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In witchcraft

Gearing Up To Lick the Socket Again

Author Satyr MagosPosted on

I am a terrible Chaos magician.

I mean, I make really, really pretty sigils.  (That whole “life dedicated to art” thing.)  And I think I get better-than-average results from them —  as much as one can say so without comparing notes on a level that very few of us are able to keep, let alone willing to show them off.  My one and only servitor has been … odd, but effective, and has been protecting my home for nearly three years running.

But I am terrible at code-switching.  When I dig into a paradigm, I can’t help but let it get under my skin.  As I do more and more of the magic, it sinks into my bones.  I can’t put it back down just like that. Read More

In witchcraft

HPF XXX: 0 – Processing

Author Satyr MagosPosted on

Aradia and I skidded back into the mundane world almost two weeks ago, now.  Between her end-of-semester madness and my retail work schedule, we’d left something of a disaster behind as we dipped out to spend a week in the woods, and it’s taken quite an effort to calm down and clean up.  There is, in fact, still quite a bit of mop-up left to do, one way or another.

The festival, as a whole, was a success and to date we’ve heard hardly a peep of criticism for our rituals or workshops.  The HSA forum has not had much chatter on the subject, but all public conversations have been highly positive regarding the festival as a whole — “best festival in years” has been bandied about quite regularly — and I cannot but hope that our rituals were a contributing factor to that.  A few technical critiques have found their way to us, one way or another — some very poorly timed — but the responces have been overwhelmingly positive … especially from the people at festival that we respect most.

The process was a strain on all of the ritual crew, and our support communities.  Some bruised feelings remain on several sides.  Many lessons were learned about how to do things differently next time around.

But there will be a next time around.

In art, witchcraft

Image of the Moon

Author Satyr MagosPosted on
Image of the Moon
Image of the Moon

Image of the Moon as she appeared to me in February of 2015.

A feminine figure on a black field, a blue-lined purple cloak hangs from her shoulders.  She holds a bowl in one hand and a stang in the other.  She is crowned, and broad horns extend from the sides of her head.  Her face bears three eyes, and two more stare from each of her horns.

When Aradia and I conjured the Moon at the end of our cycle, I had no idea how the archangel Gabriel might appear to me. After all, Michael had appeared to me as the most femme Sun I had ever seen.  That the archangel appeared to me in the guise of the Witches’ Goddess, then, was not unsurprising … but neither was it expected.

In witchcraft

Looking Forward to Heartland Pagan Festival XXX

Author Satyr MagosPosted on

A week from today will mark the beginning of the 30th Annual Heartland Pagan Festival.  There’s a lot that could be said, perhaps a lot that should be said, about the speakers and bands and history of the festival.  I think for all that, however, I will permit the HSA to speak forthemselves, except to point out the pink elephant: that this is also the first year that the festival will be facing direct competition.  What makes this coming festival significant for me is that, having attended far, far more often than not since 1998, this will be the first festival that I have helped put on.

The HSA is a public organization, and I could have paid my dues and “membered up”, as they say, at any time.  There are a lot of reasons I didn’t, but they mostly revolve around a few highly negative encounters with influential members of the organization, and my personal distrust of any org large enough to handle money.  Several events at the 2012 festival, however, fundamentally changed my relationship with the fest and the organization.

Firstly, staggering back broke from my first year at real college, I came to the festival not as a paying customer, but as work exchange: twenty hours of labor for “free” entry. Working for parking and security, I got to know a lot of the people who actually run the org.  More importantly, though, that was the year I started a massive public shitstorm over the gendered implications of the public ritual arc.  At the end of those mediated discussions, I was asked to join the organization.  Living and attending college in Indiana at the time, however, I was unable to do so.

I graduated in the Spring of 2014 and celebrated with a victory lap studying abroad in Greece then going on a three-week road trip with Aradia.  We made it back to civilization and the internet with exactly enough time and money left to join the HSA, vote for committee chairs, and join the Sacred Experience Committee.  From June to December, we helped hammer out the theory and framework of the three main rituals.  In January, the first prose drafts of the ritual appeared, and Aradia and I recruited Chirotus and Pasiphae from the old proto-coven to join the SEC.  Last week, I got on the phone with Brianna Misenhelter of the ATC Pagan Information Network and HPS of the KC chapter of the Wite Ravyn Metaphysical church, and talked a little bit about what y’all will be able to look forward to at the festival.

Over the course of the last year, I’ve gone from hiding behind a shroud of plausible deniability (anyone with a serious interest in doxxing me could probably do so without much difficulty) to being a public pagan.  Whoops.

I can’t begin to say how excited I am about the rituals we’re going to put on.  From the brouchure:

Over the course of this year‘s three rituals we will cleanse ourselves of the preoccupations
which prevent us from fully participating in the festival, reclaim our Promethean light,
and launch ourselves back into our lives with power, passion, and purpose.
Opening Ritual—Thursday, 6:30p
In this wordless ritual we are each killed and resurrected in order to cleanse ourselves of
the baggage which prevents us from seeing clearly. The first priestess appears and obtains
the tools of magic.
Main Ritual—Saturday, 7:00p
The priestess draws her consort from the crowd and, with his aid, restores the Word and
the Light to humankind. Tokens of power will be handed out to attendees.
Closing Ritual—Sunday, 10:00p
Final ritual focuses on turning words into actions and manifesting our visions in our lives.

You, my dear readers, get an additional sneak preview.  Below are four of the ten masks that I’ve made for the ritual.

Elemental Masks

In art, witchcraft

Image of Mercury

Author Satyr MagosPosted on
Image of Mercury
Image of Mercury

Image of Mercury as he appeared to me in February of 2015

A yellow-orange figure with wings sprouting from his head.  He has large orange eyes which his orange helmet cannot contain.  His arms are held tight to his body, one hand clutches a book and the other is open like a claw.  A billowing garment hangs from his waist, concealing one leg, the other boasts a winged ankle.

This image was at once one of the  most clear and one of the least surprising: active, winged, and helmed, he strongly resembles many traditional images of Mercury and Hermes, though he lacks the Caduceus.

In art, witchcraft

Image of the Sun

Author Satyr MagosPosted on

Image of the Sun

Image of of Michael as she appeared before me on Sunday 11 January 2015.

A golden voluptuous figure with a blazing star instead of a face and for wings instead of arms, each bearing a staring Dionysiac eye.

This image surprised me greatly: I have dealt with the sun as both “male” and “female” on numerous occasions, but I did not for a moment expect the Archangel Michael to reveal itself to me in the form of a woman.  The Dionysiac eyes were also a shock, but perhaps should not have been; the sun has possessed me on several occasions, though usually more penetratingly than envelopingly.

Michael also provided me with a seal for later conjurations, which I have also kept to myself.

In art, witchcraft

Image of Mars

Author Satyr MagosPosted on

Image of Mars

Image of Samael, as he appeared before me Tuesday 6 January.

Possibly the most “complete” image, and definitely one of the most readily understood.  Samael appears as a grey-skinned four-eyed man in a black breastplate and helmet, entirely concealed by his cape except for his sword-wielding right hand.  A column of red light rises from the top of his helmet into the sky and he stands in a field of grain under a stormy sky.

Samael was one of the archangels to provide me with a seal by which to conjure him later.  I have kept that seal to myself.

In scholarship, witchcraft

Seven Spheres in Review

Author Satyr MagosPosted on

I ordered my copy of RO’s Seven Spheres the second day after it was released.  I think it’s telling that people who ordered the day before I did got their copies ten days before I did.  My copy is numbered 120/1000.  I was already half-familiar with a lot of the material from the Seven Spheres in Seven Days project and the magical experiments that came before and after, but I took my time going through the book.  I took my sweet time performing the rituals, too, and even longer processing the effects before even beginning to write this review.  In the intervening time, more people than I care to count have already reviewed the book in great depth, so I will keep my own comments brief and largely personal.

The book opened with a preface, “On the Gender of Kings,” that makes good-faith effort to reconcile the highly gendered language of the rites with the much wider reality of the occult community.  It falls little short in that it doesn’t question the legitimacy of male-as-default, but as an opening gambit by a straight white male hermeticist, it’s a sea-change.  So thank you for that, Fr. Rufus Opus, it means a lot.

The following chapters go one to provide a rough outline of the neo-Platonic theology upon which the book hinges.  After, he goes very specifically into the theology and philosophy of the kingship metaphor.  These sections are both interesting and helpful, but, based on Aradia’s struggle to understand some the material, I don’t believe that they are fully comprehensible without a decent background in either Classical Studies or the wider world of Hermetics.

While the Seven Spheres does not actually contain a complete philosophy (a good thing, in my opinion), it does contain a complete ritual structure.  With only a little outside knowledge and no outside ritual, one could actually use the Seven Spheres as the basis for an entire ritual practice.  Rufus Opus has combined the Stele of Jeu the Heiroglyphist with the Trithemius’ spirit conjuration and the Thomas Taylor translation of the Orphic Hymns into an elaborate but effective and accessible rite.  Each of the seven conjurations is largely the same, substituting the names of the appropriate archangels and planets at the appropriate times and reading the (loosely) appropriate Orphic hymn.

I have only three complaints about the book, one of which is editorial and two of which are academic.

The first academic issue is one of a citation.  In the chapter about the Sun (p.50), Rufus Opus makes reference to Supernatural Assistant in the Greek Magical Papyri.  Unless he is refering to the Stele of Jeu, itself, which never uses that language, the only such rites I know of (or can find, quickly consulting the table of rituals) are PGM I.1-42 “Rite”  and PGM I.4 “The spell of Pnothis”.  The first opens with the “deification” (drowning) of a falcon, which is to then be stuffed and made offerings; the second requires the head of a (the same?) falcon.  I sent the good gentleman an email for clarification at the time, but never received a response.  This saddens me immensely because I want to read those rituals, damn it.

The second academic issue is one of translation.  Thomas Taylor’s Hymns may be good for magic, and beautifully ensconced in the public domain, but the are awful English representations of the Greek.  Athanassakis is the only legitimate English translation currently available.

Finally, there appears to be a transcription error in the ritual script.  On page 114, one is instructed to say, “…prepare now the way between myself and the sphere of Mercury…” regardless of the sphere one is conjuring.  Because there is no explanation elsewhere in the book as to why one always trucks with angels via the sphere of Mercury, one suspects that this is supposed to read “… sphere of [Planet Name]…” even as the space for the Angel’s name is noted at the bottom of the page and again on 120.

Aradia and I began our journey through the spheres on Thursday the 1st of January.  It took us about nine weeks to make it through six of the seven spheres — we never felt called to conjure Saturn.  Each time we conjured the archangels of the spheres, we asked for their blessing that we might be beloved of gods and mortals, and that they appear before us that we might know them.  In each of those rites, I drew the Powers that I saw.

The positive effects of those rites are still reverberating through my life.  I’ve finished my first novel and gotten it out to several friends for editing.  I’ve opened a portfolio site to sell my photography.  I’ve decided to go back to school for my Master’s degree.  I’ve begun an ambitious artistic and magical mask-making project for the main ritual arc at this coming Heartland Pagan Festival.  I’ve found a new lover.

I cannot possibly recommend this book strongly enough.

In witchcraft

Failure to Bind

Author Satyr MagosPosted on

More than a year ago I wrote a somewhat theoretical post about applied feminist ethics in witchcraft.  It was, of course, not all that theoretical.  Someone that I had, until that point, considered a friend had stalked anohter friend of mine home from a party and violated zir personal space in a few ways.  The creeped-on friend, however, did not want a scene made, which prevented me from summarily barring the creeper from my social circle.  What I could and did do, however, was attempt to bind the creeper from further infringing on my friend’s boundaries.

I drew a sigil, called upon my familiar spirits and the spirits of Saturn and Venus, and arranged for the person in question to drink a series of toasts that had been poured over the sigil.  A couple other people from the social circle were there as well, which was not strictly ethical, but seemed … necessary and appropriate, and it was what my Genius and Daemon had led me to do.

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My binding worked, in one sense.  To the best of my knowledge, the creeper in question never infringed upon my friend again.  In another sense, it failed utterly.  Zie went on, instead, to assault someone else.  In full view of one of the others who had been present at the binding toast, actually, which is … interesting.

Divination indicated that I should not, at that point, escalate: that all would be taken care of behind the curtain.  And by divination, I mean my tarot cards and the VERY LOUD YELLING of the very many spirits who at that point were hanging about my temple.

Doubt lingers, of course, to this very day.  What could and should I have done differently?  I was constrained in mundane action in both the initial instance and the subsequent by the wishes of the victims.  How could I stand by and NOT smite zir into the dark depths of the earth–except that it was made very clear to me that further attempts at intervention would only go awry?

I’m not even certain why I’m telling this story except, in a new life in a new Temple, it’s past time to burn the original sigil, but I wanted archival evidence of the results.And in the hopes that someone reading this has productive thoughts on how such a situation could be handled better in the future.  Because neo-Pagan sexual mores often make a highly effective smokescreen for mainstream rape culture, and there will be a next time.