The Telling: Considering Jesus of Nazareth Part One

Enrique Simonet: He Wept Over It, 1892

I didn’t know if I would do it or not because I don’t like to do things over and over from perceived tradition, but once again, as Lent ends, I am watching the long film Jesus of Nazareth. It is a Telling, and one of the best Tellings of the Gospel. Unlike most Bible movies which I flatly have a hard time watching, I believe in this one, and so because I believe in it, it opens up questions worse movies don’t create. Jesus of Nazareth is a piece of art. It is not a window onto what actually happened. It is not even how things “ought to have happened” And there are things that seem improbable or left out which make me wonder about the mystery of Christian origins. I am an occultist and a heretic, and as an occultist raised in Catholicism who still finds Catholicism deeply valuable, I must look at this story and see what is hidden and what is left out, for the occult is not outside or separated from the last two thousand years of Christianity, but interwoven with it as it was interwoven with the religions before.

We all know that the Church began—well, it began many times if you read the Scriptures, but the official date is Pentecost. The church began on Pentecost in the Upper Room when the Holy Spirit descended and yet, as I watched the movie and remembered the Bible, I wondered about the exclusive truth of this Jerusalem Church. This was a church where the one hundred twenty disciples, most of whom are never mentioned in the Gospels and certainly not in this or any other movie, receive the power to speak to the crowd in Jerusalem in every language making the Church international and centered in Jerusalem from the beginning. Though later it is a matter of Jew and Gentile, from the very beginning, the whole business is an international one. And we mustn’t imagine that Judaism was then as it is now. It was at its heart and origin Mediterranean with no long history or persecution at the hands of European Christians.

The land of Israel was primarily divided in Jesus’ time into Galilee, Samaria and Judea. Judea was the heart of the Jewish world though it could not have been exclusively Jewish. Samaria was Samaritan (for our purposes, Samaritans are a type of hybrid Jew) though one wonders if it was wholly Samaritan and Galilee was defined as being Greek, meaning it was Hellenistic in culture and would have the most mixed multitude. It would have been international. Far from Jesus growing up in backwater, he would have come from a fairly integrated place. His followers in Galilee would not have needed a holy spirit Pentecost wind to understand multiple languages.

Watching Jesus preach and teach to the crowds in this movie, something occurs to me that doesn’t occur in just reading the bible, which is that, rather like now, the question of who is a “real follower” is quite open. How many of those hundreds or maybe thousands of disciples listening to Jesus stayed, and how many turned away, and what does turning away and staying mean? Was the line as clear as we would like it to be? In the Gospel of John, when Jesus feeds the five thousand and says they must eat his body and drink his blood, many turn away in a very clear cut away, but I imagine many were just simply confused.

And we, two thousand years later can also be confused because the temptation is to dig through all this story, history, history specials, conflicting Gospels and conflicting churches for the real Jesus, the true story. I have said it before and will say again. That is all hidden from us because the true story in veiled in mystery. The true story, the heart of the labyrinth is not on a hill outside of Jerusalem, but in our midst, which is just was Jesus was trying to tell us, and is telling us still.

I imagine many were simply confused about the crucifixion and the resurrection. The land of Israel is not a large one, but it is full of mountains and hills and valleys, so there is very little travel as the crow flies, and in the time of Jesus there was certainly no telegraph, no internet or television, nothing to tell one what had happened quickly. Surely there were people who considered themselves followers of Jesus who simply saw him travel for Jerusalem, not entirely sure of what was going to happen to him and received, in one foul swoop as most young Christians do, the entire news of his death, resurrection and possibly ascension and the beginning of his church. Is it possible that even before Jesus departed for Jerusalem there were those living as the Church? There is an odd passage in Matthew where Jesus is giving advice to the disciples about how the Church is to be run. He mentions the Church, seemingly anachronistically, and though I have counted it as a mistake to think of Jesus as the founder and not the inciting spark of Christianity, though many people including me have pointed to Jesus’s mentions of the Church as rewrites placed in his mouth by those who came after, could there have been some nascent churches existing in Jesus’ lifetime?  The Bible tells us that it was Peter’s baptizing Cornelius and the council of Jerusalem later in the Book of Acts that opened up the Church to Gentiles, but the Gospels also tell us that Jesus went across the sea to the Gadarenes, who herded pigs, and cured a man of demons by sending them into the pigs, and that this same man (or men in some Gospels) went off and preached Jesus. Who were these Gadarenes? They don’t seem like Jews.

 But what was first century Judaism? I don’t think it resembled modern Judaism any more than first century Christianity resembles a Southern Baptist barbecue. Biologically we all climbed out of the same soup and our ancestral microbes resemble each other more than they resemble us or we resemble the things we spread from, and this is true of religion and ethnicity as well.  Modern Judaism came into existence as the bloody rival of Christianity for three centuries until Christianity won and the fight became very, very…. very one sided. Judaism grew to reflect  1. the absence of a temple, 2. the presence of deep persecution as a minority and a scapegoat in a story not of their invention, 3. a new central home in a very white Europe and 4.  decidedly being NOT Christianity and strictly having a theology which could never allow for the possibility of Christianity.

 The Judaism of Jesus’s day would not have had any of those points.

Christians and Jews like to pretend that the ancient people of Israel were strictly monotheistic and strictly monolithic, but neither one of these things could have been true. We know ancient Israelites worshiped the same gods as their neighbors and actually were their neighbors. Canaanite, Judaen, Israelite are not so much different ethnicities as different modalities of the same thing, and the first century people of Palestine, especially of Galilee, would have known very well about Greek thought and religion and culture. The fact that Christianity would take on more pagan aspects or that Jesus immediately takes on pagan myth aspects needs not have been something occurring from the outside slapped on by later Gentile Chrisitans, and it is only a bad thing if you are an Orthodox Christian who believes there was ever a pure Judaism and these two things were holy and right while everything else is pagan, mistaken, deficient and wrong.

The emergence of Christianity as mythic, mystery based and distinctly different from any Judaism we know today could have been quite natural and from the beginning. Mount Carmel, where Jesus was Transfigured and where he also reveals himself to the disciples as the Messiah before going south to Jerusalem, was also the shrine to the Great God Pan. Rather than imagining the disciples like rigid yeshiva boys or country Amish who knew nothing of Greek culture and completely despised it, what if they were rather sophisticated and naturally absorbed it? John’s Jesus speaks in almost Gnostic terms, and in his version of the triumphal entry, where Jesus gives the speech about how a grain must died to become wheat, we are told that Philip speaks Greek and brings Greek disciples to Jesus. What if this was at the heart of the irreconcilable difference between nascent Christianity and what would become rabbinic Judaism?

The Telling

Passiontide begins. At tonight’s service we come to an altar draped in red with images removed or covered. We bear the cross with a wreath of red berries and hear the first readings for Sunday. We hear the first hymns that are the songs not of Lent and fasting, but of the Passion, suffering, rejection and dying. Later on in the second service, there is the introit to the Passion

Vindicate me, O God, and defend my cause against an ungodly nation; from wicked and deceitful men deliver me, for you are my God and my strength. Send forth your light and your truth; these have led me and brought me to your holy mountain and to your dwelling place.

We come in with the reddish cranberry candle and with the great red shrouded image of the Madonna holding the dead Christ, and then sit down to hear the Passion. At the time that Christ dies, I rise and unveil the painting,  and then kneel and hear the rest of the ancient story.

We will hear the story tomorrow morning as well and then we will hear it the next Sunday, twice. And then we will hear another version of it on Good Friday, also one in the middle of that fateful week called Holy Week. Years ago Passiontide lasted two weeks for everyone. The story of the Passion was heard now, and Palm Sunday’s story the next week. Convenience flattened it all down to one week. Looking at this story over and over again for two weeks, living in the Passion too long, was too much.

This time of year, this time of deep storytelling, I am reminded of a magic I often forget, and that is the magic of the Telling, the transformation and power worked by the preparation to sit down and hear an ancient story, hear what is called a myth. We are so wasteful with our words and what we hear, but the bard believes his own telling and shaping of words, his story creating, his poetry, are a sort of sacred work, and we also believe that the hearing, the sacred silencing and taking time over and over again to hear the old stories, is the holy work too. We light the candles on the altar, the modern memory of when bonfire and altar, congregation and community were one, and we leave the silly mind, and the superficial mind and the so called rational mind behind and offer our whole childlike selves to receive the Telling. Dionysus, Isis, the Passion of Jesus, Adonis, Moses, the many Creationsall the different ways these tales are told, are sacred to us, the tellings which make these specific stories different from any other stories,. And they do not remain the same because these stories are composed of layers, because every story is a conversation inside of itself. Every writer knows that. And we ourselves are conversations, looping contradictions, eyes opening and shutting like cherubim or Argus and so, though the story seem the same, and we seem the same as well, the alchemy is in what comes to us and from us at this particular Telling, what magics might be wrought when we are willing to give ourselves to tales which are not simply pastimes.

Postscript:

I am watching a movie I have watched several times before: Jesus of Nazareth, the old Franco Zefirrelli made for television miniseries with movie production values. As I watch his version of the story of Jesus unfold, as I remember the Passion performed last night, it occurs to me that these stories are like the Lapwing. If you get hung up in them, you miss them. Was it really like this, exactly, whatever that means? I am almost offended by the especially blond haired and blue eyed boy they found to play young Jesus. Did Jews in the first century really live like this? Did Jesus really say those words? How real this all seems. How real was it? But this is the Lapwing. Even for the one who simply asks did any of this happen at all? it is the Lapwing, the sacred Mother who flaps around the holy thing and threatens to take those not intent on contemplation and discovery away from the holy thing by distracting with what does not matter. My experience is Christian and so Jesus means more to me than Adonis or Attis or Dionysus, but even the story of Jesus is something that is not entirely itself, that is a mystery pointing to something I cannot name and cannot explain. Even in unbelief or ante belief or heretical belief, hearing the Telling, being present for it, a glory will be revealed which the story can only hint. We must wait for it. This is the glory of the Telling.

To Be the Witch Continued

                             

Does it work Crudely put we come over and over again to the question, does witchcraft work? And then one has to sound sagacious and a little Socratic and say, “What do you mean by work?”

I used to know someone, ungracious, fearful, unkind, unconscious, always resentful and not terribly courageous, silly actually. He went to a spiral dance at a Unitarian church and came back a witch. He was talking about how magical it was that some old love he had was coming back into town and they were getting together, and it was only a little while later I thought, someone like him would make the worst out of any blessing that came his way. Ungracious by nature, even if he did possess any magic, whatever he worked for, no matter how good it turned out, would look to him like it didn’t work. His perception was so very off and his attitude so bad.

I was describing to someone the mind of a book character who was a witch and I said that one thing that distinguished her in her training was that she was almost hyper rational because she was always observing the world around her, and even examining the fidelity of own mind. Was she looking at things as they were? Was she looking at herself as she was, or was she simply playing a role. I said that, fictionally or in reality, an effective witch would have to be such a person, because how could you really know if you were effecting the world, or how would you really begin to effect the world if, in fact, you couldn’t see the actual world you were in?

For understanding magic we may have to turn to literature again. Ursula K LeGuin’s Earthsea wizards describe working magic as little as possible because each magical working effects a change and you have to see if the change really needs to be made. If you believe in such things and you acknowledge connections you have to understand you don’t really know the full force of setting a thing into motion.

I have referenced Peter S Beagle’s Shmendrick in the The Last Unicorn, the magician who becomes a true wizard when he learns to say to the magic, do as you will, and even George RR Martin’s characters say something to this effect noting that magic is like a sword with no handle.

So, I’ve said the nature of a witch in my tradition is to be first and foremost a priest and a devotee with all that entails. This precludes me from being, at least  purposefully, a magician who is attempting to contact malignant forces or control them, and it also precludes me from being someone who thinks they understand more than they do. As I have said in the past, the true witch is always an apprentice and never master of the Magic, but apprentice to it. When we call up magic, we are calling up the Holy Child and the Holy Child is Adonoy, is Adonis, Cernunnos, Hermes the Psychopomp and Master of Mysteries. We are opening ourselves to being led more than leading.

But I opened up with one question: does it work? And this is an important and constant question. And then I have several literary explanations, but in the end there was one question and it deserves an answer. The answer is the magic is as good as the practice and the practice is as good as the witch, The answer is yes.

To Be the Witch

There are some times when the rites must be practiced again. Tonight I feel like they have more meaning than they ever had before. I remember the first time I went through the first degree and the second degree and the third degree. They were fumbling and odd and yet, after passing through them my life was changed. I remember them being arduous. I don’t believe you can do something only once, not something like initiation. You have to do it again and again, not simply go from novice to knowledge to sage and then sit there again eventually you must start again, remember why you came, go through these services and rites again.

The later half of lent is that time for me. Having passed through the first degree and the second, having moved in circles and lifted candles and worked the tools, lit the candles, knelt at the altars and been anointed, I sit at the altar, legs folded under me. Something has happened. Something has been done. I have made my vows. I have promised to keep secret the magic and mystery save to the proper people in the proper circle. Power has been placed upon me, the power of the tradition, the power of the Goat Footed One placing his hand on my head, my own power, long forgotten, I place upon me again. I feel it. You have been made witch and priestess, having been made witch and priestess, you are made witch and HIGH priestess, the knives, the wants the pentacles, the censor are yours, the summoning of the circles is yours. You are no congregant. You are no bystander. You are no theoretician. You are priestess and witch. Priestess I say because even a female Christian priest is called a priest. Priestess of of the Craft, of the Goddess, is the beloved of the God, and so I am priestess. I am witch. I feel it.

And yet?

What the fuck does it mean?

In a world where we have seen Samantha Stephens sit on a cloud with Endorra and fly to Paris for lunch, where we have seen Harry Potter dodge about on a broom and play Quidditch, what does it mean to assert, I am the witch? In a YouTube world of often shallow or silly or disturbed white people who have a great desire to sell pentagram charms and and call attention to themselves, who display much gullibility and greed and very little skill, power or wisdom, what does it mean to assert, I am the Witch? Once upon a time a witch was what one was called when people saw what you were doing and how you were living and called it witch craft. Now ex boyfriends who wear black and are afraid of he dark  or walking in the woods buy a Wicca book from Barnes and Noble so everyone can see and tell whoever will listen they are witches, so I must always ask myself what is a witch? And as a witch, derwydd, priestess and priest, what is my work?

Once you have moved past the static of this questioning, the answers may not be so difficult. For those of us who are initiated the first question is what is a priestess? What is a priest? For us the word witch is tied in and inseparable from this first question. So much of priesthood as we see it is defined by Christianity and especially Catholicism. The priest here represents the establishment and is empowered by the establishment. The priest here is said to have the power of changing bread and wine into consumable God. When the priest offers rites, they work because he has the power of God. When he forgives he forgives for God.  The priesthood is conditional. You must be male and a certain type of male. You must make it through seminary, be ordained. The priest is the mediator between the people and God.

This tends to be  something many priesthoods have in common. The Bible tells the very odd story that God formed his own religion in the Sinai desert, had Moses make of his brother Aaron a priesthood and of the whole tribe of Levi priests and stipulated how they were to be priests. Many people believe that ancient Israelites would have had many priestly clans to many gods, or many faces of what they would know as God. But some old glory remains in the examples we’ve seen. The holy person does not stand between people and god, but rather is the conduit of God. It is the difference between a shut water gate and the river itself. The holy one is living in the conduit and needing to remember that over and over again. The holy one does not stand for any establishment,  does not uphold the power of males or nations or that which is already in power. The holy one is the alchemist, changing bread and wine into God, changing the very ordinary into the holy, changing what was impossible, by her or his very presence, into what is blazingly apparent. But in most societies, and certainly he ones from which our western world descend, that holy one, when working outside of the bounds of male power and assumed established and approved ways of viewing God, the holy one who works beyond the pale of what makes most people comfortable and is unconcerned with orthodoxy, indeed is heterodox, and often enoughthe holy one who is a woman and not a man is called THE WITCH.   

Mother Sunday and the White Candle of the Equinox

As we light candles and burn the incense I am gathering up the stuffs for what this new week and this particular Sunday is. Laetare Sunday, the Sunday in which we are joyful, in which we remember joy. This is Mothering Sunday, with so many connotations we may come back to. This is the Sunday right after the Equinox. This is the Sunday when the white Springtide candle is lit, this big tall pillar which isn’t burned down and hunched over melted down with old work and old blessings, but new and with only one blessing:, only one consecration offered up since yesterday:

"We kindle fire this day! In the presence of the Holy Ones:

Without malice, without jealousy, without envy.

Without fear of aught beneath the sun.But the High Gods.

Thee we invoke: O light of life:

Be thou a bright flame before us:

Be thou a guiding star above us:

Be thou a smooth path beneath us;

Kindle thou in our hearts within,

A flame of love for our neighbor,

To our foes, to our friends, to our kindred all:

To all men on this broad Earth.

O merciful son of Cerridwen, From the lowest thing that liveth

To the name that is highest of all."

This is a new candle, and it isn’t even the one we will burn for the Easter Vigil. I snuff it out after lighting the Golden Lantern. Even as we chant and pray we remember the Golden Lamp is light that burns within, the light given from the very source of light, and we ask that it might increase and light all things. And even as I pray this I see what a mess this house is, the cleaning that never happened. Tonight there is the work of cleaning the soul in silence and as we clean the floor in diligence.

Next week is the beginning of Passiontide so it is fitting that this is Mother Sunday. We need the Mother or Passiontide is nothing. Without her all of this business is just sacrifice. It’s just war, it’s just slaughter, calculated offering of life. It’s just the stiff upper lip. The presence of the Mother at the altar is not only the presence of grace, but the presence of redemptive sorrow, sorrow that goes beyond the self or self pity to embrace the suffering child in this world, the suffering child in you, sorrow and love that sees in the offering of the Holy Child, the offering of my child. The nature of the Passion and the sacrifice is changed. The necessary sacrifice becomes the awful offering of my baby that I do not assent to, the offering I woefully accept. I accept the sorrow, I accept the inability, I offer this pain, not this child. I offer my life in this child’s place. And in the Mother the slaughter and sacfirice on the altar becomes rebirth. The cross becomes matrix, becomes open arms, becomes living tree. The tomb, from which there is no delivery, is made cradle, and life, womb.

Notes from a Sickbed on Saint Patrick's Day

I am sick. There’s no getting around that. And on one of the most important days of the year to me, Saint Patrick’s Day. At the morning service I cannot even smell the incense my nostrils are so blocked, but this is not unusual. The high days of turning are usually the times of sickness. Many an All Hallows or Yule has had me sniffling and at less than my best. Last Friday, before I began to feel awful, the weather was beautiful and warm and there was energy in me, but even as that day came to an end, the sickness was coming and now it’s almost a relief that it’s here.

This year we are in the midst of a pandemic which has businesses shutting down, people worried, towns on lock down. Our school system shut down yesterday, but so many of us were getting ill it was almost a relief. Now I have the chance to just be sick and I think you need to just be sick before you can just get better. The prayers of Saint Patrick become even more urgent today, that we will be delivered from this deathly winter and this new disease, that we will be delivered from the many things that come against us, that spring and the renewing God will show up in force and with great power.

The candles on Patrick’s altar remind us of the story that long ago it was Patrick’s fire that became one with the druid fire, that in times of old the druids lit a fire from Temair that went all over Ireland on Samhain, but that this became the fire of the great candle which burns not only in churches on the eve of Easter, but in women’s gatherings and on my very altar.

It isn’t strange or an exception to the miserable cold that we put on green and drink and feast in the middle of Lent. It isn’t out of place that in sickness we have the Feast of Saint Patrick. This day occurs because it is Lent. It is because the spring is returning, though often haltingly it seems, that we are in the midst of time of change and penitence. And this is the reminder that much as I and others must do with out poor sick bodies in waiting for things to turn, rather than rush in with the violence of haste, we must wait for the miracle of healing that is the gift of God and magic in all the earth. We must rest.

Never Falter

"Ye who take but one step on this path must continue to the end, for this path is beyond life or death."

-Patricia Crowther

As we go into the second year of Lapwing and Hound, one thing that comes to mind is the need to keep being true to the Craft and the dedication to continue walking in the Mystery.  The adept does not stop seeking, does not stop digging deep, does not cease from devotion. The witch does not stop undoing normal ways, and breaking off from assumed norms and yet, most who take up that mantle eventually do. This is why so many of you have nothing to say, have never really practiced the art of having something to say or doing a deep dig. Too many would be witches, content to walk away from the churches they grew up in, content to accept something else, were also content to never dig deeply or search for a new thing. This is why so many descend into endless postings of memes and notes about nothing truly interesting, or selling what little witchy wares they have, planning the same old conventions and gathering they have every year, business witches, witches stuck in some type of made up theology because they have given up their own search for truth because that type of searching is hard.

There is an odd thing I’ve seen which is some occult people mocking Christian faith healers and Pentecostal people. This is strange to me because, once you have embraced the occult, and once you understand that power is everywhere, once you embrace the name witch, you have lost a great deal of the right to be sarcastic and doubting. Recently I heard about something not recent at all, the prayer meetings at the Cathedral of Saint Nicholas in Leipzig which were held for years in East Germany once a week, and spilled out into the entire community. The power of that prayer is regarded as one of the triggers for the end of the Communist regime there. So many people, gathered together before the Divine presence in resolute hope and love brought about a mighty work.

Once I made a posting called Witches Unite, but the truth is there just are not enough witches for only witches to unite, and like any other movement, when looked at closely, there are some devotees and a large number of congregants (posers, dead weights, semi devout, confused, hangers on) who are not about to do much of the Great Work. Twenty centuries ago, a great revelation yielded Christianity, and such was the spirit of that religion that almost immediately, Christians began to divide from each other one what was the right way to receive this revelation, who was real, who was false. They turned within and built up dogmas, doctrines, right beliefs. It could not be helped. Christianity was spawned from Judaism, a religion which denied the truth in all other religions. But in this age we reach beyond borders. It is not enough for a witch to call to other witches. It is, frankly, too many silly and useless people bearing that name. From now one people of good will who walk on the borderlands and live in the left hand world, who know and work magic and prayer have to come together and recognize each other despite their differences and never minding what they call each other, or how they name the Great Work.

In the next year we continue to veer away from the common way of things and go bone deep into the truth as we can know it, to not camp down on a few assumed points of someone else’s theology, but to remember that God is a Stranger and we are ever walking toward that Mystery. If the mystery is a thing to be solved, then we are in trouble, but if the mystery is to be loved, then we are on a true path, for how can we ever reach the end of knowing or understanding that which we love.