Sunday, March 31, 2019

Mothering Sunday



Mothering Sunday is a perfect day and a true challenge in the heart of Lent.  Often it is called Laetare Sunday and it is the day to stop penitence and rejoice in the goodness of God and the world around us. The introit to the Mass reads:

"Rejoice, O Jerusalem: and come together all you that love her: rejoice with joy, you that have been in sorrow: that you may exult and be filled from the breasts of your consolation.

Rejoice.... Laetare

This was the Sunday when, traditionally, Christians would go ‘a’mothering’, that is, return to the church they were baptized in, or the nearest cathedral, their mother church. As a person who experiences more harm than good and more boredom than both inside of churches, how I go a’mothering has become an important question.

In a way, this is an important question for every witch. Most witches are women and even if you are not biologically female, you are participating in the female by being a witch. In a world that is currently so violent, so orphaned and so often unsafe, a good question for those of us who draw near to the Great Mother is how to join ourselves to her and bring more of her charity, her confidence, her love and her grace into this world. A friend of mine messaged me the other day and said her heart was hurting, and I told her I had just ended a relationship with an unloving and sort of wretched person. We spoke of how hot and scarred our hearts can become in a world where people who do not believe they are lovable pass on their lovelessness. Regardless if we are calling her Isis or Freya or Mary or even Mother Jesus as Hildegard of Bingen referred to her vision of the fullness of God, it is a necessary challenge to over and over again return to the heart of this Mother who is so often forgotten or denied.

 For me, returning to the Mother has been the hard work of letting go of unloving relationships and emotions that weren’t very healthy, accepting rejection (what mother doesn’t do that?) and intensifying practices I’d dropped. Returning to the Mother also means dealing with my own fragility, and surrendering to a Lady who is greater than this little and often angry me. I also think that we can simply begin to ask ourselves,

In the time we have spoken of the Labyrinth, very often we have likened the Spiral Castle to a tower, a sacrifice, a Cross, a Stang, the World Tree, all symbols which are at least a little male, and all about the bloodshed of killing something. These are symbols which at least begin to pretend that life giving sacrifice is the realm of men, which is deceptive to say the very least. It is good to remember that originally the Spiral and the Labyrinth, endlessly round, the deceptively simple path leading into a twisted and turning maze which ends in the central chamber, was originally a symbol of the Goddess, and of the body of the Great Mother and all Mothers. 




The Hanged Man in his endless variations has been a symbol of this Nexus, but these male motifs are after and beside, not before another type of necessary suffering exemplified in the Weeping Isis, the Sorrowful Virgin and that most provocative image of the 1970’s, Christa.




This is a stinging, merciless world, often loveless and untrusting. But of course that is only part of the story. We dance in love and joy and are constantly surprised not only be the beauty of the natural world, but the kindness of strangers. The momentary assaults of lovelessness shock us because, often we have already known so much love. While, in these times we may experience ourselves as living in a place that is not only unkind to women, but unkind in general, where gentleness is pushed out and rage built up, we also know that is only part of the story. This Sunday maybe we can begin to return to the Mother, even if we do not entirely understand what this means, and set our faces toward her, even when so many haven’t seen her in a long while. This is not an impossible task, but a joyful one. Nurturing is our inheritance, and She is our home. The road is joy. Laetare!




Thursday, March 28, 2019

Entering the Labyrinth




Around the same time that I entered the Craft, a friend of mine gave me a present I wore for years, and may wear again one day when I have a good cord for it. It was a bronze disk with a labyrinth engraved on it. How Celtic, I thought. How witchy, how appropriate! I knew the story of Theseus from childhood. The Theseus of my childhood was an untarnished hero. He had come to Athens to find his father the King, and upon learning that the youths of Athens were sent off every years to be fed to the Minotaur, Theseus set out to stop it. Despite his father’s desire to save his newly discovered son, Theseus takes his place among the other youths and maidens and goes to Crete. There he meets the Princess Ariadne. We know so little of her. Minos is the son of Zeus, Pasiphae is the daughter of the Sun and a Goddess who is also a queen. In those days the line between gods and men was blurred. What is Ariadne? Has she lived in Crete for years and years, always a little princess? But this time around she is either ripened. or the vision of Theseus ripens her. Something happens between them, and she gives him the ball of twine, the Clew that he can tie outside of the labyrinth and wind his way through it in order to kill the Minotaur and get out. Next Ariadne gives the sword with Theseus can kill the monster.

 He has killed several monsters before. And it is important that Ariadne is sunborn, is of the family of goddess-sorceresses who are the daughters f of Helios and include Medea, Circe and Pasiphae. These women are all beautiful, and powerful, but creatures of a liminal and shadowy nature,  dubious even as they are daughters of the light. Ariadne is the sun’s light shining in the darkness of a night time where Theseus makes love to her,. Theseus comes into this night time with no real hope of making it out of the labyrinth. He does not know that Ariadne is here to deliver him. In that regard, Ariadne stands in the place of Sapientia, the Moon. She is the Virgin Goddess giving her aid. Her Clew is no ordinary Clew. It glows with her light. It leads the way home.


            In those first years that I possessed that little bronze labyrinth, I used to walk the stone labyrinth at St Mary’s College near my home, meditating, praying, trying to understand its importance. It wasn’t until several years down the line that I looked back and understood the importance of the labyrinth for the witch, or for anyone on a spiritual path. The labyrinth is the remedy to the myth of straight ahead progress. The seventeen years between the time when I walked out a church service, went down the street to the public library. and picked up my first book on witchcraft and now. has been filled with bumps, twists, short cuts and doubling backs. I have picked things up, put them down, and picked them up all over again. This can cause frustration, embarrassment, even a false sense of hypocrisy, but what this reflects is the natural, and magical, turns of the dance in the labyrinth and up the Spiral Castle. This long rambling turning back and twisting is the treading of the mill in every day life, the actual treading which completes what we do ritually. When so many give up, we keep on, and this is devotion, this is the divine treading. As did Theseus, we have the Clew, if we stop and pay attention, and it is the light of that Clew, and the voice of Ariadne that leads us to the center of the labyrinth not once, but over and over again.

Tuesday, March 26, 2019

The Mirrored Palaces





In Lyn Webster Wilde’s book, Becoming the Enchanter, her encounter with the Spiral Castle is in a room full of mirrors, and she associates this castle with the Castle of Arianrhod, and the house she enters representing it is one disconcerting and nearly deceiving with its dizzying pattern of mirrors, and here in the story of Minos we see the also see mirrors, for what happens above reflects what happens below.
            Before this story begins there is another tale, that of Zeus coming as a white bull to a princess called Europa. As a bull he seduces her and carries her from her homeland in the Middle East, and carries her to the island of Crete. There she bears him several children, one of whom is Minos. Zeus also creates a robot called Talos. This robot protects the people of Crete from other nations, but at the same time it prevents them from leaving the island, turning Crete into a prison. It will not be until Daedalus arrives that the Talos is killed, and a normal life with all of is possibilities of freedom and danger can begin.
            It is Daedalus who not only builds the underground labyrinth, but makes it possible for Queen Pasipahe to seduce a bull, a mirror of the bull Zeus who seduced her mother in law, and become pregnant with Aristaion. But wait, because Aristaion is not only a name applied to the Minotaur, but to the king. Minos is also identified with the bull, bull and man,. He is the son of a woman and a bull. The king above is a mirror of the monster below, the monster who is king of the subterranean land.
            There are several who look at the story of Theseus and the Minotaur, and see in it some distant memory of Cretan power over mainland Greece. The whole reason Theseus shows up is because Crete is exacting a tax of human lives every seven years from Athens. When Theseus destroys the Minotaur, that tax is over. There are a few ways to look at this, and they are not necessarily exclusive. The Cretans, freed of imprisonment from Talos by Daedalus, and from the terror of the Minotaur by Theseus, now no longer care about the tax they exacted from the Athenians.



            But all stories, including myths and fairy tales, possess an internal logic, and that reading is not logical. Minos could have killed this monster, should have killed this monster. Instead he furnishes a home for it and gives it human sacrifices at a regular time. The monster and Minos are one. It seems that in defeating the monster, Theseus has defeated or changed Minos.
            In just this brief encounter with the palace of Knossos, one of the oldest images of the Spiral Castle, we are always left with several people and several scenarios to explore, Daedalus the builder, Minos the King, this mother Europa and his father Zeus, Pasiphae the Sun Bride, the princess Ariadne and her hero and eventual betrayer, Theseus. All of these are encountering the maze of Knossos in different ways, as do we all.

Entering the Spiral Castle: One



Save for the circle, there is no form more magical than the spiral, and what is a spiral but a circle constantly circling in on itself? The serpent  coming back on its own tail is the beginning of the spiral, the serpent curving again and again, curling into itself more and more, or out and out, is the spiral. When we dance in the center of the circle, there is the spiral, treading the mill is the beginning of the spiral, so we are told, the kundalini travels up the spine in a spiral. Looking into the heavens, there we see other galaxies, spirals, and we ourselves, a little point in a little tip of the arm of our own glazy, are in an ever twirling spiral.
            We have seen the famous spiral staircases, but the truth is, every staircase that goes on for any length spirals. It is the nature of traveling up, that in architecture as well as in imagination, we do not simply go vertically and horizontally, we spiral.
            The oldest human stories tell us of this spiraling architecture. The Greek story of King Minos tells of a maze, a labyrinth spiraling in on itself and several thousand years later, removed from this story, Arthur Evans finds the marvelously spiraling, mazelike palace of Knossos.
            The Spiral Castle differs from the other castles because, in all compasses we revere the castles, but at given times of the year we are more in one than in the other. After the Spring Equinox, we enter the Golden Castle, but we are in the Spiral Castle all the time, because it is in the center of the circle. It is us in our working, and in our constant turning. This is why, in many ways, it is the hardest to describe. Not only is it part of us, it is us. What is more, the Spiral Castle is difficult to explain because most who work in the Craft are working from an almost strictly European influence. Up until now, I have spoken of the Circle when concerned with laying the compass. Other cultures, especially the Navajo, have always used not four directions, but six: North, South, East, West, up and Down. This firmly fixes the compass not as a two dimensional circle, but as a sphere, not a ghost of roundness, but actual, perfect roundness as the world is, as the planets are, as is the universe. Now, understanding the roundness of it, we can see the Spiral Castle as constantly going both up and down, for that is the movement of the Spiral Castle. It is the gravity of the magic sphere, the witchesphere. It is the linchpin.  It is the central pole. The implications for what this means regarding castles we will address later.

Greek myth tells us that Minos, King of Crete, and one of Zeus’s children married Pasiphae, the daughter of the Sun. To make a long story far shorter than it deserves to be, she took a liking to a white bull and conceived a child by it. This half man half bull is the Minotaur, but he also had a proper name, Aristaion, and there is even a queer system of Gardnerian witchcraft devoted to his mysteries. King Minos, afraid and embarrassed, had his architect Daedalus (who had his own set of issues, but more on him later) construct a great spiraling underground maze called the labyrinth. In the center of this maze, under Minos’ fabulous palace, he placed the bull step child. It seems that Queen Pasiphae did not object,
            Theseus also has his own set of complications, but for now let us leave it at, when he came to Crete from Athens, to save his people, currently under the domination of Crete, from being food for the Minotaur, he gained the affection of Ariadne, Minos’ and Pasiphae’s daughter, and she gave him a ball of thread called a Clew (from which comes our word clue), that tying to the end entrance of the labyrinth, he could use it to find his way into the center and then kill the Minotaur. Theseus did do, and he triumphed over the Minotaur and escaped Crete with the princess Ariadne. She did not make it back to Athens with him. What became of her varies with the tellings, but this is the bare bones of the story of that first image of the Spiral Castle, Minos’ labyrinth.




            And how can a spiral dungeon be accounted a Castle? Because thousands of years later, in real time, Arthur Evans came to Crete looking for real signs of old stories and found the spiraling palace of Knossos. He and most of us now, are convinced it was the inspiration for the labyrinth.  But if it is image, it is also inspiration, and here we see the first signs of what the Spiral Castle is, for it is goes above and below. It is an above ground high palace in the administrative center of things, mirrored in a pool of myth by a spiraling prison that goes ever down into the depths. This is the virtue of the Spiral Castle, that much of it is unseen, for it goes down into the underworld as well as reaching up into the sky, and what is seen is mirrored in what is not. This is why the Spiral Castle stands in the place of the World Tree. Everything that happens in Minos’ fantastic labyrinthine palace is mirrored in what happens in the monster’s prison maze below.

Friday, March 22, 2019

Wisdom in the Night




There is a pure light the moon casts when it is full. It shines over everything, and at the same time it allows us to see the heavens. The bright sun turns the sky a full and shining cerulean blue, and doesn’t let us see past the clouds, but in the light of the moon the dome of heaven is removed, and we can see the stars, the planets, everything beyond. The moon, reveals what before we could not see, this great light which makes what would be utter darkness a rich and living blue, and suddenly on my moonlit walk I begin to say:

Virgin most prudent,
pray for us.
Virgin most venerable,
pray for us.
Virgin most renowned,
pray for us.
Virgin most powerful,
pray for us.
Virgin most merciful,
pray for us. 

It is from the Litany of the Blessed Virgin, a prayer that, really, is so old I never learned it  in Catholic school, simply found it at the back of a hymnal. Our mythologies are often subconscious. We cannot force an identity onto a thing, or make ourselves believe in gods and spirits and goddesses because we like their stories. I was realizing, as I walked, that I had always identified the moon with Sapientia, with the the Virgin of Wisdom. She is a strange mysterious Goddess. Being wise and very primal, she has the good sense to resist stories. She isn’t Athena. She is beyond Athena. She is before the Virgin Mary, but identified with her. She may have at one time been the Holy Spirit—before the Holy Spirit was downgraded—into a male bird. In Judaism she is Chokmah, who sits perched near the top of the Tree of Life.

It is because of this very quality of calm coolness, of roundness, of absolute clarity, that one of the Virgin's homes is the Glass Castle in the northwest. She both holds the Glass Orb and is the Glass Orb, for the empty/ not empty space it holds is that of fruitful Maidenhood/Motherhood. She is most certainly the serpents made transparent, Maiden and Mother joined, the delight of the Lord Janicot. This why the Holy Child conceived in Spring is born in the stark clarity of cold winter.

She is Evervirgin, that is, ever within her own solitude, always touched but never possessed or obsessed. Under her light, which is always gentle, things are revealed. After a day of stress she whispers, “None of what you were worried about was really that important, was it?” After worrying about that man and how he may not love you or love you as much as you hoped, she whispers, “But you didn’t really love him anyway. You just loved being in love, and now you can let him go. Can’t you?” In the very early morning, when no one else is up yet, and there are one of two candles lit on the altar, she calls you out of bed to sit down and be quiet. She doesn’t say anything, and quietly lets you know you don’t have to either.

Tower of ivory,
pray for us.
House of gold,
pray for us.

Gate of Heaven,
pray for us.
Morning star,
pray for us. 

Amen.


 

Thursday, March 21, 2019

The Fiery River



Already we have seen the Golden Castle. For some weeks now, glinting in the distance, we have seen its turrets. We have had dreams of a glittering golden Lantern leading us on, though the hand bearing it we cannot completely see. But here is this castle, many walled, turreted, glinting in the spring sun. It is a castle, maybe better fitted to a southern land, a hotter clime, but here it is. There is another castle, Joyous Gard, but we are not here yet. This is the golden castle of the north, the castle of revelry, of pleasure, of laughter, the castle of conversation, ease, lightness of tongue, storytelling and singing.
            We are on our way there, for we have the feeling that after so long a winter revelry is just what we need. But what is this? Coming nearer we see a heat rising, coming even closer we see, to our alarm, this river of fiery hissing serpents. They are calling out to us, their eyes glinting, tails wrapping about each other, flames lifting off of them, the light flittering on their skins like glass, like jewels, like a red river in summer. And who are they? What are they? They give life or they destroy, depending upon how we receive them. A visitor may be carried across the river, but one who would make the Golden Castle home must cross by foot and walk through this fire. But why?
            Surely you have met those unfortunate fortunate souls who never knew trouble, who haven’t had to really pass through any pain or who avoid pain at any cost. Surely you have known people who never restrain themselves, never strive beyond the limits set for them. Are they funny? Do they have stories to tell? What insights do they have to offer? What songs do they have to sing? Have you ever sat spellbound by the conversation of such a one? It’s just a sad simple fact of this world that, unfortunately, no human soul becomes tender, grows in love and sweetness, without suffering. And it is a particular kind of suffering, a willing acceptance of what must be, a resolution to absorb something of this fire and be strengthened rather than consumed in bitterness. And the soul understands that there is no certainty in this burning. It isn’t always true that what doesn’t kill us makes us stronger. What wounds us can make us weaker, more bitter, less able to cope. Still we embrace this.
            The mystery of this burning river is mirrored throughout the centuries at this very time of year. Let the soul rejoice, for it is in the very company of the Gods who knew this journey was worth it. Inanna is with you, traveling into the underworld to seek her other self. Demeter is with you, carrying her torches to find her daughter and bring her back. According to the oldest stories, Persephone is with you, traveling to meet her dark lover. Christ, carrying his cross is with you. And so many saints. Moses and his burning bush. the Children of Israel leaving Egypt are with you, and so many more. The secret to the Castle of Revelry is that, until you cross the fiery river, the castle is really only an illusion. You bring the Castle of Revelry into this world by the life you lead in this world made of pleasures, terrors, ecstasies and also many trials.

Monday, March 18, 2019

Unspiration: Lent as Spell Breaker



Perhaps we need a better name than Lent. Or perhaps this is the perfect name. Perhaps what needs to be done is shaking off the patina of guilt laden Catholicism of this season. I find myself in Lent reading the Bible not only for inspiration, but unspiration, that process of reading old sacred texts, taking them for what they are and, because of what they are, finding my way through the holes, reinterpreting or, more often, discarding them. This is the opposite of being enchanted. I am being unchanted, dispelling instead of being put in the spell of three thousand years of bad thinking.
            Having gotten through the book of Joel and moved onto the prophet Amos, there is a definite theme of prophetic verbal diarrhea, endless diatribes that amount to, “The reason your crops don’t grow is because God is angry at you. Why don’t you repent so your crops can grow?” The human mind looks for a reason, or so we are told, for certain things and the reason the prophets give is, “You are sinful. This is your fault. Repent ,and it will get better.” By these standards, penitence becomes its own sort of black witchcraft. So, already, in these precursors to Lent, a magic drama is being acted out. In place of wailing for Damuzi, we are now wailing for our own sins, real and mostly imagined, to an angry god so that our crops will grow and our lives will be better.
            But underneath this is another subtler strain. One must peer carefully, for the old Testament prophets are full of rage, misogyny, over exaggeration and a tendency to call women whores and write graphically about rape and menstrual blood. But repentance is a call to first loves. In the later Christian Lent, which partially reflects this, it is a time to strengthen commitments, remember original loves, and test the current loves to see if they are worth having, a time to put down and pick up. It is thusly we pass over a dry land of dead grass and just barely wakening dreams and see a river flaming with fiery serpents. Its heat refreshes and terrifies, and on the other side, we glimpse, in its warm and golden beauty, Caer Daplas, the Castle of Revelry.

A Witch's Lent




I did not invent this phrase. Many years ago a witch wrote about her observance of a different type of lent.  This year, when I knew that my Craft would gradually encompass a renewal of all the things I had grown up with rather than an attempt at worshipping gods I had never known, and practicing rituals that had no meaning to me, I realized Lent was on its way, and I quickly began to see a number of posts for what is called a witch’s Lent.
            But why in the world should a witch have Lent? Why in the world is this most penitential of seasons, the thing which so many Catholics moan about, something a witch would willingly turn to? I believe, because, like many things which exist in ancient churches, its roots are far older than Christianity. Lent is, in some ways, the last initiatory mystery in a currently very mainstream religion. Before it was penitence and giving up meat it was the weeks of preparation for those about to be initiated into the mysteries of Christ. In a time when only the initiated saw the ritual which has come to be called the Mass, this was the time for the uninitiated to ready themselves and so, many centuries later, when Christianity is so common it is banal and so banal it has nearly lost meaning, unless one is to delve deep into it, Lent remains, and Lent has an appeal.
            We are approaching the glittering Golden Castle. We come to this golden, many towered stronghold on a hill, surrounded by a lake of fire. It stands directly over the cool land where green is just coming into bud, frost on one side and growing green on the other, but the mood upon approaching is not revelry or excess, no, the mood is Lent.
            We had begun to have some sense that, as we moved from the cold to growing, there was a deep need to change the way we were living and looking.

On my Saint Patrick’s Day walk I actually saw this new and snowless land. We have had a breathtakingly cold winter, but also a gorgeous one.  Such whites, the beauty of the black river with sheets of ice rising from it, the sky during a snowstorm at night, glowing pearly white as streaks of flurries blow down. But now, as the snow melts into spring, and I walk, I see not only matted hunks of grey brown grass, but all the accumulated trash of the last three months. I see, in the parks, potato chip bags and river banks clogged with debris. The mighty winds have blown down, for several weeks, only to be hidden under snow again, the branches of old trees and their skeletal limbs go grey everywhere.
In my home, devoid of daylight for so long, so very cozy, suddenly the sun shines on dust and dirt and unsightly things, and the need for Lent, for a cleaning up of all the mess that has occurred, naturally, in the time of darkness, is apparent. Winter required a different approach to life. In winter, in fact, we gave up, we went into rest, we knew it was time to not do too much. We did what we had to. It was even time to let things die, to atrophy. In the shadow country we let the shadows grow, and they had to. We follow the wheel to its end, a system of celebrations old and new which people hardly see, from Hallowmass and the Days of the Dead to Armistice Day we enter the land of the dead and winter, and there is a brief lighting of it at Yule with the birth of the Child of Light in the land of Darkness. There is a grace we need to live through this happening, and we take it more on faith than actual observance that light is increasing. Indeed, we are not even ready for light. The time of Epiphany shows a light we cannot understand and leads to Candlemas when we first set our sites away from the Glass Castle and begin to look on the Golden Castle.

From now on the light of the Golden Lantern just barely shines for us. We are stuck between the desire to grow, and the need for hibernation. We are victims of a world which will not let us rest when we want to, when we need to. We tumble toward Valentine’s Day and the first hint of the waking of Love and now, at last, in Lent, we look at melting snow and debris covered land, and we need a time of sacrifice, a time of deepening, a time to, after such a long sleeping, wake up. We want to wake up, but we don’t. All at the same time. We want the Castle of Revelry, but we also want to go on sleeping in the cave. We need the Spring, but we aren’t yet fit for it. We must get the sleep out of our eyes. This is what Lent is doing, or rather, what we are doing in this Lent.

Thursday, March 14, 2019

The Virgin, The Holy Child, and Carl Jung





Much like Saint Joseph’s Day, Annunciation is a strange and overlooked day, and I mean in Catholic circles, not in the greater world. Within its own tradition, the Feast of the Annunciation is an odd and ill fitting celebration. Taking place nine months before Christmas, Annunciation is always, solidly, in Lent, the season of fasting that culminates in the celebration of the Crucifixion and Resurrection of Jesus.
            And perhaps it didn’t always matter, the timing of this strange holiday, for there was a time when not only on the 25th   of March, but three times a day, at six and twelve and six again, bells rang,  and people stopped to pray the Angelus, recounting the Annunciation. Here, Saint Mary, on her own business, is visited by the angel Gabriel with news that she will bear the Son of God. She accepted: “May it be done to me according to your word.” She accepts, and perhaps at that moment conceives Christ. It is the moment when heaven becomes joined to earth, when Will and Spirit take shape in the world, when the Virgin’s womb quickens with life. It is, as far as magic knows, the magic moment, the moment when the Holy and longed for Child finally enters into the living world. This Child is necessary for the world’s transformation from the new to the old and, what is more, this moment is celebrated three times a day. It is as if the moment when the Virgin conceived could have taken place in the early morning, but it could have also happened at midday, or even in the evening. It is saying that, in truth, this moment is always happening.
            The Annunciation may not be accidentally placed in the time of Lent. Candlemas is forty days after Christmas and Annunciation nine months before Christmas. Saint John’s birth is six month before the birth of Christ, and all of these holy moments are ancient, deep magical days. One of the things that has always troubled me is the inability to escape the story of the Crucifixion. Even on Christmas day, if one goes to Mass, it is still a mass, and it still talks more of the death and suffering of Christ than of the birth in the manger. But Annunciation tells us that even in crucifixion and death, conception and birth take place. Annunciation is saying the two are one. Every moment that the devoted heart gives itself in purity of will to the Gods is the moment when the above is joined to the below and enfleshed, when a real and not merely a wished for thing happens, when the abstraction of heaven becomes the reality of earth.

The Sacred Child

There is a purpose to this longer than usual trip into Christian myth, and it is because the moment of Annunciation explores one of the central tenets of Craft. If Mary was the last form of the Goddess, she is also the first witch. Her womb, her life, is the cauldron. She is pulling off what every witch attempts. Joining her will to the Will of the above, she brings the Holy Child into being. In his Red Book, Carl Jung speaks of the moment when the little will of the ego yields to the wield of the Child. This Child is God, and this Child is also the true Will. They are one. In the working of what is imperfectly called, in the West, magic, this is exactly our practice. This is how magic works. Anything else is simply plotting to get what you think you want, a series of selfish wishes that may have pleasant out comes. Surely you witches have known it, Like Schmendrick the Magician in the Last Unicorn. He is full of flimflam, but there is a moment when, having done what he can in all earnestness and love, he releases his work saying, “Magic, do as you will,” and then true and marvelous events take place. The You that wills privately, as an isolated ego with limited fortitude and vision, can only will so much, only knows so much of the story. There is a reason witches are not chaos magicians claiming to control things, claiming to make our own gods. There is a reason we engage in prayer, service and devotion, because we as we often know ourselves. are only partially powerful, because we only know partially. The Holy Child is the perfect joining of our Highest most knowing self with God. The Holy Child is incarnation, and unlike simple spells which may turn out well, ill or not at all, unlike the half done work which results in getting what we want which leaves us tasting ashes, the working of this magic has the definite feeling of the presense of the Divine, for it is. This is the mystery of the Annunciation. The moment of surrender and conception is also the moment of sacrifice and death. All is one. This is the lesson of the Spiral Castle, the World Tree, the Stang, the Cross. The emblems change, but only slightly. The lesson is, in the end, inescapable.

Tuesday, March 12, 2019

The Eve of the Equinox: The Feast of Saint Joseph




Before addressing the Festival of the Event called the Annunciation, we need to address the often forgettable Feast of Saint Joseph occurring two days after Saint Patrick’s Day. It is, in the eyes of the Churches, a much more important day than the one two days earlier, a great feast that has been eclipsed by Patrick.
            Joseph suffers the fate of being a saint who is, technically, very important but also stripped of the charisma other, arguably lesser, saint possess. There are certainly some who have been incredibly dedicated to him. I live in a county in northern Indiana with his name, by a river with his name, in the shadow of a tripartite religious congregation dedicated to him. But in the end even that congregation named their two colleges around here Notre Dame and Saint Mary’s, after his wife, and the name of St. Joseph slides so blandly off the tongue that despite the two churches, their accompanying schools, the high school, the river, the county we live in, the largest hospital in the area all bearing his name, still, no one thinks of him.
            Joseph is, like it or not, a placeholder. Popes stick him in the place of other things and this is why he is important. The patron Saint of Workers, to balance against the communist Day of the Worker, he was given another Feast Day, May the First, and for any witch, this is noteworthy. May is the Month given to Mary, the Goddess as Virgin and Mother simultaneously. More on this later. The first day of that month is hers, but it is called for Joseph the Worker. In Orthodoxy and Catholicism, the first Sunday after Christmas is either his day or the day focused on him, a strange focus since neither in conception nor actual labor did he have anything to do with Christ.  And now, on the Eve of the Equinox, the day is his as well.
Joseph has always been problematic in Christianity. The Gospels list he and Mary as having several children. Both the Orthodox and the Catholics, at great pains to swear upon an eternal (and unnecessary) virginity for the Mother of God, took care to portray these other progeny of Joseph and Mary as either being Jesus’s cousins, or his older siblings from Joseph’s first marriage instead of the younger brothers and sisters they so clearly are. In addition, to make the idea of Joseph EVER having sex with his wife more unbelievable, Joseph was portrayed as impossibly old. A foster father of Jesus who is too young, too attractive, too charismatic is also too sexual. Up until Protestantism, which is far from the iconographic and resists the magical, Joseph had to be… unfuckable. So Joseph is wrapped in a silence which is more bland than mysterious. But what if we restore to Joseph his sexuality and his youth, his vitality and his power? Some Catholic portraits to this? What does it say of his relationship to his wife, and his relationship to God, and Jesus? Can it be that the mystery of Joseph is that he is a male face for Mary who herself is the Divine Woman as Mother and Virgin? The Goddess and the God always travel together. To be fully divine one must encompass the male and the female. Is Joseph, then, quite possibly, the Divine Man, the Virgin Father, the Shadow of the Father God, the Other Side of the Lady? Are all of his days shadows on which we could begin to look past the shallow theology and the vapid icons which tell us so little? When the sexuality of Joseph is restored, perhaps many other things will be restored. Perhaps we will look again at how one becomes the Son of God, how the Spirit conceives and what it means to be a Virgin, but these are weighty opening questions to entirely new mysteries.

A Mystery Called Patrick




Any Catholic saints book can tell you about Saint Patrick. There are many articles about him on the Internet. This is about the iconography of him, the idea of him. For the Craft, and indeed all real traditions, deal in visions as much or more than in words. Iconographically he is the doppelganger of Saint Nicholas. They swap bodies. They are reflections of each other. Part of this is because Christian iconography was by intent limited, Colors and vestments denoted if one was a bishop, a virgin, a married woman, what have you. In a time when writing was not widespread, an easy way to identify saints was needed, but still, the iconography of Saint Patrick and that of Saint Nicholas are almost identical. There is another thing. Patrick’s color was originally red, but in time was swapped to green while the reverse was done with Nicholas. Along with Saint Valentine these saints are the only Christian bishops to become famous far outside of their original place as men of the church. We know them now, not for what they did in the Church, but what they symbolize to the greater world.


Nicholas (December 6th ) is the herald of Christmas, of the Yule Tide. He is the harbinger of the light born in the darkness, Powers of magic and insight are his, and we will come to him later, but Saint Patrick is the herald of spring, and the death and resurrection of Christ and so, of us. In their old age, in their white beards, these men are Odin figures, but one must remember that the Romans saw Odin not as cognizant with their Jupiter/Zeus, but with Mercury, Hermes. Hermes is, in Classical stories, a mischievous scamp. But in his most ancient portraits, wrought from rock, he is bearded, neither old nor young, and messenger of new things. Hermes carries the caduceus, the staff entwined by the serpent of healing and the serpent of death to and through the Underworld. Hermes is the psychopomp who leads people in and out of the realms of life and death. Nicholas and Patrick are, among other things, two sides of him. Nicholas carries the bag of coins often identified with Mercury as a god of giving and of merchants. Patrick is surrounded by his serpents.


In Voudoo Patrick is the symbol for Damballah Wedo, the Serpent Father of the Gods, the mighty one from Dahomey. Now, he and his wife (wives) Ayeda Wedo return from the East, bringing life and power in the form of the serpents.  The Old Testament sign of Damballah is Moses, the white haired and horned Lawgiver, the Deliver of the Israelites from bondage into a difficult freedom with a steep learning curve. According to the Torah, when fiery (seraph) serpents were sent to punish the Israelites who were not ready to be free, Moses made a serpent of bronze that healed the people when they simply looked upon it. There is evidence that whatever may have actually happened, ancient Israelites identified this serpent with God, and what is more, in the New Testament, Jesus identified himself crucified as the Serpent on the Pole. The very story of Easter, the Sacrifice needed for rebirth which is central in this time of the year, is an ancient tale of the serpent.
 Perhaps, but perhaps not coincidentally, the Jewish Passover, when this deliverance is commemorated, is also taking place in this season. Though, in AFW, the Stone Bowl and the Glass Orb are hidden symbols of the Serpents, they are in the lake of fire that surrounds the Golden Castle as well. Springtime, in fact, is a season full of serpents.



Monday, March 11, 2019

On Approaching the Golden Castle


Before we can truly explore the Golden Castle, its denizens or its treasure, the Golden Lantern, we need to explore its environs, which is the endpoint of the month of March, the Vernal Equinox. The Golden Castle is placed in North East of the Compass, and it stands on a hill, surrounded by a burning lake, looking over the Spring Equinox. Now, we should say a few things about the Equinox and the way we think of it. All too often we run into junior Wiccans who have perfectly made calendars of feasts days invented or enhanced by Gerald Gardner in the 1950’s, and they will tell you, this is on that date and this is on that and the proper date of this is this and that is that. But the Craft is a return to the ancient. We can argue how ancient it really is, but we cannot argue that we are returning to something prime, and returning to something that, while forgotten in ignored in the west, is long remembered in other places. I did a great deal of damage to myself trying to celebrate and to feel a certain power on a given day for a certain number of hours. The Equinox, of course, is on a very specific day and done very quickly, but what it celebrates only begins there. The Equinox is the ending of winter ,the lengthening of days and the beginning of true spring. In many Craft circles it is called Eostara after a Goddes I have never seen appear in mythology, but others of us simply refer to it as the Equinox or by its Christian name the Annunciation. Each of the Sabbats is not only a thing we celebrate on a particular day, but the beginning of a particular season and a shift in our orientation. So it isn’t simply that we are celebrating the coming of true spring or the neopagan replacement of Easter, but that March 25th,  and the days leading to it are all celebrating several things which together give us a more holistic picture of this time of year.
            In between the Candlemas (Imbolc) and the Annunciation (Vernal Equinox) is the Feast of Saint Valentine, and maybe we can look at him later, for much of what he means has long been commercialized and forgotten, turned into candy and women with hurt feelings. But around the time of the fifteenth clump three equally important days, as important as the three days of the full moon, the Feast of Saint Patrick (March 17th) , the Feast of Saint Joseph (March 19th ) and The Feast of the Annunciation, (March 25th) .  As with Christmas, where Yule generally falls four or five days earlier, so the Equinox falls roughly the same number of days before Annunciation. What is more, all three of these days take place in the old Christian Season of Lent. There are many witches—self included—who have a difficult time with Christianity, and so attempt to ignore it or make its impact less than what it is. But the stream of Western wisdom moves through Christianity, in specific Catholicism and it is through its rituals, its calendar and its stories, biblical and otherwise that we connect to what was and what will be, and so I will make use of it often. There are many wounded Wiccans who cannot deal with this, but a witch is one wounded who is healed, who is seeking wisdom, and we make use of all of our traditions.


An Introduction




This is a strange work. I don't really know where it is going anymore than I would know if I was beginning a book. I don't know how this will end. I'm not entirely sure what it is. It is largely inspired by the American Folkloric Witchcraft blog. It is an attempt at doing some kind of work to explain, principally to myself, what that form of Craft is, to have something worth saying about it and perhaps it is to console myself for being tossed off the 1734 Facebook page where I had begun to do, without meaning to, a lot of articles exploring the Craft. But even then I never sought to teach. I was throwing out ideas and seeing if they would resonate with other witches, which is what I think I am doing here. I am exploring many ideas and practices of 1734 especially as reflected in American Folkloric Witchcraft, that brilliant Way created by Laurelai Black and her one time partner in romance but still fellow partner in the Craft, Glaux. This page is only an exploration of an expression of Craft mainly influenced by American Folkloric Craft and 1734. For more information on these interwoven ways, there is the American Folkloric witchcraft blog, as well as the 1734 page, short but dense.

This is my reflection on Craft, and I do not seek to tell you how to lay a compass, or tread a mill though I may often speak of how I do these for myself. That the compass contains for points, North, South, East and West, is common not only to all who practice the Craft, but any navigator.  But what is not common is the system of Castles as opposed to Watchtowers. For what we use in laying the compass is not only the four cardinal directions, but the Castles to the northwest, the northeast, the southeast and the southwest, and these have their correspondences, not to the great Quarter Sabbats, but to the Equinoxes and the Low Sabbats. These Castles are Glass Castle, the Golden Castle, the Castle of Stone and the Silver Castle, sometimes called the Blood Red Castle. All of these are inspired by the writings of Robert Cochrane, but discovered an elucidated by Glaux, Laurelai and Natalie, the mothers of the American Folkloric Tradition and its constant discoverers. For some reason, it has been given to me to discover as well, and so we begin not with the first of the Castles, as would be straight and fair, but with my favorite, as is Crooked and very much in the spirit of the Craft, and this is the Golden Castle, the Castle of Revelry, that which stands on a hill to the North East.