nicnevyn

So tomorrow I shall be rising early and with a short stop enroute to help a friend out transporting stock for their stall I shall be pootling off to PaganCon in Preston.

It’s not a big convention and in truth, I had last year decided that I would not be going again as they have stopped weekend camping and I nearly always end up being the designated driver, which in and of itself is fine until you have to try and load enebriated passengers into the car when your tired, knackered and hoping that there is half a chance you will get home before the offie shuts so you can buy a nice bottle of wine.

The biggest reason for going is twofold,  several friends this year are either doing talks or running workshops and I figure you should support your friends in their endeavours and also because Maxine Sanders is speaking.

Now I am not a Wiccan, nor ever likely to be, but I do think it is important to go and listen to somebody who is effectively first generation of the modern witchcraft movement. It was the same reason I spent a weekend doing a Marian Green course. These guys are our elders and for most of us, there doing it with the coffee mug and the t-shirt whilst we were still charging around in the playground at school.

I shall report back after the event I am sure.

I actually didn’t know what to call this post, I am not 100% sure that the title I have given is right even now, but it is the closest I could get. This post is not a finished peice of work my any stretch of the imagination, it is the start of something, but I am not sure what. But I imagine I will be re-examining it again a number of times over the next few months as my observations grow.

So where to start, hmm well I am a person with a lot of moles, many of these are not a result of sun damage but have been with me all my life, yesterday I started the process of having the larger, more troublesome ones removed. The one that was taken away yesterday I have had since I was only a toddler, my earliest memory of it is over 30 years old, when I caught it on clothing for the first time, I was about 3 and I can still clearly recall the pain and discomfort of catching it.

Anyway it’s gone now, although I haven’t seen the results it’s still under a dressing, I know it’s gone, a little part of me has changed. I know that it is going to take a while for me not to be freaked out when I look down at my side and it is no longer there. The realisation of it’s abscence really got me thinking about how I view myself and how that perception of myself may affect me. I realised that when I visualise myself whilst working it really does include all my spots, marks and blemishes. Even if the visualisation includes clothing I can mentally strip away that clothing and what is underneath is a pretty accurate representation of me!

So there I was this morning trying to make my “other” me and failing miserably to create a “me” without said mole, when a conversation I had with a friend sprang to mind. They are a very talented tattoo artist, who has a large following of practitioners from a number of paths who utilise their exceptional skills in the persuit of spiritual and magickal tattoo’s.

Apparently it isn’t uncommon for people to have minor personality changes after they have their tattoo, and after some discussion it was agreed that the reason for this was that the act of tattooing physically and mentally changed your wiring on the subtle. Initially I had a bit of issue with this, the tattoo I underwent as a form of personal initiation seemed to do nothing of the sort, it was easy for me to include it in my other “me” almost as if it had always been there. And then I realised that was the point, it was something I had worked towards, I was meant to have it, not a flight of fancy, but the cilmination of a hard worked for magickal operation.

But it really got me thinking, if having something “added” can tweak you subtly then surely it goes without saying that having something removed must also have a similar effect? This is not something I had considered before, all the rumination I have done over the years regarding the removal of these little parts of me have been done on the mundane, the purely down to earth here and now practical. I have no idea what the subtle implications of losing it will be, but I am pretty sure even so early on that there are going to be some. Which leads me to think that I may have to work on my personal perception of my magickal self before I make the appointment to have the next one taken away.

A few weeks ago one of my elders took me to one side for a “talk”. Apparently they were concerned that I was isolating myself too much, becoming to much of a hermit. Apparently they felt that this wasn’t in my best interests and asked that I consider perhaps interacting on the scene just a little bit more.

Now there was a caveat to this, interacting didn’t mean that I had to socialise with any old nut case out there, the idea being was that I find sane, sensible like minded folks with which to interact. So a chance invitation came my way via a good aquaintance (who actually does fall into the sane and sensible category) to accompany them to a pub moot in the next town tonight.

Now normally I would have shied away in horror, but there is actually no reason to make an excuse not to go, I have more than enough money in my pocket, I’ve not been out in over a month, the significant other is willing to babysit, and public transport runs almost door to door right into the night. So I figured what the heck, even if the folks there are completely barking, and it wouldn’t surprise me, pagan moots can be very colorful places, I will have spent time with my sane and sensible good aquaintance.

And you never know I might meet some really nice people too!

It has now been suggested to me several times that I ought to commit the last 5 years worth of research and work to print, the idea has been growing on me exponentially over the last month or so; initially I was very resistant to the idea as I really wasn’t sure that I had the level of knowledge or experience to justify putting my work out to the general pagan/magical populace.

I suppose the final clincher was running the workshop the other weekend, there I was sat in a room telling people about my research, how I used the research to create ritual in which I could better gain a working relationship with the entity in question, how you could extrapolate other syncretic areas of folklore, mythology and the occult to create a tangible working system based around said entity, guiding them in pathworkings and leading them in a ritual based upon the materials I had given them to study.

And for the first time ever, I realised, I did actually have something worthwhile to give to others. A something that has, with a few notable exceptions been mostly neglected in the genre of popular occultism, in fact I can only think of two books in the entire marketplace that actually address this entity within a magical context, most of the extant texts are the result of a Phd thesis or other academically focussed work.

So here I am with an outline of what I want to cover and how, and I am pondering two questions and I am sure somebody on wordpress will have the answers if they read this. Firstly what is the average word-count required for a manuscript; I believe 50,000 is considered a novella - so would 100,000 be a good ball park figure? Secondly how far is too far when expounding personal inverifiable gnosis, can you put just about anything down as long as you make it VERY clear that what you are writing is gnosis and cannot neccessairly be backed up with cold hard fact?

Oh which leads me to thirdly, when writing a “magical” book what is a good balance between academic and practical; especially considering that there is a woefully inadequate amount of decent academic techniques employed in many magical/pagan pbulications?

Thanks in advance to anybody that see this and can perhaps give me some sage words of wisdom.

Phew what a busy couple of weeks, the workshop went surprisingly well. The path workings in particular threw up some really interesting things. I’ve never been one to hold too much store by all this internal mumbo jumbo, but discussing with the group the imagery that they saw, one thing really struck me. It is possible to access something subliminal.

With the exception of one person, somebody who I have worked with in the past and know the extent of both their practical and academic knowledge, nobody in the group had even a passing understanding of the concept of planetary influences, symbolism or hours. So to approach a deity from this angle was an entirely new concept for them.

One person in particular seemed to tune in particularly well to this way of working and was confident enough to take me to one side after and discuss some of what they had experienced. Without fail the images, symbols, feelings and experiences they gained from the pathworking correlated directly to the particular planetary aspect that the pathworking had been written for.

It’s actually inspired me to look even more closely into this area of work, I am half toying with the idea of setting up a small informal group, perhaps one evening a month who would like to examine the phenomena of pathworking in closer detail. Perhaps taking it in turns to write and lead a working, experiementing with music, sound, smells, symbolism etc.

You know you would have thought that I would have learnt by now, but apparently I haven’t. You know that old adage “To Know, To Will, To Dare and To Stay Silent” well yet again, I’ve had a right good slapping by the powers that be for forgetting the last part, I’m pretty good at the Know, Will, Dare bit; but sometimes, less and less now adays I admit, I forget the last one.

Part of that is my desire to see all that is good and trustworthy in people, which of course is totally flawed. Whilst most people do have these traits, often in abundance, each and every person has a private agaenda, and I really don’t care how loudly people try and protest, when that agenda kicks in, no amount of anything will stop them furthering it, which includes (if neccessary) imparting senstive information at the drop of a hat if it is relevant to thier cause.

So what am I talking about, well I spent the weekend with a fellow student, somebody I have known for a good while. I shared something personal and sensitive, next thing I know it’s been reported back to those older and wiser. I do not know what they gained from this trade, and neither do I care, and in the whole scheme of things, who it was reported to was not the end of the world. But it really made me sit up and think about the whole situation. And sadly the conclusion I came to was “Trust no one, after all paranoid magicians live longer”.

I do feel a little let down, but not that much, after all each person has thier own will to follow, and the person in question was just fulfilling thiers, just as I most likely was by unwisely sharing. It did make me wonder about mine though, I really do think that in the very near future I will be branching off on my own at least for a while, it’s time. After all the only person you can truly trust is yourself, the only person who doesn’t have a personal agenda that may conflict with yours is you. Unless your delusional it’s pretty damn hard to lie to yourself for any period of time, and it’s even harder to break your own trust unless again you are a sociopathic muppet.

Anyway, mild melancholy over, in other news, I watched a documentary entitled “Hitler and the Occult” the other night on National Geographic. What a pile of biased, sensationalist, hogwash. It was poorly presented, poorly referenced, with little actual historical or even circumstantial detail to pad it. The narrator did however say “OCCULT” lots of times in a dramatic and sometimes menacing manner, so of course the total lack of substance could be over looked because saying occult lots had to make what little evidence they produced (most of which seemed to infer that publically at least Hilter actually had a decided aversion to anything Occult) seem so much more true, right?

NOT!

It was a waste of 45 minutes of my life, never to be clawed back again, I thoroughly suggest to anybody that might be tempted to watch it on a replay, DONT, go pick your toenails or clean out your ears, or contemplate the color of belly button fluff instead it will be more enlightening and satisfying I assure you.

It appears that even though I have had a resonable leave of abscence from this blog, there is still traffic trickling through; okay the figures aren’t very significant, but then neither am I, so it surprised me when I logged on today and saw the stats. Most likely they are random curious surfers and something I posted matched thier keywords, and the precee they saw on google or other search engine piqued an interest. But it got me thinking, perhaps I should post a bit more, perhaps there is a small percentage of the internet population that might find my posts interesting. So whilst this place will always remain my quiet haven just for me, perhaps I should endevour to post a little more regularly for those whose voyeristic tendancies may be satisfied by my meandering, so with further ado, I shall progress onto the main focus of this post.

Astrology

I don’t do Astrology, or perhaps I should say I didn’t do astrology, of all the occult sciences it is the one that has never resonated with me, perhaps it is memories of being a teen and pouring over very badly written horoscopes in Just 17 magazine, that could be interpretted just about anyway the reader wanted, the whole thing just left me cold.

Yet looking at it objectively, it is the one that is actually the most logical, the most scientific, you can actually place the movements of the planets for any specific moment in time according to your specific longditude and latitude, you can then record and observe events, study the empirical evidence looking for pattern, themes and correlations, now of course the results are still subjective but they are theoretically more precise than other more popular form of divination. This is an area that should be right up my street, that is how I operate both magickally and mundanely, in the known, the observable, the recordable.

Anyway until the last couple of days the why’s and wherefore’s of my lack of knowledge and lack of desire to remedy my ignorance has been something that has never even crossed my mind. So when I recieved a phone call from an elder telling me to hang fire on some work I am doing because to use thier words “there is some wierd shit astrology going on” and they were worried for my outcome, I just shrugged, that was thier bag! But they were so insistant, that I agreed to do some conventional divination just before the alloted planetary hour, ask the powers if I should motor on forward or desist for the short term until things were more favourable.

Who’d have thunk it eh! 3 out of 3 techniques came out with the same result, hang fire, so, I think perhaps it is time for me to do some good ol book learnin’ and start actually working out this stuff.

Perhaps I might use this blog to document my trials and tribulations of learning a topic that I had always written off as a bit fluffy and how I incorporate it into my daily dealings.

This has always been an area of deep interest for me, and something came up today on another blog (http://goldenthreads.wordpress.com/) which sparked me writing something that I have been pondering posting for sometime.

For a long while it bothered me that so many people in the Pagan and Occult comunities seemed to “suffer” with such an extensive and bizarre range of physical and mental illnesses. I listened and analysed this phenomena fairly carefully and the suffer’s seemed to fall into three distinct categories. Those that professed they were ill and expected it somehow to make them very very special as a result. Those who professed they were ill (and most likely were) who would shout and stomp about the first group and how it “was giving the real sufferer’s a bad name” but would then use ranting about group one as an excuse to do exactly what they were blaming group one of doing which was making themselves look special via thier “oh so awful illness”, both of course whilst claiming some kind of specialness also using it as an excuse not to actually do any magic or any of the work that pertains to it; and then there are those who definitely were very ill but just got on with it, never mentioned it, this final group I designate as “The beautifully wrecked”, but I will come back to them in a bit.

Fairly early on in my path, I became quite worried that somehow I had allied myself with unstable characters, that the pagan comunity was full of kooks and hypochondriacs looking for a way to be special, to gain self validation, to find a meaning. But then I spoke to my sister who has worked her way through just about every denomination of christian church available to her and really it doesn’t seem to be much different. There is something about “cult” communities that draw those that need whatever the “something” is, that group particpation gives. From that point on I stopped railing against either group one or group two, thier actions were thier way of getting whatever it was that they needed. That said, I did make a concious effort not to “feed” thier need, lol as my mum said, if you ain’t got anything good to say, don’t say anything.

I then came across the interesting concept of the “Occultists Disease”, this is often cited as being Asthma, but in reality seemed to cover a range of respiratory and pulmonary disfunctions. Big names such as Crowley, Chumbley, Gardener and Bennett are all cited as having suffered. I looked into this futher and discovered current real life practitioners who also suffered. I asked my mentor one day, does the act of practising magic eventually destroy you, and thier answer was “if your doing it right, then yes”. Take what you will from that statement and don’t neccessarily take it at face value either!

But the one thing that does stick out, is that all those names achieved after thier own fashion, “greatness” they were active participants in thier Great Work, they were beautifully wrecked. They did not, it seems use thier “disease” as an excuse. So now adays when I come across someone claiming to be a practitioner, but add the caveat fairly shortly after that they have an illness, I look at or listen to thier words very closely, if they are beautifully wrecked then I take heed of thier words, the others I just quietly walk away from.

I’ve been thinking further about my previous post regarding accessing particular strains of a magical current. And some interesting conundrums have come up, so I am going type as I think (it’s preferable to staring at lines and lines of computer code which currently mean nothing to me as I am brewing the mother of all migraines unless I can get to the pharmacy at lunch).

I suppose the first thought is, why do a lot of lineaged folks get so shirty at the idea that outsiders might actually have a magical “handle” on at least part of thier current without being initiated?

I suspect it comes down to two reasons, nothing more, nothing less. The first being that there are so many Grand High Pooh Bah 10th Degree MucketyMuck High Priestesses, who are 17 years old but they have been running a coven since they were 12; yeah right, okay these folks don’t actually exisit in quite the extreme I have described. I’ve been doing the online and real life out of the broom-closet type thing for more than a few years now, and very rarely do you find one of these types.

But the paraody description proves a point, there are so many out there claiming to be something they are not. Who have read a couple of llewicca books and think it’s all about green candles dressed in patchouli oil. They give themselves a title and post on a few forums, attend a few moots and declare themselves a “witch” or “magician” or my favourite a “shaman” lol with an emphasis on “sham” hahaha! These folks are dangerous, if you took them into a magical operation and you got a full corporeal manifestation, they would brick themselves, run a mile or run amuck, placing you and everybody else participating in the ritual at risk. So it seems to distance themselves from this particular type of practitioner, it’s best to make the blanket statement “Your not in our gang there fore you cannot know the password to get into the club house”!

The second and less common reason is, I believe because their magical world view is incomplete. It is beyond thier comprehension to understand that others may have managed to tap the current, outside of thier own praxis. Please note though, this may be down to the limitations of the particular lineaged individual, rather than representative of the group into which they are initiated, it may also be down to the limited teaching they themselves recieved, both here and now from thier superiors and also from the current itself.

I have discovered though over the years, that the real practitioners, esepcially the lineaged ones, get the idea that what they access isn’t unique to them and are happy to have “inter-trad” discourse, within oath bound limitations. It’s interesting how many folks complain about trad-crafters and thier riddles, but it is amazing how much oath bound material can be “transfered” through the act of riddling without breaking oaths at all. Esepcially as most of the mysteries are hidden in plain sight for those with eyes to see

Which of course then leads nicely onto the main focus of my ramblings, the concept of the magical current and the oath breaker, or as the more romantic and dramatic person might call them, the warlock. I’ve heard of people who have been stripped of thier lineage/initiation/placed under the ban, what ever you want to call it. I’ve even met a few, and have worked magically with one or two.

Now this of course is something that I wouldn’t reccomend as a general rule, oath breakers are, after all, just that, and lets face it would you trust someone mundanely if they cannot keep a promise, let alone magically. However, the two I worked with, one was stripped of thier lineage, because it turned out thier HPS was the oathbreaker, the other for political, “mob rule” reasons, so neither were technically untrustworthy magically, things might have been different if they were.

BUT and this is a big but, does the actual act of stripping a person of thier lineage stop them accessing the current, or thier ability to pass it on. Now I have given this some thought and will discuss this with those older and wiser than me at an appropriate time.  Yes it is magically possible to physically block a persons access, it could be done in a number of ways, including a direct working against the practitioner or via petitioning the enitites of that particular frequency of the spectrum.

However, in reality I doubt this happens very often, it’s more like a “sending to coventry” in the manner we all saw when we were kids, cut them out, turn your back and make damn sure as many of the other kids in the playground hear about the misdeed so as to ensure that nobody else will play with them.

Which of course then leads to another interesting conundrum, does the act of banishing an oath breaker actually remove anything other than the mundane label given to them by thier club? I suspect not!

Following a rather interesting blog entry by http://pagantoday.wordpress.com/ who I have enjoyed reading since I signed up, it got me thinking, not so much about the great wiccan/Wiccan debate and the validity of self initiation, but more the implications of such actions. But I suppose, loathe as I am to do it, we need to look at the purpose of initiation.

Talking to hardliners, they will tell you that you cannot access the mysteries unless you have been initiated into what ever the Trad is that you are claiming to be. Now I tend to think they are both very right and horrifically wrong. These so called “initiations into the mysteries” in my opinion is just the vehicle with which a particular group accesses a magical current.

I’ve been struggling with the term “magical current” and how to explain it. As a priestess of my chosen path, I can feel it and use it, but it is harder to convey in mere words, but I think I have come up with a good analogy.

If we consider magic to be much like the entirety of the light spectrum, some wavelengths are accessible by everybody and are there to be used, we could liken this to the visible spectrum of light. But further, with careful training and appropriate “filters” put in place it might be possbile to access the invisible spectrums, ultraviolet, infrared, microwave etc. Different groups will tap different parts of these unseen spectrums and this is thier current and “transmission” of the way to access these spectrums are formalised in the initiation ritual.

Now it is perfectly possible as a solitaire to also access these currents; in fact there is some basis for the argument that by being a solitaire this allows a freedom not enjoyed by others who maybe either through ignorance or deliberate choice be limited to a singular current and nothing else.

The problem arises as to what current the solitaire is actually accessing though; for example: Solitaire A decides to self initiate, and either through luck or hard work successfully accesses a part of (or even the entirety of) one or more magical currents, but what she has accessed is Luciferian rather than Wiccan (which is what they are after), what should they call themselves?

It then gets more complicated, what if Solitaire A actually accesses the current they are after, then finds a suitable Coven of the lineage they are hankering after.  Should thier existing link to the current then entitle them to a “fast track” scenario, especially if it is also obvious that they have put in the prerequisite practical and academic work in?

Lets say this happens and Solitaire A quickly makes it through their neophyte grade as a result of partial access, but they also have partial access as a result of thier self initiation to an other current. How will that affect the coven they are working with, this stuff is pretty viral you know, so then all of a sudden does the Coven have the right to claim thier name as associated with that current? Or should that part of the neophyte be “purged” for the sake of lineage and purity?

Tricky isn’t it? I do not profess to know the answer to any of it, my knee jerk feeling is that self initiation is perfectly possible and totally valid, as long as you do not claim to be of a named current (after all you will not really know if the current is the right one). If you feel like you need a name, call it yours, give it, it’s own name. After all that is what most of the big names in times gone by did.

I am not in a position to run a group, but the time is drawing nearer and nearer, and I suppose at some point I am going to have to discuss this with those older and wiser than me, but as for embracing or exterminating access to other currents brought in by self initiated neophytes; my gut says that as long as it isn’t at the complete other end of the spectrum or destructive, it should be integrated in a manner that benefits all. That’s how witches/magicians grow and progress, rather than becoming stale and dogmatic.

But of course all this is just my personal opinion and your mileage may vary.