You don’t know me, really. But, let me tell you a little something.
Some number of years ago, more than a few, I was in conversation at a local body and the person I was talking with wondered if anyone at the lodge actually identified as “pagan”. I answered that I did. I also said, “I’m sure as shit not Christian.” Whether that label “pagan” is simply used, in the long tradition of doing so, for anything not-Christian, or something else in particular, might colour and nuance my first answer, but I’d still probably say, on balance, I still identify as pagan (At the very least, it’s a lot easier than explaining “militantly agnostic non-christian cosmopolitan mystic” or whatever word-salad I’ve settled on lately, after all), but I still and again will always be quick to say, “I’m sure as shit not Christian.”
Okay, so, I am not Christian. Never was, and never will be. I’m also not Jewish or Muslim. I have no interest in them except general intellectual curiosity. But, none of those systems are part of my personal life, and they never have been. I also don’t speak or read Hebrew, Aramaic, or Arabic, even if I might know a few words, and so on, here and there, from exposure, as you can well imagine.
Even so, it might shock you, especially considering the website I run, but I’m sure you can understand if you think about it, that I don’t actually care very much what the first, last, or any words in between are in any of the Christian, Jewish, or Islamic religious texts. I also don’t care what the letters in the languages of those texts add up to, or which words are equivalent to each other. It’s trivia and lore for the fandom, about which I might know and be familiar, but it isn’t my fandom of choice.
I’m happy to let people enjoy things, and absolutely have their traditions free from persecution, when they return the favour, but it’s not something that I enjoy, let alone care about for my own part.
Shocked? Would you require a Star Trek fan to get excited about Star Wars in order to be into Scifi overall? Or would you let them enjoy their things within the overall whole?
But, let me just say also that to the extent that Thelema is soaking in Christianity, I stop being interested. And, if you don’t think Thelema is, then you’re not paying attention or are a fish swimming in water they aren’t seeing. I’d say Thelema is moist with it, but it’s positively sopping wet. If Thelema were rum cake, and Christianity were the rum, there’s a chalice full of rum on the altar with a tiny bit of bread crumbled in it. Thelema is, in my view, quite obviously a Christian heresy. To paraphrase
David Richard Jones, who exactly is it you think comes out of the tomb during the Gnostic Mass?
Heselton’s 2 volume biography
Witchfather makes a cogent and coherent case that Gerald Gardner created a religion that was permissive of his particular romantic proclivities. I’ll suggest without going into it further, that one might also see Crowley wanted a religion that fulfilled his desire for the authoritarian structures familiar to him from his childhood but that was permissive and supportive of his own
kinky AF and
queer proclivities too. Maybe the two of them even talked about that when they met? We’ll probably never know, but I can speculate that they both got what they were seeking.
This perhaps explains the shock of the organizer of a ritual I was at where one element was to trample on a cross. The organizer was shocked that so many present were willing to do it. Why were they shocked? Probably because the symbol still meant so much to them, even if in opposition, they assumed it meant that much to other people. Perhaps for some who did it the act was fraught with inner meaning over which they struggled. For me? Not so much per se.
However, I understood the act in the ritual, and the reason for it, but the actual symbol was not one I ever accepted or needed particularly to struggle over ritually rejecting as part of my life. But, for the ritual, in that space, for that moment, I trampled on that cross as a symbolic substitute for something else entirely in the spirit in which the act was intended, as much as I could embody the action for myself.
One of the questions a lot of people consider at one point in their esotericism or other is how they feel and think about the entities discussed and worked with in rituals and so on. This is the question of the
psychological model (also, for funsies, here’s
an article on a variety of models archived from Spiral Nature, not just the psychological one). Do the entities and structures in esoteric study and practice have “actual” existence, are they independent ontological phenomena? Or, are they maps for inner, psychological, epistemological experience?
Wherever you come down on that, let me respectfully submit that it doesn’t really matter in the end. There are times when in doing something it works best if you are fully invested in the belief in the actual existence of that thing represented by the elements in that working. When that’s the case, do your best to fully realize and accept the ontological existence of the elements you’re working with, at least as long as is necessary for the work.
But, after that point, be prepared to let that all go. Do anything you need to release that particular set of beliefs and certainties that aren’t in service to you, perhaps aided by physicalizing something as mnemonic triggers, like putting a particular ring on another finger or having other specific surroundings and trappings that can be doffed or stored away, for which the doffing and storing is itself a specific and ritual act.
This is like the process of a method actor, diving into embodying and living a role, who then, hopefully, returns to themselves after they de-role, or, you know, come back from the journey changed, ready to change the world, but come back to the world and don’t get lost in
Chapel Perilous. Don’t become the kind of method actor, or practitioner, that is a cautionary tale.
So, believe in what serves you, for as long as it serves you, as strongly as you can, but then let it go when you’re done. For me that means that no one particular set of symbols and correspondences is the right one, the only one, certainly not for me, anyway. And, I’m furthermore free to not find myself drawn to any of them in particular, unless, for some reason, I find that useful for the moment.
As far as I’m concerned, you just need a rich symbol system with which your self can talk to yourself, and have a vibrant inner life. Find it, use it, enjoy it. Whether that’s qabalah, tarot, runes, or the complexities of inter-species sociopolitics in the Bajor Sector in the Star Trek Universe. Give yourself something deeply and broadly symbolic and open to interpretation so that your self can have complex and rich communication with you, whatever that something is. Pick a fandom that speaks to you personally, and that gives you the mythology worthy of the depth of your work.
Put that stuff in your brain, for as long as you like, whichever you like, and cook your noodle in that sauce until you’ve got something delicious. Then, grab a cookbook or recipe online for something else next time. Maybe you’ll find some dishes that match your palate and also some that don’t. You might try some things that you didn’t like again, just to see if your tastes have changed over time. Or you want to try to practice a particular cooking skill. Maybe even, sometimes, you’ll find that there’s medicinal value in stuff that’s unappetizing, so you’ll have that in spite of the taste.
I’m happy to let people have their preferences about useful symbol sets, but I also expect that others will be happy letting me have mine.
