Continuing my experiment of using photography to explore the personalities of my four elemental masks, we have Feral, again, this time as the Keeper of Earth.
Prints, and the entire project to date, can be found at my portfolio. For the Feral as the four Keepers, click here. For the project in toto, click here. If you appreciate my work, either my art or my witchcraft, please consider purchasing prints. Times are tough.
As I mentioned the other day, I’ve been crying into my beer a little lately over the swiftly growing number of people I know or follow who have recently joined the ranks of published authors. In particular, I’m weeping over the prodigious and prestigious one-two punch delivered by Gordon White of Rune Soup. The second of two books he has published this year is The Chaos Protocols, via Llewellyn.
The Chaos Protocols, simply put, is the magic book I wish I’d had ten years ago. Of course, ten years ago it couldn’t have been written: half the calamities and fewer than a third of the innovations (technological, cultural, and magical) that produced the world today had not yet happened.
Where Star.Ships is theoretical, meandering, and academic, The Chaos Protocols is pragmatic, to the point, and actionable. Amusingly, it is the latter that has footnotes on almost every page. The book begins with a brutal crash-course in economics and ends with a miniature grimoire. In between, it provides magical theory, economic reality, and practical techniques by turn.
Economic highlights include a sober discussion of the probable medium-terms effects of crony capitalism; advocating for the return to multi-family and multi-generational housing; a realistic assessment of the value of formal education and property ownership; and a discussion of the meaning of value and the value of meaning.
Magical highlights include Gordon’s own variation on the Stele of Jeu; the print publication of his masterwork on sigils; necromancy and ancestor worship; a discussion of divination mechanics and strategies; and magical strategies ranging from personal syncretisms to the Greek Magical Papyri to street-corner Hoodoo.
The most important parts of the book, though, can be summed up in three quotations:
One does not meet the devil at the crossroads to build a life that looks like everyone else’s.
and
Even if this is the apocalypse, that is no call to avoid making things interesting.
and, finally,
Become invincible and have adventures. The rest is detail.
Let’s have at it, shall we?
From my latest photo shoot exploring the personalities of my elemental masks, Chicago native Feral in the role of Keeper of Fire.
Although not, herself, a practitioner of occult arts — an unexpected and unaccountable bit of good luck with two of my previous models, first Felicity embodying Baphomet and the Sun God/dess, and then Kajira for the Conjuring and the first round of Keepers — she was very professional and a delight to work with, taking to the role with surprising ease.
Prints and the rest of the series are available at my portfolio. For the rest of Feral, click here. For the Elemental Masks series in toto, click here. If you like my work — either or both my art or my witchcraft — please consider buying a print or two. Times are a little tough right now.
It’s the final stretch, y’all: one week from today, Aradia and I will be disappearing into the woods to begin setting up the site for this year’s Heartland Pagan Festival. The thirty-first of its kind, it will be my second year as a member of the ritual crew and my first year as a ready-to-take-the-blame committee head. I’m stoked. I’m scared.
We have a lot of fun and excitement planned for you all. We’ve got great pagan speakers and musicians from across the country, and a local legend for our Saturday night concert. Three days of workshops and rituals led by both our honored guests and members of our own communities. Public rituals on all four nights, as well as the traditional night-hike Vision Quest on Saturday.
I don’t want to give too much away, or overstep myself by blurring the line between my HSA work and this, my personal blog, but I’m really excited about the four rituals. For most of my time as an attendee, there were three main rituals: opening ritual Thursday, main ritual Saturday night, and closing ritual Monday (moved to Sunday a few years ago). Then, for a while, there were only two rituals: Thursday and Saturday. Last year we re-introduced the Sunday night closing ritual. This year we’re upping the ante by taking the elemental theme and escalating to four rituals.
First, Thursday’s Earth Ritual will banish the outside world and welcome everyone to the festival by introducing us to the spirit of the land.
Then Friday’s Air Ritual will clear our minds to find our truths, and help us name our ambitions in order to pursue them.
For Saturday’s Water Ritual, we will dredge up our individual fears so that we may confront and conquer them as a community.
Finally, with all obstacles out of the way, Sunday’s Fire Ritual will stoke our divine spark to roaring flame and impel us back into the world charged for action.
I really hope to see some of you there.
As a yet-unpublished writer, the last eighteen months have been rough on me: the list of people I know and admire who have published before I have has grown immensely. Rufus Opus, Lance Tuck, Luna Teague. Most recently, now, Gordon White has blown onto the scene with not one but two books in the last fewmonths: the first with the most prestigious occult publisher of our age, and the second with the largest. My hat off to you, sir, you fucking grand over-achiever. Holy shit.
On the off chance that you don’t already know who Gordon White is, stop what you’re doing and check him out now. Gordon runs the twin pulpits of his blog and podcast, Rune Soup, whence he pontificates on a wide variety of subjects, mostly culture and the paranormal. He speaks from a Chaos Magick and animist perspective, which is refreshingly off-center, and he is very, very clever. Some day I hope to be cool enough to win an interview on the podcast.
The first and (arguably) more ambitious of his two books is more theoretical. Star.Ships gathers up a wide swath of archaeological loose ends from the late paleolithic and demonstrates how they may lead to the earliest portions of history. Gordon weaves his argument from the recently discovered paleolithic monuments of Gobekli Tepe to the infamous heads of Easter Island to the submerged ruins off the coast of India. He draws on cutting-edge linguistics and genetics research to illustrate how the now-widely disseminated 1990s theories of human migration desperately miss the mark, and turns into the analysis of geologists and engineers regarding a variety of ancient “mysteries”. In doing so, he attempts to fill in the “missing links” of western esoteric tradition, and argues that great swaths of human history have been influenced by a handful of stellar powers. He also, almost incidentally, condemns the current state of scholarship in general and the field of Egyptology in particular.
I am, by training, a Classicist. This is to say, on the one hand, that I know little or nothing of the paleolithic sites Gordon points to to illustrate a number of his arguments — particularly Gobekli Tepe, to which he points so often — and I look forward to spending a fair bit of my spare time over the next year looking up everything in the bibliography. On the other hand, however, it also means that I know better than most how much a shambles academic knowledge is regarding the moments just before “history” (that is to say, the things we wrote down) begins. I mean … there are Classicists who still believe there was a Dorian invasion, but no city of Troy, and that Pythagorus invented the math he clearly stole from Egyptian engineers. It was a professional hairdresser who demonstrated how the women’s hairstyles of Roman statuary were physically possible and not sculptors’ flights of fancy; it was the engineers of a century ago who provided the first viable theories of how the Egyptian pyramids might have been constructed; and I have personally seen at least three drunk construction workers on YouTube demonstrating how single individuals might have erected the megaliths across the British Isles. Finally, having given up my dreams of pursuing a Doctorate entirely because of my own experiences navigating the politics of the academy, I am entirely sympathetic to his condemnations of that institution.
This late to the game, however, there is almost no point in writing a full review of the book. To that end, I have only three more things to say on the subject:
</fanboi squee>
Aradia and I celebrated Beltane this year with a brief but much-needed retreat to Camp Gaea at the beginning of last week. Our ritual was small and private: the ritual burning of the leftovers of our magical practice since Samhain — sigil sketches, expired maeteria, and the like — and the detritus of the job I was let go from at the beginning of the year. There was a great deal more of the latter than the former — despite the planetary witchcraft experiment, which has yielded largely negative results, the majority of our magical energy over the last year has gone toward the coming festival — and I believe that I got a great deal more out of our ritual than she.
That night and in the morning, I was struck by an epiphany of sorts. It came to me in the form of one of the first lines I wrote for the Earth Ritual, with which we will open HPF 2016: “We are of the Earth, upon earth, and, in the end, below the Earth.”
Two nights later, when I performed the Stele of Jeu for the Dark Moon — my first return to that ritual in many months — the power came, as usual, but to little effect. Previously, when I have performed the Headless Rite, the power has rushed out into my Kingdom, opening fissures in the landscape of my life even as it filled others. This time, however, it merely rippled out over a smooth plane, affecting nothing except perhaps to burnish the already polished surface.
For three solid years in the Sunrise Temple, and more haphazardly since coming back to Kansas City, I devoted myself to courting the spirits of the Upper Worlds — spirits of the stars and planets, of the Heavens Above. When I tried to bring my practice back to the home-place of Witchcraft, I tried to do it incrementally. My first forays back into witchcraft merely changed the means by which I sought those starry powers, re-callibrating my rites into things that would make sense to witches who, eclectic though they may be, had never dabbled in the Legemeton or the Golden Dawn. I didn’t want to just abandon all that I had learned. I wanted to, somehow, bring back the wisdom and the power I had learned among the stars.
This, I believe now, was precisely backwards. Someday, I will write my book on planetary witchcraft. But first I must make myself, again a witch, rather than the sorcerer I have become.
What I need to do now is resume my former devotion to the gods and powers . This will, of course, almost certainly prove to be a false dichotomy in the end. But I must follow the path where I see it.
The Keeper of Earth
A priest/ess and oracle, the title Keeper of Earth originates in the idealized coven structure that I developed for a series of experimental rituals (as yet never performed), and have used in both my (as yet unpublished) novels and the public rituals I have written in my capacity as a member and now chair of the HSA Sacred Experience Committee.
This image represents my first attempt at using Photoshop more vigorously than simple photo development, combining two images from very different times and places. The top image, the Keeper of Earth, herself, comes from my most recent photo shoot, at the beginning of the month, with the delightful Kajira Bound. The background image comes from Olympia, taken during my study abroad in Greece. Together they form the prototype for a maybe-someday-maybe-not oracle deck that I occasionally hypothesize.
If you would like to see more of my work, please check out my portfolio.
I was let go from my position with my former employer on the fifth of March. Thursday I accepted a new position, after only three weeks of unemployment. My first day is tomorrow.
It may surprise my readers, however, to learn that I did practically no magic in that period, except a few offerings immediately before my interview Thursday. If this fortune is the result of enchantment, it is a product of the same enchantment that resulted in my termination. I believe that it is. Magically, I set goals for my art — my photography, in particular — that could not be achieved in my previous circumstances.
There is not guarantee that I will achieve them, now. But the opportunity exists.
I live a charmed life.
Below are a series of images I had intended to submit to the Beltane edition of A Beautiful Resistance. Unfortunately, my life got away from me, and I missed the opportunity to participate in my community. But here they are, for the pleasure of my readers. I believe you may have seen some of them before, but I hope you enjoy seeing them again.
The Empress, according to Jessa Crispin, is sometimes an indication to do more rather than less, to revel in your fecundity, to make use of your resources as diversely as possible.[1]
The Empress has featured prominently in my readings over the last quarter, but I did not learn this about her until this last week … mere days after I was let go without notice from my position at the jewelry repair shop where I have worked, now, for just over eight years. My position was eliminated to make room in the budget for another sales person, a decision which speaks volumes about the company they were becoming. That sort of decision making is, of course, why I was already looking to leave, albeit on my own terms. The decision having been taken from me, I find myself feeling liberated rather than diminished. I am now free to embrace the empress.
This is not to say that I have not spent a great deal of the last week reeling. Even welcome change can be a shock. But, more than anything, I have spent the last six days working diligently at my art, my obligations to the HSA, and the maintenance of my home.
In the month since my last post, there have been so many things which I have tried to write about, but found myself wordless for a variety of reasons. But they all come down, I think, to this: capitalism is torture.
Yes, I am a historian. And, yes, I do know how hard people in pre-capitalist societies had to work to put food in their bellies. Frankly, that’s the point: most of what 21st Century capitalists know about the world before before 1865 is the lies they commissioned to make the past look nastier. Before our current level of labor specialization, before the theft of the means of production, peasants were oppressed but rarely starving, and they had the tools to grow their own food and manufacture their own goods, and sufficient surplus to trade for what they could not make. And let’s not even get into what a bad deal the agrarian revolution turned out to be, ten thousand years before the rise of industry.
Work is toil. Capitalism is torture. And in the week since I was “terminated” (think really hard about how fucked up that metaphor is for just a minute), I have been physically and spiritually healthier than I had in months. My allergies are receding, despite the early onset of spring. My sleep has improved in quality, and though I haven’t gone to bed a minute earlier, I’ve been getting up earlier and more energized.
I am adrift, now. My circumstances (fortunate in so many ways, compared to so many others, a fortuitous intersection of luck, privilege, and preparation) are such that I must find new employment.
But I am not rudderless. I have a trade. I have a number of other skills. And I am always willing and able to train. And, with a little bit of luck and maybe a bit of help, I might just be able to leverage myself into my own employer.
A few short pieces of my fiction will be available for sale, soon, as ebooks. And I’m going to keep submitting my novel for publication until I have the means to open my own publishing company(only about $500 with careful use of print-on-demand services). And my photos are even now for sale.
Expect to see more art here in the near future.
And expect to see more magic.
In the meantime, my apologies for my unreliable posting schedule.
—
