Archive for April, 2012

I believe in immanence.

Immanence, or in-dwelling, indicates that the Divine resides within, not (solely) without. I have the spark of divinity within my body, heart, mind; so does every other person alive, dead, or yet to be born. For myself, I also believe that every bodiless spirit and every inanimate object is also part of the Divine. We’re all ingredients in the great gumbo of God. :) I am different from my chair* and from my grandmother who has passed on, but I am no more or less sacred than either, no more or less part of the universe and so the Universal Soul.

(*Why yes, I am frequently guilty of anthropomorphizing objects; you should listen to how I talk to my car. However, that’s one of those personal quirks that has only positive ramifications and no negative side-effects, so I happily and freely continue. I break fewer things this way, that’s for sure.)

This belief– this connectedness, this kinship– is one of the many reasons I practice compassion and study zen. The more gently, kindly, courteously I can treat the world – including myself – the better the world is, in however small a way. The more I can see from another’s view and understand them, the less I judge and the more acceptance I bring to the world. The more connected to the Universe that I feel, the less personally I take negative words, actions, and events.

To put it slightly more practically: Shit happens, and it ain’t about me. It may be about something I said, or did, but my actions or words are not the sole constituents of the person who is me. And when I remember that and reflect that as a two-way philosophy, well, I can engage with people with much more compassion than if I feel like someone did something just to hurt me– or if I feel my mistake was somehow aimed like an arrow at someone else’s heart.

The connection between compassion and immanence may not be obvious, or even sensical, but it’s a necessary bridge in my own eyes. Everything, and everyone, is part of the Divine; everything, and everyone, deserves to be treated with as much compassion and gentleness as I can muster.

This post brought to you as part of the Pagan Blog Project.

This post has become a permanent page on this site here!

This post brought to you as part of the Pagan Blog Project.

The Kemetic (ancient Egyptian) word heka is most frequently translated to be “magic,” but it’s not quite the kind of magic that most of us in the Western world are familiar with. Heka is word-magic, the power inherent in the written or spoken word, the power of authoritative utterance. It most literally translates to “activating the ka,” which is the part of one’s being or spirit that comprises one’s current personality and psyche; the power of heka is tied to the soul and the innate power of who we are. Unlike a lot of modern magical methods, heka does not require casting circle, creating sacred space, raising or channeling energy, or invoking any entities into your personal space. Heka is language at its most powerful, and as language, prayers can be heka just as easily as “spells” can be heka.

Ancient Egyptians and many modern Kemetics place special emphasis on how they speak and what they say (or write). Heka is in every word that passes our lips and hands, not just the words we intend to be magical or prayerful. As I write this entry, I commit heka. As I pray to my gods and sing Them songs, I engage with heka. As I write my little charms in Kalash on the whiteboards at work, I inscribe heka. As I hold a conversation about silly things or deep things with my friends, coworkers, and myself, I create heka.

One of the things I love about the power of heka is that its strength and effectiveness is solidly backed by science. The power of what we say and how we say it has been extensively studied from almost every point of view, from hard psychology to self-help authors to New Age affirmation gurus to modern magicians. There’s a huge difference in how our bodies and brain chemicals and intangible minds react to “I won’t smoke anymore” vs. “I want to quit smoking” vs. “I am quitting smoking” (or “I quit smoking”).

Heka is the understanding that what you say matters. Ancient Egyptians often offered teaching wisdoms to this point: speak only in surety, do not speak out of anger, holding your tongue is to be the bigger person. The value in speaking with care and deliberation has not lessened as the ages have worn on; as a point of self-control, as part of compassionate interaction, heka has a crucial role to play in how we communicate with others and express ourselves.

Not to mention the power of intentional heka used in prayer and magic! To focus all the power of language into short forms of prayer or ritual or spellwork, written or spoken, is an amazing thing. It’s like poetry, like music, able to distill the immensity of the human experience – or at least one facet of it – down to a singular, streaming flow of words. One can bring to bear all the power of linguistic aesthetics and magical potential, calling on positive phrases and avoiding negative ones, choosing particular words for their beauty and their acute meanings. To craft heka as prayer or spell, written or spoken, is to forge a blade and hone it to a glistening, unwavering edge. With intentional heka, one etches oneself upon the slate of the universe, for good or ill, in the name of willful change or gratitude or whatever one sees fit. We can change the world – the big one outside and the smaller ones inside ourselves – with the shapes of our tongues and teeth and ink-bearing hands.

Heka can come in many forms and trappings, including those we more commonly associate with ritual – light the candle, light the incense, say the words of purification, wash, say the words of prayer or of spellwork, and even add raised energy to the mix. Ancient Egyptians so believed in the power of heka that many of their spells and rituals involved taking on a particular god’s name – and thus, all powers and relationships S/He had – in order to accomplish a goal. At its heart, heka is the power of the language we choose and use. Our words have power, and we are responsible for how that power is dispensed through our vocabulary.

This post brought to you as part of the Pagan Blog Project.

I say this while pouring a libation of water for my ancestors, then lighting a white candle. The words are inspired by and in small parts taken from a beautiful Kemetic Orthodoxy rite that’s performed every month for the blessed dead.

…

Hail akhu, known and unknown, true of voice, shining as stars in the vault of Nut! I offer to you cool water and a thousand of all good and pure things.

Dua akhu!

To the loves of my life,
my Ladies dressed in dusk,
my thousand-blessed Mothers:

I adore You.

Sweep me aloft and lift me to
the sky-Your-body, the sky-Your-home,
so I may breathe the sweet celestial wind
that is Your breath and Your laughter.

Shroud me in shadows that are Your arms
embracing me when my light is
too deep beneath the waves to be gleaned;
enwrap me and keep me from sinking, too.

Hail to my Mothers, my Makers,
the hearts beating beneath the fabric
of the universe that I know
and all the mysteries that I do not.

Dua Nebt-het! Dua Hethert-Nut!

Disclaimer: Herein lies statements of subjective experience, opinions, and selfhood. The generalizations I make are from my personal experience; I am fully aware that your mileage may vary and that no experience or group of people is without flaw. :) This post is not the post I thought it would be, but I think it’s worth sharing anyways, howevermuch I waffled about posting it at all.

It Does Get Better; hell, sometimes, it starts good and goes from there.

I’m queer. I get mistaken for the opposite sex fairly often in person and online, I identify as genderfunky (genderqueer/genderfluid), and I’m pansexual. I have dated males, females, and a genderqueer person who shared my first name. I see gender as an immense, fluctuating, color-wheel-esque spectrum, not a line from girl to boy, and certainly not a binary of yes/no either/or. On any given day, I may be more masculine or more feminine, depending on the onlooker’s gender paradigm and my own shifting nature. Essentially, though, I am always checking the “Other” box when asked to describe myself, and I am very open and “out” about my non-normativity in daily life, including my corporate dayjob in Texas. (Kid you not: I walk into my nine-story office building every day in blue-jeans and a flannel, sporting a mohawk and a scorpion talisman, surrounded by suits and skirts. No one says a word.)

Given my identity and given the gender binary and heteronormativity of many mainstream types of paganism, what’s a queer cat to do?

Well, when I got into Wicca-flavored paganism, I was a teenager and did not identify as genderfunky yet. I identified as a strong young person who wanted to be proud of everything it was, including its sex and gender, and tell you what, Wicca supported me there. Wicca made pure and powerful both genders, both sexes, finding things for men and women to rejoice in and treasure, both in themselves and in those of the opposite sex. People who were not stereotypically girly or boyish still found deities they could jive with and a subculture that was beginning to explore the potential range of gender expressions.

By the time I claimed the label genderfunky, I was away from any particular brand of paganism and following only the goddess Sekhmet. My companions within sight of my winding path were of all sorts, but many or most of them were some kind of queer or queer-supportive, as well as being some kind of pagan. Now, I find myself at home in Kemetic Orthodoxy, where queerness is welcomed with open arms and even our gods show that it’s not all male/female all the time.

I know there are a slew of potential queer pagan issues out there, particularly in traditions/styles/groups that have a strong duality or sex-based roles. I myself just… don’t really run into them. My path is either eclectic and solitary, where I make my own rules and rituals and magic, or I’m participating in a group that doesn’t even bat an eye when I fall outside the typical gender pronouns. This is one of those cases where my matter-of-fact attitude about my honest self-expression feels like an immovable object: I just don’t have any problems with being queer in a pagan world. I am Queer Rock, hear me roll.

Amidst all the uncertainties and challenges surrounding life as queer, it’s kind of nice not to have to fret about how my gender, sexuality, and spirituality mesh. I know plenty of queer pagans have trouble getting all the ducks in a row, and I am nothing but grateful that I’ve somehow avoided most of the jagged rocks. Now, granted, there are plenty of issues with being queer in the secular world, but that’s politics, and I hate talking politics. I’d rather enjoy the fact that the path I walk feels custom-made for the soles of my feet and leave it at that.

To my fellow queer pagans who may feel there is not enough queerness in paganism: roll up your sleeves and dive in. If you can’t find old-school queer deities to suit you, see if there are any new-school ones willing to say hi – or look at those old deities in a new light. Tired of binary rituals for Sabbats and Esbats? Write new ones. Magic and paganism are very personal paths, and there’s nothing really stopping you from customizing it to fit you (short of inflexible rules of a particular tradition). If the Universe gave birth to the full range of human gender identity and sexuality, then we can certainly expand our spirituality to include this variety and diversity.

Being queer, in any crowd, is rarely easy. I’m immensely thankful that, of all the cats I could hang with, pagans are more accepting of my kind of folks than most. Props to all the wonderfully tolerant and supportive people out there, pagan or otherwise, queer or otherwise. You rock.

This post brought to you as part of the Pagan Blog Project.

What happens when you combine a thorough guide to sigil theory and construction, my recent-found love of painting, and inspiration from some beautiful handmade magic scrolls?

Well, you get this:

(Left side for color distinction, right side for sheer shininess.)

The first sigil of a shoal that I intend to hang over the painted tapestry that’s over my altar. You’ll notice I used Kalash, my artificial alphabet, instead of English script to create the sigil itself; that’s because I already use Kalash for prayers and charms, and also because it looks really friggin’ cool, especially when I get to arrange the letters artistically like this.

This sigil is for my partner J and I both, but the initial idea was his: he wanted a sigil for “inspired action,” or inspiration with the capacity/willingness to manifest it into reality. The blue is vivid and deep, the primordial waters, cauldron of life; the sigil is in gold, for creativity and molten ore; strands of sacred purple come down from the stars as inspiration, and orange roots snake down to reach the fertile earth below and manifest the ideas.

Working through this has delighted my inner facets of geek in so many ways. Figuring out how to phrase the goal/intention to be linguistically aesthetic in English, psychologically effective, and magically active; using Kalash to make it visually cryptic and elaborate and pleasing to look at; using my knowledge of magical color symbolism and the psychology of color; and then getting to paint it myself! And that’s not even going into any rituals or magic that will be performed over/for the finished painting before I hang it as “active” on my wall. :D

In short, I loved doing this, and I’m eager to do the next!

I’m toying with the idea of posting photos every month of my shrine, just to see how it changes. Right now, it’s had a definite expansion: I oil-painted two small shelves to give me more surface area, which means more of the things inside the altar itself get to be placed in open air.

Here’s the shrine in total; you can see my corkboard up on the wall where I keep my religious/otherwise sacred jewelry when I’m not wearing it, including Sekhmet’s pendant and Serqet’s amulet:

To the left, I’ve added a red-painted shelf for Sekhmet alone, as I have the most icons of Her and I feel they deserve a special place:

To the right, I added a teal-and-purple shelf. I wasn’t sure Who it’d be for while I was painting it, but I knew I wanted a place to showcase my non-Sekhmet, non-RPD gods icons, so here we have Twtw and Renenutet:

I did a second painting recently for Hethert-Nut, which She requested; She liked the first one, but She prefers the iconography of Mehet-Weret, a golden cow with deep blue stars. I added the dark indigo background as tribute to the royal purple color I associate with Her. (Also, as most of my paintings, this one is metallic, so it takes poor photos. Also also, I did not use a reference for the cow shape, which is why She looks slightly deer-like.)

And lastly, I acquired a gorgeous statue of and for Ma’ahes, made by the ever-fabulous Nicolas of Shadow of the Sphinx. (He also made my little Sekhmet votive and both Twtw’s and Renenutet’s statues.) People, if you ever need any Egyptian statuary, go to this artisan first – there is no one better in terms of courtesy, skill, affordability, and receptivity to custom work.

Today I do senut, which I intend to make a regular practice as a full-fledged, formal ritual on the first weekend of every month. In it, I will offer my gods the following, and then ask each of Them for a message concerning the month ahead, via my divination tools (cards or coins, whichever They each prefer).

hetep-di-nisut, an offering which the King gives:

To Sekhmet, I offer Her the red shelf, a sacred place of Her own.

To Nebt-het, I offer a black bone ankh and a stormy grey-violet amethyst.

To Hethert-Nut, I offer Her the second painting, may it please Her, as well as night-sky-with-stars beads I found today.

To Ma’ahes, I offer the lion statue.

To Serqet, I offer a banana-milk smoothie. (Don’t look at me, She requested it.)

To Ma’at, I offer a white bird made of shell.

To Set, in thanks for His oracle assistance, I offer peppered jerky and two slim jims, as promised.

And to my akhu, I offer a painting of us; may I always think of my ancestors fondly. (I will finish it before senut today and post a picture of it later.)

Dua Netjer!

I did this painting of and for my akhu, my ancestors, the blessed dead. It was made with their guidance, which was considerably lighter/subtler than I receive when painting with Netjeru, but I still do feel they had a hand in it. (As usual, forgive the awkwardness that is photographing metallic paints. I swear I will figure out a good way to do that someday.)

Hail akhu, true of voice, shining as stars in the vault of Nut! May you receive a thousand of all good and pure things.