Mabon

Autumn is the holiest time of the year

So many people longed for the first budding leaf, and there are boys and girls lined up in black who tell you how much they love that black and dress up their depression in the black lipstick and clove cigarettes,

return to the mouth of the mother with all your fear,

remember why it was that you first came here, lift the knife and trace the secret star, remember how far the journey was to get there

There is a toadstool under a tree, and there are three geese flying ‘cross the lake,

there is a one for the money and a two for the long tall white boys,

and three for the I can’t remember now,

There is a remedy for your pain, there is a magic spell for that, there is a river for that, there is a chanting in the woods for that.

I sat on the floor with the lights turned out, to see what the magic in my head was about,

I lit one candle, took a piece of wood, to see if all my thoughts were good

I lit the incense to someone no one ever sees.

This is the temple of the name, everyone who ever came here stripped off their skin and built it with their bones. This is the tabernacle of the name, everyone who ever came here built it from their blood and lined it with their teeth.

This is the temple of the name

No one ever came here before you

Do not be so fearful of the future thirty years too afraid to embrace

the joy that’s set before you.

Blessed is the day and blessed is the even when the cup of life is set before you

Blessed when you take the earthen chalice, the bowl of stone and blood.

Your mother and your father inherited ages of despair,

now let me teach you how to be happy, now you want to hold his hand,

you know you’re thinking of that man, you know you want to sit in a chair

beside him.

You cannot hide it.

Every day you dive to pain, cutting insane round the fruit to miss its glory

Wholly cut around the rind and taste the sweetness beyond bearing.

I was twenty, now I’m forty, I looked young for twenty years, and now the fall time rolls o’er my body thinning out and making fat, pulling down and pulling in,

so I stood on the summer island that is now beneath the sea where the sun had made the rocks to stink of clams and mussels and of ink.

In my head I said to him, “You were another one of them, You never did appreciate everything people did for you, you never did appreciate it and I wonder if you do now, but I doubt, I won’t make you live without it, but I’m not going to pay”

I will go to the flooded island

I will go to the flooded island in my hat and in my cloak,

I will go to the flooded island.

The other day I went to an island that is now beneath the sea, and as I stood there amidst the clam shells, and the sticks and the debris, I said these dry rocks will be covered any day now

Any day now, any day now

They shall be received by the water

when the waters, when the water takes its autumn toll.

The Perilous Castle Continued: The Housle

Though mythologized in the stories of Gods and demonstrated in blood and juice and bread and wine, ultimately, the offering is ourselves. AFW has a specific ritual, but there are several. AFW made this Housle Chant worth learning and worth singing. They’ve also posted it to YouTube

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oBPtptln8mM

To Housle now we walk the wheel

We kill tonight the blood red meal

A leftward tread of magic's mill

To feed the Gods and work our Will.

Red! Red is the wine we drink!

Red! Red are the cords we wear!

Red! Red is the blood of God!

And red is the shade of the Housle.

There’s a lot to be said about these words, but first I would like to say something about the Craft. When we call things metaphors in the modern world, we tend to mean it in a Protestant way. We mean that the thing is “just a symbol.” The miracle did not “actually happen”, the bread and wine is not “really” the body and blood. Witchcraft is a Catholic phenomenon, which is to say the done act, the performed ritual,  is not merely a symbol but a deed which actually accomplishes something. The symbol may point to a deeper truth, but it is also a truth. When we make our offering, regardless if it is called the Housle or Cakes and Ale or Blot, to “feed the Gods and work our Will”, the moment of offering bread and wine (or in some traditions actual flesh and blood) is the act of offering our very selves. The only offering we can make that is worthwhile is ourselves. The Gods are God and so need no feeding unless we understand that the God works and lives in us. This is God in the world, and this God needs feeding indeed. The God in us needs to be fed and fostered and this act is done in the Housle. The Upanishads call the deepest part of ourselves the Self and say the Self is God. In the Northern mystery of Yggdrasil, Odin sacrifices ultimately to Odin to realize his fullness, that is, in the Housle our Cain self offers our Abel self to the true Self so that the God within, the God in this world, is manifested and sustained. It is not only that We feed the Gods to work our will, but that the feeding is the work and the manifestation of the Gods in this world is the Will is Magic. This is why the Housle is enacted, like all magic, in perfect love and perfect trust. But, I have said enough for now and too much talking verges on rambling and nonsense.

Autumntide: Coming to the Perilous Castle

I thought it was finally time to write about this new season, the season of autumn which hurts. It feels like life is slipping away, and I’m trying to hold onto it, hold onto the warmth of summer, to the vacationing and relaxation that came late to me, to the walking without jackets. I am trying to put at bay the snow and the short days. We have passed the midpoint, from now on days will get shorter and shorter and this will take us to Yule. I didn’t want to celebrate this day. It gave me no joy. I thought in a way it was better to move past it as quickly as possible. What’s more, I had no idea of how to observe this turning of the year.

But the Craft gives all the time. You just have to wait, and so I was first guided to Laurelei’s AFW posts,  guided to go back to some basics, to read about the Red Castle and Silver Queen who dwells in the southwest on an island off of the great water, I came into contact with the Castle Perilous where the Red Meal is offered. My own Perilous Castle is a nearby little island in the river. There the water and the sand taught me as did the great trees, that the Perilous Castle is a temple, and the sacrifice is, in the end, me. There, on the island, I began to be able to offer myself, to let go of holding on, to find beauty in the sacrifice, to begin to change, to question what I had not.

This can’t be all about you

Just because of what we shared in some dark room, that your stupid ass can hardly remember

You were half smoked out, half high in shades, cared for little but yourself and that’s why you are where you are now

And it’s not that I was a saint giving up my life, but it was the first time, you and your friend, that I had given myself to two men, and I was perfectly in command and you were perfectly nude,

I rode you, then I rode him,

From one to another, and I would have done it better if I had done it older and you said

will you eat my ass out

and he did

and you asked me if I could take the both of you at once

and I said it’s time to leave the sun is rising

I wonder if it’s changed you, if prison’s made a man of you or if transformation is the kind of magic that takes even more than that.

I regret to tell myself I think it does, these words take time and money’s spent for every single word that’s sent

I fear, without resentment, you might still be too dumb to understand that.

Summer turns to fall I want to hold on and I sit mourning like a lady with a miscarriage, shut my legs to this as the blood and flesh fall out and I cramp on yesterday

Summer turns to fall and summer turns to fall

And all my green leaves blood red

I cannot hold it at all, no I can’t hold it all

When you remind me of the red altar, I get on this black robe and take the walk to the red castle

cross the bridge and cross the moat and on the island make read to make the sacrifice, to ready all I have been holding onto. To let others see what all this time what I only gave to you, bear the chalice, bear the bread, bare your throat and make it red, as the leaves as the blood, as the sunset we’re sure of, the hap’ning river and by the key, bind the old Persephone

He said to me

Remember when I was on my knees in the dark, and you fucked my mouth and I thought inst that good isn’t that good, and you slid in and out of me and said, oh my god, that’s so good, feel that wood, and because of that burial, all this time I’ve een loyal to something that should have only been a moment.

He said to me

“Remember the green lights and the red and the yellow in that merry room in December when everything was hot as breath before I lost my mind and ran away, when you and I were we, do you remember all those nights I moaned while you fucked me under the Christmas tree?”

And I said I remembered when he lost his mind and vanished, and it has been some time since I have thought of fucking him in the lights of the Christmas tree

Men are not forgiving because they do not believe they’ve been forgiven

How can you believe you’ve gotten something you so loudly say you do not need?

I strip off pants and shirt and underwear, stand fat and naked in the mirror, think of myself long ago and the stupid mistakes I made

I didn’t have much wisdom then and can’t be sure I have it now

I go to the island in the river

I go to the island in the river

You change when you sit by the river

Under the pillars I prepare the offering

Stand fat and naked mirrored in the water

With a witch’s necklace and a dangling chain

Devotion and Solitude: The Work of the Witch

I don’t hesitate from the use of the word God. Replacing it with the term The Divine or, the Gods makes things hazy, or makes the thing I’m speaking of seem less than God. So, witch that I am, we will stick with the Germanic word, God.

I have refused to be part of a congregation anymore. It sucks me into rooms and away from the fire.

            

For years the discipline was to get my ass up and be at church on Sunday, make the ride in all weathers to attend daily Mass, get up and see that I was in church on Saturday evenings, make sure I was at Bible study, be sure to attend church gatherings, religious events and holy days. This commitment to community continued when I was involved in Judaism and when I approached Hinduism. It died altogether when I settled in the Craft. It serves to say that all the time I went from religious house to house, I was an initiated witch. I kept ending up in communities because I was trying to learn and I stayed until I had forgotten why I’d come. Now my discipline is solitude. My discipline is to resist the urge to participate in community, to develop this thing that had begun in me, and build this fire. To find the Craft in my worship. Sometimes the worship may feel so good we forget or neglect the responsibility of actually doing the Craft and being the Witch.  Even now, as I firmly describe a witch as a priest, I am aware that in many forms of the Craft there is no word for this devotion. In Asatru it is called being godowned, being and Odinsman, a Freyrsman, a “wife” of or “spouse” of a god, a term also used in Voudou. Newer religion and revivalist religion seems to be the best teacher for devotion these days, and thinking on this, it is perfectly fair to revive all religion, including those that are currently extant. All religion should be reconstructionist, under rebirth and revision. All true religion should be revival. And for the Young Traditions, magic burns at the heart of this revival.

What is the difference between the devotion of the witch and the devotion of one who prays and is not the witch? What is witchcraft? Like many forms of religion, including Christian Pentacostalism, it insists that the lovers of God have also been given power by God, that to exist in God is to work the power of God. It is not only the insistence that there is such a thing as prayer and prayer does change things, does effect the world, but that the meeting of the soul with God brings new things into being, that prayer is not passive requesting, but an active creation, a bringing forth of something, and an entering into a power which one manifests in this present world whether it is called ashe or Manitou or seidr. The witch is not simply humble requesting that God bless something. The which is also placing that power on all she or he does. The witch is consciously and constantly working to invest all that she does with a transformative and holy power. What I am saying here is that the devotee is not simply forcing their private will on things and making them happen, but blessing things so that what happens, what is done is actually the event of God, is a blessing, is the coming of God, so that all magic is truly ashe, is truly the Divine Presence of the Holy Child.  The magical deeds are not simply bringing forth things we want or need or thinking we need in the time, but each magical deed is filled with manitou, the presence of God. The devoted witch is always bringing forth God.

Devotion and Solitude, The First Part

The witch, the shaman, the druid, is a devotee. At least in what is somewhat arbitrarily lumped together as Traditional Craft, or let’s call it Old Craft. For a solitary of 1734, there is a complicated and freeing aspect of this, because though a devotee, there is no set myth or tradition or religion to which we devote ourselves. You are going directly to the bone temple, and that demands passing through many houses. A Wiccan will have their own gods, and so will those who practice Asatru of course. Their stories have been told. A Druid will practice more or less in some sort of Celtic fashion, praying to Irish or Welsh gods, usually. But for the Young Traditions, it is a different matter because you are a priestess or priests who is forging always your religion. This means delving deeper into the Christianity you walked away from, deeper into the Judaism that opened up your world, deeper into the Hinduism that illumined you, picking one up, putting it down for another, perhaps putting one away forever. It means, in some way, practicing a particular faith on a deeper level than you did before.

This is not like a Chaos magician who is concerned about power and thinks getting power happens by taking it from made up gods and pretending to worship them. This is an act of true worship, and in worship, meetings your gods through the gods who have often come to you either in the church, the synagogue or the ashram.

            The… danger is the wrong word… caution, is that in practicing these religions, becoming deeper in them, you may attempt to become a full of on Catholic, Orthodox Jew, Hindu, and end up right back where you started---on the inside, in the common congregational world. What you are doing may feel so good you may stop identifying as a witch and identify as a Hindu or a Buddhist. You may, in the end, turn from the Craft altogether.

            The truth is, there is no crime in this. In fact, it may even be that your place is another place, and the Craft was just a path to that place. But, on the other hand, you may have learned by long experience just the opposite.

            In Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis says that Christianity is a house with many rooms, and though you may become a Christian, in the end, you must leave the hallway and enter one of those rooms, that it is in the rooms one actually finds comfort, light and shelter and (though he does not say this) conventional acceptance and the fulfillment to the quest for identity most people crave.

            For the witch it is a different matter altogether. There is a great mansion indeed, with many, many wings, many forms of many religions. But for us the comfort is not found in one room, but in traveling from room to room to take what is needful and establishing outside of them our own habitation. This is where the light and heat and fire are, and this is such a very difficult task, one that you really have to be driven toward. It resist the comfort of being reassured that one is in the right group with the right revelation. It resist, to a large extent, the comfort of being part of a group. We so much love to be in a group that we will forsake freedom, the desire for truth,  and the quest for God just to say we are “in” something. Small wonder few people ever find this way.

Prison Letters Continued

One poem is long, and one is short, the long one is new, the short one is not. The short when is also happier and more conventional, but the longer one is everything that's going on in my head ,and everything I think it's currently important to address. So there you have it. I hope you get some joy from it. I always think of you.

-Chris

t h e   r e w o r k e d   o f   t h e   e a r t h

Not in my head, this knot in my head, this heaviness of eyelids, as if the night before we wrestled with an angel,

sometimes waking is like walking around with black eyes,

waking like a boxer.

Midway through I got up and shook out this foot on the one leg shorter

than the other, the foot that survived the car accident.

I stretch out the cramp and stretch out my will, limp

out like to make the coffee and stop the dreaming.

Sometimes life is a grinding thing, you sit here and think,

shall I season the meat and refrigerate the meat and cook

this or cook that, it’s all too much to worry about right

now with this elephant on my head, when there is this

cloud on my head, back stiff from bed, and I haven’t even

wiped the sludge from my eyes.

This is the sludge from which the world was born.

I still believe one day I will wake up full of life and not curse a room full of shit and sunlight be the go getter you see on TV, well up by ten thirty and

I will move on with my day,

move through it swiftly, gracefully, getting it done,

not being this lazy holy fuck that I’ve become

and here is the relief

cause movers and shakers don’t think

and go getters never reflect.

There’s not time to think about reality when you’ve agreed to someone

Elses

But for my recalcitrant ass

it always took an hour to blink into the world

and the sky was always a little grey, and I never liked the sunlight in my face.

I always needed this second cup of coffee

Someone out there gets up at seven and sings while making egg white omelets.

Some sad fuck tells you he’s glad he gave up smoking and pleased at the

thirty pounds he put down.

But I took them up, and, think on this, every morning I rise to write poems,

and that was why I came here

I resolved to be this person writing poems,

Look here, to follow your resolve looks like this.

looks like headaches and cramped bodies

The doing is never glamorous

The doing’s always full of doubting

And that is why the doing is so seldom done.

All through the morning, scribble down your poems

Take the knife off the altar

Get your mind in order

I had something to bring to you, but when I came, my hands were empty.

The song in my mouth unraveled to air, the words to nothing. I had rivers to say to you, but they were swallowed in blackness and the whiteness of air.

Waiting in patience is the most neutral of things.

Having done all you can do you, do a little more and find silence.

But, what? This silence cannot be enough. This waiting, but…

but sometime waiting is whole that can be done.

In the morning when I do not have to rise to tend the children,

I sit here and let words drip from my brain,

the little shower of rain and the lit candle, the thoughts I dandle

like a baby, are the fruit of using underemployment.

And I am poor, but not as needy as I think, and I looking at all

the normal people I called myself the wretched of the earth.

But wretched is the shirt and tie, and wretched is the working till you die,

smiling to make other people happy, wretched is the routine,

the memes sent back and forth from your desk, learning to live

in regret.

We, who have too much time, and too little comfort with the way

Things are, blessed are we.

We who wish for normalcy like it is a luxury,

are the reborn, the skyborn, the earth born,

the reworked of the earth.

c h r i s t m a s   s o n g

every valley has not been exalted

and the hills still need to be

made low so that i can look over

them and see the glory i stopped

believing love is lukewarm and

affection damp at best and these

damn folks don't try their best

from one look, one gaze, all i

see is half life

and still, in my life,

out of the corners

in the stable, in the cave.

so quietly, so quietly,

hear him crying,

the little child is born

all these days, all these travels

have stretched tiresome and long

but past lies, deceptions,

half attempts, i hear the angels' song

O Sacred Head

At the end of August comes the Passion of Saint John the Baptist, the commemoration of the beheading of the Forerunner of the Morn. The month of Lammas is a time of transition associated with the sacrifice of the protecting god, the God in the Grain who is cut to feed the earth. This is the time of the Wicker Man upon whom old sins and ailments are placed before burning. We have built the Wicker Man. We have taken him to the water. We have burned him, we have struggled through our demons and continue to do so. To the Irish Lammas was the Telltown where they celebrated the funeral games of Tieltui. The Lady is not the sun, but the foster mother of the Lugh, the Shining One who represents the sun light. She is the Lady of the most ancient race of gods, and she cleared the land of trees to provide farmland for the people that they might not starve. Some say she died of exhaustions, others that she was the Green Woman, and in cutting the trees cut down her own power. Either way Tieltiu gives her life.

The Mother who gives herself as sustenance shows her face as the Corn Mother in the Americas, she who demanded to be dragged across the earth until her blood and bones became corn and tobacco to feed her stariving children. So this time of the year is the time of the Life giver, the one who loses their body and gives up their life, most often seen in the removal and veneration of the Sacred Head.

The story of John the Baptist’s beheading is fairly simple. It is sad, but more than sad it is a symbol. John is the Green Man. He Gran Bwa, the Great Forest, as Tieltiu is the Green Lady. He allows Gawain to behead him and then places his head back on. He is a symbol of the power of the Sacred Head, the Sacred Head surrounded or so wounded.

To some witches, the Green Man is also a symbol of Cain, and the skull amidst growing plants is Cain the first farmer. But if we are dealing with biblical figures and Ancestors, then it is wise to remember that Adam and Eve, who give up immortality and innocence to engender the human race, human life and time including the wheel of life and death are the original Green Mother and Green Father. Christ, the second Adam, is incidentally viewed by Mary Magdalene as a gardener in the garden where he was buried, and here there is also a symbol to contemplate, the Gardener who gardens himself, raising the seed of his new life from his dead corpse.

 In India, the Sacred Head is Chinnamasta, the Hindu and Tibetan deity who cheerfully chops off her own head, sacrificing herself to give to all her children, who feeds us with the blood gushing from her throat like a fountain. Not only had she lost her head, but we must lose our heads in order to enter this mystery in joy rather than repulsion. This beheading is also the secret of Medusa, not that she is monstrosity, but rather that she is mortality, a Goddess offering, her own sacred head surrounded and sore wounded. Yes, to enter into this mystery of life giving, we have to lose our own heads as well. The Princess of Swords in the Tarot deck is Salome, and the head she holds is not only John’s but our own. Today, at this sacred time, may the God who gives his head and the Goddess who gives her life bathe us in this mystery.