Be free.

The Devas of Creation by Cilla Conway (Self-published 2013)

Today I drew The Magician from Intuitive Tarot again. I take this as a reminder that I have not yet acted on the magical working that I was inspired to take during the recent London Tarot Festival, nor have I yet changed my altar. (I have the intention to do this either this afternoon or over the weekend.)

I then drew a card from Devas of Creation and got this guy. He is titled Eros, but Cilla refers to him as 'Lumiel' throughout the text in the companion book. He is said to represent masculine energy...but that name Lumiel set off my Christian-training alarm bells. I know enough to see at once that 'Lumi-el' means 'light of God', which sounds an awful lot like Lucifer, 'Light Bearer',  who is linked to, some say is, Satan. So that triggered my whole knee-jerk 'this occult stuff is the Devil in disguise and what kind of stuff am I messing with here and are all these occult folks trying to trick me into worshiping demons and going straight to hell' response. I have heard someone say you can't be an ex-Christian, just a recovering Christian. I personally know what they mean by that. Thirty-five years of conditioning is hard to shake.

Next, I spent a most unsatisfying half hour googling Lumiel and reading the thoughts of people in various forums asking each other about Lumiel, Lucifer, and sharing what they've heard or read about this issue, all of them fretting and trying to get it right or get it straight in their heads. It got sillier and sillier to me, until at last I remembered my personal position on this sort of thing: I don't believe any of these beings are real. I don't believe in any literal gods, goddesses, angels, faeries, and so on. I believe in energy, but any personality or individuality we give to it is of our own human creation. It's our attempt to conceptualise what we cannot conceive of due to the limitations of our organic brains and finite awareness. In my view, these 'beings' are not separate entities but emanations, like solar flares -- just as a solar flare is an emanation of the sun, these concepts are emanations of 'energy'. I don't need to worry about who Lumiel is. Lumiel isn't anything -- Lumiel is a personification, one of our feeble attempts to conceptualise an aspect of energy. That's it. And I'm not going to hell because there is no hell. And I'm not being tempted by demons because there are no such things as demons. Lumiel isn't Satan because there is no Lumiel and no Satan. This is just stuff made up by folks, because folks like to think they've got everything figured out, and the tidier and more 'figured out' something is, the more likely it is to be something that's completely made up. This is my belief. And what a relief!

And so, Eros, or Lumiel, or even Lucifer if you want to call him that, seems to have been here today with the Magician from the Intuitive Tarot to remind me that I am my own Magician -- we are all our own Magicians, and the Magician is not only the 'master of the elements', he is also a trickster. And we can trick ourselves -- we can pull the wool over own eyes, blind ourselves with the details of our beliefs, bog ourselves down with illusions, worry and fret over memorizing and adhering to someone else's fantasies, which are no more relevant or real than our own. This understanding is not a bad thing, this is a good thing. If everything, all these systems, all these beliefs, are just various attempts to understand and make contact with the very same energy (and I believe they are), then all can be equally valid. They are as useful or as useless as we allow them to be. Which means -- do your own thing. Make your own magic anyway you want. Any way that is meaningful to you. You have all the power, as much power as anyone else. Use it. Believe or don't believe. Believe fervently one day and reject it all the next. Take it up again next week. Do whatever you want, feel whatever you want, look at things however you want, knowing that it's all in the attempt to get closer to something huge and real, that we can feel but can never accurately conceive of -- not while bound to this incarnation. Just do some magic with it.  Don't worry about it. Be free.

'I must create a system or be enslaved by another man's. I will not reason and compare. My business is to create.' ~ William Blake, Jersualem the Emanation of the Giant Albion