Continuing Experiments with Sigils

Just fired my first sigil in months.  Damn that did feel good.

Which gets me thinking…

I’ve been hanging out on tumblr a lot, lately, and the chaos magick tag is occasionally overwhelmed by people posting sigils to be empowered by those who view them.

On the one hand, that’s brilliant.  Taken cumulatively, with as many people would see such a thing, even their mere passing notice would raise more energy than most of us can do on our own.  I mean, I like to think I’m a badass, but come on: even if only you, my readers, see that shit: y’all are badasses, too, and (between the wordpress and the tumblr) there are over a hundred of you.  That’s some serious magical power.

On the other hand, however, it poses an ethical concern.  How do I know that I can stand behind every objective that someone else might throw out there?  I don’t know who you’re cursing. I don’t know what politician you’re backing.  Witches and magicians, contrary to our own protests, are, as a group, no better than anyone else: we have our retrofuck misogynists and racists and homophobes,  we have our predators and rapists and murderers and demagogues.  And, love you though I do, my dear readers, I also know (as you do, being exceptionally clever as well as badasses) that we don’t actually agree on everything.  So how can I ask you to, never knowing the statement of intent, back everything I might choose to post.

And, from another angle entirely, what are the risks?  Douchebags and trolls abound.  How bad could your shit get fucked if someone decided they didn’t like the look of your sigil and decided to deep-six it?  Or follow the power back and put the hurt on you?  Sure the odds are low.  I’ve been doing this shit since I was sixteen years old, and I’ve been magically attacked by exactly one person that I know of and been haunted maybe a handful of times.  The next time the sun enters Scorpio, I will celebrate my thirty-fourth birthday.  But people do, occasionally, find me personally obnoxious, and I have burnt a few bridges in my day.

So I’m not posting the sigil this time.  But I’d love to hear people’s thoughts on the matter: logistical and ethical, both.

Dark Moon Navel-Gazing: the Status of My Practice

There are a wide assortment of reasons that my magical practice (and, with it, my blogging) has been, at best, sporadic for the last year or so.  Some of them are magical dilemmas (how to incorporate the experiments and lessons of the previous two years into my personal practice), some of them are spiritual failings (see previous, also: devotional work is hard and scary), and some work and school related (overtime in the mall!  senior thesis!  trying to catch a date!).  But I think the biggest reason is that I’m lonely, and that I just don’t enjoy working or worshiping solo.

A good number of my most exciting magical and spiritual experience have been in group contexts: my first elemental energy work, my past-life explorations, the spirit-hunts, and the aura-games with my friends in and just after high school; the WPA/KU Cauldron before and after my failed life in St.Louis; discovering partner-magic with Aradia, and later with Sannafrid; the trials and tribulations of the proto-coven.  Even most of my best solitary experiences took place at times in my life when I had physical access to other practitioners to plan, brag about,and/or commiserate over my experiments and experiences.

Every time I go back to Kansas City for breaks, doing magical work with Aradia, Sthenno, Pasiphae, and Aidan are among the highlights of the trip.  When Aradia and I went on a cross-country road trip, we made a point of doing magic in each of the two parks we visited, and those moments were definitely among highlights of the vacation.

Since Sannafrid graduated, though, and since things got weird between myself and some of the local pagan group … I’ve had no one to practice with.  My current lover is, against my own rules, not a practitioner.  And our schedules don’t line up particularly well, leaving me struggling with another of the various unintended consequences of having taken the name Satyr Magician: too horny to think is also too horny to do magic, and there’s only so much I can do to take the edge off all by myself.

Now, I don’t mean to give the impression that anything’s hopeless: despite the flu that took me out for the entirety of the Full Moon, my practice is the best it’s been in a while.  With the help of my familiar spirits, I’ve been repairing the damage to my Inner Temple–escalating rites followed by a whole lot of nothing was pretty hard on the place.  I’ve been working hard (again) on getting my shields back to a level where they keep out what they need to without blinding me to the world.  (This seems to be one of those never-really-quite-work-it-out problems.)  My Sight has definitely been improving, though my mind-reading/empathy is still not back to what my crazy Scorpio ass expects it to be.

But it’s just not as much fun to tell Aradia about my latest adventures over the phone, or Sannafrid over chat.  I need a physically present community.  I need mentors and students and peers to keep me honest and innovative.  And I need it to be fun.  As hard or as frightening as an individual experiment or experience might be, my practice as a whole has to be pleasurable.  I am, after all, a hedonist witch.