The People of The Secret - The Arise of The European Witch Cult of The Middle Ages

The following is from "The People of The Secret" by Ernest Scott http://www.amazon.com/People-Secret-PBK-Ernest-Scott/dp/0863040381 It was up to a couple of years ago published by Octagon Press, but, has been withdrawn from their list last time I looked. The extract in no way negates Goddess worship or those who find they have natural powers, rather it is research drawing on little known historical events and a fair bit of the research drawing from Sufic records and history. The purpose of the chapter that this was taken from was to explain one of the reasons why secrete developmental techniques of groups can be a great danger if leaked out.

This is rather long, so if you are like me you may find it better to print it out and sit back with a cup of tea to read it.


The European Witch cult may be a further example of an activity arising from the leakage of developmental knowledge. Like the Albigenses, the witches are known chiefly from the accounts of their enemies, and it is possible that no objective assessment of witchcraft, in its inner nature, exists. Certainly modern witches do not know the origins of their practices and researchers are constantly struck by the avidity with which present day witch groups seize on "origins" found for them by academic witchologists like Margaret Murray.

Modern apologists of the cult like Gerald Gardner and Justin Glass appear to be engaged in plausible whitewashing while the traditional Roman Catholic attitude, deriving from Inquisitional material, is one of superstitious horror and vilification.

Material of the Malleus Maleficarum variety, i.e., intentional vilification, tend nowadays to defeat its own ends. Instead of confirming Satanic practices at physical level, it suggests rather a turgid excitation of the lower levels of the human subconscious: psychological rather than physical goings-on.

However, it seems undeniable that witchcraft has repeatedly shaded off into Black Magic of the most palpable kind and modern material from Huysman's Là-bas to current newspaper accounts of rural tombstone-turners confirms this.

The original nature of witchcraft remains in all probability unassessed.

Though something like the cult has probably existed since Neolithic times, the version of it familiar to Medieval Europe suggests that the original impulse obtained a high octane fuel injection from a Sufi source.

Sufic/Witch parallels are overwhelming.

The ritual knife of the witches is called Athane. The same instrument of the Saracen Two Horned cult is Adh-dhamme. The winding sheet in which the members of the Two Horned dance their rituals is the Kafan which looks very like the origin of the word coven. Members of the Two-Horned call their meeting Az Zabat ("powerful occasion") which is almost certainly the witch Sabbat.

Thomas à Becket is rumoured to have been connected with a ritual sacrifice. The legend has resemblances to disguised teaching material. Becket is said to have had a Saracen mother.

There is some connection between the Order of the Garter and witchcraft, and there are plain correspondences between Garter and Sufic ritual.

The areas in which witchcraft was were strongest were the areas most strongly under Saracen influence, Spain was conquered in A.D. 711 and was not Christianized till 1492. Arabs were in Languedoc in 759 and in Provence from 889. They were strongly established also in Savoy, Piedmont and Switzerland - all areas associated with witchcraft.

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Father Gualchelm of St. Albin's, Angers, reported in 1901 a great crowd passing him on the road. These, he decided, were the Harlechim "of whom I have heard but in which I did not believe". "Harlechim" may have been a corruption of Aghlaqin, a Sufic group known as The Silent Ones who wore patchwork clothes.

A tract of 1450, Errores Gaziorum, gives an account of a witch rite. Gaziorum would seem to be a Latinized version of Gazair-ites - the Arabic for "Andalusians". Errores Gaziorum re-translated into Arabic would give Ghulat al Algazairyin, "the Errors of the Andalusians" where "error" is an Arabic technical term for a sectarian belief.

The Sufic master Jalaluddin Rumi mentions "riding on a stick" which is a familiar witch idea.

A witch cult leader apprehended in Sweden during a witch pogrom of 1668 wore a turban, and like witch leaders in England before and since, was invoked with the word Antecessor. "Antecessor" in Arabic is Qadim which means both "antecessor" and "ancient".

Robin is a recurring witch name. The word in Persian is Rah-bin, "he who sees the road", and in the Berber Two-Horned sect the leader is referred to as Rabbans ("our master").

A considerable number of other links are given by Idries Shah in The Sufis. The connection between witchcraft - at any rate from the 10th century on - and some sort of Saracen cult activity seems beyond dispute.

But what was the nature of the Saracen "injection" which gave rise to or so deeply affected the Medieval witch cult of Europe? It may be that in researching for his book Witches and Sorcerers? Arkon Daraul uncovered the exact occasion. Among Arab migrants to Spain around 1460 were a sect of Berber ecstatics called the Two-Horned. From the information given in The Sufis by Idries Shah, this seems to have been a Moroccan branch of a sect peculiar to the Aniza tribe of Bedouins. They followed a teaching which had been given by a Dervish member of the tribe, Abu el Atahiyya, and, because the Arabic for goat has the same consonantal root as Aniza, they adopted the goat as their clan-badge. This poor goat has been appearing ever since, and is used to this day when the cover of a lurid paperback has to convey the idea of black magic. Incidentally, the tribal camel-brand of the Aniza was a broad arrow which has appeared all through the centuries as "the witches mark". The Aniza certainly started something.

According to Arkon Daraul, a branch of this sect moved from Morocco into Spain. They were a non-proselytizing cult and well disciplined; members could be cast out for an infringement of the rules.

About the time the Berber branch of this new sect moved into Spain, some dissident members met a leader of the Spanish Jews, Rabbi Ishaq Toledano. Ishaq was the head of a Jewish group who had come together with the idea of seeing whether they could use traditional Jewish magic to stem the tide of persecution by the Christians which was making Jewish life in Toledo all but impossible.

It would appear that the dissident members of the Two-Horned were welcomes eagerly by Rabbi Ishaq as being likely to make a knowledgeable contribution to the operation the Rabbi was trying to develop. In other words, the Two-Horned possessed genuine knowledge of the developmental technique and this could be used - or misused - for magical ends.

The combined organization which resulted, Jewish and Arabic, appears to have amalgamated many of the components which the West was later to identify with witchcraft.

Ishaq knew the dangers involved for himself and his followers if details of his magic operations against the Christian enemy leaked out, and he realized also - from the example of his Two-Horned recruits - the force that could be carried over to another organization by apostates. He devised a method of binding his group together.

The idea was to commit his members to actions so atrocious that none would ever dare confess to them. In this way the security of his "New Community" would be absolute. He required his members to perform evil actions and to destroy the persons and property of non-members - particularly Christians - as a trade test for advancement within the Community. He also introduced rituals involving sexual perversions and the eating of abominable material. Such activities were so outside the accepted tolerance of ordinary people of any religion as to put participants outside the pale of humanity. He also used poisons and drugs which "cemented the bond".

The sect worshipped an idol (unspecified), and when members of the cult were possessed of the spirit of the idol, they engaged in flagellation and the exchange of obscene kisses.

A devout Moslem writer, Abdus Salam ibn Zumairi, who was deported from Spain 130 years later, left an extensive description of the cult which he implied was still flourishing in his day. Rumour had it that members of the sect could fly.

About the time apostate members of the Two-Horned were collaborating with Rabbi Ishaq, the Dominican Inquisitor of Carcassonne, Jean Vineti, produced a tract declaring that a new heresy had arisen which was unconnected with the old corpus of rural beliefs which the church had more or less tolerated.

Trevor Roper regards this as a Dominican manoeuvre to get round Capitulum Episcopi. This was a sort of "common law" of Ecclesiastical Europe dating from the views of St. Boniface and Charlemagne in the 18th century. It said in effect that to believe in witches, much more to hunt and burn them, was an act of superstition unworthy of a Christian and should rank as heresy.

Trevor Roper feels that some zealous orders of the Roman Church felt that this seriously inhibited their efforts to extirpate heresy and the Dominicans at least intrigued with several Popes to rescind it and so provide Papal authority for large-scale witch-hunting.

The Dominicans apparently succeeded in 1484 when two of their number, Heinrich Kramer and Jakob Sprenger, obtained a Bull from Innocent VIII which authorized "his beloved sons" to extirpate witchcraft in the Rhineland.

Trevor Roper sees the tract of Jean Vineti , thirty years earlier, as the vital link in the chain of events which made this celebrated Papal Bull possible. By claiming that the witchcraft of the middle of the 15th century was an entirely new heresy, Vineti removed it from the protection of the Capitulum Episcopi of seven centuries earlier.

There seems little doubt that some Church orders were intensely interested in finding a way round the Capitulum, but it may not be that Vineti was not so far wrong in claiming that something qualitatively different had appeared on the scene.

In the early part of the 15th century there was a purely local and unorganized form of witchcraft, which, with some exceptions, the Church put up with.

In the second half of the 15th century there was a witchcraft in the form which Europe was to have till 1650 and beyond.

In between there was Rabbi Ishaq and his New Community. The inference is not conclusive, but it is highly suggestive.

It is also interesting that the abominations alleged against the witches of the 15th and later centuries were in the same category as those developed for his own reasons by the Jewish black magician. The sequence of events strongly suggests that genuine developmental techniques possessed by a knowledgeable religious group were leaked by apostates to an outside source and gave rise to several centuries of evil and human suffering.

How Big Is The Universe?

It's A Beautiful Day, Galileo. Do You Remember The Sun?

Music from the album "Marrying Maiden" by It's A Beautiful Day. Tracks "Galileo" and "Do You Remember The Sun?" Images of stars and galaxies from the Hubble telescope, other photos taken by me.

Transcendental Experience In Relation to Religion and Psychosis by R.D. Laing

We must remember that we are living in an age in which the ground is shifting and the foundations are shaking. I cannot answer for other times and places. Perhaps it has always been so. We know it is true today.

In these circumstances, we have all reason to be insecure. When the ultimate basis of our world is in question, we run to different holes in the ground; we scurry into roles, statuses, identities, interpersonal relations. We attempt to live in castles that can only be in the air, because there is no firm ground in the social cosmos on which to build. Priest and physician are both witness to this state of affairs. Each sometimes sees the same fragment of the whole situation differently; often our concern is with different presentation of the original catastrophe.

In this paper I wish to relate the transcendental experiences that sometimes break through in psychosis, to those experiences of the divine that are the Living Fount of all religion.

Elsewhere I have outlined the way in which some psychiatrists are beginning to dissolve their clinical-medical categories of understanding madness. I believe that if we can begin to understand sanity and madness in existential social terms, we, as priests and physicians, will be enabled to see more clearly the extent to which we confront common problems and share common dilemmas.

The main clinical terms for madness, where no organic lesion has so far been found, are schizophrenia, manic-depressive psychosis and involutional depression. From a social point of view, they characterize different forms of behavior, regarded in our society as deviant. People behave in such ways because their experience of themselves is different. It is on the existential meaning of such unusual experience that I wish to focus.

Experience is mad when it steps beyond the horizons of our common, that is, our communal sense.

What regions of experience does this lead to? It entails a loss of the usual foundations of the 'sense' of the world that we share with one another. Old purposes no longer seem viable. Old meanings are senseless: the distinctions between imagination, dream, external perceptions often seem no longer to apply in the old way. External events may seem magically conjured up. Dreams may seem direct communications from others: imagination may seem to be objective reality.

But most radically of all, the very ontological foundations are shaken. The being of phenomena shifts, and the phenomenon of being may no longer present itself to us as before. The person is plunged into a void of non-being in which he founders. There are no supports, nothing to cling to, except perhaps some fragments from the wreck, a few memories, names, sounds, one or two objects, that retain a !ink with a world long lost. This void may not be empty. It may be peopled by visions and voices, ghosts, strange shapes and apparitions. No one who has not experienced how insubstantial the pageant of external reality can be, how it may fade, can fully realize the sublime and grotesque presences that can replace it, or exist alongside it.

When a person goes mad, a profound transposition of his position in relation to all domains of being occurs. His center of experience moves from ego to Self. Mundane time becomes merely anecdotal, only the Eternal matters. The madman is, however, confused. He muddles ego with self, inner with outer, natural and supernatural. Nevertheless, he often can be to us, even through his profound wretchedness and disintegration, the hierophant of the sacred. An exile from the scene of being as we know it, he is an alien, a stranger, signalling to us from the void in which he is foundering. This void may be peopled by presences that we do not even dream of. They used to be called demons and spirits, that were known and named. He has lost his sense of self, his feelings, his place in the world as we know it. He tells us he is dead. But we are distracted from our cozy security by this mad ghost that haunts us with his visions and voices that seem so senseless and of which we feel impelled to rid him, cleanse him, cure him.

Madness need not be all breakdown. It is also breakthrough. It is potentially liberation and renewal, as well as enslavement and existential death.

There are now a growing number of accounts by people who have been through the experience of madness.(1) I want to quote at some length from one of the earlier contemporary accounts, as recorded by Karl Jaspers in his General Psychopathology (2):

I believe I caused the illness myself. In my attempt to penetrate the other world I met its natural guardians, the embodiment of my own weaknesses and faults. I first thought these demons were lowly inhabitants of the other world who could play me like a ball because I went into these regions unprepared and lost my way. Later I thought they were split-off parts of my own mind (passions) which existed near me in free space and thrived on my feelings. I believed everyone else had these too but did not perceive them, thanks to the protective and successful deceit of the feeling of personal existence. I thought the latter was an artifact of memory, thought-complexes, etc., a doll that was nice enough to look at from outside but nothing real inside it.

In my case the personal self had grown porous because of my dimmed consciousness. Through it I wanted to bring myself closer to the higher sources of life. I should have prepared myself for this over a long period by invoking in me a higher, impersonal self, since "nectar" is not for mortal lips. It acted destructively on the animal-human self, split it up into its parts. These gradually disintegrated, the doll was really broken and the body damaged. I had forced untimely access to the "source of life," the curse of the "gods" descended on me. I recognized too late that murky elements had taken a hand. I got to know them after they had already too much power. There was no way back. I now had the world of spirits I had wanted to see. The demons came up from the abyss, as guardian Cerberi, denying admission to the unauthorized. I decided to take up the life-and-death struggle. This meant for me in the end a decision to die, since I had to put aside everything that maintained the enemy, but this was also everything that maintained life. I wanted to enter death without going mad and stood before the Sphinx: either thou into the abyss or I!

Then came illumination. I fasted and so penetrated into the true nature of my seducers. They were pimps and deceivers of my dear personal self which seemed as much a thing of naught as they.

A larger and more comprehensive self emerged and I could abandon the previous personality with its entire entourage. I saw this earlier personality could never enter transcendental realms. I felt as a result a terrible pain, like an annihilating blow, but I was rescued, the demons shrivelled, vanished and perished. A new life began for me and from now on I felt different from other people. A self that consisted of conventional lies, shams, self-deceptions, memory- images, a self just like that of other people, grew in me again but behind and above it stood a greater and more comprehensive self which impressed me with something of what is eternal, unchanging, immortal and inviolable and which ever since that time has been my protector and refuge. I believe it would be good for many, if they were acquainted with such a higher self and that there are people who have attained this goal in fact by kinder means.

Jaspers comments:

"Such self-interpretations are obviously made under the influence of delusion-like tendencies and deep psychic forces. They originate from profound experiences and the wealth of such schizophrenic experience calls on the observer as well as on the unreflective patient not to take all this merely as a chaotic jumble of contents. Mind and spirit are present in the morbid psychic life as well as in the healthy. But interpretations of this sort must be divested of any causal importance. All they can do is to throw light on content and bring it into some sort of context." I would rather say that this patient has described with a lucidity I could not improve upon, a Quest, with its pitfalls and dangers, which he eventually appears to have transcended. Even Jaspers still speaks of this experience as morbid, and discounts the experipatient's own construction. Both the experience and construction seem to me valid in their own terms.

I should make it clear that I am speaking of certain transcendental experiences that seem to me to be the original well-spring of all religions. Some psychotic people have transcendental experiences. Often (to the best of their recollection) they have never had such experiences before, and frequently they will never have them again, I am not saying, however, that psychotic experience necessarily contains this element more manifestly than sane experience. The person who is transported into such domains is likely to act curiously. In other places, I have described in some detail the circumstances that seem to occasion this transportation, at least in certain instances, and the gross mystification that the language and thinking of the medical clinic perpetrates when it is brought to bear on the phenomena of madness, both as a social fact and as an existential experience.

The schizophrenic may indeed be mad. He is mad. He is not ill. I have been told by people who have been through the mad experience how what was then revealed to them was veritable manna from Heaven. The person's whole life may be changed, but it is difficult not to doubt the validity of such vision. Also, not everyone comes back to us again.

Are these experiences simply the effulgence of a pathological process, or of a particular alienation? I do not think they are.

When all has been said against the different schools of psycho-immortal analysis and depth psychology, one of their great merits is that they recognize explicitly the crucial relevance of each person's experience to his or her outward behavior, especially the so-called "unconscious."

There is a view, still current, that there is some correlation between being sane and being unconscious, or at least not too conscious of the "unconscious," and that some forms of psychosis are the behavioral disruption caused by being overwhelmed by the "unconscious."

What both Freud and Jung called "the unconscious" is simply what we, in our historically conditioned estrangement, are unreflective conscious of. It is not necessarily or essentially unconscious.

I am not merely spinning senseless paradoxes when I say that we, the sane ones, are out of our minds. The mind is what the ego is unconscious of. We are unconscious of our minds. Our minds are not unconscious. Our minds are conscious of us. Ask yourself who and what it is that dreams our dreams. Our unconscious minds? The Dreamer who dreams our dreams knows far more of us than we know of it. It is only from a remarkable position of alienation that the source of life, the Fountain of Life, is experienced as the It. The mind of which we are unaware, is aware of us. It is we who are out of our minds. We need not be unaware of the inner world.

We do not realize its existence most of the time.

But many people enter it – unfortunately without guides, confusing outer with inner realities, and inner with outer – and generally lose their capacity to function competently in ordinary relations.

This need not be so. The process of entering into the other world from this world, and returning to this world from the other world, is as "natural" as death and childbirth or being born. But in our present world, that is both so terrified and so unconscious of the other world, it is not surprising that, when "reality," the fabric of this world, bursts, and a person enters the other world, he is completely lost and terrified, and meets only incomprehension in others.

In certain cases, a man blind from birth may have an operation performed which gives him his sight. The result: frequently misery, confusion, disorientation. The light that illumines the madman is an unearthly light, but I do not believe it is a projection, an emanation from his mundane ego. He is irradiated by a light that is more than he. It may burn him out.

This "other" world is not essentially a battlefield wherein psychological forces, derived or diverted, displaced or sublimated from their original object-cathexes, are engaged in an illusionary fight - although such forces may obscure these realities, just as they may obscure so-called external realities. When Ivan, in the Brothers Karamazov, says, "If God does not exist, everything is permissible," he is not saying: "If my superego, in projected form, can be abolished, I can do anything with a good conscience." He is saying: "If there is only my conscience, then there is no ultimate validity for my will."

The proper task of the physician (psychotherapist, analyst) should be, in select instances, to educt the person from this world and induct him to the other. To guide him in it: and to lead him back again.

One enters the other world by breaking a shell: or through a door: through a partition: the curtains part or rise: a veil is lifted. It is not the same as a dream. It is "real" in a different way from dream, imagination, perception or fantasy. Seven veils: seven seals, seven heavens.

The "ego" is the instrument for living in this world. If "the ego" is broken up, or destroyed (by the insurmountable contradictions of certain life situations, by toxins, chemical changes, etc.), then the person may be exposed to this other world.

The world that one enters, one's capacity to experience it, seems to be partly conditional on the state of one's "ego."

Our time has been distinguished, more than by anything else, by a mastery, a control, of the external world, and by an almost total forgetfulness of the internal world. If one estimates human evolution from the point of view of knowledge of the external world, then we are in many respects progressing.

If our estimate is from the point of view of the internal world, and of oneness of internal and external, then the judgment must be very different.

Phenomenologically the terms "internal" and "external" have little validity. But in this whole realm one is reduced to mere verbal expedients – words are simply the finger pointing to the moon. One of the difficulties of talking in the present day of these matters is that the very existence of inner realities is now called into question.

By "inner" I mean all those realities that have usually no "external," "objective" presence -- the realities of imagination, dreams, fantasies, trances, the realities of contemplative and meditative states: realities that modern man, for the most part, has not the slightest direct awareness of. Nowhere in the Bible, for example, is there any argument about the existence of gods, demons, angels. People did not first "believe in" God: they experienced His Presence, as was true of other spiritual agencies. The question was not whether God existed, but whether this particular God was the greatest God of all, or the only god; and what was the relation of the various spiritual agencies to each other. Today, there is a public debate, not as to the trust the worthiness of God, the particular place in the spiritual hierarchy of different spirits, etc., but whether God or such spirits even exist, or ever have existed.

Sanity today appears to rest very largely on a capacity to adapt to the external world – the interpersonal world, and the realm of human collectivities.

As this external human world is almost completely and totally estranged from the inner, any personal direct awareness of the inner world already entails grave risks.

But since society, without knowing it, is starving for the inner, the demands on people to evoke its presence in a "safe" way, in a way that need not be taken seriously, etc., is tremendous – while the ambivalence is equally intense. Small wonder that the list of artists in, say, the last 150 years, who have become shipwrecked on these reefs is so long – Hölderlin, John Clare, Rimbaud, Van Gogh, Nietzsche, Antonin Artaud, Strindberg, Munch, Bartok, Schumann, Büchner, Ezra Pound...

Those who survived have had exceptional qualities – a capacity for secrecy, slyness, cunning – a thoroughly realistic appraisal of the risks they run, not only from the spiritual realms that they frequent, but from the hatred of their fellows for any one engaged in this pursuit.

Let us cure them. The poet who mistakes a real woman for his Muse and acts accordingly... The young man who sets off in a yacht in search of God...

The outer divorced from any illumination from the inner is in a state of darkness. We are in an age of darkness. The state of outer darkness is a state of sin – i.e., alienation or estrangement from the Inner Light. Certain actions lead to greater estrangement; certain others help one not to be so far removed. The former are bad; the latter are good.

The ways of losing one's way are legion. Madness is certainly not the least unambiguous. The counter-madness of Kraepelinian psychiatry is the exact counterpart of "official" psychosis. Literally, and absolutely seriously, it is as mad, if by madness we mean any radical estrangement from the subjective or objective truth. Remember Kierkegaard's objective madness.

As we experience the world, so we act. We conduct ourselves in the light of our view of what is the case and what is not the case. That is, each person is a more or less naïve ontologist. Each person has views of what is, and what is not.

There is no doubt, it seems to me, that there have been profound changes in the experience of man in the last thousand years, In some ways this is more evident than changes in the patterns of his behavior. There is everything to suggest that man experienced God. Faith was never a matter of believing He existed, but of trusting in the Presence that was experienced and known to exist as a self-validating datum. It seems likely that far more people in our time neither experience the Presence of God, nor the Presence of His absence, but the absence of His Presence.

We require a history of phenomena – not simply more phenomena of history.

As it is, the secular psychotherapist is often in the role of the blind leading the half-blind.

The fountain has not played itself out, the Flame still shines, the River still flows, the Spring still bubbles forth, the Light has not faded. But between us and It, there is a veil which is more like fifty feet of solid concrete. Deus absconditus. Or we have absconded.

Already everything in our time is directed to categorizing and segregating this reality from objective facts. This is precisely the concrete wall. Intellectually, emotionally, interpersonally, organ- izationally, intuitively, theoretically, we have to blast our way through the solid wall, even if at the risk of chaos, madness and death. For from this side of the wall, this is the risk. There are no assurances, no guarantees.

Many people are prepared to have faith in the sense of scientifically indefensible belief in an untested hypothesis. Few have trust enough to test it. Many people make-believe what they experience. Few are made to believe by their experience. Paul of Tarsus was picked up by the scruff of the neck, thrown to the ground and blinded for three days. This direct experience was self-validating.

We live in a secular world. To adapt to this world the child abdicates its ecstasy. (L'enfant abdique son extase.–Mallarmé.) Having lost our experience of the Spirit, we are expected to have faith. But this faith comes to be a belief in a reality which is not evident. There is a prophecy in Amos that there will be a time when there will be a famine in the land, "not a famine for bread, nor a thirst for water, but of hearing the words of the Lord." That time has now come to pass. It is the present age.

From the alienated starting point of our pseudo-sanity, everything is equivocal. Our sanity is not "true" sanity. Their madness is not "true" madness. The madness of our patients is an artifact of the destruction wreaked on them by us, and by them on themselves. Let no one suppose that we meet any more "true" madness than that we are truly sane. The madness that we encounter in "patients" is a gross travesty, a mockery, a grotesque caricature of what the natural healing of that estranged integration we call sanity might be. True sanity entails in one way or another the dissolution of the normal ego, that false self competently adjusted to our alienated social reality: the emergence of the "inner" archetypal mediators of divine power, and through this death a rebirth, and the eventual re-establishment of a new kind of ego-functioning, the ego now being the servant of the Divine, no longer its betrayer.

http://laingsociety.org/biblio/transexperience.laing.htm

Body Art New Zealand

http://web.mac.com/philiptaskerpoland/iWeb/Site/Body%20Art%20New%20Zealand..html

This is the end sequence of a documentary my brother in New Zealand made over four years. I believe one of those models is my niece Hannah who also has a star part in some strange NZ TV soap, but, they're so painted up I can't recognise her :))

Sorry I can't embed it, but, it's a Quick Time movie. Give it a little time to download some and then to start you have to click on the Play triangle on the play bar.

To Confound The Wise

I have been reading The Witch of Portobello by Paulo Coelho and have come across a quite enigmatic passage. The bank manager who having recently been influenced by Athena is giving a presentation at a meeting and starts his dissertation with the words of St. Paul:

God hid the most important things from the wise because they cannot understand what is simple.

Evidently this doesn't appear exactly like this in the Bible, it could be one of two passages:

Matthew 11:25: I thank thee, O Father, thou hast hid these things from the wise and prudent, and hast revealed them unto babes.

or from St. Paul:

1 Corinthians 1:27 But God hath chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise, and God hath chosen the weak things of the world to confound the things which are mighty.

Well, I've always found the Bible to be a bit on the obscure side to say the least. In fact I've often found such writings as "The Secret of The Golden Flower" or even "The Taoist Yoga of Immortality" to be easier to understand....(perhaps I'm being confounded)... :) For me the bank manager's misquote seems clearer.

All the quotes speak to me of a secret knowledge, not secret insomuch that it is not told or given, but, secret in its nature as something that is so simple that the wise do not understand it yet someone with the innocence of a babe can. There are similar references in the Tao Te Ching and Sufi texts teem with references to Higher Knowledge that is beyond the learned and intellectual.

The mind loves the complex, it has this ability to take something that's been attempted to be expressed simply and add so many layers and twists that it gets buried under intellectual dissection. A child, however, has no problem with the question of what the sound of one hand clapping is.

Anyway, I would be truly interested in what others think of the above quotes and their understanding of what they mean.

Festivities In Heaven

A whole band of beings that had progressed to the highest state along the Way were one day entering Heaven. As each reached the gate it opened a little so that he could pass inside, the door than closed and opened a little again to admit the next who went in as if he were quite expecting to be admitted. All this went on without any ceremony.

Right at the end of the throng came a scholar, he had a reverent beard, a majestic gait, a confident look and all the trappings of someone of high learning. As he approached the gates they opened wide, trumpets sounded and a great applause resounded from the multitudes waiting there.

A shining figure came forth to personally escort him in.

"This is most gratifying," he said to himself "to know that the learned will here no longer need to give themselves airs and graces. Here at least our importance is recognised."

To the shining figure who escorted him he asked, "Why all this ceremony and festivities?"

"Well," said the Angel "this is somewhat of an occasion. You see in all the infinite time that Heaven has existed, this is the very first time that we have had an academic among us..."

God Is Alive, Magic Is Afoot

God is alive, magic is afoot

God is alive, magic is afoot

God is alive, magic is afoot

God is afoot, magic is alive

Alive is afoot, magic never died

God never sickened

Many poor men lied

Many sick men lied

Magic never weakened

Magic never hid

Magic always ruled

God is afoot, God never died

God was ruler

Though his funeral lengthened

Though his mourners thickened

Magic never fled

Though his shrouds were hoisted

The naked God did live

Though his words were twisted

The naked magic thrived

Though his death was published

Round and round the world

The heart did not believe



Many hurt men wondered

Many struck men bled

Magic never faltered

Magic always lead

Many stones were rolled

But God would not lie down

Many wild men lied

Many fat men listened

Though they offered stones

Magic still was fed

Though they locked their coffers

God was always served

Magic is afoot, God is alive

Alive is afoot



Alive is in command

Many weak men hungered

Many strong men thrived

Though they boast of solitude

God was at their side

Nor the dreamer in his cell

Nor the captain on the hill

Magic is alive

Though his death was pardoned

Round and round the world

The heart would not believe



Though laws were carved in marble

They could not shelter men

Though altars built in parliaments

They could not order men

Police arrested magic and magic went with them

Mmmmm.... for magic loves the hungry

But magic would not tarry

It moves from arm to arm

It would not stay with them

Magic is afoot

It cannot come to harm

It rests in an empty palm

It spawns in an empty mind

But magic is no instrument

Magic is the end

Many men drove magic

But magic stayed behind

Many strong men lied

They only passed through magic

And out the other side

Many weak men lied

They came to God in secret

And though they left Him nourished

They would not tell who healed

Though mountains danced before them

They said that God was dead

Though his shrouds were hoisted

The naked God did live

This I mean to whisper to my mind

This I mean to laugh within my mind

This I mean my mind to serve

Til' service is but magic

Moving through the world

And mind itself is magic

Coursing through the flesh

And flesh itself is magic

Dancing on a clock

And time itself

The magic length of God

Lyrics: Cohen, Recorded By Buffy Sainte-Marie

Self Concept

I came across this many years ago in a book on psychology by R. B. Burns called The Self Concept and it so impressed me I wrote it down. I've just come across the book I wrote it in so here it is.

If a child lives with criticism,
He learns to condemn.
If a child lives with hostility,
He learns to fight.
If a child lives with ridicule,
He learns to be shy.
If a child lives with shame,
He learns to feel guilty.
If a child lives with tolerance,
He learns to be patient.
If a child lives with encouragement,
He learns confidence.
If a child lives with praise,
He learns to appreciate.
If a child lives with fairness,
He learns justice.
If a child lives with security,
He learns to have faith.
If a child lives with approval,
He learns to like himself.
If a child lives with acceptance of friendship,
He learns to find love in the world.

Anon