The last two posts have been a discussion of mythology and symbol, and how we can employ them in crisis management and problem solving.
This is an excellent jumping off point for the real power house of esoteric thought and practice, ritual.
We are all familiar with rituals. Weddings, funerals, Baptisms, Proms, Christmas, Easter, Halloween and the Forth of July are all cultural rituals that we are literally so accustom to that most people might not even realize that they represent the firmament that our lives revolve around. These events are where families connect, unions are cemented, news shared, achievements celebrated, traditions established and memories created.
If advertising has taught us nothing else, it has taught us that these rituals represent an opportunity to express the ideal. The perfect dress, or costume, or dish, or song will transform an event into the living embodiment of that ideal. While this is an exploitation of the drive to create a life that reflects our inner values (and the marketing of that drive for financial gain) these impulses exist to be exploited, and we can learn some effective means of doing so.
All that advertising is accurate in so far as the trappings of ritual have the ability to promote it’s efficacy. This is because the attention to detail we put into those trappings taps into the real driving force, the thing that the trappings represent: Intention.
Intention – Framing the Mythic Narrative
The intention behind a ritual act is the story that provides context for that action. It is what transforms the idea of blowing shit up for fun into a celebration of Liberty on the Forth of July! It is perhaps more difficult to convince your friends and family that it is a good day, in the middle of the driest part of the year, to blow shit up. But present the narrative that you are doing so in commemoration of an act of rebellion against tyranny, and it is suddenly a picnic with explosions, and everyone wants to be there!
That’s fine, you say, but that is hardly magick!
Except it is. It is an action undertaken to inculcate a specific type of consciousness, under specific circumstances, during a particular time of day at a particular time of the year. There is nothing more or less magickal in the history of mankind than that, as it is the same technology at work during a Christian Communion, a Wedding, or the Invocation of the Holy Guardian Angel.
A set of actions undertaken in a specific context in order to create a specific state of awareness, that is ritual.
So, the question becomes, how can you use this to your advantage? Great question! First you need to learn to control it!
Banishing
Once you start to work with symbols, you are going to awaken certain motives or complexes within your conscious mind that have been resting in your unconscious, where they have likely been wreaking havoc. This is a perfectly natural part of the process, that is nevertheless problematic, as they can rear their heads at inopportune moments. If only there were a way to shut them off!
Enter the banishing.
Simply speaking, a banishing is a ritual that creates a space or circle in which to work. It is a barrier against outside influence. And it is the cornerstone of any beginning practice.
You can employ it in daily practice to set up a sacred space for meditation. You can employ it before a job interview to quiet your racing mind. You can learn to do it in your sleep and literally confront nightmares with it. It is a simple, powerful and effective tool.
Rather than recreate a full course of study here, I am going to recommend several books that will be useful for a beginner if this is something you would like to explore. After all, this blog is little more than an overview tinged with personal observations, not a fully fleshed out course of study.
The first would be “Magick in Theory and Practice” by Aleister Crowley. Like the names says, it is a comprehensive guide to the Art. It also contains a few intentional blinds that a careful reading of the footnotes should clarify, but it can be difficult to interpret for beginners, especially if you are working without the benefit of guidance.
With that in mind, I find The Magick of Aleister Crowley by Lon Milo DuQuette much more approachable, containing many practical instructions for doing the work on your own.
Lastly, because this is still a theater blog, how about we premiere a clip of the Ritual of the Pentagram from The Rite of Saturn? The video clip was edited by Bob Jones, the audio provided by Christian Ballard, while the scene features Ryan Holsather, Melissa Holm, Josh Kibbey, Daniel Christensen and Richard Cardone. The group adaptation was conceived by director Melissa Holm and developed by the ensemble.
The Lesser Ritual of the Pentagram is a standard Banishing, although this version employs Invoking Earth Pentagrams. (If you want to know what that means, maybe pick up one or both of the books I suggested.)
[Editor’s Note: This blog post was nearly completed, although not entirely satisfactory, and scheduled to be posted on the morning of March 15, 2019. Upon arising that morning to review the words I had drafted, I saw the news about a gunman who killed 49 people in a Mosque in New Zealand. This tragic and misguided event shed some light upon what I had to say, and has resulted in a substantial rewrite of the piece in order to include an import aspect of the message that I had missed in my original post.]
It may come as no surprise, but producing musicals based on planetary rituals written by an infamous occultists can lead to some questions about what I, personally, believe. So, allow me to state for the record that I believe in the transformative power of mysticism and magick, and that religion is a cultural framework for those practices.
And if that satisfies your curiosity, or provides you the opportunity to write me off as a harmless eccentric, that is perfectly acceptable to me. I am mostly harmless, and rather eccentric.
But, for those of you who might want to understand why someone who seems relatively rational might engage in this type of practice and study, well, I am happy to explain.
Before I go any further, I present The Big Disclaimer. I speak for myself. My thoughts and ideas are informed by years of study and practical experience, shaped by the wisdom I have gleaned from those who were kind enough to share their understanding with me, and tried in the crucible of my own daily practice. While I have worked closely with people who have followed many paths, and while I follow many myself, I do not seek to claim authority over any tradition, but I will be making some rather sweeping and inclusive statements about all traditions. I understand that some of what I say might seem critical, and I hope that any criticism I offer is accepted gracefully.
Myth and History
Mythology and history are not the same thing. That seems like a pretty benign statement, but I will probably lose close to half of my audience right there.
We are a species that tells stories. Be it the trials we experience at the airport, or that time we met a famous musician at a dive bar, we have our narratives, and we tell them to each other and to ourselves. The dates and times may escape us, and the tales may go largely unremembered after the first or second telling, but we love to share. And those stories that resonate are retold, and embellished in the telling.
Unless we are scrupulously accounting for dates, times and locations in the record of our narratives, unless we are recording events carefully to avoid the encroachment of poetic embellishment, our tales will stray from the facts of a situation into the realm of personal fantasy in a matter of days, if not hours. And why not? In the majority of cases, it makes for a better story in our mind, especially because the new story supports our own narrative.
Most of what we are taught about history is actually mythology. Just lost another ten percent of my readers. But being frank: Columbus was basically a pirate who was bad at math. Washington never chopped down a cherry tree, much less told the truth about it. You could not fit every species of spider on an boat as small as the Ark is described in the Bible, much less two of every animal.
Yes, I said it. The Bible is mythology. Literally folk tales, told thousands of times and written down hundreds of years after they were first uttered around a camp fire. And the selection process regarding which of those tales was to be included in the book is a story unto itself, fraught with politics and the quest for personal power.
But don’t just take my word for it. Google “Council of Nicaea”. We’ll wait…
I often remark that there is a distinction between truth and fact that largely falls along the same lines as the divide between mythology and history. Fact is an event in space and time, something we can point to. Limited to the specific circumstances that govern that occurrence. Truth is our relationship to those facts, and is colored by our perception, illuminated in our recollection, and seasoned with our emotions.
In fact, there may have never existed a race between a tortoise and a hare, but the story contains a truth, or at least a childish truism. “Slow and steady wins the race.” That is the power of a myth, that it can capture an idea, and inspire further exploration. You may argue that a fable or parable differs from a myth, in that people never believed in the reality of a fable or parable, but interpreted myths as “facts” at one time.
Maybe some people did believe these stories were history. But, unless there were giant guys enacting these stories in front of the tiny folks who were originally telling them, those early artist were quite aware that they were crafting a narrative. I suspect many of the listeners were, too.
Please note that I have never said “just mythology”. I would never dream of employing the diminutive when discussing myth. Myth is a retelling of a tale that includes layers of meaning beyond the surface narrative. It inspires in a way that is entirely outside of the realm of reality, but in doing so it can improve reality.
To illustrate this point, I quote the inestimable Terry Pratchett from The Hogfather.
Symbols and Correspondences
At this point you are likely protesting about what all this has to do with magick, mysticism, and the religious experience. To address this, we are going to dive a bit into the realm of fact, and how our brains employ these various sensations into our personal narratives, and then explore how we can use this to our advantage.
The first step in understanding magick is understanding the idea of symbols.
A symbols is, by one definition: a thing or character that represents or stands for something else, especially a material object representing something abstract. Think of the tortoise and the hare.
Symbols are the key to all language. They are the figures in our dreams. They are the sum of all our aspirations, and cornerstone of all human superstition. They are the mystery of the religious experience and the horrible scream of every nightmare.
And as they are representational of other things, they lend themselves to the concept of correspondence. Each discreet symbol may correspond to many things, and those correspondences can result in a symbols set having multiple complimentary and interrelated interpretations.
As symbols are employed by the human subconscious in dream architecture, it has been surmised that the symbols our minds employ in dream scenarios are expressed in such a manner that all possible interpretation are in some way relevant. A bucket of water may have several meanings to an individual, and each of those meanings is being actively explored by the dreamer simultaneously when that image appears in a dream. If the mind were avoiding some aspect of the symbol, or if it were superfluous, it would naturally selected a different symbol that doesn’t invoke that particular aspect. A cigar is never just a cigar.
This may all seem like a bit of an aside, until we start to look at the parts of the brain that analyze symbols.
The Brain – Where Symbols Live
The frontal lobe of the brain is where rational interpretation takes place. It receives input via a gatekeeper in the brain called the amygdala, which collects input from the various sensory receptors and interpolates them. The frontal lobe is where senses and memories then meet to interpret our reality. Everything you have every seen, thought, felt or done is actually taking place in your frontal lobe.
This specialized part of the brain is truly what allows us to create anything at all! It is the seat of human genius. And teaching this part of the brain how to rationally interpret symbols is the bulk of our cultural learning, from our earliest moments. The sound and pitch of a parents voice. The glowing warmth of fire. The smell of home. These impressions are remembered and begin to shape our internal symbolic landscape.
We then analyze these memories and experiences, and look for ways to employ them; to use them to our advantage; to experiment with our environment, and learn from the results. And all this while we are still toddlers, developing our earliest motor skills and employing rudimentary tools. Eventually we start to associate sounds with words, and words with there meanings, and we are on our way to sharing our ideas as we develop them.
Fortunately or unfortunately, depending on the case, this amazing part of the mind, the frontal lobe, can be completely paralyzed by stress, anxiety and fear. These emotions trigger a response in the sympathetic nervous system, which governs fight or flight response. The amygdala will stop sending impulses to the frontal lobe, and direct them to the autonomic nervous system.
This is an excellent response when faced with a dangerous predator, or when leaping out of the way of a moving vehicle. This is not the time for analyses, but for action!
Additionally, our capacity for abstract thought allows us to invent and imagine terrors that seem altogether real to the amygdala. Since the amygdala does not interpret input as true or false (that would be the frontal lobe) but rather in terms of danger, it can shut off the part of our brain capable of realizing the insubstantial nature of the threat. And here is where our miraculous minds can poison us. When faced with an overwhelming decision, an eminent crisis, or even existential dread, the fight or flight response kicks in and shuts down the frontal lobe, often right when we need it the most.
So, how can we find our way back to the rational parts of our minds? One historically tried and true method is mythology!
Having a symbol set you can rely on in a crisis can help you analyze that crisis in light of the symbol set. And that analysis will activate your frontal lobe, engaging the problem solving part of your brain!
As an example – when faced with a dilemma as a child, one might inculcate a hero or heroine, like Luke Skywalker or Princess Leia, in order to measure their choices against the contrast presented by their fears and their vision of what heroism truly is. These are abstract concepts that are embodied in the form of myths, that they impact real life decisions.
Once you move out of the realm of fear into the inspired space embodied by the myth, the problem solving part of the brain becomes active again, and starts to imagine not only how a mythic figure might react, but specific strategies they might employ. The ideal inspires the reaction, and reshapes the narrative.
This entire scenario is the basis for religious mythology and it’s practical application for good or ill. In their best sense, these stories can inspire strength of character, generosity of spirit and integrity of the self. In there worst sense, fear of the other, crippling superstition and a reliance on external authority.
The evil that men do
There is something else to say here, regarding the fear that paralyses the mind, and circumvents the interpretive process. Sometimes, when employed in an unconscionable manner, the myth becomes the source of the dread.
There is no need to imagine how it might be if a human were to be convinced (either by themselves or by others) that if they did not engage in some servile, violent, destructive, or cruel behavior that they would be subjected to some fearful result. The fear of eternal torment by a loving God has convinced otherwise rational people to do unspeakable things, committing horrific crimes against themselves and against other.
I am a fan of religion. Religion is a shared cultural mythology, a poetic narrative of our relationship with our reality that can be usefully employed to address complex problems. It has value insofar as it imparts positive group behavioral norms, a sense of internal discipline, and a program that can be employed in managing crisis individually and collectively.
Yet, in the hands of the unscrupulous, it is a poison.
For example, I believe that the employment of chastity as a personal discipline (or even preference) is a wholesome and powerful application of sexual magick. It is a choice to abstain from certain activities in order to focus that energy elsewhere, or to set them apart as Holy.
That said, the moment that this chastity is not longer a choice that empowers the individual, but a mandate handed down by some “religious authority” enforced by either fear of eternal torment, social isolation, or just being beaten to death with big fucking rocks, it is not longer a spiritual discipline designed to make something Holy; it is an oppressive superstitious abomination, designed to enslave people, employing the same methods that can set them free.
I have heard it said that the Spirit is like a river, and that all religions are like vessels pulling water from that same river. The vessels are shaped by the culture where they are developed. Some are ornate, some are plain, some tall, some short, but all are useful, because they hold and shape the living water. It is only when someone places a lid on the container and claims to have the whole river therein that they become stagnate.
I like to shorten this to: “There are as many names for God as there are for water, it all gets you wet.” Because it sounds a little naughty.
Returning to the subject, that idea of stagnation and claimed authority is the real danger. To the extent that any leader claims sole authority, to that exact extent should they be suspect. We are all traveling our various paths, we are all learning our lessons, and finding our way. If you want to find a guide, so be it. You are welcome to employ any course of study, and find the practice that suits you best. Anyone who claims that they are the sole arbiter of the truth, the sole path to enlightenment, the sole infallible voice of God on earth, or the one true conduit for the Secret Masters is likely either delusional, or deceiving you.
Such an unscrupulous teacher will try to isolate you from other information. They will try to make you afraid of other thoughts. They will point to wickedness, evil, and impurity everywhere. Rather than seeing the divine expressed throughout humanity (an excellent method for finding it in yourself) or graciously acknowledging that the principals at work behind all these practices are essentially the same, they will encourage fear and hatred of others, often by inculcating that this fear and hatred is a glorious manifestation of your love for your friends, family and community.
It is an old and tested tool for leading people into servitude through fear. It circumvents the ability to rationally interpret the meaning of an otherwise beautiful experience, and makes it the tool of enslavement. Can you imagine any more absurd reason to hate someone than their preference between Star Wars and Star Trek? Because that is what religious discrimination is, a debate between science fiction genres. It is less substantive than arguing over which is the better sports team, as that can at least be proven by some objective measure from season to season. Yet, when faced with imagined torment, or real ostracization, it is difficult to see the irrationality of that false dichotomy.
They say the truth shall set you free. Perhaps. Understanding the method in which these symbols are employed affords us the opportunity to use these techniques to our best advantage, rather than allowing others to exploit them to our detriment. And it is up to us how we will employ this ability.
We will begin exploring some techniques for using these abilities to our advantage in the next post. Until then, courage!
One of the little aphorisms I have said to myself over the years, just to keep myself going, is that “Faith can certainly move mountains, in so far as we employ our faith to move that mountain one rock at a time.” All art is magick. All creation falls into the mundane order of miracles we shape with our will, and build with our sinews. Inspiration and perspiration are closely interwoven.
With that in mind, picking up where we left off in our previous post, we will proceed to step three of our Doing Rites Right flow chart.
3. Have your planning meetings
This step is much as we covered in the first post in this series, but you will likely need to plan several meetings, covering specific areas. Don’t neglect any of the A,B,Cs we covered before: Artisit Vision, Budget, Casting, Dates, Effects and Fallout!
Come prepared with copies of the annotated script that you can share with your cast and crew; copies that they can scribble on and generally use to keep track of evolving landscape of your vision. Your meeting topic may include:
Stagecraft and Lighting – depending on whether you are using a theater, you may need a professional for this. Props – Don’t forget to give yourself time to make these before rehearsal, so your cast can work with them. Costumes – Depending on the theme, thrift stores can be a fantastic resource. Casting – As your production size increases, your cast size may too. You may need to plan for auditions, so be sure to give yourself some advance time to advertise.
The Rite of Mercury Set, 2010
Sets – These can be simple or complex. Anything you can do with theater cubes will make your life easier, but if you are like me, you will what to do something big. Give yourself a lot of time to figure out how to construct your vision. Start with a cardboard model. I built them out of pizza boxes with duct tape. Rehearsal Schedule – Plan the number of rehearsals based on the chart about, then add 2 for tech and dress rehearsal. It is best if you plan scene by scene, and give cast members the night off it they are not in the scenes being rehearsed that night. For our productions, music and choral rehearsals – This is a whole other aspect, and should be planned prior to the blocking rehearsals, so that the choir knows it’s parts before they start acting. For each of these you will need to plan who will be responsible for the task, what sort of time frame will be required, and what sort of budget you will need.
4. Readers-Theater/Rehearsal
With a more complex vision, you will require a more granular rehearsal. Each scene and poem will need to be broken down and run repeatedly.
You can still start with a readers-theater in an early rehearsal in order to familiarize the cast with the structure, and brainstorm ideas for interactions between the characters.
Given the spartan nature of the script notes, there will be a great many questions about what motivates these characters, and how you choose to answer these questions will shape your presentation. This process will go on throughout the rehearsal schedule.
As your performance date approaches, you may find yourself invoking a rule coined by Melissa during our runs: “Simplify, do not embellish.” Your vision may be rich and complex, and creating it is certainly part of the learning process, but it will not always translate to stage. At some point, you will have to let go of the vision a little bit in order to be ready for opening night. Don’t let this discourage you! It is part of the process.
Sol Crucified, The Rite of Sol, 2012
5. Presentation
Again, depending on scale, you may do a single performance, or many. By the time opening night rolls around, the work of the director should be done. Again, I strongly advise that once the show opens, there in no more tweaking. The cast will have an idea how the show should run, and changes at this point will simply cause confusion and undermine the performance.
Allow the magick to run it’s course.
6. Review and relax. At this stage in the game, we may be talking about theatrical reviews. Here I would urge you, don’t be too worried about it. As it turns out, criticism falls into two categories. Useful, and stupid. Seriously.
A useful critique from an eloquent and professional source will undoubtedly discuss areas where your presentation either succeeded of failed in the eyes of the critic. It will contain information on the impressions that the critic received during the staging, and some indication about whether they would recommend their readers attend. Even a negative review might be very helpful in shaping your future work.
A stupid review is usually provided by someone who is unpaid on the internet. It will contain expletives, insults, and no useful information. Disregard these. Don’t even read the whole thing. If it is a comment you have control over, delete it and move on.
And don’t forget to relax and enjoy your achievement! Laugh about the hard parts! Consider all you have learned! And above all:
Party in a construction site! The Rite of Saturn 2018, photo by David Parks
If you have been enjoying our blog posts so far, but thinking, “I really want this to get more granular and nerdy!” well, you are in for a treat. And since I am going out on a limb with my nerdy self, feel free to play along at home!
In part three of our discussion of The Rites of Eleusis as Magickal Textbook (or study guide, if you will) we are going to wander into the weeds of interpretation!
To start with, allow me to say for the record, “I love The Rites of Eleusis presented as strict A.:. A.:. style rituals.” If you are a purist, who wants to present the material exactly as Aleister Crowley did, to the best of your ability, I am all for it! Hell, yes! And please, let us know when you are staging it! Put a link in the comments! I’d love to be there, and will bring friends!
Also, God I hope you find a violinist who can perform that music! I have never seen that done, and would LOVE it! I just wanted to go on record and say that as much as I love interpretation, I love all the interpretations, including the purist variety.
The Rite of Saturn – Caxton Hall, London 1910
That said, our work with the Rites is highly interpretive, and the study that informs our interpretation can be broad and eclectic. As an example: Let’s discuss Capricornus Emissarius from The Rite of Saturn. (If you didn’t make it to see The Rite of Saturn last September, we are sorry you missed it! You’ll have to wait for the video in June to watch all the scenes I am referring to. I included pictures.)
In order to fully appreciate our interpretation of Capricornus Emissarius in The Rite of Saturn, allow me to provide this helpful chart:
You can see that we have graphed the astrological figures present in each Rite against the dominant planetary force, and included the small card Tarot attributions that present information along the same axis. The meanings of these cards in the Tarot also include numerical and elemental influence, much as the characters in The Rites incorporate additional influences from the paths and myths associated with the God forms.
You may note that there are no astrological attributions for Jupiter. There are several ways that the central figures can be interpreted in The Rite of Jupiter, and strict astrology is the least satisfying. Seeing as the Sphinx represents the attributes of the Fixed Signs of the Zodiac taken in conjunction with one another (see The Key to the Mysteries by Eliphas Levi), it is not much of a stretch to interpret Hermanubis as the Mutable Signs, and Typhon as the Cardinal Signs.
This is consistent with the alchemical attributions associated with the elements that the figures on the wheel represent, Salt being Fixed, Mercury being Mutable and Sulfur being Cardinal.
The Wheel of Fortune from The Book of Thoth
Additionally, we can interpret the principal characters in The Rite of Jupiter as exemplifying all of the planetary rulers from The Rites that follow, but presented in their infancy. Thus Typhon represents Mars, Dionysus as the hidden God becomes Sol, The Sphinx evolves into Venus, Hermanubis becomes Mercury and Hebe and Ganymede become Luna and Pan, respectively.
Taken in combination, these two interpretations are immanently more satisfying than any singular astrological attribution for these figures in The Rite of Jupiter, which is why I left them off the chart. But I digress.
Returning to the question of the attribution of Capricornus Emissarius. First note that Sagittarius, alone, of all the astrological signs, has no representative in The Rites of Eleusis, unless you ascribe that association to Capricornus Emissarius. Otherwise, this seems like rather an obvious oversight. But looking at the various meanings of Emissarius we have: “emisary”, “agent”, “spy” and the literal meaning “stallion”. If we see Capricornus Emissarius as a spy (as he is depicted in The Rite of Saturn) and as the precursor to Capricorn, Sagittarius becomes a logical attribution.
Especially given the literal meaning stallion, which we turned into a double-entendre, as horse is also slang for heroin, and our Capricornus Emissarius was depicted as an alchemist, creating laudanum. To add another layer, the conjunction of Saturn and Sagittarius is depicted in the 10 of Wands in the Rider-Waite Tarot. Which is just the sort of thing one might symbolically use to their advantage in creating the iconography of a scene. (Tip of the hat to Melissa Holm and Ryan Holsather, who developed this motif so beautifully, and Richard Cardone, who breathed life into it).
The 10 of Wands, Rider-Waite Tarot DeckRichard Cardone as Capricornus Emissarius The Rite of Saturn, 2018
Obviously, this is all interpretive! Far outside of the bounds of anything we can claim Aleister Crowley intended, but that is hardly the point.
As creative magician, we should always look deeper, strive for more! Exceed! What wild interpretations have you seen? Anything you would like to share?
