So we're working through Penczak's book, The Outer Temple of Witchcraft, which was one of the early books I bought years ago when I was first looking into ritual and magic in a Pagan context. I remembered this book as being a lot about the creative, aesthetic work of crafting personal rituals.... but it's definitely interesting revisiting it now that I have nearly a decade of Pagan practice under my belt (the tenth anniversary of my first Pagan ritual is coming up this summer solstice, if you can believe it!). For one thing, I don't remember the book being nearly as logically inconsistent as it actually is. Or, I should say, maybe just poorly articulated. Many of the theological ideas mentioned in the book are simplistic, but then it is meant to be a kind of "Pagan 101" type of book. On the other hand, it's been so long since I read this kind of book that it gives me a new appreciation of the hard polytheists' complaints about "soft polytheism." It also gives me new ire at being lumped in with so-called "soft polytheism," since the polytheism as it appears in Peczack's book isn't very different from my own theology. The biggest thing the book has going for it is that it includes lots of practical exercises. Maybe that's ironic, considering the usual defense of somewhat sloppy theology in modern Paganism is that it's more focused on praxis than doctrine. Many of the practices seem to be helpful and to at least have the potential to lead to real spiritual authenticity and insight. I suspect half the problem is that Chris might just not be very good at articulating some of the deeper complexities involved in a nuanced polytheistic view. It might be that on the whole, he's not even all that interested in the theological aspect, but holds lightly to just enough belief to explain why his practices are meaningful. I've always been the kind of person who needs more, who needs to engage intellectually with my practices and beliefs as well as emotionally and physically through ritual. On the other hand, I feel kind of laissez-faire about Penczak. He was obviously articulate enough to give me a viable way into a new religion back when I needed it (even though he is also probably a big reason why Wicca/Witchcraft never really resonated with me), and on the whole his sloppiness might be relatively harmless so long as it doesn't become dogmatic sloppiness used to abuse or manipulate or exploit.
After working through the introduction and doing a few basic exercises in meditation and visualization just to "get back to basics," Jeff and I moved onto the chapter on the gods (or, in the Wiccan approach, the God and Goddess and their many different manifestations). This chapter wasn't of much value in terms of its content, since Penczak spends a lot of time discussing how the various deities from different cultures fit into a broader scheme of archetypes. It might be of some interest if done carefully with a mind to comparative religion or mythology (I'm not ready to just throw my hands up and declare that there aren't any meaningful patterns among the deities of different cultures), but Penczak doesn't have the expertise to do that and in any case that would have been a book all its own. Instead, he gives a list-like run down of a bunch of different gods and goddesses, each with a paragraph or two explaining their associations within their respective culture. Much of this is perfectly fine, if a bit simplified; but there are also enough examples of him getting specifics wrong or applying his system of categorization in ways that obscure the particularities of a given deity in cultural context that, in general, it's not exactly a resource I would turn to for reliable information.
What it was valuable for, though, was prompting me to think more about how we get to know deities in general. As sloppy as Penczak's approach seems, there's something to be said for diving in and getting to know a deity personally before (or along with) doing the academic research. I realized that I tend to be a bit of a god-stalker. To use the metaphor of personal relationships with people, there's something to be said for first impressions, even if they're incomplete and maybe even false in some ways. Imagine if someone is intrigued by a new acquaintance, and so obsessively tries to memorize all of their personal and family history, scouring public records to find out their likes and dislikes and plumping the local community gossip for details.... And then tries to interact with that person in terms of all of this compiled information, as if that person were a collection of facts instead of an individual. That someone would probably be considered a creepy stalker. And one reason for that would be because they were trying to have complete control over the relationship and dictate its terms, instead of building a relationship as a mutual project with the other person. The point I'm getting at is that, if we take seriously the idea that gods are real (in whatever sense) and individual (again, not necessarily as hard polytheism defines that concept, but at least in a meaningful way) -- then we should trust that building a relationship with deity is a partnership, not a research project, and that it might proceed in an authentic and meaningful way even if we don't know "all" the facts. Knowledge and intimacy are built up between two people over years and years, and aren't necessarily things that can be gleaned from a book on ancient history. We might just have to respect that the gods are going to interact with us on their own terms, and that only aspects of their much deeper and broader realities will ever be shown to us.
This might sound obvious -- and in fact, it sounds very similar to what I've heard some hard polytheists themselves say -- and yet, I don't often see this attitude being upheld through actual behavior, especially when it comes to how people actually talk about and treat their relationships with the gods. This might be yet another place where the term "UPG" does a big disservice to the whole conversation, relegating personal relationship and personal meaning-making to the same category as "fluffy bunny" I-saw-it-in-a-dream kind of stuff and setting it in distinction to (or even in opposition with) scholarly research into "legitimate" primary sources. (The whole issue of what gets counted as legitimate and the fact that the academic world is in no way free of socio-political and personal biases is something I'm not even going to get into now.)
In any case, I'm pretty sure that I god-stalked Brigid, and this was one of the reasons our relationship got a bit stilted for a while. It'd be like getting hung up on whether your new boyfriend likes yams or not, and obsessing about the "deeper meaning" of these types of trivial details instead of focusing on aspects of your relationship that were directly relevant to both of you in the here and now. (Sure, maybe later you come to understand how that boyfriend grew up in the south as a nerdy Buddhist outsider and his dislike of yams maybe gives you some insight into that in some weird way... but without that kind of context, which is only built over time, you could totally ruin a relationship by obsessing over it and trying to "figure him out." Believe me, I know. I once dated an engineer.) I was so busy trying to make all the trivia I could find about her fit into some coherent picture, that I neglected nurturing a real relationship with her more directly.
The irony is that when Artemis showed up, it blew my desire for a Celtic-specific practice out of the water and forced me to deal with the issue of relating to a deity on her own terms. I disliked Ancient Greek culture so much for being misogynistic and patriarchal, that I refused to do the normal obsessive research that I might do otherwise. I didn't really want to totally rework my practice (and my life) in order to make my work with Artemis be culturally contextual. So what ended up happening was that over the last half a year plus, I've spent much more time connecting with her more directly (and supplementing my understanding of her and my relationship with her with research here and there when it's appropriate). And that approach has also influenced my relationship with Brigid, so that it too is getting stronger again. (Though, as I think I've mentioned, stress from the marriage and the move also probably had something to do with that.)
So now that I'm in relationship with not one, but two of the most stereotypically popular goddesses among modern Pagans... I guess the only thing left for me to do is start worshipping the Morrigan, or maybe Odin or Cernnunous, and we'll be all set to hit the fluff bunny trifecta.
So it was in that general spirit that I approached last night's ritual/meditative work, an exercise meant to help a new Pagan meet a couple of gods. The guided meditation involved traveling along the World Tree first to the underworld and then to the upperworld, where you would presumably meet a face of the Goddess and the God, respectively (though Penczak does say that you might encounter two goddesses or two gods, since there are deities of both genders associated with both realms). Since Jeff and I work more with the three realms of Land, Sea and Sky than with an underworld/upperworld dualism, we adapted the meditation somewhat to suit our own purposes. But I went into the ritual with the attitude of seeing whatever or whoever might show up, not trying to force any expectation or assume any definitive answers about the identity of the gods or guides or whoever if any did appear. I wanted to hold the work loosely. I also wanted to set aside my general unease with people who want to rush into relationships with as many gods as they can find, as though they were action figures to be collected. Since I tend to be somewhat introverted in my human relationships, I tend to lean towards henotheism in my spiritual life; but lately I've been noticing how I can tend to be a bit one-sided in my life at times, and so I wanted to see this as an opportunity to meet some guides or companions who would be willing to work with me towards a better balance and more "inner" diversity.
The meditation was actually kind of amazing. By the end of it, I felt like I couldn't keep a stupid grin off my face.
To begin, Jeff and I did a simple centering meditation and verbally "cast the circle" as a way of establishing sacred space. Again, I don't agree with all of the theological aspects of Penczak's approach, but in my work I've found it very useful to establish sacred space through ritual and visualization, especially when working in what is normally a mundane space like the den. (I don't do this as thoroughly when we're doing our rituals outside in the woods, and I probably wouldn't feel like it was as necessary in an indoor space established for that purpose either. But I digress because I feel the need to justify why I don't agree with the ADF Core Ritual and I'm still solidly in the Revival Druidry tradition.) Then Jeff and I spent half an hour in silent meditation, with a gentle bell going off every ten minutes so give us some indication of when we should move on to the next of the Three Realms.
I should mention that I am out of practice with visualization during meditation, so even though I'm writing this out as a narrative, the experience was somewhat more jumbled, with images and sensations sometimes repeating themselves while at other times feeling like they were just outside my peripheral vision. I seemed to improve as the meditation went on, but in general I've never been fantastic at visualizing and so when I describe things that the gods said or showed me, it's more like these were things that I was sort of made to understand, and not an experience of actually hearing words or anything.
I began by standing in front of a massive western red cedar as the "World Tree" -- it's a tree I've been to in meditation before, so old that at its base there is a hollow that goes completely through the tree, creating a kind of archway or doorway, with a small space within. I placed my hands on the bark and spoke my intent of traveling to the Three Realms to meet a god or guide to help me in my spiritual work. Then I entered the tree through the archway. To the left was an opening in the inner heartwood of the tree that led down in a spiraling staircase. I traveled down and down until eventually I emerged on a beach.
The shore was rocky, covered with tumbled stones about the size of my fist and all different colors, and the waves were washing up and down the shore, the water trickling down through the rocks here and there. The wind was strong and smelled like the sea, and gulls wheeled in the air, crying out their piercing calls. For a while, there didn't seem to be anyone there at all and I wasn't sure I was going to meet anyone after all. But then, eventually, I seemed to see the figure of a woman out in the water, sort of forming and dissolving again out of the waves and sea foam. She seemed very far away, out on the water, and I wondered if maybe the tide was at an ebb and I would have to wait for it to rise again before she would come closer. But then I got the distinct impression that I was supposed to walk out to see her. So I walked out onto the water, walking across it until I was far out from shore, at which point I kind of sunk down beneath the waves to an underwater city. Even though I was beneath the water, the city itself did not appear to be under water (in other words, it was just a normal city, not like something you'd see in the Little Mermaid or something), and I walked and breathed normally as if I were still on land. I found myself wandering around a great palace full of large rooms, with the female figure always just out of sight but still present and keeping me company. In one room, I came across a hand mirror -- it's surface was silvery and liquid almost like water, and its rim was white and glistening like pearl. It seemed to me to be connected with the moon, especially with the full moon. I couldn't see the female figure, but she was there, and I tried to ask her who she was, which goddess she might be, but I could get no answer from her. Instead, she encouraged me to pay attention to my sensations while I was in that realm and to think about other times that it reminded me of. It felt as though everything was current and flow, and that my boundaries were porous -- as if, because my body was mostly water and my surroundings were mostly water, that my own edges were blurred and in flux. When there was movement in the distance, I felt that movement ripple towards me like a current within my own body, as if everything was connected. The goddess suggested to me that this was what the deep past and the realm of the ancestors and memory was like, all things fluid and moving together, influenced and shaped by that connection; and that it was also like the realm of death, when the body dissolves back into the earth and the sense of self expands to embrace and include within it all things.
At that point, the bell rang and it was time to move on to the next realm, so I thanked the goddess and asked her to show me the way to the next realm, the Sky. She showed me a spiraling staircase that I followed, up and up, climbing a long way. At first the stair case seemed to be made of rough stone and coral, then it turned to smooth stone, then eventually to crystal and then finally, in the upper reaches, to blazing light and air itself. I came to a doorway and stepped through to find myself in a beautiful, sunlit meadow.
The landscape was idyllic, a perfect blend of spring and summer -- flowers were blooming everywhere and the breeze was fresh, but it was warm (not like how it can be a bit chilly still sometimes in the spring) and the grass was lush and the trees, too, had put out young leaves. I noticed that the leaves, and in fact everything, seemed half translucent with light penetrating them like living stained glass. In the meadow were a myriad colorful butterflies and birds flitting everywhere, the birds filling the air with birdsong, and the sky seemed huge, bright blue with huge, puffy clouds drifting through it. High above, I saw the silhouette of a hawk circling and spiraling, and it grew closer and closer to where I was walking through the meadow. Then suddenly, before me was a man with wings -- looking very much like your typical angel -- great huge wings with white feathers sprouting from his shoulder blades behind him, his whole being radiant with sunlight. I was a bit confused, and asked him if he wasn't just an expression of my animus (also feeling a bit miffed at myself for my meditation conforming so neatly to the gender dualism that I'd been trying to avoid when adapting the meditation). He seemed to shake off the question, sort of ignoring it but in a way that seemed to almost suggest that, on the contrary, my animus was more like an expression of him. His wings seemed to fade or be there only intermittently, and the hawk -- a very large hawk with feathers that shimmered golden and bronze in the sunlight -- landed on his shoulder and from then on seemed inseparable from him, so that sometimes it seemed that just the hawk alone was there. Again, I kept trying to ask him who he was, what his name was, which deity he might be, but he seemed to shrug off the questions as somewhat unimportant or besides the point. He encouraged me, like the sea goddess had, to pay close attention to my sensations as I walked through the Sky realm. It seemed like, just as in the realm of the sea, everything were connected, but in a very different way. Instead of feeling submerged and porous in a fluid world of currents, I felt everything with a certain immediacy, as if these connections moved as fast as thought -- I could see a bird in the distance, and as quickly as I spotted it, my understanding was there with it, even within it experiencing the world as it experienced it. Instead of the world being thick with connection, it seemed like the world -- space and time -- were especially thin, sort of (though I don't think that's the best way to describe it). The sky god put it into words for me by making me to understand that, in the Realm of the Sea, all things penetrated you; whereas in the Realm of the Sky, you penetrated all things. Just as the blood in my body moves in currents that I can feel in every part of me, but when I breathe, the air penetrates me, a cool breath that goes deep into my lungs. As quickly as you could recognize your ignorance or your limitations, you could master them or navigate them with ease, so that he was associated with skill and mastery and the height of civilization, as well as insight and wisdom. This reminded me of Lugh of the Long Arm, and I asked him if that was who he was -- I did not get a straight answer from him, but he did present me with a long, bright spear that seemed to be a symbol in the same way that the mirror had. Just as I experienced the movement reflected in the mirror as my own movement, currents within myself and penetrating me, so I experienced the flight of the spear as my own flight, quick and piercing through the air.
Then, the bell rang again and it was time to visit the third realm, so I asked him to show me the way to the realm of the Land. He pointed me to a place that looked at first like a bit of underbrush on the edge of the meadow, but I saw then that it was a cliff and the underbrush was in fact the canopy of a great tree. I began to climb down the tree, branch by branch, until I was back at the base of the same cedar. I walked through the archway created by its trunk, this time passing straight through as if it were a threshold.
On the other side was a lush, wild forest, thick with undergrowth, huge trees, everything teeming with life and covered with a carpet of green in mosses and ferns and mushrooms and the like. I had the sudden, overwhelming sense of movement, and I was running through the forest, bounding past trees, jumping over rocks and fallen logs, with my heart pounding in my chest. I realized at one point that I was running with a pack of hounds, like hunting dogs, though they didn't appear to be hunting but just running in a pack. I thought that maybe here I would meet Artemis, and just as I was wondering this, up ahead, there she was. She wore antlers on her head, though only small ones with one or two prongs, and she was clad in a short leather tunic. She was amazingly slender and quick, and in every way seemed to embody the energy of a deer as she bounded through the forest, her dark hair flying out behind her. For a while, I just ran with her and the dogs, but eventually I felt like if we kept up this running I wouldn't have a chance to really talk to her at all, so I called out to ask if maybe we might pause for a rest for a little while. She stopped so abruptly that I was caught up short, and her whole body was tense and listening, very much like a deer that has heard a sound and freezes, waiting to hear it again. Eventually, she relaxed and turned towards a clearing, where a pool of fresh spring water bubbled up from the earth and babbled away off into the woods as a small stream. She sat by the pool, leaning to sip some of the fresh water, and I swear it was like a Disney movie, with a bunch of animals coming out of the forest to join her. Birds flitted about in the trees, and the hounds lazed about, with a couple of deer only a few yards away leaning down their slender necks to drink. I also saw a bear, like a dark shadow moving among the trees, and this made me think of Artemis' connection with the bear and how, just then, she seemed so different from that aspect, much more like a deer. As if in response to this thought, she got up from where she was sitting, and now instead of the small antlers, she was wearing a kind of cloak made of bearskin, with the head of the bear like a hood pulled up over her hair. She began to dance in the clearing -- at first, putting her hands up like claws and doing a move that looked like it was right out of Michael Jackson's music video for "The Thriller." When I scoffed in surprise and incredulity, she got down on all fours and started dancing and scampering around -- not on hands and knees, but with her hands and feet, so that her backside stuck up ridiculously in the air as she trundled around. The joy and silliness seemed to radiate off of her and she seemed very much to embody a kind of child-like state of wonder and excitement (but in a way that was deeply wise and knowing at the same time). Then I thought of her possible connection with the moon, as well, and I asked her about that, since the sea goddess I had met seemed to be connected more directly to the moon through the silver-and-pearl mirror. Suddenly, I saw the image of the new crescent moon, just past a sliver, when you can just barely see the still-dark sphere of the rest of the moon outlined against the evening sky and the sliver of light seems less like the moon itself than like a crack between two worlds. She snatched up her bow and pulled it taut with an arrow notched, and the bow seemed to be illuminated in the same way -- which, she made me to understand, was why sometimes her bow and arrows were described as silver and sometimes as gold. She said that the realm of the sacred land was a place of liminality and edges, much more so than the other two realms. She said that we tended to think of the physical, material world as the most mundane and easy to comprehend, but it was in fact the most liminal and enchanted of all. She said that the physical world was a world of surfaces -- that we could only know the surface of things in this way, and never the inside of anything, since if we tried to break it open to get at the "inside," what was internal would withdraw and we would find ourself with nothing but just another surface. To demonstrate, she picked up a rock, and then broke it open so that instead of being a smooth, rounded stone, it was now a kind of rough geode along the broken side -- but this, too, was just a new surface now newly exposed to the world and it was still impossible to see the "inner-ness" of the thing. I understood that she was not just talking about the strange mystery of the physical, material world of nature, but also my sense of her playfulness (and pop culture references to Disney and Michael Jackson) as threatening to be somehow shallow or superficial. She was challenging me on this view, intentionally provoking me to see this realm not as superficial, but as liminal and mysterious, interconnected through those very surfaces and the way they rubbed up against all the other surfaces (and yet also withheld something far more intimate than what penetrated or was penetrating in the other two realms).
By the time the final bell rang, her joy and playfulness had become somewhat infectious, and when I thanked her and returned to the World Tree to end my meditation, I found that I couldn't wipe a somewhat goofy grin off my face.
So that experience went very well, and I am intrigued by these two new deities that I seem to have met. I'm looking forward to continuing this work and exploring these new relationships to see where they lead.
