Love Minus Zero

Someone very, very dear to me recently offered me a bit of wisdom, one I would do well to remember more often:

Perfection would be as boring as prescience. Practice is joy.

Yes. Just so.

(Of course, it is well to remember that "joy" is not the same thing as "happiness," and that the family resemblance is sometimes barely noticeable. But still.)

Working with the Iron Pentacle has been interesting of late. When running the IP, I tend to start by visualizing each point not only as existing in part of my body, but in terms of what the associated word means to me, emotionally. I don't just say "sex, pride, self, power, passion," but I envision what sex is to me, at that moment: what it looks like, what it feels like, what emotions are associated with it. Same with pride, and with self, and so on. After I have those images and associations solidly in mind, I start running through it faster, feeling the energy move faster. Sometimes this process brings on associated images of its own, often connected to the paths between the points of the Pentacle and my associations with them.

It's pretty neat. ^_^

One interesting side effect of all this is that I think I'm actually beginning to understand the concept of blockages, not just intellectually, but in a visceral sense. If I'm having a negative association with one or more points of the IP, or if the bridge between two points doesn't emotionally gel, it's harder for me to create the mental image and the associative identification. It's like there's some sort of resistance to fully identifying with the point or the path in question, like I'm pushing against something. The sensation is... not precisely painful, but definitely not pleasant. It's like trying to remember something unhappy, or like trying to force yourself to stretch through a cramp. When that happens, I sometimes just stop dead in my tracks, trying to figure out what snapped me out of sync, but recently I've tried just slowing down, seeping through the blockage or simply making practice runs at it until I've found a smooth way through it, rather than just banging my nose on it and coming to a dead stop.

Nota bene: I haven't tried just smashing my way through them, as I suspect that might be A Very Bad Idea. Just sayin'.

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I think I need to revisit this post and the concepts behind it sometime in the near future. There's a lot of traction in those ideas for me...

Since I foolishly double-booked myself in December and the Rain Gods threw a little party over central California in January, I hadn't been to a DustBunnies get-together since November. Thankfully, I was able to make it last night, which meant I was finally able to conduct my long-delayed class/ritual/what-have-you for Mari.

Things seemed to go quite well—much better than I feared, despite my rampant nervousness—and most folks seemed to have a really good experience, with or without my facilitation. (I really need to remember to project when speaking in ritual!) That makes me especially happy, as I figured my job was less about giving people a particular experience and more about helping people get to a place where they can have their own experience, the experience they want or need to have. A number of people especially appreciated the idea of Mari as the Gateway of Manifestation, the "All-Becoming" to Nimüe's "All-Potential" and Ana's "All-Fulfilment", rather than being Just Another Mother Goddess. Now please understand, I have nothing against Mother Goddesses at all, but the same time, I think there's a strong tendency in modern Paganism to conflate every female deity with the Big Mama archetype, which leaves all men, a whole lot of women, and everyone who doesn't identify as either of those genders out of the party. When I took those issues to Mari, She made the point to me that gender-as-metaphor is a wildly overused concept, and that the map is not the territory. She expressed it much more eloquently than I could, of course, but also in "language" that I had a difficult time trying to translate into terms I could then share with other folks.

I did the best I could last night ("Gambatte!", as the Japanese would say), along with the neurotically requisite disclaimers about how this was all my Unsubstantiated Personal Gnosis and Your Mileage May Vary. Nevertheless, it seemed to work for folks, which is the best I can hope for. In a conversation I had with southernpm afterward, I mentioned that I'd approached this ritual with a fair bit of trepidation and uncertainty. He responded that I was probably going to be working with Her a lot more in the future: "Oh, I think you're gonna be a priest of Mari." Maybe so. I certainly can't complain... ^_^

And as a side note: holy cats, but I've missed those DustBunny folks. Being around all my Feri-flavored sistren and brethren was wondrous and silly and enlightening and fun, and I'm terribly happy I went. I'm really looking forward to next month, when southernpm and Tim do their Tyr/Krom/Cernunnos ritual-class, and to PantheaCon in a couple of weeks,

At some point when I'm not feeling intensely woogy, as a result of the respiratory gunk into whose throes I've fallen, I really should write down my thoughts on how Cardcaptor Sakura is simultaneously the sweetest, nicest shojo magical-girl anime ever made and a candy-coated exegesis and/or reinterpretation of Thelema for a mass audience of Japanese schoolgirls—and, it seems, esoterically-minded otaku like myself.

No, really. Seriously. I mean it.

Of course, if I wait until my head is no longer full of cotton, I'll probably lose the inspiration that brought this thought about in the first place.

Then again, that might not be a bad thing.

Oh, and happy Hallowe'en, All Saints' Day, All Souls' Night, Samhain, Dia de los Muertos and like that to anyone who wants one.

Holy cats, I want this book!

Both a professional academic researcher and practising magician, Dr Dave Evans delves deeply into modern British history to present a serious, but accessible and fascinating work, based on his recent and unique PhD, on developments in British magic after Aleister Crowley died. Not just the result of extensive book-research, this project involved attending rituals and having meetings with some quite remarkable men and women, who are examined and given a voice in these pages, some of them for the first time. Topics covered include Aleister Crowley and Thelema, How many magicians there actually are in Britain, The claims of Amado Crowley to be Aleister's son, the work of Austin Osman Spare, Kenneth Grant and the Typhonian OTO, Blasphemy, Chaos Magick, Gerald Gardner, Ramsey Dukes, Alex Sanders, HP Lovecraft, Satanism, Cursing, The Left-Hand Path, creating the Journal for the Academic Study of Magic, plus the work of Ronald Hutton, Dennis Wheatley, Dion Fortune, HP Blavatsky and others, all meshed into a broader philosophical, cognitive-psychological and moral-history framework of the broader Twentieth Century. Also includes how Academia deals with studying 'the Weird', and how Academia deals with having Magicians in their ranks in the first place (aka 'Reflexivity'), plus a host of tangential issues including Satan in advertising, Drugs, the Millennium Bug and 'End-Times Fever', Andrew Chumbley, Sex Magick, Inversion and Carnival, Witchcraft, neoPaganism and Wicca, Harry Potter, Breaking Taboos, Sigmund Freud, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, the madness of Montague Summers, Black and White magic, Censorship, how Tolkien and CS Lewis made magical belief the majority view in Britain, Genesis P Orridge, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, Thatcherite Politics and Magic, Oscar Wilde and homosexual moral panics, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Satanic Ritual Abuse, Bela Lugosi, messages decoded from a dead squid and the cabbalistic importance of a cat called Tibbles. Not just a book about the history of magic, this research places magicians and their work into the broader society that we all live in, and shows how that magic has always been a part of our culture.

What, he didn't have room to discuss Arthur Machen's influence on Marcel Proust while he was at it? ;)

I've done the Kala rite as part of a group working, but today was the first time I did it solo. I performed the rite alone, just before taking my shower: me, a glass of water, and my feelings. I felt the emotions, raised the power, spoke the words, and drank the water.

It was... well, "interesting" is such a wishy-washy word. I felt strangely energized and cleansed, but not in a "WOW!" kind of way. It was quiet, subtle, simple and profound; I almost want to describe it as "zen" in nature. Simple acceptance, profound release. I felt bits of me clicking back into place from where they'd been held in unnatural positions for way too long.

Sixty or seventy thousand more times and I might get the hang of this. ^_^

I went to my Feri class Friday night, after having missed last month's class (for travel-related reasons), and was desperately glad to be back. I really, really like the people I'm in class with—veedub and dbananza, inflectionpoint and foxgrrl, southernpm and elphie, and all the others who don't have LJ accounts—and I missed the connection of being there, in that space, doing the work. It was also wonderful to be able to share the experience with my dear friend bridgeweaver, who will likely be coming back for future classes now that he's made it to one.

What prompts this post, however, is the experience I had during circle. Without going into too much detail, I had an interesting experience with one of the lemniscate gods. My interaction with deities is always a bit dicey; I'm intellectually agnostic, but I keep having these subjective UPG moments where one god/dess or another will tap me on the shoulder... or, in this case, sneak up behind me, put her hands over my eyes, and whisper in my ear, "Guess who?" In this case, it was the one I least expected to hear from: Mari.

For some reason, She looked an awful lot like, swelp me, Peorth from the Japanese manga (and anime) series Oh My Goddess!, which is probably more a reflection of my current set of filters than any sort of Major Occult Revelation. At least She wasn't dressed in the improbable outfits Peorth usually wears in the manga...

In my time with Her, which was probably an objective handful of minutes but felt much longer, She said a lot of things that I can tell I'm going to be processing for a while. Things about being a mother, about being a woman, about gender itself, and some entirely personal things in relation to those topics which I'm not going to post to LiveJournal. She also indicated, in no uncertain terms, that I would be working with Her for a little while.

Gulp.

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Some relevant links, courtesy of Wikipedia:

• Mari, Mary Magdalene, Maryam, and the Blessed Virgin Mary.
  
• Kālī and Durga.
  
• The Great Mother and the Triple Goddess as archetypes.
  
• Freyja, the Lady of the Vanir, and Frigg, the Lady of the Æsir.
  
• Allāt, daughter and consort of Allāh.
  
• Hecate and Dêmêtêr.

Also, one relevant quote, as a jumping-off point for consideration, pondering and meditation (and possible deconstruction):

"Mother is the name for God in the lips and hearts of little children."
—William Makepeace Thackeray

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And there you go.

Hey, check it out: some actual, practical use of this journal, for once! Will wonders never cease?

Being as I'm a Feri student, and being as I'm a compulsive researcher, I've been accumulating a pile of bookmarks to various Feri websites and blogs. What follows is a list of links to some of the more practical (as opposed to theoretical or philosophical) Feri lore I've found on the Web. Suggestions from anyone reading this (all two of you?) are welcome. :)

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From veedub's WitchWorlds site:

• Three Souls, Three Pentacles
  
• A Daily Practice Script
  
• A Compost-Style Feri Circle Script

From faerywolf's Feri Tradition Community Resources site:

• Three Souls Alignment
  
• Kala Rite
  
• The Iron Pentacle
  
• The Pearl Pentacle

From the Witch Eye (witch_eye) magazine site:

• shemayazi's article on the Iron Pentacle

From the Lilith's Lantern site:

• Working with Mana & The Ha Prayer
  
• The Kala Rite
  
• The Flower Prayer

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The point could be made, without fear of argument from me, that this is all rather Talking-Selfy. True, but it's a bit difficult to be Sticky-One-ish in this medium... and besides which, Le Chatty Self has its place, too. (I suspect that part of the point of this post is to get Chattyself to calm the heck down so's I can actually spend some time with The Sticky One...)

Well, it's been a while since I've been here, hasn't it?

More to come shortly, I think.

On the to-read list: Benedict XVI's Deus Caritas Est.

Oh, so that's what posts look like in this layout.

Interesting.