Dreaming the Future Closer

So, I’ve been seeing, talking, and reading about divination a lot lately.  I’ve been thinking about what I thought divination was when I first started playing around with things like tarot cards and runes and comparing that to how I think of divination now.  A lot has changed for me.

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[Brief Preface: I do feel lately like my soul is moving up and down the axis of things, jumping from things humble and profane to things lofty and almost too abstract for sense to come of them.  My posting seems to reflect that well, though perhaps a touch schizophrenic from the outside.  I'm not sure what to make of it, just observing.]

Emerson’s essay “On Friendship” serves as an intellectual touchstone for me.  In saying that, I don’t mean to suggest that I accept its contents as given and unadulterated truth.  Rather, I mean the term ‘touchstone’ quite literally.  I return to it, read it, contemplate it, and find myself diverging from portions of it.  Yet I never feel like I’m moving beyond it.  Quite like a good conversation, it inspires and inspiration doesn’t settle well with straightforward right or wrong, settled or unsettled.

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The notion of magick in the Crowley-esque sense of the term tends to haunt modern polytheism.  Magick seems to run counter to the devotional elements we tend to see as properly religious.  Praising the divine seems to be one thing, plying the divine for favors quite another.  In general, both are seen as acceptable, but their relationship is a little obscure.

Crowley’s phrasing exacerbates the problem by making magick primarily a question of Will, of training the Will to exert itself over the world.  There are all sorts of qualifications here, since that isn’t the Will in the sense of ego, but Will in the sense of higher self.  And training the Will isn’t simply a matter of getting what you want but of moving in harmony with the higher Will so that you want what is proper to it. 

Still, this seems a bit different than the attitude that directs itself toward a divine presence outside of and beyond itself.  The importance of banishing, for example, points toward a defensive posture toward the world of spirit.  In more devotional frames, we tend to think that too much asking is a bit gauche. 

To paraphrase a friend, we have the sense that the gods have better things to do than just help us with some money.  What encounter we do have with the divine through devotional work tends to be received as an injunction rather than as a pact we must examine before accepting.

This pans out at the level of ritual, too, with there being two sorts of ritual, the sort meant to manipulate and the sort meant to praise.  The problem isn’t unique to paganism and we can see variations of it Christian, Islamic, Judaic, Hindu, Buddhist, and other traditions.  The question of self-worth gets posed pointedly in these discussions.  How important am I in relation to the divine?

I don’t work well in that magickal mindset and I suspect I’m not alone in that.  It jars with my basic reason for pursuing spirituality.  Yet I feel like not praying for things is equally problematic, especially since so much of my practice has to do with the sacredness of the world, not just localized in divinities ‘out there’ but in the world ‘right here.’

The approach I take is that praying for something is more than asking for some thing in your life.  It’s asking for the divine to enter into your life through that thing you pray for and giving your promise that you will nurture that spark of the divine as it enters that place.  The prayer does not end with the request or the granting of the request, but continues as we put that blessing to use.

We ought, whenever possible, to use that blessing to deepen our connection with the divinity granting it.  In so doing, we bring that part of the world into closer harmony with that sacred divinity.

I don’t think that’s solely an intellectual distinction, either.  In making requests in this way, it shifts the way in which we relate to the divine and very possibly changes how the divine responds to us.  It makes the self a point in the circulation of blessings rather than the endpoint of them.

My joy, my happiness, becomes an opportunity for shared joy.  I may manage and care for them for myself, because my self is the point of entry for them, but my self is not the measure of them.

Unlike Protagoras, I do not think man is the measure of all things.  I define my religiosity in great part by the notion that there are standards by which man is judged that man does not create.  The effort to reduce religion to man, to the symbols we create, to the movements of our psyche alone, undoes the movement of devotion so central to it.

This isn’t to do away with reflecting about who we pray to and for what.  But it becomes less a manner of caution (don’t make a bad deal, get cheated) than of care (what blessings can you make the most of).

Religious folk don’t often sit down for a talk about signs and portents.  In most every faith, they play an important, sometimes even primary, role.  While efforts to reclaim religion for ‘rational’ people tend to downplay or eliminate their place, they remain one of the defining elements of a spiritual mode of thought.

Here’s me thinking a little bit about that.

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