Showing all posts tagged Familiar spirit

In witchcraft

Order of Offerings: Spirits Before Gods

Author Satyr MagosPosted on

Last August I started a magical experiment that technically failed but which became the first thirty days of a now-fifteen month streak of daily ritual praxis that is, without question, my longest uninterrupted run. The experiment was aimed at manifesting concrete desires and measurable results. The first thing my familiar spirits told me( a week or so into that experiment) was, “Make this about us.” I did. the next thing they told me was, “We’re not going to manifest anything you don’t actually want.” Which was, arguably, the end of my career as a chaos magician, and absolutely the doom-bell for that manifestation experiment.

My familiar spirits had a lot to say at first. They helped me craft a ritual that suited their needs as well as mine. Sometimes, what they wanted was very clear and easy to do. Other times, I could tell what they wanted but had to explain that things like “I’m not that rich” were relevant. Still other times I could tell that they were talking to me, that they wanted something, but I either just couldn’t hear them or just couldn’t quite make sense of what they said.

But the daily ritual continued. I listened a lot. Asked for little (have occasionally been told to ask for more!). And I have learned so, so much – not least of which is how to hear these spirits, something that has always been a challenge for me.

The longer the ritual goes on, the less frequently I get new instructions. The most recent change to my rituals is one of the more significant. It also was one that took them longer than average to communicate to me, because it was a matter of order of operations.

When the ritual began, it was just my familiar spirits. But the spare bedroom where that altar lives is also where I house the altar for the sex-positive (quais-) Venusian gods that I honor. And after a few months of pouring out offerings while the other gods just ~watched~, it seemed appropriate to begin daily offerings to Aphrodite, Eros, Lucifer, Dionysos, and Baphomet, as well. And because of my quasi-Hellenistic influences and the nature of ~authority~, it seemed to be appropriate to make offerings to the gods first, then my familiar

the last month or so, it became clear that this was not the correct order of operations. But, being dense, I couldn’t figure out what the needed changes were. Fortunately, when clarity came, it came with an explanation: let us share in the blessings.

I now invoke my familiar spirits first, pouring their coffees and lighting their candles, and give them a moment to manifest before moving on to praying for the various blessings of the gods. And, when I utter those prayers, I pray for *us*: “Hail unto you, O Baphomet, we pray you awaken the light of your gnostic fire within us and within the world…”Every day since I made this change, I have felt my familiars and I growing closer, and felt them growing stronger from the blessings we now share.

So, if you work with familiar spirits, and there is room in your traditions to make such a change, I strongly suggest that you give it a try: call your spirits first, before your gods, so that when you do invoke the higher/greater/other powers, your spirits may share in those powers’ blessings with you.

In witchcraft

Continuing Experiments in Stellar Sorcery: Spirit of the Sun

Author Satyr MagosPosted on

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.

In witchcraft

Playing the Vessel

Author Satyr MagosPosted on

Over the course of the last week, I have twice played meatsuit to familiar spirits.  Last Wednesday, as a part of my extended Samhain rites, I allowed my natal daemon, SKM, to ride me through the school day.  Saturday night, I followed this up by offering the same privilege to my natal genius, ZG.  Both experiences, while much less intense than I had anticipated, were equal parts surreal and informative.  I required only one thing of either of them:  that, in riding me, they not undermine any existing alliances and relationships, a restriction which neither found to be a burden that I can tell.

SKM, it turns out, is a huge fan of poetry (I am not): when I went to a performance with several friends Wednesday afternoon, he was moved to tears.  He is very formal in his language and purposeful in his movements.  When he first entered into me, it was a clear and visceral sensation—particularly odd, as I was driving at the time.  He seemed especially fascinated by the experience of having hands.

ZG, I should not have been surprised to learn, is very, very quiet.  She speaks only when there is something to be gained from it, and then in as few words as possible.  I barely noticed when she came into me, perhaps because our ways of thinking were so similar, possibly because the copious amounts of absinthe I had consumed that night (it was my birthday party) served as a sort of lubricant.

Where SKM was content to observe but willing to act, watching from a distance was ZG’s preference.  Both seem to approve of the people I surround myself with.

Tsu, my first familiar spirit, who had never expressed interest in possessing me before that I can recall, reacted jealously that ZG and SKM had had the opportunity before ze had.  So I’ll be reporting on that experience at some point in the future.

In art, witchcraft

διγενὴς ἔκστασις : Queer Spirit Journeys

Author Satyr MagosPosted on

[This post was originally written ten months ago for a queer occult Zine that, to my great disappointment, seems to have gone defunct without publishing.  The tone is more … literary, and the content a bit more intimate than most of my posts. ]

The void opens before me and the crystalline spire of the World Tree rises into infinity where there ought to be a horizon. The ground beneath my feet is an illusion for my convenience: there is nothing but the void and the Tree.

In the physical realm, I am uncomfortably male. Although I reject all the social tropes of masculinity, excepting only a few which are synonymous with being a decent human being, I am generally read as so butch that I am routinely mistaken for straight. While wearing a skirt. In a gay bar.

In the Otherworld, however, things are more complicated.

My most familiar spirit approaches me before I even reach the Tree. She is eager, and there is mischief in her eyes. Until recently, she appeared as a gorgon; now, just a woman. I ask if she has any adventures planned for me, and although she is one of the few spirits whose voice I can hear reliably, tonight she answers only by taking my hand.

Together, we walk to the World Tree. She places her hand on the shimmering facets of the bark, and slides into the pillar of crystal. I follow.

It is quite telling, in retrospect, that I have been fixated on leaving my body since I first began my study of the occult at the age of sixteen. Although I have never mastered astral projection, my success with Michael Harner’s visionary techniques, to which I was introduced by a friend a decade later, has been markedly greater. Enough so, in fact, that I began having experiences that my source materials could not help me contextualize almost immediately. I began seriously exploring and experimenting with visionary techniques in the spring of 2009. At first, as I imagine it is for many people, it was all or nothing: the trance would either elude me, or I would find myself in a mindscape which I could barely comprehend. Those first visionary experiences were frightening—some of them are, still, as I have no cultural context in which to ground them.

We descend, spiraling into darkness, and emerge at the edge of a stone circle. There is a drummer hiding in the shadows on the far side. Beautiful dancers writhe in the inconstant light of a small fire. I cannot see their faces clearly, or hear their voices over the drum.

I leap into the circle, joining the dance with abandon. Our bodies collide to the rhythm of the drum. There is nothing but the drumbeat and the heat of the fire and flesh. My hips and breasts sway as I dance and spin, round and round the fire.

It probably goes without saying that, at first, my spirit-body appeared as an idealized version of my mortal flesh: a little more muscular, a little less soggy around the middle. For a while, before I realized that it was irrelevant, I tried to form an “astral body” that was more “realistic”. Then I just let it be what it was: trying to dismantle that small bit of vanity was a distraction from the real work of exploring the spirit world. So, the first time it was radically different, I almost didn’t notice.

I was at a Qaballistic workshop at the local New Age store. The instructor was leading us on a visionary journey to Malkuth, the Earthly Kingdom. The path led across a bridge over a river, where we were to abandon certain symbolic representations of our mortal lives. Seeing my reflection in the river, I was surprised to see that I was a woman. My tattoos and ritual garb were what I had formed as I entered the visionary trance, but my flesh was not. For much of the rest of the journey, which was clear and productive, I was viscerally and self-consciously aware of the differences between that body and my mortal one—and of the fact that I had been unaware of those differences until I saw my reflection.

The drummer has slipped outside the fire light, and moves around outside the circle of stones, deosil to our widdershins, so that he is always just out of sight. One by one, the other dancers disappear as I make my way around the circle again and again. One turn I am a woman: my center of gravity lower, my breasts swaying and bouncing with my gyrations. The next I am a man: my cock slapping against my thighs as my center of gravity rises. Though the movements themselves are not so different—I am a terrible, unoriginal dancer, either way—the relative proportions of hip to shoulder create the illusion that it is otherwise, both visual and tactile.

The goddess I met at the end of that journey was not the Queen of Malkuth, but the Titan goddess Rhea: vast beyond my imagining, reclining nude and crowned and flanked by lions. To this day I have always-but-once been a woman when summoned to her presence in my visionary work. Other spirits, too—such as the equally vast but yet-unnamed goddess of Elemental Water—prefer that I be female in their presence. I have always been male in the Elemental Realm of Fire. My gender in the Otherworld is increasingly uncertain and malleable: male, female, both, neither. I shift at random, or at will, or at the behest of the spirits with whom I entreat.

All that remain, now, are myself and the the fire and the drummer I still cannot see. But my body has solidified in the image of Hermaphroditus: full breasts and hips, bearded and phallic. My hair is thick and glorious, from my head to my feet. Horns crown my head. A satyr’s tail sways behind me, and a satyr’s Priapism sways in front.

I leap into the fire, and we consume one another. My flesh is incinerated, then reformed, as I swallow the flames. When I emerge, the drummer has reveled himself: my Natal Demon. My Genius is there, too, and my most familiar spirit.

We dance.

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* διγενὴς ἔκστασις – “Diges Ekstasis”, lit. two-kind displacement, alt. trance of doubtful sex. διγενὴς cf. LSJ.A, ἔκστασις Middle Liddel.A.II.4