How I Got To Be A Neo-Pagan Witch--Part 6, Lefty Psychedelic Spawn Of The The San Francisco Renaissance

[a revenant post with additions & edits /// I put up a version of this post earlier; I'm leaving it up; but, hey! things change!]

Planning out the series of posts about how I learned magic, what led me to sink my roots deep in Neo-Pagan Craft practice, and why I participate in the world this way but not that, it became obvious that my spending teen aged years in the San Francisco Bay Area, immersed in its vibrant local culture, accounted for a lot.

But that it was going to be difficult to describe. I was in the middle of these many important influences, and they were pulling me one way and another all at the same time. Plus, they were happening, and they had--and were sometimes making--history.

What's more, today many of these then new and vital influences have lost their luster, been turned from their once daring origins to the ends of marketing and weary recitations of the old days.

As a sort of introduction to themes and subjects that I'll return to in later posts, here's a bare bones introduction--Lefty. Psychedelic. San Francisco Renaissance.

Growing up in the San Francisco Bay Area when I did helped make me the Neo-Pagan Craft practitioner that I am today. I am a lefty psychedelic spawn of the San Francisco Renaissance, shaped by a diversity of local and regional cultural influences that may have culminated in the 1960s and faded away by the 1980s.

Strictly speaking, the San Francisco Renaissance generally refers to a group of avant garde poets active in and around San Francisco from the immediate post-WWII period through the 1960s. They were active presences in the local Bay Area culture, and their influence went beyond the poetic and literary into the overall popular culture.

Newspapers wrote stories about them. Radio and TV news reported on what they were up to. You could go to the art studios, galleries, lecture halls, and theaters to look at their works, hear their opinions and ideas and stories. You could even bump into them at the coffehouses, clubs, bookstores, churches, streets, beaches, forests, of buses. Local popular culture acknowledged them, even regarded some of them as notable characters, even celebrities. They made the Bay Area more interesting to live in, and the Bay Area valued them for it.

The San Francisco Renaissance, more broadly, encompasses a number of currents and movements in poetry, literature, music, studio and performing arts, philosophy, metaphysics, environmentalism, humanistic psychology, print and broadcast media, science and technology, cross-cultural awareness, and progressive politics.

Again, the Bay Area acknowledged all this, talked about it in public forums, kept itself interesting, even distinctive, with the diverse currents of the San Francisco Renaissance.

Avant garde. Innovation and experimentation in art, politics, and culture. That's what the San Francisco Renaissance meant to me. That's the seed that the San Francisco Renaissance planted in me. Make it up. Test it out. Learn from what works. Or from why it doesn't. Go on based on what you've learned. Try again. Try different. Try together.

Creativity is better than reiterating received custom. Change may be better than abiding by that legacy of tradition, particularly if that legacy squelches things to retain its dominance. Wholeness is better than separate things, separated places, people in parts. And it's worth making the effort to regain wholeness and to keep it whole.

Psychedelic . In the 1960s altering ordinary consciousness, often with drugs, gained in popularity. Musical forms and styles and modes of presentation came into being to sustain, or to promote, the insights and obstacles altered consciousness encountered. So did art styles, fashions, eroticism, politics, criminality, and other aspects of life style.

My consciousness got altered.

Lefty. The San Francisco Bay Area has a history strong in progressive politics. So does the region of the West. I thought then, and continue to think now, that a good deal of this grows from the character and the beauty of the Land. The mountains, valleys, rivers, sky, and what lives there want to be free. They want you to be just as free.

Looking back, I think that I had a predisposition towards participatory democracy and the common sense of the Declaration of Independence and the United States Constitution, plainly read. I liked Liberty. I still do. (I organized my first political action in

7th grade. I'm not saying this to brag, but to suggest that something within me, within my world view, moved me to live my beliefs.)

By 10th grade I was active in environmental causes, civil rights causes, and the peace movement. In small ways, to be sure, but active.

I got bulletins in the mail from The Institute for the Study of Non-Violence. Even though I resided in a military town, I resisted the military's grasping of my life and the lives of my friends and schoolmates. Right up the road, at UC Berkeley, a student political movement that favored most of what I did was taking shape. And taking to the streets. I felt myself a part of it.

To be clear, I didn't imagine myself politically precocious or socially visionary or any sort of leader, organizationally or ideologically. Holding these views, espousing these values, making these criticism, looking for and trying out these alternatives, taking these little steps to make a better community--just seemed like the right things for me to do.

Here I am, then, a Lefty Psychedelic Spawn of the San Francisco Renaissance, all prepared to step--reluctantly--into the realms of Neo-Pagan Craft. Or, more correctly, to be yanked in. By a Goddess.

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How I Go o Be A Neo-Pagan Witch--Part 5, 8th Grade--I Learn The Fundamentals Of Meditation & Magic

[a revenant post with edits and additions]

My 8th grade English teacher decided one day that each of us should stand up in front of the class and give an impromptu speech. Yow!

Some students gave passable speeches. I did not. I did not to the extent that my 8th grade English teacher, perhaps in consultation with the school counselor, decided that I needed to go to a special school-wide speech therapy class.

I resented this decision, since it singled me out as somebody who had to take a special class. But I went along. I attended the classes. And, reluctantly, I did the drills, exercises, and homework.

Not surprisingly, early puberty racked my body and my sociability.

What's more, I believe that I was still experiencing some minor neurological impairments as I continued to recover from my car accident (although there's no clinical evidence, since I passed the slate of reflex and response tests.) I had uncertainties in my fine motor control. My hands exhibited constant tremor. And I had some hitches in my articulation.

Maybe, I thought, this speech therapy class would help, somehow.

The class consisted of a group of six or seven students and a teacher. We met for several months one or two times a week, while school was in session, for a regular 50 minute class period. The teacher, whose name I don't remember, was a middle aged woman, a speech therapist. I believe that she had some background in meditation and the occult, and perhaps in the emerging human potential movement. But she never mentioned anything.

The class met in a small classroom with standard school furniture--student desks, a larger teacher's desk, some chairs, a window in one wall.

We did a variety of drills aimed at easing some of the hitches in our articulation. The ones I remember best had us say tongue twisters. She gave out a bunch of several page mimeographed collections, and one homework assignment was to say each one several times, speaking faster each time.

But the exercises that I remember, the ones that made a life long impression on me, revolved around relaxation and awareness, energy and intentionality, creative imagination and living with some skillfulness. Some of the fundamentals of meditation and magic, if not the whole of them.

I'm cataloging these exercises here, identifying them with terms that I learned years later, describing them according to notions and theories that I never knew at the time.

Yes, I learned a complex of practical skills of meditation and magic. But, no, I did not know what--in words--I was doing. I just did it. Because what I was doing had some benefit, I kept on doing it.

My first teacher gave me practical instructions, but she made no reference to any ideology or world view explaining these practical instructions. She instructed me and the others to carry out actions, not to think about anything or to believe anything.

The only context was the little speech therapy class.

The only touchstone was a change for the better in my ordinary life.

Did my hand tremors diminish? Could I articulate words more easily and clearly. Did I gain in self confidence? Could I cope better with strain and stress?

Yes!

The exercises that I learned in the beginning focused on more or less simple relaxation. Simple bodily relaxation linked with steady breathing. I just sat comfortably in the room, darkened as if for a movie or slide show, relaxed as best I could, and breathed steadily.

I did not learn to count or time the inhalation, the exhalation, or the periods in between. But I gained some ability to breath more deeply, taking longer to inhale, exhale, and, here and there, to hold my breath between.

My teacher passed along two further skills next, and I don't recall which came first. But because the class was limited in time, she did give instructions about one skill at a time. Both are fundamental skills.

The bodily technique that she taught me is called *Progressive Muscular Relaxation.* This involves alternately contracting muscle groups and relaxing them for increasingly long periods, beginning with the hands and feet and top of the head, incorporating more and more muscle groups until the entire body is tensing and un-tensing. This technique leads to deep whole body relaxation.

The psychological/spiritual technique that she taught me was how to locate or to create a perfectly safe place, how to access it and exist within its protection, and how to, at need or at any moment of threat or difficulty, to go to that place at once. She convinced me that this was possible to do, and that I, with some trying, could do it. She was right.

Then she taught me a cluster of techniques revolving around imagery and journeying and visualization. The basics of guided visualization, active imagination, and awareness of other worlds, inner planes, enchanted realms.

Learning this cluster of techniques put me in touch with the land, the things that live on, in, and above the land, and with the land's story, past, present, and to come.

She then taught me about energy in the body and beyond the body, how to access it, cause it to act according to my intention, how to move it within my body and beyond my body for nearly any distance, and how to use this energy in healing.

Healing myself, for the most part, but without excluding the possibility of healing others using this selfsame energy.

The techniques of energy management that I learned involved different color qualities. No particular color qualities, however, necessarily linked to any certain event or condition. Rather, color qualities offered a means to manage energies according to the needs or preferences of the exercise or whoever was moving the energies. No mandated tables of correspondence.

In later years I discovered that post WWII occultism had changed its notions of energy sources accessible via meditation and magical work. Earlier notions led practitioners to draw upon their own inner, bodily sources. Later notions pointed toward outer sources in the land and sky. I recall my teacher talking about sources in the body, being careful not to exhaust them. But I also recall tapping sources in the land and sky.

Now this speech therapy class was just one among several regular school that I was taking.
I felt some changes for the better as a result of the practical exercises and drills that I had learned. I kept on doing them, on and off.

But I was much more strongly interested in other subjects and in improving my competence as a creative intellectual. That's, to the limited extent that I had a notion of my self and what I wanted to do, how I saw myself. Participating in the creative culture of poets, novelists, critics, thinkers, writers, people of ideas who knew the ins and outs of our historical culture and other historical cultures.

What I'm getting at, I suppose, is that if anybody had announced that they were going to teach me fundamental techniques of meditation and magic, I would, as an 8 grader, have balked. I had no interest in meditation or magic then, except for how it functioned in the movies I watched and the science fiction and heroic fantasy books that I read with fannish avidity. I didn't want to do these things. More correctly, I didn't want to do those seriously.
I messed around with these notions for fun.

They didn't suit my nascent self image as a reasonable, rational, creative person.

Some years later, at university, I grew curious about Buddhist and Hindu forms of meditation and spirituality. I was majoring in cultural anthropology and South Asian studies. Such things offered useful ways of understanding other cultures, other religions, as well as possible new personal insights.

As I read texts and commentaries, as I undertook practical exercises suggested by Buddhist or Yogic schools, I found, to my surprise, that I was already quite familiar both with experiences being described and with techniques intended to bring them about.

I had, it appears, been meditating all along, without even knowing that I was. What's more, I had, without paying much attention, gained some skill sets and had gone through many of the experiences described in the texts.

A little less surprisingly, the same turned out to be the case when I investigated the relatively new and growing Neo-Pagan Craft movement. Lo and behold, I could do a lot of the things described as magical, I had been doing them since the 8th grade, and I was pretty good at some of them. What's more, I had quite a similar world view. I was a Neo-Pagan Witch, although a solo one, which at the time posed a greater challenge for me than it does these days.

To sum up. I learned fundamental techniques of meditation and magic in a speech therapy class offered over several months in a public junior high school. My teacher skillfully passed along a constellation of practical techniques and doable exercises that have served me fruitfully for a life time.

But she did not offer any concepts, theories, or ideologies to define what we did or to locate what we did in a metaphysical or spiritual system. The only test that mattered was change for the better in ordinary life circumstances. There was no examination by school officials, and we received no grades.

Because my life circumstances did change for the better, I continued to do these exercises I'd learned, build on the practical skills that I'd learned. I did so without a clue at the time that I was meditating, that I was doing simple but powerfully transformative magic, that I was building a secure and solid foundation for a practice to come. Only five or six years later, in the course of my anthropology studies at university, did I realize what I had been doing all along--meditation and magic.

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Gremlins: A New Function For Faery Beings?

While riding my mountain bike out in the open spaces and the woods here on the West Coast of North America I've encountered three faery beings who function something like gremlins--they do mischief to mechanical systems, arrange accidents for the unwary or careless, and make riding more eventful than it otherwise might have been:

Caughtapedal--in general, this entity plays tricks with the bike's propulsion and control systems, as well as with the rider-trail interface (as when a pedal catches on a rock or stump).

Wheelzipochtli--in general, this entity plays tricks with the bike's support and suspension systems, as well as the rider-trail interface (as when a tire goes flat way out where from the trail head or a shock fails on landing a jump bigger than any other during a ride).

Omehurtsteotl--in general, this entity play tricks with the rider, leading to painful body english, slips, falls, sprains, scrapes, breaks, blood loss, and other such things (as when a tree branch jumps suddenly on a rider's head, cracking her or his helmet and making the return ride both very slow and quite memorable, in a keen, nebulous sort of way).

I don't think that they are actual gremlins, even though they do stuff that gremlins do. I get the sense that they used to do other things in the past, but took up this gremlinish activity because changed circumstances kept them from doing what they used to. Their names have an Aztec resonance.

Gremlins appeared on the scene during the early part of the 20th century, mostly around aircraft. So maybe all gremlins are faery being who changed areas of activity in response to more and more human technology whirring away. Maybe their earlier functions got displaced, or suppressed, or extinguished. Maybe the historical cultures they used to have close links to were altered or disrupted or came to an end. Maybe these beings found something new to do that paid humans back a little--or a lot, depending--messing with human aircraft technology. Later, with all kinds of our human technologies.

A few more comments:

1.) The mischievous names--These Somewhat Aztec sounding names are ones that these faery beings have taken specifically in relation to mountain biking and how their activities mess around with mountain biking. The names that they allowed me to know. I got, as I realized the names, that the faery beings had other, older, and probably more telling names, names that linked to the historical cultures and functions that had somehow been lost or barred to them.

They did not allow me any clue about that. In fact, it was pretty clear that it was none of my affair and that I better not go poking around after such stuff.

Let me add that a quick search reveals that, included in the Aztec pantheon alone, are lots of potential candiates to take on a gremlin function.

Just to be clear, I'm not suggesting that these gremlins used to belong to the Aztec pantheon. There are a range of pantheons some or all of whose members could have gone gremlin. These three just identified themselves to me with Aztec sounding names.

They chose to reveal only the names that linked with a particular somewhat prankish function and limited sphere of enterprise.

2.) The activities that they have undertaken--even though disruptive and sometimes leading to injury--are not "chaotic," if that's the correct term. Mechanical breakdowns, component failures, malfunctions, friction and obstruction, lack of appropriate situational awareness, poor judgment, profound fatigue, lack of suitable skill sets, escapes, falls, sprains, bone breaks, and such like all occur within the ordinary domain of riding mountain bikes.

What I'm getting at is that these three beings--and gremlins in general--do not seem to do much of anything extraordinary. They may take a technological system, or a technological system plus humans interfaced with that system beyond the envelope of reasonable, safe, comfortable operation. They may cause components to break, or systems to glitch, or riders to brag to themselves about their skills--trying what they shouldn't--or riders to lose situational awareness, or other stuff.

Gremlins playing tricks with mountain bikes and bikers don't break Murphy's Laws. They stick with them. Gremlins urge things that can go wrong to go wrong.

But gremlins do not, say, convert complex components into pebbles or riders into jellyfish or swoop bikes and riders up in to ufos. Their mischief has to do with the world far more than other realms or dimensions. They don't go outside the greater world and bring back anything beyond the pale.

3.) In my eyes, these faery beings are not "harm-doers." They are not horrible shamblers or beings to be feared or shunned or exorcised. Rather they are one more aspect of the living Land that we take into account as we go about doing things--an aspect of the living Land deserving of our respect.

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Rumpled Foreskin: Latex & Rayon Spun Into A Precious Fold!

The Boing Boing title to Cory Doctorow's post about the artificial foreskin is:

Artificial foreskin lets you keep your sensitivity AND the covenant of Abraham!

Posted by Cory Doctorow, October 6, 2008 3:10 PM |

http://www.boingboing.net/2008/10/06/artificial-foreskin.html

According to the Covenant of Abraham, Abraham and his descendants get circumcised as a sign of their covenant with God.

As a life-long and bedrock Neo-Pagan, this has no significance for me whatsoever. I'm not interested in observing the Covenant of Abraham, and I'm not interested in using an artificial foreskin to cover up the body mod that indicates observing the Covenant of Abraham. I don't think that Neo-Pagans have really worked out a Pagan outlook around circumcision, but I myself oppose the practice. That strikes me as natural and actively "Pagan"--go with what the deities gave me!

What struck me about the Boing Boing title was that it hinted that a man who had been circumcised for the sake of observing the Covenant of Abraham could now--using this artificial foreskin--look like a man who had not been circumcised for the sake of observing the Covenant of Abraham. And perhaps undo some of the personal consequences, as far as sensitivity and appearance go, of observing that Covenant.

Why, I wonder, would a covenanter make some sort of effort to fool or deceive the God with whom the covenant had been pledged? Or, maybe, make some sort of effort to cover up the indicator of pledging the Covenant of Abraham? As a Neo-Pagan, this is not a course that I'd recommend, the deities and guardians as I've come to know them not liking to have covenants disguised or shape-shifted. Even though it does occur to me that this wearing of an artificial foreskin is a novel manner of "having one's religious cake and eating it, too!"

Plus, I never envision the Pagan Gods & Male Guardians as circumcised. To my eyes, They are always grand and powerful in Their natural foreskins.

I'm not sure just how this links up with Neo-Pagan magical practice. But, I do look at this artificial foreskin as a potentially useful sex magical tool, one that would look intriguing on an altar. Neo-Pagan magical practice in general involves recovering a range of diminished or lost sensitivities, after all !

Much more information about the artificial foreskin and its potential benefits to male health and erotic pleasure can be found at the Viafin-Atlas web site. Testimonials from wearers suggest that a man can regain sensitivity and erotic pleasure and body image confidence via using an artificial foreskin.

http://www.viafin-atlas.com/

grafik--a tip o' th' beret to Jeff Bucchino, The Wizard of Draws!
http://www.wizardofdraws.com.

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