Navigating Tower Time
Magic For an Era of Change
Course 4, Module 0
By: John Beckett
Hi, I’m John Beckett.
Were you surprised by 2020? I certainly had no idea we were going to see the worst pandemic in over a hundred years. And while I expected a contentious American election, I had no idea that we would see what will almost surely go down in history as the most bizarre election ever. But while the specifics of 2020 did surprise me, I wasn’t shocked. And that’s because we’re living in Tower Time.
About ten years ago, some people who follow the Morrigan started hearing a message: “Get ready. A storm is coming.” Over the years those messages have gotten louder and more frequent. I think it’s safe to say that the storm is here. People who work with spirits on a regular basis talk about how the boundary between this world and the Otherworld is thin, and not just at Samhain and Beltane. Ordinary people are reporting Otherworldly experiences that are stronger and more frequent than I’ve ever heard. And then, in the ordinary world, we’ve got climate change, the decline of the American empire, the rise of nationalism, fascism, and xenophobia – and of course, we got 2020.
Some of us are calling this Tower Time. In the Tarot, The Tower is a card of sudden, dramatic, and irreversible change. It’s not a pleasant card. It’s not an easy card. You don’t have to like it – I certainly don’t like it. But it’s the card we’ve been dealt, and so it’s the card we have to play. We need a strategy for navigating Tower Time, not just so we can survive, but so we can thrive.
As we examine Tower Time, there are some traps we need to watch out for. We need to make sure we don’t try to blame all of this on “those people” – whoever “those people” are for you. Not only does that lead us toward actions that are unethical and harmful, it’s not helpful to us. Tower Time is more complicated than that. We need to avoid conspiracy theories, like QAnon. That can be hard to do when you’re dealing with mysterious things and incomplete evidence, but we need to make sure we stay well out of conspiracy territory.
We need to avoid apocalyptic thinking, the idea that some big event is going to happen and all of a sudden everything is going to be fine for everybody – and then we don’t have to do anything. Or, we’re all going to die – and then we don’t have to do anything. We don’t get off that easy. Apocalyptic prophecies have a 3500-year track record of being wrong every single time.
Perhaps most importantly, we need to avoid the trap of thinking this is all going to be over with in a little while. Tower Time is not Mercury Retrograde. It’s not a four-year Presidential term. No one alive today will see the end of Tower Time.
We can’t hunker down and wait it out. We ignore it at our peril. We need a model of what’s going on, so we can understand the environment in which we work. We need a strategy for dealing with changed circumstances. Mainly, we need to build some skills so we can handle whatever comes our way. We need magical skills, spiritual skills, and we need some ordinary skills.
I don’t have all the answers. I’m not sure I have all the questions. But I’ve been watching, studying and living through Tower Time for ten years now. I’ve got some ideas about what’s going on. More importantly, I know what I’ve done and what I’m doing to get through Tower Time. And so now I’m happy to announce the fourth online class from Under the Ancient Oaks: Navigating Tower Time – Magic for an Era of Change.
Artwork by the amazing Ashley Bryner. Ashley did a wonderful job of capturing not just Tower Time, but also the beginnings of our response to it. If you like the artwork, I encourage you to go to Ashley’s website and buy a print. They are quite reasonably priced. All artists can use our support these days, and you’ll help get this imagery further out into the world where it can be seen and work its magic on people.
(Ashley Bryner’s website: https://www.firesighted.com )
“When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.”
If there is going to be a motto for this class, it’s this: “When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.” You may recognize that phrase. It comes from Hunter S. Thompson, known as the inventor of “gonzo journalism” which basically abandons all pretense of objectivity and tells a story from a first-person perspective. He’s the author of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. It’s a book that was turned into a movie starring Johnny Depp some years ago.
There’s some debate as to what Thompson meant by this phrase, or if he meant anything by it. Some people think maybe it’s just a cool sounding phrase so he grabbed it. I’m certainly not above doing that. But after thinking about it, I interpret it as saying: Don’t ignore the weird stuff going on in the world. Don’t ignore the weird stuff going on in your life. Don’t hide from it. Embrace it. It’s going to happen. Embrace it and use it to your advantage. Chaos brings opportunities.
Now, there’s some ethics required there. Natural disasters bring opportunities for businesses. It also brings the opportunity for price gouging and hoarding – the kind of things we saw at the beginning of the quarantine early last year. But it’s also an opportunity for ethical business people to provide a service and make a good living in the process. Or simply to read the lay of the land better than everybody else so you can do a good job of taking care of you and yours.
Goals For the Course
So this is “Navigating Tower Time”. What are our goals for this course?
We want to understand the major shifts going on in our world.
We want to understand economic and political shifts: The rise of the Asian economies; the decline of the American empire; the rise we’ve seen over the past few years of nationalism and fascism and xenophobia. We want to understand what’s going on here.
We want to understand the magical shifts. More people are doing magic now than at any time in history. Why? What does it mean? What does it mean when we pick up the practice of magic, or strengthen our practice of magic? Some of us believe the currents of magic are getting stronger. And while magic still requires work, but if you do the work, there is more magical oomph there to power your spells.
We want to understand the Otherworldly shifts, the Otherworld – the world of our Gods and ancestors. It’s not the same as our world. It’s alongside it or parallel to it or however you see that. But numerous people have talked about how encounters with Otherworldly persons are more frequent and are getting stronger. We want to understand that as best as we can.
We want to talk about what’s going on. Too often, when we see weird stuff going on we keep it to ourselves because we’re afraid people are going to laugh at us. Or if we talk about it at work, they’re going to think we’re nuts or dangerous and we’ll have negative repercussions on our employment. But this is a safe space for these kind of conversations. We want to have these conversations. We need to have these conversations. We want to talk about what’s going on.
We want to do this so that we build a model of Tower Time. We understand that our model will always be tentative. We can never be 100% sure that it’s right. But if we can start to build a model of Tower Time, we can use it as a context for practice. We can use it make predictions about what’s going to happen next and therefore what we need to get ready for. Most importantly, we learn how to respond. We make sure that we’re responding to the right things in ways that are helpful to us.
And we don’t just want to survive Tower Time – we want to thrive in Tower Time. We don’t want to just get by. We want to live good, deep, meaningful and – dare I say it? – happy lives.
What This Class Isn’t
That’s what the class is about. What the class isn’t: You know, I hear people, primarily in New Age communities, sometimes talk about “the Ascension” – the idea that something is going to happen and all of a sudden humanity is going to wake up and we are all going to live in peace, and everything is going to be fine. It’s going to be heaven on earth. I see no indication that’s ever going to happen. In any case, this isn’t what this class is about.
On the other hand, it’s not about anybody’s apocalypse. We talked about apocalypses in the opening. They have a 3500-year track record of being wrong every single time. It’s not about the Christian apocalypse. It’s not about the Mayan apocalypse that was supposed to happen in 2012 – except the Mayan’s never predicted that. This isn’t about an apocalypse.
It’s not a class on prepping. Now, I believe in being prepared. I think the various quarantines have shown the value of keeping some food and supplies on hand. But this isn’t about stocking a year’s worth of food and a bunch of weapons and all of that kind of stuff. If that’s what you think you need to do, go for it. I’m not going to knock anybody for being prepared. But again, this ain’t that.
And it’s not that because Tower Time isn’t a collapse. The world as we know it is not going to suddenly end. Civilization is not going to end over the next six months, or eighteen months, or twelve years. It will be a steep but gradual decline. And we need to prepare for what’s coming, not for the big collapse that gets everybody’s attention and then never happens.
It may help you understand why some people get involved with these things, but this isn’t that.
Modules
There are six modules in the course. Actually, there are seven. This is Module 0, “The Introduction”.
We start with Module 1, “Living in a Magical World”. We want to start off with talking about science, how science is not a religion, it’s not a world view. It’s a method. It’s a method for exploring the world. It’s a method for approaching problems. When science gives us an answer, that answer is usually really good. But there are some questions that science is not well-suited to answer, and that doesn’t mean those questions don’t exist. We’re going to explore some of those questions.
We live in a world full of Gods and spirits. We live adjacent to an Otherworld, the world of Gods and ancestors. There’s a boundary between their world and our world and a lot of people think that boundary is getting awfully thin these days. We don’t live in a deterministic universe. We live in a probabilistic universe. That means that if we can move the odds in our favor, we can accomplish great things.
Module 2 is “Shifts in the Ordinary World”. Certainly climate change is part of that, but so is the decline of the American Empire. Now, decline is inevitable. Every empire in the history of humanity has eventually declined. It doesn’t have to be a collapse. Look at the British Empire. Queen Elizabeth II took the throne as the Queen of the British Empire, “The sun never sets on the British Empire.” She may very well die as the Queen of England and nothing more. The British Empire has greatly declined over the last 60 or 70 or 80 years, but Britain hasn’t collapsed. I’ve been to Britain. It’s not a bad place to live. I expect the decline of the American Empire to be similar and we’re going to talk about that in some detail.
We’re going to talk about the global economic shifts. Some of the reactionary politics we’ve been seeing, particularly over the past 4 or 5 years. And we’re going to look at this with the overarching idea that people who are rich and powerful usually intend to remain rich and powerful, and they will do whatever they have to do to do that. And we don’t have to get into conspiracy theories to understand that people with more mundane power than you and me are going to do things to benefit themselves that may not benefit us. Maybe we can’t take them on directly, but if we know what to look for, we can order our lives so as not to be terribly impacted by what they’re doing.
Module 3 is “Shifts in Magic and the Otherworld”. The veil between this world and the next world is not what it used to be. The experiences we used to have only as Samhain and Beltane are happening year-round now.
We’ve seen Gods on recruiting missions, the Morrigan most notably, but also Odin, and Hekate, and Brigid, who is quietly amassing a rather impressive assortment of followers.
A couple of years ago I wrote a blog post called, “The Return of the Fair Folk to the Ordinary World.” Some people pushed back on that and said that They never left, and They didn’t. But we’re certainly having more encounters with Them now than we used to.
And there’s a huge increase of interest in magic and witchcraft. Why is that? What does it mean for the rest of us who are practicing magic? We want to talk about how all of this is shifting and what it means.
So we’re going to spend the first three modules, the first half of the class, talking about what’s going on. And then we’re going to spend this next three modules, the second half of this class, talking about what do we do about it.
And that begins with Module 4, “Own Your Witchcraft: Magical Strategies for Extraordinary Times”. A lot of people who call themselves witches don’t seem to be doing a lot of witchcraft. We need to own that witchcraft. Own your magic. Find a magical system that you like and practice it until you get good with it. Learn divination. Learn what it can be used for and where it’s less than useful. Build a spiritual practice. This is one of my classes. We’re going to talk about spiritual practice. It’s that important.
And we’re going to talk about magical strategy. Sometimes, no – many times – it’s more important to know what to work magic for than how to work the magic.
Module 5 is “Drafted into the Army of the Morrigan”. It’s not just about the Morrigan, as we were talking about a moment ago. But the Gods are dealing with Tower Time too, but They have a very different perspective than we do. If They are not immortal, They are far, far older and will live far, far longer than we will. That gives Them a different perspective. So when They call one of us into Their service, either on a short-term basis or on a permanent basis, it gives us an opportunity to get a look into that perspective. Our Gods can be our most powerful allies. Bringing Their virtues into our lives helps us to better our own lives. And it’s an opportunity to participate in something that’s bigger than ourselves. I’m a polytheist. This is not a religious class, but it’s a class built on the religious idea that there are many real Gods out there, and we need to interact with Them where we can.
Module 6, “Thriving in Difficult Times” – How do we put this all together? How do we prepare ourselves to deal with these deep changes that are coming in our world? We need a spiritual practice. We need a magical practice. We need a financial practice. Too many Pagans have a dysfunctional relationship with money. I don’t intend to try to be the Pagan Dave Ramsey, but we’re going to talk a little about money and having a healthy relationship with money. We’re going to talk about building networks of mutual support. And we’re going to talk about how chaos, for all that it brings trouble, it brings opportunity.
Course Patron: The Morrigan
Who else could our patron be but the Morrigan. If you’ve taken classes with me before, you know that each course has a patron, someone who is especially close to the material. The Morrigan is how some of us found out about Tower Time. In 2010, 2011, She was telling us, “Get ready. A storm is coming.” So, the Morrigan is the patron of this class, and we will begin all of our classes with prayers to the Morrigan.
Who Should Participate?
Who should participate in this class? It’s intended for Pagans, polytheists, and witches. It’s intended for people, it’s designed for people who see that there’s more than the ordinary world, people who already accept the reality of magic, people for whom the idea of conversations with Gods and Fair Folk and your ancestors is an ordinary thing. That’s who the class is geared toward.
But, you know, really, it would be of interest to anybody who’s interested in the weird. And especially anybody interested in a practical approach to living in difficult times.
There are no prerequisites. It would help if you’ve taken Course 2, Building a New Myth. When this is over, if you didn’t take Course 3 on Operative Magic, you may want to go back and pick it up, but we’re not going to assume that you’ve seen any of this. There are no prerequisites for this class. If you want to take the class, sign up for the class and take it.
Who Should Not Participate?
Who should not participate? Anybody wanting to proselytize for anything, whether you want to proselytize for your brand of Christianity or your brand of Atheism, or for that matter, if you want to proselytize for your brand of Paganism, this isn’t the spot for that.
And if you’re a conspiracy theorist, you know, I’m not going to say don’t take the class, because hopefully you will take it and learn something and hopefully stop being a conspiracy theorist. There will be no tolerance for conspiracy theories in this class. There is a fine line between examining difficult, complicated topics like this and drawing reasonable conclusions based on incomplete evidence, to stepping over that line into conspriracy theory. We’re going to stay on the right side of that line.
Course Format
The course format: Weekly videos. What’s it look like? It looks like this. That’s one of the reasons I do a Module 0 for all of these classes. I want people to see what they’re getting before they sign up for it.
The course videos tend to be longer than the introductory videos. Last time they were all right in between 50 and 60 minutes. I think I’ve got a couple of modules this time that may run over an hour. I think I’ve got a couple of modules that may be in the 40-minute range. But honestly, I never know until I sit down and record the voice-overs and figure out exactly what I have to say about it. But they will be longer, but they’re going to look just like this. You’ve got the video opening. Then you have the PowerPoint presentation with me talking about it.
They are on demand. I will release a new module on Thursday morning every week. You do the module when you’re ready. You want to do it on Thursday morning? Great. You want to do it on Thursday evening when you get home from work? That’s great. If you can’t get to it until the weekend? That’s great, too. It’s on demand. You do it when you want to do it. I keep running into teachers who I respect, some of them who I would very much like to take their classes and they are always at a time that doesn’t work for me. So I make my classes, you take them when you are ready to take them.
There will be recommended reading, mostly shorter pieces this time. There are no books to buy. There are a couple of books that I’m going to recommend but we will not use them as references, so buy them if you like, don’t if you don’t want to.
There will be homework for each module. Whether you do the homework is up to you. You’re paying for the class. This isn’t high school. You’re paying for the class. If you don’t want to do it, there’s nobody who’s going to make you do it. But if you want to do the homework and turn it in, I will look it over, and I will offer brief feedback. My feedback is usually two or three lines, not two or three paragraphs, though occasionally somebody gets me wound up and I have more to say. But, again, your decision whether you want to turn it in or not.
The homework, I think, will be more challenging this time – more thinking and writing. This is a material that a lot of people haven’t considered in much depth and you are really going to have to give it some thought. So, I’m going to encourage you to think about it and then write about your thoughts, because nothing helps you organize your thoughts like having to put them down on paper.
Private Facebook Group
There is a private Facebook group. It’s a “secret” group, which means only member can find the group and see who’s in it and what they post. If you are not a member of this group, you have to tell me, “John, I want to be a member of this group.”
If you have questions that either I can’t answer or would be appropriate for the wider group, post them there. It’s a place for conversations among classmates. There is one group for all Under the Ancient Oaks class participants, so you’ll have people there from Class 1, 2 and 3 who may not be taking Class 4, so keep that in mind.
There is also a Discord server, set up by one of my co-religionists here in North Texas in the last course. It didn’t get a lot of use, and I don’t know if I’ll be using it. But if you want to have some of those conversations that Facebook doesn’t exactly make easy, this is a way to do it.
All of this, the Facebook group, the Discord server, participation is completely voluntary. If you want to be a part of it, we’ll get you signed up. If you don’t, that’s perfectly all right.
Questions
If you have questions about the course, I’ll answer. The format may vary. If it’s a personal question, if it’s a brief question, I’ll probably just fire back an email. If it’s something that I don’t have a strong opinion on, I may say, “Hey, why don’t you post this in the Facebook group and see what everybody else has to say.” If you really get me thinking and I’ve got a long answer, I may turn it into a blog post. I think I’ve done that once or twice in the three classes. I don’t do it often, but maybe I’ll do it. If I do it, I won’t use your name without your express permission.
Homework reviews end about a month after the last module goes up. I have found that if people haven’t turned in homework by three or four weeks after, then they’re not going to do it. So I cut if off so I can move to something else.
That said, I’m always available to answer class-related questions. So if it’s six months, eight months down the road and you’re looking back on this and there’s something that you want to ask, feel free to do that. Also, if you’re looking at this introductory module and it’s 2023 or 2024 and you can use some help navigating Tower Time – because it’s still going to be going on then – I won’t reviewing homework anymore. But if I’m still around in 2023, and I firmly expect to be, and you have a question related to this class, I will do my best to answer regardless of when it is.
I don’t do casual conversation. Don’t send me stuff and tell me to read it and tell you what I think. I answer questions. I simply don’t have the time to carry on ongoing conversations. To be honest, I’m not big on online conversations with anybody. Don’t take it personally. It’s not you. It’s me.
If you are looking for spiritual guidance or spiritual direction, I do that on a consulting basis. If you think that’s something you need, send me an email and I will let you know what I can do and what my rates are. I don’t do a lot of it, but it is available if you think that would be a good use of your money and time.
Cost
The cost is the same as it has been all along, $50 for the entire course. I think I’ve used PayPal exclusively. Certainly, it’s just the easiest for me and for most people. They charge fees but so does everybody else.
As with the other classes, a limited number of scholarships are available. If you are having financial difficulties, and a lot of people are having financial difficulties right now, I don’t want that to stop you from taking the class. I can’t comp everybody, but we do have some scholarships available for people who are experiencing financial difficulties.
The more paid registrations I get, and the more sponsorships I get, the more scholarships I can offer. Last time, we had quite a few people who said, “You know, I’m going to sign up for the course and I want to pay for somebody else.” A couple people paid for more than one. We were able to accommodate everybody for the last class. If you are in a position where you can sponsor who needs a scholarship, I encourage you to do that. I offer some scholarships on my own, but again, with sponsorships, last time I was able to accommodate everybody. I hope that I can again this time.
The deadline for scholarship applications is January 23. I will hold all scholarship applications until then. We will see how many we’ve got. We will see what the scholarship funds are like, and I will notify everybody by the 25th.
Schedule
This brings us to our schedule. This is January 12, or at least that’s when this video is released. We release the video. Registration opens. Registration has been open a bit because some of you were so anxious to sign up that I went ahead and opened it up. I’ve been quietly accepting some registrations for a while. But it’s open now, and we’re taking scholarship applications.
January 23 is the deadline for scholarship applications.
January 25, applicants are notified.
Thursday, January 28, Module 1 is available and the class runs for six weeks.
Signing Up
To sign up, the easiest thing to do is just to send me an email: john@undertheancientoaks.com
If you have one of my other emails or want to send me a Facebook message, I’ll take that, too. It’s easier if you just send me an email to: john@undertheancientoaks.com
Or you can use the contact form. Early on, I got most of the registrations that way and I will certainly take them that way. But it’s easier if you use regular email.
When you tell me you want to sign up for the class, tell me which class you want! There are four classes now. Most people will want to take the Tower Time class. But every time, a couple of people want to sign up for the earlier classes. So tell me you want to do the Tower Time class. I’ll send you a PayPal invoice. As soon as you pay it, I will register you for the class.
If you are new to Under The Ancient Oaks, you will get an automated email from WordPress telling you to go change your password. If you are not new, this is your second or third or fourth class, I will send you an email saying that you are now registered and you are ready to go. If you do that right now, there will be not much going on until Module 1 goes up.
I do send out emails every Thursday when the new modules come out. If you are not already, I will also register you for my weekly newsletter. If you don’t like getting those emails, they are real easy to opt out of. That’s all about all I do with the mailing list, is the weekly newsletter and class-related announcements. I hope you stay on the list, but if you don’t want it, you don’t have to.
Expect a 24-hour turnaround. Usually I get people registered faster than that. If I’m sitting at my computer and I’m not tied up with my paying job, I may get you registered in a couple of minutes. If you catch me at a busy time, it may take a while. But you should expect a 24-hour turnaround in most cases.
And that’s it! I’m excited about this class. I wanted to teach this class last summer, but there was a real need to do the Operative Magic class first. And also, I wanted to see how the Pandemic played out. It’s not over yet, but we know more about it now than we did six or eight months ago. And I wanted to see how the US elections played out. We would still be having this class regardless of how the election turned out, but it would have a different focus if the results had been different. Donald Trump is a symptom of Tower Time. He is not the cause of it.
But now we’re ready to do the Tower Time class. This is something that we’ve all been living through for the last several years whether we recognized it or not. And those of us who recognize it have spent a little time contemplating it, what it is, what’s happening, why is it happening, and especially, how do we react to it? How do we, again, not just survive, but how do we thrive during this era of great change? I don’t have all of the answers. But I’ve got some of the questions. And I know what I’m doing and I know what’s working for me. And I think there’s something in here that can help us all do a better job of navigating these very challenging times in which we live.
So that’s all! Go sign up for the class. If you have any questions that weren’t answered in this introductory module, by all means send me an email and I will do my best to answer. And I will see you on January 28.