Journey Through The Obsidian Dream

I’ve been experimenting with sigils.

This is partly because Gordon recently wrote the clearest treatise on the subject I’ve ever seen. There’s also the whole thing where, until I started digging into the Western Ceremonial Tradition, I didn’t really understand how Chaos Magick was distinct from it. It’s also just an inevitable manifestation of my escalating magical practice, and forays into practical magic.

I haven’t been doing as good a job of keeping notes as I should have, but it’s also only been about ten days since I launched my first shoal. I’ve been firing them off in accordance with the appropriate planetary days and hours using either appropriately-colored chime candles to help fuel them, or votive candles marked with the planetary glyphs. I’ve also been experimenting with quick-and-easy circle constructions to help power and focus the sigils.

Here, in no particular order, are some of my first impressions. Fellow n00bs may find them interesting; more experienced sigil-users may be amused.

1) Holy shit, drawing sigils is FUN.

2) While I’ve generally thought of sigils as quick-and-dirty magic, I think I need to refine my technique. Quick-and-dirty just isn’t as psychologically satisfying, particularly when I need something more complex (conceptually) than some candle-based healing magic. Firing them off should be just as much fun as drawing them in the first place.

3) Timing is key: Do not fire off “The Registrar Gives Me What I Need” while simultaneously expecting that registrar to sit on a piece of paperwork for a week. Even if you don’t need it processed with any alacrity, you may find yourself inconvenienced when your change-of-advisor form gets processed overnight and your old advisor can no longer provide you with the password for class registration.

Besides that temporary inconvenience, however, that sigil seems to have worked out well: my appointment to discuss my transfer with the registrar has been rescheduled (at her behest) for after the Jupiter election.

4) Specifying duration is key: The “I Have Fantastic Sex” sigil was AWESOME … the night I fired it. It’s been back to business as usual (which, lest my lovers who read this blog take this statement amiss, is still pretty awesome) ever since.

5) Coming up with “Sigils to Fire for Saturday” is not the way to go. I need to work on my “100 Bad Ideas” list first, sort out the good ideas, and then sort them into planetary correspondences.

In scholarship, witchcraft

Sex, Gender, and Magic 1/n+1

Satyr Magos11/04/2012

Preface

I was already drafting this in my head as a response to a reddit thread—particularly this comment—when one of the bloggers I follow decided to wade into the subject. It’s something I’ve talked about before from time to time, but usually only in reference to Wicca. There is a great deal of gender essentialism and heterosexism in the occult community, and the privileged apologia that tends to accumulate when someone calls bullshit makes me fucking furious.

Now, let’s look at the two OPs, first: a woman asking for people to share their experiences of gender difference in different forms of occultism, and gay man exploring the possibility of a huge oversight in the (human understanding of) Hermetic Law. The first got a few genuinely thoughtful answers, but the response to both (overwhelming in the one case, so far singular in the other) amounts to “how dare you ask that fucking question?”

That response infuriates me. It drives home the fact that, just as the neo-Pagan community is rife with mainline American anti-intellectualism (a rant for another time, but just look at popular responses to Hutton’s Triumph of the Moon), the occult community as a whole is permeated by outdated and debunked ideologies of sex, gender, and sexuality.

In witchcraft

IRC and an Astral Interwebs

Satyr Magos10/04/2012

When I was 16 or so, I spent my nights on IRC chat. I didn’t really have access to other Pagans back then—if there was a witch/New Age store in Lawrence at that time, I don’t remember it; I couldn’t have afforded workshops even if there had been; and I wasn’t in the habit of driving to Kansas City at the time—so the internet was my primary access point to the Pagan Community At Large.

Damn I wish I had those log files, but they must have gotten lost three computers ago. I can’t even remember the names of most of the people I talked to, though I may still have a few pictures of them somewhere in the archives. SnowLeopard. Latinius. Tig. My handles were ScholarMage and ShadowWolf. Don’t judge me: it was the mid-90s. Handles making references to totem animals were ubiquitous, and there was inevitably enough overlap that most of us had two or three variations on our favorite handles on case our favorites were taken. No one had registered or proprietary identities: that’s not how IRC worked.

These things come to mind now in part because of a recent post by the good Jack Faust. When I think of the combination of magic and the internet, two experiences from my faunish days come immediately to mind. Although I know I wrote about them at some point, I haven’t found these events in my very fragmentary journals from the time, so I have to rely on the hazy images of memories a decade and a half old. Both push the borders of my “adult” credulity, but this is how I remember them.

Much of the time I spent not-on-the-internet was spent at a coffee shop called the Java Break. One night, walking home, I felt like I was being followed. I kept looking behind me, but the streets and alleys all seemed as deserted as usual. I was wound pretty tight by the time I made it home. That night I woke from a dead sleep to see a large, cat-shape sitting beside my bed; this was doubly strange because I slept on the top bunk, which mean the cat-shape was just floating in the air. I was (in retrospect, unaccountably) terrified, and I asked it to leave. It got up, shrugged, and departed: fading out of sight as it walked in place. When I shared this experience with my IRC friends, SnowLeopard claimed it was her spirit guide, checking me out because he was bored. This may have been the first time I ever saw and interacted directly with a spiritual entity.

On another occasion, someone on the chat circuit wanted to show me how to call lightning using a stone circle. Somehow, though I had no experience or training in (or even vocabulary for) visionary/astral work (in fact, this was the heyday of my failed attempts at astral projection), this gentleman was able to transmit to me, and I was able to receive and experience, a process of calling lightning to oneself from the center of a stone circle. The ability to so something like that is, of course, an extraordinary claim: one that I have never tested, though I can still (as with many of my visionary experiences) recall the scene with incredible, visceral clarity. For whatever it’s worth, I imagine that a person with adequate focus and training could possibly manipulate the magnetism of a storm to that degree. (Why not? I’ve seen people make fire dance to their will, fuck with lights and computers in improbable ways. I, myself, have changed the wind to keep campfire smoke out of my eyes on numerous occasions.) I don’t, however, believe for a moment that a magician has any better chances of surviving a lightning strike than anyone else, even if he called it down.

That’s it: A spiritual visitation on one occasion, and a shared visionary experience on another. Two anecdotal accounts from a not-particularly-tech-savvy, pubescent, magician-in-training who wasn’t even keeping coherent journals at the time. But it makes one think. What might be possible for someone who was fully-trained? Particularly someone actively interested in techno-magic?

In art

Dionysus Devotional Art I

Satyr Magos07/04/2012

I’ve been working on this off-and-on for a few months. I finished coloring it Thursday as a part of my Dionysia.

His beauty is a major point of iconography in Euripides Bacchae, and his purple robe is similarly emphasized in the first of the Homeric Hymns. The horns are in recognition of his title as Bull-god (and the attendant associations with unfettered lust, especially masculine). The significance of the thyrsus and wine should be obvious.

In witchcraft

Devotional Musings: Dionysus I

Satyr Magos05/04/2012

This post has already taken me too long to compose. I started it almost as soon as I first posted about the Urban Dionysia. The fact is, I find it difficult to write about my personal experiences with the gods. Some of those experiences have been very, very strange—to the point where, even after a decade and a half of living a magical life and talking or reading about other people’s magical lives, I don’t have an adequate cultural framework through which to process them. Other experiences, which may seem downright pedestrian when I reduce them to words or which I may know full well parallel the experiences of many, many others, have simply affected me so deeply that I cannot bear to subject them to public scrutiny. (The events which comprise my previous post include some of both) And, inevitably, part of it is that I spent so much of my life being angry at the very idea of gods that I still feel like something of a chump, sometimes, for honoring them. I’ve alluded to this last point before, and it is from there that I will begin.

In witchcraft

Dedication

Satyr Magos05/04/2012

Sometimes you have to need to provide context before you can tell a story. Sometimes, it’s best to tell a story first and dig into the context afterward. This is the story of how I came to perform my re-Dedication as a part of my Beltane festivities in 2009 … I’ll get to the context in a little bit.

It was my second Beltane after my failed life in St. Louis, the first with Aradia. It may almost go without saying tat we were at Camp Gaea, with my massive tent set up in Dava Wood. I had big plans for the weekend, aimed at jump-starting my magical career* in preparation for the re-Dedication I intended to perform at some point over the summer, and we were partying with the KU Cauldron. It’s tempting to break this into three different stories which coincidentally took place over the course of a single evening, but … I’m not so sure that they’re unrelated.

In Uncategorized

Manic March

Satyr Magos02/04/2012

April showers bring May flowers. That’s what they taught me as a child, anyway. It’s a gross oversimplification of course, but still …

I took this picture two weeks ago, just before harvesting a few flowers for my Ostara Altar. The flowers—star magnolia, Ginko tells me—have finished blooming and fallen to the ground and been replaced by leaves. Although the middle of last week was seasonably cool—there was even a threat of frost Monday night—the fact is that Spring has come a solid six weeks early.

We’re into April, now, but … I have been bouncing off the fucking walls for a solid month. Fuck, it’s 2.30am as I type this, and I should have been asleep hours ago.

Partly this is just me pinging from stress. I always get frantic in the Spring Semester.

Part of this is the unseasonable warmth, and the off-and-on thunderstorm. A good, solid rain helps me sleep. But this … the tension in the air has me buzzing

A lot of it is the very nature of witchcraft—one of the major purposes of the rituals we do is to attune ourselves to the natural cycles of the land, and part of it may an unanticipated side effect of some of the magic I did to establish myself here in Indiana: I made a point of putting down roots, binding myself to the land.

The land is alive and awake.

And I am alive and awake.

A lot of the time it’s awesome. Right now, though, it kind of sucks.

In witchcraft

Urban Dionysia

Satyr Magos01/04/2012

The Facebook group Prayers to the Gods of Hellas informs me that the Urban Dionysia began at sundown last night, and will continue for the next eight days . The Attic title was Διονύσια τὰ ἐν Ἄστει (Dionusia ta en Astei: lit. “The In City Dionusia”) or Διονύσια τὰ Μεγάλα (Dionusia ta Megala: lit. “Dionusia the Big”). The Wikipedia article can be found here.

It is both interesting and appropriate that Sannafrid and I (unknowingly) chose to spend last night smoking and drinking, while I read aloud from my copy of the Homeric Hymns. First the Hymns to Aphrodite, as we had been discussing goddesses of fucking, and then the Hymns to Dionysus. As the evening went on, I colored an iconographic image of the god I have been working on off-and-on for some time. This afternoon, shortly before penning this post, I poured a libation of mead before the idol on my altar.

It is further interesting that, although we are shifting from Greek drama to Roman in my Greek and Roman Drama class, I have spent the afternoon reading* Euripides Hippolytus in anticipation of reading Phaedra, Seneca’s version of the story, next week. Hippolytus was first performed in 428 BCE, and—like all the Attic dramas which have survived—was a winner of the theatre competitions which were a major part of the festival.

Unfortunately, I do not have the liberty to take eight days off in honor of Dionysos—or even to get ploughed for the next seven nights in his name (and “sacrifice my liver”, as Sannafrid put it). Besides, the original was a state-sponsored festival which (to a casual but cynical reader, at least) looks like it was intended to duplicate, tame, and profit off of the older, Rural, Dionysia … and the Cults of the Olympians are not state-sponsored religion anymore.

What I can do is make a point of taking an hour or two out of each of the next seven days to meditating on the Bacchic One and upon my relationship with him, finishing the one devotional image I have so far, finishing reading Written in Wine (the devotional anthology Aradia gave me so long ago), and working on translating the Homeric hymn I never got to over Spring Break because the Hymn to Phanes took me so long. Hopefully, between these various things, I may develop some sense of how I might celebrate this festival (and the Rural, in the winter) within my own cultural frame work and (still infantile) devotional practice.

* I have read Hippolytus before, of course, for last semester’s mythology class. The roles of the goddesses Aphrodite and Artemis are too prominent to pass up. I could write a whole post about that play alone. Possibly several: one tackling the theme of hubris and failure to treat the altars of the gods; one dealing with Euripides treatment of women in general, and another on the misogyny of Hippolytus in particular. But those are rants for another day.

In scholarship

Madness or Magic: Xerxes and the Hellespont

Satyr Magos30/03/2012

Herodotus relates a tale in his Histories of how the Persian king Xerxes bridged the Hellespont that he might invade Greece. Initially foiled, he does something that strikes modern historians as very strange:

…[A]fter these bridges had been built, a violent storm descended upon them, broke them up, and tore apart all that work.

Xerxes was infuriated when he learned of this; he ordered that the Hellespont was to receive 300 lashes under the whip and that a pair of shackles was to be dropped into the sea.

–Herodotus, Histories 7.34-35.1

He goes on to send “others to brand the Hellespont” (Ibid. 35.1), and to chastise it:

“Bitter water, your master is imposing a penalty upon you for wronging him even though you had suffered no injustices from him. And King Xerxes will cross you wheter you like it or not. It is for just cause, after all, that no human offers you sacrifice: you are a burbid and briny river!”

–Ibid. 35.2

It’s hard to say, as I’m not up to the original Greek yet, whether Herodotus and his own audience interpreted this scene the way most modern historians I have spoken to interpreted it—that is, as a sign of his barbarous idiocy, or possibly as tyrannical madness. Given Herodotus’s typical Greek disdain for foreigners—which is slightly ironic, given that Herodotus, himself, was from Halicarnassus, which many Athenians would have hardly considered Greek—this interpretation is plausible. But it’s also true that Herodotus, having travelled widely, was well and truly impressed by the works of many “barbarians”, the Persians in particular. And most modern historians wouldn’t know an enchantment from their own assholes.

As I re-read this scene today, after a few years of escalating magical practice and research into the way things were done in the Old Schools…. well, this scene looks like a binding to me. How about y’all?

Herodotus, First. Histories. Landmark Herodotus. Ed. Robert B. Strassler, Trans. Andrea L. Purvis. New York: Anchor Books, 2009. Print.

In witchcraft

Hod Altar—or, Seething on the Bench

Satyr Magos29/03/2012

I disassembled my Yesod Altar last night and built up an altar representing the powers of Mercury in Hod. This, of course, is a part of my ongoing studies in Western Ceremonialism.

I chose last night to do it, in part, because I wanted to upgrade the talisman I’ve been using to help with my studies in Ancient Greek.

Then I remembered (again) that Mercury is still retrograde, and that not only is any magic a bad idea, but that Mercurial magic specifically directed at communication was an exceptionally bad idea.

The results from my last experiment were less than ideal. To say I haven’t slept right since would be an exaggeration, and imply a causal connection that is probably better attributed to a combination of school-stress and the manic side of SAD exacerbated by unseasonable weather. In this wake of this, a friend pointed out that perhaps Mercury Retrograde and the Vernal Equinox (the former in general and the combination in particular) were not the best time to be fucking with shit if I didn’t want to break my brain (again). I decided he was right, and have pretty much set aside all my experiments in favor of some basic aura maintenance and Yoga. This is probably the best decision I could make, because I really do feel a lot better after another rest.

But I’m starting to get antsy. That’s, again, at least party the unseasonable weather and the inevitable energy burst of spring. But I’m hot to get back into the magic. This isn’t βούλομαι—a rational wish or desire. This is ἐπιθυμεω (longing desire) bordering on ἐραω (love+lust).

I have always been drawn to magic; the more I do it, the more I lust after it.

I cant wait for Mercury to turn direct so I can get back to work.