The Mistress of Magic

The Black School, John Jude Palencar

The Alexandrian witch Maxine Sanders once complained that witches in the south of England were working magic for her sick son and that they called on the Goddess to do as she willed and released their power to her, and her son sickened. She said it was irresponsible of a witch to call up power and put it in the hands of the Goddess, and that if a witch didn’t know exactly what she was doing, and exactly how much power to use, they were doing something very dangerous. She was angry at those witches trying to heal her son. She was probably angry at how little she herself could do.

Since I’m not exactly sure how a witch would do that or if witches ever did that, I’m going to have to call bullshit on that.

One weekend, a long time ago, I went with a decision I had been waiting on for some time. I decided to initiate into the Craft, to “become” a witch. This took a great deal of thinking, as much as it did to identify as queer. I was deeply devout and deeply devoted to my God who at that time I identified as the God of the Roman Catholic Church. Everything that happened later was all a result of knowing that anything we called God and the God I was experiencing relationship with and too, had to be bigger than churches, didn’t seem like he had much to do with church and the people I met there at all. The attraction to the Craft was the same as the attraction to a queer life, to other men. In some way shape or form it had always been there always delighted me, always seemed natural and would take me away from the dullness I was living in that I sensed was untrue.

There was very little going for my life when I initiated. I was pretty lost as to what mattered or where to go next.. Possibly I thought this would show me, but really I was filled with the excitement of what Gemma Gary calls “a walking away”. That weekend it was very hot and I was living with parents who had bad air conditioning and didn’t like to use it. I had procured my first robe and spent the weekend reading cards and lighting candles and really thinking about this new commitment, taking the ritual bath, thinking, that’s done, and really, only being at the beginning.

The internet existed, but not for me, not really, and it was a lot of long searching through bad books and dead ends and false stops, coming to strange places and staying to long in them before I finally made it to taking a first degree, second degree and third degree and this was before I came to 1734. So, I sit here, as a witch of many years and a little bit of wisdom, and propose one of the most important questions: what is magic? No, I pose another question: how does magic work?

I don’t know.

After so many years I’ve heard, we’ve heard…. Oh, hell, a lot. This candle for this result, bergamot and sassafras mixed together to that. Tying up this that and the other in such  way for such a thing to happen. The Book of Shadows which Gerald Gardner invented (or assembled) and which Alex and Maxine Sanders largely cribbed has several very specific ways of doing things and we are told we who have seen it online haven’t see the actual book actual covens use cause every coven is different and…. But presumably if you do not get your results, there is a lack of precision to what you have done Those (usually) men who bill themselves as ceremonial magicians are very firm about how precisely you do rituals to command demons and I’ve heard some frankly stupid shit about how they do magic and how precisely they do it and if they don’t do it right. And the sigil masters, who always get it right, because they know the right way to draw the sigil. Or the long bearded, bespectacled D and D playing magicians who tell ou magic really is a science you just have to…

But this all bullshit.

Since when I began and nothing really turned out until much later where many things I long for still haven’t happened, but many powerful workings have born strange fruit, I have learned a few things. One very powerful working was a weather one. I had wanted to go to the beach with a friend who talked about wanting to go places and who had a good car. I never have. And we had made our plans for the weekend. Almost as soon as we had she checked the weather which predicted terrible weather for the rest of the week and that weekend. I, however, began a long and powerful working despite what the forecast said while the week yielded worse and worse weather. I only needed the sunny Saturday. Friday night the sky was black and foul but when I woke up on Saturday it was one of the best, sunniest, warmest days that summer. My friend said she couldn’t go because her washing machine was acting right and she really wished she could but….  All that Saturday the glorious weather sort of taunted me and the sun winked down and me and asked me if I’d learned a lesson. Looking back I realized she’d always been untrustworthy and eventually I broke off ties with her. The next day the weather went back to being foul.

So often in our workings and ritual, and in the Great Work, which we call “magic” we don’t really know what we need or what we’re asking for. I thought I wanted good weather, but what I wanted was a reliable friend and the sense to do things on my own and for myself no matter what the weather was. Some practitioners believe they are in control of spirits or gods or demons or whatever, but this is silly. The thing about the magic done at our altars and in our circles is there is a Master of the magic, and a Mistress, and it is not us. We are apprentices.

In the Last Unicorn, the magician Shmendrick stops being a fraud and surprised to learn he is a real wizard. The way the magic works is always a surprise, for when it is time, instead of trying to manipulate or control he holds out his wand and says, “Magic, do as you will.”

The Magic is not simply a tool, and definitely not solely a servant.

Let the Magic lead.

And it does as it wills.

And then surprises come.

The Christian Issue

???

The last topic naturally (for me) leads to the question of Christian Witchcraft. Years ago I stumbled across a site for it, but thought it was silly and so never went further to find out more. I think the term Christian witchcraft is troublesome because it seems a little apologetic. It is an attempt to wed two ways that aren’t often seen as wedded and are probably opposed to each other, and then there is the idea we cannot get away from that to be Christian is somehow to be “right” so if only you can marry the Craft to the Cross, you’ve done something. Since, so often I deal with Christian themes it is important to ask: can there be such a thing as a Christian witch? In almost similar words, would I regard myself as a Christian?

Certainly in the Middle Ages and in the not distant past in England and America we know of several self or other identified witches who also identified as devout Christians, but we have to add to this that up until the very recetn past most practicing Christians were syncretistic that is, mixed other ancestral religions with Christianity and were largely ignorant of Christian theology. The old world was a much less precise world, but we live in a world of many precisions, right left, Christian pagan. We have a religion or varying religions called Witchcraft with their own system called pagan (though what relationship it bears to actual paganism is hard to say) In this world, then, the question of one being both an effective Christian and an effective witch is a little different. Certainly in the hot fringes of things, among the deeply Orthodox, Roman Catholics and Pentecostals who delve deep into the power of belief, nothing less than magic is seen. An atheist could deny it. A witch cannot. Just as in Hindu sects stone Ganeshas are seen to drinkthe milk offered to them, Catholic holy men and holy women heal, icons bleed, the Pentecostal preacher Marilyn Hickey is said to have created eyes in the head of a blind woman by the name of Jesus and for anyone who practices the Craft this should not sound unbelievable.

And yet I would say a modern witch is not a Christian, at least not an orthodox, church going one. The Christian healers are under the obligation to attribute Hindu miracles to either illusion or the Devil. Christianity asserts its primacy, not simply its primacy but it’s only game in town ness even to the point that’s its various sects condemn each other. Christians are orthodox.  A witch is heterodox. Christians espouse faith in doctrines. Witches practice heresy. The Christian view of God is in Eden and in the civilized place with its borders and its thou shalt not. The Christian God dwells in the New Jerusalem, but the witch is outside of the city walls and out of the Garden. In the proper Christian view, God strives against the Devil who is always prowling about. In the end, to the witch, God and the Devil are One.

So, unlike the village witch of the sixteen hundreds who loudly asserted her Christian faith while also admitting to speaking to devils we are not entirely able to do the same. For one, our view of the world is not exclusively western or Christian so devils and maybe even fairies might not have much place in it, Our past does have a place in our world view, though, and for most of us our past is at least vaguely Christian. But in this current world we have and know more than Christianity. We know what it is and often what it is not, we sense the difference in ourselves and the church going folk around as, in what we stand for and what the shambles of modern Christendom espouse. And yet, and yet, our rituals, our gatherings, our circles, our rites, our chalices, our housles and our sacrificed gods cannot entirely escape Christianity, no matter how much we try to give them a different origin story, and that is fine. Christianity is the chief mystery of the last two thousand years through which all mysteries before have been filtered. A mystery is to be peered into at all times. It is the lapwing that, if we settle on its surface, we will be lost, but if we give ourselves to it deeply, will reveal much.

Jesus Issues

Hermes Kriophoros

I just finished Mary Gordon’s uncomfortable Reading Jesus, a book in which, as an artistic and literary Catholic realizing that she and most of her Catholic contemporaries, never read the actual Gospels, sits down to do so and discover the Jesus in them. She is very candid about the Jesus she meets who is equal parts charming and off putting and she speaks of her intellectual and emotional struggles with Christianity and why, in the end, she remains in the camp of the faithful even if her faith is not as orthodox as if once was.

But I am not Mary Gordon. Her father was Jewish and she brings a Talmudic gaze to the Scriptures. My father was a Baptist and my mother a Methodist before their conversions. and I brought to my Catholicism a thorough going acquaintance with the Bible as well as a wild streak of magic, personal opinion and free will possessed by old time evangelicals. So why was I troubled as well as pleased by Gordon’s book? Because, as we went through the Gospels together, I remembered that, beyond priests and pastoral scandals, beyond the hypocrisy, bad theology, mediocrity and oppression dealt out by churches, there was one real reason I could not consider myself a Christian in any orthodox sense. I do not really like Jesus. You’re not supposed to say that. Even an unbeliever is supposed to say, he was a good man, a great teacher, a this, a that. But the only Jesus we meet in the Bible is a construct of early Christians, and he is, in turns, confusing, conflicting, opposed to good living, vaguely anti Semetic then anti gentile, dense in narrative, dense in perception, capricious, dull, rarely lovable.

.

Well, then, why do I still celebrate Christmas and Easter and the seasons attached? Why am I moved intensely by the ancient hymns? Why is there a Madonna and Child on my altar? Why do I still listen to the same songs I did as a teenage Christian when really, I could be spending my time making up a whole new relationship to Pan, or Adonis or Cernunnos? Why do these names mean less, and affect less, than the name of Jesus?

Some would say what’s in a name? But the answer is: a lot.There is a lot invested in a name you have used a long time for the God you live with, and magic and religion are not cerebral. We make that mistake. Because you are liberal, join a liberal church or synagogue, because you should feel X, go to Y. But true power is of the heart and almost beyond reason. On a pure and actual level, as much as I benefit from thinking of Dionysus or Apollo, I have never met them, and they cannot be the most familiar names and faces for my God. It wastes a great deal of worship and energy trying to make them so. I know. I’ve tried. In deepest work and deepest prayer I can only use the deepest names I have known, and Jesus is probably first among those names.

Clarissa Pinkola Estes wrote a not as interesting as it should have been book about Our Lady talking primarily of her as the Virgin Mary of course, but her thesis being that this was only the Catholic way of seeing her, and Our Lady was a thing beyond individual religions. She spoke of how the churches had tried to make the role of Our Lady small, but she always rose up again through the peoples’ devotion. Estes is a mostly liberal Catholic who writes for The Catholic Reporter, and she could not really get away with calling “Our Lady” the Goddess, but any witch reading her could see she was going there. I think I am saying the same thing about “Our Lord”. I think I am saying he does not belong to conservatives or white people, to churches or to Christianity or, for that matter, to the Bible. My Jesus bears only superficial resemblance to the person I meet, and cannot very long like, in the Bible. The Jesus of English folk songs and fervent meditations, has little to do with these.  Gordon’s book ends troubled, because she herself is troubled. At the end of the day she believes in this world, and for things to happen they must happen in this world. She believes in the world of imagination, but only as a metaphor. To a witch all worlds are real, and so the story of Jesus is as real as the actual Jesus, the mythic King Arthur as real as the actual chief if their was one. The myths are as true as historical religions claim they are.  The Otherworld is as real was the apparent one.  Gordon concludes her book grappling with the Bible texts and agreeing to sort of believe in a sort of miraculous sort of resurrected Jesus of Nazareth. I end it called back to the worship of the eternal Beloved and Lover, the slain Son, the holy prince, the bread and wine whom everyone knows, who is Absalom more than Isaac, who is Attis and Dionysus, Adonai and Adonis. Balder. Whose names are many but whom, for me, most kindly keeps the name I have always known him by, and name which makes me able to talk to other people about him without the unnecessary and un useful raised eyebrow.

Candlemas

I don't now what to say here, but its been some time since I've said anything. Candlemas was always one of those odd days, one of those strange times I don't know how to celebrate. The truth? I've always been suspicious and leery of Candlemas. The first one I celebrated after college, when I was still going to church, I was in a very dark time of life and I believed that, perhaps, on this day, some warmth, some light might come to me. It was very cold and back then I walked everywhere. I was numb with the ice and the driving snow, and as I sat through the liturgy I had the hopeless feeling I very often had in church, that of nothing happening. Back at home, in the cold February, having just graduated from college and not knowing what was next for me, still in the winter time coldness and separated from friends, I gave myself up to crying and depression. It would not be the last time.

Part of this is always with me when we come to the dark beginning of February, the Feast of Candles. I have always wanted it to be something. Though I grew up Catholic, nominally, when I took it up on my own and properly returned to that church it was under the influence of Thomas Merton. Flannery O'Connor and other people who had been dead since the 1960s. Their mystical mysterious church wasa thing of the past and priests chuckled at me when I asked if we were having Candlemas blessings and processions. 

The brokenhearted madness, it can only be called madness, of that Candlemas Day after college was echoed several years later. My relationship to church and traditional religion had been like one very poor and unpromising betrothal and one day I left a mass again, feeling mad and deranged and weepy and it was slowly, in the next few days I began to learn something that is the basis of Young Tradition, and the basis of solitary Craft,  that what I needed was going to be found here, at my altar, and if I was going to find God in the temple of my body, I wasn't going to find him anywhere. If I wasn't going to be healed at my sanctuary, no healing would come.

Some lessons are terrible to learn. Candlemas is also called St Bride and dedicated to the saint and the goddess of fire and healing, the lady of inspiration and stories. That Candlemas years ago, though I was totally broken and terrified, was also the time when I decided there was nothing more important to me than being a poet, a storyteller, a writer and an artists. Had I known then that the Spiral Castle and the World Tree and the Cross are one, I would have understood that the healing the Lady sends can be awful and her lessons terrible.

I do not call this time Imbolc. I don't trust the etymology, and I'm not a Wiccan. Nor is this the beginning of spring. That's nonsense. We are deep in winter. I refer to it as Candlemas, the day lights are blessed and we call on the Light, the day the Mother of God was purified and brought the Child Christ into the temple.

Lord, the Roman hyacinths are blooming in bowls and
The winter sun creeps by the snow hills;
The stubborn season has made stand.
My life is light, waiting for the death wind,
Like a feather on the back of my hand.
Dust in sunlight and memory in corners
Wait for the wind that chills towards the dead land.

Grant us thy peace.
I have walked many years in this city,
Kept faith and fast, provided for the poor,
Have taken and given honour and ease.
There went never any rejected from my door.

Who shall remember my house,
where shall live my children’s children

When the time of sorrow is come ?
They will take to the goat’s path, and the fox’s home,
Fleeing from the foreign faces and the foreign swords.

TS Eliot writes, as the voice of Simeon, the old man who was promised a vision of the Messiah and beheld Jesus, the man who says, Now let your servant go in peace...."

This peace is a strange peace, a peace of the very old who are asking to leave this life, having gone through much hardship, who are acknowledging more hardship to come. Eliot remembers more of Simeon's words, those spoken to Mary, the Mother of Jesus.

According to thy word,
They shall praise Thee and suffer in every generation
With glory and derision,
Light upon light, mounting the saints’ stair.
Not for me the martyrdom, the ecstasy of thought and prayer,
Not for me the ultimate vision.
Grant me thy peace.

(And a sword shall pierce thy heart,
Thine also).

This is a feast of paradox, denying this is not enough. A time of light and a foreboding of darkness, a welcoming and a plea to be released. We cannot unriddle the meaning of Candlemas. We can only welcome it, and learn.

Time to grow silent. Time to have patience with our anxieties and our fears. Time to treasure up all of our prayers and open out temple. Time to see what happens when Christ and his Mother come in..

The Journey

The other night when a friend of mine says, “You are so creative,” I am not sure how to take it. To say “Thank you” doesn’t seem entirely right. It seems to be missing the point. I spend some time in my notebooks writing down what the nature is of this creativity. It is is only Monday night, early Tuesday morning, in addition to the need to fill out exhausting paperwork in addition to the hope for better work and work that pays more,  that better sustains creation. I cannot believe how full of hope I was. I cannot believe the almost cloud I have been on the inexhaustible belief, hope and determination. I don’t feel it now. Last night I worked on several stories and contributed to the two writing sites I am on. At nearly five in the morning I was writing a letter and sending poems to a friend in prison. I got up, a little weary, but continued on with proofreading and submissions and the writing sites and then, overlooking the long steps to filling out new paperwork, was sent into a depression. At times like this I wonder if things will ever be easy, if I will ever have the work I long for. If I will ever feel good and confident about things again. It spirals into all the ifs, all the ways in which we might not be alright and I might be alright and it’s a little hopeless, and for a while I need to stop this working, I need to treat myself a little better. I need to, not try to feel good, but try to incorporate these feelings

On the other side of the worst of this minor depression, I know that there are things I need to do to get out of this place .i need to write in that green journal. I need to write myself out of this, and smoke myself out of this, to light the candles on the altar and sing old songs while I set up the images. Cigarette smoke, sage, smoke, dragon blood incense, I need all these things.

And I am writing in the green book but stop because I know what is being written there needs to be shared here. Its why, when my friend said I was so creative, I cringed a little bit. Because this is the admiring tone of someone who does not know where creativity come from or even what it is, who is making an amalgam of all the things I do, we are doing, and making this amalgam without understanding. I heard someone say that when people used the the term community it was a meaningless term for people who did not need such a term, and I think this is what the word creativity has come to mean because the truth is this writing, this journaling, these essays, this sculpture, these poems, these submissions and submissions, these rough drafts and final drafts, all of these are ways of writing myself out of the hole, of getting out of the dreadful box.

There are some, there are most to be be honest, who are fine with the box. There are those who have fallen so deep into the box there is no way of getting out, and they aren’t worried about surviving. They don’t really have to worry much if they’ll make it, because there is survival in the box. But you are losing your mind. You are losing your mind and this is why you write the three page poems, why you embrace the trees and vow to save your corner of the earth, why you almost howl with rage at cruelty and stupidity, at thoughtlessness and lies. This is why you’re more angry than you want to be so much of the time. This is why you learn the five point star, the six point star, the seven point star and so on and so on, why the myth given to you is not enough and so you peel back Mary and Jesus to find Isis and Osiris and then peel them back to find yourself. This is why you have learned the ninety nine names of God and delve into Qabala while you spend all night in meditation and burn incense and light the candles and cross the river to the place beyond, because the place right here is madness. It is not enough, and if you are not doing everything you can to carve the gods from your own flesh, then nothing is worth anything.

You are no fool. You believe in the stories because the stories are stories and in the stories is truth. You hold the holy images of the Gods and place them on the altar because you know all the Gods and Goddesses are inside you, and this doesn’t make them bullshit, it makes you the Kingdom of Heaven, and now and again you feel that keenly, but often it slips away from you, and you devote all of your life to finding it again. This is the journey of the artist. This is the journey of the bard, the poet and the shaman. This is the journey of the witch.

Feast of the Most Holy Theophany

All this was a long time ago, I remember,
And I would do it again, but set down
This set down
This: were we led all that way for
Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly
We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death,
But had thought they were different; this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.
We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.
I should be glad of another death.

-Journey of the Magi
T.S. Eliot

No one believes in forgiveness, not really. Many of us don't really believe in the phrase "I'm sorry". We have a hard time believing in really starting again. We have given up on evolution and no longer are convinced of revolution. We are jaded, not like adults, but like fourteen year olds with no hope of ever seeing prom. We stay stuck. We stay in the same place. We can't accept the phrase "I'm sorry" because often as not we can't really stand to say it. Mercy is not coming because mercy is not asked for and, often as not, it isn't given. We like the phrases, "we're the good guys. I'm a good guy." To admit that we aren't that great can be a bit much. And so the idea that there was a time when a man in camel hair came to the River Jordan and told people to repent is beyond our imagining. To see ourselves as the desperate people repenting, getting ready for a new age, is even more unbelievable. But this is the Feast of Theophany. Theophany is the second feast of Epiphany and we are told that once upon a time it was the original Christmas, the first Epiphany. At Christmas, shepherds come to see the baby Jesus and on Epiphany, the Magi, but today the Baby, grown into a man, comes to where the people are with the same aspirations as the people, a new beginning, an ending of the old, a commitment to a new path. This is the transition of celebrating evergreen and punch and too much cake to celebrating a commitment to life itself, and the day I celebrate entering the Young Tradition.

Initiation, a promise, is only as good as the commitment that follows. To be committed to a thing,a way of life, is difficult. To keep on doing is no joke. The Great Work, can be a hard work, a continuing resolution to keep going, to put aside what has been and walk ahead to what will be. This resolution is beyond black robes and candles. It requires everything, all the devotion of any monk or any nun. It tests us. all belief does, for belief is rare and dedication is rarer.

Today I went to pluck a wand from the thorn tree on the island where my nemeton stands. It has been raining for days and the river getting higher and higher is now nearly flooding its banks. By the time I am able to get to the isle it is nearly night and by the left over day I can see what a rushing river is, what a baptism can be. Baptism was not only symbolic of new life, This is the same river where one of my beloved dead, an eighteen year old freshmen fell and ended his life, and one misstep would have brought me the same fate. On the Eve of Theophany we remember commitment, we remember the true magic and power of putting away and picking up, and we die a little to be born a little. 

Epiphany

God appears in the most unlikely of places.... This whole world is the most unlikely of places.

On the second Sunday after Christmas and the surrounding days. Great Yule and Christmas collapse, or rather transform into the ill celebrated season of Epiphany, We don't do so well with Epiphany in the West. In this unmystical hemisphere it is merely the end of Christmas, but what it is, is the three weeks that are headlined (and guarded) by the Magi (Magoi, yes, magicians, wizards, enchanters) who came to visit and bestow gifts upon the infant Jesus. In the story they disappear at the same time Jesus, Joseph and Mary, all leaving the soon to be endangered Bethlehem. I'd like to think they notified the townspeople so they could save their own children. I'd like to think the wise men took Jesus with them. There is the old legend of Jesus studying among the druids and I don't know why this shouldn't be a legend to. The point of Epiphany is that this once privately Jewish savior, belonging to one people's story, is now the Christ and belongs to the whole world, learning wisdom from all corners, even at the feat of these wizards.

This is out of the order of things. These men have nothing to do with Judaism or with its prophecies and expectations. They are quite other. Surely what they mean when they say God is something shattering, something beyond what Joseph and Mary and all their friends knew, something, someone, beyond their theology. Beyond the Christian one two, most suddenly. Epiphany celebrates that, while all sorts of people like to define God and creation, both are beyond definition. They cannot be defined, only entered into.

The next two weeks of Epiphany celebrate the Baptism of Christ, which is also the day I celebrate my formal entry into 1734, and then Wedding at Cana. Wikipedia goes into greater length about what Epiphany means:

The word Epiphany is from Koine Greek ἐπιφάνεια, epipháneia, meaning manifestation or appearance. It is derived from the verb φαίνειν, phainein, meaning "to appear."[20] In classical Greek it was used for the appearance of dawn, of an enemy in war, but especially of a manifestation of a deity to a worshiper (a theophany). In the Septuagint the word is used of a manifestation of the God of Israel (2 Maccabees 15:27).[21] In the New Testament the word is used in 2 Timothy 1:10 to refer either to the birth of Christ or to his appearance after his resurrection, and five times to refer to his Second Coming.[21]

Alternative names for the feast in Greek include τα Θεοφάνια, ta Theopháneia "Theophany" (a neuter plural rather than feminine singular), η Ημέρα των Φώτων, i Iméra ton Fóton (modern Greek pronunciation), hē Hēméra tōn Phṓtōn (restored classical pronunciation), "The Day of the Lights", and τα Φώτα, ta Fóta, "The Lights".[22].... Wikipedia

Throughout the days of Yule we experienced the Divine in the horror of Nidhogg about the world tree, gnawing as us and calling us to go deeper. We experience him in the paradox at the world tree of the Trickster and Child, of Odin offering himself to himself and on the New Year we stand between the doors of Janus, Saturn looking to the past and Hermes to the future. Now, on this day, we are invited to witness the appearance of God again, in a baby held by its mother, in a baptism, at a wedding, in every aspect of life, for what Epiphany is really coming to teach us is that, in all of life, if we have eyes for it, and have put away our presuppositions, God is standing, ready to be seen.