Death/Knight of Cups reversed. The Death card corresponds with Water (cold/binds and wet/adapts, and sensitive, imaginative energy that strives to stay the same or take the same course), Scorpio, Nun (fish head; liberation), and the Path between Tiphareth (the hub of the creation process where energies harmonize and focus to illuminate and clarify) and Netzach (the stimulating factors of emotion and inspiration), and tells of natural change that cannot be stopped.  Death is about transitions, about the ultimate transition, permanent and non-reversible. Not fun, but effective, and maybe even exciting. The Knight of Cups (cusp of Aquarius, “I know,” friendships, the group, cause-oriented, and Pisces, “I believe,” feelings, duality, suffering, soul growth) is about feeling things strongly and about dreaming, and about the imagination.  Because my Knight is reversed today, I may be dealing with unbalanced feelings, or perhaps a lack of clarity regarding the source or motivation of those feelings.

My Thoth card is the Three of Cups reversed. “Abundance” is Crowley’s keyword for the Three of Cups (Mercury, reason, intelligence, orderliness, communication, in Cancer, “I feel,” sensitive, tenacious, nurturing, moody).  This card is about friends and blessings and networking or connections. My “Abundance” card is reversed today; perhaps I should not believe everything I hear.

My Legacy card is The Sun, flavored by The Hermit. The Sun corresponds with Fire (hot/separates and dry/shapes, spontaneous, impulsive and energetic change), our Sun (the inner core of a person or situation), Resh (the face; reason), and the Path between Yesod (the place where patterns and images emerge that may manifest in the physical world) and Hod (provides analysis and communication), and tells of a time of enlightenment; at least for now, hard work and patience are manifesting a great harvest. The Hermit corresponds with Earth (cold/binds and dry/shapes, and material, practical and stable energy that is slow to change), as well as Virgo (“I serve,” practical, analytical, work and service oriented, orderly), Yod (open hand, touch), and the Path between Tiphareth (the hub of the creation process where energies harmonize and focus to illuminate and clarify) and Chesed (the place where forms and structure are stabilized and nurtured), is about searching within for a deeper meaning.  The Hermit in an upright position uses solitude as a tool to increase understanding, but since my Hermit is reversed (and flavoring my Sun card), I am being told that the enlightenment of The Sun will be better absorbed if I keep connected to my world.

My 6-digit date number is 10, which tells of the end of a cycle, which reduces further to the number 1, which represents potential and position. 

My horoscopes: “A rush of humanitarian spirit and a desire to do some real good might find you looking into various charities in order to find those you might want to help. However, money could be flowing out for other purposes a bit too quickly for your tastes, Sagittarius. It perhaps would be best to find one group that suits you and give only to that one. Save other worthy causes for another time.”

And: “Take your thoughts and share them with those who can help execute them today. If you have a trailer that needs to be moved, don't try to do it all by hand. Ask around for someone with a large truck who can hook it up to the back and cart it around to wherever it needs to go. You have the resources available to you, all you need to do is set the gears in motion”

My Shadowscapes Insight is regarding Judgement. Sooner or later the time comes for each of us when an accounting is required.  This card is telling me that the time is good for me to look at the cycle that is just passing away in order to appraise with an open and objective mind what I’ve done.  Despite the name of the card, there is no harsh judgment here, just analysis.  If the results are good, I will reuse; if the results are bad, I will discard.   

Okay, there must be something in the water today.  I feel the need to take a time out and define my chosen religion.

First, I guess I should define that word, religion.  To me, religion is a template or form or cup if you will, into which we pour our spirituality.  In order to get the most out of our spiritual experiences, we each need to find the right template or form or cup into which we pour that spirituality; if we work with the wrong one, there will be chafing and discomfort.  Religions involve core values, instructions for worship, and often, sacred texts, and those are all man-made; this means that “religion” does not equal “Deity,” but rather a set of man-made instructions regarding a way to connect with Deity.  And religion is not the only way to manifest a spiritual nature; there are other more secular templates, forms and cups out there that can be equally fulfilling to the right person.

I am a practitioner of Wicca.  I have been practicing Wicca almost 10 years, and have been studying and researching as well as practicing during most of that time.  So, you may ask, just what is Wicca?  Well, I’m glad you asked.  It seems that many people have different ideas of just what Wicca is or isn’t, just what makes a Wiccan a Wiccan. 

Wicca is not the “old religion.”  Yes, it is based in part on some cultures and practices of pre-Christian religions, but Wicca also draws from the Golden Dawn, Hermeticism and other traditions of Western Magick and Mysticism. Aleister Crowley and Gerald Gardner were friends, so we can also assume that Crowley had some input into the BOS Gardner presented to the world.  And these are not the only sources of the core beliefs and the practices of Wicca.  There are Traditions of Wicca that embrace Celtic myths, Norse myths, Greek Pantheons and Roman Pantheons, to name a few, but don’t believe that if you practice Wicca, you are literally practicing an ancient religion. 

Does Wicca’s relative youth detract from its validity?  Wicca is not old; compared to some of the mainstream religions that are thousands of years old, Wicca (publicly presented by Gardner in the middle of the 20^th Century) is a mere infant of less than 100 years of age.  But even those mainstream religions had to begin somewhere.  After all, early practitioners of that upstart faith called Christianity took a few simple concepts and ran with them, and we all know where that ended up.  Will Wicca have the same renown as Christianity in 2,000 years?  I don’t have the faintest idea, but the mere newness of Wicca as compared to other religions cannot be seen as an invalidation of Wicca’s effectiveness.  And despite the fact that Wicca is not that old, it has already begun to evolve; that certainly seems to indicate that Wicca is relevant and will most likely remain so.

Like all religions, Wicca has a set of core beliefs that define it.  Wiccans perceive Deity as being male and female, and see the union of the Sacred Masculine and the Sacred Feminine as the source of life; we see Nature and the cycles of life occurring on our world and in our universe as one form of physical manifestation of the workings of Deity, and thus as sacred.  We do not see the physical world as the only plane of existence.  We see life as eternal; this means that there may have been a Big Bang that created our universe, but that Big Bang happened because the previous universe contracted.  We see the life essence as being the same as and/or coming from the pure essence that is Deity; thus all life is sacred.

Wiccans believe that we are each responsible for our own thoughts, our words and our actions, and the consequences of those thoughts, words and actions. We believe that our universe is composed of “energy,” and we believe that we can often have an effect on the manifestation of that energy.  However, read the sentence immediately before this one, because it applies here.  This means that we believe what we do, what we say, and even what we think can have an effect on our world.  And again, you are directed to the first sentence in this paragraph; it applies here too.  Acquiring and refining these skills in order to make them personally useful usually involves lots of research and practice.  You could say that Wicca is a form of witchcraft, however the terms are not interchangeable.  In my opinion, all Wiccans are witches, but not all witches are Wiccans.  If you define “Pagan” as a person or community observing a polytheistic religion, then you would define Wicca as a Pagan spiritual path.

Wiccans believe that the connection between each of us and Deity is unique; we believe that just as we are drawn to interact with and come to know Deity, Deity is also programmed to respond to our need to interact.  Because each of us perceives life, living and the world around us in a unique way, Deity comes to each of us in a way that we as individuals can comprehend and accept.  This means that all religions and all spiritual seekers should be treated with respect. This also means that much of what we experience during rituals and magickal working does not lend itself easily to words, and thus is not easily described to others or proved to have happened. Unlike many other religions, Wiccans mostly do not have an argument with science; rather, Wiccans see science as “sacred knowledge seeking.”

If what you practice does not contain these core beliefs, your religion is valid, equally valid to mine.  It just is not Wicca.  Wicca is a name, a name for a particular pattern or a set of beliefs; it is not a ruler that measures validity.

Just like any other religion, there are Weekend Wiccans and there are Wiccans who are not interested in going beyond a certain level of immersion into their Craft, and there are Wiccans who enjoy researching and exploring their own Craft as well as the practices and knowledge and culture of other seekers, religions and spiritual paths.  I don’t feel that I have the right to judge another, so I don’t comment on the practices of others.  This means that I treat the bride who wants fairy wings attached to her wedding dress for her Handfasting with respect equal to the guy who has deeply studied his Craft and those associated with it.  My library contains books by Cunningham, but it also contains books by Drury, Agrippa, Crowley, Saunders, Bonewits, Reed, and Radin, to name a few.  And yes, I’ve read them, and gotten something of value from each.  I am one of those people who want to know how and why things work.

Is Wicca about putting on a flowing robe and tucking flowers into your hair and going out to the forest so you can dance in a circle with likeminded practitioners?  Yes, it can be.  But it is also about striving to honestly face your darkest self and learn from those uncomfortable or frightening parts of your psyche (and they are there, in every single one of us), and it is about crying in despair and pounding the table in anger in order to do the difficult work necessary to understand who and what we are.  For it is only by doing this that we can value this life we are given, and every other life we have been or will be given; after all, life itself is not all roses and sunshine.  Wicca is not the only path to evolution, but it is a path to evolution.

I commented on a blog post today regarding the non-validity of Wicca.  I was the only post that disagreed with the blogger; I presented my argument respectfully, to the best of my ability.  My post was removed.  To that blogger I say that is a shame, because it is through respectful disagreement that we all learn.

I commented elsewhere in a similar situation, and was confronted by a very angry person who proceeded to attack me personally, even though that person had never met me, never spoken to me before, and thus made assumptions regarding who I am, what I know, and what I believe.  I have no problem with people who disagree with me; in fact, some of the best conversations I’ve had were with people who disagreed with me, but who were able to listen with an open mind, and then speak their piece without personally attacking others.  I don’t have anything to say to that angry person because I don’t choose to perpetuate such a negative conversation.

And yes, there is danger in open communications, and I understand that.  The written word is perilous, particularly in such a dehumanized, impersonal venue as the internet.  But if you comment on my blog, and you disagree with me, I won’t delete your comment as long as it is meant to respectfully disagree and not meant to wound. 

And I am grateful to these two people, because by blogging regarding my experiences, I have crystallized to a greater degree my understanding of my own Craft, and of myself.

Separation and Conjunction at its finest!

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