There’s Something About Mary… Wait, I Mean Saint Peter
by Gordon • • Life • 8 Comments
This blog has an interesting point of conception.
It was born in the permanent darkness of glorious, snowy London but it was conceived somewhere very different.
It was conceived in the tomb of Saint Peter.
Let me back it up a bit.
My magical career began when I was thirteen. I sat bolt upright in bed one Saturday morning, aware that something had happened in my dreams that I couldn’t quite recall.
So I got up, walked down the hill to my local independent bookstore, which for years had the best range of occult titles in my hometown… Pity it’s gone to the dogs recently.
Anyway, I spent everything I had on a range of magical (mostly Wiccan and Druidic) books. Between then and my early twenties there were a bunch of initiations, groups, changes, discoveries… The usual. There is more detail on my About page.
A couple of years after moving to New Zealand, my relationship with magic… Lapsed. Not for any reason other than ‘busy-ness’ and general ‘desire redundancy’. I had found love, I had a job I loved, I was making very good money, I was pretty, I was healthy. In that way, practical magic contains the seeds of its own destruction. Once you get the things you want, what’s the point? A glorious career is beckoning. Have at it!
Magic stirred in me again when I moved to London. How could it not? This is one of the great cities of the world, it’s also one of the most haunted (I’m excellent at ghost-spotting; one of my few talents) and the undisputed home of modern western magic. For instance, my house is easy walking distance from the site of the original Isis-Urania Temple.
Let me be clear… By this stage, I had carried my magical library across half the planet and through four cities. Magic was still somehow the cornerstone of my identity… It was/is the goggles I use to see the world. I just hadn’t actually… done anything with my goggles for quite a while.
And then I rented an apartment in the Eternal City. Which you all must do.
On a Wednesday morning, we got up early to tour the Vatican museum.
Here’s a fun tip. Wednesday morning is when the Vatican museum is at its quietest because there is a Pope Show at 9am out the front of the basilica so all the faithful congregate there, leaving the queue to get in as un-monstrous as it is ever going to get.
And so I went through a couple of hectares of religious art, the Sistine Chapel, etc… Teasing the Christians the whole way like any good Neo-Enlightenment boy.
Then I hit the tomb of St Peter.
If you haven’t been, the right side of the tomb -which is how you enter- is laid out in ‘reverse Papal chronological order’. You walk past Hitler’s pope, and then you walk past the Pope who is responsible for triple the deaths of Hitler thanks to his African AIDS policy. Fingers crossed the current Hitler Youth Pope ends up next to him real soon. (Are you detecting a theme here?)
I won’t lie. As I walked past them I uttered some silent curses. They are literally two of the worst people who lived in the twentieth century. These curses may have constituted my first magical acts in more than a year.
Then at the end of the tomb I arrived at St Peter himself.
It bowled me over. I almost cried. The energy emanating from this tiny gilded casket was like nothing I have ever felt. Something had happened to this man.
So I stood there and thought about what this something might have been.
- This man may have met something divine that we can still feel two thousand years later even after his bones have turned to dust.
- He was somehow raised up or elevated about normal human status by… Something.
- The faith of more than a billion people currently living on planet earth converging on this one tiny chamber have built something.
Whichever way you look at it, this was magic.
And this is what I love about chaos magic. The explanation doesn’t matter in the slightest. In fact, it’s probably speculating beyond the data. All you can know for certain is that something magical is happening.
The universe is magic. It didn’t matter that I currently had no ‘use’ for practical magic. Magic’s existence is too important to ignore. If magic exists -and it does- then that colours everything about your life.
That was it.
In that tomb I committed to pulling the sheets of the furniture in the wizard’s tower and firing up the octarine generator.
My first order of business would be to plug back in with magical folk of every colour and creed. (Hi!) I would take it from there.
I guess this story is an example of what I meant in my previous post. Holy Places are important. They also have a function. Which is why I like them so much. And why I’m not particularly fussed who is currently laying claim to them. Because, if done right, the outcome is the same.
So Cheers, Pete… Cheers very much.
Snerk! If by “modern” you mean 19th century, early 20th.
If you meant in 2010, Baltimore is obviously the home of modern magic. At least the Delaware-Maryland-New Jersey part of the East Coast.
Pretty sure.
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You cursed Pope John Paul II, after all the good he did, because of his stance on a disease spread by fucking?
Because he had the audacity to expect people to keep their dicks in their pants?
Sometimes I forget how far apart our worlds really are.
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Wow. I am actually a little surprised by you both.
@Gordon: Saying that your religion is opposed to birth control is quite a bit different than rounding up people and imprisoning them in concentration camps than executing them. The comparison is unfair.
Attributing the Aids epidemic in Africa to the Pope is also really really poor form. His influence was a minor factor at best.
I do not see anyone from the occult community condemning African Religions because Witchdoctors have been telling people the cure for aids is sex with a virgin. I would wager that this single factor is responsible for more cases than the Popes influence.
@RO The Pope had a number of stances that while on the surface seem to be supporting life, in actuality cause more harm than good. I agree with you totally that JP2 was overall a force for good in the world, but there was a shadow side to it as well.
@Gordon: Don’t you hate when you write a 1000 word post, and 50 words get all the attention?
The REST of your post rocks, as usual.
@Jason: I published an old post where I was wrestling with that, the “On the Brink” post.
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@RO I’m possibly more frustrated that I try to be all organised and get these posts queued up in wordpress on the weekend because I’m extremely busy this week and a genuinely interesting sociopolitical discussion threatens to break out in my absence.
Stupid inconvenient life!
I’m at work right now but I might try and come back to this in the evening because I would really like to get alternate opinions on the subject… Mine is the template Lefty Intelligentsia position.
@Jason my issue isn’t someone’s beliefs on birth control. It’s about action/inaction in the face of mass death when you can be a change maker… And exactly when inaction becomes complicity.
It was my final year thesis that got me top of genocide studies (although that was specifically about the Holocaust) hence why I find it so compelling.
But I would suggest witch doctors are a bad example because even they will refer a patient to medical professionals in the case of malaria or even diabetes… Diseases they know something about due to education/exposure/awareness. Which is precisely what the church went out of its way to avoid giving.
Virgin rape, of course, being a very good example of a consequence of inaction.
I’m totally willing to have my mind changed on this. For some reason I have recently had my mind changed about evangelism so it’s definitely the week for it.
Oh, and in my personal defense: It’s not like I was stringing up cats in the catacombs. My wording may have been too strong for what was essentially me mentally muttering “grumble grumble glad you’re both dead”.
And the two nuns that were crying and praying next to him would have cancelled it out.
Seriously, there was a roped off area for nuns to cry in front of him. Presumably it’s around the clock?
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I had a similar experience in front of the tomb of Santiago in Spain. Walking the Camino is definitely a magical experience, and one gets empowered at the end of it by this cathedral experience of immense and incommensurable strength. I’ve been to Rome, too, and they’re the same force but different flavors.
Encountering that same force at the same strength as Santiago or Rome, leaking out of a mis-opened Ark during a Friday night temple service at a Conservative synagogue in the back of beyond, was enriching in quite another way. Sacred places are where holy ground finds you.
I agree with you about the two popes, though. JP2 was perhaps a holy man trapped in a deeply misguided system, but he also had the opportunity to become more attuned to the mission of the Church to all people and he didn’t. He accepted that the hidebound ideas of his pre-War Catholic upbringing were more important than any new awareness. And the other one more or less gave permission for the massacre of the Jews. For Shoah he’s damned.
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