Merry Winter!

Yesterday I had the uncomfortable “pleasure” of sitting in an art class with a born-again Christian. This woman has had a tough life, and I can see that Christianity has become the crutch she needs to hobble through life, and I have no intention of criticising her for that. We do what we do to survive.

I made no mention of the fact that I am pagan. She and another member were talking about Christmas and Jesus. This year I feel so distanced from Christmas both in any religious and commercial sense that I am continually shocked to remember that other people are gearing up for Christmas. It means absolutely nothing to me. I have no happy memories of families gathered round a tree, or of religious admonitions to bring good cheer and “be good”. Other years I might have still enjoyed the decorations and the carols, but this year it leaves me untouched; not in any cold-hearted, depressed way, but more in an “I’ve moved on” kind of way. I am more excited by the prospect of a full or new moon, by seeing the flood down by the river or the way the air seems to turn yellowy brown just before a storm hits.

I’ve been watching people scurry around doing their shopping, clocking up consumerist points to prove they care about the people on their ever-expanding lists. And the rest of the year? So little consistency, so much emotional hypocrisy (and no, pagans are not immune to such hypocrisy – at this time of year you see the residual Christian in many pagans as they scurry around kowtowing to the Jesus of Christmas past).

So, has it just become a social festival? A consumerist fest of gluttony and expenditure? It annoys and saddens me to see people taking out loans “to spread the cost of Christmas”. What’s so compulsive and socially dictatorial about Christmas that you should get in debt for it at all? Ridiculous.

No. Christmas in every sense will pass me by. If I have gifts to give, I give them at any time of the year. If there is food to be eaten, I will eat it when hungry, and if I wish to bask in the affections of my friends, I won’t wait until the adverts on TV tell me it’s time to do so.

Here’s looking to the solstice! To clear nights with sparkling stars. To frost and sleet. To floods and getting soaked walking in the rain. Here’s to mud and puddles, leaves and berries. Warm fires and hot cups of tea. Merry Winter!

©Tattooed Witch 2009

Pierce me perfect

Yesterday I had my hands pierced, specifically the web between thumb and forefinger on each hand. That makes piercings No. 19 and 20 (and I had to recount that to double-check). I know that many people don’t “get” why and that’s fine. I’m not making it an across-the-board prerequisite that everyone should have them, this is just what I like.

I saw an interview on YouTube the other day with a woman who had entered the record books with her piercings. The interviewer was a bemused and puzzled woman who came out with such patronising claptrap as “Are you hiding yourself?” and “But you have such a pretty face and I can’t see it properly.” Personally I have had enough of the “you would be pretty if” conversations with people who should remove their heads from their own posteriors. The woman replied that she viewed her body as a canvas and that to herself she was living art. I warmed to the woman the more she spoke because even I got “snow blindness” looking at the multiple piercings on her face.

I’m unsure what the motivation is behind my own piercings and tattoos. I don’t consider myself a work of art, I don’t think that highly of myself and maybe wish I did! But it certainly is a process of becoming and expression.

My piercer wants me to train with him as a body piercer. He runs a piercing school and has written a book on the subject. He thinks I would be an ideal candidate – it’s flattering to think I’d be considered ideal for anything! It’s an intense three day course that covers full body piercing, including genital piercing. I may do that sometime next year, but merely as a personal interest not with a view to setting up professionally. Most courses only cover above waist piercing initially with the precondition that you practise for 6 months before qualifying for below waist piercing. The piercer threw up his hands and declaimed that as “a load of bollocks”, that if you had an issue with genitals then your attitude was wrong and you shouldn’t become a piercer. I asked him what students practised on, and I must admit I was startled when he fished a rubber vagina out of the cupboard and waved it under my nose. Oh. Issues? Who me?

When I was much younger (younger than this staid old age of 35), I used to be a bit scared of people with piercings and tattoos. But now I laugh at the men who strut around thinking that their tattoos prove that they are “hard”. I have tattoos and I am so far away from being hard you could pour me into a cup and drink me. Now I meet such people eyeball-to-eyeball and consequently have met some very nice people. The fact is that judgemental people will always find something to judge you on, whether it’s your clothes, your crooked teeth, your weight, your piercings, your squint or limp. After thirty odd (very odd) years of trying to avoid being insulted and being hurt by men hurling comments at me in the street, I have decided that nothing I do will stop such people, so I may as well just do what I like. It certainly sorts the wheat from the chaff quickly enough …

©TattooedWitch 2009

 

It’s all good

It’s been a while. Thanks to a nudge from Watching The Wheels I am back to blogging.

Sometimes there are moments when words are just an annoyance, like a bee buzzing too close to your ear and spoiling what would otherwise be a relaxing time in the countryside. I have been extremely wordy in the past, but these days are characterised by images, colours, fabrics, textures and silence. Not that I sit in solitude like a Trappist monk! I am just downloading another two series of The Good Life in audiobook form. It is the ultimate in comfort-listening for me while I’m embroidering or doing some other kind of craft work.

I have met magickians of the “highest order” who have deplored popular culture and proudly declaimed that they would rather read Aleister Crowley or Kenneth Grant than sully their polished minds with TV. Whenever I heard such comments, I always mumbled a non-committal, slightly self-conscious, “Mmhuh.” One wonders if said magickians would feel the same way if they actually had a “proper” job and worked for a living. I spend nearly every day at work translating technical texts from German to English for the manufacturing and construction industry; it is boring, academic and a real brain-strain. I enjoy a challenging read with the best of them (I am currently enjoying Solitude by Anthony Storr and Osho’s books on creativity and emotions) BUT my mind is merely that of a very little bear, so I LIKE to sit in front of mindless TV and allow my brain to chunter through its backlog while my conscious mind drifts and guffaws and lambasts personalities and characters in the TV world. “Uncle Al” as Thelemites so irritatingly call Aleister Crowley, is a good read, but doesn’t always hit the spot. Does this make me less serious about my path as a pagan and a witch? No.

Over the last year I mixed with pagans who deplored the idea of balance. They wanted chaos and everything of the Dark. They saw this dark, swirling energy as the primal power, a concentrated form of energy that they believed they could harness … a quick trip through Bagdad with an “I love George Bush” T-shirt on to buy olives at the delicatessen of enlightenment, as opposed to settling for the decent and safe-to-buy olives from Marks & Spencer… did anyone follow that analogy?! What I’m saying is: just because you throw yourself into things that other people fear, it doesn’t make you better or more enlightened. Sometimes the safe option is good. Sometimes listening to The Good Life provides greater balm for the soul than reading “Uncle Al”.

Pagan fundamentalism is just as unappetising and ignorant as any kind of fundamentalism. It is an attempt to make a safer world by dividing it clearly, cleanly and falsely into black and white, good and bad, dark and light, power and weakness, serious practitioners and dabblers. It is a sign of greater courage to accept the greys and beiges, to accept the slippers, hot milk and Jeremy Kyle/Ricki Lake days alongside the study of correspondences and LBRP practice. Thank the Goddesses and Gods that I no longer feel pressured to be part of the “Over-Achievers’ School for Witches”! I am what I am what I am. And that’s good. C’est si bon!

©Tattooed Witch 2009

Dyein’ to be creative

I had meetings in town this morning which gave me a chance to try out my new rain jacket. It works! Although it doesn’t stop me from steaming every time I enter a shop …

Worked on dyeing fabric this afternoon. I had frozen two dyes made from blackberries and turmeric a couple of months ago. One of the cafe cooks in town remembered that I was looking for bulk onion skins, so when I stopped for a coffee I got a complimentary bag of onion skins. In the end I dyed with blackberries, turmeric, onion skins and 6 different procion dyes. I still need to give them a couple of hours stewing before rinsing and hanging out the fabric. Hopefully this will give me enough fabric for the second term of my embroidery course. We aren’t meant/allowed to buy pre-dyed material as part of the creative processes is fabric manipulation through dyeing calico and weaving material strips. Love it!

I bought a book on “world textiles” today from the local witchy shop and then a parcel arrived with two books I had ordered on Art Deco designs. I shall indulge my eyeballs with those this evening.

It’s cold this evening. Definitely a night to have a hot bath with plenty of oils and bubbles.

©Tattooed Witch 2009

Dreaming to some purpose

A tough day in many respects, but not something I wish to go into here. Overnight it has turned from autumn to winter. The river is finally swollen and has burst its banks on the one side where I usually do ritual. The iron bridge is covered in leaves and there was a restful greyness to the day. The same greyness that by January will drive me to distraction, but at the moment it is welcome and beautiful.

I had to stop watching the ghost film last night: firstly I laughed till I cried when a ballroom full of people were cut in half by a rogue cable wire backlash. The drag effect of the first few rows of bodies would surely have made more of a mess of the latter rows, and the stunned look on the people’s faces before they “fell apart” was just too much for my credulity to stand. I decided I wasn’t in the right mood for the film when there was a tense scene, “Look, something is moving over there!” The characters removed sacking from over a box, and open the lid to find it teaming with rats. The main female character screams, meanwhile I shout, “Aw, little ratties!” and rewind so I can see the cute little faces and beady eyes. I love rats, which makes their use in horror films rather inappropriate.

So by chance I woke with the sunrise. Greeted the morning star with my Nehes prayer to Isis and then made breakfast and watched the rest of the film. No, it wasn’t the one I had hoped it to be, but it was a good film nonetheless.

I have felt this shift of season more strongly perhaps than any season before. Maybe the shift reflects internal movements and as such I see myself in the falling leaves and the land that is starting to doze, the sun cooling in the sky and the crisp air nipping at my skin. Even in sleep the land dreams and imagines the spring. So mote it be.

©Tattooed Witch 2009

The devil’s in the detail!

I got out for my Samhain walk late this afternoon just as the sun was setting. I was out for an hour or so and on my return the full moon had risen and was slyly peeping out behind the clouds.

It has been a blustery day; nearly all the sycamores have lost their leaves (some even ended up in my bathtub after I left the window open!), but the oaks are holding on tenaciously.

I am just about to settle down with a hot milk and a ghost film that I recorded last night while I was working. I’m hoping that it is one I watched years ago (the name of which I can’t remember). It was about demon possession on an oil rig or ship and (for once!) the magickal details of demon conjuration were fairly accurate, if simplistic – at least the basic idea of circle casting, sigils and holding the demon were pretty much spot on.

There is nothing which will spin me into soapbox heaven more than literature or films on pagan/magickal subjects which are factually incorrect. I really enjoyed reading Tess Gerritsen’s Mephisto Club, because I love Gerritsen’s writing, but I was gritting my teeth at her summary dismissal of the Eye of Horus as “that well-known symbol of evil” … what?!!

Ah well, we’ll see. Either I shall enjoy the film, or I shall be on here tomorrow morning lambasting it!

©Tattooed Witch 2009

Samhumbug

I woke in a foul mood this morning. Other women will empathise when I say it was a foul mood directed at men in general, men in particular, and men unparticular. It’s not hormonal and very unusual for me to wake in a rage.

I couldn’t settle to work so headed up to town after “fixing” my bike – the problem being a leaf that had got trapped up in the wheel arch and was creating drag and a helluva noise.

Most of the leaves have fallen down by the river beeches. The sun shone, the sky was blue and the last colour on the trees looked spectacular. I cycled under the branches with yellow leaves falling all around me. I decided not to take pictures because there is something about viewing such scenes through a camera that keeps them outside and out there; I very consciously looked at the trees, the leaves and the light and I inhaled their beauty.

Still in a foul mood, I headed for coffee and sat in the cafe yard sketching. I have been putting off this shopping trip for a while. I realised the other day that when the clothes in charity shops start looking much smarter than your own wardrobe that maybe it’s about time to buy some new togs. Naturally I shopped at only the best boutiques supplied by the largest sweatshops, staffed by the youngest children, and managed to get a new wardrobe for around a hundred quid. Phew. That’s clothes shopping sorted for another year or two.

There was bedlam in town: a jazz band, a samba band, the ubiquitous Peruvian band pretending to be Native North Americans, a living statue in bronze, a living statue in silver and a group of witches … I got excited at the latter and wondered if a local coven was trying to remind people of “The real meaning of Samhain”. Alas, it was just a bunch of middle-class, muesli-belt hippies banging on drums, dressed “as witches” and trying to encourage people to recycle…

I walked my bike home as it was actually creaking under the weight of clothes and food shopping. Now I have to begin my working day … Yawn.

So much for a contemplative Samhain – could it have been more consumerist? Only if I’d bought a plastic pumpkin and a cardboard witch’s hat … baa humbug!

©Tattooed Witch 2009

Samhain plans

This time last year I was in America (good grief, was it really only a year ago?!). I had fashioned an ambitious ritual for Samhain which would take me through the caverns of the underworld to speak with the dead. I performed this ritual alone after a group ritual to mark this Celtic Pagan New Year. It went wrong and I was distraught and shaky afterwards. There was a certain arrogance to my confidence that I could enter the caverns and essentially stroll around like I had a right to be there. Lesson learned.

Each Samhain I have undertaken ritual work that takes hours and hours to remember those who have died, to touch with the spirits and mark the moment when the veils between the worlds are thin. This year I have no urge to sit with the dead.

Tomorrow I will walk down by the river and admire, yet again, the amazing colours of the beech trees along the path. I have a few things to burn, and may do that in the afternoon: ties to be cut and things that need to be relegated to the past. These days I strive more for simplicity. I will spend the evening with my rat who has become the biggest cuddle monster in the world recently (this morning he fell asleep with his chin resting on my cheek while I massaged his shoulders!), light a candle and wish that this coming year be less “interesting” than the last!

©Tattooed Witch 2009

Witch and artist

There once was a time when my spellwork worked, always. You could say I have an overdeveloped sense of what-is-going-to-happen-anyway, and that my “little rituals” merely underlined the inevitable. So says the cynic. I know differently. And I also know that any spellwork I attempt these days is doomed to failure because my judgement is impaired and my focus scattered.

I am reading Solitude by Anthony Storr at the moment in which he says that artists attempt to create a psychological unity through their art, which is lacking in them due to childhood events such as absent parents, abuse, parental loss, etc. Spellwork has always been a creative form for me, and one that I place happily next to my drawing, handicrafts and embroidery.

Spellwork (can) = artwork and artwork (can) = spellwork: in each sense we are, or perhaps should be, striving for inner unity, whether consciously or not.

Storr writes:

The search for order, for unity, for wholeness is, I believe, a motivating force of signal importance in the lives of men and women of every variety of temperament. The hunger of imagination is active in every human being to some degree. But the greater the disharmony within, the sharper the spur to seek harmony, or, if one has the gifts, to create harmony.

I’m not even going to begin discussing the focus of the Left-Hand Path on chaos, disruption and its fast track to “enlightenment”. I browsed a few forums the other day with threads on LHP and was disheartened to see the same old arguments and the same old misconceptions of what it is and isn’t. This false, dichotomous split between Left-Hand Path and Right-Hand Path is something I have discussed to death in previous blog incarnations, and something I want to give a wide berth. But I mention it because the Egyptian path is one focused on essentially the opposite: creating harmony and balance, or reigning in the chaos of Apophis. Each magickal act and daily devotion is aimed at maintaining harmony and unity. Heka (magick) is a gift from the gods which we are encouraged to use in our lives to create balance – Ma’at.

Recently I have found tremendous strength in my creative artwork. I have been able to step outside of my Self and create something that is beautiful to me and just feels “right”. My spellwork on the other hand is fraught with questions and queries as to my motivation, my judgement, my true will and my learning process. There are too many words in my head for me to hear any divine Logos. So my art gives me a voiceless means of expression, a way of drawing together those disparate needs and expressing them in a physical unity outside of myself – in intellectual silence.

Someone once said to me that sex for him was a spiritual experience but without all the bowing and lighting of candles. There is a time and a place for ritual and ritualised spellwork, but it is so easy then to forget the everyday experience and the essence of living your spirituality.

I was once given a choice between continuing “just” with my devotional practices or “moving to a higher plane” of spiritual and magickal existence. I felt the judgement that my devotional practices to the gods were mere kowtowing to divinities when (narcissistic megalomaniacal) they believed I should strive to become god. Don’t forget that many gods in pagan pantheons are afflicted with human “weaknesses” such as jealousy, need, rage … and that infallibility is the realm of the Abrahamic god, so by “becoming god” you are not saying you are infallible – this is perhaps something that is forgotten by so many in their strivings to be divine – you can still be wrong!

Sadly however the real-world choice was more concretely thus: continue working spiritually on your own, or join me in a sexually orgiastic ritual with other highly enlightened people who will only be thinking of the goddess in you and not “Nice boobs!” Sigh. Thankfully I chose the former and I am grateful that my discomfort at this person’s disregard for my devotional practices was enough of a wedge in his credibility for me to see past the spiritual candy that I was being tempted with.

Give me the daily embrace and the day-to-day touch of a like-minded soul – I’ll leave the ritualised rocketry to others. I’m quite happy to sit and wave my spiritual sparkler at the sky and watch as others blow themselves up with fancy fireworks. Sometimes it’s not a matter of lack of ambition – after all, which consumerist deity said there was a pagan career ladder I had to climb? And who is to say that those purporting to be at the top of the ladder are not actually inhabiting an Escher world of distortion and are sitting right at the very bottom?

©Tattooed Witch 2009

Broken broom

Tempted back into the blogosphere, the hermit crab stretches a claw and clip-clips at the waves. I have some things to get off my chest.

I have heard no one in the pagan world talk about crises of faith; that’s something surely left for the Christian who begins to doubt transubstantiation and the infallibility of the pope, for example. When surrounded by so many rules and doctrinal laws, it is an environment ripe for rebellion and questions. Pagan beliefs (and yes, I am lobbing the lot momentarily together) are more experiential and flexible. I have seen many people hit against a “problem”, a question of belief … and so they discard or change their beliefs to suit the moment. Who’s going to jump up and down and say, “We excommunicate you for lack of belief in fairies!” Sure, if you hang out with multiple pagans, you may bond as many human groupings do by placing your unanimous opinions against those of another group, thereby re-enforcing the boundaries of your community, and if you change your mind, alter your beliefs, you may be pushed aside and ostracised. But that happens amongst any cliques, whether at work, college, school, church or in a coven.

So who do you turn to if you are a disillusioned pagan? Why disillusioned? Ah, that’s my other bugbear for today:

Who is there to warn you of the people you may encounter and that, if you are a vulnerable type, you will be fodder for some of the most manipulative and damaged people you could ever wish you never met? Trust me, I am not lambasting pagans. I am proudly a pagan, but I am sick of the fakery and egotistical, narcissistic bullying and manipulation that I have seen.

I have struggled with physical and mental health over the years. I wish I didn’t have to mention either issue, but my weaknesses are key to the mess I’ve made of things and the frankly awful situations I have got myself into over the last year.

I have met people who are extremely gifted in saying what you want to hear, even those things you never knew you were dying to hear from another’s lips. My best friend and soul sister has said that my biggest mistake has been to trust too easily and to believe what people have told me. If you enter a spiritual sphere (in particular) with an open heart and the desire to know and be known, and then you are torn inside out and raked over coals, where is the incentive to continue wearing your battered rose coloured glasses? Now, I see “through a glass darkly” and I feel disconnected because I have touched on the uttermost depravity and abuse.

I have considered posting some of the details here as a warning, but knowing the pagan world it will just end up as gossip, and I’ve had enough of that.

I can’t begin to enumerate the mistakes I have made over the last year; believing in people who then led me down “spiritual” paths that have damaged me in long-lasting ways. Only once I have seen the feral beast in their eyes have I realised how far off the Right Path (for me) I have been. In general in my life, I don’t just make mistakes, I make MISTAKES and then spend time patching things back together again. Yes, I learn. Yes, I grow. But at what cost? Is it worth it? There was a naiver time when I would have said, “Yes! Of course it’s worth it!” But then you hit the real dark night of the soul, not the day or week of confusion and doubt, but the month after month of disconnection and emptiness, when everything you believed (that people are innately good and that all spiritual seekers are at least united in their search – like I said, naive) is turned on its head, and even your ritual practices are tainted by memories of working ritual and circle with those who should never have been allowed past the circle line.

The by-line to this blog is “Clinging to the broom …” because in spite of my experiences over the last year, I still consider myself a witch. You would have to tear out my eyeballs for me to stop viewing the world as a witch. But I have lost hope in gentle community and creative growth. I am solitary again because I don’t trust the group. I have been “headhunted” for a few different pagan groups/movements; sure it appeals to my ego. As someone with a fragile sense of self-worth it felt great to be wanted and to be told I could offer something… anything. I realised that my ego was stroked as a mere sham in a game to stroke other people’s egos; those other people cultivated the lie of spiritual truth to get their leg over, to fill the inner void, to reek revenge on a world they think owes them – come to me ye acolytes and I will make you abusers of men and women, and ye shall also gather acolytes, and so the cycle of abuse shall continue.

I wish I could say it was “once bitten, twice shy”, but it took two major chompings at my spiritual arse to make me run. I have hidden under the bed for a while and now I am looking out from my hiding place. I won’t be mentioning names, so get your gossip elsewhere. I’m clinging to the broom, and I won’t be shaken off it!

©Tattooed Witch 2009