witchcraft – Page 17 – Journey Through The Obsidian Dream

For myself and Aradia, as well as the rest of Camp WTF, magic is a major part of our HPF experience. My first two festivals with Aradia (2009 and 2010) were some of the most intense ritual experience of my life, and it was at the last full moon festival (2010) that I underwent my first initiation. For good or ill, this year’s public rituals ended up being fairly low-impact. But with Friday night’s full moon to draw on, we took matters into our own hands.

Camp Altar

We started things off right by erecting an altar in camp and putting up successive magic circles around our encampment to encourage good times and ward off fuckwits. Each of us contributed an item or two to the setup, and we received numerous compliments on it throughout the weekend. Actually, I contributed a bit: my Kouros and Witchmother idols, my wand and chalice, my Orb and my new friend Cave Canem, who needed to be fed sacred oil (Fiery Wall of Protection Oil in the red bottle) at the Moon. Aradia brought more obsidian, the little elephant, and the dish on which they sat. Pasiphae would later bring out a selenite sphere, and Aidan set up the tripod around the whole operation.

We performed planetary invocations here as a group for the first two days, and I maintained that practice on my own through Saturday. I also demonstrated my offering rite for the others, who were curious about the ways my practice has evolved while at college.

Stele of Jeu

Friday, at sunset, Aradia and I went to the Memorial Grove to perform the Stele of Jeu together. Pasiphae and Aidan watched that, too, as I have been encouraging her to take up the rite to help her plough through some issues she’s been working on. We read the verses in tandem, excepting the barbarous words, which my notes have written in Greek and which I had to pronounce for Aradia to repeat.

The results were, at first, relatively lackluster—perhaps because we had never practiced forming the rite jointly in such a fashion, or possibly because I was still sorely depleted from the semester. The power rose, and with it the wind, but I did not get the purgative sensation that I usually have when I call upon Him Whose Name is a Heart Encircled By A Serpent. I was, however, very much ready for the next stage of our Esbat, and I wonder, if the following rites would have been so effective if I had not made myself a vessel in such a fashion.

Drawing Down the Moon

Finally, we went searching for a place to perform our esbat. Janet Farrar and Gavin Bone had spoken earlier that day, and had touched on the subject of Drawing Down the Moon and the way it had functioned back in the Old Days with Doreen Valiente. Meanwhile, Pasiphae had a selenite sphere which she has been using as a lunar force and wished to charge it more fully. At first we went to one of the ritual areas—Moonfyre Grove—but found that we had no actual view of the moon, so we trecked back up the hill to Flora’s Garden.

We cast our circle informally, as we usually do, and lit a candle. Pasiphae raised the selenite over her head and, rather spontaneously, I took the role of High Priest and drew the Moon down into her. At that point, a whole host of powers I had never dealt with before moved through me. For that moment, I was the Consort God: I grew antlers and stood tall, a channel by which the Moon descended from heaven into a mortal woman. When the time came, I prompted her and Pasiphae spoke prophesy—though time will tell if it was for all of us or for her alone.

There was a great deal of residual energy when that operation was done. Aradia used some of it to dispose of a tainted artifact, and the rest was poured into a bottle of salt water which we had prepared for the occasion. Lunar holy water is an interesting thing to See, and it had the added bonus—at least partly on account of the salt—of being potent grounding water.

In witchcraft

HPF 2013 After-Action Report: the Public Rituals

Satyr Magos13/06/2013

This year’s public rituals consisted of two main rites around central circle, a vision quest, a funeral for one of the better-known merchants, and the usual Memorial Day service. Having not known the gentleman in question, I did not attend the funeral, and, being an anti-nationalist, I never attend the Memorial Day service. I did, however, attend the main rituals and vision quest.

The Main Rituals

The main rituals were a marked departure from the norm in that they consisted of two rites—an opening rite on Thursday and a main/closing rite on Sunday—rather than the usual three, with the main rite on Saturday. I heard rumors that the ritual had been altered to accommodate some last-minute change—perhaps the funeral—but am uncertain as to their veracity.

Owing to Saturday night’s full moon, the theme for this year’s ritual was The Dragon Moon, and the Sacred Experience Committee elected to build their ritual around the theme of the five Chinese elements. For the opening ritual, five persons bearing lantern-like globes were spaced equidistantly around the circle, which was traversed first in pentagram shape and then circumnavigated by a fairly large paper-mache dragon. The ritual, itself, told a story of creation and dissolution: order rising from and then collapsing into chaos. We, the audience, were implored to consider our own life stories and determine where we wanted to go, and how the cycle of creation and destruction could aid us. We each took a ribbon, which was to be tied to the dragon and would be burned to fuel the rite at the end of the festival.

The main ritual, as is often the case, used the same setup and partially reenacted the first. We gathered around the bonfire about to be lit. There were more incantations by the ritual leaders, our intention-charged ribbons were thrown into the pile, and it was all lit to send our intentions out into the universe.

Overall, the rituals were highly theatrical: very pretty, well orchestrated, and fun to watch. Unfortunately, I did feel that there was a strong divide between the ritual leaders and the audience and that we were more “watching” than “participating”. There were few callbacks, and not even any real energy work for us to do.

My party and I did find ourselves a little frustrated at the generic quality of the magical aspect: “what do you want out of life” is a rather large and nonspecific question to tackle in any ritual, let alone a public one. On the other hand, it rather amused us that, given the synchronicity which rules these things, that was the question that apparently everyone was wrestling with this year, as well.

Finally, I was a little troubled by the fact that we were a group of largely White witches performing a ritual based in “ancient Chinese lore”. While I don’t think the Chinese are harmed by this sort of thing the way, say, Native Americans and other aboriginal populations are, there was definitely an air of appropriation to the whole thing. Even something as simple as greater specificity in the pamphlet description of the ritual—“… based on the Chinese philosophy of Wu Xing, which is often imprecisely translated as ‘Five Elements’…”—would have gone a long way, and it would have been better if they could have found a primary source to cite for us. The sad thing is, “ancient Chinese lore” (much like “ancient Native American wisdom”) is often code for “some shit I just made up”; the imprecision puts my back up (as an academic if nothing else) and the whole thing comes of as a bit racist.

The Vision Quest

Since returning from my failed life in St.Louis, the vision quest has been a major part of my Heartland experience. This was the first year that, having gone (I didn’t last year), my party didn’t make a point of being the first in line. That proved to be a mistake.

The theme of the year was Heroes and Villains. Villains included the Banshee, Baba Yaga, the Pied Piper, Lucifer (if I read the marks on his chest correctly), the Boogie Man, Lilith, and at least one figure I was not able to identify. Heroes included Queen Boudica, Robin Hood, Sigmund, and Beowolf. There were definitely some themes that resonated with me: honor and honesty and promices not kept, the question of what you’re willing to do to achieve your goals. At the end, though, the message I received was more direct and immediate: chill the fuck out, go have fun. I’m finding this charge painfully difficult.

The people playing each of the roles did fabulously. They had clearly worked very hard to find the “voice” they were aspecting and deserve nothing but commendations.

The overall experience, however, was deeply marred by logistical complications. I’m not sure what, exactly went wrong: maybe the gatekeeper was letting people in too quickly; maybe one or more of the guides on the path was consistently taking more time than they were supposed to. Regardless, despite my best efforts to move at a moderate pace, I caught up to the person in front of me after the first station. By the fourth I was caught in a pile-up that went at least three ahead of me and at least five behind. The long waits, my own irritation, and the increasingly frustrated presence of other Questers made it extremely hard to maintain the appropriate mindset. Ultimately, I spent half of the time on the path increasingly furious at the orchestrators of what had turned into an ordeal of patience.

In witchcraft

HPF 2013 After Action Report Part I: Overview

Satyr Magos12/06/2013

I was more than a little surprised to find myself at Heartland Pagan Festival this year. Although last year’s debacle was negotiated to an amicable conclusion, many of my friends had not seemed interested in returning. I had just completed the two most grueling semesters, personally even more than academically, of my life. Money was (and is) tight, and my spiritual practice was in shambles. But then Pasiphae and Aidan decided they wanted to go, and Aradia got really excited about it, and that got infectious. Then I learned that not only would it be a full moon, but Janet fucking Farrar was going to be there, and I have dabbled in Wicca/witchcraft for far too long to turn down an opportunity to see Janet Farrar and hear her speak.

There was one further complication, however: as a part of the aforementioned negotiations, I had agreed to join the Heartland Spiritual Alliance and get involved in the Sacred Experience Committee. That never happened: first I was broke, then I was busy, then I was overwhelmed and nearly crushed by the last year. So, before leaving, I sent an email to Bousiris, Mr. Crane, and Alexandros inviting them to Camp WTF to partake in my mead as an apology for my failure to act as I had intended. Ultimately, and to my chagrin, although all three accepted that invitation, either by email or in person, we never managed to actually meet up to clear the air.

Planning and packing were both achieved with unprecedented efficiency and alacrity. We arrived at the front gate for our traditional pre-fest camp out at shortly after midnight, despite the fact that preparations included baking four loaves of bread and two dozen muffins (Aradia is a badass). We were able to secure one of our top four pre-selected camp sites, despite the fact that one had been closed off to “rest” for the season, and another had been selected as the location for the Lushes in Exile, as their usual encampment was likewise closed. After setting up our encampment at a pleasant and leisurely pace, we set up the best camp-altar ever, and proceeded to relax for the rest of the day until opening ritual and public dinner… both of which were slightly disappointing, but inoffensive.

Friday started with approximately the average amount of confusion over my Community Service (after an above-average amount of confusion last year, the rest of my encampment bribed out), slightly complicated by an unusual number of musicians and merchants who felt the rules didn’t apply to them. Meanwhile, Aradia and the rest of our camp went to Ed Hubbard’s first workshop, which they enjoyed, and found me afterwards for breakfast. We went to the first Janet Farrar and Gavin Bone workshop that afternoon, followed by Ed Hubbard’s second workshop. After dinner, Aradia and I demonstrated the Stele of Jeu to Pasiphae (whom I think would benefit from doing the rite a few times) and Aidan, then went for a long walk before performing our own private Esbat. The results of those rituals were impressive.

Saturday was slow to start, and we ended up not going to any of the workshops we had considered. Instead, when we finally got moving, we went down to the lake, where we had the misfortune to discover a solid dozen unsupervised children, most in the single-digit age range. That disaster-waiting-to-happen was kind of a buzzkill, and by the time their parents showed up and then finally left, the day had cooled and the lake was too cold to be any fun. In the meantime, we did divination.

Sunday we caught a workshop on working with spirits and the final lecture by Janet Farrar. The former was disappointing, but the latter was interesting: the origin story of Lake Onessa and her name. Although much of our party crashed early, Aradia and I stayed up until the wee hours searching for a party. We were sadly disappointed.

Monday morning began a little before dawn with the threat of a storm. By dawn, the threat had been made good on with nickel-sized hail and a torrential downpour that made packing difficult and brought everyone’s temper to the surface—particularly mine. Although I won’t name names, I will point out that this is why we don’t do weather magic. Seriously: does anyone know any stories, mythic or personal, of anyone of European descent doing weather magic for good? It’s all crop-destroying, drought-causing, malicious evil-for-evil’s sake in the myths I know.

In witchcraft

The Secret Lives of Magical Beings

Satyr Magos26/04/2013

There’s a very interesting conversation going on in the magical blogosphere right now. Riffing off a remark by Gordon, Rufus Opus has sparked a conversation on the blogs of Fr. Barabas, Jack Faust, and Fr. Acher.[1] These luminaries have years more research and hundreds, perhaps thousands, more conjurations under their belts than I do, so I will not presume to question their assessments. But, although I am more than a little late to the party, I will answer Fr. Acher’s call to share a little bit of my own experiences.

I have been conjuring planetary powers for little more than a year. So far, I am largely tapping into the “elemental” power of the Spheres to imbue my talismans, perhaps drawing the attention of lesser planetary spirits … and perhaps not. On those few occasions when I have conjured specific planetary powers, or gone on spirit journeys to visit them, I have seen little or nothing to hint at what those spirits might do when not trafficking with mortals.

I have, however, been working with a familiar spirit for a bit longer than that.

Tsu has done me numerous favors—some simply out of friendship, others in exchange for offerings. More importantly for this discussion, however, she has spoken to me, some, regarding her existence outside our contact. She has, unfortunately, been deliberately obtuse on a number of points. And, of course, one always hesitates to draw broad conclusions from such limited anecdotes; certainly one cannot draw conclusions about Goetic Demons and Elemental Kings. Further, given the nature of spirits, one even hesitates to assume that anything I was told was the absolute truth.

However, for the sake of interest and posterity:

* Very early in our relationship, she asked that I name her and create a sigil for her. She implied two things: that she did not, at that point, have a name; and that the name I was giving her was temporary, that she would eventually take another, greater name.

* In the above series of conversations, she gave me the impression that she was whatever the spirit-world equivalent of a magician. What, precisely, that entails, I haven’t the faintest idea.

* In a separate conversation, she strongly implied that spirits can produce offspring by pairing with either other spirits or with morals.

* When asked point-blank, however, what she does with herself when not conversing with me, she flat-out refused to give me an answer.

* I know that sometimes when I go to my Inner Temple she is waiting for me, sometimes she is elsewhere, and sometimes she is just hanging out there, indifferent to my presence—almost as if it’s her favorite park.

Nor is Tsu the only spirit I’ve gotten interesting hints from: I’ve a veritable lifetime of bizzare spirit encounters, many of which more closely resemble Jack’s experiences with elementals:

* There was this one thing, back in the day, that was like walking into a scene from someone else’s life.

* Way back when I first started practicing, my first spirit guide was known to get bored and go bother my more psychically sensitive friends for conversation.

* One time, during my days on IRC chat, one of my online friends’ spirit guide came to investigate me for no other reason than that it was bored.

* More recently, I had an encounter with a genius locii from which a wiser magus than I might be able to draw more concrete conclusions.

* And then there was the time this one daft kid called up the someone he didn’t really have the credentials to, and a local spirit had to intervene on our behalf. Again: someone wiser than I might be able to draw conclusions from that where I am not.

* Work with Tsu , ZG, and SKM (my Natal Genius and Demon, respectively) has made clear that the three discuss me when I am not there, and that they have planned an astral excursion for me together on at least one occasion.

* When doing my explorations of Elemental Earth and Malkuth for the ceremonial experiment, I encountered a spirit who posed as a guide but who clearly needed things from me that she could not or would not communicate. When I failed to provide them on my own, she attempted to coerce me.

Again, none of these experiences do not necessarily speak at all to the nature of spirits on the scale of Goetic Demons and Elemental kings. Conversely, however, they strongly suggest (to me at least) that those spirits which more individual than archetypal (which, from what research I have done, is a fair description of these powers) have lives and ambitions at the same time both more familiar than we would imagine, and more alien than we can possibly conceive.

1 – Others may have joined the conversation by the time this post appears. I will add them below as they come to my attention.

In witchcraft

Project Null: Satyr’s First Servitor

Satyr Magos24/04/2013

I have been planning to experiment in servitor creation since I first set out to study Chaos Magick. Unfortunately, none of my major sources treat the subject in any real detail. So I went that vast repository of knowledge, madness, and wisdom which I we all know and love: the Internet. My hope was that a variety of perspectives would allow me to identify the core techniques by triangulation, and from there come up with my rite.

Here are the sources I found most useful:

* Servitor Creation at Atreus World of Wierdness

* Pope Michae’s Basic Servitor Creation

* Servitor Creation at Spiralnation

CAVE CANEM

Between native talent and practice bordering on paranoid, protective magic has always been one of the things I am best at. Thus, it was always my intention for my first servitor to be a household guardian. Because I’m an asshat, I ignored all suggestions to start simple. I chose the form of a dog in order to tap into the “guard dog” egregore, and in order to use a foo-dog shaped teapot, which I happened to have, as a vessel. I named him for one of the great guards of myth, in order to tap into that stream as well. Hereafter I will refer to him as Cave Canem[1], or CC for short.

I wrote and sigilized ten lines of “code”, and chose its master sigil from a number of glyphs which I had produced through automatic drawing last semester. I wrote a incantation containing the servitor’s name, the instructions I had sigilized, and the terms of the contract between us. I then drew a stele-image of CC bearing his name and all his sigils.

I placed that penciled image and the vessel on an improvised altar in the middle of my temple. I banished and purified everything. I got out my Abramelin oil and the brush I use for sigils. I raised the power, declaimed the incantation, inked the sigils on the drawing, and painted the vessel with the master sigil. Then I called down an amount of power that easily put this in the top ten most powerful rites I have ever performed, possibly the top five. I anointed the vessel with the Oil of Abramelin, and the dog awoke.

His presence was immediate, almost tactile. He responded warmly to my attention. The next several times I drove, CC sat in the back seat behind me with his nose on the back of my head. When I drove to Kansas City for Spring Break, he made much of the drive with me, though he grew … thin across Illinois. Even in Kansas City, though, he appeared instantly when I spoke his name.

I would consider this an unqualified success, except that I haven’t actually seen much of him since I got back from Spring Break. But I came back from Spring Break ill enough that I probably shouldn’t have driven. I missed (another) two days of class, and ultimately ended Break even further behind than I started. So I haven’t really had time for more than a bare minimum maintenance of my spiritual obligations; I hadn’t seen much of any of my Friends Upstairs, actually, for that reason, until last Wednesday when I received instructions on how best to rearrange my altar. So one is uncertain if he didn’t “last” or if one’s head is merely stuffed up one’s own ass.

Still, I’m pleased enough with the outcome of this attempt that I’m planning a second, more ambitious servitor project: an army of flying monkeys.

1 – Classical Latin: “Kah-way ka-nem”, trans: “Beware the Dog”.

In witchcraft

I’m Still Not Certain Enough of What Happened To Come Up With Pithy Header

Satyr Magos22/04/2013

Way back at the beginning of the semester, I wrote of having picked up some sort of psychic parasites which absurdly difficult to get rid of. On the advice of Veriditas Dreams, I put off my servitor experiment for another two weeks while I focused on getting my astral body patched up. I’m glad I did, because things only got more interesting.

The first night of the Full Moon, I started with wine divination. Interestingly, it pointed to a combination of internal and external factors: internally, matters of balance and power; externally, one Prince of Disks. I prepared and cast my circle using my newest Circle-casting variant which anchors an Witch’s elemental Circle to the circle of salt I have been using for a bit, now. Then I performed the Stele of Jeu the Hieroglyphist[1] and burned the little black worms from my astral body and my temple space with the brilliant and (in my experience) unique power of the Heart Encircled By A Serpent. It is, I am almost certain, the first time that I have actually managed to use up every drop of power raised by that ancient and magnificent rite.

The second night of the Full Moon I performed the Stele of Jeu a second time. I went for just a little more elaboration and experimentation. I started with a simple banishing and suffumigation. Then I tore space, as described in the Sorcerer’s Secrets[2], performed by Titan’s Cross and Pentagram Rite, and finally the Stele, itself. Where the first night’s rite had burned away the infection, this one went a long way to healing the wound, separating the psychic “scab” from my physical back and helping restore the energy lost to the ordeal.

The third night of the Full Moon, as I prepared to begin my rites, I changed tactics. Drawing a crude image of myself and writing my legal and magical names on the “poppet”, I drew a clean, healthy, and healed aura around myself and charged the image with power. I literally have no words to describe the sensation of feedback that I experienced while working with that magical self-portrait.

With those rites completed, I went about my life for a little while [3]. The itching and pulling sensations of the “scab” or “scar” on my astral body were … very, very strange. Sometimes I wasn’t certain if I was healing, or getting re-infected. Despite the fall-off in my practice between then and now, however, one of those strategies, or some combination thereof, seems to have done the trick. I can still feel a bit of psychic “scar tissue”, sometimes: it stretches and pulls, particularly when I do small magics, but it is no longer an uncomfortable or unwell sensation. At times it even seems to respond to the places where the Veil has been often parted (like, say, my Temple), much like worn joints responding to changes in barometric pressure.

These things being the way they are, I’ll never be quite certain where the infection came from. To the best of my ability to determine, however, it was not so much a direct attack as … symptomatic of a certain point of chaos in my life back in Kansas City.

I’ve spoken of my Web before: of the lines that connect the people and places in my life. Over Winter Break, Aradia and I did some Work to try to help her neighbor out with her magical practice: she was (is) experiencing a sort of demonic possession[4], either causing or caused by a serious illness and by her abandoned magical practice. I believe that this possession/infection spread into the house wards and, from them, along the lines of power to the Sunrise Temple and my astral body.

I never did manage to repair the damage done to the Temple Wards; they were supposed to be self-regenerating, but apparently that didn’t work the way it was supposed to. With my familiar spirits in house, and having established that I was not, in fact, (also, because I lost my shit this semester) under attack, it never seemed a priority.

Besides which, it was about time I replaced them, anyway. Whish is pretty much the most interesting thing I’ve done all semester.

1 – Jack Faust has a handy copy up for reference. He is also the first and only person I’ve seen provide any theory as to which “six names” (PGM V. 159) are meant and what “the formula” (PGM V.160) might be, and this was my first performance of the rite incorporating those additions.

2 – Jason Miller. Sorcerer’s Secrets. p.42

3 – And then everything went to shit: I stopped writing, stopped my magical practice and barely maintained my devotionals, never made time to try the exercises which the magnificent Melitta Benu was kind enough to share in response to another old post, and have barely kept up with my fucking homework. Which may or may not have been related to anything besides the amount of stress I’m under and the amount of sex I’m not having.

4 – For lack of a better word. Unfortunately, the details are not mine to discuss in depth.

In witchcraft

Altar Arrangement Spring 2013

Satyr Magos20/04/2013

It’s been a while since I posted. My life’s been crap. Sadly, not even the interesting kind, so while I will allude to a few highlights in the next several posts, I won’t bore you with the details.. But things are on the upswing.

This past Wednesday, among other things, I received instructions from the gods and spirits I work with on how to arrange my altar for the coming stages of my Work. I have long suspected that this particular set of instructions would come eventually: the combination of my devotional work and my more practical magic had made for an increasingly awkward arrangement of space over the last months.

The timing seemed peculiar before I had the opportunity to think about it: I’ve just been getting my practice back together along with my sanity, and that’s often the exactly right time to give me marching orders. Also, that very afternoon I found out about a couple problems with Financial Aid and the Registrar that I need magic to help me with.

So Thursday night I took apart my altar and rebuilt it, as instructed, as two separate altars: one for my planetary, Chaos, and practical magics, and one for my gods and familiar spirits. I broke it in that very night at the Hour of Jupiter to drop the Greater Beneficient on my problems.

The workbench needs to be raised up six inches or so, but that will have to wait until I have the money for some small but sturdy boxes or shelves, or until I have another lucky dumpster dive, whichever comes first. The table in the middle moves out easily, and I’m going to paint it with a triangle of conjuration.

The spirit-work altar is going to need a lot more work, though. It needs at least a one other tier so that everyone can be accommodated comfortably. I presume that they’ll instruct me some before I leave for KC at the end of the semester.

In witchcraft

Well, Then, Son … You’ve Got a Condition …

Satyr Magos24/02/2013

Back in the day, when I was fully-steeped in the energetic model of magic, aura work was how I began and ended any magic I did. Hell, more than half the time—especially during the Basement Years, when getting a finger-hold on my sanity was the main object of my magic—it was the Work. That started to slip during the Ceremonial Experiment: the banishing work had about the same effect, and the kinds of aura work I knew were actually counterproductive, as the ceremonial work was making some radical and positive changes to my aura. It’s slipped further since starting on Project Null. Actually, that’s a lie: since starting Project Null, the cognitive dissonance I’ve experienced between the various Wiccan schools I was originally trained in, the things I learned during the Ceremonial Experiment, and the Chaos Magick theories I’ve encountered on aura-work, basically amounted to a paradigmatic train wreck. I mostly managed to hold things together through the end of Christmas Break. But there’ve been some oddities.

The first oddity was a sort of psychic “sore” at the small of my back. I first noticed it while doing some banishing work with Aradia toward the end of break. As we cleaned it out, it felt like it was linked to my Root chakra. I’m not bad at doing psychic/aura healing work on other people—I can even manage a certain amount of physical healing—but I’m shit at doing it for myself. The angles are off, I guess.

Time passed, I came back to school, and the “sore” persisted, thought never as bad as it had been at first. Until I went to do my first serious banishing work at January’s Full Moon, and discovered a …. giant, black, slimy lamprey-worm-thing attached to the wound in my aura. Not really certain what it was or what to do, I pulled it off, threatened it, and threw it across town. The “sore” finally closed up altogether, and I went on with my life. I noted the whole episode, but never have been able to determine if the thing was an astral varmint, the work of one of the two psychic vampires I’ve crossed in the last six weeks, the product of my own Chaos Magick-induced delusions, or something else entirely.

Then, this last week, as I was recovering from a mundane illness I discovered a new “sore” on my aura. This one lays about where my neck joins my back, but doesn’t seem to correspond with any of my energetic centers. Squirming around in the psychic wound were a mass of writhing black worms in a sick column down to the original wound: miniature versions of the larger one I’d already thrown off. Local spirits have proven ineffectual at helping me clean out the mess—on or two smaller spirits even appear to have been injured by the things—although the manifestation of That One God who dwells at the on-campus chapel was surprisingly willing and able to help dispose of the ones I could extract (it seems to have taken it rather personally that such vermin would move into its territory).

I’m hoping that tonight’s performance of the Stele of Jeu will fix the problem. Barring that, that when I finally “create”* my guard-dog servitor tomorrow night, it will be able to deal with the problem (since that is what it’s going to be made for, after all).

In the mean time, has anyone else had an experience like this? Any advice?

*I’m not entirely certain, given the way things have been leaning, that I’m actually going to end up creating a servitor so much as recruiting a local spirit for the task. The distinction, however, is largely moot.

In hedonism, scholarship, witchcraft

My Liberalia

Satyr Magos18/02/2013

Calendars are a problem. The more of them you have, the harder they are to match up. At this stage in my life, I’m struggling to reconcile four: the Gregorian, the academic, the lunar, and the Wheel of the Year. Sometimes, it can be a fucking mess, especially as I try to splice in ancient festivals AND keep everything relevant to the life I actually live.

So, it was very much to my delight last year when I learned of an interesting coincidence: namely that Saint Patrick’s Day (an “Irish” American drinking festival, for those who don’t live in the USA) and the Liberalia fall at about the same time. Even more fortuitous, both coincide with the beginning of Spring Break (an academic American drinking festival) at my particular institution of higher education. My celebrations last year were impromptu and (mostly) solitary. But I did start a batch of mead with this year in mind.

Now the date approaches and I watch with some curiosity as Sanion anticipates Anthesteria. I am trying to find time to do research into what “traditional” festivities would have included, and then decide / beg for divine inspiration as to which elements to maintain, which to adopt from other festivals, and what to make up whole cloth.

There will be wine, of course, and mead: both drinking the mead I started last year and will bottle in about a week, and the starting of a new batch for next year. And feasting: I never open the Sunrise Temple without providing food. Offerings aplenty to the God, and a special altar erected to him for the occasion.

But what else? I don’t really have the resources to put on a play of any kind, and playing movies in the background seems … a weak

substitute at best. (Besides which, all the appropriate movies that I own will be played for the same people three weeks prior at my Midsem party.) Perhaps I can encourage participants to declaim from the various hymns to Dionysus; a lot of them are thespians, they’ll probably get a kick out of it. And should I bring in elements of the Urban Dionysia, which falls about the same time of year (depending on the vagaries of the lunar calendar) but much less fortuitously in terms of free time to devote to worship?

I’m thinking that there may be some ritual (and playful) flogging, both to purify and to excite (though, contrary to Pausanius’ Skiereia, it will be everyone getting lashed). Possibly arts-and-crafts, especially the making and donning of masks and thyrsoi. I may encourage cross-dressing, in honor of the god’s youth spent hiding from Hera, and in memory of Tieresias and Cadmus, who donned women’s clothing that they might participate in the rites when the other men of Thebes followed Pentheus’ lead in denying Dionysus.

Hopefully everyone will have enough fun to get naked, because … Maenads and Satyrs, duh. Should that happen, face and body paint are great games.

I have numerous Tarot decks, and it might be an interesting occasion on which to employ the oracular powers of Dionysus. Also, the ouija board. (Of course I have a ouija board. Don’t look at me that way. You have one, too.)

All this would be just a little easier, of course, if I had a more concrete relationship with the god. When I do my thrice-weekly offering rites, I hail him as I pour the libations: “Dionysus, Liber Pater, Lord of the Vine, source and surcease of madness.” But if those things were all that he is to me, then I would not need to have a festival: I would simply meditate on what passes for my sanity whilst drinking until I cry. But Dionysus is more than that. So much more.

I struggle in my search for how best to honor him.

In witchcraft

Weekly Sigils Shoals

Satyr Magos14/02/2013

Since coming back to Indiana for the Spring semester, I have fired a shoal of sigils every week. The idea is that doing practical, results-oriented magic on a regular basis will, a) improve my mad magic skilz in a practice-makes-perfect sort of way; b) force me to be more creative with my sigil-making and sigil-launching techniques lest boredom undo my Will; c) proivide me with raw data for deterring which desires and which techniques go well together; and, finally, d) result in improved efficacy of any technique I might employ, as the universe becomes accustomed to bending to my will.

So far, the project has been going well. My “target” is a shoal of three to six sigils every Sunday morning, as part of my regular offering schedule. So far I have not actually made that target: half my launches have been Sunday afternoon or evening, the other half on Monday nights. Still: that’s progress.

The first week’s sigils were all aimed at personal outcomes: memory and discipline. The second were social: still trying to engineer myself a new lover here in Indiana. (High standards, highly specific notions of consent, a complicated life story, and an overabundance of undesirable near-misses make that more difficult than it might otherwise be.). The third were aimed at memory and discipline again: being where and when I say I’ll be, and getting my assignments done on time. The first two sets were done in what has become my most frequently employed method: drawing the sigils on a notecard and chanting “It is my will” at them until they get fuzzy. The third week was done using a freshly-consecrated mirror as a launching platform. That seemed to work very well, actually.

This week’s Work, however, had a different target which required an entirely different approach. My parents are embroiled in an inheritance dispute. Frankly, I should have intervened months ago, but it’s an adequately messy situation that, without any real brilliant inspiration as to how to intervene, I was more than a little afraid of collateral damage. Having been struck by a bit of that much-needed inspiration, though, what you see to the right are sigils drawn with planetary Kamea and empowered at the appropriate planetary hours this past Sunday. Basically, I dropped Saturn and Jupiter on the matter, by the logic that the two celestial god-kings were the best way to bring a legal dispute to a close.

Results, so far, have been mixed. My social and discipline sigils have been slow to manifest. Perhaps my chaos sigilization technique needs work. Perhaps it’s my launch technique. Or maybe I just need a bigger lever to fight my own nature. This Sunday’s planetary sigils, however, have already manifested: the situation has shifted from the lawyer saying “they should sign the paperwork soon” to the bank saying “the check is in the mail”.

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