Tiernan

You could be Elven if…

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[Written by Tiernan and Robin. Taken from the TNO archives, Issue #1, October 1995. ]

  1. Are people spooked when you walked up behind them and they never heard you coming?
  2. You are always the first one to hear something in the distance (ie: aproaching car, person, storm…)
  3. You can smell a troll for miles and miles and miles…
  4. You couldn’t care less about gun control as long as they don’t outlaw bows.
  5. You think “Lord what fools these mortals be” should be in Bartletts Quotes.
  6. You are frequently offered ‘Santa’s Helper’ jobs at Christmas without an interview.
  7. Your best friends are nymphs, pixies, and fairies.
  8. You think trees are a great place to live, and holes in the ground are for worms and hobbits.
  9. Your friends cat, who hates EVERYONE including your friend, loves you.
  10. You HATE ear jokes
  11. You catch yourself referring to David Bowie as ‘cousin’
  12. The only iron you care to work with is the one that takes the wrinkles out of your clothes.
  13. You can smell what kind of mood the people around you are in.
  14. You HATE plastic.
  15. You LOVE mushrooms.
  16. You can be spun around at night with a blindfold on and you stop spinning pointing to true North every time.
  17. You find yourself arguing that Vulcans and Romulans are your long lost cousins with a Trek fan.
  18. Almost no-one understands your sense of humor
  19. Trolls stress you out.
  20. You have pet dragons.
  21. You would rather listen to bird songs than the radio.
  22. You can sleep on the floor, ground or a wood waterbed, but not a metal frame bed.
  23. Orcs are the cousins you don’t talk about.
  24. You have a fascination with edged weapons.
  25. Most of your clothing has ties and laces instead of buttons and zippers.

New Age vs Otherkin Community

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Back in the very late 70’s and very early 80’s, when I was first getting into the New Age thing, it seemed to me at least with regard to the people I came in contact with that the spiritualist/new age movement was about working toward enlightenment. Methods for doing that inner work became very popular, such as TM, yoga, Zen… at least in S. Cal where I grew up (and lived most of my life). The focus seemed to me to be very much on the fact that you had to find your own inner way, that there were tools to help you do that but they were intended to be just that: tools, not crutches.

Along about the mid-80’s the whole new age thing began to really catch on out there in a major way, and all of a sudden there was an influx of these new ideas supposedly being represented by “channeled information”. Suddenly it seemed like everywhere you looked, someone was channeling the 4 or 8 or ten thousand year old spirit of someone else from Egypt/Atlantis/Lemuria with information that was supposed to make us all better in one rather expensive weekend. Or on a smaller scale all you had to do was look in the back of your local new age magazine or newsletter and there were hundreds of “psychic astrologers” or “psychic channelers” or what have you with All The Answers, for a fee ranging anywhere from very nominal to outrageously exorbitant. Among these there were a few who had good information, and the vast majority were in it for either the money or the ego trip of being viewed as an Ascended Master of some sort. (I’m thinking of people like JZ Knight or Lazarus, etc, who IMO are colossal charlatans).

The main problem with most of what was being offered was that it dangled the promise of achieving in a short period of time the level of wisdom, enlightenment and self-understanding that the more traditional paths told you would take years of work. (Yasssss, people, can you say Ashtar Command and ye are HEEEEEaled I say, I place my hand upon your forehead and say the magic name of Ashtar and you are HEEEEEaled….). The problem was that some paths don’t have shortcuts because the journey is the point. Cut out the journey, and you’ve cut out the reason for walking the path in the first place. But in this age of drive-thru and disposable and instant everything, anyone who offers you (generic you) the Answer To It All in a matter of days with no commitment of time and effort on your part is going to attract a certain amount of yous who want the result without doing any of the work. People like that are *always* going to have adherents, many of whom will absolutely swear by them at first.

What happens when you find out that your problems are still there, your life still sucks, you still get depressed and you still have no idea who and what you truly are inside, underneath all the layers and labels, and you find you have learned nothing to help you cope? Most folks end up searching for the next instant-enlightenment gimmick and never end up doing any of the work to discover their own internal framework. Disillusioned and angry, they turned away from what they had once embraced in droves and the new age community obtained a very bad name that some of it’s adherents don’t deserve. I now see “fluff bunny new age” being used as an insult, because when most people think of “new age” they think of “white light dingalings” drifting around offering fluffy and unrealistic solutions that people no longer believe in.

It didn’t work for Christianity in 1890, it didn’t work for psychology in 1920, it didn’t work for Buddhism in 1985. Why do people think it’s going to work for Otherkin in 2001?

This has a lot to do with why I’m so bitchy about the “spoonfeeding” and why I see it as pointless at best and dangerous at worst. What is going to happen to people who’ve fallen into the whole coddle-the-newbie trip when the coddler gets bored with the game, and hasn’t helped anyone do the real work of developing their own inner framework? It’s very easy to criticize me for my own critical comments about the spoonfeeders, but perhaps placed into this overall context you can at least understand my concern. I didn’t *have* anyone to coddle me when I Awakened, I was alone out there. But I worked my ass off to Become.

Later, I found the Silver Elves and they gave me support and friendship by showing me that I wasn’t alone and that what I felt and experienced wasn’t weird for who and what I was… but they didn’t tell me how to walk my walk and they didn’t tell me what the things I was thinking and feeling meant. They continued to encourage me to do my own exploring and understand who I was in my own unique way. That’s what newbies need, just not to feel like they’re alone and to be encouraged to find their own Song. That’s all they need, and if we really give a rat’s ass about their own journeys rather than feeding our egos at their expense, that’s all we’ll realistically offer. We can’t GIVE them answers because our answers may not be the right ones for them. We can tell them where *we* looked… I found many of my own answers among the philosophies of Zen … but we can’t tell them that they’ll find their answers in the same places we found ours because everybody got to march to their own drum. I strongly believe the only thing we should be doing is letting people know we understand and giving them a place to air out their own thoughts and get some intelligent feedback and good, solid critical but kind questioning to give them some objective perspective… and the occasional kick in the ass when they need it. There’s tons of websites out there, let people find their own truths among what’s presented there. We aren’t human, but we cannot discount the human philosophies as useless for our own journeys because some of the experiences humanity has are universal. There are fewer resources for kin than there are for humans, but who says kin cannot benefit from human experiences? The only way people will know what Sings to them is to just start reading and searching and looking. Telling them what will and won’t sing to them is something the coddlers are doing for themselves, not for the new kin.

I don’t want to sound boastful, but a large part of why I feel so strongly about this has to do with my own personal experiences of the past couple years. My experiences from that time period tore at the very fabric of who I was and what my life was. I feel very strongly that had I been spoonfed and coddled and handed this vision of my “trueform” those events would have destroyed me. As it was, they came very close to doing so anyway but by that point I had invested a great many years in doing a lot of slow, patient work to Know Myself, to understand who and what I was down to the bone and deeper. I have this solid, strong framework of self built on years of learning to understand myself, my feelings, my ideas, my beliefs, my reactions, etc… and when the day came that I felt entirely cut adrift from the paths I had believed in and the places I thought I was going, I still had that inner sense of self and strength to hold me through it. My “time in the Desert”, as I have come to think of it, has been a time of great personal growth and a valuable experience that has enriched me in many ways. I am still IN that time, actually. I do not really know where my path will lead me next or where to even start looking for it but =that’s okay=. Because whether I’m in the desert or walking a path, I am still Me. And what I’ve learned over the years has taught me that the best thing for =me= to do when I’m not sure which direction to walk in, is to find a nice warm rock in the sun and just sit and Be.

I could not have learned that by dint of someone doing the armwavedance over me in a weekend. That is the product of years of meditation, study, practice, methodology, magic and inner Journeying.

You can call me many negative things, but you can’t say I have a weak sense of self.

From the Heart Out

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Ed: Every so often when talking about becoming aware, someone expresses the opinion that things have become, in some ways, too easy for newcomers to the otherkin scene. At which point someone asks, why should they be hard, what’s wrong with helping others…

It’s not so much that I think things have to be hard. On the contrary, I don’t think they have to be hard at all. What I do think is that some things have to be done for oneself, that they cannot possibly have the same degree of meaning for you if you allow someone else to do them for you.

When I was going through my Awakening, I was the only person I knew who was Sidhe. I had two choices: Decide I was nuts, or reach out. So I reached out, and while I didn’t find anyone “like me”, I found people in the pagan community who were willing to listen and be supportive of my search for my own answers.

They did not, however, blindly accept me without question simply because I said so. They challenged me to think about what I felt, to become aware, to experience myself. They asked me hard questions: Why do you think you are Sidhe? What makes you believe you are something other than human in spirit, and not just using it as an excuse to feel superior?

Why indeed. Naturally I threw the kind of little hissy tempertantrums that many are so very familiar with these days – how dare you question my beliefs, you’re so insensitive, I’m trying to cope with what I am and you just want to tear me down, my truth is my truth for me, yada yada. And then one day one of my friends said to me, “Look, asshole, I’m not trying to tell you I don’t believe. I’m trying to make you think about why you believe, because if you are what you believe you are then you have a whole new perspective to work with and don’t you think you’ll work with it better if you understand it from the inside out?”

Oh.

Yeah. That changed my perspective radically. I quit trying to be so damned defensive and instead tried to understand it from the heart out instead of from the skin in. Instead of trying to remember who I was, I tried being who I was – and found that remembering came naturally with that. Instead of trying to fit myself into a label that “defined” what I was, I explored what I was and didn’t worry about the labels – and found that there was a resonance with one thing in particular (Sidhe) and a couple of other things more peripherally. That led me to explore the mythologies. But at the same time, the mythologies didn’t define me because the hard questions my friends taught me to ask myself had already helped me define myself. What the mythologies did was enrich the experience and give me a cultural perspective.

I know that not everyone feels the “cultural perspective” thing is relevant or important. And it may not be for some people but it is for me to a degree that makes it hard for me to understand how the cultural perspective thing can be unimportant to someone – because it gives me some overall context for understanding the very way I think and react. Speaking here of incarnate otherkin rather than bloodline otherkin – I tend to believe that the soul has no “race”, and that by this token we are either all “other”, or none of us are. I don’t think there are very many souls who have only incarnated as a single race every time. What I believe sets those of us who identify as “other” off from those who don’t is not that we were once in another lifetime something other than human, but rather that the lifetime(s) we spent as other races so strongly impressed us at the soul level that even with the passage of cycles we still identify with those races more than we do the one we were culturally born into.

I find it difficult to understand how someone can claim to know they are a thing without any effort made to understand themselves from the heart out. If you look at a list of “you may be otherkin if…” and you try to match up what you are to what is on that list, you are trying to understand yourself from the skin in. This is useful only to an extent – it could possibly be a reasonable starting point. But if you want to understand who you are – not who your race is, not who your grandfather is – but who you are regardless of race or origin – you need to understand from the heart out. When you understand who you are from the heart out then the challenges to what you believe don’t threaten you. They become food for thought. And opportunities to understand yourself even better. And then it’s not “hard”, because it’s fresh and fascinating and enjoyable.

I believe the drive to understand oneself is an integral part of being aware of one’s Otherness. One of the things that seems to spark Awakening is the realization that one is not like others, and the desire to understand why. I have run across a few who call themselves Other who say they feel no need to understand ThemSelves, but I question if they are truly feeling the pull of Otherness or simply adopting the cloak because it’s shiny and pretty. How can you even wonder if your soul is Other without a drive to understand what that Otherness is? How can you claim a thing when you do not even want to know what that thing truly is? Being Other is not like being Goth, it’s Not Like you can just decide tomorrow you don’t want to wear this or that color all the time and presto, you aren’ t Other anymore. If that is all being Other is to you, then you aren’t Other. And so when someone comes on a list and says, “I think I’m (fill in the blank), what do you think?” I say to them, “Why do you think that? What makes you believe this? Why do you define yourself as this as opposed to human?” And when I am met with “how dare you question my reality?”, my response is, “I dare because I’m not trying to tell you I *don’t* believe, I’m trying to challenge you to understand why you believe.” So that you can learn who you are from the heart out. Every Otherkin I have met who truly *scans* Otherkin has such a burning hunger to understand why they feel and believe they way they do. That you can be so different and not burn to know why escapes me.

When someone else comes along and says, “naughty, naughty bad Tiernan being so mean and nasty to the poor widdle newbie – here, widdle newbie, you have X color eyes and phantom wings and Y memories, ergo you must be Z, wasn’t that easy?” I wonder how much of that reaction is a true desire to help, and how much is a desire to control, to be thought of admiringly, to be looked up to as a mentor type. It’s like Impressing hatchlings – you can convince yourself you’re very powerful if you have a whole crop of ‘kin who think and believe and perceive exactly the way you do – but how valuable is that experience going to be if someone has spoonfed it to you? And then it’s “go here to this website, go there to that website”. Websites are nice starting points but a true mentor doesn’t ment by pointing someone at a website and saying “go read this list and come back and tell me which one you think applies to you” – that’s goddamn lazy and if you’re too lazy to take the time to listen to what someone says, you have no business trying to mentor them. A true mentor says, “Tell me what you think. Tell me why you think that. Tell me where you heard that….”

A true mentor learns as much as sie teaches, and uses the tools appropriately. You cannot cannot cannot tell someone else what they are – if you do, you are lying to them. Oh, you may be correct – but you are still lying to them because your intent is false. If someone had told me I was Sidhe before I Understood it from the heart out, how much would it have meant? Would I have grown? Would I have learned? No, because I wouldn’t have done the footwork to try and understand why I felt/thought/experienced the way I did. I wouldn’t have come to Understand the culture that so impressed my soul that it continues to resonate thousands of years later, above and beyond any other I lived in. From the heart out.

Does Magic Work?

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Popular fantasy-fiction and childhood fairy tales have taught us a certain
view of what constitutes magic. Popular psychology discusses the concept
of “magical thinking”, or unconnected cause-and-effect thinking (such as
“if I do A then B will result” with no concrete connection between cause
and effect) as a barrier to true psychological growth. Many of us have
memories of magic that responds immediately and concretely to our
workings. What do all three of these have in common? All three of these
descriptions do not accurately describe what magic is and how it works on
Planet Earth.

For the purposes of this post I will stick to this time and place, this
reality here-and-now. Discussions of what magic did and how it worked in
other times and places are I think best left to a different post.

A large part of magic here consists of what can be loosely termed “mental
alchemy”. To put it into simpler terms, the magic worker creates the
process of magic by altering one’s own perceptions. Thus, magic here works
best when applied to oneself or one’s own situation.

Magic here is both very powerful and very, very subtle. It is internal,
drawing as much upon the will and consciousness of the practitioner as upon
the external energies of the world. The process of magic must therefore
take into consideration both the true will of the practitioner and the
ambient energies available to fuel the process, or the process
fails. Hence, the prime commandment for the successful working of magic:
“Know Thyself.”

Self-knowledge is critical to the success of magical working. You must
first and foremost know what you truly desire, and to know this you must
know who you are. By who you are I don’t mean what spiritual race; that
is almost incidental. I mean you must know how you will feel, how you will
react, what your philosophies are, what does and does not matter to
you. You must know all the light and dark sides of yourself and be at home
in your own skin. You can of course work magic successfully without this
self-knowledge. It happens all the time. Without it, though, your efforts
will produce unexpected or inconsistent results. Knowing oneself is thus a
primary focus and goal for successful magic, and it is one you would
ideally be working toward your entire life. Magic is powered by the
energies of where you are but it is focused and directed by your own
consciousness, and your subconscious. If you undertake a magical
working to bring about something you do not truly desire for yourself but
rather have convinced yourself you should want then at best your working
will fail. At worst you’ll find yourself in a situation where you now have
something you either don’t like, don’t know what to do with or got at a
price you wouldn’t have paid had you known.

I’ll relate a tale out of my own experience. Samhain 1992 I did my usual
yearly solitary ritual for the coming year and to bid farewell to the
passing one. One thing I had been trying to accomplish for about three
years at that point was to be able to sell my house and move to Connecticut
to be with the man who is now my husband. To that end, when I made my
yearly intentions I poured a huge amount of energy and passion into forming
that one. All the signs indicated that my request had been Heard and
favorably looked upon. This was in October. By March of 1993 I was indeed
living in Connecticut, however the circumstances that brought that about
were in retrospect so painful and difficult that had I an inkling
beforehand I’d have left well enough alone, and brought this change about
in some other, more mundane way. Looking back, I realize that I had
without realizing it projected some of my frustrations with my then-current
situation into my working, and that when I made my intention I had
deliberately left the reality of those situations out of the picture
instead of incorporating them into the picture in a responsible way. Yes,
the magic took those things out of the picture … in a painful way. So,
the importance of Knowing Thyself was brought home to me very, very sharply.

A critical and fundamental key to magic is to embrace the understanding
that your subconscious is a powerful tool which can be programmed. It is
for this reason that visualization is such an important tool in your
magical repertoire. You can pick up a powerful obsidian athame, make a wand
out of oak and copper, bear a silver sword and drape yourself in crystals
all you want; if you can’t visualise your intention then you can’t program
your subconscious to work on your behalf in making that intention a
reality. Again, knowing thyself is paramount to that process. One
effective technique for programming that I have found particularly useful
is to spend some time in meditation, focusing on what I am seeking to bring
about in my own life and then spending some time letting the images and
thoughts flow around that intention. This assists me in discovering if the
intention is something I truly want. I often do this several times and it
has become part of the mental preparation process for me. Once I have
explored those thoughts and images I try to anchor them as firmly as
possible into my conscious reality. One way of doing this is to embark
upon a pre-ritual meditation using music, incense, etc… things that will
bring you somewhat back to your physical reality. I then enter into the
meditative state with these reminders around me of the physical universe I
inhabit, and once again focus on the images and thoughts I have discovered
through my earlier meditations. By holding those images while remaining
aware of the physical universe around me I can bring them into my conscious
thought process and anchor them there.

During the ritual process, as I form my intentions and visualize them I
return to the thoughts and images I anchored during my pre-ritual
meditation. By now these will have been reinforced several times and have
become part of my conscious experience as well as my subconscious one. By
reinforcing this I am in effect programming my subconscious mind to bring
about in me the state of mind that will allow me to embrace the changes I
am seeking to make. Once my ritual has ended that subconscious programming
remains and will continue to effect the things I do and the decisions I
make. Over time this will ideally trigger me to choose courses of action
that will in the end bring about my desire.

It can be argued that this isn’t magic, it’s psychology. And yet magic and
psychology go hand in hand in this context. Because we are the prime
ingredient in any magical working, the psychology of how we think and
function is inextricable from the process. Knowing thyself, knowing how
you think and feel truly, understanding what it is you want and what you
are willing to do to accomplish it is the difference between success and
failure in magic. Otherwise you can be surrounded with the most magical
flow of energies ever found on Planet Earth and you lack the tools and
understanding to do anything with that. Magic exists, but only that. It
is a static force until we make it an active, dynamic force in our own
realities.

Magic exists, and it works. The magic of this world is a powerful and
subtle force. But we must use the proper tools to utilize it and the
primary tool is our own mind. Proper use of the tool requires abandoning
the old ideas of what magic should be, and growing in one’s understanding
of what it is.