Another good question from Meme

Meme asked me,

“I’m curious Nettle. When I hear the word “fairy” I think of wee folk, the Summer and Winter courts, The Sidhe, Queen Titania, and Puck. I have a feeling that when you say fairy you mean what I would call “anima”, a spirit of a local or object.Is that correct? Do you ever meet people who in their workings are trying to interface with the other type?”

RJ Stewart says faeries are “living beings which are one step, one change of awareness, beyond humanity They are also those which out of the wide range of spiritual beings described in tradition, magic, religion or folklore, are most close to humanity.” (The Living World of Faery, 1995) He thinks that the cute winged faeries are merely products of Victorian sentimentality that has been laid over the older tradition and are not “real faeries.” (I am not sure I agree with that.) The various beings you name are all part of Faerie but not all of it. Robert Kirk said that fairies were “of a middle nature betwixt man and Angel…of intelligence Studious Spirits and light changeable bodies….best seen in twilight.” (Secret Commonwealth, 1692) Orion Foxwood calls them a “co-existing order of pre-human intelligent beings [existing] very close to human awareness but not dependent on it for their existence.” (The Faery Teachings, 2003)

A. E. Evans-Wentz, an anthropologist, wrote:

And there seems never to have been an uncivilized tribe, a race, or nation of civilized men who have not had some form of belief in an unseen world, peopled by unseen beings. In religions, mythologies, and the Fairy-Faith, too, we behold the attempts which have been made by different peoples in different ages to explain in terms of human experience this unseen world, its inhabitants, its laws, and man’s relation to it. The Ancients called its inhabitants gods, genii, daemons, and shades; Christianity knows them as angels, saints, demons, and souls of the dead; to tin-civilized tribes they are gods, demons, and spirits of ancestors; and the Celts think of them as gods, and as fairies of many kinds.” (The Fairy-Faith in Celtic Countries, 1902)

I’m quoting all sorts of other people because I want to be clear that what I’m saying is not based solely on my visionary experiences but also on a long tradition of such experiences. Faeries are those inhabitants of the unseen world that exist in a liminal place between the material world and the otherworld – they have a foot in both, which is why they can sometimes be seen by waking eyes. Sometimes they are connected to a place – my friend Otter “belongs” to this stretch of the banks of Mill Creek – never mind that Mill Creek was paved over and made to run through the sewers, I still live on the banks of Mill Creek even though I can’t see it and it runs far under the street. And so Otter is here too, because this is where he lives. I have seen all sorts of “genii loci” connected to the mountains and forests of my home. I do not think that they are the animated spirits of a place so much as beings who are strongly at home in that place, if you know what I mean. RJ Stewart (I think? I can’t find the reference right now) makes an interesting observation that when he does workshops in the US, the faery contacts made by people there look different from the ones made by people in the UK – the UK contacts tend to be more humanoid and often are dressed in fanciful clothing and armor, while in the US, they tend to be shaggier and generally wilder in appearance. I can say from my own experience that I’ve never seen a faery with clothes on – generally they are hairy or clad in bark or hides, (or made of bark or hides or hair – it’s hard to tell and seems impolite to ask) and I’ve never done faery work anywhere except the northeastern US, so I don’t know what they look like elsewhere. It’s one of the reasons I REALLY want to go on a pilgrimage to sacred sites in the UK. I think that these beings are everywhere and cultural traditions all over the world describe them, but they look different in different places (I’m thinking of Totoro all of a sudden… if I met Totoro, I’d call him a faery because he looks and acts like one, but I’m sure the Japanese have their own word for beings like that. In fact, the thing I love the most about Miyazaki is that his stories are always faery-stories) I am sure that the beings described in some Native American stories are the same beings.

I also think that faeries love to upset expectations and any attempts to define them or pin them down with words will result in me having my assumptions overthrown at some point. This is ok but if I suddenly come back and say, “no, wait, I was wrong, faeries are really this other thing!” that would be… well, not unexpected. And if anyone else has another perspective to contribute to this, I’d love to see it in the comments.

So – to answer your question – yes, faeries are Puck and Sidhe and Titania and all that, sometimes, and sometimes they’re local spirits connected to a place, and sometimes they’re connected to specific people or families, and sometimes they are something completely different – the only consistent characteristic is that they are the ones who are of the Otherworld but sit very close to our awareness – midway between man and the angels, as Kirk would have it.

 

Pagan values blogging: do what you will

Pax declared June to be “Pagan Values Blogging Month,” as I’m sure anyone who actually reads this blog has noticed by now. The end of June draws near and I still haven’t said anything about it, so I suppose it’s time. I’ll get back to the tattoo next time.

I’ve read all sorts of posts on the topic of varying levels of quality. Some simply engage cheerfully and eagerly with some particular aspect of a values system without reflecting much on how or why such a value is “pagan.” Some of these are quite good for what they are, but I feel like there’s a big glaring hole in such an approach. Others address the thornier problem of defining what makes a value “pagan” or not, and have come up with various answers. I was ready to just steer clear of the whole thing because I’m not sure what a “pagan value” is either and I’m not sure I’m up to wrestling with it. But “it’s hard!” is not a good enough reason to not do something (there’s one of my values, I guess) so I have to give it a shot.

I think Kullervo hit the nail on the head in his post when he talks about the common human practice of taking what we are doing anyway and applying a values system to it in a retroactive way. We do what we do, and then we come up with a system to call the things we do “moral.” Or we take a system that already exists and bend it around ourselves so that we don’t have to change much and or be challenged – we avoid any friction between “the stuff that we want to do” and “the stuff that we should do.” That’s true of everyone; it’s not just a Pagan failing.

You have to be something of a rebel to come to this path. No matter how accepting your family, friends and neighbors might be, the fact is that you have to be willing to be an oddball to do this. It’s a little bit dangerous (or a lot, depending on where you live) and it takes courage and self-determination to follow this path. One thing almost all of us share is a strong feeling that this path is the correct one, and we all have to deal with institutional voices that tell us that our path is wrong. We have to be willing and determined to listen to that inner voice and follow our heart to what’s right. The darker side of that, of course, is self-indulgence, and self-determination/self-indulgence is the greatest strength and the greatest weakness of our community.

It’s no wonder, then, that we have a hard time coming to a common understanding of “pagan values.” If self-determination is a defining characteristic, then no outwardly-imposed system of values will stick if the inner leading disagrees with it; if self-indulgence is as well, then nothing that is inconvenient or difficult will stand a chance.

Aleister Crowley said “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law,” and I think he was really onto something there.  It got watered down a bit in the Rede with the “an it harm none” bit – I think they should have stuck with “the whole of the Law” because everyone gets bogged down on that part and the significance of “do as you will” gets skimmed over or lost, and “an it harm none” takes away the real force of “do as you will”. Do what thou wilt – now there’s a challenging value, if you’re willing to actually engage with it. As far as I can tell, Crowley’s dictum is the basic Pagan value that we all follow. It has to be, because we can only get here by following that will – there’s no one else to tell us to do this. There’s nothing else to compel us, ultimately, but our own will to do so.

 

The post about the tattoo part three: getting it done

Happy Solstice to all. I’m home sick and feeling bad about missing my druid grove today. Instead of being out under the trees with my favorite druids, I’m home writing about my tattoo. This one is all about actually doing the work to make it happen – taking a vision and turning into something real.

In early November of last year, I went to Mr. Nettle and said, “I need to get a tattoo of a deer skull on my lower back.”

“How big?” Mr. Nettle is an artist who occasionally does commissioned tattoo designs, and he already had that faraway look that means he’s working out an image.

“What do you think?” I asked. “I was thinking something small, it’s really just symbolic…”

He shook his head. “No, that won’t work. Wouldn’t look right. That’s not the place for a small tattoo – you want something small, put it on an arm or leg. Back tattoos need to be bold. Here’s what you need.” He picked up a Sharpie and proceeded to sketch with it on my back. “Like this.”

I twisted to look in the mirror. With a few lines, he’d sketched out the basic design. Nasal bones just at the top of my sacrum, eye sockets on either side of my spine, antlers sweeping up to parallel the curves of my lower ribs.

“That’s… big.” I said. I’d never been tattooed before and had imagined myself easing my way into it with something small and not so challenging.

“I think it works really well with your anatomy,” he said, “and anything smaller wouldn’t.”

It was immediately apparent that he was right.

“You could put it somewhere else if you want it smaller. It would work as a shoulder piece.”

“No, it has to be lower back.”

“OK,” he said, “Get me some reference photos and I’ll start to work on it.”

“Thanks, sweetie!”

“Can I ask why you want this?”

“The King of the Faeries told me to get a lower-back tattoo of a deer skull.”

We’ve been married almost ten years now, which is why he merely said, “Well, then I guess that’s what you need to do.”

Later, when he started work on the drawing, he asked me, “Is there anything you want to tell me about this god I’m drawing for you?”

“Not really,” I said, “I’d rather you came to it without any of those concepts. He said, deer skull, so deer skull is all you need to do. We can talk more about it later.”

“OK. I just thought you should know that he’s there when I work. I keep falling into a trance and there he is. I’m going to make this into a painting as well.”

It took a few months to get the design finished, find the artist, and save up the money to do it, but by March of this year, I had several nice pencil drawings, an acrylic painting of a deer skull, and an appointment with a talented and skilled tattooist. The day before my appointment, as I was coming home from work in the evening, I was startled to find the jawbone of a deer on the ground in front of the back garden gate, in the alleyway.

I live in west Philadelphia, in an urban residential area. We don’t have deer here. There are some in the parks not far away, but they certainly don’t venture into the neighborhoods. And you don’t find deer bones just laying around. It does not happen. It was, in fact, so perfectly improbable that my first thought was that someone (human) was messing with me. Someone had to have known that I was about to get a deer-skull tattoo, someone had to have found this thing and placed it here just for the purposes of making me say “Huh?” Someone… I stood there with the thing in my hands, wondering. But, after sifting through potential suspects, there was nobody who could have – nobody who knew what I was doing who also had the opportunity to swing by my house and leave me a surprise. The bone had teeth marks on it and looked to have been gnawed on at some point by something, probably a dog. Two of my neighbors who share the alleyway have dogs. Maybe a dog found it in the park, brought it home, and dropped it along the way so it fell right by my gate. Really, it’s the only, um, rational explanation for how it could have gotten there. On the night before I was to go get a magic deer-skull tattoo that the king of the faeries told me to get.

I am sure there are people who would consider this a meaningless coincidence. I am, you might have guessed, not one of those people.

The next day that I sat down without so much as a flicker of doubt, and only a tiny amount of fear, for what would be a five-hour session. We did it all at once – I wanted to get it done and the tattooist didn’t have a problem with that. You’re going to ask, so I’ll say, yes, it hurt. Parts of it (going over the spine, the sensitive skin just under the ribcage) hurt a whole lot. I was hoping to have some sort of ordeal-induced visionary experience, but mostly it was hours of discomfort and boredom. I’m not complaining at all – that’s just how it was. And even though it hurt, in the middle of the fourth hour or so while I felt like the touch of the needle was like the touch of a lit cigarette and I was woozy with exhaustion, I found myself discussing what my next tattoo would be. It hurt, yes, but that wasn’t really a bad thing. It just was.

It healed up well and came out perfectly. I love it. I feel… improved by it, in some indefinable way. I get weird comments on it (my favorite so far is, “Nettle, that’s one hell of a tramp stamp!”) I love that it moves and stretches with me and never looks the same from one moment to the next. I thought about including a picture here but decided that I’m not really comfortable with that – putting a picture on the Internet is sort of like releasing it into the wild and I’m not sure I want to do that with a bit of my own flesh.

Here’s the painting Mr. Nettle did for me:

The tattoo is pretty much exactly this, only done in shades of black, brown and gold on a pale (me-colored) background.

Next post: what it all means! Well, maybe. I don’t really know what it all means yet, but I have some thoughts.

 

The post about the tattoo part two: Encountering the King of the World.

Several years ago, around the same time I was having my first encounters with Deer, I had a Tarot reading done for me by a stranger. There are enough people close to me who are excellent with Tarot that I don’t usually need to go far if I want a reading from someone who isn’t me.  I didn’t need to at this time, either, and I didn’t have much of anything going on at the time that I wanted to ask a stranger about, but there was this guy and he was doing readings and I was curious.

He didn’t impress me as a reader. One problem with having a very strong background in this sort of thing is that it’s hard for me to shut off my inner critic. He was sincere enough, but I felt like he was doing too much cold-reading and not enough card-reading, and I always find that a turn-off. I listened politely out of basic respect but I really didn’t pay attention to a whole lot of what he said because I didn’t like his approach.  I wish now that I had paid more attention because one thing he said really leaped out at me and stayed with me long after I forgot everything else he said.

We were talking about my spiritual path – I asked for advice on how to proceed and how to deepen my work. I told him that I was having lots of faery encounters and I wanted to know what to do with that. He said, “These beings have hierarchies, both locally and on a planetary level. If you want to know more, you should go and see the king.” I filed that away in my head as interesting-but-maybe-not-relevant, as none of the encounters I’d had up to that time had mentioned anything about hierarchies or leadership. But it struck a chord with me for reasons I didn’t understand, in the same way as I didn’t understand Deer when it first appeared.

In the meantime, I kept on doing Faery work, and found the writing of RJ Stewart to help guide that practice, and through him Orion Foxwood and the “Faery Teachings.” Last fall, Foxwood published another book “Tree of Enchantment.” I’m usually a very fast reader and will tear through books in no time, but I’m still working on “Tree of Enchantment” six months later. I feel like it was written just for me to find at this time, because it brings together all these different bits and pieces of my spirituality that for the longest time ran on different tracks. Foxwood brings all those bits together into a coherent system that works really well for me, in part because it seems to confirm things that I was working on all along.

I got as far as chapter 6 by Samhain last year. Chapter 6 is called “Encountering the King of the World.” I don’t want to say a whole lot more about it here – if you really want to know what it says, go read the book. The experience I’m about to relate happened as a result of doing the practices taught there and in Orion Foxwood’s other works as well.

 Orion Foxwood’s image of the Guardian has antlers. This seemed significant to me because I had been continually encountering antlered or deerlike beings for a long time in the Otherworld. It seemed like I couldn’t set foot there without seeing something deer-ish. As I said in my last post, I didn’t understand the nature of the totem animal and didn’t think to relate it to that concept. I just thought, hey, here’s this antlered being and I have a thing with antlered beings, I should explore that. At the same time I paid attention to the “King of the World” bit and related it back to that bit of advice I got long before, about going to see the king of the faeries. I thought, well, hey, Samhain’s coming up and it’s about time!  And I went to my backyard with an offering and the intention of meeting the King of the World.

 I got most of the way through the induction exercises when I became aware of Otter, leaning against the fence and watching me curiously. He’s always there when I do faery work in that spot, so it was no surprise. He’s the genus loci of my neighborhood. I noticed him and paused in my work to acknowledge and greet him.

“You sure have big plans for this evening, huh?” he commented.

“Yep,” I replied, “I want to meet the King!”

He got up and strolled into the middle of my working area. Otter never looks the same way twice – I know it’s him because I know him, but his actual appearance varies. At this time, he looked a lot like the illustration of the Guardian.

“But you’re not – “

“No, of course not. But I can help you here. Keep going with what you were doing.”

I was surprised, because Otter has never actually offered to help me with anything. We have kind of a tense relationship. But here, he seemed almost kind. He approved of what I was doing and wanted to facilitate it.

I see then four gates at the four quarters around me, like shining doorways. I see figures approaching from the other side of each door. Suddenly, there is an Alice in Wonderland moment where my perspective shifts and I became hugely tall and the four doorways became like mouse holes. Otter has also grown in size and is starting to fuzz out and seem less and less like Otter. He looks kinder and less ridiculous. Almost… majestic. I find that I cannot look away from his eyes. From the now-tiny doorways, a vast multitude of small glowing beings, alight like fireflies, swarm from all four directions and begin to cover his body. They burrow in and become part of him. I can see each tiny little spark has antlers.

 The being before me is now a grand and majestic vaguely humanoid antlered figure. I think. I can’t look away from his eyes to see anything else. I know that I am in the presence of a god.

 At that point, there was a transmission of knowledge – we didn’t chat, like I might have with someone like Otter – it was more like suddenly feeling pieces of a puzzle shift together in my head, so that I understood things that I hadn’t understood before. One of the bits of knowledge was the identification of Deer with the “totem” or “power animal” concept. There were some other important things, such as an understanding of the whole King of the Faeries/King of the World/Horned God identity as a coherent sort of being – his nature and his function – things I don’t feel equipped to go into detail about. If you’ve gone through such a thing, you know why it’s hard to write about, and if you haven’t, then it wouldn’t matter even if I did write about it because that’s not how one learns these things. I could write an entire book on what I learned while standing there with him, though I probably shouldn’t. It was definitely a transformative initiatory experience.

 I asked him two things. The first was what to call him. The name he gave was Gwyn ap Nudd, which fits in well with the Welsh/Avalonian current that I’ve been on for a while now. As with other gods that I have encountered, I am unsure as to the relationship between the Being and the Name, as it were – how the being that I encountered is related to the mythological figure. I’m still sorting that one out. One idea that I have on this is that the name is a key to understanding more about who the being is – reading about Gwyn ap Nudd has certainly helped to make sense of the initial info-dump he gave me. But that’s going off topic. It’s enough to say that he is called Gwyn.

 The other question I asked was, what do I do now? I expected an instruction of some kind – do this practice, learn that story, practice this art. His answer was entirely clear and free of ambiguity. He said, Get a tattoo of a deer skull on your lower back.

 Oh, I said. Um, okay. Why?

 Because I said so, he answered. You get to figure out why.

 So I did, and that will be the next post.

 

the post about the tattoo part one

I have had difficulty in the past with the concept of a “totem animal.” Most of what I read about them didn’t make a whole lot of sense to me. It still doesn’t, actually, even now that I have something like a “totem animal” of my own. At first I thought it meant that you felt a particular friendly connection to a certain animal, as I feel for horses, cats and some dogs. Or maybe it meant that you felt some strong emotion in the presence of some certain animal, the way some people really get into dolphins or bears, and that there was some spiritual link there based on that reaction. Or that you particularly admired some aspects of an animal and wanted more of that sort of thing in your life, so you worked with the image of the animal in order to get something from it.  But in exploring the concept, none of these ideas seemed to fit. There are animals that I connect with in all these ways, either as individual beings for themselves or as symbols of something bigger. None of these feelings, though, even approached what it seemed like people who talked about “totem animals” were getting at – unless those people sounded particularly shallow or unsure on the concept, as I was. The ones who sounded serious and wise on the subject seemed to be talking about something else entirely.

I like deer. I think they’re beautiful animals. It’s always special to see one in the wild, even if you live where they are quite common. They have that admirable wild combination of shyness and ferocity that I also associate with rabbits. They are resourceful, prolific, and also very tasty. As a kid, I enjoyed Felix Salten’s “Bambi” books (though I detested the movie, as only someone who loves a book can hate a movie that messes with it) while also being quite happy when hunting season yielded a freezerful of Bambi. That’s pretty much the extent of my past association with deer. There are other animals that I have a lot more love for. Horses. Cats. Owls. Elephants. Goats. Wolves. Pine martens and various other mustelids. Butterflies. Whales. All of these would be fabulous candidates for Nettle’s Totem Animal. But, as I said, I never felt much need for one, as all of the descriptions I read of totem animals either made little sense to me or seemed shallow and uninteresting and New-Agey. Mostly it sounded like having a cool imaginary pet, which is fun but not all that useful.

I sat down to write this post with the intention of telling Sandy about how I came to have a big-ass tattoo of a deer skull on my lower back. I still haven’t come close to doing that and am a little surprised as to the territory I’m wandering into. I think I’ll get to the actual tattoo and some of my thoughts about tattooing in a later post. This is going to become a long series leading up to the one about How (and Why) I Got Decorated. It wasn’t done lightly, and there are all kinds of threads leading up to it. One of those threads, one of those reasons, is that Deer is my guide and guardian. I didn’t ask for it, I didn’t look for it, and I didn’t understand it when it came, but there it is. I’m going to try to explain what that means to me, even though it sounds very different from what I read in popular sources on “power animals” or “totem animals.”

It’s hard to talk about, as all mystical experiences are, and I think this difficulty is part of why it’s hard for me to relate to other accounts of this concept – it’s not that everyone else is getting it wrong, or that I have some special and different insight; it’s just that my lived experience can’t be talked about very well and the same is true for everyone else’s experiences. The dumbed-down version sells well, and maybe it works really well for some people – maybe it’s not shallow or dumb for them at all. And maybe my account will sound nonsensical or shallow or mad to someone who isn’t me. Maybe someone will say, “no, that’s not it, it’s not like that at all.” I think poetry might work better for talking about this, but I’m still practicing with poetry and not functional enough with it yet.

When I say “Deer” (as opposed to “deer”) I’m not talking about an individual spirit, as I am when talking about other sorts of guides or faeries or gods. I’m also not talking about those animals out walking around in the woods called deer that resemble Deer. I don’t think I have any special connection to actual deer, nor do I think that see me any differently than they see any other human. There is a connection there, certainly, but I think it’s more of a morphological similarity – the shape, the substance, and the image of Deer is connected in some way to the animal deer, but they are not the same. I am not sure what this relationship is, but I think it would be simple arrogance to imagine that I have any special insight into deer. They live their own lives with no concern for mine, and their world is not mine. But Deer, on the other hand… Deer is part of me as well as part of the Otherworld. Deer makes a connection, a bridge between this world and that. Deer is there to lead the way, to leave clues and hints, to challenge and to protect. When I go to the Otherworld and say that I need something, Deer is there to help me find it. Deer doesn’t always speak; sometimes Deer is just an antler on the ground, the flash of a tail through the trees, the glimmer of an eye in the dark – Deer is a symbol, not a person. Sometimes Deer is just a patch of fur or an antler on some other being, like the wink of an eye to remind me of the connection. And sometimes he is fully personified, in the form of a deer or a man with a crown of antlers, but even then those personifications are only partaking in Deer. Deer is present in the Horned God, but the two are not the same, and Deer is not a god. When I die, I am sure that Deer will be waiting for me on that bridge as well.

 

biology teacher

Last night, I dreamed that I was in a classroom. A class was just about to start. My fellow students were of many different ages and backgrounds, and I knew that the class was one that was offered outside of the normal curriculum. It was intended as a personal enrichment course for anyone interested, not as part of a degree program. I had a heavy textbook and a notebook and pencils. It was the first day of class, and I was eager to begin. I wasn’t sure of the subject – I knew it was one of the sciences, as we were in a room with a lab setup.

The teacher came in and put some images up showing various cellular structures. The class still wasn’t quite ready to start, so he busied himself with preparing some microscopic slides that I somehow knew were of unicellular life forms. At that point I realized that it was a biology class. I looked closer and saw that the teacher was actually the personification of Death. I laughed.

It probably helps that, probably thanks to Terry Pratchett, the Grim Reaper seemed like a friendly sort rather than a nightmare – the dream was not frightening in any way. I was amused to find that Death was there to teach me about the study of life. It was like the punch line to a joke.

 

Son of apologies if this sounds cryptic

warning: this is more stuff that will only make sense to a small number of people, and even they might not understand it. I’m sorry about that, and I’m mostly writing it for myself.

I’m still not into doing any real bloggy stuff right now, but I just wanted to check in and say, hey, still alive, still fighting. It should be over this week, one way or the other, and then I’ll probably get back on my feet in time for the pagan ethics thing. I have lots to say on ethics right now.

My Free Will Astrology horoscope for this week:

I swerve to avoid running over spiders that cross my path when I’m riding my bicycle. While at home, I prefer to shepherd flies out through an open door or window rather than swat them. I’m still not sufficiently enlightened that I’ve stopped trying to squash mosquitoes that dive-bomb me while I’m falling asleep, however. I’m working on it, but may need a few more years of meditation before I bring my reverence for all insect life up to the highest level. The way I see it, my fellow Cancerian, you’d benefit from working on a similar project in the coming weeks: improving your relationships with influences you don’t have a natural affinity for.

So far my role in this battle has been support and guerilla tactics, but tomorrow afternoon I’ll be on the front line. Five years ago I put up an invisibility shield so effective that the enemy literally doesn’t know that I exist. I haven’t been mentioned at all. Tomorrow I have to stand up in front of everyone I’ve been shielding myself from and show myself. I need to switch the glamour from “invisible” to “impressive.” I’m a whole lot better at the invisibility thing. I need to inspire confidence. I need to surprise. I need to dazzle.

No pressure there, right? If I do this well, I can do anything.

ETA at 8 pm on May 28: I am a total rock star.

 

apologies if this sounds cryptic

The joke goes like this: “Why is a math book so sad? Because it has so many problems.” But of course that’s a distortion of the truth. In fact, the math book loves its problems. Its problems are its reason for being. Besides that, all of its problems are interesting challenges, not frustrating curses. Best of all, every problem has a definite answer, and all the answers are provided in the back of the book. Now here’s the most excellent news of all, Cancerian: I think you’ll be like a math book in the coming weeks.

- Rob Brezsny’s Free Will Astrology for me this week.

Here’s to being like a math book… a battle math book.

I have stuff going on in my life that I don’t blog about here but some of my friends who read this know what I’m talking about. I’m going into battle this week and there’s a chance that I’ll come out very bruised but also a chance for victory. A good chance, as it happens. I’ve been dreading this for a while but now that it’s here I’m feeling ready to swing that metaphorical battle axe.

Bring it on. I’ve got the answer key right here, bitches.

 

Answers for Meme

My friend Meme posed a series of questions in response to my last post. They are hard questions and the answers are long and probably raise many more questions of their own. Be forewarned. This was written as a direct response to Meme (he’s the “you” below) but anyone who would like is welcome to jump right in. I’d love to hear anyone else’s answers to these.

If you are interested in magic as a subject, there’s a whole range of places to go to get different answers and different ideas. Some of them may contradict me, and that doesn’t make either of us wrong. The post started life as part of an email discussion, when one person offered a description of magic as she does it that was completely different from magic as I do it. She is an intelligent and thoughtful writer for whom I have a lot of respect and I was struck by how two people can engage with magic sincerely and earnestly, probably even working from similar sources, and come out with such different results. She is not wrong, nor am I; we’re just different. If you also engage with this work, you might also come to a completely different place. 

I should also say that I’m not totally comfortable answering some of these because once you start putting things into writing it starts the process of being boiled down, so the reader gets the boiled-down bit, processes it even further, and winds up with this little nub and says “Aha! This nub is really what you mean, right?” and usually it’s not. What I really mean is a whole lot more than what I’m saying, not any less. I tried to answer as thoroughly and well as I can, but some of these are conceptually complicated and all I can do is give it my best shot. I ran my first draft past our friend Wren (thanks, Wren!) to make sure I was actually making sense and to get some feedback from another perspective. Some of her comments are included below. Meme’s questions are in italics

Do you believe in chance? Does the fundamental nature of the universe include chaos and randomness?

The fundamental nature of the universe IS chaos, if my sources are to be believed. I looked “randomness” up on wikipedia to get a better handle on the concept and was intrigued by this bit: “Randomness is an objective property. Nevertheless, what appears random to one observer may not appear random to another observer. Consider two observers of a sequence of bits, only one of whom has the cryptographic key needed to turn the sequence of bits into a readable message. The message is not random, but is unpredictable for one of the observers.” Random processes are often used for divination. The reader as the key and decodes a message received by a randomization process based on the key. I think all of these things – unpredictability, chaos, and random processes – are fundamental to the structure of the universe, which is one of the reasons that we can use them as vehicles of exploration, as in divination or magic.

If so, how do you distinguish between answers to “prayer” and random occurrences?

 I don’t think “answers to prayers” are the same thing as what I’m talking about, but for the purposes of the question I’ll go along with what I assume you mean here. Even with that, I’m still having a hard time answering this question because I think “random occurrences” here means “stuff that just happens,” and anything that comes along in life is stuff that just happens. I think you’re asking about assigning meaning to events, and how we decide whether an event is meaningful in the context of all the other events that happen. Going back to what I just said about coming up with the cipher key beforehand, magic might be a means of creating meaning in the same kind of way that divination creates meaning. This is something that only occurred to me as a response to this question and not something I’ve thought very hard about, so I’ll have to come back to it sometime. It’s something to ponder, anyway. Shorter answer to the question: I don’t know that I do. I’m not sure it’s necessary. 

What, if anything, makes your version of magick different than a christian who prays to god? Is it only a difference in who you’re supplicating? Would you say that Christians everywhere are practicing magick then?

I’m not qualified to answer this question – I am not and have never been a Christian, so I don’t have the experience I would need to know what the difference is and whether there is any significant difference. I suspect that there is, but I just don’t know and don’t feel comfortable speculating. Not my area. I ran this by Wren, who has been a Christian, and she says:

“As a previous Christian, but arguably a strange one, I think it’s different in these ways: The person you’re asking help from is SO MUCH GREATER than you, you small peon, that it changes the flavor of the conversation. With the spirits, I get the feeling that you’re hanging out with someone who knows more than you do, someone you should be respectful of, but not someone who you must grovel for. Also, when talking to the Gods, I get the feeling that we appreciate our own wee bit of godhead and treat with them differently. I’m not scared of my God, she’s not illogical and capricious in a bad way, and I can talk to her, you know?”

After reading this, it occurred to me that a really fundamental difference between Christianity and this sort of practice is that you’re not appealing to an omniscient, omnipotent being. Heck, with fairies, sometimes they’re not even all that bright (though I should add that I know Christians who work with faery, so the two still aren’t mutually exclusive). My personal cosmology doesn’t contain a supreme being – there might be one out there, but I’ve never encountered such a thing unless you want to equate “the entirety of the universe” with an entity. It’s not anything I feel like I could work into my personal practice. It doesn’t fit – it’s too big.

 If magick consists of praying or asking for intercession, why then all the other trappings? Why the ceremonies and meetings and dress and altars? Is it to put you in a state of mind to ask properly? Is it to put the intercessionary being in the proper mood? If so, why do you think you need to approach your higher power in a certain mindset or vice versa?

I am not sure that it is the same as prayer – as I said, it’s all about the relationship. But maybe that’s what prayer is about for some – in my practice, “prayer” has to do with deities. You don’t pray to a fairy. They aren’t gods. I think people use the ceremonies and such for different reasons, so take this as my idiosyncratic answer, because I can only speak for myself. It’s also a short answer to a question that needs a long answer, and so will be inadequate and kind of vague. Daily practice makes space for the gods in my life – meditation is practice for being able to hear them – you can’t hear anything if you don’t shut up and listen, and my meditation practice is all about shutting up and listening. Other practices – drawing and circulating energy, which is mostly what is going on with all the gesturing and wand-waving and robes and such – is for getting attuned with the subtle energies of the self and the environment. Building altars and making offerings demonstrates commitment and affection for the gods and the fairies (plus altars are handy places to keep things that you want kept apart from Just Stuff. And they’re pretty, which counts for a lot.)

All of these things, I do for their own sake – because I love the gods, I love the fairies, and I just think it’s all wonderful and would do it even if they never did me any other favors than be present in my life. But, sometimes, now and then, there’s something I want. Sometimes, there’s something they want. If they ask, I give as I can – if I ask, they give as they can. This is the sort of thing that ends up looking like magic. I think “mindset” as you say is important because as I’ve said here before, the imagination is an organ of perception and you need the eye of the imagination to be wide open to see some of these things, and that takes practice. You can’t just leave that eye open all the time or you’d lose the ability to be functional in the material world – maybe that’s worth it for some people but mostly it doesn’t seem to work out and it’s not what I want for myself. I think many of the practices that have been developed over time have those two functions – learning how to See, and also how to Unsee, as it were. When I actually need something, I don’t bust out the robes and wands and incense and such – if I haven’t already done that work, it’s too late to start by then. I just quietly go to my contacts (or run screaming to them, depending on what’s going on) and say, how can I get this thing done?

 In your experience and estimation: Can magick produce any reproducible result? Is there any working or spell or prayer that always results in the same effect?

 No. I mean, I know that if I do certain practices, certain things will happen, but that’s all going on in an internal way. I can’t do tricks. I think if the results were reproducible, that would be called “science” not magic. This is also where my skepticism kicks in, as noted in the comments to the last post. If someone can, say, make a ball levitate in midair and do it every single time, I’m going to be looking around for the strings or wires. That’s not magic, it’s a trick, and if there are no strings or other such tricks happening, it’s still not magic, it’s just a physical process that we don’t understand yet.

If the answer to 4 is no, then how do you personally determine whether something happening was caused by Magickal intervention or pure chance? I’m sure you are familiar with experiments on human pattern matching. Why do you think what you experience is magick and not chance or luck that anyone could have? Why do you think that some people get what they desire/need/want without prayer or intercession?

I can’t, I don’t, and I’m not sure there is a difference. I don’t know why some people are born into wealth and comfort and some are born into suffering and poverty. These questions are way above my pay grade, as our president would say, and I would be uncomfortable with any firm answers. I don’t know if the thing that I asked for would have happened if I didn’t ask for it – there’s no parallel universe available to me where I could go and see how it would have worked out otherwise. There’s no control experiment running. That information is unavailable to me and I would have no idea how to go about getting it. I just do the best with what I have. I am aware of things like pattern matching and confirmation bias and all that, but I’m not sure how my life would be improved by chalking a portion of my perceptions up to the cognitive equivalent of an optical illusion and walking away from them. I guess I could go watch TV instead? The simple answer is that the “illusion” explanation doesn’t feel true to me, and that’s all I have. I have yet to see any compelling evidence that it’s one thing or another and I don’t think it’s the kind of thing that it’s possible to prove. Wren says this quicker than me: “In a sense, who cares if it’s chance or my God or my spell?  It’s a good thing that happens; I’ll take that and thank you very much!”   

Does magick demand faith? If so why?

I’m not sure I understand the question, sorry. I’m kind of sticky on the whole concept of “faith” – it might be what I talked about in 5, the feeling of something being true – in which case I guess it does. If you don’t feel it’s true, why would you bother doing it? If you were asking something else, I’ll try to answer if you clarify. What is the thing that is doing the demanding?

Would you agree with the statement “Magick is whatever you want it to be.” ?

No – that would be kind of meaningless. I think it’s a word with a broad range of definitions and is often situational (cooking, for instance, can be a form of magic, or not, depending on how you go about it) but it’s not just anything. (Wren, who knows a thing or two about magical cooking, says “Mindfulness is a big part of magic, and mindful cooking is very different from slap something on the table ’cause we’re hungry.”)

If any type of prayer to any being/force/power is magick, would you say that everyone has access to magick to the exact same depth as everyone else? Do some people have more? if so why?

I don’t think that every type of prayer is magic or that every type of magic is prayer – I don’t see them as the same thing. I do think that everyone has access to magic if they want it. I also think that some people are just more talented at it, just as some people are more talented at music or poetry. I have always had the ability to access the Otherworld, for instance, so when I started reading about it I was able to say, oh that! I can do that! Someone who hasn’t had that ability might have a much harder time. Anyone can learn to play the piano if they practice enough, but some people find it easier than others and many people don’t have any interest in learning the piano or never encounter a piano – everyone has the same fundamental access to “piano-playing ability” but some will find it easier than others and some who might like it or be good at it never encounter it at all. And, as I’ve said, there are other ways to do magic that I’m not so good at and others are – where I might be champion piano player, I could be just OK at the violin and hate the bassoon – so even if one approach isn’t for you, there are others.

Was there a point when you did critically examine whether they could be something other than magick, whether psychological, neurological, physiological, etc?

I have thought about all these things, of course, and the answer to “could it be something other”? is always “yes” because the Universe is a really big place and there are  always other modes of explanation. “Critical examination” is one of those things that I do a lot of, so there was no single time where I examined all this – I do it constantly, with everything. But I’ll try to go further into the question – you’re talking about different models of experience, I think – the common one that we have in this culture is that there is a firm and impermeable barrier between “stuff that happens in my head” and “stuff that happens in the Real World.”

I’m not convinced that there is any such barrier, though it is a helpful model for many situations. I think a lot more of the Real World happens in our head than we think about, and a lot more of what goes on in our head is connected to “the world out there” than we think about – perception is a funny thing and we impose meaning upon the world with every thought. Does that mean that all meaning is imposed? I don’t know – I don’t think so, but I’m really not sure.

“When you communicate with the Unseen you’re really talking to your own subconscious”  is apparently considered to be the less-superstitious, more material, rational explanation, but the idea that there is this whole part of my brain that has access to a vast amount of information and yet is inaccessible to my ordinary consciousness except under certain conditions where it takes on the appearance of another being and communicates with me as though it is someone else – this is the simple explanation? It seems so much simpler to say “There are other consciousnesses that are different from our own and operate in a different way but can communicate with us.” I suppose the secret-brain-basement theory might be the true one but it seems needlessly complicated and is only deployed to save the “in here/out there” dichotomy, which faeries pretty much just giggle at.

Wren says, “I think the brain-basement is an okay explanation, too, for two reasons: I think that we are all The Stuff Behind The Universe, whether you call that God or Nature or Fred the Giant Walrus.(hi Fred!) Being that we are all that thing, some part of us has access to that thing. Why are we here if we’re all that thing? Beats the hell outta me, but I’m having a good time. It’s hard, it’s scary, there are times when I want off of this damn ride, but adventure is rarely fun when you’re having it. You remember it later as challenging and fun and a good test of your abilities, but in the thick of it, it kind of sucks. The other reason is, it might be how it works. I have no idea and I won’t have all the answers ’til I’m dead and they give me my library card. ”

I think she and I are saying similar things here – since we are part of everything and partake of everything, there is no wall between inner and outer worlds. It’s a convenient fiction. My issue is with the pseudo-rationalist argument that says that if we can just stuff everything nonmaterial or nonrational into the brain and keep it inside the skull by using psychological or neurological explanations, we’re doing something inherently more logical and sensible than if we simply accept experience and perception as they come to us – if I see the fairy and you don’t, it doesn’t mean that the fairy isn’t real, it just means that I see it and you don’t.

 “It seems I could replace god with a 3 sided die and still get the same kind of answers. Without some kind of direct manifestation how could I tell?”  I am fortunate to have experienced such manifestations and have had enough interesting communications with other beings that I don’t think the 3-sided die thing enters into it. The answer isn’t really “yes, no or not now” – it’s usually a much more extensive conversation than that. Even if it’s “no” there’s something to be learned from “no” that you couldn’t get from a three-sided die. 

I can’t answer your question about differences between your old faith and magic – I don’t know enough about it, though magical practice occurs among all faith traditions, as far as I can tell. It’s not the same thing as religion, and none of it is mutually exclusive. Also, what I’ve described is just my way of going about things – others do it very differently.

Wren says “Having been religious and now being spiritual/magic user, they are not similar.  The two basic differences that I can see are: in religion, you DON’T have a personal relationship with god/the power that is.  It’s filtered through a church, a book, something outside of you.  A lot of religions say that is not true, and they encourage their members to have a personal relationship with god… but the thing is, the god that the parishioners are talking to is something that’s been defined by their teachings and their particular laws.  The other difference is the relationship itself.  A genuine personal relationship between beings is nothing at all like a forced relationship with strange external views imposed.  Analogy:  religion to me is like visiting a person in prison.  Someone Else tells you how long to stay, where you can meet, what you can talk about.”

Here’s a concrete example of something that happened recently that I consider to be magical:

Last week, I went to the Spoutwood Fairie Festival. Before going, I requested that I get a sign sometime during the day from Lugh, the Celtic bright god to whom I turn in the warmer months from Beltaine to Samhain – since this festival was at Beltaine, I asked in part as a devotional practice (because once you ask for something like that, you start looking, which keeps the god foremost in mind all day and encourages an attitude of devotion) and also in hopes of learning something useful by having my attention drawn in that way.

The festival was lots of fun and I had a great time and always kept my eyes open for my sign. Late in the day, I went to hear a talk from a bard, and he showed up, a sunny blond Scotsman all dressed in fiery colors – I thought, well, that might be it, but maybe I’m reaching on this one – until he said, unprompted by me and as part of his talk, that he was dressed as Lugh. Bingo! I thought, and listened closely, and learned a few things but nothing huge beyond the fact that he was a good speaker and knew about things that I wanted to learn more about. After the talk, I learned that he was relatively local and did workshops and such on topics of interest to me. So I took a flyer and later learned that while he had a few things coming up, his teaching fees were a bit higher than I could manage – not super high, but enough to make it just out of reach. I went to the fairies and said, um, little help? and shortly after got a check in the mail for some money that I was owed but had forgotten about – just enough to cover the workshop fee and travel expenses.

There are different ways to look at this series of events. One way is that the storyteller’s Lugh costume was a divine signal that I needed to learn something from this man, and the cash assistance was sent by otherworldly beings to lend material assistance towards this goal. Another way is that, in a whole giant fairy festival, something was bound to remind me of Lugh and confirmation bias would cause me to consider this as a significant thing when in fact it was a random occurrence, and the money was something that was coming to me anyway and is in unconnected to the event of meeting the storyteller. For someone who sees the world in terms of webs of connection and relationships between the seen and unseen, the first version might seem more likely; for someone who sees the world in terms of random events occurring independently of each other in ways unconnected to the observer, the second version would be preferable. The thing happened – that is true. Pigment and canvas arranged together make a painting; a series of sounds make a song – is the series of sounds the same thing as the song? Is the pigment the painting? What’s the truth there?

 

Definitions of magic

(note – this is copied over from a post I made to the AODA Yahoo group as part of a discussion on the nature of magic. This is what I mean when I talk about doing magic – it’s not necessarily what other people mean when they talk about the same thing. )

If there is something in my life that I think needs to happen, I’ll go to the spirit (for me it’s nearly always either plant spirits, if it’s a health issue, or the fairies) that I think can help and ask for some aid. It’s always a request, never a demand, and sometimes the answer is “no.” Or “not yet.” And that’s OK. Once, when there was something I wanted very much, I pushed past the “no” and insisted on, or maybe begged for, the outcome I thought I wanted. So, I got it. It turned out to be the single worst experience of my entire life. Now I take “no” for an answer with gratitude. But often it’s “yes,” and then, well, stuff happens (ask me about the time I manifested an automobile…)

I don’t see it as symbolic – if I carry a bit of angelica root for protection, for instance, it’s not because the root symbolizes anything – it’s because it is a direct material connection to the protective spirit of the angelica plant. If I’m carrying the root, the spirit is with me, and that’s where the protection comes from. If it’s a root from an angelica plant that I planted and nurtured and talked with while it was growing, the spirit will be with me much more strongly than if I bought a root in a botanica. It’s the relationship that brings the power.

I don’t see the magic as coming from me at all – it comes through the ones I call on. What I’m responsible for are the relationships I’ve formed – the connections I’ve made and nurtured. That’s what comes through me. Any kind of ethical choices I make have to come from my own personal concept of virtue, but if I wanted to do something hateful or destructive, well, I’d have to make those relationships and I’m really not into that.

I’ve been told before that what I do isn’t really “magic” – that it’s really shamanism or theurgy or whatever other buzzy word of the day is going around – but I’m not sure I need a whole different word for it. Do I?