New Moon Old Magick

My dears,

There are those of you to whom the following subject is familiar, perhaps painfully so.  As for me, I find it as painful as fingernails upon a blackboard, and freely admit that I reserve the right to ignore anything said by, or promoted by, the like of extremists like Glenn Beck or Rush Limbaugh.  However, when it comes into your world and speaks to you personally, it becomes difficult to ignore.

I was working in my local food bank today.  I got to stuff sacks with groceries.  We worked hard, and couldn’t help commenting on the fact that the shelves had gaping empty spaces, were unusually empty, and we were serving more families than usual.  There were three of us volunteers from Trinity Episcopal, and I couldn’t help but think, ‘What nice people.  They are working so hard!’.  And I was right, of course.  They were nice, and we were all working very hard.  In the fullness of time, our conversation turned to life in these United States.

We talked about the increasing shortage of good food, the rise of prices, the fact that we were now only allowed to give peanut butter out to families with kids because of the recent doubling of the price, and the scarcity of our supply.

I noted that the ‘breads’ in our donate section were primarily sugary specialty treat breads, and that there was a distinct shortage of good solid complex carb bread, or for that matter, no whole grains of any kind.  No produce at all.  Lots of cans, though.  AND some good dried beans, a poor folks’ (remarkably healthy) staple.

We were just a gathering of country folk, talking about the hard times, the importance of being prepared for more hard times, about our pantries and medical supplies.  One of my companions was a retired nurse who had volunteered for deployment in Haiti and the Dominican Republic.  She had qualified opinions on what it took to keep body and soul together.  I contributed a bit of info about canning and food preservation.  We talked about clean water and how important that was for any community.  We spoke about community, and the need for people to help one another.

Good people, doing useful work.

Suddenly, one of the ‘good people’ began to talk about a book he’d just read.  It was called A Patriot’s History of the United States.  Now I’ve heard of this work.  It has the reputation of being a work of pseudo-history cum fantasy, written as a neo-conservative response to Howard Zinn’s award winning and critically acclaimed People’s History of the US, and was thus eminently ignorable.  Until Glenn Beck recommended it to his disciples and put it on the NYT bestsellers list.  At some point it has become required reading for neocon Christian Reconstructionists, the fascist arm of the Protestant party.

My new friend talked about reading this work in conjunction with the Bible, and how he’d come to understand that the US was a Christian nation, founded upon Christian principles, and that the Bible was historically real and a contract for all people.  I blinked.  He began to talk about how the US has a duty to lead the rest of the world to a God driven form of government, all inspired by Biblical truth.  I blinked twice.  All this while continuing to fill and distribute food to clients.

Since the conversation, as it often does down here in the American South, then drifted over to the usual hatred of the feds and especially of the president, and I felt that my head was about to explode, I broke my cardinal rule.  You know, the keep your mouth shut and your eyes open rule.

Surely you know that the Bible is a collection of myths and cultural stories, and not a recording of history?   I said, not so innocently.  It’s a book of mystical revelation, not facts!  Smile and blink.  That worked.  The silence was as thick as the fog on a humid summer at dawn.  Blessed, echoing silence.

After about a half hour of this blessed silence, my friend smiled and agreed to disagree, “The Great thing about this country is…”, and we continued our ‘good work’.

But my hair continued to stand up, and the feeling of tension stayed with me thru the afternoon, and all the way home.  When had my little cypress Episcopalian church, my bastion of Anglican tolerance in a sea of Baptist this and Presbyterian that and born-again tents popping up like mushrooms…  When had Trinity been infiltrated by this fascist belief system that no amount of logic could dislodge, that covered poisonous hatred so deeply that even truly good people were brainwashed into embracing it, even as they went about their day doing good works?

(For those of you who don’t know me, or who haven’t read my bio – I am a witch in the Western tradition.  My heritage holds traditional witchcraft, Western Mystery Lodge tradition, and Episcopalian Christianity.  I embrace them all, having also practiced Zen and Tibetan Buddhism, Islam, and Hinduism.  There is a place for all faiths upon the Tree of Life, and ‘each to their own’, to me, creates a beautiful kaleidoscope within the Purple Ray of mysticism.  Christ sits firmly upon the throne of Tiphareth, the Sephirah of the Heart.  And there are a plethora of Pagan Gods all over the place, up and down the Tree.)

To be sure, I am in no way bashing Christianity.  I’m bashing Fascism.  There is a rise in these groups that join fascism together with religion.  In Islam, they are Al-Qaeda and its knockoffs.  In Paganism, they are white supremacists.  A belief in divine purpose, combined with a nationalist jingoistic fervor, the belief that YOUR belief is the only truth and should govern how others behave.  How much scarier does it get than that?

The path of the Mage, or the Witch, is a path of tolerance.  We are attempting to understand, by listening and observing, rather than reacting.  We are human, surely, in our reactions to things that make us distressed or uncomfortable.  And it goes without saying that if you see evil in action, such as a child or animal being abused, you must act – lest by your inaction you become part of that evil.  And it is also true, and very difficult, that a Mage must judge their actions to know if by acting they will make the evil worse.

But how can you listen to the unseen, how can you walk between the worlds when your mind has locked closed on itself.  Your attention totally on your own thoughts.  Your doorways of perception shuttered down so that they no longer can see anything except the propaganda posters you’ve plastered all over the inside of your own head.  Somehow, I had to be able to get to a place where I could acknowledge that inside this little country church that I love, where I sing in the choir every week, there are forces of reactionary rage and blindness at work.  That within the hearts of these ‘good people’ exist both paradigms, tolerance and love combined with chaos and hate.

Similarly, I had to acknowledge that my local coven was circling not to celebrate the lights and the seasons, but working out their anger and hatred of everyone who had ever hurt them, a High Priestess acting out her fear and pain magickally, rather than experiencing the Joy of oneness with nature and the flow of Life.  I had to walk away from my participation in coven, something I’d done in 5 states over 35 years, and be willing to walk as a solitary once again.

As a witch, you must to be able to hold the dichotomy, the concept that one thing can have completely contradictory realities, the ‘real’ and the ‘astral’ for example.  The good and the bad in other people and their beliefs, in governments, in corporations, in life.  When you can see past the surface differences in things, people, events, places and times, then you can begin to notice the connections between them.  The similarities that reveal that we are all part of the net of the stars.  When you can see this net, these connections, then you will know when your magick has merit, when you are acting in concert with the flow of Universal Life Force, and not simply acting out.  You will be able to discern a Path between the Points of Light, and be able to avoid the pitfalls of Chaos.

As a witch, you will practice Silence, Observation and Discernment.  You will try to understand.  These practices will help open your mind to the Unseen, and make you fit to truly Serve others.

My loves, next time we will look at some magickal languages and symbols that you might wish to use to decorate your wand, in greater depth.  If you wish to read ahead, look at Freya Aswinn’s Leaves of Yggsdrasil, and anything you can find on the Ogham.  You might want to also get ahold of a good dictionary of symbols.

AND, for those of you who would like to participate in the eBook questionnaire, please read THIS ARTICLE, and let me know your opinions!  I thank you for your help.

Until then,
Blessed Be!
Marie Angeli

ROSEHIPS

In traditional cultures, or those who define time by the agricultural cycles of the earth, the summer solstice is the point of the longest day and shortest night.  It roughly coincides with the passage of the sun into the first degree of Cancer.  Often, it is a time to relax after the frantic plantings of Spring, the time of growth between cultivation and harvest.  Although the chores certainly aren’t finished, as any good farmwife will tell you, there is a time now to sit and relax, look around you at the produce ripening, smell the scents of the blossoms on the breeze and be proud of your efforts.  It is a precursor to that time later in the fall, after harvest, when we give thanks for the bounty of the earth.

I often think that the USA, like Rome before the fall, uses some of these pagan festival times to support its own agenda.  July 4th has some interesting parallels of timing and purpose when one compares it to midsummer.  One can see, looking at midsummer celebrations, the drumming and dancing, the flowing mead and songs and families gathered joyfully.  Being imaginationally twisted as I am, I can see the cases of beer, the boar on a spit (a groveling apology to vegan pagans), the red white and blue tablecloths, and the addition of corn relish and hushpuppies to the table, the table of old folks, the kids table, games of pickup football and volleyball, the family dog times six.  Not to mention the pies made from recently picked and processed peaches, blueberries, and the local wild blackberries.  Sound like your family?  The one you wish you had?  The one you can do without?

The summer solstice is the bright side of the yearly ‘point of no return’.  The dark side being, of course, yule.  On the bright side, the days will get shorter now, which means we are heading towards the moment of time when our efforts will pay off.  When our struggles will bear fruit.  It’s a good time to remind ourselves that for all the flash and angst of our public life, we are in this together.  As a planet we will rise and fall together, quite literally.  Just as we plant a green life, so we can also plant discord and hate, as we’ve seen over the past several decades of public life.  In a garden, a healthy and nourished soil produces healthy and nourished plants.  A soil stripped of nourishment and filled with chemicals produces results that are twisted and infected with pests.  You can’t fight an undernourished soil with more anger and hate.  Pouring chemical fertilizer or pesticide on a garden does not solve the problem, but only exacerbates it.  Just so you can not solve the problems of hate and intolerance by becoming hateful and intolerant.  An ‘us against them’ philosophy, although understandable, is not productive of harmony.  Only love will heal hate.  Only acceptance will heal intolerance.  Only peaceful adherence to truth will heal aggression.  Fight aggression with aggression and you only get more aggression.  Do you think this is naive?  Sometimes the truth is uncomfortable.  The wisdom of this season reminds us to look to the earth for our answers, whether we like them or not.

Now, as a practicing martial artist, I have to ask, is there a time to set a physical boundary?  When is something an act of aggression, and when is it an act of self-preservation?   A big cat kills and eats dinner.  Is that aggression?  No.  A bully beats up a smaller child to preserve his sense of control of those around him.  Is this aggression?  Obviously.  What if a dog does it, to preserve his territory, and the pick of the finest females.  That’s tougher to answer.  Is the survival of the fittest based upon aggression?  NO, it is not.  We are reminded that each and every circumstance is its own moment.  No animal who is acting in a balanced and healthy manner seeks out another animal to beat up for the ‘heck of it’ or because the one does not like the other’s choice of arm deodorant.  In the moment is the truth.  And the our choice of action can maintain or destroy the balance or harmony of that moment.  The problem we seem to have, we humans, is being aware of that moment.  Of knowing where we are.  We get lost in doctrinal rules and lose track of the ‘peaceful adherence to truth’.  We respond to errors of judgement with lack of acceptance and hate, when the application of a bit of Love and Joy can restore the balance of the moment.

With the urgent necessities of public life, the life of our planet, the drama of our government, the social injustices around us, and war, it is so easy to be dragged away from the small truths of our immediate existence.  How can we not respond to the social injustices with anger and aggressive action?  The problem with looking to the temporal world for answers is that it has not yet learned the lessons of the earth.  The pendulum will swing, come what may.  And hatred planted with intolerance today may take root, and grow with twisted energy, but will not survive nor thrive.  To heal the ground left barren after that plant dies will take Love and lots of it.

As we celebrate this time of the longest day, the most solar energy of the year, we also celebrate the time of the most clarity.  In occult symbolism, the sun represents being able to see clearly to the heart of things.  This is particularly true in Exoteric Christianity, where the Sun/Son, represented by the Sephiroth Tiphareth, represents the highest point at which mankind can ‘know’ God.  Thru the Heart. To be at the crux or crossing place of the Pillar of Spirit with the Arms of Matter, to be at the Heart of the Cross, the Diamond Point of the Rose of the Rosicrucians, is to truly be in the Moment.  To be outside of, or beyond, Time.

If Samhain/Yule, is the time of Inner Wisdom, the ascendancy of the lunar energies, then Midsummer is definitely the time of Outer Wisdom.  Now is the time for our work with our families and communities to bear fruit.  Now is the time to see that wisdom of the Moment, that ‘peaceful adherence to truth’, the loving application of acceptance, heal the rifts and wounds cause by imbalanced aggression.  And now is definitely the time to honor yourselves for your good work.

Wherever you are, my friends, I hope your seasonal celebrations bring you plenty, harmony, the joy of family and friends, and an appreciation for the work of your hands and minds.  May your efforts grow strong and tall and provide you with shade, shelter, and fruit.

BLESSED BE,

Marie Angeli

all text and images ©2011 Marie Angeli

You can see more of Marie’s paintings at her Imagekind Gallery.