Sime~Gen Inc. Presents

Recommended Books

April 2003

"10 Wands, Pluto, And the Right Hand Path 
Part I"

We have spent a lot of time pondering the issues behind the use and abuse of Power as the Magician acquires and uses it. In the early columns here, we’ve examined Identity, and the source and nature of the Group Mind, and the blending of Identity into the Group Mind. We’ve looked deeply into issues behind the concept of "Government" – reading carefully books about "Who will or should be King."

And we’ve teased apart some of the tangled issues within the concept "prejudice." What does it mean to be a "stranger" – why do we trust members of our own Group Mind more than strangers? We’ve skirted the issues involved in trust, integrity, and other personality traits.

We’ve seen how and why all the great traditions agree that the signature of the White Magician, the power-user on the Right Hand Path, (i.e. in sf/f parlance, the Hero), is that he/she does not use power for personal gain.

The hardest problem is how to identify personal gain, how to distinguish right from wrong, how to know when you’re making a mistake before you actually make it.

It always seems so obvious, so self-evident so inarguable in fiction. In waking consciousness, what we use to solve that problem determines the results of our actions – whether our actions in the world will result in a smooth life or a soap opera of disasters, pickles, boondoggles, and tragedies.

I have found that astrologically, people who live a pillar-to-post existence, a soap opera life, generally have outer-planet conjunctions to the North Node, often Pluto. Or Pluto is involved with the North Node in some difficult way. Not all people who have this formation live such melodramatic existences. Not all people who live such existences have this formation. How you live your chart has a lot to do with who you are and were in prior lives.

Noel Tyl has identified the nodal axis as representing our involvement with the nurturing parent (usually the mother). I think that we first formulate our Identity from the experience of being nurtured. It is where we learn who "we" (7^th House) are and become an "I" among the "we." And it is where we learn what Power is, what it’s for and how to use it.

We learn right from wrong by being nurtured. All of this material becomes the "program" that runs in the subconscious to give us instant judgments or pre-judgments (prejudices) of people and situations. Prejudice is how we tell the good guys from the bad guys without thinking too much.

I have a stack of books here that appear to have nothing at all in common except they all deal with prejudice. Prejudice is on everyone’s minds these days because it’s the root of the problem in the Middle East and Korea. Before we can be effective in invoking for Peace, we have to analyze prejudice from a magician’s standpoint.

The Star Trek: Enterprise episode "Precious Cargo" tackles this issue when the Enterprise’s Engineer rescues a kidnapped Princess who looks down on him, until his skills are all that can save her life. She lets fact reprogram her prejudices.

That episode is the key to understanding this stack of books. Oddly, many of them are books against which editors and publishers have traditionally been prejudiced – because they are mixed genre.

Llewellyn, the publisher that produces so many fine occult nonfiction titles, has a fiction line that has grown from amateur fanzine level writing, to professionally crafted novels. Note particularly The Cowboy and the Vampire by Clark Hays and Kathleen McFall, billed as a Very Unusual Romance on the front cover, and published as Gothic Romance / Vampires / Horror on the back. It has a fairly high sales rank on amazon.com , too.

In a contemporary setting, a big city reporter meets a horse-riding cowboy trying to make a go of a small ranch. She’s a hereditary vampire and doesn’t know it. Two vampire factions have prejudices about one another. The Cowboy overcomes his prejudice against vampires to admire, love and appreciate her – and rescue her from the bad-guy vampires.

Any description of this book makes it sound silly. But the writing is clean, crisp, solid and compelling. It’s a page-turner, and raises and discusses issues of right and wrong without stopping to lecture. It’s an action story that would make a terrific feature film.

Llewellyn also brings us Beneath a Mountain Moon, a novel by an experienced, practicing teacher of the Occult, Silver Ravenwolf. Again, solidly crafted though the point of view shifts might have been done better.

Ravenwolf shows us how prejudice against witchcraft has caused a small town to reject the good guys and embrace the bad guys. A story generations deep, involving ghosts, computers, spellcraft, and murder is finally resolved in modern times by a woman and a karmic love. An engrossing read with insights into prejudice that anyone wielding power needs to absorb.

C. J. Cherry’s Foreigner Universe is exactly a case in point here, from title to plot to story. The driving force behind everything that happens in the Foreigner stories is prejudice, the "baggage" that people bring to their split-second judgments of situations.

You’ll find my blanket recommendation for C. J. Cherryh in general, and the Foreigner novels in particular in previous columns. Find those reviews on simegen.com by using the search engine on "C. J. Cherry" – and you’ll find an article by her about how she writes, too.

In Explorer, the two groups of humans who are historically prejudiced against one another join forces with a group of "primitive" non-humans just learning space-age technology, and confront yet another group of humans on a distant space station who are making a total mess of First Contact with yet another group of non-humans. Secrets abound, kept because of fear and mistrust. Mistakes happen – because of prejudice. Good humans do Evil because of prejudice. And an extremely prejudiced, straight laced, and formal old non-human female cracks the problem by the judicious application of Power – not violence.

OK, it’s just a story – a "setup" – the solution wouldn’t work in the Middle East today. But in the process of picking apart what these 6 novels say, and how and why they say it, you may learn how to formulate your invocation for Peace so that the Power you can raise will be appropriately targeted.

The power (Pentacles in the Tarot) of an invocation (Swords in the Tarot) comes from your emotions, (Cups in the Tarot), and your emotions come from your Identity, which generates your philosophy (Wands in the Tarot).

Astrology can give you the framework within which you live your life, and Tarot can reveal how you arrange yourself within that framework. Astrology can show you what characteristics you have that can’t be changed, and Tarot can show you whether you’re using those characteristics to their best advantage.

Both these occult tools delineate how you are the same as everyone else, how the challenges, vicissitudes and moments of glory in your life give you the same experiences as other people have had.

A well developed ability to read a novel, to sink into the characters, to become part of a strange world, to ride through an Initiation within the mind of a fictional character, can give you a solid grasp of how you differ from others, and what potentials you have to offer the world – whether the world rewards you for that gift or not.

This particular set of novels, read the way I’ve been showing you throughout this entire column, can give you insight into the mental cage you live within. Once you can see the bars, you will be able to figure out why you’ve never been able to reach some particular, never been able to target your Power and get predictable results.

When you can see others slamming themselves against the bars of their cages, reaching through but falling short, unaware of the existence of the bars, and then see yourself in the same predicament – you might decide to reprogram your prejudices.

We’ll discuss Stone Kiss and Devlin’s Luck next month in "10 Wands, Pluto, And the Right Hand Path – Part II"