Time Traveling

Timetravel

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.


picketts-charge
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.


gubment-cow
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.

Back next week.

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You Stole My Holiday

Pilgrims

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It needs to stop. Here. Now.

Before there are no more TVs left at Best Buy.

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

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


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

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

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

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

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