Afterthoughts - Paganicon 2013

A Bitter Cold Vernal Equinox to you, too.

 Well, I made it through another Paganicon, although this year my attendance was very brief compared to last year. I didn’t get a room at the hotel, and I was only able to stay a few hours on Saturday and Sunday. Weekends are usually the only quality time that my girlfriend and I have together since she started her clinical training in a town that is a two hour drive south from our home. Also, I had other responsibilities to attend to, such as getting back to feed and let out our dog. As long as Grace is undergoing this educational process, my ability to go on any extended trips is quite limited. The weather was also pretty odious, even for the Twin Cities, and it was yet another factor. I have never been a big fan of the northern winters, and this year my patience has been really taxed.

I only got to attend one workshop besides my own, and that was one presented by Brandy Williams on the topic of “Pagan Theurgy,” which also covered a brief history of Neoplatonism. I missed out on Orion Foxwood’s workshop, “Candle and the Crossroads” because of a need to tend to some mundane concerns. I managed to sneak in and get around 10 minutes of his talk, but then didn’t want to disturb the talk by trying to go back, and by then it was nearly over. I also got to talk a while with Brandy and share some thoughts and ideas about magic, occultism, Thelema and being a part-time author. I didn’t get a chance to chat with Orion, which was disappointing. I would very much like a chance to chat with him, but there have been few opportunities when we have met previously, mostly at Pantheacon. He is an inspirational individual, and I have many questions to ask him and topics of mutual interest. Perhaps some day we will get that opportunity, particularly if I continue to make myself available for gatherings.

Brandy Williams is quite an excellent author and writer. I have secretly modeled my literary ambitions after hers, and I have often admired her, at least from a distance. So she has kind of functioned as a role model for me, starting out as an Immanion author and continuing to write and publish for other publishers as well. I was very delighted to spend some of my precious time talking with her about various subjects. Her approach to magick, paganism and occultism is nothing short of inspirational. I got a number of ideas and thought provoking insights in my mind just from attending her class on Theurgy. I was happy to acknowledge to myself that the system of magick that I use has all of the points of Neoplatonic Theurgy amply covered, including statue animation. It appears that a number of us are getting very deeply into Iamblichus and the writings of the late pagan Neoplatonists, knowing that they represent the point in time where we should pick up their work and continue moving it into the far future.

I got to tell her that my pet idea is that the Indian esoteric philosophers of the golden age of Indian culture, which occurred as Rome slipped into the dark ages, seemed to continue on where the Neoplatonic philosophers had left off in Harran. Where Iamblichus stated that the human soul can never be of the same substance or level of being as the Gods, the discipline of Advaita Vendanta showed that the Godhead in every man and woman is commensurate with the absolute Godhead (“there can be no difference between Brahman and Atman”). I sense that there is a continuity of the esoteric strain of philosophy from Europe, to Harran, and thence, to India, where it continued to thrive and grow. Perhaps we in the West can finally complete Neoplatonism by considering Indian esoteric philosophy to be its crowning achievement. I will have to think more about this interesting insight. 

Lunch on Saturday was spent with my friend Steven Posch who I consider to be one of the living pagan treasures in our community of Paganistan (a term he has famously coined). He is a pagan poet of great renown, an excellent public liturgist, rabble rousing Jewitch and all around excellent gadfly. He is also avidly pursuing the secrets of the late demise of Baltic paganism only recently becoming available to the west, and in this area, he is acquiring a great deal of authentic pagan lore, ostensibly to pad out his own particular linage and witchcraft practice. He’s one of the few who actually knows how to count to 20 using the Witchcraft language. Lunch with Steve is always full of interesting conversation and banter.

My friend Paul Rucker, who is something of an illuminating pagan artist, along with Helda HedgeWalker and others hosted a visual presentation at the Sacred Gallery Space. While Paul was quite busy and I only saw him in passing, the Sacred Gallery was quite an exquisite exhibition of pagan artists. I sat in the gallery, which was a converted suite, for a short while fully galvanized by the beauty and artistry of the paintings and works of art carefully placed over most of the wall space. It was done tastefully and to great effect. I am only sorry that I couldn’t tell him how much I liked and appreciated what he and others had accomplished.

I also got to hang out for a little while with a group of young friends. In talking with them and spending my last lunch with them, I found that perhaps I am not so much a dinosaur as I had thought. In the beginning of my autumn years, I probably do have something of importance to pass on to younger members of my pagan and wiccan community. We will see if I have any relevant thoughts or ideas in the decades to come when I am nothing more than a forgotten monument in some graveyard.

My class was very sparsely attended, but at least those who attended were very engaged with what I was teaching and understood what I was attempting to communicate. They were a bright group of individuals, and they also bought a number of my books as well. I have been selling my copies of MARM volumes 1 though 3 at a huge discount because the MARM Omnibus edition should be coming out in the next few weeks. In the next couple of months I will reprise a more extended version of my Practical Qabalah in Brief workshop at the local occult bookstores and see if more people will be interested in attending. Based on that experiment, I will either move forward with putting together a weekend long intensive workshop, or I will consider the Qablah not be a good topic to try to teach in the Twin Cities.

A final note - my travels to and from the Paganicon hotel were made more precarious by a freak winter storm that happened on Friday. I had to leave quite early Saturday morning to make the 32 mile trip to the hotel, and the roads were not sufficiently cleared to make the trip easy. In my neck of the woods (literally) the roads were hazardous and even the freeway system was not completely clear. Thankfully, the traffic was light, but it was a slightly harrowing trip to get to the hotel in time to deliver my presentation. After that morning trip, the roads were quite clear and bare, even though the weather was quite cold. Here it is nigh on the Vernal Equinox add it feels more like January weather. I have noticed no signs of spring and it is likely that winter will continue well into April, which is not an uncommon thing. Only the brightness and warmth of the sun betrays the lateness of the season, and then it can only be experienced while sitting in a car, where the inside heats up to coatless temperatures rather quickly.

I have to say that I am quite over winter, even though nature hasn’t caught on to my mood or up to my expectations. Such a winter that we have had only makes me long for warmer climates. I guess you could say that I am wishing to leave the Twin Cities and when I have these kinds of impressions, the reality is not too long in coming. I sense that I might just get an opportunity to move somewhere else in the next couple of years. I had not previously felt that way, but I do feel it now. I will take it as a kind of omen and as I have said, time will tell how it all turns out.

Frater Barrabbas

Paganicon 2011 - First Time A Great Success

Hexagram Controversy

I wanted to post a short article about my weekend experience with Paganicon, which was the very first pagan convention in the Twin Cities. Overall, I would rate it quite successful, and it is my hope that it will become an annual institution. While it was not anyway near as large as Pantheacon, it was well attended and easily exceeded everyone’s modest expectation. Where Pantheacon is a venue that serves nearly 2,400 people every year, Paganicon didn’t even have 10% of that volume, but it was a more intimate and engaging gathering.

There weren’t crowds of folks and the venues were much more modest, but overall, I was impressed by how well it was organized and staffed. The staff of Paganicon deserve a lot of credit for having put on an excellent convention, and got nearly everything right for the very first time. My hope is that the community and staff will be encouraged to do it again next year, and perhaps for many following years beyond that. It was a great way for pagans and wiccans in the tundra capital of Paganistan to meet and greet, share ideas and knowledge in the middle of what is ostensibly the period of late winter. There may have been snow on the ground and it was quite cold outside, but inside the Double Tree Hotel, it was warm and friendly - almost as if summer had come early. I suppose that having an indoor pool nearby in the atrium helped to give this impression.

Because I had to miss Friday, I didn’t get to hear the keynote lecture given by John Michael Greer, nor was I able to attend the opening ritual and the concert, all of which I was told had turned out quite excellent. A one way trip from my house to the hotel was over 31 miles, so I could only justify going on Saturday and Sunday. I had workshops to present on both days, so that would also allow me to attend some lectures and also socialize with attendees.

I arrived at around 10 am and got registered and found out where everything was located. Then I made it to the panel that I was to take part in. The panel was called “So You Want to be a Pagan Author,” and I was joined with Veronica Cummer, Dr. Murphy Pizza, Corrine Kenner, Barbara Moore and Scot Stenwick. We spent an hour and a half sharing stories about what it’s like to be an occult author. I think that I said it all by declaring that if you want to be a pagan author, don’t quit your day job - it doesn’t pay very much. There was some interesting stories shared, as well as quite a bit of good humor. I enjoyed being on the panel and helped to liven things up a bit by making certain that there were plenty of jokes and laughs to share. The panel lasted until the lunch hour, when everyone broke up to find something to eat.

Lunch was a very idyllic experience, since I ran into two of my dearest friends, and with them, I invited John Michael Greer and Scott Stenwick to share a table at the in-house eatery. I spent my lunch talking, eating and drinking (although not at the same time) with these friends and luminaries, and it was a most excellent time. I found John to be a highly intelligent occultist, worthy of all of the compliments and accolades that he has received.

After lunch, I went to Scot Stenwick’s workshop on Planetary Magick, which I thought was quite excellent, even though sparsely attended. It would seem that Scott had the bad luck of presenting a workshop at the same time that John Michael Greer and Steve Posch were giving their presentations. However, I thought that Scott did a good job presenting his information in an efficient and succinct manner. I also learned some interesting things while attending this workshop. For one thing, I realized how Scott refers to the sphere of planetary magick using a metaphysical perspective, referring to it as the macrocosm, whereas I see it as a psychological operation using classical archetypes. I think that both of these perspectives are not only valid, but describe this phenomenon in a different but complimentary manner. What I distilled from Scott’s discussion was that planetary magick works with the macrocosm, and that the lesser invoking hexagram ritual is the key to opening the magician to that domain. You can find a copy of the transcript for the workshop here.

One of Scott’s most important declarations about planetary magick is encapsulated in the following quote: “The correct method for most macrocosmic work is in fact to combine the Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram with the Lesser Invoking Ritual of the Hexagram.” This clears the magician’s personal field of consciousness and then calls the macrocosmic forces into that field. I found this statement to make a lot of sense, although since I don’t use these rituals, I couldn’t verify that statement off of the top of my head. According to Scott, in the typical Golden Dawn planetary working, both the LBRP and the LBRH are used together. One would assume that the magician’s “operant field” would be wiped clean of any macrocosmic influences if these two rituals were used without a corresponding lesser invoking ritual of the hexagram. Scott had a particular issue with the way that these rituals are presented in Donald Michael Kraig’s book “Modern Magick.”

Much later, I looked over David Griffin’s “Ritual Magick Manual” and found that the typical Golden Dawn Planetary working did indeed perform the LBRP and the LBRH together, but only as part of the purification stage of the working. The lesser invoking ritual of the hexagram and the superior form of the hexagram are used once the lotus wand is unwrapped and the Qabbalistic Cross is performed. This, in my opinion, wouldn’t necessarily weaken the working, since the intention is to clear the magician’s operant field of all influences, microcosmic and macrocosmic. I also looked over Regardie’s book “The Golden Dawn” and found that it was kind of vague and ambiguous as to how exactly to apply the lesser hexagram invoking and banishing rites (volume 6), but perhaps there is another ritual where the methodology is completely encapsulated. When I examined Donald Michael Kraig’s book “Modern Magick,” I did indeed find the LBRP and the LBRH tightly coupled together for a basic regimen of work, and that would certainly be problematical, since the same working has meditations and a Tarot reading. Closing one completely off from the macrocosmic influences would certainly hamper any kind of clairvoyant operation. However, Kraig’s book doesn’t have any planetary or zodiacal magickal workings or techniques in it, so one could assume that it is a more basic work than David Griffin’s work.

After doing this research, I can see where Scott would have a problem with Kraig’s book, but it would seem that a proper working of the Golden Dawn tradition for planetary magick would follow a formulation that seems both logical and practical. I suppose that one could omit the LBRH in a planetary working, but it would seem that the intention is to completely clear one’s field of all influences just prior to performing a specific invocation. This is a moot point for me, of course, because I don’t even use the lesser pentagram or hexagram rituals in my elemental or planetary workings. Instead, I work with a consecrated magick circle, which appears to clear the environment of any and all unwanted influences prior to performing a working.

Since my class was the next venue for the same classroom as Scot’s class on planetary magick, attending his class gave me an opportunity to quickly set things up for my class. My class for that period was on Elemental Magick, and it’s one that I have taught previously. I had nearly a full classroom of attendees, and the presentation went pretty much without any glaring mistakes or omissions. I had to spend a bit of time explaining some of the ritual structures in greater detail, and on a few occasions I briefly got a bit tongue-tied, but overall, the class went very well and the attendees seemed to comprehend what I was talking about.

After my class was completed, I got together with my two friends and we made plans for our afternoon. I had been invited to dinner with some other friends that I hadn’t seen in many months, so that seemed like a good thing to do. I had to leave the convention to attend this soiree, and since it would last most of the evening, I wouldn’t be returning. This meant that I would miss the panel on Hedgewitch Craft, organized by Veronica and her fellow authors, who had helped to write the anthology by the same name. Regretfully, I could not do both things at the same time, so off I went for dinner and some socializing.

The next day, I arrived a lot earlier to present my class on the Twenty-two Steps of the Cycle of Initiation. I was wondering if anyone would make it to this early class, but I was pleasantly surprised when around a dozen people showed up for the class. I was able to present it without any problems or issues, and I believe that the attendees got a lot out of the material that I presented. So I was pleased with it and felt that I had comported myself in a thoughtful and knowledgeable manner.

As a side note, I won’t ever again be presenting these two workshops in their current format. Instead, I will be converting them to Powerpoint presentations. I think that this will be more helpful, both for the attendees and myself, since I can dispense with drawing things on a white board or having to look at one of the handouts while I am teaching. I will also be able to leave my outsized Rider Tarot deck at home, and I can also show other Tarot Trump cards as examples for my class on the Tarot. I think that this is a winning scenario, so all I have to do is to find a nice background theme template to complete this transition.

I also attended Steve Posch’s class “Amber Road,” which I thought was a truly excellent and compelling class. Steve has been examining samples of a massive collection of prose poems found in Latvia, called “dainas” [songs]. These songs are from the 19th to the early 20th centuries and encapsulate a very pagan way of looking at the world. For those who might not be knowledgeable about that area of Europe, the Baltic states (of which Latvia is a member) were the last to convert to Christianity, and even then, pagan sentiments and beliefs persisted until the early 20th century. These songs represent the old pagan way of looking at the world and life in general, and therefore, can act as important pointers and lore generating speculation about our own paganism, telling us what we might have gotten right, and what is still missing. I found the translated poems to be beautifully inspiring and seemed to open a window on world that time and progress had all but forgotten. I thoroughly enjoyed this class, conducted as it were by Steve, who is himself an accomplished poet, pagan ritualist and a natural sage. Everyone who attended was captivated by Steve’s rendition of the poetic songs and his analysis of the same. It was a very good presentation, and a perfect way to end my Paganicon experience.

What I came away from both attending workshops and being a presenter is the notion of just how diverse, deep and really evolved is our local community. Even though it was far smaller than Pantheacon, it was never-the-less just as deep, significant and enjoyable. It’s my hope that there will be more venues like this in the future.

Frater Barrabbas