Notes from Underground
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
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alferian) wrote,
