.

I’m certain this probably relates to numerous neuropsychological issues that people over the years have quasi-diagnosed my having. I have no further comment on that.

But I do have my very own 64 color box of Crayola crayons (though the sharpener is no longer included…lawyers…) that I don’t have to share with anyone else.

Possibly as a result of this trivial (yet very real to a seven or eight year old) trauma, I have a tendency to want “complete sets” of things, especially art supplies. When I find a brand and type I like, the first thing I do is go to the factory website and see how many colors are available. Then I look for how much that complete set is going to cost.

Most of them are considerably more than the 64 color box of Crayola crayons. Some of them approach the cost of that dented Mercedes.

Painting Stuff — All sorts of fancy watercolors/ink blocks/color media. This doesn’t include the numerous bottles of ink and liquid colors I keep in the other room. I have accumulated many of these over the years when I could afford them, usually when I got a commission or project so that I could “use” them. Recently though, I have gotten some just because the media intrigued me. When I started out (around 40ish years ago) many of these didn’t exist. In a market where differentiating yourself from all the other color companies is difficult, many vendors have invented completely new media.

But if I truly really want them, I will save my change and eat bologna and eventually get them. I’ve been doing this a bit more over the last few years, because my children have reached independent adult status and there’s less of an obligation to be frugal in all things.

I have apparently been collecting art supplies (because hoarding implies another one of those metal quasi-diagnoses). This is a thing called “opportunity buying”. I know this because I am a professional buyer. That’s actually part of my job description in the day job.

Opportunity buying is getting stuff when it’s on sale, on clearance, close-out, discontinued, or special reduced rate, and buying all the store has of it. Because it appears to be a useful thing that somehow someday you will need and won’t you feel oh-so-smart and oh-so-smug when you already have it.

Now much to my recent delight (and smugness) I have discovered that I bought some clearance priced oil painting supplies that I found really really cheap but frankly had no idea what they were. Now that I am working with oil paint again, and learning and relearning the various sorts of alchemies involved, I actually do have a use for these things, and now I don’t have to spend more to get them.

This joy came as a complete surprise, because, in looking for some other thing (which I still can’t find) among my collection (okay, okay…hoard) of supplies I discovered that I had bought this thing that I now could put to good use.

I hope I don’t forget where it is, when I actually get around to using it.

Painting Stuff 2 — The box of colors on the top are 24 of the full 72 color set of Derwent Inktense colors. It comes in the tin on the bottom and in as set of sticks/blocks which I also have. The company has recently issued a set of watercolors, but they are presently not yet available stateside. Similar high end manufacturers such as Winsor-Newton, Sennelier, Cretacolor, and Caran d’Ache, are based in Europe, where the tradition of fine art supplies has a history going back at least two centuries. Unfortunately, this tends to increase the price.

But I find I am considering just how much of this stuff I really do need. How many “complete sets” are actually required?

Am I simply fulfilling a kind of art Pokemon game, where owning the set still satisfies that seven year old with the broken crayons?

The set of pricey art supplies will not in and of themselves make one a better artist. That is in you. It’s focus and practice and patience.

Will it make it easier for you to achieve your vision. Potentially, yes.

If you struggle with the medium, it’s frustrating. Most artists will tell you they are already struggling with their vision versus their skills. We are never satisfied with the work that comes out (or at least mostly never satisfied). Adding another layer of combat between you and the brush or the chalk or the canvas just makes that harder.

But maybe I don’t need all the crayons. In fact, I have found that having all the crayons sometimes makes for a less expressive or inventive solution. So I am working toward having the crayons I will use (whether they be crayons, or pastels, or colored pencils, or paints, or papers) and living with the idea that if I find out I really really need another color, I can probably go get that.

I justify the use of such materials because they are formulated to outlast me. The various pieces I made back in art school, that have not already been lost or damaged by various external agencies, may have already started to fade.

The work I do now, with the better tools, has a shelf life of at least 500 years. Should my work please whatever culture exists in another half-millennia, I trust they’ll be technologically advanced enough to extend it’s preservation, much as we are now doing to save masterpieces from the Renaissance.

So it’s not entirely ostentation, to collect these materials, so long as I am actually working with them.

Jellyfish — A small test piece using a 24 color (out of 96) set of Caran d’Ache oil pastels. I got these because the 12 color set of Sennelier, while wonderful, were quite expensive, especially to get the whole set (120 colors). Caran d’Ache were favorably reviewed in comparison to the Sennelier, so I thought I would try them out. So far they are very different. Not bad, mind you, but very different.

It was gratifying though, working on this image last night, to realize that I was simply painting with the goal of making the media work for me. That is, there is no deadline, no client waiting, it’s just picking up the tool and trying something. That’s an exquisite relief from a very long time of working for paid output.

The same applies to the numerous wares and paraphernalia associated with the practice of magic. The “aesthetic” of witchcraft is a topic frequently raised on the socials. I have my own counsel on that.

If one looks to the traditional folk magic of our species, it’s fairly obvious that witches and their like didn’t keep specialized tools displayed on elaborate shrines or altars. For one thing, doing so in a post pagan world would get one imprisoned, or killed.

More likely the broom was the same one used to sweep the hearth, the knife the same used to make the meal. The cauldron was that pot the meal cooked in, and the hearth it sat on was altar enough. In point of fact, the connection between these things used in life made them, in my personal view, more sacred and more potent, than if they were kept hidden and separate.

Does it feel “cool” to have the custom made special broom, the hand-forged athame, and the special cauldron upon the sacred altar? Sure it does. To the extent that it makes it easier to enter into an altered state of consciousness for the performance of a rite, such props fulfill the similar role that having the higher-end paint does for the artist. It removes another barrier in the creative process.

But as to the necessity, well, that’s a personal decision. In the many years I have been both an artist and a magician, I have had to make do with what I had, or what I could disguise as “normal”. I made up for the difference with willpower, ambition, and work.

So maybe we don’t need that big box of crayons. But there’s no shame in having it if we want it.

April 14, 2024April 24, 2024

Time and Tides

Yesterday I spent on the front porch of a local restaurant working on a watercolor of the buildings on the opposite side of the street.

I remembered as I worked that the last time I had such an experience was from a garret balcony in Montmarte almost 30 years ago.

It’s not that I haven’t made art. I have. I have made pieces both digital and traditional, for personal enjoyment and for profit (and luckily sometimes both). But to sit down with no other intention than to make a record of the scene in front of me hasn’t been something I’ve done in too long a time.

The exercise is not just to work in the wild, but to determine how to execute the image with the tools at hand. While I have a full set of the Derwent Inktense pencils and blocks, the paint pans, similar to a watercolor tin, only has about a third of the colors. Yes, I can, and did, expand that with the bigger gamut of the pencils, I was quite surprised that the colors didn’t really have the subtle faded pink, sage green, and yellow ochres of the scene. Choosing how to interpret the scene is the artist’s process.

Frankly that’s my own damned fault, and my own damned vanity. Working from life is a core competency of the professional artist, and it’s my own laziness that I’ve not invested the time to get out there and do it.

The spontaneity and interaction with both the subject and the working environment are essential to any one claiming to be competent with their media. So yesterday was a return to the practice, and I expect to be spending more time engaged in it, even if the final pieces are not spectacular or commercially viable.

Today I am in studio, working on various projects that are a good deal more structured. This is not simply because I am shifting media back to oils, which of necessity are not as spontaneous. It is because the nature of the imagery requires a more “engineered” method.

The two approaches are not mutually exclusive. There will doubtless be some times where working in the open air with a live scene will require a certain deliberated method. And likewise, even a very complex and arranged studio piece will benefit from the occasional happy accident that may take it in a completely different direction.

Magic, of course has some parallels. The seat of the pants “what’s in the cupboard” approach of practical witchcraft is analogous to the plein air impression of the live street. And certainly the heavily structured rituals of so-called “high magick” has commonality with the premeditated studio work. Yet they both partake of and inform each other.

The intended outcome is, of course, the primary yardstick for the efficacy of method. In my long practice I have almost always wiggled along somewhere in the middle of both, but I confess I’ve had more freedom and courage to trust the wildness of traditional improvisational witchcraft than to be comfortable with facing the changing light of a street scene or landscape. And for that I chastise myself.

The studio piece has been worked out from rough sketch through a geometric design in the computer. The final will be hand painted, and will hopefully be more representative of a freer approach, but the use of structured technology as a step in that creation is something that I have been doing for quite a while. The patience required to cut out and apply the masks comes from commercial illustration projects, which ironically hardly employ these methods in the digital age. In essence I am utilizing a hybrid archaic process that has been superceded by layering and masking digitally. The method is still the standard for much airbrush work, but for the majority of illustration it’s become a forgotten art.

It’s never too late for the old dog to go back and relearn some tricks.

That’s all I have this week. If you find it a tad brief, I invite you to join me and Clever Kim on Your Average Witch Podcast this Tuesday, April 16, where I ramble on about a number of topics. I’m looking forward to seeing what she was able to edit together from my typical puddle of consciousness conversations.

Till next week, then. At least I’ll try to.

March 17, 2024March 17, 2024

About The Art

One of the chief reasons for my Yuletide sabbatical was that I had not had the time in recent months to work on any of the art projects that I had planned/sketched/imagined during the several months between my last major road trip in August and the advent of my Halloween/Birthday season.

As a creature of the Winter Dark, this period is often when I circle back into myself and focus on the creative endeavors that summer obligations make difficult. Alas, as the years pass this luxury of a winter respite seems harder to return to, but in this case, the one thing I could set aside was my own commitment to a weekly article here.

I am aware my readership, while loyal, is not large. And that’s fine, because I feel like I am reaching those who are open to hearing what I am saying in the way I am saying it. I had contemplated other means of doing this, most notably a book and a podcast (not necessarily both). But the logistics of doing these to the level and extent that I envisioned them, required a great deal more of a commitment of time, at least, and energy to “make a go of it”.

Withc Wip 3 15 — The slow progress on this painting is deliberate. I have not worked in oil in many years, and, to be honest, I was never terribly good with them when I did. The years have given me patience to work with the more complicated techniques, as well as wait for layers to properly cure before barreling forward to the next part. I suppose I would have been a good fresco painter back in my 20s, because I worked fast, and sometimes the spontaneity served me, but often it left a work that was not as good as it could have been. Many of the works I have envisioned for 2024 and beyond are to redress the less successful versions of my young.

So I started to put together this website with the intention of using it as a storefront, a place to sell such works as I had imagined. To compliment and enhance the branding of said wares, I started trying to put together a page or two on my personal perspective of magic and how it relates to my art. But as technical issues delayed the storefront, and I was working out options (and budget) to move the site to a new service provider that would support the storefront technology reliably, I started working with this WordPress side-site to help better articulate that message of magic and art.

I have mentioned that somewhere along the way the tail started wagging the dog. In mid December, I decided to send the dog to obedience school, and get back to the creative art part of the thing, because, a. ) the pre-paid contract for the website was already a year in with no storefront to fund renewal; and b.) there wasn’t anything for the storefront to sell.

The last couple of months have not been as productive in that respect as I would have preferred, but I do not consider the time wasted, nor do I feel that the directions I am heading in now are un-useful.

Sometimes we need to not just go back to the well, but back to the basics.

A consequence of taking a break is that my brain was somewhat more rested. Thus, said brain returned to it’s proper job of producing new ideas, resulting in a number of ideas for artwork. This was the intended purpose of taking the break. However, the new ideas brought with them a desire to use materials and methods that I had not used for some time, or never, or never together, and well, I was not at all sure I would be able to execute on the ideas offered by the now properly operating brain.

If you are a creative person, you may have had that experience of attempting to make something you can clearly see in your mind, but can’t seem to get right. It’s frustrating to the nth degree, and also, the anxiety of having such a failure can paralyze one to trying in the first place.

In fairness, after almost 40 years as a working artist, I am reasonably skilled at making my hands behave. Absent the occasional arthritic twinge, expressing visually what I see in my head is not so difficult as it used to be.

Except in the case of doing so with materials and methods that I had not used in ages, or ever, or ever together. That’s reasonable. One should not expect to execute flawlessly in a new media, or an old one that was never as friendly. And yet, the desire is there to do so. Especially if the end result is expected to be a commercial success.

Thus one is required to practice. To test, rehearse, fail, rethink, retry, and otherwise make those inevitable mistakes without the final piece being subject to these errors.

Thing is, the art of practice is not as easy as you think. Especially for a creative sort, who is expecting high quality outcomes.

Gouache Sketch Wip — Progress on a small gouache sketch on smooth bristol board. I had acquired a set of this type of paint in a discount sale, and used it with a couple of water color and aquarelle works. But in those executions, with the exception of using the white tube as a correction, I more or less used it transparently, as I would a watercolor.

That is a valid method. Essentially gouache and watercolor are the same thing- pigment with a gum arabic binder. Gouache has additional “whiting” or “body” to make them go on opaque. Unlike acrylic paint, which has largely replaced gouache in professional illustration work, the older medium will soften, melt, run, and blend even after the initial layer dries. This can be a disadvantage, or it can be useful to lighten or blend out a heavier color, as in the face above. Finessing these qualities is difficult, particularly if one doesn’t frequently use the medium.

It’s fortunate that as I am in my late 50s I have acquired the patience I did not have in my 20s. In my 20s, I worked without regard to error, in a mad blind rush of ego and drive that merely put imperfect or less successful works under the bed or in the closet to be forgotten. I had no time for specific tried methodologies of testing and practicing.

So now, I have come round full circle to making tests, to establish how the media will work for my intended final piece, indeed, whether or not it will work. In some cases, I have taken out a particular type of tool purely to practice, knowing it might not be suitable for the thing I am trying to do.

For example, I had an idea for a painting. I sketched it with oil pastel, though I knew the oil pastel wouldn’t actually give me a good result. It was not the best option to do the sketch, but I wanted to get a better feel for the oil pastels.

In another case, I sketched the idea with Conté crayon, because I had not used them in some years. The result was not a good one, but at least my hands now “remembered” how these performed. I made a very small (mind you I used to paint 4 feet canvases and larger murals) partial painting on paper using gouache, a kind of opaque watercolor. It was frustrating in ways, but also interesting to work with. I then did a second test related to the image with oil paint on paper, in order to test a metallic oil color, and a glazing medium, both of which are “new technology” since I last used oils. This also resulted in a mix of joy and disappointment.

Yet, it is the ultimate outcome of learning mastery, and understanding better, the materials which are new to me, or that I have forgotten.

Coincident with these practical exercises has been extensive research into both the direct use of these materials, but also into the proper curation of finished works using them.

For a good deal of my career, I have worked with modern acrylic paints, plain old graphite pencils, and a particular brand of colored pencils. I had academic experience with pastels, oil paint, Conté, charcoal, and water colors, as well as printmaking of various kinds and photography.

Many of these latter media are “fussy”. They can be complicated exercises in alchemy, such as oil painting, printmaking, and analog chemical photography, or simply just rather difficult to use, preserve, and store, such as pastel, water color, and charcoal drawings. In my 20s, short on patience and high on passion, it was all to easy to set these to the side, and assure myself that the “new media” of polymer emulsion acrylic paint was the way to go. “Plastic” paint would last for ages, even without a layer of polymer varnish (also easy to apply and clean up versus oil paint) and the pencil stuff was safe with enough spray on fixative.

Almost 40 years on, the implications of a petrochemical based art media is something I have more concerns about. While certainly there are pigments in use in all media that are derived from chemical sources, rare earths, and potentially toxic materials, older methods, like oil painting, watercolor, and pastels, are typically more sustainable and earth friendly.

New Media — I have spent my “mad money” the last few years on getting best-in-class art materials that I dreamed of having as a young starving student. These are expensive compared to what you run across in the “art” section of a craft store, or even at college book store. But in this case, the old adage “you get what you pay for” is often true. The quality and purity of the pigments mean that you end up using less to get the same vibrance of color compared to student or hobbyist grade materials. Another advantage to such sets is that most professional media is sold as single replacements, so if you run through all of your Naples Yellow, then you can just go get that.

Perhaps of most concern though as I get older is that the better quality materials may be less toxic, or at least are formulated with an awareness that the artist wants materials that are safe and renewable, and will pay a premium for it.

The most toxic solvent generally used with oil paint is turpentine, which is a by product of pine trees. Oddly enough, a number of professional paint companies have shifted to an “odorless mineral spirit” which is petroleum based. Neither is something you need to be breathing in close quarters. Both are volatile and flammable. Turpentine at least is renewable. Manufacturers are working with citrus based solvents that have the same effective properties, but are renewable, non-toxic, and no-flammable, so there is an awareness in the professional art industry that these things are an issue.

Likewise, manufacturers of pencils, crayons, and pastels are now producing vegan friendly solutions, These remove the beeswax that has been a feature of paint binders since ancient Egypt. In some media, eggs, animal glues, and other such by-products are being reconsidered in light of animal cruelty. Unfortunately, the alternative product is often a petrochemical, such as a paraben or an epoxy.

Hopefully research will yield solutions that meet both the ethical considerations and provide sustainable archival media that will allow today’s artists to be seen and appreciated in the museums of the 26th century, as we now can look at the works of the great Renaissance masters. Ironically, the late 19th and 20th century “modern” media are often the more problematic for curators. The materials themselves being made to a “commodity grade” standard, and applied, frequently, without the care and diligence that the artists of earlier eras learned through long apprenticeships.

While clearly I am writing about my recent studio work, my brain was not without the appreciation of the parallels to magical practice. During the last week I was also interviewed by Your Average Witch Podcast, and part of the discussion is always about methods of practice. It occurred to me that my approach to magic, like my approach to art, might benefit from a reacquaintance with those first principles. That is, while there are a number of things I do as habit, it couldn’t hurt to at least dig into the underlying principles behind those habits, and see if perhaps, in habitualizing them, I had shortcut some of the needed structure for the sake of convenience and time.

Like the painting, if I am doing something familiar, my hands know the way. The results are sufficient, but perhaps not spectacular. Such complacency is not beneficial. It leads to the trap of excusing poor performance, when paying closer attention, taking the time, and doing the research, might in fact have yielded a better result. And in fact the additional effort to get that first result invigorates and educates all subsequent attempts.

If I do a lot of the fiddly stuff for one or two paintings, then the next 10 or 20 paintings benefit from what I have learned, and also from the better habits of practice and research.

The same applies to spell craft and any other magical disciplines.

When we are young, we rush by what we need to do because we are in a hurry to get something done.

When we are older, we shortcut what we need to do because it doesn’t seem to make a difference.

And that’s because we didn’t do it when we were younger and didn’t have the basic sense to realize we were wrong.

Slow down. Take a breath. Re-read that chapter.

Not everything has to be a finished work. It’s okay to do something just to figure out how to do it. And to absolutely flop doing it until you figure it out.

I’ll be back in a week, I think. I have no idea what we’ll be getting into then.

November 15, 2023November 15, 2023

Queen Of The Night

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I’ll be back next week.

November 8, 2023November 8, 2023

Another Trip Around The Sun

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Life is a constant mystery.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Because I am always asking myself that question.

“What if you’re wrong?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

August 30, 2023August 29, 2023

The Fool That Follows Us

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thank you for your continued patronage.

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

August 23, 2023August 23, 2023

Returning to the Earth

And I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth were passed away, and there was no more sea.
Revelations Chapter 21, Verse 1 – King James Bible

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

world-cosmic-tarot — In the Cosmic Tarot we are presented with an image very similar to the one Pamela Colman Smith has created. Yet there is an exoticism, and possibly also an eroticism, in how the figure of the earth is represented. This seems certainly more accessible than the woman in the RWS version.

world-hidden-realm-tarot — The Tarot of the Hidden Realm gives us Mother Earth in a verdant green with all her bounty exploding forth from her. The Gospel animals are gone, as they were never part of Faerie, and we are left with lushness and perhaps even lustiness.

world-shadowscapes-tarot — Stephanie Law’s magnificent Shadowscapes Tarot echoes the Hidden Realm in a number of ways. Her World though, is a regal queen, garbed in mystery, and keeping her own counsels.

world-wildwood-tarot — Finally, the Wildwood Tarot, with it’s Celtic shamanism, gives us the World Tree. I’m a tad concerned about calling this a “Celtic” ideation. Yggdrasil is a Norse concept. It seems a bit clumsily borrowed here to present an idea of the universal ideal, or knowledge, or spirit, when perhaps there are better more truly Celtic symbols that might be used.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Please join me next time.

July 12, 2023July 12, 2023

To Darkness Returned

The Devil hath power to assume a pleasing shape.
Hamlet: Act II, Scene 2 – William Shakespeare

Starting with the Hanged Man at XII we have been delving into cards that, at face value, purport ill-tidings. Even last week’s Temperance is couched in the same gloomy sky that Death shares, and that tells us that we are in places where mortals fear to tread.

Number XV is called the Devil. As noted in some of the earlier articles, this card’s layout seems a parody of the Lovers card at VI, and there is a good reason for that. As depicted in the Rider-Waite-Smith Deck, the Devil is a red and orange demon, with a feline head, large bat-like ears, gray ram’s horns, great bat wings, and a shaggy lower torso and legs ending in taloned feet. In his left hand he hold inverted a large torch. His right hand is lifted and is positioned with the thumb out, and the two fingers on either side together, forming a v-shape in the middle. The Devil is perched on a black block to which is affixed a large iron ring. On either side of the this ring a chain is attached, and the chains are secured to an iron collar around the neck of a male and female being. These are very similar to the male and female depicted in Eden in the Lovers, but on closer view, the woman has horns and a tail that ends in a bunch of grapes, while the man has pointed ears and a tail that ends in a flame shape. The entire background of this card is black. Between the Devil’s horns is an inverted pentagram.

devil-rws-tarot — The RWS Infernal One says hello and wishes you’d drop by. He might even put on a shirt.

There are a number of intentional symbols included in this version of the card that derive from various sources. We can start with the basic design of the being Baphomet from Eliphas Levi. Here is a strange goat-headed god, with a center horn that blazes, an upright (by traditional reckoning) pentagram on it’s brow, with female breasts and eagle wings. From out of the robes that cover it’s lower part rises a fully erect caduceus (to prevent Victorian gentlemen from having to observe a wang other than their own, I’m sure) backed by a scaled shield (possibly the Aegis of Athena). The arms are in similar position to the one we find on the XV card, but the hand gestures are those of the common Christian blessing, on both hands. The raised right arm is inscribed “Solve” and lowered left arm “Coagula”. There are hooves at the end of the beings legs, and it sits cross-legged on a block on top of a sphere (the world?) Two crescent moons are at the tips of the fingers, a light one on the right and a darker on the left.

Baphomet was later borrowed by the Church of Satan under Anton Le Vey and has become an enduring symbol of Satanic and anti-Christian Black Magic in the popular culture. This composite being is, however, much like the alchemical chimera that we see in various depictions of the Temperance card, and represents that union of opposites, the joining of the aspects of things, to create the true shape of the thing. Despite the rather obvious societal restraints placed on displaying any sort of masculine sexuality (because that would be upsetting), Baphomet is an hermaphrodite. It is so in the same sense that the hermaphrodite appears in alchemy, not as a sexual fetish but as an allegory for the fusion of opposing powers.

The name Baphomet is borrowed from the confessions of tortured Templars who, under duress, confessed to worshiping a “head” with that name. Scholars have theorized that the word is a corruption of Mahomet, or Muhammed, the chief prophet of Islam, and that these strange crusaders had become secret Muslims during their sojourn in the Holy Land. So much is written about the Templars, and so much of it is modern fiction, that it is difficult to say one way or the other. Certainly the Templars adopted a good number of Islamic conventions, particularly regarding the handling and exchange of money. The legends suggest that this was some great fortune that has yet to be discovered (sorry, Ben Gates) but it may simply have been the use of the financial methods of their temporarily conquered enemies that made it appear so.

Levi was not the first to use the name, but he has perhaps conjured the most enduring image of it. Wikipedia would have you believe he took the Tarot devil as inspiration, and perhaps Waite thought the same, but if we glance at the Devil in the Tarot de Marseilles we see there is very little in common with either Levi’s chimera or Waite’s Devil, where there is much resemblance of those two to each other. The Marseilles Devil, and his minions are strangely attired. While the Devil itself is shown with breasts and a penis, the horns, wings and other “demonic” trappings look to be a costume. The crescent moon shaped objects on the breast might even be a kind of “wonder bra” indicating that this figure derives more from the theater than the pit. Paul Huson suggests that many of the Tarot trumps were based upon scenes depicted in the early passion plays of Medieval times, and that there origin has been obscured by history. If he is correct, and this seems reasonable, then the Devil here is meant to be mocked and ridiculed. It’s outrageous appearance is a Medieval fantasy of the church, and popular superstition.

Levi was creating a metaphor, in the good old alchemical tradition, for what he considered to be an ancient pagan ideology. The figure of Baphomet, along with the other diabolical names he cites in his works, was representative of a more ancient deity or deities that were secretly worshipped by closet polytheists. He was Pan, the great goat, the old fertility god. And of course, he is also Khmnu the creator god symbolized by the ram, and confounded with Amun in the Egyptian myths. But the Devil of the Tarot is, historically speaking, that Christian principle of the infernal, the Fallen Angel, the King of Hell, and therefore can’t really be seen as either ancient pagan avatar or modern magical symbolism.

The Visconti Sforza deck doesn’t assist us in unraveling this puzzle, because the Devil card is one of those replaced later by another artist. It is therefore difficult to say what form the original had, if any. There is speculation that many early Devil cards were used as a surrogate for the being itself, either by sorcerers seeking to curry it’s favor, or churchmen looking for a whipping boy in various rituals. So the number of such cards from the earlier decks are rare, and the best we may expect is what is depicted with Marseilles, an actor in a kind of Halloween costume, whose role was to meet and be defeated by the slain Christ in one of the apocryphal resurrection stories. This tale becomes more relevant to the history of the Tower card, so I will only mention it here, but it is derived from the musings of the early Christian fathers and seems to connect up a number of these middle Major Arcana Cards.

Baphomet would appear to have suffered a major railway accident on his way to the RWS deck. His nethers have now been tastefully covered with fur, preventing any homoerotic suggestions from polluting the practitioners’ minds. One might, if one looked at the swirling hairs, glean just perhaps a suggestion of an erect member, but of course that might simply be a Freudian illusion. The breasts are gone now, too. There’s no fusion of genders going on here. Old Scratch is unquestionably male.

The central flaming horn equated with Lucifer – the Light Bringer is now turned downward. This signifies the perversion of the Light of Truth, that the Devil brings only deceit and illusion. Curiously I have seen Hekate’s torch similarly depicted in art, though I believe these are all modern glosses and may have been influenced by Card XV in this deck. Likewise we have inverted the pentagram. The original is Aristotelean. That is, it derives from the writings of Aristotle, in describing the five elements – Earth, Air, Fire, Water, and Quintessence, which in modern terms is called Spirit. Spirit was what we might determine as anima in Aristotle’s mind. It was that substance that made something alive, which could not be accomplished by combinations of the other four elements alone. Thus pentagram then, is an emblem of this, with Spirit at the apex, the most sublime and dominant of the other elements. By inversion on the Devil’s brow, we connote his overturning of the natural order. The Devil was antithesis of God, and in all ways then opposite and backward. Dante’s Inferno has him turned upside down, where he plunged into the Earth at the time of the Fall. Spirit is now at the bottom, with the material components of the world arrayed above it. This signifies an obsession with the material, with the worldly, over the spiritual, that is connected to the idea of sin and punishment.

We find bat wings on the Marseilles Devil, and on many many depictions of demons and devils in art. Bats are creatures of the night. They shun the light. They are not birds but they fly. Thus these easily become contrary symbols and are more suitable to an infernal and oppositional being than Baphomet’s feathered pinions. The other alterations in his visage are in keeping with the Gothic style that Pamela Smith mimics in her designs for the Tarot.

devil-black-tarot — A thing of darkest nightmares peers out at us from Card XV of the Black Tarot. This deck is a recent acquisition and I have not had much opportunity to explore it. It dispenses with all the imagery of the RWS and other preceding traditional decks like the Marseilles. The imagery is totally original and as you might expect, dark in nature.

This image kept reminding me of something else, and I couldn’t quite place it until this morning. It brings to mind the Devil card of H. R. Giger, or at least the image was presented as the Devil card. Unfortunately I did not have time to scan that card before press time. There is some similarity in the single eye and the horn, but I can’t say with any certainty that this Devil was inspired by the Giger one. Giger’s version is very socially critical, as was much of his work outside the popularly known, and merits discussion on it’s own at some later point.

Something must be said of the upraised hand’s similarity to the gesture of a famous character in an old science fiction franchise. The so-called “Vulcan salute” associated with Star Trek’s Mr. Spock, is, in fact, the same as that being made by this character. They both derive from the same source. Leonard Nimoy, the actor who created much of the Spock character, was the child of immigrant Russian Jews. He based the gesture on something he saw as a child in the synagogue, when the rabbis were blessing the congregation. They put forth their hands in the shape of the letter Shin, which forms the start of the word Shem HaMeforash, a term denoting the all mighty, or the sacred name of Adonai/Elohim/Yawveh.

So while Baphomet is using the “proper” Catholic hand gesture for blessing (never mind that it’s also a Hindu mudra), in an astonishingly blatant display of anti-Semitism, the Devil is pronouncing a Hebrew blessing. It’s very hard to reconcile this with the fascination that many of the lodge magicians (Waite included) had with Hebrew “secrets” and Kabbala, but there seems to be no other good explanation for this. The lodge magicians, despite their “rediscovered” paganism, were still essentially enmired in that long Christian attitude that the Jews, in denying the divinity of Jesus, were a sinful people, worthy of scorn, and deserving of the various persecutions and disasters visited upon them. We have hopefully moved away from such horrendous ideas, but it is necessary to understand this atmosphere was very different during the construction of the RWS Tarot. Since this deck has had such a strong influence, it is important to look at the negative ideas that are part of it’s baggage, and perhaps, evolve a kinder and more enlightened awareness of the messages we are receiving through it. Particularly when writers, including Waite, expound upon the “moral lesson” inherent in this card.

The moral lesson is the need to reject that material obsession in favor of our spiritual freedom. That this is a mockery of the scene in Eden before the Fall is intentional. Rather than exulting in the beautiful garden under the protection of the Bright Angel, here humanity is chained to the slave block, owned by their bad habits, symbolized by the drunkenness of the body (Eve’s tail) and the lustfulness of the passions (Adam’s tail). The minions of the Dark One live by the motto “If it feels good, do it!” never realizing that all they are experiencing is the mere illusion of temporary pleasure. Pursuing lives of sensation and emotion, they are never free to explore the higher mind that dwells within.

There’s obviously a Judeo-Christian bent to this idea, but we can find the same idea in the Eastern beliefs. Suffering is the result of longing for that which is temporary. It is not the real world, but an illusion. The real world is permanent, inviolable, and without division. The illusionary world is one of constant loss, change, and desire. Only by denying the desire can are we able to see past the illusion.

There are several flavors of Satanism in the world today. One of the variants is that what people call “God” is actually the creator and ruler of this illusionary world. Satan, then, in opposing that “God” is trying to free humankind from the illusion, and show them the way things really are. I don’t ascribe to this personally, but I think it’s an interesting area to explore, especially in relation to resolving the Devil card. The old Hebrew word Shaitan whence comes the modern Satan simply means “adversary” In some contexts, it is more correct to view Shaitan as an externalization of the divine mind, created for the purpose of presenting an alternate, or opposing view. That is, the Rebel Angel fulfills the need for God to have someone tell him he’s wrong.

devil-pulp-tarot — I had to include this version of the trump from the Pulp Tarot. Its homage to the old EC horror comics is delightful and so well executed. At the same time, it keeps all the necessary context for us to use it in a standard reading. This, of course, is the Faustian demon, with his more or less handsome visage and that de rigeuer goatee. We would never spot the evil twin without it.

Is is just me or does he look like Nicolas Cage?

So when the Infernal Prince hops up in a card reading, the message may not be a super spiritual one, or warning about the wages of sin. It may simply mean that you need to stop believing your own press. Everything one this card is about the reversal of what is “true, just and correct”. So it stands to reason that it portends situations that are illusory, particularly those which involve self-deception, and the tendency to believe what we hope is true, despite much evidence to the contrary. It is an emblem of our willful desire to decide the world is the way we want it to be, even when it isn’t. In this respect, we are rebelling against what the universe is trying to tell us, and will reap the unpleasant result of this self-delusion. The Devil is not a creature within tempting us to this fate, it is an externalization of what we know better, but would rather not have to accept.

When next I write, we’ll be looking at the last of the dark and dreary cards, the Tower, and examine both its traditional meanings and how we may re-interpret those as a means of controlling our own destinies.

Thank you for continuing to support this series of articles. I’ll be back next week.

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