How we see the world

I'm on annual leave. Since I'm frantically keen on old telly & have nothing particularly to do, I'm spending it watching TV series of the past. It is interesting to observe the world-view of different TV series.

Of course The Avengers is the hallmark for 1960s weirdness & was also among the 1960s series on which I cut my teeth. The actual first were The Man from UNCLE, where the baddie is an organisation in opposition to the goodie organisation, UNCLE, & also Mission Impossible, where the goodies are expendable freelancers. Here, for me, is the thing: no society which treats its public servants - regardless of which side of the counter they operate on - is a well-ordered society. Of the two I prefer Man from UNCLE - in retrospect it's camp as tits, & Mission Impossible seems stodgy by comparison. The shortcoming of course is that in real life the 'baddies' seek out individual positions of power, & also make alliances among themselves, rather than the Cold War - era  perspective of an organised opposition, which may be hidden amongst us goodies, a perspective which seems somewhat simplistic in retrospect.

The (original 1960s) Avengers alternates between both these two visions of the world. The two or three avengers are inside an organisation or freelancers, depending on which series it is. The evil forces they avenge also vary between being organised opponents, individuals who have gone off the rails, and either or both who may be hidden in high society.

I've been watching some episodes of The New Avengers - I always forget how much I like them, I think I ought to approach them as I would any other 1970s detective series such as The Professionals, but the authentic Avengers world is always there under the surface. The goodies are very very organised in The New Avengers - the organisation they're employed by is obviously huge & has actual offices as well as facilities for training & what have you. The way this series sees the baddies is often as part of a (non - specific) power. These baddies may try to infiltrate our good establishment, & so it is justified for the avengers to play outside the rules.

The reality is that institutions don't like people who break their - often unspoken - rules, even in the interests of defending the institution. With greater organisation comes the demise of the gentleman adventurer, & also comes professionalism, the kiss of death to individual dedication & quirks.

It is for this reason that I would resist paid clergy in witchcraft: who pays the piper calls the tune. Far better, I think, for us to be a collection of enthusiastic amateurs, if this does risk over-enthusiasm & unprofessionalism. Being paid for something is no guarantee of quality: doctors & dentists get struck off, & so on.

I'm watching a series that is new to me, Spyder's Web. Here the goodies are expendables, definitely in the pay of government, but off the books, & working under the cover of a film company. The baddies are whoever their paymasters tell them are baddies, I.e. Anyone threatening to the government. For TV buffs, it was definitely a nostalgic look back at The Avengers. Also it is made more sombre for me by the fact that the lead actress, Patricia Cutts, killed herself by a barbiturate overdose after being turned down for a part in Coronation Street.

So where does this leave us? The pertinence to witchcraft is in the stories, depicting ways in which we can 'place' good & evil in our world. It is very clear that the dominant cultural norm is to see ourselves as good & some 'other' as bad.

How dangerous is this?! I'm capable of being a complete c*nt, myself, & will admit so.

Contra this prevailing cultural norm I would suggest there are two things a witch can do to create a more healthy world view. The first is obviously a self-examination so that one can see ones conscious or unconscious c*ntiness. I would suggest the other is to create a portrait of what one thinks should be an enemy. It will help if this concentrates on actions: so that ultimately ones identified enemy should be, for example, 'someone who rapes women'. The other purpose is to prevent us projecting our enemy-picture onto a group of people who may or may not be guilty of the actions we want to be gone.

Don't get me wrong - one of our missions must be to rid the world of turds, but we must be specific. What a lot of witches & wiccans do is buy into the 'we're all good' mythology, which is dangerous because it will lead us to find an explanation for 'evil' & project it onto someone else: down the same road as the Christians, in other words. And look where it's got *them*. Have an enemy, please do, just make sure it's the right one.

I was going to end this post with a tarot reading into why Patricia Cutts killed herself & her present state, but I'm getting a very strong sense of resistance so won't go there.

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The consolations of weirdness

In my family there's a custom that the creepiest person in any gathering covers their head with a bag.

If my last two posts were a tarot card they would give a 'reversed' idea of my current familial situation. Now to flip it over & give the 'upright' position.

As my biological family has fallen apart - whose fault & reasonings why & wherefore are not really the point here - I have acquired an alternative family. In this I'm delighted to say that I'm in with the kids, since I have read research that for people under 30 now their closest ties are actually with their 'tribe' rather than any of the more traditional groupings that are falling apart in my own case.

With this comes consolation: needless to say the people in my alternative family who are living on this plane are magical people, so I got sent a cat in the street to console me the other evening. No matter that it was meant to be a dog!

What makes it even stranger is that my dead father is joining in this. He didn't really have that much presence for me until my relationship with my mother fell apart. He regrets that I don't have the sort of relationship with her that he & I would both like, one which doesn't so stress me out that I can maintain it, but he knows that I've tried. He knows *how* I have tried.

He likes my beloved G*ddess daughter - I suspect he would also like it if things were different & we would get married & have children, but he'll just have to live with the fact that that's not going to happen. I had no idea before I became - or realised that I was - a witch, that I would have conversations with someone who has met my dead father, who died before she was born! The proof of this is that she tells me things which clearly reflect his personality, & which I have not told her.

On the other hand what he's doing talking to her when he's *my* dead dad, I can't begin to tell you. Lucky she's not freaked out by having a friend who's introduced her to the dead members of his family but not the living!

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Sometimes like attracts like

...And this is actually one of the occasions when the Hound will admit that the energies you put out there attract similar ones.

When you say to people 'my family's fallen apart' you get several different responses.

The first is that it is obviously your fault - I get this one because people don't see what I see in my family. Of course there are people whose view of 'my family right or wrong' means anyone who breaks contact with their family is wrong.

The next is something along the lines of 'that's a pity', usually followed by attempts to help & helpful suggestions. This is actually the most useful of the reactions.

The only other things that happens is that you suddenly discover how f*cked other people's relationships with family members are. Sometimes it feels like people are desperate to talk to someone who won't judge them on their inability to mend their family or on their breaking off contact with a family member.

I spoke with a very long-standing friend, whom I speak to rarely (largely because I don't want to be just friends with him, why are all the best men straight?). It turned out his big brother had got fed up with their dad & gone off the Scotland. He wasn't talking to his little brother - this was for having sex with his wife. All this in the six months since their mother died. Wooooooh!

In another family who are family friends - the youngest daughter of whom I was most friendly with & who was very keen to tell me how close her family was when I bemoaned my family - the mother never told her daughters that she had had breast cancer. Now this is the reason doctors ask you what diseases you've had in the family, because you're more likely to get them. Their mother only told the other daughters after their eldest sister died of breast cancer.

I'm being as judgemental here as anyone who judges me for not being able to have a relationship with my mother, but this frankly astounds me.

In fact so many people, on asking me how my mother is, & being told we've been estranged for two years, have come up with real divisions in their family.

Once again I'm banging my head against this shibboleth of how we are supposed to think, feel, & behave. We *should* love our family - in some families there is actual hate. Fortunately this is not the case for me & my mother.

We should also be able to behave like a family. Like all human relationships we make up ways of surviving: my personal opinion is that the most functional families are those where they come up with ways of living with or without each other.

We *should* get together at Christmas - surely one of the most stressful times of the year.

I suppose it's somewhat 'left hand path' consciously to act against these societal norms. I think it may be, to be proud of it. But if you choose the way that best safeguards your own sanity over how you should behave, that is left hand path in my opinion. What then happens is you receive the opprobrium of the 'you can't not see your mum' crowd, but you attract other things, including people who share your experience. You also find out who your real friends are. That's the crux: you come out of it resolutely you, & that is precisely what some people fear the most. Must be terrible, that, to go through life frightened of yourself.

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Tarot: The Hermit. Also Telford, Solitude & the Apparent Soullessness of the Modern Town

There is a received wisdom that the modern city is impersonal & somehow soulless. Of course there is a truth to this: the adage that 'we spend money we haven't got, to buy things we don't want, to impress people we don't like' holds true, whether at Birmingham's Bull Ring on a Saturday afternoon or any other Maul. The spelling is deliberate.

I am writing this at Telford Central station, waiting for a train to take me on to Shrewsbury. I had never been to Telford, & don't really intend to go again: the town centre is one large shopping centre with all chain stores. You can't get anywhere without using bridges to cross motorways. It's a planning disaster.

But the day hasn't entirely been wasted so far. Being me, of course, I left the pedestrianised way & had a nice little walk in a less-tamed green bit, & contacted the underlying spirit of place. Unbeknown to me I suddenly started feeling outlandishly frisking & desiring a farm boy to leap into the bushes with. Of course! This is Shropshire Lad Country! I love this parody by Humbert Wolfe, who must surely have been shopping in Telford, of Housman's verse:

When lads have done with labour

In Shropshire, one will cry

"Let's go and kill a neighbour,"

And t'other answers "Aye!"

So this one kills his cousins,

And that one kills his dad;

And, as they hang by dozens

At Ludlow, lad by lad,

Each of them one-and-twenty,

All of them murderers,

The hangman mutters: "Plenty

Even for Housman's verse."

The point here for the purpose of this post, is that some people both have a well-developed sense of self & also can sit with their own presence. The people who do not have these things are the ones who go wrong in the 'soulless' - in reality distractionless - environment of the modern world.

This is what the Hermit card depicts: when you are without distractions from yourself, the lack of escape can literally make you go mad.

So people seek distractions, & *how*! Shopping, drink, drugs, anything other than sit with their own company, which for many people is the most frightening thing in the world. This also explains why religious people are frequently the *most* dysfunctional people you could ever wish to meet: religion can make another attempt to fill up people's perceived emptiness or deal with the thoughts we think we shouldn't be having, sexual ones for example.

In the solitude our own 'demons' come up, & from these there really is no escape. Meditative practices can assist us to become more comfortable with them without being beaten over the head by them. I know mine: anger at the people who've done me over, grief at my inability to build a liveable relationship with my mother, my distrust of people & expectation of unconditional obedience.

This is what the Hermit card feels like: the totality of our existence, but particularly the shitty bits. I've always had a sneaking suspicion myself that the character (at least in RWS) is actually part of a procession, a wildly dysfunctional procession where people aren't talking to each other.

A most unusual interpretation is that of a friend of mine who refers to the hermit as the 'wanker' card. This is of course a realistic interpretation: he's in solitude with his own sexual predilections & is dealing with them as best he can. This is a kind of 'reversed' interpretation, the 'negative' side of the more positive spin I've put on sitting with your own company. Just be grateful I haven't illustrated the post with that image!

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Tarot: Meeting Granddaddy Marseille

It surely does not need repeating on this blog that the tarot cards started off life as a game, not a magical tool - oh damn, couldn't stop myself saying it again. Personally I love using tarot decks that were designed for playing games rather than divination. I particularly love the Italian style called tarocco piemontese, a descendant of the French tarot de Marseille style.

I want to draw a parallel between the Marseille tarot & the King James Bible. We all know it's venerable. It looks & feels lilke the real deal. We all know it's old. It looks right when a tarot deck is required for a reader to turn over card XIII in a film - you see, it takes over. Normally I would say the Death card but under the influence of this deck you start doing funny things.

Both this deck & the King James Bible also attract a certain fundamentalism. If you are going to seek the one true tarot deck, you might as well fix on this one. Personally I think there's more mileage in the school of thought that this style of deck makes you read differently from a wholly pictorial deck. The Marseille fundamentalists also tend to insist on their own pet edition of the deck, just as the King James Bible fanatics often insist on a Cambridge University Press edition, or anyway will collect multiple editions.

For some time I have had the standard Grimaud edition of this deck in the house: as far as I know no purists insist on this deck, but up until modern paganism made inroads into France, that was the standard divination deck there just as RWS ( or whatever you could get) was here.

Since I have had it this deck has spent much of its time in its box in my wardrobe. The Christians would no doubt say a Bible in the wardrobe is useless, & this parallel extends to the following statement, which is both obvious & an oxymoron: it has stayed in my wardrobe because I can't read with it.

I have rationalised this in my head as being because the colours are odd, which is a downright lie, since I'm not bothered by the Death figure's skeleton in my tarocco piemontese being coloured blue & yellow!

The King James Bible fanatics are very keen that its language need not be a barrier to evangelism, & the Marseille-only tarotists are also firmly convinced that it is not more difficult to read. They will acknowledge that you may have to do more learning before you can read proficiently with a pips deck. For me that isn't a problem: I have several systems of numerology fixed in my mind; bits of the Tree of Life remain on & off in my mind; if push comes to shove I can mentally reference RWS; & ffs, I'm a witch, if I can't read intuitively with whatever comes to hand there's no hope. There is no conceivable reason why I would not be able to read with this deck & not others, after all I'm fond of saying that the purpose of divination tools is to get you psychically to the point where you don't need one. But for no apparent reason, a veil is drawn over everything when I pick up this deck.

Until last night, that is. I took it to the pub with me, ironically with a view to giving it away to one of my friends, but when I took the cards out one of my friends said 'Do me a reading'. The most extraordinary thing happened: I do know the person I was reading for, but it was as if the cards came alive. I would tend to see the Tarot de Marseille as a little stodgy, & so was amazed to see some wild kinky sex coming up for her at the end of the month! So then I read for someone else, who I've met before but don't really know. The reading was fairly pedestrian, showed clearly that what he was desperately worried about wouldn't be as bad as he thought it would be.

So far so much better than I thought. Then we played a card game with them. I'm not all gone for shitface as a game - I'm still convinced the rules kept changing as we went along. I actually wanted to play Strip Jack Naked, but unfortunately Jack was having none of it. I didn't get an impression that the cards minded this cavalier treatment.

I'm actually quite surprised that my deck came alive in the pub being treated at best casually. Perhaps this is the downside of the King James Bible approach to the tarot - it teaches you to hold this deck in such awe that you actually can't get intimate with it. On the other hand they showed this deck's origins clearly: it showed itself comfortable with normal people who may sit in a bar & see what is going to happen by pulling cards out of a deck, over & against the decks born in high-falutin' occultists' drawing rooms.

The best came when someone else joined himself on to our group & asked to have his cards read. I have met him before but don't know him. Unfortunately when I drew cards showing such acute misery that I could only go with it & begin by asking him if he has financial troubles, this deck came up 'trumps' again. They also clearly showed the origin & solution to his problem: way too much cups goinbg on in his life, & if he'd just get on top of that, his coins would be much better!

The upshot is I took the deck home with me & will now see if I can get a better connection with it. Now I've discovered at least one way in to this deck, it may see more boozy outrageous readings in pubs, rather than being treated as a deck for meditative readings at the altar.

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Spirit of place: Jewellery Quarter

I've previously touched on Birmingham's jewellery quarter - in reality a posh way of saying 'the south end of Hockley'. This is a part of the city for which I have an affection: I must be getting old because this is an affection for what it used to be. In my misspent youth, the entry onto the canal bank here was a notorious picking up point - a friend once expressed her incredulity that there should be so many men hanging around there on a Saturday night, & her disbelief that they were looking for sex. Also the canal bank there used to be dark & unfrequented - almost designed as a gay hang out - but all that changed when people once again started living there & the area was cleared up.

You see this gentrification has partly displaced the spirit of place *as I knew it*. The spirit was most apparent at the weekend, when the factories & other businesses were closed. The jewellery quarter is relatively cut off from the rest of the city centre, so it genuinely felt like everyone had just upped & abandoned it. If I had to put my finger on that spirit, it would feel almost like the atmosphere deliberately created in the 1990s Avengers film - a London where there was nobody about ever, & the 60s had never ended. The spirit of the jewellery quarter is more focussed than that, though, on industry, making a living, the work of beautification, it is constantly shifting & changing.

I feel the spirit is best exemplified by the so-called warstone, a lump of felsite stone deposited near where it is now in the last ice age, between 10 & 100000 years ago. Felsite is apparently fine-grained volcanic rock that may or may not incorporate other crystals. I was talking with a witch friend the other day about how crystals do absolutely nothing for me - I get nothing from them, although I do from fossils. Strange then that I get this sense of busyness from the warstone. I had a chat with it while I ate lunch today - it's not restful because there's loads of stuff going on inside it.

The rock is on the edge of Warstone Lane Cemetery, famous for Birmingham's catacombs, that you can't get in nowadays. They felt different today - what struck me when I first went there was the smug bourgeois feel of the graves, a sense of stifling respectability. Today an anguished entity latched on to me straight away. You would not believe the sheer angst of this dead person, already dead over a century. She latched on to me because I could sense her, but she frankly had got stuck in being anguished & wanted & needed to be moved on. I simply told her to move on - it took quite some insistence actually - & she was gone, onto whatever's next.

My lack of fear of, or rather obsession with, graveyards & death was one of the things that should have alerted me to being a witch years ago. In retrospect I was - how I hate this word - 'destined' to be a priest of Hecate, on account of being inexorably drawn into endings & beginnings. Imagine my delight as a very young - but still unaware - witch to find this hymn in the old standard edition of Hymns A & M. Living closer to death, with more fear of it suddenly happening & less ability to prevent it, made the Victorians more matter of fact about death. Now it would probably be considered 'morbid' - at least that's what I got called when I went round happily singing this to myself as a teenager. Death is the ultimate reality that the witch mediates - it's also the one there is least point in trying to avoid. Oh, perhaps I should just comment that this is a *children's* hymn:

Within the churchyard, side by side,

Are many long low graves;

And some have stones set over them,

On some the green grass waves.

Full many a little Christian child,

Woman, and man, lies there;

And we pass near them every time

When we go in to prayer.

They cannot hear our footsteps come,

They do not see us pass;

They cannot feel the warm bright sun

That shines upon the grass.

They do not hear when the great bell

Is ringing overhead;

They cannot rise and come to church

With us, for they are dead.

But we believe a day shall come

When all the dead will rise,

When they who sleep down in the grass,

Will ope again their eyes.

For Christ our Lord was buried once,

He died and rose again,

He conquered death, He left the grave;

And so will Christian men.

So when the friends we love the best

Lie in their churchyard bed,

We must not cry too bitterly

Over the happy dead;

Because, for our dear Savior's sake,

Our sins are all forgiv'n;

And Christians only fall asleep

To wake again in Heav'n.

(http://www.hymntime.com/tch/htm/w/c/s/wcsbside.htm)

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Tarot: 3 of Swords going on 4 of Swords

Time for the aftermath. I was genuinely dreading going to work today, it has been the scene of much conflict recently & I was expecting a full scale battle. The upshot, though, is: we've won. For various good reasons, which I can't explain in this forum, it was necessary to make sure that various things didn't go the way certain people wanted them to. These people cloaked their actions in apparently good intentions, but it was clear that the only effect their course of action would have would be negative.

So in fact if I'd read the card Waite's way I would have had to have read it as meaning loss, etc, for the opposition. There is also an interesting synchronicity. Today was the day I gave a dog three treats shaped like keys. Hmmm... I wouldn't have made a connection between Hecate & the 3 of Swords, but there are just too many synchronicities going on here.

I now have three (yes, three) days off work so can follow Vyvyan Basterd's example in the morning! The instability of the  three of Swords has to be resolved & the four is the place to do it. While having a lie down. Once again I would feel that Smith's image is perhaps slightly limiting for this card: the four swords stabilise the energy, so that the meanings to me could range from a sort of modus vivandi established in the midst of various problems, to a stagnation in the energy leading to stubbornly sticking by a bad marriage, even to a situation of institutionalised abuse. Waite rightly picks up on the martial and conflictual energy here:

'The effigy of a knight in the attitude of prayer, at full length upon his tomb. Divinatory Meanings: Vigilance, retreat, solitude, hermit's repose, exile, tomb and coffin. It is these last that have suggested the design. Reversed: Wise administration, circumspection, economy, avarice, precaution, testament.' (http://www.sacred-texts.com/tarot/pkt/pktsw04.htm)

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