feeding the gods

In the past few months, in the ongoing conversations about Lucifer, I’ve heard from several witches something to the tune of “I don’t believe in the devil.” Not worship, invoke, or work with him, that I understand. But not believe in him?

Years back I remember reading something by a Native American elder, speaking to how and why his people had lost so much, including old traditions. I wish I could remember his exact words, the exact quote. I wish I could remember the name of the elder. What I do remember is that he said that Native Americans, being believers in many gods, many spirits, were amazed at the power and strength of the white man’s god. He was fierce and mighty, so many of the Native American people let go of their gods and turned to him, as soon as they encountered him, making way for a real loss of culture and way of living. Given the white man’s power, they assumed God and his son, Jesus, were more mighty than their gods put together.

Polytheistic cultures, those who’ve believed in many gods, many spirits, have been big pushovers for God and his son, Jesus. God and Christ have really got their mojo working over the centuries, and I can see how when introduced into longtime pagan cultures, many immediately take up their worship, leaving the circle of deities they had worked with behind. Those of us who’ve turned to polytheism and are letting go of monotheism shouldn’t make the mistake of not believing in the monotheistic gods. That’s monotheistic residue, this denying of a god’s existence.

When my coven was studying with Victor Anderson, one of the things I remember Victor talking about was feeding the gods. By working with god/desses, by saying their names, by putting them on our altars, we feed them. They are nourished by our attention, they grow stronger and more vital. Years later I read a book, “American Gods”, by Neil Gaiman, which beautifully fleshes out this idea. No pagan, witch, or shaman should underestimate the power of the well-fed gods of this world. The Devil is certainly one of them.

I personally stay far away from the mean-ass, revengeful god of the bible’s old testament. I also stay away from Lucifer, and his off-shoots, Satan and the Devil. I try to not feed them in anyway, even writing about them here is kind of pushing it. A studious cold shoulder is all I like to give them, although at times I have put in my plea with that old testament god to do some mediation with the other hothead deities claiming to be the one and only. I do feed the fierce loving sissy boy, sweet Jesus. I like him in his revolutionary peacenik aspect, and I try to feed this whenever he’s brought up in discussion. Perhaps Lucifer became Satan and the Devil way back when in the same way the loving sissy boy sweet Jesus risks being turned into the homo-hating, mean-spirited Jesus that the right-wing are feeding like crazy. There are still plenty of devotees feeding his sweet face of love and acceptance, although he’s got a tough opponent in the mean-spirited Jesus. They’ve been duking it out for centuries, and I applaud those who worship full-time at the altar of the sweet loving Jesus, hoping he’ll eventually gain strength over his evil twin. He’s got a fighting chance, but if he ever goes down for the count, that’s the time to stop invoking the name of Jesus.

The battle between Lucifer, the light bringer, and Satan/the Devil, master of all evil, was lost years ago. Satan and the Devil have won, hands down. The name of Lucifer overwhelmingly conjures up the master of all evil, not the beauty of the morning star, of love and light. I worry about those I know who are drawn to feeding the god Lucifer, and especially those who do so while not believing in the Devil. That seems like a perilously slippery slope. Why couldn’t Lucifer have stayed away from people I like and love and Elvis come into them and their buildings instead? Now there's a god worth feeding, and my, the dude has a huge appetite!

spellwork

Soon after 9/ll, as the president was beating war drums, and I could feel a blood-dimmed tide being released upon the world, I pledged myself to a particular piece of magic. Believing strongly that what happens between the worlds affects all the worlds, I pledged myself to working towards my spiritual community being in alignment with it’s principles of unity. I remember being on the deck of what we call the “cookhouse” up at my land in the Sonoma hills, talking to my friends about pulling in my energy and working on making a difference in our local community, a community that many of us were disillusioned with. I spoke passionately about my belief that this was a spell, our tending to our own backyard, creating a climate in which those principles of unity would flourish, a community which we were all proud to be part of, of our microcosm affecting the macro. I drove back to the city committed to no longer staying silent when I saw us veer from our principles, committed to acting as if it truly was a community which embraced the questioning attitude and could tolerate a diversity of opinions, and committed to saying my piece with as much love and kindness as I could muster.

The rest, as they say, is history. A little less than four years later I’ve been forced out and literally disallowed to participate in a long list of “community” groups and events, including being fired as a columnist for our quarterly publication. Others have also been bullied and blacklisted as well, but I have the dubious honor of being the most public and prolific in my expulsions from the garden. I also have had the most paradoxical of experiences, in that although I am shunned by many locally, I am held in esteem by those who have liked my columns, liked my style of witch camp teaching (which I’m barred from doing locally), and find inspiration in my adherence to the principles of unity. Other than locally, almost every idea I’ve planted has taken root. Witchcamp structures are moving away from supporting hierarchal pay scales, the idea of accountability and transparency are being embraced, and diva style priestessing is no longer emulated.

I continue to mull and muse on what is my work in regards to completing or letting go of this spell I embarked on, this piece of magic I pledged myself to. I find myself an outcast from the very backyard I was intent on tending, that mattered to me so much. I find the parallel between what I feel about the United States and what I feel about local Reclaiming to be painfully familiar. Both have these exquisite documents which were meant to be strong and guiding foundations from which to act. According to Reya, the Declaration of Independence was actually signed on August 2nd, on Lammas. It, like the Reclaiming Principles of Unity, is a magical document. The Declaration of Independence and Reclaiming’s Principles of Unity are moving in their vision, their breadth of purpose. Like so many others, I love them deeply. And like so many others, I don’t recognize them in the actions and energy body of what was built around them.

I also recognize that the U.S. is a war-mongering, capitalist empire responsible for much human suffering on this planet, while Reclaiming is simply a fastly growing pagan spiritual cult which has probably alleviated much more suffering than it has caused. They are similar only in the remarkable discrepancy between their ideals and their actual being (and this is most potent for Bay Area Reclaiming) and similar to me personally as they have been so much a part of my identity for so very long. As an American, I’ve struggled since a young teenager to hold my country to it’s ideals. I’ve been a part of Reclaiming since it’s early beginning. I helped create our principles of unity. I find myself now estranged from both, this country of my birth, and this “tradition” I helped birth.

I believe deeply in magic, in the power of spells, in our every action mattering. The spell I set out to do four years ago is still in motion, it’s being worked and working me. I've learned a lot, including that it serves no one, especially myself, to serve as a community scapegoat or whipping boy. Perhaps connected to this spell is the strange occurance of my coven sisters intensely debating the nature of Lucifer, one of them having invited him to dwell in her and work thru her. I've had the experience of falling from grace and being booted from my spiritual cloud. And I can't say it was good for my character. Even if Lucifier started out as a great guy, I can see why he became the Devil. I've had to work hard not to be bitter, mean, and full of ill-will....or conversely, bending over backward to prove I'm not the monster I've been portrayed as. Overall, what I've gone thru has not been good for my soul. It's been damaging, and I think that may be one of the teachings of that story. Getting kicked out of your circle of spiritual cohorts because of your beliefs damages you, is truly hell. And add on to that then being cast as the devil, master of all evil, that's gotta twist you up. It certainly has me! Lucifer is no deity I'm likely to call on, emulate, or invoke. It's freaking strange that he's now making the rounds in the Reclaiming Feri worlds. My experience of the past few years has resulted in my energy being brought closer to home, of tending to my own personal healing while keeping my vision wide. I continue to wait for further instructions. Perhaps at this point there’s nothing I really need to do but pay attention. And perhaps really tend to my own backyard. It needs some work.

give it time

One of the unexpected gifts of this past year has been my relationship with my clairvoyant body worker. I’ve always felt that finding the right therapist/body workers/healer is a bit like finding the proverbial needle in the haystack. It can be done, but it’s an act involving both intense focus and luck. I scored big with Zoe.

Not only does Zoe tune into what my body needs, knows where energy is stuck and how to move it, but she can read the stories that swirl around me. Early on she told me she was a clairvoyant, that she did past life readings. This was something I had to take my time with. A few years back I walked a gauntlet line of police with my friend Fern, moving quickly as we sensed they were about to charge the group of protesters we had been marching with. As we walked, I kept flashing on the two of us in high heels, walking down a dusty road in the South, getting out of town to avoid the law. I laughed heartily that the only past life that made itself known to me was one in which I was a wanton flapper. It was just a flash, but a palpable one. I could even sense the hangover and taste the cheap lipstick.

Despite this experience, I’ve tried to steer away from exploring past lives. Like the whole idea of Atlantis, they make me leery. I may be a witch from California, but I’m no flake. It's always interesting what we write off as too wacky. So it took me awhile to take Zoe up on her giving me a reading. I now love the language of this. A reading. Zoë’s “reading’ rocked my world. Stories float around us, flow thru us. Patterns and narratives are written on our skin, and pulse thru our energy field. Perhaps they are actual lives from the past, or perhaps they are stories that those who are perceptive can read, and then tell, stories that can inform the life we are living now, that connect to our own mythic quest. It doesn’t matter to me whether the tales Zoe read are lives I have actually lived or not. What matters to me is that these stories have a connection to this current epic. As I heard them, they were instantly familiar, they resonated with what I know and understand of this world. Though wildly different, the themes had bearing on my own storyline. They continue to be instructive and broaden my field of vision.


The story of Cleopatra, of royalty, of fame, these are not the stories written on my flesh. My current incarnation is informed by stories of a flapper, a woman caballero, and an African hermaphrodite. I’m enjoying giving these stories life, and letting that life flow back into mine, making it richer and fuller. And I’m thanking my lucky stars that I don’t have to learn anything yet from stories involving Atlantis. Although some voice murmurs here loudly; “give it time, give it time”.

home again

I’m back from Portland, that verdant stew of a city. And I’m exhausted. I’ve slept over nine hours, and I could sleep even more. The wedding was at a renovated poor farm built in the early part of the twentieth century. The big brick building which previously housed the poor and then the elderly (it also has been a nursing home) now is a hotel, decorated by a slew of artists to soften the institutional residue. Almost every surface is painted, many of the paintings reflective of the building’s past, so instead of softening things, it’s actually intensified them. The grounds are beautiful, and it’s a popular spot now for weddings. I slept there two nights, and they were restless ones. The place is thick with spirits. I kept thinking of the movie “The Shining”, it was that kind of hotel. Fraught.

Mormons, Jews, Wiccans, and my wacky eggroll family all came together to witness Jim and Dawn make their vows. And of course all the poorhouse spirits. I particularly appreciated Jim’s teenage son wearing a Megadeath t-shirt at the ceremony. It was a diverse group, even from the stance of the witchy world. Jim’s been an active supporter and participant in California’s witchcamp, which I’m blacklisted from, so it was interesting to feel that energy swirl in the mix. I noticed how I winced at every mention of ‘community” as it pertained to anything involving that energy body. This wedding season is helping me rework and rethink of what I consider to be community. Having a hodgepodge of people, who are connected only by their love of at least one of the individuals of the couple, come together to witness pledges of love and then celebrate it by feasting and partying, this has got to be one of the most potent rituals imaginable. This is what really makes and creates human community, our genuine bonds with each other, our willingness to mix it up with strangers as a result of that bond, creating new patterns and forms.

I’m thinking on the pitfalls of building community around ideology. I’m thinking I don’t really want to be part of a Jewish, Mormon, or Wiccan community, or an anarchist community or a dyke, vegan, or environmental community. What really is community to me is the people I commune with, who I feel connected to, who I can rely on. Thank goddess it’s a hodgepodge of people, a real wedding of diverse folks. I’m done with cults.

lightening up

Tomorrow I fly off to Portland for the last wedding of the season. I just got a call from a friend who’s already traveled there from the Bay Area. She called to talk to me about her neighbor dying suddenly this week. She’s feeling guilty she went to Portland instead of being there for the teenage daughter. Listening to her, I realized that she’s in grief, that it’s starting to hit her that a friend is dead. We are both witches, and this wedding is a wedding of two witches. After the wedding of last week, I’ve been thinking that this one will be a cakewalk, a stroll in the park. During the phone call I made peace with the fact that I am gearing up for another piece of monumental magic. It’s clear she is supposed to be there, that her grief will be a thread in the magic woven this weekend. This wedding too will have its human drama, human drama that’s already taking shape.

I spent last evening talking to my soon to be ex-husband up on my deck, with the city lights flickering all around us. It was the most comfortable time we’ve had together since we broke up five years ago. Our papers are now all signed for our divorce, it should come thru soon. I felt a tenderness towards him, and a surprising gratefulness for our history. Our wedding was fraught with all storylines that would be woven into our marriage, and all the issues that would eventually fray it to the point of coming apart. As we talked into the night, I marveled at how much we both had let go of, how old battles were now even being remembered with humor. Our war stories no longer throw us right back into the fray. The fight has left us.

This has been an incredible summer, and incredible time. One in which my household has reconfigured itself, one in which I’m consciously looking at what I want to be wedded to, and what I need to divorce myself from. Tomorrow I fly off to witness yet another wedding. As I do this, I will be focusing on what I need to continue to let go of. It’s time to lighten up.

war stories

Last night I had dinner with the couple I married and our friend who had caught on fire during the ceremony. His bandages were off, and he looked like my imagining of what a chemical peel would look like; tender, raw and reddened. Most importantly, he was not on fire. Our memories of him can now move forward, being replaced with images of him laughing, of him washing dishes. Over the evening, which included my housemates and two others who had been there, the conversation would regularly return to the retrieval of moments on that hill. All of us held different facets of what happened; all of us had focused on different things. All the bad jokes, the gallows humor, were shared. Over and over again, we returned to laughter, to the camaraderie of sharing an intense experience from different vantage points, of viewing it all now with humor.

As the evening progressed, I recognized the similarity to conversations with those I’ve done political action with. War stories, we’ve called them, these stories of facing down gauntlets of police, of holding on to each other as one by one we are picked away and arrested. The recounting always entails stories of each other at our both our best and at our worst. The moments of courage, the acts of stupidity, the losing of tempers, patience or minds. The long night of labor which resulted in the birth of my son was full of these stories, as I was surrounded by and attended to by those who I’d also been to jail with. I remember Starhawk laughing that night at how being there was like being in jail. We had a long wait, it was sometimes tense, and we had no idea of when we would be released.

I’m savoring the power of stories tonight, of how the retelling of hard times helps us, how somehow in the telling we draw closer together, how even a traumatic event can get instilled with human warmth, human laughter, by the retelling of it in community. It’s clear to me that it’s not just the experience of going thru things with others that makes bonds, it is the retelling of the experience, the co-creation of the story that bonds us, and also that heals us. More was wed this past weekend than Mojgone and Jim. Learning the importance of marrying the event to the retelling is something to rejoice. Huzzah!

wedding fever

It’s Monday, and usually on this particular Monday I would be out at the Oregon Country Fair. For over twenty-five years now I’ve gone there each year and made eggrolls at the Roll-On Eggroll booth. I know that at about this moment, the booth is packed up and everyone is about to roll into town, tired, dusty, and enriched by living for several days in the kind of world that many of us want to bring into being. I didn’t go this year, as there was a piece of magic I was asked to priestess, a piece of magic that is also about bringing into being the world of our visions. I was asked by two close friends to officiate at their wedding. This was the second of three weddings in three weekends.

My friends are dedicated activists. The community of family and friends that participated in the wedding teemed with those who work on a variety of fronts for social and environmental justice. Many of us worked closely together in Seattle, many have worked in variety of groupings at a variety of big actions and the mundane work of everyday activism.I’ve done several weddings for this community, and I love the chance for all of us to not work together against, but to work together towards. Instead of gathering to go up against the forces of doom, we come together to work with the forces of nature and the force of community to make sacred two people pledging their love and commitment. This is how life should be, this is what human culture yearns to return to.

Like the other weddings I’ve done, this was a long weekend away. Like the fair, these weddings have been a chance to come together and experience the best of human community; people working together, singing together, feasting together, working and playing in peace. At this wedding, two cultures came together as well. The bride is Iranian, so on Friday there was a Persian wedding. At this wedding, the bride and groom sat in front of a blanket covered with delicacies and objects signifying the elements of life. A veil was held over their heads and two cones of sugar were rubbed together, signifying the wish for sweetness to rain down on them. We then all feasted together, and I wondered how important the wedding the next day really was.

On Saturday the next ceremony took place up on a hill overlooking the organic apple farm where so many of us were staying. Their Nigerian friend Folabi was co-officiating it with me. This was his first wedding, and he felt called by his love for the bride and groom to play this part. He welcomed people, and I talked about remembering and recollecting that this was sacred space and sacred time. Then Folobi explained that we would be calling in the elements. The couple had wanted to call the five Chinese elements (metal, water, wood, fire, and earth) and the element of spirit. I had a bit of hard time with letting go of air, and don’t really understand the wood and metal of this system, but this wasn’t my wedding, it was theirs, and the invocations of wood and metal were lovely. Water was especially powerful and sweet, with our friend John, covered with seaweed and kelp, carrying an abalone shell of water. Then came fire.

Han and Kathy walked into the circle. She had a hula hoop with torch like things attached which Han lit with another small torch. She began to hula and then Han turned, and suddenly what I saw was a fireball coming from his mouth and then the wind turned and suddenly Han was on fire. Soon he was on the ground rolling and the grass was burning and the next few moments were mayhem. I found myself lifting the torch from the burning grass and after staring at it briefly, found an area of gravel on which to set it. People were stomping the fire from the grass and others were taking Han down the hill to drive him to the hospital. The bride’s mother and brother clothes were burned substantially on the bottom and they had some minor burns. I looked at Folabi, he looked in shock. Things were coming apart, the center was not holding.

In that moment, I felt the intense power of magic, the power of working between the worlds. Chaos and destruction had entered this circle, people had been burned. In this circle of those who have worked so intently on stopping the forces of destruction, we had to bring the focus back to loving each other, to the power of that kind of commitment, that kind of focus, especially amidst pain and suffering. I started talking. I kept talking until I felt the circle reform, the energy come back together. Fire continued to be a big part of the ceremony. The couple passed out sticks for people to put wishes and dreams in, and those sticks were collected and a fire was made in a contained pot that fueled the fires of the night down the hill at the celebration. Beautiful pledges of love were made, and the couple fed each other and exchanged rings. It was clear to me that we all will be reliving this ritual, this magic in the years ahead. There are mighty fires ahead of us. Many will be burning. We have to hone our skill in coming back into focus and doing the work in front of us that entails loving each other and feeding what we believe in.

It felt clear to me and to others that the fire had not much to do with the suitability/compatibility of this union. These two people are made for each other; their love is deep and steady. One friend said he’d love to gather people who’d been there and give them pen and paper and have us all write out why we thing the fire happened. Making meaning from events like this is part of being human. It’s necessary. If we are going to call in elements, we need to try and figure out what they are saying to us when they make such an entrance. In a community so active that burn-out is common, I think there needs to be an ongoing balancing of the fire with the water. The action with the reflection.

I'm reflecting a lot on the fact I then got stinking drunk at the party afterward. There's a reason the Native Americans called it firewater. It's a mix of both, but in no way a balance. It can sink you and also burn and destroy. I continue to reel with the power of the elemental forces, with the power of ritual and magic. I think I'll be taking a lot baths and showers this week. Tomorrow I plan on a nice long swim.

surfacing

I’m surfacing. It’s been an amazingly chock full last couple of weeks. Patti, Karl and Colin moved out soon after solstice and their flat is empty, awaiting the massive remodeling that Ilyse is planning. Soon after they left, my son came back from New Mexico and brought along his cousin, who stayed for a week. They went to Chinatown and came back with a variety of things that go boom and stink. Our neighborhood always sounds like a war zone around the 4^th of July, and the boys added to it. Gus the dog took to literally climbing the fence to escape. Casey is now in Oregon with his dad, and I’m alone in my house. Fern and Ilyse have not come back yet from the wedding we were all at this weekend in Mendocino. There’s no bombs going off, the neighborhood is settling down, this house is settling down, and after a series of stressful events, I committ myself to settling down as well.