In witchcraft

Liber Lux: Kia

Author Satyr MagosPosted on

One of the more interesting ideas contained in Peter Carroll’s Liber Null and Psychonaut is the idea of Kia[1]: that ineffable, unnamable thing which experiences consciousness.  While I’m a little (read: a lot) bothered by Carroll’s anthropocentricism–“Chaos … is the force which has caused life to evolve itself out of the dust, and it is currently most concentratedly manifest in the human life force, or Kia, where it is the source of consciousness.”[2]—the idea of mortal sensation, experience, and consciousness as a material manifestation of primordial Chaos … well, it’s almost poetic.

The “soul” (here “Kia”), as a manifest point of primordial, cosmic ur-substance (“Chaos”) provides us with the mechanic to which Carroll attributes the efficacy of magick: “…[A]s centers of Kia or Chaos, ourselves, we can sometimes call very unlikely coincidences or unexpected events into existence by manipulating the aether.”[3]  Aether, of course, being the astral sea of half-formed matter which corresponds to the entirety of the trans-lunar realms of Kabbalistic and Hermetic cosmology, and of which Carroll says, “Thought gives it shape and Kia gives it power.”[4]

Although basically a stripped-out version of the Hermetic Spheres or the Qabalistic Sephiroth, I find this cosmology much more emotionally satisfying.  Something about the impersonal nature of Chaos helps undermine the implicit anthropocentricism, where  the more traditional cosmologies double-down by attributing their personal ideals of masculine rulership (generally in monarchist frame) to the Source.  Despite protestations to the contrary—that the masculine language is purely metaphoric—this Source/Father/God King ends up looking suspiciously like the hegemonic, patriarchal masculine ideal against which I have been struggling for my entire life.[5]  This is not intended as a dig at those Hermeticists I know and respect, and I apologize if it reads that way: anthropomorphizing cosmic forces is our only way to relate to them, and I think y’all understand the problems inherent in naturalizing male dominance through your cosmology.[6]

Unfortunately, in between these points, there’s the part where Carroll dives  face-first into a steaming pile of Orientalist dualism/non-dualism claptrap.[7]  That pretty much breaks if for me.  Again, don’t get me wrong: I’m not hating on everyone who subscribes to or has an interest in Buddhist thought.  What I’m raving against is the way in which Carroll uncritically reproduces the colonialist racism of his Golden Dawn predecessors, whom he otherwise so loves to hate.  But I’ll leave the in-depth deconstruction of Carroll’s wannabe-zen-thing to someone more well versed in the actual details of the philosophies he’s pillaging.

So, despite the romantic appeal on the one hand, the critical flaws in Carroll’s Chaos-and-Kia cosmology make it impossible for me to actually adopt it.  The anthropocentricism of Kia undermines all the reasons for and advantages of conceptualizing the cosmic ur-substance as Chaos: it leaves the door open for a hierarchal evaluation of life-forms by the degree to which one credits them with Kia manifestation, and thereby within human kind by more subtle margins.  The Orientalist frame within which Carroll articulates his theories—and, even more, his of the fetishization of “Shamanism”, which will get a post of its own—basically takes these potential problems and runs with them to some of the worst possible places, where he—the enlightened white magician—can recreate the marvelous works of the noble savage, synthesize them with the ideas of the brown people his empire subjugated, and produce an ars magicae which is “superior” to either.

Fortunately, it’s not actually necessary to adopt Carroll’s cosmology in order to use the core techniques of Chaos Magick.

1 – Carroll almost certainly got the word from the grandfather of Chaos, Austin Osman Spare–Zos Kia Cultus was published in XXXX–I don’t know how much their ideas overlap.

2 – Carroll, Peter. Liber Null and Psychonaut.  San Francisco: Weiser (1987) . p.28

3 – Ibid. 29

4 – Ibid.

5 – Of course, there’s the whole problem where Carroll takes the feminine figure of Khaos, renders her first neuter, and then quasi-masculinizes her via the anthropomorphic figure of Baphomet … but that’s a post all its own. 

6 – If not, then this IS a dig at you, and you should answer the clue phone and own your fucking privilege. 

7  – Carroll, 29.  For the context to which I refer, cf. Orientalism, especially as conceptualized by Edward Said and those who follow him.

In witchcraft

Project Null is Going Off The Rails

Author Satyr MagosPosted on

It’s amazing how productive you can be while not sticking to the plan.  My formal daily practice has basically fallen apart in the last weeks, even as my various experiments have increased in breadth and depth.

I have been re-re-reading Liber Lux and am working on several write-ups therefrom.  I have almost finished Jason Miller’s Sorcerer’s Secrets and am in the process of incorporating some of his excellent suggestions into my practice.  Mr. Miller might be slightly annoyed to see him work included in my Chaos experiment—that’s not how he self-identifies—but, really, where is the line between innovative syncretism and Chaos Magick?

Meditation and Dreaming

As I mentioned above, my formal meditation and dream work have basically fallen apart.

Although I have not sat down to meditate deliberately in over a week, I have actually spent hours in trance.  Sitting outside in the cold one day, waiting for a friend, as a trance settled lazily over me for nearly thirty minutes.  I spent five hours at the loom the following day, not even half of which I can remember.  These meditations certainly don’t qualify as the concentrations Peter Carroll (and many other occultists like him) prescribe, but I refuse to concede that they don’t count.  I actually have a whole rant about this planned for the near future.

While my sleep schedule has been restored to the point where I no longer drug myself with chamomile and valerian at 10 o’clock every night, my ability to recall my dreams in the morning is spotty at best.  This is something I have always struggled with, and will probably continue to struggle with for years to come.  Most of my dreams, though—what little I can recall of them—have been clearly mundane: fragmentary remains of my bout with super-hero obsession a couple weeks ago, and my increasing state of holy-fuck-i-need-someone-to-sit-on-my-face.

Shielding

My shielding experiments continue, and I’m fine-tuning a protection talisman. At the suggestion of Chirotus Infinitum in the comments to my last shielding post, I attempted to use the image of a ladybug as shield. The visceral experience was indescribable. And it brought back a series of shape-shifting experiments from my high-school days that I’m in the middle of writing up, and will probably share after I have finished my write-up of Peter Carroll’s chapters on Evocation and Invocation, because they’re highly relevant.

Manifesting My Desires.

While none of last week’s sigils have quite manifested, my experience so far says to wait two weeks before getting antsy.  Also, those are socially complex endeavors, and while I haven’t actually found any new lovers, yet, the value of my social capital (to abuse a metaphor) seems to be rising.

I have another batch, this time aimed just at boosting my social situation, in the works to fire off this afternoon.

In the mean time, I have also been tinkering with my Web of Influence, again: drifting into a trance to tend the threads and make certain that things are moving down the pipeline (to deploy a cliché). Interestingly, though I had not yet consciously begun to incorporate my Web of Influence into my sigil work, I could see my manifesting sigils on the web as glittering lights.

Visionary Practice

I went on a pair of highly fruitful visionary journeys at the Dark and Full Moons that I still haven’t quite parsed.  In the first, I re-established contact with my my chief familiar spirits and discovered, as I had discovered when I was doing some of my work with Elemental Fire, that a portal to Chaos had opened in my Inner Temple.  I didn’t have the nerve to explore it the first night, but I did the second.  Beyond the door was a vast void: not the swirling mass of potentiality I had assumed the Chaos current would appear to me as, but the gaping void of Χαος.  I could barely sense an intelligence to it, it was so vast and alien, but it was definitely aware.

At first, there was nothing there that I could perceive, an I thought that I was walking through a black void like the astral fragment I use to access the Otherworlds.  Slowly, though, the vastness of the space in which I was moving began to dawn on me.  I began to perceive fling things moving through the void at almost unimaginable speed.  There were countless multitudes of them, but the scale Chaos made them seem few and far between.  At that point, Sue, ZG, and SKM joined me, forming a protective triangle, and helping me keep track of where I had come from for when the time came to leave.

We drifted until we came to a lone floating chunk of rock, which we landed on essentially out of my mortal, terrestrial instincts.  Faster than I could think, an insect/crustacean-like creature (I never saw the whole of it), whipped around from the other side of the boulder and impaled me through the heart with a many-jointed limb.  Although we were able to overpower it and reclaim the “blood” that had stuck to its talon, we took that moment to flee back to the Inner Temple.

Gods and Spirits

Since the conclusion of the ceremonial experiment and the Invocation of Baphomet, I now have ten gods and spirits living on my altar.  I speak to fewer than half of them on a regular basis, and I don’t think that’s appropriate.

A few weeks ago, even the gods on my altar demanded a portion of my weekend coffee offerings.  I was happy to oblige, of course: I had only not included them because they had not asked, before, and coffee is such a non-traditional offering that I didn’t wish to offend.  Yesterday, I began incorporating Jason Miller’s Rite of General Offering* into the ritual, and today I will bring back fruit from the cafeteria to add to the offering.

So far, I have rarely asked the spirits I work with for much in the way of manifesting the world I desire.  When I have, though, the results have been spectacular.  When one friend was at risk of being evicted, I got Sue to change the landlord’s mind.  When another needed a specific job, I asked Sue to make sure it happened.  When I was wallowing in a crushing pit of despair last week, I dedicated an evening’s festivities to Dionysus, asking him to purge me of the negativity and obsessive behaviors in which I was engaging; I have since heard that it was the best such party in some time for everyone else there, and I have been pulling out of my emotional morass much more quickly than usual, and am now struggling against a new, but less self-destructive so far, set of obsessive behaviors.

Although I do still intent to built my home defense servitor, and ideally do so before the end of the semester, I think it best that I tend to these relationships before adding anyone or anything else to my altar.

a Change in Plans

Although it might not seem so from my previous weekly reports, my experiment in Chaos Magick has been more productive that I would have anticipated at this early stage. It has also been productive in ways I ever could have imagined, many of which are exceptionally difficult to articulate—a dilemma with which I imagine all my mage-blogging peers can identify.  Some of them have come to light today, some I may never be able to talk about.

I originally conceptualized Project Null as a simple follow-up to the ceremonial experiment: a way of continuing my formal study of the Western magical tradition and of not loosing the momentum I had built up over the course of the previous year.  I set the time frame for the ceremonial experiment at a year because I was originally using Penczak’s year-and-a-day system as a map.  I set a year time frame for Project Null because that was how long the ceremonial experiment had lasted.

It seems, however, that Chaos Magick is even less suited for such a survey than ceremonial magic was.  And I haven’t finished processing or internalizing a number of the lessons from that experiment yet.  And this semester is much, much busier than I had anticipated.  And Project Null is digging things up from my youth that I haven’t though of in a decade or more.  And each and every one of these things deserves my full attention.

Project Null is not being cancelled.  But the deadlines are.  This shit is way too interesting to not let the phenomenal organic growth I’m experiencing progress at its own rate.  Hopefully y’all will understand that this is a carefully considered tactical decision, not just a drunken satyr flaking out.

——

* – Miller, Jason.  The Sorcerer’s Secrets.  Pompton Plains, NJ: New Page Books (2009).  pp53-5

ETA: Jason Miller reference clarified and cited properly.

In Uncategorized

State of the Dream: Midsem Fall 2012: Super Sweet

Author Satyr MagosPosted on

The other day I was nominated for my first blogging award!  I’m a little embarrassed by how excited I am about that.  So, thank you Isadore Silverspar, of Isadore’s Book of Shadows, for nominating me for the Super Sweet Blogging Award.  It means a lot. 

The award and the recent series of shielding posts have brought a lot of new traffic and a few new followers my way, so I’m going to take this opportunity to welcome everyone by talking a little bit about what, precisely, I’m trying to do with the blog besides shouting in to the dark maw of the underworld (read: the internet) and seeing what echoes back.

This is an intermediate-level magical blog.  I’ve been practicing magic for half my life, now, but as the struggles I continue to have with things as “simple” as maintaining my psychic boundaries suggest, I’m hardly an Adept.  I mean, sure: I’ve been there and done that  and, at just this side of 32 years old, I have seen and done more weird shit that a lot of people will see or do in eighty or a hundred years (and, trust me, I’m just getting started) … but … it’s been just enough to know just how little of everything there is to see and do my experience actually represents. As I once said to Mr. Jack Faust over on G+, most of what wisdom I have to share comes in various flavors of “Learn From My Fail”. 

As such, what I have to teach comes in the form of stories: what I’ve seen and done, what I’m doing now, and what I think may be possible.  Much of the rest comes from research: my passion for history, my Classical Studies major, and the tools of postmodern and feminist analysis.  Together, theses strategies result in a sort of radical honesty and intimacy that some may find off-putting: the personal is magical as well as political.

So, sometimes this blog will have an academic tone.  Sometimes it will read like a drunken diary entry.  Hopefully, as I dive into hypersigils and National Novel Writing Month (this is Officially Fair Warning, by the way), there will be some badly edited fiction with excellent illustrations being passed off as “art”.   If you know me in real life, you will see yourself here pseudonymously from time to time.

Thank you all for for joining me, new readers and old alike.  It’s an honor to have you along for the ride.

With no further ado:

The Rules:

Choose 13 of your favorite blogs. Write a post like this one, listing all 13 and answering the questions below. Then, send your chosen blogs the nomination for the Super Sweet Blogging Award by commenting on one of their posts. That’s it. You are done.

Super Sweet Blogging Award Survey Questions:

1. Cookies or Cake? Cake.

2. Chocolate or Vanilla? Yes!

3. What is your favorite sweet treat? Ice cream.

4. When do you crave sweet things the most? When I smoke the rope.

5. If you had a sweet nickname, what would it be? Oh, honey…

Thirteen Blogs You Should Already Be Reading (In No Apparent Order):

1. Dionysian Atavism

2. Rune Soup

3. Divining Belle

4. Digital Ambler

5. Native Appropriations

6. Shakesville

7. Otherworldly Sorcery

8. Root and Rock

9. The Crossroads Companion

10.  The Astrology of Austin Coppock

11. Yes Means Yes

12. Melita Benu

13. Waiting to Awaken

My apologies to all the amazing people on the list to the right for whom there was not room on this list.

In witchcraft

Shaping and Shielding III: New Experiments

Author Satyr MagosPosted on

Much like my ability to see/perceive auras, this propensity has always ebbed and flowed with my practice. With my magical practice escalating over the last couple years, so too have these psychic senses grown. the last months, apparently, my senses have reached a point where school is getting toxic. I know most of the things I want to know—and sometimes more—but the headaches and the vicarious mood swings are starting to become a little too apparent.

Since recovering from my burnout, my primary shielding technique—when I chose to employ one—has revolved around different ideas of compression and displacement.  My long-time favorite technique basically involves treating my aura like a Hoberman Sphere.  It’s simple, effective against a surprising number of psychic “weather” conditions, and has few, if any, unintended consequences—chiefly, it can put off a bit of a “not worth your notice” vibe.  The downside is that it offers little in the way of direct defense and none in the way of preemptive offence, and it’s rather easy to forget about—left closed too long, I sometimes get the psychic equivalent of muscle cramps.

Most recently, I’ve been experimenting with layers.  A layer of windows, as discussed before, as armor against psychic weather and the evil eye.  Another layer, a bit deeper into the astral, of sensitive psuedopods to keep me aware of what’s going on.  It’s been mostly effective, but oddly leaves me feeling more cut-off from the rest of the world than I actually am, as well as seeming to put off a bit of an aloof and unapproachable air.  I’m trying to come up with a visualization that’s produces a warmer and friendlier sort of charismatic aura, maybe even incorporating that as its own layer “outside” or “in front of” the glass panes.  I’m also trying to figure out what it is about those particular visualizations that leave me feeling so cut off.

Recalling my youthful experiments, I’ve also tried reproducing my bad-anime-armor-style shields.  They make me feel like a badass … and ramp up my aggression by about ten percent.  They also have the interesting effect of limiting the field of view in my astral sight in accordance with the shape of the helmet I visualize.

The astute reader will have noticed a consistent pattern to my shielding strategy: they are all rooted in visualization and imagery.  Although I understand that other magicians code instructions into their shields, keeping out “negative” or “unwanted” energies … in this, at least, I cannot form anything for which I cannot picture a shape, color, and texture.  I can’t form an image of a net that knows what I want to keep away and what to let through: I don’t know what that looks like.  Aradia can do it—you should see the mad shit she can code into personal or house wards—but I don’t have the knack.  There are, of course, those who say that this limit is self-imposed.  I won’t even argue.  Self-imposed limits are just as real as those imposed from the outside.  I’ll overcome it eventually: it’s really just a matter of creativity, which is one thing I have no shortage of … just occasional bouts of (sometimes long-running) blockage.

In the meantime, I’m also looking to experiment with sigilizing personal wards and charging talismans.  For a long time, I disdained that absurdly obvious and effective tactic as “too easy” or “a crutch”.  (Y’all may have picked up that I have had, and still struggle against, a tendency to be an unmitigated arrogant ass.)  This is bullshit.  I’m a goddamn tool using monkey!  Let’s use some goddamn tools.

It’s been a couple years since I’ve been inspired to go so far back to basics.

In witchcraft

Disorder and a Detour Through Nostalgiaville

Author Satyr MagosPosted on

projectnullSomething about this experiment in Chaos Magick has gotten me thinking about the old days.  Hence the Timeline overhaul and all the post about my teenage years.  I’ll warn you now: there may be more of that coming, though on different subjects.

Aside from continuing my daily banishing, most of my work this week has consisted of the shielding experiments which sent me down memory lane, which I’ll talk about in detail tomorrow.

Friday night, I began another round of mask-making.  In accordance with the season, I was making another Death mask, which I hoped to sell for enough to reup my absinthe supply in time for Samhain.  Sadly, the clay wasn’t quite the right consistency, and shattered as it dried.  Hopefully I will have time to try again sometime this week.

I also fired a shoal of sigils Friday night.  I’m not gonna lie: this was some seriously low-brow shit.  The sort of thing that people get into fights about whether or not it’s beneath a magician’s dignity to do, and which, if approached from the wrong angle, could even be an ethical problem.  Yeah, that’s right: I’m using magic to help me get laid.  Go ahead, judge me.  That’s fair.

Divining before hand, it was almost an unqualified green light.  But … two IMG_5571potential problems came up. In the “coming in” position of the reading was XIII Death, last seen in my monthly reading in the 7th House; a more cautious person might have taken that as a sign not to cast.  Then, 7S “Futility” and I the Magus sat together in the “final outcome” position.  It seems likely that this indicates that, despite my best efforts, success in this arena will constitute a distraction from my school work.

Speaking of distractions from my school work: although the last week has been light enough for me to write this barrage of posts, things are going to get busy again after midterm.  The timeline I established for Project Null was predicated on last semester’s workload.  This semester’s load is much greater, and while I will strive to keep to that original schedule … well, school always has to come first.

Ironically, as I do an increasing amount of magical work every day, my meditation has fallen off completely.  Sadly, time spent staring at people’s auras in the cafeteria or out and about don’t count.

I have been able to remember my dreams upon waking only a few mornings, which is probably largely attributable to the sleeping teas I’ve been relying on for the last two weeks.  The fact that my dream recall has improved since I ran out of valerian tends to confirm this theory.  Most oddly, the night after charging the “get laid” sigil shoal, what do I dream about?  Why, the zombie apocalypse, of course, featuring a number of students from my school that I have never once spoken to.

I live a charmed life, mostly, but a strange one.

My plan for the coming week is to launch another shoal or two of sigils, finish reading Strategic Sorcery, and get back into Liber Null.  I’m also contemplating how to consciously interface my sigil magic with my Web of Influence for improved accuracy and timing.  So far, I’ve begun by tacking my fired sigils up with the maps that have become the visual representation of that web.  I will also continue brainstorming for what, precisely, I want the servitor I’m going to create as a part of this project to do; the general thought right now is bolster my house wards and serve as a guardian/attack dog.

In witchcraft

Shaping and Shielding II: Learning Curve

Author Satyr MagosPosted on

My career with the KU Cauldron started almost a decade ago, now.  Back in those days, I thought I was hot shit.  I had a lot of raw talent, had seen and done a whole bunch of strange shit, and was generally more well-read than almost anyone there.  (The fact that I had mostly read Scott Cunningham, and Amber K, and DJ Conway, and a fuck-ton of weird shit on the internet makes that really fucking sad.)

My main problem with shielding had (and has always) been that I tend to build walls I can’t see out of without taking them down, and this was particularly true then.  So, increasingly, I didn’t bother: I was confident in my ability to detect and deal with threats.  When I did, though, I was always experimenting with textures and structures.

I tried great spheres of “glass” with windows that could be opened and closed at will; these worked very well, but still kept things out even when I wanted to let them in.  I tried textured cloaks to draw or distract attention from myself; these worked fabulously, particularly the latter, which could and often did render me near-invisible.  I turned my aura inside-out, squeezed it to a thin plane and turned it “sideways”, which was also produced an effect of near-invisibility—obviously, not literally invisible in either case, but pointedly unnoticed.  Most often, though, I would simply draw my aura back, condensing it until it fit well within my body, leaving only a “corona” at the original edge, which I would use as a shield.

It was during this period that I was really able to test my theories of energetic layers or frequencies of reality, slipping in and out of others awareness and around their shields during games of “tag”.  I cast circles by spinning webs of light into my Pentagram Ward, the likes of which they had never seen.  I was still going through my antagonistic agnostic phase, but I was able to conjure more energy and cast bigger circles by my will alone than they could with elemental and divine invocations.

In general, I postured and strutted about like you’d expect from a dude in his late teens and early twenties who went, basically overnight, from being a social pariah to being someone that others looked up to.  I got cocky and arrogant … and increasingly emotionally erratic.  I had only had two lovers at that point in my life: the first, a one-night-stand, “left” me for someone that would go on to abuse her; the second was also a singular arrangement, and though we became dear friends, she lived quite a ways away and we would not be lovers again for some years.  I was just coming out of the closet as bisexual, and being consistently rejected by everyone I took an interest in.  I had more friends and respect than I’d ever had before … but I was constantly thwarted in the one thing I wanted most.

To add injury to insult, these were also the days when the Cauldron’s resident vampire was starting to emerge.  In retrospect, I wonder how she contributed to the other problems: if, even when I was shielding, she could pierce and/or exhaust my defenses for longer than I’ve ever realized.  I’ve seen the wreckage left by vampire attacks.  That period of my life matches the profile.

All this drama culminated about the time that I started experiencing my first migraines.  When I recovered from all that madness, I really didn’t have any faith left in personal shields as method of defense, at least not from spiritual threats, and it would be years before I was tuned in enough again that I was even certain that my memories of psychic empathy weren’t the delusions of a lonely youth.

In witchcraft

Shaping and Shielding I: The Old Days

Author Satyr MagosPosted on

The first person I ever met who shared my interest in magic and the occult was a young man I’ll call Shire.  We were sixteen, maybe fifteen years old when we our curiosity blossomed into outright experimentation.  I don’t remember, now, what his framework was, but I was already identifying as Pagan.  I came from a generic Protestant background, more informed by the Boy Scouts and television than by any churching; his mother was a hardcore White Light New Ager.  Our experiments began with the most basic elemental conjuration you can imagine: holding our hands over candles and bowls of tap water, trying to absorb and tune to Elemental Fire and Water.  He was more sensitive; I was better at focusing and projecting power.

Like most young men with an interest in the occult, especially in the Midwest of the early 1990s, I exhibited a certain paranoia:  I was convinced that there were spiritual forces arrayed against me, and I focused much of my time and attention on the creation of protection spells and psychic shields, and on developing ways to penetrate or circumvent them.  To this day, I remain one of the most skilled magicians I know (at least in meatspace) when it comes to building and dismantling magical protections.

My first shields were formed by visualizing myself in a suit of armor.  I don’t know where I got this idea.  This was before I owned any books beside the “Simonomicon”, so if I didn’t come up with it on my own, I must have gotten it off of one of the message boards I was frequenting in those days.  Because I was a serious geek back in the day, my armor looked something like this:

My earliest magical attacks were “swords” I held in my hands, soon replaced by a knife-like formation that I would throw.

In witchcraft

Empathy and Other Psychic Senses

Author Satyr MagosPosted on

Half a lifetime ago, when I was but a wee faun of a mage, I had a number of talents that bore little resemblance or relevance to the sort of power I wanted as a practitioner of magic.  I had no access to whatever community elders there may have been, and the internet was not the deep well of knowledge it is today.(1)  It was my first year of high school and, although I cracked my first book on astrology at the age of thirteen, I had been practicing magic for no more than nine months—probably just since the beginning of the summer—with a repertoire limited to a stripped-out version of the LBRP which I had found on a message board, and about the most simple elemental energy-work you can imagine.  My chief occult interests at that time were circles of protection,  the sort of aura sight seen in bad martial arts anime, and astral projection.

I was totally unprepared for the full panorama of what psychic senses really feel like.  To this day, one of my very few crystal-clear memories of high school is of walking down the hall, looking at people and knowing things: “They’re really in love.”  “They’re not, but they’re having sex.”  “She’s cheating on him.”  These thoughts, these knowings, were alien to me: I didn’t know the students in question, and I would not discover my taste for gossip for another five or six years.  But I was absolutely certain of each and every thing that burst into my mind as I turned my gaze on each set of couples I passed on my way to English class.  The knowing, the invasion of those unwitting people’s privacy, terrified me.  I shoved the knowledge out of my head, and slammed the door closed behind it.

Over the course of the next two years, as I met more and more magical practitioners, several of them were the sort that identified as “empaths”.  In particular, one of my close friends and mentors.  The talent never seemed to bring him much pleasure, so at first I felt that I’d made the right call … but around the time I graduated high school, I started to wonder what I was missing. 

Medeia had a friend—an off-and-on student and lover—that we hung out with some times.  Hearing the above story, he offered to help me out.  Unfortunately, as it turned out, he was less than helpful.  His solution was brute force: we sat down and entered a trance; I let him into my head; he found the door, and kicked it in.  It hurt, and I panicked, and tried to slam it shut.  But the “door” was broken, now, and wouldn’t close all the way.

My practice was never very regular back in the day.  It certainly wasn’t founded on banishing or meditation.  If it had been, that shit might have just sorted itself out on its own, before I blew my circuit-breaker.  Even after that dramatic event, my psychic senses have always been a little wonky.  I have experienced “empathy” not as a knowledge of what others are feeling, but a direct, vicarious, and often unknowing and unwelcome experience of it: I walk into a room where someone’s in a bad mood, and suddenly so am I.  Of course I always picked up unpleasant emotions first, and often exclusively.  Living with Aradia, we frequently shared physical pains, and occasionally panic attacks.  And you, my dear readers, may recall some complaints about the psychic toxicity of the mall.

Shielding is the answer, of course.  It’s time for the next round of experiments to begin.

1 – These were the wild, early days of IRC and CompuServe.  HTML was shiny and new.  FTP was the preferred method of sharing files, and GOPHER was still relevant.  The internet was so small that there were published books of internet addresses, much like a Yellow Pages, and people used them.  I’ll stop now before I make anyone else feel even older than I already do typing out this footnote.

In witchcraft

a View of the Sunrise Temple

Author Satyr MagosPosted on

I rebuilt my altar at the Full Moon.  It actually took the whole weekend before I was completely satisfied with the setup.

IMG_5569

Behold: the magical engine of the Sunrise Temple.  The main altar is on the left, which you have seen several incarnations of before now.  To the immediate right of it are my jugs of mead, happily fermenting by the heater.  Beside that is a shelf of candles, stones, incense, and other supplies that don’t live in the kitchen cabinets.  Behind and above the shelves and mead are the maps which represent either my actual area of influence—that is, the places I have lived and where I still have friends and family—and the world I wish to influence with my political enchantments.  And finally, furthest right, is my newly erected seasonal altar; that table housed my chaos altar before it was pointed out to me that an altar dedicated to Chaos Magick is … almost oxymoronic.

IMG_5568Having taken down the Chaos altar, the Baphomet mask now lives atop my altar with Dionysus, Hephaestus, Rhea, and Athena.  ZG and SKM now share an alcove, and Sue—the spirit I work with more than any other—has one to herself.  The cubes on the side have been rearranged so that my money-drawing spell—which will soon be upgraded to a Jupiter cahsbox, a la Strategic Sorcery(1)—can have it’s own space.  The cube across from it is being converted into a home for all my sexual enchantments—the vast majority of which are targeted at staying child- and STI-free.  Below the financial altar are the ever-evolving house wards, and below the sex are my Tarot cards, visionary mask and pipe, and my black mirror.  My various planetary talismans have been relocated to the center base, with my God and Goddess figures elevated above them, along with my World Tree.  The flat workbench area is largely unaltered.

IMG_5567The first stirrings of my Samhain altar are very simple.  My death mask and sickle/knife, a picture of my dead grandmother and tokens of lost friends and loved ones.  I want to add gourds and pomegranates, but first I need to take care of my fruit fly problem.  Also poverty.

In witchcraft

Rubble, Toil, and Trouble

Author Satyr MagosPosted on

projectnullWhen I said I hit a wall a couple weeks ago, it was even more true than I realized at the time.  The cold I was fighting weakened me slowly, until Tuesday when I was too sick to go to class.  When the fever passed, it was followed by a wave of insomnia and depression.  Although I’ve managed to largely maintain my banishing practice (about three days out of five), meditation not on the weekends has been sporadic at best, as has dream journaling.

In line with the depression has been the bouts of obsessive behavior: after buying and finally watching the Avengers when it came out on DVD last week, I proceeded to plow through the Marvel Ultimate reboot—an exceptionally dystopian vision, full of (and uncritical of) contempt for consent and creepy sex-negativity, which did nothing whatsoever for my state of mind.  I’ve dreamed about superheroes for at least three of the last seven nights.  I don’t think the Chaos Magic is in any way to blame for this round of madness and obsession: I think the length of time since I last saw my lovers, and my paucity of friends on campus, are owed full credit.

In the middle of all this madness, though, was some actual interesting and productive work.  I have begun experimenting with psychic shields again for the first time in years. I make very, very effective shields, but I hesitate to say that I’m “good” at it: when they’re up, it’s like living in a mad tyrant’s castle: nothing gets in, nothing gets out … even if it probably ought to. But the escalating magic of the last couple years has re-opened psychic senses that I don’t want to loose again, either through atrophy or burn-out, and re-learning effective shielding has become an imperative. That’s a post in and of itself.

This weekend, I honored the Full Moon by completely disassembling and cleaning my altars and by putting them back together in a slightly more effective arrangement.  I started two batches of mead.  And I have successfully incorporated underworld journeys into two Esbats in a row, now, culminating in a journey into the very strange places opened up in my Inner Temple by my self-initiation into the Chaos Current.  No, that wasn’t what I was trying to do there, exactly, but … that’s basically what it amounted to.  That, too, deserves a post unto itself.

After firing off a few rounds of sigils, things in my life are starting to get moving.  I need to keep at it: exercising my will and manifesting the world I want.  A lot of the specific desires have not yet manifested fully, but they’re complex and delicate this time, and I’m not in a hurry.  I can see things working and that’s good enough for me.  Fuller reports will become available as they manifest.

All this has put me a little behind on my original schedule, and it’s time for me to start in on Liber Lux and Nox if I’m to have any chance of being even half done by the end of October.  The madness and illness, though, are not actually to blame for that tardiness.  Instead, they share a common cause: I’ve overextended myself a bit this semester.  I’ve almost got a handle on the work load, and I should be okay by the time I’m done with Midterms, but … well, I’ve already complained about that shit enough, here and elsewhere.  Unfortunately, everything has to take a back seat to my classes.