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 25^th   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.