Hecate's Night Four: Bring On the Captain

Well, we know who the evil scientist who stole my brain was, don't we?

It was myself, an earlier model of course.

Raised by scientist parents, for most of my life I couldn't see anything which held more worthiness than the hard sciences. And so I, the stereotypical over-achiever, became the physicist, the astronomer.

This actually set me back in some respects by years and years. I put it down to being a slow learner, but even all that time of looking for materialist explanations which followed the rules of logic hasn't totally convinced me that the answers can't be found there, sooner or later.

And so it is that post rational thinking sometimes has to completely ambush me, as it did last night.

I sit before my eastern altar facing a white-painted wall, two tall golden candles between me and the plastered screen upon which the flame shadows play. Right before my eyes, it is the perfect setting for an image of a woman with her arms outstretched, each hand bearing a candle like a flaming torch...

...and on Her brow, the crescent moon. And at Her heels, companion dogs.

Tears of awe actually coursed down my face.

But then, I never claimed to be immune to the scorn of Captain Obvious.

Hecate's Night Two - No Cosmic Parent

So I light the candles and sit for the second night of coming home again to Hecate.

Each element responds to my call in lively manner: the Air swirling in great clouds from the East, the Fire leaping in a pyramidal flame from the North, the Water rising serenely from the West and the Earth rolling densely into the circle from the South.

I feel a powerful tug through my base chakra, and realise that the moon is almost directly beneath me, where I sit right now. The Taurean moon.

Fire flickers now upon the altar from two slender golden candles which illuminate the crystal bowl of water and the silver-shod bowl of salt. Ethereal light picks out the chasings on the silver goblet on its dish, sitting front and centre...and I drop further into the gravitational pull of the earth and moon.

Rising before me, She appears once more with Her cowled head silhouetted against the moon. I bask in Her presence and She in mine.

For this is no childish dependency faith, this homage to the Lady. This is closer to a meeting of two parts of the whole. A fusion of holons, an acknowledgement of completion, one with the other.
I do not truly seek a heavenly - or an Earthly - Mother, a cosmic parent is something the entire human race should have long outgrown.

She does not compel, nor rigorously instruct. There are no sacrifices at Her hall, save those of the give and take of two pieces of the earth, two waves upon the ocean, two atoms within the molecule.

The gods are that part of Us which creates - and in creating, deconstructs and destroys, as well. We are neither less than they are nor greater. We are each as necessary as the wind upon the vocal chords of the Singer - we are complimentary parts of the whole song.


Hecate pic found here, unfortunately.

Hecate's Night Three: Thou Art That

Sitting facing West this time, my partner early slumbering with a nagging cold, I sat peering into the black mirror of my soul on no-thought . And as She appeared before me again, taking form from the formless, coming into time from the timeless, She put back her cowl.

The eyes looking back into mine spanned at least an aeon - between the time when She was first formed a deity and now, the passage of the age of heroes in between us, the dusty way of the insanity of civilisation's road lying between the then and the now like a thorny, angry barrier which we nevertheless transcended as we realised each other.

She me, and me She. Through all the march of madness in between: the rise of Zeus and the Coming of the King, over and over, through the first stirrings of agriculture and the rise of the Machine. From a place in spacetime now known as Turkey to the southern tip of Africa. We had found each other again - or more accurately, we had never really lost each other.

This mistress deity-form is older than the Hellenes, older than the goat-herders. Perhaps She was witness to the building of Gobekli Tepe. I can almost bring forth that memory.
She has certainly seen the insanity of Man, and all our thoughtless graspings and aggrandisements. Yet She abides still, and I in Her, as She in Me.

The descent of consciousness into matter is well within Her domain - yet standing outside of it She has not the comprehension of the mortal of time and space and density. This is part of what I can share with Her: the longing of the creator to truly experience the creation by encasing herself within it. The gift of the human to the gods is merely this - and yet it is a gift so prized that deities seek it from us across all eternity.

This holy earthly plane with all its sorrows and bliss. The song of the Pied Wagtail encapsulates it in a single liquid burst, that which the gods themselves hunger after: Thou art that, and ever have been.

Pretty Full Weekend

Three days to the thinning of the Veil which is Samhain, Southern Hemisphere time, and the Invitation has been sent.

It is sent continuously from the preceding New Moon, of course.

This year, an image has been forming insistently in my mind whenever I'm sitting at the Ancestor altar:

A line of light runs from me to my two most recent Ancestors, and that forms the image into two halves, at first. Mother side and Father side.
From each of those closest Ancestors run two light lines to their parents (one of whom from each side is sitting in the close-Ancestor-cluster I work with daily), and from each of those, two further parental lines.
And so on.
It fills up at first like a divided brain, in two distinct halves.
But then something interesting starts happening.
Tendrils of light connections cross the Mother-Father divide going both ways - this represents Ancestors who are antecedent on both sides. As will happen of course, if you go back far enough. Small clumps of intensity form, indicating greater or lesser spheres of inbreeding.
Eventually, it resolves itself as looking very like the human brain's neural network.

 Which is not surprising, I suppose. There are functions which govern associations such as these. Like the brain, and like dear Facebook ,or like a country club.Modelled in Maths - yet I was still surprised to see it forming so perfectly in my mind.

The Invitation, as usual, calls all Ancestors who lived well and died well, and those who wish me no harm, to the feast communication night of Samhain, which this year falls on a pretty much full moon, and also the rites of Hecate's Fires on the Taurus-Scorpio Sun-Moon axis this year.

Going to be a pretty full weekend, then.

Brain Neural Network Pic: Scientific American

Magic Without Tears

Three cheers and a very high-five to Hecate, that wise mistress of magic, for her post on the Uses and Misuses of Magic.

"Stop that shit. Because, when you hurt yourself, I will laugh. Or, if I care for you, I will cry. But, either way, it's up to you to pull yourself up by your own broomstick and act like someone able to transverse all the worlds, rather than like someone who can't even function in this one. I am just saying."

General Occult Community: kindly note the lack of a 'k' in Hecate's spelling of the Art. There's only one magic, and hers is it.



Her post comes the night after I started a new regimen in my monthly Witches Unite Against Crime work, started by our most awesome activist, Damon, more than a year ago.

Being a Witch myself, I'm not going into the details of my new methodology here, but suffice it to say I was shocked, horrified and not really surprised to learn of these revenge shootings this morning.

"Police did not know what motivated the men."

I know - and , if you're a South African who's not a policeman paid to deny it, so do you.

This is not justice - it's a perversion of Her sacred function.

The fact that we can all too easily imagine what went through those young men's "minds" is a measure of just how sick we've become.

A Veiled Singularity

This post of Hecate's put me in Faerie for most of a day, and I'm not quite out of it yet - I keep stepping back and forth over the line between this world and another one, where a night costs half a lifetime and the sun is always hidden.

I'm still in that circle of grief and fear - but it has widened, allowing me a vast space in which to abide , in perfect, deep calm, watching these things unfold around me and through me, but never interacting with me.

I seem to have lost all the terrors that this world can inflict upon a person. I am not afraid for myself, or for my loved ones, however fearful they may be.
A fathomless pool of surety and confidence has bloomed from within - well, from where else could it bloom? - and possessed my body, mind and that indefinable entity I seem to lay claim to, my soul.

Do you know, two years ago I would never have used that last word in the paragraph above?

Soul.

That which roots us to this world and connects us to all the others.

That without which we are a vainly striving, forever seeking but never finding, questioning-without-a-glimpse-of-an-answer combination of body and mind. Blind in this world and to the next and the one beside it.

I walked yesterday as though the molecules of the air could shimmer and part, revealing in the spaces between them a whole other universe. Mingling with this one and sometimes observable, but never quite coming clear.There are outlines and shapes of answers but never an unambiguous reply to where? and how?

But I am serenely undismayed by the lack of solid assurances, for I am confident in my mortal skin.

Somewhere, just beyond that next cloud of electrons, is the colour of the shape of an admission that all will be well and all manner of things will be well.

Pic: Through the north door of my house.