How to Enter the Tunnels of Set

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The Dog Days are upon us (depending on how you choose to time them) which has frequently corresponded with some of my most intense and often unusual occult experiments and experiences. Several years ago I began a complete path-working of the Qlippoth and Tunnels of Set starting during the Dog Days and stretching across a year to end at the completion of the next Dog Day period. Over the past few days a friend and occult colleague of mine began a new exploration of the Tunnels so I thought it might be useful to share some further details and concrete examples of the methods I used in my own work.

Painting by A.O. Spare

A Paganism and Politics Trilogy

 I have just published a new piece over at Gods and Radicals entitled "Nature's Rights". In it I attempt to craft a pagan view of natural rights and address several deep problems and failings that the history of rights theory has faced and, mostly, failed to solve. I've now published three pieces with them on, generally, the implications of pagan metaphysics for politics and one book review (another is on its way soon and I am very excited for it).

What I realize in retrospect, though it wasn't planned, is that my first three pieces form a sort of natural trilogy.

Gods and Radicals: Towards a Pagan Politics

I recently published an essay entitled "Towards a Pagan Politics" over at the excellent new pagan website Gods and Radicals. You should consider checking out both the site and the essay if you are interested. I will be publishing pieces with them consistently, probably one about every month or so.

I do hope you will read the full essay, which includes reflections on Ancient Greece and Rome as well as aspects of Akan culture amongst many other elements, but I will include the concluding segment here. It attempts to sketch the basic elements of a pagan politics and I would be interested in discussing any or all of it:

A Pagan Metaphysics might Assert that:

1. Reality is irreducibly multiple, made up of numerous different forces. In other words, truth and reality are always plural.
2. Insofar as these truths are irreducible there is no one final truth or god and conflict (whether constructive or destructive, whether play or war) is an unavoidable aspect of reality.
3. There is no one right way to live, best culture, highest value or single purpose.
4. Wisdom consists in a gathering of diverse truths beyond that attainable by any one individual, “Wisdom does not reside in one head.”

A Pagan Politics might be Committed to:

1. The rejection of all totalizing claims and authorities.
2. The promotion of productive rather than negative conflict (play over war) and an increase in different ways of life.
3. The commitment to creating an environment where each way of life can reach its fullest most creative form as far as is possible, thus rejecting the Roman model of one type of power ruling over all others.
4. The insistence that no one standard of evaluation can be applied to all things.
5. The recognition that most things should not be characterized in terms of monetary value and so the resistance to the reduction of all values to market values.
6. In a World Without Council, i.e. one already under the domination of one reductive way of life, pagan politics would be committed to the pursuit of the actions necessary to make pluralism possible.

The Wars of the Gods: Four, Fomorians and Faeries

They were there first, waiting as the newcomers tried their hand at taking the land from them. Massive, monstrous, having come from beneath the sea or beyond it, the Fomorians waited and held the land for their own. They were the old ones, the ancient, and all the younger gods who came after had to contend with them. Time and again they came and failed, slaughtered or shattered by disease. The invaders left or died, one after another, but always the Fomorians remained and waited. Giants, some called them, with limbs and heads of beasts. Others say they had one eye, one leg and one arm. But we know, for sure, that some were beautiful and all were mighty. They wielded terrible magics and mysterious skills, and from them came the greatest treasure of all the British Isles, the Cauldron of Rebirth - the Grail. 

The Gundestrup Cauldron

The Wars of the Gods: Three, The Disruptive Divinities of Magic

The War Between the Vanir and Aesir
 
Listen and hear of the first war in the nine worlds. When the realms of the tree were but newly formed from the flesh of the giant Ymir, then a goddess came from Vanaheim to the halls of Aesir in Asgard. She was Gullveig, the Golden Power, and she brought with her the strange new arts by which the future could be foreseen and, at times, rewritten. The Aesir gods, amazed at her power, sought to end the might of Gullveig. They pierced her with their mighty spears, then set her flesh to flame. Thrice they burnt her, and thrice they failed and she rose forth yet alive. The Aesir gods called this goddess of the Vanir Heidi. As Heidi she went about the land and, magic knowing, magic worked. Wolf-tamer, prophetess, a wonder onto the Aesir she was and they feared the aid and power she granted to the women who learned the magical arts from her. So they tried to destroy her and failed. 

The War Between the Vanir and Aesir

The Wars of the Gods: Two, Aeons and Sexes

The prehistory of the gods is shot through with primordial conflicts, the echoes of ancient wars. But who or what are these wars truly between? 

Continuing in the path I set out upon a few days ago, I would like to discuss one of the classic examples of a conflict between the gods and a lesser known example from the same cultural context. These examples are the war between the Titans and Olympians, and Apollo's stealing of the Oracle of Delphi from a female earth goddess through the slaying of the Pythian serpent.

Apollo Slaying the Pythian Serpent

The Wars of the Gods: One, The Friction of Finitude

There are a number of seriously vexing problems with which monotheism must contend that are avoided by polytheism. In fact, attempting to answer these problems constitutes almost the entirety of the history of Judaic, Christian and Muslim theology.