In keeping with my duties as chair of the Sacred Experience Committee, I’m trying to find out what, exactly it is that HPF attendees want out of the main ritual arc.
Would you lovely people who attend the Heartland Pagan Festival be willing to fill out a survey? We ask a couple questions about your attendance history, your personal practice, and what you think is important about a public ritual.
The first of many series exploring myth, ritual, and possession, I shot these photos around the first of the month with my first professional model, Felicity Houpte. Inspired by my experiences with the Conjuration of Baphomet, this series depicts a simple rite of evocation and the donning of a mask, followed by possession by the god Baphomet and finally apotheosis.
Images below the fold for space considerations and because they are not safe for work.
[Last month I was elected Chair of the HSA Sacred Experience Committee. This was my campaign statement, sans a few small redactions.]
Hello, my name is {Satyr Magos} and I’m running for the Chairpersonship of the Sacred Experience Committee. Although I may not be well known to many of you, I have attended the Heartland Pagan Festival fifteen times since 1998. I have done my community service with Parking for the majority of those years, and I came as Work Exchange in 2012, working mostly with Traffic and Security, before membering up and working with the SEC for this past year’s festival.
As Chair of the SEC I will bring to bear ten years of experience leading and facilitating small group rituals as a member of the Lawrence and Kansas City Pagan communities. More broadly, I have been practicing eclectic witchcraft since 1996 and shamanic trance techniques since 2006. I have dedicated the last four years of my life to mastering Ceremonial and Chaos Magick techniques, and as a Classicist I have a strong foundational understanding of how large-scale ritual functioned both logistically and psychologically in pre-Christian society. Together, these areas of expertise and experience will make it possible to oversee rituals which are uniquely effective and impressive, drawing on the Western Mystery Tradition as a whole but grounded firmly in the traditions of modern NeoPagan Witchcraft.
My vision for the SEC also involves a stronger community presence. After last year’s rituals, I had the opportunity to meet and interact with numerous attendees, and found those experiences to be very valuable. Going forward, I would like for the relationship between the SEC, the HSA as a whole, and the community of festival-goers at large, to be one of greater visibility, greater transparency, and greater accessibility.
In addition to the three main rituals, the Vision Quest, Tea With Crones, and the other existing duties of the Sacred Experience Committee, I will make the Committee available to the community for facilitating rites of passage, initiations, and guerilla rituals throughout the festival.
I will strive to make the Sacred Experience Committee a place where outside input is always welcome. I will use the committee to actively recruit new members to the HSA.
No, I’m not dead.
We put on a fuckin’ festival, y’all. It was bad-ass.
I, your fuckin’ favorite satyr, have been elected to the position of Chair of the Heartland Spiritual Alliance Sacred Experience Committee. Aradia has been elected Chair of Public Relations.
I finished writing a novel back in February. A lot of July went to editing it. As soon as some friends get back to me with their comments, I’m going to edit some more and try to publish. First dibs go to Nephelim Press, if they’re interested. If I can’t get a deal by January, I’m going to self-publish … partially because I’m impatient, partially because it’s too fucking queer and witchy to get mainstream traction anyway. There are five to ten sequels coming when I’m done with that. I’m going to start posting excerpts here, soon, because if anyone wants to read my novels about witches and monsters and old gods usurping the goddamn appocalypse it’s you guys. (Please tell me you want to read my novels.)
July has been lots and lots of photography. There will be more of that here, too. This was supposed to be an art blog, too. Art is magick. Magick is art.
It’s really funny that I actually blogged more when I was in school than in the year since. Dafuq, y’all?
Sorry about that. I’m trying to come back.
Aradia and I skidded back into the mundane world almost two weeks ago, now. Between her end-of-semester madness and my retail work schedule, we’d left something of a disaster behind as we dipped out to spend a week in the woods, and it’s taken quite an effort to calm down and clean up. There is, in fact, still quite a bit of mop-up left to do, one way or another.
The festival, as a whole, was a success and to date we’ve heard hardly a peep of criticism for our rituals or workshops. The HSA forum has not had much chatter on the subject, but all public conversations have been highly positive regarding the festival as a whole — “best festival in years” has been bandied about quite regularly — and I cannot but hope that our rituals were a contributing factor to that. A few technical critiques have found their way to us, one way or another — some very poorly timed — but the responces have been overwhelmingly positive … especially from the people at festival that we respect most.
The process was a strain on all of the ritual crew, and our support communities. Some bruised feelings remain on several sides. Many lessons were learned about how to do things differently next time around.
But there will be a next time around.
Hey, readers! Y’all should go listen to me talk about this year’s upcoming HPFXXX with Brianna Misenhelter over at Pagan Paths!
The photo is mine as well: taken at the top of the Old Stairs out at the Gaea Retreat Center a few years ago. Prints are available.
Image of the Moon as she appeared to me in February of 2015.
A feminine figure on a black field, a blue-lined purple cloak hangs from her shoulders. She holds a bowl in one hand and a stang in the other. She is crowned, and broad horns extend from the sides of her head. Her face bears three eyes, and two more stare from each of her horns.
When Aradia and I conjured the Moon at the end of our cycle, I had no idea how the archangel Gabriel might appear to me. After all, Michael had appeared to me as the most femme Sun I had ever seen. That the archangel appeared to me in the guise of the Witches’ Goddess, then, was not unsurprising … but neither was it expected.
I forgot to mention something really exciting about the coming festival: I will be running my first workshop.
Between the Ceremonial Experiment and working my way through RO’s Seven Spheres, I’ve been doing a lot of conjuration over the last four years. Some readers may recall my conjurations of Baphoment (still my most popular post by an obscenely wide margin), cannabis, and my natal daimon and genius. Friday afternoon, I will be running a workshop based on those experiments and instructing attendees on the theory and practice of spirit conjuration using a spirit and scrying crystal.
Readers who attend should totally introduce themselves as such!
A week from today will mark the beginning of the 30th Annual Heartland Pagan Festival. There’s a lot that could be said, perhaps a lot that should be said, about the speakers and bands and history of the festival. I think for all that, however, I will permit the HSA to speak forthemselves, except to point out the pink elephant: that this is also the first year that the festival will be facing direct competition. What makes this coming festival significant for me is that, having attended far, far more often than not since 1998, this will be the first festival that I have helped put on.
The HSA is a public organization, and I could have paid my dues and “membered up”, as they say, at any time. There are a lot of reasons I didn’t, but they mostly revolve around a few highly negative encounters with influential members of the organization, and my personal distrust of any org large enough to handle money. Several events at the 2012 festival, however, fundamentally changed my relationship with the fest and the organization.
Firstly, staggering back broke from my first year at real college, I came to the festival not as a paying customer, but as work exchange: twenty hours of labor for “free” entry. Working for parking and security, I got to know a lot of the people who actually run the org. More importantly, though, that was the year I started a massive public shitstorm over the gendered implications of the public ritual arc. At the end of those mediated discussions, I was asked to join the organization. Living and attending college in Indiana at the time, however, I was unable to do so.
I graduated in the Spring of 2014 and celebrated with a victory lap studying abroad in Greece then going on a three-week road trip with Aradia. We made it back to civilization and the internet with exactly enough time and money left to join the HSA, vote for committee chairs, and join the Sacred Experience Committee. From June to December, we helped hammer out the theory and framework of the three main rituals. In January, the first prose drafts of the ritual appeared, and Aradia and I recruited Chirotus and Pasiphae from the old proto-coven to join the SEC. Last week, I got on the phone with Brianna Misenhelter of the ATC Pagan Information Network and HPS of the KC chapter of the Wite Ravyn Metaphysical church, and talked a little bit about what y’all will be able to look forward to at the festival.
Over the course of the last year, I’ve gone from hiding behind a shroud of plausible deniability (anyone with a serious interest in doxxing me could probably do so without much difficulty) to being a public pagan. Whoops.
I can’t begin to say how excited I am about the rituals we’re going to put on. From the brouchure:
Over the course of this year‘s three rituals we will cleanse ourselves of the preoccupations
which prevent us from fully participating in the festival, reclaim our Promethean light,
and launch ourselves back into our lives with power, passion, and purpose.
Opening Ritual—Thursday, 6:30p
In this wordless ritual we are each killed and resurrected in order to cleanse ourselves of
the baggage which prevents us from seeing clearly. The first priestess appears and obtains
the tools of magic.
Main Ritual—Saturday, 7:00p
The priestess draws her consort from the crowd and, with his aid, restores the Word and
the Light to humankind. Tokens of power will be handed out to attendees.
Closing Ritual—Sunday, 10:00p
Final ritual focuses on turning words into actions and manifesting our visions in our lives.
You, my dear readers, get an additional sneak preview. Below are four of the ten masks that I’ve made for the ritual.
Image of Mercury as he appeared to me in February of 2015
A yellow-orange figure with wings sprouting from his head. He has large orange eyes which his orange helmet cannot contain. His arms are held tight to his body, one hand clutches a book and the other is open like a claw. A billowing garment hangs from his waist, concealing one leg, the other boasts a winged ankle.
This image was at once one of the most clear and one of the least surprising: active, winged, and helmed, he strongly resembles many traditional images of Mercury and Hermes, though he lacks the Caduceus.
