What Queer Witch Jesus has to do with the Philosopher’s Stone

Hello,

I pray all the time to Queer Witch Jesus – I call him that to remind myself and those around me that the shaggy guy from Nazareth wasn’t a Holier Than Thou killjoy like conventional Christianity has made him out to be…

… he was a wandering magician with a quick temper, quicker wit, and a tender heart…

… queer in that he blurred binaries of life and death, finite and infinite – and like most accomplished mahasiddha tantrikas, he was probably rather fluid in his sex life and identity.

Queer Witch Jesus famously taught forgiveness, but I think what’s often forgotten is that he preached and lived forgiveness as a flavor of hospitality.

Hospitality often gets short shrift as a revered virtue today, but it’s what Queer Witch Jesus practiced whenever a party was in danger of slowing down…

.. he turned water into wine, multiplied loaves and fishes, resurrected Lazarus, brought himself back from the dead, hung out with prostitutes and criminals – whatever it took to keep the party going!

And he told a story about the Kingdom of Heaven called the Parable of the Great Banquet that I love:

Jesus answered and spoke again in parables to them, saying, “The Kingdom of Heaven is like a certain king, who made a marriage feast for his son, and sent out his servants to call those who were invited to the marriage feast, but they would not come. Again he sent out other servants, saying, ‘Tell those who are invited, “Behold, I have prepared my dinner. My cattle and my fatlings are killed, and all things are ready. Come to the marriage feast!”‘ But they made light of it, and went their ways, one to his own farm, another to his merchandise, and the rest grabbed his servants, and treated them shamefully, and killed them. When the king heard that, he was angry, and sent his armies, destroyed those murderers, and burned their city. “Then he said to his servants, ‘The wedding is ready, but those who were invited weren’t worthy. Go therefore to the intersections of the highways, and as many as you may find, invite to the marriage feast.’ Those servants went out into the highways, and gathered together as many as they found, both bad and good. The wedding was filled with guests. But when the king came in to see the guests, he saw there a man who didn’t have on wedding clothing, and he said to him, ‘Friend, how did you come in here not wearing wedding clothing?’ He was speechless. Then the king said to the servants, ‘Bind him hand and foot, take him away, and throw him into the outer darkness; there is where the weeping and grinding of teeth will be.’ For many are called, but few chosen.”

— Matthew 22:1-14, World English Bible

The way I understand this parable is that divinity is always throwing a party – the divine is always willing to invite in strangers, “both bad and good” — the only way to miss out on the festivity is to refuse to show up or – even worse, to show up unwilling to celebrate (i.e., not wearing “wedding clothing.”)

What most conventional Christians don’t seem to grok is that the wedding Jesus was always talking about is The Alchemical Wedding, what the poet William Blake called The Marriage of Heaven and Hell – aka the union of the soul and spirit, of good and evil, of the unconscious and the conscious minds, of the inner feminine with the inner masculine.

The Alchemical Wedding is a great achievement in the life of a magician, an on-going project (like any marriage) that leads to the birth of the Divine Child, the Philosopher’s Stone, the inner recognition of oneself as a fractal holographic image of the Whole.

The Marriage and its child, the Stone, have to be continually refined through many cycles of integration, until the magician is so lucid in the dream of waking life that they can change its most elemental (unconscious, material) dimensions at will.

I love Queer Witch Jesus so much in part because he was the first person I ever heard about who succeeded in this deep magic, becoming lucid enough to do great miracles.

And I love Christmas, because it’s all about the birth of the Divine Child in our hearts, the crystallization of the precious Philosopher’s Stone that welcomes and forgives all opposites in the most profound hospitality.

So here’s me wishing you a Very Merry Queer Witch Jesus Christmas, from the depths of my good-evil magician’s heart to yours.

May we all become fully lucid in this dream of life, and revel in the glee of the infinite within the finite.



best,

Carolyn Elliott

author of Existential Kink