Ides of March - Bitter End of Winter

After having a rather mild winter with little snow, we got buried with half a foot of snow on the very last day of February. There has been some additional snow adding to what we already had, so it looks like a very wintry landscape right now. The beginning of March always looks like this even though it’s supposed to be the month when the Vernal Equinox occurs (not to mention St. Patrick’s Day), but that’s the way it is, living up here in Minnesota. Winter has a tendency of lasting from now until the middle of April, but I am hoping for an earlier reprieve.

Meanwhile, as the months have been slowly ticking away through the long period of winter, I have realized that I have still have a mountain of work to do, and less time to do it if I am to have any kind of outdoor life when summer finally does come. I have to admit that sometimes I am an inveterate procrastinator, and other times I can waste a lot of time reading some pulpy fiction book, occupying my thoughts over some pointless political blog or watching too much television. I guess it’s time to bring some discipline to bear on myself and start working more tirelessly on the many projects that I have in front of me. Getting seriously ill with the flu in the last few days has shown me that I don’t have time to burn, and I need to renew my efforts in getting things done before the winter months are over. (So much to do, so little time, really, to do it all - it’s the story of my life, and everyone else’s too.)

Luckily, I was able to perform a very condensed version of the Talismanic Elemental process allowing me to generate the first of three talismans for the Portae Lucis working. At least that ordeal is more or less on schedule. I have other magickal workings that I would like to perform in the weeks and months ahead, and I have made little progress in getting them done. I guess I will have to redouble my efforts.

With the advent of Spring also comes the annual Paganicon convention, which is a newly started pagan gathering in the Twin Cities. I have elected to present two classes on the Qabalah, and the schedule has recently been posted. My two part lecture will be presented back to back, so I will have a time slot of approximately 150 minutes to present an introduction to the basic theory and cover the various aspects of the practical Qabalah. Unfortunately, my class is competing against a well known local celebrity and also the key note speaker. My classes also will be starting at 9 am Saturday morning (March 17), so we’ll see how many folks show up to my lecture series. You can find the schedule here, on this web site.

I must admit that I haven’t put these classes together just yet, but considering that I have a mountain of material produced from doing my book research, it shouldn’t be too difficult for me to assemble a class on the theory and practice of the Qabalah. I have already put together a class outline, so all I need to do is to fill it in. I will usually build up the lecture notes for the lecturer, and produce some class notes to hand out to the attendees. I can say without any trepidation that I truly know this material inside and out. My task will be to communicate this material in a manner that is compelling, interesting, and perhaps even amusing. What I will have to avoid at all costs is to be boring, redundant, or pedantic. I will need to have passion when I am expounding from the lecturne, so that means that I will have to drink a fair amount of coffee and be wide awake when 9 am roles around.

So far, though, the class notes are coming together pretty well, although I am just in the starting stages so far. Here’s a quote from the definition of the Qabalah. What do you think of that? Does that sound interesting? Hopefully, it will be interesting when I present it in a couple of weeks.

“In the Qabalah, truth is believed to be obscured, hidden and unknown to common humanity. Thus, the Qabalah is an esoteric doctrine that uses systems of analysis to determine the nature of these hidden truths and reveal them. Causal connections (between things) are considered to be absolute - they are found everywhere. Therefore, everything is connected to everything else, and all connections are meaningful and significant. If, by extension, everything is connected together, than at some point there is a place where that unity can be resolved into a singularity - where the All can also be revealed to be the One.”

I think that I am off to a good start on the class notes. I’ll share some more material from them in the near future.

***

After an incubation period of more than three days, I went and examined the Solar talisman that I had generated in my working on last Tuesday. I was very pleased with the results, I must say. I picked up the talisman in my hands and could it feel vibrating with an intense power. With four talismanic elements projected into a single talisman, it did feel quite super charged to me. I think that I will find many uses for this talisman in the future, and I might even consider doing this later in the year for the planet Jupiter. A super charged talisman such as this can be used to charge other older depleted talismans, even if the planet is different.

Yet I am still pondering over what I had to go through in order to complete the first talisman of the Sun for the Portae Lucis working. I am quite amazed that I had the wits and fortitude to see it through. How much easier it would have been to just reschedule it instead of making the attempt. All of the nice neat and efficient plans that I had made, including determining the times when and also how I would perform this working were all basically tossed aside due to completely unforseen events. Believe me, getting very sick wasn’t on my schedule, and it certainly disrupted and even profoundly shaped the working, forcing me to rewrite the base ritual, which I must admit is much more efficient and succinct now.

Was it all just happenstance or have I started a process that will turn out to be far more difficult and profoundly challenging than I had originally thought? Also, doesn’t this amazing set of occurrences show that magick is not something that is controllable, predictable and, thereby, scientific? I had a good solid plan for generating this talisman, and it was a magickal working that I had done many times before, although not quite in the iteration or concentration of elements. The fact that my plans went completely awry shows, once again, the wiggly and chaotic nature of magick. I am certain that there is some good irony in everything that happened to me in the last several days, but right now, so soon after being so very ill, I can’t see the joke. Maybe I will see it at a later date, who knows.

Another interesting thing happened to me in the last couple of days might also seem to be a part of the magick. On Friday, I got an email from my long lost friend, Lugh McGhee. He was looking for me on the internet and later on told me that I had been on his mind in the last couple of days. I was very pleased to get back in touch with Lugh, and I had even previously written an article about my fond associations with him in the past. We had some really great adventures together years ago, and I was sad that we had gotten out of touch and I hadn’t heard from him in over seven years. That changed on Friday afternoon, much to my delight. Lugh is still living in Miami and has once again expanded his magickal and occult purview to include other areas of study and practice than his Santerian priesthood. We have decided to collaborate and share lore again, so I was quite happy with that result. I also wonder if Lugh’s sudden impulse to getting back in touch with me had anything to do with the Solar talisman that I recently generated, since his nickname, Lugh, is the Celtic God of the Sun. Interesting, but once again, who knows? I don’t doubt that Lugh may also feature in some manner with this coming work.

Also, I recently heard that Lugh’s close friend and lover from the early Circle days, De-anna Alba recently passed away. That was a very sad event, indeed, but I had never really known her very well, and when Lugh and I had our adventures, they had already broken up. I told Lugh about that passing, and he remarked that she had been around the same age as us, so she had definitely passed away well before her time. When I think of all of the things that I have yet to complete, see and do, I am grateful that I am still very much alive, healthy and living well. I am very sad to hear of De-anna’s passing, and I hope that it was painless, quick and uncomplicated.

More snow will fall tonight, and I must focus on finishing the class notes for my Paganicon lectures. Weirdly, the weather will shift and become quite warm and sunny by Tuesday, which will likely melt a lot of snow covering the ground. Despite that joyous thought, I must continue pluggin away at my tasks. Once they are done, then I will have some time to focus on the next set of tasks that await my attention. My regular job is going to be demanding a lot more of my time in the future, and I suspect that my blog articles will be slightly less substantive than they have been. I have been promising that I will be writing shorter articles, and think that the time has come to enforce that discipline, too.

Frater Barrabbas