This post is part of a series, though it need not be read in whole or in order. You can read the first post here. You can find the rest of the posts here.
The work of the Book, the Bell, and the Blade is a work of becoming. You begin where you are, and you work your way forward.
The tools, not knowing where they come from, may need to be cleansed. Do this in the traditions from which you come, but note that none of these tools will thank you for being exposed to salt water. Turn, perhaps, to cinnamon or smoke or sound or song.
In this same vein, as a part of the daily ritual, you will cleanse yourself with cinnamon or smoke or song. But we will come to that in due time.
Neither you nor your tools need be consecrated to the work in order to begin it. Lay the book and bell and blade and whatever else you bring upon whatever you wish to use as your altar. Then announce yourself to the world and begin.
You may begin by formally dedicating yourself, if you so choose. Speak your name aloud, and your intention. Consecrate yourself with holy oil and the smoke of frankincense. But then begin, immediately. Do not wait.
You may then consecrate your tools, as you wish, according to the traditions that raised you. Or they, the knife in particular, may already be consecrated when you begin. But this is not important to the work. Your tools and their spirits will grow, be shaped, and awakened, by the work, itself, just as you will be.
If it is important to you to consecrate all your tools at the very beginning and yet lack for words, I offer you these, based on my own. Turn to the weirdest and most hypercosmic deity of your pantheon, and pray to them as you will later pray over your offerings:
“Hail unto you o Baphomet, I pray you: bless and consecrate [this book, this knife, this bell] that it may be fit for the work to come.”
For my own part, I finally consecrated my Book some months into the work, using the Solar consecration PGM IV. 1596-1715 (p. 68-9 in Betz), to empower all magic done with it.
If you want to get my posts a week before everyone else, to see the magical experiments that I don’t share with the public, to get first dibs on my elected talismans and fine art jewelry, or just want to support my work, you can do so through patreon. If you’d like to make a one-time donation, or don’t want to deal with all the non-occult content I post on patreon, I also have a ko-fi.
This post is part of a series, though it need not be read in whole or in order. You can read the first post here. You can find the rest of the posts here.
You have found your book. You love your book. You have, on the frontispiece or just behind it, written something – anything – to begin the book and begin to make it a beautiful tool that you will use, not a useless treasure you will horde.
Now, it is time to scribe the true first real pages.
Here, I will speak less of what you should do and more of what I have done.
I bought my book as a birthday present for myself in November of 2019. I had been walking by it (or, more accurately, a series of identical books that passed through) as I came in to and left the New Age store where I was working for several years. I pined after the pretty leatherbound journals, especially the really big ones, but that year I made a pact with myself that I would only buy it if I were actually going to use it, and if I were actually going to use it that meant I had to know, from the jump, that I was going to fuck it up along the way.
The purpose of my book was – is – to serve as a cord to bind my art, my witchcraft, and my astrological magic together. On the fourth and fifth pages, just behind Mirrors and Veils and Proclus, I copied the Stele of Jeu, a ritual which I was re-integrating into my practice at the time, and which I have performed more than any other ritual inscribed into my book since.
Then I picked out several sections of the book and made chapter pages for each of the seven traditional planets, taking up less than half of the book but relatively in the middle, because it was already my plan to draw Triangles of Art in each of those sections, pre-marked with the relevant planetary and Olympic spirit sigils and Orphic hymns, and while I wanted the planetary work to take up less than half of the book, I wanted to give each planetary section room to grow, and for the book to lay relatively flat when I did so.
Then I took a class on the Greek Magical Papyri, and began transcribing spells from that collection into the book. I decided that divination went at the front, and certain other things went at the back. I added a section for work with the fixed stars and constellations.
Then, almost a year after I had begun my book, I added the pages that eventually became the new focus of my daily practice. I was travelling, away from my altar, and wanted something to focus my daily offerings to my familiar spirits. I drew a triangle, and transcribed the seals of each of my familiars onto it. At first, I only used that page when I was travelling. But as my talisman creation provided me with more and more familiars, those offerings overtook my planetary practice.
So, as you begin filling in your pages, consider first what parts of your practice you wish to emphasize and double-down on as you begin the work of the Book, Bell, and Blade.
If you want to get my posts a week before everyone else, to see the magical experiments that I don’t share with the public, to get first dibs on my elected talismans and fine art jewelry, or just want to support my work, you can do so through patreon. If you’d like to make a one-time donation, or don’t want to deal with all the non-occult content I post on patreon, I also have a ko-fi.
This post is part of a series, though it need not be read in whole or in order. You can read the first post here. You can find the rest of the posts here.
I know that you are most curious about The Book, but my work with the book cannot be separated from the bell and blade that accompany it. Nor, in truth, can I separate out the brass bowls, or the incense, or the candles, or the libations, or any of the other tools that have brought forward from the practices that preceded the book, nor the other tools that have accreted around it. You will bring your own practices with you, and find accretions of your own, but I suggest that you consider – at least for one day – starting fresh with just these few.
The Book
Find a book that is beautiful and empty. Let it be large enough to draw a triangle of conjuration on a single open face. Let the pages be of a quality and texture that you can work with in your preferred medium, be that pencil, pen, or paint. Let it be heavy and well made, so that you can carry it with you. Let it be something that you can love, because if you do not love it, you will not use it.
Once you have found your book, once you have decided to love it, hold it in your hands and understand from the beginning that it will NOT be perfect and that you WILL destroy it. Wax will spill. Wine will splatter. Your pen will slip. There might even be fire. Lines, pages, even whole folios may be ruined. Dozens, maybe hundreds of hours of labor will go into pages that are just not as pretty as you wanted them to be and which, some day, will be utterly irrelevant or even anathema to the direction that your work takes. In time, the whole book will be destroyed – perhaps by accident, or by the vagaries of time, or even by the demands of your gods.
Love the book. Know that it is mortal, like you. Know that that is what makes the book precious, and the work powerful.
When you have chosen your book, when you have decided to love it, when you have fully understood that it will be damaged or even destroyed, write in it immediately. If you wait, you may never have the courage. If you wait, it may become “too good to write in” and therefore be wasted, which is worse than ruined.
Do not waste your time and risk failure by choosing a ritual with which to dedicate it. Write immediately. Write carelessly. Draw on one page some symbol, such as an eye, and some words that have meaning for you. If you cannot find any that have sufficient meaning for you, Proclus’ Hymn to the Gods:
“Hear me, O Gods, you who hold the rudder of sacred wisdom. Lead us mortals back among the immortals as you light in our souls the flame of return. May the ineffable initiations of your hymns give us the power to escape the dark cave of our lives and purify ourselves.
Hearken, powerful liberators! Dispel the surrounding obscurity, and grant me the power to understand the holy books; replace the darkness with a pure and holy light. Thus may I truly know the incorruptible God that I am.
May a wicked spirit never keep me, overwhelmed by ills, submerged in the waters of forgetfulness and far away from the Gods and Goddesses.
May my soul not be fettered in the jails of life where I am left to suffer a terrifying atonement in the icy cycles of generation. I do not want to wander anymore.
O you, sovereign Gods of radiant wisdom, hear me! Reveal to one who hastens on the Path of Return the holy ecstasies and the initiations held in the depth of your sacred words!”
Or these, which I borrowed from my novel for the aesthetic:
“These things I have done with mirrors. These things I have seen beyond the Veil.”
Now place the book on your altar, where it can lay open with your working tools on and around it.
The Bell
Find a bell – silver, gold, or brass, steel or bronze or glass, it doesn’t matter. Let it be one that rings clearly and cleanly in your ears. Let it be one that fits nicely in your hand. Let it be one that stands on its own, and fits on or beside your book on your altar. If it does not sound good to your ears, if it does not fit well in your hand, if it does not fit well in your working space, you will not use it, and it is wasted.
When you have found your bell, let it ring in your sacred places. Ring it loud in each of the four directions.
Keep it with your book, where it will be ready when the time comes to ring it in earnest.
The Blade
Find a knife, one that feels good in your hand and that will hold an edge to cut. No athame is this, to cut only aether, but a tool with which you might cut equally the veil between worlds, the cords that bind you to your enemies, the herbs for your spells, or even a ruined page from you book. Let it be of a size with which you can travel, as needed. Fixed blade or folding, whatever is of the most use to you. Let it be a thing of sufficient beauty that you can love it.
The Bowls
You may need countless bowls for your practice, but for this work in particular you will need three. Two will need to be fireproof – brass or copper or steel, or whatever suits your style and practice and pocket best. Fill one with enough salt to hold incense upright, or gravel upon which to place a charcoal disk. Leave the other empty for the candles you will burn within it. The third can match the first two if it pleases you, but need only be suitable for libations and to that end must be easy to clean.
When your incense bowl is full of ash, store the ash and salt for use in other magics. When your candle bowl is full of wax, melt it down to make more offering candles from. When your libation bowl is full, pour it out at the crossroads, and clean it as often as is needful.
Other Tools
You will need other things, of course.
You will need pens and pencils and paints and brushes for filling the book. You may buy new ones to use exclusively if it pleases you, but if you are an artist, your tools are already sacred. Have no fear that they will profane your witchcraft.
You will need whetstones to maintain your blade. You may buy new ones to use exclusively if it pleases you, but if you use the same stones to sharpen the knives in your kitchen, they are already sacred. Have no fear that they will profane your witchcraft.
You will need candles and incense and libations by the tonne. Consecrate these when you are ready to use them. If they are good enough for you, they are good enough for the gods.
You will need the tools that you need. Your practice is your own. As you begin this work, use it as an opportunity to start fresh, and let go of tools and practices that no longer serve you, but do not fear to bring forward that which you love. Consider only, “Will this fit within arm’s reach as I sit before the book?” and, “When I travel, will this fit safely and securely with or within the book?”
If you want to get my posts a week before everyone else, to see the magical experiments that I don’t share with the public, to get first dibs on my elected talismans and fine art jewelry, or just want to support my work, you can do so through patreon. If you’d like to make a one-time donation, or don’t want to deal with all the non-occult content I post on patreon, I also have a ko-fi.
This post is the first in a series. It need not be read in whole or in order, but the rest can be found here.
Like many magical practitioners, particularly those of us who are writers in some other sense, I have often thought of writing a book on magic. But, after many years of fits and starts, and despite the way in which I have always structured in-person workshops so that even the most inexperienced in my community could participate fully, I have long known that I have nothing to add to the body of introductory literature.
If I have a magical book in me, the target audience for that book is the same as the audience for this blog: the intermediate practitioner. Witches and mystics, sorcerers and magicians, who have done a great deal of magic, and seen things they don’t quite comprehend, and who are looking for ways to deepen their practice and contextualize their experiences. Experienced practitioners whose confidence is not always to the same level as their experience.
Since the beginning of the pandemic, my work has turned inward. Even as I’ve been casting and consecrating Picatrix planetary talismans to great effect, my personal work has gone in directions that, while supporting that work, is also antithetical. It is the product of no one tradition. No one spirit has pointed my work in this direction. Rather, it is a contrived synthesis of all the work that I have done so far, laid out in a big book in ways that I find aesthetically pleasing, suitable for use both in-circle and as a prop in my art photography.
But, somewhat to my surprise, as I tell stories about that work on social media and in various chat rooms, I am finding that there seems to be some interest in it – academic and comradely interest, at least, with some interest expressed in making attempts at something similar. And that seems to be enough to convince me to write it down.
But, having decided to write about this work, I have to choose a voice.
Do I want to write it as a story, this is what I did? Do I want to write it as a grimoire, with absurd archaic and formal language. Can I find something in between, a concession to the probability that this is only ever going to be a series of blog posts? A part of me – a stupid, arrogant, desperate to burn out again part of me – wants to write two versions of each “chapter”: one for the blog, and one for the “inevitable” book deal.
My Libra stellium says take the middle road. Have fun with the language, but keep it personal and informal enough for the online medium.
The Scorpio stellium says to be stylish and obscure. To write like I’m using a quill on vellum, as if only the worthy and eriudite will ever lay their hands upon it.
The Sagittarius rising says not to stress about it, to just put it out there. Run it up the flag pole and see who salutes.
For once in my life, I think that I am going to try to listen to the Sagittarius. The other perspectives will inevitably creep in, of course. This is about how I made my magical practice into a work of art, and then used that art to make more magic. Language and style are inevitably a part of that.
Some of what follows will be practical, describing how the reader can reproduce what I have done and am doing. Some of it will be autobiographical, relating intimate details of my practice. Some of it will be aspirational: waxing poetic on what I intended when I started, and about what I still hope to do in the future.
And I think that this will have to be a living document: edited on the basis of your input, and my experiences as I continue in this practice through trial and error. So if you have comments, or questions, or suggestions, please don’t hesitate to speak up.
So, without further ado, let’s begin this journey together.
If you want to get my posts a week before everyone else, to see the magical experiments that I don’t share with the public, to get first dibs on my elected talismans and fine art jewelry, or just want to support my work, you can do so through patreon. If you’d like to make a one-time donation, or don’t want to deal with all the non-occult content I post on patreon, I also have a ko-fi.
Discussing tools and techniques in the Hermetic House of Life discord server this month, I’ve been reminded of how much of my work these days – especially the public-facing stuff – is rooted in the art of Drawing Spirits Into Crystals (DSIC). In discussing various elements of my practice, I have discovered that I did not leave as clear a trail in my blog as I had thought. Perhaps I was – for once – “Keeping Silent”. Or perhaps what seemed relevant at the time just isn’t what I want to share in retrospect. Either way, now seems as good a time as any to look back on my journey.
The first books I turned to in my study of the Western ceremonial tradition – these were the days of the great Ceremonial Experiment, as I called it – were guided first by Christoper Penczak and then by Donald Michael Craig. Although I have previously praised Penczak’s Temple of Witchcraft series, when he came to volume 4, Temple of High Magic, he dropped the fucking ball. And, to the chagrin of many in the community, I found DM Craig’s Modern Magic to be equally useless. So I turned to the internet. And on some random ass demonolator’s website, I found clear instructions for a barebones summoning circle.
The design I produced therefrom was simple: a triangle in a circle. The sigil of the spirit to be summoned went in the middle. Around the triangle (and, in my case, around the circle) went the statement of intent in clear script. And, falling back on my eclectic neo-Pagan witchcraft background and some vague notions of what a magic circle should look like, I wrote the names of four elementally-aligned gods, and seals and sigils associated with the moon … because that felt right.
For that first conjuration, I summoned my natal genius. I calculated her name using Agrippa’s formula via Frater Acher’s spreadsheet. (Reverend Erik of Arnemancy fame now hosts a widget that is much easier to use.) I derived her sigil using the Rosy Cross. And I wrote out my statement of intent to know her. My records of the ritual, back in 2012 or so, are unfortunately even more vague than my memories, but I got what I needed out of the ritual: confirmation of the name and sigil, a vision of the spirit, and some notes as to her nature. (You can read my original blog post about it here.) I wasn’t entirely satisfied (though, in retrospect, it went great), so I tried again, to similarly frustrating (but in retrospect phenomenal) results. Dissatisfied as I was, it was some months later before I followed the experiment through and attempted to contact my “evil demon” using that same circle, only this time under the auspices of Solar powers.
Shortly after these experiments, I consecrated my first astrological talisman using an election, ritual, and image provided by Christopher Warnock on his yahoo group, as he was in the habit of doing in those days. My notes don’t say what if any triangle I used for that conjuration, or for the Venus and Sun elections that I remember hitting that spring and summer, but I know that I had been exposed to more conventional circles by the time I began the Spirits of Spirits experiments, and used a synthesis of the two (I know that Aradia and I also conjured the spirits of wormwood and Jack Daniels, but right now I can only find a write up for the initial cannabis experiment.
The idea behind the above synthesis was a cosmogram: planetary powers in the outer circle, elemental powers within. I had not yet twigged to the fact that the four angel names were sanitized replacements for demon names from older grimoires, rulers of the four quarters of the world. Based on my background in eclectic Wicca, I thought they were elementally aligned, and placed gods I was comfortable with instead of angels in those quarters: Iris for air, Hephaistos for fire, Dionysos for water, and Rhea for earth. Though my logic was flawed, it worked well enough at the time.
My notes don’t specifically say, but I think that I was still using that circle when Rufus Opus was running his Seven Spheres in Seven Days events in October/November of 2012. Looking back at my notes, it’s no wonder the planetary magic took over my life the way it did. The call was strong. At the end of my first seven days, the powers of Saturn taught me how to better hijack the current of the project, even though I didn’t have access to the full Gates Rites. At the end of my second round of daily conjurations, the powers of Saturn taught me the triangle of conjuration that became the basis for my planetary work going forward. (And at the end of my third consecutive week of planetary conjurations, I fell flat on my face.)
In the center goes my crystal ball, and/or the glyph of any particular spirit I may be calling under the auspices of those greater planetary powers.
I have been using this double-triangle to ever-increasingly potent effect for just short of ten years now. I have transcribed it into my personal grimoire, once for each planetary section, where it sits beside the relevant lamen and Orphic hymn. Unfortunately, the pages don’t quite sit flat enough to use it as intended, so often what I end up doing is standing the book up and setting the candles and brazier in front of the triangle, but I’ve found that always works just as well, and is almost as aesthetically pleasing. Sometimes corner 5 gets a brazier with incense instead of a candle. And, as you can see, a couple other small details morphed over time.
In the years since, I’ve also developed another variation on the traditional circle, mostly for the purposes of art, but which I have used a few times to good effect, and which I would recommend as an option for someone looking for somethign mostly traditional but a little more glam. The out ring is still the Agrippan planetary characters, which I think are just neat, but the angel and god names in the outer ring have been replaced by seals of the four archangels. I use this circle in my official Mundus Occultus branding, so it is absolutely not available for commercial use, but if you want to print it out and call a spirit into it, that’s what it’s here for. Just shoot me an email to tell me how it works out for you.
Writing this post has taken me weeks longer than I originally anticipated, in part because I had to re-read as many of my old notes as I could find, and partly because I had to re-scan and re-censor several of the above images, and mostly because the last six weeks have been just absolutely bonkers.
I’m glad I finally got through it, though. Looking back over that wild year’s work, thinking on how it has shapped my current work, has been pretty educational. In retrospect, I could have asked for a lot more help during those early conjuration experiments. My excuse is that no one I felt comfortable asking for help had fucked with this kind of work, as far as I knew, but also in retrospect, there were absolutely people who could have at least pointed me in clearer directions. Also, somehow, in my memory, many of these events had shifted from late 2012 to early 2014. Why do I remember the conjuration-induced migraine as happening the week of my college graduation?
I’m also glad to finally have this done because it’s reaffirmed my dedication to my chief point of advice for those looking to start or escalate their magical practice: go forth, fuck around, and find out. The information I needed to do these things more traditionally was hidden behind the paywalls of the few people teaching classes on the subject, and the even more insurmountable barrier of 19th century translations so terrible that even as an in-the-weeds Classical Studies student, I couldn’t fucking hack it. But now, people who know more than I did then but less than they’d like to know before they start can look at this and say, “fuck it, if that lunatic can have results that good with that bullshit, anything I do will work great!”.
So make the tools you want to make. Sing the songs you want to sing. Call the spirits down from the heavens and up from the depths of hell. Do it all with style and audacity. Go forth. Fuck around. Find out.
If you want to get my posts a week before everyone else, to see the magical experiments that I don’t share with the public, to get first dibs on my elected talismans and fine art jewelry, or just want to support my work, you can do so through patreon. If you’d like to make a one-time donation, or don’t want to deal with all the non-occult content I post on patreon, I also have a ko-fi.
When I came back from Beltane, I learned that this year’s Heartland Pagan Festival would be the last. That knowledge sent me careening across the emotional spectrum. I talked about it in my last post, but it bears some reiteration: I have been attending the Heartland Pagan Festival for my entire adult life, and arguably longer. (Was I really an “adult” at 18?) Since I first attended in 1999, whether I was able to go or not, my year revolved the festival. Even after I was chased out in 2017, the hole the festival left in my life was a gravity well around which everything else orbited. When I learned that 2023 would be the very last year, I was … extremely upset at the possibility that I might not get to go.
But I am a witch, and the world sometimes bends itself to my will. Help – and sales – came out of the woodwork. Not only were Aradia and I able to get out to festival, so was two thirds of our Lunar Shenanigans crew. Alvianna and I were out there Thursday through Monday. Aradia and Kraken joined us Friday afternoon. Juniper joined us Saturday. Kraken and Juniper were only there for the weekend, and left Sunday morning. Aradia, Alvianna, and I saw it through to the end.
The final iteration of the Heartland Pagan Festival wasn’t exactly what I wanted. I couldn’t get the whole Shenanigans crew out; of the Big Damn Heroes, only Cat still comes; and no-one in Camp Taco even still talks to each other, anymore, let alone comes out to festival. The fires were lackluster, and the dancers all tired quickly. Too many people were more interested in pickling their livers on Leather Lane.
But I did get what I needed. The weather was lovely: warm during the day and cool at night, and not a drop of rain. There were fires and dancing, if not enough of either, and there was a lovely afternoon at the beach. We drank mead, and we told stories of festivals past, both good and bad. We wandered from one camp to another, our wagon of blankets and bottles in tow. We tried our best to make new friends, and we huddled close to one another in the warmth of love and companionship. And Kraken did get to see the festival at least once. After eight years, my best friend finally got to see me in my natural habitat (if, granted, in a degraded form).
Few of the people most active in running me out of the organization were there, and those few who were there lacked the spine or spleen to start shit. A couple people even tried to make amends – though one was so drunk, he immediately forgot that I existed, and the other never really understood what he’d done wrong, in the first place.
In the end, the festival died as it lived. I attended the main ritual every night, but I was unable to hear most of what was said because the ritualists used neither voice technique nor amplification. The temple pilgrimage that replaced the vision quest and displaced both Saturday Night ritual and concert was a logistical mess, with one temple running their last workshop so late we couldn’t visit without interrupting, another closing early, and one simply never being set up.
The closing ritual reminded me a lot of the “Passing the Torch” festival from one of my early years, where the weary founders passed control over to the next generation of leadership. But, where that ritual was magnanimous and hopeful, honoring attendees and everyone who had ever helped to put on the festival, this ritual was a self-aggrandizing eulogy for the ambitions of the remaining members.
The current president, a woman whose own son was hurt by the same predator-friendly policies that my crew and I were tarred and feathered for trying to change, took the closing ritual as an opportunity to blame “lack of volunteerism” for the festival’s failure. She made a point of calling up any “current or past members” of the organization that runs the land to thank them publicly, but only brought up current leadership of the festival organization for similar recognition, ignoring current ground-level members and past leadership, including some founding members that were on site.
The Heartland Spiritual Alliance has promised that they will be back with something new. They’ve asked for community input, asked what the community wants. I doubt they’ll pull anything off, honestly. I know who’s left. Whatever they achieve will be as deeply cursed as the Heartland Pagan Festival was at its very worst, and I wish them all the very worst of their own bile.
I expected to spend much of the festival in tears, or deep depression, or possibly even being sought out and tormented by people who blamed me for the festival’s demise. (An absurd accusation, but well within the standard deviation of accusations flung at anyone who ever worked the festival then left.) And, certainly, there were moments of sadness, regret, and loss. But, mostly, what I felt was relief and closure.
I’m glad that I was there to see it end. I’m glad that it’s over. I couldn’t mourn the zombie the festival became after I was chased out. I can mourn the now-still corpse.
More than that, the corpse has no hold on me. The lines the zombie held me by have gone slack, and I can pull out the last of the hooks. I can retrieve the last of my power and bits of my soul that were stollen by the festival. My wounds can now well and truly heal.
The Lunar Shenanigans Crew – the pseudo-coven I talk about so often, which I have at last decided to give it’s proper name in public – celebrated Beltane in our usual fashion, fucking off into the woods the last weekend in April. We were only able to get out for two nights, but we made the most of them. Friday night we celebrated with two of our oldest rituals: the Fuck You Fire and the I Love You, Man, fire. Saturday afternoon, I performed a personal cord-cutting ritual, one of my compatriots led a Sumbel, and we renewed our vows as Black Goat Brides – an idiosyncratic ritual that we got from Jack Grayle after he led it at Paganicon 2018. I have led the Black Goat Bride ritual several times. This year, I asked to try my hand at playing the oracle, after. They were content to let me try.
I have, in a fairly material sense, spent the last two years preparing for the role. The Lunar Shenanigans Crew spent a year of full moons Drawing Down the Moon to give each of us a bit of experience with that oracular priestex experience and role. Those of us most moved by the rite went on to form a spin-off group devoted to perfecting our trance-possession skills. Again, that endeavor deserves its own posts, but I haven’t quite figured out what to say about it.
The ritual as written gave us no formulae for preparing the oracle, only noted that one might be available at the end of the rite. Each of us who has taken that role has done so in our own way. Having received the groups blessing to play the oracle, I spent the next few hours preparing myself in the back of my mind. I think that I imagined that it would be the voice of Dionysos that came through, but what I got, instead, was my own oracular voice.
Satyr Magos was meant to be a nom de plume, not a magical name. My true magical name, which I have not and will not put in print, is more ambitious: a great seer and teacher of the mythic past. But for all that ambition, that aspiration, satyrdom is closer to my true nature, and that came through so strongly that when the voice first bubbled up in me, in the gap between talking through the details and the beginning of the rite, I literally laughed out loud.
When the rite was done, and we had all renewed our vows, I sequestered myself to prepare for and then perform my oracular duties. Preparation was largely a matter of checking in with myself, trying to determine if the voice was, in fact, oracular, not some strange delusion. But it felt right. It felt real. And if I hadn’t spent the last two years doing the work I’d been doing, I might not have been able to tell.
I wrapped my cloak around me. I draped my sacred cloth over my head. I stared deep into my crystal ball. I lit a cigarette, and then the candles to tell the crew waiting back at the main camp to tell them that I was ready.
“Who approaches the oracle?” I asked as each one came up to me. The raspy voice fit the mood, at first. Then the tone … shifted.
“Hi, NN, how’s it goin’?”
The oracular voice I found in myself that night was not the wise and noble seer of my ambitions, consulted by kings and heroes. No. I was a chainsmoking satyr who might have spent a little too much time in Brooklyn. But it was real.
“The important thing is to act,” I told one. “Once you’re moving, you can always course-correct.”
“If you’re looking for an idea, not a place,” I told another, “what you need isn’t a map. What you need is to find a rumor.”
“There’s basically two ways to be a maenad,” I told a third, “that’s full-time and part-time. Part-time has a lot of room for life and other obligations and ambitions; full-time, not so much.”
A lot of the details have faded since the night, of course. I remember just enough to get me into trouble. But the funniest thing, the thing I wanted to share with you all other than the surprising nature of the voice, was the one through line across the querents. At some point, they all asked a question that was too broad, too vague. And I would have to tell them to be more specific.
“I ain’t the Pythia,” I told them. “Just a satyr with ambition.”
“Pythia ain’t here,” I said at one point. “She’s up north with Apollo.”
I also remember that four of my five companions got real, solid answers. Things that felt right and helpful to them. The fifth, I’m sad to say, asked questions that I could find no answers to beyond my own common sense. She got robbed and I feel really bad about that. I think that the problem was how definite and material the questions were, and how far in the future. Or maybe I just dropped the ball.
But, overall, I think that I did well. I found my oracular voice and I was able to sustain it as long as it was needed. When that voice was not at all what I expected, I was able to check in with myself and determine that it was right. Maybe in another year or two, I will be more of that more noble seer whose name I took for my own back in 2009, before I even dreamed of the blog. But, for now, the Satyr Magician has spoken with a voice of prophesy, and has done well enough.
I first heard a rumor when I came back from Beltane, but Tuesday night I learned for a fact that this year’s Heartland Pagan Festival is to be the last. I am … deeply conflicted by this knowledge. For half my life, that festival was the axis around which my year revolved. I first attended in 1999: fresh out of high school, new to the pagan community, innocent and naïve. I only went for a single day. Twenty-four years later, the memories are hazy – the awkwardness of coming and going to the remote location, buying my first sarong, meeting people from the townie community in a very different context – but that first daypass changed my life.
I went back the next year for the full weekend, and about every other year from then until 2006, just before I moved to St. Louis. I came back in 2008 and didn’t miss another year until 2014, which May I spent studying abroad in Greece with my Classics program. I met new friends and lovers there, some of whom I know to this day. I brought old friends from Lawrence whenever I could. I was sexually assaulted there in 2008 – an experience I now know to be frighteningly common – by a man I wanted to fuck but who didn’t want to take “later” for an answer; he was later arrested for being too disruptively high around the bonfire, and all my food was confiscated with his because we were camped too close together, and lived off the generosity of my friends for the rest of the festival. I brought my partner to HPF 2009 as a field test before we moved in together. I had profound and powerful magical experiences as a part of public rituals, there, both good and bad. One bad experience, in 2012, set off a massive public shit-fight between me and the sacred experience committee that ended up in face-to-face mediated meetings and, ultimately, an invitation to put my money where my mouth was and join the ritual crew. I was just starting college, and couldn’t commit, then, but when I came back in 2015 it was as a staff member.
My partner and I skidded in to the June 2014 post-festival staff meeting not two days after our epic road trip celebrating my graduation and her escape from her corporate hell job. We signed up to work with the Sacred Experience Committee, the same crew that we’d had our blowout with in 2012, expecting to cut wood and carry water. By January 2015, we were hosting meetings and more of our ideas were going into the rituals than theirs. Two months later, we learned that none of them had any intention of performing the rituals we were writing – all of which required four or five ritualists – and Aradia and I were left scrambling to recruit bodies. We reached out to everyone we knew worth their salt, rebuilding bridges we’d burned to get competent witches and magicians to help us put on the festival.
I have tried before to write about those years in detail. Getting involved with the organization, getting swept up into leadership positions and being lauded for our efforts and ideas … only to have those efforts and ideas undermined at every turn. Ultimately being chased out for trying to improve the safety and experience of the attendees, and for refusing to submit to the corporate culture of “naming the problem is always worse than the problem”. It still hurts too much to go into detail, and the trauma makes some of it incredibly difficult to remember.
The short version is that we wrote and performed a series of initiatory rituals, each year sending attendees back into the world with the charge of doing more magic. Our first opening ritual was nonverbal, every action a dance, with shills among the participants to help cue their responses. Our final closing ritual was a bonfire ritual where, through enchanted masks finished at festival, we dropped almost fifty gods into various ecstatic dancers. Masks and coordinated costumes were our signature style. Prometheus featured prominently every year. None of it was perfect, but we did our very best to make our rituals as participatory and experiential as we could.
At the end of HPF 2015, I was informed that I was being nominated for chair of the committee. We had had designs on that, of course, but we’d anticipated years of work, and for Aradia to wear the title. By HPF 2016, we had found ourselves stuffed into gaps on the Board of Directors. We proposed and passed a five year plan to get the festival back on track to growth and sustainability, and to work on repairing its reputation as a drunken rape fest by fixing those problems. By 2017, I was chair of the board and she was Vice President.
But things were never quite right. I was on the edge of transitioning to gender neutral pronouns when I came back from college. The clear and abundant transphobia of entrenched leadership made me put that off, something that hurt me far more deeply than I realized at the time. As chair of the board of directors, I got to hear the then-president joke at an informal meeting about covering up the assault of a transwoman because she “had brought it on herself”. When Aradia shut down after outbursts by the malignant narcissists in the group, and I tried to reiterate her points, I was accused (in back channel discussions) of speaking over and abusing her … but no one ever tried to help her.
After 2017, though, the measures of the five year plan that the members had voted to implement were too radical, too real, and we were chased out. In particular, our desire to change security and safety policy so that records were kept of every incident and accusation, so that patterns could be tracked over time and so that the whole of leadership knew what was happening, not just the chair of the security committee, was taken as a personal threat by entrenched leadership. People were furious at our suggestion that everyone come to meetings sober. Strangely threatening was our proposal that, every few years, all staff be required to take a sabbatical year to prevent burn out, and be admitted to the festival for free as attendees. The final straw for me was in mid-2017, when I learned that both our not-for-profit status and insurance had been allowed to lapse. Chirotus had already left, as had half my crew. Aradia stuck on till November. The members of my crew that stayed on past that all repudiated me publicly.
We learned through the grapevine that new rules had been passed to prevent our return. That people believed (or said they did) that we had cursed the president and caused him to fall through a faulty ceiling. That we formed the Lunar Shenanigans Crew for the express purpose of cursing entrenched leadership. (We were not cursing anyone. We were ritualists, we wanted to ritual. The only magic we did about them was some cursebreaking and some “return to sender” work against the Evil Eye. In retrospect, I may have been flinging some Evil Eye of my own [I have an astounding capacity for hate], but I promise you, if Aradia, Chirotus, and I – let alone the three of us plus a half dozen compatriots – had been flinging curses, not a one of them would still have had a job or home.)
We were exhausted. We were hurt. We felt betrayed.
We were literally traumatized by the cult-tactics employed by senior leadership, starting with love bombing and moving immediately to trying to control the information we had available to us and trying to force us to either recruit or cut off our friends who were not a part of the organization, to ostracizing us when we could not be made to submit. I ran into one of the committee heads at the store a few months later and they literally fled from the sight of me.
To this day, I do not trust my judgment about people anymore. I am afraid to go to public events, lest I run into people who I sincerely believe want me dead. Chirotus will no longer set foot on the grounds of Gaea Retreat Center.
And yet, though I kept it to myself, I always wanted to go back. I had attended the festival since I was a literal child. I didn’t want to cede the territory forever. To my surprise, it was Aradia who brought up going back toward the beginning of April. She wanted to go bonfire dancing. We were talking about getting day passes, joking about wearing masks and claiming a vow of silence if we ran into anyone we didn’t like. I was excited to finally be able to bring Kraken to something that had always been such a huge part of my life, and whose shadow darkened the first years of our friendship.
Hearing that it’s ending has hit me hard. I got drunk and went off on twitter last night. I was already in a bad mood when tree-trimming in the neighborhood woke me up and chased me out of the house. (I’m writing this on my laptop in a park, though I’ll have to go home soon to refill my coffee.)
I don’t know who, if anyone, of the people who hurt me are still involved. I know that some of them have left because I know that someone else holds their positions. I know that one of them – the one who betrayed me most personally, and who took my place as head of the sacred experience committee – has moved on to leadership at the organization that maintains the Gaea Retreat, and runs their public rituals as badly as anyone ever has.
I find myself wishing I had the money for a whole weekend. If it’s going out, I want to be there with it. For good and ill, it made me what I am.
Some of my crew are saying “good riddance”. I can’t blame them. None of them ever loved the festival the way that I did. Maybe I should feel that way, too. But I’m not there, yet. I might not ever be.
If the end of Heartland Pagan Festival is what it takes to get those people out of power, fine.
If the end of Heartland Pagan Festival is what it takes to kill the drunken predatory culture that developed around it, fine.
Those things need to go, and I would drive the stake home, myself, if I thought I had the reach.
But, for now, I am just … sad.
Prepare yourself for some waves of Heartland memories on my various socials, and probably here, as well.
A couple weeks ago, the Trance Possession Club subset of my Lunar Shenanigans Crew invoked Persephone. (If I haven’t told any stories about that, oops. But everything you need for this post is contained in that sentence and the next.) I was neither Vessel nor Trance Guide, and the Vessel (who assigns roles for their ritual) hadn’t assigned additional roles, so my only task was to be ready to ask a question of the goddess when my turn came.
I’ve simplified my life a lot since we started this project, and I have really struggled to find questions to ask the gods we call on. In a couple cases, it’s been a matter of not wanting to owe that god anything, but more often – since we’ve gotten away from Hekate – it’s just a matter of having the parts of my life generally governed by those gods largely under control. So, when the question of devotional images came to me, it felt like a real moment of genius.
I asked for two images, but only got one.
The above art is the image I received of Persephone, alone: “life and death joined … mycelium” (the lacuna there being my inability to understand the words of the oracle). I sketched this image on my phone immediately after ritual: a skull crowned in mushrooms with a flowering tree growing out of it.
This image is definitely a tier or two above my existing wax carving skill, but it’s also too three-dimensional for my usual process, so … I guess I need to learn to be a better wax carver.
The second image I asked for was of Persephone as one of the two goddesses of the Eleusinian mysteries, for those devotees looking to discover and invent new Mysteries in that tradition. To that request, she answered: “I will say only that there was a reason I was known as the Dread Queen.” Which I partially take as, “not for you.” Which is fair, as I have no dream of rediscovering/reinventing the Eleusinian mysteries, myself, just being the personal jeweler of those who do.
It’s a little interesting and embarrassing that I didn’t think to ask that question before now. After all, I’ve wanted to create 21st Century magical images of the planets since I first started fucking with astrological image magic. For some reason, though, that didn’t translate into doing the same for the various gods my crew and I invoke.
A while ago I had the opportunity to hit a series of elections that included a Saturn election one day and a Venus election the next.
The Saturn election went great. I had visions of spirits the night before, intense pre-verberations and insomnia. I just finished up the talismans the other day, and they are On Point.
The Venus election was a bust. No problem with the election, as far as I can tell, but I was so caught up in other kinds of preparation that I was twenty minutes late turning on my electromelt. I should have just quit then, but I really wanted to hit that election . So I hoped and I prayed and I proceeded as if success was possible. I set up the altar. I burned the incense. I chanted the invocations. I could feel the potent and eager Venusian spirits gathered around me to fill the metal, and I tried, I really tried, to get the metal hot enough to pour and hit that election.
I fucking failed. By the time the metal was finally ready to pour, Venus had crossed the midheaven. Technically Venus was still within orb, and I know that others have had success within those parameters, but … I knew immediately that I hadn’t, at least not that time. Strangely, and possibly of note to other magicians, the spirits hung about in my studio until I poured the metal, even though they did not apparently go into the talismans.
My initial concern was that I’d made curse talismans. So I did extensive divination. I got a bunch of weird mixed messaging, but the gist seemed to be that they weren’t cursed … I just had to decide what to do with them. The only clear and good option was 10 Disks for slagging them, and that was a monetary concern. Also good, but significantly less clear, was the Ace of Cups for “do something else” … except every “something else” I proposed after that initial reading was just as muddy.
Eventually, I just used them as photographic exemplars and kept them as well-consecrated materia for the next Venus election.
In retrospect, the talismans may not have been cursed, but the failed electional ritual definitely did a number on me. I fell into a depression that didn’t really lift until I had melted the failed talismans down (with appropriate thanks and apologies) and cast them into the next cohort of Venus talismans.
That batch of talismans is now fermenting happily on my altar. I have their names and sigils and will be writing them up for sale soon … once I’m done processing the cohort that came after (that will almost certainly be done by the time this post goes live).
I’m still not entirely sure what was going on with that divination, or with the depression. I don’t know if it would have gotten better faster if I’d melted the miscast talismans down sooner, of if I had done some more elaborate propitiation ritual. Or maybe I had just pushed myself too hard that week and would have crashed, after, even if the ritual had been a shining success.
But I want to share this story for the benefit of other astromages, so if you all experience something similar, they know you’re not alone.
