Runa

The Swaying Inner Serpent

A source of minor frustration to me is how rarely I seem to write for this website. There are so many ideas to be explored, yet so few make it through into print (or pixels, or whatever).

I realized this evening that part of the problem is that, ironically, I impose a lot of rules on myself. Combine that with a very demanding, satisfying job that calls on all of my magical prowess, and other fun creative pursuits, well the written word languishes. That…and what I really want to be writing is material too demanding to be squeezed in around a job, no matter how satisfying that job may be.

When this site first started, I was slamming out the articles, yet my daily life had a lot less satisfaction in it. I never dreamed I would be doing the work I do now. Even if I work in a very mainstream environment and even if my interests and ideas don’t get to often openly show themselves, my creativity and tenacity and weirdness get enough of a workout that they aren’t begging for literary adventures as they once did.

This is a shame because my magical journeys have become richer and richer. Since I did a Vipassana retreat some 3 years ago I have had a most wonderful and potent meditation practice. My voyages into performance art have been giving me rich new opportunities for the veneration of Odin and Loki (and the runes!). I am learning about therapeutic applications of trembling (Jan Fries eat your heart out!) and might even get to study hypnotherapy under the auspices of a fellow Elhaz Ablaze book contributor.

Oh! And our book! What a journey that was. I have more books in me, but for now not the space and resources to realize them. What a conundrum.

Yes, and even as I write this I recognize submerged voices telling me that I’m doing it wrong, no one wants to read this. And that is the fundamental mistake: we must create for the inner serpent, not for the appeasement of a projected audience. So long as I am trying to contort myself into an externally determined form, I am violating the font of my power and inspiration.

“To find me, first lose me and find yourself,” admonished Zarathustra to his disciples as he dismissed them. This website, and our book, is fundamentally about the art of stripping away all the authoritarian introjects, the shoulds, musts, and oughts, so that the inner serpent may sway as she wills. A life of constriction and suppression is worthless. Anarchism is the only viable option in the long run (meant psychologically and spiritually, and who knows, perhaps one day even socially?).

I want to burn myself away in the mirror-flame, the harsh mistress called reflection. I want to know my desire, to become it, to articulate it, to nourish it, to be confronted only with the choice of whim, not the rigidity of doubt. For my only criterion of choice to be my judgment, not my fear.

How do we become strong? We nourish ourselves and we test ourselves. One or the other alone will not suffice. I must feed myself and then stretch myself. On the other side of punitive forcing and lax lassitude there dwells the discipline of kindness, which nourishes the endless thirst for mystery that captivates the swaying inner serpent.

Vipassana has taught me to abandon my fear of pain, discomfort, suffering, to embrace it, which paradoxically grants freedom. Not that there is less pain, discomfort, or suffering, but that they are no longer impediments as they were. “This is better than perfection,” to quote another of my incarnations.

Yet I am still so terribly constricted. Tentacles, inner armor, abound in my psyche, my flesh. I am learning more and more just how damaged I am, how much of a freak I am, and it is by turns exhilarating and devastating. Will you truly court Mystery, Runa? If you truly will, you must be ready to shed your skin.

As authoritarianism becomes progressively more brazen on the world stage, we are called upon to challenge its hold on our internal landscapes. Without that inner work I will never have the strength to defy the tyranny of mediocrity that is so dominating US politics (and other places too). My liberation and collective liberation are admixed. There is no separation, only different perspectives.

Do you crave to run screaming across the astral plane? Ride with the Hunt across storm-tossed skies? Tear yourself to pieces in the calling of rebirth? I want the truth of my nature to be fulfilled as fully as it may.

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Want More Efficient Magic? Use Compassion.

Efficient magic uses compassion as its basis. Sound too good to be true? Read on!

I take it that the goal of magical practice is efficiency. Sure, 100 years ago the goal was to dress up in funny robes, memorize pages of bad poetry, and have really awful sex on an altar in front of a room full of prudish hypocrites. Well, maybe that is still what some people want. I’m not judging.

But for many of us: we want something different. We want an immediate, sinuous, ever-changing communion with the serpent called transformation. She’s a kindly yet rigorous mistress, and she respects discipline, consistency, inspiration, and focus. What supports these? Compassion.

The minute I slide into a judgmental attitude, I am wasting psychic energy. I become a grossly inefficient engine. All that power wasted as incidental heat and noise. The groaning machinery of righteousness. Beneath that, the squeaky whine of self-doubt.

Yes: the more flagrant my judgment, the more I send a compensatory, undermining message to my unconscious. The more I puff up my outer ego posture, the more my interior musculature, my autonomic nervous system, atrophies. A dead tree with brittle bark and liquefied innards. That’s the unspoken ideal of righteous judgment.

Compassion is way more efficient. Instead of raging, resenting the other, I take two steps. First, I give myself empathy. NOT sympathy. I do not buy into my own narrative of victimhood (the basis of judgment), but I do acknowledge the pain and discomfort I feel. THEN, I extend my imagination and ask, “where is this person coming from?” If can imagine my way into their experience then I can discover a richer sense of meaning to their actions. I don’t have to excuse them or abandon accountability, but I also don’t have to waste my energy on confusion or resentment.

Now, this transaction also applies in relation to a) my self; b) the sinuous serpent called transformation. Instead of resenting the inevitable tide of change, I can find compassion for myself and for others. “I send myself kindness. I send you good will.” That simple. Thought stopping. When thought stops in brief moments, sigils spontaneously fire from the womb of mystery into the womb of mystery (for surely the universe is a lesbian and is her own lover).

So it appears that compassion is not only efficient, not only reverent, not only magically potent, but sexy as hell too. The more sexually enriched magic becomes, the more delightful (assuming we are talking about the ardent, exuberant, untarnished sexuality of the Feminine Mystery called Runa, the taproot of the world, free of the embarrassment called patriarchy).

Every time I cast magic, I conclude with a step toward non-attachment: “does not matter, need not be, that or something better.” Anxiety, fear, self-doubt, resentment, all of these are names for unseemly attachment. They muddy the waters of magical action. Compassion clarifies.

Most people feel very resistant to adopting compassion for either self or others, at least at first. Enspelled by the carceral state called Scarcity-Objectification-Judgment-Authority, they think that kindness to self or others is a dirty indulgence, or a giving of permission to incompetence, ill-doing, laziness, or chicanery. They think the hard strain and struggle of judgment and punishment is a sign that work is being done.

The hard strain and struggle of judgment and punishment is not a sign that work is being done. Work is being done when I do not even feel the slightest effort. When I am riding the tide of Wyrd with ease and grace.

How is this possible? Through kindness. How do I know this? By this.

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The Crossroads and the Gallows

Odin by Jacob Hood 1893Gods upon gods upon gods. Big gods. Little gods. Perverse gods. Strange gods. Gods of mystery, mysterious gods. This cosmos is so full of the things called gods that one cannot walk for treading on one. Is there anything that is not god?

The little god of the toothbrush, no, that is the toothbrush. The little god that is the bathroom door, that is the stair case, that is the kettle, that is the shirt on your back, that is the oxygen molecules you absorb into every cell of your body, drawing over the surfaces of your lungs, into your blood, your heart, to the very limits of your capillaries, into every single cell, that life-giving divinity called Oxygen feeding the divinity called Your Body. Fall down in reverence.

The bad mood, the stained conscience, the mean thought. All divine beings. The good mood, the selfless deed, the languid afternoon in the long sun’s demise, all deities sublime. The familiar, the alien, the comforting, the disturbing. Gods.

They are stacked up together in fractal arrangements, endless recurring icons of magic and power. As above, so below; the structure of the tiniest is the structure of the ALL. Divine, gods all. One and many, both at the same time. Is this illogical? Illogic is the name of god. Is this contradictory? Contradiction is the name of god. (Logic and consistency are also the names of God, coincidentally).

Tragedy is a god, and serendipity is a god. Change is a god, one who facilitates all the others most eagerly. Change is, you might say, the crossroads of the gods, or perhaps the traffic cop of the gods as they comport themselves to and fro along the byways of Mystery, she who may well be the greatest of all the divinities (but who can claim to know such a thing?).

Change, the crossroad of the gods, itself a god. Standing by the crossroad called Change are two wooden pillars. They are joined by two crossed beams, forming an X between the tops of the pillars. A rope is tied to the X. A tattered, black-wrapped figure creaks and groans in the wind. It is the rope’s divine purpose to be the saddle of the figure, who is the rider of the horse called gallows. Gods stacked on gods stacked on gods.

This riding god is a crossroads god, for the crossbars of the gallows are a recursion of the crossroads of change upon which the whole sordid glory of life sings its marvelous and whimsical opera. This riding god, this dead god, hanged by the neck. And is that the broken end of a spear that thrusts from his side, like a phallus cutting through the ribs? I believe it is.

This riding, hanging, rib-fucked god is my god, god of the crossroads of change upon which vast epics and homely familiarities alike unfold. They gamble, these infinite stories, these tangled up threads. Gamble at the feet of the hanged god, at the crossroads of change. The horizon of mystery (which we call The Present) looms but never arrives. All of existence, every last bit of it, playing out in ever-more complex Mandelbrot sets below the swaying dead feet of the swaying dead god who rides the gallows.

My god, this rib-fucked god, dressed in his tatters. At his feet all of existence unfolds, stretching forth from the rim of the goddess Mystery to the rim of the goddess Mystery (id est Runa). Thus is he sometimes called All Father.

Not as though he is some patriarch, some dominator, some well-spring. No. He is weathered, weakened, withered. He is desiccated, drained, death incarnate. There is no romance in what this god is. It is a gallows-riding, wind-whipped, spear-fucked god. It is my god, or least the god that occupies my attention the most of the many gods that occupy my attention.

It is my beloved god, this god at who’s feet all the other gods unfold their hour upon the crossroads called Change as they dance from Mystery Past to Mystery Promised. I love him without varnish, without the dressings of human fear, power, or control. I do not need to make him into a pompous patriarch, would not thus deign to slander he who swings from the gallows, the blood drained from his veins. Mandrake takes root at his feet, where blood mixes with semen and seeps into earth. My beloved god, who gives life even in death.

He watches, accepts all that he sees as it is, sans alteration, sans erasure. Yet always remains unscarred, for he is not ruled by the waters that run across the river bed of his undead senses. Without judgment. Death affirms life.

See how the endless multitude of gods which comprise God pulse and throb and ebb and flow back and forth on the crossroads called Change in their voyage from Mystery to Mystery (id est Runa). See how the hanging, rib-ergi god watches. Is that the ghost of a smile that haunts his lips, curved as they are? Perhaps just the faintest hint of his love for all that he surveys? Who knows what molten life lies below that cold corpse shell? “Only death is real.”

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