The eye of the storm

All of a sudden I'm having a really busy week. I worked yesterday with someone who seriously seemed to think I was going to carry her & didn't like it when I disabused her of this notion.
I slept at length & woke up to find I'd been bitten on my hand so I've had to get some cream for it on the way to work before I scratch it till I pour blood everywhere.
I rushed round emptying bins & litter trays, & found I didn't have a single thing to wear for work.
I dealt with this by prioritising reassembling the altar. It took this long since I washed the cloth because I don't really know what it's made of, so I hand washed & drip dried it.
I even surprised myself at how much less harried I feel after doing that, then lighting a candle & just sitting in front of it for a while. The altar can serve as the point where we return to ourselves.
I drew a card for today & got the 5 of Swords (using RWS). The cards are so characteristic of my path that they don't faze me at all: I can look on this & make a resolution for today that I will pick my battles, recognise the 3 swords lying there so that I don't pick them up & run with them, & make sure that if anyone else has a sword I don't let them give it to me. Of course I'm not unequipped with swords myself after my grounding & centring!
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The Witch at Home

A morning of blissful domesticity. This is what I have done:
1 Emptied the cat's litter trays
2 Shaved my head
3 Contemplated what to eat (pumpkin soup)
4 Dusted the altar
5 Washed the altar cloth
Who but a Witch would have a morning like this before going out?
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Spirit of Place: Worcester

ToWorcester today. I've always liked Worcester, it's a friendly place. Could this be related to it being a cathedral city? - not necessarily a recipe for niceness by any means, more like a recipe for privilege and ambition!

Perhaps it's to do with the sense of history the place has, and history it has aplenty. It  even has one of the inns associated with King Charles. The eagle-eyed will see that it was a lovely day and I did Worcester barechested.

History of different times of course. I love the way this Victorian frontage has been randomly stuck on this older building:

Worcester has wonderful olde worlde street names as well:

And even signs for what the streets used to be called:

I even like the Cathedral:

I swear that's a letter box in that door. But I do love the idea of there being no parking by the flying buttress:

I do realise that if it hadn't been for Victorian ideas of renovation, most ancient buildings would not now be standing, given the state of disrepair into which they had fallen by the nineteenth century. Worcester definitely shows a heavy Victorian hand in all its most visible places:

Especially the choir. Below is the monument to the Dean who had the reredos put up. I swear his feet are resting on a cat:

The crypt is of course the oldest (and least pretentious part):

 I do like the modern art that has been added:

I love the way these Christians claim not to do homosexuality when their churches are full of half-naked suffering men. The monuments of dressed men at Worcester are just plain camp:

Perhaps one of the nicest parts of the cathedral is the cloisters:

Very Harry Potter. This is where the monks (it was a Benedictine Priory - strange that a Benedictine should be the subject of my last post) would have washed:

And the cloister garth:

Abbot Laurence Soper

What I had planned for today was either a post on foliate heads or on non-pictorial minor arcana tarot decks. But something much more important has come up. Sometimes being a witch isn't as exciting as it can sometimes appear, and you can just get to the point where you begin to think that you are merely chasing your tail when something like this comes up and you realise that we witches are here for a purpose.
The clergyman pictured on the left is the Right Reverend Dom Laurence Soper, OSB, former abbot of Ealing Abbey in West London. Yes that's right, the place which has been engulfed in a storm of scandal over abuse going back over a matter of decades. The one where one of the monks (now laicised by the Vatican is nearing the end of a prison term (finally) for his abuse. The one where that monk had a nickname in the school which should have indicated something was amiss (it was Gay Dave, since you ask; Fr Laurence was allegedly known as Father Florence). The one where the rugby team used to change the words of 'Oh Sir Jasper do not touch me' and instead sing, 'Oh Father David do not touch me'. The one where several lay teachers have also been convicted of abuse. The one where abusing teachers were sent off quietly with a reference when parents complained. The one where the powers that were and be are busy protesting they knew nothing about it. The one where the abbot had to be told to move one of the monks out of the monastery since obviously previous attempts to restrict monks' contact with minors had failed. That'll be the one.
What turns this one into a farce is that Dom Laurence is on the run from the police. He was living in the headquarters on the Benedictine Confederation in Rome when he was bailed by police to return to London for questioning, which they trusted him to do. What seems to be wrong with this picture? Anyway, he left, apparently going back to London, and never arrived. He has since been on the run, only being seen emptying his bank account in Rome. News has broken this week that a new European Arrest Warrant has been put out for him. This is for a clergyman, remember. He is the most senior of RC clergy in Britain to be accused of actual abuse rather than merely covering it up.
This pisses me off. He needn't think that he's going to get away with this. This is exactly the sort of thing that witches are here to sort.

Start with a divination, no point wasting expensive treatment on the wrong taxpayer if Lily Law has got it wrong. The root of the problem: 7 of wands. There is so much more involved here than meets the eye in the news reports. A cluster of paedophile activity was found in Ealing, paedophiles justify their actions to themselves by persuading themselves that they're OK, and get together with other paedophiles. My diagnosis: it would not be true to say that he is being protected by somebody in the church per se. Rather I feel he is being protected by somebody whom he holds something over. There may even be a number of people involved (it is actually very difficult to vanish completely). They may or may not be clergy. I doubt that he is in or will go near a monastery, they're notorious for gossip. What is happening for him now: VIII The Chariot. This confirms the root of the problem: he has temporarily got people to do what he wants but this will not last. What he thinks: 6 of Cups. Can you believe it? The c*nt actually thinks he's got away with ruining lives scot-free. Action from me to put this right: 9 of Pentacles. I.e. giving him his due reward.

I invoked Hecate under her title of Nurse of Children, and she is pissed. Larry, my son, that is not someone you want to piss off, she'll pick you up and rearrange your world for you. Next she pointed out to me that he is not the only person in the photo. Notoriously if you work with Hecate you work with her alone. She is a maiden rather than crone Goddess, so is literally complete of herself. However she will usher in other people if they fit the circumstances, and so yesterday I made the reaqcuaintance of someone from years ago: St Therese of Lisieux: her statue is visible in the picture above. She is an interesting example of 19th century hagiography: the photographs were retouched after her death to make her look all sweet and simpering. Much of her iconography continues to look like that but when you see the unretouched pictures, like the one on the right, look at that chin. She was hard as nails, and she's annoyed that he has the gall to be seen as a Catholic priest in front of her statue, and still be touching up children.
So I've taken a two-prong approach to this: I have initiated a candle spell. As it burns down his hiding places will go. He will be betrayed by the people he has temporarily got to help him. It's actually as good as done, because he's so over-confident that he is not even being careful really. There are too many people who know where he is to keep it quiet and only one of them will have to speak for the whole thing to come out.
I have also started a novena to St Therese (eclectic, moi?):

O Little Flower of Jesus, you have shown yourself so powerful in your intercession, so tender and compassionate toward those who honour you and invoke you in suffering and distress, that I kneel at your feet with perfect confidence and beseech you most humbly and earnestly to take me under your protection in my present necessity and obtain for me the favour I ask in this novena...Vouchsafe to recommend my request to Mary, the merciful Queen of Heaven, that she may plead my cause with you before the throne of Jesus, her divine Son.. Cease not to intercede for me until my request is granted.

I would urge all witches and other magical people who are concerned with justice and the protection of children to join with me in this working, in whatever way you wish.

Stratford continued

It is obviously still a matter of pride in Stratford that they once won a prize.

This is the 'Best of Birmingham' installation. Actually the more I look at it I like its groovy 60s Avengers vibe!

The main purpose of this post is to post the pictures which I said were forthcoming in my last post.

Spirit of place: Stratford

The new theatre is one sexy building

I thought the old one was a sexy building as well... I know, it's such a bloke thing

To Stratford for an outing yesterday, on a train full of families obviously desperate to get the kids out of the house. So I sat there making notes on Crowley's Liber Resh vel Helios, with a view to developing some kind of daily practice.
I have a somewhat love-hate relationship with Stratford. I loved it as a child, I loved the touristy nature of it, I loved visiting the houses associated with Shakespeare, I loved that you could get souvenirs and almost take home a little bit of the world of Shakespeare. In retrospect I loved that so much of the Stratford tourist industry is actually aimed at foreign visitors. To revisit this world now is actually to revisit the world of my childhood, where it wasn't naff to buy a tin of tea with a union jack plastered across it, and it felt good to walk through Ann Hathaway's cottage.
But I now feel differently about Stratford, and in and of itself frankly don't like it as a town. It comes across as a welcoming cosmopolitan place, but I do feel Stratford has a lukewarm relationship with its own fame. If it were not for the Shakespeare industry Stratford would just be another sleepy Warwickshire town. The house prices are simply astronomical, and this is reflected in the nature of the people who obviously live there now: snobby, rude, and downright unwelcoming of other people. Stratford has been gentrified by its tourist industry and in the process attracted a crowd of braying rich residents, far removed from the town's relatively humble origins. It feels as if the energies of Stratford are disjointed between these several different identities, and while there is obviously a presence of magical people there I have no idea how they feel about this. Does anyone else experience Stratford this way, or is it just me? The RSC shop is selling prints of the top print at over £200 each. I stretched to a tea towel print of it. I did, though, find in a charity shop the DVD of Prick Up Your Ears, the film about the life of the playwright Joe Orton. There will be more of this anon in this blog, since I didn't realise it was available on DVD, and I had forgotten how formative it was for me!
On the way back I was interested to notice a plaque at Stratford station announcing that it won a Best Presented Station award in 1988 (pic to follow), obviously still a source of price a mere 22 years later. It was a relief to get back to friendly Brum, where there is currently an installation (again, pic to follow) called Best of Birmingham, by Birmingham Parks and Gardens, which consists of a pretend Greek temple and a Mini filled with flowers. It's not snobby, but it's home.

Cloacina

Coin showing the shrine of Cloacina on the Roman sewer

I have a soft spot (not soft like that) for Cloacina, the Roman Goddess of sewers, who seems to have started out as an Etruscan Goddess of marital bliss, but became associated with the cloaca maxima, the main drain of Rome. She is to be invoked for cleanliness and purity.
Personally I have to thank her for taking so much rubbish out of my life that I don't need. I actually keep a pen by the lavatory so that I can write things on toilet paper that I then ask Cloacina to sort out for me, which she does marvellously.
I have only today discovered that Jonathan Swift wrote a hymn to Cloacina (my source is here) in his A Panegyric on the Dean: In the Person of a Lady of the North, supposedly written about him by Lady Acheson, on whose estate he built two privies.

Thee bounteous goddess Cloacine,
To temples why do we confine? 230
Forbid in open air to breathe;
Why are thine altars fixed beneath?

When Saturn ruled the skies alone,
That golden age to gold unknown;
This earthly globe to thee assigned,
Received the gifts of all mankind.
Ten thousand altars smoking round
Were built to thee, with offerings crowned:
And here thy daily votaries placed
Their sacrifice with zeal and haste: 240
The margin of a purling stream
Sent up to thee a grateful steam.
(Though sometimes thou wert pleased to wink,
If Naiads swept them from the brink)
Or where appointing lovers rove,
The shelter of a shady grove:
Or, offered in some flowery vale,
Were wafted by a gentle gale
There many a flower abstersive grew,
Thy favourite flowers of yellow hue; 250
The crocus and the daffodil,
The cowslip soft, and sweet jonquil.

But when at last usurping Jove
Old Saturn from his empire drove;
Then Gluttony with greasy paws
Her napkin pinned up to her jaws,
With watery chaps, and wagging chin,
Braced like a drum her oily skin;
Wedged in a spacious elbow-chair,
And on her plate a treble share, 260
As if she ne'er could have enough;
Taught harmless man to cram and stuff.
She sent her priests in wooden shoes
From haughty Gaul to make ragouts.
Instead of wholesome bread and cheese,
To dress their soups and fricassees;
And, for our home-bred British cheer,
Botargo, catsup, and caveer.

This bloated harpy, sprung from hell,
Confined thee, goddess, to a cell: 270
Sprung from her womb that impious line,
Contemners of thy rites divine.
First, lolling Sloth in woollen cap,
Taking her after-dinner nap:
Pale Dropsy with a sallow face,
Her belly burst, and slow her pace:
And lordly Gout wrapped up in fur:
And wheezing Asthma, loth to stir:
Voluptuous Ease, the child of Wealth,
Infecting thus our hearts by stealth; 280
None seek thee now in open air;
To thee no verdant altars rear;
But, in their cells and vaults obscene
Present a sacrifice unclean;
From whence unsavoury vapours rose,
Offensive to thy nicer nose.
Ah! who in our degenerate days,
As nature prompts, his offering pays?
Here nature never difference made
Between the sceptre and the spade. 290

Ye great ones, why will ye disdain
To pay your tribute on the plain?
Why will you place in lazy pride
Your altars near your couch's side?
When from the homeliest earthenware
Are sent up offerings more sincere
Than where the haughty duchess locks
Her silver vase in cedar box?

Yet, some devotion still remains
Among our harmless northern swains; 300
Whose offerings placed in golden ranks,
Adorn our crystal river's banks:
Nor seldom grace the flowery downs,
With spiral tops and copple-crowns:
Or gilding in a sunny morn
The humble branches of a thorn.
(So poets sing, with golden bough
The Trojan hero paid his vow.)

Hither by luckless error led,
The crude consistence oft I tread. 310
Here, when my shoes are out of case,
Unweeting gild the tarnished lace:
Here, by the sacred bramble tinged,
My petticoat is doubly fringed.

Be witness for me, nymph divine,
I never robb'd thee with design:
Nor will the zealous Hannah pout
To wash thy injured offering out.