Daily Work

[haptalaon]

I'm reading David Abrams Becoming Animal (whoa!), and it's basically about vernacular mindfulness - he's a nature writer and spiritual person, and large chunks of this nonfic book are him describing everyday occurrances as made newly-strange by an intensity of noticing and sensing. At times, the effect is almost psychedelic

So yes, it's very very good. It has a strand of dated fascination with indigenous wisdom, and here the book is at its weakest, but he has at least done the work of travelling and meeting with people from other cultures, albeit within an orientalising framework.

He talks intensely about bodyminds, about the modern western shift towards experiencing themselves as cerebral instead of embodied. I'm thinking about Abrams wrt daily practice, because all my life pagan traditions have modeled what daily work looks like: something akin to, you light a candle, you sit down, you think a bit - perhaps you meditate - perhaps you draw cards - perhaps you 'hear a voice' - but it is both still and internal.

Something I emphasise in my writings is daily work that is very active:

• Solar: making sacred the daily routines of life
• The rite of walking, of being in your body and doing something outside, maybe expressed as gardening or even sitting and watching the birds if you can't hike far
• the rite of reading, of interacting with a second mind (expressed as a book, film or album, but still, a secondary perspective)
• the rite of disconnecting - that is, a taboo which forces you away from sitting in silence
• The great dance of the Solar Stellar, of dreaming in the sun, being open to experience, and ritual movement and play
• for 'meditation' I would always advocate for either reading then thinking/writing about it, or yoga/tai-chi/even jogging, some kind of body movement

And so on

I always assumed it worked better for me from an ADHD perspective, but Abrams has opened me to considering that maybe it just works better period. Why did we ever assume that stillness, silence and being alone was the best route to interfacing with pagan spirits, who most pagan theologians will describe as embodied in the world and substantial?

Sit-still paganism comes from a couple of places. Crowley brought eastern mysticism into the occult new age - he was a big fan of yoga, for example, and writes about meditation. At least some yogic traditions do involve a lot of sitting and thinking. It's likely Crowley who is the progenitor of 'meditate every day as a key building block of paganism', I haven't found it in earlier Golden Dawn texts (tho they were, in their own way, orientalist).

Meanwhile, we are all still Christians at heart, and the sitting still and saying words and thinking is a feature of normative Christian prayer. I'm a big fan of marginal christianity, of seeing christianity as diverse and weird and changing through time and location, so see: there are gospel churches where Christianity is expressed as ecstatic song and dance, there are groups where people speak in tongues and faint with the spirit, there's medieval mummers plays where christianity is expressed as movement and performance, there is flagellation and fasting and body-techniques to experience the divine in odd monastic orders. But none of this is familiar to the average pagan, because none of us come from that kind of Christian upbringing. What we bring into paganism, then, is sitting quietly in a pew

One feature I try to bring to my pagan life is revealing a new theology. That is, if the precepts of Paganism are true (and they are), then how would that change how I behaved, thought and worshipped? I try and look especially for places where these beliefs are dissonant with my own instincts and preferences. Of course, they align fairly well, otherwise I would not have been drawn into the kind of religious life I keep - but it is always good to pause and ask this.

And so: is this typical vision of a daily Pagan practice of the mud and lonely waters? Or does logic lead us from understandings that the Otherworld is just over the next hillock and there is divinity in the privet bushes all along my garden, that we must also be intensely bodied and of-the-world as our daily work? Our gods are here, and so must we be.

---

Not unrelated, but I have put up a first page (of many) on my website describing a 'location' on Landcraft's map, that is, the alchemy of sun, moon and star imagined as places you can 'go' to be immersed in a certain way of being. The Sanctuary is expressive of a lot of unspoken magical norms; part of the goal of a map is to make explicit by naming and locating.

These norms include:

• You must be ritually pure - with water and energetically
• You must be 'safe' within a container
• You must be calm and in control
• You must carefully plan all you do
• You must consider the light, as in a candle or a clear, pure energy

This glassy occultism will, I think, be familiar to everyone who has read a beginner book. Fencraft locates this as the Sanctuary, a place in which this modality works and is best. It is in strong contrast with the logic of magic where you put forth the intensity of your emotion or become ritually possessed or lose yourself in dance, which also works, but ritual must be in harmony to push all the way through, and so it is somewhere different. The magician's task is to consider which model to use for a working (or how to combine them).

If one was to attend a Fencraft mystery school, in one's third year it would be a decision as to which of these locations to spend time in. In earlier years, one would travel through them all as a taster, but the third year would be a moment to pick one and get extremely good at it - not that you ever have to stay in one, of course, but it is good to get good at something.