Early in the days of Covid, and toward the beginning of Jack Grayle’s class on the magic of the PGM, my partner and I took advantage of an auspicious astrological moment to consecrate an assortment of Solar talismans. The ritual went well. The power rose. The spirits came. All in all, we consecrated four mixed-media paper talismans of the sort I have had great success with before, three pieces of black amber, and a citrine set in silver.
But lockdown was in full force, and would remain so for months to come. Aradia took her paper talismans to work when her office reopened. The rest of talismans languished on my altar for a full year. I experimented with a few different ways of wearing the citrine, but none of them were quite right.
The first movement happened toward the end of spring, this year, when, in need of some old-school razzle-dazzle, I settled on wearing the citrine as an earring (upsides of being a sorcerous jeweler, and being able to manufacture my own findings at a whim) as part of an overall wave of you-will-never-hear-the-details magics to keep my life together.
The next action came my best friend, Kraken, bought a house in May: my familiar spirits informed me that one of the enchanted amber pieces was for them. That was easy. I don’t know what, if anything, they’ve done with it. But feedback is a courtesy, not a requirement, when you give someone a magical gift.
Things escalated shortly thereafter. The talisman, when not in my ear, began clamoring for a more prominent place on altar, not with my planetary lamens and seals and talismans and maeteria, but to join my familiar spirits and receive the accompanying daily offerings and honors. This was not wholly unprecedented. My Venus talisman from the January Venus in Pisces consecration experiment made similar requests, as I alluded to in my last post on these experiments. But it still came as a bit of a surprise. Upon hearing and comprehending the request, I began searching for an appropriate idol. Unfortunately, that sort of religious statuary was an early casualty of the supply chain issues which have been escalating since the pandemic first hit and which have finally become mainstream news. Ultimately, I decided that a space on the altar was more important than an image.
That decided, I set aside extra time on a Sunday morning in June to sit with the talisman and commune with its spirit. It told me its name and helped me to draw its sigil. It now lives on the altar when not in my ear and partakes of my daily coffee offering ritual along with my other familiar spirits. Communications and negotiations are ongoing, and I hesitate to say too much, but I am already learning form this spirit.
The thing that I am prepared to say, a few months in, is that either my chaos magic and witchcraft backgrounds make my experiences with astrological talismans very different from other, more traditional ceremonial magicians, of those magicians are desperately failing to communicate what they actually mean when they talk about the care and feeding of a talisman. Because my experiences — particularly as I get further away from my very earliest experiments — is that these are not mute magical servitors whose efficacy waxes and wanes with the attention given them, but talking spirits who listen, learn, teach, and act.