Tomorrow is one of the dates celebrated as Hecate’s Night, so this, I suppose, is Hecate’s Night Eve.
My own relationship with the Goddess of the Witches is a complicated one. But then my relationships with most of the gods and spirits is complicated, because relationships are complicated. They form organically, and grow, or die, over time.
As Hecate comes ostensibly to us out of Greek mythology, she was never top of mind for me when I was younger. Of course, I read the stories, knew the names of the gods and heroes, and how they equated to the Roman names that cropped up in astrology, astronomy, and on the various NASA programs. But I was, and remain, deeply involved in the culture of Ancient Egypt.
Hecate nevertheless made herself present in my life some years ago, as muse if nothing else. She inspired a painting I made for, and I believe still belongs to, a young witch of my acquaintance.
She is formed out of the moonlight and the mist Whispered wind in barren trees The distant baying of hounds Cold and fear Staring out of the grave.
We referred to her simply as “The Witch” or the “The Witch Painting”. It was a singular work, one of those portraits where the eyes follow you around the room. The affect was accidental, or at least synchronistic, as by intention and artifice I have not been able to reproduce it. There are no photos in my possession of this painting. This was made in the days of analog, when you had to shoot with film, develop and print same, and there was a cost associated that a young “starving artist” could not support for a mere work of vanity and friendship.
But the image remains more or less in my brain, and I have made a couple of stabs at reproducing it since, though I fully doubt the power imbued in that original will ever occupy a later copy, nor should it, and I am okay with that.
Over the intervening years, however, I have come to know that this painting was a votive or shrine or altar to Hecate. It’s a portrait of her, or at least of the aspect of her she showed me those years ago in the student ‘s studio. It does not have the usual trappings, but there is no doubt in my mind that she is connected with it. and to a lesser extent, the one’s I have made later for my own collection.
Because of that I have dug a little deeper into her background and found that she is not Greek, but probably imported from Anatolia, and like the Titans she is frequently grouped with, represents the beliefs of a much older culture, with closer connections to creative chaos than the Olympian soap opera. I try not to bring these things up. Everyone has family drama, and frankly, her background is none of my business. Think about it. If you were being summoned by some sorceror, would you want to be reminded of all the crap that you had to deal with growing up? I certainly wouldn’t. And it certainly wouldn’t incline me toward granting any potential boons.
We all have a right to our private lives, the gods no less than anyone else.
Some may think my regarding the gods and spirits with such familiarity is out of keeping with their status. Yet I would counter that this is simply the way I have come to know them, and interact with them. I do not find it useful, practical, or realistic to regard them as some distant entity residing in a crumbling ruin in a far away land. I would think the gods have moved on, or rather, that their presence has shifted to other focal points.
Look at it logically. Imagine you are a small business with a few loyal employees providing a valid service for the community. But due to changes of fortune, you start losing customers. People stop dropping in. You can’t really afford to keep your staff on, or even maintain the property.
Would you hang around there moping for an eon or two, or would you go look for greener pastures?
Yes, clearly there are spirits that haunt certain places, and I have no doubt that if you found a temple dedicated to Hecate that you might have a good chance of drawing her attention by performing an ancient secret ritual. Who doesn’t like a bit of nostalgia now and again.
But the gods (and other spirits) as we encounter them, thrive on, or at least enjoy, our interaction. So they are going to go where that interaction is, even if it’s a blasted heath in Medieval Scotland.
Thing is, though the Bard’s story was set in an earlier period, he was doubtless drawing on knowledge (or at least awareness) of the contemporary regard for Hecate as a goddess of witches, commander of lesser shades and spirits, and an excellent necromancer in her own right. While Dr. Dee and other “scholarly mages” were summoning angels to compel the denizens of the graveyard to divulge cosmic secrets and the locations of any nearby buried treasure, the common folk had recourse to witches, and the witches were clearly still worshipping Hecate.
If you are looking for specifics as to the nature of that worship, you’ll have to find it elsewhere. I understand that there’s a feast or supper traditional to the Hecate’s Night commemoration, but I have little details. The Wyrd Sisters cooked up that hell-broth we all know so well, but free-range newts are so hard to find these days, let alone fenny snake filet. They don’t even carry it at Whole Foods.
I am not a petitioner of Hecate. I was given a gift by her many years ago, and that was to paint a version of her portrait to give as a gift to another witch. Like a post hypnotic suggestion, it is only through many intervening years that I have been able to realize that it was Hecate. And it is thus entirely possible that it is only now that I should consider approaching her again.
And this brings up that question of familiarity. As I have reached this awareness of the goddess, I have gone looking for authentic sources on her nature and proper conduct of rituals. Like much of modern magic, and particularly as AI and search-engine based texts are being used to feed the new market, it is virtually impossible to look to any of these sources and be comfortable that they have a true historical or even moderately well researched link to the actual fact of how this goddess was worshipped, or even understood, in antiquity.
This can be extremely frustrating for those, either novice or seasoned practicioner, seeking to expand their awareness and connect with any spirit or god. There are a number of current practices regarding the Egyptian gods that I personally cannot connect with, both because of my awareness of the history of the worship of those gods, and because of my familiarity with those spirits through years of interaction in my own way.
Jason Miller in his Consorting with Spirits and other works suggests that one should most probably approach a spirit or god using the methods that have come down to us from elder times. I don’t disagree with him entirely about that. The reasoning he expresses is that these beings are very different in nature than us, and dwell, or at least exist primarily in some kind of space-time dimension that is separate from ours. These continua operate under a different kind of physics, and thus respond to manipulation in different ways than our own dimensional space. Chanting a spell from Ancient Greece may be an entirely viable method of manipulating the dimensional boundaries between our existence and theirs, and making possible a wee crack in the door.
On the other hand, Miller himself admits to having encountered Hecate in a charnel ground in Asia, while pursuing a study of Buddhism. This argues two points. First, the gods and spirits are not bound by our ordinary space, and may manifest as it pleases them. They don’t necessarily need their temple or an idol to inhabit, or even a ritual to be performed. They exist wherever and whenever they want to.
Secondarily, the spirits can choose to interact with humans the same way humans choose to interact with a spirit. They can, and do, decide to introduce themselves to persons who have made no attempt to propitiate them or even get their attention. And in those situations, the usual rules may be suspended, or at least flexed a bit.
Aside from Zeus notorious philandering, the Greek myths are replete with stories of one or another of the Olympians favoring or aiding mere mortals for their own reasons. The capriciousness of many of these encounters is often given as the impetus for a war or an adventure that widens the myth cycle.
Older gods out of Egypt and Mesopotamia are a bit more aloof. These cultures had a very strict caste system and the gods were at the top of it. While they might deign to aid a king, high-priest, or upper-class born hero, their connection to the peasantry was only a trickle-down. The gods smiled upon Pharaoh, because he was one of their own. Pharaoh smiled upon the people and that was enough.
This didn’t keep the common folk from going and making offerings in the temple, or praying (after a fashion) to the gods for help, but this was through the mechanism of the priesthood; a method later adopted by the Christian theocracy. These were political and economic strategies rather than an intersession from deity.
For now, I am still pursuing knowledge of Hecate, and weighing the sources accordingly. I am not much for predestined outcomes, but my conception of the world of gods and spirits includes the existence of very different timescales, and that “future” and “past” are not necessarily as fixed in these other worlds as they are in ours. The perception I have of the time since I made this portrait and my present interest in learning more about the sitter, may only be moments to her.
In any case, I wish to all, especially the good lady herself, a most respectful and propitious Hecate’s night, and hope she notes the tip-tapping of my keyboard as I write. I’d happily buy her dinner for the peace that painting continues to bring me.
Owing to my Good Lady Wife’s completing certification last week at the National Fire Academy, we found ourselves in the vicinity of Gettysburg for the weekend.
For the record, we are history nerds. We have the shirts and the hats that say that. And we enjoy a bit of time travel now and again, as a break from the multifarious pressures that come with the responsibilities of our day jobs. So we had booked ourselves a lodging at an antebellum bed and breakfast for a couple of days wandering about the various historical landscapes.
I know when I was a student in school, the battle that took place in this area on the first few days of July 1863 was taught as a very significant event. That was some time ago, and our schools keep adjusting what is historically important. Perhaps that’s as it should be.
I am a great believer that history should not be presented with blinders on. Nor should it be controlled and coerced into serving any particular agenda.
Things happen. We all experience things happening. We are all traveling through time at the pace of now becoming next, and now became then, in exactly the same unrelenting instant.
And what we experience, and how we react to it, and how we remember it is an absolutely personal thing. So it is safe to say that we may view any event we directly experience very differently than another person who experienced it with us.
This is part of the otherness that defines our human existence. It’s a consequence of being part of a universe that wants to know itself and all it’s potential selves. We can only hold that passing moment in memory, and memory is purely internal.
The American Civil War, and the slice of it that is the Battle of Gettysburg, is one of those things that has so much impact that it’s still being “contextualized” over 160 years later.
As a proper history nerd I try to follow two basic tenets.
Firstly, information should be analyzed to the extent that any bias that is likely to exist can be excised from the data itself.
That is, if you know one account was written by a Northern Abolitionist and another by a Southern Slave Holder, the information needs to get pared down to times, quantities, etc. Certainly the perspective can and should be accessed, to give us all some idea of the human experiences and ideas involved, but it’s not history, it’s the way the author viewed history at the time.
Which brings us to the second rule, people in history cannot, and should not, be judged or understood by the modern views we now hold.
Our present sensibilities are vastly different from the combatants of the American Civil War, from the Spanish Conquistadors, from the Roman Centurions, or any other person that has lived in a different period of time. Social media is rife with commentary about the differences between “Boomers”, “Gen X”, “Millennials”, and “Gen Z” and this is just among generations that we’re born since the Second World War. How then do we have the hubris to presume we “understand” the motivation of an Antebellum population?
This is why I prefer time travel to historical research. As the Doctor has said, we time travelers point and laugh at archaeologists.
Time travel is not an easy thing to do, of course. Absent a flux capacitor, temporal rotor, or warp drive, you really are tasked with finding someplace where the forces that perpetuate the illusion of linear time are relatively weak. These are becoming harder and harder to find in a modern global world interconnected with telecommunications equipment. But you can find them. And you can learn to ignore the distractions that can remind one of calendar dates and modern tech.
Find the ghosts can help.
I’m still not sure personally if ghosts aren’t simply other time travelers. Certainly we have the stories of ghosts that echo the horrible circumstances of their deaths. To the spiritualist and medium these sad beings remain because of the trauma they experienced, leaving a permanent imprint, or the presence of an unquiet spirit.
But there are lot of ghosts who simply are seen engaged in the normal activities of their life, or perhaps engaged in an emotionally intense event, like a pitched battle. In these cases, it is not impossible that we are simply peering past the walls of linear time and viewing the events that are happening just over there in the cosmic everpresent.
Several of the ghosts I have run into in my life look just like regular people. They don’t look “dead”, still have their heads and hands and aren’t bleeding profusely. As they walk past, some of them nod and smile, just as we would if we met in the hallway or on the street inside the same space-time.
They’re just slightly outside that space-time, and as such these moments can be brief and end abruptly. Almost as soon as one perceives the true nature of the encounter, one turns to look again and they’re gone.
We understand about as little of the true nature of time and space as we do the nature our own spirits. The tangibility of the meat suit, and the apparently “real” material world it inhabits, is, even to modern physics, not an entirely absolute thing. Physicality as we experience it may simply be another illusion, a limitation our our perception of the universe around us.
Time and space in our dreams is nothing like what we live in daily. It is non-linear, it is certainly non-physical, and frequently defies logical causality. Imagination is as ephemeral, so it’s a very difficult proposition to prove that the existence of the mind is bounded by the physical world and the apparent flow of linear time.
If you’re not a history nerd, it may surprise you to learn that the Spiritualist movement has it’s roots in the period following the American Civil War and in Europe following the Crimean War a couple of decades later. In both cases, there was an horrific loss of life on a scale not experienced before. Many of the dead were lost far from home, sometimes interred in mass graves with few markers. And still others were listed as “missing” which means the bodies were never identified.
In the era before modern embalming had become viable, there simply was no way to ever bring these dead men home. Such methods as existed (and they were largely experimental) were open only to the rich, who had not lost their wealth to the fortunes of war.
This left loved ones with no sense of closure. Spiritualism, with the trappings of the séance, table turning, spirit trumpets and talking boards offered mourning survivors a solace that they did not find in traditional religion. With the belief that the dead could be contacted, a wider acceptance that they remained in semi-tangible form as visible ghosts became more and more prevalent. Soon, spirits and ghosts began to expand beyond the shades of those passed on to include the shades of things that had never been alive.
The “ghost” of Abraham Lincoln’s funeral train is a widespread story across the parts of the country where his final journey passed on the way from Washington, D.C. to Illinois. Even for the animist, it’s hard to expect that the locomotive and cars that made that journey are spending eternity repeating the trip, particularly since the ghost of Lincoln himself rarely features in the stories.
We can accept that this is a mass delusion, of course. We can say that the trauma of the war and the culmination of that in the assassination of the President created a national myth that caused people to see that ghost train.
Or we can suggest that this same trauma has weakened the walls of space-time in some locales, and that we are still seeing the train as it passed on that fateful trek.
The same may be said for the phantom patrols and the ghost battles and other hauntings reported at Gettysburg and other battlegrounds of the American Civil War. It is not an exclusive experience to that event, either. I had a friend tell me they had a similar response to the battlefield of Culloden, in Scotland.
When we spill that much blood and pain and hate, it may not be possible to close the wounds for a very long time.
Culloden was the end of the Jacobite Rebellion. Gettysburg, though the war would continue for almost another two years, would signal the ultimate defeat of the Confederacy. In fact, there is one moment that historians will point to as the turning point in the war. That is what is known as Pickett’s Charge.
On July 3rd, after two days of battle with territory changing hands several times, it looked as though the Army of Northern Virginia under Robert E. Lee had the upper hand. There were still a handful of entrenched positions held by the Federal troops, but if they were broken, and put to retreat, Lee would command the supply lines that fed into Washington, D.C. and capturing the United States capital would have been much more likley.
If that had happened, the Confederate States of America might have continued to exist for some time, been recognized as a legitimate entity by other world governments, and institutionalized African slavery continued for some time, financed by the desire to feed cotton into the burgeoning mills of the awakening Industrial Revolution.
Alternatively, the area of North America between Mexico and Canada might have splintered into a number of small nations similar to Europe. The Westward Expansion that followed the Civil War would not have occurred as it did, and the vast wealth of natural resources would not be harnessed under a single banner, but squandered and fought over for decades. Alliances and pacts like those that precipitated World War I in Europe would surely have similarly volatile results in the Western Hemisphere, and the Twentieth Century could easily have been marked by constant international warfare with very little progress.
I’m sure some of us could argue that the Twentieth Century was marked by constant international warfare, and frankly we don’t seem to be making much headway in the Twenty-first, but we sew the seeds and see what will sprout in the future. Time travel doesn’t always help us see what’s coming. Because it’s complicated.
On July 3rd, 1863, General Pickett ordered his men forward against the enemy line, to “take the Yankee position” at a place called the Angle. To get there, they had to run down a rise across open territory, cross over a fence, a ditch, a road, and a stone wall, before reaching the enemy position.
If you stand on that terrain today, you wonder at what possessed them to attempt something like this. It’s clearly suicidal. It was a really bad idea. The commanding officers should have known that. They may have known it, but they chose to ignore it.
This low spot on the battlefield is where Pickett’s men met the Northern line, sword to throat and bayonet to belly, while minié balls and grapeshot whizzed around them like buzzing flies.
The din of battle is long gone, and as one descends into this shallow depression, it becomes eerily quiet. The birds stop singing. The crickets don’t chirp. There is nothing but the whisper of a lonely wind. The walls of time grow thin here. The land still weeps, despite more than a century and a half is past.
When Lincoln said those gathered to dedicate the cemetery located nearby had not the power to consecrate this land as deeply as those who died upon it, he may have peered behind the veil of time, and felt this long lasting scar. The Lincolns were early believers in Spiritualism, having lost a child at an early age. In 1865 the President related a dream where the boy took him through the White House to show Lincoln himself lying in a casket. He would be dead within a few weeks from a bullet to the brain.
We can analyze this and say it was the bravado of a Southern Empire drunk on it’s success and resting against the wealth brought to it by the subjugation of other human beings. We can assign a reliance on military training referencing the Napoleonic Wars as recent to Lee and his generals as we are to Viet Nam. Pickett, who survived the slaughter, responded when asked about why it failed said “I believe the Yankees had something to do with it.”
Not far from this site is a farm owned by former U.S. President Eisenhower. The period of the Eisenhower presidency is a source of much nostalgia in this country. During this time the more or less intact U.S. industrial complex was tasked with rebuilding both Allied and defeated nations. The economic growth was unparalleled, and propelled the U. S. A. to the top of the world scene, challenged only by an injured but pragmatic Soviet Union.
Eisenhower, before becoming president, was Supreme Commander of Allied Forces in the European Theater of Operations. He is widely considered to be the primary architect of the June 6, 1944 invasion of Europe commonly called D-Day.
I did not have the opportunity to see the beaches when I was in Normandy back in the 1990s. I was there on business, and never got that far west. But I am familiar with what was called the Atlantic Wall.
I can only imagine Eisenhower and his advisors looking at the obstacles they faced. They had to land on an open beach, covered by machine gun and artillery placements, a vast trench and tunnel network, barbed wire, land mines, and heavy concrete obstacles. Should they survive that they had to get up cliffs in some cases, and then take those fortified positions.
If the assault failed, if they didn’t clear the beaches before sundown and make it possible to bring ashore more troops and tanks and supplies, then they might never be able to break the Nazi grip on Europe. The horror and oppression of the Third Reich and the Holocaust would remain unchallenged. The Allied Nations ultimately might fail, and certainly could not maintain against it.
It was going to be a bloody violent action, and there was only a slim chance of success.
But in the end, there was no other option open to Eisenhower, so he made the decision to order the attack.
The same way Pickett sent his men down that hill toward the Northern lines.
In the end, the outcome of both battles was the better one for humanity. The oppressor lost.
The failure of Pickett’s charge was the end for the South. They withdrew on the Fourth of July, and essentially remained on the run back to Virginia, where they were ultimately forced to surrender in 1865.
The Confederate States of America ceased to be a nation, and was subject to re-admission to the United States of America. As a consequence, Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, made in January 1863 before Gettysburg, served as the impetus for the 13th Amendment which actually abolished the slave trade in the U.S.
That’s the short version we got in grade school. Over the years I have learned about martial law being declared in New York City to put down draft riots, the fact that the Emancipation Proclamation only applied to the states that were no longer under Lincoln’s control, and numerous instances of political compromise and military ambition that may have prolonged the conflict and increased the suffering.
This is not to say that the cause was not just and right. But we are harming our ability to learn from history by oversimplifying it. We encourage the growth of falsehoods that become rallying points for bad ideas. We tend to learn to put things in binary terms. Black and White. Us and Them.
That never ends well.
After the pronounced weight of the battlefield, it was an amusing irony to find that the cows on Eisenhower’s farm were obediently standing in the same location as the guide map showed them.
The period of his presidency is looked back upon as a time of relative order and stability, but beneath the surface the Cold War and the turmoil of the 1960s seethed and bubbled, waiting only for a spark to set it off.
In only a few years the world would come the closest it ever has to an all out nuclear war, and another U. S, President would be assassinated as he drove through the streets of Dallas.
Well behaved cows aside, we are always just one second away from collapse. Physicists say that holding the universe together uses more energy than letting it fall apart. We see the falling apart -entropy- as the arrow of forward time. This is one of the reasons that modern science initially spurned the idea of time travel. It takes more energy to reverse things than there is in the universe, so you can never go back.
However, “back” and “forward” are potentially the limitations of our perception, much like our inability to see wavelengths of light in the infrared and ultraviolet with our poorly evolved meatsuit eyes. Everything exists in the now, but our wee brains can’t take it all in. We have developed a kind of psychosis to shield us from the incomprehensible everpresent, and that is this notion of unidirectional linear time.
Which is why I prefer to time travel. I hope that this little trip has been entertaining to you. I understand it may be a bit heavier fare than you expected, but we are descending down into that Winter Dark, when thoughts of death and doom are closer to the surface, and it is never a bad thing to remember how close we are to the footsteps of chaos.
The American Civil War did not begin with the attack on Fort Sumter. It did not begin with the election of Lincoln, or numerous political appeasements from the beginning of the 19th Century. In some sense the Civil War began with the inclusion of institutionalized slavery in the Constitution. But it is our own long history of barbarity that fuels it, and that has sadly not been resolved.
As I have traveled across the country in the last few months I have seen and heard much to indicate that we are by no means safe from repeating the mistakes of the Confederacy or the Third Reich, or the myriad tyrannies and oppressions that mark our human history. The path forward is never straight, and sometimes it goes through dark territory. Choosing to ignore that creates a certainty that we will stumble upon it.
For God’s sake let us sit upon the ground And tell sad stories of the death of kings: How some have been depos’d, some slain in war, Some haunted by the ghosts they have deposed, Some poisoned by their wives, some sleeping kill’d, All murthered—for within the hollow crown That rounds the mortal temples of a king Keeps Death his court, and there the antic sits, Scoffing his state and grinning at his pomp, Allowing him a breath, a little scene, To monarchize, be fear’d, and kill with looks; Infusing him with self and vain conceit As if this flesh which walls about our life Were brass impregnable; and, humour’d thus Comes at the last, and with a little pin Bores thorough his castle wall, and farewell king!
Richard II – Act 3, Scene 2 – William Shakespeare
Card XIII is one of the most dreaded cards to see in any reading. It is simply called Death, and carries with it all the foreboding baggage we attach to that word in our communal culture. Death is without doubt one of the most feared parts of the human experience. It is an inexplicable enigma that haunts our steps from the day we enter into the world. Yet it’s place in Tarot is very much open to discussion.
I took this scan from my own RWS deck, which is approaching 40 years old now. The reproductions are not nearly so clear as the digital versions I have been using, but I had the deck handy and thought I’d use it.
The Rider-Waite-Smith version departs from previous imagery of the Reaper mowing down humans indiscriminately. Instead, Pamela Colman Smith chooses to show the figure of Death as the Black Knight, mounted on horseback, with his black banner dominant over all. The banner is marked by a five-lobed white Tudor rose. That this may be seen as an inverted pentagram is not without intention. His horse is white, its red eyes mark it as an albino. The bridle barding is a sequence of skulls and crossed bones. The horse and rider are taken from the Apocalypse of St. John, in the book of Revelations. “And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him.” This figure of Death on horseback is something we begin to find in the Renaissance, particularly in the work of Northern painters like Albrecht Durer. He is perhaps not so nobly depicted as he is on the 14th trump card, but the figure clearly is the Pale Rider. Much of the rest of the tableau depicted here comes from older memento mori imagery. Before the horse stands a bishop or other prelate, praying for Death to spare him. On her knees next to him is a swooning woman, and a child. They are both crowned with roses, and the child holds a bouquet of these flowers. Just in front of the child is the bishop’s crozier. The front right hoof of the horse is poised above it, ready to stamp down and smash it. Underneath the horse is the body of a king, his crown upside down in the dirt behind the horse’s other foreleg. In the background is a landscape, at the rear of which is a river. A single boat is in the middle of the river. Behind the bishop we see the suggestion of a waterfall, and above the waterfall the river leads toward two towers, with the sun setting between them. The sky is a uniform gray, and the part of the landscape from the river’s edge backward, is covered in the shadow of evening, as the light is dying.
This card is positively ripe with symbolism, probably because we have been working with visual metaphors for death since our earliest human consciousness. Death, as a thing, is both easily expressed and yet completely unexplainable. It is a cessation of a number of biological processes that we use to determine if something is “alive”. Although when we get down to the level of something like a virus, these processes are much simpler, for human beings we think of things like breathing, having a heartbeat, walking, talking, eating, excreting, making babies and similar things that we all have in common. When we stop doing that, we are considered dead. The body ceases to operate. The meat suit is no longer inhabited by us, and begins a number of other biological processes which are the result of other life now regarding the meat suit as just meat.
This rendition is from the Pulp Tarot by graphic designer Todd Alcott. The deck is a novelty theme based on the old paperback book covers from the late 20s into the 1950s. Some of the designs are more successful than others. One thing I will say for them is that in most cases they are keeping the key pieces of the RWS deck while playing with the format. Although the king is still living here, and the knight is trying to defend against the looming giant figure of Death, the pieces are there to look at, and the message is the same, even to the novice reader.
The thing that makes Death such a mystery is that it is inherently and almost always a permanent state. It is, in fact, the only permanent state that human beings experience. Everything else about us is changeable. We grow, we age, we move, we hunger, we sleep, we reproduce. Nothing is ever exactly the same way twice. But when all that stops, well, it stops forever. So in our modern culture we tend to consider that forever as Death, when really what we mean is loosely termed the “afterlife”.
Afterlife as an idea has been around a long time. It’s hard to say whether our near neighbors the chimps and bonobos have some concept of loss when a member of their community stops functioning. In my personal experience, though, I believe that animals do experience a sense of death, and of loss, both for other animals and for their humans. My grandfather’s dog died the day he did, even though my grandfather died in a hospital several hundred miles away. We found the little dog, who had been healthy and really should have lived for several more years, quietly passed in his pen. I have heard numerous such stories from friends and family.
But as humans, we seem to have become aware of something significant occurring as far back as the Neanderthal times. It is in this culture that we start to see what archaeologists call “grave goods”. That is, there are things buried along with the bodies of the people. Let’s examine what that may tell us about those early humans.
The reason to bury the dead is actually fairly basic. It’s sanitary, and keeps the decomposition from attracting big scavenger/predators to the rest of the tribe. But when it comes to a reason for burying things with the dead person, it becomes a bit more complicated.
Firstly , it may simply be that those things belonging to the dead might have been related to the death. That is, there was some fear of contagion. This potentially grew from folklore passed down when someone did get sick and die when they kept poor old Ugg’s mammoth hide cape. Now to a culture that doesn’t have sophisticated bacteriology, this idea of quarantine is as much about spiritual causes as it is about the bug. True, it may have been a nasty bacillus that brought down Ugg and sadly young Groont picked it up from the fleas in that mammoth hide. But to the people of the tribe, this was the work of an evil spirit, or an angry god, or something like that, because they didn’t have any idea about the bacillus. Hence for the future, all mammoth hides would be buried with their owners when the time came.
Secondarily, such a culture might determine that it was Ugg himself that had caused the harm to Groont, because he had really liked that mammoth hide, and he didn’t feel like Groont was going to take proper care of it. This idea that the spirit of the dead, once out of the meat suit, could still affect the affairs of the living folks, is something that evolves throughout our history. There is some point in time where the giving of grave goods served the dual purpose of appeasing the spirits of the dead, and providing them with access to their stuff once they’d shuffled off the ol’ mortal coil. If there was no more Ugg, why would he care if Groont got his cape or not. But, if Ugg was still hanging around, even though the Ugg meat suit was taking the long dirt nap, it might be very important to keep him pleased. Who knows what sort of mischief an irritated invisible Ugg could get up to? And, well, how do you get rid of him if you can’t kill him?
Of all the Tarot decks I own (somewhere around 50 now) this is the only one that presented the concept of Death as transformation in a more pleasant light. The Shadowscapes Tarot of Stephanie Law is so unusual that you will only know this is Death by looking at the label. This is the benu bird of Egypt, the Phoenix, hatching from the egg found in the ashes of its former self,. The gentle spirals, expanding in the natural expression of what is called the Golden Section, express the endless magical order of this cycle of birth-death-birth.
So offerings get made, stuff gets buried, and the dead become the Venerated Ancestors because somewhere in our early caveman days we began to conceive of this concept of afterlife. Afterlife is heaven and hell and ghosts and zombies and vampires and the numerous other incarnations of the unquiet dead. It’s also reincarnation and karma and past lives and the search for Nirvana.
But it’s not Death. Death is a moment. Death is the moment where the meat suit goes from being us to being meat.
And as with many moments that exact point is still sort of nebulous and mysterious. And scary. As people progressing through our living years, we all create or internalize some sort of belief about afterlife that gives us a shield against the inevitability of Death itself. But no matter how assured we are of inhabiting the spiritual Disneyworld promised by many religions and beliefs, that actual moment of Death still shakes us down to our very cores.
So when that card marches out in a reading, you still hear the sudden intake of breath. The pupils dilate. Sweat forms on the upper lip. No, surely, it is not my time. No!
Oh, no. It’s just symbolic. A sign of transition. Of changing from one state to another. That’s the usual response. Please don’t panic, Death isn’t really Death.
Except, of course, when it is.
The origin of the images on this card is the Middle Ages, and the Black Death. The Grim Reaper, who is more plainly drawn on the Tarot de Marseilles, is another emblem of this terrifying time in European history, when at least one quarter of the local humanity died. The great Bubonic Plague coincided with widespread belief that the time of Christ’s return was at hand, as it had been about a thousand years since the Crucifixion and the Resurrection. As an invisible Angel of Death swept whole villages from the earth, it was very easy to believe that the end times had come.
At the other end of the spectrum in the Death card from the Deviant Moon Tarot. This deck has a darkness about it, possibly even a madness about it. I recently got a copy of the artist’s companion book that not only contains the Tarot meanings/prompts, but also discussed his personal journey in arriving at the images. It affirms my impression that these are at least loosely inspired by the Venetian Carnival masks, though there are clearly layers beyond such a simple attribution. Death here, is Death. There’s no hopeful light on the horizon, no glorious or great beyond awaiting. It is just brutal, and bleak, and final. But perhaps we may look upon Her swollen belly as being a presage of new life. I have a hard time not seeing it as the distention of the corpse as it decays.
Ironically the mass extinction event changed the economic structure of Europe. Feudalism, based on a large population of people to work the land, was no longer sustainable. Labor and skills were in short supply, and in basic economic fashion, when supply is less than demand, the price goes up. People were able to rise in personal property and social status, by contracting themselves to the highest bidder. This brought about the flowering of art and culture we call the Renaissance.
So in it’s way, even the big bad Black Death on that XIII card was a transitionary force. The old society died with it, but the new one grew from the ashes.
The plague killed without distinction. Young, old, rich, poor, noble, slave, pious, and sinful. The figures surrounding the Black Rider represent this idea that Death was the great equalizer. No amount of money, or power, or faith, could protect you.
The catchphrase of the time was “Memento mori” – “Remember you will die”.
While this may have begun as church propaganda to convert the heathen, it could certainly have been a bumper sticker on the daily death wains that roamed many Medieval towns and cities calling for people to bring out their dead.
The injunction, of course, was aimed at cajoling the populace into proper Christian behavior, since, at any moment, they too, could make that final journey. In the climate of the day, real fear was attached to dying with sin on your heart, unable to make final confession and atonement, before facing the final judgement.
But consider this message in a different light.
Let’s say you’ve been told you have a fatal incurable disease and your have that proverbial six months to live. Assuming this illness doesn’t impair your abilities terribly, and is not contagious, what choice would you make to do with that six months?
Some people, sadly, would spend the entire time in fear, depression, and anger, bemoaning whatever mad fate put upon them this horrible doom. They would be miserable, and they would make everyone around them miserable, and when they were gone, their loved ones would carry that misery around forever as their last memory of the person.
Some people will pull out that bucket list, crack open the bank accounts, and live life to the fullest seeing and doing all those things they dreamed about until the very end when the dark comes upon them. That leaves behind a better legacy with their families and friends, unless, of course, they were hoping to inherit what got spent on that last blast of gusto.
But there is the third option, to do something that lasts. Maybe they make a painting, or write a novel, or go spend six months feeding the poor in the some wretched forgotten corner of the earth. But they give up that last measure of their days to leave something behind, so that when the meat suit is fully consumed, and the material nature of the life they lived is gone, something remains in the world that is a mark of their having been in it.
I don’t want to leave you with such a hopeless version of the card, so consider this offering from the Journey Into Egypt. The subject is the Pharaoh Hatsheptsut, one of the few female pharaohs, and certainly the most powerful. Her funeral temple is the structure shown in the background at the base of the cliff at Dier El Bahri. It is lit internally by torchlight, as our own bodies possess an internal light. In the foreground her body lies inside a splendid golden coffin, but her own inner light, the Ka, looks back at us. She is beginning her journey into the realm of Osiris, where she will live a life of ease and playfulness for millions of millions of years. The Death of the Ancient Egyptians is drawn on the column, leading her to the court of the Lord of the Dead. His name is Anpu, rendered via the Greeks into Anubis. As noted with last weeks image, there is an astronomical notation to these cards. This one references the full moon in Scorpio, which occurs when the sun is in Taurus, roughly the month of May, or the full flowering of the spring time. Scorpio is connected to Pluto and thus the underworld, but the Full Moon is when the moon is opposite the sun, thus in this we have both Death, and Birth.
The Renaissance, for all the secular humanism and often hedonism, is this bright shining of life and light as compared to the long dark fear of Death that marked the world of the Middle Ages. In many ways, our modern world still has not fully come to terms with that phobia that rose from the Plague Years. Nor do we always live up to that promise of using the time we are given to best effect.
The sun is always setting somewhere. And always rising somewhere. While the funeral ship is sailing into the lands of shadow, there is another ship setting off to meet the dawn.
Our entire existence is a world that is dying or dead. The majority of the stars we see above burned out a long time before our earth even spun in space. It is the merest memory of their life that makes up our reality. It is fair to say that we are constantly in that moment of Death, moving from the things that were to the things that will be. The past lies lost behind us, and the future is never quite reached. The now is what we have, and we better make use of it.
The Death card is not simply a marker of transition or change. It is the proof of the inevitability of change. Nothing that is, remains. It is a goad to get up and go out and live while we can, to not wait for the moment when we are asked to hop up on that horse, and only then beg and lament our wasted days.
I do not fear Death. Even the pain that may accompany it, if that be my fate, is transitory. It ends. Death is over quickly, and what is beyond Death, I cannot say. What is on this side of Death though, lies within my willingness to act. And act I will.
I hope this has helped you understand a little more about this complicated and often dreaded card. Next week we shall explore Temperance, which is not only a rather odd card to work through, but also sits in a strange place in the sequence of trumps. I hope you will join me again.
As a footnote, I would like to thank all those brave souls who asked me to read the cards for them at the Writers for New Orleans event this past weekend. I know there were some that time did not permit me to visit with, and I hope we will have a future opportunity to explore the Tarot together.
Card IX of the Major Arcana is one that I find myself drawn more and more to as I get older. This is, to my thinking, something of a natural progression, and we’ll look into that. For those who have not read my earlier articles where the Hermit is discussed in various contexts, this will likely all be new territory. For those who have followed me for a while, I trust you will forgive any repetition of concepts mentioned in those earlier articles as we delve into this week’s topic.
The Hermit card shows a lone figure standing on a snowy mountain summit against a blue sky. He wears a hooded grey robe, and has long white hair and beard. In his left hand he holds a simple staff, and in his right he holds a lantern. In the midst of the lantern is a hexagram star, giving off rays that travel only a short distance. There are the tops of other mountains seen in the distance. His gaze is cast downward.
In keeping with austerity of a life in isolation, this is one of the most minimalist designs Pamela Smith offers us.
The design here is one of the simplest of all the Major Arcana. That is appropriately in keeping with the subject as an ascetic engaged in isolated contemplation. Because, as we have discussed, Waite’s charge for this deck was intimately connected with Christianity, the figure is portrayed more or less as a lone monk.
Monasticism in origin was not the movement that it later became. The practice began with individuals withdrawing from the word and living completely alone, often in caves in the desert. There were no orders, and there certainly were no monasteries. The “mon” in monastic, and indeed in monk, is derived from monos- one, or lone. Supposedly Benedict was the first of these early monks to put forth the idea that they could all be alone together, and thus formed a monastic order. Later such orders would be approved as official by the church, and charged with specific duties and obligations. I imagine similar developments occurred within Buddhism, but there are still hermit monks in many traditions, who seek personal wisdom and enlightenment by a quiet withdrawing from the world.
This context is central to a number of the meanings and associations ascribed to this card. In a Christian scenario, the withdrawal is to place oneself away from sin, or at least, from the temptation to sin. In this way the Hermit purifies himself from the flesh, and thereby encourages the spirit. The wisdom imparted here, of course, is the absolute truth and rightness of the Christian teaching, and thereby the hermit monk has his soul saved, while his body suffers.
Mortification is practiced in multiple cultures for purification, but also for the creation of trance states and the getting of visions. Living in a cave in isolation, subsisting on a diet of “locusts and wild honey” could certainly induce psychologically altered states of consciousness. If one is bent to be looking for signs from God, those altered states can take on the character of a profound religious experience. Ironically, of course, these experiences are frequently depicted as ecstasy, general of the physical kind that the hermit has moved out into the wilderness to avoid.
The Hermit is traditionally given the Sign of Virgo astrologically. I find this a rather simplistic reading, equating virginity to the avowed celibacy of the monk. The two are not identical, nor are they interchangeable. It’s simply convenient to make the attribution if you are looking for some place in the Tarot to attach Virgo. The fact is, as I have mentioned before, that the Hermit in earlier decks is a personification of passing Time, and this Chronos being confounded in ancient days with Kronos the Titan, makes Saturn a more apt connection than Virgo.
This Hermit Card from the Wildwood Tarot is one of my favorites. The figure is reminiscent of Dicken’s Spirit of Christmas Yet To Come. It is faceless, and the robe is worn. The wreath and the faded adornments on the lower part of the robe identify this figure as the Holly King, the spirit of winter, and a potent symbol of the fate that awaits us all at the end of the path. Yet it carries a bright light in that Winter Dark, and shines it upon a lone little bird. The bird, along with the blades of grass piercing the snow, remind us that the future holds the promise of rebirth, and even when death awaits, it is a transition to
I have personally always seen the Hermit as analogous with both Father Time and some Saturnine aspect, and as I age, this is even more apparent. My own second Saturn return is now less than a year away, and astrologers suggest that this brings with it contemplation of deeper meanings, the path that we have taken, and the potentially shorter path that lies ahead. Old Saturn with his 29 year cycle, was rarely met more than twice by our ancestors, and sometimes no more than once. Thus associating him as I do with the aged figure on the mountain top, perhaps looking back along the trail he has climbed, is not so arbitrary as the monkish renunciation of carnal activities.
I personally identify greatly with the Hermit card. It is not that I am anti-social, at least in the sense that I live in a cave in the desert and eat bugs. But I have for more of my life than not, been very insular and private. My world has almost always been more of the inward one than the outer one. The cave I inhabit is internal. As a precocious and odd child, my social isolation was very common. I had few friends and most of them were similarly odd. I cannot with any accuracy say if the experience of being an outsider or loner led to my inclination toward silence and self-contemplation, or if I had a bent for quiet meditation that limited the ability of other more outgoing types to bond with me. Whether it was the chicken or the egg, the result is that I generally prefer pursuits of a personal nature rather than a collaborative one.
That is not to say that I am incapable of interacting with others, but it does require a great deal of energy and focus, even with persons whose company I enjoy sharing. This, I believe, is what they are defining as introversion these days. There is possibly also some overshadows of the autistic spectrum that may be applicable. The difficulty inherent in expressing oneself, combined with the discomfort, or even fear, of being misunderstood, and a compulsion to pre-run the outcomes of any and all scenarios, creates a synergy where communication is a complex and stress inducing task. The result is frequently exhausting, and therefore the appeal of the quite moments alone. The obligations of my life as I have lived it, and as the result of the choices I have made along it, require me to adapt and develop coping mechanisms to address these stresses. I have been doing so for the better part of half a century, but as I get older, I am becoming more selective as to when I need to employ those mechanisms, and when the outcome is equal or even better if I simply make the choice to be that Hermit.
Of course, my life would probably be much simpler if I had not self-imposed the need to author a weekly article on various subjects to an audience who may or may not be out there.
But that brings us to the Hermit’s Lantern.
My “genuine official” Hermit’s Lantern, or a reasonably close facsimile. Like many of the odd things in my collection of odd things, it is both a prop and a magical object. This is not unusual in the history of occult practice. The knife and cookpot and the hearthstone and walking stick are all mundane objects, with mundane uses, that the village witch of yore would have employed both for practical and more esoteric purpose. The idea that we have to have a sacred set of special tools that can’t ever ever be used for what they actually are would have been ludicrous to our ancestors. Certainly, owning a “magic wand” or “witch’s cauldron” would have brought considerable risk in the days of the persecutions, but most houses would have had staffs, clubs, switches, and other sticks, and of course there was a big black iron pot over the fire. My lantern can be used symbolically, and in spell craft. But it can also be used to light my way in the dark.
I have one of those, you know. Found it at one of the discount stores that deal in leftover merchandise originally offered in the high-end department stores. I also have a staff and the monks cassock. Sometimes things just click like that.
But the Hermit’s lamp first and foremost is the analogue for the wisdom he has gained, the secrets that he has teased out of the dark bosom of the universe during the nigh endless hours of lonely seeking. Because, frankly, the point of wisdom is to pass it on. We are potentially alone on this planet in our ability to communicate our experiences to others in a fashion that expands and extends their value.
While there are a good many creatures that exhibit the ability to pass data instinctively, there are, at least as far as we know, none that can record that data in perpetuity. The monasteries of all faiths seem to affirm the need to chronicle what comes from contemplation, meditation, and isolation. They maintain libraries as a part of their function, and through that we have preserved the collected musings of the ages. It is a sad fact of history that many such libraries were lost to war, disaster, and accident, yet what remains, though meager, is wonderful.
The purpose of the Hermit is therefore not to leave this world, but to know it. This ties card IX to card 0, the Fool. As I stated early, the symbolism of the Fool is that state of Unknowing, that exists in the Unformed. It is that moment of Becoming, that is precipitation by the I withdrawing from the Not I , that is the creation of all. The edge of the cliff the Fool strides toward is where the Universe divides from itself in order to know itself. The death presaged by the card is real. The Universe as it was before will die, and never be again, because as the full plunges over the edge a new Universe begins that has the capacity to be experienced.
Stephanie Law gives us an ethereal and elfin Hermit in her Shadowscapes Tarot. Her mastery of watercolor and deep knowledge of anatomical forms results in unique and wonderful depictions that preserve the spirit of the card, while giving us a gateway into a whole new kind of world. The symbols seem derived from Celtic myth, but walk far closer to the walls of Faerie than something like Wildwood, which is more directly a restatement of Celtic Shamanism. I work frequently with both decks, depending on mood. The Shadowscapes have a kind of music about them, and are far easier to travel into and through.
And here is the Hermit withdrawing from the world, to know himself, and in doing so, to know the greater truth that lies beyond that edge, to return, perhaps to the Unknowing, beyond that event horizon where the original Idea was made form. It is a parallel intention.
While the Fool simply does, and the result becomes the intention, the Hermit intends. I made a distinction earlier between virginity and celibacy. This is exemplified in the relationship between these two cards. Virginity is an initial state of the origin of things, that once lost, may never be again. Innocence cannot be regained. Celibacy or chastity is the result of an intended act of restraint that may be constant or practiced in intervals. While the two can exist together, that is, one can be virginal and also chaste, it is not necessarily required for the chaste to be a virgin.
Virginity is the condition of our beginning. The Fool is the first card. When we reach the Hermit, we are presented with an old man, who we hope is wiser, but is likely no longer innocent. He chooses to be apart from the world because he has known it. Yet this choice makes it all the more present in his mind.
Anyone who has gone on a diet has experienced the stronger craving for something they are forbidden, even though they were not so desirous of it when they could have it. This is what makes the changing of habits difficult.
The Buddhists say that this is why we can’t free ourselves from the desire to be, and return to the nothingness that is. We are no longer the Fool, the Unknowing, and while our objective as the Hermit is to deny it, that denial makes the desire for it even stronger. We can be as celibate as we want, but it doesn’t ever make us a virgin.
So faced with this contradiction, the Hermit re-enlists in the world, at least to the extent that those rays will reach. The light from the Hermit’s Lantern is dim, not because it does not burn brightly, but because, as a consequence of the experience only known to the Hermit, is incredibly difficult to communicate with others who lack his frame of reference.
A final variation on our theme, this from the Ghosts and Spirits Tarot by Lisa Hunt. This deck is certainly one of the most unique ones I have, and not for the faint of heart. The imagery is frequently dark and disturbing, even when expressing images that typically are considered positive in the Tarot literature. It departs significantly from conventional designs. Like Shadowscapes, it offers complex swirling tableaus where faces seem to peer from everywhere. This reflects an animist perspective, but it also signals that we are looking into a world behind the mask of simple mundane reality. The Hermit from the usual card stands here at the rear right of the image, The lantern aloft, the eyes closed in some internal reverie. But the spirit of the Hermit is a sparkling whirlwind in the middle of the wilderness of hidden realm. It is also a realm we can step into, if we are willing to take the risk.
This is why scholars and writers on esoterism and philosophy make a distinction between intelligence and wisdom. We can easily impart facts to one another. We can express that two and two are equal to four, and that four and four are equal to eight. We can explain how to properly conjugate verbs in all the languages of the human race. But when it comes to sharing our insights into the sublime wonders of the Divine our mouths fall silent. Our tongues are still. The words are simply not enough.
The Hermit’s Staff is his knowledge. He leans upon it. It is firm. It is strong. He can hand that Staff to another and it will be unchanged. It will be firm and strong and equally useful, but it is not the Light of the Lantern, with the shape barely visible within it, the simple, but also phenomenal “As above, so below”.
And as without, so within. He lives in the internal world, his eyes downcast. What does he see? What does he not see?
He may be looking toward the path he has climbed. He may be looking at the deepening road before him.
But one thing is certain. He does not, at least, look at the Lantern.
Is it because he has already seen the Light, or is it because the Light is too bright to bear. It stands out from him. It is separated from him, unlike the staff which he holds close to the body. Is this to make it a beacon unto others, or is it because he cannot stand it being too close, because the brightness is a pain and a distraction? Does it light his path, or does it obscure it to his aging gaze?
I can only say that walking along that path myself, there are times when the light is too dim to make anything out, and times when it is too bright to make anything out, and in the end both results are same. You have to put your next foot forward carefully, and hope for the best.
If you are lucky, you won’t step off that cliff.
Join me next week for Fortune’s Wheel and the inexorable turning of the days from spring toward summer. Thank you for your continued patronage.
I was going through the various articles here and saw that it has been a year since I undertook this little experiment in self-expression, writing on deadline, and delving deep into the strangeness that has been part of my nature since as long as I remember.
I didn’t actually get going until April, though, so it seems I missed anything about the Spring Equinox that would have been on the 20th of last March. The equinoxes and solstices are the hinges the year turns on, and their significance goes back to our earliest cultures. Marvels like Stonehenge, and many older megalithic sites, are tied to the recording of these astronomical events.
The Autumnal Equinox I wrote about last September, and, to be honest, it’s my favorite. As a self-proclaimed Creature of the Winter Dark, the coming of spring never really rallies me. I prefer the bleak-skied, dreary and damp short days between that fall between the Sun’s entrance into Libra and his later exit from Pisces which will come in a few days.
There are several springtime observances that coincide or orbit near the Vernal Equinox. For example, on the 17th of the month, Irish Catholics observe St. Patrick’s Day. Patrick, like Brigid, is more myth than man. Wherever one finds the Irish diaspora, this day is celebrated, frequently with drunken revelry, and a good many “temporary” Irish folk.
My ancestors hail from eastward across the Irish Sea in what is now called Wales. Along with the Scots we share some commonalities with those Irish folk, in that our original religion and culture was altered by the coming of Christianity. There are a number of memes out there about how the “snakes” Patrick is supposed to have driven out were the pagan culture, and they usually affirm that the pagan culture is coming back. I would counter that the pagan culture was less driven out, as merged into, that distinctive flavor of Catholic practice that is unique to Ireland and her people.
We tend to see the spread of Christianity through early pagan peoples as being of the same character as that imposed on indigenous peoples in the New World by a church fueled by the Holy Inquisition. Ireland’s conversion came at a time that the Catholic faith was growing outward from Rome, but was by no means dominant. Converts in this period were frequently politically and/or financially motivated. As noted in my post about stolen holidays from last fall, trading with Christian neighbors provided an impetus to conversion, and conversion of the chieftains and nobles meant conversion of the people.
I’m fairly sure that later characterizations of Patrick’s miraculous success in Ireland are retroactive continuity, embellished by a church that had moved into the driver’s seat in European geopolitics, and could say “without fear of contradiction” what they wanted to about the conversion of the Irish.
Although I am typically a non-joiner, I have from time to time belonged to some groups. Back in the 80s, I was a founding member of the Foothills Artists. Part of our usual activity was to have a themed mixer once a month. We inaugurated this with a Halley’s Comet party in early 1986.
In March, I took the comet prop and recreated it as a leprechaun for the St. Patty’s party. When finished, someone in the group christened him Vernal Equinox (Vern for short) and he operated as something of a mascot for a few years, before I think I eventually gave him to one of the other members.
In the era before everyone had a satellite linked broadcast TV studio in their pocket, photographs were fewer and further between, and I have been unable to find a picture of Vernal. This drawing made from memory is perhaps more flattering than the styrofoam, hot glue, latex and green fabric he was made of, but it’s a fair resemblance. I include him as evidence that my penchant for creating unusual creatures goes way back.
Which is why it is so absolutely delicious that much of what we see in the average St. Patrick’s Day festivities, are the remainders of the preceding Celtic faith…that of the leprechaun.
Leprechauns are the Irish version of the gnome and the kobold. They are a species of faerie that is widespread in the folklore of most of Europe. The “little people” are the inspiration for Tolkien’s hobbits, but as a branch of the Tuatha de Danann they represent a much broader tradition.
The people of Danu were, according to legend, the third race that inhabited the island before it was settled by the Celtic people coming from mainland Europe. Before the Danann there were a race of giants, called the Fomorians, who may have been personifications of a raw chaotic nature. When we reference beings like the Dagda, the Morrigan, Lugh and Llyr, were are remembering this ancient people.
The faerie faith that remained up into the early twentieth century in remote parts of Wales, living side by side with modern Christianity, was the remains of that ancient relationship with the Children of Don. These beings were said to inhabit specific places, like mounds and earthworks, passage tombs, some natural places like Scotland’s Faerie Glen, but most often they lived under the hills, or within them.
They transversed into our world through clefts in the ground, cave openings, water crossings, and other liminal spaces, altering size and shape as required. Their hidden kingdom was timeless, and filled with riches and splendor. Mortals lucky (or unlucky) enough to be “taken by the faeries” might expect to spend a few hours in such places, only to have years pass in the outside world. Gold and silver from the twilit realm turned to stones or acorns when removed, or when the morning came. And we all, of course, know that the dancing faerie court turns into the circle of mushrooms at dawn’s first light.
The presence of such beings was a reality to most inhabitants of Ireland and the western and northern parts of Britain in the 19th century. Various means of protecting oneself from these beings are recorded by anthropologists and mythologists. While not necessarily malevolent (or at least not so as a species) they were viewed as sufficiently different from humans as to be considered dangerous. This is perhaps the same way we might regard a lion or a tiger. The lion and the tiger don’t decide to be harmful, but their nature makes them potentially harmful.
Of particular importance was not offending the Bright Folk. They were an ancient nobility, and as such demanded a particular etiquette. If one encountered a faerie on the road, in the woods, or at their door, they were to be treated with the utmost respect. There were protocols, many involving not giving the being your actual name, but rather offering an oblique pseudonym by the method of saying “you may call me…” To refuse giving the name would be rude, but giving your true name would put you in great peril. Of course, it was expected that the faerie was not giving their real name either, so everyone played the game.
Iron was considered especially upsetting. There is some question as to whether it was specifically meteoric iron that the Fae found so distasteful. But over time iron and steel that included it was considered a way of preventing unwanted visits from the Good Neighbors. Iron or steel pins were often fastened to the swaddling of babies, to prevent their being stolen and replaced by changelings.
This business of spirit warfare is still ongoing. The iron “lucky horseshoe” is derived of this tradition, though most who hang them over their thresholds probably don’t know they are trying to keep out errant fae folk, gnomes, kobolds, leprechauns, and a host of other beings who are inimical to the presence of ferrous metal.
One of the more unusual blades in my collection. This one guards the entrance to my home, both by virtue of it’s bitey sharp teeth and a number of other enchantments. It partakes of the nature of lightning, for obvious reasons, but also batwings and dragon fire and is very much an angry thing when it gets going. It has two little brothers over other thresholds, with similar toothsome shapes, and predatory demeanors. They assist me in keeping unwanted visitors from the house, whether they be corporeal or ethereal.
I personally have not found the numerous swords and blades in my house to keep away my friends among the Bright Ones. I suppose that the fact they are invited may abrogate any such taboos. It never comes up in discussion (that would be gauche) and I have known many of them longer than I have known about the iron thing. Of course, if it turns out that meteoric iron is the key, then I only have a few pieces and they’re small.
I try not make my space difficult for spirits. I don’t for example, practice the same kinds of cleansing rituals I see discussed all over the interwebs. These practices, very often employing white sage and/or palo santo, which are both being impacted by the increased demand, are not something I learned when I first started working in the occult. In fact, my first awareness of it was in a fiction book maybe about a decade ago, where it was cast as an indigenous practice, used in response to a malevolent spirit.
By definition, the practice of cleansing is to drive off such spirits, entities, and energies to protect the home and the persons in it. I take a somewhat different approach, one that has served me well for many years, and that is to deal with my spiritual and ritual space the same way that I deal with physical space it occupies. And, well, I really just hate to do house cleaning.
Now, I do actually do house cleaning. I have several cats and there are some basic things that you just have to do for the sake of hygiene. Likewise, my kitchen gets policed after every meal, and on weekends, when I have time, I’ll attend to anything that takes a bit longer, or has gotten behind. But chances are, you’ll find dust has accumulated on some lesser-used surfaces, and there might be a cobweb or two in some of the corners. I’ll remove the dust from time to time, before it does any significant damage to the furnishings or other items. As for the cobwebs, the spiders do a good job of limiting other household pests, so there’s something of a detente there. Also, I like spiders. Otherwise, I generally spend my time on other more productive or enjoyable processes, and try to minimize the amount of cleaning I have to do by not tracking in dirt.
How does this method apply to the spiritual space. Well, let’s take that point by point.
In the sense of the things that have to be done, I start with warding the property in general. This applies to unwanted spirits, criminals, and traveling salespersons. If you aren’t invited to my house, you are not welcome. A coworker of mine once helped me move some heavy furniture to our upstairs bedroom. He remarked that he would pity anyone who tried to break in, because there is virtually no place in my house that I can’t just reach out and have a weapon. Those are the visible ones. And several of them have enchantments. These charged objects and symbols perform the functions of locks.
The brass rubbing on the left we believe to be a remote ancestor. His presence watching over us is welcome and warming. A more modern simulacra is my witch, who is being transformed from a basic decoration into an inhabited guardian.
Like any house with a watch dog, I have certain friendly spirits that reside with me, and/or travel with me, that provide protective or surveillance functionality. In combination with wards and sigils, they work to reduce the potential that something crosses my threshold without my awareness or invitation. These are a constant and ongoing defense, and require regular maintenance just like doing the dishes and emptying the cat box.
The second key factor is to clean up things when they happen. If there is a breech, I will deal with the problem and seal it back up. This is analogous to cleaning up a spilled drink (or cat vomit in my world) as soon as it happens, so there’s no permanent stain in the rug. Sometimes that is as simple as mopping up the mess, and sometimes it’s the spiritual equivalent of getting out the carpet shampooer. The response is dictated by the severity of the issue. Sometimes it just needs a damp paper towel. Sometimes I have to get out the Black Book.
And finally, I don’t track dirt into my house. At least I try not to do it. I’ve been at this for over half a century, and I have done some stupid things in my time. I have been lucky enough to learn from it. As Dean Martin is supposed to have said, “Good judgment comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgment”. Before undertaking any significant spiritual working, I make a risk reward evaluation, and do what I can to mitigate the risk. Sometimes, the benefits simply are not worth it to me. Your mileage may vary.
They say you should learn to live with your demons. In some cases, that’s literal.
Demons, imps, djinn, and other spirits of a more chaotic nature have been employed throughout history as guardians and gatekeepers.
Hades took the three headed dog Kerberos as protector of his underworld realm, preventing those inside from leaving, but also keeping out the unwanted. In some tales he is said to eat those trying to escape. I wonder if Kerberos is a Graeco-Roman confusion of the Egyptian psychopomp Anubis (Anpu in Kemit) in his form of the black dog, and the Ammit, the devourer of the hearts of the unworthy at the balance Anubis manned.
I burn incense as a gift to the Fae, On occasion I will find forms in the smoke, like the big fellow here. Whether he is visiting them, or just hanging around on the porch, he’s no concern to me, and I am sure that nothing is getting past him.
If you visit me on any given day, there will probably be incense burning. I like incense. It minimizes foul odors (see cats, above), relieves tension, drives off pests like mosquitoes and flies, and smells nice. This is most probably why the ancients starting using incense. In the cradles of civilization, usually along rivers, lakes, or seashores, insect-borne diseases were a real problem. Burning the resin of a shrub caused a drop in the number of mosquito bites, and consequently a drop in cases of malaria, yellow fever, and other similar diseases. The ancients may or may not have made the initial connection to it’s use as a bug repellant, but eventually the power of incense to dispel and drive out spiritual “bugs” was ascribed.
Incense as used to create or purify ritual space is widespread in many practices, both occult and orthodox. I am keenly aware of this functionality when I burn incense, though I don’t always have that intention when I burn incense. On the other hand, my incense burners all have some sort of magical inscriptions or ritual configuration, in which case they are “always on”, whether I am creating a ritual space for spell work, or just in the studio painting, writing, or composing.
I burn incense for a lot of reasons. Sometimes I just want the room to smell nice. But since all of my incense burners have a ritual nature to them, the burning of incense is essentially always a ritual. Even if I just want the room to smell nice.
Many things in my house have enchantments associated with them. I create sacred space around me that is always protected. While it may need energizing from time to time, I haven’t found that a constant focus on ritual cleansing is necessary.
But if that works for you, more power to you. Literally. The practice of cleansing rituals, provided they are combined with rites to bring in positive and beneficial entities and energies, will help reinforce your own spiritual refuge; whether you see it as quirky old house or an impenetrable castle. I have versions of both.
This is a layer of passive protection that permeates my space. But I don’t generally go and light it up and do a cleansing ritual. Cleansings as I see them described often seem an awful lot like exorcism. When used to drive out a malevolent entity, they clearly are an exorcism ritual, and my particular concern is that may not be something we want to be doing every week or day or whatever in our personal space.
Jason Miller in his Consorting With Spirits and on numerous podcasts, has cautioned against this for the simple reason that you are potentially making it difficult for any spirits to enter your personal space.
In the wake of the pandemic, we all have perhaps become a bit more intense in cleaning our home environments. While we concentrate on removing the harmful pathogens, we use methods that destroy beneficial bacteria. The same can be said for spiritual cleansing.
I remember reading many years ago in one of Sybil Leek’s books (don’t recall which, probably Diary of A Witch) that the key to such things was balance. If we do something extreme in one direction, we must do other things to balance that out. If you feel safer by doing a cleansing ritual each day, by all means do so. But follow it with a ritual that invites back in your friendly spirits, patron deities, and positive energy.
I’ll close with that thought. Next week’s article will be an introduction to the summer’s project for me, an exploration of the Major Arcana in depth. I intend to take a card each week until late August, though I expect I may have some additional articles pop up as the muse strikes. I hope you will join me.
A black draped figure seemingly glided to the front of the classroom and began scribbling on the chalkboard.
Professor Snide spoke without turning.
“Turn to page twelve-thousand, six hundred, and seventy-four and begin reading the rubric at the end of the third paragraph; subsection two, heading four, chapter eight hundred eighty-two. . .” Pausing he added “. . . aloud. . . in four part harmony. “
Wes Rongley peeped his bright orange tufted head above the antique leathern tome on the desk in front of him and peered at the board. He squinted.
To his growing horror, he could clearly make out in the ever-growing scrawl that flowed unceasingly onto the slate from the chalk in Snide’s hand integers, operators, exponents, and not a few letters of Greek.
He shuddered. He had inexplicably stumbled into a maths class.
Wes slunk back down behind the ponderous mouldering volume and wracked his hazy brain for some memory of how this could have happened. The first few days here at Hogwash’s had been a heady blur, but surely he could not have made such a colossal blunder.
There was nothing for it but to try and escape.
He slid further down in the seat, as if he could melt into liquid form and seep quietly out under the classroom’s big oaken door. He tested the floor board with the slightest pressure of his left toe.
It creaked.
“Going somewhere, Mr. Rongley?”
Caught in the act, betrayed by the ancient timber, he had little choice but to respond to Snide’s withering gaze.
“I. . .uh. . .I’m in the wrong room, sir. I don’t think I’m supposed to be in this class.”
Snide inspected the desktop and at length drew out a square of browning parchment.
“You are Wes Rongley, First Year?”
“Yes sir.”
“Then you are on my list and you are in the right room.”
The room seemed to dim when Snide had said ‘my list’. Wes felt every follicle of his flaming shock of hair contract. Perspiration formed on his upper lip. On his tightening scalp. beads of sweat began to coalesce into rivulets that ran down the nape of his neck. He ventured.
“But . . .sir . . . that looks like maths. . .”
Snide turned, his expression softening . . .which for some reason was more disturbing.
“Hmmm. . .really? Are you sure?”
Wes nodded meekly. Professor Snide leaned a bit back and regarded the unfinished equation he’d been scribbling.
“By, Jove, Mr. Rongley, you’re right! It is maths! Seen them before, have you?”
“Yes. . .yes, sir!”
“Well, now you’ve seen them again. Turn to page twelve thousa-“
“I was told there’d be no maths, sir.”
“What?”
“I was told there wouldn’t be any maths. When I signed up, sir. That old chap, Humblebore was it? He said that maths weren’t required for my programme.”
“Headmaster Mumblesnore,” Snide corrected, “may have been a tad vague on this point. Let me assure you, Mr. Rongley, maths are indeed required.”
Wes felt Snide’s dark presence swirling toward him down the aisle but couldn’t move. He was a mouse transfixed by a great black cobra, knowing doom was coming but powerless to escape.
“How else do you expect to tease out the subtler courses of the orbs on their wanderings through the heavens, or divine the sublime secrets of the Gematria, or calculate allowed deductions for consumable spell components and the depreciation of cauldrons of more than a hogshead’s capacity when filing with the Inland Revenue?
‘Let there be no doubt in your mind, Mr. Rongley. Maths. Are. Required.”
Satisfied, Snide turned and had made it halfway back toward the front when Wes exploded:
“But I don’t like maths!”
Snide whirled. There was a flash and puff of sulfurous vapor.
There, atop the vast ancient folio, in the middle of an unwholesome looking greasy spot, sat a rather confused looking amphibian with a shock of flaming orange hair.
-Excerpted Unabridged from Hairy Plodder and the Half-Done Script
Like young Mr. Rongley, I too, did not care for ‘maths’ as it is commonly styled in Britain. Seeking a similar avoidance of all things mathematical, I pursued a career in the creative arts.
It is one of life’s little ironies, that when my own term at the Hogwash School of Wizardry, Witchcraft, and Computer Repair was over, that I entered a field where mathematical calculations are both necessary and intensive.
In further evidence of the universe’s perverse sense of humor, my personal occult studies are repleat with examples of the necessity of mathematics, algebra, geometry and trigonometry, and yes, calculus.
Having avoided many of these courses in school it fell upon me to educate myself over the years as required. The result is that I perhaps have not approached the topics in the same staid way that they are typically taught, and though I do get the needed accuracy of result, my methods are more in tune with the way my left-handed right-brained operations work.
I feel confident that, insofar as I am not building a nuclear reactor in close proximity to inhabited areas, said methods are sufficient for my goals. I’m sharing a bit of them this week in order to acquaint you with the delight I often find now in working with purity of numbers and the permutations thereof.
In a previous article I have spoken about the absolute reality of number itself. That is, number is a real immutable infinite and eternal thing, which remains fixed regardless of time, space, velocity, or dimension. One is always one. Two is always two. One and two are and have been and will always be three. Whether we call that three or tre or trois or drei is irrelevant, the actual thing that it is never changes.
There’s a comfort to that. It’s nice to know that regardless of how much chaos swirls around us there’s still something that remains unchanged. It is the Anchor in the Sea of the Night. It is a Fulcrum in the Void. It is a Beacon on the Shores of Infinity.
Of course, sometimes, it’s fun just to play around and see what comes up. My subject for today is the hexagon, a regular geometric shape having six equal sides.
While the word hexagon doesn’t have a connection with our use of the word hex in occult circles, the doctrines of sympathy and correspondence would argue otherwise. Hex in witchcraft comes at us out of Old German and Old Norse, and probably shortens and corrupts from hagatesse – a word used to refer to the Norns, the old women who sat at the base of the World Ash Ygdrassil and pronounced the fates of man. The connection between Norn and witch is an easy one, and the term haxa and haxxen have been used to apply to witches since early times in various north and central European dialects. Thus it crossed the Channel with Hengst and entered into the Anglo-Saxon tree.
The hex in hexagon, though, is ancient Greek for six, and merely means it’s six sided, or six angled, and there’s no magical connotation at all.
Except that there is. And frequently this confutation between the witchy hex and the mathematical hex is expressed in the darnedest of places.
For instance, among the “hex signs” of the so-called Pennsylvania Dutch. The Dutch are more accurately Deutsch – Germans, who settled in Penn’s Woods along with other emigrees seeking arable land and the ability to worship openly. They are noted – among other things, for the curious geometric designs that grace barns and some houses, which are said to drive away the “devil” and other malicious spirits. In this case the “hex” is the old German haxxan – a specifically magic application. Yet many of these geometries are based on six sided figures, though perhaps as many, if not more are eight-sided.
The hexagon is the natural regular shape that is formed if you outline from point to point on a hexagram. Now the hexagram is an established magical and talismanic shape, known as the Star of David, Solomon’s Seal, and other specific names. It is the figure below, which is composed of two overlapping triangles, and as you can see, it fits neatly into the hexagon.
In the parlance of the occult, this image has many meanings. The following image comes from Eliphas Levi’s Histoire de la magie and demonstrates the maxim supposedly extracted from the Emerald Tablet penned by no less a personage than Hermes Trismegistus himself. It is “As Above, So Below”
The actual text,
That which is above is from that which is below, and that which is below is from that which is above
translated into English from Latin or Arabic, which was probably translated from Greek, essentially says that all things in nature are aspects of a single cohesive whole.
From the standpoint of Greek philosophers laboring in Alexandria, this might be a convenient expression for the atomos proposed by Democritus in 400 B.C.E. and a forerunner of our idea of the atom.
Thrown into the rather more fanciful environs of medieval Europe, accompanied on it’s way with tales of djinns and efrits and the glorious magics of Solomon the Wise, the idea became a binder between the heavens and the earth, and justification for the correspondences of metals, stones, plants, and the like with the natures and virtues of the planetary wanderers.
And yet in this aspect was the roots of modern medicine, metallurgy, and chemistry, as well as enduring metaphor for the expansion of the consciousness. Alchemists revered this phrase and it’s interlocking trines throughout their search for the Elixir of Life and Philosopher’s Stone. It carries within it even more secrets, hinted at in the texts of the Emerald Tablet.
Its father is the Sun and its mother the Moon. The Earth carried it in her belly, and the Wind nourished it in her belly, as Earth which shall become Fire. Feed the Earth from that which is subtle
Here then are references to at least three of the four classical elements – Earth, Wind, and Fire. This kind of phrase, along with the most imaginative of illustrations, form the rhebus instructions of the alchemical manuals. But I think the really neat trick is how we find the elements with our hexagon/hexagram.
First, of course, we just have to separate the “Above” from the “Below” and we get Fire and Water. But look more closely at the joined triangles. If you take the upward pointing triangle and the bottom line from the downward pointing triangle, you get the sign for Air. Flipping that to the downward pointing triangle gives us Earth. So the four elements are hidden figures within the As Above, So Below hexagram.
But, like any good late night infomercial pitch, that’s not all. The hexagon/hexagram combination does that same nifty trick that the pentagon/pentagram does. Within the hexagram inside the hexagon is another hexagon. You can then create another hexagram in that, which creates another hexagon inside it, ad infinitum.
Welcome, my friends, to the concept of fractals. And also the basic ideas that lead us into the murky waters of quantum theory – no matter how small something is, it’s always made up of something smaller. And, well, no matter how big something is, there’s probably something even bigger outside it, that maybe you don’t see until you get outside that, and outside that, and outside that…
So again, turtles all the way down. Most of which have no connection to Renaissance artists or togakure-ryu. But if it helps, you can think of all those repeating hexagon/hexagrams as being diagrams of turtle shells.
If infinity has you’re head spinning, let’s jump back onto a more solid ground. Platonically solid ground, in this case, as a few choice lines from the angles in the hex give us a nice diagram for the first two platonic solids, the pyramid, and the cube. From two dimensions we have moved into three, or at least we are representing three dimensions in a two dimensional space, and that’s nifty in itself. The cube is more elegantly expressed of course, because in addition to just looking better, we have the added symbolic link of a six-sided object being used to represent a six-faced object. I’ve tried to find some sacred number related to the four faces and six sides, but it’s not there, so it’s just that you can draw it if you need to, though again it’s not as isometrically clean.
On the other hand, if you wanted to get a four faced pyramid (which is actually five sided; four triangles and a square) you just have to modify that upward pointing triangle and the square of the cube. It’s not exact to the one’s that the Egyptians built, mind you, and I make no claim that it has any relation to them. I think I will probably due a future article on the legend, myth, and symbology associated with pyramid structures in human history, but that’s not for today. In the meantime, it’s a satisfying exercise.
Of course, one of the most basic ideagrams that we can render from the hexagon shape is the “hex” itself, as six-rayed assembly of lines. This equivocates to the “grove” symbol in the Ogham script. Again, I can’t say there’s any evidence of a connection, but that doesn’t prevent you making one, and drawing on the power of that symbol. In some permutations of the Ogham grove I have found it also flexes to represent the transits of the luminaries on the equinoxes and solstices. That is, if you take an aerial view of Stonehenge – or the Great Pyramid of Giza for that matter – and plot the sunrise and sunset positions of the sun and moon on the equinoxes and solstices, you get a hex line shape. In this case, the angles are much more shallow, as the Tropic are around 23.7 degrees north and south of the equinoctal line, and in a regular hexagon, the angles are 60 degrees.
Which is to say, they are sextile for the purposes of astrology. Which we can also derive from the hexagon shape. For instance, if we take one of our inner triangles, and draw a line from each corner to the middle (instead of all the way across) we get a three rayed shape with angles of 120 degrees. This is a trine. you can also achieve the same design by erasing half of the rays in the hex. Have of six is three. Half of sextile is trine, even though the angle measurements double. I always had trouble understanding that relationship until I started playing with these hex diagrams. Maybe this will help you.
You can find the 90 degrees of a square aspect with a hair more work. Put the hexagram back in and draw a line from the top of the upper triangle to the bottom of the bottom triangle. Now draw a line across the point where the two triangles join in the middle. Erase the extra lines and viola – a four rayed shape with 90 degree angles.
You have now derived the three major aspects used in astrology. Of course, you’re going to need a chart.
So take the hexagram, and draw lines through each point of the triangle, like we do to get the hex, and then draw lines through each of the intersecting angles, like we did to get the square. You end up with 12 rays, and the cusps of 12 signs. In the diagram I’ve reduced the size of the hexagram, so the relationship is clearer, but you can see it does indeed contain the keys to a zodiac.
Overlaid in color here are two of the trine diagrams, one in blue, which shows you the relationships of the water signs. You can rotate this to locate the air, earth, and fire signs, respectively. The red one also shows the locations of the cardinal, fixed, and mutable triplicity, in this case for the signs of fire, but just rotate it around and the others fall into place.
Is this all that we can tease out of the humble hexagon? No. Fiddling around in my art software I was able to come across a few more totally unrelated, but poignant connections using just the geometry and some imagination.
Taking our hex lines again, you can look to them as Cartesian coordinates. They are the X, Y and Z axes of three dimensional space. Anyone who struggles with that train leaving Chicago problem may remember some of these exercises from algebra classes. I do a lot of 3-D animation work, and the 3-D grid is almost second nature to me. Essentially the center where the three line cross is 0, and any point in space can be plotted using positive or negative values along those lines, so X is left and right, Y is up and down, and Z is forward or back. In order to see clearly the values of all three lines, the diagram is usually tilted in almost exactly the same way as our hex. So you can use a hex to put anything anywhere.
Now, I have mentioned before that we all live in a four-dimensional space-time. If I want to diagram it on my hexagon, I can just drop it in at a right angle to Y axis, and get the following figure.
So any point in space and time can be reached by virtue of the hex. That might explain why the capacious interior of a certain blue phone box has had hexagon wall decorations for several decades. Or not. Still, it’s an intriguing expression of the concept.
Moving back into more esoteric spaces, I was also able to take the basic hex, add a few curves, and arrive at the Xi-Rho symbol, usually with Alpha and Omega, this is supposedly the vision of Constantine at the Malvern Bridge, with motto “in hoc signio vincis” – In this Sign, you will Conquer. While historians generally believe that Constantine took it as a message from Sol Invictus, later Christian records give it as the Xi-Rho, a short hand for Cristos, and the basis for what became Christian Rome. While his mother was a devout Christian, and Constantine did order the Council of Nicea which firmed up the Nicean Creed and laid the foundations of modern orthodoxy, the Emperor himself didn’t convert until his deathbed.
Another imaginative permutation is the zig-zag “lightning bolt” that is said to travel down the Quabbalistic Tree of Life bringing Divine Wisdom (Ain Soph) into existence in the material world. You need to stack a couple of hexagons for the full diagram, and add a tail at the bottom, but you can get there from here. Those claiming that abracadabra derives from the Hebrew “what I speak I manifest” might want to play with this idea a little further.
Am equally interesting object from the hexagon and As Above/So Below angles is a three dimensional construct known as a merkaba. The word merkaba comes from the Hebrew as “Chariot” and so we have an immediate link with the seventh card of the Tarot major arcana. As many others have posted, 2023 is considered a “Chariot” year as it numerologicaly resolves to seven. Seven is a sacred number all on it’s own, so if a merkaba is a chariot, then we’ve managed to find seven hidden in six. That’s an alchemical spontaneous generation worthy of old Bombastis himself.
The merkaba is the three dimensional extension of As Above, So Below. It is the two triangles, expressed as interlocking three-faced pyramids (see there was a reason I talked about the platonic pyramid) such that each face of each pyramid is pierced by the the point of another one. The diagram here is derived from the hexagon. I have mocked up one in Lightwave 3-D to show how interesting this thing becomes as an object. Pretty nifty trick for an old Hebrew chariot I think.
Some also say the word merkaba is derived from the ancient Egyptian root words mer-ka-ba. Several online sources style this as “light, spirit, and body” or “love, spirit, body”, It may be more accurately translated “Pyramid of the Soul and the Shadow” or “Food of the Blessed Dead” since “mer” can be either pyramid or cake. The Greek “pyramid” derives from “pyramis” -wheat cake. The Egyptian wheat cake was called ben-ben, which is the word for the top of the pyramid or the obelisk, which had a similar shape. These shapes were also symbolic of the sun’s rays, and the primordial mound of earth rising from the flood of the celestial Nile where the Lotus that Ra emerges from grew. Mer, then, is not the cake, but the ritual use of the cake, either in feeding a god or a deceased relative, both rituals we know of. It’s not fair to say the Greeks got it wrong, because over the long age of Egypt mer came to mean “love” and “pyramid” as well as the ritual use of the cake.
Those are fascinating concepts to explore. Relating them onward to a Hebrew chariot that is visually complex and symbolically loaded, draws to my mind some of the Old Testament angels connected with the prophet Ezekiel. Plenty of places to go with this one if one is interested.
Speaking of going, in my own explorations, I have used the hexagon/hexagram as basis to develop this symbol, which I will eventually put on an amulet or an altar stone. To my mind it connects with symbols of Hekate, and well, Hekate, Heka, Hex, Haxxan, Hagatesse and Hexagon can all blur lines in rhyme, alliteration, and the verbal games we play in spell work. And now you can see that there are mathematical and geometric games you can play as well, so if you are looking for right angle (pun meaningfully intended) to approach a particular magical operation, I hope I have given you some new tools to work with. If nothing else, I hope it encourages you to spend time looking past the surface of things as presented.
Before departing this week’s article I fully admit to lifting the title from a very much more important work. Even though you can’t copyright titles, and the words fit my little exercise, equally well, I clearly acknowledge, respect and admire the work of the pioneering African-American women the book and film Hidden Figures is about. Their contribution to the advancement of both the space program, and cause of racial justice in this country, cannot be minimized. If you are unaware of it, I strongly encourage you make yourself familiar.
Thank you again for reading all the way to the end of this week’s piece. It is longer and potentially more complicated that what I have offered in the past. More like this is forthcoming, so I hope you find it useful. I’ll be back again in a week.
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.
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.
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 The Doctor Who episode “Shakespeare Code” references an alien species called Carrionites that inspired the Bard to write the Witches in the Scottish Play. I wonder if the word derived from the Carian people, but I’m not sure the writers were that literate. 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.
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.
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.
Round about the caldron go; In the poison’d entrails throw.– Toad, that under cold stone, Days and nights has thirty-one Swelter’d venom sleeping got, Boil thou first i’ the charmed pot!
Double, double, toil and trouble; Fire, burn; and caldron, bubble.
Fillet of a fenny snake, In the caldron boil and bake; Eye of newt, and toe of frog, Wool of bat, and tongue of dog, Adder’s fork, and blind-worm’s sting, Lizard’s leg, and howlet’s wing,– For a charm of powerful trouble, Like a hell-broth boil and bubble.
Double, double, toil and trouble; Fire, burn; and caldron, bubble.
Scale of dragon, tooth of wolf, Witch’s mummy, maw and gulf Of the ravin’d salt-sea shark, Root of hemlock digg’d i’ the dark, Liver of blaspheming Jew, Gall of goat, and slips of yew Sliver’d in the moon’s eclipse, Nose of Turk, and Tartar’s lips, Finger of birth-strangl’d babe Ditch-deliver’d by a drab,– Make the gruel thick and slab: Add thereto a tiger’s chaudron, For the ingredients of our caldron.
Double, double, toil and trouble; Fire, burn; and caldron, bubble.
Cool it with a baboon’s blood, Then the charm is firm and good.
Macbeth – William Shakespeare
You just can’t go wrong with the classics, eh, folks?
This post immediately precedes the Grand High Sabbat of Samhain (Northern Hemisphere) when the doors of the worlds lay open, the dead rise, and witches fly.
Samhain is of a Welsh/Gaelic/Celtic origin and thus is pronounced something like Sow – Ween, I’m told.
As my ancestors were Welsh, but I am not, and the Gaelic languages are something I am still working to learn, my English language educated brain tends to see that word as Sam Hain.
I am confident that I am not alone in this, and have jokingly pointed out that this is the full name of one of the Winchester brothers – Sam Hain Winchester. And if it isn’t, the writers of the Supernatural series surely missed a golden opportunity.
In any case, because I was born and raised in the late 20th century in America, I refer to this holiday by it’s crass commercial epithet Halloween. Which saves me considerable embarrassment around those who know how to correctly pronounce Samhain.
In most cases we celebrate this event on October 31st, whilst many of us, and probably a good number of my readers, start actively decorating around mid-August, and truthfully keep a “creepy vibe” going year round.
This delightful meme has served as a seasonal love letter between me and my wife as we will invariably post it on each other’s social media. This Halloween is the 33rd anniversary of our first date. As she puts it “Find the Gomez to your Morticia, I did. “
There is Halloween, and there is waiting for Halloween. That is all.
It’s passing strange that as witchcraft has emerged from the shadows into a full blown cultural phenomenon, the Halloween holiday diminishes more and more in the public consciousness. Outside of the dedicated souls such as myself, the witches, and other weirdos, this event has been weakened to an overly restricted children’s party that parents dread and neighbors frequently ignore. Overshadowed by the burgeoning Fat Man and his capitalist orgy of Black Friday Weekend, one has to begin early, search wide, and work hard to get their full Halloween fix.
I am not talking about the various ritual observances. Everyone does that a little differently anyway. The ancients (who may have celebrated on a different day) called it a Cross-Quarter Day. That is, it was roughly halfway between the Autumnal Equinox and the Winter Solstice. So it was an excuse to have a party. In ancient days, life was miserable, brutish, and short. Having something to look forward to, particularly in cold wet dark northern Europe, made things a little less miserable. In a world without weekends, a festival day was definitely important.
The meaning of, and doings of, these ancient feast and fire parties is really lost to history. Maybe there are bits here and there, but if you are looking for the true and authentic Gaelic experience you may be out of luck. Your tradition may be made up of what the Romans said the Gaelic peoples did, and what the Romans did that got confused and adopted by the members of that culture that survived the Roman conquest. Assimilation goes both ways, of course, so some of those authentic Celto/Gallo/Nordic traditions may have just become Roman traditions that we don’t remember were Celto/Gallo/Nordic.
My Halloween traditions probably do not resemble a Grand High Sabbat. Nor are they typically Celto/Gallo/Nordic or Roman. I carry along a lot of that crass commercial thing.
When I was a kid I loved putting on the costume and going door to door. I loved watching “It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown” while I ate too much sugar and bounced around way past my already insomniac bedtime.
When I got older, I loved making really cool costumes and going to Halloween parties with the other teens during that one time of the year I could actually go to parties with the other teens. And I loved watching “It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown”.
As a young adult out on my own, my wife and I threw outrageous Halloween costume parties that spilled out of our tiny starter home into the street and down the block. I think we had over 300 people at one. Fortunately I had won the local rock radio station’s contest for coolest Halloween party invitation, so they showed up with the a hearse and a coffin full of beer and the cops to provide crowd control and insure a good safe time was had by all. Somewhere in that background, I am sure there was a VCR playing a treasured personal copy of “It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown“.
For many of us, Linus Van Pelt was our introduction to alternative views of the universe. This 4 to 5 year old had somehow worked out that Halloween was the really cool holiday we all should be celebrating, and remained faithful to his personal gnosis despite year after year of disappointment, ridicule, and growing evidence to the contrary. Peanuts, often seen as a harmless little kids comic strip, taught lessons on a par with Aesop, and introduced us to personality types in the world that we’d only fully realize as adults. Plus the dog owned a Van Gogh. How cool is that?
Peanuts is a registered trademark of United Features Syndicate.
Then the kids came along and I loved getting them dressed up, getting myself dressed up, and going door to door for candy and treats. As they got a little older, we resumed a more subdued holiday party scene, with giant home-made props in the yard (like an Alien hive and a 40′ dragon with Nazguls). This lasted through my youngest’s undergrad years in college. I’m not quite sure what the neighbors made of a 6′ 3″ Abby Schuto accompanied by a 6′ 9″ Professor Dumbledore, but they gave us candy.
Which brought us roughly to COVID and the closing of the world. No more parties. No more trick or treating. Just grim, dark, and deadly.
My youngest was in grad school at NYU when the plague hit. She had the good luck to have experienced one Halloween in Greenwich Village before everything changed. I’d been there myself a quarter century before; a quirk of timing with my then employer. It truly is a one-of-a-kind thing. I hope the scene recovers now that the pandemic seems to be dissipating.
This last year I have more personally felt the touch of death than at any other time in my life. Coming thus to a Sabbat with so many associations with death might seem overwhelming. Yet I am deeply associated with death already. I have symbols of death all over my personal spaces. The skeletons and skulls adorn my rooms to the extent that I use glass ones to store coffee and nuts in my kitchen. I am at home with the rustle of the Reaper’s wings.
And Halloween is my holiday. Excepting my birthday next week, which is a second Halloween.
And I aim to have it back.
So in my workshop right now, are the bones of a Great Pumpkin. I’m not exactly sure where he’s going but I’d truly like to have him somewhat airborne. Linus deserves that. He’s been waiting for almost 60 years now.
You’ve heard of people with skeletons in their closets? Well, I actually have them. And skulls, and swords, and other unusual things. Halloween is the time of year when I can bring out all the odd and wonderful things that I surround myself with and it will be considered ordinary by the neighbors and other banal folks.
As you can see, our cat Amelia has spotted the problem here. This is not a Halloween decoration. Since this one is wearing an elf’s hat, it’s clearly trying to horn in from that other holiday that keeps showing up in the stores earlier and earlier each year. She’s determined he’s going back until at least after the Macy’s Black Friday Eve Parade is over.
He’ll be part of a generally safe but still fun spooky display, maybe more than the adults who shepherd them into my yard. Over in the corner you will find the legs of a giant spider, and the bits and pieces of a few hapless victims.
Kids, even the little kids, seem to love this stuff. They’re into things that are a little creepy and a little kitsch. It’s cool to be a bit spooky, because at second glance, you can see the string holding that thing up.
There’s a part of Halloween that is about that “man behind the curtain” thing. Even for us big kids who are doing our thing with real cauldrons, real spiders, and sometimes real bones. Piercing the veil is about more than just calling the ancestors or drawing down the dark forces for malefic intent. It’s our time to peer beyond the surface of things, and see what strings are holding it up. This gives us perspective on our own roles, and power beyond those who don’t know how it all spins round.
For witches this is not an unusual thing, really. One practiced and adept can cross the hedge at will. Some days it’s hard not to. That’s why some of us talk about it being Halloween all year round in our homes. It certainly is in parts of mine. I keep the doorways of the year open should I need to access them.
This brings about something that I am hearing about more often, and that is that the old European Wheel of The Year with it’s Sabbats and High Sabbats and Grand High Sabbats doesn’t fit a modern industrial global society. That’s true enough. In fairness it may not have actually fit the postwar midcentury society it was introduced into. Arguably, much of the adaptation of these traditions was about “returning to the old ways”.
Well, the old ways had no internet. Nor antibiotics, air travel, electric light, public health, and reliable agricultural production. Regardless of how romantic it may seem at times, that miserable, brutish, and short thing was very real. You would not be reading this on your iPhone if we lived by the old ways. You’d maybe have learned a few things from your mom or an old aunt or the village wise woman, but the access you have to the great breadth of human learning, history, and awareness is unparalleled in our history. This is a transformative time, and because we have nigh-instant, nigh-global communication it is possible for everyone to take part in the transformation. We can all of us cross the hedge.
What we carry with us into that wonderful new world, full of terror and possibility, is what we choose to bring along. Just like when we pierce the veil on Halloween night. Do we honor our ancestors by doing only what they were able to do, or do we honor them by standing on their shoulders, the shoulders of giants, and making a new and bright thing that has never before been dreamt of in earth or in the heavens.
It’s a little something to think about at this time of year when we purge away all the spiritual junk we’ve accumulated since the last Halloween.
I’ll be over here in the workshop with my Peanuts DVD. Enjoy the party. See you next week.
So we are in the Halloween Season, and since I have been dropping a lot of somber, contemplative, and downright depressing stuff in recent articles, I thought I’d just jump in here with some good ol’ fashioned spookiness.
Besides, it’s the one time of year when most of us can talk about our weird and witchy sides without getting the side-eye from the normal people. Simply put, I dig the dead. After all, there are a lot more of them than there are of us.
And yes, before you ask, I have dug graves. They were not occupied. I’ve never run across poor Yoric or any of his kinfolk. The cemetery is pretty good about keeping track of who is planted where. I have also dug the graves of many of my beloved cats, And I have built tombs for bees and praying mantises, when I was a child. Death and I go way back.
I mentioned that death was never far away in my Appalachian birthplace. This is somewhat a result of a harder life that even today is not mitigated entirely by the conveniences of the modern technological world. But it also is the consequence of having large extended families in close proximity to one another. Because your great aunt Fannie just lived over the ridge, her passing was known and felt by you, and it rippled through the community.
There is a sort of fatalist bent to the people in that part of the world because of that, and certainly it mirrors generations of their forebears living in tiny villages back in Wales, Scotland, and Ireland. We are all of us descended from coal miners, dirt farmers, and the wretched refuse of Europe’s teeming shores, quite accustomed to sudden reversals of fortune, loss and sorrow. I am sure this had some effect on my own interest in the macabre and morbid.
Ghosts and ghostly visitations were considered by most a fact of life in my childhood. In a culture that was an amalgam of various Protestant faiths, the survival of the individual soul after death was considered an absolute truth, so these spirits remaining, or returning, to the earth to interact with the living was not in any way out of the ordinary. Traditions such as covering the mirrors (or photos of the dead) in the house were aimed at encouraging the departed spirit to go on about it’s business and ascend (hopefully) to its eternal rest. People often took an indirect route leaving the funeral or the church, in order that the dead might not follow them home.
And yet almost everyone had some personal ghost story to tell, usually about being visited by the loved one shortly after their passing, but in some cases seeing them in later years. My grandmother told me that the night her mother was buried, she had a dream that her mother had come to the backdoor of the house, and was trying to get back in. In this instance, she did not take it as a good sign, but instead assumed it was an evil spirit trying to trick her into letting it loose in the house. Such doppelgangers are not unique to mountain lore.
I personally have been visited in dreams by the dead, often that same grandmother. Modern clinical thought would suggest that this is simply my mind replaying memories. That’s a possible explanation. Yet the nature of human consciousness is not even barely understood by science. As there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in that philosophy, I do not know what a dream really is, or what my mind really is. I can’t say that it is not a communication with a mind that is no longer in corporeal form.
This is, of course, the basis of the work of the medium, to contact a spirit mind to mind, and provide a conduit for direct or indirect messaging. I have conducted a séance or two in my lifetime, but it’s not my usual practice. I’m not proficient at it, as I don’t consider myself psychically gifted, rather just intuitive and observant. But I do often talk with the dead, and there are times I feel their presence.
Our modern sensibilities regarding luminous see-through spirits may be informed by this optical trick from the late 19th century. Dubbed “Pepper’s Ghost” for the English scientist who popularized the technique, it consisted of a “ghost” performer offstage, brightly lit, reflected into a pane of glass between the actors onstage and the audience. This method causes the reflected figure to appear as a phantasm interacting somewhat with the live persons on stage. If you’ve ridden the Haunted Mansion ride at one of the Disney parks, you’ve seen it in action.
A variation on Pepper’s Ghost was invented by cinematographer Eugen Schüfftan for the film Metropolis. In the process, a mirror is used in place of the glass plate. The mirror is set up at a proper angle to the camera. Behind it is a miniature model. Opposite, so that it will reflect into the mirror, is a set that matches part of the model, with actors. This set is positioned far enough from the mirror so that the set and actors “fit” into the space of the model. The reflective substance around the area of the set’s reflection is removed, so that the camera sees the background model, with apparently tiny actors inside it. This was used to create the Molloch sequence shown in my article on masks, as well as many others. Like Pepper’s Ghost, the technique has been disused with the advent of digital compositing and sophisticated projection systems, but it’s a great way to spook up the house for Halloween.
The typical ghost of folklore and legend, however, I have encountered more than a few times, and it’s never been that glowing see-through shade that we all saw in the moving pictures. When I have seen ghosts, they look like regular people who just happen to be there. Sometimes it is just out of the corner of the eye, but other times they walk right past.
I had such an experience earlier this year when I was visiting Salem, Massachusetts. The encounter was hardly dramatic, nor was it witchy (as one might expect). A youngish man passed me on the sidewalk. He was wearing a suit and hat from around the late 1940s. It was near the end of the day, and I was tired, and drained from the sensory overload, and it took me a minute to notice that he was out of place for the crowd, the location, the weather, and the century. When I turned to look after him, he was gone.
Now certainly, in a town like Salem where there are a number of eccentric personalities, this may simply have been a local whose particular affectation was period costume. It might have been an actor on the way to a performance. And they may simply have ducked into a storefront in that moment it took my hazy brain to realize something was odd about them.
But it didn’t feel that way. I was sure I’d seen a ghost.
In reflection I had noticed him coming down the street, in that way that you see something and the rest of the picture seems to be less important, like something you are looking at is yelling out “look at me” – “pay attention to this”.
I don’t doubt the person who passed me was not of that time and place, though what he actually was I cannot with any certainty tell you. It was a great ending to a very powerful day.
Most of my ghost encounters have been of this character. I don’t feel that I have ever run into a malevolent ghost – that is, as the spirit of a dead person appearing to me on the material plane.
But there are mischievous and malevolent spirits out there that “haunt” the usual places, old houses, castles, cemeteries, and the gallows hill. These are the goblins our ancestors believed waited behind bush and tree, waiting to carry off the unwary, to a gruesome fate that might involve a large bubbling pot.
There’s a fair argument that such hauntings are more akin to the popular idea of the tulpa. Much of modern magical thought employs this word, derived from, inaccurately, a Tibetan concept, interchangeably with words like servitor or egregore.
These Chaos magic ideas essentially assert that it is possible to create a more or less autonomous force using focused thought. These forces are believed to be capable of carrying out the magician’s will without a direct or constant intention. This might be similar to some elder concepts of the familiar spirit, but in the case of a haunting, it is the raw psychic force generated by a location, event, or person(s) that remain as a roving presence.
The angry ghost is now a trope of paranormal shows, occupying abandoned prisons and mental hospitals where the trauma and abuse of malevolent treatment is common. The pain, suffering, and madness of the inmates has taken on a life of its own. That such things continue to exist in the abandoned places is perhaps because in our own experience of the “ghosts” we feed more psychic energy into it, keeping it alive for generations.
I had the experience the first time that I visited His Majesty’s Tower of London of encountering a malevolence that occupied a part of the stairwell in the Bloody Tower. As I ascended I was almost overcome by a powerful dread. My heart raced. My hair stood on end. The entire time I was in the room at the top, I felt like there was something stalking around in the corners. This was broad daylight, with a number of other visitors. The only other person who noted the presence was my wife, who, while not as odd as myself, does admit experiencing these things from time to time.1 Though she plays it down now, she admitted to having played with two young boys at the Tower when she was a child. Like the man from Salem, they were gone inexplicably. Our family believes that these were the two princes Edward V and Richard Duke of York, who had supposedly been murdered by the usurper Richard III.
Curiously, when we returned a few years later to take our daughters, the presence was not there. I can only assume it was wandering some part of the vast ancient castle. That there should be unhappy dead in such a place is not surprising. The Norman White Tower was erected by William the Conqueror in 1066 on the remains of a Roman fortress. It has been a prison, torture chamber, and place of execution, often with the heads of the dead displayed on pikes on her outer walls. Indeed, the celebrated ravens of the Tower are descended from those corvids who came for the sweet morsels of beheaded criminals. The Tower Guard tell many tales of spirits and spooks that inhabit the place. Whether these are actual personal experiences or retold folklore depends on the person.
The executioner’s tools from the Tower of London are grim testimony to the political realities of pre-democratic times. The axe here may have ended the lives of millions whose crimes were simply displeasing the monarch or their policies of the day. Henry VIII was notorious for sending both wives and advisors to the block, though the royal and upper class offenders were probably done with the sword. In the ensuing chaos of his first daughter’s reign, Mary established an autodafe in England that was an extension of her husband’s Spanish Inquisition. Hundreds and maybe thousands were imprisoned, tortured and burned alive for heresy and witchcraft. When Elizabeth took the throne, despite initial overtures at reconciliation, attempts on her life by Catholic Spain in conspiracies with France and Scotland caused her to institute her own purges.
One would think if horrible death were a prelude to haunting that this old block of good English Oak would be swarming with the vengeful spirits of it’s victims. In an age when strangling, burning, and drawing and quartering were considered acceptable means of capital punishment, and the prelude to execution was often weeks or months of torture and imprisonment, the swift moment at the block may actually have been a merciful end to torment.
The Tower, of course, is much associated with Henry VIII and the subsequent, often tragic, Tudor dynasty. In the break between Henry and the Church of Rome, there followed many years of attendant bloodshed. Henry’s second wife and mother of Queen Elizabeth I, Anne Boleyn was beheaded at the Tower, and is said to roam the grounds. But she was not the only victim of the English Reformation. The persecutions and executions marked the reign of each succeeding monarch, and eventually contributed to the Witch Persecution in Salem in a later century.
When we visited England with our children in the mid-2000s we also went to Henry’s other palace, Hampton Court. This sprawling Tudor marvel is associated with ghosts. One is supposed to be Jane Seymour, who succeeded the beheaded Anne and gave birth to Edward, the son Henry had shed his previous two wives to get. Tragically she died from complications a few days later, and is said to haunt the stairway up to her chambers.
A second ghost is that of fifth wife Catherine Howard. Howard was much younger than the aging king, and is supposed to have openly flaunted extramarital relations. She was also beheaded at the Tower, but according to the story, her spirit replays the desperate attempt to get Henry’s mercy by running screaming down one of the hallways. Henry was engaged in prayer in the chapel on the floor below, and she never reached him.
I have seen neither of these ghosts, but on approaching the doors of that chapel at a later point in the tour, our family all experienced that same feeling of fear and dread that I had felt on the previous visit to the Bloody Tower. There is what is termed as a “cold spot” in that hallway near the chapel. It could, of course, be just a factor of the antique structures air currents. But none of us wanted to go into the chapel at the point. We satisfied ourselves with a swift look in the door, and then went on out to the warmer and merrier kitchens.
I don’t as a general rule frequent abandoned prisons and mental asylums, so I can’t relate any of the stories of those places that are so popular in the public imagination. I think there is a certain carnival sideshow fascination with places like this, and I am not certain to what extent this mystique is not creating the psychic phenomena, or at least perpetuating it. The link in the earlier paragraph on the tulpa leads to a long anthropological article on the subject of popular fascination and the possible creation of thought-form beings. It’s verbally more dense and clinical than even the kind of stuff I write, but if you are up for a challenge, I think you’ll find it interesting. As a bonus it invokes both Mulder and Scully, and the Winchester brothers. How often are you going to find a legitimate scientific article like that? Look for the connection with contemporary occult author and practicing sorceror Jason Miller near the end.
Again this time of year is a busy one for me. It’s my favorite holiday almost immediately followed by my favorite birthday, and also is that time of year when all the obligations and goals of the previous several months either come to fruition or need a final push. I hope you continue to find these articles of some interest. I will be back next week for another one before the doors to the other world swing fully wide.
My paternal grandfather passed away when I was 18. I don’t remember going to the funeral, although I must have. I know that I didn’t attend the graveside service. The cemetery was within sight of my house, and I sat on the back deck and watched from there. It was a nice sunny spring day, not a cloud in the sky.
As the coffin was lowered into the ground, there was a clap of thunder.
I know it was thunder. I eliminated the possibility that it had been blasting at one of the nearby strip mines. These shook the ground, and sometimes threw up a cloud of debris. It wasn’t that. Nor was it any other phenomena that was easily explained.
It was one loud clap of thunder, and then silence.
When the burial party returned home, my mother asked, “Did you hear that thunder?” It was a rhetorical question. We all heard it. There wasn’t any speculation or spiritual debate. It was a sign. My grandfather had been accepted into the next world.
Some years later, my cousin’s father (who was technically also a cousin, but due to age was regarded like an uncle) also passed. We had the same experience at his grave. Warm clear day. No sign of rain. A single thunderclap as the coffin was lowered.
My cousin who had been in attendance at my grandfather’s grave found this gratifying. Its fair to say that our relationships with these men, and the paths they had walked in the world, were complicated. And yet all of us took these signs as a favorable portent. The individual had received life everlasting.
I should clarify that I was not deeply religious and certainly not Christian at this time in my life, nor do I think I really ever have been. But in rural Eastern Kentucky, the biblical is interwoven into the culture. Like the ever-present tobacco and coal smoke, you can’t help but take some of it in.
I have seen this same grandfather go cut a fork from a sapling tree, hold it out before him, and where the tip would dip, water would be found. He did his dowsing for the construction company that employed him as a carpenter and woodworker. He pointed. They drilled. That was how they situated wells on new homesites.
The ancients had many means of divining the future. Elaborate rituals often involving animal sacrifice were carried out by a priestly caste, to determine the most propitious time for state events like the crowning of kings and waging of wars. Dream interpretation was practiced by the ancients as well. Usually this would be the dream of a chief or king, since those persons personified the state or tribe. But there were clearly priests and cunning folk who provided such services for the common people, for a fee, of course.
Modern superstitions such as a black cat crossing your path are possibly Medieval in origin. Cats in general were considered ill portents in early Islam. The witch’s cat was frequently cast as the devil in disguise in witch hunter manuals like the Maleus Malificarum.
Poor Bast earned such a bad reputation that feral cat populations were eradicated in many places, leading to a growth spurt in the rodent population of Europe’s cities. The fleas on the rodents carried the germ Yersinia pestis, which spread rapidly through the population. In the end one-quarter to one-third of the people died, leaving whole villages empty of life. We call it the Black Death. Better they should have kept the cats.
No one considered this the least out of the ordinary. Nor was the thunder roll that sent him off unexpected. He had some power about him, though he was a lay preacher in the Hardshell Baptist church. He had the intimate knowledge of nature that comes from relying on it for your food, medicine, and shelter. He knew what every kind of tree was, from bark, leaf, nut, and sap. He knew the wild herbs, and we routinely collected them. American ginseng was part of our autumn harvest, and would go to buy Christmas presents for the grandkids.
He was, generally speaking a good man, but he was also a hard one, and that comes from a hard life in a hard place. I learned things from him, but I can’t say that I ever really knew him. I experienced him when we went hunting or foraging or fishing. I didn’t care for many of those activities so perhaps the distance was as much my fault. In any case, there’s things the older me would have liked to have asked him. I know I have spent much time looking for things in books that I could have listened to when he was around.
Every generation we get away from the dead we lose some of who they were. My children never knew him. He is a complete abstraction. He’s a name for a man in a picture. I had the same experience of my great-grandfather, who was, apparently, the only other left-handed person in memory of our family.
Left-handedness is one of those “signs” in many cultures. Often viewed as evil, or unnatural, it’s a minor genetic variation that is frequently suppressed in early childhood. The term “Left-hand path” is almost synonymous with malefic magic and those who practice it. In Latin, the right hand is “dexter” whence emerges our word dexterity. The left hand is sinister. Well, guilty as charged.
Signs and portents are not necessarily magical. Some of them are quite natural, but people either don’t know about them, or they don’t pay attention to them. Those who do then acquire the prestige of a prophet, simply because they looked around. For instance, I can usually tell you when it’s going to rain. There’s an ache in my left ankle that seems to increase a day or so before a front comes through. I am fairly certain that this is the result of a change in barometric pressure, that my arthritic joint picks up as well as a column of mercury. If I also happen to notice the ants are building their hills up higher, and the leaves on the trees seem to be floppy and turned over, I am sure it’s going to come a gulley-washer.
The ants, of course, are responding to some indicator that they sense in the air or the magnetic field of the earth and preparing for the inevitable flooding of their tunnels by dredging. The trees are pulling the fluid out of the leaf that makes them rigid, in order to be less likely to be torn or pulled off by wind. This is probably, again, some response to changes in air pressure that are sensed in the very cells of the plant.
Okay, so it isn’t Doppler radar. But in context, and in the absence of Doppler radar and other prognosticating tools, it was how the wise knew it was time to put up the chickens and get in the house.
There’s a storehouse of lore about many important survival skills that predate modern industrialization and factory-farming. “Planting by the signs” is as old as the hills, as they say, but likely is a mixture of immigrant traditions and indigenous knowledge that survives in a few places still. The “signs” most typically is the phase of the moon, and then the moon at certain times of the year. This was determined to be most propitious so that the chance of a late frost wouldn’t blight the seedlings that just emerged. If you have heard the term “harvest moon” then you know of what I speak. There are interpretations that it meant a moon so bright you could bring in the crops by it, but that is not right. It was the right moon, at the right phase, in the right month. Any later and there’d be frost on the pumpkins, and you would have lost valuable and vital food. You might find this information in a modern Farmers’ Almanac, which was first compiled for this purpose. You’ll find a lot of other omens and signs there as well.
Birds are considered omens of good and ill in many cultures. In the Rime of the Ancient Mariner the man who killed the albatross is considered to have slain a good sign. But when the winds pick up and the ship sails northward from the polar seas, they hail him heroic for killing the bird that “brought the fog and mist”. Of course, the Mariner’s hellish voyage was just beginning, and none that condemned or hailed him would survive the trip.
These two birds visited me this year. The white ibis, bird of Thoth, the Mercury of the Egyptians, arrived on a February morning. That night my wife’s mother passed away. The black crow that came and sat on my balcony arrived a day after my father had died. These can, of course, be seen as coincidence. But I watch the birds more closely now.
As death was always near in mountain life, there were signs to look for. Remember that these people were descended from those who knew the cry of the Banshee or the Wailing Woman. The caterwaul was a creature, like Texas’s jackalope, that has evolved into a tall tale. Originally as a kind of Banshee spirit, its mournful cry presaged a death in the community. I have heard a wildcat screech at times that sounds like the keening of a woman in pain or fear. This is the beast they speak of. Sometimes, of course, it’s the call of a screech owl, echoing over “holler and hill” that mutates into the warning of impending loss. So too, was the call of the whippoorwill. Owls, of course, are birds of ill omen anyway, companion of witches and creatures of the night. But any bird that flew into the house meant that someone under that roof would die soon.
Shooting stars are another sign of bad things to come, at least in the area where I grew up. A meteor was reason to believe death or hard times were on the way. Closer to earth ghost lights and “fireballs” were often seen in the deep woods at night. While many of these may have been optical illusions, caused by atmospheric conditions and the moon or even terrestrial campfires, some of the older generation swore they’d been chased by them. They were often seen near so called “Indian mounds” like the barrow wights of English lore. These earthworks, if indeed they were not naturally formed, carried their own mystique, so the association of protective and malevolent spirits with them is not unusual. There are prehistoric mounds to the western part of the state, and northward in Ohio, so the presence of smaller ones in Eastern Kentucky is not impossible. Unlike their European counterparts, most are believed to have been ceremonial rather than funerary. Yet the spirits linger.
As we moved into cities and towns, and got electric light to drive off the night and weather forecasts on the color TV and geological surveys to drill our wells, much of the mystery and wonder of the old ways quietly slipped into the nothing. I am probably the last generation to have some direct connection with the tales and experiences that give meaning to “superstitions” that may go back to Medieval times or earlier. My children and their peers, and the generation that is coming up, can only respond to it as a recorded abstraction to be read about on the Internet.
The mantic arts are so popularly believed now that Halloween decorations tout the Tarot and “Fortune Telling”. Tarot like many systems, is based on random patterns being interpreted as portents of things to come. Random information could come from cracks on heated bones, the shapes of clouds, or the spots on a goat’s liver.
Other oracles were based on random outcomes of coin tosses or dice rolls. In the case of the former, a set number of tosses were combined and read as a pattern or value. This value was then looked up in a list. Later, yarrow sticks were then shaken in a bundle. The sticks that fell out gave the meaning. This is known as the I Ching, and is one of the most popular Chinese methods of predicting the future.
While there are certainly still wise folk in the hills, like Byron Ballard, who are recording and bringing forward these practices, there is a difference between living it and reading about it. Like the coal smoke on a brisk fall evening, you breath it in, and it becomes part of you. Otherwise, it’s not the same.
I hope you have found today’s tales worth the telling. I will return next week with more autumn thoughts.
