Chronos Apollonios' "Home On Olympus"
As a pagan, witch, magician, or whatever you will, my encounters with the Christian Bible may be something worthy of comment. While I am proud to include amongst friends and compatriots those who consider the Bible as originally being a survival manual for desert peoples, an notion I am very largely in agreement with, containing the familiar mythological style of larger than life characters and the tell-tale ideosyncracies that are not fundmentally apart from Trickster traditions riddles and negative role models, a style also characteristic of peoples geographically adjacent to its alleged authors... and while I am also proud to include amongst friends those who work with the angels and Saints in their magick, in conjurations, in meditations, and prayer...
I am aware that the obnoxious and oppressive efforts of many fundamentalist believers have created such a distaste in so many persons, that it seems difficult for them to bear to approach close enough to it to begin to extract from it a wealth of benefits that appear to uphold and support the practices of magick, going even sometimes far beyond the outward recognitions of those who perhaps most often recognize kindredness between Biblical text and their own traditions and symbols, the Alchemists...
It is beyond the scope of the present essay to examine the hoard of ideosyncracies present in the Bible, as it is likewise to argue why the Bible is nonetheless an immensely redeemable work for its philosophical strength and its impeccable moral and ethical standards and examples in some places...
And I could suffice it to say that to apply thematic analysis, such as the standards of motif-indexing set my mythographer Stith Thompson, would prove sufficient to unlock the meanings of this text, as well as mystical texts of an unlimited number of traditions...
But for those who study the art of Palingenics, of so-called spontaneous generation from mineral remains, perhaps you will recognize a kindred theme in the creation of Eve from a peice of the mineral of Adam’s bone, that from the very onset, this book begins unfolding the tools for mere mortals to approach the resurrections which are so highly and emphatically regarded within the pages that follow?
Perhaps you will detect a certain similarity in the temptations inexplicably put before the first man and woman and the classical identities of them (such as the Fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil being stylized as an apple) and the motifs and paraphernalia of Catoptromancy?
Perhaps you will find a kindredness between the travestic attention that the Bible pays to a great witches’ herb, Wormwood, and the attentions paid by ancient enthusiasts of the Mother Goddess?
Perhaps you will find a sense of affiliated purpose as a pagan or magickal herbalist, in a book which, in spite of its anomalous rebuking of pharmacea and material concerns, is said to nonetheless find the providence that is herbs deserving of mention some three thousand times? Perhaps where we would have expected God’s infinite mercy, instead of wholesale destruction, administered to the denizens of Sodom and Gamorrah, just as if they were our own children we would love and protect them (indeed a bear has more graces than this particular portrayal of God!), perhaps if our dissatisfaction here would drive us on the wheels on symbolism, we might find allusions not only to the arts of Alchemy but perhaps allusions to methods of treating the diseases that in this day and age have come to be wrongfully associated with those whose personal practices resemble those alleged for those of Sodom and Gamorrah...
The wealth of Alchemic allusions and symbols that virtually pepper the book of Revelations is, by great fortune, not lost on a substantial many...
Or perhaps it is more one’s style to recognize in the not-easily-believed story of Noah and his ark, echoes of not only medical and survival concerns of diluvean mythos of other cultures, but even of modern issues about genetics... much as certain Greek myths are capable of advancing strikingly complex questions about genetics, developmental biology, and so on.
Or any of a great long list of similar indicators that all ways are one above all else in their concerns for the means of upholding the sanctity and continuity of human life.
Just as fundamental Christianity as almost virtually stolen handfolding, the simple act of folding one’s hands and pausing for a seconds’ reflection to gain calm and sobriety, by branding it with strong and unpleasant associations to their often painful ways, and the hoard of great expectations that are attatched to prayer- many of which expectations are offensive even to pagan and Wiccan sensibilities and ethics...
So, too, should we be aware, and vigilant, to prevent the theft of a great book of not only well considered ethics- for those who will exert initiative to sort wheat from chaff, to shake the pan of sand to retrieve the nuggets of gold therein- but a great book of the edification and illumination of Magick!
But please forgive me if I seem
to take the tone of judgement
For I've no wish to come between
this day and your enjoyment
In this life of hardship and of earthly toil
we have need for anything that frees us
So I bid you pleasure
and I bid you cheer
From a heathen and a pagan
on the side of the rebel Jesus.
Jackson Browne, "The Rebel Jesus", from the Chieftains' Christmas album, "The Bells of Dublin"
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