Starting Over (part two)

Last month, in a fit of frustration, I tore down my old altar. (The fact that I haven't much missed it in a month is not a good sign, I think.) Today, I got me a new altar table.

It didn't cost me anything; I got it from Freecycle, an amazing email barter system. Have something you don't want, you send an email to the list. See something you want, you email someone about their post. Need something in particular, send an email, go out two days later to pick up your brand-new altar table. My old altar table is getting scrubbed down and moved to the living room, and the table it's replacing will go back on Freecycle. It's the new urban ecosystem -- take something out, put something back in.

It's round! I've never had a round altar before; I'll have to rearrange some things. I've always had quite a formal-looking altar, actually, and I think it's time to mix it up a bit. And what shall I do with the top? Shall I paint it? Finish it? Engrave it? Cover it with an altar cloth? Oh, I have so many options, for my current plan is to have it ready for its first dedication on Samhain. It will (hopefully) see use before then; I see no point in making a commitment to something you haven't tried out first.

I'm looking forward to remaking it immensely, actually. I remember the first time I put an altar up properly, and how wonderful it was, and how it felt like an entirely different world from the rest of my bedroom in my parents' house in the middle of nowhere. But I'd been basically moving that altar around ever since; I'm far from the same person I was when I was sixteen. It's definitely time for a change.

Magickal Thinking, Magickal Community, Magickal Games

You would not believe the number of awesome posts y'all are missing out on. I continue to be inspired at work, and I manage to scribble two or three pages worth of fascinating stuff before I things get too busy in the middle of the day, and then I get home and I'm entirely too tired to type them out. But I've written stuff about gender roles, about personal practice, about the ritual calendar and pagan stereotypes...and maybe one day I'll even get them posted. *sigh*

On a purely personal note, the latest incarnation of my magickal practice appears to be coming up with increasingly twisty and complicated sets of symbols. See, it all started when I got to rereading Crowley's Magick Without Tears again (for about the fifth time; we'll see if I finish it this time), hit the bit where he recommended learning the entire Qabbalistic system of correspondences by heart, and bought a copy of 777 and of Not Your Mama's Tree Ogam. Then I bought Christopher Penczak's City Magick and was inspired with the genius idea to create sigils out of the sudoku puzzles I do on the bus, via a complicated numerology system involving ogam and fractions. (I thought I forgot how to do fraction math years ago.)

You see, I used to hate things like that. Or rather, I used to think I hated things like that. After all the Wicca 101 books I consumed for several years straight, I developed the idea that magick ought to be simple, straightforward, and indeed somewhat childishly obvious; complicated magickal systems were either a relic of a time when such things needed to be concealed or were a takeoff from a patriarchal system where knowledge needed to be hidden from the masses. All these books recommended making your own symbols, but the examples they tended to use were things like dollar signs and little drawings of a house or a car. Which, I guess, works, but probably not if you're rolling your eyes somewhere inside at the simplistic nature of it all.

I've always loved overly complicated things. Rube Goldberg machines, clock innards, circuitboards, invented languages, and, apparently, numerologically inspired sigils. It gives me a feeling of immense glee to look at the sigil I designed for keeping my energy up for after-work concertgoing; remembering all the clever meanings I came up to the elements of its design makes me feel sneaky and subversive and accomplished all at the same time. It's fun, mainly, as all good magick should be.

ps: Pandora's Bazaar tagged me for the Thinking Bloggers' Award! I blush with pleasure, because I'd tag back if it weren't slightly unkosher. Anyway, the rules are:
1. If, and only if, you get tagged, write a post with links to 5 blogs that make you think,
2. Link to this post so that people can easily find the exact origin of the meme,
3. Optional: Proudly display the 'Thinking Blogger Award' with a link to the post that you wrote. (I'll get it up here soon, I promise; must finish blogging before dinner.)

I'll tag -- Songs of Unforgetting, Turtleheart Cove, Letters from Hardscrabble Creek, Never Say Never..., and Slacktivist. Great bloggers the lot of them.

Be Careful What You Wish For

I honestly never expected that sentiment to be a relevant part of my life. Sure, it's great for plots for fantasty stories, but I never thought I'd be playing with magick tetchy enough to make it relevant to me, at least not in the forseeable future. But.

February was awful for me, as it frequently is. I had no planned days off -- just one for the blizzard that snowed me in -- and nothing exciting going on. Just the daily routine of work, television, books and sleep. I was going nuts and had no motivation to work on any of my multitudes of creative projects. Then one morning I very nearly missed the bus, and found that the adrenaline surge that gave me kept me going through the rest of the day, and I got some writing done at work and some sewing done when I got home. I jokingly remarked to my roommate that I thought these little crises were good for me, really.

Then I found out from Blogickal that not only was there a full moon on, it was the Hare Moon, an excellent portent of fertility and productivity. Aha! I thought to myself, a wonderful excuse to do some magick. I stitched together a little spellbag with rosemary and sage and a piece of jasper and some sigils for Mercury, left it out under the light of the full moon (metaphysically speaking; we had full cloud cover and didn't get so much as a glimpse of the eclipse), and stuck it in my purse the next day, pleased at my own initiative.

And in the week since then, I've nearly missed the bus (again), got my car stuck in the snow in my own driveway (embarassing), lost and rediscovered some insignificant amounts of cash, and forgotten my keys. And written something on the order of 3,000 words, not counting blog posts; designed a pattern for my new purse; finished a skirt I've been working on for over a month; and cooked several new and intriguing recipes. The February blahs are completely gone as we head into spring thaw (or what looks like it -- it might be faking us out again) and I feel a million times better.

Even if I do have to be extra-careful about remembering my keys from now on.

What Works For Me

Never one to pass up a beta, I've upgraded to the new Blogger. Expect some fiddling with format and such while I try to figure out what they've done to the thing -- and I think one of the restrictions now is that old-Blogger accounts aren't compatible with new-Blogger accounts, so feel free to leave anonymous comments if the system seems to hate you for any reason.

**

I have refrained from writing mostly because I have been helping my roommate settle in, settling into my new job (oh god employment is so wonderful, even if I do have terrible hours at the moment), and fighting with a tempermental kitchen sink. I could have given you a very sanctimonious and self-reflective post on why these things do not encourage me to think about magic or religion at all, but I decided to save the tedium for something I was genuinely interested in.

One of the good things about my job is it involves an hour-long bus ride and a lot of downtime, so I'm getting a lot of reading done. Yesterday, on impulse, I picked up my copy of Alestair Crowley's Little Essays Toward Truth to take with me. Crowley is as close as I have ever gotten to finding Pagan literature that I really like; for all his over-reliance on Judaic and Christian ideas, his questionable combinations of Indian and Egyptian ideas, his egotism and his general self-righteousness, Crowley just does it for me. I can't explain it, except to say that I have always had an irrational love for the Victorian and the completely mad.

And, of course, I quite like many of Crowley's ideas. One of the first statements he makes in his essay on "Man" (and indeed one of his foundational ideas) is that "all phenomena ... may be classified for the purpose of discussing their observed relations, in any manner which experience may show to be the most convenient. ( ... There is no essential truth in any of these aids to thinking: convenience is the sole measure.)"

It walks the line, I suppose, between extreme relativism and extreme skepticism. On the one hand, denying the essential truth of any mode of thinking is tantamount to saying that one idea is as valid as another; evolution and creationism (to take a nice, incendiary example) are just two ideas, neither of which is absolutely true. It's the insistance on convenience that separates this statement from blanket relativism. Relativism refuses to make value judgements at all, but Crowley here is advocating judging systems based on convenience -- their usefulness to the practitioner.

To extend the earlier comparison, evolutionary thinking is useful in explaining all manner of things, from the biological origins of humanity to changing drug treatments, while creationism is useful primarily in promoting a specific Biblical literalism-based worldview. So if you're a patriarch of a Biblical literalism-based church, creationism is a great idea; for the rest of us, evolution is much more convenient. The whole basis for using convenience rather than truth as the basis for judgement comes from the tradition of philosophical skepticism, which de-emphasizes the possibility of ever really knowing the truth about anything. Of course, you can't go around denying the existence of everything in your daily life, so you have to judge things by their convenience, their use to you. (Unfortunately Crowley is in the habit of describing systems he likes as "scientific" rather than "convenient," but the concept stands.)

Reading this for about the tenth time (I always feel like I should blog these things; I've just never gotten around to it before) it occurs to me that this is where the eclectic "do whatever works for you" philosophy comes from, and not entirely without merit, although the idea has obviously been watered down drastically. Because that is exactly what Crowley says in this first essay -- "I think the Qabalah is the most useful tool in existence, but if you disagree, or if you can change it to suit your purposes better, do so -- just make sure you know what you're changing first and why." Which, in all fairness, is the responsible way to handle "whatever works for you" and the way I suspect a great many people do handle it. The problem comes in with the fact that relativism is a more common and more accessable idea than skepticism for most people, and so the eclectic ideal becomes too relativistic and, sorry, too open-minded. The emphasis on the statement should be on works, not on you.

Salt of the Earth

When cleaning off my altar to move it, I discovered something of a problem. I'd set this particular altar up in a phase where I was quite into ceremonial magic, everything laid out properly according to all those Wicca 101 books I'd picked up in my first years. Candles, altar cloth, pentacle, goblet, check; some scattered pinecones and summer flowers, check; and...a bowl of salt. Okay, the good tools are obvious, pack them up and go. Most of the natural materials I returned to the garden. But the salt? I couldn't just throw it in the trash; it had been on my altar, and it deserved better than that. I couldn't bury it, as I did the other bits and pieces which wouldn't be coming with me; salted soil is barren, and that's hardly what I intended to leave behind. Eventually I washed it down the sink with water from the bowl on the altar, but it set me thinking.

Salt. Who the hell thought that one up? As a symbol of earth, it hasn't got a lot going for it, other than just sort of generally being a mineral. Lots of other things do that. It's a consumable, yes, and associated with hospitality, but the reason for that is also its rarity -- salt was expensive, for a long time, and it was a sign of hospitality because giving away something that expensive is damn impressive. (Come to think of it, looking at what I paid for the jar of sea salt I've kept on my altar, salt is still expensive.)

So it's supposed to represent Earth. In that case, why not use...earth? Dirt's free. It's plentiful. And when you don't need it anymore, when you've cast something with it and it needs to be properly disposed of, when you just need something fresher, there's an obvious place to put it. This seemed so logical to me that I had to go look in all those Wicca 101 books that I'd kept around and see if they had really told me to put a bowl of salt on my altar. Except they were all packed already. Today I remembered that I was going to do that, so now that my books are all unpacked, I went and looked. And yes, that's exactly what they told me to do, universally and without explanation. (Although Cunningham's Wicca For The Solitary Practitioner says salt or earth can be used, it's salt in all the diagrams.)

Well, who really expected Wicca 101 books to have explanations anyway? Ephilias Levi was slightly more helpful -- in the conclusion to A History of Magic he devotes about a page to alchemical understandings of the elements, although they are other elements in question: alchemists, he tells us, associated spirit with sulphur, fire, and the Father; the 'mediator' (which I do not know enough alchemy to sufficiently explain) with mercury, change, and the Mother; and base matter with salt -- "because of the fixed salt which remains after combustion" -- and the Child, or that which is "subjected to education by nature." In a similar sort of vague Victorian language there is a tenuous connection to Earth mentioned in there as well, but hardly in the Four Elementals sense of the word. So. The Better Magick Through Chemistry crowd associated earth with salt because it's what's left over after you burn up sulphur. (Of course, I have no idea if these apocryphal alchemists did any such thing, but Levi thinks they did, and if a Victorian wrote about it you've probably found its origins in modern practice.)

A quick google through hermetic.com turns up the fact that Crowley and most other hermeticists also seem to follow the salt-for-earth rule, with a couple of glancing references (sadly unsourced) to the Sulphur-Mercury-Salt triad that seems to affirm my suspicion that the source for this practice is in alchemy. There's also a couple of references to anointing with earth and water in the form of salt water, which makes a little more sense, particularly if one lives in the sort of place where one doesn't have to manufacture salt water. In the American Midwest, well.

Unfortunately, that's about the limit of my useful research at the moment; not necessarily because I've run out of resources, but I'm not quite sure where else to look. (This has been my eternal frustration in researching modern Paganism; Llewellyn books don't have bibliographies, and while I'm moderately familiar with Victorian occultists, there's a huge gap in the middle there, not to mention trying to figure out where the Victorians got it in the first place.) Is there anyone out there with some experience or research in early Wicca who can help explain this somewhat baffling phenomenon?

Symbolism is all well and good, after all, and I'll steal drama and Latin and ripped-off yoga from the ceremonialists quite cheerfully, but as for me, the salt is going back in the kitchen cupboard and I'm digging up a piece of the back garden to put on my altar.