This is the third Sunday in Extraordinary Time, Radhakrishna, and I am thinking about an article I wrote in here called "Homecoming" which was a firm longing for all of us to come home religiously, as well as the feling tht returning to Hindu worship was a homecoming. But these last three weeks have been rough, for sure, bringing real lessons and real fears as well as true resolutions and deep prayers, and the truth is, I haven't mad this place, the place of Extraordinary Time my home in a long time. I still cling to a Catholcisim that is deadly and a Judaism that is dull. It is has been some time since I've sat down and really made a home of Hinduism, really steeped myself in Hindu prayer. Bfore Hinduism was a joy and a relief after Judaism and Christianity, and I equated it with fun, with release, but I didn't delve to the depths of it. As son as I was moving into the MarMain I was thining of going to church again, and when my parents betrayed me, I went back to church in full force And that's fine, I truly think that was a ncessary path, and even th path which eventually led to me fully embracing the Craft and embracing this life that I have now. But I think finally ,at last, Hindusim wants its time, at last, I am ready for it in earnest, for it deserves earnest treatment. I will alwaysbe Catholic, but I can only be an heretical one who never goes to Mass. I will always value Judaism, but I will also always never fully embrac and always be a pagan who believes in Jesus and celebrates his Incarnation. I will always think of Judaism as tribal and dull with bad food Advaita Vedantha I want to make a home of. I want to make a dedication I have never made before.
Young Tradition
The Official Wonder Blog of the Alchymical Rite... The true Way must be carved from our own flesh and watered in our own life's blood.
Sunday, July 2, 2023
Sunday, October 30, 2022
SUNDAY BEFORE ALLANTIDE
Firstly. There’s nothing saying this has to be a long passage, just that we have to write the witch journal every day. Earlier this week we listened to Conner Habib, sort of as the answer to listening to the Bible or the Torah, having a more witchly connectiosn. I actually listened to two of his shows. The second one with Chris O’Doneghue was really good, He’s always kind of good. The first one was somewhat off. The thing about that podcast is you wade through a lot of nonsense to hear that one good thing. But the Good Thing is worth it. Or maybe the true thing. It’s like hearing one true thing is worth all the other mess. In a few days its Halloween, but this whole month is the time of dedication. I don’t want to type everything. I don’t want to jot down every damn thing, just the things that matter.
And somewhere behind it all the fantasy novel.
I have begun to see a slight vision of the fairy world, a vision of a night time land of amber lights and strange creatures, not the old anodine idea of white robed ordinary souls, but of all sorts of creatures, and of lovers found, long and white and lovely, or long and rounded and brown and lovely. I had a vision of Sunny with Kruinh. Let my spare myself too much work, spare myself pushing myself and write half a page of Sunny before bed, see if we can’t give ourselves a few pages of Sunny this morning.
I ran across some monstrous bullshit posted by would be liberals saying: ignore the rampant inflation and poverty. Abortion is what matters. This distraction tactic is nonsense and bullshit and so called liberalism's betrayal of the poor and suffering. Years ago they had "compassionate conservatism" which wasn't real, but which assumed liberalism was automatically compassionate, or that Democrats were automatically liberal. Maybe it is time to rewrite that script and turn our backs on more than one party? Can it be time to think of something new? Well, yes. But what is the thing?
Allantide begins tomorrow night, and tomorrow in the day is a fasting and rededication time. This journal is part of how I am rededicating. I listened to the broadcast The Coming Storm, and right wing people have been using--regardless if they called it that or not--witchcraft and magic, rituals, to bring about a dark time while leftists have eschewed belief in such powerful things, but wonder why they are losing. I once made a joke that maybe the reason Republicans were getting shit done all the time is because, at the end of the day it flatters God when he is invoked. but surely there is some truth to this. My goal, or my desire, is to learn how to invoke for the good of the world and not its harm, how to do it for the progress of the small, and not of the few and great.
Tuesday, October 25, 2022
Second Tuesday in Witch Time
So, why do I even try to fit The People into the context of the art world. They are the extension of myself, my mind made visible. In this sense they are not art, certainly in the western since of the word they are not art. They are not done for clients. They are not sold to rich white people or rich any people. They do ot reflect anything but me. If you love the people, if you are mystified and delighted by the people, then you love and are mystified by me. If you know the people you know me, and the depth to which you know them is the depth to which you know me. If you are confused by them, I confuse you, if you do not understand why they would be made, you do not understand me. Ifthey make you feel eerie, then I make you feel eerie. There is really no way to separate the people from me. Not as long as they exist and I am able to make them at least.
This is the time when great art must be set aside and all the ideas associated with it. From now on we will be artists for ourselves again and instead of fifteen minutes of fame, like Germaine Greer once said, we all all be forever famous to fifteen people. The problem with the way we are –or many people are who say they want to do new things is they snobbishly want to do them in the old way. They want to be acknowledged by the old guard, clapped by the new regime, sit and have tea with the old kings and queens.
When George Washington and Thomas Jefferson and all those
founding fathers went to war against
Last Tuesday it was a gloomy day, turning to a rainy day and
I was full of depression, on my way to
Sunday, October 16, 2022
Sunday before Shemini Atzeret: Final Sunday in Tishri
I stopped keeping the journal because I didn’t have anything more to say about the rules for the brand of Craft that I was following, and I was proud of that old journal. It’s a good one. I still consult it when I’m learning what season it is or what I’m celebrating. But today I turn back to the journal because I need it to be my soulbook. I need it to check my life as a practitioner. High Holidays comes so close to Halloween, that the time when we focus on Judaism is awfully close to the time we focus on the Craft. I took Judaism down and sook it around. I thought it was dead to me for a long time, and then I was surprised when it began to mean something to me, privately, and even more surprised to practice it publicly and often again, to be treasurer to a shul. It’s made me ask a lot of questions about where I fit in the Jewish world, but at last, more importantly, where it fits in me. I come to the end of the high holidays with this real determination to be a better Jew, to practice more, to hang back less, to do new things,
I’m saying all of this because this is my relation to the Craft, even more so. About five years ago, or really about the year my parents both had strokes, my relationship to the Craft began to intensify, to become quite different from what it had been before. There was a year between the time I left the church and the time I went through the three initiations, and the last five years were truly different, much more serious than the ones before.
But now I see there is a time for a deeper change, that I can stay the same or go deeper, and that the same thing that held me back before is holding me back now. There will always be a Christian part of me, and I love—esoterically at least—the story of Jesus and the Passion. It has a hold upon me that not even Judaism does. And it holds me back from practicing the Craft, from delving back. It still makes me afraid that I am going off into something…. Not damnable… but vain and useless. I am still afraid, on a level, that the Craft is bullshit and a bad basket in which to put my eggs. I am still trying to find out what magic is, and still, all this time later, I barely dare to do into it.
Truthfully I’m still exhausted and angry about the magic I worked last year, not having examined if it worked or not or, if in its not working there was a higher working. God I worked and worked to find a new home and I’m still here. How many sigils I worked, prayers I said to find a new and better place, but here I am in this same ragged place paying two hundred plus dollars more a month to keep it. I have an apartment full of packed boxes and shelves empty of books because I still cannot admit to living here when I thought I was going. I still have found no work. Those magical happenings which seem to happen to those who have never worked magic, seem to elude me.
This is a whole lot of seems, and to a certain extend magic is about the correcting of vision.
One one front, since the lighting of the Red Candle, my sex
life has fluourished, since allying myself with the Red Goddess, my sex life
has been prolific even though my erections have not. My art has been prolific
and amazing too, and so has my writing, and my stories and communicating with
readers. This Jewish life, the life of the synagogue has been marvelous as well
the social life, the life of love and friends. And I’ve had my share of
adventures too. Not to mention, I have not fallen into true mishap, and I have
been able to leave town and go adventuring, and I have been kept from
misadventure: ie, the sense to not go to
When I evaluate this magic, funny how it seems like I’m rating it the same way I rate dishwashing liquid, how well it works, if it does this, if it does that. One some level this is fair. On some level you can do this with any practice: is yoga working, is Christianity working? And on some level we have the duty to say when it isn’t. But in another way it is awfully shallow to evaluate the Craft as “working” based on if I get what I want or not.
That day when I walked out of church and took down my altar and walked away from the Church forever, not dramatically as I’d done in the past, I have looked back on as the beginning of my journey to true Craft that wrapped up in my initiations. Now I see it was the beginning of Craft. Craft does not begin or end with spellwork. It begins with turning your back on the old road maps and certainties, lighting a candle, and placing yourself before the divine to see how that brilliant darkness manifests itself to you.
Monday, July 19, 2021
Sixth and Final Sunday of Extraordinary Time: Tisha B'av, Sunday of Suffering.
After the first prayer I went out into the unpleasant heat. I thought, I should have moved Tisha B'av to monday. Sunday is always for Mass as Saturday is always Shabbat. But I had already began this exercise and then, it wasas I necessary to do this day, to end the Three Weeks of Mourning.There is much I have to say abotu Tisha Ba'aV and the Three Weeks and hte Nine Days even. They carry many lessons, but today on the Tenth of Av, as I have eaten and sit down to eat again, as I remember bathing and purifying after a time of mourning and sleeping in a real bed and not the floor, there is something to be said about the end of mourning. Today the Bridegroom has returned. Today the King is arisen from the world below. This is the return of Adonay or Adonis or Tammuz, the Shepherd King, and all returns are joyful, but strange. No return happens all at once and without pain. Rebirth is as discombobulating as birth itself.
Tisha Bav is the day of bright darkness when an old thing died. It marks when the rabbies began to create Judaism, twice, both times at the destruction of the Temple, The destruction of the second temple also commemorates when the ancestors of Christians had to reveiw their own theology and come to an ew understanding, so two faiths were born, But Tammuz the Shepherd did not disappear. One faith dcclared tiself as waiting for his coming ,the other as seeing it in the Lord and Shepherd Jesus.
But there were and are other faiths that still see this as the return of the King Spirit, the Shepherd Lord, and I am among them. There is not one Easter, but many. Paul declare that Christ, having died never dies again, but we celebrate it again and again every year, and Adonay the Shepherd must agai and again travel between the worlds and take us with him.
The Day after Tisha Bav is a slow return to joy in the new world after mourning. It is a suble shift from the time of grief to the time of living because we cannot remain in grief. Unlike Easter, which is almost so bright we cannot stand it, Tisha B'av in its stricly Jewish context thinks about returning to a life where there is no resurrection, or better to say where the loss is permanent. But if we look closer, both Easter and Tisha B'av look at the same thing in different ways. The resurrected Israel that comes up from the flames is weak and damaned and wounded and will never be the same, can never be addressed in the same way again. This is the way of the resurrected Christ, beneath the joyful hymns that steer us away from the distubring story. He can never be known in the same way again. He is forever wounded and so are we. After crucifixion this world is no longer his home. He is in Exile and those who chose to follow him are in Exile too.
Tuesday, July 6, 2021
On Fool Sunday
I don't mind calling it Fool Sunday or the Sunday where one focuses on the journey, which in Tarot is called the Fool's Journey, especially when I felt so much like a fool on Sundya, with everything going on, especially when I felt so weak and so fragile, not like the Great Magician at all, certainly not like I had any great answers. The Journey of the Fool is our long journey toward God, the long journey back to our original home, and it is filled with bumps and, yes, we are the Fool. We get it wrong. We lose our trainign. We lose our way. We don't understand the lessons we are being taught. We forget, quite easily, we are the sons and daugters of God. We forget our magic. If i do not talk about magic it is because it is not very different from the actual faith of any believer. Anyone telling you that you can follow the magic path liek a science, or you can follow it without faith is silly. You don't know where it goes. You open yourself to it. You ask humbly for the Lord of Lords and all around you to assist. Sometimes you demand. My phone went on the fritz at the end of a very horrible morning and I said to it, you know I thank you for going on the ftitz because you helpd me learn some things, but now, I wil you to work. And it absolutely did not work by my touching it and willing it and there was no amount of wand wavign that would have worked on the phone, but a while later, a code flew into my head, and I typed it into the phone and everything was fine. That is magic in the world. Magic is needing busfare and lifting up a carpet to find the exact change. It so ordinary, and it is not that everyone is magician or we are all witches, but the magical view allows us to enter the magical world, which is to say, the world. So many of us now, are not part of the world, do not see it, wish to use. The magical world helps to us to enter this place that is our home, at the same time the magical and spiritual discipleship leads us on this road which is our journey back to our original home.
Because there isn't really any other place to type it I will say here that writing makes me less lonely, actually had a wondrous power of removing loneliness. People get marrie,d have children, all to not be lonely. But loneliness is the entreprise of this life. What our task is, especially the task of the monastic, is to transform loneliness into solitude. . Now we are in the period of the Three Weeks, the ancient time of mourning in the end of Tammuz which concludes on Tisha B'av. Yesterday wounded and stabbed me and left me angry with a God who would so quickly remove me from this happiness I was feeling into this state of fragility, but the state of fragility is the state of the whole world and the wounds are the wounds of Jesus. This suffering is the stripper that removes the vaneer of i'm alright, i'm alright, I'm aways good. I'm okay. It removes the bullshit of optimism and feigned health, of good spirits that have no time for mercy. These wounds are doors and windows to truth, to honesty. They are openings through which the suffering of others can enter. They are the doors of mercy.
Sunday, June 27, 2021
Adonay Sunday
...Is not entirely like the Devoted Lover Sunday and it is the Sunday I chose for my marriage to the Divine One. Tammuz is Adonis, is Adonay, is in some ways Christ. He is, in his own way Krishna and perhaps the Kriophoros. He is Balder the beautiful, the slain one and originally, surely he was Osiris. He is the Lord. He is the King. He is the Shepherd King prefigured in David and the prophets, fulfilled, some would say, for Christians, in Jesus.
To be wed to him is to be wed not simply to the King or the Good Shepherd but, alas, the the Lover who Goes Away. To be wed to him is to be the widow of the world. We have become accustomed to Greek Gods, but the Norse have made a comeback, when I firsr read Norse myth I was surprised by the idea that the Gods die, that Balder is slain, but then, why shouldn't gods die? Or rather, why should we alone die? Greece made Gods who could not die, but also were not holy, and the ones who did taste death were relegated to eastern side stories, like Adonis, the very one whose name means Lord, who is Lord of the Above and Lord of the Below. The Greek stories ignore this, calling the Lord of the Underworld Hades, confusing the place with his proper name which they rarely use: Aidoneus.
Aidoneus King of the Underworld seizes, while still in life, Persephone, a more bearable tale for Greeks who hated Gods who died and hated males who were not powerful. But it cannot be a coincidence, this story of Persephone seizing Adonis to be her lover in the below lands part of the year.. Surely Aidoneus and Adonis are the same. Surely, in some wise, Persephone and Demeter are the same as well.
The mystery of Tammuz is related to the mystery of Babalon. As the month began I wondered how would I celebrate Tammus and then life taught me. A lover of mine was gone, seemed like he might have been more than gone. I began to lament him and then suddenly learned he was alive and well and there were only complications. The love we made the next day was the mystery of Tammuz. Nor was he here to stay but going away again. That is the mystery of the one who is coming and going, who passes and we lament and then he returns again.
Later that same day, As an Ashtoroth offering, I had the very different experience of sex with a total stranger where I was not myself and he was not my lover. We were offerings to each other. This was sex without any end except the pleasure happening and sex without ego, the organ and the mouth. This is the offering of Babalon. Tammuz and Babalon are not husband and wife, or even lovers necessarily, but they are a pair and I do not think one is without the other. The sex is them is sacramental, two sides of the alchemical wedding.
But why in the world Tammuz Sunday? And again, how is it different from say, something generally devoted to the alchymical wedding, or the marriage of Robin and Marion, or Radhakrishna Sunday? And maybe it isn't terribly different, but is a difference in emphasis.
In Aramaic calendars including the Hebrew one which we use, this moon is the moon of Tammuz, and this is because of the ancient festival of Tammuz which was celebrated well into the eleventh century AD. Tammuz, Adonis, Damuzi.... Adonay. Christ has died Christ had risen, Christ will come again. According to popular belief Tammuz was mourned three days, but curiously in Christianity such lamentation was moved into spring with Easter which was never a full three days and in Judaism there may be a simlar thing, for they have and we celebrate, not three days, but Three Weeks, of fasting and mourning which begin today and culminate, like Easter, outside of the month of Tammuz, on the ninth day of Av. We are told in the Old Testament that the women of Gilead would annually go into the hils to weep for Jepthah's daughter, and this may also be a retelling, or erasure of the Tammuz story.
Tisha B'av, which is soon upon us gives a strange insight which Christian mourning often does not. In Christianity, like Yom Kippur, there is mourning for sin and longing for repentance, but the Three Weels of Tisha Bav, taking place at the height of summer mourn, the destruction of the temple--twice, the sin of the Golden Calf, the departure of Shekinah and generally every bad thing that ever happened to Israel. It is a curious insight, that at the height of summer, when we are told to celebrate and be happy, there is not only room for, but a necessity for, mourning, for crying out to God. Tammuz and his glorious birth from the tree, his glorious body, wondrous marriage, beauty, lordship of the above and the below, are intimately died to compassion, sorrow, and the need to acknowledge that which mourns in all of us. As we enter into the Three Weeks, may we not be afraid... of our fears, and our sorrow and our weakness. May we acknowledge in our search for strength our weakness and seek comfort in each other. In out courageous choice to be joyful, may we ignore our sorrow, and we may we earnest work and pray for the union of that which is had been broken, the union with is the restoration of Shekinah and return and kingdship of Adonay the Great Shepherd of our souls.