2: Foundations: Cosmology – Cáer
The fire is kindled in wisdom, love, and power…
In the depths flow the waters of wisdom…
The world tree stands at the centre of our worship…
In our rituals, these lines call to us to recognise the inherent power in Fire, Well, and Tree, and their connections to those primal forces at the beginning of the world. Through this Sacred Centre is where we can come together and move to other realms; from the physical Grove to the inner Grove, and from there, into realms unknown to us.
All things move together in relationships, and the cosmos is no different. The Well reaches down to the primal waters of Chaos, where the Tree’s roots are nourished. Pulling the primal Waters up the Tree, the Tree uses that energy to reach its pathways up towards the Gods in the heavens and the spirits in other realms, ordered as it may be. Near the Tree burns the Sacred Fire, which carries our offerings towards those we honour.
Because we move in relationships, these are not static forms. Rather, they are Gates through which we can communicate, either with beings or with different places. Isaac Bonewits, the founder of ADF, further examined Mircea Eliade’s concept of the Centre in Real Magic, and how this centre may be used for magic (44).
We also understand a division of the realms in a broad sense of Heavens, Midworld, Underworld. The Gates of Fire, Well, and Tree, reach all of these worlds as they do best — Fire reaches up to the Heavens, where many of the Shining Ones reside, and it is through this form that we would offer to them; the Well is a shaft to the Underworld and the land of the Ancestors and chthonic gods; and the Tree, with much of it residing in the Midworld, and the place from which we start adventuring on it, reaches out from here to all of the otherworlds.
Though the central kernel of my cosmology is this Fire/Well/Tree centre, I also adore strongly the Indo-European concept of the relationship between the macrocosm and the microcosm. That we are beings created from the Earth, and will return to the Earth, in a mosaic of elements that are brought together in reflection of each other. I’ll talk about this more in Foundations: The Elements.
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Bonewits, Isaac. Real Magic: An Introductory Treatise on the Basic Principles of Yellow Magic. 2nd ed. York Beach, Maine: 1989.
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