Journey Through The Obsidian Dream

Paper Talismans, Satyr-Style

Satyr Magos08/09/2012

As you may note by looking to the right, I am a member of Christopher Warnock’s Spiritus Mundi mailing list. I’m not very active—I don’t know enough about traditional astrology to participate(1)—but I do like to take advantage of the elections he and his students are kind enough to share. Many of the folks on the Spiritus Mundi group, like myself, are too poor to create talismans of precious metals. So there’s a lot of talk about paper talismans. So much so, in fact, that Mr. Warnock has recently posted a page on the history and construction of paper talismans.

The prevailing wisdom on the mailing list is that paper talismans are good for 90 days. My own experience has been radically different: although my Jupiter talisman, made back in April, did require a bit of a boost over the summer, it is still going strong.

So as I gear up for Monday morning’s Mercury election (the last Hour of Night, just before dawn), I thought I would share the process that is working so well for me.

I start with two unlined notecards. I mark one as the front and one as the back: if I’m going to print them off (which I have done in the past) I’ll prepare everything the day before in an openoffice document(2); this weekend, as I’m out of printer ink and money, I’ll be hand-drawing them in pencil to be inked and colored at the electional moment. If I don’t already have an appropriate planetary incense on hand, I’ll gather the herbs and resins for that, as well, also to be mixed at the time of the election. Finally you need glue; I prefer rubber cement.

With your cards and images prepped, either digitally or by hand, you wait until the appropriate hour as taught in electional astrology, then print or ink the images. Write your legal and magical names on the backs of the cards—that is, what will be the “inside”. Blend or grab your incense that you will use to suffumigate the talisman. Trace the edge of one of the cards with your glue and sprinkle the incense blend inside it. Place the other card on top, make sure it seals all the way around. Suffumigate and incant as the ritual calls for. I also tend to finalize the concecration with a drop of Abramelin oil.

This is how I produce paper talismans that are still effective almost six months out. Checking and recharging these talismans is becoming a part of my Full Moon rites, along with my active sigils.

1 – I am, in fact, the exact kind of learn-at-my-own-pace system-hacker he despises. My saving grace is probably that I keep my damn mouth shut instead of demanding that he pontificate at my convenience.

2 – I’ll assume you know how to format the pages and everything yourselves to make that work. If not, there are message boards for that.

In scholarship, witchcraft

Failed Enchantment: No Scholarship for Satyr Magos

Satyr Magos04/09/2012

I don’t often enchant for concrete outcomes. The fact is that I have most of what I want and need. My web of influence (and social privilege) and mundane efforts keep things flowing pretty well. Most of my enchantments are aimed at bolstering that web: my planetary talismans, my safe-travel spells, and my circles of protection. Every once in a while, though, I do need something specific badly enough that I enchant for it: generally it works; this time it didn’t.

At the end of July I was invited to apply for a “scholarship” (actually a service-based work-study) program offered by my school. I cut things pretty close last year, and part of the problem was that I couldn’t get all my work-study hours, which the program would guarantee me. In addition to about a thousand extra dollars to live on each semester, it also offered a stipend for summer work. I wanted it badly.

As one is supposed to, I did a Tarot spread about the application. On the one hand the message was clear: yes, I should apply. On the other hand, the actual outcome was more ambiguous.

I put in the work on both ends. I was given two weeks from the time I received the invitation to the due date. I busted ass on application, itself, and turned it in on time. It was a damn good application essay, if I do say so myself.

Aradia and I charged a sigil and fired it off with a seven-day candle. I then sent that sigil to a few, select, close friends so that they could help charge it, too.

Then I waited. I was supposed to hear back about my application by the 6th of August. No word came. I got caught up in the process of packing, and basically let it go.

I got to Sunrise on the 14th of August. Still no word had come. So I walked up to the office and asked. The email had been sent, they told me. But, no: I had not been selected for the program. The application and the spell had failed.

There are a lot of variables here. Perhaps my application was invalidated for some technical reason I can’t know. Perhaps the sigils I designed were flawed in some way. Aradia and I raised energy for the sigils by laughter; perhaps that was not the way to go. Perhaps passing them off for a boost was a bad idea. Perhaps they somehow conflicted with other enchantments I have in place to assure my financial solvency. Perhaps my mistake was as simple as failing to encode a time frame: perhaps I will be selected for the program next year, on the basis of the same application.

A brief consultation with the Tarot—“Why did my spell to receive the scholarship fail?”—produced what you see below….

…. which basically comes across as pure static. Obviously, one could interpret this as “you didn’t put the work in”, but …. to the best of my ability to determine, I did. And the optimist in me wants to try to spit in as, “because something better is in the pipeline.”

Thoughts or suggestions would be very welcome.

In witchcraft

Circles of Salt: Still Experimenting With The Stele of Jeu

Satyr Magos03/09/2012

I first performed the Stele of Jeu ritual in late January of this year, and for the last eight months it has been a regular part of my Dark and Full moon Esbats. At the beginning, I was advised to do the ritual outdoors, ideally at a trivium crossroads or in a vineyard, and that if I must—as my circumstances realistically dictate—perform the ritual within my temple, that I ought to do so within a circle of salt, as a Wiccan circle would not be adequate to keep out the wandering dead that would be drawn by the spell. Given that there is a graveyard next to the school I attend and live next door to, and given that Sunrise, IN is old Quaker territory, and they only started marking their graveyards when sectioning off the dead was legislated as a public health concern … well, let’s just say I took that advice to heart.

From January until May, it was my habit to move my rug out of the way and pour a circle of salt right out on my linoleum-over-concrete floor. The results ranged from spectacular to blasé, depending, I think, largely on just how much I heart I had to put into the ritual at the time.

In May, at the Heartland Pagan Festival, I had my first opportunities to perform the ritual outdoors. Just as the semester was ending, I performed the ritual on a creek bank in he woods behind campus as a part of my Full Moon ritual. The results were very different, but it ways that I find it difficult to articulate. The spirit world did not really become more aware of me, so much as I became more aware of it: it was both comforting and disconcerting to have a visceral feel for how vast the spirit world is, and for just how few shits it gives that humans even exist. Then again at the Heartland Pagan Festival, to incredible results that I have already detailed.

Things were a little different in Kansas City. Aradia’s apartment has old wooden floors that would be damaged by the salt, and hard to clean afterward. So I took a risk and performed the ritual without the salt: the results were unspectactuar. A Wiccan circle may be inadequate, but the years of circles and wards that Aradia and I put up around that apartment, to say nothing of the work done with Pasiphae and Aidan and the rest of the proto-coven, were more than adequate. I say “more than” advisedly, because the Stele of Jeu rituals I performed there were … limp. I actually wondered if I were performing the ritual too often, if maybe it was loosing its efficacy.

I moved back to Indiana just in time for the Dark Moon. I performed the Stele of Jeu as usual, but I had just acquired a new, heavier carpet which is too large to move readily, so, based on my experiences in Kansas City, I went without the circle of salt. And … things went off the rails, just a little bit.

I didn’t get any of the poltergeist effects during the ritual, which I had been warned was a possibility, but after is another matter. One the one hand, I’m fairly sure that that a lot of the weird-ass noises I was hearing that night were just the no-longer-familiar sounds of the Sunrise Temple. On the other hand, though …. I never did identify all of those noises, and they all stopped when I did some serious banishing work a couple days later. Also: the nightmares. That shit was out of control, and that’s all I’m going to say about that, except that those also chilled out when I did the banishing work.

Why did the Stele of Jeu have such strange and unfortunate side effects without the circle of salt in Sunrise, but not in Kansas City? Years of house-wards built up around the latter is my best explanation. But “why” is beside the point. The question is “what to do about it”. While the most obvious solution is to get rid of the rug that’s preventing me from pouring salt all over the floor …. The rug stays. It’s not actually mine, I’m just caring for it while the owner is doing a year abroad in China. So the solution, it seemed to me, was to come up with a way to have both the rug and the circle of salt.

When the full moon came, what I did was take three bowls and arrange them about equidistant from each other in a triangle around where I intended to sit while I did the ritual. I have a rock salt candle holder that lives on my altar, and I put that in the front bowl. After performing the first half of the evening’s rituals, I poured salt in each of the three bowls, going around the circle three times in order to do so, and lit a candle in the rock.

That worked beautifully. The ritual went fabulously: I did my banishings afterward, and slept … well, I’d say slept like the dead, but there are a couple necromancers who read this blog sometimes, and I know they’ll call me out on that. I slept soundly, dreamed as peacefully as I ever do, and went on to do another two nights of successful Esbat rites.

I count this as a successful experiment. If one needs a circle of salt, but can’t (for whatever reason) pour it directly on the ground, a simple solution is available. At least in this instance, the salt circle need not be contiguous; one may fill an appropriate number of vessels with salt and place them in a circle and achieve the protective effect.

In witchcraft

Reining In and Cutting Loose: My Unruly Mind vs. Project Null

Satyr Magos02/09/2012

Project Null officially kicked off a week ago today. This is the first of what I hope to be weakly updates on my progress through the project. This week has been more theory than practice, but both aspects have been solid.

Despite classes, my reading has been progressing swiftly. I have finished Carroll’s Liber Null and Psychonaut. I have re-read the Simon Necronomicon. I have read most of Frater U.D.’s Practical Sigil Magic, and the first half of Stephen Mace’s Stealing the Fire from Heaven. The last two are particularly exciting, because between U.D. and Mace, I have what I feel is an adequate grasp of A.O. Spare’s sigil methods. I’m waiting on Amazon to get around to shipping Jason Miller’s Sorcerer’s Secrets, and I’m really looking forward to reading that, too, though I don’t yet know if it’s “Chaos” enough to qualify for this project.

Mind Control

Outside of my constant struggle to recall and master my dreams, I have never encountered the Psychic Censor in quite the way Peter Carroll describes it. Perhaps I struggled against the very perception of the supernatural when I was younger—I did, after all, begin practicing magic at the age of sixteen—but I cannot now recall.

For me, much of my struggle is against what I have often described as my “unruly mind”. Owing to my overwhelming (and largely irrational) fear of medicine in general and psychiatry in particular, I have never been diagnosed with anything. But when people complain of their struggles with ADD/ADHD … well, the Rotten Card above is a familiar experience to me. Outside of my magical practice, I rarely work on only one thing at a time: music or television plays in the background while I study or do housework; rather than see either task to completion before moving on to the other, I will often do laundry and another cyclical chore, such as the dishes, in tandem to create a natural flow of breaks.

Beyond that, I often struggle against the vestigial remains of the protestant work ethic which was instilled in me as a child: the idea that one must, at all times, be productive, and that even in moments of leisure (earned only by suffering) one must still be doing something. Working on my art does not rouse this nagging voice; even smoking weed and watching television—the most useless and slothful activity in which I engage—does not bring the restless, almost painful feeling that comes from inactivity. But meditation? Simply sitting in the quiet of my own presence and listening to my breathing? That drives my inner Puritan into a mad frenzy.

Since beginning the meditative practice called for in Liber MMM approximately ten days ago, I have rarely managed to perform my meditations two days in a row. When I have, it was over the weekend. Around half of each meditation session—which has averaged five minutes, went as far as six once, and as little as three—is spent thinking about journaling or blogging about the experience. During the first several sessions, my mind was awash with a riot of images. Counting my breathing has helped with that, but not eradicated it completely. Regardless of the position I sit in—and I have tried several—my body almost always grows restless, and on two occasions this actually manifested as physical pain.

On the plus side, there have been several days where I was able to carve out small blocks of time to sit and trance, without a timer, in the sun around campus. Those sessions were actually more fruitful, in some ways, than my planned meditation sessions.

One interesting thing that’s come up while I’ve been doing these meditations is the relization that my aura is loosing its differentiation again: without doing chakra-specific meditations, I’ve dropped down from the “usual” seven to four: a crown above my head which somehow includes my third eye, a point at my heart, one at my loins, and one below my feet. Also of interest is that, though it’s better now than it was a week ago, my crown feels tightly congested. (And that was before hayfever season kicked in to high gear three days ago.)

Magic

I have not actually launched any sigils, yet, though I have done a bit of work recharging sigils I have previously fired. There’s not actually anything new that I want right now.

What I have been doing is daily banishing. I’ve actually only fucked that up twice, and was on one of those occasions able to go home, do my banishing and card-of-the-day, and put things right. I’ve been keeping it simple with a banishing pentagram and the Qabalistic Cross, but that seems to be doing me a fair bit of good.

Thursday night, for the full moon, I busted out with the full Pentagram Rite for the Stele of Jeu. It was fucking incredible, and deserves a post all its own.

More interesting than any of that, though, are my experiments with creating my own Alphabet of Desire. Which also deserves a post of its own, but will have to wait until I’ve made it a little further along that road. For now, suffice to say that I’ve had some interesting and positive results with producing personal sigils by automatic drawing, but because of the nature of some of the work, I am uncertain of what about half of the characters mean.

Dreaming

I have been doing better at recording my dreams on waking than I have done with my daily meditations, but there have still been a number of days where, for one reason or another, I didn’t write down my dreams. In one instance, it was because the nightmares were so terrible that I was afraid attempting to record them would draw me back down into them. In at least one other, it was just that I’m a fucking idiot first thing in the morning, and have no idea what’s going on (why, yes, that was one of they days I didn’t do my morning banishing).

So far, though, nothing interesting or significant to report in the dream arena.

In witchcraft

So … What Is My Personal Practice, Anyway?

Satyr Magos30/08/2012

Having committed publically to not letting my personal practice slip any further while I work on Project Null, I find myself in a position of needing to define it. Which is probably good for me, really. The goals for this sort of work are not going to be as specific as those for Project Null, but it will behoove me to pursue them with at least equal vigor.

Here’s what I’ve got so far.

Develop My Relationship With My Household Spirits. Three spirits now “live” on my altar: Sue, ZG, and SKM. One is a longtime friend, and accustomed to my occasional lapses … besides which, she’s got her own shit going on (not that she tells me anything about it). My relationships with ZG and SKM, my Natal Genius and Demon respectively, are new. More importantly, as natal spirits, I’m pretty much their primary focus (assuming I have any idea how these things work, anyway), and they are allies I can’t afford to neglect. The one because I need that inspiration and insight; the other because “idle hands …”, “with friend like that …”, and all that rot.

Resume and Refine My Devotional Practice. Specifically, I need to step up my game in regards to Dionysus and Rhea. This will involve both research and visionary work. I need to come up with appropriate offerings/sacrifices, and a schedule for making them.

Speaking of Visonary Work. I keep letting that slide; I shouldn’t. I wish to continue exploring the planetary and elemental realms, and, more importantly, the hidden corners of my own Inner Temple.

Art. Above and beyond the fact that I want to do more art for its own sake, it is increasingly a part of my spiritual practices. I want to do more automatic drawing in conjunction with conjurations. I want to do more art based on my visionary experiences. I want to do a whole bunch of arts-and-(witch)craft projects that have been on the back burner for a while, ranging from getting back into mask-making to a protective spell to help a friend with an alcoholic room-mate manage the charge on her space. There will be a lot of overlap between this and my experiments with sigils and hypersigils.

Homebrew. My failure to keep up on this has more to do with cashflow stoppage than anything else, but I need to get back on the mead brewing. Partly because it’s part of my devotional practice in respect to Dionysus, but mostly just because it’s awesome and makes me happy. And drunk. I also want to post the recipes I’ve had success with but haven’t gotten around to typing up.

This list is probably going to grow, but it’s a good place to start.

In witchcraft

Opening Liber MMM

Satyr Magos29/08/2012

As I described in the launch post for my chaos magic experiment, I am beginning with Liber MMM: mind control, magic, and dreaming*.

Mind Control

Except for the emotional auditing, Peter Carroll’s “mind control” is basically meditation, and I’ve been starting simple with sitting motionless and breathing concentration. The hardest thing about five minutes a day of meditation isn’t the meditation, itself: it’s sitting down to do it. So far I’ve been managing about every other day.

I’ve experimented with three different positions to date. Sitting cross-legged on my bed, with my arms extended and my elbows resting on my knees. Laying flat on my back on the bed, arms limp at my sides. And sitting in one of those mini-papasan chairs that they sell for dorm rooms, facing my altar, with my hands in my lap. I’ve had mixed results with all three. I have done my meditation in the morning, promptly upon waking, and at night, shortly before going to sleep. Again, the results have been mixed.

Sitting still for five minutes was, in fact, physically painful the first time I did it as a part of this experiment. And, for whatever reason, flatly impossible yesterday morning. I’m not sure why: it’s not like I don’t sit motionless for a lot of my magical workings. Maybe it’s because I’m not focused on anything in particular. Ironically, I think this will get easier as I progress, not because of the practice, itself—though that will absolutely help a lot–because shape and object visualization are things I do more often as a part of my visionary practice.

Magic

Coming back to the Sunrise Temple has made it easy to get back into my practice of daily banishing. For the last week I have begun my day with a banishing pentagram and a Qabalistic Cross. Except for today, which got off to a fuckered start when I woke from some fairly disturbing nightmares that pretty much threw off my whole morning game.

I have also been working on designing a few sigils, and researching different methods of designing and launching them. In addition to Liber Null, I have ploughed through most of Frater U.D.’s Practical Sigil Magic, and am delighted to finally have some grasp of AO Spare’s original Alphabet of Desire/Sacred Language. As someone who has dabbled in conlang, and envies the utility of verbs in inflected languages such as Attic Greek and Classical Latin, I’m really, really, really excited to start developing my own personal magical grammar for complex sigils. I have some really interesting ideas about how to combine this technique with Hellenistic curse tablets and my own theories of art as an act of magic that I can’t wait to try out.

I have finally designed, but not actually enchanted, a set of talismans to give to my friends and colleagues by which they may offer me magical aid, or call upon me for the same. Look forward to further reports in that arena, too.

Dreaming

Like meditation, getting back into the habit of keeping a dream journal has been hit-and-miss. I’m still at a point where, often, I literally cannot remember my dreams even moments after waking. And then there’s shit like today, where the imagery is so disturbing that I just can’t bring myself to write it down in the first moments of my day.

Magical dreaming has always eluded me, in part because I am so violently dysfunctional upon first waking, and this is going to be a major area of struggle for me, personally.

* – Where’s that third M come from? “Morpheus”?

In scholarship, witchcraft

Project Null

Satyr Magos23/08/2012

Closing one project makes way to begin another. The next major project in my cue is a study of Chaos Magick. At Aradia’s suggestion, I have decided to call these experiments Project Null, and tag related blog posts accordingly. (The Squirrel has pointed out to me that this is somewhat grandios and rediculous, to which I could only respond, “Yes. And?”

One of the things I learned during the last experiment was that I needed to set more concrete goals. Here, then, are lists of the sources and resources I am planning to make use of so far. The reading list will grow longer, and I can only ask for your help with this dear readers: who/what else should I be reading? Is Frater U.D. worth my time? Who else was/is iconic and revolutionary in the Chaos Magick movement that I clearly haven’t heard of and simply shouldn’t ignore?

(RE)SOURCES

Carroll, Peter. Liber Null & Psychonaut.

–. Liber Chaos.

Hine, Phil. Condensed Chaos.

Mace, Stephen. Stealing the Fire From Heaven.

Miller, Jason. Strategic Sorcery. Blog.

–. Sorcerer’s Secrets.

Moore, Alan. Promethea.

Morrison, Grant. The Invisibles.

–. The Disinformation Speech.

White, Gordon. Rune Soup. Blog.

ROADMAP AND GOALS

1) Liber Null. I’ve gotta start somewhere, and given the contents of my library and Aradia’s, this seems like the best place. With a little bit of dedication, I should qualify for initiation into the IOT by the time I’m done.

1.1) Liber MMM. Particularly the meditation and the sigils. These experiments will continue throughout the project and hopefully beyond. The first weeks of Project Null will be devoted exclusively to developing a meditation practice—something I’ve never done—and reestablishing my daily banishing practice.

1.1.1) Mind Control. I will begin by setting aside 5 minutes a day for these mindfulness exercises. By the end of the year, I want to be capable of minutes of visualization and/or object concentration for 15 or 20 at a stretch three times a week. This may seem like a low bar. If it turns out to be, I’ll raise it.

1.1.2) Magic: Banishing and Sigils. In terms of banishing, I will continue experimenting with daily banishing rituals until I perfect one for my own purposes. As for sigils, I will begin by firing off at least one shoal of 3-5 sigils every week. I’m a greedy bastard: there’s at least that much I want in the world. (And if I run out of things I want, I can always start working for others.)

1.1.3) Dreaming. This art has eluded me for years. As such I will simply set pursuing it as a goal. In addition to Carroll, I intend to make use of Frater Acher’s recommendations on the subject.

1.2) Liber Lux, Liber Nox. Oh, yeah: y’all know I go both ways. The second and third books of Liber Null are as much theory as practice, and not all of the practice is relevant to me, but I will commit to studying each section and writing about them, and explaining my decisions for those exercises which I choose not to work through. I intend to have completed my first run through Liber Lux and Liber Nox by the end of October.

1.3) Liber AOM. This shit is just whak, and much of it irrelevant as someone working reasonably hard to not die any time in the near future. Still, I’ll spend some time in October and November (assuming I’m on track) exploring these concepts.

2) Psychonaut. As I work my way through Liber Null, it is my intention to simultaneously work through Psychonaut. I have already performed the Mass of Chaos, adapting it to dedicate my Chaos altar. I hope to incorporate the suggestions and contexts provided by Psychonaut to the work of Liber Null. As such, I intend to post musings on the subjects contained therein, as well as develop my own experiments based on them. I aim to complete this stage of the work by the end of November. As with Libri Lux, Nox, and AOM, I will discuss each section, weather it offers me a particular exercise or not.

3. Servitor Creation. The creation and maintenance of servitors is one of the most visible and iconic portions of Chaos Magick. I cannot claim to study the field without at least one experiment in that area. I intend to start with creating a protector-spirit to accompany my house-wards, and to have it “up and running” by the end of November.

4. Analysis and Check-In. By the end of November, I hope to have made it at least halfway through the above reading list, and added at least as many more to the cue. From that position of (relatively) greater knowledge, I intend to have a better idea of how to progress specifically.

5. Lovecraftian Magic. I’ve told you all before about how the first occult book I ever purchased was the “Simon” Necronomicon. For years I’ve been hearing about Chaos magicians performing invocations of Lovecraftian horrors … hell, once upon a time, it was one of the things that kept me from away from Chaos Magick. So … now I want to try it. I don’t know if I’m going to use the Simon or the Donald Tyson version, or play with some weird shit I dig up on the internet. But there will be Eldrich Horrors. And I plan to sick them on some senators.

6. Feminism as Chaos Magick. I first mentioned this project over on G+ and Tumblr. I want the initiatory essay completed by the end of the semester, and have the project in motion by the beginning of the next semester.

CAVEAT

I’m excited about this project. I’ve been looking forward to it since the idea first occurred to me. But I try to be vigilant, and to be wary of my own motivations. And after a certain amount of soul-searching, I have come to the conclusion that while the ceremonial magic project was good for me, it also gave me a rock-solid excuse to let my personal spiritual practice slide.

When was the last time I encountered Dionysus or his messengers in my journeys? I have seen Rhea once in the last year. Even Tsu and ZG don’t show up as often as I’d like. I’ve thought a lot about the potential implications of conjuring my Natal Genius and Demon, but I haven’t done any magic or divination to explore it.

Project Null has the potential to be the same. So to help keep myself honest, I’m going to try to post at least once about my personal practice for every two posts about Project Null, not including posts serving double duty.

INVITATION

Aradia and I intend to work through this project together, scheduling our reports to post simultaneously so as to avoid cross-contamination of our experiments. We cordially invite any interested parties to join in with the Project Null experiment. If any such parties have blogs of your own, we would love to share the #ProjectNull tag with you.

I can be reached through the comments section of this blog, the ask box at my Tumblr, or even my G+ account. Aradia can be reached through her blog.

Although I have already begun working with Liber MMM—banishings, motionlessness, and breathing concentration–the official kickoff for the project is Sunday.

Obviously, there must be some uniformity in order for it to really count as a group project: for this first section, that’s working through Liber Null and Psychonaut. Your own personal goals and interests within that sphere, however, will vary. Maybe you want to shoot for an hour a day of motionless, thoughtless meditation. Aradia has no personal interest in Lovecraftian magic. Some of you (though it breaks my heart to know this) will not care about the Feminism as Chaos Magick project. As we approach the end of November, we can plot our course for the second “half” of the project together.

This is short notice. Whatever. Anyone can joint the project at any time. If you can’t keep up with the pace we set, or if you think everyone else is moving too slow: go at your own speed.

In witchcraft

My Chaos Altar and Alchemy Lab

Satyr Magos23/08/2012

Coming back to the Sunrise Temple with some new plans, I’ve done a bit of rennovation. Specifically I’ve rebuilt and organized my secondary altars. It’s a little silly but I’m kinda proud of them.

THE CHAOS ALTAR

Featuring my mask dedicated to Baphomet. To the left is a paper skull representing Thatatos, and to the right a glass vial for Eros, to be filled with Venus oil once I’ve perfected a blend. And, of course, my first Chaosphere: hand drawn with a pencil, compass, and ruler, then inked with a variety of pens. It’s got a nice kick already.

THE ALCHEMY LAB

Yes, it’s a glorified spice cabinet. It’s even right over my stove. The bottom shelf are the things that might actually go into food. The next are teas and things that may be brewed as tea. The third shelf are things that can’t, shouldn’t, or (for whatever reason) won’t be ingested, and the high shelf if full of empty bottles waiting to be filled with fun things.

In witchcraft

Sunrise Temple Altar Rebuilt

Satyr Magos21/08/2012

Rebuilding the altar wasn’t quite the first thing I did upon returning to Sunrise, Indiana, but it was close. I have been tinkering with it a little every day, but I think I am mostly done.

The uppermost portions are little changed. The left side contains my idols of Dionysus and Hephaestus; the right side has my shrines to Rhea and Athena. The center is currently a collection of my personal talismans and artifacts of power, waiting to be remade into a seasonal altar. Behind it all sits a mirror, in which reflect my library, textbooks, and an image of Dionysus which I cannot fit on the altar itself. The reflections were unplanned, but work beautifully: my books are every bit as much a part of my life as my gods.

The level below has been changed significantly. While Sue and my vision mask still reside there, the have both been moved, and now share space with images of and offering bowls for my Natal Genius and Demon. Those shelves also bear representations of the planetary powers: the “masculine” of the left; the “feminine” on the right.

The two double bookshelves on either side of the table contain various magical experiments. Going counter clockwise from the upper left: my various active talismans and sigils; my house wards; my safe travel spell, money-for-Greece spell, and anti-fertility charms; and a collection of talismans of people and places close to me. In the middle are my “God” and “Goddess” statues beneath a miniature cosmology.

The flat surface of the table is, finally, pure workbench. My Triangle of the Art holds the place of honor at the center of my elemental symbols. To the right sit my ritual knife, my talisman of the Beneficial Sign, my brazier, and the coffee I just offered to all my household spirits. To the left are my copper ring and bracelet that I use when channeling forces, my “bolean” and my cauldron.

Misclaneous tools and projects hide below. My wands are visible in the corner on the left.

In scholarship

The Ceremonial Experiment In Summation

Satyr Magos20/08/2012

I know that my year of studying ceremonial magic (particularly of the Golden Dawn and grimoire traditions) has been a whirlwind tour at best. How can one cover, in a year, the variations and culminations of two thousand (or more, depending on where you start counting) years of magical tradition and experimentation? At times I have felt like a child playing with forces I can barely comprehend.

Fuck: the fact of the matter is that I am such a child. We all are. I think that the best many of us—particularly those of us with families, jobs, and other “worldly” obligations—can ever dream of achieving is adolescence. Still, though, if I sit down and enumerate (as I did a bit in my previous posts on the subject) the things I’ve accomplished, it turns out that I’ve made respectable inroads.

In this final post on the subject I want to talk about the resources I accessed in order to make those inroads. It would have been impossible for me if I weren’t in college, for one: my access to top-notch internet; the moments of down time between classes that were too long to waste but too short to do any real homework; the intellectual ambiance (so radically different from the outside world) that treats spending weeks at a stretch with your nose in obscure data as healthy behavior rather than as dysfunctional. There’s also the thing about my relative economic privilege which has allowed me to amass (and hoard) my library over the last decade and a half.

Over the course of this project, in approximate chronological order (with some considerations for ease of citation [and comments]) I have read:

Du Quette, Lon Milo. Chicken Qabalah of Rabbi Lamed Ben Clifford: Dilettante’s Guie to What You Do and Do Not Need to Know to Become a Qabalist. San Francisco: Weiser, 2001. [Gave me the courage to really dig into this project.]

–. Low Magick. Woodburry, MN: Llwellen, 2011.

Penczak, Christopher. Temple of High Witchcraft. Woodburry, MN: Llwellen, 2007. [Solid at first glance, but structurally unsound: lessons begin and end but don’t middle.]

Crowley, Aleister. Moonchild.

–. Book of Thoth. (*)

–. Book Four. (*)

Fortune, Dion. Sea Priestess.

–. Moon Magick. York Beach, ME: Samuel Weiser, 1978.

Kraig, Donald Michael. Modern Magick. St. Paul, MN: Llwellyn, 1997. (*) [I see that there’s a new edition out, but it looks hardcore Llwellenized. Does anyone know if it’s been nerfed as bad as it appears, or if it’s actually still solid?)]

Turner, Robert. Trans. Arbatel of Magic

Frater Barrabbas. Mastering the Art of Ritual Magick Volume One: Foundation. Stafford England: Megalithica Books,2008 (*) [Explain to me again why people take this guy seriously?]

Agrippa, Cornelius. Three Books of Occult Philosophy. (*)

Trithemius, Johannes. The Art of Drawing Spirits into Crystals. (*) [So … is he a cryptographer or a magician? Can someone more expert in these fields help me with this?]

Betz, Hans Deiter (ed.). The Greek Magical Papyri in Translation Including the Demotic Spells. (*) Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986. [I wish I had the brazen gonads needed to do half the magic in this book.]

Warnock, Christopher (trans.). Picatrix. (*) [Working with excerpts provided on his web page and via the Spiritus Mundi group.]

Greer, Mary K. Women of the Golden Dawn: Priestesses and Rebels. Rochester, VT: Park Street Press, 1995. [Brilliant. You should read it.]

Books I didn’t make it all the way through are marked with an asterisk(*). Yes, there’s some novels on there. I apologize for those citations which are incomplete, especially to the owners of those works, I do not have the print volumes on hand for all the relevant publication data.

And, last but not least, I have been hip-deep in the blogosphere. Rufus Opus at Head for the Red and Polyphanes the Digital Ambler have provided me with a great deal of information on Hermeticism. The former operates in a decidedly Christian tradition, while the latter is somewhat more eclectic, and between the two I’ve really been able to get a better view of the mechanics behind the symbolism and ideologies. Also Aaron Leitch of Annael, who provided me a view of the (sane quarters of the) modern Golden Dawn, a recipe for Abramelin oil (and a process for extracting essential oils in general, which has been great fun), and a few other things. I should also point to Skyllaros of the Crossroads Companion, because he’s awesome and his work is more accessible to me than that of many other hermetic magicians, but I only discovered him late in the game.

Deserving of special attention and thanks is one mister Jack Faust, of Dionysian Atavism, who has helped me contextualize a lot of these ideas with his very post-modern thoughts on the subject, backed by wonderfully hard archaic sources. He also gave me a number of personal pointers over email and on G+, for which I am extremely grateful.

Thank you, all of you, for sharing your knowledge and experiences with me.