Triple Moon Goddess
This post is geared towards women, I would do a post on men’s mysteries except for the fact that I don’t have the right equipment, and to speak like I had any idea about what it was like to be a man, would be arrogant at best. So with that being said, in various cultures, the sun and moon are interchangebly associated with male or female dieties. Most of the time it’s a Sun God and a Moon Goddess, but sometimes it’s vice-versa, in Japan there is a Sun Goddess and The Ancient Egyptian Tehuti or Thoth was a Moon God. For my purposes though, we’re going to go with majority and discuss the correlation between the moon and the archtypal feminine.
There is a concept in paganism of the Triple Goddess. Her symbol is pictured above. Women are naturally aligned to the moon because of their mestrual cycles. A woman who spends enough time outdoors will naturally synch with the moon so that she is fertile during the full moon and bleeds during the new. The Triple Moon symbol speaks to the 4 phases of a woman’s life, maiden, mother, crone and then death. The waxing moon correlates with the Maiden, the young virginal woman, untouched by man, unfettered by children. The full Moon correlates with the Mother, a woman at the height of her strength, with the primal power to nourish and give things form. The Crone is associated then with the waning moon, and it symbolizing that yes her strength is waning, but her wisdom grows with each passing year. Finally there is the inevitable death, symbolized by the new moon and archetypally by the death crone, the hideous half rotted hag like the Norse Hel or Izanami of Japan, the Lady of Death who offers priceless wisdom to those who have the courage to look and face her, that priceless wisdom being that death is regeneration, rotting results in the fertile ground for the new. The cycle never ends, the cycle never breaks, death is the passage to the new. If one can learn to face this, death loses it’s sting, and that is priceless indeed.
In our culture, a woman’s period very often is viewed as an inconvience at best. This is especially disconcerting to me. You can hear it in the misogynist idiots who talk about not trusting something that bleeds for seven days and doesn’t die. In ancient times a woman’s “dark moon time” was viewed as the height of her power. The menstrual blood is viewed as regenerating in Sexual Alchemy traditions such as Tantra and across the board it is during this time that a woman’s powers of prophecy were considered to be at their greatest strength. Part of this is due to at the new moon, during a woman’s period she is closest to her “underworld” dark aspect, and dreams and oracular visions come from the under world. Bleeding every month is also a woman’s way of renewing herself, flushing out the month before so that at the end of her cycle she can emerge stronger. Woman need to stop trying to keep up with men during this time, and take the time to rest and sit in introspection. To hell with people who tell you you need to be able to keep on during your period, they are ignorant to say the least. You can actually damage yourself if you exert yourself too much during your moon time. You’re not a man, stop trying to be one.
Which brings me to my final point. Meditate on these mysteries as there is much more wisdom to be found than what is written on this page. Stop playing things on men’s terms. The greatest strength of a woman is her magnetism, implicit in this is gravity and magnetism at it’s extreme, black holes, which can crush anything that enters into them, not even solar masculine light can escape, stick that in you’re pipe and smoke it for awhile:) Our strength is also our ability to get along with other woman. Bond together, and bring men to us on our terms, instead of chasing after them, because no matter how good you are, you’re playing their game on their terms, you’re gonna lose. I said it in my previous post about “the roots of the subjugation of the feminine”, if we women would learn to band together and not give into men until our demands are met, demands like decent compensation for “woman’s” work, like being treated with dignity and respect, men would have now choice but to listen. Don’t try to go to them, make them come to you, use you’re receptive strength to it’s greatest potential. I realize this might make me sound like a ball-busting feminist. The truth is if a man comes to me with honor and respect, I will return it threefold, but if my love and affection are taken for granted and I am ridiculed, I know my power and I have no compunctions about using it. I believe in the equality of the sexes, one is not better than the other. We both need each other, but we need to learn to truly understand and respect the fact that we are different, and not be afraid of that fact. We were created that way for a reason. A woman’s moody seeming bipolarness, is the way she supposed to be, because we are equipped to dip down into that frightening underworld of death, of emotion, to regenerate ourselves, and those that have the courage to unite with us during that time. I think the truth is in those matriarchal prehistoric cultures men were treated as inferior, and that paved the way for the pendulum to swing back the other way so that woman are now treated as inferior. What goes around comes around, and unfortunately among the Goddess/Pagan circles I hang out in, there is definately the notion of male inferiority, which truly saddens me. We are equal, and we are different. We were created as such so we might feel the ecstacy of reuniting with each other.
Litha/Midsummer
So this weekend was Litha or for you mundanes, the summer solstice. This pagan sabbat celebrates the Sun at the height of it’s strength, and the change from the light half of the year to the dark. This change is allegorized in the struggle between the Holly King and the Oak King. The Oak King reigns over the light half of the year and the Holly over the dark. At summer solstice the Holly King is victorious, at Winter Solstice (Yule) the Oak King is victorious. It is a holiday of abundance and the awesome splendour of the sun.
Deeply Rooted Lecture Outline
So I just gave a “lecture” this weekend at the Pagan retreat I go to in Athens WI. I figured I’d post it for posterities sake (insert sarcastic smile here).
Chaos vs. Order-A mathematical and physical approach to Magick
As witches/shamans we tread on ground that few even know exist. Magic is something that no matter how real it may be, is forever relegated to the status of make believe by the establishment. Einstein was quoted to have said that Imagination is more important than Knowledge and I think it was to the fundamental nature of our world that he spoke, for in truth the world is fluid, and imagination/belief is what pulls any semblance of order from the primal abyss. The purpose of this workshop is to provide some scientific basis (and ammo for the next time someone starts grilling you) for what we pagans already know to be truth, and to give you a different perspective on the Craft, reinforcing belief in it.
Chaos vs. Order
-to the uninitiated, most life is pretty ordered, pretty predictable.
-Initiation occurs usually around teenage years when some traumatic/chaotic experience shatters that illusion of stability and order, leading to an inward journey that many do not make it back form (schizophrenia), but the few that do emerge forever changed and wiser.
-This Order masquerading as chaos masquerading as order is the shamanistic rite of initiation and part of a greater pattern of interplay between chaos and order
-Modern Physics has begun exploring these “random coincidences” and “chance occurances” and the result is chaos theory.
-Chaos theory describes behavior of certain dynamical systems (systems whose state evolves with time) that may exhibit dynamics that are highly sensitive to initial conditions (butterfly effect-a butterfly flapping it’s wings causes a hurricane half a world away). As a result of this sensitivity, which manifests itself as an exponential growth of perturbations in the initial conditions, the behavior of chaotic systems appear to be random. This happens even though these systems are deterministic, meaning that their future dynamics are fully defined by their initial conditions, with no random elements involved. In essence it is likely they will stick to a certain pattern, but it will play out differently every time and in a way that is wholly unpredictable.
-One example is the weather. Why the weatherman can not predict weather beyond a week because even though he knows all the variables and equations that affect the system, there is always an unknown chaotic element, there’s always room for chance.
-Another example are computers. They run off of very set defined calculations but yet even after the millionth time of performing an operation, gliches do show up. The ghost in the machine.
-As an adept this is where we have a chance to change things with spellwork. The undefined, that exists in every system is where the imagination has a chance to work it’s magic. Our world in truth operates on belief. Belief that the sky is blue, the grass is green and if you let go of the object in your hand it will fall to the ground. But if there is an unknown involved than anything is possible, and whatever you believe is what will happen and you can pull anything you want out of that chaotic element. Learn to use this unknown to your advantage. Nothing is fixed anything is possible.
-Chaos Magick-Chaos farms and manipulating lotteries.-
-Divination and oracles-chaos in action
Heterotic Universe
-Universe is constant interplay between the forces of creation(nuclear fusion of stars, pulsars) and destructive force(gravity, black holes)
-Directly parallel to Taoist Yin vs. Yang, Chaos vs. Order.
-These two forces translate to the cosmic dance of Shiva and the Divine Intercourse of the Lord and Lady, which we are all children of
Bohm’s Implicate and Explicate Order
-further backing up the fact that we as adepts can use the unknowns that exist in our world to our advantage is Implicate and Explicate Order
-Most science is reductionist as opposed to wholistic but this theory emerged in the 80’s in stark contrast to this trend.
-States there is an underlying unity among all phenomena, particles etc. Nothing is entirely separate, this includes influences that stabilize and those that involve metamorphosis. Whole is in continuous flux.
-The motivating force for the development of this theory is incompatability of quantum theory and relativity theory, relativity works on large predictable bodies, not quantum particles which tend to be random (react to expectations of observers)
-Explicate is the separated phenomena, Implicate is the implied totality
-Quantum entanglements-large separated bodies linked on the quantum level
-TV station example-Signal and station, implicate; image on tv is explicate
-Cells and body, cells explicate, body implicate
-Elaborates eastern concept of division is sign of sickness and that there is an underlying unity amongst all things. (Taoist and Tantra)
-If we are all fundamentally linked than it is possible for a single entity to affect the whole collective. Collective Unconcious. Therefore the profound psychological change that accompanies magick and spellwork very much has the possibility to affect the outer world, because the reality is that we are all linked, all made of energy and the same subatomic particles
-This ties into chaos theory in the sense that unfoldment which is part of imp/exp order, where the explicate become relevant, is the vehicle of chaos to play out.
Statistics and Probability
Always part of one in the other (the YinYang) Extreme Yang becomes extreme yin, and vice versa, there is no polar yang or yin that exists in this world, only the gray area that exists in between.
-This concept correlates with calculus and the concepts of limits. With a given function there is a domain (the x coordinates) and the range (the y coordinates). Y= 3×2 + 8x + 9.
In certain cases when you plug in an x value you get a y value that approaches a limit. Where you can get closer and closer to that value, but when you put in the x value that should yield the y limit, you get a null set. This is the mathematical illustration of the concept of extreme yang and extreme yin, you can get infinitly close, but you cannot totally ever get there.
-The point is that this illustrates again the fluidity of the world we live in and the cyclical nature of the magickal experience.
-Odds are for the uninititiated. Probabilities do exist in our world, but they are just as much in a state of flux as everything else. You can have 99.99% certainty that an event will happen, but there is always that .01% chance that the opposite will happen. If looked at from the perspective of chaos magick, you can use those statistics to up the probability of a certain event happening and loosening up your powers of belief, which are what makes anything happen.
-Tying into this is baby universe theory which states that we quite possibly may be only one universe amongst billions, all connected by wormholes. We as adepts exist with one foot in this world and one in the beyond. We alter reality, and with the introduction of the idea that there may be billions of similar universes, the possibility exists to shift from one to another, and it even further loosens up the probability that a desired event may happen, because maybe it won’t happen in this world, but who says you can’t travel to a parallel universe where such a thing is possible, or that we are not already doing so, but it is in an imperceptible manner. It loosens up the possibilities to what is possible, and using magic to create the world you want to live in.
Magickal Relevatism
-Implications of both general relativity and special relativity;
-Free fall is natural state according to relativity
-Time dilation-moving clocks are measured to tick more slowly than an observers stationary clock
-Relativity of simultaneity-two events that appear to be simultaneous to an observer A will not be simultaneouos to an observer B if B is moving with respect to A.
-Mass energy equivalence-E=mc2, energy and mass are equivalent and transmutable
-Gravitational time dilation-Time goes more slowly at lower gravitational potentials
-Even rays of light(which have zero mass) bend in the presence of a gravitational field.
-Frame dragging-in which a rotating mass “drags along” the space time around it.
-Magical implications
-All things are relative. There is no such thing as stability or a zero point in which is fixed and removed from the rest of the observable universe, if natural state is free fall than that is reinforced. There will come a point if you haven’t come to it already that you will realize everything’s in a state of flux and there really is no stable ground to cling to. This fluidity whereas it may seem scary is actually the basis of magic, everything can change.
-The energy fields of a human being. In truth we are beings of energy (proton neutrons and electrons). In the model of the chakras the highest chakra, the crown is referred to as having the thousand petaled lotus. Can be likened to the phenomena of the propellers of an airplane that after they reach a certain speed they blur and are indescernable. Gives a false sense of slowness when in reality they are moving so fast they’ll chop your hand off correlates to time moving more slowly when moving or in a lower gravitational field. Adepts are open to the voice of the universe (less gravity/less ego, less sense of self except during spellwork, in which case more gravity/more ego to will change in cosmos) and so in most cases have reached the state that their crown chakra has opened, so their energies are so fast that time for us slows down. (time dilation) we can stop things for a minute and slip in and out of this world at a speed that the average person is not going to notice. Same with the relativity of simultaneity. Time loses some of its meaning to an adept and we see things from a different perspective, we are cycling throught the various layers of this reality faster than the average Joe and so we see things differently. Mass and energy are equivalent and transmutable, again universe is malleable. Are conscious of the subtle processes of our world and can manipulate both radiant energy and gravitational energy to our advantage. And frame dragging speaks to the profound effect we have on the world around us because of our increased energy potential.
Mythological references
-Eris principle-Chaos theory-(Murphy’s law) threw apple of discord in that started Trojan war.
-Creation myths-pulling the world (order) out of the primal abyss (chaos)-read genesis?
-Egyptian Geb and Nut. World was said to have been created when RA separated them from their passionate embrace.
-Cosmic egg of asian tradtion, egg being a associated with intercourse and creating new life.
Cosmic Dance of Shiva-dances the world into creation and destroys it. Is said to have already destroyed the world many times, but he restores it so quickly that we humans do not notice
Divination-Oracles
One of the most important tools in my magickal repertoire, is the Oracle I study, the I Ching. As far as I know it is the oldest known divinatory tool. It began as Chinese “Shamans” using tortoiseshells, and writing the result on said shells. It then morphed into the system that is known today with the legendary Chinese Emperor Fu Hsi, who is said to have meditated on the shapes of Nature and spontaneously arrived at the basic trigrams of the I Ching. After him there were several more addendums and additions by later emperors, but it’s basic form remained the same. It was a tool for emperors and was forbidden to commoners. There are two methods of asking questions, three coins, or fifty yarrowsticks (bamboo bbq sticks work well too:) )
As far as I can tell it works off of chaos theory, and by that I mean that in seeming chaos there is order and that order is the voice of the divine and the spirits. When you deal with statistics and numbers enough, and this is at heart mathematical, you start to see patterns in seeming random events. These patterns are what the Oracle works off of. When you count the sticks or cast coins when asking a question, you adding in an unknown (chaos), and through that unknown, of not knowing how many sticks or how the coins are going to come up, that otherworldly voice has a chance to speak.
I’m not going into the exact procedure of how to consult the I Ching, if you want, go get a book, and it will show you. When choosing a book keep in mind that the I is a Taoist work, and as such there is no good or bad, good or evil, it just is. A lot of translators have translated the work from a christian, heaven and hell perspective, like when something like hexagram 18 (decay/rotting) or hexagram 36 (darkening of the light, underworld journey) comes up. Neither of those two concepts are evil, decay is what creates the fertile ground for the new, and underworld journey is going within yourself to find strength and renewal, but most translators label these two hexagrams as bad omens, that isn’t true. They must be seen in the light of the question asked, and how they speak to the diviner.
The I ching is composed of 8 trigrams, which combine to make 64 hexagrams (8×8 matrix for you math people, also note that it works off of the constant interplay of yin and yang, yin being a broken line and yang being a solid line, it is at heart a binary system). It is a treatise on change, in fact it’s name means the book of changes, and it speaks to the fact that the universe is alive and dynamic, never fixed, which to an adept means everything, if nothing is fixed than anything is possible. It shows you how to tune into the unseen forces in the world, and put yourself in harmony with them. It’s a lot easier to go with the flow than fight it, and the I Ching shows you how to do that. It can show you hidden motives in yourself and others, it is a tool of self exploration as much as it is a predictors of the future. And yes it can predict the future, but it will usually come veiled in a context you’re not immediately going to understand. Which is another point, Oracles are never clear, they are always cryptic, you’re not going to get a yes or no answer out of this, and by consequence you can’t ask yes or no questions, because the I isn’t equipped to answer them. It will give you an answer, but it may confuse you more.
There are many types of divination, there is the Asatru system of the runes, there is the more widely known Tarot, and there are things like tea leaves, cloud divination and then Augury as i have mentioned before. Always be careful with these tools and the I though, they are very reactive to you’re subconscious. If you’re upset when you do a reading, the answer you get may upset you even more and drive you nuts. That’s not to say that it’s wrong, it’s just going to make you insane. Oracles also come from the Underworld, Prophecy and divination of any kind are associated with the land of the dead, I think that is why they have been labelled as evil. When you’re dead, you live outside of time, past present and future have no meaning and you can see both directions, both forward and back. Keep this in mind when you are doing this, you are talking with ghosts, treat them and the tool with respect.
