Back in the day, when I was fully-steeped in the energetic model of magic, aura work was how I began and ended any magic I did. Hell, more than half the time—especially during the Basement Years, when getting a finger-hold on my sanity was the main object of my magic—it was the Work. That started to slip during the Ceremonial Experiment: the banishing work had about the same effect, and the kinds of aura work I knew were actually counterproductive, as the ceremonial work was making some radical and positive changes to my aura. It’s slipped further since starting on Project Null. Actually, that’s a lie: since starting Project Null, the cognitive dissonance I’ve experienced between the various Wiccan schools I was originally trained in, the things I learned during the Ceremonial Experiment, and the Chaos Magick theories I’ve encountered on aura-work, basically amounted to a paradigmatic train wreck. I mostly managed to hold things together through the end of Christmas Break. But there’ve been some oddities.
The first oddity was a sort of psychic “sore” at the small of my back. I first noticed it while doing some banishing work with Aradia toward the end of break. As we cleaned it out, it felt like it was linked to my Root chakra. I’m not bad at doing psychic/aura healing work on other people—I can even manage a certain amount of physical healing—but I’m shit at doing it for myself. The angles are off, I guess.
Time passed, I came back to school, and the “sore” persisted, thought never as bad as it had been at first. Until I went to do my first serious banishing work at January’s Full Moon, and discovered a …. giant, black, slimy lamprey-worm-thing attached to the wound in my aura. Not really certain what it was or what to do, I pulled it off, threatened it, and threw it across town. The “sore” finally closed up altogether, and I went on with my life. I noted the whole episode, but never have been able to determine if the thing was an astral varmint, the work of one of the two psychic vampires I’ve crossed in the last six weeks, the product of my own Chaos Magick-induced delusions, or something else entirely.
Then, this last week, as I was recovering from a mundane illness I discovered a new “sore” on my aura. This one lays about where my neck joins my back, but doesn’t seem to correspond with any of my energetic centers. Squirming around in the psychic wound were a mass of writhing black worms in a sick column down to the original wound: miniature versions of the larger one I’d already thrown off. Local spirits have proven ineffectual at helping me clean out the mess—on or two smaller spirits even appear to have been injured by the things—although the manifestation of That One God who dwells at the on-campus chapel was surprisingly willing and able to help dispose of the ones I could extract (it seems to have taken it rather personally that such vermin would move into its territory).
I’m hoping that tonight’s performance of the Stele of Jeu will fix the problem. Barring that, that when I finally “create”* my guard-dog servitor tomorrow night, it will be able to deal with the problem (since that is what it’s going to be made for, after all).
In the mean time, has anyone else had an experience like this? Any advice?
*I’m not entirely certain, given the way things have been leaning, that I’m actually going to end up creating a servitor so much as recruiting a local spirit for the task. The distinction, however, is largely moot.