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    • About Luna Luna
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Ritual: Writing Letters To Your Self β€” On Anais Nin, Journaling, and Healing

January 31, 2019

BY LISA MARIE BASILE

During my mid-20s, I first delved deeply into the work of the writer AnaΓ―s Nin. Before then, I’d read bits and pieces of her workβ€”always knowing that I would, when ready, return to it. As it is with most of the great works of our lives, she found me when the time was right, when I could incubate her emotion and resuscitate myself through her abundance. I was always too guarded, too busy, too scattered to sit down and let the velvety intensity of her work move through me.

This is because Nin’s work is audaciously honest. It is at once shadowy and nude. Erotic. Wild. Feverishly introspective. Showy. Always vulnerable.

You may have read her diaries or her letters to Henry Miller. Within these works lives a whole entire world of expression and bravery (and ego and mania and trauma and desire and more). In the 1940s, she was writing explicitly about topics such as sexual desire and abortionβ€”words that were kept silent, for they were unthinkable, punishable. She was widely mocked, often deplored by critics for both her personal life (sheβ€”gasp!β€”had two husbands) and her literary worksβ€”and yet she has earned her place as the literary patron saint we adore now. (She would be so pleased). Over time (and largely posthumously), as time is wont to do, she has become both a feminist icon and a literary muse. She’s certainly my literary witch archetype.

Anais Nin writes to Henry Miller in A Literate Passion: Letters of AnaΓ―s Nin Henry Miller, 1932-1953,

β€œIt is true that I create over and over again the same difficulties for myself in order to struggle over and over again to master them [but] to continually struggle against the same problem and to continually fail to dominate it brings a feeling of frustration and a kind of paralysis. What is necessary to life, to livingness, is to move on, in other words to move from one kind of problem to another.”


Reading her works, I have always wondered: How did writing her feelings and desires and fears in letter or diary form change her relationship to those feelings? Without writing all of this down, would she have realized her tendencies toward creating difficulties for herself?

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πŸ–€ I talked with the wonderful @ragqueenperiodical + @kaileytedesco about how light and darkness is the throughline in all of my work, including my forthcoming book and my poetry and other work: β€œThe grimoire is concerned with the same things as my work as a poet and essayist: death, forgiveness, the self as something to be worshipped, sex, creating beauty and honoring the shadow.” LINK IN BIO.πŸ–€ #LightMagicDarkTimes

A post shared by Lisa Marie Basile (@lisamariebasile) on May 19, 2018 at 10:20am PDT

Is there a certain quality to letter writing or diary keeping that inspires the confessional? I believe so. Our words are our magic. Once the words are thought, intent exists.

Once the words are spoken, they become an incantation. And once the words are written down, the spell is cast.

The truth is staring back at youβ€”asking you to make a change or bury it or let it go. Whatever it is, the garden has begun to grow, and it must be tended to in some way or other.

That’s the silent promise you make to the page and to yourself; when you write, your mind floods and you become a vessel for the truth (or whatever version of the truth needs to exist at that moment).

The mind is the translator, the page is the vehicle, and something more intangible β€” something divine, the self everlasting, perhaps the soul β€” is the ultimate recipient. That something changes you and upends your reality.

When we write specifically for the page, or for one reader, we wield a massive responsibility to uphold a deep truth.

We stop writing for success or Instagram likes or money. We start to write for ourselves, or for the intimacy between ourselves and the reader. This is the case even if the letter will never be delivered (that’s not to say Nin wasn’t ecstatic when her personal journals became a best seller de rigeuer).

Only after reading your own words do you discover patterns and themes that perhaps you would have missed in your everyday life. In letter writing, there is a vulnerability that takes place necessarily; why write a letter if you won’t show up for it?

Why express anything at allβ€”in such a delicate, deliberate, and painstaking manner? After all, a letter is not a passing thought or a forgettable text message; it’s a statement, a declaration, a confession. It’s a storm.

Ritualizing your words

For this ritual and writing prompt, you will be examining the inherent power of letter writingβ€”as a tool for reconciliation, healing, closure, acceptance, and honor. But you can also write letters to express rage, jealousy, and fear.

It can feel as though we’ve lived many lifetimes. To prep, think on your childhood, your teen years, and who you are now. What was lost? What remains? Who we are now has changed so much from who we were. At the same time, there are things that having a lasting impact, good and bad. Ghosts linger. Sometimes that ghost is you.

Our traumas, our growth, our pain, our losses, our loves, our whimsies, our accomplishmentsβ€”these are the things we’ll be writing to in this practice.

I have written letters to the girl I was at 15. She was so lost, so sad. She moved from homeless shelter to shelter, to a foster home and then another β€” always looking for an anchor. Within her heart lived thousand hopes and goals. She was excited to write, to study, to liveβ€”and yet always felt held back by a need to survive her trauma. She couldn’t simply be, as she was struggling. In her, a darkness grew.

That darkness was her fuel, but it also hurt her. She had self-esteem issues, felt alone often, felt unworthy. In my letters to her, I tell her what she’s accomplishedβ€”what her steadfast determination did for her. I tell her what her pain gave herβ€”art! Empathy! A softness. An ability to adapt. A leaning-into the malleable, the liminal. Through her pain she found magic and ritual and poetry, and all of this carved a life she’d love today.

Writing these letters to her allowed me to heal her, and as a ripple in space-time, I largely healed myself today. I am not perfect, but I am better.

The Ritual: writing a letter to your younger self

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🌻I included a few peeks inside my book Light Magic for Dark Times over at @lunalunamag - lunalunamagazine.com. It’s full of rituals, practices and writing exercises and it’s all about resilience, self-care, trauma recovery, accountability and magic. 🌻

A post shared by Lisa Marie Basile (@lisamariebasile) on Jan 29, 2019 at 1:22pm PST

Light a candle. Look into the flame and take note of what thoughts arise when you think upon your younger self.

As you look at the flame, conjure the person you were. Quietly welcome them into the room; sit with them. What are they wearing? What are they feeling?

Choose a memory or a era in your life and write a letter to yourself. What’s the goal? Is it to remind your younger self of the love they have but never felt? Is it to congratulate them on their resilience? Is it to say that their weakness and struggles were beautiful? Perhaps you will pull a tarot card to find illumination or specificity in this process. Perhaps you will think on how your birth chart influenced the person you were.

Life goes by so quickly. We are so busy existing in the middle of it that we rarely look back and study what happened:

What went right?

What went wrong?

What just was?

What would you tell your younger self?

What does the room look like?

What were you wearing?

What do you want them to know?

What do you want them to let go of?

Write all of this down.

Honor it.

Keep it in a place where you can let it go, or return to it.

If you want to work more with journaling magic, I include lots of it in my book, Light Magic for Dark Times. & follow me on Instagram for more prompts and literary goodness.


Lisa Marie Basile is the founding creative director of Luna Luna Magazineβ€”a digital diary of literature, magical living and idea. She is the author of "Light Magic for Dark Times," a modern collection of inspired rituals and daily practices. She's also the author of a few poetry collections, including 2018's "Nympholepsy." Her work encounters the intersection of ritual, wellness, chronic illness, overcoming trauma, and creativity, and she has written for The New York Times, Narratively, Sabat Magazine, Healthline, The Establishment, Refinery 29, Bust, Hello Giggles, and more. Her work can be seen in Best Small Fictions, Best American Experimental Writing, and several other anthologies. Lisa Marie earned a Masters degree in Writing from The New School and studied literature and psychology as an undergraduate at Pace University.

In Occult, Books Tags Anais Nin, Journaling, Healing, Writing, Diary, Henry Miller
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Photo Credit:  YouTube

Photo Credit: YouTube

Hearthcraft & the Magic of Everyday Objects: Reading Arin Murphy-Hiscock's 'House Witch'

January 14, 2019

BY TRISTA EDWARDS

I was immediately hooked on Arin Murphy-Hiscock’s The House Witch: Your Complete Guide to Creating a Magical Space with Rituals and Spells for Hearth and Home in the first chapter when the author writes, β€œthe home itself is an essential element within a nourishing, vibrant, ongoing spiritual practice.” 

She continues, β€œHonoring the hearth means honoring your origins, where you come from each day, and where you return each night.”

I read this one morning right after sitting down at my dining room table having just lit a candle, putting on a vinyl record, and ritualistically preparing my morning coffee. I took a long slurp from my cup and smiled. Oh, this is the book I’ve been hungry for.

Photo credit:  Author

Photo credit: Author

I was already familiar with term and practice of hearthcraft (Chances are, even if you are not familiar, you already practice it to some degree or another.) but I had yet to find a book that spoke on it so directly. 

Hearthcraft, as Murphy-Hiscock explains it, is the β€œbelief that the home is a place of beauty, power, and protection, a place where people are nurtured and nourished on a spiritual basis as well as a physical and emotional basis.” 

 It roots itself in practicality and, as the author stresses, with little ritualistic guidelines or necessary formality. Murphy-Hiscock asserts that hearthcraft functions on one very basic truthβ€”

 Living your life is a spiritual act. 

How is this different, you may ask, from keeping a warm, nurturing house filled with loved ones or pets or material objects that provide you with joy, comfort, or relaxation? How is this different from opening up your home to host friends and family as a safe place to gather in times of celebration or even grief? 

 The answer in that lies, as so many things do, in performing domestic acts with mindfulness and intention. 

 BUT! 

Keep in mind, this is with daily tasks, rituals, or routines you are already performing. No need to feel overwhelmed with the call to add another activity or tool to your spiritual arsenal if you don’t want to. 

 I mean, I love a good crystal grid, tarot deck, and DIY potion as much as the next magickal seeker. I am not knocking these things. I get giddy at the sight of a new, beautifully illustrated deck and my home is chockfull of magickal crystals, stones, witches’ bottles, incense burning cauldrons, botanical curio, and the like. 

RELATED: Interview with Arin Murphy-Hiscock, Author of β€˜Protection Spells’

 All I’m saying is I get it. Sometimes we can even get overwhelmed by the things we love. Sometimes I just want to screamβ€”I can’t do another thing! Please, please, please don’t make me add another thing!β€”when a well-meaning friend suggests yoga for my anxiety or performing paced breathing exercises while taking a cold shower. 

 With hearthcraft, you are already doing it. 

 Now you just will think of it with more purposefully intention and mindfulness. Murphy-Hiscock’s book helps β€œrecognize those things and lend awareness to them so that you can appreciate them all the more.” 

 The concept of hearthcraft always reminds me of the painting β€œThe Light of Coincidences” by the surrealist artist RenΓ© Magritte. In the painting, a single candle lit in a tall candlestick rests atop a table casting light on the sculpture of a nude, female torso. 

Photo Credit:  Author

Photo Credit: Author

The candle throws shadows on the torso, highlighting its depth and dimensions which makes the torso appear to be a three-dimensional object displayed in a box. The sculpture, however, is a framed painting itself. The eye is tricked into seeing both the torso as flat painting and three-dimensional sculpture. The painting as a whole, represents everyday objects but undermines our commonly held perceptions of the everyday worldβ€”allowing us to see in a myriad of ways. 

 Hearthcraft is like that candle that lends awareness, new perspective, and appreciation to the everyday world, particularly the domestic sphere. 

 For me, I started becoming more aware of how I β€œwake up” my house every morning. I take the same path through the house every morningβ€”From bed to the back door to let my two pups out. While they are outside, I circle around the house and open up all the blinds to let in the morning light. I refill the water in their dog bowls and scoop out their kibble. By this time, they both let out two sharp little barks at the backdoor saying they are ready to come back in. I set their bowls down on my way back to open the door. 

 Next, I begin the process of making coffee. I pull out a small electronic scale. Place a ceramic bowl on top and measure out some whole coffee beans. I toss them in the automated grinder and then get to work on filling the gooseneck kettle with water, lighting the stove, and placing the kettle, just so, on the burner. 

 While the water heats up, I grab my Chemex pot and a filter from the cupboard. I crease the filter just so and place it in the mouth of the pot. When the kettle shrieks that it is ready, I pour, with a swirling motion, a small amount of water over the paper filter, saturating it, and letting it trickle down into the belly of the pot to pre-heat the glass. I then pour this water into my chosen coffee mug to pre-heat that vessel as well.
I add my coffee grounds to the paper filter and the perform a series of small, measured circular pours, stopping periodically to watch the water and coffee perform the magic of science with their gaseous blooming of bubbles. When the brew is complete, I toss the hot water that was warming up my coffee mug, take cup and pot to the table, sit down, open up my computer, and light a candle to keep on the table beside me while I work. I pinch the corners of the filter together, lift it up from the mouth of the pot, and pour into my cup. 

Yes, I understand that I may have a more extensive coffee routine than some, but I never fully thought of this whole process as a ceremony unto itself until I began to more fully involve hearthcraft into my life. 

 I would often sweep through this coffee making routine without much thought. Sometimes with the TV on in the background, sometimes mindlessly scrolling through my phone while sloppily pouring water or impatiently pulling it from the burner too soon. I would make a mess with the grounds, hurriedly mis-measuring the beans resulting in either too weak or too bitter of a brew. I found mornings where I skipped even a lackluster process of brewing coffee, I would miss this allotted time that was specifically for this purpose. 

 This ritual was intuitive ceremony, one that I put more and more conscious and mindful practice in. 

House Witch stresses that everyday things can be magical. 

RELATED: A Simple Spell to Summon and Protect Your Personal Power

Making coffee. Arranging your tea caddy. Wiping down your kitchen counters. Washing the dishes. Organizing your desk. As Murphy-Hiscock says, β€œIt isn’t the addition of something that is necessary, so much as a recognition and acknowledgement of something that is already there.”

 How do you recognize the magic? 

The author breaks it down intoβ€”

 1.    Live in the moment. 

2.    Be aware of your intent.

3.    Direct your energy properly. 

4.    Focus on an action.  

Simplicity. Work with what you have. Build awareness and appreciation into the everyday actions of how you use your house and the everyday objects that fill it. 

 For more, The House Witch goes in depth to detail the kitchen as a scared space, magic in everyday objects, using a cauldron in hearthcraft, cleansing rituals, preparing food with awareness (accompanied with magical recipes), various activities in which you spend timegetting to know your physical house through traveling from room to room and journaling your emotional observations in each space. 

You can find more on the author and purchase The House Witch: Your Complete Guide to Creating a Magical Space with Rituals and Spells for Hearth and Home HERE.



Trista Edwards is an associate editor at Luna Luna Magazine. Her first full-length poetry collection, Spectral Evidence, is forthcoming from April Gloaming Press in 2019. She is also the curator and editor of the anthology, Till The Tide: An Anthology of Mermaid Poetry (Sundress Publications, 2015). You can read her poems at 32 Poems, Quail Bell Magazine, Moonchild Magazine, The Adroit Journal, The Boiler, Queen Mob's Tea House, Bad Pony, Occulum, and more. She creates magickal candles at her company, Marvel + Moon.

 

 

In Books Tags Hearthcraft, Witchcraft, BOOKS, Arin Murphy-Hiscock, Trista Edwards
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True to The Earth: Cooper Wilhelm Interviews Kadmus

November 26, 2018

BY COOPER WILHELM

The times we’re in are bad. Climate change is looming; fascism is on the rise; income inequality is getting worse; rents are going up; drought, famine, antibiotic-resistant diseases, artificial intelligence...the roster of apocalypses has gotten crowded. More and more, people are wrestling with the conclusion that the road we’re on right now leads only to ruin. If we’re going to save ourselves, and save each other, things need to change in big ways, and fast. 

true to the earth

Enter True to the Earth: Pagan Political Theology, a new book which offers a bold solution to the troubles we’re in: a return to high-pagan ways of seeing the world and our place within it. The book’s authorβ€”a neopagan and practicing ceremonial magician (think summoning demons with a magic circle and the Order of the Golden Dawn, not Penn and Teller)β€”is quick to point out that the high paganism he advocates for is not Wiccanism or the paganism of a particular place at a particular time. Rather, he points to a number of what he calls β€œhigh pagan societies” and how their shared insights might give us the tools we need to remake the world and avert (more) catastrophe.

On a rainy day in Brooklyn, I sat down with the author, Kadmus, to talk about him, high paganism, magic, and his new book.

You wrote this book under a pseudonym. What prompted that?

I’ve had some people assume β€œoh are you worried you’ll get into trouble cause you’re criticizing capitalism” or something like that, and that’s not the motivation at all. The motivation is actually that I’m a professional academic in philosophy and the world of philosophy can be surprisingly dogmatic and surprisingly closed. I don’t have these statistics exactly right, but I wouldn’t be surprised if 80% of contemporary philosophers are naturalists. In other words, they’re committed to the idea that science has a monopoly on truth, and most questions worth asking can be answered by science. So if I was known in the world of philosophy as being a ceremonial magician, as being a committed pagan, there would have been consequences to my professional career that I wasn’t ready at the time to deal with. 

Did your practice as a ceremonial magician or as a pagan affect or influence this book?

I think so. There’s a few aspects to this. One is I am very much a practicing ceremonial magician, and by and large the tradition of ceremonial magic tends to have, especially these days, an experimental aspect to it. What this means is that throughout my own life and my own career, I’ve worked with spirits and gods from many different cultures, from many different traditions. And I think that this made me already very open to seeing that there are shared insights throughout pagan cultures globally. 

Not that they’re all the sameβ€”radically different; important differencesβ€”but when you really look at the orality of those societies, you see that there are shared metaphysical commitments.

And I think I was more open to that because, within my own life, I had already worked with spirits from several different cultures, from several different historical time periods. So I think that this informs the pluralistic approach of the book.

 Another part of it is that I’m not writing this purely as an academic or intellectual endeavor. I am to the best of my ability living this worldview, to the best of my ability living within it, and a lot of the spirits I talk about and the gods and goddess are ones who I have very close relationships with. 

Do you feel as though any of these spirits and gods had a say in this book? 

Yes. I found, just as a matter of fact (not that this was planned), that a lot of the Interludes were inspired by, suggested by, directed by different spirits and divinities that I was working with. 

What I would want to avoid saying is that anything in here would count as something like revelation. This isn’t dictated by them. But there’s support. There was support and encouragement and suggested insights. 

I say early on in the book that I’m very skepticalβ€”and I think we should beβ€”of claims to authority via revelation. And that’s not because revelation doesn’t exist, I’m not saying that those things aren’t there, but I don’t care who’s revealing stuff to you. I have to come at it from where I am, and engage with it critically. 

And I think that this comes from a more pagan view VS a monotheistic viewβ€”I’m not one for the acceptance of authority, especially on questions that we can think about, based on claiming divine dictate or something like this. Even if a god or goddess speaks to me, I’m going to critically engage with what they say. There’s not a spirit out there that I would accept what they say unquestioningly.

The gods are personalities, they have agency. And they’re up to stuff. They’re up to different stuff and they disagree. They’ve got agendas. Just like dealing with a group of people you have to think about what folks are up to and what parts of it seem to fit with what seems meaningful and of value to you.      

I was watching Rosemary’s Baby for the first time last night, and it made me think about your book because there’s that scene where Rosemary is doing all this research on witchcraft, and she gets to a point where she demands that her husband take off his shirt to see if he has a witch’s spot. And there’s this sense that if you’re a witch, you absolutely have to have one, that to be a witch you have to believe some particular thing. Which is something I think your book is against.

Yeah, so, there is a difference between offering alternative ultimate truths like this is some new ultimate truth that someone should adopt VS entering the view from which you can see that there is no ultimate truth, there’s a plurality of truths that are fundamental to the universe, and it’s an ever-growing, ever-differing and changing collection of truths. This second position is the one offered by the book.

This pagan way of looking at the world is one you ascribe in the book to β€œhigh paganism.” And when you say, β€œhigh paganism,” you’re talking about something specific. What is that as opposed to paganism in general? Like, Plato is not a part of this.

There’s a period everywhere on the planet, in every culture, that was oral, before there was writing. Writing causes some really fundamental changes in the way we think, in the way that we view reality, in the way that we experience reality, right down to the bedrock of our experience. What I began to realize was that what seemed to be truly pagan cultures, what seemed to be most committed to these ideas of pluralism and plurality of truth in reality itself, were all oral societies, were all pre-writing. 

So, high paganism is a period in any culture when the culture is oral, and that orality contributes to certain ways of seeing the world that I understood to be high pagan.

What are some of the biggest differences in how a high pagan society sees the world compared to a literate society?

The most basic difference is that oral societies are concrete and action-based, whereas in literate societies what writing allows us to do is have abstract nouns. You can talk about β€œgoodness” all of a sudden as if it were a thing, rather than talking about how it’s good to act or what’s an example of good events in life.

We can give abstract definitions of a triangle and say that two sides of a right triangle have a relation to the other side and blah blah blah….If you were to do that in an oral society it would have to be a story. It would have to be some sort of story about the behavior of the sides or the triangle, so the one side stands firm and courageous and faces the other side in a certain way. It would have to be concrete. It would have to be about action.

This gets at something I really liked about this bookβ€”that one of the ways that high paganism can respond to and alleviate a certain amount of the alienation people feel in the current circumstances is with the way that high paganism understands how a body or a thing is defined. 

The high pagan understanding as I’m defining it tends to be relational. So a thing is what it is based on what it does, and the relationships it has with other things, and its context in the world around it. So rather than defining something in terms of, say, the base matter it’s made out of, or the purpose for which it is designedβ€”designed either by an ultimate creator or designed by us or designed by natureβ€”you instead understand it in terms of the way it behaves and the relationships it has with other things. 

A late-pagan thinker already is usually committed to what I call a monotheist metaphysics.  Aristotle, who’s what I call a late-pagan thinker, thinks the entire universe is unified, that everything has a purpose that is internal to that thing, and if you want to understand what a thing is you understand its purpose. We look at a fruit tree, and Aristotle is going to say What is the function of a fruit tree? What does a fruit tree do that is unique to a fruit tree? And it’s make fruit. So, a good fruit tree is going to make good fruit, a bad fruit tree is going to fail at making fruit, and that’s the ultimate essence of a fruit tree.

A high pagan view of a fruit tree is going to look instead at all the other connections and relationships. Obviously we care about fruit trees partially because they make fruit. They’re important to the animals they feed with the fruit as well. But there's all kinds of other relationships that tie in there, and some of those are going to be cultural relationshipsβ€”the role of the fruit tree in a society that isn’t just about providing fruit but is instead about its mythic history, for example. Or something like the other relationships: the squirrel that lives in it, the shade that it gives, and so on and so forth. 

All of these relationships are going to be branching, and growing, and altering over time. So the nature of that fruit tree is going to be increasingly complex, increasingly pluralistic. The same can be said about us. We are the relationships we find ourselves within and tend. We are what we do in the world and how the world responds to us.

Do you feel that this sort of reductive purpose-driven or substance-driven view of the nature of things is widely applied to human beings right now?

Yeah absolutely! One way that we see this is that thinking that everything has an essence that pins down its purpose and is therefore the basis from which we can judge its goodness or badness shows up in society and shows up in our political approaches to society. That there is the right way to formulate a society, to structure it, the right political form; there is the right answer to how our society should be organizedβ€”we just have to figure that out and force anyone who disagrees into that structure in one way or another. This is the history of 20th-century politics and a lot else. This attempt for the β€œpure society” where you have some pre-set idea of what the purity is, what the purpose is, what the appropriate structure is, and you have to in some way destroy or heal or re-educate or fit in anything that doesn’t fit that perfect pure society. 

Because the bottom line is that once you know (or once you think you know) what a thing’s nature is, then you come up with a very simple view. And the view is that anything that is closest to that nature is good, and anything outside of it is bad. You have to oppose this badness. So diversity itself, pluralism itself, becomes a mark of impurity or disorder or chaos

Whereas high paganism embraces this diversity.

Embraces it both as fundamental to realityβ€”it’s always going to be there, you’re never going to be able to do away with itβ€”but also embraces it as the source of the most important things in life. 

For example, I talk a lot about the idea of council, and the Akan civilization talks about wisdom as something that can’t reside in any one person’s head. So if you want to be wise, you can’t do it, only a collective can. And the more diverse that collective is, the more pluralistic that grasp of reality, the wiser that council, that collection of viewpoints, is. 

So, it’s both an unavoidable aspect of realityβ€”it’s pluralistic, it’s irreducibly pluralisticβ€”and it’s also the source of strength, of fertility, of growth, and of wisdom. 

And this even goes to the level of the gods. You do an Interlude about the Greek Magical Papyri, and one of the points you make is that multiple gods from multiple cultures are brought up in a non-hierarchical framework. 

Yeah, there are some exceptions, but by and large what’s striking about the Papyri is this wild multiplicity of gods from totally different cultures and traditions all thrown in together without some overarching system that would organize them in terms of importance and power and who rules who. 

And this is actually an aspect of high pagan culture. We’re used to monotheistic religions that are hostile to alternative views. But it is a huge part of archaic or high pagan cultures, this curiosity, and even greed, for new gods and new traditions and new practices. So it’s both an openness to them, but it's also a hunger for them. Someone comes through Athens and says hey there's this weird tradition I picked up somewhere in Persia and they’re willing to give it a try. They’re willing to see what things look like from within that tradition.

Kwasi Wiredu, who’s an amazing philosopher who deals a lot with African philosophy and African culture, talks about the fact that the Akan society had what he calls an empirical or experimental attitude towards gods and spirits and religious practice, where if something is working, if you go to it for helpβ€”or if you go to it for healing, or for wisdom, or whatever you’re going to it forβ€”and it’s useful for you, then it ends up increasing in value, and importance, and increasing in attention. 

On the other hand when those things fail, you begin to withdraw from them. So it’s not in line with the way that faith is thought about in a monotheistic context, where whether God β€œfails you” or not, you owe absolute obedience and devotion, and if it seems like you’re being failed, if it seems like your prayer hasn’t been answered, it’s a test, it’s a test of your obedience and devotion. 

In a pagan culture it’s not seen that way. The idea is that look, if these gods aren’t alive in my life, if these spirits aren’t alive in my life, if these practices aren’t meaningful in my life, if they're not doing something for me, if they're not intimately involved in the meaning of my worldβ€”I don’t owe them anything. There’s a sense that that idea of devotion to something that is precisely refusing to be present is a fool’s game. 

So, in this high pagan culture, the gods are very present. You describe how there can be a god of rivers generally, and there can be a god who is a particular river, the river itself rather than, say, a magic god-person floating above the river. 

And this isn’t an absolute distinction, gods aren't going to fall into the one category or the other constantly. But very often our modern perspective on pagan gods that are identified as gods of mountains, or the goddess of a river, or Gaia who is goddess of Earth, is that they are somehow the spirit of that thing: there’s the Earth and then there’s a conscious, intelligent spirit that is separate but maybe inhabits that thing. 

Gaia is clearly identified by the high pagan Greeks as the Earth. When you dig in the Earth, you’re digging in the body of Gaia. She is described as β€œbroad-bosomed” meaning the mountains and the hills. And this isn’t symbolic. Oral societies are not symbolic, they do not use symbolism, they are concrete and literal. So when Gaia is the Earth, she is the Earth, a living entity with a body that is the Earth. 

We see a great example of this in the Iliad. There’s a scene where Achilles fights the river Scamander. And it’s not that some spirit steps out of the river, some, like, divine representative of the river.  No, it’s the river! The waves are crashing on him as if a horde were attacking him and he is struggling in the river. The river itself is the god and the god is the river. 

The gods were embodied, and many of them were directly understood to be the thing that was identified as divine. So, the Earth is divine, it is a goddess, it’s a living bodyβ€”that is what Gaia is. 

Then you get distinctions. Poseidon is a god of the ocean. It’s probably wrong to say he is the ocean. If you think about an engagement with Poseidon, it’s usually going to be something like a fairly anthropomorphic manifestation of the ocean, which is how a lot of neopagans think about all the gods, missing the fact that that works for some, but it doesn’t work for all.  

Speaking of neo-paganism, because this ties in a bit to the political moment, there has been in recent years a connection between neopaganism and far-right politics, especially fascism. The Nazis used Norse sigils in their iconography, there’s the Soldiers of Odin, a far-right group that also uses Norse mythology…

You see this in Greece, too, a lot of far-right movements that identify with a return to Greek pagan religion.       

...But your depiction and conception of high paganism, and the sort of high paganism you advocate, would seem to be an antidote to this, or at the very least certainly not part of this.

I would hope so! Part of what motivated the book was trying to get clear in my own mind about the full extent of the mistake you make when you think that to be engaged with the old Norse gods you have to fit into some sort of racial profile or nationalistic commitments. 

Part of what I really try to stress is precisely the way in which purity, and the politics of purity, play such a key role in these fascist reinterpretations of paganism, and how foreign that would have been, how utterly opposed to the main insights of a pagan culture. The Norse gods were not pure, that were a mixing of various sorts, children of giants and so on and so forth. We also see the background of the Norse gods in the Γ†sir and the Vanir, who are two different families of gods. And there’s debates about which one is foreign, but it’s clear that at some point in time one of them was foreign and the other wasn’t. And the relationship between them wasn’t one of conquest and dominance, even though some people try to interpret it that way. It ends up being a compromise with exchanges of family, and this gives rise to some of the most distinct powers of the Norse gods. 

So, my point is that the cultures that gave rise to these religions were not themselves committed to racial purity, they weren't committed to nationalistic purity. But also that the theology within these religions is opposed to these concepts of purity, to these concepts of firm boundaries between peoples to begin with….or between anything. The type of purities that obsess fascism wouldn’t have made any sense to high pagan cultures. 

How else do you see the lessons of high paganism being applied in a contemporary context? How could someone apply these in their own life, maybe in a way that is anti-fascist, anti-capitalist, or anti-prejudice?

There’s a few things to say here. We can see that there are certain things that are very difficult for us to think and to experience and to see in the world that other cultures and other time periods could think and see much more easily. In and of itself that doesn’t convince us that we should adopt it, but it does allow us to begin to see the failures and the limitations of our own ways of seeing the world and the cost of them. So often nowadays what you find is that people want to use the very principles and very ways of seeing the world that got us into problems in the first place, that have led to disasterβ€”they want to use those same ways of seeing the world to solve the problem. And it’s not going to work.  

For example, with global warming, very often the dream is that it’s just some new technological order we need, some new collection of inventions. And it’s not to say that those things might not be helpful. But what got us into this problem in the first place was seeing the world as an object for use, as a source of raw material, and if the answer is well we just have to manage our raw material better, you’re gonna fail. Seeing that we’re already making that assumption requires seeing that there’s another way to see the world.

This is just an argument for why the history matters, because it gives us access to different ways of understanding reality. Which might be better, might be worse. I argue that there are some specific ways that it’s better, and there are some limits and failures as well, so it has to be a critical endeavor.  

What’s the most direct way to apply this? There are a few things I can say.

One is that if you’re seeing the world in a pluralistic way, then you have to give up on the idea that what you think or what you understand is sufficient for solving any problem. And the same thing applies to this book. This book is insufficient for addressing the problem and for developing a full grasp of what a truly pagan worldview would be. It’s part of the process; it’s insufficient by itself. 

And I see this in my students all the time. I’ll have someone who’s very deeply religious, and who’s also committed to freedom of religion and freedom of speech, and it’s a good thing, but when you dig into what their thinking is, their thinking is Look, I know I’m right, I’m committed entirely to the fact that I am right, and I’m giving other people the chance to realize that they’re wrong. Freedom of opinion and freedom of religion is a chance for everyone else to come to see that I’m right. 

Now, there’s a fundamental failure there.  If you’re going to gather folks together to try to solve a problem, and each of them thinks they’re right, and is open to debate and discussion with the sole aim of getting everyone else to realize that they’re right, you’re not going to come up with a solution.  And you’re not going to be able to progress in that conversation. 

On the other hand, what I think pagan cultures teach us is that there’s a radically different view when you admit from the start, and everyone does just as part of the framework, that every single one of the views present, every single one of the grasps of reality present, is incomplete. And that we need each other and we need an increased complex grasp on the situation to address it. 

So an immediate, concrete, in-our-daily-life way to approach this is by accepting the limitations of our own position and accepting the vital necessity of the truths of others, the insight they have into reality.  

You make this really interesting point in the book that there is this connection between divinity and what happens when you lie, whether or not your lies can become reality.  Which is interesting, especially in the current climate where you have basically competing realities at play in the mainstream media.

That’s actually my favorite Interlude. There’s a whole Interlude about truth and lie and the role of lying and deception within a pagan worldview. And you see many examples of this, but when you lie to a god, if you do it well, it’s not always that you’re tricking the godβ€”you’re able to, in some cases, trick divinitiesβ€”but if you can lie to a god or a goddess and get them to accept the lie, that becomes a reality. At that point it's no longer you lying, it’s making a change.

A great example of this is Hermes and the Homeric Hymn to Hermes. Hermes just lies nonstop, and Zeus knows immediately he’s lying, and is really pleased and smiles to see how well Hermes is lying. And what that story ends up being about is that Hermes creates a space for himself on Olympus through telling these lies, and engaging in theft, and it makes space for him. And he ends up being a god.

We see this with Loki too, right, where you have someone who is not a god but essentially lies his way in.

Yeah. Another example that I love is the transformation that occurs of the Furies into the Eumenides. The Furies were these ancient goddesses that were very dangerous and their job was to enforce the oldest laws of the gods. And part of these laws were things like you don’t kill family members. So if you kill your mother or father, it’s the Furies that get to punish you. 

And all this leads to this climax where the Furies are trying to punish someone, and Athena and Apollo do not agree that the person should be punished (this is all in the Oresteia). And the way that peace is brought about is that the people of Athens start calling the Furies the β€œEumenides,” which means the ones who bless, it’s the good-minded ones, and the good-spirited ones, and the ones who bring blessings and all of this. And these aren’t blessing spirits. 

It’s like when someone is being barked at by a big dog and they say, β€œNice doggie!”

Yeah, exactly. And it works! 

The official mythology is that the Eumenides are the Eumenides in Athens, that they are friendly to Athens. And they bless marriages and they bless new births, and there's all of this new meaning that comes with their new title. And it comes from lying to them, saying oh, you’re beautiful, you’re a force of blessing. And they accept the lie and become a force of blessing. 

And one of the good things about this book is that there is a kind of despairing fatalism afoot these daysβ€”climate change seems inevitable, our politics don’t seem representative and aren’t terribly effective anymoreβ€”and one of the things that the book brings up is that you have access to all these tools: the lie that becomes reality, the fact that you can stand up to a god, you can fight that river and win.

Right, and we see these examples throughout cultures: times where the gods are defeated. Times where you can side with one god VS another. Rebellion is absolutely always a choice. And this is an important thing that we get from paganismβ€”rebellion is always an option. There’s no value in absolute obedience.

In monotheism, rebellion is always foolish because the only source of existence is the one god. So there’s this sense in which there can be no victory against that force, so you simply have to obey, there’s no choice. This trickles down into politics, even in our contemporary world.

That’s not the pagan worldview. There, there are many sources of power. The sources of power rise and fall, and shift and change. So, if you’re in a tight spot, rebellion against the gods, some of the gods VS others, is always an option.

And that tied in with the idea of change becomes really important, because there’s this sense of fatalism. This comes from all different areas. Part of it you can see in certain types of Marxism, too, the idea that there’s a deterministic nature to history, things are going in a certain direction, and even if they change that change was determined by the structure of the universe, or something like this.

And what paganism as I understand it is committed to is the idea that the structure of the universe constantly changes. It’s been changing since whatever the start might be and it will go on changing, which means that no matter how determined something seems, the rule of reality is unexpected, unpredictable alteration. Which means that no matter how grim things be, tomorrow might be a world of difference.

Cooper Wilhelm is an occultist, researcher, and poet in NYC. He is the author of three books of poetry, including DUMBHEART/STUPIDFACE (Siren Songs/2017). More at CooperWilhelm.com and on twitter @CooperWilhelm

Kadmus is a published academic with a Ph.D. in philosophy teaching at the college level. He is also a practicing ceremonial magician with a long standing relationship to the ancient Celtic deities.

In Occult, Books Tags paganism, BOOKS, KADMUS, cooper wilhelm, NATURE, POLITICS
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An Interview With John Pivovarnick

October 31, 2018

BY ANDI TALARICO

John Pivovarnick’s novel-within-a-novel Tales from the Back of a Bus tells the story of a young author handling the aftermath of his book’s publication. Jake Maldemer, a young writer in 1980s Los Angeles, writes a series of tales featuring a protagonist named Jack Moses as well as an ethereal, spooky man named Kobold. But when Jake hits the road to promote his book, a man claiming to be Kobold finds him, and things only get weirder from there. It becomes almost impossible to separate fact from fiction as we’re guided through a Dantean LA landscape and later in the piece, New York. The work speaks to the confusion of identity, cognitive dissonance, shame-based fear, and PTSD. Fans of Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five or the film Jacob’s Ladder will feel right at home in these pages. I spoke with author Pivovarnick about the work.

I understand that you wrote much of this book some time ago, in the early 80s. What brought you back to it? What was the editing process like as you finalized this edition for print?

The story is pretty much as described in the afterword, moving that big honking filing cabinet and wondering "WTF is in here?" then spelunking in the monstrous thing.

The clincher, as it were, was finding those rejection letters talked about, too. The "its sooo good, no one will publish it" comments. "Too challenging." Too whatever.

The hardest part of editing was keeping it accurate to the timeframe. I hired an editor and he was like, "Did Jiffy Mailers exist in 1979?" and my answer was always, "They must have, because that's when that part was written."

There were also some characters I had a hard time not editing to fit today's standards. I had to let them stand [while cringing] because they were accurate and honest for the time.

What made you decide to finally move forward with the book's publication? Was there a moment?

The moment was getting similar rejection letters for Beneath a Glass Triskellion which Dave and I are still hammering away at. The thought being, let's learn this process so we're ready to go with these books when we're ready. There's quite a learning curve, as you can imagine. Luckily, I have a unique set of skills...

The story takes place in a city that both is and is not Los Angeles, in that it takes place in the physical and spiritual planes. What about Los Angeles made it available to you as a magical or ethereal realm?

I ran away to Los Angeles when I was 19, and it was both a magical/ethereal realm, and the drudgery of two jobs to make rent and no time to write. I took that bus ride to get that job. I ate at Ships a lot. Just the difference between growing up in Scranton, PA and finding myself in Los Angeles at 19 was quite the journey of discovery.

The act of writing is magical in the same sense the cards are magical or ritual is magical.

Your story is a frame narrative, a classic story-within-a-story, but because you also discuss this work being autobiographical, it's a actually a meta story-within-a-story-within-a-story...within a story? Jack is Jake is YOU, John. How did you handle the psychological gymnastics required to get within two characters that are both based upon your experiences?

Who said I handled them? I have a radio interview coming up next month, and my mind is blown about that.

Also, as a queer kid in denial, your life is all about getting in the heads of two characters that are both based on your experience. That's the closet in a nutshell.

One of the most potent aspects of the work is the main character's struggle over defining and understanding his sexual identification. What was it like, looking back upon those ideas in 2018 from a time when that was still a struggle for you? Do you identity as an LGBTQ author?

I'm an author who is gay, and my life informs what I write, regardless of characters, genre, or whatever. I always strive for representation in what I write, all the way around. I administer the Bechdel test to myself.

Screen Shot 2018-10-30 at 9.51.53 PM.png

At Luna Luna, we're always interested in the cultural signifiers of witches and witchcraft. While Tales from the Back of a Bus doesn't deal directly with witchcraft, you've long been a tarot reader and witchy individual. Do you see a corollary between witchcraft and authorship in general? How does your craft or spiritual practice inform your work.

The act of writing is magical in the same sense the cards are magical or ritual is magical. They all bring about a state of mind that makes you open and receptive, to see. Ritual informs your being. The cards inform another person. Writing informs the readers. It's all the same process of seeing, understanding, and communicating. To me at least. My best writing happens when the characters take control and I'm reduced to just transcribing what they tell me--that's whether they're people, creatures, space aliens, or what not. That "divine madness" Plato was so hot about.

Anything else you’d like to let us know?

This is a weird, weird book. Even I'm astonished at how strange it is. But it's a pretty accurate representation of me and my mind and life process at the time, through a lot of transformative stuff--personal stuff, the Reagan era which was also the start of the AIDS crisis, coming out, shaking off my catholic school upbringing to embrace a wider mystical world. Mind blowing stuff that I was lucky to survive intact. Ish. Intactish.

More than any other element in it, I think it maps my transition from the childhood view that the world is safe and sensible to the more truthful world "red in tooth and claw" ready to chew up the unwary/unaware and spit them out. A simmering summary of this story, maybe, in which I come out transformed on the other side. My life is way stranger than the novelization of it.


Andi Talarico is Luna Luna’s book reviews editor, and a Brooklyn-based writer and reader. In 2003, Paperkite Press published her chapbook, Spinning with the Tornado, and Swandive Publishing included her in the 2014 anthology, Everyday Escape Poems.

She’s taught poetry in classrooms as a rostered artist and acted as both coach and judge for Poetry Out Loud. She also penned a literary arts column for Electric City magazine, and currently curates the NYC-branch of the international reading series, At the Inkwell. When she’s not working with stationery company Baron Fig, she can be found reading tarot cards, supporting independent bookstores, and searching for the best oyster Happy Hour in NYC.

In Books Tags books
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Image via  GOOP.

Image via GOOP.

Interview with Arin Murphy-Hiscock, Author of 'Protection Spells'

September 19, 2018

I recently had the chance to ask Arin a few questions about her most recent book, Protection Spells: Clear Negative Engery, Banish Unhealthy Influences, and Embrace Your Power, the necessary and active role in taking charge of your own magic, and some common misconceptions about spell-casting.

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In Books Tags Spell, spellwork, Witchcraft, Trista Edwards
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