Coincidance - Principia Discordia

COINCIDANCE 59
working within the monotheistic patriarchy of Islam, could not emulate
this, but made her an angel communicating between Allah and man. The
witch covens made her the great mother goddess. Aleister Crowley's secret
teachings, in our own century, instructed his pupils to envision her as the
Egyptian star-goddess, Nuit.
When anthropologist Weston La Barre says, "Mothers make magicians;
fathers, gods," he means that the magic or shamanistic trance is a return to
the bliss at the breast of the all-giving mother, while religion is an anal
propitiation of a fearful god who is an enlarged portrait of the punishing
father. These distinctions do not always remain sharp—Tantra managed to
get incorporated into the patrist framework of Hinduism, and Sufi sexmagic
into the equally patrist Moslem faith of Allah. In the West, however,
patriarchy became extreme; Jehovah would bode no rivals, least of all a
goddess equal to himself, and the magic-matriarchal-oral cults were driven
underground, masqueraded as pseudo-sciences like alchemy, or came forth
only in the form of poetry. Even so, patriarchy is so nervous of rivals in the
West that the poet has come under considerable suspicion at many times, is
often thought to be "queer" in one sense or another and, in the most anal
cultures, often seems to be deliberately ignored or starved into submission.
(If he is kind enough to die young, he is then forgiven and becomes a kind of
secular Christ or martyr, as in the Dylan Thomas cult.) In England, the
prejudice is so bad, Robert Graves notes in The White Goddess, that poets,
when forced to identify themselves—on government forms or in courtrooms,
say—will almost always use such terms as "teacher," "novelist," "historian"
or whatever else they happen to be besides poets.
In Mammon and the Black Goddess, Graves nicely summarizes the relationship
between poetry and the old oral cults of magic and matriarchy:
The poet is, on the whole, anti-authoritarian, agoraphobic and intuitive
rather than intellectual; but his judgments are coherent. Symptoms of the
trance in which poetic composition occurs differ greatly from those of an
induced mediumistic trance; though both seem directed by an external
power. In a poetic trance, which happens no more predictably than a
migraine or an epileptic fit, this power is traditionally identified with the
ancient Muse-goddess. . . .
Almost every poet has a personal Muse, a relationship first introduced
into Europe from Sufi sources in Persia and Arabia during the early Middle
Ages.
Poetry and magic, then, are based on a belief that thought can create its
own reality—which Sir James Frazer in The Golden Bough called the theory of
"the omnipotence of thought" and which Freud, in his comment on Frazer's
anthropological investigations in Totem and Taboo, traced back to the child's