Magickal Correspondences
December 11, 2007
by Jeffrey Pierce
I started the morning approximately ten days behind as far as the publishing schedule is concerned, but as of this writing, I'm almost completely caught up. Let's just say that I'm was once the world's best secretary and that I still find application for most of those skills. Saturday's "
All Around Us" is up as is the article, "
A Reason to Give Thanks" which looks at my strangely pagan Thanksgiving. I'll be posting a second
Magickal Correspondence this week and I'm hopeful that the latest lesson in
The First Cycle will post before the weekend. And then, I think, we're current again.
There was a lot of e-mail this week, enough that it actually justifies a mid-week mailbag column. Even so, let's jump right in - and wow, are you in for some interesting stuff!
But we're going to save the really good stuff for the very end.
Starting our correspondence on a lovely note, Tiger wrote to say, "What a beautiful web site. I sent my sisters the link to the article Being Pagan so they can understand my path. I don't think I have ever heard it described more beautifully. It is as if your words were taken directly from my heart." This was one of the sweetest compliments I've ever received and I was greatly touched by the sentiment in your email. A lot of what I write (including the article Tiger mentioned) are written with my fingers crossed and the hope that someone out there will get something out of it. I'm always touched and often moved to know that someone really connected with one of my articles. Thank you so much for taking the time to write.
I receive a couple of emails each month asking me if I'm taking on new students. Jordan's came as I was writing this week's mailbag column and represents exactly the type of student that I would love to be able to help - intelligent and insightful with a wry sense of humor. Unfortunately for Jordan (and Rachel and a couple of others), the simple, often-repeated answer is, "I would love to, but I can't - I simply don't have the time."
But please let me give you a better response than that.
First, I can only take on so many students at any one time. Each takes a considerable amount of dedication on my part to train properly. After all, the current subtitle of the Web site is "Finding Your Own Path," which implies that the instruction that I offer is adapted to each individual student. Beginning with the first new moon following Winter Solstice, I'll be teaching the Craft to Sparrow and Bear. Otter is looking for pointers from me and I have a half-dozen friends I can think of off the top of my head that are at the front of the line if I find the time and energy to begin teaching widely again.
Which brings up the second part of the equation - energy. I've shared my schedule with you before and it's practically a miracle in itself that I find the energy to write Old Ways. And when something like the winter holidays comes up, I'm constantly running to catch up. Now imagine doubling that process, because what I'm teaching a student and what I'm writing through the site aren't going to synch up and I'll be creating twice the amount of material each week. Ugh! It's just not possible!
And then there's the time requirement. That's not me saying that I can't make time for you - it's that there literally isn't time to sleep more than five or six hours a night as it is. I carry my laptop with me nearly everywhere I go and write Old Ways mostly on my lunch breaks at work each week. Email is answered during my morning and afternoon breaks (thank the gods for wireless Internet.) Teaching Sparrow, Bear, and Otter are special cases because I already share the vast majority of my free time with them. To take on another student would literally mean going with about four hours of sleep at least one night in my world and I honestly don't have anywhere in my schedule to catch up when I fall behind. Sorry.
So it's the simple answer. "I would love to, but I can't - I simply don't have the time." There's just a lot behind that answer and it's honestly not intended to dismiss anyone without giving it a lot of thought.
Victoria (of last week's fairie story) asked, "How long is a lunar cycle?" Twenty-eight days, typically measured from the beginning of one new moon until the end of the waning full moon. Just as we begin in the darkness of the womb, so the lunar cycle begins with the darkest part of the lunar cycle. It's also easy to think of the moon as a single lifetime. We always begin counting with the new moon because life grows stronger from its beginning and then fades to its end, just like the light that the moon reflects. See, there's a reason it's referred to as the "new" moon.
Since we're referring to last week's MC column, especially the part that focused on the fae, it's a perfect place to address another question. Saoirse referred to my comment that honey, bread, acorn hats, and blue string are all traditional gifts to give the fae. "Not having that much experience dealing intentionally and deliberately with the fae," she asks, "why blue string? Just wondering what the 'blue' part has to do with the equation."
Magick is a very symbolic art. When you picture yourself standing in the woods and think of the color blue, about 90% of your are going to think of the sky. "Reaching the sky" can be accomplished by numerous means, all of them mystical in nature. Since any interaction with the sky represents a transition from our realm (the ground) to a higher realm (the sky) it's a very specific type of magick - the same type of magick which the fae use to move from their realm to our own. Since the color blue can be symbolically woven into that entire process, it's not only appropriate to use the color blue in gifts that are given to the fae, but the faire folke have a rather soft spot for the color for the same reasons.
The story about the fae inspired another practitioner to write in. Since their question is a little outside of the "norm" (even where we pagans are concerned), I'm intentionally keeping their name to myself. After all, what they shared with me they shared in confidence - and I have the feeling it was a step of faith on their part to do so.
To put things succinctly, this person was told by one of the fae that she was the being's granddaughter "by six or 8 generations removed." Surprised? So was she. "'What?' I said. 'How can this be?'"
Tune in next week for the article, "There Are Fairies in My Family Tree" to find out.
Sorry. A little pagan humor there. I may actually write a longer article on this particular topic, perhaps even next week, maybe even with the same title, but here are the basics:
The answer that our reader was given was fairly straightforward at first glance. "In order for our race to survive [the olden times], as less and less [humans] honored mother earth and less knew of our race, we found that we were slowly being pushed out... As a result we decided [rarely] to allow one of our kind... to cross over the veil and take on human form for one [mortal life] and then return. They were to [bare children with a mortal] keeping the fae bloodline thriving and alive." And with that as the groundwork for the answer, our reader was then told that she has faerie "blood within your blood."
First, forget everything you know, including the definition of "bloodline." As big as we are at pushing the frontiers of science and expanding our knowledge, Western culture is amazingly narrow-minded. We like things in neat little boxes and prefer to approach reality from a perspective we can definitively measure.
What's amazing is that most of us think of the spirit world as being an extremely simple, very straightforward place. We die, we move on to an afterlife that is like the best parts of our daily life. There might be animals there, there might not be. And every now and then that level of reality bleeds over into ours and we experience something mystical.
It's like looking at a forest and saying, "Okay. What's the big deal. It's a bunch of trees." But then we look closer and see the other plants. As we grow still we notice the animal life. With our understanding slowly growing, we take in a relationship between the climate, the land, and the things that grow upon it. Where once we saw only trees we find ourselves presented with an infinitely intricate tapestry of life where one thread is simultaneously dependent and supportive of all of the threads around it.
The spirit world is a lot like that. Most of us are still at the "Wow, trees," stage of things and have yet to consider the infinite complexity of reality.
Bloodlines, when see from the physical realm, reflect the union of two sets of genes and the traits those genes have expressed throughout generations. We see red hair or blue eyes pop up here and there in a family or we'll say, "You have your grandmother's chin."
However, seen from a spiritual perspective, bloodlines are something completely different. Instead of passing on measurable traits, they pass on something that is ridiculously difficult to explain in a couple of paragraphs, which is why I may devote an entire article to the topic.
Think about it this way. In a human bloodline, it's easy to see when someone has the same eye color or hair color as someone in their family. For instance, Sparrow not only has my eyes but she also has my lips and Bear is the spitting image of me when I was his age but his blue eyes are from his mother's side of the family. Those parts of the bloodline are easy to measure. Bear has my athletic ability and Sparrow has my knack for the arts. Those are a little more difficult to measure. Taking things a level deeper, Bear has the gentleness of my spirit and Sparrow has my connection to the spirit world. Those last two traits can't be seen and they can't be measured, but they're there.
When we talk about the fae and human bloodlines mingling, we're not talking about someone having the eyes of their faerie mother or even their gentleness of spirit. You know how you can look at certain people and you can instantly see their ethnic heritage? For instance, it's pretty clear that Otter's family hails from somewhere near the Czech Republic. You can see it clearly reflected in her facial features. But it's not as if she's specifically reflecting the traits of a mother or father, but of an entire group of people. If you can imagine that being an energy signature rather than a set of physical traits, you're getting close to the most basic form of the concept.
That's why the fae needed to blend the bloodlines. It's found in the statement, "We found that we were slowly being pushed out." Their "traits" were fading from our world. When they talk about allowing one of their kind "to cross over the veil and take on human form for one [mortal life] and then return," they are not talking about a process where the being was born fae, crossed over into our world, shape-changed into a human being and lived out their life as a mortal. In it's most simplistic (and slightly innaccurate) form, you can think of it as a faerie's soul incarnating in the mortal realm.
We'll look at the concept in a little more depth in the next lesson in The First Cycle, "The Divine," which should post this week and then again in April when The First Cycle considers Nature Spirits. That course will begin to delve deeper into the topic in 2008 with the lessons "The Hierarchy of the Spirit World" and "Totem Animals and Guardians" and then again in 2009 with "Unity of Spirit" and "Spiritual Ecosystem."
And that's it for this installment of Magickal Correspondences. As always, may this email find you and yours well and filled with joy. Expect to hear from me again mid-week. There's more mail to answer and a few more excellent questions were raised.
In peace and light,
Jeffrey Pierce
www.oldways.com