The Revolution Cannot Be Televised.

In so much of what would be liberalism, for the sake of greed, it has ceased to be progressive. Progressivism yearns toward something new, but so many who would call themselves feminists or activists are helping in making the world ground to a halt so they can get the present goodies.

Germaine Greer predicted that as the world changed, as the witches came from the heath and we left a patriarchal and colonial frame of thinking for something different, art would cease to be so precious. Fine Art would give way to smaller every day arts. What she was speaking of was that the monopolization of the current world seen through religion in monotheism and through art as fine art would yield to a democratization of creation.

The other place where capitalism has lead to a monopoly on art is in our entertainments. Not many of us are going to spend the day in art museums, but many of us will obsess over musicians and other super celebrities. The obsession with manufactured entertainment keeps us from being creators and sharers. Instead we become consumers and what is done for us is production. We consume “content”

The witch resist the content that is not questions, delivered up precooked and drugged to our doors so we can simply swallow it and go to sleep. The witch is creating, creative, awake, capable of making her own things including her own entertainments.

The witch is waiting for the revolution. The witch is waiting for those things which have not yet happened. The witch is the priestess of the past who is waiting for the new creation. The witch is waiting for the feminist revolution, the Black revolution, the sex revolution which has only one fourth happened and has queers crawling back into Russian doll like closets in closets. The witch is waiting for the indigenous revolution, the green revolution, the second, third and fourth coming no one can envision. The witch is waiting for the equality of things long sought. The witch does not want to things to stay the same. The witch is waiting for the old church to give way to the new church to the no church. The witch is waiting for God the Father to meet God the Mother and then transcend both. The Transex God then a whole new word altogether, like Tiresias the prophet, once man then woman and man again, like the bearded, breasted witches of the Scottish Play, the which is transgressing and transsexual, is waiting for the end of old polarities and gender roles. And all the time the witch is waiting, the witch is working. The witch is stirring her cauldron.

The Young Tradition

Of course what many of us know as the Craft is far from what is commonly called Wicca or paganism, and the further we get into our path, the further it will get from those easy names. Once again, I am making sideways stabs at Margot Adler’s Drawing Down the Moon, and again I am struck by the fact that it unabashedly not only sticks to the Americans (that wa the point of her book), but has no real problems solely focusing on white people dabbling in the occult. She is talking about beliefs and ways of white Americans who are trying to start another stream of religion which she and they call paganism and which excludes large swathes of what most of us know as the Craft. Adler intentionally leaves out Eastern spirituality, but she also excludes American and British root traditions. Satanists, and therefore anyone who acknowledges anyone who could be called the Devil are excluded. So the Witch’s Devil is excluded from Adler’s witchcraft and paganism. In her very thick book there is little about Gardnerian witchcraft and as far as I know, nothing of Alexandrian. Because she defines witches as a subset of pagans, and who use Christian ritual or reference a monotheistic God are also excluded which means Clan of Tubal Cain, again traditional witches on both sides of the Atlantic, high magic, Voodoo, Candomble, Santeria and all Afro Carribean practices.

There are many witches who came into the Craft through a steady diet of Llewellyn books and paganism, or even through Gardnerian and Alexandrian witchcraft, and as they went deeper and needed a thorough spiritual practice, became Buddhist or Hindus or became so Buddhist and Hindu in their practice that it makes no difference to call them witches. And of course, there are those who gave up and went back to church, considered magic a phase. When we come to the Craft we are all seeking different things, and in the light of the Craft will discover what these things are. In time we may find that those things are found by simply entering another religious path, or deepening the one native to us already.

But there are some who find in the occult a deeper devotion, who turn toward those paths ignored in Adler’s book, and outside of the stream of paganism, and deepen themselves in the cousins of Candomble, Voodoo and Santeria, who follow the old wisdom traditions of American and Britain which, usually, in Britain, are called witchcraft. We go down and down, for the craft is as deep as we who practice it are willing to go. It is always a little ahead of us.

And the thing for all of us is that we do not know what to do. We are walking in the dark because there is no way for us prepared. There is no tradition for our tradition. Indeed, we have eschewed traditions and dogmas, teachers and absolute teachings to follow another way, one that we must build ourselves. The going is hard, because this is not just the getting of power, but the getting of mastery over ourselves and not just the getting of knowledge, but the getting of wisdom and understanding, and we don't have the wise grandmothers. We've never seen peace. we didn't have the elders or the in tune and spiritual parents who could set us on our way. We haven't seen the way. The way is counter to this world in which we live.

“The path to life is never very easy for very long. That path is worth it. All beside it pales. Devote yourself.”

Foxes and Birds

When things begin to happen, how can you feel full of power? Magic isn’t even like that. Magic is a poor name for it. Today, after I have lain naked, stretched out in the dark in the form of a Pentagram, I embrace the name of witch because I embrace the darkness. I embrace that Name because I embrace the Devil. If you cannot embrace the darkness of it, the solitariness of it, the river twinkling at night, the walking through the trees, the transgression, the walking away from the normal order of things and the common way of thinking, then how can you be the witch? If you are trying to turn a coven into a Unitarian church, then I really feel like you should be something else. There is a tendency for those of the Craft to make many many videos of themselves, and show off their grim and depressing altars, and these people are laughingly called darker than thous. But there is such a thing as lighter than thous. There are many faces of enchantment, but the dark face is the face of the witch. If one will not embrace such darkness, perhaps one should use a different name.

At any road, though it is a craft, when things begin to happen you realize at the end of the the day it is a matter of asking and receiving from your gracious gods, from the spirits and elements around you, a matter of simply sitting down to wait, of beginning to become quiet and starting to listen, and how can you do anything but sit up in wonder and clap your hands in gratitude when the working and waiting yields wonders? How can you clap yourself on the back and think of this as your own discrete and personal power?

The Craft is deep and constant. It is a way of life. Like Bon in Tibet, it is a way that underlies many other practices and sometimes can be confused or conflated with them. It is the very radical definition of the word religion, from the Latin religio, the binding together. The Craft is a way that gets deeper and deeper and affects all of what the witch does. For me, it increasingly underlies Catholicism. For a long time I tried to make it replace Catholicism, not understanding that I, like several witches before me, had already been given a perfect skeleton on which to build something which ceases to resemble either conventional Christianity or the Wicca I first encountered in Llewellyn books long ago.  Twice in the readings of a church I do not attend, while still adapting its rituals and using its lectionary, have I read about Jesus calling his disciples, saying “The birds have the air and the foxes have holes, but the Son of Man has no place to lay his head.” Having said this, having been very hard on those who would follow him and making us certain that the life of dedication is no easy thing,=, he next says  “Follow me.” This reading has occurred three times in the last few days, by a not quite accident of the lectionary, a reading which speaks the same message over and over again: “The path to life is never very easy for very long. That path is worth it. All beside it pales. Devote yourself.”

The Devil's Due

Yesterday I had to leave town. I had to get out because I had lost a part of myself and had to get it back. I was out of courage, out of imagination, out of some vital witch spirit.  I know that it’s a chic habit to seek the witch spirit in the dark forests in the middle of the night, but I had to find my spirit in the bright sun, on white gold sand and by big water on the beach.

The seeking of the witch spirit came at the end of a powerful working, the fact that the working had turned out might make you think I was full of my own power, full of courage for anything that followed, but no, not so. And so I headed to the water and the sand. I did it like a pilgrim, even a little joylessly, certainly desperately, ready to crawl the fuck out of my miserable skin. The trip was not easy, and I was going through a place I’d never been—but finally I was there, and the Great Goat was there to greet me.

What?

Coming onto the beach I was greeted by, of all things, hovering above me, on a great pole, a giant red ram with curved and shining horns. I reached up and stroked the fiberglass wonder, patting the ram’s nose. I came just short of kissing him because, well, I’m on a public beach. But as I left him, wading onto the white gold sand, I thought, “I had forgotten to make the Devil apart of my life, That’s the problem.”

As we depart from whatever conventional and popular witch teachings there are, and even as we evolve from what schools we are deeply called to, we add our own revelations. Truths specific to us arrive ar our door. New gods, old friends revisiting. It is well known that the Solstice is regarded as the birth of John the Baptist, but the truth is, in Christian tradition, John the Baptist means very little. He baptizes Jesus. He is later arrested by king Herod Antipas and beheaded. His territory is the desert, the sand which is reminding me again of the ram on the sand before the beach. It is John, whom when Jesus is preaching, sends a message to Jesus, ‘Are you the one promised, or should we seek another?” This is a message of challenge, and John challenges King Herod. He is the model of the prophet Elijah who also challenged or opposed the kings of ancient Israel. The word for one who challenges, who opposes, who tempts, is satanas, Satan, a devil. Of old, the territory of devils was, to the Israelites and other desert people, not hell, but the sand, the desert.

In the Egyptian creation story, though Set is called the Dark God and we might associate him with evil, for he certainly brings disorder and challenges the perceived natural order, when he opposes the god Horus, who by conventional morality ought be to considered the hero, Amun and Thoth, the gods who judge between the two of them as they judge all things,  cannot see a definite difference between the two until, by a technicality, Set loses. Set, the husband of Nephthys is also an Egyptian devil, but a great power, and his territory is… yes,  sand, heat: desert.

            The association of the Summer Solstice with the birth of a young green (and beneficent) god who will be slain at winter or some such, is an invention of Robert Graves and an article of faith for Wicca. I am not the first to say that we must again return to the witch’s devil, even as in the last six months I have returned to some type of witch’s Christ. The Old One has many and powerful faces, and while it is fine and good to show some reverence for the corn deity and Forest Lord, to remember the hot force of the of the one who is Prometheus, Coyote, Loki, the Prophet, the disruption, Pan, the Tempter, and the Crooked One, is also important. This summer let’s spend a little time in his burning and mesmerizing heat. There had been so much of sacrifice, let the indulgence begin.

Summer Solstice and the Extraordinary Time

Tonight I hear a sermon for Trinity Sunday in which the minister announces the liturgical year is over. This is a surprise to me. In Catholicism it is always said that the liturgical year ends at Christ the King in November, right before the first Sunday of

Advent. But what this minister has said is more honest. From December till now, the witchly feasts have been fed by and mirrored ancient Christian feasts. The two come from the same source and are related. But it is at this heated time of the year the Churches, which just barely enter into mystery in their deepest of days, leave mystery and story all together and enter into the blank time where nothing happens and nothing is celebrated, the blandly titled, Ordinary Time.

From now on, with precious little relation to mainstream religion, the witch and the wizard tramp on into other side of the year which is shadowed and blank from Christian eyes and still unexplored by the eyes of others. The Birth of Christ yields to the Birth of Saint John, and the next months, beginning with the Solstice yield their own witchly mysteries.

As we come to the longest day of the year, we set our sights on the Stone Castle. We also acknowledge other things, resolving ourselves to what is, to the lack of money or having less of it than before, to the quest for new work, finding new ways to get old things which are going away, to adjusting ourselves to the new rhythms of the summer months, the time when I delve into the past and feel the sweetness of something that is more than nostalgia and the ache of something more than a love of the past. This is the bending toward something old time, when I reach into the past for links to the future.

            Now it is time to take down the Stone Castle and examine it. The first thing it is to me is Tintagel, the castle by the sea where Arthur was born, the place where the Roebuck brings the child our of timelessness into flesh from Igraine’s body. In a shadowy way, Tintagel is also the Grail Castle,  the Castle of the Great Alchemy, the Castle called Corbenic where Galahad is conceived. And the mystery is that Galahad, born from the rape and deception of Lancelot is another form of Arthur born from the rape and seduction of Igraine.  The young prince who in Arthur’s old age pulls a sword from a floating red stone is the mirror of the young king who pulled a sword from a grey stone on an anvil.

The Castle of Stone is the Castle of many contradictions. Though, in the circle it lies to the southeast, it is in Britain southwest, on the world’s edge in Cornwall looking over the sea and the sunken lands of Lyonesse. Though Arthur has been called the winter king born at December 25^th, this is the castle of the Summer Solstice and the Child born of Fire and Heat. As Christ and John the Baptist are linked on two sides of the year, so Arthur and Galahad.

The Stone Castle is the castle of paradox. It is Morgan le Fay’s Castle of Mirrors and rightly so, for she was born here, at Tintagel, daughter of Igraine and Gorlois, sister of Arthur.

She is also Dame Bryson, the maid of Elaine who brings about the conception Galahad about.

Every Castle mirrors every other castle. All castles Mirror the Spiral Castle. But the Castle of Stone is the Castle of Paradox and the castle of deep looking. Galahad is not only the other Arthur. He is the perfected Arthur. Arthur’s swords complete themselves in each other. The Sword in the Stone is the sword in the anvil planted on a rock. It breaks in time and is replaced by the sword from the water, Excalibur. But Excalibur itself is not whole for long. Morgan Le Fay steals the sheath that heals all wounds and never returns it. Galahad is the perfected hero who takes the place of the old hero, and his sword is the sword of perfection. It is the Sword in the Stone that rest not on earth, but on the water much as did Excalibur. It is the two in one. And Galahad is the many in one. He is the new Arthur. He is son of Lancelot, the perfected Lancelot. He supplants Percival, the failed Grail knight, the who is too stupid, who gets the questions wrong. He is the all too perfect knight conceived in sin, the perfect sword raised from stone. Though for the outer world, this is Ordinary Time, to the witchly mind, this is simply another beginning.

Approaching the Stone Castle

As we come to the longest day of the year, we set our sights on the Stone Castle. We also acknowledge other things, resolving ourselves to what is, to the lack of money or having less of it than before, to the quest for new work, finding new ways to get old things which are going away, to adjusting ourselves to the new rhythms of the summer months, the time when I delve into the past and feel the sweetness of something that is more than nostalgia and the ache of something more than a love of the past. This is the bending toward something old time, when I reach into the past for links to the future.

            Now it is time to take down the Stone Castle and examine it. The first thing it is to me is Tintagel, the castle by the sea where Arthur was born, the place where the Roebuck brings the child our of timelessness into flesh from Igraine’s body. In a shadowy way, Tintagel is also the Grail Castle,  the Castle of the Great Alchemy, the Castle called Corbenic where Galahad is conceived. And the mystery is that Galahad, born from the rape and deception of Lancelot is another form of Arthur born from the rape and seduction of Igraine.  The young prince who in Arthur’s old age pulls a sword from a floating red stone is the mirror of the young king who pulled a sword from a grey stone on an anvil.

The Castle of Stone is the Castle of many contradictions. Though, in the circle it lies to the southeast, it is in Britain southwest, on the world’s edge in Cornwall looking over the sea and the sunken lands of Lyonesse. Though Arthur has been called the winter king born at December 25^th, this is the castle of the Summer Solstice and the Child born of Fire and Heat. As Christ and John the Baptist are linked on two sides of the year, so Arthur and Galahad.

Whitsunday

Pentecost is where so many things have happened. As I was putting on the rings and going through the morning rituals I was remembering not only my Confirmation, but also my twenty first birthday party—a week late—and so many other birthdays which took place around this holy time. This summer festival is unlike Christmas and Easter. There is no special Whitsunday dinner, no gifts. The day is simply private and beautiful to me. There couldn’t have been a better day to take the pearl ring and complete the road of Initiation I have walked the last several seasons.

This is the day when the Holy Grail Quest has begun. This is the day the Church was born and another type of quest begun, a type of an ending, but also the start of a new thing. We are led by the Spirit. The White Masked Lady is present as is the Dove, but this Spirit is more force and less form. Calling it she falls almost as short as saying he.

The Spirit is the force moving through all things, the She is the Grail Maiden who bears this force to all who wait for it in the form of the Grail. This energy is moving through us, and we don’t need to force it or push it or make ourselves feel it extra extra good for it to work. At a time like this, the work is the work of stillness and waiting in quiet for the Grail Maiden, she who delivers the Grail in which grace becomes force and force becomes form.