Scorpio 2023

Nov 08, 2023

Welcome to the new quarterly edition of Three Blessings Virtual Grimoire. In honor of the Scorpio season and the onrushing darkness which surrounds at this time of year I want to share four “spooky” essays.

The first, deals with The Devil as we find him in the Waite-Smith Tarot. In this piece I explore the idea that The Devil represents something fundamental, and therefore unavoidable about living in the material world. Next I share some of the ideas that shape my approach to “ancestor work”. In this essay I cast “haunting” as the most fundamental shaping aspect of our lives and world. Third is a little piece about loosing things and the strange state of mind we enter when we “KNOW we put that damn thing RIGHT HERE”. Finally, I share one of the first things I wrote for this blog. Remaining unpublished until now, this esay deals with being “stuck” in life and history and suggest that the only way forward might be to finally believe in things that we might never prove.

I hope you find these writings interesting. Thank you again for your time and attention. While it is nice to believe that creative endeavors should be undertaken for their own sake, most creators don’t believe it even if they want too. We write (or paint, play music, etc) for others. Thank you all for giving me a reason to do this thing I love so much.

I hope you will find or BE a light in the dark. Remember that spring will come again. I’ll be back when The Sun nears 15 degrees of Aquarius. Until them, take care of your self and those you love.

Peace

Frank

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DOWN WITH THE DEVIL

The 15^th Trump of The Tarot has been given the names “Lord of the Gates of Matter” and “child of the forces of Time”. These designations are key to understanding the true scope and limitation of The Devil’s power. This power is not something that The Devil exercises over us. Rather it is a power inherent in the material world as such.

The Devil Card is associated with the Zodiacal sign of Capricorn. This is the Cardinal Earth sign and has to do with the foundations of material existence. The sign is ruled by Saturn, planet of structure, discipline, labors, limitations, boundaries and time. Saturn is represented in Tarot by The World Card. Saturn represents all of the difficult but necessary virtues necessary in the making of the material world and everything that happens in this world. It is also the source of all the world’s vices. However we might feel about The Devil, we must recon with him if we wish to accomplish anything here in the Material Plane, even when our goal is to forsake this plane for one “higher”.

In Pamela Smith’s image we see a hybrid beast with the posture and baring of a man. Upon his goat like forehead he bares the inverse pentagram. The pentagram illustrates the relationship between the Material Plane and the Spirit world. When upright, we see the material world (the lower four points of the star correspond to the classical elements) reaching up to the realm of spirit. Spirit presides over nature. When the pentagram is inverted, as it is here, we see the world of matter above spirit. Spirit is trapped in nature. It is for this reason that many occultists associate the inverse pentagram with evil and the Devil.

He is seated on a black cube symbolizing the world of matter, heavy, dark and seemingly impervious to time and change. We see a male and female figure bound to this cube by heavy chains. The horns and tails they bare symbolize the animal nature of human kind driven by lust and fear, ignorant of spiritual reality. The chains are only loosely looped around the necks of the captives. They could be easily removed. The captives are so much in thrall to desirable and fearful things within the material plain that they seem not to know, or care, that they have the power to release themselves.

One of the most widely accepted interpretations of this card is that it describes a person or persons who find themselves in a bad situation which they either can not, or will not, see their way out of. Perhaps there is something in the situation that they want or feel they need (toxic relationship but hot sex, bad job but good pay, bad drugs but good times). Or perhaps they imagine something bad will happen to them if they leave (I will be lonely, I will be poor, I will loose all my friends). For these reasons, The Devil is often associated with addictions, obsessions, compulsions, etc. By this interpretation we are tasked with recognizing that what appears to be a threat from without, truly arises from within. Since we are the source of our own bondage, it is only we who might free ourselves. All of this is true but there is more to it than that.

It is important to note that The Devil isn’t looking at his captives. He looks at us as if to say “I’m not holding these people against their will. Look at those chains. They can leave any time they want”. The devil is being “tricky” here but not dishonest. If the captives would but imagine a possibility beyond their chains they might leave. Perhaps they fear what The Devil might do if they made a break. They know he isn’t looking at them but he might if they tried to escape. They might imagine all manner of tortures. The Devil you know is better than the one you do not.

But what if The Devil’s only power was his ability to frighten and tempt us. The power of our own imagination often paralyses us with visions of pleasure or pain. Often these visions have little or no relation to what is actually happening. A mere specter in our mind is all that is needed to keep us in Hell.

One thing that The Devil is best known for is the making of deals. Perhaps he looks down upon his captives in not quite mock pity and asks if they would like to make one:

Devil “Why do you not throw off your chains?”

Captives “Can we?”

Devil “Of course you can”

The captives inspect their chains, perhaps for the first time. One of them starts to lift the loop than, ceased by an unaccountable fear, drops the heavy chain back to their shoulders.

Captives “we are afraid of what will happen if we leave”?

Devil “What do you imagine will happen?”

The captives proceed to regale their host with all the things they fear that they might loose, and more, all the nightmare visions of creatures even worse than him. The Devil moves the torch he holds a little closer to the man’s tail and asks:

Devil “Could it really be worse than here? How do you know it isn’t better. How about this, you both have told me of your hopes and fears. If you would view me as a teacher and maybe even a friend, I will show you how you might have more of what you like and less of what you don’t, more good, less evil. Take those chains off and I will teach you”.

And teach us he has. All of the material progress we have made rests on our ability to isolate individual things and processes as sources of good or evil (as judged by us). Isolation of specific details is a Saturnian quality (remember, Saturn rules the sign of Capricorn which belongs to The Devil).We have learned how to extract wealth, pleasure and security of every kind through our sciences. Yet we have consistently run into the same basic problem - abundance in one place means want in another, security for one group of people is bought at the price of uncertainty for others, the pleasures of a few are purchased by the pain of the many.

Occasionally we might run back to the teacher and complain that something we like always seems to come with something we don’t, why do riches seem to breed poverty, abundance leave the environment denuded. The Devil’s answer is always the same:

Devil. “I thought you wanted lots of things”.

Us. ‘Yes but we didn’t realize that people would be harmed and nature itself turned into a midden. It seems that we are always surrounded by trash and angry people who seem to resent us. It makes us frightened”.

Devil. “Look, the deal was that you tell me what you want and do not want and I will tell you how to how to have it. If you don’t like trash and resentment you could take less, share more, treat the trees and seas like they had the same feeling and needs as you.

Us. “Would that mean we would have less abundance, security and pleasure?”

Devil. “Who do you mean by ‘we’”?

The perceptive reader might perceive that The Devil is withholding a key piece of information, namely, the necessary connection between abundance and want, pleasure and pain, even life and death. But does he conceal it? Does he even need to? Is not the connection between cost and benefit obvious, if not intuitively than experientally? We understand perfectly that for someone to eat, someone else must die, for someone to prosper, someone else must not. Isn’t this obvious even from our physics? When I was a church goer the pastor used to tell the story of a man who asks God why he allows terrible things to happen. God asks the man what sort of things. The man recites a list of human tragedy: hatred, war, poverty, and so on. God thinks about it for a moment and asks the man “Why do you?”

The Lord of the Gates of Matter and Child of the forces of Time is a “nature spirit” (some say he is Pan). Nature is not immoral, it is amoral. Like it or not, morality requires a value judgment. Nature makes no such judgments, it allows that which is strong enough to thrive to do so, it allows those who are not to die. This is all there is to nature. When we are confronted with the Devil Card, we are confronted by nature itself, our nature. We do not have to accept that nature is strictly “red in tooth and claw”, but it is that sometimes – for the protection of its’ kind and its progeny – the tooth and claw are as much instruments of love as the mother’s breast. To deny this is to deny reality. This is the reality the Devil confronts us with. When he appears we are obliged to answer his question: “Who do you mean by ‘we’”? He will not judge us. That isn’t his job (that would be the Judgment Card).

Saturn will help us understand what is actually at stake here and what we can not escape. Saturn creates and maintains boundaries: between self and other, us and them – between what matters to us and what does not. If we live, move, and wish to act in the material plane, not matter how lofty our objectives, we must recon with these boundary issues. These are the boundaries that The Devil calls our attention to when he asks us “who do you mean by we?”

There is always someone or something which must be left out when we try to “build a better world”. There is no exception to this rule. Look within our self. Is there anyone or any thing which you would exclude from we? Saturn is the planet of Isolation but also protection, belonging but also exile. It is his (or perhaps her) power which we borrow when we answer The Devils question. In the world of matter this is the question we must answer so that our values and our people might thrive.

The material world is the reflecting of the spiritual. Whatever is bound here is bound there, whatever loosed here is loosed there. The horror that the Devil calls forth in us, in our Tarot Spread, or in our life, is the horror of knowing that it is we who bind and we who loose. So to ask the Devil’s question one final time, who do we mean by we?

EVERYTHING IS HAUNTED

If you have ever been told something like “you have your mother’s face, your fathers eyes, your grandmothers sense of humor, your grandfather’s temper, etc.” you have some idea of the sense of “haunting” that I want to bring into focus here. Contact with the dead, or other discarnate beings, isn’t a super power limited to people with mediumistic powers. While it is true that their are virtuosi in this field, you don’t have to be a classically trained singer to sing in the shower or around a camp fire. Anyone can, and indeed does have regular contact with their ancestors and even those to whom one is not related by blood.

Each one of us is literally shaped by our experience. When you see a deer run across the road, this experience is nothing more than your bodily reacting to a particular stimulus. When exposed to the same or similar experiences repeatedly, our brains form complex neuronal connections that correspond to these experiences. This process is responsible for everything from learning to ride a bike to traumatic responses to people and situations. The only thing we “know” about anyone or anything is how that person, that thing, affects our bodies. Who a person is is always and only who they are to you. This is not the same thing as saying that all a person is is who they are to us. All a person is involves who they are to everyone they ever meet, how everyone they ever meet represent them to others through stories, the impact they have on the material world, and who they are to themselves. If you have ever known a person well but see them in a different context (say seeing your partner at work) or if you discover that they have some talent or skill you didn’t know about, you get the picture I am trying to paint here. Everybody who has ever lived “haunts” the world in some way, big or small. Everyone alive experiences this haunting in some way.

The world we inhabit shapes itself around us like modeling clay around a penny. This includes the impressions we make on other people. At the same time, we, as part of everyone else’s world, pick up impressions like that modeling clay. Remove the penny and see an impression. We pick of habits of speech and patterns of behavior from our families, friends and our culture (including the cultural products we consume, (literature, film, music, etc). All of these influences coexist, sometimes harmoniously, sometimes not so, in what we call our “character”. As this character moves through the world it, in turn, shapes all it touches.

A while back I shared a story about Susan and I seeing a particular bird one winter afternoon. Something about the way this bird moved reminded Susan of her Grandmother. After talking about this for a bit, we realized that this was the anniversary of her Grandmother’s death a few years before. Something in the outer world triggers an unconscious bit of information, a memory not currently attended, and brings it into the light of conscious awareness. An uglier version of this same process occurs when someone behaves in a way that reminds us of someone else who may have harmed us in some way. The latter case we refer to as trauma. Both cases are hauntings in the sense I am pointing to here.

Such situations, good or bad, are not what we usually think of when we think of a haunting. Think of the typical “ghost story”. Someone moves into a house, for example. Shortly after, all manner of strange things start to happen. Perhaps they hear from the locals that some horrific or terribly sad thing once occurred in the house. Or perhaps a medium is called in who announces that they have “seen” such a thing. Maybe the undead spirit is contacted and somehow appeased, leaving the home and its’ residents in peace. Such stories have been told forever. What they point to is our understanding that there are things that have happened in the past, sad and terrible things, that have been forgotten. Nearly everyone has had a “creepy” feeling about a place, or maybe a person. When this happens, it is because this place, this person, “seems” like the kind of place or person who might house some lurking, unknown thing that might pop out and hurt us. These vague sensations often involve some material condition that calls forth feelings of caution: darkness, bad weather, strange behavior. This is probably the reason that so many spooky stories begin on “a dark and stormy night”. The ghost story brings to mind the feeling of being in the presence of something we can not perceive by our senses but who’s presence we none the less feel.

Stories have the effect of reminding us of something we know but can not quite say. In the case of ghost stories, we are reminded of those moments in life when we feel that there is something, or someone at work who can not be seen but who’s presence can be felt. A common place example of this would be a situation when you are having a conflict with a loved one and they are behaving in a way which does not seem congruent with the situation you both find yourself in at the moment. Many MANY love songs revolve around the idea of paying for the mistreatment suffered at the hands of the lovers previous partner. Of course the same thing plays out in real relationships where one or both partners are responding in a present situation to some unresolved issue in the past. This situation scales up and down the range of social interactions from conflicts at work to conflicts between nations. In all cases, some unknown or uncounted for past pain, fear, resentment, etc, acts as an active influence in the present. History, on every level, is a specter which haunts our moment.

In cultures that practice forms of ancestor veneration there are usually strong taboos against denying, maligning and worse of all forgetting those who have gone into the land of the dead. These taboos serve several important social functions. One of these is continuity between generations and, therefore, social continuity across time. Another is that if you know your descendants will keep you connected to the material plane through their memories, you might be more careful about the impressions you make on those around you. Such beliefs disclose the notion of a community as something extending through time as well as across space and, as such, serves the continued well being of the individual and the community, the living and the dead.

Another function of such beliefs, and one that is close to the point I am trying to make here, is that it helps to center the identity of the individual in a network of relationships. Many of us find ourselves feeling alienated from our communities and even our families because of feelings we have that do not seem to be shared by our peers. But if you could identify a distant relative, or even someone in your community who is not a direct relation, you might feel less loneliness. Perhaps by learning about this person, how they dealt with their feelings and the way people responded to these, you might even learn something useful about getting along in your own social world. It might even be that, if this distant figure had a rough time of it, if they were misunderstood and maligned, you might, in learning to advocate for yourself, advocate for them. In this way, the dead can do a service to us and we to them.

Of course, one of the most fraught aspects of our relationship with the dead is when they have harmed us, or those we care for during their lives. In my own work in this difficult area, the journey began with seeing certain aspects of my problematic dead in myself. There is a well known saying: “hurt people, hurt people”. This doesn't have to involve terrible abuse. If you grew up around chronically suspicious, pessimistic or fearful people you might, even if you intend not to, carry these traits into your own life. One of the most common ways this happens is that we identify a character trait in someone who caused us pain and say “I’m never going to be that”. Of course these traits may “live within us” as unconscious emotional responses and behavior patterns. The shadow we confront in moments of deep self awareness is the denied, maligned and forgotten parts of our self which haunt our waking life. This is one of the most challenging aspects of coming to peace with a difficult ancestor, the question of how much “like them” we might be.

When ever I find myself talking or writing on this subject I always feel a little sad that so much attention must be given to the traumatic material I have outlined in the previous paragraphs. At the same time, the representation of communication with the dead in popular culture is so universally horrifying that it seems clear that much work needs to be done before we can be at peace with our dead and they with us. In my own practice, the dead I “talk with” most often are those with whom I had the most troubled relationship in life. Those I loved and trusted without much reservation seem content to let me know, as they did in life, that they are there, that they care and that they are with me. The dead with whom I struggled in life, however, have become close allies over time and have taught me most about myself and the areas in which I must grow. From their teachings I might hope to become the type of person my descendants will remember as someone who was, and is, there, who cares, and who is always with them.

If you would like to begin working with your own dead, those who made you feel good, and especially those who did not, it can be as simple as greeting them when they “cross your mind”. If you would like to deepen the relationship, you might take some quiet time to sit with their memory. Perhaps you might serve them a drink or some food, play some music they liked. Allow their presence to sink into you as it did in life. If you have somethinmg to say to them, especially if it is something difficult, just say it. They will not be able to harm you and finally saying something you may have held back for years can be quite cathartic. The biggest caution I might offer in this practice is that sometimes the dead indight us with our own shadow, reminding us that we are not free of the bad traits we charge them with. If this happens, try not to shrink from this truth. We can not change what we are not aware of. The dead have no choice but to hear what we say to and of them. We however can choose to ignore their council. DON’T! The biggest favor our ancestors can do for us is to teach us how we might have a better after life than they. Allow them to do this service. In this way we might begin to heal generational traums and bring peace between the living and the dead.

VANISHED OBJECTS

When ever I talk with people about wyrd things that have happened to them, one of the most common stories is something like this:

I lost something. I searched in all the places I might have put it to no avail. Then later, it showed up in a place I was sure I looked many times.

You may never have been visited by ghosts, never had a strange and powerful revelation that seemed to come out of no where, never had a prophetic vision that later came true – but I bet something like the above story has happened to you. Something like it just happened to me. It has happened to me before with all sorts of objects, a child’s toy, a camp stove. I know where I put it, I looked there – MANY TIMES. And it just isn’t there. But often it shows up later in a place I know I’ve looked. What is this all about?

If you have been following these posts for a while, you will know that I am open to all sorts of strange things. I read Tarot and I Ching, I “believe in” astrology, I regularly commune with the dead. If I had to give an “explanation” for these things, I would say that, spirit entities, being real but not physical, have no way of expressing themselves in the material plane. They “piggy back” themselves onto things that are happening anyway, the random pull of tarot cards, the smell of cigarettes or perfume that brings the subconscious thought of a person into conscious awareness, the crack of a branch or bark of a dog at the very moment you were asking yourself if you were making the right decision about some important matter. The fact that an apparently spirit contact might be explained by some perfectly natural phenomenon does nothing to disprove our intuition of the super natural. Magik requires a “means of manifestation”. If you do a money spell and find $10 in the street, it probably got there in the usual way. The magik is in the fact that the spell caused you to cross paths with something “ordinary” under extraordinary circumstances.

But when some actual, physical object just “disappears” such explanations just don’t seem to jell. So we default to some “natural” reason – “I just ‘missed’ it”. Even when the thing shows up again, sometimes months or years later, it is still difficult to shake the idea that we just must have somehow failed to find it even though we know we’ve looked there so many times. The problem is this: until you find the missing object (if you do), there is always the possibility that you DID just miss it. When you DO find it, it is easy to tell yourself that you did just miss it. Of course, if you have ever actually BEEN in this situation, you KNOW DAMN WELL you looked there a lot of times. Yet, there it is. How can you PROVE it was taken by the faeries (or what ever)? YOU CAN’T. In this way, the wyrdness of the disappeared and reappeared object is like any other form of magikal result. Since magik needs a means of manifestation, you can never know if what you feel to be a mysterious, possibly profound experience, might not have “just happened on its’ own”. What is at stake here is less the authenticity of the experience than the meaningfulness there of.

As magikal practitioners, we should not get hung up on proof. Ramsey Dukes has an interesting and useful construct for dealing with such experiences. He points out that, if a politician, for example, says something outrageous, it is better to ask WHY he said it than whether is is TRUE. We need to have the humility to accept that no matter how complete our understanding of a subject, there are things that we do not know, and that since we do not always know what these things are, we will never be able to say with certainty whether we have fully understood. But we CAN ascribe a meaning to the things we encounter in the world. If I find $10 dollars in the street (or loose it), I can ask myself if “the spirits” are trying to tell me something but I do not assume that it just appeared out of thin air. People loose money all the time but we are not always the one who finds it. What do you do when you find it depends on what you think it means that you did.

So yesterday I lost something. It was a small object that could fit in the palm of your hand, easy enough to loose. But this is an object that I usually have pretty close at hand and we live in a very tiny cabin. After a pretty thorough search of all the places it could be (and a few that were highly unlikely), and even having my wife help (I have really bad eyes but she doesn’t) we determined that this was one of those situations in which we would have to accept that the thing was just GONE. We have been through this sort of thing before so the idea that the fairies (or whom ever) steal things isn’t entirely off the table. Never the less, there was the normal round of, “now this thing just HAS to be here somewhere!”.

After a while, perhaps just to calm my mind, I decided to ask the Tarot about it. Instead of asking where the thing went, I asked why some spook might want to steal it. I drew a lot of Mercury related cards. I do a lot of work with Hermes (Mercury) who is, among other things, a God of both messengers and thieves. In addition, I drew one of the Saturn related cards (7 of Pentacles). This card has to do with the discipline of waiting for things to ripen, remaining vigilant as they do but not rushing them. I have my second Saturn Return coming up next April and planning to begin a long season of Saturn work in preparation starting on November 4^th (when Saturn comes out of its’ current retrograde). Saturn has to do with structures, boundaries, hard work and time. As I enter this next season, I hope to “tidy up” many aspects of my life. The cards seemed to be suggesting that this process would take a long time (The Saturn return cycle is just over 29 years long) and that the first lesson I would have to master is patience in letting things develop. Part of this was accepting that this lost object would be returned to me (or not) in its own time and that I would have no control over that process. So I reluctantly accepted that, like many times before, a lost object might just stay lost and then reaper at some point in the future.

As it turns out, I found this object the following day in a place that both my wife and I had looked more than once. Now, did I just miss the thing? I don’t know and have no interest in proving anything. What the incident did was provide me a chance to examine a normally frustrating and just down right wyrd experience as an opportunity to learn something important from the spirit world.

The point of this story is simply this: we are often confronted by unexplainable experiences that can be unsettling even to those of us who expect and even invite weird happenings. The next time something like this happens to you, instead of trying to explain it rationally or simply shake your head at the bald strangeness of the situation, try to think of it as something calling attention to an important aspect of your life in the only way it can. Use divination, intuition, introspective or what ever works for you. Ask what it means that you have lost this particular object at this particular moment. Who knows, maybe if you get the message the fairies will give your thing back.

IN THE MIDDLE OF NOWHERE

Our Liminal Moment

This essay is one of the first I wrote for this blog. I have never published it because I didn’t feel that I could give it an appropriate context, until now. As we pass beyond the Scorpio Cross Quarter, past Samhain, Halloween, Dia de los Meurtes, All Saints and All Souls Day, we enter the most liminal part of the year. The deep night of the year, as deep as the fixed water of Scorpio, our thoughts to that space after death and before birth. This essay deals with liminality as a pervasive cultural phenomenon. What does it mean that we seem to be stuck in history? This is what I try to explore here from a magikal perspective

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As a devote of Hekate, I am intrigued by anything that could be called liminal. For as long as I can remember I have been drawn states that are neither here nor there, neither present nor past. I derive a great deal of inspiration and a strange kind of comfort from these spaces, whether in the physical world or in the world of ideas.

Ever since the Great Conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn at the end of 2019, which heralded the beginning of two years of global pandemic, I have noticed that the sparsely populated no man’s land that I have grown so accustomed to has become quite crowded. Why is liminality top of mind for so many people? Young adults are finding it increasingly difficult to “launch”. Issues of race and gender identity and a “generation gap” the likes of which not seen since the 1960s underscore the growing division between and within people. National borders and personal boundaries are both high stakes issues while the pervasive influence of the internet erases the difference between private and public. Why are borders, boundaries and the spaces between so strong in our imaginations at this moment?

I decided to write about this after my daughter sent me some pictures of so called “liminal spaces”. A quick search of the internet yields thousands of these images. They range from gas stations at night to empty office buildings and abandoned shopping malls. From playgrounds without children to the surreal, sci-fi landscapes of video games. The feelings such images evoke range from vague nostalgia to a kind of paranoid uneasiness. There are many, MANY videos on YouTube that try to get at the “why” of these feelings. What I would like to do here is look at liminal spaces, and the liminality of this historical moment from a magickal perspective. I hope by doing so, we may come to understand how we reached this threshold and why we seem to be having so much difficulty crossing it.

Liminality relates to the moment within an initiatory rite when one is no longer what they were before entering the magickal space, but has not yet become what the ritual is intended to turn them into. The shore lines are gone and there is no reference to origin nor destination. Whether one feels this as a moment of liberation or of being desperately lost, perhaps never to return, will determine much about how the initiation will ultimately “take”. If one is too frightened, they will simply freeze, unable to advance or retreat (you can’t go home). At the same time, if one becomes too intoxicated with the sense of liberation that can attend such moments, they too will “wander in the bardo”. Every thing we hope for and everything we dread awaits us on the other shore. Sooner or later we must go to meet it. But before we can, we must understand the nature of the waters that surround us.

Since World War II, and even before that, thinkers from all over the political and cultural spectrum have lamented the lack of effective rights of passage within western culture. During this time we have also seen an increasingly prolonged youth. In the 1940s it wasn’t unusual for people to get married, start families and begin long term careers by their early 20s. Now people live with their parents, with room mates or as singles, often well into their 30s. The manifest reasons for these changes, (cultural, economic, etc.) are, I claim, surface effects of latent spiritual forces.

Rights of passage, from the often brutal ceremonies of hunter/gatherer people to the fairly tame rites of conformation and bar/bat mitzvah, have always served the purpose of bringing people from childhood into the privileges and responsibilities of adult members of the community. They usually involve performing some feat that demonstrates bravery and competence in doing some thing that will be required of them as adults. If your culture is primarily focused on hunting and the skill and bravery this requires, the rites will involve undergoing trials of mental and physical endurance. In more sophisticated cultures, like those informed by the so called “high religions” a lot of being an adult has to do with understanding and enacting the cultural values of your group (reading a Torah passage without vowels for example or memorizing important passages of scripture). In all cases, however, rites of passage have involved interacting with ancestors and other “spirits”. For most of human history, all human activity, even the most mundane, turned to the “spirit world” for guidance as well as justification, in other words, for meaning. For most of human history, day to day life was embedded in stories. Joseph Campbell called myths “stories that never happened but which are always happening”. The idea here is that the foundational narratives of a culture serve as a kind of psycho/spiritual scaffolding that gives life coordinaties and allows us to navigate its’s changing seasons and their demands.

For at least a century, “developed countries”, and especially the United States, have become increasingly secular and technical, the current “fundamentalist” backlash not withstanding (more on that later) Events like high school graduation, having a first job, getting a driver’s license, voting, and entrance into college or the military have became important rights of passage. These achievements, while they announce an increase in social privileges, do not (with the possible exception of joining the military) place specific obligations on the individual. They do not require commitment beyond obedience to the specific laws which regulate them. They DO NOT place one in the context of a story. Notice I have said nothing about marriage as a right of passage here. This is because marriage is an institution who’s meaning, and therefore future, is somewhat in question.

While all this happened, the space between childhood and adulthood grew from the fairly short and intense rights of more “primitive” cultures to the longer, more gradual series of achievements that shift one into adult roles. Finally, and most importantly for our discussion here, what it means to be an adult has gone from the few but vital roles filled by adults in hunting and agricultural cultures, to the broad but less consequential roles one might choose (or not) to take on as adults in more “advanced” societies. Finally we find ourselves in a place where it takes much longer to become an adult and, at the same time, it is less clear when one has become one or what this even means.

Without passing judgment on exactly how “good” the old days were, most of us would agree that they were simpler. For our purposes here, simpler means a narrower range of roles that one might aim to fill and a fairly proscribed set of values that determine the prestige and rewards that these roles bring. Over time, the stories that a culture tells about itself becomes more complex. It takes longer to learn these more complex stories and to find one’s place within them. This accounts for the widening space between childhood and adulthood.

While increased personal liberty and socioeconomic mobility are good, they are not unambiguously so. The more complex our cultural context, the more places there are to get stuck, lost or returned, empty handed, to the place where you started. I think most of us sense this. We find ourselves anxious about futures that may never materialize and longing for a simple past that we may never have known. These images of liminal spaces evoke these feelings while giving them a place to rest. This is why they can seem both disturbing and strangely calming.

In response to this historical moment I see three broad camps emerging. The first camp are “traditionalists”. These range from religious zealots” to free market capitalists who would have us return to some former greatness, or at least stability. Generally this camp is either ignorant of, or unconcerned with the fact that the past was only great, or even stable, for “their” kind of people. The second are idealists. These range from technocrats and rationalists to political activists (usually on the so called “left”) who seem to feel that all of our disorientation and indecision can be cured by “proper” education and appropriate technology. Finally there are what I will call liminalists. Liminalists range from biter cynics and “nihilists” to those who approach life like a video game, challenging and sometimes thrilling but ultimately of no real consequence. Traditionalists lean toward the past, idealists, the future. Liminalists are the only people who apprehend the present. Having no where to lean, they flail around or walk in circles or simply sit where they are. The only people who are living authentically in the present, in other words, are going nowhere. This camp, it seems, is growing rapidly. What makes our historical moment unique is its lack of continuity with the past. Earlier historical epochs have always oriented themselves toward the past, either by maintaining a strict continuity with it, or aggressively setting themselves against it. In other words, they have been either traditionalist or idealistic.

The pace of social and technological progress over the past three or four hundred years has been enormous compared to that of the previous thousand. Almost all of this change has served to undermine tradition. Evolutionary theory gained ascent over biblical accounts of creation, psychology has made the notion of the soul an anachronism and revolutionary political theory from constitutional democracy to communism has permanently altered the relationship between the political and economic elite and “The People”. These are simply the broad outlines of a pervasive reordering of human experience that reaches from our relationship to the cosmos and our planet to the relationship with other people and even with ourselves. We have attempted to write a new story by un-writing the old. Perhaps we have nearly completed this project.

REST STOP

Imagine a brightly lit gas station in the middle of the desert. It is a moonless night and not many cars pass by on the two laner out front. The ones that do might come from either direction. Their occupants are hungry and thirsty and road buzzed. They might be heading “out” from someplace or returning from some place “else”. Perhaps they are escaping something, perhaps they are beginning a new life far away. The image of such a place, devoid of context, allows itself to be a single frame in any movie one chooses to project. Does it look lonely? Hopeful? If you were crossing the parking lot, entering the small, brightly lit room, country music playing on an old transistor radio behind the counter, would you feel a sense of liberation, fatigue, paranoia? Would you remember road trips with your family? Would you imagine the scene that awaits you when you reach your father’s hospital room in your old home town?

The middle of nowhere is an image for our time precisely because that is where we find ourselves. Abandoned and forgotten places, corridors and stairways leading no where in particular – these images make perfect containers of increasingly common feelings. Even before they were an internet sensation these uncanny images had a strong appeal. Edward Hopper’s iconic 1942 painting “Nighthawks” is such an image. The novels of Jack Kerouac and songs of Tom Waits drip with the same late night chiaroscuro atmosphere. The films of David Lynch and even the print ads for Levi’s 501 jeans from the 1990s reveled in this same dusty light. These images are not post modern, they are post everything. Or maybe pre?

Anyway …we hit the John, got coffee and snacks, car is gassed up and we are paid up. Can’t hang around here forever (someone might call the cops). Where do you want to go. We could go anywhere but we gotta go somewhere.

BACK ON THE ROAD

I must admit I am having trouble knowing how to complete this essay. This is sort of the point. A lot has happened over the past 50, 500, 5,000 years and a lot has been said of all of it. What does it come too. The Book of Ecclesiastes, written over 3,000 years ago, assures us that “All Is Vanity”. In 1942 (Same year as the Hopper painting mentioned above) Albert Camus picked up on the same theme in his “Myth of Sisyphus” but tried to put a new spin on it. Yes, life is meaningless and heading nowhere, it is, in a word, absurd. But the small pleasures of life, the feeling of being alive should be enough to justify going on. Further, indulging in fantasies about the world to come, whether the Kingdom of God or the Workers Utopia only serves to distract us from this simple truth, and demoralize us with its always unfulfilled promises. Of course Camus was handsome, talented and famous. His death in a car crash, although fittingly absurd in some ways, did nothing to detract from the fact that, although his life and work might have been, in the long run, absurd, it was still a pretty good life compared to the drudgery that attends the life of the average Amazon Warehouse worker. Absurdity can still be romantic, necessity is nearly never so.

Is this then where we end … necessity?!? What is necessary? Are we? Is life as such. Is simply wanting to go forward enough? What if we don’t want to? And even if we do, where are we to go?

We can not go back. The fervor of those traditionalists who want to take us back to what they call the “good” old days and “traditional values” makes me feel that they want to force me to believe something so they can justify believing it too. It makes me furious sometimes and sad most of the time. I am also skeptical of claims that we can form any real, life affirming values in a thoroughly secular age. The biological imperative to simply live can do nothing to convince us that we should, at least once we are fed and sexually satisfied for the moment.

The best thing about Gods was that they gave us a reason – to glorify them – or at least not piss them off. Same thing with our ancestors. If they are watching they might expect something from us and we delivered, if for no other reason, because we would see them again eventually. That still leaves our decedents, perhaps we might go on for their good. What good is that? If we don’t know, can’t find a reason to live that we can believe in, what reason can we bequeath to them? These are the questions that we must answer if we are to move beyond this liminal moment. If there is any necessity left for us surely this is it. Not only that we ask these questions, but that we answer them. What ever answer we give, what ever stories we tell, will create the future. For all of the gleeful celebration of futility that has haunted a wide swath of western thought and culture for nearly a century now, we find that the most absurd thing we can do – believe in something – might turn out to be the most necessary thing for our survival.

Behold, we have become as Gods, knowing Good and Evil. But we, you and I, are not the only Gods around here, the whole sky is full of us. Our stories will clash and cohere, there will be resonance and dissonance, solve et coagula, Great golden copulations and gnashing of teeth, and somehow a world will be born from this chaos, A future we can believe in because we made it ourselves. And since nothing will stand that is not consonant with laws of nature, we will know that it is good by the mere fact of its duration. We will do this again and again and in so doing we will, like Sisyphus challenge entropy itself … Or … we could just look at more pictures of abandoned Taco Bells

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Scorpio 2023

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