I put the toast I wrote for my family reunion here, appended to my July 4th post. The MacRitchies are a sept (a "subfamily", with a different name) of Clan MacIntosh. The toast is meant to go with Scotch Wisky, and references our clan motto: "touch not the cat bot a glove". "Bot" is "but", i.e. "without", meaning, don't provoke us, or you'll get clawed. On a tangent, Ritchie is another MacIntosh sept, which means that Madonna is now married into my clan. As such, I feel obliged to express my concern over her use of Cabalistic imagery. On the right side of this page you can see that the Tree of Life has been incorporated into the logo for her current tour. Traditionally, this sort of material was reserved for the initiated. I do believe that we have reached a point in our development when some things that were formerly hidden should now be brought to light, but I'm a little suspicious of M's usage. I don't want to doubt her sincerity, but I don't like seeing this sacred symbol bandied about in commerce. As far as I know, she's still a novice, and this smacks of spiritual pride. Maybe I'm too hard on her, but it's not clear to me how her newfound mysticism squares with other mythologies she deploys, like the sub-Tarantino video her husband directed for her. The current fashion for Cabala is reminiscent of the 1960's taste for Eastern spirituality. I'm sure a few people learned something, but most of it was superficial at best. In any case, I don't think that people who aren't Jewish should manifest this material in Hebraic form. The Tree exists outside of Jewish mysticism, and Cabalistic technologies have long since been incorporated into Western spiritual systems, including Christian ones. It's also worth noting that the typical diagrammatic Tree is highly intellectualized and abstracted. The "real" thing actually is a tree, and has roots; a sort of mirror image tree which grows down into the Underworld, engaging deeper levels of Tradition, without which the supernal tree could not stand upright.
|
- alex 8-23-2001 8:44 pm