In August, I will celebrate three years of unbroken daily practice. The book, bell, and blade posts that you’ve been enjoying for the last couple weeks are, in part, the result of that work.
I did not have a regular practice when I bought the book. It was November of 2019: my partner and I had finished the first sections of the Hekataeon in June, then went on a road trip in July, and never really got back to it; our work with the Shenanigans Crew was about to go through the usual chaos of the holiday season; and in the first weeks of 2020, the majority of my time and attention was focused on getting ready to present at Paganicon in March. Then the plague came, and lockdown happened, and all our plans were cancelled. Aradia and I started the PGM course. In fact, it was not the book, itself, that jumpstarted my daily practice, it was a Do Magic Challenge.
For those of you who don’t remember them, Do Magic Challenges were about what they said on the tin: Andrieh Vitimus would issue a magical challenge and you had a month to develop goals and methods in line with the provided parameters. In this case, the challenge was to enchant for concrete goals. For whatever reason, I chose to launch a series of thirty sigils, one each day, and see how many manifested. (If I recall correctly, I think I had around a 20% success rate, which … could be better. But given how random some of them were – I am given cake; someone gifts me green stones – it’s still much more than pure chance.) But halfway through the challenge, some things came up.
On a whim, I had roped my familiar spirits into the thing. After all, wasn’t achieving magical ends the whole point of attracting familiar spirits? Hadn’t they been telling me that I should be asking more of them? But at a certain point, my familiars came back to me and pointed out that they were happy to help, but a lot of the sigils I was firing off were things that didn’t actually matter to me, and that was not really what they were there for. But they liked the daily attention, and the daily ritual was good for me. So, when the Do Magic Challenge was over, I kept up the daily practice.
It is, perhaps, no surprise that, lacking any inspiration otherwise, I began doing daily planetary rituals. Each morning I would turn the book to the pages appropriate planetary hymn and triangle, and I would make offerings of incense and a candle and some coffee. I aimed for the hour as well as the day, but I have never been a morning person, and I did not – and do not – believe that devotional prayers need be timed as precisely as that. The planets – and the book that has become so central to my work with them – are literally always there.
After a few months, though, that did get repetitive. And it wasn’t a perfect fit for the real objective of the daily ritual, which was deepening my relationships with my familiar spirits – then limited to Tsu, ZG, and SKM, and my Venus and Mars and Sun talismans.
I don’t remember the exact stages that I went through, now. I know that I kept the planetary pages as a part of my ritual for a long time. I know that it was around the end of October, or the beginning of November, that I first drew an entirely new triangle of art, this one surrounded by the names of those familiar spirits, because I had gone travelling and left all the other accoutrements or my practice at home. But I don’t think that became the focus of my daily ritual until sometime after my March 2021 trip to Anne and Abel van Meter state park, where I started doing portraits of my various familiars in the pages behind that triangle.
I also don’t remember, exactly, at what point I started including in the gods in my daily rituals. The biggest point, as I moved past the Do Magic Challenge, was to improve my relationships with my familiar spirits. But certain divine altars were in the same room, and at a certain point it just started to feel … pointedly rude to exclude those gods from the daily offerings. And then, once those gods were joining me for my first cup of coffee, it seemed rude to exclude the god conspicuously absent from that room: Hekate, whose altar lives in the portion of the house where we do the most magic.
And then at the beginning of 2022, I started doing a LOT of money magic, particularly focusing around my new Jupiterian familiars, and daily offerings grew to include that altar.
I used to try to keep my focus on maybe one familiar and one god each day, obviously based on a (ham-fisted, in the case of several gods) planetary scheme. Aphrodite get offerings on Friday, obviously, but all the gods in that altar room are vaguely Venusian. And how do I decide whether Hekate or Baphomet (or even Lucifer, if I’m not honoring him on Venus’ day) is better suited to Wednesday or Saturday? I did eventually work out a system, and it made … mostly sense. But as the rest of my work just gets weirder and weirder, that Chaldean cycle just makes less and less sense for my personal practice.
These days, especially these last two weeks, as I resume the work of the Hekataeon, I just sit at my altar and see who answers. My familiars are mostly astrological talisman spirits, so they get honors on their obvious days, and I’ve worked out Saturday as the day for my natal spirits, and Monday as the day for Tsu, who doesn’t really fit into a planetary scheme. And I still do my best to honor them all at Venus Hour on Venus Day, but ….
Mostly I just sit, and listen, and see who has something to say. And that can get a little crowded, some times.
The latest change has been an order of operations. For a long time, I did all my offerings in the one room, sat and drank my first cup of coffee with those gods and spirits. Then I would make a few notes in my journal, then went out to the back room to make the rest of my offerings, having a second (small) cup of coffee with those altars, and finally came back to do my daily tarot spread. As of the last week, I’m pouring all my offerings in both rooms before sitting down and drinking that first cup of coffee. It’s a small change, but it feels right.
I’m very proud of my three-year streak. But I know that it will end. Even more absolutely, I know that it will change. Each day is a little different than every other. There are days I forget the epithets, or even the prayers that go with each god/dess. There are days I forget to wash my hands with cinnamon before I begin. There are days when I can’t face myself to do the work of soul alignment, or when I try but can’t get in tune with myself or with the stars whose fire I carry within me. And, periodically, the gods and spirits that I sit down to drink coffee with each morning, have opinions about what I should do, instead, going forward.