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.

 Yesterday wasn’t a day for doing, but being and thinking and resting and I think goddamn, but last week you were in Chi and you had to make up for all of that, for not getting done then either. And there is this new story you want to work on, and proofing the Blood, and proofing Eden and…. Goodness.

 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.

 

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 England, they disdained England not because it was tyrannical, but because it would not incorporate them properly into its tyranny. We cannot despie what is because it leaves us out. We must turn out backs on it because it is wicked and we want no part in it, not in order that we might  have our own share in the wickedness. That has been our problem so far.

 

Last Tuesday it was a gloomy day, turning to a rainy day and I was full of depression, on my way to Belmont.  By the end of the day I was in my first bath house experience what I was told good Christian people did not do, but then, I have long ceased to be a good Christian person.

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 Ohio, and being saved from another Ohio trip, being saved also, from a rash of bad lovers.

 

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.