Showing all posts in June 2022

In witchcraft

Ritual Report: Orphic Solstice Vigils

Author Satyr MagosPosted on

At yule, my psuedocoven and I finally pulled off a ritual that we’ve been talking about for years: an all-night vigil, reading our way through the Orphic Hymns. 

Some of us had done Yule vigils, before. Aradia and I hadn’t, so we (arguably) overprepared. We designed our ritual so that four of the seven of us had something to do at every stage, and rotated roles so that no one could space out so hard that it became a problem. We divided the night into hourly shifts, with each of us taking a turn reading the hymns in English (and with Alvianna and I alternating reading the hymns in Greek), pouring wine and burning incense (“sacrificer”), tending to the coffee maker and crock pots (“mom friend”), and participating by chanting back pre-selected lines when prompting by the readers. 

Of the various translations available to us – Thomas Taylor (1792), Apostolos Athanassakis (2013), Patrick Dunn (2018), and Sarah Mastros (2020) – we settled on Dunn. It’s Alvianna’s favorite translation, overall, and my second-favorite after Athanassakis, which is more academic but is admittedly not as good for actual use.

Each shift covered seven hymns, taking us from a bit after sunset (the sun sets early at the Winter Solstice, and most of us have day jobs) to just after dawn, and we bracketed the entire thing with prayers and offerings to Hestia. It was cold in our temple at first, but between my pellet stove and the body heat we generated, it was sweltering by the end. The air was already psychoactively thick with incense by the time we got to the God of Annual Feasts, whose hymn demands an offering of “suffumigation of everything but frankincense, plus a libation of milk”, at which point we were officially chonged out by the time we got to the moment of dawn and the Hymn to Eos. One of us had to leave before then, and a couple of us didn’t quite make it (I was among those falling asleep in the last hours. 

It went so well that we decided to do it again, this time at the Summer Solstice.

Going from the Longest Night to the Shortest required a couple changes: nine hymns each hour instead of seven. Cold food and drinks instead of hot. We also elected for a change of venue: Gaea Retreat Center instead of my home.

We had originally planned to make a three-day campout of it. Unfortunately, this year’s heat wave made that impossible. Instead, we rolled out Sunday afternoon with just our cooler, our camp chairs, and our Clam. We got set up early enough to ease into ritual, and we were more than ready to begin when the sun went down. We added fire-tending to the sacrificer role and guard duty (though that proved unnecessary) to the mom-friend role. We might have made those individual jobs, but there were only five of us, and we actually had camp almost entirely to ourselves, so that wasn’t necessary.

The shorter vigil improved the ritual greatly, and we still had down time to rest, eat, and vibe in between the end of each batch of hymns and the beginning of the next. The outdoor venue also really improved things, particularly since the weather for the overnight was nicer than we had any reason to expect – though, I did miss the psychoative effects of the frankincense, and it was too hot to drink wine or even smoke weed. None of us fell asleep, and we were all surprisingly spry in the mornings.

I honestly don’t remember a lot of the fallout and followup from the first ritual. I was already neck-deep in my Christmas Depression. I think that the vigil gets at least partial credit for getting me through December without a complete and total meltdown, and with giving me the courage to quit my day job in January. I am so far experiencing some vitalization in the aftermath, but that has been a mixed blessing.

Inevitably, we have already been discussing how the ritual could be improved for its next iteration. Our first thought is a compromise between the weather and the clock: having the next Orphic Vigil at the Autumn Equinox. I have suggested two or three minute breaks between each hymn, shortening the break at the end of each section. We are also discussing the merits of having everyone who is not reading Greek, sacrificing, or keeping track of food and coffee, reading along with the reader at the head of the altar. Alternately, rewriting the callback lines to be a little more speciffic, and to always invoke the name of the deity.

We have also been discussing aftereffects. Unsurprisingly, we have all reported sleep and dream disturbances – though, for myself and Aradia, we were already struggling to sleep normal hours… which might have been ritual preverb, or might just be the Spicy Sads. 

What is surprising is that fully three fifths of us, rather than experiencing an bump in our Hellenic contacts, have felt a distinct tug in Luficerian directions. For myself, Lucifer (the gnostic/devil/sabbatic figure, not the Roman Morningstar) has been a part of my daily ritual practice for some time, now, but on my previous rounds of initiatory work with my morning gods, he told me that it was not the time. Tuesday, after my first post-vigil sleep, he announced that now, in fact, is the time. More on that as it develops, I guess.  That was strange enough, but the following day, one of us mentioned their own post-vigil Luciferian visions, and a third confirmed that he had poked his head into their work as well. So now we’re wondering what the fuck is up with that.

After two iterations, though, I can confidently recommend the experience. Each group will need to tweak the general shape of things to their own preferences. As you’re planning things, though, we can say with certainty that a spreadsheet will absolutely be your friend.

In art, witchcraft

Triptych Vision of Baphomet

Author Satyr MagosPosted on

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 art

From the Sorcerer’s Workbench: Pride 2022: Divine Images of Sappho and Antinoos

Author Satyr MagosPosted on

Happy Pride, friends. It’s been a bit of a road to get here. I meant to have this done weeks ago. Life, as they say, happened, instead.

Having a Sorcerer’s Workbench Pride Line was one of my big goals for 2022. But I set that goal for myself before I quit my day job, and while that decision did ostensibly leave me with more free time, the burnout and depression that led me to that decision … well, tending to those wounds has been a serious investment in time and energy.

In the end, I was only able to come up with two divine persons to launch what I hope will be an annual tradition: Sappho and Antinoos. Both are semi-mythic figures: real to the best of scholars’ knowledge, but the majority of their true biographies have been lost and replaced by myth. 

The Antinoos design went perfectly from the jump. The Sappho design has given me trouble: the first prototype came out looking more like a Muppet than Classical beauty. The second prototype was perfect, but the first bronze exemplar didn’t turn out at all, and I somehow failed to get an exemplar into that day’s silver cast. But, as of tonight, I have a successful bronze cast and can properly unveil these images.

Sappho, on the off chance that you don’t know her, was a poet from the island of Lesbos in the Aegian Sea, who lived and wrote in the seventh and sixth centuries BCE. Her work was taught as a pinnacle of poetic skill for centuries, well into the Roman Empire, until – through a combination of censorship, neglect, and luck – it was lost to the ages. No contemporary biography survives, and mere scraps of her estimated 10,000 lines of poetry, but her work has been associated with sexual love between women since the Hellenistic period. Now, she and the island from which she came are virtually synonymous with queer women and their experiences.

Antinoos was a young man beloved of the Roman emperor Hadrian. More myth than fact remains of either his life or his death, but the record is clear that he died while travelling with Hadrian in Egypt and that emperor had him deified, established a hero cult in his name, and named a city after him. The cult never became a major religion, but it was widespread and reasonably popular, and Antinoos became both a religious and literary icon of sexual love between men.

I based the artwork for both of these medallions on classical artworks: Sappho on a black figure vase painting from the late 6th century BCE, and Antinoos on a Roman statue in the Antinous Mondragone style from the 2nd century CE, reframed in imitation of an ancient coin. Both will be in my usual 1 inch talisman style, though I am considering a 3/4 inch variation if there’s sufficient interest.

So, friends. Here it is. Sacred Sappho and Holy Antinoos, ancestral figures (for those of y’all who are into that thing), heroes in the hero-cult sense, shining beacons from the ancient past, lights that we can hold up to say “we have always been here, and we will always be here”. The Sorcerer’s Workbench Pride Line 2022. Better late than never.

In Uncategorized

Obsidian Dream Blog: Rite of Her Sacred Fires 2022 – After Action Ruminations

Author Satyr MagosPosted on

At the last full moon, my ritual crew and I joined Sorita d’Este’s Rite of Her Sacred Fires. It was our fourth round – 2018, ’19, ’21, and now ’22 – and the fifth anniversary of the point where, at least for me, we crossed the line from a working group that (singly and together) happened to do a more-than-average amount of Hekate-oriented rituals into what I now jokingly call the Accidental Hekate Cult. Having done the ritual three times before, all as-written, we could not help but give it the Lunar Shenanigans treatment: elaborating on and escalating the ritual, taking a relatively short and to-the-point ritual intended for a solitary practitioner and turning it into something that six people could do collaboratively.

We started by adding an opening purification of self and space, drawing on elements of our various syncretic practices and the opening rites of the Hekataeon. We added a protection spell written by one of our members. We included an invocation of Hestia. We added a space for each participant to pour offerings, and to prophesy or speak as called, and a divination to confirm that our offerings were both worthy and sufficient. And then we divided up the ritual so that everyone had a key part in the overall ritual.

Alvianna consecrated the candles in earth and water the night before. Someone else in the crew made special incense for offerings. I built the altar while cleaning the house for company. We had a lovely dinner and then transitioned quickly to ritual.  

It all came together beautifully. Our offerings were accepted, and then we went outside together to look at the eclipse. As a personal bonus, though I did have a section, I was not *in charge* of anything.

We may make further changes – that’s who we are as people – but we’re definitely keeping the changes we’ve made so far.

And yet, for all that …

I think everyone else got more out of it than I did.

That disconnect is why it’s taken so long for me to post this.

I am still, as I’ve spoken about before, more sorcerer than priest. I work with gods and spirits far more than I worship them, and the Rite of Her Sacred Fires is more devotional than magical, more theurgy than thaumaturgy. Religion, in any conventional sense of the term, remains strange and uncomfortable to me. It’s not like ancestor work – no matter how many people I otherwise respect advocate for it, they will ever convince me that white people can ethically do anything with ancestors other than bind them, and the very subject makes me physically ill – but it is deeply alien.

I know when a magical or ecstatic ritual is successful – I know that feeling intimately. But devotional ritual? We had divination, this time, to confirm that for me. And I will say that I felt the presence of the goddess. But the very impulse of worship continues to make me uncomfortable.

Why am I even doing it, you ask? I don’t entirely know. Each of the various devotional practices that I have taken up in the last five years have made sense in the moment. Each has been a natural and obvious outgrowth of the work I had done up to that point. 

But together, in aggregate? I’ve reached a point where I barely recognize my own life. I remain deeply hostile to anyone practicing a mainstream religion, or who is willing to submit to a god-king. There are powers in the universe that we can work with, but those are edge cases. Like the mortal parts of the world, the majority of the supernatural and spiritual realms of the cosmos are indifferent to or hostile to human life.

You know what, I take it back. Just thinking about religiosity does make me angry. 

And yet, here I am? Twenty-two months into daily devotional work, mostly centered on my familiar spirits, but increasingly encompassing a handful of gods. Five years into an increasingly devotional Hekate practice wherein she is the de facto patron of my jewelry business (I sell more Hekate devotional jewelry than everything else combined). Ten years into my devotion to Dionysus, the only god who has ever felt more like home than a threat or a challenge.

When I’m just doing it, everything’s fine. Maybe I’m a little bemused. But the harder I think about it, the weirder and more uncomfortable it gets.

Three weeks out from this latest encounter, I am still struggling to write this, to reconcile my feelings around this. What does it mean, what does it cost, to offer devotion and sacrifice to a god?

My Christian upbringing teaches me that devotion is submission and slavery, not just to the god but to their worldly representatives – priests and missionaries. Large parts of the neo-Pagan movement exist ostensibly to cut out those intermediaries. But, frankly, so was the entire Protestant movement, especially in the US, and all that did was establish smaller and more absolute fiefdoms for charismatic priests. And sometimes Paganism feels like it’s just reproducing US Protestantism, just with different questionable fashion choices. But I know that it doesn’t have to be that way.

So, I continue the work to the best of my ability. And I wait. and I wonder.