Thermal sent me an email including some magick he is working in response to bin Laden’s death.  I pass it on.  I think his message is a wise one.  I am working on a lengthy post on the spiritual dimension of what we call evil, and his post is in harmony with it.  I think what we call evil is real, powerful, and ultimately a thought form fed by all humanity, probably its creators.  Bin Laden fed it mightily, but so did George Bush and Dick Cheney and Pat Robertson and many more.  But before we get too proud of ourselves because we are  better people than those worthies, we should consider that every time we hate, we send it at least a tid-bit as well.

Some Pagans point out that Pagans have no requirement to forgive.  True enough.  There is a time to even things out.  I believe what happened to bin Laden was appropriate. But for nearly all of us living in harmony with all our relations is a Pagan value.  And hatred strengthens all that is out of harmony, both in ourselves and between ourselves and others. We do not need divine commandments from some sky God threatening vengeance on us to do what is appropriate, all we need do is look within in a discerning way, and consider that our world as a whole is sacred.

Mourning a Lost Child

A man was killed this week, and many are celebrating his death.

Many others mourn him.

Whether his killing was the doing of justice or its undoing will be
debated, but it is done. He eloquently advocated killing to achieve
religious or political ends. In the end he was subject to the law he
spoke so loudly. Much has been said about the innocent victims of the
acts he encouraged and funded, and the people they left in mourning, but
I find myself unable to celebrate his death. Instead I find myself
mourning him.

For all his terrible sociopathic deeds, the monstrousness of what he
did, he also was a victim of the hatred he advocated. It captured and
destroyed him as surely as it destroyed his victims. It has no mercy,
and is as cruel to those who serve it as those who are harmed by it.
Indeed to serve it is to be harmed by it.

We will never know when the innocent child who grew into the murderous
sociopath became so infected with hate that he began to work in its
behalf. But the forces which converted him are still here, woven into
the fabric of our languages and religions. A long chain of cruelties
which begat other cruelties has been woven through humanity for
millennia, he was merely one of its latest victims. It may have seemed
beautiful to him when he embraced it and began to work to make more
cruelties, but in the end it crushed the innocence and gentle humanity
from him, and coiled back upon him to take his life.

I will mourn the child who was ensnared and crushed by that chain, the
love and innocence which was lost. I will not celebrate the death of the
monster, for it is not dead.

Even now it is weaving sinuously before new victims, cloaking itself in
a mantle of beauty, calling itself justice done before the ones
celebrating the death of its latest victim, calling itself martyrdom
before those who mourn him. Calling to them to embrace it, and so begin
the making of another link in its ancient and hideous body.

Me, I make a different calling. I call to love, the ancient enemy of the
chain of hate, to help me to throw it off from my own heart.

I call to love to clear the vision of those who would be ensnared by
hate, to help them to see its bloody, death-stinking monstrousness.

I call to love to move in us, to help us to unwind that bloody chain
from our doings, to drop it into the sand it has soaked in the blood of
the innocent, and to spurn it beneath our feet as we turn our hands to
healing the wounds it has given us all with its long binding.