The Veil

[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.