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When I was but a wee faun, new to the madness-inducing arts and sciences of magic and sorcery, I suffered from a number of very strange ideas, most of which I cannot really tell you where they came from.  One of those ideas which seems particularly strange in retrospect was a strong taboo against “summoning” spirits in any way shape or form.  In all probability, this idea was probably rooted in the fears of the overculture: in the image of doomed, demon-haunted madman who could not banish what he summoned; in stories of spirits enslaved, and the vengeance the wreak upon escape; in horrific stories of possession.

I think, perhaps, that I was also a victim of the neo-Pagan “it’s okay, really, we’re not Satanists” propaganda machine.  You see, I discovered magic in 1993, and was an openly practicing Pagan in 1996.  Those of you who were of an age and inclination to follow the news may remember that period as the years when the Satanic Panic was beginning to decline.  Police and other authorities seemed unable to tell the difference between Wiccans, Vampire LARPers, and actual serial killers.  I seem to remember the websites I found and the books I read all admonishing the neophyte to stay away from anything as dangerous and immoral as conjuration and evocation.  I wish I could cite a source for this, but few of the books I was reading in that era remain in my possession and none of them have come to Indiana with me. 

But however I came to the idea, in my own mind it was an inviolable taboo.  “Summoning” was so wicked that, at a time in my life when I absolutely refused to speak any lie whatsoever, I put off a close friend who wanted to conjure an elemental: promising to aid him as soon as I did “more research”.  All the while, I was hoping that he would figure out on his own how bad an idea it was, knowing that he wouldn’t listen to my warnings and that if I didn’t “help” him, he would find someone else who would.  Part of what reassures me that this idea was not wholly my own is the fact that, sooner rather than later, he came to the desired conclusion: that it was too dangerous an operation to perform.  I would add “at our level of experience”, except that I remember how arrogant we were in our ignorance at seventeen years old.

Although I no longer believe that conjuring spirits is inherently immoral or mortally dangerous.  Certainly conjuration and evocation pose no greater risk to one’s sanity than any other transcendent experience, and are no more dangerous (possibly less so) than spirit-journeys of an astral or shamanic nature.  And I am increasingly skeptical of the idea that a mere magician could force an Archangel or a real demon to do anything it didn’t feel like doing—though the moral concerns of pressing lesser spirits probably still apply.  (And let’s just not get started on the moral ambiguity of creating “elementals” and “servitors”.  That’s too sticky a wicket for my amateur philosophy.  No offense intended to anyone.)

Still, that taboo has lived in my brain for too long: unexamined, not even re-shelved for deconstruction.  It’s left a mark that may well affect my relationship to the spirit-world for the rest of my life.

Has anyone else been exposed to this meme?  The taboo against “summoning”?  If so, have you overcome it?  How?  (Besides simply doing the work.)

[Warning: This gets awfully personal.]

When I chose the name Satyr Magos, it was as a literary convention.  The name was a sort of joke, a ribald recognition of the sensuality which separates me from so many people who call themselves “magicians”.  It was a subtle warning that there was going to be some serious talk about sex and drugs on this blog, in addition to and as a part of the magic (and while there hasn’t been as much of that as I originally intended, there has been enough and there will be more).  It was an excuse to draw a mythic caricature of myself.

I knew that it was bad Greek, even though I hadn’t studied any Greek yet.  It didn’t matter. I already had two (secret) magical names—one I took at the age of 16 (and later made several unsuccessful attempts to get rid of), and one that I took upon my initiation—and while I intended to take a magical (and public) motto in the Lodge style upon my next initiation, I planned on dabbling a lot with languages and ideas and ceremonial magic before doing so.  Rendered into actual Attic Greek, Satyr Magos becomes σάτυρος ὀ μάγος (saturos ho magos), which can be translated as “the satyr is a magician” or “the magician is a satyr” with approximately equal accuracy. 

The definition of μάγος was just as sketchy in ancient Greek as “magician” or “sorcerer” (both of which are valid translations are in modern English) and, to the best of my ability to determine (albeit through the limited sources so far available to me), covers approximately the same range of activities and specialties.  The most noteworthy difference is that, at least according to Pope’s essay in Witchcraft and Magic of Europe: Ancient Greece and Rome, the word μάγος bore strong connotations of services for sale.  And does anybody else remember what it means to be a satyr?

Maybe I just didn’t think it through. I have been blogging under the name Satyr Magos for less than six months, but it’s already seeping into my meatspace identity—both magically and in my “mortal” life.  Although I’m not going back to partying like I did a decade ago, I’m feeling a powerful urge to escalate some from where I’m at now, and I’m absolutely running out of patience with people who disapprove of the way I do things now.  While I have practiced the socially expected form of serial monogamy for my entire previous adult life, I find I simply have no patience for the dynamics and assumptions it entails.  My sense of humor is getting more ribald, and a little bit more cruel.  My libido—for both men and women—is through the roof … and my loves and lusts are well reciprocated.  When I tried invoking the sexless servants of the God of Abraham, I didn’t run into any of the trouble I expected, but I was completely short-circuited physically (TW: semi-graphic contents which may be particularly upsetting to people who know me IRL).  Spirits have started making some pretty wild demands of me that I’m still not sure how to process, much less how to talk about without sounding even crazier than I already do.  And I have been feeling an urge to go into business, magically speaking, which I had never felt before taking the “name”.

By and large, I’m comfortable with these changes.  Many of them are also in line with the things I have been  working on deliberately, and/or are also in line with the Name I took at my last initiation.  Some of them may just be the product of advancing age and sharpening radicalism.  Some of them are freaking me the fuck out, but that’s part of transformative magic.  And that, more than anything else, is what I’m in this game for.

So it seems I have undergone a dedication without realizing it, and took a motto almost by accident.  Well, so be it.  Σάτυρος ὀ Μάγος it is, at least until I’ve worked my way through this stage of life.  But, please: no one address me as Frater S.M.?  I’d take it as a kindness.

Yesterday Shakesville, one of my favorite sources of news and criticism, pointed me to an amusing online tool: the Gender Analyzer.  This idiot website reads a website and somehow comes to a conclusion on the gender of the writer.  Yesterday, it was 62% certain that I am a woman.  Today it is even more certain (65%).  Who knows what it will say when I update again?

I am unspeakably amused by this.  Doubly so as the guy who that he can walk into a gay bar wearing a skirt, nails painted red, and more jewelry than anyone else there … and be mistaken for straight.

Now, the reality of the matter is somewhat more complicated than that.  I am male bodied, and generally pass as cisgendered.  I don’t actually identify as male, I just let people assume that when explaining that I’m third-gender/genderqueer in a magical-transgressive-shamanic-liminal-brainfuck sense is just way too much work … which, admittedly, is most of the time.  In the simplest terms my gender identity is not so much “male” as “witch”.  Of course that’s too much for most people to people to parse, let alone a program trained on a measly 2000 cherry-picked blogs.

Further, as Melissa points out, a legit AI experiment would explain more about the rubrics in play.  As it is, it reads to me as some sort of bizarre internet gender-shaming devise.  It’s also pretty damn clueless.  For reference, as I was composing this digression I checked out how several of my favorite bloggers rate:

* Rufus Opus is “quite gender neutral” but also probably (52%) a woman.  Which is odd, because he always struck me as fairly butch.

* Scylla rates almost identically (51%) to RO.  Right this time, though only barely.

* The Wild Hunt is also identified correctly, though they’re only 65% sure.

* The Tiger Beatdown is probably a man, but also “quite gender neutral” … despite the majority of contributors to the front page being women.

* Deborah is also correctly identified, and they’re somehow much more certain about her (75%)

Food for thought, y’all.

I am embarrassingly grateful for Deb’s permission to take the week off.  There are problems with making use of it, of course: I’m already behind on some of my goals, and there’s a lot of work to do this year in many, many senses of the word. But it’s the last week of my winter break, and there are things here in the mortal Now which need to be tended to. 

Too much of my break already consumed by work.  I spent my New Year only a little better off than good master Jow: my food poisoning struck Thursday, but I was still too weak to do much of anything on Saturday.  Far too little of my break has been spent with my family and closest friends.  Schedules just haven’t lined up.  Things have come up which have prevented me from spending more than a cursory amount of time with several people who really deserve my undivided attention.  Yesterday was spent trying to correct that: breakfast with my mother, a free haircut from my stylist sister, a long lunch catching up with D after way too long, meeting my old boss (the man who taught me jewelry in the first place) for coffee, dinner with another friend, and finally catching up up with my tattoo artist/writing buddy to get a piercing redone and for a long overdue game of “so what have you been doing”?  Today and tomorrow are shopping and packing and trying to catch up with people in a last-minute fashion. 

That said, I have gotten a lot done.  Aradia and I made the safe travel talismans which I still need to blog about.  I have come up with a new name for my “BoS”: Book of the Labyrinth (βιβλιου ὀ λαβύρινθος).  I have made good progress on Sannafrid’s natal chart, though not as much as I want; in my defense, she’s got a lot going on.  I did write up my Dark Moon rites (most of them), and I have been keeping up with the New Year, New You prompts.

And catching up with all my people has been an adventure, too.  Aradia has started a blog of her own, largely (but not exclusively) talking about Tarot.  Two friends of mine (that I don’t often talk about here because we haven’t practiced magic together in years) have started a daily Tarot practice, engineered themselves into a better apartment, and one of them has managed to put herself back in school.  Pasiphae has escalated her magical practice since I left, is talking to gods, and has started selling incenses and blends.  D, who has been in business for herself for a while, has found two brick-and-mortar outlets for her teas.  Whytar has gone from Forever Alone to engaged to a woman from his (relative) youth in a matter of months.  My sister has (wisely, finally) given up on Texas and moved back closer to the family. 

It’s been a hell of a year for the blog and I. 

I graduated from my community college with honors.  I applied to real colleges and went on a road trip to see them.  In the process I made my first forays into practical divination, exploring the options using Tarot.  At the conclusion of which, I pulled a Tower and a Hanged man at the same time, moving from the Westernmost end of Missouri to the Easternmost point of Indiana for said college. 

I performed my first wedding and conjured gods I’d never even heard of before.  I started my experiments in Western Ceremonial Magic. I did so much magic that I couldn’t even write about it all.  I did so much research I don’t even know where to start writing.  Even so, I wrote a hundred and one posts in 2011, just over four times the previous two years combined.

My followers have doubled over the last year—many of them people I don’t know in the physical world!—and my hitcount has skyrocketed over the last months in particular.  There as that post I pimped out on /r/occult back in September.  And participating in Deborah Castellano’s New Year, New You project has definitely gleaned me a few hits.  Several times, I’ve actually gotten as may as sixty or seventy hits a day.  I have had readers from Russia, the UK, Malaysa, Canada, Germany, Australia … just to name a few.

This is kind of a big deal.  Thank you all for being along for the ride.  I hope to see more of you all soon.

Let’s face it, Charmers, the critical component to success or failure in your goals is your ability to do shit you don’t want to do.  I can promise you that your goals are crammed chock full of glistening gems that you would rather claw your own eyes out than address.  If you liked addressing these things, your goals wouldn’t be goals, they would be called Items I Am Already Doing No Problem-o.

What have I been putting off?  I’m proud to say that, in all honesty, there’s not much left.  I’ve dealt with my fear of returning to the underworld.  I’ve started working on practical magics.  I’ve even dealt with most of the meatspace relationship issues that I’ve been (uncharacteristically) letting fester.  As I sit here and thing about things, that really only leaves one:  putting out my shingle as a professional ritual specialist. 

Long-time readers will recall that I’ve talked about this a few times.  I feel strongly called to serve the community in several ways, and feel that I have particular talents in other areas as well.

1) Rites of Passage.  This is the strongest calling by far.  Too many people lack access to solid groups and traditions to help mark their transitions.  Dedications, initiations, whatever.  I have already performed my first wedding. 

2) Protection Spells and House Cleaning.  I have relatively little experience with most forms of practical magic, but when it comes to shielding and protection I am not afraid to say that I am a badass.  I performed my first ghost-banishing about a decade ago.  I have helped mediate between some friends of mine and the genus loci of their ancestral land.  When the clueless amateur drug-dealers who lived in the apartment below Aradia and I got into fight where someone drew steel, the bullet went harmlessly into their floor instead of up into our apartment, us, or our cats (you may be tempted to call that a failure of our wards, but no amount of magic could completely shelter the building from their level of stupidity).

3) Divination and Consultation.  Tarot, astrology, natal genius/demon work.  I’ve still got a lot to learn about the latter two, of course, and I’ve only done public readings a few times.  But it’s valuable work and it can be immensely rewarding.

4) Spells, Charms, and Enchantments.  People have needs.  I’m a magician.  Whether it’s designing and/or participating in rites for fellow practitioners, or doing it all for the “mundane” …  I can help.  This, however, is where we really start to drift away from the calling into the “that would be fun!”  Designing and aiding in magical rituals for less or otherwise experienced practitioners falls into the same category as the rites of passage, but the rest … well, there’s a little bit of greed and ambition there, too.

5) Teas, Potions, and Homebrew.  Because they’re fun, and because when I really go at it, I’m pretty damn good… even if most of my close personal friends are actually even better.  Fortunately, back in Sunrise Indiana, I won’t be competing with them.

6) Mask Making.  I make sacred masks.  I need to make more of them.  I can’t keep them all in the first place, and the use of magical masks is a practice I wish to encourage in neo-Pagan witchcraft—that means gifting and selling them.

That’s a long list of services for a beginner.  And how does one build a clientele?  How does one make sure one’s clientele doesn’t reach a point where it conflicts with other obligations—chiefly school, in my case, but also friends and family?  And how does one advertise when one wishes, out of concern for one’s academic professionalism, to keep a certain distance of plausible deniability between ones public identity and a blog such as this?

My first round of goals were more trajectories than concrete goals.  So here are some real goals before I move on to the next NYNY prompts.

Immediate

1) Finish the car-protection talismans tomorrow.  They just don’t quite feel “done” yet.

2) Write up my Dark Moon rites for the amusement of my readers.

3) Keep up with the New Year New You prompts.

Short Term: Complete Before Break Ends

1) Interpret the natal chart I’ve calculated for Sannafrid.  I’ve been studying a bit of astrology along with ceremonial magic, and doing birth charts for friends has been my chief method.  I promised hers by the start of the new semester, and I’ll keep that promise damn it.

2) New title for my book of shadows.

3) Research or design and make a talisman to help me with my Greek language studies.  That shit is kicking my ass.

4) Resume my attempts at astral projection.  Astral projection has always fascinated me—it was one of my first major magical efforts, back in high school—but has also always eluded me.  This is unacceptable.

Short Term: Complete Before Valentine’s

1) Finish interpreting my own natal chart.  I’ve been working on it off and on for half a year, but my ego keeps getting in the way.

2) Illustrated meditation on the Element of Earth and finish my meditation on the Element of Water.

3) Develop an outline for the new book of shadows.

4) Transport this blog to wordpress.  Blogger is getting on my nerves.  I hope this won’t irritate my established readers too badly, but there are just so many technical advantages to wordpress.  I wanted to use it originally, actually, but it was broken the day I decided to register my domain.

5) Successfully achieve astral projection.

6) Complete (for the purposes of my survey of ceremonial magic, though not in any larger sense) my studies of Earth/Malkuth and Moon/Yesod.

Medium Term: Complete This Semester

1) Successfully visit the astral temple of another practitioner.

2) Add Athena and Hermes to my altar.

Long Term: Complete by the End of 2012

1) Finish the first draft of my novel Necromancer and the Mark of the Wolf.  I’ve been working on this draft for almost five years, and working on the story in one form or another for a decade.  The story is about 3/5ths complete.

2) Produce a draft of Witches’ Brew.  This is a project Aradia and I have been talking about for the last year or so: a magical recipe book of homebrew, teas, and potions.

When I posted my most recent thoughts on being a queer running in the heavily Wiccanized regions of the neoPagan community, I had been struggling to articulate myself for several weeks and finally decided to just post what I had.  As such, a couple major issues eem to have gotten lost while I was frothing at the mouth.  Jack Faust was kind enough to point some of them out to me on G+:

Hm. I don’t own Sheba’s version of the BoS (it is only part of the BoS she was given by Michael Howard, and includes her own ideas in many places – which have no part in Trad. wicca), so I can’t comment, there. However, I have not seen your reference point from it in other sources – which makes me dubious about it.
That said, there is at least one Trad offshoot (Alexandria-Cthonica, I think) that is now doing a massive level of same sex work that you might want to look into. I won’t take my time discussing the gender essentialist doctrines some covens have (remember: all trad. Covens are autonomous, meaning what goes on changes based on coven, line, and trad) and my issues with them. I think they are… Iffy, most of the time. Not quite what I’ve been taught, at all. But I’m mostly bound to silence there, alas.

I am not an initiate to any tradition of Wicca.  As such, I am precluded from the details of coven-by-coven variance, and have only the Outer Court materials (many of them from the 60’s) and my personal experiences with Wiccans (Traditional and Eclectic) to judge by.  In the parts of the Midwest where I have lived, Traditional covens are hard to come by, and the one time such a coven showed interest in me, I was unable to reciprocate due to the direction in which my life was going.

I can only speak to what I’ve read and seen, and I should have made that more clear.

Deb’s prompt.  My initial thoughts.

The apartment is cleaner now.  Almost all my laundry is done, and the dishes finally done.  If they weren’t, the paper never would have been written.  Yes, this counts as magic; it was done mindfully, with the intent of clearing my mind.  I also smudged everything thoroughly with white sage.

My Yesod altar has been disassembled.  I think I’ve wallowed in the Moon enough for now.  I almost wonder if some of my … issues over the last weeks might relate to leaving it up too long.  I had originally planned to move on to Hod long before finals week.

Due to some unexpected car trouble, in addition to my struggles producing my final paper, I am returning to Kansas City tomorrow morning instead of this morning.  Tonight I will make a Mercury talisman (I should have done it yesterday) and tomorrow morning before I go, I will add some Mercury power to my existing car-protection ward.

When I return from break, I will probably set up my Hod alter.  I will absolutely have a plan for how I will balance continuing my ceremonial experiment with better maintaining my previously established practice, and balancing those with school.  This will require much meditation.

Lessons for next year: never start finals week with the house a disaster. It’s almost as hard to research in a messy temple as it is to worship or work. Also, try not to let your car break down at the same time, because that just pushes the stress over the top.

The way in which Deb’s challenge is in sync with my own life is fascinating.  Major housecleaning and a bit of Mercurial Work were already on the table.  It’s the last days of the semester: the apartment must be clean and cleansed before I leave, so that I don’t come home to a disaster and loose all the sanity I intend to gain before break; it’s my last day to write & study before I take my final exam and turn in my final paper, which makes Hermes my best friend and Mercury my fuel; also, I need them both to help me out with the ten-hour drive through corn corn corn corn corn corn corn and more corn, punctuated only by major urban areas and rural speed traps.

Deb is right to point out the importance of a clean house for magical work.  I was skeptical of this theory for years, but I got the clue phone eventually.  These days I can tell the difference in my magic—be it my daily practice, my lunar rites, or anything else—when I haven’t taken the time to put everything away, do the dishes, and sweep the floor.  Yes, my body is my temple.  So is my house—I named it the Sunrise Temple for a reason.  I need to get me a besom and an aspergillum.  In the meantime: smudge, smudge, and more smudge.

The matter of my time management is a little different.  Finals is the high-stress-point of a student’s year, and that involves a mad roller coaster of high production and gross procrastination.  I’m doing better than many of my peers—I turned in my first final paper a whole hour early, my last should be done tonight, and I’m think I’m prepared for my final exam in Attic Greek (expect to see a bit of original Greek composition and my first attempts to translate Homer here over the next few weeks)—but I’m still here blogging right now instead of studying.  We’ll soon see if that’s time well invested in legitimate “rest”, or just another round of “anything but homework”.

In magical terms—because while my scholarship is intimately related to my religious practice, it’s not quite “magic”—I need to work out a new schedule.  After several months of off-and-on daily practice, I’ve come to the conclusion that what I’ve been doing isn’t quite working for me.  I need more variety.  I need to up my “chill meditation” to “magical ritual” ratio.  I need to spend less time worrying about my daily practice and get back on top of my lunar rites. 

I just missed the Full Moon.  I haven’t even done my monthly tarot reading.  So be it.  The Dark  Moon is coming, it has always featured more prominently in my personal practice than the full—that whole shamanic thing—and the Hellenic lunar calendar starts on the first day of the waxing moon anyway.  I was already considering making that shift, and now’s as good a time as any.

These things are all easy.  I was going to do them anywhere. 

Putting down and moving rocks … that’s a little harder.  I’m a little vague on what I want right now, outside of the academic sphere.  I’m moving in a lot of directions but I don’t actually have goals.

This is often how I get myself into trouble.

I’m so overwhelmed right now that I don’t eve know which of the weights on my shoulders are my schoolwork, which are the demands of others, and which are my own.  I won’t be able to sort out which are the good weights from the bad until I’ve had a little rest.

ETA:  Fucking typos.