NMR ISSUE 47

Activating Miraculous Success
Astrological Forecast 47
Editorial 47
Esoteric Symbology of the Tarot
Garden Rituals
Herbal Remedy for Summer Boredom
Herbal Sex
Isian Ceremony of Spiritual Renewal
Isis Play
Lazaris
Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram
Letters 47
Magickal Garden
Other Editorial 47
Peacock, Ass/Donkey & Beetle
Potted Herbs - In and Out
Prayer to Isis
Reviews of Unusual Books
Skhmet: The Fire Within
Summoning Hathor
Waking up
Witch's Tor

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The Editorial

By Scot Rhoads

Changes

We still have a bug or two left to iron out with our new printer. The problem that made many bulk mailed issues arrive last time will be solved when we move our print deadline up a month for our next issue. We will also need renewals and submissions sooner!

Where is All That Kryptonite When You Really Need It?

Christopher Reeve annoys me. Part of it is that he played Superman, and Superman annoys me (a subject for another editorial1). But Chris didn't bug me so much before his accident, so that doesn't explain much. Chris Reeve irritates me because part of me sees him as a puppet of people's fears, or worse, a quisling.

If you press me, I'll admit I have no reason to doubt he's a wonderful sincere guy. I can't deny it's great that Mr. Reeve is a positive inspiration to help overcome disability and misfortune. But that makes more tragic the feeling that he is also being used, unconsciously, as a club by those with a pathological fear of death. This should be no reflection on Reeve. Anyone who honestly chooses life is to be celebrated. Rather, this is a symbol of my own dark perception of a dark part of our society.

Our society fears death. And who can blame it? We get to choose between door number one, Nonexistence, and door number two, Eternal Damnation. Some of us get the curtain where Carol Merrill is standing, Paradise, but most of us know we deserve to get zonked. When we are sure in our hearts that we will never again have the things we love or the people we care about, a pathological fear of death is no surprise. We will bankrupt ourselves and our society for even the illusion of a little more time (regardless of quality) in our only chance to go for all the much-vaunted gusto we can. If we are willing to create a self-destructive healthcare system to address our fear, it should be no surprise that some are too scared to attend to the feelings or wishes of a helpless minority.

If death is so horrible, then life, by comparison, must be invaluably wonderful. That's what everybody says. Life is so invaluable that to think twice about any expense to preserve it is sick materialism. Life with a capital `L' does deserve such consideration; but life with a lower-case `l' is what receives it.

The difference between `Life' and `life' lies in the duality that our culture is so fond of. Everything is `Life' in the transcendent sense. A sunset is Life. Loving is Life. Crying is Life. Money is Life. Cellular respiration is Life. Rocks are Life. Death is Life. But most things are definitely not `life' in the vernacular. To distinguish, I will call `Life' Living and stick with our cultural definition of life.

Life is a dualistic term, though the dividing line is plastic, because some things are considered not to be life. Dead bodies are not life. A rock is not life. Money is not life. Brain waves are life. Pupillary contraction is life. A heartbeat is life. Cellular respiration is life when it occurs in a live body. A human sperm and egg are not (human) life until the moment they combine, when some say they are. Though not everyone agrees on the particulars, our society believes that each thing must definitely be life or not-life.

This dualism of life is, I feel, another expression of the fundamental dualism in our culture; better characterized as a dualism of sanctity. When God created the earth, it was not sacred according to our present attitude. The earth is a thing, an object, a tool, dirt, it's here for whatever we want it for. It's blasphemy to think the earth is sacred. Our culture, even where atheistic, believes that some things are sacred and some are not. We may disagree on the dividing line. Animal Rights people may say anything with a face is sacred. Neo-Nazis may say only Aryan things with faces are sacred.

The problem we have seen all too well, though have yet to fully recognize, is that when anything is profane, everything is profane. Economics offers a good metaphor. One economic truism is Bad Money Drives Out Good. Back when William Jennings Bryant became the champion of Populism with his Cross of Gold speech, people wanted a bimetallic system. It's in the original Wizard of Oz allegory; the silver slippers on the yellow (gold) brick road. Money, based solely on gold, had become tight; it was squeezing the farmers. The Nevada silver mine owners felt very strongly that it would be in every good person's interest to base the US dollar on gold and silver in the treasury. The country was sufficiently convinced. For some time both silver and gold were in circulation.

The problem is, gold is more valuable than silver. So people hung on to the gold, gradually leaving only silver in circulation. Eventually they no longer bothered basing the currency on gold. When some things are sacred and some aren't, the profane things take over. If you can't strip mine sacred land, then land with resources on it will stop being sacred because, well, that land over there isn't sacred, why should this land be? So it goes until there are only a few parks and church foundations that remain sacred.

Similarly with Living, most things about it are no longer sacred: bodily functions, making money, talking with ordinary people, driving, playing sports just for fun. People complain that our culture worships materialism, that what is sacred to us is the dollar, selfishness, things we buy. But this is the result of a lack of sanctity more than its misplacement, as is the attitude that decries materialism. Material things are sacred and should be sacred. But when we treat everything as profane, we throw out our ability to balance our sacred materialism with our sacred spirituality. There are things we need to do to survive and to serve our immediate desires. They can become our only focus (mislabeled worship) when we lack a tradition that informs us that less obvious things are also important. Lacking a universal sense of the sacred, we box it up in whatever empty vestige the inertia of tradition has left to us. People are considered religious when they go to church on Sunday to hear and do and think things that are alien to the rest of the week.

Seeing so much of Living as profane when we still have a deep need for the sacred, makes the few things that remain holy become so to a paranoid extreme. They are threatened, under siege. We cling to them desperately, knowing they could stop being sacred any time. Their sanctity becomes rigid dogma, and we must reinforce it by relentlessly differentiating these sacred vestiges from all that other profane stuff in life. If you affiliate something sacred with something profane, that is at best sick, like selling indulgences.

Life is this kind of sacred thing. Life is Good. Death is Bad. Life is Sacred, but Living usually isn't. It's sacred when you go to church on Sunday. It's not when you go to work Monday through Friday. The gulf is vast, and it's all or none. Life is still just as sacred when it's a body that will never do more than lie inert on a hospital bed. And the struggle and money necessary to keep that life going are profane. To take the extreme case, an empty life of pain that can be extended for a few days is sacred. The resources and feelings consumed in extending it are profane the tens of thousands of dollars, the hours of professional labor, the work that goes into providing the money, the pain, the depression, the sadness. But when something sacred is at stake, it is sick to even consider the cost.

In our culture, we convince ourselves that we respect animals by preserving them in cages after we destroy their habitat. We convince (d) ourselves that we respect women by keeping them safely locked away all the time where others can't get at them. We convince ourselves that we respect life by enslaving ourselves to its biochemical perpetuation regardless of cost in money, in toil, in pain, in sadness.

But things are improving. The Right to Die movement is making surprising progress. The religious groups opposing it have been less than convincing with their tiresome halfhearted slippery slope mantra. It's an open secret that their real reason is religion. And, apart from pathological obedience, their driving fear can be characterized as one of losing another critical piece of the sanctity that they themselves started throwing away when they said God and Man are sacred, and everything else is not. Understandably they want this outpost to remain sacred. They need to justify themselves to themselves. Though this is a religious issue, it is not specific to religions. It is so ingrained and fundamental that the religious roots can be invisible. It is a cultural phenomenon, ingrained in the atheistic Materialist as much as the Fundamentalist. They all need to retain the sanctity of Life, distinct from the profanity of everything else.

To justify that sanctity, people have to believe that life is really wonderful and death is really horrible. This is fine for any that choose it, but in our culture people can't allow others to disagree with their core beliefs. In an Objectivist world, everyone has to agree or someone is wrong. Though it's never us that are wrong, we can't escape discomfort while someone breathes who says I don't think so. So if I fear death, you better fear it. If you don't, I'll make you act like you do. You want to die? Too bad. You're in pain? I know that even a life of pain and misery is better than death. Even without having any such experience I am doing wrong if I fail to prevent anyone's death, even when they feel they have a compelling reason to choose death. I know they are wrong because I have strong, unpleasant emotions associated with death.

Not that this irrationality needs justification to empower it in its fans, but it clings to whatever it can in an effort to expand its hold over the all-important common mind. Anyone in difficult circumstances who finds enough meaning or happiness or satisfaction to live on or who simply lacks the guts or imagination to choose death is championed as justification for demanding that we all do the same. They don't want to choose death. If you only thought about it properly, you would see that they're right. It's not his fault, and I don't believe it's his intent, but Christopher Reeve is salient in my mind because he's salient in the media as the latest Reason to Live. Not that he provides any reasons, but he provides assurance (however empty or personal) that those who think they have good reason to choose death must be tragically deluded. If we wave Mr. Reeve in front of unhappy people emphatically enough, they will surely have to see the error of their thoughts and feelings. If they don't, at least those sane enough to be thanatophobic will have convinced themselves for a while longer of the Rightness of their beliefs. And it will help convince them sufficiently to justify whatever coercion is necessary to impose their choice and fears on all.

I believe that choosing life is a wonderful thing; but, like anything, it can be used to serve a negative agenda. I don't believe that choosing death should be trivial or common; and I recognize the fear of it becoming so. Choosing to conceive should be taken as seriously, yet is too often unconsidered, and our world suffers. So it's not surprising that people would fear a right to die could get out of hand. But this issue is a small aspect of a global problem of a lack of sanctity. If we can restore sanctity to our whole world, we empower ourselves to make decisions about death more responsibly; we secure the sanctity of the besieged remnants of the sacred, freeing us from that fear of loss; and we are able to reintegrate troublesome and unbalanced aspects of our dualistic lives. The only thing that loses is our desire for the material, which will have to share more of our attention, and since material desire cannot be satisfied, this is moot.

Christopher Reeve, as a symbol, is a sideshow within a sideshow. I should not have a Reeve peeve; but as he symbolizes hope and the celebration of life to some, so he symbolizes fear, coercion and selfishness to me in my contrary nature. And it's kind of fun to get to complain about it.

Yet, ironically, Christopher Reeve's choice of life can and should be a symbol of the solution to the problem. When we choose life out of joy, we see its true sanctity, not a sanctity embalmed by fear and dogma. This expansive view can grow to encompass all the profane things we dismiss or denigrate. In truly embracing the sanctity of life, we start to see all of it as sacred, and everything it touches or which touches iti ncluding death. All it takes is the courage to allow others to explore and express that sanctity in their own way, for only when it is free can Life be real and alive.

How does this reflect on the recent Interesting Time at Heaven's Gate? Not much, I feel. I have been talking about extreme cases of quality of life issues. But Heaven's Gate can be a parallel issue when the motivation to interfere with their choice is the same as in the question of quality of life.

Apart from the above discussion, should we allow people to take their own lives for religious reasons? My feelings are ambivalent, but my personal conclusion is not. I figure what the hell, why not? Who are we to say they were Wrong in what they did? Certainly we should step in when we can make a case for incompetence; mental or emotional problems, mind control, etc. But when we can't, and there's no threat to others, how can we justify interfering? More important, we should force ourselves to address the causes that lead to such a choice. If we continue to stop at making suicide illegal, we absolve ourselves of solving the problems that encourage people to choose suicide. There's a big difference between a society where people are unable to kill themselves and one where they don't want to kill themselves. If suicides inspire us to create the former, we enslave and blind ourselves and help waste their lives. If suicides lead us to create the latter, we do some honor to their lives and give meaning to their deaths.

I must admit considerable admiration for people from our culture that can believe something strongly enough to kill themselves. (Interestingly, there's not a similar shortage of people willing to kill others for their beliefs.) It's not what I'd choose to believe myself, nor do I feel it's a healthy expression of a belief, but otherwise there is considerable attraction that kind of magnitude of belief. People want to believe things strongly. We are tearing down our old belief systems with good cause; there was much negativity there. But when you do a cleansing to get rid of negativity, you should also work to attract the positive to take its place. We have dismissed not just what we believed in, but even belief itself. We haven't recognized that we are believing animals and sought new positive beliefs. This leaves us vulnerable. Let Heaven's Gate help us to see that we have created a vacuum that we must consciously fill with positive beliefs.

Blessed Be!
SR