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.

Comments

[violetcabra]

If I may be so bold:

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.

[causticus]

I agree that Judaism is certainly way more nuanced than its two main Abrahamic offspring religions.

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.

[violetcabra]

If I'd been raised Jewish I'd probably be ultra-Orthodox right about now, wearing a black suit and a black hat and preparing for this week's Shabbat!

[kimberlysteele]

Thanks for this, Violet. Because you mentioned this, I went down a rabbit hole. A simple search revealed that "American poet Gustav Davidson listed shekhinah as an entry in his reference work A Dictionary of Angels, Including the Fallen Angels (1967), stating that she is the female incarnation of Metatron." I actually own the formerly mentioned book -- it's available through the Athena Library from my own collection -- and that led me to research Metatron.

"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"

[violetcabra]

Many thanks for sharing your research on this! I did not know that, but it fits. It is fascinating given what Scholem wrote in his book on the origins of the Cabala --- he draws a similarity between the Shekhina and Sandalphon, an archangel of Malkuth, the earthly Sphere. The other archangel of Malkuth is, you guessed it, Metatron. Jews consider Metatron also the archangel of Kether, the highest Sphere. Cabalistic Jews consider Kether the "Lesser Tetragrammaton," according to Greer's in his _Paths of Wisdom_.