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In scholarship, witchcraft

A Brief, Rambling Argument For a Polytheist Universe

Author Satyr MagosPosted on

A religious scholar by the name of Stephen Prothero has recently put out a book denouncing the idea that “all gods are one God” and that “all religions are fundamentally the same”. I have not yet had the chance to read the book, but I have read the Boston Globe article he wrote which reiterates his thesis. There are problems with his thought process – not the least of which being that he seems to have limited his study to the post-Christian world – but we’ll leave those aside for the moment. What I’m really interested in is how this idea relates to neo-Pagan thea/ology

I do, incidentally, believe that the whole of the universe – energy, matter, humanity, life, non-life, divinity, ALL OF IT – are made up of the same basic stuff, and can be reduced to that sole common denominator. We are all, on a macro-cosmic level, One. Physics has codified this idea more clearly than mystics: E=mc^2, matter and energy are the same and can be converted back and forth between states. But let us not forget the equally important and true Law of Correspondence: “As above, so below. As below, so above.”

The material world is full of mind-boggling diversity. We have plants, animals, bacteria, all with radically different biological functions and reproductive strategies. We have minerals, gasses, and organic compounds, all of which are put together by the same sub-atomic forces, but which combine and interact in radically different and inconflatable ways.

Let’s do a little thought exercise.

All organic compounds include carbon. So do many gasses, actually. But what else is made of carbon? Let’s take diamonds and graphite: two allotropes of carbon. Both are made up of the same pure C2 molecule, but arranged in completely different ways: flat sheets of molecular carbon appear to us as a fine grey-black powder that we use as an electrical conductor or to make pencil “lead”; arranged in a particular lattice, by heat, pressure, and time, however, the same carbon molecules become a diamond.

Diamonds and graphite are made from pure carbon but are in NO WAY the same.

This is why, as a hard polytheist, I do not conflate “gods” or “the Divine” with “the Absolute”.

You and I, organic life forms that we are, are made up of a great deal of carbon. Are we made of diamonds? Pencil lead? No. That assertion is absurd.

This line of reasoning is directly contrary to (some) Wiccan and other New Age assertions, that all gods and goddesses are really masks of the Great God and the Great Goddess, facets of them.

Myself, I would argue the reverse: that the gods and spirits and people and plants and minerals and gasses and sub-atomic particles of the world are made up of bits and pieces that abstract Absolute. Or that, perhaps, the Absolute is made up of us. But this is NOT saying that we are, in fact, fundamentally the same.

All gods and goddesses and spirits and ghosts and souls and Powers are not One God. To say that they are is akin to saying that all straight men and straight women and intersexed folk and genderqueers of any sex and gay men and lesbian women and white people and black people and yellow people and brown people and red people and purple people are All One Straight White Guy Living in the Suburbs Outside Topeka.

Correspondences are relationships, not equivalencies.

In art, witchcraft

Art as Magic

Author Satyr MagosPosted on

Early this month Aradia and I went to a lovely Kansas City event Known as First Friday. We looked at lots and lots of awesome art, although a great deal of it was not something anyone would actually want in their living room. Onesuch piece – which I would, in fact, not let within 100 feet of my home, no mater how gorgeous it was – also tied in with the evening’s other topic of conversation: using art to work magic.

The particular piece in question was an image of a woman. It was a blue figure on a black field, curled up in the corner of the frame. The frame itself was exaggerated, coming two or three inches from the canvas toward the viewer. A half-dozen chains were stretched across the canvas, mounted to the inside of the frame.

“See,” I said, turning to Aradia. “You paint someone inside of that, and they’re FUCKED.”

“Yeah,” she agreed, aghast. “And so are you.”

“Well, yeah. You’re never going to get anything accomplished until you let them out.”

Anyone who is, themselves, an artist knows how much time, energy, and soul goes into the creation of a piece. You recover, learn, and grow … but you never actually get those parts of you back. Much like big magic.

I recently drew a warding-glyph to protect my car: mechanical pencil overlaid with Sharpee and colored pencil, set off with a little candle magic. I still need to trim and mount it, so it’s still in my altar, but the ward matrix is already laid over my car. You can see it.

A while ago, I drew a meditation on fire: a pencil sketch covered with lots and lots of colored pencils. Some people have trouble touching it.

The interesting thing to me about using art to create magic is the depth and complexity of the intent that can be conveyed through an image, and the amount of refining that you can do over the course of the process. Layers upon layers upon layers of color and focus and power.

Has anyone out there ever tried this? Art as magic?

In witchcraft

Ascending Practices

Author Satyr MagosPosted on

I am living a more productive magical life now than I have since high school, when – haphazard as it was – I was practicing nearly every day. I was almost this consistent in St. Louis – the only thing that took up more of my tiny studio apartment than my altar was my writing desk – but I was by myself, and meditation and house wards only get you so far.

My friend Chirotus invited me to help him start a magical study group about eighteen months ago. The premise was that we, as experienced and competent magicians of wildly different schools of thought, could learn a great deal from each-other by starting back at the basics. We started meeting monthly, practicing aura viewings and energy awareness, elemental conjurations (one month for each element), spent a couple months on personal shielding, and are back to aura viewings. At Samhain we started celebrating the Sabbats together, and will have celebrated half the year come Beltane. We have recently started meeting twice a month.

2020 has been the year that I’ve finally started keeping comprehensive magical journals. I’m not quite up to every day or every exercise, but I’m getting there. The things this does for my clarity and recollection are astounding. Why did I think journaling was too dorky for words? Oh, right. I was 19.

Over the course of the last semester I’ve started doing yoga every week or two. If you’ve never done an hour of meditative breathing combined with moderately strenuous physical activity, allow me a moment to highly recommend it. Last year I was doing three traditional Western work-outs a week (45-65 minutes) combined with meditative breathing. I need to get back on that: never in my life had I felt better physically.

I’ve started a daily tarot practice over the last two months. I still need to write about my thirty days of Rider-Waite. I’m twenty days into the Crowley Thoth, and while it will never be my primary, I already know I’m going to need to put in a second thirty (at least) before I can move onto another deck. My most significant insight from this so far was best put by Aradia: “You think doing daily readings will change your life, but it won’t. You still have the kinds of day you’ve always had.”

Last Beltane, I performed a formal Dedication for the first time, and at Heartland Pagan Festival, I gave up the magical name I’ve been using since I was sixteen years old. I have, at last, chosen a new name, and this year at Heartland, I’ll finally undergo a rite of initiation.

My aura sight, my tarot reading, and my clairsentience are as clear as they have ever been. My energy work is almost as potent as I remember it being in high school, just before I gave myself the migraines, and it’s a hard to say that I don’t just know so much more now than I did then that I’m just judging myself on a much harsher scale: I’ve been on spiritual journeys that I could not have even imagined then.

I think these things may actually count as progress. Evolution. Maybe even ascension.

In witchcraft

Buffy the Vampire

Author Satyr MagosPosted on

For about ten years now I’ve known a woman – we’ll call her B, for the sake of the pun – who is a rare example of a real-life psychic vampire.

It was subtle, when I first met her. Most folks would just describe her as “needy”. At that time in my life, I had a lot of friends with whom I was fairly physically intimate – these were the heydays of the WPA, and the couches in the dormitory kitchen/lounge where we met were almost always filled well beyond capacity. We greeted each other and parted with warm hugs, and no one thought anything of it. But as more and more of the group got into and out of relationships, and just as we got a couple years older, B’s hugs started to change. It wasn’t that she touched anyone inappropriately (not back then, anyway), but when she touched you … you came back diminished. And if you wouldn’t let her touch you, she’d give you the kind of look a kicked puppy gives you: uncomprehending disappointment. After a few months, it got to where I, at least, didn’t feel safe touching anyone when she was around.

The group met twice monthly, and every meeting I came home feeling exhausted. This was a rough period in my life, and the WPA was my only social outlet. I thought that it was dealing with people, putting on a happy face and pretending that I wasn’t coming apart at the seams, that left me so drained. But we had a lot of turnover, that year, including picking up a few people who’d been around the block more than us, and for reasons that escape me now (hell, maybe I never even knew back then), B began to miss about every second or third meeting. And we started to realize that on days B wasn’t there, we all had more fun and still felt good at the end of the night. Those of us who had been practicing magic for years – the group was always a mix of newbies and (relatively) more experienced practitioners – got to where we could feel our energy pouring into her.

We started meeting at people’s homes over the summer, and several of us warded our homes against her. One couple did the classic freezer-binding; I had her, and the rest of the WPA, cast a circle around the house I was living in, then used her part in the circle-casting to teach the wards what they needed to keep a lid on. House-level wards were effective, but almost nothing short was. Strangely enough, it was almost impossible to get people to join the group.

We tried calling her on it, in our various immature ways. “B, your aura’s sticking to me again.” “Can I have my power back? I wasn’t done with it.” She pretended we were joking, but by the time I was setting things in motion to move to St. Louis, I was being more direct: “You’re draining me again. Stop it.” “I’m sorry, I didn’t even know I was doing it” “I know. That’s what makes it even worse.”

Then I moved to St. Louis, and left her in everyone else’s hands. Their town, their problem.

I heard stories occasionally, of course. She found a group to do full, formal circles with, and it was filling her to the brim with power. Mutual friends of mine and hers moved, and found sticky cobwebs of her power after they’d taken down all their own wards. People would learn to shield against her, and she’d ask third parties why so-and-so didn’t like her anymore. Once, when supposedly casting a circle of protection, she ate all the mana out of a wall. On several occasions she has made people sick as fuck. People unaccustomed to her presence feel ill as soon as she walks into a room.

I saw her tonight for the first time in years. My lady-friend and a mutual acquaintance were hit first, almost as soon as she entered the room. It took a little while longer to overwhelm me, but not much: even working in the mall is not as toxic as half an hour in the same room as B. Before we all left, I had to pull tendrils off of each of them – sick, orange things that left a residue like fast-growing fungus.

Merely being in the same room as this woman made most of us exhausted, irritable, and even nauseous.

Tragically, there is not yet any conclusion to this tale. B remains at large, psychically assaulting everyone within reach, and driving newcomers away from the WPA – now the KU Cauldron. Something must be done, but what? Talk to her? Certainly the first step. Bind her? And be bound to her forever? Psychically assault her in return? All three, possibly.

How long will this go one before someone intervenes?

What troubles me most about B – what troubles me most about every one of the not quite half-dozen vampires I have encountered in the almost fifteen years I have practiced magic – is how similar their power is to my own. To heal, to weave … or to drain and bind … these things are not so different. I am partially resistant to her attacks, particularly aware of them, because I am perfectly capable of replicating them.

In scholarship, witchcraft

A Few Introductory Thoughts on Tarot

Author Satyr MagosPosted on

Cartomancy, to the best of my understanding, lies somewhere between a technical skill and a psychic gift. One selects a deck by intuition, at random, or after careful study. Some bless or enchant their cards, others carefully nurture the spirit of a deck. Some favor traditional decks – true Tarot decks based on the Rider-Waite and Golden Dawn originals – others favor oracle cards whose artists have abandoned the five suit structure altogether. Some people I know have intense visionary and psychic experiences while working with divinatory cards, sometimes almost completely unrelated to the actual cards at hand; others, like myself, are more decoders of the symbols within the cards, occasionally assisted by strong intuition.

The traditional structure of a Tarot deck is of five suits: four lesser and one greater. The lesser suits associated with the ceremonial magician’s tools and with elemental power. Disks, Cups, Swords, and Wands. Earth, Water, Air, Fire. The suits have other names, of course, varying from deck to deck. Disks are known variously as Coins, Pentacles, or even simply Earth; Wands are sometimes Rods, Staves or just Fire; alternative names for Swords and Cups are rare, but not unheard of. The lesser suits are comprised of fourteen cards each:, most commonly known by the numbers and titles: ace through ten, page, knight, queen, and king. The fifth suit, the “Trumps” or “Major Arcana”, are a series of twenty-two ascending images and archetypes, originally from Renaissance Italian theology and popular culture (I don’t have the book on hand for a proper citation, but look to Robert Michael Place’s The Tarot: History, Symbolism, and Interpretation) .

The suit of Disks – I favor the name “disks”, for whatever reason, though I recall that my first deck, the Hansen-Roberts, called them Coins – deals with the material world, material things, and material resources. Being associated with elemental earth, themes of fertility and fecundity are also found here. The suit of Cups deals chiefly with emotional attachments, memory, and romance. Being associated with elemental water, there are also some associations with psychic gifts and dreams. The suit of Wands deals with passion, glory, and drive. Frequently, this entails themes conflict, victory, and loss. The suit of Swords deals with suffering and torment. Being associated with elemental air, there are also associations with matters of intellect and understanding.

The major arcana is where the imagery of tarot cards get really, really interesting. It’s also where things begin to vary wildly between decks, as authors and illustrators embrace or discard the original Christian and Hermetic symbolism.

I’ve worked with four decks since I began my practice in 1996.

My first was the Hansen-Roberts deck, and Rider-Waite variant that moved a couple of the major arcana around (I can’t remember which ones, all these years later, and I’ve long since lost the original booklet that explained the decision; it may even be that they made the same moves as the Waite deck from the previous “traditional”, not instead of) and replaced the lackluster art with images that were infinitely more visually appealing, although symbolically similar if not identical. The deck developed a serious attitude over the years I used it, with a caustic voice to rival some (gentler) Thoth decks by the time I retired it. The deck was still in full working order, and I have it to this day, but at the age of 18 or 19 when I stopped reading the cards for a while, I simply couldn’t trust myself to read what the cards said, not what I wanted them to say.

The second is a Tarot deck only insomuch as it has the five suits. DJ Conway’s Shapeshifter deck owes more to the Thoth deck, I think, than the Rider-Waite, but softens the brutal voice of Crowley’s work with the fluffy-bunny attitude one rightly expects from Conway, with a dose of faux-shamanism and animal totem. The art and imagery are beautiful, drawing from that transformative/animal theme. If nothing else, I recommend it as a piece of art.

The third was the Robin Wood, another Rider-Waite variant, even more beautiful than the Hansen-Roberts. I purchased it when I resumed doing card work at about the age of 22. The deck was reliable, consistent, but unfortunately printed on slightly inferior paper, and I was forced to retire it when several of the cards became too badly damaged.

The fourth deck, my current deck, is one of two Art Nouveau decks I’ve found and purchsed, largely because they’re pretty. One of the two I will never use – the imagery is too sexist – but the one I am using has some interesting variations to the traditional themes. The images on the minor arcana are greatly simplified: a single man and woman, seemingly made out of stained glass, in a tableau depicting the theme of the card, with a different couple and color scheme for each suit. The major arcana is similar in meaning, but more modern in imagery and certain themes than older Rider-Waite based decks, and as I begin to explore the meanings of the Tarot, it is to this deck that I will refer most often and in greatest depth.