Journey Through The Obsidian Dream

The Room

Satyr Magos26/08/2011

I got my first college care package this week. Of course it was from Aradia. She quoted Adrianne Rich for me at length:

Night-life. Letters, journals, bourbon
sloshed in the glass. Poems crucified on the wall,
dissected, their bird-wings severed
like trophies. No one lives in this room
without living through some kind of crisis.

No one lives in this room
without confronting the whiteness of the wall
behind the poems, planks of books,
photographs of dead heroines.
Without contemplating last and late
the true nature of poetry. The drive
to connect. The dream of a common language.

–Origins of History and Conciousness

She muses about whether the room”is the space one inhabits or the the Creative Mind itself. It is both. It is my too-dark, faux-wood paneled living room with the bright white cinderblock wall in front of which I built my altar. It is the echoing cavern of madness where I listen to my muses and transcribe their nearly-incomprehensible wails onto the lining of my skull. It is more.

It is also my life here: a white room with two doors. One of the doors locked behind me when I came in, though there is a fire-ax hanging beside it, the words “Break In Case of FUBAR” painted carefully in white-and-red across the class. I haven’t found the other door yet, only the walls. Empty walls marked by a few snapshots – faces of people who might be friends or enemies or (worst of all) indifferent – and scattered windows I can’t quite see out of.

She goes on to quote Lorrie Moore: “This is good for your writing.”

Of course it is. No matter how good or bad it gets. And whether at the end of this period I go on, as planned, to a Masters in History and a Doctorate in Greek mystery cults; if I end up selling my writing much earlier than I can comprehend; or if the world as we know it ends, and I find myself presiding over a temple of freaks, geeks, and survivalists who aren’t quite sure how I ended up in charge. This is good for my writing.

In witchcraft

The Concerns of Being a Man-Witch

Satyr Magos26/08/2011

It bothers me, sometimes: being a man (however queer) with aspirations to leadership in the NeoPagan community.

Witchcraft is supposed to be Womyn’s Religion. We honor a Goddess before a God, exalt the role of the High Priestess, assert that the “feminine principle” is the dominant power on the inner planes. And yet … too often our leaders and teachers are men. Gerald Gardner. Alex Sanders. Raymond Buckland. Carlos Castaneda and Michael Harner. Raven Grimmassi, Ed Fitch, Oberon Zell. There are great women, too, of course: Doreen Valiente, Margot Adler and Starhawk and Z Budapest. But what does it say that I – a man who once called himself Scholar Mage, who has read as many histories of witchcraft as how-too manuals – can think of so few ladies who had as much influence on modern NeoPagan witchcraft as these.

(I’ll leave alone entirely, for the moment, the overwhelming preponderance of gentlemen over ladyfolk in ceremonial magick which has been so influentialon the NeoPagan movement as a whole. I’ll also leave for another time the discussion of such inseparable couples as Gavin and Yvonne Frost, or Janet and Stewart Farrar, and the erasure of Rosemary Buckland and so many other influential wives and partners.)

To make matters worse, when we think of the grand disasters, whose are the names that come to mind most readily? Amber K, Edain McCoy, Silver Ravenwolf. Really, what makes Ravenwolf (whose work I won’t touch) so much worse than Penczak (whose work I’m embarrassed about, but make extensive use of)?

Witchcraft is supposed to be Womyn’s Religion. So where are the women? That’s a silly question: of the groups I’ve worked with, women made up a little more than half their number; of the solitaries I’ve known, women made a solid 2/3 majority (leaving Heathens and Not Wiccan Damnits out of the count for the sake of this discussion). Instead I should ask: where are the women leaders? The lady-writers reshaping the movement with their brilliance?

There’s a part of me that wants to cop out and take an easy answer: the good ones are at home, leading covens – too busy with the real Work to publish self-aggrandizing through publishing. But Deborah Lipp (brilliant and under recognized, at least in the circles I run in) manages both; that’s part of what being brilliant is about. An even easier answer is that they’re squeezed out by a sexist publishing industry that’s too afraid of risk to print anything but another idiot Witchcraft 101 – With a Twist! This feels closer to the truth, at least. Maybe a portion of the truth, a part of the problem.

But I wonder sometimes … if I’m not part of the problem, too. Not me, personally (I hope), but man-witches in general – still struggling (or not) to escape the patriarchal paradigm that privileges our worst ideas over any woman’s most brilliant. If the preponderance of male writers and leaders is a passive (or active) force keeping women out of the public sphere in this community, even as it is in the mainstream world.

What, then, is my role as a male witch? How can I serve the community that has sheltered me? How do I pass on the knowledge I’ve acquired after a decade and a half of struggling with Mysteries and a sea of mediocre books (spotted rarely with islands of genius)? How do I create the small, intimate, power magical community – the coven, ideally, or temple failing that – that I can’t seem to find ready-made? How can I do these things without furthering the problem?

In scholarship, witchcraft

At the Gate of a Labyrinth

Satyr Magos24/08/2011

After a five-day ordeal called New Student Orientation, I am officially matriculating. There My first class, appropriately, was Ancient Greek. But I’ll talk about all that later. Right now, I have a decision to make. I want to work in the art-metals department to help pay for school … which is leaving me with a dilemma.

There aren’t any work-study openings left. The head of the department didn’t come right out at say it, but it was made clear to me that they all go to his seniors. There are, however, openings in his advanced metalworking class. Two problems: that costs money, and I’m already taking a full course load. He’s willing to work with me, though, so I have three options: to take the course (and with it the full additional cost and workload), to work as a TA under him (and work out the cost on an ad-hoc basis), or to leave my course load alone.

Being a magician, I of course consulted the Tarot – my Crowley-Harris Thoth deck, to be specific; I’ve been using it for my daily readings and carrying it around with me rather like a child with a favorite blanket. I did a modified version of the Decision Game (Banzhaf and Theler, pp 44-45) spread for three options instead of two.

My results are as follows:

The significator is the Queen of Swords – I’m struggling to impose rational order on what might be a fundamentally emotional decision.

The first path – to take the course – procedes from [XV the Devil] to [10 Wwands “Oppression”] to [VII the Chariot]. In some ways, the Devil aspect of this is easy to see: the temptation of the fire, metal, and hammers calls strongly to me; the temptation to do something I already know I’m good at, to keep my hand in; to make every penny of my tuition count. The generative aspects seem more metaphorical, but one can never be quite sure. Looking at the 10W, I was initially confused. After closer examination, however, I feel that it is simply stating the obvious: that I will be overworked, pushing the limits of my time and energy. That it will end in the Chariot is most interesting: that the class will give me the opportunity to move forward in some meaningful and powerful way.

The second path – to take the TA position – is more clear. [XI Lust] leads to [XII the Hanged Man] and ends in [9 Swords “Cruelty”]. This is probably not the way to go. But then, half-measures rarely are.

The final path – to skip it and leave my course load as is – begins with [2 Wands “Dominion”] and leads through [the Knight of Wands] to [the Queen of Wands]. The 2W gives me pause, as Banzhaf talks a lot about risk-taking in relationship to this card; this seems strange to me as this is the path of not taking the risk. The Knight of Wands is more clear: this is the direct path, the road of staying focused and on target. The Queen of Wands seems to promise leadership opportunities at the end, and perhaps other opportunities as well that I can’t foresee. It is also interesting to me that here, on the “stick to the books” path, is where I find the most fire cards.

One rarely expects clear answers from the Tarot, but rarely have I gotten answers quite so ambiguous.

In witchcraft

Q-Crossed

Satyr Magos18/08/2011

As a part of my burgeoning studies in ceremonial magic, I have now performed the Qabalistic Cross ritual every morning for the last three days. I can already feel it making changes to my aura: my crown chakra is rising, my root is descending, and the two stars at my shoulders are becoming semi-permanent fixtures. I had not anticipated these precise changes, but they seem to confirm a theory of mine: I don’t believe that the human aura has pre-configured centers of power. I think that those nexi and meridians are formed as mystics, witches, and magicians work magic – particularly the internal kind.

When I was taking Aikido in high school, and first establishing my magical practice, I read a great deal about chakras, but the only ones I could actually feel were my Third Eye, my One Point – very important to Aikido practice, to the exclusion of all others – and my Root. Of them all, though, only my Third Eye was where I expected it to be. My One Point and Root were both low. The One Point only a little bit, too close to my genitals; but my Root seemed to hover somewhere below my feet unless I sat cross-legged.

It was only after years (and years, and years) of pointed practice that I could detect the others, and they always faded quickly when my practice lapsed. I can still feel them in my aura now, of course: although my practice has not been as regular as I might like, lately, I’m still very near the top of my game. But as I begin this very different regimen of ritual and meditation, I can alread feel them mutating.

Which leads me to wonder (more. Again.) what the purpose of the Qabalistic Cross ritual is. The resources I can find that talk about the why suggest that it is primarily about centering, both in the sense of ground-and-center and in the larger sense of realizing one’s position as the center of one’s own universe (the King of the Kingdom Malkuth, the Keeper of the Garden). But it seems to me that it’s doing more than that.

Is it to begin making the changes to the aura that will be furthered by the Circulation of the Body of Light, the LBRP, and all the rest? is it, as Rufus Opus has suggested of the LBRP, to “season” one appropriately to be devoured by the Secret Chiefs? The answer, I suppose, is the same as always: more research, and more practice, are required.

In art

Sacred Space to Establish Space

Satyr Magos16/08/2011

When I drove across three states to go to college, almost a fifth of what I brought pertained either to my altar, or my magical library. I set up my altar even before I set up my bookshelves or unpacked my clothes. Since them, I have spent hours poking and prodding at it, trying to tune it properly to the new space and my new needs.

When I took it apart back in Kansas City, I had high ideals of putting it together so that the symbolism was clear and consistent, with cosmic forces at the heart, building outward to symbols of the mortal world. Unfortunately, the gods whose idols make up my altar would have no part of that.

This evening, at last, I think we have reached a compromise: an arrangement that displays them as they wish to be displayed and fits my need for a pattern of some sort, all while still leaving me the space I’ll need to work. It’s somewhat unbalanced at the moment. There are gods who need spaces, but for whom I have not yet found or made adequate icons or idols.

The topmost level consists of a candle rack where I have anchored protective spells for almost twenty years. Behind it is a slice of blue geode, given to me by my grandmother when I was a child – it has been a part of my altar for as long as I can remember. In front are a pair of quartz crystals, mined and cleaned by Pasiphae and Aidan in Arkansas; and a dragon-bell given to me by a neighbor in St.Louis.

The next level is divided into three sections. You can see Dionysos clearly on the left, and at his feet is a Maenad. Sharing that shelf are a paper skull, representing mortality; and an anvil marked with a fire glyph, which I work with when honoring Hephaestos. You cannot quite see my ritual blade. In the center section are the God and Goddess statues I have been working with as I struggle to reconcile my fundamental queerness with heavily gendered archetypes that seem to work so well for others. In between them is the altar-box Aradia made me as an Initiation-gift, a world tree painted on one side; the other bearing six small drawers, each filled with an elemental power. On the right is my ritual chalice; a rubber purple Ostara egg from a ritual several years ago; a copper bracelet and ring in the shape of serpents, which I used to channel the spirits at the Farmhouse Séance. My cauldron completes the set, but that section needs a great deal more attention.

The lower level is divided into five sections: three along the wall, an elemental circle in the center, and a working surface. The back left section contains a variety of tools – my jeweler’s hammers, saw, and and bench pin; a gong and striker; a sickle-shaped ritual knife, and several cloths. The central recess contains my sun-god maks and a piece of driftwood found in Chicago. The back right section contains my visionary mask, my Orb (long story), the statue wherein lives a spirit I work with (though I haven’t seen her since Heartland), and a rose and candle from my Phi Theta Kappa induction which will be incorporated in my altar to Athena as soon as I find or make an appropriate idol.

The elemental circle is fairly straightforward: candle nubs saved from the altar where I worked with Aradia, Pasiphae, Aidan, Chriotus, and D; a quartz crystal, a flame-shaped stone and a clay censer, a stone, a blue bowl and a sea shell, each accompanying their respective elements; in the center is a clay pentacle I made.

The rest is all working space: a mad collection of tools and spells and memories and works-in-progress. The five stones – one beside each element, one atop the pentacle – are for a project I’m working on, as are all the stones lined up in the front: blending the hot-stone massage I’m learning with the ceremonial magic; the four will be marked with elemental sigils, others will be marked with zodiac and planetary seals. There’s a money spell in the back left, and a bottle in which I dump excess lust (that one never worked right – it overfilled almost immediately and I always had more … still handy from time to time, though). The giant sage wand was a gift from a shamanic practioner at Heartland 2009, who took Aradia and I on very interesting inward journeys. The pile of quartz are also from Pasiphae and Aidan. There’s a green soapstone container full of all the hematite rings I broke in highschool, which I’ve kept for spell components. And more. And more. There’s even more below and inside the altar table.

This is where I work. By the way, I’m crazy.

In witchcraft

Corn Moon Rite

Satyr Magos16/08/2011

I posted about my full moon reading yesterday, but the ritual itself bears mentioning as well. It was the first in the new home, the last I’ll be able to perform with Aradia until Yule at the soonest, and the only magical rite in which my mother has ever participated.

In keeping with that last point, and because we were all too overwhelmed and exhausted to do any serious heavy lifting, we kept it simple. Rather than alternating in silence, as Aradia and I usually do, or assigning a call to each of the participants – as we have historically with larger groups – I took the lead, calling on the “powers and spirits” of each element, while Aradia and my mother followed behind. We cast the circle hand-to-hand, and a storm hit exactly as we finished.

We called upon the moon to help establish the household and to aid in the transition. The three of us then worked together to charge a bottle of water with moon energy. Finally, we closed the circle and went outside to see what was going on.

The storm was still blowing in, but the tree outside my front door had already dropped a massive load of sticks and twigs. This was where my mother really shone, and proved that with little or no actual instruction in what I do, she already knew enough: she encouraged me to collect a particularly attractive fallen twig to add to my altar. As the storm continued, I set the moon water outside to continue charging, along with my amethyst orb. Both were tingling when I brought them in shortly before dawn.

In witchcraft

Corn Moon Reading

Satyr Magos15/08/2011

It’s that time again. I haven’t done (or have done, but haven’t actually spent any time with) my full moon readings since the last time I posted here.

It’s appropriate, then, that this be my first post from the new Temple: a one-bedroom apartment where the sun first rises over the state of Indiana. I moved in the night before the full moon, and performed a simple Esbat and house blessing (which I will write about later), and did my monthly reading.

HOUSE	CARD	GENERAL MEANING	SPECIFIC MEANING
1^st – Self, Viewpoint	Ace of Swords	New beginnings, esp. ideas. Thirst for knowledge. Opportunity and clear decisions.
2^nd – Finances, Income	3 Swords	Heartbreak, disappointment, bad news, miscalculation.	Miscalculation, threat of loss.
3^rd – Daily Experiences immediate influences	Knight of Cups	Tender, romantic man; seducer and charmer. Expression of feelings.	Incidentally, the card who rules my birthday.
4^th – Home-place family, land, roots	XXI the World	Completion, joy of living. Being in the right place at the right time. Fulfillment and reconciliation. Warns against thinking one has reached the goal.
5^th – Fun / Pleasure children, hobbies,	Ace of Cups	New beginnings, esp. emotions & relationships. Bliss and opportunity.
6^th – Work illness, duty, routine	3 Disks	Taking concrete steps; translating ideas into reality. Slow process.	Stabilizing what one has achieved; turning projects into reality. The semester is starting in a week. I think the meaning here is pretty clear.
7^th – Partnership associations, spouse	8 Disks	Cautious new beginning. Moderation. Care and patience. Encourages letting time do the work for you.
8^th – Taboo / Crisis sex, death, taxes, loans	XX Judgment	Transformation and new beginnings. Hope and self-discovery. Spiritual development. Career progress.
9^th – Higher Perception journey, movement	3 Cups	Partnership, fulfillment, joy, exchange and rich harvest.	Gratitude.
10^th – Recognition career, ambition, status	XVI the Tower	Collapse, catastrophe, and new beginnings. Upheaval. Breakthrough. Liberation. Fate.	Radical change. A tour de force.
11^th – Friendships groups, social activities	4 Wands	Stability, order, and harmony. The Wheel of Fortune in miniature. Partnership and completion.
12^th – Secrets & Fears hopes, ambitions	Queen of Swords	Wealth of ideas, presence of mind, quick-witted. Independent. A person (particularly a woman) who exhibits these characteristics.	Of course I want to be the Queen of Swords. Or meet her. And of course I’m scared of her – you think I’m stupid or something?
+2 – Current Position / Outside Influences	7 Wands	Doing battle from the higher ground. Risking a single-handed effort. Growing beyond one’s limits. Taking a risk or hard assignment.
+2 – Current Position / Outside Influences	4 Swords	Peace. Rest. Stasis. Calm before the storm. Building one’s strength.
Underlying Theme	Queen of Disks	Fertility, sense of security, sensuality, serenity, endurance. Dedication to the task with endurance and patience
THEMES
Me / You – 1^st, 7^th	Ace of Swords		I really have no idea where this is going. “Focus on your self and let time take care of the rest”?
Me / You – 1^st, 7^th	8 Disks
From Where To Where – 4^th, 10^th	XXI the World		Neither of these cards come as a surprise this month. I just finished disassembling one life and must now begin building a new one.
From Where To Where – 4^th, 10^th	XVI the Tower
Fire – 1^st, 5^th, 9^th	Ace of Swords		Two aces – air and water. Another water card – the highly auspicious 3. But there are no fire cards in my fire trine. My passion is a hurricane, not a firestorm.
	Ace of Cups
	3 of Cups
Earth – 2^nd, 6^th, 10^th	3 Swords	Heartbreak, failure.	My material world has come apart and must be put back together. Nothing I didn’t already know.
	3 Disks	Craft and process.
	XVI the Tower	The shiny red reset button.
Air – 3^rd, 7^th, 11^th	Knight of Cups	Feelings and their expression.	My mind is going to be on everything but my mind this month. That’s something I’m going to have to be careful of.
	8 Disks	Patience and meticulous process.
	4 Wands	Completion and stability.
Water – 4^th, 8^th, 12^th	XXI the World		Again the major arcana speaking of completion and reconstruction. And again with the air-water connection.
	XX Judgment
	Queen of Swords	Discernment, brilliance

There haven’t been many surprises in this reading – well, except 8D, which might refer to my transforming relationship with Aradia (who has not moved to Sunrise, IN with me) or might refer to something new coming along much sooner than I would have expected or wanted.

There are only three major arcana cards in my reading, but they’re all doozies: XXI, XX, and XVI. I have pressed the shiny red reset button on my life.

Given the amount of upheaval in my life, it’s no surprise that my elements are out of balance. My air and water are cross wired – QS in my water trine, KnC in my air ; the AS and AC in my fire – and I have no wands except for the 4 in my air. I’m going to have to work very hard to keep from getting completely out of balance.

In Uncategorized

Nom de Guerre: A New Self-Introduction

Satyr Magos06/08/2011

I started this blog under my real name. It seemed like the thing to do at the time. In November of 09 I hadn’t quite made the decision to become a professional academic, let alone begun to process everything I was going to need to do to achieve that end. I was going to school, yes, but … I still thought of myself more as a jeweler than anything else. As a jeweler, practicing magic in a city where I have an established base of power, I have nothing to hide.

But now I’m moving, and I have academic politics to think about. The people where I’m going don’t know me, and I don’t know them. And when I finish my Bachelor’s degree, I’ll be moving on to another school where I’ll have to rebuild my reputation from the ground up again. (And, of course, there’s the whole angle where I might just join the war.) Having this come up when you search my real name might be inadvisable.

My career as an occult author is, at best, years off. Until then it seems prudent to adopt a pen name. I will not name the school I am attending, or the town I live in – though anyone willing to websearch the details I do give will no doubt be able to put two and two together. I don’t need a secret identity … just plausible deniability. As such, I would ask friends who know me in the real world to post comments here on the blog, rather than on my facebook – as an added bonus, our resulting conversations will be better preserved for posterity.

Allow me, then, to reintroduce myself: I am Satyr Magos. I have been studying witchcraft since 1993 and practicing since 1996. I am deeply eclectic – the kind who can lecture you for hours on the schools of thought I’ve studied to get to where I am. Although I do not think of myself as Wiccan, many of my rituals are based in that framework. At the moment, I would describe my practice as Helenistic neo-Wiccan shamanic witchcraft. I am, for the moment, the one and only Initiate of the Obsidian Dream.

For the first two-thirds of my life, I was an angry agnostic and my magic was largely theoretical – personal shields and house wards and tarot and playing magical tag. In 2007, shortly before my life in St. Louis failed utterly, I began making offerings to Dionisos, Hephaestos, and Apollon. The first two took me in readily; Rhea informed me of her presence in 2009. I am still negotiating with Apollo – and now with Athena and Hermes, as I more seriously devote myself to school.

At the same time I began working with gods, I also began to study shamanic techniques: a friend of mine took me on my first journey to the underworld. I read Penczak’s Shamanic Temple … but it was Michael Harner’s Way of the Shaman that actually got me somewhere.

I put off studying ceremonial and Chaos magic for most of my life. There was too much penis-waving and too many invocations of a god I don’t trust in the former; the second, as I’ve mentioned elsewhere, gave me flashbacks to playing D&D in high school with that older friend who never moved out of his parents basement. I am dedicating the next year of my magical life to filling those holes in my magical education. In the process I aim to develop a daily practice, and master the skills needed to aid other witches with their spells, potions, and rites of passage.

Welcome, again, to my blog. When I started it, I never imagined that I would have over a hundred pageviews in a month. Thank you all for coming.

In witchcraft

Start the War Without Me?

Satyr Magos30/07/2011

[EDITED: As I sat through the day I realized that this post – hastily pounded out as soon as I woke up this morning – didn’t really convey everything I wanted it to. It has been edited from its original form. The changes are in blue, lest anyone accuse me of “covering my tracks”.

Like most people raised in this society (there are other societies that suffer this problem, but I can’t speak to them in the same way), my brain is contaminated with the idea of the End Times. Some day – and probably soon! – there will be an epic struggle to determine the fate of the universe: the Y2K Bug; the Second Coming of Jesus Christ; 2012 and the Mayan Calendar; whites becoming a racial minority; the Islamic fundamentalist takeover of the world. A guy I knew in high school had been “assured” by his “spirit guides” that there would be a race war in 2013. My own delusions of the Apocalypse always revolved around a battle between the One God and the Old Gods – or their followers, at least. I don’t believe this any more – consciously, at least – but I’ve spent too many hours contemplating this and other end-time scenarios to wholly resist the power of the meme.

Now we have the New Apostolic Reformation, which is flatly declaring war not just against the followers of the the Old Gods, but against everyone who opposes their uniquely American Protestant Free-Market-Is-The-Hand-Of-God Capitalism. (No, I won’t link to them directly. I can’t handle the troop-carriers of trolls that might unleash. Use yer Google.) Some pagans – and not just our own troll-warriors – are talking about fighting back. Others are framing themselves as conscientious objectors. This situation takes me uncomfortably back to the age of eighteen – except that back then I would not have hesitated to join the fray.

Politically, I’m a pacifist: I don’t believe that there is any justification for two groups of people to line up and do violence against one another. Personally, though, I’m a believer in self-defense: if you come at me swinging, I’ll duck, dodge, hit you with a fucking chair until I can run away, then destroy you from a distance (I am a Scorpio, after all). So … I’m sympathetic to both sides of the argument.

But … Allison Leigh Lilly, in particular, makes a lot of good points. There’s a lot of creepy nationalism in the idea of nominating any deity as the God of American Freedom; choosing Columbia or Zeus over Jesus and Jehovah … doesn’t really impress me any. The eliminationist language on both sides makes me uncomfortable. Further, the DC40 campaign does not parallel with either scenario above: it is neither a direct person-to-person attack against me, nor a move by one state against another. I don’t want the NAR/Third Wave to curl up and die; I just want them to go away and let me live my life somewhere else. And they don’t necessarily want me to die: they’ll settle for a theocratic state that subjugates me to third-class citizenship, or perhaps outright slavery. The DC40 campaign is maleficent magic aimed at motivating lawmakers to do their dirty work for them.

Fortunately, magic gives us options that are more nuanced that “let them hit me, run away, or hit them back”. We can shield ourselves – build a magical bunker, if you will. We can try to bind our enemies from doing us harm. We can do our own enlightenment-bombing of the Capital … or even the NAR, themselves (problematic, but better than trying to give anybody cancer).

Unfortunately, I’m about to leave behind my base of power. I’m not just leaving Aradia and our space where we’ve built up so much power. I’m not just leaving Pasiphae and Aidan, with whom we’ve worked with for much of the last two years, and Chirotus and D – with whom I disagree about more and more, but who I think I could convince to work with me on this one – and the KU Cauldron and all the other local groups and places of power I’ve worked with for most of my life.

I’m leaving the entire state of Missouri for a city and state where I have no relationship to the land or its people. I’m going to be rebuilding from scratch. My altar may not be able to make the move at all; at best I’m going to be able to pack bits and pieces.

So …

Working alone. With no relationship to the land. With half my stored power left behind. Attending classes full time at a badass school (full of hardcore pacifist Quakers, I might add) which will consume more time and energy than I can really imagine at this stage (and be the magical equivalent of trying to build a ballista atop a sinkhole).

What is morally right? What is tactically feasible? What is the best long-term strategy? What are the odds that the answers to these questions are the same course of action?

What can I do? What should I do?

The answers: I don’t have them.

In scholarship, witchcraft

Belated Forays into Ceremonial Magick

Satyr Magos27/07/2011

I have always been simultaneously fascinated with and repulsed by ceremonial magic. Fascinated with the elaborate props and ritual, with the finely tuned cosmology and infinite resources, and with the endless influence it has held over Western magical tradition. Repulsed by the fundamentally Abrahamic roots, the seeming rigidity of rank and practice, and the endless hours of formal, repetitive work.

As a witch, my magical practice owes a great deal to ceremonial magic: Gerald Gardner based his infamous Book of Shadows on the rites of the Freemasons and the Golden Dawn, steeped in pastoralist poetry and (presumably) tempered by his own visionary experiences. Many British Traditional rites (or so I am assured the scholar Ronald Hutton and by those who are willing to push the boundaries of their oaths to one group or the other) are nearly indistinguishable from those of the Golden Dawn, and many of those in turn mimic Masonic rites.

Even before I began studying Wiccan ritual as such, my first magical work was a variant of the Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram. That ritual – the bastardized one, found in some forum or FTP server; not the true LBRP – remains fundamental to my magical practice.

I have owned many book son ceremonial magic over the years. Eliphas Levi’s Doctrine and Ritual of Transcendental Magic was my second occult book purchase, after the Simon Necronomicon (I was sixteen years old. I didn’t know any better.). I own Barret’s The Magus and Donald Michael Kraig’s Modern Magic. I have owned and lost or sold a half-dozen other books on the subject over the years. Most of them I never got around to reading, let alone doing.

My actual forays into ceremonialism began, interestingly, with Chaos Magic – borrowing Phill Hine’s Condensed Chaos from Chirotus Infinitum). I have recently finished reading the much-lauded Chicken Qabalah of Lon Milo DuQuette, supplemented in interesting ways by Dion Fortune’s Sea Priestess and Aleister Crowley’s Moonchild. Now, I continue with this much-belated portion of my magical training with a … somewhat less respectable source: Christopher Penczak’s Temple of High Witchcraft. I will be supplementing this with Kraig, Barret, and Levi , of course, and with several blogs recommended to me by my friend Sthenno – observant readers will have noted the addition of several blogs to my reading list over the last few moths; Head For the Red, Rune Soup, Conjure Gnosis, and My Occult Circle are among her recommendations.

Frankly, If I’d realized that ceremonial magic involved so much visionary work, I’d have probably tried it years ago.

Because it is such a cerebral form of magic, I am reading the books ahead of time and will begin Penczak’s exercises on the 15th of August – as I begin settling into my new apartment in Far Eastern Indiana and wait for the Fall semester to begin. I will journal rigorously, and will hopefully have many elucidating experiences to write about here.