Writings from Elsewhere

To Strike the Waxen One Away

After the candle is lit and the scent of Kapet drifts skyward. After the libations and offerings. There is a prayer. A prayer given to all of them, but marking my name by his. "I hold the spear at dawn to strike the waxen one away. I stand by my father."

And I know the waxen one.

I remember a night long before when the pain was enough to want more than the end of life. It was enough to want the end of being. It was a lonely place where I cried. A place that was full of people but empty of hope. A place wrapped in coils. I wanted for a touch, for a light, for a reason, for sound, a name, a whispered hush of something…anything.

They touched me. Set touched me.

After that, I was his. And for that, the serpent still follows me. Set points it out to me. I stand beside him, spear in hand, and he shows me those places where it lies and I learn to fight it in all its many forms.
I have written about Apep a few times before in other places, but I wish to compile some of that wisdom here. As I find them again in old archives, I will add them. I suddenly get an urge, a feeling, that having them all in one place is useful and good. The entries below are marked with the times of their original postings. The most recent are on top so the list can be easily added to. It will be. That much I have learned.

04/30/2012 (Part 2 of 2)

 How many times will I find myself back in the sights of serpent?

I know the temptation--our youth is not attractive to our elder selves. Our young selves say things, do things. Things we wish we could take back. Things we can't take back. We change over the years. We think better on our decisions in years past. It becomes easy to resent ourselves for being so naive. So easy to blush and turn our eyes away from our failures and our humiliations in hindsight.

But we cannot erase who we were.  Failure is part of learning--as crucial to who we become as is our success. Our awkwardness is as much a part of our being as our elegance. We are not new people in each stage of our life. We are the same person evolving into ourselves. We are becoming. From the day we are born we struggle to complete our birth--and we rarely complete that process before death.

There is no "old self" to forget. There is only one self--with all it's imperfections and its bruised flesh. If we seek to destroy that, we seek to destroy ourselves.

04/25/2012 (Part 1 of 2)

I gave up the war against dust a long time ago. In these dry climes, a thin layer of the stuff is almost inevitable, and you might be surprised how easy it is to get used to it, if it surrounds you constantly. But I am always astounded that while it gathers on every conceivable surface of my home, and even finds its way into closets and zippered bags, it never seems to seep into the shrine. Whenever I open those doors to peak momentarily at the silent, stoic statues I find the space within clean and pure.

The shrine is like a church in my home; one I rarely go to. It sits closed and waits patiently; waiting for me while I don’t wait for it. Life is busy and the road I walk is steep. I have paused, at times, to peak into the shadows inside—but hurried off. In some part of my mind, I think I don’t need to go before them. Last night, at the suggestion of a friend, I opened the doors and lit the candles and made the offerings. I have done this before but this time I didn’t ask for anything. I didn’t say anything beyond the usual prayer. I explored the lower altar, fingering religious artifacts that I have almost forgotten the meanings of…why did I go away for so long? I can’t remember.

 It took some time, but eventually, my mind made its wandering rounds and landed at a different set of doors. A cabinet within the cabinet. A smaller shrine enclosed in the larger one because I don’t have the luxury of space. That is the ancestor shrine. The painted doors and curved roof give it the impression of a sort of house. A house for the dead. It may as well be the gates to the duat itself. I don’t recall if there are gates in any of the myths but whatever the origin of the image, it sticks in my mind. It is not to be opened. But I open it. I have a reason…

My mother may soon make that westward journey. I think to myself, perhaps I should make a space to place her remembrance—she will be the most important of the blessed dead in my life when the time comes. I need to know what size of token to find among the belongings she will bequeath to me, so I might find the perfect item to place within the shrine for her on that sorrowful day. The ancestor shrine is not empty, I know, but it nearly is. I know that inside of it lies a small “Anubis Box” (that’s what the label on the bottom called it—a gold colored box with a black jackal sitting atop it). In it is a family treasure, a pin that represents the nameless multitudes of family my immediate relatives left behind when they immigrated to the US. But that was not all I found within.

 I had forgotten about the other box: a small faded green ring box, unassumingly placed next to the other. My heart stops when I see it. I have been looking for this box for some time.

From my research and efforts in the art of Talisman and Amulet magic, I know that nostalgia is a powerful force: Items that have meaning to us, that recall who we were in another place and another time, are strong magic. Connected magic. A kind of name magic, in a way, though names are rarely spoken. I have looked for this box because it holds that magic of my first name. This box contains me. Or at least, part of me. It contains five tiny trinkets which defined me as a child. Precious pieces of my past.

 I am stunned. I suddenly realize that I put this here. With intent. But when? When did I bury myself?
When and in what state of mind did I decide that doing such a thing was needed or okay? I take it out quickly and shut the painted doors with an overly loud snap.

Now I know: I am not fine.

 The idea that I have a "life finally being lived well" is laughable given the knowledge that I just somehow buried the most innocent part of me. Alive.With the gods as my witness. No. I am not okay. Something is very wrong indeed. I just don't know what or how.

The statues watch in silence.

02/09/2011

Set showed me another form of Apep tonight. Lots of things are bound up in this, and it’s late so I’m barely coherent, but the gist of it goes something like this:

You can’t please all of the people all of the time. What the common phrase doesn’t tell you is that trying to do so is dangerous. It’s a form of perfectionism. Perfectionism sought in an effort to avoid social judgment; an inherently unavoidable thing. And perfectionism, at its core, is an attempt to erase flaws.

If you’ve ever read a story with flawless “mary-sue” characters, you already know something about people who have no flaws: they have no existence either. Flaws make a character because ultimately, flaws, and how they impact human actions, are what make us who we are. Flaws are the reason that each of us reacts differently to a situation. Bound up in our “issues” and “baggage” is the core of our being.  It’s what makes us, and characters, real. Scrub away the flaws and you are left with a hollow doll. This can happen to people. Perfectionists go beyond fixing the broken bits that hold them back to erasing the flaws that make them who they are. They uncreate themselves. And rampant, unchecked people pleasing can lead to this.
And lest I gloss over a really important point made in the paragraph above: it’s worthless to try to perfect the self anyway because the balance and meaning we seek is really about something entirely different: the actions we take. No one is loved or respected or remembered for “who they were”, that only exists in cheap romance novels and hallmark cards. No, in the real world, people are only loved, respected, and remembered for what they do, for what actions they have taken in their lives, for what goals they worked toward (whether or not they were successful in those pursuits). You don’t have to be a florist to give a friend a flower: in context, perfectionism is meaningless.

All this time I have been treating myself as if the end-all-be-all of my spirituality was to transform “me” from my current state into some sort of “good person” that embodied all the things I believed in. That is so wrong to me now that in retrospect the thought is laughable. Firstly, it makes the assumption that I’m not already a “good person” (inflicting that irrelevant concept of “original sin” on myself) and secondly, it ignores the importance of doing things. I can spend eons trying to perfect myself: my thoughts, my personality, my sociability, my health, my sexuality, my motivation, my discipline, my ego…and all the while I would never have to do a damn thing. Without using those improvements to better the world around me, what good are they?

Goal centric spirituality is a better road, I think. I’m not trying to perfect “me”—or rather, I shouldn’t be. I should be using what I’ve already got and working toward manifesting and upholding Ma’at in the world.  The only time that “flaw scrubbing” is necessary, or even permissible, is when a particular flaw is interfering with that goal or causing me to act counter to it. That’s it. Everything else is workable the way it is.

Simple. Blindingly, amazingly simple.

But apparently, Set has to hit me with that lighting bolt of his to get me to notice this kind of simple stuff.

12/14/2008
Comments made after watching a video online called “Set and the Temple of the Living Nuhati” . The Living Nuhati is a temple which has apparently banned the worship of Set in their sacred spaces.

 I would be remiss not to comment on this, and not only because I am one of his. I may be partial to Set, but the other half of my soul hails Ma’at, in all her glory, and that part of me is also miffed by the ignorance of these people. In their hurry to brand Set a traitor and a murderer, they have forgotten his true role in the system. He is not only the one who ‘clears away obstacles’, he is not only a force of ‘creation through destruction’, he is the guardian who stands between us and the horror of uncreation.

I’ll be bold here and make the argument that chaos and order as we know them are inseparable: they depend on each other. Google chaos science and read up on butterfly power and self organizing systems if you doubt it. Systems of complex and natural order are born from chaos. The chaos which resonates throughout may seem counterproductive, but only because the greater pattern cannot be observed by human experience. The ancients observed the world around them for clues to the workings of existence. They assumed the universe was fractilic and that patterns in the everyday life of an organism on this planet would be mirrored up into the realm of the gods. (I happen to agree with them) Using their tactics, let us examine a mundane example of the chaotic order we depend upon.

If you set a pot of water up to boil, you may see a calm system descending into chaos. As bubbles float and flit and eventually roll and roar, there is no pattern, no order present. But keep watching. Eventually, that mass of jumbled boiling bubbles of steam will suddenly and spontaneously self organize into perfect rising and falling hexagonal columns of water which interlock in a honey comb pattern.

Order born of discord.

 The final result of the system is a matrix of chaotic forces balanced into a constructive design. This is the type order, the ma’at, that we see in the world around us. The order and calm of the water before the boiling is of another type: potential. Without that boiling, the introduction of chaos to the calm system, no dynamic order can be achieved and the potential is unbroken. Remove the chaos from the system, let the water cool, and all returns to potential.

Sound familiar?

 Potential is what our existence arose from and what the serpent Apep seeks to return us to. The serpent desires a return to pure potential, a reunification of the energies of all souls and gods into the state of pre-existence. The serpent desires a pure and controlled system with no flaws and no uncertainty. A system which can only exist in theory. So it seeks to return to the time when the system did not yet exist. A time when the system was perfect: when it was a mere possibility, a fragment of a dream somewhere on the horizon. It desires the before.

How does Apep do that? How does it bring back the before? By removing the force which allows dynamic order, ma’at, to exist. What force is that? Chaos. If you seek to eliminate chaos from the system, you seek to side with Apep.  You seek uncreation.

The system of chaos and order is the spine of the universe. The solid vertebra of order are required to protect the sensitive and vulnerable cord of existence buried within. One might be seduced into thinking that the thin gaps between the vertebra, the chaos in the system, are some sort of liability, offering a way in which the hostile world might access the precious core. One might decide to eliminate those gaps, fantasizing in a controlled system with no inherent risk.

 This is the lie that Apep sells us, for if those vertebra where welded together, their flexibility eliminated, the backbone of the creation would snap under any unexpected stress, and all would be lost.

Communities, our most sacred of human constructs, play by these same rules. Organizations which remove the parts of the system that allow the system to change are doomed before they begin. Existence has little tolerance for absolutes. The system of chaos and order perpetuates itself. It actively destroys stagnant organizations, eating them from within by reclaiming individuals, recruiting them for the cause of progress and change. Often there are losses involved, acceptable losses by the system standard, but losses which nonetheless have great significance on the human plane.

If this temple is lucky, they will simply fade away as they outdate themselves and their dogma. If they are unlucky, fate might break them open to free their constituents. They have banned their protector from the halls of their houses of worship. They have exiled their own salvation. I will be so bold as to predict that they will not last long. They think they can erase chaos and destruction, discord, confrontation, and animosity by not inviting them into their sacred spaces, but they are fooling themselves. The perfect utopian religious community where conflict is eliminated in favor of absolute harmony is one of Apep’s many seductions. When humans seek to join in ‘perfect light and perfect love’ they are really seeking ‘oneness’.

The serpent desires complete oneness in all things, a lack of individuality, to bring an end to the sense of isolation inherent in the original division which signaled the awakening of our existence. It is the dream of a lonely echo of the preexistence, of the aching void left behind when existence transformed the potential. The serpent’s dream leads us to a state of stagnation, to a desire to uncreate ourselves to achieve peace and silence the pain and loneliness of our conflicting and very separate existences. When the call is heeded by an individual, it unravels the unwary soul. When heeded by a community, it can have far reaching and disastrous consequences.

07/16/2007

Gah! The chaos child in me rebels at this essay. My heart screams “It’s not that flippin easy!” Good vs. Evil? Pshaw. I am convinced in my soul that the only evil is an extreme...any extreme.

I intuitively sense a calm center to chaos that makes the foundation upon which rests the substance of order. There is a whole spectrum of choices involved in the creation of a unique individual consciousness, not a simple Light or Dark, Right or Left, Good or Bad, Hero or Villain affirmation that we make after reading an Eddings book. And to go so far as to say that everyone who does not consciously choose to be ‘good’ is therefore siding with evil? Come on. That’s just plain insulting.

To me the only real choice is whether or not to exist. There is Creation and there is Uncreation. You can choose to ‘be’ or you can choose to ‘not be’. I have chosen to be. I am a part of creation, a contributor to it. To me, not being is the only crime, the only direct opposition to my gods and the community of creation that I consider myself a part of. Even then, the only true evil is endeavoring to strip others of their existence as well or to reverse the progress of creation in an attempt to turn something backward into a state of unbeing. How does that happen?

By impeding change.

Change is the clearest indicator of the created. All things in creation change over time. When something no longer changes, its existence fades until it is no longer a part of creation. Complete stagnation uncreates and is therefore ‘evil’ or ‘wrong’ in my terms. Many evil acts, in my eyes, are truly just an attempt to stop or avoid change. Some are even well intentioned, and the line blurs between traditional notions of right and wrong when you try to pin down a moral judgment.

I don’t buy that people need to choose “Good” or “Evil”. I think people need to be open to change and allow themselves to shift and morph along with the chaotic tides that churn the ocean of being in which we exist. Maybe we don’t always find the best path, but we need to keep moving.

 But she is right about one thing: sit on the sidelines and never even consider the question and you have to watch it, because you might just be standing still, and standing still endangers your existence.  You need to ask the questions, but you don’t always have to come up with a definitive answer. Sometimes just asking, just deciding not to be indifferent, is enough.

06/01/2006

When I got that card reading during graduation week, I thought Apep would be drastic and unpleasant to say the least. But it’s not. It’s subtle and barely noticeable under the roaring current of my life. It’s a soft backward motion, moving like an aquatic side-winder through the ripples of the river below me. Following me, overtaking me, like a shadow though the hours of the day. Vigilance alone finds it and stays it. It only has as much power as I give it. It can only move when I am not looking at it.

Set warns me in my mind that this is only one of many incarnations of Apep, but it is the one threatening me now and the one that I will see most often. It is the longing for a happy ending. Such a beautiful and impossible fantasy... that’s what makes it so deadly. “Happy Ending” is an oxymoron, because when we say it, we don’t really mean that it ends. A happy ending lasts forever. Anything that lasts forever, no matter how pretty, is stagnation, and stagnation unravels that which has come before. A ‘happy ending’ morphs into something that uncreates us while we sit clinging obliviously to an illusion of bliss.

“There is no ending,” Set tells me, “until Our end. Keep moving, and it,” he nods toward the sidewinder in my mind’s eye, “cannot strike at you.”

And so I start moving again.