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In witchcraft

My Web of Influence and Fortune

Author Satyr MagosPosted on

One hesitates to speak of good fortune – it’s taboo. One is simultaneously afraid of being named a braggart, and of having one’s luck evaporate.  Be that as it may: I have long lived a charmed life.  Being in the right place at the right time is pretty much my story.  I have achieved this (inasmuch as it is an achievement, rather than a blessing) through two things: listening to my instincts, and my web of influence.

Growing up in Lawrence, I walked everywhere.  As a young magician (though that word implies more intention and structure than I ever had going on), I practiced magic everywhere I walked – spinning webs, lobbing energy spheres, or even just playing around with subtle trance states.  Over time – years, literally – I became increasingly attuned to those places where I spent the most time.  If something interesting was going on somewhere I frequented – I knew, and I would show up just in time. 

This was before the days of cell phones: if you wanted to meet someone somewhere, you had to call them in advance and hope they happened to be around, or make use of a pay phone (if there was one) when you got there.  My magical friends – Kat, Lyra, James … I use your real names here in the hope that you recognize these stories and contact me – rarely had to call me.  They would just show up, and there I would be.  Thirty minutes later, if I wasn’t waiting for them when they arrived. 

I came to call this knowledge of time and place my Web, and anchored it to a number of tools that lived on my altar (my Orb, in particular, if you recall it from the Story of Tsu).  When I wanted or needed something, I fed that need into the web – no ritual, no ceremony, just focus – and it usually manifested sooner rather than later.  When I moved out of my parents’ house into my first apartment, I moved it with me.  I moved it again and again, as I moved around Lawrence.

When I moved to St. Louis, it was a little more complicated.  For one thing, the move was so frantic that I forgot to take down the house wards before I left.  For another, I was homeless for the first ten weeks – it’s hard to set up a power-center while living out of your car and sleeping on your buddy’s couch.  (Not saying that it can’t be done: I’m sure many of you out there are up to the task.  But it was very hard for me.)  When I finally got my apartment, I still had to make another three or four trips back to KC to get my things, including key components of my altar.  Nor was my life in St.L ever really stable: unemployment, temp jobs, and the batshit crazy jewelers I worked for there; friendships falling apart, an ill-chosen romance, and isolation. 

Still, I did my best: laying down lines of power as I searched for jobs, marking trails as I did what partying I could.  As wrong as so many things went, they still went very well in many regards.  I had my choice of lovers, though I can’t say I made the best choices.  I never went hungry or got into any real trouble.  Despite my initial successes, it took about a year before things really started moving in my favor … and by that time it was too late.  Too many things had already down the shitter.  That said, I got out of my lease without a problem and found a safe place to land.

Kansas City – where I landed – was a little easier: being closer to Lawrence, where too much of my energy was still invested, things didn’t have quite so far to stretch.  I had an easier time getting jobs, making friends, and even started going to school.  All of which made it easier to lay down roots and get more of the same.  Again, though, it took about a year for things to really get rolling – for last-minute decisions and gut-felt impulses to star putting me where I needed to be; to get that feeling of “I need to be a Missie’s tonight”.  It was a series of fairly wild coincidences led Aradia and I to being in the same place and time at the right moments – little, if anything, in my life has turned out quite that well.

Now that I’ve moved again, it’s time to build a new annex to my web.  Hopefully, between my more sophisticated witchcraft, my more focused intention, and my larval ceremonial practice, it won’t take a whole year to get the web established.  I’ve already started the process.  I’m making interesting friends.  Let’s see how it goes, shall we?

In witchcraft

Earth and Water, Flesh and Blood

Author Satyr MagosPosted on

I have been here in Sunrise, IN for almost three weeks now.  For all that it doesn’t look any different from the places I come from, the landscape still feels alien to me.  I don’t quite belong here, yet.

Originally, I intended to bond with the land slowly – as naturally and organically as possible.  The problem with that approach, though, is that I won’t belong here until I have bonded to the land.  I won’t feel safe.  Not at school or in town or anywhere but in the power-center I’ve set up in my apartment.  That realization came to me slowly, over the course of the last week.  So I set about planning how to spin my web here more deliberately.

Last night the sky was full of heat-lightning.  The moon was waxing and gibbous; it was the hour of Mars.  There was a school “rave” party scheduled on the lawn, and a thunderstorm rolling slowly in.  I did Earth Breathing as I walked from my apartment to the center of campus, where I cast a circle in the great open lawn and called upon the Elements and the Quarters to make me a part of the land and it a part of me, “so long as I am relevant to the school” (which, as a college student, is as long as I am either a student and/or contributing alum).  I released the circle, promptly made friends with a bunch of potheads, and later attracted the attention of the first serious-seeming witch I’ve yet to meet on campus.

Once the power-high wore off, I slept well and deeply and had vivid, school-related dreams.

This morning, I continued my practice of Earth Breathing on the way to and around the school, cementing and deepening the bond.  I already feel more like I belong here.  I’m more comfortable, more focused.  I will now be better able to do the work I came here to do.

In witchcraft

There’s No Way To Tell This Story Without Looking Like a Moron or Possibly a Lunatic

Author Satyr MagosPosted on

For almost two years now, I’ve been working closely with a spirit I call Tsu (as in “A Boy Named ~”).  You’ve seen her mentioned here once or twice.  Only in passing, though, because she’s something of a long story.  You see … I think I may have made her.

The story actually begins back in high school.  Yeah.  I don’t know how many of you out there started practicing magic that young; but I know that those of you who did probably have your own set of “what the fuck was I thinking” stories, too.  Some of them might even start the same way: Like most young dabblers in the arts of magic, I suffered a certain paranoia.  I didn’t necessarily think that anyone or anything in particular was out to get me.  But they might be!  If not today, than some day! 

Like drawing and writing, I have a natural talent for shielding and warding, but that wasn’t enough for me.  I wanted to be sure that I was safe.  So I made myself a bindrune (a sigil, if you will), took a secret Name, and – I have no idea where this part come from – hid a piece of my soul inside a stone.  This might have actually been the beginning of some interesting Work, if I’d had any idea what to do with it.  But, again, I was young and dumb and (even more so than today) unclear on the benefits of the whole “Keep Silent” thing.

The stone – I called it my “Orb” (keep in mind, I was seventeen) – quickly became more of a liability than a boon.  So I took the Work I’d done with the stone and moved it from the half-inch bloodstone sphere I’d started with to something no one would threaten to swallow, and which couldn’t be quite so easily misplaced: a gray granite sphere.  Not long after, the Work somehow moved again – at the time I blamed an unknown wandering trickster spirit; in retrospect, I’m still not really sure what happened – from the granite to an obsidian sphere I had brought with me to show off. 

If I’d been a more clever lad, I’d have ended the experiment then and there.  In my mind at the time, though, Name, rune, and stone were linked and, having been made, could not be unmade.  Besides, everything else had gone so smashingly!  What else could go wrong?

For the next several years, the Orb – in its final incarnation as the obsidian sphere – was the centerpiece of all my magical work.  I used it to raise power; I used it to ground and ccenter; I brought it with me to every spell and ritual I participated in, and sometimes carried it around just because.

I think I was twenty-two when I decided I needed to retrieve that sliver of soul from the Orb, and unbound it with a spontaneous bloodletting at a pubic Beltane ritual.  (Of course that went over well – why do you ask?)  A year or two later, I decided it was time to put it back.  Only to reclaim the hidden fragment again, after another year or two.

Meanwhile and even after the final retrieval, the obsidian sphere remained a central part of my magical practice.  in particular, I used it to ground and purify my excess energy after rituals, and as a place to release and launder my unwanted rage and lust and whathaveyou.  I fed the energy in as a thread, winding it tighter and tighter.  There really seemed to be no end to the amount of power the obsidian sphere could store. 

Fast forward a few more years to my working group in Kansas City.  whether or not you could touch the Orb had become a somewhat juvenile test of how badass a magician or witch I met was.  Some people began to report that they could feel it watching them.  Then, one day, something inside the sphere “woke up” and started talking to us. 

It particularly liked to come out when the working group was over and discussing magic.  Of course I started talking to it; it seemed like the polite thing to do.  It helped me with the elemental and visionary work I was practicing at the time.  When I underwent my initiation, it asked that I give it a name.  So I did – Tsu is the abbreviated version.  It started complaining about the flavor of energy I was dumping into the sphere – which did and does remain one of my favorite tools – so I gave it a home in a tchotchke … a medusa statue I got on special when I purchased my Dionysos idol.

At which point things got even a little stranger.  Previously, Tsu had been amorphous: formless, or a vague humanoid shimmer, or (once, when it followed me to work at the mall) appearing in the form of a small Chinese dragon.  (Why, yes: sometimes, though not often, I do actually see spirits.)  Once housed in the medusa statue, “it” took the form of “she” and has appeared as the gorgon ever since.  She has taken up residence in my Inner Temple / House of Memory, and served as a guide on several occasions.  She disappears from time to time; most notably she was largely absent from HPF until very recently, when she asked me to make her a sigil/seal. 

So, of course, I did.

Although I occasionally refer to her as a guide, she says she technically isn’t one – or, more accurately, that she wasn’t at the time I asked. When I asked if she were my HGA she straight up laughed at me.

I tell you this story now, somewhat apprehensive.  Several witches to whom I’ve spoken seemed outright frightened by the story.  Others have merely been puzzled.  Neither reaction has been particularly helpful to me.

Did I make Tsu?  Do spirits often come into being spontaneously in crystals used as batteries?  Did some strange spirit leave her there, in some larval state, to feed and grow?  Am I just batshit crazy?  Seriously: What?  The?  Fuck?

In witchcraft

Pentagram Ward

Author Satyr MagosPosted on

Warding circles are used to define and protect a space for a variety of reasons. Witches and magicians use them to protect our homes from unfriendly spirits and mortals. We also use them to define and preserve our ritual areas between formal rites.

The pentagram ward is the rite I found, so long ago, misrepresented as the Lesser Banishing of the Pentagram. They are admittedly similar, but the Lesser Banishing is a ceremonial rite, requiring a ceremonial magician’s tools and formal incantations.  My pentagram ward is somewhat simpler.

The pentagram – with or without a circle around it – is a symbol of elemental power, representing the microsm. Earth, Air, Fire, Water, and Spirit. A ward drawn with such a glyph draws power both from the idea of the pentagram and from the elemental energies of the physical and astral planes.

A warding circle begins, as do all rites, with grounding and centering. Breathe.

Face forward and focus your will. Using one’s tool of choice – knife, wand, sword, hand, eye – draw a pentacle in the air in front of you; fill it with enough power that it glows before your eyes and stays where you put it.

Focus your will on the rightmost point of that pentacle in the air and turn 90 degrees to your right, drawing a quarter-circle line as you go. At the edge of the line you have just drawn, cut another pentacle in the air and fill it with your will as you did the first.

Repeat this process twice more, drawing a total of four pentacles in the air, one in each of the four directions: before, right, behind, and left. The left circle being charged, complete the greater circle with a final quarter-turn. Feel the circle snap closed, feel it fill with power.

Your ward is complete.  It’s simple.  Magicians might even scoff.  But it does the trick under most circumstances, and it makes an excellent framework upon which to hang more sophisticated protections.

In witchcraft

Inner Temple

Author Satyr MagosPosted on

I have long called this technique the “House of Memory”. Some call it the Inner Temple. Some build a palace, others a city, still others a cave. Although I call it a house, mine is in fact a castle. Many of my friends have built or found glades, mountains, and forests in the weird recesses of their minds.  As I speak to more and more witches in my life, I have come to understand that what I once thought was a a unique exercise in visualization, projection, and memory (possibly of my own invention) is, in fact, something that many of us have done deliberately, unconsciously, or even in a previous life.  Despite – or perhaps because of – this intuitive prevalence, I find little mention of this technique in books or even on the internet.

Some of my readers, I’m sure, have been long familiar with this and similar techniques.  If you’ve built one already, what do you use it for?

Finding or Creating a House of Memory

Begin by entering a meditative trance: relax the body, relax the mind, and drift off into the Void (or the astral or wherever it is you go when you trance). Once in a trance-state, focus on a room. From the floor to the ceiling, make it around yourself… as if you were looking at it through your own eyes, actually standing inside the room. It is best to make it simple, so that it is easier to visualize it as the same every time. Build every aspect of that room; be sure to include a door, if you are going to have more rooms than the first. Make every important detail… in fact, every detail you can cram into the visualization… paradoxically, remember to keep it simple so that you can recall it exactly as it was. If there are bookshelves, include them.  Keep them empty for now, you can add to them later.

Once you have completed building your first room, look at it. Walk around inside the room, observing and trying to memorize every detail. The texture, the smell, the color – maybe even the taste.  Don’t be worried if you don’t get it quite the same every time, that’s natural; there will be some parts, quite likely, that will be different every time you’re there. Once you have the room solidly in your memory, leave (preferably by the door, if there is one) it helps maintain the “reality” of the construct.

Come back. After a while—a few hours, a day or two, even a week—come back to your house of memory, trying to rebuild it in your head as accurately as you can. Simply the act of rebuilding it will stretch your “mental muscles” and improve your memory as well as your skill at visualization. Repeat this step until you are confidant in your ability to recreate—or, rather, return to—the room each time.

If you are planning on adding further rooms or areas to your House of Memory, begin doing so now, before the “permanence” is too well established.  Depending on your personality, a certain amount of transience can be good.

Begin filling your house of memory. However you wish to file the information is up to you… some use scraps of paper in bottles. I use books. One might wish to create a filing cabinet or indexing system of some sort.

Return to your house of memory often.

Maintain it… simply sit and think (meditating upon the house, then sitting down inside and meditating there is a method of reaching deep levels of relaxation and meditation), file information… dust the shelves. Without putting effort into the House, it will eventually fade out.

Through this construct, which exists in both our own minds and as a place in the astral realms, we develop the foundational skills needed for more complex visualizations, for astral projections, and for shamanic journeys. Further, we can, with practice, bring others to our Houses of Memory or seek our theirs in dreams and journeys.

The House of Memory is a real place in the more subtle corners of reality, and rituals performed here can be as effective as those performed in material reality.

Practitioners inclined to visionary work, underworld journeys, and the like can use the house of memory as an Inner Temple – a place to connect with the divine, to meet guides and powers, and as a starting point for exploration of the inner worlds.  Teachers can bring their students to their own inner spaces to help instruct them.  There are probably uses for the house of memory / inner temple that I have never imagined.

In witchcraft

August Dark Moon Esbat

Author Satyr MagosPosted on

Two weeks ago, Aradia and my mother helped me lay the foundations of my house-wards.  Since then, though, my dreams have been more troubled than my waking life, alone, can account for.  I’m accustomed to living in a tightly Warded space, and although the neighborhood is quiet … it’s not that quiet.  Besides, I’ve been performing the Qabalistic cross daily for the entire interim: I was ready for a badass ritual, and I needed to prepare the space for rituals to come.

I began with a shower – a ritual cleansing that I often forgo.  I cleansed the space with a blend of sage, lavender, and kava – not my usual mix, but it was what I had on hand.  I called up an elemental circle, asking the powers, creatures, and beings of the quarters to guard my space so long as I abide there.  I charged a bottle of Dark Moon water to mix with my flying potion, and for whatever other uses I can find in the next month.  I made sacrifices to my household gods and spirits – mead for Dionysos and for the Nameless Ones; absinthe for the Nameless Ones, my journey-mask, and Tsu. 

Drawing on the theories of Frater Barrabbas, I opened a vortex within my initial circle and raised a cone of power as well.  With that power I turned to my oldest, but in some ways best, tricks: my Pentagram Ward, a structure upon which I will build more sophisticated wards and protection spells.  My power raised and protections in place, I could do what I’ve been putting off to long.  Doning my mask and downing my flying potion, I returned to the Underworld.

The world tree took me down to my Inner Temple, where Tsu, one of the spirits I work, with was waiting.  She pointed me toward a portal, and I followed.  Interestingly, the portal led first to campus, where I found another portal that led me into a void where I found the Leopard of Dionysos.  I was relieved to see her – I’ve been lax in my practice for a while, and I was afraid my allies had deserted me – but she reassured me that he was unconcerned by my absence; Rhea, on the other hand, was waiting for me.

I descended to a grassy plain I’d seen before, and went deeper into the Underworld via the Temple of Rhea I had seen before, during my initiation.  Dionysos appeared briefly – a translucent image, but still a presence – and I descended further.  I found the Magna Mater in a vast cavern, gargantuan and reclining as before.  I abased myself and apologized for not delivering Pasiphae to her before I left Kansas City.  A realization came to me suddenly: “This is all for my benefit, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” she conceded, and pointed me to a tunnel leading down.

That tunnel, in turn, led to oceanic depths I had encountered before, most recently while exploring the Elemental Realm of Water.  It occurred to me that perhaps the Power I had encountered here had not been knocking me around for her own amusement, but that perhaps there had been a purpose.  I swam in the direction she had thrown me and discovered a passage leading up.

That passage led me to more familiar territories, the caverns beneath a ziggurat I had “discovered” in my earliest spirit-journeys.  Reaching light at the top of the zigurat, I encountered a spirit I had almost forgotten – a winged stone serpent placed atop that temple, whose nature I have never determined.  After a brief, silent communion with him, I was returned to the heart of my Inner Temple.

I concluded my journey with a brief but fruitful conversation with Tsu, and returned to my body to put a lid on the vortex and close the circles.

In scholarship, witchcraft

My Unruly Mind

Author Satyr MagosPosted on

This afternoon I was working on my Greek homework.  In particular, on memorizing the alphabet.  To aid with this, I turned to my Tower of Memory*, pulling one of the many blank books from the shelves.  I placed the book on the table, pulled as pen from the air, and opened the cover to the first page.  Or tried to anyway.  The book refused to cooperate, pages flapping until it was open to the middle.
I tried putting the book back on the shelf and starting over.  I tried leaving my trance state, casting a circle, and entering a deeper trance.  I could feel the pebbled texture of the cover, smell the leather and paper. Still, the book insisted on opening to the the middle.  One of the spirits I work with was there the whole time, laughing at me.

It’s been some time since I started a new “book” in my Tower of Memory.  As I think on it, though, I’ve had this problem before.  I’m better at visualization now than I’ve ever been, but there are still times when my mind refuses to cooperate with me. 

I know that my visualization needs work.  I have had enough experiences where my body and the mortal world were simply gone to know that I am capable of full, six-senses visionary work.  (Though I also know that this is simply not going to happen every time no matter how good I get.)  But I also know that the mind and the Otherworlds have rules (largely unwritten, which is part of why I keep this blog: in the hopes that someone else will be aided by my fumbling experiences) different from those of the mortal world.  Which, of course, beg question: is this a failing on my part, or something about the nature of this particular visionary technique that I don’t know?

* In his Temple of High Witchcraft, Christopher Penczak talks about using a portion of the Inner Temple as a “Tower of Memory”. This, of course, is not a new idea by any stretch of the imagination. It’s not even new to me: I’ve been using both techniques for as long as I’ve practiced magic. I couldn’t even begin to cite my original sources, cribbed as they were from message boards and FTP sites back in the Cretaceous Period of the Internet, when HTTP was shiny and new, everyone’s homepage was on lysator, and geocities hadn’t happened yet. (I mention these things first, so that if you haven’t heard of the technique you can go look it up; and second, to re-establish that Penczak is not my first or only source by any stretch of the imagination, just one I’ve been drawing on recently.)

If I can’t find a good link on the subject in the next few days, I’ll post an instructional write-up of my own.  It’s strange that, though I’ve been working with these techniques since I was sixteen years old, I still don’t feel confident to impart them to others.

ETA:

A basic instruction for creating the Inner Temple in the first place: http://www.plotinus.com/exercise_temple_of_light_copy%281%29.htm

A non-occult conceptualization of the Palace of Memory: http://litemind.com/memory-palace/

These are adequate, but I think, however, that I will still refine my decade-plus-old write-up of the Inner Temple and House of Memory. 

In witchcraft

The Concerns of Being a Man-Witch

Author Satyr MagosPosted on

It bothers me, sometimes: being a man (however queer) with aspirations to leadership in the NeoPagan community. 

Witchcraft is supposed to be Womyn’s Religion. We honor a Goddess before a God, exalt the role of the High Priestess, assert that the “feminine principle” is the dominant power on the inner planes.  And yet … too often our leaders and teachers are men.  Gerald Gardner.  Alex Sanders.  Raymond Buckland.  Carlos Castaneda and Michael Harner.  Raven Grimmassi, Ed Fitch, Oberon Zell.  There are great women, too, of course: Doreen Valiente, Margot Adler and Starhawk and Z Budapest.  But what does it say that I – a man who once called himself Scholar Mage, who has read as many histories of witchcraft as how-too manuals – can think of so few ladies who had as much influence on modern NeoPagan witchcraft as these.

(I’ll leave alone entirely, for the moment, the overwhelming preponderance of gentlemen over ladyfolk in ceremonial magick which has been so influentialon the NeoPagan movement as a whole.  I’ll also leave for another time the discussion of such inseparable couples as  Gavin and Yvonne Frost, or Janet and Stewart Farrar, and the erasure of Rosemary Buckland and so many other influential wives and partners.)

To make matters worse, when we think of the grand disasters, whose are the names that come to mind most readily?  Amber K, Edain McCoy, Silver Ravenwolf.  Really, what makes Ravenwolf (whose work I won’t touch) so much worse than Penczak (whose work I’m embarrassed about, but make extensive use of)?

Witchcraft is supposed to be Womyn’s Religion.  So where are the women?  That’s a silly question: of the groups I’ve worked with, women made up a little more than half their number; of the solitaries I’ve known, women made a solid 2/3 majority (leaving Heathens and Not Wiccan Damnits out of the count for the sake of this discussion).  Instead I should ask: where are the women leaders?  The lady-writers reshaping the movement with their brilliance?

There’s a part of me that wants to cop out and take an easy answer: the good ones are at home, leading covens – too busy with the real Work to publish self-aggrandizing through publishing.  But Deborah Lipp (brilliant and under recognized, at least in the circles I run in) manages both; that’s part of what being brilliant is about.  An even easier answer is that they’re squeezed out by a sexist publishing industry that’s too afraid of risk to print anything but another idiot Witchcraft 101 – With a Twist!  This feels closer to the truth, at least.  Maybe a portion of the truth, a part of the problem.

But I wonder sometimes … if I’m not part of the problem, too.  Not me, personally (I hope), but man-witches in general – still struggling (or not) to escape the patriarchal paradigm that privileges our worst ideas over any woman’s most brilliant.  If the preponderance of male writers and leaders is a passive (or active) force keeping women out of the public sphere in this community, even as it is in the mainstream world.

What, then, is my role as a male witch?  How can I serve the community that has sheltered me?  How do I pass on the knowledge I’ve acquired after a decade and a half of struggling with Mysteries and a sea of mediocre books (spotted rarely with islands of genius)?  How do I create the small, intimate, power magical community – the coven, ideally, or temple failing that – that I can’t seem to find ready-made?  How can I do these things without furthering the problem?

In scholarship, witchcraft

At the Gate of a Labyrinth

Author Satyr MagosPosted on

After a five-day ordeal called New Student Orientation, I am officially matriculating.  There  My first class, appropriately, was Ancient Greek.  But I’ll talk about all that later.  Right now, I have a decision to make.  I want to work in the art-metals department to help pay for school … which is leaving me with a dilemma.

There aren’t any work-study openings left.  The head of the department didn’t come right out at say it, but it was made clear to me that they all go to his seniors.  There are, however, openings in his advanced metalworking class.  Two problems: that costs money, and I’m already taking a full course load.  He’s willing to work with me, though, so I have three options: to take the course (and with it the full additional cost and workload), to work as a TA under him (and work out the cost on an ad-hoc basis), or to leave my course load alone.

Being a magician, I of course consulted the Tarot – my Crowley-Harris Thoth deck, to be specific; I’ve been using it for my daily readings and carrying it around with me rather like a child with a favorite blanket.  I did a modified version of the Decision Game (Banzhaf and Theler, pp 44-45) spread for three options instead of two.

My results are as follows:

The significator is the Queen of Swords – I’m struggling to impose rational order on what might be a fundamentally emotional decision.

The first path – to take the course – procedes from [XV the Devil] to [10 Wwands “Oppression”] to [VII the Chariot].  In some ways, the Devil aspect of this is easy to see: the temptation of the fire, metal, and hammers calls strongly to me; the temptation to do something I already know I’m good at, to keep my hand in; to make every penny of my tuition count.  The generative aspects seem more metaphorical, but one can never be quite sure.  Looking at the 10W, I was initially confused.  After closer examination, however, I feel that it is simply stating the obvious: that I will be overworked, pushing the limits of my time and energy.  That it will end in the Chariot is most interesting: that the class will give me the opportunity to move forward in some meaningful and powerful way.

The second path – to take the TA position – is more clear.  [XI Lust] leads to [XII the Hanged Man] and ends in [9 Swords “Cruelty”].  This is probably not the way to go.  But then, half-measures rarely are.

The final path – to skip it and leave my course load as is – begins with [2 Wands “Dominion”] and leads through [the Knight of Wands] to [the Queen of Wands].  The 2W gives me pause, as Banzhaf talks a lot about risk-taking in relationship to this card; this seems strange to me as this is the path of not taking the risk.  The Knight of Wands is more clear: this is the direct path, the road of staying focused and on target.  The Queen of Wands seems to promise leadership opportunities at the end, and perhaps other opportunities as well that I can’t foresee.  It is also interesting to me that here, on the “stick to the books” path, is where I find the most fire cards.

One rarely expects clear answers from the Tarot, but rarely have I gotten answers quite so ambiguous.

In witchcraft

Q-Crossed

Author Satyr MagosPosted on

As a part of my burgeoning studies in ceremonial magic, I have now performed the Qabalistic Cross ritual every morning for the last three days.  I can already feel it making changes to my aura: my crown chakra is rising, my root is descending, and the two stars at my shoulders are becoming semi-permanent fixtures.  I had not anticipated these precise changes, but they seem to confirm a theory of mine: I don’t believe that the human aura has pre-configured centers of power.  I think that those nexi and meridians are formed as mystics, witches, and magicians work magic – particularly the internal kind.

When I was taking Aikido in high school, and first establishing my magical practice, I read a great deal about chakras, but the only ones I could actually feel were my Third Eye, my One Point – very important to Aikido practice, to the exclusion of all others – and my Root.  Of them all, though, only my Third Eye was where I expected it to be.  My One Point and Root were both low.  The One Point only a little bit, too close to my genitals; but my Root seemed to hover somewhere below my feet unless I sat cross-legged. 

It was only after years (and years, and years) of pointed practice that I could detect the others, and they always faded quickly when my practice lapsed.  I can still feel them in my aura now, of course: although my practice has not been as regular as I might like, lately, I’m still very near the top of my game.  But as I begin this very different regimen of ritual and meditation, I can alread feel them mutating.

Which leads me to wonder (more.  Again.) what the purpose of the Qabalistic Cross ritual is.  The resources I can find that talk about the why suggest that it is primarily about centering, both in the sense of ground-and-center and in the larger sense of realizing one’s position as the center of one’s own universe (the King of the Kingdom Malkuth, the Keeper of the Garden).  But it seems to me that it’s doing more than that. 

Is it to begin making the changes to the aura that will be furthered by the Circulation of the Body of Light, the LBRP, and all the rest?  is it, as Rufus Opus has suggested of the LBRP, to “season” one appropriately to be devoured by the Secret Chiefs?  The answer, I suppose, is the same as always: more research, and more practice, are required.