The Blog of Baphomet

I love this time of year; the dark is rising and Hallowe’en will soon be upon us. And while of course I value all seasons, all the signs of the Zodiac, it’s Scorpio that really does it for me. My birthday falls on November 1st and so this time is always tinged with that childhood expectation. Add to this my love of the occult and especially those elements of esoteric practice that are typically linked with Scorpio (sex, drugs, death and transformation) and you can see why I adore this time.

Pumpkin Tribe

I buried one of my cats yesterday (the 25th of October), a suitable seasonal event.

Gozo (as we named him, after the Mediterranean island) had reached a suitable age but, as is commonplace with Felis domesticus, his kidneys were failing fast. For some years he’d actually been living with a friend on the over side of the Torridge valley, but I remembered Gozo as a small and sharp-clawed ball of black and white fur from when he came to live with me during my sojourn in Brighton.

We collected his lifeless form from our friends and I drove him back to my home where my two children waited. Number One son took the whole thing in his stride and was philosophical about Gozo’s age and painless death (he was ‘put to sleep’). Number Two Son needed a little more support to talk things through. At moments like this, when Real Reality bites, we find ourselves having to explain things in simple terms. Sure I’m able to talk to my children about death and we conjecture what may or may not happen. But there, with that silent cat basket in the boot of the car, I needed to help my youngest son with his feelings of sadness and to find some way through in that moment.

Such situations are good for us, they summon forth simple and honest answers and, if we are skillful, they are opportunities to make discoveries for ourselves.

Acknowledging his sadness, and that it was okay to have those emotions, I told my son what I see as the facts. That Gozo’s body was going to be returned to the earth. That in time the molecules and atoms that he was made from will become food for, and then become, other living things; from plants, to birds, to people. I spoke of how for things to live something else must die, that even the molecules that make up all life on earth are the debris of long dead stars.

I spoke of how the story of Gozo would live on in us, in our memories and that the power, the life force he was, like the atoms he was made from, would return to the great sea of life-force energy which animates our planet.

The next day all three of us, but especially Number Two Son, prepared the grave for Gozo. We looked at him, my youngest touched his still soft fur, and we placed him, along with grave goods (a cat bowl made by a friend bearing his name) in the earth. We said thank you to him, and to the life force of the world for bringing us Gozo. We hoped that the bowl would keep him fed in the cat afterlife (which I imagine as the Gozo in our memories). We said goodbye and let him sleep in the ground.

We planted wild garlic over his grave that will blossom in the spring.

The next day me and the kids set fire to a 4ft high silver robot in the garden, full of home-made gun powder, but that, as they say, is another story.

Autumn comes to the valley in which I live. The warm sunshine is still (Sunna be praised!) with us, but the pivot point of the September equinox has passed. Mist shrouds the trees in the morning the leaves of the willows fill up with yellow and fall down upon the moist green earth.

This is the season of the spiders, when these miraculous beasts spin their webs between the fast dying stems of grasses. In common with many humans I deeply admire the tenacity and technical skill of spiders. I watched one recently in a still-scented honeysuckle bush, dealing with a yellowed leaf that had become entangled in its web. She (I usually think of spiders as ‘she’, because reasons) carefully made fast some gossamer lines. She ran new strands from her spinnerets and carefully cut other silks. The leaf went swinging out from the face of the web, dangling, quite literally, from a thread. Then she sat for a while, me watching intently to see if she would slice the final connection. She didn’t, and looking down, I could imagine why she had stopped. The leaf hung now away from the prime killing zone of her trap, it was no longer an impediment to her. Had she cut the final strand there was a distinct possibility that the leaf would have become caught on one of the lower main strands supporting her web. If the leaf landed in this position it would have been very hard to remove, and she could have risked the structural integrity of the whole network. Instead she chose to let this now minor irritation stay, to make the calculation between risk and benefit and decide she had done enough.

Araneus diadematus hangin’ out

As in the fabled story of Robert the Bruce the spider is an instructor. In the context of the spider I observerd, she teaches an approach to the things in your life that are irritations, things that get in your way. These things may be social issues (your tiresome ex-partner is still obsessively bad-mouthing you), physical difficulties (you notice that your back problems are getting worse, inevitable as you age) or more esoteric problems. The lesson of the spider (in the honeysuckle) is that you really don’t always need to finish the job. Sometimes good enough is simply good enough. If you’ve already done all that’s needed to get your irksome ex out of your circle of friends, if you’re doing exercises aimed at strengthening your poorly spine and so on, then that may be sufficient. Save your energy for what matters (in her case sucking the life blood from flies) and strengthen your core. Don’t waste attention on that which is good enough, especially if, by trying to completely resolve the problem, you risk ending up with diminishing returns or even upsetting what you have already achieved.

Meanwhile inside my house another lesson from the spiders. A voluptuous garden spider had spun her web right across my kitchen window while I was away at a conference in Cambridge. Upon my return I noticed her handiwork, a lovely circular web of almost Platonic perfection. While I do groove on that Goth style I was minded to remove her until I considered the implications of doing so. On my windowsill (which is pretty deep, it being an 18th century building) sit a number of pot plants. These include aloe vera (essential medicine for minor burns), various exotic cacti and more delicate plants. One in particular is very susceptible to insect attack (this beautiful herb reproduces by getting humans to make cuttings of it, and rarely flowers or sets seed). So why move my arachnid guest, especially when she is protecting my indoor garden?

Another spider who made an appearance in my living room last night was a giant house spider. As autumn arrives so the males of this species leave dark and unmolested webs in the corners of buildings. They race across the prairie of the carpet in the hope of finding a mate. Typically we encounter these chaps when they get stuck in the bath. Whether spotted in the tub or on the prowl along the floor there is a tendency for folk to capture them and ‘set them free’ in the garden. This reaction is understandable. We think of our homes as ours, they are the modernised caves in which we dwell. We’ve bought and paid for them and any other living things inside (pets, plants, children etc) are there because we’ve put them there. Spiders are also, for possibly evolutionary reasons, creatures than many of us are nervous of. Best get their weird eight-legged forms out of our house.

However again the spider has a teaching, and that is that all our spaces are in fact shared. Whether we’re talking about the immense amount of microbial life that swarms inside and upon our bodies, the dust mite denizens of our beds, or our much bigger (and therefore more obvious) eight-legged housemates. We are actually surrounded by other lifeforms all the time. There are very few environments in which humans find themselves where other lifeforms don’t exist (there are perhaps even bacteria on the outside of the international space station as well as those in the guts of the crew). Typically you’re never more than a couple of meters away from an insect and of course the very air we breathe is seething with bacterial beings. Speaking of spiders, several species are specifically linked to human dwellings. We are part of nature, we make and shape habitats, and in any given environmental niche lifeforms will find a foothold; fleas, silverfish, rats, pigeons, foxes, hawks, mice….the list goes on…

Eratigena atrica on the prowl in my front room…

While some of us might imagine that we have few dealings with other creatures in our day-to-day lives actually, if we stop and look, other non-human persons are all around us. These facts are one of the considerations that makes that old chestnut, that modern pagans are necessarily cut-off from nature, untenable. We can learn from the attercop racing across the kitchen floor, that this is his territory too. Paying attention to our needs, as I did with the arthropod who now protects my house plants, we can often enter simple, mutually beneficial relationships. And as we observe and interact with these beings, these spirits, we can learn from their wisdom.