Three Tales of Magik

II. AVA

Long before this story begins.

It is late Autumn in the year 1995, I am 30 years old. I am standing in a small oxbow along the Pennypack Creek in Philadelphia. The moon filters down through almost leafless trees. I found this spot by following the bank of the creek beyond where the paved green way crosses a bridge to the other side. Its a nice spot with no sign of partying high schoolers or camping homeless folks.

I am about six months past my 30^th birthday, recently returned to college, on my second marriage with 4 kids. Susan and I are trying to negotiate being responsible, involved parents of young children while trying to maintain some semblance of the creative bohemian life we hoped for. The balance is hard and I am uncertain of who I am or who I want to be. A big part of the reason I am deep in this city park at nearly 10:00 PM is to think through these things, or escape them for a while.

I’m pretty familiar with even the remote reaches of this park but I’ve never been in this particular place. It reminds me of a little chapel. I started to wonder how many places like this there might be in the world, unnoticed but clearly distinct from their surroundings. A place where one might do something. I start to compose a poem:

No place is a place

Until someone stops, and stands

and gives it a name.

I tell myself I will return, maybe construct some sort of alter, make this a spot for meditation. … But I never do – I never finish the poem.

...

The very recent present.

I was having coffee with a new friend on the day of the Spring Equinox just passed. We were discussing how many different kinds of discarnate entities there might be in the world. They told me about a “ghost hunting app” they use. As soon as I got home I downloaded this app.

Not that I was interested in ghosts per se. I think of the unstable and unpredictable anomalies produced in electronic signals as another form of tea leaves or clouds, a medium that, by virtue of its “randomness” might be employed as a kind of oracle. There are MANY such apps available for smart phones and tablets. They claim to use the phones built in sensors to monitor radio signals, magnetic fluxes and environmental sounds to detect the presence of “entities”. The one that was recommended to me, has an internal bank of words that are triggered by what the sensors pick up.

The first thing I did was take my phone to a place close to our cabin which I thought of as a “portal”. We have experience a fair amount of “haunting” near this place. The app spit out a name and some other words which seemed to vaguely confirm what I expected to find there. An old name of Scotch-Irish origin and a sense that this individual had contempt for the indigenous culture here. According to local legend, there was particularly violent conflict between the white settlers and Cherokee in the valley below our cabin so I wasn’t surprised to see this. But its one thing to know who the folks down the road are, another to get all up in their personal business. As the old saying goes, good fences make good neighbors and I am pretty tight on my banishing game. I decided, for the time being, to take a live and let, “live?” approach to this particular neighbor. The next experiment was way more interesting and the one I want to talk about today.

I keep an alter to Hekate and Hermes where I make offerings: to Hekate on the New Moon and to Hermes on Wednesday when Mercury transits the meridian. One particular Wednesday, after making my Hermes offerings, I sat in conversation with him as I do. Sometimes I will pull a few Tarot Cards and invite him to speak to me through these. On this particular afternoon, I thought it might be interesting to place my phone on the alter between Hermes and Hekate to see what kind of signals \the app might detect. As I said, random radio emissions, magnetic fluxes and the like are, like Tarot cards, a current of randomness that can carry the voices of spirits. As soon as I put the phone down, the meter went to full and a name appeared: AVA.

One of the assumptions I make about the spirit world is that not everyone there is an X human with some unfinished business. There are all sorts of “spirits”: Plant and Animal spirits, spirits of places (mountains, rivers and the like), angels, demons, fair folk, entities from “other dimensions”, the Gods and Goddesses invoked by their adherents, servitors and egregores and tulpas. We have but little grasp of the varieties of such entities, their “ontological status” or the rules (if any) which govern their appearance at a particular place and time. Ultimately we must depend on our intuition, imagination and scraps of knowledge to determine what kind of entity we are dealing with.

Starting with immediate intuition, I surmised that, who ever Ava is, she is not what we would normally call a “ghost” (spirit of the deceased). I thought that maybe her name might reveal to me something of her nature (names, true names, are powerful). Google gave me many pages devoted to baby names. I learned that Ava is an old name which seems to have arisen independently in many cultures. In Latin her name means bird or birdlike. In Persian it means voice or sound. In medieval German Ava might have meant both island and water and is also the name of an 11^th century poet (Frau Ava). In ancient Hebrew the name means life, breath and is cognate with Eve who is our mother.

All of these meanings, taken together and assembled like one might do with Tarot Cards or Runes, a picture formed of an entity with the qualities of a water bird which flies from island to island and who’s song forms a bridge between. This song is a song of life that connects like places (in the same way one generation is connected with another through mothers). Perhaps this song is a poem which tells her story. I could almost picture this bird like spirit rising like an egret while simultaneously landing in some place else entirely.

I was talking through these findings with my younger daughter who thought that, because the name appeared when I placed the phone on the alter, this Ava might have something to do with that alter or alters in general. I tried to reach out to this spirit with my mind to ask whether this was so. I received the impression that Ava IS a patroness of alters, but not only that, any place made separate and sacred: alters and hearths, even the place where we might draw a circle to protect a magikal working or a house site.

For the next few days my thoughts kept returning to the association of Ava with the Hebrew connection to life, breath and Eve. I read some articles and watched videos about the Hebrew letters that spell her name. Hebrew letters are fascinating. Like Runes, each letter is not merely a phonetic marker, but represent an object or concept that allow layers of latent meaning to appear beneath the manifest content of the written text. In Ava’s case we see two Alephs separated (and united) by a Vav.

I say separated AND united because Vav can mean a hook that connects or a ladder from Heaven to Earth. As for Aleph, we see that it is composed of a diagonally placed Vav with another letter, Yud, placed on each side of the Vav. The Yud is an important letter which represents the mystery of God as well as the revelation of that mystery in the material world. Yud is a kind of seed from which the divine presence unfolds into our world. So Aleph is where the world of spirit meets the world of matter by means of a hook which both unites and separates these worlds. We might say that Vav is something like the “veil” between worlds and Yud is the “reflection” of these worlds one into the other across the veil. To me, Aleph is a good place to build an alter, shrine, temple or just to lay a hearth and set a cauldron because the workings of heaven can be mirrored in the earthly plane. Of course, there is more than one such “good place” (you may have such a place in your home). But although such places occupy different coordinates in space and time, they are all connected (Vav) by being a meeting place between the worlds of spirit and matter. Ava “lands” in such places and calls our attention to them. She isn’t a “spirit of place” like we sometimes sense in a mountain or river, rather, she is a spirit of place making, the inspiring spirit when we feel “this must be the place”.

And now that I think of it, I met her before. That night in Pennypack park all those years ago. I know so much now that I didn’t know then. So much of what worried and inspired me then seems, in retrospect, to have been not only less important than I reckoned at the time, but also counter productive and in some ways toxic. I had nearly forgotten that night in the park until I met Ava. But as I began to decipher her name, that night in the park, by the water, beneath the shadowed trees and moon light, the memory resurfaced with such startling clarity I could not doubt its significance to this spirit who revealed herself to me. It was her voice that bid me “write a poem, build an alter, return to this place”.

There is a concept known as retro causality. Basically it means that the future can influence the present. The most common example of this would be reconciliation. You have a falling out with someone and vow that your relationship is over. The meaning of such a moment is some thing like, “You hurt and disappointed me because I expected you to be one thing and you turned out to be something else, something alien”. This alienation creates a future without this other person. Perhaps later some event brings you back together: one of you becomes ill for example and begins to feel the need to seek reconciliation. If we are moved by compassion to hear the other person out, revisit the painful rift between us, we might see that we may not have read our self, or the other person properly. We may come to see that, what we rejected as alien in the other was some part of our self that we didn’t know or want to know. In the moment of forgiveness we reach back in time and change the meaning of the moment of rupture between and within us. Now someone might argue that you didn’t change the past but only what it meant. I can only suggest that one who makes such an argument might deeply inquire into the difference between what something IS and what it MEANS.

In the process of learning the name and nature of Ava, I was transported back in time to a place partially made. At that alter that I did not build I finally met the ghostly presence of a future self I could not have imagined at the time. I finally learned the things I know now – things about the meaning of long term commitment to people and the ephemeral nature of artistic creations. Things that, had I known better then, would have served myself and everyone I touched better. More than this, I have finally heard the insecurities and uncertainties of the young man I was at that time, things that I wouldn’t have been able to bare in full light at that moment. And in my mind I gather sticks and stones to build that alter, sit before it with my past and self as his future and finally complete that poem.

A Hymn to Ava

No place is a place

Until someone stops, and stands

and gives a name.

Who is it that stops?

From whence do they come, and whither do they go?

And why this resting branch?

Wings across the waters

A voice that calls from shore to shore,

To Bridge the space between,

Making of each end a place.

No name without another name to call.

No place without an other singing back.

Let this place be a womb

Where spirit seed breaths life

Into this world of dust and stone.

And let this place bring forth a name that we may know it.

Ava make a place here

As an egret makes her nest.

Finally, in the time honored tradition of giving form to spirit in the form of a glyph I have drafted this sigil to represent Ava in my workings. You may feel free to use it should you too decide to call upon Her when you establish a permanent place of magik.

…

After Words

I set about writing these “Tales of Magik” because I wanted to share the way in which magik shows up in my life and practice. Although I practice forms of divination and spell craft in order to learn things and influence events, most of my experience of magik is as something I allow rather than something that I do. As often as not, when I seek the state of mind that sees magik in each small moment (gnosis), it is more like a walk in the woods to see what might be growing there than a hunt for some particular thing.

The world around us is, and has always been, enchanted. There are all manner of spirits that surround us and new ones being born all the time. All the ancient Gods were once unknown. Their names and forms and stories arose from minds sensitive enough to sense their presence and creative enough to give them form. Whether such entities enjoy an independent ontological status or are “created” in the imagination of magikal practitioners is a matter of some debate, and probably a matter of faith. My impression is that they arise from fruitful interactions between the material world and the world of the spirits or, if you prefer, the imagination, to me there is little difference between the two.

Almost all cultures have a sky god related to storms. To minds such as ours, which seek connections between isolated sensory experiences, the storm that brings both fertility and destruction appears as a powerful being who dispenses blessings and curses according to its’ own caprice. We form an image of what such a being might be like, tell stories about him or her and attempt to develop strategies aimed at increasing blessings and reducing curses. In a similar fashion, the swoon we experience in the presence of beauty or the blood fever of anger and ambition become Goddesses of Love, Gods of Strife. Almost any experience can be personified in this way, from the appeal to “Lady Luck” whispered by gamblers to the way people talk to their plants, or even their cars. We are inclined to see “spirits” in nearly everything. Magik is an attempt to establish a line of communication with these spirits.

When we seek the council of oracles we invite the spirit to speak through the medium of cards or the swing of a pendulum. Another way to say this is that we attempt, through divination, to invite synchronicity. In a similar way, when we seek gnosis through ritualized activities - dance or trance, sensory deprivation or overload, prayer or entheogens, we enter a state of mind where any sequence of events might glow with the significance we find in a spread of cards or rune stones. In my own devotional practice, I call upon Hekate to open and light a path to understanding and upon Hermes to grant me the ability to speak what I see. When I placed my phone upon the alter, between these two trusted spirit guides, a series of events unfolded through which Ava appeared. The account I have given completes the sequence. It makes little difference to me whether Ava existed prior to the sequence of events which merely revealed her or she was created through the sequence. We might as well ask whether any of us existed before our parents conceived us. How we answer this question tells us much about our own relationship with and understanding of the spirit world.