All the world’s roads lead to the heart of the
Warrior;
she plunges unhesitatingly into the river of
passions
always flowing through her life.
The warrior knows that she is free to choose her
desires
and she makes these decisions with
courage, detachment and – sometimes
with just a
touch of madness.
She embraces her passions and enjoys them
intensely.
She knows that there is no no need to renounce
the pleasures
of conquest; they are part of life
and bring joy to all those
who participate in them.
But she never loses sight of things that last
or of the strong bonds forged over time.
A Warrior can distinguish between
the transient
and the enduring.
Warrior of the
Light: A Manual, Paulo Coelho,
Harper One Publishers, 2003, pg. 2
Magick: spent one
entire afternoon in mid-August banishing things ... this was the night of the
new moon of August; no better a time for banishing things. Impediments, blockages, everything. What a day it had been ... I could not seem
to regain my wits, or my peace of mind, at all.
I have a friend who had to sit through all the agony and the tears and
the self-recrimination (although, as good friends do, she held him completely
accountable for everything and called him every name in the book). Then around 5:30 at night, these
appeared. No, not from the heartbreaker,
from her ... just because she felt so bad for me. What are friends for? They were a “Happy Anniversary” bouquet, so
naturally, I said, “Huh? Anniversary of
what?” The card read, “Happy Anniversary
a year early, to you and to the wonderful man who knocks Bozo the Clown off his
pedestal.” I couldn’t help it, I burst
out laughing. Like I said ... and I did
appreciate the sentiment.
The August new moon – in
Virgo – set the scene for the banishment of some things, the call for the
growth of others. I began the meditation
not quite in any frame of mind to seek out anyone else in the love sphere ... as
this was one of those “once in a lifetime” loves you don’t get over all that
easily ... but I did ask for aid in healing the shattered heart I was dealing
with, because boy, did I need it.
Then I remembered something: I had a lot of mystical training behind
me. That’s how upended I was – I’d
forgotten that in the the hysteria of the heartbreak. Yes, I’d forgotten I had power. I didn’t have to be the victim of
happenstance; I had more power than that.
Did a lot of research on
rituals that didn’t involve forcing him to do something against his will. I
mean, really, how much fun is forcing someone to love you against their
will? Not much.
I finally decided on 3 of
them, all performed over time ... giving him the opportunity to rethink what HE
was doing; not forcing him to think anything he normally wouldn’t. Not forcing him to feel things he didn’t
feel. None of that interfering with him
... what I did was re-open the channel of communication between us and keep it
open.
And it worked. Boy and howdy did it work. This time I did not forget to thank all
deities, spirits and powers for their help ... I definitely forgot to do that
the last time ... but he reached back out to me ... and I learned anew what
love was: forgiveness, courage,
understanding, empathy ... all good things.
The part of our relationship that needed a little tweak was the erotic
side of it ... so I reminded him of that ever so gently, and let him respond in
his own fashion: hungry, longing,
aching. I fell head over heels in love
with him all over again, a little wiser and more patient this time.
I realized that this man is
going to need a lot of encouragement ... a lot of not assuming he knows what I
mean when I say something; a lot of clear speaking, clear writing, clear
communicating, telling him what I want and letting him roll that around in his
libido when he awakens in the morning, horny and hungry.
Valuable lesson
learned: if you’re being trained in
something, don’t forget all your lessons when your heart is broken. Remember who you are and what you’ve been
trained to do. And then do it.
Back to the Biography of
Satan (Kersey Graves, 1924). You’ll
recall when we last left this work (July 2), I was rather annoyed at the quotation
of the infamous “Rev. Mr. D ----“ and his “fit of inspirational turgescence and
mental explosion ...”. However, Graves,
despite forcing readers to meander their way through miles of formal gardens
planted with his own flowery prose, does make a few good points – or he has
thus far. There’s only so much flowery
prose I can stand before setting it aside for a while. Most importantly, if you look at the initial
“bad deeds” performed by various humans in the early pages of the christian
bible, at no point do you read of any of them being tossed into a fiery pit
overseen by a nasty dude with horns and a pitchfork.
Good examples: Adam & Eve, Cain murdering Abel, everyone
on the planet except for Noah and his arkful of inhabitants. In fact, Eve’s big punishment for supposedly
getting all of humanity tossed out of Eden was having cramps in childbirth,
Cain was sentenced to be a vagabond ... and in Noah’s case? A lot of people drowned, supposedly – but
there was no mention of any of them being roasted in any fiery pits for having committed
sins so grievous than the whole world had to be drowned as a result.
Moses never makes mention of
either concept in those ten commandments of his. Graves makes a good point with this – if this
concept were intact from the very start of judeo-christian beliefs, you would
have thunk that these major crimes would have earned these beings a visit to a
fiery pit somewhere ... but it didn’t.
The reason: this concept didn’t
exist at the times these tales were recorded.
So, if I’m looking at Paradise Lost, at which point did the fall
of an angel named Lucifer come into the picture? Because it sure wasn’t in the original story
of the banishment from Eden. Eve spoke
to a serpent, the traditional symbol of wisdom and healing, not some fiery
fallen angel with a bad temper. And,
Graves reasoned, if humanity had managed to survive without the presence of
“The Big Bad” for four thousand years, what did the introduction of such a
being actually accomplish? Has humanity
improved in any measurable capacity with the introduction of this being into
the belief system?
