The Magician, Her Hat, Tea Leaves, And The Shadow of Byker Wall

A post about the reading of tea leaves.  This is the fourth and final post of short pieces that were written in Writers' Cafe sessions this week.

Personally I don't believe in the power of the tea.  I believe in the power of the reader of the tea.  Not to read the tea of course.  But to see into a situation and form ideas and pictures based on that situation and upon human psychological skills to instinctively see or cognitively analyse and comment based on what's in a person's head rather than what's left in their tea cup.  I believe the same about other methods of divination and analysis too, from palmistry to tarot to numerology and the roll of dice.  Feel free to disagree and ascribe power to lines and cards and leaves or to a mystical, prophetic guide who places the leaves and cards in the right order for a situation.

I've been to a place sometimes and we've drawn cards to represent our lives.  Everyone goes "Wow!" at the interpretations given.  The next week we're there again.  We draw different cards.  Everyone goes "Wow!" again.

Have all of our lives changed so drastically in the course of a week?  I don't think so.

Divination, I believe, teaches us of ourselves.  It can be useful - or it can be dangerous.  Sometimes it's just a bit of fun.  And on occasion, a rarity, it can be a writing prompt.

So it was at the Writers' Cafe.  Each of us had our tea leaves read.  With mint tea because the leaves were more varied than those of the tea tea in the cafe.  The woman who runs the group read us.

Here's my cup.  I ask you.  What do you see?  A friend just saw a cup that needed cleaning.  Another friend saw Jesus - but she is a Carmelite lay sister so she sees Jesus in many things.

Our group leader saw a magician with a wand.  She decided that the magician had lost her hat.  She said other things too but as a writing prompt the magician appealed.  Can you see too?

Here's the writing, the same words as were freely written in not many minutes at the end of our session.  I gave myself a D minus for it.  People seemed to like it though.  That, I suppose, is magic.

Byker, for those who don't know, is a district in Newcastle Upon Tyne.  A children's programme was set there but not filmed there.

Byker has a wall.  The wall contains 620 flats and homes and encloses the Byker Wall estate.  The whole place is architecturally famous and is now Grade II listed.  Fame doesn't imply beauty of course.  Some very ugly places are listed.

Some will speak of the estate in terms that say "Abandon hope all ye who enter" and imply that just walking into that estate will lead to a consequence somewhere between losing your possessions and losing your life.  Others speak of the estate in terms that say "I really like it here.  There's an amazing community and loads of artists."  I find I have friends there.  It's not a rich estate.  The millionaires live in other parts of the city.  And it's had its problems.  Every impoverished city estate does.  We were told when moving to the city, "Don't, whatever you do, move to Byker."  We were taught to fear a dangerous ghetto behind the Wall.  It must be admitted that crime levels in Byker are higher than those where I currently live.  The crime map for that area has more than twice as many reported crimes as the map for this area.  But most people of course are just getting on with their lives.  And there are loads of good people in the area too.  Yes, including artists.  Including friends.

It took me six years to enter the estate.  And at that moment I fell in love.

The magician lost her hat.
But somewhere, under the shadow of Byker Wall,
Her magic will be returned to her.
In the Wall is life.  In the wall is death.
In the Wall the elemental gods play together.

Under green wood and rainbow rooftops,
Among addictions and artists,
Within the underclass and dispossessed -
The purest of humanity.
Above Tyne waters returning to ocean,
Full-felt, full-flung source of Poseidon's blessings.

Through sacred seclusion, close community,
The magician will not find her old hat.
But she'll weave, spin, breathe a hat
Fine enough that the original may be gladly forgotten.

Replaced, reborn under Byker Wall,
The magician will learn to speak.
In the new beginning was her Word.

I Was Baptised By Poseidon And It Was Wonderful Even Though He's Not Real

I admit it.  I'm into some shit that people would rightly call weird.  They'd say I'm off my head and have lost all sense of reason.

In the last week I've taken the strangeness to a new level.  A week ago today I was walking in the Derwent valley.  Taking a rest at the top of a hill - I'm not the fittest of individuals - I looked at the trees and was surprised to spot a wolf sitting in the branches.  Who wouldn't be surprised at this turn of events?  Since wolves aren't known for sitting in the branches high in trees.  And they're also not known for living in the Derwent valley or indeed anywhere else in the country.  Imagine the effect on my surprise when the wolf turned towards me, transformed into some kind of wild cat, and smiled at me for a while before wandering away through the branches of the trees.

I sat and pondered this for a while.  Then the branches shimmered and I saw in them the god Poseidon.  Yes.  Him.  The actual ancient sea god.  In a wood.  Not in the sea.  He stood there, complete with trident and crown and I accepted this turn of events.  I'd run out of space for surprise.  He looked at me for a while and then spoke, simply saying "Come, receive my gift."  I was disappointed because I didn't know how to come to him to receive a gift.  After a while he nodded at me and shimmered away.

I told a new friend this.  Explained how I'd encountered Poseidon.  Even though, quite obviously, he doesn't actually exist.  She said, "But he does exist.  I talk to him all the time."  Sometimes it's good to share things with people who turn out to be pleased you've found some sanity rather than wanting to reach for a new anti-psychotic medication to alleviate the hallucinations you keep having.

Two days ago I visited the sea.  I found a wonderful spot.  The tide was at its lowest point and many rocks were uncovered.  Lots of amazing rock pools.  Lots of space.  And no people.  I spent over an hour there before I had to leave to be somewhere else.  I'd have loved to stay longer and will return.  Well, nearly no people.  Two guys sat nearly 100 metres away near the cliff.  And at one point a guy with a towel wandered close before wandering off again.  To be honest I was hoping he would be someone so in tune with the needs of everyone that he was only there to give me a towel.  Unfortunately I remained towel-less and he towel-ful.

I sat close to the water.  As close as I could without being sprayed.  And I meditated for a while.  Opening my eyes I saw Poseidon again.  This seemed more normal.  While it may be abnormal to encounter a non-existent ancient god in person at least he was in the right place this time.  He spoke to me again.  We talked for a while and I cried out to Spirit in acceptance of life.

Image taken from here.

After a while things got physical.  I had to respond in action.  He said that he didn't want me to do this where the sea met the rocks because that would have been too dangerous.  But he pointed me to a rock pool behind where I sat.  A very deep rock pool full of life and the most perfect shade of blue-green you can imagine.  He told me to go and dip my hands and wrists into the water and feel its life.

I knelt by that pool, obedient.  Felt the water.  It was cold!  But brilliant and had I the right clothes and a towel it would, later, have been tempting to immerse myself in the pool.  Poseidon spoke again.  He told me to lean further out and pour the sea water over my head, to baptise myself into a new sense of Spirit.  He gave me the words to say.  I won't repeat them here.  Partly because they were for me and for that occasion.  Partly because many of them are lost.  I haven't been told to write a liturgy for others or to start a Poseidon Spirit cult.  Not yet anyway!

So with his help I baptised myself.

I then returned to the sea and stood on the one rock higher than the rest and watched the sea strike the shore below me.  I shouted into the sea.  I sang.  I prayed - mostly in Christian language because that's the language I have even though I don't have the doctrine to go with it.  When I call out "Come Holy Spirit" I'm in no way calling to the third person of a Trinitarian God who is what the Christians claim.  And yet the words are working for me.  If I say "Lord" or "God" or any of the other words or even "Baptism" I'm not saying them as you might find them in the Catholic Catechism.

Then Poseidon said to head to another pool.  Baptise myself in that one too.  And we sat together.  We might have shared a pot of tea had we had a pot to share.

Reluctantly I had to leave for an event.  I didn't want to.  I wanted to stay with the god.  With the rocks and the sea and watch as the tide continued to rise.  Feel the breeze.  Feel the sunlight.  Soak myself some more.  Meditate in that place of near total solitude.  Explore the rock pools.  Watch the seaweed forests rise up again.  But I had to leave.

I had a good time at that event.  A social occasion.  The new friend I mentioned was there and she was so pleased that I'd met Poseidon again.  There was talking.  A guided meditation based in part on opening up channels between chakras.  And we each drew cards from an animal tarot pack.  I drew the monkey and the raven.

So what do I say now about all this?

1.  I'm not going to call it weird any more.  I'm going to own it as my experience and say it is what it is.  Nobody else has to believe a word of it.  You can call it weird.  Call it whatever you like.  But I did meet Poseidon.  In some way or other.  Even if he isn't real.  Even if he is just a symbol, a story.  Stories are immensely powerful.  I met a philosopher a while ago who argued that stories are powerless and we should give them up for pure reason.  He was wrong.  That's my dogmatic statement for today.  He was wrong.

Perhaps when we tell the most powerful of stories they are real in that moment.  Perhaps I need to express what I might mean by real before I write a sentence like that.

2.  I love tarot cards.  I'd love to have more of them and to give myself the time to use them, to learn more about them.  Many of the sets contain seventy-eight works of art. The imagery is wonderful and the stories and interpretations are fascinating.

I don't believe that tarot or other ways of divination have any power in themselves whatsoever.  Whatever interpretation a book may give to the card drawn is of no use.  Except that we then, from our own wisdom and inner intuitive knowledge, bring power to it and learn what we may learn.  Or we bring our own ego and arrogance or shame to it and replace the truths with lies.  It can be hard to know the difference.

Still, I did enjoy drawing the monkey and then the raven.  Especially the raven.  It's kind of my animal.  Also the animal of the new friend as it happens.  And in claiming that I have new ways in which to look into my life and being and hopefully learn something.  It was interesting too at a writing workshop based on tarot this year to draw the devil followed by three sixes from the minor arcana.  The Devil.  666.   That was amusing.

3.  I don't believe Poseidon is real.  I don't believe any of the gods are real.  Not the god of the Christians, the many gods of the Hindus, and not the gods of the many religions that have passed into history.  My new friend says our belief brings them their existence.  Maybe that's so in a way.  The Hindus sometimes say they have a thousand gods, none of whom are divine.  I like that idea.  Pray to a god and the god is not reality.  The god is a powerful symbol though.  A personalised emanation.  A holder of a facet of reality.

Poseidon spoke to me.  That's a powerful thing.  Even though he's not real.  Speaking to unreal gods is powerful.  I was talking with a Discordian a while ago who said to me how it was amazing that many changes come from praying to a god he knows full well doesn't exist.  I presume he spoke of Eris.  Maybe it will be the same for me.

4.  I want to dig more deeply into all the things I will still habitually call weird.  I have friends who tell me how much tapping (EFT) helps them.  EFT is nonsense - but I'll try it one day.  I want to enter into considering the Sephiroth, run more into meditation, and learn of a whole load of different ways.  I want to explore energy work more.  I learned to balance chakras and auras as a teenager and I want to return to it and I don't give a damn whether or not science would ever tell me they're real things or whether they're just superb symbols that can be used for understanding, healing and realisation of truths and ideas.  I want more of the woo.  More of the nonsense.

5.  I say that while wishing to remain completely skeptical.  To keep my brain screwed in place and to call out fake therapies.  It's all well and good using the stories, the symbols, the cards and the gods to understand and grow.  But when they're marketed erroneously as curers of disease or packaged as the truth in themselves then everything changes and something that may be good becomes something that is intensely bad.

6.  I want to say it again.  Because I believe it.  Poseidon talked with me and led me through a baptism in sea water.  Even though he's not real.


And so I will return to the sea.  Perhaps Poseidon will be there again.  Perhaps not.  Perhaps I will only (only!) encounter the universe, nature, the surface of the deepest water.  That will be enough.  What more is needed?  Ancient gods are just an added bonus in the expression of life.

I began writing this text with a very different plan in mind.  I was going to speak out against woo.  Against all the rubbish people speak and sell and how dangerous some of it actually is.  Instead I've written something that most people would say is also woo, rubbish, nonsense.

They're right.  It is.  Because quite clearly I've been communing with a nonexistent deity.  It's nonsense.  You're right.  I could have been hallucinating accidentally.  Then more purposefully.  I understand that hallucinations are more common among autistic people and I've certainly hallucinated before in more scary, sometimes terrifying, ways.

And yet it isn't nonsense or just my head playing a trick.  Because as a symbol, as a path into understanding, Poseidon has been very powerful for me in the last week.  I call upon no one to believe in him.  He's not real.  I don't believe in him.  He's not real.  And yet I spoke with him and would happily do so again and I am happy to find meaning in the experience.

Hail Poseidon! (Unreal) God of the Sea! May I find whatever wisdom I need to draw from your story and from the waters you (don't) rule.

Hail Poseidon!

The Past Made Present - Glastonbury, 1985

On a family holiday, when I was fourteen, we visited Glastonbury for the day.  After a visit to Glastonbury Tor - where I had a most interesting talk with a stranger about how he liked to levitate there - we visited the village, including some of the more spiritual shops that have boomed there.  If I remember rightly I bought myself a book about occult exercises and practices. 

After lunch we visited Glastonbury Abbey which was unsurprisingly packed with tourists and coach parties.  Why shouldn't they be there - it's famous and a beautiful ruin.  Wandering off alone down some steps I found myself in St Mary's chapel - cooler, deserted at that time and with an atmosphere more powerful than the Tor.

This shouldn't be a surprise given the Christian and pre-Christian history of the site.  Looking online a moment ago I found this statement:  The Mary Chapel in the Abbey lies in the Vulva of the Birth-Giving Goddess of Glastonbury. This is one of the most potent places on the Island.  Make of that what you will!  People write all kinds of things about Glastonbury, based on all kinds of spiritual belief and practice, which is appropriate for somewhere that was such a centre for both paganism and Christianity.  I will leave it up to you whether Glastonbury really was Avalon, home of the Goddess.

Last week I was thinking about early experiences of "the sacred".  Without defining "sacred" I am pretty certain that I experienced it/him/her/them that day in the few brief minutes that I stood, alone, before the altar of that chapel.

Writing came as I sat in a cafe.  It's in the form of a sestina.  Six stanzas of six lines and an extra three lines at the end, with the last words of each line rotated through the different lines of each stanza.  There's an official way to rotate them but I was sitting in a cafe with no access to anything that told me the "right" way, so this may all be "wrong".  In any case it's not good poetry.  I hope next year to write far more - to learn something of the art - and eventually produce something decent.



Abbey of noise, far from Cistercian silence
Hurrying coaches, camera snappers seek the common view
Japanese tourism - the south-west in a day.
Here stood Arthur; Joseph planted his tree.
We must see it all, rush, rush, rushing
This, no holy hour of freedom to seek the monastic.

Abbey of noise, I seek God, I, monastic,
Walking alone, from tourism, tack, time, into a silence.
Underneath, under the crowds, root of cloistered tree.
Above, the teashop calling, the people still rushing
Below, place of prayer, of silent, silenced voices singing: God in view.
Below, presence of lost centuries manifests this day.

Away from shallow, short life, the longevity of the tree,
The chapel altar stands stark, a remembrance of the day
Monkish voices were squeezed, squashed, quelled in the rushing
Of a King seeking to rule God, abolishing the monastic.
The chants, the rich intonement, God's praises turned to silence.
Five hundred years, God unchanging, time cannot shroud the view.

I stood in profound riches, feeling guilt for not rushing,
Alone with the alone - but why not with camera pointed at that tree?
Inside, impulse escapes, birthing the thrill of the monastic.
In quiet, in immense living atmosphere, the sacred opened my view.
Minutes, just minutes, stretched like chant memory into a day.
Above, above, bustle, noisy chaos; but for me, long silence.

I would have stayed, could not stay, force to leave that view.
Moments of a life, just a glimpse of the eternal monastic.
Moments of a meaning, brief, all changing, revolutions in silence.
Come back, return to the wells that enabled this day,
Back to family, to that other deep rooted tree
Back to above, we too were tourists - more to see, onwards, rushing.

Years pass but still present to me are those moments, that day.
A moment of calm, stilling the rushing.
Whatever darkened horror appears, the beyond comes to my view.
In the deafening noises, a present past, a moment of silence
That set in place a yearning for a life monastic,
For timeless prayer roots, deepening of the tree.

Abbey of silence.  Gone but called to view.
I was not there a day but it's strong seeds became my tree.
I've lived, rush, rush, rushing.  But ever inward, turning to monastic.

The Distraction of Ra, Disappointment of Apollo

What was a spiritual seeker to do having rejected the church at an early age?  It's a common question, asked by many who never had a religious faith and many who lost their faith.  Outside of God, where is meaning?  Philosophers ask it - Nietzsche found meaning, others found none.  My faith at that time said "There is a sacred beyond appearances.  But it's not to be found in a church."

I'd been reading books on spirituality and the occult from time to time for a few years.  Now my reading and collecting became more enthusiastic.  By the time I was eighteen and converted to a personally held Christian faith I had over 1000 books on themes related to the occult, the new age, spirituality, world religions and philosophy.  Most of them I hadn't read.  Nearly all I threw out or sold: my new Christian faith urged me to cleanse my life of all these supposedly unclean, evil things.

Where was a young person to go, having decided Christianity to be based on a false story but having a yearning for something beyond this world?  I looked into lots of things.  Vedic wisdom.  Meditation.  Astral projection.  Yoga.  Cartomancy, chiromancy, lots of mancies!  Many other little obsessions.  And magic.

There's not a lot of old ritual magic that a young person can do in the comfort of their own bedroom.  The Golden Dawn rituals aren't designed for a few square feet of space, or to be performed as a solo endeavour.  But there's some ritual, proper ritual - not the books of invented "spells" that are now so common on the spirituality shelves of bookshops.  I've forgotten most of what I ever read about magic but remember part of a ritual that I tried each day for a while.  Not for too long, nothing seemed to come of it, so I moved on to other things:



In sadness, turned from a religion without meaning,
I turned, turned, turned again.
Where is hope, truth, peace?
Where is that God, that promised life?

I turned, incense burning, held tight in hand, widdershins turning.
Give me reason    -     Hail Ra
Give me purpose     -      Hail Mithras
Take my dark agony      -      Hail Apollo
Light bringers come      -    I welcome thee
I turned, turn, calling      -      Into the light of my life

Turning, burning;
        felt my fall, called, pulled by dreaming.
Turning, turning;
        from empty God to godly life
Hail Ra, Mithras, Apollo, I welcome thee,
Turning in holy ritual, come, come, light beings come.

You came, if you came, in silence.
I heard.
Nothing.

In sadness, turned, lost again,
Spinning, direction free,
Turned, turned again.