Third Sunday in Alchymical Time: The Alchymical Marriage of the Divine and Beloved Mary Magdalene (August 16th, closest Sunday to August 15th)

 This is the article that didn't get written. We were celebrating this feast day for the time in place of the Assumption, and really, in place of a special theme for the week. The very eve of the feast we were in an unbelievable car wreck which my mother and I walked out of with no scratches, though certainly a little bruising. Because of such an event I wanted to thank every defender, The virgin whose feast is Assumption and Mary Magdalene who Alchymical Marriage we celebrated that even, the mother of Christ and his beloved, both ladies are revered in the image and title of Our Lady of the Strong Defense, for they were both defending us mightily in a way that is still difficult to comprehend.

So we were so caught up in all this that there was little time to talk about the mystery of that Sunday which definied this week, and that is the divine marriage of Magdalene with Christ, the Communion with God and her transformation and apotheosis. This is not something wholly of my making, the old legends tell that Magdalene received communion every day of her life, having become a hermitess and gone to live in a cave. Daily she was taken up to heaven to receive this communion which we think of as bread and wine, but which was union with her Lord and certainly upon her death the union with the beloved was permanent. This is why Magdalene is Our Lady, because her link was not the natural link of a mother, but the link of one beloved to another wh owas transformed and made divine because her lover is God, and she is first of us because, like Radha to Krishna, her love made her one with her Lover, and realized her divinity. This transformation to the original self, this union of the Lover with the Beloved, is Alchemy.

Origins: Part One

                                         

                                                                              Art by Glyn Smith

Religion so often goes against its own aims, and nowhere more than in answering the question of its origins. We are supposed to be engaged in the struggle for truth and for love, but because of a lack of love, begin to spin a truth that never was. Young Tradition certainly sits in that vague field of modern Craft that is usually called "Traditional." The idea is that, unlike Wicca, this is a form of Craft which is rooted in what was happening for centuries, that this thing begin done was handed down secretly, sometimes through families. This is actually a variation of what Gerald Gardner and Alex Sanders said about their own schools of witchcraft. 

But making up stories about where what we did came from is lying, and this is called the Craft of the Wise. Supposedly we are looking for truth, and truth cannot be found in intentional deception. Having a conversation with Laurelai Black about the things I did that originally came out of her American Folkloric Witchcraft but which had been adapted to my vision, she said, insightfully, "That's what it means to be part of a Tradition". I am not going to talk about AFW for too long, only say that there is no pretense there of having a Tradition handed down from generations of venerable witches in woods, but a very real understanding that visions and honest understandings were linked with the actual practices in existense, and that adopting these practices to your path is what makes a tradition a tradition. This is what I have done in Young Tradition, and the thing about that is that, just like all children, just like all families, there is a chance that what is born this time around might look like its brothers and sisters or like its parent,s or it might be a throwback to older ancestors. Genes are funny that way, and so is spirituality, and that is why I want to, as honestly as possible, map out a sort of family tree of this Craft I am doing.

Young Tradition began as a branch of 1734 heavily influenced by AFW. AFW is NOT 1734, it is its own thing, but its founders were very much steeped in Cochrane's Craft and 1734 is a form--a somwhat poorly developed form--of Cochrane's Craft.  Cochrane, like Gerald Gardner and like Alex Sanders, claimed to have a tradition he'd inheritted from a secret coven of English witches who had passed it on for centuries, and yet we know two things about Cochrane: he despised Gerald Gardner and, according to Doreen Valiente, who was part of Cochrane's coven after being part of Gardner's, what he did was pretty identitical to what Gardner did. It was not his rituals that made his Craft different, but his emphasis on wisdom over either power or the idea of God and Goddess and the witch as pagain fertility priest. To Cochrane the name witch was insufficient, a misnomer partially accepted and witchcraft only part of what he was doing. He was, in the true sense, an occultist attempting to link all strangs of wisdom together into something alchemical, transformative. Some would call him a bit of a liar--his real name was Roy Bowers, and the covern he said he'd been a part of may have never existed, but scholar Ronald Hutton gets it right when he says that Cochrane believed that, "By saying a thing he made it so." By picking up and old cup and calling it a long lost chalice it became such. Imagination and story were the gateway to true knowledge and true power. This insight would distinguish Cochrane from Gerald Gardner and Alex Sanders.

 Around the same time Cochrane was doing his work (the mid to late 1960's in England) Alex and Maxine Sanders, who had started out as Gardnerians, were refining their practice into what they would eventually call Alexandrian Witchcraft, and though Alex Sanders claimed to have inherited his witchcraft from his grandmother, his practice was Garderian and, in structure and ritual, so is his Book of Shadows.  Members of he Clan of Tubal Cain have claimed that the difference between what they do and what Gardner did was that Wicca was a holdover from the middle classes in the Romantic Era (larger middle part of the 1800's) but that Cochrane's Craft was directly descended from folk magic and the people.  This is what we call legend and not fact. If one is looking for truth, they should not have a problem with facts. The difference between Cochrane and Gardner was that Cochrane was more interested in the truth found through legends, poems and stories than Gardner seemed to be, but the source of his practice is, as many Gardnerians have said, undoubtably Gardnerian. 

What Cochrane did was loose his version of the the Craft from being reliant on Gardner's rituals or the concept of a Book of Shadows as well as his priestly structure, and the Cochrane Craft that exists now is nothing like Wicca, but nevertheless, that is how it began.  Beyond Cochrane there were other forms which emerged, all claiming ancient lines of ancestry that were pre Wicca, all taking a little bit from Cochane, many claiming ethnic and familiar descent, and we call these Traditional Crafts. Ofetn Cocrhane is seen as part of it, since they came out of him, just as broad form Wicca came out of Gerald Gardner's very strict and classical Wicca, but I'm going to hold Cochrane's Craft as distinct from Traditonal Crafts in that it has a definite ritual and moral component to it which is not necessarily seen in the Traditionals.

Now, since no matter what grand claims they laid, it seems Cochrane Craft and Alaxandrian both originaned--thoguh they are very different in form now--from Gardnerian Wicca, from whence did Wicca come? Was there actually a coven that Gardner was initiated into? I don't know. Did he have his own coven? Yes. We know this and it gave us the likes of Patricia Crowther, Ray Bone and Doreen Vailente. Valiente gave us the Charge of the Goddess, one of the most recognizable products of Gardner's Craft, but anyone who knows much of Aleister Crowley must note that Valiente adapted her Charge from Aleister Crowley's writings and there is no doubt, at least from where I am standing that, far from being the child of ancient English covens, Wicca is the better dressed son of Aleister Crowley's Thelema, with perhaps modern druidry for a mother. Gardnerians and Alexandrians wanted to reproduce a fertility and nature cult. They wanted to be pagan. Crowley wasn't concerned with this at all. He was intentionally perverting ceremonial magic and Christian iconography to bring about his new Aeon.

It should be stated, that though Gardner and the Wicca he spawned clearly identified as and one might even argue gave birth to paganism, Alexandrians to this day do not acknowledge themselves as pagans, but rather a mystery cult and this applies to those in Cochrane's Craft as well. Cochanre's dichotomy was not between the pagan and the Christian, but between deep knowledge and that which was merely surface deep. The Gardnerian and certainly the Alexandrian practices dealt with angels, demons and medieval Christian magic, and it is in part two of this article that we will dig a little deeper and look at Thelema and the forebearers of the modern occult.  

What Was1734 and MORE IMPORTANTLY What IS the Alchymical Rite?

            

So, last week I wrote the following article on 1734, the method or Rite or path or what have you that I prcticed....

Here is  daunting title! Young Tradition is a form of 1734, and I think in the past I may have set out to explain what 1734 is, but there are two things about this, firstly almost because it is counter to religions of orthodoxy, most traditions and lines in the Craft do not offer hard explanations of what they are, and then the truth is that explanations of what 1734 is are actually pretty poor, and while some of this is by intention, some of it is simply by lack of skill and not enough thought. So, right here, for my good more than anyone else's, I will attempt some small explanation of what 1734 is, and what it is not.

Firstly, it is the American form of what is known as Cochrane's Craft. It is a wisdom tradition: the word witch is such a vague and overarching term that it is as unhelpful as it is helpful. Cochrane as well as his immediate British heirs in The Clan of Tubal Cain are very careful about wording what they do and what they are. "We are what would have been called by some, witches". Cochrane's Craft is concerned primarily with wisdom in the occult as well as the common sense, connection to the Ancestors and ones spiritual kin. The magic that occurs is part and parcel of the greater goal that is often referred to as the Great Work, Cochrane's Craft is concerned with the getting of wisdom from all the traditions that have never left us from nursery rhymes and fairy tales, to Greek myths and the Bible. Part of that wisdom is called magic, and can be accessed through what some call magic, but the aim of anyone in any Cochranist path is not to be called a witch or to achieve magical powers. Get wisdom to live wisdom, walk in love. Do what is given you to do. And though I say magic is not the sole goal, magic is certainly part of the path, though the emphasis on wisdom and vision will certainly change the focus and the idea of magic is 1734.

Before we move onto our second point it must be addressed that while the scholar Ronald Hutton flatly calls 1734 the American form of Cochrane's Craft, and I side with him, some will correct us saying 1734's founder is Joe Bearwalker Wilson and it is not Cochrane Craft. They are mistaken. The official webpage for 1734 lists it as "the Authentic method of Cochrane AND Joe Bearwalker Wilson." I haven't bothered too much with Wilson because according to him the difference between 1734 and anything else that came form Cochrane is the influence of two people none of us knows who contributed no rituals and no theory, a Ruth and a Sean, and an influence that isn't detectable is no influence at all. The only extensive body of work used in 1734 is Cochrane's letters and Cochrane's riddles and theories which means that 1734 is Cochrane's Craft. 

Secondly: 1734 is not pagan. There is no hard and fast definition for what pagan is and because of that I will say neopagan, But there are certain trends that tend to reflect it: the worship of nature, or the statement that one worships nature. The belief in a Great Goddess or a lesser God and the invocation of the Earth as that Goddess, the idea of "working with" or "invoking" deities which one "dismisses" when he or she is done with them, in fact a small idea of divinity that sometimes can be whittled down to no idea of it. A resistance to or ignorance of the major religious traditions of the earth--not simply the monotheistic ones, a shallow White-Centric cobbling together of other religious paths and a solely white understanding of them, the emphasis on magic over wisdom and in magic as reliance upon the shallow self and the ego, and a dismissal or demotion of ones gods. I am not blind, I see that what began as an explanation of paganism can be seen as nothing less than a serious criticism of it. It is biased. I am biased. I am critical of it. Pagan worship seems like a post Protestant, post atheistic invention whose emphasis is not on wisdom, and not even on nature so much as a white person's view of nature. I have little feeling for it and am not part of it. I also admit that there are some people of a much more spiritual bent who would call themselves pagans, especially in the Spanish world, but I wonder if they would call themselves neopagan or find themselves at home among most pagans north of the equator.

1734 IS a devotional path. On the occult tree, 1734 is linked more to Asatru, Vanatru, and other restoration paths including that of the British mysteries than it is to Wicca as most people know Wicca or paganism or what most people mean when they say Witchcraft. Though there are covens and gatherings and solitaries who regard themselves as 1734 and none is beholden to the other, even the ones whose traditions have descended from others, what they all have in common is the feeling of purpose, a devotion to living in the light of some form of the Divine. Regardless of how the Divine is interpreted, be she a form or several forms of Divine Mother, the Holy Daughter, the Father, the Beloved, be the divine in many forms or one, in some way we are devoted and consecrated to that Divinity. Even if in 1734 we do call upon what might be known as spirits or ancestors or sprites or saints for that matter, they are invited into the temple, the family setting, for they are part of the family. They are not dismissed, and they are not instruments of our purpose. I would say, and this is my interpretation and may only stand in Young Tradition, I am always the assistant mage. At my altar the chief priest is the Divine One in the form of Mage and teacher who, for convenience, we will call Hermes.

There is a great blessing in this. I was raised Christian and my references tend to be fairly Catholic, but I remember listening to the Hindu Bhagavan Das talking about altar building. He said the problem with us is we make ourselves the center of everything, what about me? what about me? what about me?

    "Put your load on the Lord," he said. "Put it on Krishna, put it on Jesus, put it on Buddha. He can do it. Take the focus from yourself." 

This good old wisdom is sorely missing from paganism and pagan witchcraft. I heard a witch saying, "Oh, I don't pray to my gods. I treat them like teachers, the way you have an instructor for one class, and then you move on." This is poor understanding both of god and teacher. Traditionally one's great teacher, one's guru, was treated as God and revered as God, even seen and experienced after death. So, God is always the object or worship because and not in spite of being the Teacher.

.... I ran the following to another practitioner--and it is not a wide practice--and got in return, a lot of bitchiness for not actually seeing things the exact way he saw them. When I said we were all entitled to our differences I got more bitchiness and swift ostracization. It was similar treatment that made me begin this page when I first began 1734, and at that time, I was tempted to leave that path, to give into anger and hurt and walk away, This time around I realized that, in the intervening nearly two years I have built a solid path and one that is actually far removed from where I began. The value of 1734 was that it had never been developed and was a very bare set of scraps from which much could be made. The weakness was that no one seemed to be making much of it and those who did, were swiftly treated poorly. Well, now we have made of those scraps what we were given, and what we were given and what we created is in the article above, but this blog is no longer 1734. It is not even Cochrane's Craft. It is its own thing now. It is the Young Tradition. It is the Alchymical Rite..

Saint Clare

                      

Saint Clare has figured large in my life since the first time I read about her, this woman who is called by the Catholic Church simply Virgin Not Martyr, and who has a memorial but not a great feast. In the long ago time when I wanted to take a different sort of religious vow than I took as a dewin, I remember reading the book, For The Love of God, and reading about the Poor Clares them gathering on the eight hundredth anniversary of the death of Clare. For me Clare has always been a saint whose spirit, when invoked, pervades a place with the desire for simplicity and the love of God. To me, if she is second to any saint, it is only Mary Magdalene. Her call for poverty, should probably be understood in modern times as a call to absolute "simplicity" She was Clara, or Clarity, and she is the saint of Clear Vision. Her poverty was a desire to be stripped of anything which came between her and the experience of God. She was also known for clair audience, clairvoyance and claire.... videance, having received on the wall of her room visions from God. This last story made her the patron saint of television because this is the way we bastardize the profound.

I am thinking now of the moment in Brother Sun Sister Moon when Clare comes to Saint Francis to be consecrated and he cuts away her lovely blond hair. She has a look of absolute freedom and joy as she puts on the brown robe and veil and goes off to start her order. Clare is the saint of freedom and devotion to the Beloved. She stands right beside Saint Francis. 

Clare is the Lady of Lammas. Many of the great feasts in what has come to be called (perhaps erroneously) the witch's year last over several days, not one, and at least Lammas, Samhain, Yule and Beltane stretch eleven or twelve days before being concluded by a holy day or a Saint's Day. Lammas concludes with Saint Clare who is always portrayed carrying a paten in which the Eucharistic Host is contained, always shining like the sun. There is a legend tied to this, but legends are often ways of explaining images. The image is the first thing. The Lammas Load that ends Extraordinary Time is another form of the Eucharistic Host which begins it with Corpus Christi, and at the end of Lammas, behold Clare holding the Bread of Life, and so rather than trying to beat the mystery to death with junior explanations, we rejoice in the presence of one who is so close to the Divine Presence for whom we long.

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Second Sunday in Alchymical Time: Open Heart Sunday

 

              

Today we sung to and sung about the Open Heart, the Divine Heart, the Seeing Heart that rises from the Chalice and loves the whole world. This is the witchly Sacred Heart, the essence of our love that makes what we do flow with love and hope. This is the heart that sees all and doesn't deny the sorrow. This is the heart with the river of love that washes into all of us. This is the heart that washes away untruth. We don't just think of it as a thing. We pray to it as the very nature of God. This is the Lammas God, the God of the Grain who is always offering himself. This is the God nature which comes down into the witch's work. We meditate on this Heart. We contemplate it. We adore it and we divinely prepare to be transformed by it. We need this Open Heart to not only come into the world, but to come into our temples, into our altars so that, in the end, they are coming into our hearts. If we would be transformed into God, then our hearts and our actions must be transformed first. The Open Heart is the loving, burning heart we need so very much when by nature--or by this lack of nature we are living in, our Hearts have grown cold. We again and again come to Jesus's words, "Come to the Water. Come to that Water and to that life." We are invited to it. We come to it and we offer it. It is much as Jesus said to the disciples when they did not know what to serve the crowds, "Feed them yourselves." We have at our hands, far more than we ever knew.

This Heart is the union of the Beloved. The female Eye is the Eye of the Mother as well as the Eye of Our Lady Magdalene even as the heart is the Heart of the Beloved Lord, the Christ, the Hidden Hermes. Atum, the Great Thoth. As further lesson, this Alchemical Heart rises from the Chalice. As we work the ritual of the Chalice are not simply working our Will, but working our hearts to come to life. There is no Will worth mentioning if there is no Wisdom, and there is no true Wisdom without the Seeing Heart.

The Alchemycal Rite

 As we turn toward the South we know this as the Alchemical Rite. Young Tradition is not like other forms of Old Craft I've run into which insist on an entire cosmology and ideology. I am honestly moving on inspiration, bit by bit, and very often things change. For several months now I had been doing Freemasony until I realzied that what I was doing, and will continue to do, is Alchemy, and that I had very little use for or feelings of connection with any branch of Freemasonry. Already though, I had adopted the series of knighthoods and planned to use in ritual, and correlating to the turns of the year, three swords, It was with the taking of the Red Knighthood and the Red Sword at Lammas that I turned to the South and began to think of another name for Young Tradition which is, the Alchemical (Alchymical) Rite.

The Alchemical Rite is the same as Young Tradition in the same way that the Latin Rite is the same as Roman Catholicism. The name denotes a difference in intensity and orientation. Like say, not very many Catholics would say, "I practice the Latin Rite" and, at the same time, there are many people who do not belong to the Church of Rome, who have left it over the years and become something else, or who have been left by it, who describe themselves as Catholic but not Roman, who would just as well be described as "practicing the Latin Rite." The Alchemical Rite is Young Tradition, but it did not start at the same time as Young Tradition and it is what I am doing especially in regard to the use of Knighthoods, Swords and the direction of the South. The Alchemical Rite is also something that would be followed after a long time of being in Young Tradition, as an adult Catholic would join the Knights of Columbus, not an unconfirmed youth. The Alchemical Rite is all I am gathering by looking south and east toward Egypt and the Arab world, the home of Alchemy, and the Alchemical Rite is also the insistence that the root of this Craft is Alchemy and its long eastern history. 

But, in a very serious way, the Alchemical Rite is also something I do not understand, because I am just making it up or discovering it.  The signs of the Alchymical Rite are the Alchemical Meeting, different from the narthex, the circle raising or the services of prayer and mediation, the Three Lights, Three pillars, three pyramids, the honoring of the south and the southeast, and the reverence of Fire and the Prince of Fires,  hence the blessedness of the Red Sword and its association with Fire as well as life's blood.

What is the purpose of these swords, though? I was enchanted by the AFW idea of the Three Blades, but these swords do not serve those purposes, not really. For starters, they are unfit and unwieldy implements for cutting. In addition to the same purpose as Cross and Stang, the Swords are signs of the Axis Mundi. They represent knighthood as well as kingship and belong to the Kings and Princes of each realm. They guard the altar and therefore the heart, mind and soul and therefore the practice, and in the case of the Red Sword, I cannot help but see it protecting the Alchemical Mysteries, the first one of which we have discussed, the Holy Heart which is ever in need of care.

Lammas Sunday and the Mystery of the Seeing Heart

Now we are in Alchemical Time, Last year I discussed  Extraoridnary Time ,the Time of a Witch that did not intercede with anything Christian, that kept going once it was off the map of most western Litrugical calendars. Extraordinary Time wasa bit tongue and cheek, but it was also a bit long. After all, could everytning between the middle of Jude and december be one season? Or could that one season not have little seasons. And so, as we come toward August, as we approach Lammas it is time to enter into the Alchemical Season. The weather is changing as well as our reactions to it.. Summer and the way it is received alters. We come to the hottest, driest part of the year, bu scarcely know how to celebrate it. Everyone prepares for children, somehow or some way, to go back to school. The time of celebration, even in this year, rounds to an end. We no longer look forward to summer, though the weather will certainly be warm for months to come. Now they days are incrementally shorter and the work toward autumn is just beginning

I am rememberign learning about the seasons called the "little winters" that last until May, the seasons that Appalachian people amongst many others are ful laware of, but that we, in our continual discontent and searching for the future pretend to not exist until we strumble full into them. Much of the tension of our current life if from resisting or failing to pay attention to the way of things. Lammas, like Candlemas is that marker, that caution light that says now the big season will be a series or little seasons. In the same vein that we had little winters up until May, the height of Spring, it seems we will have little summers until the heigh of autumn. The fact that I cannot say when the height of autumn is underscores how little we pay attention to such things and how much I am a part of that we.

Lammas is the mystery of the Loaf Mass. Extraordinary Time began with Corpus Christi, the memory of the Divine Christ present in Bread and Wine,. Here the Bread and Wine is the share in immortality, it is our spiritual food. I am not sure Lammas is so much different--to a witchly mind--as a slighlty different perspective.  Lammas is the celebration of the loaf, the celebration of the earth goods we have and the memory that these things we have, we are given, the basic bread that feeds us is a gift and this gift is divine. All the vety mundane things we have are not only gifts of divinity, but divinity. The focus from the Eucharist is different only because centuries of not understanding myth and relying on the words of priests have made it different.

In the Popul Vuh, the points is made that whenever the Gods create something or offer something, they made sacrifice, they shed their blood. They give themselves. The figure of Jack Barleycorn as well as Osiris, the saving of the last Sheaf all symbolize that the Divine Gift is not passive the way a very rich person write a check at a cause. We have lived, even thouse who deny it, in a Deistic way with a God removed from things. Christianity did begin this, this is why the Christian emphasis on the Eucharist was that it provided a heavenly and eternal hope. but Lammas is the loaf, not linking us to the eternal and everlasting--as important as they are--but to the eternal and everlasting in our common mortal lives. Lammas states not that God distantly sets thignsi nto motion, but that not a blade of grass grows without not simply the allowance of God, but the work of God. Lammas, in fact, insinuates that the blade of grass, the offered gift is God. 

Of course, for the occultist, for the wiseworker this means even more. If the Eucharist is a sort of signing on to be united to the rising and dying of Christ--however we interpret it--then Lammas is a signing on to understanding that the Great Work is an offering, and our offering is one with the Mother of Grains, and the Harvest Lord. It is an offering where we give all. And that's all right, because in the course of things not only will we be revived and resurrected, there is not other way.

                                                    

After two thousand years of Christianity one would htink the world would be ready for this, but it could be two thosuand years of Christianity that has been just the thing to stop this revelation of divine love and divine work. One only has to look a little to see the cruelty, the apathy and the coldness of heart that is in the world today. And yet the Mother of Grains is always giving and always hearing us even while so many systems in this world and so much coldness shuts her out.  The Lord is still present even while so many who speak in his name keep him at bay. Let us keep the Holy Heart in mind, contemplate on it and live by it. Let us pray for its presence and ask it to make its place in this world and in the temples of our own hearts.