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kimberlysteele
My first experiences of the occult involved the Thoth tarot deck. I was sixteen and recently heartbroken after my first boyfriend dumped me. We lasted three months. I bought the Tarot deck with the intention of pestering it about the future -- of course my desired outcome was for my boyfriend and I to get back together. We never did get back together, but I did begin my first spill down the Path because of those cards.
When I used to gaze at the Priestess, its symbols remained a mystery. I had the blurbs of text in the white book memorized as well as significant chunks of the Book of Thoth. I read cards by repeating those bits of information. For some odd reason, people liked the readings well enough and I became somewhat known for it among my family and friends. Thirty years later, I began to understand a small part of the symbolism of the cards because of discursive meditation.
On the Tree of Life, Gimel is the path from the Father (Kether) to the Son (Tipareth). Crowley, like a few other Golden Dawnies, was an Icarus whose wings melted when he got too close to the Sun. The Priestess provides the veil to shield the eyes from the light of the Father. She is the Virgin Mary, Isis, and Artemis. She is the Divine Feminine as a connection to the Father. Without her hazy, nurturing influence, the forces of Father and Son would burn everything between them with their power.
She is the idea of home: gentle, nurturing, and compassionate. The one who makes a home makes it possible to digest the influences of the Father. The feminine is the way towards the father. She creates the necessary polarity to return to him, much like electricity needing positive and negative ions to move.
Christianity and Islam have a problem with disrespecting the divine feminine. Protestant Christianity diminishes Mary to a side player, shunting any veneration for her to a couple of holidays. Islam perverts the veil, turning it into a hijab and a burqa. The result is naked hatred of women and girls and another diminution of the feminine and nature itself. The discounting of the feminine is not surprising -- the unigod religions were a natural outgrowth of animal herding and its child, capitalism. Capitalism commodifies spiritual ideals: for instance, the transformation of the idea of home into a red and white labeled can of soup, or the winter folk song rehashed as an annoying Christmas ad jingle. Obsessive marketing and relentless kitsch makes homemaking easier to dismiss as an art.
Homemaking is the art of etheric balance. The etheric represents the ebb and flow of energy one level more subtle than smell. It can and will be affected by aesthetics and human emotion and perception. The etheric is the veil between the astral and the physical. To understand how a certain smell or bit of music can trigger an emotional rush is to grasp the idea of the etheric. The goal of homemaking is generally to stabilize the etheric into harmonious patterns that provide protection via the diffusion/mitigation of outside forces. As the Druid prayer goes, "In protection, strength". The creation of a home, whether it's a grand Taj Mahal or the tin pan on Johnny Appleseed's head, is essential for the process of evolution to take place. Without feminine balance, there is no connection to the father. The aesthetic is important because it influences perception, and to perceive balance is to imitate it.
Oooooohhh
Date: 2021-09-22 11:21 am (UTC)Re: Oooooohhh
Date: 2021-09-22 04:17 pm (UTC)Re: Oooooohhh
Date: 2021-09-23 06:19 pm (UTC)Re: Oooooohhh
Date: 2021-09-23 07:09 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-09-23 03:15 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-09-23 07:09 pm (UTC)Islam doesn't have any feminine aspect to worship, does it? Women must wear the hijab because the sight of their hair incites men to lust. There is no feminine ideal in Islam that is free of shame or presumed inferiority.
Judaism is a more pragmatic religion (again, just my opinion) so though the deity is a male, it may be a little bit more egalitarian because of its focus on doing good works here on Earth and the idea that you have to challenge your own faith. Consequently, there doesn't seem to be as much room for one sex to dominate the other.
I think the all mono-cults will become minority religions in a thousand years or less. They are just too imbalanced.
no subject
Date: 2021-09-23 08:17 pm (UTC)Judaism has several female personifications of the divine. Probably the most important in terms of contemporary religious practice is the Shekhina, the "dwelling" of Ha-Shem in the world. For instance, the Shekhina is present whenever there's a minyan, or over 10 Jews, at a service of worship.
Gershom Scholem discusses the Shekhina at length in his book on the origins of the Cabala, and she's certainly a divinity that observant Jews talk about in conversation. As I understand it from a conversation a few years back with a Rabbi, the Shekhina also relates directly to Chassidic mysticism, although I'm a bit obscure on the precise details. Point being, some of the manifestations of the divine in Judaism are explicitly female.
no subject
Date: 2021-09-23 08:50 pm (UTC)I also believe the "god" of Judaism is a jumble of older pagan deities who were **nominally** homogenized into a single generic mono-god. Reading through the OT this become quite apparent. The wrathful jerk version of Yahweh seems to be a composite of Saturn, Vulcan, and Mars. In other sections we get a Jovian-Solar type god. The older god El (the Canaanite Enlil) is reminiscent of the agricultural father God that featured in the mythologies of so many Taurus-age pantheons. And of course, as you mention, there is Shekhina occulted (barely) all over thew Jewish tradition.
no subject
Date: 2021-09-24 03:18 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-09-24 02:50 am (UTC)"Metatron (Hebrew: מֶטָטְרוֹן Meṭāṭrōn, מְטַטְרוֹן Məṭaṭrōn, מֵיטַטְרוֹן Mēṭaṭrōn, מִיטַטְרוֹן Mīṭaṭrōn) or Mattatron (מַטַּטְרוֹן Maṭṭaṭrōn)[1] is an angel in Judaism mentioned in a few brief passages in the Aggadah and in mystical Kabbalistic texts within the Rabbinic literature. The figure forms one of the traces for the presence of dualist proclivities in the otherwise monotheistic visions of both the Tanakh and later Christian doctrine.[2] The name Metatron is not mentioned in the Torah and the Bible and how the name originated is a matter of debate. In Islamic tradition, he is also known as Mīṭaṭrūn (Arabic: ميططرون), the angel of the veil"
no subject
Date: 2021-09-24 03:16 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-09-23 08:34 pm (UTC)Levi also postulates that there's indeed an unstated female counterpart trinity. Many have suspected that the Virgin Mary is simply Isis with the old serial numbers filed off. Plutarch equated Isis with Athena, whom the Gnostics re-branded as Sophia (Wisdom). And of course left in this Dawn triad is Venus/Aphrodite. So we have a triad consisting of the Wise Mother, the Virgin Protectress, and the Goddess of Love. Finally, when we fasten together the masculine and feminine triads and you get the Hexagram figure.
Christianity would have surely been much more interesting if it followed an integral/balanced scheme along these lines.
On Islam, this is quite a curious case. The Muslim holy day is Friday, which is of course the day of Venus/Aphrodite. In the pre-Islamic Arabian pagan religion, supposedly their version of Venus was one of the most important deities. Some of these old habits surely carried over into Islam, though in a very bizarre and repressed form. A "psychoanalysis" of Islam would be quite an interesting undertaking for an adventurous and brave soul to undertake.
no subject
Date: 2021-09-24 03:06 am (UTC)I consider Islamic law a mockery of Aphrodite. It punishes women (and men) for their urges so severely that men regularly turn to open secret boy pedophilia/bacha bazi. In certain Islamic states, women are continuously imprisoned within their own homes. And of course there is the tribal custom of FGM which was eagerly adopted in east African nations. As brutal as male circumcision is, the female equivalent is far worse. Often it happens at an older age, like somewhere between age five and nine, and the botched, at home operation is so overzealous, girls lose continence and feeling in their genitals for life if they don't die of infection first. If there is a Satanic reversal of Aphrodite in this world, it is Islam-approved FGM. There doesn't seem to be a lot of love between Islam and femininity.
Historic Objects
Date: 2021-09-26 12:30 am (UTC)Re: Historic Objects
Date: 2021-09-26 02:35 am (UTC)I'd be happy to look at the object and give my impressions but I am no expert. Maybe some of the readers here or at the Ecosophia Magic Monday forum can give their opinions.
no subject
Date: 2021-09-29 11:10 pm (UTC)Colleen
no subject
Date: 2022-01-29 10:51 am (UTC)I just reread this-- thanks for the link from your latest post on the veil.
What really struck me:
"Homemaking is the art of etheric balance. The etheric represents the ebb and flow of energy one level more subtle than smell. It can and will be affected by aesthetics and human emotion and perception. The etheric is the veil between the astral and the physical. To understand how a certain smell or bit of music can trigger an emotional rush is to grasp the idea of the etheric. The goal of homemaking is generally to stabilize the etheric into harmonious patterns that provide protection via the diffusion/mitigation of outside forces. As the Druid prayer goes, "In protection, strength". The creation of a home, whether it's a grand Taj Mahal or the tin pan on Johnny Appleseed's head, is essential for the process of evolution to take place. Without feminine balance, there is no connection to the father. The aesthetic is important because it influences perception, and to perceive balance is to imitate it."
This is simply, brilliantly true. Thank you for saying it so well.
Cetiosaurus