“The Third Mansion is Azuraye (that is, the Pleiades) and it is for acquiring every good. When the Moon is in this mansion, make the figure of a seated woman holding her right hand above her head and dressed in clothes.” Picatrix Book 4 Chapter Nine Paragraph 31 (trans. Attrell & Porecca 2021)
Picatrix calls the mansion Azuraye, but it is better known by a name given elsewhere: al Thurayya. I have made this image in silver, on a square ring as the Picatrix describes later, and gotten good results from her. I have long wanted to illustrate it for paper petitions, as well.
“The image of Mercury, according to the opinion of the wise Apollonius, is the shape of a bearded youth holding a dart in his right hand. This is his shape.” Picatrix Book II, Chapter 10, Paragraph 31. (trans. Attrell and Porecca, 2019)
I shared this image with my Patreon supporters back in October, but never publicly due to illness (physical and mental) and exhaustion. I’m still working on perfecting my digital illustrations: finding a balance in between speed and perfection, mastering line weight and movement. It’s really nothing like the pen and pencil work that I’ve done for most of my life.
Please feel free to print this image out to use in your personal rites, but don’t reshare without attribution or use for any commercial purpose.
Last year was a whirlwind escalation of my magical practice. There were also a handful of stumbling blocks. Some of it makes for good stories. Some of it does not. Ultimately, I collapsed about mid-October. That, combined with a second covid infection at the beginning of November and the worst Christmas depression that I can immediately recall, and a few sticks in the spokes of my mundane life, culminated in the longest magically fallow period I’ve experienced in some years.
I have, except for my trip to New Orleans, maintained my streak of daily offerings. I have not, however, managed to maintain my tarot practice, my journalling, my work with the Black Book, or the rituals I had picked up from Six Ways. I’ve done a bit of money-magic, trying to get the gods on my side against this shit economy; the utilities haven’t been shut off, so I’m counting those as successful … but only barely. What divination I have done has all come out nonsense. Where, last summer, the gods and my familiar spirits were present to the point of overwhelming, now I can barely sense them at all.
It would be overly dramatic to say that I’m bottoming out. It would also be untrue: I have definitely fallen farther, before. I have had more and crueler hands raised against me. But in this moment, I can’t think of better words to describe the feeling.
This is, of course, by no means the first time my magical practice has fallen off the rails. I have been here, and done this. I know what I need to do.
I need to take a real rest. Dial back my magical ambitions. Dial back my daily ritual to the barest of bones; I may or may not need to let it lapse, completely.
I need to cleanse and purify. Spiritual baths. Banishing rituals. Rites to avert the evil eye. Fumigate the house. Fumigate the yard. Re-assert my claim to the property. Take steps to reinvigorate my protective wards and spirits.
After that, come some choices.
Usually, when I come to a point like this, I find it helpful to do some kind of back-to-basics program. My current three-and-a-half-year streak of daily ritual began with just such a move: thirty days of sigils with concrete goals that metamorphed into work with my familiar spirits and grew into a much larger and more complicated daily practice. If I am to go back to basics, again – and I think that I am, in some sense or another – what is that going to look like, this time?
Beyond that, I have a number of magical projects that I got somewhere north of knee-deep into before hitting a wall. I have, in fact, more than I can reasonably continue with at the same time.
My work with the Hekataeon stalled out again while I was gathering materials for the next series of rites. While I have the goddess’ permission to continue, it seems that it may not be what I really want. Do I continue? If so, how? If not, what then?
My work with my idiosyncratic pantheon produced a handful of rites that I am collectively calling the Satyr’s Grammar. I have shared several of those here. It has been made clear to me that I should perform some (or all) of the rites I have already recieved before I can expect to be shown more.
I have half the parts needed to assemble an altar to the nine muses that I saw in a vision. When and where and how will I complete that work?
I have made astrological images a cornerstone of my magical jewelry business, but I feel like I have reached a point of diminishing returns when it comes to incorporating astrological images and timing into my own magical practice. If I am to continue my experiments in astrological magic, what is the best way to make that work both for me and my customers?
I don’t currently have the answers to any of these questions. As I write this, I am making frantic last-minute preparations for Paganicon, including final edits on the KC Sorcerous Arts Collective’s ritual. By the time this post goes live on the Obsidian Dream Blog, we will be winding down the convention and preparing to return home. Only after that, will I have real time to sort out my own shit.
The magical life is not a choice I made, any more than i chose to be a writer. It’s who I am as a person. The choices I have to make are “how” and “when” and “where” and “why”.
Two things I know for certain: I will continue to do magic, and I will continue to write about it.
I hope you all continue to come along for the ride.
Over the last couple years, my partner Aradia and I have found it necessary to develop a recipe for a cleansing spiritual bath. It’s the sort of thing we need a little too often to buy pre-packaged (and we’re pretty intense DiY types, anyway), but we couldn’t find a recipe we liked online. Plus, most of the recipes we didn’t like were all attached to places selling something and/or choked with popup ads. So, surprising no-one, we made our own.
Almost all of my herbalism and plant magic, I learned from Aradia. She is, as I may have mentioned before, a huge fan of the practice of recipes based on 3, 7, or 13 ingredients, with a strong preference for 13 on the basis of “more is better”. I initially wrote a 7 ingredient recipe, and when the time came for the next round, she had six more things to add. Together, we combined of what (few and partial) traditional recipes we could find online and supplemented them with Scott Cunningham’s Encyclopedia of Magical Herbs (we grew up in the 90s). The final recipe (below) leans heavily on things that we like to keep in the house, regardless, so you’ll probably have many of them already on hand, as well. The measurements are idealized and more useful when making big batches, but they give you somewhere to start. A volume of each equal to a teabag or a cigarette will do the trick.
Ingredients:
black salt – 5 grams
fennel – 3 grams
basil – 1 gram
rue – 1 gram
lavender – 1 gram
thyme – 1 gram
benzoin – 1 gram
copal – 1 gram
bayleaf – 1 leaf
tobacco – 1 cigarette
anise – 1 star
peppermint – 1 tea bag
chamomile – 1 tea bag
Instructions:
Measure the ingredients into a reusable teabag for use or storage.
When making multiple doses simultaneously, you’ll find it convenient to put the single-unit ingredients (cigarette, teabag, anise star, bayleaf) directly into the bag, then mix the remaining ingredients together in a bowl or mortar for consistent distribution and texture.
Store the baggies in a cool dry place if you’re not using them immediately. (I store mine in the same tote where I store the raw ingredients.)
When used, place bag of ingredients in a heat resistant container – a pyrex measuring cup, a metal pot or bowl, or whatever other vessel seems appropriate – with a mouth big enough to ladle the liquid back out of. Pour boiling water over the bag of ingredients and steep until no longer scalding but still warm.
Ritual:
This is my ritual. Yours will necessarily be your own.
I assemble the ingredients in the kitchen or my workroom.
When I am ready to use them, I bring them and a large bowl and a kettle of boiling water to my altar, where I make offerings of incense and candles and pray over them, asking my gods and familiar spirits to bless and consecrate the materials that they may cleans and purify me. Then I pour the boiling water over the ingredients and let them steep for 20-40 minutes, depending on where my heat sensitivity is at that particular day. This produces about a half gallon of bath.
When the bath is cooled enough, it take it in to my shower with me. I ladle the bath over my head, down my back, down my chest, down each arm, down each leg, and repeat until I have used the whole volume. As I do so, I pray extemporaneously to be washed clean and purified.
Once I have poured the bath over myself, one ladle full at a time, I sleuce it off of my body, always away from my head/heart. Then I take a mundane shower, again always scrubbing down my body and limbs, away from my head/heart. (This last step is an idiosyncrasy and a favor to the people I live with who have a sense of smell.)
If I am feeling particularly benighted, I will spend the steeping time in prayer and/or meditation, including performing the Stele of Jeu. If I am feeling well and truly fucked, I may follow up the bath with another Stele of Jeu and/or an application of uncrossing oil or even a full uncrossing candle ritual.
Use:
While I’m usually a big proponent of Chaos Magick and the benefits of fucking around in order to find out, after many years of finding out I have come down firmly on the side of “traditionalists are not wrong about maintaining a regular purification practice”. It is no more world-hating or puritanical to tell you to take your spiritual hygiene seriously than it is to tell you to wash your dick and your asshole. (Because we all know that it’s cismen who are the problem here, right?) Days or weeks of vegetarianism and/or sexual abstinence? I remain unconvinced. Regular baths, fumigations, or other spiritual purification rituals? I’ve switched teams and am now a full advocate.
So, in a more ideal world, I would be doing some version of this ritual somewhere between “every time the Moon is New” to “every Saturday” and following up with a sound-cleansing and fumigation of the house.
In the real world, I struggle to maintain the parts of my ritual practice between “daily offerings” and “enchantment as needed”. So in practice I end up doing cleansing baths in batches as I’m crawling out of depression holes and then maybe regularly for a week or three after. In fact, even as I write this I am winding up just such binge of spiritual purification. As such, I tend to make the baths in big batches, reducing the barrier of entry from “find where I hid the ingredients from myself” to “boil water and grab the bag”.
