The Lady and the Power
of Air
As pagans, we are
aware of being children of Mother Earth.
She carries us with her from life to life as she evolves at the slow
pace of goddesses; for, as a good Mother, she wants to take all of her children
with her in her evolutionary journey.
Pagans are
therefore in no hurry but, as a courtesy, should wish to develop their
awareness to the next level, so as not to be a burden to their Mother but
rather help her along.
Life thus is
school for the children of Earth, and for those who wish to evolve more
swiftly, becoming proctors, as it were, in her school, special schools called
mystery schools are provided in each age.
The Craft of the Wise is one such mystery school.
Awareness or
consciousness is held to consist of four principal powers plus a fifth, which
must be cultivated together in a balanced fashion for awareness to
develop. These are the power to know, to
will, to dare, and to keep silence or still.
When these are cultivated together for a sufficient time, with the help
of the Lady and the demigod known as the Lord or Lad, a fifth power, the power
to go (that is, to go on ætheric journeys), is the result. These five powers are the inner elemental
powers of the classical elements of Air, Fire, Water, Earth and Æther,
respectively. Each forms a body within
the gross material body of the witch, and each is nourished by its appropriate
food. Air is nourished by proper
breathing, Fire by proper perception, Water by proper drinking, Earth by proper
nourishment of solid food, and Æther by proper awareness.
Our Western
tradition of the Craft comes from the last mystery schools of Egypt, which were
still extant in the late Saitic period just preceding the Persian
conquest. Some of them, along with
schools in Babylon, lasted until the time of Alexander the Great. The Egyptian wisdom was taught to the sage
Pythagoras, who brought it to southern Italy, where for some time the Etruscan
aristocracy patronized the Pythagorean communities there, and it found further
development in the teachings of the sage and wizard Empedocles, who taught the
doctrine of the elemental powers. [1] The
mystery teachings of Babylon were brought west by the philosopher-sage
Poseidonius, [2]
and the schools of Italy were revived by the wisdom brought all the way from
India in the first century C.E. by the sage and wonder-worker Apollonius of
Tyana. It is likely that he was the one
who brought the teachings of the Grigori, the Watchers of the four quarters,
from the school of the Medes in Babylon, where they were called the Iygges. [3]
The mystery
schools of Italy survived the catholic persecution into the Dark Ages, with
branches in the Basque country, whence they crossed the Bay of Biscay (which
means Basque) to Devonshire and Cornwall.
This is only one strand of historical development which led to the
secret cult of Witchcraft in medieval Britain.
The Bacchic Mysteries entered into the Craft as well. Some of the arcana, such as the teaching of
the Watchers, were preserved in ceremonial magic, as taught for instance in the
school of Toledo. [4]
Later there was a confluence of this teaching with that of folk magic. Gerald Gardner depicted this process of
amalgamation of the two traditions fictionally in his novel High Magic’s Aid.
[5]
The Lady of
Witchcraft has three aspects: Maiden, Mother and Crone. While she favors different times of the year,
day and the lunar month with these aspects, she is also “old or young as she
wishes.” [6] This
means that she can manifest as Maiden, Mother or Crone on any occasion, and
exhibits her influence in ways not dependent on the time of day, lunar month or
year.
The Maiden governs
purification, the Mother consecration, and the Crone charging or
transmutation.
Purification
involves the clearing out of stale energy, to make room for fresh. Stale energy was referred to by the ancients
as ‘miasma,’ and was regarded as poisonous.
Spring cleaning is an age-old method of purification, traditionally
carried out in February, when the Maiden returns. The name ‘February’ refers to
purification.
The office of the
Maiden is evident in the fact that if we want some new thing to come into our
lives, we must relinquish some old thing.
Some New Age writers like to suggest that we can immediately access
abundance. They fail to recognize the
fact that our hands are never empty.
Thus, we always already have abundance, though it may include elements
we would rather go without.
We already contain
within ourselves all the magical energy or personal power we need to develop,
but much of our energy is locked up in habits which squander it without giving
us a profitable return on our efforts.
These include nervous movements, expressions of negative emotion, and
inner conversations and imagination. In
order to develop as witches, we must free our energies from these energy knots,
and we do so by engaging our efforts with the offices of the Maiden.
Knowledge, like
air, seeks to penetrate everywhere, and all living beings share it among
them. Different creatures have different
capacities for using air and knowledge, and we see this variation even among
members of the same species. Humans
differ in how they make use of air and knowledge, according to whether or not
they engage with the energy of the Maiden.
Some people know a lot of information, but they typically pigeonhole
anything new in terms of the old, saying “that sounds like…” Academics in
particular are subject to this gradual ossification of their
understanding. Past a certain age, they
settle down in their opinions and appear incapable of learning anything really
new. Their knowledge is often very
intricate, but its subtle interconnectedness actually serves to exclude new,
fresh knowledge, such as that which they started with in youth and which guided
them in laying the foundations of their future prison. In this they are like people who almost never
take full breaths of air, starting with a full exhalation. A full exhalation exhibits the Maiden’s power
as manifested in breathing.
So far we are
speaking of knowledge in general, but in this paper we are concerned with that
special knowledge which advances us in the Craft. In order to receive new understanding from
the Watcher of the East, we must make room for it by hearing new knowledge as
new, as if we had never encountered anything like it before. This is how we took in knowledge in youth,
when it excited us and began building the foundation of our inner home. If we take in a teaching as mere information,
as being on the same level as a novel or academic textbook, it will pass
through us like sands in an hourglass; we shall retain nothing energizing from
it.
The Mother governs
consecration. Consecration inaugurates a
path which we follow throughout life, and which involves a deep sense of
commitment on the part of the learner.
The new knowledge freed from miasma by the Maiden is brought into focus
by the Mother and lives within the witch like an unborn child. The same process
takes place with the magical purpose. It
is divined through the offices of the Maiden, but conceived within witch or wizard
by the fructifying power of the Mother.
Thereafter, as long as we keep it alive and nourish it, the Mother will
cause it to grow within us, until when we are ready to cast the spell, when we
shall be pregnant with it, and ‘heavy with child.’
The Crone governs
charging or transmutation. Her touch is
the touch of initiation, of change of consciousness. She is not gentle like the Mother, but
cataclysmic. The casting of a spell is
like giving birth, which (if I as a male may presume to say so) is far from
easy. At any rate, this is the closest a
male witch, a wizard, can come to the ordeal of childbirth endured by
women. Whether casting a spell or
undergoing initiation into one of the degrees of the Craft, one must engage
one’s efforts and focused energy with the transforming power of the Crone.
*
Bibliography
GARDNER, Gerald
B., ‘Scire’, High Magic’s Aid, New Bern, NC, Godolphin House,
1996.
Published originally in 1946.
GRAVES, Robert, The White Goddess, New York, Farrar, Strauss and
Giroux, 1993.
MEAD, G.R.S., Apollonius
of Tyana, New Hyde Park, NY, University Books, 1966.
NAHM, Milton C., Selections
from Early Greek Philosophy, New York, Meredith,
1964.
Princeton
University article on Posidonius: http://www.princeton.edu/~achaney/tmve/wiki100k/docs/Posidonius.html
[1] Nahm, Early Greek Philosophy, p. 117. See Bibliography.
[2] See article on Posidonius in the Princeton University article, http://www.princeton.edu/~achaney/tmve/wiki100k/docs/Posidonius.html
[3] Mead, G.R.S., Apollonius of Tyana, pp. 84-5.
[4] Gardner, Gerald B., High Magic’s Aid, pp. 29, 51.
[5] Gardner, Gerald B. See
Bibliography.
[6] Andro Man’s confession, quoted in Graves, Robert, The White
Goddess, p. 432.
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