The Gates of Horn

This was a question I found in my e-mail last week, and boy did I relate to it!

"Douglas, I've been meditating for some time now, or at least I've been trying. My friends seem to be having all sorts of fabulous spiritual experiences, meeting angels, and so on. But I don't see anything. I just sit there watching my mind scamper about. I'm very frustrated. Help!" -- Zatoichi.

Well, Zatoichi, I've had the same experiences. Once I was at a group meditation with a swami in charge and people were told beforehand that they may be asked to volunteer their experiences during the twenty minute meditation that followed. And they did!

In 1991 I was talking by invitation to a group of pagans, mostly Wiccans, and someone raised the question of rituals like the Banishing Pentagram and Hexagram and other practices which seemed to be connected to magickal work based on the Kabbalah.

His question was: What does Kabbalah have to do with Wicca? Isn’t that all just Jewish stuff? My reply, though necessarily long, is still relevant, and may interest some readers. Here it is.

Josh Billings once said “It isn’t what folks don’t know that’s the trouble…it’s what they do know that ain’t so.”

Question: I’ve asked all the Wiccans I know and looked in many dictionaries but I can’t find out where the word ‘athame’ comes from. Lots of books describe what an athame is, but they have no derivation. Is it a made-up word? ( Wordfreak.)

Reply: You were probably looking in English dictionaries. Even as recently as 1989 the Webster’s Encyclopaedic Dictionary with hundreds of thousands of words didn’t have athame in it, though the word has been around since Gardner’s books came out. Now you can look on the Web and find hundreds of places that tell you it’s a black handled knife with a straight, double edged blade, used by Wiccans. Some say that it’s a double bladed knife, which is usually, I hope, an editorial oversight.

Seminar question: I don’t seem to have the will-power to do some of the work. Any suggestions?