autumn twilight
… where the water meets the sea, between the worlds, within the void …autumn twilight
… where the water meets the sea, between the worlds, within the void …Prayer of the Phoenix
Mighty Phoenix I adore thee.
Grant me the power to transform myself and the world around me.
I breathe in of your light and touch the flames.
I exhale of my love, and fan the flames.
I am changed and I change.
I am healed and I heal.
Blessed are the flames of transformation to which I open my heart.
Ta kya te.
we are building a religion…
I was looking forward to writing a little tonight. Then I got busy and it got late and I figured I’d just go to bed. But now my mind is buzzing with a thousand thoughts. Writing for a while is the only thing that will give me any hope of a restful night, so here I am.
Ruby Sara of Pagan Godspell had an interesting post today in which she talked about religion as culture. Her words struck a chord in me.
Once upon a very distant time, Religion wasn’t. Religion wasn’t, because Religion was Culture instead. Then, civilization came along, and divided Religion from Culture, and Religion had a choice. It could either choose to support the dominant Culture, or it could be Countercultural.
Mabontide
I had a dream last night that I was supposed to put on a mabontide ritual for the community. In my dream I had been asked weeks ago to do this, but then there was no further information or communication from the organizers. All of a sudden I was on the spot and it was time to go, ritual in a few minutes. We were getting the space ready, and I’d done no preparation. I had nothing written or planned, no props or tools, nothing but my questionable wit.
… read the rest
Sacrifice: a primer
At this time of year I start thinking a lot about sacrifice. About what it is, and why it is important. In past centuries, this was the beginning of harvest time. All the work that we’ve put into our crops through the spring and summer is paying off, and we begin to bring the fruits of our labors in from the fields before they rot. In so doing, we kill a great many plants before their natural time. We cut them down and preserve them, so we will have grain, and fruits, and vegetables to carry us through the winter.
Today, the timing is different. We have a global season for planting and growing, and a shortfall or failure to harvest probably won’t mean my family starves this winter. (I am fortunate to live in a first-world country, and I realize this is not the case for all places on the planet.) But the truth is still there. In order for my family and I to survive, we kill things around us. Often brutally.
Around this time of year, conversations often come up that talk about sacrifice. I think it’s just part of our social consciousness, particularly as pagans. Many of them, like this one at About.com About.com Paganism/Wicca (Patti Wigington) Attorney: Why I Defent Goat Sacrifice. The comments are what I’m pointing to, not the post itself.
Why is it that we can’t accept that sacrifice is part of life? The nature of sacrifice is simple. You give up something of value in hope that you will recieve something which you desire. Sacrifice takes many forms, and has many layers. I think it’s not only wise, but vital, that we as people consider the various levels upon which our actions and sacrifices have meaning.
For instance, I often (among pagans anyway) hear people thanking the earth for providing the bounty of the harvest. But I almost never hear them thank the spirit of the plant or animal they are planning on ingesting. I think making the food they are about to ingest spirit-less prevents us from thinking about the truth of what’s going on. We are killing this other thing that we may devour the force of it’s life and sustain our own. Thanking the spirit of the food is far more difficult, and far more respectful than thanking a nebulous earth-mother-goddess for providing. Yes, she has provided, but we make the choice to partake of what has been provided, and that requires sacrifice. Pretending differently strikes me as a self-delusion perpetuated by the Harm None myth.
There are a lot of facets that come up for me here. One of the ones that frustrates me the most has to do with vegetarians and vegans. I know many of both, and I have a deep respect for their choice of diet. However, I sometimes question the motives of vegetarians. If you believe it is healthier for you to eat vegetarian. That’s great. If you have an ethical dillema with the way livestock is raised and slaughtered, we’re cool. I might question your thoughts on the mass-production and forced growth of crops, and how that affects the lives of humans and livestock, but it’s cool. If your reason for being a vegetarian is “Because I don’t think other things should die so I can survive,” I’m going to get annoyed, because life requires death. If you don’t see that then you aren’t paying attention.
I don’t want to rant about that much, so that’s all I’m going to say on the matter. Getting back to sacrifice, think for a moment about what it means to sacrifice something. To give up something of value. For a sacrifice to mean something, you have to miss it. You have to give it up. The more important what you are giving up is to you, the more valuable the sacrifice, the more meaning it has, the more power it has. I think this is something that we miss when we talk about sacrifice today. I think it’s something we don’t want to see. We’re all caught up in symbolic sacrifice, which has value and power. But we sort of see it as a way of getting around the necessity of sacrifice to create change. Symbolic sacrifice is powerful because it reminds us of the real deal. It stirs the feelings and memories of real sacrifice, and that gives it ooomph.
But in the end, it is only symbolic, and there’s only so much ooomph our memories and fears can give it. Imagine the discipline and power you could generate by fasting for a day. That imagining can be given as sacrifice. We can make it real and experience it in our minds and it can have great power. But the experience of fasting for a day releases a far greater power, because we have actually pursued the course and given of ourselves to the path. (On a side note, we often lose the power of sacrificial acts by spending time focusing on the act of the sacrifice, and not focusing the energy on our goal, or spending too much time congratulating ourselves for our efforts.)
Just as important, is the realization that the object being sacrificed is not necessarily the primary source of power when talking about sacrifice. The power comes from what we have sacrificed yes, but also from our reaction to the act of that sacrifice. Burning a wicker goat in place of cutting a real goats throat may have exactly the same physical energy involved (although if we bring spirits and Gods into the equation, often the object being sacrificed is of tantamount importance). But it is much easier for us to burn a wicker goat than to actually cut the throat of a real one. The power of our reaction to the act of actually killing a goat is (in general) much more visceral and powerful than our emotional response to watching a wicker pile go up in flame. This is the level that we ignore often. Sacrificing our own desires, compromising our ethics or taste. These are the things that powerful sacrifices are made of. It’s not about the goat. It’s about what you have to give up in order to carry out the sacrifice of the goat.
One could view it in a karmic light, and I think one should explore that, but it’s not my point of interest tonight. For now, think about that goat. What does it cost you to burn a wicker effigy of it? What does it cost you to shoot it with a gun from 50 feet? To inject it with poison? What if it’s a goat that you’ve never seen before? How is that cost different if you raised the goat from birth? If you eat meat, is the sacrifice different if you slaughter it in a way to make the goat inedible, wasting the virtue of it’s flesh?
The point I’m driving at here, is that sacrifice is not so simple as give up A to get B. The power in A, the value of A, is not the most important part of the equation, it’s only one part of the price. The other part is equally important, and sometimes more important. What does it cost you to give up A?
One last thought. In our society, A is almost always money. How does it affect your relationship with money to think about it as the currency of your labor, the product of the hours you have sacrificed at work? And if we view money as a symbolic sacrifice of that time and effort, are the things we spend it on worth it?
Auric Lawn Signs & advice from the Divine
I was going to do a tarot reading and post it tonight, but that doesn’t seem to be in the cards, as it were. I’m feeling a lot moving around me regarding the divine today. For the last several days actually. Yesterdays funk of pain is perhaps a good example of how much stuff moves around in the presence of the divine.
It’s hard for me to define my relationship with the Divine. As I recall saying recently, our individual relationship with Divinity is something based inherently in the experiential realm. As a result, we can’t really define it, or comprehend it, or translate it. I believe the disconnection between our subnoumenal experience of the Divine, and our attempt to expose that experience through language (a tool precisely tuned towards definition) is one of the greater challenges that faces us all, most particularly the mystics.
As a mystic I live in many worlds at the same time with varying simplicity. Some days it is very easy, and others very difficult. I’ve noticed that it seems to be getting more difficult for me, and I’m kind of wondering why. I find that I sometimes can’t ignore or set aside a thought or message that is nagging at me. I seem to be prone to slipping into trance state of varying depths whenever the opportunity arises.
While I don’t want to blame them, I think a fair part of this has to do with the people I surround myself with. More and more I am spending large quantities of my time in communion with people of a mystically focused bent. As I’ve commented in the past, I find that there is a disportionate growth of spiritual/mystical/psychic experiences in people when they are in proximity to other people. I could write quite a bit about my thoughts on how some gifts/energies/flavors/vibrations compliment each other, heighten, enhance, and sometimes greatly expand each other; but the important thing here is that any psychic gift or talent you have will get stronger or develop faster if you are in regular contact with a resonant gift. If you have latent abilities and you happen to move in with two experienced sensitives, it is very likely your sensitivity will wake up and become active.
For some reason, the last 6 months have seen quite a few people enter my perceptual circle, and many of them have talents that resonate strongly with my own, and I’m noticing a difference. This is all relevant, I promise.
Recently, I met someone who has a relationship with the Divine that I can’t really define. The best way I can put it is that he has been claimed. The Divine (for lack of a better identifier) has made it clear that this person is theirs thank you very much. As I shared with a friend earlier today, it as if there is a very polite “do not step on the seedlings” sign posted in this persons aura. I’m a very curious person, but I know the handwriting of the Divine, and I prefer not to test the possible annoyance of disobeying that sign. Perhaps the most interesting thing about this, is that this person seems to have very little, if any, awareness of this connection. This person is watched over, and for whatever reason they haven’t been made fully aware of that guardianship.
The Divine works in many ways, and often they are beyond our ken. As a friend recently said, “Their sense of humor is completely bigger than ours, and they don’t care that we don’t find it funny.” More than just humor, the Gods are working with a much larger set of images than we are. Just as we, as mystics, witches, magicians, and others are working with more information than our mundane counterparts, who are working with more information than your average puppy. The universe is large and complex, and we can not hope to understand the system. The best we can do is work with the best guesses we have and listen to the guidance of those who see more than we do.
And so I’ve found myself turning to the Divine more and more frequently in my daily life. When I don’t understand what’s going on, or when there are just too many things for me to get a handle on all the pieces, or when (like yesterday morning) I feel small and crushed and full of needs that will not be met. I’ve found myself turning my eyes to the Limitless Light, and listening patiently for an answer. And I’ve found that I am never let down.
Tonight I’m thinking a lot about Persephone. I’m drinking pomegrante juice and trying to let her power suffuse me. She reminds me of the power of sacrifice, and that there can be great joy in surrendering to a power greater than your own. The word Denial is coming up for me a lot lately. It first showed up in some channeled messages about two weeks ago, and it’s been cropping up in a few places since then. I’m not sure I understand it’s importance yet, but I figured out part of it today.
One of the things that we emphasize in the west is Will. We focus on the development of, honing of, and attainment of our Will. We have a whole religion devoted to it. We lean towards recognizing Will as the most important thing there is. Unfortunately, we’re westerners, and the idea of Will inevitably gets conflated with ego. The Will of the Divine, our Higher Will, the guidance of our Holy Guardian Angel, is ultimately beyond our sense of self, our ego. But we so rarely manage to look beyond. We try and define our Will in concrete terms to give us things to focus on, missions to accomplish. The reality is that Will is a being, not a doing.
Our Greater Will has to do with force, not form. Our Will is not to rid the world of homophobia or discrimination. The very idea of action is anathema to the principle force that we are. Action is a result of our Will, it is the outgrowth of who we ARE. My Will is to become fully enflamed with the light and force of my own soul. When that is done, I can not act against my Will. The two goals are one. If we assume that we are spiritual beings having a physical incarnation, than our Will must be disincarnate at it’s root, and it is thus unmanifest force. Our Work is to align ourselves with that force, to make ourselves the perfect vessel of that force, to seek the grail, if you will.
And to do that, we must understand the limits of our own ego. Our ego tells us that we must accomplish great Works. Our ego tells us that we must do something, help someone, change something. How can I tell though, when ego is protecting itself, or when I am moved to act by the Force that is my Will? Thelema tells us to seek the knowledge and communion of our HGA. But that is the same as achieving one-ness with our will. What can we do in the mean time?
The answer lies with the Divine. Persephone sees more than I do. As does Gwyddon. The Divine that surrounds me, that offers me their love, can help me decide when to act and how to do so. When I feel the urge to act but question myself, I find that turning to the Divine seems to lead me true.
This is especially important when making decisions inside a complex system, as I mentioned earlier. There are times when we have an urge to act or fight for a cause that seems right to us. We are willing to put a lot on the line for that for better or for ill. The very urge to fight comes from a place of ego, and so I always tend to question it.
Perhaps one of the biggest problems we have as humans is that we too often ask “What do I want?” and too rarely ask “What is best for everyone involved?” Ignoring my ethical challenge with the idea of determining what is *best* for anyone other than myself, the important part of the question is to consider the system as a whole, or at least as much of it as you can. Often the decision is clear, and most often it is not in line with my personal egotistic desire. Thus sacrifice, personal desire for the good of the whole. This is an easy choice to make most of the time. Sometimes not so easy.
What is more difficult is when the situation is larger or more complex than I can truly fathom, or has more moving parts or variables than I can reasonably control to work towards a specific outcome. This is when the light of the Divine really comes in handy. Pretty much any sticky social/organizational issue falls into this category, largely because people are unpredictable, and anything you do now is likely to have consequences far into the future. So I ask my Gods and Spirits if they can help me puzzle out what the best choice is, or what the possible results of a certain action are.
It’s late and I’ve rambled enough. Gotta get to sleep now. Share the gift.