Banishing and Recovering

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?

Aspartame Poisoning, Duality and Great Insults

There was an article that went its way through Facebook – who knows where it originated – on the symptoms of aspartame poisoning.  Two of the symptoms jumped right off the page at me:  muscle spasms and leg numbness/weakness.  I went and looked at the bottle of sugar-free Coffee Mate I’ve been drinking in my coffee every single morning since ... practically forever.  They apparently use sucrose, which was in the same category.

Neither the primary care or the endocrinologist had a lot of studies on aspartame poisoning they could pull up, but both suggested the same thing:  stop using it, then; let’s see what happens.

So ... my first morning using light cream and a teaspoon of stevia instead.  You know, if there’s one thing I don’t like, it’s having my morning coffee messed with.  So I wasn’t happy with the taste, no – right now it tastes more like espresso to me than my morning coffee.  But I spent weeks in Italy drinking coffee that tasted exactly like this, so I thought:  I can adapt.  If this is what the issue was, all this time ... I can definitely adapt.  I’m not sure how much time I should be giving this.

In C’era una volta, I was reaching the point where I needed to figure out where the character of Satan originated.  I knew he wasn’t part of the Jewish tradition, so I needed to learn where the concept originated and why – mainly because I needed to know where John Milton came up with his rather colorful version of the guy.  Christians had to have drawn it from somewhere, and for some reason ... surely there had to be more to it than just controlling people out of fear, although I’m sure that was an added benefit of coming up with the Big Bad to point at and blame for everything they did that fell short of ethical purity.

I also knew other traditions believed in a “dark and light” duality, but even they hadn’t come up with a being to embody the dark side of things.  Zoroaster, for example, taught that darkness and light (or also translated as lies and truth) existed inside of each person and it was their responsibility to decide which side gained the upper hand.

Like most people, deities had always encompassed both light and dark aspects.  Pazuzu was a perfect example:  if you were a Sumerian, he was a household protector, someone you called upon to protect you and your family, someone you admired and thanked wholeheartedly for your blessings ... and someone who sent locusts when he was pissed off.  Like anyone else, he had his sunshiny and cloudy days.  And he was definitely not known as a being who possessed little girls and made them throw up green split-pea soup and masturbate with crucifixes until The Exorcist – if the ancient Sumerians were still around, they would be seriously pissed off at how badly the poor guy was libeled in that film.  (But since they’re not, I’ll act in their stead).  Blatty made that up, everybody!!! All of that disgusting stuff came out of Blatty’s head, not Pazuzu’s!!  Just saying!

So I was reading a biographical history of the character.  Unfortunately, it was written back in 1865, in an age where people would write coy little things like, “A popular Christian clergyman, the Rev. Mr. D ----, in a fit of inspirational turgescence and mental explosion ...” and should you wish to verify said “inspirational turgescence” – you’re basically out of luck, because who the heck knows who he’s supposedly quoting?

But what a great turn of phrase!  I would love to use that on somebody.  You know, like you’re on a first date, and the guy is boring you witless with his relentless self-indulgent opinions on everything.  You bat your eyelashes and purr:  “Oh myyyy, what inspirational turgescence!”

Okay, fine if you’re too lazy to look it up:   tur·ges·cence  (tûr-jĕs′əns).  n.  The condition of being swollen, the process of swelling, pomposity; self-importance.  Happy now?

Point is:  the author, Kersey Graves, was prone (in his own variation of turgescence, I would imagine) to write coy little sentences like that, making the heads of his readers ... or more specifically, me ... blow up in frustration.


But back to the Rev. Mr. D ---- of Xenia, Ohio, whoever he was ... this was part of his sermon to a congregation of men, women .. and impressionable young children.  Read this, and you’re thinking, “Wow.  No wonder people walk around filled with such horror and dread ... what a horrible image to lay out in front of them! Everyone you know and love – your spouse, your parents, your siblings – in unspeakable agony, while this awful being is stomping on them, sending geysers of their blood all over his own clothes, with a look of ... delight?? ... on his face.   Because ... why?  They’ve made a mistake?  They did something wrong?  This is their supposed loving deity?  He sounds worse than all of the world’s most evil tyrants rolled up into one ... a demonic creature so horrible you’d beg to escape any universe in which this thing has any place at all.

And where did the Rev. Mr. D ----- get his awful imagery?  Can you just imagine him simply writing out this grotesque sermon?  Surely – you think – he had to have a biblical source of inspiration for this – surely it didn’t come out of his own horribly twisted mind!  And you’d be wrong, of course.

As neither the Torah or the Bible has any such description – the good (and I use that term rather doubtfully) Reverend just plain old made it up ... in the days before blood-soaked horror movies, apparently church on Sundays was the rough equivalent.  But what he did have was Isaiah 45:7.

From the various versions:

I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil: I the Lord do all these things (KJV).
I form the light, and create darkness, I make peace, and create calamity; I, the Lord, do all these things (NKJV).
I form the light and create darkness, I bring prosperity and create disaster; I, the Lord, do all these things (NIV).
The One forming light and creating darkness, causing well-being and creating calamity; I am the Lord who does all these (NASB).
I form light and create darkness, I make weal and create woe, I am the Lord, who does all these things (RSV).

Yes, what the reverend did have was proof that the original texts christians draw from (in this case the old testament, or the Torah) state rather baldly that it is their deity who is the source of all evil, not a separate entity.  Which would certainly explain how the poor, unsuspecting citizens of Xenia, Ohio got hit with such a nightmarish description, although it’s equally astounding that they didn’t all run screaming out the church doors and move to Columbus, where things might have been presented to them more rationally.  No offense to the residents of Xenia, but ... why didn’t you just fire the pulpit-pounding, blood-thirsty fool?  True, they might have – we’ll never know, will we?