Season of Contemplation

The final months of the year are always a period of deep contemplation for me.  Samhain, Yule, New Years.  My birthday and my partner’s, and our anniversary.  Five different calendars turn over from 31 October to 1 January, plus Thanksgiving and Christmas and all the navel-gazing that goes with that.  This year, even more than most, I have a lot to contemplate.

Usually, I begin the season with a sort of revel: dressing up for days leading up to Halloween, each costume more outrageous than the last, and greeting each night with as much wine and ecstacy as I can muster.  I have pushed the boundaries of dress codes at my places of employment, unnerved the casual libertines of a residential liberal arts college, been too weird for the weirdest town in Kansas.  I have gone out into the world to be seen, to confront the squares with the life they could have if only they’d grow a soul and a spine.

This morning, however, I woke in a mental place of quiet.  I have no revel in me, today.  My thoughts circle on who I am and what I want.  I find that my answers do not come as readily as they have in the past.

Mine is not a simple life.  Much of that is by choice, but at the core it’s also my nature.  I am not now, nor ever have I been, nor ever shall I be a “get-along, go-along” kind of person.  I have always believed in things that others do not; always wanted things that were not what was prescribed for me.  I have always not pursued those desires – all other arguments aside, there are only so many hours in the day – but I have always stood up for what I believe in the face of not just convention, but actual authority.

This year has seen a great deal of both those things.  The one has left me blessed, surrounded by more love and stronger community than in many years.  The other has left me adrift as certain ambitions were broken on the rocks of my ideals, shattered by my refusal to be expedient with my ethics.

This year, I have been victorious and beloved.  This year, I have been disappointed and betrayed.  Certain magical operations have, all rather suddenly and together, born fruit: I feel like there is more of me than there has been in years, and that I can see more clearly than I have since the Sunrise Temple … or possibly even Lawrence.  At the same time, though, I feel like the world is murkier by the day, and that even more of me isn’t enough for the work at hand.

The last year has seen the rise of a new autocratic strain in US politics, and a savage resurgence of white supremacy in both the US body politic at large and the KC neo-Pagan community in particular.  Homophobia and heteronormativity are coming back like a tide, and allies are mistaking the most banal lip service for real support.

In this moment, I’m feeling mostly good.  In an hour that might change.  Looking back over the last year, I’m really not certain I can say that there hasn’t been more down than up.  So begins the season of contemplation.

 

Do Magick Challenge: Beginner’s Mind Master Post

In the Beginning

I have intended to participate in Andrieh Vittimus’ Do Magick Challenge for some time.  My tendency to lose months at a time has resulted in me checking the web page days into each challenge and having missed the research period several times, now.  Including this month, actually, but Jason and Andrieh made it clear on the podcast that one could join at any time this month.  And so I did, posting my Statement of Intent on the second day of September and diving in head first.  I set myself a number of goals: daily meditation; magickal art three days a week; conjuring the Spirit Bune; and, finally and most importantly, the rediscovery of my sense of magical play.

Week One

On the first week, I opened strong.  On Day One, I sat down to meditate for the first time in weeks — it had been perhaps months, actually, since I last mediated outside the Esbat circle.  On Day Two I performed Andrieh’s Baphomet ritual, and then confronted the reality that the mundane world changes at its own pace.  On Day Three I made my first serious efforts at my goal to do more magical art, devoting hours to my Mask of Venus, then spent the evening in Esbat rituals attempting to rid myself of baleful influences.  On Day Four I did more magical art — working on both the Venus Mask and a number of apotropaic jewelry designs — and made myself a charm against the evil eye.  On Day Five I continued my mask-making and escalated my mediation practice.  On Days Six and Seven I coasted, only meditating, but I began to notice changes in my dreaming.  Additionally, on Day Seven Aradia began joining me for meditation.

Despite resting on my laurels the last two days, I feel like the first week was a success.  I did a lot of magic and a lot of art.  Coming from practically no meditation to meditating daily is an intense lifestyle change.  The depression and anxiety that plagued me before beginning the project did not, of course, vanish immediately.  In fact — an upside to journaling, I guess — they initially got worse.

Week Two

In the second week, Aradia and I added planetary invocations to our daily work, immediately before nightly meditations.  Days Eight, Nine, and Ten were slow days for most of my goals, but I continued to escalate my meditation times slowly and escalated the planetary magic from previous versions of our ritual by reading both the Thomas Tayor and Apostolos Athanassakis translations.  On Day Eleven I returned to my masks, and did some divination to help me decide how I wished to approach the spirit Bune, and on Day Twelve I went through with that conjuration.  Day Thirteen was meditation only and on Day Fourteen I strung myself a necklace for my Baphomet pendant but missed my daily meditation.

In this second week I continued to increase my daily meditation time and, in doing so, I began discerning changes in my energetic body.  I also particularly struggled to balance my mundane and magical lives.  I made my three days of magical arts and crafts, and achieved my goal of conjuring the Goetic spirit Bune, but failed at my goal of daily meditation.

 

Week Three

In the third week, my physical health failed me.  Day Fifteen was exhausting, and I barely managed my daily routine.  On Day Sixteen I turned a museum trip with my mother into a magical experiment, examining mummies with a magical eye, then collapsed onto the couch for the next two days (17, 18), though I was able to resume meditation and planetary rituals on Day Eighteen.  On Day Nineteen, I was feeling mostly better and went through with teaching a class on using the Classical Planets as a source of power for freeform energywork.  On Day Twenty I collapsed again, sicker than I had been yet; I went into work then needed someone else to drive me home.  On Day Twenty One I called in sick and spent the day on my couch, working on magical jewelry designs.

I managed only one day of magical art and missed a second day of meditation.

 

Week Four

I did my best to come back strong in week four, but my total collapse in week three left both me and my house in serious disarray.  It was struggle to resume even daily planetary rituals and meditation, let alone my loftier goals.  In retrospect, I pushed myself too hard, because I wasn’t really fully myself again until Day 28.

On Day Twenty Two I managed 22 minutes of meditation.  This would prove to be the peak.  It was also the second day in a row when I experienced intense sensory non-sequiturs.  See the daily records for details.  On Day Twenty Three I experimented with adding the Qabalistic cross and pentagram banishing to my daily rituals.  On Day Twenty Four I began designing and constructing a new set of house wards.  That night I gave up on my goal of escalating to 30 minutes of meditation by the end of the month and began setting my timer for 15 minutes.  On Day Twenty Five I decided to fumigate the house to clear out any lingering bad vibes.  On Day Twenty Six I meditated only, and on Day Twenty Seven I managed only my planetary ritual and meditation.  On Day Twenty Eight I succeeded in tracing an amulet gifted to me to a particular grimoire,

Overall, in that week I succeeded only at meditating daily.

Denouement

On Days Twenty Nine and Thirty, I concluded my Beginner’s Mind experiment by erecting the first two layers of my new household protective wards, invoking the Sun and Moon by Taylor’s Orphic Hymns and empowering the talismans with Picatrix invocations.  I meditated fifteen minutes each night.

In theory, I wanted to end the month of magic with a bang.  In the moment, though, I was just glad to have made it through.

In Conclusion

At the beginning of September, I chose a particular (broad) interperetation of the Beginner’s Mind challenge.  Where others cracked open grimoires,  or sought to master various forms of divination, I sought to reclaim a portion of my own mind.  Over the course of several previous magical experiments and programs, I have painted myself into various corners.  I miss the enthusiasm with which I once pursued and practiced the magical arts.  To that end, as detailed above, I set myself a number of smaller challenges.

I challenged myself to meditate daily, starting at five minutes and escalating to thirty.  I … mostly succeeded.  I meditated 28/30 days.  One day I missed in favor of a hot date.  One day I missed because I was sick as fuck.  I ultimately capped out at 22 minutes of meditation, then settled for a more achievable goal of 15 minutes.

I challenged myself to work on magical art three days a week.  I succeeded at that for the first two weeks, but failed abominably in the second two.

I challenged myself to conjure the spirit Bune.  I did so.  That conjuration has yet to receive results, but so far the spirit contact has proved positive and potentially fruitful.

I challenged myself to follow my magical whims.  They proved less, well, whimsical than I had imagined they might, but overwhelmingly succeeded in this.  I can recall only one whim I did not follow through on, and that was because the particular school of thought I wished to apply to a situation proved inapplicable in that moment, and then I forgot about it before the opportune moment arose.

All this with the ultimate goal of reclaiming my magical practice.  Of finding the fun back.  In that, I think, I succeeded.  I no longer feel so constrained by the schools of thought I have studied.  I feel like my magic is my own again.  And I’m excited to move forward with my art and experiments.

I am also reminded very viscerally of the value of daily meditation.  At the beginning of September, I was a depressed and anxious mess, despite how objectively awesome my life is.  During the first week, perhaps slowing down to confront those feelings, I actually fell down a little further.  In the weeks since, however, despite the physical illness I suffered in week three, I’m feeling incredibly better emotionally.  We can see some evidence of this, in fact, in this and my previous blog post.  I’m actually writing again, something I hadn’t done in a while.

The Do Magick Challenge came with its own requirements, chief among them daily public journaling.  The value of that has been demonstrated what I should have already known, which is the value of such journaling.   I don’t wish to spam my followers (or continue the particular self-censorship public journaling requires), so I must now challenge myself to do one of the important sorcerer’s tasks I have never quite managed before.

And with all this written up, I now look forward to the next Do Magick Challenge.  I’ll try not to be a stranger here in the interim.

Dabbling in Deomonolatry – Preliminary thoughts

I’ve spoken before on how, in the late 1990s and early 2000s when I began my magical career, conjuring spirits in any way was considered deeply taboo.  Nothing was more taboo than the point where the lingering echoes of the Satanic panic overlapped with Neo-Pagan respectability politics: Crowley’s Goetia(1) and the summoning of demons.  I, of course, confronted this taboo through juvenile art (tragically no longer extant), but I also worked very, very hard to enforce it in the magical circles in which I socialized.

So when Andrieh Vitimus proposed Beginner’s Mind as the theme of this past month’s Do Magick Challenge, the Goetia was one of the first things to come to mind.  I briefly considered devoting the whole month to the grimoire, but given that I was dragging myself out of a deep depression during which I had done relatively little magic, had skipped the research month because where the fuck did August go, anyway?, and would be diving in to the challenge two days late … Yeah.  That just seemed like a bad idea.  Instead I set my sights lower: to conjure a single spirit from the grimoire.  I, perhaps inevitably, chose Bune.  I would conjure him to bring me riches.  On a whim, having made the decision, I engraved his seal in brass.

In a sense, then, my first two weeks of the challenge were spent in preparation for that ritual.  In addition to getting my aura back into fighting shape, I needed to decide which approach to take in the conjuration.  I boiled my potentially unlimited options down to three: to perform the operation as described in the Goetia; to perform an alternate Bune ritual presented by Jason Miller(2); or to perform a ritual of my own design(3).  I turned to divination to help make the decision.  Drawing a card for each of the options, I got XIII Death, 0 The Fool, and 3 Disks “Work” respectively.  I interpreted this to mean that the Miller rite would be my best place to start, that the work would continue freestyle, and that I would eventually conclude with the Legemeton ritual.

On Day 12 of the challenge, at the Day and Hour of Jupiter, I conjured the spirit of Bune using Miller’s rite.  The ritual was very bare bones, so I made a few aesthetic alterations to account for the layout of my temple space — I made and donned the paper talisman of Bune as Miller described, and set the brass talisman in my triangle along with the obsidian sphere I use as a focus in almost all of my rituals.  I then performed the rite as Miller described, and the ritual worked as promised.

The spirit’s appearance was faint, but discernable; although I did not perceive him immediately, he made his presence known before I repeated the call.  I made my request of Bune – a sum of money from a certain source and within a certain time frame – and he (I believe) acquiesced.  I dismissed him and my circle.  I put away the brass seal in the box I bought for it.  I went about my day, flush with the afterglow of successful magic.

On Day 28, Bune appeared to me during my nightly meditations.  He informed me that by putting the brass seal in its box, I had limited his ability to act.  To quote my original notes:

He said that I had left his seal in a box too long to accomplish the task I had asked of him.  In order to procure my cash, he said, he needed his seal placed on my Jupiter altar and a candle lit for him.  I considered saying no, but part of the premise of the Miller invocation I had originally chosen is that you are building a cooperative relationship with the spirits, and that request is well within the boundaries of reasonable established by my other spirit-work.  I assented, and when I was done with my meditation I moved his seal and lit the candle as promised.  As an act of good faith, tomorrow I will put in the order for the copper seal I promised him upon his success.

I have since made good on those promises: the seal has been moved to my Jupiterian money altar, not one but two candles have been lit for him, and the copper seal has been ordered.  We’ll see how things come and go.


1 – Crowley, Aleister, and Hymenaeus Beta, eds. The Goetia: the lesser key of Solomon the King: Lemegeton–Clavicula Salomonis Regis, book one. Translated by Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers. 2nd ed. York Beach, Me.: Samuel Weiser, 1997. It should, I hope, go without saying that the volume is Crowley’s more by reputation than by fact.

2 – Miller, Jason. The Sorcerer’s Secrets: Strategies in Practical Magick. Pompton Plains, NJ: New Page Books, 2009.  Pages 139-142.

3 – Such a ritual would have probably been based on the conjuration circle shown to me by the spirits of Saturn.  I may yet perform it anyway.