Showing all posts tagged by the way i’m crazy

In scholarship, witchcraft

NY, NY: Help? What? I … Er… Fuck

Author Satyr MagosPosted on

Ask for help?  What?  I don’t need help.  I help other people.  It’s what I do, right?  I’m an endless font of support and wisdom.  Or, you know, funny stories.  Or whiskey.  Or mead.  Whatever the occasion calls for.  I’m your monster.  Er … man.  Goat.  Baphomet.  Or something.

I’m not just bad at asking for help: I’m not even very good at taking it when it’s offered.

Part of my problem right now, of course, is that there’s not really anything going on that people can help me with.  I’m a student.  No one can really help me with the work.  In terms of my personal history, I’ve actually done a pretty good job of asking for help, lately.

When it came to performing the Stele of Jeu, I turned to Jack Faust for advice on sources and those potential problems which somehow never seem to get written down.  Without his generous councelling, those experiments would almost certainly not be going as well as they are.

After wresting with the Registrar for a couple weeks getting my transfer status sorted out a little better, I spent this afternoon talking with my academic advisor, working on my three-year plan.  I really want to spend time abroad, but as a transfer student I don’t have quite as much time for that sort of thing, and the London program doesn’t fit as nicely into my academic requirements as I might like.  Also, it’s never too soon to start planning for my Senior Capstone.

I’ve been employing time-management techniques I learned from Aradia during out time together, and that’s been helping me get caught up..  I’ve been begging my local friends for assistance in the form of patience while I climb out of the hole I’ve dug for myself, falling behind in my course work.  The folks at the local pagan store have been helping me out by providing me a venue to make a little cash on the side, teaching mead-making workshops—even when I only break even, like this weekend, I at least get a concrete reminder that I am a) competent at a lot of things; and, b) already a decent teacher.

Sannafrid—and all my friends, but her in particular—has been doing her best to keep me sane, but that’s a Herculean task at the best of times.  I am not a fun person to be around when I’m stressed out.  Just ask anyone who knew me in St.Louis.  Especially the ones who don’t talk to me anymore.

So we come full circle.  I’m not very good at asking for help, and I’m pretty damn graceless when it comes to taking it as offered.  I’ve been doing better, lately, but unfortunately my problems are largely things that no one can help me with.

Except the gods.  But in the highly ritualized headspace created by my ceremonial studies, I’m not sure how to ask them for help.  I’m still working on phrasing sigils and enchantments.  Any of you folks out there have suggestions for time-management magic?  Charming the shit out of obnoxious professors?  Battering the bureaucracy of the Registrar’s office into submission? Oh, hey.  There’s me being good: asking for help some more.

And fuck it: I’m a witch, I could just try asking nicely; start with some devotional images as a bribe.  (And, fuck, I should probably try out some of my own damn self-care rituals while I’m at it.)

In art, scholarship, witchcraft

Areas of Expertise

Author Satyr MagosPosted on

It seems like I’m writing a lot of “inspired by” posts lately, but there’s just been so much awesome in the air that it just makes me want to participate.  Alison Leigh Lilly and John Becket have been discussing the need for us each to specialize somewhat, rather than to be Experts in All Things Pagan.  Having once, myself, wanted desperately to be such an EiATP, I am more than sympathetic.  Mr. Becket has outlined a variety of disciplines that he thinks people might divide themselves between.  Inevitably, I feel the need to place myself within it.

Mystics. These are the people who are walking between the worlds: the shamans and hedgewitches. They experience gods, spirits and the Otherworld directly, and some of those experiences are as real to them as your experience of today’s lunch.

This is very much the primary direction my practice has been taking over the last several years.  As strange as things have been getting, I know that I am only beginning to push the far edge of “Novice”.  I have a long way to go on this road before I’m ready to get off, and things are only going to get stranger.  Of all my callings, this is one of the strongest.

Magicians. From the high magic ceremonialists to the low magic kitchen witches, these people are all about causing change in conformance with Will.

Readers of this blog know that, having neglected it for much of my life, this is where the majority of my efforts are currently focused.  I will not be one of the great magicians of my generation, but it it my hope to someday be much better than I am.  And I hope that my experiments will be informative and inspirational to others.

Environmentalists. Whether they see the Earth as a living being or simply as the only planet we’ve got, these people emphasize living sustainably and with deep concern and respect for other creatures and ecosystems.

While these issues are deeply important to me, the fact is that they take a back seat to almost everything else.  Although I will strive to live ever-more sustainably throughout my, and recognize the intersectionality of environmental issues, an absolute dedication to environmentalism requires more sacrifice than I can currently afford.

Advocates for Justice. The political Pagans, questing for the rights of religious minorities and for an end to exploitation of the environment and of the poor.

Like environmentalism, this is a hugely important issue that I simply can’t make enough time for.  Unlike environmentalism, I’m trying a lot harder.  My social justice work, so far, consists largely of striving to live a publicly feminist and sex-positive life, and calling out people on issues when I see them.  This is insufficient.  I want to start volunteering with the local Planned Parenthood, and the campus sexual violence and queer organizations.

Artists. Writers, poets, musicians, dancers, painters, film makers, sculptors, liturgists, costume designers and all the people who articulate Pagan concepts and practices and who make them beautiful.

The conection between art and magic is something that I have dabbled in my whole life, but only recently begun to explore seriously.  Devotional images, masks, talismans and tools, even a bit of poetry (people who know me will laugh at this; I hate poetry, and I’m terrible at it).  Tattoo art, sigils, tarot decks, visual meditations.

I’ve been drawing since I was a child.  It is inevitable that would eventually find a way into my magic.

Culturists. Historians, anthropologists, folklorists, linguists and others who study what our pagan ancestors believed and did. Some attempt to re-create or re-imagine ancient practices, while others simply try to understand our ancestors so we can better honor them.

I am currently attending college to study History and Classical Greek.  I have long said that the neo-Pagan movement needs better scholarship.  Happily, we have been getting better scholarship, particularly in the last decade or so, particularly in the reconstructionist quarters, but not limited to that.  I intend to be part of that trend: to help reconnect the neoPagan movement to the Graeco-Roman tradition it so often invokes by advancing the field of scholarship in the mystery cults and providing translations and adaptations that are both accurate and relevant to modern Paganism.

Priests. Priests and priestesses serve their gods and goddesses and they serve their religious communities. They are the glue that holds covens, groves and other groups together. They do the planning, organizing and leading of our seasonal celebrations and other rites.

Some day I hope to build a temple.  Until then, I will do what I can to aid other priests.

Theologians and Philosophers. (added on prompting from Alison Lilly) The people who study our beliefs and practices and organize them into a rational framework that helps us understand and explain our experiences.

As much as it fascinates me, this is not really my work.  I don’t have the mindset for formal logic, nor the patience to write apologia for an unsympathetic world.  Instead, I will provide the primary sources for those theologians and philosophers to contemplate and cite: “Here’s the crazy shit I did.  It was awesome; I’m’a gonna go do it again.  Someone else make sense of it.”

That’s an awful lot of areas of expertise for me to try to lay claim to.  Life will probably whittle me down a bit further.  But no one achieves greatness without trying for something more.  Fame happens by accident, but not greatness.

In art

The Room

Author Satyr MagosPosted on

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

Author Satyr MagosPosted on

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 Uncategorized

Introduction

Author Satyr MagosPosted on


Hello.

My name is _______. I have been a practitioner of magic and a member of the neo-Pagan community since I was sixteen years old; astronomical Samhain marked my twenty-ninth birthday. I have identified as a witch, specifically, for about three years now, during which time (between moving from St. Louis to Kansas City, starting a new job, attending college for the first time ever, and getting involved in a romantic relationship that is quickly approaching the one-year mark) I have been rediscovering the basics. I am looking for ways in which to give back to the community that has sheltered me for almost half my life.

I am a bisexual hedonist witch. I am a writer of fiction and a student of history – and, as such, I would like to see both better prose and better scholarship coming out of the neo-Pagan world. I am a jeweler and craftsman, and I believe that this makes me a better witch that I would otherwise be: that fire, metal, clay, and the blank page have taught me Mysteries that can be learned no other way. I have been involved with working groups for most of the last decade – most notably the WPA, now the KU Cauldron, as well as several smaller, private groups but I have always been a solitary practitioner. (Although, recently, my working group started has asking, “Have we turned into a coven?”) Out at Heartland Pagan Festival, I am known as “that guy who hangs out with Camp Taco and the Big Damn Heroes” and “that guy who always carries around a bottle of massage oil”.

Drawing on my research into and growing experience with Wiccan ritual and neo-shamanic practice, I am developing a Tradition of my own: the Obsidian Dream, named after the Void that has been my experience of the astral and inner planes. Dionysus and Hephaestus are my patron gods; I am still searching for my goddesses.

If you follow beyond this, my introduction post (Yes, the introduction post! That inteweb font of self-aggrandizement and self-mutilation!), this weblog will be a place for me to explore and share my experiences and musings, exercises and rituals, hopefully to the benefit and amusement of those who stumble across it. The primary focus will be just what the subtitle says: jewelry, hedonism, and witchcraft. But, because these things also fascinate me, there will also be some politics, history, feminism, and good, old fashioned, sex, drugs, and rock&roll. As such, while this will never become an “adult blog”, there will certainly be some discussions that are not for the immature.

Welcome, then, to this space. Thank you for joining me on my journey.