Letters from Gehenna: The World on a Slant

K is for Klein Onion

2012-05-27T22:35:00.000-05:00

A Klein Bottle is a sort of object where what is "inside" and what is "outside" is topologically ambiguous, a 'three-dimensional' equivalent of the 'two-dimensional' Möbius strip.

A lot of the stuff I do is kind of like that, only with onions - where I have no idea which layer - if any - is "inside" and which is "outside", and suspect the overall question of being kind of fundamentally meaningless.

It goes something like this:

I do some research and come up with a notion. I wind up doing more research around it, digging at it in pieces. I have a wacky brain-connection like arc lightning connecting that thing with something else. I look into the something else. That process winds up connecting me to a mystical experience. The mystical experience appears to point to a third thing, which, although it's kind of weird, I wind up researching. That research winds up pointing at the original notion, often in such a way that I suspect that the third thing may actually have been the first thing, or have developed in symbiosis with the first thing, or ....

Anyway. You can come in at any point on this or a more complicated loop and it all winds up being the same - there are pieces of lore, random connections, and genuine spiritual experiences that intermesh in weirdly consistent ways. And then I go take those meshworks and show them to other people because - hey - just because I think it makes sense doesn't mean shit, but then the other people go, "Oh. Shit. Right," and run away to suddenly do new things, which means I think that it all makes sense outside my head. Which can be a little scary.

But that's the interesting thing, the way everything is interconnected.

The one that got me pondering the Klein Onion went something like this (a bit more UPG than the usual one, but the stuff that's more lore-based is waaaay too personal right now):

I'm doing research on the Night Journey in various forms (the Amduat, the Book of Nut, etc.)

Which got me pondering the nature of the Tree Goddess (a form of Nut, Hetharu, or I believe occasionally Aset, but in materials I've come across usually Nut or Hetharu).

Chatted with a friend about the Tree Goddess, mentioned a few things, got a detailed blat of feedback about stuff that exactly matched things that I didn't say. Huh. Well. That's interesting.

So, okay, I've done Axis Mundi stuff lately, and what pagan hasn't stumbled across one goddamn tree meditation or another, right? What can I do to explore this more thoroughly, especially as this is a theophany of my patron?

Shit, I wrote another goddamn tree meditation.

Well, let's work with that. And explore more of it.

Well, the Nut/Geb polarity always has a solid erotic zing to it, but that's in Their myths - that They were so into being together that They had to be forcibly separated, after all.

... wait a second. Hetharu is often paired with Heru - it's in the names after all - which is another consort relationship, and Heru as a sky power is very ... there ought to be a branch-level erotic connection.

(Did I just find an MFM threesome in my mysticism? This is the point at which I took a break to laugh like a drain.)

Okay, so how the fuck do I deal with the branch-level eroticism? Root to earth is easy, all the twining of tree through the dark moist richness of the ground, and the tendency of growing things to be phallic in their reaching for the sky.

... shit. My head is full of stars, that's some of my d/s kink, isn't it. And thus the eroticism is that cosmic world-spanning thing, and it's threaded through with power and ...

... uh-huh. Hetharu/Heru is reigning king and queen, no wonder it's threaded through with power.

... and of course Heru is the ruler of Malkuth, the seen world, the entire visible cosmos as made fully manifest (which was the end product of another completely different branch of crackpot mysticism involving the kabbalah, which I almost never play with at all)

... but the Geb/Nut pairing is the first manifestation of the non-theoretical (if we're still playing kabbalah, which I wasn't when I did this but hey it's sequitur to writing this post and adds another layer for the bloody onion...)

... more precisely, Heru is said to inhabit the throne of Geb, the pharaonic/kingly seat of Egypt. While Wesir, Heru's father, is the deceased king from which Heru inherits, that is the throne of His father.

At which point I commented to a different friend about all this, and she said that it all sounded kind of dynastic, at which point I said something along the lines of, "Gee. The dynastic power flows through the Goddess who is responsible for feeding the glorified dead and allowing them to rest in Her branches when they return to the living land." Because it's all about ka-energy in the end.

Which is back to the beginning, in so many different ways.

H is for Heart

2012-05-24T15:46:00.000-05:00

Yeah, okay, back to the pagan blog project. I'll see if I can do a bit of catching up. Unfortunately, the post I had drafted at one point seems to have vanished from my hard drive, so I'll have to do some rebuilding....

Both of my primary religions have symbolism that orbits around the heart. When I talk about this, I am talking about one or the other or both without differentiating, so you get to sort it out if you wanna.

Heart as true nature, heart as moral centre, heart as direct connection with divinity. These all exist: to be in accord with one's heart is to be in accord with divine will, to be doing what is right in the world, to operate from a place of truth and simplicity.

This is a goal. It is not a place that we actually live, except in moments of perfect alignment, perfect purity; it is a place to strive towards, and to experience like we experience creative flow. Perhaps we can't live there all the time, like creative flow - maybe we need the other times to achieve something meaningful. I don't know.

But there is this deep, primal need in most people, to hear the truth of the heart. That still small voice of the conscience, perhaps, or the thing that drives connection, right action, right being, right living. It doesn't matter what the trappings are on that; there is "I did not put in their hearts to do evil" in an old Egyptian texts, after all.

It is worth being careful, though. It is too easy to bury the still small voice, the soft murmurings of the heart, under other things, and claim that those are the voice of the heart. Fear is one; hunger, another, things that reside in the pit of the stomach, up against the places where we assimilate our power. We want, and we want what we want to be pure; we fear, and we want what we fear to be impure.

The heart doesn't always back us up on that kind of thing. H is also for hubris, I suppose.

Gah

2012-05-18T10:04:00.001-05:00

Apparently Blogger went and rearranged all my crap while I wasn't paying attention, and now I have comment moderation that I never noticed existed that's been shuffling things sideways, and I can't figure out how to do the compose post thing properly anymore because it's a giant mess. Bleah!

Something other than a PBP post

2012-04-11T14:48:00.003-05:00

As some of you know, I was recently diagnosed with an autoimmune disorder. (Hashimoto's thyroiditis. Basically, my body is trying to kill my thyroid gland.)

This whole process has been a very interesting one for me on multiple levels.

You see, this happened because I changed doctors. I hadn't been to the doctor since before Little Foot was born, and I was beginning to get all agitated about it (as my family was very good about the preventative medicine things, so there's a certain amount of 'but I haven't had my appointment' deep-seated in my psyche).

And we did a little interview thing as my first appointment, rather than the checkup, and he asked me about my health concerns. And one of the things I said was "I want you to run my thyroid numbers. I was treated for hypothyroidism as a teenager, and I like to monitor my condition."

So, in among the other blood tests he ordered, he ran the thyroid numbers.

Not only did he run the standard three thyroid numbers, he ran the antibodies numbers, and bam. There it was.

But the great thing was that before he mentioned the antibodies, he said, "I don't like your TSH number. It is too high."

My previous doctor - at the same practice - would, I felt grudgingly, run those numbers for me every year. And I would get numbers like that - one time, that TSH was notably higher, even - and she would say "It's within the lab parameters. You're fine." Somewhere along the line I learned that some regulatory agency's recommendations wanted to see lower numbers, so I mentioned that to her, and "It's within the lab parameters. You're fine."

Now, consider what Wikipedia says about Hashimoto's: "Given the relatively non-specific symptoms of initial hypothyroidism, Hashimoto's thyroiditis is often misdiagnosed as depression, cyclothymia, PMS, chronic fatigue syndrome, fibromyalgia and, less frequently, as ED or an anxiety disorder."

I've been in and out of treatment for depression with anxiety features for years. I have chronic fatigue issues (which are not entirely related to my Delayed Sleep Phase Disorder, also treated by this shiny new doctor).

It also has relationships with celiac disorder - which runs in my family, and for which my brother has been in treatment (I have a mild gluten sensitivity). And cardiac stuff - and just around when I went to the new doctor, I was having intermittent tachycardia / heart flutters, which have magically completely cleared up now that I'm on a minimal dose of levo.

It is nice, for a change, to have a respectable invisible disability condition. There isn't a blood test for depression to prove that there's a real problem involved. DSPS, well, you just have to go to bed earlier, kid, stop making excuses. PTSD? Drama queen. But no, I have magic numbers to prove that there is something that this is treating. It's oddly comforting, to be dealing with something that most everyone believes is actually real. There are actual antibodies. They actually do damage to the endocrine system. Science shows it!

Yeah, this is cynical of me. But at the same time as this I've been watching a friend deal with the sort of utter contempt that mental health stuff can bring out in others, and for all this culture's valorisation of the life of the mind and the desire to escape the body, we really do put a lot of stock in those little numbers, don't we?

G is for Gifts

2012-04-09T14:20:00.002-05:00

One of the things that's common in a lot of discussion of ancient religions is the phrase "do ut des", which means something like "I give so that you may give."

The idea goes something like this: the stuff of being, particularly food, would not exist if it were not for the gods who embody those processes doing Their work, and thus it is appropriate for the people to return some of that which has been provided to the gods so that the cycle may continue. In ancient Egypt, this was amazingly recursive: the crops were harvested by the people, who paid a fraction of their crop to the church/state complex, which would use that to provide offerings to the gods, and after the "main" gods in a given temple had taken their share the offerings would go around to lesser shrines until, at last, they were given back in a process called "reversion of offerings" to provide the pay for temple officials, each according to their rank. (Who would then trade some fraction of their take for goods and services within their community.)

This sanctified version of gifting, however, is simply an example of what is, fundamentally, a natural process.

It is fundamental to the energy of life that it moves.

On the macroscale: the sun gives its light and heat. That gift is taken in by plants and used. Animals take the energy from the plants, converting some of it back into heat, sustaining themselves. Other animals eat those animals, repeating the process. In the end, the bodies of all animals are consumed by microorganisms and reduced to nutrients and heat, which are then given to the plants as part of the return to the cycle. The energy moves, passed from species to species until it returns to its interrupted journey through space, and the nutrients, similarly, are passed around in a great big circle.

One can think of this as a theft economy, of course, and there is a lot of critique to be made about the way people frame themselves as entitled to these things.

But it is also a process of gifting. Consider those plants who have evolved fruits - a massive investment of energy - so that animals will eat them, which scatters their seeds in the animals' dung - providing those seeds with a distribution network and a tidy package of nutrients to sprout in. Deer breed with the expectation of predation, and in fact in areas in which the big predators have been killed or driven away, the deer suffer horribly, as overpopulation leads to both starvation in the winter and the deaths of the plants that the deer wind up nibbling to death, which of course only aggravates the problem in the long term.

The network of exchange of this energy is a vastly complex one, but it is built on gift and sacrifice. (Recall that sacrifice literally means 'to make holy'.)

Likewise, human lives, not just human food traditions, are built on gift and sacrifice. Every one of us was born from someone who gave us a space to gestate and sacrificed of time, energy, health, nutrients, and other things so that we might live. Our intimate lives are built on gifts and exchanges and compromises, so that we may all have what we need to thrive.

An ancient Egyptian might have presented a gift to another with the phrase "for your ka". The ka being the soul carrying life. Because it is by these gifts that we sustain and encourage this soul to grow and be healthy.

G is for Goals

2012-03-29T10:19:00.002-05:00

A lot of people have goals for religion.

They want to achieve initiation. They want to find a patron deity. They want to do this, have done this, achieve that, get to the finish line, and then, I guess, ... what? You can stop? I suppose for the ones whose goal is "get access to heaven" once they get there they can stop, but seriously folks.

And a lot of these people sound to me like folks who have planned out their perfect wedding and have no idea how they want to conduct a marriage. But it will be brilliant, it will be perfect, the weather will conform, and the spouse will be ideal. And everything gets measured up against the wedding, that supposed "best day of your life" for a cartoon woman: will it serve the wedding? will that person look right in the tux? is this picture-perfect? Does it do what I want?

And some of these people achieve their fairy-tale lacy cake with the fluffy, cloying frosting. And then they wake up the next morning and have no fucking clue what they're doing with themselves. Everything was geared towards The Goal, all issues were plastered over and touched up with paint to make it through The Goal, and now everything can come apart, because there's nothing sustainable about that vision of peak performance aimed at perfection.

Every day is not your wedding day.

There are a lot more every days than there are wedding days.

In fluffy fairyland I can do my morning prayers when I get up after feeling fully rested, and go about my day. In the real world, I'm awakened by Little Foot poking me and shouting "Time get up! Go down taaaaairs!", and half the time can't convince her to stay and "help mama count" my situps, let alone let me do my prayers without either jumping on me or heading off on her own (fortunately, she can take care of herself well enough that I don't worry about that much). And that's just morning rituals. Making a goal of perfect religious practice is a non-starter, and even if through some miracle and divinely appointed childcare I pulled it off one day, there's still tomorrow.

It's not done. When you reach a goal, you get to be done.

Religion is not goals. (And really, look at all those people who have as a "goal" making it to heaven - how many faces do some of them stomp on because they think it'll give them a step up towards the clouds?) Religion is relationships.

You don't get a relationship and then be done. You have to show up the next day too, and the next day. Sometimes they want more time, sometimes they want less. When everything is going well, relationships are uplifting and supportive, helping you to be better, stronger, more competent, more secure, because people are the sort of animal that gangs up on things. I'm not talking just romantic relationships here - friends, family, all of these are relationships. Deities: also relationships. The grand span of the freaking universe: relate to that too! And sometimes the relationships need your support instead of just feeding you, and it all goes around in cycles: I give, you give, and as we give so we make it possible to continue giving.

Don't think of it as something you get done.

Think of it as a relationship with how to live.

F is for Family

2012-03-23T13:59:00.002-05:00

I sometimes get the impression that a lot of pagans are kind of allergic to thinking of religion as something that happens in families.

Yes, I get it: there's a substantial number of pagans who are dealing with the aftermath of having been indoctrinated into some form of religion that didn't work for them, which might even have been cruel to them, and who have resolved that they will never participate in that sort of thing.

But religious ritual isn't just about the cosmic. It isn't just about the turning of the seasons and making sure the sun comes up.

Religious ritual marks births, deaths, comings of age, marriages - not all of them in all religions (no marriage in mine, for example), but most of those big life event things, the things that form, transform, and change families tend to show up again and again in religious ritual. I can't see how to take family out of religion without taking the people out.

Oh, sure, you can do DIY family. Coven-oriented oathbound witchcraft is, as I understand it, supposed to be that: the family of the religion is the circle of initiates. But not everyone is into that sort of thing.

But still the books come out, with titles that end "... for the solitary practitioner". "... for one." The unspoken things in the books are so often either geared towards a young adult with no voluntary fixed ties or people even younger, still at home with presumably-disapproving parents. The assumptions are adult, independent, almost isolated.

My household is mixed-religion. It's important to me to support the religious Stuff of each of my family members. Which is why I spent some time a few months ago making a children's menorah so that Little Foot could learn about her other mom's Judaism in a participatory manner. She would light the candles for the adult menorah, and then we would go light little LED candles in the cups of the other one, and let them 'burn' until morning, a small child's miracle. And Little Foot loved the Hannukah rituals just as much as she loves helping tend my (Celtic pagan) liege's cattle shrine.

My ritual notebook has notes on formal grace prayers for the dinner table. It has morning prayers, evening prayers, bath prayers. Things that I could, when she is a little older, teach my child, because children thrive on rituals. When I look for how to celebrate my holidays, I don't just dig for the esoteric and "spiritual", the meditations, the ecstasy - I look for the things that a child can love, a child whose response to a candle is "Make fire!"

"Make fire!" is the core of so much of religious ritual, cross-traditionally. "Make fire!" is the foundation of the hearthside, the meal cooking, the resting in the long winter. "Make fire!" a child understands.

Which means a child can understand religion.

Make fire.

F is for Festivals

2012-03-22T19:49:00.003-05:00

Running way behind.

So the thing about Egyptian religion is that, from the point of view of the common man, the stuff they got to participate in outside their household were the festivals. The daily cultus of the deities in the temples was under the purview of the priests, and regular folks were not invited.

Which means that I think it's kind of important to figure out what to do for those festivals, the things that people like me would be regularly participating in. And that's not a simple question.

Some of the festivals, as is the case for pretty much all religions, were seasonally based. And the Egyptian seasons were different. There were three of them - Akhet, apparently meaning 'horizon', the flood season; Peret, meaning 'emergence', the planting and growth season (often translated, I've found, as 'winter'), and 'Shomu', which means 'low water', the harvest and parching summer season. While that hot summer season significantly overlaps the Northern Hemisphere's temperate season of summer, note that that winds up putting the planting and farming season starting around the time that Wheel of the Year celebrating pagans mark the harvest and the dead at Samhain.

There are ways of thinking about this, but they do require thinking.

There's also the problems of building the calendar itself. The oldest festival calendar appears to have been lunar, and thus structured similarly to the modern Jewish calendar. However, at some point after the establishment of the civil calendar (a 365-day year), festivals started to 'drift' and attach to that. So that raises the question of whether a given date refers to the civil calendar or the religious lunar calendar or, indeed, the later lunar calendar that was attached to the civil calendar rather than observations of the stars.... And how does one want to do it? My current draft calendar is basically a civil-year calendar. I don't like that, and I want to update it at least somewhat, but that's a lot of work - and I haven't really wanted to go to the work to hand-calculate every month, so that's work I'm not doing. Maybe someday I'll find a computer program that will do the grinding for me, and then I can make a shiny new webpage for that.

And then, of course, what to do for each of those festivals, which - in ancient times - were celebrated by the state apparatus, often had governmental activity, involved interactions between active great temples, and so on. Finding something that can be done simply, at home or in a small community, is a lot harder.

E is for Exclusivity

2012-03-09T08:44:00.003-05:00

Touchy, touchy subject, especially in the wake of things like the PantheaCon Trans Inclusion Debacle (Mark 2). But I'm not just thinking about that, I'm thinking about huge chunks of things.

Most people reading this likely grew up in a culture that was dominated by Christianity. And the thing about that is that there's a whole bunch of subtle stuff that comes with it, a lot of assumptions that don't actually get questioned and checked - even among people who have actively chosen to reject Christianity, often with the "my awful ex sucks" attitude that a lot of pagans have.

For example: Christianity is a universalist religion. It claims to be there for everyone, available to everyone, and in fact it wants everyone. Different bits of it manage different quantities of genuine welcome, but even the parts that are least friendly to us deviant types will say "We want you to join us, give up your deviancy and get our divine cookie when you die!" (Why that's appealing is still unclear to me, but that's neither here nor there.) In the two most common (in my experience) framings of Christian universalism, people are either divided up into Good People (heaven-bound) and Sub-Human Scum (hell-bound) or categorised in some flavor of "You can just get to heaven if you do it right, let me show you what I know about how to do it right." (I know plenty of Christians who do not proselytise at me or consider me hell-bound, mind, but I suspect that their basic approach is something like that from C. S. Lewis's Narnia, in which 'doing it right' is by axiom recognised by the Power(s) that would appreciate such action.)

The assumptions of universality are much more persistent than the actual belief in Christian religion, though. (If you need an example of this, go into any atheist vs. theist flamewar and see how often "religion" is equated with a coercive force intended to convert or compel those people who are not adherents to it. I have stalled out several ranting atheists by pointing out that I really could not give less of a fuck whether or not they "believe" in any of my gods. They generally paused briefly, and then went back to arguing as if I did not exist.) The fact that it was an innovation, and that most religions historically have not been down with that kind of nonsense, is completely lost in the hegemonial status of A Religion Is For Everyone (Except Maybe The Sub-Human Hellbound Scum).

Ancient peoples, for example, were not generally universalists (though some philosophical branches within them might have been: vide Atenism). Oh, each tribe and culture likely thought that their gods were the best gods - and one act in war was stealing icons from the enemy to deprive the enemy of their power - but it was an axiomatic given that those people over there had different gods. After all, they were different people, a different culture, with different customs. If they had the same gods and practices, why, they'd be us, not them.

Obviously, this attitude has its ups and downs - Christianity has had an effect in making it more plausible to see widely varied people as part of "us", after all - but it does mean that the whole "impose on you the one true religion" thing is kind of a no-starter. I think the closest we get are things like the Romans, who tended to do things like conquer places, study the local Powers, and say, "Oh, your gods? Those are other names for our gods. Update your statues accordingly and pay your taxes and we won't smite you a second time." (Some times their accuracy in parallelism was better than others.) And even with the equation of "proper attention to the Roman cultus" with "decent citizen not in need of smiting", there were periods when Jewish people were given exceptions from those laws, despite being, in Roman terms, atheists (without statues to update).

But modern paganism has a largely-unrecognised tension between universalist tendencies and exclusive ones. I have - more than once, probably more than a hundred times - seen the basic argument between the person who expects religion to be universal, and thus to be coddled, persuaded, and handed membership for the asking, and a person who expects religion to be something affiliated with a specific community or even family, who therefore asks the universalists why they should get special treatment as a total stranger.

And of course this always blows up, because, at some level, the would-be pagan coming from a universalist standpoint takes that as "you are Sub-Human Hellbound Scum". Because if they weren't Sub-Human Hellbound Scum, obviously they'd be welcomed as a member! There is no other reason to say no! Religion is for everyone! And information wants to be free! (Has the information climbed into your personal ear yet? No? That's why you're asking for it? Clearly it doesn't want to be as free as all that.)

There's also the thread that the universalist probably thinks 'pagan' is a religion, rather than the none-of-the-above category box for leftover religions, and thus expects a well, more universalist approach to things. Sure, anyone can be pagan by saying so. That doesn't mean jack shit about anything specific....

The critical thing about modern paganism as a mishmash is that while some of the founding influences were fairly open (for example, most reconstructions being fairly open to those who are willing to do the work and adopt the appropriate attitudes), others - including the best-known things - are organised around mysteries. And mysteries, by their nature, are not general-access things.

A mystery is, at root, an experience that can only be understood by going through it. One can learn all kinds of theory about many mysteries, but that doesn't actually provide functional knowledge. (Much like reading and learning about sex is not the same thing as having sex: sex is a mystery.) A mystery may be an experiential aspect to a comparatively open religion (technically speaking, Communion in Christianity is such a thing, not that this is commonly presented) or it may be more limited - only those people who make the correct sacrifices may enter, only those people who have the correct devotions, the correct background, or whatever else.

If the entire religion is structured around a mystery, then it is the responsibility of those people who are in possession of the mystery to only bring it to appropriate dedicants. Simply wanting the mystery does not make it happen, any more than wanting a pony pays the rent of a stall at the stable.

The tricky parts come in with trying to talk about how and why these communities are limited-access.

A while back I had a few go-arounds in a conversation about a particular religious witchcraft tradition. Unlike Wicca, it has not yet spawned a more universalist derivative (using the same name or otherwise), and the teachers are still heavily localised. And, for one reason or another, the conversation degenerated to, "Well, if your tradition is so great, why aren't you sharing it more? Don't you want to share your shiny thing?" And a lot of the responses got read as "Well, I sacrificed to get to a place where I could get training, so if you don't do that, you just don't want it bad enough" or "Something will magically happen to make it possible if it is your destiny, otherwise fuck off" or "Only the special people get in."

And, y'know, some people think that way. It's not a useful way to think, especially, but it's out there.

I'm suspecting people wanted to convey was something more like, "Look. Training in a mystery religion is hard work. It's very rewarding for the people who pursue it, yes, but it will also quite likely turn your life upside down, force you through all kinds of complicated and painful situations, and honestly, if you're not a person who really, genuinely, truly needs to do this particular thing, you will not succeed, because it's not worth it unless you need it." (Doing outer-court training in a mystery tradition led directly to the end of a five-year relationship for me, by the way.) I'm also suspecting that there was something to be said along the lines of, "Look, just because you think something is shiny doesn't obligate someone to invest their personal time to give it to you; if you really, truly want it - if you think you're one of the people for whom it's worth that level of effort - you have to evaluate what you're willing to do to get it."

And also, I don't think that this was actually a part of that conversation, but it needed to be said anyway: mysteries are a dime a dozen. You can trip over one walking out your door. Your life is full of them. If the access to this specific mystery isn't compatible with your life, find another. The thing that makes this mystery all that for me is that it's the one that I choose and the one that I need and the one that blends with my experience.

Mysteries are by definition hard to talk about, but I think people need to start being clear about them. "This is the mystery for the people who need this specific mystery" is something that only makes sense when one has a little knowledge, after all.

"This ritual is for those people who wish to celebrate their menstruation experiences" is a much better phrasing than "this is for women's mysteries" (which suggests that it's for women in general, including those who have never menstruated for whatever reason or those like me who find that 'menstrual spirituality' is much of a muchness with stuff like 'tasty, tasty shit pancakes in delicious oil-spill sauce') or "this is for blood mysteries" (which gives me a vastly kinkier impression than I think was intended).

"This ritual is for those people who are seeking to develop an intimate devotional relationship with this specific Power" is a pretty specific way of dividing the wheat from the chaff of potential attendees, though obviously traditions where the nature of the Power in question is among the information held privately it is harder to judge whether or not one wants to seek to develop such intimate relationship.

It's even possible to put things in the negative, though I think it's harder to do so without potentially creating issues. "This ritual is for survivors of sexual violence", for example, would include male survivors and trans survivors of all sorts, while a ritual structured in a way where there is concern that someone might be triggered by an encounter with a penis perhaps due to a lack of trousers, and where avoiding those triggers is important to the organisers, would not in fact be open to all people dealing with an experience of rape, and should not bill itself as such.

"This ritual is for adult Greek-speakers who have never committed murder, who make the appropriate piglet sacrifice, and who perform the appropriate ritual bath in the river Illisos", meanwhile, is all that and a bag of pomegranates.

E is for the Elements

2012-03-01T22:05:00.004-05:00

Most pagans are of course familiar with the classical Greek conception of the elements, which wound up in ceremonial magic and thence into Wicca. Earth, air, fire, water, and all that associated crud.

What is an element?

An element, according to a handy dictionary I have kicking around here, is "one of the fundamental or irreducible components making up a whole". The stuff that stuff is made out of, you know?

Dealing with the classical elements produces spiritual compounds that have particular traits. These are - both due to their ubiquity in magical language and their clear derivation from fairly straightforward bits of the observable world - particularly tangible and perceptible structures. They are arranged in a particular grid, which is also a structure of balances and oppositions: fire and water suspended between earth and air in a set of perpendiculars and negations, the properties defined in opposition to each other. There is a solidity to this set of checks and balances, which perhaps inspired the addition of a fifth element intended to correspond to the spiritual or animative world.

Consider, though, a different system, such as the Chinese five elements. There is no tidy pairwise opposition to be had in odd numbers. Instead, each element gives rise to another in an organic process, and each element likewise can be seen to destroy another. It becomes readily apparent why many translators say "phases" or "movements" rather than "elements"; these are part of a cosmic flow rather than compartmentalisable building blocks.

The elements you build from will inform and structure what can be built from them. It is the nature of a thing to reflect what it is built from, after all.

I don't do a lot of exoteric stuff with the concept of elements. It does not appear to have been a terribly significant thing for the ancient Egyptians, which means that when I stumble across people trying to wodge Egyptian thought into a Greek elemental system I mostly just kind of avoid; it's not generally a good translation.

However, I have done more than a little noodling at esoteric elements, and in this I draw from my favorite of the major Egyptian cosmogenetic myths, that of Khmun, better known as Hermopolis. The name "Khmun" meant "The City of the Eight", and it is those eight that I ponder when I want to ponder elements. They are:

Nun and Naunet: the formless primeval waters
Amun and Amaunet: the hidden and secret (also associated with the invisible air)
Kek and Kauket: the darkness
Heh and Hehet: the infinite and eternal

In some of my Craft training, it is said that there are titans who hold the boundaries of the cosmos, and here I perceive them: formlessness, secrecy, darkness, and boundlessness. These are things that can only be approached mystically, in a manner beyond what can be contained in the tangible and aware. These are the traits of the borderlands, the edges of things, the unknown, and the uncreated. They neither give rise to each other nor oppose each other; they are serpents and frogs in the realm outside where time and space were created by their inversion.

That which exists has form. It can be known. It can be illuminated. It is bounded, finite, and mortal. These are the inversions of the elements of the Ogdoad, the guardians of the mysteries at the edge of creation. At the first time, the titans touched and polarised and created being. But yet they remain, on the edge of the manifest, between us and the dissolving chaos beyond.

I find those an interesting set of edges to explore. What can you build with formlessness and form, with secrets and knowledge, with darkness and light, with infinity and that which can be measured?

These are my elements.

On "Women's Mysteries"

2012-02-25T12:40:00.003-05:00

A lot of people have written about the various happenings at PantheaCon recently, where, again, the question of cis-separatist women's rituals has come up. And in and among all the things about which women get into which spaces and all that, there's something that doesn't go unquestioned: the idea that there exists a "women's mysteries" dependent on cis bodies and associated with menstruation, and that this can be referred to as "women's mysteries" and somehow, magically, everyone will know what it is.

Well, y'know, the only mystery involving menstruation I care about is why it's so unspeakably horrible.

If I were to accidentally stumble into such a ritual because people were too shy about their body stuff to actually mention what they were focusing on, that would be kind of a mess for me. I'm not up for celebrating this particular vile experience, particularly not with people who are overjoyed by it. The Mirena is my favorite cybernetic upgrade ever, because it means it basically goes away.

I don't want the mysteries of my body to be reduced down to something I find unspeakably awful.

I mean. Even with my moods levelled out a whole hell of a lot, I spent the weekend recently hating myself, hating my body, filled with moderate dysphoria and dissociation, and generally kind of fucked up. Why? Because I was having a menstrual cycle. Eventually my liege stabbed me in the knees, which at least reset my equilibrium a bit. It was genuinely a horrible experience, and one I hope not to repeat.

And that's without the usual side-effects - the tremendous pain, for example. The serious emotional lability and not in good directions. The sensation of sweating filth out of every pore, like the endgame of having the flu - the sort of vile sense of contagion that requires doing a lot of time in the shower to have a hope of feeling clean. (And yes, yes, I know, Teh Patriarchee treats menstruation as unclean! But really, the whole 'no really, I need a bath' thing is not manufactured out of social pressure.)

If someone assumes that a cissexual woman is welcome and appropriate at their menstruation ritual, well...

... I exist.

Define your fucking terms. Don't call your menstruation celebrations women's rituals, because not all the women you might *want* to bring in want to fucking be there.

D is for the Divine Androgyne

2012-02-24T12:36:00.002-05:00

(This one is probably not a shocker to the remainder of my long-term readers.)

I was actually tickled that one of last week's Pagan Blog Project posts was a takedown on some of the concepts of 'the divine feminine', because I already had this sucker in my mental queue.

In and around the edges of my reality, I know a couple of people who describe themselves as neutrois, which is a concept that I poke at occasionally. I think I've come to the conclusion that neutrois is so exactly what I'm not that it's actually kind of similar in practice, which is an interesting thing. Mostly incidental, but I'll mention it because it's actually relevant background.

As is this post from P. Sufenas Virius Lupus of the Aedicula Antonoi, from which I will quote:

The final being in this new tetrad of deities is complex, and was the result of the efforts of all three of the others working together–each can be said to have “fathered” this final being, and each can be said to have “given birth” to em, and yet none of them fathered nor gave birth to this being either in any way that would be recognizable by humans and most deities currently operating. This final being was called Panaletheia, “All-Truth,” by Panhyle; Panpsyche called em Paneirene, “All-Peace”; Paneros called em Pankalos, “All-Beauty”; but this being named emself Pancrates, All-Power. Pancrates (not to be confused with Pancrates/Pachrates of Heliopolis, mind you!) can be described as androgynous or as pan-gendered, and exhibits characteristics that could be found in every and any gender, both mentally, behaviorally, spiritually, and physically. One of Pancrates’ symbols is the lion.

Last autumn I was wrestling with an assignment for my training. For those who are familiar with the Thelemic rituals of the Stations of the Sun, it was similar work - an address to the transformational nature of the times of day, rooted in relationship with the encompassing divine. I had written several such litanies over the course of my training, all of them perfectly good poetry, none of them an improvement over the verse around which my practice had been originally built.

The original verse addressed the All-Mother in the form of a rose. I tried to address the All-Mother in the form of the lotus - my preferred Egyptian symbol. I tried to address the All-Mother as a cow, as a raptor, in all Her various forms. Nothing seemed to work right.

I commented, unrelatedly, to my teacher, that I was not yet old enough to be able to be a child.

And I dabbled, in free corners of my brain, with associating the kabbalistic Tree of Life to the Heliopolitan cosmogony, because I found it funny.

Up until.

I wrote another daily litany. Addressing the Solar Child borne by the All-Mother, who is of necessity not exclusively of one gender, because as governor of Malkuth the Child must encompass all of the possibilities that emerge from Kether and reflect the entire Tree.

That one fucking worked.

And perhaps I have been enough of the Mother and need to learn to be the Child. Heru-sa-Aset in His name of Heru-pa-Khered, the hawk, perhaps having more than a passing acquaintance with Pancrates the lion. However one wants to look at it. Here S/He is, the emerging manifestation, the Solar Child laid bloody on the Mother's lap at dawn, ascendent to rule at noon, returning to nourishment at sunset, forged and cradled anew through the night.

I had had Issues with some of the relentless maleness of power in Egyptian religion, not just in Heru's status as male but in how kingship itself was a male role to the point that Hatshepsut put on the same false beard as any other ruler. (And I think, as I put my daughter to sleep, of how I named her for a famous king of Poland.) But this Child, this Divine Androgyne, this one who Becomes as Khepri becomes, this is a Heru I know. All potentials, not just the ones that come of some form of maleness; all rulership, all governance, not just the bearded kind.

And perhaps I am old enough to be a Child now. Not a girl-child nor indeed a boy-child, but the Divine Androgyne, the Solar Child who ascends with all the other gods and bathes in the Field of Rushes before the gates of heaven.

D is for the Devil

2012-02-16T17:50:00.004-05:00

Oh, but wait, so many pagans will say: we are not Satanists! We are not devil-worshippers! We are not the bad people bogeymen in your sensationalised and mostly manufactured news stories! We are normal people, just like you! We are not dangerous! Let us differentiate ourselves from the people we find it acceptable to be the scapegoated Other who might otherwise be numbered among us.

Oh, but wait.

I hang with Set.

I had a friend whose protector - chosen by her parents - was Loki. And I read the work of people who deal with the various jötnar in various ways.

My first teacher in the Craft named her line of the tradition "Morningstar". You know, one of those titles of 'the Adversary' (tee em).

Now, obviously, I have a problem with the whole "We're nothing like them so don't persecute us (we don't mind if you persecute them)" attitude. But really, the whole "but I'm not a devil-worshipper" thing is more deeply problematic than that, as anything other than a factual correction.

It's a factual correction that I cannot provide in that many words. Because, honestly, I don't fucking know if I'm a devil-worshipper or not. Not with any intellectual honesty.

That Christian adversary figure, Source Of All Evil In The Eyes Of Those People Who Don't Do Close Textual Analysis Well? Not so much.

But, again, I hang with Set. And really, Set has a lot more in common with Judaism's ha-Satan than that guy they call "Satan" does. Ha-Satan being the title of Hashem's prosecuting attorney, whose job it is to test and prove the righteousness of others. (I actually have a fascinating book called The Devil: Perceptions of Evil from Antiquity to Primitive Christianity, which, among other things, manages not to paint Neb.y as the boogety-boo God Of Ee-vile Tee-Em in His, like, two paragraph mention.)

And, as someone who hangs with Set, I've done things like peer at the public information put out by the Temple of Set, because hey, one good Setian deserves another. A lot of it sounds familiar. (A lot of it sounds like someone who's missing the goddamn point already, could someone slap 'em upside the head please.) But oogety-boogety Satanists, right? Not anything like us fine, upstanding pagans.

Sorry, I'm getting sarcasm in your peanut butter.

One thing I think matters about polytheistic systems is that they don't make benevolence into a virtue. (Except, perhaps, those goddess-worship groups often snidely referred to as "Jesus in drag.") Many of the Powers - even the ones who are put forward as "this is one of the good and proper ones to venerate" - are not actually all that nice. Important, necessary, possibly even in some cases in favor of the greater good, sure, but you wouldn't want your offspring to marry one.

Being beloved of Set does not mean that I can go waltzing out in a suit made of copper bakeware waving a conductive antenna at the sky when there's a front coming through. Because one of the things about storm gods is, well, when you have a certain charge built up, the lightning's gonna go somewhere. Not because lightning is evil. Because lightning goes from here to there when there's a particular buildup, and you don't want it to be you in the middle. A storm god taking a fancy to ya is not going to give you electricity resistance 10; this isn't D&D. If you're lucky, it'll give you the sense to keep in out of the rain.

So yes. Lightning strikes. With a combination of indifference and opportunistic exploitation. Does that make Set a devil? Or does that mean that we know something more about Set when we understand lightning?

One of the things that that first Craft teacher mentioned was that most of the lines of traditionally-oriented witchcraft work with some form of Lucifer. That dreaded force in the dark is also the initiator, the enlightener, and "Lucifer" was deliberately chosen as a term, that alternate name for Morningstar: that feared force that illuminates understanding. In the Book of Job, the trials Ha-Satan seeks permission to inflict upon Job are chosen to illuminate his piety and test out the limits of his strength.

She told a story: a vision of angels wrestling in heaven, the Good Angel and the Evil Angel. And the Good Angel won, and cast the Evil Angel out, and closed the gates of heaven to leave that force dying on the rocks. And that fallen Angel was nurtured back to health by a passing herdsman, who won from it the chance to grow through struggle, to learn, to change, to become stronger - so what is Evil anyway? And what form of Good closes the gates of heaven to watch something suffer and die from the far side of that barred palisade?

Fairy folklore has a lot of interesting things in it, and one of them is that the fey lands are those populated by spirits neither of heaven nor of hell. Or, as some put it, there is the road to heaven, the road to hell, and there is the third way, where the spirits are neither. But still dangerous, and in many ways more so than those who have granted their allegiance to a set of laws and principles. So are those devils dancing in the fairy circle, or something like? Or is that something more dangerous?

Even in non-Craft circles, this idea kicks around - the sacred monster. The Jungian shadow, which conceals and reveals the depths of power. The wild god, dangerous and compelling, with the power to transform. Sometimes the stories are clean and gentle, and sometimes that is a bowdlerisation, like a fairy tale purged of its old blood to make it safe for children. But we are not children, and we cannot run from our devils.

Every so often I toy, in my fiction, with writing a universe in which angels and demons exist. And angels are the Powers of Virtues, things to which people may aspire. The demons ... are the powers of Passion. And if this were the world, would it look all that different from the one built as virtue and temptation, where asceticism and restraint rather than that visceral, blood-filled joy in being are celebrated?

I mean, it's easy to kick everything back to "define your terms".

But when people ask me about devils, I truly don't know how to begin.

C is for the Craft

2012-02-10T16:04:00.006-05:00

Mostly when I write religion, I write reconstructionism. I write books and research and the joy of finding a little nugget of something somewhere and bringing it out and polishing it until it shines and fits into the whole of the system. I write ancient theologies and stories written in ruined stone buildings.

The thing with recon, even the kind of deeply mystically oriented and extrapolative stuff that I do, is that it's fundamentally all known things. You could, if you got a burr up your arse, go read the same things I do and do the same work, and you might even come to basically the same conclusions. It's all out there.

It's not all that I do, of course, but that's the nature of icebergs.

Sometimes I don't talk about the Craft because, as a student, I'm not fully qualified to do so. Sometimes I don't talk about the Craft because what I do there is not that interesting to people outside my head - or I *do* talk about it, but I don't explicitly label it as religious work. Sometimes I don't talk about the Craft because the Craft doesn't want me to talk about it.

Silence is a crocodile.

Someone asked a group I was in recently what the "goal" of the Craft studies was. They compared it to an idea that the "goal" of Christianity is salvation, is reaching heaven.

I don't trust goals. Too much gets lost along the way.

The Craft is about getting my ass moving, not getting my ass to a specific location and then being done. The Craft is about relationship - within myself, with others, with the Powers, with the cosmos. The Craft is about the edges of things, the twilight space at the edge of a knife.

It's not about where you're going. It's not even about where you are. It's about how you choose to proceed.

Since I'm all about the quotations lately, let's do a bit of poetry. This is one of my favorites, and I think its relevance is obvious.

pity this busy monster, manunkind,

not. Progress is a comfortable disease:
your victim (death and life safely beyond)

plays with the bigness of his littleness
--- electrons deify one razorblade
into a mountainrange; lenses extend
unwish through curving wherewhen till unwish
returns on its unself.
                          A world of made
is not a world of born --- pity poor flesh

and trees, poor stars and stones, but never this
fine specimen of hypermagical

ultraomnipotence. We doctors know

a hopeless case if --- listen: there's a hell
of a good universe next door; let's go

E. E. Cummings

I got the formatting from this site because my HTML skills are not up for attempting to convey Cummings properly.

B is for Black

2012-02-08T19:35:00.007-05:00

"The blacker the body, the whiter the light – the incandescent, active virgin heart from which all comes." - Victor Anderson

I first encountered that line in a training group run by Thorn Coyle (and in fact when I pasted it into a search engine just now the top hit was her book, Kissing the Limitless). I responded with some pretty crazed mysticism about astrophysics, which is neither here nor there.

One thing that modern pagans have to deal with is our common origins in a culture that valorises whiteness. This is not just a racial thing, but yes, racism is threaded through it. (And the question of why so much of pagandom is pale is perhaps not as unrelated as some might want to think.) Anyone who has done more than a little time in a pagan discussion board will probably have come across someone asking about the coloration of their magical work: Is this black magic? When might it be okay to do black magic? Is black magic being worked on me?

And here we come across is: Black is bad. Black is malevolent. Black is scary.

"Even semantics have conspired to make that which is black seem ugly and degrading. In Roget's Thesaurus there are 120 synonyms for blackness and at least sixty of them are offensive, as for example, blot, soot, grim, devil and foul. And there are some 134 synonyms for whiteness and all are favorable, expressed in such words as purity, cleanliness, chastity and innocence. A white lie is better than a black lie. The most degenerate member of a family is a "black sheep." Ossie Davis has suggested that maybe the English language should be reconstructed so that teachers will not be forced to teach the Negro child sixty ways to despise himself, and thereby perpetuate his false sense of inferiority, and the white child 134 ways to adore himself, and thereby perpetuate his false sense of superiority." - Martin Luther King, Jr.

Whenever someone asks me about "black magic", I reply with another Victor Anderson quote:

"White magic is poetry. Black magic is anything that actually works."

Reframe your paradigm.

What is whiteness, what is light?

Some people talk about white as a symbol of purity - talk about that.

And talk about the cruelty of concepts of purity, too.

Talk about the treatment of children with multiple ethnicities, and consider how many of them live in exile from the worlds of all their ancestors due to being insufficiently pure. Talk about the madness of ideological purity that makes those who will listen to other positions anathema and only the wildest, most outrageous, most pure positions put forth. Talk about the spectre of the Holocaust, talk about the murders of trans women who died because some man thought he would catch a contagion of gayness from them, talk about menstrual blood taboos, talk about the madonna/whore complex, and talk about which people never have a chance at being shoved into the tiny box labelled 'madonna' because they're already socially impure. Talk about the whole concept, not just the - here's that color again - whitewashed versions thereof.

Symbols are complicated. Using them is a precise and delicate art, and sometimes they say other things than one thought they meant, too.

"Apollo, the god of light, of reason, of proportion, harmony, number--Apollo blinds those who press too close in worship. Don't look straight at the sun. Go into a dark bar for a bit and have a beer with Dionysos, every now and then." - Ursula K. Le Guin

When I tell you I am Kemetic, I am aligning myself with blackness. This is what the word means, if you chase it back - an English noun form, from "Kemet", one of the Egyptian words for their nation: The Black Land. Black for night and black for death and black for the flesh of a mummy prepared for wrapping and black for resurrection and black for hands deep in the wealth of rich soil that comes like a miracle when the floodwaters part. Black for life. Black, also sometimes written in green.

And the Black Land is not opposed to Whiteness; its counterpart is the Red Land. Red for the desert, the barrenness of that space untouched by the sort of earth that can become rich with greenness, the earth which cannot be substituted one for one with green. Red for fire and blood, but blood is what unifies a body into a living thing, the pulse in every limb proof of wholeness. Red for the fire serpent that is the essence and protection of the sun.

Red for danger, anger, destruction, death, but black also for death and the night is not without its dangers. [*]

When I tell you I am Kemetic, I am telling you that I am black and red, and black means death and black means life, and red means death and red means life. I am telling you that it is not as simple as black and white thinking.

And when I tell you I am Feri, I am telling you to look to the night sky.

([*] Reference for these few paragraphs can be found in Wilkinson, Symbol & Magic in Egyptian Art, by the way, if you want to check my notes.)

A is for Authorship and Authority

2012-02-07T17:46:00.003-05:00

Today, my first book went on sale. (So if any of the people who said they wanted to know when I got something published are still following this blog, there it is.)

There's something about having a book out that makes me feel like a grownup. As if, up until this point, I was just another amateur kicking around chewing the fat about religion, and now, all of a sudden, I'm filed as The One With The Information. Or at least some information.

It's a little uncomfortable, as a feeling. It's not like the fact that I study this stuff in depth hasn't gotten me a few people who wanted to fling themselves at me and take me as their guru or something. It doesn't matter that I'm not looking for disciples, there are a few people who'll come at me with the "You're so smart! You know so much! I am pathetic and low! Take me on!"

(If you are pathetic and low, I don't want you.)

I mean, yes, there's something there that I think is valuable; if I didn't think that I wouldn't have spent years researching, writing, and putting together the thing. I think it's got a lot of information, and I think a lot of the information is pretty good.

But I'm still just a person. A person who wrote a book and sold the publishing rights to it, yes, but a person. The skills I used to put together the book are skills that people in general can acquire. The books I read to do the research for it are books that people in general can read (though honestly it takes a certain amount of monomania to get through a few of them). The fact that I did all that makes me something of an authority as well as making me an author.

But you, out there, you're your own critical authority too. You have responsibility to evaluate the books you read, not just venerate them and their authors. You get to figure out what works for you.

I can't do your work.

C is for Calendars

2012-02-03T14:50:00.002-05:00

One of the things I have been, as a going thing, kind of obsessed with is building a religious calendar. I mean, I have put together a satisfactory draft, even though I am not happy with it, and I haven't done the work to work out what to do for most of these dates. (I had a notion that this year I would work out what to do for each festival by the end of the festival. This resolution lasted for one festival.)

Part of my problem is that everyone around me is fixed on the solar year. Even if I get out of realms where "holiday" is assumed to be "Christian or maybe Jewish unless hey we've heard of Muslims, they celebrate stuff too, right?" and am dealing with general pagan circles, it's all "What are you doing for this sabbat?" and frankly, some pagans are even nastier about the idea that someone might not celebrate their festivals than I have ever encountered from a mainstream monotheist.

Last October, I had a lot of people screaming imprecations at me and telling me how horrible and intolerant I was. Why? Because I (rather gently, perhaps especially for me) pointed out that Samhain was not "the pagan new year", but "the new year for those pagans who celebrate Samhain and consider it a new year". Wep Renpet falls in August. I think my liege - who does also mark Samhain, given that he's largely Celtic-oriented - probably considers Imbolc, yesterday, to be his liturgical new year. (Or at least one of them; I think he might argue he has three.) But simply nothing that Samhain-new-year-celebrator was not an equivalent set to "pagan" got me marked as scum of the earth, the sort of person who was trying to Oppress Everyone Different by ordering them to not talk about their Samhain/new year celebrations.

Calendars are complicated. I have a solar-year calendar which I'm currently using as a basic approximation for what I need to be doing, but as I noted before I'm not done with that yet. It's a beginning. I don't expect to be done with it for a good while. (For one thing I really wish I could find some sort of calendar calculation software that lets me put calculations in that depend on moon phases rather than civil calendar dates.)

But.

I wish I didn't feel I had to fight with other pagans all the damn time for the space to have my own holidays.

I should get back on the horse and figure out what can be done for the Festival of the Lights of Nit....

Political PTSD

2012-01-29T22:51:00.003-05:00

A while back I was talking with my lion about politics and reactivity, and I realised something.

US politics has PTSD.

And some people like it that way, because as long as the body politic can be reliably triggered, then it can be controlled. Atavisms may be abrupt, violent, and at least somewhat unpredictable, but they can be channelled, and really when that good old fight or flight kicks in, what happens is either a "fight" or a "flight".

But seriously. Look at the diagnostic criteria for PTSD, and think about how much of speechifying is all about bringing up the intrusive recollections. Waving that bloody shirt, keeping a good low level of panic, because actually healing from these triggers would mean that people would be able to think more clearly, and wouldn't react in predictable ways when the predictable buttons are predictably pushed.

And yes, the whole "OMGTerrorists" thing is a pretty dramatic example of it, but honestly, I think as a culture the US was pretty vulnerable to this kind of collective traumatisation. (Not entirely tangentially, sometimes Little Foot wants us to read Dr. Seuss's The Butter Battle Book to her, and it strikes me very profoundly how very Cold War it is, and how likely it is that she will not actually understand its deeper message because "mutually assured destruction" is no longer the big red button of the collective consciousness of the polity.) I mean, "socialists! socialists!" is still a code word for setting off "run in circles, scream and shout!" responses. Boogety boo.

But.

Sound like any nation you know?

Breathing

2012-01-26T21:31:00.005-05:00

I have posts I want to make, and I have gotten out of the habit of making them. So I'm going to see if I can use this Pagan Blog Project thing as an excuse to try to rebuild my habits. What the hell, hey? And maybe in and among that I'll get around to other things that I was meaning to stick in the blog.

One of the things that I have as my standard advice to people who are undergoing stressy situations (good or bad) is "Breathe."

And it's actually way more useful than it sounds. The reminder to breathe often catches people in a twisted-up bodystate, one in which it's impossible to take a deep breath, in which there's a choking back of the capacity to inhale. And that place is one that keeps the physicality of stress in place, when taking a moment to uncoil, to take a breath, can release that tension.

The first person I trained with was a hardass about posture, which was really being a hardass about breathing. She wanted her students to be able to take a full, deep breath at any time, and to this day if I hear her voice my shoulders go back from their usual techno-hunch. But she would point out - not just that a body unable to efficiently process oxygen was not going to support spiritual or magical practices - but that breathing is a part of how people draw in life-energy. That magical work is made of power drawn in on the breath, transformed within, and then - again - spoken, using the breath. Breath is a part of the continuity that situates people in the world.

When I was early on in my Egyptian studies, I noticed that the word 'heka' - the word for magic - was written with an H hieroglyph and the symbol for the ka. Where the ka is the vital soul, the soul most bound to the body, the soul that passes from the ancestors on to the children (the soul that I refer to when I say "Hug your children so they have souls"), the soul whose name has ties to food, to sex, and to magic. And I folk-etymologied that H-ka to say, "Ah. Magic is the breath of the soul." It turns out that by actual Egyptology standards I'm closer to right than not - the standard literalistic rendition is something like 'activation of the ka', and given how tightly words are bound to magic in Kemetic procedure the notion that activating the soul is linked to speech, to breath, is not precisely farfetched. (And pun and soundplay is a theological obligation anyway, so even if it's not true, it makes sense as a folk etymology, which makes it religiously valid!)

The creator in some of the more popular Egyptian cosmogonies, Amun, is associated primarily with air. His is an invisible power, without which there is no life. To breathe is to receive life from the hands of Amun. For this and various other reasons, it was easy for Him to be seen as a universal god, personally interested in and aware of even the most ordinary peasant. The power of breath was an intimate connection with the animating power of the progenitor of all things.

I was reading a book recently that addresses, among many other things, some mystical symbolism regarding birth and rebirth (My Heart, My Mother, by Alison Roberts). There is a lot of discussion of the mingling of fire elements (represented by solar discs, crucibles, and so on) and water elements (boats, streams of semen) in the process of engendering life - but there is also a critical phase in which the wind moves the process along, in which this life-giving breath, this vital energy, the power to be and enact, joins the process of fire and moisture and converts it into breathing, moving life. I wrote, as part of my current training, addressing an unborn deity, and making reference to the texts Robert quotes:

Keeping the Sabbat Holey

2011-09-21T22:10:00.004-05:00

I just had another run-in with another one of those neo-Wiccans who has a serious burr up their arse about the fact that not all pagans celebrate their festivals. Which was one of those tedious things that crops up every so often when one doesn't bow to the Llewellynist hegemony, but whatever.

It has me thinking about calendars.

Actually, a lot has me thinking about calendars because I've been up to my armpits in calendar research trying to make things go for my life, my work, my theology, and so on, but that's gotten me a much clearer sense of what works for me in a calendar and what doesn't.

I startled someone a while back by commenting that the Wheel of the Year thing never really worked for me, I never connected with that system of eight festivals. And that's despite growing up in a climate where it actually was something that suited the seasons, more or less, so if it was going to be intuitive it is not like I was living in Texas or another not-four-temperate-season climate.

Somewhere in this I realised one of the big deal things for me, though.

Equinoxes are way too fucking abstract.

I mean, the breath of the year, the lengthening and shortening of the days, that I can understand; I can understand marking the long and the short of it, even though that's not part of my personal practice. But the moment in the middle? Tracking that makes as much sense to me as taking note of the moment when my lungs are half-full. When I'm doing breath exercises, it's in, fullness, out, emptiness, and 'in' and 'out' are continuous functions, not things with notable break points at three places along the road ('halfway' and the points between). It's a neat trick to calculate, but it doesn't have any particular immediacy for me.

I'm a little obsessed with getting the lunistellar version of my festival calendar calculated out somehow, rather than just settling for the thing I have which pins things to the civil calendar like moths on a lepidopterist's display, because of the thing about breath. If the breath of the month is the breath of the moon, that's immediate, that's there: it's something I can see, or could if I ever left the house but that's kind of tangential. Breathe, and the moon breathes with you.

The mechanical life support structure of the civil year is something that can do for now, keeping my little Frankenstein's monster going while I actually build the heart properly and get it to breathe, breathe in a way that doesn't depend on these machines of calculation. It's something real, though: I see the star. The moon flows through its mythic rending and mending and all things are made whole thereby.

Abstractions like a balance of seconds on either hand elude me; a day is a breath in and a breath out, however long each is held. I cannot celebrate a teetering pile of seconds or register it as spiritually meaningful - it does not connect to my world in that way. It's a curiosity, a piece of abstract knowledge, a process of understanding the world that does not speak to my souls. I studied astronomy and loved it, and understand the wheels of this process, but that does not make them liturgy to me.

I am probably more annoyed than I should be by that conversation, more annoyed than it deserves, but I am tired of being pinned to seconds and to declarations that this cycle matters and that does not, because the hegemonic forces of pop paganism have so declared it. Talk to me of what stars are rising and how many fractions the moon has, and leave the measured paces of the sunlight in peace.

Tomorrow begins Opet, at least in my lepidopterist's calendar. Perhaps by the end of it I will have the slightest clue what to do about that.

Best Anonymous Comment Ever

2011-01-10T13:19:00.002-05:00

Followed a link from a friend on livejournal and read the comments, and for once it was worth it because I found this, from a point where the discussion was commenting on how 'food policing' was often 'woman policing':

If you read the Bible, it turns out that apparently all the sins of the world were caused by one woman making an inappropriate food choice.

Via Making Light

2010-12-02T18:49:00.001-05:00

Close the Washington monument.

So tired of 'War on Terror' bullshit.

By the way, I'm a "domestic extremist"

2010-11-25T20:14:00.004-05:00

Signal boosting this: apparently there are rumors that the TSA's sense of listening to people being upset about the new, ineffective, and invasive 'security' techniques is to put 'em on a ... you got it! ... list.

Maybe someday I'll have time and brains to post again, but 'til then, let this bit of fucking outrageousness tide ya over.

This gives me a little moment of optimism

2010-08-13T11:19:00.002-05:00

So I have a tag on this blog, if you haven't noticed, of "sixteen tons". Which I use, of course, for ranting about American corporatism and the nature of employment and related subjects like "What do you mean you have a life and can't do overtime?", etc.

Sometimes I see little glimmerings of things that might make me hope that in some future time, I wouldn't need it.

(Class-limited, that is, but it's something for someone, and that's a little better than nothing for nobody.)

No comment beyond that, just a little quickie note.

Paradigm Lost

2010-08-11T18:28:00.004-05:00

Normal kinky people confuse me so much sometimes.

In the last week I've come across a "we must totally structure our relationships in a particular way lest Disaster Follow", a "well, I could understand how she might feel a conflict between feminism and kink if she were submissive", and a "How can you do d/s and be poly without the master having control over the submissive's other relationships? Where's the power exchange in that? Surely if the sub gets told 'no' it's her obligation to deal, and if the master wants something he gets it!" (Gendering from original quote; I don't know if it's the usual conflation fail or because it's a response to a thread in which a female submissive was seeking advice about a situation with her male master.)

I just.

No, really, it's entirely possible to let relationships work out and see what properties they emerge to rather than either strictly segregating them or doing the Anapol-bullshit "you all must have a shared cause![tm] in order to succeed!" thing.

No, really ... oh, for fuck's sake, shoot me now. The whole tacit, "Oh, of course a female submissive would be uncomfortable with feminism"/"Oh, of course a feminist would be uncomfortable with female submission" is, ... I can't even work up a good head of rant about this right now. I've said it all already, so many fucking times.

The third one kinda blew my mind, though. The idea that d/s means that some obvious package of agreements is in play - "obvious" meaning "unnegotiated and tacitly present" because we totally all do the same thing right and we don't have to think about what we do even if we're rooting around in the spooky parts of the psyche - and thus it's just flat incomprehensible to not include the package.

Of course the dom wants to control the sub's sexuality, because, you know, sex! It's about sex! And power! So putting tight restraints, restrictions, and obligations on the sex is what it's all about, even if that isn't actually fulfilling to anyone! Because! Sexsexsexsexsex! And power!

Gah.

It makes me miss the carpentry.