Spirit Mystery's Spiritual Palace

Last issue the subject was mythology and how it relates to our Pagan religion. But many don’t understand the need for mythology.

Neo-Paganism is a religion removed from the mainstream religious system, but as such it is but one of many. Paganism has grown rapidly in the years since it arrived from England as Gardnerian Wicca. But so, too, have the numbers of followers for Buddhism, Krishna, Shamanism, and the conglomeration of beliefs called "New Age". In addition, Native American belief has achieved a public acceptance that was non-existent a score of years ago.

These religions have one important thing in common. They all share a set of values alien to those that dominate the thinking of our larger culture. They differ from the philosophies not because of the variations between each group, but because they approach a world view from completely opposite points of view.

Discoveries about the functioning of the brain have led some to suggest that these different values are the product of different halves of the brain. Our society ...indeed all of what is termed "Western" society, be it found in the US, Europe, or Japan...is said to be dominated by the left hemisphere of the brain. This side controls such skills as reading, writing, mathematics, and engineering, which are considered important in this society. The Alternative Beliefs, on the other hand, places higher value on dancing, arts, poetry, and abstract thought.....the concerns of the right hemisphere of the brain.

About 40 years ago, Robert Graves said the difference between the two forms of thought were "solar" or Western knowledge, and "lunar" or what he termed "Eastern" knowledge....what I call Alternative thinking. What is of the solar mind is the product of the conscious mind, and can be understood intellectually. What is of the lunar mind is the product of inspiration, revelation, and epiphany. It comes from outside the conscious mind...from gods or the unconscious mind. On the conscious, intellectual level, lunar expressions are difficult to understand...gibberish to some. If you are in some other country and do not speak the language, what the people say there sounds like gibberish to you. That is YOUR perception, however. What they are saying is perfectly lucid, only you cannot understand it. Thus, someone in tune with their lunar mind might speak in terms that a person who only accesses the solar would consider gibberish; likewise someone who is totally immersed in lunar mind would find that subjects of the solar mind are so much gibberish. People with a predisposition to the lunar mind often have problems with some solar mind products, which the solar mind considers a "learning disability". It is interesting to note that many of our best philosophers, poets, artists, and even actors have had "learning disabilities" to a greater or lesser degree.

Many in our society consider the lunar mind to be unproductive. It is better your son be an engineer than a poet, for example. Better a doctor than an artist. Poetry and art, no matter how much we profess to enjoy them, are too often seen as inconsequential. And like all arts, both are subject to the enforcement of what the solar mind considers proper and artists who paint outside that propriety often pass as unrecognized genius.

Our society places great emphasis on technology and science, and is dominated by solar knowledge. It is so dominated by solar knowledge that even Christian expressions of lunar mind are immediately suspect, and are considered embarrassing at the least and psychotic at the worst. Faith healing, speaking in tongues, and the ecstatic behavior of people at "revival" meetings are frowned upon by the Christian majority with almost as equal a strength as they frown on us.

Technology has given us a life style far beyond that of what the ancient king or emperor would have dreamed of. A touch of a finger floods our homes with light, and warmth is not provided by a smoking fireplace that warms only those closest to it. We no longer need to spend our days producing the food we eat. We can fly across the world is considerably less than the eighty days of the old "sci fi" book. We communicate almost instantly with one another via telephone and computer. Yet while we value technology and its gifts, more and more people are wondering if it is just maybe running a bit amok. Progress that goes nowhere in particular is not really progress. We are inundated with "new and improved" products which really are not that "new" or "improved". And we are faced with things like veggies injected with human and animal genes, terminator seeds, water pollution, air pollution, the despoiling of our land through strip mining and deforestation...not to mention the loss in terms of wildlife. Even many solar minded individuals are becoming concerned...being "green" is no longer the "freak show" it was held to be in the past. The average Joe no longer believes that science will get us out of the fix we got ourselves into, because science/technology often had a great part in getting us into it in the first place!

In addition to this, some people are rejecting solar values and taking time out from the rat race to refresh themselves spiritually. Some opt for religious or secular retreats...others for time out during the day for meditation. Others band together to explore their innermost selves. People doing tai chi or yoga in the park no longer merit a second look from most of us, and most of us secretly admire their discipline.

From Christianity to Paganism to Eastern thought to New Age, many of us disagree about the most suitable techniques for self-exploration or the spiritual path that guides them. On one point they all have come to agree...that the exploration of inner space is infinitely important to our outer space. The goal is inner change. There is recognition that the conscious mind is only a fraction of the whole mind. The unconscious is little used and largely inactive, mostly due to our culture’s focus on the conscious or solar mind. Children are open to the unconscious but are slowly trained out of it. Imagination, we are told, is good only to a point...and then it should be solar imagination that allows the technician or scientist or engineer to make that desired connection. For most people, the term unconscious means "unaware" and it is not a desired state. Yet more and more people are realizing that the unconscious mind is a gold mine of wisdom, power, and beauty. If a person can tap the energies of their unconscious, these energies can be used to alter the total personality. They can help to heal the body, and strengthen the conscious mind. The results can be spectacular.

Mysticism is, most of us assume, lunar. But many scientific minds have been mystics as well. There are many Pagans, Buddhists, and New Agers who work in technical or scientific areas. One does not have to throw out the solar mind in exchange for the lunar mind. The goal is balance between the two. If we don’t have this balance, we are shutting the door on half of our being. We are, like Georgei Gurdjieff claimed, sleepwalking through life, unaware of the world around us. This state, he claimed, made us incapable of original thought or genuine feeling, so that we pass through life like robots, following the ingrained patterns of custom and habit, ignorant of the beauty and wonder of the world around us. We are like my daughter, when I tried to point out to her the beauty of the aurora borealis and got a bored response of "so?" Mythology is not literal truth. Most mythology contains a strong element of fantasy, but this serves as a key to unlock the doorways that lead from the solar consciousness to lunar intuition, revelation, and epiphany. Our society walls itself of from things of the spirit, but once this self-imposed limitation has been overcome we find our life has been transformed. Mythology is one path to overcoming this limitation. Through mythology the physical landscape - forests, mountains, and rivers - become imbued with a life of their own. Through mythology we discern the deep spiritual meanings of what were previously assumed to be irrelevant "myths, folk tales, and fairy stories". Most of these were previously considered "superstition". The modern meaning of the word is an excessive "fear" of spirits. Perhaps "respect" would be a better word, but the original Latin word, superstitio, simply meant religious practice which was outside the state rituals.

Lets examine "superstitio" religion. Rome’s deities were originally guardians of the land. The farming localities or pagi were the focus of these deities. These gods were worshiped without images, even without personification of any kind. The basic Roman belief was in "numen" or supernatural power rather than in personified spirits.

The spirits of the fields were known as the Lares who were honored at outdoor shrines. They were not given any personality or even an individual name. At first there was a single "lar familiaris", but from the early first century BCE there were two, represented as youthful, dancing images, kept in the house in a niche by the hearth or in their own shrine, the "lararium". In later times, these deities became known as the genius of the household. These lares were worshiped indoors and were the unseen masters of the household. Rome itself had its own shrine to its own Lares compitales, or genius of the city.

The indoor numenia were, however, known as Penates, the rulers of the store cupboard or penus. Once again, these were known collectively and not given individual names. The hearth goddess and the doorway god were later given Indo-European names...Vesta and Janus. The doorway was the transition point between the uncontrolled outer world and the safe territory indoors, and hence was hedged about with taboos.

In addition to these deities or spirits, there were the ancestors...the worship of ones progenitors. This was a duty or respect but also one of protection. If angered, the ancestors could withdraw their favor from the family. Ancestors were honoured by rituals in the home and by seasonal offerings at the family tomb.

These then are the origins of "superstition". A respect for the land, the home, and ancestors in short. Some people have told me modern neo-paganism is a return to "superstition" and equate superstition with ignorance. But we know better...it is an acceptance of and understanding of the natural world, hopefully not wrapped up in a Pollyanna/Bambi syndrome (which is unfortunately not that uncommon because so many of us live our lives totally out of touch with nature). In Pagan terms, nature is an intermingling of mind and matter, with different being tending more to the one than the other. A rock is predominantly material, a disembodied spirit is predominantly psychic, but no being is devoid of either principle. Thus the mythological descriptions of the gnomes...slow moving, thick bodies, but the mobile spirit of the rock/earth teaches via myth this understanding, enabling us to see nature as an active theophany. With this understanding, we can seek conformity with nature, or what we call the nature of things, which is reason (ratio, a translation of the Greek logos). If all beings behave according to their nature, then balance is achieved. This is combined with the tacit assumption of indigenous religion that each locality has its invisible inhabitants, some wiser and more powerful than human beings...these inhabitants people the myths and fairy tales and modern sci fantasy. They demand of their human neighbors a particular way of life, including particular rituals, in order to preserve a balance between them...a balance in nature.

Our mythology, while drawn from various sources, basically incorporates the myth cycle we call the Wheel of the Year. Through this myth cycle we see the Gods as manifestations of the One divine power. The myth cycle also, through the birth, death, and rebirth of the year king, reinforces our acceptance of the divinity and immortality of the soul. Death is not to be sought after, martyrdom is not the goal, nor even heroic actions to earn us deification through mythology. But death is not to be feared, for the myth cycle shows us the soul is immortal. Through the death and rebirth of the year king/god we see that individual consciousness is not confined to a single life, that each of us is a link in a chain of existence that stretches backward and forward in time and space.

Through mythology we glimpse a world that indicates that the world of technology is not the only path to human fulfillment. But within the myths we are shown not to throw the baby out with the bathwater...we are to seek balance between technological worlds and spiritual worlds.

We learn that real wisdom is not the prerogative of any one culture or historical period because we draw our myths from more than one culture and historical period. We even learn of otherworldly beings via myths, and perhaps that is a training to the acceptance of people who right now are still literally out of this world, or extraterrestrials. Through myth we learn to be cautious with the unknown...how unwise it is to open Pandora’s box just out of curiosity, just to see if you can do it...a warning science would do well to heed!

This is all very puzzling to those who are used to a clear-cut, and what they consider factual, view of the world. The intuitive perception of reality that is lunar in origin is hard to put into words but finds its expression in witchcraft, sacred dance, faith healing, and poetry...all suspect by the larger society whose attitude is that these things are "black magic" or practicing religion by unclean means . Their understanding of mythology is that is "not true" not in the sense of "lie" but in the sense of fantasy, or superstition. What mythology is for us is a guide to the hidden world of dreams and visions.

Mythology guides us on the left-hand path. When I was beginning in Wicca, the term the Left Hand Path was fully understood. More recently I have heard people who equate the left hand path with negativity, black magick, and other nefarious attitudes. The term comes to us from the East, and reflects the attitudes of the poster that said "if the right brain controls the left side, then left handed people are the only ones in their right mind!"

The negative connotations of the term "left hand path" comes to us again from a misinterpretation of the Latin term "sinister". Originally the term meant the left side. No more, no less than that. No negative connotations about it. But Christian mythology decrees that Judas sat on Jesus’s left side, and from then on the term sinister, or left, came to mean "inauspicious, unlucky, evil, ill-omened, corrupt, dishonest". Even the word "left" itself took on undesirable connotations: left behind, left at the post. It is even better to be far right politically, than leftist.

Left and Dark came to share the same connotations. The night was, from ancient times, a chancy time, a time when spirits roamed. Not evil, per se, but dangerous...as well it would be when wolves and bears lurked, and your only light was a sputtering torch and your only weapon probably a staff. The night was dark and you couldn’t see far. What was out in the dark was unknown and we all know how our imagination can people the dark! In solar thought, often what was not known became equated with danger, and the dark was peopled with unknowns. It came to be considered evil. We all know the Pagan cry to "take back the night", to remove this fear of the dark that has come to include even those who wear dark clothes or have dark skin. We need to cry "take back the left" as well. The left hand path is the path of spiritual illumination. It moves away from the thinking of the right, that is ALL-right, in modern interpretation. It shows us that the right is not ALL there is and that by turning left, we are not left behind, but going forward along a different path to the web. If we accept, via our mythology of the Web or Wheel, that all paths lead to the center, why is the path to the right or before us preferable to the one on the left? If we understand that mythology, we understand there are no absolute rights and wrongs. That black is not bad automatically and white is not good automatically. We can choose a path that is solar minded/right or lunar minded/left, or go down the middle in a sense of gray/balance.

Mythology teaches us to look to other worlds, otherwhens, to beauty and mysterae and magick. It teaches us to walk the left hand path, that pebbled path running in meanders and spirals and curves near the straight as an arrow paved interstate. It teaches us to reach out to nature and each other, accepting us as we are, like the crone, warts and all. It teaches us of symbols and how to sing and dance and love. We are not hedged in by high wooden sound baffles on the left hand path. We hear all the sounds, the musical brook, the sowing of the wind, the song of the bird...the crash of thunder, the howl of the wind, the growl of the beast. The myths teach us that without dark we don’t appreciate light, and without rain we don’t appreciate sun.

Mythology opens our minds, our eyes, our hearts, and our souls. That is its purpose. That is its goal. Sometimes the myth is plain and simple. Sometimes it is gussied up in ornate trappings. But the kernel of truth is still there. The trappings myths are often robed in occurred over centuries. It happened to draw out the story, continued tomorrow night around the fire. It happened to dress up the teaching into something palatable to the easily bored, rather like surrounding a pill with a piece of candy. It came about to hide the kernel of truth from those who didn’t want it heard. Understanding mythology means we look for the kernel of truth, the teaching within, that we open our lunar mind to the nuances of the poetry we call mythology.

Go out now, pick up a book of fairy stories or mythology...begin your own search. Open your lunar mind to all possibilities and embrace them. Celebrate the Wheel with song and dance. Write poems. Talk to the trees and rocks and see the Wild Hunt ride before the storm. Discover what a wonderful, magickal and mythological world we still live in.

Blessed be,
Juneberry