Saint Uriel, Archangel of the South

 

Eighth and Final Sunday in Alchymical Time: Eve Mother of Wisdom

 

To honor Eve is to undo a lot of damage.Even before we come to an intentional misreading of the story, we have to acknowlege the story is mistotld. We all know it. There is no need to rehash it, Eve is the mother of all living, but she is the mother of wisdom and the mother of paying a price for that wisdom. She heeds the snak'es voice, but the snake's voice is her own and she takes up the fruit to gain wisdom, yes, but she also takes up because she wants. Having taken it up, her eyes having been open, she gives it to her husband. The price they pay is having to go out in live in the world. The price they pay is that they leave paradise and unconsciousness and life begins.

But they are already leaving consciousness when they "sin". They are leaving it when God says do a thing, and the think on this and the nsay now. Rejection of the divine will, a pushing back, is the beginning of consciousness.

The people is semi[-mythical. That is the compromise the Hebrws made. We all live in myth, even the Buddhist who tried to escape it, in the end clothed the Buddha in all manner of myth. But to get more from this story, maybe we have to change it from semi myth to total myth. In a total myth, God is not God, but a God, and the one who creates these people and tells them t ostay away from the fruit. But while we are talking about semi things, at the moment they are only semi people. it is only Christian  writers like C.S. Lewis in his wodnerfully awful Perelandra who think that perfect obedience is perfect humanity. While the two people are living a sort of Golden age or being groundskeepers, its sort of hard to say, for not much is going on, another god arrives, a serpent in tree God, in fact the very God of this tree, and he beckons to the woman, no the man to eat the fruit and be wise, and the woman becomes wize and offers this fruit to the man. The other God, who will prove himself to be quite flawed, punishes the snake god and sends the man and woman out into the world. The lesson we learn is the lesson of obedience to a very capricious deity who, the Hebrew Scriptures tell us, is good by dent of being the only game (God) in town.

But what if this is a massive misreadying? What if Eve is telling us we must leave the Garden and a god who would keep us there is roundly to be disobeyed. What if, after all the time of demonizing women's voices and the voices in our heads Eve is saying, no, no, listen to the voice in your head. Heed the uncomfortable snakes.

I read Perelandra by C.S. Lewis for the first time when i was a freshmena in high school. Twenty years later i found it almost unbearable to finish. In this novel a character is taken to the planet Venus awhere a new race is starting and God had made a new version of Een's test fro the eve of that planet. She msut decide if she will obey God's arbitray command or disobey to do what seems right. This book veers off into a lot of the man character talking to hismelf and to a devil and the devil points out that it was Even's decision to take the fruti that started the ball rolling. Ransom, our main character si fully ocnvinced that the ball would have got rolling anyay if only Eve had not taken the fruit if only she had been in perfect obedeicne. He doesn ot know how we would have gotten out of the garden and into a better world and canot conceive of what that world would be, but he looks back with bitterness on what the world is and what it has been and thinkgs how htings would have been..... somehow... different.

The blaming of Eve is the impotent blame game qhich recieves a lot theological attention in Christianity. It is the disatisfaction with how thigns are that verges on disgust and swears it could have veen, somehow, easier, different, painfless, and then finds a way to blame someone for why things are as they are. True enough things are far from perfect, they are absolutely fucked up. But it is this idea of Lewis that looks to put that blame on one person's feet and say, none of this would have happened without her. It is the ultimate blaming your mom for life. The reverence of Eve acknowledges the pain of existence while also acknowledging that it is better, far better, to exist than to not be here at all, which, from my reading of the story, is the true alternative.

Every week in the seasons is devoted to something or someone, a deep alchemical mystery, and that means we cannot exhaust the meaning of our weekly devotion. The story of Eve had layers we do not even know or simply begin to fathom. She is, of course, not only the mother of wisdom, but the mother of humanity and human consciousness. He name, Chavah, after all means living because she is the mother of all living, but also because she is the life force that makes us more than animals. She is the breath that makes man a living soul. She is potent life. The meaning of woman, serpent and tree is endless and had endless permutations, but we cannnot doubt that in this story a nameless creature, called on Woman, of From Man, comes, naked and lush to a tree and meets the serpent, the very emblem of sensual knowledge, and when she leaves the tree she is Eve, and everything is changed,

  

Rosh Hashanah

Dome of Wilshire Blvd. Temple, L.A.

 I am celebrating Rosh Hashanah for the first time in years. Cahtolicism and even Hidnusim and Buddhism have made their way into Young Traditon, but I have had a difficult dance with Judaism. I was always close to the religion and practiced it for around two years, attending first a Reform synagogue and then a Conservative one. Me and my friend Miriam had an amazing time traveling between the Conservative synagogue and our visits to the Orhtodox community on the South End. We met a lot of wonderful people. We super paid our dues, more than most people who convert to or deal with another religion. For both of us, it went deep down, and for both of it us it did not go deep enough to stay. We would always be accepted as visitors, and as visitors it was easy to see a lot of foolisnness that could also be seen in any institution. For me who was fleeing the problems of patriarchal monotheism it was more of the same but without the charms I had grown up in. It was my experience at the synagogue that was largely responsible for why I became a solitary, and stopped looking at other religions and houses to join, and chose to look within and build this Craft.

Around the same time I was dealing with my deep discontent, but still coming to to the synagogue, my friend came to me one day in excitement and nervousness, and told me that she missed being a Hindui and it was calling to her and she had barely gotten the words out of her mouth before I said let's go to the Hingu Temple. Five minutes after making this decision, the Rabbi's wife invited us to Passover lunch at her house, and there followed the experience of us eating matzoh and knowing we were going to pray to Kali. 

In the middle of lunch at the Rabbi's Miriam suddenly said, "We need to just pray. We really need to talk to the Lord. Have a relationship with him." The Rabbi was alarmed and smiled nervously. We ate lunch and the enxt week were in the Hindu Temple. Miriam eventually ended up in India, and I ended up a few places that led to to where I am now as a through practicing occultist, but the beginning was there.

It takes a while to own what was yours, to bring something with you in a different form. It took a long time to bring Catholicism int othe mix of Young Tradition, but it was necessary, the form of it answered something crucial, and it had been the same with Judaism. For some things only these rites will do. I took a long time to learn them, for them  to sit in my but they are stranger to use because they are not native, because I was not excepted, because, in the end, though I still think of myself as a Catholic and I can never really think of myself as a Jew. The Buddhist parts of me respond to it being an open system, a world religion, to being warmly accepted and welcomed by Buddhist., but this was neveer really the case in Judaism, and whenever I use its rituals I remember this.  I remember that Judaism was a system broken in deep ways the way I feel about Catholcisim, and that what I am working for in the rituals is wholeness I never experienced an probably isn't there, but must be worked for all the same. When I do the Torah readings and recite the prayers from the Siddur, I am remember good times and rather painful times, but I am still making a needful orfering.

So this year, for the first time in at least seven years, I am remember how to sing these prayers again, I am drawing the tassels of this tallit together breathing life into something I left dead on the floor years before. It is vivid, and it is real. Because it is mine.

I thought I would have some answers, some explanation of what this day means and why I have kept it. After all, it has meant so much to me. But the truth is Rosh Hashanah is just the beginning of a long and holy time, and its really to early to reflect on it much.

My New Year is wrapping up. It is already Sunday when I am writing this, and I am feeling the effects of good celebration. But like most celebrations, I am not entirely sure of what has just happened, what was just done. There was much singing, much remembering, a lot of stumbling  over Hebrew and a surprise at things I still remembered. I wrote my old friend who moved to India and realized I might never hear from her again. As the night came on and the Maariv prayer became the prelude to the usual more Christian services I remembered that the first time I had gone to shul on Rosh Hashanah I had gone, not to convert or to become, but to know. A Jewish witch blogger wrote of the experience of trying to unite her Judaism with the so called paganism of the past and called it the desire to reunite the flower with the bee. This is what I went to do, and eventually I got lost in it, It was part of the path, but I thought it was the entire path. I thought it would be a short work, but it became a work that lasted years and that took years to recover from, and if someone would ask me what I am doing these high holy days or what I am learning, what all this means, and what I am feeling, then I would say, "I am uniting the flower and bee. But I never knew it would take quite so long."

Seventh Sunday in Alchymical Time: Flowering Sunday

The seventh and penultimate Sunday of Alchymical Time brings us to Flowering Sunday, the mystery of dawning Enlightenment as personified by Ananda receiving the Flower from the Buddha. The central mystery of this week is personifed not under the usual Catholic iconocraphy, but under a story which Catholicism hasn't yet come to understand, that of the moment of transformation under the Bo tree, when enlightenment flowers in the Buddha after he has made his resolve to not leave that spot until he is enlightened. In that moment he calls the earth to witness, touches the ground, and the whole universe, gods, demons, men are enlightened. Later in the in the Deer Park when the Buddha teaches his first sermon, one of his old companions is the first to be Enlightened and it is declared, from this moment the Wheel of Dharma is set in motion. No one, no gods, no devils, no holy men, princes, kinds or scoundrels will stop it. The Flowering of true light has begun.

But what can this mean? Is there any term for it in the West, any more icon for it.Baptism is not it. Salvation has a different connotation though this is salvation most certainly. Even the blessed union with the Beloved is not completely it because this requires re examining the nature of the Beloved. Nor is it apotheosis. To call it the getting of wisdom almost smacks of a self satisfaction. This is the moment of calm, I think, the moment of realization of one ness, the moment of actual seeing and being relieved of delusions and fears.And of course, after this moment comes the next moment, and so the moment of Enlightenment is a grace, but its also the beginning of a work, where you work toward, not simply getting that moment back, but living your life in the light of that moment. Having experienced the universe as the Beloved, having experienced the pain and yearning and the relief from suffering, we don't want to add lives that add to this nonsense.  Not only that, but there are several moments of Enlightenment, several moments of seeing things as they are, seeing the wholeness of it all and rejoicing in it, several moments of returning to living ones life in the light of that vision, several moments of flowering.

But a confluence of things this week holds many holy days. The Sunday of Flowering leads to the Eve of the Ezaltaion of the Holy Cross. At first I wondered about keeping this as part of New Traditions, but after I heard the readings, I realized that the Holy Cross is also the tree of wisdom in Eden and the Axis Mundi. It is the serpent on the pole that brings healing as well as the center of the compass and the Spiral Castle. It is Jacob's Ladder ascending and descending, the traverse point connected heaven and earth and what is below. The Holy Cross is the Fire, first element, that carries all sacrifices up, and the messages of heaven down, and it is the Bo tree which flowers when the Buddha is enlightened. How could we not celebrate it?

In some motifs, such as the crosses on the Red Sword I use at this time of year, we have crosses upon crosses upon crosses. Another form of the cross is the tassel used on the Jewish tallit as well as the tassels seen on Masonic tracing boards. Both of these symbolize the drawing together of the four corners of the earth together at a central place, a place, we witches would say, of alchemy The place of alchemy is also the place of offering.  There had been confusion over this, but perhaps better than confusion we should have confoundment. The Cross is where we offer our work and ourselves to God and God offers the Divine self to us. In Christianity this story is deeply convoluted and the whole theology of the Crucixfision. In the story of Odin and Yggdrasil, Odin, as chief God, offers himself to himself. Thus we learn our offering is to the God without to realize the God within that what we do at our altars in the underworld and the above world may be done in the outer world. The Offering shown in the image of the Cross is the offering of total transformation and actualization. The more I speak about it, the more I am confused and boggled by it, and so I will stop.

Our Lady of the Sea

 

Sixth Sunday in Alchymical Time: Maritime Sunday

                

They that go down to the sea in ships, that do business in great waters;
These see the works of the Lord, and his wonders in the deep.
For he commandeth, and raiseth the stormy wind, which lifteth up the waves thereof.
They mount up to the heaven, they go down again to the depths: their soul is melted because of trouble.
They reel to and fro, and stagger like a drunken man, and are at their wit's end.
Then they cry unto the Lord in their trouble, and he bringeth them out of their distresses.
He maketh the storm a calm, so that the waves thereof are still.

Psalm 107. 23-29

Maritime Sunday is the time when we celebrate and contemplate one of the biggest mysteries yet, the Sixth Alchymical Mystery, which is the Sea and all it holds.  All it holds includes the many faces of She who watches over it and lives in it, Tethys, Yemaya, Maristella, Our Lady of the Seas, Our Lady of the Lakes, the Lady of the Lake. And this involves the contemplation and reverence of all the many ways in which the sea exists for us, all of the seas and oceans, the depths of them, rivers even, especially, for me the great lakes and that great lake by which I live, Michigan.

But the seas, the deep waters exist also in metaphor and in spirit and in fundamental archetypes. The Sea is the waters under which we are emmersed for baptism and spiritual cleansing, , for initiations, the witchly borderline we cross when making the circle boundaries and doing spiritual travels, and the sea is the sea of life on which we sail with its beauties but also its uncertain depths. The sea is even the very sea of space in which our planet, a blue island is floating. 

The sea is in our blood which is made of salt and water, and water we need to continually sustain us. The sea is our mother from which all live came and we can never live without that water. It must always be flowing through us. Hence in the blessing of the altar we say, "Blessed art thou, water, without which we would not be." The waves of our hearing, of electricity, the higher and stranger waves of sense perception, connection, magic, are all echoed in the waves of seas. 

                                                                 Our Lady of the Seas

Mami Wata is the Woman of the Seas, the myster of the mermaid, which is a famous story among northern European pirates, but which is central to mythologies over the world. Mami Wata is the forebearer of Yemaya and the Caribbean Lady of the Sea and the first and foremost of the fishtailed Sea Maidens.  She is, in Voudou, La Sirene, and indeed the Greek Sirens and the Germain Lorelai as well as the East Anglian river maids are her cousins. That the beautiful sea is inhabited and guarded by these ladies as strange and inviting and as dangerous as the waters, is another mystery. Their enchanting faces and torsoes speak of longing and desire, but their fish tails remind us that they are beyond the human. These embodiments of the power of water, we humbly remember and beseech.

                                                     Tethys Our Lady of the Deep 

Tethys is the Lady of the Deep, and her depths are not salty. How we have interpreted Greek myth is strange for her partner is Okeanos, from whom we get the word ocean, but the original ocean was a band of fresh water that encircled the earth and Tethys was the font of fresh water. Her daughters, the Okeanids were goddesses of springs and rivers, and the Nephaeli, the goddesses of clouds who nourished the earth. Her depths are not the bottom of the sea. Her depths are the absoluteness of water and nourishment, the source of all purification, all initiation and all life.

Origins: Part Two

It's just an uncomfortable truth that you can't help who your family is, and no one chooses their brothers and sisters. It seems that, though they distanced themselves from it, Gerald Gardner and Doreen Valiente as well as who knows how many other people were trying to do something with Thelema and this became Wicca. Aside from the adapted Crowley verses which become The Charge of the Goddess, much of Gardner’s Book of Shadows, which is adapted into Alex Sander’s Book, deals in the same demonology, sacred names and elemental terms not of paganism or some ancient pre Christian British past, but of a very Christian medieval magic. Crowley was working to turn this Christianity over on its head, but it seems Wicca was attempting to make what Crowley was at respectable, even placing very Christian ideas of community and the need to suffer, the need to do good and to meditate and study in an almost monk like way to attain magical power. This may be a reason why, though people who practice a broad and devolved form of Wicca regard themselves as pagans, at least Alexandrians have steered away from that term and only very recently and very reluctantly did Maxine Sanders accept the term pagan for herself.

Before we move on I want to say here that pagans are often eager to draw a very superficial line between pagans and Christians while at the same time choosing to have some knowledge and borrow some practices from every culture around the world and then barring Christianity, Islam or Judaism, thus making those religions as special and different as they claim to be. In this and all articles, religion is simply religion and no specific kind is being ignored. Maxine Sanders was a raised a devout Catholic, and met the occult through her mother who was a devout Catholic all her life. Janet Farrar claimed to have a vision of the Virgin Mary opening up her robe and revealing a pentagram before saying, “And now you know.” Here, and in all articles, I will not draw the difference between anything as simple as Christianity and paganism, but orthodox and heterodox, exoteric and esoteric, mainstream and occult.

But the founders of the two branches of Wicca were not the only ones working with Crowley’s material. On the other side of the world there were Americans who were trying to work with Thelema to bring about Crowley’s Scarlet Woman. Jack Parson’s, the rocket engineer turned occultist was inducted into Crowley’s Thelema and along with new friend L.Ron Hubbard sought to bring about the Scarlet Woman who would give birth to the Dark Child of the new Aeon. Even Crowley in his old age was disgusted by their plans, and they seemed to have failed, Parson’s falling into madness and dying early. But Hubbard kept up with Crowley’s archetypes and ideology until it became radically transformed into what he would call Scientology. Scientology, which has done and continues to do untold harm to its members was born in America around the same time Wicca was born in England, and it was born from someone intentionally practicing dark arts. For someone who is not occult it is hard to see how something so apparently dark can control and hurt so many people for so long, but for an occultist it is hard not to see a powerful and negative magic at work here.

Despite Aleister Crowley's inability to escape his own lusts and megalomania which would lead to poverty and low reputation at the end of his life, some aw the value of the system and redeemed it. Thelema is a full functioning high magic today. In fact, as a wisdom tradition and not a fertility cult or a brand of paganism, Thelema has ties to Cochrane Craft and formal Wicca. The latter two are wilder and less regulated than Thelema, but I imagine Thelema itself was wilder than the father from which it sprang: the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn.

Founded by Samuel Mathers, William Westcott and William Woodman, Golden Dawn was part of a Romantic movement reconnecting the people of the nineteenth century to Martinism, Rosicrusianism and the other mystery schools of the Middle Ages and early modern period.  Golden Dawn has several branches and several incarnations, but its distinguishing signs are being alchemical, and being Christian while being deeply concerned with ancient Egypt and the Khemetic Gods.  The rituals are a reconstruction of Egypt, Greek geometric rituals and Catholic ceremony. Amongst others, William Butler Yeats was a member and so, if these people were Christian, it was their own type of Christianity. Golden Dawn was coming into being at the same time as Theosophy and other spiritualist movements by people who did not forsake Christianity so much as radically (and heretically) expand its meaning. Golden Dawn is the very opposite of pagan. It is mystic, it is occult. Members of Golden Dawn would never regard themselves as a fertility cult, but it is from Golden Dawn that we get most of our modern concepts of magic and spell casting including, yes, the Tarot deck. It is the opinion of some that these people were theoretical magicians and did not get their hands dirty with actual magic as Crowley and his spiritual descendants would, but if they didn’t practice magic much, it seems they did as much as most modern pagans.

Of course, the Golden Dawn and the groups that sprung up around it came from a fertile soil and parents just as interesting and in our last section, we will turn to those beginning with the movements that would arise from men meeting in British pubs in the 17^th century, Freemasonry and modern druidry.