Magic – Page 3 – A Sacred Life

April 5, 2023April 5, 2023

The Gift of the Magi

The first numbered card of the Tarot deck is called the Magician in RWS. It is called also the Juggler in some decks, or the Magus. Like many of the other trumps, its original character and image have evolved over the centuries and what was originally not only mundane but essentially negative has been elevated to a nigh-divine status.

The Magus was initially, at best a street conjurer, and at worst a con-man running a crooked gambling game of “ball and cups”. This accounts for the discrepancy between the depictions on earlier decks. Curiously the name on the Marseilles deck “Le Bateleur” actually translates to The Fool, so perhaps someone got that mixed up early on. This just enforces that his original role was as an entertainer or performer, rather than as an occultist and true sorcerer.

RWS_Tarot_01_Magician — This is the Magician as he appears in the usual version of the RWS deck. You can see here that perhaps one of the reasons that this deck became so popular is that it employed a printing technology called photorotogravure. That is, metal plates were made using a photographic process which produced high fidelity color prints rapidly and cheaply. While ultimately these would wear out just as the wood blocks used in previous decks would, they could always be re-imaged from the original artwork. So they were subject to less “mutation” than decks like the Marseilles. The additional detail also allowed Smith as an artist to create visual messages on each of the Minor cards instead of just elaborately drawn pips. The printing method is a consequence of the Industrial Revolution and is still used today for creating large numbers of highly colored images with sharp small detail.

Pixie Smith’s rendition of the character is a good deal more formal and refined than his predecessor in the French deck. He stands center scene, behind a table on which are arrayed the pentacle, chalice, sword, and staff that define the four suits, and their emblematic elements. His right hand holds a white scepter aloft, while his left points to the earth. He is clad in rather Roman looking robes, with a simple white band around his brow. The Infinity symbol floats above his head. Above him the top of the card is bordered by a flowering vine (probably roses) and below by roses and lilies. If you look very closely you’ll see an ascending dove is carved into the edge of the table just above the leg.

I will stop here and note that I refer to the Magician card as “him” and “he” because this is part of the gendered language that is inherent in working with Tarot historically. I have a few decks where the figure on this card is portrayed as feminine. I realize that both the language and the depictions present some issues for LGBTQ+ persons. There are a number of works out there trying to address the historical genderedness of Tarot, and of the practice of magic itself. I believe many of them are probably in a better position to speak to that than I am. I can only say that I recognize this is a problem, but it is a problem that we have to be open about.

female-magicians — The Magician as Woman. These are from the Darkwood Tarot and the Green Witch Tarot respectively. There are some others that take this approach, but these were the easiest to find in my collection as an example. In this case, the Darkwood raison de etre is expressed as a Tarot journey (go look that up, there are a lot of books on it) where the adept evolves through each of the Majors. Here the Crone serves to initiate the adept onto the path, in the same way a traditional coven experience might. Prior to the reconstruction that lead to Wicca and other modern practices, a witch might be of either sex, and the role of head of the coven based on seniority or experience rather than a gender role. If men were not involved, then perforce a woman would have the same role. The Green Witch Tarot, being a witch’s Tarot, substitutes the Witch for the Magician, in expression of a rejection of the patriarchal term used by the Victorian ceremonial lodges. I don’t see it as necessarily hexing the patriarchy as much as simply distinguishing itself from that form in search of a more nature-centric tradition. I could easily be wrong about that. Hexing the patriarchy is never a bad thing anyway.

The problem with this language is not that something is considered to be masculine or feminine but that so many things have been grafted onto the ideas of gender that have nothing to do with it. Because we exist in four dimensional space-time we tend to express ideas in terms of duality. We are here or there, past or future, day or night, light or dark, and good or evil. These dualistic ideations (which are in themselves problematic) have been confuted with the idea of gender over time, and frequently the feminine side of things gets the negative attributions. In fact, just the idea of “negative” meaning bad, versus simply “the opposite of positive” is one of the problems. These examples of pure misogyny were perpetuated by the 19th Century occultists, even though in practice I am sure there was more than a little gender fluidity among them.

The use of this language in the Tarot and it’s symbols is old and deep, and even when we are conscious that it is not adequate to the task, we must acknowledge what it has brought to the current experience of the art. Like the baggage in the purse on the Fool’s staff, what came before exists, whether we are happy with it or not. While we can work toward a non-binary expression, the symbols themselves were chosen because they are mnemonic of certain concepts, and those concepts, right or wrong, may be historically associated with masculine or feminine genders. It is equally unsatisfying to adopt other terms that try to assert a positive spin while covering up the obvious duality.

For my part, no offense is intended here. If my use of gendered language falls short of the reader’s enlightened view, I beg pardon, and ask that they consider the difficulty with which we must pick through the rubble of the Fallen Tower in order to build anew.

In my earliest texts on Tarot, I was instructed to presume that the Magician was representative of myself as the card reader (unless, I was a woman, in which case it was the High Priestess, there’s that gender thing already). This offers several barriers to reading with the cards. The most obvious one is that if the Magician is me, he can’t ever be anything else. He ceases to a valuable symbol open to interpretation and becomes a fixed identity, and a personal one, whose presence in the layout of the cards is incongruous to say the least. It is akin to the doctor seeing himself as part of every diagnosis, and it’s just plain silly.

The derivation of this idea (and I don’t know if it’s still taught, as I don’t typically read most of the included books in “true” Tarot decks I acquire), is that there are some layouts that require a “querent” a card to represent the individual for whom the reading is being done. This is most notable in the Celtic Cross spread (which I suspect is not in anyway Celtic). If one is reading for a client, then one picks the face card that has similar physiognomy to that client. But if reading for oneself, then you always pick either the Magician or the High Priestess depending. And in practice, even doing a client reading, I would tend to identify myself with one of those cards when it shows up, thus again blocking it from being a proper tool for divination.

hoi_polloi_magician — My personal Magician from my 50+ year old Hoi Polloi deck. You can find similarities and differences here, some of the more important ones I cover in the text of the article. I will add here though, that the roses are gone, or rather, they’ve become blue. Grapes are visible, the foliage might now be identifiable as pea vines, but also they resemble hickory fronds to me. You will note that the wand that lays on the table has a sprout on the end. This is the symbolic Rod of Aaron, that budded and brought forth fruit even though it had been uprooted. The symbolism of this has a lot of Hebrew and Christian overtones, as does the Dove and Fish engraved in the table’s edge, but it can also simply be another manifestation of the miracles the Magician is capable of performing given the right intentions and focus.

So in shedding this traditional approach, I have returned the Magician to a useful role, and can begin to explore it solely as visual metaphor, and use it in that way for reading, meditation and magic. In all honesty I doubt I could have ever really been comfortable with the severe figure on the RWS card. For the first fifteen years of my Tarot practice, I had the very different, though similar, Hoi Polloi deck. In preparing for this article I dug out the Magician for comparison, and found some very interesting concepts. As you can see in the image above, the patrician toga of Smith’s image has softened to what might be a velvet robe, in colors of Earth and Water. While he still holds the rod, it is in his left hand rather than the right, and his angled pose does not now simply point to the ground, but to the elemental symbols arrayed on the table before him.

While I suspect the switch from right to left may have been aimed at forestalling a potential infringement suit (which it did not) from the owners of the RWS copyright, it does bring up some interesting ideas.

As I am a lefty (and in Latin the word for left-hand is sinister, so again, language) I can certainly consider this Magician to be more my Magician. But that means for most of the time I was learning the Tarot, I was seeing this version as bringing down the power into the tools on the table. The act of “charging” the symbols then, meant that this power was moving out into the Minors and thus energizing my entire deck.

It is on this card, in either version, where these symbols are united. In no other card in the deck do we find all four of the suit symbols, and inherently all four elements, brought together. We don’t see the wand again until the Hermit, and swords are only held by the Sphinx atop the Wheel and by Justice. Temperance has two cups, and the Star two pitchers. While we can suggest that the Pentacle is seen symbolically in starry crowns and perhaps even as the Wheel itself, it’s never clearly presented as a pentacle in the same way as these other objects. Except here for the Magician.

It is this mastery of the elemental forces that defines the purpose and meaning of this card. If he is not directly sanctifying them, he is still assuming a symbolic pose in their presence that implies the same thing. This is a Hermetic message, straight from that old Emerald Tablet.

“That which is Above is from that which is Below and that which is Below is that which is above.”

illuminated_magician — One of the more unusual decks in my collection is the Illuminated Tarot. It was a Yule gift from my Good Lady Wife a year or so ago, and initially I found it a bit off-putting. It has only 53 cards, so it’s essentially a playing card deck. Except that it isn’t. The images of the 22 Major Arcana are merged onto the designs of the various Minor Arcana Cards. This is the Magician, with his upraised baton, and his table with the sword, cup, and coin. It is also the King of Wands, and the King of Clubs if you are playing a basic game of solitaire. They’ve also thrown in Leo and sunflowers to affirm the fire energy of the Wands suit, and still place the Magician in his garden.

This ability of the artist to provide Tarot mnemonics with only a traditional playing card sized deck is fascinating. I find it challenges my imagination and intuition because I now find combinations and inferences that aren’t there in the standard 78 card decks. I think because this one is somewhat difficult to work with, it has ended up on the shelves of many discount stores. It’s a squarish blue box with gold imprint, and it generally retails in the discount stores for under $20. I highly recommend it for the experienced reader looking for a fresh view, or for the collector interested in it’s novelty.

This pose is derived into the Tarot from Levi’s “Baphomet”, cast most frequently wrongly as the devil or “god of the witches”. On Baphomet’s lifted arm is written “Solve” and the lower arm bears “Coagula”. These are lifted from alchemical texts, also derived from Hermetic tradition, but essentially meaning that things may be dissolved and reconstituted. That is, the upper arm is dealing with unformed energy, and the lower with structured matter.

If we consider the Fool to be representative of the raw energy of Creation, we can consider the Magician the process of Formation. It is where energy becomes idea and where idea becomes artifice. If all the alchemical mumbo-jumbo gives you a headache, simply look at the card and imagine the table is an anvil and the rod is the smith’s hammer. This is the Forge of Vulcan, it is the point where the Formless becomes Form.

And that is, after all, what we expect out of the Magician, whether we perceive him as Merlin laboring in his Crystal Cave or on stage in Vegas pulling a bouquet of flowers “out of thin air”. It is that act of bringing into being that we identify as “magic”. It is the assertion of intelligent will upon the unordered fabric of the universe.

The rod the Magician holds is not a “magic wand” though I have seen it characterized as such by other authors, who would mention similar wands in the hands of the driver in the Chariot, and in the World card. These are scepters. They are symbols of authority, deriving in form most likely from the consular baton of the Romans. The simple short ivory staff was replaced by more elaborate ones after the Republic became the Empire, but in any case, it signified someone who had the authority to exert control, and control is what this card is all about.

three-magi — Behold the Three Magi. As I was preparing for the article last night I went in search of some variable approaches to the Magician card that reflect other artists’ views of the prescribed symbols.

Al left is the Enchanted Tarot, which eschews traditional imagery entirely for an Arabesque style one might find in an Arthur Rackham edition of Scheherazade. At first I thought the suit markers were missing, but if you look closely, you can see that they are fastened to his belt, in the form of a star-shaped buckle, a bottle, an elaborate wand or scepter, and his dagger,. The flame he manipulates is the same as the *baton blanc* in the hand of the RWS version. In the sky above the palace dome, we find not the Christian dove but Buraq, the flying horse of the Prophet, said to have borne him to Paradise at the end of his life. These are not Islamic cards, but rather reflect as pseudo-Arabian style popular in the 19th Century Colonial Empires.

At center are a recent acquisition, the whimsical Pulp Tarot that cast all the cards as covers to the dime novels of the 20s and 30s. As a fan of this style of artwork, I couldn’t resist adding them to my collection, particularly when they were being offered new at deep discount in the Half-Price Books store. They keep enough of the keys in the artwork to serve as a functional deck, and will surely be a conversation starter at the writers retreat I am attending this summer in New Orleans.

At right is the Magician card from the Tarot Universal Dali, by the surrealist Salvador Dali. This deck produced as mixed media extensions of collage, employing multiple works from the history of art, was originally commissioned for the early 70s Bond film Live and Let Die. Dali apparently set to work on it before the ink dried, and when his requested fee exceeded the entire production budget, the deck was replaced by a more basic deck by Scottish illustrator Fergus Hall. These are now sold under the title Tarot of the Witches, though I think perhaps all that recommends them is the notoriety of their connection to the film. The Dali deck, however, is a fascinating study in how the themes created by Pamela Smith can be interpreted in the hands of a great master like this mad Catalonian. While my deck is not a first edition, it is a facsimile edition made in short run in Europe, rather than the currently mass produced Taschen versions. It is both a pride in my collection and an inspiration for journeys in Tarot and art. Dali has here substituted himself for the Magician, as well he might, and given us symbols from his own esoteric vocabulary in place of the traditional ones. Yet they are immediately readable.

If we go beyond the four elements as the suit symbols, and look into the historical associations with social class Joseph Campbell and others ascribe to them, we begin to see the Magician as a very powerful and potentially very dangerous individual. The suits at one time or another have connected the Wands to the peasants or working class, the Cups to the clergy, the Swords to the nobility, and the Pentacles to the merchants and bankers. The Magician then, exists beyond these groups. He is outside of the social definitions. He is a creature operating in those areas reserved for gods alone. Like Frankenstein, Prometheus, and Lucifer, he is calling down the fire of Heaven and making it do his personal bidding.

Indeed, the boundless nature of space and time itself is shown as residing within his mind. The infinity symbol above his head signifies that he has access to things that are immortal, and immaterial. Through the lightning rod in his hand, he controls how these forces are manifest, and metes them out to the rest of humanity as he sees fit.

These attributes; the desire for authority, dominance, and control, are, I must sadly admit, still considered masculine traits. So perhaps the gendered nature of it’s history is not that far off. I don’t find such traits positive or affirmative myself, because the arrogance that usually goes with them is self-defeating. Frankenstein in his hubris, creates a creature that he ultimately cannot control, and cannot destroy.

This is the trap of science in our modern world. We are experiencing massive environmental impacts because of our use of technology, and we are as yet unable to see any solution other than more technology. This next technology will be better. Except, of course, when it isn’t. The blindness with which we stumble forward, secure in our belief that we are smart enough to change the rules instead of learning to play the game better threatens to be our undoing.

The Magician won’t put down the scepter and pick up the wooden wand. Why? Well because it limits him. He can only use the wooden wand to do wooden wand magic. And why would he choose to do that, when he can do wand and cup and sword and pentacle magic? Remember, he’s the only one that gets to use them all, the only card in the whole deck with that power. And that makes him dangerous.

Magicians are masters of prestidigitation and legerdemain. These are very fancy terms for the idea of sleight-of-hand; the ability to palm a card, slip a ball under a cup, or retrieve a dove from a secret pocket with you being none the wiser. This art of distraction is also to be found in the imagery of this card. Harkening back to his early days on the streets of Milan, the Moebius over his head and the arms at ten and five echo that ability to make you look where he wants, not where you want. The Juggler has you following the ball in the air. The Magician has you looking at the bright shiny stick, instead of the other hand that is doing something down behind the table.

In this way the Magician’s appearance in a reading can indicate distraction, misdirection, and even outright deceit. As it is such a prominent personage, it may often mean self-deceit, or at least self-delusion. Again, because the Magician is smart enough to believe his own hype, he can get into trouble.

Yet, caution, focus, and adherence to structure are also hallmarks of his art. Depending on where he shows up, he can as easily mean sterility and rigidity as agility and quixotic energy.

He draws down the power of the old gods. He can therefore be Saturn or Jupiter. He can be so locked into his method that any innovation is thwarted, but in the right circumstance, he brings forth growth, generosity, and the bounty which he has access to.

Behind him the Fool stands as old Uranus, pure and violent creative energy. It takes both the Saturnine structure and the Jovian expansion to make anything of it. The balancing of the two forces is the Juggler’s dance. It is the loop that goes ever round and round, because if one of the balls drop, the whole thing comes crashing down. Creation through discipline is his motto. From the ethereal to the material. Solve et Coagula.

The Moebius appears twice more in the Tarot, in an identical fashion on the Strength card (which may be eight or eleven depending on the tradition) and in the Minor Arcana’s Deuce of Pentacles. While my articles here are aimed at exploring only the Majors, I find it instructive to see where symbols and themes get shared across the whole deck and this is one of those important parallels.

RWS_2P_Juggler — Can you find the Magician here? If you look carefully enough, and know the secret language that Smith was inventing for this deck, you can find the same pieces underlying the traditional reading of this card. I have gone to some depth in the text of the article on this, but I wanted to include the card for the reader to contemplate. All the Tarot should be viewed as having symbols hidden, or included, for interpretation or expansion beyond what Waite or any other authors have had to say about them. They are a visual tool, created by a truly gifted artist, that continues to find favor with new artist and Tarot artists alike.

Sorceror — I am frequently inspired by the Tarot, even if I am not attempting to make a Tarot image. I don’t recall if this was another attempt to find my “vision” of a new deck, or if it simply was using the Magician card as a jumping off point for an artistic experiment. This piece is somewhat unique in my work. I was trying to master the curvilinear styles of the Art Nouveau -inspired by the looping tableaus of Mucha, and also playing with the felt-marker as an art tool. In neither did I succeed well in this image, but it has grown on me over the years. If I were to consider it my Magician, I’d have to create a whole deck in the style, and then I’d probably come back to this liking it less. As it is, it serves as a blind alley, I stumbled into, that I might return to someday, but not with any intention of something so large and daunting in scope. The style, or a mature evolved version of it, still entertains me as an artist, but I have no intention of using it to interpret the cards.

The second Pentacle card shows a Juggler, with the Moebius wrapped around his hands, each of which hold a large pentacle. Behind him ships are driven across an unruly sea. The ships are clearly made of wood, so here we also have the air in their sails and the water they sail upon, taken with the pentacles in his hands. At least through symbolic extension, all four suits are also present here, in this Minor card. It’s difficult for me to believe that this was merely a coincidence, so when the Deuce shows up, I frequently read it as an extension, or echo of, those same qualities I find in the Magician. While the typical reading of this card involves competing forces in finance or perhaps work-life balance, it’s not hard to overlay the desire to exert control on an unruly world, or have things our own way. And perhaps again, we are being distracted by the Juggler from the dangerous tableau that is happening in the background. We are being told things are all okay when they are clearly not okay.

Pay no attention to that man behind the current.

Well, he was a magician, too. And not coincidentally, one who used artifice to appear as magic. To create with machinery the illusion of power. And this also is inherent in that nature of this card. If we believe in the thing that we see then the power is real. It is not any different from the real power, because our perception makes it so. Reality is what our minds tell us it is. If we want to change reality, it is as simple as changing our minds.

Yet this itself is an act of will. It is that very thing which separate the Magician from the Fool, that his work is made with specific intent. It still requires the raw forces, the pure energy of the unmade to power it, but it is useless without the intention. Electricity is a powerful force, but without a mechanism to direct it and control it, it is either an untapped potential or a destructive lightning bolt.

The Magician is that conduit that brings the fire from the gods. It is, according to myth, religion, and fiction, an unrewarding task. Prometheus is chained and has his guts gnawed out eternally. Lucifer’s name is synonymous with Satan. Merlin was sealed in his cave. Faust ultimately found his pleasures empty ones. Frankenstein died in the frozen wastes attempting to destroy that which he created but could not control.

My ambivalence toward this card has grown as I have grown older. I think this is a natural progression. As we (hopefully) mature we cease to be as entertained by the rabbit in the hat, though I admit freely that in my youth I bought such a hat just hoping to pull a rabbit from it. It has become my magic hat, though not in the way that I expected, and that perhaps is a good message for this card as well. Intention and control are only the beginning. What actually proceeds from it may not be at all what was expected. To paraphrase Galadriel from The Fellowship of the Ring ;”Not even the wise can see all ends.”

That character is also an example of the dual nature of the Magician card. Characterized as both a seer and a sorceress, feared as a witch, and tempted by the power she wielded and could wield, she eventually is redeemed and allowed to pass into the West, along with Gandalf, the only wizard that seems to have met a gentle end. I think this is because ultimately Tolkien couldn’t divest himself of that deep Anglican Christianity, even when he wanted to live among the faeries.

His recent antecedents and contemporaries among the Victorian and post-Victorian esoteric movements seem similarly hampered. I think this is perhaps why the tiny bird is carved into the edge of the Magician’s table. You can find it amplified in all it’s Catholic glory in the Ace of Cups, as the Holy Spirit coming to inhabit the Chalice of the Eucharist, but here it offers a small, almost secret protection for the Magician from his own ego. Like other Romantic symbolism, it’s presence tells us that the New Pagans are still secret Christians, unwilling to let go completely despite how debased and debauched their rites might become, just in case they were wrong.

We struggle with that Christian legacy in the Tarot because it is a Christian oracle. It was derived from Christian symbolism and re-invented multiple times to try and shed those roots. But the key players were frequently fallen, or at least faithless, Christians, looking perhaps in some way for redemption and re-admittance.

The Magician with the little dove is less problematic in this way than other cards we’ll access, including the next one in the Deck, which I will undertake in a week. I hope this journey has inspired you to greater insights on the Juggler, the Magician, and the Magus, or at least has instilled in you the desire to question the traditional meanings you may have read.

If you don’t you are following his right hand and not watching what the left hand is doing, and you have ceded your will to that of the Conjurer.

Thank you for reading. I’ll return next week with the High Priestess.

March 29, 2023March 28, 2023

The Fool Who Follows Him

It’s been about a year since I started this column. The first of April is right around the corner and I am thinking about beginnings and endings. I felt it time to delve deeper into one of the more enigmatic symbols of Tarot, that of the Fool.

The Fool is interpreted simply in many dissertations on the subject. However, there is much more beneath the surface. I have teased this particular trip down the rabbit hole before, but now it is time to grab our pinafore and go after that púca with the pocket watch.

In most interpretations of this card, it is read more or less literally. It represents idiocy, poor judgement, ignorance, and cupidity. Some variations talk about it as a sign of new beginnings and innocence, but this is a more modern, “New Age” take.

The RWS depiction shows a youth, oblivious to the world around them, about to walk off a cliff. A small dog yaps at their heel. They wear a richly decorated tunic similar to the French Medieval style, a feathered cap, hose and boots, and they carry a leather purse or satchel on the end of a staff. In their left hand they hold a rose. The sun shows wanly in the background, and there are high mountains, indicating that the cliff overlooks a deep ravine and that the drop is most assuredly fatal.

Since this deck, or rather the license infringing Hoi Polloi deck that derives from it, was my first, all later impressions from other decks mentally point back to it. That is, the currents and eddies of the brain invariably take any new (or old) image of the card and compare it to the image as created by Pamela Colman Smith. Therefore the description above identifies the key pieces of that image, and those points for comparison and contrast in other interpretations of the theme. It is those points that I use when contemplating the cards, and teasing the secrets out of them in a reading.

RWS_Tarot_00_Fool — The Fool as drawn by Pamela Colman Smith supposedly at the direction Arthur Edward Waite. Her distinctive “PCS” monogram might be barely detectable under the Fool’s left foot, but it might be missing altogether, making this the only unsigned card. Of course, it’s also possible that the signature was simply cropped from the artwork by the printer without any realization of its purpose.

For this reason, the next twenty-one articles in this theme will begin similarly. While I can’t imagine anyone interested in Tarot does not already own some version of the Rider-Waite-Smith deck, it’s also a means of getting everyone on the same page. For good measure I have included a screenshot of each card, which are now in the public domain.

The Fool is also given the number zero, but this has not always been the case. Initially the trumps were not numbered, and then later, only this card was unnumbered, so that in later conventions, it was assumed to have a zero value, when it actually has none. That sounds confusing, I know, but there is a subtle difference between something being given a quantifier, even if that quantity is zero, and something that has no quantifier at all. This is actually a point worth contemplating at length, because in both cases it gives us access to some of the more esoteric messages available to this card.

The somewhat related Eastern ideas of nirvana (quenching), anatta (non-self), and sunyata (emptiness) can be instructive in respect to this subtlety. In many Eastern teachings the ultimate goal of the human spirit is to rise past the need for it’s own identity. Suffering, so it goes, comes from longing, which comes from fear, which comes from the individual ego. When all are one and one are all, there is no need for fear or longing or suffering, and thus the soul is freed from the cycle of reincarnation, because it no longer requires it.

But beyond that, there is a point where none are all and all are none. This is a state where the awareness of the state itself is gone, there is no longer any awareness. This, for lack of a better word, is the void.

Depending on whose philosophy you are reading the void is end or the beginning, the void is a final and immutable state, or it is an intermittent state between cosmological incarnations, because it is inherently unstable, and prone to reasserting its diversity.

In quantum mechanics, physicists talk about things like the Big Bang and the Big Crunch. These represent the opposites ends of all space and time as we perceive it, when everything there is and may be gets pushed into a point so small that no scientifically accurate description can be made of it. The scientists call these points singularities, but because they exist outside the realm of the physics that describe them, they are essentially nothing.

The universe, as the story goes, was without form and void.

visconti-fool — A Fifteenth Century Fool. This one comes for the well-known Visconti-Sforza Deck the majority of which is held at the J.P. Morgan Library in New York City. This poor sot bears little resemblance to Smith’s bright medieval fantasy, or to most of the other fool figures that appear in the Tarot. He is missing the pack, the cap, and the dog, in addition to his pants. While there is the suggestion of mountains at his feet, this is more of a Renaissance convention than any significator. The figure still has more in common with the flat spaces of Gothic iconography than the fully dimensional depth that Leonardo and Michelangelo would bring to the world shortly afterward. He is painted against a gilded screen (as are most of the Visconti-Sforza cards) that likely would have been prepared by a separate craftsman as a blank.

Paul Huson suggests that the images we encounter on the Major Arcana derive from the Medieval mystery pageants that gave rise to our modern theater. If he is correct, the pitiable condition of the Fool in this image may be a metaphor for the bleak condition of the human soul in need of salvation. This attribution of the images resolves a number of questions regarding the inherently Christian content of the trump cards, even though they have been re-interpreted in more secular and pagan ways in the intervening centuries. It is important still to remember that the “book” meaning of Tarot in modern times stems significantly from the works of the occultists Eliphas Levi and Papus, both of whom studied for the priesthood before pursuing their esoteric careers.

There’s a permutation of these theories that says instead of the universe contracting back to a singularity at some point in the distant future, it will continue to expand to the extent that none of the forces of gravity, electromagnetism, or nuclear attraction will hold anything together, and eventually it all just becomes cold and dark and empty. Since none of the physical laws that describe the universe function, the universe itself may be seen to become nothing.

And then there’s the theory that after the universe collapses down to the Big Crunch, it explodes again into another Big Bang in a never ending cycle of time ending and beginning again. Because time and space end at the singularity, the new universe beyond can also be seen to not exist, even though it does.

So he we are, standing on the edge of that cliff, trying to define what the difference is between something that has nothing in it, and nothingness.

Yes, I am still talking about the Fool card.

And the zero which is also a circle. So it is nothing, that has no beginning or ending, completely surrounds nothing within it, and completely excludes everything outside it. It does not exist, yet there is no other.

But from this nothingness all other things must arise. The only way to get something is to have nothing to compare it to. Our numbers all exist as a reference against the value of zero, and zero exists against the value of other.

The light was separated from the darkness. The seas were separated from the dry land.

Things begin. On the edge of a cliff, with a dog yapping at our heels.

That little dog is entropy. It’s the natural tendency of things to fall apart. Stephen Hawking says entropy results in a less organized universe, where the structure and form of matter and energy become more chaotic. The tea cup, he says, always falls off the table and breaks into many pieces. It never reassembles and comes back up because it takes less energy to break it than it does to put it together.

At first glance, that means that our universe is heading for that Big Nothing. But physics also says that after the universe had the Big Bang, things were all sort of the same thing, and it was only because that didn’t stay that way that we got to where we are now. Particles formed as energy transferred from point to point. Forces acted upon the “uneveness” of the particles, and caused them to clump up into bosons and mesons and quarks and atoms and molecules and stars and galaxies. And those got really really big and they fell apart, and then the dust left over and the forces at play swept those clumps together and the process repeated.

We’re basically a second-hand cosmos. Maybe even third-hand.

But apparently that dog keeps chasing us right toward the edge of nothing. Even though it’s going to go over with us. Makes one wonder which one is the Fool here, doesn’t it.

In other versions of the card, the dog (and sometimes tiger or lion) is shown biting the Fool, traditionally read as another sign of their obliviousness to reality. But there’s a second option, and that is the dog is actually trying to stop him from going off the cliff. Like Lassie telling us Little Timmy is in the well, the loyal companion here is looking out for it’s master’s best interests, even if the effort is not wholly appreciated.

thoth-deck-fool — Aleister Crowley’s “Book of Thoth” version of the Fool Card. In my late teens and early 20s I was very much drawn to the Thelema system of magick and the imagery and interpretation of these cards had a major influence on my thinking about Tarot. I had the book before I ever got a deck of the cards, so I probably have read more deeply these meanings than many of the others. Crowley, in an effort to synthesize a bigger better magickal system, sought to bring together ideas from witchcraft, alchemy, Hinduism and Buddhism, and Esoteric Kabbalah – along with the Golden Dawn magic systems, into a unified theory. The idea still intrigues me, but this card, along with a number of the others, just comes off as busy, over-complicated, and inaccessible. While there is symbolism aplenty, it doesn’t lend itself to the imaginative voyage of the reader. I love to contemplate the Crowley Deck, but I hardly ever do a reading with one.

In Medieval symbolism, the dog is frequently portrayed as an emblem of faith. The name often associated with family dogs is “Fido”, from the Latin “fidelis” – Faith. Compare that to the other common epithet of Rover and you can see how the two contrast. It’s a common feature of tomb effigies to show the little dog at the feet of the night or lady. This wasn’t a love of the pet, but a symbol of both marital fidelity and religious piety. Basically, if you showed up at the Pearly Gates with a Fido under your arm you got a pass. Rover, on the other hand, might have to do a turn or two in Purgatory for his indiscretions and philandering nature.

So we can take that and read the Fool’s dog a number of ways. It may be seen as just emblematic of our instincts trying to avert our mistakes. That’s for anything atheists out there, who just dig the pictures on the cards and don’t believe in the spooky weirdness. We can take it up a notch and consider that dog as the presence of higher forces, guardian angels or a divine power, depending on what works for you, that is guiding our forward steps. To the extent that we believe in and rely on such forces comes back to that faith part. Though, finally, we can just consider it a faith in ourselves, the nature of the universe, and the always rushing-forward power that somehow seems to keep all the plates spinning and all the balls in the air. The universe pushes onward because that is what the universe does. It’s part of the mechanism. What it pushes to, and where it pushes from, are completely irrelevant.

That cliff is usually a metaphor for the unknown, whether it be the future, the secrets of the universe, or this week’s winning Lotto numbers. It is the unformed void, the nothing that will become something. It is thus the potential inherent in all beginnings, and in fact all motion, because when we move we are inherently leaving what was and entering what wasn’t. It’s the zero just before it becomes one. It is also the assurance that zero is always going to become one.

mystical medleys fool — Simplicity need not be bereft of depth. This jolly little card from Gary Hall’s Mystical Medleys deck not only manages to incorporate the symbols we find in the RWS, but gives us other insights into the nature of this card. Most notable of the differences (except of course the use of the old-time cartoony style) is that the Fool’s head is a cyclopean pyramid. This has been a symbol for the presence of Divine Intelligence, or a Divine Plan for many centuries. It is frequently identified with the Illuminati, that mythical secret society directing all the worlds politics and commerce, and holding secret mystical knowledge that would make Dan Brown’s knees quiver. But it also may be read as simply the Divine in all, the secret sacred nature of humanity as it rolls inexorably toward the future. Anyway you spin it, there’s a lot going on here.

I love this little deck, as both an artist and animator, and a Tarot enthusiast. When I bought it I assumed it would be a very basic pastiche of the RWS cards, but they have incorporated a lot of deep secret stuff in each image. you can find it on the Zon, at B&N, and other Tarot resellers. It may be my favorite of the “new” Tarot decks.

Yet the Fool never steps on the cliff. Yes, I know with a piece of printed cardstock that defies our basic understanding of physics (and that as a metaphor is also worth some contemplation). But it never happens because the future never happens. We simply are in the next moment, and then the next and the next. We experience existence through an eternal present where the past is only a memory, and the future is only a thought. Neither state is really real, only the eternal present, which can be sliced down past minutes to seconds to microseconds and nanoseconds and ad infinitum. has any validity to our senses. We never reach the future. We cannot reach the past either.

This is the ignorance the Fool represents. They cannot know the future because when they get there it is always the present. They are not able to break that pattern. Forward movement is constant, but they never arrive.

These are very troubling ideas. It’s easy to get lost and distracted and give up on understanding any of it. That’s why the sun is behind them. Setting out on the journey here the comfort of the ordinary and the established is put to the side. Once the step is taken onto the path, what was once “true” may not be so ever again.

And very close to the sun in the image is the purse or satchel that the Fool carries with them. We’re familiar with this bag on a stick from numerous illustrations of hobos and vagabonds. It is the sum total of worldly goods that the poor creature owns, bound up in a tiny little bundle. That is, it’s the personal baggage we all carry.

The bundle represents all those things we drag along with us into the future, our identity, our upbringing, our social and cultural suppositions, stereotypes, bigotries, and other limiting factors. It is a small thing, after all, in comparison to the wide potential of all possible futures, but we can’t seem to leave it behind, and it will characterize and color anything that we come across.

The Fool is not “innocence” but “ignorance”. They are blissfully unaware that they carry the package, instead preferring to regard the rose in the other hand, that smells sweeter. This tiny white rose can be seen as a potential for enlightenment and improvement, in balancing the baggage of the past life and poor decisions. As we approach that unknown landscape of the yet to be, we have the choice to rise above the past.

fool sketches — Interpreting the Fool is not as easy as it seems. In pursuing Tarot, I have used the images and ideas associated with the cards as inspiration for artworks (sometimes unconsciously) and also have attempted to define my own deck. The above show two different attempts at the Fool, neither of which are satisfactory. The need to not only incorporate the “standard” features of Tarot – in order to make it a Tarot card that other readers will recognize, but also to include my own take on the card’s message from 50 plus years of working with the decks is frequently very frustrating. These images were made many years apart, and reflect changes in both my understanding of the cards and the symbolic language that I use. I see bits and pieces in both that I might employ today if I sat down to design a new card. And ultimately I intend to do so, but because the meanings and the messages change over time. I don’t know that i will ever be satisfied with it. If I made one this year, I would probably look at it in ten years and tell you it was horribly wrong.

Which is why we find the Fool up in the mountains. Every card in Smith’s designs takes place in a very specific locale. They are, I believe, all happening in a particular land which is as much a part of the Tarot as the key symbols themselves. Like the map just inside a Tolkien book this internal landscape gives us insights into the overall “story” the cards are presenting. It’s not a straightforward, consistent narrative, to be sure, but there are connections to be made. Within the Major Arcana, on the Hermit card is found in similar surroundings. While the Fool represents that raw charge at life with no regard for its dangers, the Hermit is a world weary soul who seeks the true experience of the unknown through a journey of internal contemplation. They are the extrovert and the introvert. The sensualist and the ascetic, yet both inhabit the same rarified air, an air which cannot be occupied constantly or for long periods, without some kind of detriment.

The use of Tarot for non-divinational magic is possibly as old as its more usual role. There are accounts of certain trumps being used in the Renaissance for magic. Often this was limited to the Devil or Tower cards and their aspect to lay malevolent powers upon others. Some speculation has been made that the number of Devils missing from extant decks was because they were used for clandestine veneration by secret witches, but these may be fantastical anecdotes manufactured by the Church, whose relationship with Tarot has always been ambivalent. There are some records indicating that Devil cards were equally employed by parish priests to perform exorcism rites, or otherwise drive the evil out of a place or personage.

Certainly they are potent symbols and their use in sympathetic magic should be obvious to all but the greenest novice. Tarot have been marked, attacked, bundled, buried, and burned. The purpose of the spell governs selection of the card, and method of application. This varies from system to system and tradition to tradition, of course, as do the meanings ascribed to each card, and therefore, its likely efficacy.

The longer one reads with the cards, the more meanings and subtleties may be perceived. The ones I have offered here for the Fool are from my own musings. Doubtless other experienced readers will have differing views. But that green novice may experience a brilliant flash of insight that shocks and amazes us all, because they come to it with fresh eyes.

That is the moment of the Fool. It is the energy of the Big Bang, before it cools to become predictable, quantifiable, and exploitable. It is the fire of pure creativity before it becomes entwined with the conscious control of the artist, who must meld the inspiration with the tool and technique that limits it. It is the raw fury of the Universe, pouring out in a constant roar, before it is tempered and directed by the Magician. It carries within it all that delight and terror that unrestrained chaos offers us.

I personally rarely see the Fool as an emblem of folly and recklessness. There are plenty of other cards in the deck to tell us when we are being idiots. When I see this rise in a reading, I look to how it embraces the future, the possibility of unknown and unknowable factors, and the shaky ground that represents. Cards near to the Fool may be blessed with sudden intuition and brilliance in equal (or unequal) measure with heartache and loss. For creation always carries destruction in her belly. To make a new thing is to destroy the old thing that was before the new thing became.

In this wise, the Fool can also be a death card. They may plummet over the cliff into the abyss. There is nothing to say that the unknown is not Hamlet’s undiscovered country. That is a part of the journey we eventually all experience. The future for all of us is a mortal one, at least in regard to the meat-puppets we pilot merrily along. Beyond that there is only speculation, faith, and myth. If we turn back, and drag our feet, and shy away from the next step, there are consequences. The Fool does rush blindly on, as we all do in a way. Time gives us no respite. Our experience of the universe is a constant forward motion. The little dog is always yapping at our heels.

I hope this article has offered you some new perspectives on this traditionally first of the Major Arcana trumps. I have hinted above at our next adventure, with Card One – The Magician, beginning next week. I hope you will return for it. Thank you again for reading my work.

March 15, 2023March 15, 2023

Spring Clean(s)ing

I was going through the various articles here and saw that it has been a year since I undertook this little experiment in self-expression, writing on deadline, and delving deep into the strangeness that has been part of my nature since as long as I remember.

I didn’t actually get going until April, though, so it seems I missed anything about the Spring Equinox that would have been on the 20th of last March. The equinoxes and solstices are the hinges the year turns on, and their significance goes back to our earliest cultures. Marvels like Stonehenge, and many older megalithic sites, are tied to the recording of these astronomical events.

The Autumnal Equinox I wrote about last September, and, to be honest, it’s my favorite. As a self-proclaimed Creature of the Winter Dark, the coming of spring never really rallies me. I prefer the bleak-skied, dreary and damp short days between that fall between the Sun’s entrance into Libra and his later exit from Pisces which will come in a few days.

There are several springtime observances that coincide or orbit near the Vernal Equinox. For example, on the 17th of the month, Irish Catholics observe St. Patrick’s Day. Patrick, like Brigid, is more myth than man. Wherever one finds the Irish diaspora, this day is celebrated, frequently with drunken revelry, and a good many “temporary” Irish folk.

My ancestors hail from eastward across the Irish Sea in what is now called Wales. Along with the Scots we share some commonalities with those Irish folk, in that our original religion and culture was altered by the coming of Christianity. There are a number of memes out there about how the “snakes” Patrick is supposed to have driven out were the pagan culture, and they usually affirm that the pagan culture is coming back. I would counter that the pagan culture was less driven out, as merged into, that distinctive flavor of Catholic practice that is unique to Ireland and her people.

We tend to see the spread of Christianity through early pagan peoples as being of the same character as that imposed on indigenous peoples in the New World by a church fueled by the Holy Inquisition. Ireland’s conversion came at a time that the Catholic faith was growing outward from Rome, but was by no means dominant. Converts in this period were frequently politically and/or financially motivated. As noted in my post about stolen holidays from last fall, trading with Christian neighbors provided an impetus to conversion, and conversion of the chieftains and nobles meant conversion of the people.

I’m fairly sure that later characterizations of Patrick’s miraculous success in Ireland are retroactive continuity, embellished by a church that had moved into the driver’s seat in European geopolitics, and could say “without fear of contradiction” what they wanted to about the conversion of the Irish.

Vernal-Equinox-Esq — Although I am typically a non-joiner, I have from time to time belonged to some groups. Back in the 80s, I was a founding member of the Foothills Artists. Part of our usual activity was to have a themed mixer once a month. We inaugurated this with a Halley’s Comet party in early 1986.

In March, I took the comet prop and recreated it as a leprechaun for the St. Patty’s party. When finished, someone in the group christened him Vernal Equinox (Vern for short) and he operated as something of a mascot for a few years, before I think I eventually gave him to one of the other members.

In the era before everyone had a satellite linked broadcast TV studio in their pocket, photographs were fewer and further between, and I have been unable to find a picture of Vernal. This drawing made from memory is perhaps more flattering than the styrofoam, hot glue, latex and green fabric he was made of, but it’s a fair resemblance. I include him as evidence that my penchant for creating unusual creatures goes way back.

Which is why it is so absolutely delicious that much of what we see in the average St. Patrick’s Day festivities, are the remainders of the preceding Celtic faith…that of the leprechaun.

Leprechauns are the Irish version of the gnome and the kobold. They are a species of faerie that is widespread in the folklore of most of Europe. The “little people” are the inspiration for Tolkien’s hobbits, but as a branch of the Tuatha de Danann they represent a much broader tradition.

The people of Danu were, according to legend, the third race that inhabited the island before it was settled by the Celtic people coming from mainland Europe. Before the Danann there were a race of giants, called the Fomorians, who may have been personifications of a raw chaotic nature. When we reference beings like the Dagda, the Morrigan, Lugh and Llyr, were are remembering this ancient people.

The faerie faith that remained up into the early twentieth century in remote parts of Wales, living side by side with modern Christianity, was the remains of that ancient relationship with the Children of Don. These beings were said to inhabit specific places, like mounds and earthworks, passage tombs, some natural places like Scotland’s Faerie Glen, but most often they lived under the hills, or within them.

They transversed into our world through clefts in the ground, cave openings, water crossings, and other liminal spaces, altering size and shape as required. Their hidden kingdom was timeless, and filled with riches and splendor. Mortals lucky (or unlucky) enough to be “taken by the faeries” might expect to spend a few hours in such places, only to have years pass in the outside world. Gold and silver from the twilit realm turned to stones or acorns when removed, or when the morning came. And we all, of course, know that the dancing faerie court turns into the circle of mushrooms at dawn’s first light.

The presence of such beings was a reality to most inhabitants of Ireland and the western and northern parts of Britain in the 19th century. Various means of protecting oneself from these beings are recorded by anthropologists and mythologists. While not necessarily malevolent (or at least not so as a species) they were viewed as sufficiently different from humans as to be considered dangerous. This is perhaps the same way we might regard a lion or a tiger. The lion and the tiger don’t decide to be harmful, but their nature makes them potentially harmful.

Of particular importance was not offending the Bright Folk. They were an ancient nobility, and as such demanded a particular etiquette. If one encountered a faerie on the road, in the woods, or at their door, they were to be treated with the utmost respect. There were protocols, many involving not giving the being your actual name, but rather offering an oblique pseudonym by the method of saying “you may call me…” To refuse giving the name would be rude, but giving your true name would put you in great peril. Of course, it was expected that the faerie was not giving their real name either, so everyone played the game.

Iron was considered especially upsetting. There is some question as to whether it was specifically meteoric iron that the Fae found so distasteful. But over time iron and steel that included it was considered a way of preventing unwanted visits from the Good Neighbors. Iron or steel pins were often fastened to the swaddling of babies, to prevent their being stolen and replaced by changelings.

This business of spirit warfare is still ongoing. The iron “lucky horseshoe” is derived of this tradition, though most who hang them over their thresholds probably don’t know they are trying to keep out errant fae folk, gnomes, kobolds, leprechauns, and a host of other beings who are inimical to the presence of ferrous metal.

the bat — One of the more unusual blades in my collection. This one guards the entrance to my home, both by virtue of it’s bitey sharp teeth and a number of other enchantments. It partakes of the nature of lightning, for obvious reasons, but also batwings and dragon fire and is very much an angry thing when it gets going. It has two little brothers over other thresholds, with similar toothsome shapes, and predatory demeanors. They assist me in keeping unwanted visitors from the house, whether they be corporeal or ethereal.

I personally have not found the numerous swords and blades in my house to keep away my friends among the Bright Ones. I suppose that the fact they are invited may abrogate any such taboos. It never comes up in discussion (that would be gauche) and I have known many of them longer than I have known about the iron thing. Of course, if it turns out that meteoric iron is the key, then I only have a few pieces and they’re small.

I try not make my space difficult for spirits. I don’t for example, practice the same kinds of cleansing rituals I see discussed all over the interwebs. These practices, very often employing white sage and/or palo santo, which are both being impacted by the increased demand, are not something I learned when I first started working in the occult. In fact, my first awareness of it was in a fiction book maybe about a decade ago, where it was cast as an indigenous practice, used in response to a malevolent spirit.

By definition, the practice of cleansing is to drive off such spirits, entities, and energies to protect the home and the persons in it. I take a somewhat different approach, one that has served me well for many years, and that is to deal with my spiritual and ritual space the same way that I deal with physical space it occupies. And, well, I really just hate to do house cleaning.

Now, I do actually do house cleaning. I have several cats and there are some basic things that you just have to do for the sake of hygiene. Likewise, my kitchen gets policed after every meal, and on weekends, when I have time, I’ll attend to anything that takes a bit longer, or has gotten behind. But chances are, you’ll find dust has accumulated on some lesser-used surfaces, and there might be a cobweb or two in some of the corners. I’ll remove the dust from time to time, before it does any significant damage to the furnishings or other items. As for the cobwebs, the spiders do a good job of limiting other household pests, so there’s something of a detente there. Also, I like spiders. Otherwise, I generally spend my time on other more productive or enjoyable processes, and try to minimize the amount of cleaning I have to do by not tracking in dirt.

How does this method apply to the spiritual space. Well, let’s take that point by point.

In the sense of the things that have to be done, I start with warding the property in general. This applies to unwanted spirits, criminals, and traveling salespersons. If you aren’t invited to my house, you are not welcome. A coworker of mine once helped me move some heavy furniture to our upstairs bedroom. He remarked that he would pity anyone who tried to break in, because there is virtually no place in my house that I can’t just reach out and have a weapon. Those are the visible ones. And several of them have enchantments. These charged objects and symbols perform the functions of locks.

house-witch — The brass rubbing on the left we believe to be a remote ancestor. His presence watching over us is welcome and warming. A more modern simulacra is my witch, who is being transformed from a basic decoration into an inhabited guardian.

Like any house with a watch dog, I have certain friendly spirits that reside with me, and/or travel with me, that provide protective or surveillance functionality. In combination with wards and sigils, they work to reduce the potential that something crosses my threshold without my awareness or invitation. These are a constant and ongoing defense, and require regular maintenance just like doing the dishes and emptying the cat box.

The second key factor is to clean up things when they happen. If there is a breech, I will deal with the problem and seal it back up. This is analogous to cleaning up a spilled drink (or cat vomit in my world) as soon as it happens, so there’s no permanent stain in the rug. Sometimes that is as simple as mopping up the mess, and sometimes it’s the spiritual equivalent of getting out the carpet shampooer. The response is dictated by the severity of the issue. Sometimes it just needs a damp paper towel. Sometimes I have to get out the Black Book.

And finally, I don’t track dirt into my house. At least I try not to do it. I’ve been at this for over half a century, and I have done some stupid things in my time. I have been lucky enough to learn from it. As Dean Martin is supposed to have said, “Good judgment comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgment”. Before undertaking any significant spiritual working, I make a risk reward evaluation, and do what I can to mitigate the risk. Sometimes, the benefits simply are not worth it to me. Your mileage may vary.

personal-demon — They say you should learn to live with your demons. In some cases, that’s literal.

Demons, imps, djinn, and other spirits of a more chaotic nature have been employed throughout history as guardians and gatekeepers.

Hades took the three headed dog Kerberos as protector of his underworld realm, preventing those inside from leaving, but also keeping out the unwanted. In some tales he is said to eat those trying to escape. I wonder if Kerberos is a Graeco-Roman confusion of the Egyptian psychopomp Anubis (Anpu in Kemit) in his form of the black dog, and the Ammit, the devourer of the hearts of the unworthy at the balance Anubis manned.

I burn incense as a gift to the Fae, On occasion I will find forms in the smoke, like the big fellow here. Whether he is visiting them, or just hanging around on the porch, he’s no concern to me, and I am sure that nothing is getting past him.

If you visit me on any given day, there will probably be incense burning. I like incense. It minimizes foul odors (see cats, above), relieves tension, drives off pests like mosquitoes and flies, and smells nice. This is most probably why the ancients starting using incense. In the cradles of civilization, usually along rivers, lakes, or seashores, insect-borne diseases were a real problem. Burning the resin of a shrub caused a drop in the number of mosquito bites, and consequently a drop in cases of malaria, yellow fever, and other similar diseases. The ancients may or may not have made the initial connection to it’s use as a bug repellant, but eventually the power of incense to dispel and drive out spiritual “bugs” was ascribed.

Incense as used to create or purify ritual space is widespread in many practices, both occult and orthodox. I am keenly aware of this functionality when I burn incense, though I don’t always have that intention when I burn incense. On the other hand, my incense burners all have some sort of magical inscriptions or ritual configuration, in which case they are “always on”, whether I am creating a ritual space for spell work, or just in the studio painting, writing, or composing.

incense-tower — I burn incense for a lot of reasons. Sometimes I just want the room to smell nice. But since all of my incense burners have a ritual nature to them, the burning of incense is essentially always a ritual. Even if I just want the room to smell nice.

Many things in my house have enchantments associated with them. I create sacred space around me that is always protected. While it may need energizing from time to time, I haven’t found that a constant focus on ritual cleansing is necessary.

But if that works for you, more power to you. Literally. The practice of cleansing rituals, provided they are combined with rites to bring in positive and beneficial entities and energies, will help reinforce your own spiritual refuge; whether you see it as quirky old house or an impenetrable castle. I have versions of both.

This is a layer of passive protection that permeates my space. But I don’t generally go and light it up and do a cleansing ritual. Cleansings as I see them described often seem an awful lot like exorcism. When used to drive out a malevolent entity, they clearly are an exorcism ritual, and my particular concern is that may not be something we want to be doing every week or day or whatever in our personal space.

Jason Miller in his Consorting With Spirits and on numerous podcasts, has cautioned against this for the simple reason that you are potentially making it difficult for any spirits to enter your personal space.

In the wake of the pandemic, we all have perhaps become a bit more intense in cleaning our home environments. While we concentrate on removing the harmful pathogens, we use methods that destroy beneficial bacteria. The same can be said for spiritual cleansing.

I remember reading many years ago in one of Sybil Leek’s books (don’t recall which, probably Diary of A Witch) that the key to such things was balance. If we do something extreme in one direction, we must do other things to balance that out. If you feel safer by doing a cleansing ritual each day, by all means do so. But follow it with a ritual that invites back in your friendly spirits, patron deities, and positive energy.

I’ll close with that thought. Next week’s article will be an introduction to the summer’s project for me, an exploration of the Major Arcana in depth. I intend to take a card each week until late August, though I expect I may have some additional articles pop up as the muse strikes. I hope you will join me.

March 1, 2023February 28, 2023

ALIENS!

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
–Arthur C. Clarke, Author of 2001: A Space Odyssey and Inventor of the Geosynchronous Satellite.

Since I stepped into the Wayback Machine and dropped into the wild and wacky 1970s with the article on Pyramid Power, I thought I needed to address that other peripherally persistent paranormal phenomenon.

I don’t believe that space aliens (or even ALIENS!) were responsible for the pyramids, Stonehenge, Easter Island, the Nazca Plateau, Teotihuacan, or the Ziggurat of Ur. As I said earlier, human beings, even without modern technology, had technology and it worked.

They also had motivations that we don’t share, because we live in a different culture, in a different time. So what to our modern eyes appears to be a wasteful dedication of tremendous labor and resources to a strange obsession would seem the most normal of things to them.

The human brain physiologically is fairly the same now as it has been since Cro-Magnon times. To suggest that this brain simply couldn’t accomplish any of these things without the intervention of an advanced alien species is really just unfair to our ancestors.

That said, I fully believe that there are extraterrestrial species, probably extradimensional and extratemporal ones (and some that might qualify as all three) and that they have visited this world in our past and likely still do.

So lets look at this a little less sensationally than the cable channels do for bit. Lets talk about the physical realities of time, space, and dimension, and just exactly how those realities can give us some insight into the nature of our visitors.

Firstly, as we know, space is really really big. Enormous in fact, and possibly infinite. Since Einstein and his contemporaries and successors have established that we exist within a time-space continuum, that bigness may be both infinite and eternal.

So given that, the denial by any person or group that there is certainly the potential for alien life is truly against all odds. To insist that only this tiny little gravel in the whole vastness of vastness alone contains not only the spark of life, but the sole intelligence, and spiritual monopoly over all that is, was, or will be is ludicrous.

Carl Sagan, in the original Cosmos book and series popularized something called Drake’s equation. This was formulated by astronomer Frank Drake to address the potential for communicating with an alien species.

In general terms, it says there are a certain number of stars in the galaxy, and of those, a certain number that have planets, and of those planets a certain number that could sustain life, and of the life-sustaining planets, a certain number that have civilizations that arise capable of sending signals into space, and of those civilizations, a certain number that don’t end up nuking or polluting themselves out of existence before they can send a signal. And finally, of these, they have to be sending the signal at the time that we are able to receive it (which in our case has only been a little less than a century) and be close enough that receiving that signal is within the lifespan of the civilization sending it.

This last couple of points is where things get really tricky.

The speed of light is a constant (the” “c” in E=mc²) throughout the known universe. This constant speed means that the light from a distant star will travel a certain distance in a certain time, and we use this to measure how big space is.

The typical measurement is a light year.

For reference, a light second is a bit over 186,000 miles (a bit under 300,000 km). So there are 60 seconds in a minute, 60 minutes in an hour, 24 hours per day and 365 days in a year. It’s about six quadrillion miles.

To put that in perspective, the sun at a scant 93 million miles away is 8 light minutes. The planet Mars is around 2 light minutes, but even when we fly there in the most direct path, our conventional spacecraft still take several months.

Six quadrillion miles is huge. And that is one light year. Just one. Outside our solar system, there’s nothing that is that close.

The nearest star is about five light years away. Thirty quadrillion miles. That’s almost across the street compared to most of the stars we see in the sky at night.

So going back to Drake’s equation, let’s say some brilliant alien physicist on Alpha Centauri sends a radio message out in the general direction of our boring little blue dot. It would take about five years for that message to reach us, and another five years for any reply we sent to get back to them. So a round trip text takes roughly a decade. Since we have only really been able to receive radio messages since the early 1900s, in the entire 40 millennia lifespan of humanity, we’d have only been able to send and receive maybe a dozen messages.

Now assume that the physicist on Alpha Centauri lived over 100 years ago. He sent the message out, then they had an atomic war and the technology was lost. That message sailed right past Earth before Tesla and Marconi were experimenting with variable oscillation of electrical waves, and we never even knew about it.

That’s just the guy next door. Let’s talk about someone sending a message out from somewhere like Antares, the big red giant in Scorpio. That’s 554.5 light years. If we got a message from them now, it would have been sent almost forty years before Columbus began the colonization of the Western Hemisphere.

If the message got sent from the other side of our own Milky Way galaxy, it would have started it’s journey to our tiny speck a bit less than 106,000 years ago. So the civilization on that planet developed technology before the coming of the modern homo sapien, a mere 43,000 years ago.

Now suppose they lived a long time ago in a galaxy far far away?

The Great Spiral Galaxy in Andromeda is our closest intergalactic neighbor, and that is just over 2.5 million lightyears away. On Earth, 2.5 million years ago, the first homonids that would eventually give rise to the human race were just evolving in what is now Central Africa, and the Ice Ages were about to begin. Any intelligent signal we’d get from Andromeda now would have been beamed out that long ago.

These vast distances in time and space are one of the many reasons that contact with “space aliens” would seem so very unlikely as to be nigh impossible. Even if there had been a message sent out (intentionally or not) might the great gulf of years not simply have ended the species that sent it?

On our own planet, we have evidence of several mass extinctions due to planetary upheavals, environmental disasters, and bombardment by interstellar debris. Within our recorded history the precarious grasp our own species has on planetary dominance has been significantly threatened by war, famine, pestilence, and death. Our advancement to the stage where we can send and receive such signals has gone hand-in-hand with the discovery of technologies that could effectively destroy us, and possibly make the planet unlivable for any succeeding species.

In two and half million years, could any species survive all these factors? And if it did, what might it have evolved into in that time?

In 2.5 million years we moved from being just another animal in the ancient jungle to sending probes into interstellar space. How would another couple of million years change us? Would we even be recognizable as the species that sent that probe? And would we even want to still communicate with whoever, or whatever it reached?

The fact is that the Andromeda galaxy we see today was what it looked like that long ago. For all we know, the entire galaxy may no longer be there, or it may be vastly changed. Stars will have died and been born in the ongoing pattern of entropy that characterizes our experience of passing time. And our perception of this is currently limited by that speed of light, beyond which nothing can be observed.

The reality of this has lead authors of science fiction, futurism, and space fantasy to develop several tropes for Faster-Than-Light (FTL) travel. Whether it be warp drive, wormholes, or hyperspace, these stories all rely upon some means of getting us out there in the thick of it all, meeting with the aliens, making love and war, and doing all those human things we do that apparently all the aliens do just enough like we do so that we understand it.

spacewahle — The chances that our alien visitors will look or act anything like our concept of “life forms” are actually pretty remote. If they are carbon based, we might be able to recognize that they are alive. Whether or not they are sentient and advanced enough to travel the stars might actually elude us.

Numerous science fiction stories talk about alien spores that form a hive mind when they “infect” the fauna of the planet onto which they drift. Compare this to the “zombie ant” phenomenon, where a fungus invades an ant, takes control of it’s behavior, and uses it to spread the fungus.

There are theories that it is not just the ants that are part of some fungal consciousness. Much has been made lately of the size and interconnectivity of mushroom mycelia underlying forests and fields. There are theories that some kind of plant telepathy is going on across the fungal network, and that we may be dealing with some sort of intelligence that is so different from our own that we don’t even realize it is intelligence. Whether it’s origin is terrestrial or otherwise is an open topic.

There are even a few texts I’ve encountered asserting that the psychotropic effects of psilocybin are a means of this fungal consciousness communicating with humans, and elevating us to a higher order of being.

And that’s just one bizarre possibility for carbon-based life like ourselves that depends on things like amino acids and liquid water. If we get into critters made from silicon and methane, all bets are off. They certainly wouldn’t register as living by our standards, and we might not even be able to determine they were communicating with us, or even with each other. In that context the whole “magic crystal” branch of occultism takes on a completely different character.

Which is the other great trope of science fiction, that the majority of the aliens look and act and communicate just like us. This, of course, is where things can also go awry.

Even if an alien species can get to Earth from so very very very far away, we might not even recognize them. Douglas Adams pointed out this in So Long And Thanks For All The Fish. Roger Zelazny takes it a step further in the story ‘Kjwalll’kje’k’koothai’lll’kje’k featured in his My Name Is Legion anthology. Leonard Nimoy was influenced by Adams when he made the fourth Star Trek film, so this idea that we have an intelligent alien species living among us, but that they are so alien in how they respond and interact with their environment is not new.

The evolutionary history of cetaceans is about as well documented as that of our own homonid ancestry, so calling dolphins and whales “aliens” may be a bit of a stretch. The cephalopods in our oceans also demonstrate what we would consider “intelligence”. There are several internet videos of the octopus at the aquarium that would leave it’s own tank, crawl across the floor, and help itself to a tasty snack from one of the other tanks, before returning home. This sort of behavior is on par with chimpanzees and gorillas.

Yet the chimpanzees and gorillas inhabit our terrestrial environment with gravity (or at least without buoyancy) limited vertical depth (without supporting structures), and they have bilateral symmetry and binocular vision. Sound and scent do not travel as far through the medium of air, and changes in pressure are less intense. And rarely do we find that food just floats by.

So our ability to understand and possibly communicate with chimpanzees and gorillas is ultimately aided by our shared experience of the world. We have far less in common with the dolphin and even less with the octopus.

How then do we expect to understand and communicate with the little green man from Alpha Centauri? In fact, would we even recognize him? Has he been sending us messages for ages and we just think it’s noise, part of that “cosmic background radiation” that used to show up on old TVs when the broadcast day had ended (yes, boys and girls, that actually was a thing when I grew up).

Well, the scientists argue that the aliens will also have thought of that. They’ll have realized that “life, but not as we know it” is probably more the norm for the universe than “life as we know it” and looked for something that does seem to be truly universal. Which brings us back to math.

Numbers are universal, they are immutable, the idea of number is endemic to the nature of reality. There are things and other things and because of this number exists without question in all times, spaces, and dimensions. And the permutations that can be applied to number, which we call mathematics, is also a finite, established, and absolute. So we can send signals using numbers and have these signals interpreted by another vastly more alien species.

There are some other things we have in common with the aliens. Things like frequency and wavelength, which along with mathematics, can be used to express more complicated concepts like atomic structure, chemical makeup, interstellar distances, and music.

Yes. Music.

Music is the result of intervals of waves. At varying frequencies, you get higher or lower tones, but the basic set of tones in human hearing tend toward 7 discreet whole notes and another 5 half notes. Every piece of music ever written is made of just 12 notes. Ergo this sort of thing might give us a simple basis for a shared language, like an interplanetary esperanto, when we meet the aliens.

If any of my readers are familiar with the classic film Close Encounters of the Third Kind, you have seen this theory in action. Benevolent little grey aliens visit the earth in the late 70s, imprinting psychic messages to those humans who are receptive. Some of them interpret the messages as five specific tones, which are translated by the scientists into the latitude and longitude of a location. Others express the message as paintings or drawings or sculptures. I always found it fascinating that the aliens spoke to us through art, which I believe is a marker for highly intelligent self-aware life.

In the end they bring everyone together at the Devil’s Tower in Wyoming, where the mothership arrives and returns people who were “abducted” through history from places like the Bermuda Triangle.

In writing the movie, director Steven Spielberg drew upon many of the popular themes of the UFO subculture of the 1970s. The alien abductions, the little grey men with big heads and big almond-shaped eyes, suspension of passing time aboard alien ships, and even the government cover-up were a part of the modern zeitgeist following Chariots of the Gods. It is little wonder that the immensely popular film, and the more kid-friendly ET, has perpetuated these impressions of the alien encounter to the present.

But for a number of reasons such as I just mentioned, it is very very very unlikely that visiting aliens from a distant planet would look anything at all like humans, or humanoids. We are more likely to encounter the “Old Ones” from Lovecraft’s At The Mountains of Madness than smaller, taller, greyer, greener, furrier, scalier, multiple-limbed and eyed versions of ourselves. So where were these guys coming from?

Well, the UFOlogists and sci-fi writers have postulated on more than one occasion that they look like us because they made us in their image. That is, according to several different theories and popular fictions, at some point in the remote past, maybe around 2.5 million years ago, the aliens beamed down to the jungle in Central Africa, beamed up some monkeys, and started tinkering with the DNA, splicing in genes from their own, in order to create what would become the human race.

This is an intriguing and potentially comforting theory, but I don’t put a lot of credence in it. Namely because, aside from a certain Dr. Moreau, we humans don’t seem to have any interest in gene splicing monkeys into proto-humans (and that is a good thing). While we’re happy to mix DNA from jelly-fish into a tomato, that’s in the interest of increasing shelf-life. There’s not a profit motive to making monkey-people…at least not yet.

Permutations of the original story in the novel Planet of the Apes suggests at some point in our future, intelligent simians may be substituted for menial labor, essentially bred as a slave race. Well, we’ve done that for horses, and we have done it for so many other species for the pure purpose of food, so it’s not an impossibility.

But why overcome the extreme problems of interstellar travel just to drop in on a little rock and play havoc with monkey DNA? Speculative fiction gives us every option from said slave labor to preserving something of a dying alien species. It’s a kind of terraforming or colonization, by way that the colonists don’t know they are colonists.

But then why come back a couple of million years later, looking just the same as you appeared to the monkey-men, and start that whole probing business? Did they not evolve at all during that period of time? Shouldn’t they have even bigger heads and be even less human like?

Well, there’s an obvious answer for that, too (except for the whole probing thing). They’re time travelers.

Time travel solves a lot of those pesky problems about the universe being too big and the aliens being too far away and them dropping in to check up on us every now and then.

treks files_ — At the forefront of physics are assertions that parallel universes not only do exist, but are likely. The extent to which these diverge from our own, and whether or not travel in time, or through things like wormholes, give us access to a multiverse, and it to us, is still in the realm of fiction.

In quantum reality, potential exists for multiple outcomes until one outcome is fixed by observation. Multiverse theories say that all those other outcomes got fixed by other observers observing them, and so they went on to the next potential outcome and the next, until all other possible universes exist. Since this would tend to become quite crowded, other quantum universes are separated from us by membranes that prevent our being aware of them. They may, and probably do, exist in the same space and time that we do, but don’t experience them and they don’t experience us.

Until, of course, something breaks.

Perception of other planes of existence, even our own altered states of consciousness, could very well be traversing the boundaries between these quantum states. Our dreams, scientifically, are internal illusions created by our brains to process experiences into memory. But that same science can’t fully explain how a few ounces of soggy meat can do that, or any of the other things we experience as living thinking creatures. So who can say whether when I dream I walk on the sands of Mars an aeon ago and listen to the strange harps that play in the shadows of two moons.

If they have mastered time travel, then they can land here before they even leave Rigel VII, park the DeLorean next to the police call box for as long as they want, and still be home in time for dinner. The FTL trope almost always involves some kind of time travel, because our measurement of time is tied to our experience of the universe, and that is tied to the speed of light.

So I got to thinking, that maybe the aliens didn’t create human beings in the distant past. Maybe they simply were human beings from the distant future, after we’d evolved the big heads and grey skin and the weird probing fetish.

Maybe we were coming back at points along our timeline to fix ourselves, and keep us from wiping out the future. Maybe we’re trying to stop nuclear war or environmental collapse or Trump from getting that sports almanac and other worthwhile endeavors.

At least that all seems a tad more likely to me than that millions of years ago an unbelievably advanced alien civilization decided to propagate itself using Earth’s monkeys. Or that the same civilization needed them for slave labor or even food.

Let’s be real, if you can cross time, space, and dimension at that scale, breeding a bunch of metachimps to tend bar (or mine ore) is not a requirement of your culture. Exploiting the local primitives is a fairly exclusively human point of view.

In solving the secrets of the cosmos necessary to make it your local park, you will have elevated yourself as a species beyond that. You may, in fact have elevated yourself beyond the need to work with time, space, and dimension in the way our current terrestrial understanding of physics allows.

You might just be using magic.

angels-spaceship — I’ve clearly been having a bit of fun here with the pictures for this article, but they still illustrate my points. We are conditioned to think of modern “alien encounters” as a science-fiction style experience, and separate from the ancient experiences of similar phenomenon.

The descriptions of “fiery chariots” pervade many early accounts of extraterrestrial interaction, though the people of the time considered them to be gods and angels. The seraphim and cherubim of the Bible (left) with their wheels within wheels, and many faces turning in all directions are not terribly dissimilar from the spinning towers of the Hindu vimana (right) or “Celestial Chariot”.

The Chariot is a powerful symbol. In ancient times, the chariot was the jet fighter of the battlefield. . It provided a mobile platform for striking at an enemy, breaking ranks, and delivering grievous harm to foot soldiers. Invariably the nations that possessed this technology rose to being feared powers in their regions.

It’s natural association with the solar deity can be found in almost every culture where it existed. In Egypt, where it was a later import, it gives way to the Boat of Ra, but otherwise it is ubiquitous from the Asian steppe to the Hibernian shores.

It comes down to us as an emblem of force, of active energy working upon the face of the void. As such it is an apt metaphor for a process transcending space time. Some older versions of this Tarot show wheels all around the central platform, denoting “impossible” motion, and the capacity to operate outside of normal dimensions.

In Smith’s version this is carried in the gyro, or spinning top on the emblazon of the front. It’s intriguing that our own spacecraft carry such gyros as a means of finding their way where normal conventions like up/down and east/west/north/south don’t function. This inertial navigation system was developed by people who worked in places like Area 51, and things like the USAF Project: Bluebook investigating UFOs.

But, of course, that’s only a coincidence. Or maybe it’s ….

Our word “astral” comes from the Greek meaning star. Astral travel is basically space travel. Those who first coined the term in ancient times were experiencing, or believed that they were experiencing, arriving on other worlds, inhabited by strange and wonderous beings.

These worlds they equated with the “planets” they saw in the night sky, and perhaps the further stars. Humans have been traveling through interstellar space before the Voyager mission, and long before the Montgolfier brothers even floated above Paris in their balloon. We just called it something else.

And by the same token, it’s highly likely that alien beings of greatly evolved intellect may have found a means of visiting this world, or this dimension, or even this universe, using methods that we wouldn’t recognize as space craft. These aliens may have been perceived as spirits and gods, though not in the sense that Von Däniken describes them. His theories are of physical spacemen arriving in physical machines that were mistaken by “primitive” people for other things, and described in less technological terms.

By his telling, our ancestors could not conceive of a flying machine, so they had to speak of great birds. I’m not sure I buy that. Early humans may have ascribed mystical properties to stones and metals, but they knew what they were. I don’t think they could have mistaken a glass and metal craft for a living animal. Indeed, in India, the stories of the Vimana are distinctly about such machines, used by the “gods” in battle.

On the other hand, experiences of “wheels within wheels”, “wheels full of eyes”, and “beings of coals of fire” found in various Biblical accounts of angels are certainly more in keeping with the idea of an advanced life-form that is being experienced in an extra-dimensional or extra-physical way.

There are at least a half dozen episodes of Star Trek where the aliens are just glowing balls of light. These are intelligences that have grown beyond the need for the physical body. The ability of such a being to manifest or appear to manifest in a physical form is also postulated -so that we can communicate with it.

To excerpt from the episode Errand of Mercy one such alien, having created the illusion of an entire human-like culture offers the following:

“. . .please leave us. The mere presence of beings like yourselves is intensely painful to us. . . .Millions of years ago . . . we were humanoid like yourselves, but we have developed beyond the need of physical bodies. That of us which you see is mere appearance for your sake.”

I find these ideas echoed well in Jason Miller’s Consorting with Spirits. He offers that the purpose of meditation, ritual, and incantation is needful to bridging the gap between the world we inhabit and the world that such rarified beings inhabit. Instead of using hypergolic rockets or warp drive to reach them, we are bending the nature of reality using the intrinsic energy of the universe itself.

This is a kind of technology. It operates according to certain rules, and produces certain results repeatedly, provided that all required factors are met. We simply call it magic, like many of our ancestors did.

Two hundred years ago, the electricity being used to make these words appear before you, some time and distance from where they were written, would have been considered a work of pure sorcery, and probably a tool of the devil.

In my own lifetime, we have taken machines that once filled entire buildings and made them fit in one’s pocket.

We can now see each other from across the globe, in real time, without even batting an eye.

How much harder is it to believe that an older race, a different kind of race, can do the same thing across millions of light years of space or thousands of years in time or myriad dimensions beyond our reckoning?

Up until the last 150 years or so, this belief would have been held by most of the people in the world. As science has moved to the forefront, and catalogued and quantified much of our natural world’s processes, the ability of people to accept a spirit behind every tree and under every rock has waned. This is a sad loss.

Science has told us that there are no angels, so we’ve started calling them aliens.

The truth is out there.

I’ll be back next week.

February 15, 2023February 15, 2023

Pyramids Then

Taking a poll here.

The fact that we have pyramids or pyramid like structures around the world among different cultures that never were connected with each other proves that:

A. ALIENS!
B. ATLANTIS!
C. If you want to build something really big out of bricks or blocks, the easiest thing to do is just make a big pile.

My answer today is C.

I was a firm believer and did much research into both A and B (and of the variant A1. ALIENS! FROM ATLANTIS!).

But it was the 70s. If you think paranormal is big now, you should have been around for the Golden Age.

I’m talking Pyramid Power.

I haven’t heard the term used in a while, but back in the 70s and early 80s it was the cat’s pajamas (also a term I haven’t heard in a while).

When Uri Geller was on Merv Griffin bending spoons with his mind, the rest of us were sharpening razor blades, treating migraines, and curing erectile disfunction with the awesome power inherent in that magical shape.

You could buy cardboard Pyramid Power kits from the backs of magazines, or go for the super deluxe model that you sat inside in your living room. Pyramid Power was the panacea. It cured what ailed us. It kept us young and vital and was fueling the Sexual Revolution, or at least the one-night stand.

The origins of this mania started as a concept about keeping meat fresh.Iin the 1930s a French dowser named Antoine Bovis theorized that the pyramid shape would inherently “mummify” organic materials. The basis of his thinking is a bit fuzzy, I am not up on the idea of dowsing enough to work out quite how he deduced pyramid shapes had this power. He extrapolates in his theory that since his cardboard shape worked with a small fish and a piece of meat, the bigger Egyptian pyramid must contain the same magnetic energies.

There is an apocryphal account that he observed mummified cats that had supposedly been created by the Egyptian pyramid itself. Of course, the interior of the pyramid is relatively warm and dry and works fairly good as a giant dehydrator. But we know that couldn’t be what was doing it. Had to be some mystic force.

After the Second World War, an enterprising Czech inventor took Bovis’s ideas of concentrated magnetism and started marketing his own line of patented cardboard pyramid “sharpeners” to prolong the life of razor blades during the bleak Soviet bloc economy. They were apparently successful enough to draw the attention of a couple of authors who included these ideas in the book Psychic Discoveries Behind The Iron Curtain in 1970.

In an American generation that was deeply embracing counterculture, ideas of supernatural and paranormal were frequently the topic of general conversation. People were experimenting with altered states of consciousness, Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, and other non-abrahamic religions, including Wicca and other occult practices. “Secret” practices that had been suppressed by the Soviets (and probably the CIA) just had to be looked into. Von Däniken had just had tremendous public success with Chariots of the Gods, and the idea of an ancient alien spiritual techno-medicine just hit the right chord.

Generally if there’s not a satisfying rational explanation for something, people are willing to accept a much more enticing irrational one. Thus the pyramid business took off, initially with dueling books both entitled Pyramid Power. As you might imagine, theories that the pyramid shape might augment or reflect or collect earth’s natural magnetic field in such a way as to deter degeneration, got intertwined with any wild occult paranormal pseudoscientific idea that caught public attention.

And we all did our pyramid things. I think I built one or two. I watched every show that mentioned it. I read all the books I could find (and without the ‘Zon, they were few). And like Agent Mulder I wanted to believe. There had to be a secret power. There must have been some kind of ancient civilization. Aliens had to have helped them cut the stones.

pyramidsinwands! — Pyramid mania isn’t a new thing. The fascination with Egypt in the Victorian Era doubtless inspired Pamela Coleman Smith to hide the Giza pyramids in these “hills” behind a couple of Wand Court cards. And understandably so, since the pyramid was confuted with “pyro” or fire and the outline shape of the triangle is the alchemical rune for same. Like the salamanders on their tunics, the pyramids in the background are fire symbol, both of common terrestrial fire, and of the cosmic celestial fire of the cosmos.

Although many designers choose to show the wands more literally as torches, Smith has elected to portray them as simple branches, with a few leaves here and there. This is also symbolic, as it refers to the Rod of Aharon. Moses half-brother wields his staff significantly during the 10 plagues, and later in Exodus, it is said to have budded, showing the power of the Almighty to bring life from the dry wood. It is one of the relics kept in the Ark of the Covenant, and in the RWS Tarot symbolizes the present of hidden fire within.

And then I went there. I went to the pyramid. I climbed the passage and scrambled across the rock into the King’s Chamber and I stood in the heart of the Great Pyramid of Giza and expected my Great Epiphany. And possibly also alien teleportation and super powers.

And then I realized, sliding my hands across those glassy smooth stone walls with the perfectly fitted seams, how it had been done.

Lots and lots of people, with lots and lots of sand, and lots and lots of time.

No aliens. No laser beams. No antigravs.

Just people, sand, and time.

But the Great Epiphany was something even better.

Now, mind you, I do understand why everyone wants to believe. Aside from it just being a lot cooler to think it was space aliens with laser guns posing as ancient gods, the Pyramid itself evokes a sense of massive awe that is hardly paralleled. I have only experienced the same kind of mental and spiritual transport a few other times. Once was the Chartres Cathedral in France, and once was the Saturn V rocket here in Houston.

Now all of these things are firstly very very big. They’re bigger than many things we encounter in our lives. The Pyramid was the tallest building on Earth until the Eiffel Tower was built. But the Eiffel Tower, though admittedly cool, and really big, doesn’t impose itself upon you like the Pyramid does.

There’s the old saying that all men fear time, but time fears the pyramids. That’s a palpable feeling when you are standing near it.

My first experience of Chartres was much like my first experience of the Pyramid. You are driving along and then suddenly there is this massive thing rising out of the horizon. Chartres is situated on a natural hill, and at the time (late 1990s) was surrounded by large wheat fields, so it’s massivity was augmented by this isolation. Of course, it sits in the middle of the modern city, but it’s hugeness is still unique for the locale. So both with Chartres and the Pyramid you can approach them and get the same sense of how they appeared at the time of their builders. They are effectively timeless.

Gothic-Chartres — Notre Dame des Chartres as it appears today. It’s really hard to get a sense of the scale of these things until you are next them and yet it’s daunting. The great Gothic cathedrals, many dedicated to the Virgin Mary, sprang up between the end of the first Millennium and the Black Death. They strove to portray the heavenly Jerusalem described in the Book of Revelations, by a complex series of symbolic and mathematical inclusions in the architecture. Many Christians believed that the promised return of Christ was going to follow the year 1000, and these grand churches were a plea for mercy, as well as a kind of working penance. The towers above are different because they took so long to build that the artistic style had changed when the second one was started. It was almost 100 years before it was completed. For comparison, from the beginning to the apex of the Pyramid age in Egypt was about that long.

The Three of Pentacles shows the fine detail work inherent in the Gothic style. The pointed arches are all parts of full circles, that push into each other. The geometry defining them could be done with a simple divider (what we sometimes call a compass in math class). The trefoils – here holding the pentacles, and quatrefoils were circles arranged on circles, and the great rose windows that pierce the walls of the apse and transept are circles holding up circles holding up circles, all of them pushing together in a magic dance that allowed such massive structures to be made with thin walls and glass windows.

Chartres photo from Wikipedia by Olvr – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=16331210

We know more or less how Chartres was constructed. It took hundreds of years, and lots of people, and lots of stone and other resources. It uses sophisticated and ingenious technologies to lift massive weights high above the ground, and keep them there, without benefit of an internal steel skeleton. Chartres, like all Gothic Cathedrals, is held up by gravity. This oxymoronic statement may seem absurd at first, but the basic engineering principle goes back to the Romans.

The Romans worked out the true arch. The arch is half of a circle. Gravity is causing every stone in the circle to fall toward the center, but every stone in the circle is caught between two other stones also trying to fall so that the whole thing stays up.

If you put a row of arches in line after each other you get a vault. If you put two of them in perpendicular, you get what is called a groin vault, which gives you a square room underneath with openings on all four sides. Large Roman buildings employed these techniques to create very large interior spaces. They also used the same principle to create the dome, where instead of going in a single direction the arches pivot around a central point. And because the stones near the top were pushing into each other all around the circle, they could even leave an opening – called an oculus or “eye”- in the middle of the dome and it would still stay up.

The only difficulty in such structures was that the weight of the downward pushing stones tends to press outward at the bottom, so initially Roman buildings had to have walls with equal or great mass than the weight of the stones in the arches.

The Gothic innovation, was in utilizing arches upon arches upon arches, to make thinner lighter walls, which they filled with brilliant stained glass, and flying buttresses, which pressed inward against the vaults but carried the weight out and down to a set of descending piers. The whole effect results in a kind of wedding cake extravaganza of a building.

The Pyramid, by contrast, comes from a time where post and lintel construction is necessary. If you are using stone, you can only make your openings as wide as the stone you are using for the lintel – the piece that goes across the top – will bear before it breaks. Or you have to use a bigger stone. Which means you have to have bigger posts. And a lot of them. This is why the Hypostyle Hall in the Temple of Amen Ra at Karnak has the forest of massive pillars. Think Stonehenge, but one a bigger scale.

Even with that though, the chambers inside the Great Pyramid can’t bear the weight of the structure above it without some pretty amazing tricks. The passage that goes up into the pyramid is only a few feet wide, so it is constructed of limestone and using basic post and lintel method. But the burial chambers would need to be much bigger, and for whatever reason, Cheops wanted them inside the stone mass of the Pyramid. This is generally believed to have been to deter robbers, but Peter Tomkins, in his Secrets of the Great Pyramid Revealed offers some other plausible ideas -ideas that are as nifty as space aliens and still don’t involve Atlantis.

In any case, the middle parts of the Pyramid use heavy granite, a stone much stronger and capable of spanning a chamber 20 or 30 feet wide without snapping. Of course, it’s incredibly heavy, is almost impossible to carve with copper chisels (even if you were sharpening them in a pyramid) and was quarried hundreds of miles up the Nile at Aswan.

And yet there it was smooth as glass, with the faintest hint of a joint between the massive blocks. And above me the great weight of about another third of the Pyramid over my head was pressing down on those granite roof beams. As they had been for thousands of years.

So clearly, Pharoah’s overseer of works just phoned over to where they were building Stonehenge and got Merlin to come move them. No aliens at all.

Thing is, we know now that they rough cut the granite stone using fire cracking. They moved the great slabs from the quarry using various ramps, sledges, mud “lubricant” and a whole lot of people pulling on ropes. They barged them down the Nile to the job site, where the docks were a lot closer than they are today, and using more ramps, sledges, and people drug them up to where they belonged.

And then some dude sat there with sand, and a jug of water, and maybe a reed or papyrus matte, and sanded them glassy smooth. Okay, fine. It was several dudes. But it’s the same thing they did at Chartres 3000 years later and nobody claims that was aliens or mermaids or the Loch Ness Monster.

And in both cases, they were building a monument to God.

It’s just, that in the case of the Pyramid, God came to look over the building site from time to time.

Even though in the last couple of decades all that I have just explained has become widely known, we still have a fascination with this curious shape. I personally have several pyramids made from semiprecious stones and crystals. And for all of them I probably also have an obelisk, a sphere, and probably a skull carved from the same rocks.

And I am not alone, judging from the numbers of rock and crystal pyramids that I find wherever fine rocks and crystals are sold. Clearly we still believe in Pyramid Power, if not exactly in how it was perceived in the 1970s. The physical shape of the pyramid is a touchstone to our psyche in a way that few things are. Even when we see simple the two dimensional outline of it as a triangle, our minds evoke exotic locales, ancient civilizations, and mysteries. The pyramid is sacred geometry. And was meant to be.

The Great Pyramid in Egypt and all it’s little brothers and sisters up and down the Nile were meant to be magic engines that transported the soul of the Pharaoh (and later lesser personages) to the sky where they would ride in the Boat of Ra for all eternity. The shape was derived from both the “god rays” we sometimes experience when the sun shines down through clouds, and also from a stone emblematic of the Primordial Mound of Earth that formed in the beginning of time, and from which grew the Lotus that Ra emerges from.

In the Mesopotamian cultures great ziggurats were built that were capped with temples, bringing the priesthood and the kings closer to the gods that lived in the sky. In Mesoamerica, pyramid structures fulfilled a similar purpose, though we have some that were also used as tombs. It’s probable that burying the dead king in the pyramid temple was seen to give an additional power and sacredness to it, but as far as we know Mesoamerican pyramids were not conceived as tombs.

There is a parallel here to the numerous famous personages who are buried in modern cathedrals. The church is holy ground. The holier the church, the more important the community of it’s dead become. Tompkins puts forth that assuming the only purpose of the Egyptian pyramid was a tomb, would be the same as asserting that the only purpose of Westminster Abbey was to bury the royals of Britain. While it is done there, there are a number of other purposes.

The orientation of various pyramids to astronomical phenomenon cannot be denied. We tend today to separate sacred and scientific, but this has never been the case until recently. Building anything required consultation of the spirits, the stars, and the omens, and building something as important as a pyramid or temple complex even moreso. It’s telling that in China some pyramid like structures were created for the purpose of improving the flow of chi in accordance with Feng Shui principles. They were human made mountains because natural mountains were not in the proper place.

Much has been made of secret numbers and ratios and measurements inherent in the Pyramid. And they are. This is because they were intended to be there, just as they were intended to be in Chartres and it’s sister cathedrals. We “discover” the correspondences to our modern measurements because our modern metrics (not the metric system, but the old ones – foot, yard, fathom, etc.) are derived from scales used to create the Pyramid.

All these things only seem wild and crazy and beyond belief if we assume that our ancestors were all a bunch of idiots, walking around with knuckles dragging.

The splendor of Pax Romana brought along with it the propaganda that the Roman way was the best way. A certain amount of this arrogance was inherited from the Hellenic Greeks who wrote up standards of truth and beauty and morality and ethics and just about everything. When the broken bones of these civilizations were resurrected in the Renaissance, they were idealized by the secular humanists over the cultish, insular, and dogmatic church of the Middle Ages.

So the secrets handed down from master to apprentice mason were divorced from their sacred meanings, and ultimately became purely mechanical operations. In this transition, the idea that pre-Alexandrian cultures could have possessed any such understanding was scoffed at. And so we reached the 1970s comfortably assured that the pyramids had to be built by aliens because human brains just couldn’t do that.

AstroVette-Saturn-5 — The state of the art in 1969 technology. The big rocket now is housed in a specially built hangar following a major restoration. If you are ever down Houston way, I highly recommend visiting it. Despite this being the product of modern engineering, you can see a number of structures within it that are derived from universal mathematical principles that the builders of Chartres and the Pyramid would have seen and understood.

If we underestimate the human capacity to imagine, to dream, and to dare, we do a great disservice to ourselves and our ancestors. The pyramid builders may not have understood mathematics and engineering as we do, but they had a technology and it worked. Despite the stories told by Greeks centuries afterward, the majority of the work on the monuments of Egypt were done by free people, in exchange for food and other needs, during the time of the Nile flood. Like the workers on the grand Gothic monuments, they were assured that their efforts would guarantee them a life everlasting.

In 1903, the first heavier that air machine took off at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, and flew a third of the length of the Saturn V rocket. Sixty-five years later human beings landed on the surface of the moon. We generally have been brought up believing that this accelerated leap in technology is a purely modern thing.

The Step Pyramid of Djoser was devised and executed by the vizier and sage Im-Ho-Tep around 2600 BCE. The Great Pyramid of Cheops was completed about 100 years later, and assuming the current figure of 20 years to build, that’s only a little longer than it took us to get from Kitty Hawk to the moon.

We did not have any help from the aliens. We didn’t even have electronic computers until the very end of the process, and we were checking those with mechanical sextants and slide rules because these 18th and 19th century devices were more accurate than the roomfuls of tubes and wires.

I would like to think, that should humanity survive it’s comparative infancy and follow those first explorers out into the void, that our progeny will someday look back at that weird collection of cylinders in the museum down at Clear Lake, with the same kind of awe and admiration and wonder that we feel about that old pyramid.

Until next time, remember that humans with their mind and their will can build mountains. Aliens not required.

January 25, 2023February 2, 2023

Hidden Figures

A black draped figure seemingly glided to the front of the classroom and began scribbling on the chalkboard.

Professor Snide spoke without turning.

“Turn to page twelve-thousand, six hundred, and seventy-four and begin reading the rubric at the end of the third paragraph; subsection two, heading four, chapter eight hundred eighty-two. . .” Pausing he added “. . . aloud. . . in four part harmony. “

Wes Rongley peeped his bright orange tufted head above the antique leathern tome on the desk in front of him and peered at the board. He squinted.

To his growing horror, he could clearly make out in the ever-growing scrawl that flowed unceasingly onto the slate from the chalk in Snide’s hand integers, operators, exponents, and not a few letters of Greek.

He shuddered. He had inexplicably stumbled into a maths class.

Wes slunk back down behind the ponderous mouldering volume and wracked his hazy brain for some memory of how this could have happened. The first few days here at Hogwash’s had been a heady blur, but surely he could not have made such a colossal blunder.

There was nothing for it but to try and escape.

He slid further down in the seat, as if he could melt into liquid form and seep quietly out under the classroom’s big oaken door. He tested the floor board with the slightest pressure of his left toe.

It creaked.

“Going somewhere, Mr. Rongley?”

Caught in the act, betrayed by the ancient timber, he had little choice but to respond to Snide’s withering gaze.

“I. . .uh. . .I’m in the wrong room, sir. I don’t think I’m supposed to be in this class.”

Snide inspected the desktop and at length drew out a square of browning parchment.

“You are Wes Rongley, First Year?”

“Yes sir.”

“Then you are on my list and you are in the right room.”

The room seemed to dim when Snide had said ‘my list’. Wes felt every follicle of his flaming shock of hair contract. Perspiration formed on his upper lip. On his tightening scalp. beads of sweat began to coalesce into rivulets that ran down the nape of his neck. He ventured.

“But . . .sir . . . that looks like maths. . .”

Snide turned, his expression softening . . .which for some reason was more disturbing.

“Hmmm. . .really? Are you sure?”

Wes nodded meekly. Professor Snide leaned a bit back and regarded the unfinished equation he’d been scribbling.

“By, Jove, Mr. Rongley, you’re right! It is maths! Seen them before, have you?”

“Yes. . .yes, sir!”

“Well, now you’ve seen them again. Turn to page twelve thousa-“

“I was told there’d be no maths, sir.”

“What?”

“I was told there wouldn’t be any maths. When I signed up, sir. That old chap, Humblebore was it? He said that maths weren’t required for my programme.”

“Headmaster Mumblesnore,” Snide corrected, “may have been a tad vague on this point. Let me assure you, Mr. Rongley, maths are indeed required.”

Wes felt Snide’s dark presence swirling toward him down the aisle but couldn’t move. He was a mouse transfixed by a great black cobra, knowing doom was coming but powerless to escape.

“How else do you expect to tease out the subtler courses of the orbs on their wanderings through the heavens, or divine the sublime secrets of the Gematria, or calculate allowed deductions for consumable spell components and the depreciation of cauldrons of more than a hogshead’s capacity when filing with the Inland Revenue?

‘Let there be no doubt in your mind, Mr. Rongley. Maths. Are. Required.”

Satisfied, Snide turned and had made it halfway back toward the front when Wes exploded:

“But I don’t like maths!”

Snide whirled. There was a flash and puff of sulfurous vapor.

There, atop the vast ancient folio, in the middle of an unwholesome looking greasy spot, sat a rather confused looking amphibian with a shock of flaming orange hair.

-Excerpted Unabridged from Hairy Plodder and the Half-Done Script

Like young Mr. Rongley, I too, did not care for ‘maths’ as it is commonly styled in Britain. Seeking a similar avoidance of all things mathematical, I pursued a career in the creative arts.

It is one of life’s little ironies, that when my own term at the Hogwash School of Wizardry, Witchcraft, and Computer Repair was over, that I entered a field where mathematical calculations are both necessary and intensive.

In further evidence of the universe’s perverse sense of humor, my personal occult studies are repleat with examples of the necessity of mathematics, algebra, geometry and trigonometry, and yes, calculus.

Having avoided many of these courses in school it fell upon me to educate myself over the years as required. The result is that I perhaps have not approached the topics in the same staid way that they are typically taught, and though I do get the needed accuracy of result, my methods are more in tune with the way my left-handed right-brained operations work.

I feel confident that, insofar as I am not building a nuclear reactor in close proximity to inhabited areas, said methods are sufficient for my goals. I’m sharing a bit of them this week in order to acquaint you with the delight I often find now in working with purity of numbers and the permutations thereof.

In a previous article I have spoken about the absolute reality of number itself. That is, number is a real immutable infinite and eternal thing, which remains fixed regardless of time, space, velocity, or dimension. One is always one. Two is always two. One and two are and have been and will always be three. Whether we call that three or tre or trois or drei is irrelevant, the actual thing that it is never changes.

There’s a comfort to that. It’s nice to know that regardless of how much chaos swirls around us there’s still something that remains unchanged. It is the Anchor in the Sea of the Night. It is a Fulcrum in the Void. It is a Beacon on the Shores of Infinity.

Of course, sometimes, it’s fun just to play around and see what comes up. My subject for today is the hexagon, a regular geometric shape having six equal sides.

While the word hexagon doesn’t have a connection with our use of the word hex in occult circles, the doctrines of sympathy and correspondence would argue otherwise. Hex in witchcraft comes at us out of Old German and Old Norse, and probably shortens and corrupts from hagatesse – a word used to refer to the Norns, the old women who sat at the base of the World Ash Ygdrassil and pronounced the fates of man. The connection between Norn and witch is an easy one, and the term haxa and haxxen have been used to apply to witches since early times in various north and central European dialects. Thus it crossed the Channel with Hengst and entered into the Anglo-Saxon tree.

The hex in hexagon, though, is ancient Greek for six, and merely means it’s six sided, or six angled, and there’s no magical connotation at all.

Except that there is. And frequently this confutation between the witchy hex and the mathematical hex is expressed in the darnedest of places.

For instance, among the “hex signs” of the so-called Pennsylvania Dutch. The Dutch are more accurately Deutsch – Germans, who settled in Penn’s Woods along with other emigrees seeking arable land and the ability to worship openly. They are noted – among other things, for the curious geometric designs that grace barns and some houses, which are said to drive away the “devil” and other malicious spirits. In this case the “hex” is the old German haxxan – a specifically magic application. Yet many of these geometries are based on six sided figures, though perhaps as many, if not more are eight-sided.

The hexagon is the natural regular shape that is formed if you outline from point to point on a hexagram. Now the hexagram is an established magical and talismanic shape, known as the Star of David, Solomon’s Seal, and other specific names. It is the figure below, which is composed of two overlapping triangles, and as you can see, it fits neatly into the hexagon.

In the parlance of the occult, this image has many meanings. The following image comes from Eliphas Levi’s Histoire de la magie and demonstrates the maxim supposedly extracted from the Emerald Tablet penned by no less a personage than Hermes Trismegistus himself. It is “As Above, So Below”

The actual text,

That which is above is from that which is below, and that which is below is from that which is above

translated into English from Latin or Arabic, which was probably translated from Greek, essentially says that all things in nature are aspects of a single cohesive whole.

From the standpoint of Greek philosophers laboring in Alexandria, this might be a convenient expression for the atomos proposed by Democritus in 400 B.C.E. and a forerunner of our idea of the atom.

Thrown into the rather more fanciful environs of medieval Europe, accompanied on it’s way with tales of djinns and efrits and the glorious magics of Solomon the Wise, the idea became a binder between the heavens and the earth, and justification for the correspondences of metals, stones, plants, and the like with the natures and virtues of the planetary wanderers.

And yet in this aspect was the roots of modern medicine, metallurgy, and chemistry, as well as enduring metaphor for the expansion of the consciousness. Alchemists revered this phrase and it’s interlocking trines throughout their search for the Elixir of Life and Philosopher’s Stone. It carries within it even more secrets, hinted at in the texts of the Emerald Tablet.

Its father is the Sun and its mother the Moon.
The Earth carried it in her belly, and the Wind nourished it in her belly,
as Earth which shall become Fire.
Feed the Earth from that which is subtle

Here then are references to at least three of the four classical elements – Earth, Wind, and Fire. This kind of phrase, along with the most imaginative of illustrations, form the rhebus instructions of the alchemical manuals. But I think the really neat trick is how we find the elements with our hexagon/hexagram.

First, of course, we just have to separate the “Above” from the “Below” and we get Fire and Water. But look more closely at the joined triangles. If you take the upward pointing triangle and the bottom line from the downward pointing triangle, you get the sign for Air. Flipping that to the downward pointing triangle gives us Earth. So the four elements are hidden figures within the As Above, So Below hexagram.

But, like any good late night infomercial pitch, that’s not all. The hexagon/hexagram combination does that same nifty trick that the pentagon/pentagram does. Within the hexagram inside the hexagon is another hexagon. You can then create another hexagram in that, which creates another hexagon inside it, ad infinitum.

Welcome, my friends, to the concept of fractals. And also the basic ideas that lead us into the murky waters of quantum theory – no matter how small something is, it’s always made up of something smaller. And, well, no matter how big something is, there’s probably something even bigger outside it, that maybe you don’t see until you get outside that, and outside that, and outside that…

So again, turtles all the way down. Most of which have no connection to Renaissance artists or togakure-ryu. But if it helps, you can think of all those repeating hexagon/hexagrams as being diagrams of turtle shells.

If infinity has you’re head spinning, let’s jump back onto a more solid ground. Platonically solid ground, in this case, as a few choice lines from the angles in the hex give us a nice diagram for the first two platonic solids, the pyramid, and the cube. From two dimensions we have moved into three, or at least we are representing three dimensions in a two dimensional space, and that’s nifty in itself. The cube is more elegantly expressed of course, because in addition to just looking better, we have the added symbolic link of a six-sided object being used to represent a six-faced object. I’ve tried to find some sacred number related to the four faces and six sides, but it’s not there, so it’s just that you can draw it if you need to, though again it’s not as isometrically clean.

On the other hand, if you wanted to get a four faced pyramid (which is actually five sided; four triangles and a square) you just have to modify that upward pointing triangle and the square of the cube. It’s not exact to the one’s that the Egyptians built, mind you, and I make no claim that it has any relation to them. I think I will probably due a future article on the legend, myth, and symbology associated with pyramid structures in human history, but that’s not for today. In the meantime, it’s a satisfying exercise.

Of course, one of the most basic ideagrams that we can render from the hexagon shape is the “hex” itself, as six-rayed assembly of lines. This equivocates to the “grove” symbol in the Ogham script. Again, I can’t say there’s any evidence of a connection, but that doesn’t prevent you making one, and drawing on the power of that symbol. In some permutations of the Ogham grove I have found it also flexes to represent the transits of the luminaries on the equinoxes and solstices. That is, if you take an aerial view of Stonehenge – or the Great Pyramid of Giza for that matter – and plot the sunrise and sunset positions of the sun and moon on the equinoxes and solstices, you get a hex line shape. In this case, the angles are much more shallow, as the Tropic are around 23.7 degrees north and south of the equinoctal line, and in a regular hexagon, the angles are 60 degrees.

Which is to say, they are sextile for the purposes of astrology. Which we can also derive from the hexagon shape. For instance, if we take one of our inner triangles, and draw a line from each corner to the middle (instead of all the way across) we get a three rayed shape with angles of 120 degrees. This is a trine. you can also achieve the same design by erasing half of the rays in the hex. Have of six is three. Half of sextile is trine, even though the angle measurements double. I always had trouble understanding that relationship until I started playing with these hex diagrams. Maybe this will help you.

You can find the 90 degrees of a square aspect with a hair more work. Put the hexagram back in and draw a line from the top of the upper triangle to the bottom of the bottom triangle. Now draw a line across the point where the two triangles join in the middle. Erase the extra lines and viola – a four rayed shape with 90 degree angles.

You have now derived the three major aspects used in astrology. Of course, you’re going to need a chart.

So take the hexagram, and draw lines through each point of the triangle, like we do to get the hex, and then draw lines through each of the intersecting angles, like we did to get the square. You end up with 12 rays, and the cusps of 12 signs. In the diagram I’ve reduced the size of the hexagram, so the relationship is clearer, but you can see it does indeed contain the keys to a zodiac.

Overlaid in color here are two of the trine diagrams, one in blue, which shows you the relationships of the water signs. You can rotate this to locate the air, earth, and fire signs, respectively. The red one also shows the locations of the cardinal, fixed, and mutable triplicity, in this case for the signs of fire, but just rotate it around and the others fall into place.

Is this all that we can tease out of the humble hexagon? No. Fiddling around in my art software I was able to come across a few more totally unrelated, but poignant connections using just the geometry and some imagination.

Taking our hex lines again, you can look to them as Cartesian coordinates. They are the X, Y and Z axes of three dimensional space. Anyone who struggles with that train leaving Chicago problem may remember some of these exercises from algebra classes. I do a lot of 3-D animation work, and the 3-D grid is almost second nature to me. Essentially the center where the three line cross is 0, and any point in space can be plotted using positive or negative values along those lines, so X is left and right, Y is up and down, and Z is forward or back. In order to see clearly the values of all three lines, the diagram is usually tilted in almost exactly the same way as our hex. So you can use a hex to put anything anywhere.

Now, I have mentioned before that we all live in a four-dimensional space-time. If I want to diagram it on my hexagon, I can just drop it in at a right angle to Y axis, and get the following figure.

So any point in space and time can be reached by virtue of the hex. That might explain why the capacious interior of a certain blue phone box has had hexagon wall decorations for several decades. Or not. Still, it’s an intriguing expression of the concept.

Moving back into more esoteric spaces, I was also able to take the basic hex, add a few curves, and arrive at the Xi-Rho symbol, usually with Alpha and Omega, this is supposedly the vision of Constantine at the Malvern Bridge, with motto “in hoc signio vincis” – In this Sign, you will Conquer. While historians generally believe that Constantine took it as a message from Sol Invictus, later Christian records give it as the Xi-Rho, a short hand for Cristos, and the basis for what became Christian Rome. While his mother was a devout Christian, and Constantine did order the Council of Nicea which firmed up the Nicean Creed and laid the foundations of modern orthodoxy, the Emperor himself didn’t convert until his deathbed.

Another imaginative permutation is the zig-zag “lightning bolt” that is said to travel down the Quabbalistic Tree of Life bringing Divine Wisdom (Ain Soph) into existence in the material world. You need to stack a couple of hexagons for the full diagram, and add a tail at the bottom, but you can get there from here. Those claiming that abracadabra derives from the Hebrew “what I speak I manifest” might want to play with this idea a little further.

Am equally interesting object from the hexagon and As Above/So Below angles is a three dimensional construct known as a merkaba. The word merkaba comes from the Hebrew as “Chariot” and so we have an immediate link with the seventh card of the Tarot major arcana. As many others have posted, 2023 is considered a “Chariot” year as it numerologicaly resolves to seven. Seven is a sacred number all on it’s own, so if a merkaba is a chariot, then we’ve managed to find seven hidden in six. That’s an alchemical spontaneous generation worthy of old Bombastis himself.

The merkaba is the three dimensional extension of As Above, So Below. It is the two triangles, expressed as interlocking three-faced pyramids (see there was a reason I talked about the platonic pyramid) such that each face of each pyramid is pierced by the the point of another one. The diagram here is derived from the hexagon. I have mocked up one in Lightwave 3-D to show how interesting this thing becomes as an object. Pretty nifty trick for an old Hebrew chariot I think.

Some also say the word merkaba is derived from the ancient Egyptian root words mer-ka-ba. Several online sources style this as “light, spirit, and body” or “love, spirit, body”, It may be more accurately translated “Pyramid of the Soul and the Shadow” or “Food of the Blessed Dead” since “mer” can be either pyramid or cake. The Greek “pyramid” derives from “pyramis” -wheat cake. The Egyptian wheat cake was called ben-ben, which is the word for the top of the pyramid or the obelisk, which had a similar shape. These shapes were also symbolic of the sun’s rays, and the primordial mound of earth rising from the flood of the celestial Nile where the Lotus that Ra emerges from grew. Mer, then, is not the cake, but the ritual use of the cake, either in feeding a god or a deceased relative, both rituals we know of. It’s not fair to say the Greeks got it wrong, because over the long age of Egypt mer came to mean “love” and “pyramid” as well as the ritual use of the cake.

Those are fascinating concepts to explore. Relating them onward to a Hebrew chariot that is visually complex and symbolically loaded, draws to my mind some of the Old Testament angels connected with the prophet Ezekiel. Plenty of places to go with this one if one is interested.

Speaking of going, in my own explorations, I have used the hexagon/hexagram as basis to develop this symbol, which I will eventually put on an amulet or an altar stone. To my mind it connects with symbols of Hekate, and well, Hekate, Heka, Hex, Haxxan, Hagatesse and Hexagon can all blur lines in rhyme, alliteration, and the verbal games we play in spell work. And now you can see that there are mathematical and geometric games you can play as well, so if you are looking for right angle (pun meaningfully intended) to approach a particular magical operation, I hope I have given you some new tools to work with. If nothing else, I hope it encourages you to spend time looking past the surface of things as presented.

Before departing this week’s article I fully admit to lifting the title from a very much more important work. Even though you can’t copyright titles, and the words fit my little exercise, equally well, I clearly acknowledge, respect and admire the work of the pioneering African-American women the book and film Hidden Figures is about. Their contribution to the advancement of both the space program, and cause of racial justice in this country, cannot be minimized. If you are unaware of it, I strongly encourage you make yourself familiar.

Thank you again for reading all the way to the end of this week’s piece. It is longer and potentially more complicated that what I have offered in the past. More like this is forthcoming, so I hope you find it useful. I’ll be back again in a week.

January 4, 2023January 3, 2023

In Darkness Met

As part of the universe, when your mind changes, the universe has been changed as well. What an amazing power to have. Aim carefully. Aim well.
— Heart of Light, Blade of Thunder – Stephen K. Hayes

Drop a pebble into a pond, and you will see the ripples travel outward from where it struck the water.

Drop a second pebble, and the ripples from it will interact with the ripples from the first one, causing them to change.

Drop another pebble and another and another, and soon you won’t be able to tell where the ripples started.

Eventually you end up with the pond overflowing and nothing but a pile of pebbles.

Actions have consequences.

I may have mentioned I’m not part of the love and light crowd. If you can really make that work for you, fantastic. The universe probably needs more of that with horrifying monsters like me walking around.

Let me know how that works out with hexing the patriarchy or the Supreme Court or Donald Trump. Not saying that’s a bad thing, just posing a little thought experiment. It goes something like this.

Donald Trump, against all odds and the sanity of the universe, got elected President of the United States. There followed a great groundswell of anger and hatred, including many people who practice witchcraft actively cursing him in an effort to remove him from office.

There followed an inexplicable worldwide plague and poof, no more Donald. Orange man gone.

But wait, you say. That’s not how it happened.

But what if it was?

A lot of pebbles got dropped in that pond. Can you be sure you know where that ripple came from?

Here’s another story.

I did not have an enjoyable youth. I am sure many of you have experienced the frustration of growing up in a small town, which is backward, rigid, and narrow-minded. Anyone with an interest in ideas beyond the day-to-day or sports, was looked upon as strange. And I think I was considered the strangest in the bunch.

Many was the time I wished great harm come upon that town and all its inhabitants. You do this kind of thing when you’re a lonely weird kid and lonelier weirder teenager.

Eventually, though, I left the town, grew up, got over it, and got on with my life.

A few years ago the town was nearly destroyed by a rogue tornado.

My first thought was “Did I do that?”

Now, logically, tornadoes happen (just like inexplicable worldwide plagues).

They are the result of weather conditions coming together in specific ways that are still somewhat unpredictable. They may be more likely due to cyclic climatological changes, or the result of the widespread impact of human industrialization and environmental exploitation.

But they don’t happen because a kid was hurt and angry several decades ago. Even if that kid had a penchant for the occult, and on occasion whistled up thunderstorms. Still, in the back of my head, I wonder.

Did I do that?

If we believe in our personal power; if we believe that we can make our thoughts manifest and alter reality, then we must consider that answer might be yes.

And if the answer is yes, what kind of horrifying monster does that make me?

My child is fond of saying “Don’t put that idea out into the universe”. Usually that’s when I posit the more absurd outcome of an otherwise normal situation as my strange bent on a dad joke, but that bears consideration.

If we believe in our personal power; if we believe that we can make our thoughts manifest and alter reality, then what we do – all that we do – has an impact.

Truth be told, you aren’t sure that the person you muttered should have a horrible accident for cutting you off in traffic actually made it home alive.

So what kind of horrifying monster does that make you?

Actions have consequences.

We may not see where the ripple we started ends up. We may not know how many other ripples it will encounter, crash into, and alter. Or how long that ripple keeps going.

So we need to be very focused when we drop that pebble.

Even if that pebble is a curse, or other malevolent magic. Oh, yes, you can drop that pebble.

There is evil in the world. There is evil and chaos and things that don’t bend to the laws of man or the laws of physics and sometimes those things need smiting.

Some times deeds must be done that best be done in the dark.

faust-harry-clarke — The wonderful images of the Irish illustrator Harry Clarke ¹ for Faust way back in 1925. The original story, derived from a 13th century personage named Johann Faust, is the root of every polemic about selling one’s soul to the Devil.

Many modern renditions focus on how the hero gets out of the contract, tricks the Devil, and avoids Hellfire and Damnation. But the real message of the story is the slow and inexorable corruption of Faust as he delights in seduction and sadism – not prompted by his patron Mephistophiles, but coming from his own wanton nature.

Certainly this message about the corrupt state of the human soul was in line with the Church’s teaching, and many versions have Faust repenting at the end and gaining the last minute reprieve.

This also showed the Almighty’s dominion over the Fallen Angels, and allowed for “pious” experimenters to follow in Faust’s footsteps, in the 17th and 18th centuries because summoning demons for fun and profit was thereby made a “godly practice”.

Elric-spread — A more modern examination of the question of moral sorcery can be found in the works of the author Michael Moorcock. His Elric series, illustrated here by P. Craig Russell in Epic Comics, gives us a similar setup.

The hero, or anti-hero, is inheritor to an ancient black magic tradition, which he has eschewed initially for more “nature-based” work with elementals and animal spirits. Ultimately, he chooses to seek out the demon lords his ancestors served, in order to gain the power to defeat his enemy.

The story ends tragically, as one would expect, but it is not presented as Christian moralism. Rather, the multiverse (and I think Moorcock is among the first to use that term) is completely random, subject to the whims of beings of power, who use all less powerful without any qualms, and are all in turn used by those who can dominate them.

I find the similarity between Clarke and Russell’s artwork quite striking. When I first encountered the Faust images I thought it was a version done by Russell. Intriguing that they both deal with similar themes.

I have no issue with this, because as I said, I am aware that I am some sort of horrifying monster. And rapists and child molesters and murderers and evil people ought rightly to fear that, because when I let loose and get going, well, it’s not a pretty sight.

So it’s a good thing that it’s takes one whole hell of a lot to get me going. Like exhausting all possible reasonable normal options. That’s not easy. I’m Scorpio with Aries Moon and Aries rising so my basic inclination is to smite first, then go to the bar for a round of drinks.

When you can move mountains, you may find it easier to just go around them. While I spend a good deal of time in the study of magic and the occult, I am sure my active spellcasting is minimal compared to most of you. Honestly, I don’t find it necessary for every little thing. And I am frequently concerned about what the ripple touches.

That doesn’t mean I don’t try to bend things in my favor from time to time. The point of living a sacred life is to tune into the universe and improve the mutually beneficial tendencies of things to happen.

You should question everything. You shouldn’t, for that matter, just automatically believe anything that I write. For all you know, I could be the most evil self-serving psychopath ever loosed upon society, using my clever words to manipulate your thinking and enslave your mind. I’m not, of course. As far as you know, anyway.

Such people do exist. You have but to look to history and the great dictators and cult leaders. People are routinely charmed into committing horrible atrocities and self-destruction at the behest of a charismatic leader using the right words.

Adolf Hitler, considered one of the most horrible dictators of all time, actually trained in the use of his voice and mannerisms to extract the most effect out of the crowds he drew to him. The great Nazi rallies that inspired an otherwise rational nation to commit the Holocaust were designed and derived from occult and pagan traditions.

Frighteningly the Nazi ideologies are still extant in some pagan circles. I see swastikas pop up in “magic” posts on Pinterest. While the symbol is an ancient sun sign, and common to cultures around the world, these are thinly veiled attempts to de-stigmatize the Nazi version of the symbol in the seeking community. It’s vile.

We use the term “silver-tongued devil” as a half-compliment, to describe one whose way with words can convince someone to contrary behavior. Usually we mean minor escapades that are harmless but the devil’s still in there.

The beguiling power of the magician is an age old belief and an age old fear. There’s ample evidence that tones and sounds influence our perceptions of the words being spoken, and of the person speaking them. These skills are part of what we seek. It is part of what we gain from that inner confidence and stability that results from our journey of self-knowledge.

It is precisely because of this that we are obliged to be constantly aware of how we speak things into the universe. The mantra, the chant, and the spell are obvious. We are focusing our intent in these situations. But we are also capable of subconsciously or even unconsciously projecting power, which may be fearsome and malefic, if we are not watchful.

We do not know where the ripple will go.

Actions have consequences.

There is a road, no simple highway
Between the dawn and the dark of night
And if you go, no one may follow
That path is for your steps alone
— Ripple – The Grateful Dead (Robert Hunter/Jerry Garcia)

Thank you for reading this week’s article. I hope that it may be of help to you. But I do encourage you to question it. I do.

I will return next week.

November 30, 2022December 1, 2022

Many A Quaint And Curious Volume

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Header Image by Dana Ward on Unsplash

November 16, 2022November 16, 2022

A Brief Correspondence Course

It occurs to me that the pun in the title of this week’s article is completely lost on a couple of generations accustomed to Google, Wikipedia, and Youtube as the source of all knowledge. By way of explanation, back in Ye Olden Days, ere the Internet was a one-lane goat track, and the Elves still appeared right out there in broad daylight, one might pursue educational endeavors by means of the postal mail service. The back and forth epistles between student and teacher made up said correspondence,

That’s okay, I’m sure nobody gets all of Gandalf’s jokes either.

However, it is the backing and forthing that are important, particularly in the art of spell casting. This is the root of sympathetic magic, which is one of the oldest, if not the oldest, of magical practices.

There are three important tentpoles to remember in sympathetic magic.

The image of the thing is the thing.

The name of the thing is the thing.

The thing that is like the thing is the thing.

Number three is the Doctrine of Sympathies or Correspondences.

If a stone is deep red it connects to blood. If a flower looks like an eye it’s connected to the vision (both spiritual and mundane). If the leaves are dark we consider it saturnine. Pick up any spell book from the Greek Magical Papyri to the latest Witchcraft for Real Idiots on the ‘Zon and you’ll likely find at least one table of correspondences. There are even magic texts that are nothing but correspondences.

There are astronomical correspondences that match the planets to metals, stones, plants, parts of the body, colors of the spectrum, and hours of the day. Astrology is perhaps an early archetype of the use of correspondences. The nature of the animal applied to the constellation is used to express how those born with the sun in that sign are inclined. The facets of a person’s life are divided into houses, which “naturally” align with the nature of these signs, Then the nature of the planets may be interpreted as to how they react with the sign and the house, and in aspect with other planets.

Much work has been done with astrological correspondences to the Tarot, so that reading the cards can incorporate the heavenly influences as well as the imagery on the cards themselves. Of course the Tarot are also intimately connected with the letters of the Hebrew alphabet, and with numbers, and the four elements, and the core tools of the witch’s practice- wand/staff/broom/torch; cup/cauldron/well; sword/knife/pin/needle; and stone/coin/hearth/tomb. It is probably because Tarot has become so ubiquitous, due to it’s simple operation and portability, that all these additional connections are grafted on. They are not, perhaps, inherent to the Tarot itself.

Tarot and Astrology are interlinked in most modern magical systems. There are traditional associations of the cards with specific planets, signs, and houses that allow the interpretation of the cards as astrological and vice versa. In the use of cards as symbols in spellcraft, these traditional correspondences may be called upon.

For example, Gemini is most usually connected with The Lovers, the seventh card in the RWS deck. This sees the two figures, as Gemini.

There are however, four other serviceable cards in the deck. The Deuce of Cups is seen as a “Lover type” card, and we have the inclusion of the serpent staff of Hermes/Mercury, ruler of Gemini.

The Deuce of Swords might be more beneficial to break up a romance. or perhaps break a contract or get out of a legal problem. These are the purview of Gemini /Mercury, and this Sword card always reminds me of Blind Justice (especially since in RWS, the Justice card is not blind).

Gemini also covers short travel, and the Deuce of Wands and of Pentacles have travel motifs. Although the long journey typically associated with sea-borne imagery is usually Sagittarius, Gemini/Mercury is involved with commercial ventures. Balancing your checkbook whilst your freight is on stormy seas applies.

While the idea of correspondence is nothing new, there are new correspondences. Much of the attachment to Tarot is perhaps a century and a half old or less. There’s good evidence that they were used for “fortune telling” back in the 1400s but the layers of esoteric synthesis started in France with Eliphas Levi. The same can be said for other correspondences you might find in all those spellbooks.

In pre-historic times, the use of herbal medication was a necessity. If something looked like a particular part of the body, then it could be used to treat ailments of that part. However, as Freud pointed out, sometimes a cigar was just a cigar. If the medicine worked, it was used again and again. If it didn’t it was likely forgotten, ignored, or left out of the oral tradition. This would not preclude it from being “rediscovered” by successive generations who might add it back to the pharmacopeia for a while. This methodology was followed up until relatively modern times.

The same practice was used for the medicinal/magical use of stones, jewels, crystals, and the like. The ancient Romans dissolved pearls in vinegar and chugged it down to give them a pearlescent complexion. Whether it worked or not is questionable. Pearls being largely calcium carbonate with trace compounds, it was probably equivalent to quaffing chalk, and may have made their bones and teeth stronger. But being wealthy enough to drink a pearl milkshake on a regular basis may have been more of an attraction than milky smooth skin. The apothecaries of the ancient and Medieval times were no less mercenary than their modern counterparts.

Mandrake has long been a witch herb. These images from a Medieval Herbal show lore that has been unchanged for ages.

The mandrake was supposed to cry out when pulled from the earth, and it’s scream would either cause madness or death. So the enterprising apothecary simply tied a dog to the plant, and then called the dog from out of earshot. It’s not clear whether the dog went mad or died, but in the Middle Ages dogs were not accorded the value they are now.

Mandrake roots came in male and female versions, and were selected for a specific purpose accordingly. Most texts considered the undivided root as male, and a root with a fork as female. The drawing here is probably wrong, as it appears to depict two different plant species. It was copied to several herbals of the time.

And certainly this contributed to adding to the lists of exotic, rare, and hard to come by ingredients that fleshed out correspondence tables throughout history. Chinese herbals call for bits of dragons, unicorns, and other mythical creatures. Sadly these were – and still are – often substituted by parts from rare and endangered terrestrial animals like the rhinoceros, whale, and condor.

In fact, the idea of correspondences makes substitution an “ethical” option for the harried apothecary. If this rock looks like that rock, or this bone looks like that bone, then they are, for most intents and purposes – the same. This obviously can – and did – have tragic consequences, as many herbs and plants are not only not interchangeable, but can be outright deadly.

Because medical/recreational use of certain compounds is hardly a new thing, it’s important to recognize that the use of something in witchcraft might be the same as it was in folk medicine. In so many societies magic and medicine were interchangeable, and this has only changed in the last 150 years or so. At the height of the Enlightenment, when the scientific method was about to burst onto the scene, people were still being bled and purged to remove “ill humours” that were the cause of their diseases. Opium, cannabis, and coca were used as anesthetics and soporifics into the early 20th century, and their chemically synthesized children are still with us today.

So called “flying ointments” often partake of a number of herbs which create euphoria or somatic states, and many of the ingredients are those old Saturnine herbs, the nightshades. Containing potent alkaloids, plants like Atropa Belladonna, Hyoscyamus Niger, Datura Stramonium, and of course, Mandragora Officanarum have been the companions of witches since time immemorial. These are highly dangerous toxic plants that have a real potential to kill. Yet they are closely related to other nightshade plants like the potato, tomato, bell and chili peppers, which we consume as part of an ordinary diet.

Tobacco is also part of this family, and has long had sacred use among Indigenous Peoples of the Western Hemisphere. It was readily adapted by witchcraft and voodoo in the aftermath of the discovery of the New World by European colonials. Like many magical herbs, it’s sacred use in moderate amounts might be deemed safe, but in mundane and constant consumption leads to a pernicious addiction and a plethora of health problems (I am a former smoker – I know of which I speak).

candle-color — Color is a common feature of correspondence, and one usually easy to work out. Red is associated with the blood, the heart, and love. Purple, the color of royalty, often connects with Jupiter, King of the Gods. Yellow represents the Sun and is used in solar magic. Black is color of death, the deep night, and in post Christian Europe, evil spirits that dwell there.

Color magic often employs candles, and much has been made of having the proper color of candle for the spell. Given that coloring candles is a fairly modern technique, and that witches historically would not only have made do with the tallow and beeswax they had, and would not have usually advertised a spell by showy ingredients, you are probably safe with plain old white candles. Personally, I have a number of faux candles in various colors that I use interchangeably with actual ones. The LED candles are safe for my cats, vegan friendly, and reusable.

So were the ancient sorcerors just bombed out of their gourd all the time? It’s possible. There is some good evidence to that theory. Also, if your job is to have visions for the tribe, and eating the little white berries gives you visions, you’re likely to be eating a lot of the little white berries. If your job is to hunt the mastadon, it’s probably not the greatest idea. (Seriously, though. Don’t eat the little white berries. They’re very bad for you.)

The sacred nature of altered states of consciousness is fairly accepted in some cultures, as are things like mental illness, and even what we used to call mental retardation. People who were “different” in the way they spoke and acted were assumed to be in touch with the spirit world, and cared for and respected. Other cultures, of course, see such things as evil. Joan of Arc was probably schizophrenic or suffering from a brain lesion. She was sent by God to the French, and burned by the English as a witch.

Correspondences change similarly from culture to culture and place to place. If you are perusing that Chinese herbal you’ll find a lot of dragon bones (possibly ground fossils, or crocodile or snake bones), ginseng, and mushrooms. A European grimoire might place greater emphasis on precious stones or metals, and the Arabs would favor much incense and spices that were native or common in their lands. These were all compiled as part of an industrial mechanism that fed both the magic and medical practices of the culture. While there is probably some folklore to a lot of it, there was clearly money to be made by padding the lists.

I personally don’t make much of correspondences. I’ll consider astrological metals if I am working on an amulet, but given the price of gold and silver these days, I’m not likely to be petitioning the Sun and the Moon. Since petitioning the Sun and the Moon might be beneficial, though, maybe I ought to consider a way to get around that pesky high-dollar metal thing.

magic-stones — We all love the shiny rocks, don’t we? Crystal and stone correspondences are some of the most common we hear about. They are regarded as “birthstones” so can be astrologically attached. They have associations with the Chakras (usually based on color), planets, and various “vibrations” that may be traditional folklore or modern myth.
The pieces in the image above are (Clockwise from top) amethyst- quartz contaminated with iron, rutilated quartz with bits of a greenish tourmaline crystal, fluorite, amethyst again, and iron pyrite, or Fool’s gold.

This is a crystalline formation of iron and sulfur, bonded at the molecular level. It doesn’t have the malleability and ductility of true gold, so it probably didn’t substitute for it in all those solar amulets. On the other hand, being made of iron and sulfur, it can serve as well for Mars and Ares, or Vulcan, lord of the forge, or even Infernal association.

How about aluminum instead of silver? It’s a shiny white metal. It’s relatively cheap (compared to silver) easier to get, and – hey – it was actually used to go to the moon. There’s aluminum that we left behind on the moon right now, in fact. Would the Angel of the Moon accept aluminum instead of silver in my mystic moon amulet? Well, probably not if one goes with the strictest rules of the grimoire. But I am fairly sure that gold and silver were just as hard to come by in the days before alchemy, so I’m not at all sure that the Angel of the Moon didn’t accept the equivalent of a wooden nickel.

Alchemy, of course, changed everything because you could make all the gold you wanted. I hear you snickering in the back there. There actually is a chemical trick, doable with the technology of the time, which has the appearance of turning a piece of metal into gold. It’s a kind of simple electroplating, and for a short period of time (perhaps time to pass it off to an irate landlord) it would pass most Medieval tests for being gold.

So again, how many of the spells in the old grimoires actually used gold and silver and rubies and emeralds is open to question. I think potentially a lot of them employed early synthetics made by the alchemists. And if it was good enough for the Angel of the Moon in 1278, it’s good enough now. Scribing the spell with a shiny metallic marker might horrify some working in “high magic” and I can’t guarantee your results, but it has worked for me on occasion.

Substitutions can be made. Instead of silver you might use a silver coin, like a nickel or a quarter (if you’re in the US). These were originally struck from silver, but now operate as symbolically so. There’s no reason the correspondence between a modern silver colored coin and an antique silver coin can’t extend to the correspondence between that silver coin and the Angel of the Moon.

The working witches of yore didn’t have access to all the shiny stuff you can get shipped from the ‘Zon. They were frequently on the down low to begin with, so having a bunch of shiny stuff around the hut probably alarmed the local populace who sent out the torch and pitchfork memo. To the extent that an herb or a stone or a piece of red thread worked, they kept it, maybe in secret. But I don’t believe any of them looked up a table of correspondences and said “Well, we can’t fly to the Sabbat, tonight, we’re out of eye of newt.”

Because any fool knows you need wool of bat for a flying potion. Duh.

I hope you found this diversion diverting. I will be back again next week with more windmills to tilt at.

November 9, 2022November 9, 2022

The Knowing of Things

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There seems to be a lot of it going around.

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

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

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

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

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

I have a couple of really good reasons.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Talk in song from tongues of lilting grace
Sounds caress my ear
And not a word I heard could I relate
The story was quite clear
Kashmir – Robert Plant, Jimmy Page, John Bonham

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

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

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

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

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

And that’s kind of the point.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hekate may have come from a group of people living in the southwestern part of what is now Turkey called the Carians.¹ She was amalgamated into the Greek Pantheon in various ways, depending on the time period, but all were supernatural in origin. She was not originally a chthonic goddess, and seems to have only connected that way in her assisting Demeter in searching the underworld for Persephone. This is how she acquired the torch symbol. She is at some point connected to the crossroads, and dogs and snakes and death and witchcraft, but these associations may have had little to do with her original form in the country of her birth.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

For that matter, she could be a Hekate impersonator.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Please Share and Enjoy !

Please Share and Enjoy !

Please Share and Enjoy !

Please Share and Enjoy !

Please Share and Enjoy !

Please Share and Enjoy !

Please Share and Enjoy !

Please Share and Enjoy !

Please Share and Enjoy !

Please Share and Enjoy !