PantheaCon 2013

I attended PantheaCon in San Jose California again this year, my fourth attendance. The event is one of the few times, I can totally be myself (the mom, the engineer and the magician) and get both the ritual and scholarly experience I yearn for. I have been really fortunate lately in that I am beginning to meet more and more people who have decades of experience, write books and/or have the academic experience which lends them great credibility. I do not look so much at a title from a university, although a formal degree provides more proof, I have been leaning towards people who know how to research (many them are featured to the right of this window) and really commit a great deal of their Life to the Great Work. I think finding/honoring the basis and learning about the foundations of the Great Work is really what differentiates a normal practitioner and an actual priest(ess) or the difference between a New Ager and magickal practitioner/priest(ess) . Although much of what we do are reconstructions or have a basis in imagination, I see the Great Work like engineering, you build up enough of the various knowledge/skill sets, that the imagination can actually manifest and you have a language or symbolic framework to actually describe it. Additionally, I believe what I am finding is different than just an "armchair magician" because those black and white images from a book have been transformed within the mind and heart of the priest(ess) and begin to affect change internally within the magician and externally in the form of inspiration for change to others. The Work becomes more than just a regurgitation of ideas. A fellow Soror likened the idea to that of a baby pacifier, in that, the pacifier offers comfort but no nourishment... Absolutely BRILLIANT!  

The Pacifier

I have also been thinking more about Hermes since I attended the phenomenal OSOGD rite for Hermes, Thoth and Mercury and found the following passage. The rite awakened something and has caused some intense dreams:

"Dreams are beyond our unravelling - who can be sure what tale they tell? Not all that men look for comes to pass. Two gates there are that give passage to fleeting dreams; one is made of horn, one of ivory. The dreams that pass through sawn ivory are deceitful, bearing a message that will not be fulfilled; those that come out through polished horn have truth behind them, to be accomplished for men who see them." Homer (Od. 19.562)

The Key of Life

Dreams are the knowledge/skill sets, we hope to attain...Some come to fruition, some do not... And I think the pacifier is the ivory horn and the polished horn is the mother's breast. The polished horn is the Great Work. Besides, which one of our skill sets do we use to really differentiate one bulbous head on a handle, from another?

 
This year, I decided I wanted to find out more about the magick within me that I could not ascribe to just the ceremonial magick I am learning in this lifetime, I wanted to learn why I have such an attraction and affinity to it, perhaps because of some karmic or hereditary association. I did two things different this year. I got a reading from a form of divination that is older than the Tarot so I can frame some of my personal assumptions about my background in a non-CM context. Also, I had an opportunity to experience shamanism within my own ethnicity, which was very empowering because I have always felt it was something deeply rooted in my ancestry, but could never really find information about it, The reading and the shaman experience both led me to the notion that I need to begin to learn more about my ethnic traditions I have found so I can round out myself as a magician and tap into a current of power that has been lying dormant. For now, it is just another dream.

QED