Over the course of the semester three new magical tools have come into my possession: a pentacle, a staff, and a black-handled knife. The pentacle I picked up at a swap-meet hosted by the local pagan store. The staff is hand-made by a fine gentleman in the local community, and was given to me as a gift. The knife was also a gift, a birthday present from another friend here in 
Sunrise. These were my first clues that it was time to get back to my basics. I didn’t ignore the message, per se; I just couldn’t figure out how to enact it in the context of my current workload.
Wednesday night was the Full Moon. I tried to start my observances night before, as is generally my custom, but both my apartment and my brain were in such catastrophic disarray that it just wasn’t possible. The night after was consumed by homework.
My brain is in disarray because my life is on the brink of disaster—a theme I’ll get to another day—but I decided that, rather than spend the Moon doing practical magic or begging for assistance, I would make offerings and just do a lot of listening before I beg for shit-tons favors.
For a while, now, I’ve been feeling a subtle call to go back to my roots, and to focus on integrating everything I’ve learned over the last eighteen months. At first I resisted, thinking that the impulse might be cowardice, rather than genuine inspiration or even just the most rational thing to do right now. But it has taken me this entire time to recover from the Seven Spheres in Seven Days project, and that’s more evidence than I can deny. Finally, I have given up and begun to answer that call.
I began, first, by redoing my seasonal altar in a slightly more “traditional” fashion [1]. My Kouros and Cyclades figures remained 
on my primary altar, but I did add gold and silver “God” and “Goddess” candles, as well as examples of the traditional tools. In keeping with my own tradition of the last several years, the Death mask was returned to its hiding place, and the Sun God mask was elevated to the center stage.
I opened my Esbat rites with the Titan’s Cross and the Pentagram Rite (my “new normal”), then cast my Circle with my new knife, half-dedicated at the Dark Moon, and called up each of the Elements through silent prayer, as has been my custom with Aradia. Finally, I performed the Rite of Offering [2], and just sat and listened—drinking first a glass of wine in a toast to my friends and allies, then a glass of absinthe to open my astral vision. When moved to do so, I completed the dedication of my new ritual blade, then donned first my Vision Mask, followed the Sun God mask.
Only one of my adventures with the Sun God mask have found their way to this blog. The other stories have been too mundane
or too intimate to share. The Sun God reveled in the opportunity to be embodied: he stretched and flexed my arms and back; he drank his libations and breathed deeply of the fumigations; he begged me insisted strongly that we make the opportunity to repeat some of those intimate adventures. He poured and guzzled another glass of wine, and would have devoured all the ready-to-eat food in my house, had there been any. He insisted that his image be recorded and shared.
He released me at last when I began to weaken, but the message was clear: he—and the other powers I have connected to, but him most immediately—is the next phase of my Work.
Although I regret that Project Null must be officially sent to the back burner, I seem to have made the right decision in answering that call: the results were phenomenal. For the previous several days, the combined stress of personal drama and the end of the semester had reduced me to a neurotic mess of obsessive behaviors and procrastination. Over the two days since, I have been much more able to concentrate on my work, and have spent much less time on the razor edge of a breakdown. And, as I said before: it would be antithetical to Chaos Magick to reject something that was actually working in favor of sticking to a theoretical plan. The Chaos Magick experiment continues, just more slowly and organically, growing out of my needs and the inspiration of my Genii and Muses.
1 – Recalling that, while I have never really identified as such, most of my early sources of inspiration and information were books and practitioners of eclectic Wicca.
2 – Adapted from Jason Miller’s Sorcerer’s Secrets (p.