Reclaiming the Hidden Sacred

All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.
-*

There are multiple ways of telling the history of humanity for the last three-hundred years.  We all know at least a few of them, and embrace at least one of them. Whether we are consciously aware of the narrative we've chosen, it affects not only how we see history but also our current society.

For a person of european descent living somewhere besides Europe, there are various tales we tell or have been told regarding how it is we happened to be in the lands we were born.  I won't go into every one of them, and I've little interest in addressing what one might term "conservative" narratives (that is, God led our forefathers across the ocean, etc..) here, nor do I think many who hold those ideas would be reading this.

We choose these narratives both consciously and unconsciously, inheriting them from our cultural and educational history (parents, media, church, friends) and refining them or adopting new ones when they no longer seem to fit our need to understand both our history and our current world.  The dominant one in America seems often enough that europeans (and others) came across the ocean in search of "religious freedom, "better lives," and "opportunity."  Whether or not you accept this idea, I think it's interesting to note what isn't said in the narrative: "what were they leaving?"

The Great White Hope of Puritans

The question of (early) religious freedom is easily addressed: several religious groups, particular the Puritans, were expelled from the places they lived because their repressive ideas were no longer welcome in certain cities.  Few think of this: the Puritans had to flee from England after Oliver Cromwell lost power, went to the Continent for a little bit until they were expelled there, and then finally settled in the Colonies.  

But if people were looking for better lives, opportunity, jobs, work, and all of that, why weren't they finding it in Europe?

Displacement and the Sacred

We all mostly learn the story of the rise of industrialization in Britain from high school.  The story goes as such: we were once all living under Feudalism, slaving away for little to anything of our own, and then suddenly the factories came about.  Our ancestors had a new way to live, and fled from the countryside in droves to towns where we no longer had to live such horrid, menial lives.

In the towns, they learned ideas, they learned to read, they learned that they didn't have to live under Feudalism anymore.  The towns got bigger, the markets got full of new, shiny things that we didn't have to make ourselves anymore.  And because there was a "new land" across the ocean, people left Europe to flee from crowded towns to wide-open spaces with even more economic chances.

Essential to this narrative are two things: progress and choice.  As far as progress is concerned, the story says that things have gotten better, we went from monarchy to democracy and from hand-sewn to factory-churned, from cramped huts on the edge of the forest to better homes in the cities, and from oppressive religious societies to open, tolerant societies.

And regarding choice--well, how much choice did our ancestors really have?  Though we say "we no longer had to make our own things," we forget that "we no longer can."  We don't have the time to do so anymore, for the only way to make a living is to work for someone else.  Though we "don't have to" grow our own food anymore, it is also true "we don't have the land to," nor can we survive on what we grow (remember, people used to do this All the Time, and not just thousands of years ago). 

That is to say, we have no choice in the matter now, nor really did our ancestors.  We had to sell our labor in the factories, we had to rely on stores and markets for our food and clothing, and living a simple, self-sufficient life is now only possible if you've the money to buy land.

The market, in essence, replaced much of what we did "for ourselves," and while we usually tell us that we were freed from the constraints of the old ways, we forget that we now have no choice in the matter.

And thus far, I've only been speaking of material matters.

The False Narrative of Progress

Though Max Weber, in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, is credited as being the first to describe capitalism's "dis-enchantment" effect upon social and spiritual relations, another well-known writer did much of the work beforehand.  Karl Marx's Das Capital and The Communist Manifesto are both rife with descriptions of how the engines of capitalism disrupted social relations, and I intend to write more in-depth on this in another post. 

Suffice it to say, for now, that as people were displaced from their lands (usually because they could no longer afford the rents), moved into the cities and began working in the factories (whole families, not just men), their relationships to each other, to their ancestral knowledge, to the land, and to the sacred changed.  Enlightenment thinkers and those inspired by them typically see all these changes as being good, and it is from them that we derive the very notion of historical Progress.  It is telling that none of them worked in factories.  But no-one wants to be against the Enlightenment and Progress, right?

Maybe we should all be.  Attempting to find the Sacred now is incredibly difficult, and all most of us ever have to rely upon is The Market.  We may have found certain books that inspired us to look on the world as a more magical place, or maybe music or films, rarely a teacher.   I know for many people my age, it was Loreena McKennit or Dead Can Dance which got them into paganism, or maybe (the incredibly problematic) Braveheart.  The Market has, from time to time, managed to disseminate ideas to those of us who may not have come to them from our families, friends, or personal revelations.  But this is not a good thing; this is a consolation prize, and worse, the capitalists get to claim that it was because of them that we discovered our ancestral knowledge.

We should counter, rather, with this: it is in spite of Capitalism and the displacement of our ancestors, it is despite the homogenizing affect of materialism and the market that we have found and fought for the Sacred.  And despite the narrative of Progress attempting to re-write our histories into a story that asserts "we are better off now," we have begun to recover the histories of the sacred that linger just beyond the pretty, meaningless words.

Worker's Maypole

Other things which get caught up in the Progress Narrative include Rights: Capitalism and its narrative claim to have made life better for us all, particularly minorities.  Women's rights, Abolition, gay rights, etc., are all supposedly derived from the transformational force of industry, commerce, and capital.  We should do better by our ancestors than to believe this.  People who fought and died for the 8-hour work day, for the right to vote, for the right to love who they want--they didn't do this because capitalism made it possible.  In many instances, they had to fight directly against capitalism.  And, interestingly enough, many of them were both "radicals" (usually socialist or anarchist) and also occultists.  One of the early founders of the Druid order to which I belong, MacGregor Reid, was a socialist who'd spent much of his time helping to organize dock-workers in NYC.  The painter of the Rider-Waite Tarot, Pamela Colman Smith  (who's name is sadly rarely mentioned), was a Suffragette.  Much of the early history of worker-resistance in the UK and the US was rife with pagan imagery, there was a vast nexus of relationships between the Golden Dawn and Anarchists in England (and by nexus, I mean Oscar Wilde--see Lela Ghandi's Affective Communities), and many of the early gay rights pioneers, particularly in Europe, used the pagan gods to justify their love (see this fascinating paper).

Recovering Without Theft

Much of the rest of the world are fortunate enough to live near the relics of their ancestors. In America, unless we are First Nations, we are not.

It's tempting, because of our history of displacement and the scrubbing of our history, to give up completely on the search for historical veracity.  When everything seems to have been taken from us, it almost makes sense to either make it up as we go along or to borrow from whatever authentic-traditions are on hand.  The first option is lazy, and the second one is called appropriation.

The first option implies a sense of despair, or embraces the narrative of Progress and Capitalism that the old ways are either lost or unworthy of our attention.  The question of pagan continuity is thorny and debated, but there are enough "reconstructionists" around that no one really needs to look very far to find people who've already done much of the work on digging up the traditions, beliefs, rituals, and gods of our ancestors.

The second is what spurred me to write this post in the first place.  The question of cultural appropriation came up in this blog, as well as a few other places on the Internet where it was re-posted.  The reaction to the writer's piece was surprising to me, because I live in a hyper-sensitive, "liberal-left" environment where people break the windows of stores that sell Ghettopoly and "Navaho Underwear", both undisputedly racist products.

But products are just products, items outside of ourselves, easily disowned.  Beliefs are stronger, are considered not just part of ourselves but integral to who we are.  And the search for spirituality is deep within many of us, as is the desire to have authentic spiritual experiences.  In the Northwest, where I live, Buddhism (or what some have termed "Western Buddhism") is very popular, though much of it reflects only the outward rituals of the practice, as with Yoga, which was a preparatory ritual for spiritual work, not the spiritual work itself. I sometimes play a game at the local organic food co-op, called "find-the-non-white" in Eastern-Mysticism magazines.  The game is this: you open up the magazine and flip through the pages until you see the first photo of a non-white person not in an advertisement.  I usually get to page 50.  I once modified the game (I should note, I do this aloud, boisterously) to find the first non-white person who was photographed in color, and gave up.

Um, yeah.

This is very rude of me, I admit, but there's a point to it.  We white, european-descended spiritual seekers face not only the displacement of our ancestral lines into a land that was stolen from the indigenous inhabitants, but we also suffer in our search for authentic spiritual experiences from our own racist perceptions of other cultures.  That racism filters and mediates our approach in multiple ways.  We tend to approach the Sacred in the other as something frozen in history, something from an ancient past that no longer exists (we are not the only ones guilty of this, by the way--I remember the utter shocked delight when I told a pagan friend in Europe that not all the natives were dead.  She asked me "have you seen one?" and seemed likely to die when I told her I knew many).  A lot of the appropriation in Western society comes from our refusal to acknowledge that there are still living traditions around, and not very far off from where we live, and that there are still people who can teach us about spirits, the gods, and traditions of magic.

The other problem we encounter is just as negative.  We are the inheritors of a dominant culture, of political, cultural, and economic imperialism.  Capitalism originated in England in the 17th century, and from then on, white Europeans, displaced willingly or unwillingly, have been part of the destruction of other cultures.  We have been the dominant one, and are horribly unused to being changed by cultures we encounter.  We encounter Buddhism and Hinduism and suddenly plaster billboards with pictures of white women, seated lotus-style, in front of their laptops checking their bank balances on-line.  We encounter a Mayan time-keeping system and foist our own apocalyptic fantasies upon it.  We see Native sacred crafts and fill our living rooms with them.  (And here, Capitalism and its consolation, The Market, rear their heads again.)

The problem isn't the search for authenticity.  The problem, I'd argue, is the refusal to allow ourselves be changed by the cultures who birthed the spirituality we embrace.  We pick and choose what we want to cobble together a system that does not actually change our way of life, and when the teachers of some of those beliefs demand the right to teach them to us, we hide behind pretty notions of truth belonging to all people, of universal teachings, or just utterly deny our condition altogether.

There are better ways to go about this.  The fact that there are still indigenous traditions, real, living traditions, means that we actually still have access to people who can teach us.  And in the experience of many people I have known, these teachings are willingly given, but they aren't given out in pamphlets or books or seminars.  A former lover was invited to partake in such things, but the expectation was not only that he be open to the teachings but that he maintain a connection to and take on a responsibility for not just the teachings but the tribe who offered it.  As far as other traditions go, the situation is similar.  Also, there are many orders who focus on reconstruction of traditions and avoid taking from others unless it is offered or given.

And maybe even better, we can reclaim our own Sacred.  Not just the folk-ways of our ancestors (not many of us can even accurately be certain who our european ancestors are), but the still-living traditions hidden in our current culture.  One of these is the pagan resistance still evident up to the early 1900's in America and Europe. Besides the aforementioned examples, it was recently brought to my attention that the Molly Maguires posted eviction notices to landlords in the name of local land gods. Also, despite all the horror that Catholicism has wrought, pagan gods are still worshiped as saints within their traditions and can be re-discovered and reclaimed from there, and is some of the work I hope personally to do in September when I go to Bretagne.  (And as an aside, for those following the saga of my impending pilgrimage,I recently learned that I'll be traveling to Europe on the day of one such hidden-god, St. Dionysos, revered on September 6th)

Nature is also a great place to look.  If gods or spirits introduced themselves to people 100 years ago, it seems unlikely they would have stopped now.  But we must be careful with this, because almost every spirituality teaches that one must first delve into our own mind to find what is hidden there, what motivates us and what prevents us.  Learning to hear the Sacred requires learning to distinguish our own thoughts and their foundations from what is outside of us.  Relying on established traditions is an important safeguard against both appropriation and error.  Making it up as we go along is sometimes necessary, but it should not be our only method of finding the Sacred, otherwise we are merely "making it up."



*the source of the quote at the top: Karl Marx and Fredrich Engles,  from The Communist Manifesto

Hiding (Midsummer/Solstice, 2013)

Suspended over a river of concrete the edge of a forest lingered, just off the edge of my vision.  All my visions seem like this, just off the edge of sight, the peripheral within the liminal, only there in the place one's unclosed eyes go when one looks away.  He stood there before the forest-that-wasn't there, massive, what man desires in himself, what man strives to become, what man runs in terror from.  Frightening in his beauty, his virility, and his indifference.

Two hours later, I stood in the middle of revelers, watching, hearing thunder in my body, not in my ears, watching.  Words in song, song in screams, screams forming words which evoked, invoked, lamented arrogance, lamented destruction.  I could not tear my eyes from the ringed-tree suspended from his neck, nor my mind from the unveiled invocations.

Then the moment of the sun's height. Fumbling pages could not conceal the intention.  The sky fell away, though the Great Light lingered, and beyond the encircled figures (nimbused in this other world in white and yellow) the trees and beyond the trees the stars.  The crown raised, the sword heft, another union accomplished both here and always, a thousand times over, a thousand times at once.  Ancients watched with us, stag, hawk, bear and salmon saluted, and then the unwound ring and snacks.

Crossing the bridge away from that place another vision, warm gold across vast fields, but then the sun's red was fire, and the field burned, and I looked away.

--
They hide, just as we do.  We'd patent their genes if they had bodies we could imprison, we'd sell them connected plastic if they worked as we do.  They hide, we hide. 

We hide from each other.  I've known men who hide their glances behind lenses and then note their interest later in unread forums.  Those who look and look away, down, and search the phone in their hand to divine another's preferences, occupation, length. 

We hide behind screens, yes, but we hide behind masks, too.  I know a man whose dark profundity is hidden behind manic joy.  I know another who veils his deep awareness from his friends with frivolity.  A third whose radiant beauty is cloistered by diminished presence, a fourth who has cached his exhalted brilliance inside a shell of apparent stupidity.

We hide behind masks, and we hide behind mirrors, we hide from each other and we hide from ourselves.

It is no surprise they hide from us, but I have learned, lately, they are not hiding very well.

They are only barely out of sight, it seems, lingering like the forest just beyond the concrete, the sea below the pavement, the bird-song and laughter heard but unseen.

It is no wonder, I understand, that we do not see them well, as we can barely stand to look at each other.  Was it not said "how can you love god whom you have not seen when you do not love man whom you have seen?"

There is a strand of paganism which believes the gods and the spirits are all within us, aspects of our own (collective) personality.  While this is not my experience, I can understand how one reaches this conclusion.  Something must change within in order for that which is without to be glimpsed, a way of looking away must become a way of looking at, a way of seeing must become a way of unseeing and then seeing again.

For me it has been this.  When I look away, just before I look again, I attempt to look at what it was I didn't notice. In between the glance and the glance, the gaze and the regard, is the Other, hidden, like our selves, like each other, in plain sight.

Update to Novel

I've begun editing more of my novel (a manuscript I completed a few years back).  It's called The Jhen of Winter, and I've just posted the second chapter.  I've wild hopes of completing the edit before leaving for Europe in early September.

Feedback is dearly desired. Feel free to comment on the pages themselves or by email:
industrialise [at] gmail [dot] com

Chapter one

Chapter Two

Progress and the Spirit of Place

Thirteen years ago, after a short stint of semi-homelessness (homeless by federal definitions, but I only slept in bushes a few times), I moved into a house which was to become my home the better part of my adult life. 

I have stories of the place, for a place is not just a background or setting for a story, but it is a story in itself.  Sun-soaked evenings upon a porch overlooking a lake and the mountains, clinging to the edge of the most interesting and living neighborhood in Seattle.  Strangers have stopped and stared, taken photos and waved, sometimes looked longingly, sometimes shaken in frenzied prayer at the abode before them, a hundred-year old house with (Viking, pirate, prayer and upside-down American) flags waving in breezes which spun storms of dancing sun-motes reflected from an ancient disco ball.  Salvaged plants and bells adorned the crumbling banister over which I’d look, sipping tea, sometimes unclothed, at the strange, adorable urban world into which I’d rooted.   

And I’ve paid 250 dollars a month for my place in this house, this city, this world.

And Then Progress Came

I’ve been here long enough to remember the economic collapses and downturns and recessions or whatever words we summon to describe what happens when each new wave of “progress” ebbs out back to the sea of failed ideas.  With each new surge came some grand plan whole classes within the city embraced, a new idea (which seemed always an old idea, one those old enough might remember) to usher the ambitious into the future.  I got here just before the internet start-ups started ending-down.  Money everywhere, new restaurants and clubs and stores to sell to all the sorts of people who knew what they were doing, knew they were living the future.

And then that ended, and people fled.  I’ve never really figured out where most of them went.  I didn’t know many of them, because they had more money than I did.

Then biotech.  Suddenly the largest university here started down-sizing its liberal-arts department to make way for all the new science students, canceling its direct-transfer agreements with the community colleges to attract more out-of-state, out-of-country tuition.  Whole streets were razed to make room for the future, and people who’d lived in places like mine found themselves scrambling to find new places to live.  But there were fewer and fewer places to which to run, because with all the new “industry,” all the new progress, came the new buildings replacing the old. 

A little later (when the rush for bio-medicines began to lag, when we all realized it would take decades to make medicine from genes, not weeks) came the “housing bubble.”  Suddenly everyone wanted a house, even if they didn’t want to live in one.  Suddenly it was the “thing to do,” and I couldn’t escape the conversations at bars discussing how it was an easy way to make money.  Middle-class white homosexuals started leaving the “gay” neighborhood for other places where there were houses, and when people decried the change of the neighborhood’s character, ridiculous and irresponsible articles in the local alternative papers (written by white gay men) declared “the gay ghetto” to be a dangerous notion, a primitive throw-back to the time when people didn’t like gays.  Gays had to progress, and home-ownership was the future. 

That didn’t last so long, either.

The Spirit of Place

Recently, there’ve been a few brutal crimes against sexual-deviants in my neighborhood, accompanied by utter shock that such a thing could happen in our brave new present future. 

Under all of this has been a completely different change, unmarked by most because it is not a measure by which we mark things.  Spirit of place is not something many people can speak of without getting blank stares.  It can be defined in multiple ways, cannot be scientifically measured, and is therefore not quantifiable and does not enter into most conversations when one discusses displacement of people.

But it is something that is felt, anecdotally, by those who stay in a place long enough to become part of it.  Live somewhere long enough and you will know it.  Participate in its growth, open yourself up to its personality, and you will know it well.

“The neighborhood has changed,” goes the most common complaint, the most common remark.  “I don’t recognize it any more” is another.  And sometimes, “The Hill is dead.”

Buildings go up, buildings are torn down.  Streets are widened, narrowed.  Faces change, faces flee.  Conversations between strangers diminish, conversations into wireless devices increase.  Familiar bars and cafes disappear.  New ones arrive, different, sometimes adequate, sometimes less so.  But things are different. 

It’s facile, puerile, and utterly shallow merely to utter “people don’t like change.”  I love change, I love things being different, but I do not like things disappearing, being torn down, being destroyed and rebuilt.  I don’t like prices increasing, I don’t like rents getting raised.  I don’t like feeling unsafe, unfamiliar in the city I’ve chosen to make my home. 

What I do like, what I crave—is being part of the spirit of the place.  There is a simple yet profound joy in tending a garden which needs (really) very little help from a human to grow—participating in its existence, being part of it is much of the pleasure and provides much of the meaning.  On a larger scale, a neighborhood requires the people within it to exist, and requires certain things of certain people to maintain it.  The old man wearing skirts and bells is one of its shepherds, as is the old hunch-backed lady who still manages to smile despite being bent at an almost perfect right-angle.  The bartenders, the shop-keeps, the baristas, the bus-drivers, the leather-queens and street-punks and all the “normal” people in between them tend the Spirit of Place.  They are each replaceable to some degree, but not all at once

Capitalism and Displacement 

When we decide to move from one place to another, to leave a city for a new one, or a suburb, or the countryside, we individually weigh multiple factors.  Amongst those--and I dare say a significant part of them--are economic and aesthetic factors.  Where jobs can be found is often the most important, but so, equally, is where a good and interesting life can be lived.  We each experience this as a set of decisions based on free-will, but there is an external engine which affects these internal decisions.

In most of history, when there are large-scale migrations of whole groups of people, it is usually due to war, famine, or natural disaster.  But in Capitalism, in the forced-march of Progress, this is the every-day.  Economists refer to it as "mobility," and it was recently a thing for politicians to blame joblessness on the immobility of certain workers living hundreds of miles from open job positions.  We move for "opportunity" and flee "cost."  We re-locate for cheaper housing, or livelier neighborhoods, or to avoid poverty.

One of the most useful ides of Marx is his description of how the demands of Capital(ism) alter social relations.  The birth of Capitalism in the 1700's in England began a process of endless displacement which started with farmers who rented their land no longer able to afford these rents and fleeing to the new factories where they could still find a way to survive off their labor.  These migrations emptied villages and flooded towns, broke apart old friendships and customs and families and, quite importantly, disconnected people from the sense of place they once felt.  They left one location, one Spirit of Place for another, one to which they were new and unaccustomed.

Capitialism and Progress

A short diversion is useful here, to explain how the Progres and Capitalism relate.  Adam Smith, the first evangelist of Capitalism, is known for many things, including “the invisible hand of the market” and the doctrine of self-interest as benefiting all.  However, one of the most important contributions he made to the justification of Capitalism gets ignored quite often, his doctrine of the “imperative of improvement.”  He justified the taking of native lands in North America by the virtue that they were doing nothing with it, that is, not improving it.

Improvement is one of the imperatives of Capitalism, for, to compete with others, one must constantly be producing more, or better, or more efficiently.  This imperative became quickly the very ethic of Capitalism, its command: improve or die.  An economy must grow every year or it is dying, one must make at least a little more each year than the next, charge a little more rent each year, etc. 

And one of the ways to do this is to destroy what was before, which cost less, and replace it with something that generates more money.  An old apartment building housing only 30 people for which those tenants would only ever pay $600 a month gets torn down and replaced by 60 units at twice the price.  This is improvement.   

This is Progress.

This is displacement

 

Modern materialism and secular scientific pop-philosophy has left us with very few ways to define what has happened around us.  We can point to the sadness we feel when the familiar goes away, we can talk of our fear or frustration. We can use terms like “gentrification” or “character” to describe the processes of our loss, but it all falls ultimately flat. 

Understanding the external forces of this changes helps somewhat, which is why I will never relinquish my Marxism.  But even still, it fails to describe that certain specific thing we collectively experience when everything changes around us, the cause of the shared trauma.  And it’s a “first-world problem,” particularly, as the land we’re living on is not ancestrally ours and was taken from people experiencing even more significant trauma (and death) from the coming of whites.   But it is a trauma nevertheless, experienced on a numb level which leaves us full of words which never quite describe our rage and loss.  

The Genius Loci

A pagan concept helps significantly here.  In latin, the Genius Loci was the name given for the spirit of a place, an existent guardian spirit.  Many pagans believe such a thing really exists, but one does not need to be a pagan to see the use of such a concept.  The Spirit of Place can still exist to a materialist, a Christian, or an agnostic with as much meaning as to one who believes it can be named and spoken to.

There are migrations to this city from other cities, foreigners flooding in with their strange customs and disregard for this Spirit of Place.  I’m not talking about immigrants (who tend as a whole to be more aware of the concept of Spirit of Place than most Americans).  I mean, in Seattle’s case, southern California. But where they are from doesn’t matter (though if I hear another group of heavily-cologned straight men shout their Orange County zip codes at each other across the street on a Friday night…).  What matters is that they are new, they do not yet know the Spirit of Place, and they alter it. 

And I would be remiss if I did not point out these people experienced the same pressure as we do now.  While I want to vomit a little when I think of some of them being mere refugees from other Genius Loci, displaced by the engine of Progress, it is more-than-likely true,

Another way to look at it exists, though—the pain of the Spirit of Place, the confusion of the Genius Loci, the loss it experiences as whole parts of its long-time devotees flee from its boundaries and new ones come in, too new to be known by it, too money-obsessed to spend the effort learning of its character and personality, maybe even too traumatized by previous loss to embrace a new Spirit of Place, still clinging to old ideas, old familiarities. 

To be fair, admixture isn’t bad.  New blood, new ideas, new faces—these are all what keep cities alive, what refreshes and expands the personality of a city, what strengthens and fortifies the Spirit of Place.  Change is not bad, but nor is it inherently good. 

Cities can expand, neighborhoods can grow.  But when the guardians of the guardian of a place are chased out, when what made the place safe, interesting, exciting and alluring to those who lived there and those who wanted to live there flee, this is not a thing to be celebrated, nor, really, even to be sighed at.

It is to be mourned. 

HELP WANTED: Weavers

Early this year, after a great sorrow and a sudden re-awakening of parts of myself that I’d let go dormant (or likely consciously buried—I don’t know, and there’s no one to tell me this answer), I initiated into the Order of Bards, Ovates, and Druids. I needed to.

 I had dreams, you see.

A massive, diverse throng “from all nations” waiting to get into a skyscraper, entering a passcode at the great mirrored-glass doors.  I didn’t know the code.  I was terrified, because I needed to get in.  A man took pity on me, saw my confusion, asked what worried me.  I told him I didn’t know the code, and he said, “Oh. It’s Brighid.  You can tell by the way the rain is falling on your cloak, and in-between the rain.”  I entered, and I was in an immense, ancient temple.  But what does this mean? I don’t know.  There’s nothing to tell me.

A lover and I with a third man.  A woman washing dishes in a sink, watching as I watch her back rather than participate.  She tells me it will be okay, beckons me elsewhere.  And then I am on paths, and a woman with a cauldron stops me and questions me, and I answer, and then I am allowed on those paths.  What are those paths? Who were those women? I have only guesses and suspicions, because there is no-one who collects these dreams and suggests what they mean.  

Another dream. Me attempting to escape from a massive house familiar to at least one friend (and, from what I’ve learned, possibly three others).  I can throw myself off cliffs, but I don’t. I take a difficult (but not deadly) path which leads me back towards someone I was fleeing, and two figures stop me (one in shadow, one in light, “and he a face still forming”) block my path.  The one in light wears my the same flute case I carry, and he asks me, “did you forget your recorder? You shouldn’t forget your recorder.”  And I am left for days with only “hints and guesses” at who they are and what this means.  

There are many, many more dreams.  But consider my waking hours. 

I ask a question of a goddess.  The next day, the answer comes to me in the voice of another, seeming unbidden.  But this could be just co-incidence, and I don’t know how the gods work.

I am given stones and crystals, and they do what they are purported to do, and very well. But this could be just superstition and placebo.

I pour some wine out to a god known to enjoy that sort of thing, and suddenly I am flooded with random, incredibly erotic encounters with men so much so that I have to stop for my own balance (and certain parts of me need a bit of rest).  But maybe I was just looking for it, and the god had nothing to do with it, but I don’t know, because few who deal with that god have written books about his ways in the present.

I can calm a schizophrenic, except maybe I can’t and just think I can. Or maybe this is just good counseling skills.

I have waking visions where I am somewhere else, I am someone else.  A voice speaks, and I listen to what it says, and suddenly certain things happen in my life that go better, easier.  I could consult a Christian priest and get an exorcism, I could consult a psychiatrist, and get medications. 

A god appeared on the face of a lover the other night. His face contorted, I saw different features, a mirthful sneer or an ecstatic delight.  The next day, a friend who’d seen this god in dreams (unless he’s wrong, too), shows me a drawing of this god, and it is the same. And what, I ask, do you dare do with that?

I have a very strong sense of self and will.  I have lived my entire life as my own.  I am from the dregs of the lower classes, I am gay, I look like a thug, I live with other people in a crumbling but beautiful house for an eighth of the rent that any of my friends pay.  I do not care what people think of me, I raised myself and my little sisters from the time I was 13.  I enjoy being a fool, getting kicked out of bars for dousing conservatives with my beer, I will say ridiculous things in public to ease tension.

I believe ridiculous things, like Capitalism is evil.  I’ve been to jail because I believe this, and thought it was kind of cool.  I would rather live poor than dress well.  I’ve had my genitals out at inappropriate times, including in the middle of busy intersections with other people doing the same thing, in high heels.

This is all to say, I don’t care what other people say or think of me, and I am completely happy to come to my own conclusions about things, to live my life the way I want to, to build my own world and embrace the (almost unmanageable) throng of wonderful, beautiful people who have thought I’m doing something amazing. 

And yet, there is no one to tell me what the gods mean, what they want.  I have to dig. I have to churn through libraries (I read more than almost anyone I know, and it’s not enough).  I have to consult others, Tarot, the stars, the spirits, my own soul, my Order, the flights of birds.  I compare this all to what the science says, what the histories suggest. 

And I have come to conclusions, yes, and I’m happy with my conclusions, and I now have theories, I know have fragments of a (gasp) theology.

And it’s ridiculous that I’ve had to do this all myself.  Hours and hours on the internet sorting through discussions with no clear reference and in no obvious direction.  Morbid fear derived from the terror that there’s something wrong with me until I risk asking an uncomfortable question to a stranger and find out they’ve seen the same, they’ve heard the same, that there is a pattern here, a system, that there are shared beliefs amongst scattered, isolated, strong-willed souls already used to being thought of as freaks, subaltern, wrong.

Where can those of us without such strong will, already scarred so thoroughly by the wounds of difference that we no longer feel the pain of our different paths, go?  There are initiatory orders, and these are great but far from perfect or sufficient.  There are festivals and gatherings, leaderless (and I’m an anarchist, so I’m not advocating what you suspect I might be) where the only guidance is provided by “the land” or a helpful older man who will guide you after you ride his cock for awhile.  Great for those of us who don’t mind that sort of thing, but I am in yet another minority here, and this idea really should make anyone a bit nauseous when they consider the abuse inherent in such center-less “teaching moments.”

There’s an obvious reluctance to tell anyone what something means.  That’s fine.  Don’t.You might be wrong, too, and that's a frightful risk.  You might be right, and that's even scarier.

And there’s an obvious danger in being told what something means, particularly if the recipient of this knowledge has no experience parsing stuff out.  Taking stuff at face value, without using your mind--that's the stuff fascism and hegemony is built upon.

Orthodoxy requires Heresy.  The High Priest (or the Heirophant) can be upright or reversed.  This seems commonsense, but it cannot be reversed if we remove it from our deck, tear it into pieces, and declare that we all must find our own way and don’t need or want those sorts of people who are actually good at making connections between other peoples’ experiences and patterning this together into something that works. 

The theorist, the theologian is a weaver, and the woven threads are our collective experiences of the spirits, the gods, the Other.  Smash the loom if the tapestry makes no sense, binds you instead of liberates you.  I’ll help. 

Or better, show that weaver someone else’s tapestry.  Compare the two, or ten, or hundred.  None of us wants just one weaver (and if that happens, I’ll happily help break that weaver’s fingers).  But for the love of the gods, or, better yet, for the love of all of us struggling alone, consider learning to weave, or finding us some people who dare.

Beltaine, 2013

He stands before a gaping wound in the earth. Sun beats down, waiting, beating with the drums, waiting.

Women and men heft an elder upon their shoulders, struggling, sweat, strain, hope, waiting.

At the wound is the center, and the elder, its life given, waits to fill it, waits to heal it. 

Drums. A chant.  A man doesn't know why, doesn't ask why.  He holds a rod of wood, his breath streaming through it, wind from flesh resonating, making wood sing, waiting.

Across the abyss that waits, waits to be repaired, the wound that waits to be healed as the drums wait, beating, as the women and men heft and struggle, waiting, is a woman, waiting.

She wields jade, a bowl, and it sings in her hand.  She stares across the pit at the man, the man who stares at her. 

They are suddenly one, as are those who carry the weight of life upon their shoulders, as are those who wait between the beat of drum.

The man plays, the woman plays, the drums play.  Wails, shouts, all is about to break, all is about to be made whole.  The man sees the woman, he sees other women, he sees other men, men he has loved, men he loves, men who loved and love men he has loved and loves and will love, men he hopes to love. He sees sweat on a beautiful brow, he sees eyes from a mountain, he sees eyes seeing something distant, something he wishes to look at too, something he thinks he will one day see, see maybe with those same eyes.

And then all is broken, all is made whole, and the pole is raised, the rift is healed, the hole is filled, and all is suddenly one, all is suddenly new, all is suddenly now again, now and always again, now and always now.

And there is no longer any waiting.

Reasonable Irrationality

The things I believed most then, the things I believe most now, are the things called fairy tales. They seem to me to be the entirely reasonable things. They are not fantasies: compared with them other things are fantastic. Compared with them religion and rationalism are both abnormal, though religion is abnormally right and rationalism abnormally wrong.

...

We are all under the same mental calamity; we have all forgotten our names. We have all forgotten what we really are. All that we call common sense and rationality and practicality and positivism only means that for certain dead levels of our life we forget that we have forgotten. All that we call spirit and art and ecstasy only means that for one awful instant we remember that we forget.

--From Orthodoxy, by G.K. Chesterton

It has occurred to me that we've collectively lost our reason and decided to replace it with rationality.

I'll start with a story. It's true, as far as stories go, which is to say all the truth we can know.

A client with which I work, diagnosed by doctors who diagnose such things as Schizophrenic, hasn't taken a shower in her home for a very, very long time, because the toilet drains into her faucets.

She presented me with this tale, and I, finding the whole thing a bit perplexing, asked for more explantion. She told me, “The water comes out like sewage, and I can hear the toilet drain into the shower, and no one has fixed it yet. No one believes me.”

I didn't believe her either. I knew her to be one of the more rational, highly-functioning clients; also, she had impeccable hygeine. So it was with great interest I went to her apartment to prove her wrong. She showed me, however, all the evidence of her understanding, and I witnessed all the effects which led her to her conclusion. All faucets in her apartment poured out dark, almost black water, and her shower the blackest of all. In addition, when she flushed the toilet, I could hear with her the rush of water in the wall just behind her shower simultaneous to the noise of the flush.

She was right. She had used the power of reason to come to a rational conclusion based upon all available evidence, constant observation. She'd taken showers in other apartments and saw how therein the water ran clear and fresh. Something was different in her apartment, and nothing could persuade her rigorous logic.

But she was wrong, you see. I am a believer in modern plumbing and the good-will and competency of most people who install plumbing. Also, I was horrified by the idea, and wanted to make every effort to prove to her that she was wrong, to prove to myself she was wrong. So I ran the water longer, and it came out clear, and then I drank some in front of her and did not become ill. This is an irrational thing to do, to risk one's health to prove a suspicion (that is, that she just didn't run her water often enough and foul-smelling sediment had built up within her pipes). And she was convinced.

What strikes me most about her logic is its pristine quality. There was nothing wrong with the conclusions of her observations nor her method; rather, she was missing something else, an irrational hope that mayhaps she was wrong and a reasonable suspicion that I could prove her otherwise. In addition, I'd some previous knowledge regarding the matter—I'd seen what occurs in stagnant, unused pipes, my own observation applied with wild (dare I say reckless) reason towards a problem for which rationality had failed.

I realise I'm using Reason and Rationality in a different mode than most are familiar with, and that so most they are synonyms. This, I think, is a dangerous spell woven by the Rationalists, to claim for materialism one of the most useful tools of the mind. That is, not only are Rationalists asserting that the system of knowledge derived from observation based upon fundamental(ist) principles (exclusively) correct, but also that it is the natural conclusion of anyone who fully uses their reason.

The obvious conclusion, then, if one embraces the Rational way of thinking, is that everyone who believes in Fairies, or Gods, or Spirit, is not just being Irrational, they are being unreasonable.

Besides pointing out that there exists therein a vastly arrogant and elitist conception of the world, the rational person is thus also being unreasonable, discounting the experiences of a myriad of existences in a myriad of places and times. Rationality proposes progress, that we as humans are slowly (too slow for their liking) becoming more rational, less likely to believe in tree-spirits and more likely to believe in the authority of a great system which disenchants the world. The more honest among them admit that this is very much merely their hope, their assertion, a dream of a collective (secular, maybe humanistic, most likely capitalist) society where we no longer take anything on faith but instead rely only on observation, testing, and the knowledge of the wise.

I have embraced a highly irrational faith, and am happy to have done so and find it to be the most reasonable thing possible for myself (thus far). I believe in gods, suspect an Other world, and deeply assert that the earth ought not to be shat upon (or, that is, not shat upon with things other than shit). I suspect magic, yet doubt everything.

And to be fair, I like Rationalism. I find it quite useful for some things, particularly understanding the world of technology and consumerism and capitalism. It isn't merely just to “know one's enemy,” but also to enjoy an incredibly pristine logic which allows for no chance of chaos, no external forces. It's really nice sometimes to think that a human can be completely right and be able to explain everything.

But it's also useless for everything else, particularly when one actually wants to know something. Its Truth is concrete and dead, dry and staid and very limited in what it can actually tell you. It can tell you how, but never why or why not (though it's begun to try, and it's attempts are embarrassing and mostly have to do with sex*). It can tell you what something is made of, but never what it means. With rationalism comes the discreet set of use-values and predictions which work when things always repeat, but sometimes they don't, and it is this lack of repetition which is actually the stuff of life, where reason matters more and a system of rationality is quite useless.

For the rest of life, there is poetry. There is the truth and reason behind the brilliant lies of art, startling and dazzling in the reflections they show of an Other truth. In song find we what was lost when the world became written words, in story find we what we forgot when the ciphers woke.

*Evolutionary psychology is frightfully sex-obsessed, and I often wonder how much its prophets have actually chanced to experience, and I hope they one day have the pleasure of a bit more of it