I confess, I tend to believe that potentially all of us can be chosen--by whatever one wants to call it... the gods, fate, ancestral spirits, or the universe--to deliver a certain message(s) in response to a larger collective folk endeavor. When Raven Grimassi put Aradia's words in print, I tend to believe that he was performing a special function for a larger collective. Her energy came alive in those words! This may be due to the fact that a particular individual is more suited for a certain task. Feelings like this may be partly based on our own personal ego, but think of the wealth of riches that many authors, researchers, and a few academics have contributed to this movement(s). Since the old ways were destroyed so thoroughly centuries ago, it takes a tremendous amount of extraction of information from many sources to produce a synthesis of traditions from a distant past.
I tend to believe that mystical experiences can also be part of that idea. At the least, they should be compared to the data that we do have; is the visual perception reflected in congruence with the known facts and evidence? Among many other things, Guido von List was a mystic; and I would have less faith in that if I had not had experiences of my own. I believe that he was--in part--tapping into ancient traditions that existed prior to the arrival of the Teutonic people... the Proto-Europeans. Even he pondered this concept from all of his research... but as far as I know, never openly stated that there may have been more than one historical sub-cultural tradition in places like Lower Austria.
From the film 'Field of Dreams'--which I have not viewed since it came out--the vision of the baseball field in the middle of a massive cornfield comes to mind. I remember little of the film, except that magical field; particularly its unusual location. It was seemingly on the edge of forever; where time and space didn't exist. Unlike other sports, the outer perimeter of a baseball field possesses a strange ambiguity where the play could theoretically extend beyond the wall or fencing. Also, baseball is the only sport that I know of where the geometry goes so far beyond the rigid grid of squares and rectangles. For example, triangle, semicircle, diamond, small circles, square, triangle, small boxes, and even a pentagon! There are even numerous raised platforms of several different shapes; the bases and the pitcher's mound. Also, there is the interaction of shapes within shapes. It's almost set up like a complex altar, such as the grid of Washington D.C. The general consensus is that baseball was invented in 1839 by Abner Doubleday...... yes... a Freemason.
There is much material regarding baseball's Masonic connection, and I have not even looked into any of it. I wanted to go in a different direction with this; something more in line with the Proto-European connection. In other words, not tied to Freemasonry, Alchemy, Rosicrucianism, Western Ceremonial Magic, etc. For once, the spirit of the native believer! Half of the reason that I describe these things is because I want to encourage other folk pagans to look more closely around them for hidden gems within the local landscape; and the other half of this is that I tend to believe that I experienced something of an imaginative reality vision. Something that I had seen in my mind many times... and then it unexpectedly was just "there."
Thursday was a warm day here, and I left the house to get a large cup of iced sweet tea at a nearby establishment. Being a clear evening with an almost full moon, I couldn't resist the temptation to explore a location where I had not actually walked on before. As strange as it sounds, sometimes we can drive by a location hundreds of times... but not truly see it. It is located on one side of a small but well formed valley. It was a baseball field that sits all alone on the side with pleasant rolling hills of dry grass above it. There were lights in the distance which gave it just enough light to illuminate it a bit, but it was still a dark field.
I walked out onto the large field, and out to the edge of the outfield. Just a little bit beyond the fencing was a fairly steep drop... but not a cliff. Below--in the flat valley plane--were the streets, lights, trees, shadows, and modest structures of an old industrial area. Beyond that was the other side of the valley; a much more dramatic black mass of mountains covered with mostly heavy shrub. Above that were the moon and stars. Something looked oddly familiar about this environment, but I was more immediately interested in the sweet tea and not thinking about complex or spiritual things. Slowly however, the basic geometry of the landforms around me came into focus.
Surrounding me--with a 360-degree panoramamic view--was what one could imagine to be a mountain altar. The outfield was a semicircle sitting well above the the flat industrial plane below, but equally well below the grassy hillsides, and still low enough to look up at the mountains on the other side. Now add the clear dark sky, the moon, the stars, the black abyss of the mountains, along with the occasional sounds of coyotes and owls.... well, it was just about as perfect as perfect could be. It reminded me of a scaled-down version of how I imagined what my pagan ancestors saw when they traveled north deep into the Alps to celebrate the eight seasonal festivals and full moons.
Pagans, as late as the seventeenth century, would travel north from the three Brescian valleys and connect with pagans who had traveled south from Valtellina and Val Chiavenna. They celebrated on the mountain passes in between, and certainly must have observed the moon during night rituals. Of course, there likely were permanent locations and altars... or perhaps even one permanent central location. They may have sung and performed time honored rituals from clear back into the ancient past. On a few occasions, I have heard people ask others what event or time period that they would visit from the past... as if they could travel back in a time machine. For me, it would be to partake in one of those mountain rites. Perhaps this experience jogged something deep within my ancestral memory. It was so very perfect: the moon, the stars, the clear evening, the warmth, the mountains, the valley, the coyotes howls, the hoots of an owl, and the semicircle outfield altar.
The grass carpet was so thick and lush that you could just lay down and fall asleep if you wished to. It would not be hard to imagine the plane below as wooded, the night much darker minus the lights, a fire pit upon that semicircle, and of course no fencing... just an altar resting high above the dark abyss below and in the distance. I can imagine people of all ages, some carrying torches, singing and venerating the Goddess under her magical moonlight. The Alpine tribes once made up a Proto-European nation of Rhaetian people; before Germans, French, Italians, or Slavs. However, I don't want to pigeonhole this concept to one particular people, tradition, or landscape. For some, their ancestral altars may have been something more like the outfield from "The Field of Dreams"... or some other natural environment; upon water or woods. It may have been more tied to agriculture, hunting, or fishing.
If we take this particular concept of a semicircle altar and landscape, it would encompass four basic levels of elevation: the mountains, the less physically imposing hills, the lower plane, and of course the altar in the middle. One of the surnames from our village history is "Mitterpergher"... which basically translates to "a person from the middle elevation of the mountain." There would be additional features, such as the moon and stars. All of this could be laid out upon a diagram, in the same general manner as Freemason Abner Doubleday's baseball field. We could have our own version of "as above, so below"... with a half moon and the semicircle altar... or a full moon and perhaps a full circle altar constructed with stones or bricks. A five-pointed vehmic symbol could be added, which would produce a different "as above, so below" along with the perception of a "star" (five-pointed).... or a star with a different number of points.
To be blunt... folk pagans have just as much impetus to form our own symbology--"occult" or otherwise--as those wacky Masons do!
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