Monday, July 9, 2012
Religion & Me
I just read Aidan Kelly's blogs having to do with his religious background. I’d like to respond by telling all of you about my own early religious experience. Even though I was brought up a Lutheran, and he a Roman Catholic, a lot of the experiences he relates resonate with me very much. Religion-wise, I didn’t have any choices until I was an adult. When I was twelve, and taking confirmation classes, which are pretty much the same as Kelly’s catechism classes, if you take out the denomination-specific stuff. They’re both indoctrination into Christianity, to make sure that we have the important points of the faith firmly in our pliable young minds, so that we can blurt out the points of our faith without thinking. That’s the thing about the cookie-cutter religions; they all place a high importance on orthodoxy of belief. Everyone has to believe the same stuff, and pass it on to others, if they get the chance. And we’re not supposed to try to work it out logically, using scientific evidence or anything like that. We’re just supposed to take it all on faith. But it hit me, here’s this deity that I’ve never seen. I only have the preacher’s word that he exists, and he’s the one source of salvation from something he invented called sin. I later learned that a “sin” in archery means a missed mark. That’s all. If only I’d called a stop to it then and there, and been courageous enough to announce to my parents that I no longer believed in the existence of this old bearded white man on a throne in the sky. That’s always been one of my shortcomings; a lack of courage.
I was a Satanist for maybe five or six weeks when I was 27. Then I found a third way to go; Paganism. I was taking a class on the occult at Diablo Valley College, and our instructor told us about a meeting where we could meet some Neo-Pagans. I went. Unfortunately, so did some Christians who claimed “equal time.” Wonder how they’d like it if we started walking into churches claiming “equal time.” They haven’t given us equal time for over 1600 years, why should we give them them equal time? The Pagans left their seats, and went to the side of the library where the door was. I joined them. We introduced ourselves, and generally had a great old time while the jesoids prattled on with their same tired old message that nobody wanted to hear.
I joined a Druid Grove, and started going to the Horned Moon meetings of a NROOGD coven. I started with the Sabbat celebrations. The funny thing was that when the Goddess was invoked, I could feel Her in my mind and soul, as I’d never felt the presence of the Christian god. I always felt that I was talking to a big nothing. In April, 1976, I was initiated, and started studying Wicca close up and personal. Since then, what adventures I’ve had! I’ve formed three covens, which unfortunately didn’t get very far, I’ve learned ritual magick, perfected my reading of the Tarot to where I’m writing a book on it with someone, and gotten my 3rd degree in a trad I’d only heard about in the ‘80s. Now I’m in the middle of forming a working online coven.
Monday, February 27, 2012
Wrinting, Magick, and Me
My Paganism and writing life are interwoven. So as I write this, there may be spells in here, or spiritual experiences I want to share. I wrote one story about a woman who was not Pagan. She was an Episcopalian, a social Christian, she goes to church to maintain her social position. There are millions of those. But all the rest of my characters are Pagan or Heathen. I wrote one story called “Yule Yelps” about a Heathen town in northern Minnesota that is plagued with werewolves, or vargs, as the Scandinavians call them.
Last night we were in the Abbott’s Inn Magick School chat room I created, and a lady came in who has a blog on Blogspot which is her Book of Shadows. I’m old school enough that I will always have a hard copy BOS, but I thought I’d take a page from her and come back here, and do a combo blog. Yesterday I also saw a video on Magic[sic] Realm which was the late great Scott Cunningham talking about Herbal Magick, and there were a few recipes which I wanted to copy down. I told my friend Len about it. He wants to get the DVD of it.
I’ve started to make a fifteen hour plan to determine what my plans are for the day. I make it the night before. This is a smaller increment of the five year plan I adopted back in 1985. You see, I grew up during the Cold War, when the Russians and Chinese were our sworn enemies, and the Red scare was on. The Commies were always launching glorious five year plans. I interpreted these plans to mean that during the five year plan they would focus their resources towards a stated goal. I decided to adopt and adapt it for my own needs. I divided it up into smaller increments of time; the five month plan, the five week plan, the fifteen day plan, the five day plan, and the fifteen hour plan. Sometimes I have just a five hour plan. What doesn’t get done today will go on tomorrow’s fifteen hour plan.
I’ve had many teachers over the years of both magick and the Tarot. I’m counting the authors whose books I’ve read as my teachers. The first one was the late great Phillip Emmons Isaac Bonewits. I possess and have read at least three of his books, four if you count his edition of The Druid Chronicles but my favorite will always be Real Magic[sic]. There is Chandria, who taught me Wicca, Rowan Woods who taught me a lot about the Tarot, I also learned from some of my students. There has to be an exchange between the student and teacher of Wicca, or there is exploitation of one another. I learned from Doc.
My friend Len did some online research after an unfortunate experience with a Memorex product, and found that Memorex has a very bad reputation. So I’m telling you here. Do not buy anything made by Memorex. They are made in India, probably in sweat shops, so we should launch an across the board boycott. Do not buy anything made by Memorex. Tell your relatives, tell your friends and neighbors, tell any one you see in a store contemplating the purchase of a Memorex product. Complain to customer service of any store where Memorex is the only brand sold, and demand that they stock and alternate brand. The way to hurt them is in their pocketbooks, and if nobody is buying their products they should inquire why, and then improve their products, or they’ll go out of business. We the ninety-nine percent have tremendous power when we get together, armed by the truth.
Magick is an all consuming force, a little like writing. Any act which causes a change in reality in accordance with one’s True Will is a magickal act. Oberon Zell-Ravenheart changed this to “Any act which causes a change in consciousness is a magickal act.” In psychology, there is a symptom called “magical thinking”, note the lack of a k in magic. Magickal thinking is different, although, subtly. When we who are magick, and know it, do magickal thinking, what we think about just may come true, providing it isn’t too crazy, or is within the bounds of possibility. The dead don’t come back, except as infants, and people don’t age backwards, and cars don’t send us messages, unless we’re on a cellphone, and getting a call from people in that car. But we live in an age of technology, both of hardware; electronics, computers and the like, and software; mind-science, all the techniques the ancients knew, and we are only just rediscovering. Magick exploits little or unknown laws of nature that the uninitiated call “supernatural’ because they have a very limited view of nature. There is nothing supernatural because nature is all inclusive and embracing. It includes all that is on this fertile blue-green planet of ours, and what lies beyond, both in physical space, and in other dimensions, as well as what we have created ourselves. Humankind’s creations must obey the laws of nature.
Belief and emotions are the fuel that magick uses to make our desires form. The sub- and un-conscious (some people say one, others say the other I believe there are both.) are the vessel and the mechanism by which the magick takes place. In Huna (the Hawaiian tradition) the sub- and/or un-conscious is called either the Lower or the Younger Self. Max Freedom Long was a leading exponent of Huna. Scott Cunningham was another. Together they educated those who were open to learning the ways of the ancient Hawaiians, and incorporating them into their personal paths. Long wrote many books on the subject, Cunningham, only one; Hawaiian Spirituality. Max Freedom Long can be researched online, as well as at your friendly local public library. I urge you all to patronize the library, Ben Franklin’s invention, because the top 1% want to do away with our public libraries, just as they want to do away with our public education system, and the postal service. If you have the means, by all means, support the library. Your children and grandchildren will thank you. In Santa Clara County, the branches of the public library system, as well as the buses in the Valley Transit Authority, are marked as Safe Places, places a child can escape to if a predator is pursuing hir. It is my view that public libraries are not obsolete, but are more necessary than ever, especially when more and more young people are home schooled, instead of being sent to schools which may not be understanding about a family’s cultural or spiritual beliefs.
Back to the subconscious or Younger Self. Inside we are all that five year old who wants what it wants, when s/he wants it. What does s/he want? Well, what did you want when you were five years old? Toys, right? Toys and candy, costumes. Well, to do magick all that is really necessary is the mind. As my friend and house mate Stephen Abbott says, “Magic is sleight-of -hand; magick is sleight-of-mind.” The only tool the Witch and/or magician needs is hir mind. All the rest, the altar tools, the sword or athame, the wand, cup, pentacle, censer, candles and candlesticks, the jewelry, robes, and all the other trappings of magick are just toys and costumes to make the Younger Self happy. At pagan gatherings such as Ancient Ways or Pantheacon, rooms such as the huckster or dealer rooms or rows are very well populated with magickal people, cash or credit cards clutched in their hands,eager to purchase toys and trinkets to keep their Younger Selves happy.
The Secret or the Law of Attraction says that the Younger Self will replicate on the earth or material plane what it perceives to be happening already. That’s why the rich get richer and the poor stay poor or get even poorer. The rich have the awareness of being rich, so more money and resources accrue to them. The poor only have the awareness of being poor, so their Younger Selves, believing more poverty is what they want, send them more poverty. I’m familiar with the Law of Attraction because it is in reality the first Law of Sympathetic Magick, or the first law of Hermetics; Like attracts like. There are two other Laws of Sympathetic Magick. Law number two is the Law of Contagion. That is, what once belonged to a person or a thing still has a connection or link to that person or thing. That is where all the prattle about hair and finger- or toenails comes in. We now know this to have scientific merit, in that hair and fingernails contain the DNA signature of the person to whom they once were attached. The entire science of forensics is based upon the 2nd Law. The third Law is the axiom; As above, so below, or the macrocosm equals the microcosm. To give you an idea of what this means, Khemetic (Egyptian) Pagans and Witches put on ritual plays of the Khemetic myths to show the Mighty Ones or their Younger Selves what they need. For example, for a healing, the circle would act out the time that Horus got very ill, and Isis tricked Ra into revealing His true name so that He would give Isis what She needed to heal Horus. This is how theatre started by ritual dramas. I have a theory that is the reason for the ancient saying, “The show must go on.” You see, entertaining the people was secondary to entertaining the Mighty Ones, and if the drama stopped for any reason, They would be displeased.
Thus we see that magick has been with us since the very dawn of our species, forced underground with the coming of the new faith, but slowly re-emerging into the light of the surface, yet there will always be a segment of magick that calls to us from deep in both the Earth and ourselves. What we have to realize is that magick obeys laws, just as all of nature does, for magick is part of nature, just a part of nature that the plodding scientists do not fully understand, and may never understand as long as their minds are closed to the marvelous.
Last night we were in the Abbott’s Inn Magick School chat room I created, and a lady came in who has a blog on Blogspot which is her Book of Shadows. I’m old school enough that I will always have a hard copy BOS, but I thought I’d take a page from her and come back here, and do a combo blog. Yesterday I also saw a video on Magic[sic] Realm which was the late great Scott Cunningham talking about Herbal Magick, and there were a few recipes which I wanted to copy down. I told my friend Len about it. He wants to get the DVD of it.
I’ve started to make a fifteen hour plan to determine what my plans are for the day. I make it the night before. This is a smaller increment of the five year plan I adopted back in 1985. You see, I grew up during the Cold War, when the Russians and Chinese were our sworn enemies, and the Red scare was on. The Commies were always launching glorious five year plans. I interpreted these plans to mean that during the five year plan they would focus their resources towards a stated goal. I decided to adopt and adapt it for my own needs. I divided it up into smaller increments of time; the five month plan, the five week plan, the fifteen day plan, the five day plan, and the fifteen hour plan. Sometimes I have just a five hour plan. What doesn’t get done today will go on tomorrow’s fifteen hour plan.
I’ve had many teachers over the years of both magick and the Tarot. I’m counting the authors whose books I’ve read as my teachers. The first one was the late great Phillip Emmons Isaac Bonewits. I possess and have read at least three of his books, four if you count his edition of The Druid Chronicles but my favorite will always be Real Magic[sic]. There is Chandria, who taught me Wicca, Rowan Woods who taught me a lot about the Tarot, I also learned from some of my students. There has to be an exchange between the student and teacher of Wicca, or there is exploitation of one another. I learned from Doc.
My friend Len did some online research after an unfortunate experience with a Memorex product, and found that Memorex has a very bad reputation. So I’m telling you here. Do not buy anything made by Memorex. They are made in India, probably in sweat shops, so we should launch an across the board boycott. Do not buy anything made by Memorex. Tell your relatives, tell your friends and neighbors, tell any one you see in a store contemplating the purchase of a Memorex product. Complain to customer service of any store where Memorex is the only brand sold, and demand that they stock and alternate brand. The way to hurt them is in their pocketbooks, and if nobody is buying their products they should inquire why, and then improve their products, or they’ll go out of business. We the ninety-nine percent have tremendous power when we get together, armed by the truth.
Magick is an all consuming force, a little like writing. Any act which causes a change in reality in accordance with one’s True Will is a magickal act. Oberon Zell-Ravenheart changed this to “Any act which causes a change in consciousness is a magickal act.” In psychology, there is a symptom called “magical thinking”, note the lack of a k in magic. Magickal thinking is different, although, subtly. When we who are magick, and know it, do magickal thinking, what we think about just may come true, providing it isn’t too crazy, or is within the bounds of possibility. The dead don’t come back, except as infants, and people don’t age backwards, and cars don’t send us messages, unless we’re on a cellphone, and getting a call from people in that car. But we live in an age of technology, both of hardware; electronics, computers and the like, and software; mind-science, all the techniques the ancients knew, and we are only just rediscovering. Magick exploits little or unknown laws of nature that the uninitiated call “supernatural’ because they have a very limited view of nature. There is nothing supernatural because nature is all inclusive and embracing. It includes all that is on this fertile blue-green planet of ours, and what lies beyond, both in physical space, and in other dimensions, as well as what we have created ourselves. Humankind’s creations must obey the laws of nature.
Belief and emotions are the fuel that magick uses to make our desires form. The sub- and un-conscious (some people say one, others say the other I believe there are both.) are the vessel and the mechanism by which the magick takes place. In Huna (the Hawaiian tradition) the sub- and/or un-conscious is called either the Lower or the Younger Self. Max Freedom Long was a leading exponent of Huna. Scott Cunningham was another. Together they educated those who were open to learning the ways of the ancient Hawaiians, and incorporating them into their personal paths. Long wrote many books on the subject, Cunningham, only one; Hawaiian Spirituality. Max Freedom Long can be researched online, as well as at your friendly local public library. I urge you all to patronize the library, Ben Franklin’s invention, because the top 1% want to do away with our public libraries, just as they want to do away with our public education system, and the postal service. If you have the means, by all means, support the library. Your children and grandchildren will thank you. In Santa Clara County, the branches of the public library system, as well as the buses in the Valley Transit Authority, are marked as Safe Places, places a child can escape to if a predator is pursuing hir. It is my view that public libraries are not obsolete, but are more necessary than ever, especially when more and more young people are home schooled, instead of being sent to schools which may not be understanding about a family’s cultural or spiritual beliefs.
Back to the subconscious or Younger Self. Inside we are all that five year old who wants what it wants, when s/he wants it. What does s/he want? Well, what did you want when you were five years old? Toys, right? Toys and candy, costumes. Well, to do magick all that is really necessary is the mind. As my friend and house mate Stephen Abbott says, “Magic is sleight-of -hand; magick is sleight-of-mind.” The only tool the Witch and/or magician needs is hir mind. All the rest, the altar tools, the sword or athame, the wand, cup, pentacle, censer, candles and candlesticks, the jewelry, robes, and all the other trappings of magick are just toys and costumes to make the Younger Self happy. At pagan gatherings such as Ancient Ways or Pantheacon, rooms such as the huckster or dealer rooms or rows are very well populated with magickal people, cash or credit cards clutched in their hands,eager to purchase toys and trinkets to keep their Younger Selves happy.
The Secret or the Law of Attraction says that the Younger Self will replicate on the earth or material plane what it perceives to be happening already. That’s why the rich get richer and the poor stay poor or get even poorer. The rich have the awareness of being rich, so more money and resources accrue to them. The poor only have the awareness of being poor, so their Younger Selves, believing more poverty is what they want, send them more poverty. I’m familiar with the Law of Attraction because it is in reality the first Law of Sympathetic Magick, or the first law of Hermetics; Like attracts like. There are two other Laws of Sympathetic Magick. Law number two is the Law of Contagion. That is, what once belonged to a person or a thing still has a connection or link to that person or thing. That is where all the prattle about hair and finger- or toenails comes in. We now know this to have scientific merit, in that hair and fingernails contain the DNA signature of the person to whom they once were attached. The entire science of forensics is based upon the 2nd Law. The third Law is the axiom; As above, so below, or the macrocosm equals the microcosm. To give you an idea of what this means, Khemetic (Egyptian) Pagans and Witches put on ritual plays of the Khemetic myths to show the Mighty Ones or their Younger Selves what they need. For example, for a healing, the circle would act out the time that Horus got very ill, and Isis tricked Ra into revealing His true name so that He would give Isis what She needed to heal Horus. This is how theatre started by ritual dramas. I have a theory that is the reason for the ancient saying, “The show must go on.” You see, entertaining the people was secondary to entertaining the Mighty Ones, and if the drama stopped for any reason, They would be displeased.
Thus we see that magick has been with us since the very dawn of our species, forced underground with the coming of the new faith, but slowly re-emerging into the light of the surface, yet there will always be a segment of magick that calls to us from deep in both the Earth and ourselves. What we have to realize is that magick obeys laws, just as all of nature does, for magick is part of nature, just a part of nature that the plodding scientists do not fully understand, and may never understand as long as their minds are closed to the marvelous.
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