Magic and science have long been strange bedfellows. Their histories are interwoven, much like the histories of magic and religion, although the story is not as widely known. Many magicians have been scientists; many scientists, magicians. At times, the line between the two seems blurred, unless viewed through the scientific lens of today. This rather furtive love affair has continued well into the present day, where magicians will borrow heavily from scientific findings to prove that their magical worldview is scientifically tenable. However, there are two interesting factors in this relationship. First, science rarely borrows from the realms of magic to prove the existence of its worldview. Second, there are very few magicians who are actively engaged in the front lines of science. It seems that most read the popular accounts of science, then begin making connections. Most magicians will claim that they practice magic as a pursuit of knowledge and power, or at least knowledge. Science has proven its effectiveness in both of these areas; we have learned a tremendous amount of information regarding the universe, and science has given us power to control the universe to a large extent. Thus, it would only seem natural that magicians would seize the opportunity to learn about the universe they hope to understand and affect.

In the past, many magicians, whose names have become legendary, were not only interested in science, but pioneers in the field. These figures regarded magic and science as complementary, not adversarial. Their desire was to understand the universe, not play ideological or emotional politics (although, of course, many found themselves engaged in such activities). Thus, magic and science were considered different aspects of a single reality, and as such, both contributed to the knowledge of that reality. Paracelsus is a prime example. As an alchemist, he felt that the true purpose of alchemy was to create medicines that could lead to a better, longer life. He is credited with giving birth to the science of pharmaceuticals. Alchemy itself had named many of the elements that the science of chemistry would later use in its investigation of the universe. John Dee, who is remarkably well known in the occult and magical communities, was engaged in navigation and mathematics, in addition to the more well-known espionage connections. The Neoplatonists of the Renaissance were often involved in science, either through investigation, like Dee, or by patronizing scientists. Aleister Crowley related a lifelong love of science, which he claimed to have “sacrificed to the altar of magick.” Despite this he maintained a keen eye toward scientific advancements, and often touted the worth of science. Plato himself laid the foundations for the integration of science and magic; he proposed that reality is composed of two Worlds, the World of the ideal, perfect Forms, and the World of the imperfect Things. According to Plato, the means whereby one may apprehend the World of Forms is through their “shadows” in the World of Things.

Many people of a magical, or otherwise spiritual or religious bent, decry the exclusive materialism of the new scientific worldview. The fact that many, supposedly due to the scientific worldview, ridicule or marginalize any type of spirituality (with the possible exception of orthodox Christianity) often leads to a distrust of or enmity toward science in general. Thus, magicians seem to find themselves in the position of using the findings of science to “keep up” in the world of ideas. Quantum physics is one such branch of science that has been used extensively in conjunction with magical ideas; psychology is another. However, as we’ve seen, this split between magic and science is not inherent in these two systems of knowledge. What is needed is a wider acceptance of science and magic as two means of observing, categorizing, understanding, and controlling the same reality.

The world as we know it is ripe for such a change. We live in an era where the rate of technological advancements rise exponentially each year, where values either shift daily or become embittered political parties, where the world constantly swings between global prosperity and global economic meltdown, where the very planet that sustains us may be our demise. As far as the sciences are concerned, they are booming. We are witnessing the development of new technologies almost daily, with advancements in computers, biotechnology, and the tantalizing promises of nanotechnology. As literacy and scientific knowledge spreads across the world, more and more young people are taking up the challenge. Likewise, there are perhaps more magicians in the world than ever before. Magicians are able to openly profess their practices and beliefs, and there are entire sections in mainstream bookstores dedicated to “New Age” or “Metaphysical Studies.” A simple web search will yield vast amounts of magical lore, from our ancient predecessors to modern-day practitioners. The number of organizations dedicated to the practice of magic is greater than ever before. Some maintain the old ways, others look to new ways to bring magic to ever greater heights of sophistication. Magic is studied extensively in universities, and more and more academics are beginning to see the value of magic. In this storm of chaos, those with clear eyes can see the seed of potential. Humanity is in a position to redefine our position in the cosmos, and our relation to it, much as happened in the Renaissance period before us.

Whenever two human cultures begin to interact, whether through trade, exploration, or warfare, there is always an exchange of ideas. This exchange is sometimes mutually beneficial, such as those between Spain and China as facilitated by Marco Polo, sometimes destructive to one culture, such as the colonization of North America by the Europeans, and the persecution of the Native Americans. Regardless, an exchange occurs on some level. This exchange often leads to new and more empowering worldviews. With magic and science, we have two cultures, one of magicians, one of scientists. With these come to distinct worldviews. Magicians generally see humanity as a key player in the cosmos, whether its perfection or co-creator, with the universe as a place of mystery and wonder. Scientists generally see man as an unusually intelligent creature, no more a creator in the cosmos than the simplest archaea, and the cosmos as a massive clock with strange, quantum irregularities. If these two cultures, and their attendant worldviews, were to merge, with the trailblazers of science being simultaneously the trailblazers of magic, the resultant worldview could be extraordinary. It would be foolish, however, to expect scientists to initiate this merger. Science, as a worldview, holds sway currently in the West. Thus, it is up to magicians to begin this transformation of human knowledge and perception. If it were to be any other way, then magicians would not deserve that title.

©2010 by Alexander.
Edited by Sheta Kaey

Many books and articles that I’ve read, as well as some I have written, espouse writing in a journal. Since middle school I’ve not had a class or person require me to keep one, so a lot of skills that I had back then I lost until I became a pagan and I started to practice ceremonial magic. What I write here may not be academic or “the right way” of journal writing, but these techniques have worked for me. What I hope you get from this is both a sense of what to use your journal for, and how to write in it so you can actually benefit from using it.

Physical Journal or Blog?

We’ll first delve into using paper journals, then move on to blogs. This isn’t because I dislike the medium for journal writing, but the purpose of a physical journal as opposed to one online can be and usually is totally different. I look at physical journals as useful because they can act as repositories of everything contained within an experience. I used to be more honest in my physical journals because I’m not writing for an audience, but as I’ve become more comfortable with writing online, this has changed (more on that below). I also tend to record more in the introduction, where I include time, moon phase, and the like, and in the body of the entry, where I tend to include more details. I do this because I’m usually doing my journal alongside or immediately following the magic or spirit-work, lending the journaling itself to being part and parcel of that spiritual work. It can be as much a time to ground as it can be a time to record, write down insights, and reflect on the working.

As for blogs, out of the gate they have a ton of advantages. Perhaps the greatest advantage a blog has is that you have a worldwide audience able to comment on your journal, suggest changes, give advice and provide links for more information, or vice versa. Most are highly customizable, even without knowledge of HTML, letting your design your journal however you like. There are other benefits, such as being able to upload photos of your working area or tools, as well as other media and even polls for some blog sites. Personally, this is the only way some friends will see my journals. Some live too far away or are people I only know online, and for the remainder, my blog tends to be much more convenient than coming over and reading my journal. My handwriting isn’t the greatest, and blogs allow for quick dissemination of ideas and occurrences within your life to an audience you can choose to let in or not, as the feeling takes you.

With regard to journals, the security of your work is also a factor: Do you want this work to be seen, even critiqued? Do you want to deal with questions about “Why did you” or outright rude or abusive statements like “you don’t know what you’re doing”? I’ve yet to receive one of these kinds of statements, but you may potentially have to deal with them in an online setting. The spirits you may work with may or may not want their work with you to be posted online. Another thing to consider is that if your physical journal is lost or destroyed, that’s it, and you may have to write everything over from scratch or memory. A physical journal, however, can be right there with you alongside all your other working tools, it needn’t be plugged in, and it can be another physical way to connect you to what you are doing or have done. I personally do a mix of both. Some things I write may never reach my blog because they are deeply personal, whereas my blog contains some quite personal entries that my physical journals do not because I wanted feedback and it is easier for me to type than write. Ultimately, the choice as to where your journal ends up is yours.

Why Journal?

The first thing you should decide on is why you want to keep a journal. I’ll give you some examples below, but I look at there being three main archetypes: 1) Experimental, 2) Experiential, and 3) Multipurpose. Experimental journals are entirely about experiments in spirituality, magic, etc. and are written in a straightforward format that nearly entirely eliminates personal perspective save where it is needed. This is a style that closely mimics a scientific journal. The Experiential style is almost exclusively about subjective experiences, opinions, and observations. The Multipurpose style can be either of the two in whatever amounts you need and the flow in it changes as needed. The writing styles will vary greatly; I’ll show you examples so you can decide which you want to use.

Journaling

I personally advocate a two-pronged approach to physical journaling. Keep your physical journal, but electronically back it up. Either scan it or write it out in a word processor. If you lose the journal, you’ll at least have a backup, and can print it off or refer to it in later sections of your physical journal. The advantage here is that if you have spelling errors, or large sections crossed out (like spirit-corrected entries of spirit communications) you can put your journal into a more logical, and less messy format.

As the actual content is largely up to you, here are some suggestions:

1. Regardless of which style you go with, the journal should have all the information you may want to reference later. Write down anything which may affect a working at the beginning of an entry — information like the date, time, moon phase, astrological time, etc. of the working.
   
2. Write as thoroughly as you can, noting feelings and facts with equal weight. Sometimes those feelings can be looked back upon, and you can note trends, or how your emotions may have affected the outcome of a working. It could also give you ideas of how to do a working better next time.
   
3. Do not censor yourself. This is so incredibly difficult, but keep in mind no one needs to read this but you. This is your work, your private journal if you make it so. The details you put in here may help you when you least expect it, so honesty really may help you out some day.
   
4. Nothing is inconsequential. You have feelings, reactions, instincts and intuitions for a reason. It is good to reflect on them, even if they prove wrong later on. Again, as above, your honesty can help you fix or avoid problems altogether.
   
5. Have fun or, at the least, do not make this a chore. If you really don’t like journaling on paper, find another medium. If journaling is going to be a help, approaching it with The Death March playing in the background won’t endear you to it.
   

Sample Entry

DR: OR: RR:
8-17-2010
10:00pm
PDS: Saturn
PHS: Venus

Today begins with a meditation to Hela, then Odin. After getting my breathing and heart calmed, I did square breathing for 15 minutes and slipped into trance state. I went utiseta (out of body).

The DR, or Daily Rune, can also be replaced with DC or Daily Card if you’re using tarot. The OR is Outworking Rune, and RR is Results Rune, and all can be labeled according to what you need. The PDS is the Planetary Day Sign and the PHS is the Planetary Hour Sign, all of which can mean something according to what system of magic or spirituality you are working in. These are just suggestions as to what you can record. To me, anything that you record during these workings can be of value.

Some Sample Activities to Journal On

Sometimes you get settled with doing activities that you can journal on, like spiritual events, spells, and the like. What do you do when you’ve hit a dry spell? Here are some things you can do and journal on to give yourself something to write, and perhaps jump start a low period in your life or spirituality.

• Write on a spell you’ve done that did not work. You may be surprised to learn that the spell worked in a way you didn’t think it did, or you may uncover why it didn’t work.
  
• Revisit a topic you thought you’d mastered, even something relatively simple like basic energy work. Refreshers can help you spiritually, and going back over it can show progress or give you some new tricks to play with.
  
• Commune with Deity, noting particulars like how they might appear to you, what they’ve said, or information they’ve told you that their myths, legends, and lore doesn’t cover.
  
• Commune with your Ancestors; learn a skill or insight into your family tree from them.
  
• Write a tune, chant, mantra or ritual for a God/dess or spirit.
  
• Do research on a God/dess, spirit, spell, ritual, or religion and write about what you find.
  

Comment here if you have suggestions!

©2010 by Sarenth.
Edited by Sheta Kaey.

Sarenth has been a Neopagan since 2004, on and off as a solitary eclectic. His personal practice consists of NeoShamanism stemming from the Norse pantheon, but he also engages in ceremonial magick and works with a variety of other gods. He is a co-founder of the Pandoran Society. Visit his blog here.

It is sadly true that in many pagan and magical communities, individuals who have much to gain from working together are spending too much time and energy in pointless arguments, paranoia and hostility. We’ve all seen it — the “witch wars,” the malicious gossip, the fragmentation of communities over issues both great and small. Writing about the disconnections we encounter, as I did in the last issue, can seem like nothing more than complaints and accusations, but it’s necessary to look at our communities and groups with discernment, and to be honest about what we find there.

I feel this is doubly important now, because of the fractious and divisive tone the over-culture has adopted. You see it everywhere — from political discourse to mundane interactions. Media portrays a country divided, with the rhetoric running hot, violent and hyperbolic. Casual violence — in word and gesture if not outright blows — seems to be in the air we breathe. There are many reasons for this, but the illusion of separateness is at the heart of this phenomenon. Only by refusing to view other beings as worthy of respect, forbearance and compassion are we able to do and say the hateful, hurtful things that have replaced common civility in public discourse. I’ve done this myself, and I know it was my inability to trust, my unwillingness to see others as more than obstacles in my way, that was at the heart of my hatefulness.

Lately I found myself becoming enraged at the terrible traffic in my neighborhood, and “talking smack” about mutual friends with a colleague, for no reason at all. The negative emotional charge behind my reactions to both these events was shocking to me, and caused me to look further. My feelings of powerlessness and incompetence were at the base. Disconnected from my own sense of power and worth, it was an easy task to disconnect the very real humans in front of me from their own right to courtesy. Lacking respect for myself, it was easy to deny it to everyone else.

Alienation is the primary mental state of our culture, and the mechanisms that should be acting to bring us together are instead fostering the alienation and isolation, the outright paranoia of the other. “We” (i.e. “us”) are not “them,” and you can’t trust them. This wariness may be a logical precaution, but as magicians, we have to see look more closely at this message. Fostering this illusion of separation and hostility is in the interests of the dominator culture for various reasons — it distracts us from important things with red herrings; it discourages the building of alliances and coalitions; it reduces public discourse to the most infantile of bickering. All of this distracts us from the most pressing matters that demand our attention. We as magicians must be able to peer through this illusion of separation to see things as they are, connected in a web of interdependence so subtle and grand that we can only perceive tiny portions of it.

Connection is the natural state of life, not isolation. Predator and prey, seed and sower, flower and pollinator — it’s all about relationships and connections, give and take, a delicate balance that demands participation from all beings.

Of Wolves and Willows

I heard a report on NPR years ago that brought home to me the vast webs of connection that all Earth’s species share. In a move that is still controversial, wolves were reintroduced in Yellowstone National Park. Years later, biologists assessed the wolves’ impact on the terrain.

What they discovered surprised them. Creek beds that had been dry for years were suddenly full of water and wildlife. With wolves absent from the area, the elk had come out of the high country to graze in the low-lying willow stands along creek beds. Thus stripped of cover, the creeks would dry up. But with the wolves back in the landscape, the elk retreated back to the hills, and the willows were able to reestablish themselves, bringing along mink, otter, frogs, amphibians and songbirds. No one could have anticipated that reintroducing apex predators back into their former food chain would reestablish songbirds and crayfish as well, but it was true. We removed the wolves from the landscape long ago to serve human needs, and there were negative consequences we had in no way anticipated.

If those connections are rampant in the natural world, why do we think they don’t apply to us humans, and to human interactions and endeavors? The over-culture wants us to believe they don’t. Case in point: Many years ago I attended a lecture by Robert Bly, poet and a founder of the Men’s movement, and Deborah Tannen, linguistician and feminist scholar. The media hyped this event as the “battle of the sexes” and a “shouting match” between two polarized opponents. It was nothing of the kind. It was a lively discussion about gender, sex and power, where the tone stayed respectful and amiable, even when they disagreed. Bly and Tannen were able to discuss sensitive topics without degenerating into name-calling or antagonism, and were able to find more common ground than not. But that illusion of separation was what local media chose to focus on — men and women have different agendas, therefore they cannot be on the same side. Since they disagree on some things, they must disagree on all things, and what’s more, they must also be determined to destroy the other’s credibility. The over-culture sees anger and antagonism as logically following any kind of difference — if people aren’t the same, they must be in direct competition. This assumption that everyone is in an adversarial relationship has had a negative impact on all of us. This philosophical stance informs our thinking, if even on the most subtle level. It is our responsibility to look for a higher truth, and to find ways of coming together.

Thesis, Antithesis and Synthesis

This is the promise of the Aeon. If we live in polarized times, with the discursive pendulum swinging wildly from one extreme to another, we as magicians have a responsibility to find that new middle ground that is informed by both the wisdom and follies of the past while creating something better. With clear-eyed discernment and openhearted compassion, we see through the illusions of separation, and resolve them in our own psyches. It is our responsibility to look beyond mere surfaces and to not fall prey to the prejudices and hatreds socialized into us. Each conscious soul must part the Veil of this illusion themselves, in order to fully integrate this lesson. The illusion of separation exists as a test to us and a challenge to our imaginations, to see if we can transcend our pain and powerlessness, to create something better. After all, we are divided for love’s sake, for the chance of union.

How do we get past this illusion of separation? Through engagement with the “real world,” the mundane, our dharma. For the next month, try to discover those connections in your life that are rendered invisible. Where does your tap water come from? Where does your garbage go? Where does your food come from? How well do you know your neighbors, your town? You might be surprised at the answers. You might also find new ways of connecting with the world, with other people, new ways of creating a better, more conscious life. And wouldn’t that be powerful act of magick?

©2010 by Leni Hester.
Edited by Sheta Kaey.

In 1612, in one of the most meticulously documented witch trials in English history, seven women and two men from Pendle Forest in Lancashire, Northern England were executed. In court clerk Thomas Potts’s account of the proceedings, The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches in the Countie of Lancaster, published in 1613, he pays particular attention to the one alleged witch who escaped justice by dying in prison before she could come to trial. She was Elizabeth Southerns, more commonly known by her nickname, Old Demdike. According to Potts, she was the ringleader, the one who initiated all the others into witchcraft. This is how Potts describes her:

She was a very old woman, about the age of Foure-score yeares, and had been a Witch for fiftie yeares. Shee dwelt in the Forrest of Pendle, a vast place, fitte for her profession: What shee committed in her time, no man knows. . . . Shee was a generall agent for the Devill in all these partes: no man escaped her, or her Furies.

Quite impressive for an eighty-year-old lady! In England, unlike Scotland and Continental Europe, the law forbade the use of torture to extract witchcraft confessions. Thus the trial transcripts allegedly reveal Elizabeth Southerns’s voluntary confession, although her words might have been manipulated or altered by the magistrate and scribe. What’s interesting, if the trial transcripts can be believed, is that she freely confessed to being a healer and magical practitioner. Local farmers called on her to cure their children and their cattle. She described in rich detail how she first met her familiar spirit, Tibb, at the stone quarry near Newchurch in Pendle. He appeared to her at daylight gate — twilight in the local dialect — in the form of beautiful young man, his coat half black and half brown, and he promised to teach her all she needed to know about magic.

Tibb was not the “devil in disguise.” The devil, as such, appeared to be a minor figure in British witchcraft. It was the familiar spirit who took centre stage: This was the cunning person’s otherworldly spirit helper who could shapeshift between human and animal form, as Emma Wilby explains in her excellent scholarly study, Cunning Folk and Familiar Spirits. Mother Demdike describes Tibb appearing to her at different times in human form or in animal form. He could take the shape of a hare, a black cat, or a brown dog. It appeared that in traditional English folk magic, no cunning man or cunning woman could work magic without the aid of their spirit familiar — they needed this otherworldly ally to make things happen.

Belief in magic and the spirit world was absolutely mainstream in the 16^th and 17^th centuries. Not only the poor and ignorant believed in spells and witchcraft — rich and educated people believed in magic just as strongly. Dr. John Dee, conjuror to Elizabeth I, was a brilliant mathematician and cartographer and also an alchemist and ceremonial magician. In Dee’s England, more people relied on cunning folk for healing than on physicians. As Owen Davies explains in his book, Popular Magic: Cunning-folk in English History, cunning men and women used charms to heal, foretell the future, and find the location of stolen property. What they did was technically illegal — sorcery was a hanging offence — but few were arrested for it as the demand for their services was so great. Doctors were so expensive that only the very rich could afford them and the “physick” of this era involved bleeding patients with lancets and using dangerous medicines such as mercury — your local village healer with her herbs and charms was far less likely to kill you.

In this period there were magical practitioners in every community. Those who used their magic for good were called cunning folk or charmers or blessers or wisemen and wisewomen. Those who were perceived by others as using their magic to curse and harm were called witches. But here it gets complicated. A cunning woman who performs a spell to discover the location of stolen goods would say that she is working for good. However, the person who claims to have been falsely accused of harbouring those stolen goods can turn around and accuse her of sorcery and slander. This is what happened to 16^th century Scottish cunning woman Bessie Dunlop of Edinburgh, cited by Emma Wilby in Cunning Folk and Familiar Spirits. Dunlop was burned as a witch in 1576 after her “white magic” offended the wrong person. Ultimately, the difference between cunning folk and witches lay in the eye of the beholder. If your neighbours turned against you and decided you were a witch, you were doomed.

Although King James I, author of the witch-hunting handbook Daemonologie, believed that witches had made a pact with the devil, there’s no actual evidence to suggest that witches or cunning folk took part in any diabolical cult. Anthropologist Margaret Murray, in her book, The Witch Cult in Western Europe, published in 1921, tried to prove that alleged witches were part of a Pagan religion that somehow survived for centuries after the Christian conversion. Most modern academics have rejected Murray’s hypothesis as unlikely. Indeed, lingering belief in an organised Pagan religion is very difficult to substantiate. So what did cunning folk like Old Demdike believe in?

Some of her family’s charms and spells were recorded in the trial transcripts and they reveal absolutely no evidence of devil worship, but instead use the ecclesiastical language of the Catholic Church, the old religion driven underground by the English Reformation. Her charm to cure a bewitched person, cited by the prosecution as evidence of diabolical sorcery, is, in fact, a moving and poetic depiction of the passion of Christ, as witnessed by the Virgin Mary. The text, in places, is very similar to the White Pater Noster, an Elizabethan prayer charm which Eamon Duffy discusses in his landmark book, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England 1400-1580.

It appears that Mother Demdike was a practitioner of the kind of quasi-Catholic folk magic that would have been commonplace before the Reformation. The pre-Reformation Church embraced many practises that seemed magical and mystical. People used holy water and communion bread for healing. They went on pilgrimages, left offerings at holy wells, and prayed to the saints for intercession. Some practises, such as the blessing of the wells and fields, may indeed have Pagan origins. Indeed, looking at pre-Reformation folk magic, it is very hard to untangle the strands of Catholicism from the remnants of Pagan belief, which had become so tightly interwoven.

Unfortunately Mother Demdike had the misfortune to live in a place and time when Catholicism was conflated with witchcraft. Even Reginald Scot, one of the most enlightened men of his age, believed the act of transubstantiation, the point in the Catholic mass where it is believed that the host becomes the body and blood of Christ, was an act of sorcery. In a 1645 pamphlet by Edward Fleetwood entitled A Declaration of a Strange and Wonderfull Monster, describing how a royalist woman in Lancashire supposedly gave birth to a headless baby, Lancashire is described thusly: “No part of England hath so many witches, none fuller of Papists.” Keith Thomas’s social history Religion and the Decline of Magic is an excellent study on how the Reformation literally took the magic out of Christianity.

However, it would be an oversimplification to state that Mother Demdike was merely a misunderstood practitioner of Catholic folk magic. Her description of her decades-long partnership with her spirit Tibb seems to draw on something outside the boundaries of Christianity.

Although it is difficult to prove that witches and cunning folk in early modern Britain worshipped Pagan deities, the so-called fairy faith, the enduring belief in fairies and elves, is well documented. In his 1677 book The Displaying of Supposed Witchcraft, Lancashire author John Webster mentions a local cunning man who claimed that his familiar spirit was none other than the Queen of Elfhame herself. The Scottish cunning woman Bessie Dunlop mentioned earlier, while being tried for witchcraft and sorcery at the Edinburgh Assizes, stated that her familiar spirit was a fairy man sent to her by the Queen of Elfhame.

The crimes of which Mother Demdike and her fellow witches were accused dated back years before the 1612 trial. The trial itself might have never happened had it not been for King James I’s obsession with the occult. Until his reign, witch persecutions had been relatively rare in England compared with Scotland and Continental Europe. But James’s book Daemonologie presented the idea of a vast conspiracy of satanic witches threatening to undermine the nation. Shakespeare wrote his play Macbeth, which presents the first depiction of a witches’ coven in English drama, in James I’s honour.

To curry favour with his monarch, Lancashire magistrate Roger Nowell of Read Hall arrested and prosecuted no fewer than twelve individuals from the Pendle region and even went to the farfetched extreme of accusing them of conspiring their very own Gunpowder Plot to blow up Lancaster Castle. Two decades before the more famous Matthew Hopkins began his witch-hunting career in East Anglia, Roger Nowell had set himself up as witchfinder general of Lancashire.

What do we actually know about Mother Demdike? At the time of her trial she appears as a widow and matriarch, living in a place called Malkin Tower with her widowed daughter Elizabeth Device, and her three grandchildren, James, Alizon, and Jennet. Her clan was very poor and supported themselves by a combination of begging and by the family business of cunning craft. The trial transcripts mention that local farmer John Nutter of Bull Hole Farm near Newchurch hired Demdike to bless his sick cattle. Interestingly John Nutter chose not to testify against her family in the trial.

Demdike’s family at Malkin Tower had a powerful rival in the form of Chattox, another widow and charmer, who lived a few miles away at West Close near Fence. Chattox allegedly bewitched to death her landlord’s son, Robert Nutter of Greenhead, for attempting to rape her daughter, Anne Redfearne. For social historians it’s interesting to see how having a fearsome reputation as a cunning woman could be the only true power a poor woman could hope to wield.

Unfortunately this could also backfire as it did with Demdike’s granddaughter, Alizon Device, who exchanged angry words with a pedlar outside Colne in March, 1612. Moments later the pedlar collapsed and suddenly went stiff and lame on one half of his body and lost the power of speech. Today we would clearly recognise this as a stroke. But the pedlar and several witnesses were convinced that Alizon had lamed her victim with witchcraft. Even she seemed to believe this herself, immediately falling to her knees and begging his forgiveness. This unfortunate event triggered the arrest of Alizon and her grandmother. Alizon wasted no time in implicating Chattox, her grandmother’s rival, and Chattox’s daughter, Anne Redfearne.

The four accused witches were interrogated by Roger Nowell, and then force-marched to Lancaster Castle, walking over fells and moorland. Both Demdike and Chattox, whose real name was Anne Whittle, were frail and elderly. It was amazing they survived the journey. In Lancaster they were handed over to the sadistic Thomas Covell, the gaoler who reputedly slashed the ears off Edward Kelly, friend of John Dee, when he was arrested on the charge of forgery. The women were chained to a ring in the floor in the bottom of the Well Tower. Although torture was officially forbidden in England, gaolers were allowed to starve and beat their prisoners at will. Being chained to a ring in the floor and kept in constant darkness would certainly feel like torture for those who had to endure it.

On Good Friday following the arrests, worried family and friends met at Malkin Tower to discuss what they would do in regard to this tragic situation. Constable John Hargreaves came to write down the names of everyone present and later Roger Nowell made further arrests, accusing these people of convening at Malkin Tower on Good Friday for a witches’ sabbat, something he would have read about in Daemonologie. The arrests didn’t stop until he had the mythical thirteen to make up the alleged coven. Twelve were kept at Lancaster and one, Jennet Preston who lived over the county line in Gisburn, Yorkshire, was sent to York. Apart from Chattox and Demdike and their immediate families, none of these newly arrested people had previous reputations as cunning folk. It seemed they were just concerned friends and neighbours who were caught in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Kept in such horrible conditions, Demdike died in prison before she came to trial, thus cheating the hangman. The others experienced a different fate.

The first to be arrested, Alizon was the last to be tried at Lancaster in August, 1612. Her final recorded words on the day before she was hanged for witchcraft are a moving tribute to her grandmother’s power as a healer. Roger Nowell, the prosecutor, brought John Law, the pedlar she had allegedly lamed, before her. Again Alizon begged the man’s forgiveness for her perceived crime against him. John Law, in return, said that if she had the power to lame him, she must also have the power to heal him. Alizon regrettably told him that she wasn’t able to, but if her grandmother, Old Demdike had lived, she could and would have healed him.

Mother Demdike is dead but not forgotten. By the mid-17^th century, Demdike’s name became a local byword for witch, according to John Harland and T.T. Wilkinson’s Lancashire Folklore. In 1627, only fifteen years after the Pendle Witch Trial, a woman named Dorothy Shaw of Skippool, Lancashire, was accused by her neighbour of being a “witch and a Demdyke.”

History is a fluid thing that continually shapes the present. Long after her demise, Mother Demdike and her fellow Pendle Witches endure, their story and spirit woven into the living landscape, its weft and warp, like the stones and the streams that cut across the moors. Enthralled by their true history, I wrote my novel, Daughters of the Witching Hill, dedicated to their memory. Other books have been written about the Pendle Witches, but mine turns the tables, telling the story from Demdike and Alizon Device’s point of view. I longed to give these women what their world denied them — their own voice. Their voices deserve to finally be heard.

©2010 by Mary Sharratt.
Edited by Sheta Kaey.

Author Mary Sharratt has lived near Pendle Hill in Lancashire since 2002. Her novel, Daughters of the Witching Hill, inspired by Mother Demdike’s true story, is published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Visit her website.

Sources:

• Owen Davies, Popular Magic: Cunning-folk in English History (Hambledon Continuum)
• Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England 1400-1580 (Yale)
• Malcolm Gaskill, Witchfinders: A Seventeenth Century English Tragedy (John Murray)
• John Harland and T.T. Wilkinson, Lancashire Folklore (Kessinger Publishing)
• King James I, Daemonologie, available online.
• Jonathan Lumby, The Lancashire Witch-Craze (Carnegie)
• Margaret Murray, The Witch Cult in Western Europe, available online.
• Edgar Peel and Pat Southern, The Trials of the Lancashire Witches (Nelson)
• Robert Poole, ed., The Lancashire Witches: Histories and Stories (Manchester University Press)
• Thomas Potts, The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches in the Countie of Lancaster, available online.
• Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (Penguin)
• John Webster, The Displaying of Supposed Witchcraft (Ams Pr Inc)
• Emma Wilby, Cunning Folk and Familiar Spirits (Sussex Academic Press)
• Benjamin Woolley, The Queen’s Conjuror: The Life and Magic of Dr. Dee (Flamingo)

Matrix of Possibilities

There are many ways to perform the operation of theurgy and the evocation of spirits. Most of those who practice this kind of magical operation work through one or more of the many available grimoires. However, there are other ways to perform this operation that have little to do with the old grimoires; yet these other methods require the invention of a completely alternative magical technology. A practitioner is generally stuck between using existing information and available materials or creating something entirely new. The path that I took was to create a new methodology for invocation and evocation; but the clues on how to proceed were already well documented, even though they were subtle and obscure.

Ever since I first examined the Goetia of the Lemegeton, or Lesser Key of Solomon, I have been fascinated by those entities called Goetic Demons, but found the methodologies for invoking them to be too abbreviated and incomplete to be entirely useful. Others have made use of this grimoire, but I found it beyond my ability to produce an effective methodology for evocation. I also found the 72 angels of the Shemhemphorasch (ha-Shem) in this same category, even though they were not specifically listed in any grimoire that I had at the time. To me there seemed to be a lot of pieces of occult lore without the ability to pull them all together. So I tended to work with the spirits and powers that I was able to access through my developed ritual systems, and ignore all of the other spirits that didn’t fit into those structures.

However, when I first read Aleister Crowley’s Book of Thoth and also studied Israel Regardie’s The Golden Dawn (specifically, Book T) there seemed to be a new structure implied that might associate the tarot, astrology, Qabalah and the hierarchy of spirits into one unified system. That structure was found in the 36 Naib cards of the minor arcana of the tarot and the 36 astrological decans.

Aleister Crowley discusses that there is an associated spiritual hierarchy with each of the Naib cards, stating it as such: “It is governed from the angelic world by two Beings, one during the hours of Light, the other during the hours of Darkness. Therefore, in order to use the properties of this card, one way is to get into communication with the Intelligence concerned, and to induce him to execute his function.”¹

Crowley goes on to write that these two spirits are the angels of the Shehemphorash and that there are a total of 72 of them, corresponding to the five degree astrological segment of the “quinaries,” or what I refer to as the quinarians.² Crowley omits relating the astrological decans to these 36 Naib cards, but he does use the old style planetary rulers that are associated with them in assigning the planets to these tarot cards. One can see this illustrated in a table on page 283 of the Book of Thoth.

Book T goes further than Crowley by not only showing that the astrological decans correspond to the 36 Naib cards of the tarot, but also that there is a larger matrix consisting of the 16 court cards and the four aces.³

So it would seem that there is a very tight tabular system consisting of all of the 56 cards of the lesser arcana. This tabular system can also be used to represent a spiritual hierarchy of the four elements, the ten sephiroth of the tree of life and the twelve signs of the zodiac. The one association that is missing is where the decans are shown to be hierarchically related to the quinarians, since the former would represent a ten degree segment of the zodiacal wheel and the latter, a five degree segment.

A decan would therefore be the higher order structure of two corresponding quinarians. What this means is that the decan and its associated spirit correspondences rules over the associated quinarian and its spirit correspondences. If the angels of the ha-Shem and the demons of the Goetia are associated with the quinarians, then the angelic ruler of the decanate would be their hierarchical lord, and the decan would be the key to the quinarian.

Clues to the nature of the astrological structure of these spirits are found in the lore from the Golden Dawn and Alesiter Crowley. In the book 777 (cols. CXXIX CXXXII, CXLV CLXVI), the angels of the Ha-Shem,⁴ angelic rulers of the decans and demons of the Goetia are organized by the zodiac, using the ascendant, cadent and succeedent parts of the wheel of the zodiac, by day and night.

It would seem that the number 72 would lend itself to occult interpretations, being a multiple of six times twelve, both very sacred numbers in Judaism. Also, there already was an astrological structure for the quinarians as lesser aspects of the decans, so I think that it would fit into a neat hierarchy.

I don’t know where this idea originally came from, but I was using existing schemes for all of this, as well as hints from Aleister Crowley in the appendices of the Book of Thoth, so I didn’t invent it.⁵ As a system it fits really well together, and it’s better than using the Shemhemphorash as a unique and separate set of spirits without any correspondences. As I have stated above, determining a context for spiritual entities so that they may be defined and highly qualified is important if the magician seeks to invoke them.

When I carefully researched the clues, I found where the angels of the Shemhemphorash were given their astrological correspondences. It was in Agrippa’s Book III of Occult Philosophy, Chapter XXV, paragraph 6. Agrippa writes: “And these are those [angels of ha-Shem] that are set over the seventy two celestial quinaries.” So if the angels of ha-Shem are set over the seventy two celestial quinarians, then their hierarchy would naturally be associated with the 36 decans and the twelve signs of the Zodiac, and also with their associated archangels and angelic rulers. This relation between decan and quinarian is not spoken of either by Agrippa or anyone else, but is alluded to in Aleister Crowley’s Book of Thoth,⁶ and also Book T of The Golden Dawn. If you put what he says together with the tables in 777, you come up with the system that I am using. To my knowledge, no else quite makes all of the combinations that I have made; but it seems to be functionally elegant.

Needless to say, I was quite thrilled at how neat and tidy all of these various elements were pulled together through the cards of the Lesser Arcana of the Tarot. I speculated that if one could identify the various correspondences associated with each of these cards, that one could put together a system to invoke and evoke all of the associated spirits. So, after basking in this wondrous revelation, I set to work to build a system of magick that would do just that.

To recap, the angelic ruler of the decan and tarot Naib card has the following hierarchy:

• Element godhead
• Qabalistic sephirah
• Zodiacal base element
• Zodiacal triple spiritual intelligences (archangel, angel, house ruler) — these qualify the specific zodiacal sign
• Planetary ruler of the decan
• Angelic ruler of the decanate
• ha-Shem angel of day and night
• Goetic demon of day and night (from Lemegeton — Goetia)
• Angel of the zodiacal degree (From Lemegeton — Ars Paulina — Part 2)

Obviously, if one were to perform an invocation of the angelic ruler of the decanate, one of the angels of the ha-Shem, or one of the Goetic demons, then one would establish or invoke the associated spiritual hierarchy, beginning with the element godhead. Tools used to assist in the establishment of these qualities would be the pentagram (element), lesser hexagram (astrological triplicities), greater hexagram or septagram (planetary ruler) and the enneagram (sephirah).

My methodology uses a technique that defines a spirit through a matrix of correspondences and generates the elemental body and planetary intelligences of the spirit from them. I will defer that explanation to a future article, but I believe that the above information is enough to get occultists thinking of an alternative method to performing invocation and evocation.

Importance of the Astrological Decans

So, what is the importance and significance of the astrological decans? Even if they seem to fit into a nice tidy structure that defines a whole hierarchy of spirits, why is it such a compelling structure by itself? These are good questions, but in order to answer them, we will need to share some historical information about the decans. Once that is done, I am sure it will be obvious why they are significant.

The decans have a long history in the annals of magical religion — the Egyptians had minor deities associated with each of them and these play an important part in the Book of Gates.⁷ The decans are used in horary (predictive) astrology to determine the dignity of planets in the divinatory chart and they have been represented in both the Egyptian and Mesopotamian theological systems as sidereal gods of time and destiny. Thus the magician contacts the angelic ruler in order to realize and control his destiny, and to affect the general causality of the world. The decans were also used by the Egyptians to indicate the hour of the night.

What gave me a startling clue to the importance of the decans is when I came across a passage in the book Magic, Mystery, and Science — The Occult in Western Civilization by Dan Barton and David Grandy. That passage said that the Egyptians used the decans (and their associated godheads and marking stars) to determine and qualify the hours of the night sky. During the night, the decan that appeared at the ascendant (eastern horizon) would tell the Egyptians what time it was. A decan period would last approximately 40 minutes, so for each night approximately 18 of the 36 decans could be revealed. During the changing of the seasons, the evening would potentially begin with a different decan over time, passing through the whole zodiacal wheel during an annual period.

So the decans were possibly used as magical hours during the night, but these hours would have lasted 40 minutes instead of 60, and each decan would have been accorded a different minor godhead and quality, not to mention the 12 gates of the diurnal solar boat transit through the underworld.

It would also seem that the Egyptians used a system of reckoning when attempting to determine the hours at night, using the decans passing over the horizon as a kind of clock. Since twilight would have made this reckoning impossible, there would have been 12 hours of night associated with the decans, since making this measurement would have required complete darkness. Dawning light would have also potentially interfered, so there would have been an hour and a half both before full night and before dawn when such reckoning would have been impossible.

A device called a merkhet (plumb line) was discovered in an Egyptian tomb. This tool, whose invention was late, probably around 600 BCE, was used to determine the north-south axis. Two of these devices were set up in a specific measured line from each other, and the subject would observe the rising of the decan star between the line of these two devices. It’s likely that this late tool was based on more primitive technology, which would have been used to perform the same kind of sighting.

Another interesting thing about the decans is that every ten days a new decan would appear at the horizon at the first observable hour of the night. It’s from this array of 36 decans, each lasting ten days, that the Egyptians determined their solar based calendar, where the last decan coincided with the period just before the annual inundation of the Nile river. They had a yearly calendar of 36 decans with five days added to the end to make 365 days in all. The five additional days would probably represent a 73rd quinarian in the Egyptian astrological system, but that is another interesting item to discuss in another article.

As you can see, the decans were used to measure time during the night. They also represented the hours of the domain of the underworld, where the solar boat and its occupants fought the threatening chthonic foes in order to gain passage to the gateway of the dawn in the east. This underworld passage occurred every evening, but to the Egyptians it represented the mythic passage from death and mortality to the immortality of the gods — an initiation cycle of profound consequences.

If we now observe that the decans and the Naib cards of the lesser arcana of the tarot are analogous, then not only do we have an elegant system of occult correspondences, but we also have a map for an aspect of the Inner planes, governed by various spirits and representing the underworld passage of occult initiation.

©2010 by Frater Barrabbas.
Edited by Sheta Kaey.

Bibliography

• Barton, Dan and Grandy, David Magic, Mystery, and Science — The Occult in Western Civilization (Indiana University Press 2004)
• Crowley, Aleister 777 and Other Qabalistic Writings of Aleister Crowley (Samuel Weiser, 1994)
• Crowley, Aleister The Book of Thoth (Samuel Weiser, 1972)
• Regardie, Israel The Golden Dawn (Llewellyn — 6th edition, 1995)

Footnotes

1. See The Book of Thoth p. 43
2. David Griffin, in his book Ritual Magic calls them “quinants.”
3. This association was first documented in the Golden Dawn material, particularly Book T — Tarot. See The Golden Dawn by Israel Regardie, 6th edition, p. 87 & p. 551.
4. Actually, the angels of the ha-Shem correspond to nine of the ten sephiroth of the tree of life for the four suits of the tarot, paired by day and night. Pulling the various pieces together requires a correspondence between the decans and the Naib cards of the lesser arcana of the tarot.
5. The Goetia of Dr. Rudd has paired the angels of the ha-Shem with the Goetic demons. The relationship of the 72 spirits to the quinarians is quite old, and may be a part of the ancient system of astrological magick, such as that proposed in the Picatrix (11th century). However, there is no precedence for grouping the decans and the quinarians together, and organizing the associated spirits into a hierarchy.
6. See The Book of Thoth by Aleister Crowley, “Part I — Theory,” p. 40 — 44, and “Appendix B,” p. 283
7. The Book of Gates, or Am-Tuat, was a hieroglyphic book depicted in Egyptian tombs of the New Kingdom, but may have been conceived from earlier sources. The Tomb of Seti I is a prime example.

   Frater Barrabbas is a writer and practitioner of witchcraft and ritual magick. He has published two books — Disciple’s Guide to Ritual Magick, and the two volumes of a trilogy, entitled Mastering the Art of Ritual Magick — Foundation and Mastering the Art of Ritual Magick — Grimoire. The third volume in this series, Mastering the Art of Ritual Magick — Greater Key will be published soon. You can contact him at this email address and visit his website.

Once upon a time, I was speaking with a friend online about some aspects of shamanic work, and the old axiom of “keeping silent” came up as a topic relevant for both us. Sometimes the things we see or experience in our Work can contradict what is generally accepted or acceptable among modern magical practitioners, and we keep quiet lest someone declare that what we are doing is wrong. I realized that I have internalized this attitude to a certain level. It keeps me from actually doing or trying different things, not just in trance work but in any sort of esoteric practice I might undertake.

Letting yourself be limited isn’t a healthy approach to spiritual work. When worry about things you cannot control, like potential failure or community censure, comes into the picture, it can quickly overshadow anything else happening in your practice. Fear can keep me from undertaking any sort of new or unfamiliar practice, which is probably the worst possible response.

First, on the matter of failure itself. It’s easy for me to sit here and type that if you tried and failed, at least you tried, which is better than not trying at all. I can also tell you that people doing their work for years or even decades, whether mundane or magical, will still fail sometimes. The key is how you handle that failure. Do you get up, dust yourself off and try again, or do you wallow in the feeling of failure? I know how hard it is to pick yourself back up when you’re in that moment — wondering if it’s even worthwhile to make the effort to continue or to simply keep replaying that failed moment in your head.

The only thing that seems to help is to learn from it. Don’t give up, and don’t feel sorry for yourself. Take an inventory: Is your failed magic based upon a technique you have previously used successfully, or is it something new? Is there some bigger reason for your magic not succeeding? Maybe you have doubts as to the wisdom of the work, or maybe you feel you don’t deserve success. Is it perhaps time to try a new technique, or a different practice entirely? Maybe you need to shift your perspective from, say, a particular concrete result to the efficacy of the process itself.

If you are in suffering a failed working, I would suggest not making any rash decision in the heat of the moment. Take some time to distance yourself from the event to gain impartiality, and work from there. If you let missteps keep you from walking, your only option is to stay in the exact same place, never progressing further. Rather than giving up, step back and look at things more objectively.

When the fear comes from a worry of being shunned, that is more difficult. I am well aware of the drive in most people to seek both approval and success. Positive reinforcement from others is a powerful motivator, and success means you live to see another day. But what do you do when you fall on your face? Or do not receive reinforcement? Or when people tell you exactly how you messed up? Are these people, the ones who’ll be judging, of any real consequence? Do their personal opinions really matter to you? Do you even need to share what you’re doing? Community is a wonderful resource for support, and it helps knowing that at least one other person has possibly tread this path before you. There is no substitute for learning from others, even if we are a community made up of people who most often learn from books. But when we worry for our reputation, often it’s a misguided need for validation that will enhance (or at least not undermine) our self-esteem.

Are their reactions knee-jerk? Are they responding from a place of concern for your well-being? This is one that is not as easily answered. I would hate to sound like a relativist and somehow allow my words to imply that if you’re doing something, it’s automatically okay. On the other hand, in my own Work I often find myself at the boundaries, which is not a regular space for most people, nor a comfortable one. Some of what I learn, I share — and some of it is meant to be shared. A great deal of my work is private and, at this point, meant for me first and foremost. I find that it’s a balancing act.

My best advise it to take a good look at why other people might not agree with the directions your magical work takes you. Are you ready to be taking this step? Could what you’re doing cause a great deal of hurt or harm? These are necessary questions to ask
yourself in this situation. Don’t shy away from the answers if they are not to your liking.

Hopefully, you are not in a position in which your choices are potentially harmful, and the fallout from whatever you’re doing will be minimal. If this is so, and you’re still feeling fear, and you’re not doing as a result, what can you do?

Perhaps a divination is in order, either cast by yourself or someone you trust. Or you could set this particular Working aside for the time being and focus on another project, or even on another aspect of your life, whether it be magical or mundane. You could throw caution to the wind and do it anyway, and see what happens. If you fail, so what? You’re not the first person to do so, and certainly not the last. That’s when you pick yourself up and learn from the experience.

And, perhaps, you’ll succeed.

What then?

©2010 by Soli.
Edited by Sheta Kaey.

The diversity of esoteric exercises and rituals fill volumes, the variety systems of magickal practice is known and accepted, and yet that there is more than one way to look at what magick “is” and how it “works” seems overlooked, and the effects are not insignificant.

My magical philosophy was early informed by chaos magick, and when I first read about Frater U∴D∴’s four (or five) models of magick it made a great deal of sense to me, aiding greatly in my understanding of how people who experience the same phenomena can interpret it in such a variety of ways.

Frater U∴D∴ understood these models as a progression in human thinking (see “The Paradigms of Magic” in High Magic, especially p. 373-383), but these models co-exist in magical theory today. The four (plus one) models are as follows:

The Spirit Model

This could also be called “The Theists’ Model.” In this model of magick, gods, angels, demons, spirits and discarnate entities of all types exist and can physically and/or psychically possess, inspire, and communicate with human beings.

The Energy Model

In this model various forms of energy are posited as the source or medium through which magick works. Expressed forms may include Reiki, chi, astrological vibrations, healing energy, magnetism, crystal energy, amongst others.

The Psychological Model

This model can also be misconstrued as a “Skeptic’s Model,” as it adheres to a strictly psychological interpretation of magical effect. That said, this model should not be dismissed as “mere” psychology; psychology is a powerful tool.

In the psychological model, “spirits” might be interpreted as a neurosis of some sort, and any physical manifestations are determined to be psychosomatic in origin, and can be reasoned with therapy.

The Information or Cybernetic Model

The magician here works with pure information. For instance, in the information model a particular “spirit” may be seen a negative meme, or unit of information, which has “infected” its host, and requires replacement with a more effective and useful meme. This is a newer approach, and so has not gathered much of a recorded history of yet, but it is one which is continually gaining in popularity.

The Meta-Model

A magician working from a meta-model may work with a combination of these models, or simply use that which is determined to be most effective for the rite at hand, regardless of what the magician hirself believes.

The Models in Action

Most people work from a variety of models, without realizing the effect the tone of their belief has.

For example, a ceremonial magician may work with Enochian or Goetic systems (spirit), practice pranayama (energy), and seek deeper connection with their current (spirit/energy). An atheistic magician may perform the exact same rites and practices, but acknowledge the root of its effectiveness to be rooted in changing mindsets (psychological) or memetically-derived (information).

The experienced Pagan may believe in a god and goddess pair or an entire pantheon (spirit), while working with meridians and chakras (energy), have an interest in memetics (information), yet believe the monster hir daughter fears under the bed has been fabricated by fears of the unknown (psychological).

The sophisticated chaote, on the other hand, may slip between models as need dictates. For instance, suppose a friend is having a rough time which they interpret as a string of bad luck (energy) and this is affecting their mood, relations with family and work (psychological). A chaote may propose demonizing this bad luck, projecting its effects onto a demon (spiritual), which can then be ritually exorcised with much fanfare.

As Jordan Peterson writes:

We all produce models of what is and what should be, and how we transform one into the other. We change our behaviour, when the consequences of the behaviour are not what we would like. But sometimes mere alteration in behavior is insufficient. We must change not only what we do, but what we think is important. This means reconsideration of the nature of the motivational significance of the present, and reconsideration of the ideal nature of the future. This is a radical, even revolutionary transformation, and it is a very complex process in its realization – but mythic thinking has represented the nature of such change in great and remarkable detail. (Peterson, 1999, p. 14)

The effect of reshaping the belief in “bad luck” to “demonic activity” and banishing the personalized form is an exceedingly effective approach to ridding oneself of this influence. Its success may or may not be due to banishing a demon (spirit), releasing tension (psychological) or ridding oneself of “bad luck” (energy) — however it happens, it works.

The “Truth”

So which one is correct? Well, all of them, kind of.

In his essay “Models of Magic” Frater U∴D∴ describes the following theoretical exchange:

“Are there spirits?”
“In the spirit model, yes.”
“And in the energy model?”
“In the energy model there are subtle energy forms.”
“And what about the psychological model?”
“Well, in the psychological model we are dealing with projections of the subconscious.”
“What happens in the information model, then?”
“In the information model there are information clusters.”
“Yes, but are there spirits now or not?”
“In the spirit model, yes.”

The matter of which is always “true” or “right” is never addressed because, ultimately, it’s not relevant. Use of a single model can be limiting, and even the most hardcore atheists can appeal to the spirit model to help a friend in need.

©2010 by Psyche.
Edited by Sheta Kaey.

Psyche is the curator for the occult resource SpiralNature.com, blogs esoteric at Plutonica.net, and runs a tarot consultation business at PsycheTarot.com. She has been published in The Cauldron, Konton, newWitch, Blessed Be, Tarot World Magazine and her essay “Strategic Magick” appeared in Manifesting Prosperity: A Wealth Magic Anthology, published by Megalithica Books in February 2008.

Bibliography

• Frater U∴D∴ “Models of Magic,” on SpiralNature.com, 1991. Last updated 14 December 2002.
• Frater U∴D∴ High Magic. St. Paul: Llewellyn Worldwide, 2005.
• Peterson, Jordan B. Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief. New York: Routledge, 1999.

In the recent case of Citizens United versus the Federal Election Commission, the United States Supreme Court narrowly ruled the First Amendment protection for freedom of speech extends to organizations and corporations who wish to fund political advertisements. By way of disclaimer, I deeply disagree with the Supreme Court’s decision upon this controversial point, and by the conclusion of this essay I’m sure the attentive reader should be able to tease out my reasons for opposing the supposed (emphasis on “supposed”) expansion of First Amendment rights. Still, my main interest here concerns the occult implications of this decision, and especially how our culture views certain egregores, or group-empowered spirits.

First, let’s review how we arrived here. United States law has long regarded corporations as “persons” for purposes of whether someone can bring suit against a corporation. The limited liability corporation constitutes an entity distinct from its investors, complete with its own assets and liabilities. Consequently, individual shareholders cannot be individually held liable for the actions of the corporation. The United States government, along with most contemporary capitalist nations, allows this arrangement of convenience ultimately because it fosters economic growth. After all, investors are more likely to pour money into joint enterprises if their potential losses remain a known quantity.

Now here’s the rub: For the better part of our history, the personhood of the corporation has constituted a legal fiction — a convenient fiction, indeed, and yet fiction nonetheless. Corporations can and often do function as interested parties in tort actions, though otherwise their powers and limitations are quite different from those of living and breathing human beings. Corporations aren’t bound by the biological limitations and emotional ties which govern human choices. And generally speaking, individual human beings possess neither the financial resources nor the sheer wherewithal necessary to maintain nuclear power plants, or to distribute life-saving pharmaceuticals, or to manufacture the complex and deadly weapons of modern warfare. Human beings are people. Corporations play by an entirely different collection of rules. By this line of reasoning, the fact that corporations can be held liable for their actions, without thereby jeopardizing the assets of individual shareholders, constitutes the necessary – if deeply uneasy – compromise between the public good and the capitalist impulse. And yet. . .

By quite another line of reasoning, one widely supported across occult circles, corporations really are people. To understand why this is so, we must consider the nature of spirits and thoughtforms, and especially the class of thoughtforms known as egregores. In its simplest incarnation, an egregore constitutes a spirit supported by collective belief. Every mask which Deity wears, every goddess and god of antiquity and modernity, may be considered an egregore. Hecate Trevia is an egregore. Lilith of Eden is an egregore, as is Jesus of Nazareth. Still, egregores aren’t limited to traditional theological and mythological incarnations. Any idea, any collective entity around which people gather in belief, can adopt the mantle of egregore. Democracy is an egregore, as is Marxism. Santa Claus is an egregore. And tellingly, corporate entities — like Exxon-Mobil and McDonald’s — constitute egregores.

In his modern fantasy classic American Gods, author Neil Gaiman presents a world where the incarnate spirits of antiquity, beings like Woden and Ostara, find themselves besieged by the personified idols of modernity, things like Television and Media. In the surreal realm Gaiman creates, the various gods — both ancient and contemporary — really are people, with hopes and fears and dreams all their own. Still, setting aside those not-insignificant sects who believe in reincarnated savior or teacher figures, our “real world” religions generally adopt comparatively abstract — or at the very least more distant — conceptions of Deity. In any event, our “real world” typically doesn’t manifest things like energy conglomerates and restaurant franchises as flesh and blood human beings.

This restriction, however, doesn’t make the underlying spirits any less real, and it doesn’t make them any less influential. You may freely inquire of any parent steeped in the holiday traditions of the West whether the fact Santa Claus lacks material existence diminishes his influence over the Yuletide season, and find but few who would deny the power behind the idea of Santa Claus. And I can nearly guarantee you those few who ostensibly doubt the power of Santa Claus are much too busy with their Christmas shopping to give your inquiry a genuinely reflective answer!

An egregore who embodies human generosity and childlike wonder might not be such a bad thing, yet there exist other egregores — especially corporate spirits — whose agency is seldom bound by things like human morality and compassion. Absent government regulation, many — if not most — corporations would sacrifice both human health and our shared environment upon the bloodstained altar of Mammon. (For some deliciously dark humor along this vein, I refer the reader to the opening sequence of the 1999 movie Fight Club, wherein Edward Norton’s character explains to his fellow airline passenger how auto manufacturers decide whether to recall vehicles with known safety flaws: “Take the number of vehicles in the field ‘A’, multiply by the probable rate of failure ‘B’, multiply by the average out-of-court settlement ‘C’. A times B times C equals X. If X is less than the cost of a recall, we don’t do one.” And for which auto manufacturer does he work? “A major one.”) To give these dangerous thoughtforms not only some voice, but indeed the capacity to drown out competing points of view upon the airwaves, seems at best reckless beyond all imagination.

I’m sure some readers will disagree with my admittedly negative portrayal of the corporate world. Well and good — We can agree to disagree, and moving forward we can debate such points as we please. Speaking for myself, I identify with Locke’s philosophy enough to regard freedom of speech as an essentially natural right, so barring immediate threats against human life — the proverbial “shouting fire” inside a crowded theatre — I’m loath to restrict free speech upon the basis of possible outcomes. If we hold with natural rights, then however we might choose to characterize the moral capacity of the corporation, we must nevertheless confront the a priori question of whether or not the corporation is “person” enough to merit First Amendment protections. If we should answer in the affirmative, logical consistency demands we extend freedom of speech to corporate egregores. If we should answer in the negative, intellectual honesty demands we give an account why.

Like “real people” made of flesh and blood, corporations exhibit an instinct for self-preservation. Likewise, corporations make choices and exhibit agency, often with greater range than any individual human being could practice. Unless we arbitrarily limit our definition of personhood to animate beings who display literal breath and pulse, then corporate egregores demonstrate relevant signs of personhood. Still, these signs are nothing more or less than other egregores and spirits possess. The mythological figures of antiquity, by inspiring their followers, everyday exert real changes across our shared cultural space. Such otherwise powerful godforms are partially bound from exerting too direct an influence upon the political course of the United States, insofar as the institutional mechanisms cannot rally behind individual candidates for office without thereby jeopardizing the tax-exempt status enjoyed by churches. And there exist other egregores who are much too “unofficial” — and often too far removed from the notion of money — to really flood the airwaves with their unique messages.

I should point out there are numerous lobbyist groups which also function as egregores, for whom money becomes merely the means towards an end. Groups like Planned Parenthood and the National Rifle Association focus upon public policy, rather than profit margins, and consequently — ironically — their coffers generally can’t compete with the largest among the corporate interests. (Notably, given the substance of the case at hand, the Supreme Court could have restricted the scope of Citizens United decision to non-profit groups only. Inexplicably, the Court opted for the broader interpretation.) These non-profit groups, as well, may now spend as they please to help or harm individual campaigns, as they see fit, because — according to the Court’s decision — these organizations enjoy the same First Amendment protections which other “people” enjoy.

Did you catch that? Corporations are now people. Egregores — or at least those egregores with institutional avatars registered with the Internal Revenue Service — are now people. Now I consider myself an ardent supporter of First Amendment rights. And I’m an occultist who maintains regular discourse with certain denizens of the astral realms, which only makes sense when I acknowledge such spirits as persons. Why am I less than thrilled?

Earlier I observed if corporations are people, then logical consistency demands we extend First Amendment protections to such beings. And it’s true the First Amendment merely guarantees freedom of speech, and not particular platforms or podiums from which we might wish to speak. Herein the problem follows: Exceptionally deep coffers make for exceptionally high podiums. More to the point, they make for exceptionally loud megaphones. I’ve remarked before that the free marketplace of ideas allows truth to bubble up and falsity to sink under its own weight. I stand by this fundamental assertion, yet all around our little planet money buys airtime, and lots of money buys lots of airtime. We may question — and I do — whether a world in which corporate interests can and mostly likely will run wall-to-wall political advertisements constitutes a free marketplace of ideas. Natural rights come with the important caveat the rights of one being end where the rights of another begin. The First Amendment is no different. I genuinely fear by unleashing the loudest megaphones, we are thereby silencing both flesh and blood human beings and the egregores who don’t serve Mammon. A plutocracy which pays mere lip service unto the free marketplace of ideas isn’t really free at all.

Looking back, I’m not entirely sure my article has maintained the political neutrality for which I had hoped. And yet mayhap as an example, my reasoning herein might inspire others to measure their own cultural views by the standard of their chosen paths. Our magical paradigms — reflectively held — must continue to apply when we leave the unseen realms. And sometimes, as with the Citizens United decision, those unseen realms come crashing into our material existence. Are spirits people? Are egregores? If we answer yes, then what rights and duties might such spirits thereby inherit? I’ve expressed my feelings upon the subject; your mileage may vary. I would challenge you, my dear readers, to reflect upon how your magical paradigms shape your cultural perspectives. By introspection we grow as Magicians and as people — whether flesh and blood or otherwise.

Blessed Be!

©2010 by Grey Glamer.
Edited by Sheta Kaey.

We have covered the greater wheel of fortune and how it’s associated with the solar return and the point 180 degrees from the solar return, or halfway in the annual cycle. This greater wheel of fortune is very important to know if one is going to work magick to change one’s material situation.

There is also a lesser wheel of fortune that involves the moon and this lesser cycle is more characterized by the emotions than by material gain. It’s an important truism that if the emotions are not aligned with one’s greater material purpose, then one’s endeavors will ultimately fail.

This lesser wheel of fortune has the same basic components as the greater wheel. The natal chart lunar position is extracted and the halfway point in this cycle is determined by plotting a position that is exactly six zodiacal signs ahead of the natal moon position. For instance, my natal moon is in Gemini when the moon was gibbous (just before full), so the halfway point would be the moon in Sagittarius when it is balsamic. So I can use either the lunation types of gibbous and balsamic to represent the natal return and halfway point or I can use the signs of the moon in Gemini and Sagittarius. Either set of points have their validity.

Now for me the emotional wheel of fortune works like this: When the moon is gibbous or in the sign of Gemini, I am typically feeling very emotionally centered, grounded and fulfilled. When the halfway point is achieved, then my emotional state is decidedly muted and turned inward. It’s a time when I am not as certain of myself and feel compelled to question my motives and the things that I usually take for granted. The natal lunar point is an emotional high point and the halfway point is one of instability, where the unconscious mind is more able to affect me and my emotional sense of self.

The key to this emotional wheel of fortune is that it’s better to perform magical workings so that they achieve their climax up to but not beyond the full moon. The waning moon represents particularly difficult times for me and it’s much better to use that time for reflection, divination and contemplation, allowing the unconscious mind to unload some of its internal pressures and negative or dark self-perceptions in a controlled environment. It’s also a good idea to synchronize the greater and lesser wheels of fortune so that magical workings and mundane actions involving material advancement occur during the better half for both cycles. For me, that would be the second half of my solar year when the moon is gibbous. I would also be advised by these cycles to avoid taking risks during that same time when the moon is waning and nearing the new moon phase.

We can also analyze the transit aspects of the natal moon with the transiting moon and get a very clear idea of the kind of forces that are active. Like the sun, we can examine the aspect where the transit moon is in conjunction with the natal moon and the aspect where the transit moon is in opposition to the natal moon.

Transit Moon Conjunct Natal Moon

This is called the lunar return and it occurs once every month. It represents the beginning of an emotional cycle. It’s a time of emotional sensitivity and emotional intensity. It has a magnetic effect and tends to attract external events and people to its emanating field. Another way of examining the Lunar return is to determine the precise lunation type found in the natal chart. This represents the lunation type that one was born under, so it becomes a powerful emotional base for the individual.

Transit Moon Opposition Natal Moon

This aspect represents deepening moods and powerful emotions. One becomes self-absorbed and loses objectivity, which tends to create emotional oppositions with others. It’s definitely not a time to be dealing with relationship issues, business partnerships or emotional issues involving family or friends. It is a good time to go deep into the self and retrieve insights and directives from the deeper self.

So you can see, there is a Greater Wheel of Fortune involving the solar return and a Lesser Wheel of Fortune that involves the lunar return. Both cycles need to be carefully examined, and dates where both cycles are at their optimum can be chosen for the working of material based magick.

Bibliography

• Hand, Robert (1976) Planets in Transit: Life Cycles for Living Para Research Inc., Gloucester, MA

©2010 by Frater Barrabbas.
Edited by Sheta Kaey.

Frater Barrabbas is a writer and practitioner of Witchcraft and Ritual Magick. He has published two books — Disciple’s Guide to Ritual Magick, and the two volumes of a trilogy, entitled Mastering the Art of Ritual Magick — Volume 1: Foundation — Volume 2: Grimoire. The third volume in this series, Mastering the Art of Ritual Magick — Greater Key will be published soon. You can contact him at this email address and visit his website.

When people hear the sort of work we are involved with in the Order of Thelemic Knights, I am often asked why we believe that something like Thelema, when many of its adherents show a disdain for compassion, respect and hard work, would have anything life enhancing to offer individuals, much less the world at large.

The greater majority of people who have heard of Thelema only know it from the Web, or from some unfortunate meeting with a Thelemite on the street who views the philosophy as something of a fad or a means to rebel against their parents. Let’s be fair. Not every Thelemite has taken Crowley’s love affair with Nietzsche to condone a disregard for one’s fellows. Not all Thelemites are adolescence teenagers who parrot his every word because they think this makes them more powerful or admirable.

There are various groups who have embraced Thelema for whatever reason, creating a pretty tasty sectarian soup with which many Thelemites of different types can enjoy fellowship with their own kind. What pits the OTK apart from other Thelemic groups is that instead of focusing our studies exclusively to the life of Aleister Crowley, or some other Thelemic prophet, we are mostly concerned with how Thelema can help humanity solve the tremendous problems that we are about to encounter. We realize that we live in a different world than our predecessors, so we must endeavor to see how Thelema is relevant in today’s world. What does it have to say to us today?

It is no big secret, nor is it unfashionable as it once was, to say that the human race faces some very challenging times ahead. It is still a subject of great controversy and debate, but ignoring the science isn’t going to delay the inevitable. As resources become more difficult to find the human race is adapting an “every man for himself” or “me first” paradigm which is manifesting in some of today’s most important social issues, such as immigration, universal health care, and same sex marriage. The loss of resources, or the fear of losing resources is at the root of these issues. And this bigotry towards others will increase with the scarcity of resources. It will get worse before it gets better.

One of the things that makes Thelema relevant to us today is the Law itself. “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.” That is to say, every man and woman has a True Will or purpose, and the knowledge of that purpose will lead us to understanding our place in the grand scheme of things. We feel, for example, that man’s ignorance with regard to his relationship with nature has led us to the social issues (soon to be survival issues) we are facing today. We must each act in accordance with our own true natures. To do otherwise, or to likewise force another creature (such as an animal) into behavior which is outside of its own true nature is an abomination. To restate this in another way, The Law of Thelema implies that all living things have a True Will. What we mean by True Will is a deep understanding of one’s place within the cosmos and the realization that each of us is a piece of a puzzle too majestic to grasp intellectually. Knowledge of oneself leads to knowledge of the Divine.

“Love is the law, love under will.” Anyone that has ever studied comparative religion will recognize that Love is the universal constant driving force of the cosmos. Love always has been, and probably always will be, the foundation of our existence and the secret to our salvation. It is this Love that drives us toward the knowledge of ourselves indicated above.

“There is no god but man.” This is where we begin to really see the obvious value of Thelema as a solution to the world’s problems. Our mission is to unite with individuals who have had this realization in earnest. To know oneself is to know God. It is an easy thing to say, “There is no god but man,” but we seek those who have a gnostic understanding of this phenomenon. Only by adopting this view will the human race come to the realization of the Divinity of each individual, and the awesome power that individuals posses with regard to plotting their own courses. With that epiphany comes a rude awakening. One realizes that we have been in charge all along, and that ignorance has led us down the path of destruction. We can no longer blame god for these problems because we have created them ourselves. Neither can we wait for god to come save us from ourselves, for we have the power and resolution to do it for ourselves. Once Knowledge has been tasted, Faith and the way it helps us avoid responsibility will no longer serve to quench our thirst for answers.

“Ever man and every woman is a star.” This gift belongs to everyone; as Aleister Crowley said, “The Law is for ALL.” This makes it everyone’s job. If one accepts the Law of Thelema, then one is pledging to discover one’s own True Nature. That discovery will naturally bring one to the “god awareness” mentioned above, and then one must act accordingly to reverse the damage of thousands of years of ignorance.

What humanity needs today is a way to look at the universe, and a way of life befitting those with a sense of duty. If one person can accomplish much, imagine what a group of similarly awakened individuals could do. Thelema is what the human race needs today.

So how does this translate into our activities? We recognize the value of a specific set of virtues which have remained unchanged throughout the ages. By adhering to these principles we help to temper those as of yet unevolved instincts which are based on ignorance, fear and superstition, which will inevitably lead to the destruction of the world as we know it today. It is every member’s personal duty, to bring honesty, consideration, and self-discipline into their own lives. These are essential, not only for Thelemic Knighthood, but for all persons. In other words, we do this work because it benefits us as humans beings trying to discover who we are and our relationship with The Divine. This in turn benefits others, and that is a wonderful side-effect and a coincidence of metaphysical proportions.

Since we were first formed in 1999, we have raised several thousand pounds of clothes for the Lakota Indian Tribes and homeless; hundreds of pairs of shoes for street kids; books and school supplies for needy children; raised money for battered women’s shelters; provided security for The Red Cross during the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, as well as disseminating instructional pamphlets to street kids about how to avoid AIDS and hepatitis . . . all in the name of Thelema.

All of this work was done by a handful of very commuted individuals . . . Thelemites, who see themselves as being agents of change, oftentimes using their own money to getting the job accomplished. No one in our organization ever receives any payment for the work that we do. All donations, dues or other forms of monetary support goes toward the accomplishment of our charitable campaigns. There is no glory or press, and in fact this work is often thankless. Doing it, however, is its own reward. And there you have it.

©2010 by Gerald del Campo.
Edited by Sheta Kaey.

Ever since the advent of Masonry, individual occultists have sought to unify and organize themselves into a collective to facilitate group ceremony, study and collaboration, often using the Masonic lodge as a model. A Masonic lodge has temporary leadership roles, and Masonic brothers are considered to be equal no matter what their social status, degree or role. Perhaps this is why many founding fathers of western democracies were members of Masonic groups. Masonic lore seems to perpetuate the ideal that all men are created equal, despite the fact that initiates and cowans (outsiders) are treated differently. Yet a spirit of egalitarianism pervades Masonic organizations even to this day. This is especially true in the more basic Blue Lodge, which promotes only three initiatory degrees and a rotating hierarchy.

Grand lodges and larger aggregated organizations forewent this spirit of equality and produced a hierarchy of individuals vested with various degrees of authority and power. The Societas Rosecruciana In Anglia and the Golden Dawn were based on this later kind of organization, and other groups, such as the O.T.O., invested certain individuals with authority to ensure that the local bodies as well as the grand lodge had trusted individuals to maintain continuity and stability. Many of today’s occult groups modeled their organizational structure loosely on the model of the Masonic blue lodge or grand lodge. Others have deviated quite remarkably from the Masonic belief in the equality of all members. However, Masonic lodges have shown themselves to be capable of extreme longevity, withstanding change and still operating long after the deaths of the original founders. Fraternity and equality arguably play an important part in the endurance of these groups.

In the various religious groups of Wicca and Neopaganism, there is a trend in which a grove or coven is headed by an autocratic leader or small group of elites ruling a larger group of novices, often with no checks on their authority and little accountability. I have personally experienced the abuses that can occur within Wiccan covens, but the fault is to be found wherever groups invest their leaders with near dictatorial powers. This is true whether or not these individuals have the qualities and experience to be good leaders. If leaders are gifted and skilled at leading, then a benign aristocracy is formed; otherwise, the worst kind of cult of personality and autocracy can develop. The fact that ritual magick and godhead assumptions can be practiced in such groups makes the effects of bad leadership even more damaging.

This is probably why many ritual magicians prefer to work alone and retain their autonomy despite the benefits of belonging to a group. Many magicians started out belonging to a group or organization, but seldom do they stay for more than a few years. Being alone and completely isolated is not a good idea, either. Regardless of the religious or spiritual background of magicians, they tend to branch out, discovering that performing magick for its own sake is more rewarding than belonging to a cult or creed.

The choice to work magick within a group is often made because all magicians need peer review, objective viewpoints, and solidarity, which are critically important to one’s spiritual growth. There is nothing more stultifying and potentially dangerous than the practice of complex and intense ritual magick in complete isolation. While working magick alone is at times necessary, a magical practitioner should have recourse to a peer group of other magicians to balance the intensely subjective nature of ritual work. Having a group of experienced and knowledgeable friends to judge one’s work is very important. In fact, it’s probably the only way that a ritual magician can maintain balance and objectivity. A peer group keeps individuals honest with themselves and helps them to understand their spiritual and magical processes in an objective manner.

Since ritual magicians are not common, such a peer group will be small and intimate. It may not even be centrally located in one’s own community. Because of Facebook, MySpace, blogs, email and Yahoo! groups and chat rooms, the social network of a ritual magician may be entirely virtual. Yet it’s important for a practicing ritual magician to have friends and fellow magicians his or her physical neighborhood so that he or she may periodically meet them and have intimate conversations about personal, spiritual and magical topics. I maintain that a virtual community, although helpful, can never replace real social contact between individuals. Much more is communicated through phone conversations and face to face to meetings than could be written in blogs, chat rooms or email. These same close friends will share common ideas, swap books, look over rituals together, examine excerpts of each others’ magical journals, and perhaps even perform rituals and ceremonies together. When a loose confederation of ritual magicians starts working magick together, then group organization will naturally develop.

Rituals magicians, like many occultists, aren’t known for their social skills, diplomacy or empathetic abilities. They are usually absorbed in their own practices and perspectives, and they generally despise authority figures within their own discipline. They don’t like being ordered around or told what to do. They are independently minded and probably even a bit anarchistic, eschewing any kind of formal group dynamic. This is my question and the central theme of this article: How do you get a group of ritual magicians to function as a creative, sharing, objective and harmonious organization? The answer to this question is to use what is known as a “Star Group” model.

What is a Star Group, one might ponder, and how does it differ from other kinds of groups? First, a Star Group is an autonomous, egalitarian collective where each member is an equal and respected partner, functioning as an integral facet of the whole group. A Star Group is particularly sensitive to the phenomenon of the egregore, also known as the group mind. The leadership roles in a Star Group are temporary and carry little or no real power or authority. The true authority is vested in the group itself and all decisions are determined by a process of consensus.

I define consensus as a mutual agreement in which, for any given decision, a majority of the members of the group are for it and no one is against it. Abstention does not count as a negative vote unless there is not a majority who are for it. An objection from any one of the members of the group will force that decision to be either shelved or altogether abandoned. This kind of rule-by-consensus ensures that a majority will not override the objections of even the humblest member. All individuals are heard and decisions have the backing of nearly everyone. The person who presents the idea or direction to the group has the responsibility to sell it to everyone so that no one finds fault or objects to it. Getting a small group of ritual magicians to agree nearly unanimously to a given plan of action is no small matter, but it can be done. In fact, it must be done so that everyone feels that they have been intimately involved in the decision making process. When the group makes such a decision by consensus, the outcome is guaranteed to be satisfactory to all of the members. Leaders are essentially facilitators with all of the responsibility and none of the authority. Thus no one person can abrogate the power of the group and the equality of everyone is fully protected.

I can almost sense the eye-rolling from my readers after proposing this kind of group. The first objection is that such an organization will not be able to accomplish anything substantive if there isn’t someone who makes the final decision and acts as an overseer. Hierarchical groups seem to be more efficient, goal directed and practical. Anything done by committee is guaranteed to be mediocre at best, and terribly disjointed and chaotic at the worst. It often ends up representing the untutored whims and creative hubris of the least capable in the group. I have seen rituals constructed by committees and I would agree that they are usually ineffective. Yet a Star Group is deliberately small. The execution of consensus agreements incorporates the best abilities of the most able members.

What does that mean? It means that a Star Group is not driven by ego gratification, since everyone is a respected and valued member. Each has a role and a part to play. In such a situation, the group will vest an individual with certain tasks that they are best equipped to accomplish, incorporating other members to aid and assist them as required. People work together and cooperate jointly to produce the best product that they can. A Star Group is an egalitarian team with objectives and goals, and they work together with the powerful commitment of having unanimously agreed to do a given task.

Suppose a Star Group decides to perform elaborate theatrical rituals that require props and even sets. One person who is a gifted artist may produce the sets; another who is a writer would write the script; another who is a musician would assemble the music; an electrician would provide the lighting; yet another might be a costume maker and would design and sew the costumes. One individual might be chosen to act as the director, to direct the others to take on various parts in the ceremonial play. None of these individuals would act alone, since all of their contributions would be screened and examined by the whole group. Everyone would contribute materials, time, labor and money. The net result would be the combined efforts of gifted individuals working together as a group. The quality of such an effort would be far greater than what one of the members could do alone.

Would there be disagreements and sometimes heated discussions? Certainly, since disagreements and occasional arguments would be part of the dynamic. However, the overall objectives and goals of the group would have been set up early in its formation, and the members would be motivated to work out their differences in a peaceful and cooperative manner to get the work done. It might take longer to complete a project, but the level of group satisfaction and the quality of the work would be pleasing to everyone.

Contrast this same effort as applied to a hierarchical group. If the leader is smart and knows how to motivate people, sensing their needs, strengths and weaknesses, then the assignment of roles may show a high degree of wisdom. It may also show a high degree of favoritism and cronyism, since those who are favored by the leader would get the best roles. It would be guaranteed to be done in less time, but it probably would not be satisfying to the whole group unless the leader used good judgment to correctly and accurately call the shots.

If the leader is an autocrat, then the outcome of any project may be just as disorganized, poorly contrived and executed as it would have been done by a committee. In such a situation, the hard labor would be delegated to the least favorable members and the best jobs reserved for the favorite members. A skilled seamstress may be completely overlooked because the leader’s girlfriend wants the job. Similarly, a gifted writer may be forced to do carpentry work because the leader either doesn’t know about her skill or purposefully ignores it to favor someone else. Often the leaders reserve the best parts for themselves. When the overall project fails to be fully satisfying, he blames the least favored members for failing to do their jobs. Other members who know what is really going on will resent the leader’s biased authority and either leave the group or eventually force a confrontation. A hierarchical group may have to contend with a leader’s ego inflation, unethical conduct, exploitation of other members, favoritism, despotism, incompetence and outrageous behavior.

Of course, not all hierarchical groups are dysfunctional and certainly large groups can’t function without a hierarchy. Large groups use bylaws and formal procedures to ensure that leaders are accountable, so despots or incompetents can be removed from their positions of authority. However, we are talking about small groups with less than twelve members. In such a group the temptation to acquire and hold power over others is just too great. Magicians don’t have much stomach or tolerance for such blatant examples of hubris and ego inflation, but with a Star Group, there is an alternative capable of accomplishing goals and tasks with everyone fully engaged. This is much more satisfying than what might occur with permanent authority figures.

The qualities of a Star Group can be summarized by the following points:

• Egalitarianism — each member is treated equally, valued and respected.
• Consensus — each decision is made through the process of consensus.
• Leadership roles are temporary and frequently rotated.
• Groups are fully autonomous (they answer only to themselves).
• Sensitive to the formation of egregores.
• Authority and power is vested in the group, not any individual.

An example of the bylaws used to organize and run Star Groups in the magical Order of the Gnostic Star can be found at this web address. (PDF; right-click and “Save target as”)

©2010 by Frater Barrabbas.
Edited by Sheta Kaey.

Frater Barrabbas is a writer and practitioner of Witchcraft and Ritual Magick. He has published two books — Disciple’s Guide to Ritual Magick, and the two volumes of a trilogy, entitled Mastering the Art of Ritual Magick — Volume 1: Foundation — Volume 2: Grimoire. The third volume in this series, Mastering the Art of Ritual Magick — Greater Key will be published soon. You can contact him at this email address and visit his website.

As the Year darkens and grows cold, and as we fall into the depths of the oncoming Winter, we perceive a drop of bright energy in all the chilly gloom. The Winter Solstice season has traditionally been associated not with darkness and despair, but with hope, renewal and light. We feel a deep acceptance of limitation and loss that allows us to surrender into the dark, surrender ourselves and our dearest attachments of ego to the Source, in order that we may be renewed. This energy is manifest as the Solstice dawn lights up the depths of the barrow at New Grange and paints a piercing sliver of light known as the Sun Dagger on the stellar calendar at Chaco Canyon. These observances morphed into the ancient Roman celebrations of the Saturnalia and the Kalends, and found their most recent expression in the dozens of celebrations of the Christmas and New Year season. The Winter Solstice is as close to a global holiday as we Earthlings have, and these metaphors of renewal, rebirth and undying light persist through millennia.

I feel the relief and repose of the land as it goes fallow, of life turning itself gently inward against the cold. It’s reassuring, in its way. As I fall into the growing dark in the weeks after Samhain, I find myself craving sleep, craving tranquility, craving my meditation mat. I’ve brought my harvests in, I’ve fed and praised my ancestors, I’ve done my divinations — all that’s left to do is to drop into my tenderest places, and dream. It’s the time of deep mystery, of silence and stillness and of great joy blooming in the dark and cold.

Sadly, the beginning of Winter as it manifests in our culture and time most certainly does not support introspection or slowing down. The things I dislike about this season — the frenetic crush of activity, the pathological drive towards consumption, toxic family dynamics, the unnecessary glorification of Christian culture — are largely avoidable, so I consciously try to spend my energy wisely. But given the psychic overload of this time it’s no surprise to me that many people claim to despise the whole Christmas season. I certainly hated the whole Christmas season for many years. But I didn’t really want to hate it. I loved Christmas as a kid, and not just because of all the gifts. I wanted to reclaim the Winter Solstice for myself, to honor what I felt were the important lessons of this time. I had to rediscover the magic that I had resonated with so strongly as child.

My earliest memory of Christmas centers on the story of a magical quest. The story of the Nativity, as I learned it, was always couched in magical terms. The story began with the Magi king Melchior, noting the Star in the Eastern Sky, and obsessing over its meaning. I was fascinated by heavenly portents and the wise astrologer-king who alone could read the signs and felt compelled to follow them. I was thrilled by the perilous expedition to follow the Star, and moved by its surprising end: the birth of the Child of Grace in the humblest surroundings.

This is why there always seems to be magick afoot on Christmas Eve. When I stopped celebrating Christmas, I continued to feel that sense of wonder and expectation of joy. In tracing the pagan roots of Christmas traditions, one finds that the Nativity story is just the most recent iteration of this myth. In neo-pagan celebrations of Yule, this child of light may be evoked as Llew, Attis or Horus. This Child is the new Aeon coming about, the resolution of the Dyadic pair into something greater than the sum of its parts. This is the Mystery that the Magi were seeking. This is the promise of renewal that speaks to us from the dark.

Seen in this light, the Nativity myth takes on added depth. Christ’s parents symbolically occupy places on the Pillars of Severity and Mercy, but by moving towards the Middle Pillar they are able to give birth to a being who balances that polarity. Christ’s foster father, Joseph, descendant of the line of King David, is an exemplar of the Law as handed down by his forefathers, representing Logos (logic, law, the written word). As such, he stands firmly on the Pillar of Severity. According to the Law, he could demand that his bride-to-be be killed, since she is pregnant but not with his child. He is moved by compassion to spare her in defiance of the Law. Mary, on the other hand, has long been a symbol of the selfless devotion of motherhood, placing her on the Pillar of Mercy. Yet by embodying the Child’s physical being, she is also condemning what is mortal and human in him to torture and death. From her position on the Pillar of Mercy, and in contradiction of every maternal instinct, she offers her child to expiate the world’s sins. The resolution of these two opposites is the child Christ, who unites these principles and offers up a vision of a perfected Universe that neither paradigm could have predicted.

These potentials exist in every one of us, for all of us are seekers, all of us stand in our turns on the Pillars of Light and Dark, and all of us struggle to come to balance. We all spend time as logical beings trapped in our own histories, cultures and heritages. We are all beings of compassion who give of ourselves. And we are all Children of Light, emanations of the heart of flame that burns in the core of every star and in the soul of all who live. “Every man and every woman is a Star.” We as magicians are always seeking the Star which is our most perfected, essential self. We seek it as the only reliable guide to the Aeon, to the promise of a renewed World. This is the potential of which every Solstice season reminds us, and that we cannot help celebrating, in some small way.

©2009 by Leni Hester.
Edited by Sheta Kaey.

Leni Hester is a writer, ritualist, Witch and scholar. Her latest work is included in Women’s Voices in Magic from Megalithica Press (out November 30). Her work also appears in the anthologies Pop Culture Magick and Manifesting Prosperity from Megalithica Press, and in various pagan magazines including Sagewoman, NewWitch, Cup of Wonder, In a Witch Eye and Pangaia. She practices Transformational Magick and serves the Orisa near Denver, where she lives with her husband and two daughters.

When doing some practice or ritual, if one is a Thelemite then one must always ask this question:

How does this help the fulfillment of my Will?

Too many times do Thelemites perform ceremonial rituals and yoga practices for some aim other than the fulfillment of their Wills.
Thelema often speaks of Initiation, the Great Work, Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel, Nothing/ Naught/ None, union of opposites, etc. which represents the attainment of the “consciousness of the continuity of existence” wherein one becomes “chief of all,” insofar as one becomes identified with the All. The Universe and the Self are understood as one Thing, a state of non-duality. This unity is called “Nothing” because it is continuous (see Liber Al Vel Legis I:22-23, 26-30). This is the First Step or the Next Step. One’s Will is the dynamic nature of the Self: if you don’t fully know the nature of that Self, then one cannot fully express that nature.

Therefore, attainment of “the consciousness of continuity of existence” must be every aspirant’s First Aim. “There is a single main definition of the object of all magical Ritual. It is the uniting of the Microcosm with the Macrocosm. The Supreme and Complete Ritual is therefore the Invocation of the Holy Guardian Angel; or, in the language of Mysticism, Union with God. All other magical Rituals are particular cases of this general principle. . .” (Magick in Theory and Practice). If one seeks the Will of the True Self, one must attain to that True Self. “The True Self is the meaning of the True Will: know thyself through Thy Way” (“The Heart of the Master“). In this way, all Acts must be done “To me,” with the intention of the attainment of Infinity in one’s mind.

Once one has attained to “Naught” (Solve), then one’s task is the formulation of that Divinity in motion (Coagula). The True Self has been attained, now it must express itself in the world. “To me” now takes on a new meaning: All Acts must be done as an acknowledgment of that Infinity, as a fulfillment of one of its Possibilities. “To me” means treating all Acts as sacred. . . as participation in the Joyful Sacrament of Existence. Further, since the Higher (the attainment of unity of perception) has been attained and solidified, the Lower must be consolidated. The mind and body must be fortified and enhanced by all means. The Book of the Law says “Wisdom says: be strong! Then canst thou bear more joy.” The mind and body are the means of manifestation of Divinity in the world; they are the means by which the All may become self-aware of itself in the Many. Therefore just as a polished diamond may reflect light more clearly, so must the mind and body be “polished” to reflect the Supernal Light more purely. One must “Contemplate your own Nature,” “Explore the Nature and Powers of your own Being,” and “Develop in due harmony and proportion every faculty which you posses” (Duty). The body must be strong and healthy, and the mind must be elastic and ever-expanding in its limits & knowledge. Not only must one’s faculties be strong, but one must always “exceed! exceed!” You must “Go… unto the outermost places and subdue all things” (Liber LXV) and “Extend the dominion of your consciousness, and its control of all forces alien to it, to the utmost” (Duty). This must always be done with the fulfillment of one’s Will in mind as the impetus; whether one is attempting to attain to Unity or attempting to fortify the mind and body to fashion a suitable vehicle for Divinity to manifest is up to the individual.

We’ve seen that all ritual, yoga, or any workings must be towards the end of the fulfillment of the Will. First, “the consciousness of the continuity of existence” must be attained, and secondly one’s mind and body must be strengthened, fortified, explored, contemplated, and their dominion extended. The former might be called the Mystic Half of the Path, and the latter might be called the Magick Half of the Path. Either way, both the Higher and the Lower must be attained “For Perfection abideth not in the Pinnacles, or in the Foundations, but in the ordered Harmony of one with all” (“Liber Causae“). If an Act is not made “To me,” either as a desire of one’s spirit to unite with All Things or as a rapturous love-cry coming from the joy of participation in the World… “if the ritual be not ever unto me: then expect the direful judgments of Ra Hoor Khuit!”

“There is no law beyond Do what thou wilt.”

©2009 by IAO131.
Edited by Sheta Kaey.

IAO131 is the creator and editor of the Journal of Thelemic Studies and author of many essays on Thelema, magick, and mysticism including a short treatise called “Naturalistic Occultism.” You can find his blog here.

Yule — the wheel of the year turns; yet everything appears to stand still in the frozen, icy world. Thoughts during this season turn to the past as we examine and reflect on everything that has happened — from joys to disappointments.

We make promises to ourselves, New Years’ resolutions aimed to fix the flaws and invigorate the positive within ourselves.

Timing is everything. That is probably the greatest lesson to be learned from the year’s successes and failures.

In the realm of magick there are many considerations to make, such as when to work magick, when to pause and when to plan. We can examine our natal charts to determine trends, consult calendars that tell us the cycle of the moon and what sign the sun is in. We can divide the day and night into planetary hours, seeking some kind of insight as to when a given event is auspicious. Timing is everything, but in the practice of magick there is little said about when we should or shouldn’t work magick. Are there auspicious times? Does it even make a difference?

With all of these factors to ponder, we ignore one important consideration and that is the personal cycle or wheel of fortune of the magician performing the magick. Even the most optimal and auspicious signs and portends will avail magicians nothing if they ignore important factors about their own waxing and waning material fortunes. Magick done during a weak trough in the personal fortune of the magician may produce nothing or it might even cause losses and misfortune. Perhaps the most important knowledge that magicians can possess is that which will enable them to work magick on their own material circumstances, and knowing their own timing is critical to that kind of working.

In the many years that I have worked magick, I have discovered purely by accident that certain times of the year are better for materially based magick than others, and that there is a pattern to this cyclic process.

What I discovered is that there is a personal wheel of fortune that systematically turns so that half of the year has the potential for material gain and the other half is better used to plan and position oneself for more optimal times, when action can be met with success. The year is cut in half, and one half fosters increase and the other, decrease. It may not be that the poorer half of the year actually experiences losses or setbacks, although this certainly can occur, rather the richer half of the year seems to effortlessly assist one in the pursuit of material gain and personal advancement.

It’s analogous to breathing — inhalation represents internalization and re-grouping, and exhaling represents external activity and successful outcomes. Both are required for the cycle of breathing to be complete. This is also true of the wheel of fortune.

The simplest way to determine this wheel of fortune is take one’s birthday and add exactly six months to it. So if you were born on January 5 as I was, then your halfway date is July 5. So the two most important dates are the natal return and six months later, which would be a point where the sun would be 180 degrees from its natal position. I am a Capricorn according to my natal sun sign, so my annual halfway point is under the sign of Cancer.

I have found that my time of increase begins after the halfway point in the year. From there it proceeds to climax at my birthday and then declines until the halfway point is again achieved. For me, the best time to plan and reorganize is during the winter, after the holidays and before the summer. After the summer vacation period, I am ready to start putting into action everything that I have learned and determined in the previous six months. This is how my wheel of fortune works.

A few years ago I experienced a terrible economic downturn and the resultant massive debt almost forced me into bankruptcy. However, with an open mind and a willingness to do whatever it took to legally regain my fortune, I performed a large series of Elemental magical workings, starting in June and proceeding for three months. At the climax of these workings, I also invoked and charged several items with the talismanic elemental, Jupiter of Earth, during the lunar mansion called the Star of Fortune¹. In addition, I put together a list of specific material objectives that I wanted to accomplish and crafted them into magical sigils, which I charged. In the intervening months, I was able to accomplish all of my objectives.

All of these events helped me to completely transform my financial situation. In fact, the magical workings still continue to aid me, often from unexpected sources. Because I worked this magick at the most important pivotal point in my wheel of fortune, it had a profound and incredible effect on my material situation. Once I discovered this pattern and realized it, I decided that it was the most important piece of self-knowledge that one could possess.

How do you determine the greater wheel of fortune for yourself and learn about your own important personal timing? The first thing that you do is to find that halfway point in your yearly cycle and note it down.

Then look at the past several years and see if you can see a pattern as to when important material advancements occurred for you. It won’t be perfect, but I think that you will find that one of those half year cycles is more auspicious than the other, which is better for planning and regrouping.

The period from the halfway point to my birthday is the most important time for material advancement. However, for others it may just the opposite, from their birthday to the halfway point might be auspicious. I don’t believe that one pattern should fit everyone, but you should at least examine all of the things that have happened to you in the past and make some kind of judgment as to what part of the year is better for advancement, and that will reveal the time that you can work magick to aid that advancement.

An astrological examination of the transits of the Sun to the natal chart Sun show that a conjunction aspect for the birthday and an opposition aspect for the halfway point are clearly delineated as auspicious points in one’s astrology. The Natal Sun is compared against transiting positions of the Sun in the paragraphs below.

Transit Sun conjunct Natal Sun

This is the Solar Return, when the Sun returns to the position that it had when one was born. This aspect represents new beginnings, the ability to perceive the whole year ahead as if one were standing upon some metaphorical ascent and looking across time at the events for the coming year. It is a time of receiving new impulses and perspectives as the old year gives way to the new².

In some ways a birthday is a lot like a personal New Year’s day, symbolizing the end of the old year and the beginning of the new year.

Transit Sun opposition Natal Sun

This aspect represents energies in life reaching a culmination, events causing realizations, revealing a critical point of success or failure. Situations judged to fail now appear to fail. The way to success opens up and is revealed. It is necessary for one to change course or redirect oneself³.

The halfway point is a place of judgment and evaluation, where one thoroughly examines all of life’s activities, especially those that bear upon one’s fortune. Those efforts that are failing should be either drastically adjusted or ended. Those that appear to be gathering momentum for success should be steadfastly continued. New opportunities may also arise that will need to be judged as to their worth and a change in course may be called for to take advantage of them.

If one reads these two aspects correctly, then my cycle of the wheel of fortune would seem to fit them. However, it would also fit if one experienced the greater fortune on the first half of the year instead of the second half. It really depends on the individual to determine his or her own personal cycle, and once realized, it should be used to one’s greatest advantage. What is clearly indicated is that these two points in the calendar are very important to working material based magick.

Footnotes

1. Al Sad Al Su’ud (#24 The Star of Fortune) Capricorn 25E 51N — see Celestial Magic by Nigel Jackson, pp. 82 – 96
2. See Planets in Transit: Life Cycles for Living by Robert Hand, p. 55
3. See Planets in Transit: Life Cycles for Living by Robert Hand, p. 58

Bibliography

• Hand, Robert (1976) Planets in Transit: Life Cycles for Living Para Research Inc., Gloucester, MA
• Jackson, Nigel (2003) Celestial Magic: Principles And Practices of the Talismanic Art Capall Bahn Publishing Sommerset, UK

©2009 by Frater Barrabbas.
Edited by Sheta Kaey.

Frater Barrabbas is a writer and practitioner of Witchcraft and Ritual Magick. He has published two books — Disciple’s Guide to Ritual Magick, and the two volumes of a trilogy, entitled Mastering the Art of Ritual Magick — Volume 1: Foundation — Volume 2: Grimoire. The third volume in this series, Mastering the Art of Ritual Magick — Greater Key will be published soon. You can contact him at this email address and visit his website.

 
 
Artemis Pangaia!
 
Mystery of mystery
White light within the Flame
The Hidden Fire
Is the Heart of Nature.
The brilliant Light
Erupts from Yoni
In the scream-cry-chant of Birthing
Cosmic, Whole, All Embracing
Transforming All.
Light beyond all lights
Luminescent, Transcendent
Peacock Sheen
Beyond.
Body of Flaming Sun
Of crystalline brilliance of full glowing moon
All rays of Star-Light
One light
A Ray.
The Flame of the World
The Flame of the Altar
The Flame that is the blazing aura
Of a Stalk of Wheat
A Branch of Offering
The Tree of Life;
The shimmering Light that is HER
Is scattered as an ever out-rippling cascade of Stars
Shining forth from Her Heart,
her Breasts,
her Yoni
Creating the Stars- the Sun and Moon
And the glimmering life in Every Living Thing .
Mystery of Mystery
The Light
Reflected in a million smiles, a million lives,
A million Minds- One Mind
Transforming All
Consciousness
Awareness and
Feeling
Into awe and love that is endless and deep.
Re-Birth!
Kyria Kore!
Hekas, Hekas, Este Bebeloi!!!
Artemis Pangaia!
A New Life is Born!
 

©2009 Aion131

As human beings, we necessarily craft metaphysical paradigms which explain our perceptions and direct our actions. Whether we believe in Providence or in Lady Fortune determines whether we acknowledge some propitious turn of events as divine blessing or else merely good luck. Whether we believe in the inherent dignity of human life crucially affects how we approach questions of personal and societal ethics, as does the manner in which we interpret ambiguous terms like “dignity” and “human life.” Inextricably embedded within every bare perception lies the question of interpretation, and our interpretations have for their bedrock our philosophical and magical paradigms.

Oftentimes, human beings simultaneously harbor two or more paradigms which — considered reflectively — prove mutually repugnant. This confused state of affairs can preserve human life and society, as the extreme conclusions of any one paradigm are tempered by rival belief systems, yet such ideological inconsistency can also inflict significant levels of cognitive dissonance and psychological stress upon those who straddle opposing viewpoints over prolonged durations. The Chaos Magicians within our midst might well regard the ability to dance across multiple paradigms as virtue rather than liability, at least when the pragmatic incorporation of any and all viewpoints occurs consciously and reflectively.

Speaking for myself, I am not so sanguine about the postmodern approach which Chaos Magic takes towards reality — I believe against all odds there is an intelligible cosmos which admits human apprehension! — although I think there are lessons to be learned from an introspective consideration of the paradigm or paradigms to which one holds. In this essay, I wish to examine some common interpretations of that most ubiquitous of paranormal phenomena, the ghostly haunting, and specifically what these explanations suggest about the underlying magical paradigms. My aim here does not encompass the proving or disproving of any particular phenomena. I will not explain what ghosts are, or how such ephemeral beings might interact with the realms of the quick, at least in any definitive or authoritative sense. Rather, I wish to think about how we think about ghosts, and then examine what these thought processes say about us. (To any Zen Buddhists out there, you may fairly assume I am traveling in the opposite direction; in fairness, I am doing so reflectively, and since space-time is essentially curved we might safely assume given enough time we shall meet upon the other side.)

The original impetus for this essay began with idle musings around Samhain, when the Mists which apparently divide the material and the astral grow especially thin. While reflecting upon the nature of ghosts, I found myself face to face with a logical conundrum. There are basically two schools of thought concerning the origin of an active, apparently self-aware haunting. The simplest interpretation, by and by, says the haunting wherein the ghost interacts both with environmental changes and with living people represents the human soul of the deceased, still present in some meaningful sense within our pre-afterlife world. When people die, goes this theory, some people get “stuck” — most frequently due to exceptional life circumstances — and cannot move beyond their earthly existence. (Strictly speaking, this explanation does not require belief in some specific afterlife, or even belief in any afterlife, although one seldom holds the belief in ghosts without some concurrent belief in the afterlife.)

There exists a competing explanation for the existence and nature of ghosts, one fairly well documented in the contemporary occult community. By this reasoning, a ghost isn’t the same being as the deceased individual; rather, the deceased leaves behind a mental and emotional imprint which a sympathetic nonhuman spirit then animates. I presume we’re all familiar with this phenomenon on smaller scales; if you’ve ever walked into a room and felt some inexplicable “vibe” — whether good or bad — then you’re at least familiar with the sort of psychic residue I’m describing. Spirits tend to manifest where this psychic imprint aligns with their own natures and aims. When the deceased leaves behind some especially potent psychic imprint, or when such an imprint is fueled by the emotional charge of those who mourn the loss, then the Mists grow very thin indeed for those spirits in tune with the mental and emotional state of the deceased. The result? A “ghost” which manifests through the psychic imprint surrounding certain deaths.

This latter theory accords better with my personal sense of things, and especially my belief in reincarnation. (I should also add my definition of sympathetic spirits does not generally include what certain strands of Judeo-Christian thought would regard as demons. While I remain skeptical the ghostly presence watching over little Sally really is Grandpa, I’m reasonably certain the manifestation in question isn’t some machination of Satan. That’s not to say there aren’t dangerous ghosts out there. There are dangerous people across the world, and dangerous people leave behind dangerous imprints, which dangerous spirits then inhabit. Nevertheless, I stand by my conviction most spirits are like most people — basically good at heart, sometimes selfish, essentially looking for love.)

This belief in the “ghost” as spirit-animated imprint points towards the thorny problem of personal identity. If the nonhuman spirit animating the psychic imprint does so self-consciously, then there is little issue here; at this point, the “ghost” becomes the Trickster — epitomized by The Magician within the Tarot — although mayhap one who operates with benevolent ends in mind. Some variations of this theory take one additional step, suggesting the animating spirit may inhabit the psychic imprint so completely the spirit forgets its own identity as an independent being.

Now the issue of personal identity begins to take shape. I inquire of myself, as student of the occult: Who am I? Everyday I wear masks, glamers which I adopt and discard as my circumstances require. Here I am child, and there I am lover. Here I am teacher, and there I am student. These masks develop and evolve as I develop and evolve, although we might push too far, were we to identify me as the mere sum of such mutable projections. I am process, perhaps — a ripple of interconnected events and perceptions fanning out across space-time. And yet what are these events? My intellectual processes? My emotional responses? These are certainly the ephemeral things which leave my mark upon the psychic fabric of the universe, and were some spirit to inhabit my energy signature, the workings of my mind and my heart would be the medium through which such manifestations might happen. The warmth I bring to this room, wherein I gathered many times with family and friends — this emotional energy proves the gateway for spirits of warmth and benevolence. The wrath I displayed in another place — such anguish and terror becomes the gateway for much more malevolent spirits. The kindnesses and cruelties we bring into the physical world inevitably set the stage for the spirits who might follow afterward.

If the nonhuman spirits animating such energetic signatures merely echoed the ambient emotions, then we might have little cause to worry about personal identity; we constantly return the smiles and the scowls of those around us, all without losing any meaningful sense of who we ourselves are. Meaningful empathy towards, and interaction with, those around us normally doesn’t compromise our sense of personal identity, and we have no reason to believe spirits should materially differ from us in this regard. And yet ghosts do more than merely resonate with the ambient psychic energy; they actively mimic certain mannerisms and idiosyncrasies of the living. The question then arises: How deep does the psychic imprint run, and how much could the animating spirit really lose itself within the impression?

If some living human being lost all memory of her own identity, and moreover fully believed herself to be some other individual, we would consider her at the very least deeply delusional. If I develop amnesia, and then believe myself to be Bill Clinton, I would be regarded as lunatic, and mayhap rightfully so. The mere belief — even when passionately held — that I am someone else does not make this belief true in any meaningful sense. And yet what if the psychic imprint which the spirit accesses runs deeper? If I had all the memories, together with the intellectual and emotional responses of Bill Clinton down into the most minute of details, then might I in some meaningful sense be the former United States president? Returning to my own (non-presidential) identity, if my own memories and psychic processes could be uploaded into some simulacrum, would this simulacrum then be me? These are the questions of science fiction, of course, although actual hauntings challenge us philosophically precisely because they represent the possibility of such transference. If the imprint runs deep enough, and if we are equal to our mental and emotional activity, then how can we genuinely separate the nonhuman spirit from the deceased individual? The very hypothesis may fall to its own definitional vagaries.

There is one possible solution, although this approach suffers from its own difficulties. We might choose to define ourselves as something apart from the things which leave our mark upon the psychic backdrop. Mayhap we are something other than our mental and emotional activity. Together with the mind and the heart, we are flesh and we are soul. These latter two constitute our own animating force, the means and the will by which we translate the desires of mind and heart into action. For ghosts, the normal definition of flesh in inapplicable, although such beings generally possess the ability to impose at least limited alterations upon their environments, whether through fluctuations in temperature and electromagnetic fields, or through full-blown telekinetic or ectoplasmic phenomena.

Very few people who believe in ghosts would suggest personal identity remains strictly tied with the physical corpus, since ghosts by their very existence challenge this notion, and yet methinks we hold very solid philosophical grounds to challenge an enduring connection between personal identity and the physical manifestation, since this physical manifestation is liable to constant flux, constantly absorbing and expelling elements without any actual destruction of the underlying identity. We might say the same thing of the mind and the heart, and yet there exists this at least intuitive difference: While the complete transference of the mind and heart into another vessel might stretch our sense of personal identity, we would intuitively recognize the simulacrum receiving the psychic imprint as the original individual, whereas changes to the mind and heart strike into the very core of who we are.

There remains under consideration the personal spark of will, sometimes termed the soul. I remain uncertain whether we can meaningfully separate the will from the remaining aspects of human identity, yet making the endeavor in the abstract, we discover something very much like the physical corpus — an animating force which translates mental and emotional desires into meaningful action across our shared world. We constantly “breathe” the ambient psychic energy; much like the flesh, we observe elements enter into the will, and we observe other elements depart. I am reluctant to give some primacy to our mental and emotional aspects, and yet these seem to define us in ways more enduring than the constant flux of energies which mark the flesh and soul. And again, if the psychic imprint runs deep enough — if this imprint contains something enduring about ourselves, then does our identity change with the animating force? And if we answer this question in the negative, then does our hypothesis merely confirm the ghost is — in some meaningful sense — one and the same with the deceased?

Within this especial moment, I cannot answer these questions. I most certainly cannot unlock such conundrums for you, my dearest readers who have patiently endured unto the end. You may harbor a magical paradigm in which such questions are meaningless. Or the nature of ghosts may raise different questions within your own unique paradigm. I hope my personal reflections here encourage you to reflect upon your beliefs and your paradigms, in order to tease out what naturally follows from the assumptions you might make about your world. As always, I welcome your thoughts upon this most mysterious of subjects.

Blessed Be!

©2009 by Grey Glamer.
Edited by Sheta Kaey.

In my last column, I suggested that the western magical tradition can be seen as a response to Plato’s theory of Ideas. If we imagine that magic interacts with a world of more primary forms than our physical senses can detect, we are Neoplatonic. If we argue the opposite, that there is no such Ideal world, we are Aristotelian and, usually, materialists who do not do magic at all. However, even if we are Chaos Mages who suggest that magic is mostly a matter of internal belief, and that there is no world of Ideas external the mind of individual magicians, we’re still responding to Plato.

If Plato is right, and there is an essential world of Ideas, for magic to be real would mean that it must appeal to that essential world. If such an essential world exists, its essential truths must be universal. Perhaps the shape of those truths would be different, but any culture of any time that perceives that truth, will perceive the same.

For example, every culture that looks into the geometry of a circle will discover that the diameter of the circle encircles the circumference of the circle 3.14 times. If they have sufficient mathematical sophistication, they will even recognize that this number is irrational and continues an infinite number of nonrepeating digits after the decimal point. It doesn’t matter if we call this number pi, or Liu Hui’s constant, or the Archimedes Constant. It remains true, regardless of our ideas about it. We cannot legislate pi.

Even though we cannot know pi in its totality, we do not propose that there is not, for example, a ten billionth digit of pi. In fact, we know there is, and we know that it is one of ten numerals, although we may not know which one. And since there is no perfect circle in the physical world, we also know that it does not rely on any physical object whatsoever to calculate.

Similarly, if magic is real and we believe in the Platonic ideal, then we know that there should be some things about magic that are essential, and some that are incidental or contingent. Those contingent things will change, from society to society or even from practitioner to practitioner. But the essential things, for real magic, for magic that works, will remain the same. Of course, some people may do magic that doesn’t work, just as someone might try to calculate the area of a large circle using the approximation that pi = 3, and find themselves receiving an incorrect answer. At the same time, we cannot suggest that the essentials of magic boil down to a popularity contest. If a million people think that pi = 3, they will be wrong, no matter how persuasive they are. It doesn’t matter how many votes it gets: pi is not a popularity contest.

Yet we can say, with some certainty, that diverse cultural practices operating on the same principles may be pointing to an underlying essential truth to magic. Of course, they could also point, as a skeptic would argue, to an underlying flaw in the capabilities of human reason.

For my purpose I am content to point out a few of the similarities across cultures as possible pointers toward an essential truth about magic. I am not pretending to be exhaustive, and certainly there is room for argument.

Fortunately, my work is done for me by Sir James George Frazer, whose The Golden Bough (1922) was one of the most influential books of the twentieth century. Frazer pointed out several similarities between the magical practices of diverse peoples. He did not suggest, as I do, that these may point to some underlying truth about magic, but he did suppose that it represented an underlying structure of culture.

Frazer identifies two principles of the practice of sympathetic magic: the law of similarity and the law of contagion. The law of similarity says that any two items that appear the same are, in some sense, the same. This recalls Iamblichus’s practice of using symbols of divine forces to direct those forces. A hawk is Horus, because the two are similar. Similarly, gold is the sun, because they partake of similar signatures. In non-western magic, we see the same thing: a plant with a human-shaped root might stand for a person, or a mantra might be regarded as the God it invokes. Contagion suggests that any two objects in contact remain in contact. We see this practice in the Christian mass: the bread that Jesus broke is still in contact with all other bread, which is itself in contact with the flesh of Christ, and therefore is the flesh of Christ. In nonwestern practices, it’s common enough to require hair or other leavings of someone for or against whom one wishes to work magic. Frazer regards both of these ways of thinking as “mistakes,” of course, but really they represent the very basis of fundamental symbolic thought.

Symbolic thought is that ability of abstraction that allows us to say “this word ‘water’ represents this substance.” Moreover, it allows us to say “this substance in this cup is the same as the substance in the ocean; I can abstract them with the same symbol.” We find, then, that one of the roots of magical practice, the world over, is symbolic thought. Magic cannot work unless the world is abstracted into ideas.

It’s worth noting that it is the process of abstraction, not the result of the abstraction, that matters. In other words, it doesn’t matter what collection of sounds you choose to use to represent the concept of water: “water” or “agua” or “mayim.” What matters is that you do the abstraction and that you share that abstraction with others. Of course, if you say “mayim” and no one around you speaks Hebrew, you’ll be in trouble. But “agua” isn’t an inherently better word than “mayim.”

Looking back, I find it interesting that I ended up using language as my metaphor. Of course, it makes sense: what are words but symbols? And what are symbols for, if not to communicate? The importance of communication brings me to the next universal of magic: magic operates on the principle that we are communicating with something or someone outside of our physical perception. Ancient Greeks threw tablets down wells to communicate with the chthonic gods, while medieval European magicians conjured angels. Yoruba magicians make offerings to gods. Tantrikas invoke protector deities. Even our etymologies betray the magical importance of communication: evoke and invoke both contain the root “vocare,” meaning “to call,” and “enchant” means “to sing into.”

We also, in looking at magical practices the world over, find the notion of separation nearly everywhere. The Shaman is separated from society, the medieval wizard draws a circle, and the “hedgewitch” lives on the border (the hedge) of the village. This separation amounts to a cutting off not just of society but of the physical world; there is a turning inward which is in its final analysis a turning outward into the world of ideas, a mental world no less real than the physical. Physical objects are merely means to that end, symbols that are meant to stir something in the mind.

Few magical practices fail to emphasize the importance of mental preparation. Even medieval magic focused on mental preparation, although the grimoires we have seem more concerned with the proper furniture and clothes in the temple. If one looks farther, at the works of — for example — Giordano Bruno, one quickly finds that there’s an emphasis on mental training. That mental training is not simply trance work, either, although that is certainly present. There’s also training of memory and philosophical training.

It’s easy to imagine that our culture’s practices are, in essence, absolute. But obviously we must have some ways of thinking of things that are curtains on the window, and not the light itself. We must have decorative notions that are not essential to magic. It’s worth while, in looking at the commonalities, to look at what is not common to all cultures as well.

The first thing that sticks out for me is “energy.” Few cultures recognize the concept of energy as essential to magic. Certainly, Chinese magic has qi and Polynesian magic has mana, but neither of these are energy. Qi literlly means “breath,” and could probably better be translated “life force.” Force is not a synonym of energy, as any basic physics student could tell you. Similarly, mana means something a lot more like “embodied authority” than “energy.” And if you doubt that our ancient predecessors lacked a term for energy, do try to translate the term into Latin. You may find yourself stymied: the closest similarities to the word in even its mundane sense fall short of what we mean by it. The ancients did not have the concept of energy divorced from work or power (which are, again, distinct concepts).

So why do so many magicians in modern America talk about “magical energy?” It’s not ignorance and it’s not laziness. Just as the word “agua” means “water” in Spanish, the word “energy” represents, in a magical context, one of the essential characteristics of magic. It’s not some mystical energy that any physicist will ever discover in any lab, be her instruments ever so advanced. But “energy” in western magic fulfills a simple role, easy to determine if you read this signifier in context. Every time a book on magic mentions “energy,” it hastens to point out that this energy responds to intention. It’s not like electricity, or light, or heat, or kinetic energy, or anything else, because unlike those kinds of real literal energies, it pays attention to what we want. In fact, it represents a quality essential to magic: willful action.

Magic, always and everywhere, is not an accident; it is a willful action. Of course, there are accidental powers that we would classify as magical, and seem to share some similarities. For example, in Timor some people believe in a malignant power which comes out of an unsuspecting woman and does harm to the community. And of course there are spirits or other entities who might act according to their own wills. But, like fire, while it may get out of hand and do damage, magic is a technology that we use, like all technologies, deliberately.

Energy is a symbol of that intentionality. Other cultures provide other symbols. Ainu shamans sit under cold waterfalls, for example, as a sign of their willingness to suffer to heal others and speak for the dead. And we can see that mana and qi are, then, similar to the symbol of energy in that they represent, in culturally specific and different ways, the intentionality of magic.

Obviously, there may be more essential shared characteristics; it would take a book to examine them all. But we can sum it up in a simple definition: magic is an intentional and symbolic act of communication with a nonphysical reality.

If magic were only the wishful thinking of deluded people, we would not expect it to share any similarities across culture. And we can expect the trappings to differ, as long as the essence remains the same, just as we can expect the name of “pi” to change from culture to culture, while its value remains the same. At the same time, one could argue that magic is delusion, but that delusion has some essential quality, and so shares similarities from culture to culture. This possibility, while perhaps appealing to skeptics, would be hardly any less amazing than magic itself. Both possibilities point toward some essential quality of the human mind, or perhaps of consciousness itself.

©2009 by Patrick Dunn.
Edited by Sheta Kaey.

Akashic Record

(Yoga, Theosophy) A term invented and popularized by Helena Petrovna Blavatsky. The idea is that the Akasha is a thought substance which can be imprinted by experience, making it possible to retrieve otherwise inaccessible information from the past, such as a person’s past life. This is remarkably close idea to the concept of Jung’s Universal Unconscious and may in fact be a reference to the same phenomena.

Aponia

(Gnostic) Literally, “Unreason.” The act of misusing thought.

Child

(Alchemy) A naked child symbolizes the perfect intelligence, the innocent soul. In alchemy and in magical tomes, the child represents the Union of Opposites. A crowned child or child clothed in purple robes signifies Salt or the Philosopher’s Stone.

Descriptive Meaning

(Philosophy) A statements or declaration whose meaning is shown in terms of reporting or describing actual or possible facts have descriptive meaning. Compare to Emotive Meaning.

Egg

(Alchemy) The egg represents the hermetically sealed vessel of creation. In alchemy, corked retorts, coffins, and sepulchers represent the same principles.

Gold

(Alchemy) The most perfect of all the metals, gold in ages past represented the perfection of all matter on any level, including that of the mind, spirit, and soul. The Sun is often used to hint to gold.

Maggid

(Qabalah) Hebrew Master or teacher. Synonymous with the Holy Guardian Angel, Higher Self, etc.

Mercury

(Alchemy, Roman mythology) The smallest of the inner planets and the one nearest the sun. The Roman god of pranks, thievery and commerce, which says something of how Romans conducted their business affairs. Called Hermes by the Greeks, Mercury is the messenger for the other gods, as well as being the god of science and travel, and patron saint of athletes. He is typically represented as a young man wearing a winged helmet and sandals and holding a caduceus. Mercury is also a heavy, metallic silver poisonous element that is liquid at room temperature. Often used in scientific instruments. Also called also quicksilver, alchemists acquired it by roasting cinnabar (mercury sulfide). The mercury would sweat out of the rocks and drip down where it could be collected. When mixed with other metals, liquid mercury has a tendency to bond with them and develop amalgams. These properties seemed to make mercury the master of duality in solid and liquid states; earth and heaven; life and death, and the Above and Below.

Philosophy of Science

(Philosophy) The branch of philosophy which scrutinizes the nature and results of scientific inquiry. Central questions include: Do scientist describe reality or just appearances? Can we have good reason to believe in the existence of unobservable entities (e.g. quarks)? What happens when one scientific theory replaces an older theory?

Ruach ha Kodesh

(Qabalah) Hebrew The child of the Supernals, she is the unmanifested essence that lingers like a curtain beneath her parents. Marked on the Tree of Life by the illusive, non-Sephirah Daath, or Knowledge. It is a portal through which the Absolute may enter to intervene directly with existence. Mystic Christians think of Daath as The Holy Spirit.

©2009 by Gerald del Campo.
Edited by Sheta Kaey.

Gerald del Campo has authored three books on the subject of Thelema: A Heretic’s Guide to Thelema, New Aeon Magick: Thelema Without Tears, and New Aeon English Qabalah Revealed. He is a photographer, musician and CEO for the Order of Thelemic Knights, the first Thelemic charitable organization. You can visit his blog at http://solis93.livejournal.com and his websites at http://thelemicknights.org and http://egoandtheids.com. Gerald serves as Senior Managing Editor of Rending the Veil.

Every witch is familiar with intention-based magickal workings — Know Thy Will, focus intention through a process or on an object, direct the focused energy, then expect manifestation. For simple example, my Will is “I will be healthy and fit.” I then focus my intention of health onto an apple, directing that intention by eating an apple several times per day. Finally, I expect my body to manifest itself as healthy and fit. (Yes, sometimes magick is really that simple.)

I prefer intention-based magick when performing Elemental workings. But when Chaos is my ritual’s force majeure, nonintention seems to be most effective. After all, as powerful as consciousness is, it is also exactly what can screw up a spell. Self-sabotage is often subconscious, and quickly and cleanly effective. Working with Chaos through nonintent ritual eliminates the consciousness variable by allowing the unmanifest to randomly express exactly what you didn’t know you had Willed in an act of pure epigenius. Wild Chaos. Wise Discord.

Nonintention-based magical workings vary slightly from the intention-based sort: Know Thy Will, erase intentions from the conscious mind through an automatic perfection task, imprint task’s perfected symbol of forgotten intention onto the unconscious, live your life and forget about all of it.

Austin Osman Spare’s sigil magick is a beautiful system of nonintent. Even the simplest sigil spell is extremely effective. An outline for creating a basic sigil is: I write out my Will in capitol letters; “I WILL BE COVETED”. Then I begin the process of erasing my intention by crossing out any letter that appears twice, leaving me with; “IWBCOVTD.” I write the remaining letters directly on top of one another, noticing what new shapes are being made. Sketching and resketching my way into artistic trance where I am essentially performing automatic drawing, I define a new story from the previously overlapped shapes. My goal is perfection of the sigil, not artistic merit (necessarily). The task is perfect when I am done. I then imprint the new sigil deeply into the unconscious through orgasm, entheogen or physical exhaustion. Finally, I forget about forgetting about it and live my life.

The challenge and opportunity in this style of Chaos Magick lies in the honest erasing of intent. If I am thinking about “being coveted,” or thinking about “forgetting the desire to be coveted” while drawing, I am performing an intention-based working rather than a nonintent working. Success in sigil magick in this case, would be defined by becoming completely unable to recall one’s original intent. The honest erasing is the key.

Recently, a fellow Chaote partnered with me on an advanced sigil working that assures I have no idea what I’m working towards. Hail, Discord! Here is how we, together, achieved a powerful symbol of Forgotten Intention:

Advanced Sigil Working: Partner Iconography

1. Know Thy Will and from it, locate your intent. I honestly cannot remember what my intent was upon start of this sigil working. Well done.

 

2. Convey that intention to your magical partner. In this case, Chaote and professional magickal artist, Nemo, was my partner. In an email I suggested my now forgotten intention to Nemo, blurring the original intent already. The process of forgetting began with the first communication.

 

3. Your magical partner now creates the sigil through automatic drawing. Nemo, in this case tells me that he held space for my original intent, and then concentrated so deeply that he tranced out, surrendering all my (and his) intention to the spirit that wished to be drawn. Again, we stepped even further away from my original intent.

On this, Nemo adds, “My own form of ‘forgetting’ is done by trance. . . akin to making the outline of a form with intention and then filling in the details by intuition/ deep-mind/ trance/ universal-will. . .” and, “The key to making this kind of painting is to focus on your intent so deeply, you forget it at the moment of manifestation.”

4. You receive the finished artwork, then imprint the entirely new symbol of forgotten intent onto the unconscious. In this case, Nemo created a vibrant piece of art in the center of which is my glowing image. We’ve coined this artistic sigil style Iconography. I imprinted my Icon into the unconscious by dancing about it, around it, in front of it until I was flat with exhaustion. I then meditated on its visual for three days more.

 

5. Finally, appreciate the artwork and live your life. All of this comprises a forgetting technique. I appreciated Nemo’s art as a magnificent masterpiece and displayed it on my hearth. Friends commented on it, it brightened my Beltane eventing. By trusting a magical partner with my intention, allowing him to transform intention into an original piece of art, and relating to the artwork as nothing more than beautiful artwork, I have honestly forgotten my original intent. And don’t you know, without me knowing, this new symbol presents itself to me throughout my daily life in different forms — I see a cactus in a Hollywood garden, I dream of candy cane octopi, I enjoy the sight of the art on my mantle.

Together, Nemo and I have created a path for random genius to emerge — in a form of its own unexpected choosing, and without the chance for my conscious mind to interfere. I am working with the unmanifest here. My Will is done without me even knowing it.

So mote it be.

©2009 by Tonya Kay.
Edited by Sheta Kaey.

Tonya Kay is an actress, pro dancer, danger artist and raw vegan renegade appearing this year on The Tonight Show with Conan O’Brien, CBS’s Criminal Minds, Comedy Central’s Secret Girlfriend, Showtime’s Live Nude Comedy and the History Channel’s More Extreme Marksmen. Look for Tonya Kay, starring in Jim Balent’s comic book series Tarot: Witch of the Black Rose, the pagan-centric 9-years-running comic (released Nov 25). For a complete nutritional analysis of Tonya Kay’s athletic raw vegan diet, visit http://kayosmarket.com.

“The majority is always sane.” — Larry Niven, Ringworld
“Happy Halloween, ladies . . . Nuns — no sense of humour.” — The Kurgan, in Highlander

All my life, the stories that have spoken to me have invariable been from what are usually considered the “lesser” kinds of storytelling — science fiction, comics, B-movies, horror, fantasy.

Why?

Mostly, because I can more readily identify with the characters. The mainstream and “literary” works I’ve read are about people utterly unlike me and those I know and care about. Their concerns (blood relations, conventional seductions, party politics, capitalist greed — in other words, the consensus reality called “normality”) are not my concerns. My heroes and inspiration in fiction are larger than life — because my life, though not on the same scale as such figures, is still far closer to those “unreal” tales than to the “real life” ones. Being a magician in a world which mostly doesn’t believe in magic will do that, I guess.

I also think that genres that allow room to step outside contemporary society and look at it from an angle have far more to offer than those which reside utterly within it — it’s something at which science fiction (SF) and horror, at their best, excel. Reading SF and other fantastical genres stretches your brain in beneficial ways that mainstream works simply cannot do (one benefit seems to be a kind of memetic inoculation against Future Shock — once you’re used to considering complex multiple universes and ideas in your reading matter, rapid change of information and wider ranges of ideas in the physical world become so much easier to assimilate).

It’s not easy being at such a remove from consensus reality. Even ignoring the scorn (and occasional bullying) it can attract, just finding people you can talk to who get it, who share some of your perspective and have read those same weird writers, seen the same odd films, is an uphill struggle. It’s easier now of course — the Internet has made fandom much more accessible than back in the day when the only way to contact other fans was through mimeographed zines and occasional conventions. And while those folk are not always people I can get along with, I still feel a stronger affinity for them than for those who stick to the mainstream of thought and art.

(It’s worth noting that there’s a huge overlap between fandom groups and other Outsiders¹ — roleplay gamers, sexual and gender explorers . . . and, of course, magicians.)

Sometimes, I think of it as being a member of the Tribe of the Strange. Those (to adapt a quote from SF writer Bruce Sterling) “whose desires do not accord with the status quo,” base their existence, their idea of what that entails — and the values they espouse — are often qualitatively different from those of the mainstream.

It’s not simply a matter of the knee-jerk opposition to or rejection of the mainstream (though there’s always an element of that going on, I suspect). It’s more that there’s a greater breadth of possibility outside it. And it’s certainly not saying that those who live within the mainstream are inferior or wrong — just that other possibilities exist and can be just as valid (or more so to those who the mainstream consider outsiders). And some of us prefer to live in that tribe far more than any of the ones offered by the Normal world.

Interestingly, ever since the outpouring of the counterculture in the 1960s if not before, those stories and underground ideas have become more and more part of the mainstream. We’re now at a point where the most popular books ever written are fantasies about magicians and vampires; the best selling movies are about robots, superheroes, spaceships and aliens. Yet somehow there’s still that disdain for the “Fantastika²,” both from ordinary people (who find it “weird”) and the academic intelligentsia (who find it “common”).

Co-opting of the counterculture is something that’s gone on for a long time, but the pace of it has increased rapidly as the mainstream has begun to run out of ideas. But what gets pulled into contemporary mainstream culture is of necessity diluted and superficial, not to mention lacking in imagination — the fuel that drives both genre writing and magic . . . and which seems to be peculiarly limited in mainstream and literary writing. (After all, how much imagination does it really take for a middle-aged college professor to write a novel about the sexual desires of a middle-aged college professor?)

While out for a walk during the writing of this, I overheard a conversation which ties into this nicely.

A young-ish upper middle class couple, chatting after visiting a friend, who they were talking about: “He’s just so . . . so unconventional,” they said. “I sometimes wonder if he’s got a screw loose.”

Unconventional equals insane? For a lot of folk, that’s about right. Showing even a tiny deviation from the Normal is an invitation to scorn, rejection — even violence.

But what the hell is “normal,” anyway?

To anyone who’s paid attention to history (and is not part of a religious or political tribe which rejects examining the past through any filter but their own) the definition of normality is a mercurial thing — changing constantly, no more solid and immutable than fashion. But all those definitions of normal have to be about stability, conservative (small “c”) attitudes, preservation of the status quo — and I do see the necessity of that. But at the same time, there needs to be room for outliers from that majority view, or the culture/ tribe/ country stagnates. There are even indications that the lack of innovation caused by the rejection of the un-normal can destroy civilisations³.

Perhaps this is why so many societies have times where the rules of the normal are temporarily suspended, where the usually despised and shunned aspects — sexual expression, weirdness, dressing strangely — are allowed to roam the streets. Carnival. Mardi Gras.

Halloween.

That lovely time of the year, when dressing like a monster (and increasingly, a sexy monster) in public is acceptable. When, for a short while, Goths, gender queers, and other outsiders can blend in, won’t be ostracised. When the rules of Normal don’t quite apply. Where the superheroes and wizards and beasts are, briefly, as welcome as anyone else.

And of course a time when the normal folk get to be tourists in the Tribe of the Strange . . . only to wake up the next day (possibly with hangovers or sugar crashes) and go back to the “real” world where dressing up like David bloody Beckham is the only acceptable form of cosplay — and the demons and witches get put back in the box marked “Unreal.”

I love Halloween. I love that everyone gets to join in. I don’t think the Tribe of the Strange needs a solid border between it and the “mundanes” — but I know the difference between being a tourist and being a citizen, that me and mine can’t really do the same. That dressing up as a magician one night a year, and being one all the time, are quite different things. Part of me wishes my tribe and theirs could get along better . . . but that the distance and difference between us might actually be the whole point.

Another part of me looks at all this and sees something that looks a whole lot like cultural theft.

Think about it — the majority culture cherry-picks what it finds attractive from an existing tribal tradition, shows little or no respect to that tribe, commodifies what it’s nicked and still insists it’s somehow superior to the tribe that’s been pillaged . . . (Much like those “literary” writers who co-opt SF and horror tropes without having actually read enough of the genre to avoid the worst clichés, then loudly claim what they have created isn’t that horrible sci-fi but somehow better . . . the Plastic Shamans of the Fantastic.)

I don’t actually take that idea seriously. If anything, I see that the weird is actually colonising the mundane in many ways. As our world grows more complex (both technologically and in terms of how many competing ideas surround us), ordinary life more and more resembles the science fiction of only a few years back. Those discrete fandoms that used to be obscure are becoming more acceptable and fannish conceits (from the value of behind-the-scenes documentaries to slash fiction) are becoming part of the general culture.

But no matter how much is absorbed into the common culture, there will always be those ideas and people who are too weird, won’t fit, stay beyond the pale — no matter how much money and publicity gets thrown at Harry Potter and Edward Cullen (and as the latter so perfectly shows, even those parts of the weird which do creep into the mainstream are softened, bowdlerised, rendered safe). And as mainstream culture shifts from permissive to restrictive and back again, this will oscillate. Or the weird will simply, once again, fall out of fashion. For a while.

And outside the normal world, the Tribe of the Strange will persist. We don’t shift with the tides of fashion. We’re not tourists in the weird parts of life — we live here.

We’re not as scary or inhospitable as the mundane world thinks. We don’t want to take them over or make them go away — we just hope to find a place where we can all talk, hang out, celebrate life in all its oddity and loveliness. Maybe we’ll find that Temporary Autonomous Zone, where the fantastic and the ordinary are all one tribe.

On Halloween, perhaps?

Buffy: “You’re missing the whole point of Halloween.”
Willow: “Free candy?!”

— From Joss Whedon’s Buffy The Vampire Slayer.

Footnotes

1. Read more about Outsiders here.
2. Fantastika, a word favored by John Clute and one worthy of emulating.
3. BioEd Online: Conformists May Kill Civilizations.
4. Cosplay, defined at Wikipedia, retrieved October 2009.

©2009 by Ian Vincent.
Edited by Sheta Kaey.