You honor me ... oh, and ... I'm sorry ...
What I was more interested in is why out iMac user chooses wicca over others? His brief answer about being "unable to reject the realm of the spirit" is thin and unsatisfactory.
What is this "realm of the spirit"?
How does wicca address this issue to his satisfaction?
Are there any objective tests which were applied to W?
Can ppl why fly around on broomsticks?
etc.
All fine questions, including the bit about broomsticks. I had hoped to actually find a way to resolve the present debate with the ... uh ... Space Monkey ... (I'm following your precedent, but hesitantly at this point) ... before delving into some of those vital questions. Simply, I had hoped to present them away from the cloud of apparently needful bashing.
But, as they have arisen, there's no time like the present.
•
What I was more interested in is why iMac user chooses wicca over others?
I have often said that what separates me from the atheists is a matter of vocabulary, and this result is from, as you have noted, my inability to dismiss spiritual realms. (We'll get to that ....)
To start with counterpoint, when I moved "out" of the Christian realm, I landed amid the Satanism rage of the 1980's; I had always taken a different, less aggressive view of Satanic philosophy than others I knew, and as I read about the subject I found out why. Satanism is, in fact, when you get down to the Nine Statements, the religion everybody seems to want; holy license to be selfish. Ayn Rand, Machiavelli, and Mark Twain are among Church of Satan literary recommendations and are intended to be somewhat conclusive in their moral derivations, Twain's warnings otherwise notwithstanding. It now seems strange, this philosophy which licenses greed; as opposed to my Christian brethren, who were afflicted with greed. To license greed is no better than to be afflicted with it, since greed is a disease in this moral consideration--that is, greed is the problem, not whether or not it is licensed. The absolute nail in the coffin, however, was not the request to lead a foundling blood cult, though there was actually some sense of satisfaction in explaining that crew out of their idea by showing a larger stake than whatever the hell it was they were looking for. The absolute nail in the Satanist coffin, though, was when I realized that I was
still trapped within the Christian sphere of influence. That is, I hadn't left the savage arena, but merely "switched teams" as such. It didn't mean the game had any more purpose. Jesus or the Devil, as with licensed or afflicted greed ... the problem was the religion and not which side you took.
And so I spent a few years just getting to know magic again. Not magick as in ceremonial and ritual magick, but the simple magic of being human. It was not the easiest education, as that magic is well-corrupted by years of realist siege. I even went through an atheist period, but could not shake the persistent importance of the "intangibles". And here is where I will be as harsh toward atheism as I ever expect to get: it seems that much as I draw the line and say that the issue is not "which side you're on" but that you're in the game at all, That is, when it comes to fancy or speculation, it matters none "which side you're on", but that you speculate or view the world fancifully at all. In the religious term, we might say it matters not which spirit you pick, the problem is that you pick spirit at all. Unfortunately, my particular atheist phase marked this pattern as one deeply recurring. It did not appear to discriminate 'twixt degrees of atheism, whether those who chose to actively acknowledge no sense of God or those for whom such questions as God do not seem to occur. The pattern seemed to be an unhealthy focus on the objective which created certain results. It should be noted that this focus is hardly uniform, but among those I knew for that period in which God and spirit were impossibilities, there existed a general trend toward eliminating
any intangible factor. It did, in fact, license a certain immorality, but being a general philosophy did not necessarily manifest itself in such a manner. But wherever something good rang hollow, it came from that something's inability to look beyond actuarial tables, statistical formulae, and so forth. For instance, a close friend of mine will argue, when discussing poverty abroad and so forth, that this or that people aren't poor because they have what, a bowl of rice a day? While also imagining the poor to be uniformly fed, the perspective overlooks the intangible aspect of happiness. That is, would my friend consider himself privileged to have a single bowl of rice to eat every day of his life? But since "you can't know what makes people happy", such a consideration is inappropriate to this particular harsh objectivism. The result of which seems horrible to me. It should be said that in no way can I blame atheism itself for this; that's a ridiculous leap. But the lack of intangible factors results in frightening conclusions. As my father put it once, when child labor issues came to CNN, "The kids should be happy to work because at least they're doing something to contribute to the family." You know ... I don't know, what about ...
school? But the social advantages to be gained from educating a generation to be more than stock labor are apparently subjective and therefore intangible, so we ought not consider them. I can point it out with a simple bumper sticker from recent Seattle history:
Why can we spend a billion dollars on sports arenas but not for our schools? Quite frankly, because the billion dollars spent on two stadia are
tangible hypotheticals. That is, we'll make
lots of money in the future with these facilities, so we ought to look at them as
investments; that is, we will see a good, profitable return. Unfortunately, the profitable return for investing in the schools doesn't fit quite right on a ledger page: 20,000 kids taught to read this year? 100,000?
Hey, great, great. But they don't need to read. Look, see this red button on the assembly line here? See this picture? They don't need to know how to read in order to do their job and make money. I can't quite stomach the idea that schools and libraries and fire departments are
luxuries (Oregon Measure Five, 1990--property tax revision that
would have worked but for legislative interference ... schools, libraries, and fire departments all took a hit. But what happened in the schools made people panic, and then the legislature tried to patchwork it to voter satisfaction and blew the whole thing to pieces. Property taxes went up, schools still had a funding issue, and the people were outraged. It should be noted, though, that before the property-tax revisions provided the schools plenty of money, there was a necessary, explained, and known-before-they-voted-for-it problem with funding the schools that was expected to last five years. Everybody panicked two years into it. Gee, maybe if they'd thought about the intangible of making learning suffer for five years? Before they voted, that is?)
It's not that this harsh objectivity is limited to atheism (it infected many regardless of religion or lack thereof), but in needing more intangibles, I could hardly abide by a philosophy which seemed to compel me against including them.
In the meantime, young Tiassa, all of 18 or 19, is working at a Pizza Hut and running around to allegedly haunted houses and other such strange places. Pioneer cemeteries I always liked, and you could feel something different in the air even before you saw the vandalism. I have many taboos about f--king with the dead, many of them purely based on this time. Sitting in a field, I watched sephirothic lights dance, some in familiar patterns, others in patterns I would come to recognize, and still others that I've not found significant. The relationship between natural phenomenon, psychology, and intangible factors is probably where I buried my religion during my atheist phase. After all, at this point, Lovecraft, Barker, and Charles Grant are at the forefront of my literary attention. And that's another thing I'll rip my own atheist phase (and therefore myself) for: I gave up a lot of the connection I had to things not mundane. Crap, I even read Anne Tyler novels during this period ....
But a series of odd phenomena, including the spectres of
living cats prowling the night (and this is at least a year before marijuana would become a factor in my life--I'd smoked it only once), a fifteen-foot-tall Ihavenoideawhatitisgoddamnit, knots untying themselves, spectral eyes in the darkness giving my friend a heart attack (literally, at age 23), falling in an open grave that wasn't there, seeing entire rooms of a "haunted church" change in an instant, tracking a bipedal cloven-hoofed animal (I have its antler), and that's just the stuff that sticks out like a sore thumb ...
I'm not going to say that the cats were pan-dimensional or that the shadow of the Devil did rise from the gully, or that I was actually tracking a satyr, but I can say that the appearance of the blue eyes in the belfry of a "haunted" church was definitely (A) a sensory experience of multiple entities, and (B) the reason our friend fell over, though to be honest it was at his next physical that his doctor, upon checking him out, asked him if he remembered when he had the heart attack. I can't say that I actually saw dancing anything in a field, I can't literally say that it wasn't some glitch in my immediate perception that made the moon move 180º around the sky in a matter of minutes.
However ... being that I prefer the natural explanation of natural phenomena, I would accept any, but I've hardly given enough toward any of them because it's beside the point. (In addition, I've managed to explain away a good half of what I think I saw over that period, and with time and more knowledge, I'll get to some of the others.) What is the point is that I have seen a few things interesting enough to make me wonder about how
any natural phenomenon will play out--angels, Ufos, ghosts, monsters in the lake, &c. For instance, conclusive proof of ghosts would not prove anything but proof of ghosts. What actual event is occurring there will be the reality of what ghosts are. I generally hold with explanations that involve the participation of the witness in the manifestation of the event; the actions of ghosts are so often symbolic to the witnesses that I can't help but lean toward psychiatric phenomena. But, to be purely speculative, what happens if one day we do measure an extremely subtle energy flux and what it turns out is that the witness is seeing is a natural occurrence but lending it their own manifestation in the sense that the perceptory process, being aberrant, triggers a specific assimilatory response in the brain? That is, for some reason, the witness can perceive the otherwise imperceptible disturbance, but making it into a ghost or an angel or such is all of their own mind as determined by the organic response to perception.
Just as a for instance, because I'm well aware that not only is the human race
not finished discovering new things about the Universe, it is also
not finished discovering
new ways of discovering things. That is, what happens if the vibrations of will common to Crowleyan philosophy and others turns out to be manifest in some sense of radiation (e.g. aura?) that humans are not capable of detecting? Not that I ever expect to be able to make the blue-glass paperweight on my desk levitate just by thinking about it. But since everything in our Universe seems to be deliniated electrochemically (it's all a matter of ratios) there most likely exist .... (
edit: I have
no idea how this sentence was supposed to end.)
Enter Wicca. I still can't even tell you how. But it crept quietly into the circle of my association, apparently through myself and a friend. I still wonder if he picked it up from some girl he was trying to charm, and I can't remember what her name was. But it quickly fell victim to the first warlock I would meet. What followed was an ugly descent into D&D witchcraft which I countered with everything under the sun. I think I even threw the Necronomicon in there for good measure
But in the end, I had a broad range of interests all deriving from Western theology. And here I submit a ... well, a process that I hope isn't
that thin. But just as I'm seen here debating some ludicrously liberal civil rights and other issues of liberty, we might say that the reason I'm so convinced I'm right is that my way the most people are free or otherwise benefitted. It's a simple paradigm issue. That's what happens when you're taught Kant by Catholics while moonlighting as your school's foremost Satanist. Seriously. My
a priori, like the comfort Christians used to enjoy in the civic arena, is so naked that few people actually challenge it because to challenge it directly is to say that liberty is a privilege and not an inherent right, to directly presume the innocent guilty, and to have to objectively place oneself in the privileged class. It's nearly anarchic, as we've seen, but that's the point. Everybody's free and if they're smart enough to figure out what that means, we'll do okay as a species. That's not a presumption that they're smart enough to figure it out; reality suggests quite firmly nearly the opposite, so it's problematic. But it's what I aspire to, and when I figure out how to pull it off, I'll let y'all know. I promise. Try to stop me
And that's what happened. Diabology, Qabalism, Wicca, various
ad hoc philosophical menageries pulled from fables, childhood stories, the most poignant experiences I knew. In the end, the more formalized systems fell away, and the sunshine and friggin' rainbows became not only a living result, but in its fleeting nature something to hope for and have faith in.
Wicca gave me a number of things. A craving for peace and harmony, a better appreciation of rhythm, a new curiosity into my fellow human beings which made them less and less
unreal.
None of this, of course, helped me get through college. If for no other reason, I'm glad I at least went because I found Emma Goldman, Sherwood Anderson, and a few other treasures before I dropped out. All in all, I'd say it was profitable. But by that time, the myriad concerns of my studies (ha!), having a girlfriend (ugh!), and substance-abusing myself out of school (woo-hoo!) put the magic in the backseat. I did find Barret's
Magus during that period, and also my
Clavicula Solomonis. By the time my theological experience started moving beyond the western experience and touching on Sufism, Buddhism, HIndu and others, I wasn't really interested in realigning myself yet again. And the scope of my vision changed. If anything, what little intellgence is in the most part of the psychobabble pseudo-magick I saw along the way pointed me toward examining things in terms larger than the mere world. God, as such, or the Universe, if you will. Whatever the whole of creation is, life holds a very unique place in it, and right now, as far as we can tell, the self-aware experience is extremely limited in the Universe. The old somewhat-Wiccan structures still work in a sense, but I learned it as an Earth-scheme and not a Universal-scheme.
And it's what I'm stuck with. Insofar as I can tell, I'll never be a Sufi, and since I already believe that life is suffering, why should I codify it by turning Buddhist
But I'm not ready to rule out the invisibles, intangibles, and undetecteds. While whatever part of me is still a witch is and always has been composite, Wicca was a useful and worthwhile experience, and it's never that far from me.
And I do speak ill of some aspects of the Wiccan experience. I met a number whom I absolutely could not stand, and they were instrumental in keeping me away from coven structures and locked in my own ivory tower of hope. In the end, though, you just let down your hair and keep waiting for the next sunshine and the next friggin' raiinbow. It's not like they're hard to find. But I'm still more at home among Wiccans than just about anyone else. Maybe the crowd at a Phish show, but I can't afford to follow them. I guess I could always string necklace beads or sell water for $2.00 a pint ....
When I was four years old, "Uncle Shelby" told me a story about a tree. Go figure. When I was twenty-four years old, I tried to read about a guy who was married to a tree. Don't bother trying to figure. Trying to read about the guy who was married to a tree is part of the mystery of the goddess (Frazier's
Golden Bough), which is a part of trying to understand why I've chosen "goddess" as a representation for such abstractions as she represents. But this standard reflects a story I learned from a Jewish guy who plays guitar and wrote really funny books when I was four. And that story reflects, insofar as I can tell, everything that people--parents, preachers, grandparents, aunts, uncles, the pre-school lady ... a whole-bunch of grown-ups--tried to teach me about right and wrong.
In that sense, Wicca is the most cogent representation of my connection to that direct experience. And that I'll keep locked up in my Ivory Tower of Hope. And, like I said a long time ago in a topic far away, the Craft in general, and the Goddess herself, weren't upset when I "outgrew" the philosophy. I mentioned somewhere in here that the structures are still there, but they're microcosmic compared to the things I have occasion to consider.
Hmph ... that was ... well, now aren't you glad you asked?
•
What is this "realm of the spirit"?
Specifically, the realm of spirit is the realm of all factors intangible. Whether it is the metaphoric "spirit" of a nation turned toward war, or interesting lights hovering in the trees ... it's part of an experience which is only real in the sense that humans recognize reality in non-literal, intangible, or in which that which is
known inwardly, or,
known to the self.
In the same way, for instance, as superstitions about masturbation--e.g. hair on the palms of your hands or going blind--contained a certain element of truth in their goal but not in their veracity (e.g. too much wanking is unhealthy at least psychologically, and therefore self-restraint is advisable), so, too, do other superstitions need to be contained through identification and adaptation. You won't find me throwing salt over my shoulder unless I'm supremely stoned and feeling inwardly sarcastic, or knocking on wood unless I'm out among the trees feeling
kinship to the firs and pines and cedars themselves. Yes, when I was in Hawaii, I
hugged that damn banyan tree. Why? Because it felt good to be close to a representation of so much human will and hope. But you'll find certain recognizable trends among Wicca that you'll find elsewhere in society. In the Wiccan manifestation, and to be as vague as the SSM for just a moment, it's worth noting that of the Wiccans I've known, among the positively oriented there exists a certain realism, recognizing that the faery in the glade only exists because we empower it to be so. Did God create Man or does man create gods? If human beings only exist for the benefit of the divine (e.g. God, an end result of a particular philosophy I have encountered among Lutherans, Catholics, Baptists, and just about every Christian sect I've encountered
except for the Society of Friends) then the divine cannot exist without the human adoration. Thus, we empower gods. I have long acknowledged that my Goddess is alive on the one hand, for everybody, but in the particular, only for me, who empowers her. This empowerment is true of all Wiccans, though whether they realize the process is at play or not is its own issue, and I'm well aware of what that invites. The result, though, of overlapping (though not entirely common) visions is a composite deity empowered by the collective hopes of the thousands or millions. It isn't much, but it isn't after your children, either.
The realm of spirit, therefore, becomes a realm in which all that is not known exists in its potentiality. That something might be is a real possibility, and what that something's properties are happen to be a real possibility though we cannot know it. Some do, in fact, absorb themselves in this idea, seeking an answer as if such a philosophical answer to a question that does not exist will solve anything. Nonetheless, we thank them for the effort, and for sparing us the necessity of having to put the effort into finding such an abstract answer for ourselves. Who knows? Perhaps someone exploring the nature of divinity will, someday, stumble onto something useful. It
could happen. In the meantime, a philosophy that encourages you to assemble the most noble way possible cannot hurt, and even might be helpful. That gamble is well worth it, in my opinion. Of course, why this is presents its own host of questions that we can get to if we must, but it becomes a digression in four more words.
Why do the staunchest realists creep forward in their seats, silence their banal chatter, and forget about their beers in the bottom of the tenth and Hasegawa is pushing to wrap it up
now? What about their televison faery-land, with its
don't-call-me-now-you-stupid-S-O-B rules and its "How can you mention the
no earned runs and not jinx him" mentality really escapes the living experience? What abstract cause have we to chuckle when they pitch Ichiro out? It's not like I'm the one out there wearing the jersey and scaring the piss out of the pitcher. But everybody seems to have a connection to the intangible, the abstract, the hopeful. I don't understand why so many people shun it. The burden of hypocrisy just tears at you in the abstract. There is a direct correllation between how much of a functional grasp I have on the world and how much I drink once I'm drunk. This is true of people far more intelligent and far less superstitious than myself. (And I'll thank the OTO for that realization, of all groups; don't ask, it's another post for another time.) What is it creeping about our subconscious that makes today any different from yesterday? A buttload of e-mail you put off until tomorrow? Well, if you'd done it yesterday when it came in ... (and in this lesson I am standing absolutely firm, having just learned it the very hard way).
Even the strictist objectivists fall victim to the subjectivities of human nature. I tend, at my most critical, to view it as the difference between
recognizing that people are imperfect and
accepting that fact. The realm of the spirit is the realm of the subjective; that which compels us to respond to instinct and "intuition" (e.g. "woman's intuition") and superstition (e.g. "woman's intuition", socio-political class, general
-isms) instead of strict, objective reality.
In other words, the realm of the spirit is everything which we refuse to classify as real, but which we respond to as if it was real.
•
How does wicca address this issue to his satisfaction?
It allows for boundless possibility. Outright. Compared to Donald Michael Krieg's
Modern Magick, which amounts to a compendium of Golden Dawn and otherwise Crowleyan ideas, Wicca absolutely allows for greater possibility of discovery. Instead of rushing to classification, it remains intentionally aloof and curious. Certes, the ritual aspects of it have their compartmentalized specifics, but among genuine witches, only the snottiest and most borderline are that openly demanding about ritual. Of course, they're the ones who are usually compelled to put the effort into large gatherings, so even our most "Sunday Wiccan" types have value. But where other esoterica pushed toward more definitive classification, Wicca pushed toward discovery of the nature of the classifications, and thus insight into otherwise-ignored aspects of the mundane world. In the long run, Tibetan mysticism and Tibetan Buddhism would have probably done me better, but exposure being such as it is, Wicca is a quiet but significant foundation to my present station in the world. Sure, I'd like more money, but I can still drop jaws from time to time. And what more can I ask than to give a person something they won't forget, and will hold fondly? The thing about sunshine and friggin' rainbows is that they're bloody infectious if you let them be.
It's all a better world when everyone's happy. So shoot me.
•
Are there any objective tests which were applied to W?
I've never bothered. I can cite some incidental objectivism, such as when I speak of the problem of the warlock. But I also know that a lack of education in any discipline will cause bad results. The best you can do is to stand off darkness whenever it directly challenges you. To assume that any darkness requires challenge is to forget that darkness is essential to light. How to minimize the disease that darkness brings ... therein lies the question, eh?
But no ... while Wicca has never gone out of its way to create the impression of physical legitimacy (I'm thinking of Scientology for this comparison, and their little equipment for attitude-adjustment meditation), nor has it ever held objective legitimacy beyond the absolutely empirical. Nor should it be. If Wicca held that kind of objective legitimacy, nobody would be such a sour-puss about anything because the mandate of Life itself would be joy and harmony. (I'm not pointing any specific fingers, but look around at how
unhappy people are, in the US at least. F--king miserable lot. And this from someone who just had his best tax year ever--thanx much to GWBjr for putting that public money toward my irresponsibility
)
And I'll stand on that answer. What does anyone do to make themselves feel good that actually
matters? Cologne? Fashion? Material exuberance? Cocaine?
•
Can ppl why fly around on broomsticks?
Yes. Absolutely.
Er ... as long as ... well, that is ...
Okay, it's time to bust a serious myth about witches, here.
Now, you've all heard of our infamous flying ointment, right?
Part of the myth is definitively erroneous. That is, Christians, in an effort to defame witchery in Europe, invented the myth that the key ingredient of the witches' flying ointment was the fat stripped from an unbaptized infant. This is not true, and everyone knows it.
Baby fat? Incidental. I doubt it happened except in a couple of ... well ...
human ... cases. I mean, nobody's going to pretend that it didn't happen, but read the f--king
Magus ... now
that is insanity. Goose blood? Incense? What the hell?
But no. Baby fat has nothing to do with it.
In fact, I recommend jojoba wax.
Everybody should know by now what the flying ointment's secret is.
Think of it this way ... the ointment is applied to the wrists, the temples, the center of the forehead, and anywhere else you feel like putting it. But be careful with your imagination, because the
secret of the witches' oil is two ingredients.
Understand, the clove, while it lends a nice scent, is also a mild irritant that will open your pores.
Your temples, the center of your forehead.
The clove, then, acts as a nice escort for the
hashish oil in the flying ointment.
Understanding this and all its ramifications,
Yes, you, too, can fly on a broomstick.
thanx much, and
you asked ...,
Tiassa