Tree of Life Geometry, Revisited

I’m not entirely sure this will work. But here goes.  Thanks to Gordon’s recommendation to try out VINE, I was able to produce a trio of short videos today, including this one on the traditional geometry of the Tree of Life.  It’s fast, because Vine only allows six-second videos.  But it’s kinda cool, and if you watch it a few times, you can probably figure out how the geometry of the Tree fits together.  Enjoy!

Vine: Video of the Tree of Life

Update: Apparently you have to go to Vine’s website to view it, because I can’t embed it on a WordPress site.  Alas.  Enjoy anyway.

Painting the White Pillar

I’ve been working on and off for a few years on this tall, thin painting. Some of it was learning geometry first. Turns out that heptagrams are kinda complicated. Squares in circles, not so much, but yin-yangs are deceptive — they look easy but there is an undergirding complexity.

The statue at the base is by my friend, Albert Sussler. He’s a much better artist than I am: an American, Japanese-trained, master potter.

Part of me is reluctant to put my painting on display like this, half finished. It’s not done. It may never be done. Oh well — that’s how these things go sometimes. The point is that te artist and the designer are creators, principally. Sometimes teu create work within an existing theme, as here; sometimes they create utterly unique and semi-original works. The artist makes for himself; the designer makes for others— yet both are committed o the core act of making. Of shaping. Of calling something into being.

I had help, of course. Geometry teacher is Andrew Sutton — I learned from his book,
Ruler and Compass. The pillars came from the western mystery traditions by way of English esoteric training in magic, apparently. The paint came from Michael’s supply, the brushes and canvas the same.

Where is your creative power taking you? Or is it just sitting over there on the ground?

Compartments, measurement, geometry

My evolving druidry kit
Originally uploaded by anselm23

Over the last few days, while working on other things, I’ve been fussing and sawing and sanding and gluing small bits of wood into place to make this little box.

I’m a member of a couple of druidic organizations, namely AODAand DOGD, and I’ve noted that the more of these kinds of ritual groups and ritual paths that I practice, the more that my house and life gets cluttered up with stuff… stuff that’s difficult to pack, difficult to put away, difficult to sort or keep separate, and difficult, frankly, to explain in short order.

Plus, there’s the Hermetic Kavad, which is going to take more carpentry skills than I currently have, to finish in any appreciable way that people are going to find useful or interesting. So there’s the need to practice those skills, and this is a good way to do it.

I need more practice. Clearly.

Part of it is that carpentry is not pure geometry, nor pure measurement. The thickness of the wood worked matters; so does its flexibility and strength. The rules for assembling pieces are not hard and fast – there are knots in the wood, there’s the fact that a piece of wood which has straight sides is not perfectly straight, and there’s the challenge that cutting a piece of wood that looks flat may in fact warp it — particularly if it’s these tiny thin pieces that make up the internal walls of this box.

Also, this was about making sure that certain objects fit, and fit snugly, inside the box, without a lot of wiggle room (Some of them are fragile, after all). It’s not pure geometry by any means. Actually, most of it was done with a straight-edge, with only inches marked and not to any degree of accuracy (no quarter or half inches).

And you know what? It turned out ok. Not perfect by any means. But not bad. Not beautiful. But functional. Acceptable. A suitable learning experience.

A good beginning.

If you’re further interested in the contents of the kit, click on the picture, and visit the Flickr page… there’s about 20 notes about the contents of the box, but you have to be on Flickr to read/see them.

Via Flickr:
(Roll over the image to read the notes.. but on Flickr, not here.)

I had it in mind to build a small box for the tools and equipment of druidic practice in the DOGD. I got the box from Michael’s Arts & Crafts, and I’m in the process of laying out a Celtic knot-work pattern on the outside, along with spaces for the four animals of the directions (hawk, stag, salmon, bear), the sixteen geomantic characters, and the various other sigils of this society.

One of the big problems was the red cross and the green ring. The standard 5″ diameter one doesn’t fit in the box. I’ve now tried making a 3×3″ ring and cross, but the scale of the two parts seems off. Time to remember my proportional rules, and try again.

Inside the box are compartments for incense and candles, a small egg cup ‘chalice’, a crystal ball, three candlesticks, two cauldrons, a wand, and (tucked out of sight) four geomantic “Druid wands” for casting geomancy charts. There are also two bottles which will eventually hold Spagyric preparations, and space for several more. Although I don’t think this box will ever be able to hold all 17 spagyrics that the order has on offer… by then it will probably be time for a new box…

Vervain Spagyric

Filtering Spagyrics

Alchemical Spagyric of Vervain

This is a preparation of common vervain (Verbena officinalis) made using Bulgarian from Mountain Rose Herbs.   In a Spagyric tincture, the herb is macerated or soaked in high-proof alcohol, and then strained after several weeks to produce a menstruum or herb essence-infused alcohol. The herbal residue is calcinated or burned to black or white ash. The ash and the menstruum are then recombined for a period of cohobation, before the ash is re-filtered out, and the resulting spagyric bottled.

Vervain is also known as van-van, and is a common ingredient in hoodoo and other rootwork. It is an ancient herbal cure for eye strain, and a relaxant of some kind. A few drops in a large amount of water is a strong dose.   I produced this as part of my initiatory work in the Druidical Order of the Golden Dawn. I’m not at all sure that I’m ready to drink even a few drops of it, actually.   I mean, it’s black. With this tinge of green around the edges where light can pass through.

Except, when I hold it up to the light, it has this green color which is somewhere between the traditional color of Venus, and the green glass of a bottle of Rolling Rock Beer. After several strainings through cotton balls and coffee filters, it is nearly cloudless; there are no remaining films or mists of particulate left in it, and it is vaguely emerald in color.

The residue

One is reminded of the Emerald Tablet, and the wisdom of Hermes Thrice Blessed.

So, from a Design perspective…

So, from a design perspective, this is dumb.  I mean, what’s to be gained from soaking a bunch of herbs in alcohol for weeks, burning the remaining herbal mess, recombining the ashes with the herb-infused alcohol, and then letting it sit for a week.  Add a teaspoon of wine to a barrel of sewage, you get sewage.  Add a teaspoon of sewage to a barrel of wine, you  get… sewage. Seems utterly dumb, right?

And yet the symbolism, both alchemically and chemically, as well as the value of the actual nutrients left over in the ashes, is kind of important.  The soaking part, what alchemists call the menstruum, is where you get all the easy stuff to make the switcheroo from being solid to being liquid. The alcohol becomes a solvent which makes it easy for the plant essentials to cross over from being plant to being something else.

But there’s a whole crowd of things in a plant that can’t make the crossover that easily.  You have to break them down, break them out, smash them up, and mash them up, and then recombine those shattered, broken-down bits back into the easy stuff.  This process is called Calcination.  In alchemy you do it by putting the oven on 500°F and then putting all the soaking-wet alcoholic leafy bits in there, and watching them burn.  It’s pretty.  It’s ugly.  It’s hot.  You’re making sure the dross burns off — all the crappy parts of the design.  Some writerly type said, “Kill your darlings.” Harlan Ellison said, “don’t write crap.” Stephen King said, “Cut 10% of everything you write in the first draft.”  The Alchemists did that too.  Dump the bad stuff, and reduce the waste to ash.  Make it utterly black, make it gray, make it white.  Heat it up, and burn away everything but the essentials.

Then dump that ugly black ash, the leftovers of your furious cutting-away, back into that beautiful green, herb-infused alcohol.  And leave it in the darkness for a while, bringing it out only a couple of times a day to shake it and stir it and make a mess of it all over again.  It will turn so black and so dark, you won’t be able to see light through it.  It will become utterly opaque.  That’s cohobation.

And then filter it.  The coffee filters, or the cotton balls, will be ugly and slimy and burnt-looking.  It will be crusty and black.  And the liquid will still look black from the side.  Tilt your head funny at great design, and you can see the magic that’s being used against you in the final product, and the ghastly waste that went into producing something that amazing… it’s like following the production chain of an Apple product back to the iridium mines in Africa and the sweatshops of Shanghai, that leftover teaspoon of ashen-black liquid tar leftover at the end of a spagyric operation.  It’s the difference between good design and great design.  It’s the difference between taking twenty minutes on a project and twenty months.

But that’s where excellence comes from. From the reuse and the burning up of ideas, from the consumption of materials, from the willingness to apply tools and heat to a problem.  Getting the low-hanging fruit — getting the base chemicals to cross from plant to alcohol — that’s easy.  Getting the raw chemical building blocks of the world into the spagyric… that requires a different kind of effort.  A deeper one, a heartier one, a more dedicated one.  Separate, Dissolve, Burn Up the Leftovers, take the Ashes and dump them back in, Recreate the Work Fresh and New.

It’s a beginning.

From A Teaching Perspective…

The Filtration Process continues

From a teaching perspective, this is hard.  The rewards of a spagyric tincture aren’t really meant to be shared. They can’t be, really — nominally, this is medicine, but medicine from a style and philosophical approach to medicine that is no longer common nor approved.  The techniques require access to tools and materials that we no longer accept that students should work with.

And yet the process!

“Take something natural — using human gifts, dissolve the easily-gotten parts, and break them down — using other human gifts, shatter what remains into miniscule pieces — burn those pieces to release the even stranger bits — recombine with the easily-gained bits — leave them alone a while, except for a little gentle stirring — filter out the raw bits.”

Isn’t that what we ask students to do with their writing? Or their lab reports? Or when correcting mathematical errors in a piece of homework? Don’t we teachers sit like coffee filters over open jars, to collect the black bile that students spew out, and find a way to make sure the pure essence of their work, and the pure essence of their personhood, reaches the page or the presentation or the planning book? Don’t we occasionally apply too much pressure, and the filter breaks, and we say terrible words, and reach for the paper towels, and call in the heavy hitters and have to re-filter the whole batch?

Does anyone get what I’m trying to say?

There’s richness is the reminders here.

Tai chi Y2D55: teaching vs, working

Yesterday a friend of a friend approached me about learning tai chi. And while I showed him how to do Five Golden Coins, I realized that I had zero interest in teaching tai chi during that short training demo. Part of it is that I don’t feel ready to teach. I’ve learned how to do tai chi daily, and keep at it; there’s a big difference between base competency and mastery, though. And I’m not at mastery. Meanwhile there’s several good tai chi teachers in town who don’t need me stomping all over their feeding grounds.

But more than that, I find, is the challenge that the work, and the teaching of the work, are two different things. When I’m teaching, as I did yesterday, I’m not working. When I’m working, I can’t teach. I have to do one or the other. And I realized that — while I’m perfectly happy to show someone a qi gong routine or do a form with them — I have zero interest in doing the intense one on twenty practice necessary to train someone to do what I do. Not only do I have zero interest, I don’t actually want the job — I’m already in a teaching relationship with quite a lot of people, and it’s enough. I don’t want fewer students than I have now, but I don’t want more.

Out of the blue, as well, a friend of mine and I had a chance to text each other, and I realized I’m investing a lot of energy in friendships that aren’t actually working, and not really investing enough energy in the friendships I already have. It was quite the insight, and related, I think, to the teaching vs. working problem: if I’m teaching, it’s hard to form friendships; if I’m working in friendship mode, it’s hard to teach.

So don’t expect me to start up a dojo any time soon.

Simple Gifts

It turns out that a dodecagon is fairly simple to produce from a circle crossed by a cross. The use of circles at the intersections of of the cross and circle can then be evolved into the dodecagon, and then into a twelve pointed star. How awesome!

The Full Neo-Orphic Hymns

I’ve gathered together all seven of these Neo-Orphic Hymns that I’ve written, to the seven planets as they’re understood in the Hermetic philosophy.  And they’re now available on a single page for your reference and readability.  If you do make use of them, please let me know!

Poem: For the Sun

I have it in mind to write seven planetary odes— hymns for the seven classical planets of the ancient world, and the principal divine forces of the “seven heavens” as laid out in classical Hellenistic/Roman philosophy, and as later used by Medieval Christians, and as later used by Renaissance humanists.

Today being Sunday, the hymn in question is for the Sun.  This is the last of the seven!

Great golden titan, lord of light and heat,
agile and vital, our great king, the Sun—
only from your warmth, does our life stay sweet,
and when you bless our work, it’s well-begun.
When your golden chariot mounts the sky
at break of day with four stallions of flame
you fill the world with harmony divine!
Not even the darkest cloud can deny
that it is day, and worthy of your name!
Yet lend an ear, and to my prayer incline

For all of earth and sky receive your light
and you rule each season in its turn.
The wicked fear you, but you guide the kind,
for all things bend toward justice in your sight.
Throughout all ages you are doomed to burn
ripening both grape and creative mind,
rising and setting in your ordered way—
father of night and the sower of stars,
teach us to quit the night and seek the day:
for you bring an ending to baseless fears.

Come, valiant Sun, and to my prayer take heed:
awake your noble influence in me!
For nothing lives or does that does not need
your glorious golden divinity:
Bright source of all existence, lord of noon,
whose golden lyre holds the melody
that joins as one the music of the spheres,
Phoebus almighty, brother of the Moon,
help me to play with the great harmony,
that psalm eternal which gladdens all ears!

I’ve had this poem kicking around for a couple of weeks, and I’ve made a few edits along the way.  But I wanted to release it on a Sunday, because, you know — it’s the Sun and the energies of the Higher Self which the Sun represents.   You don’t want to release those sorts of powers casually into the world.  You want to make them happen on the right day!

Poem: Quatrains on Geomancy

Like the Digital Ambler, I’m pretty interested in Geomancy. Geomancy is one of the divination systems of uncertain origin, although Ron Eglash and others believe it originated in west Africa, possibly among the kingdom of Mali, Ghana and the like.  It eventually became part of medieval European lore by translation through Dar al-Islam and Caliphate-era Spain.  Thanks to Alphonso the Wise and other medieval royal patrons, it entered the Western magical vocabulary, and was in use frequently from Spain to Slovenia up through the mid-1500s, when its use began to decline. There was a brief revival in the mid and late 1800s, but now it seems to be making a genuine comeback.

Which means that it’s the perfect time to launch a poem about the sixteen signs of Geomancy, this Double-Quatrains on Geomancy.  Each of the unrhymed stanzas deals with one of the sixteen signs of Geomancy, and serves as a way of encapsulating the lore and information about each sign.  Enjoy.

BOY more strong than good,  beardless sword-swinger
acting before thinking: heading for trouble.
Fire-headed ram: martial, heady, rash,
blood-spattered white-head, questing here and there.

LOSS — escaping wealth, purse emptying fast;
transience and loss, all things pass away…
Earthy-throated bull, loving yet losing.
yellowing white-neck: all beyond your grasp.

WHITE chalice upright, mind’s peaceful wisdom,
favors intellect, rarely works alone.
Twins of strong shoulders, stable quicksilver,
pure white spotted red, mystical madness

PEOPLE mill in crowds: multitude muddles
without goal or plan: stable inertia.
Crab full of sweet milk: watery full moon:
unfocused sea-green — no real direction.

GREAT FORTUNE coming: fair river valley!
inner strength achieved; stabilized glory.
Great-hearted Lion noble in Sunlight:
green, yellow and gold…press onward: succeed!

CROSSROADS diverging: multiplied choices,
ranges of options, many paths open.
Virginal belly — Mercury’s swiftness
honest purple earth: temperance restored.

GIRL of bright beauty: desire’s mirror,
fickle happiness, impermanent joy.
kidneys on the scales, breath born of Venus —
white and bright greenness: impermanent joy.

RED and hot-tempered, shot-glass upside-down
passion, pleasure, sex: drunk on life and love.
big-cocked scorpion: wild-running Mars
red, for town-painting — hard-partying star!

GAIN, the full wallet: fat purse of bounty,
successful prudence, profitable care.
Hips of the archer, Jove upon firey throne;
red, yellow and green, material gain.

PRISON, cold jail cell: lonely enclosure.
binding, restriction, impairment, delay:
the kneeling sea-goat beached on Saturn’s lead;
fixed russet and dun: focused work alone.

SORROW, in the pit: illness or failure,
grudging permanence — woe, pain and trouble.
hobbled water-man breathing Saturn’s myrrh:
dirty, tawny, dark, grounded in mourning.

JOY, singing, laughing, raw vitality,
creative genius, health and inner light,
koi swimming ’round feet — Jove swimming in pond,
glittering emerald — health, success and smiles.

DRAGON’S TAIL — endings, completed efforts,
concluded cycles, and finished labors.
Left-handed archer, Moon in south station
robed in dark crimson, endings wreathed in flame.

DRAGON’S HEAD — blessings, beginnings, grand starts,
benefic outset, change for the better.
Virgin on her throne, Moon in north station.
pure white with citrine: well-made beginnings.

SMALL FORTUNE — lucky, happy accidents
man on mountain-top, luck comes from outside.
Fast-leaping Lion, breezes of summer,
yellow fickleness, unstable success.

ROAD — Journey begins, change can’t help coming,
travel and motion, nothing stays the same.
Crab swims in Ocean, Moon has full stomach.
White flecked with azure, Pilgrim walks alone.

This piece bears more in common with the Rune Poem than most of the poetry I’ve ever written.  It’s a mnemonic device more than it is a poem, although the sound of the lines being read aloud is kind of cool.  And I suppose that it could be turned into a mini-book of sorts.  I may have to work on that.  A note on the text: in English, it’s customary for the Geomantic signs to be given their Latin names, e.g. Puer, Amissio, Albus, Populus, Fortuna Major, Conjunctio, Puella, Rubeus, Aquisitio, Carcer, Tristitia, Laetitia, Cauda Draconis, Caput Draconis, Fortuna Minor, and Via.  I belong to the Druidical Order of the Golden Dawn, and we learn the Welsh names of the signs: Mab, Colled, Gwyn, Pobl, Bendith Fath, Cyswllt, Merch, _____, Gyr, Carchar, _____, ______ , Bendith Fach, and Ffordd.  I was tempted to work those names in.  But something John Michael Greer said recently in a private list made me realize how much of this lore is hidden behind the

Poem: For Saturn

I have it in mind to write seven planetary odes— hymns for the seven classical planets of the ancient world, and the principal divine forces of the “seven heavens” as laid out in classical Hellenistic/Roman philosophy, and as later used by Medieval Christians, and as later used by Renaissance humanists.

Today being Saturday, the hymn in question is for Saturn.  Funny, that:

 Ethereal Titan, Time’s own father,
Ancient of Days, through eternities vast:
carry our spirits, as light as feather,
joining our present with future and past.
You govern all perfection and decline—
the seed in furrow, and the harvest scythe,
life’s final stages, and the gaping grave.
With trudging step, you walk the outmost line
of seven heavens, where abysses writhe
and tremble — fear stalks the steps of the brave

who venture to walk in your silent hall,
and only ghosts dance in your groaning tomb.
For everything that lives, must have its fall;
nothing last forever which leaves the womb.
Yet all that dies must in due course renew
what now begins, and moves toward completion.
Each generation in turn goes to dust,
as heat from the fire goes up the flue,
and fuel becomes ashen dissolution.
Even iron stoves crack and turn to rust.

Always in like manner does Time beat down
every growing and every shrinking thing;
forgotten solitude follows renown,
like cables unraveled to tangled string.
Rhea’s husband and Prometheus wise,
who binds obstetric nature in his chains:
propitious hear these prayers at sacred rites,
Lord Saturn, make our blameless lives the prize,
and come, peaceful death — reuse our remains,
as fuel for future lives, and future lights.

Not much re-writing here — the last six lines of the last stanza needed some fixing, but in general it was the same poem beginning to end.  Saturn and I have always had a bit of a complex relationship — I’ve had the experience of coming into a hospital room where a relative lay dying, and had them die in the room right then and there, to be entirely comfortable with my relationship with the powers of death and endings. At the same time, though, I don’t think it’s possible to completely ignore the presence of these powers in the world, and the result was that I had an easier time writing this poem than some of the others.