Nom de Guerre: A New Self-Introduction

I started this blog under my real name.  It seemed like the thing to do at the time.  In November of 09 I hadn’t quite made the decision to become a professional academic, let alone begun to process everything I was going to need to do to achieve that end.  I was going to school, yes, but … I still thought of myself more as a jeweler than anything else.  As a jeweler, practicing magic in a city where I have an established base of power, I have nothing to hide.

But now I’m moving, and I have academic politics to think about.  The people where I’m going don’t know me, and I don’t know them.  And when I finish my Bachelor’s degree, I’ll be moving on to another school where I’ll have to rebuild my reputation from the ground up again.  (And, of course, there’s the whole angle where I might just join the war.)  Having this come up when you search my real name might be inadvisable.

My career as an occult author is, at best, years off.  Until then it seems prudent to adopt a pen name.  I will not name the school I am attending, or the town I live in – though anyone willing to websearch the details I do give will no doubt be able to put two and two together.  I don’t need a secret identity … just plausible deniability.  As such, I would ask friends who know me in the real world to post comments here on the blog, rather than on my facebook – as an added bonus, our resulting conversations will be better preserved for posterity.

Allow me, then, to reintroduce myself: I am Satyr Magos.  I have been studying witchcraft since 1993 and practicing since 1996.  I am deeply eclectic – the kind who can lecture you for hours on the schools of thought I’ve studied to get to where I am.  Although I do not think of myself as Wiccan, many of my rituals are based in that framework.  At the moment, I would describe my practice as Helenistic neo-Wiccan shamanic witchcraft.  I am, for the moment, the one and only Initiate of the Obsidian Dream.

For the first two-thirds of my life, I was an angry agnostic and my magic was largely theoretical – personal shields and house wards and tarot and playing magical tag.  In 2007, shortly before my life in St. Louis failed utterly, I began making offerings to Dionisos, Hephaestos, and Apollon.  The first two took me in readily; Rhea informed me of her presence in 2009.  I am still negotiating with Apollo – and now with Athena and Hermes, as I more seriously devote myself to school. 

At the same time I began working with gods, I also began to study shamanic techniques: a friend of mine took me on my first journey to the underworld.  I read Penczak’s Shamanic Temple … but it was Michael Harner’s Way of the Shaman that actually got me somewhere.

I put off studying ceremonial and Chaos magic for most of my life.  There was too much penis-waving and too many invocations of a god I don’t trust in the former; the second, as I’ve mentioned elsewhere, gave me flashbacks to playing D&D in high school with that older friend who never moved out of his parents basement.  I am dedicating the next year of my magical life to filling those holes in my magical education.  In the process I aim to develop a daily practice, and master the skills needed to aid other witches with their spells, potions, and rites of passage.

Welcome, again, to my blog.  When I started it, I never imagined that I would have over a hundred pageviews in a month.  Thank you all for coming.