At the end of February, Aradia and I, along with the rest of the Kansas City Sorcerous Arts Collective, signed up for Jack Grayle’s year-long class on the Greek Magical Papyri: PGM Praxis: 50 Rites for 50 Nights, offered via the Blackthorne School. We, along with seventy-odd others, are following Jack down a rabbit hole I’ve been circling for a while, putting the fragmentary spells of the PGM into practice, and I’m very excited.
It’s worth noting, here at the outset, that while I have been practicing magic since 1996, have attended lots of workshops and have studied a lot of systems, I have never before taken a long-form, externally-directed class. Intense study periods have often coincided with my best blogging periods. On the one hand, I imagine that will be true of this, as well; on the other, there are course materials that I cannot, in good faith, share to those not taking the class.
I have, of course, done some work with the Greek Magical Papyri before. I have been using the Stele of Jeu the Hieroglyphist (PGM V. 96-172) since Jack Faust introduced me to it back in 2012. I have made more than one pass through the book since, looking for either rites to experiment with (though I never had the nerve / inspiration to do any of the ones that caught my eye) and for inspiration for magical practices for characters in my novels.
But this is a guided tour. With homework. And technical support. And I am very, very excited.
We’re into the third week, now, as I type this. We have done our first three rituals (week two had a two-fer) and are winding up to do our fourth. I’ve spent most of the last two weeks on an escalating high of magical power, more optimistic and resilient than I have been in years. Only the one-two punch of a Bad Day in Retail and the Archonic vampirism of Daylight Savings Time has been able to blunt my ecstasy. There will be more about that in the next post.
My classmates — not just the KCSAC — are starting to open up about their adaptations and experiences, and it’s fucking fascinating. Unfortunately, that’s the last I’ll be able to say about that, though I hope to encourage the rest of the Collective to blog about their experiences, and will share the public posts of any of our classmates who want such attention.
It is, of course, possible that I will be less enthused about things at some point (or points) over the course of the remaining 47 weeks. That’s how things go, sometimes. But right now, I’m really, really stupid excited. And I’m going to hold on to that for as long as I can.
On a technical note: we are, of course, using the University of Chicago Press edition of The Greek Magical Papyri in Translation, Including the Demotic Spells, as edited by Hans Dieter Betz. We are at times augmenting this by use of the Orphic Hymns, for which I usually favor the Apostolos N. Athanassakis edition. I also happen to have a copy of Stephen Skinner’s Techniques of Graeco-Egyptian Magic, which may come in handy.
