talking to spirits – Page 2 – Journey Through The Obsidian Dream

In art, sorcerer's workbench, witchcraft

Half-born Spirit

Satyr Magos07/09/202231/08/2022

Over the last decade in general, and the last three years in particular, I have been doing increasingly intense work with electional astrology and astrological images, culminating (so far) in an ever-expanding series of metal talismans cast in my home studio. But, as any of you who are in the arts in general, and jewelry in particular, know, neither art nor magic are science, and results are sometimes perfect. Casting, in particular, is a bit finnicky, and the vagaries of combining the process with spirit conjuration only complicates the process.

So far, most of the time, the issues have been minor. Some of the coin talismans had been meant to be pendants, but the bail didn’t cast correctly. In those instances, I just cut off the nubs with no harm to the metal talisman or complaint from the talismanic spirit.

In most cases where more intense intervention was necessary, I kept the talisman for myself and worked with the spirit to determine what was needed to achieve our mutual ends. My Mars talisman, for example, had been meant to have three jump rings, but only the bottom one cast. I made him a frame so that I could wear him as a necklace, rather than string him on prayer beads, and hung a Roman arrow head from the bottom ring.

The case of my Jupiter talismans was more extreme. One talisman had a hole in the blank space over the lion-man’s bolt, and two of his three jump rings had failed. Working with him, I tube-set an emerald in that hole and built him a silver frame so that I could string him on lapis and moonstone prayer beads. A second talisman had mis-cast more drastically, missing one of her hands and a great deal of the thinner parts of the talisman had cold-shut, leaving negative space in the background talismanic image. I thought that I was, finally, going to have to figure out a funerary process for failed talismans – but the spirit informed me, in no uncertain terms, that she wanted to live. And so I made a frame for her, as well, with “wings” that would clip into my cuff bracelet. They were not the strongest talismans I’ve made, but they’ve been growing stronger as I work with them, and they have been good and loyal familiars.

At the second of August’s Mercury in Virgo elections, however, the inevitable finally happened: one of the talismans I cast failed entirely. The problem was on the jewelry end of things: I didn’t get a good enough seal between the flask and the vacuum of the casting machine. If it hadn’t been an elected cast, I’d have had more than a few seconds to fuck with it and get a better seal. But it was and I didn’t.

The talisman was barely there, a cartoon crescent moon where there should have been a full disk. At first I thought there wasn’t even enough there to catch as spirit. As I cut it off the sprue, though, I could feel the spirit in the metal: struggling to manifest, but without enough material or image to fully enter the world – but too much to just leave on its own.

I didn’t ask its name. That seemed like an insult. I just held it in my hands and apologized. I asked what it needed. It needed the fragment to be destroyed, rendered unrecognizable as even the attempt at a talisman. That was absolutely in my power.

I took the crescent nub to my soldering block and turned on my torch. As I put fire to metal, I apologized again and reached out my psychic hands to cradle the spirit as I pulled it softly from the melting metal. I continued apologizing to the spirit, promising that it would have another chance at life in the material world when next I came to a Mercury election.

The brass burned blue as I melted it and resisted being slagged at temperatures that should have melted it readily. But the metal gave, eventually, and when it did, curling into a ball as best as brass can, the spirit came free. With a final apology, I released the spirit to return to its sphere.

Sometimes casts fail, even when there’s magic involved. I’ve been afraid of something like this happening since I started casting elected talismans for my friends back in 2020. In a sense, I’m glad that it finally happened, because now I know how to handle it, and that I can, and that – approached properly – it’s not as traumatic to either magician or spirit as I was afraid that it might be.

I’m also glad that it happened because it answered a question that has been with me since I first heard about spirit conjuration magic back in the 1990s. The spirits we call – or at least the ones that come when I throw my consecrated casts – are here because they want to be. There is something about incarnating as a talisman spirit that is appealing to them. They all want to live.

In art, witchcraft

Triptych Vision of Baphomet

Satyr Magos22/06/202215/06/2022

I’ve mentioned a few times that my daily ritual includes an invocation of Baphomet, calling upon them to light their Gnostic fire with me, my familiars, and the world. I have mentioned that, on some days, I have been rewarded with visions of the god, and that I have attempted to reproduce those visions in art as a devotional practice. I have not been particularly successful at doing so *frequently*, but that practice has continued.

I may also have mentioned that the god has frequently appeared to me as a … triptych, for lack of a better word. Or I may not have. Frankly, I have struggled with the vision, in part because it is so different from the way Baphomet is depicted in any other source that I’ve seen. I have made a few attempts to render those images into art – as an act of devotion, yes, but also so that I can contemplate them, and try to understand them. These three pencil sketches from mid-May are the best that I have managed so far.

In the center, of course, is Baphomet as one usually sees them: goat-headed and goat-footed, in the magician’s pose, the sacred androgyne: both man and woman and neither; both divine and mortal and neither. Levi, who first drew this image, hid their phallus behind a magic wand. I suffer from no such cowardice. In this vision they are the Red God. No, I don’t know what that means.

On the right hand side (of my vision) is the White Lady, or perhaps White Priestess. She is crowned by the moon, and sometimes veiled or blindfolded. She tilts her head back toward the sky, and her arms hang down with her hand open, palms up.

On the left hand side is the Black Man, or the Man in Black, or both. His head is that of a deer, or perhaps the skull of a deer, with branching antlers. He holds his hands up in a gesture of power.

I don’t know what this means. I don’t know what any of this means. Didn’t I just write about how deeply uncomfortable I am with religious impulse and experience? And yet, mystic visions like these are what I live for. And if there are mystic waters unmixed with religion, well… I left those shallow shores behind years ago. When I wrote last, that thought made me angry. Today I am just … confused.

Of all the gods in my altar room, Baphomet is almost always the most present. Even as I have struggled with deep depression over the last weeks – a plain fact that deserves a post of its own – and I have struggled to feel the presences even of Dionysos and Aphrodite, gods who have been with me even longer, Baphomet has been there with me, reaching out, a palpable presence in the room.

The images above are still as much artistic flourish as mystic vision. I hope that, as I continue to struggle out of this emotional morass, I will be able to resume that work, the vision will return and I will be able to render it more clearly.

In witchcraft

Speaking of Speaking to Spirits (Self-censorship When…)

Satyr Magos26/02/202219/02/2022

I wonder, sometimes, how much other witches – and magicians, sorcerers, wonderworkers, mystics, what have you, those who even talk about their experiences – dial back, tone down, even outright censor their processes and experiences. Not just because somethings are private, but because they don’t want to admit in that forum just how far into the weeds they are.

What got me thinking about this most recently was a post that I wrote for my Patreon supporters, talking about casting and consecrating a series of Jupiter talismans. There were some things that came up in the process that gave me pause. For a couple of those problems, I pulled cards. For others, I consulted my familiar spirits. And I wondered – publicly on twitter – how many occultists just elide that distinction, obscuring their spirit contacts behind cartomancy and other slightly-more-respectable forms of divination.

For all that my brand is radical authenticity bordering on oversharing, I’m certain that I’ve been guilty of this in the past. And I know for a fact that I’ve been guilty of the reason for this: even in the last few days, having written the opening lines of this post, I’ve seen people talking about “the spirits told me” and physically cringed. I remember clearly a moment a few years ago when a woman came into the jewelry store where I was working, asking about making a series of custom Mjolnir hammers because Thor had told her that it was her responsibility to do something about the growing presence of Nazis in the visible Heathen community. The store was (and is) explicitly magical / New Age / Pagan, so this was a little less weird than it might sound, but it was still incredibly jarring. This woman didn’t know me from Adam, and she was – to put it in the least flattering light possible – talking to me about hearing voices. Nor do I think I am alone in seeing any public claim of “channeled messages” (that phrase in particular) as a glowing red flag.

I’ve been thinking about this off and on for the last week, and have not come up with any answers that I’m comfortable with. Public channeled messages are almost always weirdly invasive, and have historically often served as the hook for literal grifts and cons. There are reasons they had to be banned in the Facebook group I helped moderate a few years back. At the same time, spirit contact has historically composed the overwhelming majority of magical practices in the Western mystical tradition (and, to the best of my knowledge, most others, but that’s not my lane). The Greek Magical Papyri is literally nothing but a stack of notes on how to beg, bribe, or coerce spirits into doing something for you. The Picatrix and other astrological image magic revolves around timing your spirit petitions so that they will do the most perfect job of what you want. The Solomonic tradition is just about getting a cohort of very specific spirits to do what you want, based on very specific rites and their very specific specialties. This is not to say that I don’t believe in and practice magic based in the energy and cybernetic models of magic as well, but spirit-model is – to use one of my least favorite neologisms – the GOAT.

Which is all to say that the best magical practitioners are almost all involved in some degree of spirit contact, and are therefore both talking to and listening to spirits. So why do so many of us hold back from talking about that? And why do we – myself very much included here – get so uncomfortable when people break that silence?

Speaking only for myself, it comes partly from my deep-seated fear of institutionalization. I read too much Victorean literature as a child and have spent the subsequent decades in terror of being thrown into a sanatorium. It also comes from how difficult spirit contact has always been for me. I have been able to see and sense spirits since my teens, but only learned to hear or understand them with any reliability in my early thirties, and only developed real confidence with that in the last three or four years. And, finally, I think it comes at least in part from a fear of cringe-by-association: we’ve seen the weirdos and grifters in both physical and online spaces, people who will approach you with a “message from the spirits”, people whose guides and allies seem to be leading them astray, people who think that their cat or dog or ferret is a magical familiar, and we frankly don’t want to be mistaken from them.

So, I’ll talk about how my familiar spirits advise and aid me on the selection of astrological elections, and the consecration of elected talismans. I’ll talk about my daily offerings, and how I came to offer coffee instead of wine – well, in addition to wine. But I don’t talk about the advice they give me about my mundane life. I don’t talk about the adventures we go on together, physically or astrally. I don’t talk about the strange and complex interactions between my familiars, or about the hints I sometimes get of their lives outside of mortal contact.

I don’t even know that these boundaries are wrong or unreasonable. Maybe it’s for the best that we self-censor like this. But as someone who always had a certain amount of physical community, but still mostly learned magic from books and experiments, I would have loved to know more about the nitty gritty details of spirit contact when I got started. Because the idealized form that so many people talk about … well, frankly, eleven years since the conjuration of my Natal Genius and Daimon and the experiments that followed, I still haven’t experienced it.

In witchcraft

Hekate: An Unexpected Devotion

Satyr Magos24/05/201923/05/20192 Comments

This week has marked an anniversary, half-forgotten in the madness of 2018. This time last year, my working group participated in the global Rite of Her Sacred Fires. It was not the first time I had invoked Hekate, but it was the most significant up to that point.

I must emphasize “up to that point”. Hekate began to appear more frequently on our docket, culminating in a devotional Samhain ritual in which I make made myself a vessel for her so that my compatriots could approach and petition her for aid. Three months after that, Jack Grayle’s Hekataeon went live. Aradia and I dove in head first. Our copy arrived just in time for Paganicon, and we started the work as soon a we got back.

I am 38 years old. I have been practicing magic since I was 16. But I was raised with the blandest (functionally atheist) sort of Protestantism, and I did not reach out to the gods until I was 28. Excepting my easy relationship with Dionysus, I did not manage to cultivate anything resembling a devotional practice until I was 30, and that was very much rooted in the particular circumstances of the Sunrise Temple. I have had relationships with a wild variety of spirits and an eclectic assortment of gods and powers, but little of it resembled anything akin to worship. And until a year ago, Hekate was never even on my radar.

I began to work the Hekataeon at the end of March, as I was coming out of a deep depression, a descent that began early in 2017 and bottomed out last Thanksgiving. The ascent has been steep but rocky, and it is difficult to say how much of my improvement is the native cycle of my fucked up brain and how much is as a result of the work. I could not have begun the work had I not begun to feel better at the first of the year. Any daily practice would certainly have improved my life. But also, the calming and cleansing of mania is a recurring theme in the Hekataeon.

Now, a year after that first significant contact, I have participated in the Rite of Her Sacred Fires for the second time. I had just completed the twenty-seven days of devotional meditation that comprised the second section of the Hekataeon, studying the facets of Hekate, and was about to make the transition from Devotee to Adept. By the time this post goes live, I will have completed that initiation.

Jack Grayle’s vision of Hekate is Gnostic, cosmic — the beginning and end of all. As I dig in to his ancient sources, and compare them to other modern visions, I find that he is not alone in this. I wish that I were in a financial position to take Jason Miller’s Hekate Sorcery course.

I am a sorcerer. A witch. A heretic. A Gnostic. I make handshake deals and back alley bargains with spirits. I treat with gods and demons and angels as equals. I seek ecstasy. Not Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel, but rather Gnosis — knowledge of the divine power from which mortal and immortal life both spring, and which I cannot believe is a person of any kind, not even a god. I reject the capital G.

Though I have courted a few, with varying degrees of success — Apollo, Hephaestus, Aphrodite, Baphomet — Dionysus is the only god I have truly loved. I did not seek out Hekate, but rather met her through my friends. One thing led to another. And now … I have graduated from disinterested third party Reader to Devotee … and now to Adept. Degrees of priesthood follow, culminating in a binding contract that will last into future lives.

Devotion in this life I am prepared for. I do not know, however, that I am prepared to make any promises about the next.

For now, though, the road ahead of me is obscure. I do not know, precisely, what will be asked of me. The work may reject me before I am forced to reject it. Or the goddess and I may come to more complex and nuanced arrangements. Decision, after all, is her sacrament.

Until then, it seems, I am Devoted. Very much to my own surprise.

In witchcraft

Prosperity Mojo: Further Work with Bune

Satyr Magos05/01/201905/01/2019

In early November, shortly after Jupiter entered Sagittarius, Aradia and I decided that the stars were reasonably well aligned for our working group to do some prosperity magic. But because our working group was getting a little burnt out on charging sigils with Orphic hymns, we decided to go in a slightly different direction: pulling out our collections of scrap fabrics, herbs, loose stones, oils, and whatnot, we decided to make mojo bags.

Having previously worked with Bune (October-November of 2018), I made the spontaneous decision to include the seal I had hand-engraved in brass in the otherwise conventionally Jupiterian prosperity talisman. It sits on my altar and I spritz it with prosperity spray every pay period.

But Bune likes public praise, and I’ve got to hand it to him: he’s delivering. Despite an otherwise slow holiday season at work, every pay check has been above average. My ebook sales bumped, and my Kindle Unlimited pageviews skyrocketed. It’s not a huge amount of money, but it’s workable and sustainable growth.

I keep hearing about how dangerous it is to work with Goetic spirits. How they’ll fuck up your brain and your life. And, don’t get me wrong, there’s some folks in the Lesser Key that I won’t touch with a ten foot pole. And it’s always possible that there’s something unique about my natal chart or my previous magical practice that makes my situation special. But so far, I’ve found Bune to be a reasonable and companionable partner in crime.

In Uncategorized, witchcraft

Early Spirit Contact: “Daemon Wolf”

Satyr Magos14/09/20161 Comment

The first spirit contact I can recall was with a “totem” spirit I came to call Daemon Wolf.

As many of you may recall, animal totems (or, spirits, phenomena, and identifications we called animal totems) were a HUGE THING in the mid-to-late 1990s. Ted Andrews was fucking everywhere. People looked to their totems not just as spiritual guides and masters, but to explain and shape their very personalities. For example, many “Cat totem” people I knew meowed and tried to purr and gleefully used their identification to invade (or avoid)ur personal space; people with “wolf totems” cast themselves in roles of leader or tragic outcast; “bear totem” people set themselves up as the “cuddly bouncer”. But I digress.

In this atmostphere, as I began to transition from my earliest period of studying magic, the occult, and the paranormal, to actually practicing magic at aboout the age of sixteen, one of my first rituals was aimed at finding my totem animal and/or spirit guide. (Other people may have been clear on the distinction between those things in 1997/8, I was not.) I wish that I could reproduce or cite that first ritual for you here, but alas… Although I had access to a small collection of friends books at that time (I think my library still consisted entirely of the Simonomicon and maybe a Cunningham encyclopedia), I preffered the rituals I learned from people on IRC chat and in FTP archives. Six computers later, unfortunately, those files are long gone.

The ritual as I recall it was simple. I set myself up in a comfortable chair, with a candle and glass candle holder. I put on some nice, quiet Celtic harp music. I cast an elemental circle. I carved my personal sigil, a bindrune I had designed, into the side of the candle, and imbued it with my desire to know my totem animal/spirit guide. I dropped the candle in the holder, lit it, and tried to slip into the trance. The candle holder, which I have to this day, was round and convex, with red dragon’s tears affixed to an inner layer by some sort of grey-green ceramic. As I tried to enter and maintain the trance, I turned the candle holder around and around in my hands, gazing into the back-lit dragon tears and waiting for an image to appear in my mind.

This ritual would be my first firegazing, and possibly my most successful to date. I saw the image of a snarling, black-furred wolf with flaming red eyes. Even at that young and tender age, I could tell that this was not the spirit of all wolves. There was a darkness about it, a savagery outside of the natural wild. I called it Daemon Wolf. (Yes, the penchant for high drama goes way back.)

I remained in contact with that spirit off and on for years, but I could not “hear” it. I could tell that it was attempting to communicate, but, I couldn’t grok whatever signals the spirit was trying to send. It began appearing to my friends in IRC chatrooms (some of whose animal spirits came to investigate me in return) and my more magically experienced local friends to relay messages and relieve its boredom. The spirit in question also had a penchant for melodrama.

On a particularly notable evening, 31 October 1998 – one of my earliest surviving joural entries, in addition to one of my earliest clear spirit contacts – I was hanging out in the coffee shop with my friend Medea and one or two other friends. I don’t remember what we were talking about, but as the conversation progressed the sese of someone sitting close to my right side grew stronger and stronger. But I couldn’t see anything … not clearly, at any rate: just a vague silhoette crouched on the floor.

After a while, it was too much for me, and I interrupted my own train of thought to demand if anyone else could see the thing sitting beside me.

“Wolfie,” Medea idetified the spirit for me, laughing and using the nickname she’d given Daemon Wolf in previous conversation.

Things changed trajectory after that. My spirit-senses did improve, slowly. It did become easier for Daemon Wolf to contact me. It was clear, however, that there was a lot it wanted to convey to me that I just wasn’t picking up on.

As my practice escalated over the next few years, more spirits began appearing in my life. I couldn’t hear them any better than I could hear Wolfie, but it … appeared to resent them. It very clearly resented that I was not pursuing my relationship with it as dilligently as it desired. Frankly: focus is not my strong point in the medium term. Short term – jewelry repair, a single ritual, a lover – I am a laser ; long term – college, my novels – I am relentless; medium term … that’s where the distractions live. And I had a lot of distractions, as I was rotating through whole circcles of freinds about every 12-18 months those first few years out of high school. Contacts with Daemon Wolf grew increasingly sporadic. When I did make contact – or, more accurately, when it made contact – it was increasingly cross with me.

Eventually, the spirit I called Daemon Wolf lost patience with me. I wish I had the xact date, or could find the record — I know I wrote about the event, somewhere, but … I’ve mentioned before that my journalling is not the best. Some time before I departed Lawrence, KS, for what would become my failed life in St.Louis, it made final contacct and told me that it was giving up and moving on.

This is one of the few places where I wish I had done things differently back in the day. I don’t think most people have spirits take that sort of proprietary interest that early. It’s not unheard of, of course, but it’s an opportunity not everyone gets … and I blew it. I also wish I’d kept better journals, so I would have more wheat from which to sift chaff. Still, my relationship with Daemon Wolf taught me one essential lesson: relaitionships between mortals and spirits are opt-in, for both parties. Either party can leave when their needs are not being met, or their goals are not being achieved.

In Uncategorized, witchcraft

Ouija: Spirit Contact and Controversy In The KU Cauldron

Satyr Magos06/09/20161 Comment

In 2001 and 2002, despite not being a student, I was heavily involved in the KU Cauldron — then the Wicca-Pagan Alliance. Meetings were Tuesdays weekly, if I recall correctly — I seem to have too many memories from too short a time for it to have been only monthly, and I know that there many meetings I missed because I simply couldn’t bring myself to leave my apartment. Sometimes we had topics, sometimes we didn’t. Occasionally we had presenters. Many nights we spent doing tarot readings, or sharing energetic and psychic techniques. More often than I care to admit, we spent most of the night talking about anime. Two things we managed to keep consistent, though: we opened nearly every meeting by casting a circle; and after the meetings, about half of us would stay for Ouija.

The weekly Ouija sessions were a source of a surprising ammount of contention. There were, of course, the two or three rationalists — I’m still not sure why they were there — who believed that the whole thing was even more hinkey than everything else we were doing. The rest, though, were deeply disturbed by the talking board. Most wouldn’t talk about their misgivings. Those who would — ironically, the vampire numbered among them — were concerned about the nameless evils that might come through. No one out-and-out told us to stop, but … There was serious concern that our post-meeting sessions might begin before the non-participants had cleared whatever they believed to be minimum safe distance.

I had, prior to my time in the WPA, known a few people who had had their own experiences with talking boards. Most had nothing remarkable to report. A few had the usual stories of flying objects or lingering entities. But I had never tried it, myself. Given the lower-than average success rates my friends had reported, I was moderately skeptical. But back then, though, before the migraines, I was much more open to wild experimentation than I often have been since.

Given all the concern and side-eyes we got over the whole thing, I was somewhat disappointed by the reality. Most of our sessions were fairly tame. We got positive contact more often than not. Names and dates and details of lives and deaths that we could never verify. All juicy enough to hold our attention, but never quite enough to convince the more skeptical participants … myself included.

Well, not never. There were … incidents. But I’ll get to that in a moment.

The Oija board was owned and brought by one of our members, by the name of Jason if I recall correctly, and he always took point on the planchette. From the other side of the board, our sessions were mediated by by a spirit that called itself “Ouija”, apparently a familiar spirit to Jason. We would open sessions on the board and the planchette would fly over those five letters: O … U … I … J … A … then, WELCOME. We would ask this spirit Ouija to manage contacts for us, find the spirits to whom we would talk.

Some, myself included, believed that Ouija was Jason. Not that he was deliberately guiding the planchette — though that was, occasionally, a subject of debate — but that he had some need for control, and manifested the Ouija “spirit” to exert that control over the talking board. I was often tempted to test that theory by usurping the board from the other side, using the woven energetic techniques that were then my signature style, but ultimately never tried to pull such a dick move on someone who was ostensibly my friend.

Three particular evenings stand out in my memory, fifteen years later.

The first was the spirit of a girl who claimed to have committed suicide in the building where we held our meetings. I don’t remember her name, or when she claimed to have lived. I do remember that she hanged herself. I remember the pall that came over us all as the spirit spoke. Jason later claimed to have confirmed the story, but I never saw any newspaper articles.

The second was an attempt to make contact with a spirit that had approached me early in my carreer. That first contact is a story in and of itself, a strange night from the days of guerilla magic in the Java Break, but the short version is that one Halloween, a spirit approached me and made … contact. High voltage, visceral contact. And it spooked the shit out of me. And I rejected her. One night on the Ouija board, some years later, I convinced the Cauldron crowd to let me reach out to her in return. There was contact, but it was … unclear. Staticky. Only one thing came through to me inteilligibly: contact me again. Spoiler alert: I never did.

The third and most dramatic session with the KU Cauldron and the Ouija board was the sort of thingthat tends to scare people off of not just spirit contact, but magical practice altogether.

We opened the board as per usual: O … U … I … J … A … WELCOME. That was where any resemblance to our usual evening ended. Ouija was frantic. Insistant. GO, it told us. GO!

“Go where?” we asked.

It gave us the name of a building on campus. We went there, and brought the board with us. We did not, immediately, find anything of partifular interest at that location. We did, however, run into a member that had not been present at the meeting — we’ll call him Scott — who joined us for our mobile seance.

We attempted to re-establish contact with Ouija. It was not a smooth transaction. When we did make contact, the spirit was still agitated. This time, while still identifying itself as “Ouija”, it gave us a name. When asked to clarify, it repeated the anem.

Scott was somewhat perturbed. “That’s my sister’s name.”

Everyone became very adgitated at that point.

Scott borrowed a cellular phone — something that not everyone had back then — and called his sister. Her abusive ex was at her appartment, pounding on her door. He’d been there for a few minutes. Scott talked her down from raw panic. Talked her into calling the police. Called her back and waited on the line until they came.

It was some time before we broke out the board again. I think that Jason may have left the groop not long after, though that may well be either the vagaries of memory or the natural course of the four-year graduation cycle. The incident did leave a lasting impression on all those that were present.

I’ve been thinking about the past a lot lately. Listening to podcasts, so many guests telling stories of their magical youths. Writing novels set in my own magical youth. Things I had all but forgotten floating to the surface. This story, in particular, has come to mind in the wake of several podcasts about the myth and practice and history of talking boards.

Makes me want to use one, again.

Makes me want to make one by hand.

But before I begin the neew experiments, I need to recall the old.

In Uncategorized, witchcraft

Ancestors for the Alienated: First Contact

Satyr Magos25/08/2016

At last Thursday’s Spirit Circle, Shauna Aura Knight’s Full Moon included an invocation of the Ancestors and the Descendants – either literal or figurative.

As I mentioned fairly recently, I’m SUPER UNCOMFORTABLE with the notion of ancestor work because, as a white person, there is no clear differentiation between my biological ancestors and White Supremecy. The descendants part was more uncomfortable for reasons that ar much more personal as a child-free individual who may or may not ever take students or produce work whose influence might be equivilent.

But one of the things about rituals led by other peope is that they sometimes go places you weren’t 100% prepared for.

In this case, at least, I was about 50% prepared. I didn’t expect it to come up in the moment, but I had names to call. In that moment, two particular names came to mind.

I called out to Aleister Crowley and Pamela Coleman Smith as my occult progenetors. My mental image was, in case it’s relevant, drawn from the most common pictures available of them.

Contact with Crowley was … ephemeral. Neither positive nor negative. Further experimentation needed.

Smith, on the other hand, responded warmly. Positive contact. It was a fleeting moment. No terms were discussed. But the mother of the modern tarot is open to further contact.

In witchcraft

HPF 2016: Spirit Conjuration Workshop Notes

Satyr Magos09/06/2016

For the amusement and convenience of my readers and in the hopes of getting feedback from the more experienced conjurers in the community, I present my notes for the spirit conjuration workshop. I would greatly appreciate feedback from anyone who attended, or who has an interest in the subject, in order to make a better workshop next year.

I) Introduction

A) Allow me to Introduce Myself ….

i) 20 years and counting of magical practice and experiments

(a) Started with energy work and failed attempts at astral projection at 16 yrs

(b) ~’00-06 swapping tricks and going on adventures with KU WPA

(d) Intense exploration of ceremonial and chaos magicks 2011-2015

¨ Ceremonial Experiment

¨ Project Null

B) Conjuration

i) When I was but a wee faun of a mage …

(a) 1990s taboo against spirit conjuration

(b) Jeremy and summoning elementals

ii) Historical perspective

(a) Extremely ancient tradition, dating to earliest preserved spells

(b) Extensively attested across the whole of the Western magical tradition

¨ Archaeology

¨ PGM

¨ Picatrix

¨ Renaissance Grimoires (to say nothing of theater)

¨ Lodge traditions – GD, A .: A .: (Argentium Astrum), Thelema, &c.

¨ ATR &c. – Hoodoo, vodoun, voodoo, conjure, &c.

¨ Basically everywhere but mainstream modern neo-Pagan witchcraft

iii) Sources for conjuration experiments

(a) Christopher Penczak’s Temple of High Witchcraft

(b) Electional astrology via Christopher Warnock’s Spiritus Mundi

(d) Rufus Opus’ Seven Spheres in Seven Days marathon

(e) Peter Carol’s Liber Null

(f) RO’s Seven Spheres

(g) Wild assortment of personal accounts by other sorcerers gleaned across the internet and over beers

II) Theory, Part One

A) Theories of magic (Phil Hine, Condensed Chaos 1995)

i) Cybernetic model – fractal reality, programmable magic: coded wards and servetors

ii) Psychological model – 19th + 20th C,Jungian/archetypal understanding of the cosmos, “it’s all in your head”

iii) Energetic model – also introduced to the West in the 19th C, “subtle energies”

iv) Spirit model – oldest, probably best, and most relevant to our discussion

v) All four must be at least partly true, because all four work

B) Conjuring, obviously, works on the spirit theory

i) magic is achieved through petitioning spirits to act on our behalf

(a) ancestors & other dead

(b) elementals/fairies/devas

(d) gods and demons

ii) the magician makes contact with the spirit, persuades them by some means, and the spirit makes the magic happen

III) Ethics

A) Concerning Free Will

i) do spirits have it?

(a) actually don’t according to many theories of the spirited world

ii) does conjuration infringe upon it?

(a) lots of authoritarian language in spirit conjuration

(b) lots of it reads as theater

iii) survey sez spirits do what the fuck they want, regardless of “contract”

(a) why doesn’t anyone ever extend this line of reasoning to include the gods?

(b) Quarter calls traditionally “bid” spirits rather than “asked” them

B) Indirect Action and Unintended Consequences

i) how responsible are we for the means that spirits employ in our name?

IV) Mechanics

A) Ritual Arc

i) Preliminary Work

(a) Clean the workspace

(b) Physical construction of the altar

(d) Bathing

(e) Banishing

(f) Fumigation

ii) Opening

(a) Dedication of sacred space

¨ Blessing the altar

¨ Incense

¨ Circle casting

¨ Offerings to relevant familiar spirits

(b) Invocation of authority

¨ Supreme deity/deities

¨ Identification with great mages of myth and history

à Moses and Osiris in the PGM

à Potentially Medea, Merlin, or Aradia for modern witches

à Affiliation with established order or egregore

¨ Offerings to that authority

iii) Body

(a) Evocation of the spirit by speaking its name and attributes

¨ This is the place for hardcore flattery

¨ Listing off multiple names and attributes of spirit to be called helps to specify

¨ Traditional hymns and/or devotional poetry go here

(b) Depending on the ritual tradition, there may be cajoling, bribery, or threatening

¨ Hermetic tradition ~ “Don’t I remind you of Dad?”

¨ Grimoire tradition ~ “Dad made me the boss of you!”

¨ Egyptian style ~ “If you don’t do as I say, I’ll get a bigger god to clobber you!”

¨ Folk magic ~ “If you do something nice for you, you’ll do something nice for me!”

¨ First round of offerings go here – fumigation and/or libations

¨ “say ‘hi”,”

¨ “empower this talisman”

¨ Planetary spirits are great for initiations and general power-ups

¨ Second round of offerings to the conjured spirit may be appropriate, particularly libations or food offerings

¨ If I am asking for communion or initiation, this is where I will share a drink with the spirit

iv) Closing

(a) Thanking and/or Dismissal of the spirit

¨ May be personal or formal

¨ More offerings are not uncalled for, particularly libations

(b) Thanking the authority

¨ More offerings, depending on the authority

(d) Dismiss circle

(e) Banish as necessary

V) Theory, Part Two

A) Style

i) varies from one tradition to another

B) Substance

i) A conjurer (“exorcist”) must believe in their own authority

ii) Psychodrama of ritual

C) Planning

i) What is your purpose?

(a) Empower this talisman/sigil

(b) Perform this action –

ii) Who or what are you conjuring?

iii) What school of thought are you employing?

iv) Have your script ready

VI) The Triangle of Conjuration

A) A reality map – Trimethian archetype

i) Characters of the seven planets on the outer ring

ii) Archangels of the four earthly quarters in the second ring

iii) Sacred geometry make up the center

iv) Crystal placed in the central geometry in which the spirit appears

v) Represents the material and spiritual realms through which the spirits must descend to the “exorcist”

B) Traditional tool helpful with some kinds of conjuration

C) Adds to the psychodrama

VII) Personal Experiences

A) Relationships With Spirits

i) Formal first contact is best

ii) Research and experience alike indicate that personal is best

(a) Some relationships may remain extremely formal

(b) Depends on the magician as much as the spirit or rite

B) Conjurations

i) Natal genius and demon

ii) Cannabis

iii) Planetary spirits/archangels

VIII) Sources for Research

A) Books

i) Rufus Opus’ Seven Spheres (Scarlet Imprint 2015)

ii) Gordon White’s The Chaos Protocols (Llewellyn 2016)

iii) Corpus Hermeticum (public domain)

iv) Lesser Key of Solomon the King (Crowley’s Goetia, Weiser 1990)

B) Blogs

i) Rufus Opus @ Head for Red

ii) Polyphanes @ Digital Ambler

In scholarship, witchcraft

Orphic Hymns to the Sun: Translations in Action

Satyr Magos03/01/2016

A great deal of the current work being done with planetary magic right now relies heavily on the use of the Orphic Hymns, chiefly the 18th century translations by Thomas Taylor. Long-time readers may recall that I am uncomfortable with those translations, and have argued that the more recent and more accurate translations of Apostolos Athanassakis be used instead. It was not only inevitable, then, but entirely by design that my first week of conjurations put these two translations back-to-back to see what differences might be discerned in their efficacy.

For those magicians who are not also ancient language geeks (how have I not bored you to death?), the gist of it is that the Ancient Greek in which the Orphic Hymns were composed was written in meter rather than rhyme, and hammering the verses into a simple English rhyme-scheme takes some serious torture. Also, archaeology is amazing, and we know more about the languages of Hellenistic Greece today than Taylor did, so some of his mistakes may be rooted in bad dictionaries. Some magicians, equally if not more geeky and educated as I, believe that the Taylor translations work better magically for all sorts of reasons, but I ride this hobby horse to hell, regardless.

Taylor’s rhyming cant does, I must concede, a certain something for the brain of the English speaking magician. We have this whole thing with magic and rhyme, and any good Chaos magician knows how valuable it is to tap into that sort of unconscious power source. Moveover, between their ready (and free) availability, and the work of Rufus Opus (among others), the Taylor translations of the Hymns are explicitly tied to the planetary rites of the modern Western magical tradition. All this goes to say that when I used the Thomas Taylor translation of the Hymn to the Sun, by itself, as a part of RO’s Seven Spheres rite, and as a part of conjurations of my own design, I already knew something of what to expect.

The warmth of the Sun responds readily to the hymn, and one may ride that way direct to the planetary current, and the Archangel Michael or the Titan god Helios respond equally readily to accept the offerings laid out before them.

The translations of Apostolos Athanassakis are aimed at the casual enthusiast as much as the professional Classicist, so they are not as sharp-edged as some might fear — the pages are unmarred by indications of broken text in the original, or annotation regarding the academic infighting of one translation versus another. Moreover, in the particular case of the Hymn to Helios, the differences between the two translations are much less stark and more stylistical than other Orphic Hymns.

The Sun that responded to Aradia and I when we called by this hymn, both by itself and as a part of the Seven Spheres rite, was startlingly different from that which answered to the Taylor translation. It was tarnished, or perhaps brazen rather than gold. It was older, more aloof, more … Titanic. Aradia described the experience as having used a back door to the sun.

It was the Athanassakis translation of the Orphic Hymn to Helios, substituted for Taylor in the Seven Spheres rite, which produced my most vivid experience of the experiment so far: the sensation of having ascended to an old, cooling, and abandoned region of the Sun, and of being observed by a vast red-gold eye, the size of a planet, staring widely at my from within an almost understandably vast head.