Well, on the recommendation of a beloved mentor, I am reading Paschal Beverly Randolph’s Eulis! the History of Love, which is available in part on Google Books. Let me tell you, I am having real trouble wrapping my head around it — despite the fact that P. B. Randolph speaks in complete sentences, is very sparing with the New Thought pseudo-technical terms (so far), and writes a gripping narrative.

My problem is what I might call Randolph’s Anatomy: he plunges right into assertions on the electro-magnetic-spiritual functions of the Cowper’s gland, the spiritual/energetic properties of the upper and lower lip, and then asserts, but does not bother to explicate or prove, the evils of masturbation as commonly practiced.

Well, all that bewilderment was late last night. It took me until this morning to figure out that the anatomical bits are the equivalent of modern-day New Age folks’ invocation of quantum physics: a placeholder in the material world for spiritual forces which may or may not be empirically verifiable.

I was going to say “falsifiable,” but not everything that is falsifiable is physical, somatic, or tangible. And I think Randolph was convinced that spiritual functions and forces which can be experienced in the human body must have somatic roots. I think he’s probably right on that, but he’s going to have to do a lot more work to convince me that the Cowper’s gland is the repository of the magnetic fluid, life force, or — what was it he said now?

This is double-knit with two colors of self-striping yarn, a soft, nubbly, shiny acrylic. When I'm done, I'm going to join the ends into a moebius strip ... wait, this isn't a knitting blog?

Well, I have reading summaries to send out (so much faster now that it’s basically a recording of the reading and a list of links), and candles to design and light and prayers to say and people are starting to clamor for me at Hoodoo Psychics (and I’ve been meeting some really nifty people that way lately).

And didn’t I promise everybody a post on “Getting with Mr. Wrong” a couple of weeks ago?

And I took so long about getting my chapel registered with the Missionary Independent Spiritual Churches that they got tired of waiting for me and listed it  in the Crystal Silence League newsletter anyway.

Oh, and I’m supposed to be blogging or podcasting about “Storefront Theology” over there at the chapel.

And there sits temptation, in all its particolored fluffy glory…

You know what, though, if I’d given in, that scarf would be about three-quarters finished by now, so there!

…so to speak.

First, a picture of a small part of my candle supply, waiting for your petitions.

Oh, and the brown candle on the far left was white when I bought it. Similar process (described below), just added dye.

Candles are fragile things. Any shop that sells them has to figure on a certain percentage of loss when candles arrived broken, melted, or even with manufacturing defects such as no wicks. One of the commonest problems is candle glasses breaking in transit. That’s what happened to the four candles in the center of this picture:

They spent the afternoon in a solar oven, melting (and leaking) out of their original broken glasses. When they were melted, I removed the wicks, hot-glued them into the new candle glasses you see here, and poured the wax in. By tomorrow they’ll be ready for your needs.

OK, theoretically, this will be the last Crystal Silence post for a while.

	We begin with transparency, which I don’t count as a color, exactly, to focus, to find tranquility, and to open a peephole into the world of the spirit. There’s something about the subtle play of light in a clear glass ball that makes everything look kind of differently real.
	We move on to black. Surprised? I learned in school, decades ago, that black soaks up all other colors of light and reflects none. I use it to soak up discouragement, fear, and all kinds of bad luck and negativity. I pour it all into the maw of the Great Hunger that eats all and transforms everything. Down it goes into the great compost heap that turns filth into golden fertility. Any lingering bad luck or meanness gets knocked from the black sphere into the bar of selenite, the long white crystal you see behind it.
	Next, just because using black is a little nervous-making for some folks, we move on to blue – the dark, calm sky-full-of-stars blue of the old-time bottle trees that kept evils spirits away. The blue sphere pours serenity and security into your life.
	Next, purple for mastery: I invite you (and myself!) to come out of hiding, to take dominion in your life; I invite warriors to protect you and mentors to lead you; I invite Jesus to walk at your right hand and John the Conqueror at your left!
	Lastly, the fertile green glow of prosperity and healing of every kind. May your cup run over, and the divine goodness and mercy surround you every day of your life.

Aunt Caroline Dye (R) and St. Jude (L) make sure you get what you need through the Crystal Silence League, as Rev. Howard Thorman (C) looks on

If you go to the Crystal Silence League’s Prayer Requests page, you’ll see a link below each one: “Click to tell [Name] you prayed.”  Well, the prayers roll in at a couple dozen or more a day, so if I want to pray for a person for several days in a row, it’s like crawling through jungle to find that link and click it again.

So, just so you know: you may be getting more prayer than you realize.

When I pray along with the Crystal Silence League, I do pray for specific individuals (their prayer requests are the slips of paper you see in this picture).  But the goodness over flows bountifully — to you.

So pick up your crystal ball!  Incoming!

I receive from the Cosmos, and send on to you, joy, tranquility, ease, peace, confidence, Christmas consciousness!

You look up from yesterday’s troubles and see the path to True Love House on Easy Street stretching before you; look down and see that your feet are already on it!  Take the next step!

The time for money worries is over! You are a miracle-magnet and a money-magnet; prosperity flows to you from all directions and stays with you. Everything you own now has a lifetime warranty signed by The Eternal. Mentors come to you to lead you by the hand, into the ways of thrift, security, abundance and generosity.

Spiritual protectors surround you: enemies of all kinds, whether in this world or any other, shy away from you. So crawl out from under the bed; come out of hiding; take dominion in your life, for John the Conqueror is your twin brother!

 

My "crystal set," newly expanded with a wonderful gift from Thomas Jenkins. The water in the little vase is purple, not black. The white bar is a piece of selenite, my favorite spiritual cleanser.

 

Being raised an agnostic, in what I call the “Western Scientific Tradition,” I had the hardest time getting a grip on the very concepts of prayer and meditation. Even though I don’t “do 3-D” very well, I’m more effective with any spiritual discipline if I have something in my hands. Hence, eventually, the Crystal Silence League and this pretty little crystal ball.

I was dipping into the accompanying manual this morning, and found this sweet and liberating thought:

Understanding: You have enough to start. You need no more now. When more knowledge and understanding is required, it shall be given you. See, Spirit beacons shine to lead you on! Voices out of the night call to you. … Go forth and you shall understand. Step out and you shall have the power. … Your understanding of Intuition will develop in time.

This week, a little theology potluck for y’all.

Most of the things I want to say on this subject were expressed perfectly by Fred Clark.  I can’t improve on perfection, so I’ll just invite you to read his comments on Love and Holiness.  The comments are wonderful too, both practical and poetic. Like this:

“I wish the phrase “love the sinner but hate the sin” would be retired.”

“Fear and respect are not the same thing.”

“Jesus said to love other people the same way we love ourselves. This means it’s ok to love, respect and esteem ourselves (indeed we even ought to – the more I love myself, the better my neighbour gets it when I love them the same way I love myself).”

A great crew over at Slacktivist.

And there’s a good old Al Green song in there, too.

When you’ve read that, here’s a random picture from the Lucky Mojo workshops held on May 7 & 8.

A blue crystal ball is reflected in a huge black crystal ball.

In this world of Internets and shopping malls and crash-n-burn celebrities, it can be hard, really hard, to get access to the spirit.  We remember the dribs and drabs of our high-school science and get snarled up in debates about whether this is real.

That’s why I appreciate the wisdom of John Michael Hilford, who, when he was teaching us to reach the spirits of our ancestors, began with “Let’s pretend….”

Now, when we were children, wasn’t pretend our deepest, most vivid pleasure?

And why did we do it?  To have big adventures; to make our lives bigger, to expand our territory. Even the little girl in her Disney princess garb is stretching her mind and her life — what fame, success, beauty and love might be like.  And if she is playing with her little plastic karaoke set, or putting on a backyard circus, she’s trying on skill and talent, too.

So let us inform our intuition and imagination and then use them — so that when success, love, mentors, and happiness approach, we will recognize, court andinvite them into our homes and our lives.

What truth will you pretend into existence today?

A Wicked Pack of Cards: The Origins of the Occult Tarot
Ronald Decker,Thierry DePaulis, Michael Dummet
St. Martin’s Press, New York, NY, 1996

An acquaintance with the historical-critical method of Bible scholarship, even on the popular level (Bart Ehrman, for instance) is excellent prep for this book.

It is not about how to read the Tarot. The ancient Egyptians, the Rosicrucians, etc., do not appear in it, except as objects of ridicule.

Yes, I said ridicule. The authors give good snark, despite their dry erudition. Every chapter, from the introduction, “Imaginary Magi,” to the final “Papus and his Circle,” peels back another of the fairy-stories passed off as spiritual history – and their indignation glares from every page.

To begin with, the word Tarot is not derived from “Tar-Rho … which means royal road,” nor from “T’a'Rosh, the science of cosmogony,” which isn’t Egyptian either.

In fact, what we now know as the standard playing card deck came first, and the Major Arcana were originally common symbols, some of which we still understand (Justice, the Lovers, Death, for instance). Much of the Tarot lore attributed to De Gébelin was common currency among Freemasons in his day.

The entire book raises the issue of authenticity; of generations and layers of tradition versus a return to primeval truth, a “Protestantism” of divination, if you like. But the historical-critical truth about the Tarot is relatively trivial, making “Tarot fundamentalism” much more attractive than religious fundamentalism, for instance.

Decker, DePaulis, and Dummet are meticulously gossipy about all the great Tarot luminaries; suffice to say that all the glittering legends are stripped away, revealing a crew no more glamorous than you and me. The traditions of Tarot divination were established by grocers, hairdressers and Christian clergyman, just as other religious (“spiritual”?) traditions were established by fishermen, shepherds and caravan leaders.*

There is a great deal of painfully meticulous crawling along centuries-old paper trails.  The book is filled with obsessive detail about the movements, work history, and marriages of these linchpins of Tarot history, which is occasionally interesting.  For the lay reader, this is reminiscent of the begats in the Bible.

In chapter 6, one-third of the way through the book, Mademoiselle LeNormand suddenly appears – but only because the divinatory cards associated with her have been miscalled Tarot:

Although she filled her books with anecdotes about her life and the people she met, and although many works have been published on her career – there are at least six biographies, not to mention dictionary entries – it is not easy to trace the real life of Mlle. LeNormand. Most of her assertions are spurious, many of her biographers are forgers, recognized or not.

The authors spend more ink on the publication data of LeNormand’s bibliography than on its contents, which are (perhaps deservingly) dismissed with a sneer. Mademoiselle LeNormand’s autobiography is a promotional item. She also wrote a biography of the Empress Josephine which had very little history in it. The authors are not at all impressed. She wrote a number of (largely inaccurate) prophecies about contemporary French politics, and promised even more. This chapter wades through about a million times more than I ever wanted to know about Mademoiselle LeNormand before finally getting to the subject of LeNormand cards.

The cards now called by her name were not invented by her and were certainly unknown to her; apparently she used many other divinatory systems – and, for that matter, many kinds of cards. These cards, and other decks intended solely for fortune telling, were designed only after her death. (One of these days I’ll open my new LeNormand card deck and compare it to the description given in this book.)

A designer whose name is unfamiliar to me, Edward Moulth, impresses the authors as the first author of a Tarot manual – that is, an instruction book about how to read the cards – who is both sincere and knowledgeable.

By the time of Eliphas Lévi, science and hucksterism had almost extinguished the Renaissance cosmology on which Western high magic was based.**

Lévi was the great synthesizer and popularizer of the various strands of Western magical traditions. For this, despite his “bombastic” writing and “slipshod” scholarship, the authors praise him highly; and yet –

[Regarding Etteilla's view that, with nothing more than the Tarot as a guide, one could acquire knowledge of "all things:"]

It is a pity that this fact is not known to scientists; instead of squandering billions on space telescopes and particle accelerators, they could discover all they wanted to know for the expenditure of some £10 or so.

I think the authors get some of their snark from Eliphas Lévi, whose assessment of Etteilla scorches the page.

“The Tarot was not, for Lévi, to be considered on its own, but only as it intertwined with all the rest” of the traditions of Western high magic. He returned to the earlier idea of correspondence between Hebrew letters and the Major Arcana, which the Order of the Golden Dawn later rejected.  One thing Lévi has in common with his predecessors (and successors): he made a lot of things up.

There follows a gossipy, entertaining biographical sketch. In fact, about a third of this book is gossipy biographical sketches.

Each of the chapters is devoted to one great name in Tarot lore, and to his or her principal contribution: Lévi and the association with Kabbalah, and the need to “rectify” the Tarot deck; de Gébelin and the supposed Egyptian origin; Paul Christian and the astrological correspondences (and the free and deliberate use of not-true data); Etteilla’s … well, he was the first, after Court de Gébelin, to approach all of these. Vaillant’s chief contribution was developing the deep roots of the Romany Tarot tradition, which the Romany themselves did not take up until the 20th century.

Papus, the subject of the final chapter, sounds like someone I would have liked to know: a medical man whose house was full of strange and wonderful magical objects, who “presented the appearance, not of a magus, but of a bon vivant.” He is described as a clear and systematic (and copious) writer and a quick study, but not an extremely original thinker. He was also a great founder and builder of occult organizations.

I must confess I was not able to finish this book – it was simply too much of a muchness. The combination of true gossip and meticulous pedantry is arresting, but over-rich. This is a book to buy, not borrow – if you can find it – if you can afford it once you find it.

And I must say that it is a fangy, vinegary pleasure to gossip about the hubris and scandals of occultists (or folklorists) long dead. I thought only catherine yronwode did that.

*Mohammed is usually described as camel driver, but he actually managed caravans for his wife, a successful merchant. You can find details in Karen Armstrong’s Mohammed: a Biography, I believe.

**The authors pause to define “high magic”:  ”In Richard Cavendish’s illuminating definition, it is ‘an attempt to gain so consummate an understanding and mastery of oneself and the environment as to transcend all human limitations and become superhuman or divine.’”