Hail Marys, the Feast of Mary Magdalene and the Silent Sister

The Feast of Mary Magdalene is the bright spot in that thing the Church calls Ordinary Time, and which I am calling the Extraordinary Time. Though there are some who would stop and say, why in the world talk about any church, the truth is the history of the Catholic Church is the history of the shaping of the Western world, so a few moments to talk about Saint Magdalene in that context are necessary.

These days, the kinder, gentler face of the Church is fond of calling Mary Magdalene the Apostle to the Apostles, which sounds nice, but the Mass and the services for her are still those celebrated for common days and commemorations. So far, among women, only the Virgin Mary ever ranks three readings and a Gloria, the full compliment of a high day in the Catholic Church. Looking up hymns and readings for Magdalene, I was greeted by several things, hymns for the Virgin Mary, esoteric videos by voodoo priestesses, Gnostic teachers and Catholic silence. If the Virgin Mary is the safe face of the feminine that the Church raises up, much as Athens raised up their own Virgin, then the Magdalene is something else entirely.

And this isn’t to disregard the power of the Virgin, for she herself has always been treated warily, and the Church has been careful about how she is reverenced. Movements to revere her come up from the ground rather than the church official, but the time for Mary Magdalene seems to be arriving, and her movement is coming up from the ground too.

There is another issue about Mary Magdalene. How many of her are there? In something that is not quite innocence, many women have been conflated to make her. The nameless Sinful Woman who wipes Jesus’s feet with her hair is conflated with Mary of Bethany, that most excellent saint and mystic, who wiped Jesus feet with spikenard and foretold his death,  and then, for reasons unknown, that Mary is conflated with Mary of Magdala who was at the foot of the Cross, the disciple of the Lord who was first to witness his rising. So we are confronted with at least two Marys, and two goes against the conventional urge of the Church toward mono everything. It would seem that from the very beginning, Mary Magdalene was the Lady off the Mysteries of the Church, she whose presence guarded the door to deeper and more personal truths. If the Virgin was the mother of the baby Jesus, Mary was the companion, and the mother of the Resurrection. But it is only natural that the easiest and most proselytizing form of the Church would be the successful one, the one which went with the order of the day, insisting on the supremacy of the male and the supremacy of what was already supreme. Such a church, which had no room for mysticism, could not readily accept such Marys, the midwives of the Resurrection and the arch disciples and beloveds of God. In a streamlining church of one God and one way, there was only room for one woman, and this comes to be the Blessed Virgin. Counter to all this, holding no baby, but a red egg, and not veiled in blue, but in red, the color of resurrection and sunrise, is Mary of Magdala. Equally brilliant, though nearly visible, stands beside her, Mary of Bethany, the sister of Lazarus who sat at Jesus’s feet. The most visible of Jesus’s many women disciples.

In the first century, the people who would be called Christians called themselves, among many things, the Way, and it appears that, unlike the streamlined version of Christian development offered in the Bible, there were many and generous versions of that Way, often quite startling to modern eyes. In that same sense, the two Marys still stand at the entrance of that Way, sphinx like, and await our coming.

The Gravity of Heaven

These days have been stifling. Yesterday afternoon I go on the only walk I’ve taken during daylight hours. It is raining a bit, and I come back in and the clouds begin to clear. I knew that before the hour passed. the pleasant but wet 70 degree weather would skyrocket back to the heat we’d been living in, and it is around 90 degrees in the nighttime. In the Midwest we do not have the blessing of deserts which take the heat away every night so we can have a fresh start. The heat and the humidity accumulate like a hothouse.

During the esbat, the days are so hot that by the time the moon is out, I want nothing but a shower and a lie down. But, at last, I slip on shoes at two in the morning and go out to see the full moon and be in the actual air that I had not experienced the whole day. I am surprised that the air has cooled, information I would not have known, and I am surprised by the breeze and how connected I feel by it, not just to it, but by it, linked to myself and all that’s going on in me, linked to the world about me. The moon is hidden for most of the time while I chant and pray, and it is only in the end that she reveals her bright white face.

            For the witch, the Moon has a special place. It isn’t that the moon is a little sun. IUt isn’t at all.. If the magic of the moon is that it reflects the light of the sun, then the second magic which we rarely speak of is that ir reflects the magic of the earth. The moon is a mirror of us, a planetoid that had been pulled into our orbit, and circles us as we circle the sun. Witches become witches by being outside, by being in the world and feeling the pulse of nature. Our power is not different than the growing power in the trees and flowers, than the animal power of the birds and the beasts. The power in the witch is that which moves in the water and the wind. As witches we are grounded when we are grounded in the reality of the earth. We are pulled in by the gravity of the ground beneath our feet. The Esbat is so important, and the moon matters because it is then we are reminded of the gravity of heaven which grounds us as well. Earth and heaven, the witch is of both. We are pulled by the moon, as is the sea, as is the earth, and the moon is pulled by the earth, the two pulling each other, one circles the other in an unending dance, and all the time the earth circling the sun, the sun the galaxy, the greatest Spiral Castle we know, all of us pulled to each other and pulling. This is the power of the moon which we enter into at the Esbat.

The Witch Craft

The Work expresses itself through many things. Often the expression may occur through the very mundane workings of life, the simple duties, but very, very often, the witch experiences the work through acts of art and music and ritual, through sex, through strange biddings be new moods and voices to do the impractical, the seemingly ornamental. Once such bidding was to craft a boat for the Sea Altar which has been coming to fruition in the living room. In the midst of working on this simple ship, it becomes apparent that its crafting is Crafting, This is a work. I blow upon it, sing and pray over it, move it about along the currents of the air, remembering that another term for a boat or for anything built for travel is a craft. This little ship I am making is a witch craft. It is my witchcraft. We talked of the Craft being a skill, worked on and practiced continuously, and it is, but we are quick to forget that our Craft, our devotion is the vehicle through which we traverse the Creation.

Witches are voyagers before we are anything, and we know how many approached this road briefly, but were scared or lazy or both and did not go very far. We may have been that person ourselves, content to shudder at mystery, fill our houses with crystal balls and Tarots, dress in black and leave it at that. But the witch is the opposite of orthodoxy. This is not religion that takes comfort in assumed truths and worn out assumptions, nor is the Craft vague and untested hope. We are not camping down in the blessed security of the dogma we have been taught or for that matter, the emptiness of an unexamined mind.

The first impulse of the Craft is to move past what we have been handed and search for something new on the edges of things. Surely there must be more. Surely the something we have felt on the edge of our mind and right outside the church doors must be explored. Surely there is something beyond the subtle and not so subtle versions of an Michelangelo’s old Italian in a pink nightie God, the God, something to the tantalizing whispers in the back of our mind. And so we begin our journey, and though years later I light candles on the Sea Altar, and honor our Lady of the Lake, though I make trips to the water to honor her and bring back sand and shells, that lake points to a deeper water, the water from which we all came and to which we all return, in which we have our being, at this very moment. That thing which upholds us, following an internal North Star, taking us farther and farther from the barren shore where there was really nothing for us, is what Christians call grace, and what I will call, for now, the Witch Craft.

Dun Mor Druid Order: Commentary

The Revolution Cannot Be Televised.

In so much of what would be liberalism, for the sake of greed, it has ceased to be progressive. Progressivism yearns toward something new, but so many who would call themselves feminists or activists are helping in making the world ground to a halt so they can get the present goodies.

Germaine Greer predicted that as the world changed, as the witches came from the heath and we left a patriarchal and colonial frame of thinking for something different, art would cease to be so precious. Fine Art would give way to smaller every day arts. What she was speaking of was that the monopolization of the current world seen through religion in monotheism and through art as fine art would yield to a democratization of creation.

The other place where capitalism has lead to a monopoly on art is in our entertainments. Not many of us are going to spend the day in art museums, but many of us will obsess over musicians and other super celebrities. The obsession with manufactured entertainment keeps us from being creators and sharers. Instead we become consumers and what is done for us is production. We consume “content”

The witch resist the content that is not questions, delivered up precooked and drugged to our doors so we can simply swallow it and go to sleep. The witch is creating, creative, awake, capable of making her own things including her own entertainments.

The witch is waiting for the revolution. The witch is waiting for those things which have not yet happened. The witch is the priestess of the past who is waiting for the new creation. The witch is waiting for the feminist revolution, the Black revolution, the sex revolution which has only one fourth happened and has queers crawling back into Russian doll like closets in closets. The witch is waiting for the indigenous revolution, the green revolution, the second, third and fourth coming no one can envision. The witch is waiting for the equality of things long sought. The witch does not want to things to stay the same. The witch is waiting for the old church to give way to the new church to the no church. The witch is waiting for God the Father to meet God the Mother and then transcend both. The Transex God then a whole new word altogether, like Tiresias the prophet, once man then woman and man again, like the bearded, breasted witches of the Scottish Play, the which is transgressing and transsexual, is waiting for the end of old polarities and gender roles. And all the time the witch is waiting, the witch is working. The witch is stirring her cauldron.

The Young Tradition

Of course what many of us know as the Craft is far from what is commonly called Wicca or paganism, and the further we get into our path, the further it will get from those easy names. Once again, I am making sideways stabs at Margot Adler’s Drawing Down the Moon, and again I am struck by the fact that it unabashedly not only sticks to the Americans (that wa the point of her book), but has no real problems solely focusing on white people dabbling in the occult. She is talking about beliefs and ways of white Americans who are trying to start another stream of religion which she and they call paganism and which excludes large swathes of what most of us know as the Craft. Adler intentionally leaves out Eastern spirituality, but she also excludes American and British root traditions. Satanists, and therefore anyone who acknowledges anyone who could be called the Devil are excluded. So the Witch’s Devil is excluded from Adler’s witchcraft and paganism. In her very thick book there is little about Gardnerian witchcraft and as far as I know, nothing of Alexandrian. Because she defines witches as a subset of pagans, and who use Christian ritual or reference a monotheistic God are also excluded which means Clan of Tubal Cain, again traditional witches on both sides of the Atlantic, high magic, Voodoo, Candomble, Santeria and all Afro Carribean practices.

There are many witches who came into the Craft through a steady diet of Llewellyn books and paganism, or even through Gardnerian and Alexandrian witchcraft, and as they went deeper and needed a thorough spiritual practice, became Buddhist or Hindus or became so Buddhist and Hindu in their practice that it makes no difference to call them witches. And of course, there are those who gave up and went back to church, considered magic a phase. When we come to the Craft we are all seeking different things, and in the light of the Craft will discover what these things are. In time we may find that those things are found by simply entering another religious path, or deepening the one native to us already.

But there are some who find in the occult a deeper devotion, who turn toward those paths ignored in Adler’s book, and outside of the stream of paganism, and deepen themselves in the cousins of Candomble, Voodoo and Santeria, who follow the old wisdom traditions of American and Britain which, usually, in Britain, are called witchcraft. We go down and down, for the craft is as deep as we who practice it are willing to go. It is always a little ahead of us.

And the thing for all of us is that we do not know what to do. We are walking in the dark because there is no way for us prepared. There is no tradition for our tradition. Indeed, we have eschewed traditions and dogmas, teachers and absolute teachings to follow another way, one that we must build ourselves. The going is hard, because this is not just the getting of power, but the getting of mastery over ourselves and not just the getting of knowledge, but the getting of wisdom and understanding, and we don't have the wise grandmothers. We've never seen peace. we didn't have the elders or the in tune and spiritual parents who could set us on our way. We haven't seen the way. The way is counter to this world in which we live.

“The path to life is never very easy for very long. That path is worth it. All beside it pales. Devote yourself.”

Foxes and Birds

When things begin to happen, how can you feel full of power? Magic isn’t even like that. Magic is a poor name for it. Today, after I have lain naked, stretched out in the dark in the form of a Pentagram, I embrace the name of witch because I embrace the darkness. I embrace that Name because I embrace the Devil. If you cannot embrace the darkness of it, the solitariness of it, the river twinkling at night, the walking through the trees, the transgression, the walking away from the normal order of things and the common way of thinking, then how can you be the witch? If you are trying to turn a coven into a Unitarian church, then I really feel like you should be something else. There is a tendency for those of the Craft to make many many videos of themselves, and show off their grim and depressing altars, and these people are laughingly called darker than thous. But there is such a thing as lighter than thous. There are many faces of enchantment, but the dark face is the face of the witch. If one will not embrace such darkness, perhaps one should use a different name.

At any road, though it is a craft, when things begin to happen you realize at the end of the the day it is a matter of asking and receiving from your gracious gods, from the spirits and elements around you, a matter of simply sitting down to wait, of beginning to become quiet and starting to listen, and how can you do anything but sit up in wonder and clap your hands in gratitude when the working and waiting yields wonders? How can you clap yourself on the back and think of this as your own discrete and personal power?

The Craft is deep and constant. It is a way of life. Like Bon in Tibet, it is a way that underlies many other practices and sometimes can be confused or conflated with them. It is the very radical definition of the word religion, from the Latin religio, the binding together. The Craft is a way that gets deeper and deeper and affects all of what the witch does. For me, it increasingly underlies Catholicism. For a long time I tried to make it replace Catholicism, not understanding that I, like several witches before me, had already been given a perfect skeleton on which to build something which ceases to resemble either conventional Christianity or the Wicca I first encountered in Llewellyn books long ago.  Twice in the readings of a church I do not attend, while still adapting its rituals and using its lectionary, have I read about Jesus calling his disciples, saying “The birds have the air and the foxes have holes, but the Son of Man has no place to lay his head.” Having said this, having been very hard on those who would follow him and making us certain that the life of dedication is no easy thing,=, he next says  “Follow me.” This reading has occurred three times in the last few days, by a not quite accident of the lectionary, a reading which speaks the same message over and over again: “The path to life is never very easy for very long. That path is worth it. All beside it pales. Devote yourself.”