My Top Ten (Sort Of) Influential Books, Part 2

In Part One, I got up to nine titles, which I figured was about half the planned Top Ten. The rules, you’ll remember, are that these are not necessarily my favorite books (though most certainly are), or the ones I consider the best, but the ones that have influenced me. I take influence to mean an effect on my writing, my teaching, but also my life. So I’ll begin with a couple from the last category.

Clarence Darrow for the Defense-Irving Stone. I discovered this in high school, and then read all the Darrow books I could find, especially Attorney for the Damned, a collection of his summations to juries and other public speaking. It wasn’t just Darrow himself, though his mixture of clear thought and wit and soaring eloquence will probably never be equaled. It was learning the real history of labor and capital in the United States. The common practices of companies of 100 years ago are both hideous and hidden, and the heritage of that time continues.

The plays and essays of George Bernard Shaw. I won’t single out one in particular (though my favorites are Major Barbara, Arms and the Man, and Heartbreak House). Shaw’s goal ultimately was to teach people how to live, to look at the world as it is, not as you think it should be—and then do what you can to make things better. It was Shaw who said “Don’t do unto others as you would have them do unto you. They may have different tastes.”

Finnegans Wake—James Joyce. My love of Shaw and Joyce, so completely different, come from a pair of courses taught at NYU by Prof. Dan H. Laurence. I’m sure I never would have read Joyce if not for Laurence (not sure about Shaw). But Joyce is one of my heroes—uncompromising, totally committed, lyrical and funny. I’ll probably never sit down and read the Wake from start to finish, but there are parts, especially the last pages, that I’ve read over and over. Joyce was an influence on me when I was writing the comic book Doom Patrol. In retrospect this might have been a mistake! On the other hand, I still think we did some strong stories in DP.

The Wasteland—T. S. Eliot. One of the greatest poems ever written, the best use of Tarot in poetry that I know of, and another major source for my Doom Patrol run. I re-read it every April, and always get something fresh from it.

The Place of the Lion—Charles Williams. Williams wrote mystical Christian thrillers, probably most famously the great Tarot novel The Greater Trumps (source of the expression “78 degrees of wisdom” to describe the cards). They were often clunky, even preachy. And yet— Lion tells of the Platonic Archetypes entering the everyday world through a spell cast at the same moment that a train wreck allows a group of circus animals to escape into the countryside. When I re-read it some years ago I was amazed to see how much the structure of my books stems from this single novel.

Awakening Osiris—Normandi Ellis. Ellis’s loose translation of the so-called “Egyptian Book of the Dead” is quite simply one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever read. The book shows us how the Goddess can be passionately real in our imaginations and our lives.

For the Time Being—Annie Dillard. I’ve read this small book four times and taught it twice. Dillard mingles science and Hasidism, the sadness of a world that abounds with birth defects and earthquakes along with the love of existence found in science and mysticism.

The Special Theory of Relativity—Albert Einstein. I’m cheating here. Not being a physicist or mathematician I have never read the actual theory, only prose treatments of it. Nevertheless, I have been fascinated by it since college, and even more in recent years. I think of it as the great Gnostic text of the 20^th century, with its clear implication that only light is fully real, all that we think of as absolute, such as time and matter, are really contingent on, and relative to, light. I wrote about this, and the connection to the Fool in the Tarot, in my book The Forest of Souls.

A Big Jewish Book—Jerome Rothenberg and Harris Lenowitz. This is one of a series of remarkable anthologies that Rothenberg co-edited with various people. They all mix modernist translations of tribal and ancient poetry with radical 20^th century poetics. These books were so strong an influence on me that when I read part of Unquenchable Fire in my writers group years ago, my partner, who was also in the group, said “Aha, you’ve been reading Rothenberg again.”

SF 12—edited by Judith Merrill. Merrill did a series of “best of the year” science fiction anthologies. In the 12^th year she championed the radical “New Wave” work that centered around Michael Moorcock’s magazine New Worlds, but branched out beyond sf to European surrealism. Reading this collection completely changed my writing, and in fact New Worlds published my first story and a couple of others.

Gates to the New City—edited by Howard Schwartz. Schwartz is most famous for his re-tellings of Jewish myth and folk tales. In this early collection he brought together modern stories from Europe and America based on traditional Jewish themes. Not only did this book show me the power of re-telling ancient stories in contemporary settings, it introduced me to two legends that I’ve returned to again and again, in short stories, novels, and the last storyline of my Doom Patrol. These are the Talmudic tale of “The Four Rabbis Who Entered Paradise” and the strange sad story of Rabbi Joseph Della Reina, who performed a disastrous forbidden ritual to try to force the Messiah to come into the world. As Dr. Joseph Reina, “the child eater,” he appears yet again, as the villain in my story “Simon Wisdom,” in my collection The Tarot of Perfection.

So let’s see. With nine books in part one, and eleven in part two, I think I’ve reached the quota of ten. Did I mention I wasn’t a mathematician? And I didn’t even get to include the brilliant Tarot books of Eden Gray, Gail Fairfield, and especially the indispensable Mary K. Greer, The Tao Te Ching of Lao Tsu, The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Leguin, James Hillman’s school of “archetypal psychology,” The Language of the Goddess by Marija Gimbutas, the works of Yoel Hoffmann (for the last few years my favorite writer), Major Trends In Jewish Mysticism by Gershon Scholem, and all the vital influences I’m simply forgetting. To those of you who’ve got this far, thanks for reading!

Advertisement

My Top Ten (Sort Of) Influential Books – Part One

Politically I would characterize myself as a far left progressive (I see Obama as a right winger). To make sure I don’t get too cozy in my point of view I look for right wing columns to read, even occasionally Redstate.com, though I tend to find it kind of strange and otherworldly (not in the good way). I prefer the sort of conservative the uber-rightwingers like to denounce as soft, or trying to suck up to the supposed “liberal media elite.” Two favorites are David Brooks of the New York Times and his younger colleague Ross Douthat. Douthat recently had a column in which he listed the ten books that most influenced him. In other words, not necessarily his favorites, and certainly not those he considers the “best.” Just the ones that had the biggest effect on him. I think this is a really fun idea. You get to write about books you care about (the book nerd’s favorite activity), and even, really write about yourself.  Mr. Douthat made sure to keep his list to exactly ten (with a few runners-up). Being far left I don’t worry too much about coloring in between the lines. If ten becomes twelve, or fifteen, why worry?

And To Think That I Saw It On Mulberry Street—Dr. Seuss. I posted the idea for this kind of list on Facebook and got wonderful responses. Many people figured that the books that most influenced them were the ones they read as kids. I had many favorites as a child, including the Babar stories, and the Dr. Doolittle series. But Dr. Seuss’s first book, about a little boy who walks down the street and imagines bigger and bigger wonders as he goes, kind of epitomizes my outlook. Why settle for reality, or what passes for it among the grown-ups?

Grimm’s Fairy Tales. I loved all fairy tales as a child. Andrew Lang’s color series (The Blue Fairy Book, The Red Fairy Book, etc.), Hans Christian Andersen, whatever I could find. But I always knew that the Grimms’ stories were the real goods—unsentimental, scary, magical. Many of the stories I write are fairy tales, even if set in the modern day, and featuring adults (such as my novel, Godmother Night). The best translation of Grimm’s that I know of is The Juniper Tree by Lore Segal—direct, elegant, beautiful, and dark.

The Lord of the Rings—John Ronald Reuel Tolkien. Quite a few of the Facebook comments included this mighty work. I always feel compelled to tell people I discovered it all on my own, in the public library, years before it became a giant fad. There’s an entry further down on this site about Tolkien, so I won’t say too much here, except that I was fairly obsessed with it for some time (until the fad saved me—I didn’t want to be seen as one of those people), and that it showed me you don’t have to adapt existent worlds, you can create an entirely new one. Even though my novel Unquenchable Fire is nothing like TLOTR, I might never have written it without Tolkien’s influence.

Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy—Mircea Eliade. This too I discovered on my own, when most people had never seen the word “shaman.” Eliade did not do any fieldwork, but he sorted through a vast amount of anthropological reports from all over the world, putting together a comprehensive vision of people for whom the “other world” is not theoretical or literary or a matter of faith, but an absolute reality. And a very strange one as well. I think it’s fair to say that the whole contemporary shamanic revival comes from this book—and so does a lot of my writing.

The Hero with a Thousand Faces—Joseph Campbell. JC, as I sometimes think of him, was another of my personal discoveries. I went to a lecture of his around 1965, and went out and got his book right afterwards. That copy is so full of underlinings, and exclamation points, and my own comments, that I am simply too embarrassed to open it! I think everyone in college should have a book like that. Campbell’s views actually became much more complex after this early book, but I don’t think he ever matched the passion and beauty of Hero. It was a major influence on me stylistically, and at least two of the stories he re-tells, The Ruin of Kasch, and the transformation of Gwion Bach into the magical bard Taliesin, have been touchstones for me ever since.

The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony—Roberto Calasso. Calasso, whose first book was titled The Ruin of Kasch(!), delves more deeply into the Greek myths than anyone I’ve ever read. Stunning, and strange.

The Gate of Horn—Gertrude Rachel Levy. When I was immersing myself in contemporary Goddess writing, I kept seeing references to this book, published in 1948, and long out of print. I figured I should read it but did not really expect to learn much that was new, since after all, so much work had been done, so much important research, since the ’40s. I ended up taking over three hundred pages of notes. Seriously. Though Levy was a scholar, her history of religion from the Stone Age through the Classical world felt to me like fireworks going off on every page. At one point I had the fantasy that if I had to testify in court I would ask to be sworn in with my hand on The Gate of Horn.

The Rider Tarot—Arthur Edward Waite and Pamela Colman Smith. Not a book in the normal sense, though I often think of the Tarot as a book that you remake every time you shuffle it. I first saw the Rider deck when I was teaching college in 1970 and a colleague offered to read my cards if I gave her a ride home. It’s fair to say that it’s been a major influence in my life ever since. Forty years later I discover new things in it all the time.

The Man in the High Castle—Philip K. Dick. It’s always hard for me to choose my favorite work by Dick. The first thing I read of his was a short story, “Electric Ant,” about an executive who discovers he’s an android, commissioned by his company and imbued with false memories of a life history as a human being. I was amazed by the simple elegance, the intensity of the idea, the visionary quality of the executive’s attempt to find ultimate reality. Much of science fiction is the playing out of interesting notions. What makes Dick’s work so powerful is that it really mattered to him, the question of how we know that we are real was close to life and death. It’s fashionable in literary circles to celebrate Dick’s ideas while dismissing him as a writer. I couldn’t disagree more. The simplicity and spareness of his style are an expression of the bleakness of his vision. And yet, at the same time he can be extremely funny. There are passages in my own work that are direct homage to the style, and vision, and intensity of Philip K. Dick.

Okay, so that’s nine titles, which I figure takes me about halfway through my top ten. More to come!

Forty-Six Years at the Omega Institute

This summer, Mary K. Greer and I will once again be teaching at the legendary Omega Institute For Holistic Learning, in Rhinebeck, NY. (Yes, for those who know a little about me, this is indeed the town where I live. Omega is no more than six miles from my house, and yet, I always stay on campus when I teach there, it is simply a great place to be.) This will be my 22^nd year at Omega, and Mary’s 24^th. Together that makes 46 years of Omega experience.

And this year will feature something very special. Usually, Mary and I will teach a weekend class—Friday evening to Sunday afternoon—and then a five day, Monday morning to Friday lunchtime. The topics are different, so that many people who come for the weekend decide to stay for the five day as well. A couple of months ago the programming director for Omega called us with an idea. Why don’t we host a forum of top Tarot teachers, a weekend conference of the best in modern Tarot?

Click here for details!

Mary and I loved the idea and began to brainstorm whom we might invite. After some discussion—there are quite simply so many wonderful teachers and writers—we came up with our A list. And amazingly, every single one of them said yes! Here’s our dream team:

Ruth Ann and Wald Amberstone (lovingly dubbed RAWA by Tarotist Ferol Humphrey), the founders of the New York Tarot School. Wald and Ruth Ann are brilliant in their literally encyclopedic knowledge of the Rider-Waite-Smith deck, and endlessly inventive in finding new ways to use that knowledge in people’s readings and lives. And they are the creators of the amazing Readers Studio, an annual festival where I have taught three times, and Mary will be teaching for her third time this April. It’s a pleasure to turn the tables and invite them to speak at our event!

Juliet Sharman-Burke, possibly England’s pre-eminent Tarotist. Juliet is the designer of the Mythic Tarot, the New Mythic Tarot, and the Sharman-Caselli Tarot. She is also a wonderful teacher.

Lon Milo Duquette, brilliant magician, Tarotist, expert on Aleister Crowley and the Thoth Tarot, and one of the funniest people in the world. It is always a pleasure to see and teach with Lon, and it will be doubly so at Omega.

Finally, in talking about the wonderful group of teachers who will be at this event, I want to take this chance to say that Mary K. Greer is the Tarotist I most admire in the world. Endlessly inventive, generous of spirit, passionate about Tarot on all levels, and a genuine scholar of Tarot’s convoluted history. I have learned more from her than anyone else. Her Tarot blog is simply indispensable.

And finally, here once again, is the link for the event itself:

http://psychicfriendsblog.com/blog/2009/12/31/omega-institute-tarot-conference/

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

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

Return of the Blog—A Bit Like a Vampire Rising

It’s been awhile since I’ve done this, written an entry.  Mostly it’s my crazy schedule—occasionally I lie awake at night, ponder everything I need to be doing, and conclude, very sensibly, that it’s not physically possible—but I’ve wanted to come back to this, and recently was thinking of what might be a good place to start.

I could write about some really exciting news, a new trip to Greece planned for next May.  This will be my third time leading a group of people on a sacred journey.  But I thought I would wait until the plans were up and running.

Then there’s the year long Tarot course I’ve been teaching, Becoming A Reader.  We’re almost finished with the first two of four sections, and it’s been wonderful. Section Three begins in September, and will be open to newcomers.  I’ll write about that too as it gets closer.

And of course there’s all the stuff that pops into my head when I’m walking with Wonder (best dog ever), or writing letters with 100 year old fountain pens, or watching Dr. Who.  Dr. Who!  Now there’s a subject, the best treatment of immortality I’ve ever seen (among all its other excitements).

But what I decided to share was a Tarot reading I did with Robert Place’s Vampire Tarot.  Robert is the creator of one of the great modern decks, The Alchemical Tarot.  His new deck is based on Dracula and vampire lore in general.  The art is among his best, which is to say the highest level.  The Major Arcana, or Trump cards, are characters and scenes from Dracula, the Minor Arcana, or suit cards, are based on the weapons against vampires.

Wands=Stakes
Cups=Holy Water Vessels
Swords=Knives
Pentacles=Garlic Flowers (it’s not the edible bulb of garlic that repels vampires but the flower)

The reading was a standard one for a new deck, but it seemed to me to reach beyond that to make powerful statements about the whole practice of reading cards, that strange activity that has captivated me for so many years.

Here’s the spread:

2.        1.        3.

4.

1.  What is the essence of this deck, what is its voice?
2.  How does it speak to us?
3.  What does it ask of us?
4.  What is possible with it?

And here were the cards:

Knight of Garlic Flowers      7 of Knives           2 of Stakes

9 of Stakes

 

7 of Knives

The voice of the deck—Seven of Knives

The Seven of Knives depicts a vampire (based on the 1920s movie, Nosferatu) coming through an open window.  He is sneaking in, and indeed trickiness is quality often associated with the Seven of Swords.  As the essence of the deck, it sneaks up on us, but we also have to let it in.  Tarot in general is like that, we start doing readings for fun, or curiosity, and it takes us over in some way.  Of course, the vampire in this picture is up to no good (“Count Orlock,” he’s called in the movie) but we’re adapting here.

 

Knight of Garlic Flowers

How does it speak to us—Knight of Garlic Flowers

The Court cards in the Vampire Tarot are based on writers and other figures connected to vampire literature or Bram Stoker, the creator of Dracula.  The Knight of Garlic Flowers is John Polidori, who, Bob Place tells us, wrote the first prose vampire story.  Thus, as Place says, he moved “from the ethereal realm of poetry to the more concrete realm of prose.”  Tarot is a spiritual tradition, a complex intellectual and mystical structure.  But in readings a deck speaks to us by addressing concrete issues.  The spiritual is not abandoned, not at all. It comes sneaking through the window of the practical questions.

 

2 of Stakes

What does it ask of us—Two of Stakes

Here we see the character Lucy Westernra from Dracula, asleep as Dracula, in the form of a bat, approaches her window.  The window theme is repeated from the Seven of Knives, and the power of the Count will entice Lucy to open the window, to let him in.  While she is consciously innocent, there is a quality of desire and risk about her.  Place says “This is a card of attraction, hunger, and lust.”  So the deck, all decks, ask of us that we come to them with desire, that we open the window and let them bite us.

 

9 of Stakes

What is possible—Nine of Stakes
Here we see a vampire burning up in the Sun.  Place says this comes more from movies and tv shows than vampire literature.  He also says that the card represents “a burning away of what is unwanted.”  There is a kind of transfiguration implied.  A return of that spiritual dimension as the lower levels are consumed.  Thus, the cards take the ethereal symbolism and ground it in people’s life issues, but they also transform the ordinary, they raise us up.  This is not just a concept, I have seen it in myself and many others, that we start doing readings out of curiosity or excitement, and the cards change us, we become, through surrendering to them, more aligned to the ancient truths that run through all the cards.

The Opening To Apollo

I’m back from Greece, filled with a kind of quiet awe at all we experienced. It’s often said of the Mysteries that the things people saw were not simply secret in the sense of being forbidden to tell, but secret because they are impossible to tell.

In our own way this was what we found on our journey, through the ceremonies and meditations. I could describe what we did and saw, but I know that while it will be interesting, it will not really convey the experience. Still, there is much to tell, and I hope to share some of it here, in the next few weeks.

I begin with with the ceremony I called The Opening to Apollo. Readers of this blog may remember that I wrote an entry before I left called Getting Right With The Boys, about the need to find a deeper relationship with some of the male dieties, in particular Apollo. In my book, The Body of the Goddess I tended to see Apollo as a villain, the detached Sky God who conquers the female powers of the Earth.

And indeed, the myth tells us how the great oracular site of Delphi was originally sacred to Gaia, the Earth Goddess, with the oracle being focused on a great snake, called the Python. Apollo supposedly sailed in, accompanied by dolphins (the name Delphi derives from Greek words for dolphin and–very tellingly–womb).

Apollo killed the snake, a being from the Goddess powers of the land, with the cry “Now rot here upon the soil that feeds man!”  Even so, the oracles were always women, and they bore the title Pythia.

It’s no wonder that many feminist writers have denounced Apollo as the emblem of the patriarchal takeover of ancient Goddess powers.  For the Greeks, however, Apollo represented civilization, and light, and beauty.  And classicist Peter Kingsley has written of Apollo as originally a God of shamanic death and rebirth journeys.

In Greece I came across another aspect of Apollo, one that definitely undercuts his aggressive male image. 

To put it simply, Apollo is very feminine, represented almost as a cross-dresser.  In at least two places we saw representations of what looked like beautiful Goddesses, in flowing dresses with done-up hair, only to find that they were Apollo.  Near one of these images (where Apollo actually was sitting in a row of Goddesses, and was the softest and prettiest of them) we saw his sister, Artemis, looking tough and fierce, in a short tunic, with wild hair.  I remembered how Leto, their mother, was criticized in some myth for having “a manly daughter and a womanly son.”  More about this in a future entry.

Before these issues, however, came the sense that if we wanted to eperience the power of Apollo, or Delphi, we needed to open ourselves to the light of the God.  I came up with a ceremony I called The Opening To Apollo.

At first we planned to do it at the temple itself.  Our guide knew of a small groundlevel entrance where the Pythia, the oracle herself, used to enter into her chamber, and it was out of the way of the usual tourist run.  So we went there, and the guide stood at the edge of our circle to try and ward off both curiosity seekers and the guards, and we all set up our altar with various things we had brought, and one of our group, Pat, climbed into the chamber and out again. 

Before we could get to the ceremony, however, we got word that a group of French tourists had complained, and the guard was coming, so Nicki Scully, my brilliant co-leader,  swooped up our altar and we all made like good tourists, gawking and taking pictures.

That afternoon we went to the Temple of Athena Pronaia, a marvelous site at the bottom of the hill from Delphi, just far enough that many tourists on day trips from Athens don’t stop there.  While Delphi itself is set against the spectacular rock face of the Phaedriades, or Shining Ones, two high plates of stone on Mt. Parnassus, Athena Pronaia is in a softer setting against the side of the hill.  As well as a range of archtectural features it contains a huge boulder that powerfully evokes the presence of Gaia.

Nicki and I scouted around for an out of the way place to do our ceremony, and found a small double row of stones (most likely broken pillars) with a perfect altar stone at the end, between the two rows. 

There was a couple nearby, a man and woman in their 20s, and we went and told them we were planning a quiet ceremony and hoped we would not bother them.  They whispered something together, and then the woman laughed, and said since the man was the official guard for the site he would make sure we were not disturbed.

The ceremony was simple.  We set up our altar, and then we all did a breathing meditation to enter into a sacred framework.  Then Nicki led each person to  me in turn and I invoked for them the power of the serpent of Gaia, for part of our purpose was in our small way to heal the ancient split of Earth powers and Sky powers, the dark snake and the light of the Sun God.

Then I used one of my magical tools, a Tuareg dagger I found years ago in Paris.  I had been on my way to a conference on magic in the south, and discovered first that my hotel was across the street from La Musee de l’Histoire de Magie (Museum of the History of Magic), and two doors down from an African store where I found the dagger.  It has a decorated handle, with a downward pointing golden triangle (symbol of the Goddess since the Stone Age), just above the blade.

I drew the knife down in the air in front of the person, as if to cut an opening in the fabric of reality.  This symbolized their willingness for Apollo’s light to enter them.   Then I touched the very tip to their forehead, their lips, and their heart, to inspire the mind, expression, and feeling.

What I said was slightly different for each person, but here is a text I later put together as a poem.

THE OPENING TO APOLLO

Welcome, bright one,
to the place of opening.

Feel the serpent of Gaia
rise through your body,
in and out and around your spine,
and through the top of your head,
and into the sky
where Athena shields and protects you.

Alongside you
Hermes and Persephone
guard you and guide you.

Accept the opening to Apollo!

May his glory enter you.

Open your mind with brilliance.
Open your lips with beauty.
Open your heart with radiance.

Know yourself,
and may all your footsteps
bring together
the Earth and the Sky.