Twilight Crossing
 Proposed Charter
 19 June 91
(Updated January 3rd, 1994)
 
 Twilight Crossing is a network dedicated to assisting its members
 in the pursuit of their artistic and spiritual satisfaction and freedom.
 
 0. Legends
 
 A.  Thirty centuries ago, dark crossroads were haunted by Hekati, earth
 goddess (or demon) of magic and sorcery.  Hekati was far older than the
 "classical" gods of the Greeks.  She was one of that band of primeval
 deities known as Titans who were deposed by the patriarchal conquerors
 of the Grecian lands.  The myths were rewritten to parallel politics:
 the Titans were cast down from Heaven to the pits of Tartarus by Zeus,
 the God-Father, the victorious King of the invaders; yet Hekati had
 always lived there beneath the ground.  Alone of the Titans she retained
 her status in later myth.  Of the elder goddesses of the region, she was
 one of many retained by the invaders, but the only one not reduced to a
 pretty ankle and a breeder.  Every home in Athens was fronted by an altar
 to Hekati: her worship was strongest in the Greek city-state with the
 smallest amount of centralized control and with the least power given
 over to a King.
 
 B.  Ghost-herding Hekati, with her hair wound with snakes, dogs howling
 about her heels, and a guttering torch borne in one hand, represented a
 vital current of underworld power too strong for the force of arms to
 suppress.  Her old Colchian sorceresses, Medea and Circe, became oddly
 sympathetic villainesses: their old herbal drugs were fermented to
 poisons, their sex magics were retold as child murders, their
 shamanistic animal transmutations were reduced to spells that waylaid
 careless adventurers; yet as a token of "respect", each became the
 lover and helpmate of great heroes -- Jason over Medea, and Odysseus
 over Circe.  Hekati's great sorceresses were thus degraded more than
 the goddess herself.  In the West's Middle Ages, these legendary
 sorceresses became the models of those most feared women, the witches,
 and Hekati was degraded to their unholy Queen.  Those dead who were
 refused the sacraments were buried at crossroads, where once sacrifices
 to Hekati were held.  And all without any change in their basic
 attributes, representing those qualities sacred to paganism which
 despots abhor in any hands but their own :-- will, beauty, immortality,
 knowledge, power, mystery, ecstasy, love.  In middle Christendom all
 these became crimes.
 
 C.  In middle and modern times, this current of dark power has come to
 be known as "Satanic" by analogy to Satan, the chief demon of the
 monotheitic triumvirate.  Like Hekati, Satan represents the underworld,
 sorcery, and opposition to the ruling gods.  Satan's name is the Hebrew
 word for "enemy"; he is identified with the Serpent that brought
 humanity to ruin, and in legend he was cast down to Hell from Heaven.
 In the Zoroastrian religion a similar devil was known as Ahriman, a
 name which also means "enemy".  Zoroastrianism, endorsed and enforced
 by the Persian Kings, saw all existence as a war between Ahura Mazda,
 the god of light and the Sun, and Ahriman, the dark god of evil and
 snakes.  The ancient Egyptians feared Set, an earlier form of Satan,
 dweller in the demon-haunted land beneath the earth through which the
 Sun-King fought his way each night.  Set was aided by his serpentine
 ally, the monstrous Apep, and a host of magical snakes.  Set had been
 one of the greatest and most ancient gods of Egypt, but his people were
 conquered.  For a long while he enjoyed a Hekatian status as the
 necessary ruler of the darker aspects of life, and he was degraded into
 more and more a demon as time wore on.  By the time of the mythical
 Exodus, Set was a generic enemy, and glorious tales of battle became
 tales of victory of the Sun over Set and his minions.  Just so the
 early Hebrew scriptures use "ha-satan", "the enemy", as a generic term
 for their military enemies in Palestine.
 
 D.  A pattern emerges from the "anti-gods" of history.  Time and again,
 serpent deities representing both the underworld and magic have been
 declared inconvenient and driven from their status by official
 violence, figured in myth by a Sun-God who is also the King.  It is not
 enough to forget them as most deposed deities are forgotten; they must
 be demonized.
 
 E.  How does this demonization serve the needs of those in power?
 Authority feeds on enmity.  The exercise of power is easiest to justify
 against an absolutely evil enemy who plainly demands the strictest
 opposition.  Once this license for power against evil is obtained by
 consent of the people, it is easily applied against the people
 themselves.  Most will never object to the ferreting out of "agents of
 evil" in their midst, will indeed gleefully support such a campaign of
 persecution.  By supporting the authorities they vicariously exercise
 the same unfettered power.  It is very comforting to be one of the
 agents of shining good standing firm against unimaginable depravity.
 But reality is not obliging in providing absolute evils for the use of
 Kings; all enemies are more understandable and sympathetic when more is
 known about their motives and history.  Imaginary enemies do not evoke
 this difficulty, and once the belief in imaginary enemies -- Satan, the
 International Communist Conspiracy, what have you -- is established, it
 is easy to represent real people as agents of these ultimate enemies.
 Hekati would hardly have found a friendly home in Sparta.  The common
 beliefs about Hekati, Ahriman, Marx, and the rest serve a vital
 political purpose.
 
 F.  But why are underworld and sorcerous deities especially demonized?
 Officialdom is chiefly opposed to the individual will: the power that
 authority delights in exercising is the power of imposing its will on
 others.  The opposition to this authoritarian will is the individual
 fount of creativity and unpredictability.  In psychology, this fount is
 called the unconscious mind, the obscure and unseen intelligence which
 motivates us all to seek our own paths.  The unconscious mind, the dark
 side of the psyche, is the symbolic meaning of the mythical underworld
 or "Hell".  Tyrants are right to fear this deep well of power and to
 frighten their subjects away from it.  Sorcery is a symbol of
 independent action, unauthorized and unregulable, obeying only the laws
 of the dark side and scorning the workings of temporal power.  Tyrants
 who believe in its "magical" power fear it for pragmatic reasons, but
 these mundane concerns reflect the nature of the sorcerous myth.  The
 individual sorceress could, like Medea, shatter the structures of
 authority if they became intolerably alienating.  Sorcery is the
 mythological face of art.  All good artists are sorcerors;
 spell-weavers; subversives; Satanists.
 
 G.  The veneration of demons is not, as is commonly believed, the
 "worship of evil", but an escape from the authoritarian mentality of
 "us vs. them", of allies and enemies, of repressive and arbitrary
 regulations expressed for power itself rather than for the general
 interest, of good and evil as absolute forces in the world rather than
 as subjective judgments applied to human behavior.  All these naive or
 corrupt political influences are banished from the crossroads at
 twilight by the irresistible, but subtle, influence of Hekati,
 snake-woman, Medea's muse, friend and mistress of the hounds of Hell;
 they are cracked and ruined by this sorceress behind and beyond all
 sorcery.
 
 H.  Among the major exponents of this "Satanism" or "Diabolism" have
 been poets and playwrights, musicians and magicians: such as Rabelais,
 Blake, Shelley, Baudelaire, Swinburne, Shaw, Crowley, Grant, Daly and
 Galas.  The assembly known as Twilight Crossing has an interest in
 continuing and expanding on this tradition, known as the "Satanic
 school" in the Oxford English Dictionary, without dogmatically adhering
 to any one creator's conception of it.
 
 I.  The symbol of the crossing is significant beyond its Hekatian
 correspondence (but in ways that reflect on that symbolism).
 Conventional magical orders, covens, and the like, teach a path, a
 sequence of initiations or similar steps, more or less fixed in
 structure and adapted little if at all to the individual.  Twilight
 Crossing is instead a meeting of paths, an intersection of ways: yet a
 particular meeting point, a crossroad sacred to Hekati, rather than a
 union of all paths.  There may be those people whose roads do not touch
 this crossroad, but we welcome meetings with them at other intersections;
 and we remind them (and ourselves) that Hekati may live even where she
 is not at once apparent.
 
 1. Membership
 
 A.  The only requirement for membership in Twilight Crossing is a
 shared interest in the Hekatian or Satanic current as it is expressed
 in poetry, theatre, music, magic, and other arts.
 
 B.  The Crossing makes no promisesof magical powers, exalted spiritual
 degrees, contact and contract with discorporate beings, nor simple
 answers to difficult questions.  Nor does it forbid its members or
 assemblies from asserting such powers, degrees, contacts, or answers.
 
 C.  Members of Twilight Crossing are free to believe what they will,
 but they are expected to scrutinize their beliefs to avoid dogmatism
 and folly.
 
 D.  Members of Twilight Crossing are free to behave as they will, but
 they are expected to monitor their actions to avoid disrespect for
 their own interests and the rights of others.
 
 E.  Twilight Crossing officially supports the rights of all human
 beings as put forth in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.  All
 forms of discrimination on grounds of race, gender, national origin,
 social class, sexual preference, religion, creed, and so forth are
 expressly forbidden at the Crossing.  The only exception is that
 assemblies formed exclusively of members of oppressed groups, such as
 women or African-Americans, are permitted as are assemblies composed
 of those who share a common belief on some issue.
 
 F.  The Hekatian symbolism used to define the Crossing must not be
 taken as a mandate of literal belief in such a being, or in any
 spiritual being.  Nor must the use of the symbolism of sorcery be taken
 as mandating a belief in the "paranormal" or extrapsychological powers
 of the black arts.  Such matters are left to the individual judgment of
 members.
 
 G.  Rituals of initiation, meditation, invocation, celebration, and so
 forth are sponsored by spiritual and service assemblies and by
 general assent of the whole of Twilight Crossing for the artistic
 and spiritual benefit of the members.  In all such rituals, the widest
 possible latitude of beliefs is to be embraced, so that no one should
 feel excluded because of the integrity of their intellectual conscience.
 Rituals and other works sponsored by the Crossing as a whole are to avoid
 all definite statements of belief or disbelief in such matters as the
 primacy of a certain artistic movement or the reality of spiritual
 beings and psychic powers.  These restrictions on expressions of
 opinion apply only to rituals sponsored by the entire Crossing, not
 to rituals sponsored by assemblies.
 
 2. Hierarchy
 
 A.  All hierarchy is suspect.  The Satanic school stands firmly against
 all abuses of power, all attempts to reduce living beings to positions
 in an organizational chain, all stamping of people with formal
 estimates of merit, all dehumanization and forced conformity.
 
 B.  The Crossing has no doctrines other than those intended to
 guarantee the freedom of its membership and of all people.  To the
 extent that the Crossing has any fixed rules at all, they are meant
 only as pragmatic guidelines, and should never be considered to
 overrule the freedom of thought of any member.  Any member or assembly
 finding itself in conflict with the "rules" of the Crossing should
 consider carefully before leaving the group, and should instead strive
 to preserve the meeting of the paths.  If the free resolution of this
 conflict requires a change in the rules of the Crossing, then let the
 other members and assemblies not balk, but gratefully accept.
 
 C.  There are no degrees, grades, or titles at the Crossing proper. All
 members are considered equal.
 
 D.  Should it become necessary to create an internal service assembly
 due to the size of Crossing membership, all its offices shall be
 selected by the full membership, and those who hold such positions
 shall not be considered superior to other members in any essential
 way.  They have chosen to serve the group; no one may choose or be
 chosen to lead it.  The full membership shall also have the opportunity
 to determine the structure of any internal service assembly and to remove
 unfit members from office via the democratic process.  All these votes
 will be decided by simple plurality, but no vote is valid without the votes
 of more than one-half of all members.
 
 E.  The founder and early members of Twilight Crossing enjoy no special
 office, exemption, or position within the group, though they are free to
 pursue whatever offices etc. are open to other members.
 
 F.  Individuals are generally accepted without difficulty.  If a member
 challenges an admission, and another seconds the objections, then a
 general vote may be taken, or the person may withdraw.  The admission is
 rejected on a two-thirds vote of those participating.  (There is no
 voting quorum.)  A member may also be ejected by a vote of two-thirds
 in similar fashion.  Excessive dogmatism or exclusivism, or radical
 disregard for the rights of others, are the only grounds for refusal or
 removal of an individual.  An individual who is removed or refused may
 apply for membership after one year.
 
 G.  This foundation document and any other rules may be amended by a
 vote of three quarters of the membership.
 
 H: All general votes in the Crossing are tricameral, with three faces:
 general debate, popular election, and assembly election.  Each assembly
 has one vote in the assembly election, ordinarily a popular vote among
 its members (but this is only a guideline).  Only Twilight Crossing
 members and assemblies may vote in these general elections.  General debate
 is informal but should be facilitated by the Crossing through personal
 contacts, computer networks, newsletters, ballots, position papers,
 formal debate meetings, and other technologies and strategies of
 communication.  Matters may be submitted to a vote by proposal of any
 assembly and the seconding of another, or a petition of the popular
 membership which accounts for at least five percent of all members.
 Twilight Crossing will facilitate the distribution of any petition
 proposed by one member and seconded by another.
 
 3. Assemblies
 
 A.  Twilight Crossing harbors various assemblies, or "special interest
 groups", dedicated to shared interests concerning the Satanic school,
 or shared conditions of oppression.  These are chiefly intended to be
 oriented towards the execution of various artistic and spiritual projects,
 but may also form research groups, social groups, informal discussion
 groups not explicitly devoted to any particular project, and so on.
 
 B.  Rules concerning freedom of belief and dissociation are somewhat
 relaxed within the assemblies, so that people who share opinions or
 states of oppression may work together on projects dependent on those
 conditions.  For instance, a group dedicated to atheism and to the
 freeing of members' minds from all belief in literal gods would certainly
 fall under the aegis of the Satanic school and Twilight Crossing in
 particular, but would be incapable of meaningfully including members
 who did believe in literal gods.  Similarly, a group especially dedicated
 to occult spellcasting intended to work effects at a distance could hardly
 benefit from the presence of skeptics.  A group dedicated to establishing
 sexual rights for S/M practitioners and freeing them from internalized
 oppressive attitudes might not benefit from allowing the attendance of
 those who lack sympathy for the value of such practices.
 
 C.  Assemblies are permitted to draw their doctrinal basis more
 narrowly than the Crossing as a whole, but they are expected to deal
 with their differences from other opinions as disagreements among
 reasonable people, rather than a special handle on the absolute truth
 which renders them the denizens of Olympus and others the denizens of
 Hell.  Assemblies with apparently contradictory beliefs should appoint
 liasons to each other and encourage dialog, but they should not shy
 away from argument as if intellectual competition were some unthinkable
 poison or rudeness.
 
 D.  These relaxed rules on doctrine should not be taken as a license
 for dogmatism.  Limits on opinion are to be as unrestrictive as
 possible given the mission of the assembly and the nature of its shared
 interest.  Any limits are to be drawn out explicitly when the assembly
 is proposed, and cannot be narrowed without recertification by the
 whole Crossing (as below) and by two-thirds of the entire assembly.
 Furthermore, an assembly should be so arranged that persons not sharing
 the assembly's common opinions would not be especially interested in
 joining its projects.
 
 E.  Assemblies are created by assent of the whole membership.  A simple
 plurality of votes, with a voting quorum of fifty per cent, admits an
 assembly to the Crossing.  A vote of two thirds, with the same quorum,
 dissolves an assembly.  Excessive dogmatism or exclusivism, or radical
 disregard for the rights of others, are the only grounds for refusal or
 dissolution of an assembly.
 
 F.  There should be no confusion about which expressions of opinion in
 assembly publications and statements pertain to the minimalist Twilight
 Crossing policy and which pertain to the particular assembly or writer.
 
 G.  Members may disagree with the efficacy or ethics of allowing,
 for instance, all-Hispanic or all-Thelemic assemblies, but they are
 expected to respect the right of each assembly to disagree concerning
 complex points of interpretation of Twilight Crossing's pro-freedom
 principles.
 
 4. Initiations
 
 A.  In no case is attendance at any initiation ritual mandatory for
 continued membership in Twiligt Crossing as a whole, though it may be
 required for membership in a particular assembly.
 
 B.  No initiation or other ritual sponsored by the Crossing or any
 assembly is to be taken as conferring any intrinsic spiritual
 superiority over those who have not taken the degree.  Such rituals
 represent a personal progress along a particular path of artistic or
 spiritual refinement.  Initiations should be structured in an open, not
 linear, fashion to help assure this, though this is only a
 recommendation.
 
 C.  Assemblies may structure their initiations in a hierarchical way,
 where initiations require prerequisites.  These prerequisites may be
 within the assembly or within other Twilight Crossing assemblies or
 alliances, and they should be waived when prior experience demands it.
 But in many cases it will be better for a spiritual assembly to have
 a spectrum of initiations accessible to any member.  Who is to say
 that the limbs of the Tree of Knowledge may not be explored in any
 order?  Should not polytheists in particular have mysteries of
 particular deities, which require no prerequisite or pedigree?
 As always, unneeded restriction should be avoided.
 
 D.  It is acceptable that those undergoing initiation rituals should be
 sworn to secrecy concerning the contents of those rituals, but only so
 that the rituals do not lose their efficacy through predictability.
 
 E.  Individuals are not to be subjected to unanticipated physical
 jeapordy, or any deliberate harm of any kind, by any initiation or
 other ritual at Twilight Crossing.  The dramatic use of tension and
 fear is permissible, as it is in any art.  Hazings for the sake of
 strengthening the group bond are forbidden, though voluntary pain is
 not forbidden as a ritual tool.  Any member must be able to resign
 an initiation at any time; use of a safe word system for withdrawal
 is recommended.
 
 5. Relations to Other Groups
 
 A.  Members are free to sponsor their own rituals, groups, and so forth
 which involve practices frowned on at the Crossing, and to belong to
 such groups sponsored by others.  Twilight Crossing encourages its
 members to join any and all religious or artistic groups which seem fit
 to them while members of the Crossing, as was often the case among the
 pagan mystery traditions of ancient Rome.
 
 B.  Twilight Crossing is especially interested in maintaining good
 relations with other groups which define themselves as occult, Satanic,
 or Neo-Pagan in orientation, all of which are words which describe the
 Crossing as well.  However, to the extent that the practices of these
 groups conflict with the values of Twilight Crossing, those groups
 should expect a certain amount of reasonable criticism from its
 members.  This criticism is a vital and important function of the
 values of the Crossing; it is not intended to damage relations with
 other groups, but neither should members of the Crossing fail to
 respect their own interests in free intellectual exercise by
 artificially restricting the scope of their comments.

 C.  Despite its orientation towards the Titans and Satan, the Crossing
 has no fixed teaching relative to Classical Greek mythology nor towards
 Christianity and the other two major monotheistic religions.  A person
 holding any of these traditions in high regard should not feel
 constrained by that opinion against membership in Twilight Crossing.
 Just as it is by no means obvious that a modern Christian must oppose
 Buddhism simply because it teaches that God is deluded, neither is it
 clear that a freethinking Christian must oppose the redeemed symbolism
 of Hekati or Satan merely because their tradition has been one of the
 demonizers.  The way is especially open to contacts with those modern
 Christian individuals and groups which share the Crossing's distaste
 for dogma and repression.
 
 D.  The Crossing is critical of many temporal authorities.  All
 governments drawn to date are flawed by authoritarianism and
 narrow-mindedness.  Its right to criticize officialdom is guaranteed by
 the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.  Nonetheless, it is not
 seeking the violent overthrow of these governments as a matter of
 policy.  Individual members of the Crossing may support one or
 more revolutionary movements throughout the world, but they do so as
 individuals and not as members of the Crossing.  No project of Twilight
 Crossing or any of its assemblies seeks the violent overthrow of any
 government.  This rule should be taken as a pragmatic realization of
 the limits of a group like Twilight Crossing in a world polity where
 such projects are everywhere high crimes when they are without the
 sponsorship of government.  This rule is not an official requirement
 or condemnation of any belief about the ethics of revolution.
 
 E.  The Crossing does, however, refuse to recognize laws which stand in
 contravention to the rights of artistic and religious freedom, and
 freedom of thought and privacy, such as restrictions against sexual
 practices between consenting and sexually mature persons and against
 the voluntary consumption of consciousness-altering drugs.  From the
 prehistoric past through the present, many cultures have incorporated
 both sex and drugs into religious and artistic practices, and it has
 credibly been argued by some scholars that all religion derives from
 them.  Religious prostitution and sacramental drugs have been common
 mysteries of pagan religion from before the start of recorded history,
 and strong traces of both remain in the myths of monotheism as well.
 Twilight Crossing firmly insists that all people have the right to
 engage in sacred practices of these venerable types, and that no
 government or other agency has the right to interfere in them any more
 than in any exercise of freedom of religion or freedom of thought.  Our
 patron sorceresses Medea and Circe had mastered every form of magic
 drug and herb, and of the arts of love; we would be untrue to their
 legend were we to turn away from their wisdom for mere political
 convenience.
 
 F. In some cases Assembly status may bea form of recognition by Twilight
 Crossing more than a form of membership in Twilight Crossing.  Assemblies
 may be just as much allied to other formal or informal groups as they
 are to TC, and may include non-members of Twilight Crossing in their
 assembly membership.  However, only Twilight Crossing's members may
 participate in its elections and votes.
 
 G. If an assembly has members who are not members of Twilight Crossing,
 then it is best to present it as an independent group which (if the
 subject arises) may be explained to have recognition as a member
 assembly by Twilight Crossing, a networking group.  However, the
 assembly is always free to make its recognition known.
 
 6. Contact
 
Twilight Crossing was a thought experiment in group building.  It is
not a real group.  Feel free to draw on its design in building your
own groups, however, and to continue to discuss it as a thought
experiment.