Spirit of Place: Key Hill Cemetery

I have posted before on Key Hill's neighbouring cemetery, Warstone Lane Cemetery, but had actually never been to this one until today. The reason Birmingham has two cemeteries next door to each other is one was for the nonconformists, namely Key Hill. It is actually the older, since Warstone Lane was only started after Church of England churchyards started filling up.

They are both now closed to new burials, & both on preservation registers, yet feel subtly different. For a start, I'm surprised at the exaggerated height of the surrounding buildings, on what is already a sloping site. This means the key feature at Key Hill is mush, damp, sludge (at least today). It is also apparently not as well cared for as Warstone Lane: the paths are clearly visible in Warstone Lane today, but indistinguishable in Key Hill. Both have had their chapels demolished.

The gravestones at Warstone Lane are more flamboyant, whereas at Key Hill they bring the feeling of the solid nineteenth century Nonconformity on which so much of Birmingham was built. Many of the great names of Birmingham's early history are buried here, & their scientific interests bring to my mind the dead atmosphere of nineteenth-century Deism. Yes, darlings, it is possible to reconcile Christianity with rational thought, & what you end up with a strange moral Christianity with almost nothing supernatural in it.

What did I feel there? Absolutely nothing. The people buried there are either long gone or horrified at the thought of me. I've never got on well with Christian nonconformity, preferring Anglicanism & Catholicism, where at least you get to dress up. My mother was brought up as a Primitive Methodist, giving her a strange approach to drink: the man she describes as the 'black sheep of the family' got that title purely for drinking, which is rank hypocrisy when you think what some of the rest of the family have been like.

Actually, I did meet someone there: I met the stock from which my mother's side of the family comes. I wound up getting in contact with my roots, because let's face it, saying 'I am a witch' is about as non-conformist as you can get. I had not thought before that what I do is actually in a great family tradition, even if those people would turn in their graves at the very thought of me. But here's the difference: I aim to live on many levels at once in a multitude of worlds & possibilities. They aimed to close possibilities, & even memorialised their attempt by slamming the mausoleum door shut.

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Not cosy

There is something about this time of year - my favourite time of year - that changes what I want to fill my mind with. Often I have turned to Boswell's Johnson in the past, or sometimes to Sherlock Holmes, only short-term because I want to slap Holmes. This year I'm finding myself listening to cosy Golden Age murders. One I listened to recently, Agatha Christie's The Moving Finger, has set me thinking.

It is very clear why these Golden Age mysteries continue to be popular, despite their often cardboard characterisation & plots holed like old socks, the reason is the world they portray. The Moving Finger is set in a village, with all the characteristic intrigue you get in a Christie village, despite the simplicity of the solution, which Miss Marple insists is perfectly obvious. She fulfills the role of providing a safety net in a world invaded by a dangerous murderer, but which otherwise is inhabited by safe stock characters. The book invites the reader to become a native of the village for a time, which would necessarily mean being surrounded by people one had known all ones life. The feeling of familiarity & safety would be incredibly seductive.

But the point I want to make is that this is not real. For me personally the very idea of living in a village makes me want to flee to the nearest city screaming for anonymity. The life in a Christie village would be so stifling, & actually not cosy at all. Small communities have ways of imposing their own standards on their inhabitants. Having grown up in a Black Country village - one which was superficially well in communication with larger places near by - I can witness to the horizon-narrowing effect of small communities.

Those kind of places are the kind of places that people like me get out of at the first opportunity. If anyone is tempting to hurl the 'snob' epithet at me, do an experiment: move to a small village. Act as if you are a transsexual, without saying 'I am a transsexual', but otherwise act as if you were. Believe me, you'll want to be out of there in no time.

It boils down, as so many things do, to the person that you want to be. Obviously sometimes it's to do with the person that you just are, when it includes such things as sexual orientation, gender, & race. Sometimes you just have to get out of where you are.

When other people do things that we don't want, we have the option if we swish to try to negotiate with them about what they are doing, in addition to the option of getting out. Otherwise you have the potential to create yourself as you will yourself to be. Sometimes they mix. For example, I am very very high maintenance - but you'd sussed that, hadn't you? I take offence very easily & throw a hissy fit easily. So, for example, if I send a friend a text & he doesn't reply I will automatically start looking for reinforcing evidence that I'm not being paid enough attention. And of course sometimes that is actually true: as we change our relationships change.

But here's the nub, & the bit that will explain why I can't do cosy, because living the Willed life is never cosy. I don't want to be a touchy old queen. I don't want to be a difficult old man - at least no more difficult than I already am. My will is to become hopefully more flexible & easy-going as I get older. Hence the recognition of my own touchiness & a lack of comfort at it is essential. Cosy means stagnation, & I flatly refuse to go there.

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When it goes quiet

There are times when the witch's life goes quiet. This is the reason for the scarcity of my posts lately.

My personal opinion is that these times illustrate one of the differences between us and conventional religions, which are very insistent that you stick to their prescribed practices come rain or shine, regardless of how inclined you feel to do so. They also have an experience called spiritual dryness, when you don't feel like it at all.

I would like to think that we witches live in a world that we are in a relationship with, & it & we respond to each other accordingly. I've posted before on how often the witch is actually dragged kicking & screaming to a task, so I certainly wouldn't want to imply that what we do is dependent on our feelings, but more that we respond to the tasks & challenges as they appear in front of us.

This is the true school of witchcraft, & this is what is meant by the tradition of putting down the books & just doing it. I would personally resist a too rigid daily practice: I mean, G*ddess knows I'm probably the least disciplined witch in the world. For me, there is no point trying to set a daily discipline & stick to it. I can't do it. Working shifts also interferes with it. The failure to stick to the discipline I set myself ultimately leads to 'ought', 'should', 'must', & guilt, & the one discipline I insist on is not feeling guilt because I haven't stuck to an arbitrary rule. I feel for the witch guilt is a suspicious emotion: it suggests something is being imposed on us - even when we do it ourselves - & dammit I *will* be free from slavery!

I also avoid any negative implications of these times, seeing them instead as part of our natural life cycle, of times of busy witchiness alternating with rest. If we're truly trying to be responsive to the world about us, these hints from the universe will be welcome, & paralleled by the necessary times of rest for fields.

Because nothing doesn't happen in these quieter times. In fact they're the prelude to activity. For example I cast a spell on someone before this rest came along, it seemed like nothing had happened, but it now seems like it's working. It was a spell that she would see & not deny a given situation. She actually told me the whole situation today, & the sitch itself is certainly feeling very pregnant, & ready to pop!

Perhaps that's the secret sometimes: sleep on it & don't force it...

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More thoughts on the Library of Birmingham

I've now been into the library a number of times & actually used it so am in more of a position to assess its quality as a library.

There is a very clear difference between this one & the previous one, illustrated by the two pictures I've chosen. One shows the secret garden on the top but one floor. I went up there after sunset yesterday evening. It was exhilarating being up there in the dark during rush hour with the traffic out of the city like ribbons of light way below. I had this sudden strange urge to ask the security guard for sex & I assume it has that effect on other people because of the large signs warning about CCTV.

The other picture shows the space under the old library's inverted ziggurat as it was originally meant to be. And this is the difference: the old library was a statement in architecture & shape, sacrificing function to form. The present library is designed for its users.

I have a few qualms about its likely effect on its staff. Despite the large sign at reception stressing how important welfare of the staff has been, my impression is that the staff are very exposed to the all-critical eye of the public. There are walls of glass into offices & meeting rooms: the sense of continual scrutiny must be extraordinary.

In terms of using the library it doesn't have the strange 'underground' feeling of the old one - caused by little natural light & few windows. It's actually the other way around - it's spacious to the other extreme! Once you get your head round where the subjects are thing - with the *huge* exception I will mention below are actually easier to find now. There are a variety of places & things to sit on on every level.

The only major criticism I have of the library as a building is I think mistakes have been made in some of the surfaces used. I mean in terms of usability: the fashion in public spaces is away from carpets, but they would make it much less noisy than it is. Also I mean in durability: some of the floors & walls are looking rather scuffed, weeks after library's opening. And, darlings, black shows dust. If you're going to have empty black shelves high up you have to organise the dusting of them or your new library looks very tatty.

My other criticism isn't really of the Library of Birmingham as such but a criticism of the management of the central library for the past forty years. The old central library had two catalogues running at once, one a card index, the other electronic. There was an overlap but the card index seems to have been what was taken from the previous library in the 1970s, & a single catalogue was never created. This is something that should have been remedied when an electronic catalogue was created. Similarly the works that were done to move to the new library such as rationalising, preserving & cataloguing the collection, all seem to me tasks that *should* be the day to day work of a library. The impression that the bread & butter work of maintaining the collection has been neglected is irresistible. I understand that in the public sector there are no doubt financial constraints to taking on the personnel in Britain's second-busiest public library, & that I have the impression that the excellent staff's  customer service may have been prioritised at the expense of behind-the-scenes work.

It was a relief to notice the complete absence of card indexes in the new library. I therefore assumed that there is now a single catalogue. I therefore thought that I'd wander through the catalogue at home to see what I could read on a visit today. I found the location of a children's book that I've been wanting to revisit for some time: I wish I'd pinched more than one copy from school all those years ago: I could sell them for £30 a time on ebay now.

Then a terrible thing happened. I've been wanting to read Philip Hesleton's biography of Gerald Gardner & I wondered if they'd bought it, so I just did a keyword search for Gerald Gardner. Nothing. In. The. Whole. Of. Birmingham. I thought that must be wrong, they used to have a first edition of Witchcraft Today, so I did an author search for Gerald Gardner. Nothing. A title search produced nothing. An awful fear came over me. So I searched for the (first edition) Witch Cult in Western Europe. Nothing. Had they got rid of them?

I got my answer today: the stack is not yet fully catalogued or accessible at all. This to me is a real problem, & here's why. Libraries have difficulty making magic books stay on the shelf, not because they fly around but because magical people are dodgy people & steal books. For this reason the best stuff in that library has always been in the stack, as far as I'm concerned. I don't object at all to either presenting extra identification  even to sit in the reference library with a book, or have to sit right under the eye of the staff, if this is what it takes to keep expensive magical books in the library rather than nicked by some muppet.

What is good is that recataloguing will create a catalogue of what they've actually got, since the card catalogue was not altered to reflect what was missing over the years. However as I say this should have been done well before now, because the sum result is that the majority of the library's stock, & much of what is of interest to me personally, is inaccessible still. And that, for whatever reasons it's happened, isn't a lot of use, is it?

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Tarot: The Hanged Man Today

I must come clean at the beginning of this post & say that I don't really like this card. Of course this is for the reason that it is one of the most multi-faceted tarot cards in the tarot, with virtually all of these facets having a sting in the tail somewhere. That said, what set me thinking about it again was that it was my card for the day yesterday. I had real difficulty thinking how a totally pedestrian day at work of trying to hold people back from some unwise decisions could relate to this card, until I realised I was actually being one of the supports, not actually the man himself! It was as if I was creating the necessary 'suspension' for other people.

My personal main connection for this card is lengthy illness I had some years ago, when this kept coming up. The card's feeling of discomfort is connected to its likely inspiration:

'This picture of a man hung upside down by one foot is what was known in Italy as a pittura infamante, a defaming portrait. It was used as a kind of rag publication that showed thieves, traitors, those guilty of bankruptcy or fraud in this punishing position and displayed in centers of public view. Those paintings weren't literal, in that the depicted victims were not actually hung in this manner but were shamed by the portrait. They were akin to our political cartoons except that they were approved and even requested by the municipal civil authorities as a form of public punishment. They began to lose popularity when they began to be appreciated more as an art form, like the political cartoon, rather than be seen as a form of punishment. The intended effect, shame, was lessened, and the practice diminished.

'But why use this particular positioning of the figure to shame someone? That answer can be found in even earlier paintings of a more religious nature. Religious art from the 13th through 15th centuries, before the creation of Tarot cards, show various scenes of the Last Judgement and the unrighteous receiving their eternal damnation. In many of these scenes one can see people dangling from their feet over the pit of Hell.' (http://78notes.blogspot.com/2009/01/for-shame-hanged-man.html?m=1)

This far-off inspiration makes it difficult for us to relate to thus facet of the card now, because we don't live in a world where we have pictures of eternal damnation up to frighten us, nor shame convicted criminals by displaying their pictures. However I feel there may be some mileage in connecting this card with the publication of suspected paedophiles' names by vigilantes (this references the Judas theme in this card). It could even feel like seeing a CCTV picture of yourself on the news, saying that you're wanted to help the police with their enquiries (this may be more like the St Peter crucified upside down theme).

Whatever this card portends, it's going to be involuntary, & almost certainly not a straightforward punishment that will soon be over. If the man was hanged the right way up, it would suggest a penalty for a capital crime, bringing it on himself if you like. The fact that he's upside down for me makes him look like the picture of the man plummeting to his death from the World Trade Centre on 9/11. The 'obvious' card for that event would be the Tower, but I think it feels more like the Hanged Man, because it is an involuntary, not brought on yourself at all event, and in the time it takes to plummet, you would definitely have the full experience of how this card feels & what the thoughts that go with it are. I would determine the difference between this & the Tower, is that whether you admit it or not, whatever happens in the Tower you've brought on yourself whether you admit it or not, here it is totally un-asked-for.

The other discomfort is the man's expression. Nobody in his position should look that serene. I have deliberately chosen my tarocco piemontese to illustrate this post because it shows what happens when this card is made more like a normal playing card. It just looks even more weird than normal. if you do reversals, it's the card that is reversed when it's upright, & vice versa. I feel this sting in the tail relates to its meaning of self-sacrifice, involuntary in this case, of course. Those who are sacrificed become heroes but this has a damaging psychological effect on those who remain in crippling survivor guilt. This totally fits this card: heroic self sacrifice screwing up the beneficiaries for life.

However the man's serene expression indicates what is going on while the suspension required by this card is happening. Suspension is a management intervention in the worlds of education & work that puts things on hold while things are investigated or else as a punishment before complete exclusion. It is a state of being on hold, & those to whom it has happened describe exactly the feelings of powerlesness that this card depicts. The point of his serene expression is the difficult lesson of this card: we cannot always act, sometimes things happen where acting will not work, & the only thing we can do is wait. Illness is the perfect example really because some things you just have to wait for them to heal.

Of course suspension means something else:

'In chemistry, a suspension is a heterogeneous mixture containing solid particles that are sufficiently large for sedimentation. Usually they must be larger than 1 micrometer.[1] The internal phase (solid) is dispersed throughout the external phase (fluid) through mechanical agitation, with the use of certain excipients or suspending agents.' (http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suspension_(chemistry))

My own interpretation of this would probably have most empirical chemists laughing hollowly, but there is something alchemical about this in a magical context. There isn't really a change in the solid, but it together with the fluid make a suspension of the solid, which can be used differently to just a powder. In a magical context, I feel we would be more likely to interpret the experience of this card as the suspension process leading to transformation.

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A mark of the witch

I have commented before that one of the remarkable things about the modern witchcraft movement is that we can both share the same experiences without having to meet or be taught them, & also differ completely on matters of importance without it being an 'issue'. This explains why it seems as if there ought to be historical evidence for us as a movement: don't worry, there isn't & our movement is a completely modern one. Rather, what has happened has been that different people in different places have done the kind of things that we call witchcraft, culminating in certain historical turning points, such as Gerald Gardner joining the New Forest Coven. As I understand the evidence, it indicates that there were co-masons & others doing magical things in the New Forest. It does *not* indicate the existence of an ancient religion. People create/believe/are taught 'lineages' for themselves because people who are confident enough that the mere fact of them doing what they are doing is enough to validate what they are doing, are few & far between.

One of the commonalities that mark us is a certain ability to pass among all sorts & conditions of people. Now if it be your will to take a more political or class-conscious approach to witchcraft than I do, I don't have a problem with that. Some witches identify as anarchists, for example, & may spend their time in direct action at correcting injustices. I would be surprised if the early Wiccans voted anything other than conservative. The point I'm making is that it is not necessary for witchcraft or witches to identify with a particular political or class 'current'.

Rather what I mean is that what we deal with as witches surpasses the compartments we divide people into. It's as if we are dealing with the vibrations - which could manifest as class differences on the material plane - that underlie these things. As clergy of the world's most freaky religion we can expect our 'congregation' to be also incredibly diverse. And boy do they come to us, whether or not it is conscious or they know we are witches. More often people's paths cross ours at times of significance for them, which is when they need the witch most. They may not even know that we would interpret their story in mythological or eternal terms, but at that moment of us being involved in their world, social differences disappear.

And the purpose of all this? We don't have a specifically religious message nor seek to convert people. Instead if people's lives can be made easier, if they can deal with their own 'stuff', if they can feel a spark of enchantment in their lives, surely that is what it is all about.

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Ghost Walk round Birmingham

This is the clearest image I have seen of light anomalies caught on film. These huge orbs are obvious evidence of supernatural activity.

This evening a walk round the haunted sites of Birmingham city centre, with the group I go to on a Tuesday evening.

We started off at the Wellington on Bristol Street, which unbeknown to us is rumoured to have about five ghosts, one of whom tidies up. Then via Hurst Street to the Old Rep, then the Alex. This bit was interrupted by reminiscences of the olf Midland Red bus station there, with its associated cottage. I had no idea that New Street station is rumoured to have so many ghosts, mainly of people who have died in variously tragic circumstances.

Whatever you do, don't live in Brindley Place or the general environs of Broad Street: this area is plagued by unhappy spirits, mainly seen on Friday & Saturday nights. Actually they are poltergeists, notorious for their apports of vomit on the pavement.

A funny thing happens when you do something as a group in a city, you attract other people. There were only four of us, for heaven's sake, but we still managed to attract two other people interested in doing a ghost walk!

I have mixed feelings about the Trocadero. The instant we got in the back room one of my companions felt he could sense Henry, but I had the slight problem that the last time I sat at that same table with another friend my dad wandered through. This evening I sensed absolutely nothing of the rumoured supernatural personages, including Henry, but will admit that the room felt colder in places. It was also interesting that everyone in the pub was at the front of the building, when on paper the room we were in was more attractive.

I brought up the subject of Borley Rectory at one point, in which I was once a passionate believer, but am now of the opinion that there is certainly something weird about the place but also a lot of hype. You only sense these things in moments when you're receptive & for me that always means alone. I have never sensed a ghost that I had already been told was there.

Oh, we were lucky in having a marvellous guide, who should certainly do it professionally: if he can cope with the audience he had tonight he can cope with anyone.

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