Last night I finally unpacked my second Dionysus statue–the one that went with me to Indiana and back–and dedicated the altar he now shares with Eros and Aphrodite. This is not their final home, but the vanity I wish to appropriate for this purpose is still full of heirlooms.
No, your eyes do not deceive you: that is a penis-shaped bottle opener front and center. I got it in Athens.
Excepting the Valentines’ Day Full Moon, when I was laid low with the literal flu and a fever of 104, I have performed the Stele of Jeu the Heiroglyphist (or one of my experimental variants) at least twice at every Full and Dark Moon Esbat this semester. It has, to my own surprise, become the centerpiece of my magical practice over the last few years. The results of the ritual, however, have been in no way consistent.
I have written about the ritual before–perhaps more than anyone on the internet except Mr. Jack Faust, who introduced me to the ritual–and I don’t want to re-tread too much ground, but there have been some interesting changes, particularly lately. In my two years of research, now, I have found about a double handful of people who mention or advocate the ritual. Only two have talked about the effects of the rite, or their personal experiences with it, and they have spoken to me mostly in private. I don’t know if this in any way resembles the experiences that others have had with the ritual.
When I first began performing the ritual, I could feel it sending shockwaves throughout my world. My web of power trembled. Cracks emerged in the foundations of my reality. I got so high on power that sometimes I could barely walk to bed at the end of the ritual.
As I became fore familiar with the ritual, the effects seemed to diminish. The earthquakes were fewer, further between, and came mostly when I was either performing the ritual at a place of power or making the most radical changes to the structure and performance. It became a sort of touchstone, a powerup, and I had to push the power out into my web. I began to use the power to help the people in my web transform their lives. Then I hit a breaking point.
In the last months, I’ve been keeping the power of the ritual to myself again. And, rather than being disruptive–rather than earthquakes and cracks–the power of the Headless One has been regenerative. The cracks in me, the cracks in my life, have been filling with that golden-white power, and they’ve been starting to close.
My latest Beltane altar, built on the first night of the Full Moon. Needs more phalloi.
Just fired my first sigil in months. Damn that did feel good.
Which gets me thinking…
I’ve been hanging out on tumblr a lot, lately, and the chaos magick tag is occasionally overwhelmed by people posting sigils to be empowered by those who view them.
On the one hand, that’s brilliant. Taken cumulatively, with as many people would see such a thing, even their mere passing notice would raise more energy than most of us can do on our own. I mean, I like to think I’m a badass, but come on: even if only you, my readers, see that shit: y’all are badasses, too, and (between the wordpress and the tumblr) there are over a hundred of you. That’s some serious magical power.
On the other hand, however, it poses an ethical concern. How do I know that I can stand behind every objective that someone else might throw out there? I don’t know who you’re cursing. I don’t know what politician you’re backing. Witches and magicians, contrary to our own protests, are, as a group, no better than anyone else: we have our retrofuck misogynists and racists and homophobes, we have our predators and rapists and murderers and demagogues. And, love you though I do, my dear readers, I also know (as you do, being exceptionally clever as well as badasses) that we don’t actually agree on everything. So how can I ask you to, never knowing the statement of intent, back everything I might choose to post.
And, from another angle entirely, what are the risks? Douchebags and trolls abound. How bad could your shit get fucked if someone decided they didn’t like the look of your sigil and decided to deep-six it? Or follow the power back and put the hurt on you? Sure the odds are low. I’ve been doing this shit since I was sixteen years old, and I’ve been magically attacked by exactly one person that I know of and been haunted maybe a handful of times. The next time the sun enters Scorpio, I will celebrate my thirty-fourth birthday. But people do, occasionally, find me personally obnoxious, and I have burnt a few bridges in my day.
So I’m not posting the sigil this time. But I’d love to hear people’s thoughts on the matter: logistical and ethical, both.
There are a wide assortment of reasons that my magical practice (and, with it, my blogging) has been, at best, sporadic for the last year or so. Some of them are magical dilemmas (how to incorporate the experiments and lessons of the previous two years into my personal practice), some of them are spiritual failings (see previous, also: devotional work is hard and scary), and some work and school related (overtime in the mall! senior thesis! trying to catch a date!). But I think the biggest reason is that I’m lonely, and that I just don’t enjoy working or worshiping solo.
A good number of my most exciting magical and spiritual experience have been in group contexts: my first elemental energy work, my past-life explorations, the spirit-hunts, and the aura-games with my friends in and just after high school; the WPA/KU Cauldron before and after my failed life in St.Louis; discovering partner-magic with Aradia, and later with Sannafrid; the trials and tribulations of the proto-coven. Even most of my best solitary experiences took place at times in my life when I had physical access to other practitioners to plan, brag about,and/or commiserate over my experiments and experiences.
Every time I go back to Kansas City for breaks, doing magical work with Aradia, Sthenno, Pasiphae, and Aidan are among the highlights of the trip. When Aradia and I went on a cross-country road trip, we made a point of doing magic in each of the two parks we visited, and those moments were definitely among highlights of the vacation.
Since Sannafrid graduated, though, and since things got weird between myself and some of the local pagan group … I’ve had no one to practice with. My current lover is, against my own rules, not a practitioner. And our schedules don’t line up particularly well, leaving me struggling with another of the various unintended consequences of having taken the name Satyr Magician: too horny to think is also too horny to do magic, and there’s only so much I can do to take the edge off all by myself.
Now, I don’t mean to give the impression that anything’s hopeless: despite the flu that took me out for the entirety of the Full Moon, my practice is the best it’s been in a while. With the help of my familiar spirits, I’ve been repairing the damage to my Inner Temple–escalating rites followed by a whole lot of nothing was pretty hard on the place. I’ve been working hard (again) on getting my shields back to a level where they keep out what they need to without blinding me to the world. (This seems to be one of those never-really-quite-work-it-out problems.) My Sight has definitely been improving, though my mind-reading/empathy is still not back to what my crazy Scorpio ass expects it to be.
But it’s just not as much fun to tell Aradia about my latest adventures over the phone, or Sannafrid over chat. I need a physically present community. I need mentors and students and peers to keep me honest and innovative. And I need it to be fun. As hard or as frightening as an individual experiment or experience might be, my practice as a whole has to be pleasurable. I am, after all, a hedonist witch.
Behold, ξένια (xenia):
“… There you have my lineage. That is the blood I claim, my royal birth.”
When he heard that, Diomedes spirits lifted. Raising his spear, the lord of the war cry drove it home, planting it deep down in the earth that feds us all and with winning words he called out to Glaucus, the young captain, “Splendid–you are my friend, my guest from the days of our grandfathers long ago! Noble Oeneus hosted your brave Bellerophon once, he held him there in his halls, twenty whole days, and they gave each other handsome gifts of friendship.
…
Come, let us keep clear of each other’s spears, even there in the thick of battle. Look, plenty of Trojans there for me to kill, your famous allies to, any soldier the god will bring n range and I can run to ground. And plenty of Argives too–kill them if yo can. The men must know our claim: we are sworn friends from our fathers’ days till now!”
Both agreed. Both fighters sprang from their chariots, clasped each other’s hands and traded pacts of friendship.
— Iliad VI.251-279. Translated by Robert Fagels. Penguin (1990).
From ξένος, “stranger” (though, specifically a civilized neighbor, not βαρβαρος ) and often translated as “guest-friendship”, ξένια was the ancient Hellenic practice of hospitality that assured travelers a safe place to stay, on the one hand, and the good behavior of guests on the other. In a very real sense, the reciprocal obligations obligations of hospitality among mortals mirrored the reciprocity of piety and patronage between mortals and gods: it was a covenant. Guest and host honored their duties alike, because it was one of the founding ethics of their society; to fail to do so invited chaos. The central conceit of the Iliad, after all, is that Paris/Alexandris violated the terms of hospitality when he abducted Helen (willingly or unwillingly, the primary text is unclear … and how does being brainjacked by Aphrodite, as Helen implies she was at III.460-5, calculate into discussions of consent?), and the otherwise un-unified whole of Greece went to war for it. For further examples, the whole Odyssey is basically a treatise on what goes wrong when you violate the terms of hospitality.
This is one of the Hellenistic practices that translates almost directly into my own life: all who come under my roof come under my protection–for the duration of their stay, at the very least. Those who partake of my hospitality may always expect (at the very least):
But the idea of sacred hospitality also intersects, in my mind and heart, at least, with Hermetic notions of the Kingdom and with my feminist notions of witchcraft. For those who partake of my hospitality on the regular, the protection follows them home. And, however problematic it may be, I expect the same of them. They are allied nations, in a sense, and the standards by which I judge the hospitality they offer are raised considerably. Although I have never been handed this law as a taboo, it is the only position I can hold given my particular background of neo-Hellenism, Hermetics, and feminist witchcraft. Simply put, fair or not, I hold the hospitality of others to my own ethical standards as a matter of spiritual obligation.
The thing of it is, though, these are not just words. Ideas have consequences–ethics in particular. What does one do, then, as a modern neo-Pagan neo-Hellenistic feminist witch, the divinely-charged manager of one’s own spiritual world, when one learns that a friend–the lord of an allied Kingdom–has grossly violated the laws of hospitality?
Clever readers will have already noted that this is a particularly neo-Pagan spin on one of the fundamental issues in feminism and other social justice movements: how do we police our own spaces? What is the best way to respond to racist, sexist, and homophobic language when it’s coming out of the mouths of people we love? What do you do when your friends exhibit sexually predatory behavior?
I don’t have the answers to these questions, unfortunately. Confronting bigots in the wrong way often leads to them doubling-down on heir biases; socially isolating predators can lead to faster escalation. Do we bind them then? Curse them into oblivion? Feed them to the Furies or to Tartaros, himself? But I’m tired of seeing these issues blown off in Pagan circles as “divisive”, or being the fault of people who just can’t hack it (whether “it” be the liqour they’re drinking or the permissive atmosphere of festivals or whatever), or dismissed as “politics” and therefore unrelated to spirituality.
I am, however, hereby formally proposing that, at the very least for those of us who see a sacred component to hospitality, these are issues of spiritual consequence.
Over the course of the last week, I have twice played meatsuit to familiar spirits. Last Wednesday, as a part of my extended Samhain rites, I allowed my natal daemon, SKM, to ride me through the school day. Saturday night, I followed this up by offering the same privilege to my natal genius, ZG. Both experiences, while much less intense than I had anticipated, were equal parts surreal and informative. I required only one thing of either of them: that, in riding me, they not undermine any existing alliances and relationships, a restriction which neither found to be a burden that I can tell.
SKM, it turns out, is a huge fan of poetry (I am not): when I went to a performance with several friends Wednesday afternoon, he was moved to tears. He is very formal in his language and purposeful in his movements. When he first entered into me, it was a clear and visceral sensation—particularly odd, as I was driving at the time. He seemed especially fascinated by the experience of having hands.
ZG, I should not have been surprised to learn, is very, very quiet. She speaks only when there is something to be gained from it, and then in as few words as possible. I barely noticed when she came into me, perhaps because our ways of thinking were so similar, possibly because the copious amounts of absinthe I had consumed that night (it was my birthday party) served as a sort of lubricant.
Where SKM was content to observe but willing to act, watching from a distance was ZG’s preference. Both seem to approve of the people I surround myself with.
Tsu, my first familiar spirit, who had never expressed interest in possessing me before that I can recall, reacted jealously that ZG and SKM had had the opportunity before ze had. So I’ll be reporting on that experience at some point in the future.
Classicist Apostolos Athanassakis recently released a new edition of his English translations of the Orphic hymns—previously released in the 1970s and, to the best of my ability to determine, the first new translation since Thomas Taylor’s in 1792. I’ve been going over the hymns and notes for the last month, and using the hymns in my rituals for the last two weeks. I must admit, that I’ve been rather surprised by the results.
Firstly, the Athanassakis translation is every bit as different from the Taylor as I would have imagined: no anachronistic rhyming couplets, no 18th century euphemisms or evasions, no substitutions of Roman names for Greek. Because Classical scholarship has come a long way in the last two hundred years, I do not hesitate to assert that the translations are more accurate for reasons other than the brutal mangling needed to turn Koine iambic hexameter into English rhyming couplets. And, to my delight, my own translation of the Hymn to Phanes ends up looking pretty solid.
For worship of the Hellenic gods, the new translation is by far superior: epithets are better preserved, and Athanassakis pointedly maintained what he felt to be the religious feel of the texts. Dionysus, Phanes/Eros, Hermes, and Aphrodite have all responded well in my private rites.
For in/evocation of the Planetary powers, however, and to my extreme surprise, I have found the Taylor translations to yield much better results. This is partly because, however I may despise them aesthetically, rhyming couplets make great magic. This may also be partly because the Taylor translations have been so thoroughly incorporated into the Hermetic tradition, and thus provide better access to that magical current. Further, the actual textual differences between the texts(coincidentally or otherwise) align the Taylor translation more closely with the Planetary powers than with the divine mythology.
Thus, while I must strongly advocate that any Hellenic-flavored neo-Pagan invest in the Athanassakis translation, as well as anyone with a scholarly interest in the hymns, ceremonial magicians have no need to do so.
A while ago, I split my giant altar up into a devotional space and a planetary working space. It was good for the planetary magic, but it actually made devotional work really difficult, as it greatly reduced my space. Offerings were spilled, gods were cramped, and it was pretty much less than ideal. So, shortly after coming back at the beginning of the semester, I started rebuilding again.
The fact is that planetary work is no longer a large enough portion of my practice to justify each planet getting its own mini-altar. So I’ve replaced that structure with a set of planetary boxes, inspired by Jason Miller’s Jupiterian cash-box, and reincorporated the shelves back into my primary altar, leaving only the end-table as a workbench which I can lift out of its corner and back in as needed.
As a part of that reconstruction, I finally—as I had been considering doing for some time—added Eros/Phanes and Aphrodite to the altar. You can see them in the box immediately below Dionysus at the apex.
It’s somewhat amusing, but it actually didn’t occur to me until more than then days later that I had framed the two as a divine pair: like the Witchmother and Kouros at the heart of the altar, like my natal genius and daemon, even like my familiar Tsu and the Cave Canem construct. Like I have considered pairing Hephaestus and Athena as gods ruling craft—or, alternatively, Athena and Hermes as gods of the mind.
It’s interesting how ideas linger. I have never identified as a Wiccan, never really believed in the duotheistic worldview. But all of my formative literature came from that perspective, and the asymmetrical balance of Wiccan altar construction has always appealed to me. I have consciously employed that aesthetic to various degrees at various times, but this is the first time I can recall having done so unawares. Unlike the Witchmother and Kouros, a fairly traditional set of complementary opposites—specifically set up, in fact, so that I might explore my relationship with those archetypes—they form a unified pair: dual expressions of the primal need that moves the world.
When I pour out my libations, I address them as “Eros/Phanes, Aphrotide: source and expression of desire.” So far they have been good to me.
[This post was originally written ten months ago for a queer occult Zine that, to my great disappointment, seems to have gone defunct without publishing. The tone is more … literary, and the content a bit more intimate than most of my posts. ]
The void opens before me and the crystalline spire of the World Tree rises into infinity where there ought to be a horizon. The ground beneath my feet is an illusion for my convenience: there is nothing but the void and the Tree.
In the physical realm, I am uncomfortably male. Although I reject all the social tropes of masculinity, excepting only a few which are synonymous with being a decent human being, I am generally read as so butch that I am routinely mistaken for straight. While wearing a skirt. In a gay bar.
In the Otherworld, however, things are more complicated.
My most familiar spirit approaches me before I even reach the Tree. She is eager, and there is mischief in her eyes. Until recently, she appeared as a gorgon; now, just a woman. I ask if she has any adventures planned for me, and although she is one of the few spirits whose voice I can hear reliably, tonight she answers only by taking my hand.
Together, we walk to the World Tree. She places her hand on the shimmering facets of the bark, and slides into the pillar of crystal. I follow.
It is quite telling, in retrospect, that I have been fixated on leaving my body since I first began my study of the occult at the age of sixteen. Although I have never mastered astral projection, my success with Michael Harner’s visionary techniques, to which I was introduced by a friend a decade later, has been markedly greater. Enough so, in fact, that I began having experiences that my source materials could not help me contextualize almost immediately. I began seriously exploring and experimenting with visionary techniques in the spring of 2009. At first, as I imagine it is for many people, it was all or nothing: the trance would either elude me, or I would find myself in a mindscape which I could barely comprehend. Those first visionary experiences were frightening—some of them are, still, as I have no cultural context in which to ground them.
We descend, spiraling into darkness, and emerge at the edge of a stone circle. There is a drummer hiding in the shadows on the far side. Beautiful dancers writhe in the inconstant light of a small fire. I cannot see their faces clearly, or hear their voices over the drum.
I leap into the circle, joining the dance with abandon. Our bodies collide to the rhythm of the drum. There is nothing but the drumbeat and the heat of the fire and flesh. My hips and breasts sway as I dance and spin, round and round the fire.
It probably goes without saying that, at first, my spirit-body appeared as an idealized version of my mortal flesh: a little more muscular, a little less soggy around the middle. For a while, before I realized that it was irrelevant, I tried to form an “astral body” that was more “realistic”. Then I just let it be what it was: trying to dismantle that small bit of vanity was a distraction from the real work of exploring the spirit world. So, the first time it was radically different, I almost didn’t notice.
I was at a Qaballistic workshop at the local New Age store. The instructor was leading us on a visionary journey to Malkuth, the Earthly Kingdom. The path led across a bridge over a river, where we were to abandon certain symbolic representations of our mortal lives. Seeing my reflection in the river, I was surprised to see that I was a woman. My tattoos and ritual garb were what I had formed as I entered the visionary trance, but my flesh was not. For much of the rest of the journey, which was clear and productive, I was viscerally and self-consciously aware of the differences between that body and my mortal one—and of the fact that I had been unaware of those differences until I saw my reflection.
The drummer has slipped outside the fire light, and moves around outside the circle of stones, deosil to our widdershins, so that he is always just out of sight. One by one, the other dancers disappear as I make my way around the circle again and again. One turn I am a woman: my center of gravity lower, my breasts swaying and bouncing with my gyrations. The next I am a man: my cock slapping against my thighs as my center of gravity rises. Though the movements themselves are not so different—I am a terrible, unoriginal dancer, either way—the relative proportions of hip to shoulder create the illusion that it is otherwise, both visual and tactile.
The goddess I met at the end of that journey was not the Queen of Malkuth, but the Titan goddess Rhea: vast beyond my imagining, reclining nude and crowned and flanked by lions. To this day I have always-but-once been a woman when summoned to her presence in my visionary work. Other spirits, too—such as the equally vast but yet-unnamed goddess of Elemental Water—prefer that I be female in their presence. I have always been male in the Elemental Realm of Fire. My gender in the Otherworld is increasingly uncertain and malleable: male, female, both, neither. I shift at random, or at will, or at the behest of the spirits with whom I entreat.
All that remain, now, are myself and the the fire and the drummer I still cannot see. But my body has solidified in the image of Hermaphroditus: full breasts and hips, bearded and phallic. My hair is thick and glorious, from my head to my feet. Horns crown my head. A satyr’s tail sways behind me, and a satyr’s Priapism sways in front.
I leap into the fire, and we consume one another. My flesh is incinerated, then reformed, as I swallow the flames. When I emerge, the drummer has reveled himself: my Natal Demon. My Genius is there, too, and my most familiar spirit.
We dance.
* διγενὴς ἔκστασις – “Diges Ekstasis”, lit. two-kind displacement, alt. trance of doubtful sex. διγενὴς cf. LSJ.A, ἔκστασις Middle Liddel.A.II.4
