MIdsummer

Light and lithe comes
lissome son, to cast
a pall on Eve's beset
and coronation's choir

some are calls to oak's
demise, others hail hallowed
trees, while She again
the Quested Queen

wanton, won and wond'rous.
Enthralled, enthroned,
Crown-on-us brands his kiss
over twin-fell'd foe, queen-claiming
culling, grove to grave

Beltane

Beltane sends
merciful flowers
following, finding
vine-wound door

enthralled in hedgerow
opening lushly
sprinkling tresspassers
threshheld a-court

there sleeps Titania
fortified by wine
wounded from sport
delayed by nothing

laid bare by her own
arrival, holly's rival
for the opal boys in
their poison beds

her honey's sweetening
with each braid of the pole
bound around the verdant
mound, a blade set aside for the dead

God and Faith for the non-God-and-Faith Crowd: An Easter Sermon

Part I : "God"

I do not believe in God; I have an understanding of God.

Now, perhaps when you hear the word "God" you think of "your God", or "somebody else's God". In one of those cases you might imagine a sort of grumpy Santa Claus; he sees you when you're sleeping, he knows when you're awake. He knows if you've been bad or good so be good or a lump of coal in your stocking is going to seem like a frosted cupcake by comparison to what's coming to you.

When I say God, of course, I'm talking about a phenomenon, more verb than noun. I'm talking about what Einstein called "The Mystery". This is Plato's God. Blake's God. Jung's God. Not a personified third party entity, but a process of which we're a part. Now, this Mystery is to my mind entirely rational – which is to say, understandable, reasonable, natural. Sure, damn puzzling and profoundly weird at times. Also extremely inconvenient, what with the speed of light etc. But this is God, nonetheless. I certainly did not create it in my own image.

It seems to me that the rejection of "God" by those who do so is not a rejection of the above, for the most part. I'm sure some are more comfortable with descriptors like "an event cloud of non-local phenomena" or "those laws of physics which we don't have the math for yet but we will someday" – because that's at least what I'm talking about when I use the term God. (Etymologically, the word is likely derived from the proto-indo-european gheu: "to pour" as in to make a libation or sacrifice of something by spilling it on the ground, just as the word bless means "to spatter with blood").

Okay so there's my God / laws of physics / vastly complex yet understandable universe in which we participate. And maybe you're okay with that and maybe using the messy, spilling and blood-spattering word God gets under your skin. Sounds pretty cave-man and we should be above that sort of thing, etc. Perfectly reasonable objection, really. Some would, with good reason, argue we abandon this whole "God" word, especially once we've established that we're not talking about Santa Claus but rather stuff which we may not be able to test in a lab today but someday possibly shall.

Of course, the word "God" is rather effective at getting people to do things. Certainly a number of those things have, historically, been unpleasant. But these same students of history who would criticize the term and its employ must also acknowledge that entire civilizations, cities, and virtually every university in the world was founded in service to the idea of the term: quite literally, all of civilization was founded in "the name of God".

I certainly understand the heebie-jeebies experienced by those who hear the word, though. I really do. Personally I think the culprit is poor religious education, particularly in the Protestant-skewed United States. Millions of people have the idea that God is a kind of weapon to be used against naughty children so they'll sit still, because that's how they saw it used. So they were literally taught that this literal grumpy Santa Claus was going to smack them on the knuckles for cheating on their homework, and every reasonable person would be anxious to replace Him with either

a) nothing,

b) something in opposition to Him (such as Satanism), or

c) a kind of HR decision in which He's fired and She's hired; that is, replacing the knuckle-whacking God with Odin or Hera or Light-bearers from UFOS, etc.

But the lesson here is if you can explain it in Sunday School, it's probably wrong. You end up with the same unsubtle, un-nuanced, and yes, immature understanding of the Mystery, regardless of which you choose. Whether you accept or reject outright the theology that's handed to eight year olds, you're still thinking like an eight year old. Atheism, literalist monotheism, and literalist polytheism are all wrestling unsuccessfully with the same Sunday School class that likely has nothing to teach you anymore.

I recently got into trouble on a Pagan forum for implying that panentheism (that God is the whole universe and then some) is more "mature" than literalist polytheism (Odin and Hera literally exist as third-party entities distinct from humanity). I shouldn't have implied it, I should have stated it outright. Literalist polytheism and literalist monotheism are the Tooth Fairy vs. Easter Bunny debate of philosophy. We're grown-ups. We can move on. We don't need either to stand over us with a ruler making sure we behave ourselves.

Now it does occur to a minority of Christians who have seen the idea of God used in the knuckle-whacking capacity that the priest/pastor/Sunday School teacher had it all wrong, and that Christianity really does not mean what these individual interpreters say it means. That is to say, just because your parish priest says the Catholic Church teaches x does not in fact mean that the Catholic Church teaches x. (Best example: Catholics learn that sex is bad and dirty, but Catholic doctrine teaches that sex is awesome and you should have more of it. Yay sex.) That path – of skipping a level of authority to ask deeper questions from allegedly the same source of that authority – is much harder and rockier, and I'm personally glad that I didn't have to take that one on as a teenager. But thats maturity for you; nothing but hard work.

So now we seem to be left with two choices; either the a) nothing from the sequence above, or a new b) asking deeper questions. As I've already annoyed the literalists by declaring it as immature, I may as well declare atheism as being psychologically unhealthy. Currently (and yes I've read all your big-name atheists at length) atheism is frought with sloppy logic (all religion is bad except for when it isn't in which case that's not religion, religions make people ban books so we should ban religious books, if God is real and jealous why doesn't he stop me from typing this, ad nauseam) and socially maladjusted. It won't work. It can't work. It dedicates an idol to a logic it immediately fails to respect. It begs the question and then wonders why it doesn't get invited to parties.

We are symbol-using, meaning seeking creatures. When we fail to employ and integrate myth and symbol, we become broken. We just do. And integrating myth – without abandoning reason or science or civility – is what keeps us from disintegrating as human beings.

Summary: 1) The God you grew up with doesn't exist. 2) God exists. Duh. You just need to think bigger. 3) If you don't have stories with God in them, you go crazy.

Part 2: "Faith"

Oh man, I do not like this word. This, for me, is even harder than the "G" word above. Largely because I've had Plato on my side for the first one (appeal to authority, two beer penalty, I know, I know), and the deck is stacked against me for the second.

I got handed the word "faith" the way most people get handed the word "God"; as a cartoon caricature of the real thing. Faith so often, as someone so expertly put it, is faith in somebody else's faith. Faith meant belief, another word of which I'm specifically not fond. If "God" can be an excuse to make people crazy, it's in faith where the rubber meets the road to crazy-town.

But, as we return to asking deeper questions, we get that faith also means strength, and strength by association. I've been using the word "fides" to describe this strength, this integrity which comes from integrating myth in a deliberate way, but it's confusing and I should knock it off, hold my breath and take the "faith" plunge.

Across the street from my home is the gorgeous, gothic Anglican Cathedral. I often walk its labyrinth, or sit in the pews in silence when it's open during the day. But my favourite part of the place is backstage, down the hall towards the offices. There are four photographs; a bench outside in the gardens, one picture for each season. A simple story about endurance, about permanence, about recognizing the turning wheel of season. The bench set amidst blossom, bathed in sunshine, scattered with rich autumn leaves, dusted with snow.

Faith did that. Faith brought people together and built a church and set up a bench. Faith lead to an observation and one, patient photographer who knew their faith would endure and return them to that same spot three months, six months, nine months from now. The story of that bench, that spot, became integrated in the narrative of the photographer. Internalized, transmuted. Abiding.

And today it is Easter. I can hear the bells.

The myth of the risen Christ matters. It's not just fodder for cheap zombie jokes. It matters and we know it matters because we've been telling this story to ourselves and each other for thousands of years; thousands longer than Christianity. The triumph of love over death. The renewal of life in Spring. Hope after despair – after the acknowledgement of and victory of and incorporation of grieving despair, defeat, annihilation. The big, ugly suck.

Have you ever been so invested, so committed to something or someone and experienced that aching, hopeless loss? Been gutted by life and love and defeat? Scooped out and made hollow by a broken promise. By failure. By being "unworthy".

And have you, then, maybe a month or a year or a decade known, again, whatever spark of joy or beauty or delight lead you first to that which you lost? Ever had that glimmer, with the still fresh wounds of a broken heart, that you are yet loved, yet honoured, yet capable of feeling whole or at least acknowledging the possibility of wholeness?

That's what the bells are for.

Faith did that.

Myth honours that, connects with it, recasts it and makes it manifest and whole not 2000 years ago in a garden at the fringes of Empire, but right here in our lives. In this hour we know that we can have life after a death of something deep and holy within is, that light returns. That joy is and continues to be. We fold that perfect lesson into our selves and lives and families and neighbourhoods and nations. It strengthens us. Fides. Integrity.

Hutton and the Underground Stream

Moreover, modern pagan witchcraft is a counter-cultural tradition by a double descent. It not merely embodies challeges to social and religious norms based partly on images of early modern witchcraft; it descends directly from the Western world's oldest and most continuous intellectual counter-culture. This is one that overlaps with witchcraft, but has generally bypassed it.

The earliest surviving rites of modern witchcraft certainly draw heavily on the nineteenth century myth of a surviving pagan religion. They are, however, much more heavily dependent on the Western tradition of ritual magic, and, in particular, that branch which seeks to use particular actions and words to produce a direct contact between the human celebrant and a deity, amounting at most to a full if temporary union of the two. This act is at the core of the modern witch religion.

To effect it, modern witch liturgies employ invocations, at times, taken directly from early modern magical texts. The informing spirit and ambition of the rites, however, are older still, coming out of the angelic magic of the Middle Ages, and before that, from Greek Magical Papyri. The texts in those papyri are, in fact, by far the closest counterpart to modern witchcraft in the ancient world. By the steps I have just recounted, and others on which I have written, modern witchcraft can credibly claim a direct and unbroken lineage of descent from antiquity. It is just not the one it has been claiming.

- Ronald Hutton, "The Status of Witchcraft in the Modern World"

Hutton draws a straight line from antiquity, through ambient Christian mediaeval culture, to the esoteric re-emergence of the late 19th century, and winds up with modern Witchcraft. And he's right to do so. (Of course I point it out and suddenly I'm a "Christopagan" or some such. Oy vey!)

Every significant player in what would later be identified as "the neo-pagan movement" before 1950 came directly out of Rosicrucian, Gnostic, Esoteric Christian and Independent Catholic churches. All of them. And yet somehow modern Pagans tend to assert that their path and Christianity of any description are parallel at best and antagonistic at worst.

This is just a hangover from the anti-clerical propaganda of revolutionary France which gave us the "burning times" hoax. The witch as misunderstood "noble savage"; a European version of their own misrepresented American Indian charicature (this idol leading to its own trail of exploitation and co-option which continues to this day).

As Hutton points out, it's magic that makes the difference, not religion (and please, never ever "magick". I deeply apologize to the English language for ever even occasionally participating in that linguistic monstrosity). The religious front - the exchange of bland Sunday school Protestantism for bland Wednesday night Paganism – strikes me as less compelling. Those for whom literalist polytheism is a modular swap-out for their former literalist monotheism really have "converted" from one barely-examined set of religious pray-n-obey beliefs to another. I have no doubt that such conversion is wholly valid and authentic an integral to the newly minted Pagans. I'm just not particularly interested in this as a cultural phenomenon.

However, the real juicy stuff is in the journey from an educated, literate and articulate world view from antiquity; how that world view and scientific inquiry informed, adapted and mutated Christianity to result in (among other things) both experiential Christian mysticism and western Alchemy; how this current resurfaced in the 19th century as the Gnostic Restoration, and how those same individuals (not even schools of thought, but the very same people) end up dancing nekkid in the woods and jumping over bonfires. Without converting. Because eyes open, we see it as one contiguous Tradition; flowing in and out of Phoenicia and Judaism and Hellenism and Gnosticism ad Rome and Christianity and Wicca. Those who would pretend that each of these are in some way distinct or tidy are playing a kind of revisionist dress-up.

It saddens me that contemporary Neo-Paganism as a whole is not entirely ready for this demonstrable, historical truth.

Ostara

between blossoms, a star
exactly there, a hare's breath
from dawn, her rising

quick knocks on season's
door – awake, alight
and dew-wet, stirs

nothing is tentative;
all is rush and grasp
and sweeter hungers

white-petalled, she
succumbs to our
succumbing

Confessions of a Spiritual Dilettante: G is for Golden Dawn

[Okay, G could be for Gnosticism, but I wrote a whole book about that, and all 4 of my blog readers have read it already. Oh, it could also be about the Grail, but, um, yeah, I wrote a book about that too and I know you read that one. So... Godzilla? Geomancy? Gephilte fish? Oh wait...]



In the artistic and literary café circles of the end of nineteenth century, an occult secret society was formed with the intent of initiating its members into the secrets of the ages.

Alchemy. The Philosopher's stone. The invocation of angels, of the elements. Ritual magic.

Known as the Order of the Golden Dawn, the group attracted some of the greatest artistic and philosophical minds of turn-of-the-century London, including fantasists Arthur Machen, Algernon Blackwood, Dracula creator Bram Stoker, Fu Manchu creator Sax Rhomer, occultists Arthur Edward Waite (creator of the popular tarot deck), Samuel Liddel Macgregor Mathers, überweirdo Aleister Crowley, and famed Irish poet WB Yeats.

Unique for the era, the society treated its female members with total equality: renowned actress and director Florence Farr, dramatist Annie Horniman (who first produced the plays of Yeats and George Bernard Shaw), Irish revolutionary Maud Gonne, feminist, author and activist Annie Besant, and author Dion Fortune were among the Golden Dawn's most advanced practitioners.

"Woman is the magician born of nature, by reason of her great natural sensibility, and of her instinctive sympathy with such subtle energies as these intelligent inhabitants of the air... the earth... fire... and water."

- Moina Mathers

The Order's teachings, claiming origins in ancient Egypt, embraced esoteric Christianity, Jewish mysticism, and the "perennial philosophy" of the Renaissance scholars.

A strict and formal heirarchy, the Order was structured along the lines of the Tree of Life of the Jewish mystical tradition of Kabalah entwined with the esoteric significance of the Hebrew language.

The Golden Dawn taught prophecy,the secret meanings behind Greek, Roman and biblical myths; astrology, tarot, and – ultimately – the promise of enlightenment.

A curious fusion of both secrecy and celebrity,the Order quickly became legend. Like Madame Blavatsky's Theosophy, it claimed to be led by Secret Chiefs, ancient intelligences from an unknown realm, making themselves understood only through privileged reception by the Order's innermost initiates.

An unstable solution of obedience and curiosity, comingled with volatile egos, resulted in an explosion of scandal, hyperbole, and sensationalism.

Those loyal to the Great Work of occult teachings continued in secret, known to increasingly fragmenting circles as the Alpha and Omega, the Stella Matutina,the Brotherhood of the Hidden Light, and the Order of the Silver Star. Their members continued to study and publish,
their efforts eventually bearing fruit in the counterculture of the 1960s – generations after those first, secret ceremonies.

A Brief Chronology of the Golden Dawn

1867 - Foundation of a secret Masonic organization: The Societas Rosicruciana in Anglia or the Rosicrucian Society in England by Masonic historian Kenneth Mackenzie, Robert Wentworth Little, Lord Bulwer-Lytton, and others.

1885 - Discovery of the famed "Cipher Manuscripts" by Mackenzie: These are coded "recipes" for occult rituals and teachings which will become the DNA of the Order.

1886 - The manuscripts are passed to SRIA members Dr. Willam Woodman, then to Dr. William Westcott

1887 - The Cipher manuscripts are decoded by Westcott – they contain an address for a German Adept, a Fraulein Sprengel in Stuttgart. Westcott writes to Sprengel, and recieves a charter to establish the Order of the Golden Dawn in England

1888 - the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn (Isis-Urania Temple) is established in London. Remarkable for a Masonic organization, the Order accepts female initiates as equal members. Among the founders is Samuel Lidell MacGregor-Mathers, who launches a prolific writing and publishing career on occult subjects. His wife Moina also joins the Order and is instrumental in its development.

1889 - Mathers' publishes both the Key of Solomon and the Kabbalah Unveiled

1890 - Noted Irish author and poet W.B.Yeats joins the Golden Dawn

By 1895 the Order has over 300 members across 6 Temples in England

1897 - Westcott, a coroner and public servant, leaves Order materials in a carriage: potential scandal forces him to choose between his career and his membership in the Golden Dawn. He resigns the Order, leaving Mathers in control. Mathers is emotionally unstable, autocratic and ruthless in the face of criticism.

1899 - The first stirrings of revolt against Mathers' rule by higher ranking initiates of the Order. Mathers, now living in Paris, is asked to present proof of the Order's origins, and his authority.

1900 - The first American temples of the Order are established under Mathers' control

That year, a young occultist named Aleister Crowley is expelled from the Golden Dawn by the English Adepts for his perverse sexual mores. Crowley travels to Paris to be initiated by Mathers, and becomes his secretary. Arrogant to the point of egomania, Crowley is an ideal companion for Mathers, who continues to refuse to prove his claims and, instead, expels those who question him.

Schism. Mathers' loyalists are known as the Alpha et Omega - the beginning and the end.



1901 - The Horos affair. Mathers is swindled by con artists posing as powerful Adepts. They are later arrested for the rape of an underage girl while pretending to be Golden Dawn initiates. The Order becomes known to the public and tainted with the scandal.

That year, WB Yeats leaves the Golden Dawn. (Well duh).

1903 sees an offshoot, the "Stella Matutina" – basically the Golden Dawn without Mathers – headed by Robert Felkin and Johh William Brodie-Innes. WB Yeats joins the Stella Matutina and remains a member until 1921

By 1903 Crowley breaks with Mathers. Both Alpha et Omega and Stella Matutina factions discontinue the name "Golden Dawn" in the wake of the Horos scandal

1907 - Former Golden Dawn member Alan Bennet, known for introducing Buddhism to the West, creates the A.'.A.'., or Order of the Silver Star. A chain system involving only one student and one teacher, it is designed to escape the dynamics of Temple politics. Aleister Crowley quickly joins the Silver Star. Under this system, any initiate can claim any grade at any time - providing they can withstand the retribution of temperamental magical forces.

1909 - Crowley is sued by Mathers to prevent publication of the Order's rituals. Mathers loses the suit, and for the second time the Order is in the newspapers in an unfavourable light.

1910 - the Rider-Waite Tarot deck is published. It will remain the most popular deck in the world for the next 100 years.

1918 - Mathers dies

1919 - Violet Firth, known as Dion Fortune, joins the Alpha et Omega at a London Temple headed by Mathers' widow, Moina. Fortune becomes one of the most influential occultists of the 20th century.

1922 - Dion Fortune switches from the Alpha et Omega to the Stella Matutina, eventually leaving that organization to form her own "Fraternity of the Inner Light" based on Golden Dawn teachings.

1925 - William Wynn Westcott, last of the founding members, dies

1934 - Israel Regardie, a former associate of Crowley, joins what is left of the Stella Matutina. Regardie's intellect synthesizes Order teachings with modern psychotherapy, lets the genie out of the bottle, and ensures survival of the Golden Dawn tradition even as the Temples themselves continue to disintegrate.

1939 - William Butler Yeats dies

1942 - Arthur Edward Waite dies

1946 - Dion Fortune dies. Her Society of the Inner Light continues to this day.

1947 - Aleister Crowley dies, leaving the Silver Star in the hands of kabalist and author Charles Stansfeld Jones, who reforms the Order around the Egyptian Goddess Ma'at. The Silver Star is renamed the Fellowship of Ma'Ion; its membership includes novelist Malcolm Lowry, whose Under the Volcano remains a literary and kabalistic tour de force.

1985 - Israel Regardie dies, leaving at least three modern "Golden Dawn" organizations competing over questionable claims of lineage and copyright.

Today there are hundreds of independent, networked and autonomous Temples working privately in the Golden Dawn tradition, untouched by such territoriality and litigation.

Umm... this isn't much of a confession, dilettante or no.

So busted. Although you've learned more in the chunk above than every GD site on the 'net put together. I deliver. So bear with me.

Setting aside the politics, posturing, and self-important nonsense (no, really, set it aside, it's a lot to carry) there are 3 basic lessons I've taken away from my Golden Dawn experiences:

1) It takes about a year and change to go through the elemental grades of the "Outer Order". This is a challenging, rewarding, insightful pursuit. Spend a few months learning about your air nature, your fire nature, your earth and water nature. And reconcile them in an intentional way. This really has nothing to do with learning a table of correspondence: it's a metaphor for how all the bits of you relate to all the other bits of you. 5 years of therapy in 18 months, not a bad deal for wearing a polyester robe and mangling Greek and Hebrew beyond recognition. Oh, most of the people next to you are crazy (at least the first time you go through it, you'll learn discernment the hard way) or of the non-bathing variety. Personally I'd take the crazy. Regardless: Persevere. Hey, that's a decent motto right there.

2) Hierus or no, the Adeptship of the Inner Order is a priesthood. It's more about logistics than anything else, and yet there's no room for blinking when a Neophyte shows up and places their journey in your hands. You're a janitor, but a kind of ridiculously important janitor. So step up, or step aside.

3) You are the Secret Chiefs of the Order. Deal with it. Okay, you're probably not ready to deal with it but you do this enough times you will be.

4) I said there were 3, but I'm all about the giving. You can sell someone something, or you can initiate them. You can't do both. An 800 number or a credit-card-processing form means the former, and never the latter. But you knew that.

Okay here's what happens; I know what you're thinking (not you, you). You want me to hook you up. Option A is a Temple somewhere; smells 'n bells and other Seekers. Option B is Temple-free direct mentoring through the whole ugly, painful, gruesome, unpleasant Work. And yes, okay fine, I'll hook you up, you know where to find me. That's my job.

Long hast thou dwelt in the darkness; quit the night, and seek the day.

Wikipedia is deleting ALL articles on Contemporary Gnosticism

An entire NRM has been declared unworthy in the eyes of Wikipedia and is being systematically erased. The Apostolic Johannite Church, the Alexandrian Gnostic Church, the Ecclesia Gnostica, Gnostic authors and university professors, even this article on modern Gnosticism itself are on the chopping block or have already been deleted.

We're talking about independently published books, peer-reviewed academic authors, university and college course materials, internationally published news stories – all of these sources are being dismissed as either not relevant or not reliable. Given the AJCs coverage in US News, and the EG's coverage in the LA Times as well as the definitive work on the Independent Sacramental Movement, these churches don't have the "reliable third party source" chops for a few powerful Wikipedia editors.

Given that Gnosticism straddles esoteric Christianity, Paganism, Jungian thought and even Buddhism, what chance does Asatru or Druidry or Hellenismos have of maintaining a presence on Wikipedia when their populations are so much smaller and the level of academic interest is marginal (though, I argue, significant and noteworthy)? Most of these vital and important movements have a fraction of the independent cred that Gnosticism possesses. Even PanGaia magazine, a newstand publication with a print run of 8,000 copies that I've personally seen on the racks in 3 different cities, is dismissed snidely as a "web" publication (and therefore irrelevant). So someone with 30 articles and 30,000 readers on Witchvox doesn't stand much of a chance of withstanding scrutiny, I suppose.

Where's the activity in New Religious Movements? On the 'net, and in academic journals. And yet suddenly these don't matter, according to some.

As a friend suggested, we'd best stick to our knitting: we have work to do and patients to visit and volunteer hours to clock and services to perform. And she's completely right. We'll survive this tempest in a teapot.

But I do wonder about the actual usefulness of Wikipedia as a resource for NRM researchers should these various independent and Pagan organizations cease to officially "exist" according to a few self-appointed mods.

U P D A T E :

"Regarding your post on Wikipedia and deletion of Gnosticism articles: Deletion has been canceled for Wikipedia article "Gnosticism in Modern Times"."

Now, this article needs a LOT of work and is certainly not up to, I think, anybody's standards (especially with all that Crowley and Vogelin in there, oy vey) but it's a voice at the table, and that's all we're asking for.