Book of Light and Shadows cast

I have often toyed with the idea of writing a formal Book of Shadows.

At some time it came to me the idea that properly, such a tome would be called a book of Light and Shadows cast, for without light there can be no shadow; and so the abbreviation term 'book of shadows' signifies this thing. I rather like the optimism involved with it being a Book of light as much as Shadow. Take note that it is not Darkness nor Void that we are referring; it is not absence of Light, but rather it is Shadow, which has several layers of meaning.Shadows are of different tones, something like the rainbow of an oil slick.

In Jungian terms it resonates with the Mayan deity Tezcatlipoca whose domain is the future, the subconscious, the unknown, and death which I interpret in the Buddhist sense of the Betweens; the spiritualist in me involves all this with the transmigration cycles during which we look out for our relatives of two or three mortal re-generations removed. So there we have several distinct topics all referred to by the term Shadow. I will save my experiences with Shadow as Anubis / Chiron for the relevant blog entry.

So here it is; my involvement with the Pagan Blog Project will have to suffice as a dictionary of my thoughts and experiences relating to this Book of Shadows. There is a reason why I have entitled the page Sarfa; the concept means "the act of turning one's back on God". Of course 'god' is the Sun, Ra, source of Life and so to turn our back on him is to face our own shadows. Facing our own shadows. It goes rather deeper than the simple Sanskrit concept of Kamma which originally means simply 'action has consequence' or 'cause has effect', a non-ethical bias that Buddhist philosophy has snuck in there; I use the spelling variant Karma to refer to the Tibetan doctrine.

Light a candle, keep it safe. This is the true way of mastering the Craft.