Alferian's · Journal

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 complete the former by saying that although as children we must needs fall from innocence and pure happiness as soon as we encounter the knowledge of good and evil in the world, nevertheless, the Reason which is the faculty with which God and Nature have endowed us, allows us to make sense of these conflicted forces and seeming opposites.  Logos empowers us to make meaning out of the light and the dark.

Our ancestors were much smarter than we usually give them credit for.  How many times in growing up have I heard Catholics criticized or ridiculed by either protestants or pagans?  Yet, there is great thought in Catholicism.  Great mistakes too, no doubt.  But there is light and dark in everything and we would be foolish to not expect to find them in our religions and our wise men too.

Blessings of the Light and the Darkness,