Animals in the City

Among the things I like about city living is that periodically you come across animals that aren't dogs or cats and you really wouldn't expect to see in a city.

For example these pigs on Digbeth High Street in 1903 (you can see the library and the Old Crown in the background):

More contemporarily we have Angel and Muffin, the two famous alpacas who live at the vicarage in Winson Green:

There have been deer:

And in the past week a random sheep has been running round in an unidentified part of the city:

Now even I know that with the exception of the alpacas (who have a specific therapy role) these animals are mainly destined to be eaten. Even I know that lamb doesn't conveniently come in chops. The same reason explains the pigs and the sheep a century apart. It's an absolute jungle out there.

Image sources:

The pigs: https://mobile.twitter.com/oldcrownbham/status/1009684843133730816

The alpacas: https://www.birminghammail.co.uk/incoming/gallery/say-hello-alpacas-james-turner-21820353

The deer: https://www.birminghammail.co.uk/news/local-news/urban-deer-are-on-the-rise-in-birmingham-says-131630.amp

The Magical Significance of Silence

I have immediately hit a snag with the title of this post because I was going to make the point that for Christians and witches and/or Pagans silence is different. But of course there is nothing to stop a Christian being a witch, practicing magic or even having a foot in paganism! So perhaps I mean the significance of silence in some magical traditions.

Of course I am not aware of any history of a monastic movement as such in modern pagan or magical traditions (come on, you didn't seriously expect me to stay on the subject for more than a paragraph did you?). You will find formal, vowed monasticism in some of the Old Catholic or Liberal Catholic traditions. In modern magical traditions we do have a long tradition of going into the quiet with our books, or on a walk, to do the thing that monastics do in silence.

But what is that? Monasticism comes from the Greek word monos meaning alone and has implications of paring things down to what is necessary. And that's where the difference starts, because I'm a witch and I'll decide what I'm doing thank you very much.

I think we do, however have activities which aim to focus, concentrate and feed our witchcraft. They may well not take place in silence. There is a Judaeo-Christian tradition where God is a still small voice and it is necessary to silence the chatter to some extent to enable an I and Thou encounter, whereas in paganism you're standing on the Divine and she's quite likely to tell you when she wants attention.

So rather than the quietening for encounter meaning, influenced by the Qabalah in magical world views silence is more likely to represent the nothingness before something, even before an intent of creation. Like taking a breath before speaking. Or the sensation that you might need the loo soon but the idea hasn't popped into your head.

Don't get me wrong there is an implication of purity type thing but it tends to be the thing before the actual thing.

It also has remarkable power, considering it's nothing, because the child on the Golden Dawn fool card is making the sign of silence but yet can control the wolf!

Sssh!

Green Spaces in Birmingham

This blog aims to be useful and informative, not only in inspiring people to the magical arts, but I also claim to be a guide to the city as well. So here is a short guide to the green spaces, more or less cultivated, for those who would like to know.

First up we have Winterbourne House and Garden (which belongs to the University of Birmingham) which obviously offers both a house and a garden:

The house was built for John Nettlefold, a pioneer of early housing reform in Birmingham at a time when the city had a serious lack of decent homes for working people. John and his wife Margaret were from prestigious local families who had made their living in industry. Choosing their house to be designed in the Arts and Crafts style reflected their modern outlook.

Next we have the Botanical Gardens:

Being one of Birmingham’s best attractions, The Birmingham Botanical Gardens offers something for everyone, be it one of our four stunning glasshouses showing tropical rainforest to arid desert, playground, tearoom and garden gift shop all surrounded by some of the most beautiful gardens in the UK.

There are four glasshouses which range from our exotic Tropical House through to our Subtropical, Mediterranean and Arid Houses. There is a large lawn in front of the glasshouses with a range of beds and shrubberies around its perimeter. Overall, the character is that of a Victorian public park with a bandstand set in 15 acres (6.1 ha) of landscaped greenery.

Martineau Gardens is a therapeutic community resource:

Martineau Gardens is a beautiful therapeutic community garden and a charity, located two miles from Birmingham city centre. An oasis for wildlife, a haven of tranquillity, a destination for an outdoor escape, there are two and a half acres of organically managed landscape for you to explore.

I don't really do greenery but Moseley Bog is somewhere I have a soft spot for:

Moseley Bog is on the site of an old millpond. It is made up of both wet and dry woodland together with patches of fen vegetation which has developed on the site of an old millpond.

Joy's Wood is an area of secondary woodland, which has developed on the old gardens along the eastern boundary. Source

Of course this is not to mention the many parks and open spaces in the city.

And you didn't think I'd forgotten the canals did you? If you're lucky you might even bump into me sunning myself!

Weird Shit: The Incredible Power of the Coronavirus Vaccine

I should have known when I wrote about quack remedies the other week I would find the subject of health misinformation coming back.

There are two simple facts about modern medicine and vaccines in particular that covidiots don't understand. One is that no treatment in scientific medicine is 100% effective. Not one. That's just the way it works, and if you see a treatment that claims to be 100% effective, it's a quack remedy and should be avoided. The other one is that if you have the Coronavirus vaccine you are not guaranteed not to get the virus. You are however significantly less likely to get it and to die from it.

However the vaccine seems to have other incredible powers which I couldn't have foreseen. I actually can't really put them better than the tweet which heads this post. The vaccine combined with a vaccine mandate also serves to clear out idiotic health professionals, teachers and scientists who will happily put the rest of the population at risk for the sake of their ignorance.

There is literally no disadvantage to this and I can't speak for education but in every place I've ever worked in healthcare you didn't work there unless you had the mandatory hepatitis B vaccine.

Shame, poor dears.

It Takes a Witch to Break a Generational Curse

This post was inspired by a meme I found saying exactly the title of this post. So, wanting to at least nod to other people's opinions (only if they're right, of course) I leapt on the internet to see what other people had to say about this subject, and all I can say is, I'm shocked. Shocked.

These Christians steal virtually everything and this area, the one where you're virtually guaranteed to need a witch, is no exception. And I wouldn't even mind them stealing so much if what they stole wasn't contradictory to their own religion.

According to The Gospel Coalition, a “generational curse describes the cumulative effect on a person of things that their ancestors did, believed, or practiced in the past, and a consequence of an ancestor’s actions, beliefs, and sins being passed down.” Source

At the risk of sounding like Jeff Tiedrich (actually, fuck it, I might start a Tiedrich tradition of witchcraft right here), holy fucking shit, that's some industrial strength batshit crazy right there. From a Christian point of view. Because I don't know who this Gospel Coalition are but they sure as hell haven't read the gospel, because in Christianity that thing of sins being passed down through generations has gone, baby. But it turns out there's a whole Christian industry of dealing with this thing they don't believe in. Holy shit.

It's not even like we believe in that shit either, because we don't believe in sin. You heard that right, the Hound was conceived without sin. I do however carry my own actions from previous lives but not other family members' unless I am them reincarnated.

There are two causes of generational curses. One is the more spiritual one that you would expect although is virtually never because of someone actually putting a curse on your family. It is more to do with the way the family as a whole acts and relates to every reality surrounding them. For example (and I'm choosing a fairly dramatic example because it's a clear one) the children of Fred and Rose West will have to live with the ongoing effects of their childhood. I mentioned relating and it is truly in all sorts of relationships that this kind of curse comes back. If you have your own children, for example, you will forever be wondering if you are looking after them well enough, if you could have done more about your siblings, and so on. Conversely you may end up so frozen you can't think about it at all. And how cursed is that? It's generational because previous generations of your family have caused this.

The other way, which is far more common, is that you won't have the resources to deal with life without repeating the same actions again. This is the lesser one because (to stay with the serial killer family example) once you know there's a problem you can get books about parenting and do things differently. Another example would be that if you've been physically neglected you can make a point of feeding your own children better. This way is less inside you than the other way, and ironically once you start dealing with this way you are well on the way to dealing with the first aspect of the generational curse.

The inner curse is the reason it needs a witch. Did I mention that anyone can do witchcraft and that it's usually that sort of adversity that makes someone a witch? It's magical because it means reframing your whole existence, acknowledging and dealing with thought forms that can literally go back generations, and creating a new life. It's also bloody scary work, because it's almost guaranteed to leave you with family members and others furious at you. I speak from experience!

It also needs a witch rather than a Christian because with no disrespect, praying won't do this one. It needs action. It may also conceivably need a few prison sentences and safeguarding but hey, that's the territory and I think the most difficult thing would be that people don't get it. The link referring to the Gospel Coalition above makes some absolutely bizarre comments about childhood, and let's face it the actor Dominic West was attacked in the street after playing Fred West in a documentary. Stupidity is not curable and is not a curse. And it's not even like they had a sensible reason for thinking he was actually Fred West because the guy died right here in Her Majesty's Prison Birmingham thirty years ago. 

You'll notice that I'm not rushing to write a how to book, for reasons of individuality of cases. That's the other reason it takes a witch, is it needs a bitch who's dealt with a few fuccbois. And fuccbois will clearly be abundant.

Tarot: A Simple Way of Reading using Allegory

Meet my Holy Guardian Angel 

Allegory is a genuinely ancient way of telling one story using another. For the sake of this blog post I am using the word to indicate that everything in a tarot card can be something else. The classic example of this is the water which burbles along at the back of so many cards. This is not just a stream, but is often taken to be a stream of consciousness, starting with the High Priestess and carrying on through the journey of the deck. 

It is surprisingly simple to use allegory in a reading, you can just ask yourself what something reminds you of. For example the church in the five of Pentacles could represent your significant other's unwelcoming family.

The technique I would suggest would be to use the Tarot School of New York's Voice in the Card technique. You simply let your eye wander over the card and let it settle somewhere, on some detail or some action, person, emotion... You get the idea.

Personally what i would then do to get at an allegorical meaning would be to say to myself 'That isn't (thing), it is....' and let the answer pop into my head.

A very good example of the allegorical understanding of a tarot card is Judgement. On the face of it this card represents the final judgement of the dead, one of the Four Last Things of the Catholic faith.

But it is also a card which is heavily allegorised and I will borrow the interpretation by David Allen Hulse in New Dimensions for the Cube of Space (Red Wheel Weiser, 2000, p. 48). In this interpretation the angel is the Holy Guardian Angel which magically is your highest self and here calls you to awakening and oversees it.

The flow of water in the background is the thoughts of your conscious mind, which are stopped by the iceberg of meditation and other spiritual acts in the background, allowing you a glimpse of your higher self. The coffins represent the restrictions of the body or the physical plane, which are overcome temporarily in this awakening so that the HGA can give you a higher consciousness beyond space and time.

Probably none of this was in the mind of the original designers of the card but that is the point of allegory!

Unspirituality: Maya/Illusion

I have always been frantically cynical about what is said about the idea of maya or illusion. I may be caricaturing but generally speaking it's the idea that everything is illusion and by extension nothing matters. It's cognate with the idea that not desiring anything will make us happy. You might as well start saying other people only have power over you if you let them.

I am very sceptical of any philosophy that tries to deflect from the suffering of the world in front of us, while also being very aware that that is sometimes the only coping strategy we have. I am also very wary of any philosophy originating in the East, as peddled in the west. Literally all of the ideas of Eastern philosophies are understood in the west through the prism of Theosophy, because that is how we first came across them. We therefore subtly misunderstand all of these ideas including karma, reincarnation, and so on.

Is it conceivable that an ancient world view would come up with the sort of thing you hear in a workshop in Moseley? Of course not.

Vedanta philosophy refers to the term “Maya” as the cosmic illusion on account of which the one appears as many, the Absolute as the Relative. Adi Sankara in the hymn Bhaja Govinda, also known as Moha Mudgara, cautions people about the power of Maya by which this entire creation is constituted, pointed out Sri B. Sundarkumar in a lecture.

‘The world is only as real as the image that is seen in a mirror,’ says the acharya in the Dakshinamurthy Stotra. When this image of the world is seen within oneself, it is similar to what is seen by one due to an illusion.

In the state of sleep, one sees many scenes that appear real. One might have reacted to a fearful dream and cried out aloud while still in the dream state. 

 So the dream is true to the one who has seen it. This reality of the dream state is shattered when one switches to the reality of the waking state.

So is the dream state true or not? If the dream state is true, what happens to the dream when one wakes up? If the dream state is untrue, then what happens to the experiences felt in the dream state?

In the Advaita viewpoint, the illusory world is known as Mithya. What is seen, what is heard, what is thought by the mind and felt by the heart are all because of Maya. All this appears as Truth, but it is not the truth.

As long as one avoids the question ‘Who am I,’ one lives in this world thinking it is real. Confronting this question in earnest opens the path for the search for the Absolute Truth which a jnani is able to realise, while the ignorant are yet to transcend the veil of Maya. Source

 

So not the caricature I gave above, and at the same time exactly the kind of thing that white people run away with and get all wrong.

I am, however, coming round to the possibility that the realities we experience can consist of multiple layers and need different understandings. I am now aware that the idea of maya which has been peddled to us is an illusion and that is some pretty freaky shit.

One of the things which has made me shift slightly is the study of Kabbalah and tarot, and particularly the idea of the cube of Space, where the major arcana are laid out on a cube rather than the more familiar tree of Life. The outer faces of the cube represent different initiations and hence perceptions or understandings, and the axes inside the cube cannot be perceived.

So I'll just leave it there, because I recognize one of those things you're not supposed to understand when I see one.