Alferian's · Journal

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.

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