Showing all posts tagged keeping score

In art, witchcraft

Visions of Gods and Powers, Attested and Otherwise

Author Satyr MagosPosted on 2 Comments

The image above is one of my first attempts to illustrate the gods and spirits I have encountered in my conjurations and explorations. I didn’t date it, so I can’t say exactly when it was done, but based on the sketchbook I found it in, and what immediately preceded and followed it, I think that this was from the Sunrise Temple period – that is to say, college, when I was still doing really intense visionary journey work and just having my first successes at contacting planetary powers – but it may have been from my first year or two back in Kansas City, after that.

The figures in the image are the Lunar intelligence(s) as they appeared to me when I made my one of my first spirit journeys to the Sphere of the Moon. I don’t know why they have (almost) always appeared to me as two spirits, unless it’s just that I took that from Agrippa’s dual-seeming sigil the intelligence of the Moon and of the spirit of the spirit of the Moon (the latter, below, being a pair of glyphs and a notion that i found repeatedly stated but never really discussed back in the day but can’t find reference to now). Nor do I know why the one figure is asleep but ithyphallic.

The next page in the sketchbook, from that same time period, is of another power, first seen a year or two (i think?) before I began my ceremonial experiments. I met her on several of my visionary journeys. She sheltered me against enemies and taught me some of what I know about navigating the Underworld.

The drawing is tragically incomplete, but it does its job. Having found this page back, I am strongly moved to return to the Underworld and re-establish this relationship, finish this drawing, and perhaps share some notes on the use of that sigil.

Honestly, I had completely forgotten these early experiments in occult art. I remembered my first masks, from 2009/10. I remembered some of my magical art plans and schemes from the late Oughts, and some my first magical self portraits from the Sunrise Temple. I remember drawing my first Picatrix image in that same time frame. But these, I had forgotten.

It’s interesting to look back on them now. For one, my illustrations are consistently better than these, now, which is nice because I often feel like my older art is better than my newest. Looking at these two, in particular, you can really see my anime roots, especially the proportions and head shape.

Later in the same sketchbook, I found more images drawn as part of my first rounds with The Seven Spheres. I feel certain that I talked about them on the Obsidian Dream Blog, but I can’t find that post back at the moment. Patreon makes sharing multiple images in the body of a post really obnoxious, so I’ll only repost a couple of my favorites, here:

The Moon and Venus, respectively these images were drawn in-circle after conjuring the planetary powers and asking for a vision.

At the same time I was doing some of the images above, I was also illustrating icons like this image of Dionysus:

and of Thanateros

My most recent magic, though, and the art I’ve done about it, has all been much more … formal. That has its advantages and disadvantages, honestly. Working from the spirit-portraits in the Picatrix, I have a source to point back to, a common ground on which my audience and I can both stand. Moreover, many of my most recent works have been some of the best drawing that I’ve done this year, which is (again) definitely not the case for the Spirits of the Spirit of the Moon and the Queen of Endless Water.

These older works are more raw, the spirits in them unattested. They also have a vibrancy and authenticity that some of my more recent images (I’m thinking, particularly, of 2023’s Image of Mercury) lack.

Once upon a time, I was a fairly prolific blogger. I shared my monthly full moon readings, and the visions I conjured at full and dark moons. I liveblogged years of experiments in chaos magick and planetary conjurations.

These last few years, I haven’t had as much to say – in words – as I would like to. Partly, that’s been the depression and the burnout and the crisis of faith that kicked off in the summer of 2023. Partly, though – and I haven’t really wrestled with this like I should, yet – it’s that I’m at a stage in my magical, spiritual, and mystical development where the things I see, the messages I receive, are really just for me and about me. As uncomfortable as it makes me, sometimes, I am deep in the Mysteries.

Somehow, these old images – these early attempts to communicate the ineffable – are a welcome reminder that creating magical images is not some weird side quest, some distraction from my real work as a witch and scholar, but rather something that I actually set out to do. That which can’t be spoken or written can sometimes be conveyed in other ways. And, even if I can’t convey my exact experience, if I can convey an image that provokes or facilitates a mystical experience in someone else, that’s as good if not better.

Because the purpose of my occult writing has never been to establish myself as an occult expert with the answer to every question. The purpose of my occult writing has always been to communicate with my peers.

This is what I’ve seen. This is what I’ve done. This is what I learned. These are the questions I am left with.

Have you seen anything like this? Does any of this resonate with you? Does it inspire you? Does it encourage you?

And, more than anything else: please, share your experiences with those with the eyes to see and the ears to hear. Come, join me in the wilderness and the void.

I am very near to completing another set (or two) of Picatrix planetary images. When I have done so, hopefully in the first months of 2026, I will almost inevitably move on to Picactrix images of the Lunar Mansions and fixed stars and maybe even the Zodiacal constellations. I also hope to resume making icons (and start making idols) of the gods to whom I have burnt and poured out so many offerings. And I hope that I will find the strength and courage to resume my explorations of the astral planes and underworld. And I hope that, in doing so, I will find the courage and the inspiration to resume my portraits of the wild and unattested powers that I found there.

And, perhaps, in the midst of that work, I will find that I have something new to say, as well.

In art, witchcraft

Reflecting on My Astrological Images So Far

Author Satyr MagosPosted on 1 Comment

The first Picatrix image I ever drew was this image of Venus:

I drew the image while I was still in college, all the way back in 2012. I started with that image because it was relevant to my interests at the time, and because that sort of therianthropic imagery was (and is) right up my alley. I then went on to use that initial drawing as the basis of my first talismanic image jewelry, and finally inked it just the other day.

More than ten years later, with the completion of a Lunar image illustration (moon according to Mercurius), I have finally made a complete set of Picatrix images of the seven traditional planets.

I’m pretty excited by that accomplishment. Not a lot of modern artists (that I’ve been able to find, at least) have fucked with these images at all. Fewer still have made a full set of seven.

I rushed past that milestone to finish second images of the Moon and of Jupiter, but since then I’ve been taking a bit of time to reflect on the images that I’ve made and what I’ve learned from them.

Laying them all down to look at them, the first thing that stood out to me after a few moments was that I’ve drawn three each of images according to Picatrix (Venus, Jupiter, and Saturn), three according to Mercurius (Moon, Sun, and Jupiter), and four according to Apollonius (Moon, Mercury. Sun, and Mars). That even distribution is fascinating to me; I obviously didn’t plan it.

The second most obvious thing about the collection as a whole is that they’re not as cohesive as I might like. That’s no surprise, really. I didn’t originally draw them as a set. I drew them out of order, with some fixed stars and Lunar Mansions and decan/face images thrown in the mix.

They all started out as pencil sketches, but they’ve been inked on three different computers using three or four different software suites (two different laptops, one with a touchscreen and fancy pen and one with a drawing tablet, and a desktop with a drawing tablet; a couple were done in photoshop, the rest were done with different iterations of Clip Studio Paint). The earliest ones were done in large formats, 3000 to 5000 pixels tall. The more recent ones, while drawn at a higher DPI, are smaller because of the tarot card format that I finally settled on. In part because of those differences, the line weights and styles vary wildly from one image to the next. Some of the images are depicted in modern clothing; others are in ancient or fantasy costumes, and two of them are naked.

I started this series (as opposed to the images that were made specifically for jewelry) of astrological images in 2022. I only settled on the tarot card format and proportions a few months ago. The current double-line border is, frankly, a placeholder for a cooler design that may never come.

To the best of my ability to reconstruct, I finished these images in the following order:

Mercury according to Apollonius

Sun according to Mercurius

Venus according to Picatrix

Saturn according to Picatrix

Saturn according to Other Sages

Jupiter according to Mercurius

Sun according to Apollonius

Mars according to Apollonius

Moon according to Mercurius

Moon according to Apollonius

Jupiter according to Picatrix

Venus to be well received and esteemed by all

IMAGES ACCORDING TO PICATRIX

IMAGES ACCORDING TO APOLLONIUS

IMAGES ACCORDING TO MERCURIUS

If I include our stragglers, Saturn according to “other sages” and the just-published Venus to be well-liked, that makes for: two Moon images; one Mercury; two Venus; two Sun; one Mars; two Jupiter; and two Saturn images. (I should really hurry up and make a second image each of Mars and Mercury, shouldn’t I?)

PICATRIX IMAGE MAGIC

Of these images, I have elected and consecrated talismans with, Mercury according to Apollonius, Venus to be well-liked, Venus according to Apollonius Mars according to Apollonius, Jupiter according to both Picatrix and Mercurius, and Saturn according to other sages, all in metal. I have also cast metal talismans of the Sun according to Picatrix I have used the image of Jupiter according to Mercurius and the Sun according to Mercurius in petitions. I have had good, but not spectacular effects with all of them. My clients have had results that ranged from good to spectacular.

Following my Seven Spheres initiations into the mysteries of the planets, I feel like each image I create, and each iteration thereafter, brings me closer to the planet in question. Each successive image, when I am finally ready to sit down with pencil and paper, moves through me more easily, and comes out better both magically and artistically.

In my post on what to do with planetary images, I spoke of using them for stellar idolatry, and I wasn’t joking or exaggerating. But I’m finding the process and the experience difficult to describe. Perhaps it suffices to say, I’m finding the experience rewarding and I’m going to continue to work.

PICATRIX IMAGES AS ART

Looking back over them all, now, I think Saturn according to Picatrix and Mars according to Apollonius are my favorites. I like the line weights and the way that they fill the space. When I re-do Mercury according to Apollonius and Sun according to Mercurius, I will very much be trying to find back that sense of weight and flow (I think I did well with my new Venus image, but didn’t quite nail it). I may decide that several others need to be tweaked or even re-drawn, as well. Even as I say that, though, I have to say that I’m really pleased with how they’re coming together both individually and as a series.

And, before I take anything back to the drawing board, I feel like I need to finish at least one of the above sets.

The images according to Apollonius are the obvious set to finish, since that’s the most complete set, so far. His image of Saturn is straightforward enough: an old man on a throne. Venus is similarly straightforward. And Jupiter is riding an eagle and holding a severed head, which is kinda wild.

Mercurius has a bird-headed Venus image that I’m looking forward to drawing because I love therianthropic gods, but he and Picatrix both have an overly-complex image I’m distinctly less excited about (Mercurius’ Mercury is a one-winged figure juggling objects, and Apollonius’ Mars is man-handling an image of Venus). So Apollonius is probably going to be the way.

And then I get to decide if I’m going to do the various images according to “other sages”, and the lone image (Venus) according to Ptolomy.

Inevitably, I’m also thinking about other design elements going forward.

Do I want to do color versions? Or more single-pop-of-color variations, like Mars and his red cape? Do I want to do larger versions for a book, some day? Or posters, even?

Of the human figures, so far Saturn according to other sages and Mars according to Apollonius are clearly Black, and Jupiter according to Mercurius could be Desi, but the rest are pretty white. That’s definitely something for me to work on. At a minimum, one of my Venuses needs to be a Black woman, for example. Conveying phenotypes in this small black and white lineart format without accidentally crossing the line into racist caricature is going to be a … challenge. But I think it’s a worthwhile one.

And how to dress them? I like drawing naked people, obviously, and there’s a long tradition of depicting deities in the nude, plus the images that are canonically naked. But some figures are explicitly dressed a certain way, and the truth is that I’ll probably have an easier time selling (and even sharing) these images if they’re not all flashing their tits and/or peen. I like researching and drawing ancient costumes, and clothes inspired by fantasy and high fashion, but … I do think it’s interesting and valuable, sometimes, to have magical images and occult art in contemporary settings and costumes; it makes the magic less remote.

And, finally, what can I do to draw these images together into a more cohesive collection? What can I do to make them a set?

Time will tell. The only way out is through.

And, in case it isn’t clear, I’m excited to meet these challenges and answer these questions. I’m proud of and very pleased with the work I’ve done so far. I’m looking forward to completing at least one more set of seven planetary images. I’m looking forward to the magic I’ll be able to do with them. And I’m looking forward to sharing all of it with you.

In witchcraft

Reflecting On Five Years of Daily Ritual

Author Satyr MagosPosted on

Reflecting On Five Years of Daily Ritual

The arrival of August marks five years of my daily ritual practice.

My streak began in 2020 with what (to the best of my knowledge) proved to be the last of Andrieh Vitimus’ periodic Do-Magick Challenges. The idea was to enchant for a series of concrete things; I took that as an opportunity to work more closely with my familiar spirits, invoking them to fulfill my desires. I can’t find back the spreadsheet with my enchantments and their results, but I think that my success rate was something like 20%; most significantly, I remember being gifted cake (yum) and green rocks (a baggie of malachite pieces that I still haven’t used up). Whatever I failed to manifest, however, I more than made up in the establishment of my longest-running streak of daily ritual.

I honestly don’t remember what the ritual looked like at the very beginning. I might be able to find my old notes back, but I wasn’t doing a very good job of journalling, back then, despite it being a key part the challenge. I do remember that I originally tried launching a sigil every night before bed, but quickly found that I had run out of brains by the time I’d made it there (a problem that has plagued my Solomonic pentacle experiments this past year, as well).

I’m really, really not a morning person. It sometimes takes me thirty, even sixty minutes to force myself to get out of bed after I wake up. But, by the end of that first month, it was very clear that “first thing when I got up” was the only place I could fit a recurring ritual into my life.

Again, I don’t remember exactly what my ritual was when I started, but I do know that by the end of that first month it had already crystalized around a practice that I had actually started back in college: pouring libations of coffee for my spirit court and having my first cup with them at my altar.

The ritual has grown and changed and collapsed and regrown at least a dozen times over the last five years. At times, it has involved a full formal circle casting with blades and bells and calls to the quarters. For a while, it included a daily tarot spread. There was a time when I was pouring out individual libations into little espresso cups and shot glasses, one for each god and spirit on every altar in every room of my house, and lighting a candle to go with every one of them. Since the summer of 2021, I’ve gotten pretty good about journaling my daily ritual, if not necessarily any of the other things I want to be keeping track of. At the very top of my game, I even managed to supplement my morning offerings with ten or even twenty minutes of sitting meditation in the afternoon. Other times, all I could manage was to pour myself a cup of coffee, light a candle and incense, and call it good.

Only one thing has remained constant over these five years. To this day, “coffee with my spirit court” remains the heart of my daily ritual. Still, for all the changes and variations that have come and gone, that continuity feels really, really good. With all the chaos in the world since Covid landed, I can’t begin to imagine how unhinged I’d be without this stabilizing practice.

Right now, my morning ritual starts with making coffee in a French press. While the grounds steep, I clean up the previous day’s offerings and gather the candles and incense (and sometimes other materia) and set out my coffee cup for that day’s ritual, and take note of the planetary day and hour, the position of the sun, how much and how well I slept, and record any dreams that I can recall, and (when needed) fill out the previous day’s diary entry.

When the coffee is ready, I purify myself with cinnamon and invoke Baphomet to bless the candles, incense, and coffee. I make my offerings under my motto and magical names, and then greet my spirit court by name. Then, finally, I sit in quiet contemplation, praying for aid and listening for any guidance I might receive.

I use a meditation app to time things. I used a different one for years, but when I finally paid for it, that didn’t actually make the ads go away, so fuck them. Now I use InsightTimer, which lets me set a bell for each stage of my ritual: ten minutes while the coffee steeps; six minutes to make my offerings and invocations; and, finally, five minutes to sit in quiet contemplation.

Some days, I follow up my quiet contemplation with a bit of candle magic. At a minimum, I do an uncrossing and cursebreaking ritual every Saturday and healing magic every Sunday.

Uncross my conditions, turn away the Evil Eye, break every curse that has been laid upon me. May the work of ignorance be undone, may the work of jealousy be undone, may the work of malice be undone, may the work of my enemies be undone. The work of ignorance is undone, the work of jealousy is undone, the work of malice is undone, the work of my enemies is undone.

Heal me. Heal me. Heal me. Heal my flesh that I may live and thrive. Heal my heart that I may better love and be loved and participate in community. Heal my mind that I may see and think clearly, and act in my own best interest. Heal my soul that I may approach the altars and the gods in good faith and with an open heart.

Some weeks I do one of those candles every single day. Other weeks, I add other magics to the morning ritual. Road openers. Fiery walls of protection. Whatever life calls for.

My daily ritual will continue to evolve. It will change as I change and my needs change. Honestly, even now I feel a need to change it up fairly significantly, but I don’t yet know what I want to change it to. We’ll see what inspiration brings when it finally strikes.

Other occultists sometimes push daily ritual as an ideal of praxis. For myself, I think regular practice is much more important than the specific frequency. I post pictures of my altar every morning because it’s fun, and gives me something “witchy” to share when my practice isn’t producing good stories, but I don’t talk about it much because it often feels like bragging.

Daily ritual works for me, very much to my own surprise. It works better than weekly or monthly rituals because it doesn’t require me to keep track of anything. Sure, there are a few details that change with the day of the week, but that’s not the same, at least not for me. I get up, I clean the altar and turn the page in my magic book, and drink a cup of coffee with my spirit-court.

Then, and only then, I figure out what day it is and what I need to do. Then I get to work and forget what day it is, what time it is, what’s going on in the world. Which is why afternoon mediation and Thursday prosperity altar and Venus Night and all the other less-regular rituals that I want to do never manage to reach the level of consistency that I’ve managed with my morning ritual. I’m trying to change that, trying to get more consistent with other things. But I’m not there, yet. And that’s okay.

So I’m going to take this moment and be proud of my accomplishment. Five years of daily ritual, ever-evolving in slow motion to suit my needs.

Hail unto you gods and powers, patrons and allies, friends and familiars. Hail unto all you who live on the altars of my house and in the pages of my sacred books. Come to the feasts that I lay before you. Hail! Hail! Hail!

In witchcraft

Gnosis or Delusion (My Persistent Fear)

Author Satyr MagosPosted on

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 scholarship, witchcraft

Working the Sorcery of Solomon: Using My First Pentacles

Author Satyr MagosPosted on

[This is the fourth post in a series. Click here for the first.]

Those of you taking Sara Mastros’ pentacles course may have noticed that my last post did not actually make it to the end of lesson three. I had not, yet, put to use any of the pentacles I had inscribed in by book. Those experiences were weird and interesting enough to deserve a post of their own.

Jupiter Pentacles

My very first pentacles, as it turned out, were made outside the framework of this class. Over the summer, Mastros offered a workshop on using the Hexagram of Ab Ehyeh (second pentacle of Jupiter) for financial gain. I had inscribed but not yet deployed my first Lunar talismans, and decided not to jump ahead to teach my book the Jovial talisman before the class, so I printed the pentacle to inscribe over… which was where I made my first mistake.

I printed the pentacle on the wrong paper. Rather than just roll with it, I reprinted it on the cardstock I had wanted to use … and then I got all up in my head about proper care and disposal about the Hebrew god-names, and decided to punt the problem by consecrating both of them, each to a different professional goal: a particular sales goal, difficult but achievable; and a particular number of Patreon supporters. Both by the end of November.

They didn’t work.

Sales through the end of the summer and were good, but not what I was hoping for in October, and straight tanked in November. I have been delighted to welcome several new patrons, but did not meet my goal. (Writing that sentence, knowing y’all will read it, feels a little weird. Sorry about that.)

It’s possible that they did help. That these two pentacles, along with my other prosperity and financial magic, are what pulled me up out of the pit that was the first half of this year’s sales. But even if so, that’s not a resounding success.

But I didn’t know how those first pentacles would turn out, yet, when I finally sat down to put my first book-pentacles to use.

Preparing and Planning

Sara Mastros strongly suggests The Lunar Lock and Key (the first Lunar pentacle, per Mathers) as a student’s first pentacle, specifically to use it to journey to the underworld. Up to this point, I really had planned to stick as close to the lesson plan as I could. But I couldn’t figure out what would be the … best, most useful, most interesting way for me to employ the pentacle, an unfamiliar magical technology, to go to the underworld, something I am well accustomed to doing on my own.

It’s … a stupid thing to get caught up on. But get caught I did. I stewed on that problem for probably a whole month. Finally, the solution came to me: I would ask the Third Pentacle of the Moon, The Witch’s Teacher.

The Witch’s Teacher

The Witch’s Teacher (the third Lunar pentacle per Mathers) is a more conventional pentacle than the Lunar Lock and Key: round, with clear internal geometry, if with a slightly more obscure versicle. Inscribing it in my Book, as I described previously, went smoothly. Employing it was even more straightforward: I invoked Solomon and wound up the Book according to Mastros’ techniques. I told various powers – Solomon, the Book, the Great Seal, and the pentacle, itself – what I wanted, invoking each in turn, explaining my situation . I asked to be instructed in a vision in circle, in a dream tonight, and/or in visions and revelations later. Anointed a candle with holy oil, then lit it.

I was hit immediately with clairsentient knowledge: the Lunar Lock and key will serve as a guide, showing me where and how to go; it will lead me beyond the brass gates that I have seen in previous visionary trances; it will serve as a passport and a badge of authority; that using the Lunar Lock and Key to journey to the underworld is, itself, a rite of passage.

I thanked the spirits, wound down the book, and began planning my next adventure.

The Lunar Lock and Key

I put the Lunar Lock and Key to use around the middle of October.

Despite – or, more accurately, because of – my familiarity with less structured underworld journeys, I was careful to maintain the ritual and protocols I have developed in my pentacles work so far. I bathed and changed into my ritual whites before the start of the planetary hour. I sat down to meditate with my Book before winding up the ritual proper.

I struggled to stay focused, at first. I did not feel as strong a connection to Solomon as usual during initial invocation. I still didn’t get name or presence from Great Seal, but it definitely opened up and powered up. I didn’t get a strong sense of resonance while invoking the pentacle (further evidence for my theory that I am somehow not tuning in to the right frequency to properly perceive the pentacles), but visualizing using the angel names as the key and “tickling” the lock open (Mastros’ word; those of you who’ve tried your hands at lockpicks might find that metaphor more relatable) did produce a gate through which I was able to move.

I descended through the void, bypassing all my usual routes and landmarks, until I came to a great wall winding through a red desert, and a brazen gate which looked a lot like those that I’ve seen in previous visionary experiences. A glowing blue figure that answered to the name Shioel was waiting for me and led me to a postern gate where we met the spirit of my Book.

Inside the gate was, briefly, a vision of fiery red desert that gave way to a vision of poppy fields and a yellow brick road leading to the Emerald City. Yes, that Emerald City. Sort of. I flew there with Shioel a the spirit of my Book, and we entered the city by a side gate.

Inside the Emerald City was initially a void. Then there was a vision of a throne, which Shioel said was what I expected to see. The vision of the throne exploaded into a vision of light, followed by a series of visions more weird and personal than I care to share at this stage of internet culture enshittification.

At the end of my visionary journey, Shioel told me to return at the dark of the moon and I returned to my body.

The next dark moon turned out to be Samhain. Winding up for and then having to cancel our usual Samhain campout was exhausting and demoralizing, and I almost spent the night stoned in front of the TV. Somehow, though, I rallied enough to sit down in front of my altar to light some offerings and at least meditate for a while, and commune with my familiar spirits. Those few minutes of meditation quickly escalated into an unplanned visionary experience.

Solomon appeared to me, and the spirit of my Book. They admonished me not to use my Solomonic materia for anything but the Solomonic work (I had lit some of the incense as “the best I’ve got” right then), and then cajoled me to conjure up the Lunar Lock and Key and make my planned descent to the underworld.

In the end, I gave in. I called up the pentacle in my mind, invoked the names as best as I could remember them, and opened the portal. With the Book closed on the altar, instead of open before me, it is perhaps unsurprising that this second journey was more like my other underworld journeys than the first descent with the Lunar Lock and Key had been.

I descended first into light and the void, then ascended to the sphere of the Moon, where the spirit of my Book underwent a Lunar initiation much like those that I have been through in my Seven Spheres workings. Then we descended, again, and returned to the Emerald City for another round of visionary experiences weirder than I am prepared to share publicly, including some that were so weird I couldn’t even find words to record them in my most private journal.

Preparing for the Next Stage

For a wide variety of reasons, I’ve fallen off the work since November. I could point to the US presidential election, or to my father’s illness and death, or to my annual Christmas Depression, or any number of things, and that would all be true … but they are more true about why this write-up too me so long. What really broke my ritual streak was the Fall Back shift from Daylight Savings to Standard time: the Third Hour of Night now coincides with my dinner time, making it incredibly difficult for me to fit planetary timing into my regular life, even as a full time artist and magician. This fallow period, though, is by no means an end of my work in Mastros’ course and with the Solomonic pentacles.

I have already learned so much. About the grimoire tradition. About the legendary King Solomon. About the Hebrew language. About making magic books (this is my … third? Fourth?). About bringing my lifetime of witchcraft to ceremonial magic, and incorporating ceremonial paradigms into my witchcraft. I’ve had insights about how to improve my Picatrix talismans. I suspect that I will learn things that will lead me to make pentacle-like talismans using channeled imagery and versicles from extra-Biblical texts (specifically but not exclusively Homeric and Orphic texts).

Having now deviated from my post-per-lesson format, I think it’s fair to warn you that I’ll be deviating further. I am not going to hand-hold you through the whole of Sara Mastros’ pentacles course. That would be rude to her and boring for me and not actually that helpful or interesting to you.

Instead, going forward, I’ll be sharing my most interesting results from my classwork, and from the experiments that classwork inspires.

So I’m going to end this post again recommending that you buy Sara Mastros’ book, The Sorcery of Solomon: A Guide to the 44 Planetary Pentacles of the Magician King, and that you take her class if you can. (Her main site is down for maintenance at the time of this writing, so that second link might be dead by the time you read this. If so, let me know?)

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 witchcraft

It is over. I am free.

Author Satyr MagosPosted on

When I came back from Beltane, I learned that this year’s Heartland Pagan Festival would be the last. That knowledge sent me careening across the emotional spectrum. I talked about it in my last post, but it bears some reiteration: I have been attending the Heartland Pagan Festival for my entire adult life, and arguably longer. (Was I really an “adult” at 18?) Since I first attended in 1999, whether I was able to go or not, my year revolved the festival. Even after I was chased out in 2017, the hole the festival left in my life was a gravity well around which everything else orbited. When I learned that 2023 would be the very last year, I was … extremely upset at the possibility that I might not get to go.

But I am a witch, and the world sometimes bends itself to my will. Help – and sales – came out of the woodwork. Not only were Aradia and I able to get out to festival, so was two thirds of our Lunar Shenanigans crew. Alvianna and I were out there Thursday through Monday. Aradia and Kraken joined us Friday afternoon. Juniper joined us Saturday. Kraken and Juniper were only there for the weekend, and left Sunday morning. Aradia, Alvianna, and I saw it through to the end.

The final iteration of the Heartland Pagan Festival wasn’t exactly what I wanted. I couldn’t get the whole Shenanigans crew out; of the Big Damn Heroes, only Cat still comes; and no-one in Camp Taco even still talks to each other, anymore, let alone comes out to festival. The fires were lackluster, and the dancers all tired quickly. Too many people were more interested in pickling their livers on Leather Lane.

But I did get what I needed. The weather was lovely: warm during the day and cool at night, and not a drop of rain. There were fires and dancing, if not enough of either, and there was a lovely afternoon at the beach. We drank mead, and we told stories of festivals past, both good and bad. We wandered from one camp to another, our wagon of blankets and bottles in tow. We tried our best to make new friends, and we huddled close to one another in the warmth of love and companionship. And Kraken did get to see the festival at least once. After eight years, my best friend finally got to see me in my natural habitat (if, granted, in a degraded form).

Few of the people most active in running me out of the organization were there, and those few who were there lacked the spine or spleen to start shit. A couple people even tried to make amends – though one was so drunk, he immediately forgot that I existed, and the other never really understood what he’d done wrong, in the first place.

In the end, the festival died as it lived. I attended the main ritual every night, but I was unable to hear most of what was said because the ritualists used neither voice technique nor amplification. The temple pilgrimage that replaced the vision quest and displaced both Saturday Night ritual and concert was a logistical mess, with one temple running their last workshop so late we couldn’t visit without interrupting, another closing early, and one simply never being set up.

The closing ritual reminded me a lot of the “Passing the Torch” festival from one of my early years, where the weary founders passed control over to the next generation of leadership. But, where that ritual was magnanimous and hopeful, honoring attendees and everyone who had ever helped to put on the festival, this ritual was a self-aggrandizing eulogy for the ambitions of the remaining members.

The current president, a woman whose own son was hurt by the same predator-friendly policies that my crew and I were tarred and feathered for trying to change, took the closing ritual as an opportunity to blame “lack of volunteerism” for the festival’s failure. She made a point of calling up any “current or past members” of the organization that runs the land to thank them publicly, but only brought up current leadership of the festival organization for similar recognition, ignoring current ground-level members and past leadership, including some founding members that were on site.

The Heartland Spiritual Alliance has promised that they will be back with something new. They’ve asked for community input, asked what the community wants. I doubt they’ll pull anything off, honestly. I know who’s left. Whatever they achieve will be as deeply cursed as the Heartland Pagan Festival was at its very worst, and I wish them all the very worst of their own bile.

I expected to spend much of the festival in tears, or deep depression, or possibly even being sought out and tormented by people who blamed me for the festival’s demise. (An absurd accusation, but well within the standard deviation of accusations flung at anyone who ever worked the festival then left.) And, certainly, there were moments of sadness, regret, and loss. But, mostly, what I felt was relief and closure.

I’m glad that I was there to see it end. I’m glad that it’s over. I couldn’t mourn the zombie the festival became after I was chased out. I can mourn the now-still corpse.

More than that, the corpse has no hold on me. The lines the zombie held me by have gone slack, and I can pull out the last of the hooks. I can retrieve the last of my power and bits of my soul that were stollen by the festival. My wounds can now well and truly heal.

It is over.

I am free.

In witchcraft

Beltane Oracle (or, Satyr’s First Prophesy)

Author Satyr MagosPosted on
high contrast image of the coals below the beltane fire, with a burning log that looks remarkably like a face

The Lunar Shenanigans Crew – the pseudo-coven I talk about so often, which I have at last decided to give it’s proper name in public – celebrated Beltane in our usual fashion, fucking off into the woods the last weekend in April. We were only able to get out for two nights, but we made the most of them. Friday night we celebrated with two of our oldest rituals: the Fuck You Fire and the I Love You, Man, fire. Saturday afternoon, I performed a personal cord-cutting ritual, one of my compatriots led a Sumbel, and we renewed our vows as Black Goat Brides – an idiosyncratic ritual that we got from Jack Grayle after he led it at Paganicon 2018. I have led the Black Goat Bride ritual several times. This year, I asked to try my hand at playing the oracle, after. They were content to let me try.

I have, in a fairly material sense, spent the last two years preparing for the role. The Lunar Shenanigans Crew spent a year of full moons Drawing Down the Moon to give each of us a bit of experience with that oracular priestex experience and role. Those of us most moved by the rite went on to form a spin-off group devoted to perfecting our trance-possession skills. Again, that endeavor deserves its own posts, but I haven’t quite figured out what to say about it.

The ritual as written gave us no formulae for preparing the oracle, only noted that one might be available at the end of the rite. Each of us who has taken that role has done so in our own way. Having received the groups blessing to play the oracle, I spent the next few hours preparing myself in the back of my mind. I think that I imagined that it would be the voice of Dionysos that came through, but what I got, instead, was my own oracular voice.

Satyr Magos was meant to be a nom de plume, not a magical name. My true magical name, which I have not and will not put in print, is more ambitious: a great seer and teacher of the mythic past. But for all that ambition, that aspiration, satyrdom is closer to my true nature, and that came through so strongly that when the voice first bubbled up in me, in the gap between talking through the details and the beginning of the rite, I literally laughed out loud.

When the rite was done, and we had all renewed our vows, I sequestered myself to prepare for and then perform my oracular duties. Preparation was largely a matter of checking in with myself, trying to determine if the voice was, in fact, oracular, not some strange delusion. But it felt right. It felt real. And if I hadn’t spent the last two years doing the work I’d been doing, I might not have been able to tell.

I wrapped my cloak around me. I draped my sacred cloth over my head. I stared deep into my crystal ball. I lit a cigarette, and then the candles to tell the crew waiting back at the main camp to tell them that I was ready.

“Who approaches the oracle?” I asked as each one came up to me. The raspy voice fit the mood, at first. Then the tone … shifted.

“Hi, NN, how’s it goin’?”

The oracular voice I found in myself that night was not the wise and noble seer of my ambitions, consulted by kings and heroes. No. I was a chainsmoking satyr who might have spent a little too much time in Brooklyn. But it was real.

“The important thing is to act,” I told one. “Once you’re moving, you can always course-correct.”

“If you’re looking for an idea, not a place,” I told another, “what you need isn’t a map. What you need is to find a rumor.”

“There’s basically two ways to be a maenad,” I told a third, “that’s full-time and part-time. Part-time has a lot of room for life and other obligations and ambitions; full-time, not so much.”

A lot of the details have faded since the night, of course. I remember just enough to get me into trouble. But the funniest thing, the thing I wanted to share with you all other than the surprising nature of the voice, was the one through line across the querents. At some point, they all asked a question that was too broad, too vague. And I would have to tell them to be more specific.

“I ain’t the Pythia,” I told them. “Just a satyr with ambition.”

“Pythia ain’t here,” I said at one point. “She’s up north with Apollo.”

I also remember that four of my five companions got real, solid answers. Things that felt right and helpful to them. The fifth, I’m sad to say, asked questions that I could find no answers to beyond my own common sense. She got robbed and I feel really bad about that. I think that the problem was how definite and material the questions were, and how far in the future. Or maybe I just dropped the ball.

But, overall, I think that I did well. I found my oracular voice and I was able to sustain it as long as it was needed. When that voice was not at all what I expected, I was able to check in with myself and determine that it was right. Maybe in another year or two, I will be more of that more noble seer whose name I took for my own back in 2009, before I even dreamed of the blog. But, for now, the Satyr Magician has spoken with a voice of prophesy, and has done well enough.

In witchcraft

Breaking Up With Bune

Author Satyr MagosPosted on

Back in 2017, I made a prosperity sachet using the seal of Bune. It was an unorthodox procedure, combining a bit of US folk magic with modern chaos and ceremonial magic, and (of course) my own unique style. Overall, it served me well. I wrote briefly about the positive results in 2019. And as the Sorcerer’s Workbench got me through the pandemic and turned enough profit that I was able to quit my day job at the beginning of this year, the relationship was strong and solid. I was making offerings with every sale, and more offerings at certain sales goals.

Then, toward the beginning of this year, things went sideways.

Back in December, I hit a Deneb Algedi election that provided swift and powerful results. Then in February, I cast two cohorts of Jupiter talismans, and kept two pieces for myself. And after that, sales got real slow.

Initially, I thought one or both of the Jupiter talismans was to blame. The two I had kept for myself had mis-cast – cold shuts that left gaps in the images – and, though they assured me that they wanted to live and to work with me, it was still only my second time casting elected talismans for sale and I was still waist-deep in the same mental health crisis that had led me to quit my day job with only half the savings I’d wanted, and, as such, I lacked confidence in my own perceptions. Additionally, as March waxed into April, one of those talismans was being very explicitly tetchy about working with a demon.

But I had been working with Bune for five years at that point, and – as a relational rather than strictly transactional practitioner – I was not prepared to end that relationship yet. So I contacted a peer – Asphodello of Ward and Weave – to check in. His suggestion – short of severing my relationship with Bune – was to set up separate altars and specific spheres of responsibility. That worked very well in the short term: May was a *very* good month.

But June, July, and August have been real challenges. Weird bank shit. Rude custom inquiries, including two requests to rip off another artist’s work. A shocking lack of interest in my elected Venus talismans. Constant reassurances from my familiar spirits and divinations that things were in the works, but no explanation for why they weren’t manifesting.

In August, I took advantage of some oracular work my coven and I are doing (that I’ll write up some day) to get a more clear perspective on what’s going wrong. The answers I got, in three separate sessions, were “make more offerings”, “make even more offerings, and a new altar”, and “you’re doing the wrong work”.

That last answer was, of course, infuriating. I’m putting in the material work. I’m putting in the spiritual work. If I’m missing something, then what?

So, I went back to the tarot. The divination I did for myself was, of course, unclear except in retrospect. “What should I be working on, instead?” *VIII Adjustment* Contracts and consequences? Dafuq? Clarification, please? *Princess of Cups* Feelings, intuition, and mediumship?

Clearly I wasn’t going to puzzle this out on my own. So, at last, I called my partner in. Aradia is one of the best diviners in our social circle; I should have asked her for help months ago, but I try not to abuse her time and talents.

Our first reading was a basic 10 card Celtic cross. It was lousy with court cards, and overall seemed to agree that everything was fine. The one off card was the 7 of Cups in the crown position, indicating that that was probably where my problem was. But that wasn’t actually a clear answer. Another spread indicated that I needed to change my magical approach. So we looked to the spirits on my prosperity altar: how do things stand with each of them?

The answer came with the first card in the next spread. Bune was the 7 of Cups. We named and inquired about each of the other spirits, too, but he was the only problem. Another draw indicated that it would sort itself out in time, but the solution was to sever the relationship. That left only when: immediately (6 of Disks, “that’ll work”) or when I clean my prosperity altar on Thursday (V the Hierophant, “this is the most correct way”).

So, two days later (an hour or so ago, as I write this; some days ago, as you read this), I did the deed.

Using the same conjuration that I had used to make my initial contact with Bune (found in Jason Miller’s Sorcerer’s Secrets), I called the spirit up and told him that it was time to end our relationship. I apologized for any insult I might have given, any accidental failure to fulfil my end of our contract, and for any number of possible slights. I disassembled the sachet and promised to bury it and the lamen at a crossroads, and to slag the metal seals that I had made for his altar. I made one last round of offerings – coffee, candle, incense – and it was done.

I felt him appear to hear me speak. I more than half expected protests, or promises of better behavior. I did not expect him to fade out so softly that I barely noticed.

Now, having completed the rite to release him and end our contract, I feel a very strange rush of energy. My heart is racing; I’m near tears. It’s more like a panic attack than mania or a meltdown, but it’s not any of those things.

I’m disappointed. I feel a little bit like a failure. Both are slightly silly.

My relationship with Bune was mutually profitable for five years. It fell apart when I started accumulating other financially beneficial spiritual relationships. Mostly, I’m frustrated that I didn’t realize more immediately that it was the demon who likes to be paid in public praise that was not playing well with the other spirits, not vice versa.

I feel the need to make absolutely clear that this story is not a cautionary tale about working with demons. It bears repeating that, despite my hilariously idiosyncratic methods, good guy Bune *delivered*. It might not even have been the other magic that I was doing that broke things: five years might just have been the absolute limit on the life of the mojo bag. Further divination might reveal some useful post-facto analysis. Bune might have also been happy to work with other spirits on the prosperity altar if it had occurred to me to consult him before conjuring them, instead of just piling the altar high with planetary petitions and Jupiter talismans and (more recently) Mercury talismans. But, without question, once it was over it was over. The cards were clear that there was no fixing what was broken.

And so I will end this with a note of final, formal, public praise for Bune, the 26th spirit of the Lesser Key of Solomon. For five good years, you brought me patrons and prosperity. Without you, the Sorcerer’s Workbench would not have been possible. Hail unto you, O Bune.

In witchcraft

Daily Practice, Two Years and Counting

Author Satyr MagosPosted on

In August of 2020, I joined the Deeper Down the Rabbit Hole Do Magick Challenge. The goal was 30 days of manifestation: set one or more measurable goals, and spend the month enchanting to make it happen. I set 30 intentions of varying importance and significance, sigilized them, and then launched one per day. Of the 30, I managed to get maybe 5 to appear within the month and the months following. (Gifts of red rocks and green rocks stand out in my memory, I know that there were a few others.) Objectively, the project had a very low success rate. Subjectively, the purpose of the work drifted over the course of the month, shifting from “manifest these things” to “developing and reaffirming my relationships with my familiar spirits through daily offerings”. That latter project, I think I can say as I begin working my twenty-sixth consecutive month, was a resounding success.

The ritual, at its heart, is very simple. Each morning I sit down, light a candle and a stick of incense, and share my first cup of coffee with my familiar spirits. The details have grown more elaborate, then been re-simplified, several times over the course of the last two years.

A candle in the morning escalated to a candle for each familiar spirit (the number of which has doubled in that time, owing to work with the Hekataeon and making Picatrix talismans), plus one to consecrate the altar, until I was burning eleven tealights a day and ultimately had a panic attack as I left the house one day, convinced the cats were going to set themselves and the house on fire. A tealight for each spirit was replaced by a single votive candle in a brass bowl, marked around the edge with each of their sigils. I still make candle offerings to everyone during other ceremonies, and that seems to be enough.

A stick of incense became one for the temple and one for the spirits.

And, most recently, nine familiars on one altar have been redistributed across three altars. My core six are still on my primary personal altar, but two have moved to my prosperity altar and one to join Hekate on her growing household altar. All of them still appear around me each morning, though.

There was a period where I set aside a day of the week to commune with each spirit individually – a process complicated by the fact that there were nine of them, and four didn’t have clear planetary associations. And that was important, for a while. And then, after a bit, it wasn’t so important anymore. They had said what they needed to say, and I had learned to hear them better.

Somewhere along the line, gods got involved.

Five gods live in in the bedroom where I keep my personal altar (and, since this summer, my office desk): Baphomet, Aphrodite, Eros, Lucifer, and Dionysos. In a sense, Hekate should have a shrine here, too, but she doesn’t like it when I have sex in front of her, so she stays in the back room with the public altars. Somewhere along the line, it seemed a natural evolution to begin including them in the daily offerings. That, probably inevitably, escalated to daily communions.

Daily communion with divinity, as long-time readers might guess, has been a … complicated experience for me. I am, despite everything, still very ambivalent about the notion of worship. And yet, I pour offerings … and the gods come when I call.

Some days, they come harder than others. I have had visions so intense that they left me shaken for weeks at a time. Other days, I can barely sense their presences.

Baphomet has appeared before me in forms that I have never seen or heard discussed elsewhere. I have alluded to this, but not yet been able to produce a clear image in art, let alone articulate the experiences in prose. A tryptich. In the center something like the best-known goat-headed figure: full-breasted, fat-bellied, ithyphallic, a lush and luscious androgyne, arms marked solve et coagvla, whom I call the Red God. To my right, a pale and moon-horned woman, blindfolded or perhaps eyeless, blind gaze to the heavens, hands open and arms loose, the White Lady. To my left, a shadowy figure with the antlered head of a deer’s skull, his body muscular and his hands upraised in a twin gesture of benediction, the Black Man or perhaps the Man in Black. I pray they awaken the light of Gnosis within me, those I love, and the people of the world.

Aphrodite has appeared before me, a shining beauty whose face is too bright to see. She bids me make art in her image. Every day I pray to be loved by her, by gods and mortals, and to have the strength to know when I am.

Eros has teased and mocked me. He is both the hypercosmic Eros the Elder, Eros Phanes, and as the teasing lusting lord of the Erotes. He says that I do not yet aprehend him. I pray to him that the light of creation shine through me, and that I burn always with passion and ambition.

Lucifer appears to me as the Dweller on the Threshold. As a transman. A beautiful pale figure standing before a monstrous shadow. I pray for secret knowledge, and to be free of the chains of my oppression, and to stand tall in the face of the heavens.

Dionysos appears to me always with his leopard. He is distant but loving. I pray to him for salvation, for freedom, for ecstasy.

Some days I can hear my familiars clearly. Sometimes they are almost physical presences. Sometimes I can barely sense them at all.

Some days they are demanding. More often they are comforting and reassuring. In the early days, they had a great deal to teach me. Now, lessons in magic come rarely, and usually in response to a specific need.

Sometimes the voices of the gods drown out the voices of my familiar spirits. Sometimes they stand back so that my spirits can be better heard. Sometimes I am a conduit for their power, channeling it into my familiars and the world. Sometimes I am simply overwhelmed.

I think that the most important thing I have learned from two years of daily practice is that, for me, there is a delicate balance between continuity and novelty. For the fist months, I tweaked the ritual constantly. Sometimes this was in response to my own needs – shifting from before bed, which often almost didn’t happen, to first thing in the morning, which is a very different sort of struggle for me; or when I had to reduce the fire hazard of a dozen daily candles. Sometimes this was at the prompting of the spirits, themselves.

I am at a point, right now, where I feel like more change is needed. I don’t know what change, just that I am struggling to stay focused and not let the ritual motions become rote and meaningless. I am struggling to hear the voices of gods or spirits, even my own.

I have said before and I will say again, this is a streak. It’s the longest I’ve ever run, but at some point it will be broken. At that time, I will re-evaluate my needs, and the needs of my magical guides and gods and friends and familiars, and we will proceed from there. For now, the work continues. August 2020 to September 2022, twenty-five months and counting.