διγενὴς ἔκστασις : Queer Spirit Journeys

[This post was originally written ten months ago for a queer occult Zine that, to my great disappointment, seems to have gone defunct without publishing.  The tone is more … literary, and the content a bit more intimate than most of my posts. ]

The void opens before me and the crystalline spire of the World Tree rises into infinity where there ought to be a horizon. The ground beneath my feet is an illusion for my convenience: there is nothing but the void and the Tree.

In the physical realm, I am uncomfortably male. Although I reject all the social tropes of masculinity, excepting only a few which are synonymous with being a decent human being, I am generally read as so butch that I am routinely mistaken for straight. While wearing a skirt. In a gay bar.

In the Otherworld, however, things are more complicated.

My most familiar spirit approaches me before I even reach the Tree. She is eager, and there is mischief in her eyes. Until recently, she appeared as a gorgon; now, just a woman. I ask if she has any adventures planned for me, and although she is one of the few spirits whose voice I can hear reliably, tonight she answers only by taking my hand.

Together, we walk to the World Tree. She places her hand on the shimmering facets of the bark, and slides into the pillar of crystal. I follow.

It is quite telling, in retrospect, that I have been fixated on leaving my body since I first began my study of the occult at the age of sixteen. Although I have never mastered astral projection, my success with Michael Harner’s visionary techniques, to which I was introduced by a friend a decade later, has been markedly greater. Enough so, in fact, that I began having experiences that my source materials could not help me contextualize almost immediately. I began seriously exploring and experimenting with visionary techniques in the spring of 2009. At first, as I imagine it is for many people, it was all or nothing: the trance would either elude me, or I would find myself in a mindscape which I could barely comprehend. Those first visionary experiences were frightening—some of them are, still, as I have no cultural context in which to ground them.

We descend, spiraling into darkness, and emerge at the edge of a stone circle. There is a drummer hiding in the shadows on the far side. Beautiful dancers writhe in the inconstant light of a small fire. I cannot see their faces clearly, or hear their voices over the drum.

I leap into the circle, joining the dance with abandon. Our bodies collide to the rhythm of the drum. There is nothing but the drumbeat and the heat of the fire and flesh. My hips and breasts sway as I dance and spin, round and round the fire.

It probably goes without saying that, at first, my spirit-body appeared as an idealized version of my mortal flesh: a little more muscular, a little less soggy around the middle. For a while, before I realized that it was irrelevant, I tried to form an “astral body” that was more “realistic”. Then I just let it be what it was: trying to dismantle that small bit of vanity was a distraction from the real work of exploring the spirit world. So, the first time it was radically different, I almost didn’t notice.

I was at a Qaballistic workshop at the local New Age store. The instructor was leading us on a visionary journey to Malkuth, the Earthly Kingdom. The path led across a bridge over a river, where we were to abandon certain symbolic representations of our mortal lives. Seeing my reflection in the river, I was surprised to see that I was a woman. My tattoos and ritual garb were what I had formed as I entered the visionary trance, but my flesh was not. For much of the rest of the journey, which was clear and productive, I was viscerally and self-consciously aware of the differences between that body and my mortal one—and of the fact that I had been unaware of those differences until I saw my reflection.

The drummer has slipped outside the fire light, and moves around outside the circle of stones, deosil to our widdershins, so that he is always just out of sight. One by one, the other dancers disappear as I make my way around the circle again and again. One turn I am a woman: my center of gravity lower, my breasts swaying and bouncing with my gyrations. The next I am a man: my cock slapping against my thighs as my center of gravity rises. Though the movements themselves are not so different—I am a terrible, unoriginal dancer, either way—the relative proportions of hip to shoulder create the illusion that it is otherwise, both visual and tactile.

The goddess I met at the end of that journey was not the Queen of Malkuth, but the Titan goddess Rhea: vast beyond my imagining, reclining nude and crowned and flanked by lions. To this day I have always-but-once been a woman when summoned to her presence in my visionary work. Other spirits, too—such as the equally vast but yet-unnamed goddess of Elemental Water—prefer that I be female in their presence. I have always been male in the Elemental Realm of Fire. My gender in the Otherworld is increasingly uncertain and malleable: male, female, both, neither. I shift at random, or at will, or at the behest of the spirits with whom I entreat.

All that remain, now, are myself and the the fire and the drummer I still cannot see. But my body has solidified in the image of Hermaphroditus: full breasts and hips, bearded and phallic. My hair is thick and glorious, from my head to my feet. Horns crown my head. A satyr’s tail sways behind me, and a satyr’s Priapism sways in front.

I leap into the fire, and we consume one another. My flesh is incinerated, then reformed, as I swallow the flames. When I emerge, the drummer has reveled himself: my Natal Demon. My Genius is there, too, and my most familiar spirit.

We dance.

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* διγενὴς ἔκστασις – “Diges Ekstasis”, lit. two-kind displacement, alt. trance of doubtful sex. διγενὴς cf. LSJ.A, ἔκστασις Middle Liddel.A.II.4

A Pause for Reflection Before I Continue

I’ve been lying fallow since coming back from the epic road trip with Aradia.  I managed to put down an awful lot of things that I don’t really need while I was out there in the quiet, and I’ve pointedly avoided picking back up the mantle of power that I left here in the Sunrise Temple when I set out for Kansas City at the beginning of the summer.  I’ve been honoring my gods, feeding my familiar spirits, and mostly working on getting caught up on my sleep while some things work their way through my subconscious.

The ceremonial experiment is officially over.  I am delighted that I can now claim conjuration among my magical skills, and the relationships I have developed with planetary powers will benefit me for the rest of my life, but neither the Tree of Life nor the Seven Spheres will ever serve me as a cosmological map.  The emphasis on fatherhood and kingship gives me the heeby-jeebies. 

As I mentioned over on tumblr earlier, I’m working on a chapbook with the results of those experiments.  Hopefully others will find that useful, and take the results to places I have never even imagined.  I meant to have it ready to proof before the school year started, but that didn’t happen.  It will be free.

Project Null is still on the back burner.  The do-what-works philosophy of Chaos Magick has pretty much integrated itself into my life, but I’m not really at a point right now—as I begin my senior year of college—where I can risk blowing up my life FOR SCIENCE!

As I work my way through my senior year, as I begin seriously putting my spritual practice back together after everything that’s gone right and wrong with my magical experiments of the last two years, and as I prepare to uproot myself from the Temple I have established here at college, there’s going to be some changes on the blog.  Hopefully those changes will include more frequent and more thoughtful posts, but I sadly can’t guarantee that.  There will definitely be cosmetic changes.  There may be services offered.  There will definitely be (occasional) plugs for donations: I’m trying to go abroad, and that costs money.

There will be experiments and failures.  I hope you all will stick around with me through the growing pains.

PAX LVX ET LAETUS FUTUENS

Genius Locii: Overseer of the Standing Stones

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When our friend Sthenno learned that Aradia and I were going on a road trip to the Badlands, she asked us to bring her back some dirt to dad to her collection of Earth and Waters from various parts of the world.  She gave us a baggie to collect the dirt in, and a vial of water and a tea-light to serve as an offering for the exchange.

Although we were happy to oblige, there was the small concern of where and how to do such a thing.  After all, the removal of any rocks or plants from a national park is technically a crime (though we carried off enough mud on or shoes and gear to equal easily five times the volume that we collected for Sthenno).  Further (and, frankly, more importantly), this was not a region where white people have historically covered themselves in glory with regards to the First Nations peoples or the spirits of the land.  Although Aradia got a slightly different vibe off of everything, the overwhelming majority of the spirits that I could percieve in the Badlands were fundamentally disinterested in my existence one way or the other.

The one notable exception to that was a spirit near our camp site.  There was a hill to the West of us that called to me.  And not just me: a camp of hippies near us took it upon themselves to climb the small mountain in the dark.  Aradia and I watched their lights and listened to their yells; I very much wanted to follow them—as I put it then, “carrying our jug of wine and screaming like a maenad”—but Aradia disuaded me.

The spirit knew that we needed dirt, and it called to me.  The second day we did climb the hill, and found concentric circles of carefully stacked stones with a set of three piles that were clearly an altar of sorts, and two extra pairs set like gateways at the heads of two paths leading further away from the site.  The spirit—who we believe called others there to erect the “standing stones”—accepted Sthenno’s offer of water and fire in exchange for the dirt (though the wind made the latter … complicated), but wanted blood from Aradia and I without making itself particularly clear about what it was offering in return.  We politely declined, and—perhaps as a result–the spirit also made clear that we were not to take any pictures of the top of it’s hill, so the above picture from the road is the only image I can offer you; one can just barely see the stones rising up at the top of the hill.

Upon our return, the dirt maintained a clear and potent charge, and Sthenno was startled but intrigued to hear the story.  For myself, I look forward to hearing what comes of her workings with the dirt and the associated spirit.

The site, itself, remains clear in my mind, and it is my intention to return astrally to see what I can learn from that perspective.

Spirits of Earth and Air

Last Friday Aradia and I skidded into KC at the end of a nine day road trip to the South Dakota Badlands and Rocky Mountain National Park.  As tempting as it was, in theory, to turn the road trip into a spiritual retreat, the fact is that I desperately needed the vacation.  And what a vacation it was.   Even after all the travelling I’ve done with Aradia and my family, I had never seen landscapes like the ones I saw over that week-and-a-half: the Karst cartography of central and south Missouri gave way to the Loess hills of northern MO and eastern Iowa before we set off across the grasslands of South Dakota.  We came into the Badlands from the north, via I-90, and I don’t even know how to describe the feeling when the earth dropped off in front of us, only to rise back up in magnificent spires of white and red stone.

A view from the Juniper Forrest trail.
A view from the Juniper Forrest trail.

 

Tragically, as our visit coincided with the Perseid meteor shower, it rained on us briefly every day we were there, despite the arid climate, and every night was overcast.  That unseasonable water made it all the more shocking when I tried to get a sense of the spirits of the place and sensed nothing by Earth and Air: ancient, slow-moving things from whom I sensed not just a vast indifference to human life, but to mortal life in general.  My poetic nature wants to describe that indifference as “bordering on cruelty”, but I think that’s a little bit of projection and a great deal of anthropomorphization; I think the spirits that ancient stone, weathered by the wind and by water whose brief appearances is as destructive to the rock as it is necessary to the survival of plant and animal life, are simply the most alien things I have yet to come into contact with.

The Badlands were vast, alien, and austere.  So far from my lands in which I have invested my power, and from the Water which makes up so much of my nature, I felt empty—sucked dry.  Surprisingly, that feeling was healing and cathartic: my waters have been murky, almost poisoned for the last year, by the stresses of my personal and academic life, and by the rigid forces of the ceremonial I had been practicing.  By travelling outside my own personal bog, I was able to let some of those “contaminants” (to continue the metaphor) dry out and be carried off by the constant winds of the desert.

From there were traveled south and further west, cutting through the top-left corner of Nebraska into eastern Wyoming, where we skirted the foothills into north-eastern Colorado where, after gaining elevation slowly over hundreds of miles, we finally ascended into the mountains proper.  The thin air of the Rockies hit me hard, and I was nearly useless for the first twenty hours or so.  The green and grey vistas of the mountains hit me as hard as the desert had, and I found the magical climate much more to my liking, but even farther from “home” and equally alien.

A View from Alpine Ridge Road.
The Rocky Mountains, as viewed from Alpine Ridge Road.

I don’t know if the Rocky Mountains are actually younger, geologically, than the Badlands, but they felt that way to me.  More patient, and with an indifference to my passing that was somehow less hostile.  Earth and Air still dominated, but Water was more familiar, perhaps even more welcome.  When I finally had the opportunity to perform the Stele of Jeu on the last day—something that I had been trying to fit in for the whole trip—the local spirits wanted reassurance that I was not attempting to dominate them, but they took me at my word that I only sought to purify myself.

By the end of the trip, as we came down off the mountain to get coffee in Denver and struck off eastward for dinner and a hotel in Hays, I finally felt like a person again: scoured clean by spirits of Earth and Air.

Spirits of Spirits: Conjuring Cannabis

Last week, Aradia and I conjured the spirit of Cannabis Sativa.  No that is not a euphemism for smoking weed.  Y’all should know by now that I only use euphemisms when they’re more entertaining and obscene than what I’m actually trying to say.  We literally conjured the spirit who rules over marijuana.

The idea came to me somewhat at random: a way of similtaneously linking my study of ceremonial magic with my study of Chaos Magick and with the process of getting back to the witchcraft that has kept me sane.  Building on my experiments with Triangles of the Art, I scribed a triangle just for the task:

cannabis triangle

Such an endeavor could not, of course, be complete without an invocation.  A little bit of creativity, a couple rough drafts, and finally a bit of trial and error produced this:

We call upon you, oh spirit: You who preside over the sacred plant cannabis sativa.  Oh spirit – Mercurial, Jovian, Saturnal, and Venusian by turns – We call uponyou to appear before us.

We call upon you by your various names: marijuana, ganja, grass, mota, reefer, endo.  You are the diggity dank!  You are the beloved mary jane!

We call upon you, oh spirit: we offer you fumigation of frankinsence and libation of blood-red wine.  I evoke you, oh spirit, to appear before us in our circle that we may converse in friendship and that you may instruct us in your nature.

Aradia and I performed the conjurations jointly, first Wednesday night and then Friday.  Aradia performed the incantation for the first conjuration because I was having difficulty articulating what, precisely, I had planned for the rite, itself.  (The problem with listening to your Genius instead of writing out the plan.)  The cats went ballistic as we cast the circle.  Smoke from the fumigation curled thickly in front of the mirror.  I could feel the spirit appear and caught glimpses of it moving around the room, but otherwise I experienced none of the sensations that I expected from my planetary evocations.  The more magical of my two cats flopped down behind us.   I retrospect, I think that my sense of time must have been distorted: I can usually sit and wait for quite a while for a spirit to answer, but that night it only took a few minutes (possibly only a few moments) before I started getting impatient.  I felt that the ritual had been a failure, and dismissed the spirit (prematurely, as it turns out).

Aradia started acting very strangely almost immediately: grinning strangely, playing with the cat. Somehow I failed to imagine that her strange behavior might have been the effect of the spirit.  I’ll leave her to tell her half of the story in her won time, but she gleaned a great deal of useful information, most notably that the spirit is not particularly impressed by frankincense.

We speculated that the mixed results may have been in part because the original invocation, which Aradia read, employed first person singular verbs.  For the second round, we changed the number to plural and substituted patchouli for frankincense, thinking that the spirit might like it better.  Also based on Aradia’s reports, we shared the libation we offered.

One or all of those changes worked wonders.  Conjuring her—which we did stone sober—had a physical effect much like smoking some high-quality creeper.  I never saw the spirit, or heard her the way Aradia had the previous evening, but her presence was powerfully felt.  We shared the libations again, thanked and dismissed her, and went to bed.

By my reckoning, the experiment is a mixed success.  I never really saw her, and never received a seal or sigil with which to summon her again.  On the other hand, I strongly suspect that such formalities are a little bit funny to her.  Aradia described her as a trickster spirit.  She certainly has a sense of humor, and a strong interest in being in the presence of humans.  We amuse her immensely, and I think there’s a relationship to be developed here.

Milestones

In the last month, despite my relative inactivity, I’ve reached two milestones in blogging: 11,000+ all-time pageviews and 50 “official” (that is, wordpress users who pressed the button) followers.  Combined with those who follow by email and via Tumblr, that’s 120 followers altogether.

I just want to say, “Thank you all.”

I know that it’s been quiet around here lately.  School ate my life for a while, then the summer job.  To say nothing of a little bit of that “real life” drama that we alternately mock and wish we had more of, as it’s proof positive that one has a “real” life.

To commemorate this grand occasion, I will now share with you some interesting but semi-random statistics about this blog:

* Not counting the home page/archives, the most viewed single post on this blog is the Conjuration of Baphoment, viewed 417 times as of this posting.

* The two blogs which have forwarded the most traffic to me are Polyphanes’ Digital Ambler (112 referrals) and Gordon White’s Rune Soup (94).  Thanks guys!  I love you!

* Of the various search terms with have brought people to this blog, the most common are “liber mmm” (21; too bad I didn’t have more to say about that), “stele of jeu” (20, which really just goes to show how few people are talking about that rite), and “dweller on the threshold” (14).

* Of the various search terms which have brought people to this blog, the most entertaining have been, “picatrix sex” (5 times!), “dionysus statues white pagan wiccan stores” (3), “sexsigil” (2), “anime couples sleeping together” (2!?!), “my uncomfortable journey”, and “why is my life a giant clusterfuck”.

Tables and Triangles

The  sacred geometry of conjuring circles has proven one of the most surprising difficulties in my study of ceremonial magic.  Even as someone who can draw well, there’s something about concentric circles brings out more of the OCD than the artiste.  So I started playing around with my computer.

This first image was designed with a Trithemian table of practice in mind, but I haven’t quite mastered circular text in either the GIMP or Inkscape, the two image programs I can afford.   In my studies of ceremonial magic, freely available electronic templates were of immense use to me, so I offer this one here in the public domain for use by anyone for anything.  It’s not perfect, but it’s better than anything I could find royalty-free.  Enjoy

Triangle in double circle

This second is the first stage of a prototype based on the Trithemian table, using the Agrippan planetary characters rather than the names of the archangels.  My thought is that I, or anyone else, might substitute the elemental or directional powers with whom they are most intimate for the four angels Trithemius prescribes.  I share it here for private use, and I would be delighted to hear about any experiments performed with it.

triangle of art with characters

This third and final table that I’m going to share today is the one revealed to me by the powers of Saturn during the Seven Spheres in Seven Days challenge.  I share this, too, for personal experimentation only.

saturnian triangle of conjuration with notes

The Dweller at the Threshold … Again

At the beginning of the summer, I took on two projects that have given me much more trouble than I anticipated.  To my frustration, the trouble has not been that the work, itself, is beyond me, but rather the emotional crisis that it has precipitated.

Skylights

With the conclusion of the 2012-13 academic year, I have been studying and experimenting with ceremonial magic for two years.  I have conjured my Natal Genius and Daemon.  I have journeyed to each of the seven Spheres via both neo-shamanic visionary techniques and by conjuring archangels to lead the way.  I have employed electional astrology to create talismans of great power, and conjured the powers of the planets to influence the shape of politics.

I recognize that this is a pittance, and that I have barely scratched the surface of the subject matter.  I have dabbled in the Golden Dawn and Agrippa the Picatrix and the Arbatel, mostly via Christopher Penczak, Rufus Opus, Christopher Warnock, and a few other modern authors.  Although I await Aaron Leitch’s new book eagerly, I have not yet even made the most cursory study of Enochian magic.  Although I have read Crowley/Mather’s Goetia, I have never conjured any of those demons.  There are countless grimoires of which I know precisely nothing.

With that said, however, I think that the products of my experiments—my insights and my struggles—may be useful to others.  There are core concepts in ceremonial magic that are simply alien to anyone coming from a witchcraft background like my own, and straightforward presentation of the core techniques are few and far between.  As such, I think that I might be able to shed some light on the path, at least the first few steps, and have committed myself to writing a chapbook on the subject by the end of the summer.

The plan is to publish the results of my experiments so that others may build upon them.  As I said on tumblr, I would like a few beta-readers who have more experience with conjuration than I have so that they can tell me how far off the mark I am, and a few beta-readers with no experience in conjuration to try to see if my UPG works for others.  I have one volunteer for the former and two for the latter, but would like one or two more of each.  (Hint.  Hint.)

Translating the Stele of Jeu

I began performing the Stele of Jeu as a part of my Esbat rites at the end of 2011.  Although I no longer perform the ritual quite so regularly, I still find it to be an exceptionally useful part of my practice.  Because of the difficulties that one of my friends is having right now, I believe that the ritual would benefit her a great deal.  Unfortunately, however, she is not of a mindset which will permit her to simply perform the ritual: it’s too alien.  So I have taken it upon myself to annotate and, where possible, rephrase the ritual for her benefit, and the benefit of other witches who find the peculiar language of Greek-translated-for-scholars to be incomprehensible bordering on intimidating.

In my magical fantasy world, this project will culminate in my writing a version of the Stele for witches of an eclectic Wiccan background what Crowley did for his own students and peers in writing Liber Samekh.  Unfortunately this has been hampered by my inability to locate any scholarship on the subject, forcing me to rely in unseemly fashion on my personal experiments and UPG, and on the research of Mr. Jack Faust.

The Crisis

The crisis these projects has engendered is twofold, but the components are embarrassingly straightforward.

Firstly, I am plagued by the question, “Who am I to pose as an expert of any kind?”  The fact of the matter is that I know how little I know.  For all that I’ve been practicing magic for upward of fifteen years, my neuroses and social circles have somewhat limited my avenues of research.  Attending college in Indiana has also been surprisingly limiting to my options for interlibrary loan.

The fact that I am explicitly positioning myself as a fellow Seeker, not an expert or teacher does not seem to assuage this fear at all.  The fact of the matter is that I want to be a community leader somewhere down the road, have said so before, and only a fool could fail to put two and two together: Yes, I am hoping that some day, when I have something more substantial to offer, people will remember that I had clever things to say before.

Secondly, somewhat in light of the above, I find myself asking the question, “Is this where I want to focus my efforts?”  I am just old enough, at 32, that I am beginning to really feel my own mortality.  There are so many things I want to study, so many experiments that I want to do, so many books that I want to write.  Every time I choose to focus on one of them, I am potentially closing off others simply by virtue of the limited time available to me.

Is planetary witchcraft the thing I want to focus on?  What about the visionary work?  What about the alchemy?  What about the elemental powers I have touched, or the Chaos Magic I’ve dabbled in, my experiments in art as magic?  And where does that leave time for my novels?  Or my formal, public scholarship?

And, oh, yes, that whole thing where I want to seek out my gods but am deathly terrified to do so.

So I find myself stalling.  Sure, I needed to take advantage of this long weekend to actually relax and get some things done around the house.  Yes, I need to work my job to pay my rent and save up in hopes of being able to study in Greece at the end of the coming school year.  Damn right I need to actually get caught up on my sleep.  But I don’t need to do any of these things to the exclusion of the Work.

ETA: Edited to provide link and correct the spelling of Mr. Leitch’s name.  My apologies, sir.

Taking Pain

Taking a break from all the Very Serious Posts which I should be writing, let’s have a little bit of story time.

Aradia and I are hosting some of my college friends right now, so we took them to our favorite bar in Kansas City, which also happens to be the best gay bar in town.  It was also our first trip there since I got back from the summer, and we were delighted to find our favorite bartender working.  He greeted us warmly, made our friends feel welcome, and made us the best drinks ever.  It was glorious.

But he was also holding his left arm at a funny angle, and it was clearly paining him.  I asked what was wrong, and he made a lot of inarticulate noises and hand gestures (which I originally translated as, “I was drunk at the time and I feel stupid”) before finally explaining that he had taken the pain from the lovely lesbian with the broken arm sitting next to us.

“Give it to me,” I said.  “I’m a professional.”  (Perhaps a slight exaggeration.)

“No,” he said.  “I took it.  It’s my responsibility.”

I respected that, so I let it go.  My friends were like, “what?” and I explained the principles to them.

“Oh,” my one friend says, very  much to my surprise..  “I did that once.”  He goes on to tell me about how this one time he took half of his friend’s migraine so that they could both study before a test.  “If I hadn’t done it myself,” he said, “I wouldn’t believe it was possible.”

The evening progresses, and I come back to the bar to order the next round of drinks.  My bartender is in so much pain that he actually shorts me my change.

“Why do we do this, again?” he asks me.

“Because we can,” I say.

As I work down on my third bourbon, though, the whole thing starts to weigh on me.  He’s nourishing the pain, taking it on as some sort of martyrdom, and it’s making it so he can’t work.  I’m reluctant to push the issue, but Aradia argues that it’s just as idiotically macho to let him suffer as it is for him to insist on suffering, and that if I won’t take the pain off of him, she’ll do it.

We all finish our drinks, and its time to go.  Aradia and one of my friends go to the ladies’ room, while my other friend and I go in search of the bartender to say goodbye and (again) offer to take the woman’s pain from him, and to tip him a little more before we leave.  He refuses both my offer and the tip, but then he gets all weird about it, twisting my friend’s arm rather than taking the tip, and patting me on the heart with the wounded arm.

While his hand is resting on my heart something goes off in the back of my brain, and I just breathe the pain into my lungs, and exhale it as fire into the air above us.

He looks at me in shock and says, “You took it.”

“I did.”

“But you know we have to give it back.”

“No, we don’t.”

Aradia shows up and we finish our goodbyes with a little more drama and groping than usual, then leave the bar.

My friend can no longer contain his enthusiasm: “You breathed it out as smoke.  I saw you take the pain.  I was watching really close because I wanted to see how you did it, and I saw you breathe it out as smoke!”

There is nothing like third party confirmation to make an evening perfect.

I feel a little bad about it, now.  He took the burden so seriously.  But the whole martyr angle just grated on me, and the way he touched me with the wounded hand … it just seemed to be the thing to do a the time.

HPF 2013 After-Action Report: Our Private Rites

For myself and Aradia, as well as the rest of Camp WTF, magic is a major part of our HPF experience.  My first two festivals with Aradia (2009 and 2010) were some of the most intense ritual experience of my life, and it was at the last full moon festival (2010) that I underwent my first initiation.  For good or ill, this year’s public rituals ended up being fairly low-impact.  But with Friday night’s full moon to draw on, we took matters into our own hands.

Camp Altar

We started things off right by erecting an altar in camp and putting up successive IMG_5661magic circles around our encampment to encourage good times and ward off fuckwits.  Each of us contributed an item or two to the setup, and we received numerous compliments on it throughout the weekend.  Actually, I contributed a bit: my Kouros and Witchmother idols, my wand and chalice, my Orb and my new friend Cave Canem, who needed to be fed sacred oil (Fiery Wall of Protection Oil in the red bottle) at the Moon.  Aradia brought more obsidian, the little elephant, and the dish on which they sat.  Pasiphae would later bring out a selenite sphere, and Aidan set up the tripod around the whole operation.

We performed planetary invocations here as a group for the first two days, and I maintained that practice on my own through Saturday.  I also demonstrated my offering rite for the others, who were curious about the ways my practice has evolved while at college.

Stele of Jeu

Friday, at sunset, Aradia and I went to the Memorial Grove to perform the Stele of Jeu together.  Pasiphae and Aidan watched that, too, as I have been encouraging her to take up the rite to help her plough through some issues she’s been working on.  We read the verses in tandem, excepting the barbarous words, which my notes have written in Greek and which I had to pronounce for Aradia to repeat. 

The results were, at first, relatively lackluster—perhaps because we had never practiced forming the rite jointly in such a fashion, or possibly because I was still sorely depleted from the semester.  The power rose, and with it the wind, but I did not get the purgative sensation that I usually have when I call upon Him Whose Name is a Heart Encircled By A Serpent.  I was, however, very much ready for the next stage of our Esbat, and I wonder, if the following rites would have been so effective if I had not made myself a vessel in such a fashion.

Drawing Down the Moon

Finally, we went searching for a place to perform our esbat.  Janet Farrar and Gavin Bone had spoken earlier that day, and had touched on the subject of Drawing Down the Moon and the way it had functioned back in the Old Days with Doreen Valiente.  Meanwhile, Pasiphae had a selenite sphere which she has been using as a lunar force and wished to charge it more fully.  At first we went to one of the ritual areas—Moonfyre Grove—but found that we had no actual view of the moon, so we trecked back up the hill to Flora’s Garden.

We cast our circle informally, as we usually do, and lit a candle.  Pasiphae raised the selenite over her head and, rather spontaneously, I took the role of High Priest and drew the Moon down into her.  At that point, a whole host of powers I had never dealt with before moved through me.  For that moment, I was the Consort God: I grew antlers and stood tall, a channel by which the Moon descended from heaven into a mortal woman.  When the time came, I prompted her and Pasiphae spoke prophesy—though time will tell if it was for all of us or for her alone.

There was a great deal of residual energy when that operation was done.  Aradia used some of it to dispose of a tainted artifact, and the rest was poured into a bottle of salt water which we had prepared for the occasion.  Lunar holy water is an interesting thing to See, and it had the added bonus—at least partly on account of the salt—of being potent grounding water.