Neo-Pagan Cynicism

I recently read a ritual called "The Council of All Beings." It goes something like this.

In a group ritual format, people gather an mourn all the ecological problems they can think of. All of them. This is followed by a kind of group 're-birthing' interpretive dance to get in touch with either the evolution of homo sapiens or else the gestation process. Lastly, people become representatives of non-human species and processes. Someone speaks for all wolves, someone else is an eagle. Participants can even choose to channel lichen (I am not making this up). There is a pause for participants to use Stanislavski's method of acting to get into their character.

The animal (and plant and geological) representatives circle around and take turns dropping character and going to the center to be the human representative. The non-humans essentially point, and say, "Look, you've screwed up my life cycles." The human representative(s) must remain silent. Then the non-humans say, "But, hey; you obviously need a gift that only I can offer, so here it is." Insert celebratory drumming here. The End.

That's right: "The End." At no point during this event (at least the description I read) are participants encouraged to say what positive actions they'll take when they return to their normal, non-ritual lives.

What bugs me about this ritual is that 1) it reinforces the concept that humanity is an "unnatural" component of the ecosystem; 2) it strikes me as putting the curse of Original Sin into the mouths of a bunch of talking animals (and rocks); 3) it's a ritual for us to receive gifts of wisdom disguised as an event to raise ecological awareness; and 4) the ritual description seems to have taken a page from the Men's Mythopoetic Movement (insert repetitive self-flagellation here).

I wonder -- did the dinosaurs have rituals like this ? Or what about the early anaerobic bacteria that poisoned themselves in the process of making the planet's current atmosphere ? And do we really need this: it seems to me a less egocentric ritual would be formed around cleaning up one's locality, turning out lights, driving less, and raising money for clean-up efforts (and education on consuming less and researching green energy sources).

My final observation is a re-imagining of this ritual: A bunch of white people gather together and some of them choose to be (and speak for) people of color....

Brief Summary of Kabbalah

Kabbalah (Notes primarily from Joseph Dan's "Kabbalah: A Very short Introduction".)


Kabbalah is complex, fluid subject with a written history of development spanning about 800 years. There are many forms of contemporary Kabbalah studies. Some of the worship forms used in Neo-Paganism can trace their development through Dion Fortune (aka Violet Firth) and Israel Regardie, The Golden Dawn, 19th Century Free Masonry and Theosophy (H.P. Blavatski) to Renaissance Christian Kabbalah. Kabbalah's practice in the last two centuries (at least) is a mystical one, although its earlier Jewish roots were more scientific.

Briefly (and incompletely), Kabbalah is a cosmology, a metaphysics, and a tool used to contemplate one's relationship with Deity. Kabbalah states that the universe was created by a series of utterances or emanations, called sefirot, from deity. The structure of sefirot is called the Tree of Life. Imbalances in flow of divine power through and to the sefirot strengthen the Left-Hand, or evil powers. Restoring the proper flow aligns the restorer with cosmic or divine powers.

Within (Western European) Neo-Paganism, Kabbalah's influence is most readily seen in theories behind divination by Tarot card -- a particular card is a reflection of a specific sefirot's functioning. Kabbalah's Tree of Life paradigm can be (and has been) used as a template by Neo-Pagans and occultists as a comparative table of world religion by assigning various cultures' gods and goddesses to particular sefirot on the Tree of Life.

Christian Kabbalah's source materials can be traced back to the early 1500's; the most well-known English writer from this time would be Robert Fludd. Its Christian authors were interested in using Kabbalah as a system of magic, numerology and alchemy.

Jewish Kabbalah's written source materials probably go to the ninth century, with claims of an older oral tradition. These are the "Sefer Yezira" (The Book of Creation), probably written in the ninth century; the "Book Bahir," written around 1185; and the "Zohar," written by Rabbi Moses de Leon (d. 1305) and collected in a single printing in 1560.

It is possible to speculate (and the author wishes to point out that this is only speculation on his part) that Dion Fortune's theories of male and female polarity as two ends of a magical battery may trace their roots to "Book Bahir," which introduced gender polarity to Kabbalah by presenting the "Shekhina" as the cosmic bride / divine wisdom.

Earlier writing on Shekhina presented this as an ungendered concept for the limited human perception of Deity. Writings of Lurianic Kabbalah after 1572 also may have influenced Fortune's magical theories, as they suggested bringing the Shekhina into an eroticized union with the deity as expressed through the sixth sefirot (associated with Fortune with the Messiah in general and Christ specifically) would increase and correct the flow between the sefirot.

To the best of this author's knowledge, there is no connection between Shekhina -- a divine (and later a feminine) manifestation of deity -- and Ashera -- an 11th century BCE goddess.

What Kabbalah contributes to Neo-Paganism is: a worldview that words or utterances have a causal relationship with the cosmos; (paradoxically) a worldview that is mystical and beyond verbal expression; erotic union (i.e. The Song of Solomon) as a metaphor for divine knowledge of deity; theurgy, or the idea that humans can help and influence divinity by their actions; and that ancient sages had an esoteric toolkit for influencing the spiritual and divine that allows practitioners to regain a lost relationship with deity.

Descending into the Chariot

I'm reading a fascinating book, Joesph Dan's "Kabbalah: A Very Short Introduction." It's a history of Kabbalah, which is not as straight forward as one would think. The idea that's struck me the most, and which shouldn't have been so much of a surprise, is that Kabbalah (like the Egyptian collection of spells known as "The Book of Going Forth By Day") has been changing, developing and fragmenting over centuries.

Dan's thesis is that Kabbalah has been used for many things; that Kabbalahistic writings are probably only about two thousand years old; that at various times it's been used as a kind of secular set of rules to be Jewish without being orthodox; and although it has non-mystic roots, mystics have latched onto it; and, about every three hundred years or so someone does a radical reinterpretation of it that eventually is considered "ancient wisdom."

As an amateur historian of Neo-Paganism, what I find interesting is the dualism and strands of Neo-Platonism that have worked their way into Kabbalah studies -- which, apparently, wasn't originally the case. I'm waiting to see if Dan will make mention of either Dion Fortune or some other member of the Golden Dawn (he has mentioned Robert Fludd), since they were so keen on Kabbalah, and their conceptions of ceremonial magick influence the worship format of Neo-Paganism.

As a writer, this history is interesting to me. Yes, I'm working on an alternate world, and the problem as an architect of a believable Secondary World is the nature of divinities in the world. I want to have my fantastical divinity active -- which means I have to decide things like the nature of Nature in relationship to divinity, and the nature of divinity (is it perfection, or just super-natural?) And I probably don't want to go down the road of "Is a Perfect Divinity Knowable through Human Awareness?"

Hmmm.... looks like I have to go create a boulder so big I'm unable to move it. Oh. Wait...

Fountain Adventures

Well, what do you know? I was up in the attic searching for glass beads to anchor an iris that I'd rescued after the winds and slugs had bent it, when I found, a small water pump.

So I guess not buying one yesterday was a blessing in disguise.

Late April Musings

Ah spring. That time of year when I obsess on purchasing a water pump and setting up a fountain. Or wind chimes. The theory being that if I do I will sonically sequester the yard and it will become an oasis of serenity. With tea.

Despite the inevitability of much more rain, I have pulled the indoor/outdoor carpet and the two wooden chairs out of the garage and installed them at Cafe John. Cafe John needs something, though; either a screen or a string of party lights or a mediaeval or classical statue or something. Je ne sais quoi... but the BBQ grill, garden hose spool, and saw-horse workbench ain't it. I want to sit down with tea and scones and feel fantastic -- in the fantasy sense -- not like I'm in the garden section of a hardware store.

Oh! And in related news, Mark made home-made strawberry "Pop-Tarts" this weekend. They were a touch on the salty side, but very good.


It's official. Second Life is bad for my writing. I've been spending way too much time on it translating a kind of history of Neo-Paganism into a museum display and logyrithmic timeline of written texts and artefacts. It's sort of like doing reseach on the holodeck, which explains the appeal. What is iteresting to me how everything clumps together around 1900 CE, 350 CE, and 400 BCE, and how modern cultural values of identity, society, deity and nature are used to interpret ancient artifacts.

Perhaps I should be a museum curator in my next life.

Anyway, the challenge for me is to say, "I only have a 20 minute span of uninterrupted time, I should write (instead of hop onto Second Life).

Ratios and Design.

I was flipping through a design book earlier and I read that the designer liked the ratio 1:3:9. I thought of Arthur C Clark's Monoliths -- which, now that I think more about it, were 1:4:9. What the designer said was that it was an "important ratio" used to direct attention. I wonder, why 1:3:9 ? Why not 1:4:9, or 1:2:8 ?

And why is 1:3:9 important?

On the shoulder front: The physical therapist thinks I have only one more visit to go.

On the writing front: I think my challenge is writing not when my optimal writing time is (the afternoon and evenings) but when my current schedule dictates (the mornings). It's irritating; especially when I don't have enough sleep the previous night (either through circumstance or through lack of discipline).

Life, Don't Talk To Me About Life

OK. So - it's been a new new moon; so that Prosperity Check experiment thing is over. Guess what, (surprise) I didn't get $1000 from selling short stories. In fact, I got my usual quota a rejections. So much for Prosperity Checks. Ha. I laugh disdainfully at your greedy superstition from my impoverished, artistically exalted, moral high-ground.

And the rest of this post is probably going to be a long whiny post. I'm having a bout of ennui and existential angst. Singing "The Ladies who Lunch" doesn't seem to help. Writing sad-high-school-thespian-girl haiku doesn't help. Listening to high-drama, dance tunes in a minor key with ambiguous lyrics (or Aqua) on Pandora seems to help a little.... It's messing up my writing, because I look at the stacks of manuscripts and the blank computer screens and even the finished manuscripts and I ask myself "Why Bother."

Yes, we all have stories to tell, our stories, blah blah blah... I feel like Kepler from Carl Sagan's Cosmos: "He couldn't make it work, and he couldn't leave it alone." (Insert scene of Kepler leaning back wearily from his intricate model of the solar system with planets and Platonic solids, putting his hands to his eyes, leaning back more, whapping the model, and returning his hands to his eyes)

And then I look around at the rest of my life.

Which probably explains the anxiety dreams about last-minute discoveries that I'm failing college chemistry.

I think the typical thing to do is to run away to Monaco, take a lover, or sign up for the new studies on hallucinogens. Which, to quote Judith Viorst, "seem rather impracticable."

(bing!) And our time is over. See you next week.

Happy Spring 2010 Equinox

Happy Equinox, a little early. This afternoon, to my pleasure, I checked the Portable Stonehenge with the angle between the Sun and the Moon and it was spot on. Lately, especially during the Winter Months when it's cloudy, the moon peg gets a little off. But today, when I held Portable Stonehenge up so that the sun peg's shadow crossed through the center of the board and then sited over the center and the moon's peg, the thin crescent moon was right on the moon peg's top. It sounds more complicated than it is. Anyway, out to look at the crescent moon before it goes behind a hill.

The Cynical Neo-Pagan

This morning during a writing break, I was speaking with a fellow writer, Loreen H., about how it was the New Moon, and my plans to write a "prosperity check" to myself for $1000 with "from selling short stories" on the memo line. And blog about it.

"Wow," she said. "I think you're the most cynical Pagan I know. Not spiritually but on the surface, you're almost like an atheist. ...Sort of like some pony-tailed professor atheist."

"Well," I said, "It's a side effect of wanting to be a Neo-Pagan Thomas Aquinas. I suppose if I were being honest, I'd really write, 'Being Able To Say a Variation on "Ha! Where is Your Goddess Now?!"'"

Our mutual friend, Jai, added, "And the universe will oblige you."

So. I've written my check, and now I'm going to forget about it until next new moon. We'll see if my acceptance level goes up (which, all things being equal, I'm not expecting).

I feel myself becoming more spiritual already....

Random News

On the dream front:

Nothing much to report other than they've been too sexual for me to comfortably write about on my blog. Okay, and on occasion I've woken up wondering, not exactly "What was I dreaming?" so much as "Why did I dream that?" I prefer the dreams of sexual tension to be about rising water and overflowing swimming pools. Although now that I think about it, I suppose being in a production of MacBeth on a floating slab of rock in the middle of an indoor moat might count.


On the writing front:

I've been using Scrivener to trim down the short story I've been working on. I've got a plot, and ... I have a feeling the story as it is plotted will receive critiques like "too slow," "not enough action," and "I get the feeling that characters were working toward something, but I couldn't figure out what it was."


On the house front:

It's that time of year when I want to do things to the house. Like rip off the roof and add a second story, or install a greenhouse along the (long) south side of the house. The latest house longing is to replace our outside patio cover with one that will actually be rainproof and extend the concrete patio about three feet south and west. Oh, right, and install that labyrinth I designed eighteen months ago.

Ah well, at least I have propagated some rose canes from the pruning I did earlier.

Left Turn Rant

I don't know what it is about Eugene motorists and left turns. It seems every time I'm crossing the street (at a crosswalk with a light), there is someone turning left on an apparent trajectory to run me over.

There's nothing quite so stimulating to the fight-or-flight response as the headlights of an oncoming car.

Afterward, the driver gives me a friendly wave and mouths a "Hi." This does nothing to temper my autonomic desire to vaporize his car with photon torpedoes. A lot of photon torpedoes. I can only imagine what's going through these peoples' heads: "Oh, I know you thought I was about to plow into you with five tons of metal, but, see, it was joke; I didn't really mean it. So, um, Hi!"

It's enough to make me want to walk around with photocopies of pages from the Oregon Driver's Manual covering the laws yielding to pedestrians. I think I'd slap it onto the side of their car as they coast by.

Sigh. I suppose there's other laws about using an electromagnetic pulse gun to fry the chips in their car's engine. ("Oh, I made your car stop advancing on me while I was in a crosswalk. Nothing personal. Hi.")

We Are the Stuff of Dreams...

I dreamed I was MacBeth. I think it started out as being in the play. The play was set in a dark stone castle, and there was a moat on the inside of the building, making a square around the perimeter of the main hall. I and another actor (dressed in medieval clothing) were on a square slab of rock floating in the inside moat, delivering our lines. I had a split sense of saying my lines as an actor, and also being MacBeth with an awareness of the play's script.

But then I became "Young MacBeth." The dream was slightly confused, because as a Young MacBeth, I was on a beach with a bunch of Vikings, and we were all standing there in the middle of the night with torches. I was wearing white homespun breaches and a jerkin (as were most of the other Vikings) and we were having a spiritual moment around some standing stones. I think there was chanting.

Applied Writing

Reminding myself that a strong protagonist, when faced with a situation that threatens something they cherish, reacts with action, not moping.

Early March Nightmare

Mostly nightmares last night. Starting around 2AM I kept waking up and drifting back into the dream-plot....

Part One:

The dream was in Gotham City, sort of colorful and bright.
I was Batman (Adam West, not any of the more modern ones). The Joker (or possibly The Riddler) had just been elected mayor of Gotham City. One of the first things Mayor Joker did was declare me a vigilante and persona non grata at city hall. The setting became more dark and Tim Burton-esque. Commissioner Gordon had to work for the Joker, but was also helping me out on the sly. In the dream he was less statuesque and shorter than the actor who played him in the campy TV show. He put on a black trench coat and set out to warn me that The Joker was going to trace the Bat Phone line (obviously, some of this dream plot has been borrowed from the show).

There was a sudden shift in the dream's point of view... and I heard a voice saying, "The government always targets the poor. They put turtle urine into the drinking water and deny them healthcare. I have a vague image of the Joker in a water treatment plant.


Part Two:

I think Commissioner Gordon walked onto a beach were a commercial was being filmed. Or else it was a beach wedding. My recall is a little muddled here, and I have an disconnected image of sea foam or else whipped cream (or bridal veils?) in my head. At some point some guy is swimming in the ocean, and sea-monster-shark-stegosauruses come out of the water and eat him. I think there was more than one kind of monster. They were fast, stealthy, had scales or rough skin, and loped about on four legs eating people. I guess they could swim, because they came from the sea. Some had short triangular heads (with shark mouths), some had bony club heads. Somehow, the Joker (or his government) had sent them.

Monsters appeared all over the world and began eating everyone. Commissioner Gordon left the beach. By now he had a white trimmed mustache and spoke with a light British accent. Monsters rushed off of the beach and into the surrounding brush to stalk everyone. Around here, the dream got its own soundtrack: staccato violin and string-section "danger lurking in the bushes; you know it's right in front of you, HA! it's really behind you and now your head has been chomped off" music.

Somewhere around here, the lighting got very dark and noir. English Commissioner Gordon was attempting to lead his children through the dark and rain-slicked alleyways of Gotham City while monsters were popping out from behind corners and up from sewers.

Society adapted to the rampaging monsters by building thick, stone walled houses -- which the monsters crashed through in order to eat the occupants. So people built buildings honeycombed with empty rooms. The dream became video-game-like in the imagery -- I watched from above as though looking at a kind of architectural drawing of a house -- as monsters with battering ram heads galloped down long narrow hallways, crashing through walls into little room after little room. Somehow they sensed the cowering occupant holed up in the the last room; quaking as the sounds of thudding stones grew closer.


Part Three:

By this time I had woken up and returned to nightmares several times.

And then I was Arcosanti.

I think I might have had a sense that I was dreaming. I remember looking at The Vaults and thinking that for once I was visiting an Arcosanti not wildly at odds with its real location and state of construction.

I was speaking with Mary Hoadley, who was a site manager when I lived there. I don't remember all of our conversation, but I think I had just moved back to Arcosanti for something like the third time. I said, "I'm sorry; I keep coming here by mistake. If you need a computer consultant, maybe I could visit for a few days once a year."

I don't recall her response (if any).

... and then I must have woken up for the seventh time that morning....

Writer Bug

Just write.

That's what I tell myself.

The other half of that is that I have to have something to say, something that interests me, some destination I can aim my words to.

I think that is what makes January and February (and March) so difficult for my speculative fiction -- my interest is directed inward toward mundane, banal things. So I blog; in the days before blogging I probably wrote bad poetry. Am I a post-pupating caterpillar dreaming it's a writer? In winter, as a writer I feel like a butterfly in a chrysalis, waiting for the seasons to turn so I can break out and expand my wings. I can feel the first stirrings.

Sort of. So for now, it's back to the drafts and the words written last night.