Theiatry Pt. 1: This Family Must Be Healed

It happened in my personal life first, of course. I learned who I wanted to be and who I didn’t want to be from my relationships with my mentors, friends, and romantic partners. I learned what I valued and what I had to live up to in order to be able to look the people I loved in the eye each day.

Then it happened in my spiritual life. I found myself drawn by resonance to mystical and magickal traditions I never would have expected, first at the extreme of the Right Hand Path (Orthodox Christianity) and then at the extreme of the Left (Setianism).

I fumbled my way through my grade work at this time as best I could. My primary teacher had recently died, and before his death we had fought and a rift had formed between us. I am deeply ashamed to say that I behaved poorly. In any case, I had little direction. Each part of the Work seemed clear as it was happening but the shape when I looked at it as a whole was also wrong. I was soon to discover that it wasn’t that the Work didn’t fit me, it was that I didn’t fit the Work.

Not yet.

My Saturn Return hit me like a truck. I got sick, or rather the time-bomb that was my body went off. Severe spinal stenosis. I sat up in bed one morning and was suddenly in the worst pain of my life, like an electrified harpoon had impaled my right shoulder. I was in that pain for most of the next year as the doctors ramped up the meds until I could find some sort of equilibrium. I still can’t lift very much weight and I am still in pain almost all of the time, but it’s livable. I also have to watch for certain danger signs and am always one step from going into emergency neurosurgery to prevent permanent paralysis in my arms.

Becoming permanently disabled and being in constant pain put me into a deep depression for a long time. Years. It also forced me to grapple with a deep spiritual crisis. That crisis served both as a psychological and spiritual catalyst for realization and change. I eventually came back to the Great Work more dedicated than ever, but my heart had been broken and a tiny crack, a softness, had been revealed.

That crack widened. It started as work with Demeter, suggested by my therapist at the time, of all people. She knew that I was pagan and that I worked primarily with Greek deities, so she suggested working with Demeter as a way to address my multitude of mother issues. She thought that a mother who would literally fight the Heavens and the Underworld to be with Her daughter and keep Her safe would be a good substitute for my own.

And She was. She still is.

The softness in my heart expanded.

Then, after being introduced by a priestess, I began to work with Aphrodite. At first, our relationship was what I was used to from many years of ceremonial magick…I understood my Lady primarily as a particular manifestation of Venusian energies and as the cosmic principle of love, secondarily as an archetype within my subconscious. When I first invoked Aphrodite I was invoking an idea, and that was how She behaved…as a principle of existence, as the underlying logic of love and beauty itself made into poetry.

But our relationships with people tend not to stay inside boxes. They grow and change. We see the hidden sides of them, the hard, soft, and special bits that are only revealed over time. We see them at their worst and best, when they are exciting and when they are sad, and even when they are a little boring, and they see the same in us. We build a life with them, day by day, and life tends to change us.

So I changed, and one day I realized that I was in a loving, sometimes spicy, and always surprising relationship with a person, not just a principle. That nothing I was doing looked like the Neoplatonic and Hermetic Qabalist tradition of mysticism that I had been practicing for most of my life. I was no longer doing philosophy as religion and mathematics as mysticism. I had long considered myself a pagan, and I had long been a theist in the sense that I believed in the Divine, the Ain Soph, the One…but now it was somehow real. Now I was actually a theist. I no longer believed that deities were mere principles of existence, mere logical abstractions given names and faces for ease of use by the human subconscious and its need to tell stories.

I had come face to face with a living goddess and She had plans for me.

After that, after She had truly won my heart and mind in every possible sense, after She had gently guided me out of mere poeticized logic and into overwhelming, head-over-heels love with Her as what She is, an actual goddess moving in the world, ancient, powerful, and alive, only then did She reveal Her plan for me to become Her priestess. Only then did She tell me what to do to become ordained into Her service.

Once those dams were open, the waters flowed. Hermes and Ares, whom I had been devoted to as ideas for many years, soon made Themselves known as people as well. They didn’t want me as Their priestess, nor did Demeter—that was reserved for Aphrodite alone—but They all wanted me to know that They are people and They have things to say.

So I listened. I’m still listening. The message is both complicated and simple, and there is a great deal to do, but the first half, the part that says what must be done, is this:

All the gods are family.

This family is broken.

This family must be healed.

That is the mission. That is what must be done. The second half, the half that says how to do it, is Ζένη, the Xeno Position, the epistemological attitude that I have put forward as the first position of my work on formulating a philosophy of magick. This position invites us to take on the mental role of the “Alien”, a being from another plane of existence, who has suddenly found themselves with no memories and in the body of an adult human. The philosopher of magick is then invited to engage with the situation of existing, being a person, and dealing with other people from the point of view of the Alien, not in an attempt to gain some sort of unattainable “God’s-eye view from nowhere that sees everything”, but in an attempt to reveal and center the basic phenomenological experiences of ignorance, doubt, uncanniness, and loneliness at the root of the human experience. It is from this basic combination of phenomenological high weirdness and the existential need for connection that the Xeno Position arises to say to the world: “Hello, I am a stranger here and I would like to get to know you.”

The reason I believe in this approach (besides my mystical experiences) should be obvious. I was taught by traditions handed down by generations of mages and mystics what deities like Aphrodite are and what They are like, and I was a good student. I studied hard and I believed my teachers. I believed the books my teachers told me to study. But my life would lack a great deal of its current depth and meaning if I had not approached the gods anew, on Their own terms, with no preconceptions. I simply did short, heartfelt invocations and opened up and reached out towards Them. I invited Them to appear to me as They chose, whether in wonder and ecstasy or in the quiet hum of the world around me as I meditated at Their altars. Rather than tell Them who and what They are, I just sat down with Them and got to know Them.

Of course I knew Their myths, what people like Hesiod and Homer said of Them, and there is value in learning these stories, just like there is value in sharing my story with you today. Stories are incredibly powerful and transformative. But if you really want to get to know me, you can’t use the stories I have shared in my writing to do so. You can’t use the stories others might tell you about me, either, no matter how well they know me. You have to actually do the work. You have to spend the time with me. You have to enter into a real relationship with me from one person to another.

I am saying that we must do the same with the gods.

Only in this way, only in meeting deities and spirits (all of this equally applies to spirits) on their own terms and getting to know them as people, can we learn who they are and what they need.

Only in this way can we learn how to heal the family.

I have used the examples of healing the relationships between the Primordials, the Giants, the Titans, and the Olympians as a start, as a beginning to theiatry, the healing of the gods. But even that barest beginning is a huge undertaking and requires exploration in order to understand what such a series of mystical and magickal workings would actually look like.

Some things are clear, however. Such work will have to be done both as individuals and within community, because the family exists as both individuals and a community. This leaves a lot of room for the idiosyncratic and unique ways that mages tend to engage with both ourselves and each other. Whether we feel most comfortable alone in our temple, with a whole camp full of witches, or somewhere in between, and whatever tradition or background we come from, we can all help heal the family.

I have spoken of the spirit of Empire, which, while a spirit, has defined our age as much as any deity. I have also said that we should not try to make war upon Empire. Now I will tell you why: Empire is part of the family. Like many other members of this family, they have engaged in acts of transgressive violence and caused unnecessary harm to other members of this family. That harm must be addressed and Empire must be held accountable and removed from their position of harmful dominance. But this must be done as we would with a beloved family member who has lost their way and become abusive. I believe that Empire once wore another face. I believe that once they were a true friend. That there is an older name that they were known by when they originally made their pact with humanity. We must discover this name so that we can call them back from what they have become. So that we can help them join us again in love. We must help them tell a story where they can come home so that we can all be a family again.

It is also necessary to address the rest of the family…humanity as a whole, other terrestrial life such as plants, mycelium, and nonhuman animals, and the others, such as the Fae, with whom humanity share the world. We can’t live in a relationship of war and exploitation with the rest of existence and expect the rest of existence to live in a relationship of peace and generosity with us. Everyone in the family must do the work of repair and—as Alecto (yes, She’s a person, too…a very scary person) made clear to me on the last New Moon—everyone must get what they deserve. Everyone must be held accountable and everyone must do the work.

That is the only way that real healing takes place.

So I invite you all, mystics and seers, witches and magicians, to join me in this work of theiatry, this work of healing, this work of love.

Let us heal this family together.