Pagan Godspell

AS o’er the gloomy heath the Pilgrim strays,
When night’s dark shadows thicken all around,
While nought he hears, save the low moaning sound
Of sweeping winds–at length, far distant rays

Sonnet, “As o’er the gloomy heath the Pilgrim strays” – Susan Evance, 1808

Greetings, Pagani, from pools of light spilled in icy darkness that coats the indigo pockets of the not-so-wild Midwest. The Mama has delivered unto us a visitation of freezing rain that pierced the day and splashed sheets of ice on every blade of grass and naked twig. The crabapple tree with the delicate spring blooms and the hardy fruit in summer has lost every leaf and turns in the moonlight like a piece of precious glass. In the spirit, we are wrapped in blankets and do the majority of our evening work by candlelight and oil lamp, pondering lost arts. Witchcraft and candlelight are married to a dream and the sensuality of real magic – there are no shadows like those made by fire, and there is no craft without shadow. A mystery of fire and ice in the first days of December.

I am thinking of solitude. Not hard, in the thick of a winter storm, to cast one’s thoughts out on the lonely stretches and invite the delicious saturation of emptiness into meditation. The path of the Pagani is one of dancing and hands and delicious conspiracy, conflict and transforming madness and laughing wrapped in the velvety, sandpapery art of community…certainly, we humans with our hot blood and our easily frost-bitten skin are communal creatures, touching and whispering and bickering and loving. But the path of mystic and occult wanderer necessitates Something Else in addition to our mingling breath and our throngs and assemblies. A witch may raise sand with her sisters and brothers in a copse of trees under a blood moon and with them throw her arms out in a shot of blistering, splitting joy on Sabbat Eve… but likewise, she knows that there is a lonely call, a Hand that plucks her thread from the ribbon of her bonds and sets her to wandering on hills and in dry riverbeds, picking stones from the dust and measuring loneliness into a coat of moss.

Of course, one could argue about what it means to be alone. It’s a silly civilized assumption that solitude is predicated solely upon the absence of human life. When I wander in the sweet lost hours over and through the prairie grass, I am never alone. I am watched by a million eyes and my scent is tasted by a thousand tongues. There are languages being spoken all around me, though I’m ignorant of their nuances, and I find that fact lamentable. But this isn’t really what I’m talking about. Just as there is silence and Silence, so there is solitude and Solitude. Alone with the spirits. Alone with the self. Alone with the Stars. Alone with the Gods. Alone with Silence. And the Soul. And the Cobalt Heart of the World.

Ultimately, there is a lot of Work to be done alone. Indeed, it might could be argued that the first duty of a mystic is the marriage to Solitude – to be entered and emptied simultaneously. Whether the Desert or the Sea, there is an Expanse Within, and we are standing in the middle of it. To walk in physical solitude is an exercise of itself – to walk while the core of your heartsblood is infused with the essential liqueur of Holy Solitude is deeper still. All those invisibility spells that get splashed around are hinting at the deeper secret. To melt into the Presence by virtue of solitude is to become the beam of sunlight in the corner of the bookstore where the dusty old tomes on philosophy and theology are kept – that beam of light with the dust motes in it, rapturously spiraling out of the ink between yellow pages and into some other story altogether. There are people on the other side of the bookcase, caught in a bubble of words and breathing the same air, and you are illuminating their book and their hands, and you are Alone in All the World.

Now me, of course, I go back and forth (as I’ve stated numerous times – no miraculously preserved corpse that smells like violets and juniper smoke for me). Solitude can be wholly and unequivocally, knee-jellying and stomach-thunking scary. Vast and bare. The Desert. The Sea. They can cut your heart open and pin it back exposed to all those eyes and tongues faster than you can spit. Naked naked naked. The Silence can undo you as neatly as it stitches you back together. It’s fucking hard for my civ-self to get down with the Big Shocking Lonely. Oh but that Hand still plucks at the hem of my skirt, on nights filled with the splinters of stars and the trees like lacy death. Those delicious kindled moments, I burn with the call to slip through the cracks of the golden hour as it slips into the first blue notes of evening, haunting the tall grass and becoming intimate with the heavy blanket of the wee hours of the morning, when so many other creatures of solitude make their way in the world. And then my heart aches after light and voices…and then the lonely night, and then the busy day…waxing and waning with the rhythm of a walker and a nomad, learning the lesson of balance with each turn of my head and each flicker of my eyelashes.

On this evening of all hard angles and sharpsy freezing bits that will rip you open before they melt, I wish for all People Who Dream an evening of shadow and ice – the Silence and the Solitude. Those brilliant, terrifying companions that wait in the middle of the Presence and dance until you are too enchanted to do anything but Come Home. In the fire of the blessing Desert. In the salt of the blessing Sea.

Grok Earth. Pray without ceasing.