Category: Magic

Includes Spellcasting, Magic Theories, Ritual Magic, and related topics;

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Betwixt and Between

Island Time 2022

As you read this article I am traveling. That would usually not be considered an interesting statement on it’s own. If I said that I was traveling to London and Paris and Rome, it might acquire a romantic cachet. Traveling to Egypt or India is still more exotic; I have been to the former, but not the latter.

If I were to tell you that I was wandering the astral plane, or traversing the rivers of time itself, you’d either think me a fiction writer or a madman-though some small number of you might take me at my word.

But this trip is a simple vacation to a rather pedestrian area of the Florida Gulf Coast; one which I return to nigh annually at this time of year as it coincides with other interests that make such a visit affordable. Excepting two postponements during the pandemic, this has been on my August calendar for the past several years, and likely remains so.

It is this occasion of locomotion that inspired me to delve into the subject matter of this week’s article, namely that of liminal spaces and the use to which they can be put in imagining our magic.

The liminal space is that undefinable point between one thing and another thing. It’s a border that is not marked on the map. It exists in space and in time, in object and artifice, and in mind, if not in body. It is part of neither, but joining both. By this nature of poetic non-existence, it provides an opportunity to draw power from the fabric of the universe, send messages across the aethers, and walk between the worlds.

The crossroads and hedgerow are traditionally liminal locations. Mountaintops, the banks of rivers and streams, and the shores of lakes and seas also qualify. Cemeteries and graveyards, being places where the living go to meet with the dead, are ripe places of the in-between world.

Temporally midnight in modern society is considered between one day and the next, though it is not always the Witching Hour referred to in writings on the subject. Cultures like the ancient Celts and Hebrews reckoned the day as from sunset to sunset, so these times, along with the dawn which is the middle of that day, become points of special significance.

The eve of the High Sabbat Beltane is considered to have a special nature, and is called Walpurgisnacht in central European tradition. Midsummer’s eve opens the doorway not just to Oberon and Titania but to a host of spirits and devils. Hallowe’en is connected to the Samhain ritual of the Celtic people, and given similar power. The Winter Solstice and the Equinoxes were likewise marked and celebrated, though lore regarding their status as liminal gateways is less extant. These are pinions the Wheel of The Year turns on, and their importance goes back to our days in the caves.

Of course, sometimes the magic needs making and the crossroads at midnight is not a desirable place to be, and it’s weeks to any of the High Sabbats. The doorway of your house, apartment, or room constitutes a working liminal space. In our experience of the world, we are always now… never in the past or future, but always in the present moment. That makes time itself something of a crossroads.

But when we travel, we also experience liminal spaces. It’s important to be aware of this, because we can use those energies. If we are not aware, then we are also susceptible to having our own energy altered, sapped, or diverted as we encounter these places.

The most liminal space I can think of in the modern world is the airport. It’s not a real destination. No one is going to the airport to be there in any way other than temporary. Either you are going because you are leaving for someplace else, or you have arrived from someplace else and want to leave the airport.

The energy of an airport is chaos. So many people want to be elsewhere. People are nervous, frustrated, homesick, longing, exhausted, and sometimes just plain lost. If you’ve done any amount of air travel, you know what I am talking about.

oskar-kadaksoo-DDBDkz0p918-unsplash
Despite the vast number of hours I have spent waiting for flights, I’ve never snapped the requisite “waiting for a flight” photo. Maybe I’ll do that this time. Until then: Photo by Oskar Kadaksoo on Unsplash

I’ve spent a lot of time in airports. One of my former occupations had me flying around the planet every couple of weeks. Thankfully this was when I was younger, and the security was less intense, but it was still generally a place of unease. If I was departing on a mission, my mind was on the next stop, what time I would have to get my bearings when I landed, and what problems awaited me there. If I was returning home, I was impatient to get on the plane and get going, even if it was 8 to 12 hours in the air.

Often I would arrive some hours before the flight, owing to hotel check-out times and rental car returns. After you’ve shopped duty free, had dinner, and as many drinks at the airport bar as you could and safely make it on the plane, there’s not much to do but sit and think.

This was pre-Internet. There was no Wi-Fi (free or otherwise) and you might only find a TV in the bar. Even if there had been Wi-Fi, my company laptop was a rarity among air travelers in those days. So if I’d finished that novel I stuck in my luggage, my only choice was to people watch (which is not nearly as interesting the 45th time) or retreat into my own mind for a while.

I spent a lot of that time contemplating the nature of reality. If you’re weird, and you’re bored, that’s a thing. While not necessarily working with magic, I did develop a lot of my personal ideas about how energy works, how it can be manipulated, and the relationship between perception and reality. And a good deal of that was related to ideas about traveling betwixt and between said perceived realities.

Adjacent to the airport is another liminal space, and that is the airplane itself. Aside from boarding and unboarding (which are also liminal times at the boundary of the flight) the plane is almost constantly in motion, even though you are sitting still. “High into the sky, moving without moving” seems a fitting snippet for all manner of spell crafting. You are above the clouds. You are near to the stars. You sail the heavens in a silver bird. All wonderfully evocative and poetic thoughts for making magic.

Closer to ground, of course, are trains and buses, and the depots that they stop at. In the USA this manner of travel is less common than it used to be, outside of commuter traffic. But there’s no reason to ignore the potential on the subway. You are tunneling into the bowels of the earth, going underground and underwater, in the belly of a metal snake. In those darkened tunnels you may find displaced trolls and gnomes, raised from their natural slumber by the incessant clickety-clack of the passing cars.

A personal automobile is just as easily seen as a space between, but if you are the driver, I discourage any complicated working. As a passenger though, you can enjoy the ride, traveling without moving. You are pulling at the edge of the world around you, dragging it along, pushing it up in front of you. That’s the only real way that you are going to get that big car through the tiny tunnel you see ahead on the road.

Traveling shifts our perception of time and space. Indeed, how is it that the tunnel entrance grows larger as we near it, and then gets small again as we drive out the other side. Logic tells us that the tunnel is always the same size, it is simply our perception of it that changes. Things only look smaller because they are farther away. Yet no one is really quite sure why light behaves like that, or our brains translate it that way.

Light does strange things when you are moving. Einstein (sorry, we’re going to be doing maths again) posed his thought experiment of the railway carriage to explain the idea of relative observation of phenomenon. It goes like this.

Say you are on a moving train and you drop something heavy out the window. You will see it drop straight down.

Meanwhile, someone else is standing on the side of the track, and sees the object drop down at a forward angle. So far this doesn’t seem too weird. After all, the person in the train is moving forward at the same rate that the item is moving forward as it drops. From the point of view of the train rider, the object goes straight down.

But because it was moving forward when it left your hand, it still has the forward momentum of the train, and will until it drops to the ground. So someone watching from the side will see it going forward and down at an angle. If we plot both observations together we get a right triangle.

The nifty thing about right triangles is that they are subject to the rules of Pythagoras, expressed as the square of the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the square of the other two sides. If you fell asleep in Freshman Geometry, the hypotenuse is the longest side, in this case, our angled descent.

Now we could measure the distance that the object fell from the train window, and measure how far forward it travelled before it contacted the ground and stopped, multiply each of those by themselves, and then add them together, and take the square root of that number to determine how long the long side is. That’s a useful tool in surveying and working out how high something is in the sky, and I recommend learning it. In this case, though, our eyes will tell us what we want to know.

The path of the object falling at an angle is longer than the path of the object that dropped straight down.

But the object traveled the longer path in the same amount of time that it dropped the shorter distance straight down from the train.

Now, we can go invoke the same logic that gets us through that road tunnel up ahead, and say, well, what was really happening is that it was traveling the longer distance. It was the perception of the person on the train that was wrong.

But that perception is 100% accurate, from the context of the train. So how do we get around two different distances being traveled at the same speed in the same amount of time. That’s physically impossible.

Simple. You just alter time.

You may want to sit down for this. Take a sip of water. It gets bumpy.

raliway experiment
When one is late for their flight and desperately searching the interwebs for “railway experiment” to illustrate this portion of the text as the nifty demonstrative infographic didn’t get done, you may find the strangest things. For instance, the first passenger railway carriage, clearly modified from a stage coach, was call the Experiment. I don’t know if anyone riding inside it perchanced to drop their watch from the window, but at the staggering speed of 15 miles per hour, the same strange alteration of time and space would occur according to Einstein.

When you are on the train, you experience time passing at a slower rate than the person standing on the siding. So time for you passes slow enough for the object to fall along that longer angled path, exactly as you watch it travel the shorter path to the ground.

Since Einstein, we’ve become accustomed to the term “space-time” or “space-time continuum” if you want to be fancy. Basically what this says is that time is a dimension of space, just like length and depth and height. So in the universe we inhabit in our waking state, things are left or right, up or down, here or there, and past or future, relative to our position.

Space gets curved by gravity. We’re still not entirely sure how, but it works that way. We have proof of this in the recent photos from the James Webb Space Telescope, showing light from distant galaxies being distorted by the gravity of a closer star. It takes longer to get through curved space than “flat space” so the light we see gets bent.

Gravity is a factor of mass. Something really big can bend space, and since time is connected to space, well it gets bent too. Mass can come from large amounts of matter, but it can also come from smaller amounts of matter that are moving. This is because energy itself has mass, and something that is moving has energy.

So on the train the amount of energy present from it’s motion is slightly bending space-time. Bending it enough so that when you dropped that rock out the window you saw time pass slower than the person standing on the siding.

So when you are traveling betwixt and between on an airplane over the Atlantic, you are in fact, time traveling. You are living at a slower time than the friends you left on the ground behind you and you will be moments younger than them when you land.

The faster you go, the slower time gets. Of course, the faster you go, the more energy you have, and the greater your mass. This causes space to curve as well as time, and explains why, at least as far as our little universe is concerned, you can’t exceed light speed. The faster you go, the more bent space becomes, and the slower time passes. Eventually you reach a point that you can’t get there from here, and that is the lightspeed barrier.

At least not in this universe. Which is why scientists and science fiction have created holes in the universe that open onto other universes, alternate realities, and “hyperspace” where the gravitational wall doesn’t apply. Hyperspace and wormholes are the ultimate in liminal space. They can be reached, accessed, traveled through, and yet never inconveniently partake of the local laws of physics.

Witches have been using these things for eons. Wandering in Faerie has many similarities with these non-Newtonian spaces. Years pass in a matter of days. Castles, kingdoms, and entire worlds exist through a hole in a hedge. Relative size is not fixed. One pill makes you larger and one pill makes you small.

Look you for the openings at the edges;
Places where water comes from nowhere;
The way not seen in passing,
but only glimpsed when looking behind.

At least it will give you something to do when you’re flight is delayed and you’re stuck in Denver.

Thank you for reading this week’s article. Rest assured I will return from my bit of Island Time to present more conundrums for you next week.

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The Play’s the Thing

Nocturnus Eye Revised For Blog

When the magician writes as poet or novelist, are we to take his literary works as a veiled grimoire?

It’s not as uncommon as you might think. Crowley, of course, published poems, plays, and other fiction. Although certainly more recognized for his literary work, William Butler Yeats was an enthusiastic member of the Golden Dawn. A. E. Waite and Eliphas Levi were both considered poets as well as occultists, and more modern authors on occult subjects pen fictional works under their own name, myself included.

Alternatively, if the magician writes as poet or novelist, are we to take his occult works as fraud? This is an unfortunate tendency by those looking to debunk. But the non-believer just sees it as evidence that he was right all along. What about the believers? As those who practice various occult disciplines, does the appearance of a fictional occult novel penned by a known occultist make the ground slippery?

It’s not unfair to say that there is a history of fraud within the occult. Orthodoxy, of course, has it’s own share of charlatans and money-changers violating the temple. It is only reasonable to consider that any spiritual or supernatural belief is likely to attract con-artists. After all, traffic with the unknown and invisible is easy enough to claim.

When we look at the cyclic flowering of interest in magic and spirituality, we see a trend. Prominent figures intermingle with the intellectual and artistic celebrities of the day. Said celebrities often are dabblers themselves- certainly they are drawn to it. Pixie Smith worked in the theatre with Bram Stoker. Her works were exhibited by Alfred Stieglitz, and admired by Georgia O’Keefe. That she is responsible for the most widely know modern Tarot deck seems a minor footnote.

Believer’s see her work as inspired by esoteric powers. It certainly gives life to Waite’s text, and allows us to explore beyond it. And this is true of the works of many artists that use magic, myth, and spiritual dimensions as part of the creative process.

Austin Osman Spare is cited as instrumental in the foundation of Chaos Magic but this was secondary to his career as artist and illustrator in his lifetime, at least in context of the wider public. It is with the hazy fog of time that his magical workings have gained more prominence. I first encountered him through his art, which resonates very much with my own personal tastes and style. I could clearly see the inclusion of occult subject and symbolism, but then I know what I am looking at. An untrained eye will just see “spooky pictures”. I have heard that applied to my work as well.

But I am also trained with the eye of an artist and a good-sized library of art history books and I can think of numerous examples of symbolic art using occult imagery that has little, if any relation, to the artist’s personal spiritual belief. So if I am looking at an overtly occult piece, I don’t automatically assume that the artist is actually involved in the occult.

Nor am I likely to assume that if someone is an open follower of spiritual disciplines, that their creative output is an overtly spiritual act. As an artist, myself, I can speak to this being a very confused landscape. While every work I make has some infusion of will, intention, and perhaps even symbol and construction derived from magical sources, they are not all works of magic. A painting is not a spell, nor is it necessarily enchanted.

arkham01
This is the tour de force double-page spread from the Grant Morrison (author) and Dave McKean (artist) masterpiece Batman: Arkham Asylum – A Serious House on a Serious Earth.

Supposedly the author (who is openly involved in the occult) and the artist (who uses occult symbols but is officially an atheist) were somewhat at odds during the creation of this piece. Perhaps it was this strife that resulted in such a unique and enduring episode in the multi-faceted Batman genre. The image above incorporates a number of familiar occult symbols, such as the Hanged Man and The World from the Thoth Tarot, astrological symbols, Hebraic and Kabbalistic ideograms, Dee’s Monas Hieroglyphica and other scribbles and scratching fit for the finest Medieval grimoire.
arkham02
Another selection from the graphic novel, making reference to the use of the Tarot as a means of retraining the “Two-Face” character from his monomania for outcomes based on a single coin toss to 78 options (156 if you count reverses). The artwork is experimental, often disjointed, and seems to contain all kinds of hidden meanings. Yet neither author or artist represent this book as anything other than a creative expression designed to entertain.

On the other hand, anything that partakes so profoundly of my own inner spirit, cannot but be charged with it. So a painting does have some power about it. This magic is separate from incantation or ensorcelment. It is creative energy made manifest, and in being that, perhaps is even more richly imbued with that power than an actual intentional work of magic.

It’s a question for philosophy majors and not artists or magicians. As both of the latter, I am in a unique position to appreciate the works of the artist/magician. The artist looks at the work and sees only the art. The magician looks at the work and sees only the symbols. And the rest of humanity just sees the spooky picture. Maybe they are drawn to it or repulsed by it, but their connection is, to my mind, a lesser one.

The fusion of mythology and creativity is by no means a new one. The great masterpieces of the Renaissance are taken from both the Judeo-Christian teachings and the tales of the ancient Greeks and Romans. The Roman arts copied the Greeks, and the Greeks were influenced by the Egyptian, Persians, and possibly even Hindus. The magic and the art flowed together, as it always had, since those first scribblings on the walls of Lascaux and Alta Mira caves.

It is only recently that the distinction between art made for sacred purpose and art made for commercial purpose has diverged. It’s part of that secular humanism of the Renaissance.

While it is true that the ancients plopped down their denari at the idol store in the forum for the same kind of mass produced imagery that lines the shelves at your local occult shop, they did not see this as reducing it’s sacred nature.

Ancient peoples understood that the gods lived in every idol, whether carved in finest marble by Phidias for the Acropolis, or poorly modeled in clay by slaves in a foreign port. The magic was in the talisman, whether you paid dearly for it at the temple, or got it from a street vendor outside the bath or brothel.

The craft of the magician, the priest, the witch, and the sorceror were seen as an equally valid career in ancient times. Although the spread of Christianity and later Islam would do a great deal to make those careers socially unacceptable, illegal, and evil, they more or less continued to operate. The Black Books of the Middle Ages simply adopted the monotheistic deities as the inscrutable source of all that was. Angels and demons were at His command, so the sorceror simply used God to bully them into doing his will.

But when we get to the Renaissance and start questioning the nature of that God, the nature of Nature, and the nature of the human role in it, sacredness begins to disappear. Yes, there are certainly spiritually inspired works of art from this period. They are some of the more famous and celebrated works of all time.

But we talk about Michelangelo’s Sistine Ceiling, not God’s, or even the Popes. The focus has shifted to the individual, the personal, away from the divine. While architects had apprenticed in the ancient traditions of Sacred Geometry that drove ever higher the great Gothic cathedrals, they eagerly sold these secrets to build palaces for a new merchant elite, who wielding power and wealth from their own achievement, rather than a heavenly mandate.

By the time we get to the Industrial Revolution, machines are making the art and craft. This triggered several artistic movements aimed at reclaiming the sacred and mystical nature of art, as well as making art a vehicle to communicate these ideas. The Pre-Raphaelites are a strong example of this, using classical and mythical themes in recurring tableaus.

One of my favorites of this period is John William Waterhouse, whose use of Greek and Arthurian myth is ripe with resplendent examples of magical practice, paraphernalia, and iconography. Yet there is no evidence that Waterhouse had any direct experience of occult practice, despite being a contemporary of Waite and Crowley.

Waterhouse was working with a vocabulary common the people in his movement, whose meanings were symbolic, but perhaps more philosophically than spiritually so. The Crystal Ball and Destiny are virtually the same painting, with the same model in the same pose, and communicating a similar idea. But the eponymous crystal is not seen to be a symbol of magic, but of the ideation of future time.

Of secondary consideration is that the Pre-Raphaelites and related movements were very obsessed with the richness of surfaces. The figures exist in complex drapes, flowing dresses, shining armor, reflected in glass and water. There are wide varieties of flowers and plants rendered in accurate detail. Furniture and artifice are exquisitely designed.

Arnolfini-portrait
The Arnolfini Portrait is a splendid example of late Medieval symbolic painting. This is as much message as masterpiece. The various secret/sacred cues include:

The shoes cast aside indicating that this is a sacred space.
The single candle symbolizes the presence of God.
The little dog is code for fidelity – marital faithfulness.
The bed to the right foretells the consummation of the marriage.
Her “pregnant pause” is symbolic of the children she will bear.
Her domestic role is heralded by the little broom on the bedpost.
The figure of St. Margaret on the bedpost offers protection to expectant mothers.
The mirror is surrounded by images of Christ’s passion, indicative of the piety of the couple. This is enforced by the rosary next to it.
The red bed curtains and chair drape represent the Blood of Christ (a source says it’s symbolic of romantic passion but that seems out of place with all the other religious symbology).
The chair itself is topped by a pair of carved cherubim (in the Old Testament sense- the winged bulls of Babylon.) The chair may represent the Throne of God or the “Mercy Seat” on the Ark of the Covenant, which was flanked by two such creatures. The lion on the chair arm may be connected to St. Mark.
Her shoes are closer to the Throne and red. The exposed part of her dress is blue. These are indicators that she is a virgin, and identified with the Holy Virgin Mary.
The green in her robe is further indication of fertility.
His black robes indicate sobriety and dedication.
The hat is another marker that this is taking place in a holy space.
The apples on the left are said to represent original sin. Tangentially, they may also represent the “fruit” of that sin. Much of this painting is about the getting of offspring.
The window indicates that the man is connected to the outside world, whereas his wife (at this time in history) was given dominion over the household only.

The truly interesting part of this, however, is the fact that there is a snuffed out candle over the bride’s head. Though this purports to be a painting of an actual event done at the time, she was dead by the time it was finished.

This emphasis on surface can be found in the late Medieval works in northern and central Europe, notably the painting of Jan Van Eyck. Van Eyck’s most famous painting is The Marriage of Giovanni Arnolfini and his wife. It is a study in esoteric symbolism, and also a marriage license. The painter’s signature indicates he was present to witness the wedding vows, and in fact, he is reflected in the mirror at the back of the room.

Van Eyck was employing a number of sacred codes that would have been familiar to viewers of his day, but this doesn’t mean that he had any specific religious intention in crafting this portrait. As noted in the caption above, Arnolfini’s wife did not live to see it, so it may be a memorial as much as a marriage certificate.

Michelangelo was by most reports a devout Catholic, yet he created imagery that celebrates humanity more than heavenly forces. His works and those of his contemporaries shifted the focus away from a constant piety to a more worldly mindset. The impetus for this movement was the reintroduction of classical Graeco-Roman art and literature through the ports of Venice and the Moorish Kingdom of Cordoba.

Among these works were translations of Ptolemy, the various Greek Magical Papyri, and the Ghayat Al-Hakim – translated into Latin as the Picatrix. The roots of the Tarot probably came by the same route. Fascination with magic and astrology went hand in hand with the philosophy of Aristotle and the science of Archimedes. These were new exotic ideas that had been “lost” during the Dark Ages, and were lustily embraced by those who had survived the Black Death and prospered in the New World Order. Maps of the world now listed many terra incognita and the potential that strange beings and powerful forces lay just beyond the horizon was a very real thing.

As I have mentioned before, the flowering of secular humanism did not go unchallenged by the orthodoxy of the Church. The Renaissance and the years following it were some of the bloodiest in human history, as the establishment sought to maintain control over a population through the Witch Trials and the Holy Inquisition. These paranoid reactions spread to the New World, as well, and have left a stain on our heritage comparable to the Holocaust.

This stain perpetuates today when people characterize anything with a touch of occultist mysticism as “the work of Satan!”. Art, music, and literature that employ the symbolism of spirits, ghosts, deity, and mythology comes under fire as being infernally inspired and corruptive of the consumer. Yet sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.

I like fantasy imagery, like the works of Frank Frazetta, Michael Whelan, and Bernie Wrightson, to name only a few. I am equally interested in Salvador Dali, Gustav Klimt, Alphonse Mucha, Frida Kalo, Leonora Carrington, Remedios Varo, and Eugene Bernan, all of whom are considered “real” artists as opposed to “illustrators”1But that’s another show.. Am I drawn to this imagery because it has a mystical context? Probably so. But, I have no idea where that yen came from. I have always been more interested in the wild and incredible. This drew me to the works of authors like Tolkien, Zelazny, Herbert, White, and Poe. While these works and the attendant imagery and films certainly informed my awareness of mystical and occult materials, the desire to explore it was always there.

I still locate the occasional tidbit of lore or discover a different approach to a certain magical procedure from works that are technically fiction. Sometimes I am reminded or inspired by things that are not, in their intention, designed to have a mystic quality.

So, at least from where I stand, not all works by a magician are intended to be magic, contain mystic revelation or coded secrets, or be anything other than a work of art. And in that context, it doesn’t reduce the respect I have for the magician in any way. All of us do things to gain our daily bread that are not necessarily connected to our spiritual universe (whether we wish it were or not).

I have so many such irons in the fire. Some are magic oriented, like this blog. Some are just art, and some fall somewhere in between. I try to view what other practicioners and creatives do with a similar eye. I encourage you to consider it. We can but gain access to a wider world.

Thank you for reading to the end. I will be back again next week with more or less obtuse obfuscations.

Please Share and Enjoy !

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Those Troublesome Victorians

Troublesome Victorians

One of the programs I listen to habitually is Your Average Witch Podcast. The format used by host Kim is somewhat unique (at least with regard to podcasts I follow). She poses to each guest a series of the same questions. Aside from getting to hear the guests’ answers, I find it often sets me wondering as to how I would respond as well.

One of the questions always asked of guests who (or what) are the top three influences in their magical practice. This question got me thinking.

You probably have ascertained that many of my influences are not the authors and personalities of the 90s and later decades. Most come from over 100 years ago. Chief among these is not an occultist in the strictest sense, but a scholar and translator from the British Museum named E. A. Wallis Budge.

If you’re not into Egyptology you may never have heard of him. His reputation is much abused in the modern Egyptological community. The general consensus is that his work is subject to significant error, and in particular his translations are flawed and poorly referenced.

I have read the newer translations of the Book of the Dead and find them substantially similar. Perhaps some of the pronunciations of the symbols have changed, but considering the language had not been spoken for say, a millennium, before anyone tried to decipher the written texts, it’s hard to say what it sounded like.

There are a number of people who practice a form of Ancient Egyptian religion today. I am not one of those. Nor do I work with the pseudo-Egyptian rituals out of the Golden Dawn and other ceremonial magic lodges. But my view of the cosmos is definitely shaped by the many books that Budge wrote, translated (if poorly), and preserved for our modern era.

While there are some good arguments that his translations don’t meet current standards, I find it more concerning that they are deeply tainted by Victorian Imperialism and Church of England Christianity. Yet, if you can find any text from that period that isn’t, it would be indeed rare. That is simply how things were.

The people who had the money and resources to research other cultures were inevitably going to put their slant on what they found. The myth that we do not do so today is ridiculous. We are, after all, evaluating those troublesome Victorians in the context of our current culture that is striving to overcome imperialism and monolithic patriarchal ideologies.

While there is no question that from the 16th through the 20th century, Europeans plundered the Middle East, Africa, Asia, and Central and South America for their ancient artifacts and cultural heritage, the collection of these things into museums has preserved them, and made them accessible to people who could never have visited them in their original location. Some of them were unknown even to their own people until an ambitious conqueror arrived with spade and shovel.

2048px-British_Museum_from_NE_2_(cropped)
The venerable British Museum, repository of the treasures of ancient civilizations from around the world. Under criticism in modern times for acquisitions plundered from fallen empires and less powerful states during the 19th century, it remains probably the greatest public collection of human artifacts in the world. I have spent days roaming its halls and galleries, which are still accessible via free admission. During my last visit I was able to view the great Winged Bulls of Nineveh that had been evacuated from the museums of Baghdad to prevent destruction and plundering during the first Gulf War. Many of this museum’s treasures, as well as those in other museum in Europe and the America’s, might not have survived in the political instabilities of their native lands. But there is a moral question as to whether these pieces should remain where they are, are be re-patriated. Do we risk the destruction of our history by sending it back to where it came from?

Ham, CC BY-SA 3.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/, via Wikimedia Commons

Someday, it may even make possible the return of these artifacts to the lands of their creation and the custodianship of the descendants of those who made them. It is all well and good to support this principle, yet in my own lifetime great atrocities have been committed against art and artifacts in times of war. Plundered objects go to private collections of the uber-rich and never benefit anyone but a single person’s vanity.

So I have no problem with the large number of Budge’s books in my collection. After several decades of my own personal growth and experience, I am able to read past the taint and still find the magic and wonder of the original documents he has compiled from Egypt, Assyria, and Babylon. These texts, in the form that Budge wrote them, have been used by occultists and magicians from his time down to our own. They were the authority on the subject, and once inculcated into the magical tradition, their authenticity or interpretation was not again questioned.

And it is in the occult sense that I reference these works. I have books by Peter Tompkins, Howard Carter, Bob Brier, Kent Weeks, Zahi Hawass, Kara Coonie, and Peter Weller that offer very different views of ancient Egyptian history and culture. Archaeology is an evolving science, and new evidence can change what we have held as true for decades.

But the occult is much more forgiving when it comes to “facts”. If there are hundreds or thousands of occultists who have used Budges glyphs for the last century or so to write spells and inscribe objects of power, then those versions are the one’s being put out into the universe to manifest.

One thing that is relatively unchallenged about Ancient Egyptian culture is the emphasis on the power of these glyphs. Cecil B. DeMille in the 1956 The Ten Commandments gives the line to Yul Brenner as Ramses the Great :”So let it be written. So let it be done.” This underscores the value placed on the written word, and the hieroglyphic texts even moreso.

Most ancient Egyptians were not literate, so the glyphs covering every object and artifice were lost on them. But they knew it was magic. It was power. The glyphs were there to record for all time the works and deeds of Pharaoh, thus making him immortal. His named carved in stone would last, he hoped, for all eternity. This belief was so strong that many Pharaohs were cursed by having their names removed from temples, tombs, and sarchophagi, thus dooming them to oblivion. Some notable personages consigned to this fate were Hatshepsut, the Female Pharaoh, Akenaten, the Heretic, and his short-lived successor Tutankhamen.1Curiously all of these were erased by Seti I and his son Ramses II (the Great) in order to establish a new dynasty free of tainted bloodlines. Seti had been a military officer with no royal connection, so the need to establish his descent from Amen Ra was political as will as spiritual. By removing, hiding, or sometimes overwriting the names with their own, Seti and Ramses effectively deleted their entire reigns from reality, at least as far as Egyptian belief was concerned. This is one of the earliest examples we have of revisionist history, though it probably was practiced before Seti. It just may have been done so effectively we will never know it. The redaction of the latter king was a lucky break for him and for history, because his tomb was lost to obscurity, and thus remained unplundered until Carter’s discovery in 1927.

Rosetta_Stone
The Rosetta Stone is supposedly the most visited object in the British Museum. It is considered to be the key that unlocked the mystery of the hieroglyphic language, though it was not so immediate or so simple. It is probably better to say that it provided translators with a clue that these signs were sometimes phonetic, rather than being alphabetic or purely symbolic. This was adduced by Francois Champollion who was working from a rubbing made during the Napoleonic Expedition. Napoleon’s army had captured the stone, along with many other artifacts, but had to leave them when the British forced them out of Egypt. They came into possession of the British Empire as spoils of war from the French Empire.

Ironically, the clue that allowed Champollion to break the code, was the need to write the Greek names Ptolemy and Cleopatra in ancient hieroglyphics. Determining that the glyphs surrounded by the loop of the cartouche were the names written in Greek and Demotic on the lower portions of the stone, he worked out which symbols were standing for sounds, and then went to find them on other artifacts. This would never have happened if Egypt hadn’t been part of Alexander’s Empire, and subject to the rule of invading foreigners.

By © Hans Hillewaert, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3153928

If we are to seek validation for using Budges bad conversions of the glyphs, and the potentially errant interpretations of gods, goddesses, and their veneration, we need look no further than that most troublesome of the Victorian magicians, Aleister Crowley. More specifically, we can hold up his Book of Thoth, as he calls the “Egyptian” Tarot. The word “Thoth” is a Graeco-Roman gloss of the ancient Egyptian name, Tehuti/Djheuty/dhwtj which refers to the ibis headed god of writing, magic, and sometimes the moon. It is this god who writes the names of the beloved of Osiris after they have passed the test of the Balance and confirmed that their heart is as light as the feather of truth. Thus written, they are eternal. Thoth’s book is the prototype from which all others descend.

We can see this idea of emanations in Qabalah, and it’s not surprising that Eliphas Levi made the connections between the Hebrew alphabet, the root of Qabalistic revelation, and the 22 cards of the Major Arcana. Levi’s confutation, without any real external facts, descends down into Waite and Crowley, and virtually every other Tarot system extant today. Tarot cards are a 15th or 16th century invention, which may have been used from the beginning as an oracle by many people, including the Romani, who were wrongly believed to be from Egypt. Hence this “ancient oracle” held the secret wisdom of the Book of Thoth, from which everything in the universe is made.

The Crowley Tarot is still in widespread use by Thelemites and non-Thelemites. I have at least a couple of decks, and a few derivatives. The designs by Lady Freida Harris are iconic, and offer a more modernist appeal than the sometimes quaint renditions of Pixie Smith or the woodcut Medieval harshness of the Tarot de Marseilles. But they are not, and never have been, Egyptian, or linked in any verifiable historical way with the god Tehuti/Djehuty/dhwtj.

This in no way makes them less useful as Tarot, or the alleged connection, any less useful in magic and spellwork. The gods still like hearing their names spoken, even when mispronounced. People have been calling to Thoth from Hellenistic times, and that has built a bridge the rest of us can cross.

levi-waite-crowley
A triptych of Tarotists. Eliphas Levi (left) connected his deep belief in the Hebrew Qabalah with the Major Arcana of the popularly published Tarot de Marseille and referenced it in multiple works. This connection is based on their being 22 characters in Hebrew and 22 cards in the Arcana. There is no real basis for this at all. It was merely Levi’s unverifiable personal gnosis.

In the middle we find Arthur Edward Waite, member of the Golden Dawn, translator and publisher of the works of Eliphas Levi, and writer of the Pictorial Key to the Tarot. His cards, executed by Pamela Colman Smith, are the most widely published, and will be moreso now that the designs have entered the public domain. Waite dismissed the myths that Tarot were an ancient oracle, but kept much of the interpretations of his predecessors.

Aleister Crowley was, like many Victorians, fascinated with Ancient Egypt and the discoveries being made there. He didn’t invent the idea that the Tarot are Egyptian, or represent an ancient occult Book of Thoth. That comes from a late 18th century writer named Alliette, who was elaborating on a “history” by Court de Gebelin with no factual basis. The interest in his theory was fueled by the importation of Egyptian antiquities by the European empires during that period. Crowley returned to the concept, layered on Levi’s Qabalah inferences, and married it to esoteric concepts he encountered in India and Asia (if not outright copied from Blavatsky).

We use their systems and interpretations today, though the meanings of the cards are gradually evolving to meet modern needs, and modern sensitivities. In a hundred years, the myriad decks published now may be more well known, and some industrious 22nd century chronicler will talk about how they were all derived from sources without any historical or cultural antecedent.

The important thing we need to understand is that when we cross that bridge, we don’t need to carry all that Victorian baggage. It’s not an expedition into the darkest jungles replete with racist stereotypes of native African bearers, submissive Punjabi manservants pouring Afternoon Tea and enforcing our White Imperialist Christian Righteous Rightness at the point of Sahib’s big elephant gun. So when we approach these texts, we need to learn to read past the inherent arrogance that sometimes works hand in hand with the ritual.

This arrogance is one of the problems I have always had with the compulsion of spirits -usually reckoned as demons, using the power of the Christian god. This practice is not exclusively Victorian, of course. They were parroting Medieval beliefs that derive from the Holy Mother Church’s dogma suppressing all other beliefs. There’s some evidence that Abrahamic religions supported this kind of thing, but it’s hard to say whether that was an original doctrine or some contamination from later influences. Certainly pre-Christian traditions used compulsion and exorcism rites to drive away unwanted spirits that were not pacified by more placative means. But this seems to have been more of a utilitarian approach, than assertion of a Divine Right.

The Victorians were the product of their time. India had been under British dominion for several hundred years by that point, and the boundaries of Nepal and Tibet were loosely defined. Egypt and Arabia had been in their control, more or less, since Napoleon was defeated. The Chinese Emperor had been declawed in the Opium Wars, and the ancient Silk Road had to pass through British Hong Kong. Aside from those uppity Americans, the people of the British Empire could consider themselves masters (and it was masters, despite Her Majesty the Queen) of the world of the 19th century.

When one sits in the center of that world, it’s an unfortunate tendency of human nature to believe in one’s own importance. People talk about Manifest Destiny and the White Man’s Burden and other foolish justifications for oppressing less technologically advanced cultures. They begin to believe that the ideas they may have pilfered from these cultures are their own invention, and rightfully theirs, because of who they are. It is only with the benefit of looking back from 100 years on, with a gentler perspective and wider awareness, that we can perceive their errors.

Or maybe not. When I started writing this article I was thinking about this massive blooming of occultism and spirituality at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century, spurred by the horrors of the American Civil War and Crimean War in Europe, fueled further by World War I and the toppling of several European kingdoms, and the extreme social change wrought by the massive numbers of deaths during the Spanish Flu epidemic.

And then I look at the parallels of the later 20th century and early 21st, wars and rumors of wars, social upheaval, global pandemic, and a corresponding rise in new spirituality and occultism.

I am not here to claim that history is repeating itself. You can make your own choice there.

It’s fair to say that the ends of centuries seem to mess with our collective heads, as the end of the 18th included the American and French Revolutions, and sad stories about the deaths of kings. Our millennial event in 1999/2000 amplified this tendency that we as a species have to connect importance to dates on a calendar and then act as though something should be happening.

We are now in the unenviable position of becoming the next century’s troublesome Victorians.

There is an unpleasant undercurrent of extremist rightwing viewpoints pervading some pagan groups. Discussions of pure blood are creeping into ancestor veneration in places.

While giving lip service to making the new spirituality open and welcoming to persons of color, the economically disadvantaged, members of the LBGTQ+ community, and differently abled individuals, the core remains largely white, middle class, and neurotypical, using rituals and symbolism that connects to a binary heterosexual duality, frequently where one or the other partner is dominant.

These are the echoes of that 19th century arrogance. We are hopefully engaged in changing that, to make a better brighter world for all. But the Victorians believed they were making a better brighter world for all. That is the trap of arrogance, of sitting in the middle of the crumbling empire, and saying, oh, look how we can fix this.

I am as guilty as anyone of this arrogance. This little publishing enterprise is evidence of my confidence that my voice has value and should be heard. It’s not very different from the plethora of self-published magazines and books that we have from the late 19th and early 20th century on magic, spirituality, art, literature, and social change.

Nor am I saying that any of us should stop trying to achieve this change. It is vital that we make these changes.

But we have the advantage of well-documented hindsight. We know that in a hundred years, what we write and record and say today will be reviewed, dissected, appraised, interpreted and judged by whoever is leading the vanguard on spiritual transformation in the 22nd century. So we are able to consider how we want that posterity to remember us.

Are we going to be the carriers of the fire of a New Enlightenment, or are we going to be troublesome?

Thank you for reading to the end. I know my style of writing is more in common with those troublesome Victorians; the result of reading so much of their work, no doubt. I hope you will join me again next week for another trip down the rabbit hole. Peace and long life.

Instagram poster image edited from a photo by Alvesgaspar – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3259988

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Walking in the Mirror

Opalized Nautilus

I am writing to you from the future. By my calendar, this article will publish on August 3rd, 2022, and I will have written it and moved on by the time you read it for the first time.

By the time August 3rd gets here, I’ll be working on an article for late October or possibly even November. What I am doing here is always in the future, even though you’re reading it in the past.

Sounds a bit backward doesn’t it. I’m really writing this now, for future publication on August 3rd. So really it’s written in the past for the future, and you’ll read it in the future.

That’s how things work, right? Linear time and all that.

That is a very unmagic way of thinking.

Tying ourselves to one place and time is surrendering to an objective reality, with all it’s rational rules, interlocking causality, and very little that is wonderful and unexplainable. It’s analogous to being on a one-lane one-way road, with no exits, and nothing to see but the same damned boring road in front of you.

I personally prefer to pull over every now and again, and take in the sights. Maybe even have lunch and meet the locals. Marvel at the largest ball of twine in the Tri-State Area. It broadens the spirit and refreshes the soul. That’s what travel is all about.

I am speaking about astral travel, of course. The art of displacing ones identity outside the physical limitations of objective reality has been practiced since ancient times. Modern psychology calls this an altered state of consciousness.

There are a lot of altered states of consciousness. For example, your awareness in that moment when you sneeze is different from the moment before or afterward. It passes so very quickly that we hardly notice the difference, but it’s there. Your consciousness when you’re hungry and your blood sugar is low is different from when you’ve just eaten and the brain is lulling you into a torpor so it can digest the meal. We dismiss these mundane fluctuations in our perceptions because they are part of everyday activity. Our brain, however, is different, it reacts differently, decides differently, and perceives differently. We are rarely as fully awake, alert, and fully focused as we imagine we are.

The human dream state is sometimes acknowledged as a basic form of astral projection. We are encountering things that didn’t exist in the real world, but generally we are not aware that we are in this state. We’re not conscious of dreaming when we dream, only when we wake up. Because we are only pmartially invested in the dream world, our worst consequence may be a nightmare, or other frightening nocturnal event.

bumbleedream
This painting by surrealist icon Salvador Dali is called “Dream caused by the flight of a bee around a pomegranate a second before awakening“. The imagery is exploring how our brain rewires stimuli when we are in the dream state, and is influenced by Dali’s interest in Freud’s work on the subconscious.

Aside from the usual fabulous beasts, the painting plays with time, space, and proportion as we experience it in the dream world. Gravity does not apply, Gaia (she was Dali’s wife and chief model) floats above a landscape that could make her a giantess. Distant Gibraltar rises, about to stomped by the Space Elephant (Dali’s name). A tiger leaps out of the mouth of another tiger that leaps from a fish that springs from a giant pomegranate. The actual pomegranate, with the eponymous bee, hovers just in front of the scene lower right among floating rocks.

From the psychoanalytical perspective this is happening in Gaia’s mind and are distortions of remembered images. From the occult perspective, it is happening on the astral plane and the things are very real.

Folklore frequently says that we never die in our dreams, because if we did it would kill us. Of course, like the afterlife itself, there are few people who have the experience to confirm or deny this assertion.

Science says we hardly remember most of what we dream about, so it’s possible we die all the time and just don’t remember we’re dead. Given the theory that ghosts frequently remain because they are not aware they’ve died, we may all be a bunch of dream zombies. That is both fascinating and horrifying to me. It’s a wonder I ever sleep at all.

Sleep is an altered state of consciousness all it’s own. And it’s a weird one. We’re not dead, but aside from some simple autonomic processes like breathing and cardiac activity, we might as well be. We don’t move. We don’t talk, hear, see, smell, or otherwise respond. Fortunately it is usually easier to leave sleep than enter it. A loud noise, or gentle shaking, is enough to rouse the sleeper into a more or less conscious state, though it may take a few moments to orient and react with full wakefulness.

Then there are the states that are like sleep but aren’t sleep. Coma, absent brain death, is like a deep and prolonged sleep, which defies efforts to arousal. Yet coma patients have reported being aware of the presence of people in the room with them, and remember conversations, Sleep doesn’t work that way.

There’s somnambulism, which is a cooler sounding term than sleep walking. People who walk in their sleep, get up, walk around, sometimes have eyes wide open, dress themselves, speak and answer questions, and even have unlocked the door and left the house, all without any awareness. Folklore also says you shouldn’t wake a sleep walker because it will kill them. As far as I know this is completely without scientific merit. There’s a lot of folklore about sleep and death, probably because the two states are so eerily similar. And we’re all dream zombies.

I experienced sleep walking in my younger years, as well as having very bad insomnia. Later in life, when I was attempting to get healthy and removed the stimulants from my bloodstream, I started falling asleep in traffic. I was finally diagnosed with severe sleep apnea. I now sleep in scuba gear and lull my good lady wife into slumber with the dulcet tones of Darth Vader breathing. But I sleep.

The “really bad snoring” that is characteristic of the type of sleep apnea I suffer from has been around since childhood, and probably also afflicted my father and grandfather. To what extent it was responsible for my childhood sleep disorders, I will never know. The diagnosis was unknown to the doctors of rural Appalachia. I tend to think it didn’t help to calm my overactive brain and the severe anxiety that an overactive brain produces.

So naturally, in exhaustion and desperation, I tried to find any means of quieting the noise in my head. Hypnosis was a natural choice. There wasn’t any real good reference on hypnosis available to a pre-teen kid in the mountains of Eastern Kentucky, What I started with was the bad Hollywood hypnosis we see at least once in the life of every situation comedy:

“You are getting sleeeeeppppyyyyy…..”

It didn’t work. Well, actually, it sort of did.

I was trying very hard to make it work. I was trying oh so very hard to make myself get sleepier and sleepier and sleepier.

I didn’t get sleepier.

In trying so hard, however, I became hyper-focused, and that is an altered state of consciousness in itself. Although my desired goal of becoming drowsy and drifting off on the boat with Winkin’, Blinkin’,and Nod was for naught, I had effectively silenced the chatter in my brain and just concentrated on the one thing.

This is meditation. It is the directed and controlled contemplation of a single thought, in an effort to remove all external distractions. Once in this state, it is possible to open up the mind free of background noise, and experience heightened perceptions and potentially extradimensional realities.

When we first attempt to enter an altered state of consciousness in this way, it’s difficult. The brain, absent distraction, invites distraction in. This is you waking up at 3 AM wondering if you left your car keys in the refrigerator. It’s the one off-key instrument in the whole orchestra being the tuba. It’s infuriating and frustrating and pulls us out of the moment and shatters that whole inner peace thing we started meditating for in the first place.

That frustration can be a wall. We concentrate on the frustration, and not on putting it aside, starting again, breathing in, breathing out. Breathing in, breathing out. In. Out.

Sometimes that is what it takes. Ultimately that is what worked for me, was just concentrating on my breathing (and snuffling and coughing…it was not an easy road) and with every breath just relaxing a little bit further. There are a lot of mental exercises that amplify this technique, and others may work for you that won’t work for me.

Likewise, there are physical techniques such as yoga or tai chi that either put the body in an unordinary position, or focus on repeating movements, in order to jolt the brain into an altered state. Acupuncture works on various points of the body to address the flow of chi, and thus may also be a method to a different awareness.

Certainly there are altered states that result from the consumption of certain compounds, whether it is mugwort tea or lysergic acid diethylamide. I’d be lying if I said I had never experimented with these methods. The choice is a personal one. Like any practice it may have benefits and it will certainly have detriments. It is my experience that short-term use may improve vision while reducing control and impairing memory. Long term use is not advisable. Your mileage may vary.

Like reciting the aum syllable, any ritual or rote performance can open the doors of perception. The process of drawing the mandala or casting the circle focuses the mind on specific structured tasks. The investment of thought and energy properly and effectively on each of those tasks is necessary for the successful completion of the ritual, but it also serves to direct the mind into it. It prepares one for the working ahead, and creates a state of hyper-awareness where things more subtle and rare may be more readily apprehended.

The ability to focus the mind and shift at will from one state to another is a practiced skill. We are all capable of “zoning out” from time to time, but to cultivate this state on demand requires dedicated repetition. Eventually you will learn to feel the change, then learn how you caused it. It works a bit in reverse.

Approaching it from a conscious word-thought direction will not aid you. I don’t think about the keys while I am typing. I learned to touch-type in high school, so I know instinctively where the keys are. Beyond that, though, I don’t think about which letters I am typing. I know the word I want to use. It comes out of the fingers onto the keyboard without articulating it in my head.

Shifting from a “normal” state of consciousness to one of hyper-awareness, or focused intensity, or dissociation, is similar. You learn what it feels like, and then you just do it.

That last one, dissociation, is probably harder than most. It involves being able to disconnect yourself from the here and now and place your conscious awareness somewhere else. This is what the ancients spoke of as astral travel.

It’s hard, because we first of all are afraid to let go of the here and now. We have a natural fear that we won’t come back. That’s a healthy reflex. The old books I studied called this the Silver Cord, which links our astral self back to our physical self that is hanging out in the real world apparently asleep. It’s an interesting visualization tool, I guess, but I always was more pre-occupied on my cord getting caught on something. If you’ve ever played an electric guitar, you know this feeling. So much was made of the need to protect the Silver Cord that it’s safety overrode my will to travel.

I don’t believe in the Silver Cord, myself. I find the construction too distracting, and if it doesn’t work, well, I have no issues in rejecting it. I’m not worrying about being swept away on the astral wind with no way home. I’m not entirely sanguine on the astral wind either.

People who have not studied magic talk about out-of-body experiences (abbreviated OOBE by those trendy folks in the paranormal community). Most of these are near death experiences (NDE) but every now and again, someone takes a walk without themselves for no apparent reason.

In the NDE, the OOBE is characterized by leaving the body, floating up to the ceiling and watching medical personnel attempt resuscitation. Some drift off toward a bright light, experience meeting dead friends and relatives, or otherwise affirming they are in the afterlife, if only briefly. These experiences can have profound effects on a person’s outlook, or not.

An OOBE without an attendant NDE, shares a number of similar reported events. One feels light, floats or flies, and can see and speak to people (or things) that aren’t there in the room with the normal people. The environment being brighter or suffused with light is also not uncommon. The difference, of course, is there’s no crash cart and someone yelling Code Blue.

OOBE are reported by mediums, psychics, and mystics around the world. The CIA even had a program in the 70s to train people for OOBE in order to have them secretly spy on the Soviets (who we were sure were secretly having OOBEs to spy back). The program was dubbed Project Looking Glass, if it is anything other than a CIA misinformation campaign. But it supposedly involved several OOBE experiments including projection to the past and future, as well as other planets, things detailed in the old magic books as astral travel.

strange mystic eye
Doctor Strange’s “mystic eye” has been made more popular by the recent movie version. The third eye in the forehead is a comic book rendition of the sixth Chakra, Ajna.

This energy center denotes enlightenment and perception. It is considered the opening through which one can perceive higher levels of existence.

The third eye is a feature of many depictions of beings in the pantheons of Hindu and Buddhist beliefs. In those instances the eye is typically vertically oriented, rather than the Cyclopean image in comics and movies.

The three eyes of the deities pierce beyond the material world, see past, present, and future, and strip away the illusions that obscure cosmic truth. A handy power to have if you intend to go trapsing around the astral plane without your mystic eye amulet.

Like how I am writing this in the future and sending it back for you to read in the past. That’s a mirror of what we usually expect, hence “looking glass”. If one can train their mind to disconnect without physical detriment, then the limitations of the physical need not apply. We have followed Alice down that rabbit hole, and emerged we know not where. I needn’t worry about the physical reality that Saturn is several million miles away from the Earth, I could go there and watch the sunrise. There’s a wonderful little Bistro on Titan with the greatest views, now that the clouds have all been rained away.

Some would call that fantasy, and they might be right. The capacity to discern what is in our heads, including whether or not we can leave them, is a finer skill than meditation. In the end it is a matter of what your experience feels like. Should it bend solely to your will, then perhaps it is made up, dragged up out of your subconscious even. But if you aren’t calling the shots, who knows.

I choose to believe what I want to believe. I have recurring dreams and I know that much of that dream imagery is my brain processing surreal images of real world things, usually things that were frightening to me as a child. These are now magnified and morphed into a sometimes terrifying landscape that is nonetheless absolutely familiar.

But there’s the other side of the coin that these are real places, altered not by my dreaming brain but by the nature of the strange worlds where they exist. In that case, it’s only logical that I would see them repeatedly, since most of us travel the more familiar rather than the exotic.

There are folks who go and live on these worlds on a more or less permanent basis. Modern psychology considers this a mental illness, but that is only one viewpoint. Who is to say that the catatonic or delusional patient hasn’t simply moved elsewhere. It would be tragic if they had gotten lost and their Silver Cord was cut and they just couldn’t find their way back, no matter how many anti-psychotics got pumped into them.

This is perhaps another sign that your travels are fantasy. They’re pleasant and friendly and welcoming and a nice retreat from the real waking world. It is my experience that every place has a shadier side. There are neighborhoods in Paradise you still don’t want to get stuck in after dark.

The clearing of the mind is also about preventing self-deception. Discernment of what is within and what is without, comes from looking at it over and over and waiting for one of you to blink.

If it’s you, then you’re probably a dream zombie.

I thank you for continuing to read my ramblings, even if they are written from the future and can’t help you now. Since last week’s article was so long I am going to give you a little respite and end this one now. I have to get it into the time machine mailbox before 5 PM, or it will end up in 1985 again. If you manage to escape the temporal loop and not break your Silver Cord, please join me next week for further confusion.

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The Delicate Art of Seeing

Art Of Seeing

In addition to my penchant for Shakespeare, I spent a good deal of my youthful free time engaged in the adventures of a certain consulting detective residing at 221B Baker Street. Like the works of the Bard, many of Conan Doyle’s stories have been adapted and revised for film, but it is the written word I first encountered, and still connect with.

Latter day incarnations of the Great Detective portray him as an anti-social know-it-all with no people skills. I suppose that’s one way of looking at it. To my semi-adolescent self, this person was, if not a kindred spirit, at least a similar one. His command of vast regions of abstruse information and the ability to rationally synthesize viable patterns from the mundane was a great inspiration to me. I never saw him as cold, rude, or brutal. But then I also may have been an anti-social know-it-all with no people skills.

Imagine you are playing a group guessing game. I’m not sure how many people would remember charades, though it pops up in modern commercials. Now suppose that you have figured out the clues. You know the answer, but you have to wait there while everyone else makes ridiculous guesses.

Sherlock Holmes lived that 24/7. It’s a wonder he didn’t kill anyone. His choice to turn his faculties toward the solution of crimes is showing wonderful restraint.

Modern interpretations make the same mistake universally, and that is seeing Holmes’ best friend and sidekick as being ill treated by the genius detective. The problem with that is that John Watson is not Holmes’ friend. He’s not even a character. He’s a literary device. His sole purpose is to be a mask over Holmes’ thought so that when the why and how is revealed at the end, it’s a wonderment.

Watson is there to give us a version of the story without all the details and clues and trivial tidbits that Holmes sees as valuable. Or rather his job is to make them seem like trivial tidbits. His job is misdirection.

Conan Doyle didn’t invent Watson. He stole him from Edgar Allen Poe. Poe wrote about a genius detective and his thick friend in the first half of the 19th century. The Parisian sleuth C. Auguste Dupin astounds his unnamed narrator by deducing who committed the murders in the Rue Morgue (which sadly about a street and not a morgue).

Poe only wrote two other stories about the amateur investigator before his passing, but it’s enough to credit him with the creation of the detective story, and why the Mystery Writers of America give out an Edgar instead of an Artie for exceptional work.

It evens out, of course. Agatha Christie stole the same device from Doyle to use for Hercule Poirot. Without the dunderheaded sidekick, the Great Detective can’t appear great. You would see how the sausage is made.

Doyle, I will say, shows us how Holmes does it, if only after poor Watson scratches his head and looks dumbfounded at the clues. He spells it out very well in A Scandal in Bohemia. Watson visiting for the first time in a while since he married and moved out, is told by Holmes that he has gained weight, been out in the rain, hired a lazy servant girl, and has returned to his work as a doctor. Watson’s incredulous response is the usual jaw dropped.

“My dear Holmes” said I, “this is too much. You certainly would have been burned had you lived a few centuries ago.”

Great Detective
Holmes and Watson per illustrator Sidney Paget in the Strand Magazine on their way to decipher the odd goings-on at Baskerville Hall. The pair would be transformed into House and Wilson in the Fox Networks House M.D series. British actor Hugh Laurie gave us the first modern reworking of Holmes as self-absorbed and brutal monomaniac. This take was further refined by Benedict Cumberbatch in the BBC series Sherlock and Robert Downey, Jr. in the film versions. Keen observers will notice that the four actors in the last two photos have migrated from Baker Street to the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Strange isn’t it?

Holmes then patiently lays out all the little signs that make up the bigger picture. The weight, well he looks heavier, obviously. The servant girl is marked by a cut on the inside of Watson’s boot, made, while scraping off mud; hence the rain. As to his medical practice well he smells of antiseptic, and has dented his hat with the earpiece of a stethoscope. All easily seen and connected dots according to the master.

Watson’s jaw remains dropped. To which Holmes adds:

“You see. You do not observe. The distinction is clear.”

This was a fundamental idea for me. As with any young person who is impressed by a fictional character, I strove to emulate that hero. I endeavored to learn to truly observe.

Humans think they see a lot of things.

Science says that our brains aren’t capable of processing all the visual information our eyes take in, so we fill in the gaps. This is sort of how digital video compression works. A frame shows everything, and the next frame only shows what changes.

Our brain fills in the gaps so that we can function in a visual world without walking off a cliff or driving into a tree because if we had to process all the pixels, we’d never respond in time.

That seems a bit unreal to me, but it’s one of those widely held theories.

We’re really much better at just making things up.

This faculty of imagination would seem to lay at cross-purposes with Holmes’ rationalist approach. But it requires a certain degree of imagination to take all those little bits and pieces and concoct a working theory. Yes, it does have to be strained through the sieve of logic and reality.

“Eliminate the impossible. Whatever remains, however improbable, must be true.”

So the capacity to leap beyond logic and experience a world that cannot be wholly explained rationally can still work in concert with that rational critical world. It’s a matter of knowing when to apply each.

If you’ve gotten to this point and are starting to wonder when I’ll start talking about the usual weird stuff, just hold on. It’s coming.

A reliable and effective use of the mantic arts is based upon knowing when to apply imagination and when to refine that information with critical reasoning.

Pure intuition, while it may have the cachet of a psychic experience, is not always useful in the absence of the reasoned context. I’d like to believe that my “gut instincts” will serve me effectively in every situation, but it has been my experience that it doesn’t. And this is following five decades spent honing that instinct and learning how to listen to it.

Sometimes, you’re wrong.

Ordinarily we filter these kinds of things automatically. We experience an input from the beyond, and assay it’s relative chance of being real and useful. But this process can be improved, and the controlled application cultivated.

You may know that Conan Doyle was deeply involved in the Spiritualist Movement. It is surprising to a lot of people that the creator of a character so attached to reason and logic would hold such a powerful belief in the existence of spirits.

He’s also known for his staunch defense of the photographs known as the Cottingley Faerie Hoax, and continued to persist in the reality of the Bright Folk. Some would suggest that had he applied Holmes’ methods he could have discovered the hoax. It seems obvious he didn’t want to. Belief can override our senses. We see what we think we see.

We may be doubly damned if we’re used to hearing these kinds of revelations from our own “inner voice”. Some of the meditative practices I have been working with lately involve going deep down into one’s own mind, and then bringing up that consciousness to the everyday. My experiences with this have been startling in the results. I have received “signs and portents” relating to what I am studying at a much higher frequency than before.

Or perhaps I am imagining it. Perhaps it is a trick my mind is playing, or rather replaying. My tricksy brain is externalizing the material I am working with to “create” correspondences in the real world. It is possible that because I am engaged in heavy study of the subject matter than I am subconsciously identifying that material in the world around me. As they say, when you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

But what if it’s both?

What if my brain is projecting the work I am doing through meditation into the world, as a means of improving my perception? In other words, yes, I am seeing signs and portents because my brain is subconsciously engaged in signs and portents. But also, the signs and portents are there, and this process has me noticing them more. It’s really not possible to say objectively if my “heightened powers” are a quirk of neurochemistry or a “real” external phenomena.

And it actually doesn’t matter.

A person with schizophrenia can perceive things that aren’t there. We consider that mental illness in our modern society. In other times and cultures these people were considered touched by the gods, and sacred oracles. And other times and cultures they were considered possessed by demons and burned as witches.

The degree to which our perceived world is a detriment to how we function in society varies from person to person and culture to culture.

Persons on the autism spectrum connect to that “exterior” world very differently than neurotypical people do. Sometimes this can manifest in a preternatural eye for detail, much like the fictional Mr. Holmes. Complex patterns may be observed that are only otherwise discoverable with cutting edge search algorithms. This can be attended by obsessive behaviors, difficulty or inability to communicate emotions properly, and a host of other challenges. These are not the result of impairment, but of a brain that moves differently from idea to idea, linking them in non-standard ways; at least by the “standard” of the general populace.

For a short time Conan Doyle and Harry Houdini were friends. Houdini spent a good deal of time debunking “psychic phenomena” including divination. Houdini had been a stage performer since a young age and had witnessed hundreds of “mind-reading” acts. The trick with mind reading on stage is to start with something general, which is likely to be true for most of the people in the audience. Then you circle in with some details, the letter of a name, a piece of clothing. This is still quite vague, but you start to get a reaction. “My Uncle Henry” someone will shout, and then you keep drawing the circle closer, looking for the mark to give you more clues.

It’s part trick, part observation, and part suggestion. People want to believe, so they’ll let their brains be led, especially if you lead them in a way that can be a kind of hypnosis.

Now if you think this is disingenuous, I invite you to go find an old recording of a TV preacher faith healing in the 1980s. This is exactly the process they are using. 1Obviously I personally believe that the televangelists were as aware of this being a show as the stage magician, but your mileage may vary. Watching the observable practice of both, the similarities are obvious. Were there preachers who believed that their schtick was doing the Lord’s work? I don’t know. Most of them got paid as well as a headliner in Vegas. The extent to which someone who is anxious, or depressed, or suffering from a psychosomatic illness being “healed” by such a practice is equivalent to the audience member believing he received a message from his Uncle Henry. But I am extremely skeptical about the lame walking, the blind seeing, and cancer going into spontaneous remission.

To be fair, and openly honest, when I was reading Tarot for clients, I also employed this technique to some extent. I very closely observed the client as I drew cards and performed the interpretation. You can pick up things from body language, vocal tone, etc. that indicate when what you are saying is hitting a nerve. The setting for a reading is almost universally made intimate, and often dramatic, to encourage a receptive mood in the client. It has the added effect of eliminating distractions so that I can concentrate on what I am picking up from them.

Now some people call this a psychic connection, and I am not about to argue that. I personally don’t consider myself any more psychic than Sherlock Holmes. I know his methods and I apply them. When I get a “vibe” from a client it is because I have spent many years honing my perceptions to pick up those cues. And these cues are vital.

A modern incarnation of the Great Detective was the television series House, M.D. An anti-social iconoclastic diagnostician whose genius was such that it mystified all his associates, Greg House flaunted convention at every turn until he was able to ferret out the mystery disease (spoiler alert: it’s not lupus). House had a maxim that was proven out in almost every episode.

“Everybody lies.”

The Tarot client comes to you either skeptical, or timid. They either don’t believe you or they don’t trust you and in either case you will not get the full story from them unless you employ these deep observational skills.

This is not a trick. It’s not a con. It’s a method to get inside the head of the client and really truly help them, which is why they came to you in the first place. If I had an M.D. I could call it psychiatry and charge $150 an hour. But my parents couldn’t afford medical school, so here I am with a deck of cards, and a spooky knack for reading people.

My cards are not mere props, nor is the reading just a fun mask for psychoanalytic counseling. The client and I, in our little purple draped space, are participating in a ritual that is hundreds, if not thousands, of years old.

Ritual is in itself an altered state of consciousness. The roles we both play are not what we are outside the curtain, this event is special, the space sacred, the time suspended. Both reader and client are engaging in a semi-hypnotic symbiosis.

In this state, the interaction of keen observation, willing responsiveness, and the mnemonic and evocative imagery of the cards produce a result that is more than the sum of the parts. The skilled reader will already have a deep understanding of the codified meanings of the cards, but in the moment, they may see something beyond.

This is also the result of heightened observation. For example, a few weeks ago I did an article on the Tower card, and used an example from my set of the Via Tarot. One of the messages is, in general, the fall forecast in the Tower is redeemed in the Star card that follows it.

Now as I was mixing decks for the article (because I have about 50 and I like showing them off) I didn’t immediately notice an artistic conceit in Via’s Tower and Star combination. The temple shown on the Star card (XVII) is the same as the “House of God” (XVI-the Tower in most decks). On XVI, when the tower is falling, all is in chaos, and the wolf is literally at the door, the viewpoint is close. In XVII, the viewpoint is more distant, the perspective relaxed, and overall feeling much light. Yet this is the same building architecturally.

tower-star-via
The Tower and The Star from the Via Tarot. This deck derived from Thelema doctrines and influenced by the Thoth Tarot was produced around 2005 in the UK. As Thoth took inspiration from the modern art movements of the time, Via has several images that remind me of the artist Michael Whelan. Whether that is homage or coincidence I can’t say.

The dome behind the star is a cleansed and renewed version of the House of God in card XVI. If we step back from the central arch of the Tower edifice, we can see that it is a much bigger building, able to accommodate more entrances. The piercing Eye of Omega has become a gentle nourishing afterglow. Isis approaches us, no longer wearing her veil. The Light that burned and broke is now refracted through the stellar heptagram, and cast as the steps of the rainbow she descends.

The 7 points of the Heptagram are the old Chaldean planets, – Sun, Moon, and Mercury through Saturn. The twelve pillars of the temple roof are the Zodiac. The Pentagram in center is the Microcosm and Macrocosm, Earth, Air, Fire, Water, and Spirit.

Tarot is a journey through symbols. It’s equivalent to a waking dream. While the images recur, the meaning changes.


So what meaning does that give us? Is this even an intended meaning, or did the artist do it unconsciously? Is my connection a “trick of the mind”? It doesn’t matter if the idea gives me a new avenue to explore when these cards show up in a reading.

I’ve had this deck for the better part of two decades, and I never saw this until I was writing that article. The additional study, contemplation, and multiple exposures to the various cards stimulated a number of new observations.

Some times, even when we observe we do not observe.

And sometimes we take in a massive amount of seemingly trivial data until some trigger causes it all to coalesce into a meaningful pattern. 2Meaningfulness is a relative term. When we are talking about the landscapes of the mind, symbolism has as much weight as literalism We may have symbolic connections that are ours alone and not even fully understood, consciously.

Dream interpretation is a mantic skill going back to the Stone Age. If we don’t know what the flying hot dog going into the train tunnel means, we’ll often just accept someone else’s explanation. It relieves us of the responsibility of uncovering it.

I wonder about the damage done to our psyche when we overwrite the subconscious source code with the wrong answer.

This is aim of the Tarot. It exists to be that one electron spark that starts the lightning strike. But for lightning to strike the conditions must be right. The mind must be receptive, alert, and observant.

The skilled reader will develop a rhythm that achieves these conditions naturally, without stopping to think about “Am I watching their body language?”; “Does this card in this position mean something differently than normal?”; “Am I listening to my intuition?”

For the novice this can be terribly frustrating, and made even moreso by the myriad decks and books on the subject. Even if you have a “talent” for the cards, for reading people, and observing their reactions, getting comfortable with the basic and reverse meanings is a process. It goes beyond just not having to check the book (and sometimes even old hats still have to). It’s about knowing them well enough to see where they sit in context of the a reading. And then once you get that working, you can start to see where they sit in context of your client and how they are responding that day.

It can help to just start with the Major Arcana. If you really go deep into a standard Waite Deck that alone can keep you busy for weeks. Once you’re happy with that, pick a suit and work through them the same way, until you get all 78 more or less.

Don’t expect to recite the full pages of the text. Get it down a to a few sentences at most, so when that card comes up you know immediately what you are dealing with. That’s actually on Pixie Smith’s cards, which is why the deck became so popular, and why it’s the best “starter”.

Don’t worry about esoteric meanings, numerological, astrological, qabbalistic, or alchemical meanings. Just learn that this card means this, and if it’s upside down, it either means the opposite, or that the meaning is lessened.

When you get past that point, you will start to make those connections naturally, and then be able to expand upon them. And then you can go back and find all those other meanings that may or may not have been intended or even connected to the cards.

Or not. If you and your clientele are served well by a basic understanding, don’t you dare feel intimidated by others who claim you should know more to be a “real” Tarot reader.

I have a passion for Tarot, both as art and method. I have spent many years working with it, reading about it, collecting it, and writing about it. At some point in time I am likely to make one or more decks, and possible write a book or two. But you should not look at my example as what is normal or required.

Everyone can benefit from the mental exercises of meditative observation. If you never pick up another card, or have never picked up one, you can still get more out of your life by looking around, paying attention, and trying to puzzle out what meaning it has.

Thank you for coming all the way to the end, here. I know this one was ponderously long, but it is something that needs explanation and example, so I do appreciate your making the effort. Join me next week for another descent into the maelstrom.

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Math is Involved

Einstein Math

Way back in my early years (between five and seven) as a weird child, I had discovered The Encyclopedia of Ancient and Forbidden Wisdom by Zolar in a dark corner of the family bookcase. I don’t know where it came from or how it got there, and no one else ever acknowledged its existence when I took it to my room.

Within its tattered coverless pages, I gained access to many of the mantic arts, including astrology, tarot, palmistry, phrenology, and a host of others. The one that was of most immediate interest and service, however, was numerology.

The reason is simple. I did not have any tarot cards. There was no Amazon in the early 70s. There was no internet, and the few bookstores that existed in the nearest large town (a two-hour trip away) did not have shelves resplendent with 57 varieties like the B&N does today.

A sampling of sorcerial tomes from the local mass market bookseller. Had I this kind of access in my early teens and twenties my practice would look vastly different now, and I fear, would be less rich and complex. These can’t all be good. That’s just statistics. Sensing a marketable concept, publishing houses, some far outside the usual occult presses, are churning out “magic” titles like they were printing money, and they are.

Sadly some of these books are even written by machine, collected via web search AI and only moderately edited before some “author” is paid for the use of a name. The hundred or so titles in stock in the store are the tip of the iceberg carried online, or available as a digital version.

And among the ones in the store, I didn’t even notice the lone dubious volume on numerology. But, hey, you can learn all about all these secret sacred practices and have matching covers.

If you are starving for a resource that goes beyond packaging, take a spin around archive.org. You can find scanned copies of old magical texts downloadable for free, like the Tetrabiblos of Claudius Ptolemy, Waite’s Pictorial Key to Tarot, The Greek Magical Papyri, The Keys of Solomon, and Paracelsus’s Three Books of Occult Philosophy. If you are multi-lingual you can even find Eliphas Levi’s works in the original French, and a number of good texts in German, Latin, and Greek.

I started my own journey with the few mass market omnibus texts available in the 70s and 80s, so there’s no harm in it. Just be aware there’s more to it than that.

Likewise, astrology required an ephemeris and tables of houses and complex calculations which also were not readily obtainable in my current environs.

But numbers, well, those were free. I could work with them in my head while I didn’t sleep at night ( I suffered from terrible insomnia into my 40s) . They were also much more limited in scope than Tarot. Ten digits, 0 through 9. And while it took me a bit to visualize the layout of the 26 English letters against the ten digits, once they were converted, and computed, and got down to a single significant digit, then there were only a few meanings to keep track of.

So between experiments with astral travel (also in the book) I lay awake and reduced names and dates and places down to their essential numeric quantities. And I developed a love for number play that serves me to this day.

I haven’t seen a lot about numerology discussed on the interwebs. It doesn’t have the flash of posting a handful of tarot cards or the hook of warning about Mercury Retrograde.

I gather it may be a bigger thing in Hindu culture, but I must confess that I know very little about the method or the meanings. Perhaps that is something I shall explore.

There’s a Kabbalistic version as well, since Hebrew letters have assigned values, thus words may be read for the numbers and the meaning of the numbers interpreted. This permutations of letters that is part of the Kabbalistic tradition can also be worked with the numbers. I’ve dabbled with this a bit.

Numerology, like all the mantic arts, seeks to reveal something to us about ourselves and our future that is not readily apparent. It does this by taking numbers like dates, and reducing them down to a single digit, or two sets of double digits.

For instance, take July 4, 1776. That’s a 7, for July, plus 4 plus 1 plus 7 plus 7 plus 6. The result is 32. So then we add 3 and 2 to get 5. Five is number associated with this date. Five by the system I learned can be interpreted as conflict, chaos, or instability. This might be readily applied to that date.

But as the day of the month can be seen as a separate thing unto itself, it’s possible to come up with different numbers.

4 plus 7, of course is 11. 11 is one of those special numbers (22) being the other one, that typically are considered “resolved” without adding the last digits (to get simply 2). And the year resolves to 3. Three is considered a stable number because it represents the union of the masculine 1 and the feminine 2 (apologies to folks struggling to find non-binary traditions, this is from thousands of years ago) . Eleven can be seen to be a spiritual number, and two may be read as community or loyalty within a group.

These could also be effectively applied to this date. While I am sure some readers will hold differing views in this regard, the example was to illustrate the method, and not to render a judgment.

In actual practice, however, we have to suppose John Hancock went to Ben Franklin and asked him the best date in July of 1776 to get the Declaration signed. Been would have run the numbers and said that the 2nd should be good, because it resolved to three and spoke of harmony and union. But Hancock said they couldn’t get it back from the printer on time.

So Ben took out his tables again and told him that the next best time to sign it would be August 2, because that equates to a 4, and 4 represents the Four Cornerstones of the Universe and the Foundation of the Temple (any National Treasure fans out there. You know what I’m talking about).

And that’s when it was signed. August 2, 1776. The July 4 date is when the membership voted agreement to the version we now know, which deleted Mr. Jefferson’s more blunt condemnations of the slave trade objected to by the southern colonies. But it was signed in August, and no one has a picnic. According to the almanac it was time to be harvesting instead of picnicking.

It’s not unreasonable to assume that old Ben, and potentially many of his contemporaries, dabbled in the mantic arts. The 17th and 18th Centuries saw us moving from Mesmer to Faraday, and from Ptolemy to Newton, but it was never an immediate and brutal break. Sir Isaac Newton himself was a practicing alchemist, and the period of madness he suffered around 1693 is often attributed to mercury poisoning from his experiments. Yet he invented calculus to prove how the wheels of the universe turned.

Franklin is one of those fascinating polyglots from history that you just know was into something they left out of the books. Put aside all that secret Masonic conspiracy stuff. He was playing with lightning. Gotta love that.

And his inventions are still in use today. Otherwise I couldn’t see what I am typing.

A true figure of the Enlightenment; he was philosopher, scientist, and, I think, magician. Franklin is rumored to have rubbed elbows with Count Cagliastro and the Comte de Saint-Germaine during his numerous European travels. Some of his other buddies were known students of the occult.

Magic, alchemy, and the mantic arts survived into the Enlightenment by transmuting themselves.

Astrologers could accommodate Newton’s Principia Mathematica because it gave far more accurate calculations. Knowing better the true nature and motions of the Heavens, they reasoned, could not but result in a truer reading of their portents.

The concepts of Sacred Geometry were better expressed through the new math, and the analogy tied into the Masonic doctrines. The symbol of the All Seeing Eye atop a pyramid of sacred numerical dimensions adorns the back of the Great Seal of The United States and is familiar to anyone who has seen a dollar bill. Boldly the motto proclaims “By Divine Favor – A New Order for the Ages”.

Looking for ancient occult symbols? You need not go further than the good ol’ greenback.

The back side of the one dollar bill features both sides of the Great Seal, commissioned just after the Declaration of Independence was approved on July 4, 1776. The final design, however, wasn’t adopted until 1782 (there was a war on, you know.)

Despite what Jerry Bruckheimer would have you believe, the symbols employed are from common heraldic devices of the time, and not the product of a secret Masonic code. Of course, the heraldic symbols have a whole heapin’ lot of occult meaning going back into pagan days. That eagle is Roman, of course, the pyramid Egyptian. Don’t miss the hexagram layout of the 13 stars over the eagle’s head. As above, so below.

Officially, the 13 courses of stones in the pyramid is representative of the 13 Colonies that became the United States. If you look on the opposite side of the Seal, the eagle holds 13 arrows, has 13 stripes on the shield, and there are 13 stars in the circular cloud (a variation on the mandorla of religious art) over it’s head with the motto “From Many One”. The olive branch of piece held opposite the arrows of war has 13 leaves and 13 olives.

You gotta wonder, if 13 is such an unlucky number, how come they were so enamored of it. Surely this was courting disaster. Okay, sure, they were kind of stuck with it, being as they had 13 colonies, but if it’s a bad number, how do you fix it? It’s not like Gandalf could add a hobbit.

Well, one way to do it is to rationalize it as King George’s bad luck. But the numerological way is to get a different number, and you can do that by including the bad number enough times to get a better one. In this case, there are 6 instances of the number 13 on the Great Seal. Six times 13 is 78. Seven and eight add up to 15, and one and five add up to 6. The number 6 can signify harmony and stability, so that’s better than unlucky 13.

Alternatively, we can reduce 13 to one plus three and get 4. The number 4 represents stability, responsibility, structure and effort. It can represent the four elements, four cardinal directions, and by extension tie into the order of the universe. That’s definitely something a New Order for the Ages would be looking to partake of. Of course, there are six instances of 13 so we have to do six times 4, and that comes back to 6 again (24 = 2+4 = 6).

On the other hand, we can take 4 and 6 and get 10, which can be read in many ways. Reduced to 1, it represents unity. That charts. Read as 1 and 0, it contains the generative principle of beginnings and the unlimited potential of the future. It can also be seen as a union indivisible (where have I heard that before…) and finally, 10 being the number that occurs after the first series of single digits, can also represent a new beginning.

Now I am not saying that the founders of the nation, or the committee to design a Great Seal, or anyone in that secret Masonic conspiracy to hide the Templar Treasure, ever did any of these calculations. That does not alter the fact that the calculations can be made, and the meanings inferred, and there being something to it after all.

Numbers are part of the nature of the universe. We can argue about gravity and electromagnetism and strong and weak force and spooky action at a distance and whether or not anything can exceed the speed of light, but we cannot change the absolute fact of number.

Math, Science, and Magic were still very much entangled at the beginning of the 20th century. In the 1927 science fiction epic Metropolis, we find the robotrix/homonculus brought to life using both electrical arcs and the power of the pentagram. Her creator Rotwang speaks of sacrificing his hand to gain the knowledge to bring her to life.

In the long version of the film, we find out the robotrix is created to resurrect Hel, a woman that both Rotwang and the city master loved. But she favored the city master over the eccentric scientist/magician, and died giving birth to the male protagonist in the story. Hel, of course, is also the name of the Norse Goddess of Death.

The process of animating the robotrix gives her the appearance and life force of the human woman Maria. She puts it to immediate use presiding over an orgiastic scene as Babylon riding on the Beast with Seven Heads.

There’s a lot going on with this movie. If you can locate a copy of the restored version (I think it is available through one of the online services) I recommend viewing it with an eye toward the magical symbolism.

If there is a thing we’ve got numbers. If there is a thing, and another thing, we’ve got numbers. If there is nothing at all, we still have numbers. Zero is a number, and even zero is one. There is one nothing if we have nothing (Did you hear that in Count von Count’s voice; because I did?).

Two is always two. It’s two here. It’s two on the dark side of the moon. It’s two on Alpha Centauri and two ten billion years ago. While the symbols and words we use to describe number may change from language to language and era to era, number does not change. Number is a fact of reality. Any reality. All realities.

If you are looking for an anchor in the Waters of Darkness, numbers will be there. It is not for nothing (“one,,,one nothing,,,,”) that numbers play such a significant role in magical practice.

Our use of triangles, circles, squares, pentagrams, hexagrams, and other geometric constructs derive from the power we associate with these numbers, and the symbols we can attach to them.

The pentagram is the Five Elements of Aristotle – Earth, Air, Fire, Water, and Quintessence (literally Fifth Substance).

The hexagram is the Star of David, the Seal of Solomon, and a symbolic representation of the Hermetic maxim “As Above, So Below”.

The Hebrew alphabet has 22 characters each with a numeric value. Tracts written in Hebrew can be read as either letters or numbers when seeking hidden messages. And they can be manipulated numerically as well as alphabetically to reveal new secrets. According to Eliphas Levi these 22 letters equate to the 22 cards of the Major Arcana, thus demonstrating that the secret teachings of Kabbala are recorded in the Tarot.

There are 21 numbered cards in the Major Arcana, and one unnumbered card, the Fool, which is regarded in modern decks as zero. The placement of the Fool actually varies, and Levi put him at the point between the Last Judgment (20) and the World (21). If you are using Waite or a deck based on his, you probably have the Fool before the Magus.

In any case, it’s possible to read the 22 cards as representing the meanings of the Hebrew characters assigned to them, as well as in the usual way. For that matter, we can read the Tarot astronomically because planetary and zodiacal connections have been made. 1The traditional astrological correspondences don’t always work for me. For example, I have always felt that the Hermit was Saturn, even though the usual attribution is Mercury. I find some justification for my purely intuitive association, in that on the old Sforza deck, the Hermit carries the hourglass of Time rather than the lantern. And then both these correspondences can be read numerologically. And, of course, there’s the numbers on the cards themselves. Death is XIII, our unlucky 13. The Devil is XV, or 1+5. Here the resultant six is likely connected with the Biblical Number of the Beast 666, from Revelation.

Here’s another little game to explore. The first three cards – Fool, Magus, Priestess, are 0+1+2=3. The next three cards – Empress, Emperor, Heirophant, are 3+4+5=12=1+2 = 3.

The Empress can be seen as the material incarnation of the Priestess principle. The Emperor the earthly Magus, and the Heirophant the structured dogma ascribed to the natural Creation of the Fool. That these numerically equate reinforces this interpretation, as above, so below.

In fact, if you add the numbers on the next three cards, you also get 3. And the three after that. And the three after that. Until you are left with the last card- the World, which is number 21. Two plus one is three.2 While this trick works for the numbers 0-21 split into sets of three (with the one remaining), it’s always intrigued me how the Major Arcana can be so readily divided this way. Viewing them as trines is integral to my personal work with the deck.

Then we have the Minor Arcana, which until Waite, were usually just pips. So there wasn’t an image to evoke a particular meaning. These were done solely by number and quality. The number 5, for example, was seen as instability and conflict. The 5 of Wands, for example, then is a disagreement, potentially in the courts, as the wand may be symbolic of civil or religious authority. A 5 of Pentacles, which represents the home, heart, and wealth, could presage marital difficulties or a loss in the markets. The face cards typically were assigned to people, a child, a young adult, and a mature man and woman, though these are as easily numbered, 11 through 14. This makes the queens bear the burden of unlucky 13. I wonder if there was intentional misogyny there. Taken together the four suits have 56 cards, that reduce to 11.

So the combined deck of 78 cards (which would work out to 6) can be viewed as 11 and 22, the two super numbers of numerology.

When you start seeing numbers, you start seeing numbers everywhere. Not just the direct numerals that are on the mailbox or the clock. You start to notice quantities and sets. You become a kind of Count von Count all on your own. Why are there three pillars on that building? What is the significance of the octagonal base of the columns? Why does the building have a round footprint?3If you know the answer to some of these questions, you might be part of that secret Templar conspiracy. But if I told you about it, I’d have to kill you.

Our awareness of numbers in our life is generally very low unless we are performing some function that required counting, math, or reference, like telling time. But number permeates the universe.

Like the so-called “angel numbers” an enhanced observation of the apparently random appearance of numbers in our everyday life can be a source of relevant insight.

Numerology goes past the basic birth number and life number. it includes things like sequences of prime numbers, Ï€ and Φ, and fractal as well as sacred geometry. It’s angles and calculus are inherent in every pentagram and magic circle, whether we consciously evoke them or not. We can express through number both time and space, and use number to manipulate them.

If I woke up and saw that it was 2:22 in the morning, I might briefly recognize that this was an Angel number before rolling over to sleep. If it occurs on February 22, I might need to pay more attention. And if it happened this year, that is 2:22 2/22/22, I had better take notice. It was 2:22, on February 22, of 2022. If it was not revealed to you personally, it might just be a fun coincidence, but if something woke you up that morning, it bears further investigation.

Numbers being what they are, this kind of thing can actually lead to compulsive behaviors. Superstitions abound with instances of threes, sevens, and nines. You can become so obsessed with number that you need to have an exact number of items on your plate at lunch or you won’t get on a bus with certain number, or you regard certain dates as being bad luck.

Numerology, like astrology or Tarot, can be taken to the extreme. I have never seen it as an absolute, but I definitely use number in my practice, in my art, and in everyday life. I don’t look askance at going out on Friday the 13th, anymore than I hide out in my house during Mercury Retrograde. But as tools to expand my universe, and a means of listening to that universe, numbers are very handy. And you really can’t escape them.

I hope you have enjoyed this foray into the wild and wacky world of numbers. I have only scratched the surface of the connection numbers have with magic and esoteric thought. We haven’t even mentioned things like the Golden Ratio, magic squares, planetary hours and other complex beliefs around number that fire the mind and open the eyes. I will probably revisit the topic in future articles. In the meantime, I hope you will join me again next week.

Count Von Count is a creation of Sesame Street/The Children’s Television Workshop/Jim Henson.

Metropolis was in the public domain but has since been re-copyrighted by the FW Murnau Foundation.

Images of Albert Einstein were found on the Internet. While the intellectual property probably belongs to his estate or the original photographers, they are fairly ubiquitous.

I am not making a profit on this blog, so I consider the inclusion of these images as fair use. I will remove them if requested by the respective rights holder(s).

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You Must Go Alone

The Hermit

Living in the fish eye lens, caught in the camera eye;
I have no heart to lie.
I can’t pretend a stranger is a long awaited friend.

–Limelight by Neal Peart (Lee/Lifeson/Peart)

 

I’ve always been something of a non-joiner. That’s not to say I don’t form associations, friendships, and work with groups or teams of people for a common goal. But I don’t do it often or easily. I am what is currently called a solitary practitioner.

For my part, being solitary was initially just a fact of life. My own innate weirdness formed a barrier to developing relationships as a child, even inside family. Absent the internet, which we are both lucky enough to be on at this moment, “finding my tribe” was a virtual impossibility. At most I might have developed close relationships with three or four people, and even in that context, some things were just not discussed (and considering what was discussed, that says something very significant about the local community’s stance on things occult).

In later life, and in a wider world, I now choose to keep my light under a bushel, though I am sharing something of it here. Witness the beam that escapes from the door of yon Hermit’s lantern. But like the Hermit, the journey I am on is a personal and lonely one. And so, I will wager, is yours.

Despite parapsychological assertions and perhaps rare glimpses, we cannot live inside each other’s heads. It’s probably a constriction of being tied to these meat bags we walk around in, but on this plane and in this life, we’re more or less in solitary confinement. At least, that’s true for most of the time.

And even if we’re not, our psychological makeup hides things. We bury the dirty secrets. We put a big mask over our fears and vulnerabilities. We cover our outrageous libido, our kink, our fetishes. We reign in the rage and hatred. and derision. We wallow in guilt for all those things we hide, and we hide that we wallow in guilt. And that makes us feel even guiltier.

And then there’s the unconscious. As Samuel L. Jackson would put it, “the shit we don’t know that we don’t know”. The things we keep hidden from our own brains, that haunt us in dreams, that drive a hundred little neuroses, that pile up like a heap of discarded toys in that dark attic of our minds.

So, please, when you make telepathic contact with your closest dearest friend and lover, be sure to let them see all that.

Yeah, I didn’t think so. I am not even sure if we are liberated from the physical if we can unpack all that.

Well we all have a face
That we hide away forever
And we take them out
And show ourselves
When everyone has gone

Some are satin some are steel
Some are silk and some are leather
They’re the faces of the stranger
But we love to try them on

–The Stranger by Billy Joel

The goal of Freudian psychoanalysis was to open up and integrate all the dark secrets of the unconscious mind into a functional and less guilty whole. His star pupil, C. G. Jung, coined the phrase Shadow Work to describe this process, which he felt was more an internal journey than an external therapy.

This phrase seems to drip from almost every witchcraft book and blog these days. And it seems, at least as far as I can determine, that it is being applied in Jung’s context, as an aid to spiritual growth and the healing of the psyche.

And that’s not a bad thing.

But when I hear Shadow Work, I immediately think of dastardly deeds done in the dark. Things that ought not to be done by light of day. “Black” magic, curses, hexes, and other maledictions. But then I have been walking the lonely road a long time, and perhaps that’s tainted my perspective a bit.

For the record I have met my inner demons. We get together for drinks and dinner every now and again. That is, I have not cast out those demons, nor do I live in a world of Love and Light. That does not mean that I have not learned from the experience. And continue to do so. It’s cheaper than therapy. As to whether or not it is more effective, I couldn’t say, but it works for me personally.

Let’s take a look at that Hermit card again. He is standing alone on the mountaintop, his right hand lifts a lantern that glows with the light of a hexagram. But he still holds his staff with the left hand. His head is down and his face is a mask of weariness. Yet he seems poised to step forward and continue his journey. This is not resolution, but resoluteness. The road goes ever on.

Pamela Coleman Smith’s Hermit stands alone on the mountain top. What purpose is there in shining the light? He is above the world and the clouds. Presumably he does not need to see the path ahead because he has reached the summit. Or has he?

Is he carrying the light back down into the world, or is he headed for that next mountain top in the distance?

This card has been my significator in personal readings for many, many years. My earliest instructions on Tarot specified that if a male, one should choose the Magician, and if a female, the High Priestess. This thinking, aside from being difficultly binary, also seems a bit arrogant to me.

Imagine a young inexperienced reader (I was seven when I started) assuming the role of a Magician -a Maker. Presumptive to say the least. Later texts indicated that the appropriate card for the novice would be the Fool, but then, esoterically the Fool is an even more powerful Maker than the Magician (but that’s another show). It was not much longer after that, however, that I started making my own interpretations and associations of the cards, and very frequently the Hermit felt right.

As noted, I am solitary. Check one. I am on a personal journey of discovery. Check two. I have obtained certain knowledge through this experience, a small portion of which may shine out through the crack in my lantern. Check three. If we want to go for four, I actually do have that outfit.

It’s important to understand that the Hermit’s light is limited only because so much of it must be personally experienced, personally known, rather than handed down, written out, or posted on Instagram. Clearly I have no problem writing extensive tracts, and I could go on and on and on about a wide range of subjects, many of them enlightening and helpful. But in the end, you have to walk that road yourself. You have to stand at the crossroads in the middle of the night. And you have to go alone.

Jason Miller in his Consorting with Spirits talks about the Lonely Initiation. While the description is somewhat vague, those who have experienced this can immediately identify what he is talking about. It is a transformative event that forever alters one deep down. One emerges with a changed view of the world, a view that is often more broad and more subtle, than what was held before.

Miller says that this process can occur several times during the course of a lifetime. In fact, given his parameters, the transition from Life into Death can be seen as one of these Lonely Initiations. We all make that journey by ourselves. Even when there are guides, they aren’t having the experience.

So the journey of the Hermit is this exploration of our selves. When one is alone in the Wilderness, who else is there? Maybe there are gods, but maybe not. That’s one of the questions that comes up. Internal contemplation inevitably brings us face to face with whether we can trust external reality.

Descarte’s old solution that since he was not self-created, there must be an external world, doesn’t always hold up. If he were self-created, would he even have that knowledge? He wasn’t present at his creation, only afterward. So awareness of that demiurge is by no means a given.

And if we have self-created, who’s to say that everything else we perceive and respond to as “real” is not also a creation of our own consciousness.

This is the shaky ground on which the Hermit walks. It can lead one down endless rabbit holes of speculation, it can be identity destroying, cause madness, addiction, and even self-destruction. The biographies of many famous and infamous practitioners bear witness to this. Those who are shocked and appalled by the actions of people like Aleister Crowley should consider he may have plumbed too deeply the Waters of Darkness, and the inevitable void in his soul led to his debauchery and depravity.

Diary of a Madman. Aleister Crowley is probably the most popularly known of the lodge magicians of Victorian England though most of what is popularly known is probably wrong.

Viewed through the lens of the 21st century his racism and misogyny are heinous, but he would not have raised an eyebrow among his peers. While it is true that he was addicted to opium and cocaine, the same could be said for a number of his contemporaries. His more or less open bisexuality, and the frankness of his texts on sex magic, caused condemnation and controversy in tightly-laced, largely hypocritical British society. The “wickedest man alive” epithet originates from his taking of male lovers, rather than anything to do with his occult practices.

That said, he did not live a life of moral virtue by any stretch of the imagination. He had multiple sexual encounters with men and women, prostitutes, and probably young boys. His frequent use of drugs as part of his rituals obscures any relevant results he may have achieved. There is little question that the man had a giant ego that he enjoyed having stroked repeatedly. The attentions of the press when he was riding high were welcomed and inflamed by reports of more lurid details. As his personal star waned, the public couldn’t separate the fiction of the Beast from Crowley the Magus. Even today much is reported based on the tabloid sensation of the Victorians.

Crowley should not be viewed with sympathy, but perhaps with sadness. Sybil Leek wrote about him coming to visit their house when she was a young girl, and how the aura of power and insight surrounded him. The fact that he chose to indulge his Beast instead of cultivate that power is indeed sad.

And a warning to all of us who tread the path.

Crowley can be something of an enigma. Many of us today still study his works, despite the criminal actions of his later years. Still others scoff at his public persona of the Beast and claim he was more a charlatan than magician.

His legacy is part of any serious study of the occult and magic. Even modern folkcraft is tinged with some of the Victorian spiritualist awakening, and Crowley is part of that. He is a key figure in the mystery lodge movement of the late 19th century and must be evaluated as much in that context as for his darker nature.

I do not apologize for the man, but I do think I understand him. I have walked some of those paths and stared into the abyss. I have opened the doors that most people will not open, and seen what lies beyond there.

The difference between me and Crowley is that I chose to shut some of those doors instead of walking through them.. Those doors are still there, and I know how to find them. To say otherwise would be self-deception. Self-deception is a path into the darkness.

That’s why people fear the magician and the witch and the sorceror. We keep close company with our Inner Darkness. We needn’t fear what we will find when we journey deep into our mind. We can be a danger to ourselves and others.

That’s why the literature is resplendent with tales of mad magicians being carried off by something unsavory. Abdul Al Hazared (author of the quasi-fictional Necronomicon) is supposed to have been torn to pieces in the town square by unseen forces. Grimoires have as many warnings and cautions as spells.

So it is no surprise that instruction, mentorship, and group practice are an alternative to the lone figure on the mountaintop, struggling to harness the winds. But then I am non-joiner, and that’s because of a few things.

For one, I’m just not willing to surrender my will to the will of the group. The practice of magic is very will-forward, and it tends to attract personalities who are strong-willed, self-possessed, and with very clear intentions. If you get a lot of these kinds of people together in a room, you can, for a period of time, accomplish wonderful things. However, long term the individualism that makes these people capable and powerful can tend to create division and conflict. Witness the splintering of the mystery lodges in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and the various “flavors” of witchcraft practice extant today.

Certainly divisive group dynamics is not exclusive to the occult community. Protestantism, after all, was a similar break in the universal Catholic Church, that, once broken, continued to shatter like a mirror hitting the floor. In any situation where charismatic, forceful people are brought together, there is a potential for eventual conflict. I’ve been there and done that, and well, I just don’t find the benefits to be worth the drama. Your mileage may vary.

And there are benefits to being in the coven, lodge, or monastic order. For one, you get to work with others who are going through the same things as you, and be instructed by those who have been through it. A good many of these groups have hierarchical systems that release information only when adepts have attained a certain level. This reduces confusion and protects one against accidents. Akin to this is that the groups usually have some kind of documented tradition that maintains a sense of orthodoxy. Finally, there are things that are open only to members of the group. Together these processes can greatly accelerate the progress of a member toward mastery.

The magical group is symbolized by the Hierophant rather than the Hermit. They are the Keeper of Secrets. The knowledge is there, available, preserved, protected, and disseminated to the faithful/worthy/joiners. You may have access, but you will have to surrender something of your identity in the process.

Well, the same is true for the Hermit, he has surrendered society in search of self. The Hierophant will reduce your self in return for society. Both are valid paths. Some can walk both. Monasticism is a phenomenon that evolved out of structured religion. There is nothing that says an individual is barred from this evolution, or that they can move freely between both poles (or walk casually in the middle for that matter).

If all the books on magic currently in publication were the One True Way, there’d not be all the books on magic.

I personally went looking for the One True Way when I was very young. What had been presented as the One True Way was lacking in certain fundamental ways. In my lifetime, I have found that searching for the One True Way is the flawed premise, that causes all subsequent results to be equally flawed. The journey is the destination.

The Hermit’s lantern contains the same message that the Hierophant has. It does not reside in order or structure, but in experience and experimentation.

This message is “As Above, So Below”,

This is the opening invocation from the Emerald Tablet of the fabled Hermes Trismegistus. This being, a composite of the Greek Hermes and Egyptian Thoth, was worshiped in the Empire of Alexander.

Magical texts of all sorts have been attributed to him over the centuries and the Hermetic doctrines at the root of alchemy and Western ceremonial magic owe a great deal to these early traditions.

The name means Hermes the Thrice Great. The number of the Hermit card is IX – nine, or three times three.

Of course, the Hermit is actually the tenth card, so we have a secret hidden there as well.

The One in ten represents Unity, the First Principle, the Primum Mobile. The Zero represents the Void, the Unformed, the Waters of Darkness which are divided from the dry land to create the World.

As Above, So Below.

To connect “Hermes” to “Hermit” is perhaps a bit of a stretch. The root words are not the same despite the similar sounds.

Consider that Hermes Trismegistus worship originated in Hellenistic Egypt.

The root word that hermit is derived from means “a desert place”. Egypt is a desert place.

The connection is my own, but not arrived at in an unusual manner. There are numerous examples of puns, homophones, and other kinds of word play used to hide information in esoteric writing. The Hierophant resides within the Hermit. As does the Magician.

As Above, So Below.

Thank you for reading to the end. If you found some of the meandering obtuse, well then you actually have gotten the message. It’s the wandering/wondering that’s important. Join me again next week for more confused ramblings.

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It’s Full of Stars

Saturn Sunrise

This morning, when you got up, everything you saw, touched, heard, tasted, and smelled was made of tiny atoms that were formed in the dark fiery heart of a giant dying star untold billions of years ago.

Those atoms are clouds of circling particles, that are made up of clouds of circling particles, that are probably also made of clouds of circling particles over and over and over.

It’s turtles all the way down.

The particles aren’t really particles. They’re packets of energy, moving through space, in ways that cause invisible forces to shape the nature of space to create our ordinary visible world.

This is not magic. This is science. At least, this is among the leading current theories on the nature of the universe.

So if you have someone giving you a hard time about believing in invisible spirits that influence your life and alter your destiny, ask them to show you a box of gravity.

There is nothing new under the sun. Or in it. Although the sun itself is reckoned to be about 4.6 billion years old, it too, is made from the bones of dead worlds. We’re all in someone’s afterlife here.

And around that other sun, the mother sun, that gave birth to us all, there may have spun many worlds as well. And on the surfaces of those worlds may have been water, and oxygen, and amino acids and condominiums and car parks.

We’ll never meet them. We’ll never know how they felt or the songs they sang or if they cried when it rained. Because they’ve all gone down to dust and the dust has come back up as us.

Cosmic time can kick you for a loop.

On the left is one of countless galaxies visible to the instruments of modern technology. It represents billions of billions of billions of worlds, each possibly full of richly diverse life forms that are similar to, and vastly different, from what has grown on our little speck of damp rock circling an unspectacular star in a quiet backwater of our own galaxy. The lovely spiral arms bely a terrible secret. At the heart of most galaxies, we think, is a monsterous black hole, swallowing entire star systems into an impenetrable void. One theory holds that our entire universe will eventually end up in such a state, when the energy of the Big Bang is no longer able to withstand the inward pull of gravity. The opposite fate is just as terrifying; a future where every particle of every particle drifts so far apart that no energy remains at all, and the rest is darkness.
This is the much shown Hubble Deep Field image. This shows galaxies upon galaxies upon galaxies (many of which may already be extinct, since the light left them before the dinosaurs were born). Each galaxy may be like the one above, with untold numbers of life-creating planets. And this represents a part of the sky equal to the size of a tennis ball viewed at the other end of a football field. There are roughly 24 million times more galaxies than the 3000 or so here.

For example, the vast majority of humanity has lived and died in the last 30,000 years or so. Of them, we remember the names of princes and potentates, and a few laureates, visionaries, and healers.

And that’s it.

The further back we go, the fewer we can name. Past about 7000 years or so, it’s totally anonymous. They may have been called Gilgamesh or Noah or Hermes or Lucifer but that’s what we called them later. No one really knows their names, and their stories are doubtless confused and embellished.

We don’t know the name of that Sorceror on the wall of Troi Freres, or the artisan that lavished so much time and care on shaping the tiny Venus of Willendorf. The builders of Catal Huyuk and Gobekli Tepe are abstractions. We know only the little that remains. A few bones, some stone tools, and then oblivion.

Back along that path the family turns into the ancestors, and the ancestors into the legends, and the legends into the myths. And past the myths, we are going out beyond Saturn, beyond the old Titans, into the realm of the outer dark.

It’s a cold, dark, and largely empty universe that might as well be infinite because we can’t really work out how to get outside it.

Science can’t even agree on that. So far theories suggest three possible outcomes.

It’s either an expanding universe that will keep expanding until everything is so far away from everything that all those particles of particles of particles cease to glow with any residual spark and the entire thing becomes nothing.

Or it’s a collapsing universe that expands just so far before the gravity within it starts to overcome the initial energy of its creation and everything falls back down into itself, crushed into an infinitely dense and infinitely tiny dot. Again, essentially nothing.

And some argue that it’s an oscillating universe where cycles of expansion and contraction go on and on and on forever, where each previous universe is erased from existence by being crushed into a point so dense and so small that it erupts into the next one.

Does any of this sound a tad magical to you? Mythical at the very least? There’s a few similar stories in old Sanskrit. The kalachakra, or Time Wheel, oscillates universes that are born, grow old, and die, just as humans do, and as with humans, the universe is reborn into the next order of life.

And that one about the universe suddenly springing into existence in a flash of light. . . well, the scientists call that the Big Bang. You can find it Genesis if you read carefully.

The world was without form, and void, and darkness was on the face of the deep.

Let there be light.

This is about energy expanding into the void of space.

What the Kabbalah expresses as emanations of the divine into the material; the bolt of lightning comes down through the realms of the Tree of Life to illuminate the mundane worlds.

This action was a conscious withdrawing of the Divine Intelligence to create something that was Other than itself.

The light was divided from the darkness.

The Divine Intelligence created the universe in order to know itself.

And the morning and the evening were the first day.

Time started. And we’ve been trying to understand it ever since.

In this image by Stonehenge Dronescapes Photography shared on Facebook, we can see the sky as our ancient ancestors experienced it. Without the light pollution of modern industrialization, or even the fire that kept predators away at night, the universe we inhabit is very much present. It is not hard to imagine seeing Indra dancing above the horizon, or the plumed serpent Quetzlcoatl rising up into the night sky. Now we are only able to experience such awe in places like the deep desert, where technology doesn’t intrude.
An artificial starscape is projected on the ceiling of the Gobekli Tepe museum. This site in modern-day Turkey is possibly 7000 years older than the megaliths at Stonehenge, but seems to have some similar purpose as both temple and timepiece. Much recent archaeology suggests that multitudes gathered at this site over a period of 1500 years, to feast, trade, and get intoxicated. The remains of ancient beer is found here among the animal bones, suggesting that the fermentation of grain was a key part of the site’s activity. One theory has been put forth that this desire for mind-altering grog is what led to domestication of grains, and not the other way around. Fascinating if true, it makes our remote ancestors need to travel inwardly as well as outwardly of far greater significance that was once believed.

That’s why we watched the stars on cloudless nights when we huddled around the fire, and named those stars after things in our world. We noticed the ones that were wanderers and called them planets.

We used them to tell us when it was time to move south because the winter was coming. We used them to show us where south was. When we started to domesticate plants and animals we used them to tell us when to plant, when it was birthing season, and when we should harvest.

We built places like Stonehenge and the Sunwheel and the temples of Meso-America and pyramids of Egypt to connect with this fundamental understanding of space-time. Religion and ritual are built around propitious times and locations.

We do things when the stars are right.

We mark out our year by equinoxes and solstices and dot the in-between times with feast days derived from lunar phases and tallied days. We divide our time by months that were once moons, and split them up by days defined by the seven planets of the ancient Chaldees. We live in a modern digital scientific world and modern science basically proves that those ancient Chaldees had it on the ball.

So when your scientist buddy scoffs at you discussing energy work, you might remind them that all matter is energy, that the universe is teeming with light, and that energy can be manipulated to create various effects. They might choose to use a high voltage magnetic field rather than an incantation. The only difference here is that their “spell” is supported by modern convention and belief, just as a few hundred years ago, yours would have been.

In the 1600s, everyone believed that magic existed and did things, even if they didn’t really understand it. It was potentially dangerous, maybe evil, and could be used effectively only by those who knew how.

In the 1800s the same things could have been said about steam engines and electricity.

The 20th Century applied these ideas to the power of the atom.

All are ways of describing how the universe works, and harnessing that natural energy that is everywhere. We don’t know where it came from, or how it got here, but it’s here, and we are affected by it.

We are made of it. We can’t help but be affected by it.

Let’s consider that our scientific universe of space-time is spinning and whirling and oscillating along like mad. Yes, the planets circle the sun, but the sun is spinning around the galaxy, and the galaxy is whizzing across the universe, and the universe is doing whatever it is the universe is doing. So relative to where we are here on Mother Earth, it might look like we see the sun going up and down in about the same places, and those places wiggle ever so slightly between Midsummer and Midwinter, and the planets and the stars overhead seem to repeat their familiar patterns.

But this is all relative to our viewpoint. Which is what Einstein was telling us about the universe. What we see isn’t what is. It’s what was, a moment or so ago, when the light of whatever happened left the place it happened and headed toward us. So for the moon that’s only a few seconds. For Mars, it appears to be where it was a couple of minutes ago.

The sun itself is about 8 minutes back in time. If it went out right now, we wouldn’t know it for eight whole minutes. If we were on Pluto, we wouldn’t see that final sunset for over four and a half hours.

So we really are time travelers in this fixed formal digital modern magicless universe. We see the stars as they were years and decades and centuries and millennia and eons ago.

The universe we look at each night was gone before we were even born.

We, our children, grandchildren, the human species, and even the earth itself, may be gone before the light of some of those stars, as they are now, ever reaches this spot.

But it’s safe to say that whether it’s the universe of the past we see, or the universe of the present that we never will, each moment in time describes a unique and never repeated structure of the energy within the universe. Now is now. The instant before was different, and the instant after will be different, and it keeps on going and going.

Even on a summer night on a quiet suburban street, we are still drawn to look up and marvel at the heavens above us. In such a scenario, the best we can hope for is the changing face of the moon, a few of the brighter planets, and a handful of the most prominent constellations on a very clear night, and away from the glare of street lamps and house windows. We know instinctively that there is something out there that we are a part of, even if our technological conveniences have blinded us to seeing it.

This is one of the reasons I find some merit in the practice of astrology. Granted, the most usual natal charts are based on the relative local positions of the planets, asteroids, and some calculated points derived from these, as seen overhead (or below the horizon) at the time of your birth.

Plug that into the context that a constantly spinning, whirling, whizzing, evolving universe is never in the same place at the same time ever, and each human lifetime can be seen as a change in the fabric of the universe. When you are born, you alter the nature of all that is by your presence. Surely an event of such significance participates in something of that greater universe.

The light from the sun and moon reach us first, and then all the planets. So applying their energy, their influence, most directly, seems only logical.

The background stars, which form the signs of the Zodiac, and to some extent rule the houses, take a lot longer.

By virtue of that, they are only slightly changed from when Claudius Ptolemy charted their positions in Roman Alexandria, using data compiled by those witty Chaldees a few thousand years earlier.

The energy we receive now, may only have left some of those stars when the Chaldeans named them, or when Ptolemy charted them. That energy is consistent, and thus the attributes we ascribe to it is consistent. At least for as long as I will be drawing up horoscopes anyway.

As Above, So Below! I acquired this polished orb of ocean jasper because it immediately reminded me of the storms that churn across the surface clouds of our largest planetary neighbor. The stone sphere is some two inches or so. Jupiter is 1000 times larger than the entire Earth. Our planet would fit across it’s famous Great Red Spot. The most easily seen feature on Jupiter’s surface was possibly discovered by Galileo Galilee in the 1600s. It’s a hurricane that potentially has been going for 400 years or more. Despite it’s horrifying size, Jupiter is made of mostly “air”, a swirling miasma of hydrocarbons, floating above seas of liquid methane. It may be much bigger than the little stone sphere, but the sphere is more solid. For comparison, Great Jupiter would fit inside the sun as many times as our Earth fits inside Jupiter. There are millions of stars in the galaxy that are 1000 times bigger than the sun.

But if I were standing beneath the red rays of far Antares, and looking up through Scorpio’s claws toward our tiny pale sun, I would have a very different universe. I might have two moons in the sky at night, or seven. My longer year would be punctuated by their movements, forward and back (with multiple moons you get retrograde). The names I would give to the stars and the pictures I would draw between them would be what my remote ancestors had seen when they set by the fires in front of their caves, and began trying to work out how to manage the energy that was teeming through the universe.

Because that’s what living beings do.

The Divine Intelligence created the Universe to Know Itself.

We all participate in that. We are all bright sparks of that limitless eternal energy.

That’s why we’re here.

Thank you for reading to the end. I hope you found it enjoyable. These are the things I think of when in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes, the market is down, inflation is up, and Monday lies too closely ahead. It is, I think, helpful to remember that we are all part of something much brighter than the dust and bones around us.

Space images are courtesy National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) unless otherwise noted.

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To Thine Own Self

Reaper Portrait

I trust you’ll pardon yet another title borrowed from the Bard. His use of the language is exquisite, and I am fairly sure he was a working witch…that double-double thing didn’t come from outside reading.

Borrowing, not coincidentally, is the subject of this week’s article. Specifically it’s on the borrowing of ideas, beliefs, and practices from cultures other than the ones into which we were born.

This is a hot-button topic under the buzzword “cultural appropriation” and has grown into a major concern of the esoteric community.

And I certainly agree that it should be. Yet, I am probably guilty of it to some extent.

And so are you.

The problem with cultural appropriation is that we live in a globally-connected instant information society where literally everyone has access, if not direct exposure, to everyone else’s sacred experiences; many of which are not explicitly identified as such.

Human beings are somewhat natural mimics. We are constantly adding bits and pieces from our daily life to our bodies and minds, usually unconsciously. We do it as protective camouflage, to attract friends and lovers, and to define ourselves to ourselves.

Maybe it’s an outfit we see in a store window. Maybe it’s from a character on our favorite show. Maybe it’s an hilarious meme of the socials. We add it to ourselves, switch it around, make it our own. But we do it because that’s what humans do.

Spiritual inquiry and magical practice are no different in this respect. There are literally thousands of books out there that purport to specific knowledge of this or that practice.

Some will follow them to the letter. Some will pattern their entire lives on one thin trade paperback.

Others will build a library of diverse works of all ages (raises hand) and forge a unique and personal path from the morass of opposing ideas.

Still others will go to the Internet (how great it would have been to have had the Internet in my teens. Well, no, not really…) and base their practice on clips from Instagram and TikTok.

None of these methods are inherently wrong. In fact, the anarchical nature of occult philosophy implies that wrong doesn’t exist. If it works for you, then it’s not wrong.

Except, of course, when it is.

Welcome to the socio-political miasma of cultural appropriation. We need to get a good definition of this. It should be fairly basic.

If you are practicing beliefs and rituals from a culture that is not your own, or one you have been accepted or initiated into, then you are potentially committing cultural appropriation.

Why is this bad?

Well, at the most basic, it is disrespectful.

At worst, it implies that you – usually meaning a Caucasian person, likely middle or upper class, with a European heritage and a more or less privileged lifestyle – feel that the ideas, beliefs, and practices of non-Caucasian peoples are yours to take without permission and do with as you will. It’s an act of imperialist colonialist aggression and a figurative rape of the culture. White Europeans have been doing this a lot for a long time, and finally there’s a push-back.

I grew up in rural Appalachia. Like many people in rural Appalachia, some of my ancestors came across from the lands of Ireland, Scotland, and Wales, where they had been disinherited and displaced by invading Normans (see imperialist colonialist aggression above).

But some of my ancestors were already living in Appalachia when the white people got there. That’s not uncommon in the mountains. The region is harsh and difficult to travel, even up to the time of my own childhood. Those who settled it were mostly hunters and trappers1 “Western expansion” in the early 1800s often shows the rugged buckskin wearing frontier hero, but the majority of settlers moved through the Cumberland Gap to homestead more hospitable farming land in Central Kentucky and Tennessee, The Appalachian region remains a micro-culture of it’s own., on good terms with the Native peoples, and sometimes taken in as members of the tribe, allowed to marry freely and raise children of mixed heritage. The Native American DNA diluted over time in some families, but it’s still there.

The people of the mountains are insular, wary of strangers, and tend not to stray far from their homes. Having moved to Texas, I am something of a pariah, but then there are a number of original Texicans (as they were called in the 19th century) who migrated from rural Appalachia, so I think I am in good company still.

You may recall (I hope) from your American history class, that in the 1830s, then President Andrew Jackson forcibly moved vast numbers of Native Americans from the Appalachians on a death march to the “Indian Territory” located in present day Oklahoma. The Trail of Tears, as it was known to the Natives, was one of the more significant acts of the American Holocaust, a long and slow process of exterminating Native Americans and eradicating their culture in the United States. Those of us with some little Native DNA in our bloodlines retain very deep feelings about this.

This is why I personally rankle every time I see someone on social media talk about smudging with sage to purify something.

This is a Native American ritual2It is true that the use of incenses and/or smoke for purification and ritual purpose is both ancient and worldwide. This specific practice is part of a culture that has already suffered horrendous treatment at the hands of ancestrally white Europeans. It need not be further diluted and distorted by them.

I know that I have ancestors who did it, but I don’t do it myself, because I am not now a part of the tribe.

I have not been initiated into that circle, and I do not understand the deep spiritual significance of the ritual components, and how they are used to clear away evil spirits.

A selection of sacred objects from local discount shops taken this past weekend. The left and center images were at one of the last chance type stores that offer wares that didn’t sell in high end department stores. So these were probably aimed at ladies of upper middle class or better shopping at Sax, Nordstrom’s, and Neiman Marcus.

The one on the right is from a deep discount store that imports products from mass producers overseas. You’ll note that in addition to Sage and Sweetgrass “wands” (last month was sage and palo santo) you can also get authentic “meditation crystals”. They’re badly dyed quartz points. I suppose you could use them as quartz in a pinch, but I think the dyestuffs might be a little sketchy or possibly even toxic. Probably not the optimum choice for aligning the chakras.

Not sure how to use these? Well, the same shop has stacks of cheaply produced books on various topics to make you an expert. The trendiness of Magic and it’s trappings is being fed by mainstream mass marketing. That will not end well.

In my personal opinion, little white college girls with the “dorm room smudging kit” from Five Below who saw all about it on TikTok should NOT be doing it.

Ever.

NOT EVER.

I don’t care if you have watched a video online about it.

And yes, there are even how-to videos made by Native peoples on the Internet, both to communicate this to other indigenous persons who no longer have the connection to their tradition, and to teach non-indigenous people.

So even within the Native American community, whether this constitutes disrespectful cultural appropriation is still not clearly defined.

As I don’t consider myself “native enough” to perform the ritual, I certainly will not speak for the Native American culture. But for me, personally, it’s a bad thing, and it always trips my trigger.

Largely because a number of the examples I see are people who don’t really invest in the spiritual nature of the ritual.

For example, the aforementioned college student, who just discovered that being a witch is a sure way to rebel against mommy and daddy, so she’s dressing goth and playing with ouija boards. And smudging everything in sight.

I’m sure I’ll be called out for “gatekeeping” on this. Well, my response is that this is my personal opinion, and I am not going out seeking the so-called “baby-witches” and telling them what they can and can’t do. “Gatekeeping” has unfortunately become one of those “chilling words” that stops dialog and attacks the messenger rather that addressing the message.

There are very good reasons for saying that any practice should not be done by those without proper training, proper awareness and the proper reverence for the sacred nature of the act.

It’s a form without substance, and that can only offend the spirits and invite chaos into your life.

And trust me, friends. You do not want to offend Native American spirits.

Or Native African ones either. Stay away from that Voodoo unless you have been brought into the culture. It’s not going to end well.

This is coming from someone who has made what is probably a Baron Samedi hat. As I said, I may be guilty of unconscious cultural appropriation myself. Or not entirely unconscious. That goes back to that natural tendency to mimic.

Human see. Human do.

When I was a freshman in college (coming up on four decades ago), my rebellion included buying a Victorian style top hat. One of the actors in a play had one, and I fell in love with it. It’s the Mad Hatter style, purchased not unexpectedly from a now defunct shop called The Mad Hatter.

Being the natural weirdo that I am, I started to gradually embellish this hat. I stuck in some feathers from a hawk and a falcon that I had found in the woods near my home. I got this silk covered mask somewhere, a theater shop most likely. Behind it I placed the eyes of two peacock feathers. These were a gift from a friend, originally attached to a bronze candlestick. The mask and feathers we pinned permanently in place by an Egyptian scarab style pin…except instead of the sun his wings hold a skull.

It evolved from there. A morticians veil. Playing cards from the Dead Man’s Hand. Black roses.

It’s a Death thing. But it’s not supposed to be Baron Samedi’s hat.

On the left is my original mid-eighties Victorian style top hat, which is not a Baron Samedi hat.

On the right is the Baron Samedi hat I bought in New Orleans on Halloween, 2015. I have embellished it so that it is no longer a Baron Samedi hat either.

The original was plain with the white and black skulls on the band. Far too plain for my artistic sensibilities.

Yes, that is Buzz Lightyear in the background. Some things must remain a mystery. .

Baron Samedi is a Voodoo spirit. He is a spirit of the cemetery – sometimes known as Baron Cemetery and Baron Saturday. He usually manifests with a skull face, top hat, and cigar.

You’ve seen him. He’s even been in Disney movies. And so he’s probably been tacked on to a number of non-Haitian occult personalities, including my own.

But I honestly had zero connection to that when I started transforming my hat. If anything I was riffing on the magician’s hat of my youthful memories – waiting for a rabbit to appear.

That said, I do have a Baron Samedi hat. They sell them in the souvenir shops in New Orleans. I bought it on Halloween weekend a few years ago, as a sign of recognition and token of respect to the Baron. He doesn’t seem to mind.

From Bond baddie to Disney villian, Baron Samedi, or some stylistic variation of the Voodoo lwa is called up whenever a sinister African presence is needed in a Hollywood film.

The 1973 flick Live and Let Die fueled my existing fascination with Tarot cards, and got me interested in Voodoo for its malefic qualities.

Somewhere on my bookshelf is a tattered copy of the International Imports Catalog, wherein Miss Anna Riva offered personally manufactured Voodoo charms, talismans, and conjure bags. It’s a good thing that in my teen years, I could never afford them (nor was able to have them delivered away from parental eyes) as Miss Anna Riva does not appear to have been initiated into the Voodoo religion or any other tradition.

Dorothy Spencer, the real name of Miss Anna Riva, wrote several books of spells and rituals, all of which required one or more of Miss Anna Riva’s oils, incenses, or powders Even then, that seemed a tad shady to me. It just demonstrates that marketing the occult is hardly new. The ancients did it.

In fairness, I learned from those catalogs a number of things. My practice from my pre-teens to my college years consisted of inferring what some of the things in the catalog were, or did, and what I could substitute with locally. I freely admit that I may have unintentionally borrowed from other cultures through that process.

I don’t practice Voodoo, but I have studied it. Admittedly I went to it looking for malefic powers, and the ability to harm my enemies by sticking pins into a doll. We’ve all seen that episode of Gilligan.3The problems inherent in Hollywood Voodoo are much worse than even Hollywood Witchcraft. If you’ve never seen the episode (and I can’t imagine how) the plot is that a Voodoo Witch Doctor (sic) has come to the island and carves wooden effigies of the castaways. Once he obtains a personal possession from each of them, he has complete control over them, including turning the professor into a zombie (basically paralyzing him). The Skipper knows all about these South Sea Island Voodoo practices, and manages to lift the curse by stealing the dolls and getting their items back. While no one will look to Gilligan’s Island as representative of high art, cultural sensitivity, or even basic reality, the liberties that Hollywood has taken in other movies and TV shows with almost this exact plot is horrendous.

But I discovered a beautifully rich and complex ancestor religion where the spirits of the dead are invited to “ride” the living for a short time, to re-experience the joys of the physical by eating and drinking and smoking and talking, before returning to their slumber.4Once I realized that Voodoo was an ancestor religion of a very specific group of people, I stopped my research into it. I did not feel that I belonged, or was connected, and that further study was inappropriate. So if this paragraph is inaccurate, I apologize. It generalities are based on a few books that I read on the subject before I ceased studying it.

So though I might have the knowing of how to do certain Voodoo rites, I will not do them because I am not part of that culture, and I am not likely to be.

But I think the Baron and I would get along. I did, after all, spend a lot of my younger life hanging around cemeteries (and I still do when I can), so we have that in common.

And there’s probably a lot of the magical aspects of Voodoo that has filtered over into Southern myth in the last few centuries. So it’s hard to say if some of the things I personally do is borrowed from that culture directly, or accidentally amalgamated into my own, at a time in the past when “cultural appropriation” was not an idea. 5In fact, it’s fair to say that some aspects of Voodoo and related practices in the American South may have been “contaminated” by traditions from white folk magic in the region.

The term didn’t exist in the 70 and 80s when I was studying the various occult disciplines, so it is extremely difficult to determine if I borrowed something then, and have since forgotten the source. I am examining a lot of that, and re-reading many of my old books with an eye toward original sources. It’s a growth process.

And there’s a different rabbit hole to go down. Through my studies in art history, I can find you prototype of most of the spirits and deities as far back as the Stone Age. Humans have a number of shared spiritual concepts because a long time ago we were all part of the same general culture.

One of those fundamental concepts is the doctrine of sympathy – that things that are of the same nature- whether they look alike, feel alike, or are called by similar names- can affect each other. Thus the doll is an image of a person that can be manipulated to control and potentially harm that person.

The bulls on the walls of the ancient cave of Alta Mira are believed to have been ritually “attacked” to either bring about a successful hunt, or initiate a young man into his new adult life as a hunter.

Likewise, putting on the skin or the antlers of the deer, transformed one into a deer. And yet, this may have evolved out of the most practical need to look, and smell, like a deer when stalking the herd. At some point the line between the physical deer and the spiritual one is blurred, if, in primitive humanity, they were ever separated.

We can see in the so-called Sorceror image the Cave of the the Three Brothers, that even before we developed writing the idea was firmly fixed. Here is the remote ancestor of Celtic Cernunnos. Her also stands the Minotaur, the Apis, Pan, Aries, and every horn, corn, and herm of ancient myth.

The wall of this deep cave was speared with primitive paints and scored with flint or antler to make a permanent image of this enigmatic figure. Dubbed “The Sorcerer” by scholars, it’s believed to represent either a shaman in a ritual practice mimicking a deer, or transforming magically into the creature.

The white on black image on the right is sketched based on the actual cave painting. While we find petroglyphs all around the world of people wearing what is probably ritual gear or headdress, this is possibly the oldest, estimated at having been made 15,000 years ago.

When I look at it, I am reminded of ritual costumes among the native peoples of the American Southwest, as much as the Celto-European Horned One.

Not far away we can find the Venus of Laussel, with her voluptuous form shared from many small portable fertility idols. Laussel is somewhat unique. She holds forth a horn with thirteen lines across it. The horn, here, is the masculine symbol, transformed into the symbol of the moon, and its thirteen lunations per year. So even as we had barely mastered fire, we had made the connection between the lunar cycle and the feminine one.

The Venus images are probably older than the Sorceror. There are a lot of them, and most of them are very small. They were believed to have been carved as portable devotional items, or fertility objects.

They typically emphasize the breasts hips and sexual organs, while the faces are often anonymous, simplistic, or sometimes covered in a stylized hairdo or perhaps a veil. Hands and feet are frequently absent or only suggested. The women are round and ample, desirable traits for a Neolithic mother, whether actual or spiritual.

Laussel’s is a permanent installation, which would indicate that the place was either inhabited over the long term, or returned to frequently by roaming peoples. This context may mark the transition of the Venus from a fetish object into a proto-goddess. I first encountered this image in a graduate art history seminar, and immediately felt there was more significance to our modern beliefs than was generally expressed by the historians.

By – photo 120, Å“uvre dont l’auteur est mort depuis environ 25 000 ans – Own work, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5044488

Our remote ancestors weren’t the primitive knuckle-draggers we see in the popular fiction. Cro-Magnon man – generally recognized as the first full human, had the same size brain, all our faculties, and certainly all our curiosity. The majority of his time was spent pursuing and defending the bare essentials of survival. Complicated things like rack and pinion steering and mobile phones weren’t going to get done, but it’s not impossible that his brain could have worked them out. If he’d needed them in the first place, that is.

The need to survive and the limited resources meant that most of early humanity lived in small mobile groups where the philosophical observations were passed through oral tradition, and frequently to an anointed or otherwise chosen receiver. So we aren’t sure what was actually done or actually believed except by observing similarities between ancient surviving examples and that which is more recent and better documented, like the cultures of Mesopotamia, Egypt, and Greece.

Cultures existing on the fringes of these “civilized” nations certainly maintained less formalized practices, and these were transmitted word-of-mouth down the generations. As humans migrated around the globe, their traditions transformed to include and respond to new plants, animals, and spirits encountered in the local landscapes.

So we end up with very distinct and very individualized spiritual and ritual practices that reflect our unique cultural experience. And while Baron Samedi, Anubis, Thanatos, Charon, and the Grim Reaper may all be personifications of the same essential entity, each of us has exposure to that entity and its masks in a different way. This is true not just for cultures but for individuals. I will have a very different view of death than you, because I have led a different life.

And this ultimately is where the issue of cultural appropriation must be understood. The things held as sacred and profane by one person or one group are that because of what that person or that group have experienced.

Absent that particular experience, your understanding of that particular sacred and profane simply doesn’t exist. At best you’re fumbling around and at worst you are mocking both belief and culture. In either case it will not bring you the results you seek. And it may cause you grave harm.

If you believe in the power of the spirits or the gods to affect change in the real world; power beyond your mortal ken; then you should be very wary of making them angry. That’s just basic.

And coming to the table uninvited is, to my thinking, a sure way of irritating the spirits that are out there. If you feel you are truly called to a particular belief system, then seek, humbly, for those who live within it. Ask, respectfully, if you can become an initiate. In some cases it will still be forbidden, because you are not part of that culture. But you may be able to join that culture in some cases. If so, you need to join it. You’re not there to pick and choose. You have to become.

I personally have not felt the call of any such thing. I come from a different time. The Internet offered no easy instruction. Covens or initiatory groups were few and far between, and rarely advertised. And there were not books and books and books delivered conveniently to your door from B&N and Amazon. You had to go find them.

For me, magic was an individual practice, derived from such books as I could locate, deep personal contemplation and making acquaintance with those spirits that I could, as dictated by my particular talents and temperament. In my case, there’s a lot of old bones and cemeteries. Still, the dead have outnumbered the living for a very long time, so there’s plenty of choices for conversation.

So I don’t pretend to work with Baron Samedi the same way a Voodoo priest or priestess would, or even to understand fully what he represents.

But I know who he is. I tip my hat to him when I am over his way. He tips his hat back. It’s mutual respect, between two individuals, who are from different cultures. And that’s how we should all act, whether we are made of this crude flesh or of rarer stuff.

By all means, study other cultural practices. With luck you will grow to understand that we all have much in common as humans. The understanding of others makes us better understand ourselves. That is as true of magical practice as it is of anything. What I do, what I know, and what I pass on, comes from many years of study and contemplation and carefully tracing back the threads.

You can find so much information out there now, but acting upon it without taking the time and effort to evaluate and understand it will not aid you.

I hope you have enjoyed my diatribe. If you were offended by my perspective, remember that is just that- mine. I am not campaigned or advocating or otherwise trying to convince you. I am just standing on my soapbox saying what comes to mind. I appreciate your reading to the end, and I invite you back next week for another journey inside my mind.

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By Any Other Name

Belial Cover Treatment

You may have noticed I’m fond of the Bard. Well, who wouldn’t be. So many of our modern idioms are borrowed from the pages of his plays and poems (or from a certain religious text he may have worked on for James I ). This particular passage (unfortunately from Romeo and Juliet ) pertains to our human tendency to judge things by the labels we apply.

Shakespeare is also very much responsible for our characterization of witches. His Wyrd Sisters and their delightful cooking show have been borrowed by everything from Bugs Bunny to Harry Potter to Doctor Who. The modern association of Hecate as the Goddess of the Witches may even trace to her appearance in the Scottish play.

Perhaps lesser known is his nigh prototype of the lone wizard, Prospero, in the Tempest, and his workings with the elementals and nature spirits. But here, of course, Prospero is the hero, or at least a redeemed antagonist. Not so for those labeled witch.

Don’t get me wrong. Prospero is engaging in things that Elizabethan era folks would have considered dangerous, if not inherently evil. Remember that Dr. John Dee was only recently traveling about the Continent conversing with spirits to the delight of the Crowned Heads of Europe. Prior to his dalliance with the departed, Dee had been the official astrologer to Elizabeth I. He is said to have prophesied her ascension to the throne while she was a prisoner in the Tower at the orders of her half-sister Mary. This act would have been considered treason, as any prognostication regarding the rise of a new monarch essentially predicts the fall of the reigning one.

James Stuart succeeded Elizabeth to the throne in 1603 and took over as Sweet Will’s chief patron. Prior to that promotion, he was King James VI of Scotland. In 1589 he’d married by proxy Anne of Denmark, whom he awaited in Edinburgh. But storms prevented her arrival. Here ship, badly damaged was forced to put ashore in Norway, where James went to fetch her. He finally succeeded although his own journey was frought with perilous weather.

Weather that had, according to the Danish authorities, been the result of a witch conspiracy.

Said witches were thence discovered, tried, and executed in Copenhagen. This apparently was somewhat common.

While witchcraft was technically illegal in Scotland, James hadn’t been a zealous prosecutor of the laws. Until the threat to his wife, which was also a threat to his future children, his dynasty, and therefore his throne. So we’re now talking treason.

James himself penned Daemonlogie in 1597, which was one of the earlier witch-hunting manuals. Like many people in the 16th century, he was a strong believer in the truth of witchcraft. He saw it as evil, pure and simple.

And that religious book that Shakespeare may have worked on for James had a pretty basic rule for dealing with it.

“Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.”

This one sentence is responsible for untold suffering and bloodshed. It’s what justified the Puritans in putting people to death in Salem almost a century later. It continues to hop up in evangelical sermons in the 21st century.

Witchcraft had been a sin in many cultures going way, way back. The use of baneful magic is recorded in things like the Leyden Papyrus and other of the Greek Magical Papyri. In pre-Christian times, the general practice was to employ countermeasures, such as amulets and charms, obtained from a temple or helpful sorceror. Spells and curses exist in the hieroglyphic record and the clay tablets of Mesopotamia. We’ve been at this a while.

The directive to kill witches is attributed to Moses, and supposedly came directly from God HIMself. And yet this directive seems to have been little enforced among the Israelites as they struggled to take over Canaan and establish themselves as the power in the region. King Saul having banished those “having familiar spirits” from his territory then seeks out the Witch of Endor, in order to raise the spirit of the dead prophet Samuel.

The_Witch_of_Endor_William_Blake
In William Blake’s representation of the Witch of Endor, we can see the horror of Saul on confronting the shade of the prophet Samuel. His terror, though, is not of the spirit, but its confirmation of his own imminent demise.

Saul sought out the witch (at right) in defiance of a ban on sorcery, because God would no longer take his calls. Samuel’s message then, is not just that Saul is going to die in battle on the morrow, but that he has lost the favor of heaven, and is thus ultimately doomed in the afterlife as well.

So not only is he ignoring the dictum of the Lord God Almighty, he’s actively engaging in necromancy and disturbing the spirit of a holy man. As you may know, it doesn’t end well, for Saul (as Samuel tells him) but the witch gets off in the end. She had extracted an oath that he would do her no harm…which he swears to the God that forbade witches.

Politics and witchcraft are strange, but old bedfellows.

It’s said that Conservative Republican paragon Ronald Wilson Reagan1Reagan’s name of six letters each was also believed to be proof he was Anti-Christ. People actually believed this in the 1980s. paid more attention to his wife’s astrologer than he did his cabinet. Well, I can hardly blame him for that. Maybe if he’d kept counsel with stars he wouldn’t have got into Iran/Contra.

I can’t help but wonder what his buddy the Reverend Jerry Falwell would have thought about that. As one of the chief architects of the so-called Satanic Panic and one of the most universally intolerant human beings to ever live, surely he would have objected to Reagan’s flirtation with the Devil.

Then I recall that Falwell, like many of his peers and followers, was probably a raging hypocrite.

Belial-presents-credentials-to-solomon
If we are to believe Medieval and Renaissance sources, the original Sorceror Supreme was the Bible’s King Solomon. His Greater and Lesser Keys (the attribution is specious, but ancient) form a framework for much modern ceremonial magic and doubtless were influential to people like Paracelsus and Dee. In stories from Islam he is said to have bound all the djinn. His only ancient peer in the mystic arts is Hermes Trismegistus.

Solomonic magic is an adaptation by the urban magician to legitimize his consorting with Dark Forces. Compelling demons (and sort of compelling angels) by the name of God Almighty was clearly acceptable behavior. This potentially provided protection from the Inquisition or other instruments of the Church that was cracking down on alternative points of view.
King Solomon evoking demonic King belial
The illustrations above (and the header image) are from the 1473 Augsburg edition of Das Buch Belial. They usually are characterized as Solomon compelling the demon, the real story is far more fascinating.

It’s a German translation of Consolato peccatorum, seu Luciferi contra Jesum Christum. The ponderous title is an early Christian tract by Jacobus de Teramo written around 100 years before, concerning a lawsuit brought by Lucifer against Jesus, for trespassing in Hell on his way to the Resurrection.

The title character Belial is the Infernal One’s attorney. Solomon, by virtue of his reputed wisdom, is here shown in his role as judge.

The story, later a banned work, was one of several early Christian writings that were meant to explain or address certain theological questions. Spoiler alert: Jesus wins the lawsuit. But it did establish that Satan owned the souls of the damned after the Last Judgement, which seems to have satisfied him and pleased a great number of Renaissance painters.

Yet this serves as a reminder and a warning that persecution is neither dead nor long buried in the distant past. We didn’t call it the Satanic Panic in my youth.

Growing up in rural Appalachia, I actually heard sermons pronounce that Catholics ate babies. When reading books outside of school might mark you as a “dope-smoking, devil-worshipping queer” oppression of differently minded individuals was hardly a new thing. If you played Dungeons and Dragons, you were going straight to Hell.

dndscare
Behold 1979’s gateway drug to Hellfire and Damnation. This book, and its fellows, would lead one into temptation and madness, surer than Lovecraft’s Necronomicon or LaVey’s Satanic Bible.

One brief encounter with the non-trademark violating version of the game and Tom Hanks became a rabid cross-dresser! Beware! Lock up your children. And for God’s sake don’t let them read or do math.

While today’s TV preachers are peddling a more upwardly mobile brand of snake-oil, the threat is by no means over. Prattling busy-bodies appear on college campuses terrorizing young people who may never have been out on their own. They tell them they’ll go to hell for wearing short pants or majoring in the arts. It would be laughable, but there’s always someone who buys into it.

Trolls on social media routinely harass and report witchcraft accounts, in the name of religion. While Wicca is a recognized, and theoretically protected religion on it’s own, witchcraft does not have a similar legal status. So these people can do pretty much whatever they want. “Report and ban” has become the tool of the oppressor, and social media companies, terrified of bad press, comply by closing accounts without much investigation.

We’re in the midst of a social and economic upheaval right now. It’s entirely possible that someone, somewhere, will start blaming this all on witchcraft. It’s happened too many times before to ignore the possiblity.

In the 80s public witchcraft simply didn’t exist outside of a few shops in the major cities. And yet people readily believed there was a secret widespread Satanic conspiracy. Witches weren’t out and proud then, and the people who were out and proud were dying of a mysterious illness that preachers like Falwell said was divine punishment for the sin of homosexuality.

It’s great to live in a time when we can speak openly about alternative lifestyles and spiritual beliefs. I continue to hope for a world like the one in the old Star Trek series, where there was no want and no war and all of us were accepted for what we were, without reservation.

But I am not sure I’ll see it in my lifetime.

Keep fighting the good fight, children. But stop every now and then and look over your shoulder. That mob with the torches and pitchforks is back there, always, waiting for a chance. They’re ready to let their fear and hatred bury you. So don’t let your guard down.

Thank you for reading this week’s ramblings. I hope you found them enjoyable. Come back next week for another round.

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