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
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.
No comments:
Post a Comment