Coming to the Book of White Flame after The Call was a bit of a shock. Every move in the first book had come with a ritual: the first nine nights were strictly prescribed, and if the second nine were a little more of a waiting game, there was a chant to go with each stage of the iynx ritual. The Book of White Flame is more of a litany culminating in a ritual. Aradia and I needed more structure than that.
Our solution was to bring the general ritual format of The Call forward. That was four years ago, now, so of course my memories of the details are a little vague. But I remember that each night when we sat down to do the work, we washed our hands with lustral waters and cinnamon, lit a candle and incense, and sang the consecration song. We then drew two versions of the sigil: one on a small slip of paper that we burned at the end of the ritual, as with the crossroads sigil in The Call; and one in a notebook which we mediated on and colored over as we tried to memorize the sigil and its uses.
Throughout the month, I gathered supplies to make our Ladders. I was broke as shit, then, and had to cheep out: using thinner wire and much thinner chain than was ideal. But I was able to cast up silver talismans for use as the central “coin”, some of the first exemplars of my Eye and Six Hands devotional talisman. In the last days of the sigil-study, I brough Aradia and Chirotus (who was working the Hekataeon at the same time) together and showed them how to string the beads on wire to form the chain.
In preparation for the rite, we made a special trip out to a sacred site where we knew that we could find a honey locust tree with exceptionally savage thorns. We took garlic from our farm share for our cloves, and raided our stash of local honey that I had originally purchased to make into mead.
When we had finished our study of the sigils, and the moon waxed to full, Aradia and I went to Alvianna’s property, where we could perform the ritual at a crossroads without fear of attracting police attentions. We had made arrangements in advance, so that we could come, and do what prep needed to be done there, without breaking the silence that preceds the ritual.
The consecration was an ordeal. Keeping silent for the hours preceding the ritual. Kneeling on the concrete. Holding the ladder in our mouths while we performed the ritual. Releasing the ladder slowly when the time came, not just vomiting it out.
There’s a lot I don’t remember about the night. Partly, that’s because it was almost four years ago, now. Partly that’s because I was so deeply entranced. What I do remember is that the Ladder felt alive and powerful almost immediately, and that the garlic cloves all sprouted while we were performing our rituals.
Then I went on an epic road trip. In the midst of searching for appropriate skulls with which to begin the Book of the Red Blade, we lost track of the work. I even forgot the names I had given to both my (original) iynx and my Ladder, and lost wherever I had written them down.
Then, one day in 2020, while I was doing my daily work with my other familiar spirits, the name – or, at least A name – of my Ladder came back to me. I began working with it more extensively. And, like all my familiars, what the spirit wanted was not just offerings but work to do. So, when something was not clearly in the purview of one of my other familiars, or when I wanted Hekate’s backing for a thing, I turned to the Ladder spirit and rite. It also offered its services in other means: speciffically, it offered to aid my work with Aidan Wachter’s Black Book, as I was struggling to resume that after having stopped and started. As such, it has become a familiar spirit somewhat greater in scope and intimacy than it was intended to be, and – as I am finally incorporating the Black Book into habitual ritual practice, I am working with my Ladder spirit almost daily.
As such, I can call my Hekate’s Ladder my greatest success with the work of the Hekataeon so far.
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