The Night Queen

Cernunnos and Yoga, Conclusion (For Now)

      At first, I titled this entry “Cernunnos and Yoga, Part 3,” but it began to occur to me that some readers might think I was flogging the horse to death, that I would continue with further horned god installments until asked by interested parties to “cease and desist.”  Hence, instead of “Part 3,” I call this entry “Conclusion (For Now).”  Cernunnos is a subject that deeply interests me, and like General MacArthur and the Philippines, to this subject, eventually, I shall return.

     I was so proud to have discovered what appears to me to be some ancient Indo-European link between Cernunnos and spiritual practices of prehistoric India; I felt like a pioneer in scholarship!  Then I made the discovery that the Order of Bards, Ovates, and Druids (OBOD) has long suspected this link, actually mapping into their teaching the yamas, or virtues of early yogic instruction.  There is even a budding discipline called “Celtic yoga,” which combines elements and techniques of Celtic spirituality with some of those found in ancient Hindu teaching.  In fact, Philip Carr-Gomm who, from 1988 until 2021 was the head of OBOD, has personally trained in yoga and includes it in his spiritual teaching.  

I would like to make three remarks, and then close this subject, leaving the freedom and delight of further Cernunnos exploration to those who have a yen for it. For now. 

     First of all, I cannot recommend yoga highly enough.  Whether such teaching was associated with Cernunnos or not in antiquity, it is still a practice which can be adapted to virtually any spiritual path. What makes yoga especially worthwhile is that it addresses the physical issues of the body while simultaneously challenging and helping heal the spiritual condition of the practitioner.  As one learns how to employ the body to bring peace and order to one’s thoughts, one also learns simultaneously how to invite health to the body through the awareness of the quieted mind.  

     Second, the regular, age-appropriate, daily practice of yoga returns mobility and strength to aging bodies.  I am much more agile and fit at 70 than I was at 50, when I started.  I have seen my  middle-aged back problems and sciatica issues reduced to almost zero in old age.  Additionally, thanks to yogic breathing and a little mild physical conditioning, I can run indefinitely without getting out of breath. Finally, combined with meditation, I find yoga to be one of the best tonics there are for coming to terms with fear, and dealing with stress.   

 I may not have made the case conclusively  that yoga might be part of the Cernunnos path, but it seems clear that, for future votaries of the Horned God, it could be.  

   Cernunnos and Yoga, Part 2

 When I was a teen, a remarkable young man entered my circle of friends. He was a very ordinary-looking fellow from off the farm who turned out to be academically brilliant in maths and sciences, and he was, in spite of his country-boy appearance, rather exotic.  It turned out that he and his father were in some way connected to a community within the Sioux nation, and that they were entrusted with fashioning pipes out of soap stone for ceremonial, not touristic, purposes. He would not say much about that particular business, but when he saw that I had an interest in indigenous spiritual practices relating to a life lived in nature, he shared a few pointers with me about how to “hook up” the interior life with the natural world around me, and with the cosmos.  

     One of those lessons involved the importance of silence and the use of deliberate movement when exploring nature.  As somebody who loves to hike in wilderness areas, I have found this lesson to be among the most rewarding I have ever had from anyone.  Once, in Colorado, my wife’s uncle and aunt drove us up to an observation point near the top of a local front-range peak.  While the three of them chose to stay near the car and enjoy the view, I padded down a trail laid in by the park service, moving as quietly as I knew how.  In just a few minutes, I found myself in the middle of a herd of Rocky Mountain bighorn sheep.  They were not domestic creatures, but wild denizens of the place.  As I moved along deliberately, slowly, and with as little noise as possible, they allowed me to pass through them, close enough to have reached out and to have stroked a horned head or two. I minded my own business and left their heads alone.  After I had walked that path among the herd for a while, a newly-arrived family started down the trail behind me.  They were excited to be there, and to have this time together.  There were some bursts of shouting, some witty comments, and a noisy scuffling of feet through the stone and duff of the trail.  Suddenly, I found myself alone.  Not one sheep was visible anywhere. You see my point about silence.

    I have walked along with a deer, have watched a beautiful white crane within arm’s reach as she dabbled in the reeds for food, have had a skunk, quite aware of my presence, saunter by within inches of me without any apparent anxiety, have stood within reach of an owl eating a squirrel, have shared a bench with a road-runner, and  have passed through a swarm of bees (by accident) without being stung or threatened; I could add other experiences to this list.  My point is that, when you are in the world of nature, if you want to have some really interesting experiences, do the following:  be silent, look, and listen.  

     In my last entry, I showed a picture of Cernunnos along with one of the Buddha, worked in silver several centuries apart, which showed them both positioned in the yogic pose you see above.  In each case they are seated in a half-lotus position, with the right foot turned sole-up, and the left in front, slightly down.  In both cases, they are shown in natural surroundings with wild creatures nearby, untroubled by their human presence.  The representation above was found in the ruins of Mohenjo-Daro, a city of the Indus Valley civilization in India (5000 BCE-1900 BCE).  Buddha did not come along until 563 BCE, about 1500 years AFTER the Indus civilization ended, and yet here we see a figure seated in an almost identical pose surrounded by very similar images as those we found with the more recent Buddha and Cernunnos.  

Cernunnos and Yoga, Part I

     My earliest memories of people involved in spiritual practice come from a local Dutch Reformed church where my grandparents attended.  When we were in town to stay with them, church attendance was mandatory.  The sanctuary was scrupulously clean, everything made of polished, gleaming, unadorned wood from the floor, to the pews, to the altar.  There were no adornments or images of any kind, except for a cross set into the back wall behind where the choir sat.  While fellowship time in the narthex was loud, boisterous, and friendly, worship in the sanctuary began with a period of utter, profound silence until the service began.  Prattle or fidgeting from a child was universally met with a powerful squeeze to the arm or the painful flicking of the ear with thumb and forefinger.  Infants went to the nursery and were never to be found where they might wail through the sermon or scream through the congregational prayer.  When we returned home after a severe and thoroughgoing exegesis of Scripture by the dominie, the pastor, we would begin lunch with the reading of Scripture at the table and a lengthy prayer prior to digging into the feast.  As much as I hated such a regimen of discipline when I was a child, it sank deeply into me and colors my practice to this day.  

     My father’s work took him to the western Pacific when I was transitioning from childhood to youth, and we went with him, living in the Marianas Islands for two years.  Twice a year, we went as a family for brief vacations either to Japan or to Hong Kong.  On these visits we encountered Buddhist temples where clergy and local lay people could be found sitting on mats in a profound contemplative silence, punctuated and enhanced by the reverberations of occasional bells and the fragrant smell of burning incense.  Here again, in a different faith, I saw the imposition of the discipline of silence and stillness.  I was 11 or 12 at the time and found that this Dutch Reformed-style stillness in an exotic setting and in a different belief-system made it more interesting than it had been at church.  I asked to buy some incense at a local vendor while we were visiting Tokyo, and attempted my own Buddhist-adjacent spiritual practice when we returned home.  With my allowance, I bought a Japanese-style robe of some sort and wore it as part of the practice.  My father began, contemptuously, to call me “Mr. Moto.”  I am sure this cultural reference will be entirely lost on anyone under the age of 70; if you’re interested in discovering its significance, a brief Mr. Moto AI query, adding the name Peter Lorre, will satisfy your curiosity.  

     Years later, when I took up the practice of yoga, a discipline which I continue to follow to this day, I was delighted to find the same commitment to contemplation and inward silence.  With yoga, however, the silence is not imposed; it is something which occurs naturally through the performance of  poses and procedures.  A lot of emphasis is put on breathing, on learning how to bring air into and out of the body in a slow and deliberate way, coordinating those breaths with the slow and deliberate movements of the body.  As the practitioner mindfully assumes a pose, inhaling for certain movements while being careful to wait for an exhale before performing others, there is a focus brought to the consciousness which centers on the body, its structures, and its way of operating.  

     For the ceremonial magician, this is important stuff, since the traditions of that kind of magic have their roots in the old medieval idea of the “godly order.”  According to this idea, the universe is something like a sphere containing a sphere containing a sphere, and so on.  Each sphere, starting with the outermost sphere of the fixed stars, was held to exert powerful influences on the spheres within its particular enclosure.  Stars exerted power over everything in the universe.  Within that sphere, planets did not influence the stars behind them, but did influence everything in the inner spheres below them.  Earth was believed to be at the center of all the spheres in the universe,  under the  influences of all the stars and planets, and every form of life and matter on earth was held to receive those influences into themselves.  Thus, a human being was seen to be his own microcosm, his own little version, in miniature, of the entire cosmos.  In each human being could be found organs that represented every one of the planets and all of the stars.  Doctors operated under the assumption that the powers radiated by various entities in the cosmos must be taken into consideration and used as a part of therapy.

     Such views have since been rejected as unscientific, yet I hold to the idea that each of us is related and tied to the rest of the universe, right down to his inmost being.  We are part of the cosmic dance and do best when our movements coordinate and harmonize with the rhythms of the cosmos.  In yogic teaching, there is an understanding that within the body are centers, called chakras, which regulate the operations of the physical self while at the same time performing that service for the components of our spiritual interiority.  As one breathes in the practice of yoga, one learns, over time, to breathe “into” those centers, to become aware of them.  With awareness comes increased consciousness of how one's body is currently working, of what its needs are, and of how one should live in accordance with those needs.  Those chakra centers are each understood to be tied, by some invisible thread of influence and function, to the planets and stars, so that the saying “As above, so below” takes on a uniquely physical and intimate meaning for those who understand body and being as an expression, not just of local life, but as a local manifestation of the nature of the whole universe. 

      Which brings me to Cernunnos.  I will leave you now with two photos, one of Cernunnos as he is depicted in silver on a panel of the Gundestrop Cauldron, and one of the Buddha in a yogic pose with his disciples, also fashioned in silver.  Compare the two and do some thinking on your own. Note particularly the position of the feet, the animals in the background, and the vegetation. Until next time, Blessed Be!

Spirits of the Dead

     As Spring now begins its slow transformation toward summer here at the Cottage of the Night Queen, the earth and air have begun to warm.  The nights are not as clear as they were while the days were cold, because now, a humid breeze has begun to come up from out of the distant sea, carrying with it a mist made of warming sea water dissolved into  droplets of evaporated moisture.  Some hours before dawn, this white veil woven by sea and air draws itself over the gleaming stars until the sky is the color of milk.  Dawn comes gray, but then with the rising sun, the mist is burnt away and a blue morning tinged with gold asserts itself over the mountains.  

     As I grab my broom and prepare to sweep the walk leading back past the holly grove to the Grotto, I find myself thinking thoughts that more appropriately belong to the end of October.  I find myself thinking of the spirits of the dead.  In my defense, I will say this: the spiders in these woods tend to build their most elaborate webs twice a year.  I see them in the Autumn when the air turns cool, before it begins to blow in wintry gusts, and again in the Spring, when the breeze calms to a standstill in the early hours, carrying with it its careful freight of mist and dew.  Perhaps, just as spiders see something akin in the weather conditions of Spring and Autumn, something which permits the construction of their most interesting work, perhaps that kinship of calm vernal cool and pensive autumnal chill which permits spiders to build also allows the dead, twice yearly, to remind us of their presence in a special way.  

     Some years ago, I had a few encounters with people who were supposed to be “no longer with us.”  Now, I’m no psychic, but these experiences seemed real enough to me, and they are part of the fabric of my magical practice today.  The first of these adventures started with my wife feeling the disquieting presence of Someone Else in our house in the flatlands. Eventually, an image of this person came to her in a dream.  She seemed to be dressed in late 19th century clothing.  I was reading about other people’s encounters with the dead at the time of her dream, and I decided to see if interaction was possible.  Though I could not see her or hear her, I asked the empty air if she could somehow let me know who she was.  On a walk later that day, I found myself near an old local cemetery a short distance from the house.  I felt the need to enter and do some looking.  I was attracted to a grave which turned out to be marked with a death-date in 1895.  It was that of a young woman.  I told the empty air that my wife was distressed by the young woman’s visits and asked if I could pray with her about finding her way to a place where there might be some peace, safety, and fellowship for her disembodied soul.  I prayed and fancied that she prayed with me.  There were no more visits to our house after that.

     Later, I had  dreams of my own from time to time  in which I thought I was awake.  These involved intensely vivid encounters with grandparents on my mother’s side, as well as with a deceased lady in my parents’ church who had always sat in the loft to record the service for shut-ins, and who now, in death, seemed to feel that it was the only safe place where her spirit could languish. She was absolutely petrified of leaving that sanctuary!  At this point, I consulted various authorities including the Episcopal Book of Common Prayer and the Tibetan Book of the Dead for ideas about how to handle these visits in a way that would be mutually beneficial both to the spirit in question, and to my own understanding.  I formulated a ritual and liturgy to give me a framework for responding helpfully (I hoped) to these visitations. 

     The hispanic community in which I often live, move and have my being has taught me many additional techniques for interacting with the dead.   There are any number of people around here who maintain altars containing photos and remembrances of the dead in their families, along with little offerings for them.  Additionally, along the sides of our highways and local county roads, one often finds descansos, little shrines usually marked with a cross, some flowers, and perhaps an object or two once treasured by the dead person being commemorated.  The descanso is generally erected in the spot where the person died in a car accident, or where they were murdered.  Fortunately, there has been no need to erect a descanso in our family, but we do maintain an altar with pictures and remembrances of our beloved dead.  I pray decades of Rosary for them from time to time, and occasionally I seem to experience their attempts to communicate with me. They seem to be present and living with us as a result, and there have been situations where they seem actually to have intervened on our behalf and provided help in time of need.  Finally, I have written a few blog entries about La Santa Muerte, a very dramatic phenomenon centered on the concept of death which has been emerging in many Latino communities since the 1960's. You might take a look at those, if you're curious. "Santa Muerte" is always in the title.

The Garrison

     I practice a form of meditation which could be called the “imaginary conversation.” This is a technique which turns up in odd places - Robert Graves employs it in his classic neopagan work The White Goddess, and Ignatius Loyola, the founder of the Jesuits, recommended it as a form of devotional practice in his teaching. It also turns up in Thomas á Kempis’s The Imitation of Christ, in some modern occult books on pathworking and in some manuals of meditation, among many other places.  

      As a ceremonial magician, I structure my rituals to center on the traditional seven planetary intelligences that were called upon by wizards in the late Middle Ages and Renaissance: the Sun, the Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn.  The days of the week in many western languages are actually named for these deities, and must have served in pre-Christian times as days of special sanctity for honoring them.  In English, the Anglo-Saxon names for the gods are used, so unless you know who those gods were, it’s hard to see the planetary connection.  But in Spanish and French it’s quite clear:  lunes (Monday), martes (Tuesday), miércoles (Wednesday), jueves (Thursday), viernes (Friday) - the Moon, Mars, Mercury, Jove (Jupiter) and Venus.  Same thing in French: lundi, mardi, mercredi, jeudi, vendredi. In those languages, the association of the Jewish and Christian holy days with the weekend seems to have worked the two weekend days loose from their old planetary associations.  In English, however, we retain them:  SUNday, and SATURday, days once holy to the sun god and, of course, to Saturn.

     I work ritual seven days a week, each day honoring the god whose name the day bears.  So, for example, if it’s Friday, my altar is adorned to honor Venus and the liturgy for that day will call upon her.  I never forget to honor Our Lady and her Horned Consort daily as part of this system, and they have their special days set aside, as well.

     On Tuesdays, the rite focuses on Mars, the god of war. The altar cloth is red, the various accoutrements adorning it have the appropriate Martial associations, and the sigil of Phaleg is displayed prominently.  Early in my journey along the path of magic, a dream came to me in which I saw the cabbalistic Tree of Life engraved into a ceiling with its fruits representing the seven planets, along with Earth and the celestial realm.  The only one I could clearly identify in the dream was Mars, known on the Tree as Geburah. (The name Phaleg for Mars, which I mentioned earlier, comes from a  grimoire called the Arbatel of Magic.)  This dream was dense with events and images, all of which I am still meditating on to this day.  But the sighting of Geburah led me to the conclusion that I was receiving a little guidance:  Mars might be of special importance to me in the course of my life. 

      As it turned out, it was my rituals to Mars that first led me into the technique of “imaginary conversation.”  The theory behind this method of speaking with the gods is based on the idea that we really can’t directly perceive the Spirit World as it is.  It is for this reason that humanity has devised myth and religion to be filled with so many fantastic images and outlandish stories.  They don’t depict the bare actualities of the Divine, but their symbolism and drama can help us to see and understand what our physical eyes and rational minds cannot.  Using our imaginations to encounter and communicate with the Spirit World is the well-established means whereby humans have been able to find paths which lead to fullness of life and to meaning and belonging in the cosmos.  Every vision and apparition ever seen by humans, even when it comes from spirits and gods, is clothed in recognizable images, however fantastical they may appear.  And those images arise from the store of memories and archetypes found in our own brains.  Our imaginations are the wardrobe of the gods, whereby they adorn themselves and we are able to behold them.  To attempt to see them as they are without that clothing . . . well, the ancients universally remind us that we are not equipped for that sight, that to look upon their true forms leads to alienation, madness and death.  Moses was warned of this on Sinai; the Greek virgin Semele died in a fire kindled by her own terror, the Indian warrior Arjuna, to save his  sanity, prevented Krishna’s full revelation of himself in a terrifying vision by confessing his true nature, the Japanese foster parents of the crane maiden lost their beloved daughter after seeing her real form, and Lydian Attis, in the madness to which he was driven by the inconceivable, took a knife and castrated himself, dying from the loss of blood.  The imagination, in short, is our safe looking-glass for beholding the Divine.

     In one of my imaginary conversations with Mars, years ago when times seemed safer, I visualized us as two soldiers sitting on a grassy ridge, overlooking a wide prairie, with mountains in the distance.  We sat at a campfire in the early morning light, and Mars, on watch with me as though we were on duty, disclosed himself to be in a storytelling mood:

     “You may not know this, Zopilotay, but our Roman generals were not very different from the football coaches and quarterbacks in your world.  Roman legions were something like modern football teams, in that they compiled effective plays and practiced from playbooks.  Now, their plays might better be called ‘maneuvers.’  These maneuvers were not written down in binders or notebooks, but were learned and memorized by the men who practiced them.  And the generals who led those men knew every one of those maneuvers like the backs of their hands.  Just as a quarterback can, with a single word, call his players into a specific formation to execute a play, so, too, could these officers give the command, and every soldier out on that field knew exactly where to be and what to do.  Those men had practiced in camp like any modern team would do, and in action, each one of them could move immediately into the appropriate position.”

     “This is fascinating, oh Lord of War and Adversity,” I said.  “But why are we talking about formations and practice?”

     “We are, at this moment,  in a time of peace,” said Mars.  “No enemy awaits us in those fields below just now, but we know that their territory is not far away.  Someday, voices may stir them to the hunt, and then, we shall see them before us, readying themselves to throw us down.  For now, we are not a fighting force, but a garrison.  We occupy a safe place overlooking the scene and our eyes are watchfully open.  As your modern philosopher George Santayana reminds us, ‘Only the dead have seen the last of war,’ and trouble sooner or later comes.  Now, I should like to pose a question to you, if you’re willing to hear it.”

     “My ears are open, oh Lord of Might.”

     “What shall this garrison do with the time of peace given to it?  With what shall we occupy our thoughts?” 

     “The playbook?”

     “Yes.  The playbook.  Do you know it?  Has it even been devised among you?  Have you practiced the maneuvers in your mind?  Do you know your place and duty in each of these?”

     “Oh Mars,” I said, mournfully.  “I have never given a moment’s thought to any of this, and I suspect that many of my colleagues in the practice of magic would say the same.  I wouldn’t even know where to start.”

     “A garrison, even in the absence of an enemy, is not really at peace.  It is merely at vigilant rest.  Don’t you suppose you had better start learning what will be required of you when the challenge comes, when aroused and angry powers array themselves to force the world into their righteous image of the future and obliterate your own?”

     “Where do I start?”

     “Know your attackers.  Learn his means and methods.  Devise and practice your responses for defense, until you know them like the backs of your hands.”

     “It is hard to think seriously about strategy and defense when there are no immediate signs of a threat.”

     “Oh, but there will be. In times like those which are to come, when men fear for the future, there will be  those who decide that all their woes are someone else’s fault, perhaps your fault, that your kind, whoever you are, must be brought to heel and suppressed. While there is always hope that the need will never arise to organize for the purposes of  defense, is it not the duty of a garrison to be ready and prepared for the worst?”

Turn Not Thy Face From Me

     I am sitting on my porch at the Cottage of the Night Queen.  There is an adirondack chair with a high back and a downward-sloping seat that hikers love to slump into after a strenuous climb, but I prefer my straight, cane-bottom wooden chair which allows me to sit up and see the view.  Although I am surrounded on most sides by forest, the yard that slopes down and away from me to the east opens up on to a wide meadow which plunges still further downward.  This meadow, with its complete dearth of obstructing trees, provides a wide view of the valley below.  If I turn my chair so that I’m looking off toward the left end of the porch, I can watch the Sun rise, lighting the long stretches of cultivated farmland below, the distant spires and roofs of the local village, and the ribbon of road which connects it all. 

     As the Sun comes up, I am taken, as if for the first time, with His brilliant beauty and with the way He seems to say “Good Morning!” with His first touches of warmth on my face.  The Sun was gone all night, off on His journeys to other places, but now He’s home, and just in time, too.  I was getting cold in the brisk dawn air.  

     But wait just a moment!  It suddenly occurs to me that the Sun has not gone anywhere.  The Sun has remained, with respect to this planet, in the same place.  And though in the night the cold had deepened, it had not plunged down to the frigid cold of outer space, hundreds of degrees below zero.  Why?  Because the other side of our world had continued to receive His constant light, and the warmth of that light on the day side of Earth had kept the whole atmosphere, including the night side, at survivable temperatures.  The Sun had not turned away from me and my mountain.  We had turned away from Him, and yet His light never failed, not for one moment.

     If, like me, you have had a Christian or Jewish upbringing, your thinking about deities and how they operate may be shaped by the way that the ancient Middle Eastern prophets talked about Jehovah.  They taught that their god could turn his face away from them, that he might sometimes sit down with his arms folded over his chest and refuse to hear their cries (if he was angry with them) and that, at times, he would lash out in exasperation and fury if their behavior got out of hand. My own experience as a former dedicated disciple of Christ certainly led me and my friends in the faith to such conclusions, even though many modern theologians would, in their writings, reassure us that this anthropomorphizing of our god was a useful fiction, but not the cause of our sense of divine abandonment.  As Paul Tillich, Karl Barth and others taught, it was not our god who had turned from us but we from him. It was our abandonment of the humble disposition to receive his grace that left us feeling dry, not the actual turning away of his face.

     Now what about pagans like us who have decided to include gods in our calculus of magic?  In the myths we have of them, they, too, are anthropomorphized, that is to say, given human attributes.  In the past, some of them, according to the tales, engaged in acts of petty larceny, some indulged in personal vendettas and deeds of vengeance, while others withheld help in time of need when motivated by anger.  There are, in the annals of our gods, acts of horrible cruelty, not to say sexual assaults, perversions of justice, and  even murders.  Although we have no commentary from the original composers of these tales as to their inspirations and motivations for telling such stories, later commentators have sometimes left assurances that, once again, the depiction of gods as capricious and cruel was done for the purposes of teaching and accounting for certain phenomena, not as scientific descriptions of their actual divine nature.  Later philosophers of antiquity  like Epicurus and Marcus Aurelius assure us that the gods, after all, are actually good and just.  

      If you have followed me for  two or three months, you can probably guess my answer to that assertion.  I’m not sure that any spirit or deity can simply be dubbed “good” or “just,” anymore than a human being can.  A human being at his height of goodness and just behavior can be tweaked into at least the occasional acts of pettiness, reprisal, and larceny.  No one is immune, in my opinion, even gods, because we and they live in a universe that cannot itself be characterized as good and just.  The universe simply is what it is with all its moments of beauty and horror.  I suspect that we, as the children of the cosmos, share its DNA, and I believe that reality bears me out in making this assertion.  The cuddliest bear may sometimes tear open your chest and eat out your heart, and the most beautiful roseate flamingo ascending the skies in morning light is going to unleash a periodic shit bomb.  But with care and proper respect for where we are and who we’re with, we can live well and be of help to each other. 

     Because I moved from one faith to another, both of which I have practiced with passion, dedication and discipline, there is a thing I have noticed:  no matter who you pray to, at least if it is a deity with a reputation for answering prayer, you’re going to get answers, you’re going to experience moments of grace and divine generosity, you’re going to receive guidance, you’re going to get that sense of being uplifted and being upheld as you slog along the thread-like road of your existence.  While Christians might sometimes say that once you turn from their god, you’re on your own and open only to the influence of deceitful spirits, the fact is that there are other divine friends out there who seem quite as capable of accompanying you through life with blessing, with encouragement, and with strength and help in time of need.  And they don’t end up tricking you into selling your soul to Yog-Sothoth before dumping you into the Lake of Fire.  

     Let me return to the Sun for a moment.  I love how the Sun never stops doing what He does.  At every moment of every day and night, His light goes forth from Him without fail.  If the Earth rotates my side of Herself into night, the Sun still shines and is warming me though I do not know it from direct experience.  I can make all manner of choices which keep me out of the Sun temporarily or permanently, but its light ceaseth not.  And just as the Sun’s light continues at every moment to shine, bringing green to leaf and gloss to branch, providing the energy for nearly every bit of movement and manifestation of life in the world, I think perhaps our gods do the same.  I think that some of them, at least, may be like the Sun or the stars, always radiating the power which comes forth from them, always providing what is theirs to give.  It is up to us to receive those rays of grace, to employ them as we can.  If I am a farmer and wish to receive grace from the Sun, I must plow, sow seed, and safeguard my crop through weeding, watering, and taking protective measures against pests.  If I want to receive electrical power from the Sun, I must construct an array, install solar voltaic cells into its surface and connect the lot to an electrical system.   If I want a tan, I must place myself in a location where the Sun’s unobstructed light may find me and roast me to the desired level of doneness.  

     And if I want to receive grace from Jehovah or Jupiter, prayers and sacred rites are among the means whereby such grace is received, along with actions that put me in a position to receive what I’m looking for.  If I want bundt cake, I must move in the direction of the bakery or at least dial DoorDash.  

Mother and Son

       It’s a misty, rainy morning around the Cottage of the Night Queen.  The mountains are hidden behind a gray veil, except for the one I am on right here.  I’ve been down the trail to the Sacred Grotto of Her Majesty, clearing the way of fallen branches and pine cones.  A few bits of twig scattered on the trail with just a soupçon of fallen leaves can be pleasing to the eye, but if left to build up, they can become annoyances and tripping hazards to Our Mother’s visiting pilgrims.  

     We have many such visitors in the later weeks of spring; while the majority of them come to pay their homage to the Goddess, there are those, like me, who also wish to honor her Consort.  One hears disagreements about whether or not the Goddess has a Son or Husband.  Some devotees of Our Lady will have nothing to do with a divine male figure of any kind.  There are compelling reasons for this, which might provide subject matter for a future blog entry.  

     I like the idea of a divine partnership, myself.  This may be because I am male, and therefore desire to have a likeness of the Divine in my own male image.  

     Archaeology at various sites like the Indus Valley and Çatalhoyuk seem to indicate that there were whole civilizations and whole epochs of human history in which the Goddess remained solitary, but in others, like Sumer and Egypt, we find divine marriages to be the norm.  I have decided to carry on the tradition of these latter civilizations, and so, when I pray to the Mother Goddess, I also look to honor Her Consort.

     In the Gospel of Luke, we read that Jesus’s parents fled with their child to Egypt when the Palestinian king, Herod, began to murder local infants.  The king had heard of the birth of a messiah in his precinct, and desiring to be such a messianic figure himself, decided to wipe out the competition.  So goes the tale.  Jesus and his parents fled to Egypt.  Local legend specifies that they lived in Iskandariya, which we know as Alexandria.  I wonder if, in the Egyptian month of Khoiak (around December) if young Jesus ever saw the local parades featuring images of the Divine Mother Isis holding her baby son Horus?  Would he ever have suspected that one day, Christmas processions in that same city would feature the same figures, only with his name and that of his mother Mary attributed to them?

     There are certain ideas that seem to associate themselves with the idea of Goddess and Consort.  The Goddess, as I understand Her, is dark, infinite, all-embracing, and uninterruptedly eternal.  The Consort, on the other hand, is born, lives, dies, and then resurrects in local places within Her vastness.  She is eternal, He is perennial.  She is the starry Night.  He is the shining star of Day.  She neither departs nor changes. While She is adorned with stars, Her nocturnal robes encompass all.   His story follows an arc of appearance, recognition, death, disappearance, and reappearance.  His light is always local, appearing in shining points for brief periods within the unending story of the cosmos.  

     The holly bushes behind the Cottage of the Night Queen tell this story.  A holly tree, or bush, grows a great mantle of dark green leaves which seem to live forever, never to fall, while within the changeless green mantle there appear, here and there, tiny, delicate white blossoms which ultimately fall, leaving green berries that mature to blood red, before falling into the holly’s shadows.  There the berry decays into earth, until new life shall resurrect from it at some future point.  In the old Christmas carol “The Holly and the Ivy,” the songwriter makes the comparison explicit.  The divine Mother Mary is like the eternally green holly, and Jesus is like the little white blossom that appears briefly, becomes a berry, and then is gone, to reappear again.  

     For me, just as the Goddess embodies the great black void which extends into eternity and continues unchanged forever, so the Consort embodies the nature of everything that comes into being within that void.  He is existence itself, and like all things that exist, He comes, endures for a while, and then perishes, only to reassert Himself elsewhere.  And no matter how bright and big He is, His Mother’s robes of eternal darkness always enfold him and envelop him.  

Our Only Shot

    We were all enthralled recently as the crew of Artemis II provided us with images of the moon, particularly from its far side.  As captivating as those images have been, there are many who found the astronauts’ photographs of the distant earth just as exciting, perhaps more so. These Artemis snapshots are not the first color images taken of our planet.  The first and best-known color photo of earth as seen from the moon was taken by William Anders, an astronaut aboard the Apollo 8 spacecraft in 1968. 

     A few years ago, my wife bought a wonderfully thoughtful gift for my birthday:  tickets to a virtual experience of life aboard the International Space Station.  The experience actually took place in a hangar-sized room with nothing in it, at all.  But each of us who paid the entrance fee were given Oculus Rift-style head-sets.  If you’ve never worn one of these things, let me describe the service they provide.  These headsets place you into the middle of an immersive experience in which you are taken out of your actual world and put into a virtual one that seems very real.  You may be wearing that headset in your apartment living room, but if its software program has you in Paris, you are totally and completely there.  If you look up, you see the Paris sky.  If you look around you on every side, you are seeing the city from a particular vantage point, as if you were standing along the river Seine in person,  perhaps right next to the Pont Neuf, or maybe on the outskirts of La Defense.  And if you’re at a virtual experience of the International Space Station, you find yourself walking in the emptiness of orbital space, hundreds of miles above the earth’s surface, seeing, below your feet, whatever continent you’re orbiting over.  The black sky above you is filled with stars.   It seems very real.  The space station is nearby, orbiting with you as you float suspended over the only world you, or any of us, have ever actually known. 

     The thing that such images, and such experiences, drive home is that we, all of humanity, are here together, in this place and no other.  We are all from earth, and we all belong here.  From space no national borders can be seen.  The world is one entity, not metaphorically or ideally, but actually.  

     Right now, we are in what, in another blog entry, I called a “canoe moment.”  If a canoe with an inexperienced crew is getting ready to tip over, the rowers who rowed in harmony temporarily lose their ability to work together as they yell at each other what each thinks is necessary to right the boat and prevent it from sinking.  If the crew is lucky, someone will then coordinate the necessary response, or the majority of rowers will realize together what must be done to get the canoe back on course.  If they’re not lucky, they’ll all wind up in the drink.

     Our canoe moment, the thing that threatens to tip us into the depths of chaos, is that all of our once-separate communities are fusing with each other - most major cities in the world and all industrialized countries have, or are developing, populations that are demographically, religiously, and racially diverse.  It grows increasingly difficult for a society anywhere to say to itself, “Well, we alone of all others know how to live and believe correctly.  Those poor ignorant bastards out there in the dark!”  Us poor, ignorant bastards are now each others’ neighbors, and whatever our differences, we will all run into each other at Walmart buying school supplies for our kids or new gardenias to plant in our flower beds.  

     Except that now, in every culture being thrown into the mix, there are those who are attempting some kind of return to purity, some kind of zero-sum conservation of cultural identity, some kind of retreat to the right being and right belief of yesteryear. While it may seem natural for our species to come to terms with our essential oneness in the one undivided world we have, it is also natural for some people to look up with alarm when they believe their existing order is threatened, and then to attempt a defense.  

      We all have times when the changes around us make us sad or angry.  Whatever the version of the world we knew from infancy into adulthood, that version is dissolving before our eyes.  Change has been, and will continue, to accelerate for everyone.  We can respond in one of three ways.  We can find a way to retreat from it all, move to a cabin in the woods, apply for candidacy as a monk somewhere.  We can organize ourselves to curse the changes, force the world to stay the same through political manipulation and pressure, and bring isolation, deprivation and violence against those whom we regard as threats..

     Or we can grow.   Physical growth for human beings involves nourishment and exercise.  Emotional, intellectual and cultural growth requires that we observe, that we ask questions, that we listen and learn, that we balance fear with curiosity, and that we find within ourselves the willingness to try new things. Here are some random examples of what I mean:   A die-hard NFL fan, to broaden his horizons, can begin to learn something about soccer, its rules, and its famous teams.  A Christian can explore the use of the Buddhist practice of sitting meditation in his quiet time, or compare the story of the Annunciation from Luke with the one found in the Quran to see what new perspective is brought to the event by the Muslim view.  A small city whose local manufacturing plant has attracted a new community of Ethiopians can learn who these people are, can learn something of what they might think and feel, how they do things.  And then they can extend a helping hand, offer some community assistance, teach them about life here in our country, to make them feel welcome while learning about their culture, their way of understanding the world.

    There are, of course, the alternatives of moving away behind gates or to another place, or calling those who are different from ourselves rotten names and ginning up trouble for them.  Which of these options lead to a stable, integrated community and which of them create insoluble complications leading to violence, to vengeance, and to the need for intervention by outside force?  

 Sun, Son, and Consort

      We are now in a time of seasonal change.  Spring has arrived, more or less, depending on your latitude in the northern hemisphere.  Where I grew up, spring came late.  We occasionally had terrible blizzards even in April.  In my hometown, the winter months passed with very little sunlight. On a cold, gray morning of early spring, if I was walking to school and the sun came out with the kind of brightness and warmth we had been missing for long weeks, my body would, for a second, involuntarily shiver, then my lungs would automatically fill themselves with air, as if I were trying to suck in much-needed nutrients from the light.  

     I remember how, in my small hometown, once the sun established its spring ascendancy, a deliciousness would settle over the land:  the sweet smell of clover, the greening of the earth and wood, the upspringing of daffodils first and then tulips.  By early May, the world would have fully awakened.   As I walked to school in the flower-scented breeze, there would be a sprightliness in my step and lust in my heart.  

     This shift from the dead cold of winter to the living warmth of spring is part of the dramatic story of the sun, which seems to live out a kind of life cycle each year.  Actually, one could identify two such cycles.  Each day, for example, the sun appears to be born out of the earth’s womb, to move from weakness to increasing strength as it moves across the sky, just as a baby grows in strength and stature from infancy to adulthood over the course of time.  Eventually, the sun descends into the west and its light wanes, fading from burning gold to a sanguinary red as it descends into its tomb, the earth, which was formerly its womb.  That is one cyclical story the sun tells, from birth to death.

     But there is also a second version of this life tale, told in a long story arc over the course of the year.  In this version, the sun emerges from the dead, cold underworld of winter, following a path which is less close to the southern horizon and higher in the sky each day. The longer nights of winter shorten, and the brief days of that season lengthen until in March, we have the spring equinox, when day and night are of equal duration.  This winter-to-spring period is sometimes compared with human infancy, where a child begins as an infant crawling close to the earth, and by childhood’s end is standing tall above the ground beneath.

     The sun reaches its zenith of might and power in the summer.  The days lengthen and the nights shorten until we have the longest day, at the time we call the summer solstice. Unlike in winter, when the sun stayed low in the south during the hours of daylight, it is now high in the sky, passing nearly overhead at noon.  We are in the youth and young adulthood of the year, at the height of its power.

     Gradually thereafter, the days shorten and the nights lengthen.  As they do, the earth cools and the sun’s trajectory begins to veer southward, closer to the horizon again.  The green of the grass fades and the leaves of deciduous trees have one last moment of glory as their leaves turn from their former verdance to brown, red, yellow, orange, even violet.  We are now in the mature adulthood of the year, when the life of the world renders its fruits and then begins to give up its former strength.  In the growing darkness and chill of autumn, the sun makes its progress back again toward the southern horizon and the underworld.  Eventually, there comes a point where the duration of day and night are equal, the autumnal equinox, after which the nights grow longer than the days.  By Christmas, the long golden afternoons of summer are well gone, and  suddenly, what Shakespeare called “the dragon-wing of Night” falls all too quickly over the world. Winter has come, and with it, the sun, now very low in the southern sky, gives brief light, but no heat.  Its life, like the life of the year, is virtually spent.  We are now in the old age of the year, in the long, cold dark of its sleep.  The bare and skeletal trees, the frigid cold, attest to its death.  We may grieve what is past and lost, but we also know that resurrection and rebirth lie ahead.  The sun will not stay in his tomb, but will, at the proper time, come forth, and grace the world again with life.  

     For me, a devotee of the Night Queen, the starry Mother of All, I see the sun–and all forms of light everywhere–as avatars and symbols of the Queen’s Consort, her divine Husband, who comes forth from the Void which is Her body, and in union with Her brings all things else into being.    This light, in all its forms, represents for me the Divine Son and Husband, the One who comes, who is born, who lives, and who dies, sacrificially, to renew the world, and is then resurrected.  This concept has its roots in many of the faiths of antiquity and is one way of understanding the divine.  It is, of course, not the only way, and blessed be those who find understanding through other paths that they have chosen!

To the Great Goddess:

Hail Mother Night,

Queen of the cosmos! 

Blessed art Thou amongst all souls,

And blessed is the fruit of Thy womb,

The Sun, Moon, Earth and stars.

Holy Night,

Our Mother and Mother of the Gods,

Watch over us now

And at the hour of our death.

To Her Consort:

Oh Light that shineth in the darkness

And the darkness overcometh it not;

That Light, which is born,

Which liveth,

Which perisheth,

And which is resurrected unto continuous and perennial Being:

Oh great Hunter, Reaper, Shepherd and King,

Son and Consort of the Mother:

Cernunnos, God of Mystery

     There are so many things I love about the Cottage of the Night Queen: the mountain beauty which surrounds it, its proximity to one of the Goddess’s holy places in the underworld, and the woodland trails that come up to Her cottage from down in the valley, wandering on through the pines, the deer meadows, and ultimately, on past the cabin, up to the treeless tundra and fields of summit snow.  

     One evening, as I risked a long walk under the light of a full spring moon, I came to one of those places along the trail where the forest suddenly gave way to open grassland.  Rising there from the moon-silvered pasture rose a single Douglas fir, standing by itself in the meadow.  Though it lacked the close company of other trees, it was not alone.  At its base stood a small gathering of white-tailed does, and a single stag, whose twelve-point spread of antlers gleamed white in the lunar glow.  For a moment, I lingered stock-still at the meadow’s edge, unnoticed, but then, the stag saw me.  We gazed at each other, neither moving, for a short while.  Then, with a silver leap under the moonlit tree, he and his concubines dashed for the cover of the wood.  Instantly and silently, they were gone. The encounter held a powerfully numinous quality, and a shiver of something went through me, a feeling that I had been in the presence of the Divine. And that leads me to the topic for this blog entry:  the antlered god Cernunnos.  Though revered by many witches the world over, his provenance is not well-known.  This is a good time, perhaps, for a snapshot of his history among practitioners of the Old Religion.  

     During the First World War, a renowned Egyptologist, Margaret Alice Murray, found herself unable to remain among the antiquities of Egypt. The war forced her to return home to England.  There, she brought her attention to bear on another area of interest, the persecution of witches in the 16th and 17th centuries of European history, publishing, in 1921, her first work outside of Egyptology, titled The Witch-Cult in Western Europe.  In this book, Murry argued that many of those women arrested, tortured, and cruelly executed had indeed been witches, and that they had belonged to an ancient fertility cult which devoted itself to the worship of a horned god named Dianus.  

     In the 1950's, with the repeal of the Witchcraft laws in the United Kingdom, a retired civil servant named Gerald Gardner began to publicize himself as a witch.   Along with Doreen Valiente and a stalwart group of disciples, he and they would go on to lay the foundations for modern Wicca.  In their Bricket Wood coven, Valiente would later report, Murray’s horned god was given a different name:  Cernunnos.  From whence had this name come?

     While the modern concept of the horned god seems to have roots in various divine figures known to the ancient world, such as Pan and Dionysius’s close companion Silenus, the first modern association of a horned deity with the name Cernunnos comes from the discovery in 1711 of a Gallo-Roman pillar showing an antlered male figure wearing Celtic neck rings, or torcs.  This discovery was made in France, on the Ile de Paris, the site of the ancient Roman settlement of Lutetia.  The name Cernunnos accompanies the horned figure in the carving.

     The much more celebrated image which has come to be the definitive model of depiction for Cernunnos comes from an ancient silver vessel discovered in 1891 in a Danish peatbog:  the Gundestrop Cauldron.

  Here we have the antlered god with his torcs, sitting cross-legged, and surrounded by animals.  There are those authorities who place the creation of this object just before the Christian era and those who think it was fashioned in the first centuries just after.

     Other finds include a pagan altar discovered below the cathedral at Reims, Germany, with the figure of Cernunnos depicted between the images of the gods Apollo and Mercury.  

     Additional images which ought to be mentioned include the celebrated Val Camonica rock drawing from Italy and the so-called God of Bouray statuette discovered in France.

     As a student of antiquities, what Murray would have found especially compelling about these depictions is that they were not restricted to the European continent.  For example, among clay seals found in the ancient Indus Valley site of Mohenjo Daro (India), we find this image showing quite clearly our horned figure seated in the accustomed posture and accompanied by his traditional zoological audience. 

 Murray’s conclusion, which has been discredited by some and supported by others, was that there had existed an ancient prehistoric religion, spread out across the Eurasian continent, centered on a mother goddess and her horned consort.  According to her, this ancient matriarchal faith had survived through the ages, and was still being observed in the sixteenth century among rural people. It was women among these folk, she theorized, who became the targets of inquisitors and witch-hunters.  

     There is so much that has been said, and could be said, about why these persecutions were undertaken.  The Reformation movement in Northern Europe had broken the powerful and universal institution of the Church into smaller Christian factions which were now fighting with each other.  All sides in the theological wars that followed moved to defend themselves against adversaries, real and imagined.  Women practicing magic and appealing to supernatural powers other than the God of the Bible were seen as part of a larger conspiracy headed by God’s adversary, the Devil.  Thanks to the discovery of Etruscan tombs in northern Italy during the Renaissance, with their depictions of life after death, the ancient painted images of horned underworld demons began to enter the lexicons of modern people’s imaginations.  If there were folk who believed in the ancient horned forest deity depicted in those artifacts mentioned earlier from Roman times, and if these beliefs figured into spells and charms practiced by women engaged in healing and magic, inquisitors defending the Christian faith would have closed in on the perpetrators swiftly and with a vengeance.  Which is, in fact, what they did.  It’s virtually impossible to know with any certainty what testimonies gotten by torture were honest accounts and which were outright lies offered up to stop the pain.  But the theme of “the black man,” the horned “demon” who was met out in the woods and who was said to initiate new witches into the practice, is ubiquitous.  This being was interpreted as “the Divell” himself, or one of his assistants, and terrible punishments including execution followed for those who claimed to have met their cloven-footed deity out in the forest shadows.

     With the collapse of Christian authority and the rise of experience and experiment as the new means of revelation, western civilization opened up for itself a path away from religion into science.  I grew up in the twilight of that modern age of skepticism about the supernatural, until it came to an end with the Christian religious revival in the late 1960’s.  Modern science had created wonders and luxuries unknown to our ancestors, and the quality of physical life in the twentieth century greatly improved, yet people found themselves with a hunger for things transcendent and greater than themselves.  In the United States, this hunger first expressed itself in the hippy movement with its emphasis on using psychotropic drugs to achieve mystical visions. What followed then was a reaction in which Christianity reinterpreted itself among the young as a faith which had been brought into the world by the first long-haired hippy:  “Like, you know, Jesus, man.”  Unlike their scientifically skeptical parents who had attended church but felt that miracle stories could not possibly have been literal, these new young  baby-boomer converts, who had seen demons and angels for themselves under the influence of psychedelic compounds, had no trouble accepting a more literal interpretation of the Bible.  For them, unlike for their parents, demons were not merely psychological conditions, and miracles were not merely normal occurrences which had been exaggerated into legend.  No, they were all literally true.  These young people grew up to be the politically-powerful evangelicals of today.  Meanwhile, others left the hippy movement when they found that it was dissolving and becoming unfashionable and looked for other means of moving forward with their spiritual explorations.  Some found meaning in transcendental meditation, various forms of Hinduism, or through Buddhist philosophy.  And there were those who found paganism and the Craft.

    The horned god, who had long ago been relegated to a kind of police lineup of demonic suspects, now emerged again, not as Satan or his messenger, but as a divine being in his own right. Since his contemporary emergence, he now seems to be stealing onto the scene again silently, through the quiet ways of nature.  Here and there, those disposed to look and listen for his presence are finding him.   Meanwhile, in our contemporary world, technology and military power are merging with literal religious belief in the supernatural, not only in Christianity, but among other forms of monotheism in the world.  This, in turn, has led to what appears to be–among believers in the “One True God”–an avowed hatred of the natural world, as various believing powers, increasingly influenced by the idea that God is on their side, that Earth is not our home but God’s grab-bag of wealth for right believers, and that an un-earthly Paradise awaits the Believing Faithful, now move to restore the old medieval verities, using technology to suppress freedoms, or to bomb each other into oblivion.  Christian prophecies remind believers that in God’s new world to come, “every valley shall be lifted up, every mountain and hill made low.”  In other words, the natural beauty of the world will be flattened into a parking lot.  In place of a turbulent, sparkling ocean, those who conquer in the name of God will have a tepid “crystal sea” in which not a motion of current will be found.  There will be no trees in that world except for the monumental, tree-like presence of the prophets Moses and Elijah. (See Isaiah in the Old Testament and the New Testament book Revelation, if this description sounds incredible to you.)  Sun and moon will no longer give light.  What will be left?  A city dripping with wealth, the New Jerusalem with its walls of porphyry and its streets of gold.  Among its people will be a culture of absolute obedience and adoration of the Boss, with the Faithful shouting their praises to Him forever and ever and ever and ever . . . .

On What Things Do We Agree?  What Are Our Differences?

Spring has come early this year to the Cottage of the Night Queen.  I’m out on the porch, sitting back in an Adirondack chair, my feet propped up on an old wooden cable spool serving as foot rest.  Though I dread the summer to come (after such a short, warm winter), right now the air is comfortably cool and the sunlight pours its morning light across the clearing in front of the cabin.  Some previous inhabitant of the cottage had the foresight to plant bulbs in the wild grasses which cover the slope before me, and now the sun has coaxed forth from them a delightful array of daffodils and tulips. Each year, a few more colorful monocots join the brightly-colored assembly.  We can anticipate that eventually, there will be, not spots, but patches of prismatic color where for now the flowers pop up as individual sentinels here and there among the slowly waking grasses.  

     This world of the Great Goddess and her Divine Daughters has its varying moods:  sometimes it is a dark place threatening a rainstorm.  Sometimes it is cold and clear.  Today, it allures with bright promises of spring, and a barely visible halo of pale green from thousands of buds shows faintly among the bare branches of winter forest.  

     In this bright, fair weather, I feel encouraged to return again to the theme I had begun some weeks ago - the theme of how we might be able to live together despite our differences.  Though this discussion seems to have met with cold silence, I feel that it should be continued.  Why?  Because we are entering a time when our close contact with one another all over the world has begun to inspire a retreat, a desire to set walls and defenses between our various races, cultures, and religious affiliations. There is the constant threat of repression in the air.  Why is this trend important for pagans, and particularly witches?  Because if a way of tolerance is not found through this reactionary time, we will be among the first to be buried underground, enforced back into the invisibility from which we had emerged after 1948.  

  CERNUNNOS IN THE PINEY WOODS

     A twenty-minute drive north of Hot Springs, Arkansas takes me into the foothills of the Ouachita Mountains and to the lake named for them.  They are very old mountains which had begun their careers as bare, jagged, and lofty as the Rockies; now, 286 million years later, they have worn down into gently sloping peaks, covered from foot to crown with long-leaf pine in some places and broad-leaf deciduous forest in others.  Along the trails, there are long stories to be read in the rocks, the leaves, the soil.  Here, a small vein of coal or novaculite surfaces between two layers of shale.  How did those long stripes of black or white get there in the middle of that gray rock?  The forest floor among the pines provides a dense cover of grasses, fallen leaves and bits of branches, while under the broad leaves of the deciduous trees, the ground is brown and bare, against which the lizard-like skink with its electric blue tail stands out in splendor.  And as one walks along, sudden vistas open out between gaps in the trees, revealing the sparkling surface of Lake Ouachita, out of whose waters rise hilly emerald islands, set like jewels in silver.  

     This is a place where I could spend the rest of my life, happily wandering the hills to the soft music of wind in the pines and the faint calls of the crows from distant slopes. 

      Since my life and the expectations of loved ones hold me to the flatlands, however, I must keep my mountain visits short, and carry back from them what memories I can.  From these, in times of meditation and prayer, I can reconstruct something of that splendor and walk its trails thanks to the gifts of imagination and remembrance.  And it is there, in the Ouachita of the mind, that I meet Cernunnos.

     With other gods, when I meditate on them or perform rituals in their honor, I can often hear them speaking to me through the words that have been attributed to them in myth and literature; there is a conversational nature to our encounters from which I am able to derive insight and encouragement for facing the vicissitudes of life.  With the horned god of the forest, however, the experience is different, because he is as silent as the deer that sometimes walk along beside me at a distance as I hike, staying well out of reach but close enough to leave me with a tick in my scalp to be discovered later.  

     We have images of Cernunnos with his horns, his torques, his enigmatic face, but we have no stories, no remembered words spoken by him, and not much from which to deduce his history but what, as Gimli the dwarf would say, bare rock can tell.  

     Stone and metal carvings, an inscription or two bearing his name, and the accompanying images of woodland creatures tell us that he is a god of wilderness and earth.  And it comes as no surprise to me that he speaks in the language of wordless woodland, in the tongue spoken by wind passing over stone, in the enigmatic calls of birds and in the warning call of a nearby stag to his companions when he hears the approach of possible danger.

How Much Things Change

    A few weeks ago, I stopped writing in this blog.  There were reasons.  I began the Night Queen as a teaching blog for metaphysical students of mine and for friends who were interested in the spiritual path I have been following.  These folks, as we have spoken to one another, have questions.  While I was teaching a form of meditation at a magic shop recently, a question came to me for which the answer was more complex than I could deliver in the instruction time we shared together.  When I had asked the students to tell something about themselves, every one of them felt compelled to add, among other items of interest, their respective ages.  When my turn came and I told them I was 70 years old, there was a moment of silent disbelief.  One of these young adults, looking stunned, asked, “What’s your secret?”  I told them it was magic, and that is the truth.  Then I let the matter drop.

      The fact is that my discovery of ceremonial magic, and the salutary habits that the Spirit World has got me up to since my initiation, seem to have helped extend–to a limited degree–the youthfulness of body and mind.  I am in much better physical and mental shape than I was when I was 20.  Sooner or later, the scythe of Saturn will hew me down all at once or piecemeal, but for the moment, I seem to be pulling a Bilbo Baggins.  I’ll take it, for as long as it lasts.  

     The strength, the inward joy (most of the time), and the boundless energy which have come through the practice of ceremonial magic made me want to set down, in readable form, some of the beliefs and practices which have brought me to this (so far) happy point in my life.  And so, I have written extensively about them and intend to write more.  For several months, I received positive feedback and encouraging comments, many of them given by people with wonderful insights of their own - for this I am most grateful.

      At a certain point, however, I began to notice that a cold silence had descended.  At some point in my writings, I had said something which apparently did not sit well with many readers. (Or maybe I wrote too much, or it became boring?)  I published pieces one after another for which there was virtually no response at all from anyone.   One piece was returned to me by a sweet, very intelligent, and quite reasonable person who found the entry to be inappropriate. She was very kind and for that reason, I believe she did not say all that she might have.  This was to be expected, sooner or later, I think.  No one can blab as much as I have done without revealing the Shadow Self within, and apparently that’s what happened.   

     I withdrew a handful of other things I had written, thinking that it was also in those pieces I may have crossed a line, and felt sad that I had allowed a taint of rot to enter into what I had hoped would be a helpful and healing blog.  I considered ceasing altogether.  After all, a survey of other blogs in the neighborhood showed me that the usual etiquette in Tumblr is to present something briefly with a few words and get off the stage.  I’m too long winded for that. Also, I am teachable, and a word of advice about any shortcoming of mine is most welcome! If I know where I have offended, I can amend my behavior or beliefs. Silence, on the other hand, is not very helpful.

     So, after all, I’ve decided to keep this thing going.  The wider world, in the weeks since I stopped writing, is now in the process of turning upside down, and I have something real (also magical)  to say about how to change some things for the better, one person at a time.  I will say it with too many words and I will probably reveal, now and again, the dark and unappealing side of my character. The Shadow Self has a way of popping out.  Perhaps that is only appropriate in a world that is going dark and increasingly ugly before our very eyes. Or perhaps I will get better at not being offensive.  

How Can I Help You, and How Can I Keep From Hindering You? Part II

     Let’s continue our conversation, shall we?  I had posed a question to you, one which came to me in the meditative state:  How can I help you, and how can I keep from hindering you?  My family connections all live in a large port city where local neighborhoods tend to be extremely diverse.  In the single-story house across the street from my mother in law  lives a devout, hard-working young Muslim family from Syria.  Next door to them, a retired  Baptist couple from Georgia.  At the end of the street, a Chinese couple with grown children and charming grandkids, who maintain a beautiful garden of fruit trees, when they’re home.  One of them works in import distribution and the other is a medical professional.  We have people of African descent as neighbors, and also African people working in our country who live in the neighborhood.  There are Japanese corporate couples here, several Sikh families with ties to India, and so on.  One never hears of interracial or intercultural violence. The local masjid with its date palms is almost within walking distance of the Church of Christ with its steeple, and the Buddhist temple is a short drive down the road.   Life proceeds smoothly, and neighbors act, well, neighborly toward one another.  In a world of ethnic, religious, and cultural animosity, how is this possible?

     Well, first of all, people who move to affluent suburban neighborhoods in this city don’t have a lot of free time on their hands to fume about personal differences, and they want their residential lives to be as uncomplicated and smoothly-running as possible.  Ginning up a feud with the people across the street is a bit like weeing into your own wellwater.  So they wave at each other and smile, sometimes exchanging comments about the weather, and then turn back to minding their business.  Of course, if one’s next-door neighbor needed his car battery charged, one would hurry over with his own car and cables.  This is a neighborhood where people do not hinder each other, and where, occasionally, they offer mutual assistance.  That is to say, they help.

     Meanwhile, on television, the latest political commercials here suggest that one’s Muslim neighbors are a menace who mean to supplant our democratic society with shariah law, that the Chinese people down the street are probably involved in espionage, and that the legislature has moved heroically to prevent them from buying commercial property.  These advertisements run throughout the region, and seem largely to be targeting working-class neighborhoods that are racially self-segregated, or small cities and communities in the country where the traditional, generational culture feels itself to be under attack by the whirlwind of change that is blowing through our society just now.  These people have almost no contact with those who are not like them, and so their imaginations can be fired into conjuring  lurid and frightening images of a world miscegenated and diversified into chaos. (I am conveying their mindset and not my own in using these triggering terms.) The question in their minds is, “How can I not help you, and how can I hinder you to the best of my ability?”  And there are important people ready to show them the way.

     As witches, pagans, and practitioners of magic, we know what it is like not to be part of the local tribe, and most of us understand that helping-and-not-hindering involves discretion about our own activities, along with the quiet tolerance of others not like ourselves.  If we have time, ability, and willingness, we may even have discovered how our personal voluntary assistance offered to the community has put us into friendly contact with people we might otherwise have regarded as less than ideal neighbors.  The fundamentalist Pentecostal Christian may seem to you, in the abstract, like a cultural and religious enemy, but when the two of you are loading food onto a truck for hungry people and find that you work very well together, your religious differences can come to seem less daunting.  You are, after all, helping each other, and not hindering.  

How Can I Help You, and How Can I Keep From Hindering You?

Good morning and Bright Blessings to you! I see you’ve brought your mandolin with you in your backpack.  How fortunate!  I’ll explain why in just a moment.  Meanwhile, an apology is in order.  I’m afraid family concerns and business had called me off the mountain, and the Cottage of the Night Queen has stood empty for days on end.  Her sacred cavern was without a local priest, and Her holly grove left untrimmed.  But, happily, I’m back for a while to dust, sweep, prune, and recite sacred liturgies into the holy darkness of Her grotto.  

If you wouldn’t mind, I’m heading out that way now, for the hour has come to offer morning prayer within the lightlessness of chairos time.  Come, we’ll make these orisons together, and then I have a thought I’d like to share.

Let’s whisper as we enter.  Watch your step and keep a hand touching the wall as we leave the day for everlasting night.  It’s palpable, isn’t it, this darkness?  As if the infinite folds of Her eternal robe flutter around us, feather-touching us as we move through, until at last . . . shh.  We’ve arrived at the Abyss.  Here let us seat ourselves.  If you’ll play something meditative and soft, I’ll offer the prayer.

Hail Mother Night,

Queen of the Cosmos,

Blessed art Thou amongst all souls, and 

Blessed is the fruit of Thy womb,

The Sun, Moon, Earth and stars!

Holy Night,

Our Mother,

And Mother of the Gods,

Watch over us now,

And at the hour of our Death!

And now, with your musical accompaniment, let us sing a sacred hymn:

Lady of silence, Mother of Night,

She is the Magna Mater,

She in whose arms the Infant shines bright,

She is the Magna Mater.

All things have life within Her round womb,

The flower in the meadow, the Sun and Moon,

The stars in the evening that over us shine,

Are in the Magna Mater.

Deep in the forest, among the green leaves,

There lives the Magna Mater.

Where the doe watches, while the fawn sleeps,

There dwelleth the Magna Mater.

All things have life within Her round womb,

The flower in the meadow, the Sun and Moon,

The stars in the evening that over us shine,

Are in the Magna Mater.

Thank you for the musical accompaniment.  Now, I’m afraid I must ask you to lay by your mandolin!  It is the hour of silence . . . .

Well, that was time profoundly and well spent!   And here we are, back at the Night Queen’s Cottage and in broad daylight.  In the bright morning, I’ll share a thought or two with you.  I hope the tea is to your liking?  Good.  Here, have a biscuit.

I have begun meditating nightly under the stars, taking counsel with the Immortal Gods, as I perform their sacred rituals.  How powerful these rites seem, done under the light of their ascending planets as they appear over the horizon!  Why am I taking counsel in this grandiose way?  Well, it may just be the imaginary fantasy of a foolish old man waving a renaissance-festival wand and dressed in costume robes as he attempts to emulate the real wizards of old!    But I’ve learned that through our imaginative mimicry, sometimes the Spirit World speaks to us!  As I have played at being a merlinesque master of gramarye, it seems to me that the voice of Mercury, the Teacher of all teachers, Magister Magisterium, is whispering to me.  He has noted the teaching of the Goddess I set forth in the Five Voluntary Duties, and now, He seems to be saying, “Zopilotay, these are fine for the individual practitioner of magic.  But in the transformative work we do, we must also move beyond the concerns of inner growth to the social contract.  Human beings of the present moment are living at an impasse.  They cannot see their way clearly to shift into a world where all of us can live together skillfully and harmoniously, in spite of our differences.  To begin our learning together on this great issue, I leave you with an opening question:  How can I help you, and how can I keep from hindering you?”  

Lotería - The Three Column Spread

Zopilotay here!  I noticed a lot of positive interest in the blog entry written concerning lotería cards.  It seemed a shame not to follow up with more content concerning them, and an idea hit me.  When I was young, a very long time ago, people still read newspapers, and among the features found in the entertainment sections of these publications were columns on the playing of games, such as chess and canasta.  The most popular, titled “Goren on Bridge,” concerned itself with a particular type of card game featuring four players.  Mr. Goren, the putative author of the weekly piece, would set up a theoretical situation which might occur in the game and would explain how the reader, as one of the imaginary participants, could play her cards to best effect.  Recently, it occurred to me that something similar could  be done with the sets of divination cards I’ve recently introduced to you.  Today’s theoretical situation will be an experiment.  We’ll see if it’s entertaining and informative . . . or not.  

The situation I intend to use is actually not too theoretical, but it is general enough not to air anyone’s specific dirty laundry.  The question I posed for the purposes of reading these Mexican lottery cards was:  “What is our cultural future here in the United States?”  In order to do a reading on this query, I decided to use one of the traditional patterns of cards employed for the purpose.  In this case, it was the spread of three cards for past, present, and future, with each card then becoming the head of a column of three cards, as shown below. I suppose each row could have had four cards or twelve, etc.  6-7, as the saying goes.  Here is the random spread as I set it up below:

The three top cards represent past, present, and future.  The cards underneath these refer to underlying conditions.  The first card, standing for the past of our current American culture, is la maceta, the flower pot.  You may remember that, in my last entry on cartomancy, each image of the lotería deck has a dicho, or saying, which accompanies it.  This dicho is often printed on back of the card, and so we have it here:

The saying means something like, “Anything grown in a flower pot isn’t going to be leaving the hallway.”  The idea here is of growth with dependence and protection.  In the case of the flowers in the pot, they are growing, healthy, and doing fine, but it is a protected environment.  Now, let’s apply this metaphor to our culture. For decades, a system of protections and positive government support has made life liveable for many minority groups of people who used to exist absolutely at the mercy of the dominant majority here in the US and suffered thereby.  That system of protections is now being made a thing of the past.

     The second card, representing the present, is la corona, the crown.  The dicho that accompanies this image says, simply, “El sombrero de los reyes,” the hat of the kings.  

The system of protections for racial, religious, and sexual minorities is in the process of being disassembled by a series of federal executive orders, legislation, and federal court rulings.  Centralized authority, which some people see as autocratic and kinglike, is at work dissolving the traditional system of protections which had been put in place for a diverse population.  The third card, indicating the future, displays la rosa, the rose, which comes with a saying that runs like this:  “Rosa, rosita, Rosaura,” which could be translated as, “Pink, bright pink, pink and gold.” 

 For those who see the current time as socially and politically dark, this future card seems to paint a picture of a brightening dawn.  Perhaps, if the card has been read rightly, there are better times ahead for those who have felt assaulted by the abrupt and invasive changes imposed by the current, and hostile, political regime in their lives.  

Now we look at the second row of cards, which is thought to provide details about influences and conditions for the past, present, and future cards on top.

Under the flower pot (la maceta), we find la sandía, the watermelon.  This fruit, cut to be eaten, comes with the saying, “la barriga que Juan tenía, era empacho de sandía,”  Juan’s gut was swelled up by watermelon.  This card would be interpreted by some to indicate that the maceta time of protections allowed some racial, cultural, religious and sexual minorities to prosper and grow here in the US.  Since empacho is also associated with the idea of indigestion, the card might also indicate that this past period of rights and protections also brought with them inherent problems, and that the recent past, though better than now, was no paradise for those who benefited from those protections. 

Underneath the crown card of the present, we see a picture of a drunk, el borracho, stumbling in the street.  “iAh! Que borracho tan necio, ya no lo puedo aguantar.”   The dicho? Oh boy, what a stupid drunk!  I can’t keep putting up with his crap!  Placed under the corona card for the present, it might be interpreted to mean the perception that a lot of people have of the current regime and its actions out in the streets.  Some commentators have claimed to see the impairment of federal reason, suggested by drunkenness in the card, as an influence on current policy.  

Underneath the rose card of the future, we see two jaras, or arrows, crossed.  Here the saying is, “Las jaras del indio Adán, donde pegan, dan.”   The arrows of Adam the Indian, where they are shot, they stick.  This card is often thought to be about the results of one’s actions - that what a person, or a regime, does will have consequences. The name Adam reminds us of the unfolding and continuous consequences of sin. Under the rose card, if the rose card means the dawning of a new day and better times, then the suggestion here is that, with the dawn, there will also be a reckoning for hurtful deeds done in the present time.  

The last row:  the bottom card under the flower pot is la garza, a heron-like bird.  If you’ve ever observed herons, they like to stand quietly in lonely margins of lakes and rivers, quietly and intently working to feed themselves and their families.  But their eyes are always looking out at the surroundings.  If anything looks possibly threatening, the heron spreads his wings and flies away before the danger gets close.  As a comment on the past, one could say that under previous regimes, even when there were legal protections and life was better, a lot of protected people realized that their positions were precarious and that things could change at any time.  

The bottom card under the crown, el violoncello, says “Creciendo se fue hasta el cielo y como no fue violón, tuvo que ser violoncello.”  The little violin was growing bigger, toward the sky, and when it got so big it couldn’t be a violin, it had to go ahead and be a cello.  The suggestion here might be that many minority people had their dreams of what they could do with their lives but when their numbers and influence grew, the authorities got scared and moved to block the growth.  Now people are realizing they have to take into account, not only what is being imposed on them from above, but that they themselves are bigger and more powerful than they previously believed. Else why would the regime act with such fear?  Time to realize that fact and make use of it.  

Finally, the last card is el mundo, the world.  “Este mundo es una bola y nosotros un bolón.”  The world is a ball, and we are, like a meatball, all balled up together on it.  People have to find a way to live together and cooperate, because, whether we like it or not, we are glued and mashed together here.  Under the hopeful rose card, the suggestion seems to be that the key to a new dawn and a path out of the darkness lies in teaming up, organizing,  and working together to push back and change the current dark situation.  

If you can bear with me for a moment longer, let’s look for a “thread” in the reading, something which repeats itself.  How about the concept of growth? Notice how we have the flowers growing in the pot, the rose, which grows and opens up as it matures, the watermelon which grows huge, displaying the seeds of its future progeny, and the violin which grows into the much larger cello.  A diviner might read this thread as indicating that, whatever the misfortunes of the current time may be, and whatever uncertainties lie ahead for many in the current version of our American culture, there are opportunities for growth here, a chance, in spite of how difficult it seems right now, to progress to something new and better.

That’s my reading.  See you in the blog!

Two Forms of Holy Death

“La vida solamente es un paso a la Muerte.”  (Life is only a path to death.)

Quoted by Cressida Stone in Secrets of Santa Muerte

“Santísima Muerte, ven, te lo pedimos de corazon; gracias, gracias, gracias, Santísima Muerte, por estar con nosotros y, en nombre de Dios Padre Todopoderoso, te ofrecemos y te rezamos la siguiente . . . oraciones.  Gracias Niñita Blanca.  Gracias Rosa Maravillosa por tu estancia con nosotros, Bendita seas.”

(Most Holy Death, come, we ask thee from our hearts!  Thanks be to thee, thanks be to thee, thanks be to thee, Most Holy Death, for your presence with us and, in the name of God the All-Powerful Father, we offer, and recite, the following prayers.  Thanks be to thee, little girl child in white.  Thanks be to thee, Marvelous Rose, for making your dwelling place here with us.  Blessed be thou!)  From La Biblia de la Santa Muerte (The Bible of Holy Death) by Anónimo (Anonymous)

     If you read these two passages together, there are at least a pair of realizations that are bound, sooner or later, to come to you.  The first is that Death is conceived as the ultimate and unavoidable imperative of all existence, while Life is a brief interlude, a path leading inexorably in one direction, to the halls of Death Herself.  This is an observation that author Cressida Stone heard repeatedly from the devotees and curanderas with whom she interviewed.  La Santa Muerte seems to be understood as the ultimate power in the Universe.

     And yet, in the liturgical book which is popularly used among Her votaries, we find Her placed in a subservient position to “God the All-Powerful Father.”  And in fact, since the Biblia is based on the Catholic models and formulae for prayers, Her position is always stated as a spirit subject to the will of the Christian God.  

     This tentative assignment of the Divine Feminine to a position of great power, followed by the retreat from that position to subservience, is something which can be found in Hispanic thought going back at least as far as the late medieval poetic work Los Miraglos de Nuestra Señora, where the author repeatedly assigns the Blessed Virgin to her subjected place below the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, but then attributes powers and insights to Her which go beyond Theirs.  To an audience born and raised in the Catholic faith as the only world view they knew and could know, this habit of tentatively promoting the Virgin and then demoting Her as if to keep people from “getting the wrong idea” was probably the only safe position to adopt where the authorities of the day were concerned, and probably the only comfortable stance for the author to take, if he wanted his readers to accept, and not reject, his ideas.  In a Mexican culture steeped in tradition, then, it is not surprising that La Santa Muerte, for all the power and reverence She is receiving these days, should still be presented to Her believers in this kind of ambiguity as both sovereign power in the world and subject of the Lord of Hosts.  We shall shortly see another situation where this treatment is given to Her.  

     The second thing you might have noticed from the two readings above is that She is imagined symbolically in different forms. She has many. In future, I will be spending some time on these, but you may have noticed two in the second reading offered at the beginning of this entry:  the first is “the little girl in white,” and the second is “the Marvellous Rose.”  

Since La Santa Muerte developed out of the cult of the Blessed Virgin, it is probably a natural development that the rose, Mary’s prime symbol in Christian iconography, should assume a place with Most Holy Death.  According to Mexican legend, the Virgin (in Her traditional form!)  presented Herself to an indigenous peasant on the hill of Tepeyac, and gave Him evidence of Her appearance to take to the local bishop:  an apron full of roses of Castille.  By the roses, the bishop knew immediately Who it was that the Indian Juan Diego had seen.  Along with the roses, Juan Diego delivers the message that a cathedral is to be built on Her hill of Tepeyac.  This is a sovereign command from the Queen of Heaven.

     Yet in the same passage from La biblia where we find Mary’s royal signifier of the rose, there is another epithet given to her:  the little girl in white.  Promotion and demotion in two sentences right next to each other.  La niña blanca is usually explained as a term of affection, as if one were calling the Lady of Shadows “little sister.”  This is one of many expressions said to emphasize the fact that when devotion to La Santa Muerte is brought into the home, She becomes an intimate and beloved member of the family.  In a way, the dual regard given La Santa Muerte is like that given to the Blessed Virgin, who is both a peasant maiden and Queen of Heaven.  In Mexican culture as well as in our own, if we were raised Catholic, these two images stand equal with each other in our understanding of the Virgin Mary. This same dichotomy of big and small is also found in the Queen of Death.

Next time, I would like to explore the many other forms taken by Most Holy Death, for she comes in all the colors of the rainbow.  See you in my blog!