Sevenfold Silence

It's been a long-standing goal of mine to integrate my spiritual practice into something genuinely coherent; it's got ceremonial magick, pagan (with a strong heathen streak), and otherkin elements, but I tend to keep them strongly compartmentalized and don't mix them. I'm still in favor of not mixing my ceremonial magick with my paganism, though otherkin, I think, is the closest I come to a bridge between the two. I claim a fey current, which affects how I work my magick, and how I deal with my gods.

I'm receiving a strong push from my gods right now to start doing ancestral work. I did a little genealogy this summer--all of the explicitly human kind, natch. I've got a pretty big/impressive family tree going on right now, and I'm pleased--although this does approximately fuck-all for my otherkin work. What elucidates my human ancestry, in fact, seems to muddy my fey current. My identification with elves/the fae/the sidhe/whatever I am, primarily takes the form of an energetic, symbolic, or archetypal alignment. I've received some indication (from a medium, in trance) that there might be something genetic/in the blood/from the family in there, but I don't hold that to be unconditionally true.

But somehow assembling all of these names, fleshing out this tree, learning locations and dates, all of this seems to weaken (temporarily) my connection to that fey current. I'm not sure what it is--skeptics, I think, could say that I'm looking back and seeing that there's no big mark on my family tree that says GREAT-GRANDMOTHER WAS SEELIE SIDHE but that's not really true; my connection is non-literal, and if there's any genetic predilection to this non-literal connection of course it wouldn't show up on a family tree. (Maybe in family stories, though.) IF anything it piques the curiosity: it makes me want to go further and further back (as though I'd find the connection back there!)

In the process of doing this work I've found myself called to make an ancestral altar, which I've done. One of the most interesting things about having done this and sat with it is that it serves as a mirror for the fey current and reflects it back to me. It's much calmer and more dignified of a current than I'd given it credit for. I'll have to sit with it more, evaluate it, consider it. This should balance out the mitigating effect, I think, that more everyday genealogy has.

(further camping stories under the beltaine 2008 trip tag)

I made mention in the first camping story post to a walking stick, I think, but I didn't go into it--long story short, I went into the woods, got a branch to balance with so I wouldn't fall as I was going up and down the slopes, and ended up feeling compelled to work it over the course of my stay. I attribute that primarily to the land wights, not anything internal. Here, take this, make use of it, play with it--it's from us.

While I was doing that I felt like all of a sudden I understood the whole cold iron thing, which is one of those things I don't twig to (!) instinctively. (Admittedly, though, I was understanding it in relationship to the supernatural world in general, not in relationship to myself and my own 'kinness.) When I brought it back to camp and started messing with the branch, I was offered knives, over and over again, to work the wood. And I turned them down again and again, increasingly pettishly, increasingly repulsed. Knives weren't right. Not my knives, not anybody else's knives. Knives were hard and unyielding and cold, and with this it was between me--my own flesh and blood--and the stick I was working. I'd peel off the bark with my fingernails, heat it over the fire, but metal was cold and unnatural and wrong and I'd have none of it. This was from the forest, and damn it, it'd stay that way.

(That said, I did hand off the staff the next morning to a friend who professed interest--apparently she loved what I'd done with very literally my bare hands. I don't have need for a staff but I wasn't about to work it and cast it off into the forest--it was a gift, after all. I don't know what she'll do to it, how she'll treat it, if she'll carve off the rest of the bark or add crystals or anything. Nor do I really care--working the staff on my own, with my own personal power, was what was important.)

I see that on MySpace there's a blog called Sevenfold Silence already, or, rather, there's a band called SevenFold Silence that has a blog where nothing has happened for over a year. That's interesting, especially since the only other source I can find for the phrase is an essay by Thomas Brooks, entitled "The Mute Christian", providing commentary on Psalm 39. I wonder if they're a Christian or particularly literate band. (I'm guessing they aren't.)

As far as I know I pulled the name of the blog out of my nether regions; I'd heard of neither the band or "The Mute Christian" before. Sevenfold as in the heptagram (and, therefore, otherkin), and silence as in that lack of discussion that's been permeating the otherkin community for the last year or so. I thought about naming it something like "Breaking the Sevenfold Silence" but that was a) long and unwieldy and b) sounded like a power from a White Wolf book. I probably also named it, unwittingly, after my friend and mentor Francesca De Grandis' out-of-print chapbook "Her Winged Silence". Didn't mean to, FDG. Sorry.

So in case you were looking for the Thomas Brooks essay, and/or if you're wondering, because of the name, if this is a Christian blog at all: it's not, really. I'm a heathen but this blog doesn't really have a blessed thing to do with religion no matter how you slice it. Nor is it a blog for the band SevenFold Silence. Nor is it a blog for the band Avenged Sevenfold.

It's a blog for otherkin, and ideas and conversation about such. Yes, really!