I had originally intended to write a review for Donald Tyson’s Necronomicon Tarot, to be published alongside Lon Sarver’s review in this issue. As I read Lon’s perspective and reflected on my relationship with Don — who’s been a close friend of mine for nearly a decade — I realized that my bias was firmly in the way of composing an objective review.

I’d been confronted with the issue of bias once before, when I’d considered reviewing an anthology by Taylor Ellwood, a colleague of mine at Immanion Press. Such a dilemma was a new experience for me. I bowed out of reviewing that book, and never gave the matter much further thought. Now that it’s happened again, I have to consider that reviewing the works of anyone who has previously contributed to this magazine (or whom I already know) is a conflict of interest. For this reason, I won’t be reviewing any of Tyson’s works, now or in the future. I apologize to anyone who may have been expecting one, and direct you to Lon’s review instead. He did a good job.

— Sheta Kaey

From the Editor will be a semi-regular column by Sheta Kaey, concerning issues confronting Rending the Veil, its management, and its future. Sheta is Editor in Chief of Rending the Veil and is working on her first book.

©2009 Sheta Kaey

Beyond a certain point, we can really know only so much about cultures prior to written history in a region. The stories supposedly tell about the people who lived in the British Isles 6,000 years ago, well before there were any written records; while the author draws from texts about the Celts and other older cultures, these are still newer peoples than what Smedley describes. Whether the people of 4000 BC lived in ways the book described is unknown; nonetheless, the author does a lovely job of weaving together a solid description of her thoughts on the matter, and we get a good picture of what it is they did and believed.

So I chose to primarily read this for its storytelling value. Similarly to my experience of reading MZB’s The Mists of Avalon, it didn’t matter whether the story was literally true or not. I found myself sinking into a world where animism was the central belief, where the plants, animals and other denizens of nature were so important to the people that they took their names from them. I read about the rituals these people performed, as well as the participants’ feelings about them. I witnessed the interactions between individual groups of people, and how they wove into the greater overarching culture of the time. It didn’t really matter whether this was the way things “really happened”; it was a great journey anyway. Even if seen only as a novel, it’s a worthwhile read.

I can’t entirely vouch for the validity of the herbal information; the author knows more about that than I do. A lot of the information about plants peppering the stories dealt with magical uses; however, there were some medicinal uses mentioned as well. For those intrepid enough to backtrack the author’s research, there’s an appendix with the common and Latin names of all the plants (numbering in the hundreds) mentioned. Additionally, she included a thorough bibliography for further research and fact-checking.

This is a book I had to read in bits and chunks over time; at 700 pages, it’s a lot to read! The formatting left a bit to be desired, most notably the complete lack of page numbers which, in a book this length, is frustrating when trying to find where I left off, or where I found a piece of information or a snippet of story I wanted to go back to. Also, I can’t for the life of me find information about the publisher, the owner of the publishing company, or the author.

Ancestral Airs is a thoroughly enjoyable read, regardless of how much salt you choose to take the research with. Whether you choose to read it as I did, in little pieces, or simply spend several hours going from cover to cover in one fell swoop, I hope you like this unique combination of research and narrative.

Four and a half pawprints out of five.

Review ©2009 Lupa
Edited by Sheta Kaey

Poetry usually isn’t my preferred reading material, but every so often I find a book of it that I truly enjoy. Dancing God is the second volume of poetry that’s caught my attention in such a way, the first being The Phillupic Hymns by P. Sufenas Virius Lupus. In this particular text, I was treated to a lovely variety of verses, some of which are strongly flavored by mythology — but all of which speak to the human condition.

Diotima’s verses are generally not long, but instead are bite-sized descriptions of her interaction with the world, divine and mortal alike. There are four themes, each with its own section: Gods, Myths and Sagas; Love; Life; and Death. Diotima has done a lovely job of sorting her works into these categories, but the variety she displays demonstrates an understanding of multiple perspectives on each theme.

The poems in the Gods, Myths and Sagas section may be of particular interest to pagan readers. Her works encompass several mythologies, from Greek to Celtic to Japanese; primarily, though not exclusively, they are snippets of story or honor (or both!) offered to a particular deity. Some are rooted in the deities’ contemporary cultures, such as a rather macabre description of Dionysus’ darker aspects, a retelling of Fenris’ chaining, and a poem to Hekate as “lady of the hounds.” Others, such as Icarus’ musing on human’s common flight in airplanes, a poem comparing the original manifestation of angels to their modern “cute” depictions, and wondering “Do the old gods walk the streets of London?” are more modern commentary. They all weave together well, and demonstrate that the gods are not, in fact, dead at all. These would all make lovely incorporated into private rituals and meditations.

All of the poems, however, are exquisitely crafted. Both the kind and the painful sides of love are evoked. (I was particularly fond of “Communication”, with its recurring line “Damn you, pick up the phone!”) “Life” is a short section full of little slices thereof, commentary on the day to day (and yet how unusual it can be from this angle!). The theme of death is dealt with using everything from grief to black humor, a good catharsis for working through loss.

Having been assaulted with bad verse and worse attempts, Dancing God is a reminder that we still have muse-touched poets today, those who create beauty through carefully structured words. There’s magic in these pages, and Diotima is an accomplished magician when it comes to evoking the feelings she wishes to convey.

Five pawprints out of five.

Review ©2009 Lupa
Edited by Sheta Kaey

It’s been a while since I’ve reviewed a totem deck/book set. I’ve had this one sitting in my personal collection for a while, and figured it was about time to take a break from my review stacks. I also wanted to give myself a fresh look at it, because someone I respect as a totemist gave it a pretty scathing review last year, and I didn’t want that biasing my approach.
There’s good and bad in the set, so I’ll give you some details in list form:

The Good:

• The author emphasizes interconnection and responsibility to nature in the book. There are some valuable lessons for postindustrial cultures that often take the environment and its denizens (includes humans!) for granted. It’s obvious that she’s passionate about being a caretaker, and while she doesn’t include it quite to the extent that, say, Susie Green does in the Animal Messages deck, it was a nice touch. (In addition, she walks the talk, having set up a charity and refuge for rescued animals of various sorts, for which I give her major kudos.)
• Morrell has a Ph.D. in Huna, a New Age mix of Hawaiian mythology and other elements. She’s pretty familiar with Hawaiian mythos, and includes mythological information on each of the animals along with her interpretations, to flesh out the meanings and give people more to ponder when working with each animal.
• The cards themselves feature some of the most beautiful artwork by Steve Rawlings (who sadly only gets mentioned on the copyright page and the acknowledgment in the back of the book, instead of on the cover of the book or box). A lovely blend of realistic depictions of animals and brightly colored environments, the pictures make working with this deck extra delightful!

The Bad:

• One of the first things that stuck out was the author’s dogmatic adherence to vegetarianism even in the face of historical facts. I’ve no problem with vegetarianism in and of itself; however, Polynesian cultures are not and never have been vegetarian, and they did not simply begin eating meat because of contact with the Europeans. Yet she asserts this very idea on the first two pages (6-7) of the introduction.
• Lemuria and Atlantis: Arrrrrrgh. This is New Age stuff, pure and simple. Yet, like so many New Age authors, she tries to connect these fictional, completely unproven, conveniently lost continents to Hawaiian indigenous culture.
• Related to my last point, her book is based on the aforementioned Huna — which is not traditional Hawaiian religion. It’s a creation from the latter half of the 19^th century when spiritualism and other such things were all the rage, and while it (and this book) dabble in Hawaiian religious and cultural elements, they are not synonymous. The author (who as I mentioned has a Ph.D. in Huna gained from University College in London, U.K.) claims to have spoken to indigenous Hawaiian practitioners of this, but she doesn’t give any indication of what status they have in their indigenous culture(s) or where they learned their material. Given that even indigenous cultures can have their frauds (being indigenous in genetics does not automatically confer full understanding of indigenous culture if you are primarily white in culture), I have to question how verifiably indigenous her information really is. This looks more like cultural appropriation than indigenous Hawaiian religion and culture.
• ”Land of Light”? This idealization of Hawaiian culture (and it’s definitely not limited to the subtitle) smacks of the Noble Savage stereotype.

Honestly, I’m leaning towards setting aside the book and keeping the cards. Unless you’re brand new to animal card divination and don’t yet feel you can interpret the cards based on your own observations (and the study of a species’ natural history, from whence its lore ultimately springs), it’s really not necessary. The information that is provided on cultural and other contexts is spotted with questionable content. Read through the book to get an idea of the author’s perspective and intent for creating the deck, but take it with a huge lick of salt.

Two pawprints out of five (though I give the art a five!)

Review ©2009 Lupa
Edited by Sheta Kaey

By the time the Great Galaxy of Andromeda was coming around for its second pass through the Milky Way, before that final series of events that would lead to the merger of two great spirals into one stochastic elliptical galaxy of Milkomeda, we’d managed to irritate two galaxies worth of interstellar civilizations.

When the first merger began, things were already dicey for us in the Milky Way, as Earth was far too known for mucking about with the nature of Time and manipulating the history of its immediate region to its own benefit. With the establishment of Meta-Platonic Time in the 24^th Century, extending all the way to the heat death of the universe and beyond, and our establishment of faster than light capabilities in the 556th Century, we had a pretty good gig going.

Though we decided to not set up any other series of Meta-Platonic Time on our interstellar colonies… we were able to guide them with news from the future centuries in dealing with other species.

Until those other competitor species discovered what we’d been doing inside and outside of time.

Usually we’d set out to adjust history before their occurrence, dropping special Faster Than Light Ships several centuries back and then going out and tinkering with them before they became a threat.

After three billion years we had half the galaxy under our sway and the other half wanting nothing to do with us, often trying to destroy our colonies. The Weapon of choice: targeted pulsars that dropped significant quantities of antimatter onto their neutron rich surfaces. An antimatter-neutronium interaction can be seen to the ends of the universe.

When Andromeda came cruising through the Milky Way on its first pass, we decided to move the entire solar system over into the other galaxy. Some stars were going to be exchanged anyway, and shuffling Earth’s system over there should not have been a problem. We checked the up-now to millions of centuries into the merger and it looked like smooth sailing in the other galaxy. Humanity on Earth would go on having a reality of minimized fine tuned probabilities and maximum well being, and we could leave our colonies behind to work out their own fates.

All it took was a polarizing of the magnetic field-folds around our system. Oh we had to burn off the entire Ort Cometary Cloud to give that extra nudge Sol’s orbit around the center of our Galaxy and flinging out on a perpendicular loop around the center of Andromeda’s core. After less than a million years our solar system, stripped of comets, settled into a new orbit in a different Galaxy as we watched our old stream of stars recede temporarily into the night.

But it wasn’t until then that we noticed something was horribly wrong. The centuries toward the “Heat Death” of the universe were suddenly sealed off to us. And the past down-now of the 25^th century appeared to be subtly altering more and more, as if some one else was adjusting our history before we began to adjust it ourselves.

Having lost contact with our colonies back in the home galaxy, we had to set forth again and explore our neighborhood. We found many empty and useful systems, and expanded out again for five hundred light years… until we started to encounter the native interstellar civilizations.

They had a completely different means of experiencing and adjusting time. Instead of one endlessly manipulated reality, they had access and participation in a near infinite number of possibilities of outcomes: they lived in multiple time lines simultaneously.

So began the long fight across this swirl of alien suns. In contrast to our usual mode of operations we set up new Meta-Platonic Times on our colony worlds, and spread out in a sphere 10,000 light years in diameter, creating a zone of controlled realities.

This lasted only so long — ten million, maybe twenty million years — as the natives had weapons that could reach out of time and disrupt the Meta Platonic Time Continuum, in some cases targeting stellar mass black holes at our colonies that had Meta-Platonic Time Establishments… black holes we could do nothing to shift, as they were undeniable facts of the underlying reality.

As the second merger of the two galaxies approached (which would commence the fusion of the two into the new Galaxy of Milkomeda), we decided to position the sun outside the merger… detonating five nearby stars into false nova states; these systems were lost anyway as their colonies were destroyed by the guided black holes of the hostile native civilizations. Four of these false novae created singularities and high velocity targeted stellar mass black holes, aimed at the enemy’s black holes that had just wiped out our worlds.

We timed these to all merge simultaneously. The resulting gravity waves disturbed the orbits of our planets and set the sun into a path that would have it hurled outside the merger birthing the new larger galaxy of Milkomeda..

It took 50 million years for the sun to climb to a point over galactic north of the rapidly merging galaxies, so we would be safely outside of the blast path of gravity waves and other radiation as the two super massive black holes at the centres of the original galaxies merged catastrophically, setting off a Quasar event that would shine in all Forty Six Billion light years of the visible universe.

Unfortunately, we did not calculate all the factors of our orbit, and when the holes merged one of our futures was just on the edges of the polar jet of the resulting Quasar.

The focused gravity waves unhinged most of Meta-Platonic Time. Some Centuries, their Meta-Platonic Time Sections, were ripped out of the artificial time they inhabited. Some of these, we think, fell into the deep past. Some of them simply ceased to exist. It became incredibly difficult to access centuries we had controlled for meta-temporal periods immeasurable.

Soon after this the citizens of Earth around the year 5-billion picked up communications from the merging galaxies, some of them of formerly human origin, seeking the home system of the time meddling humans, giving out a description of the system and its sun.

The planets were already in some confusion, and we had parked a ring of former gas giant moons, out where the asteroids had once been. Mercury was long lost. Venus was cooling out beyond Saturn. Mars was habitable, warm and balmy and richly wet. We designed some new species to live there, including an evolving Ape and some slippery Cetaceans with an artificial civilization we had built them into.

Mars would be OK during the swelling of the sun… but what to do with the Earth?

We decided to leave it parked where it was. Using technologies developed during the reality wars with the Natives of the Andromeda Galaxy we were able to create a shell around the earth that would take the heat energy of the sun, radiation that would have crisped the earth, and used it to shore up our access to Meta-Platonic Time.

In the process, we finally lost the moon. It actually went flying off at half the speed of light.

So we hid inside the swollen sun, as our enemies and former colonies came up and out from the new galaxy looking for us. They searched the scattered stars of Milkomeda’s halo. We knew when they found Mars, but they never thought to look inside the Sun.

So under a red, twilit, smoky sky we waited. Occasionally, small sections of the field would fail, and great heat would come down to steam an ocean or bake a landscape. It was during this period that we started gathering into fortified cities. After 600 million years, a period comparable to the emergence of advanced life forms and the evolution to man, we had all moved to one last city, hundreds of kilometers across. We hoped the universe had forgotten about us. We tried to forget about the universe.

There, deep in the city of Dazeit, we waited it out.

For a billion years.

Until the sun started to shed his outer layers of unused gas and dust on the way to becoming a white dwarf star.

Access to Meta-Platonic Time never returned to its former fullness. Travels through time became spotty at best.

When the sun finally settled down into its long white dwarf phase, radiating heat from a core of diamond the size of Venus, we had to quickly huddle the planets up to the sun. For extra heat and light we, stellified the jovians by dropping artificial atom-sized black holes into them.

Thus we could sit out the long night between galaxies, and stay out of the way of races we had competed unfairly and cruelly against.

Then, just one thousand old years after we had the new solar system the way we wanted it, we had full access to Meta-Platonic Time again! Unfortunately, access to the centuries was not a linear matter within its own continuum of artificial time, so we might head for the 35678944^th century and end up in the 82,000^th. We even encountered some of the century sections that had broken free of Meta-Platonic Time and plunged past the down-now terminus.

And while those lost sections were in ruins, they had penetrated into real time. Primitive time. Before the establishment of Meta-Platonic Time. The age old dream had finally come true, due to accident and misadventure: a time machine traveled to a period before its own creation.

We had access to the primitive past. To the times of origin and discovery.

After much deliberation we decided to arrange all of the Past, starting with the Primitive Past so that everything would result in Dazeit. Into the ultimate Dazeit. The perfect Dazeit. Dazeit the Timeless and Eternal, with all of human history cataloged like books on a shelf in a library of time.

We started in on fixing the 20^th and 21^st centuries, as these were the crux locus points in the development of humanity. It had been decided by consensus that the history of these periods could not be left in a wild and natural state.

Little did we know that we would encounter resistance to our adjustments&ehllip;

Beyond the Veil is a regularly appearing column featuring fiction, including occult, horror, science fiction, and fantasy. If you’d like to contribute a story, please contact admin@rendingtheveil.com and we’ll be happy to review your submission.

©2009 J. Michael Glosson
Edited by Sheta Kaey

Christopher Fish just wasn’t built for a normal life, though he did his best. He tried to ignore the stares his pale skin, white hair and faded gray eyes earned him. He learned to stop following certain people around whenever he caught some strangely familiar scent of decay clinging to their skin. He pretended in conversation that he slept like regular folks do, knowing better than to tell people that he had never lost consciousness in his entire life and wasn’t the worse for it.

But there were times that it was just so clearly not working and he would lose his temper and spew such rage that he soon had a reputation for being cruel as well as ugly and weird. It was probably for the best that three weeks after his twenty-second birthday, his attempted life, the time wasted sweating at Chester Cheese’s and lurching around campus and just the whole charade, came to an end.

It was one o’clock on a Saturday afternoon, so of course Chester Cheese’s was a prepubescent madhouse. Fish nimbly weaved his way through the schools of darting, shrieking children in the dining hall and shouldered through the kitchen’s swinging doors into the reassuring smell of burning cheese and grease. Nobody in the kitchen greeted him or even looked up as he passed through to the rough little lounge in the back room.

There, lying draped across the stained couch like some cartoon-world hunting trophy, he found the Chester Cheese costume it was his job to endure. He would wear the suffocating, sweltering mouse suit and serve birthday kids their pizza and try not to run away when he saw the resentment in the parents’ eyes, the hatred they had for their own offspring. Christopher Fish lacked that part of the mind that shields the heart from what people truly are and was, as a result, something of a hate detector.

He dressed with morbid resignation and was prepared to heft Chester’s bulbous, grinning head over his own when a metallic squeak sounded behind him. He turned to see Jared Gladstone struggling free of one of the lounge’s rusted lockers. Fish could only gape as the little man jerked his second foot free and then stood there staring back, swaying slightly.

“There you are, Christopher.” Gladstone’s voice wasn’t the nervous hum it usually was; in fact, he sounded a little raspy, almost parched.

“Were you hiding in that locker?” Fish had to fight the urge to slap the restaurant’s assistant manager. “Have you lost your mind? Spying little creep. This is too much even for you.”

“Why did you leave home, Christopher? I planted you, like a little banzai tree, in Chicago but here you are in Denver. What were you thinking?”

Fish was nonplussed all over again. Gladstone was a hectoring little jerk who made far too many off-color comments, but he didn’t usually talk nonsense.

Gladstone took an unsteady step towards him and continued, “I was delayed, distracted. But now I’m back and I’m going to need you in Chicago.”

“What are you talking about?” Fish asked, noticing now that the other man’s name tag was on upside-down and that his shoes were tied in strange, ugly knots instead of bows. “Jared, are you feeling alright?”

Gladstone awkwardly crammed a hand into his pants pocket. “Oh, don’t worry about Jared, he’s a happy whore-hopper. It’s Mr. Nine who needs special consideration now.”

Fish’s world went quiet; the clanging in the kitchen and the distant music of the animatronic animal band fell away. Fish clutched Chester’s hollow head like a child does his teddy and couldn’t speak.

Gladstone yanked his hand from his pocket and haphazardly brandished a snub-nosed .38. “It’s mostly my own fault. I should have been back for you years ago but there was this shaman, the memory of a shaman really, with sand for skin and reef for bones. He chased me across a chain of islands that ran a ring around a world; he chased me until we reached a living tar pit and there I undid him, finally.”

Gladstone paused expectantly, as if waiting for congratulations. Fish managed a weak, “No. Don’t do this.”

Gladstone scowled and took another two steps closer. “Yes. We do this now.”

“No.”

Gladstone pressed the gun against his own temple. “Come back to Chicago.”

“No.”
Gladstone shrugged. “I don’t want to have to do this again.” And then he pulled the trigger.

Fish lowered Chester’s head over his own and instead of suffocating, the suit felt safe, like soft armor. He would go and serve birthday kids their pizza now. He walked through the kitchen and ignored the questions from the cook. What was that noise in there? It was a gunshot, silly.

He walked out into the dining hall and waved to the kids watching the unliving figures twitch onstage. He heard a high little voice say, “Look, Mommy, it’s Chester! He spilled pizza on hisself!”

Evening was creeping into the city by the time Fish finally wandered home, his mind still a numb jumble. It was heartening then to walk through the door of his absurd little apartment filled with paper maché oddities and see Daryl, his roommate, embedded in a green beanbag chair, playing a video game on the hulking television that dominated their living room. It was regular, if not completely normal.

“How was work?” Daryl asked, without turning around.

Fish finished throwing the three locks on their door and kicked aside one of the capering figures he made in the silent night hours. “Gladstone killed himself today.”

Daryl maneuvered the little character on the tv screen right off a cliff. “Wow. But that’s probably how managers of Chester Cheese’s usually die.”

Fish grunted appreciatively. Daryl used to be shocked by Fish’s own displays of black humor but he was coming along nicely now. He kicked off his shoes, padded into the kitchen and started rummaging around in a cupboard. There was no mention of Mr. Nine as he narrated the day’s events while microwaving a bowl of Spaghetti O’s. When he finished and the steam from the bowl was wafting pleasantly around his face, he saw Daryl walk his game character over the edge of a lava-filled pit.

“Man, you suck tonight.”

“My eyes are a little sore,” Daryl admitted, turning around so Fish could see his face, see what was done to it.

Fish dropped the bowl, splattering his feet in tomato sauce.

“Come back to Chicago, Christopher,” Daryl said, mild as can be. “Come back or we can just keep doing this.”

Fish found his voice and his rage at the same time; Daryl was as close to a friend as he had. “What the hell do you want from me?” he snarled and snatched the toaster up as if to use it as a weapon, a faintly ridiculous move considering the problem.

“One favor. Just one little favor and then we’re forever done with each other.” Daryl held up a straight-razor and said in a squeaky voice, “Golly, Mr. Nine, I’d sure love to open Daryl’s jugular. Can I? Can I?” Then he answered in his regular voice. “Not yet, my little friend. Let’s give Christopher a chance to do the right thing.”

Fish hurled the toaster just inches past Daryl’s head, hitting the television screen smack in the center. The game’s repetitious guitar soundtrack cut off with an explosion of glass and crackling sparks. “You win. Go ahead and tell me how to find you but you’re not going to like it when I do.”

Daryl frowned. “Perhaps. You are immune to just about anything I can do but I bet you’ll lose interest in harming me when you see what I have to show you. Northwestern Memorial Hospital. Be there or I kill this square.”

It was nearly a solid day’s drive to the Windy City, even for a driver who didn’t need to sleep. The entire way there, Fish brooded on how to kill his enemy; he had never before taken a life but he knew himself, knew that murder could fit his soul reasonably well. By the time he parked his car, a dented and dinged old Saab, two blocks away from the hospital; however, the vague scenarios he had concocted dissipated like smoke.

Late spring was already hot in Chicago and he hated the city year round anyway. Only a handful of memories from here warmed him and they all involved a woman and her unexplained interest in an orphan; her visits always meant green jell-o salad, tenderness and seemingly outlandish tales. The rest of his childhood was a collage of savage children, vaguely hostile adults and periodic encounters with a madman.

The madman in question was waiting for him outside of general admittance. He still dressed the same in unremarkable dark clothes, a long raincoat and fedora, like a man trying so hard to be inconspicuous that he was instead completely the opposite. A collection of bone flutes still hung from a thick leather belt around his waist. He leered enormously when he spotted Fish, revealing the same ivory teeth, each engraved with a different sigil; these were the tools that sent his voice across leagues and made his words move like quicksilver, liquid and lethal.

He had aged, though, had become thinner and a bit more lined. And as they moved towards each other, Fish noticed a discordance in what had once been the most assured stride he had ever seen, a slight limp in the right leg.

So Fish greeted the other man with a lunge, hoping to inflict some quick damage to whatever injuries he had, but Mr. Nine hopped back, narrowly escaping Fish’s grab for his collar.

“No more of that now. No more,” he laughed, unhooking a long ivory pipe from his belt and twirling it like a baton. “Made from the femur of a will-o-the-waves, knight of the ocean lost and the spiny sunless. On this, I could blow a single note of such despair that every tumor would will itself malignant, every strained heart would burst, every patient balanced between life and death would double back flip into the next world. Keep your hands to yourself, please.”

Fish angrily returned some of the stares they were getting from passersby until the scrutiny passed, then asked, “Why am I here?”

Mr. Nine flashed his nightmarish smile again. “Good. Look at you, so tall but so washed out. I didn’t see that happening. Did you bring those books I gave you?”

“Nope. I didn’t bother to take them when I left the foster home.” This was a lie; he had sold them for several thousand dollars to an eager, twitching little occultist whom he never saw again.

Mr. Nine looked stricken. “But you remember what we talked about? What I taught you?”

“You didn’t teach me anything. You would just show up and rant about magic as mathematical systems and music as equations. I remember a whole bunch of garbage about language as keys…”

“Garbage!” Mr. Nine spat. “After all the things I have shown you, you doubt?”

“No, but what good has it done you? What do you have to show for yourself? You —”

“Shut up!” Mr. Nine roared and the ageless voices of the Ravenous Thousand roared with him. A momentary hush fell over the city. Fish went silent too but only because he chose to.

Mr. Nine turned abruptly and began limping towards general admissions. “Follow me,” he muttered over his shoulder.

He produced another instrument, gray and barely longer than his hand, and played two alternating, undulating notes all the way to the elevator and then again from the elevator to the sixth floor room that was their destination. Nobody stopped them or even noticed their passage.

The room’s lone occupant was a sunken relic of a man, old and still, a lifeless mass under stiff white sheets. In the slack, jaundiced features of the patient’s face, Fish saw the bluntness of his own nose, the sharp slope of his own jawline and the brevity of his own mouth.

Mr. Nine watched Fish watch the old man, eyes shining with eagerness. “Well?”

“Who is he?” Fish whispered.

Mr. Nine waved a thin hand. “You can be as loud as you want, he’s not waking up.”

“Coma?”

“No. He’s sleeping. He’s been sleeping for the past twenty-two years and he’ll sleep till the day he dies; I’ve seen to that.”

Fish felt as if the room were suffused with some strange cloud of possibilities and wondered if this was hope; a world that made a little more sense seemed just around the corner. “This is my father, isn’t it?”

Mr. Nine swept all that away with a flippant shake of his head. “Nope, not at all.” He removed his fedora and ran a hand over the swirl of symbols and numbers branded and scarred into his bald scalp. “He’s you, actually. The real you. His dreaming mind is the engine that generates you.”

Fish blinked. The he laughed in disbelief. Then he stood there gazing at nothing until his expression collapsed in anguish and Mr. Nine grinned like a half-moon.

“I don’t really need to convince you, do I? Truth is a knife that slips so easily between the ribs.

“His name is Christopher Fowler.” Mr. Nine’s lips curled downward in amused chagrin. “You know, I had some kind of witticism in mind when I named you, a specific line I was going to say on this day of days. But twenty-two years on I can’t remember how it went, the exact wording of it.”

“Why?” Fish slumped onto an aggressively orange plastic chair and gazed at the slumbering wreck in the bed. “Why would you do this?”

“Because he betrayed me and did something only he can undo.” There was no trace of humor in Mr. Nine’s voice now. He put his fedora back on and pulled it low over his eyes. “No matter what I did, he wouldn’t undo it, wouldn’t even acknowledge that he had cheated me. Insufferable, arrogant bastard. I couldn’t force him to; we were too evenly matched.

“But I could give him something he wanted, deep down in the polluted pool of his mind. It’s not even that unusual, though. Who doesn’t want a chance to live their life all over again?

“So I put him to sleep and conjured a dream that leaves footprints in mud and snow and ash. A simultaneous reincarnation. You don’t want to know about all the sacrifices the magic required — not a project to be undertaken lightly.”

Fish held his head in his hands. “So am I real? Do I even need to eat?”

“How the hell should I know? I’ve never done anything like you before or since.”

“When he dies —”

“The dream ends. Something to keep in mind, yes? If you cooperate, I won’t hold a pillow over his face and you might live for another twenty years.” Mr. Nine paused a moment, letting that sink in. “I planned on raising you myself —”

“But you couldn’t be bothered,” Fish interrupted. “Thank God for that much, at least.”

“I was busy,” Mr. Nine corrected. “There were other worlds to walk and other projects to run.” He knelt before Fish and his next words were unnaturally earnest. “Christopher, that life back in Denver would never have worked; my return has saved you from wasting your few years trying to be something that you’ll never be.

“Tonight, you’re going to return the favor. You’re going to untie the Knot your older self tied.”

The moon hung high and white amidst bruise-colored clouds, illuminating the deep green grassy mounds and winding gravel paths stretching out before the two men. Fish had been in Garfield Park as a child and never cared for it, but night and lonesomeness made it beautiful. They had entered from the west side, the east being far too exposed to the street.

Mr. Nine was so excited he was practically skipping and Fish had to work to keep up.

“This is it,” the older man babbled, “the heart of the city that is the heart of this land. We’re on the continental divide, you know. Men have always settled here, this place of power, of transition. It’s the center of movement within your great American empire but even before —” He froze suddenly, his feet and his tongue coming to an abrupt halt at the same time.

He stood there, his eyes wider than Fish had ever seen them, until he spun and dove behind a mound, hissing frantically at Fish to follow him. Fish let out a grumbling, exasperated breath and did so.

“I can’t believe he’s still here,” Mr. Nine muttered as Fish crouched down next to him.

“Who? I didn’t hear anything.”

“This place was once prehistoric marsh and shades of those things that ruled here still linger deep in the layers that remember them. Years ago, when I tried to force the Knot open myself, the land spat something up and drove me off.” He cautiously crept up the slope of the mound and peeked through blades of grass.

Fish heard him gasp and had to look for himself. He saw a barely discernible naked figure standing in the center of an unbelievably thick cloud of insects just thirty yards away. It strode towards them with stiff, inexorable purpose.

“Yet another enemy,” Fish murmured. “Everywhere you go.”

Mr. Nine glared at him. “I’m the victim here. I’m the one betrayed.” He leapt to his feet, stood atop the mound and lifted the largest, ugliest instrument from his belt; it was oily gray, twisted and jagged. “I’m ready for you this time.”

But apparently the creature had also given this encounter some thought. As Mr. Nine brought the flute to his lips, the swarm surrounding it surged forward and closed the distance in an eye-blink. Mr. Nine all but disappeared in an onrush of mosquitoes and dragonflies that stuffed themselves into the flute’s airways and his mouth. Mr. Nine gagged and thrashed until his right leg failed him and he tumbled down the green slope.

Fish spent a few seconds waving his own arms, trying to fend off the attack, until he realized the swarm had avoided him completely. By then the creature had joined him on the moonlit hill; it may have once been a man, but now its skin was a bilious yellow and its eyes an endless black. An enormously engorged, strawberry-red tongue lolled and lunged from its gaping mouth.

It gazed vacantly down at the struggling, sputtering Mr. Nine, seemingly unaware of the man standing right next to it. Fish felt a macabre thrill as he watched fat, full mosquitoes return to the creature, alight soft as air on its eager tongue and kiss the red, wet surface with their tiny needle-mouths.

The thing smelled like an open doorway to death and it made Fish feel more alive than he ever had and though he could not recall Fowler’s memories, he could feel the empty spaces they had left.

Without giving himself any time to rethink it, Fish hit the creature with as much momentum as he could pack into an uppercut. Its jaws snapped together and its tongue ruptured, falling to the grass in plops and patters.

The ancient thing saw him then and looked on him with such confusion that Fish would always be haunted by an inexplicable guilt whenever he thought of it. It took a faltering step back, then slowly raised a hand and drew its own eyelids down. All at once, it fell limp and rolled lifelessly down the mound where the grass swallowed it like the waves of a jade sea.

Fish turned in time to watch the swarm dissipate suddenly, blown away by an intangible wind, leaving behind a gasping Mr. Nine whose skin was an appalling white with tiny red speckles.

Fish tromped down the hill and dropped a knee across the supine man’s throat. Mr. Nine went bug-eyed and tried to buck him off but Fish didn’t budge. “You’re going to unbuckle that belt and take out your teeth and give them both to me or I’m going to kneel on your neck until you die, okay?”

Mr. Nine opened his mouth but no sound came out. He hesitated a moment but as his face started to turn crimson, he frantically did as he was told. Fish hefted the belt triumphantly and accepted the teeth with a bit less enthusiasm, then got off Mr. Nine, who exploded in a fit of gasps and ragged wheezing.

When this had subsided, the older man, exhausted, toothless and beaten, rolled over on his side and began to cry silently. Fish watched for a while, fascinated and pitiless.

Finally, he said, “Stop your blubbering already and get up. You’re still taking me to the Knot. I want to know what all the fuss is about; I want to know what my life is about.”

“Alright, which one do I use?” Fish rattled the bones hanging from his belt.

Mr. Nine scowled at his ignorance. He had been mopey and silent for the remainder of the walk to the west entrance of the Garfield Park Conservatory. Even his fedora looked defeated, bent and as encrusted with crushed bugs as his coat was. He pointed a thin finger at a stubby little flute etched with spirals.

Fish unhooked it, vigorously wiped the mouthpiece with his sleeve and blew a note that made Mr. Nine scowl even harder.
“Don us play anying!” He sounded like an angry toddler without his teeth.

“Thanks for the tip,” Fish whispered with a grin, “but it would be easier if you just showed me what fingers to use.” A bit of a risk but under current circumstances he figured Mr. Nine wouldn’t be too hard to fight off if he made a grab for it.

Mr. Nine reached over and tapped Fish’s fingers in a short sequence. Fish played through it three times before the door softly unlocked. “It worked. Magic is handy.” He took a step back and searched the dark space within the glass for any sign of movement, but all he saw were the looming, prickly silhouettes of desert plants.

People knew on some level, Fish realized, that this was where places met and paid tribute to that convergence by surrounding it with handfuls of environment from around the globe. He cast a suspicious glance back at Mr. Nine, wondering what, of all the doors between worlds the older man knew of, made this one so special.

The moon peered down through the glass ceiling as the two men crept into the Desert House and followed a walkway past a row of hedge cacti into the Children’s Garden, where moonlight and shadow made the giant-sized flower and bee displays menacingly surreal.

Fish was so on edge as they entered the Sweet House that he almost cried out when Mr. Nine grabbed his arm and hissed, “Guard. Come.”

Fish allowed himself to be dragged off the path and into some sugar cane. He lifted the small gray flute Mr. Nine had used at the hospital and his companion nodded his approval. The focused glare of a flashlight rounded the coconut trees further along the path; it paused as Fish falteringly started playing the two alternating notes, then began moving in their direction again.

The security guard, a swarthy and squat specimen, swept the flashlight right over them and seemed not to notice. As the man continued on his oblivious route, Mr. Nine motioned for Fish to pick up the tempo. Without thinking, the younger man complied and was shocked to see the guard stumble and fall.

Fish threw Mr. Nine to the ground and pinned him with a forearm across his throat. “What did you make me do?” he growled.
“Sleep,” Mr. Nine forced out, “us sleeping.”

When Fish had checked and was satisfied that the man was indeed sleeping, the two continued through the Palm House, where they had to repeat the spell on another two guards, and into the Fern Room at the center of the conservatory. Centuries old cycads rose to the ceiling in a continuous leafy green mass and bordered the artificial lagoon at the center of the room.

Mr. Nine took a long, challenging look at Fish as he shrugged off his coat and tossed aside his fedora, then silently began wading into the water. Fish kicked off his shoes and followed, trying to remember every stupid New Age calming mantra he had ever heard as he submerged himself in cold darkness. He spent several moments completely blind underwater, until he spotted a faint red luminescence, a large object below, backlit by some unseen source.

He swam down and saw great black roots that broke up through the bottom of the lagoon and wound around each other in a tangle. Beneath the Knot, something burned red. Vaguely aware of Mr. Nine drifting beside him, Fish ran his hands across one root’s cold, coarse surface and felt symbols there. Something that wasn’t quite an equation, a sequence of notes or a riddle bloomed in his thoughts and coiled itself around his mind, awaiting his answer.

Fish surfaced from an ocean of red voices and woke with a wave of disorientation and a burst of fear. He jerked himself upright, realized he was sopping wet and covered in grit, and found himself in a vast spherical cavern. Glittering pools of still water dotted the landscape around him and, impossibly, above him. From each pool rose a black tree with vast, meandering branches and broad green leaves. Each bore fruit but no two the same and none Fish recognized. Vast swarms of fireflies drifted and swirled through the air and the light they cast was both frightening and beautiful.

“The pool next to you is the way home,” said the familiar, nasal voice.

Fish turned to see Mr. Nine squeezing excess water from his socks, smiling in his wolfish way. “I see you’ve got your teeth back.”

Mr. Nine pointed at the belt around the younger man’s waist. “Yes, while you were away in your mind. But I let you keep the flutes; you’ll need them to play your way out of the conservatory when you go back. Consider them payment for a job well done, Christopher.”

“You’re not going back?”

Mr. Nine cackled giddily. “Oh, I am but I won’t need such tools anymore. Things are going my way from now on.” He pulled his socks on, reached into his pocket and produced something that looked much like an apple core. “I’ve already eaten the fruit of our tree. Now all I need is to get the Ancient to write my name in his book and the world will truly be home.”

Fish began to wonder which of the flutes would be effective against the other man if it came to that. “And what does that mean?”

Mr. Nine sighed as if he was dealing with the most obstinate child who had ever lived. “Christopher, countless beings may be born into a particular world but it is never home to them. Who is happy? Who is at peace? Which of the countless worlds is not an enemy to the men walking it? I have been to so many and my educated guess is none.”

“So, what? Whatever your doing will rewrite reality to your benefit?”

Mr. Nine tsked him. “Nothing so melodramatic. There won’t be fiery pits full of my enemies and statues of me as far as the eye can see but events will subtly shape themselves to give me the best possible life. Look, before the real you tied the Knot, many men had found this place and lived flawless lives as a result.”

Fish shook his head. “That can’t be without effect. Who knows what kind of ripples those changes made? And do you seriously think you deserve this?”

“Nobody gets what they deserve,” Mr. Nine snapped. “The very existence of that word is shear absurdity.” He stalked away, apparently done humoring him.

Fish lifted his eyes to the fat red spheres dangling from the low-hanging branches overhead. He leapt, snatched one and bit into it before he even had a clear idea of what his plan was. It was crunchy and very tart and somehow vacillated between being delicious and unpleasant. He ate the rest of it as he hurried to catch up to Mr. Nine.

It was a long walk and Fish knew they must be climbing the curve of the chamber but felt no change in gravity’s pull. They seem to come upon their destination all at once; the Ancient was nowhere to be seen until they passed a thick cluster of the world trees and suddenly there it was.

It sat on a stool next to a table, both of intricate ironwork, pouring over a huge volume that a man would have trouble even lifting. A black, hooded cloak hid most of its body except for the taloned hands, the long segmented tail curling and uncurling idly behind it, and the massively jawed snout sticking out of its hood. If standing, it would have been nearly nine feet tall.

Fish cried out and turned to run but stopped when he heard Mr. Nine’s howling laughter. “Oh Christopher, I forgot what it’s like to be so provincial. This is the Ancient, the slithering shepherd of man, the angel of the cold-blooded; he is a facilitator of history and believe me when I tell you he is a friend to man. He stands between us and much that would harm us.”

Despite these assurances, Fish couldn’t keep from jumping when the creature fluidly rose from its seat and disappeared into the large domed hut behind it.

“It’s impossible not to get the cold sweats around him, isn’t it?” Mr. Nine murmured, mockingly. “There is a story that tells of a world completely taken by a plague of madness. It says he walked in that place and killed everything he found there, by himself — simply emptied the world out.”

He fell silent as the Ancient returned, sat back down on its stool and placed a large birdcage under a satin cloth on the table. A voice, high and reedy, called from the cage, “You have eaten the fruit?”

“I have,” Mr. Nine answered.

The Ancient lifted a large, sharp quill and held out an open hand. The voice in the cage asked, “And what is your name?”

“Mr. Nine,” he answered, gingerly placing his hand in the Ancient’s.

“But what kind of name is that?” Fish cried out. “Who gave it to him? Is that even his real name?”

“Shut up!” Mr. Nine roared at him and turned his attention back to the Ancient, only to find the creature motionless, waiting. “It… is the only name I have ever known. It was given to me by the man who taught me the worlds and the arts. It’s real, I swear it.”

“What was the man’s name?” Fish asked.

Mr. Nine looked pained when the voice in the cage repeated the question. “What was the man’s name?”

“Mr. Eight! But what does it matter?”

Fish approached the Ancient warily, looked into the shadowed hood where he thought its eyes were and was glad he couldn’t see them. He said, “He set this in motion over twenty years ago and he still needs it. What’s he been doing with all that time? Why can’t he change?”

Mr. Nine flew into a rage. “Enemies keep thwarting me! People like you who won’t just —”

The Ancient’s sudden motion was faster than any living thing Fish had ever seen. The great jaws snapped and Mr. Nine was gone from the shoulders up. His body tottered and fell.

“And do you know yourself?” the voice in the cage asked Fish.

Fish forced his gaze away from the corpse and thought a moment. “Sometimes I think so but I get surprised an awful lot.”

The Ancient held out its hand. It was warm and dry and when it pierced his palm with its quill, it didn’t hurt as much as he thought it would. The Ancient leaned over the tome, poised to write, a thick droplet of blood falling from the quill.

“What is your name?,” asked the voice.

Fish wondered on his short, unhappy life and thought there probably wasn’t a power in the universe that could make him fit with people, that could make him happy. So he said, “Christopher Fowler. Put down Christopher Fowler.”

It took a couple weeks to find her, but he did, living in a trim little blue house on the outskirts of Chicago. She was meditating in her back yard when he first approached her, sitting in a circle of small stones, burning incense. She still had the waist-long iron gray hair he remembered.

“Emma Fowler?” Fish asked.

The old woman opened her eyes, gaped in surprise and then smiled broadly. “Christopher! Figured out who I was, eh?”

He sat down, cross-legged, next to her and nodded. “I found out who I am or was or whatever. There was a wedding ring on the old man’s hand and I remembered one on the woman who took such a strange interest in me way back when. So I looked for you under his name.”

She pursed her lips and asked gently, “Are you okay?”

“Well, one of the stories you told me came in very handy. You could have told me a lot more, though.”

She took her straw sunhat off and fanned herself with it. “Not without deciding your path for you. I wanted to help you without destroying your second chance.”

“But don’t you care that your husband is sleeping his life away? You know… I ate the fruit and put his name in the book but he’s still sleeping and I’m still here.”

She reached out and touched his face. “I remember when he looked like you. For some people, though, time erodes more than just their bodies. Sometimes we move away from our best selves. Towards the end of our time together, I loved Chris more for who he could have been than who he was. I would look at him and see something beautiful marred in ways I couldn’t repair. Nobody could.

“And now there’s you; so maybe he’s getting what he wants.” She withdrew her hand, set her hat high on her head. “You do what you want to, honey, but let the old man sleep.”

Beyond the Veil is a regularly appearing column featuring fiction, including occult, horror, science fiction, and fantasy. If you’d like to contribute a story, please contact admin@rendingtheveil.com and we’ll be happy to review your submission.

©2009 Bret Tallman
Edited by Sheta Kaey

2) The True Self contains Good & Evil, Upright & Averse

“My adepts stand upright; their head above the heavens, their feet below the hells.” — Liber Tzaddi, line 40

Initiation in the New Aeon is “the Child Growing to Maturity” by the slaying of the ego-self whose “death is life to come” for the True Self. But what is the nature of that True Self? Essentially, the True Self transcends dualities. Specifically, the True Self transcends the moral duality of Good and Evil.

People have a common tendency to imagine their goal as their “Higher Self” which they imagine as Absolute Good, caring, benevolent, etc. In short, many people construct an ideal or an abstraction of their highest ideals and believe that to be the goal. Crowley asserts in Magick Without Tears, “He is not, let me say with emphasis, a mere abstraction from yourself; and that is why I have insisted rather heavily that the term ‘Higher Self’ implies a damnable heresy and a dangerous delusion.” The term “Higher Self” is a delusion because the aim of Initiation in the New Aeon is to bring the individual to identify with the “Total Self” or “All-Self,” not the “Higher Self” (or “Lower Self”). We must explore and conquer both the “good” and “evil” sides of ourselves: in terms of modern psychology, we cannot neglect our own Shadow. As Crowley advises, “Every magician must firmly extend his empire to the depth of hell” (Magick in Theory and Practice, Chapter 21). As Nietzsche says, “The great epochs of our life are the occasions when we gain the courage to rebaptize our evil qualities as our best qualities” (Beyond Good and Evil, Aphorism 116).

Much of Thelema’s imagery may be seen as “sinister.” Examples include the “Beast” and “Babalon” from the Book of Revelations (where they do not appear in a favorable light), the experience of divinity as “evil kisses corrupt[ing] the blood… as an acid eats into steel, as a cancer that utterly corrupts the body” (Liber LXV, I:13, 16) and “poison” (Liber LXV, III:39, IV: 24-25, V:52-53, 55-56), “the concealed” within oneself wherein “all things are in thine own Self” (Liber Aleph, “De Libidine Secreta”) is called Hell or Satan (who is identified with the Sun in Liber Samekh), etc. These could all be considered as attempts to bring the psyche of the individual to acceptance of both the upright and averse aspects of existence. One might even say it is the “darker” side of the self emerging because of its neglect in Old Aeon systems that focus on Good, Virtue, Grace, etc. and exclude their opposites. In the New Aeon we assert that the True Self contains (and thereby transcends) both Good and Evil. “Less than All cannot satisfy Man” (William Blake, There Is No Natural Religion).

This idea of the True Self as containing both Heaven and Hell, Good and Evil, Upright and Averse, is captured succinctly in Liber Tzaddi, lines 33-42:

“I reveal unto you a great mystery. Ye stand between the abyss of height and the abyss of depth. In either awaits you a Companion; and that Companion is Yourself. Ye can have no other Companion. Many have arisen, being wise. They have said ‘Seek out the glittering Image in the place ever golden, and unite yourselves with It.’ Many have arisen, being foolish. They have said, ‘Stoop down unto the darkly splendid world, and be wedded to that Blind Creature of the Slime.’ I who am beyond Wisdom and Folly, arise and say unto you: achieve both weddings! Unite yourselves with both! Beware, beware, I say, lest ye seek after the one and lose the other! My adepts stand upright; their head above the heavens, their feet below the hells… Thus shall equilibrium become perfect.”

As mentioned in the last section, the True Self transcends the duality of Life and Death. In this section we see that the True Self transcends the duality of Upright and Averse, Good and Evil. The True Self is even “beyond Wisdom and Folly.” We must unite both with the Upright, “the glittering Image in the place ever golden,” and with the Averse, “that Blind Creature of the Slime.” Only thereby may man come to knowledge of his true Self: otherwise the individual will have a lopsided perspective of the self. One must remember that it is only because of its roots deep into the dark ground that a tree is able to produce fruit. As the psychologist Abraham Maslow noted, “Man’s higher nature rests upon man’s lower nature, needing it as a foundation and collapsing without this foundation” (Toward a Psychology of Being, 1968).

The method of Initiation in the New Aeon is therefore one of Union of Opposites and Equilibrium. The equilibrium is not that of moderation, the Middle Path of Buddha (or the Doctrine of the Mean of Aristotle), where we seek to avoid extremes and remain in the center. The equilibrium of New Aeon Initiation is understood as the balance attained by pushing to both extremes of any duality. “Go thou unto the outermost places and subdue all things” (Liber LXV I:45). We don’t take the upright (“white light”) or averse (“satanic”) of the Upright/Averse duality and aim for that alone; we aim for both the heavens and the hells. One might say, symbolically, the Old Aeon is like a pole or a tree, where the vertical section is straight and narrow, avoiding extremes. The New Aeon is then like a large building or a pyramid where the base is expanded horizontally. This symbolically shows that, by pushing towards the extremes (expanding the base horizontally in this metaphor), we enlarge our foundations which thereby allow us to withstand the “winds” of experience better. As it says in The Book of the Law, “Wisdom says: be strong! Then canst thou bear more joy. Be not animal; refine thy rapture! …But exceed! exceed! Strive ever to more!” (II:70-72). William Blake also enigmatically stated, “The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom” (“The Marriage of Heaven and Hell“).

Again, we can look again to Horus (with the Infinitely Contracted Core of Flame as His Heart and the Infinitely Expansive Space as His Body) as a symbol of That which transcends the dualities of Good and Evil, Upright and Averse. In uniting with both the “glittering Image” and the “Blind Creature of the Slime,” we come to know ourselves as the All which contains but transcends both: “For two things are done and a third thing is begun… Horus leaps up thrice armed from the womb of his mother” (Liber A’ash, line . As Horus says in The Vision and the Voice, “I am light, and I am night, and I am that which is beyond them. I am speech, and I am silence, and I am that which is beyond them. I am life, and I am death, and I am that which is beyond them.” We might add, “I am good, and I am evil, and I am that which is beyond them.” Horus, the Sun, is a symbol of That which contains & transcends dualities, an image of our True Selves, identical in essence yet diverse in expression for each individual; other cognate symbols include the point in the circle (the Solar glyph), the Rose-Cross, semen and menstrual fluid combined (two live, generative fluids combined into a third which “is one substance and not two, not living and not dead, neither liquid nor solid, neither hot nor cold, neither male nor female” — Magick in Theory and Practice, Chapter 20), the Heart Girt with the Serpent (see Liber LXV), the cross in the circle, the circle squared (Liber Al II:47), the Sun and the Moon conjoined (called “the Mark of the Beast” in Liber Reguli and “the secret sigil of the Beast” in the 1st Aethyr of The Vision and the Voice), the Lion and the Eagle, the word ABRAHADABRA, and infinite others. In a certain ritual were the individual comes to identify with Horus (Liber XLIV: The Mass of the Phoenix), we proclaim our transcendence of the moral duality: “There is no grace: there is no guilt: / This is the Law: DO WHAT THOU WILT!”

“For Perfection abideth not in the Pinnacles, or in the Foundations, but in the ordered Harmony of one with all.” — Liber Causae, line 32

3) Embrace of the World

“Enjoy all things of sense and rapture… —” Liber Al Vel Legis II:22

We found the True Self which we come to identify with in Initiation is beyond the duality of Life and Death (part 1) as well as the duality of Good and Evil (part 2). Now we unite yet another divide with an embrace of the physical, “mundane” world. Another common dichotomy (at least in the West) that has split the psyche of man is Spirit versus Matter, or Sacred versus Profane.

In the ancient and medieval world, the predominant conception of the universe was of an earth below and the heavens above. People conceived the law of the Heavens as perfect and the Earth as degraded. Isaac Newton was one of the main figures who helped bridge the gap between Heaven and Earth. He said that the same force which makes objects fall on earth is the same force which makes the celestial objects in heaven move in their orbits: gravity. Symbolically and literally, Newton said the heavens and earth do not have separate laws but abide by one law. Also, we now know that the heavens are not above us but surround us on all sides. There is no separation between the “mundane” Earth and the spiritual” Heavens: Earth is literally immersed in the Heavens.

In the New Aeon we assert that “Every man and every woman is a star” (Liber Al I:3). On the physical level, we are all literally made of star-stuff (or “stardust”), as Carl Sagan was fond of noting, but there is a more important meaning here. Nuit — who says of herself, “I am Heaven” (Liber Al I:21) — is a symbol of the Infinite Space in which we are all immersed. Each star — each individual — is the center of self-awareness and expression of Heaven on Earth. Crowley writes, “Know firmly, o my son, that the true Will cannot err; for this is thine appointed course in Heaven, in whose order is Perfection” (Liber Aleph, “De Somniis [delta]“). In an important sense, this asserts that we too are in a perfect course through Heaven just as the celestial stars are. In the New Aeon there is an “unveiling of the company of heaven” (Liber Al I:2): every man and every woman. We are each Gods, Stars going their unique Ways in Heaven. Crowley comments, “[The] Pantheism of AL: The Book of the Law shows forth all things as God” (“Djeridensis Comment”) and “The ‘company of heaven’ is Mankind, and its ‘unveiling’ is the assertion of the independent godhead of every man and every woman!” (The Law Is For All).

From all these considerations its easy to see that in the New Aeon, not only does the True Self transcend the duality of Heaven and Earth/Spiritual and Mundane, but there is essentially no distinction between them at all. The Earth is not a prison, but a Temple where the sacrament of Life may be enacted; the body is not corrupt, but a pulsing and thriving vessel for the expression of Energy; sex is not sinful, but a mysterious conduit of pleasure and power as well as an lmage of the ecstatic nature of all Experience.

In fact, the embrace of the world, and even an ecstatic embrace of the world, naturally comes from cosmological perspective of the New Aeon. “Existence is pure joy” (Liber Al II:9) in the New Aeon (and not pure sorrow as some old hypochondriac and many pessimists since have suggested). We are also told, “the Truth of the universe is delight” (The Vision and the Voice, 17th Aethyr). This is because the Cosmological Picture of the New Aeon is that all Experiences are acts of Love between Infinite Forms (“Nuit”) and Infinite Forces (“Hadit”).

“Hadit, who is the complement of Nuit ["the infinite in whom all we live and move and have our being"]… is eternal energy, the Infinite Motion of Things, the central core of all being. The manifested Universe comes from the marriage of Nuit and Hadit; without this could no thing be. This eternal, this perpetual marriage-feast is then the nature of things themselves; and therefore everything that is, is a crystallization of divine ecstasy.” —Liber DCCCXXXVII: The Law of Liberty

Therefore, in the New Aeon we see every experience as the joyful union between Form and Force, Infinite Space and Infinite Motion. The world itself is an expression of Divinity, and therefore there is no reason to retreat from it in New Aeon Initiation. Just as we must transcend the dualities of Life & Death and Good & Evil, we must transcend the duality of Heaven & Earth, Sacred & Profane. We are told in the 19th Aethyr of The Vision and the Voice, “Worship all things; for all things are alike necessary to the Being of the All.” This idea of worshipping all things, and not making a distinction between “spiritual” and “mundane,” leads to the Formula of the Scarlet Woman.

“The Formula of the Scarlet Woman” refers to a certain attitude to the world. The Scarlet Woman is traditionally associated with the image of a whore, who symbolically represents “that which allows anything and everything into itself.” The opposite image is that of a chaste woman who shuts herself up and does not allow any intimate contact with anything around herself. Crowley writes, “The Enemy is this Shutting up of things. Shutting the Door is preventing the Operation of Change, i.e. of Love… It is this ‘shutting up’ that is hideous, the image of death. It is the opposite of Going, which is God” (The Law Is For All). The whore is an image of Change and the embrace of all things without distinction, and the chaste woman is an image of Stagnation and the separation from all things. The chaste woman is also therefore an image of the ego which refuses to give up its claim to be “King of the Mountain” (the True Self is the rightful “King” and the ego its minister, but the ego insists on claiming this title). Just like a chaste woman will not “let herself go” to have intimate relations with others, the ego will not “let itself go” to dissolve in the non-ego, the rest of the world, so that the individual may become One (beyond dualities). As mentioned in part 1, the work of we mentioned that “the work of each person is the release of identification with the ego and the consequent identification with Horus, That which transcends Life and Death (and all dualities).” We are therefore a “chaste woman” if we refuse to release identification with the ego and insist on a world of division (i.e. a world of ego vs. world of non-ego). This is another example of the “averse” or “sinister” symbolism that is often used in the New Aeon: the symbol of stagnation is a chaste woman (chastity being a “virtue” in the Old Aeons) and the symbol of growth and change is a whore (promiscuity/sensuality being a “vice”/”sinful” in the Old Aeons). In summary: the Formula of the Scarlet Woman applies to every individual (not just females) and refers to the attitude of accepting all things into oneself, refusing nothing, and growing through their assimilation. Crowley writes, “[This is] a counsel to accept all impressions; it is the formula of the Scarlet woman; but no impression must be allowed to dominate you, only to fructify you; just as the artist, seeing an object, does not worship it, but breeds a masterpiece from it” (Book of Lies, Chapter 4). Therefore, we accept all things but we do not thereby become a passive, lifeless receptacle which is buffeted by external forces; instead we must allow all things “to fructify” us. We all accept all things but we also turn these things towards the accomplishment of our Wills.

Here is an illustration of this point: a musical composer does not neglect C# as “profane” or “not worthy” but accepts all notes as worthy and beautiful in themselves, yet that does not mean his song will consist of hitting all the keys at once. On the contrary, he selects among the possible notes, arranges them in accordance with his vision, and produces a particular composition. The same idea is true for the Scarlet Woman, for the Formula of the Scarlet Woman is the acceptance of all things no matter if they are “unclean” or “mundane.” Crowley insists, “I urge you to beware of the pride of the spirit, of the thought of anything as evil or unclean. Make all things serve you in your Magick [causing Change in conformity with Will] as weapons” (“Djeridensis Comment”).

In short, in the New Aeon we do not avoid the things of the world or the world itself in fear of it being “unspiritual,” “profane,” or “mundane.” On the contrary, each individual is immersed in Heaven itself, as a Star among Stars. In the New Aeon, each individual proclaims, “All things are sacred to me” (Liber A’ash, line 29), and enacts “the Formula of the Scarlet Woman,” refusing nothing and accepting all. Thereby does each individual come to embody the union between (and the fruit of) Heaven and Earth.

“Behold! these be grave mysteries; for there are also of my friends who be hermits. Now think not to find them in the forest or on the mountain; but in beds of purple, caressed by magnificent beasts of women with large limbs, and fire and light in their eyes, and masses of flaming hair about them; there shall ye find them. Ye shall see them at rule, at victorious armies, at all the joy; and there shall be in them a joy a million times greater than this.” — Liber Al Vel Legis, II:24

Editor’s Note: While many titles of the libers of Thelema are typically presented in quotation marks rather than italics, we have used italics to make the references in this article easier to find while scanning quickly.

 

See part one of this series here, and part three here.
©2009 IAO131
Edited by Sheta Kaey

For decades witches and other modern pagans have been in a war of words, which sometimes escalates to a war of fists, with the Christian churches. Christians are berated in the most uncivil language on New Age Web sites and in Wicca zines for being malicious fools incapable of thinking for themselves, who allow their pastors, priests, and other Christian spokespersons to tell them what to think about the practice of magic and the worship of pagan gods.

The most withering contempt is always saved for the Fundamentalists, who are taught by their charismatic preachers that all forms of magic, and all worship other than their own beliefs, will result in damnation. Pagans regard Fundies, as they are derisively called, with loathing and view them as their greatest enemies. But is this really so?

There is another enemy, common to both Christians and pagans, that has been quietly gathering strength over the past few years. Its presence on the Internet has expanded exponentially, so that whereas not long ago it was almost impossible to locate, today it is equally impossible to avoid. It is a militant movement with its own dogma and it will tolerate no discussion or debate, except under its own terms – and those terms make true debate impossible.

The new enemy is atheism. It is the belief – the unfaith – that there are no gods, no spirits, no angels or devils, no paranormal abilities, and no magic of any kind.

There is nothing particularly wrong with individuals holding such a view. Everyone should be free to believe what they wish. It becomes a problem for Christians and pagans alike when atheists begin to promote their agenda as a movement with militant insistence, and with intolerance toward other beliefs. They are not content to allow others to believe what they wish, but must seek to convert them.

Atheists don’t regard their opinions as beliefs, of course, but rather look upon them as reality. That this same opinion has been maintained by every fanatical and exclusionary religious cult that has ever existed down through the centuries seems to escape them. All fanatical movements proclaim themselves possessors of the only truth, and are aggressively intolerant toward other beliefs – so it is with atheism, which is really a kind of fanatical cult of science that worships godlessness.

For a couple of decades, atheism has attacked the New Age movement under a different guise, that of scientific skepticism. The Committee that was started by prominent skeptics such as the Amazing Randi has systematically assaulted those who practice magic, or who believe in psychic abilities, and has called its campaign of harassment and intolerance “debunking.” Its more famous members have generally avoiding attacks on mainstream religion, although they target charismatic Fundamentalist preachers who employ magic (under another name, that of miracles) for healing purposes. Nor have all of them overtly proclaimed themselves to be atheists, but the writing is on the wall.

Their creed is unbelief, or rather a fanatical belief in the unreality of all spiritual things. They maintain that there is no magic in the world, of any kind – no spirits, no angels, no miracles. The universe they believe in with such fanatical and absolute certainty has no room for the occult or the paranormal.

The debunkers are only the leading edge of the growing atheist movement. The ultimate goal of atheism is to destroy all forms of religion, and this includes both Christianity in its many varieties, and all types of New Age beliefs that worship pagan gods or use magic, such as modern Wicca and Druidism, and even occult movements that arise from traditional Christianity, such as Spiritualism.

This essay is a plea for tolerance and unity. Pagans should reflect that in spite of their long history of conflict with Christianity, it is still a supernatural belief system that acknowledges magic, even though it refuses to call it by its true name. Christian miracles are a form of magic. The healing done by Jesus was done with magic. The exorcism rite still used by Catholic priests to drive out demons is a form of magic rite. Pagans know this even if Christians do not.

The differences between pagans and Christians are not really so deep as they appear. Both believe in higher supernatural beings. Both groups believe that such beings have servants or messengers who mediate between these beings and humanity. Both recognize that such beings can initiate or enable acts that seem to transcend the normal laws of nature. Both are focused upon spiritual discovery, spiritual evolution, and spiritual perfection as the highest goals in life.

It is unfortunate that Christians have been taught for so many centuries to hate and despise pagans, because at root, both movements are engaged in the same kinds of activities, and hold similar views concerning the survival of consciousness after death, the importance of intangibles such as the soul and non-physical realms of experience, and the possibility of intervention by benevolent higher powers in our lives, who act to guide and protect us.

By contrast, atheists reject God and the gods alike. They reject angels, the existence of the soul, life after death, supernatural intervention, ghosts, poltergeists, channeling, possession, divination, miracles, the paranormal, nature spirits, and any higher morality or code of conduct that is communicated to mankind by wise teachers not of the flesh.

What the atheist faithful worship – and make no mistake about it, worship is the only word for their fanatical and intolerant devotion – is the Void. It must be capitalized because the Void is their anti-god. They worship a lifeless mechanism, a cosmic clockwork with no Maker, a world devoid of hope or inspiration, a world purged of all traces of magic both Christian and pagan.

With every day that passes there seems to be more evidence that atheism is a growing movement. You probably remember the campaign of bus signs proclaiming that God does not exist. Such campaigns cost money. Somebody organizes them, and somebody funds them. Make no mistake, atheism is more than simply a collection of skeptical individuals – it is a cohesive unfaith that has as its ultimate purpose, not only the eradication of all religious beliefs and practices, but the destruction of all forms of magic and the supernatural.

Atheism has the potential to become a much greater threat to witchcraft, paganism, and New Age practices than Christianity ever was, even in its darkest and most intolerant days, because even then, when witches were being burned at the stake throughout most of Europe, both pagans and Christians shared a belief in higher spiritual powers and in supernatural agencies.

Atheism is a kind of many-tentacled monster of the Void that will eventually devour all forms of faith other than its own merciless, unforgiving worship of what is dead and empty. If allowed to grow unchecked, it will do immense harm to the human race, by cutting off avenues of communication between human beings and spiritual beings. As we all know, belief creates reality in the astral realms, and the fanatical belief of atheism is in sterility and non-existence.

Not all Christians are Fundies. Many are open to belief in various forms of magic. It is time to stop indiscriminately attacking Christians, and to attempt to find a common ground with them against the growing threat of the atheist movement. It is no longer a case of which god we worship, yours or mine, but whether we are allowed to worship the gods at all, or are forced to abandon them through a misguided ignorance that masquerades under the guise of scientific rationalism.

Science was never designed to deal with spiritual issues, and it is no more capable of commenting on things of the spirit today than it was five centuries ago. Yet atheists have seized on the jargon of science to promote their fanatical unfaith in the Void, and their increasingly militant movement of anti-spirit.

Once atheism is recognized as a threat to spiritual belief as a whole, a threat to all faiths and creeds and practices both Christian and pagan, it can be effectively countered, because at root atheism has nothing to offer – nothing but nothingness, not hope but hopelessness, and as we have all come to understand in our lives, there is more to the universe than the empty worship of the Void, the anti-god of the atheists.

Veiled Issues is a semi-regular column featuring opinion and debate topics. If you’d like to write a rebuttal for this article, send your proposal to admin@rendingtheveil.com and if accepted, we’ll feature your opposing article in the next issue of Rending the Veil.

Donald Tyson is the author of Sexual Alchemy: Magical Intercourse with Spirits, Familiar Spirits, and Soul Flight: Astral Projection and the Magical Universe, among other works. You can visit his website here.

©2009 Donald Tyson
Edited by Sheta Kaey

The study of magic is, by and large, the study of paradigms. The Witch — by whatever title she or he may adopt — steps beyond the default worldview presupposed by the surrounding society, and instead cultivates a unique paradigm which resonates with her or his deepest intuitions. This line of inquiry constitutes an ever present challenge for the practicing Witch. Our sisters and brothers who practice Chaos Magic may well find this interpretation of magic resonates with their approaches. For the Chaos Magician, paradigms are tools which the enlightened soul can adopt and abandon at will. Dancing from one worldview into the next, ever light of step, the Chaos Magician draws from some particular paradigm what she or he requires before moving on. Key to this approach is the conviction that all paradigms are merely artificial constructs by which we organize and render intelligible an essentially ineffable cosmos, yet herein we discover the key dilemma of Chaos Magic: If all paradigms are ultimately expendable, then where can we hope to ground the very conviction all paradigms are expendable interpretations? Thus presented, the argument becomes paradoxical, which may prove no obstacle for the practicing Chaos Magician — or for the Mystic, should we care to explore beyond the boundaries of the purely rational.

Still, the rationalist inside me, who has yet to surrender all hope for an intelligible universe, questions whether Chaos Magic simply sets up one meta-paradigm that encompasses all other possible paradigms. My concern here is simple: If the meta-paradigm thus proposed resolves into an essentially existentialist position, and I fear Chaos Magic indeed reverts back into existentialism, then how do we overcome or sidestep — or even incorporate — existential angst into our magical paradigms?

Allow me one step back. For those less versed in postmodern philosophy, existentialism proposes that existence precedes essence. That is, there is the world, eternally cold and mechanical in its manifold operations. These operations are pure existence, subsisting without reference to meaning or essence. Essence is what we add, the significance which conscious thought projects into the mechanical process. This essence can be thoroughly uplifting and optimistic — witness Soren Kirkegaard’s essentially Christian answer to the existentialist question! — yet whenever one takes up the mantle of existentialism, there lurks the spectre of nihilism. If all the universe is cold, mechanical process, devoid of any meaning apart from what we decide, then there can be no intrinsic meaning subsisting within anything. The universe simply grinds along, oblivious towards even the possibility of some deeper meaning. This scenario, as presented by existentialist philosophers like Sartre and Camus, becomes the source of existential angst, the pervasive and disquieting suspicion that any significance or teleology to things remains, at bottom, false.

It may remain possible that the Chaos Magician can refer all lesser paradigms back towards one primary reality which has meaning, transcending the merely mechanical. Certainly the irrepressible ebullience of Discordian thought suggests the possibility of one such meta-paradigm. Still, the question of whether reality is truly devoid of meaning — apart from what we add — remains.

This question turns especially vexing if we regard magic as something essential — that is, an essence — as opposed to something purely mechanical. If magic consists of the meaning we add into otherwise purely mechanical motions, then magic seemingly has no truck with reality at its most really real. (I recognize that if you do not perceive magic as the art of paradigm bending, I may have long since lost your attention, and if you regard magic as straightforwardly mechanical process, then existential angst constitutes no threat towards your magical paradigm. For those few readers as crazy as me, or for the morbidly curious, I shall continue this line of inquiry just a little further.)

While I am not deeply opposed to the existentialist project, I do regard their central proposition as essentially misleading. To assume that existence precedes essence means to assume an unobservable existence, for all observation imparts some meaning or essence, however slight and however poorly articulated. We simply cannot observe without becoming drawn into the connection between observer and observed. We are inexplicably entangled with the things we observe, and from this entanglement we derive the essence of the observed. Indeed, we might just as well say this entanglement — the way we think and feel about the observed — actually constitutes the essence in question. And there can be no unobserved existence.

Let me reiterate this point: There can be no unobserved existence. To say an existence is unobserved constitutes a manifest contradiction, since the supposition of the existence in question is itself an observation. Moreover, everything exists precisely by the virtue of being observed, by itself in the barest sense if nothing else. (For those familiar with my metaphysical views, my pantheism does allow for other forms and degrees of perception, but these I shall pass over presently in the interests of constructing the simplest argument possible.) Within everything there is essence, both the essence from self-perception and the essence from an outside observer. Existence and essence are forever and inescapably entwined, just as every being has both material and spiritual aspects. (Indeed, existence and essence are respectively much the same things!)

If spiritual essence always and everywhere coexists with perceived existence, then our next set of questions must revolve around what kind of essence we will or should intermingle with matter. Essence, consisting of a qualitative connection between observer and observed, depends in large part upon the choices we make when interpreting our world. Kirkegaard makes this very point in Works of Love when he suggests we are forever confronted with the choice between belief and mistrust. Love, argues Kirkegaard, is unique among the virtues in this: Love can only thrive within us when we believe in — indeed, unconditionally presuppose — the presence of love within others, from the first moment clear unto the last. Forever the mistrust endemic to nihilism raises the terrible possibility that there is no love within others, and whenever we choose this mistrust, we remove from ourselves the very possibility of finding love. Believe, and we find love, perhaps within others, yet more crucially — more gracefully — within ourselves. The tension between these two possibilities, between which we are eternally poised, lies at the root of existential angst.

Something of this same dilemma confronts the practicing Witch, I should think, for the quality of being magical, much like the quality of being loving, turns precisely upon finding without that which we seek within. To be magical means finding the magic inside those things around us, discovering the connections of meaning and correspondence which empower our spells. I’m not unaware that this position seemingly inverts the traditional formulation of the “Charge of the Goddess” — though in seeming only! Near the end of the Charge, the Goddess observes, “If that which you seek you find not within yourself, you will never find it without.” These are powerful words, words which counsel the Witch to look inward for genuine power and wisdom. To suggest we should seek the magical in the world around us, should we hope to discover the magic within, seems at odds with this Wiccan saying. Still, the choice to discover the magical inside things is itself a choice which dwells within the Witch, the same choice between belief and mistrust which Kirkegaard proposed nearly two hundred years ago. Magic is an essence, and essence depends upon the relationship between observer and observed that we ourselves choose. “Seek and ye shall find,” says the Christian. “As above, so below,” answers the occultist. And so our world takes shape. Seek love, and you will find love within. Seek magic, and magic you will surely possess. Seek the coldly mechanical universe, of course, and this you’ll find, as well.

Kirkegaard suggests we have no more reason to doubt the goodness within the world than we have to believe in things life-affirming, and I see no reason to doubt this essentially hopeful position. Indeed, the Chaos Magician can happily accept this argument, and then skip between the two positions as she or he desires, perhaps a little more mindfully than most everyone else who blend belief and mistrust in daily life. Still, this paradigm bending fails to escape the spectre of angst that existentialism suggests, and while I’m hesitant to jettison this pervasive sense of angst entirely, I am eager to arrive at workable terms with this metaphysical uneasiness. My solution returns to the central issue of ontological primacy. Simply stated, does existence precede essence? As an idealist, I simply don’t grant matter any existence independent of our ideas of matter. (Taking a page from George Berkeley, “To be is to be perceived.”) Furthermore, I believe every perception includes some qualification, some interpretation — in sum, some essence. Therefore, I cannot grant that existence precedes essence in any meaningful sense. This break from existentialism, however, becomes perhaps the greatest boon for the Witch, because every last sensible thing thus becomes pregnant with the possibility of magic. With every interaction, indeed with every bare perception, there arises the question of essence, whether this especial thing is something magical. And to this question, we Witches can answer with a resounding YES!

The nihilist will suggest we are simply fooling ourselves, choosing to make meaningless qualifications of an impersonal and mechanical universe. They will argue the underlying angst of existentialism points towards the one great truth, that everyone ultimately suffers alone within the cold void of reality. I don’t suggest we should remove all doubt about the nature of things, for such not only blinds us against genuine interaction with the world, but also removes the very emotional urgency which gives our Craft its power. In truth, the nihilist perceives reality through filters just as obscuring as those adopted by their magical brethren; the nihilist cannot cheat around our fundamental inability to grasp directly the ineffable nature of reality. All reality — everything that is — constantly forces us to choose between belief and mistrust, between the magical and the mundane, and this choice speaks most of all towards what we seek within ourselves. I choose to walk with belief, to walk with the magic around and within me. Such is the choice — and the power — of the Witch. And so with this choice I leave you, my dear readers.

Blessed Be!

©2009 Grey Glamer
Edited by Sheta Kaey

The teacher heaved himself from his stone seat. “Enough sitting. My knees are aching. Let’s walk and talk together,” he said to his few disciples. Other teachers had more — some as many as thirty students — but Aristotle took his pleasure in selecting the six or seven students who could best understand his teachings.

Used to their teacher’s habit of wandering while he lectured, the students gathered together styli and wax tablets and a few closely spaced sheets of lecture notes painstakingly copied from their teacher’s own notes. They gathered in a close circle around their teacher as he walked, trying as best they could to prick out a few salient notes on their tablets. Walking, talking, and juggling the material of learning forced them to listen carefully to their teacher.

“An object falls through the air,” the teacher says. “Imagine two objects — a section of that column here,” he tapped it with his staff, “and a blade of grass dropped from a height. They fall toward the earth. Why?”

“Both contain Earth in their nature, and so are drawn to the greatest concentration of that element,” said Eudemus.

“And why does the column fall faster?” Aristotle asked.

“It is heavier,” blurted out Phanias.

“Which just means that it contains more Earth than the grass,” Eudemus put in.

“And Earth is another name of mass, so we can say that objects of greater weight fall faster than objects of lesser weight. Yes?”

The students tossed their heads back in agreement.

“But why do they fall at any speed at all? Why not simply contact the ground instantly as they leave the hand? What holds them back from their affinity with Earth?”

The students thought for a while, and finally Phanias ventured an answer, hoping to redeem himself from his earlier stupidity. “The element of Air pushes against them, and Air is inimical to Earth. Every falling object is a war between Air and Earth.”

“Exactly so. Now, reason this out. If there were no Air to push against falling objects, how fast would they fall?”

“Infinitely fast,” put in Eudemus. “Which is an absurdity.”

“Therefore?” Aristotle’s “therefore” was always devastating. It meant you hadn’t finished your chain of reasoning.

“Therefore there can be no place without air. There can be no void.”

“Because if there were?”

“It would lead to a logical absurdity, and the universe is rational.”

Aristotle smiled, pleased. “Exactly so. So now let us explore this idea of the rational . . . ” And the students walked with their wise teacher into two thousand years of fame.

* * *

Galileo huffed his way up the stairs of the tower, his secretary in tow lugging not only the necessary writing equipment but a heavy bag that made a low clunking noise with every step.

Galileo had done the arithmetic and it had all worked out, but for it to work out required something nearly unthinkable. Aristotle had to have been wrong. And not just Aristotle, but everyone else stretching back between that time and this — and that of course included the holy church.

Finally, at the top, he fished two cannon balls out of his bag. Aristotle was right about the air, at least partially — air resistance would slow down an object as it fell, which is why a feather did, indeed, fall slower than a cannon ball. But two cannon balls, one of a large caliber, another of a smaller caliber, should cut through the air at more or less the same speed, being spherical. He sent his secretary to the bottom to watch as he dropped the two objects, and call out whether they hit the earth at the same moment, or different moments.

He conducted the experiment over and over, with both him and his secretary watching on the ground, and in every instance, the two balls struck the ground at the same instant.

Rather than being elated, he found himself a bit disappointed. He felt cut adrift, like a boat whose rope has finally frayed beyond control. But no, that was the wrong analogy. He was more like a horse who has realized that the line that seemed to be securely tied was, in reality, merely draped over a twig. From here, he could go anywhere.

* * *

I’ve fictionalized these two incidents because they illustrate an important shift in the way that humans thought, and this story is one central to the history of science and — I wish to argue — magic. Because I wish to argue that contrary to magic being a science, magic and science are both two ways of knowing, compatible, but independent.

But the stories I’ve told are not stories of compatible ways of knowing, but two warring systems of knowledge.

Aristotle began with the commonly held assumption that our senses can be deceived. In fact, we know this to be not simply common sense, but quite true. A simple optical illusion can reveal that our eyes don’t always see what we think they do. Our ears can hear things that aren’t there, or mistake things that are; even our taste and touch can be confused. We can drink a soda and believe we’re tasting cherry, when really we’re drinking sugar and apple juice colored red and flavored with chemicals. Our senses are inadequate.

So Aristotle joined the tradition that, since senses are faulty, we must rely on reason. This idea led to mathematics, where senses are not only faulty but useless. One cannot see “two” — the best one can do is see symbols about twoness, or two of something. But arithmetic, not to mention the higher branches of mathematics, is abstract well beyond the range of sense. So we must rely on pure reason. We know that 2 + 2 = 4, to employ the hackneyed example, because if it doesn’t everything else we know about mathematics falls apart. In mathematics, we can have certain knowledge. Of course, that certain knowledge is of an abstract system, and as later mathematicians discovered, if you start with slightly different assumptions it’s easy to end up with a different system, in which 2 + 2 does not equal four but, perhaps, eight. Yet Aristotle would argue that the real world, while not the perfection of mathematics, clearly partook of it. After all, maybe the idea of right triangles is all just an abstraction, but just try to erect a house without it. The very concrete and sensory house is built of abstract numbers.

If pure reason led to truth in mathematics, Aristotle reasoned, and mathematics led to truth in matter, then surely we could come to truth about the physical world without relying on our senses at all. We could simply reason it out from first principles. Select the right set of first principles, apply rigorous reason, and knowledge would result like a nice buttery baklava. And if we avoid the engagement of the senses, we avoid the faults that senses are heir to.

Galileo began with a different set of assumptions. While accepting that senses could be deceived, he worked from the premise that this deception could be evened out by having multiple people observe at different times. In the fictionalized (and probably apocryphal) account above, both he and his secretary make observations, and they do not stop with just one but do it again and again. In addition to building up excellent calf muscles by lugging cannon balls up the leaning tower of Pisa, this method has the benefit of certainty. We know it works because we can see it working.

I’m not a philosopher, so what I’m attempting here is a bit arrogant of me, but we can summarize Aristotle’s underlying assumptions about knowledge and compare them to Galileo’s. For Aristotle, observation is secondary to reasoning. For Galileo, reasoning is secondary to observation. For Aristotle, we make a prediction based on reasoning from first principles. For Galileo, we define principles by reasoning from observation.

The scientific revolution was a war between these two ways of knowing the world. In the end, the latter system of reasoning conquered the former, usurping it to its own purposes. Pure reasoning still has a place in the sciences — mathematics, after all, is core to all sciences and still employs reasoning that Aristotle could understand, although he might not follow all the advanced concepts of modern mathematics. Now, scientists observe the physical world and create models of reasoning to explain and predict the behavior of that world. These models are called theories. It’s easy, therefore, to laugh at Aristotle’s naiveté. He simply had the incorrect method for gaining knowledge about the world, and now we have the correct method, and so we’re done. Give us enough time and observations, and we’ll figure it all out. And, in fact, we’ve come quite far in just a few hundred years after the scientific revolution. We know — with some certainty — more about the structure of reality than Aristotle could have imagined, and we even understand how to manipulate it to some degree. Aristotle’s explanation of a magnet from first principles was clumsy and inadequate. Scientific explanations of electromagnetism allow me to use this computer to write this essay, which some of you may be reading on an electric screen that would baffle Aristotle.

The problem is, the above isn’t entirely true. Aristotle didn’t have the wrong method, because Aristotle is still quite relevant. Virtue ethics as Aristotle described them, for example, are still relevant, and literary criticism classes still often begin with his works on the structure of tragedy. Obviously, those fields have advanced in volume of books if nothing else, but we still read Aristotle there not to ridicule him but to appreciate his insights. Yet physics classes rarely — if ever — begin with Aristotle’s Phusis. It seems he got some things right — in ethics, literary criticism, and other areas — and other things wrong. We cannot simplify then and say, “this system of knowledge is the right one, and his was the wrong one.”

The war between Aristotle and Galileo was misguided on all sides. On the side of Aristotle stood the church, which had long since reconciled that pagan philosopher with their understanding of the world. On the side of Galileo stood — at first — Galileo. Then the Royal Society of London and other groups of scientists who struggled mightily and won (the Church recently surrendered by apologizing to Galileo). The Church was wrong in that indeed Galileo had the right idea about gravity and the right notion about planetary motion (with some fuzzy details). But the church wasn’t arguing that — they were arguing about his method. If human observation could discover truth, what purpose remained for God? Their error was assuming that the truth of planetary motion is the same truth as the nature of the divine. Similarly, newly minted scientists made the same error, assuming that religion existed only to explain what science has not yet gotten around to on their grand to-do list.

The reality is more complicated.

The current state of this war is between two fronts: science and religion. Science, represented (or perhaps more accurately co-opted) by militant atheists like Richard Dawkins, argues that religion is inherently absurd and even deluded. Religion, on the other hand, argues that science cannot answer the questions that religion approaches. In this war of words, it is hard to tell who is winning, but the atheists are making some headway with the same sort of spurious and fallacious reasoning that they decry. It’s not my goal to enter this war in these pages; instead, I want to suggest another approach, as an inhabitant in that neutral country of magic. After all, we lost this war long ago — and yet a few of us still remain, quietly doing what the dominant culture no doubt regards as eccentric at best.

What magic offers is the model, not of war, but of a toolbox. Perhaps instead of imagining that one way of knowing the world is right and all the others are wrong, we could imagine that one way of knowing the world is very good at accomplishing a certain task, and other ways are good at accomplishing certain other tasks. The skeptic picks up magic and says “look at how empirical examination of astrology proves that it’s bunk. How can you still believe it?” This skeptic is like the do-it-yourselfer who picks up a wrench to pound in a nail. If you approach a system of knowledge, you must do so first by understanding its use.

Each system of knowledge begins with certain assumptions, axioms if you will, and has certain strengths. To understand and employ that system of knowledge you must understand its assumptions and strengths. Moreover, our toolbox must contain more than two means of knowledge about the world. In fact, magic teaches us a myriad of ways to understand the world. Most magicians pay their bills, do their taxes, and go to work like normal people living in an empirical world. But at the same time, they recognize that associational thinking — linking diverse symbols to create new ideas — can affect reality in a fundamental and concrete way.

If we imagine that associational thinking is the only tool in our box, we become superstitious and become paranoid at a world too fraught with meaning. On the other hand, if all we have is empiricism, we never examine our underlying assumptions about knowledge, our philosophical foundations, and so we can never move beyond a naive empirical view of the world into meaning. Meaning, if empiricism is the only tool in our toolbox, is reduced to data collection.

It’s clear, then, that different mental tools suit different life-tasks better. What is needed, in both science and magic, is cognitive flexibility and willingness to experiment meaningfully. I think that science can teach us something about magic, maybe even investigate some of its claims, just as magic can help us create meaning out of the discoveries of science. Yet science is not just magic that we’ve learned to understand, and magic is not just unexplained science. If that were the case, we would be the poorer for it. Our minds understand the world physically and metaphysically, and we need to honor both in order to make full use of our toolbox, and we must avoid the errors of both Aristotle and Galileo, while simultaneously respecting their unsurpassed contributions to human thought.

©2009 Patrick Dunn
Edited by Sheta Kaey