Wandering Heathen

Things have come to a turning point. I can be pretty stubborn sometimes, but there are only so many times the universe can give you some giant wake up calls before you actually start …to wake up.

These wake up calls came in a couple of forms. First was the break up with my girlfriend of a year, so far the longest romantic relationship I’ve had in my young-adult life. Second is the boon of a new studio for myself completely dedicated to artwork. This finally allows me to pursue my artistic passions, and I’m finding that barely a week in I can keep time with the muse. But I’ve struck a sudden balance with personal finances and artistic needs that I’m able to grow at almost an unhindered pace.

The last is the latest book I finished reading this month. I’m reading a lot, but this is the one that’s made the most impact… Sex At Dawn.

I’ll try to summarize the book briefly for the benefit of background—basically, this is book of anthropology, culture studies, gender studies, and human psychology rolled into one, with a cultural appeal at the very end. At the center is monogamy and modern culture’s demand on both male and female to remain monogamous. It throws that cultural expectation into complete doubt with loads of evolutionary biology and social studies that basically proposes that human’s aren’t physiologically or psychologically (to a point) wired up for monogamy. It explains that sex as a cultural phenomenon was treated radically different in pre-agrarian societies and draws on current-day isolated cultures as examples—polyamory, polygamy, communal parenting, etc.

This book left a firm impression on me. Having been raised in a Christian home, I absorbed all the heritage of a monogamous culture and a religious culture that only reinforces this demand. Further, I was blessed (I will say blessed) with parents that are in a strong and loving relationship. The depth of their relationship left a deep desire in me to have the same, and thus I abstained from all “unnecessary” relationships in the quest for a soulmate.

While that now sounds pretty immature, at the time it was my greatest quest in life. And subsequently each relationship that I went through, even as a teenager, became a kind of heartbreak that threw into question my whole cosmic worldview—or, at least, wore it down bit by bit. Before I met Natasha I was at the verge of giving up an this whole quest, and even though I was much older and wiser when I met her, I nonetheless wanted—and believed I wanted—a solid, lasting relationship I could always count on. I was convinced that if this one didn’t work out, I’d have no choice but to give up the ideal and become like every other male: sexually frustrated, emotionally repressed, and only able to handle short term relationships that may or may not be shallow.

While Sex At Dawn doesn’t rail against monogamy per se—it rails against the way it’s culturally forced upon us—and I do believe that singular relationships can happen and are a wonderful and beautiful thing, it delivered a few bombshells that I’m having to mull over. Mostly having to do with my sex life as a human male and how it interfaces with my psychologically and spiritually.

I couldn’t help but think about how this book would influence my spiritual quest into paganism and magic. While paganism is not by any means pre-agrarian, which is what the book is interested in asking questions about, I think it’s safe to argue that the pagan views of sexuality are and were much different than they are as sanctioned by the modern Abrahamic faiths. Additionally, my quest into magic and magically identity has also put my gender on the table: my male gender. At the moment I happen to be reading Iron John, which is a book solely about the male gender and in a way re-genderizing it in a post-feminist world. I always knew that the culturally imposed conditions of maleness were false and shallow, but in my teenage mind I didn’t quite know what to replace them with. Now, with an understanding of what it means to be a sexual male and a spiritual male, I’m finding that so much of what makes me who I am is not innately false or wrong. Strength, courage, and the rush headlong into adventure are virtues and ones that should not so easily be replaced by the other virtues of gentleness, kindness, and the softly spoken word. There is as much place for energy and power as there is vulnerability. With my studies in magic I’ve gradually realized that to be firm in ones’ own identity is so much of what it means to be magical first place. Neo-pagan magic is often heavily Goddess-oriented, and rightly so in a world of patriarchal Father-God religions. But the place of the male God in magic is as firm and as powerful as the Goddess, and understanding that this is a good, beautiful (and handsome!) thing is an important mental and spiritual leap to make.

As for Sex At Dawn and how this may influence me spiritually, I hesitate to say completely here because I’m still working through the intricacies. But I may say that where so much of my life spiritually used to be characterized by denial, perhaps the next chapter—and it does seem to be very clear that this is a new chapter—should be characterized by what I affirm. Following one’s own heart, wherever, to whomever, and to whatever it may lead.

This is at once a frightening and exciting thing. Frightening because it requires me to drive straight into what I had so long avoided and believed was wrong for myself and others. Exciting, because it is new and is beyond my wildest imaginations. Yet if there is any reason why I am here right now, it is to learn and to grow. If this is the direction on which the leaves of spring will fall, then I will follow. I enter it soberly, knowing that the power of the heart weighs heavily on all… so I beg for humility. But I understand also that this is where I cannot turn back. This is where I must grow.

This is a new chapter. As if to usher in Spring itself, Imbolc is coming, as well as my own birthday. If my desire would be actualized this year in 2011, then may it find me walking this path with a grin, an open heart, and a hand full of those words which will guide us to wisdom.

With the ending of this relationship I’ve found myself not going through grief—in truth, this process was done weeks ago, almost as if I was anticipating the end. Instead, I’ve found myself going through a different process. Wondering what’s next.

So much expectation, desire, and self-vision was bottled up in this relationship. With this relationship gone, it is as if that bottle has been smashed, and all the contents have been left pouring out on the floor.

Of course there was the dark period. When the rumblings of this coming change were felt, it already seemed as if the world was about to crash. In truth, these “crash” was just the foreshadowing. So in actuality there has been relatively little sadness on my part, perhaps only because there was little more to give.

I was left feeling almost energized. Not happy, mind you, and I was certainly confused, but I was nonetheless energized as if an old fire had been re-stoked and starting to come alight. The confusion was the only thing that kept it from outright bursting. But even on the day of the change, opportunities fell into my lap that I’d been waiting months for, and yet had not been actively seeking. Maybe it was a wake-up call?

I’ve started to consider how I want to resume my studies. I had let this blog languish for awhile. Lack of time and lack of energy had put me up to doing other things, and relationships take up time. The rhythm I had cultivated for myself in the period when she had moved to San Francisco but I hadn’t yet—well, that was a remarkably productive time. This is only, I think, because it takes work to be in a relationship. Especially the kind that I wanted to construct.

Now I feel like I’m playing catchup. I’ve read a lot of books fully or partially since I last wrote about books. My small library has grown by a few notable volumes since I got to the Bay. I happened to find a one-volume of the Nag Hammadi Scriptures and a book called the Quadrivium in a local bookshop. I haven’t even finished all my books from the desert, nevermind the ones she gave me to read.

I checked in with some important sources though. My feeling, and the word, is that this is a time for patience. Not necessarily a time for slowness, but a time for careful consideration and a lack of expectations. Of receiving whatever comes, and learning from it all. I have the feeling I’m at the beginning of a multi-year phase, something around five or so. Regardless of the time, the important thing to realize is that there is a simple regimen that needs to be cultivated. I’ve wondered if I should follow the curriculum that was suggested in the Magician’s Companion, but I feel that following it to a T would missing the point. It was, after all, a suggested curriculum. A brilliant one, but a suggested one only.

I feel like I have a grip on the places I need to start for my learning, however. But one of the lessons I have to keep in mind that I most remain humble, and this is not a time for hasty action. Decisive action, yes. But the subtle kind, and the kind that I know that will tend well to my innermost parts.

So many projects, and so many books. So many possibilities. I will have to take them all one at a time.

I moved to San Francisco in order to follow a relationship that had begun in the desert. I loved, and still do love, a wonderful girl who taught me a lot about love, life, and spirituality. She was the reason I could work up the courage to jump into the world of spiritual mystery and discover what it meant for me in this life.

Unfortunately, over the course of this weekend that relationship ended. It was mutual, and it was agreeable. We did it both with clear minds and clear hearts, and did so believing it would be the best for both of us. Our friendship remains intact.

Now I’m left wondering what my next steps are. I was so absorbed in what I believed the relationship had to be that I missed so much of what was already there. I have a long history with expectations, both for myself and others, and I’ve found that expectations for your desires are they themselves often the things that keep one from having their desires fulfilled. It’s a cruel game we play on ourselves.

While that may not necessarily be the reason why me and the other have parted ways romantically, nonetheless it’s caused me to stop and think. It’s not the first time I’ve had to go through this proces, though this time it feels different than the others. Somehow, actually, it feels like a new beginning. Like a great clutch let go of my back, and now my shoulders are free to move about.

Perhaps that clutch was only my self.

I have a firm belief that we come into this life with lessons we have to learn. Often times those lessons directly come from past mistakes and past lives that we’ve left unfinished. I don’t have any kind of firm metaphysical belief on the subject, and in a way I feel like a firm belief on the metaphysics is an adventure in missing the point. The point is the lesson that we learn and the story we tell with our lives, here and now.

Love is never a lost cause. Sometimes, expectations are. It requires work to maintain a relationship, but not at the cause of wounding one’s own self or the other, and especially when love is involved. I had to make this choice for myself and another person once—now it’s happening again, but I’m on the receiving side. I’m humble enough to say thank you—and I do—and I realize now that she was right.

Where does this leave me? In a natural place. In a comfortable place. What I now know about myself is that life is not a linear journey. It cannot be. We romanticize faith and love to such an extent that we kill them before they’re full born, and the real thing passes us by. For each partner I’ve had, I’ve learned something new, no matter how long or how short I was with them. They are like nodes along a storyline, all unconnected in and of themselves, but woven together in my mind, and in my heart, like some kind of thin web.

I’m happy to say there’s no sadness. I’m also happy to say that this won’t be the last time I see her. Perhaps the only thing that ended was my expectation for myself and her. To walk the path is to walk humbly, with your walking stick, through the leaves. The path is worn but not well-tended. It gives you only what you are willing to give it, and as such you find that it is a mirror. To walk humbly is to follow your heart while still not knowing where you are going, and to know that there is no danger outside of what you yourself are willing to face.

We cannot construct our lives or our faith. It is they that construct us. To follow who we are, not what we believe about ourselves, is what it means to live. Maybe to live fully.

I happen to work in the heart of San Francisco’s financial district, and I’ve been delighted to find that there’s a farmers’ market in the plaza area next door every Thursday. Appropriate enough, considering my last entry on urban life and how it meshes with pagan spirituality, I’m treated every Thursday to the site of fresh vegetables and fruit. They fill up the aisles of the small, multi-level plaza like some kind of invasive, earthy bacteria, still covered in the dirt they came from, reminding me that not all that makes us human (and perhaps much that is) isn’t made of glass on concrete.

That aside, occasionally the folks who run the farmers’ market sell handmade wares too. This time I happened to notice a redheaded man at a table covered in scarves, many with tartan patterns.

I idled, and so he struck up a conversation. They were cashmere scarves made in Scotland, he explained in a light Scottish accent. If his accent was a beer, it would have been a hop-filled ale. With all the department and brand stores that surround my office, the air of legitimacy and closeness to origin was a welcome change. I had been looking for a scarf recently since it was getting colder, and happened to look through of the patterns he had. Then he explained that the particular pattern I was holding was the same pattern the Scots had worn on their kilts when they fought the English.

I have a soft spot for the Celts and their heritage anyway, but this made me stop. This was a pattern that had soaked up blood, and carried a people to eventual victory. Suddenly I felt that the simple scarf, because of its pattern, could carry potent energy and power. The man continued to explain in the slightest of a wry and ironic grin that another pattern, one that had already been bought by a number of the business folk walking past, belonged to the Stewart family and was “what they wore when they went to have their heads cut off.”

I would like to say at this point that I have a deep fascination with memory. To me, memory is not a phenomenon simply in our brains, but is something that we project into the world and that we carry with us. Memory affects us as much as we affect it, and my readings in many a rogue scientist’s book suggest that memory may have subtle affects in the physical world too. Whether it does or not, it is nonetheless a powerful and human concept, and one that should be familiar to anyone who practices “magic”.

I would go so far to say that magic and the manipulation of memory could be the same thing. With intention we imbue a kind of memory onto an object for ourselves and for others. Like a symbol or a word, that object can radiate that meaning back at us then, as if it was a container or the meaning had stuck to it like a dusty residue. Practitioners would call this “charging,” but objects can become charged by themselves through proximity (think of a soldier’s pack or a sailor’s compass). Depending on the power and depth of that meaning the effect can be solitary and personal, or, if it is commonly shared, it can halt a whole group of people midstep. It’s not the kind of power we usually associate with the word “power,” as if it need be an active physical force, but it is power nonetheless. I would say this is universal among humans, from the tribal to the urban. We all rally around flags, heirlooms, and symbols. Even physical places, artificial or not, can radiate this kind of mnemonic power (the Celts had a concept for those naturally mnemonic places, too).

This particular tartan stopped me still when I realized the meaning it must’ve held for a people, and one that carries history close to their hearts. I have also been interested lately in the spiritual nature of the male gender, and on realizing that this pattern’s origins was probably in the hands and spinning wheels of women, who then gave it to their men to wear while they fought off not-so-distant oppressors… well, that’s a lot of memory woven into a single bit of cloth.

I am not scottish by major ancestry, but I am largely Scandinavian, and these are two branches from the same trunk. While I did not think by any stretch I could lay a claim to what the cloth means for the Scottish people, I did hope that I could adopt its colors and see that meaning play out in me—a sort of mnemonic proxy. I carefully watched as the scarf passed through the hands of an indecisive asian lady who seemed to be looking for the appropriate color of navy blue for her taste, probably realizing that the tartan’s true nature was much more sanguine than its color. As soon as she put it back on the table I grabbed it, paid the Scotsman, and briskly walked away.

I hope one day I can flesh out my thoughts on memory more deeply, and the tartan was only one example. It is such a human and natural concept that we often miss it, or mistake the object that retains the memory for the memory itself. This is an important distinction because the signifier and the signified are not one and the same. I would say there is something such as the poetic signifier, or a signifier that does not différ the signified such as in normal language, but is in use by artists, poets, and any kind of spiritual practitioner, and it electrifies the relatedness of meaning into a kind of overdrive. One thing refers to another, which refers to another, along an infinite chain of meaning. It is as if it swings the other way than in the case of deconstruction, and instead of delaying meaning, pushes it forward and through the chain. This is why I think poems have the power they do, or painting, or any kind of similar “poetic,” artistic, or mystical activity. For me, I would define them as things that generate meaning or memory, as if these things were in fact a physical “stuff”.

Yet it is not so much the poetic signifier itself, but the intention with which it is used. Maybe also, perhaps, in the way that intention is reiterated or repeated. Like a tartan pattern finding its way from the grassy plains of Scotland to the shoulder of a boy somewhere in San Francisco, wondering aloud about the power of memory.

My apologies on the recent silence. I moved from Tucson to San Francisco this past month, and so the silence on my part here is not due to lack of thoughts (the contrary!) nor a sign of life or non-life on this blog; it is merely a sign of my life transition and the busyness that ensued. There are more thoughts here than I can count that I’d like to write here actually, and I’m struggling with the way that time compresses itself in the Bay Area. Aside from simply adjusting, my time is often taken up by my new job (which I thankfully love) or spending time with my lovely girlfriend, Natasha. My blog entries therefore may be shorter, though I hope to keep their frequency the same as I gradually fall into what’s to be my normal life rhythm.

Awhile ago I posted on Twitter that I was considering what it meant to be an urban pagan. Since moving to San Francisco, a dense town of closely contained parks, steel, glass, and concrete, I’ve come to gradually wrestle with the nature of place. The nature of place has been on my mind a lot especially since I’ve moved into a new flat in a shared living space and, with all the moving of furniture and normal settling in, also made an effort to be sensitive to spaces and the memories they retain. Chiefly, my space. Knowing that my occupation is mentally taxing and that I needed a safe and rejuvenating area, I set about making sure that my home, while confined to one lofted room, would no doubt be a place of safety and subtle, regenerative power.

It has been slow going. Furniture is in transition, not everything is settled—, and I overextended myself a little in cleansing it from its last state in terms of both memory (via general intention and some sage) and physicality. I redid the hardwood floors, painted almost all the walls, and repainted the loft. The space impacts you immediately when you walk in, and I hope it can be as much a rest for me as it can be for any guest I invite in. Still, transitioning is hard.

Being an urban pagan is also an interesting identity choice, and not necessarily one I choose to take for myself, at least in name. Neopaganism is deeply earth-based and rightly so, but how does one structure their spirituality in the world of concrete? Technologicism, or techno-paganism, I feel is a romance that can be tacked on without understanding the full ramifications of meshing machine (a singular identity and style of consciousness in itself) with organic gray matter. Writing poems/incantations/verses in ASCII doesn’t cut it. I don’t think the term “pagan”, even in loose usage, really works here. Paganism runs away from the concrete, steel, and glass, and looks for the Earth-mother. Structured religion is the religion of the city even dating to medieval times. The city’s center was always the cathedral. To be a “Heathen” in the first place means, literally, to be dwelling among plants, or the country. You do not share the religion of those who live in civilization’s walls: the city.

So what do I do here in terms of my spiritual identity?

San Francisco, like most big cities, attracts people because it is a place to carve out your dreams. My occupation is only an occupation—I’ve come here to be with my girlfriend, to practice art, and to write and tell stories. San Francisco is a great venue for that, but in its activity and opportunity—not in terms of its energy. It is not a regenerative place. People get burnt out here very easily and often without knowing it. If I am to be a “pagan” in this city—or, put it this way—one who retains the power of their self and, in my case, the Muse which often possesses me, then it means I must be more intentional than ever about who I am, what my practices are, and how I practice them. I must at once be able to express and absorb without ever becoming either too full or too empty. Money is only one concern—the more important a concern is how you keep your soul.

For me, nature will always have its place. Even as a teenager I saw wisdom in the trees in the backyard, and trees in the wild have a distinct kind of hum to them—a whisper that is so low you can only hear it if you sink to their level and, perhaps, see the world through their eyes. It’s hard to listen to any tree in the city over the noise of the cars—or even the concrete (consider what kind of noise concrete sidewalks have). So it will be good to retreat from the city, and both me and Natasha will probably do so whenever we have the chance.

But as for urban paganism, the question becomes how you create that space for yourself when so many others rise and fall—and do quickly, sometimes without it. Maybe you could describe it in the terms of their own personal space: chiefly, it collapsed. There’s the academic argument whether humans were made for the city (or vice versa) in the first place, and while I may take up that debate eventually, for me it’s not practical. I have to deal with the city as it is, and find myself who can at once harness and be submissive to the powers of nature while being in a world that is mostly artificial. For now, it may be a struggle, but I think, as with many things, it may be a challenge of balance. At least, that will be part of it.

I’ve read a number of great books the past few months. In trying to keep a steady stream of information related to science, spirituality, and myth, I’m constantly looking at serious reading material. Since I haven’t been able to digest them and write about them here individually, I’m going to list them here along with the thoughts that came to me while reading them.

The Oracle by William J. Broad

The Oracle of Delphi, human mistress of the god Apollo, had the power to communicate his prophecies and advice. Accounts from the time describe how she breathed in vapors rising from the temple floor before communing with the god. But modern scholars have long discounted these reports. Broad, a writer at the New York Times, tells the story of scientists who worked from subtle clues scattered through the ancient literature and the landforms near Delphi to uncover evidence that explains the oracle’s powers.

From Scientific American via Amazon.com

This book was a spectacular read, especially for me back in July where I harbored a very skeptical, somewhat troubled mindset. I knew very little of the Oracle at Delphi, so I was learning as much about the ancient stories surrounding her as I was the modern consensus and re-discovery of her existence and practices. The book functions like a fact-finding journey, following two unlikely scientists as they revisit the subject of the Oracle, who had long been seen as a fraud and myth of ancient Greece. Set against the background of her role in ancient Mediterranean society, the book was dynamic and raised great questions about the culture of the scientific community and how it goes about making its conclusions about seemingly unlikely phenomena.

For me, it was a great reflection on the nature and limits of reductionism, which requires an explanation by breaking things down into their simplest forms. While these two scientists found everything that was recorded about the Oracle and her practices—from the crack in the Temple floor to the noxious vapors that seemed to cause her reverie—none of this added up to her gift of foresight, which was just as well documented by the same seemingly discredited sources prior to the modern investigation. Without more information on the inner workings of the Oracle’s tradition, which was kept completely secret, modern science simply can’t account for these powers, despite that they were documented. Late in the book, Broad reveals how the numerous scientists, all experts in their respective fields, found a strong disillusionment with the response to their findings.

From a pagan perspective, the probabilities of the Oracle’s power is unsurprising. My thought is that there was a great feminine tradition behind this woman’s role. For it to have persisted through the generations like it did, there was certainly a backbone to it—one that I don’t think has been reproduced, at least in terms of its influence or grandeur, in modern paganism since. The nature of that backbone we may never know—and somehow I wonder if it is for good reason. One of the lessons the Oracle seems to teach by example is that we are receive the knowledge we are ready for.

Science and the Akashic Field by Ervin Laszlo

In Science and the Akashic Field, philosopher and scientist Ervin Laszlo conveys the essential element of this information field in language that is accessible and clear. From the world of science he confirms our deepest intuitions of the oneness of creation in the Integral Theory of Everything. We discover that, as philosopher William James stated, “We are like islands in the sea, separate on the surface but connected in the deep.”

From Amazon.com

An excursion into quantum physics, entanglement, information theory, and other heady concepts, this book is light in weight but heavy in material. It’s made for a general audience, not a scientific one, and the skeptic in me wants to read deeper into Laszlo’s scientific justifications for his thoughts (he calls it the Connectivity Hypothesis). However, the overall stroke has deep implications and will come to no surprise as people in the occultist community.

I’m on the fence about the Akashic Records and their existence. I actually have a deep philosophical interest in memory and its place in identity, relationships, and ethics, so the idea that everything is connected via deep memory field (what Laszlo calls the “Akashic Field” or A-field , borrowing the ancient Indian term) is extremely interesting. The picture he paints is of a holographic universe that can store the information of any and every particle and its actions, like one can mathematically deduce the original position of a rock in a pond by its ripples. The book might be a bit of a scientific minefield, as it covers deep and complex subjects quickly for the layman’s benefit, and I’m sure the experts would object to some of its statements. That said, Laszlo seems to be able to back up his hypothesis, as the back of the book is riddled with footnotes and citations on more in-depth sources.

If the hypothesis is true, it very well might be the kind of intuitive, sweeping suggestion that brings about leaps in science. Unfortunately this is only the kind of thing, from a scientific perspective, that time will tell.

Biocentrism by Robert Lanza

In this paradigm, life is not an accidental byproduct of the laws of physics. Biocentrism takes the reader on a seemingly improbable but ultimately inescapable journey through a foreign universe—our own—from the viewpoints of an acclaimed biologist and a leading astronomer. Switching perspective from physics to biology unlocks the cages in which Western science has unwittingly managed to confine itself. Biocentrism will shatter the reader’s ideas of life–time and space, and even death. At the same time it will release us from the dull worldview of life being merely the activity of an admixture of carbon and a few other elements; it suggests the exhilarating possibility that life is fundamentally immortal.

From the book’s back cover

Before skeptics start objecting to the last sentence in that synopsis, I encourage them to read the book. It’s a great integrative look at the quantum world, how it interfaces with biology, and also a bit of a look in the mirror for modern scientific perspective. It might as well be a companion book to Science and the Akashic Field actually, since it deals with many of the same specific experiments and concepts. However, instead of going deeper and positing the idea of a “memory field”, it goes upward into the realm of biology and the senses. The overall idea is that our worldview is innately shaped by the nature of our senses (duh) and that “quantum weirdness” suggests that reality may function on very different principles. The radicalness of the book is in its overall suggestion that consciousness may be the defining feature of the universe, not the other way around—such that if you had an object, say, a ball in a room, being observed by no one but you, and then walked out of the room, the ball would cease to exist (at least as far as our senses are concerned).

The value of this book is its shift in perspective from one that is physics-centric, that we exist in an inert world that we actively manipulate, to bio-centric (hence the title)—that our mere presence causes reality to fall into place as we understand it, becoming “concrete” only when we would expect it to. Together with Laszlo’s book, a picture could by painted of the world that is anathema to typical college science, but is familiar and unsurprising to spiritualists—or, perhaps, the Oracle of Delphi.

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The interesting bit about all of this is that I’m finding these books, written by different authors and, in some many cases, from different walks of life (though these ones are particularly science-based), are wrapping in on themselves. These are no doubt the renegades of modern science; radical in their writings yet still riding the line’s edge of contemporary evidence. They’ll be easily dismissed by armchair skeptics, and even some of the experts.

For those of spiritual interest though, I don’t think its healthy to commit to books like these as “evidence” for spiritual practice or beliefs. Even Ervin Laszlo describes his book as not so much of a theory as it is a pre-theory, a “fable”. I’m not interested in so-called quantum mysticism, which seeks to conflate the spiritual with a field of science that is still very young and not entirely understood even by the scientists. The spiritual life should have a good component of staying informed, but the conclusion is not the point of what we do. It is about the journey. My belief is that if we forget that, we are missing the entire point.

A few days ago I spotted an article on CNN about how Druidry has become an officially recognized religion in Britain. Aside from smiling at the photo of gray-haired men in the snow with staffs and Stonehenge in the background, I thought it was a great development for inclusion and, for people of alternative or lesser-recognized faiths, a great political win. Nothing less than a step towards the mainstream.

A few days later, I spotted an opinion column in response to this on the Daily Mail by Melanie Philips, completely blasting the development. I was slightly shocked at the writer’s venom in the article, seemingly directed at the religion itself. Now that I am on Twitter (heathenwanderer) and hooked into all the various #atheism and #paganism hashtags, I saw a lot of people of the druidic and related colors angered by the article.

Here’s some pieces from it:

Will someone please tell me this is all a joke. Until now, Druids have been regarded indulgently as a curious remnant of Britain’s ancient past, a bunch of eccentrics who annually dress up in strange robes at Stonehenge to celebrate the summer solstice.

However, according to the Charity Commission, they are to be recognised as a religion and, as a result, afforded charitable status, with the tax exemptions and other advantages that follow.

If the Druids qualify as a religion, can other cults such as the Scientologists be far behind?

Can it be long, indeed, before the wise and learned theologians of the Charity Commission similarly grant charitable status to sorcery, witchcraft or even the Jedi — the fictional Star Wars ‘religion’ which the 2001 census recorded as having no fewer than 390,127 adherents in England and Wales.

The whole thing is beyond absurd. But it is also malevolent. For it is all of a piece with the agenda by the oh-so politically correct Charity Commission to promote the fanatical religious creed of the Left — the worship of equality.

On first reading the article I thought there must have been some reason for her venom, which especially appears in the last third of the article. I think part of it was political, and understandably so. First, I’m an American, so I realized that this involves British politics that is beyond me. What I found was that Melanie Phillips’s response was in part political. She was angered that Druids could gain charity status while independent schooling had taken a back seat:

The Commission was primed by Labour for this attempt to restructure society back in 2006, when charity law was redrawn to redefine ‘public benefit’ as helping the poor.

This put the independent schools in the front line of attack, since education was no longer itself considered a benefit — as it had been since time immemorial — but only insofar as it furthered the ideology of ‘equality’.

Thus, we have arrived at the extraordinary situation where some of these schools, which have delivered such inestimable benefit to the nation, face the loss of their charitable status, which is to be given instead to people who dance naked around stones and worship the sun.

The malicious comment about sun worshiping aside, I would be angered too if, let’s face it, minority religions gained financially beneficial statuses while educational institutions, which should benefit everyone, were stripped of theirs.

However, I was still interested to find that not only was there a lot of fact bending in terms of her view of Druidry and its pratices, some of what she declared about religion was simply untrue:

Elevating them to the same status as Christianity is …an attack upon the very concept of religion itself.

This is because Druidry is simply not a religion. Now, it’s true that religion is notoriously difficult to define. But true religions surely rest on an established structure of traditions, beliefs, literature and laws.

Above all, they share a belief in a supernatural deity (or more than one) that governs the universe.

False—not all major religions worship a deity: Buddhism. While Buddha to nonadherents looks like a sacred deity, he is an awakened teacher—no more, no less. There are no claims to divine nature—only divine achievement. And Buddhism is a well established world-wide religion of the same caliber as the three Western Abrahamic faiths.

Further, Druidry is very, very old, if you want to talk about time-honored tradition. It once did have an established structure, and that structure was embedded in ancient Celtic society. Some scholarly interpretations see them functioning much like priests. Granted, modern Druidism is (at least I would say) a reconstruction of its former self. The underpinnings that defined it within the ancient Celtic culture are not there in the same way they are now—perhaps at all—and simply because the ancient Celts don’t exist anymore as they once did. On top of that, the reason why it seems so flimsy to non-adherents—and perhaps why modern Druidry may only be a shadow of its ancient self—is because writing was strictly for mystical purposes and the Druids never wrote anything about themselves down.

All this said, I try not to think about the difficulty it can be to identify one’s self full-heartedly as a believer in the alternative. I can only say that I admire these people who decided to take it to the top and reinstate Druidry as an official religion in the country that is its origin (in theory). Ironically, this kind of development would be the first step towards the Druidic faith and practice becoming structured in the way Philips is critiquing it as not being. Any foreign practice seems strange—this is a simple fact of human discrimination, the nature of the practice aside. Christianity too was once a cult, and lacked an “established structure of traditions, beliefs, literature and laws,” which is apparently our standard for all realistic belief. It was a submovement that mingled with a number of other “cults” and became a favorite of the Hellenized and Roman elite.

Ironically, I think that the moment it became an official religion in 400 AD with the rise of Constantine, it lost its heart and soul. The stew of freethought allows for the “weird” to perpetuate unchecked, but it also allows the new and possible to be tried and stretched without limits. This is healthy for any kind of new thought, spiritual or otherwise. It is ironic that the standard this writer is putting on this brand-new religion is the very standard that would otherwise keep it from being mainstream had it not been officially recognized. She damns it for being a cult when it has just made a step from being more than a cult. All belief systems start this way, regardless of how “weird” you think them to be. Zoroaster was once nothing more than a strange idealist with an excellent skill at debate, and Jesus a wandering preacher who told his message to the public solely in imaginitive stories. To demand “official credentials” from these characters would be laughable—this is what the Pharisess tried to get out of Jesus and never could.

Belief always starts as a “weird” thought. How it comes to inform our lives and morality is more to the critique of history than any temporal individual. And I’m not sure if I would be such a proponent of “structured” religion and its supposed moralities anyway.

Over time, I’ve studied the value of language—not academically, but as an amateur reader in things like semiotics and deconstruction. I like to think that I understand how language forms our worldview, our culture, and our biases. And, of course, when you understand how something shapes you, you can start shaping it.

One of my early ideas when I embarked on this new spiritual journey was to create my own language for mystical and expressive purposes. This came to me partially because I’m a writer, and I’ve created fictional languages before. The ideas of incantations, prayers, even simple poems, attracted me as a kind of spiritual expression. While being in tune with things like plants (I garden constantly), or a track of earth, or even a concept or a time of day, my first impulse was to speak to it. This is not an uncommon thing in this kind of spirituality—there is very little difference between a poem and a spell. In some cases they might as well be the same thing.

But I found that I was uncomfortable doing it in English. English is a rough language, confusing and confused with lots of idiosyncrasies that can be exploited by poets, but also can be frustrating in the limitations they impose. For instance, I dearly wish English had a gender-neutral personal pronoun. This is why it always feels wrong to call God “It”, as opposed to “He” or “She”. “It” doesn’t convey the personable qualities that the other pronouns do, but you can’t use those without imposing a gendered God (a point of contention for Feminists).

So I decided to start from the ground up, and create my own.

Maybe it’s overkill, but from a traditional mystical sense it’s perfectly reasonable. “Magical” tools are often separated from common every-day tools due to a concept of “charge” or other specialness that makes them unique and useful to mysterious purposes. The Wiccan athame, or any ritual dagger, is an easy example. But for a way to express one’s self that is set completely to their own, reflective of their own beliefs and notions of the world—I found that really compelling.

Like I’ve said, this isn’t my first time creating a language. I created one for my sci-fi novel, Children of Falin, a good two to four years ago (a very Tolkien thing to do, I guess). I based it on Latin, since Latin is the language of the Church and the novel was all about critiquing the history of the Church. It’s an entirely speakable language, complete with grammar, genders (something you’d get in Spanish or Italian), and a unique set of language biases that’s reflective of the story itself. The language reflects the rigid caste system that the race in the novel is bound to.

For this language though, I wanted to start in a vacuum as much as possible. I say “as much as possible” because it’s really impossible to completely escape language bias. The fact that I was born as an English speak will subtly influence any language I create, no matter how wild it is. But I wanted to regress as much as possible and create something that was not just structurally different, but conceptually different. Think of it as creating a tool. The more finely tuned the tool is, the more finely tuned the results can be—in theory.

I started this back in April. So far, the language hasn’t progressed very far beyond a few words, much less the alphabet. I kept rewriting the structure when I thought of a new concept that I wanted to integrate. I thought first about how I wanted it to sound, and drawing from my own ancestral heritage, I thought it should have some influences of Gaelic and German, but have a kind of smoothness of the tongue you find in something like French, or even a fictional language like Elvish. Its structure or words would have no Indo-European roots. It wouldn’t be based on another language, like the language in Children of Falin was based on Latin. I would not just be making words, but the roots of words.

What eventually arrived at—I think—is a final draft of the alphabet and basic roots, or “Elements” that will make up much larger and more complex words. The alphabet alone is a project because of the interrelatedness of the consonants. Every consonant is assigned to one of six elements, and based on their position within the element, they may have a relationship to another element. Usually based around their sound, this creates almost a grid of relationships around the letters. Think of what “F” connotes to you compared to its close sister, “V”, or “SH” as opposed to its French brother, “J”. If you had to assign Platonic elements to these letters, what would they be? Even better—if you had a chance to create new elements, completely outside of the Platonic model (Earth, Wind, Fire, Water), what would they be? I picked two more because we live in a transient world that retains information. Life is not simply inert “stuff”—stuff transitions, is saved and is lost. If I could work that concept into the alphabet—the very bedrock of the language—then it could filter up into complex words.

Of course, I’m not going to go into all the details of language or its words. After all, this is supposed to be a mystical language. Blurting it to the world would defeat the point! But you get an idea of how it works, or how it could work. So far, there are nine genders (or “Realms”) which function like the genders in a Romance language. These correlate to certain primal bodies that couch the language and its words in a cosmic stage. When the words are spoken or written, the words change meaning depending on the position of these bodies (think night and day) and, thus, are recognized as being in a different place altogether—perhaps even having a different nature. And that’s what I found really surprising when I started to work out the structure of the language and piece together the first words. It wasn’t just a language that was forming, but a whole worldview—even a mythology.

If language influences our worldview, creating a language, to me, is like starting with a new worldview from scratch. With a blank slate like this I’ve been able to impose or suggest certain paradigms which simply don’t exist in another language. In some cases it can become dizzyingly complex—a simple word like “tree” can have—no joke—24 variations, or even more (we have many words for the same thing too though: tree, plant, seedling, sprout—what makes these things different?). It’s not that I’m aiming for complexity… I’m aiming for richness in meaning.

I’ll update with progress on the language as it grows. I’ve toyed with the idea of maybe making it available to others once its finished… but for now I’ll keep the most of it closely guarded. Though the picture above is a hint to the structure (think about what they mean as archetypes).

Also, I haven’t thought up a name for it yet. At least, not one that I want to share.

Recently I had dinner with with a good friend of mine that has been “there and back again” (let’s just sum it up this way), and whom I have known for a… long… time.

I described some of the things I’m wrestling with as a spiritual person. My religious programming, and my effort to undo that religious programming. I described to her, in brief, what my family went through in the Church.

She asked my if I was connected to that emotion of loss. I paused, and gave a lukewarm affirmative. She smiled.

“That means no.”

I have a deeply rational and practical side, and this has in part grown out of past relationships and events which harmed me. In fact, in one particularly damaging relationship, I only clawed my way out of it because of my disconnection from the emotion and dealing with the whole thing “rationally.” I did not rationalize it away—but I tried to understand why things went wrong. Thus the emotional aspect became abstracted away.

A similar thing has happened with my relationship with the Church and Christianity. I have abstracted away the emotion of loss that is so potent. But because it is such a long-term emotion, and a long-term process, that emotion of loss can lay buried beneath the subconscious.

Then there are times when, unexpectedly, it rises to the surface—if you let it. And it’s then that profound things can happen.

I received a package from my parents with a movie in it, among other thing—a movie called the Book of Eli. This movie was a trigger, and I’ll try to give a bit of context (movie summary to follow). If you haven’t seen it, it’s fantastic, and worth seeing. From Wikipedia:

The story revolves around Eli, a nomad in a post-apocalyptic world, who is charged with delivering his copy of a book, the last remaining Bible, to a safe location on the West Coast of the United States. The history of the post-war world is explained along the way as is the importance of Eli’s task.

There was a certain aspect of this movie that struck home for me… in a very personal way. So much so that, when it was done, during the credits, I suddenly burst into tears—unexpectedly, uncontrollably. It was one of those emotional open-heart-surgery moments that does not come easily, and you don’t easily forget. The rest of the night I was in a state that was, in some parts, completely out of my control. I haven’t had very many mystical experiences, but I think I know enough about the subject that when it does come, I could recognize it. Moving around my apartment that night was like swimming in molasses. Picking up a cup to drink from took a conscious act of will. My girlfriend happened to call me in the middle of it, long after the movie had stopped, and my voice was quivering.

The trigger was the character of Eli—or, more, his dedication to this book. He was completely, without fail, bound to his task of delivering his secret book, only going on a voice that had told him to bring it West. In the last scenes of the movies where the grizzled, lethal Eli shaves his beard and hair and is dictating the book to Lombardi, who will print it back into circulation, he’s dressed in complete white—like what you would expect from a prophet or guru. His life ends with a prayer and Solara, his travelling companion, later takes up his same garb and tools. The closing scene with her on the road back to the violent Outlands made me think of the Judges of ancient, kingless Judea.

When I was a Christian, I was a Christian. I was a Christian among Christians. Perhaps to the point that I wasn’t willing to take the answers I was provided at face value—I wanted to understand them in their totality. Perhaps that was where the disillusionment came from—the fact that these answers were constructed by men and theology, not given through the mysteries of God.

This said, faith is about walking the long road. It is about striving for the greatest goal because nothing else is worth the effort. This is what I believe Jesus was getting at when he told the parable of the rich man and the pearl.

But when your faith is lost, it’s not simply that your answers to the great questions change. It’s a loss of identity. Because you fashion yourself around this faith, you become it, and vice versa. When this changes, you must change.

My girlfriend described it like how she had to stop dancing. For years she trained in ballet, and from a young age. It became her very identity. But when major injuries caused her to have to quit dancing altogether, she had to re-form her self. She suffered an identity loss.

Struggling with this is what it means to heal. I have to connect with the emotion of that loss to truly understand it and integrate it. This can’t be abstracted away. But there are a few things I do feel sure about: there is so much to this world, and so simple are my tasks in it, that I need only follow my heart in order to go the way I must. This sounds cliché, but when you are de-programming yourself, the idea of “following your heart” or what you “naturally believe in” is not a simple task. It’s like trying to imagine yourself without your childhood, and extrapolate from that.

But through this process I’ve begun to realize that it’s not my place to judge. I do not have the power or skills to deduce the “right” answers from the “wrong” ones. There are only two things that I need to do, and I know them to be true for my self: I must learn as much as I can, and I must create (as an artist) as much as I can. Art is the transmission of these ideas. I need not state them as fact—because they are not. This is not a place where science applies.

I am not in a place to judge. I was put on this earth to be a student—if only to be a student of myself—and to express, through myth and metaphor, what I have learned. In this way I can take comfort that I do not need to know, nor can know, the “right” answers.

The Book of Eli ends with a short but what I think is a powerful scene—and one that drove home my whole experience. After Eli has dictated the Bible and the first copy is made, Lombardi, the printer, goes to a bookshelf in his vast library of re-printed books with which he hopes to re-culture humanity after its devastating war (and it’s suggested that this war was due to religion). He places the book next to many others, including the Talmud and the Qur’an.

I could not think of a better statement than this.

We are not above our equals… we are counterparts to them. Different parts of different answers to the same questions. Our task as humans is not to deduce the answers of life, but to learn the proper questions of life. Perhaps the answers cannot be told, they can only be experienced. And to have those experiences, we have to be willing to connect with those questions… however painful they may be.

I firmly believe that wizardry is not about conquering things. It is not about gaining power, nor being a solitary individual in a white tower in which you formulate secret verses. Though there have been some wizards that do things like that.

To me, wizardry is a path of understanding yourself. To be a wizard (the male equivalent of a witch) is not to invest yourself in esoteric processes and forms to control them. It is to invest yourself in these processes to control yourself.

Wizardry is a path of self-understanding and self control. It is the art of allowing your self to be a reflection of the universe’s will. And thusly, to allow your will to be reflected in the universe.

I am a strong believer in the proverb that was written on the Temple of Apollo at Delphi. This is where the Oracle of ancient Greece stood as a pillar of mysterious truth and, in her own subtle way, guided the future of a whole civilization. On the temple within which she sat, this was written on the walls:

“Know thyself, and you shall know all the mysteries of the gods and of the universe.”

The Oracle’s secrets remain unknown, as much as her history became unveiled through archaeology and fact finding. The mystery of her power remains. And so too remains the power of that simple proverb.

There is no need to control the universe. One must not even understand it. There is only one thing that must be understood, if any magic is to have any power and if one’s purpose as a practitioner of esoteric things is to be truly meaningful beyond one’s own basic desires. It is to understand your self—simply, fully, what you are, who you are, everything that you are. Only then can you become a mirror on which secret light can reflect, untainted.

Only a few days ago my girlfriend moved out to the west, where I will have to wait before I can see her again. The short week we spent together during her process of her moving, having just past, is weighing on me heavily. I know that I have to make the same leap out to a distant place. Her being gone shows me how much she actually means to me. I’m a firm believer that in order to have real love, you first have to let go of your desire of love in the first place. When I let go of that desire nearly a year ago, that was when I met her. And now, having experienced her being close to me after having been away, I realize how much she actually means to me. We only realize the value of things once they seem to be gone.

Know thyself.

The mystery of love is something I am still comprehending. It is nothing less than to be bound to someone else. By being bound, it is as if there is a thread that ties the two of you together—an astral cord, a golden braid, a psychic link—whatever it is you wish to call it.

For me, however, it may be as simple as finding her strands of red hair in the place where I sleep. A tangible reminder of her presence and her closeness to me, and that there need be no secrets between us. There need only be truth. We share the truth of ourselves with each other. But if we do not know that truth about ourselves, then love becomes meaningless.

Know thyself.

I know that I can easily slip into patterns of distraction, which lead to a spiritual decay. It’s a way to avoid the truth about ourselves—about my self. We engage in false desires because they are romantic attractions—seductive enough that they may as well be our own reflections, and we’re found staring into them like Narcissus. But the path of the wizard is to break this reflection. This path is to cultivate a rhythm that ties one’s self with the powers of the elements, which are foundational elements that weave in and out of our psyche. These are the things that we evolved from, and what consciousness was born out of. They are our teachers—and, if we learn from them, then they can become our tools.

With her gone it is easy for me to fall back into old patterns of distraction that not only delay me meeting her again, but also delay my progress of becoming a completed human being. So tonight, I made a prayer—a spell, if you will—to separate the distractions from the truth. From what is truly necessary in my life to what is truly unnecessary. To unlock knowledge  for myself so that I may not be a slave to my own reflection.

Know thyself.

It’s said that God once came to Solomon and offered him a choice of two things: wisdom, or wealth. He could have as much of either, but could not have both—he could either be the richest man in the world, or the wisest man in the world.

Solomon chose wisdom. And when he did, God was so impressed with his choice that he granted him riches as well. Solomon went on to not only become the wisest King of Israel, but also one of its most splendid.

When I was a young boy, I made a similar request, after reading Solomon’s writings on the value of wisdom (“it is better than pearls, more precious than diamonds”). I believe that it truly affected me as a boy, for it made me aware that knowledge was a key to so many things about the world. Ironically, understanding one’s self actually made not just one’s own self so much clearer, as one might expect—but also the world around one’s self and everyone in it. I made a renewal of that request tonight, realizing that in new journeys under new lights, it may be worth revisiting old commitments. I wish to know myself. Because I understand that if I can know myself, I can be the student of anything. And instead of reflecting one’s own face, one’s soul becomes a reflection of otherworldly will.