The Great Dreaming Tea Experiment

Happy Terminalia.

Well, actually, Terminalia was the 23rd; but I wasn’t online that day. So ... HAPPY TERMINALIA!!!

Back on 07 February 2011, I decided to change my religion to a perpetual worship of Terminus, the God of Boundaries. I announced that the "credo which must appear on the holiday cards which I fully expected my friends and relations to send me each February 23rd (and I’m still waiting): "Concedo nulli". Translation: "I yield to nobody". Each year I preach a sermon to the masses: ‘I VANT TO BE ALOOOOONNNNE!!"

It’s something akin to the official holiday of anti-social, grouchy people like me, who set wide and rigid boundaries around themselves. Love it!!

I’m continuing to read The Plant Spirit Familiar, becoming more and more engrossed with it. I wonder if the entire "wicca" century wasn’t really just an opening door for those of us who are intent on pushing wiccan boundaries back towards truth, angrily and forcefully, if necessary. I was screeching (a few entries ago) about defiantly forbidding the fear-filled beliefs of monotheism to infect our teachings; to question everything; to make certain we knew that our sources weren’t demonized now because christians had infected it with their intense fear of sexuality first.

Penczak has another version of that urge to push back against contemporary wicca: "As witches we are growing away from the model of using plants and tools of all sorts, back to an animistic wisdom, where everything is a potential partner, an ally, a familiar spirit, not a tool." (p. 281)

Considering how long most of us have suffered under others clinging to the (erroneous) belief that human beings are superior to every other living being on the planet – and that includes the planet herself, not just plants, animals, rocks, earth, fire and water … and every other type of resource! - I loved this concise summation of the way things should be.

I am teaching myself the principle behind the Doctrine of Signatures … I am astounded at everything I’m learning about natural spirits. Learned the coven of the guy who wrote it – a literal paragon of non-judgmental virtue, unlike a mess of other people I could name (like me) - isn’t that far away: just past the Methuen border into New Hampshire, in SALEM! (HAHAHA!)

Sorry, the irony of that never fails to hit me in the head. Slightly less than a year ago I was curled up in a fetal position, sucking my thumb and whimpering, "I will never ever EVER go back to Salem!!" – forgetting there were more "Salem’s" than just the Massachusetts one. And so here I am, thinking, "Hmm. I should go to Salem."

So here’s the first recipe I’m going to try: Scullcap. Hops. Valerian. Poppy seeds.

Fine. It WOULD sound disgusting, unless I quickly clear up three misconceptions: a scullcap is not a SKULLcap, we are not going to murder the Yalie valedictorian and chop him into bite-size meaty bits and make a stew out of him, "hops" doesn’t mean "beer" in this context and yes, you can visualize the Wicked Witch of the West crooning, "Poppies! That will put them to sleep! Sleeeeeep," while gleefully waving her mortar and pestle around, red smoke spewing everywhere. Yeah, like THAT happens every time I crush herbs. Red smoke spewing everywhere ... blinding and choking the winged monkeys. Poor li’l guys.

The recipe is for Dreaming Tea, but appears in the book after instructions for both water infusions and decoctions. My first question: so which is it? Do I infuse? Do I ... er ... decoct? Well, here’s my opinion: no time like the present to learn by experience. First step was to order the ingredients, none of which I had on hand, not even the poppy seeds. Here’s hoping the scullcap, hops, valerian and poppy seeds arrive sometime this week. And then I get to figure out what happens after I drink it.
Lastly, I finally had to come to terms with the fact that Massachusetts – despite its horrible history in Salem – still enjoys making life difficult for its witches – athames are illegal here, for some reason no one can explain to me. You can buy KNIVES all over the place, single sided and double sided, but you can’t sell athames here. So here’s my silver athame. It started out its life as a silver letter opener; now its a consecrated athame.

More later.

The Earth Collides with the Moon ... and I Think of Sex

Flipping through the March 2013 issue of Astronomy, we find an interview with Professor Sarah T. Stewart of Harvard who would, I am quite certain, be none too pleased to find herself in a magickal blog between fallen angels and incubi. But – oh well, tra-la-la, she’ll have to get over it. The details originally appeared in Science.

Along with SETI scientist Matija Ćuk, Professor Stewart has proposed a solution to the disputed notion that in Earth’s earliest formative period, she was part of a monumental collision, sending ejected material out into space – which eventually coalesced into the body we know as the moon.

If we temporarily set aside the mythology and only look at the science, some of the data raised by scientists in support of the collision theory include

(1) the volume of water on the planet – they believe the volume better matched a planetary body further away from the sun, which would be explained if a huge collision moved Earth closer to the sun that it had been originally. Another clincher:

(2) the earth and the moon contain identical isotopes.

As for the original story of the collision – I do remember the mythology: Earth and a planet called Tiamat (others say Theia) collided in a gigantic explosion, returning the earth to its molten state and sending a big chunk of itself rolling and spinning out into space, where it became the moon.

But how did the Sumerians know this? Not sure … I want to say that Zecharia Sitchin credited the inhabitants of the supposed Planet X itself – called the Annunaki - with passing the info along, but don’t quote me on that, either.

I may have had lot of respect for the Sumerians, but did I believe Zecharia Sitchin’s Planet X/ Nibiru/ Annunaki story?? No, I did not – or at least, not the “we’re all gonna die!” version of it you see all over the internet. Mainly because of the fact that if Sitchin were correct, we would have seen the planet approaching, coming in out of its 3,600 year-long orbit a long, long time ago. I mean, really, some of these conspiracy theorists are too silly – they seem to believe that a gigantic planet would appear in the skies out of nowhere, and only start causing havoc all over the place when it got within a few miles of Earth. Ain’t gonna happen that way. Hasn’t anyone read the reviews of the movie Melancholia? Every scientist on the planet – not to mention a lot of laypeople as well - made fun of the (complete absence of) astrophysics behind it.

There are telescopes on satellites from every civilized country out there in immediate orbit around Earth – even if the U.S. government decided to keep it a big secret, you don’t think other countries would go along with us, do you? Ha! Trust me, we’re not THAT well liked.

Besides, trying to keep it a secret would be futile anyway: NASA is correct – it would be visible to the naked eye while still a huge distance away, and would be the brightest object in the night sky – again, while still a long, long way away. It could not “hide behind the sun” – given our own orbit, we would have seen it a long time ago. Things that big don’t just “show up” out of nowhere. Nobody could have kept it a secret.

But if you’re interested in the original article on the theory of the moon being spun off from earth following a collision:
Ćuk, M., S. T. Stewart. Making the Moon from a fast-spinning Earth: A giant impact followed by
resonant despinning. Science, 338 (6110), 1047-1052, doi:10.1126/science.1225542, 2012.

And now … ahhh, the joy of returning to the topic of sex.

“GOOD LORD! IS THAT ALL YOU CAN THINK ABOUT??” you shriek.

“Why, yes. Yes it is,” I reply calmly. “That’s all I EVER think about. Morning, noon, night. Always. Sex, sex and more sex.  It’s constant. It’s relentless. It never ends. It’s the exclusive focus of my entire existence. A perpetual Dionysian drool-fest, born of desperation and wanton craving. I’m completely overwhelmed with white hot passion, twenty-four hours a day. I hunger with desire, from sunrise to sunset; I am submersed in raw, untrammeled, raging lust!!”

[PAUSE]

Okay, not really. But why do you even CARE?

Ahem. As I was saying … ahhh, the joy of returning to the topic of sex.

So I was reading the The Plant Spirit Familiar, by Christopher Penczak. Not the first book you would open, were you to be researching incubi, and in fact, I wanted to read about people who could hear plants, trees, flowers, etc. Last time I brought up this topic, I was the only one who could hear trees scream, because, thanks to christians, I had to endure that misery almost every year.

“Oh, PISH-POSH!” snaps the know-it all from Yale. “How could they scream? They don’t have vocal cords!”

(*SLAP!!!!*) (Heh, heh. I always wanted to do that, just slap a pretentious Yalie upside the head, for the fun of it. Don’t worry, Harvard, you’re next).

“The ‘scream’ is my interpretation of what I feel when I’m near a christian christmas tree lot, Yalie boy,” sayeth I in annoyance. “Pressure. Frantic pressure. The urge to run, to escape. Panic. To cover my ears or to cry. Physical pain. It’s horrible; a horrible sensation. I wouldn’t wish it on anyone. It’s the christians who aren’t emotionally or mentally – or spiritually - evolved enough to be aware of the damage, destruction and death they cause to other living beings. And then they dress the corpse up like a Las Vegas showgirl and prop the dead body up in their living rooms. It’s horrifying. How can those evil christians not HEAR what they’ve done? When I was a child, I’d actually throw up.”

But I digress.

All of a sudden I flip open the book, see a chapter on “Sexual Congress with the Green”, and I’m reading about incubi. I’m sure your first thought (as was mine, I’m ashamed to say, so I can’t really pick on you) is, “He’s having sex with PLANTS?!?” No, he is not, so you can stop trying to imagine the logistics and visualizing yourself covered in grass stains with thorn scratches in peculiar places on your body – unless you enjoy that sort of thing. (And not that there’s anything wrong with that!) What he IS talking about are spirits associated with various trees and plants.

Before that, however, he devoted a paragraph to the history of the incubi/succubae. Made me smile.

“Modern psychologists speculate that the mythos of the succubae/incubi stemmed from religious guilt over erotic dreams and men’s nocturnal emissions, and provided an explanation for both sleep paralysis and pregnancy out of wedlock. The concept of something evil seducing one into the pleasure not normally allowed to them by those who felt it was wrong to experience and enjoy such things, provided them with the opportunity to have the experience but ultimately take no responsibility for it, though such confessions usually led to other problems, such as clergy believing such people were bewitched. Some even speculate that the mythos acted as a coping mechanism to help people deal with issues of rape and sexual abuse, particularly when the clergy themselves were the perpetrators. Devout parishioners couldn’t face that fact, so the myth of sexual demons was created.”
Penczak, Christopher. The Plant Spirit Familiar: Green Totems, Teachers and Healers on the Path of the Witch. Copper Cauldron Publishing. 2011. Page 262.

THANK YOU!!!!

Although actually, I tend to think that last speculation on clergy being the perpetrators came from the historical record I published here earlier of a nun’s complaint against a priest and his response that an incubi who looked like him had done the deed, not him. (And the convent believed his version of the story over the nun’s “That letch humped me like a dog!” version. Oh, what else is new?)

What Penczak does point out – and I now want more information on this:

“If you go into surviving tribal shamanic traditions, you will find the concept of the shaman’s spirit lover, or spirit wife, as a primary inner world tutelary spirit and initiator. You will find a similar concept in the Celtic faery traditions of a Faery Lover, Faery Bride and every Faery Queen/King mating,”

and …

“Sexual union of this nature, i.e. the transmission of such energy between incarnate and discarnate entities, was both initiatory and sacramental, benefitting both entities in their spiritual evolution and development. Only in a dark age, where such knowledge is lost, would potentially holy contact with the spirit world be interpreted as demonic.”

THANK YOU!!

I hadn’t thought of these days as “The Dark Ages”, but from our perspective they really are, aren’t they? Those westerners whose beliefs pre-dated or stood outside of monotheism really were made to suffer for a long, long time. Only now are we regaining any space for our own beliefs, and grudgingly at that. In the news as I write this are the stories of Fox News jumping up and down and squealing hysterically over a decision made by the University of Missouri:

Students at University of Missouri don't need to cram for exams that fall on Wiccan and Pagan holidays, now that the school has put them on par with Christmas, Thanksgiving and Hanukah.

The university’s latest “Guide to Religions: Major Holidays and Suggested Accommodations” — designed to help faculty know when and when not to schedule exams and other student activities — lists eight Wiccan and Pagan holidays and events right alongside more mainstream occasions. It's all part of the school's effort to include everyone's beliefs, although some critics say listing every holiday associated with fringe belief systems is a bit much.*

(*And by “some critics”, Fox News meant, of course, Fox News, “the official mouthpiece of the lower intellectual echelons of christian fundamentalism”).

Penczak also wrote The Green Lovers, which I want to read next.

Finally, another idea I hadn’t thought of is learning the skill of creating an “artificial familiar”. Also known as a “tulpa” in Tibet, or a “thought form”, this is basically a being that you create with your own mind and will for a specific purpose. We already know what the specific purpose is; now, we need to learn how to do it.

More later!