Perspectives – Page 5 – A Sacred Life

December 21, 2022December 21, 2022

The Solstice Article

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nature will consume us.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

December 14, 2022December 13, 2022

Looking Ahead…

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Dylan Thomas

I thought to close last week’s article with this snippet of poetry as it reflected my personal response toward the relatively crappy year that was 2022. Following the Plague Years, we none of us expected too much, and yet, we all of us hoped for a final dawning of the day.

Well, the world more or less went back to business as usual, which is a sad thing in itself.

But I hope as Byron Ballard said on a recent episode the Your Average Witch Podcast, we have passed through the Tower Time, and are now just cleaning up the mess. Star Time awaits us, with all the potential of celestial level rebirth.

I have become acquainted with the wit and wisdom of this wonderful witch who hails from the North Carolina mountains on the other side of the Appalachians from where I grew up. Naturally being both native Appalachainians (a word made up by my sixth grade math teacher, as something of a joke, and yet it fits) we have many things in common.

I look forward to a time Mrs. Ballard’s path crosses my own and I get to speak with her face to face. In meantime, I recommend you locate her on your favorite podcast and her own. She is a delightful, funny, and brilliant woman who I hope will continue to lead in the larger community toward Star Time.

For my own part, I have plans for 2023 to expand my horizons just a bit, to see if I can support the additional load of some new ventures while honoring the responsibilities of my day job and giving right and proper focus to my family.

This blog was actually supposed to be something of a sideline to my primary intention of opening a webstore to sell my art, craft, and jewelry work. My artwork has never been mainstream, and those who will appreciate are also not likely mainstream, so the blog was supposed to be about my methods, meanings, and merchandise. As you can doubtless tell it evolved. I am pleased with that, and I don’t intend on making any great changes. T

hat said, I am committed to returning to my art as the year progresses, and so there may also be articles, short posts, and announcements popping up here from time to time that are not “on subject” in the usual manner. My art is, and always has been, informed by and imbued with, my occult sensibilities, so maybe it won’t be too far off the beam. Just don’t get upset if I do a bit more “active selling”. At some point this has to generate a profit.

I also have a plan to add perhaps a biweekly article where I go deep on a particular Tarot card. Tarot is my core discipline, having been drawn (pun intended) to it early in life because of my visual nature. I have begun several times to write a book on Tarot. Every time I do, I get to a point where I realize I need to go deeper or go back to the cards or just don’t think what I started with is anything not already out there in the world. So to some extent this is an experiment in Tarot analysis designed to clarify my own understanding, as much as expand that of the reader. Don’t expect this too soon, though. I have The Fool on the calendar for around April 1, as appropriate, and since we’ll start there, well, it gives me some time to really figure out how I want to do this, and how I can sustain it with previously mentioned responsibilities and obligations.

I am preparing for another Tarot related activity as well. For several years, my good lady wife and I have owned the domain bookmark-this.com. In previous lifetimes we used it for book review and author interviews adjacent to other media ventures, but it’s been dormant for quite some time. We plan to reinvigorate that this year, and I aim to expand it to include review of Tarot and Oracle decks. I am beginning with my own sizable collection, but if anyone out there is a publisher or has an in with one, I am happy to accept review copies, and feature pre-release news articles. I have been a journalist (in one of my lifetimes) and Bookmark This will grow as we can grow it.

My focus with the Sacred Life has been to share my personal perspectives. It is not and will not become a Magic 101 or similar site. There are so many sites, books, podcasts, and other resources that are available and better equipped to provide that kind of information. My objective has always been to spark that most fundamental of questions – Why?

Understanding the how of something is powerful. It’s necessary. But as we are all experiencing magic from the human perspective, I think it’s important to explore how that human experience has evolved, and is evolving. I am frequently a cynic and an iconoclast. I am clearly sarcastic and irreverent. I think such qualities are a good way to approach life in general. Question everything, my friends. Including me. Including you. We are none of us so enlightened or elevated that we cannot look further up the path and still wonder.

I thank you all for your patronage since I began earlier this year. Had I any idea of the things that would change in my life, I don’t know that I would have committed to this. But that can be said of any and all changes that come. If we don’t choose to act, we will be acted upon.

I hope this last season of the calendar year is a good one for you and yours, and if it isn’t, I hope you find the energy to get through to brighter days. Change is a constant.

See you next week.

December 7, 2022February 2, 2023

Looking Behind…

I am not what has happened to me. I am what I choose to become.
C. G. Jung

This week’s article is necessarily brief. I am writing closer to deadline than usual, and this time of year is very busy in both my business and personal life. I trust my readers will understand, and may even appreciate the departure from my usual loquaciousness.

As we approach the end of the Western calendar, journalists reliably turn to the retrospective to fill their blank pages. The typical “Year in Review” has become an accepted and even expected feature on editorial boards, though it most usually occupies that week just prior to January However there’s already a more temporally relevant article scheduled for that week, so we’ll drop this here for now.

I have noted in earlier articles that this has been a difficult year and transformative year for me. In approaching this article, I have come to consider that enumerating this again would be a disrespectful disservice to my readers. While the need to offer content that is more than “first do this- then do that” requires writing in the context of experience and perspective, there is a thin line between being self aware, self analytical, and self indulgent.

For this reason I open with the quote from Jung. Growth is a necessary condition of life. Without growth, stagnation occurs. From an ecological standpoint, stagnation ultimately results in the consumption of resources without the regenerative processes needed to maintain a viable environment. It can only continue for a finite period.

It is a fool that ignores history, whether it’s their own or the wider world’s. Like astrology or tarot, such attention and analysis gives us a view to patterns and tendencies that can be beneficial or baneful depending on how we exploit them. But like the mantic arts, preoccupation and obsession with these patterns and tendencies can become paralytic.

There’s a great deal of emphasis on “shadow work” and “personal healing” in much of the writings in the modern occult community. I can understand that we have an almost generational awareness of the sorry state that much of the world is in, and this seems echoed in experiences of personal trauma and a kind of vague emptiness. The forced confinement of the past few years, combined with the real loss related to global pandemic has generated an almost universal climate of introspection.

Certainly these influences have figured in my motivation to begin writing publicly on these topics regularly for the first time. But I also feel the need to lift my head up from the earth, and look on to the horizon, and await the sun’s rise.

I am acutely aware of the tendency to become maudlin and melancholy as the days grow shorter. I say this in regard to the astronomical effect of the earth’s annual tilting on it’s axis, and the metaphor of growing age. When I started writing in April, it was motivated by an awareness of mortality and passing time that has become increasingly more concrete as this year has progressed.

At times it has been a struggle to find positivity, motivation, and mirth each week when faced with repeated reminders of “the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to. ” And then about mid year I ran across the quote above. Along with other influences, from reading new and comparatively younger works in the occult genre, and exploration of Eastern ideas and perspectives that, in earlier parts of my life seemed not to fit, I have found the means to reinvigorate and reinvent.

I hope I have done so effectively for my audience. It was my intention that this series of articles would reach at least some few who might find them enriching. This was never meant to be a how-to blog. What I offer is hopefully a catalyst to personal exploration and investigation. I hope that it spurs and sparks the imagination, to perhaps set a foot on a path not as distinctly glimpsed from the main trail. Or at least, to send one wandering in the woods for a bit.

If I have succeeded in that, even in a little part, then this has not simply been a self-indulgent exercise in personal analysis. Meeting these self-imposed deadlines each week while dealing with the “real world” has been both confidence building and somewhat therapeutic. It has helped set the stage for the successful implementation of future plans, which I will discuss a bit next week. I hope you will join me again, even though this short article is not so directly in the occult vein as my other writings.

In any case, if you have just started on this journey, or have been with me from the beginning, I offer a heart-felt thank you for your continued patronage.

November 23, 2022November 22, 2022

You Stole My Holiday

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It needs to stop. Here. Now.

Before there are no more TVs left at Best Buy.

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

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

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

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

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

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

November 9, 2022November 9, 2022

The Knowing of Things

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There seems to be a lot of it going around.

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

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

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

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

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

I have a couple of really good reasons.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And that’s kind of the point.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

For that matter, she could be a Hekate impersonator.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

November 2, 2022November 1, 2022

The Birthday Article

This article is scheduled for publication just before my birthday of November 7th. I’ve always been fond of saying that I was born 7 days after Halloween, but I have only recently become aware that my birthday may be the actual date celebrated by the ancients as Samhain.

The ancient calendar (or so I was told) was based on the Equinoxes and Solstices that divide the year into quarters. The Cross-Quarter Days, were the midpoint between those, which, being a middle space, heralded the Opening of the Ways.

Apparently our modern November 7th is the Cross-Quarter Day midpoint between the Autumnal Equinox and the Winter Solstice. It’s 15 degrees through the sign of Scorpio which sits between the Libra of the Equinox and the Sagittarius of the Solstice. The equinoxes and solstices are 90 degrees apart on the zodiac, and 15 degrees of Scorpio is 45 degrees from either side.

So, like I told the clerk at the store the other day, I am Halloween.

That certainly would explain a lot.

Lab Experiment 2 — Since last week’s article fell before the Samhain/Halloween holiday, I thought I would adorn this week’s posting with pictures from my Haunted Firehouse setup. The props are things I have collected or made over the years, employing lighting and basic stage trickery to delight and frighten the visitors. It seems to have been effective. The lab experiment is a hairdresser’s mannequin I acquired in one of my other lifetimes when I worked as a professional stylist. That was between being the cemetery caretaker and international man of mystery.

The good news is, we all get Halloween for another week, and that can’t be a bad thing. I no longer have to call it second Halloween. It’s Halloween. Which I guess makes the other Pre-Halloween, but let’s not spoil it with technicalities. Tis time, Tis Time!

My birthday this year commemorates 57 trips around the Sun. I still have a little time ahead before my second Saturn return, but when you get close, you start feeling it. The first one in our late-twenties/early-thirties usually knocks us on our ass, dropping a load of adultness on us in one fell swoop. I am hoping that this second round is a tad more refined, mature, and circumspect, owing to those changes in myself. I think, perhaps, I needn’t be conked on the head quite so forcefully this time to get the message.

Though if this year is any indication. the conking has begun. My family has been visited by death three times closely, and three more times nearby, and the year still has a few more weeks to work. Despite the months that have passed, I still find myself working through things related to the realization of the permanence of these losses. Regardless of all other things that may come to be, these things will never be altered. They are now a permanent part of the web of memory and thought and emotion that constitute who I am in the universe.

So pardon me, Saturn, if I say I’m ready to get through this return thing sooner rather than later.

This blog is partially due to hearing that ticking of the clock a bit louder every day. Now, I am in relatively good health, I am taking steps to improve my health and hope to see Saturn return at least once more, if not twice (it’s possible). But as you reach certain points in life, you start thinking about things that you’ve put off, or allocated to someday.

My life has been full. It has moved in unexpected ways, and I consider every twist and turn to be one step closer to where I stand now. Some of the things that have happened I planned. Some of them I dreamed. Most were thrown at me by the universe in a mad game of existential catch. I’ve done my best not to drop the ball, though I’d be a liar if I said I hadn’t a few times.

In walking down that road, some things that were the dreams and ambitions of my youth were cast aside, to be filled with more useful, enjoyable, and worthy pursuits. But there are those that linger, that I still find joy in, and thanks to the advent of the Internet and the broad community connected to one another by it, I have opportunities to explore those things.

The fire department has excellent fog machines. They are used to simulate the conditions inside a burning building and boy howdy do they work. It was difficult to get pics of the various stations of the spooky tour, and this clip from the video is about the best shot I got of my coffin. Yes I have a coffin. Oddly enough I got it at work. Not the job at the cemetery.

The series of articles I have been posting here since around April are part of that. Originally I intended this to be something of an aside to the webstore, which I still hope will appear on this domain. But life, the universe and everything frequently interferes with my plans, and this has become a larger, and hopefully more enjoyable, offering.

I get that even today a written blog is fast becoming an anachronism. In an environment dominated by “influencers” and social media, anyone wanting to be seen and heard has moved on to the podcast circuit, and my friends know I considered that at the beginning. It’s not been completely ruled out, as I have the equipment from my filmmaking work. But the time required to produce, record, edit, and publish a regular podcast is just not something I have right now. Maybe in 2023. Or 2024. Still lots on my plate.

The weekly dribbling from my mind’s eye that you will find here was initially motivated in a previous incarnation by my feelings that many in the modern occult community were getting a lot of surface but little depth. I think that may still be true for a lot of people, but either the tide is turning, or I am just becoming more aware of the deeper voices.

This clip is Charlie who you might just make out on top of the coffin in the previous image. Charlie was made for a sculpture class I took in the mid-90s. Over the years, the latex and foam rubber have naturally degraded to give him a wonderfully creepy countenance. He comes out now and again. He was seen briefly in my short film Silent for the 48 Hour Film Festival, but usually he stays in his cage. It’s better for everyone that way.

I have been working with the unseen since I was about 7 years old and got my first Tarot deck. Along with a book on a broad range of esoteric disciplines, and a later book on witchcraft directly, this journey was undertaken in comparative secrecy and on a solitary path. After decades, it is likely that I will always be more or less solitary, but in later years the secret part has slipped away. This is the result of moving from a very restricted rural community in the hills of Eastern Kentucky to the suburbs of the largest city in Texas. There are more weirdos here than me, and I have been lucky enough to meet up with a few.

I am that guy on the Hermit card. While it is relatively easy for me to be loquacious on the most bizarre of subjects here on the internet, in person I am less so. This is a holdover from those years when talk of such odd things was considered evil sacrilege or worse by the local populace. But I still am not entirely trusting of people I meet who present a strange and unusual vibe.

Let’s be honest. Some of them are crazy. For that matter, I might be crazy, too. But there’s a good crazy and a bad crazy, and I have had that experience of sharing perhaps too freely with someone who needs professional help.

There are doubtless some who might say I would probably benefit from professional help, myself. But it’s hard to find a reliable alchemist these days.

See, that flippancy is what the therapists call a deflection. Avoiding the deep complicated stuff by making a joke. There’s the meme that goes around about “sarchotic” being the state where people don’t know if you’re being sarcastic or if you’re psychotic.

I never know either. But it’s usually fun, and it can be entertaining for those paying close attention. For the rest, well, I’m not really all that interested in keeping their company. There’s that Hermit thing again.

The world has over 7 billion people on it, and a lot more in it. You can’t possibly be friends with all of them, and you’ll go mad trying. In my youth, I lived in a community where conformity was the standard. Think about that. Being like everyone else meant you had to be like everybody else. That’s soul-crushing and sadly not isolated to small towns in remote regions.

I chose not to conform, and that rebellion ultimately got me cast out. Figuratively at first – being ostracized from the social groups, both in school and afterward. I was considered as weird by “adults who should know better” as my so-called peers. The kids had to learn it from somewhere. Eventually I just up and left, because there was a wider world beckoning.

And in that wider world, I ran across, from time to time, others who had a similar outlook, and formed connections both short and long. I also ran across people who were utterly despicable, wasters of my time, lost souls, mad, bad, and dangerous to know. I was lucky enough to recognize those encounters and move away from them as fast as was practical and possible. You can’t always tell the boss to shove it.

Esmerelda here was probably my favorite setup. The Temple of the Golden Idol had to be drastically scaled back to comply with new fire codes, so the Fortune Teller ended up being a big hit. Of course when you have Tarot Cards and crystal balls around the house, it’s a fairly easy scene to put together. Esmerelda has been seen on my instagram multiple times as Erasmus. It’s handy to have gender fluid props when trying to set up something like this.

I find as the years pass that some of that latter group might simply have appeared to be that way because of who I was at the time. And to be honest, some of the “friends” I made along the way turned out to be that only because of who I was at the time. We change, we transition. we hope that we grow. Or at least learn not to mistake simple change for actual growth. I am as guilty of seeking greener grass as the next person.

The Hermit is not at the end of his path. He is just at a stopping point for this moment.

“The road goes ever on and on, down from the door where it began.”

I use my birthday as a kind of regeneration. I attempt to assess, improve, reject, and jettison any unneeded parts of myself that have ceased to serve. In a way, it’s a personal Samhain. It signals a new beginning for the next year.

I hope that you will continue to join me for it. Back next week with hopefully less introspective content.

August 10, 2022August 1, 2022

Those Troublesome Victorians

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Most ancient Egyptians were not literate, so the glyphs covering every object and artifice were lost on them. But they knew it was magic. It was power. The glyphs were there to record for all time the works and deeds of Pharaoh, thus making him immortal. His named carved in stone would last, he hoped, for all eternity. This belief was so strong that many Pharaohs were cursed by having their names removed from temples, tombs, and sarchophagi, thus dooming them to oblivion. Some notable personages consigned to this fate were Hatshepsut, the Female Pharaoh, Akenaten, the Heretic, and his short-lived successor Tutankhamen.¹ The redaction of the latter king was a lucky break for him and for history, because his tomb was lost to obscurity, and thus remained unplundered until Carter’s discovery in 1927.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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