Crafting the Book of Shadows: Get over the Illuminated Manuscript

I obviously can’t speak for all pagans, but I’m pretty sure that most of us under the Pagan Umbrella keep some sort of written account of their work.  In Wicca, the body of writings a practitioner produces is called their Book of Shadows.  Of course, what that collection is made of can differ widely.  In more eclectic traditions, it can be some sort of amalgam of personal journal or a ‘lab notebook’ of various spells, rituals, and magical resource material. If you’re a British Traditional practitioner, you might have a system like that, but you’ll probably also have a Book of Shadows that you copy from your initiator and which might not be allowed to be changed or added to depending on your tradition.

A view of “The Book of Shadows” from the TV series “Charmed.”

No matter what the specific type of one’s own Book of Shadows is, I do know that every Pagan I’ve ever met seems to have a mental picture of this ‘ideal BOS’ in the back of their minds.  Sometimes it seems that everyone thinks that a giant leatherbound tome handwritten in gorgeous calligraphy and masterfully illuminated is what we should be striving for when we create our books.  You know, something that has the effect of the prop in the TV show Charmed.

A photograph of pages from one of Gardner’s surviving Books of Shadows.

Please.  That’s never going to happen for 99% of us.  In the first place, practically no one has the money to have some craftsman bind up folios of vellum into massive leather covers.  In the second place, practically no one has the technical skill and artistic talent to fill those vellum pages with beautiful, even calligraphy and intricate inked drawings.  The likelihood of one person being able to do both seems pretty astronomical to me.  Even Gerald Gardner, the guy who gave us the term “Book of Shadows”, didn’t even try to pull this off…and I’m sure he would have if he could, given his penchant for the theatric!  In this picture, you can see the nod in the ‘ideal’ direction as Gardner clearly broke out the calligraphy (probably a good thing as his handwriting and spelling were atrocious) and dotted the text with some drawings, but it’s certainly not done with an artist’s eye and the book itself is no great affair.  It’s a basically a simple composition notebook!

But it’s still an important and powerful magical tool, isn’t it?

For the longest time I struggled with the idea of keeping a Book of Shadows because I had this idea that I should be creating sacred art with it.  My art was never good enough, so consequently my ‘proper’ Books of Shadows rarely had much in them aside from a few poems and things while I slowly acquired stacks and stacks of notebooks and binders crammed with scraps of paper and various drafts and journals…not to mention the countless files I curated in a hidden folder on my computer.  And, of course, it was a ridiculously unorganized mess.

I think that the concept of the ‘ideal’ BOS kept me from coming up with something workable for the longest time, and that’s just a crime.  So I’m dedicating the next couple of posts to discussing what systems I’ve developed and am developing in order to keep my magical writings flowing and organized.

Settling on a Pen of Art

Today I’m going to talk a bit about a tool I don’t hear much about today in the Pagan and Wiccan communities, and that is the Pen of Art.

For those not in the know, the Pen of Art is nothing more than a simple ink pen that is reserved only for magical work, which can involve various aspects of spell work or writing in one’s Book of Shadows.  I’m about 99% certain we get this term and concept from Mathers’ Greater Key of Solomon, where it is used many times.  In modern practice, the Pen of Art can be just about anything:  a feather quill, a favorite ball point, a collection of Sharpies…heck, some would even argue that you could have a “Keyboard of Art.”  Truly, it doesn’t matter what the pen is, so long as it is dedicated for magical work.

I think mentions of the Pen of Art have declined in part because keyboards do rule our lives.  I’m a bona fide stationery nerd–I go through the pages of the Levenger catalog with the same glee that other women have for Victoria’s Secret–and even I have come to prefer typing to handwriting.  As with many others, I can type much faster than I can write, it’s easier for me and others to read, my hand doesn’t ever cramp up, and I can edit all day long without having to re-write every single word.  And then we have something attacking on the other side of the spectrum:  scrapbooking.  I swear to you, I’ve seen some amazing hand-crafted Books of Shadows that must have required an entire room full of specialized equipment and supplies in order to make.  Between the two ends of this increasingly polar spectrum, it’s no wonder that we don’t really hear much about people reserving one special pen for their magical work.

However, I really do think that this is a practice to be kept.  We all know that doing something by hand increases the energy (and provides a greater opportunity for one to meditatively infuse more energy into a working).  Hand writing craft lore, personal spells, different rituals and other things can be beautiful…even if your penmanship is atrocious.  I myself have long enjoyed doing this…but I certainly make sure to do all the primary drafting and editing rounds on a computer and only hand write the final master copy!

So, as you can imagine, I’ve made the rounds on choosing a Pen of Art.

In my first year or so studying the craft, I actually used dip pens, if you can believe that!  Those are sort of like quills without the feather–you dip them directly into the ink and write until you need to need to dip again.  I had a couple, actually…and I think my mother bought them for me at Tuesday Morning!  One was a metal rod you could insert different nibs into, and the other was a swirled glass one.  I might actually have them tucked amongst my belongings at my mom’s, come to think of it.  Dip pens are definitely a little annoying to use and can be incredibly messy, so that was a short-lived endeavor.

I think that I would have eventually settled on a nice rollerball pen, but sometime around the beginning of my junior year in high school, my German friend Julianne turned me onto fountain pens.  After consistently writing with a couple cheap ‘disposable’ ones for a year, I decided that I wanted a ‘good’ fountain pen for my Pen of Art…and that started me on my path to Fountain Pen collecting.

The original Levenger Verona by Stipula. It initially sold for $159.

My first pen was Levenger’s Verona, which was made for them by Stipula.  I lusted over that pen.  I thought its aqua blue pearly color was gorgeous (I still do, actually), and thought it’s modern style was just what I was looking for.  I even liked the little onyx cabochon on the clip.  So even though this pen was ungodly expensive for me at the time, I saved up and eventually treated myself to the pen, which I intended to be my Pen of Art for life.

Unfortunately, it wrote scratchily and I never took to it.  I thought I just had to break it in, but–as it turned out–the Veronas were a bit hit and miss.  Some wrote beautifully while others had poor ink flow.  By the time I realized it was the pen’s fault, it was far too late to exchange it.

The Waterman Phileas, then retailing for $39.

Funnily enough, even though I’ve continued to acquire fountain pens, it’s been a long road to finding one to dedicate as a Pen of Art.  This fellow, a Waterman Phileas I acquired sometime in college, was another that I’d intended to be a Pen of Art.  I like it a lot: it’s a pretty weighty pen for its size and I do enjoy its Art Deco styling and it’s vague resemblance to a cigar.  Better still, it writes really, really well.  In fact, because it writes so well and because it wasn’t insanely expensive, it’s become the pen I use for everything.  Of course, that pretty much precludes it from specialized dedication as my magical pen.

The Waterman Man 100 Opera pen, which originally retailed for $350.

When I acquired this pen, a Waterman Man 100 Opera, I really wanted it to become my Pen of Art.  It’s the favorite in my collection.  It writes like a dream, feels great in my hand, and looks as sharp as a tuxedo.  But I’ve got sentimental associations with this one.  It was a gift, and a really important one at that: my father gave it to me when I graduated from college, telling me that I was to write my first prescription or sign my first book with it.  Moreover, it was a pen that was special to him, too.  I don’t know how he acquired it, but I do know that he really only used it to sign the most important documents.  His giving me his favorite pen meant so much.  So now I regret to say that I really don’t want to add magical meaning to a really important personal meaning.  In my mind, this fellow already has a dedicated purpose, and that purpose is not a magical one.

And that brings me to the final pen in my history of searching for the right tool.  I’ve just ‘rediscovered’ it, and I really think I’ve got my Pen of Art this time!

As with the Opera pen, I got this from my father, too, although he doesn’t know it.  After he and my mother split up, Mom found it in its box, crammed into a deep corner of his desk and completely forgotten.  She sent it to me, and as I was really upset with my father at the time, I put it in a storage box and promptly forgot about it, too.  I only recently found it again in a massive round of reorganizing.

The Parker Sonnet Fougère. In 1993, its suggested retail price was $250.  That’s like $380 in 2012 dollars!  Geez, Dad was spendy!

The pen didn’t look as nice as this at first.  It was pretty tarnished and grungy looking, and I couldn’t get it to write at all.  I actually thought that both the exterior and interior were permanently ruined and that I’d have to get rid of it.  Instead, I decided to see what the pen was and decide if I could rehabilitate it.

A long round of googling eventually told me that this pen was a Parker Sonnet Fougère.  This pen was part of the original Mk. 1 pens that launched Parker’s Sonnet line in 1993.  In fact, it was the top-of-the line Sonnet in that first batch.  Unlike the other Sonnets, it boasted a thick gold cap band, a duo-toned nib, and two gold nib rings.  And its exterior casing was solid sterling silver.

You definitely don’t blithely dispose of such a pen, so I set to rehabilitating it.  Of course, the exterior cleaned up quite nicely with a little sliver polish (and some gentle ingenuity to clean under the pen clip).  Getting ink to flow again took some doing, but after a few hours of trying every trick in the book, I got it going again.

I’ve spent a couple days now using this pen whenever I have the chance, and I’m finding I like it quite a lot.  It is a smooth writer; perhaps not as smooth as my beloved Phileas, but very good nevertheless.  I guess its original marketing as “the writer’s pen” wasn’t too far off the mark!

I think this pen is it for me.  It came to me through serendipity, and I like how it looks and how it writes, and I don’t have any emotional attachments to it.  As a nice bonus, its silver exterior makes it especially suited for magical work.  I think, then, that I will ritually dedicate it as my Pen of Art.

Since we’re on the topic of statuary…

Seeing as this “clear the queue” session of posts on my current tools ended up with a fairly extended series of posts on pagan statuary, I thought I’d round that bunch out by sharing another couple that have come into my collection.

Sometime last year around spring, my High Priestess Z. had a bit of a sort out of all her witchy things.  She had a few items that she though some of us in the community might be interested in, and this pair of statues was amongst them.  I kind of eyed them all through that meeting not realizing Z. was looking to pass them on.  I was wondering what she’d intended to do with them and rather assumed that at some point in the evening we’d be reconfiguring the main altar.  I don’t think I really wanted them, but somehow by the end of the evening they ended up coming home with me!

I later found out from Z. that these sculptures were not some sort of spring Lord and Lady as I’d assumed, but were intended to be fan art collectibles from the British TV series Robin of Sherwood which aired from 1984 to 1986.  I’d never heard of this show until that point, as I was born in 1983, but I later learned that lots of people in the community consider it a pagan classic.  These two statues are intended to represent Robin (Loxley) and Marian at their wedding.

Loxley and Marian, fan art sculptures from the TV series “Robin of Sherwood.” The artist is Leigh Ann De Lany.

Their artist, Leigh Ann De Lany, still makes these figures in addition to a Herne who presides over the marriage.  Through her business, Herne’s Child Wares, she also makes and sells several other ceramic items, including a Wiccan line of various goddesses, cauldrons and the like.

I’m not sure what I’ll end up doing with these.  They’re not really my aesthetic, and I don’t really have loads of space to store or display them.  I can sort of see keeping them around and using them for an altar in my children’s room…but who knows if I’ll ever even have children?  Maybe I’m just supposed to hold onto them until they find the person they “click” with.

A wonderful representation of the Great Rite

A close up on the kiss. Nicely detailed work, wouldn’t you say?

While I was tooling about the Internet on one of my searches for a God representation, I came across this sculpture.  While it wasn’t quite what I was looking for, I did think it was perhaps the single best three-dimensional representation I’ve ever seen of the Great Rite, and it quickly vaulted it’s way to the top of my “If I had the money and the storage/display space, I’d buy this now” mental list.

I really can’t find anything concrete on who the artist behind this work is.  The manufacturer’s mark notes only that Jai Bhagavan in India mass produced it.  (Jai Bhagavan’s been making and internationally exporting statuary since 1978, for what it’s worth.)  Several websites that offer this sculpture say at the end of their description “design by Bose & Allen, copyright 2010,” but I can’t find this Bose and Allen anywhere.

Views from all four major angles. I have to admit, I’m quite impressed at the detail and craftsmanship of this sculpture.

Frankly, I’m of the mind that someone somewhere adapted images from Maxine Miller into this piece.  Looking at her drawings (or, in this case, the plaques that resulted from them) of the Triple Goddess and Cernunnos, you’ll see that the maiden has her left arm raised up and a bird is alighting on her palm, as does the moon goddess here.  Maxine’s maiden has chains wrapped about her middle.  The moon goddess here isn’t wearing as much as Maxine’s maiden, but she does have a chain wrapped about her middle, too.  The Cernunnos similarities are much more compelling.  Both have long, ropy hair, both have the exact same oak and acorn headdress on their brows, they have identical torcs around their necks, hold identical torcs in their right hands, and grasp identical horned serpents in their left.  They even have the same pointed finger and toenails.

In short, I think that either Maxine has some artwork out there that became this sculpture or someone else was ‘highly inspired’ by her work and created it from elements of her published pieces.

That being said…I’d still probably purchase this piece.  Right now, it wouldn’t have much of a place in my personal practice, though I’d probably make it a focal point of my altar surrounding the Beltane season.  I think that if I did end up purchasing Maxine Miller’s plaques for use in a future Covenstead situation, I’d certainly buy this piece as well, and maybe permanently display all three together.  At any rate, it’s some food for future thought.

Hunting for a God representation, part 2

Having arrived at “Horned God” as a starting point for my new batch of representation searches, I finally have what I call a “google-able term.”  Simply putting that into Google’s image search yields thousands of evocative images.  Narrowing it down a bit with “horned god sculpture” brings up all sorts of possibilities.

With a few days and some ever-increasing googling creativity, I’ve drummed up 18 potential options.  The list could have been expanded a little, but I chose not to include Paul Borda’s work as most of his Horned God pieces are wall-mount affairs, which I definitely do not want.  I also eliminated all bust sculptures, all Baphomets, all Norse gods (horns typically from helmets…not to mention it’s a highly specific pantheon), all minimalist-style sculptures (though these are gorgeous!), and anything that looked poorly constructed.  As it shook down, all the images that made it past those basic filters were all mass-produced on some scale (with the exception of Jeff Cullen’s work), which means no haggling with commissions.

Of the sculptures left, I determined that they largely fell into two main groups:  Pan-style and Cernunnos-style.  Let’s begin by looking at the pros and cons for the Pans.

That’s a lot of Pans.

From left to right we see Oberon Zell’s Forest Faun (Young Pan), and his Pan the Piper.  The Zell pieces are followed by a Museum Store Company replica and another replica from Design Toscana. That especially phallic Pan is followed by a colorful little guy, a 5 inch high Misaki figurine and two cold-cast bronze items. The first bronze is a goat-horned smiling man from Private Label, and the other is a ram-horned scowling man from Pacific Gifts.

Right off, I can tell you that I’d never even consider the two replica pieces.  In the first place, I’m after a more neo-pagan aesthetic than a reconstructionist one, so I would prefer art that was born from contemporary conceptions of the gods.  In the second place, both of them strongly remind me of images I’ve seen in The Exorcist. I’ve got zero chance of connecting with either of them.

Given that I’m looking for a more contemporary sensibility, the two Zell pieces would logically be decent candidates, especially as they’re from the same hands that crafted my Gaia. Unfortunately, they’re both way too cartoon-y for my tastes, as is the little Misaki figurine. None of them seem to represent a powerful masculinity that could make the constant goddess change.

The two bronze pieces are a little more up my alley. In fact, I’ve almost bought them at different times in my long search.  I also have a small history with the goat-horned one: he’s the representation on the Hartwood Grove altar.  He’s a comfortable choice, and he’s clearly physically powerful.  However, there’s also an element of playfulness about him that I specifically associate with Pan and not with the Horned God archetype.  Clearly, there’s not so much playfulness in the ram-horned piece…and I think that of all of these, he’s the one who’s closest to my mental conception of the horned god.  Physically powerful.  Sexual.  Dominant.  Dangerous.  Desirable.  He could be a hunter or a lover very easily, and he would definitely be the type that could stir up some potent change.  If he just didn’t have those stupid pipes, I probably would have bought him long ago.

Of course, there’s a whole other grouping of Horned Gods to be sorted through still, and so I present the Cernunnoses (Cernunnosi?).

10 different representations of Cernunnos

Just as I immediately discounted the museum Pans, so too do I immediately dismiss the whole top row:  Oberon Zell’s Cernunnos, a Gundestrup replica, and Kernunnos of St. Germain.  None of them spark a connection with me, and they’re all “artifact” inspired, and I’m in search of contemporary.  In the middle row, the first is an example of artist Jeff Cullen’s work. He’s the same artist behind the Pan I cringed over in my last post. While I like his Cernunnos far more, I am still not a fan of the artist’s style, and Cullen’s prices–though fair for the quality–are more than I want to pay for something I don’t love.  The second in the line just makes me giggle. Its proportions are ridiculous, and I’m not just talking about the prominent cock. There’s no way I could seriously consider it.  The third in line–Lord of the Wildwood–is VERY contemporary, but he reminds me too much of Jesus, and the fourth reminds me too much of a cross between a totally zen yogi and Herne as depicted in the 1984 TV series, Robin of Sherwood. In the third row, the first in line–The God of the Forest–reminds me more of a Yeti than a god. The second two have more promise than any of the rest. Like my favorite Pans, they are both made of that cold-cast bronze material, and I like their proportions. I particularly like the hunter motif of the first, with the bow and arrows. Alas, his face is far too “Jesus”-like for me: that total, serene calm. The last one escapes the immediate Jesus vibe of the first, but he unfortunately reads more “sensitive poet” than “Lord of the Hunt” or “Lord of the Dance.” I definitely need this God to have more action!

Neil Sims’ Cernunnos

As I’d almost given up with the Cerunnos-styled Horned Gods, I happened to come across Neil Sims’ work.  And I immediately had a “click” moment almost like what I had the first time I saw Gaia.  I knew that I had found my God.

One of the things that immediately captured me was how well Sims has blended animal features with human features.  This Cernunnos doesn’t just have a goat head and legs attached to a human torso.  The animal features blend with humanoid proportions.  The femur length, for example, is just what it should be for a man.  For some reason, I find this to be very evocative of the same simultaneous immanent/transcendent nature of divinity that I discussed when expounding on my connection with the Gaia sculpture.  The god is both man and animal, civilization and the wilderness, hunter and hunted, but in being both he is also neither.

More importantly, though, I find that there’s something about this sculpture that makes me think “movement”, like I’m surprised the statue remains still.  It is, to its very core, dynamic, and that is the root of what I feel God energy is.  This is the image that I can see being the great hunter of the forest, the warmth of the sun, the king of beasts, and the lover of the Goddess.

Happily, I also think he meets my aesthetic wish list!  He has grabbed me, his representation definitely jives with my idea of his energy, and he shares several macro concepts with Gaia being full bodied, highly detailed, and primarily one color with a few accents.  He’s also definitely neo-Pagan through and through:  very contemporary representation with the artistry coming straight from the concept we’ve been developing over the past 60-70 years and not necessarily a literal representation of ancient images.

Sims’ Cernunnos is much taller than Zell’s Gaia:  11 1/4 inches to her 7.  I think, though, that their comparative scales are more equal with Gaia perhaps being larger:  she’s another 6 inches tall from the bottom of her spine to the top of her ankle.  It would be a fairly simple thing to make up a four-inch tall pedestal for her to rest upon to get more symmetrical heights on the male and female sides of my altar.  I think, then, that when I can save up a little disposable income, I’ll snap up a copy of Sims’ work.

Hunting for a God Representation, part 1

So now we know of my great adoration for Oberon Zell’s “Millennial Gaia” sculpture and how strongly it is, for me, a representation of the Goddess.  Unfortunately, there’s another side of the story.  Another major component of what I believe the nature of deity to be is that it is both male and female: that there is, in fact, a God as well as a Goddess and that they join to create The One.

Alas, I have never been able to find a God representation that I believe can stand as a true consort to what is my Goddess representation.  I have been using Oberon Zell’s Bacchus plaque as my God representation in the interim, since I definitely want to increase the Dionysian energies in my decidedly Apollonian life, but I’ve always known that this was not a long term solution.  For years now–really over a decade–I’ve been looking for that other representation.

While I searched, I ended up developing a “wish list” for what my ideal God representation should have.  These are the current highlights:

• He should “grab me” in a similar way that Oberon’s Gaia did. It should speak to me of a core aspect of divinity.
• His representation should match his energy.
• He should ‘look well’ with Gaia.  This does not have to be a matched set, obviously, but there should be some sort of aesthetic similarity.  For example, since Gaia is a statue and not a wall-mounted plaque, He should also be a statue.  Since Gaia is a full-body statue and not a bust, He should be a full-body statue.  Since Gaia is highly detailed, He should be highly detailed.  Since Gaia is primarily one color (green with blue, gold, and silver accents), He should be primarily one color…preferably with a few accents.
• He should ‘work well’ with Gaia.  This is something of a tall order, since I am taking the position that Oberon’s Gaia is not synonymous with the Greek primordial deity.  Instead, I find it to be highly contemporary iconography and born of neo-Pagan poetics.  Therefore, I would like Him to reflect what contemporary paganism has brought to his mythos instead of an emphasis on historical accuracy.

I know.  I’m insane.  This is an order so tall and abstract, it will never be able to be filled.

A sculpture of Pan someone commissioned from artist Jeff Cullen.

One good friend of mine once mentioned that if I’m going to be so particular, I should either learn how to sculpt or save my pennies so that I could some day commission a piece to my liking.

I’ll not say she didn’t have a point, but I don’t think either of those are feasible avenues for me.  Although I am a fairly crafty person and really enjoy creating art, I know where my interests and energies lie.  Even if I did become a competent sculptor, I would never have the skill or talent to make the art I desire.  And I never would become a competent sculptor, for I deeply loathe the mess of sculpting.  Commissioning an artist to create for me would probably yield something quite lovely, but I doubt it would be ‘right.’  Commission work loses something, I find.  The artist isn’t so invested in capturing the evocative thrust of a piece so much as they are in pleasing their client.  Something suffers.

There’s also the fear I have that a commissioned piece would turn out something like this Pan here.  Apparently the client was thrilled with it, as well they should be. This is a Pan with a lot of artistic character. But every time I look at it, my immediate thought is that the hand placement looks like Pan is forcing an invisible head around his prominent cock.  It is a lovely piece, and my association with it is most certainly not one meant by the artist, but I couldn’t stand to go through the whole process of commissioning something only to see something unintentional in the final piece.

I do, however, need a concrete starting place.  In the past, I’ve tried looking for representations of specific gods–Hermes, Dionysus, Odin, etc.–to see what people have come up with.  Over the past five years especially, I’ve found that many pagan artists are bringing contemporary iconography to these god forms, but it increasingly specifies that representation to that God or Goddess.  There is absolutely no way, for example, that Maxine Miller’s Brigid could work as a symbol of that simultaneous immanence and transcendence of the Great God Heads.  Every part of that sculpture pulls on very specific myths of Brigid.  So browsing sculptures based on specific gods has gotten me no where.

Recently, though, I think I’ve had a bit of a break through.  Thanks to working with Hartwood Grove, I am developing a stronger relationship with the God, particularly in terms of how British Traditional Wiccans view him.  I’m starting to see the Horned One not as a specific God with a specific cultural context, but as more as a personified metaphor of a theological gendered truth.

The BTW clan always take great care in framing the God as the Goddess’s consort.  I have always bristled against this language, for I take “consort” to mean “less than.”  Contextually, this word is almost exclusively used in reference to a monarch in which the monarch’s consort is his or her spouse, but does not have the political power of the monarch.  Since I strongly–and rightly–believe that the male and female energies are equivalent, I did not like the implication that the God’s powers were somehow less than the Goddess’s when he is referred to as her consort.  I still believe that our language needs a bit of help, but I’ve come to have an appreciation for this word in this context, for its use does highlight the fact that the gendered energies are decidedly different.  That is crucially important, for equivalence does not mean identical, and that is a nuance that can be lost.

In fact, the use of “consort” in reference to the relationship of male energies to the female might be the most accurate.  In biology, the male is actually superfluous.  Even some multicellular species still reproduce parthenogenetically–or from an unfertilized ovum.  It is routine reproduction among many plant species and simpler animal species, and it is speculated that even more complicated animal species have occasionally produced parthenogenetic offspring; after all, it just takes a happenstance in meiosis to pull all the chromosomes into one ovum to essentially create a fertile unfertilized cell.  It’s statistically very, very rare (and becomes more improbable with the more chromosomes a species has) but it is not impossible.

So, in theory, the female of a species could be genetically immortal since her parthenogenetic daughters would be clones (or near clones since parthenogenesis does not preclude genetic recombination or mutation).  What the male contributes, then, is variety…and variety is crucial for evolutionary change.  If the female is the eternal constant, the male is the eternal dynamic.  He is a consort because he is not necessary to perpetuate life, but he is necessary if life is to be plastic enough to endure all obstacles.  In a way, then, the male also gives life since he is necessary to ensure it endures on an evolutionary scale…and that is what makes his energies equivalent to–but not the same as–the female’s.

I can see, then, why Wiccans associate the God with wilderness and virility and the hunt.  The forces of the wild and of predation are what make him necessary to ensuring species virility over the long term.  And I can see where mythically he would annually succumb to these forces in order to understand the changes he must create so that life can continue the following year.  I can also see how this role would put him in the space of mediator between life and death, between the eternal constant goddess and her creations–creations that are both a part of and a part from herself.

The more and more I think about what the biologic differences between the genders are, the more I can understand and agree with how the Horned God is figured in Wiccan theology.  And the more he becomes my God.

So maybe I should begin with him in searching for my personal representation.

My Goddess Representation

I can clearly remember the first time I saw what would eventually become my Goddess representation. I was still in high school–the early years, maybe 1998 or 1999 as I was not yet driving–and one afternoon I wandered into the closest thing my tiny town had to a witch shop:  Gaia Natural Foods.  In addition to some tofus, yogurts, and all the vitamins and supplements a person could ever want, the proprietor also stocked some things I used in my witchy ways:  chime candles, oils, incense, and so on.  I had probably gone in that day to pick up a few more candles and noticed that in a nook behind the register they’d installed a little corner shelf and had made a shrine surrounding this small sculpture of a cross-legged pregnant woman whose belly was the earth.

It was gorgeous.

The cashier saw me staring at the shrine and mentioned that the statue was of Gaia, and so of course had to have a home in the shop.  I remember asking if it was for sale or if they had plans to carry them, and the cashier replied that no, she was just to watch over the business.  I remember being so disappointed, for by that time–a time before Internet shopping–I’d learned that if you saw an occult item in a store that called to you, you snapped it up as soon as you could because it wasn’t like the stores stocked dozens more in the back room.  I thought I’d never see this Gaia again, and I knew that this image was just about as close to what I felt the Goddess would look like as it got.  I was so, so sad.

My own Millennial Gaia perched on a brick in my front yard.

Now that sadness seems silly, not only because “The Great God Internet” can get us the hook up in just a few minutes, but because this sculpture turned out to be  Oberon Zell’s “Millennial Gaia”.  Zell considers this to be his masterwork, and I think a big portion of the pagan community agrees, for she is definitely a popular representation and continues to sell very well.  In fact, I noticed when I went to this year’s Pantheacon (and got to meet Zell himself, which was so cool for me!) that he’s begun offering a cold-cast bronze version of her in addition to the painted resin one, though the bronze one has yet to be offered online.  He’s also turned her into a plaque, so there must have been demand for that, too.  She’s also often found for sale in non-Pagan places; for example, she’s in the yoga company Gaiam’s catalog.

Eventually, I did happen upon Gaia in another local store–Camp Chesterfield’s Tree of Life bookstore.  This would have been in 2000, as I had just gotten my driver’s license and used that newfound independence to visit places my parents would never take me.  I remember that they were selling her for $80, and I didn’t have that kind of cash to spend.  I went back to Chesterfield to see her every couple of weeks for several months and she was still there.  One day I saw they’d dropped her price to $55, and–even though that was still a lot of money for me to be spending at the time–I figured it would never be better than that.  I also had exactly $60 dollars in my wallet:  just enough to cover her price, the sales tax, and still get a couple gallons of gas…which was averaging about $1.25 back then.

So think for a minute about what I just said.  A fourteen year old girl was so captivated by this figure that she watched for it for two years and eventually spent all her discretionary savings to buy it.  In case you don’t know, 14-16 year old girls have the attention span of a gnat and covet money more than anything else.  The impact Gaia had on me was incomprehensibly huge.

So what is it about her that’s just so captivating?

Well, for me she’s a reminder of the simultaneous immanence and transcendence of deity, and that is a huge part of my spirituality.  This statue is made of all the parts of the world.  Not only is the planet her pregnant belly (with her navel centered on Delphi), but her arms, legs, and hair are covered with the story of all the planet’s life.  On her left ankle, we can see a single cell next to one undergoing mitotic division and a pair of parameciums.  Across both her calves one can see the first creatures of sea life–a trilobite and a lamprey, jelly fish and a nautilus, a giant squid and a plesiosaur.  As you progress past her knees to her thighs and buttocks, the sea creatures segue into contemporary beasts: marlins, whales, dolphins, manta rays, sharks, turtles, manatees and otters.

It’s no accident that the closer you get to the base of her spine, the more mammals can be found.  The entire back of the goddess is covered by her hair, which is a mass of leaves in which a bunch of coils are entwined and various animals are inset.  These coils represent DNA, and they form a phylogenetic tree of life.  At the base of it all is the creature who walked out of the water, and it soon branches into amphibia, reptilia/avis, and mammalia.  Further down the tree are the animals which have gone extinct:  dinosaurs, saber tooth tigers, etc.  The closer and closer you get to her crown and to the front edge of her hair, the more extant the animals become and the “more sophisticated” they get.  For example, the human line shows some sort of prehistoric rat creature becoming a monkey becoming a gorilla becoming man, who sits at the very crown of the statue next to a blue whale: the world’s largest animal.

The front of the goddess’s hair prominently displays leaves from the fifteen sacred Celtic trees framing her face and arms, and tucked within them are important flowers (a rose, daisy, hibiscus flower, poppy, and morning glory with a hummingbird feeding from it), and sacred insects:  a scarab, a spider, and a dragonfly as well as a silver Luna moth to represent the moon and a gold Monarch butterfly to represent the sun.  Each of the goddess’s nourishing breasts has a different theme, as well.  Her right breast is a green and gold cornucopia a fruits and vegetables, while her left breast–or her heart–is the silver moon, which provides the planet’s regular pulse.  Where the goddess’s legs depicted the evolution of the sea, her arms depict the evolution of the forests.  The wrists of her right arm depict simple flowers and fungi, and they unfold to show the giant sequoia trees on her upper arm.  Her left arm shows ferns and small palms which similarly spring up to show a rainforest:  the planet’s lungs.  Her face is an amalgam of all the human races.

The goddess is each of these wonderful things throughout time, and this is what reminds me of her immanence.  She is me as I am her, and she is all that I can see as all of it is her.  And yet, all of these parts come together to form the shape of one pregnant woman that is apart from all the components:  the one that transcends them all even while they remain a part of her.  That simultaneous nature of divinity is so essential to my beliefs that I would not be able to be a believer without it, and I think that this sculpture does the best job I’ve seen at trying to visually represent this belief.

Pagan Statuary: Complementary Representations of Deity

When I was just a baby pagan dreaming of what life would be like when I was grown and could have a house of my own and practice openly (instead of carefully squirreling all my tools and altar items in dozens of hidey holes), I fantasized about having a whole large room in my house to be my temple.  The centerpiece of that temple was, of course, the altar where a pair of matching statues that would represent my God and Goddess would proudly rest.

Obviously, anyone with half a brain knows that you don’t have to have your ideal temple to practice effectively.  You don’t even need much in the way of deity representations.  In fact, I did really, really well for the longest time using two different colored pillar candles to stand as physical tokens of deity…but there is something nice about minimizing the divide between abstract and concrete with closer representations to the image you hold in your mind of your God.

In Wicca–particularly that of a more British Traditional Flavor–we primarily split the divine into complementary male and female halves.  Different groups generalize or specify these halves in different ways, of course.  For example, the God could be more like a generalized Horned God or Sun God, or he could specifically be Pan or Apollo.  Similarly, the Goddess could be an Ancient Earth mother or Triple Goddess, or she could be Gaia or Hecate.  When it comes to representing the Gods on the altar, though, I have found that unless a practitioner has a very strong personal relationship with a specific God/dess, the deity representations on their primary altar tend to be more generalized.  Even if a practitioner does have a relationship with specific deities, he or she often chooses to either maintain separate shrines for them and use more generalized representations on the main altar, or use the general representations in group work and specific in personal work.

Now, it isn’t too terribly hard to find Pagan artists who work to create representations of many deities within a particular pantheon, so if specificity is the name of your game and you’re just itching to lay statues of Isis and Osiris on your altar, your search will be quick and easy, and you’ll probably find beautiful work at just about every price point imaginable.  Funnily enough, though, I don’t find too many Pagan artists creating what I like to call “Matched Sets” of generalized divinity representations.

Abby Willowroot’s Spiral Lord and Spiral Goddess

Perhaps there’s not really much of a market for it, which seems a little paradoxical seeing as everyone has the potential to relate to the general.  However, it’s also incredibly easy for a person with little to no artistic skill to sculpt some polymer clay into more abstract, symbolic figures.  In two or three hours and maybe $20 of materials, you could end up with something  akin to what Abby Willowroot has created with her Spiral Lord, Spiral Goddess, and associated figurines.  When done, you have something that could stand “in aspect” for any specific deity you could imagine.  And, perhaps, one could consider these the most appropriate representations of deity, which will always be at least a little abstract to us.

Paul Borda of Dryad Design is pretty prolific. His Sun God and Moon Goddess are meant to be a complementary set, as are the seated god and goddess on the far right. The middle statue, Brigid, also works well with the Sun God (which also functions as Lugh), for those who prefer a triple goddess figure.

Another route would obviously be to add a little more detail to a general concept.  The pagan artist Paul Borda has certainly done so with his company, Dryad Design.  Paul is a wood carver, and he and his wife turned his skill into devotion in 1994 when they launched their business.  Over the past 18 years, they’ve offered beautiful representations of the gods and today offer many specific offerings from the Celtic and Nordic pantheons.  They do, however, also offer two very thoughtful generic options, though.  For those who prefer a more solar/lunar emphasis, Paul offers his matched set of Lugh (or Sun God) and Moon Goddess sculptures in both a small and large size (one 5-6 inches high, the other 8-10).  For those that prefer a more Wiccan-flavored bent, he also offers a horned forest god, which he calls Seated God, and a lunar goddess, Seated Goddess, each about 8 inches high.  All in all, Borda’s work is stunning and it is clearly evident that each of his creations comes from a deeply meditative, loving place.  For years, I lusted over the Seated Gods in particular, and almost rued the fact that I’d fallen in love with another Goddess sculpture instead.

On the left, Maxine Miller’s “God and Goddess Altar Set”. Authors Raven Grimassi and Stephanie Taylor gave the artist some input in this set. On the right, Neil Sim’s busts of Danu and Cernunnos, which he created to be a pair. He also has a bust of the Morrigan, for what it’s worth.

Very recently I’ve also been introduced to the work of two other pagan artists, Maxine Miller and Neil Sims, each of whom produce brilliant work.  My high priest and priestess brought back Miller’s Horned God and Goddess pentagram plaque from Pantheacon in 2011, and her Queen Maeve has been the coven’s primary goddess representation for about as long as I can remember.  When I was at Pantheacon this year, I had a chance to see the rest of her creations close-up, and I fell madly for her Brigid and her Hecate.  Though the gods don’t have much of a presence in her three-dimensional work thus far, Miller does offer two very nice options for the “matched set” crowd:  her God and Goddess Altar Set and wall plaques of the Triple Goddess and Cernunnos (pictured below).

I–quite literally–can’t stop looking at the wall plaques.  If I had any need for them in my personal practice, I would snap them up this very second, I adore them that much.  Maybe when my finances get a little better, I’ll purchase them anyway.  I can really see using them as the deity representations in a group BTW practice, though not perhaps my own personal work.  I am less enthusiastic about Miller’s altar set, which the authors Raven Grimassi and Stephanie Taylor co-designed (their names are prominently written on the backs of each sculpture’s base).  While they would be lovely focal points for an altar, I personally find something off-putting about them.  I kind of want to give the Goddess a snack–something about her eyes makes her look anorexic and haunted–and the God kind of looks incredibly worried and ineffectual.

Neil Sims’ busts, on the other hand, I find as drool-worthy as Miller’s plaques.  The level of detail is extraordinary, and I see a masterful sense of movement in both that I find lacking in most statues, which–frankly–are posed and stiff.  Sims is a British artist who, according to one rather sketchy looking site, chose to pursue a full-time artistic career after hearing the Sabbat song “Horned is the Hunter.”  From what I can tell, he’s known for his level of high detail and close realism no matter what he turns his attention to–even Doctor Who figurines!  His pagan offerings include these matched busts of “Earth Mother” or Danu and Cernunnos busts as well as smaller busts of the Morrigan and Hecate and a “full sculpture” of Cerunnos.  Sim’s work can be found in a number of places with careful googling, but it looks like in America, two good sites for his (and others) work are Unique Gifts and Decor and Magical Omaha.

Maxine Miller’s Triple Goddess and Cernunnos plaques. The level of detail on these is captivating. I could totally see staring at them for hours and piecing together the legends behind them, much as illiterate Christians in the past used the stained glass windows in cathedrals to learn the stories of their religion. Absolutely inspired work.

Altar Addition: A Candle Hearth

I’ve been following the Etsy store Ant’s Pottery for quite some time now–since 2008!  In fact, I got my first working athame from her son, Jensen.  The potter, Antonia Barry, did remove her shop from Etsy for much of 2009 and 2010 as she nursed one of her sons (not Jensen!) through his final illness, but she returned better than ever.

Naturally, I’m most drawn to Ant’s pagan pottery, which has included all sorts of ceramic cauldrons, bowls (I lust after her scrying bowls), altar tiles, and figurines.  What I find most unique, though, are her ritual hearths, which she created in order to perform hearth magic in a home without a fireplace.

When she first started making them in early 2008, the hearths were really just the “chimney piece,” as I like to call it, without a dish-like hearth surrounding them.  By late 2008, the hearths had become a little shorter, were surrounded by a flat plate, and had a little mantle piece above them.  These days, Ant seems to be playing with the chimney height, has done away with the mantle piece, slightly cups the plate rim so that it might almost be considered a very shallow bowl, and has the chimney surround a beautiful spiral.  The net effect is gorgeous, especially when Ant plays with two-tone glazes.

My candle hearth from AntB.

After drooling over these hearths for almost 4 years–which involved two major bouts of “why didn’t I buy one?!” blues when Ant’s shop went offline and again when it looked like she had stopped making hearths–I finally scraped up the money to buy this beauty when it came up on her site.  I couldn’t be happier with it!

Of course, I’m still trying to figure out how to incorporate it into my altar (where it looks quite lovely) and my practice.  I think that in the long term, it will probably become the “maiden candle” home upon my altar.  I think that perhaps it will someday sit between my God and Goddess representations along with the offering bowl(s), probably on a shelf shrine above the altar’s main working surface.  I think it would be a very domestic little place:  a home for my representations of deity.

I am experimenting a little with using it in my daily practice.  Right now, I wake up, make my bed, shower, dress, and eat, then go to my altar, light the hearth candle, ground, and go about my domestic to-do list.  If I don’t have to leave the house for anything, I let the candle burn until the tealight puts itself out.  I kind of like the idea of keeping the candle lit there as much as possible…but I’m still playing with how safe that might be.

Still, I really, really love this piece and am looking forward to experimenting with it further.

My Favorite Altar Tools: Elemental Bowls

I’ve been maintaining a devotional altar for years now.  In high school it was little more than a pretty feather, a collection of river rocks, and a nice candle all contained in a shallow little blue bowl.  It looked like a pretty little “candlescape” and completely flew under my mother’s radar.  Not long before college, I acquired my first explicitly pagan piece–my statue of Oberon Zell’s The Millennial Gaia–and the more formal altar I have now began to take form.  The most recent ‘innovation’ in its set up was inspired by something Deborah Lipp wrote in The Elements of Ritual (2003).  Early in this book, Lipp discusses how some people choose to represent Fire on their altars.  She notes that “[a] flame on the altar is a pretty intuitive way to represent fire”, but that she prefers “to use the burning incense to represent both Fire and Air” (9).

I loved that rationale.  In my rituals, I’d brought the salt to the water and combined them.  I missed that same reflection when I used a flame for fire and incense for air.  It all seemed like too much fire:  the incense was burning, after all, so the candle was just hanging out, unincorporated and fully redundant given the number of burning candles that usually happens in ritual.  So I fully agreed with using a charcoal in a censer to represent fire, and the aromatic incense itself as air.  For a long while, then, I looked for a nice censer for my altar.  What I ended up with was far more perfect and far more serendipitous.  Funnily enough, I came by it through happening upon my water bowl.

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In early 2008, I was back home living with my parents, working part time, and saving up money for graduate school.  I’d just begun receiving acceptance and rejection letters from all the different programs I’d applied to, and knew that a new start was on the horizon.  I was also fairly prominent as a loose tea reviewer and had become good friends with many of my peers in that circle.  One of them, Alex, acquired a stunning piece of Japanese pottery in February for his teaware collection:  a hagi-yaki piece from the influential ceramicist Yamane Seigan.

A classic piece of hagi ware, this one a sake cup from ceramicist Ken Komatsu

Now, hagi ware is primarily known for two things:  its humble, organic forms and its translucent, white, and uneven glaze.  The running joke among the tea nerds was that hagi looked like pottery that a 3-year-old made and that (hopefully!) someone else ejaculated upon.  We often called it bukkake ware.

Hagi is not something that most Westerners find attractive, but the tea nerds loved it because of the clay that was used.  Hagi-yaki utilizes a highly porous clay, so as the pieces are used, tea deposits sink into the glaze and the clay, changing not only the appearance of the piece over time, but enriching the taste of the tea, too.  Smart tea drinkers, then, dedicate their hagi pieces to one type of tea only.

As intrigued as I was by the taste-enriching potential of hagi ware, I was too put off by the appearance of the pieces to consider investing in any until Alex acquired his piece.  His was an example of aohagi, or a hagi piece that uses a blue-tinted glaze.  It was not just any blue glaze, though:  it was Seigan blue, the glaze that earned Yemane Seigan international fame.  Yemane’s work is incredible:  The smooth, blue glaze seems to actually flow.  Waves of yellow and periwinkle swirl around midnight blue and skim over the rocky substrate of the piece.  The contrast against the coarse clay creates its own eddies of color patterns, and the play over the different clay ridges adds to a rippling effect.

The moment I saw Alex’s piece–an ippukuwan or small tea bowl–I knew it was the perfect water bowl for my altar.  It was so much more representative of the element than any random blue bowl could possibly be; it was practically water itself made solid.  I was in love.  Eventually I bought a very similar piece to Alex’s, though mine was happily more cauldron-shaped and had a pronounced spiral at the bottom of the cup, and it has graced my altar ever since.

My tea-dedicated aohagi chawan next to my altar-dedicated ippukuwan. Notice how the salt leeches through the clay.

Of course, after I began using my water bowl, I fell in love with it even more.  After the first time I used it, I left the salt water remain in the bowl for a couple of days.  When I next returned to my altar, I saw to my complete surprise that the porosity of the clay was no joke:  the salt water had completely permeated the bowl and, as the water evaporated from the exterior, it left behind the salt.  Every part of the bowl where the clay was exposed to air had salt crystals ‘growing’ out of it–even some glazed areas had pin-points of salt crystals!  Of course, my tea friends would shriek in horror, but I love that consecrated salt has now inextricably become a part of my tool.

Once I obtained my water/earth bowl, however, I realized that it would harshly contrast with any of the censers I’d considered obtaining.  Most of these were metal swinging pieces, and looked too sharp and industrial next to my organic little blue bowl.  Most were also much larger than the bowl, and I thought that would tip the balance of yin and yang just a bit.  So I decided to just stay open to the possibilities and trust that eventually I would arrive upon the perfect tool.

Funnily enough, perfection arrived only a few months later just as I was packing to move across the country and start school at Oregon.  As I recall, I was randomly surfing Etsy looking at the Japanese tea ware that ‘amateur’ Americans were producing when I came across a piece called “tea bowl no. 2” by the artist “sunrisemountain”.  My jaw dropped when I saw it.  It wasn’t a piece that I would have been drawn to on its own, but it was the perfect foil to my ippukuwan.  It had the same sort of cauldron shape and a similar foot, but the lines were much cleaner and less fluid.  It had little rosettes stamped in the four “quarters”, which further spoke to a more Apollonian insight.  More interestingly, it was glazed in both a creamy yellow–an air color–and a deep reddish-orange–or fire colors–and the glazes met at strong angles rather than flowing into each other.  It spoke “masculine” where my water bowl spoke “feminine,” a very appropriate differentiation given that water and earth are the feminine elements and air and fire are masculine elements.

It seemed to be a perfect air/fire bowl to me, and a quick consultation with my ruler showed that its 4 inch wide and 3 inch tall dimensions would be about the same size as my ippukuwan, which was 3.9 inches wide and 2.8 inches tall.  Better yet, the price with shipping came to $16.50–which wouldn’t hurt my tight purse strings too much if heat from the charcoal broke the bowl.  So I bought it.  And, of course, I could not be more pleased.  I keep the bowl about 3/4 full of sand, and that provides plenty of insulation to keep the bowl from breaking due to heat shock.  Better yet, that depth of sand is great for supporting incense sticks, which–given the small size of my current room–I’m far more likely to use than loose incense.  All in all, I found a match made in heaven!

My Fire/Air and Water/Earth Bowls.  Could they be any more perfect for their purposes?

Most recently, I acquired two small complements to these pieces.  I’d been using two little one-ounce white porcelain tea cups to hold my salt and loose incense, but they looked so stark and fragile small next to the heartier clay pieces.  I knew that eventually I would want to replace them.

My salt and incense bowls along with my Cartier salt spoon.

At a recent trip to Eugene’s Down to Earth, I found a great solution in the form of two little ‘sauce bowls.’  These bowls are typically used when serving sushi and are used to hold a puddle of soy sauce.  Americans, however, have gone wild for them and use them to hold all sorts of condiments.  Their shallowness also makes them great mise en place containers for spices, so they’re often found in kitchen supply stores in addition to places that have a more Asian slant.  These little guys are about three inches wide and an inch tall, and came in two glazes:  one a brown and black glaze, the other a tan an orange combination, each with an evocative spiral curling down into the bowl.  The black one is perfect for holding my salt and the tan one is perfect for holding loose incense.  I couldn’t ask for a better group of elemental containers, and I love how symmetrically eclectic they look upon my altar.  It was a collection that took a couple years to acquire, but it was well worth waiting for the right pieces.