Travel, Interrupted. With Friends.

I’m working on the Ninth Mansion of the Moon image, called Al-Tarf after beta Cancri.  It’s… ahem… an image of some delicacy, because it’s a man covering his eyes and wanting his genitals.  I suppose I could draw or photograph a Ken doll.  But a different image both suggested and presented itself, so I’m working on that. On the other hand, I don’t think it’s going to appear here.  Lines have to be drawn somewhere.

Plus, it’s an image for “causing discord among men” and causing trouble in travel and limiting harvests.  So I’ve interrupted myself several times in the drawing of it, to consider whether it’s a good idea to finish it. And now, I’m stuck in Atlanta at the airport.

The modern American teacher, typically a modernist and a materialist and a rationalist (no matter what church they belong to or what god or gods they believe in), is likely to regard this as unlucky coincidence.   I mean, here I am stuck in an airport, and it’s no big deal — travel at the holidays, this time of year, is likely to be complicated.  It’s winter — weather incidents are likely to get in the way.

Nonetheless, here I am under a full moon, on the day that the Moon is in the Ninth Mansion of Al-Tarf, and the number of people who are showing up at the gate to fly back “home” who I know is growing and growing.  There’s a whole family that lives just up the hill from my lady, and a guy I know from a festival in eastern New York called SpiritFire.  I have this feeling that others I know will be showing up shortly to take this same “last flight from Atlanta” to get back to New England. Astonishing.

And part of me wonders if part of it is that Barbiel, the angel of the ninth mansion, wants his/her image finished and opened to the world?  Is that why we’re all here?  It’s a lot of odd coincidences piling up on top of one another.  Folks from my magical life all appear at the same gate at the same airport?

Of course a typical American teacher — from a rationalist, materialist, modernist viewpoint — would insist that this is ridiculous.  Angels are not particularly supposed to be in American public schools at the very least, and how would drawing a picture of Barbiel’s image and reciting a prayer or declaration on his behalf get me home any sooner? Would publishing his image make it easier or harder for me to get home?  Would it have any effect at all?  Again, the rationalist, materialist, modernist teacher in me would say, no, of course not.  

Am I always those things, though?  No, not really. Not so much.  I’m mindful that we know more than we realize, and that we affect more than we realize.  There’s more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.  And so it’s an easy matter to resolve.   If Barbiel wants his image revealed to the world, he’s going to have to wait — holdign me up is not going to get me to give out a tool for causing discord among men or causing infirmity.

But let me release a different kind of tool to the world, a poem.  Let me unlock my word hoard, and remind Barbiel that we mortals are not utterly powerless to the machinations of the spirit realms.

Hail, al-Tarf’s Barbiel, honest and sure,
who of twenty-eight mansions rules the ninth.
Give me strength, infirmity to endure,
and help me through a long journey day’s length.
You halt winnowers on the threshing floor,
and hinder travelers at the portal,
and strand the ships on sandbars far from shore,
while warning the youthful that they’re mortal.
“Prince of unpleasant truths” thy epithet,
while Heaven’s Cancer defines thy mansion:
Leave us untouched, and now kindly forget
to gift us with trials of your invention.
Distance me from men of malignant will,
and go on thy way without doing ill.

They’ve just announced the gate for my flight, and we’ll see whether Barbiel lets me go home.  But let me ask this of myself and my readers, O materialist, rationalist, modernists that we are… IF I do get home, is it because Barbiel helped me?  Or that my poem hindered him? Or that he’s punishing me for my audacity?  Or that his power is waning now that his time is ending and the next mansion is beginning?

OR… is it just that the weather cleared up and the airline got their act together, and so on?

These matters are not cut and dried.  They are not settled, though we believe them so.  When we take on an alternate mindset, like “magic is real and there are spirits that work in the world,” we start encountering murky but consequential evidence that this is on.  When we take on a materialist mindset, and adopt the idea that this physical body of meat and minerals is all that there is, we encounter murky but consequential evidence that this is so. When we perform experiments to determine if there are spirit-beings, like writing these poems, and determine their results— we encounter evidence that they exist and that they can be persuaded or guided or governed.  When we deny their existence, we likewise encounter evidence that they are not real, and that travel delays and weather challenges are just part of the ordinary circumstances and difficulties of travel.  Welcome to the world. Life is hard.  Oh well, get used to it.

As Yann Martel pointed out in The Life of Pi, though, the world benefits from a degree of magical thinking from us.  We reënchant the world, in some sense, by believing in it and making it so.  My life is enriched and beautified by writing poetry in praise of an angel that most people in this airport would be hard-pressed to believe exists — “an angel who acts to hinder travelers and cause infirmities?  Isn’t that a bit much for a God who is absolutely just?”

And yet, in writing this poem, haven’t I enriched your life?  Haven’t I done what I could to bring my companions and colleagues and fellow travelers closer to home?  Haven’t I done my best to enchant the world so that they arrive at their intended destination?  Let us hope so.

Barbiel, may you prosper our way by forgetting about us for now.

Tulips drawing process

Tulips overview
Originally uploaded by anselm23

Via Flickr:
I heard that they give tulips in Japan on the first day of school. Actually, it turns out that they don’t (I heard this today from a Japanese schoolteacher), because school starts in April there, and tulips aren’t in season there in April.

But for my advisory group or homeroom students, I made little Artists’ Trading Cards of a bouquet of tulips, using Sachiko Umoto’s methodology from one of her books. Here are four cards in process: one with the bow, one with the background leaves added, one with the little forget-me-nots in the foreground, and then one with the three tulips.

I think they came out pretty nicely.

Kavad 4.7 — Sacred Geometry

The pentagram, badly drawn, with eight geometric constructions, and nine roundels of mathematical formulae (eventually)

There’s a beautiful geometrical pattern that I learned from JMG’s work, that was actually in a book by Mark Stavish.  Eventually that proof, I think, is going to go onto this panel as a nod to my initiaiton as a Freemason.  For now, I don’t feel comfortable putting that proof on display — the discovery and rediscovery of such a proof is not mine to share, especially not in working photographs of a construction project.  But the IDEA that there should be a panel within the kavad devoted to the issue of geometry, and sacred geometry — as well the “Blazing Star” of the pentagram, representative of the five elemental forces, and a tool for teaching the LBRP and other systems of energy work related to Hermeticism, strikes me as critical.  No less, the five pointed star (correctly drawn, of course, not as shown here), reveals the principle of Φ — phi, the Greek letter representing the golden ratio, or 1:1.618… and so on.  Including it large-scale in the kavad as a pentacle is a way of relating the Hermetic tradition to Wicca, to mathematics, and to concepts of natural beauty.

It occurs to me that I now have the five pointed star and the six pointed star both arranged in the Kavad now, and even though in an earlier post today I was dubious of the value of having the Cross in the center of the Kavad, maybe it makes more sense now to have it there. I wonder… can I get the star and moon of Islam in there too? What about the Om symbol of Hinduism?  The yin-yang? Maybe I should just put a big “coexist” sticker on the thing somewhere.

Prototyping a Painting

My friend Daniel says its important to carry prototypes all the way to the end. That way you can see all the mistakes, and not just the ones that you made at the beginning. When I outlined my painting on canvas, I immediately realized that I hadn’t properly spaced the circles. As a result, I couldn’t follow the actual plan or outline of the Sefer Yetzirah, the tree of life. But, in the spirit of figuring out what it looks like when you do the geometry incorrectly, I realized a number of things.

One, the retraction of earth and the moon places the Moon sephirah in the place of power, not the sun. Thus daath or knowledge becomes a place of power unconnected to other realities. This is the realm of the invisible sun.

Second, the more regular geometry feels less organic, more structured. It’s not alive, exactly. It’s more balanced, but less energetic. The empty space is necessary for the work to flourish.

I’m going to keep working on this painting, but I suspect it won’t be a Tree of Life when I’m done.

A Palace of Memory assignment

Some of you new readers (wow there are quite a few!) are trying to develop the skills to develop your own Palace of Memory, but you may not really grasp how important it is to develop a strong visual image of the thing you’re trying to remember. It’s one thing to memorize a poem through rote repetition, but it’s another to remember a whole web of facts and fingers as if it were a complete and thorough visual image.

Along those lines, I’m asking my readers to develop a script or a text or an image for the Palace of Memory, to share here in comments, of a specific thing that can or should be remembered.  Read on for a sample script, or go straight to comments for a chance to see what people are doing.

Letter Meme: I

I me

This is the letter meme. Rick Jones () gave me the letter I. I
gibber about 10 things that start with said letter. If you want to
play, comment and I’ll give you one too.