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.

The Lapwing, the Dragon and the Day After Christmas

There is a witch’s dilemma. There will always be a witch’s dilemma. People talk about blue Christmases, but the truth is that the actual blues do not set in until the day after Christmas, until the grand celebration is done and you are left with the prospect of your life as is and three months of a winter which, for the most part, has not truly even begun.

You had thought in pretending to disavowing the mainstream and Christianity that you would not be caught up in this, but the truth is you have simply traded in Christmas for a pretend ancient modern day imitation of it. Calling a Christmas tree a Yule tree or a Solstice bush does not save one from witch’s dilemma, predicament, problem.

In my personal practice, at certain times of year, I still do use the services and rtuals of the church I grew up in, the mother church of the west. The times when my old practice coincides with the new is a lovely return, and then time when they must separate is always strange and a little awkward.

This morning, after a beautiful season of Advent, I had the distinct sense that this was the last time I would do the Church readings in the morning or in the evening, that now that Christmas Day had passed, it was time to dig deeper and in other directions for the fulfillment of what I had seen on Christmas night, and worked toward (waited for) all Advent. Doing the same thing again and again was not the answer.

There is that childish place. Unfairly (maybe) I call it the Wiccan place, where you buy all your black and get a necklace and earrings shaped like pentagrams. You change the names of holidays and try to celebrate full moons, solstice, you know. But this is an external changing. This is not wisdom. The witchly change is one of perspective, understanding, being. It is not that the witch calls God Cernunnos instead of Christ, but rather that she recognizes the Antlered One even is she is sitting in a dull church with a friend. It is a way, a deep way, a hard way, a putting away of old conventions, a walking away, a deepening. And yes, it is magic.

The ending of Christmas is so tragic for the witch because, of course, we are always devoted to the Holy Child entering the world, to the Housle, to the incarnation of the divine in human living and not only the possibility, but the expectation of wonder. And it seemed, for a little while, the world around us was too. But in the churches, and certainly after, the wonder of the first 25 days of December is packed up for business as usual, and here we are, out in the cold again.

The lapwing is that symbol of the nature of Craft. The Lapwing is the guardian of it, but it seems to be pointing in the wrong direction and so, if we are not carefully while watching her, we can mistake the symbol for the actuality, the shallow dig for the deep dive.

At this time of year we are susceptible to the magic of Christmas, because we do not yet understand the word magic, or perhaps even the word Christmas. The warm feelings of endless possibility, glinting lights and childish joy, the general openness that touches more people than usual, the soaring idea that anything can happen, the childish wonder, the happiness—if one feels any of those—is a lapwing. Though we talk about blue Christmas, the blue return to actual life is the real bump in the road. During this time of year, everyone around is a little more willing to be open to magic, and that does change things, but that is only a face of magic. The actual magic continues today, when everyone else has forgotten about it.

The temptation of living so close to the rest of the world, religious and otherwise for a little time in the year is remembering that neither the church nor the life most people lead is the answer either. When we have come in from the cold to join the common life at Christmas, it’s hard to remember the common life is not necessarily our place, and to find our place we must return to the altar, and to the root and to the dragon at the root, and acknowledge all our strange fears and feelings and continue to offer them.

Emmanuel, Such Power In the Hands of Men

But that ye may know that the Son of man hath power on earth to forgive sins, (then saith he to the sick of the palsy,) Arise, take up thy bed, and go unto thine house.

And he arose, and departed to his house.

But when the multitudes saw it, they marvelled, and glorified God, which had given such power unto men.


Matthew 9.6-8

As Cochranists, we are mystics and priests first, seekers of wisdom and doers of good whose rituals are enacted to bring the divine into the world. The word witch can be debatable, and is enfolded into the rest of what we do, The story of the Paralytic Brought Through the Roof in the Gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke is a perfect illustration of that which is sometimes called magic, of the divine alchemy. The power of Christ is the divine power working through the hands of men to heal and to bring change in the midst of perfect love and perfect trust, the final incarnation of Christ called upon before Christmas, Emmanuel, not merely God is with us, but God with us, God as us, the Divine in our midst, in all of our doings




Latin:

O Emmanuel, Rex et legifer noster,
exspectatio Gentium, et Salvator earum:
veni ad salvandum nos, Domine, Deus noster.

English:

O Emmanuel, our king and our lawgiver,
the hope of the nations and their Saviour:
come and save us, O Lord our God.

Limo Formasti

Latin:

O Rex Gentium, et desideratus earum,
lapisque angularis, qui facis utraque unum:
veni, et salva hominem,
quem de limo formasti.
English:

O King of the nations, and their desire,
the cornerstone making both one:
Come and save the human race,
which you fashioned from clay.


Two thoughts as we approach tonight's meditation. Firstly, I remember my old prayer book--I mean it was OLD--full of all the Catholic self abasement one could long for, and in the O Antiphon was translated thusly:


O King of the nations, and their desire,
the cornerstone making both one:
Come and save Man,
whom you fashioned from the slime of the earth.


I will take the straightforward translation Google gives me


King of the Nations, and their desire;
keystone, who makes both peoples one,
Come and save mankind;
whom you shaped from the mud.

Because this is the one that tells me the most about this verse. This isn't really the place to dwell on kingship except to say all this time we have heard of the Root and Shoot of Jesse, the King of Judah, the King of Israel.Now we chant to the ruler over all, not simply the ruler over a few people and a few things, but the overarching ruler over everything. This is an idea that seems to Christian in many Craft circles, but I'll accept it. Without dwelling on it too long I want to look at what this King has come to do. He functions as the cornerstone which makes the two peoples into one, that's an important point because the question next is what two peoples. In the language of early Christianity and Judaism for that matter it is the people who are Jews and the people who are not. But, even though Christians didn't trouble to think about it, it should have also meant Christians and whoever was not Christian. The idea of two peoples always includes those who are out and those who i think are in, Those who are occultist, and those who are not, those who are magical and those who are not, those who are witches and those who are not. It would be ashamed to get stuck on the nature of God/Goddess , Kingship and forget the central message is that the energy of god we call on at this moment is the energy that purifies us from the us them mentality and heals these old wounds, refuses to be boxed into one camp..

This antiphon is a call to the God who made us to remember us and come back again. To really bring us to life. The image is the story of Adam. We are not simply being told that we are made of mud, but remember that in several ancient stories human beings were fashioned, but did not possess full life until God himself had breathed into him. And so wait to be not only saved, but recreated, re inspired, born again.

Even while this holy coming is the desire of nations, the nations do not seem to desire this divine visitation. We want to be real and alive, but we still play in the mud with the things close at hand, afraid of the change that could come.

Mother Night and the Return of the Light

There is irony in the fifth O Antiphon

Latin:

O Oriens,

splendor lucis aeternae, et sol justitiae:

veni, et illumina sedentes in tenebris, et umbra mortis.

English:

O Morning Star,

splendour of light eternal and sun of righteousness:

Come and enlighten those who dwell in darkness and the shadow of death.

As Nox, Nyx and Nuit, Night is a primordial grandmother goddess. On the longest night of the year while she covers everything, the Light is reborn and promise restored.

Or if there is not irony, then there is anticipation. Every O Antiphon is sung in the evening, and this one is always sung on the evening of the longest night of the year. Oriens is the Morning Light, the Morning Star, Lucifer, the Radiant Dawn, the Rising Sun, but all of these things are sung as the longest night of the year approaches. The mystery celebrated is that the Holy Child will not be born until the darkest night is passing or has passed altogether. For most the Holy Child on the back of the Roebuck is Jesus, born three nights after the Solstice, but even if the birth is celebrated tonight, still, it is celebrated on the other side of midnight, after most of the night has passed.

In the day we remembered The Veiled One, he who is called Saturn and Odin and Tinia. As we went to the island and cut the thorns and berries and brought them back, we remembered the one who makes tyrannical kings impotent and clears the way for new life. Tonight we rest under the brooding shadow of Mother Night and wait for the brilliant Light to be reborn. This darkness is not the shadow of death. This is the original holy darkness. In the morning the Bright One, Llew, the Christ, will come and sanctify the day, but for now, Mother Nyx has come to sanctify the night.

We need that holy night, and we wait for the blessing of the day. We do not know who the holy child is, not really? We do not understand the mystery, and for the most part, are too superficial, too frightened to delve in. And yet, here he comes anyway, the One we long for and fear.