Magickal Circles and Pitiful Class Notes

Recently enjoyed my second Saturday afternoon workshop in New Hampshire, this one on casting a magickal circle.  The workshop was so interesting and so packed full of information, I kept forgetting to take good notes, and ended up with bizarre and incomprehensible scribbles such as:  “apple pie, citrus, wafts in space.”   Which is why no one should allow me to cast a magickal circle any time soon.  (see diagram of my anticipated first attempt at it, right)  And then I spent the next morning trying to make sense of everything that was said.  No luck so far.  *sigh*.   Or should I say, “d’oh!”

Fortunately, the instructor decided to tape the workshop, so I’ll listen to it this weekend and try to catch some clues as to why it was I scribbled incomprehensible nonsense about apple pies and citrus.

Found another wonderful witch in support of anti-Twinkism.  Twinkiism?  WHATEVER!  This one from Zsuzsanna Budapest in The Holy Book of Women’s Mysteries.  Now, obviously she’s not in favor of running up and down the west coast zapping everyone who ticked her off with some swishes and flicks of her wand ... or the entire coast would be one gigantic mass of boils, warts and broken bones, and all of Hollywood’s special effects make-up artists would be out of business.  But she is, thankfully, completely in favor of empowering witches with the ability to zap people when they need to.  Such zaps should be well thought out, definitive, done with courage and a willingness to face whatever consequences there may be.

“A witch who cannot hex,” sayeth she, “cannot heal.”

My first reaction?  Just what you might expect:  THANK YOU!!!!!

I hadn’t realized that there was a name for what I had been slowly doing over the last several years – more or less:  Pagan Reconstructionism is the general term for insisting on going back to the original historical source material.  Drew Campbell in Old Stones, New Temples described Reconstructionism as preferring:

•    The primacy of historical precedent regarding deities, worship and symbolism.  (And yes, I can see from here those readers who have witnessed me blowing up time and time again when this hasn’t happened, nodding energetically at that one.)
•    An insistence on cultural specificity and rejection of eclecticism.  (Say wha ...?  Took me a while to figure out what that meant.  Basically:  pagan reconstructionists are not in favor of picking and choosing deities or rituals from various cultures and combining them.  I’m not sure I do agree with that one.  Sounds too much like “rules and regulations” to me.  Why couldn’t I combine a ceremony honoring Sekhmet with a ceremony honoring Aphrodite?  They both have sexuality, lust, love and sensuality as characteristics, although there are differences in nuance, I think.  Other examples:  An and Ki, Nut and Geb playing much the same roles).
•    The rejection of Mesopaganism (e.g., revival-era druidic groups, Freemasonry, Rosicrucianism, ceremonial/ritual magick) and Christic influences on modern pagan religions.  Another definition:  “A term coined by Robin Goodfellow and used to refer to a religion which attempts to revive any of a various form of a paleo-pagan religion but are unable to completely give up judeo-christianity. Some examples are Masonic Druidism, Thelemic and some eclectic wiccans who still attend a xian church.”
•    An emphasis on “hard” polytheism, and skepticism regarding modern unifying theologies, particularly (1) Wiccan duotheism (“All gods are one God; all goddesses, one Goddess”) (2) the triple goddess paradigm of Robert Graves (Maiden-Mother-Crone); and (3) Jungian archetypism.  The unifying theology sounds to me much like the mesopagan definition.
•    A respect for personal gnosis (individual spiritual inspiration) coupled with a clean distinction between practices derived from intuition and those based on historical precedent.

Now, not every single one of those points pertained to me.  I hadn’t rejected ceremonial or ritual magick, mainly because it seemed somewhat useful in the “Let’s Learn About Incubi!” side of things, and I found Crowley’s work with ritual magick – or was it ceremonial magick? – fascinating.  I did realize it didn’t quite fit in with everything else I was learning, though.

I haven’t stopped searching for methods ways to invoke incubi, which I consider the same as the angels from the Book of Enoch.  I think Ida Craddock’s spirit husband was more of a very talented ghost than anything else.  But to invoke one of those angels, there are a lot of skills I need to pick up first.

About the Christic influences?  Definitely!  That always stuck out like a sore thumb, it was so obvious when you saw it.  Every time I went nuts over yet another “church lady in a pointy hat”, spouting rules, regulations and puritanical anti-sex crap at everybody, that’s what I was rejecting.  Far too many of those running around, pretending they were witches, or, even worse, actually thinking that they were witches.

I’m not ready yet to run headlong into pagan reconstructionism, though, mainly because there are so many directions in which to run.  Towards Sekhmet?  The Sumerians, Assyrians?  The Italians?  The teachers I’ll be learning from focus on the Celtic, which I suspect is not where I want to go – I’m not Celtic, for one thing – and some of the Gardnerian foundation bothers me.  Still, if the recent class was any indication, there is so much to be learned from them.  Once you respect the teacher’s basic skills and intelligence, it doesn’t much matter what tradition they seek for themselves, as long as they have the ability to teach you the skills you need to learn to seek your own.  Basic classes begin in September.

Woke up a week ago SCREAMING.  Charleyhorses in both calves, tendon cramps on the outside of both feet, and the inside of both feet, ankle level; cramps in both thigh muscles; tendon cramps on the backside tendons of both thighs.  All simultaneous.  At that point I was beyond crippled, beyond immobile and howling with pain.  I couldn’t even move to massage the cramps in both legs; all I could do was lay flat and scream into the pillow until I was hoarse, and try to WILL my muscles to unclench.  It took five to ten minutes of horrific agony until I could try to roll over and push myself up, and by that time I was nearly blacking out from the pain.  Even that slight movement set my legs off again – and me into another bout of pillow screaming.  Took me a full thirty minutes before it was even remotely bearable.  By four in the afternoon, Saturday, I could still barely walk, that’s how awful the damage was.  Both of my eyes were bloodshot from the screaming.

There has to be some way to get rid of these things!  The medication they gave me works most of the time, but is also beginning to give me tremors – slight ones, although every once in a while my hand will suddenly fling itself off to the right or something, and my pen flies across the room.  My legs do the same thing every once in a while, too, and thank goodness I’m usually sitting down when it happens.

While I recovered from the horrible leg & foot cramp experience, I read more detail about the cimaruta in The Evil Eye : an account of this ancient and widespread superstition by Frederick Thomas Elworthy, 1895, London: John Murray.  If you can stomach the sneering christian condescension and nastiness ("superstitition"?), it’s available on Google Books for downloading.  Really.  It’s nauseating.  The next time a christian whines about all the anti-christian sentiment directed at people like her who are obviously saints, wave the book under her nose as a good reason why she and her ilk had it coming.

Still.  If you can ignore the appalling rudeness, the book is vaguely useful when it comes to historical practices – even without the information on cimarute, the work is full of the ancient symbols and talismans employed in classical civilizations – although, you have to admit, it didn’t much save them from the onset of the Dark Ages from which  we’re still suffering, although fortunately, the dark Age of Pisces is fading away, brought on by ever more ugly scandals perpetuated by christians and their deeply repressed lust.

The cimaruta is always made from silver, which is sacred to Diana and is always created with three branches, sacred in all sorts of ways:  maiden/mother/crone (see, there’s that Robert Graves thing again.  I should probably read his book); three-road intersection; the three sisters, the three wyrd sisters, the Triple Crown ... okay, forget that last one, but you get the idea.

Early morning nooner with a FWB and went flying over the moon – twice.  Second flight so intense it felt as though it lasted 5 minutes.  Afterwards, he was so sure he was responsible for the experience, strutting around so puffed up and impressed with himself I didn’t have the heart to remark that, in actuality, a Piero fantasy – both times – was responsible.  The second fantasy was just a little more inventive than the first.  I consider myself lucky I didn’t scream Piero’s name out loud and destroy the FWB’s ego for life.

Oh, the shameful deliciousness of it.

Tree Magick Preparation and Perdurabo

I’m preparing for a workshop on The Standing People being held today … [pause for thought] … I don’t like the word "workshop"; it makes a tree sound like bacteria you peer at through a microscope, scribble notes about in laboratory notebooks and discuss endlessly with your peers in biology class. "A Respectful and Powerful Introduction to the Magnificent Tree" is better. I’m preparing for that.

I finished Perdurabo, and suggest that if you’ve only heard bad things about Aleister Crowley, you’d do well to read the book, if you have the time.  Very thick, well documented, 562 pages!

Not saying I would have enjoyed being part of his OTO family; just that you realize he was nowhere near as evil as the British and American press said he was while he was alive. Enormously intelligent and quite gifted. He seemed to REALLY enjoy sex magick, until he got older and his ‘get up and go’ got up and went. AND, he seemed to have an odd habit of being sexually attracted to women who were borderline insane – in the medical sense of the word "insane" – as more than a few of them became so downright frightening after becoming involved with him that he seemed tame in comparison. Of course, our primary source for that are his notes and diaries, so he could have greatly exaggerated his demeanor in the midst of their chaotic hysteria, knife-wielding crazed jealousy and baby-producing.

Things I questioned: I tend to give people of Crowley’s era a bit of a break, because it almost feels as though they were the ones who had to forcibly begin to crawl out from under the historically smothering, dangerous, toxic cloud of patriarchal christianity that had placed Europe and the Americas in the dark ages for so long. They tried their best, but they seemed to be still suffering in many respects from the choking stench, even though they’d lifted their heads above the swamp.

For example, Ida Craddock did her best to maintain an intense christianity while railing against their loathing of and longing for sex – the end result killed her.

Crowley’s biography discusses OTO and one of the grades of Magus he claims Crowley had attained:

"The Magus was a special attainment, as only seven others in the past had ever attained the grade and founded a religion: Lao Tzu’s Taoism, Thoth’s Egyptian mysteries, Krishna’s Vedanta, Gautama’s Buddhism, Moses’ Judaism, the suffering and slain pattern of Adonis, Attis, Osiris, Jesus and Dionysus, and the Islamic religion of Mohammed." (p. 295)

Now, I would have backed away from "founded a religion" like I would have backed away from a nervous skunk backing away from a porcupine being stalked by a cougar. As it was, my first thought was, "Yeah, THAT’s exactly what the world needed: another religion!" But Crowley was still deeply entrenched in the era of men whose world view consisted exclusively of organized systems of political, sexual and personal power with themselves at the apex, something all the more evident if you look at the gender of the list of so-called "Magi", above.

As far as Crowley was concerned, women were merely tools in sex magick and walking wombs who could produce heirs. Not a single one of them had any real power or respect. (And his women, being the stupid, chronically insane nitwits they were, went along with it.) Crowley wasn’t intelligent enough to see past his own world view, and ultimately, that would be why he DIDN’T found anything of lasting value beyond many interesting ideas which can be incorporated into more relevant and contemporary belief systems. Yes, there are those still studying Thelema and more power to them if they can bring it into the next century. But I don’t think they can.

I don’t mean to pick on the Thelemites, though. Honestly, I don’t think any of us can. Seeing past one’s own world view is something so rare, I have yet to see or read anyone who could manage it. If you’re going to create a "religion", name it the "Religion of Moi", because you’re the only person who will understand it; the only adherent to whom it will make sense.
 

The Amazing Ida Craddock

As I finish up the biography of Aleister Crowley – I ran across Vere Chappell’s Sexual Outlaw, Erotic Mystic: The Essential Ida Craddock. Craddock had written a number of books and pamphlets, although the only one I could find in Google Books was Heavenly Bridegrooms: An Unintentional Contribution to the Erotogenetic Interpretation of Religion, by Ida C. (Ida Craddock), Bibliography, with an Introduction by Theodore Schroeder, 1918. Schroeder, by the way, was a Freudian, who basically held her up like a psychological specimen and peered at her curiously. Unfortunately, Freudian men in 1918 were just about as bad as the Comstockian pastors. Nonetheless, one does what one can with what’s available.

Heavenly Bridegrooms is fascinating. Although, I would suppose that you’d need to know something of Ida Craddock to appreciate it. Basically, she researched the topic of spirit lovers, and provided a huge wealth of bibliographic detail on the subject. Surprisingly – or perhaps not surprisingly, as she was raised by a strict evangelical christian mother, a lot of the examples she used were biblical. And yes, she brought in the Book of Enoch and the wonderful angels already mentioned here.

What made Ida unusual was the time period in which she lived and worked: any woman who displayed even a remote interest in sex could be tossed into an insane asylum, or in jail for running afoul of the evil Anthony Comstock’s obscenity laws. (And Ida was.) Both Ida and Margaret Sanger, among others, came up against Anthony Comstock, who as the Postal Inspector and self-proclaimed vice squad, was the perverted christian right’s spyglass into everyone’s bedrooms; women, of course, always being the ones punished for anything odd taking place in the bedroom.

What made Ida even more unusual – and what caught my attention immediately! – was that she had a spirit husband. She identified him as "Soph", and their sexual unions were so passionate and so loud, that even the neighbors noticed. Why should anyone find this unusual, she wondered, when Jesus himself was the offspring of such a union? Human mother, spirit father.

"Am I not right in saying that to impugn the possibility of marital relations between earthly women and heavenly bridegrooms is to strike at the very foundations of Christianity?"
Ida Craddock, Heavenly Bridegrooms: An Unintentional Contribution to the Erotogenetic Interpretation of Religion, by Ida C. (Ida Craddock), Bibliography, with an Introduction by Theodore Schroeder, 1918

I grinned from ear to ear when I read this! The conclusion of her life? Tragic. Anthony Comstock and his christian supporters had her arrested for sending "smut" though the mail, the said "smut" being marital advice for women, none of whom had been told what "sex" was, before they were tossed into the marital bed. Rather than die in prison, she committed suicide, already fully aware that she would NOT be punished for it, the way christians insisted she would. She’d be with her spirit husband, and death held no fear for her. Her suicide letters, one to her mother, the other to the public, are some of the most powerful letters you’ll ever read.

For those interested in a brief but very interesting biographical sketch of the amazing Ida Craddock:
http://www.radiolab.org/blogs/radiolab-blogland/2012/may/17/sexy-ghost-story/