Softcore hex!

Toe of frog and eye of newt,

Judges hammer and policeman’s boot,

Photographer’s flash and a journalist’s pen

And the craft and the daft are warring again.

Hail standing stone and running water!

Hail sexy son and devil’s daughter!

With Magick Wand and Holy Grail

Curse the Wicked Witch of the Daily Mail!

The bards of old wandered through Albion, singing stories and swapping tidbits, bringing news and offering commentary. In the spirit of the Bardic tradition, I offer the above malediction in response to the Daily Mail’s recent attack on druidry, entitled “Druids as an official religion? Stones of Praise here we come”

In this article, Eastern philosophies, pagan and spiritualist religions, and “mind-bending cults”, are lampooned as “totally barking mumbo-jumbo”. Such ill-informed and unprovoked attacks pass for journalism in the paper which used to run favourable editorials about Hitler and Mosely, (“Hurrah for the Blackshirts!” - Jan 1934), and it is popular. 2.3 million people pay for the privilege of reading it, and it is a major shaper of opinion. So what can a conscientious druid do? In the spirit of “What would Jesus do?”, I ask you:

What would the Morrigan do?

Would she write letters of complaint and sign petitions?

No. She would work a curse, and a pretty one.

The tragedy of the old gods is not that the godless slander them, but that their adherents do not take refuge in them. The spirits which once took part in our daily lives are lying about unemployed as never before.

A week later, the even more popular Sun printed “Mind-busting Jungle Drug hits UK”:

This is so ill-informed that I had to ask myself if they really were talking about the same ayahuasca which has recently been seized at the English border, the same ayahuasca that the Brazilian and Peruvian governments have declared to be safe for use and part of the cultural patrimony of their countries. Until a few months ago, several UK groups had been importing ayahuasca openly and above board, as they do in most of Europe. We held sessions in huge Church of England churches in the heart of London, with the blessings of the vicars. It was not a smuggling operation. We were not extracting, smoking and selling DMT crystals. DMT, which is produced naturally in our brains, can be extracted with much less trouble and expense from several easily available plants. Why go to the trouble of a week labouring by a furnace, painstakingly breaking up woody vine, picking tens of thousands of leaves, and then boiling it up ritualistically for days?

Now suddenly our sacrament is being impounded, people are being arrested, dossiers are being prepared, and DMT is “set to become a bigger menace than crystal meth”.

The conservative estimates are that a court case will take 2 years and tens of thousands of pounds, but is it in courts and editorials that mystics should fight their battles? Does good fight evil? Or can it just be present, rather than absent? Things are shit, or gold, or something in between, and that continuum is where the alchemist focuses his efforts.

Druids, alchemists, mystics and magi, work your art in your temples and your labs. Seal your circles and crucibles from the lords of ignorance and opinion, whose work is to criticise what they don’t understand. Let your own work be the Great Work, though it be practiced underground and humbly, internally, in secrecy and solitude, for there is no news here. We have been doing this for millennia.

The Great Work is defined variously as the emancipation of the will, or the path of spiritual evolution, or raising the consciousness of conscious beings. In alchemical terms, it is making gold from terra negra, variously considered as shit, mud or otherwise detestable matter. The catalyst is the philosopher’s stone, and the basis of this is Vitriol. Alchemists made a distinction between common vitriol and the Vitriol of the Philosophers, and noted the danger in swallowing the common one.

The opinions of the stupid and the lazy, distilled into invective, make common vitriol, and if we swallow it, we allow Muggins materialism to poison our work. The seal is broken, and our work ceases to be hermetic. The Vitriol of the Philosophers is something different, and its formula is as follows:

V.I.T.R.I.O.L.:

Visita Interiora Terrae Rectificando Invenies Occultum Lapidem

(Visit the interior of the Earth, and by rectifying it, find the hidden stone)

The nature of the Philosopher’s Stone is to turn shit into gold. As for the nature of Philosopher’s Vitriol, that would be something to ponder.