X is for X______________

Okay, yeah, whatever, that's excessively meta.

But that's where you sign your name on the dotted line.  Put down your mark, all of that stuff.

It's worth thinking about what you put your name to, where you put your commitments.  And this isn't just a "which god do you swear to" (or by, or at) sort of thing.

Because your commitments are a part of how you build your worth, your personal authority: the point of pride that is your personal law.  Your discipline, the spine of your practice.

This is the root of magic, among other things: being able to stick to your intention.  Whether your magic is based in word or will or some other thing, you need to bloody well follow through.

It seems like a simple thing, but it really rather isn't.  Everything slips, everything loosens up at times.  Meaning to do it isn't doing it.  (And that's what Yoda was on about, right?  Don't intend, act.)  This is one of those Witch's Pyramid points, to will, to put creation in motion in the forms you demand of it.

This point of pride, of action, these things make up how your identity is defined: what you follow through on, what you affiliate with, what you allow to shine.


(I meant what I said and I said what I meant, an elephant's faithful one hundred percent.)

P is for Preparation

Sometimes, the hard work in magic, in ritual, in whatever, is heavily in the groundwork.  In the preparation.  Not in what one does, but in getting ready to do things.

For the last few weeks I have been doing preparatory work for a ritual.  The ritual involves my maternal grandmother, the child of Polish immigrants, and, among other things, her troubled relationship with her own heritage which has led to me not having a sense of my own.  There are important things in here, in my religious practices, in my personal life, in my arc of healing, in my own becoming a mother: and Little Foot has, as a middle name, this grandmother's name.

I tend the shrine.  Not as regularly as I perhaps ought, but I light the candle, I offer water, I burn incense.  I cultivate mindfulness of this particular thread of bloodline, even as I give blood to the medical personnel who are analysing it for traces of this particular heritage.  I think that I do not have enough in my shrine for this piece of heritage, and wonder where the jewelry boxes are that have this grandmother's gifts in them, the costume-jewelry pins in the shape of cats and a few similar things.  (We are still not moved in to the new house, and so many things are hidden away in storage.)  I spent this morning going through photographs from my childhood, pursuing the names of relatives, reawakening old memories, coming to new understandings from moments caught in time that I was too young to read, before.

There is something deep working here, as I look through the photographs, as I see things and have the context of an adult to bring to the occasionally blurry moments in time long ago.

My father is visiting.  He had been planning to visit a few weeks ago, but changed his plans because he had to take a business trip.

To Poland.

He brought me the usual collection of oddments and endments, and, almost as an afterthought, asked me if I would like some Polish coins.  I said yes. (I have an odd collection of international coinage, mostly brought from his business trips, though I did once startle someone immensely in a hotel room in Minneapolis when he said to me, in a bit of an in-joke, "You are [...] and I claim my five pounds" and I promptly fished through the pockets of my jacket - which I had brought with me on a trip to the UK a couple of years before - and eventually managed to produce five pounds in miscellaneous loose change.  This was perhaps not the expected joke result, to be four thousand miles from home and presented with a punchline in one's native currency.)

He handed me a pill bottle's worth of coins, reserving one of them, a little thing about the size of a dime.

"This one is special," he said.  "They're pretty rare, and it's said that they're lucky."

"Because they're the equivalent of a penny?" I asked, turning the coin over in my fingers and attempting to read the back.

"More like a quarter penny."

I studied my Polish farthing for a moment, and thought about magic.  As I reach back towards my Polish grandmother, speaking of peace, speaking of connection and continuance, I am given a little piece of luck from Poland.

Preparation can also come with signs, I suppose.

Tools

I was given two tools: a wine carafe and a knife.

The first lesson was the knife.  I hated it, I hated the task: being held to a standard of challenge, of knowing the standard and being unyielding when the standard was unmet.  Of being, not cruel, but hard; of offering the support of critique and voicing an awareness of failure.

It was Ordeal work - both in supporting the Ordeal I was serving as challenge-master for, and in finding in myself a place where I could do this thing, rather than do what I wanted to - rather than be softer, gentler, more cuddly, more gracious, a haven rather than a fight.  And I did the work.  And it was hard. And I became stronger.

And I was glad of the resting time afterwards, the space to recover.  Holding to the knifework is hard.  The surgeon's mind - knowing when is the time to cut and when is the time to put the knife away - is a sharp and dangerous place, and it is not easy work.  I had longed for the place I thought of as more of the carafe - the healer, the sustainer, the refuge - and having to cleave to something sharper was exhausting.

There is a common false dichotomy in the gendering of tools - the knife as active, the cup as passive - the phallic nature of the thing that penetrates taking that masculine, dominating, urgent energy in symbolism, while the thing that contains and holds is that vulvar feminine, submitting to its contents, patient.  This is all through a lot of ceremonial magic and other things, and cultural things, and perhaps it infects the brain even when one doesn't symbolise the hieros gamos by stabbing something in the wine as a matter of standard protocol.

The idea is that the knife is work, and the cup just kind of sits there.

This idea, of course, is bullshit.

Even at its most simplistic, the vessel to hold power must be as strong as that which it holds or it will fracture.  That strength must be a held strength, something that sustains, not the sort of burst strength of a single action.  To cut takes strength in a moment; to hold takes strength over time.

Hold the power.  Hold it available.  Be the well, the place from which strength can be drawn.

Hold the image of the possible so that it can be found as a reflection.

Wait.

Try not to run dry.

M is for Mythology

I sometimes get the impression that a lot of people are confused about mythology.

I suspect that growing up in a Christian-dominated culture is part of this.  I commented recently on this elsewhere, actually.  The question of the historicity of Jesus is a constant thread of discussion about Christian mythologies, with a whole lot of people basing their comfort with the theology of the religion with whether or not a particular person lived, died, and was resurrected in a particular way.  It's a fascinating frailty, and one that I think promotes the nutcaseries of Creationists, who, too scared to imagine a universe in which their historical figure may not have been precisely as depicted in their mythology, have a need to literalise all the rest of their myths, too.

(Yes, there exist a number of religions with historical founding dates and known personalities involved in their foundings, but very few of them are strongly focused on the particular person of the founding figure as opposed to their teachings.  It's my very unstudied understanding that this is one of the reasons that Islam finds Christianity to be an imperfect implementation of the teachings of that particular god - that Christian theology got hung up on the messenger, rather than the message, thus requiring another prophet to come along and correct the more egregious mistakes.)

(Though it is of course quite common for outsiders trying to demonise groups to start accusing them of being effectively idolaters worshipping their founding figure - that is, after all, how "Gardnerian" became an appellation for a particular denomination of Wicca.)

So on the one hand, there's this strange notion that a myth has to be a statement about history and the world in order to be functional, which is a legacy of a cultural rooting in a religion that has mythologised history as foundational; on the other hand, there is the post-Enlightenment idea that what is important is the verifiable, the factual, and that is all that counts as "real".  So not only are myths historical, but they have to be factual to be valuable.

Can we kinda drop this nonsense and actually pay attention to the function of myths?

Someone who deals with this stuff sociologically will tell you, more or less, that mythology is the corpus of sacred stories dealing with cosmic truths.  (And 'religion' is the translation of sacred story into functional belief and action.)  And cosmic truths are not the same thing as facts, because facts can never provide you with meaning.  "Meaning" is one of those things that can only happen inside your head - or someone's head.  The structural processes of meaning can be codified into story, possibly even sacred story, but they will never be intrinsic in the scientifically measurable modern world.

In Terry Pratchett's Hogfather, the character of Death made this point quite sharply when he said (if you will forgive my lack of smallcaps):  "Then take the universe and grind it down to the finest powder, and sieve it through the finest sieve, and then show me one atom of justice, one molecule of mercy."  These are things we make, not things that we find; our stories tell us how to make them, or how to fail.

The realm of meaning is one that is navigated in part through shared cultural landmarks, and I think in the modern day a lot of that has been separated from the spiritual.  We may still think that 'red' is a good mark for danger or peril, and use it to say 'stop' as a result, but we don't have that laced through the rest of our lives, we no longer have our ritual procedures written out in red ink above our liturgies, nor is the red and black of the land something that most of us are living with every waking hour.  When folklore comes up that ascribes meaning to events or makes connections between things, the ordinary thing to do is to say "superstition" and dismiss it.

And the gods get turned into big cosmic babies, or the sneering "beard in the sky", because the stories about them become more and less than they are.  Because the ancients must be idiots, Thor is just "Oh, this is the story people told to explain why there was thunder", and now that we have science, we don't need Him.  The most trivial, superficial aspects of the gods are thus all that remain, and the concept that we can know how thunder happens according to science and hear the rumbling of that goat-drawn chariot just doesn't appear to cross the mind.  We do not care, anymore, about the coming rain in partnership with the lady of the wheat-gold hair, so the meaning of the marriage of Thor and Sif isn't something that anyone bothers to think about; our boisterous common folk are schooled into nine-to-five jobs or inappropriately, well, common, so their large-appetited and raucous defender becomes unworthy of honor.

And that's not even one of my gods.  I'm sure if I actually, like, knew something about Norse powers I'd be able to do more in-depth things.

But these are ways of expressing things within the world.  If the moment of creation - call it the Big Bang if you like, it doesn't matter - was the orgasm of a deity, what does that mean about our relationship with sexuality?  If humanity is the tears of a deity, do we care about whether they were shed in joy or sorrow?  If the sun becomes weak and frail when His daughter leaves in a snit, what does that say about the importance of women, of family, or of harmonious social relationships?  If both order and chaos stand to place the crown upon the king's head, what does that mean about power, rulership, the nature of government?  If a powerful, beautiful god becomes terrible and destructive when not aligned with the hand of love, what does that mean about power, about beauty, about awfulness, about love?

These are sacred stories.  They are not a periodic table of deity, a historical recording of events, or an engineering plan.  We humans are creatures primarily of kronos; They are primarily of kairos.  In Egyptian terms, we function primarily in djet, linear time; They in neheh, cyclic time.  Every time is, or can be, the First Time; every moment is simultaneously unique.

In religious work, we combine djet and neheh into a spiral of time, and become cosmic.

Breathing

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:

Among the unwearying stars
The crucible glows with life
You wait, resting, in the fluid dark
As breath ignites the waters.

Not One Of Your Holiday Games

One of Ren's prompts for this next round of the Carnival of Sexual Freedom and Autonomy was on the importance of women naming their own sexuality. And I've been thinking about that one for a while.

And after a lot of contemplation, I'm left with the feeling that it boils down to "If I don't do it, someone else will." If I want to leave it inchoate, unnamed, mysterious, I have to keep it entirely secret, because any sign that I have a hint of sexuality somewhere will be dragged out and assigned meaning by someone else. Even the category of being unsexed can be sexualised in some cases.

I have to make my own meanings, hold to them, define myself, or someone else will try to override me.

I am a cissexual woman. If I don't work on what, if anything, that means then I can get swept away in all of the cultural meanings of 'woman' and buffeted between them. Trapped between madonna and whore, career woman and brainwashed housewife, all the dichotamous piles of what 'woman' means. Whether it means I'm perceived as a set of penetratable holes and some boobs, or a little child in need of paternalistic protection, or both simultaneously, or one of the other godawful forms of womanness that floats around and tries to latch onto people like a facehugger out of Aliens and infest them with parasitic larvae doesn't matter: if I don't have a strong enough narrative of myself to refute these things, I can get infected and corrupted by these things. I am someone with these body parts and no dysphoria about them; it has no ontology, no deeper truth.

I am heterosexual. I am not in denial of my true and intrinsic bisexuality; I am not compelled into unsatisfying relationships by a heteronormative culture; I do not experience my orientation as fluid and malleable because I am a woman; I do not project my sexuality into images of women in the media; I do not consider my attractions to be oppression. I like looking at certain men, because I find them attractive, and I am just fine with that, thanks.

I am a sexual assault survivor. I am not a victim for revictimising, an object of pity, someone whose entire life and reality orbits around a golden afternoon in 1992 that left its marks in my mind. I will not be truncated and boxed into no more than helplessness and damage. I will not accept the myths, that I have a perpetually defective sexuality because of my experiences, that I just need to loosen up and get laid more to get over my trauma, that my kink or my polyamory or my anything else is a result of being warped, that my flashbacks or fears are a sign that I am a defective. All of which I have heard. I am a person who had a horrible experience; I have suffered, and I have worked to heal.

I am polyamorous. I am not looking for a quick lay, I am not available to just anyone, I am not too damaged to commit, I am not incapable of real love, I am not any of these other stereotypes or condemnations. I was not abandoned by my father, nor was I sexually abused. I am a person with two wonderful, committed, loving partners to spend my life with and another person of whom I am quite fond indeed.

I am kinky. My kink was not created by assault, manufactured by patriarchy, adapted from a need to seek abuse and disparagement, born of a sense of inferiority, a sign that I am a pathetic doormat, an invitation to treat me like a victim, or a signpost to deeper psychological defects. It is what it is, and I have invited commentary on neither the legitimacy of how I choose to conduct my relationships nor the progress of my spiritual development.

I am pregnant. This is not a validation of traditional barefoot-in-the-kitchen mores, a sign that I am more interested in baybees than my own autonomy, ownership by a man, a betrayal of women's freedom, a perpetuation of patriarchy, a sign that I am the right kind of woman with correct values, an embodiment of The Goddess [tm], or whatever other crazed myths that come up about motherhood. It is a part of the process of mammalian reproduction, which is not unrelated to sexuality.

Also: I am an emotional abuse survivor. I have my stories. If you want to define my reality for me, to override who I am and where I came from, to erase my stories, you are just like the one who abused me. I will exist in defiance of you and your fantasies about who I am, and I will not be quiet because you find me inconvenient. I don't care what your agenda is, whether it is important to you as a feminist or a traditionalist or a whatever else that people like me not exist and not be heard: you are the enemy of my personhood and my souls, and I deny you the power to name me.

I am many, many things, multitudinous beyond listing, and I. Am. Not. Yours.

I don't want other people's stories about me. I have my own.

If you want to have stories about me, listen - or, as a friend put it once, refrain from copulation and discorporate.

I Want To Be Holy

There is a place where my soul fills up with starlight and the vastness between stars, when I open and unfold and bloom and blossom like the universe. Macrocosm and microcosm.

I open up, I spread out, I am the land that is the ground of being, I am the rock upon which the temple will be built. These are the old rites, and I am no Blodeuwedd; this is mortal flesh and breath and bone and I a willing bride.

I am the axis mundi, the life growing beneath my heart is the center of my universe and I its pillar. My roots are in the shadows and mists beneath the earth, and my branches touch heaven, like the feet and plumes of God Who shakes the seven heavens with His thunder and whose tears extinguished all the fires of hell.

I am of the soul-maker, the ordeal-master, the guardian of gates, the reigning queen of life. I am a warrior of joyfulness, and I will not be approached without respect. I know what I am and what I must be, and I am the one I have been waiting for.

Is the word for this hierodoule? Vessel? Gatekeeper? Who is the master and who the servant here when the land demands its marriage bed? What is the nature of power and lust when gods touch?

The witch is one who walks the lines between worlds, neither one nor the other. These are the pillars and the gate, these are the embracing shadows and the sharpness of light. This service demands worship from its master as its price.

I. Love. My work.

Echoes of the First Parent

"... you spat out Shu, you expectorated Tefnut, and you set your arms about them as the arms of a ka, that your ka might be in them." - Pyramid Texts, Utterance 600

One of the things about theology is the way that it translates, encapsulates, and expresses basic truths, basic concepts, basic meanings.

Consider this word, "ka". I got in elementary school the instruction that the Egyptians thought people had two souls, the "ka" and the "ba", and the "ka" was their double. Not very sophisticated, and we spent a lot more time on architecture anyway.

But what is this thing, "ka"? This wikipedia article has a photo of a ka statue and the hieroglyph, both showing the symbol referred to in "as the arms of a ka". There are figure statues with the arms held in the ka position, uplifted, with children all along the upper arms (and that's gotta be some strong biceps, man). Etymologically, the word is related to words for fecundity, genitalia, and, in the plural, is a synonym for victuals. The Egyptians would present gifts to each other with the phrase, "For your ka", and make offerings to the gods with "May your ka be fed."

Life-energy. Family-energy. Animating soul. Linked to reproduction but not reproduction itself; sustained by gifts, offerings, that which is fed and sustains being.

Shu and Tefnut, the first children of the Creator, were born, existent, and it was not until their Parent's embrace that they were invested with that life-energy, that the animating soul of creation was in them.

Set arms about those children and embrace them, that they may have life; this is the gift and essence of parenthood. Not the making of the form; the sharing of the soul. Parent is a thing that we do, not a thing that we are by happenstance or breeding; it is a holy act, the extending of the lifeline that came from the first Parent and the outspread, welcoming arms of being.

What's In A Name?

I breathe a theology of words.

Language is a holy thing, a thing of power, threaded through with the power of raw creation, the power to speak the name of a thing and bring it into being, evoke it, make it more real.

This is the power that humankind shares with the gods: we have words. By our words, by our ability to draw concept into reality, we make and break the world.

We make and break both large worlds and small.

Sometimes the word is "Mine".

Sometimes my response is, "Your what?"

Because there is the underlying theology of it, the spiritual drive: name me, claim me, speak this real, take up the power of the gods and name, what am I? Which of my kaleidoscopic shapes is forefront in your mind at this moment?

"My lover", sometimes, close and sexual and partnered. "My blanket", a laughing snuggling claim demanding warmth and comfort. My friend, my partner, a pattering of nouns each blowing a little reality into one piece or another of the complicated shape that is what is a relationship.

I breathe words of heirarchy, of mastery, into his ear, just to hear them said. To speak them real. To invite him to speak back, at times; other times to plead for it, to ask to hear myself recognised. Sometimes just to say it, to have it said, breathed out again like the sun breathes out dawn, not changed, but asserted in the real as Re-Horakhty asserts morning.

And here is the deep magic, one of the secret powers: when a thing that is seen, recognised, and named true is a thing that, in another world, cannot be shown, cannot be seen, will be taken as shameful, defective, broken - when that thing can be heard and celebrated and named aloud - that is power.

It is the power to be the thing from the dark.

It is the power of being seen, recognised, named, heard, known.

It is the power of the ringing words that have the power of the gods, the naming of a thing as real.

To recognise power, to name it, to have someone see it and be aware of it and move in the space of the named thing.

There are words that come out of the primal dark places, the places where things are unspeakable - or at least treated as unspeakable, and thus live in the space between denial and absence. There is, sometimes, "my sacred whore", whispered or growled or spoken with dark red undertones of emotion, and with the rich velvet intensity of reality.

There are words spoken then that some people would call degrading.

And I don't understand how that could be.

These are god-words, full of spirit, going bump in the night, speaking of the power of the shadow-things with teeth. It is not degrading to be.

Name me.

Scale to Skin

There is a snake on my leg. A winged snake, coiled to protect an egg.

She is wrought in blood and ink and time, from my initial vision and the skilled hands of an artist who knows how to work flesh.

She is a sacred snake, a royal python, who guards her eggs when she lays them. She is a sacred snake, winged like the uraeus, the guardian of the king (though the uraeus is a cobra).

I was born in her year, the Snake, though just at its transition; my summer boyfriend when I was sixteen, four days younger than I, was born a Horse. When I was a child, we caught a garter snake once, kept it in a jar a while to study it and learn to have no fear, released it in the stump at the bottom of the yard, into which it wriggled and vanished like a mystery.

She is wise, is the snake, a liminal creature. She knows the mysteries of rebirth, shedding her skin to be made anew over and over again, many times in her life. She is a primordial, one of the first gods, guardian of secrets. There were times she bargained with people, to live in their homes and keep them free of vermin, in exchange for the warmth of their hearth, the protection of their children. She gave oracles, sometimes in the dangerous edges of the effects of her venom. Her reputation as a healer is multicultural, touching many worlds, many serpents.

She spreads her green, feathered wings widely, wrapping my leg in a gesture of benediction; green for life, living, birth, rich against her fertile browns. She can freely move in any direction she chooses, and chooses to mantle protectively over one egg, tucked luminous dark into her coils.

The egg she protects is a pisanka, an egg of old, old tradition among certain of my ancestors. An egg now marking and celebrating the mysteries of life and death, the shedding of the skin, being born into salvation. Blue for breath, breath for soul, ruach the colour of sky; the starburst sun in white and gold, pure and joyous and the brightness of the laughter of children.

She is my ancestor mark, my protector always with me. She is my memory of those who came before, my promise to those who come after. She is wrought in flesh and bone and blood and breath, etched under skin, holding close and gentle.

When the healing skin peels away, it will look and feel just like snakeskin.


(As I started writing this, some weeks ago before the work was done, Stephen Bodio's Querencia linked to this post at Atomic Nerds about ink and the shapes and meanings thereof, and what people will see.)

Tremulous and Tender

When I was in college, one of my friends had a thing for tormented, mysterious dramatic fellows with cloaks and masks. Epic Phantom of the Opera fanfic sort of 'thing'.

I never loved the Phantom.

But I had a massive thing for the music of the night.

I can't remember when I first heard the musical; I have memories of listening to it going back and forth to the shrink in junior high school, but that's the closest I have to something that dated it. Call me twelve, that's probably close enough.

It caught me, caught my attention. The rest of the plotline of ALW's Phantom fell completely by the wayside in its incoherent jumble of spectacle; I was captivated by the music of the night, this first portrait of compelling, beautiful dominance. It spoke of "cold, unfeeling light", which was one of those deep secret associations in my child mind that I would not speak of, because I was supposed to find the light warm and welcoming, and I never had; that touch of familiarity made the siren song of the Phantom's music grasping for control, for compulsion, for beauty that much the more real and personal to me.

Perhaps like Christine in the storyline, I was too caught in the music to be aware of the savagery that fed the Phantom, but it was the music I always wanted more than the man, the music that was the perfect master. The music that needed that one point of perfect inspiration, the idealised Christine, the one who was willing and able to open to the music, fill herself up, and pour it out again. The music was always my master, I its dedicated worshipper, filled with it, shaped to it, spilling it out again with my own voice.

The music of the night, in concept -- not in the form given in the musical, but as its own angel -- was my first Master. The one that trained me most in service, in being owned, in being the cherished slave of power, alive as never before with a resonance that shook my ribs and drove my breath deeper, richer, more powerful.


There is a story here about why I no longer partner with musicians which I will leave implicit.

Advertising Futures

I saw this billboard when I was doing the mad holiday travel and relatives-placating thing:

"SEX CAN WAIT. YOUR FUTURE CAN'T."

I just want to ... take it apart. Look at all the subtexts of this. What the hell makes this a good message?

I mean, off the top of my head, the metamessages I pull out of this are:

• "Sex" and "Your Future" are in direct opposition; pursuing one precludes the other.


• People who are interested in sex are frivolously discarding their futures.


• "Your future" requires constant vigilance and attention; letting your eyes get off it means it will surely get away.


• Sex is not a part of your future. Or, if it is, it happens somewhere in the distant not-to-be-thought-of parts thereof, presumably after the Sex Pixie magically bestows upon you the knowledge of how it works so you don't have to actually develop any skill or comprehension experientially. (Presumably, this is similar to how the Beer Fairy bestows knowledge of how to drink responsibly on the twenty-first birthday, when the taboo lifts.)


• Sex will ruin or destroy you and your future.


• It doesn't matter how much you want sex. That interest should be set aside For Your Own Good.


• It doesn't matter how responsible and mature you are and how capable of making choices and evaluating risks. Just don't, your nebulously-defined existence will be placed at risk.
  

Why is any of this shit a useful message?

Mortification of the Flesh

Daisy and I were talking last month about ecstasy and pain and sacredness and a variety of other things. And I'm working my way through the pain and blood that is my own calling to the divine, the things that it demands; the flogger I picked up at the Fetish Flea is still sitting by my bedside table. At some point it will be more than merely a pretty object.

The power of pain has always been something that I have known, down in my bones, something that spoke its own language. There was debilitating pain -- the headsplitting agony of the migraine with its warped vision effects, the sick wet pop of my hip missocketed, the way I could only do pushups with one hand on the knuckles so it wouldn't fail under me. And then there was the other pain.

There was the pain when I was so far gone into my own head, into the demons of the darkness lurking somewhere south of sanity, that I could grab, rake down my arms with my nails, dragging myself back into the world rather than fall into the abyss of going mad. There was the pain that took that stuff from inside and pulled it out, inverted it, made it something under my control, taming the beast. There was bringing myself back into reality, the sharpness and clear sparkling realness of it. There was tracing patterns in the back of my hand with the point of a knife, because I could see that doing something, and it hurt less than anything else I put my focus on. (That time my husband took the knife away from me.) There's the sharp immediacy of pain grabbed and put through alchemical transformations, my standard first step of the little energy work trick I learned in my teens: how to block pain.

(I don't know if any of my readers know the game Egyptian Rat Screw, but the relevant point is that if two cards of the same value are played in sequence, the first player to slap them wins the stack. I once slapped in on a pair of queens and won the game. My roommate one summer at camp was very good at it, and played some kid with a cast on his arm. At midnight, she was up plaintively complaining how much her hand hurt, so I got up, and I made it stop. Then, bloody rationalist, she whined that I had stopped it, until about two, when she exclaimed, "Yes! It hurts!" and went promptly to sleep. Occultists get no respect.)

I had scars, thin brown discolorations, down the outside of my left forearm for about eight years, from high school.

When I need, absolutely need, to keep control of my temper, my nails go into my palms, leaving little crescent arcs that last long after I let go. Or sometimes somewhere into my arms. Sometimes I've left bruises.

And I have this rigid wall between pain and sex, pain and ecstasy, and I'm suspecting it's going to come down.

The rigidity of that wall may be surprising to some, with the way I bite and sometimes scratch -- I've had a reasonably nippy evening, just that kind of mood, even without any sex being involved -- but none of that parses to me as working with pain. Physicality, sensation, a feral streak that has a large thread of sexual energy to it, sure, but not pain. That spot where the shoulder flows into the neck? Biting that doesn't hurt. Biting that is something else altogether.

Taking the wall down scares me.

(And yet, He said, fear is how we measure ourselves.)

It scares me because so much of the work with pain goes so deep, so intense, and so closely tied to madness and managing madness. And I refer to "Have you ever gone mad?" a few posts down because there's a seductiveness to madness, this sense of release, of freedom, and choosing to turn my face towards the abyss, to go to where that huge, deep wellspring of power is, that tremendous, transformational power, and beyond it the hungry Void ... scares me.

I know that siren song, the seductiveness of going completely unmoored.

So for a long time, I maintained this rigid, rigid wall. This is not me. I don't understand it. I don't go there.

It scares me, and it scares me deep and hard and hitting right around Swadhisthana.

There's an edge there, a sharp one, a delicate balance between madness and reality, that sharp erotic curve of the transformational line.

I have always met the gods at the edges of things.

You're Mine Now, But You're Not My Slave

(Title pulled from this song, which is entirely in keeping with the sense of perverse humor that my music collection frequently exhibits.)

I was chatting with Annwyd the other day about, among other things, kink stuff, and she asked me about the words I use in public discussion of my relationship with my liege. Such as whether terms such as 'my liege' were common in the community, or whether that was our personal thing.

We actually have spent a lot of time talking about language and connotations of language. Trying to talk about what we're doing with reasonable accuracy matters to me a great deal.

I don't use 'my liege' in private space with him, generally, but I imagine I might well when I feel like playing high protocol in a whimsy; I have other language for the personal. But after a lot of discussion, we came to the conclusion that this was a useful model for what our dynamic was: an exchange of service for protection and territory. (Love? Wikipedia reminds me that one of the services a vassal owes is "counsel". Scolding reinforced.)

The territory is an interesting thing -- in an early conversation I said something like, "So, if you're my liege, what's my fief?" But there's this whole scope of space and resources available to me in order to provide service, difficult to articulate; a discussion on a BDSM community on livejournal suggested that the relationship itself was the relevant form of territory, which is close enough for government work. The whole thing is an abstraction -- I mean, an original-framework vassal's primary service is military rather than sexual -- but it works for the shape of things.

It works for the notion that I am valuable, that my strength supports his; a weak vassal is less valuable to the liege, after all. It makes my power something worth developing, turns being strong of itself into a form of service. (And I can get antsy around 'power exchange' language, because, as I've written before, my experience of a stable d/s relationship is not 'power exchange' but 'power unleashing' or maybe 'power revelation'. And this is not unrelated.) Which gets around to my incomprehension at the notion that a dominant must be better or more skilled than the submissive in order for the relationship to be successful, when that's so orthogonal to the lines of power, the creation of the space of the fiefdom in the dynamic and the choice to grant it in exchange for service.

And it's an abstracted and idealised sort of version of flow of power, but that's not exactly uncommon in the kink community for framing structures. Witness language like master/slave, after all ...

Part of our discussion about terminology came down to connotations on words. For example, while I refer to him as my master in some discussions (mostly where the kink aspect to our relationship is relevant and I don't want to get bogged down in "what was that word?" discussions), I do so with permission. "Master", unadorned, suggests to him rather a lot of breadth of scope; a term for, say, Lugh Samildánach. Similarly, 'slave' carries a heavy connotation of nonconsensuality rather than chosen service, and he values greatly that I choose to offer these things to him.

Which isn't to say that we don't wander off in the occasional sex slave direction as part of occasional interaction, but more often I am called 'hetaera'. To play with a completely different historical practice abstracted outwards.

I'll close off with something from Annwyd, 'cause I asked her for permission to quote her and then didn't actually cite anything from our conversation the whole post: "I find that sort of...not exactly roleplaying, but *use* of these very dramatic, elegant roles...to be kind of hot. ;) Don't know if I have the discipline to keep it up in a relationship, but man."

*grin*

You're missing the whole point-- you're not my little pet
Don't throw away your life-- the game's not over yet
I do not own your soul--don't want you in a cage
I only want your heart to find a special place

You're mine now but you're not my sister
You're mine now but you're not my slave
You're mine but you're not my child
You're mine now but you're not my slave
You're mine now but you're not my slave

Shadow Drums

This is something I wrote a while ago, a little bit tidied up; I figured I'd re-audience it or something.

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

I tend to be of the opinion most days that the culture I grew up in believes that the Apollonian pleasures are the only true pleasures, and the Dionysian pleasures are wicked indulgences that one might sneak into but which are really flaws in character.

The results I see of this are twofold. First, that very few people are taught a healthy way of interacting with Dionysos, such that they either fear him and his servants, or are swept away by him and claim they were not themselves, not in control, not at fault, and such that they do not know how to make _use_ of the secrets of sex, of drugs, of music, of any of the other dark drumbeats of the soul. Second, that those people whose souls balance more naturally as servants of Dionysos than servants of Apollo are lost, unable to find a place where they can stand and feel that the axioms of the universe fit the way they see it.

Where are the places for the ecstatics, for the potion-makers, the dancers, the drummers, the temple harlots, the prophets, the shamans, the makers of poetry, the makers of sculpture, the painters, the singers, all of the people who try to speak to the gut rather than the head, in a culture where what is rational and _productive_ is what matters? On the edges, if anywhere at all, when the Vice Squad and the War on Some Drugs leave them alone long enough.

It's all, "Don't do that, that's bad," "You should wait until you can deal with that as an adult," "You need to be rational about this," and those things don't work so well when the sirens sing and the drums start beating. Is it any wonder that so many people can't deal with sex and drugs when they're never taught how to dance with Dionysos without getting torn to pieces by the Maenads?


And now, after reading some stuff Belledame linked to, including some commentary on Little Light's brilliant monsterdom piece, I'm puttering about reading the Bacchae....

People Are Weird About Words

(And I'm not just saying this because I'm once again being croggled by someone with a partially shared nominal religious affiliation having the little 'labels are bad' dance. Though that happening while I'm being weirded out by other people's language is at least one of those nice synchronisities of complete bafflement.)

Anyway, to be on my intended topic.

So, one of the fora I read is a discussion group for science fiction and fantasy writers. A reasonable proportion of the population of the group is made up of people who have made professional sales, including people who make their living off their professional sales; probably about half are people who hope to make professional sales someday, or (like me) who intend to write no matter what and consider it appropriate to see if that can be parlayed into income; the remainder are interested hangers-on, writers with no particular interest in publication, former writers, people who hope to write, and so on. Strictly speaking, the newsgroup bans advertising in its charter, though exceptions are made for venues offering professional pay rates, which should mention this in their posting; this is noted explicitly very early in the newsgroup FAQ, which is posted regularly.

(I'm sure you can see where I'm going with this.)

So someone came in to invite people to submit to the second issue of their small press magazine. And someone replied to say, "Okay -- your post doesn't say what you pay. Neither does your website. We're largely a professional group, here, we're not interested in being scammed or in giving away our work for free."

This gets a response from the original poster of, "Don't include that in a cover letter." And the claim that quoting rates isn't "classy", and that they do not pay for journal submissions -- those are for the fame and credential on a CV. (Er?)

Which was, well, rude enough; the other responder told her to drop dead.

Which was, well, rude enough, but at least he left after one or two posts; the next one, the original spammer's husband, informed the newsgroup that it was composed entirely of "fucking cunts", and whose next post was suggesting that all of the female posters in the newsgroup (a fair fraction of whom I've met face-to-face, incidentally) "are just male nerds who get off on using a female pseudonym" and masturbating over the responses they were getting. (I would note that I post somewhat gender-neutrally. My strongly gendered legal forename and middle name are not in my headers, and my usename is; while said usename is probably guessable as female, and is strongly gendered in its culture of origin, I doubt that many people are familiar with the names of any of Akhenaten's wives other than Nefertiti Neferneferuaten to be certain of that.)

I'm just croggled by the notion that someone thinks this is an appropriate way to enter into a group. (When I found out that the fellow was married, my response was, "And he's still got a mouth like a fourteen-year-old trying to shock great-aunt Sadie?" Kids these days, wandering the internet unsupervised ....)

I'm profoundly croggled by the whole coming in with slavering misogyny to defend one's wife. Okay, maybe the riding in on a white horse thing crosses into vaguely understandable somewhere, at some level, but I can't think I'm alone in thinking, "You know, I'm not going to be terribly impressed by, 'I defended you from those meanies, dear! I called them fucking cunts and fake women!' If he thinks 'fucking cunt' is a useful term of insult, he's not gonna be fucking mine any time soon."

I have similar thoughts about some of the trolls that hit in the alt.sports.* newsgroup I read, who seem to think that "cocksucker" is one of the nastiest things one can say about someone. I have to wonder what their girlfriends think about this. One of these days I'll have the story that that thought goes into.

It's not like it's all directed at women and bottoms either -- when I commented on this, someone responded to point out the number of synonyms for "penis" that are used to mean "obnoxious and somewhat stupid".

And then there's this PS2 ad campaign with the slogan "PS2: Because Your Girlfriend Bores You Shitless". This whole ... sense of what's appropriate, the playing to stereotype and contempt, and ... it's almost tangential, but it's the same damn noise, too.

Here is one of the demons of the culture this guy is writing from. Male genitalia are obnoxious and stupid; female genitalia (and bottoming) are venomously contemptible. This is what the encoding of the slang that gets grabbed carries with it, down in the subliminals of the use of language. These things are insults to be, these things are insults to have. Be ashamed; be especially ashamed if you are encoded 'done-to', because that makes you sickening, rather than 'doer', at which point you're merely some variety of jerk. By definition in the metamessage.

We build this world with our hands and our voices, and some people choose to build it with words that mould it out of sexual shame and contempt even for their own partners.

People are so weird.



(Hey, wait, didn't Little Light write about this back in May? Why yes, yes she did. More broadly, too.)

Fractal Liturgy

I love liturgy.

I was having a lengthy pontification about liturgy this evening, which is tied up with a poem I'm working on at the moment, though that's sort of incidental to it. And I came to the realisation that liturgy, good liturgy, has a fractal nature.

Look at it this way: someone who's first encountering a religious ceremony isn't going to know what's going on. The liturgy provides action guidelines and a set of imagery that should be able to convey the basics of what's going on and serve as a pointer to the basics of the action for someone who doesn't know a thing about it.

It also, for someone who does know the basics, goes deeper, pointing out and evoking points of the Mysteries of that particular faith.

If it fails at the former, then new people will be unable to smoothly begin to assimilate the religious material; if it fails at the latter, it will be ineffably shallow.

I got here because I'm trying to write about a Mystery, and because of my study in the relevant religion, I don't have much liturgical knowledge. This is, in part, because people are supposed to be constructing their own religious material -- which is, in fact, why I'm trying to write about it -- to serve as pointers to and illumination of their understandings of the Mystery.

The problem is, I only have one strong verbal pointer to this one. I can wave that around a bit, but it's not enough to get me parallax that includes language. And Mysteries are hard to talk about; all we can really do is exchange pointers. And I caught a new layer of fractal, I've gone deeper than the surface, than the basics, and I want to articulate an image of where I've been, leave it as a signpost saying, "I am here". And I don't have enough to interpolate from to do it easily or smoothly.

Liturgy is a form of dialogue, engaging the people, the experiences, the ways of relating to the faith, moving these things around so they can be grasped and grappled. New liturgies develop in part because of this exchange, this way of talking about faith, the generating the images of meaning.

I've got a single line. In iambic pentameter.

And an old pointer to where I want to go.

And the stars my compass.

Courting Equality

The existence of this book makes me very happy.

On a lot of levels, really: the Goodridge decision was one of those watershed things, and the backlash (some of it spearheaded by then-Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney) more or less fell flat in Massachusetts. And the photography that's visible on the site looks spectacular.

And there's the fact that the text on the website uses things like "marriage equality" and similar language, which goes back to my ongoing rants about same-sex marriage rights and the proper use of language to describe what one's in favor of.

Just, y'know, damn, those people look happy.

Women's Magic

This is just one of those trivial, trivial things, one of those tempests-in-a-teapot, and it's not even my teapot, but it would make me angry if it didn't make me tired.

Some guy says "guys [tend] to cultivate nerdy hobbies, and women tending to be more invested in raising children, resulting in reduced participation in magical stuff" over here, which is a flamewar entirely irrelevant to where I go off with this but included for context and attribution.

The thing is, I come at this a day or two after meeting my deadline for writing an article for an esoteric webzine about home protection magic, the research for which mostly involved me trawling through a bunch of folk magic traditions for bits. And if you look at the traditional magical practices of ordinary people, they are preoccupied with the stuff that ordinary people are concerned with: safe pregnancies and healthy children, care and feeding of the family, protection from nightmares ... Not some "nerdy hobby", it's a part of the process of normal survival: appeasing or warding off of threats, fertility of people and livestock and crops, knowing how to heal illness.

It's an esoteric and really quite tangential thing, but there's the microcosm there: the real whatever is the thing of the leisured classes; the people whose focus is on living, using magical tricks if that's a part of what they do/believe, their contribution to magic, or art, or whatever else, is completely dismissable. Vast collections of lore and knowledge about producing healthy children is blown off as "reduced participation in magical stuff" because it's not, well, as Granny Weatherwax might put it, full of geometry -- abstractions divorced from the real world of breath, blood, and bone. It doesn't matter that this is a conversation about magic; magic is just a placeholder for the whole concept of whose stuff is valued and marked as real. And in this case, the women and the working class and the people who are hands in the muck rather than thinking great and abstract theoretical thoughts are the ones who aren't really participating, apparently by definition.


And it's not related, but also not unrelated, that I'm watching someone I know go to a birth center because her insurance won't cover a homebirth, and now they're saying that she needs to have a psychological evaluation to determine whether or not she's sane enough to give birth other than in a hospital ... because she was in therapy once upon a time after a sexual assault. There's this whole battle of the paradigms there, this notion that she needs to prove that she's qualified as a mother to not go through the system that she's uncomfortable with; the fact that she can't afford to get the care that she would prefer to have, despite the midwife care she had for her first child being far superior to that which she's can get that's covered by her insurance; the whole fact that her psychiatric history due to her post-rape counselling is being dragged in and revictimising her. And there's that thread of women's magic in what she expects of a midwife's group that she's not getting, that sense that there's someone who's in tune with that rather than the medical-condition concept of pregnancy and childbirth that she is trying to avoid, and her sense of betrayal that this group wants to make her get a pass to certify that she's sane enough to be not treated as an impending medical crisis needing hospital care.


I know an ancient Egyptian charm against nightmares. Someday, I expect that I will teach it to my children.

But that's not real magic. That's just women's magic.

A Moment's Breath

So last week or so a bunch of folks were talking about expressions of women's desire, and context thereof, and I wound up spending about a week and a half trying to write a poem. I did write it, but it falls short of what I wanted to say, so I'm still left with inarticulacy.

And here's the thing: art is hard.

I can tell you flat out that if I could know one thing about my lover, it would be how to bring out the fire in his eyes. I can tell you flat out about the time I rested my hand on my pseudoniece's back and recognised her as one of my tribe, a small person who is, in part, my responsibility, the understanding of the importance of a small life to me. I can tell you that I spotted a cardinal yesterday, a splash of colour in a grey-and-brown world, and that I found it captivating.

I can just tell you these things.

Telling you doesn't mean you feel them. And perhaps those people who know what I mean -- know the other side of the mystery, in the classical sense -- will take my pointing and saying, "I mean that thing" and know how it feels. But that's luck, hitting something that can serve as a signpost. It isn't craft, the ability to lay the foundations so that people who don't happen to know that specific vantage point in detail already can maybe catch the hint of what I'm talking about.

The evocation, the ability to convey an emotion, an idea, an experience, something from inside my head, is the magic. And the magic takes work, mere passion will not do it. If mere passion were enough, that damn poem would have been a lot easier. There's still the crafting, the assembling, the putting it together into something that will encapsulate that thing, whatever it is, and express it elsewhere -- express beauty, or lust, or faith, or revelation, or some moment that was exactly what it was. And that part is hard work, and complicated.

There is something in there that defines reality, what it means, transforms a moment into something that can be eternal, expressed outside of time. That's a powerful magic to work.

And it's really goddamn hard.