Return to Greece – May 2010

RETURN TO GREECE—MAY 2010

BECOMING A SEE-ER

This coming May 20-29, 2010 I will once again lead a group of people on a spiritual journey to Greece.

It will be my fourth journey in Greece, and my second leading a group there. Last summer I also had the privilege of co-leading a trip to the Australian Outback with Linda Marson, founder of Spiritual Adventure Tours, and my co-facilitator for next May’s journey. You can see the details and sign up information on the website.

A common thread runs through all this travel, like the rope Ariadne gave Theseus to guide him in the dark depths of the labyrinth (see below). We go not just to look, but to see. Through archaeological guidance, through re-telling the myths, through finding their meaning in our own lives—and through using the Tarot to guide us, as individuals and as a group—we change and become something different than what we were. We learn to see sacred the places, and ourselves, in a whole new way.

The theme of this trip is Initiation As An Oracle Through The Sacred Sites. We will develop our own Seeing, through the temples, the landscapes, the sea, and our own work with Tarot, both individually and as a group.

I have written on this blog of the previous Greek journey, especially in the entry The Opening To Apollo.

So much happened on that trip, from astonishing omens—like the four tornadoes that appeared on the sea when we arrived in Crete—to the overnight healing ritual we did to Aphrodite, Goddess of Love. And there were things that simply cannot be written about, but only experienced. I have taken enough sacred journeys to know with certainty that this trip too will be something you will never forget.

The itinerary for the journey is so exciting I only wish we were leaving tomorrow—though late May is in fact a wonderful time in Greece, before the summer heat, with wildflowers everywhere.

We begin in Athens, where a new and dynamic Acropolis Museum has just opened. Athens is the city of Athena, Goddess of Wisdom, and we will invoke her guidance as we set out.

First stop, Delphi, the site of the great Oracle, with the mountain of the nine Muses rising behind it. Delphi was home to Gaia, the Goddess of the Earth, Apollo, God of the Sun, and Dionysus, God of Ecstasy (more on Dionysus below). The ancients called Delphi “the center of the world,” and there is no more magical place on Earth.

Return to Greece May 2010

From Delphi we go to Olympia, home of the original Olympic Games, and site of a massive temple to Zeus. The ancients described all events, past and present, as contained within “the mind of Zeus,.” Here we will open our own minds to the possibility of seeing beyond our limitations.

From Olympia we return to Athens and the port of Piraeus to head out for the islands. We go for two nights to Mikonos, known for its beauty—and its nightlife. Besides having some time for fun we go there for a very special reason, Mikonos’s closeness to the sacred island of Delos. Delos was the birthplace of Artemis, Goddess of the Moon, and her brother Apollo, God of the Sun. No one lives on Delos, there are no hotels, the whole island is a sacred sanctuary. As well as walking the land and seeing its wonders, we will awaken our own lunar and solar energies.

Return to Greece May 2010

Our final stop before we return home is Naxos, largest of the Cycladic Islands. There are no large temples here (though we will visit a site of strange prehistoric statues), but in the world of myth something very important happened on Naxos.

To understand it we need to know a little of the story of the labyrinth. Ariadne, princess of Crete, helped the Athenian prince, Theseus, kill the monstrous Minotaur hidden in the center of the labyrinth. Ariadne then fled with Theseus but when they came to Naxos he cruelly abandoned her. And there Dionysus, the God of Ecstasy came to her and joined with her in a sacred marriage, so that she was raised from mortal to divine. There are many mysteries around this story, far too many to describe here. On Naxos we will follow some of the lines, through the myth, through the land and sea, and through our own oracular initiation.

This will be an incredible journey filled with wonders. Space is limited, so sign up early.

Please note: since Spiritual Adventure Tours is an Australian company the price quoted is in Australian dollars. With the exchange rate the price becomes very favorable to Americans.

See you in Greece!

Return to Greece May 2010

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Blessings for the Major Arcana

One of the more interesting aspects of traditional Judaism is the concept of blessings for almost every occasion. There are blessings for waking up in the morning, for washing hands, for eating various foods, for doing or seeing something for the first time…

It may sound excessive, or tedious, or even a bit silly—and I have to admit I’ve never tried keeping track and saying them all, but it’s way to make ordinary life sacred. My father once spent some time with a Hasidic family in Jerusalem, and I remember him talking about the blessings throughout the day as a wonderful experience.

(At least one of the blessings that men say in the morning is controversial. This is the line “Blessed are You, God, king of the universe, who has not made me a woman.” In an attempt to remove this from its seeming extreme misogyny, some modern Orthodox Jews maintain it’s said out of respect to women. That is, to be a woman is an exalted state, and men are grateful that they do not have to live up to such a standard.

Nice idea—as long as they don’t pretend this was the original meaning—but I prefer the more radical approach of the Reconstructionist prayer book: “Blessed are you, the Imageless, who has made me in your image.”

In my book The Forest of Souls: A Walk Through the Tarot, I wrote how this paradox inspired my one sentence description of the Tarot: “78 images that are gateways to the Imageless.”)

A couple of years ago it struck me that it might be nice to come up with a series of blessings to say when specific Major Arcana cards come up in a Tarot spread. The idea is to make each one reflective in some way of the particular card. Here are my Blessings For the Major Arcana. Cards are from the Rider-Waite-Smith Tarot deck, unless otherwise indicated.

Fool—Blessed are you, Ignorant One, who leads us forward, in brightness and joy.

Magician—Blessed are you, source of all light, who surrounds us in roses and lilies.

High Priestess—Blessed are you, Silent One, who sits in the doorway of secrets.

Empress—Blessed are you, Mother of Passion, who brings life to the dirt and joy to our bodies.

Emperor—Blessed are you, Planner and Architect, who designs the four corners.

Hierophant—Blessed are you, Holder of Mysteries, who shows us and teaches us.

Lovers (The Shining Tribe Tarot)—Blessed are you, Chooser of Passion, who brings us to life.

Chariot—Blessed are you, Master of Questions, who opens the way.

Strength—Blessed are you, Gentle One, who opens and closes the mouth of the lion.

Hermit—Blessed are you, Lonely One, who shines light from the mountain.

Wheel of Fortune (Visconti-Sforza Tarot)—Blessed are you, Blindfolded Angel, who turns the seasons of life.

Justice—Blessed are you, Weigher of Hearts, who balances Above and Below.

Hanged Man—Blessed are you, Tree of the World, who turns us around.

Death—Blessed are you, Bright Hand of Darkness, the end of beginnings.

Temperance—Blessed are you, Balancer, who flows and combines.

Devil—Blessed are you, Shadow of Morning, who stands guard in the doorway.

Tower (Crowley/Harris Thoth Tarot)—Blessed are you, Destroyer, who speaks to us in fire and light.

Star—Blessed are you, Naked and Empty, who pours out the waters.

Moon—Blessed are you, Shining Face, who makes the wolves speak, and the waters surge and fall back.

Sun—Blessed are you, Fire of Life, who delights in flowers and children.

Judgment—Blessed are you, Voice of the Trumpet, who raises and summons us.

World (Shining Tribe)—Blessed are you, Dancer of Wisdom, who reveals our true home.

Prophet of His Own Universe

As I write this it is September 2, 2009, the 36th anniversary of the death of J.R.R. Tolkien. Though this won’t go up for a few days, it seemed a good time to think about what The Lord of the Rings
meant to me back when I discovered it.

There’s a famous line about Tolkien—I don’t know the person who wrote it, but it goes something like this:

How did one man, in the course of a single lifetime, become the literary equivalent of an entire people?

The writer was referring, of course, to Tolkien’s creation of a whole mythology, complete with sacred books, founding myths, pantheons of gods, devils, and heroes. The other day I was looking at The Silmarillion, a book I have not read in many years, and was struck that there are actually competing stories about the early stages of the world. This truly reflects the way mythologies build up, for there is never just one story line, one official version. Different sources find their way into the canon.

(People who take the Bible literally are always getting into trouble, not just because they have to accept that all of it is true as history, but also because they have to begin with the assumption of a single author—God. Thus, the fact that there are two versions of Creation in Genesis becomes a real problem. To the skeptics this simply disqualifies the whole text, renders it empty. But there are creative approaches that avoid either absolute literalism or total dismissal.)

In fact, I would argue that Tolkien did something more than create a mythology. His work reads as if it is the source of all mythologies, the original account of a history that gets garbled and mis-remembered in “later” generations and cultures. And the nice thing is, he was smart enough never to spell this out, never to step outside his created world and explain to us, for example, that Numenor is the actual place dimly remembered as something called “Atlantis,” or that the palantiri are the originals of what we now call crystal balls, or indeed, that the Valar were later confusedly remembered as “gods.”

Something struck me as I started thinking about LOTR again. There is no religion in Tolkien’s Middle Earth. No churches, no rituals, no offerings, no priests. Why should there be? In terms of the book they have the solid reality, why would they create representations?

In my previous entry I commented that I discovered the books around 1961, and that the date was significant because at that time, and for some four or five years after very few people—certainly no one I knew, or even read—had ever heard of it. This was before the first huge wave that led to posters, “Frodo Lives” buttons, and some 100,000,000 copies sold. God knows how many copies have sold now, after movies reignited the fans.

Is it snobbery to make a big deal about discovering it myself? Well, partly. When you’ve found something all by yourself and later it becomes a huge craze you don’t want people thinking you’re just another person caught in the wave. I remember, at the height of that first surge, reading a comment in The New Yorker. The writer said it used to be if you went to a party and discovered someone who’d read LOTR the two of you went off to a corner and talked about it all night. Now, he said, when he went to parties, he pretended he hadn’t read it.

The reason why the book remained a kind of secret for so long was another kind of snobbery. Tolkien refused to allow a paperback edition, and in those days almost nobody—certainly not science fiction fans, the most obvious audience—bought hardcover books. There were book club editions in hardcover, but I’m sure Tolkien wouldn’t have gone along with that idea. And no large format “trade” paperbacks, either, for classy books. What we now call mass market was the only real alternative to expensive hardback, and Tolkien considered that beneath him.

Then, in 1965 (or thereabouts, I’m writing this from memory, not Google) the publishers of Ace Books discovered a loophole in the copyright status of LOTR. Somehow, there was nothing forbidding a paperback edition on its own to appear in America. Not Britain, apparently, but America (Britain and the States have always had parallel copyright systems). So they came out with a cheap edition.

I still remember seeing that. It was in a book rack in Grand Central Station, as I waited for a train to go home from college for the weekend. I was thrilled. The book I’d been talking about for years to my friends was suddenly available!

The Ace edition forced Professor Tolkien’s hand. He made a deal with Ballantine Books to publish an “only authorized paperback” edition, and in fact took the occasion to revise the original publication (I believe all hardback editions since then have been the revised version). Ace withdrew (whether gracefully or not I have no idea), and then, amazingly, the books took off, became a full scale generational mania.

Here’s another interesting bit of LOTR history, that I happen to know about. In that first wave the slogan “Frodo lives” became a rallying cry for the fans, seen on buttons and posters in great multitude. I actually know its origin, and saw the original.

One of the very first (if not the original) campus cults for LOTR, from before the paperbacks, was at Columbia College in New York. In fact, the very first person I met who’d read the books without me pushing them at him or her was a woman from Columbia who was dating a friend of mine.

My friend invited me to go somewhere with them, and when we were in his car together he said to her “Go ahead! Say it!” His girlfriend then said to me “Have you ever heard of a book called The Lord of the Rings?”

That period was not terribly long after the early death of the great jazz genius, Charlie Parker, known as Bird.

(People assume the nickname came because his music soared, which it certainly did. But in fact it was short for Yardbird, a reference to him being kind of a momma’s boy when he was young and hanging around at home a lot. Again, this is memory, not Google, so I may be off.)

In tribute to Parker’s music, and his everlasting influence, someone came up with the slogan “Bird Lives.” As a joke, someone in the Columbia Tolkien group spray-painted “Frodo Lives” on the wall of the 96th St. subway stop. When the craze began, the expression took off.

Does all this sound like I resent the fan mania that took away my special secret treasure? Actually, I was grateful for it. My fascination with LOTR had become something of an obsession, and the craze kind of eased me out of it.

Which doesn’t mean I wasn’t thrilled when the movies came out. But that’s a subject for another time.

Next: The Return of the Tarot, with an entry on “Tarot Blessings.”

The Mad Anglo-Saxon

Ah, Belknap, is there no word from Howard since his death?
Poem (by Clark Ashton Smith?), addressed to Frank Belknap Long, in memory of H. P. Lovecraft

(My writing, like my speaking, is often digressive. One subject leads to thoughts of another. Usually I try to subtly weave the loose threads into the main fabric. But here I thought it might be nice to put any digressions more than a few words in parentheses and indent them from the rest of the text. I hope this is not too distracting.)

(Oh, and for those who look to these entries for Tarot bits, sorry. This is the first of several that look at works of imagination that have meant a great deal to me. More Tarot soon, I promise.)

A few days ago I checked my magic calendar, the Autonomedia Calendar of Jubilee Saints and discovered it was the birthday of H. P. Lovecraft, author of some of the worst-written and most compelling stories in American literature.

Despite the purple excess of his prose, and mostly one-dimensional characters (that dimension being usually “gibbering” horror, or “stark raving” madness) Lovecraft has a deep almost worshipful following. They range from cult fantasy groups (some of whom seem at times to think he was reporting rather than inventing), to such High Literary figures as Joyce Carol Oates, who wrote an admiring article in the New York Review of Books around the time of the Library of America edition of Lovecraft’s work. LOA, NYRB, you can’t get classier than that.

(I confess I hesitated several days before publishing this entry, for fear of offense to HPL’s often fanatic admirers. Literary taste is a matter of, well, taste, and I am in fact an admirer of Lovecraft, just not as a stylist.)

When the LOA (yes, the acrostic for the Library forms the generic name for Voodoo gods—how Lovecraftian!) published its omnibus editon of four of Philip K. Dick’s novels they were attacked for pandering to low culture by publishing a science fiction writer. I don’t remember any such criticism around the Lovecraft volume. Books labeled as horror have a longer pedigree, headed up by Edgar Allan Poe. Personally, I think that PKD was a far better writer than HPL or EAP, but I may be the minority on that.

Lovecraft was a horror writer—terror and revulsion seem to be the primary emotions of his stories—yet he was much more than that. An atheist, he created, or hinted at, an entire cosmology of warring gods who existed long before the emergence of humans. Chief among these were the Great Old Ones, and in the world of the stories even just reading about them, especially in a mythic grimoire known as the Necronomicon, written by “the mad Arab,” Abdul Alhazred, was enough to drive a human being—what else?—stark raving mad.

Chief among the monsters (though some say not the most awful) was Cthulhu, so that the whole thing has taken on the name “the Cthulhu mythos” (first coined by August Derleth). Mythos is a nice expression; it suggests fragments of an implied mythology, sparing the writer from having to fill in all the gaps. It’s as if all we had of Greek mythology was chunks of the Iliad, brief sections of Hesiod, and single stories or rituals of a handful of Gods from different sources.

In Lovecraft’s world, humans exist only because the terrifying monsters are asleep or banished to some other dimension. Attempts to break the banishment or wake them up would seem truly nuts, but without such craziness there’d be no story, and so we get mad Abdul and others like him. And to be fair, if we read “Sinners In the Hands of An Angry God” the most famous sermon in American literature, the God of the Protestants could give Cthulhu and Yog-Sothoth a run for their money.

I discovered Lovecraft when I was around thirteen, possibly through a Modern Library anthology titled Great Tales of Terror and the Supernatural, which published two of his stories (no one hold me to this, please; it was half a century ago). I never cared for the whole gibbering horror shtick, but that idea of creating your own mythos really excited me. I also liked the sound, the feel in the mouth, of Cthulhu. Names are vital in any created myth or fantasy world, they make us feel a substance behind the image in the story. Some of Lovecraft’s other attempts seemed excessive to me—Shub-Niggurath, for example. I read an essay awhile back that claimed Lovecraft was a rabid racist and anti-Semite, the sort that goes on about sub-humans polluting White culture. Perhaps some of his names are projections of his attitude to various ethnic groups. Maybe we should think of Lovecraft as “the mad Anglo-Saxon.”

Something else fascinated me about Lovecraft: the community of people around him. A recluse who communicated almost entirely through letters, he was very generous as a mentor. That, and his compelling imagination, inspired followers, such as Robert Bloch (who later wrote Psycho), the poet and story writer Clark Ashton Smith, and especially August Derleth, who created a whole publishing company, Arkham House, to collect HPL’s work in handsome volumes. Arkham House went on to publish Smith, the fantasy writer Robert E. Howard, and other writers originally published in the magazine Weird Tales. When I checked recently Arkham House was still going strong.

(If the name Arkham seems familiar, the writers of Batman borrowed it for the nice idea that Batman’s villains are all crazy, locked up, when caught, in a place called Arkham Asylum, with the constant suggestion that Batman himself may be a mad Anglo-Saxon who would some day find himself in an Arkham straitjacket.)

I sent away for the Arkham catalogue and ordered a fair number of their books. Rather lonely and geeky (if only I’d known of science fiction “fandom”) I wanted to see myself as part of that creative world. And I really liked the idea that you didn’t need to borrow characters and images from existent mythologies, you could just invent your own.

And yet, there was always something that didn’t quite work for me—the emphasis on terror, madness, and disgust, the over the top language. And something else—it didn’t go far enough. A mythos, after all, is still not a mythology, and the need to set all the stories in our world, seen through human eyes, limited the imagination. I was looking for something else and didn’t know it.

Then something happened. In those days I used to wander around the Poughkeepsie Library in search of unusual books. I would look for titles and sometimes authors whose names intrigued me. In this way I discovered some wonderful writers, such as the great Spanish author Miguel de Unamuno or the German-Jewish novelist Lion Feuchtwangler.

One day, around 1961 (the time is important) I came across a book with an odd title, by an author unknown to me. I picked it up and the cover immediately fascinated me. Under the title was a large stylized drawing of an eye, while all around the margins ran letters in two very different but equally unrecognizable alphabets. I opened to the front page and found a poem, a kind of chant,, and as I read it the strange sensation overcame me that I’d been looking for this book all my (short) life, with no way to know that until that moment. This, I later came to believe, was what I’d been seeking in Lovecraft, which was why the emphasis on horror had seemed a distraction.

I literally have not read the poem in decades but I still know it by heart. It begins like this:

Three Rings for the Elven-kings under the sky,

Seven for the Dwarf-lords in their halls of stone…

The name of the book was Fellowship of the Ring, and the reason the year is important is because in 1961, and for several years after, no one I knew had ever heard of it.

To be continued…

We Do and We Hear

In the movie Julie and Julia there’s a moment when Julia Child is waiting in a train station for Avis, a friend of many years and many letters back and forth. A bit nervously Julia tells the woman who has come with her to the station that Avis has said she will be wearing a plaid jacket and that is how Julia will recognize her.

The friend is confused. Has Julia never met Avis? No, Julia says, they’ve only written letters.

The friend is amazed, and clearly we in the audience are meant to be as well. How can you have a years long correspondence with someone you’ve never met? To me this is quite ordinary. I have been writing letters for years with nine or ten people, only three of whom I’ve had the pleasure of meeting face to face (and them only once or twice).

I collect fountain pens. Some are brand new, others as much as 100 years old.

Fountain Pens

[Group of Wahl pens from the ’20s, ’30s, and ’40s. The gold pen, second from left, inspired my story “Master Matyas” in my bookThe Tarot of Perfection: A Book of Tarot Tales. Look closely and you can see the inscription, “M. Matyas”.]

The pens are not for show, I write with them. I write almost all my books and stories and articles by hand, in journals with blank pages (I don’t want to draw between the lines, why should I write in them?)

And I write letters. There’s a whole community of us, connected by online forums (my favorite— www.Pentrace.net) but then branching off into actual letters, sometimes running eight or nine pages. When I first starting doing this a friend asked “What do you write about?” (considering that I didn’t know any of the people). I kind of mumbled “Well, mostly what pens we’re using, and where we got them.”

That’s changed. With some people I write about politics (including a friend in Baltimore who’s as far right as I’m left), some it’s metaphysics, some it’s issues of psyche and identity, and with some it’s just about our lives. My pen pals include a horse rancher in Texas (formerly of the intelligence community), an Indian-American physicist in Anne Arbor, and a poet and academic in New Zealand (okay, her I met first, before we began writing),

One of my favorite correspondents is a woman deeply versed in Jewish history, Talmud, and other spiritual traditions, including early Christianity. Her name is Myra Love, and she’s one of the people I’ve met (twice now). Myra’s letters are long and rich, covering a lot of territory.

In the most recent, she wrote that when the Israelites heard the divine voice at Mt. Sinai they responded “We do and we hear.” This, as Myra says, is an odd construction, since we’d expect the opposite. I wrote back that what they were being told was not immediately clear to them, and that the only way it could ever become clear, be really heard, was by doing what was asked of them.

Some things cannot be theorized. We have to do them to know what they’re about, and often, keep doing them before we can start to get what they are. Tarot reading is like this. Some people try to study books, and memorize meanings before they try out reading the cards. But reading cards is so fluid and dynamic, changing every time we do it, that the only way to learn is by doing. We do and we hear.

I decided to ask the Tarot about this issue—literally do a reading and see if I could hear what the cards were telling me. Two cards, one for doing, one for hearing, from The Shining Tribe Tarot.

Justice

Doing—Justice. One of the primary attributes of this card is seeing, looking. The Tarot version of Justice does not wear a blindfold. And of course, the first thing we do with a card is look at it. But the seeing of Justice is also a commitment to truth. We do readings justly. In my book Rachel Pollack’s Tarot Wisdom: Spiritual Teachings and Deeper Meanings, I quoted a line from the Torah: “Justice, justice shall you pursue.” Thus, one of the main things the Israelites pledged to do before they could hear was pursue justice.

Chariot

Hearing—the Chariot. The Chariot is a vehicle of action, of will, but not just the will of the ego. By reaching up into the light, the Charioteer connects his will to something higher. The Chariot is a vehicle. Two thousand years ago mystics traveled to heavenly “palaces” through intense visualizations of a divine chariot. “Hearing” is not a physical act but a total experience that takes us to unknown places.

We do and we hear.

The Tarot of Perfection: A Book of Tarot Tales

Tarot of Perfection

The Shining Tribe Tarot, Revised and Expanded

The Shining Tribe Tarot

Rachel Pollack’s Tarot Wisdom: Spiritual Teachings and Deeper Meanings

Tarot Wisdom