The Truth In The Night

"Night, the beloved. Night, when words fade and things come alive. When the destructive analysis of day is done, and all that is truly important becomes whole and sound again. When man reassembles his fragmentary self and grows with the calm of a tree."  Antoine de Saint-Exupery

I love to do something really weird, and dangerous, at Night. First of all, you have to understand, the Night is my time. My whole life I have been a Night-Owl. As far back as I can remember I have been staying up late into the Night to do things I should have, could have done during the day. I literally feel better when the Sun goes down, and I don't think it's purely psychological.

In any case, I love to do something really weird, and dangerous, at Night. There is a road here in Bowling Green, right in the city, that is surrounded by fields, and dare I say forests, and I love to walk it at Night. It has no sidewalks so I walk against traffic, trusting in my boon staff to get me into a ditch in time, and I have found many truths along it's stretch during the Night.

 In the Night you have to truly admit to yourself what you do and do not believe. Take tonight for example; I was walking and I saw something in a field off to the side. Shadowed as it was, I could not tell what it was except it was a hunched shape and the closer I drew to it, the more I was sure that it was some sort of gnome or other northern creature, ready to devour me. Of course it wasn't (I am here to write this!) but I had to admit to myself that I actually believed it was a possibility they existed. This is not a Truth I could have discovered in the Light of Day, I had to let Night touch my heart to find it out.

At Night a tree is a tree, it is also the site of a nature shrine, the totem of an old spirit, and the harp a god of the wind is playing. A stream babbles as it runs over rocks, and it is also crying out for a sacrifice. Nothing is sure, Nothing is safe, Nothing is concrete.

Only in the moments of uncertainty can we discover what, for us, is Truth. I have heard that there is no Truth, only Perception and this is made abundantly clear at Night. I think there is still a lot of value to Truth, even if it is our own Perception, because as magickal practitioners we are called upon to upon our Perception, our Will on Reality. That is Truth, and I found it in the Night.

Let's Make A Deal: Modern Covenants For Modern Mages

I am part of a really good book club and we have been working our way through a book on chaos magick. This has led to some really wide-ranging discussions, and really caused my mind to really re-examine some magickal concepts.

One of the areas we have recently delved into is the concept of "god-slaves", as well as the correspondences for invoking and evoking with deities, as well as the idea of pagan reconstructionism. I am going to delve into that a little here. If that is your thing, just let me say this is all my own musing and attempts to work through this, and not some kind of slap in the face.

Let's Make A Deal: Modern Covenants For Modern Mages

First, let me say this, I am an eclectic. Phew! Got that off my chest so that I can admit that my cosmological view of the heavens is very fluid. That's really important to me, because I want to play Let's Make A Deal!

I personally ascribe to the idea that whatever you consider a god [be it truly divine, an empowered thought-form, or what have you] it has a function that it performs, and desires to perform, and it is both empowered by and empowers those who call on it. This relationship is symbiotic I believe, and because of this, I feel we live in a golden age of "deal making".

There is an entire cosmological constellation of deities out there who have the desire and impetus to act, but lack the willing workers they used to command. They are smart enough to know that the whole setup of these matters has drastically changed in the past few years, but let's not ignore how matters changed even in the heyday of their particular faiths.

For example I have been really interested in the Ogdoad (hence my username) who were a group of 4 frog headed gods, and their 4 snake-headed goddesses from Ancient Egypt.

[The Egyptians believed that before the world was formed, there was a watery mass of dark, directionless chaos. In this chaos lived the Ogdoad of Khmunu (Hermopolis), four frog gods and four snake goddesses of chaos. [Balance in infinity]
These deities were Nun and Naunet (water), Amun and Amaunet (invisibility), Heh and Hauhet (infinity) and Kek and Kauket (darkness).

The chaos existed without the light, and thus Kek and Kauket came to represent this darkness. They also symbolized obscurity, the kind of obscurity that went with darkness, and night]

Even in the time of the Ancient Egyptians, the beliefs surrounding these goods and goddesses changed at least 3 times in a major way, so I decided they could go with another. I have started calling on them and trying to work with them as much as possible and it has born dividends. A frog showed itself to be my animal totem after long striving, and the elemental sea of chaos they represent meets me in my meditations with power (sometimes too much). 

I believe the time is ripe for those who would find deities of worth, but who are not called upon, and try to work with them. Much like the internet and mass media has made our world much smaller, easy availability of arcane and occult texts has made the cosmological world of the gods much more available.

Let's make a deal.