Light GOD

 

The God of the Waxing Year, Lord of Light, Sun-God, Grain Reborn: Ra, Apollo, Lugh the Long-Handed--his image seems as bright and clear as the sun at dawn. Consort, brother, son of the Lady, he is born at Yule, is celebrated as the Waxing Light at Brigid, overcomes Night at Eostara, becomes the Lady's lover at Beltaine, and dies at the peak of his power at Litha, when his place is taken by his twin, the Dark God of the Waning Year, who will in turn be replaced the following Yule.

This is one way of looking at the Horned One: as twin brothers who vie for the Goddess' favors, and turn and turn about win the victory. This is the most ancient way of viewing the conflict between growth and decay which is actually no conflict at all, but rather twin aspects of one cyclic process.

The problem with getting a clear view of the God is complicated by the historical changes which have taken place in religious attitudes toward the Male and Female Principles. Ever since the superseding of the ancient matriarchal religions, the God has been, on the one hand, inflated into the Sky-Father, Creator, Jehovah, Source of All (thereby usurping the prerogatives of the Mother as well as absorbing all her solar attributes); and on the other hand, suffered the reverse sort of inflation into the Devil, the Evil One, lumped with the World and the Flesh (the Goddess as Moon/Earth and as Venus) into the evil Trinity which opposes the Divine Trinity. Both of these distortions have worked to cause a like distortion in both men's and women's views of the Male Principle within themselves.

Perhaps a saner view of the light aspect of the God is to be found in the image of the Hero Triumphant: born of a virgin with the winter solstice, raised in hiding from the wrath of earthly rulers, he sets forth on his quest against evil, and in the midst of his triumph is transformed. Upon his death/transformation, he departs for the Island of Appletrees, to sleep and await his rebirth. Sound familiar? King Arthur, Hercules, Luke Skywalker, Jesus of Nazareth, Parzifal, all are variants on the same ancient myth. It is from the time of his birth until the time of his triumph that we see him as the Shining One, God of East and South, Air and Fire. To the Light God, the Hero, the quest is against Evil. He has not yet reached the point where he sees ambiguity, for this is the point of death, the point of his transformation into the Dark God, the point of the Hero Transformed, the point of sunset.

Thus it is that the Light God is the god of youth, of confidence, of adventure, of noble ideals, of the pure song which hums in the heart when life is fresh and new. He is the Seed-Sower, Grain Reborn, ever springing up from under the ground, setting the feet to dancing and making the Lady young and lovely again with his love. He is her lover as well as her son and her brother: if she did not love him, she would not keep giving him birth year after year, even knowing that it would grieve her when he dies.

And he always dies. That is what makes him so beautiful. He never grows old, and he always comes back. Making his cyclic reappearance into one historical lifetime, never to be repeated, was the worst blasphemy the christians could have brought about to the religion of the Goddess; and it was only because the Goddess religions had died out as an effective political force at the time that the cult of Jesus of Nazareth was able to gain its ascendancy--and even then it took several centuries to pull it off.

By medieval times, the Goddess was crammed into the figure of the Virgin Mary, and the Light God and Dark God battled for human souls in a purely masculine field. By this time, too, there was not much to choose between them. Neither the Holy Trinity of the christians nor the Horned God of the Witches has much resemblance to the true state of the masculine psyche, except insofar as it has been warped by social/cultural factors. The true Male Principle is much more akin to True Thomaas of Erceldoune, who went with the Queen of Elphame and served her for seven hears as her true knight: the Hero, the Poet, the one who is transformed by the quest.

I have gone on at such length about the God (and plan to go on longer, about his dark aspect) because I feel that it is a mistake to ignore him, the way certain segments of the Craft do. Obviously, the Female element in spirituality has been neglected (when not actually being persecuted), and the Macho-Man Sky-Thunderer element in the Male Principle has been elevated clear out of all reason in religions of the past two millennia; however, it is just as macho to do no more than reverse the polarity in an attempt to gain back lost ground. What needs to be done about the God, and about the God in both men and women, is for him to be re-transformed, into the Lady's love, into the ever-living, ever-dying sacrifice (John Barleycorn must die if we are to have beer and bread), into the heroic urge.

This is an age with too few heroes, and too little scope for heroes. Men and women seem to be diminished into mere citizens, slots on the IBM cards, scrabbling for physical survival and losing all nobility of mind in the process. It does not have to be so. Just as contact with the Lady makes all ordinary things Magick, contact with the Lord makes all ordinary activities Heroic.

A SPELL FOR COURAGE

If there is something you are afraid of, write it on a small piece of paper in your own blood. Burn it to ashes, and powder the ashes in a mortar & pestle with some cinnamon, nutmeg, & ginger. Use this mixture to flavor a) cookies, b) mulled wine, c) any other food you like. When you mix in the herbs and ashes, consecrate what you are cooking to the service of the God in you. When you eat or drink, know that what you are physically absorbing is the flesh of the God himself, and that his courage is within you, If you like, you can do an invocation, self-blessing, or other charm which will remind you of this fact. One good one is:

May the Sun shine within me, may Mars lend me his courage and Jupiter his strength. Let the blood of heroes run in my veins, and my feet walk in the paths of heroes. My name is ___________, and I am brave. (repeat)

If you can do this while looking in a mirror, so much the better. Do this spell in full daylight, when the sun is shining.

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DARK God

"In the Cycle of the equinox-solstice festivals, the year begins with the spring and the germination of the seed; however, the vision of the Celtic folk sought deeper into the spiritual essence of such a process, and to their consciousness the year began with Samhain, the first of November.

They saw the year's beginning marked by the descent of life into the dark of winter, the descent of the seeds into the Earth. With the same consciousness the Celts reckoned the day to begin not with sunrise but with the sunset of what we would call the preceding day. And thus to these people the unconscious darkness of their imagination was not a facet of nature to be feared, but an essential part of their being, out of which conscious thinking could grow.

Over the millennia, this mode of consciousness has been replaced by one which fears the darkness, and this corresponds to a way of thinking that marks the day 's beginning at dawn, and sees the positive energies and forces of the day dying out into the evening darkness. The night becomes a place of the death of the light, and not pictured as the source of the light." –Adam McLean, Four Fire Festivals

The shift of consciousness about which McLean writes is nowhere seen better than in the transformation of the Lord of Death and what comes after from the Son of the Mother into Hades. Just as the Light aspects of the God were taken over by the figure of Jesus as Savior, the God's Dark aspects were made into a threat to keep people in line--and are used in that manner and for that purpose to this day. The popularity of "Exorcist"-type movies show that, even in the minds of those who profess to be removed from credulous acceptance of religious dogma, the dark powers of the unconscious are a source of unease. And certainly with good reason.

The unconscious is in direct touch with the sources of our being, the subhuman strata from which we have evolved--an origin which threatens some religions enough that they cannot bear to think about it, but take refuge in myths of creation which effectively separate human beings from the "lower" animals. The Dark God is not merely dark--He is also the Goat-foot God, whose animal origins are bared without shame.

When Persephone was carried off by Hades, she screamed and struggled. But sooner or later the screaming and struggling came to an end, and she accepted the gifts of the God: pomegranate seeds, and his love. By them she was transformed from the Maiden into the Queen of the Underworld. How was this accomplished? What we Pagans know about the Goddess' transformation is told thus:

"In ancient time, our Lord, the Great Horned One, was as he still is, the Counselor, the Benefactor, but men knew him as the Dread Lord of the Shadows--lonely, stern and just. But our Lady, the Goddess, would solve all mysteries, even the mystery of Death. And so she journeyed to the Nether-lands, and the Guardian of the portal challenged her, saying, 'Strip off thy garments, lay aside thy jewels, for naught may ye bring with thee into this our land.'

"So she laid down her garments and her jewels and was bound as all living must be who seek to enter the realms of Death. Such was her beauty that Death himself knelt and laid his sword and crown at her feet and kissed her feet, saying, 'Blessed are thy feet that have brought thee in these ways. Abide with me, but let me place my cold hand on thy heart.'

"And she replied, 'I love thee not. Why dost thou cause all things that I love and take delight in to fade and die?'

"'Lady,' replied Death, ''Tis age and fate, against which I am helpless. Age causes all things to wither, but when men die, at the end of time, I give them rest and strength so that they may return. But you, you are lovely. Return not: abide with me.'

"But she answered, 'I love thee not.'

"'Then,' said Death, 'An you receive not my hand on your heart, you must kneel at Death's Scourge.'

"'It is fate, better so,' she replied. And she knelt. And Death scourged her tenderly, and she cried, 'I knew the pangs of love.' And Death raised her and said, 'Blessed Be.' And he gave her the fivefold kiss, saying, 'Thus only may you attain to joy and knowledge.' And he taught her all the mysteries, and he gave her the necklace which is the circle of rebirth.

"And she taught him the mystery of the sacred cup which is the cauldron of rebirth. They loved and were one, for there be three great mysteries in the life of man. Magic (love) controls them all. For to fulfill love, you must return again at the same time and at the same place as the loved one, and you must meet, and know and remember and love them again. But to be reborn, you must die, and be made ready for a new body, and to die you must be born, and without love you may not be born. And our Goddess ever inclined to love and mirth and happiness and guard and cherish her hidden children in life: And in death She teach the way to have communion, and even in the world, She teach them the Mystery of the Magic Circle, which is placed between the worlds."

And the Dark God, who stands at the Sunset Door, rules not only over those dark things which we fear to see, and the death of those things which we fear to lose, but also serves to welcome each of us through our transformation and death into the source of new life and light.