The first time I performed the ritual – PGM XII. 153-60, Spell for a divine revelation – it was a part of Jack Grayle’s PGM course, Fifty Rites in Fifty Nights, back in 2020. It’s a short ritual, near perfectly complete, with little suggested framing or preparation.
I bathed, dusted my hands and hair with cinnamon. I sat, terrified, but summoned the courage to begin. I intoned the name IAO three times, growing in size and confidence as I did so. I called out the great name, stumbling over the Vocces Magicae. The serpent-faced god appeared.
I asked them, “How do i thrive as an artist in these times?”
They came upon me from behind. Held me. Came in through my left eye, then my right. I began to cry. The god moved in to my mouth.
I said. “I am to look, to feel, to speak. Have i understood you?”
“Yes,” the serpent faced god told me.
I thanked them, made the offering of serpent skin.
And they departed.
It was one of the most intense visionary experiences of my life.
I have performed the ritual a number of times since. For a while, it was fully incorporated into my dark moon rites. With each invocation, the vision of the serpent-faced god grew more and more feminine. I was told that the ouroboros image which has so long fascinated me, which I have tattooed on my flesh, was her image.
In 2020, visions I received revolved around the theme of “see, feel, and speak”. I don’t know how well I succeeded at following that imperative, but I did my best.
In 2021 a new theme arose: a vision of a thunderstorm storm in the desert, of long road west and a mesa rising out of the plain. I took this fairly literally: that I needed to fuck off into the desert, a physical and spiritual retreat.
For Samhain 2022,I was finally able to make that pilgrimage. My partner and I and our ritual crew took a road trip to Black Mesa, Oklahoma, where we spent four nights under the clearest, darkest skies that I have ever seen. (I have been a few places that boasted skies as dark or darker, but every time I brought storms west with me, and could not see the sky.) The Milky Way flowed directly over our heads. The Great Bear hovered on the western horizon each night, and Jupiter rose in the east.
I performed my ritual at dusk of the last night, offering wine and incense. The vision that came to me was faint but clear. I could see the serpent-faced god in all her glory. She was potent and ancient and primordial, of the earth and all that lies below it. Her message was clear, too: the time has come for me to resume my underworld journeys, because that is where I will find her. And I am to seek out a serpent priestess, whatever that means, and to make one if I cannot find one.
I thanked her for the vision, and for her patience – it took me more than a year to find her in the desert – and then I returned to my revelry.
This trip healed something in me that was broken. I slept better than any of my companions every night. Back in the world, I am more rested than any or all of them. I feel better than I have in years.
Hail to the serpent faced god. I hope that I can hear what she has to teach. I hope, too, that it is wisdom that I can share.
I first heard the Luciferian call something like ten years ago, now. It came, perhaps oddly, the same year that I began conjuring archangels as a part of the Ceremonial Experiment. I was still, in a very real sense, new to working with gods of any kind, and god-like powers at that scale. And I was still the product of my youth in the tail end of the Satanic Panic: I had spend the first five, maybe ten, of my practice trying to convince onlookers that we were not Satanists, that most witches don’t even believe in the Devil. So, though the metaphorical phone kept ringing, I refused to answer.
The call kept coming. Little signs. Songs. Visions. And I kept putting it off. Putting him off.
I don’t remember exactly when I changed my mind and decided to answer the call. I think it was a craft night with the coven. I was making a mask and it … went in a direction. And I figured that was as good a place to start as any. And I recommitted to the work in Beltane of 2019, when I made a star talisman in Luciferian colors during another Lunar Shenanigans craft extravaganza. I put those tokens on a shelf in the spare room where I kept my personal altar, but it didn’t really go any further than that.
The work really only started in the fall of 2020, when the daily offerings to my familiar spirits escalated into daily offerings for the gods who shared the space of my altar room. From there it was slow escalations.
The visions began early this year, when I quit my day job to pursue art and magic full time. I was going around the altars, each day asking one of the gods in that room to initiate me into their mysteries. And I had put Lucifer off for so long that, at first, he refused. Since then, though, he has begun revealing aspects of himself to me.
Whether or not you believe that the being I am calling Lucifer is the Devil at odds with That One God depends a lot on how you see him.
To me he is a Promethean figure: a bringer of light and magic, a teacher of art and mysteries. He is the Peacock Angel of the Yazidis. He is Melek Taus of the Anderson Feri tradition.
He is a Gnostic power: bringing light and wisdom to mortals, kindling and sheltering their fire against the dark of the universe and the malice of the demiurge and the archons.
He has presented himself to me as the Dweller on the Threshold: the terrifying image meant to keep the weak from the mysteries. To pass him, one needs only sufficient courage.
He has presented himself to me as the Light in the Darknesss: the light-bringer, literally.
And he has presented himself to me as transmasculine, or perhaps as an androgyne opposite and equal to the full-breasted and tumescent androgyny of Baphomet.
In this image, I have done my best to evoke all of these, and to recreate the visions of Lucifer that I have seen in my morning meditations. This is a first attempt. It will not be my last.
I haven’t spoken publicly my talisman construction & consecration process in detail before now for a variety of reasons, most of which are just abusing the thesaurus to avoid admitting to my insecurities. Most of the others in my field are professional astrologers, or work very closely with one. Many teach classes or write books on magic. I’ve taught some workshops, and I had a short stint in local Pagan leadership – if you don’t already know it, that’s a story for another time – but all my magical writing is here on this blog. But someone asked for details in a forum where I had posted a link to my most recently elected and consecrated talismans, and I’m not here to be mysterious about my process. Answering a couple questions over there quickly led to a longer-form answer here.
There are, obviously, two parallel and interacting parts of my process: the jewelry and the sorcery.
On the jewelry side, the core of my process is lost wax casting. I was raised in a casting studio, and that’s even though I’m only just now getting a real handle on wax carving, that’s always been my go-to process for design and production. I suspect that someone with a background in, say, hand engraving, or etching, would find that applying sorcery to those techniques would serve them better than learning to cast just for the sake of talisman making.
<blockquote class="tiktok-embed" cite="https://www.tiktok.com/@satyrmagos/video/7138499729222241582" data-video-id="7138499729222241582" style="max-width: 605px;min-width: 325px;" > <section> <a target="_blank" title="@satyrmagos" href="https://www.tiktok.com/@satyrmagos?refer=embed">@satyrmagos</a> <p>i am the Sorcerer's Workbench. i make talismanic, devotional, and art jewelry in silver, shibuichi, brass, and bronze</p> <a target="_blank" title="♬ original sound - iluvart - ฅ^•ﻌ•^ฅ" href="https://www.tiktok.com/music/original-sound-iluvart-6882633195850844929?refer=embed">♬ original sound - iluvart - ฅ^•ﻌ•^ฅ</a> </section> </blockquote> <script async src="https://www.tiktok.com/embed.js"></script>
On the sorcery side, I am an autistic eclectic witch who has made a special interest of the grimoire tradition, but whose every ritual is informed by their previous decades of spiritual work. I am not a purist in anything. Moreover, I am unconvinced that most talisman recipes can be performed as-written: the jewelry part will always take much, much longer than the astrological window available, even without the ritual part. All my pieces are the result of years of art and magical training, both formal and informal, and more years of trial and error.
The jewelry and the sorcery come together, before I even begin thinking about a specific election, with the magical nature of my studio. Every day I consecrate my home, including the studio below my altar room, as a temple for the gods I worship and the magical work I do, and make offerings to those gods and my familiar spirits. Every time I descend to my studio, I light a candle and incense as offerings to the gods and powers that aid me in my work, the planets that I call, and the spirits who dwell there waiting for good homes.
The process of making a consecrated talisman begins with finding a viable election. I get mine from a few sources, but mostly from Nina Gryphon’s monthly election newsletter. After vetting the election to make certain that it’s as valid in Kansas City, MO, as it is in Los Angeles, CA, I then sit down with my tarot cards and divine whether any given election is suitable for: a) a personal petition; b) a personal paper talisman; c) metal talismans for myself and my coven; or, d) metal talismans for customers. I don’t always understand why a particular election might not be a good candidate for me and my customers, but this is spiritual work as well as material and we do divination for a reason.
Having determined that an election is suitable for metal talismans, I make up the waxes and invest them the day before the election, timed so that they’ll be ready to cast when the time comes. Once the flask is in the kiln, I rearrange my workspace into an altar where I will perform the consecration. I only do one flask per election, because getting the metal up to flow temperature takes too long to pour and have it really still be at the peak of the electional window.
A little more than an hour before the election, I turn on the electric crucible that melts the metal, and I begin my preparatory rituals. I shower, and I purify myself with cinnamon. I make offerings for my familiar spirits, my personal gods, and the gods and spirits of the workshop, who will all work together to bring the best possible spirits into the talismans. I consecrate all the maeteria, specifically both the incense I will be offering and the metal that will become the talismans. Some of the details vary from ritual to ritual, depending on when the election is relative to my daily purifications and offerings and the instructions provided to me by my familiar spirits, but those variations are minutiae.
About fifteen to twenty minutes before the election (depending on the kind of metal and the weight), I start melting the metal and begin suffumigating the studio and invoking the spirits. I alternate between the Orphic hymn to the relevant planet and the appropriate Picatrix invocation. The timing, here, is honestly the hardest part: if left too long, the metal will boil and the final cast will be pourus; if not left long enough, it won’t flow and there will be cold shuts.
In the minutes before the election’s peak, when the metal is at temperature, i suffumigate the flask of molten metal, pour into the waiting flask, then suffumigate the cooling flask – this is the point at which I can feel the spirits enter the talismans. I time this process so that I make my final Picatrix invocation before or as I pour, and then my final hymn after. I am, of course, always trying to complete my consecration at the precise minute of the election, when the relevant planets are precisely conjunct the ascendant or midheaven. But I also know for a fact that modern timekeeping was invented for trains, and ancient astrologers must necessarily have been working with wider and wooblier windows of time.
Once the pieces are cast, I get as much of the plaster off of them as I can before the window has closed (i strongly prefer ascending elections for this reason) and store the talismans in a planetary altar box until the next appropriate hour to clean them up as jewelry.
<blockquote class="tiktok-embed" cite="https://www.tiktok.com/@satyrmagos/video/7133267092798836010" data-video-id="7133267092798836010" style="max-width: 605px;min-width: 325px;" > <section> <a target="_blank" title="@satyrmagos" href="https://www.tiktok.com/@satyrmagos?refer=embed">@satyrmagos</a> <p>the aftermath of some work for myself and my coven</p> <a target="_blank" title="♬ Howl's Moving Castle - Merry-Go-Round of Life - Vitamin String Quartet" href="https://www.tiktok.com/music/Howl's-Moving-Castle-Merry-Go-Round-of-Life-6702010411413145602?refer=embed">♬ Howl's Moving Castle - Merry-Go-Round of Life - Vitamin String Quartet</a> </section> </blockquote> <script async src="https://www.tiktok.com/embed.js"></script>
While cleaning and polishing each piece, I get a name and sigil and specialty from it, which whoever it goes to can use to make initial contact.
When each piece is done, it goes into an envelope with a bit of the incense used to consecrate it. That envelope goes into the planetary altar box, where it lives until i find it a home.
I have practiced many kinds of magic over the decades of my magical career. Astrological images in metal are what I am (probably) best known for, at this point, because that is the most marketable combination of my artistic talents and magical aspirations. But talismans of metal and stone are not the only such combination. In the past, I have dabbled in sigil magic, and masks, and talismans made from mixed media and witchcraft, and portraits of spirits – both conjured and constructed. Most recently, I have been experimenting in talismanic images of ink and paint and paper.
My first elected talismans were paper. Back in the fall semester of 2013, as I was fighting with the registrar over what classes and credits from my associate’s degree would and would not count toward my bachelors, I combined what I had managed to learn of spirit conjuration (mostly from Rufus Opus’ blog) with a Jupiter in Pisces election and talismanic image from Christopher Warnock on his then-Yahoo mailing list. I assembled the talisman from a pair of 5×7 note cards, one bearing Warnock’s image (probably by Nigel Jackson), the other bearing seals and sigils of Jupiter, glued together with dandelions and other Jovial maeteria in between them, and suffumigated in the smoke of the same.
That talisman steamrolled over the registrar and her objections to my insignificant (in her eyes) urban community college credits. It, and the other similar talismans that I made that year – Sol, Venus, Mercury Cazimi, maybe one or two others – lasted not the weeks or months generally expected of paper talismans, but for years.
When I had my first chance at a decanic election – Sol in Aries I, back in 2020 – I went that same route. Aradia and I were taking Jack Grayle’s PGM Praxis course, and I believe that we consecrated them using a PGM solar rite. But I used the Picatrix image, and I made it available for others to use on my blog.
I got this election, in fact, who had just discovered Nina Gryphon’s monthly election newsletter, and I suddenly had enough advance notice on most elections to begin planning for them. My two-sided Venus talisman (and my personal Venusian familiar spirit) is the result of these experiments, and ultimately served as the template for the rest of my Picatrix planetary image talismans.
I returned to paper talismans toward the end of 2021, with my first fixed star election: Jupiter on Deneb Algedi. I was up to my eyeballs in burnout, and had neither time nor money to prototype and prep a metal talisman. The results were swift and phenomenal. Likewise, a Solar election early in 2022.
After years of such experiments, frankly, both my home altar and my prosperity altar were getting a little crowded. So, when the opportunity for a pair of Libra decanic talismans (Venus ascending in the first and second face of Cancer) and I wanted to do something less than a metal talisman (which I couldn’t afford to prototype, or fit onto my altar) but more than the paper talismans I had done so far, I turned to my personal grimoire.
Now, flashing back to the beforetimes, I bought myself one of those big leather-bound “journals” for my birthday in 2019. I divided it up into likely sections and started drawing planetary circles of conjuration in it, which became the centerpiece of my first few months of daily rituals. Then it quickly served as a prop in a couple photo shoots (first with Cailin, then with Vanessa). Then became a repository for my favorite pieces from Jack Grayle’s PGM course, and the object of several such rituals, including a Solar consecration aimed at increasing the effecacy of magic done with the book. Then I did a series of portraits of my familiar spirits in it.
It occurred to me to combine the theory behind conjuration circles and the practice of the spirit portraits. I selected a page, drew the image, inked the outlines and colored the scene of the image with water-color pencils, and sigilized my petition. During the window of the election, I wet and blended the watercolors, painted and detailed the figure and the seals and sigils, and consecrated it with the Picatrix Venus prayer and suffumigated it.
It went so well that I repeated it with the second face of Cancer. And then with Regulus. And now, most recently, with Aldebaran. (The images below are, obviously, not photos of the paintings in my personal grimoire. As public as my practice is, that feels like … too much. Instead, they are the practice drawings I did to perfect my design and layout, and then refined to share with my coven, in case they wanted to catch the elections, and now with you for your benefit.)
Cancer IIRegulus
The images are all still hot to the touch. Each day, after my ritual honoring my household gods and familiar spirits, I turn to one of these images and let it emanate into the world. They all seem to be always active, but whichever is currently visible seems to be most active.
It’s still very early days to speak about material results or longevity, but I think that I’ve sufficiently demonstrated that it’s a technique worth speaking about so that others can try their own experiments with it.
So, if you have a magic book that you work with – a Wiccan Book of Shadows, or a personal grimoire, something that lives in or around your altar and participates in your rites, and you want to fuck around with astrological image magic but aren’t prepared to financially commit to metal talismans, I strongly recommend experimenting with talismanic images in your personal magic book.
Back in 2017, I made a prosperity sachet using the seal of Bune. It was an unorthodox procedure, combining a bit of US folk magic with modern chaos and ceremonial magic, and (of course) my own unique style. Overall, it served me well. I wrote briefly about the positive results in 2019. And as the Sorcerer’s Workbench got me through the pandemic and turned enough profit that I was able to quit my day job at the beginning of this year, the relationship was strong and solid. I was making offerings with every sale, and more offerings at certain sales goals.
Then, toward the beginning of this year, things went sideways.
Back in December, I hit a Deneb Algedi election that provided swift and powerful results. Then in February, I cast two cohorts of Jupiter talismans, and kept two pieces for myself. And after that, sales got real slow.
Initially, I thought one or both of the Jupiter talismans was to blame. The two I had kept for myself had mis-cast – cold shuts that left gaps in the images – and, though they assured me that they wanted to live and to work with me, it was still only my second time casting elected talismans for sale and I was still waist-deep in the same mental health crisis that had led me to quit my day job with only half the savings I’d wanted, and, as such, I lacked confidence in my own perceptions. Additionally, as March waxed into April, one of those talismans was being very explicitly tetchy about working with a demon.
But I had been working with Bune for five years at that point, and – as a relational rather than strictly transactional practitioner – I was not prepared to end that relationship yet. So I contacted a peer – Asphodello of Ward and Weave – to check in. His suggestion – short of severing my relationship with Bune – was to set up separate altars and specific spheres of responsibility. That worked very well in the short term: May was a *very* good month.
But June, July, and August have been real challenges. Weird bank shit. Rude custom inquiries, including two requests to rip off another artist’s work. A shocking lack of interest in my elected Venus talismans. Constant reassurances from my familiar spirits and divinations that things were in the works, but no explanation for why they weren’t manifesting.
In August, I took advantage of some oracular work my coven and I are doing (that I’ll write up some day) to get a more clear perspective on what’s going wrong. The answers I got, in three separate sessions, were “make more offerings”, “make even more offerings, and a new altar”, and “you’re doing the wrong work”.
That last answer was, of course, infuriating. I’m putting in the material work. I’m putting in the spiritual work. If I’m missing something, then what?
So, I went back to the tarot. The divination I did for myself was, of course, unclear except in retrospect. “What should I be working on, instead?” *VIII Adjustment* Contracts and consequences? Dafuq? Clarification, please? *Princess of Cups* Feelings, intuition, and mediumship?
Clearly I wasn’t going to puzzle this out on my own. So, at last, I called my partner in. Aradia is one of the best diviners in our social circle; I should have asked her for help months ago, but I try not to abuse her time and talents.
Our first reading was a basic 10 card Celtic cross. It was lousy with court cards, and overall seemed to agree that everything was fine. The one off card was the 7 of Cups in the crown position, indicating that that was probably where my problem was. But that wasn’t actually a clear answer. Another spread indicated that I needed to change my magical approach. So we looked to the spirits on my prosperity altar: how do things stand with each of them?
The answer came with the first card in the next spread. Bune was the 7 of Cups. We named and inquired about each of the other spirits, too, but he was the only problem. Another draw indicated that it would sort itself out in time, but the solution was to sever the relationship. That left only when: immediately (6 of Disks, “that’ll work”) or when I clean my prosperity altar on Thursday (V the Hierophant, “this is the most correct way”).
So, two days later (an hour or so ago, as I write this; some days ago, as you read this), I did the deed.
Using the same conjuration that I had used to make my initial contact with Bune (found in Jason Miller’s Sorcerer’s Secrets), I called the spirit up and told him that it was time to end our relationship. I apologized for any insult I might have given, any accidental failure to fulfil my end of our contract, and for any number of possible slights. I disassembled the sachet and promised to bury it and the lamen at a crossroads, and to slag the metal seals that I had made for his altar. I made one last round of offerings – coffee, candle, incense – and it was done.
I felt him appear to hear me speak. I more than half expected protests, or promises of better behavior. I did not expect him to fade out so softly that I barely noticed.
Now, having completed the rite to release him and end our contract, I feel a very strange rush of energy. My heart is racing; I’m near tears. It’s more like a panic attack than mania or a meltdown, but it’s not any of those things.
I’m disappointed. I feel a little bit like a failure. Both are slightly silly.
My relationship with Bune was mutually profitable for five years. It fell apart when I started accumulating other financially beneficial spiritual relationships. Mostly, I’m frustrated that I didn’t realize more immediately that it was the demon who likes to be paid in public praise that was not playing well with the other spirits, not vice versa.
I feel the need to make absolutely clear that this story is not a cautionary tale about working with demons. It bears repeating that, despite my hilariously idiosyncratic methods, good guy Bune *delivered*. It might not even have been the other magic that I was doing that broke things: five years might just have been the absolute limit on the life of the mojo bag. Further divination might reveal some useful post-facto analysis. Bune might have also been happy to work with other spirits on the prosperity altar if it had occurred to me to consult him before conjuring them, instead of just piling the altar high with planetary petitions and Jupiter talismans and (more recently) Mercury talismans. But, without question, once it was over it was over. The cards were clear that there was no fixing what was broken.
And so I will end this with a note of final, formal, public praise for Bune, the 26th spirit of the Lesser Key of Solomon. For five good years, you brought me patrons and prosperity. Without you, the Sorcerer’s Workbench would not have been possible. Hail unto you, O Bune.
In August of 2020, I joined the Deeper Down the Rabbit Hole Do Magick Challenge. The goal was 30 days of manifestation: set one or more measurable goals, and spend the month enchanting to make it happen. I set 30 intentions of varying importance and significance, sigilized them, and then launched one per day. Of the 30, I managed to get maybe 5 to appear within the month and the months following. (Gifts of red rocks and green rocks stand out in my memory, I know that there were a few others.) Objectively, the project had a very low success rate. Subjectively, the purpose of the work drifted over the course of the month, shifting from “manifest these things” to “developing and reaffirming my relationships with my familiar spirits through daily offerings”. That latter project, I think I can say as I begin working my twenty-sixth consecutive month, was a resounding success.
The ritual, at its heart, is very simple. Each morning I sit down, light a candle and a stick of incense, and share my first cup of coffee with my familiar spirits. The details have grown more elaborate, then been re-simplified, several times over the course of the last two years.
A candle in the morning escalated to a candle for each familiar spirit (the number of which has doubled in that time, owing to work with the Hekataeon and making Picatrix talismans), plus one to consecrate the altar, until I was burning eleven tealights a day and ultimately had a panic attack as I left the house one day, convinced the cats were going to set themselves and the house on fire. A tealight for each spirit was replaced by a single votive candle in a brass bowl, marked around the edge with each of their sigils. I still make candle offerings to everyone during other ceremonies, and that seems to be enough.
A stick of incense became one for the temple and one for the spirits.
And, most recently, nine familiars on one altar have been redistributed across three altars. My core six are still on my primary personal altar, but two have moved to my prosperity altar and one to join Hekate on her growing household altar. All of them still appear around me each morning, though.
There was a period where I set aside a day of the week to commune with each spirit individually – a process complicated by the fact that there were nine of them, and four didn’t have clear planetary associations. And that was important, for a while. And then, after a bit, it wasn’t so important anymore. They had said what they needed to say, and I had learned to hear them better.
Somewhere along the line, gods got involved.
Five gods live in in the bedroom where I keep my personal altar (and, since this summer, my office desk): Baphomet, Aphrodite, Eros, Lucifer, and Dionysos. In a sense, Hekate should have a shrine here, too, but she doesn’t like it when I have sex in front of her, so she stays in the back room with the public altars. Somewhere along the line, it seemed a natural evolution to begin including them in the daily offerings. That, probably inevitably, escalated to daily communions.
Daily communion with divinity, as long-time readers might guess, has been a … complicated experience for me. I am, despite everything, still very ambivalent about the notion of worship. And yet, I pour offerings … and the gods come when I call.
Some days, they come harder than others. I have had visions so intense that they left me shaken for weeks at a time. Other days, I can barely sense their presences.
Baphomet has appeared before me in forms that I have never seen or heard discussed elsewhere. I have alluded to this, but not yet been able to produce a clear image in art, let alone articulate the experiences in prose. A tryptich. In the center something like the best-known goat-headed figure: full-breasted, fat-bellied, ithyphallic, a lush and luscious androgyne, arms marked solve et coagvla, whom I call the Red God. To my right, a pale and moon-horned woman, blindfolded or perhaps eyeless, blind gaze to the heavens, hands open and arms loose, the White Lady. To my left, a shadowy figure with the antlered head of a deer’s skull, his body muscular and his hands upraised in a twin gesture of benediction, the Black Man or perhaps the Man in Black. I pray they awaken the light of Gnosis within me, those I love, and the people of the world.
Aphrodite has appeared before me, a shining beauty whose face is too bright to see. She bids me make art in her image. Every day I pray to be loved by her, by gods and mortals, and to have the strength to know when I am.
Eros has teased and mocked me. He is both the hypercosmic Eros the Elder, Eros Phanes, and as the teasing lusting lord of the Erotes. He says that I do not yet aprehend him. I pray to him that the light of creation shine through me, and that I burn always with passion and ambition.
Lucifer appears to me as the Dweller on the Threshold. As a transman. A beautiful pale figure standing before a monstrous shadow. I pray for secret knowledge, and to be free of the chains of my oppression, and to stand tall in the face of the heavens.
Dionysos appears to me always with his leopard. He is distant but loving. I pray to him for salvation, for freedom, for ecstasy.
Some days I can hear my familiars clearly. Sometimes they are almost physical presences. Sometimes I can barely sense them at all.
Some days they are demanding. More often they are comforting and reassuring. In the early days, they had a great deal to teach me. Now, lessons in magic come rarely, and usually in response to a specific need.
Sometimes the voices of the gods drown out the voices of my familiar spirits. Sometimes they stand back so that my spirits can be better heard. Sometimes I am a conduit for their power, channeling it into my familiars and the world. Sometimes I am simply overwhelmed.
I think that the most important thing I have learned from two years of daily practice is that, for me, there is a delicate balance between continuity and novelty. For the fist months, I tweaked the ritual constantly. Sometimes this was in response to my own needs – shifting from before bed, which often almost didn’t happen, to first thing in the morning, which is a very different sort of struggle for me; or when I had to reduce the fire hazard of a dozen daily candles. Sometimes this was at the prompting of the spirits, themselves.
I am at a point, right now, where I feel like more change is needed. I don’t know what change, just that I am struggling to stay focused and not let the ritual motions become rote and meaningless. I am struggling to hear the voices of gods or spirits, even my own.
I have said before and I will say again, this is a streak. It’s the longest I’ve ever run, but at some point it will be broken. At that time, I will re-evaluate my needs, and the needs of my magical guides and gods and friends and familiars, and we will proceed from there. For now, the work continues. August 2020 to September 2022, twenty-five months and counting.
Over the last decade in general, and the last three years in particular, I have been doing increasingly intense work with electional astrology and astrological images, culminating (so far) in an ever-expanding series of metal talismans cast in my home studio. But, as any of you who are in the arts in general, and jewelry in particular, know, neither art nor magic are science, and results are sometimes perfect. Casting, in particular, is a bit finnicky, and the vagaries of combining the process with spirit conjuration only complicates the process.
So far, most of the time, the issues have been minor. Some of the coin talismans had been meant to be pendants, but the bail didn’t cast correctly. In those instances, I just cut off the nubs with no harm to the metal talisman or complaint from the talismanic spirit.
In most cases where more intense intervention was necessary, I kept the talisman for myself and worked with the spirit to determine what was needed to achieve our mutual ends. My Mars talisman, for example, had been meant to have three jump rings, but only the bottom one cast. I made him a frame so that I could wear him as a necklace, rather than string him on prayer beads, and hung a Roman arrow head from the bottom ring.
The case of my Jupiter talismans was more extreme. One talisman had a hole in the blank space over the lion-man’s bolt, and two of his three jump rings had failed. Working with him, I tube-set an emerald in that hole and built him a silver frame so that I could string him on lapis and moonstone prayer beads. A second talisman had mis-cast more drastically, missing one of her hands and a great deal of the thinner parts of the talisman had cold-shut, leaving negative space in the background talismanic image. I thought that I was, finally, going to have to figure out a funerary process for failed talismans – but the spirit informed me, in no uncertain terms, that she wanted to live. And so I made a frame for her, as well, with “wings” that would clip into my cuff bracelet. They were not the strongest talismans I’ve made, but they’ve been growing stronger as I work with them, and they have been good and loyal familiars.
At the second of August’s Mercury in Virgo elections, however, the inevitable finally happened: one of the talismans I cast failed entirely. The problem was on the jewelry end of things: I didn’t get a good enough seal between the flask and the vacuum of the casting machine. If it hadn’t been an elected cast, I’d have had more than a few seconds to fuck with it and get a better seal. But it was and I didn’t.
The talisman was barely there, a cartoon crescent moon where there should have been a full disk. At first I thought there wasn’t even enough there to catch as spirit. As I cut it off the sprue, though, I could feel the spirit in the metal: struggling to manifest, but without enough material or image to fully enter the world – but too much to just leave on its own.
I didn’t ask its name. That seemed like an insult. I just held it in my hands and apologized. I asked what it needed. It needed the fragment to be destroyed, rendered unrecognizable as even the attempt at a talisman. That was absolutely in my power.
I took the crescent nub to my soldering block and turned on my torch. As I put fire to metal, I apologized again and reached out my psychic hands to cradle the spirit as I pulled it softly from the melting metal. I continued apologizing to the spirit, promising that it would have another chance at life in the material world when next I came to a Mercury election.
The brass burned blue as I melted it and resisted being slagged at temperatures that should have melted it readily. But the metal gave, eventually, and when it did, curling into a ball as best as brass can, the spirit came free. With a final apology, I released the spirit to return to its sphere.
Sometimes casts fail, even when there’s magic involved. I’ve been afraid of something like this happening since I started casting elected talismans for my friends back in 2020. In a sense, I’m glad that it finally happened, because now I know how to handle it, and that I can, and that – approached properly – it’s not as traumatic to either magician or spirit as I was afraid that it might be.
I’m also glad that it happened because it answered a question that has been with me since I first heard about spirit conjuration magic back in the 1990s. The spirits we call – or at least the ones that come when I throw my consecrated casts – are here because they want to be. There is something about incarnating as a talisman spirit that is appealing to them. They all want to live.
At the beginning of the month I was able to catch the two Venus in Taurus elections, casting two cohorts of shibuichi Image of Venus talismans. For this election, I divided my efforts between my usual Picatrix Image of Venus talisman – “…the shape of a woman with a human body but with the head of a bird and the feet of an eagle, holding an apple in her right hand and a wooden comb similar to a tablet in her left, which has these figures written upon in [the Greek letters OLOIOL]. Whoever carries this image will be well received and esteemed by all.” (Picatrix Bk 2, Chapter 10, Paragraph 55, translated by Attrell and Porecca) – and an experimental variant without the characters, which effectively becomes a synthesis between the Picatrix (“…a woman holding an apple in her right hand and, in her left, a comb… “) and Mercurius (“…a shape with the body of man , the face and head of a bird, and the feet of an eagle.”) images (Book II, Chapter 9, paragraphs 27 and 28)” .
The first cohort, cast before dawn on the 1st, consisted of four talismans – two each of the friendship and experimental images. The second cohort, cast before dawn on the 6th, consisted of five – three friendship and two experimental. The pre-verb for both rituals was intense: I couldn’t sleep at all those nights, and spend the non-ritual hours leading up to the elections working on old drafts.
All are being sold for $409, including shipping anywhere in the US.
THE FIRST COHORT
Doing divination in preparation for the first cohort, I drew the Princess of Disks: good things will come of these, but they may be slow to manifest – possibly as much as nine months, depending on how literal that pregnancy metaphor gets. I mixed up an incense for the rituals on the night of the 1st, consisting of red sandalwood, rose buds, crushed amber, oil made at a previous Venus election, nutmeg, and cinnamon. I invoked the spirits by means of the Orphic Hymn to Venus (Athanasakis translation, as usual) and the Picatrix Invocation of Venus (Attrell and Porreca, p. 173), calling upon the powers of Venus to send down spirits who would aid and serve and be good companions to whomever carried them, and bring with them the blessings of the planet Venus. I got a little restless and hurried during the casting, and poured the metal at the exact beginning of the election’s window, but I think that was the spirits on the other side as much as me, because I could absolutely feel them come through.
The first talisman is a pendant, and she promises to teach self-love. This is the first of the experimental images. Sold.
The second talisman features the experimental image and is meant to be strung on prayer beads. She promises to help build a new life in a new place.
The fourth talisman bears the experimental image and is meant to be strung on prayer beads. She says, “I am a muse. I draw and inspire muses.”
THE SECOND COHORT
In preparation for the second cohort, I drew IV Art (Crowley’s answer to the Temperence card). Although I was and am confident in the go-ahead message, I am less certain what it means for whomever will carry it. I used the same incense for the second cohort as for the first, and invoked the spirits by the same two hymns, and again asked that the planetary powers send down spirits who would be good companions to those who carried them, and bring with them the blessings of Venus. This election I hit more precisely, a single minute before Venus crossed the ascendant, and again I could very much feel the spirits rushing through.
The first talisman is a pendant and she promises to “bring true connection.” Sold.
The second talisman is a pendant bearing the experimental image. She promises, “I will awaken something within you.” I’m not sure if this will be a new passion or a new fetish, but … I’d take her at her word.
The third talisman is a pendant and she promises, “I will help you find family.”
The fourth talisman is a pendant and she promises, “I grant grace and bring friendship.”
The fifth talisman, bearing the experimental image, is meant to be strung on prayer beads. She promises, “I offer all the blessings of Venus.” SOLD
A FEW CONCLUDING THOUGHTS
Between various mundane and magical exertions, I collapsed both physically and emotionally after these elections, and was not able to complete and polish these pieces until the last few days. I got them clean and free of the sprue during the Night Hour of Venus on Friday the 10th. I polished and communed with them on at the night hours of Venus on Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday of this week. Having now done these spirits their due honors, I am feeling much better … though that may be confusing causalities.
It is also worth noting that while my divination indicated that these would be good elections for me and my customers – possibly owing to my unique relationship with Venusian powers – two of the astrologers I follow and respect made a point of not taking advantage of these elections: they considered the Uranian influence too destabilizing. Certainly these are not talismans for someone hoping to stabilize existing relationships. But I’m glad that I made them, and I think that whoever takes them home will be glad that they did so. The ideal recipients of these talismans are queer magicians with passions for the arts.
At yule, my psuedocoven and I finally pulled off a ritual that we’ve been talking about for years: an all-night vigil, reading our way through the Orphic Hymns.
Some of us had done Yule vigils, before. Aradia and I hadn’t, so we (arguably) overprepared. We designed our ritual so that four of the seven of us had something to do at every stage, and rotated roles so that no one could space out so hard that it became a problem. We divided the night into hourly shifts, with each of us taking a turn reading the hymns in English (and with Alvianna and I alternating reading the hymns in Greek), pouring wine and burning incense (“sacrificer”), tending to the coffee maker and crock pots (“mom friend”), and participating by chanting back pre-selected lines when prompting by the readers.
Of the various translations available to us – Thomas Taylor (1792), Apostolos Athanassakis (2013), Patrick Dunn (2018), and Sarah Mastros (2020) – we settled on Dunn. It’s Alvianna’s favorite translation, overall, and my second-favorite after Athanassakis, which is more academic but is admittedly not as good for actual use.
Each shift covered seven hymns, taking us from a bit after sunset (the sun sets early at the Winter Solstice, and most of us have day jobs) to just after dawn, and we bracketed the entire thing with prayers and offerings to Hestia. It was cold in our temple at first, but between my pellet stove and the body heat we generated, it was sweltering by the end. The air was already psychoactively thick with incense by the time we got to the God of Annual Feasts, whose hymn demands an offering of “suffumigation of everything but frankincense, plus a libation of milk”, at which point we were officially chonged out by the time we got to the moment of dawn and the Hymn to Eos. One of us had to leave before then, and a couple of us didn’t quite make it (I was among those falling asleep in the last hours.
It went so well that we decided to do it again, this time at the Summer Solstice.
Going from the Longest Night to the Shortest required a couple changes: nine hymns each hour instead of seven. Cold food and drinks instead of hot. We also elected for a change of venue: Gaea Retreat Center instead of my home.
We had originally planned to make a three-day campout of it. Unfortunately, this year’s heat wave made that impossible. Instead, we rolled out Sunday afternoon with just our cooler, our camp chairs, and our Clam. We got set up early enough to ease into ritual, and we were more than ready to begin when the sun went down. We added fire-tending to the sacrificer role and guard duty (though that proved unnecessary) to the mom-friend role. We might have made those individual jobs, but there were only five of us, and we actually had camp almost entirely to ourselves, so that wasn’t necessary.
The shorter vigil improved the ritual greatly, and we still had down time to rest, eat, and vibe in between the end of each batch of hymns and the beginning of the next. The outdoor venue also really improved things, particularly since the weather for the overnight was nicer than we had any reason to expect – though, I did miss the psychoative effects of the frankincense, and it was too hot to drink wine or even smoke weed. None of us fell asleep, and we were all surprisingly spry in the mornings.
I honestly don’t remember a lot of the fallout and followup from the first ritual. I was already neck-deep in my Christmas Depression. I think that the vigil gets at least partial credit for getting me through December without a complete and total meltdown, and with giving me the courage to quit my day job in January. I am so far experiencing some vitalization in the aftermath, but that has been a mixed blessing.
Inevitably, we have already been discussing how the ritual could be improved for its next iteration. Our first thought is a compromise between the weather and the clock: having the next Orphic Vigil at the Autumn Equinox. I have suggested two or three minute breaks between each hymn, shortening the break at the end of each section. We are also discussing the merits of having everyone who is not reading Greek, sacrificing, or keeping track of food and coffee, reading along with the reader at the head of the altar. Alternately, rewriting the callback lines to be a little more speciffic, and to always invoke the name of the deity.
We have also been discussing aftereffects. Unsurprisingly, we have all reported sleep and dream disturbances – though, for myself and Aradia, we were already struggling to sleep normal hours… which might have been ritual preverb, or might just be the Spicy Sads.
What is surprising is that fully three fifths of us, rather than experiencing an bump in our Hellenic contacts, have felt a distinct tug in Luficerian directions. For myself, Lucifer (the gnostic/devil/sabbatic figure, not the Roman Morningstar) has been a part of my daily ritual practice for some time, now, but on my previous rounds of initiatory work with my morning gods, he told me that it was not the time. Tuesday, after my first post-vigil sleep, he announced that now, in fact, is the time. More on that as it develops, I guess. That was strange enough, but the following day, one of us mentioned their own post-vigil Luciferian visions, and a third confirmed that he had poked his head into their work as well. So now we’re wondering what the fuck is up with that.
After two iterations, though, I can confidently recommend the experience. Each group will need to tweak the general shape of things to their own preferences. As you’re planning things, though, we can say with certainty that a spreadsheet will absolutely be your friend.
I’ve mentioned a few times that my daily ritual includes an invocation of Baphomet, calling upon them to light their Gnostic fire with me, my familiars, and the world. I have mentioned that, on some days, I have been rewarded with visions of the god, and that I have attempted to reproduce those visions in art as a devotional practice. I have not been particularly successful at doing so *frequently*, but that practice has continued.
I may also have mentioned that the god has frequently appeared to me as a … triptych, for lack of a better word. Or I may not have. Frankly, I have struggled with the vision, in part because it is so different from the way Baphomet is depicted in any other source that I’ve seen. I have made a few attempts to render those images into art – as an act of devotion, yes, but also so that I can contemplate them, and try to understand them. These three pencil sketches from mid-May are the best that I have managed so far.
In the center, of course, is Baphomet as one usually sees them: goat-headed and goat-footed, in the magician’s pose, the sacred androgyne: both man and woman and neither; both divine and mortal and neither. Levi, who first drew this image, hid their phallus behind a magic wand. I suffer from no such cowardice. In this vision they are the Red God. No, I don’t know what that means.
On the right hand side (of my vision) is the White Lady, or perhaps White Priestess. She is crowned by the moon, and sometimes veiled or blindfolded. She tilts her head back toward the sky, and her arms hang down with her hand open, palms up.
On the left hand side is the Black Man, or the Man in Black, or both. His head is that of a deer, or perhaps the skull of a deer, with branching antlers. He holds his hands up in a gesture of power.
I don’t know what this means. I don’t know what any of this means. Didn’t I just write about how deeply uncomfortable I am with religious impulse and experience? And yet, mystic visions like these are what I live for. And if there are mystic waters unmixed with religion, well… I left those shallow shores behind years ago. When I wrote last, that thought made me angry. Today I am just … confused.
Of all the gods in my altar room, Baphomet is almost always the most present. Even as I have struggled with deep depression over the last weeks – a plain fact that deserves a post of its own – and I have struggled to feel the presences even of Dionysos and Aphrodite, gods who have been with me even longer, Baphomet has been there with me, reaching out, a palpable presence in the room.
The images above are still as much artistic flourish as mystic vision. I hope that, as I continue to struggle out of this emotional morass, I will be able to resume that work, the vision will return and I will be able to render it more clearly.
The third talisman
The fourth talisman
The second talisman
The third talisman
The fourth talisman
