Over the course of the semester three new magical tools have come into my possession: a pentacle, a staff, and a black-handled knife. The pentacle I picked up at a swap-meet hosted by the local pagan store. The staff is hand-made by a fine gentleman in the local community, and was given to me as a gift. The knife was also a gift, a birthday present from another friend here in 
Sunrise. These were my first clues that it was time to get back to my basics. I didn’t ignore the message, per se; I just couldn’t figure out how to enact it in the context of my current workload.
Showing all posts tagged gods
Project Null is Going Off The Rails
It’s amazing how productive you can be while not sticking to the plan. My formal daily practice has basically fallen apart in the last weeks, even as my various experiments have increased in breadth and depth.
I have been re-re-reading Liber Lux and am working on several write-ups therefrom. I have almost finished Jason Miller’s Sorcerer’s Secrets and am in the process of incorporating some of his excellent suggestions into my practice. Mr. Miller might be slightly annoyed to see him work included in my Chaos experiment—that’s not how he self-identifies—but, really, where is the line between innovative syncretism and Chaos Magick?
Meditation and Dreaming
As I mentioned above, my formal meditation and dream work have basically fallen apart.
Although I have not sat down to meditate deliberately in over a week, I have actually spent hours in trance. Sitting outside in the cold one day, waiting for a friend, as a trance settled lazily over me for nearly thirty minutes. I spent five hours at the loom the following day, not even half of which I can remember. These meditations certainly don’t qualify as the concentrations Peter Carroll (and many other occultists like him) prescribe, but I refuse to concede that they don’t count. I actually have a whole rant about this planned for the near future.
While my sleep schedule has been restored to the point where I no longer drug myself with chamomile and valerian at 10 o’clock every night, my ability to recall my dreams in the morning is spotty at best. This is something I have always struggled with, and will probably continue to struggle with for years to come. Most of my dreams, though—what little I can recall of them—have been clearly mundane: fragmentary remains of my bout with super-hero obsession a couple weeks ago, and my increasing state of holy-fuck-i-need-someone-to-sit-on-my-face.
Shielding
My shielding experiments continue, and I’m fine-tuning a protection talisman. At the suggestion of Chirotus Infinitum in the comments to my last shielding post, I attempted to use the image of a ladybug as shield. The visceral experience was indescribable. And it brought back a series of shape-shifting experiments from my high-school days that I’m in the middle of writing up, and will probably share after I have finished my write-up of Peter Carroll’s chapters on Evocation and Invocation, because they’re highly relevant.
Manifesting My Desires.
While none of last week’s sigils have quite manifested, my experience so far says to wait two weeks before getting antsy. Also, those are socially complex endeavors, and while I haven’t actually found any new lovers, yet, the value of my social capital (to abuse a metaphor) seems to be rising.
I have another batch, this time aimed just at boosting my social situation, in the works to fire off this afternoon.
In the mean time, I have also been tinkering with my Web of Influence, again: drifting into a trance to tend the threads and make certain that things are moving down the pipeline (to deploy a cliché). Interestingly, though I had not yet consciously begun to incorporate my Web of Influence into my sigil work, I could see my manifesting sigils on the web as glittering lights.
Visionary Practice
I went on a pair of highly fruitful visionary journeys at the Dark and Full Moons that I still haven’t quite parsed. In the first, I re-established contact with my my chief familiar spirits and discovered, as I had discovered when I was doing some of my work with Elemental Fire, that a portal to Chaos had opened in my Inner Temple. I didn’t have the nerve to explore it the first night, but I did the second. Beyond the door was a vast void: not the swirling mass of potentiality I had assumed the Chaos current would appear to me as, but the gaping void of Χαος. I could barely sense an intelligence to it, it was so vast and alien, but it was definitely aware.
At first, there was nothing there that I could perceive, an I thought that I was walking through a black void like the astral fragment I use to access the Otherworlds. Slowly, though, the vastness of the space in which I was moving began to dawn on me. I began to perceive fling things moving through the void at almost unimaginable speed. There were countless multitudes of them, but the scale Chaos made them seem few and far between. At that point, Sue, ZG, and SKM joined me, forming a protective triangle, and helping me keep track of where I had come from for when the time came to leave.
We drifted until we came to a lone floating chunk of rock, which we landed on essentially out of my mortal, terrestrial instincts. Faster than I could think, an insect/crustacean-like creature (I never saw the whole of it), whipped around from the other side of the boulder and impaled me through the heart with a many-jointed limb. Although we were able to overpower it and reclaim the “blood” that had stuck to its talon, we took that moment to flee back to the Inner Temple.
Gods and Spirits
Since the conclusion of the ceremonial experiment and the Invocation of Baphomet, I now have ten gods and spirits living on my altar. I speak to fewer than half of them on a regular basis, and I don’t think that’s appropriate.
A few weeks ago, even the gods on my altar demanded a portion of my weekend coffee offerings. I was happy to oblige, of course: I had only not included them because they had not asked, before, and coffee is such a non-traditional offering that I didn’t wish to offend. Yesterday, I began incorporating Jason Miller’s Rite of General Offering* into the ritual, and today I will bring back fruit from the cafeteria to add to the offering.
So far, I have rarely asked the spirits I work with for much in the way of manifesting the world I desire. When I have, though, the results have been spectacular. When one friend was at risk of being evicted, I got Sue to change the landlord’s mind. When another needed a specific job, I asked Sue to make sure it happened. When I was wallowing in a crushing pit of despair last week, I dedicated an evening’s festivities to Dionysus, asking him to purge me of the negativity and obsessive behaviors in which I was engaging; I have since heard that it was the best such party in some time for everyone else there, and I have been pulling out of my emotional morass much more quickly than usual, and am now struggling against a new, but less self-destructive so far, set of obsessive behaviors.
Although I do still intent to built my home defense servitor, and ideally do so before the end of the semester, I think it best that I tend to these relationships before adding anyone or anything else to my altar.
a Change in Plans
Although it might not seem so from my previous weekly reports, my experiment in Chaos Magick has been more productive that I would have anticipated at this early stage. It has also been productive in ways I ever could have imagined, many of which are exceptionally difficult to articulate—a dilemma with which I imagine all my mage-blogging peers can identify. Some of them have come to light today, some I may never be able to talk about.
I originally conceptualized Project Null as a simple follow-up to the ceremonial experiment: a way of continuing my formal study of the Western magical tradition and of not loosing the momentum I had built up over the course of the previous year. I set the time frame for the ceremonial experiment at a year because I was originally using Penczak’s year-and-a-day system as a map. I set a year time frame for Project Null because that was how long the ceremonial experiment had lasted.
It seems, however, that Chaos Magick is even less suited for such a survey than ceremonial magic was. And I haven’t finished processing or internalizing a number of the lessons from that experiment yet. And this semester is much, much busier than I had anticipated. And Project Null is digging things up from my youth that I haven’t though of in a decade or more. And each and every one of these things deserves my full attention.
Project Null is not being cancelled. But the deadlines are. This shit is way too interesting to not let the phenomenal organic growth I’m experiencing progress at its own rate. Hopefully y’all will understand that this is a carefully considered tactical decision, not just a drunken satyr flaking out.
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* – Miller, Jason. The Sorcerer’s Secrets. Pompton Plains, NJ: New Page Books (2009). pp53-5
ETA: Jason Miller reference clarified and cited properly.
Vision of Thanateros
Back in Kansas City, before I officially started Project Null, I was making my last trip out to Camp Gaea. I was floating on lake Onessa, with just enough of me out of the water to keep from drowning, tranced out and seeking the Initiation of Water. The below NSFW image is one to two visions I had that afternoon.
HPF 2012: The Blessings of Dionysus Upon you All
Flannigan’s Right Hook was playing their cover of Paint it Black as Aradia and I stumbled back from one of the furthest-flung encampments at Gaea, still high from our first shamanic journey. That was Friday night of HPF 2009, our first year together; they played again the following year on the Sunday night main-stage, to which they returned this year. I missed the first part of this show, too, eventually abandoning half of my encampment to their face-painting shenanigans.
After the quiet of rest of the festival, walking up to the stage was like running face-first into a cacophonic wall of neon light and raucous sound. A beautiful, much-needed wall, the impact with which brought me back to 2k9 and ‘10, returning to those moments in cyclical time. The guitars, the cello, the electric fiddle … it was catharsis, pure and powerful.
I needed it desperately. The festival, to that point, had had its ups and downs. The main ritual, the day before, had been an utter disaster from which we were all—despite the passage of twenty-four hours, multiple cleansing rituals, and the completion of the public closing ritual just hours before—still recovering. Even the land was stained.
So I stood there, vibrating with the music, and trying to let go. To let go of my frustration with the Sacred Experience Committee. To let go of my frustration with my camp-mates, most of whom had not yet made it to the pavilion[1]. To let go of my desire for the festival—which I have been attending since I was eighteen years old, to which I have introduced probably a dozen people at this point, and to which I had brought three “virgins” this very year—to be perfect, and just enjoy it as it was in the then and the now. Perfection doesn’t exist in this world. I’m skeptical that it exists anywhere. …. So why, then, do I get so upset when things turn out to be less than perfect?
The music was amazing, the light show was a blast, and I was drinking thoroughly-blessed wine. And yet, I was still struggling to find the fun. My ambivalence must have been clear. When Aradia asked me if I was alright, I didn’t lie.
Aradia and Aurora had been to one of the workshops I’d missed on account of my work exchange obligations. The workshop was on aura cleansing and chakra balancing. Together, as I stood there listening to the music, they worked over my energetic bodies until I was almost in tears. Finally, something inside me broke loose, the tears came, my aura opened up, and I was able to let go and find the fun. Power filled me, and a few sudden insights.
The band was clearly having the time of their lives, too. Somehow, bottles of mead kept finding their way on stage. At one point, the band stopped to toast the audience. I raised my glass and toasted them back: “The blessings of Dionysus upon you all.”
My wine, as I said, was well-blessed. Recognizing that I was not the only one in my encampment stained by the miasma of the previous night’s ritual, I took the box of wine Aurora had offered for the purposes, and called upon Dionysus to bless it so that all who drank of it would be purged of the stain and incited to sacred revelry. I wish I’d thought to wright down the specifics, but I kinda got lost in the moment. I completed the blessing by pouring a libation in a circle around the box; suddenly, it was “hot” to the touch.
“Holy shit,” said Aradia. “What did you just do?”
When I toasted the band, my blessing spread to their bottles. But one of the things about working with gods and spirits, I guess, is that once you start talking to them, they’re listening more than you realize. And I had said “upon you all.” Little lights started going off in the audience as the blessing spread to those bottles. And then little bells started ringing in my head as other bottles throughout camp were lighted with the same blessing, too.
It was about that time that the rest of our encampment showed up, beaming and with faces painted. The wine flowed liberally and, when the concert was over, we found a secluded place to load a bowl while they lit the bonfire.
The tenor of the evening was changed, radically, and for the better.
1 – I love you guys, but you can’t spend five days camped with anyone and not end up a bit frustrated at some point.
Dionysus Miscellanea
Hey, folks, it’s the end of the semester. While I’m buy writing papers for the next few days, I may not get another chance to post. In the meantime, check out some of the fun facts I that my research turned up but which I couldn’t work into my paper on the cult of Dionysus in Hellenistic Greece and the Roman Republic:
* Although most often described as the son of the mortal princess Semele, Dionysos is also said to be the son of Persephone, a relationship which explains his cthonic attributes (Burkert 1985.294) Those familiar with Orphic mythology already know this.
* The thyrsos wand, associated with Bacchic worship, may—according to Burkert—draw its name from association “with a god attested in Ugarit, tirsu, intoxicating drink, or alternatively with the Late Hittite tuwarsa, vine…”, and that the very name Bacchus may be drawn from a Semitic word for wailing, drawing a parallel with the wailing over the death of the Mesopotamian god Tammuz. (Burkert 1985 p.163)
* Dionysus shares the thyrsos wand with Artemis—the only other deity to use the wand in their rites. (Burkert 1985 p.223)
* Dionysus may have been depicted on herms, either as himself or synchretised with Hermes (Burkert 1985 p.222)
* Prefiguring later synchretisms, the worship of Dionysus was influenced by the cult of Osiris as early as 660 BCE (Burkert 1985 p.163), an association later affirmed by both Herodotus and Plutarch, the latter of whom also equated Dionysus with Serapis. (Martin 1987.91)
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Burkert, Walter. Greek Religion. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985.
Martin, Luther H. Hellenistic Religions: An Introduction. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987.
Dionysus Devotional Art I
I’ve been working on this off-and-on for a few months. I finished coloring it Thursday as a part of my Dionysia.
His beauty is a major point of iconography in Euripides Bacchae, and his purple robe is similarly emphasized in the first of the Homeric Hymns. The horns are in recognition of his title as Bull-god (and the attendant associations with unfettered lust, especially masculine). The significance of the thyrsus and wine should be obvious.
Devotional Musings: Dionysus I
This post has already taken me too long to compose. I started it almost as soon as I first posted about the Urban Dionysia. The fact is, I find it difficult to write about my personal experiences with the gods. Some of those experiences have been very, very strange—to the point where, even after a decade and a half of living a magical life and talking or reading about other people’s magical lives, I don’t have an adequate cultural framework through which to process them. Other experiences, which may seem downright pedestrian when I reduce them to words or which I may know full well parallel the experiences of many, many others, have simply affected me so deeply that I cannot bear to subject them to public scrutiny. (The events which comprise my previous post include some of both) And, inevitably, part of it is that I spent so much of my life being angry at the very idea of gods that I still feel like something of a chump, sometimes, for honoring them. I’ve alluded to this last point before, and it is from there that I will begin.
Dedication
Sometimes you have to need to provide context before you can tell a story. Sometimes, it’s best to tell a story first and dig into the context afterward. This is the story of how I came to perform my re-Dedication as a part of my Beltane festivities in 2009 … I’ll get to the context in a little bit.
It was my second Beltane after my failed life in St. Louis, the first with Aradia. It may almost go without saying tat we were at Camp Gaea, with my massive tent set up in Dava Wood. I had big plans for the weekend, aimed at jump-starting my magical career* in preparation for the re-Dedication I intended to perform at some point over the summer, and we were partying with the KU Cauldron. It’s tempting to break this into three different stories which coincidentally took place over the course of a single evening, but … I’m not so sure that they’re unrelated.
Urban Dionysia
The Facebook group Prayers to the Gods of Hellas informs me that the Urban Dionysia began at sundown last night, and will continue for the next eight days . The Attic title was Διονύσια τὰ ἐν Ἄστει (Dionusia ta en Astei: lit. “The In City Dionusia”) or Διονύσια τὰ Μεγάλα (Dionusia ta Megala: lit. “Dionusia the Big”). The Wikipedia article can be found here.
It is both interesting and appropriate that Sannafrid and I (unknowingly) chose to spend last night smoking and drinking, while I read aloud from my copy of the Homeric Hymns. First the Hymns to Aphrodite, as we had been discussing goddesses of fucking, and then the Hymns to Dionysus. As the evening went on, I colored an iconographic image of the god I have been working on off-and-on for some time. This afternoon, shortly before penning this post, I poured a libation of mead before the idol on my altar.
It is further interesting that, although we are shifting from Greek drama to Roman in my Greek and Roman Drama class, I have spent the afternoon reading* Euripides Hippolytus in anticipation of reading Phaedra, Seneca’s version of the story, next week. Hippolytus was first performed in 428 BCE, and—like all the Attic dramas which have survived—was a winner of the theatre competitions which were a major part of the festival.
Unfortunately, I do not have the liberty to take eight days off in honor of Dionysos—or even to get ploughed for the next seven nights in his name (and “sacrifice my liver”, as Sannafrid put it). Besides, the original was a state-sponsored festival which (to a casual but cynical reader, at least) looks like it was intended to duplicate, tame, and profit off of the older, Rural, Dionysia … and the Cults of the Olympians are not state-sponsored religion anymore.
What I can do is make a point of taking an hour or two out of each of the next seven days to meditating on the Bacchic One and upon my relationship with him, finishing the one devotional image I have so far, finishing reading Written in Wine (the devotional anthology Aradia gave me so long ago), and working on translating the Homeric hymn I never got to over Spring Break because the Hymn to Phanes took me so long. Hopefully, between these various things, I may develop some sense of how I might celebrate this festival (and the Rural, in the winter) within my own cultural frame work and (still infantile) devotional practice.
* I have read Hippolytus before, of course, for last semester’s mythology class. The roles of the goddesses Aphrodite and Artemis are too prominent to pass up. I could write a whole post about that play alone. Possibly several: one tackling the theme of hubris and failure to treat the altars of the gods; one dealing with Euripides treatment of women in general, and another on the misogyny of Hippolytus in particular. But those are rants for another day.
Orphic Hymn to Phanes
As my first solo attempt at translating Ancient Greek raw, the below represents about twelve hours of work. I’ve included notes on some of the less clear choices I made in the translation, as well as some of the interesting subtext. Unfortunately, I can’t find any modern or reliable translations to compare mine to—the Thomas Taylor translation, while pretty, is to poetic too aid me.