Friday, March 27, 2009

Musings on a response to a comment



The above image was nabbed off of the Ohio State dance department website. I think that is a perfect fit for my response :)

A comment was left on the Good Fraters blog that really struck a cord with him. If you are reading my blog there is about an 80% chance that you are reading his too :)He challenged the universe to respond. Here is the comment for those who do not have it memorized by now :

" I really have more of a question really. I am new to pagan exploration so I apologize for my ignorance in advance. I have a few gods and goddesses that I feel personify and embody energies pertinant to certain areas of my life except one, my sexuality specifically. I am a lesbian and I can not "connect" with any god-energies on this level. Oddly enough, Pan is what keeps moving to the front and center of my spiritual vision. For a while, I could not figure out why...and then something came to me. I will explain it in short. I may be breaking all kinds of traditions in suggesting this but I would like to get some feedback on this if you have time. Ok, according to mythology, Pan is dead. However, I personally do not believe that energy can be destroyed and therefore Pan must still exist somehow. I am a devotee of Cybele and in mythology she has restored other gods in various forms. What if Pan was restored by Cybele with the condition that he take a female form (as was customary for men to do in devotion to Cybele) but remaining the same god energy within, therefore rendering a Lesbian Goddess (a kind of butchy one ;) ). Does magick allow for continual reincarnation for the sake of change in time, culture and social context?"

I will start by saying that I have a form of deeper understanding on this that most of brothers on this subject. While the Good Frater is wonderful and perfect, I would have been just as contented if he was a Good Soror. So while not exclusively so, obviously, I have a little bit of understand on the lesbian male God issue.

Rumored to be over the doorway to the oracle at Delphi were these two prophetic statements loosely translated:

"Know thyself" and "Thou art Divine"

These have been my guiding light since I literally stumbled on the path. Please follow me on my circular logic jaunt. At school I have noticed that the reasonable accomodations for one group of folks (raised bumps on the side walks for incline changes for instance) work very well for one group of folks (those with canes) and a nightmare for another group (those in wheelchairs for instance). With liver issues and wheeling a huge case of books around, I have started to notice these small details. The hooks in the accessible stalls in the bathroom are at the perfect place to put your purse if you are confined to a wheelchair, but are the at the right height for a kidney punch otherwise. One size most certainly does not fit all. Magick is no different.

With that in mind I find that magickal paradigms are very much the same. The system that fits me like a glove chafes the Good Frater. So the trick to working through the macrocosm is to figure out what fits your microcosm. Hence my love of the venn diagrams. They are in general an intersection of a few dissimilar ideas into an overlaping inclusive grop.

To explain the circles, if we take the macrocosm as a whole all things are happening and possible at once. Time is not a function of it and therefore makes our lives difficult when we try to comprehend it's ALL ENCOMPASSINGNESS. That jumble of infinite possiblity is filtered through our personal adaptations to the universe and finally we get a little area of overlap. Most of the conventions adopted magickally are simply from one or two groups perspective of the universal jumble. I try not to get to excited over other peoples opinions. Sometimes they are right and sometimes they are just plain wrong.

I do not think that Pan is dead and in fact in my paradigm he is quite alive and well. Every spring he gets a bird in my grove on the Spring Equinox just to prove his point. As an old physics major, I also do not belive that energy is destroyed. At most it is changed into another form. The macrocosmic force that is Pan on a macroscopic level does not change based on our interpretations. It is what it is. However, in this case, how you receive that is absolutely the most important function. Gender is a microcosmic form of differentiantion. It has nothing to do what so ever with the macrocosmic polar forces of creation. Except in how we interpret and receive them. It is more like a cheap computer system patch rather than a function of the system. As I have worked with various systems I have come to understand that gender is placed on things for our interpretive needs not because it is an intregal part of the force.

What I think that the more important point is to seek the polar opposites and not break any one paradigm by exclusion. While all of us have difficult times with one specific form of energy or another it is vital to not exclude either of them at face value. They are there for a reason. We are all male and we are all female, it is just in varying degrees. The goal of most Work is to bring enough of opposing forces into your life that you shore up the areas you are weak in. Most people get in trouble early on because we stick with what we are good at and not what we need.

With that said the key point is to experience it somehow. If in the beginning you need to see Pan as a butchy boi, peachy. Sometimes that is as far as our paradigms can stretch - for now. The beauty of the Work is that we and it are always evolving. What was an impossible stretch yesterday, is a piece of cake today.

Off to paint and ponder. Much love!

1 comment:

Unknown said...

>>I will start by saying that I have a form of deeper understanding on this that most of brothers on this subject. While the Good Frater is wonderful and perfect, I would have been just as contented if he was a Good Soror. So while not exclusively so, obviously, I have a little bit of understand on the lesbian male God issue.

Well, the GF did have a possible point that maybe a lesbian perspective on mystical things can be useful, as a guy that was a lesbian in a past life that had mental powers, there's not that much of a difference in the level of understanding.

It's more of true harmonizing than an apparent harmonizing, as you write. Not as a superficial experience. I have had harmonies with fertility/sexuality spirits that are from both genders, as they present themselves visually/auditorily and in how they do the work they do.

One of them even had an issue with how people and animals and even the smallest forms of life that use sexual reproduction randomly use sex without concern for the occult reprocussions. He hates he's called on to get guys (and lesbians) laid, since that's how his bio is written when he's really a fertiltiy spirit. He refuses to help people with such things unless you can figure he works with sex and magick in its true sense, where it's used in creation and union and not just for charging a random sigil or enlightenment on subjects that aren't about sex magick. That enlightenment bit really pisses him off.

In this particular spirit's case, he's willing to join in such a union and present himself as either male or female, while he always has a male presence and is written about as a guy. For him, romance is another tool to sow fertility and he would fall under the bisexual category, if he was human.