For the first time in years, I return to the Jewish prayer
book. Everything around me is changing and I am stuck doing old dead rituals.
In this part of Extraordinary time, the switch from Catholic opening ritual to
Jewish is like when the Christmas lights are finally put away and I stop hiding
from the season and burying myself in something which was, for a time
appropriate, but no longer is. There is a feeling of disease about the way I’ve
been doing things. I have felt trapped, bitter, tired, afraid, cynical,
wingless. I need to change and work through these old dark feelings. Moving
into the Jewish liturgy there was a lightness of heart which disappeared when I
went back to the wintertime and spring Catholic ones to usher in the night. In
a time where prayers must move beyond words, the Hebrew which is not my
language serves the language of prayer much as when Saint Paul would say the
Spirit speaks in groans for those deep longings we cannot express, the deep
longings, the desire which becomes will which is the source of the Craft. There
is a dizzying openness in the Siddur which spins me to the place I need to be
in this changing season.
Chaos magicians do the same thing,
though their source, their goals and their philosophy is different from 1734.
They recognize in the words, the ways and the names expressed, different
energies bringing us to different realizations. Perhaps in the change of
formats they realize that they are, foremost, not priests of Isis and Ra or
Wiccan clergy, but magicians. And so with me. For some weeks I have felt myself
moving to the Siddur and all sorts of little anxieties have plagued me. I first
entered Judaism for mystic knowledge and stayed in it quite a while. I also
left it in time and returning to the old words brings old memories, much like
Catholic memories. Both ways represent traditions where I learned knowledge,
earned wisdom, met loved ones, suffered more than I needed to from unloving
ones and never wish to return. All of that comes up as I recite the Siddur as
it came up the first time I began to take up Catholic practices again.
When I move from the Catholic
ritual it is good to remember I am not a Catholic. I am a witch using Catholic
ritual. When I come back to these old Hebrew words I have to remember I won’t
ever be joining a synagogue or count myself as a Jew again. There was a time
when these two faiths kissed. It was not in the long long ago of prehistory,
but in the first centuries of our current era before either religion took their
current forms, and in their kissing, in that strange nexus there were many
other expressions of worship and power that would be accepted by neither group.
It is in that bright and liquid nexus I dwell with Hebrew words on my lips, The
Blessed Virgin, Mary Magdalene and Hermes on the altar and a wand of witchwood
in my hand.
This nexus which could be the door
to fear is the brilliant place most shrink from where I have the opportunity to
make something beautiful for myself, to interpret things which have arisen in
dreams or remain on my altar unexplored, the Glass Sun, the sun at night with
the candle behind it on the altar, the charm of making from Excalibur, the
Doctrine of the Dragon from that same film, the Mermaids who come to me in
dreams and story and grace a separate altar as well as the Mermaid Lantern on
that altar. Now, with new eyes, we approach the Castle Beneath the Sea, the Castle
of the South which we look upon at Lammas.
Now is the time to come to those things which are my revelations, which
are interpretations not of old traditions, but of the dreams and revelations
that come to me personally. This is the final frontier.
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