Review - The Book of Shadows Tarot

 I stumbled across the Book of Shadows Tarot about six months ago and was immediately intrigued by the concept.  This tarot is actually two decks; As Above and So Below.  The first deck, As Above, has been out for a while now and is designed to address the spiritual side of the question at hand.  The second deck, So Below, has just come out and is designed to address the mundane concerns of the query.  Quite an interesting approach no?

As witch with some strong Wiccan leanings this tarot immediately caught my attention.  I always enjoy exploring tarot the strong Pagan or Wiccan undertones because they resonate with me a lot more than the more ceremonial and alchemical underpinnings than classic tarot, like the Rider-Waite or Thoth decks (not that I don't use them from time to time).


The So Below deck has all the cards of a standard tarot, while the As Above deck is a little different.  The As Above deck is a larger than standard tarot deck that uses its own version of the major arcana.  For example, it has The Summerlands rather than The Fool and Wisdom rather than The High Priestess.  It also has a card for each of the Sabbats.  The So Below deck has all the cards of a standard tarot deck, but with Wiccan imagery. 

Both decks have the four standard suites  The As Above deck using The Elemental, The Maiden, The Mother, and The Crone as trumps.The So Below deck uses the more standard Knave, Knight, Queen, and King as trumps. 

I really enjoy the way the two decks work together.  The As Above deck is full of fantastical, mystical imagery, while the So Below deck has images of everyday life that I think will be familiar to any practicing witch.   It's nice to see a tarot system that actually addresses the dichotomy of the mysticism of the mind everyday reality.  It makes translating the reading into practical advice very easy.  The only criticism I have of the decks is that the imagery is too female heavy.  I'm a card carrying feminist (I went to Wellesley, it's sort of requires), but magick is not all female and the lack of male energy in the cards is palpable.  As a woman it's not really a problem for me, but I'd be interested to see how it worked in male hands.

I decided to do a simple 3 card (past-present-future) reading to see how the two decks work together.  I asked the simple question: what do I need to know?

From the As Above deck I got: Initiation, 8 of Air, and 4 of Fire.
From the So Below deck I got: 10 of Chalices, Knave of Wands, and The Hanged Man

From this I interpreted that in the past I had metaphysical initiation and mundane happiness.  In the present I have the mental clarity and focus of meditation, while biting off more than I can chew in the mundane (I took this to mean that my focus would help me deal with my having over loaded myself a bit).  In the future I have metaphysical action and mundane stasis - quite an odd combination.  As I'm planning to get started on my next book (which requires furious though and a still body) I'm going to take this as an OK thing.

It's an interesting combination of decks to use, but I think I like it.  I'm absolutely going to have to play with it more.

Upcoming Events May 25th and 26th

I've got two events coming up soon.

On Friday, May 25th I will be on a panel at PNW Paracon (a subset of Crypticon).  From 4-6pm we will be discussing the Legal Aspects of the Paranormal and Investigating. 

Hilton Seattle Airport & Conference Center
17620 International Blvd.
Seattle, WA 98188

On Saturday, May 26th I will be at Avebury Mystikals in Bremerton.  I will be doing a workshop on Common Magickal Pests from 11-12:30pm and from 12:30-1:30 I will be there signing copies of my book, Defense Against the Dark.

544 4th Street
Bremerton, Wa 98337

I hope to see you there!

Practice for Practice's Sake

I've been very fortunate during my time as a witch.  I have a deep connection with my deity and have traditionally always felt a pull to do the things that my deity wants me to do.  I've come to depend on that tug at the back of my brain, the feeling at the base of my spine, to let me know when I need to do something and what.  It could be to go to a particular place and meditate, to do a particular ritual, to learn a particular skill, etc.  When I was a beginner that type of direction was imperative; I just didn't know what I needed to do on my own.

These days it's a little different.  Things are a little less urgent than they once were.  I used to need to do certain rituals on a regular basis because I'd come under attack if I didn't.  That's no longer the case; your everyday boggles just don't come anywhere near me.  I used to need to do formal devotions to retain my connection to deity, that's not really an issue any more.  These day I kinda of live and breathe my practice.  On the one hand it's great - I don't lose anything if I skip certain practices and make substitutions for others.  On the other hand, because nothing is as urgent as it once was it just doesn't feel the same. 

I find myself in that odd place where any formal practice I do is solely for my own benefit.  My rituals are formal reminders and elaborate focusing exercises.  Sure, they give me an opportunity to feel my connection to deity without distraction, but that connection is always there.  All I had to do is close my eyes for a few moments on the bus to sense its presence - if that.  Spells and rituals are less about creating power and connections at this point than they are big pointers at what's already there.  Most of my spells these days are accomplished with a thought and a flick of power as I go about my life.

I really don't have to do any kind of formal practice, but sometimes I do it for its own sake.  Sometimes it's good to go back through the practices that gave me the foundation for what I do now.  Sometimes doing a formal ritual, even when I really don't have to, is a wonderful reminder of just how solid magickal practice can be.  When everything I do is almost instinctual it's easier to write it off, forget just how much impact it can have.  It's a lot harder to doubt what I do when I watch flames dance when there's no wind and feel the temperature drop when the circle is opened.  It's good to be reminded of the wonder I felt when I first started practicing.  So these days go out of my way a bit to bring some of the formal practices that I've dropped over the years back into my routine.  We can all use a little more wonder these days.

Belated Beltane

Well, I was going to have a nice blog post all about shadow work on Beltane ready to go for Wednesday, but then I caught a very annoying cold and decided to watch television instead.  However, some groups still celebrate Beltane on the 5th of May (Old Beltane) so I don't feel too badly.

In general, Beltane is all about sex, fertility, growth, and color.  It's definitely the most uninhibited holiday we Pagans have, with giant phalli abounding and folks going off for "alone time" in the forest.  Traditional symbols like the Maypole, bonfires, and fresh flowers are all about the explosion of new life and the sympathetic magick of human fertility inspiring crops to be equally fertile.  It's about as un-shadowy as you get.  Of course, there is Walpurgisnacht on April 30th to counterbalance all that sex and joy (Walpurgisnacht is sort of a mini-Samhain).

Much as I do love Walpurgisnacht and doing ritual while listening to Night on Bald Mountain by Mussorgsky, this year I wanted to actually celebrate Beltane.  Wellesley's been in my thoughts a lot of late, with the marathon bombing and my upcoming 10 year reunion, and Beltane was always a big deal for us there.  We'd wake up before dawn and go around the lake to do ritual while the sun rose and then have a big celebratory breakfast.  We'd make May Baskets (paper cones filled with candy and flowers) and give them to our friends.  My senior year we went all out and had a maypole in front of the chapel and a massive bonefire by the lake.  The Beltane is one of my favorite memories of undergrad and I still have the picture of all of us in front of the maypole up on my altar.  This year I really want to recapture some of the joy from that day.

Since I spent the 1st asleep on my couch with a big box of tissues, this year I'm celebrating Beltane on the 5th.  It's supposed to be a stunningly nice day so I'm going to get myself out into the woods to hike up to Fragrance Lake.  I'm going to get up as early as I can make myself, since it's about 2.5 hours up to the trail head, and get out into the forest.  It's early enough in the season that the forest will still be dark and rather dank in the morning and will gradually get warmer as the sun rises.  I think the progression of the hike should nicely mirror the progression of the season and the heat and sunshine I'll get by the time I get up to the lake will be a wonderful reflection of the energy of Beltane itself.  Hiking is always meditative for me and I feel that it's fairly reflective of the old practice of going out into the woods to have a mystical experience. 

Maybe I'll swing through La Conner on my way south to see if any of the flowers are still blooming.

Boston

Wow.  You know how yesterday I went on at length about being compassionate and almost never cursing people.  This.  This is something that warranted being hexed until you rot alive.

I went to undergrad just outside Boston.  Every year I looked forward to Marathon Monday.  You see, Wellesley is the halfway point for the Boston Marathon.  There are no classes on Marathon Monday, instead we have a carnival.  For me the Boston Marathon was about getting my fried dough and screaming my head off for all the runners.  They call it the Wellesley Scream Tunnel.  WZLY sets up outside Munger Hall and plays music while Black Bart watches over all with a benevolent eye and volunteers hand out water and orange slices.  One year I got to watch the marathon from the roof of Pomeroy alley (I had a tower room whose window opened out onto the roof).  I loved every moment of it.

That someone would try to turn a celebration of human achievement and perseverance and turn it into a horror show sickens me.  This.  This is something awful enough to warrant a hex.

Shadow Magick and Compassion

I've been doing shadow work for so long, I sometimes forget how ooky it can seem from the outside.  Yes, shadow work is dark, difficult, and sometimes scary.  And yes, the magick that derives from all that work is potent, sharp, and has the potential to break things.  But the darkness isn't the point.  The ooky spooky scary bits are there because if you want something special you have to earn it.  The ookiness is a means to an end, not the end in and of itself.  Shadow magick isn't about being angry and dark and wanting to hurt yourself or others - and if you approach it from that point of view you will either change in a hurry or deal with the consequences.  For the Shadow to work for you, your intent actually has to come from a place of compassion.

It's easy to hurl your anger into the darkness; but shadow work isn't easy.  Real shadow work is about facing the darkness and having compassion for it.  It's about coming face to face with your flaws, with your fears, and both forgiving yourself for your weakness and forgiving the world for allowing the thing you fear to exist.  It's not about conquering your fears; it's about learning to live with them.  Shadow work is about seeing yourself and the world around you clearly, warts and all, and learning to accept that truth.  The only way I've found to accomplish that without going completely mad is to learn to have real compassion. 

When I tell people that I'm a "black witch" or a "shadow worker," they will usually either say "what does that mean" or they will completely freak out.  The freak out is rare and it always surprises me a little.  You see, I don't tell just anyone that I'm a shadow worker - people whose only exposure to the spooky is television will inevitably react uncomfortably - I generally only tell other practitioners and I generally expect other practitioners to be able to look at my aura and realize that I'm not evil.  Sadly, that's not always the case.  There are always those folks who were taught that anything outside their particular brand of magick is evil (anyone who calls themselves a white witch will always react badly to someone who calls themselves a black witch, regardless of what either one means by those terms), and they do not tend to like me very much.  It's always a little disheartening to see that kind of knee-jerk prejudice in my own community.  I expect an abrahamic fundamentalist to object to what I do, I don't expect it from my own people.  It always makes me sad when people who should know better never bother too look beneath the label to find out what shadow workers actually do.  Maybe it bother me because my own reaction to something I fear is to find out all I can about it (this almost always alleviates me fears), so I have trouble understanding why other people don't do the same.

You see, people who are afraid of shadow workers are actually quite ridiculous.  It's almost impossible to become adept at shadow work without developing a deep rooted sense of compassion and understanding.  An adept has to learn to look at their own flaws every day without melting into a useless heap on the floor (this can be rather difficult), and one of the side effects of this skill is the ability to see those same flaws in others.  And let me tell you, it's really difficult not to feel at least some compassion for someone (regardless of how awful their behavior) when you see that their doing it because they have the same damned flaws you've got, that they just haven't dealt with yet.  It's hard to sustain anger with someone who you can see only lashed out because they don't know how to handle their own pain or fear.  This doesn't mean shadow workers all turn into Mother Theresa - hell no - but it does mean that our knee-jerk reactions aren't terribly violent and don't usually last very long.  The only "curse" a shadow worker is likely to lob at another person is one to make them see themselves more clearly and to develop a better understanding of what their doing - nothing more than what we voluntarily do to ourselves every day. 

Sure, the process of becoming an adept at shadow magick is difficult and often painful, but that doesn't make us bastards or masochists or anything else.  All it makes us is honest people who don't lie to themselves.  To be afraid of us just means you're afraid of yourself and we remind you of what you aren't willing to do.  Fear is a natural and healthy thing, just point it in the right direction.

Portland Beyond Bizarre Ghost Tour

Last weekend I headed down to Portland for the uber-fabulous annual Vampire Ball.  My friend and I decided to go down Friday night and enjoy a little more of Portland.  Our favorite way to learn about a new city?  Take a ghost tour of course!  There's no better way to get a quick and entertaining bit of history and culture than a good ghost tour.  We had heard about the Beyond Bizarre Ghost Tour and decided to give it a go.

 The tour began at Old Town Pizza with a discussion of the "Shanghai Tunnels."  If you've ever seen any of the paranormal shows that go to Portland they're always going on about the Shanghai Tunnels.  The story is that the basements of Portland were interconnected so drunkards could be abducted and made to work on ships in the Pacific.  This story makes for great dramatizations, so it's what the tv shows go with.  In truth, the tunnels were made to deal with the periodic flooding of the Willamette River (that bisects the town).  They've been almost completely sealed off since the 70s and now the "tunnels" are about 3-5 foot long cubbies.  Not so spooky.  I appreciate that this was the kind of tour to actually make that sort of clarification rather than going for the easy scare.

Still in the basement of Old Town Pizza, we were all given K2 emf meters and invited into a very dark, earthen floored area.  There was a nice circle of chair for us to sit in as the guide told us stories of happenings in the basement.  I don't remember the stories too well because I was kind of entranced by my friend Rae's K2.  Most people's meters were dead steady with two lights showing - which is normal.  Rae's, however, was pulsing from nothing to three bubbles, up and down, slowly - not so normal.  Rae also felt a cold spot where her meter was.  When I put my meter near hers it would pulse the same way.  The strange part was that once Rae got up, the spot was completely normal again.  So something down there liked her.

From there we went exploring through Chinatown and came across several old nightclubs that are supposed to be haunted by former owners, patrons, and folks who died there.  In the location above (the Roseland I believe) the spirit of a former employee is said to haunt the upper floors.  He was supposedly murdered by his boss when he tried to extort his boss for drug money.  Not the smartest move apparently.

From there we moved to a nicer part of town and went into the fabulous Benson hotel.  This hotel is supposedly haunted by the ghost of several suicides that happened there.  It's said that if you look into the big mirror on the main stairs you might see people or objects in the reflection that won't be there when you turn around.  I didn't notice anything all that unusual, but I'll admit that I didn't look too carefully because mirrors, in general, creep me out - to easily turned into portals for my taste.  We sat up in a little lounge area overlooking the main hall as the guide told us the extremely creepy story of a woman stuck in a telephone switch office with a ghost (the office in question being about five feet from where we sat).  It was creepy.

From there we went over to the old Portland police station, that is now mostly vacant but for one small law office.  This was an extremely creepy place.  Just standing next to the building you could tell that some very nasty things had gone down in there.  Tales of police corruption, crime bosses, and murdered stool pigeons just made it worse.  Although the building itself wasn't as odd as the parking lot just across the street.  In that parking lot I got the very odd sensation that energy of the place was hungry, and I could actually feel it sucking at my legs, drawing my energy down into it.  Needless to say I didn't feel terribly comfortable and didn't want to linger.  Apparently this was the only parking lot in all of Portland where you were guaranteed not to see a homeless person camping out for the night.  I believe it.

From there we went back into the more lively bar district and passed by the original Voodoo Doughnuts location.  Since our guide had a deal with Voodoo we all got a free doughnut without waiting in the gargantuan line.  Hooray for shortcuts :)  There was an interesting haunted theater/strip joint next to Voodoo so we heard our next tale of vice and tragedy while dodging drunks on sugar highs.  The added color actually enhanced the experience.

The next spot we talked about was the Portland Kells.  Now I didn't realize that Kells was a chain - there's also a Kells in Seattle that is also haunted.  The Portland Kells has haunted bathrooms (so haunted that the staff are trained to deal with freaked out patrons) and the Seattle Kells is just all haunted (former mortuary, oh yeah).  So this was quite an interesting site.

Towards the end of the tour we talked about an old saloon and the Oregon Leather Company.  Apparently several of the businesses in the area have reported seeing a large, hairy creature lurking in their basements.  Sasquatch or a really gnarly shadow person?  The world may never know.

All in all it was a very fun tour and I highly recommend it.  So next time you're in Portland, take the late night Beyond Bizarre Ghost Tour.