Quotes

My definition of a devil is a god who has not been recognized. That is to say, it is a power in you to which you have not given expression, and you push it back. And then, like all repressed energy, it builds up and becomes completely dangerous to the position you’re trying to hold.

Oh my twice-great master Thoth,
The Only One,
Who has no equal,
Who sees and hears whoever passes,
Who knows whoever comes,
With the knowledge of everything that happens!
You have made my heart walk upon your waters,
He who walks on your road will never stumble.

Oh people living on this Earth,
And those yet to be born,
You who come to this mountain,
You who see this tomb and pass by it.
Come, I will guide you on the Road of Life,
You will sail with a favorable wind, without accidents,
And you will arrive at the abode of the City of Generations.
The road of the man who obeys God is straight,
Happy is he whose heart urges him to follow it!

(p. 42)

To walk on the road of God is to be filled with light,
Great are the advantages gained by those who
Discipline themselves to follow it.
It’s a monument raised by them on this Earth,
Those who follow the Paths of God,
Those who cling to the Ways of God,
Spend all their lives in joy,
Gathering riches without equal.

(p.43)

Thoth, the God of Knowledge, rewards every act according to its own merit.

(p.88)

As you act so shall you be treated.
To speak a good word is to build a monument.

(p.89)

Happiness is to be found in observing righteousness (Maat).

(p.124)

The West is the dwelling place for he who has not transgressed the Rule.
Happy is who reaches there!
Nobody can reach there unless
Their hearts have conformed exactly to the Rule.
Down there there is no distinction between rich and poor,
Unless it is in the favour of he who is found to be righteous
When weighted in the scales of justice before the master of Eternity.

(p.152)

And this brings up something else. Asking gods to do things for you. This can be tricky. Asking Kali to blat the guy in the next flat who plays his stereo too loud when you’re trying to meditate is a bit like using a tac-nuke to swat a fly with. It is said by some that gods have a different sense of time than we do and our sense of ‘now’ is a lot different to theirs. I got the impression, when doing some work with Isis a few years ago, that she wouldn’t actually get round to doing anything for a few thousand years at least. Elementals are easier by far. Though again, they can be tricky. I blame all this magical psychology. It lessens the impact of all the entities and let’s face it, it someone came up to you and said “you’re only a subpersonality of me, so do this sharpish mate” would you go for it? No, you’d punch them in the face (hopefully) and half the time I think that entities feel the same way about all these jumped-up magicians saying “do this, do that” without so much of a please, thank you or a decent sacrifice.

The incipient magician will confess his faith to a universal religion. He will find out that every religion has good points as well as bad ones. He will therefore keep the best of it for himself and ignore the weak points, which does not necessarily mean that he must profess a religion, but he shall express awe to each form of worship, for each religion has its proper principle of God, whether the point in question be Christianity, Buddhism, Islam or any other kind of religion. Fundamentally he may be faithful to his own religion. But he will not be satisfied with the official doctrines of his Church, and will try to penetrate deeper into god’s workshop. And such is the purpose of our initiation. According to the universal laws, the magician will form his own point of view about the universe which henceforth will be his true religion.

Baphomet wears human bodies as a drag act; lingers on in fading trails of glitter and snail-tracks of secretions.

Why do we hesitate to call Babalon a Goddess of Love? Love has been bled almost to death, drained to an insipid pink when it should be a shameless scarlet. The commercialized face of Love is the very opposite of Lust, a weak, warm fuzz of nebulous good feeling. The arrows of Eros are no longer barbed, but smothered in sentiment. The hounds of Love are muzzled. It is a product without passion, a stupefying cocoon.

Keep thou not silent when evil is spoken for Truth
like the sunlight shines above all.

Here’s my life. My husband and I get up each morning at 7 o’clock and he showers while I make coffee. By the time he’s dressed I’m already sitting at my desk writing. He kisses me goodbye then leaves for the job where he makes good money, draws excellent benefits and gets many perks, such as travel, catered lunches and full reimbursement for the gym where I attend yoga midday. His career has allowed me to work only sporadically, as a consultant, in a field I enjoy.

All that disclosure is crass, I know. I’m sorry. Because in this world where women will sit around discussing the various topiary shapes of their bikini waxes, the conversation about money (or privilege) is the one we never have. Why? I think it’s the Marie Antoinette syndrome: Those with privilege and luck don’t want the riffraff knowing the details. After all, if “those people” understood the differences in our lives, they might revolt. Or, God forbid, not see us as somehow more special, talented and/or deserving than them.
There’s a special version of this masquerade that we writers put on. Two examples:
I attended a packed reading (I’m talking 300+ people) about a year and a half ago. The author was very well-known, a magnificent nonfictionist who has, deservedly, won several big awards. He also happens to be the heir to a mammoth fortune. Mega-millions. In other words he’s a man who has never had to work one job, much less two. He has several children; I know, because they were at the reading with him, all lined up. I heard someone say they were all traveling with him, plus two nannies, on his worldwide tour.
None of this takes away from his brilliance. Yet, when an audience member — young, wide-eyed, clearly not clued in — rose to ask him how he’d managed to spend 10 years writing his current masterpiece — What had he done to sustain himself and his family during that time? — he told her in a serious tone that it had been tough but he’d written a number of magazine articles to get by. I heard a titter pass through the half of the audience that knew the truth. But the author, impassive, moved on and left this woman thinking he’d supported his Manhattan life for a decade with a handful of pieces in the Nation and Salon.

Example two. A reading in a different city, featuring a 30-ish woman whose debut novel had just appeared on the front page of the New York Times Book Review. I didn’t love the book (a coming-of-age story set among wealthy teenagers) but many people I respect thought it was great, so I defer. The author had herself attended one of the big, East Coast prep schools, while her parents were busy growing their careers on the New York literary scene. These were people — her parents — who traded Christmas cards with William Maxwell and had the Styrons over for dinner. She, the author, was their only beloved child.
After prep school, she’d earned two creative writing degrees (Iowa plus an Ivy). Her first book was being heralded by editors and reviewers all over the country, many of whom had watched her grow up. It was a phenomenon even before it hit bookshelves. She was an immediate star.
When (again) an audience member, clearly an undergrad, rose to ask this glamorous writer to what she attributed her success, the woman paused, then said that she had worked very, very hard and she’d had some good training, but she thought in looking back it was her decision never to have children that had allowed her to become a true artist. If you have kids, she explained to the group of desperate nubile writers, you have to choose between them and your writing. Keep it pure. Don’t let yourself be distracted by a baby’s cry.
I was dumbfounded. I wanted to leap to my feet and shout. “Hello? Alice Munro! Doris Lessing! Joan Didion!” Of course, there are thousands of other extraordinary writers who managed to produce art despite motherhood. But the essential point was that, the quality of her book notwithstanding, this author’s chief advantage had nothing to do with her reproductive decisions. It was about connections. Straight up. She’d had them since birth.
In my opinion, we do an enormous “let them eat cake” disservice to our community when we obfuscate the circumstances that help us write, publish and in some way succeed. I can’t claim the wealth of the first author (not even close); nor do I have the connections of the second. I don’t have their fame either. But I do have a huge advantage over the writer who is living paycheck to paycheck, or lonely and isolated, or dealing with a medical condition, or working a full-time job.
How can I be so sure? Because I used to be poor, overworked and overwhelmed. And I produced zero books during that time. Throughout my 20s, I was married to an addict who tried valiantly (but failed, over and over) to stay straight. We had three children, one with autism, and lived in poverty for a long, wretched time. In my 30s I divorced the man because it was the only way out of constant crisis. For the next 10 years, I worked two jobs and raised my three kids alone, without child support or the involvement of their dad.
I published my first novel at 39, but only after a teaching stint where I met some influential writers and three months living with my parents while I completed the first draft. After turning in that manuscript, I landed a pretty cushy magazine editor’s job. A year later, I met my second husband. For the first time I had a true partner, someone I could rely on who was there in every way for me and our kids. Life got easier. I produced a nonfiction book, a second novel and about 30 essays within a relatively short time.
Today, I am essentially “sponsored” by this very loving man who shows up at the end of the day, asks me how the writing went, pours me a glass of wine, then takes me out to eat. He accompanies me when I travel 500 miles to do a 75-minute reading, manages my finances, and never complains that my dark, heady little books have resulted in low advances and rather modest sales.
I completed my third novel in eight months flat. I started the book while on a lovely vacation. Then I wrote happily and relatively quickly because I had the time and the funding, as well as help from my husband, my agent and a very talented editor friend. Without all those advantages, I might be on page 52. OK, there’s mine. Now show me yours.

tonight, the gods are sick of being gods.

aphrodite drinks your worship straight from your lips
and chases it with a scotch, crashes a cigarette,
flicks the ash on the floor and leaves
without so much as a thank you.

you find apollo in a nightclub on 55th and 3rd,
his prophets writhing in the intermittent darkness,
bassline pounding in their ears, liquor coursing in their veins,
smoke and strobe lights clouding their eyes.

you watch as ares starts a fight in a dive bar, takes
a knife from his pocket and uses it without flinching,
smiles as he wipes the blade on his thigh,
smashes a bottle on the floor and lights a match.

artemis spends the night in a jail cell,
blood on her knuckles and on her shirt and in her mouth,
the smell of metal lingering in the air.

athena chainsmokes in an alleyway,
waits for a boy with dark eyes and a mouth like sin.

dionysus shoots up in a basement in the seedy side of town.

hades stalks the streets, hazy in the fog of the streetlamps.

tonight, the gods are sick of being gods
and somewhere in the city
their forgotten divinity waits for morning.

The dreaming awareness amongst the Kongo is similar to the one found in the Græco-Roman world. In the 19th book of Homer’s Odyssey and likewise in Virgil’s Aenid, dreams are located in the realm of Hades and can be either true or false. Penelope dreams of two doors, the ivory gate of false dreams and the horned one of true dreams. Both doors allow dreams to pass through into the world of the living, to deceive or enlighten, to give rise to flights of fantasy or flights of imagination. The Kongo likely perceived dreams as spectres and ghosts and thus approached dreams as they did messages from the ancestors.