halloween as a hermetic tradition

Halloween as a Hermetic Holiday

halloween as a hermetic tradition

Little ground exists between Halloween and Freemasonry. Here and there a costume ball or an orange crepe paper centerpiece marks the passing of the season, but that is probably the extent of any connectivity. For me, the holiday has always been an important one even as my own little goblins have forsaken the quest for candy for more adult like pursuits.

This is the first year of a house devoid of pint sized celebrants leaving me to reorient myself to the signs of the season. Few could argue that the air itself reminds us that it is autumn – it comes from the harvest; the slow subjugation of the sun; the withering leaves. Today, I’ve come to see the holiday in a different perspective, a Hermetic point of view that, in a sense, encapsulates some importance of the season.

For me, Halloween is the point upon which my spiritual year turns. It is the window between the bountiful summer that comes from the victorious sun and its falls closer to the horizon. Autumn is the stretching shadow that foretells of things to come. This is when the cold seeps in, the dead begin to walk and ghosts skulk out from shadows.

As an adult, I’ve found a greater love of the holiday with a deeper sense of what it represents. My childhood memories of the season have paved the road of time with recollections of cheap drugstore costumes imbued with magical powers – powers that allowed me to wantonly go door-to-door in search of candy. These magical powers were not remarkable themselves but the costumes that they came from were. They gave me the power to pretend for a time to be someone else. Besides being a day of candy corn and mummy dogs, the celebration of Halloween is a way of celebrating the opposite ideation of ourselves – to be something more than what we are. In doing so, it allows us to assume that things power, if even if for an instance.

Understandably, this ignores the traditions of Samhain or dia de los muertos as they each in kind have their own specific practices. Rather than celebrating the dead or forestalling their return, I see the fundamental aspect of Halloween as the celebration of becoming something we wish we were. The season reminds us of this with the change in the air that it brings. It taunts us with the slowly enveloping cocoon of winter looming before us.

The lessons I glean from All Hallows Eve are the forces of change at work in both our physical and mental universe as we reminiscence and contemplate the imaginary roles of our past and future selves. It is the polarity that the Kyablion speaks of and the duality that such polarity embodies. From those thoughts go our fears on the flickering lights of the jack-o-lantern and upon the whispers of invisible ghosts.

The celebration of the harvest and of Halloween gives us command over the power of our past and shows us the potential of our future. It puts us in charge of who we are at this moment of being in a way similar to the action of becoming HIram Abiff. Fundamentally, it represents our own juxtaposition of static change giving us, perhaps, a glimpse of some dimensional otherness.

That’s what Halloween reminds me of – melancholy and spice; damp eyes wet with the glimmer of the future; it’s imagining what we want to be.

It’s Halloween, time for us to assume an imaginary mantle of some otherness of who we want to be… even if for just a few fleeting hours.

Paranormal Activity 3 and the Masonic Nexus

occult symbol, satanic symbol, pentagram, symbols in the movieIt’s Halloween, time for spooky movies, and the new film Paranormal Activity 3 does a terrific job in delivering the spooktacular. If you haven’t followed the series, Paranormal Activity 3 is actually the first story installment of the trilogy giving us the foundation of its Paranormal predecessors.

I won’t give away the plot (big house, bumps in the night, and Ghost Hunter esque videography) but in the climax of the movie, the audience is treated to a glimpse of perhaps why the activity is so paranormal and a tease of things to come. Its a fun film and perfect for the season and with the end of the film, I can only say that there needs to be a pre-prequel to tell the story of the apparition/demon Toby and what really is going on at Grandmas house.  But it was the end of the film that I found myself pulling it into the Masonic nexus of freemason symbols.

Neared its end, there came a scene that made me chuckle and find a thread to pull with a link to Freemasonry. In the films transition from a faux cinéma vérité into a DIY shaky camera aesthetic, a la Blair Witch Project, we catch a glimpse of the why the activity is so paranormal. This is the last 15 minutes of the film that Derrick Deane of Fandango.com says “.. will ‘Mess You Up For Life'” which is right about where we find the Masonic connection.

It’s obvious that the sinister Paranormal Activity is coming from somewhere. Its not so obvious from where.  Its not the benign ghosts from the Disney Haunted Mansion, or the night vision sleuthing of Syfy’s Ghost Hunters. On the wall, in the manner of the Satanic Panic films from the 80’s, is the Luciferian leverage to make it really creepy.

If you go watch the film, pay attention to the unicorn.

In the blur between the faux cinéma vérité and shakey cam we, from the vantage of the hapless cinematographer and stepfather Dennis, find ourselves looking for the missing wife and step kids amidst a flurry of things that go bump in the night. There, on the all where the cute and cuddly unicorn once rested is a modified Magical Triangle of Solomon followed by a quick camera pan to the infamous Sigil of Baphomet on the opposite wall.

While, neither of the symbols are truly freemason symbols, the Magical Triangle comes out of a tradition of King Solomon, the wise king and one third Master Architect behind the construction of the great Temple constructed in his name to house the ark of the covenant.

magical triangle of solomonChristian tradition holds the wise king was benign and kingly in status, but when you read deeper into the subtext of Judaism and Islam, as Lon Milo Duquette does in his book The Key to Solomon’s Key: Is This the Lost Symbol of Masonry?, we discover a king, prophet, and wizard, on the level of the great eastern Magi. Duquette writes “…he [Solomon] could talk with animals, fly through the air on a magical carpet, and cause others to fly through the air to him.” One other thing Solomon is thought to of done was summon evil spirits. The Triangle comes out of a work called The Lesser Key of Solomon the King or Clavicula Solominis Regis, a work originally translated by MacGregor Mathers who, in occult circles, was a well known Golden Dawn mage and Masonic devotee in the rebirth of magical spiritualism.

As the symbol goes the triangle with the circle, Duquette refers to is as the Magical Triangle within which Solomon commanded evil spirits. As it was used in ritual practice, it was a place on within which the magician inscribed on the ground to hold the demons he summoned. While it looks good in the movie on a wall, the symbols when used to summon “evil spirits” it is to be made 2 feet from a Magical Circle on the ground in evocations.

pentagram, rams head, sigil of baphometThe Sigil of Baphomet is a bit more abstract in the Masonic landscape. Coming out of the work of French Occultist Eliphas Lévi, the pentagram with a rams head is more a device to illustrate (represent) evil than serve as any summoning symbol. Often the illustration includes the words Samael and Lilith which are inscribed in the middle and come from the work La Clef de la magie noire, by French Occultist Stanislas de Guaita. Guaita was a student of Levi’s work and elaborated in image to Levi’s conception. The Church of Satan website says of the symbol “…oriented in the opposite direction, the pentagrammatic Star is nothing more than a symbol of iniquity, perdition, blasphemy: its two points in the air become the horns of the foul Goat threatening Heaven, and whose head is framed with the stellar pentacle, with its low ears in the side branches, and its beard in disorder in the single lower point.”

Levi’s work, in time, became important in the occult world at the rise of spiritualism in the late 1800’s along side with tarot cards, Ouija boards, astrology, and séances. Evidence of Levi’s influence can be traced into the workings of the Golden Dawn which is in and of itself an extrapolation of Masonic degree work.

So, with those two images at the end of the film, from an occultist’s point of view, it’s easy to see the film maker’s idea of connecting the Paranormal Activity to some form of magical summoning from which the terror ensues. Without a doubt, the two symbols have been absorbed by the black magic community and fallen into the material culture of all things evil, with Paranormal Activity 3 becoming the latest instance. As viewers watch the film and begin to ask themselves the meaning of the two symbols, it makes me wonder if it will incite another decade of Satanic Panic as it did in the 80’s or if the sinister black magic of the cinema will be treated as just another work of cult fiction made to titillate the timid with the evils of witchcraft and black magic shrouded in the horror things that go bump in the night.

 

Freemasonry and El Día de los Muertos

Mictecacihuatl

Mictecacihuatl

Most holidays can be associated into the Masonic calendar and celebrated without much connectivity to the fraternity, patriotism and religious veneration aside.  One holiday, not widely celebrated in the U.S., comes to us from the south in the form of a celebration (and perhaps veneration) of the Dead in the Mexican tradition of Día de los Muertos.

Suggested to have origins in the ancient past, the celebrations roots grow out of the distant Aztecs dedicated to the goddess Mictecacihuatl, who is the queen of the Aztec underworld and watcher of the deceased’s bones.  Today the celebration is a hybrid of this ancient practice and the more modern Catholic celebration of the All Saints Day, which venerates all known (and unknown) Catholic saints.  In this Latinized tradition, the feast extends to the remembrance of all those who have passed in the previous year to remember their spirits.

The resonance to Freemasonry comes in the veneration of the idea of Hiram Abiff, the Grand Master himself, as the fraternity venerates his role in every Masons making.  It strikes me that the idea of veneration is truly at the heart of our being.  Not to say that it is a ritualized worship, but rather a means of remembrance of his spirit upon the fraternity.

Día de los Muertos altar

Traditionally, Día de los Muertos is celebrated with the construction of private altars to honor the deceased, the making and decorating of sugar skulls which is a gift to both those still living and those departed, marigolds, and the favorite foods and beverages of the departed.  The meaning behind the offerings of food is representative a welcoming gesture (called ofrendas) to bring the departed with the foods spiritual essence.  Further, the celebrants go upon visitation to their graves with these as gifts and stand watch for their spirits through the night.

Again, this resonates with the tradition of Freemasonry, in that it is in the spirit of Grand Master Hiram that all Freemasons strive to emulate and represent, and it’s through the ceremonies of the degrees and that his essence is to be imparted through his wisdom and actions.

Día de los Muertos Catrina figures

Día de los Muertos Catrina figures

Also, there is a tremendous symbolic connectivity in the use of the skull and skeleton imagery, in that their application in the Día de los Muertos tradition closely follows its use in the Masonic tradition as a remembrance of the place where each of us is destined for.  Further, that no matter our status in life, we all are equalized and made to look the same in death.  The Calavera mask (skull mask) and the full calacas (skeleton) led to the more recent Día de los Muertos attribution of the Catrina figures, which are today a prominent inclusion to the day’s celebration.

It is in these symbolic gestures that I suggest Día de los Muertos most resonates on this most spooky of holidays, and that in the giving of sugar treats to young ghouls and goblins to pause for a moment and reflect on the passing and upon the spirit of those brothers who have passed before us and to leave one sweet treat should their spirit be passing by.

In memory of the spirit, for a moment forget the reality of ones life lived and instead remember their presence of spirit.

Happy Halloween.

Día de los Muertos sugar skulls

Día de los Muertos sugar skulls – Photo by Glen Van Etten, licensed under Creative Commons