> get lamp

At Midsummer (24th June) the God of the Waxing Year gives way to His twin, the God of the Waning Year. The sun, of which He is ruler, now diminishes the day. The Goddess conducts the God of the Waxing Year to a ritual death at the hands of His followers, where, after a suitable interval He is resurrected as His counterpart. The Lady’s colour changes from white to red. (In many ancient mysteries the twins uneasily rule together for a time, the High Summer, the ritual death of the God of the Waxing Year not taking place till Lammas.)

http://ronaldchalkywhite.org.uk/the-new-pagans-handbook/the-reading-of-the-festivals-of-the-year/#continuation

orly? that would make more sense to me intuitively...

The mind may go, but the heart endures long, and knows the best truths.

Wow, I am totally word-dumping on PantheaCon. I think I'm going to have to split into several posts. Alakazam!

( Seeking the Center )

( Black Magic and Dark Paganism )

( The Rollright Ritual )

( Ascension Magick )

( Kindling Ancestral Hearths )

( Leland, Maddalena, Aradia, et al. )

( Fairy Lore in British Folk Music )

I had a strange thought tonight.

My state in life is so breathtakingly fortunate that I can afford to once a week take forty gallons of perfectly good drinking water, expend fuel to heat it, adulter it so as to be undrinkable, and then simply pour it down the goddamn drain -- all for my own pleasure.

That's called "taking a shower".

Gratitude crops up in odd places sometimes...

Read this post from elorie: My artistic ethos, or Ars Poetica. Please.

the_misha posted this in an f-locked context, so I am reposting it because I thought it so thrillingly awesome:

an excerpt from Robert Anton Wilson’s introduction to Undoing Yourself With Energized Meditation and Other Devices by Christopher S. Hyatt, Ph.D.:

The second part of this Secret of the Illuminati is what I have called elsewhere Wilson’s 23rd Law. (Wilson’s First Law, of course, is “Certitude belongs exclusively to those who only own one encyclopedia.” Wilson’s Second Law is the Snafu Principle described in ILLUMINATUS: “Communication is only possible between equals.” All of Wilson’s Laws will be published when the world is ready for the staggering revelations contained therein.)

Wilson’s 23rd Law is:

Do it every day

This is the most profound of all the Secrets of the Illuminati and I have often been warned that Terrible Consequences will ensue if I reveal it prematurely, but—what the hell, these are parlous times, friend, and this primitive planet needs all the Light that can be unleashed on its dark, superstitious mind. Let me repeat, since I am sure you didn’t get it the first time:

Do it every day!

Have you ever wondered why Einstein became such a great physicist? It was because he loved the equations and concepts of mathematical physics so much that he “worked” on them—or played and tinkered with them—every day. That’s why Otto von Klemper became such a great conductor: he loved Beethoven and Mozart and that crowd so much that he practised his music every day. It’s why Babe Ruth became such a great ball-player: he loved the game so deeply that he was playing or rehearsing every day.

This rule also explains, incidentally, how people destroy themselves.

Do you want to become a suicide (it’s the fashionable thing in some circles, after all)? Practise being depressed, worried and resentful every day, and don’t let anybody distract you with Energized Meditation or any other mind-change system. Do you want to land in jail on an assault and battery charge? Practise getting damned bloody angry every day. If you want to become paranoid, look carefully every day for evidence of treachery and duplicity around you. If your ambition is to die young, do the depression-worryresentment system every day but center in especially on visualizing and worrying about every imaginable illness that might possibly inflict itself upon you.

(On the other hand, if you want to live as long as George Burns, “work hard” every day at being as cheerful and optimistic as he is.)

Almost anything is possible if you

DO IT EVERY DAY

Of course, this rule does not guarantee 100 percent results. Playing Chopin on the piano every day for 4 or 5 decades does not mean you will become as good as Van Cliburn; it merely means that you eventually will be a better piano player than anybody in your home state. Worrying every day does not absolutely guarantee a clinical depression or an early death, but after only a few years it does ensure you will be one of the three or four most miserable people in your neighborhood. Writing a sonnet every day for twenty years may not necessarily make you Shakespeare or Mrs. Browning, but it will make you the best poet for an area of about forty to fifty miles, probably. Doing Energized Meditation or similar exercizes does not mean you will be a Perfectly Enlightened Being or a Guru in a few years, just that you will be a great deal happier and a hell of a lot more perceptive, creative and “intuitive” than most people you’ll meet in an average city.

There is a story that Bobbie Fisher, the chess champion, was once in a room with other chess masters when the conversation turned to the latest nuclear accident and the effects of the resultant fall-out. Fisher listened impatiently for a few minutes and then exclaimed irritably, “What the hell does that have to do with chess?” While I am not urging that you imitate that degree of monomania or obsession, there is a significant lesson in this tale. The reason Fisher became a champion is that he cared so much about chess that he did not even have to nag himself or remind himself to do it every bloody day.


(full thing here.)

I found this as an ancient email from ely'chelai-rah posted to awakenings, a now long-dead list, saved for some reason on a floppy disk along with a number of other messages of the same 1999 vintage. (It was apparently a folder-dump of some type because there were also a couple that belonged to the boyfriend I was living with at the time, which was a pretty weird pastenblasten. Nothing private; just stuff about a LARP event he was involved with called "Adventurers' Inn." Anyway--) I was originally going to repost it where I thought it had come from when I thought it was sidhelist, but as mentioned, when I re-checked it I noticed it was awakenings and that's no longer extant. So since LiveJournal is the new black of the 21st century, or something, here you go:

From "Wanderings: Notes and Sketches" by Hermann Hesse.

For me, trees have always been the most penetrating preachers. I revere them when they live in tribes and families, in forests and groves. And even more I revere them when they stand alone. They are like lonely persons. Not like hermits who have stolen away out of some weakness, but like great, solitary men, like Beethoven and Nietzsche. In their highest boughs the world
rustles, their roots rest in infinity; but they do not lose themselves there, they struggle with all the force of their lives for one thing only: to fulfill themselves according to their own laws, to build up on their own form, to represent themselves. Nothing is holier, nothing is more exemplary than a beautiful, strong tree. When a tree is cut down and reveals its naked death-wound to the sun, one can read its whole history in the luminous, inscribed disk of its trunk: in the rings of its years, its scars, all the struggle, all the suffering, all the sickness, all the happiness and prosperity stand truly written, the narrow years and the luxurious years, the attacks withstood, the storms endured. And every young farmboy knows that the hardest and most noblest wood had the narrowest rings, that high on the mountains and in continuing danger the most indestructible, the strongest, the ideal trees grow.

Trees are sanctuaries. Whoever knows how to speak to them, whoever knows how to listen to them, can learn the truth. They do not preach learning and precepts, they preach, undeterred by particulars, the ancient law of life.

A tree says: A kernel is hidden in me, a spark, a thought, I am life from eternal life. The attempt and the risk that the eternal mother took with me is unique, unique the form and veins of my skin, unique the smallest scar on my bark. I was made to form and reveal the eternal in my smallest special detail.

A tree says: My strength is trust. I know nothing about my fathers, I know nothing about the thousand children that every year spring out of me. I live out the secret of my seed to the very end, and I care for nothing else. I trust that God is in me. I trust that my labor is holy. Out of this trust I live.

When we are stricken and cannot bear our lives any longer, then a tree has something to say to us: Be still! be still! Look at me! Life is not easy, life is not difficult. Those are childish thoughts. Let God speak within you, and your thoughts will grow silent. You are anxious because your path leads away from mother and home. But every step and every day lead you back again to the mother. Home is neither here nor there. Home is within you, or home is nowhere at all.

A longing to wander tears my heart when I hear trees rustling in the wind at evening. If one listens to them silently for a long time, this longing reveals its kernel, its meaning. It is not so much a matter of escaping from one's suffering, though it may seem to be so. It is a longing for home, for a memory of the mother, for new metaphors for life. It leads home. Every path leads homeward, every step is birth, every step is death, every grave is mother.

So the tree rustles in the evening, when we stand uneasy before our own childish thoughts. Trees have long thoughts, long-breathing and restful, just as they have longer lives than ours. They are wiser than we, as long as we do not listen to them. But when we have learned how to listen to trees, then the brevity and the quickness and the childlike hastiness of our thoughts achieve an incomparable joy. Whoever has learned how to listen to trees no longer wants to be a tree. He wants to be nothing except what he is. That is home. That is happiness.