I am placing the blog on a summer hiatus/summer schedule. This essentially means I will not be posting on a regular basis for the next few months, due to other obligations, travel plans, and the desire to focus more fully on my visual creative works.
I realize this runs the risk of alienating those folks who do follow me, but it’s a necessary choice. I am feeling a bit burned out with life online in general.
The heavy push of “AI” in all things with no choice to opt out, accompanied by some very invasive licensing rewrites, requires that I consider at length the type of materials I will be making available to the Internet. Indeed, the digital creative process that I have spent many years of my life and career learning and improving is now potentially swept away. This is not any context that the AI is “replacing” those skills, but that the AI, and the companies who own it, are assuming rights to do with my work what they will, under the sham excuse of “protecting against improper use”.
My initial response to this overreaching asset grab is to go analog. A painting or sculpture made by my hand, is unquestionably my own work, to do with as I will, not what the corporation will. Even should I employ digital means to present and sell that work, the work itself lies outside the grasp of corporate greed, and the ignorant masses who are too ready to fuel it by boosting their own egos using AI created works “they made”.
A secondary consideration is that social media is now swarming with advertising to the point that I have no interest. Every new splinter service that bubbles up, should they survive long enough to reach a viable population density, must either subsist on ads or subscription. This is not unreasonable in itself. I am in the technology business, and I understand that the resources cost money (though I seriously question whether it costs as much as the mega-corps are raking in). A recent foray onto Pinterest looking for reference and inspirational images was saturated with 50-60% advertising pins. I have no time for that.
Meta properties are possibly the worst (I find it rather easy to ignore ads on Youtube, as I have many years experience ignoring them on TV) as far as this exploitation goes. Again, I seriously doubt the ratio of cost to profit is “fair and reasonable” even given the global reach of these applications and the need to support them 24/7/365.
Hardware is cheap. Software licensing from third parties (where it exists, most of the web runs on freeware Linux, Apache Servers, and MySQL databases) is tremendously cheap at scale, and this then leaves the proprietary code of application, and the humans engaged to modify and maintain it.
Facebook and it’s brethren are devised on top of freeware or Open Source engines, that are then extended by programmers. Many, if not most are offshore, making far lower wages than their US equivalents. The greatest amount of energy and resources are devoted to keeping “the algorithm” a perpetually moving target.
This spawns the false requirement to purchase advertising, and feeds a sub industry of expert consultants to “optimize your SEO”.
Having seen the output of various seminars and training programs, I can say without much fear of contradiction, that the persons touting them are not imparting any real understanding of marketing principles, and encourage practices which are antithetical to long established mass communication principles.
This leaves a discouraged attendee wondering what they missed, and ripe for the next round of “miracle cures” for the algorithm blues.
In short, the best way to make money on social media is to sell training on social media. Since the algorithm is always changing, and there’s really very few useful metrics available for statistical analysis, the average sole proprietor or small business won’t recognize the snake oil until you’ve packed up the wagon and moseyed on to the next town.
Obviously, there’s a lot of venom here.
I am not even going to elaborate on the extreme amounts of unwelcome posts of socio-political nature that, despite actively “curating” my connections on the social platforms, continue to invade that space. Yes, I do have political views. I have political discussions when it suits me, in private, with people who I may or may not know “in real life”. But so very much of what floats on line is pure misdirection, propaganda, and outright fraud.
I do not need to be marinating in this toxic soup daily. It makes me grumpy, stifles the creative impulse, and wastes a lot of time I could be drawing and painting and sculpting and petting cats.
So for the nonce, I shall post when I am inspired to post, and I really hope to post only when such inspiration is a positive thing.
No one (especially me) wants to hear nothing but bitching. I don’t want to be the one telling those damned kids to get off my virtual lawn, and lately I am feeling it. So I hope you will all understand.
The book is not closed, but I am going to put a marker here and come back to it at some later point, when I feel better about it all. If that doesn’t happen, well, I was around before all this. I am fairly sure I can function without it.
Thank you all who have supported me to this point. I hope you have some value from it. All previous articles will remain available for as long as I keep the site going. I now need to focus on other things, some of which may generate needed revenue to that end.
My artistic journey began hand-in-hand with my magical journey in very early childhood. When one is still forming their awareness of the world, and learning to separate self from other, the distinctions of time, space, reality, and the imagined are not as clearly cut as we often pretend they are in later life.
That’s certainly evident when we examine so many of the classic works of children’s literature, like the work’s of Roald Dahl, Lewis Carrol, A.A. Milne, J.M. Barry, and Dr. Seuss. These stories delight in taking liberties with our grasp on the “real world” and frequently draw the attention of artists and illustrators who want to play in those fertile grounds.
Along with these and a tattered copy of Grimm’s, my youthful creativity found equal inspiration in film and television, and often did not distinguish the blossoming of science fiction with the actual events of America’s voyages to the moon in the late 1960s and early 1970s, There was frequently cross-over by artists depicting both the real and historical, and the futuristic and fantastical. I quickly became a fan of the works of Chesley Bonestell, Robert McCall, John Berkey, and Syd Mead.
I answered the siren call of comic books at about the same time, and through experimental graphics works by such masters as Jack Kirby and Jim Steranko, I was introduced to the artistic movement of surrealism. Likewise, the bizarre and fanciful art direction of people like Maurice Noble, Chuck Jones, and Bob Clampett on the Warner Brothers cartoons immersed my malleable mind in the distortions one might encounter in the works of Salvador Dali and Joan Miro.
It was about the time I entered high school and had my first formal art classes that I became aware of the work of Belgian surrealist Rene Magritte, and this was through the now defunct Omni Magazine. His most famous pieces, produced mostly in the 1960s, became widely seen and copied in popular culture about this time. The so-called “Man in the Bowler Hat” or “Man Who Isn’t There” inspired several interpretations on book and album covers, music videos, and poster art. In those days I just felt that his work was “cool to look at” but like Dali and other surrealist painters, the depth of their messages escaped me.
This is possibly Magritte’s most famous work, at least in artists’ circles. For those who are deficient en français, the inscription reads “This is not a pipe.”
It is, in fact, a painting of a pipe. For that matter, it is a digital image reproduction of a photograph of a painting of a pipe. It should not be surprising then, to discover that the name of this painting is “The Treachery of Images”. It basically states what we all know, or at least think we know, that the image of a thing is not the thing itself. In doing so, it plays with that old human conception that lies at the root of all sympathetic magic. The image of the thing is somehow equal to the thing, while clearly, in our “reality” it isn’t. It’s just a picture of the thing. Yet we accept that the images of things are the things, at least in some way, as the basis of our communication of that shared reality.
As I get older (and weirder) my appreciation for Magritte and the other surrealists has grown, and the inspiration they provide both for my artwork and my thinking about life, the universe, and everything is much more profound.
A couple of week’s ago I took a long weekend in one of my favorite getaway spots, to celebrate my 34th wedding anniversary. In that time, inasmuch as possible and practical, I “unplugged” from the interwebs, and particularly social media.
This necessary disconnect was both to spend more time and attention on my Good Lady Wife, but also to simply clear my mind from the kind of artificial experience that most of us take as “reality” in the early 21st Century.
“Social media” is a skosh over two decades old. According to the Google AI now summarizing what it thinks it found on the Internet, the ancestor of all, the original MySpace went live in 2003, with Fascistbook and Twaddle following a few years afterward.
Like many interweb startups, MySpace collapsed and vaporized, to be replaced by Web 2.0-A type networks that somehow inexplicably found a way to keep tweaking the algorithm so that everyone kept coming back.
But this means that for the last 20 years or so, we’ve been living “online” instead of “irl” and this has changed our perception of reality and how we operate within it.
Social media engineers bank on the “fear of missing out”. What did you not see in your feed? Which messages of vital importance and life changing wisdom has the algorithm buried during the 0.087 seconds that you weren’t scrolling through, that you will never ever ever see again? Unless, it goes viral and becomes that cat meme. Or the one with the girlfriend. Or Batman abusing Robin.
If you are the same vintage (and now apparently the term vintage is also important) as I am, you can remember the world pre-social. I even predate the interwebs themselves. Consider the implication of how human beings function with each other that this thing has wrought.
While I am thrilled to find a bully pulpit for my lunatic ravings, and hopefully a viable market for weird art, I am a pre-net dinosaur and remember how different things were, and actually still are.
“In real life”, aside from immediate family, and perhaps a few neighbors and co-workers, we generally were not, and actually are not, in constant contact with all that many people we know. Our friends often live at some distance, and we see them when we visit them, they visit us, or we make arrangements to meet somewhere to do something.
Yet life “online” asserts the principle that we should be constantly inveigled with each other, to the point that every action online gets copied to everyone in our friends list. Whenever we like, everyone knows we liked. When we know someone, everyone knows we know someone. And they should know them too. Everything about us is assumed to be of interest and equally interesting to everyone we know.
This is not socializing. Socializing was based on choice. This is marketing. The sheer amount of unconnected and uninteresting goods and services that have gained some tenuous status of being liked or looked at by a friend of a friend of a friend that dumps into my feed daily inspires me to disconnect and distance.
Friends, we are not supposed to be this connected. There’s supposed to be distance. There’s supposed to be mystery. Sometimes we need to be invisible.
Magritte’s “The Blank Signature” plays with our perception of space and reality. It’s exceptionally powerful because our brains are wired to fill in the parts of the image that aren’t there, and make assumptions about the “depth” of the space.
Though, again, we are looking at a flat surface that represents the illusion of depth using changes in tonal value and color. Like the false pipe, this image deceives us into thinking we see the invisible parts of the horse and rider, and that they are properly imposed across the background.
A further magic here, though, is that we think we are seeing more “wrong” than their actually is. We mentally “feel” the horse and rider are cut up into several strips, but it is really only just behind the neck, and the imposition of the background tree behind the rider that creates this effect.
What we see is what we think we see. The visible is no less an illusion than the invisible.
Invisibility seems an especially important trait for wielders of magical secrets. Merlin and Gandalf frequently disappear for weeks, months, and even years. The Wyrd Sisters of the Scottish play show up as required to further the plot, but seem to hold no permanent space in relation to the world inhabited by Macbeth and his cronies. Faerie godmothers, woodland witches, and sea sorceresses are not usually to be found wandered down the village high street. Their remoteness and difficulty in contacting marks them as creatures to be sought only in cases of direst need, or greatest peril, because they do not care to be disturbed.
There is a two-fold nature to this. In dealing with the “invisible world” one must have some bit of a toe on the threshold. The beings we frequently truck with “not of this earth” don’t have Linked In Profiles and pages on Facebook. They are not to be summoned on TikTok.
I do enjoy sharing the dark humor of fellow witches and weirdos. And there is knowledge to be passed, in quiet conversation and private chat, but perhaps not in the repeated meme. But we must also remember the old adage – “to know, to dare, to keep silent”.
There are those people who still, even in the early 21st Century, look upon the occult and those involved with it as Servants of the DevilTM (and some are, willingly and with full knowledge) and seek to “save souls” or suppress difference, whichever is easier. There are people who will use politics and bigotry to that end, exploiting the frequently misguided, and perhaps not terribly intelligent mob. This has always been the case.
This is also why the ancient practices were kept secret, even in societies where the working of wonders was accepted and appreciated. Those who did such working were a people apart, and spent much time “away” from the rest of their culture. They would go on spirit quests, or seek the gods on mountaintops or celebrate mysteries in darkened sanctums of ancient temples. They were not posting thrice daily on YouTube.
Magritte’s Decalamonia is one of several paintings with a similar symbolism. This one, and “The Pilgrim” are often reimagined by other creatives to show an empty suit, a so-called “invisible man” though he never specifically painted that image.
These views of clouded vistas and other landscapes, framed by the shape of the ubiquitous middle class mid-century European man in a bowler hat recur through his art. The critics, and perhaps Magritte himself, would suggest this is a dreamscape, but it augers to me that our external reality is entirely framed by our own minds. Ironically we are always separated from it, because we are we and it is Other. So we only have the internal world, and it creates our impression of the external one, which we can’t truly verify.
My approach to the internet, as my approach to the blog and social media, is not “content-based”. I encounter people, through serendipity for the most part, and build relationships with those people. In that context, I probably interact more with them than I do with people “irl” outside of my wife, children, and cats. But then I am something of a an old hermit.
It is difficult to say if these relationships are any more or less illusory than “irl” relationships that require meeting in person and doing activities that are mutually enjoyable. We are all aware of the isolated nature of being, and the extent to which an online person is any more forthcoming or presenting themselves authentically compared to an “irl” person is debatable. But the machinery of the interwebs tends toward surface more than substance.
In order to continue to connect with persons we like, we have to engage, and deliver “content” that the algorithm favors. This is opposite to “irl”, where we have some measure of control over the interaction. We can call our friend up, go have dinner, see a show, play a sport, take a trip, or otherwise engage without the intermediary interference of the algorithm.
So by the nature of thing, the personae we present online are skewed to favor engagement, even if that’s not our general intention. And consequently the algorithm demands that we are online as much as we possible can be. This is anathema to the old wizard going out and wandering the woods and speaking to the trees and rocks (who do not have Threads accounts…so far.).
I personally find this condition to be ultimately unhealthy and eventually intellectually and creatively stifling. Your mileage may vary,
In the few months that I took off from blogging earlier, I found new ideas emerging and I have since entered a period of artistic creativity and energy that I haven’t felt in ages.
Where it leads, I cannot say. I am still working out the need to “engage” sufficiently to find a market for the work. Although I get tremendous joy and satisfaction from the process, the mortgage company will not accept my joy and satisfaction as monthly payment, no matter how tremendous it is.
In any case, I recommend that all of us who walk a creative or strange and unusual path practice a healthy introspection and cultivate self-awareness of how the interweb is affecting our practice and our identity.
The people who want you to believe that you can’t be invisible from time to time are doing it because they are selling your visibility -like magic beans- to the advertisers who don’t understand how to reach people in any human way.
I’ll continue to be visible each week, at least for now, unless something is out of my control. I appreciate the interest you have taken in my words to read all the way down here.
As a child in the 70s, particularly one with an artistic bent, there was nothing quite so cool as the big 64 color box of Crayola crayons.
Yes, there was probably some sort of status symbolism attached to it. It was not, despite what one might think, accessible to people at all income levels.
At least, that was what my parents frequently told me, and I accept that to have been the case. The big box (with that ever so cool built in crayon sharpener) was a rare gift, one that only came every few years. It had to be shared with my brother, and frequently with cousins and other visiting children, who invariably would break the crayons, lose them, and possibly eat them.
Leaving me with a less than pristine complete set, which caused me no end of frustration. Imagine how one might feel if the neighbor borrowed the Mercedes and returned it dented, with a broken windshield and missing fender. It was that big a deal.
I’m certain this probably relates to numerous neuropsychological issues that people over the years have quasi-diagnosed my having. I have no further comment on that.
But I do have my very own 64 color box of Crayola crayons (though the sharpener is no longer included…lawyers…) that I don’t have to share with anyone else.
Possibly as a result of this trivial (yet very real to a seven or eight year old) trauma, I have a tendency to want “complete sets” of things, especially art supplies. When I find a brand and type I like, the first thing I do is go to the factory website and see how many colors are available. Then I look for how much that complete set is going to cost.
Most of them are considerably more than the 64 color box of Crayola crayons. Some of them approach the cost of that dented Mercedes.
All sorts of fancy watercolors/ink blocks/color media. This doesn’t include the numerous bottles of ink and liquid colors I keep in the other room. I have accumulated many of these over the years when I could afford them, usually when I got a commission or project so that I could “use” them. Recently though, I have gotten some just because the media intrigued me. When I started out (around 40ish years ago) many of these didn’t exist. In a market where differentiating yourself from all the other color companies is difficult, many vendors have invented completely new media.
But if I truly really want them, I will save my change and eat bologna and eventually get them. I’ve been doing this a bit more over the last few years, because my children have reached independent adult status and there’s less of an obligation to be frugal in all things.
I have apparently been collecting art supplies (because hoarding implies another one of those metal quasi-diagnoses). This is a thing called “opportunity buying”. I know this because I am a professional buyer. That’s actually part of my job description in the day job.
Opportunity buying is getting stuff when it’s on sale, on clearance, close-out, discontinued, or special reduced rate, and buying all the store has of it. Because it appears to be a useful thing that somehow someday you will need and won’t you feel oh-so-smart and oh-so-smug when you already have it.
Now much to my recent delight (and smugness) I have discovered that I bought some clearance priced oil painting supplies that I found really really cheap but frankly had no idea what they were. Now that I am working with oil paint again, and learning and relearning the various sorts of alchemies involved, I actually do have a use for these things, and now I don’t have to spend more to get them.
This joy came as a complete surprise, because, in looking for some other thing (which I still can’t find) among my collection (okay, okay…hoard) of supplies I discovered that I had bought this thing that I now could put to good use.
I hope I don’t forget where it is, when I actually get around to using it.
The box of colors on the top are 24 of the full 72 color set of Derwent Inktense colors. It comes in the tin on the bottom and in as set of sticks/blocks which I also have. The company has recently issued a set of watercolors, but they are presently not yet available stateside. Similar high end manufacturers such as Winsor-Newton, Sennelier, Cretacolor, and Caran d’Ache, are based in Europe, where the tradition of fine art supplies has a history going back at least two centuries. Unfortunately, this tends to increase the price.
But I find I am considering just how much of this stuff I really do need. How many “complete sets” are actually required?
Am I simply fulfilling a kind of art Pokemon game, where owning the set still satisfies that seven year old with the broken crayons?
The set of pricey art supplies will not in and of themselves make one a better artist. That is in you. It’s focus and practice and patience.
Will it make it easier for you to achieve your vision. Potentially, yes.
If you struggle with the medium, it’s frustrating. Most artists will tell you they are already struggling with their vision versus their skills. We are never satisfied with the work that comes out (or at least mostly never satisfied). Adding another layer of combat between you and the brush or the chalk or the canvas just makes that harder.
But maybe I don’t need all the crayons. In fact, I have found that having all the crayons sometimes makes for a less expressive or inventive solution. So I am working toward having the crayons I will use (whether they be crayons, or pastels, or colored pencils, or paints, or papers) and living with the idea that if I find out I really really need another color, I can probably go get that.
I justify the use of such materials because they are formulated to outlast me. The various pieces I made back in art school, that have not already been lost or damaged by various external agencies, may have already started to fade.
The work I do now, with the better tools, has a shelf life of at least 500 years. Should my work please whatever culture exists in another half-millennia, I trust they’ll be technologically advanced enough to extend it’s preservation, much as we are now doing to save masterpieces from the Renaissance.
So it’s not entirely ostentation, to collect these materials, so long as I am actually working with them.
A small test piece using a 24 color (out of 96) set of Caran d’Ache oil pastels. I got these because the 12 color set of Sennelier, while wonderful, were quite expensive, especially to get the whole set (120 colors). Caran d’Ache were favorably reviewed in comparison to the Sennelier, so I thought I would try them out. So far they are very different. Not bad, mind you, but very different.
It was gratifying though, working on this image last night, to realize that I was simply painting with the goal of making the media work for me. That is, there is no deadline, no client waiting, it’s just picking up the tool and trying something. That’s an exquisite relief from a very long time of working for paid output.
The same applies to the numerous wares and paraphernalia associated with the practice of magic. The “aesthetic” of witchcraft is a topic frequently raised on the socials. I have my own counsel on that.
If one looks to the traditional folk magic of our species, it’s fairly obvious that witches and their like didn’t keep specialized tools displayed on elaborate shrines or altars. For one thing, doing so in a post pagan world would get one imprisoned, or killed.
More likely the broom was the same one used to sweep the hearth, the knife the same used to make the meal. The cauldron was that pot the meal cooked in, and the hearth it sat on was altar enough. In point of fact, the connection between these things used in life made them, in my personal view, more sacred and more potent, than if they were kept hidden and separate.
Does it feel “cool” to have the custom made special broom, the hand-forged athame, and the special cauldron upon the sacred altar? Sure it does. To the extent that it makes it easier to enter into an altered state of consciousness for the performance of a rite, such props fulfill the similar role that having the higher-end paint does for the artist. It removes another barrier in the creative process.
But as to the necessity, well, that’s a personal decision. In the many years I have been both an artist and a magician, I have had to make do with what I had, or what I could disguise as “normal”. I made up for the difference with willpower, ambition, and work.
So maybe we don’t need that big box of crayons. But there’s no shame in having it if we want it.
Another Earth Day has come and gone. This seems to have passed with little hooplah or recognition, but then I have made the choice to no longer look at the majority of the media, so it may be a skewed observation.
The witch accounts I tend to follow on the socials mostly mentioned it. But witches live with the Earth daily, or so we say. I actually was quite displeased with myself when considering that point.
I was taking the trash out, which in itself is a problem. It is a consequence of living in the burbs, I know, in that all our waste products have to go into some sort of managed system to keep down the potential of contagion when so many people “decide” to live so closely together.
But it got me thinking.
We’re an empty nest. Our children have grown to the point of moving out, so it is just myself, my wife, and currently five rather overindulged felines. Our neighborhood homeowner’s association dues cover trash pickup twice weekly. In actual fact, I take the trash out to the curb for pickup maybe 4.25 times per month. That is, once a week, but not always twice a week.
But I am still taking the trash out. Trash is still being generated at a rate that requires I remove it from my property at least weekly. I really need to consider doing better than that.
When I was a child back in the hills of Eastern Kentucky, we did not live in a suburb with HOA dues and regular trash pickup. I am not sure if that has changed since I left. I know a lot of “services” have been imposed by the local municipality that now technically has expanded to include the smallish plot on which I was raised.
But in those days, we did not seem to be creating as much garbage from a family of four with an extended family group of seven, three or four dogs, and a multitude of cats, and from time to time a hog or two.
In the first place, we lived a more frugal lifestyle. Not out of choice, but purely from necessity. Food waste was a rare thing. You ate leftovers until they were gone, and you took care to keep them from being spoiled before you could eat them. Anything that was marginal or did not reheat well, probably supplemented the diet of the aforesaid dogs, cats, and especially the hogs. Hogs are a natural disposal for organic waste products, and they appear to like it.
So this then leaves other kinds of waste products, which cannot be consumed or composted (which was another thing typically done, though we didn’t call it that).
Forty or so years ago, much of what currently comes in “recyclable” plastic was dispensed in glass bottles.
Tending to our own is one step in making the Earth better all around. We can protest and complain all day long but without our own direct action, it’s not going to change.
Soft drinks and some alcoholic beverages were sold in glass bottles that required a “deposit”. Because glass was so durable, and so easy to sanitize and reuse, manufacturers actually wanted you to bring them back so they could refill them. Hence, if you didn’t bring back that 8 bottle carton of empty Coke bottles, you were charged and additional fee for the new ones. Typically this was a nickel a bottle when I was a child.
There was a secondary consideration here, in that if you brought back bottles you could get that five cents, so people frequently patrolled public areas looking for bottles that were littering roadsides and parks.
But cheap, “recyclable” polymer bottles replaced the glass market, because profitability. Sell big two and three liter bottles of soft drinks in a giant plastic jug. No more broken glass bottles that might cut people. But fast dispensing, quick consuming sugar loaded goodness in simply plastic jugs, which could be “recycled”.
The trouble with that, of course, is that now one was recycling. Recycling of plastics was hardly an option in a great number of American communities when the plastic overtook the glass which was being reclaimed, reused, recycled, and disposed of using an industry that went back hundreds of years.
But the corporations were making more money and generating better stockholder value and onward we went.
About the same time, the brown paper grocery bag that was the default from about the mid-twentieth century began to disappear in favor of the flimsy plastic “t-shirt” bags now prevalent in every grocery store that “reminds you to bring your reusable bags”. I think Aldi, Trader Joes, and a few places like Whole Foods or Sprouts are still offering the paper bags as an option.
The plain brown unadorned paper bag had a multitude of uses. It was never thrown away. It was used to carry things. It was used to wrap packages. It was used stop up drafts in the windows in winter. It was also used as a trash bag for those things which could not be consumed or composted or were recycled reused glass.
But plastic was quicker and cheaper and no one cared about how many sea turtles it was going to strangle because, hey, it could be recycled. Somewhere. In some big city. Maybe.
I don’t know about the big cities in the 70s and 80s because I didn’t live in them. Country folk had their own means of recycling glass and plastic that didn’t have deposit cash incentives. They reused them. They used them most often to store those leftovers mentioned earlier. They became useful containers around the house for non-food items. Jars were frequently used for buttons and screws and nuts and bolts. Plastic bowls and tubs were used for paint, or other materials, when not storing food. The big plastic gallon jugs that milk came in were cleaned and used to store water, or other drinks. They’d often be frozen in summer and taken out in the mornings to the fields, so that as the day went on they’d naturally thaw and become cold water to drink.
Aluminum was typically collected and taken for recycling because, like the soda bottles, it was a source of supplemental income, as it is today for some people.
This basically leaves behind paper waste that cannot be reused (and we reused a lot) and non-aluminum food storage – a.k.a. the “tin can”. There was a minimal amount of polystyrene foam waste from meat packing as well. The paper waste and the polyfoam, along with some plastic that was “used” up made it’s way to a burn pile or burn barrel once every couple of weeks.
Yes, I know this is hardly eco-friendly or carbon neutral, but remember it’s still a lot less than is being produced by slash and burn agriculture and other industrial processes. And in colder months said burning was frequently in the fireplace or heat stove, and used to reduce consumption of fossil fuel-based electrical energy.
The waste of metal can packaging was also somewhat minimal, because a lot of the things that came in tin cans, like vegetables, we grew ourselves. And we preserved them ourselves, in glass jars, that were reused from the previous year’s “canning”. So only a few things came in tin cans, namely coffee, tinned fish like salmon, and potted meat (SPAM). And coffee cans, like the empty butter bowls and jelly jars, were put to new use for storage.
In the end, we went to the “city dump” maybe twice a year, with that stuff that we simply could not find a use for, or dispose of ourselves.
Wood, stone, building materials, cloth, furniture, crockery, china, and “yard waste” were all reused, recycled, or consumed. None of that went to the dump. Even pieces of glass and ceramics were frequently just broken up and buried somewhere on the family property, or used as infill with masonry.
I can’t burn trash in my neighborhood. Officially anyway. A backyard “firepit” can cover a multitude of sins, but even then it’s not practical. So much of what comes into our houses, like the plastic bottles and plastic bags, is designed for hauling back off to a “landfill” or other type of industrial waste disposal facility.
In fact, the high price I pay for trash pickup does not include recycling, though incorporated urban areas and some suburban ones have it required. I do recycle. But it must be an active choice, that requires me to separate, collect and then deliver that material personally to the facility, because the contracted garbage service doesn’t do it.
And I save and reuse paper and plastic bags, bowls, boxes, bottles, and other paper as much as I can. I try to repurpose things like packing foam and other persistent environmental pollutants into art pieces or film props, or something that has some intrinsic value that will keep it out of the landfill or the ocean for as long as possible.
But I am still very disappointed in myself for producing the amount of waste that I do. Particularly because I had a childhood where I learned better. That can’t be said of everyone. Not everyone knows how, and to our great disgrace, we are not teaching it to people.
The Western World encourages conspicuous consumption, planned obsolescence, and easy disposability. At the same time we were preaching cleaning the environment and conserving energy, we were making it all the more attractive to just have someone else deal with it. We created a waste disposal industry, and we are still not properly regulating or monitoring it. We find frequent incidence of “recycling” being just dumped into the landfill. Landfills themselves have been found to contaminate water supplies and localities in ways we have not envisioned, and have not legislated for. Our oceans, and apparently all of us, have some measure of microplastic contamination.
Reversal may not be entirely possible. We may be at a tipping point with hydrocarbons in the atmosphere and pollutants in the water cycle that our planet is fundamentally changed forever.
This should concern us. But only because of our self interest in human survival.
Earth has fundamentally changed a number of times. Species have become extinct. Climates have radically altered. A myriad of known and unknown naturally occurring disasters have pocked the surface of the planet for billions of years. Such changes are actually the “nature” we self-righteously proclaim we are trying to preserve.
But what we are most concerned with is the status quo. Even if we leave the billions of dollars out of the conversation, even if we don’t consider the sheer inconvenience of having sea levels rise and our air conditioning bills soar and barely enough land and water on the planet left to feed our overgrown population, our focus is in keeping things the way they are.
And that’s not how the system actually works. Which is why everything we seem to be doing appears to be failing. We just don’t get it.
It’s not about us. It’s not even about the panda or the polar bear or the tiger or the elephant. It’s about the Earth.
The world will carry on without us. She’ll miss us no less than she does the dinosaurs, or the wooly mammoth. We’re temporary. World Card from Shadowscapes Tarot by Stephanie Law.
Sing O muse of the wrathful Achilles, Peleus’s son Who brought much woe upon the Achaens
The Illiad – Homer
Given the brevity and inconsistency of recent posts, I am this morning again in possession (for the moment) of inspiration for something a bit more long form.
In truth, last week I had gotten busy in the studio and had resolved to just skip posting on Sunday, but I saw that my interview on Your Average Witch Podcast was going to be released, and of course it would be bad form to ghost on that.
So I cobbled some pics from the phone and posted a bit of something. I feel less than satisfied about that, but it’s again that struggle between the time to do the work, and the time to talk about doing the work. And doing the work needs to become my priority.
Finding the balance is an ongoing task, but then there is that return of the inspiration that fueled the first year of articles, and the rewards of writing as an artistic work in itself.
So this is why I began with the opening line from Homer. His second great epic, The Odyssey (which may have come first in a very Hollywood prequel fashion) opens with:
Tell me O Muse, of that man of great resourcefulness, who wandered wide and long after ruining the sacred citadel of Troy.
The Odyssey – Homer
From both of these (and there are so many translations, but these are paraphrased to mine own sensibilities) it’s clear that the blind poet, if he actually existed as a person, felt the need to invoke a deity to begin his works.
To the modern mind, this is simply the blandishment of poesy, oft copied by the modern romantic odist. Yet to the ancient Greek, and certainly to his audience, this was a very real and clearly magico-spiritual invocation.
This piece in progress betrays it’s more esoteric origins. The idea came to me while I was working with the Hindu/Buddhist objects known as Vajra (Sanskrit), or Dorje (Tibetan). These are a stylized representation of the the Thunderbolt of Indra, and might be considered analogous to both the Thunderbolt of Zeus and the powers inherent in the Merkaba shape and the Chariot Tarot card. It is an expression of will or force,
When I obtained the objects, there were two version, one that had the “claw” shape on either end, which is the more usual, I believe, and one that had four such “heads” in the shape of an equilateral cross. In my earliest working with them, I found that putting the two ended one across the four ended one seemed to generate a natural jolt, so this variation came about. The next logical extension was to put it over a hexagon (and this then also connects it to the merkaba shape). From there ideas for representing it two-dimensionally began to flow into my mind.
Several additional images sprang from this, so I believe that the “jolt” I speak of has definitely opened me up to something, and I’m going to run with that. If the end images find an audience, then that’s great, but one does not create a mandala to sell it. The purpose of the mandala is in the creation.
At very least, the invocation of Calliope (muse of epic poetry) would be equivalent to the modern “break a leg” used by actors in the theater to warn off a bad performance. That still, is a summoning of spiritual intervention or influence in the forthcoming endeavor. It is a summoning that Homer in his recitations would have felt necessary, and one his listening audience would see as supremely important.
Angering the gods, after all, was what the whole Illiad and Odyssey thing was about. Acknowledging their role, then, in the performance of the work, was necessary, especially if one was to get their cooperation for tomorrow’s matinee show.
The artist, poet, and musician in our modern times use the muse euphemistically to mean that spark of idea that comes from seemingly nowhere, that informs the work, and provides an energy and mood that makes the creation of art a joyous and uplifting thing.
Working without the muse, is to descend into the mundane and commercial and technical.
It bogs down progress. It leadens the spirit. The end result, while perhaps technically correct and adequate – possibly even superior in its way, is never as alive as that work produced through the hands of inspired spirit.
In the quickly composed article of last week, I alluded to working on two different projects. One was a life painting which provided a number of challenges and rewards, but might hardly be called “muse-inspired” That is, the work was essentially a response to the scene before me, and the artistry was in how I would translate that scene to the paper, given the tools available. It is not without joy, mind you, and it is intuitive as well as technical, but it comes from a place very much extant and “real”.
The second piece, underway in the studio, while appearing to be more rigidly technical, is actually the piece that is more inspired from spiritual or preternatural source. It is a painting that has no external analog, and it something that grew from working with certain symbolic tools from Hinduism and Tibetan Shamanism, and Buddhism.
I acquired the tools as my interest in some of the various esoteric teachings of these related cultures attracted my attention in recent years. But the inspiration is not from any of those teachings. It was a flash, and then that flash expanded, and then the image formed in my consciousness. I sat about trying to bring it into greater focus mentally, and then eventually began to construct it with a sketch and then that sketch became a blueprint -a very structured drawing that would allow me to express this image on canvas as I had conceived it.
This path to the thing is by no means as clear and relatable as the one people who were walking past my table at the restaurant looking at the painting of the street scene could easily make out.
And this is the nature of the muse moment. It is that quicksilver revelation that may only be experienced directly, that words fall short of describing. Like the climax of the passions, even the tongues of poets strain to convey the full transport of it.
And this got me to thinking about the experience referred to in todays occult world as Unverifiable Personal Gnosis, or UPG. The thing that we “know” or are given to know that hasn’t come to us through teaching or tradition or externally demonstrable scientific proof.
We simply know.
UPG is a hot-button topic in discussions of magic. In a world dripping with Tik Tok hot takes on so many ideas and traditions, anyone asserting personal revelation as a key to their practice is almost immediately going to be the subject of skepticism, scorn and ridicule.
But the artist’s muse is exactly that experience. It is the thing that comes from nowhere, that we just know to be right. We are moved to create by it, we are almost compelled to get it out on paper or canvas or into clay before we lose that brief spark.
The artist in their youth is generally more open to exploring methods and imagery that go against convention. Subject that are taboo are not so for them, in fact, seeking out these edgier contexts may be a goal in itself.
As time passes, however, one may find themselves pushed into a kind of conformity, whether this is to bring about a desired commercial success or because they become used to working in a place of comfort. Perfection may not be the enemy of good, but every artist has a near perfect image in their mind when inspired. That this perfect image may not be executed due to limitations of skill, media, or even mood, brings about a paralysis. The dread of being frustrated bars action. Like writer’s block, the canvas sits empty, or the artist produces only what they are comfortable doing.
It’s a hard-learned lesson that the making of the work is the reward. How the world will react is out of the control of the maker. If the end result is satisfying, or even elating, then this is an added boon. If the anticipated frustration wins out, the final piece is not up to the intent of the artist, or is rejected by audience and critic, then this will either inform the artist to improve, or to change their approach.
To do otherwise is to stagnate, and eventually decay and be replaced by those willing to keep striving.
As an occultist and an artist, my muse moments are frequently indistinguishable from the UPG.
Frequently the creation of the art is a means through which the esoteric and often obscure message of the UPG sheds itself of the dross brought across from the other side, and becomes full-fledged and full formed in my consciousness.
Sometimes the thing comes clear to begin with, and the execution of the artwork is the goal of process. It is a magical construction that has some sort of purpose.
Perhaps it is for me personally.
Perhaps it is an homage or gift to a particular spirit (consider it like a magical commission to paint a portrait).
Perhaps it is destined to hang on a museum wall in some distant future when I am gone to dust, and pass along it’s true message to a lucky soul who will know how to make use of it.
To be fair, I am not often sure of that purpose, even when the bell rings loudly and the image is fully formed and yelling at me to paint it.
As an artist who draws upon dream imagery and such subconscious inspiration as this, I may often be employing symbols from many cultural and magical systems. I do not see this as an exploitation, because I am responding to the voice of the muse. It is what is being sung to me. I am one who believes that all these various cultural and magical systems are the shared heritage of a human race, and that they all developed from the same source so long ago that we do not fully understand how or why they came about.
Human beings make art. Human beings practice magic.
Other animals use tools and mourn their dead and have complex social structures for the getting of food and the rearing of young and protection of the social group.
But it is our relationship with the muse that began our great journey as a species out of that plain, to an awareness of our cosmos, and hopefully a dawning understanding of the importance of that journey. After eons of exploitation of the Mother of Us All, we have reached a point where our population is threatening to alter the nature of the planet in ways that may not be recoverable.
Looking for a purely technical solution does not really appear to be working. There is a deplorable tendency for such advances to be held and hoarded by the few elites, who will use to add even more pieces of silver to their burgeoning coffers. Even if this were not the case, having such solutions adopted across cultural boundaries with very different ideas of the nature of our cosmic experience is difficult.
Fear and ignorance are at least as much a barrier to solving our looming ecological crises as greed and avarice.
The occult community is not free of these issues. In many ways what I have observed on social media in the last year or so is a microcosm of these larger issues. People fixate on dogma. People separate over traditions. People argue trivialities. All the while asserting, ironically, that they are building a future free from these trappings of the patriarchal capitalistic monotheist religions that “stole” their traditions.
As the late great Jimmy Buffet puts it, “It ain’t that simple.”
Opening ourselves can be a difficult process. We are creatures of both habit and environment. We may have been brought up to believe in one thing, and even if we later rebel or refuse or escape from it, the influence of it is permanently there. This is the same for society as a whole as it is for the individual. Thus the systemic change necessary in the widely variable human culture, nuanced by thousands of years of tradition, lore, and history, and hemmed in by very different economic realities, is not something that has a simple, immediate or even generational solution.
I’m old enough to remember when the hippies were going to change the world. Peace and Love for everybody regardless of anything that was different.
Some things did change. Some things that changed only appeared to change. And still other things were simply sweep under a convenient rug in a “developing nation” where the self-righteous no longer had to smell it.
Thus conveniently removed, such distasteful things as slave labor, environmental pollution and unbelievably unsafe workplaces were pronounced “fixed” and convenient and cheap production went on to fuel the fortunes of tech billionaires and global corporate e-tailers.
The new awareness of a new generation that these old things didn’t actually get fixed is much the basis of the widening gap between those hippies (now designated “boomers” in the most derogatory way possibly). my own generation who were basically let run feral for a couple decades as said boomers grasped at a fading youth, and the “millennial” (also a derogatory designation) , Gen Z, and whatever the newest group are being grouped as.
The generation gap was a thing invented in the 1960s, and wow, retro again today. This may be the first time in our history as a species we’ve had so many generations around to be blaming each other for whatever great ill and frustration confronts them.
I knew one of my great grandmothers. She was born in 1895. In her lifetime we advanced from the steam locomotive to having people land on the moon. In my lifetime, we’ve gone to a permanent human presence off the planet, in orbit, capable of phoning home to anyplace in the world. We have a global community with near instantaneous communication, and it is no longer possible for iniquity and injustice to hide in the dark. But somehow they still manage to do so.
Somewhere there’s a war going on. Somewhere there’s always a war going in. Somewhere hate is driving action. Villages are burning. People are dying. Somewhere someone is making bank on that. This is the human condition as it was since we came down out of the trees, and began struggling for finite resources on a small rock in the middle of a great big inhospitable nothingness.
We haven’t managed to fix that. Even in the utopian futures imagined by the science fiction fabulists, there is inevitably an “enemy” somewhere out there, who threatens the stability and peace of the protagonist society. That’s a construct, to illustrate the desired state of moral superiority in no longer being like said enemy.
I’ve been a believer in the brighter future of the Star Trek TV show since I first encountered in the late 60s and early 70s. Yet the first iteration had enemies that bore perhaps too close a resemblance to current foes of the American state. It’s hard to look at the “grand vision” and not see a certain jingoism. But it is a thing of it’s time. To hide the dialogs about war, bigotry, and other social issues, the producers had to provide the type of adversarial adventure that would get sponsors to pay because viewers tuned in. Later versions of the show attempted to show a rehabilitation of the relationship between those enemies (as foretold in earlier episodes). But that only meant that new enemies were discovered or invented that echoed the changing geopolitical climate.
Put most simply, we don’t even seem to be able to imagine a future where we won’t have someone somewhere at war for something.
That’s a frightening and profoundly disheartening thought.
When I transitioned from the generally free environment of academia into the results-oriented cash-driven world of gainfully employed adult, I gradually reduced the number of really strange and unusual pieces I produced. Such that I did make, were themselves a more pedestrian type of thing, geared toward illustration of popular science fiction or fantasy, and while technically very professional, they weren’t terribly imaginative or inspired. And along the way there were a lot of pieces that were certainly more “normal” being produced, because that was feeding my family.
Of course that is also frustrating, and leads to dissatisfaction with one’s position and one’s life, and can feed back around into other aspects of one’s life and relationships. Creative people, whether they are painters or writers or musicians or inventors or motivators, have an almost physiological need to harken to the call of the muse. When they are stifled in this process, whether through their job or their personal life, they will suffer at a very deep level, sometimes without even realizing it.
That I am capable of creating things that are arcane, odd, eerie, and disturbing, while at the same time able to produce mainstream mass market traditional imagery, and enjoy doing both, is testament to a long life of contemplating that issue. If someone is attracted to the one, but the other causes them to not buy my work, that’s fine. I really don’t want my work owned by someone like that. And it doesn’t matter if the potential buyer wants the creepy stuff but is put off by the normal stuff, or vise versa. If they are unable to enjoy the image they are attracted to because my other works are upsetting to them, then again, I’d rather not have them owning either work.
Both come from the same head, heart, and hand. I have nothing to prove. This is my time to make the work for me. If you like it, great. If you don’t, well, that’s about you.
And perhaps it is the frustrated musings of an aging artist, who sees the ticking away of the days, and the accompanying difficulty of making the work, particularly at a time when the voice of the muse may be coming clearer than it ever has.
I celebrate that I am lucky enough to have reached the age when I can contemplate making work simply to please my own soul. That is not to say that I haven’t, and didn’t have opportunities to make works of this kind over the years. But in those years between the experimental freedom of youth and the late stage of a career, there is first and foremost the need to make a living.
Providing food, shelter, care, and comfort for oneself and one’s chosen family is no sin. We can wrangle with the moral implications of the few super rich occupying the highest echelons, and the disparity between our relative comfort in the Western World, at least if we are part of a particular ethnic background. But to be alive is to have certain real needs, and these are not met by wishful thinking, or philosophical stance.
I have made art for myself. I have made art for others. And I have made art for money.
I will make art for myself. I hope to make art for others. And I have no doubt that I will make art for money.
This is neither selling out nor compromising my artistic integrity. There is still joy in the creation of subject matter that has a more “commercial value” even if that is not where the muse sings loudest to me. On the other hand, my willingness to see that experience as joyful, as valuable, as something that helps me grow, has been rewarded by a flood of visions and ideas that are fresh, and freely given. I am encouraged to conceive of works that in earlier parts of my life I would have found strange, or uncomfortable. I have broadened my own thinking of what the moniker of “occult artist” might include, and feel like I have passed the secret door to a whole new cave of wonders.
And in receiving these new songs, I feel that many things I’d once have considered “too far out there” may actually also have “commercial value”.
The frustration, of course, is having so much I want to do, and struggling still for the time to do it. The mundane and necessary business of business that puts food on the table, a roof over my head, meds in the cabinet, savings in the retirement fund, and keeps my cats in the manner to which they’ve become accustomed still takes priority over my desire to execute the next grand idea.
So I beg indulgence, O Muse, that you have patience. Do not withdraw from me because you mistake my need for the daily bread an indifference to your gift. Understand my struggle to sip the nectar of your song at the end of an exhausting day in “the real world”.
I know that your cup holds restoration and healing. Were that I had strength but to bring it to my lips.
You’ll no doubt notice that this article has returned to the previous Wednesday at 5:00 PM Central Time live date. That was working. The reschedule was not. If it’s not broke…
The muse responsible for these articles seems to be cooperating again, in concert with her sister more involved with the visual and plastic arts (or they may be one and the same). If such favor holds, I’ll be here next week.
Yesterday I spent on the front porch of a local restaurant working on a watercolor of the buildings on the opposite side of the street.
I remembered as I worked that the last time I had such an experience was from a garret balcony in Montmarte almost 30 years ago.
It’s not that I haven’t made art. I have. I have made pieces both digital and traditional, for personal enjoyment and for profit (and luckily sometimes both). But to sit down with no other intention than to make a record of the scene in front of me hasn’t been something I’ve done in too long a time.
The exercise is not just to work in the wild, but to determine how to execute the image with the tools at hand. While I have a full set of the Derwent Inktense pencils and blocks, the paint pans, similar to a watercolor tin, only has about a third of the colors. Yes, I can, and did, expand that with the bigger gamut of the pencils, I was quite surprised that the colors didn’t really have the subtle faded pink, sage green, and yellow ochres of the scene. Choosing how to interpret the scene is the artist’s process.
Frankly that’s my own damned fault, and my own damned vanity. Working from life is a core competency of the professional artist, and it’s my own laziness that I’ve not invested the time to get out there and do it.
The spontaneity and interaction with both the subject and the working environment are essential to any one claiming to be competent with their media. So yesterday was a return to the practice, and I expect to be spending more time engaged in it, even if the final pieces are not spectacular or commercially viable.
Today I am in studio, working on various projects that are a good deal more structured. This is not simply because I am shifting media back to oils, which of necessity are not as spontaneous. It is because the nature of the imagery requires a more “engineered” method.
The two approaches are not mutually exclusive. There will doubtless be some times where working in the open air with a live scene will require a certain deliberated method. And likewise, even a very complex and arranged studio piece will benefit from the occasional happy accident that may take it in a completely different direction.
Magic, of course has some parallels. The seat of the pants “what’s in the cupboard” approach of practical witchcraft is analogous to the plein air impression of the live street. And certainly the heavily structured rituals of so-called “high magick” has commonality with the premeditated studio work. Yet they both partake of and inform each other.
The intended outcome is, of course, the primary yardstick for the efficacy of method. In my long practice I have almost always wiggled along somewhere in the middle of both, but I confess I’ve had more freedom and courage to trust the wildness of traditional improvisational witchcraft than to be comfortable with facing the changing light of a street scene or landscape. And for that I chastise myself.
The studio piece has been worked out from rough sketch through a geometric design in the computer. The final will be hand painted, and will hopefully be more representative of a freer approach, but the use of structured technology as a step in that creation is something that I have been doing for quite a while. The patience required to cut out and apply the masks comes from commercial illustration projects, which ironically hardly employ these methods in the digital age. In essence I am utilizing a hybrid archaic process that has been superceded by layering and masking digitally. The method is still the standard for much airbrush work, but for the majority of illustration it’s become a forgotten art.
It’s never too late for the old dog to go back and relearn some tricks.
That’s all I have this week. If you find it a tad brief, I invite you to join me and Clever Kim on Your Average Witch Podcast this Tuesday, April 16, where I ramble on about a number of topics. I’m looking forward to seeing what she was able to edit together from my typical puddle of consciousness conversations.
Restarting the articles has proven more difficult than I expected.
The previous two weeks unforeseen professional and personal demands on my time prevented even this simple message. The good news is that such demands appear, for the moment, to be resolving positively.
I am continuing to use my time making art. I am pleased to say that the general shift of my emphasis has resulted in a number of fresh ideas for images.
That these images depart from my previous experience painting delights me. But my desire to successfully execute these ideas means that much more time needs be spent in preparation and testing of the methods in mind. Even a decade ago I would have lacked the perspective or patience to make these experiments. I would have feared the final product might escape my imagination.
Minotaur Skull -material test of the Derwent Graphitint pencils and paint pans. The idea evoloved from a desire to have an underlying image on a canvas I am using to test various methods of gilding.
Now, I find that the experiments not only yield the necessary experience to work on the original idea, but that new ideas emerge from the experimentation process.
I hope my small cadre of readers will forgive this period of unevenness in the blog. I cannot say with certainty if it will resume the regular cycle I had committed to. I hope it will, because I believe such commitments to one’s audience is important. I’m old-fashioned that way.
Another test of the Derwent Graphitint. I was looking to get the effect of fog. In the end, I used some Winsor Newton Cotman watercolors to deepen the foreground intensity. I like the Graphitint, but the basic 12 color pencils set and the half-pan paints didn’t really have enough “oomph” to sell the effect I was looking for.
In the meantime, please accept the art candy here, and rest assured I am working toward resumption of our regularly scheduled programming.
One of the chief reasons for my Yuletide sabbatical was that I had not had the time in recent months to work on any of the art projects that I had planned/sketched/imagined during the several months between my last major road trip in August and the advent of my Halloween/Birthday season.
As a creature of the Winter Dark, this period is often when I circle back into myself and focus on the creative endeavors that summer obligations make difficult. Alas, as the years pass this luxury of a winter respite seems harder to return to, but in this case, the one thing I could set aside was my own commitment to a weekly article here.
I am aware my readership, while loyal, is not large. And that’s fine, because I feel like I am reaching those who are open to hearing what I am saying in the way I am saying it. I had contemplated other means of doing this, most notably a book and a podcast (not necessarily both). But the logistics of doing these to the level and extent that I envisioned them, required a great deal more of a commitment of time, at least, and energy to “make a go of it”.
The slow progress on this painting is deliberate. I have not worked in oil in many years, and, to be honest, I was never terribly good with them when I did. The years have given me patience to work with the more complicated techniques, as well as wait for layers to properly cure before barreling forward to the next part. I suppose I would have been a good fresco painter back in my 20s, because I worked fast, and sometimes the spontaneity served me, but often it left a work that was not as good as it could have been. Many of the works I have envisioned for 2024 and beyond are to redress the less successful versions of my young.
So I started to put together this website with the intention of using it as a storefront, a place to sell such works as I had imagined. To compliment and enhance the branding of said wares, I started trying to put together a page or two on my personal perspective of magic and how it relates to my art. But as technical issues delayed the storefront, and I was working out options (and budget) to move the site to a new service provider that would support the storefront technology reliably, I started working with this WordPress side-site to help better articulate that message of magic and art.
I have mentioned that somewhere along the way the tail started wagging the dog. In mid December, I decided to send the dog to obedience school, and get back to the creative art part of the thing, because, a. ) the pre-paid contract for the website was already a year in with no storefront to fund renewal; and b.) there wasn’t anything for the storefront to sell.
The last couple of months have not been as productive in that respect as I would have preferred, but I do not consider the time wasted, nor do I feel that the directions I am heading in now are un-useful.
Sometimes we need to not just go back to the well, but back to the basics.
A consequence of taking a break is that my brain was somewhat more rested. Thus, said brain returned to it’s proper job of producing new ideas, resulting in a number of ideas for artwork. This was the intended purpose of taking the break. However, the new ideas brought with them a desire to use materials and methods that I had not used for some time, or never, or never together, and well, I was not at all sure I would be able to execute on the ideas offered by the now properly operating brain.
If you are a creative person, you may have had that experience of attempting to make something you can clearly see in your mind, but can’t seem to get right. It’s frustrating to the nth degree, and also, the anxiety of having such a failure can paralyze one to trying in the first place.
In fairness, after almost 40 years as a working artist, I am reasonably skilled at making my hands behave. Absent the occasional arthritic twinge, expressing visually what I see in my head is not so difficult as it used to be.
Except in the case of doing so with materials and methods that I had not used in ages, or ever, or ever together. That’s reasonable. One should not expect to execute flawlessly in a new media, or an old one that was never as friendly. And yet, the desire is there to do so. Especially if the end result is expected to be a commercial success.
Thus one is required to practice. To test, rehearse, fail, rethink, retry, and otherwise make those inevitable mistakes without the final piece being subject to these errors.
Thing is, the art of practice is not as easy as you think. Especially for a creative sort, who is expecting high quality outcomes.
Progress on a small gouache sketch on smooth bristol board. I had acquired a set of this type of paint in a discount sale, and used it with a couple of water color and aquarelle works. But in those executions, with the exception of using the white tube as a correction, I more or less used it transparently, as I would a watercolor.
That is a valid method. Essentially gouache and watercolor are the same thing- pigment with a gum arabic binder. Gouache has additional “whiting” or “body” to make them go on opaque. Unlike acrylic paint, which has largely replaced gouache in professional illustration work, the older medium will soften, melt, run, and blend even after the initial layer dries. This can be a disadvantage, or it can be useful to lighten or blend out a heavier color, as in the face above. Finessing these qualities is difficult, particularly if one doesn’t frequently use the medium.
It’s fortunate that as I am in my late 50s I have acquired the patience I did not have in my 20s. In my 20s, I worked without regard to error, in a mad blind rush of ego and drive that merely put imperfect or less successful works under the bed or in the closet to be forgotten. I had no time for specific tried methodologies of testing and practicing.
So now, I have come round full circle to making tests, to establish how the media will work for my intended final piece, indeed, whether or not it will work. In some cases, I have taken out a particular type of tool purely to practice, knowing it might not be suitable for the thing I am trying to do.
For example, I had an idea for a painting. I sketched it with oil pastel, though I knew the oil pastel wouldn’t actually give me a good result. It was not the best option to do the sketch, but I wanted to get a better feel for the oil pastels.
In another case, I sketched the idea with Conté crayon, because I had not used them in some years. The result was not a good one, but at least my hands now “remembered” how these performed. I made a very small (mind you I used to paint 4 feet canvases and larger murals) partial painting on paper using gouache, a kind of opaque watercolor. It was frustrating in ways, but also interesting to work with. I then did a second test related to the image with oil paint on paper, in order to test a metallic oil color, and a glazing medium, both of which are “new technology” since I last used oils. This also resulted in a mix of joy and disappointment.
Yet, it is the ultimate outcome of learning mastery, and understanding better, the materials which are new to me, or that I have forgotten.
Coincident with these practical exercises has been extensive research into both the direct use of these materials, but also into the proper curation of finished works using them.
For a good deal of my career, I have worked with modern acrylic paints, plain old graphite pencils, and a particular brand of colored pencils. I had academic experience with pastels, oil paint, Conté, charcoal, and water colors, as well as printmaking of various kinds and photography.
Many of these latter media are “fussy”. They can be complicated exercises in alchemy, such as oil painting, printmaking, and analog chemical photography, or simply just rather difficult to use, preserve, and store, such as pastel, water color, and charcoal drawings. In my 20s, short on patience and high on passion, it was all to easy to set these to the side, and assure myself that the “new media” of polymer emulsion acrylic paint was the way to go. “Plastic” paint would last for ages, even without a layer of polymer varnish (also easy to apply and clean up versus oil paint) and the pencil stuff was safe with enough spray on fixative.
Almost 40 years on, the implications of a petrochemical based art media is something I have more concerns about. While certainly there are pigments in use in all media that are derived from chemical sources, rare earths, and potentially toxic materials, older methods, like oil painting, watercolor, and pastels, are typically more sustainable and earth friendly.
I have spent my “mad money” the last few years on getting best-in-class art materials that I dreamed of having as a young starving student. These are expensive compared to what you run across in the “art” section of a craft store, or even at college book store. But in this case, the old adage “you get what you pay for” is often true. The quality and purity of the pigments mean that you end up using less to get the same vibrance of color compared to student or hobbyist grade materials. Another advantage to such sets is that most professional media is sold as single replacements, so if you run through all of your Naples Yellow, then you can just go get that.
Perhaps of most concern though as I get older is that the better quality materials may be less toxic, or at least are formulated with an awareness that the artist wants materials that are safe and renewable, and will pay a premium for it.
The most toxic solvent generally used with oil paint is turpentine, which is a by product of pine trees. Oddly enough, a number of professional paint companies have shifted to an “odorless mineral spirit” which is petroleum based. Neither is something you need to be breathing in close quarters. Both are volatile and flammable. Turpentine at least is renewable. Manufacturers are working with citrus based solvents that have the same effective properties, but are renewable, non-toxic, and no-flammable, so there is an awareness in the professional art industry that these things are an issue.
Likewise, manufacturers of pencils, crayons, and pastels are now producing vegan friendly solutions, These remove the beeswax that has been a feature of paint binders since ancient Egypt. In some media, eggs, animal glues, and other such by-products are being reconsidered in light of animal cruelty. Unfortunately, the alternative product is often a petrochemical, such as a paraben or an epoxy.
Hopefully research will yield solutions that meet both the ethical considerations and provide sustainable archival media that will allow today’s artists to be seen and appreciated in the museums of the 26th century, as we now can look at the works of the great Renaissance masters. Ironically, the late 19th and 20th century “modern” media are often the more problematic for curators. The materials themselves being made to a “commodity grade” standard, and applied, frequently, without the care and diligence that the artists of earlier eras learned through long apprenticeships.
While clearly I am writing about my recent studio work, my brain was not without the appreciation of the parallels to magical practice. During the last week I was also interviewed by Your Average Witch Podcast, and part of the discussion is always about methods of practice. It occurred to me that my approach to magic, like my approach to art, might benefit from a reacquaintance with those first principles. That is, while there are a number of things I do as habit, it couldn’t hurt to at least dig into the underlying principles behind those habits, and see if perhaps, in habitualizing them, I had shortcut some of the needed structure for the sake of convenience and time.
Like the painting, if I am doing something familiar, my hands know the way. The results are sufficient, but perhaps not spectacular. Such complacency is not beneficial. It leads to the trap of excusing poor performance, when paying closer attention, taking the time, and doing the research, might in fact have yielded a better result. And in fact the additional effort to get that first result invigorates and educates all subsequent attempts.
If I do a lot of the fiddly stuff for one or two paintings, then the next 10 or 20 paintings benefit from what I have learned, and also from the better habits of practice and research.
The same applies to spell craft and any other magical disciplines.
When we are young, we rush by what we need to do because we are in a hurry to get something done.
When we are older, we shortcut what we need to do because it doesn’t seem to make a difference.
And that’s because we didn’t do it when we were younger and didn’t have the basic sense to realize we were wrong.
Slow down. Take a breath. Re-read that chapter.
Not everything has to be a finished work. It’s okay to do something just to figure out how to do it. And to absolutely flop doing it until you figure it out.
I’ll be back in a week, I think. I have no idea what we’ll be getting into then.
Seek ye the openings at the edges. Places where water comes from nowhere. The doors invisible at first sight, Only noticed in passing.
I am, at least for this week, back from my temporary sabbatical . I did not get to do most of what I took the time off to do, but I did do some of it, and in the doing found sufficient inspiration to return here, again, at least this week. And probably next. And then we’ll see.
Yesterday was my second Saturn return. As I write this on the day before that, I can’t offer any specific recollection of the passing of that milestone, save to offer what I posted the other day on threads.
It’s not a date, it’s a process.
Although I have had an interest in astrology since I was first acquainted with magic and the occult in childhood, it remained for many years outside my practical grasp. For those of you without recollection of the pre-internet era, once upon a time, the construction of natal charts, and from thence the progression toward a predictive astrology, was done without the aid of software.
One had to have at least one ephemeris. Considering that most clients would have been born in the 20th century, a good one for that century centered on midday or midnight was essential. Ephemerae for early periods were available, used for calculating the charts of various famous personages, organizations and states, whose nativity predated the current era. Sometimes this was for instructive purpose (“see here, you have your Moon in Aries squared by Mars in Leo, just like Mozart”), and sometimes you would be called upon to cast a horoscope for something like a corporate merger so you needed to create a “birth chart” for the involved corporations whose origin may have predated 1900.
I don’t recall how much mine cost, but I know I considered it expensive as a first year college student trying to get by on a meager stipend and acquiring potentially expensive habits beyond the already pricey ones of art supplies and books. There was also a need for a Table of Houses, at minimum, and a set of fairly accurate mathematical instruments. Fortunately I had some of those already left over from high school trigonometry and/or art class, and I had possession of an antiquated (even in the early 80s) slide rule. Doubtless many people reading in 2024 will assume this has something to do with measuring, but before computers and calculators became ubiquitous, the slide rule was a precision instrument for dealing with complex calculations out to many decimal points. In fact they were more accurate and capable of handling bigger numbers with greater precision that most affordable electronic scientific calculators making the rounds.
If you’re not a math nerd (guilty) things like significant digits and scientific notation will possibly leave you staring at me like a doomed deer on a lonely country road. But let me take you through the steps of calculation a planetary position for a natal chart as I had to do it in the 1980s, and you’ll get some sense of the weight of this process, and why software is a wonderful boon to the practice of astrology.
Saturn and I are old friends. This illustration by the great Chesley Bonestell of Saturn as seen from its moon Titan, was part of a solar system map that hung on my wall in early childhood. My interests in things that were beyond the mundane was part of me from the very beginning, and I am happy to say, that interest has not waned. If anything, it has become stronger with age.
An ephemeris is a table of planetary positions taken from a fixed point in space and time. That is, depending on the ephemeris, it will tell you at what degree, minute, and second of arc a planet occupies on a given day at a given hour when viewed from a specific latitude and longitude. The one I bought was set for midnight (’cause I’m a night person) at the Naval Observatory of Greenwich, England -home of the Prime Meridian. These were compiled by the Observatory for the purposed of aiding naval navigation, because it could be used with a sextant and trigonometry to plot one’s position out of site of land in the days before GPS. The data has also been handy for astrologers, who no longer had to watch the skies directly and extrapolate this information.
We’ll start with talking about the Sun’s position, since our “Sun Sign” is generally what everyone in the 70s and 80s sort of understood about astrology. So we look up your birthday in the ephemeris and find out what degree, minute and second of arc the sun occupied at midnight in Greenwich, England.
Which, of course was not where or when you were actually born. So the first thing we need to do is figure out your birthplace.
Did I mention you need an atlas, too? A very good one with lots of detail, so that little bitty town in Eastern Kentucky where you were hatched shows up close enough to the big latitude and longitude lines to make calculating it’s true position less difficult. Because that’s what we’ll do now, using the nearest main line, and the map’s scale, correcting for the convergence of those lines as they get further from the equator.
Got it? Good.
So now we just have to figure out the difference in time between that location and Greenwich. This is generally a little easier, because we have time zones. If you live to the west of Greenwich Mean Time (or GMT) then it’s a negative number. East is a positive number. What we call Eastern Time in the United States is GMT minus five hours. Be sure to correct for Daylight Savings Time (which is different here than it is in Europe, but GMT doesn’t change for DST, so Eastern Time DST becomes minus 4 GMT). Also remember that modern ephemerae may use UTC instead of GMT, but it is nearly the same thing. That is, UTC is the same zero hour as GMT which preceded it, but is derived from precise atomic decay clocks kept by the observatory, and synchronized with other such clocks around the world as a basis for determining the local offset time zone.
Luckily, the chart I am working with is a winter chart, and in the Eastern time Zone, so I take Midnight GMT and subtract five hours. This means that I now know which degree, minute, and second of arc the sun was occupying at 7:00 PM (or 19:00 on the 24 hour clock) at the birth location. We’re making progress. Unfortunately, the subject was born at 3:30PM so we’re going to need to calculate where the sun was four and a half hours earlier.
I got myself a little something for my second Saturn return. It was auspiciously on sale last week. I have a whole box full of costume jewelry like this that I swap out on my cape and other magical wear as the mood strikes, but I had yet to have an image of Saturn. Which is surprising considering the image of the ringed planet is quintessential to the attire of any self-respecting wizard depicted in fairy tale illustrations.
For the record, I do have a pointy satin blue hat with stars, crescent moons, and of course, Saturn, on it in my costume closet. And one of the earliest pieces of magical clothing I made still bares the faint impression of the giant planet on the back of it, so none of this is new.
The sun transits the zodiac once every 365.2422 days. The zodiac is divided into 360 degrees of arc. Each degree is then divided into 60 minutes, and 60 seconds, just as we divide terrestrial maps in order to translate the vast distance between the degrees on land and sea into something specific. We’ve already done that with the location of birth. To get the sun’s rate of travel, we divide the 360 degrees by the 365.2422 days and get a velocity of .9856473321 degrees per day. Then we need to divide that by the 24 hours in a day to determine how far it moves in an hour, which is .0410686388 degrees of arc, or rather, 2.464118328 minutes, or 2 minutes, 2.784784709080 seconds.
This is where we get to those significant digits. With a slide rule and scientific notation actually compute those numbers out to the ends of those decimal points. And a quality astrology software program currently available on the market is doing that for you. We couldn’t do that in 1980 unless we used the slide rule. But even then, it starts coming out with numbers that are frankly, impossible to plot a chart of the size that one would prepare for a client, which might at most be the size of a standard letter size sheet of paper. I did bigger poster style charts for the few I did, because, the art was as much a part of the service as the chart, and it also made it easier to draw all the lines.
So at some point, I default to saying that the speed of the Sun through the zodiac is roughly 2 minutes and 3 seconds of arc per hour. So in four and a half hours (GMT Midnight and 7PM local) the Sun will be a little over 8 minutes and 12 seconds of arc ahead of where it really was at the time the subject was born at this location. I then take the position of the Sun and subtract 8 minutes and 12 seconds of arc, and I know where the Sun is at the moment of birth.
Now I just need to repeat this process for the Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto, and the Ascendant (position of the Eastern Horizon). Most general texts didn’t even talk about asteroids, or the Arab parts, or any of the number of other calculations to be made in a complex natal chart.
Oh, did I cover the part about sidereal versus tropical zodiac? Natal charts in the west are usual done with a tropical zodiac that has a neat division of twelve signs of 30 degrees each. It is locked to the solstices, so the Sun moves from Gemini to Cancer on the Summer Solstice and from Sagittarius into Capricorn in winter. The latitude lines where the sun is visible directly overhead on these dates are called the Tropic of Cancer and Capricorn respectively, and relate to earth’s 23-ish degree wobble on it’s access over the year. Without the wobble, we’d have no seasons.
Sidereal time, however uses the position of the sun (and subsequently the other planets) in relation to their location in the constellations taken at sunrise on a given day. The Vedic astrology practiced in Hinduism uses the sidereal system. Lucky for your, the switch is a simple option in most modern software. But if you happen to have purchased a sidereal ephemeris and you are making a tropical zodiac, you’re going to have to work out the math. The variance between the two is 23-24 degrees on average, but it’s another layer of calculation, and is a big enough number to put planets and your Ascendant in other signs.
I can’t think about Saturn and especially not the portents of a Saturn return without recalling this haunting image by Francisco Goya. This is far and away my favorite painting by that mad Spaniard (followed closely by the etching “The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters” from his Los Caprichios series).
He painted this, along with a number of other mystical and magical “Black Paintings” on the interior walls of his home in the 1820s. Proclaimed a pariah by both the ruling class and the Inquisition, and on the outs with his own family, some speculate he may have been experiencing a deep depressive episode. Still, these works are unquestionably genius.
He’d have been a bit past his own second Saturn Return, which was the day before my birthday in 1804. He died some years short of his third one, but at 82 was at a respectable old age for the 18-19th century.
So now that we know where the planets and the Ascendant are, we can start to plot the chart. We start by scribing a circle on the page. We’ll then draw a horizontal line through the center.
The Ascendant is where the sunrise horizon is at the moment of birth. In the case of our test subject, that’s about one and three quarter degree into Aries. So the point where the left side of the line intersects the circle is marked as 1 degree, 44 minutes of Aries. Now we’re going to take a protractor and locate a point 1.75 degrees above that center line. A line drawn from the edge of the circle to the center now represents the start of the Sign of Aries. From that line, we measure 30 degrees counter-clockwise, mark a line, and label that the beginning, or cusp, of Taurus; 30 degrees counter-clockwise from Taurus is Gemini, the next is Cancer, and so forth, until 30 degrees from the cusp of Aquarius/Pisces is the beginning of Aries.
Now we take those hard won positions of the planets and put all of them in on the chart, since we now know where the signs begin and end. It’s time to take a well-earned break, have some lunch, and maybe even a long nap.
The next steps are both necessary but don’t necessarily have to be performed in a specific order. We need to calculate the aspects for the planets, and we need to calculate the positions of the Houses. In order to give our brains a bit of a break, I’ll go with the aspects first.
Planetary aspects are simply the distances between each planet (and sometimes calculated positions, like the Ascendant, Descendant, Mid-Heaven (abbreviated MC for Maximus Coeli, the “top of sky” or Zenith) and Immum Coeli (“bottom of sky” or Nadir), Part of Fortune, and other Arabic Parts. These aspects are in degrees of arc, and generally are on divisions of 30, or the breadth of a full sign.
Objects said to have Square Aspect are 90 degrees apart, or three full signs different, and these are considered difficult or unfortunate. At 60 degrees we have a Sextile aspect, and at 30 degrees a Trine aspect, which signal better cooperation between the planets and a positive relationship in general. Objects at 180 degrees are in Opposition, and work against each other, and objects that are within a degree or so are considered to be in Conjunction and have the most beneficial aspect. There are several minor and special ones, but this is just the basics I would go for in a hand-calculated chart.
Planetary Aspects are arrayed in a grid which has the planets across the top and down one side, where the intersecting boxes are marked with the glyph for the type of aspect. These are generally also drawn of the page with the chart, for quick reference.
Before we bring the Houses into the picture, it may be also helpful to make a note of the Elemental positions, and the Modalities.
Each sign has an elemental nature, in that it corresponds to Fire, Earth, Air, and Water, in that order, starting with Aries, and moving counter-clockwise around the chart. Thus Taurus is considered an Earth Sign, Gemini Air, and Cancer the first Water Sign. Leo is the next Fire, Virgo, the second Earth, and so forth. Four elements means that this happens three times in a 12 sign zodiac and sometimes these groups of signs are called Triplicities.
The Modalities speak to how that Element interacts with the Sign, and any planets within it. These are Cardinal, Fixed and Mutable. Cardinal signs represent the first full blush and power of the element. They frequently mark the beginnings of the seasons, but do not necessarily fall in line with the first time the element appears in the zodiac. For example, both Aries (Cardinal Fire) and Cancer (Cardinal Water) mark the beginnings of Spring and Summer. But Taurus, while being the first Earth sign, is considered Fixed, because it represents that element as it is established and in it’s fullest natural influence. Likewise Scorpio, as Fixed Water, represents a world that is firmly in Autumns grip, which began with Cardinal Libra and the Autumnal Equinox. Mutable signs are the endings of a season, when the Element in one is beginning to transition into the Element in the next, thus Mutable signs precede Cardinal ones, and Fixed signs precede Mutable. As there are four seasons this occurs four times in the zodiac.
These natures are used to describe the Signs, and so they influence how a planet’s nature will be interpreted when entering into them. In drawing a chart, it is sometimes helpful to make a notation of element and modality at the rim or down nearer the center for reference when the actual reading begins.
At this point, we can begin to overlay the Houses. The Houses reflect various parts of our personality and our life, as well as the world we live in. This is where we can look for indicators of personality, aptitude, relationships, children, career, health, longevity, and spirituality. The most basic system of Houses is that of the Equal House system, where each house, like each sign, has 30 degrees. The houses begin at the Ascendant, and move counter-clockwise around. Depending on the position of the Ascendant, this may mean that an equal house system matches, or nearly matches, with the signs, as is the case of our test subject. By having the Ascendant only a hair inside of Aries, the first house will overlap most of Aries, the second most of Taurus, etc. such that the houses, who share many traits with the underlying signs, would not greatly vary the reading of the planets and their aspects. Aries and the First House speak to the I, the Ego, the Individual.
However if the Ascendant were over in Gemini, which is concerned with communication and interaction (as is the Third House) planets here might be analyzed for their influence on how well the person speaks and presents themselves. Such a shift places Gemini’s native Third House, over in Leo, which then may be reviewed as to how our subject commands, leads, or influences. These are over-simplifications, not so much as one gets with a daily newspaper horoscope, but they serve here simply to illustrate the connection between the nature of a given sign, and the nature of a given house, and then how the houses have different origin points than these signs. Houses change as a factor of location, since the position of the Ascendant is related most directly to where the subject was born.
This further complicates matters though, because the lines of longitude converge at the poles, so the distance between them is shorter the further one moves from the equator. This brought about the first calculations of the unequal houses, to compensate. Possibly the eldest, and potentially the most common, is called the Placidian, and is calculated based on degrees of latitude. When these houses become known, you get a chart where the houses are wider on one side than the other, and thus their influences can vary. For example, one might have a fourth house that spanned two or even three signs, in which case the planets and signs there would all be taken into account in terms of expressing tendencies in home and family life. Consequently on the other side of the chart the seventh, eighth, and ninth houses might share portions of a single sign, such that the planets and the sign would govern issues of marriage, business, death, and life goals.
In extreme northern latitudes (which thankfully I have never had to create a chart for) the various forms of unequal houses can cause some to collapse entirely, and frequently astrologers simply revert to an equal house system. This, of course, leads skeptics to pronounce that if the calculations are this quixotic, then the whole thing must be an utter sham.
Again, that is not my point, I am just trying to give the texture of the experience of working with astrology prior to the advent of small personal computers, and accurate natal astrology software.
Where once creating a serviceably accurate natal chart could take days or weeks, not even considering the study and contemplation to interpret it, I can now get a reliable result inputting a few key data points into the computer, or even into my mobile device. While arguably this has made the practice of astrology much easier and more accessible to those who have a true gift for reading a chart, I would counter that that is also something to be gained from the experience of finding and placing all that information oneself.
Because this task was so onerous, I admit to have only done a very few charts, and since Tarot and numerology were much simpler and more readily available, my career as a world famous astrologer never really took off. I did follow my horoscopes and such in the mass media, and I tried to keep enough of the skillset to smell when these were gilding the lily. Somehow I never won the lottery, had a windfall inheritance, or was an overnight sensation, so I took it with a grain of salt.
A few years ago, I ran across the Planetdance software which I have mentioned in previous articles, and started digging more deeply back into the charts. Particularly my interest was in why the majority of the new friendships I was making in the witch community on social media were mostly Piscean women. One of them told me it was that Pisces in Saturn in the 12th House placement. I’m still trying to work that all out, but it started me looking into this whole Saturn Return business.
Saturn takes around 30 years to get through the zodiac back to where it started. The actual orbit of Saturn is about 29.5 years, but because of retrograde motion, your Saturn return could vary a year or more. But generally speaking it hits us first as we are exiting our 20s, looking at the “big 3-0” and wondering just what the hell we are going to do with our lives.
I’ve only learned recently (like yesterday) that there is a secondary cyclic process called the Inverse Nodal return that hits around age 27, and so consequently the approach to that first Saturn return, with all the changes it portends, appears also to be a while. I am still looking into that as it applies to the second time around, as if it runs in a 27 year cycle it should have hit right around 2019 and thus just before the upheavals of 2020. Yet when I am cycling through my software, I see this event as happening in 2011. In fact, it looks like after the initial 27 year cycle that preceded the Saturn return, it now seems to be running on 19 year intervals. That’s actually somewhat concerning and I am going to ask some folks more familiar with astrology than I am to puzzle that one out.
At any rate, the second return hits as one is approaching that Big 6-0 and wondering just what the hell we have done with our lives, and thinking, quite significantly, if we’ll manage a third pass with this enigmatic outer planet as we approach our 90s.
When I was in my twenties, that idea never occurred to me. A life span of three-score and ten seemed to be around the norm. My great-grandmother passed at age 83 when I was in my early teens. My grandfather died of cancer in his early 70s a few years after that, so the perspective of a longer game seemed highly unlikely. When he died, my own father was not yet 40. When my father passed in 2022, also of cancer, I was almost 57, and already had a different perspective of that road.
As I have delved deeper into the supposed influence of Saturn’s return, I see some the impacts of reaching my age. These are, I believe, perhaps common to my peers. Many of us are beginning to lose our parents. Some of our contemporaries are also passing away. We are experiencing a sense of the clock ticking, of an urgency to our actions, that impacts our choices. We are thinking about that last hurrah, the big swing at that thing we always wanted to take a swing at. Maybe it’s writing a novel, maybe it’s touring the world. Maybe it’s finding a quiet corner of the world and letting go of the day to day frustrations and simply being able to breath deeply and listen to the birds sing.
Whether we as humans are doing this because the milestone of age 60 is driving it, and that has become associated with Saturn, or whether Saturn’s influence causes us to start thinking this way is really irrelevant. We have made this journey together, Saturn and I, and for now, I plan to keep on traveling.
We’ll see what I come up with next week. I may also move the day this article gets regularly posted so I can spend time getting it done without it impacting my other recent art projects, which are the reason I got into this thing in the first place. Also, I plan on making them shorter articles, which I am sure will please my readers immensely, so that they have the time to do their other projects.
…or Pippin. Or Frodo or Sam or Bilbo for that matter. It’s all about the eating.
This week in the Unites States, we celebrate the Feast of Thanksgiving.
At least we used to.
Now we tend to celebrate the Feast of Black Friday, unless we decided to go camp out at the Big Buy to watch the Coming of Big Screens, but I went into that last year.
This year, I want to talk about feasting as ritual, about food as sacrament, and about communal eating as an ancient and vital expression of humanity.
The irony that you may be reading this on small personal communication device while ignoring all the other people sitting at the table with their own small personal communication devices texting Uncle Sal to pass the gravy is not lost on me.
Nor should it be on you.
We are self-isolating at a terrifying rate, mistaking “social media” for human contact, and it most certainly is not.
Unfortunately, this illusion is compounded by the fact that social media is where many of us have “found our tribe”.
Those of us who are patently and professionally strange and unusual are very often lonesome in our IRL world. It depends on where one lives, of course, but locating a number of like-minded weirdos to hang out with is problematic for a great number of people.
At the same time, we are very often required, by family, job, and community, to mask ourselves to a greater or lesser extent. This is why the online “witch community” calls to so many of us. At least there, we can let our freak flags fly proudly, and the rest of the world be damned.
It’s a welcome relief from a cold, cruel world of boring and unimaginative people who are far more interested in small talk. And I certainly despise small talk.
If you want to talk about the weather, well, okay.
Let’s talk about rainmaking. Get me going about what kind of spells are best for thunderstorms. I’ll talk to you about tying winds in knots so ancient sailors would never sit becalmed (a very real fear).
Conversely, I’m more than happy to discuss potential cloud seeding techniques, or the implications of weather control on an already overburdened climate system.
But please don’t…don’t EVER…just talk about the weather.
People do. I know that.
Once upon a time this was actually an important conversation.
That was back when we farmed for our food, instead of having it delivered in a pre-packaged form that comes with instructions for the machines to cook it for us. I’m just waiting for the pre-holiday ad blitz that has that “smart” toaster oven prepping dinner for the eighteen plus kith and kin that are coming to your house this year. I’m sure it’ll be a great Pre-Black Friday Black Friday Sale Doorbuster.
But in those farming food days when reaching a consensus on whether or not it was going to be a dry spring actually meant something, getting together to share food, drink, and human companionship overrode the frequent dysfunctional disagreement, and, in a few cases, meant we got to spend time with “Weird Aunt Sadie” or “Odd Cousin Tim” who were into the same strange stuff that we were.
The Cornucopia or Horn of Plenty used to be a common autumnal symbol in my youth. I’m not sure if they still have it on the bulletin board where the first graders proudly display their “turkey” drawn from outstretched fingers. I have noticed that it has largely disappeared from seasonal marketing in recent times, de-emphasizing the communal eating as part of the holiday celebration, in favor of a decidedly non-communal weekend shopping frenzy.
While I can understand that the Mad Men and Women plotting the means of best separating us from our hard-earned dollars are eschewing such images in favor of a newly body-conscious population, fear of upsetting those with eating disorders, and dissociating from the stress of preparing a big feast for all the kinfolk in the tri-state area- I can’t help but wonder if they’ve thrown the gravy out with the bath-water.
And long before the third Thursday in November was enshrined as the beginning of the holiday shopping season, and the absolute myth of those witch-burning colonial religious fanatics sitting down to harmoniously break bread in the spirit of brotherhood with the native peoples whose land they were polluting, there were seasonal feasts among families, and villages and tribes.
This is true of all cultures, though for many of us who were inculcated to that very very White Anglo-Saxon Protestant version of the Plymouth colony as being central to the founding of America (spoiler alert – it wasn’t ) our awareness of such feasting is often limited to the various European traditions.
Feasting is not just a winter sport, of course. There are spring feasts and summer feasts, and harvest feasts, all serving the vital purpose of consuming the hopefully surplus bounty of nature’s rhythms at those various times, whilst engendering a spirit of community and cooperation, and affording Oog and Groont a day or two off from the flint mines.
In the Winter Dark, however, this need to join together for shared resources becomes especially vital, particularly in the Northern climes where the growing season ends around mid August, and stores of preserved foods might be wearing thin.
Remember too that in such months, many people were cooped up in their houses. The cattle or sheep or goats weren’t grazing in the fields. Much of the wild game was already bedded down in their dens, so hunting was infrequent, and such other activities that could be performed in the late autumn and early winter were done during the shorter daylight hours, when the meager sunshine was warming. After dark, temperatures dropped and non-hibernating predators like wolves were roaming in search of their own feasts.
Once all the baskets had been woven, and the nets mended, and the swords honed and oiled, and the other tasks suitable for internal pursuits were completed (and in primitive times there were a lot more of them) there is no question that folk eventually tired of each other’s company.
We use the term “cabin fever” today to reflect this general malaise with idle hands and close quarters, and the natural sort of bleak outlook that comes with shorter days and longer nights. The medical term “seasonal affective disorder” which I’m sure took a committee of several prominent psychiatric professionals to anagram to SAD is used to describe a kind of depression or nervousness that affects some during the winter, compounded, of course, by the dread of the impending “holiday season”.
This is largely because, in my view, we have lost touch with the aspects of that series of communal feasts and celebratory rites that serve as a tonic to the body, and a boost to the spirit.
Coming together in the dark times was beneficial. Some people may have had a better harvest, or may have been better at hunting or putting up and preserving food. The winter feast insured that those who did not have such arbitrary luck might still get a slightly fuller belly and larder for a short time. This meant that the blacksmith or the boatwright or the village wise ones who still performed a valid function need not starve to death in the middle of winter.
But it also was an occasion to let off steam, for drinking and wrestling and telling tales and singing songs and generally getting a break from the long cold nights in the family hovel with none but the spouse and several younglings to give company.
We’ve replaced that these days with slipping into a food coma whilst watching considerably over-valued surrogates engage in competitive events like the Big Game from the comfort of our straining recliners. Our fattened asses need not worry about the privation of our ancestors, unless, of course, there’s a hole in the tent the spouse is using to camp out for a slightly bigger Big Screen to watch said Big Game.
Meanwhile we are simultaneously swiping through our social media on the smaller small screen so we’re absolutely certain we didn’t miss out on any extra-special super-duper post-Black Friday pre-Cyber Monday, door-busting door-buster deal-a-reenos. And ignoring pretty much everyone around us. So the pressure valves are gummed up with anti-social social media, constant consumerism, and way too many carbs. T
he carbs were always more prevalent than protein in the winter. And they do make us fat and happy. They increase the amount of stored calories on our bodies, and such satiation brings a pleasant sensation that may help alleviate the SADs.
But the folks in ancient times weren’t going to go sit in front of more screens after the long weekend, and be basically torpid.
They were going to burn off that fat in the leaner times of the winter, or work it off come spring when the fields greened up and fjords thawed out and the hard scrabble work of hard scrabble existence was going to be done.
Our modern technological society has little of that, and replaces it with the onslaught of advertising for stationary bikes and health club memberships, which statistically will also be idled by mid-March. Not because the spring thaw has pulled our Big Butts out of the recliner to go outside and burn off the fat, but because being fat and happy is just a lot easier than getting on that bike. Even if we are now paying a monthly subscription to have a “personal coach” scream at us (and a few thousand other personally coached people) to get up and do it.
The food of the ancestors was not laced with extenders, emulsifiers, preservatives, additives, artificial flavorings and colors, and Things-Never-Meant-To-Be-Let-Alone-Meant-To-Be-Eaten. In the efforts to make food more accessible, the engines of a capitalist economy got focused on making food more profitable. The extended shelf life meant that less of the produced goods got chucked out because of the natural process of decomposition. The longer a loaf of bread lasts, the more can be sold. But why stop there, when you can make twice the loaf out of half the flour by adding <insert barely pronounceable chemical compound here>?
As I have gotten older, and as I have been exploring how my spiritual journey bleeds over into more mundane parts of my life, the need to reduce the amount of this commercially produced chemical garbage in my diet has become more important.
As an example, I have stopped eating that Big Bag O’ Chips, but I still enjoy the clean carbs of potatoes- even fried potatoes – in reasonable moderation. Even when I add butter, bacon, cheese, and sour cream to my baked potato, I am still taking in cleaner and less artificial carbs than comes out of the factory-processed Big Bag O’ snacks.
And lets be honest. A Big Bag O’ snack is basically one of three or four grains and or potato starch, modified with various un-food additives to change the shape, color, texture, smell, and taste.
That’s basically what they do to make Purina Dog Chow, so think about that before loading up at the Big Screen Big Game Big Bag O’ Black Friday sale.
I have found that after several months of avoiding processed foods, and this includes drive-thru fast-food, and quick service restaurants, I don’t really crave them anymore. I had a bag of chips at lunch the other day for the first time in a couple of years and I didn’t even finish it…and it was the extra small bag you get with lunch. So I begin to wonder if all these “extras” added to the people chow products don’t also included compounds that promote an addictive response.
By the way, a lot of the processed food processors are owned by Big Tobacco, an industry with a history of using additives to make their product more addictive. But I’m sure there’s no connection. I mean, the government wouldn’t allow it, right? Like they did with nicotine for several decades. Because, money.
So, before I ride off into the sunset for a long weekend that I hope will be restful, restorative, and creative, I gently suggest that you might put the phone on mute, at least during the meal, and enjoy the benefits of a clean communal feast, without the urge to go shopping, or hole up in the kitchen the entire time to avoid those judgy relatives. I have them too. They are a pain in the ass. But it’s a temporary thing, and you may find that one or two of them might just be a little weirder than you remember.
And for those that aren’t, just load them up on potatoes and gravy and wait until they pass out on the couch and you can change the channel to something other than that stupid football game.
