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In witchcraft

Synthesizing Planetary Magic Into My Personal Practice

Author Satyr MagosPosted on

Some readers may wonder, looking at my bio, how it is that I can be so ignorant of Chaos and ceremonial magics if I’ve been practicing for as long as I say I have.  The short, easy answer is: freestyle circles and energy work, augmented by ecclectic/New Age Wiccan ritual and (in the last few years) visionary work.

When I was 18 or so, I came to the conclusion (in absence of any evidence, but … I was 18) that Cetlic knotwork was a two-dimensional representation of ways to shape energy.  That, in combination with the stripped-out version of the LBRP that I had found on the internet and a keen interest in elemental energy, became the basis of my magical practice.

Like (I imagine) most magicians, I can conjure elemental energies essentially at will: drawing energy from the world around me, filtering it through my body and aura, and transmuting it by will into Fire, Air, Earth, or Water to suit my needs … just as one conjures and focuses intent for, say, some forms of candle magic or sigils.  Unlike some witches and magicians, however, I also do this with Solar and Lunar energy.

One of the things I’m looking to do with my experiments in planetary magic is to come to understand those energies well enough that, in absence of convenient astrological timing—say we’re rolling retrograde when I need to do some mad Mercury, or right now with Saturn in the long retro, or it’s the Hour of Jupiter and I need some Venusian mojo right the fuck now—that I can conjure them in similar fashion.  This sort of understanding of planetary forces would also facilitate my desire to, for example, make a talisman invoking the “baleful” aspects of Venus and Mars for a “No Babies Conceived Here Ever” talisman to hang above my bed.

Some will ask, “If it’s possible, why didn’t the ancients do it that way?” The easy answer is, of course, that’s not the way they thought about magic. Except, of course, in the East where we get a lot of these ideas from in the first place. Chi, anyone?*  Again: I can already do this with Solar and Lunar energy.

Now, I realize that this will not shelter me from astrological “weather” altogether.  It may never work the way I imagine it will (what does?).  But think: if I can generate my own planetary energies as needed, how much more awesome could my sigils and talismans be when used in conjunction with astrological timing?  And if I know how to move that energy, I could, for example, take advantage of the next Jupiter election to endow the shit of of some Jupiter water or store that energy in a crystal battery for another occasion.

*A gross oversimpification, I know.

In art, witchcraft

Seeking the Natal Genius II

Author Satyr MagosPosted on

Almost two weeks ago, the Saturday after Mercury went direct, I made a second attempt to contact my natal genius, whom I will hereafter refer to as ZG.  In order to do so I drew a second, less inspired, Triangle of Conjuration and performed the operation at the appropriate Hour of Night.  The sigil and name are blacked out for obvious reasons.

triangles of conjuration

The Triangle on the right is the first; the left is the second.

In one sense, the evocation went well: I was able to produce a much clearer and more iconic drawing of ZG, and even to establish a certain degree of mental/psychic rapport.  She’s a strange creature, whose imagery and iconography come from no particular time and place (though, given my own nature, what surprise in that?): bearing the wings ubiquitous of spirits in the Mediterranean and Near East, with a horned crown and clawed feet that remind one of the powers of Bronze Age Mesopotamia, a multiplicity of limbs evoking Indian gods, and a face which resembles something out of Hebrew tradition.  The outline of the picture below was produced through a sort of automatic drawing, where I asked the spirit to appear to me and then waited to see what turned up on the page; the colors were added for aesthetic sake, but were not received during the communication.scan0002

ZG

On the other hand, the conclusion of the experiment was less than ideal: ZG used that psychic contact to inform me clearly that the approach I was taking was not working and would not work.  Essentially, she dismissed me, and I am left with the relatively little information I acquired through the initial contact.

Is this a normal rate of progression?  Am I doing something seriously wrong, or am I just so used to unusual degrees of success that I don’t know what to do with a more “natural” learning curve?

Most importantly, I’m still left with the primary question which led me to phrase my evocations the way I did: what the fuck do I do with my natal genius now that I’ve found her?  Given her Saturnian nature, should I ask her for help exercising discipline, especially in terms of time management?  Since she is Scorpio, shall I enlist her aid in my plots and schemes?  As much help as those will be, what little I have seen others write on the matter seems to imply that the nature of a natal genius is far broader than these things.  Can anyone share some personal anecdotes or published sources for me?

In witchcraft

Early Lessons of My First Forays Into Sigil Magic

Author Satyr MagosPosted on

I’ve been experimenting with sigils.

This is partly because Gordon recently wrote the clearest treatise on the subject I’ve ever seen.  There’s also the whole thing where, until I started digging into the Western Ceremonial Tradition, I didn’t really understand how Chaos Magick was distinct from it.  It’s also just an inevitable manifestation of my escalating magical practice, and forays into practical magic.

I haven’t been doing as good a job of keeping notes as I should have, but it’s also only been about ten days since I launched my first shoal.  I’ve been firing them off in accordance with the appropriate planetary days and hours using either appropriately-colored chime candles to help fuel them, or votive candles marked with the planetary glyphs.  I’ve also been experimenting with quick-and-easy circle constructions to help power and focus the sigils.

Here, in no particular order, are some of my first impressions.  Fellow n00bs may find them interesting; more experienced sigil-users may be amused.

1) Holy shit, drawing sigils is FUN.

2) While I’ve generally thought of sigils as quick-and-dirty magic, I think I need to refine my technique.  Quick-and-dirty just isn’t as psychologically satisfying, particularly when I need something more complex (conceptually) than some candle-based healing magic.  Firing them off should be just as much fun as drawing them in the first place.

3) Timing is key: Do not fire off “The Registrar Gives Me What I Need” while simultaneously expecting that registrar to sit on a piece of paperwork for a week.  Even if you don’t need it processed with any alacrity, you may find yourself inconvenienced when your change-of-advisor form gets processed overnight and your old advisor can no longer provide you with the password for class registration.

Besides that temporary inconvenience, however, that sigil seems to have worked out well: my appointment to discuss my transfer with the registrar has been rescheduled (at her behest) for after the Jupiter election.

4) Specifying duration is key: The “I Have Fantastic Sex” sigil was AWESOME … the night I fired it.  It’s been back to business as usual (which, lest my lovers who read this blog take this statement amiss, is still pretty awesome) ever since.

5) Coming up with “Sigils to Fire for Saturday” is not the way to go.  I need to work on my “100 Bad Ideas” list first, sort out the good ideas, and then sort them into planetary correspondences.

In scholarship, witchcraft

Sex, Gender, and Magic 1/n+1

Author Satyr MagosPosted on

Preface

I was already drafting this in my head as a response to a reddit thread—particularly this comment—when one of the bloggers I follow decided to wade into the subject.  It’s something I’ve talked about before from time to time, but usually only in reference to Wicca.  There is a great deal of gender essentialism and heterosexism in the occult community, and the privileged apologia that tends to accumulate when someone calls bullshit makes me fucking furious.

Now, let’s look at the two OPs, first: a woman asking for people to share their experiences of gender difference in different forms of occultism, and gay man exploring the possibility of a huge oversight in the (human understanding of) Hermetic Law.  The first got a few genuinely thoughtful answers, but the response to both (overwhelming in the one case, so far singular in the other) amounts to “how dare you ask that fucking question?”

That response infuriates me.  It drives home the fact that, just as the neo-Pagan community is rife with mainline American anti-intellectualism (a rant for another time, but just look at popular responses to Hutton’s Triumph of the Moon), the occult community as a whole is permeated by outdated and debunked ideologies of sex, gender, and sexuality.

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In witchcraft

IRC and an Astral Interwebs

Author Satyr MagosPosted on

When I was 16 or so, I spent my nights on IRC chat.  I didn’t really have access to other Pagans back then—if there was a witch/New Age store in Lawrence at that time, I don’t remember it; I couldn’t have afforded workshops even if there had been; and I wasn’t in the habit of driving to Kansas City at the time—so the internet was my primary access point to the Pagan Community At Large.

Damn I wish I had those log files, but they must have gotten lost three computers ago.  I can’t even remember the names of most of the people I talked to, though I may still have a few pictures of them somewhere in the archives.  SnowLeopard.  Latinius.  Tig.  My handles were ScholarMage and ShadowWolf. Don’t judge me: it was the mid-90s.  Handles making references to totem animals were ubiquitous, and there was inevitably enough overlap that most of us had two or three variations on our favorite handles on case our favorites were taken.  No one had registered or proprietary identities: that’s not how IRC worked.

These things come to mind now in part because of a recent post by the good Jack Faust.  When I think of the combination of magic and the internet, two experiences from my faunish days come immediately to mind.  Although I know I wrote about them at some point, I haven’t found these events in my very fragmentary journals from the time, so I have to rely on the hazy images of memories a decade and a half old. Both push the borders of my “adult” credulity, but this is how I remember them.

Much of the time I spent not-on-the-internet was spent at a coffee shop called the Java Break.  One night, walking home, I felt like I was being followed.  I kept looking behind me, but the streets and alleys all seemed as deserted as usual.  I was wound pretty tight by the time I made it home.  That night I woke from a dead sleep to see a large, cat-shape sitting beside my bed; this was doubly strange because I slept on the top bunk, which mean the cat-shape was just floating in the air.  I was (in retrospect, unaccountably) terrified, and I asked it to leave.  It got up, shrugged, and departed: fading out of sight as it walked in place.  When I shared this experience with my IRC friends, SnowLeopard claimed it was her spirit guide, checking me out because he was bored.  This may have been the first time I ever saw and interacted directly with a  spiritual entity.

On another occasion, someone on the chat circuit wanted to show me how to call lightning using a stone circle.  Somehow, though I had no experience or training in (or even vocabulary for) visionary/astral work (in fact, this was the heyday of my failed attempts at astral projection), this gentleman was able to transmit to me, and I was able to receive and experience, a process of calling lightning to oneself from the center of a stone circle.  The ability to so something like that is, of course, an extraordinary claim: one that I have never tested, though I can still (as with many of my visionary experiences) recall the scene with incredible, visceral clarity.  For whatever it’s worth, I imagine that a person with adequate focus and training could possibly manipulate the magnetism of a storm to that degree.  (Why not?  I’ve seen people make fire dance to their will, fuck with lights and computers in improbable ways.  I, myself, have changed the wind to keep campfire smoke out of my eyes on numerous occasions.)  I don’t, however, believe for a moment that a magician has any better chances of surviving a lightning strike than anyone else, even if he called it down.

That’s it: A spiritual visitation on one occasion, and a shared visionary experience on another.  Two anecdotal accounts from a not-particularly-tech-savvy, pubescent, magician-in-training who wasn’t even keeping coherent journals at the time.  But it makes one think.  What might be possible for someone who was fully-trained?  Particularly someone actively interested in techno-magic?

In witchcraft

Devotional Musings: Dionysus I

Author Satyr MagosPosted on

This post has already taken me too long to compose.  I started it almost as soon as I first posted about the Urban Dionysia.  The fact is, I find it difficult to write about my personal experiences with the gods.  Some of those experiences have been very, very strange—to the point where, even after a decade and a half of living a magical life and talking or reading about other people’s magical lives, I don’t have an adequate cultural framework through which to process them.  Other experiences, which may seem downright pedestrian when I reduce them to words or which I may know full well parallel the experiences of many, many others, have simply affected me so deeply that I cannot bear to subject them to public scrutiny.  (The events which comprise my previous post include some of both) And, inevitably, part of it is that I spent so much of my life being angry at the very idea of gods that I still feel like something of a chump, sometimes, for honoring them.  I’ve alluded to this last point before, and it is from there that I will begin.

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In witchcraft

Dedication

Author Satyr MagosPosted on

Sometimes you have to need to provide context before you can tell a story.  Sometimes, it’s best to tell a story first and dig into the context afterward.  This is the story of how I came to perform my re-Dedication as a part of my Beltane festivities in 2009 … I’ll get to the context in a little bit.

It was my second Beltane after my failed life in St. Louis, the first with Aradia.  It may almost go without saying tat we were at Camp Gaea, with my massive tent set up in Dava Wood.  I had big plans for the weekend, aimed at jump-starting my magical career* in preparation for the re-Dedication I intended to perform at some point over the summer, and we were partying with the KU Cauldron.  It’s tempting to break this into three different stories which coincidentally took place over the course of a single evening, but … I’m not so sure that they’re unrelated.

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In witchcraft

Urban Dionysia

Author Satyr MagosPosted on

The Facebook group Prayers to the Gods of Hellas informs me that the Urban Dionysia began at sundown last night, and will continue for the next eight days .  The Attic title was Διονύσια τὰ ἐν Ἄστει (Dionusia ta en Astei: lit. “The In City Dionusia”) or Διονύσια τὰ Μεγάλα (Dionusia ta Megala: lit. “Dionusia the Big”).  The Wikipedia article can be found here.

It is both interesting and appropriate that Sannafrid and I (unknowingly) chose to spend last night smoking and drinking, while I read aloud from my copy of the Homeric Hymns.  First the Hymns to Aphrodite, as we had been discussing goddesses of fucking, and then the Hymns to Dionysus.  As the evening went on, I colored an iconographic image of the god I have been working on off-and-on for some time.  This afternoon, shortly before penning this post, I poured a libation of mead before the idol on my altar.

It is further interesting that, although we are shifting from Greek drama to Roman in my Greek and Roman Drama class, I have spent the afternoon reading* Euripides Hippolytus in anticipation of reading Phaedra, Seneca’s version of the story, next week.  Hippolytus was first performed in 428 BCE, and—like all the Attic dramas which have survived—was a winner of the theatre competitions which were a major part of the festival.

Unfortunately, I do not have the liberty to take eight days off in honor of Dionysos—or even to get ploughed for the next seven nights in his name (and “sacrifice my liver”, as Sannafrid put it).  Besides, the original was a state-sponsored festival which (to a casual but cynical reader, at least) looks like it was intended to duplicate, tame, and profit off of the older, Rural, Dionysia … and the Cults of the Olympians are not state-sponsored religion anymore.

What I can do is make a point of taking an hour or two out of each of the next seven days to meditating on the Bacchic One and upon my relationship with him, finishing the one devotional image I have so far, finishing reading Written in Wine (the devotional anthology Aradia gave me so long ago), and working on translating the Homeric hymn I never got to over Spring Break because the Hymn to Phanes took me so long.  Hopefully, between these various things, I may develop some sense of how I might celebrate this festival (and the Rural, in the winter) within my own cultural frame work and (still infantile) devotional practice.

image

* I have read Hippolytus before, of course, for last semester’s mythology class.  The roles of the goddesses Aphrodite and Artemis are too prominent to pass up.  I could write a whole post about that play alone.  Possibly several: one tackling the theme of hubris and failure to treat the altars of the gods; one dealing with Euripides treatment of women in general, and another on the misogyny of Hippolytus in particular.  But those are rants for another day.

In witchcraft

Hod Altar—or, Seething on the Bench

Author Satyr MagosPosted on

I disassembled my Yesod Altar last night and built up an altar representing the powers of Mercury in Hod.  This, of course, is a part of my ongoing studies in Western Ceremonialism.

IMG_5151

I chose last night to do it, in part, because I wanted to upgrade the talisman I’ve been using to help with my studies in Ancient Greek.

Then I remembered (again) that Mercury is still retrograde, and that not only is any magic a bad idea, but that Mercurial magic specifically directed at communication was an exceptionally bad idea.

The results from my last experiment were less than ideal.   To say I haven’t slept right since would be an exaggeration, and imply a causal connection that is probably better attributed to a combination of  school-stress and the manic side of SAD exacerbated by unseasonable weather.  In this wake of this, a friend pointed out that perhaps Mercury Retrograde and the Vernal Equinox (the former in general and the combination in particular) were not the best time to be fucking with shit if I didn’t want to break my brain (again).  I decided he was right, and have pretty much set aside all my experiments in favor of some basic aura maintenance and Yoga.  This is probably the best decision I could make, because I really do feel a lot better after another rest.

But I’m starting to get antsy.  That’s, again, at least party the unseasonable weather and the inevitable energy burst of spring.  But I’m hot to get back into the magic.  This isn’t βούλομαι—a rational wish or desire.  This is ἐπιθυμεω (longing desire) bordering on ἐραω (love+lust).

I have always been drawn to magic; the more I do it, the more I lust after it.

I cant wait for Mercury to turn direct so I can get back to work.

In witchcraft

Magical Self-Care IV

Author Satyr MagosPosted on

I’ve told the story of how I broke my brain and then spent a year or so hiding in the basement.  To say that I quit practicing magic altogether is an exaggeration, but these two meditations made up 90% of my practice at that time.  It is to these meditations and that period of seclusion that I attribute my current sanity (such as it is … if that gives you any idea of how crazy I was before hand).

The first exercise, obviously, is rooted in the near-ubiquitous seven-chakra system I was originally trained in.  It is not of my own design, but I can’t find my original source—perhaps it’s back with the library in Kansas City—or anything similar on the web.  It should be easy to adapt to whatever shape you’ve worked your aura into.  The second is of my own design.  Suffice to say, I was once obsessed with energetic balance in the form of the Yin-Yang.  Still, it was very useful.

Fountain of Light Chakra Meditation

Find somewhere quiet, preferably in front of your altar.  Light incense, put on music—do whatever it is what you do.  Sit comfortably with your back straight.

Reach down into the Earth, as far as you can.  Open your Root chakra and let energy flow up into it.  Feel it energize, swirling, building.  The traditional color of the Root Chakra is red, and I found it helpful to concentrate on that color.  Feel yourself grounded, steady, and rooted.

When you’re ready, let the energy flow up from your Root into your Sacral Center.  Feel it energize, swirling, building, orange light.  Feel yourself swell with vigor, love, and lust for life … and maybe outright lust. 

The light and energy rises further, to the One Point at your solar plexus.  Feel it energize, swirling, building, yellow light.  Feel your body: feel its strength and precision, your capacity for movement.

The light rises further, to your Heart Center.  Feel it energize, swirling, building, green light of primal life.  Feel your heart and lungs, feel the blood and breath of life moving through your body.

The light rises further, to your Throat Chakra.  Feel it energize, swirling, building, blue light.  Feel your voice, your  spiritual connection to the world around you.

The light continues to rise to your Third Eye.  Feel it energize, swirling, building, violet light.  Your Astral Sight grows sharper.

The light reaches your Crown.  Feel it energize, swirling, building, and finally pouring out of you and back down into the earth in a fountain of brilliant white light.  Your whole body buzzes with power.  As the light flows out of your crown, you continue to draw it up from the earth, through each of your chakras, and out of your crown.

Allow the energy, the light, the power to continue cycling through you until you feel clear and bright.

Break the cycle at your Root, and allow the excess energy to drain off.

image

Yin-Yang Power Meditation

Sit somewhere comfortable where you are unlikely to be interrupted.  Visualize yourself floating in a void. 

In the void below you, visualize a large Yin-Yang disk floating perpendicular to the axis of your spine.  Set it to rotating clockwise, and let its power rise up to fill you, then overflow upwards into infinity.

When you are ready, visualize another Yin-Yang disk floating above you, parallel to the first.  Set it rotating counterclockwise and feel its power flowing into you, parallel to the stream from the first, and down into infinity.

Let the perfectly balanced energy fill you to the brim, as much as you can take.  When you are ready, slow the rotation of both disks simultaneously, letting the energy flow taper off slowly until you are grounded and centered.