Showing all posts tagged by the way i’m crazy

In witchcraft

Gnosis or Delusion (My Persistent Fear)

Author Satyr MagosPosted on Leave a comment

I have practiced magic for nearly three decades. I have been pouring out daily libations and burning offerings for my small, eccentric pantheon and my spirit court for four and a half years, now. I have been writing publicly about my rites and the experiences they have engendered since 2010. I am, at this point, a professional mystic as much as an artist of any stripe. I should be elated that when I sit in silence before my altar, sometimes I have visions.

But the thing that I have always feared most in life – more than pain, more than death, more than humiliation and betrayal – is being locked away in an asylum. (People keep telling me that’s a thing that doesn’t happen anymore. Somehow, that doesn’t help.) And so every vision I have, every divine epiphany, every moment of clairsentience, is followed immediately by fear and doubt.

Is it so strange that, after years of prayers and offerings – to say nothing of more vigorous invocations – the gods or their messengers might appear to me? Is it less mad to claim I was comforted by a messenger of Aphrodite than the goddess, herself? Why do those epiphanies seem more suspect than the spirit journeys that I used to write about regularly? Why are they harder to talk about than the visions of the cosmos I have been granted?

Some of it, I think, is the changing world. It’s a more hostile place, now, than when I started this blog. Some of it is just that I’m older, now, and more deeply wounded.

Grifters and con artists abound. I know, now, as I did not, ten and fifteen years ago, that many of the people claiming to be mystics and magicians and visionaries are liars and thieves. I know, now, how sincere seekers can be subjugated by cult leaders and other abusers.

Worse, I have seen magicians that I admired, whose work I have benefited from, whose work has become foundational to my own, crawl up their own asses to die. I have seen good teachers fall prey to prosperity gospels and other unjust theologies. I have seen others turn to fascism and white supremacy. I have seen friends and colleagues lose confidence in their works, doubt their insights, and retreat into mundane diversions and, ultimately, disappear from the public sphere. I have seen peers become convinced that the salvation of the world is their responsibility, alone; that the taboos and strictures the spirit world has applied to them must be obeyed by all. I have seen countless members of my community fall victim to conspiracy theories and taken in by cults. Any of them could have been me. It could still be me.

How do you discern between gnosis and hubris and delusion? How do you know which visions to share, and which are for you alone? More pointedly, how do I discern? How do I know?

I know, at least, that I am reporting my visions in good faith. I am not trying to start a cult, or grift anyone out of their life savings. All I want is to share what I’ve seen and done with my peers, to encourage them to share their own works and visions, that we can all benefit. (And, sure, sell some jewelry and some novels, but on the basis of their artistic merits not my spiritual authority.) But all anyone else has is my word.

I also know, as much as I seem to overshare, how very much I hold back. I have had experiences that made me doubt whether “reality” is even a thing that exists. I have had experiences that leave me shaking in fear that I have devoted the last thirty years to wallowing in my own madness, that I should be locked up for my own good and for the good of society.

I have seen and done things that cannot be explained by anything I’ve read, that fly in the face of the conclusions I’ve drawn from my other experiences. I have done things that people more experienced and respected than I am assure everyone are impossible. Conversely, things that should have worked didn’t. Magic works in practice, not in theory.

Some days, some years, I can sit comfortably with those dissonances.

Some days, some years, I can’t.

How much of what I have seen is real? How much is the product of madness, of drugs, of cruel trickster spirits and mortal charlatans? How much of what I’ve said is true? How much is the best approximation I can manage, an artist’s sincere attempt to convey the ineffable? How much is the rambling of a madman?

If I don’t know, how can you?

—–

I began writing this in September of 2023, after a particularly intense visionary experience in a season of intense visionary experiences, possibly the high point of my magical and mystical career to date. No more than a month later, I was plummeting into one of the deepest depressions that I can remember, lasting well into 2024.

I finished writing this in April of 2025, on the far side of that depression, following a wildly different series of visionary experiences. These more recent visions have been, on the one hand, much less intense than anything from the summer and fall of ’23; on the other hand, they have been significantly more actionable.

The question of “did i just imagine all of this” has haunted me from the very beginning, even as a teenage dabbler in the 1990s. Although there are days, weeks, even months where it weighs less heavily than others, I suspect that question will haunt me forever. As uncomfortable as that often is, I don’t know that it’s a wholly bad thing. Self-doubt can cripple us, yes, but it can also keep us honest.

The questions of what to share, and how, and when, will dog my steps for as long as I am participating in public Paganism. That won’t be forever: some day I’ll die or retire. In the meantime, though, I would rather grapple with these issues semi-publicly rather than present myself as some sort of infallible expert.

I am an artist, not an authority.

All things wax and wane. My madness and my magic are no exceptions. Lately, rather than the rise and the fall, I’ve been thinking on the turning points; the apex and the nadir. My practice and I, I think, are on the rise right now. That will not last forever. What was it about the autumn of 2023 that led me to crash out so hard? What was it about the last year that has made staying in the work despite that fall so much easier than some falls before?

I still have my doubts, my fears, my wounds. And yet, I persist. And, for the foreseeable future, I will continue to do so.

If I were writing a different article/essay/blog post/whatever, this would be the part where I tell you how you, too, can recover from depression and burnout; how you can overcome and confront your fears; how you can defeat the Dweller on the Threshold. I have no such wisdom in me, today. I know only that I have stumbled and carried on. You have, too, at some point. We will both do so again.

Finally, though the through line may not be clear to everyone, this post is very much of a piece with this one from last May.

In witchcraft

Ambivalent Theism: The Mystic Urge to Find God and Punch Him in the Dick

Author Satyr MagosPosted on

At forty-three years of age and art-making, after twenty-seven years of magic and mysticism, I can say for certain that two things are true: much of what we call our “selves” and “personalities” are, in fact, behaviors and habits that can be changed with sufficient effort; and, also, there are parts of ourselves that are innate, the products of fate or consequence, which we cannot change, no matter how we might wish. I have changed and grown a great deal over the course of my life, the (mostly positive) results of a life committed to doing better, to being better, to more positive outcomes. I have done so in ways that others have found enviable … and also terrifying and hateful. At the same time, there are parts of myself that, no matter how badly I or those around me might wish I could change, that seem fixed, utterly immutable.

For as long as I can remember, I have sought out mystic experiences and Mystery, both through sacred connections with the people in my life, and through my magical practices. I began my earliest research at the age of thirteen, and began practicing magic at the age of sixteen. From that day forward, I have had few friends who weren’t fellow travelers on this path, and those who did not share my proclivities had to be prepared to hear about those experiences.

At the same time, many of my earliest memories are of teenage and pre-teen efforts to reconcile the exoteric practices and theologies of late Satanic Panic Middle American Christianity with the actual text of the Bible (inasmuch as even a precocious child could actually understand that book). The clear rules the Bible presented, and the punishments promised for the breaking of those rules, and the clear lack of punishment for the wicked in the modern world, made one thing abundantly clear to my ten- or twelve-year-old self: the God of the Bible was a bully who enforced rules as he saw fit, just like the bullies in my life and the authorities who enabled them. When, a few years later, I learned that other gods existed, it was implicitly obvious to me that they were of the same moral fiber.

In the thirty years since, despite my best efforts, I have been utterly unable to shake that bone-deep conviction.

I say “despite my best efforts”, because I have, in fact, attempted to change that. In the beginning, I tried to believe in and pray to a generic eclectic Wiccan goddess that I could never quite feel or fully believe in, but I could never get past the pervasive (and not particularly theologically sophisticated) “all gods are the God; all goddesses are the Goddess” monism of late-1990s and early 2000s Paganism. Later, in my middle and late twenties, I renewed my efforts to find gods worthy of worship; I couldn’t get past all the rape and warmongering in the mythologies I could get my hands on. My earliest visionary journeys included trips to the upper worlds where I encountered gods that I had tried to worship, with decidedly mixed results.

A more rational person, perhaps, would have given up the pursuit of magic and mysticism years ago. But that just doesn’t seem to be who I am as a person. My earliest magical experiments (besides an obsessive teenage preoccupation with wards, shielding, and other magical protections) were in astral projection and trying to develop my psychic senses. Those experiments ultimately led me to “shamanic” visionary work and to my conjuration experiments and to the trance possession experiments I just wrote about. I wanted to see the parts of the world I couldn’t see. I wanted to experience the larger cosmos. I wanted to communicate with the spirits that I could see and feel but not hear.

I still want all those things.

And so I have persisted.

Rites and rituals and research, escalating experiments both solitary and with my Lunar Shenanigans crew.

I have said before, and I will say again, that the one god with whom I have anything like a “religious” relationship is Dionysus. That one god has answered my prayers with ecstasy and insight. That one god has shown up in my visions consistently, meaningfully, and helpfully. That one god I love in spite of all the other assholes who worship him.

I accidentally started a Hekate cult. The crew has never shared my ambivalence toward divinity, and Hekate just … kept being the right number call for any given Esbat. One ritual led to another led to another led to another until I decided it just seemed polite to buy an idol for our rites. Then came the Hekataeon. Hekate is the one god who gets her own altar in our house, not shared with anyone.

For two, maybe three years, I poured out daily offerings to Baphomet, Aphrodite, Eros, Lucifer, Dionysos, and Hekate. Over the last two summers, I have had intense visionary experiences at my morning prayers: potent divine visitations that left me shaking and crying. I had experiences that I can’t even tell my closest conspirators about, because it’s “monks locked in a tower with nothing but ergot rye bread” levels of crazy. I experimented with deity possession, opening my mind and my body to be ridden by Hekate, Baphomet, and Eros Protogonos, and receiving visions from other deities as my co-conspirators took their own turns in the hot seat.

And then, somehow, it all came crashing down.

In retrospect, I can identify some of the factors that led to my collapse.

Last summer, at the height of certain workings, I learned that a spiritual teacher whose work I had based a great deal of my practice on had stalked a friend-of-a-friend back to her hotel room. On the one hand, what the fuck to I expect of straight white men in positions of authority? Real talk: exactly that; I had been waiting for him to fail in pretty much exactly that way. On the other hand, it hurt me much more than I expected to be proven right, and while I went on and published all the writing I had already queued up, I have not been able to continue that work, and that knowledge has … fundamentally undermined my relationship with the goddess in question.

My failure to make myself a vessel during what proved to be the last meeting of the Possession Club was … deeply hurtful to me. In addition to the obvious and, I think, understandable disappointment, it also hit me in my pride and my self-confidence.

The October eclipse fucked me up good. It amplified everything else that was going on inside and around me. In a very real sense, things didn’t start turning around until the second half of the eclipse-pair hit in April.

Also in October, I got chased out of a local pagan meetup. I thought it was going to be a good group because it was run by two trans men. I honestly thought I was making friends. But it turned out that the group was half Nokean Heathens who expected everyone to just know without being told that speaking Loki’s name aloud was taboo and were not prepared to have that taboo questioned. They were also not prepared to hear any criticism white ancestor worship.

All that, combined with more mundane difficulties in my social circles, the soul-crushing effort of self-promotion on modern social media, my second round of Covid, the ever-rising prevalence of Christofascism and the horrors that the US government is facilitating around the world, and the worst depression of my adult life …

I feel like I have lost all the progress that I have made over the last ten years.

I am back in a place where, despite the mystic impulse that has followed me for literally longer than I can remember, I am blindingly blisteringly angry at the gods and anyone who loves them. That anger is obsessive. It keeps me from my work during the day and keeps me from sleeping at night. It interferes with my ability to do magic, to exist in magical communities.

It took me nearly twenty years, from my first offerings to Dionysus, Hephaestus, and Apollo, back in 2007, through visionary journeys and ecstatic rituals and trance possession, to get to my apotheotic experiences of the summer of 2023. To find myself here, feeling like I’m back where I started, hurts more than I have words for. So now I’m in a place both where I feel like I need to write about it … and can’t write about it.

Part of the problem, is that I don’t know how to talk about the gods and my struggles with them without insulting and alienating my friends and followers who sincerely love them. I feel like even alluding to the anger and alienation I’m feeling is a threat to those relationships. Expounding on those feelings in any detail? Almost impossible.

Part of the problem is that the only way I have ever figured out to do the work I want to do is to just … put that anger and distrust out of mind, and hope that the ecstasy of magic and apotheosis will magically make it go away. Clearly, fucking clearly, that hasn’t happened. Which only reinforces my deep-seated suspicion that antitheism is not just a thing I learned very early in life, but an intrinsic part of who I am as a person, every bit as much as my art.

So here I am.

Hurt. Angry. Afraid. Fighting to reconcile two parts of my nature: the inescapable desire to do magic, to experience Mystery, to seek the gods; and a bone-deep suspicion that the gods are corrupt authorities who should face the gallows alongside their mortal counterparts. I have jokingly described this conflict as a fundamental urge to find God and punch Him in the dick.

Honestly, I don’t know that I’ll ever really be able to fully reconcile those two natures. It’s possible that I don’t even need to. It’s possible that what I really need to wrestle with is the blinding, murderous rage that rises when those two parts of my nature come into friction.

I do know that this will not be the last time I talk about my deep, painful ambivalence towards the gods. And I know that, the deeper I dig into this, the more likely I will be to offend or even hurt my friends and other readers. I promise is that I am doing my best to approach this in good faith, to work my way through this pain without lashing out. I apologize for any pain I cause to you while I work through my own.

In witchcraft

Working the Hekataeon: A Cacaphony of Gods

Author Satyr MagosPosted on

There are seven gods who receive daily offerings in my house. (Though I only speak of six with any regularity, there is also the Serpent Faced God of PGM XII 153-60.) As I have said before, I have no impulse toward exclusive worship – not henotheism, not monotheism, not even monism – so I had no notion of suspending those offerings when I sat down to resume the work of the Hekataeon. But it had been my intention to devote my active attention to Hekate alone. The gods, it seemed, had other plans.

In retrospect, this should not have come as a surprise.

Over the last two years, in particular, there have been times when my morning rituals have evoked intense visionary experiences. The visions that resulted in the triptych images of Baphomet, and the vision of Lucifer as the Dweller on the Threshold, were the most significant that I ever felt comfortable relating publicly. They were not, by any means, the most intense. I could feel the hands of the gods upon me, see their faces before my eyes, smell their headdy, uncanny musk.

But it seemed that I never had more than two or three visions of one god before other gods began appearing, as well. Already struggling to deal with the implications of the first visions, the addition of other powers to that mix was inevitably more than I could handle. I retreated from the experiences, and all the gods fell silent.

My friends who were raised with more religion than I was laugh at me when I wonder aloud if having been raised in a different environment would have better prepared me for these experiences. But I think they underestimate how alienated my upbringing was from divinity. In the same way I was raised vaguely aware that queer people existed, but with a strong implication that they were all far away and that I would never meet one, I was raised in a place where religion was just a social control mechanism, where people of strong convictions and intense experiences were alien and threatening. As a child, they were snake-handlers and madmen on television; as a teen, they were still that, and they were also Pat Robertson and the 700 Club: people who wanted me dead for being effeminate, for playing D&D, and for dabbling in witchcraft.

My earliest epiphanies were always of singular divinities, always months apart. They were also largely spontaneous: the presence of a god intruding on what had been intended to be some other sort of mystical experience. One of the earliest such was Rhea/Kybele appearing to demand I bring my then-friend Pasiphae to her. (I still wonder, sometimes, if that contact ever happened, or if Pasiphae’s commitment to a faceless generic Goddess was impenetrable to the real divine.)

Now, working my way through the first and then the second nine days of the Hekataeon, I am once more blessed/plagued by a cacophony of divinity. Baphomet shows me new faces every two or three days, revealing how the trinity/triptych aspects I have been shown unfold into seven (and nine) planetary epiphanies. Their Lunar aspect has much in common with the White Lady, and Saturnian Baphomet shares much with The Man in Black. Their Solar manifestation is Akephelos (Headless), and caries the Light of Creation, Phanes, like Eros. I have glimpsed their Martial aspect, bull-headed, armed and armored, which I so far call Korebantes, and that bull-headed vision gave way to another: a starry, mystical, Neptunian which I have (for lack of a better name so far) dubbed Asterion.

Aphrodite has blessed the photoshoot I did in her honor. Eros and Lucifer and Dionysos all loom large at their altars. My familiar spirits have begun speaking again on the regular, giving me practical advice for how to achieve my goals.

On days three and four and five and six of The Call, this was … unsettling. Distracting. Dissonant.

But, speaking with my compatriots at our regular New Moon Esbat, as we had all concluded our first round of The Call, those with more experience than I with the gods assured me that this was common. So, too, have a handful of people around the internet when I spoke of this problem. “Problem.”

So, even as I find the experience unsettling, I am reassured. As alien as this experience is to my upbringing and my expectations, it appears to be … typical. (As hurtful as that word is to us mystics and madmen.)

And so, as uncomfortable as it is, and as hard as it makes things from one day to the next, I am going to try to sit with that discomfort. To try to find the symphony in the cacophony.

After all, am I not a mystic? Am I not here for gnosis of the gods and the cosmos? Did I not tell Hekate, herself, that I am here to see where the road will take me? Did I not seek out each of these gods, too, even as I have sought out Hekate? Did I not seek out some of them – Dionysos, Baphomet – even before her?

This is the work. This is what I have come here to do. I have taken the names that I have taken. Each day I repeat them, both assertion and demand: I am [That Seer of Antiquity], I am [The Satyr Who Is a Magician], I am [The Sacred Companion]. I will live up to those ambitions. I will live up to those expectations.

When the gods speak, I will strive to listen.

If you want to get my posts a week before everyone else, to see the magical experiments that I don’t share with the public, to get first dibs on my elected talismans and fine art jewelry, or just want to support my work, you can do so through patreon. If you’d like to make a one-time donation, or don’t want to deal with all the non-occult content I post on patreon, I also have a ko-fi.

In art, scholarship, witchcraft

Triangles of the Art: An Idiosyncratic Journey

Author Satyr MagosPosted on

Discussing tools and techniques in the Hermetic House of Life discord server this month, I’ve been reminded of how much of my work these days – especially the public-facing stuff – is rooted in the art of Drawing Spirits Into Crystals (DSIC). In discussing various elements of my practice, I have discovered that I did not leave as clear a trail in my blog as I had thought. Perhaps I was – for once – “Keeping Silent”. Or perhaps what seemed relevant at the time just isn’t what I want to share in retrospect. Either way, now seems as good a time as any to look back on my journey.

The first books I turned to in my study of the Western ceremonial tradition – these were the days of the great Ceremonial Experiment, as I called it – were guided first by Christoper Penczak and then by Donald Michael Craig. Although I have previously praised Penczak’s Temple of Witchcraft series, when he came to volume 4, Temple of High Magic, he dropped the fucking ball. And, to the chagrin of many in the community, I found DM Craig’s Modern Magic to be equally useless. So I turned to the internet. And on some random ass demonolator’s website, I found clear instructions for a barebones summoning circle.

The design I produced therefrom was simple: a triangle in a circle. The sigil of the spirit to be summoned went in the middle. Around the triangle (and, in my case, around the circle) went the statement of intent in clear script. And, falling back on my eclectic neo-Pagan witchcraft background and some vague notions of what a magic circle should look like, I wrote the names of four elementally-aligned gods, and seals and sigils associated with the moon … because that felt right.

For that first conjuration, I summoned my natal genius. I calculated her name using Agrippa’s formula via Frater Acher’s spreadsheet. (Reverend Erik of Arnemancy fame now hosts a widget that is much easier to use.) I derived her sigil using the Rosy Cross. And I wrote out my statement of intent to know her. My records of the ritual, back in 2012 or so, are unfortunately even more vague than my memories, but I got what I needed out of the ritual: confirmation of the name and sigil, a vision of the spirit, and some notes as to her nature. (You can read my original blog post about it here.) I wasn’t entirely satisfied (though, in retrospect, it went great), so I tried again, to similarly frustrating (but in retrospect phenomenal) results. Dissatisfied as I was, it was some months later before I followed the experiment through and attempted to contact my “evil demon” using that same circle, only this time under the auspices of Solar powers.

Shortly after these experiments, I consecrated my first astrological talisman using an election, ritual, and image provided by Christopher Warnock on his yahoo group, as he was in the habit of doing in those days. My notes don’t say what if any triangle I used for that conjuration, or for the Venus and Sun elections that I remember hitting that spring and summer, but I know that I had been exposed to more conventional circles by the time I began the Spirits of Spirits experiments, and used a synthesis of the two (I know that Aradia and I also conjured the spirits of wormwood and Jack Daniels, but right now I can only find a write up for the initial cannabis experiment.

The idea behind the above synthesis was a cosmogram: planetary powers in the outer circle, elemental powers within. I had not yet twigged to the fact that the four angel names were sanitized replacements for demon names from older grimoires, rulers of the four quarters of the world. Based on my background in eclectic Wicca, I thought they were elementally aligned, and placed gods I was comfortable with instead of angels in those quarters: Iris for air, Hephaistos for fire, Dionysos for water, and Rhea for earth. Though my logic was flawed, it worked well enough at the time.

My notes don’t specifically say, but I think that I was still using that circle when Rufus Opus was running his Seven Spheres in Seven Days events in October/November of 2012. Looking back at my notes, it’s no wonder the planetary magic took over my life the way it did. The call was strong. At the end of my first seven days, the powers of Saturn taught me how to better hijack the current of the project, even though I didn’t have access to the full Gates Rites. At the end of my second round of daily conjurations, the powers of Saturn taught me the triangle of conjuration that became the basis for my planetary work going forward. (And at the end of my third consecutive week of planetary conjurations, I fell flat on my face.)

In the center goes my crystal ball, and/or the glyph of any particular spirit I may be calling under the auspices of those greater planetary powers.

I have been using this double-triangle to ever-increasingly potent effect for just short of ten years now. I have transcribed it into my personal grimoire, once for each planetary section, where it sits beside the relevant lamen and Orphic hymn. Unfortunately, the pages don’t quite sit flat enough to use it as intended, so often what I end up doing is standing the book up and setting the candles and brazier in front of the triangle, but I’ve found that always works just as well, and is almost as aesthetically pleasing. Sometimes corner 5 gets a brazier with incense instead of a candle. And, as you can see, a couple other small details morphed over time.

In the years since, I’ve also developed another variation on the traditional circle, mostly for the purposes of art, but which I have used a few times to good effect, and which I would recommend as an option for someone looking for somethign mostly traditional but a little more glam. The out ring is still the Agrippan planetary characters, which I think are just neat, but the angel and god names in the outer ring have been replaced by seals of the four archangels. I use this circle in my official Mundus Occultus branding, so it is absolutely not available for commercial use, but if you want to print it out and call a spirit into it, that’s what it’s here for. Just shoot me an email to tell me how it works out for you.

Writing this post has taken me weeks longer than I originally anticipated, in part because I had to re-read as many of my old notes as I could find, and partly because I had to re-scan and re-censor several of the above images, and mostly because the last six weeks have been just absolutely bonkers.

I’m glad I finally got through it, though. Looking back over that wild year’s work, thinking on how it has shapped my current work, has been pretty educational. In retrospect, I could have asked for a lot more help during those early conjuration experiments. My excuse is that no one I felt comfortable asking for help had fucked with this kind of work, as far as I knew, but also in retrospect, there were absolutely people who could have at least pointed me in clearer directions. Also, somehow, in my memory, many of these events had shifted from late 2012 to early 2014. Why do I remember the conjuration-induced migraine as happening the week of my college graduation?

I’m also glad to finally have this done because it’s reaffirmed my dedication to my chief point of advice for those looking to start or escalate their magical practice: go forth, fuck around, and find out. The information I needed to do these things more traditionally was hidden behind the paywalls of the few people teaching classes on the subject, and the even more insurmountable barrier of 19th century translations so terrible that even as an in-the-weeds Classical Studies student, I couldn’t fucking hack it. But now, people who know more than I did then but less than they’d like to know before they start can look at this and say, “fuck it, if that lunatic can have results that good with that bullshit, anything I do will work great!”.

So make the tools you want to make. Sing the songs you want to sing. Call the spirits down from the heavens and up from the depths of hell. Do it all with style and audacity. Go forth. Fuck around. Find out.

If you want to get my posts a week before everyone else, to see the magical experiments that I don’t share with the public, to get first dibs on my elected talismans and fine art jewelry, or just want to support my work, you can do so through patreon. If you’d like to make a one-time donation, or don’t want to deal with all the non-occult content I post on patreon, I also have a ko-fi.

In art, witchcraft

Vision of Lucifer

Author Satyr MagosPosted on

I first heard the Luciferian call something like ten years ago, now. It came, perhaps oddly, the same year that I began conjuring archangels as a part of the Ceremonial Experiment. I was still, in a very real sense, new to working with gods of any kind, and god-like powers at that scale. And I was still the product of my youth in the tail end of the Satanic Panic: I had spend the first five, maybe ten, of my practice trying to convince onlookers that we were not Satanists, that most witches don’t even believe in the Devil. So, though the metaphorical phone kept ringing, I refused to answer.

The call kept coming. Little signs. Songs. Visions. And I kept putting it off. Putting him off.

I don’t remember exactly when I changed my mind and decided to answer the call. I think it was a craft night with the coven. I was making a mask and it … went in a direction. And I figured that was as good a place to start as any. And I recommitted to the work in Beltane of 2019, when I made a star talisman in Luciferian colors during another Lunar Shenanigans craft extravaganza. I put those tokens on a shelf in the spare room where I kept my personal altar, but it didn’t really go any further than that.

The work really only started in the fall of 2020, when the daily offerings to my familiar spirits escalated into daily offerings for the gods who shared the space of my altar room. From there it was slow escalations.

The visions began early this year, when I quit my day job to pursue art and magic full time. I was going around the altars, each day asking one of the gods in that room to initiate me into their mysteries. And I had put Lucifer off for so long that, at first, he refused. Since then, though, he has begun revealing aspects of himself to me.

Whether or not you believe that the being I am calling Lucifer is the Devil at odds with That One God depends a lot on how you see him.

To me he is a Promethean figure: a bringer of light and magic, a teacher of art and mysteries. He is the Peacock Angel of the Yazidis. He is Melek Taus of the Anderson Feri tradition.

He is a Gnostic power: bringing light and wisdom to mortals, kindling and sheltering their fire against the dark of the universe and the malice of the demiurge and the archons.

He has presented himself to me as the Dweller on the Threshold: the terrifying image meant to keep the weak from the mysteries. To pass him, one needs only sufficient courage.

He has presented himself to me as the Light in the Darknesss: the light-bringer, literally.

And he has presented himself to me as transmasculine, or perhaps as an androgyne opposite and equal to the full-breasted and tumescent androgyny of Baphomet.

In this image, I have done my best to evoke all of these, and to recreate the visions of Lucifer that I have seen in my morning meditations. This is a first attempt. It will not be my last.

In art, sorcerer's workbench, witchcraft

Half-born Spirit

Author Satyr MagosPosted on

Over the last decade in general, and the last three years in particular, I have been doing increasingly intense work with electional astrology and astrological images, culminating (so far) in an ever-expanding series of metal talismans cast in my home studio. But, as any of you who are in the arts in general, and jewelry in particular, know, neither art nor magic are science, and results are sometimes perfect. Casting, in particular, is a bit finnicky, and the vagaries of combining the process with spirit conjuration only complicates the process.

So far, most of the time, the issues have been minor. Some of the coin talismans had been meant to be pendants, but the bail didn’t cast correctly. In those instances, I just cut off the nubs with no harm to the metal talisman or complaint from the talismanic spirit.

In most cases where more intense intervention was necessary, I kept the talisman for myself and worked with the spirit to determine what was needed to achieve our mutual ends. My Mars talisman, for example, had been meant to have three jump rings, but only the bottom one cast. I made him a frame so that I could wear him as a necklace, rather than string him on prayer beads, and hung a Roman arrow head from the bottom ring.

The case of my Jupiter talismans was more extreme. One talisman had a hole in the blank space over the lion-man’s bolt, and two of his three jump rings had failed. Working with him, I tube-set an emerald in that hole and built him a silver frame so that I could string him on lapis and moonstone prayer beads. A second talisman had mis-cast more drastically, missing one of her hands and a great deal of the thinner parts of the talisman had cold-shut, leaving negative space in the background talismanic image. I thought that I was, finally, going to have to figure out a funerary process for failed talismans – but the spirit informed me, in no uncertain terms, that she wanted to live. And so I made a frame for her, as well, with “wings” that would clip into my cuff bracelet. They were not the strongest talismans I’ve made, but they’ve been growing stronger as I work with them, and they have been good and loyal familiars.

At the second of August’s Mercury in Virgo elections, however, the inevitable finally happened: one of the talismans I cast failed entirely. The problem was on the jewelry end of things: I didn’t get a good enough seal between the flask and the vacuum of the casting machine. If it hadn’t been an elected cast, I’d have had more than a few seconds to fuck with it and get a better seal. But it was and I didn’t.

The talisman was barely there, a cartoon crescent moon where there should have been a full disk. At first I thought there wasn’t even enough there to catch as spirit. As I cut it off the sprue, though, I could feel the spirit in the metal: struggling to manifest, but without enough material or image to fully enter the world – but too much to just leave on its own.

I didn’t ask its name. That seemed like an insult. I just held it in my hands and apologized. I asked what it needed. It needed the fragment to be destroyed, rendered unrecognizable as even the attempt at a talisman. That was absolutely in my power.

I took the crescent nub to my soldering block and turned on my torch. As I put fire to metal, I apologized again and reached out my psychic hands to cradle the spirit as I pulled it softly from the melting metal. I continued apologizing to the spirit, promising that it would have another chance at life in the material world when next I came to a Mercury election.

The brass burned blue as I melted it and resisted being slagged at temperatures that should have melted it readily. But the metal gave, eventually, and when it did, curling into a ball as best as brass can, the spirit came free. With a final apology, I released the spirit to return to its sphere.

Sometimes casts fail, even when there’s magic involved. I’ve been afraid of something like this happening since I started casting elected talismans for my friends back in 2020. In a sense, I’m glad that it finally happened, because now I know how to handle it, and that I can, and that – approached properly – it’s not as traumatic to either magician or spirit as I was afraid that it might be.

I’m also glad that it happened because it answered a question that has been with me since I first heard about spirit conjuration magic back in the 1990s. The spirits we call – or at least the ones that come when I throw my consecrated casts – are here because they want to be. There is something about incarnating as a talisman spirit that is appealing to them. They all want to live.

In witchcraft

Hekate: An Unexpected Devotion

Author Satyr MagosPosted on 2 Comments

This week has marked an anniversary, half-forgotten in the madness of 2018. This time last year, my working group participated in the global Rite of Her Sacred Fires. It was not the first time I had invoked Hekate, but it was the most significant up to that point.

I must emphasize “up to that point”. Hekate began to appear more frequently on our docket, culminating in a devotional Samhain ritual in which I make made myself a vessel for her so that my compatriots could approach and petition her for aid. Three months after that, Jack Grayle’s Hekataeon went live. Aradia and I dove in head first. Our copy arrived just in time for Paganicon, and we started the work as soon a we got back.

I am 38 years old. I have been practicing magic since I was 16. But I was raised with the blandest (functionally atheist) sort of Protestantism, and I did not reach out to the gods until I was 28. Excepting my easy relationship with Dionysus, I did not manage to cultivate anything resembling a devotional practice until I was 30, and that was very much rooted in the particular circumstances of the Sunrise Temple. I have had relationships with a wild variety of spirits and an eclectic assortment of gods and powers, but little of it resembled anything akin to worship. And until a year ago, Hekate was never even on my radar.

I began to work the Hekataeon at the end of March, as I was coming out of a deep depression, a descent that began early in 2017 and bottomed out last Thanksgiving. The ascent has been steep but rocky, and it is difficult to say how much of my improvement is the native cycle of my fucked up brain and how much is as a result of the work. I could not have begun the work had I not begun to feel better at the first of the year. Any daily practice would certainly have improved my life. But also, the calming and cleansing of mania is a recurring theme in the Hekataeon.

Now, a year after that first significant contact, I have participated in the Rite of Her Sacred Fires for the second time. I had just completed the twenty-seven days of devotional meditation that comprised the second section of the Hekataeon, studying the facets of Hekate, and was about to make the transition from Devotee to Adept. By the time this post goes live, I will have completed that initiation.

Jack Grayle’s vision of Hekate is Gnostic, cosmic — the beginning and end of all. As I dig in to his ancient sources, and compare them to other modern visions, I find that he is not alone in this. I wish that I were in a financial position to take Jason Miller’s Hekate Sorcery course.

I am a sorcerer. A witch. A heretic. A Gnostic. I make handshake deals and back alley bargains with spirits. I treat with gods and demons and angels as equals. I seek ecstasy. Not Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel, but rather Gnosis — knowledge of the divine power from which mortal and immortal life both spring, and which I cannot believe is a person of any kind, not even a god. I reject the capital G.

Though I have courted a few, with varying degrees of success — Apollo, Hephaestus, Aphrodite, Baphomet — Dionysus is the only god I have truly loved. I did not seek out Hekate, but rather met her through my friends. One thing led to another. And now … I have graduated from disinterested third party Reader to Devotee … and now to Adept. Degrees of priesthood follow, culminating in a binding contract that will last into future lives.

Devotion in this life I am prepared for. I do not know, however, that I am prepared to make any promises about the next.

For now, though, the road ahead of me is obscure. I do not know, precisely, what will be asked of me. The work may reject me before I am forced to reject it. Or the goddess and I may come to more complex and nuanced arrangements. Decision, after all, is her sacrament.

Until then, it seems, I am Devoted. Very much to my own surprise.

In Uncategorized

Another Year in Review

Author Satyr MagosPosted on

This year sucked.

I mean, not all of it, obviously. I’m not dead yet. Still walking and talking. I even accomplished some really amazing and important things that, in the rear view mirror, may eventually loom larger than the sucking. But for the most part, I spent this year crashing and burning after the stress and betrayals and hurts and failures of the awful year that came before.

People better known and more clever than I have been joking for months that 2018 was absolutely no less than three years long. I deeply resonate with that. Looking back at the first two thirds of this year, I can’t even say for sure what happened when because there doesn’t seem to be enough time for that much to have happened.

For that matter, the first third of this year blurs together with the last months of 2017. There was an awful lot of suck. Frankly, I don’t even know how to get into it without being accused of rumor mongering and poo-flinging, which is a large part of my radio silence over the last year and a half. The short version is that, following my departure from the HSA in November/December of 2017, I withdrew from public participation in the KC Pagan community entirely and lost a few friends along the way. I then proceeded to bleed on everyone within anime-blood-spray distance, and things only got more unpleasant from there.

Hands down, this has been the worst year for my mental health since 2004, which I spent almost exclusively hiding in the basement of The House on Shoal Lane. It even beat out Fall Semester 2012, which featured daily panic attacks and more reasons I will never trust a mental health professional. As unpleasant as it was to be around me, it was even worse to be me.

At the same time, there were some truly amazing accomplishments.

Even as other parts of my life were burning down around my ears, I spent the first three months of 2018 putting the final polish on my debut novel, getting the typesetting just right, and ultimately putting The Mark of the Wolf in print. I am now a published author. Bucket list item checked.

At some point last winter, a friend admitted to me that he was the proud owner of an under-used farrier’s forge. Over the summer, he, Kraken, and I set about teaching ourselves blacksmithing. I won’t say that we’re experts (or even very good), but I have now made three knives (mostly; I need to get a chainmail glove before I try to put an edge on them). Bucket list item checked.

(Between those two accomplishments, I have done everything that I dreamed of as a sixth-grade satyr. My childhood vision of my life is complete.)

After a year of trying and failing to get a D&D game off the ground, I launched my first 5th Edition campaign in a brand-new homebrew setting in March. The campaign is still going strong and a bunch of people I barely (if at all) knew are now my friends. While nothing compared to the preceding or following accomplishments, this is my first campaign since I stopped gaming for college in 2011, and has been one of my chief points of stability amidst the madness.

In June, the private working group Aradia and I have been hosting passed it’s one-year mark. At Samhain we came up with a motto.

At midnight New Years, as 2018 becomes 2019, I will have been with my primary partner Aradia for ten fucking years. This is an accomplishment that I did not, could not, envision as a child. Or even as an adult. Frankly, I’m struggling to wrap my head around any one putting up with me for that long even as it’s happening.

After a year long hiatus from public ritual, Aradia, Chirotus, and I submitted an application to perform a public ritual at Paganicon 2019. We were accepted, and our Classically-inspired purification ritual is currently scheduled to go just before the opening ceremony. (No pressure.)

In retrospect, regardless of how awful 2017 was, I think that a collapse this year was both inevitable and necessary. 2018 was the first year since 2011 (when I started Real Liberal Arts College in Sunrise, Indiana) that I haven’t been burning the candle at both ends. I knew since April that what I needed was isolation. It took till July or August before I got to the point where I just stopped returning messages. I should have just told (more) people that I needed to go away for a while and just done that instead of waiting until I Just Couldn’t Anymore and ghosting. I guess we’ll see in the coming months how badly those bridges are burned.

I want to end this on some clever note, maybe something upbeat. I don’t have it in me. But here we are, on the cusp of the new year. At risk of tempting fate, I’ll just take this moment to tell 2018 to fuck right off. You didn’t kill me, you fucking fuck. To the rest of you: raise a toast tonight to your own divinity, if nothing else. Raise one to the rest of us if you have it in you. I’ll see you all on the flip side.

In Uncategorized

Life Chapter N+1

Author Satyr MagosPosted on

It is a common fallacy among writers, or so I am told, to see our own lives as a narrative arc.  I am more guilty of this than most.  I know that it is a fallacy.  I know that real life is, for better and worse, much, much stranger than fiction.  I know that mortal lives are always messier than that.  And yet … the arc of a story remains the chief frame through which I experience the world.

The last chapter of my life began when, upon graduating college, I moved back to Kansas City.  I returned to the mall jewelry store where I had spent the previous six years, off and on.  I volunteered with the organization that puts on the festival that had been the highlight of my year since 1999.  I got involved in a relationship with someone who, though the romance didn’t last, has proved one of the best friends I’ve ever had.  I buckled down and finished my first novel, and successfully ran a Kickstarter to start a publishing company to print that novel.  I started producing jewelry of my own design, mostly for myself and my closest friends, but solid work that I’m proud of.  I took up a whole new art, photography, which I grow better at each time I pick up my camera.

In December of this year, I formally resigned from all my positions and responsibilities within the festival organization.  In February, I released my novel into the world.  In March I taught one of my energy work classes at the Witches’ Meet-Up, my first class hosted outside the HSA.  All this to say, I believe that these events mark the start of a new chapter in my life.  I don’t know, precisely, what the road will look like, but it is my hope that it ends with me as a full time professional Pagan.  I’m already working in a Pagan jewelry store.  I have just released a Pagan novel.  I am building a small repertoire of workshops on magical technical skills.

In the last chapter of my life, I took on too much responsibility, too quickly, without adequately vetting the people I was working with.  In this next chapter of my life, I hope to deepen my personal practice, to deepen the relationships that survived the previous chapter, and to make more art.

Thank you everyone who’s been along for the ride.

 

In witchcraft

Light in Darkness: A Long Unanswered Call

Author Satyr MagosPosted on

The temple space was erected in my craft room: an altar flanked by couches and sitting cusions, air thick with incense, and lit only by candles.  I stand outside over a secondary altar, lighting a bundle of sage to fumigate each participant before entering.  A line is forming behind Aradia, awaiting my attentions.

I know all these people: they trust and respect me.  I began the night by returning to the Headless Rite.  I should be at the top of my game.  I am not.  Neither the fumigation nor the anointing packs the punch that it should.

At last, everyone is in the circle.  Aradia takes charge and we cast the circle hand to hand.  She has been feeling less than herself, as well, and asks the group for healing and purification.  As she takes her position in the center of the circle, all rise and reach out to offer what aid they can.

One by one, most of us take our turn in the center.  This is not my strong suit.  Somehow, despite a couple spectacular successes, I have never devoted any real time to energetic healing.  Mostly, I try to keep the energy level in the circle high, so that our less experienced participants are not draining themselves needlessly.

At some point, I, too, take my turn in the center.  I feel everyone reach out to me, feel them brush the edges of my energetic body.  I try to let them in, to do the work that needs to be done.  I can’t.

At last, all who feel the need for purification have taken their turn in the center and it is time to move on.

I put on a drum track and don my visionary mask and we all drift into trance.  Well, they do.  I go nowhere.  I cannot even find the Void or my own Inner Temple.  I drift, aimlessly, trapped in my own head.   Finally the beat shifts, signaling the end of the track.  I take off my mask and wait for everyone to return to themselves.

Now is the time for divination.  My guests pair off quickly, trading tarot readings while I sit dazed.  There is a song stuck in my head again.  It’s been there off and on for days.  This is something that almost never happens to me, but it has happened like this once before.

I have to wait a while, and end up ignoring too many of my guests as I remain lost in my own head, but I finally get a reading from Odyssia – one of maybe a handful of witches I have met in the KC metro whose skills are on a whole ‘nother level than Aradia and Chirotus and myself.  The reading covered a lot of territory, but one thing stood out: in the wake of my experience over the last five years, I am without a worldview.  I have no system of reference by which to contextualize my experiences.  I need a frame.  I need a direction in which to explore.

Looking for something concrete to give me, rather than simply affirming my laundry list of questions, Odyssia pulled a new trick from her bag: a pack of note cards she is drafting for her own oracle deck.  At last, a clear image emerges.  A name.  Melek Taus.

I laugh.

The Peacock fucking Angel.

That song, you see, has been stuck in my head before.  My senior year of college, it was there for more than a solid month before I realized what it was: an offer; an invitation; a call.  From the one Power I had never, ever considered.  I grew up in the Satanic Panic, you see.  I spent the first decade of my practice defending against accusations of Devil Worship.  And now Lucifer is reaching out to me?

And yet …

The Yezidi Peacock Angel (who may or may not be Lucifer) features prominently in modern Gnosticism.  I have been flirting with Gnostic thought for more than a year.  It’s all over my art, and half my favorite writers and thinkers have been flirting with it for years.  The alien God who made everything and walked away is hard for me to embrace, and the desire to root itself in Christian heresy is not aesthetically or ethically appealing to me.  But the Archons and the Blind Idiot God who rule over the hologram of the Empire and everything that falls under its shadow … yeah. I can see that in the world.

Melek Taus, I learned that night, also features prominently in the Feri tradition, which I have looked into on more than one occasion.  Just to make things interesting.  Because I need another source of queer art and power.  (Actually, yes, I really fucking do.)

So here we go.  Down the rabbit hole I’ve been dodging since 2014.  I wanted a direction.  Now I have it.

I’m giving in to the Luciferian Gnostic urge.  I will write my own gospel and live my own myth.

Let’s wage war against the world.  Awaken the sleepers.  Fistfight heavenly powers.  Engage in cosmological terrorism.  Set ourselves ablaze and be lights in the darkness.

I’m in it to win it.  Who’s with me?