What is 'Mystery'?
“The King of the Waning Year sails o’er a sunless sea,
The Goddess draws Him to Her as he enters the Mystery...
She wraps her cloak around Him, and offers Him her Craft,
She says: ’Do not be fearful as You go into the Dark’...”
(Words and lyrics: Shiena Phillips / Silver on the Tree; 1990)
What is mystery?
- Mystery is experiential; and that experience is emotional, psychic, numinous...
- Mystery is pre-rational, non-verbal, non-reductive. Mystery cannot be understood, only entered into and experienced and lived...
- Mystery is expressed in symbol and myth, poetry and art, the riddle and the koan...
- Mystery is the Truth hidden in plain sight...
- Mystery is the affirmation that there is more to life than just...
- Mystery is the “!”
Mystery is not the same as secrecy: Secrecy is almost always about the manipulation of information for the purposes of power and control. The Mysteries are secret because they cannot be spoken of...
Speaking of The Mysteries gives the impression they are understandable, definable, reducible. The secrecy of the Craft is not a hiding of information from others - it is saying “I can’t tell you anything because it would just be words - you can’t understand unless you experience it first!”
How many of us have been dissatisfied by love because it did not fulfill the expectations raised in us by Popular culture? How many Marriages end because the “hearts and Flowers” period ended? Because we feel we know what love is - that we understand it's mystery -we try to limit it, to rationalise and control it; when the mystery of love doesn’t fit our expectations, it appears that some of us abandon it and pursue an unreal ideal...
The Mysteries are the same - They must be experienced for the first time in innocence and naivete - without the filter of expectation or rational definition. If I try to explain The Mysteries to one who has not first experienced them, I deny them the right to ever truly experience them for themselves - they will always carry my explanation as a filter over their own experience: The Mystery of the Chalice and Athame can only be known by drinking from that Cup - In trying to understand them without first experiencing them we build a barrier of supposed understanding which prevents us from truly experiencing them for what they are.
That is why as Priests of The Craft we hold It and The Mysteries it holds Secret; and that is why entry into the Craft and its Mysteries can only truly be through Initiation into that Priesthood... Initiation is the opening of the door to the experience of the Mysteries; that door may be within us all, but it takes one with the Keys to open it - we need to be led to the door by one who has been there before, experienced it before, been transformed by it themselves. They can't give us the keys themselves, but they do lead us to were we might find them for ourselves...
And that is what initiation is - and why for true entry into a Tradition it needs to be at the hands of an Elder of that Tradition...