Deborah Lipp

Zsuzsa talked a lot about the meaning of the firewalk being a release from fear. Once you’ve walked on fire you can do anything; that sort of thing. Fear wasn’t on top of my list, though.

Someone asked about what it would mean, how to know what it would mean to them. And I asked, what if I don’t want it to “mean” something? Like, if I want it to live in a place in me beyond words that can condense into “meaning.”

Which is a lot of what I got, in truth, and I think where my deep sobbing came from — that place beyond meaning within.

A lot of what it meant for me was the move past cynicism. I tend to sneer at a lot of things. Which is, hello? I’m a witch! So why make fun of crystals? Why make fun of anything without first giving it a fair hearing? But I do, I do. I sneer and am cynical and think a lot of things that people do are silly. And doesn’t that hold me back? Doesn’t that leech into my magic? Well, certainly a thing I laughed at was firewalking, but now I’m not laughing, and maybe that changes me.

I used to long, long for visible manifestation of magic. Blue light shooting from my athame. Levitation. All that fancy stuff. And at some point I gave up that wish. I got reasonable. Sane. Witchcraft worked without all that Hollywood stuff. But firewalking? Pretty frickin visible.

But a big thing was about releasing trauma related to fire. I realized, after I signed up for this, that I had a major trauma about this. Arthur walked on a Starwood firepit when he was nine years old. He thought it was cool ash, but there were hot coals underneath the ash, and he absolutely trashed his feet. Trashed. Spent the summer in a wheelchair. We were, in fact, investigated by Child Protective Services for possibly abusing him (our doctor told CPS he thought we were forcibly initiating children by making them walk on fire — nice!). So I knew I had that trauma, and I didn’t know how that would play out with this ritual.

But I’d utterly forgotten an earlier trauma. About fifteen years ago, there was an incident involving a person at a festival jumping into a fire. Deranged, drug-and-alcohol addled leap into the fire, pulled back by two people, fought them off, jumped back in. And this was someone I knew fairly well and liked, a stable and gentle person before and after (he ultimately recovered from his burns), not some dingbat crazy person. I was standing no more than six feet from him when it happened, and I gave an eyewitness report to the police. It was, let me say, a bad night. Worse for him than for me. Bad night all around.

And the day after the firewalk, I suddenly remembered that, and was full of feeling. And I though, how did I forget that and not think about it around the hot coals? How did I do that?

Beyond words. Beyond “meaning.” But the meaning is there.

I haven’t seen any movies this week, and, while I could review movies I’ve seen but not reviewed, I’d rather not. I just got back from Wic-Can Fest and talking about movies is just not where I am today.

I want to talk about firewalking.

I cannot say for sure why I signed up for the firewalk. I saw it was offered, and I guess that I wanted to make a chink in my own armor. I am such a cynic, after all. I mean, I’m a witch, and a psychic, and I know this isn’t other people’s definition of cynicism, but within the context of the magical community I am high on the snark side of things, and have great disdain for people I perceive as too credulous. And firewalking? That’s crazy. That’s impossible.

Somewhere in there I thought “But.”

But they’re offering it here. But people here have done it and report being blown away by it. But what have I got to lose (burnt feet!)? But what if I’m wrong? Well, my friend assured me that you don’t have to walk the fire if you attend, so I signed up.

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In addition to pluralism, I think the other core value of Paganism is immanence. And, like pluralism, I think it stands in strong contrast to the monotheistic society in which we live, and I think it provides us with an ability to shape values that the larger culture can easily mistake for having no values at all.

Let’s define two basic ways of viewing deity: Transcendent or immanent. Transcendence means that deity is outside of and apart from ourselves, and immanence means that deity is within and a part of ourselves. Although this is a binary, we can believe in more than two ways: We can believe that deity is transcendent, is immanent, is both transcendent and immanent, is neither transcendent nor immanent, or is unknowable. So I count five variations, and maybe I’ve missed some.

But we can still talk about the binary, because the binary is this: Either a belief in immanence is present or it’s absent. Every variation I talked about can be fitted into that binary, and that’s really important in terms of values. (I would say that most atheists and agnostics believe a form of immanence, in that they believe non-deity values are within.)

Fundamentally, if God is outside of us, then the rules of good behavior must come from outside of us. They are handed to Moses on stone tablets, or derived from Gematria, or received through divine inspiration. We can receive messages in prayer or study Scriptures or find some other method, but if you believe the gods are not within, then you believe that right and wrong cannot be found within.

Without immanence, people aren’t trustworthy. They will do the worst possible thing the minute they allow God’s Law to loosen its grip on them. That’s why Christians don’t, in general, trust atheists.

But if you understand the gods to be within us, in whatever way you understand that, then people have the innate capacity to be good. People can be good without Law! Now, that is not to say people will be good, or that there is no need for laws, but I am talking about values, not governance. Maybe at some point I’ll write about evil (maybe not). Right now, that’s not the point.

Okay, I’ll digress for a moment. Pagan religion is behavior that places us in touch with the gods. Through our ritual life we do things that allow us to experience closeness to deity. Because obviously, we don’t normally, day-to-day, get the I Have the Goddess Within Me feeling. We mostly get the I’m Stuck in Traffic feeling and My Kid Freakin’ Ignores Everything I Say feeling. So having a ritual life places me in a better position to have an experience of immanence (and transcendence). Many people who are atheists also do things that allow them to enhance the experience of inner goodness or wisdom, just without the deity part.

But okay, where was I?

The point is, the entire book on doing the right thing is within you and within me, and within every human being, because the gods are in there, inseparable from us.

That allows you and I to have different values. We aren’t going by an external rule book, after all, so we won’t necessarily find the same answers when we look.

Which brings us back to pluralism again, doesn’t it?

And again, it doesn’t mean there are no rules. It just means that the rules can vary, can be situational, and don’t have to be written down or handed down to be valid.

I have a friend who describes himself as a “Jesus-ian.” He says he worships Jesus but he’s not a Christian. This used to drive me crazy: Isn’t that like saying “I only sleep with the same sex as me but I’m not gay”? At what point to you get to twist definitions past what they mean?

…which opens up a whole possible conversation about definitions which I’d really like to get into, but is not the point of this post. This post is about religion.

I worship Kali. In terms of formal worship, I do so infrequently and imperfectly, but She is with me and a part of me (literally, via my tattoos), and I often worship informally. Through my relationship with Kali I have developed spiritual relationships with other Hindu deities, specifically Shiva and Ganesha, but also Lakshmi, Durga, and Hanuman.

But I’m not a Hindu. There’s more to Hinduism, after all, than its gods. I’m not a Hindu because I don’t believe in liberation as a basic goal of the human soul, because I don’t accept the Vedas as a primary source of sacred scripture, and because I don’t believe in a guru system nor do I seek to have a guru. Primarily, I think, I’m not a Hindu because I already have a religion: I’m a Wiccan. And while Wicca doesn’t in any way demand that you be exclusive to Wicca (it’s not monogamous), Wicca informs my ritual life and my sense of who I am as a spiritual being. Any Hindu ritual I do is ancillary to my core Wiccan practice, not because Wicca requires it, but because of who I am.

So if I worship Kali and am not a Hindu, I guess my friend can worship Jesus and not be a Christian. I dunno, it still kind of bothers me, I guess because there are SO MANY different kinds of Christians, so many different belief sets that are defined as Christian, it seems like he should fit in there somewhere; if nowhere else, as a “mere Christian,” to quote C.S. Lewis.

But the broader point is that a religion is more than its gods, although we seem comfortable defining religion as “the worship of ____.” Religion is gods, stories, practices, beliefs, goals, and community. All of these. And all of these are found, for me, in Wicca. That other gods are also a part of my life doesn’t actually change that.

Hooray hooray
The first of May
Outdoor “loving”
Begins today.

Or not, in this weather.

I’m having an ironic first day of Spring here, as it’s snowing out.

The equinoxes have a poorly-formed tradition in most of the Pagan community, and I don’t know if I’ve ever attended a really dazzling Spring Equinox or Fall Equinox ritual. (I’m talking community rituals, here, not oathbound Tradition stuff.) For six of the eight holidays, there is plentiful folklore and a rich and varied ritual tradition throughout Neopaganism. The equinoxes, not so much. Fall tends to be a Thanksgiving sort of thing, “Harvest Home,” but both the festival before and after are also harvests, and have other distinctive and beautiful features.

Spring equinox, which some call Ostara, tends to be a bit of a piggyback on Easter. Colored eggs and all that. Which is fine; Pagan holidays and Christian holidays are often related. But the colored eggs don’t figure prominently in ritual behavior—no egg hunts under the High Priestess’s robe, although hey, that’s a thought.

In much Western occult tradition, equinoxes are considered unlucky. Balance is always sought in magical work, but healthy balance is dynamic and fluid. Perfect balance is stasis, so on the equinox, change cannot be effective. Initiations and marriages are not performed.

Spring equinox is when we plant early seeds. Where I live, peas are ideal, as they are harvested about the time other planting is done. If you use starter seeds (rather than planting from seedlings), they should be started now in temperate climates. My normal spring equinox ritual is a consecration and planting of seeds, and this can be quite beautiful (despite my grumpiness).

All my life, I have struggled with the notion of prayer. Prayer, unaccompanied by ritual or ceremony, is just, well, thinking at God. From childhood, this baffled me. How does it work? How is thinking at God not just plain thinking?

I was attracted to Orthodox Judaism as a child, I think, because there’s so much stuff to do. Doing is what’s lacking in the notion of prayer.

I still don’t get it, to tell you the truth. There are definitely people who just pray, or who pray with so little ritual that they might as well just pray, and they get a satisfying religious experience from it.

At the funeral mass on Monday, I watched the priest perform the transubstantiation, and I totally got how magical that was. And then he said “let us pray,” and I thought, well here we are. This is where I was in synagogue as a girl. Pray? How am I to do that?

One of the things a religious experience is supposed to do is get us out of our heads. I mean, for those of us who are in our heads. So praying in the head, that’s not going to work. Ritual is how we allow prayer to not just be more head stuff.

For the Catholics at the mass, the ritual had prepped them to be ready for the moment of prayer. (a) I wasn’t there with them, wasn’t connected to that ritual, and (b) it was never enough for me. Sitting there in the seats watching the ritual happen, reading from the prayer book, sitting, standing, sitting. I never saw how that could school my mind so that I could pray.

Plus, you know, they encourage you to pray at other times. When I was nine and my grandfather was dying, someone said I could pray for him, which I did. By thinking at God. Which never felt like anything except thinking.

People’s minds are not all alike, of course. Some people say, ‘Why do all that ritual stuff? Why make it so complicated when in truth, it’s all in your mind?’ For some people, that’s fine. Not many, I think. Most of us need some doing to move ourselves into a receptive spiritual state.

The doing part can be the physical behaviors (bowing the head, davening*, the Osiris position**), preparatory steps (casting a circle, lighting a candle), and more. Another sort of “doing” is the act of setting aside; of reserving certain things only for prayer, so that locations (church, an altar), objects (an athame, an idol, a meditation mat), or articles of clothing (a ritual robe, a prayer shawl), are triggers for a proper state of mind. The act of moving in the direction of the set aside objects (donning the robe, going to the location) or using them, or gazing at them, or touching them, is part of the doing.

Meditation helps prepare and train the mind for prayer, but of course, meditation, too, is a kind of ritual.

It’s the body-mind connection. Head alone isn’t enough. Doing plus thinking, with intention, that’s how prayer can truly happen.

(By the way, in looking for a definition of daven, I found this great article that sort of says the same thing, except in a Jewish context.)

*To daven in Yiddish is literally to pray, but in common usage it means the rocking up and down that Orthodox Jews do during prayer.
**Traditional in Wicca, sometimes called the God position.