The Night Queen

Of Trees

     In the places where most of us live, they are found everywhere:  in our yards, along our sidewalks, in our parks, along the jogging and cycling trails, in the parking lots of big box retailers and grocery stores, in front of our schools, our government buildings, and in the esplanades laid out between opposing lanes of highways and boulevards. Some mountainous areas are absolutely covered with them, clothed in such numbers that it numbs the mind.  Trees are so ubiquitous, so omnipresent, that even when our eyes take them in, we don’t always really see them.  They become just a part of the backdrop of our lives.

     My friends and I, as children, practically lived in the woods whenever we could.  We did notice the trees.  My favorite denizen of the local woods was fagus grandiflora, the American beech tree.  There was, in a stand of nearby forest, a community of these giants with their flat, ovaloid symmetrical leaves and their skin smooth enough to run a hand over without getting splinters, but rough enough to provide a grip for climbing.   I loved climbing to the top of a beech tree whenever I could, carefully negotiating my way from branch to branch until at last, like Bilbo Baggins in Mirkwood, I found myself at the very top, hugging the crown of my chosen giant as I looked out over a swaying roof of green to the wide world beyond.

     When I was a teen, we moved, for two years, to Guam, the southernmost major island in the Marianas, a chain which forms the border between the Philippine Sea and the Western Pacific.   There, along the edges of our neighborhood, surrounded by jungle, among the palms and breadfruits, stood the occasional banyan tree.  These strange trees send out long branches from their central trunk, so long, in fact, that many of the branches have to grow multiple trunks of their own to hold them up and keep them from breaking.  A single banyan tree can become, in effect, a wooded grove, even a forest of its own.  In the midst of such trees, we were warned, lived spirits who might resent our passing if they were not properly saluted, or at least respectfully cautioned, that we were in the near neighborhood.  Entering into the interior spaces of one of those trees was absolutely out of the question. There were those who said that the spiritual inhabitants of our local banyans were the “people of before,” the Taotaomo’na, ancestors of the indigenous Chamorro people of the island and protectors of the natural world.  Some thought they might be Aniti, evil spirits.  Still others said they were Duendis, from the Spanish duende, meaning elves or tricksters.  Of these last, it was said that they often liked to contact children.   Whichever they were, they were indeed active where we lived, and in another entry, I will describe my limited exposure to their antics.  I have many tree stories from different parts of the world, but will resist the temptation to be even more long-winded than I usually am.

     The point of this essay is that trees are remarkable beings that offer us a point of entry into the spiritual side of the natural world around us.  They invite us to admire and adore nature by providing us with things that are directly understandable and important to us.  They can protect us from sun and rain, they can cool us with their shade, they can feed us with their fruits and nuts; some trees can alleviate toothaches and headaches.  Some can, with their leaves, aid in the healing of wounds.  Others, with their bark, can soothe the cramps of intestinal illness.  Their stately beauty, rising up from the shaded earth into the sky, can remind us of the presence of the Divine around us, and they can, with their graceful arcing limbs, lift our hearts along with our eyes as we follow their contours.  Many European cathedrals, their rising pillars terminating in curved and meeting branches of stone, celebrate and mimic the natural architecture of the forest.  

     My interest in trees started with childhood play, was intensified by Chamorro lore connecting certain trees to the denizens of the Spirit World, and absolutely set afire by Tolkien’s fictional accounts of the Old Forest and the ents of Fangorn.  I also had a well-worn copy of the indigenous classic Black Elk Speaks, in which that Sioux holy man reminds us that all living things are our relatives and have spirits of their own.  On my long teen-aged walks into the back country near my town, I had come to the conclusion that, even in the apparent visual absence of animals or insects, I was not necessarily the only conscious entity in the neighborhood.  Trees, especially the big, old ones, just seemed to be saying, “Listen and look.  I have something to say.”

     One of my favorite trees has come to be the cottonwood.  These trees can grow to dramatic heights, and they are covered with canopies of heart-shaped leaves.  When the wind blows through them, those leaves set up a sound which seems to have elements of a kind of celestial music, with voices whispering words in them.  To hear such trees in the breezy daytime soothes the soul.  To hear such trees at night under a sky full of myriad  stars, is to find oneself at the door of Annwn, on the very stair-steps of the Spirit World.  

What Good Can Our Magic Really Do?

“ . . . together through ages of the world we have fought the long defeat.”

Galadriel, speaking to Frodo and his companions, of the elves’ war with evil, in The Fellowship of the Ring

     Like the elves in the novel The Fellowship of the Ring, we now find ourselves in a world where the shadows lengthen, where the future becomes daily more fearful, and where great forces beyond our strength seem to be gathering for some kind of existential assault on human freedom and dignity, and on the whole world of nature.  As these plutocratic, technocratic and theocratic dinosaurs move across our darkening landscape seeking combat with each other and with any who stand in their way, the question arises:  against such powers and principalities that have reared up on their haunches and roared their threats into the smoke-filled sky, who can stand?

     It is not just the physical reality of mighty men armed with wealth and weaponry, dead set on drilling the world and its inhabitants for everything they possess, ready to set peace and security aflame for their own nefarious purposes.  There is also the spiritual dimension, the disquieting sense that the gods we call upon are also facing fellow divinities that feed on greed, fury, division, and violence as their own venomous kind of ambrosia.  If there is such a thing as war amongst the gods, Götterdammerung, we are seeing it now.  

     In the short term, I am a pessimist.  I believe that the worst has not yet befallen us.

     In the long term, I am an optimist.  I do believe there will come a time when humanity grows weary of offering service to those who feed upon them.  The time of freedom will come.  But it is not now.

     The question, then, is:  What do we do under the thickening clouds issuing from Mt. Doom?

     Some of us have found things to do.  People are speaking out against injustice, helping the poor and defenseless, organizing to push back against policies that are leaving good people feeling fearful and powerless.  

      But our magic.  Do we dare use it to aid in the great battle of our time?  How much will it help?  

      A long while ago, when I had the time to devote to it, I became a gamer.  My favorite on-line role-playing game was World of Warcraft.  I confess I was not a very strong player, and bloody awful at one-on-one player vs. player  combat.  But when the call came over the chat feed of an impending battle at Darkshire or some other crossroads, I would come to the site, find a vantage point in the second floor of an inn or atop a rock, and use my long-range weapons and healing powers to support those allies in the thick of the action.  

     This is how I visualize the work of my magic in the current period of metaphysical warfare.  Part of my ritual time each midnight or early morning is spent maintaining or casting spells of protection and aid for all those with whom I am closest.  I have a growing trove of talismans set to provide special help to those of my allies, family and friends who seem to be most in danger or most seriously in need.  

     Do I believe these activities are effective?  The proof, of course, is in the pudding.  For many of my workings, the result still lies in the future.  Well, I have a sense of assurance which rises from magic done in the past which seemed unlikely to bear fruit, but then did, sometimes in very dramatic ways.

     I would like to tell in detail about the villain who threatened and harassed my young family years ago, but I won’t.  I will say this.  When his foul treatment of us began, I felt powerless to defend us.  So powerless, that when I turned to magic, my level of desire and desperation was very high indeed.  I needed the spell to work desperately, since it was my only option, and I threw all my hope into it. I never went anywhere near him, nor did anything other than the spell itself.   It dealt  a blow to our victimizer so serious that   our safety was thereafter assured.

     On a more positive note, years ago I had become estranged from wonderful close friends through my own actions.  When it came to me with full force that I had lost them, I was dreadfully sad.  When I started practicing magic, one of my first essays into the Craft  was to create a talisman to bring about our reunion, and the healing of those relationships.  Into that talisman, I put my agonizing desire for our being reunited, along with a request for the exact circumstances and location where it was to take place.  (This may sound persnickety, but I had my reasons!)  

     Nothing happened for seven years.  But then, almost overnight, the people, the time, the place, and even the beautiful weather I asked for all came together exactly as I had asked.  Success!

     I could tell many other stories, but these are two of the most dramatic and personally unforgettable.  Now I ask you, if magic can do things like this over distances and spans of time, do we, or do we not have the long-range weapons we need at hand?  

     Magic can be done with anything, even chewing gum and chicken wire.  But there is one indispensable ingredient without which the whole thing is a waste of time:  burning, desperate desire for the outcome.  

     I am not speaking as a Christian here, but I think Jesus was a magician in his way.  The Gospels tell us that when he went places where people didn’t feel that they needed him or his power, he could do nothing.  Every prayer he answers in the Gospels, every miracle he performs, is for people who really, really want what they’re asking for.  Burning desire is the key.  As the infamous Aleister Crowley advised concerning the working of magic, “Inflame yourself with prayer!”  With this in mind, let us send our invisible rays of healing and our subtle arrows of metaphysical vengeance in support of those in the thick of the action!  

And when the strife is fierce, the warfare long,

Steals on the ear the distant triumph song,

And hearts are brave again, and arms are strong!

Self-Defense and the Wheel of Retribution

I can’t thank you enough for coming up to the Cottage of the Night Queen so early this morning!  You were just in time to accompany me at dawn as I made my way back here to the Grotto of Our Lady.  The Gods alone know how early you must have awakened to reach the trailhead before daybreak.  Armed with no more than a flashlight, you made your way to my door, and now here you are, ready to assist me in the morning ritual of devotion to Our Queen.  

     Well, we’ve reached the Abyss, the great plunging depth in the middle of the Grotto and we have set out our lamps.  In a moment we will douse them so that the darkness is total.  Then we shall pray, for Our Queen is the Eternal Night, the measureless depth of the Void in which galaxies are brought into being, in which all existence is found.  Let us say a little of the Rosary of Our Lady:

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.

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     Now, we meditate  in silence.  Do not fear to fall into trance or even sleep, for these are Her gifts, in which Her presence may be found.  

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     Well, how long have we been in the Dark?  I don’t know either.  She took us within the folds of Her robe and held us safe in Her silence.  Now, let us relight the lamps and head back to the surface.  I could use a cup of hot tea and a bit of pastry.  How about you?

     I love the sacred darkness of Our Lady, but I also adore the summer Sun in the mountains, where the coolness of the high altitudes keeps the worst of His heat at bay.  What a pleasure it is to enjoy the peace and quiet of this place.  You have probably noted how I have mentioned the concepts of safety and silence more than once this morning.  It is for a good reason.  There are some serious concepts I wish to share with you, if you’ve time to hear them.

     It has always been clear that human beings are diverse in their values, their ways of living, their forms of expression, their physical appearances.  People have grouped themselves into societies, associations, social circles and even religions on the basis of these differences, bonding with those who are most like themselves.  That process of social formation, around the world, has proven fairly  organic, natural and inevitable.  But now and again, through the building of empires, through the demands of economies, or because of unpleasantness at home and abroad, these naturally-forming groups have been split up, moved to various other parts of the world, and thrown together into awkward new communities.     

     Where I live in the flatlands, there are, for example, many Muslims from a lot of different countries arriving to make our area their home.  Political ads on television suggest that a lot of my neighbors are afraid of these Muslim arrivals, of the various cultures they represent, and of the influence their religion and styles of life may bring to the region.  Masjids (mosques) have sprung up.  There is one such house of worship 10 minutes from my neighborhood.  Halal grocery stores and restaurants can now be found everywhere.  

     My attempt at a positive response, when these new neighbors began to arrive, was to start by reading an English paraphrase of the Koran (it cannot be translated accurately from Arabic into English, but something of its meaning can be conveyed.)  I read biographies of the Prophet Muhammed’s life, and of some of his most famous companions, and found books on the social and religious etiquettes expected in various different Muslim communities. I read up on the history and development of the Muslim faith in its two major forms, Suni and Shia.   I memorized the Bismillah, found in the first chapter of the Koran, in Arabic.  I started listening to the singing of their scriptures, the way it is done in the masjid, and though I understood the words not at all, unless I looked them up, the power and beauty of those recitations afforded a great sense of solace and a powerful sense of the cosmic nearness and otherness of the Divine.  I began to read things written, or translated, in English from the point of view of Muslim authors and scholars, passages in works like Sayyid Qutb’s commentary In the Shadow of the Koran.   I found videos in which various leaders of Islamic communities in the US expressed  themselves concerning life in response to Islam. I visited masjids when they held open house educational events.   I listened to what some of the concerns of Muslim people were and to what some of their dreams and aspirations were.  I did this at a time when we were still living under the dark shadow and raw memory of 9-11.

     I cannot say that I agreed with, or was pleased with, everything I saw, heard and read.  But I did discover that these folks were human beings like me, and that there were many things upon which we could agree.  I found much beauty, wisdom, and power in the testimonies and writings of Muslims, as well as in expressions of their cultures and approaches to worship.  For this reason, though their point of view is not my own, and though they bring new ideas and ways of being into our familiar culture, I do not fear them.  I respect them and welcome them. I am prepared to learn from them and to be persuaded by reason to agree where currently I may disagree. I am also prepared to represent my own culture, my own spirituality, with firmness, politeness and clarity.  They are my neighbors and not my enemies.  It may be that their presence here will change my culture, the neighborhood, and me personally.  I do not fear those changes either.  And in my volunteer work, I am thrilled to be serving Muslim clients who are struggling to establish a foothold here, or to maintain the one they already have in a social and political climate that has become increasingly hostile.   All I have met are honest, hard-working people of good will who make fine neighbors.

     Years before Muslims began arriving in numbers, our area received the first big waves of immigrants from Mexico after the collapse of the Mexican economy under President Jose Lopez-Portillo.  I took Spanish courses, found opportunities to work with and help these people who had lost their livelihoods and needed to feed themselves and their families, who didn’t have months or even years to ask permission to come here before they would have gone bankrupt and starved, and who didn’t have the small fortune in dollars necessary to pay for all the paperwork and court expenses to become legal residents.  Eventually, I became a professional educator teaching them and their children English, while at the same time they worked patiently with me to move me from being an early Spanish adapter to becoming a state-certified fluent speaker of the language.  The adoption of Spanish as my second language and the opportunities that came with that adoption led to adventures at home and overseas.  I have made many friends, been to many barbacoas, translated at intercultural social events including church services and funerals, taught innumerable bilingual classes of various kinds for many years, helped with a couple of immigration cases, and on one occasion, in the mountains of Honduras, in a moonlit square, had the chance to bring my guitar, and to play and sing música folklórica with a group of campesinos (farmers) for a dance in a village square lit only by moonlight. 

      When we lay aside our defensive actions and hateful talk, when we start to listen to and learn from our newcomers, we set ourselves up, not for destruction, but for adventure, and for the enrichment of our lives and the lives of those we serve.  

     The alternative to embracing newcomers is being promoted all over the area where I live.  This alternative is to make life hard or impossible for new arrivals, as well as for  immigrants who have, through long years of hard work, established themselves as responsible citizens in all but name.  This alternative is to suggest that every one of them is here to take over and impose their beliefs and ways of life on all of us, that they’re all here as purveyors of crime and terror, that they’re here to live off our charity and take our jobs.  This alternative holds that laws should be passed to restrict their presence and, if possible, to send them back home, wherever home once was.

     Welcoming newcomers of any kind into a community always presents challenges and changes.  If our response is hostility and defensive measures, the eventual result is always the same.  External forces have to be brought to bear to restore the peace.  Police must be called.  Laws, authorities, and militarized bodies of armed men from outside the community must be imposed upon local people who fear them and come to loathe them. Incarceration for people just trying to survive becomes the norm instead of neighborly assistance. Violence and anger are inevitable. And as one hostile act is met with another, the Wheel of Retribution turns.  And turns.  And turns.

     On the other hand, when new arrivals are met in a community with honest curiosity, a willingness to learn, and a desire to work together, a community may change and not be as it was before, but its integrity has a better chance of being maintained rather than ripped open to government intervention, its local culture is enriched and variegated, and the regulation of local life remains in the hands of local community leaders, neighbors and friends working together in their own mutual self-interest.  Community relationships aren’t always easy, but neither are human relationships of any kind.  As a verse from our own dominant religious culture says, “Come, let us reason together.”  And as the Goddess says, “I am the Mother of all things, and my love is poured upon the earth.”  We can do a great deal more positive good acting as sisters and brothers, the children of one Mother, than as sworn enemies.  

  The One Who Called Me

   When I was a sailor fifty years ago, one of the things I loved most about being at sea was the night.  On an upper deck of the ship I sailed on, the boatswain’s mates always left a pile of thick, heavy rope coiled neatly in a perfect circle.  After supper, when night fell, I would sometimes go outside to stand alone on the empty weather deck under the stars and eventually would climb to the 02 level.  There I would find that 6-foot wide circle of hemp on the steel deck and lay myself down across it, my head pillowed on part of its circumference, and my feet propped up on its opposite curvature, thus becoming a kind of human diameter line across the circle.  It was the most comfortable bed in which I have ever rested, and it gave me an incomparable view of the stars in their thousands.  On a dark sea, far from any lights, it becomes clear that the stars are beyond all possibility of numbering, and that they are not laid onto a curved, black surface, but that they hang in deep void in vast swirling three-dimensional clouds.  

     This experience of lying in a circular bed of hemp, rocked like a baby by the pitch and yaw of a ship at sea, was part of my catechism into the dark faith of the Night Queen.  I have mentioned elsewhere in this blog that the Mother of All began speaking to me through a boyhood sighting of the crescent moon at twilight, accompanied by the glittering jewel of the planet Venus.  At a later point, when I was a teenaged musician wandering a moonlit park full of roses in the city of Vienna, inspiration for my first song came to me about someone called Lady Moonlight.  At the time, I thought it was a love song about a girl, but when I look at the lyrics now, I realize my spirit was praising Her Grace.  The third early encounter I mentioned somewhere was about finding a book with the Charge of the Goddess in it.  As I did a ritual on a sandy beach, reading the Charge aloud for the very first time, fog rolled in, silvered by moonlight, and Her form appeared in the roiling mist.  These three prodigies were all part of Her slow grace in awakening me to an awareness that divinity in the universe didn’t have to mean an angry cosmic gentleman looking for repentance from pleasure, blind obedience and martyrdom.  

     The Catechism of the Night Sky slowly taught me many things, night after night, as I lay staring up into the glittering Void.  I did not feel myself to be Alone and insignificant among cold and distant stars.  Instead, I felt buoyed up by the sensation of being surrounded by the myriad shining children of our universe, of being the same substance as them, of being in the same great family as them.  And though at first, though I understood myself to be a fellow sibling among the celestial jewels of Night, it was only gradually that the sense of Who Night was began to dawn on me.  It is not that my concept of a Supreme Being should be normative for everyone, but that the One made Herself known to me, at last, as My Lady.  While the One from whom all things came wears many masks and has many names given by others, for me, She is the Goddess.  It is in this form that my soul is able to open like a flower to Her in perfect love and perfect trust.  This is the way I prefer to know Her, as the Creatrix of the universe who has no armies fighting in Her name, who does not demand the blood of others to slake Her thirst, who does not drive men to endless wars, who does not hold one part of humanity loved and the other part hated until demands are met and knees are bowed.  Dark She may be, but without Her darkness, there is neither sun, moon, nor star; without Her darkness, there is neither rest nor peace.  I choose Her, and to Her shall I cleave.

     Long, long years ago, the singer Leonard Cohen wrote a song about a woman named Suzanne Verdal.  One of the lyrics goes like this: 

Suzanne takes you down to a place down by the river.

She is wearing rags and feathers from salvation army counters,

and the sun pours down like honey on Our Lady of the Harbor. 

And she shows you where to look, among the garbage and the flowers.

There are heroes in the seaweed, there are children in the morning.

They are leaning out for love, and they will lean that way forever,

While Suzanne holds the mirror .

     And you want to travel with her, and you want to travel blind,

and you think maybe you’ll trust her,

for she’s touched your perfect body with her mind.

Reclaiming the Land, Conclusion

     I wish I could spend the rest of my life here at the Cottage of the Night Queen.  It is a place holy to the Great Goddess, and it is a location of wonderful natural beauty.  Summer has finally come with full force, with all of its relentless heat and thick humid air, but for the moment, that is a problem for the people down in the valley below me, and for the flatlands beyond.  Here, on the side of this front range peak, I receive the sun and the warmth, but altitude mitigates its effects.  I still need a jacket in the mornings and evenings.  

     During the week, however, duty and love calls me down to my home in the flatlands.  My very elderly  mother-in-law's doctor appointment is on Monday;  I’m her driver and note-taker.  I have a jury summons to answer on Tuesday.  If I’m passed over for jury duty, I’ll be picking up groceries for the local food pantry on Wednesday, and sitting at their receiving desk on Thursday to register people for food distribution.  Friday morning, it’s house cleaning that awaits, along with laundry, and a lawn that needs mowing.  As a retired old man, I had been led to expect golden years of gloriously dull moments; instead, my calendar is full.  And I actually wouldn’t have it any other way. 

     The fact is that most of us are very busy most of the time.  The natural world in which we live, move and have our being is often just the backdrop for our preoccupied lives, and not a place with which we have much chance for connection.  In this, our ancestors had the advantage. Their lives and labor were often immersed in nature.  My great, great uncle Ben, at the end of the 19th century, farmed a hundred acres of fertile blackland with a mule and an iron plow.  He grew cotton for the cash, sorghum for feed and syrup, and kept a vegetable garden up near the house where he could chase varmints out of the ripening tomatoes and send family members out the backdoor to gather black-eyed peas for shelling.  He raised a pen full of hogs so that in the cold months, he could pull one out occasionally, kill it, and render it down into salted meat in barrels and bacon in the smokehouse.  He had a couple of cows, and my mother, among other family living on the place, took turns churning some of their milk into butter, clabber, and cheese.  I have that old ceramic churn sitting next to me as I write.  Its dark wooden paddle is waxy with ancient, hardened butter grease.  

     In the countryside where Uncle Ben lived, one can still find, here and there, the old meeting houses where people came to church.  They had to listen to whichever minister happened to ride in on a horse to take his turn sermonizing on any particular Sunday.  After services, a potluck meal was often served outside under the towering pecan trees, within sight of the cemetery.  If you lived in those times and in those places, that burial ground contained your own ancestors and those of your neighbors.  Near Uncle Ben’s old farm, there is a cemetery where I can go to find most of my family, almost all of which have now passed on into the Spirit World. Though more recent generations of them had moved away to cities, when death told them he was coming for them, they asked to be brought back to the old cemetery and buried there.  These meeting houses and their burial grounds were among the last natural sacred places our society had before we moved, as a modern culture, into the cities and suburbs.  

     The indigenous people who lived on that land before my ancestors were also farming people.  From the scant evidence we have, we know that they built houses of wood and straw that looked like beehives.  In some places further north, though not locally, they left great human-made hills which we refer to as “Indian mounds.”  The folks who lived around here in ancient days must have had their sacred places out in that countryside, but we no longer know where they were or what they were for.  Some of their lore has been preserved and there are places further north whose sacred associations remain clear, but in my family’s ancestral land, not so much. 

     In my last entry, I described how it is possible to reconnect with the land through learning the names of its living denizens, and how, once their names are learned, we begin to notice and remember the cycles of their lives and the transformations they rhythmically undergo.  In this way, it becomes possible to see the sacred natural world as a place of dynamic cyclical motion, in a kind of wheeling dance.  Further north, in Spiro, Oklahoma, in a place where more indigenous lore has been preserved than here, and where mounds testify to the existence of an old pre-Columbian city, I saw a circular work of art, at the center of which was a spider with a singular design on her back: it was a motif one comes across in many cultures around the globe, usually signifying the sacred directions, the turning of the year, the circular or spiral motion of natural time.  The four divisions of the spider’s back design were not painted with lines straight up and down from the center outward, but with lines that curved so that the four quarters gave the visual impression of being in motion, spinning around and around perpetually. In the circular margin outside the depiction of the spider, there were hands, all pointing in the same direction, as if moving around in a circle with the four directions or seasons.  Most of Mississippian cosmology has been lost,  but the motion suggested by the design suggests to me the wheeling of the heavens, the dance of the cosmos, the circle of the seasons by which humans must number their days, remember their seedtimes and harvests, and celebrate their gods.  

Reclaiming the Land (Part 2)

Domina mea,

Regina de rerum naturae,

Rogo qui proteges hoc terram

Cum presentiam tuam,

Cum potentiam tuam,

Cum pacem perpetuam tuam.  Amen.

     In my last entry, I talked about Fio Gede Parma’s concept of acknowledgement of country, where one attempts to discover the primordial names and indigenous understanding of the land’s geography by digging into the folklore and myth of the original inhabitants.  That concept really got my attention, and I understood, I think, what he’s going for - a way to look at his world through the eyes of people who were intimately involved with nature and its cycles, who knew the names of its creatures and plants, who lived in a throbbing unity with his land’s circling seasons and wheeling constellations.  As a witch located in Australia, he has access to at least some of the lore, some of the stories, and some of the aboriginal geography as it exists in the collective memories of the indigenous people who live there.  Armed with such lore, and with proximity to people who still work to perceive the land and name its places according to the traditions of their ancestors, he has an advantage which I do not.

     When I was a child, I was more fortunately located in a place much further north where the land with its hills and deep gorges was covered over with old-growth forest. I spent every spare moment I could find in the patches of woods which remained after housing construction, and as I recall those times, I think I was engaging in my own kind of childish and primordial acknowledgement of country: For myself and my friends, I made maps of those patches of woodland, drawing the meandering routes of their dirt trails along with special locations worthy of note.  There was, for example, a place we called the Leaf Room.  The lowest branches of a tree, radiating out in all directions from its massive trunk, hung low to the ground, their tips nearly touching the soil.  Little boys could crawl on their bellies under those branches and find themselves in a natural chamber under a roof of green leaves in summer, through which the sun shone dimly.  In the fall, that leafy chamber’s ceiling changed from green to a golden yellow, so that the natural enclosure looked like a palatial chamber of Galadriel’s treeborne manse in Caras Galadhon.  In groups, we met briefly within and never tarried long in the Leaf Room, for there were adventures to be had, but for a child on his own in need of a time of solitude, it was a sanctum sanctorum, where  the music of the wind through leaf and branch could soothe anxious thoughts.  There was something of the holy in that place.

     Some dirt-pile artificial hills, overgrown with grass, became The Dunes, a place where we could slide on our bellies from the top to the bottom on the long pieces of cardboard we used for toboggans.  There was the Hole Tree, where erosion and perhaps a cave under the roots of a huge old elm gave it the appearance of being a gateway into the Underworld.  By virtue of our naming these places and agreeing on their identities, we transformed a patch of woods between our housing development and the cornfields beyond into our private and enchanted kingdom.  The landmarks reminded us of where the fragrant maples grew, where the tadpoles could be seen, and where the bugs with shells that looked like thorns could be found mixed with the spiny growths on certain trees, and where to rally for tribal battles with other groups of kids competing for the territory.  In tribal wars of that kind, our chosen weapons were small rocks and dirt clods. Our castles were houses and platforms we built in trees with cast-off materials from construction sites, or in one case, high, vast bulwarks made by massive old trees which had fallen to their deaths in a windstorm, forming a natural royal courtyard surrounded by walls.

     In the last few years, when the weather has permitted, I walk with my wife or go on my own to the little natural  patches of our neighborhood for walks.  I don’t draw maps, but I’ve started to remember how to bring my child’s eyes back to the landscape around me.  I know where the willows grow, and why.  I know when and where we’ll see evening primroses in May and when I can harvest horse mint for its medicinal virtue.  I know where the nutria have their watery lairs, and where the blue herons most prefer to fish.  I know where I am most likely to discover a rose-plumed spoonbill dabbling for minnows and larvae with Egyptian geese. I know where to stand in the evening, and by what type of flower, if I want to see giant moths coming in for their evening repast.   I talk to trees, and sometimes, in dreams and visions, they answer back.  It’s good to know that the natural world still lives, and that it still stands ready to unfold its secrets to those who look and listen.   And it seems to me that the Gods are present in those places in a way I do not experience them elsewhere. 

Reclaiming the Land

     One of the things that strikes me as I read the primordial myths of ancient cultures is how much the land and its local features figure into the storytelling.  Rivers, mountains, high promontories, notable rocks, trees of special significance . . . the list goes on of places and objects that bring the Earth into the old tales as a character in Her own right.  With the advent of cities and the establishment of designated roadways along which people must travel, the features of Earth Herself have been relegated to the background and the emphasis instead is put on human-made places with their planned relationships to streets and highways.  In the Christmas carol “Old King Wenceslas,” when the medieval monarch asks where the poor man lives, he is told by his servant, “Sire, he lives a good league hence, underneath the mountain, over by the forest fence (the edge of the woods, not a structure), by Saint Agnes Fountain (not a stone construction spraying water but a natural spring).”  The poor man’s address consists of a series of natural landmarks.  Today, if the same question was posed, the answer might be something like, “He lives over at 18th Street and Sycamore, in those apartments by the pharmacy.”  Note that the landmarks are now gone, that the poor man’s universe now consists entirely of human constructions.  Even if the wood’s edge or the mountain’s foot existed nearby, they would probably not be mentioned.  

     I don’t necessarily mourn this development in human orientation, but I will point out that our understanding of where we are within an artificial universe of our own making has placed a barrier between ourselves and the natural world that brought us into being.   

     We are separated from the Earth in other ways, too.  My home in the flatlands enjoys about nine months of very hot weather, two months of cool but muggy tropical dankness, and roughly a month of actual cold winter weather.  By “winter,” I mean temperatures between 55 and 35 degrees (12.8 and 1.7 degrees Celsius).  As acclimated as I am to this steamy climate, and as much as I get out into it to work in the yard and garden, to do volunteer work in various places and to sell my art at outdoor markets, I still prefer to spend most of my free time indoors, where there is air conditioning and almost no mosquitos. This poses a challenge even to basic awareness of the natural world in which I live.  

      Nevertheless, it is important to me to maintain a sense of connection with the natural world, with the Earth who is my mother.  In his wonderful and strange book, The Witch Belongs to the World, author Fio Gede Parma recommends that we begin our approach to Earth with something he calls “acknowledgement of country.”  As he describes it, this is a kind of ritual in which one begins by laying by all the artificial and arbitrary markings our societies have laid upon our local land in order to meet it at a more primordial level.  This means asking questions like, “Who was here before us?  What did they call this land?  Where were its sacred places (if that is still known), what grows here naturally that nourished bodies, healed wounds, and served as offerings to the Spirit World?  Who were the gods of this place?  What were its original stories and myths?”  According to Parma, a good acknowledgement-of-country ritual would salute and recall that original understanding of whatever territory in which we now live, perhaps making use of what it provides as part of ritual in which a person greets the local Earth and asks formal permission to enter the land respectfully.  

     For me, acknowledgement of country poses certain problems.  The indigenous people who once lived here were largely wiped out by European diseases, and those who survived were either displaced to other territories, or were so few that they intermarried into the colonial system which destroyed their cultures, and left little record of who and what they had once been.  Furthermore, the natural environment was radically transformed over a few generations with the introduction of new plants and animals, and with the extinction or removal of much of the fauna and flora that had been here before.

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 . . . .