Showing all posts by Satyr Magos

I actually never got a picture of the last incarnation of my altar.  This is what it looked like before I took down my separate Samhain altar-which was taking up too much of the very little space I had available-and incorporated the two.

Now my altar looks like this:

Note the conspicuous absence of my zodiac poster, which has served as my wheel of the year.  This morning, while I was moving the two-liter of mead which will serve as my holy water, the zodiac poster pitched off and crashed right in the middle of the lowest table.  Somehow, it did this without nocking the quartz and amethyst off the top.  The poster did knock off the horned god mask and cross … yet, somehow, neither suffered any real damage.  The mask has a slight chip on the bottom; the cross is untouched.  Even the geode right in front of the cross was undamaged.

There were a lot of delicate things on the surface where the poster landed were largely untouched: an impossibly delicate perfume bottle that has somehow survived on my altar for the last fifteen years miraculously survived this experience, though the stopper was flung halfway across the table.

Only three things, in fact, were broken: the candle holders for my Earth and Water candles, and the plastic poster frame itself, which looks like someone punched it in the very center.

There are a few different ways for me to read this somewhat surreal experience:

1) I knocked the poster over without realizing I’d even touched it, and through miraculous intervention nothing of real value was lost.

2) Someone on my altar needs more attention.  Candidates include (from left to right, top to bottom) the Horned God Mask, the Death Mask, Dionysos, Hephaistos, Kouros, Cyclades, Rhea, and Sue.

3) Someone not yet on my altar needs more attention.  Candidates include (in no particular order) Iris, Apollo, and Mercury, to say nothing of the multitudinous gods and spirits who may not have introduced themselves to me by name.

4) The altar itself is feeling unloved, and wants a hardcore cleaning.

5) None of the above.  Something that never even crossed my mind.

For the moment, I intend to simultaneously act on possibilities 1 and 4.  Until someone informs me otherwise.

Many of the things which belong on the altar you see above seem to have been misplaced in the move.  This strikes me as somehow appropriate.  I have spent the week between callender and astrological dates of Samhain in off-and-on meditation on loss and transition. 

It is perhaps no coincidence – particularly as I work through my issues with Yesod and the Moon – that I have felt exceptionally burnt out over the last week.  I’m very happy with where I’m at, and with where I’m going.  But I’ve given up a lot and gone through a lot to get here.    I’ll have to give up more to get where I’m going.

I’ve spent a lot of time dwelling on these sacrifices and transformations – both past and future.  And I think that these ruminations – the details of which are too personal to share, even here, and of no particular value to anyone but myself anyway – have been fruitful, but they have also been painful.

Tonight these rites and meditations will be complete.  I’ll share the rest of my Mabon mead and a bit of the Samhain bottle with friends tonight, and finish celebrating the latest anniversary of my birth.  I will be glad to disassemble the Samhain altar in the morning, and begin getting back to living my life.

Today is Samhain, celebrated as the neoPagan counterpoint to Haloween, All Saints Eve, and Dia de los Muertos.  The astrological cross-quarter is actually a week from today.

I usually throw down pretty hard for Samhain, but I don’t think I’m going to this year.  I nursed a friend through a drunken flashback this weekend, and it really drove home for me that it’s just not that kind of Samhain this year.  My life is too fucked right now.  I think everybody’s life is too fucked right now.  So instead of having a lot of people over for a big ritual, I’m going to set up an altar to my honored dead and spend the week in mourning and contemplation.  I’m going to focus on my transitionary state, and my mortality, and maybe make a few trips to the underworld.

Blessed be, everyone.  Be safe.  Be loved.  And if you’re having a better year than many of us, please drink a toast to our health.

And try picking up a Guy Fawkes or V for Vendeta mask at the Haloween stores as they start closing down tomorrow, for your Occupy Wallstreet related magics.

Behold: my altar to the Qabalistic Moon.  At the corners of the tile are the Nines of the tarot suits in Cowley’s Thoth and the Pamela Coleman-Smith Centeniall.  Atop them are my newly made Air Knife – a loose blade that has been sleeping in my altar for some years joined to a split branch found near my home – a lab-grown quartz wand I had not found use for (besides showing off and zapping guests with) during the decade it has lived on my altar, an art-glass cup serving as chalice, and my newly-recharged peyton.  In the middle are nine candles (they’re tea lights, on account of I’m too cheap to shell out for nine nice candles on a project like this), a rock painted with they glyph of the moon atop the Seal of the Moon, and my ever-handy obsidian orb.  Around the outer edges are XXI the World/Universe, leading back to Malkuth; XIX the Sun, leading to Hod; XIV Adjustment/Temperence, leading to Tiphereth; and XVII the Star, leading to Nezach.

With the construction of this Altar I begin my study of Yesod.  My tasks for the month include:

• The production of Abramelin Oil (I intend to follow the example of Aaron Leitch, rather than Penczak’s recipe)
• The Middle Pillar Exercise
• The Circulation of the Body of Light
• Storytelling as an act of magic
• Various Pathworkings and visionary journeys

Two of these, I realize, may well have helped with the issues I was having with the LBRP, had I been willing to tolerate another ten days of that bullshit.

Although the program expects about a month spent on each sephira, I anticipate spending no less than six weeks on Yesod. This is in part because I need to solidify my relationship with the Moon in many regards. One of the tasks Penczak associates with Yesod is sacred story-telling, and I intend to dedicate this year’s National Novel Writing Month effort as an ordeal in the name of the Muses.  The additional time is also necessary for the production of the Abramelin oil, whose ingredients are much harder to come by here in Sunrise than I they would have been in KCMO.

I will, of course, be sharing the results of all these experiments with you: my dearest readers.

I began my second night of full-moon rites with an earth-to-sky variant of Q-Cross.  I performed an “LBRP” using a burning sage wand instead of the knife, banishing pentagrams of spirit instead of earth, and invoking Iris, Hephaistos, Rhea, and Dionysos instead of the archangels.  I completed the rite with by invoking Gaea, Ouranos, Hephaistos, and Dionysos in the second Q-Cross.  Let me just say: holy shit that was awesome.  I cast my elemental circle, lit the candles on my Malkuth altar, and invoked Earth manifesting as Malkhuth.

I drank my absinthe-and-dream-herb flying potion, donned my mask, and descended to elemental realm of earth by sinking into the center of the stone circle in my Inner Temple (why can’t I ever go the same way twice?).  I met the guide I call Troll Lady, who was amused when I greeted and addressed her formally.  I asked her to take me to the Lords and Rulers of the Elemental realm to confirm the receipt of my Stone of Sovereignty (in retrospect I probably should have asked for something more open-ended).

She led me down and down and down to a vast dark cavern, along the outside of a bronze gate and wall and into a cavern where I met with shadowy figures who refused to confirm my stone and told me that the sphere was something else entirely.

When they were done with me, I asked Troll Lady to take me to where I should have asked to go in the first place; she told me it was too late for that.  I asked her to take me to where I needed to go now, and she took me to the Garden, from where she led me back to the Inner Temple via a mountaintop which deposited me on the plains facing the gate to my Inner Temple.

I returned to my body, did my monthly Tarot reading, thanked all spirits and powers who have helped me, and closed the circle.

With that journey, my month of Malkuth was complete.

At the beginning of the week I performed three days of Lunar rites, which largely consisted of spirit-journeys following up on my issues with the Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram and with my transition from the study of Malkuth to the study of Yesod.  I began by dedicating the offering bowls which I made for my idols of Dionysos and Rhea, and for my spirit-helper Tsu; I also made bowls for my Kouros and Cycladic figures, but they … didn’t turn out.  I finished by building my Yesod altar.

Monday night, the first night of the full moon, I performed my rites in the Hour of the Moon.  I opened with my inverted Q-Cross and abstained from any variation of the LBRP, as my mission was to return to the underworld for the instruction I had been promised.  I cast my circle, opened a vortex, and descended to the Garden via a World Tree which looked like an apple tree.

I met the leopard and he guided me to the temple again, this time with two kraters of wine.  The path was already open, giving me glimpses of hundreds of other Gardens as I passed.  I took my female shape at the temple, thanked the leopard, and went up several steps.  Rhea waited for me on her throne again, and there was something hiding behind it which left me with a vague impression of yellow.  We performed the same drinking ritual as before: I handed her the krater to drink from, se returned it to me to drink, and we passed it back and forth until it was empty. 

She handed me a sphere of pale stone and asked me to perform the LBRP as I had been instructed.  I did so, and I could feel my root chakra rotting even in that sacred space.  I knelt at her feet and she healed me again.

I received no … direct instruction.  Not in the way I had imagined, anyway.  Instead she filled me to the brim with purple light – subconscious clues, I believe, which will surface as I need them.

When asked if I was ready to pursue the mysteries of the moon in Yesod, she said yes and bid me farewell.  I returned to my body almost directly.

Since discovering that satyrs and archangels don’t mix, I’ve been experimenting with variations on the Qabalistic Cross and the Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram.

The first variant I tried was the simplest: I stripped the god-names and the archangels from the rites.  Instead of intoning the various Names, I tuned to analogous forces from within my own paradigm.  The Source and Manifestation (Atah, Malkuth) of the Q-Cross are not unfamiliar to me, though they’re archetypal energies I had never worked with before this exercise.  Power and Glory (Vi Geburah, Vi Gedulah) … well, so far they’ve always felt more like Wrath and Wonder, and again, not so unfamiliar.    Replacing the archangels was even easier: I simply tuned to the elemental powers I’ve been working with for years.  Had I not performed the proper LBRP for the previous three weeks, I would have thought this rite an effective one.

The next variation was more significant: I continued with the Cross, but inverted it altogether: starting with Earth – or, more accurately, the Primal Life of which Earth is a manifestation – below and drawing that power up through my chakras to connect with the Source above.  Power/Wrath and Glory/Wonder I left the same.  This was incredibly effective, though I haven’t done it long enough to determine if it has any strange side effects.  When I next attempted the Pentagram Ritual, I tried replacing the banishing pentagram of earth first with the banishing pentagram of spirit, then with the invoking pentagram of earth.  Both were interesting, and deserve further study.

In the three days between seeking healing for the damage done to me by the LBRP and the beginning of my Lunar rites, I gave up the pentagram portion of the rite altogether until receiving the instruction I was promised.  The details of that instruction were … vague, but I’ll get into that later.  The second night of the moon, when I cleansed my house and dedicated a number of new tools, I performed a variant where I invoked, rather than the archangels, the gods Iris (in the east for air), Hephaistos (in the south for fire), Dionysos (in the west for water) and Rhea (in the north for earth).  Let me tell you, I felt the ground move when I did that.

This morning, as I resumed my daily practice in preparation for my study of Yesod, I invoked a number of more primal gods: Earth and Sky, Sun and Moon for the Cross; Mnemnosyne for air, Prometheus for fire, Rhea again for Earth, and Okeanos for water.  That, a little to my surprise, was less potent.  Possibly due to my exhausted state after a week of chaos, or due to my lack of practice for the last six days, or even possibly due to my lack of relationship with most of those gods.