Green Fingers

I know there are like, traditional witch plants which are super edgy and stuff, but onions - regular kitchen onions - look super evil when planted. Spring has sprung so hard they've been sprouting in my pantry, like green curved fingers reaching out of the ground. A few days sun has retrained their shape, pointing into the sky - but they've still got a creepiness factor that I adore.

Step into the Light

I'm re-reading Self Initiation into the Golden Dawn Tradition by Chic & Sabdra Tabatha Cicero, and increasingly I think the key to the occult project is replacing all instances of the word "Light" with "Knowledge", or "Gnosis" if you feel fancy, and all instances of "Darkness" with "Ignorance". I think that's implicit in most ceremonial material, but most of what I've read has also leaned hard on The Light as literally manifesting itself as more-or-less the God of the Christians, omnipresent and celestial and summoned by Biblical iconography.

My current direction is, I guess, a "Luciferian" ceremonial tradition - focusing on the Lightbringer's aspects of knowledge, freedom, discovery and so on. That means some of the Biblical imagery isn't totally off base, and it's working with figures and concepts already in my mental map.

(I visited Friend S at the weekend, and they scoffed "...you don't want bright light deities but you are also a Luciferian?". Well, it's different. But point taken: and maybe this was the genesis of the idea.)

----

I've been doing a bunch of work trying to "re-draw" the Tree of Life, and basically invent a new one with my concepts. I've still not got something working, although I'm fairly pleased with what I do have. Just inventing my own magical systems and adapting old ones has been the most liberating and satisfying evolution in my practice to date, and I'm delighted by it. Maybe like the parable of the pots, where the students who were to be graded on how many pots they made also created better pots than the students who were to be judged on the outcome of a single pot. I don't know if my new systems are up to much cop, but I think actively experimenting and consulting my books and researching and tossing ideas around is "using" magic in a way that keeps it vivid and at the forefront of my mind.

----

One of the big problems with bigotry is you're damned if you do, damned if you don't. Example: it's a problem if you write no characters of colour; it's a problem if you DO write them as a white author and don't also get it on point. It's a problem if you don't desire trans bodies on the basis that they are trans, but it's also a problem if you specificially desire and fetishise trans bodies for their transness. The more you dig, the more you find the problem isn't exactly your actions, but the whole soceital context which makes some things unavoidably fraught however you interact with them. You can't minimise or avoid problems, society won't let you.

Anyway, been thinking a lot about the Jewish influences in occultism. As I said, I think it's basically Christians (from the 15th century to the present day) who want to "do magic" without being a heretic, and discovered Jewish Mysticism as close-enough cosmologically, yet still feeling exotic, edgy, a walk on the wild side, even a bit "evil". I've seen a bit of modern discourse about how participating in these traditions is appropriative, and I think that's correct - but the appropriation happened centuries ago, and these are legit & powerful traditions. I don't want the only answer to be "...therefore we must stop participating in them". At what point does ceremonial magic become its own context and culture? As well as the Walmart shamanism appropriation problem, you also get a weirdly anti-Semitic strand of thse traditions. And then finally, I've been experimenting with ways of removing the Abrahamic context from ceremonial trads - which in practice means, removing the Christian elements, removing the Jewish elements. You know, I also don't feel great about "Let's use the tree of life but remove all the Judaism", because that's also shitty. A different kind of shitty.

Damned if you do, damned if you don't. Julia Serano writes about concepts like passing/not passing, and model minority/evil stereotype as double binds marginalised people must obey, but I think similar forces exist for non-marginalised people when engaging with issues. A double bind where, there's no option to step out of your culture and history and have an unproblematic relationship with a thing. In this case, the double bind is - participate in traditions which have appropriated Jewish culture, often in shallow and skeezy ways, or remove the Jewishness entirely from a Jewish tradition.

You can't win. I'm going to keep being thoughtful about it and turning the options over - I think that's the only way you can engage with these political double binds, just being constantly open to them, constantly exploring and questioning and willing to adapt what you're doing as you go. But I wish there was a simple answer. I don't want to hurt anyone, deliberately or by acts of ommission. I just want to draw weird shapes on my floor, faff about in robes and summon shit.

The horror, the horror

I'm working on a series of profiles for popcultural figures I work with. I think the genesis for this is -

I'm writing a book about How To Pagan. I don't know if it has any value to others, but I enjoyed writing it, and I enjoy using it to remind me of important precepts or ideas. In the summoning chapter, writing about safe summoning - it occured to me that truly horrifying beings do not exist in real world mythologies.

Me and my growlfriend made a list of things you really did not want in your living room - and the list was Slenderman, Cthulhu & the Lovecraft mythos, the Daedra from the Elder Scrolls games, the Harbingers from the Atmosfear series, the Nothing from The Neverending Story etc etc etc.

Real world mythologies have evil powers, but they tend to be contained. The Norse mythos has Loki (who is chained to a rock) and the Fenris wolf (who will be killed by Víðarr). The Egyptians have Set (defeated by Horus), and Apophis (defeated each night by Ra). Christianity has the devil, but his minons can be banished through the power of Jesus, and ultimately his armies are defeated by St Michael in the the last days.

And so on: there's something about human nature here, needing representations of horror but also needing them to be containable. We invent werewolves, then we invent silver bullet legends. We invent vampires, and then we invent all manner of kryptonites to destroy them, even silly things like they have to untie knots and count poppy seeds. Anything humanity has ever literally believed to be real - we've also believed in a way to stop them.

(There's an incredible article in an old Fortean Times called "Killing Slenderman". The author has studied Slenderman in detail, as a potential internet tulpa/spirit brought into reality by our collective belief, and so this article is about people who have tried to write weaknesses into the Slenderman mythos, as a deliberate act of self defence. In other words - at the moment people started believing Slenderman could be real, they started looking very seriously for ways of containing him. Albeit in a very meta way, as all Slendy related things are).

I think this is the appeal of the pop-cultural powers I'm drawn to. They provide a thing I can't find in non-imagined pantheons: a sense of horror, of cosmic horror, of total insignificance. That's a sensation I want to work with and understand, and it's core to my understanding of the Landweird. I think it's a trauma thing, as a sense of constant and unending hollow terror is a pretty average day for me; how else could I percieve the divine except with awe and terror? Powers who embody the ugly extremes of human experience - not beatific love but obsession, not a personified forest but primal horror - the extremes where I live.

And then generally, a relationship pattern of loving things that might harm me, or that do harm me, and that have a lot of power over me - again, my mortal patterns of being drawn to people who are bad for me, inevitably repeats itself in a draw to gods who are bad for me. But maybe it's a fuller way to indulge the abus-ee's ultimate fantasy of finding abusers who can love them, you know? The old "he's good on the inside and only I can change him", and with a pop-cultural deity you almost certainly can have that experience, you can dance near to the flame and fall over the edge - but then be caught.