Christmas is when you get the thing you want the most in the world. How you get it is the Christmas story. That story has changed for me throughout my life, but it has always been about being a daughter, and magic.
Santa Claus
The first story I learned about Christmas was that a jolly old elf slipped into my house to leave presents.
Santa Claus didn’t leave presents under the tree. I always knew my parents bought those. In a hybrid of Czech and American customs we opened our big presents on Christmas Eve, then while we slept Santa Claus left presents in our stockings for us to find on Christmas morning. Because we were poor we used our real stockings, hunting for the biggest ones to hang on the windowsill.
On Christmas morning my parents were always up before I was. My brother and I would run into the living room and stare wild-eyed at the bulges in the toes. My mother would hand the stockings down to us and I would catch my breath hoping for the toy of my dreams. What we got was little chocolate candies, and the bulge in the toe was always an orange. I won’t say it was just as good because my little girl heart would hurt that the toy didn’t appear. But the magic had actually happened, he’d come! And he’d left us delicious surprises.
My developing intelligence took that story away. I could see that there were many Santa Clauses in all the malls, how could there be more than one? He was supposed to come down the chimney but we had no chimney, how did he get in? At school I voiced these doubts and the kids in the know laughed at me. “There’s no such thing as Santa Claus!” I asked my mother and she confessed: she was the one putting oranges in our stockings. We were too poor for the toys I wanted. The magic wasn’t real.
The Virgin Mary
I immediately learned that there was a second Christmas story. This one, I was told, was the real story, and it was not magical, it was a miracle. A virgin girl received a visit from an angel who told her God would give her a son. When she became pregnant without a husband it looked very bad for her, so her friend Joseph married her so he could take care of her and the baby. They were Jewish, living in Israel, and a census required everyone to travel to Jerusalem and be counted. When they got there they discovered there was no place to stay – there was no room in the inn. So they slept outside in the barn with the animals.
Then the baby came! Joseph placed the boy in a manger filled with straw. Mary and Joseph were quite surprised when three magnificent looking visitors showed up to admire the new baby. They said a star had guided them to find the savior of mankind. They brought three gifts for the baby: gold, frankincense, and myrrh.
It was a lovely story. Mary was so special an angel appeared to her. She was so good God chose her for his son’s mother. The baby was so special that kings showed up in a barn to give presents to him. And Mary and Jesus had kind and strong Joseph to take care of them. I learned that Mary wasn’t my mother, but she was the mother of Jesus and she was kind, and I could pray to her.
My Catholic family sent me to my first confession and first communion. In catechism class I learned the other half of the Jesus story: when the special baby grew up he taught people the word of God. Then he was crucified, suffered, and died while his mother watched and wept. The third day after he died he emerged from the tomb alive. He showed himself to his followers, then he was taken up to heaven to live with God.
Catechism taught me that the death of Jesus cleared away my original sin. This sin was committed by the first people, Adam and Eve, and I inherited it by being born human. I still had to confess my ongoing sins though. When I died I would get sorted into one of three worlds: hell and eternal torture if I was irretrievably bad; purgatory where I would serve out a punishment to clear out the sins I still hadn’t atoned for; or, rarely, heaven, if I lived a good life and received a last confession on my deathbed.
The churches of my childhood featured a larger-than-life-sized Jesus on the cross hanging on the back wall behind the altar. It was a terrifying image. Somehow the joyful promise of the miracle child had turned into a requirement of obedience under threat of torture. I’m not telling this story as a description of what Catholics believe but as what I understood as a child. I am certain that this story would be experienced differently today and could be updated by a nuanced and sympathetic adult education. But I didn’t remain Christian.
My developing intelligence picked at the holes in this story. When the three wise men showed up with gold, didn’t Joseph buy a better house? Why would a baby need incense? Why didn’t Mary go to heaven to live with God when Jesus did? I rejected the idea that I had been born to pay for a sin I didn’t commit and that any mis-step in life doomed me to post-life torment.
Also, even in a family where “feminist” meant “bra-burner”, I believed it was wrong that my brother got to sing in the choir but I didn’t because I was a girl. Looking at the priest at the altar in his splendid vestments, I thought, I want to make offerings at the altar and wear the vestments. But I knew it was impossible in the church – women couldn’t be priests.
The Winter Solstice
When I was sixteen I read Sybil Leek’s books on Witchcraft. “Hear ye the words of the Great Mother,” she said. “All acts of love and pleasure are my rituals.”
I converted instantly.
My feminist teachers taught that the Christmas story reflected the patriarchal suppression of women. God the Father arrogated to himself the power of procreation that rightfully belonged to the Mother Goddess . For patriarchy it was so important to pass property through the male line that women’s sexuality had to be controlled to ensure the parentage of sons. Brides must be virgins, right back to Mary, the virgin who gave birth to God’s son.
As part of this patriarchal suppression Mary had been demoted from divine to human. With a sense of homecoming I learned about the goddesses who preceeded Mary in the vast history of Mediterranean and Near Eastern culture. These divine mothers acted on their own behalf. When Osiris was dismembered, Isis re-assembled his body and laid with him one last time to conceive a son. The image of Mary with infant in lap is modeled on the images of Isis holding her son Horus. In this story the miracle is the child snatched from death.
When her daughter Persephone was kidnapped and dragged into the underworld as the unwilling bride of Hades, Demeter complained to Zeus, who said he had approved the bride-snatching and refused to help. Demeter then held the earth in eternal winter until Zeus relented and allowed Persephone to leave the underworld. The miracle in this story is the joyful return of the daughter.
Academic studies of mythology sometimes frame these stories as explanations of the change of seasons in the natural world. Scholars in older eras leveraged this insight to compare magical superstition to the superior reason of science. But I saw no conflict between understanding the rhythms of the natural world and celebrating the metaphorical story of mother and child. The mother who gives birth to the child is the earth, and the child is nature, the return of springtime, the triumph of life over death in the renewal of birth.
With my conversion to Witchcraft, Christmas slid seamlessly into Yule. Happily, Yule falls within a few days of Christmas, and the decorations pretty much stay the same. Pagans get trees and mistletoe and presents. We burn lights through the winter solstice, the darkest night of the year, making our wishes for health and prosperity and happiness in the new year.
Babalon and the Beast
I continue to be a Witch and celebrate Yule. I am also an intellectual and a lifetime learner. I moved into esoteric studies and Ceremonial Magick practice. In due time I was introduced to Ecclesia Gnostica Catholica and the Gnostic Mass.
The Gnostic Mass is patterned on the Catholic mass I attended as a child. This version however re-introduces the Great Mother in the forms of Babalon and Nuit. The mass is celebrated by a team which includes a priest, priestess, deacon and two children. The priestess sits on the elevated altar where the priest worships.
The E.G.C. and the Gnostic Mass healed the pain of rejection from my childhood. I chose to be baptised, then confirmed, and then ordained. In this church, priestess, priest and deacon are all clergy and share the same powers. As E.G.C. clergy I can conduct baptisms and other rituals just as the priest can. And every mass requires a priestess.
The church also partially integrated for me the Christian and Pagan stories of birth and renewal by returning Goddess and sexuality to the story. Babalon emerges from Crowley’s visions of the Babylon of Revelation, a whore holding a cup and riding a seven-headed beast. Crowley identified with the beast and celebrated Babylon. In a world where women can either be virgins or whores he weighed in on the side of free sexuality. All acts of love and pleasure are her rituals.
Revelation’s visions also incorporate other female imagery. Feminist scholars point to the story of the woman clothed with the sun as an echo of the Mediterranean goddesses. In this story a woman with her feet on earth, her head in the stars, and clothed with the sun is about to give birth. A beast waits to devour the boy. When she gives birth her son is whisked away to heaven, but the woman is left behind on earth – like Mary! The beast is enraged and pours out a stream of water to drown the woman. She is saved, but it isn’t God in heaven who reaches down to protect her; instead the earth helps the woman, opening a chasm to swallow the waters.
Revelation also envisions a Bride who will marry Christ, which turns into a metaphor about the city of New Jerusalem where the elect will spend eternity. The woman clothed with the sun, the earth, and the Bride all roll up into the powers of the priestess in the Gnostic Mass.
Caveat: I am not a member of the Sovereign Sanctuary of the Gnosis and all descriptions of the Mass reflect only my own understanding. That said, one way to look at the Mass is that it is a form of renewal. In a metaphor of sexual impregnation, priest and priestess dip a lance into a cup of wine. The lance tip holds a fragment of a cake of light which contains ash, the burnt residue of a substance which can be semen or menstrual blood. The priest then consumes the rest of the cake and the wine.
The Catholic Mass is a repetition of the meal Jesus shared with his followers. That meal was a celebration of Passover which itself commemorates a religious event. When the Jewish people were held in captivity in Egypt, God sent plagues to convince pharaoh to release them. The final plague was carried by avenging angels; one terrible night they killed the first born sons of every family, passing over the houses of the Jewish people. They recognized those houses because they were marked with the blood of a sacrificed lamb. This was the calamity that finally convinced the pharaoh of Egypt to release the Jewish people from their captivity. The blood of the lamb saved them. In his Passover meal, Jesus told his followers that he was now the sacrifical lamb, and his death would release them from slavery and death.
In Crowley’s version the priest sacrifices not a lamb, or himself, but (the ash residue of) semen or blood. We can consider these to embody the power of procreation to renew the life of the body. The power of sexuality is itself a metaphor for the yearning of the soul to reunite with the source of the infinite, the Great Mother Nuit.
The Daughter of the Mother
For the two decades I have spent in the E.G.C. it has been my Christmas custom to watch the midnight Mass televised from Rome and compare it with the commentary on the Gnostic Mass by Sabazius.
I love the Gnostic Mass. I love being clergy in my own right. I love the celebration of sexuality and the acknowledgement of the female power of birth. In the Gnostic Mass the priestess goes through a series of transformations: she begins as the virgin, turns into the priestess, and becomes the metaphorically sexual partner – bride or whore or both as you prefer.
As much as I love the ritual, eventually I had to confront the fact that even though priestess and deacon are required to conduct the mass, it is the priest who wears the serpent crown and makes the offerings at the altar. He’s the only officer in the mass team who actually consumes the sacrament.
Now, the congregation also takes communion. There’s a difference between the Christian communion and the Thelemic communion. At midnight Mass on Christmas the Catholic pope consecrates the hosts – the marble altars glitter with dozens of gold reliquaries. However, the Thelemic priest only consecrates his own cake of light and wine. Each congregant then takes another cake and goblet of wine and consumes them. The script says: “The PEOPLE communicate as did the PRIEST…” One way to understand this is that the individual congregant consecrates her/his/their own sacrament. This is not an original thought, I’ve heard something like this from E.G.C. bishops, although again I am not empowered to explain doctrine.
In the Gnostic Mass people of all genders take communion. The soul has no gender, and every soul can yearn for union with the divine. In the most inclusive sense this means that every soul in every gendered body is free to benefit from the magic of the mass. I consecrate the cake and wine and consume them for my own renewal. In Thelema I am my own savior.
That said, the priest sets the example for the consecration, and the example he sets is the achievement of the male magician. The language of the mass centers on the relationship of father and son. Crowley was a spermist and it is enlightening to spend one entire mass meditating on this. A Thelemic man once made the argument to me that the magic of Thelema is that a man is reborn as his own son, and this doesn’t work for women. I have yet to meet a Thelemite who agrees with this, to my great relief, but you can make a case for the idea.
This still leaves me as a woman magician with the question, how can I perform the ritual of the mass as the active celebrant? Not just pretending to be a man, taking the role of the priest, but as a woman in a woman’s physical body engaging in the physical renewal and spiritual promise of union. I pondered this question at length in The Woman Magician.
Ultimately I answered the question in the ritual of the Star Garnet. This ritual creates a magical womb as a retort in the body of the practitioner, whatever their biological gender. The operator places the seed of a new life in the womb. Eventually that seed grows into a new energy body which expands to completely fill the physical body. Each time I perform this ritual I step into a new energy body.
In the ritual of the Star Garnet I experience the magic of renewal. I am parthenos, the Virgin Mother, giving birth to myself.
The Star Goddess
Hear ye the words of the Star Goddess, she in the dust of whose feet are the hosts of heaven; whose body encircleth the Universe; I, who am the beauty of the green earth, and the white Moon among the stars, and the mystery of the waters, and the heart’s desire, call unto thy soul. Arise and come unto me.
This is the first version I learned as a young Witch. While Doreen Valiente wrote The Charge of the Goddess it is clear she was inspired by (and cribbed liberally from) the channeled work received by Aleister and Rose Kelly Crowley, The Book of the Law. As a priestess in the Gnostic Mass I speak these words from behind the veil:
I love you! I yearn to you! Pale or purple, veiled or voluptuous, I who am all pleasure and purple, and drunkenness of the innermost sense, desire you. Put on the wings, and arouse the coiled splendour within you: come unto me! To me! To me! Sing the rapturous love-song unto me! Burn to me perfumes! Wear to me jewels! Drink to me, for I love you! I love you. I am the blue-lidded daughter of sunset; I am the naked brilliance of the voluptuous night-sky. To me! To me!
Gordan Djurdjevic and other contemporary Thelemic scholars trace the origins of the magick of Thelema to kundalini yoga and Tantra. Aleister Crowley studied yoga. He was also initiated into a sexual magic secret held by the Sovereign Sanctuary of the Gnosis of the Ordo Templi Orientis. It’s a favorite parlor game for Thelemites to try to figure out what the secret is and where the O.T.O. got it. Indications are that it refers to the Tantric practice of consuming semen and menstrual blood as sacraments to improve physical health, manifest desires, and bring the practitioner into communion with the divine Father or the divine Mother.
I’ve studied Tantra for four decades now but haven’t called myself a tantric, even while practicing and writing about and teaching sex magick, because I did not have a Tantric initiation. Now, however, I do have an initiation under my belt, as well as a trip to the Tantric motherland, and I am studying Shakta texts and engaging in practices specifically designed for women.
In Tantra, all forms of Devi are mother even when they don’t have mythical children. Shakti has many names and faces. The most immediate difference between the Tantric Shakti and the magickal Mother Goddess is the flip in polarity. In western esoteric conceptionalization the female goddess is moon, matter, form, passive. The male god is sun, energy, force, active. In Tantra all of that is Shakti! She is sun, energy, force, while Shiva is the moon and matter, the cool white form which lies inert beneath her feet.
In my childhood I met the Holy Mother Mary. My young adulthood introduced me to Demeter, Isis, and the Goddess of the Craft. In my later adulthood I have embodied Babalon and Nuit. Now I place myself in the field of Durga, Lakshmi, Kali, Saraswati, Kamakhya. They are all Her forms. She is the source of everything. The universe of illusion, all the veils of maya are only Her play. When I sit in practice Her love surrounds and fills me. She is mother not because She is the mother of God, but because She is the mother of everything. She is my mother.
In the Star Garnet I found a way to do magick as a woman by literally creating myself. Tantric practice teaches me why that works. Since She is everything, She is also me, and I am a form of her. I know that in my body, I know that in my yearning, I know that in those moments when I my mind stops and I remain.
Christmas is that moment. We learn to prepare for it by the delicious anticipation. The hush of the woods, the silence of the snow, the fertile darkness illuminated by the miraculous dawn are all mirrors of that singular reality. In my new Christmas story I hang suspended in the moment before time starts again, the year starts again, life starts again. I am loved, I love, I am love. And that is what I want the most in the world.
