|
|
Wednesday, February 13th, 2008
| |
3:15 pm - Thoughts On "Natural Witchery" By Dugan
|
(Draft #2: now with less meandering!)
My new local library carries quite a few books on the subject of Wicca and witchcraft. I recently picked up "Natural Witchery," a book that purports to be a guide to intuitive magic. The general idea is one that I full-heartedly agree with: develop your instincts and use what works for you.
It starts off on a very promising note, with a "how to" guide on developing better intuitive skills. If you're as jaded by Pagan books as I am, you can imagine how shocking this section was... dear gods, someone actually wrote something that is moderately *useful*! Additionally, there is a good test at the beginning of the book that helps you pinpoint what sort of "psychic" --I hate that term, but can not think of another at the moment-- abilities you have. Not too surprisingly, I found that I was strongest in clairvoyance (visualisation) and precognitive dreaming, two perceptions that tend to go together in a twin-like fashion. I'm a visual learner and I used quite a few mental visual "puns" to get through the bar exam. My natural inclination in practice is silent visualisation in casting, and I did glean a few more ideas to play with from this book.
However, as with so many Wiccan/Neo-Pagan books, this one quickly descends into the realm of fluff. There are plenty of spells written out for connecting with elements (the usual fodder), and a number of accounts by the author about her own experiences. Some were interesting and some were dull (every nonfiction-writing parent in the Universe seems to assume that you want to read a chapter or two about their kids... personally, I think we're overdue for a Wiccan book that actively validates the decision *not* to bring more children onto our burdened Earth).
And then, there was the author's section on ethics, which I found particularly disagreeable and obnoxious. The thing is, I consider myself a highly-ethical person, within reason. At least once a month, I'll get groceries and the cashier will forget to charge me for something. I always bring it to their attention. Quite ethical by most standards, one would think. I can also get into a holy little fit over legal ethics issues and so forth. Here is one example of where I disagree with the author's "ethics" section:
She practices with a small group of women. They went out into the hostess's backyard to have a simple ritual, and a couple of neighbourhood men were leaning over the fence leering at them. The author cast a spell that managed to chivvy the men back inside their own house quite quickly, by appealing to their fear of what their wives would think of them staring at the pretty young things gathered together outdoors. Nifty concept, actually. Maybe some day I'll be able to pull that sort of stunt too. But, alas, this author goes on a whole paragraph-long ramble about how ever-so-wrong it is to cast such a spell. Ooo, it was *manipulation* (her favorite term for condemning someone else's magic). How evil! My thought on the subject is that she had every damn right to use that spell. Staring at someone is bloody rude to begin with, and the men were doing so while these women were in their own yard on a summer evening. They invaded the women's territory. The women are fully entitled to defend that territory. Of course, my own solution would probably tend more towards the nasty glare and radiating my beloved "fuck off" vibe... or a sharp word if that didn't work. All magic of a sort. I've long since lost patience for any sort of harassment or invasion, especially by chauvinists.
The parts of the book that I strongly disagreed with were rather eye-opening about where my own path lies. Another example: in another "ethics" story, the author talks about how someone was telling a group of practitioners about a nasty coworker they had. This person cast a spell to let everyone see the co-worker "as she really was," and --supposedly-- within a week the coworker was fumbling up projects, having her incompetence revealed, and ended up getting booted from the company and having a nervous background. The author notes that once the caster was gone, everyone else he had talked to thought that his spell was wrong and unethical. On the other hand, I thought that the spell was probably overkill, but that *if* the woman was really that bad and a huge drain on everyone, she basically had it coming. After all, the caster did not create any new evil for her: he just said let people see her as she is.
In any case, this latest attempt to read a Wiccan/Pagan book brought to my attention that I simply am not on the same wavelength as at least some other practitioners. Typical, really. I seem to be incapable of being orthodox, even in a non-orthodox religion. Which is one of the many reasons I don't often talk about my philosophies or hang out with other witches. I am far from cruel; just practical, really. But my beliefs don't exactly accord with every bit of sunlight and rainbows advocated by the authors at Llewellyn Publishing.
I'll wrap up with a personal revelation I had recently. It's been a tough time, overall. Between long-term unemployment, grim weather, and my husband working long hours, I often feel disconnected and gloomy. A week or two ago, I had a very interesting dream while traveling through this darkness: I was exploring the basement at my parent's house, finding many interesting old antiques and books... and then, I suddenly found a very vibrant old painting of Kali. The words "Dark Mother" came to mind. When I woke up, I realised that the Dark Mother archetype has been touching my life since earliest childhood, as I grew up with a schizophrenic mother whom I never could trust. In a way that I find hard to convey in words, the Kali dream was reassuring and helped put childhood experiences in context. It's not the sort of aspect of the divine that you necessarily *want* to have trunk with; but if you've been through the darkness already, it is sort of reassuring to get a dream or archetypal connection with a Goddess who has been--and is--there. Oh, and of course add to all this a long-standing interest in Baba Yaga, another "Dark Mother." Not as frightening as Kali, in my opinion (Baba Yaga helps clever girls and young women sometimes), but not exactly a woman who is all sunshine and fuzzy bunnies, either.
Honestly, I am just such total a "Crone" sympathiser.
|
|
(comment on this)
|
| Wednesday, December 26th, 2007
| |
1:32 pm - A Solstice Celebration, 2007
|
|
I went to a Solstice celebration the past week, held at the local Unitarian church. It was nice to get out and celebrate the old-school "reason for the season," but this experience was different than any circle I've ever been at, even though I have only really been to open circles. The Solstice celebration was a sort of combination of a Unitarian church service/Wiccan-style ritual. Basically, they had chairs arranged in rows in a rough circle (with lots and lots of attendees, which was nice to see), a small choir of women who were very good singers, and a number of other women performing the ritual part of the celebrations. It was more like observing a circle than being a part of a circle. As my husband noted, even when the choir led songs that everyone could join in on, the group was very quiet. Pretty low-energy all around (except for my husband's singing; he just rules). The coolest part of the service was writing a hope for the New Year on flash paper, and watching the women leading the celebration light it and toss it in the air. That appealed to my inner pyrophile all right.
|
|
(comment on this)
|
| Tuesday, December 11th, 2007
| |
10:12 am - Meditation
|
I started up with meditation about a month ago, after reading "Meditation For Dummies." Weirdly, I'd never read a book on the subject before. This one seemed to give a flexible overview for newbies such as myself, and made a very good case for meditating regularly, what with all the mental and health benefits involved. As a long-time insomniac, they sold me on meditation's ability to make the mind more relaxed and less stressed, enabling one to sleep!
-One way to meditate, I gather, is to focus on your breath. Keep returning your drift to the center of your attention. This seems to work well for me as a basic grounding technique, especially for grabbing a short meditative state at a bus stop, or whatnot.
-They also wrote about the concept of the mind as a "clear sky." So, I sometimes use that idea quite literally, visualizing open sky around me and letting the thoughts that pop into my head drift to the bottom of the globe. Overall, this is very good for clearing the mind, though one is still left with the sky interfacing between one's mind and the outside world.
-One of my own techniques is to focus on the hands to clear the mind, as the hands are energy points of a sort, and representative of power and control over the environment. Again, this seems to work well for grounding.
-Sometimes I can get my mind into an immediately-still state just by an act of will. This does not tend to last too long, as I inevitably think, "wow, my mind's finally still!". ;)
-Finally, another technique that sometimes works well is to concentrate all my attention in a tiny space in the head, leaving my mind open and perceptive to the outside world. Again, this only works for a short while, but it temporarily eliminates the mental chatter that "screens" perception from what is actually in front of one's own senses.
Overall, I am very much enjoying meditation. It does seem to help calm the mind and give one a sense of balance and control. If "energy follows attention"--a phrase that struck me as very enlightening the first time I saw it in a cheesy fantasy novel--then it seems that meditation allows one to work better with energy by learning how to work with attention.
This is already proving useful in real life; for example, in interviews, it seems I can better relax my busy mind and do a cleaner job of balancing my energy with the other person's, leading to a smoother flow of conversation and being more "present" in the moment. This is especially helpful to introverts like myself who have finite levels of energy in the social sphere.
|
|
(comment on this)
|
| Tuesday, December 4th, 2007
| |
8:08 am - Back and Out of the Broom Closet
|
I decided to take up this journal again, hopefully on a regular basis, and to unlock it.
A few factors underlie this coming out, if you will.
One is being thoroughly done with law school, a place that daily and not-so-subtly asks one to conform and not engage in too much spiritual thought. But that is a small factor.
A larger one is that I am tired of hiding my core beliefs. Somewhat ironically, it was a few trips to my local Unitarian Universalist church that brought this to the forefront of my attention.
I grew up Unitarian. Some of the many good parts were learning about other religions, taking field trips, and being introduced to D&D. Being a reasonably-perceptive child, though, I did notice something subconsciously back then that I had occasion to notice consciously on my recent visit to a Unitarian church as a 30-something adult. For lack of a better term, I'll call it "fluffy dogmatism." There's a certain, underlying attitude held by some people there that coming to a real conclusion is *wrong*. Fundamentally, at-the-core wrong. They might not fess up to that attitude out loud, but they have no qualms about contradicting everything you say if you should be callous enough to express an idea that isn't entirely fluffy and open-ended. And the really killer part is that they feel no need to back up their ideas with pesky little things like data or historical context.
Well, the thing is, my mind *never* worked that way. Based on available evidence, I concluded Atheism was the right way to go, sometime right before my seventh birthday. Over the years, I have come to other conclusions. Conclusions which make a lot of sense to me personally, and that I have thought through deeply. If you provide me with a factual context, including the experiences of people I trust, I will be happy to at least ponder what you are saying. It may or may not resonate in the end, but I will respect you for having some sort of logic: e.g., I understand and empathize with the drives and spirit underneath a lot of C.S. Lewis's writings, while being unable to embrace his ultimate inferences about the nature of the Divine.
So, I realized that I am not a full-fledged Unitarian, though they are a nice enough group to spend some time with. There is a distinctly different style to our spiritual search.
Here are some conclusions that I currently hold, presented in a manner a bit reminiscent of the Nicene Creed. I make no claims that they are 100% empirical, though I do have reasons--some very strong--for why they make sense to me personally.
1) I believe that the mind runs far, far deeper than day-to-day consciousness.
2) I believe that death is not the end of our consciousness. I have no problem with the concept of ghosts, a.k.a. consciousnesses that have not moved on yet. I strongly suspect that there is some world or worlds before and after our lives. I am amazingly certain that reincarnation is a fact in our Universe.
3) I believe that oftentimes dreams--even the bad ones--are a profound tool to help us heal and find our own power. I believe dreams can be predictive and/or provide information we have no way to consciously know (repeated personal experiences).
4) I believe that many animals have spirit and true emotions. I suspect that a some have honest-to-goodness language (whales) and that to hunt these is form of cannibalism. I believe that animals can be a part of our chain of reincarnation, and not necessarily a "lower" or "less-evolved" part. Nonetheless, I am not a vegetarian, under the logic that meat-eating is natural to many species, including the human one.
And, to really solidify things, here is a conclusion that I have very been reluctant to admit even to myself:
5) My path is essentially semi-Wiccan, for better or worse, with a spin in the Nordic tradition. I personally honor Loki, and Freya as Goddess. I honor the Elements. While I will continue to studiously avoid discussing this with random people on the street or at a workplace, I will be at least be consistent about it with myself. I will stop feeling like I need to hide or justify my basic spirituality, especially in my own mind. I acknowledge that the right to hold beliefs that others find kooky or unpleasant is not a gift open only to those who follow mainstream religions like Christianity. I acknowledge that if some or most of the people choosing the same label as me make me uncomfortable, I still have a base right to my own faith.
Well, there you go. A whole bunch of conclusions that I finally just got tired of keeping under lock and key.
|
|
(2 comments | comment on this)
|
| Tuesday, December 6th, 2005
| |
12:53 am - More Slavic Spirituality
|
After finishing the book from a few posts ago, I started digging around google.ru for Slavic pagan sites (as Russian is currently the only Slavic language I can actually read). After a few misdirects --including a huge number of sites about some Vedic guru or another who puts the "creep" back in "creepy"-- I finally found a grand total of eleven links about home-grown Russian paganism.
Interesting concepts that you won't get from English sources:
1) Russians call their own paganism Yazychestvo, which is connected to the word for "language" or "tongue".
2) There's a definite theme of free Pagan tribes living in the wild vs. people being subordinated by freedom-destroying Christian princes in the cities.
3) Unfortunately, you also get a vaguely nationalistic feel from some of these sites. I think the Russian language itself is partly to blame. In English, the word "people" had a nice, neutral connotation. If you say "Jewish people" there can be a sense of us all being interconnected, of different folk coming together. Contrast this with Russian, which uses the word "narod." That word is not nearly as neutral: it has the same root as birth, with the sense that each group of people arises from one root, and that they do not really ever, truly intermix. Ultimately, a "narod" is separate. That aspect of Russian Paganism makes me a bit nervous. I could see it being used to focus too heavily on setting the Russian people (in their sense) on a pedestal, apart from and above others. Fiddler on the Roof as well as most of Russia's history remind us why this is a very bad idea.
4) Back to more pleasant matters: Baba Yaga, it turns out, has iron teeth and iron breasts that hang down to her waist. While not winning points for attractiveness, she does like animals: her familiars are black cats, snakes, and crows, according to one site. Yay, Baba Yaga!
|
|
(comment on this)
|
| Monday, November 14th, 2005
| |
2:16 pm - Slavic Spirituality
|
I'm re-reading a book on Slavic Paganism (Slavic Sorcery, by Johnson) that I haven't picked up in about 5 1/2 years. Many things have changed since the last read, including the fact I no longer work for a toxic little department with high-school politics in a more-generally-toxic company. It's always nice to realise how far you have come. Since the last reading, though, I have: started keeping a regular dream journal, come to believe in a lot of rather Jungian outlooks, and met the greatest guy ever/soulmate (as well as a long-lost soul brother and a few other very solid friends as well!). So, total 180-degrees in circumstances.
I'm not sure what I think thusfar. The book is an account by a Californian who went to Russia looking for the old practices. It seems modern Russian practice ends up incorporating a lot of Eastern Orthodox Christian elements, which personally I could never use. Too much bad mojo; I was Eastern Orthodox for a while, and not exactly feeling the love in retrospect. The book does make the very good point that Orthodoxy was much less given to witch-hunts than the western branches of Christianity --and the people were great at holding on to folk-beliefs at the same time they practiced Christianity, by force or otherwise. Hence, we actually have some real access to Slavic practices.
I do relate to some of the worldviews, esp. those that overlap a bit with Nordic myths: the world tree, the serpent... the idea of dualism as a key to balance (as opposed to the exclusionary dualism you get in Christianity). I especially like the use of water, and the idea of charging water for use: you visualise flames in your hands, and breathe the energy into cold water to create "water of life." I also rather relate to Baba Yaga/White Bones Mother. She always got bad press, but I can't help but like a woman who lives in a hut on chicken-legs in the depths of a forest and flies about in a mortar and pestle. Of course, I can't see myself using a huge amount of Slavic imagery in everyday life. This is a different landscape, with it's own energies. I'd feel a bit odd trying to use a leshiy or Perun the Thunder-God in a meditation, when surrounded by forests where other entities were revered (sometimes I do bank on that 2% of Native American blood from my father's side, and actually use storm-birds or Crow in a meditation).
Guess that's about it for now. More might be forthcoming when I've actually finished a larger chunk of the book.
|
|
(3 comments | comment on this)
|
|
|
|
|
![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
tea_and_stones's journal