Pagan Beliefs vs. Christianity (A Second Darkness Covers the Lands) - Original

[Heather Delaria]

Heather Delaria

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Member # 2196

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   posted 02-26-2006 08:30 PM                       
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quote:
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Originally posted by Brooke:
Heather Delaria, your posts are so funny! I'll bet that 90% of them bash Christianity.
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They aren't meant to be funny, Brooke, I actually find them kind of sad.

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"An it harm none, do what ye will."
-the Wiccan Rede

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Posts: 637 | Registered: Nov 2004   

[Heather Delaria]

Brooke

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   posted 02-27-2006 12:54 AM                       
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I thought it was funny anyway!
Helps to have a sense of humor about things.
 

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"The most incomprehensible thing about our universe is that it can be comprehended." - Albert Einstein

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[Heather Delaria]

Gwen Parker

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   posted 03-03-2006 12:49 AM                       
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Pagan Goddesses and Gods of the Delphi Oracle

The Pagan Oracle of Delphi was located about 75 NW of Athens on the Corinthian Sea (Korinthiakos Kolpos), 5 miles inland and 10 miles south of Mount Parnassos' (Parnassus) summit. There on the sharp, Parnassus mountain cliffs, at nearly 1900 feet above the Corinthian Gulf, where the sacred spring, Castalia still flows into the Cephissus river, two spectacular crags form a ledge. It is here that the Pagan temple of Apollo was located. The lower level of the Temple was reached by steps at one corner, and it is said that intoxicating fumes rose from a cleft in the floor near the center of the chamber, which were believed to be the smell from the decaying Python which Apollo is said to have killed. It was on Parnassus that the sacred Stone of Rhea landed when Cronus disgorged it. (There is a large stone that still rests in destroyed temple.)

Tradition has it that Delphi was found by Coretas, a shepherd boy, who discovered that his sheep and goats acted strangely when they approached the area and he himself soon began uttering prophetic statements which came true. However, oracle was given at Delphi by the Priestesses of Daphoene during Cretan times, which was at least 200 years and possibly 400 years before Apollo. The shepherd, Coretas obviously did not discover the sight, but rather he uncovered the secret to the Priestesses of the Serpent Oracles of Mother Goddess who presided there.
Christian sources assert that the Priestess at Delphi (Pythoness) was intoxicated by fumes escaping from the underground cavern and that she spoke gibberish which had to be interpreted by the priest; and further that the questions had to be formed so as to receive a "yes" or "no" answer.
Adamantius Origenes [Origen (c. 250 CE)], the Christian writer who defended Christianity against attacks by the philosopher, Celsus, in Contra Celsum, uses the following argument against Paganism:
"It is said of the Pythian priestess, whose oracle seems to have been the most celebrated, that when she sat down a the mouth of the Castalian cave, the prophetic spirit of Apollo entered her private parts. She sat with parted thighs on the tripod of Apollo, and the evil spirit entered her from below, passing through her genital organs, and plunged her into a state of frenzy, so that she began with loosened hair to foam and rage like a drunkard."
It must be noted that the Pythoness was still giving oracle at the time Origen wrote, and Origen did not report having personally seen this--even though he was a Greek--but rather, he reports that "it is said." And his statement was pure fantasy, intended to paint the Pythoness as a demonic channel.
The Pythoness did sit on a brass tripod, each leg of which represented a Goddess; the front most--facing east-- was Hera; tripod right was Pasiphae, the Cretan wife of Minos whose Bull worship was still reflected in Delphic worship; and tripod left was Ino, who, like Pasiphae predated the Apollonian invasion of the shrine. Thought apotheosis Ino became, Leucothea, Goddess of pools and streams, as it was from the pool of Castalia that the Priestess obtained her bowl of water from which she descried the oracle. The water from the Castalia pool contained methane and ethylene, traces of which are still present in the pool today. And it is likely that there was a greater degree of these gasses present anciently. And it is also possible that the amount of these gasses, and possibly others, decreased over the centuries, and as their euphoric properties decreased, so did the ability to produce oracle.
It was upon this tripod that the Pythoness sat with parted thighs, but she did not give frenzied oracle. That was the Sibyl of Cumae; and of course Origen would have considered any spirit or God which entered the Pythoness to be evil.
Socrates recognized the differences in madness, distinguishing it from being sane,
"but there is also a madness which is a divine gift, and the source of the chiefest blessings granted to men. For prophecy is a madness, and the prophetess at Delphi and the priestesses at Dodona when out of their senses have conferred great benefits on Hellas, both in public and private life, but when in their senses few or none." (Phaedrus, 243)
But being out of one's senses does not mean that one is "plunged" into a state of frenzy. On the contrary, all ancient paintings of the Pythoness show her seated on her tripod with a laurel sprig in her right hand and a bowl of water in her left from which she descries the oracle. No picture of the Pythoness shows her in a frenzied state, nor would she have been able to hold a bowl of water in that condition.
Origen, thus, becomes a classic example of the Christian ignorance which prevailed in the early days of that religion. That ignorance did not improve with age.
This is not to say that the Pythoness was not frenzied when she was in the cavern, as she most often was, for theolepsy was part of the oracle of Dionysus whose shrine was behind that of Apollo's. However, the cavern was forbidden to all but the priestess, and it is doubtful that she was ever seen in frenzied state when seated upon her tripod.
Modern exploration of the temple show mineral traces of methane and ethylene which could have been the fumes described by Plutarch. However, many of the questions asked by the inquirants have survived, and though many are trivial, they require more then a simple "yes" or "no" answer. Moreover, many of the answers have survived, and none are gibberish, but are articulate, though often couched in ambiguous terms. The Pythoness, however, did not speak directly to the inquirant, but rather she spoke to the priest of Apollo was always placed between the pythoness and the people.
This is what the 536th High Priestess of my religion told me about the Pythoness:
"She sat on a brass tripod, with a brass bowl filled with water in her right hand and a laurel sprig in her left; it was not fumes from the cavern which intoxicated the Priestess, for oracle had been given there long before the murder of Python by Apollo; the Pythoness was entered by the Spirit of the Vortex while alone in the lower cavern, protected by her two assistants who remained above. When she ascended she gave oracle in the ancient Cretan tongue, which was gibberish to the uninitiated, but was translated or interpreted by the priest and given to the inquirant. When the spirit was too weak to enter the Pythoness, she used a plant to induce a weakened physical and mental state; the plant which induce the trance-like state grew near the temple, and Coretas' goats had become intoxicated from eating the leaves of the tree (or bush), while the sheep, which are grazers, not browsers, were not affected. Coretas, however, had not eaten the leaves, but had become intoxicated after he had drunk a tea he had made from the leaves - which our priestesses say is a Laurel which grows only in that area; but originally oracle was given to the priestess when she was in an orgiastic state in the lower chamber and her assistant priestess conveyed the oracle to those who waited above." (The High Priestess also stated that while the fumes did not intoxicate, they produced a sense of euphoria which elevated the Priestess the same way music elevates the soul.)
Robert Graves seems to agree somewhat with this, stating that the "Goddess Daphoene [also Daphonesissa [the bloody one] was worshiped by a college of orgiastic laurel-chewing Maenads" and that "Apollo took over the laurel which, afterwards, only the Pythoness might chew".
Some species of the Laurel are mildly poisonous in small amounts--lethal in larger dosages--and when made into a decoction (boiled) of honey-wine, it has been know to produce prophetic hallucinations at the places of oracle. However, prior to the use of laurel leaves, the priestesses received oracle in three other ways,the first was by ecstatic orgasm, the second by drinking blood of sacred bulls, and the other by use of poisonous snakes to induce the oracular state.
Delphi is a classic example of the patriarchy overcoming Goddess worship. In order for the priests of Apollo to take possession of the oracle, it was necessary to destroy the Python and overcome the Cretan Goddess worship which had employed Snakes and the Bull for centuries. And while Apollo was very new in the Greek pantheon, the sacrificing of sheep to Apollo did not supplant the sacrificing of bulls to the Goddess until Classic times.
It is recorded that Doria [also called Rhodopis, the Thracian courtesan who lived in Egypt] donated a tenth of her wealth to have hugh iron spits made which were large enough to roast whole oxen. This was done in atonement of her fellow Thracian, Aesop, (of Fable fame) whom the Delphinians had killed by throwing him from the precipice (c. 193 AUC--560 BCE). These iron spits were used for the sacrifices at the altar of Dionysus which was opposite the temple building. After the ram supplanted oxen, the spits were removed and stored behind the altar where they were seen at the time of Herodotus (c. 299 AUC--454 BCE) but they were only mentioned by the priests at the time of Plutarch (c. 800 AUC--47 CE).
There had been six shrines at Delphi. The fifth which was made of dressed stones was burned and the sixth [and last] was erected in 262 AUC--491 BCE). Tradition has it that the fourth shrine had been built of brass by Hephaestus but was swallowed by an earthquake. However, this brass shrine of Hephaestus would have predated that of the laurels, as Hephaestus (Ptah in Egypt) was the master of the Cyclops (Kyklops), who predated the worship of Apollo. The brass shrine is more fable than myth, as there is no evidence of this kind of earthquake activity at the sight for at least 30,000 years. The second shrine was said to have been made of fern-stalks, which indicates that the oracle was purely sexual before it was replaced by the equally sexual Cretan Order. This is confirmed by the first shrine also which was made of bee's wax and feathers, which indicates that the oracle was not only sexual, but had its origin in Egypt, and that the cave was at one time a Vortic center--the bee's wax being formed in the shape of an omphalos.
The Omphalos, or Navel of the World, was said to have originally been in the cave at Delphi, but that would have been at least 6,000 years before Troy; and that conflicts with Greek myth which has Zeus losing his navel string at Omphalion, which is on Crete, near Knossos. Knossos, of course, predated the Greeks by at least one thousand years, and it is likely that the later Greeks attributed the Omphalos to Delphi because it was the home of Pythos, the Stone of Rhea.
The Stone of Rhea came about when Uranus, whom Cronus had castrated before usurping his throne, prophesied that one of the Children of Cronus would in a like manner dethrone him. Cronus took this to heart and after making his sister, Rhea, his consort, each year she bore to him a child. Hestia was the first, then Demeter, and Hera, third. After this were born Hades followed by Poseidon. Cronus devoured each of these five as they were born. Rhea's third son, Zeus was born at night on Mount Lycaeum in Arcadia. Knowing that Cronus would devour her newborn son, Rhea bathed him in the River Neda, to cover him with an earthly scent, and gave him to Gaea (Mother Earth) who took him to Lyctos in Crete where he was hidden in the Cave of Dictes. There he was cared for by the daughters of Melisseus, by name, Adrasteia and Io, and by the Goat-nymph Amalthea, who fed Zeus and his foster-brother, Pan, on her milk.
When Zeus grew to maturity he went to the Ocean Stream where he took his first mate, the Oceanid, Metis (counsel), one of the thousand daughters of Oceanus and Tethys. It was Metis who instructed Zeus in how to become the Cup Bearer of Cronus. She also taught Zeus how to serve his father an emetic concoction, which caused Cronus to vomit the children he had swallowed. The first disgorged was not a child, but the Stone Rhea had given to Cronus, wrapped in swaddling clothes, and which he believed to be Her Son. When disgorged, the stone called Pythos, was hurled down to Mount Parnassus where Zeus fixed it in a deep cleft. It was constantly anointed with oil by the suppliants of Apollo who offered it strands of unwoven wool. It was Metis, also, who would be the force in the dethronement of Zeus.
The usurping of the priestess' authority took place no more than three generations before the Trojan war. It was Heracles who had restructured the zodiac with his twelve labors, and it was Perseus who had set Pegasus and Agyieus loose to destroy the Goddess worship in Greece. For it was the winged-horse, Pegasus, springing full grown the body of Medusa, who then flew to mount Halcion where he became the favorite of the Muses; and it was the poets, touched by the Muses, who created the myth of their past. Even so, the takeover of Delphi was not completed for least 600 years.
Greek myth has Phoebus (radiant) Apollo being born on the small floating island of Delos, the seven-month child of Leto, (Roman, Latona) and Zeus. His twin sister, born a sacred nine days before Apollo on the Isle of Ortigia, was the Grey-Eyed, Virgin-Huntress, Artemis, who would become the Roman Diane, and bear the epitath Cynthae, which She gained in Her dispute with Aphrodite who bore the title Cynthera.
The Greeks had Zeus always off seducing and impregnating married and unmarried woman and the Goddess, Hera, His wife, was always trying to take vengeance on those women. One fable--for it is certainly not myth--has Python pursuing Leto until she came to Delos. This is obviously a Hellenized version of Isis who, when pregnant with Horus, was pursued by Set (the Greek Typhoon) until she came to the moving island of Ta-Neter, as the Greeks considered Isis and Leto to be the same, just as they considered Apollo to be Horus. The Egyptians, prior to the Greek invasion, made no such association, but rather worshiped Leto as a foreign goddess whom they called Lat--the Romans would call Leto, Latona. Most of the remainder of the Apollo fable is inconsistent with Egyptian myth.
The Chick Quail, which is the last letter in the Egyptian Alphabet--pronounced U (OO), is found in both cultures, but in very different aspects. And while all Egyptian Goddesses or Netert supported Isis in her travails, the Greek, Hera, was made the enemy of Leto. Also, Ta-Neter, which was to the South and East of Egypt, welcomed Isis and floated away, never to be seen again, when Isis and her infant son left. However, the Isle of Delos was unwilling to receive the Greek Leto, fearing that it would be forgotten and sunk into the depths of the sea. Delos, of course, became a permanent Island, and one of the centers of Apollo worship. Hera was said to have used guile and deception to keep Ilithyia, the Goddess of Child Birth on Olympus, thus making the labor of Leto (after the birth of Artemis) nine days, before the birth Goddess could come and deliver her son.
After leaving Delos, Apollo pursued Python, the enemy of Leto, who fled to Crisa, which would later be called Delphi. There Apollo entered the shrine of the Goddess Mother of the Earth and killed Python beside the chasm. Of course, Pythos, was the Stone of Rhea which was placed there by Zeus, but the destruction of Serpent Worship at the oracle needed justification. It was the fumes of the decaying body of Python which were said to fill the lower chamber of the shrine--but since only priestesses were permitted into the lower chamber, even the Greeks had to speculate on what was there.
The Pythian games were inaugurated as a funeral honor to Python. Apollo may have been able to do away with the Python (that is, the Goddess worhsip of the priestesses) but the people still honored their ancient Goddesses. In later years, the Olympian Games would invoke the Pythian Truce which were written on the five concentric rings which insured that the Olympics could be held every 4 years without fear of attack or revenge by any attending. Today those rings are said to represent the five modern continents from which contestants came to the first modern Olympic games--there were of course six continents represented in the first modern Olympic game.
Apollo was tainted by this murder of Python, and Zeus sent him to Tempe for purification; but Apollo sailed instead to Tarrha in Crete, where King Carmanor [son of Dionysus and Alixirrhoe] performed the rite. This of course makes Dionysus older than Apollo, which is also indicated by the oracle of Dionysus which was at Crisa, before its name was changed to Delphi--in honor of Apollo-Delphinus, or dolphin.
Cleombrotus, in Plutarch's Why Oracles Failed (21) tells of a wise man on the Persian Gulf, who stated to him that
"[the] slayer [of Python] was not afterwards banished for nine years nor did he go to Tempe, but on being sentenced he passed to another world. After nine cycles of great years he came back from there purified and truly Phoebus, and took over the oracle which until then had been guarded by Themis. (The Goddess of Justice.)
On his return to Delphi, Apollo attempted to seduce Daphne, the priestess of the Goddess Mother Earth, but when he was about to catch her, she cried out and Mother Earth took her away to Crete (the home of the Serpent Priestesses), and left the laurel-tree in her place. Apollo consoled himself by making a "laurel wreath" for himself. Or so the Greeks would like us to believe.
Ovid makes Daphne the daughter of the river God Peneus, and the blunt (literally of Cupid's revenge) Apollo chided Cupid one day for his use of the bow, and bragged how his arrow never failed, and how he slew Python with countless darts. Cupid countered by telling Apollo "You are far above all creatures living, and by just that distance your glory less than mine". Cupid then waited for his revenge. That was not long coming, when Cupid saw Apollo approaching the place where Daphne bathed in her father's pool. He drew from his quiver two different arrows, one gleaming golden and sharp, the other deadeningly blunt, tipped with lead to drive all love away, and this he used on Daphne, while he shot Apollo with the stinging sharp arrow of love, through bone, through marrow, and through the heart, and he loved Daphne. Daphne had many suitors, bus spurned them and made the marriage torches hateful and criminal to her. Apollo pursued her, telling her he was lord of Delphi, Tenedos, Claros and Patara and Zeus was his father. But she fled and Apollo, driven by the superior power of love gave chase. She escaped him at first, but his relentless pursuit drove her to terror and exhaustion, and seeing the river of her father she cried for his help. Her father heard and "when her limbs grew numb and heavy, her soft breasts were closed with delicate bark, her hair was leaves, her arms were branches, and her speedy feet roots and held, and her head became a tree top. Everything gone except her grace, her shining. Apollo lover her still. He placed his hand where he had hoped and felt the heart still beating under the bark; and he embraced the branches as if they still were limbs, and kissed the wood, and the wood shrank from his kisses," and from that time on he loved the Laurel above all trees.
The truth of the matter is, Daphne (laurel) was the daughter of Teiresias, the blind Theban Prophet who gave birth to her during the seven years when he had been a woman. His other daughter, Manto [the mother of Mopsus, the seer] he sired after he was a man again. Daphne and Manto were both taken captive when Thebes fell in the generation before Troy. Manto was sent to Ionia where she married Rhacius, King of Caria, by whom she had Mopsus--said to be the son of Apollo. Daphne remained a virgin and was sent to Delphi; most likely to add the power of Teiresias to the Delphi oracle which had recently (within 100 years) been taken over by the Apollonians. There she became the Sibyl. There are some who say that Manto had her name changed to Daphne when she was sent to Delphi, but this is perpetrated by Apollonians who forget that the Sibyl spurned Apollo's love, while Mopsus was the son of Apollo and Manto.
To obtain Priests for his new cult, Apollo, became a Dolphin and sought out a ship from Crete, which he led back to Greece. The Captain was made High Priest of Apollo and instructed in his rites. The priestesses of Daphoene remained at Crisa, which was now named after the Dolphin--Delphi and were now Priestesses of Apollo and were 9 in number. Originally the priestesses were chosen as young girls, and like all priestesses of The Goddess performed sexual rituals in the function of oracle. During the reign of the Spartan king, Cleomenes, the method of selecting priestesses was changed when it was discovered that the Pythoness, Perialla, had been bribed by love to give false oracle. Their number was reduced to three and they were chosen only after they had reached an age when they were no longer eligible for marriage, [50 years] at which time no man would desire them sexually--some women as old as 70 years when chosen. The Pythonesses did not die young as some modern scholars assert, as they were old before receiving their calling.
It must be noted that Apollo was strictly a Greek creation. He existed in no other nation before the Greeks became a world power. Where Zeus ruled the heavens, Poseidon the seas, and Hades the underworld, with the earth common to all, Apollo held dominion in all--or so the Greeks believed. Along with Athena, Apollo holds the distinction of being the one Greek god who was not represented in the heavens. He was said to be the Sun God, but Helios held that distinction--he was also said to be the light of the moon, but that is because of his twin sister Artemis. It is obvious that Apollo was a Greek form of the Egyptian Horus, who through religious transformation became unique to the Greeks.
Apollo was not just a god of light, but also of healing and disease. His greatest and most feared weapon was thus inflicted on humanity in the form of deathful diseases. It would appear that when the Aryan herdsmen began their invasion of Asia and southern Europe, their first contacts with the hunters and gathers of the lands brought disease and death to the natives. This has always been the case because most deadly diseases, smallpox, etc, are also diseases of herd animals. Cowpox, for instance, was found to be a good vaccine against smallpox. The herdsmen built an immunity towards the diseases, but the hunters, gathers and farmers who had no domestic animals, like the Native Americans, were ravaged the common cold for which they had no immunity. The invading Aryans attributed this great power to destroy by disease to their new God--Apollo--who fought on their side and destroyed all their enemies. And while Apollo was the most beloved god of the Greeks, when other nations became immune to the diseases of the Aryans, he was also the first to lose his power. The deadly far-shooting arrow of Apollo, which would spread disease would be replaced by his murderous worshipers, who launched the Dorian Invasion.
Cleomenes became co-king of Sparta on the death of his father Anaxandrides, son of Leon, who was co-king with Ariston during the time when Croesus was king of Lydia. Until the time of Anaxandrides, the Spartans were undefeated by any other nation, except the Tegeans. Upon consulting the Oracle at Delphi he was told that Sparta could achieve mastery over Tegea only if they retrieved the bones of Orestes--the son of Agamemnon who avenged the murder of his father and became the archetype of the Dorian race--from Tegea. Not knowing where the bones of Orestes were, Anaxandrides sent Licuas to the Oracle of Delphi, who told him to "go where two winds meet, where stroke meets stroke, and where evil rings upon evil," and there he would find the bones buried in the earth. Licuas went to Tegea where he met a smith who was forging a sword of iron instead of bronze. Licuas marveled at the sight and was told by the smith that more unusual things were there. While he was digging a well he had found an enormous coffin which had huge bones in it. Licuas then knew that the "two winds" referred to the smith's bellows, the "strokes" were of the hammer meeting the sword, and "evil upon evil" referred to the iron hammer meeting the iron sword, as iron was the sign of the evil of the "Iron Age." Lichas returned to Sparta and told what he had discovered. Anaxandrides sent him back to the smith disguised as a runaway slave. During the night he stole the bones from the coffin and escaped with them to Sparta. From that time on, the Spartans became the masters over Tegea. Anaxandrides had married his sisters daughter, and even though she was barren, he refused to put her away as the ephors demanded. The ephors and elders of the Lacedaemon came to him again and ordered him either to put away his wife (or they would find a way to do away with her) or take a second wife (contrary to Spartan law). He took a second wife and she became the mother of Cleomedes.


http://www.goddess.org/vortices/notes/delphi.html
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Posts: 475 | Registered: Nov 2004 

[Heather Delaria]

 
Heather Delaria

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Pagan Beliefs


Paganism is the oldest religion known to humanity. It's origins are obscure, but conjectured to have arisen with humanity's desire to explore the unknown, and seek unity with the divine force (however that may be perceived). Therefore, Paganism has no founder or founders, no earthly leaders, no prophets, no messiahs, and no saints.

The word Pagan is derived from the Latin Paganus, "a civilian", and from Pagus, "a village". This delineates Pagans as those who are from a village, or more commonly, simply country-dwellers. Whilst the majority of Pagans today - like the majority of the population - live in towns, this term accurately describes the Pagan heritage, and the affinity which modern Pagans feel with the natural environment.

Thus modern Pagans follow a religion which is as old as humanity itself, but whose practices have been adapted to suit life in the modern world. The concepts which were vital to sustaining life in bygone times are revered, and their principles have been retained; however, we acknowledge that our modern lifestyles are sustained in very different ways.

WHO ARE MODERN PAGANS?

Modern Pagans are people who have made a positive choice to follow a path of individual spiritual growth that is in harmony with the Earth upon which we live. Many people have become aware of a spiritual void in their lives, and have discovered, in Paganism, a religion of joy and love, which allows self-expression, but also encourages social and environmental responsibility.

Modern Pagans are men and women of all ages, drawn from all walks of life, and from vaious racial or cultural backgrounds. Members of the Pagan Alliance include scientists, solicitors, students, health care professionals, teachers, farmers, information technology specialists, industrial relation specialists, graphic designers, engineers, members of the Defence Force, Project Managers, members of the Public Service, Librarians, psychologists, artists, and research assistants, to name but a few.

The one thing they all have in common is a desire to follow a spiritual path which is in harmony with the Earth, and which encourages self-discovery, and individual responsibility.

PAGAN TRADITIONS

There are numerous traditions under the generic classification of Paganism.
Click Here for more information on Pagan Traditions.

PAGAN BELIEFS

The spiritual or religious beliefs of Pagans are that deity is both imminent and transcendent. Deity is therefore a part of the fabric of our being, of our environment, and of that which is beyond anything we can imagine.

Deity is perceived as both male and female. God is seen in many ways, and expressed in our worship as the male principle; all of the male Pagan deities are accepted as aspects of God. Goddess is seen in many ways, and expresses the female principle. All of the female Pagan deities are accepted as aspects of Goddess.

Pagans do not believe in a dualistic viewpoint of absolute opposites; of "good versus evil". Pagans believe that all things exist in their own place, and that we should strive for dynamic balance and harmony. Extremism of any form does not have a place within the Pagan philosophy.

Most Pagans believe in reincarnation. There is a strong affinity with the idea of cyclical life patterns, which do not cease with the death of the physical body. Most Pagans have no concept which could be described as heaven or hell in the commonly-used Christian sense. However, Northern Pagan traditions encompass both a heaven and a hell, with a sophisticated philosophy which describes the operation of these realms. Briefly, Heaven (Asgard) is a final resting place, and Hell (Hel) is a place of rest, from where souls may choose to be re-born. In the Northern Traditions, Hel is not a place of damnation and torture.

The Wiccan religion has what is called "The Summerlands"; a place where souls find rest before being re-born into the physical world.

The Druid belief in reincarnation is confirmed many times in classical sources; e.g. Posidonius (quoteed by Diodorus): "... [Druids believe that] the souls of men are immortal, and that after a definite number of years they live a seconed life when the soul passes to another body."

Julius Caesar: "The cardinal doctrine which they seek to teach is that souls do not die, but after death pass from one to another; and this belief, as the fear of death is thereby cast aside, they hold to be the greatest invective to valour."

Each Pagan religion has its own philosophy about the afterlife, and about reincarnation. Individual Pagans may also have their own philosophy about these subjects, for the Pagan religions do not have a dogma, or strict set of teachings, which all Pagans must folow.

Paganism is one of the so-called "Mystery Paths", where each individual has direct experience of divinity. Although it is becoming more common for Pagan Priests and Priestesses to administer rites to a group of people, individual experience of divinity remains the primary objective for most practising Pagans.

This differs significantly from most State religions, where a figure of authority performs rites, and mediates the divine force, on behalf of a congregation. In most Pagan religions, each individual is a Priest or Priestess in his or her own right.

Pagans do not "worship" trees or rocks; however, they do revere the divine force which is contained within trees and rocks; indeed, is contained within every part of the universe.

Pagans do not worship a savious, or other spiritual leader. The emphasis is upon each individual's spiritual enlightenment, and responsibility for this is not abdicated to another person. The practice of Paganism is a voyage of self-discovery, and the discovery of one's own place within the divine realm.

Paganism is not, therefore, a cult, for a cult has a leader, and Paganism has none. Individual groups will often be led by one or two people who are experienced in the practice of the religion, but such people have no influence outside of their own group or tradition.

RELIGIOUS PRACTICES: WORSHIP

Pagans believe that each individual has the right to worship in their own way; there is no legislation that requires Pagans to follow any prescribed manner of worship. Some Pagans worship in a formal manner; have a more instinctive and unconscious mode of acknowledging and communicating with Goddess and God. Some Pagans prefer to make their worship a private affair; others gather in groups and make their worship a communion with each other, as well as with Goddess and God.

Like most religions, Paganism has Rites of Passage, with some traditions having a formal set of rituals for birth, marriage and death. Those Pagan religions which adhere most closely to the "Mystery Path" will also have rites of initiation. These are designed to effect a spiritual awakening within the initiate, and do not include such practices as animal or human sacrifice, nor any activity which is against the wishes or ethics of the initiate.

Rituals to celebrate a birth, which often include a naming ceremony, do not promise the child to the religion, in the way of a Christian baptism. The parents of the child will often adk for divine guidance and protection for their child, but will not make any promises about bringing the child up in a particular faith.

It is a strong Pagan belief that each individual must follow his or her own path. Children are taught to honour their family and friends; to have integrity, honesty and loyalty; to treat the Earth as sacred, and to love and respect all forms of life. Other than these basic teachings, children are encouraged to question, and to find their own spiritual path. Many Pagan parents will ensure that their children are exposed to the teachings of a number of religions, so that the child receives a well-balanced spiritual education.

RELIGIOUS PRACTICES: HOLY DAYS

To Pagans, every day is a holy day, but there are a number of Festival celebrations which are held throughout the year. The Festivals, and the time on which they are celebrated, varies. Within each tradition, there are commonalities, but these are by no means definitive across the whole religion.

Perhaps the best known is the cycle of Festivals celebrated by many Pagans, including the Wiccan tradition, and modern Druids. There are eight Festivals, being Samhain, Giuli (Yule), Imbolg (also known as Candlemas), Spring Equinox (also known as Eostre), Beltane, Litha (Midsummer), and the Autumn Equinox (also known as Mabon).

These Festivals are derived from variously, Celtic and Saxon sources, and their essence has remained in modern society through folk memory, and in many rural traditions.

Other Pagan traditions celebrate the turning of the seasons with four Festivals to mark Spring, Summer, Autumn and Spring. As always with Paganism, the emphasis is upon what is meaningful for each individual, rather than a strict adherence to a rigid doctrine.

PAGANISM IN AUSTRALIA AND NEW ZEALAND

The history of Paganism in Australia and New Zealand is lengthy, for the indigenous people were Pagan, before the arrival of colonisation and its attendant Christian Missionaries. The conversion of the native people to Christianity was uncompromising.

The earliest incidence of revived European Paganism in Australia and New Zealand is unknown, but there are reports of witches meeting in Canberra, ACT during the 1920s. Many immigrants brought their own traditions and practices with them, and since the 1970s numerous books have been published about the revived Pagan religions and their practices.

Although laws against "the pretence of the practice of witchcraft" remain on the statute books in a few places, the modern Pagan in Australia and New Zealand can practise his or her religion without fear. Pagans remain the target of mainstream fundamentalist fanatics, but thankfully, fewer and fewer rational people are taking fundamentalist absurdities seriously. However, for this reason, and because bigotry still exists in many places, some Pagans practice their religion privately, and prefer not to make their beliefs public.

Some Pagans are prepared to be public spokespeople for their religion, and through the Pan Pacific Pagan Alliance, and other similar organisations have provided accurate and sensible information to the media, police forces, local government organisations, child care agencies, health centres and so on. That we have been so successful in our attempt to inform society of the truth of our religion is a testament to those Pagans who live and work in Australia and New Zealand.

PAGAN CUSTOMS

Because Paganism stresses the importance of individuality, there are few, if any, widespread customs. A sense of the sanctity of the natural world, concern for the environment, and acceptance that we are socially responsible to our fellow-creatures, dictates the kind of customs which most Pagans follow.

There are no dietary requirements, or any prohibitions within the Pagan philosophy. Those who follow a vegan/vegetarian diet, or who abstain from alcohol, tobacco, etc., do so out of choice, not tenets of faith.

There are no laws of blasphemy and conflict between individuals remains the responsiblity and concern of those who are involved. There are no penances, or any other form of religious punishments.

Paganism does not legislate where matters of morality and ethics are concerned. It is up to each individual to be responsible for their own viewpoints and decisions. The religion itself does not promote nor condemn practices related to sexual activity, procreation, use of alcohol and other mind altering substances. Individual Pagans may hold viewpoints on one or more of these issues, however, they are PERSONAL viewpoints, and not the considered opinion of the religion per se.

Pagans have a high regard for the equality of the sexes and do not suppress the feminine principle in the way that many other religions seem to do. Pagan Priestesses have the same status as Priests; in some traditions, they have primacy in leading the religious practices.

Many Pagans acknowledge the concept of "Elders"; those from the community who, by virtue of their training or experience, have a greater understanding of social, moral and practical matters. Pagans who gather together (either formally or informally) as a group, will often look to those who lead the group for guidance on moral issues and socially accepted behaviour. However, it is a fundamental aspect of Paganism that each individual must accept full responsibility for their own actions. There is no "confession" or other absolution to devolve responsibility to another person, or to God and/or Goddess.

FALLACIES

Pagans are not concerned with perverting the sacred symbols, beliefs or practices of any other religion.

Pagans do not perform sacrifices (other than of their own energy and time), and are not opposed to any other religious beliefs.

Pagans do not sexually abuse children; quite the contrary. Despite many hysterical claims of sexual abuse by witches and other occultists, none has ever been proven to be true.

For a Pagan to abuse a child is total anathema. It is contrary to everything that we hold close to our hearts. Our children are our future, and a part of the ultimate divine source. Pagan children are born in love and unity; they are sacred, and are treated as such.

CONCLUSION.

Paganism is a legitimate, coherent and responsible spiritual path to which many people are attracted in these days of ecological concern. To be a Pagan in the 20th (and 21st) century is to hold and believe in the sacredness of all things; to revere and respect all life; and to love and honour one's family and friends.




http://www.witchesway.net/links/paganism/beliefs.html

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"An it harm none, do what ye will."
-the Wiccan Rede

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Posts: 637 | Registered: Nov 2004
 

[Heather Delaria]

Heather Delaria

Member
Member # 2196

Member Rated:
   posted 05-09-2006 01:33 AM                       
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Slavic Pagan Beliefs

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The Slavic peoples are not a "race". Like the Romance and Germanic peoples, they are related by area and culture, not so much by blood. Today there are thirteen different Slavic groups divided into three blocs, Eastern, Southern and Western. These include the Russians, Poles, Czechs, Ukrainians, Byelorussians, Serbians,Croatians, Macedonians, Slovenians, Bulgarians, Kashubians, Albanians and Slovakians. Although the Lithuanians, Estonians and Latvians are of Baltic tribes, we are including some of their customs as they are similar to those of their Slavic neighbors.

Slavic Runes were called "Runitsa", "Cherty y Rezy" ("Strokes and Cuts") and later, "Vlesovitsa". The Cyrillic system ("Cyrillitsa") was created in the 9th century by Sts. Cyril and Methodius based on a combination of the Greek alphabet and the Slavic Runes. Vlesovitsa continued to be used by the Pagans, while Cyrillitsa was used by the Christians. During the "war" against Paganism, the Christians destroyed each document that contained Runic instead of the Cyrillic writing, usually along with its owner. This was done so effectively that according to most sources, the ancient Slavic peoples had no written language at all. Therefore the nearly all records of the rituals, temples and idols/gods of the ancient Slavs come from the very people sent to destroy them. This, along with the fact that very little information on Slavic Mythology and Magick has been translated into English, makes studying the subject extremely difficult.

Research must then be done through the study of folklore and folk customs. Fortunately, the medieval Slavic peasant did not embraced Christianity on any more than a surface level. This gave rise to what the Russians call dvoeverie (dvoh-ev-VAIR-ryeh) or "double-faith". According to one historian, Christianity so shallowly masked the surface of the true Pagan beliefs, many a peasant did not know the name of the man on the cross to whom he prayed.

Dualism & The Origins of Slavic Belief

The origins of Slavic belief, like that of the rest of the world's, reside in animism and ancestral worship. The first two types of spirit were called the beregyni - female spirits that bring life and are the forerunners of the Rusalki, and Upyr - the spirits of death who eventually became our modern Vampire (Wampyr). From this original dualism sprang belief in all of the nature spirits, and eventually in the Rod and Rozhenitsa, the God and Goddess who imbue the newborn child with a soul and his/her fate. Although nearly all deities were originally ancestral, Rod and Rozhenitsa eventually pulled the Slavic mind out of that way of thinking and opened the doorway for the later "Indo-European" structure, although the original "Old European" mindset kept a stronger hold on the average Slav.

Dualism permeates all of Slavic Pagan spirituality and actually seems to be the basis for most of it. This should not be confused with the dualistic good against evil beliefs of the Christian religion which have unfortunately seeped into the Slavic spirituality of today. It is a system of complimenting opposites such as darkness and light, winter and summer, female and male, cold and hot more similar to the yin/yang. The God-brothers Bialybog "white-god" and Czarnebog "black-god" who rule the sky and underworld respectively, are further illustrations of this polarity. Unfortunately, because of the introduction of Christianity, these two gods later became confused with Jehovah and Satan.

Other examples of dualism are - the two Rozhinitsy, the mother and daughter fates, the spirits of midnight, Polunocnitsa and noon, Poludnitsa - both times seen to be equally as frightening, and the Zorya - Goddesses of dusk and dawn.

The Elements

The ancient Slavs had a deep sense of reverence for the four elements. Fire and Water were seen as sacred dualistic symbols on the horizontal or earthly plane. Earth and Sky were seen as a more vertical system of duality. High places such as mountaintops or treetops, especially birch, linden and oak, became sacred as meeting places the Sky father and the Earth mother. Where they met, they would join their procreative forces, usually in a flash of lightening and clap of thunder.

The winds were seen as the grandchildren of the God, Stribog. Water was refered to in mythology as the water of life and death and rivers were treated with respect lest they should drown you on your next visit. There are records of human, as well as other sacrifices being made to rivers such as the Dneiper and the Volga. Although many bodies of water had their own deities, most of them were ruled by spirits known as Rusalki or Vodanoi. Fire was personified by the god, Svarozhich and it was considered nearly criminal to spit into a fire. Mati Syra Zemlja or Mother Moist Earth, however, seems to have been given the greatest amount of respect.

No one was allowed to strike Mati Syra Zemlja with a hoe, until the Spring Equinox, Maslenica, as she was considered pregnant until then. Earth was considered so sacred that oaths were sworn while holding a piece of her, sometimes in the mouth and ancient wedding vows were taken while swallowing a small clump of Earth or holding it on the head. The custom of asking the Earth's forgiveness before death was still being observed far into the 20th century and when a priest could not be found it was considered appropriate to confess sins to the Earth.

Totems

Like the native Americans, it seems that each Slavic tribe had a totem animal that the clan was usually named after. It was considered taboo to kill or eat this animal except for specific religious rituals. Each member of the tribe was thought to have an animal twin, and the death of that twin could cause the death of the tribe member. The World Tree

The Slavs believed that the world tree was divided into three parts; The roots existed in the realm of the underworld, "Nav", and were where the zaltys lived. The main section existed in the mundane world and the uppermost branches reached into the land of the sky Gods. A magical bird was said to live in the branches. Although the Slavs did have Viking influence, the world tree beliefs seem to come more from the native Siberians. These Asian peoples each keep a tree, usually a linden, near their home and see it as a sort of "telephone" to the other realms. Creation Myths

(Russian 1071 CE - the transcript of Lavrentij) - A Slavic magi was recorded as saying:
"We know how man was created: God was washing in the bathhouse and, after sweating,
he wiped himself with a towel that he threw onto the ground; then Satan entered into dispute with God as to who should make man out of this towel; and God breathed a soul into him, therefore after death man's body returns to the soil and his spirit to God."

A Christmas Carol from Galica explains:

When there was in the beginning no world,
Then there was neither heaven nor earth.
Everywhere was a blue sea,
And on the midst of the sea, a green plane-trees
On the plane tree three doves,
Three doves take counsel,
Take counsel as how to create the world.
"Let us plunge to the bottom of the sea.
Let us gather fine sand;
Let us scatter fine sand,
That it may become for us black earth.
Let us get golden rocks;
Let us scatter golden rocks.
Let there be for us a bright sky,
A bright sky, a shining sun,
A shining sun and bright moon,
A bright moon, a bright morning star,
A bright morning star and little starlets.

-Drahomaniv p.10

In other recorded versions of this song, there are two doves not three, two oaks instead of a plane tree or blue stones instead of golden ones. Much later versions have God, St. Peter and St. Paul riding the doves as the actual creators.


In the beginning, there were no earth and no people, only the primordial sea. Bielobog flew over the face of the waters in the shape of a swan and was lonely. Longing for someone to keep him company, he noticed his shadow, Chernobog and rejoiced.

"Let us make land" said Bielobog.

"Let us," said Chernobog, but where will we get the dirt?"

"There is dirt under the water, go down and get some," answered Bielobog, but before you can reach it, you must say 'With Bielobog's power and mine'."

The devil dived into the water, but said "With My Power", instead of what he was instructed to say. Twice he dived down and neither time did he reach the bottom. Finally, the third time he said "With Bielobog's Power and Mine" and he reached the dirt. Scraping some up with his nails, he brought it to the surface but hid a grain of dirt in his mouth in order to have his own land.

God then took the dirt from him and scattered it upon the water. The dirt became dry land and began to grow. Of course, the land in Chernobog's mouth also began to grow and his mouth began to swell. Chernobog was forced to spit and spit to rid himself of all the earth and where he spit, mountains were formed.

Angered that he was cheated out of his own land, he waited for Bielobog to fall asleep. As soon as the god was sleeping peacefully, Czernobog lifted him up to throw him in the water. In each direction he went, but the land had grown so much, he could not reach the ocean. When Bielobog awoke, Czernobog said "Look how much the land has grown, we should bless it."

..And Bielobog said slyly, "I blessed it last night, in all four directions, when you tried to throw me in the water."

This greatly angered Czernobog who stormed off to get away from Bielobog once and for all. In the meantime, the earth would not stop growing. This made Bielobog very nervous as the Heavens could no longer cover it all, so he sent an expedition to ask Czernobog how to make it stop.

Czernobog had since created a goat. When the expedition saw the great god Czernobog riding astride a goat, they couldn't stop laughing. This angered the god and he refused to speak to them. Bielobog then created a bee, and sent the bee to spy on Czernobog.

The bee quietly alit upon Czernobog's shoulder and waited. Soon, she heard him say to the goat "What a stupid god! He doesn't even know that all he has to do is take a stick, make a cross to the four directions and say 'That is enough earth'. Instead he wonders what to do."

Hearing this, the bee buzzed off in excitement. Knowing that he'd been heard, Czernobog yelled after the bee, "Whoever sent you, Let him eat your excrement!".

The bee went directly to Bielobog and said "He said All you need to do is make a cross to the four directions and say 'That is enough earth.' And to me he said 'let whomever sent you eat your excrement'.

So god stopped the earth from growing and than said to the bee "Then forever after, let there be no excrement sweeter than yours."

This myth is a combination of myths from Bulgarian and Ukranian sources. Although the
versions of these myths use God and Satanail as the dual creators, Slavic scholars agree that the myth is a later form of the original dualism of Czernobog and Bielobog. Because of this I have replaced the names.

The World Tree.

Some Slavs believed that the Earth was an Island floating in water that the sun was immersed in every evening. At the center of this Island stood the world tree or mountain. The roots of this tree extended deep into the underworld and the branches reached high up into the realm of the sky gods, Irij.

Nav was the underworld, realm of the dead from whence it gets its name. Weles/Wolos, the God of cattle and wealth and Lada, Goddess of springtime were also said to reside here. This is not really surprising, considering that most cthonic deities, such as Pluto, Saturn and Ops were also associated with wealth and that the crops are pushed upward from inside the Earth. Also, Lada would return from the underworld in the spring, much like Kore, Persephone and Ostara of the Teutons did.

Origin of Witchcraft - a story

Long ago, when the world was still fairly new, a young woman ventured into the woods to pick mushrooms. In no time at all, the skies opened up upon her and narrowly escaping the rain, she ran beneath a tree, removed all of her clothing, and bundled them up in her bag so they would not get wet. After some time, the rain stopped and the woman resumed her mushroom picking. Weles, Horned God of the forest happened upon her, and asked her what great magick she knew in order to have kept dry during the storm.

"If you show me the secret to your magick, I will show you how I kept dry." she said. Being somewhat easily tempted by a pretty face, Weles proceeded to teach her all of his magickal secrets. After he was done, she told him how she had removed her clothing and hid under a tree.

Knowing that he had been tricked, but had no one but himself to blame, Weles ran off in a rage, and thus, the first Witch came into being.

http://hometown.aol.com/hpsofsnert/beli.html

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"An it harm none, do what ye will."
-the Wiccan Rede

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Posts: 637 | Registered: Nov 2004

[Heather Delaria]

Heather Delaria

Member
Member # 2196

Member Rated:
   posted 05-09-2006 01:36 AM                       
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Becoming a Pagan


Many people, both young and old have asked me for information on how to become a Pagan. This page will answer some of the most common questions. In matters of spirituality, many paths are open to you.


There is no "one right path". There is only, the path that is right for you. Learning about what Pagans believe and practice will help you know if this path is one that helps you to truly express your own spirit.





The Goddess within you has the power to remember. All things are possible when you claim your Goddess-self. Imagine you are a Goddess, Now, be the Goddess you imagine.


Pagan 101


What is a Pagan?
A Pagan is a person who believes that everything has a soul or spirit. This is called Animism, and all Pagan religions share this belief. Rivers, animals, rocks, trees, land are all filled with there own unique spirits for people who are Pagans. Traditionally, Christians believe that only humans have souls or spirits. Many environmentally conscious Christians today share the belief with Pagans that all forms of life have a soul. Pagans see the divine spirit in all life, as do some members of other religions.


Is there more than One Pagan Religion?
There are hundreds of different Pagan Religions. Some of the best known Pagan religions are Buddhism, Shintoism, Native American Religions, Hinduism, Taoism, Wicca, Druidism, Asatru, Shamanism, Neo-Paganism and Eclectic Paganism.

Is Paganism a Cult?
No, Paganism is a major World Religion, with many branches. More people on Earth are Pagans than any other faith. Some Pagan groups may be classified as cults, just like some Christian groups are cults.
The Christian groups headed by Jim Jones at Jonestown, who committed mass suicide, and the followers of David Koresh at Waco, Texas are both considered cults, but they were once considered Christian denominations. Any religious or spiritual tradition can have cults in its midst, that does not mean that the entire tradition is a cult. Wackos and religious charletans come in all religions, denominations, and races.
The word Cult is often used as a slur word to disparage someone elses religious beliefs. It is frequently used derisively toward non-white or indigenous folk cultures and their beliefs.


Are Pagans Devil Worshippers?
No, Pagans do not worship the Devil or Satan. Pagans do not believe in the Devil, he is part of the Judeo-Christian Religions and mythology. Most Devil worshipping groups are not Pagan, because they are centered on a Judeo-Christian supernatural being, namely Satan. These Devil Worshippers are a sect of Christianity, even though Christianity does not want to claim them.

Their focus is on opposing the mainstream Christian God and honoring the Devil, neither of these beings are part of Paganism. There is a tradition that calls itself Satanist. Satanists are not devil worshippers. They do not believe in god or the devil or any force outside themselves and other living creatures. They believe they can control their lives without the need to place responsibility on a higher power of any kind. Devil worshippers on the other hand sometimes do claim to be Satanists. . . this leads to lots of confusion.

People often confuse the Occult with Pagan Religion, this is a mistake, they are very different things. Many religions, including; Pagan, Non-Pagan, Christianity and Judeaism have occult aspects, many do not..


Are Pagans Witches?
Some Pagans are Witches, some are not. Many Pagan groups do not practice Witchcraft. Wiccans are a type of Pagan Witches, there are also Dianic Witches, Green Witches, and other types of Pagan Witches. There are also Christian Witches, many of these people are practicing Christian, but also practice Witchcraft. Santeria is a South American religion that is a blend of VooDoo, Witchcraft and Christianity.

What do I need to be a Pagan?
A love of Nature, and a commitment to live in harmony with the Earth and Her creatures. You need to feel in your heart that it is where your own spirituality is leading you. Paganism is for Pagans, only you know if you are a Pagan in your heart.


What is a Pagan Ritual?
A Religious or Pagan Ritual is anything that focuses your spiritual energy. A church service is a ritual, so is a wedding, or a funeral, or a Hopi Sun Dance. Humans have created rituals since the beginning of time. Ritual is the way humans express their connection with divinity and each other.

There are many kinds of Pagan Ritual, personal rituals you do by yourself, full moon rituals, by yourself or with a group. There are blessing rituals for a new home, or for children, or for healing, or cleansing. There are protection ritual, and banishing rituals, to name a few.

Your Grandmother may have placed a horseshoe over the door, this is a popular form of simple protection ritual that is rooted in Pagan tradition. Or throwing salt over your shoulder if it is spilled, so as not to attract bad luck.


For Wiccans and Neo-Pagans there are some basic Ritual Traditions that you may have heard about. Many Pagan Ritual begin by honoring the Earth and the 4 directions, as well as the elements the directions represent, Air, Fire, Water and Earth. A circle is cast and blessed with water, smoke, salt and light in honor of these elements. Rituals often include, singing, chanting, dancing, drumming, poetry and hymns to the Goddess or Gods. Some Rituals are very complex and are almost like a play, other rituals are very simple and flow with the energy of the group.


Do Pagans believe in Jesus?
Some do and some do not. Many Pagans believe in a wide variety of higher beings. Jesus is one of these beings for some Pagans. Some believe he was a great spiritual teacher, but not a god. Some have no feelings about him at all.


Who is the Pagan God?
There is no single Pagan God. Some Pagan faiths, like Hinduism and Eclectic Paganism have many Gods and Goddesses. Some Pagan Traditions like Taoism have no Gods or Goddesses. Some popular deities with contemporary American Pagans are Artemis-Diana, Inanna, the GreenMan, IsIs, Brigid, Rhiannon, Apollo, Kore, and Demeter.

What is a Goddess?
The first deities humans worshipped were Goddesses. A Goddess is the female creative and life giving forces of the Universe and much more. See "Goddess 101" for more detailed answers about what a Goddess is Goddess 101


Do Pagans Pray?
Yes, many Pagans pray and many connect with the divine in other ways. Many meditate as a form of prayer, other drum as a form of prayer, others chant, sing or dance. Some dedicate each task they perform during the day, to the Goddess. Throughout human history people have spoken to their Gods or Goddesses through many different kinds of "prayer".

When a Muslim prays, they bow toward Mecca, when a Christian prays they cross themselves, when a Buddhist prays they chant or make a sand mandala, when a Pagan prays, they may be chanting, doing ritual, hugging a tree or picking up litter on a beach, as a way of connecting with their Goddesses or Gods.

How do you become a Pagan?
You look into your heart and ask if it is the right path for you. Some people are born Pagans, even though they do not even know the word, others are born into Pagan cultures, and many others become Pagan when they search their hearts for a connection with their Spirits.

To become a practicing Pagan, you must learn to look at Nature and begin to honor Her ways and cycles. Many new Pagans begin by celebrating the phases of the Moon. This can be as simple as taking the time each evening to gaze at the Moon and sing softly to yourself. Make up the words as you go along, you will be amazed at how easy it is. Really look at plants, and your cat, sit quietly and see if you can feel their energy. The first steps to becoming a Pagan are becoming aware of the magic of the natural world around you. The second step is do a small personal ritual and self-blessing that celebrates your entering the Pagan Path.


What do Pagans do?
Pagans try to live in harmony with the Earth and raise their children to honor the ways of Nature. Pagans strive to strengthen their understanding of this miracle called Life.
Pagans go to school, go to work, pay taxes, clean house, garden, raise kids, make art, watch TV, do not watch TV, eat at McDonalds, do not eat at McDonalds and love or hate computers, just like everyone else.

Pagans are just folks who have a different religion, a Nature Religion that teaches them to honor all life. Pagans honor their Goddesses and Gods with the same faith that non-pagans have their own religions.


Where are the Pagan Churches?

There are thousands of Pagan Temples around the world. Most Eclectic Pagans, Wiccans and Native American Religions do not worship in churches. Because they are Nature Religions. Religious Rituals are often held outside, in parks, fields, wooded groves, at a beach or lake, anywhere that promotes a connection with Nature. Large public rituals are often held in auditoriums, small rituals are often held in peoples homes. There are also Virtual Temples and Altars online.

Why do people say bad things about Pagans?

People often ridicule what they do not understand. Fundamental Christianity seems especially threatened by Pagans, although I do not know why. Many hateful, ridiculous, and untrue things about Paganism have been said by Fundamentalist preachers, who obviously were not paying any attention to Jesus message. Hate and prejudice were never a part of Jesus teachings. Hollywood has also created many damaging and untrue stereotypes to sell movie tickets. Funny, no one believes Robo-Cop is real, but people seem anxious to believe any absurd thing said about Pagans or Witches. (NO "The Craft" was not realistic or true at all!!!)


Can a Christian be a Pagan too?

Many cultures have a blend of Christian and Pagan beliefs within their Christian Religions. Irish Catholicism, Mexican, Italian and South American Catholicism all have incorporated many Pagan beliefs and customs into their Christian faith. I am sure there are many others, but these are the ones I am most familiar with. The crowning of Mary on May Day is from the older Pagan custom of "Crowning the May Queen" as a representative of the Goddess.

Religious belief is a very personal thing, it is the most personal thing about you. How you express your spirituality is no ones business but your own and what you believe is between you and your higher power. Your truth is in your own heart, honor it and do not let anyone limit it.


How do I start learning about being a Pagan?

You look into your heart and begin asking yourself questions about what is sacred. The essence of Paganism is within you, many of the answers are there. There are some resources listed below that will help you to learn more about Paganism. Start with remembering top be grateful to the earth for sustaining your life and giving you food.


What can I do if my family or friends think it is bad to be a Pagan?

You can try to educate them. If this does not work, quietly develop a Pagan heart. You can begin by trusting your own perceptions. Then honor Nature and learn Her ways. You may not be able to buy books or go to public rituals, but you can watch a small patch of grass for 10 minutes and really see it, all true power comes through understanding.


You can gaze at the night sky and feel the power of the Moon, and get to know Her phases .......You can learn about herbs, and the environment .......You can practice sewing, so when you can have ritual clothes, you will be able to create beautiful ones .......You can look at National Geographics at the Library and learn about Pagan societies and beliefs around the world .......You can go to museums and see ancient Goddess & God figures .......You can study about Native American customs ....... You can pick up litter as a way to be a Pagan honoring Mother Earth .......You can meditate .......You can collect pictures of Nature .......You can soak in a tub and do a private ritual in your mind, as you bless the water for its life giving essence .......You can notice if the plants or animals around you need food or water .......You can thank the Earth for each bit of food you eat.......You can learn to recognize what Nature is saying by listening.


Regardless of what your friends or family believe, you can practice your faith in small, simple, healing ways that will create a powerful spiritual energy within you and strengthen your connection with the Earths Wisdom and Spirituality.

http://www.spiralgoddess.com/Pagan101.html

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"An it harm none, do what ye will."
-the Wiccan Rede

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Posts: 637 | Registered: Nov 2004 

[Heather Delaria]

Heather Delaria

Member
Member # 2196

Member Rated:
   posted 05-09-2006 01:38 AM                       
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The Ohio State University
Pagan Student Association

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Some Basic Pagan Beliefs
Please note: these beliefs are generally held in Paganism but because Paganism consists of many religions and is so individualistic, beliefs vary. The beliefs summed up here are by no means the only beliefs there are and some Pagans may have different views than these.

Belief in Deities
Pagans believe in the existence of Gods and Goddesses that affect our lives. Paganism tends to be polytheistic (belief in more than one Deity).
Individuals often follow a specific pantheon such as Celtic, Norse, Greek, etc. Some Pagans worship the whole pantheon while others choose to direct their worship to a few or even one of the deities. Some Pagans consider the deities to be aspects of reality or personality, which helps them to focus on specific attributes of life or the self tsuch as strength, learning, or love. Other Pagans consider the deities to be external beings who embody certain traits again such as strength, learning, or love. Pagans have very Personal relationships with their deities and so how they perceive them is very personal and individualistic.
Reincarnation
Most Pagans believe that after death, the spirit is reborn in another body. Again, beliefs in exactly what happens and wheter or not you are punished for you wrong doings in this life or the next, vary.
Magick
The ability to use your will to effect real and positive changes in your life is magick. You do not have to practice Magick to be Pagan but many Pagans do practice Magick in one form or another (actually, much of today's modern medicine was once considered to be part of Magick until science explained how it worked). Magick is, of course, controversial. Magick, and the fear that it caused (and still causes in some situations), is what led to the persecution of Pagans.
Ritual
Like the rituals in most religions, Pagan rituals mark changes and events in human life: birth, death, marriage, and so forth. Ritual can be a ceremony of celebration (as in the holy days) or a way of honoring the Gods and Goddesses and thanking them for Their blessings. Offerings made to the Gods and Goddesses often include things of beauty, flowers, art, stones, crystals, or things of art made by the practitioner, poems, songs, and dance. These offerings demonstrate the level of dedication and devotion of Pagan worshippers.
Sabbats
There are usually eight major holy days, or holidays, in the Pagan calendar. All are agrarian, four relate more to plants (planting, harvest, etc.) and four relate more to animal husbandry (cycles of fertility).

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http://pagansa.org.ohio-state.edu/beliefs.html

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"An it harm none, do what ye will."
-the Wiccan Rede

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[Heather Delaria]

Heather Delaria

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   posted 05-09-2006 01:42 AM                       
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Animal Welfare and Pagan Beliefs
Animals and Pagan Beliefs
Branwen's View


This short essay is not intended to fully give the details of our spiritual path, but only that part of it that may explain the emphasis on the care of homeless and abandoned companion animals. We also offer opportunities to donate directly to Kitten Rescue, a non-profit organization dedicated to caring for cats, or to participate in our project of adopting a feral cat colony.

It will be no surprise to the pagans reading this that a pagan-owned company would take an active role in animal welfare. Most pagans practice religions that are grounded in Nature and in which reverence for the Earth is crucial. However, in some pagan religions the connection to the Earth is more passive than in others, primarily informing the appropriate times for worship, the nature of particular deities, and a belief that it is wrong to harm animals without cause.
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Our spiritual path takes the connection to the Earth to a deeper level and insists upon an active demonstration of reverence for all living things. Of course, there are many other pagan religions and local organizations that are equally involved in animal welfare, though it is likely that the specific reasons differ. A quick glance at the number of pagan web sites that are partially or entirely about saving animals and dispelling misconceptions about the relationship between pagans and animals is evidence enough.

We believe that everyone, human and otherwise, is connected spiritually. The Universe includes a spiritual realm as well as a material one that is in us, around us, and in every way a part of us. It is not some distant realm that we can only reach through ritual and prayer, but can be seen and felt every day in everything we do. Our spiritual nature is part of a whole being that was here from the beginning and will be here long after we are gone.

When a creature (including humans) is born, it is given a spark of life, a tiny portion of the Universal Spirit that makes it alive. Some may call this God or Goddess or many other names, but they are part of one whole. The gods and goddesses we know from various pagan religions are no less divine entities in this view; they were given a spark of life at some time in history like the rest of us. ALL creatures are made to live through their connection with the Universal Spirit. When death comes, each of us returns his portion of the life spirit to the Universe. Since the spirit begins and ends as one, this view does not include a traditional view of reincarnation in which the person continues without material form, but with the same characteristics as he had when living upon Earth. However, since all becomes one after death, the next creature born will receive its life force from everyone who has gone before. In that sense, we are reincarnated eternally.

This view of the Universal Spirit has the consequence of regarding all creatures on Earth as spiritual equals. All animals have souls, or spirits, if you prefer. They are our brothers and sisters in spirit and are entitled to every consideration we would give to another human being. The laws of Nature with regard to food animals and those which endanger our lives in some way does not contradict this view, but that is a subject for another essay.

But what of companion animals? Humans have more concern for dogs and cats than any other animals, yet many people treat them with unbelievable cruelty and only a few try to help them. We have a duty to take care of these animals because we are responsible for their being helpless. When an animal is domesticated, it becomes dependent on humans for all its needs. Cats and dogs were domesticated thousands of years ago and have long ago lost the ability to care for themselves without human intervention. Many people think that cats can survive on their own, catching mice and other small animals. They cannot and do not survive, unless one thinks of survival as living one or two years with no shelter and only a few scraps and an occasional rodent for subsistence. Compare that existence with the life of a housecat that lives in comfort for 18 to 20 years.

Humans have not acted responsibly toward these animals that we removed from their natural habitat to make them into our companions or to help us with our work. We treat them as possessions, abandoning them at will, killing their children, and abusing them in unimaginable ways. Too many times someone hears tiny mewing from a dumpster and finds a bag of newborn kittens. When a rescuer comes to take these babies, he can only wonder about the many who were never heard. Our shelters are overflowing with animals brought there by people uninterested and unwilling to care for the offspring of their own animals. In the United States, eight million puppies and kittens are euthanized in shelters every year. Do we not have a responsibility toward animals who live and die in such precarious circumstances because of our choice to domesticate them?

These animals are our brothers and sisters. They have spirits that are the same as ours and come from the same source. All of our ancestors are present in them, and all our children and children’s children will be a part of their children as well. The emphasis on active animal welfare in our path comes from this belief. The homeless dog or cat you may see in the street is entitled to your attention. Its spirit is neither more nor less valuable than any other, including your own. If we are to profess to have a close connection to Nature, a reverence for it, we must acknowledge this connection through action, and if we believe that animals are endowed with spirits identical to our own, we must take actions that give them an equal opportunity to live and contribute to the Earth. No pagan would leave an abandoned child in the street without calling for help or acting directly to ensure the child’s safety. It is our belief that we can do no less for the abandoned animals among us.

The emphasis on cats in our efforts is partly due to Branwen’s long affinity for these beautiful creatures and partly to the practical matter of living in a place where dog rescue would be impossible. If Branwen's Cauldron owned property rather than being housed in a rented city apartment, we would have animals of all kinds sharing our space. For now, cats lend us their beauty and mystery, and our attention is focused on aiding those of their kind who need our help.

http://www.branwenscauldron.com/beliefs.html

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"An it harm none, do what ye will."
-the Wiccan Rede

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Posts: 637 | Registered: Nov 2004

[Heather Delaria]

Heather Delaria

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Member # 2196

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   posted 08-26-2006 07:35 PM                       
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Archetypology 101: Fact, Fiction, & Fallacies
Episode 7 - Roll up for the magical mystery tour
by Aeon
November 27, 2001 Salagadoola mechicka boola bibbidi-bobbidi-boo
It'll do magic believe it or not
bibbidi-bobbidi-boo.
- "Bibbidi-bobbidi-boo," from Walt Disney's Cinderella
Any exploration of magic and magicians, be it historical, mythological or purely fictional (or, as in the case of this article, a combination of all three), will necessarily fall short in some fashion. Magic, you see, is intertwined with human nature in an inextricable way; it's been with us since the first humans crawled down from the trees (or were raised from the ashes by the God of your choice, if you prefer). And for as long as we've had magic, we've had magic-users, practitioners of the magical arts and guardians of its secrets. For that reason, any comprehensive study of magic would be millions of pages long, and would take far longer than I have. Thus, it's essential that I explicitly limit the scope of this article, to give form to what would otherwise be formless--to tame the dragon, so to speak.

First of all, it's important to note that this won't be an article about magic. The topic is too broad, and the concept too intangible, to imagine discussing it here at any length. And since I won't have time to cover magic in general, that also means I won't be discussing things like magical schools (i.e., Necromancy, Thaumaturgy, Illusion, Divination, etc.) except in the most broad terms. In part, this is because there's just no time to do each one justice, and in part it's because the history of magic does not always clearly differentiate between "types" of magic. When you're burning a witch, for example, you don't usually stop to ask her whether she specializes in Abjuration or Conjuration.

Secondly, this won't be an article about magicians, which is to say, it's not going to be about the people who practice magic as it's most commonly recognized today (i.e., stage magic). David Copperfield and his brethren are certainly good at what they do, but much like professional wrestling, there's no real attempt made by them to present their art as real magic. Everyone knows it's all smoke, mirrors and rotating platforms, and while that's certainly a valid form of illusion, it belongs more within the realm of the Role-Playing rogue than the wizard. The term "magician" is typically best avoided because of this modern connotation.

Thirdly (and in keeping with our magical theme, most importantly), this isn't going to be a religious diatribe. Various religions and mythologies are discussed herein, including the Judeo-Christian belief system as well as religions and systems that are often seen to be its opponents, including Wicca and Satanism. It's not my place to pass judgment on the validity of any beliefs, nor to try and convince an audience one way or another if it's real magic, pure hokum or worthy of worship. I can only hope that my readers can avoid falling into the same snares. I have no intention of sparking religious warfare, in part because such discussion is best restricted to articles about Role-Playing clerics, priests and divine faith, and in part because one's faith is a personal matter. Religion is discussed here as I believe it pertains to the magic-user, and that's as far as I wish to take it.

That said, what will be discussed here is the Role-Playing Wizard, where he came from and where he's going. In a column about character and race archetypes, this statement seems pretty self-evident and somewhat redundant, but whereas other columns had built in limitations, no such boundaries exist here. Every Role-Playing Game system has a different magic system, and while fighters will always fight and thieves will always steal, the magician changes his colors like a chameleon. Poof, I memorize my spells. Poof, I use mana and spell points. Poof, I can carry a sword. Poof, I can't use weapons or armor. Poof, I draw pentagrams and summon demons. Poof, I only create illusions. And so on, and so forth. Poof, I'm a magic-user. Poof, I'm a wizard. Poof, I'm a sorcerer. Poof, I'm wearing robes and a pointy hat. Poof, I'm wearing leather bondage gear and have a tattoo on my bare chest.

Ewww... how the heck did we get *there*?

Let's take a look.

Memory and Mana - The Role-Playing Magic-user
There was a man and he had eight sons... the eighth son grew up and married and had eight sons, and because there is only one suitable profession for the eighth son of an eighth son, he became a wizard... against the Lore of Magic and certainly against all reason... he fled the halls of magic and fell in love and got married... And he had seven sons, each one from the cradle at least as powerful as any wizard in the world. And then he had an eight son... A wizard squared. A source of magic. A sourcerer.
- from "Sourcery," by Terry Pratchett

Magic (and thus words like mage, magician and magic-user) comes to us from the Middle English/French magique by way of the Latin magice by way of the Greek magike by way of the Old Persian magos, which means "sorcerer." Got all that? Good. Because we also have to add into the mix "magi," a Latin word tangled up with the Greek "magoi"; it's from somewhere in here that we get the Biblical concept of the magi, the three "wise men" who came to visit the infant Christ in his manger. These "magi" were most likely Persian Mithraic priest-magicians; according to Herodotus, a magus (the singular of magi) was one of the social classes of the Medes, similar to medicine men, or shamans. So here we've got magic tied up with religion too.

Sorcerer (and sorcery) come from the Middle English sorcerie, by way of the Vulgar Latin sortiarius, which comes from the Latin root "sort- or sors-", which has to do with drawing lots or chance. A sorcerer, then, is one who divines the future by way of casting lots (as with rune stones, or the I Ching, or knucklebones). Since sorcerers claimed to be speaking and conjuring spirits to do their divining, they were ultimately lumped in with magicians.

Wizard (and wisdom) comes from the Middle English wysard, from the root "wis or wys," which means wise. In its earliest appearances, it's almost synonymous with sage (one who is sagacious, or wise), which itself comes from some combination of the Latin sapere (to have taste/be wise), the Oscan sipus (knowing) and/or the Old Saxon ansebbian (to perceive/be perceptive). A wizard, then, is a sage, a wise man, and an advisor. At some point in the 15th century or so, wizards, too, got lumped into the larger category of "magicians" along with sorcerers. Today, of course, wizard has gotten back to its roots; a wizard can be anyone who's skilled at a specific task (often shortened to "wiz or whiz," as in whiz-kid, computer wizard, pinball wizard, etc.) One of today's most famous basketball wizards, Michael Jordan, is even a literal Wizard.

But I digress. The point here is that originally, a mage/magi was either a priest or a sorcerer, a sorcerer was a fortune teller, and a wizard was a wise man, and none of them specifically had anything to do with magic as Role-Playing Games recognize it. In today's RPGs, these terms mean entirely different things. Even if the names don't exactly line up, we find ourselves with at least three distinct types of Role-Playing Magic-user:

1) The Wizard, who came first (at least in the world of Role-Playing), was originally called the Magic-user, or the Magician. He tends to be older, as befits a professional student of magic, and spends most of his time reading ancient tomes and polishing his magical talents before, inexplicably, he chooses to suddenly drop out of college and wander around the world with killers and thieves. He's typically pictured wearing the stereotypical long robe, pointy hat with stars and slippers, and is most likely toddling around with a wand or staff. Most importantly, he must memorize his magical spells, reading them from books and then speaking the incantations which will release the stored energy from his mind. Sometimes he specializes in a particular school of magic (such as Necromancy or Illusion), but sometimes he's just a generalist. Somewhat importantly, he's also mostly limited to lists of spells, and rarely, if ever, makes things up as he goes along.

2) The Sorcerer is a more recent "invention," bolstered primarily by the popularity of the Magic: The Gathering Collectible Card Game. Sorcerers as defined here are those Magic-users who don't memorize spells, but rather have access to an array of powers which draw upon an energy source (typically referred to as mana, ki, chi or the more mundane "spell points"). Often these powers are bestowed in some supernatural fashion upon the sorcerer, who tends to be younger and is often depicted as somewhat dangerous and unpredictable. Of them all, the sorcerer is the most likely to be found brooding atop a tall, moonlit crag in a Byronic pose, tall, dark and scary. For all his wild power, however, the sorcerer is also a slave to them, for he rarely, if ever, is able to develop outside the limits that nature has seen fit to build around him. The main difference between the two is that wizardry is a career, whereas sorcery is a condition; this is often confused in some works of fiction (there are, after all, no hard rules here), such as in the case of Harry Potter, who is sorcerer-like in that he has some innate talents, but is wizard-like in that he attends a wizard's college.

3) The Mage, who is in many ways both the most modern and the most traditional of the Magic-users. The term, like the others, is typically misused, but by any name the mage hearkens back to his roots as magi, being a more general practitioner of the arts, a wanderer sans benefit of a large college, often one who acts individually (emphasizing the self over society) and breaks the rules in some way. Ars Magica, for example, features magi/mages who can either cast pre-formulated spells (which are stronger) or make stuff up as they go (which is more creative, but also weaker). Often, spiritualism or outright religious belief is a part of his magical abilities (bringing them a bit closer to the realm of the Cleric, Druid and Bard than the others). When he has achieved great heights of power, he becomes an Archmage, a truly dangerous foe, and while wizards and sorcerers have apprentices, mages don't. The mage is also often loathe to use his powers, holding back for one reason or another until it's needed, or (as in the case of the Mage: The Ascension game), not showing off his powers in public at all. Some of the best known Magic-users, including Merlin, fall into this category for reasons which will be explained later.

And yes, I know there will be someone to cite an example of an RPG which doesn't adhere to those definitions. These are guidelines, not rules, so for the sake of argument, let's just go with it.

In most game systems, no matter how ambitious they try to be, the Magic-user is extremely limited in several fashions. First of all, to keep the Wizard or Sorcerer from dominating the game too soon, they are given a limited spell selection; once they are out of spells, or energy, they are almost useless as characters and must run off to recharge their batteries. Secondly, the Magic-user is physically weaker than the other characters around him. This is almost entirely an invention of combat-oriented games, which had to balance the game out by giving the powerful Magic-users a lack of strength and constitution. Finally, the Magic-user is typically forbidden from using weapons or armor of any sort. This is somewhat hard to understand when you consider the fact that Gandalf kills more enemies with his sword than his spells in Lord of the Rings, but when you understand that we're talking about game balance it becomes clear that it's just a crutch, a sacrifice to the Gods of the die roll.

The origin of most of these flaws is Dungeons & Dragons (and, to a somewhat lesser extent, the original Chainmail rules), which almost immediately turned Magic-users into pitiful weaklings who threw magic missiles and lightning bolts around like little catapults. This had absolutely nothing to do with history, mythology or prior literature, and everything to do with the fact that there was more hack-and-slash and less role-playing in the early days than some nostalgic gamers like to admit. There was no real use for intelligence or wisdom back then; Magic-users were all just clones of the wizard in the old Gauntlet arcade game, whose only goal in life was to run around and shoot fireballs.

Such contradiction between high intelligence, and the inability to properly use it, also severely weaken the importance of concepts like the wizard's college, present everywhere from the earliest role-playing games to the Harry Potter series. Removed from its role-playing foundation, the college works because it makes sense; not only is it a place for wiser, elderly wizards to teach their skills to a younger generation of apprentices, but it mirrors widely accepted scholastic practices found around the world. However, stick the college inside a role-playing game and suddenly the towers begin to crumble. If a wizard's college is where a wizard learns his spells, then why is he instead out crawling around in dungeons? And if the world's most powerful wizards got that way by exploring dungeons, then who's teaching the apprentices? Why would a powerful wizard reduce himself to selling his wand to the highest bidder?

And what about those poor apprentices, who keep forgetting their lessons the moment they practice them. Can you imagine what it must be like on exam day if this were true for all wizard's colleges? Scratch your ear to remove an itch and poof, you've just forgotten how to answer question 17. Quite obviously, the memorization thing appears to be a game balance issue; after all, if your 3rd Edition D&D wizard could just cast fireball after fireball after fireball, you'd have... (drumroll please) a sorcerer. Yes, the debate over memorization versus spell point/mana/energy based systems has raged for years, and the most recent "solution" to the problem has seemed to be not to create a new system, but to offer both at the same time. So now (at least in Dungeons & Dragons) you can play a wizard with a large array of spells, but limited ability to memorize them, or you can play as a sorcerer with nearly unlimited ability to cast a few spells, but a serious lack of flexibility and creativity.

To be fair, the Magic-user's place in the world varies greatly from setting to setting, and system to system, and not all games shove the Magic-user to the back of the party so he doesn't die. While in many Dungeons & Dragons worlds he's just another adventurer out for personal gain, in the White Wolf world the Mage is a defender against the evil Technocracy, fighting to keep magic alive in a world that's moving towards technology. This latter view is somewhat interesting, as it openly places magic in opposition to technology, a theme which appears almost as often (such as in the Arcanum PC Game) as does the opposite point of view, that technology is a type of magic (e.g., TSR's Spelljammer setting). This relationship between magic and science forms the basis for the path we'll follow through the history of the Magic-user. A path which begins, as one might expect, with fantasy fiction.

From Pulp to Poe - The Magic-user's Literary Roots
"In ages gone... a thousand spells were known to sorcery and the wizards effected their wills. Today, as Earth dies, a hundred spells remain to man's knowledge, and these have come to us through the ancient books... But there is one called Pandelume, who knows all the spells, all the incantations, cantraps, runes, and thaumaturgies that have ever wrenched and molded space..."
- from "The Dying Earth," by Jack Vance

At first glance, it's difficult to see where Role-Playing Games got their wizards from, even though it's pretty clear that, as with most other fantasy classes and races, literature is the closest and most direct source. Part of the problem is that many role-playing ideas about wizards are so misguided and shortsighted that trying to find similarities in works of fiction becomes an impossibility. The main problem, however, is that true fantasy magic-users don't really resemble wizards at all.

Oh, sure, nowadays we've got Harry Potter and Raistlin and Elminster and wizards by the dozens, all wrapped in robes and pointy hats, clutching their oversized phallic symbols as they throw fireballs and magic missiles around like no tomorrow. But these are all post-D&D wizards, and for the most part they are the creations of authors who are familiar with the "laws of wizardry" laid down by Role-Playing Games, almost like science fiction authors inevitably tend to follow Aasimov's "laws of robotics." To get at the heart of the real wizard, we need to completely disregard almost everything since the mid 1970s. Once you do that, the magic mirror gets a whole lot clearer; if we look at the period between the 1950s and early 1970s, for example, three names immediately jump out as having been crucial to not just the fantasy magic-user, but fantasy Role-Playing Games as a whole.
 

[Heather Delaria]

The first is the most obvious: J.R.R. Tolkien, whose The Hobbit (1937) and Lord of the Rings (1956) gave us not only Gandalf, but Rangers, orcs, hobbits, dwarves and elves to boot. The second is Michael Moorcock, of Elric fame, whose late 1960s and early 1970s work (including the Swords Trilogy and the aforementioned Elric saga) not only laid the foundation for the system of alignment that D&D popularized, but brought the world a glimpse of some truly evil anti-heroic Fighter/Sorcerers as protagonists. And the third, and most often forgotten among his more well-known comrades, is Jack Vance, who is almost single-handedly (and somewhat accidentally) the father of the Role-Playing wizard; in 1950's Dying Earth saga, he imagined not only the concept of spell memorization and casting, but the practice of giving spells and magical artifacts, shall we say, somewhat "memorable" names (including the Prismatic Spray spell and the ever-popular Ioun Stones).

If you took a survey, and the question to be asked was "Name a famous wizard or sorcerer," Tolkien's Gandalf would probably place third, undoubtedly behind Merlin (who we'll discuss later) and the aforementioned Harry Potter (only ranking higher because of his current fame). Third seems a poor place to put Gandalf, but in fact, if we're exploring Role-Playing wizards, then we have to question whether Gandalf belongs at all.

Quite curious about Gandalf is the fact that he carries a magic sword. In fact, he not only carries it, but he uses it, and quite well, in fact: if you bother to count, he dispatches more foes with Glamdring than with all his spells put together. This runs completely counter to traditional RPG thinking, wherein wizards and other spellcasters are completely incompetent when it comes to weaponry. And this, of course, leads us to the second, and more "troubling" issue surrounding Gandalf, which is that for being one of the world's most powerful magic-users, he sure doesn't cast a lot of spells; only perhaps a half dozen across The Hobbit and LotR combined, only one of which has any truly significant damaging effect while "on camera":

'I am servant of the Secret Fire, wielder of the flame of Anor. You cannot pass. The dark fire will not avail you, flame of Udun. Go back to the Shadow! You cannot pass.' ... Gandalf lifted his staff, and crying aloud he smote the bridge before him. The staff broke asunder and fell from his hand. A blinding sheet of white flame sprang up. The bridge cracked..."
- from "Fellowship of the Ring," by J.R.R. Tolkien

And depending on how you read this, it isn't even Gandalf who does this, but the staff itself. Gandalf never casts a fireball or a lightning bolt. Rather, his chief value throughout the story is first as an advisor and sage, guiding the other heroes through the story, and secondarily as a warrior, wielding his sword like a champion. An easy way to see Gandalf's purpose here is to remove him from his magical surroundings, something that's already been done for us in Star Wars: A New Hope. Obi-Wan Kenobi is quite obviously a Gandalf-like character, in every respect. He's old, bearded and robed, a powerful magician from an ancient order who's subdued about casting spells. His chief value is to guide the other characters through the story, providing leadership and counsel to a young hero, and his death (battling a black-armored evil creature wielding a glowing red sword) is not final, but instead leads him to yet more power in a second reincarnation. Certainly, both Gandalf and Obi-Wan Kenobi are magic-users of a sort (mages, one could argue, and/or wizards who've long since put down the books and stopped studying), but neither of them wanders around casting spells all the time.

Much of the same is true of Michael Moorcock's magic-users, including Elric of Melnibone and Prince Corum Jhaelen. Both of them are endowed with sorcerous talents of one sort or another, Elric coming from a long line of Sorcerer-kings ("His sorcerous powers... are now greater than any possessed by his ancestors for many a generation") and Corum eventually receiving a six-fingered gauntlet and magical eye which allow him to conjure up spirits from beyond. And yet despite their magical talents, neither Elric nor Corum resorts to using them most of the time, preferring a strong sword (a magical one, in the case of Elric's Stormbringer) to a quick spell when one is in the heat of battle. Of course, what's interesting about their martial preferences is that neither of them is actually a very good warrior to start with, for one reason or another. Corum gets his hand cut off, which sort of puts a damper on plans, and Elric is, for lack of a better word, a weakling:

By magic potions and the chanting of runes, by rare herbs had her son been nurtured, his strength sustained artificially by every art known to the Sorcerer Kings of Melnibone. And he had lived--still lives--thanks to sorcery alone, for he is naturally lassitudinous and, without his drugs, would barely be able to raise his hand from his side through most of a normal day."
- from "Elric of Melnibone," by Michael Moorcock

In fact, Elric doesn't really cast a spell until he's tossed overboard and has to do so in order to save himself from drowning. Moorcock gives us a pretty good reason for this about halfway through the first Elric story, just after Elric's summoning of Arioch, the God of Chaos, when Elric proclaims that "I hesitate to use sorcery, save where absolutely imperative..." When pressed on this issue, Elric tells his companion that "You cannot conceive of the mental and physical effort involved..." Indeed, before Elric could summon Arioch, he had to rest for three entire days, not to mention spending hours in precise meditation and study. Spells were not mere utterances and gestures, but major undertakings.

The same is true of the spells in Jack Vance's world of The Dying Earth, in traditional pulp style being somewhat of a collection of short stories gathered together to form a longer narrative (and in this way sharing even more of a kinship with Role-Playing Games, being not unlike a series of short adventures forming a larger campaign). In this world, even the most powerful magic-users can only memorize a half dozen or so spells at a time; the first wizard we meet, about to journey to a dangerous other world, can only memorize four: The Call to the Violent Cloud, the Excellent Prismatic Spray, Phandaal's Mantle of Stealth and the Spell of the Slow Hour. A far cry from the 36 to 40 spells that a powerful D&D wizard can memorize.

Of course, anyone who's ever had the misfortune of playing a first level wizard or sorcerer in a D&D campaign certainly understands the perils of running out of spells. In older editions of the game, a magic-user was quite literally a one-trick pony, typically memorizing a single magic missile or sleep spell, popping it off when needed, and then spending the rest of his time hiding in the back of the party. Vance's wizards do similar things; when one named Mazirian casts the last of his few memorized spells, he almost immediately suffers a gruesome death.

There is more similarity to the works of Tolkien and Moorcock than it might first appear. Like Middle Earth and Elric's Melnibone, Vance's Dying Earth is quite literally a world that's reaching the end of its natural lifespan. Powerful magics abound, as with Tolkien, in the form of weapons, amulets and potions, and the few powerful wizards who remember the old magic mostly keep to themselves, almost struggling to remember everything they can about what was once called the "Grand Art," but is now nearly forgotten. And the spells which the wizards do know are treasured and used sparingly, partly because they are so difficult to remember, and partly because of the hazards involved in misusing them. In one case, a rogue named Cugel accidentally mispronounces a spell, and manages to transport himself thousands of miles away from his intended destination. Later, a witch named Merthe tries to use a spell that's too powerful for her, and suffers "an explosion of power too strong for the tissues of her body, so that blood spurted from her mouth and nose."

The wizards of Tolkien, Moorcock and Vance did not arise out of thin air, but rather evolved from the pulp fiction of the early 20th Century. This is most clearly evident with Vance, whose own works are more science-fantasy than pure fantasy, as was often the case with the earliest "fantasy" stories (Vance was primarily a writer of science-fiction, and the fact that the Dying Earth stories just happened to influence fantasy RPGs is somewhat of a fluke). These earlier fantasy stories, many of which originally appeared in pulp magazines like Weird Tales, contain the roots of magic-users like Gandalf and Elric, and much like the Norse world-tree Yggdrasil, those roots take us all the way back to the world of the Gods.

The prime example of pulp fantasy is undoubtedly Robert Ervin Howard's Conan stories, some 18 of which appeared singly and in serial format in Weird Tales between late 1932 and June of 1936, when Howard committed suicide at the height of his career. Howard's own life may only have spanned 30 years, but Conan, of course, has taken on a life of his own, going on to appear in comic books, novels, and films (partly thanks to the republication of many of his short stories in novel format by L. Sprague de Camp and Lin Carter in the 1960s and 1970s). And while one of the reasons for this popularity is certainly Conan and his muscle-bound friends (the source of the RPG Barbarian, of course), much of the success of Howard's stories has to do with his brilliantly realized villains, including some rather powerful wizards.

Howard's work has much in common with later fantasy works; for example, Conan wanders around during the Hyborian Age, a period of time some 12,000 years ago before Atlantis sunk and history began to be recorded, and as such it's roughly analogous to Middle Earth. His wizards, too, are quite similar in some respects: like Moorcock's Sorcerer-Kings and Vance's bickering mages, Howard's wizards tend to be quite selfish and evil, mostly concerned with taking over the world for their own purposes; and their power is immense, but like later wizards they were often forced to prepare spells in advance, resting afterward to regain spent strength and energy. But one of the key differences in the Conan stories is that these powerful spellcasters are removed from their central place in the stories, and are relegated to roles as either larger-than-life villains, much like Sauron in Lord of the Rings, or plot devices (as in the case of Zoqquanor, who is little more than a reason for Conan to hook up with the maiden Stefanya). They are neither heroes nor active, central anti-heroes.

One of the best examples of a Howard wizard is Xaltotun from Conan the Conqueror, a dead sorcerer from a Hellish ancient empire who is summoned from death for the knowledge he possesses. Of course, once revived he takes matters into his own hands, summoning plagues, overpowering Conan himself and using the ancient Heart of Ahriman to boost his powers, with which he intends to raise the lost continent of Acheron and rule the world. And then, of course, there's Conan's nemesis Thoth-Amon, who sends a variety of half-snake, half-human creatures after Conan in "The Sword and the Serpent", and was reborn (in a way) as the serpentine Thulsa Doom (borrowed from the Kull stories) in the 1982 film Conan the Barbarian (where he was played by the one and only James Earl Jones, voice of Darth Vader).

It's a bit easier to see where Howard's wizards stood in relation to the story's heroes by exploring the wizards of the man who is arguably Howard's heir to the throne, Fritz Leiber. While Leiber's Fafhrd and Gray Mouser stories (mostly written between 1939 and 1970) mostly contributed rogues and thieves to the world of Role-Playing, they also contained some fairly important wizardly characters, and are worth a look.

The Gray Mouser himself is a wizard of sorts, and a shady one at that, providing a tentative link between the concept of the aloof, powerful wizard (his master) and the sword-carrying, dark-tinged, spell-casting warrior we see in Moorcock's stories. Mouser himself is originally an apprentice to a good "white" wizard, but when his master is killed he's hunted down, captured and tortured, forced to combine the white magic he knows with blacker, evil magic to free himself (white plus black equals gray). Neither he nor his companion Fafhrd are paragons of virtue (although they're certainly not evil bastards like Elric either). But more importantly, neither of them control vast, powerful magics; even if Mouser is a wizard of sorts, he has trouble controlling his magic, which is precisely why we need Ningauble of the Seven Eyes and Sheelba of the Eyeless Face to do it for them.

Even though Leiber's two main wizards are on the same side of the fence as our heroes, Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, they don't really play a central role in the story. The wizards don't wander around in dungeons with the boys, nor do they stand around casting fireballs and invisibility spells. Instead, they stand back and provide support functions, in most cases doing little more than chatting at the beginning and end of a story, and occasionally providing a means to an end. For example, in "Adept's Gambit," Ningauble is needed to cast a time-travel spell to transport Fafhrd and Mouser to a historical empire; without the wizard, the two would never have gotten there, and the story couldn't take place. But Ningauble isn't about to lift a finger to actually do anything heroic:

The seven eyes of Ningauble the Wizard floated back to his hood... "Now about Lankhmar. She's been invaded, her walls breached everywhere and desperate fighting is going on in the streets, by a fierce host which out-numbers Lankhmar's inhabitants by fifty to one -- and equipped with all modern weapons. Yet you can save the city."
"How?" demanded Fafhrd.
Ningauble shrugged. "You're a hero. You should know."
- from "The Swords of Lankhmar," by Fritz Leiber

Ningauble and Sheelba are particularly interesting, in that they are alien entities, their faces tangles of horror. And it is through them that we can trace the origin of our wizards back to the horrible tentacled beasts and dark magics found in the 1920s and 1930s scientific and horror pulp fiction of magazines like Weird Tales and Worlds Beyond.

Certainly, fantasy itself has roots in many gardens. For example, the many brilliant short stories of Lord Dunsany, written mostly between 1905 and 1920, had a major impact on many fantasy writers, and are recognized by some as the first "pure fantasy" stories. Also not to be discounted are the many "pure pulp" action-adventures of the 1910s, 1920s and 1930s, written by such oft-forgotten writers as Talbot Mundy and Sax Rohmer (the latter responsible for the infamous evil hypnotist, Dr. Fu Manchu). Nor can we completely write off the archaeological and scientific fantasies of writers like Edgar Rice Burroughs, with his "Victorian Sci-fi" of Mars-bound dirigibles and his hero Tarzan, or his predecessor H. Rider Haggard, whose turn-of-the-century novels about Allan Quatermain, Zulu witch doctors and the immortal goddess Ayesha influenced everyone from Burroughs to Howard and Moorcock in one way or another.

But much of what has gone into the Role-playing magic-user comes from a much darker building material, clearly visible in the works of horror pulp writers as Clark Ashton Smith and H. P. Lovecraft, whose most relevant works appeared in the 1920s and 1930s. These two men were not only contemporaries of fantasy greats like Leiber and Howard, but they all shared imagery and mythology from the Cthulhu mythos between their works (Leiber's Ningauble and Sheelba, and Howard's Thoth-Amon, are purely Cthulhuesque). The Cthulhu mythos, for those unfamiliar with it, is based around the concept that alien beings known as the "Great Old Ones" long ago ruled earth, but have since been placed into a magical sleep from which they will one day awaken.

As is always the case, there are those who are willing to barter their souls for a chance to gain the favor of these creatures, and these dark cultists and necromantic sorcerers peruse ancient books like the Necronomicon in the hopes of awakening these great beings through their worship. Innocents who learn the true secrets of these ancient godlike beings are typically driven to the brink of insanity. And this, then, brings us far closer to the truth about wizards and magic-users than one might suspect--that they are those who can explore the unknown, and survive to tell the tale. This is a concept that takes us right back to the dawn of humanity; Lovecraft himself attested that "(t)he oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown." Thus, not knowing the truth causes fear, and knowing the truth (at least in the Cthulhu mythos) breeds insanity and terror; only those capable of walking the fine line, willing to trade their souls and their sanity for knowledge, can survive.

Lovecraft himself cites a bewildering assortment of sources for his own inspiration, from Matthew Gregory Lewis (whose 1796 novel "The Monk" describes a Faust-like Spaniard named Ambrosio) to Bram Stoker (Dracula, as described in the 1897 novel, is as much a sorcerer as are those who hunt him down). Most directly influential in many respects was undoubtedly Edgar Allen Poe, whose during his relatively short life (1809-1849) produced some of the most darkly magical fiction of his time. Even in works without wizards and sorcerers, Poe's protagonists and antagonists are of the same cut as obvious magic-users, being tall, dark and handsome, highly intellectual and yet deeply secretive. Both "The Fall of the House of Usher" and "The Masque of the Red Death" feature powerfully disturbing central characters, the latter's Prince Prospero portrayed excellently as a Satanist by Vincent Price in the 1964 film of the same name.

Edward Bulwer-Lytton, a contemporary of Poe (and best known for his overly ambitious opening paragraphs), was also responsible for creating some oft-forgotten but nonetheless important wizardly figures who fall prey to their own dark magics in one way or another. 1842's "Zanoni" features an ancient Chaldean sorcerer who agelessly survives only to be killed during the French Revolution, and 1862's "A Strange Story" offers the magician Margrave, who is controlled in his sleep by unseen and unknown forces. Both Poe and Lytton, of course, were following in the footsteps of other writers of Gothic horror, most notably Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin. Her Frankenstein: A Modern Prometheus (1817) portrayed the title character (the name of the doctor, not the monster) as part magician, part alchemist, dabbling with dark secrets that are best left untouched. In attempting to create life, Victor Frankenstein inadvertently creates a being which, through his rejection, he causes to track down and destroy everything he loves. Again, the same story: those who would perform magic and learn the secrets of the universe must be willing to face its wrath in the end.

This, then, raises an important question: exactly how did our powerful wizard arise from such horrific, humble beginnings? For where we now stand, those who would use magic must do so in secrecy, lest they be torn to shreds by darker powers, or destroyed by those who fear them. The answer to that question, of course, lies just a bit further back in history, in a little town called Salem.

From Witches to Wicca - The Persecution of the Magic-user
...they saw, standing in just the spot the screen had hidden, a little old man, with a bald head and a wrinkled face, who seemed to be as much surprised as they were. The Tin Woodman, raising his axe, rushed toward the little man and cried out, "Who are you?"
"I am Oz, the Great and Terrible," said the little man, in a trembling voice. "But don't strike me--please don't--and I'll do anything you want me to."
- from "The Wonderful Wizard of Oz," by L. Frank Baum

Neither The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, nor the film it inspired, have anything to do with wizards; in both cases, the deep, dark secret is that the Wizard of Oz isn't a wizard, and that Dorothy's magical slippers, nabbed from a witch's corpse, actually hold the power to get home. It is the witches in the story who have all the power; those of East and West being evil, they must be defeated in turn by Dorothy, with help from the good witches of the North and South. Dorothy herself is arguably a witch, for in keeping with some magical legends, in killing the bad witches she takes part of their power.

Of course, when you boil it down to magic, a witch and a wizard are basically the same thing; between the 16th and 18th centuries, a witch was simply what you called a wizard when you were lighting the bonfire. The name "witch" itself even carries many of the same connotations; witch itself which means to "twist or bend," and is derived from the Anglo-Saxon "wicca," which is in turn derived from the word "wicce," which means "wise." But it certainly was not wisdom that led to the widespread persecution by Christians that caused wizards to vanish from sight for a few hundred years. H.P. Lovecraft himself discussed the persecution in his story "The Case of Charles Dexter Ward" (later remade into the 1963 Vincent Price film, "The Haunted Palace). Both film and story are about a male witch (i.e., a warlock) who curses a village as its inhabitants are burning him, and his descendant who fulfills the curse by murdering the villagers. But one doesn't need Lovecraft to tell us about burning witches; there's plenty of other material to go around.

Persecution of witches really started to heat up (pun intended) around the end of the 15th century. Prior to that time, there's not much evidence that witches were burned at the stake merely for being witches. For example, Joan of Arc was certainly put to death in 1431, but she wasn't accused of witchcraft, as many believe; in fact, she was accused mostly of heresy, denying the authority of the church, and crossdressing. Duchess Joan of Navarre, who died in 1437, was accused of being a witch and plotting against King Henry IV of England, but she was pardoned of her alleged crimes and freed. And Mother Shipton, a well-known witch and prophetess born in 1488 was well-respected in her community and died of natural causes in 1561. Not a torch or bonfire in sight.

But things certainly started to change around 1486, when the infamous witch-hunting manual called the Malleus Maleficarum (The Hammer of Witches) was produced. A detailed exploration of exactly what the Catholic Church hoped to accomplish by hunting witches will not be undertaken here, but it's perhaps worth noting that statements in the Malleus like "No one does more harm to the Catholic faith than midwives" probably contributed to the fact that of all the witches executed over the next 200 or so years, over 80 percent of them (4 in 5) were female. Aside from being female, other obvious signs that one might be dealing with a witch were curiously similar to other undesirable conditions: homosexuality, Leprosy, or simply being Jewish. In short, a "witch" was anyone you didn't want living next door to you; it had little to do with magic or wizardry.

Regardless, people saw fit to cook up a whole series of images surrounding witches and wizards, most of them of arguable relevance except when taken in totem around Halloween, when the kids are getting their costumes ready. Certainly, black cats and toads were to be found all over in small villages, and the old lady at the end of the row was undoubtedly going to have a broom and a wart on her nose. The business about flying through the air, cooking small children in cauldrons and having sexual relations with the devil is very nearly the stuff of pornography, and would almost certainly have incited to riot anyone who actually believed the stuff. And this is precisely why we don't find many fictional wizards being written about during this period of time. Books by people like Pierre de l'Ancre describing wizardly goings-on, witches' Sabbaths and such matters were not taken as fictional accounts by a society that had been brought up to believe in the absolute truth of religious doctrine, and the supremacy of the Bible as the be-all, end-all of truth, justice and the Christian way. After all, the Bible says "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live." (Exodus 22:18).

The Spanish Inquisition, of course, is most commonly associated with the most intense witch hunting, and actually stretched from 1478 until 1834. Clearer hindsight makes it evident that this wasn't so much a hunt for devil-worshippers and witches, but more of an attempt to purge society of those who did not believe in Christianity (in particular, Protestants and Jews). The most infamous inquisitor, Tomas de Torquemada, was personally responsible for over 2,000 executions over a 14 year span, but this was nothing compared to the numbers racked up in countries like Switzerland, where the first major witch-hunt occurred in 1427, or Germany, where at least 30 thousand and possibly as many as 100 thousand were killed over a 150 year period.

In some countries, the witch-hunting craze never really caught on: Ireland only officially executed four or five, for example. But nearby Scotland and England can trace their own witch-hunting frenzy to the 1530s, when King Henry VIII of England officially separated from the Catholic Church, and Anne Boleyn was beheaded as a witch for, among other things, having six fingers and not bearing her husband a male heir. The next hundred years or so were fairly rocky times, witches notwithstanding, seeing the Catholic Queen Mary fleeing Scotland, her son James taking the throne under the tutorship of fanatics, and the rise to power and eventual death of Queen Elizabeth. Perhaps it would have been wise not to allow James to become King of England as well as Scotland in 1603, considering the fact that he penned a witch-hunting book called "Demonologie" in 1597. Suffice to say that many, many people were hung, burned and otherwise done away with between his rise to power and the eventual dying down of the fanaticism, towards the end of the 17th Century when the craze spread to America, bringing us the infamous Salem Witch Trials of 1692, where nineteen witches were hanged.

Surprisingly, the Salem Witch Trials are not the end of the story. Two women were burned as witches in Poland in 1793, and a wizard was killed via "ordeal by water" in England in 1865, 31 years after the official end of the Spanish Inquisition. It took until 1957 for the Massachusetts State Legislature to finally exonerate Ann Pudeator, one of the witches burned in Salem, and until 2001 for them to finally exonerate by name five more. Even as I write this, Christian fundamentalists are raising a hue and cry over the Harry Potter movie and books, claiming that they are inspiring young children to turn to Satan, wizardry and witchcraft.

Wiccan groups, arguably the only legitimate "witches" around today, steadfastly (and correctly) deny any connection between their faith, the (mostly fictional) "black Satanic witchcraft" which inspired the witch-burnings of the past, and the entirely fanciful wizardry and witchcraft of the Harry Potter books. But Wiccans do, in fact, have at least a nominal connection to wizardry as we know it, partly because of (and perhaps in spite of) Christianity, and partly because of the ancient Druids.

Druids and the Divine - Religion and the Magic-user
"Behold the sword of power, Excalibur. Before Uther, it belonged to Lud, before Lud, to Beowulf, before Beowulf to Baldur the Good, before Baldur to Thor himself and that was when the world was young and there were more than seven colors in the rainbow."
- Merlin, from "Excalibur," screenplay by Rospo Pallenberg and John Boorman

Although no one can precisely pinpoint when and where magic-users started to crawl out of the woodwork, there are more than a few experts who will be happy to point you in the direction of northern European hunters, whose artifacts and cave drawings seem to prove their case. Certainly, there's evidence that horns and claws carved with little enchantments seem to have been used in some sort of primitive magic, and cave paintings depicting hunters turning into animals demonstrates something halfway between disguise and magical belief. Without a doubt, any such natural magic found its way down into the beliefs of the ancient Celts, and the Druids who walked among them.

The Celts, descendants of the Indo-Europeans which nobody seems to be able to prove really existed, lived among the British Isles between 700 B.C.E. and 100 C.E., with the Druidic faith existing for several centuries thereafter. The Druids (and all Celts) had a pantheistic belief system, worshipping both a god and a goddess while revering nature and the divinity within it. Partly because Christianity devoured parts of their faith (Christmas takes place in late December not because that's when Christ was born, but because it was the Winter Solstice, a day when Celts celebrated the rebirth of the sun), and partly because many of them were massacred by Romans, we don't know all that much about the Druidic faith, but we do know that Druids believed in things like reincarnation, were astute students of astrology and the healing arts, and were generally revered as sages, judges and peacemakers.

As Roman and Christian influences began to dissolve the original Celtic beliefs, the Druidic faith gradually transformed itself into the much broader concept of "Paganism," derived from the Latan "paganus" which means "country-dweller." As the name suggests, it was a religion for those who dwelt in the countryside, rising up from the Celtic reverence for things like oak trees and mistletoe and evolving into a general, practical sort of religion that dealt with "hedge magic" such as crafting potions, grinding herbs and performing bits of medicine. The means in which these religious beliefs came to be seen as Satanic witchcraft have already been discussed; here we're mainly concerned with what happened before that, because it's where we find Merlin.

[Heather Delaria]

The Merlin that we know comes to us primarily from Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia Regnum Britanniae, published in 1135. Within this tome, we get a Merlinus who is a composite of several other fictional characters, including a 6th century Druidic bard named Myrddin and a bastard orphan named Ambrosius. Geoffrey's Merlin is a half-demon, his mother a nun who was defiled by a foul creature of Satan (certainly this didn't help the case of witches). But rather than being an evil creature, Merlin is instead bestowed with the ability of prophecy, helps Uther Pendragon and may or may not have been involved with creating Stonehenge. Only later, thanks to Sir Thomas Malory's Le Morte D'Arthur, does Merlin become advisor and seer not only to Uther, but to Uther's son Arthur as well. It is here, too, that we get the full story of Excalibur, the "sword in the stone," and other such myths (portrayed beautifully, if not entirely accurately, in films like Excalibur).

Merlin's untimely demise partly results from the patriarchal influences of Christianity: he falls in love with a sorceress named Nyneve/Viviane/Nimue, who imprisons him in a cave for all eternity. In part, this is symbolic of the coming of Christianity, for where Christ comes out of the tomb to save mankind, Merlin's magical time is ended and he must go back into the cave to make room for the new religion. One wouldn't be entirely off base to compare this to Lord of the Rings, which has Gandalf sailing off as Middle Earth's magical era comes to a close. Indeed, both Merlin and Gandalf are alike in many, many ways, from their appearances (wandering old men with grey cloaks and staves) to the fact that neither of them uses magic most of the time. Indeed, but for a few choice spells, most of Merlin's time is spent making predictions and offering advice to the king he happens to be serving at the time. His value, like Gandalf's, is not that he can cast spells, but that he's smart and wise.

More important, however, is the fact that both Merlin and Gandalf are otherworldly and superhuman in some fashion. Merlin, of course, is half-demon, his overall appearance and abilities derived in part from the Celtic Cernunnos (God of the Wild Hunt) and partly from the Norse Odin, the sage and magician of that religion's deities. Gandalf is drawn from the same well, being not human but one of five Istari, otherworldly Maiar in disguise sent to protect and serve Middle Earth (besides Gandalf the Grey, there were Radagast the Brown, Saruman the White and the two "Blue Wizards," Alator and Pallando). As one of the Maiar, Gandalf is raised up into the realm of the immortal and the divine. He is older than the world itself, and will exist long after it has come to an end; his immortality is proven definitively when, after being killed in defeating the Balrog, he is returned to life as Gandalf the White, and made more powerful for the journey.

In part, Tolkien manages to present Gandalf in this way because he did an "end-around" in researching for Lord of the Rings, drawing not upon the fiction of his time but upon mythology itself. As such, he wasn't forced to drag his concept of a wizard through the mud of witch burnings and horrific otherworldly science-horror, but could present a wizard who, like Merlin, came directly from the realm of the divine.

In fact, if we look back at where everything came from, there's really very little difference between the Role-Playing cleric and the Role-Playing magic-user, but for one important fact: the cleric believes, and his God performs "magic", whereas the wizard seeks to know, and to perform magic on his own (and to extend the comparison one step further, the sorcerer or prophet already knows, because he's given the answer before he asks the question). The following chart, while most relevant to D&D 3e, demonstrates the point:



The wizard doesn't commune with God/the gods, but rather seeks to attain the divine secrets of the universe himself; a much more difficult path, but for the devoted seeker of knowledge certainly more rewarding in the long run. Of course, in the Judeo-Christian world this is the sin of Lucifer, who seeks to match the power of God and is cast out of Heaven for his efforts, as well as, in a sense, the sin of Adam and Eve, who seek to eat from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, and are expelled from Paradise, basically, for wanting to know secrets intended for God only. In a larger sense, this is the downfall of the medieval magician Faust/Faustus, who gives up his very soul in exchange for magical powers. One could argue, then, that at least from a Role-Playing, druids are actually more closely aligned with wizards than with clerics, since druids seek to understand nature and use that knowledge to create magic. One doesn't need faith to heal when one knows how to use herbs to make a poultice, after all, and both seem equally magical to those who don't know or understand the truth.

The Judeo-Christian mythos is filled with magicians of various sorts, with not only the Old and New Testaments of the Bible but many apocryphal works containing many references to magic of various sorts. Much of this is due in part to the fact that the earliest portions of the Old Testament relate events that took place in places like Egypt, where we have records of practicing magicians from as early as 2700 B.C.E. The Egyptian magician Dedi, for example, claimed not only to be 110 years old, but to be capable of severing the head of a goose or a bull and then reattaching it without harming the animal. By far, however, the best example of the old "your religion's priests are my religion's evil magicians" comes in the guise of Jannes and Jambres (mentioned in II Timothy 3:.

The Biblical tale of the Exodus is filled with events that seem magical, from a burning bush to a pillar of fire, but the most direct magical demonstration comes when Moses and Aaron engage in a duel of sorts with the Pharaoh's court magicians.

(10) And Moses and Aaron went in unto Pharaoh, and they did so as the LORD had commanded: and Aaron cast down his rod before Pharaoh, and before his servants, and it became a serpent. (11) Then Pharaoh also called the wise men and the sorcerers: now the magicians of Egypt, they also did in like manner with their enchantments. (12) For they cast down every man his rod, and they became serpents: but Aaron's rod swallowed up their rods.
- Exodus 7: 10-12

In the end, Moses and Aaron's faith in Yahweh proves stronger than the magic of Jannes and Jambres, but taken at face value it's still evidence of the presence of some sort of magic use. Indeed, part of the reason Pharaoh doesn't immediately release the Israelites from bondage, despite a series of plagues visited upon Egypt by Yahweh, is that his own court magicians are able to replicate many of the events, thus (in his mind, at least), disproving the divinity of their origins. Moses and Aaron turn the Nile to blood, and "magicians of Egypt did so with their enchantments" as well. Time and again, the magicians "do so" with their "enchantments." It's quite clear here that this is not a matter of one God facing down another; although Yahweh later advises his followers to have "no gods before me," the Old Testament, at least, is pretty clear that the Israelites believed in other deities (such as Baal). But here, Jannes and Jambres are called magicians, though they are the grandsons of a priest of the Egyptian god Apis. In short, the magic they perform is wizardly magic, not divine magic.

Of course, in the end, Jannes and Jambres meet a predictably bad (and somewhat Faustian) end. According to one apocryphal source, Jannes suffers a terrible ulcer which ultimately kills him, and for his disbelief he is sent to Hell, after which his brother Jambres uses necromantic magic to summon and commune with his brother's spirit. How Jambres eventually dies is not certain, but one can surmise that it's certainly not a happy end. Even Moses, a devoted follower of Yahweh and a prophet, is not permitted to enter the chosen land of Canaan because he at one point doubts that he can strike a stone with his staff to produce water. In this, and in other ways, even Moses is wizard-like; after all, he is the one who climbs Mt. Sinai to retrieve the 10 Commandments, which are in a sense the Words of God engraved in stone. Moses, like so many other magic-users, does not pray for enlightenment and rely solely on faith; he makes the journey to the realm of the divine himself, and brings back knowledge for his people.

Of course, by no means am I claiming that Moses is on par with the Egyptian magicians; he's clearly presented as a prophet and a holy figure, and is by no means a "M'khashepah," which is the Hebrew word which translates as "wizard" or "witch." This word was clearly reserved for evil sorcerers and magic-users, against whom there was little protection. Hence, we get Deuteronomy 18:10-11: "There shall not be found among you anyone.. that useth divination, or an observer of times, or an enchanter or a witch, or a charmer, or a consulter with familiar spirits, or a wizard, or a necromancer." The M'khashepah could reveal mysteries and truths about the universe, and that circumvented the desired path of following the will of God, and having faith and belief that through Him, everything would work out just fine. Again, the distinction between knowledge and faith gives us our magic-user.

The New Testament, too, gives us several references to magic-users, not the least of which involves Jesus Christ himself; in at least one interpretation, one of the charges brought against him at his trial is that he was a magician, claiming to have knowledge that was reserved only for God. Others include Bar-Jesus or Elymas (Acts 13:4-12) and Simon Magus (Acts 8:19-24), a Samaritan magician who claimed to have the "great power of God" and gave his name to the act of simony by attempting to purchase Holy power. The delineation between the magic-user's power and that of the cleric is clearly evident in an apocryphal story of Simon, in which he uses magic to fly into the air in an attempt to impress a Roman Emperor. Two of the Apostles witness this act, and pray to God to stop him from flying; God apparently listens, and Simon plunges to his death.

More than one source also associates Simon Magus with the other magi of the New Testament; namely, the three magi who visit the manger where the infant Jesus lies. As mentioned earlier, these magi are not kings, but were likely rather Mithraic priest-magicians, part astrologers and part astronomers. Left out during the Christian Christmas celebrations is the fact that according to the ancient Persian beliefs of these three magi, a savior named Mithras would come to earth, his coming announced by a star. Whether the Christians borrowed Mithraic symbolism for their own use, or the magi followed a mistaken and false belief to discover the true savior of another religion, or whether both religions shared some common truth, it is not this writer's place to consider.

What is certain, however, is that on some level, we have here another instance of not only interaction and delineation between divine magic and wizardly magic, but acceptance of the latter as real and legitimate, if not exactly acceptable and proper. Exactly where the line could be drawn was a topic that would be considered by many for hundreds of years, leading to the development of practices which would influence not only fictional magic-users, but the medieval world's own true wizards and alchemists.

Of Angels and Angles - Mystical and Mathematical Roots
"To know what is necessary for ascent to the heavens; to travel through all that is in the seven heavens, to behold all the signs of the zodiac... to learn the names of the guards of each firmament and their work and how they manage everything, and what are the names of their servants, and what libations are to be made to them..."
- from (the very real) Sefer ha-Razim, "The Book of Secrets"

One of the many reasons Dungeons & Dragons got itself in trouble with religion in the late 1970s and early 1980s was because of their detailed lists of demons and devils (many of them first appearing in the 1976's Eldritch Wizardry supplement), and their appropriation of imagery commonly associated with medieval witchcraft and wizardry. It wasn't so much that the cover featured a naked virgin bound to a sacrificial altar, or that the interior contained 13 line art drawings of demons and 6 bare female breasts. Well, maybe it was partly that. But it was also how accurately (at least in the minds of its critics) the book (and later books) depicted the world of demons and devils. After all, medusae and gargoyles and vampires were obviously fantastical and mythological, but here were Orcus and Demogorgon and Succubi, names ripped straight from old Judeo-Christian apocryphal texts and pseudo-mystical tomes from the Middle Ages. To the casual role-player, it was nothing more than one more mythos being depicted among a collage of dozens--Cthulhu, Nehwon, Greek, Norse, Judeo-Christian--but to Christian opponents, it was nothing short of heresy and witchcraft. An understandable reaction, if not necessarily a wholly logical or equitable one. After all, this behavior amounts to nothing less than saying "All religions are mythical except my own."

It's difficult to fully grasp what all the fuss was about if you merely look at the shape of modern religions, because, to a great extent, modern Judaism and Christianity are watered-down versions of what they originally were. This is not to say that either religion is invalid or impotent in any way, but rather to point out that a few millenia ago, there was a whole lot more going on than any modern day Bible or Torah can possibly relate. To use a Thanksgiving analogy, the shape of the bird hasn't changed, but there was definitely a lot more "stuffing" in the turkey.

People took religion a lot more literally back then. This goes far beyond thinking that Satan could possess a person and be exorcised, and that people could magically speak in foreign languages--such things are accepted, to some degree, even today. But medieval thinkers took literal to a whole new level. You've heard the phrase "seventh heaven?" They believed it. There was not one heaven, but seven layers of heaven, each with its own unique geography, spiritual focus and meaning. In much the same way, hell was not just a big fiery pit, but rather nine unique layers, each devoted to a different sort of sin, with Satan at the center of the earth, and of hell. Which is, of course, why Dungeons & Dragons presents nine hells and seven heavens in its planar structure: it's straight out of medieval beliefs. Or, more correctly, medieval "knowledge." It wasn't just that Dante believed that hell had nine layers when he was writing Inferno; it was a given, a fact. And it was knowing facts like that which gave the medieval wizard his power.

Take something simple like angels. Today, angels are either cute, fluffy little cherubs sitting on top of the Christmas tree, or trenchcoat-wearing Hollywood stars who perform miracles on television and fall in love with humans at the movies. The notion that angels walk among humanity is hardly a new one, and some of their modern depictions actually get fairly close to their true origins, such as the Prophecy series of movies, which features Christopher Walken as the self-serving angel Gabriel, along with a slew of archangels, Nephilim and even Lucifer himself. This film series continues a long line of pseudo-apocryphal fiction about the infamous War in Heaven, which, although it's not mentioned directly in the Bible, is accepted as fact by most scholars and theologians, and was the main source of inspiration for famous literary works like Dante's Inferno, and Milton's Paradise Lost.

The gist of the story, for those who aren't quite up on angelic history, is that at some point between the Old Testament and the New Testament (wherein there's a gap of some 400 years), Satan (then the highest ranking Seraphim and chief of the angels) decided that he was too important and intelligent an angel to bow down to God/Jesus/mankind. He and a third of all the angels (in some accounts a few hundred, in others a few million) rebelled against God in a brutal war, which ultimately led to the archangel Michael casting Satan and his rebels down into Hell. "Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven," he says in Paradise Lost, apparently trying to convince himself as well as the reader that it's better to be the master of one's own destiny in search of truth than a faithful follower of a greater power. Of course, even in Hell, he and his fallen angels are subject to the will of God, even if they cannot look upon his glory any more. And it's that "fact" which led to the belief by early medieval theologians that one could summon Satan and his minions, as well as the good angels, to do one's bidding.

Of course, in order to control something, you have to understand it, and be able to find it in time and space. In our modern scientific era, this goes without saying: we know when the Leonid Meteor Shower will be at its peak because we understand it, and know its place in the Universe relative to Earth. In much the same way, it was important for early magic-users to understand the place of angels and demons, and to know where they were in relation to one another.

Exactly how or where this all got started is up for debate, but gradually a massive library of grimoires and secret texts built up, starting towards the end of the Roman Empire and peaking somewhere around the time of the Renaissance. Books like the Sefer ha-Razim (Book of Secrets), the Sword of Moses, The Lemegeton (The Lesser Key of Solomon the King), the Book of Abramelin the Mage, The Ars Notoria and the Clavicula Salomonis (Key of Solomon) proclaimed, with great sincerity and devotion, to understand the secrets of summoning and controlling angels and demons, almost always "In the name of the mighty and holy God." Though probably seen as at least mildly heretical and Satanic by some, to others they were a logical extension of religion, and a desire to attain a deeper understanding of the unknown world of the Divine. At any rate, without a doubt such tomes reached a sort of culmination with the 19th century Libellus Magicus, which explicitly placed devils and angels in their proper places with great detail.

And so we get not just Micha'el, Gabri'el and Rapha'el (from the Bible), but a whole host of angelic names, each with individual meaning, purpose and control over certain aspects of nature. Micha'el (Who is as God) was not only leader of the celestial armies and protector of Israel, but the angel of the Sun, associated with Sunday, the astrological sign of Leo, the metal gold, the color yellow, the jewels diamond, topaz and jacinth, and the powers of long life, wisdom and transmutation. Gabri'el (God is my strength) wasn't just a cute cherub and the messenger of God, he was also associated with the moon, Monday, the sign of Cancer, silver, pearls and medicine. In like fashion, every major angel was associated with a planet, which corresponded to an astrological sign, which was related somehow to a specific mineral, plant, color, shape and purpose. We have Uri'el, Chamu'el, Jophi'el, and Sari'el, Oriphi'el, Zachari'el, Sama'el, and Ana'el. Thousands of angels, thousands of names, ordered into three choirs and nine distinct groups: Serpahim, Cherubim, thrones, dominations, virtues, powers, principalities, archangels and angels.

Devils, too, were not only known by name, but by function and number. Lucifer and Satan were not always the same being, but distinct fallen angels with distinct purposes and spheres of control. Likewise, there was Belial, Beelzebub, Astaroth and Mephistopheles, as well as Mammon, Moloch, Orcus, Demogorgon and Baal. And because of the "your gods are my demons" attitude of the times, many devils took on the names of the deities of other religions: Pluto, Jupiter, Neptune, Horus, Isis, Apollo, Odin and others were all given demonic names and a place within the "infernal council." Leviathan, associated with water, was obviously admiral of Hell's navy. And let's not forget Marbuel, chief engineer and superintendent, and Astaroth and Melshom, Hell's treasurers. Striving to know and understand your enemy, after all, gave you additional powers over him. This was not a faceless random evil, nor was it a single red-skinned, horned monster derived from Greek imagery of the gods Dionysius and Pan. These were understandable creatures with a place in the divine order, and in knowing their name you could call them, and control them.

Some tomes contained extensive instructions on what colors to wear, what words to speak and what components to prepare before calling upon an otherworldly power--quite clearly, these were magical spells, not prayers, and meant for users of magic, not priests. Central in the summoning and controlling of magical spirits was knowing how to inscribe a proper magical circle, hexagram or pentagram, within which the spirit would be summoned and thereby entrapped. The hexagram, constructed of two interlocking triangles which form a star-shaped figure, was (and still is, for many reasons) one of the most potent magical symbols. Known as the Khatam Shlomo (Seal of Solomon) and the Star of David, it's not just the symbol of Judaism but has long been associated with the warding off of evil forces. But without a doubt, the pentagram and the pentacle take center stage in the world of the magic-user.

The difference between a pentagram and a pentacle is clear, even among the uninitiated; enclose a pentagram in a circle and you get a pentacle, most often associated with modern Wiccans and Neo-Pagans but historically symbolic of both man's place in the world (more clearly seen in Leonardo Da Vinci's famous Vitruvian Man sketch) as well as protection from evil (the circle protecting that which lies within). Invert the pentagram or pentacle so that two points face upwards, and you've inverted the meaning, placing spirit below the realm of the physical elements (air, fire, earth and water) and demonstrating a symbol often associated with the goat-headed Baphomet (from the Greek baphe and metis, meaing "to absorb knowledge") and Satanism (although Wiccans, too, wear inverted pentacles to symbolize different things).

Of course, there's nothing inherently evil about any hexagram, pentagram or pentacle, and the relatively modern reactions to the symbol as such are as misguided as the belief that the swastika is a symbol only of Nazi Germany. Pentagrams were used by the Hebrews, not only as the seal of the City of Jerusalem, but also as a symbol of the five books of the Pentateuch. For early Christians, including Emperor Constantine I, the pentagram was even used interchangeably with the cross as a symbol of Christ, the five points of the star representing Christ's five major wounds (from whence, perhaps, we get the notion that the inverted pentagram is evil, it being associated with an inverted cross). Throughout the Medieval era, it was also known as the Goblin's Cross, the Pentalpha, the Witch's Foot and the Endless Knot (the symbol can be drawn with a single line), and was commonly used as an amulet to protect against evil and strange demons. It's even found in apples, and starfish, and flowers, and 50 times over in the American flag. But perhaps most importantly, the symbol was important to the Pythagoreans of ancient Greece, not only because of magic, but because of mathematics.

Pythagoras (586-506 B.C.E.) and his followers were fascinated with the pentagram, known to them as the pentalpha (since the symbol can also be seen as being five letter A's) and the Ugieia, a word which brings with it connotations of wholeness of being, and described the five elements represented by the five corners of the pentagram: U for Hudor, or water; G for Gaia, or earth; I for Idea; EI for Heile, the sun's warmth (i.e., fire); and A for Aer, or air. Perhaps more fascinating, however, were the mathematical qualities that the pentagram possessed. First of all, it is a prime number. Additionally, it was contained in the faces of the dodecahedron, a Platonic solid considered to be a symbol of the heavens. It can create infinite mirrors of itself by the repeated inscription of pentagram inside pentagon. And most importantly, it contains the "Golden Ratio," perhaps the most significant mathematical proportion in the history of mankind (whereby the ratio of the lengths of the two sides is equal to the ratio of the longer side to the sum of the two sides); this ratio is present in many works of art, the Great Pyramids, and even the human body itself.

Of course, this essay is not intended to be a treatise on mathematics any more than it's intended to discuss magic, but it is certainly interesting to see how numbers and magic correlate to one another. Certainly, on more than one level, Pythagoras and his followers can be seen as wizards in the broad sense of the term, for they were renowned scholars, teachers and students of religion, music and geometry. Pythagoras, who was driven underground for his beliefs, learned much of what he knew from Egyptian scholars, where we've already seen evidence of not only the Pyramids and other great architectural achievements, but of magicians and magic. For the Pythagorians, mathematical study was nothing less than a way to unlock the secrets of the universe, and in that sense they were performing magic. Little wonder, then, that the Masonic Order, long associated with magic in more ways than one, traces their origins back 2,500 years to Pythagoras.

Mathematics and geometry is found everywhere in both religion and magical study, and to a certain extent there's little difference between the search for Pi's final digit and the search for any other celestial truth. Magical squares (in which the sum of the numbers of any line are all identical) were used by magic-users and alchemists throughout the middle ages to unlock secret truths about the universe, and every number had its own special meaning. Zero (0) represents not just a mathematical truth, but a metaphysical one as well, representing nothingness (it's interesting to note that the Pythagoreans did not have a true conception of zero). Likewise, we get: 1, wholeness, unity; 2, duality, male and female; 3, the trinity; 4, the earth, the perfect square; 5, man, the stigmata; 6, imperfection (and, thus, 666 representing ultimate imperfection, being 6 thrice over); 7, perfection, the days of the week, the creation of the universe; 8, resurrection and rebirth, baptism; 9, ranks of angels ; and 10, the number of commandments. This is to say nothing of the magical significance of the number 13, as unlucky for a medieval peasant as it was to Tolkien's dwarves in The Hobbit; it's Gandalf the wizard who does the math and selects a 14th to be their lucky number.

[Heather Delaria]

Alphabets and Alchemy - Qabalism, and the Quest for the Philosopher's Stone
"Now you know, poets have powers greater than those of scientists. We merely put to use what they invent. Most poets rarely use their Words of Power for any practical purpose, but when they do... The humblest poet can by his art summon springtime in the midst of winter, or bring to life improbable things."
- from "The Hero from Otherwhere, by Jay Williams

Of course, spells aren't written in numbers, but letters, and while the former will get you symbols and structure, it takes language to fill in the necessary blanks and create real magic. The mystic Qabalists believed that language was, quite literally, magical, and that the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet had magical properties which could be arranged in different ways to bring about various magical effects. One of the most well known was in the fashioning of a golem, a being made from clay or stone and brought to life by inscribing the magic word, Emet (Truth, or Life) on its forehead; likewise, it could only be killed by erasing the first letter, E, thus leaving the word Met (Death). Even the well known magic word "abracadabra," while not directly Qabalistic, is neither merely another Disney creation, but was a powerful invocation during the Middle Ages to rid one of illness, when written on a charm or talisman in such a way that one letter dropped off the end of the word with each line. The magic was in the words themselves.

This, too, is both divine as well as magical, for in Genesis God creates the world not by dancing or waving his arms, but merely by speaking: "And God said, "Let there be light," and there was light. (Genesis 1:3) Even Raistlin from the Dragonlance books could do it faster than that, with a harsh "Shirak" being the trigger for his light spell. And if God's words and language were magical, then the most magical word of all was the name of God himself, considered by some to be so holy and important that they will neither speak it nor write it (using G_d, Adonai or Elohim instead). Taken as a whole, the four letters of the Hebrew God's name, YHWH (pronounced Yahweh) were known as the Tetragrammaton, perhaps the most powerful of the many magical "words of power" which were undoubtedly uttered in dark towers during the Middle Ages. The word is perhaps one of the most significant utterances imaginable, translating as "he is," an acknowledgement of existence second only perhaps to "Yah," or "I am," this latter more powerful even than the infamous "cogito, sum," -- "I think, I am" (oft incorrectly quoted as cogito ergo sum).

Tolkien, too, understood this, which is perhaps why Gandalf and Saruman are renowned as great and powerful magic-users although they don't use magic all that often. Rather, both of them are powerful orators and rhetoricists, capable of using words to sway the minds of others. In The Two Towers, Gandalf warns his companions to "Beware of his voice!" in reference to Saruman's ability to weave enchantments through speaking, and in the wizardly duel which follows, Gandalf and Saruman cast nary a spell, the battle being won by Gandalf when he one-ups even Saruman, using not language, but laughter, to break the evil wizard's spell. Even if Tolkien himself was not aware of it, this laughter is undoubtedly related to the very real magic of ancient Gnostic amulets, which are nothing but long strings of apparently meaningless Greek vowels; only when pronounced aloud do the incantations come to life, resonating through the air and releasing their power. Laughter, anger, and indeed all emotion can echo through the air and do their magic without a single consonant pronounced.

Tolkien's elven and dwarven alphabets are also drawn from real historical sources, their origins coming from a variety of real world "magical" alphabets which have been used throughout the ages. Greeks saw Egyptian hieroglyphics as magical, as did some Egyptians, who employed a cursive form of writing for day-to-day communication. The ancient Celts and Druids had their own magical writings, called Ogham, related to the more well known Nordic Runes in that both are angular and were used for various occult purposes, not the least of which was divination. Still other alphabets were created by medieval magicians themselves for their own purposes, partly to maintain an air of mysticism, and partly to keep the secrets of their magic safe from the prying eyes of those who did not understand the code. The Theban Alphabet, for example, was created by the magician Honorious, and The Celestial and Malachim Alphabets were created by Agrippa. Modern practitioners of the magic arts often have a preference for one of the Enochian alphabets, the original created during the Elizabethan era by John Dee, a mage, and Edward Kelley, an alchemist, and the more recent "Dagger Alphabet" associated with Aleister Crowley.

It's perhaps appropriate that it is the Greek messenger God of wisdom, knowledge and trickery, Hermes, who lends his name to the Hermetic philosophy which winds its way throughout the history of magic, right alongside alchemy. A complete exploration of either Hermeticism or Alchemy would be impossible here, but it's interesting to look at both in relation to how they affected the development of the magic-user as we know him today.

Alchemy is often mistakenly defined in narrow terms like "trying to turn lead into gold," or "looking for the Philosopher's Stone" (the latter dubbed "Sorcerer's Stone" in the Harry Potter books for the benefit of what is obviously perceived as a stupid American audience). While true that alchemy was certainly a development of mathematical and scientific study, eventually giving way to modern day physics and chemistry, this is only half the story. In reality, many famous alchemists were actually more interested in exploring the mysteries of the universe and discovering esoteric truths, and it's in this way that they are the true ancestors of the modern wizard. This latter point of view is perhaps best illustrated via the example of Roger Bacon (1214-92).

Roger Bacon is heralded by many as one of the early advocates of what is known today as the "scientific method." In actual point of fact, Bacon's value as a chemist is questionable at best, many of his "recipes" and procedures offering little more than a mish-mosh of vague references. Much more importantly was that Roger Bacon was a man with an active imagination and a tendency to speak his mind about theological matters. He was at least nominally a Franciscan friar, but it was clear in many ways that he was not cut out for the life of a cleric. He was a wizard at heart, not content with mere faith and belief but instead a proponent of a careful study of the natural world by which one could discover the truth about the Creator. He was a harsh critic of theology and philosophy, much preferring the study of languages, mathematics, alchemy, and experimental science over intangibles. Whether or not he actually predicted things like gunpowder, airplanes and telescopes, or was actually capable of "real magic" is missing the point. Bacon's magic, like that of many alchemists, was in that he was interested in rooting out the truths of the Universe for himself instead of simply believing what he was told.

For the alchemists, using the Philosopher's Stone to create the magical "elixir vitae" was not merely a matter of using a rock to create a potion. The Philosopher's Stone, in many ways, was the heavy rock of logic and science used to bash philosophy on the skull, and the elixir of life was certainly analogous to the eternal life promised by religion. Alchemists simply didn't feel like waiting around for religion to provide something they felt they could find on their own. Certainly, God would provide salvation, but that didn't mean they couldn't look for the gates of Heaven on their own, for the benefit of themselves, their country and their King. Of course, the gold was nice too, and it's probably because of that hope that by the end of the 15th century, practically every ruler was sponsoring an alchemist or a "court magician" in his search for the truth. Books about their explorations soon joined the more Qabalistic texts on the shelves, including the Alchemical Catechism, The Golden Tractate of Hermes, The Mirror of Alchemy, The Secret Book of Artephius, The Six Keys of Eudoxus and the Circulatum Minus, all truly magical tomes in their own way.

By the dawn of the 16th century, our alchemists and Qabalists were happily lurking within their towers searching for the truths of the universe, joined closely by their brethren the mathematicians and scientists who would inevitably outlast them. And outside, in the groves and villages, we had our druids and pagans, practicing a more earthly sort of magic. Neither group was truly interested in simply accepting the religious beliefs of the day, both devoted instead to an exploration of how the world really worked, motivated by a desire to empower themselves with a sort of Promethean intellect, taking fire from the gods instead of waiting for the gods to throw the lightning bolt down from above. All it would take to turn them into the wizards and magic-users we know would be a powerful religious entity accusing them of true witchcraft and sorcery, driving them deep underground, and burning those who were unable to run fast enough. It would take just that to plunge magic-users into the darkness, so that they could then be lifted out again in all their horrific glory and laid on the table of fiction, quivering and twitching.

Which is, as history tells us, exactly what happened.

[Heather Delaria]

From Crowley to Chaos - The Modern Magic-User
In this book it is spoken of... Spirits and Conjurations; of Gods, Spheres, Planes and many other things which may or may not exist. It is immaterial whether they exist or not. By doing certain things certain results follow.
- Aleister Crowley

I mentioned earlier that the notion of the mage (as opposed to the wizard and the sorcerer) was perhaps the most recent type of magic-user to be developed fully in fantasy fiction. This is mostly because the most modern versions of what could be called "wizards" tend to act much like what we can call mages; that is to say, mostly solitary, wandering individuals seeking individual enlightenment and an ever-increasing sense of personal power and strength. Certainly, the more modern magic-users were not all hermits living in caves. Indeed, most were members of well-established orders such as the Gnostics, Hermetics, Illuminati, Masons and Rosicrucians, many of whom traced their origins all the way back to Pythagoras and the magic of geometry. Perhaps most interestingly of all (at least to those who would condemn all post-Inquisition magicians as Satanists) is the fact that the members of these magical orders were, for the most part, Christians. This would not always be the case.

At about the same time that Lovecraft and his fellows were churning out stories about Cthulhu and dark necromancers, groups of real magic-users were taking the traditions of the past, borrowing from the fiction of the day, and creating new wizardly orders for themselves. Some of them were even responsible for some of the fiction they were borrowing from, as in the case of Bulwer-Lytton, who was a Rosicrucian, and Sax Rohmer, who not only wrote about the fictional wizard Dr. Fu Manchu, but was a member of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, which included other writers like William Butler Yeats and had already reached its peak of influence between the late 1880s and the start of World War I. Lovecraft himself was probably not a member of any of these magical organizations; such has been alleged, but Lovecraft was, for the most part, philosophically opposed to magic of any kind, despite his vivid imagination (although his grandfather, Whipple Van Buren Phillips, was a Freemason).

One of the earliest results of this churning up of old ideas and fresh new minds was the Ordo Templi Orientis, or Oriental Templar Order (abbreviated O.T.O.), founded at the dawn of the 20th century by Carl Kellner, a chemist and student of Freemasonry, Rosicrucianism and Eastern mysticism. Aleister Crowley (of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn) would soon become a member of this order, and with his help over a dozen unique magical traditions contribute to a larger body of teachings and symbolism. Perhaps more importantly, Crowley also believed that the O.T.O. was losing its edge, that the Masonic rituals and initiations were becoming bloated, losing their symbolism and power under layers of unnecessary symbolism. His stripped down, revved up and decidedly new way of doing things laid the groundwork for what's known even today as Chaos magic.

Crowley's own first "encounter" with this sort of magic was described by him as being "an experience of horror and pain, combined with a certain ghostly terror, yet at the same time it was the key to the purest and holiest spiritual ecstasy that exists." And if that sounds contradictory, it is. To understand Chaos magic, first take everything I've told you about magic-users, both fictional and historical, and forget it. Now take Crowley's Law of Thelema, "Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law" (perhaps paraphrased from the Wiccan "An' it harm none, do what thou will"), and you've basically got everything you need. Thelema, of Greek origin at least in theory, represents free will in the Nietzschean "will to power sense," empowering those believing in its tenets with a desire to think, act and do for themselves, free of the strictures of society and religion. Magic is central to this line of thinking for Crowley, who described magic as "the science and art of causing change in conformity with will." Of course, this was scary stuff, especially to Christianity, which never entirely got over the witchcraft thing and tended to associate any such turning away from God, and towards the self, as anti-democratic, anti-Christian and Satanic.

Modern Satanism (including the modern Church of Satan, Temple of Set and the Church of Satanic Liberation, as well as that of Crowley's time) has very little to do with the Satan of the Judeo-Christian mythos, except perhaps in name and in overall philosophy. The Satanist does not (and probably never did, except in the overactive imaginations of witch hunters) worship Satan, or any God for that matter; in the manner of the magic-user, he seeks personal power, emphasizing personal goals like virility, sexuality and sensuality over the needs of others. And it's because of this similarity in theme, perhaps, that Crowley and many Chaos magicians are seen as Satanic, even if Crowley himself might have proclaimed that he had moved past Satanism in pursuit of a more complete vision of reality and his place in it. Even so, in combining the ancient magical traditions passed down from early Judeo-Christian, Greek and Egyptian traditions with the more wild magics of ancient Druidism, Neo-Paganism and Eastern mysticism, Crowley and his compatriots definitely wound up with something that was pretty scary and decidedly anti-Christian in many ways. It didn't help matters any that Crowley was something of an antagonist as well as a self-proclaimed drug and bisexual sex fiend, delighting in referring to himself as Baphomet and the Beast from Revelation, probably in part because he enjoyed riling up his critics and in part because he believed it, if only symbolically. Even his closest friends and relatives couldn't handle it: his two wives both went insane, and five mistresses all committed suicide. This probably had more to do with the fact that Crowley hung out with unstable drug addicts, but it certainly didn't help his image any.

Taken to its ultimate end (and far beyond where Crowley went with it), Chaos magic is ultimately a rejection of all order and tradition, a "recognition" that established symbols, orders and magic knowledge are no more valid than fictional stories told by pulp fiction writers. Even the well known Satanist Anton LaVey openly included Cthulic magic from Lovecraft's stories in his Satanic Rituals, declaring that fiction was just as magically valid as history in that regard. In such an atmosphere, reason itself is meaningless, and the search for a power greater than oneself is perhaps a futile search, not worth undertaking when there is so much within oneself already, or when one realizes that the God one is looking for could very well be a many-tentacled horror waiting to devour one's soul. These Chaos magic-users are certainly mages in the sense we defined when we began this journey, solitary wanderers who want or need no part in the search for knowledge outside of themselves, in the realm of the divine. Language, symbolism and the like are meaningless. What matters is that one has the will to act, and if the end is achieved then all is well with the world. It's not that God is dead, necessarily; it's that it doesn't matter whether or not he's dead.

The path of the Chaos mage is rather dark and lonely, and in this respect and many others, modern Chaos mages share a lot in common with one of the first pseudo-historical mages, Merlin himself. Though not necessarily Druidic like Merlin, the Chaos mage might very well refer to his art as Techno-shamanism, an obvious reference to far older and more primitive energies. Guides like The Book of Pleasure, the Ouranic Barbaric Dictionary, Techniques of Modern Shamanism and The ChaosMatrix make it clear that the sort of magic we're dealing with here is far more raw and untapped than any rituals found in an ancient, moldy tome. It's magic that goes back to the heart of the matter, and in this it shares much in common with the mages of many of the more modern Role-Playing magic-users.

Closing Comments
"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."
- Arthur C. Clarke

I'm as sick of that quote as you are, but it's more relevant here than perhaps anywhere else. And that's because many of the most modern Role-Playing magic-users are going even further back to their roots, in mathematics and science, and the world of computing. Instead of Necromancers we have Neuromancers, instead of the Necronomicon we have the Cryptonomicon. Cyberpunk's netrunners send programs into the ether with a flick of their wrist, and Shadowrun's elven datajackers cast spells with one hand and jack in with the other. Right now, US spy satellites are combing Afghanistan to try and locate a man named Osama Bin Laden, while at the same time government agencies are recruiting psychics and remote viewers to try and do the same thing via magical means.

It's a little difficult to understand where this has all gone if you try too hard to sort it out. After all, we've got wizardly colleges and structured orders in both fiction and history, but at the same time we've also got chaotic bundles of horror both in the present and in the past. Is magic rooted in mathematics, Druidic nature magic or pure chaos? Is the path to enlightenment an outward journey, or an inner one? Do words give power, or is the Word of God the only source of power? Ultimately, the answer to all of these questions and conditions is affirmative. As I mentioned when we started down this road, magic is in all things, and has been with us, for good and evil, in law and chaos, right from the very start. For this reason, both today's Role-Playing magic-users and history's wide array of alchemists, prophets and mages have many faces, act in many different ways and come from many different traditions.

And yet there is a common thread that runs throughout everything we've discussed herein, and that is the search for truth. As Friedrich Nietzsche said, "Fiat veritas, pereat vita." Let there be truth, and may life perish.

There's much to be said for having faith in a higher power, or accepting the traditions of one's ancestors, or believing what's written down as the final word. But for the wizard and the sorcerer and the mage and every other type of magic-user, past, present and future, historical, mythological and fictional, it's not enough to have faith in something, to entrust one's well-being to another's care. For the magic-user, as with The X-Files (now absent) Fox Mulder, "The Truth is Out There," and it's that truth which unlocks the power of the magic-user, for good or evil. It's the Promethean myth of stealing fire from the gods, of Lucifer cast out of heaven, of Faust bargaining with the devil and the hacker cracking passwords night after night in defiance of the law. Magic is the unknown, and the magic-user is the person seeking to know that which is unknown, and to say that which is unsaid.

And that has nothing whatsoever to do with a 6-die fireball.

(in)famous Historical Magic-users
Although many specific examples of magic-users were given in the text above, it was simply impossible to include them all there, so several more are listed here. Anyone truly interested in exploring the history of magic and magicians in the real world would do well to learn more about the following individuals:


Cornielius Agrippa - 16th century German occultist and mage.
Archimedes of Syracuse - Greek mathemetician and inventor, killed in 212 B.C.E.
Roger Bacon - 13th century experimental scientist and alchemist.
Marie Laveau(s) - Two renowned 19th century voodoo queen(s), mother and daughter.
Albertus Magnus - 13th century Catholic bishop, alchemist and magician.
Isaac Newton - Renowned inventor and thinker, died in 1727.
Paracelsus - 16th century physician, chemist, and occultist.
Grigory Rasputin - Infamous early 20th century healer and mystic.
Leonardo da Vinci - Architect, engineer, inventor, and alchemist, died in 1519.
Joan Wytte - Revolutionary-era seer, diviner and healer.
Next time: orcs and 1/2 orcs

http://www.rpg.net/news+reviews/columns/archetypology27nov01.html

[ 08-26-2006, 07:37 PM: Message edited by: Heather Delaria ]

[Heather Delaria]

 
Heather Delaria

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   posted 11-11-2006 07:27 PM                       
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Paleo-Paganism: A retronym coined to contrast with "neopaganism", denoting a pagan culture that has not been disrupted by other cultures. The term applies to Hinduism, Shinto, pre-Migration period Germanic paganism as described by Tacitus, Celtic Polytheism as described by Julius Caesar, and the Greek and Roman religion.
Meso-Paganism: A group, which is, or has been, significantly influenced by monotheistic, dualistic, or nontheistic worldviews, but has been able to maintain an independence of religious practices. This group includes Native Americans and Australian Aborigine Bushmen, Viking Age Norse paganism. Influences include: Freemasonry, Rosicrucianism, Theosophy, Spiritualism, as well as Sikhism, and the many Afro-Diasporic faiths like Haitian Vodou, and Santería.
Neo-Paganism: An attempt by modern people to reconnect with nature, pre-Christian religions, or other nature-based spiritual paths. This definition may include anything on a sliding scale from reconstructionist to New Age and non-reconstructionist groups such as Neo-Druidism and Wicca.

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"An it harm none, do what ye will."
-the Wiccan Rede

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Posts: 637 | Registered: Nov 2004   
 

[Heather Delaria]

Heather Delaria

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Member # 2196

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   posted 12-26-2006 01:15 AM                       
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Pelagius
Pelagius (c. 354 - c. 420/440) was an ascetic monk and reformer who denied the doctrine of Original Sin from Adam and was declared a heretic by the Roman Catholic Church. He was well educated, fluent in both Greek and Latin, and learned much theology. He spent time as an ascetic, focusing on practical asceticism, which his teachings clearly reflect. He was not, however, a cleric. He was certainly well known in Rome, both for the harsh asceticism of his public life as well as the power and persuasiveness of his speech. His reputation in Rome earned him praise early in his career even from such pillars of the Church as St Augustine of Hippo, who referred to him as a "saintly man." However, he was later accused of lying about his own teachings in order to avoid public condemnation. Most of his later life was spent defending himself against other theologians and the Catholic Church.

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"An it harm none, do what ye will."
-the Wiccan Rede

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Posts: 637 | Registered: Nov 2004