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.
