Category: Spirituality/Paganism & Magick

It was hot that November and the sand glowed in the noonday sun like burnished grains of glory. The shadows hid in the shade, grey and faint, and the light moved in waves of heat shimmer and bounced in vicious glares from chunks of Old Kingdom white limestone. The old pyramid hunkered in the brightness like a stone wedding cake stripped of its icing, and the drift dunes and mounds of half exposed ruins added a somber sense of permanence. The ancient City of the Dead seemed even more impressive in the flood of light, looking as if a dream had materialized from the otherworldly glare, then melted and fell apart.

Tolkien's Invocation of the Star Goddess

Close onto forty years ago when I discovered Tolkien's magical trilogy, The Lord of the Rings, it was a vastly different world. Magic was rather thin on the ground in those days, what with the Cold War, Civil Rights struggles and the growing Vietnam conflict. It was a mean, hard reality and one didn't have to look far to find the Black Gates of Mordor or examples of the still surviving spirits of Sauron and Saruman.

Where Were You When the World Ended?

The other night, while sipping a brain food smoothie and watching stereoscopic TV pictures from the surface of Mars on CNN, I had a sudden realization. It wasn't at first exactly a thought, more like a sensation so intense I thought I'd swallowed a block of smoothie ice and my brain had frozen. Desperately, I groped for the image behind the sensation.

What I came up with was an old illustration in a science fiction magazine: Ray Bradbury's ethereal Martians windsurfing on the salt lakes of old Mars. And then it really hit me. I was living in the future...

The Pagan Christ:
Putting The Fun Back In Fundamentalism

This Thanksgiving, I had the opportunity to announce to my fundamentalist relatives that Christianity was in fact a dead religion, or at least dying. Curiously, this didn't provoke the reaction it would have just a few years ago. Even the most fundie of Christian mentalist have begun to suspect that something is wrong with their religion.

Sekhmet is the most prominent of the many lioness deities. Worshipped primarily in Memphis, she is the consort of Ptah and mother of Nefertum.

All the Gods of Electricity:
Frankenstein and the Myth of Modernity

I was thirteen when the great horror movie fascination took hold. Trying to understand fear, I proceeded to scare myself silly with an endless diet of vampires, werewolves, zombies, and all the other monster motifs the early sixties could provide. After a while, the make believe horrors began to pale. But, I can vividly remember one dark late night in front of the TV screen when I found something that really shook me.

The time period, between Oct. 31st and Nov. 2nd is one of the most widely celebrated ancient traditions. Samhain means "summer's end" in the Celtic tradition. The harvest is complete and the land will lie fallow for the winter months with the seeds of new life deep underground. Cultures worldwide have recognized this as a time to honor ancestors and loved ones who have passed on to the other side. The ancient cultures understood death as a natural part of the cycle of birth, death and rebirth and embraced the lessons of death as a part of life. It was not feared in the same way that it is now, but respected as all great mysteries must be. They knew that after the grain is harvested, the seeds will rise again in the early spring to bring new life.

Now for your personalized self-marketing forecast. One that you can be sure to count on with absolute certainty:

Do not expect clear skies.

The decision to self-market your dream will cloud you with confusion, thunder you with turmoil, and leave you wading chin-high through doubt pouring down in a torrent. Know now that weathering the daze of disappointment, frustration, and setbacks will not leave you toasty and dry, and it is not (repeat: not) for those individuals with weak mental and emotional resources. To take on the challenges and obstacles of self-marketing your dream, you must have the ability to work from the inside out in all ways, approaching each new day with a presence and consciousness that is catalyzed with patience, persistence, and perseverance. We promise you that no matter how great your intention, how sincere your aspiration, how exceptional your idea, without resolute steadfastness and purposeful determination, you will tangle yourself in nonexistent limitations and knot yourself in unfounded fears. Doomed by your own inaction, you will wimp out, abandoning the richer experience that awaits you, languishing in the repeated echoes of shoulda-coulda, the ultimate phantasm that haunts us all.

Saint Rémy de Provence; September 17, 12:00:10 am. . .
Dr. Strange's 418th Dream:

I was in bed asleep in the tower room of the Hotel les Antiques when something, some sound from outside, awakened me. The French doors to the balcony stood open and the curtains drifted slightly in the breeze. The air tasted of crushed sage and lavender, and the breeze did have a voice, whispering quietly as the edge of the lace trimming danced over marble. The window squeaked faintly, opening a little wider as the breeze stirred up from the town with a promise like a goddess' kiss.

The relationship of modern Paganism to ancient Egypt seems to be one of an evolution of fact and fantasy. We pagans, unfulfilled spiritually by existing religions, gravitate towards a past culture and body of knowledge independent of the Bible and the Koran. We look back to the earliest high culture, seeking connections with creation, the Divine and original knowledge. The architecture and art, mysteries and magic, wisdom and worship of ancient Egypt offer a fertile field in which we can cultivate this aspiration.