Practically Spiritual.

• Come join me at Zia on the evening of Wednesday, July 15 for an evening of card reading and designer clothing.

• I'm no longer reading cards on Wednesday nights at Main Streets. To schedule a private consultation with me, please click here.

New "Not Always So" column posted at BoA.

Writing for BoA allows me to get a bit more wild and woolly than I might on this blog. The new column is called "Everything You Wanted To Know About Channeling But Were Afraid To Ask." If you're interested, check it out here.

Upcoming Appearances at Circles of Wisdom Bookstore.

You can now book an appointment with me online. Just click here to get to my page at Circles of Wisdom. 

I only read at Circles about twice a month. If you'd like to book an appointment with me on any other day, please click here.

What I'm up to lately...

As you may have heard on the news, tough economic times for the rest of the world = busy season for Tarot readers.

I'm now booking readings a week or two in advance, and it's very rare that I can accommodate same-day appointments any longer. But if you want to meet me more quickly and try a reading, I am usually reading cards on Wednesday evenings at Main Streets Cafe in Concord, MA.

In other news, I'm proud to announce that I now have a biweekly column at Binnall of America called "Not Always So." Check out my introductory column and a piece I did last week on women in esoterica. Don't miss the fascinating interviews done by Tim Binnall in the audio portion of that site, as well as the wonderful work done by the other columnists there.

More to come soon.

The Meaning of the Moon Card, Pt. 2: Moonstruck Love

It is difficult to tell from the drawing in the Rider-Waite deck (I see the Rider-Waite as something akin to the King James Bible -- flawed in many ways, very much a product of times, but also the gold standard of the genre) but one of the dogs above is supposed to be a wolf, the other a family pet. Yet they both howl at the moon. The image suggests that, whether we consider ourselves domesticated or wild, at our roots we are pulled by the same instinctual urges. 

The Moon card is not an obvious romantic card, but clues to its true nature can be found embedded in the idioms of our language, which developed hand-in-hand with the symbolic language of the Tarot. Moonstruck. Over The Moon. Mooning over someone. Even though one of these creatures is wild and the other is tame, it is not inconceivable that -- like so many of the other characters one meets in the Tarot --these dogs are mates.

Of all of our inner forces, love is one of the shadowiest, and The Moon card rules all mysteries and ancient patterns. Sometimes love causes us to leave our safe warm homes in the middle of the night and meet with someone whom our friends might think is utterly unlike ourselves, but may happen to be a perfect match.

The Moon card suggests that opposites are meant to be drawn, inevitably, together. And sometimes it's thrilling and deeply spiritual to allow the tide to carry one along to a seemingly inevitable destiny. But left on their own, without the light of consciousness, Moon energies can also be a fearsome trap. The Moon card rules illusion as much as it does instinct; what may seem like a magnetic lover in the shifting light of the moon may also simply be the ancient predator in a fresh disguise.

The Meaning of The Moon Card, Pt. 1: History Repeating Itself

The Unknown

As we know, 
There are known knowns. 
There are things we know we know. 
We also know 
There are known unknowns. 
That is to say 
We know there are some things 
We do not know. 
But there are also unknown unknowns, 
The ones we don't know 
We don't know. 

—Donald Rumsfeld. Feb. 12, 2002, Department of Defense news briefing. (From "The Poetry of Donald Rumsfeld.")

When I teach the Tarot, I always introduce The Moon card with this spontaneous "poem" from former Secretary of State Donald Rumsfeld.

The Moon card has everything to do with what unconscious poet Rumsfeld calls the "unknown unknowns," with the parts of ourselves that we do not understand -- our hidden instincts, desires, and dreams. The Moon also rules the oldest things in the world, the simple ancient creatures of the sea that skitter back and forth along the ocean floor with the movement of the tides.

Rumsfeld's war is definitely a "Moon" war, one begun for muddy, unclear reasons, fought against a people we barely understand. Baghdad itself is also ruled by The Moon -- the Islamic crescent is an obvious example -- but the venerable city almost predates civilization itself. Writing was first invented near Baghdad, no doubt imprinting new consciousness on a human mind that will always be, to some degree, pre-verbal.

It is significant that Baghdad's museums were looted almost immediately when the war began. The unconscious mind is so ancient itself that it is unimpressed by any artifacts of antiquity.

I will have to come back to this topic, because I'm currently writing it in a cafe next to an old man who is rambling loudly and thoughtlessly about everything from cell phones (bad) to church (good) to the price of bologna at Market Basket (variable, but much worse than it used to be). He's distracting me from conscious thought, so I cede the floor to this living avatar of Moon energy:

"I eat a lot of turnips...But after a while I need to have some meat...Now, this meat was nice and brown. No red. And tender! You could go through five slices like that..." 

I have learned to distrust anyone who seems too certain of themselves. This goes double for the psychic world and highway driving, where people who are too sure of themselves are the most dangerous.

The Man With The Missing Eye

"Hitler ended up in a ditch covered in petrol on fire. So that's fun. I think that's funny because he was a mass murdering fuckhead. And that was his honeymoon as well. Double trouble. Eva let's marry. Well where shall our honeymoon be? In a ditch covered in petrol on fire -- I've already arranged it upstairs." -Eddie Izzard, Dress to Kill

Last night I got the chance to slip out and see Valkyrie, a movie whose commercials had led me to expect it to be sort of a light-hearted comedy. On that note, I was disappointed because it's a reasonably serious film (it even has Kenneth Branagh in it).

I am convinced that the Second World War (and the Holocaust, in particular) is the great moral and spiritual puzzle of the twentieth century and that, as a people, we have still not figured out what exactly we were meant to learn from all this. So we constantly make movies about it -- from the insultingly absurd upcoming The Boy In The Striped Pajamas to a number of genuine classics such as Saving Private Ryan -- in an apparent attempt to simplify these great dilemmas and make them, if not palatable, more human-sized. But World War II is enormous. It refuses to cooperate.

Valkyrie is set in the late days of the war. Tom Cruise plays a one-eyed Nazi colonel who has recognized the evil nature of the regime and is trying to organize a last-minute coup against Hitler before the Allies ride into town. (Apparently Tom Cruise resisted wearing an eye patch, saying he found it uncomfortable, but it was pointed out to him that the real Colonel Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg probably wasn't crazy about having to wear it either. The sacrifices we will make for our art!)

Watching Cruise strut about as the one-eyed colonel, it is impossible not to be reminded of Odin, the one-eyed Germanic god of war, justice, and wisdom. Symbolically, one-eyed people use half of their energy to look within, to seek wisdom from the inner planes.

The mythologies of the old gods such as Odin had been revived by the Nazis themselves. Himmler himself spent considerable time formally invoking them at Wewelsburg Castle in Buren -- and here, finally, was the embodiment of one in person. Unfortunately for Himmler and co., Odin was playing for the other team.

As we know from history, Cruise's ersatz Odin fails disastrously in his mission to assassinate Hitler. The bomb in his briefcase goes off, but almost no one is injured. Cruise's character spends the rest of the movie insisting that Hitler is dead, but observant moviegoers can spot the Fuhrer himself stumbling around on the lawn shortly after the blast, dazed but unhurt.

No deus ex machina here. The gods showed up late to World War II and, as it turns out, they are inept with modern explosives. History, it seems, was already passing them by.

Hitler survives for mere months before becoming a "burnt offering" himself, anointed with gasoline, as if to invoke the next cycle of terrible wars.

The great poet Homer had to put the Greek gods into his epics in order to make human actions and motivations comprehensible.  Thousands of years later, our own souls remain a great, unassailable mystery.

(The Tarot is brilliant in part because it uses the gods to understand human motivations, rather than the other way around. It's only when blown up to drive-in-movie scale that we have any hope of understanding ourselves.)

The Devil Came Himself

The Big Lebowski: What makes a man, Mr. Lebowski?...Is it being prepared to do the right thing, whatever the cost? Isn't that what makes a man?

The Dude: Hmmm...Sure, that and a pair of testicles.

-The Big Lebowski, 1998

Lately I have been reading a lot of Dion Fortune, one of an astonishing number of powerful pre-feminist women in the Western esoteric tradition. Fortune was a psychotherapist as well as an occultist -- this was in the early days of psychotherapy, when there was no licensing, few professional standards, and when it was nearly de rigeur to sleep with one's patients. (Fortune, known as a prig in the relatively libertine circles of occultism, would never have crossed this line, but her contemporary Anais Nin certainly did.)

Like the more famous analyst Carl Jung, Fortune found psychological insight in the fairy tales of Western culture. One of these that fascinated Fortune, and many others before and after her, was the concept of the changeling.

As the stories went -- and they were common all over Europe for centuries -- a normal human baby could be stolen from its crib in the middle of the night by fairies or goblins, only to be replaced with a monstrous double of non-human origin. One could sometimes tell a changeling by its unusually thick head of hair, its enormous appetite, or the greenish tint of its skin. Sometimes, one might get one's real child returned by beating the changeling with a stick.

Modern interpreters believe that changeling stories were a medieval attempt to explain deformities or developmental delays in human children. But, as Fortune herself often lamented, modern academia too frequently gives our forebears short shrift when it comes to subtlety and common sense. The descriptions of changelings are actually quite consistent and precise, and they do not sound like either mental retardation or deformity, two conditions of which agricultural Europe was certainly already aware. What on earth were these stories really about?

In her own day, Fortune observed certain people who, as she wrote in her book Psychic Self-Defense, "might well be described as non-human, soulless, in that the ordinary human motives are not operative with them, nor do the ordinary human feelings prompt or inhibit them...Gratitude, compassion, good faith, morality and common honesty are utterly foreign to their natures." Fortune identified such individuals with the changeling phenomenon.

In the modern day, as her biographer Alan Richardson smugly points out, we call these people sociopaths. But in Fortune's time they knew of sociopaths by a clinical name as well ("moral insanity," which I rather like) and the well-read Dion would no doubt would have known this.

We no longer suppose that people can be literally switched at birth with a monster child, but we have not come up with any better ideas about why sociopaths are the way they are. And the more we look for them, the more of them we find hiding among us. Contemporary books such as The Sociopath Next Door suggest that as many as one in every 25 people may lack normal human empathy for the suffering of others.

At the end of August, our country quietly sentenced Joseph Edward Duncan III, one of the worst sociopaths and serial killers of modern times, to death. I will stay away from the details of Duncan's crimes as much as possible in this post; suffice it to say that he is a killer of children. If one doesn't already know what he did, it is better not to know. 

Endlessly fascinated by himself, Duncan kept several journals, both on and offline. In one, he whined, "I have no feelings for my victims, and I never will. But I do have feelings, very real feelings." I am inclined to believe this. On some level, Duncan understood that he was, in some way, fundamentally different than other people and every now and then, one can see him trying to wrestle with this in his writing.

What made him like this? Duncan's childhood was not enviable, but many others have suffered much worse and gone on to lead exemplary lives. If it is something in the circuitry of the brain, it is a process we do not understand. Psychology has no answers, only classifications.

Duncan himself believed that he was infested with demons, even at one point channeling the devil. "The devil is here, boy, the devil himself," he told one of his victims in a videotape confiscated by police. "The demon couldn't do what the devil sent him to do, so the devil came himself!"

"The devil made me do it" excuse is older than the hills, and lame. There's no doubt that letting "the devil" take him over gave Duncan "permission" to do what he really wanted to do anyway. "The devil" is only another part of Duncan, as he is part of me and Norman Mailer and my cat and Sarah Palin.

To paraphrase Lon Milo Duquette, one of the finest occult authors of our day: everything we can perceive is really part of us -- we're just a heck of a lot bigger than we think we are. It makes sense, then, to look at the sociopaths among us as changelings of a sort, people for whom the wrong part of the psyche is behind the wheel. Who made the switch? And how does one push the devil out of the driver's seat, once he has taken over? Nobody knows how.

For years, Joseph Edward Duncan III was a poster child for prison rehabilitation. Several wealthy men lobbied hard for his early release and offered to put him up in their own homes, among their own children. (Wisely, the state said no.) But Duncan was eventually released. Went to school, got a good job working with computers, "journaled" about his demons.

Then he went on a killing spree.

The state will kill Duncan, just like monsters in fairy tales are always slain. But even with his killing, there will be no sense that evil has been eradicated.

Dion Fortune got out of the psychoanalysis business pretty quickly, writing that "I had very little success in alleviating human misery, and this was a thing for which I was sincerely concerned; it made me genuinely unhappy when I saw cases drag on and spend their little all in the hope of a cure of which I knew there was no prospect."

Who Is Looking Through Your Eyes?

"I am large, I contain multitudes." -Walt Whitman

You are not you. Personality, identity, who is looking through your eyes, is a surprisingly mutable thing.

I think of patients diagnosed with multiple personality disorder (now called dissociative identity disorder) who are able to identify dozens, hundreds, even thousands of separate personalities within their shattered selves. When someone has a thousand different "parts," it strains the credulity of the public and even the medical community. But it is so. Psychologists theorize that sufferers of this condition fragment due to trauma, offering up personalities better able to deal with suffering and abuse. They leave behind shells, personalities frozen in varying stages of childhood like some tragic nursery.

I think it is more than this. There is a door at the back of the human mind -- perhaps one much like the opening at the back of the wardrobe leading into Narnia. Usually, this door is sealed. Trauma, like an earthquake, can split this portal open, but the door can also be unlocked consciously, allowing strange other selves to slip through to the light of day.

Great actors know how to do this. But it's a dangerous, taxing practice and, typically, they stop. The great actors of my parents' generation have lapsed, mostly, into mannered performances, echoes of characters past, caricatures like the shouty, table-pounding Pacino, the rakish and grinning Nicholson. This is, perhaps, why they are still alive.

Heath Ledger, of course, is dead. No one who has seen The Dark Knight this summer can forget that. His Joker is not a macabre clown with a vest full of stupid tricks, but the very force of chaos itself. This is what people are lining up to see. Ledger plugged into some vast and overwhelming force. It probably killed him. Anyone who has seen the movie will attest that he is not himself.

Some pagans call possession being "horsed." You are being ridden by a god. It doesn't sound pleasant, does it, but apparently it is reasonably safe if invoked respectfully, with the proper offerings.

Online, one can find video of the "King of the Witches," the late Alex Sanders, allowing himself to become possessed by an Aztec fire spirit. "I'm a trance medium," he says as followers dress him in a golden mask and a gigantic feathered headdress. "The moment I put the mask on, I start to change. I don't particularly like to do it...When the feathers go on, then I become a leader of my people and I want to blaze a trail. I want to defend. Everything against evil and against wrongdoing."

Presumably a character like Batman feels much the same way when he puts on his costume. The history of comic books tells us that the stereotypical mask, tights, and cape superhero costume originated in vaudeville, from a practice akin to modern-day Mexican wrestling. Many of the early superhero incarnations, particularly in the films, kept this cartoonish quality.

Not anymore. The Dark Knight, then, has brought us something new in the performances of Christian Bale and Heath Ledger. Modern-day myth has connected at last with the ancient power of the mask, allowing the new gods of our imagination to walk among us, even for a little while. This is what people are lining up to see.

It is no accident that we happen to need them now. We live in the psychic Straits of Magellan, where two colossal oceans meet. Our little ship has no captain.

In myth, these are the times when the gods intervene and when magic awakens in the world. It is unclear what we are about to become, but it is clear that something is starting to happen.