Mothering Sunday

Mothering Sunday is a perfect day and a true challenge in the heart of Lent.  Often it is called Laetare Sunday and it is the day to stop penitence and rejoice in the goodness of God and the world around us. The introit to the Mass reads:

"Rejoice, O Jerusalem: and come together all you that love her: rejoice with joy, you that have been in sorrow: that you may exult and be filled from the breasts of your consolation.

Rejoice.... Laetare! 

This was the Sunday when, traditionally, Christians would go ‘a’mothering’, that is, return to the church they were baptized in, or the nearest cathedral, their mother church. As a person who experiences more harm than good and more boredom than both inside of churches, how I go a’mothering has become an important question.

In a way, this is an important question for every witch. Most witches are women and even if you are not biologically female, you are participating in the female by being a witch. In a world that is currently so violent, so orphaned and so often unsafe, a good question for those of us who draw near to the Great Mother is how to join ourselves to her and bring more of her charity, her confidence, her love and her grace into this world. A friend of mine messaged me the other day and said her heart was hurting, and I told her I had just ended a relationship with an unloving and sort of wretched person. We spoke of how hot and scarred our hearts can become in a world where people who do not believe they are lovable pass on their lovelessness. Regardless if we are calling her Isis or Freya or Mary or even Mother Jesus as Hildegard of Bingen referred to her vision of the fullness of God, it is a necessary challenge to over and over again return to the heart of this Mother who is so often forgotten or denied.

 For me, returning to the Mother has been the hard work of letting go of unloving relationships and emotions that weren’t very healthy, accepting rejection (what mother doesn’t do that?) and intensifying practices I’d dropped. Returning to the Mother also means dealing with my own fragility, and surrendering to a Lady who is greater than this little and often angry me. I also think that we can simply begin to ask ourselves,

In the time we have spoken of the Labyrinth, very often we have likened the Spiral Castle to a tower, a sacrifice, a Cross, a Stang, the World Tree, all symbols which are at least a little male, and all about the bloodshed of killing something. These are symbols which at least begin to pretend that life giving sacrifice is the realm of men, which is deceptive to say the very least. It is good to remember that originally the Spiral and the Labyrinth, endlessly round, the deceptively simple path leading into a twisted and turning maze which ends in the central chamber, was originally a symbol of the Goddess, and of the body of the Great Mother and all Mothers. 

The Hanged Man in his endless variations has been a symbol of this Nexus, but these male motifs are after and beside, not before another type of necessary suffering exemplified in the Weeping Isis, the Sorrowful Virgin and that most provocative image of the 1970’s, Christa.

This is a stinging, merciless world, often loveless and untrusting. But of course that is only part of the story. We dance in love and joy and are constantly surprised not only be the beauty of the natural world, but the kindness of strangers. The momentary assaults of lovelessness shock us because, often we have already known so much love. While, in these times we may experience ourselves as living in a place that is not only unkind to women, but unkind in general, where gentleness is pushed out and rage built up, we also know that is only part of the story. This Sunday maybe we can begin to return to the Mother, even if we do not entirely understand what this means, and set our faces toward her, even when so many haven’t seen her in a long while. This is not an impossible task, but a joyful one. Nurturing is our inheritance, and She is our home. The road is joy. Laetare!

Entering the Labyrinth

Around the same time that I entered the Craft, a friend of mine gave me a present I wore for years, and may wear again one day when I have a good cord for it. It was a bronze disk with a labyrinth engraved on it. How Celtic, I thought. How witchy, how appropriate! I knew the story of Theseus from childhood. The Theseus of my childhood was an untarnished hero. He had come to Athens to find his father the King, and upon learning that the youths of Athens were sent off every years to be fed to the Minotaur, Theseus set out to stop it. Despite his father’s desire to save his newly discovered son, Theseus takes his place among the other youths and maidens and goes to Crete. There he meets the Princess Ariadne. We know so little of her. Minos is the son of Zeus, Pasiphae is the daughter of the Sun and a Goddess who is also a queen. In those days the line between gods and men was blurred. What is Ariadne? Has she lived in Crete for years and years, always a little princess? But this time around she is either ripened. or the vision of Theseus ripens her. Something happens between them, and she gives him the ball of twine, the Clew that he can tie outside of the labyrinth and wind his way through it in order to kill the Minotaur and get out. Next Ariadne gives the sword with Theseus can kill the monster.

 He has killed several monsters before. And it is important that Ariadne is sunborn, is of the family of goddess-sorceresses who are the daughters f of Helios and include Medea, Circe and Pasiphae. These women are all beautiful, and powerful, but creatures of a liminal and shadowy nature,  dubious even as they are daughters of the light. Ariadne is the sun’s light shining in the darkness of a night time where Theseus makes love to her,. Theseus comes into this night time with no real hope of making it out of the labyrinth. He does not know that Ariadne is here to deliver him. In that regard, Ariadne stands in the place of Sapientia, the Moon. She is the Virgin Goddess giving her aid. Her Clew is no ordinary Clew. It glows with her light. It leads the way home.

            In those first years that I possessed that little bronze labyrinth, I used to walk the stone labyrinth at St Mary’s College near my home, meditating, praying, trying to understand its importance. It wasn’t until several years down the line that I looked back and understood the importance of the labyrinth for the witch, or for anyone on a spiritual path. The labyrinth is the remedy to the myth of straight ahead progress. The seventeen years between the time when I walked out a church service, went down the street to the public library. and picked up my first book on witchcraft and now. has been filled with bumps, twists, short cuts and doubling backs. I have picked things up, put them down, and picked them up all over again. This can cause frustration, embarrassment, even a false sense of hypocrisy, but what this reflects is the natural, and magical, turns of the dance in the labyrinth and up the Spiral Castle. This long rambling turning back and twisting is the treading of the mill in every day life, the actual treading which completes what we do ritually. When so many give up, we keep on, and this is devotion, this is the divine treading. As did Theseus, we have the Clew, if we stop and pay attention, and it is the light of that Clew, and the voice of Ariadne that leads us to the center of the labyrinth not once, but over and over again.

The Mirrored Palaces

In Lyn Webster Wilde’s book, Becoming the Enchanter, her encounter with the Spiral Castle is in a room full of mirrors, and she associates this castle with the Castle of Arianrhod, and the house she enters representing it is one disconcerting and nearly deceiving with its dizzying pattern of mirrors, and here in the story of Minos we see the also see mirrors, for what happens above reflects what happens below.

            Before this story begins there is another tale, that of Zeus coming as a white bull to a princess called Europa. As a bull he seduces her and carries her from her homeland in the Middle East, and carries her to the island of Crete. There she bears him several children, one of whom is Minos. Zeus also creates a robot called Talos. This robot protects the people of Crete from other nations, but at the same time it prevents them from leaving the island, turning Crete into a prison. It will not be until Daedalus arrives that the Talos is killed, and a normal life with all of is possibilities of freedom and danger can begin.

            It is Daedalus who not only builds the underground labyrinth, but makes it possible for Queen Pasipahe to seduce a bull, a mirror of the bull Zeus who seduced her mother in law, and become pregnant with Aristaion. But wait, because Aristaion is not only a name applied to the Minotaur, but to the king. Minos is also identified with the bull, bull and man,. He is the son of a woman and a bull. The king above is a mirror of the monster below, the monster who is king of the subterranean land.

            There are several who look at the story of Theseus and the Minotaur, and see in it some distant memory of Cretan power over mainland Greece. The whole reason Theseus shows up is because Crete is exacting a tax of human lives every seven years from Athens. When Theseus destroys the Minotaur, that tax is over. There are a few ways to look at this, and they are not necessarily exclusive. The Cretans, freed of imprisonment from Talos by Daedalus, and from the terror of the Minotaur by Theseus, now no longer care about the tax they exacted from the Athenians.

            But all stories, including myths and fairy tales, possess an internal logic, and that reading is not logical. Minos could have killed this monster, should have killed this monster. Instead he furnishes a home for it and gives it human sacrifices at a regular time. The monster and Minos are one. It seems that in defeating the monster, Theseus has defeated or changed Minos.

            In just this brief encounter with the palace of Knossos, one of the oldest images of the Spiral Castle, we are always left with several people and several scenarios to explore, Daedalus the builder, Minos the King, this mother Europa and his father Zeus, Pasiphae the Sun Bride, the princess Ariadne and her hero and eventual betrayer, Theseus. All of these are encountering the maze of Knossos in different ways, as do we all.

Entering the Spiral Castle: One

Save for the circle, there is no form more magical than the spiral, and what is a spiral but a circle constantly circling in on itself? The serpent  coming back on its own tail is the beginning of the spiral, the serpent curving again and again, curling into itself more and more, or out and out, is the spiral. When we dance in the center of the circle, there is the spiral, treading the mill is the beginning of the spiral, so we are told, the kundalini travels up the spine in a spiral. Looking into the heavens, there we see other galaxies, spirals, and we ourselves, a little point in a little tip of the arm of our own glazy, are in an ever twirling spiral.

            We have seen the famous spiral staircases, but the truth is, every staircase that goes on for any length spirals. It is the nature of traveling up, that in architecture as well as in imagination, we do not simply go vertically and horizontally, we spiral.

            The oldest human stories tell us of this spiraling architecture. The Greek story of King Minos tells of a maze, a labyrinth spiraling in on itself and several thousand years later, removed from this story, Arthur Evans finds the marvelously spiraling, mazelike palace of Knossos.

            The Spiral Castle differs from the other castles because, in all compasses we revere the castles, but at given times of the year we are more in one than in the other. After the Spring Equinox, we enter the Golden Castle, but we are in the Spiral Castle all the time, because it is in the center of the circle. It is us in our working, and in our constant turning. This is why, in many ways, it is the hardest to describe. Not only is it part of us, it is us. What is more, the Spiral Castle is difficult to explain because most who work in the Craft are working from an almost strictly European influence. Up until now, I have spoken of the Circle when concerned with laying the compass. Other cultures, especially the Navajo, have always used not four directions, but six: North, South, East, West, up and Down. This firmly fixes the compass not as a two dimensional circle, but as a sphere, not a ghost of roundness, but actual, perfect roundness as the world is, as the planets are, as is the universe. Now, understanding the roundness of it, we can see the Spiral Castle as constantly going both up and down, for that is the movement of the Spiral Castle. It is the gravity of the magic sphere, the witchesphere. It is the linchpin.  It is the central pole. The implications for what this means regarding castles we will address later.

Greek myth tells us that Minos, King of Crete, and one of Zeus’s children married Pasiphae, the daughter of the Sun. To make a long story far shorter than it deserves to be, she took a liking to a white bull and conceived a child by it. This half man half bull is the Minotaur, but he also had a proper name, Aristaion, and there is even a queer system of Gardnerian witchcraft devoted to his mysteries. King Minos, afraid and embarrassed, had his architect Daedalus (who had his own set of issues, but more on him later) construct a great spiraling underground maze called the labyrinth. In the center of this maze, under Minos’ fabulous palace, he placed the bull step child. It seems that Queen Pasiphae did not object,

            Theseus also has his own set of complications, but for now let us leave it at, when he came to Crete from Athens, to save his people, currently under the domination of Crete, from being food for the Minotaur, he gained the affection of Ariadne, Minos’ and Pasiphae’s daughter, and she gave him a ball of thread called a Clew (from which comes our word clue), that tying to the end entrance of the labyrinth, he could use it to find his way into the center and then kill the Minotaur. Theseus did do, and he triumphed over the Minotaur and escaped Crete with the princess Ariadne. She did not make it back to Athens with him. What became of her varies with the tellings, but this is the bare bones of the story of that first image of the Spiral Castle, Minos’ labyrinth.

            And how can a spiral dungeon be accounted a Castle? Because thousands of years later, in real time, Arthur Evans came to Crete looking for real signs of old stories and found the spiraling palace of Knossos. He and most of us now, are convinced it was the inspiration for the labyrinth.  But if it is image, it is also inspiration, and here we see the first signs of what the Spiral Castle is, for it is goes above and below. It is an above ground high palace in the administrative center of things, mirrored in a pool of myth by a spiraling prison that goes ever down into the depths. This is the virtue of the Spiral Castle, that much of it is unseen, for it goes down into the underworld as well as reaching up into the sky, and what is seen is mirrored in what is not. This is why the Spiral Castle stands in the place of the World Tree. Everything that happens in Minos’ fantastic labyrinthine palace is mirrored in what happens in the monster’s prison maze below.

Wisdom in the Night

There is a pure light the moon casts when it is full. It shines over everything, and at the same time it allows us to see the heavens. The bright sun turns the sky a full and shining cerulean blue, and doesn’t let us see past the clouds, but in the light of the moon the dome of heaven is removed, and we can see the stars, the planets, everything beyond. The moon, reveals what before we could not see, this great light which makes what would be utter darkness a rich and living blue, and suddenly on my moonlit walk I begin to say:

Virgin most prudent,
pray for us.
Virgin most venerable,
pray for us.
Virgin most renowned,
pray for us.
Virgin most powerful,
pray for us.
Virgin most merciful,
pray for us. 

It is from the Litany of the Blessed Virgin, a prayer that, really, is so old I never learned it  in Catholic school, simply found it at the back of a hymnal. Our mythologies are often subconscious. We cannot force an identity onto a thing, or make ourselves believe in gods and spirits and goddesses because we like their stories. I was realizing, as I walked, that I had always identified the moon with Sapientia, with the the Virgin of Wisdom. She is a strange mysterious Goddess. Being wise and very primal, she has the good sense to resist stories. She isn’t Athena. She is beyond Athena. She is before the Virgin Mary, but identified with her. She may have at one time been the Holy Spirit—before the Holy Spirit was downgraded—into a male bird. In Judaism she is Chokmah, who sits perched near the top of the Tree of Life.

It is because of this very quality of calm coolness, of roundness, of absolute clarity, that one of the Virgin's homes is the Glass Castle in the northwest. She both holds the Glass Orb and is the Glass Orb, for the empty/ not empty space it holds is that of fruitful Maidenhood/Motherhood. She is most certainly the serpents made transparent, Maiden and Mother joined, the delight of the Lord Janicot. This why the Holy Child conceived in Spring is born in the stark clarity of cold winter.

She is Evervirgin, that is, ever within her own solitude, always touched but never possessed or obsessed. Under her light, which is always gentle, things are revealed. After a day of stress she whispers, “None of what you were worried about was really that important, was it?” After worrying about that man and how he may not love you or love you as much as you hoped, she whispers, “But you didn’t really love him anyway. You just loved being in love, and now you can let him go. Can’t you?” In the very early morning, when no one else is up yet, and there are one of two candles lit on the altar, she calls you out of bed to sit down and be quiet. She doesn’t say anything, and quietly lets you know you don’t have to either.

Tower of ivory,
pray for us.
House of gold,
pray for us.

Gate of Heaven,
pray for us.
Morning star,
pray for us. 

Amen.

 

The Fiery River

Already we have seen the Golden Castle. For some weeks now, glinting in the distance, we have seen its turrets. We have had dreams of a glittering golden Lantern leading us on, though the hand bearing it we cannot completely see. But here is this castle, many walled, turreted, glinting in the spring sun. It is a castle, maybe better fitted to a southern land, a hotter clime, but here it is. There is another castle, Joyous Gard, but we are not here yet. This is the golden castle of the north, the castle of revelry, of pleasure, of laughter, the castle of conversation, ease, lightness of tongue, storytelling and singing.

            We are on our way there, for we have the feeling that after so long a winter revelry is just what we need. But what is this? Coming nearer we see a heat rising, coming even closer we see, to our alarm, this river of fiery hissing serpents. They are calling out to us, their eyes glinting, tails wrapping about each other, flames lifting off of them, the light flittering on their skins like glass, like jewels, like a red river in summer. And who are they? What are they? They give life or they destroy, depending upon how we receive them. A visitor may be carried across the river, but one who would make the Golden Castle home must cross by foot and walk through this fire. But why?

            Surely you have met those unfortunate fortunate souls who never knew trouble, who haven’t had to really pass through any pain or who avoid pain at any cost. Surely you have known people who never restrain themselves, never strive beyond the limits set for them. Are they funny? Do they have stories to tell? What insights do they have to offer? What songs do they have to sing? Have you ever sat spellbound by the conversation of such a one? It’s just a sad simple fact of this world that, unfortunately, no human soul becomes tender, grows in love and sweetness, without suffering. And it is a particular kind of suffering, a willing acceptance of what must be, a resolution to absorb something of this fire and be strengthened rather than consumed in bitterness. And the soul understands that there is no certainty in this burning. It isn’t always true that what doesn’t kill us makes us stronger. What wounds us can make us weaker, more bitter, less able to cope. Still we embrace this.

            The mystery of this burning river is mirrored throughout the centuries at this very time of year. Let the soul rejoice, for it is in the very company of the Gods who knew this journey was worth it. Inanna is with you, traveling into the underworld to seek her other self. Demeter is with you, carrying her torches to find her daughter and bring her back. According to the oldest stories, Persephone is with you, traveling to meet her dark lover. Christ, carrying his cross is with you. And so many saints. Moses and his burning bush. the Children of Israel leaving Egypt are with you, and so many more. The secret to the Castle of Revelry is that, until you cross the fiery river, the castle is really only an illusion. You bring the Castle of Revelry into this world by the life you lead in this world made of pleasures, terrors, ecstasies and also many trials.

Unspiration: Lent as Spell Breaker

Perhaps we need a better name than Lent. Or perhaps this is the perfect name. Perhaps what needs to be done is shaking off the patina of guilt laden Catholicism of this season. I find myself in Lent reading the Bible not only for inspiration, but unspiration, that process of reading old sacred texts, taking them for what they are and, because of what they are, finding my way through the holes, reinterpreting or, more often, discarding them. This is the opposite of being enchanted. I am being unchanted, dispelling instead of being put in the spell of three thousand years of bad thinking.

            Having gotten through the book of Joel and moved onto the prophet Amos, there is a definite theme of prophetic verbal diarrhea, endless diatribes that amount to, “The reason your crops don’t grow is because God is angry at you. Why don’t you repent so your crops can grow?” The human mind looks for a reason, or so we are told, for certain things and the reason the prophets give is, “You are sinful. This is your fault. Repent ,and it will get better.” By these standards, penitence becomes its own sort of black witchcraft. So, already, in these precursors to Lent, a magic drama is being acted out. In place of wailing for Damuzi, we are now wailing for our own sins, real and mostly imagined, to an angry god so that our crops will grow and our lives will be better.

            But underneath this is another subtler strain. One must peer carefully, for the old Testament prophets are full of rage, misogyny, over exaggeration and a tendency to call women whores and write graphically about rape and menstrual blood. But repentance is a call to first loves. In the later Christian Lent, which partially reflects this, it is a time to strengthen commitments, remember original loves, and test the current loves to see if they are worth having, a time to put down and pick up. It is thusly we pass over a dry land of dead grass and just barely wakening dreams and see a river flaming with fiery serpents. Its heat refreshes and terrifies, and on the other side, we glimpse, in its warm and golden beauty, Caer Daplas, the Castle of Revelry.