Alferian's · Journal

I have recently adapted a few of my classes to the new modular format on Moodle.  Today, I had another nudge when I received another application from a prospective student.  This one looks more promising than the one I received last month and having even one student makes me want to get my classes tidied up and working properly.  The technicalities of seeing that Moodle is working properly and that all the bits and pieces of my courses are in place and functioning for students is laborious.  Hours of work.  Moodle is not as user-friendly or reliable as I should wish.

However, I do get great satisfaction out of writing up courses and perhaps I will move ahead to work on it some more in the weeks to come.  Freed now from a quarter system, I feel liberated somewhat in the ability to get courses up and online at any time during the year.  If I miss the beginning of a quarter, it doesn't matter too much.  I seem to operate better in an a-chronological or perhaps anachronistic idiom.  A fault or a virtue?  I do not know.  But when a destiny is unfolding, it seems to me that it can neither be predicted accurately nor rushed. 

If you are inclined, please check out the courses listed at the following link and tell me if you are interested in taking them. 

http://class.avaloncollege.org/

The rabbits have been eating the bark off my hazel and willow trees this winter.  Somehow I find this symbolic...

Alferian

I thought I would make a brief entry here on the odd chance that anyone is looking.  Avalon Center, though I closed it's doors still exists and the Board of Governors is very slowly moving towards actuallymeeting.  Some ideas have been tossed around via e-mail but the meeting has not occurred yet, interrupted by the holidays and everyone's obligations in that respect.

I'm hoping for a meeting in January or February, but have left this in the capable hands of the board's secretary to arrange.

Keep hope alive,

Alferian

I've now shifted over my online journaling to The Weekly Owl.  This will from now on be the repository of most of my thoughs.  The blog is like a penseive in Harry Potter.  We deposit our thougths and memories there the better to percieve patterns and for the small pleasure of unloading them from our brains.

The Board of Governors of Avalon Center is carrying on an online discussion of the future of the organization. It is a legal corporation and so needs to be legally disposed of in some way.  By "disposed" I do not mean tossed in the garbage.  The word has broader meaning that that. 

I myself am disposed to keep the corporation alive if the Governors are willing to help with the costs of doing so.  Whether the IRS will permit us to keep our tax-exempt school charity status as a non-profit educational organization if we are not maintaining a permanent faculty or student body remains to be seen.  Having dealt for a year with the IRS, I am inclined to think that they will not go out of their way to investigate so long as we are reporting to them legally and have so little income.  The projected three years of revenue and expenses we had to submit to get tax-exempt status was completely hypothetical and they cannot really expect any organization to meet their goals exactly.

For me it is important that the school be closed so that, if we wish to, we can reconstruct it more radically. Who will have the energy to do this remains to be seen.  But the goals we have to meet, as I see them, are primarily to recruit reliable administrative help who will have time to volunteer and a life that allows them to gradually expand the amount of time it takes them to do the administrative work, as operations expand.

What I want to avoid is the situation we created in the first experiment of three years, which was that it all depended upon me.  That is not a business plan.  So, we need to do what we wanted to do earlier, which is write a business plan and then get the initial staff necessary to run it.  And, I would like to avoid the whole matter of distance learning entirely untlil we have established a sustainable institution on the ground.  That means no online classes until we have classes on the ground and a facility that we own and can maintain financially.  For my part, not being very interested in financial risks, I want to see fundraising be our first step.  Without patrons we cannot sustain our operations and without an officer dedicated to directing fund raising for the institution, the whole business is too unstable for my nervous temperament to put up with.  It is like being the captain of a leaky ship with no sails and a crew that keeps jumping overboard.

I have no reason to believe that anyone is going to come to our rescue.  Indeed, I would be very skeptical if anyone did.  But the dream of Avalon College does not need to die and the corporation does not necessarily need to be dissolved.  Nor, in fact, have I resigned as Chancellor or been removed from the job by the board. I'm still president of the board, and am prepared to let the Governors deliberate as long as they like.  If they decide to maintain the corporation in a dormant state, that is their perogative and at that point we might even proceed to invite new governors to the board.

Frankly, however, it has been my impression that very few of our present governors are willing to devote their own energy and labor to getting done what needs to be done.  If they aren't willing or able to give their time and talents, and we cannot recruit the staff who can do so, I really do not see much hope of progress.  I've watched the thing leap forward with students and teachers and new governors, and then ebb back into almost nothing.  As Druids we ought to be able to cope with ebb and flow and perhaps we can.  But we need to start over and do better ground work, building up a network of people who are willing to invest their time, talents and money in getting a business plan together, finding financing, and working from the ground up. 

I do not say that starting operations on line with Internet courses was a mistake.  It was an experiment and we learned a great deal from it, both positives and negatives.  But we need now to do the groundwork, lay a real corerstone and foundation. And I have come to think that the first small step in that direction is to work to get people here in the Twin Cities to understand what Druidry is and how a Center for Druidic Studies (or whatever we may chose to call it) can be of benefit as an educational center and a center of seasonal celebrations.  So, we shall see.

My next step is to give a presentation on oghams to a chapter of Royal Arch Masons and then to work up other presentations on Druidry and Masonry and give the presentation at as many masonic venues as I can.  At the same time, I have a wand book to get finished off and sent to the publisher.  Then perhaps some other books on Druidry or other topics.  I have a series of juvenile novels I want to write too.

Merry Samhuinn to you and your ancestors
and may you have a month of good luck for reading this log,

Frater James Alferian, 24°

by Grace of †God† Doctor of Philosophy,
Druid, and Knight of the Rose Croix 18°
Eques ab Ivsticia et Veritas

Dear Friends and fellow druids,

Not meaning to be melodramatic about it, but it seems that Samhuinn is a good time for a corporation to pass on into some new form of life, and I have made the decision now to let Avalon Center pass on.  Some of you may be completely unaware of Avalon Center for Druidic Studies.  Some of you may be avid supporters.  Some may have picked up our brochures at a local conference or shop.  In short, ACDS was founded to be a scholarly center for Druidry, a post-secondary institution of higher education founded on druidic principles.  

However, three months ago I reached the conclusion that if I could not manage to find administrative help for the Center, I could not continue directing it.  Although I have had contributions from perhaps a score of teachers, donors, advisors, and governors serving on the ACDS board, still the majority of the work falls upon my shoulders.  My health has not been good and despite the doctors working on it for the past year or more, it still isn't very good.  No need to go into the details.  The upshot is that I have very little energy and have many bad days when I can do little but rest and be melancholy.

This situation, as you can appreciate, makes for a very ineffective leader.  My lack of business experience does not help matters.  I have been carrying on with the energy from a sense of calling, but even that has now ebbed away and the practicalities of physically living will not support it.

This Summer I suspended teaching operations at the Center for two quarters.  Lack of students along with lack of personnel to run the Center, and lack of funds, have made ACDS unsustainable.  Some of the Governors encouraged me to carry on for another term and see if we could resume offering classes for Winter Quarter.  As recently as last week, I still maintained some hope that we could, but then my health took another downturn.  So, I have resigned myself to this decision and am going to close the Center.

Perhaps in the future circumstances will change, patrons and staff will be found, and someone will be able to revive the idea of a druid college.  But I no longer anticipate that I will be the one to do so.  We can only hope that when the time is right, such an institution may be brought into a more complete manifestation.

Meanwhile, we can content ourselves with having achieved a good experiment.  We succeeded in gaining tax-exempt status as a school with our mission, which is certainly a small step but a hopeful one for the future of druid education in the United States.  

I wish to express my sincere thanks to all the teachers who have contributed their time and talents to developing courses for ACDS, whether or not they actually taught any students.  It was not effort wasted, but all part of our experiment to see if our world was ready for such formal education directed at achieving further light in Druidry.  The conclusion I come to is that the world is not quite ready, or, as is perhaps equally true, I lack the skills necessary to create a viable institution which could market and promote itself to draw in a sufficient and sustained flow of students to make the business work.  I have learned a great deal about just how difficult it is to create any business and sustain it, and I have learned a great deal about not-for-profit organizations.  My respect for those who can create such organizations and sustain them until they become established cultural institutions is more profound that ever before.

We can be proud of having managed Avalon Center in a fiscally responsible way and ended our endeavor with our books balanced.  Any money remaining in the Avalon bank accounts, of which I think there will be little, will be, according to our articles of organization, donated to another charity with a similar mission.  That decision will be made by the Board of Governors before they go home and return to their other pursuits.

We can also be proud of having served some 25 students over the past two years, some of whom were unable to complete their coursework, but all of whom, I trust found the courses valuable.

Thanks once again to everyone who has made this venture possible.  I hope that you will all be proud that you were once a part of that shining spot called Avalon.

Blessings and Light /|\

The deadline for submission of courses for Winter quarter has passed and not even I have managed to get my classes completely up and ready on Moodle.  I still hope that I will do so and rather more feebly hope that some of the other members of the faculty will manage it too.  However, the level of commitment seems low.  The faculty members do not communicate with me as much as I want them to and I dislike having to badger people.  That is one reason, I imagine, that I am not a great "boss."  I trust people to know what is going on and get their work in on time.  That works to some degree with students, who if they fail to get their work in will just not get a grade for their class.  But for teachers, if they do not get their courses developed and set up on Moodle, then Avalon Center has precious little to offer our prospective students.

We founded this organization to be a school, to provide resources for the study of druidry and ancillary subjects.  I imagine Avalon serving not only self-labeled "druids" but a wide range of clients in search of knowledge and a structured environment for learning that goes beyond reading books at home in one's spare time.  Druid orders are growing.  Many independent druids are doing excellent work.  But as for my little school, I am not very satisfied with it.  When I cancelled classes for Bealtaine and Lughnasadh quarters in 2007 I felt that it was not possible for me to manage the organization and teach, or at least not teach enough to really make our study programs viable.  If we are offering just a class here and there, I'm afraid we are not going to hold people's interest.  I wonder if seekers will decide that we aren't really offering enough or that we are promising more than we actually deliver.  That last statement is really true.  Our catalog and web site promise more than we are able to deliver at present.

So, we may well ask ourselves, why have we not had greater success in developing and teaching courses?  We've opted to change the format, which I think will help matters, but the fundamental lack of committed teachers is the central problem.  I have teachers who hardly ever contact me, even if I send them an email.  When I call a faculty meeting, only a few stalwarts show up.  And although they mean well, those among our teachers who have promised me developed courses have as often as not failed to produce them.  In the mean time, the past year has seen three or four teachers leave for other pursuits or mysteriously disappear without a word to me. 

I don't suppose it will be surprising, under these circumstances, that I am frustrated and disappointed in Avalon Center.  It may be that some folks think I should just give it up.  My nine year old daughter suggested that I could do that herself.  One day when I was feeling particularly overwhelmed and miserable, she said, "Well, you could just stop, couldn't you?"   The difficulty is that If I stop, then all the work and money of so many people will be lost and at least a few people will be disappointed.  I have had several email letters from prospective Avalon students who have been writing to say that they admire what we are trying to do even though they cannot afford to take classes right now. 

When I began Avalon Center, I insisted to the members of the Advisory Board, that if it was going to be all about me, then I wouldn't do it.  I am not a know-it-all and cannot teach most of the Avalon Catalog.  Even those fields such as history of magic in which I have a deep interest, I do not yet feel competent to teach because I have not had the time to do the reading and research needed to develop a course.

So, at this point, I am not sure of the prospects for Winter quarter 2007-2008.  I think I will have a couple of my established courses up and running.  I may get the first module of Druidry Today up as well, if I can write a few more lectures this week. 

Saturday is a meeting of the Board of Governors.  They are usually encouraging meetings.  It does me good to have a few people in the same room with me who care about Avalon and sincerely want to help, even if they too have too little energy to contribute much.

I've been thinking of relatives to whom I could write fundraising letters, but have not yet been able to do so.  There are some talks in the works however, which should at least give Avalon Center more visibility in Masonic circles.  Yet, I worry that as we increase our public relations adn advertising, if we do not have any classes to offer and if our online library is still not very far along, what do we have to offer the people who do hear about us?  I feel as if I'm pulling on one end of a rope and the other end is getting shorter.  If I devote more energy to promoting the school, then I devote less to teaching and developing courses, and even less to beating the bushes for new teachers to join us.

Time, perhaps, to post a call for teachers again on the OBOD message board and the AODA yahoo group.  Occasionally, I do get a nibble.  However, it occurred to me over the week end that what I really ought to do is research the cost of putting job notices in the Modern Language Association's job list and equivalent lists in history and other branches of the Humanities.

Despite all these apparent complaints, I am really grateful.  Grateful for all the support and interest so many people have shown.  Grateful for those donors who have made monetary contributions and have shown faith in me.  Grateful to Arianrhod and Dagda for calling upon me to take up this challenge.  If there is one thing that Celtic myths will teach you, it is that even a failed enterprise can make a fine story and indeed tragedies are usually better entertainment that bland success stories.  I have been having fun working on my floor plans for Avalon Center Villa, our castle in the country and thinking and planning about what we will need for that day when we lay the cornerstone.

And too, I cannot let myself lose sight of the fact that the Internet has permitted us to build something out of electrons and light that otherwise we would not have had at all.  If I had been forced to wait until I assembled a local group of teachers and a building to put them in, this dream would be a great deal more dreamlike still.

Samhuinn is the end of Summer (Samios) but the beginning of a new year, a new period of gestation that will bring forth new buds and new shoots in the Spring.  And that is always good comfort.

From the Chancellor's Desk,

Alferian

Good Lord, it's October 1st already!  This hardly seems like a "journal" and more like a "lunal".  But what have I to report from the Underground headquarters of Avalon Center?  Yesterday I attended Pagan Pride, our local event celebrating pagan ways.  There was rather a pronounced druid presence there and I organized a panel on Druidry where I gave a powerpoint presentation on "Druidry Today" and spoke a bit about OBOD.  I'm afraid that I ended up curtailing my presentation on OBOD in order to let the other panel members talk and then felt that time was running short and the audience was restless. The metal folding chairs in our room were mind-bendingly uncomfortable.

In the morning session, I gave a presentation on Avalon Center which was attended by only two people other than my family. Still, it went well and everyone seemed quite stimulated by it.  My impression is that the Minneapolis/St.Paul pagan community, as we call it, is interested in the idea of pulling together to create some permanent institutions, and especially a place. Earth House is an organization that has been around for five years attempting to raise money to fund a "community center" for pagans.  John Stitely, who I hope will be joining our faculty soon, is one of the people involved in that group.  They seem to have established an annual fundraising gathering, which I think is actually held in Wisconsin, but I do not get the impression that they have done much other fund raising, or accumulated anything like the money needed to purchase a house, much less a larger building.

I stopped in at the open house of the little house on the next block which I think could make a good in-town home for Avalon Center.  It has a lot of rooms, a fireplace, a kitchen, and the added feature that its kitchen layout is terrible, so that any family buying it would have to remodel the kitchen immediately.  For our purposes, this doesn't matter.  The trick is finding a patron who will donate enough money to allow us to buy the house outright.  Then any income we make off of renting the facility to others can be applied to paying the taxes and upkeep.  I need to discuss with my lawyer the matter of a non-profit tax-exempt organization owning property because I believe we should be exempt from state taxes as well, but have to file some paperwork.  Anyway, that's a big step.  We need to make it, but at the same time I really want more staff in place to manage it.  We would need a Seneschal along with the property.

However, there is hope.  I met a few people and introduced myself to a few on Sunday at Pagan Pride.  Unfortunately my health intervened to prevent me from attendingon Saturday as I had intended to meet people and hand out brochures.  I must say, Andrew Jacobs, who I finally met, is doing a good job of promoting Temple of the River, handing out leaflets and such.  I was glad he could participate in the Druid panel, particularly as he represents a sort of druidry that is quite different from traditional British druidry.

Now that Pagan Pride is over, I must write my November presentation to the Royal Arch Chapter on Oghams.  I'm rather enjoying creating these powerpoint presentations and delivering them.  I have to overcome my fear of standing up in front of a crowd and introducing myself.  Wearing purple robes will, I hope, permit people to remember me.

I am wishing now that I could indeed get my classes together to offer locally in a face-to-face setting.  It would require much patience as we advertised and recruited students and I would have to require at least three students to make it worth my time.  And, of course, it remains to be seen whether pagans will pay for instruction.  They will pay for books and shiny things and robes and such, but as long as there are self-appointed priests and teachers around offering free instruction, a lot of people are  likely to opt for that.  I think that some of my audience found my presentation on druidry informative, but it is hard to say.

Besides all this, the weekend also held the Feast of Tishri at the Scottish Rite Temple.  We took Linnea and she was good even though it was like slow torture.  The brethren dragged out dinner and the ceremony much longer than necessary.  The logistics of people getting up and sitting back down was handled badly, so that it became like a game of musical chairs.  For some reason (probably traditional) they inserted half an hour of entertainment by a very fine pianist between dinner and the ring presentations.  I think this was a mistake.  I would have been much better to have music as a processional for the Elus and the 50-year S.R. recipients and seat them all in the semicircle.  Then have music played throughout the process of cycling everyone and their spouses through the line to receive rings and take pictures and sit down again.  And, gracious!  They should have thought it would be better to have everyone sit down in the seat they had vacated, rather than on the other end of the circle.  Oh well.  If I criticize too much, I'll find myself master of ceremonies!

Despite the terrible length of the evening, receiving my 14th degree ring was a marvelous feeling.  They gave us a scroll with a little thing written on it called "If your Ring could talk" and it tells about what it signifies.  I think I may enchant mine so that it does talk.  I need that sort of positive reinforcement.  However, there is not denying that it is a good boost for my self-esteem to receive such an honor and congatulations and handshakes and all that.  The plain gold band bears a Latin inscription inside that says "Joined by Virtue, Death cannot separate [us]"  Which can be taken a number of ways:  Joined to our Scottish Rite brethren by the bonds of our pursuit of virtue; or as I prefer, Virtue transcends death and binds us intrinsically to the Supreme Being and Grand Architect symbolised by the equilateral triangle and the Yod on the outside of the ring.  Yod is the first letter of YHVH, of course, but it is also the number 1, which is the name of Deity for the Elves, Olan, meaning The One.  It is part of the Hermetic traditon also, of course.  And Kabbalistically, 1 is the number of Kether, the first emanation from the supernal mystery of Creation, essentially the creative force in the Cosmos.

It is very hard to make the point in a single presentation that drudiry or masonry are equally not bound to any single religion and partake of the perennial philosophy.  I get up in front of an audience of strangers at Pagan Pride, for example, and am troubled by not knowing where to begin.  I don't know how much or how little they may know.  They may have read a great deal, may have studied Hermeticism, but chances are, if they are Wiccan, they have mostly studied their own Craft.  This is a bit like addressing any religious audience that has only received a religious education and probably never gone any further.  No matter how much school they have had, they aren't very likely to have studied philosophy, much less Hermetics.  Moreover, the level of historical knowledge in America is so dismally small that filling people in on the history of druidry is rather daunting.  I'm still reading Hutton's book "The Druids" and enjoying it very much, but a 20 minute presentation can hardly convey the complex and detailed social and cultural history he presents.  Even ten units may not be enough!

Well, must go get Linnea off to school.

More anon.

/|\  Alferian

Here I sit once more in the dungeon office.  Someday I want a tower office. 

Anyway, I've spent an hour or two today writing up the minutes of the last Board of Governors meeting from the Merlin's notes.  Posted them to the forum and now need to mail copies to the governors themselves.  I still have not sat down to organize my to-do cards.  Just flitting about like a butterfly instead, which anyone will tell you is not an efficient way to be a Highly Effective Person.

But I never said I was, did I?

My gentlemen's Scotch and cigar club met last night and I sat up around the fire pit drinking waters of life and smoking the death sticks for far too long.  Stumbled to bed at 1:30 a.m.  But the funny thing is on these perfect, cool, early Autumn nights, the longer you stay up looking at the stars and listening to the night sounds, the more inclined you are to continue staying awake. 

I need to be off to bed tognight too, shortly, but decided, rather foolishly, to toss in another load of laundry in the washer after I had finished watching part one of Fellowship of the Ring.  What a beautiful film it is.  Meanwhile, what I had intended to do today was to finish the re-painting on my office and see if I couldn't at least make a start on putting in the shelves in the closet which I've been wanting to do for months. 

I did some correspondence with the personnel committee today as well, regarding a very promising applicant.  I must remember to phone her Monday if she's free to do our little interview.  However, as one thing always leads to another, this has reminded me that among my still unfinished work is the Faculty and Staff Handbook and the Faculty contract.  I know nothing about writing legal contracts, so I shall have to draft something and have my lawyer look at it I suppose.  But just that extra step prevents me from even making a start.  Really quite annoying, my procrastination on these things.  Sigh.

At the moment the talks for Pagan Pride have to take priority, but I wish I could just get them done and not drag out the time spent on them.  Probably no one will even show up, and I'm perfectly capable of speaking off the cuff, but I like to prepare notes.  Back in the day, I used to always prepare careful lecture notes for my classes and then go in front of the podium and almost completely ignore them.

Reading Harry Potter to my daughter this evening and then watching the film of Fellowship of the Ring, I was struck by some interesting resonances.  I realized that Rowling's idea of a "horcrux" (which so far as I know, is a made-up word out of her Awen), is quite similar to the One Ring.  Sauron, who like Voldemort (and Darth Vader) is called "The Dark Lord" places part of his soul into the ring, so that the ring being separated from him physically he cannot even maintain physical form.  Voldemort has similar problems, and it is something I have long thought of magical devices, particularly rings.  A ring of power contains part of the wielder's soul, especially if he or she actually makes the thing, from scratch, as it were. 

In Rowling's version of reality, the dividing of a soul is inherently evil. Well, the reality I live in is a bit more complex than that.  Because, a soul is not really "divided" when invested in a magical object.  The soul, being in fact infinite in potentiality, it cannot exactly be divided.  Or, put with more mathematical correctness (metaphorically speaking), it can be infinitely divided.  But when creating a ring of power (which many magicians do), they are storing their pranic energy, their soul-force, as it were.  Or, to use our convenient druidic Welsh, the nwyfre.  The point of storing nwyfre is much the same as storing electricity or some kind of fuel - you have it when you want it and you don't have to try to instantly generate a whole large quantity of it.  However, when it comes to nwyfre, the stuff is not really quantifiable as it does not belong to the material cosmos.  It underlies the material cosmos, therefore it can only be thought of qualitatively.

Of course, it is a bit of a challenge for most of us to get our heads around a "thing" which cannot be quantified, or to understand what "qualitative" measurement might be.  Boggles the language.  Especially, the language of science, in which we are used to thinking.  Measurement implies quantity.  Quality is a slippery word, as anyone who has read Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance will know.  Yet, when we speak of placing a quantity of nwyfre into a ring, it is really a matter of placing some part of our soul's qualities into it.  But you see the difficulty right away:  words like "some" and "part" are quantitative.  Our language is constructed to speak of quantities, as if everything can be measured and if it cannot be measured, well, it doesn't really exist does it?

But imagination cannot be measured.  Thoughts cannot be measured.  And magic likewise cannot be measured.  It can only be appreciated qualitatively.  It is comprised, we might say, of patterns, but any representation of such patterns is a mere shadow of the reality.  For example in essential calculus numbers and equations and a number of other sorts of functions are used to notate magical qualities, or what we might call essential patterns -- that is patterns of Essence, or nwyfre.  But the notations are representations and are no closer to the real thing they describe than a map is to a landscape.  The human mind embraces maps and charts, loves them, lavishes attention on them in fact.  The human observer who can never travel to the lands described by the maps and charts will even fetishize the maps to the point where they become the object of desire themselves and what they represent is more or less forgotten because it cannot be approached in any other way. 

We do this all the time with photographs.  They are representations, but we are infatuated with them, sometimes because of their beauty, sometimes because of their horror, sometimes because of the tantalizing promises of wish-fulfillment they dangle before our eyes.  But magical rings are also representations, vessels, as we might say, for nwyfre that can only be described qualitatively, not quantitatively.  With ordinary sight we see only the representation, the vessel, and not the thing itself, the reality, the essence. 

Yesterday I spend a deal of time in my garden thinking of Masonic light.  The three S.R. degrees I went through (or rather watched) on Thursday night left me feeling drained.  I am so affected by them, these morality plays.  All three were marvelously affecting and we are, alas, not allowed nearly enough time for processing.  The Scottish Rite of Freemasonry is a marvelous system and it is at its core magical.  The presenters obviously feel that if one does not hear everything clearly, or see every detail, or process it intellectually, that is really for the best.  Like most mystery schools, the Scottish Rite is based on the idea that our subconscious minds do most of the work of integration and understanding, and if our heart learns the lesson, it hardly matters whether the speaking mind can articulate it. 

But, you know, I'm a horrible word chap.  Love words. Love to articulate things in words.  It's a challenge, and I usually don't ever know if anyone else can understand me, but I still do it.  So, I was thinking:  You know its about time someone wrote another book like Albert Pike's Morals and Dogma.  The title and the language of the book are so outdated as to be almost incomprehensible to a fellow of the 21st century.  But as I've spent a number of years reading 19th century writers, it isnt' illegible to me.  Pike is quite marvelous, but one wants to paraphrase him so that others might understand.  And coming to him as a druid, I am particularly cognizant of the sort of pagan threads that run through his ideas.  He gives a nod to "pagans" and even druids from time to time, but the imagery he uses is thoroughly imbued with a reverence and love of nature and the natural world.  Moreover, when he says, "even the pagans agreed that..." he is pandering to his Christian readers but is really pointing out that most of (if not indeed all of) our moral ideas about virtue and the good life and self-perfection came from pre-Christian philosophers.

We might say that the word "pagan" sort of means "extra-Christian" which is to say, outside of Christianity and the body of ideas and words that have been built up around the religion of Christian Rome for two thousand years.  "Pagans" in this broad sense, are always on the margins of the dominant imperial culture which has borrowed most of its ideas and images from earlier non-Christian and non-Judaic cultural streams.  I don't say this to discredit Christianity as a living religion and faith, but perhaps to pop its sometimes excessively large bubble of false pride.  It is like a person who takes great pride in his own ideas and expressions, but has actually borrowed them from someone else.  I shouldn't exactly call it plagiarism these days, because it is for the most part unwitting.  But there it is.  And the borrowers did pretty likely know they were borrowing at the time.  I can't understand people who represent someone else's ideas as their own, so I really cannot speak to the thought process or motivation in this case.

In any case, I won't wander down that dark alley.  It is the Scottish Rite that interests me at the moment because its methods are really quite effective, and yet I feel they could be so much improved.  Just imagine, if you happen to know about the S.R. degrees, what it would be like to take one degree a year, to live in a community that valued and respected those degrees as actual offices in a working community.  Wear the sash, jewel, and apron of the degree, even just for a year, or until you and your mentor in a higher degree feel that you have truly learned the lesson of that degree.

One degree, for example, let's just say, teaches one to be a good and honest business man, a just employer, caring about one's employees, taking care of them or their widows and orphans if necessary.  How long would it take a person in today's America to learn that lesson to heart?  Not "by heart" but "to heart."  I don't mean memorizing stuff, though that is always a good part of learning.  It needs more than memorizing to reach the stage of knowledge.  To really "know" something, one must understand it, take it to heart, feel it, do it. 

I see the potential in these degrees for very rich experiences.  Take a course module in Justice, for example.  Take that as a degree.  Wear the apron and place the title before your name on a daily basis, not just a couple times a month in the lodge or temple, but in daily life.  That would be interesting!

And, for those of you in the know, I don't mean Mormonism.  I don't mean taking it as a religion in that way, but taking it as a philosophical school, a true mystery school.  It's all there, already created by Albert Pike, Mackey and all those old ancestral brothers of ours. But the way it is executed is, in my opinion, too fast and not individual enough.  What if each candidate went through each degree ceremony, not just a principal candidate?   I don't know.  The camaraderie of the class of men is a very valuable part of the process, so maybe that isn't necessary, but I think it is actually a good thing for the Masons themselves that the classes are smaller today than they were 30 years ago.  One older brother at dinner told me that in 1969 when he went through the Rite, there were 150 in his class.  It  must have been impressive, yet it seems to me that one might feel a little lost in the crowd.  Less like a philosophical school and more like boot camp induction into an army.

Well, my laundry has stopped and I should throw it in the dryer and then off to bed.

Pip toodles,

Alferian

I wish that I could keep my glasses clean.  I've never had such trouble with a pair of glasses before and these are not my first set of progressive bifocals either.  The bally things seem to be always out of focus. 

I also wish I could afford to get meself a full sized flat monitor to go with my power book.  As much as I maintain a great affection for the little lad, my eyesight isn't what it used to be and I am always having to increase the font size of things to make them visible on the screen when seated at my desk.  But then that would just clutter up my already hopelessly cluttered desk even more and spoil my view of the old map of York that I have hanging in front of me as a reminder of the old home town.

Ah!  How I miss the fish-rich Ouse and the old Foss and all the book shops and pubs, even though now that I am gluten intolerant I can't have ale, real or otherwise.  Sigh.  Dairy intolerance has forced me to drink my tea without milk too, dash it.  Rum deal all around.  Fortunately I can still drink rum.  And whiskey.  I'm sure that will be next.  I hardly dare smoke a pipe or cigar anymore because they inevitably set my mucus membranes all at sixes and sevens and I can't breathe properly when I'm asleep, even when hooked up to the old VPAP.

I think my sleep has been marginally improved these past couple of days as I've found myself feeling almost human.  One reason for my journalistic lapse of weeks here is that I've been taken up with reherasals for the part of Jubela in the 3rd degree of Masonry rite.  I'm sworn to secrecy on the secret "arts, parts, and points" of the fraternity, of course, and will get my bottom paddled no doubt it I go into explanations.  Fortunately for the curious reader, the whole ritual has been published in Duncan's Masonic Monitor and Lester's Look to the East.  Duncan even includes all the secret signs and handshakes and all, dash him for a party pooper.  It's just spoiling things for the lads to give away those secrets.  People who suppose that Masonic secrets are either sinister or keys to some powerful "secret society" are letting their imaginations run away with them.  Makes good novels and movies, but the reality is far different.

Masons are a private club and the model of all later fraternities, whether the Greeks at university or druid orders and magical lodges.  The degrees are symbolic dramas intended to stimulate the mind to further inquiry and curiosity about philosophy and religion.  The Catholic church and other fundamentalist religions based on the Bible which believe themselves to be the sole posessors of absolute truth and right doctrine are quite understandably disgruntled with Masonry, which essentially teaches, with those who have ears to hear, that stories are stories and legends are useful, but they are obviously not to be confused with historical facts.  Legends are dramatic, poetic, and fun, especially when acted out.  But when mistaken for journalism or historiography, God help us.  Which, alas, is what practically every brand of Christianity has managed to do.  Having discarded the original structure of a mystery school in which the outer order teaches legends and the inner order (or higher degrees) teach people how to think more philosophically about legends, the various churches of our Western Christian culture have ended up taking the legends literally and looking rather foolish to anyone on the outside. 

I was raised a Christian in an evangelical brand of Lutheranism.  Leave it to a German to take things literally.  But you know, I'm two quarters German, so takes one to know one, and I also appreciate that Germans have given us Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Goethe, Shilling, Schubert, and God knows how many other geniuses.  Just got rather a bad name in the past century for being incorrigible militarists.  Now in the 21st century the United States seems to be taking on that role, thanks to our pea-brained political leaders.

It's quite refreshing reading Albert Pike.  I've been reading my way through "Morals and Dogma" as part of my Scottish Rite studies.  First night tonight and I'm very excited.  I do wish my brother Masons would restrain themselves from being to bally bored with the whole thing, and appologetic.  I told one of them once that I had signed up as a card-carrying member of the Scottish Rite Research Society and he made disparaging remarks about it, and particularly about Heredom, the society's annual publication.  What prompts Masons to join an organization and then belittle it?  Once I've been around a bit longer, I plan to give the lodge a good talking to about this point.

I've been pondering whether I'll ever be invited to join the officers line and whether I want to do so.  I would like the honor and title of it and to be a past master and all that worshipful stuff, but on the other hand, I think it would be bound to distract from my study of Masonry.  It's rather like being administrator of Avalon Center interfering with my practice of druidry.  The old saw has it that those who can, do; and those who can't, teach.  But the truth is that those who chose to teach for a living (and because they like passing on their experience to brilliant minds) haven't the time to "do" their art.  I was sort of glad for a few years there that I had not gotten a full-time professorship after grad school because it potentially allowed me time to write.  However, I squandered that time pretty much and didn't finish the revision of the first book of "Marzanx: The Hidden Kingdom" my novel about the Rhûzamedi.  Then we had Linnea and my time has been taken up watching here and catering to her needs.  There is nothing you can grow that takes more attention and time than a human child.

Well, thank God she's relatively healthy.  Got her mother's constitution.  But that doesn't prevent me from spending 15 hours a day worrying about her.  I can't imagine how fathers of old managed to just sort of ignore their children and leave it to the wife to take care of them.  But I suppose when you are busy and away from home that's easier to do.  Working at home and being my own boss, it is all too difficult not to make my daughter always my first thought. 

Hope it doesn't just spoil her.  Trying to inculcate good manners and common sense.

But this journal is supposed to be about what is going on in the Chancellor's office.  So, let me ellucidate how my Masonic studies pertain.  For one thing, I am planning to leverage this captive audience of brothers to give some talks on druidry.  Druidry in the form of modern druid orders is closely related to Masonry, as are practically all magical lodges.  1717 was the year of the formation of the Grand Lodge of England and also the Druid Order, which subsequently became known as the Ancient Druid Order and gave birth to organizational children and grandchildren.  Anyway, I need to write up and deliver a pithy talk on this relationship and explain what druidry is (always a challenge), which I consider to be helpful in general when I am called upon to explain what druidry is to other people.  It also gives me an opportunity to explain what Avalon Center is to those who haven't the foggiest idea.

I'm on the books, nominally, to give a talk about druidry, OBOD, and Avalon Center at Pagan Pride this year.  There is supposed to be a druid panel, but I am not sure how many druids will participate.  I think I asked the members of Geal-Darach Grove whether they could participate, but I don't recall getting much of a response.  Giovanna always replies to posts to the Yahoo group but can't recall if anyone else did.  Ray is probably busy teaching.

Mariah Sheehy said she can participate, so we have a bit of ADF representation.  I can talk about the AODA too, but that's just me again, alas, which looks a bit stupid.  Perhaps I'll try contacting Doc and see if I can find anything on the Temple of the River chaps.

Other than that, the office of the Chancellor has been wishing for an administrative assistant but not finding time to actually go out and beat the bushes.  Maybe I'll find someone at Pagan Pride.  But, I also need to put together some sort of print version of our catalog.  Well, I have student handbooks I can hand out, I suppose.  I think I should have a banner made for the table too with the old coat of arms and all that.  It continues to be very hard for me to take ACDS as seriously as I should because so few of the others involved take it seriously.  For the most part i think the teachers and governors do take it seriously, but they don't express themselves to me on the matter very often and so I don't get enough positive feedback.  The result is that it all seems to me (its principal creator) like a bit of a conjuring trick and I am a bit embarrassed to stand up in front of people and represnt it as a serious non-profit organization.  But it is, of course.  Just a very very under-staffed and under-funded one.

The lack of patrons also makes it hard for me to carry on very seriously and energetically.  Of all the people who have expressed their support for Avalon, very few indeed have contributed to it in any monetary way.  The result of this, for me, is to feel that they do not trust me or do not take me seriously, or else that I am not doing a good enough job at convincing them to part with their cash.  I hate asking for money and I do not like selling things.  I like few things less than fund-rasing phone calls, and so I am reluctant to press my suit with potential patrons. 

One thing I ought to do is write up an appeal to have it put into a mailing from OBOD.  It would go out to  OBOD members at least, which would be a start.  If I could make it work like a chain letter, then we might reach quite a lot of people.  But how many of them would take out their checkbooks and write us a donation?

In theory every person who visits our web site can see our donations page, and yet, I think not a single person has ever donated money through our web site.  Everyone who has supported this enterprise has been a personal friend or relation, or member of the staff.  I suppose that is not unusual in non-profit start-ups, but it is a bit disappointing. One would like to inspire one's readers with enough emotion and faith in the vision to be moved to toss a few bucks into the offering plate, as it were.

So, I'm left feeling that I have not done a good enough job of putting forward the benefits of a druidic studies center.  It's a bally obscure thing, druidic studies, and so I should not be surprised that few people see the point.  Environmentalist organizations have great emotional appeal.  You know the sort of thing:  Your water is being poisoned. Your food is being poisoned.  The wolves, the grizzlies, the harp seals, all in danger of extinction unless you send in a check to help our good work.  Well, druidic studies hardly has that sort of immediate emotional appeal. 

What does one say? Our organization aims to encourage and teach the arts of imagination, the re-enchantment of the world, and greater spiritual sensitivity to nature, trees, plants, and animals.  It is the deep spiritual side of ecology or environmentalism, not teaching it as either science or dogma, but teaching that spriit is rooted in nature and, as Albert Pike puts it, the book of nature is God's most perfect holy scripture because it has not passed through the minds and pens of interpreters and been all muddled.  The book of nature is there for every human soul to read and understand.  Druidry encourages and teaches one to approach the divine through nature and to learn about oneself and one's inner life and soul through communion with nature.  This is in distinction to spiritual traditions that ask one to approach God and the soul through the writings of men and through moral rules and watching the performance of rituals without actually understanding the power of myth and legend.  Druidry as part of the bardic tradition, embraces myth and legend as such, not as "truth" or as "history" or as something to argue about, but as stories that can enrich our spiritual lives as well as entertain us, appealing to both mind and emotions.

All of which, as you see, is a bit hard to "sell."  It's not soap and it isn't cars.  It can't really be sold with sex, nor can one appeal to peoples lust for power.  Magical lodges have sometimes fallen to the level of Madison Avenue in appealing to people's base desires for power over their neighbors, and their feelings of powerlessness in life.  Religions appeal to the emotion of fear, either by threatening Hellfire, or promising a better life in the hereafter, or whatnot.  Wicca, in its commercialized form as promoted by publishers and their stables of authors, all too often stoop to the base appeal of sex.  Sadly, I think this is why Wicca is so popular today, and appeals so particularly to younger people.  The idea of getting together and chanelling the energy of a nature god and goddess with a bunch of other naked people has an irrisistable appeal to young people bubbling over with sexual urges.  To older more paunchy people like me, it is quite a horrifying prospect, however titillating in theory.  Wicca and witchcraft generally hardly have anything to do with nudity or sex -- no more than anything else anyway.  But the thing has been promoted that way with both base and high-minded intentions by different people.

A friend of mine remarked in a recent conversation that Wicca seems, ironically, to share many of the characteristics of Catholicism, such as an obsession with proper ritual forms and rules and endlessly arguing with people who learnt their Wicca somewhere else, and endlessly denouncing everyone else's Wicca as wrong and illegitimate, if not in fact heresy.  There are some druids who engage in these sorts of childish games too. There's some French druids and Irish druids who seem to do little more than anathematize each other in the belief that this somehow will make them look more legitimate. What poppycock!

So, it is hard to sell.  There are fools that give druidry a bad name, and more fools who give paganism in general a bad name, and precious few who are serious about the pursuit of Light and understanding through an engagement with nature.  Instead, like most religions, pagans too often seem to be pursuing emotional thrills and self-congratulations through engagement with ideas created by other human beings, but which they mistake for some sort of absolute truths kept secret from the uninitiated.  Such religion gives religion a bad name, yet there you are.  It's most of them.  They appeal to the very human vice of wanting to be superior to everyone else and have a reason to feel smug.  In psychological terms, they appeal to the ego's fear of insignificance. 

Druidry, on the other hand, takes the ego's insignificance rather as a given.  Individuals are important as parts of the great web of being in nature, but their egos hardly ever have a real grip on what is going on.  They can't.  The ego is the center of human consciousness.  It is the part of our mind we use for talking, for engaging with other human beings.  It is not the part of our larger psyche that we use for engaging with nature, where words are unnecessary, and indeed a hindrance to understanding.  Nobody loves languages better than I do, but unless a druid gets beyond words to the wordless realm of the unconscious mind, he or she is never going to truly engage with Mother Nature on her own terms.  You don't really talk to the oak trees with words, you know.  Your ego, dependent on language (indeed constructed out of language) translates what the oak says into words, but obviously, this is even further from a reliable translation that translating Chinese to English. 

Madison Avenue and TV are just utterly unequipped to sell such subtle and intangible ideas to people.  Even if we take the example of American schools and colleges, the analogy is dim.  Schools almost invariably sell themselves on the basis that students will get a "superior" education, meaning that they will learn and retain lots of knowledge, and perhaps also learn some Christian values (if its a Christian school), or learn lots of math and science, which, as everyone knows, will get you those high-paying jobs in the world of technology.  And the whole bally culture is propagandized around the consumption and purchase of technology, whether electronics or motor vehicles.  Work, recreation, hobbies -- in our current culture everything revolves around machines.  It's like Aldous Huxley's Brave New World.

Druidry, on the other hand, is based in the idea that such a culture is missing the boat.  That it is in fact both spiritually shallow and philosophically misguided, and for the most part destructive to the web of life upon which our very existence depends.  This current worship of technology promulgated by Madison Avenue and, to a large degree supported by our educational mainstream, ignores almost everything that makes human beings worthwhile.  Very little of this propaganda is encouraging even the small human virtue of toolmaking.  It only encourages using tools that have been invented by other people (for the most part).  This produces nothing but worker bees, and leaves them completely ignorant to the higher virtues of human genius. 

Good lord, outside of a Masonic lodge, does anyone today even teach the names of of the four cardinal virtues, let alone educate children or adults in how to cultivate those virtues in themselves?  Prudence, Temperance, Strength, and Justice.  Of these the first two are almost completely ignored in American culture.  Justice is given lip service, but interpreted in opposite ways by the political left and the political right.  Strength is touted by Madison Avenue and Hollywood as a purely physical virtue.  Physical strength, not mental or moral strength, or strength of character, are usually offered up.  But even there, the "teachers" don't get beyond telling their eager pupils to buy a Bowflex or a membership in a gym.  Sports heroes are idolized, but the actual playing of sports is neglected after about the age of 17.  So, even in the limited, blinkered understanding of the virtue of Strength, we fail as a culture.

It's no good promoting one of the virtues at the expense of all the others.  If we do not engage in Justice, Prudence, and Temperance, in our souls, what is the good of devoting ourselves to Strength of the body?  And what good is strength of the body without strength of character and mind?  Druidry and the bardic tradition, in my own understanding of it, are devoted to the arts of imagination, which is to say really, Art.  Artistic expression and the connection between people through art is emotional and intellectual, in engages the mind and the senses in ways that are quite different from participation in sports and games.  I do not think one is superior tothe other or should be privileged over the other.  In the Irish mythic system Ulster is the representation of Strength, or Battle.  Munster is the representation of Art and Service.  Service is essentially grounded not in an unjust class system or slavery (in the ideal philosophical sense) but rather in the idea of Charity.  Love of others makes service possible and enduring. 

Believe me, I struggle with this every day.  You cannot serve other people if you think them to be ungrateful and uncaring.  Charity is a two-way street.  But it is the very glue that cements our human society together.  One person helping another.  It starts with the way we have to raise our children as a species.  Homo sapiens is designed is such a way that our offspring need years of supervision and protection before they can begin to take care of themselves and survive.  The result of this is a structural dependency in human beings that stays with us throughout life.  We must take care of each other.  The weird ideology that says people ought to be rugged individualists and take care of themselves flies in the face of this fundamental human truth.  It is true that individual human beings can go off and try to be islands unto themselves, and there are some who by nature seem to prefer being hermits.  That's all well and good, but the reality of it is that we are, for the most part, dependent on the charity of others, we are dependent upon the love of others and their love is dependent in turn on our love for them, our gratitude if nothing else, but often our mutual desire to return the favor if we can.

This is, of course, if you know anything about Freemasonry, right at the heart of it.  And I believe it is at the heart of druidry too.  Druidry is not about rituals or about worshipping old pagan gods.  It is fundamentally about recognizing the interdependence of ourselves with our fellow human beings and acting upon that recognition.  Moreover, it is about realizing that we are actually interdependent upon and with the whole of the natural world.  In other words, charity, as one of the three great spiritual virtues (along with Faith and Hope) must be extended to Nature as a whole, the more-than-human world.

Just as no man is an island, in the words of Donne, our species cannot be an island either.  We've been trying to take over the planet and ignore other species for centuries and have succeeded in just about destroying our natural habitat.  We are, as a species, killing ourselves off with our current religious and ideological ideas because they are so remorselessly and blindly homo-centric.  We hardly deserve the name "sapiens' with such rotten thinking going on as we've seen for the past few hundred years.  I'm encouraged, in a sad sort of way, by Albert Pike, writing more than a hundred years ago, describing the stupidity and flaws of both Republics and Despotisms.  Neither political system sets the wise in leadership.  It may be the fatal flaw of homo sapiens that it cannot escape its own political systems and find something that does not promote the most craven and power-mad individuals either by means of force, on the one hand, or demagoguery on the other. (I say, "demagoguery" is a mighty ugly-looking word.  Quite suits its meaning.  Leading the demos, the mob.)

Pedagogy, demagogy.  We suppose pedagogy to merely mean teaching (it actually originally meant the chap who walked the kids to school to keep them safe from being mugged).  But demagogy, as Wikipedia puts it so well is "a political strategy for obtaining and gaining political power by appealing to the popular prejudices, fears and expectations of the public — typically via impassioned rhetoric and propaganda, and often using nationalist or populist themes."

All of which is quite well understood by the Bardic tradition.  The bards of old, and the poets of today, see through demagoguery and propaganda, religious dogmas, and self-puffheadedness in general.  This is, to my mind, one of the great values of a bardic college as an educational institution. 

But, of course, it is quite natural that outsiders might say, "Yes, well, I can see that. But why does your school have to include all this bally nonsense about magic and Celticism and old pagan gods and whatnot?"  And that is the quetion for which I do not have a witty retort.  What is the point of druidic studies being druidic?  Why can't it just be common sense?  Well, I suppose one answer is that its all part of a tradition and that the Celtic myths and legends have long been the bearers of lessons for life that are not found in the legends of the Bible.

That, I suppose, is one of the reasons that Freemasons broke away and created modern druidry in the first place, back in the 18th century.  They saw in this British and Irish traditional material something that told different stories and taught different lessons than the Judaic and Greek and Roman materials that dominated their culture and dominate Masonic legends.  Masonry, though founded on religious tolerance, is based on Biblical legends and particularly on the legend of Hiram Abiff, which is not in the Bible but based on the biblical stories of King Solomon and his temple.  I agree with Lon Milo DuQuette in his assessment of this angle of Masonry, namely that the legend of HIram Abiff calls attention to the fact that the story of Solomon's Temple is legendary, not historical.  Its the stuff of bards -- or ought to be understood in that way.  It is the stuff of theater, bearing no more relationship to historical facts than Shakespeare's Macbeth does to Scottish history, or Hamlet to the history of Denmark.  Maybe even less, if DuQuette's thesis is correct.

So in the Chancellor's office this week we are thinking about what might make a good sales pitch to potential donors and to that audience I may get at Pagan Pride or in lodge rooms round about town. 

Better stop writing in my bally journal and get on with it.

But first I have some boxes to make and wand bags to sew and wands to get in the mail to customers...

A.

/|\

A lousy topic if ever there was one; however, I've been under the weather more often than not in the past few weeks and it has little to do with the weather.  Bad sleep and bad digestion.  My wee lassie and I had a hike on Tuesday morning and then went for brunch at Denny's nearby the park where we were walking and birdwatching.  I carefully avoided anything with gluten, including putting ketchup on my hash browns because of the bloody wheat vinegar that is in most commercial ketchup; yet, I still could not escape unscathed.  Probably the hash browns were fried up in butter and so my dairy intolerance has left me with the unpleasant reactions and weakness overall.  Yesterday, after we finally retrieved my lady wife from her office, I collapsed and went to sleep about 6 p.m. and slept for 12 hours with only the usual interruptions. 

So, my spirits are low and I am not getting much work done.  I'm trying hard to finish a wand that needs to be enchanted while the moon is waxing, but I'm not sure I'll even manage that, the way I'm feeling today.  Fortunately, LK has a play date with a friend today so I at least don't have to worry about supervising her and entertaining her while trying to clean house and address my projects.  She and I had a brief exchange sitting on the couch this morning.  I said, I wish my life were simpler.  Just a job and a paycheck.  How lovely that would be.  No taste for bizarre clothes or hats, no inner voices telling me to create things.  No talents to go to waste.  How lovely that would be.  Anyone who envies a creative artist really has no idea what its like.  My wee girl told me that I didn't have to run Avalon Center if I didn't want to.  I agreed that that was true, but if I give up, then it ceases to be.  There is no one else to carry on with it.  Of course, there are other schools and centers out there.  But essentially, it takes me a great deal of energy to remain optimistic, dynamic, and positive enough to be a leader of a group enterprise like this.  And at the moment my body is using up all the energy that might be otherwise used to create those positive emotions.

But I said to the girl, I said, I'm in low spirits and I've learned never to make decisions when I'm in low spirits.  The only thing to do is wait until the wind changes.  Yes, that's a good analogy.  My body is like an old sailing ship and from time to time I am becalmed with not wind in my sails and there is nothing to do but wait for the wind to return and blow me somewhere else.  It's a good analogy in another way too because the wind does not always blow in the direction you want to sail, so in order to get where you want to go you have to usually tack across the wind, using its energy to take you on an indirect course towards your destination.  Avalon Center is a bit like that too.

For the past week I've been trying out a new architectural drawing program called "Punch! Home Design Studio".  At first glance it seemed like it did all sorts of cool and useful things that would make architectural drawing much faster than simply using Adobe Illustrator.  However, the more I've used it the more maddening it seems to get.  It lacks some fundamental features.  For instance, it has libraries of rooms and furniture and so forth that you can paste into your drawing, but it seems to have no way to copy and paste your own creations into the libraries.  It automatically connects walls together, but not all of them.  And when you highlight a section to copy (such as a large bay window that you want to use over again), it picks up the extra walls attached to what you've highlighted even though it doesn't tell you beforehand that there are walls attached to what you've selected.  Arrrrrrghhh!  There seem to be no tutorials and the manual that came with the software is the usual sort of useless manual that just goes through each command and feature and tells you what it does, not how to use it or how to solve problems.  Sigh.

I'm about ready to give up on that too.  I hate learning new software without a teacher.  I wish I had a teacher for this one.  Maybe I need to go back to the School of Architecture.  But, I don't really want to deal with all the engineering and details anyway.  I just want to draw the floorplans and elevations so that I can turn them over to an architect to produce professional renderings, and much later, working blueprints.

Sigh.  What is the point of doing all this when I have no inkling of a financial source to permit it to be carried out?  Hope, I suppose.

On the bright side, I was, out of the blue, today contacted by a Ph.D. in Celtic languages and literature who has experience in on-line course design and who is interested in joining our faculty.  Crazy, huh?  Well, I will have to pursue that and hope it works out.  I have a hard time getting over disappointments, especially when my spirits are low. 

Well, at least I can say that today I mounted the under-cabinet radio/CD player in the kitchen and cleaned out all the dust behind the refrigerator.  I even walked the dog!  Kudos to me.

I've bought a lovely collection of colored index cards to use to organize and color-code my to-do items.  It's been about a week now and I haven't been able to sit down to do that.  Sheesh. Day after tomorrow the Renaissance Festival starts, so I'll be out there bright and early doing calligraphy.  Must get all my bits and bobs ready for that. 

Yours truly,

Eeyore

We decided to get my daughter an old iBook 300 for her ninth birthday and it arrived this week, so naturally I've been busy in all the spare moments explaining things to her and today we went to get it a new battery and the software and hardware needed for her to connect to our wireless internet network.  We'll see if all that works.  Meantime, I found a really cool software program that is used for designing houses and landscaping.  I bought it to speed up my work on Avalon Center's physical campus designs and, I hope, render them in attractive presentation form to show to potential patrons and donors to the Center.  However, predictably, the new program required me to upgrade my OS from Panther to Tiger and so now I am learning the world of wonders programmed into Mac OS 4 -- Owl learning how Tigger works.

Today has been nothing but running from one doctors appointment to another and to the computer store in between.  In less than an hour I have to be off to the lodge to rehearse the role of Jubela (the first of the three "ruffians") in the 3rd degree ritual drama.   --- and then of course the doorbell just rang and it was a fundraiser.  Arrrrrrgggggg!

I'm quite sympathetic to fundraisers as I'm trying to learn how to do it myself and want to get some people to help raise funds for Avalon Center.  But I really hate door-to-door fundraising and phone calls.  It works, of course, especially on weak-minded, soft-hearted chaps like me, but I would feel guilty of coersion applying such methods myself.  People need to be given the time to think and ponder their budgets. Too much fundraising of this sort aims to manipulate people's charitable emotions at the expense of their family's budget.  Now, I know that many American households (especially in my neighborhood) have two incomes and spend loads of money on stuff (like computers) and that perhaps that money would be better put to political action groups or charities.  But it is a powerful moral dilemma to know where to draw that line.

Jesus reputedly said, give away everything you own and follow me.  Well, I don't think I've ever met a Christian who actually did that, but Jesus also said that it was easier for a camel to get through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to get into heaven.  This is a remark typical of Jesus, who liked to talk in witticisms and metaphors.  It is often taken to mean that just as it is clearly impossible for a camel to be put through the eye of a needle, so no rich man will ever get into heaven.  I had a biblical studies teacher once explain that in old Jerusalem there was a particularly small gate into the city which was called (in Hebrew of course) "The Eye of the Needle" due to its smallness.  For a laden camel to enter the city through this gate it had to be completely unloaded and still had to stoop down.  In other words, not impossible, but the camel had to be divested of all its merchandise (software upgrades as well as electronics).  Possibly the camel could keep its iPod earphones on...  Anyway, this is a lovely metaphor or analogy.  The rich man, carrying the weight of all that stuff (today probably in an SUV) has to divest himself of all of it to "get into heaven." 

But what does it mean to "get into heaven"?  You know that's always been a poser.  The medieval Church (if not the earlier more sophisticated Greek and Jerusalem Christians) developed the idea that Heaven was a particular place, the place of the afterlife, like the Greek Elysian Fields.  Lots of writers developed their own imaginary ideas about what that was like -- playing harps, singing praises to God the Father all day, floating on clouds.  These imaginings must have come from priests and monks.  The Islamic afterlife is considerably more like that imagined by the ancient Norse and the Celts -- a place wherer warriors got to fight all the time and never died and came home at the end of the day to marvelous feasts and lots of attention from the opposite sex (or whatever their preference might be, in the case of the Celts, apparently).  All in all, it is supposed to be a nicer place than here, our mundane earthen lives.  No disease, poverty, though the matter of rank and status was not wholly abandoned, as there certainly were hierarchies of angels (at least in the Roman idea of Heaven). 

But is that what Jesus meant?  I mean, the rest of the story is allegorical or analogical, so is "Heaven" a metaphor too?  A symbol, as it were, of a place within oneself, a paradise of love, charity, and peace, joy, praise of the Deity, appreciation of the sensuous in life, appreciation of beauty?  In short, is not "Heaven" that inner place, temple, or city that we build within our own soul that is as we might say, Enlightenment? 

I do not mean to suggest that Heaven or the Celtic Otherworlds are not real, that they are "only" symbols.  The enlightened mind sees that realities are also symbols and symbols realities and that there is no distinct separation between those categories.  So, yes, you might die and really go to a lovely place with young, immortal people, doing the things you loved to do in life, and experience an existence of pleasure and complete health.  It might be for eternity, or it might be simply timeless so that if you tired of it you could choose to be reborn into the world of time.  Rather like leaving the sauna and jumping into the frozen lake just for the change, the shock, the excitement, the risk, and because it doing so actually is healthy for your body and soul.  But if such existence is just as real as the one here where I sit typing at my Mac in my study while the Sun sets on a late Summer's day, it is also symbolic of an inner existence, an inner state of being, or even, as we sometimes say, state of consciousness.  Heaven, Valhalla, the Otherworlds within the mind and soul.   We are in it, and it is in us.

But I digress from my title topic of this entry, which included also Harry Potter.  I was very pleased this morning to, at last, after years of cajoling, finally convince my daughter (now nine) to permit me to read the first Harry Potter book to her.  Egads, that girl is stubborn when it comes to anything she thinks might be scary!   I read to her for about two hours this morning after we took mama to work and she was drawn into the story, wanted more, and was delighted.  She has heard enough about the stories her whole life almost to know a few things that are coming, which seems to delight her all the more.  She doesn't like to be completely surprised by anything. 

So, all in all, it was a good day, even though I am tired.  I've made myself some eggs and sausages and potatoes for dinner and will be off to the lodge shortly for fun with the lads.

So it goes.

Alferian

/|\

Whew!  I can't believe it has been three weeks since I made an entry here.  The Summer is zooming by.  July seemed to last only a blink of the eye.  Among other events, the month contained the Summer Board of Governors meeting and our grove's harvest  festivities in honor of Lughnasadh last weekend. 

At the moment, I'm still trying to adjust emotionally to the catastrophe of the 35W bridge collapse.  That is a route I have often taken and it was shocking to see the ruins.  Humbling.

Well, I've discovered that quite a few people thought that when I suspended Avalon's teaching operations online last month I was throwing in the towel and giving up on her.  I'm afraid that Arianrhod isn't likely to permit me to do that. Those who know me more personally know that my moods swing rather widely depending on my digestion and sleep.  Sleep apnea causes me to be operating with sleep deprivation most of the time, even though it is being treated and, yes, I've been through two sleep studies now. My neurologist suggests I may need a third to see what is going on with the medications.  So much for medical science.

The Center, in any case, is still vulnerable to my fluctuating functionality and the fact that I am obligating in several other directions simultaneously.  In the Summer, my daughter's social life takes a good deal more time than it does during the school year, so a fair proportion of time is spent on logistics, scheduling, and phone calls to her friends.  The pile of management and public relations books I checked out of the library to study business administration issues (wearing the Provost's hat), are languishing on the sideboard unread.  And my book manuscript is only getting tinkered upon - a tap of the hammer here, a rub of the polishing cloth there, and not much closer to being done and sent off to the publisher. 

Avalon administration is taking a backseat and I am concentrating, where I can, on such exciting bits as getting our 2006 tax return filed. Our first as an approved tax-exempt organization.  We have seen one happy result of this status in the form of a $2,000 donation to the Center.  This has permitted me to revise our brochures and have some more printed.  I mailed off a large box of them to Astrocelt in Wales to hand out in the U.K.  So, you see, these secretarial duties consume what little time I have; time that would be better devoted to writing letters to potential donors and producing a potential donor packet of information.  Well, even that would be something I could wish to delegate to a secretary, if I had one.  Someone to whom I could delegate such writing tasks as assembling and composing the faculty handbook and the donor packet.

I am searching for a Provost, but frankly have not figured out where to look yet.  On my list of things to do when I'm not making wands or writing books or preparing talks on druidry is the task of reading throught he SCORE web site and the MCN website to figure out what sort of resources they offer.  Minnesota Council of Nonprofits and SCORE do offer resources that are free, as well as inexpensive workshops.  But I have not managed to find time to even do the research, let alone follow up and do the personal networking that will undoubtedly be requried to find a Provost and a permanent director of PR and marketing who will work on a percentage rather than salary.  We need someone to devote themselves full-time to seeking donors and grants.

And, of course, wearing my Dean's hat, I still have to seek out more faculty members with time to develop courses.  I'm arranging a faculty meeting for later this month, but have received replies only from a few of the faculty. 

This week we celebrate Lammas and the birthdays of my dear lady wife and my daughter the druish princess.  Today, we are off to the zoo.

So it goes. 

-- Alferian

Back home now with my ergonomic keyboard.  Man, I never realized how one gets accustomed to a keyboard.  It was like trying to use someone else's wand!  Anyway, mum's 85th birthday bash was a fantastic success and kudos to my brother and his wife for helping to host parts of it at their house and to my sister for acting as master of ceremonies.  I presented mum with a hand drawn family tree, a picture of a tree with the names written on the roots and branches.  The cousins and uncles laughed when I pointed out that they were all little suckers coming out of the roots.

I had a really grand time, despite bad sleep and indigestion, which inevitably accompany me on trips away from home.  Well, at home too for that matter, though I sleep better in my own bed.  I so enjoyed seeing cousins I haven't seen in many years and some of my mom's cousins too.  I had thought I might be able to talk about my work with Avalon a bit to some of the relatives, but the opportunity did not present itself much and I was interrupted a few times when I did try to talk about it -- usually by someone serving food.  My brother-in-law Mark, who has recently retired from the school for the arts that he founded, chatted with me and gave me advice.  Nothing too eye-opening but confirming some of my thoughts as being sound directions.  He particularly urged me to keep my eyes on the big vision, which I do appreciate.  It is very hard to do so, and to keep my spirits up, when I'm niggling over the details of administration. 

We did talk briefly about the inherent problem in founding an institution to develop one's own artistic practice:  The more one becomes an administrator, the less time one has to actually practice one's art.  In my case, writing and drawing are both arts I wish to practice, music another art that I have only ever practiced intermittently in life but for which I want to find more time, and, of course the magical arts.  The Druidic arts more broadly encompass more than what one usually thinks of as magical art, but basically it is a type of magical practice, just as are the practices of hermetic or kabbalistic orders or of witches.  The wizard path, in general, seeks to improve oneself, to raise up, metaphorically, one's soul and as Lon Milo DuQuette put it, to raise up and enlighten the dark demonic parts of ourselves along with the light half.  This is equally true in druidry, even though we don't usually speak of "demons" as the medieval Solomonic magicians did.  We seek a balance and interplay between light and dark forces, order and chaos, the Dedananns and the Fomorians.  The Celtic tales teach us genealogically, that these two sides of human nature must be joined and married to produce alliances and offspring of great wonder.

This is a very different mythos than that in which most of my relatives live, which is the Christian mythos in one variety or another.  Doctrinal differences and subtleties of practice aside, the essential mythos of Christ is that human nature is inherently flawed ("sinful"), that it is a fallen nature and that the fall was due to disobedience.  Now as a father of a young daughter, I can see why patriarchs, prophets and kings would want to teach a mythos founded in obedience. It is a fundamental cornerstone of Order and without obedience to laws and commands, human society falls apart into warring and bickering factions or clans.  What is curious about this mythos of Christ is that it takes the story of Abraham offering up his son Isaac as a sacrifice to God the Father and expands it into a spiritual drama.  God tested Abraham's obedience with a preposterously awful test -- commanding him to sacrifice his son -- but then at the last minute said, okay, you can substitute a lamb instead.  This story is about the ending of human sacrifice and the substitution of animal sacrifice that happened at some point in human pre-history and is commemorated this way by the Hebrews.  The Christian mythos takes this a step further and has God sacrificing his own son, who is immortal and so (rather like Gandalf in Lord of the Rings) just comes back more powerful after enduring a most horrible death.  This dying and ressurrected god-man runs through many cultures and is not unique to the Christian story, but there is no question that has become a very popularized version of it, so that characters like Gandalf are referred to as "Christ characters" by literary critics.

Christian doctrine teaches that this divine sacrifice put an end to the need for any blood sacrifice at all.  Not even lambs needed to be sacrificed any more.  I was reminded recently that in Islamic culture the sacrifice of the lamb without blemish is still carried out by each head of the household once a year.  This commemorates and re-enacts Abraham's sacrifice.  Very complicated body of literature, those biblical texts and their offshoots.  In this case, there is more than just the literal ending of blood sacrifices, however.  Christ is said to have conquered Death.  He is said to have "saved" all who believe his story from Hell and damnation.  Now, if we put that into terms along the lines suggested by DuQuette, we can say that the mythic act of the sacrificial god-king (Jesus descendant of Kings David and Solomon as well as Yahweh the Sky Father, king of gods) is an act which opens the doorway of possibility for us to escape our inner psychological hells and demons.  DuQuette sees demons, such as those in the Goetia, not as literal beings existing only outside our heads in some literal place called Hell.  He sees them as inner forces of darkness and temptation that also show potentials for good. 

For example, many of the demons of the Goetia are described as having the power to manipulate other people one way or another -- make women fall in love with you, or turn adversaries into animals.  That sort of thing.  But they also have the power to tell you the future, teach the liberal arts, or find hidden treasure.  These are all potentially positive and good.  We like to turn to economists and meteorologist to predict the future trends, even if we don't believe in human destinies.  Practically all of us are trying to seek the hidden treasures within the vast abundance of our human economies.  So, these are not bad things per se.  DuQuette suggests the Goetic demons are poetic metaphors for those potentialities inside us.  We seek to know the future, but this or that particular demon will only tell us if we control that desire with our higher nature, the rational processes of Solomonic magic.  We elaborately bind and command these desires through the use of symbolic and ritual actions.  Although, I'm sure many priests and ministers would be appalled to hear me say so, this kind of ritual action is a "sacrament", literally, a sacred act.

Professional priests don't like professional magicians for precisely this reason, that they engage in experimental sacrements rather than confining themselves to consuming the ready-made and sanctioned variety offered by the Church (in whatever denomination.)  But the mythos of Christ demonstrates that far from relying on the sacraments and rituals of an organized religion, we must take it upon ourselves to act, to make our lives a "sacrifice" to God, metaphorically speaking, to dedicate ourselves to Divinity, and take the good with the bad.  We may be persecuted and ridiculed for our dedication and we may undergo misfortunes.  We have to die to our old ordinary self and discover our luminous true Selfhood that is connected so intimately to the Divine that we can call ourselves "children" of God.  If you prefer to say Goddess, that doesn't matter to me.  I agree with the feminist critique of patriarchal language and imagery that has so long privileged the male over the female, the father over the mother.  But if you really study the biblical texts and especially the teachings of the theologists and kabbalists, you will find that the word "God" is just a placeholder for that "Divine" (to substitute the Latin word) which is absolute goodness.  The Divine, or "Deus" is both father and mother, metaphorically.  It is sky, earth, and sea united as a whole.  It is this trinity and many other trinities.  It is the family, the order of Nature, the planet Earth and every other heavenly body.  That is the worth of this religious tradition of thought: The profound ability to imagine the Divine as Absolute and One.

To put that another way, the old polytheisms, so far as we can tell, tended to see the Divine as an invisible force or power or potentiality or intelligence behind particular aspects of nature and culture.  So the comparative mythologists tell us of a Sun-god and a Sky-god, and a Moon -god, and Earth-goddess, and a Triple-goddess of war, a god of war, a god of kingship, river and lake gods and goddesses, etc. etc etc.  Hundreds and thousands of divine spirits infusing every aspect of nature and life.  Indeed, they mediate between nature and culture.  The most famous example, perhaps, being the marriage of the king to the land to ensure the tribe's right relationship to the cultivated earth.  However, at some point at the edge of history it occurred to philosophers that there was also a whole that we could imagine behind all this diversity.  Like the opposed forces of analysis and synthesis, the world could be divided and categorized, mapped in all its minute details, but it could also be synthesized together into relationships.  The idea of "systems" emerged, and with the scientific age, the idea of invisible forces united and binding all things together and determining their existence.  These forces, taught in the most secular school, are the same invisible intelligences that we humans have observed throughout history and presumably before.  The science of ecology returns us to an understanding of interconnection and holism.  We see the Oneness in things now, not just the parts.  We see the ecological system, not just the individual species with their Latin nomenclature.

This, for me, is that same meaning that is expressed in the Christ mythos.  Human imagination sees the whole.  It doesn't always do so.  Maybe it doesn't even do so naturally, but whatever the case, it is capable of seeing systems and wholes.  This is an aspect of our human spirit.  Indeed the ability to conceptualize and sense spiritual realities is part of our nature too.  What are "spiritual realities"?  Well, far be if from me to attempt a comprehensive definition, but it seems to me that spiritual realities are those invisible forces that connect us together with each other and the whole of the world. The cosmos is made up of spiritual connections, invisible and subtle, that can only be detected and named by their effects.  They are causes and intelligences.  We ourselves are spirits because we are causes and intelligences and a great part of our being is invisible and inscrutible.  Even the talented Seer only catches glimpses of spirit.

The symbolic "salvation" spoken of by those who speak of Jesus as their "personal savior" is the salvation from inner darkness and ignorance.  Queerly, that mythological first act of disobedience perpetrated by Eve in the garden of Eden was to seek knowledge.  I say it is queer because what is so bad about seeking knowledge?  The mythic story seems to imply, if taken literally, that God is a bad father who wishes to deprive his children of knowledge -- particularly the knowledge of good and evil.  How does that make sense?  Well, you have to look deeper.  If we humans, in our primitive pre-rational form, lacked knowledge of good and evil, that would mean that we simply lacked these concepts.  We don't suppose dogs and cats have a concept of good and evil.  Concepts of that sort come with language, don't they?  That is one reason dogs look so befuddled when you yell "No! no!" at them.  They understand that you are upset and angry and they feel fear, but they don't have a concept of good and evil even after training. 

So, given that starting  point, let's think further.  Eve disobeyed her father.  Let's modernize that and compare it to  a nine year old daughter who disobeys her father's explicit rule that she should not go on the internet and look at porn sites.  Why does he forbid this?  Because he thinks she isn't ready for the ugly truth of human sexual weirdness and the potentially damaging messages porn web sites can send to a girl (or a boy, for that matter) about the role of women and the role of sexuality in human relationships.  The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil is explicitly distinguished in the Genesis myth from the Tree of Life.  I believe this is very significant and as far as I know too few ministers and priests explicate this story sufficiently.  It is not just that Eve disobeyed her father and we have no reason to imagine Adam and Eve as mature adults.  Even if we think in terms of the myth itself, they are naive babes in the garden, sheltered and innocent.  Many of us react with disgust at the fat that the Father in this story throws his children out of the garden because they disobeyed him.  But that is just one, rather superficial and patriarchal, reading of the story.  We ought to expect more from great myths. 

What happens in this story is that Even and then Adam acquire knowledge of the categories of good and evil.  Till then their life has been pretty much what we would call the good life.  But at some point when any child grows up and starts to think for herself, she will learn that there is evil in the world, which is to say, not literally "the Devil" but bad actions and bad motives, things that lead to unhappiness.  So, it isn't so much that God literally choses to throw Adam and Eve from the Garden and bar them from ever returning.  It is simply that becoming an adult and realizing that you don't get your every wish and the world is a hostile place with people in it who may exploit, hurt, or even kill you and those you love -- well, that is the inevitable outcome of growing up in this world.  The knowledge of good and evil is the understanding of this fact of life.  The myth tells us that the Father tries to shelter his children but cannot do so forever.  Eventually, they are going to grow up and realize that the garden isn't all it seemed to be. 

Think about that Edenic world of myth.  How like our children's literature full of talking animals and lions laying down with lambs.  C.S. Lewis recreated that world in Narnia and Aslan.  But even in Narnia, innocence is eventually overcome by experience.  Now, good prevails, but that isn't the same thing as returning to the state of innocence represented by the Garden or the nursery.  The story of the Garden of Eden and the Fall is a classic myth with great wisdom in it.  Feminist and anti-Christian critics have interpreted it literally and reduced it to absurdity.  Any myth will be absurd if you take it literally.  Heavens!  Any poetry at all will be absurd if you attempt to take it literally.  But as children we do lead sheltered and protected lives and good parents will not, of course, respond to their children's forays into the knowledge of good and evil by throwing them out of the house.  That literal interpretation of the myth has been the cause of a lot of grief and we can lay responsibility for that at the door of foolish priests and ministers who don't understand how myths work.

No, what happens, according to our Edenic myth (just as we find in the Atlantean myth) is that seeking knowledge is dangerous and can lead to horrors and misfortunes as well as wonders and great wealth.  It can lead to love or hate, life or death, pain or pleasure, and often these things are all mixed together.  Those who like to put their minds firmly on Heaven, might miss this crucial truth.  The word "crucial" comes from "cross."  We see the intersection of the heavenly and the earthly, good and evil, and the light and dark sides of the cosmos.  We look to our relationships with our fellow beings in the material world and time we inhabit, and we look upward and downward at these invisible relatives we humans alone can see through our faculty of imagination.  Upwards to the light and downwards to the dark, which is also to say, upwards to our rational faculty capable of grasping the good and seeking happiness, and downwards to our dark interiors where we sometimes hate ourselves, wallow in guilt, and feel rejected by our fathers and mothers.  Christ and the symbol of the cross ask us to look in all those directions.  So does Druidry, and so do most of the magical traditions of which I am aware.  Taken literally and simplistically, without a broader spiritual awareness, any of these traditions can fail to enlighten, but the potential is there in all of them if myth and symbolism are understood.  Jesus, Joshua bed Joseph, the carpenter's son, gave us the clues when he said that we must understand parables.  That is, metaphorical stories, myths.

Over the weekend, thinking so much of genealogy and my ancestors and relatives and the invisible connections that bind and me to all these people, even when I don't see them very often or even know them very well -- these thoughts mingled with my reading.  I was finishing Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix in preparation for the movie, and I then was reading that little green leather book I picked up at the Midwest Bookhunters Fair, titled "My Way of Life."  Written by two Catholic priests, it is subtitled "The Summa Simplified" and is based on Thomas Aquinas's magnum opus the Summa Theologica.  In this book the authors follow Aquinas's Aristotelean thought process to logically demonstrate that the aim of human happiness is the quest for ultimate good and that ultimate good, simply put, is God.  Therefore, we attain happiness as we align our actions and our desires toward that ultimate goodness.  It's an interesting and compelling argument and I haven't finished pondering it yet.  I love rational arguments, but it is important to tease out their premises.  I was drawn to the book however by the simple desire to find happiness because I spend so much time unhappy.  Disphoria is the preferred psychological term these days.  My bouts of disphoria do have chemical and bodily causes in part, but it leads me to want to find not just a "medical" answer but also a philosophical answer to the problem of happiness. 

We all desire to be happy and connection to others can certainly provide some happiness, but it is happiness of a limited sort.  Just like eating a good meal can give use pleasure and temporary happiness.  Aquinas argues that there must be more than these local and specific little gods, as it were.  He argues that we will not be able to steer a course to lasting happiness and the strength of character it can bring, unless we set our compass by the star of the Absolute Good, which we name God.  As a druid, I don't find that doctrine contradictory to my own and indeed I find it very sensible.  If there is in fact something we can identify as Absolute Good, then it makes perfect sense that it should be the source of our happiness and seeking it the goal of our lives.  The authors of this little book also (presumably) follow Aquinas in suggesting that it is by yoking together reason and will that we can act for the good and seek our own happiness.  Reason sees that goodness leads to happiness and so pursues it by commanding the Will, which is our desires, to then act.  Reason for Aristotle and Aquinas was the Logos, which is also the word that St. John in his gospel uses for Christ.  God sends us Logos, which is to say, words, language, reason, in order that we may see what is good and what is not good for us.  The knowledge of good and evil.

Thus the Garden of Eden and the mythos of Christ are paired stories, complementary, the latter intending to c