Showing all posts tagged keeping score

In witchcraft

Diminishing Returns or Deepening Practice?

Author Satyr MagosPosted on 2 Comments

I think that all of us who practice real magic, real spirituality, real witchcraft, go through periods of feast and famine. Fallow periods, sometimes so long that we forget what magic is like. Periods of growth where everything is sharp and bright and we wonder how it is that anyone ever steps away. Periods of high strangeness where we feel alien beyond words. Periods of deep immersion, where we forget that there are people who don’t devote their lives to all this.

This blog has gone through a long fallow period, interrupted only by project announcements and brief shouts into the void. My personal practice, on the other hand, has been going through a long period of slow growth.

I am approaching eighteen months of daily practice, easily the longest consistent streak in my twenty-five years of magical practice. During that time, I have maintained a regular (but not clockwork) practice of Friday night offerings to the Venus(planet)-associated gods in my life, a regular (but not clockwork) lunar practice, including guiding my pseudo-coven through a daisy chain of Drawing Down the Moon rituals, taken advantage of every astrological election I could squeeze into my schedule, and a grown a magical jewelry business – consisting primarily of Picatrix talismans and Hekate devotional jewelry – from side gig to full time job.

And when I put it like that, holy shit does it sound like a lot. An epic adventure of magic and mayhem. Living the dream, right?

But in the day to day experience of it, it has often felt like a struggle. I will not even begin to pretend that I have managed to bring my A game to every one – or even half – of the 517 and counting daily offerings to my familiar spirits and the eclectic pantheon that live in my altar room. Nor, when I have, did the gods and spirits in question necessarily deign to respond. Nor, even when I really, truly, sincerely tried, did I always manage to clear enough of the mundane static and internal screaming to hear what the gods and spirits had to say when they deigned to speak.

I have been thinking about that struggle over the past couple weeks. I can’t say, exactly, when daily coffee offerings for my gods as well as my spirits escalated to daily prayer, but it did. Every day I pray to Baphomet to awaken the Gnostic fire within me. Every day I pray to Aphrodite to open my heart that I may know that I am loved. Every day I pray to Lucifer to help me throw off the chains of my oppression.

I do know that it was about a month ago that those basic prayers escalated to include prayers for initiation into the mysteries. And I also know that I have cried every morning for the last two weeks.

The slow, careful, methodical work of healing and personal growth and deepening spiritual practices … it’s not the fun, dramatic, glamorous kind of magic. And it often feels like diminishing returns.

 At the beginning of the challenge that grew into this daily practice, I was receiving new instructions from my familiar spirits nearly every day. I could barely keep up. Hell, I should probably go back through my journal entries just to see what didn’t sink in. I know that there are some special requests in there that I never got to fulfilling before getting distracted by the next demand or suggestion.

Now, on the days when I can both hear and understand my gods and familiars, my journal entries mostly just read “warm contact with gods; warm contact with familiars; all content; no clear messages”.

It’s worth remembering, here, that I got into magic in search of adventure and high strangeness. I practiced kinds of magic that got me high. And, looking back on my magical youth, I think that sense of diminishing returns is what often led to fallow periods. Then, when I came back, everything would be bright and sharp again. And I wonder if others have had the same experience, if many of us have mistaken deepening practice for diminishing returns. Because, even on days when I’m so tired or depressed that I’m half-glad I’m not receiving potent visions of divinity, or clear instructions from my familiars, I’m also disappointed.

I’ve seen it said often enough that it’s probably officially cliché, but it is still worth repeating that a magical or spiritual practice is practice in both senses of the term: a thing you do repeatedly for its own sake, and doing a thing repeatedly in order to get better at it. How many of my magical and experiences in the last year were made possible by that praxis? If I had not been doing my daily ritual for nine months last Beltane, could I have led the Dionysiac ritual as well as I did? Could I have been possessed, let alone spread that possession as the contagion it was meant to be?

This streak won’t last forever. When it ends, probably after some amazing ecstatic ritual culminating in brain-borking gnosis (or maybe when I just fuck off into the desert), I will enter another fallow period. When that happens, I will probably focus on some mortal art – maybe actually finishing some of the novel drafts that have brought me to tears over the last year. It’s the natural cycle of things. Only the independently wealthy or those with infrastructure support can go forever without breaks.

But I hope that I will be able to carry these lessons forward, and remember that the returns of a regular practice are not diminishing as quickly as they may feel.

In scholarship, witchcraft

Stellar Sorcery: Introductory Experiments

Author Satyr MagosPosted on

I have been dabbling with old school astrological talismanic magic for a few years now. It started with the Ceremonial Experiment while I was in college, synthesizing what I was picking up from Rufus’ Opus blog with what I could glean from Christopher Warnock’s yahoo mailing list. I produced a handful of well-elected talismans that helped get me through college, and which still sit on my altar today (even though the prevailing wisdom is that talismans of paper and herbs never should have worked in the first place, let alone for so long). In the years since, I’ve produced a variety of talismans and performed an assortment of rituals using my ever-improving understanding of astrological timing and images, with varying degrees of success.

Over the last year or so I have finally deepened my understanding of astrology to the point where I can mostly follow Chris Brennan’s podcast and was delighted to receive his book for Christmas. And I have also, finally, begun to work my way through the Picatrix from cover to cover.

The Picatrix was written in a time and place where magic was understood through the lens of a very limited and limiting spirit model. Obviously, my own understanding an practice of magic is much more syncretic. My spirit modelling draws on Classical, Late Antiquity, Medeival, Rennaisance, and 21st Century shamanic spirit practices. I also work using 20th and 21st energy and spirit models.

I, personally, understand the planetary spheres as magical realms and currents in which spirits live. I believe that it is possible to access those currents directly, without intermediary spirits. I am also finding, through trial and error, that those two approaches are good for very different things. That is to say, that they can produce entirely different genres of error-comedy.

The Picatrix admonishes to have faith that the magic will work, and warns sternly against experimentation. Unfortunately, while I can be good at following directions, “do not experiment” is … not a direction I can follow. So the experiments continue, undaunted by stuffy medieval magicians.

The Framework

Stellar Sorcery, as the modern practice of performing spells and crafting talismans by the use of Medieval and Renaissance astrological timing is coming to be called, is a young discipline wherein the competing schools of thought are all shiny, new, and hot to the touch. The schools of thought within that discipline are too young to be named. One can only cite one’s influences — Christopher Warnock, Kaitlin and Austin Coppock, Clifford Lowe, and so on — and one’s references — the Picatrix, Agrippa, what have you. In case it wasn’t clear, those are mine. They might be ashamed to know it, given how fast and loose I play with the rules.

The components of Stellar Sorcery are deceptively simple:
1) Astrological timing. Certain things are available at certain times.
2) Vocalized prayer and petition. You have to say it out loud. You have to tell the spirits what you want.
3) Physical maeteria. The talismans are vessels for the power/spirits. They must be appropriate (however you define that from your primary sources of choice). They must be made as well as you are able.
4) Fumigation. You seal the deal by holding the talsimanic maeteria in the smoke of your offerings.

You can always add more, but these four things are essential. There’s not a lot that Warnock, Coppock, and Lowe all agree on. These four are it, and my experience so far bears it out.

The experiments I describe below are not the whole of my experience, only the most relevant and best-documented

2012 Jupiter in Sagitarius Talisman

My first semesters of college were a battle against the registrar. She didn’t want to take more credits than she absolutely had to from my declasse community college. At times it felt like she didn’t want to be bothered even looking at my file. I was in her office every week, as polite as I could be, but there wasn’t any traction.

Until, early in my ceremonial experiments, Christopher Warnock offered up this election to his Spiritus Mundi mailing list. Back then he announced elections far enough in advance that you could do something with them, and even offered pdfs with images and prayers. That was a good year for Jupiter, and I hit that election twice: once at dawn, and once at the 3 o’clock second Jupiter hour of that day.

Lacking better maeteria at the time (I was in college, no access to jewelry supplies) I made a paper talisman. I printed the Image of Jupiter that Warnock provided on one note card and various sigils, seals, and characters of Jupiter on the back. I glued the two pages together, sealing Jupiterian herbs and oils in the middle. I called upon the spirits and powers of Jupiter using the Thomas Taylor translation of the Orphic Hymns in the ritual I had cobbled together by following the work Rufus Opus, then blessed the talisman using Warnock’s Picatrix prayer.

I took that talisman with me to the registrar’s office the next day and not only did she finally open my file and finally start looking at my transfer credits, by the end of the semester I had gotten credit for things she swore up and down couldn’t transfer.

2020 Venus in Pisces Talisman

There were a series of semi-questionable Venus elections at the beginning of this year. The Moon and Venus were constantly dodging ill aspects to Mars and Saturn in Capricorn. But I was desperate to try my hand at electioneering and talisman crafting.

I had successfully cast a set of four shibuichi talismans as prototypes and wanted to experiment with casting during an election. A comedy of errors ended up surrounding the attempt to cast the talismans — Alvianna and I had some miscommunications and oversights about what tools I would need to bring from work, then her kiln turned out to be completely unsuitable, and we ultimately decided that casting in her shop was a “later” project. Perhaps a wiser magician would have stopped there, but I did some divination and decided to proceed by blessing the prototypes.

In addition to the relatively basic Stellar Image ritual — prayers, offerings, &c. — I added a component at the end where I asked that the name and sigil of the spirit of each talisman be revealed to me. I also formally consecrated a copper talisman that I had used to tap into the current of the image and been carrying for some time.

My talisman, to date, has produced good results. I have become increasingly inspired and disciplined about creating art. My friends and partners immediately became more physically demonstrative with me. And, by virtue of having their name and sigil, the talismanic spirit has effectively become a fourth familiar spirit (we are currently in search of an appropriate statue for them). I attribute the success of the Eye of Beauty ritual, in part, to my relationship with my familiar.

Reports from my friends who took the shibuichi prototypes have been more mixed. One has not really worn theirs. One has carried theirs to no effect. One described the talisman as heart-opening. One has reported frequent crying. I need to check in for updated reports.

Some observations from the whole of the process:

2020 Sun in Aries Talisman

We got this election from a variety of sources: a co-conspirator in the PGM Praxis group pointed it out first; it was also available in Nina Gryphon’s March election newsletter. We researched the election as thoroughly as we could, finding a couple potential issues with the Moon (according to Picatrix rules that later authors seemed to find excessively restrictive), but went ahead with it anyway.

We selected our prayers by divination, with clear results: 9 cups and 9 disks for the Picatrix prayer, Art and the Devil for the PGM prayer, and the Sun for both.

Aradia mixed a tincture while I scribed the sign of Och on a citrine pendant and three slices of amber that I had cut the night before. Then, together, we made paper talismans, one set bearing a Picatrix Image of the First Face of Aries and another bearing a Renaissance Image of the Sun. Things felt good, but off, until the last minute when I realized that we had not fumigated the talismans. Hastily we threw another lump of frankincense on the charcoal, fumigated everything, repeated the PGM Prayer to Helios a final time, and everything snapped into place. Because we used the whole election window to create and bless the talismans, I have not yet asked for names and sigils for them. I will do that once they’ve had a week to set.

Early Observations and Hypotheses

It’s too early to call anything a conclusion, except that magic is cool and making talismans is fun. I have, however, made some clear observations and have begun formulating some hypotheses.

The skill of the magician is relevant. All your magical skills are relevant, and more skills make a better magician.

Meditation makes it easier to see and hear spirits.

Having good relationships with spirits improves your stellar sorcery. Being beloved of your gods and familiars and allies makes your stellar sorcery stronger, regardless of your arts-and-crafts skills or your ability to find a perfect election. The reverse is probably also true: if you annoy the gods, they’re probably not going to do you any favors.

Better ritual makes for better magic. Elections can be short, but that doesn’t mean you can’t have everything good to go and spend half an hour before the window making offerings to your gods and familiars and getting them and you wound up for the work.

Doing energy work makes you a better vessel and conduit for planetary powers and currents. Just because Medieval and Renaissance writers didn’t know about it doesn’t make it not real or not relevant.

Paper talismans absolutely have a shorter life than talismans made of metal and stone. The once-prevailing wisdom that they are utterly inert, however, is demonstrably false. All things of this earth are mortal: remember how old the universe really is.

Working with a talisman as a spirit-ally seems to improve its efficacy exponentially.

Regarding casting the shibuichi talismans, specifically:

1) The talismans felt inert at the time of casting. Some people have told me that the pouring of the metal is the magically operative moment, but it didn’t feel like it to me. When I broke the talismans off the sprue, however, is another matter: it was like a tiny vortex opening up.

2) I have made a lot of magical jewelry using various schools of thought. Cleaning, filing, and polishing the rough cast in preparation to be enchanted felt like crafting a vessel, as opposed to other talismans I have made using other schools of thought where I could feel the spell coming together as I assembled each component, with everything snapping together as the final pieces went in place.

3) It is entirely possible that if I had been able to either cast the talismans, or pull them from their sprue during the enchanting ceremony, things would have gone even better. With that said, the spirits called did not resist entering the finished vessels and seemed happy at the time. The one I have worked with since seems very happy, except that they want the same honors my other familiar spirits receive, which is reasonable.

In witchcraft

Hekate: An Unexpected Devotion

Author Satyr MagosPosted on 2 Comments

This week has marked an anniversary, half-forgotten in the madness of 2018. This time last year, my working group participated in the global Rite of Her Sacred Fires. It was not the first time I had invoked Hekate, but it was the most significant up to that point.

I must emphasize “up to that point”. Hekate began to appear more frequently on our docket, culminating in a devotional Samhain ritual in which I make made myself a vessel for her so that my compatriots could approach and petition her for aid. Three months after that, Jack Grayle’s Hekataeon went live. Aradia and I dove in head first. Our copy arrived just in time for Paganicon, and we started the work as soon a we got back.

I am 38 years old. I have been practicing magic since I was 16. But I was raised with the blandest (functionally atheist) sort of Protestantism, and I did not reach out to the gods until I was 28. Excepting my easy relationship with Dionysus, I did not manage to cultivate anything resembling a devotional practice until I was 30, and that was very much rooted in the particular circumstances of the Sunrise Temple. I have had relationships with a wild variety of spirits and an eclectic assortment of gods and powers, but little of it resembled anything akin to worship. And until a year ago, Hekate was never even on my radar.

I began to work the Hekataeon at the end of March, as I was coming out of a deep depression, a descent that began early in 2017 and bottomed out last Thanksgiving. The ascent has been steep but rocky, and it is difficult to say how much of my improvement is the native cycle of my fucked up brain and how much is as a result of the work. I could not have begun the work had I not begun to feel better at the first of the year. Any daily practice would certainly have improved my life. But also, the calming and cleansing of mania is a recurring theme in the Hekataeon.

Now, a year after that first significant contact, I have participated in the Rite of Her Sacred Fires for the second time. I had just completed the twenty-seven days of devotional meditation that comprised the second section of the Hekataeon, studying the facets of Hekate, and was about to make the transition from Devotee to Adept. By the time this post goes live, I will have completed that initiation.

Jack Grayle’s vision of Hekate is Gnostic, cosmic — the beginning and end of all. As I dig in to his ancient sources, and compare them to other modern visions, I find that he is not alone in this. I wish that I were in a financial position to take Jason Miller’s Hekate Sorcery course.

I am a sorcerer. A witch. A heretic. A Gnostic. I make handshake deals and back alley bargains with spirits. I treat with gods and demons and angels as equals. I seek ecstasy. Not Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel, but rather Gnosis — knowledge of the divine power from which mortal and immortal life both spring, and which I cannot believe is a person of any kind, not even a god. I reject the capital G.

Though I have courted a few, with varying degrees of success — Apollo, Hephaestus, Aphrodite, Baphomet — Dionysus is the only god I have truly loved. I did not seek out Hekate, but rather met her through my friends. One thing led to another. And now … I have graduated from disinterested third party Reader to Devotee … and now to Adept. Degrees of priesthood follow, culminating in a binding contract that will last into future lives.

Devotion in this life I am prepared for. I do not know, however, that I am prepared to make any promises about the next.

For now, though, the road ahead of me is obscure. I do not know, precisely, what will be asked of me. The work may reject me before I am forced to reject it. Or the goddess and I may come to more complex and nuanced arrangements. Decision, after all, is her sacrament.

Until then, it seems, I am Devoted. Very much to my own surprise.

In witchcraft

Prosperity Mojo: Further Work with Bune

Author Satyr MagosPosted on

In early November, shortly after Jupiter entered Sagittarius, Aradia and I decided that the stars were reasonably well aligned for our working group to do some prosperity magic. But because our working group was getting a little burnt out on charging sigils with Orphic hymns, we decided to go in a slightly different direction: pulling out our collections of scrap fabrics, herbs, loose stones, oils, and whatnot, we decided to make mojo bags.

Having previously worked with Bune (October-November of 2018), I made the spontaneous decision to include the seal I had hand-engraved in brass in the otherwise conventionally Jupiterian prosperity talisman. It sits on my altar and I spritz it with prosperity spray every pay period.

But Bune likes public praise, and I’ve got to hand it to him: he’s delivering. Despite an otherwise slow holiday season at work, every pay check has been above average. My ebook sales bumped, and my Kindle Unlimited pageviews skyrocketed. It’s not a huge amount of money, but it’s workable and sustainable growth.

I keep hearing about how dangerous it is to work with Goetic spirits. How they’ll fuck up your brain and your life. And, don’t get me wrong, there’s some folks in the Lesser Key that I won’t touch with a ten foot pole. And it’s always possible that there’s something unique about my natal chart or my previous magical practice that makes my situation special. But so far, I’ve found Bune to be a reasonable and companionable partner in crime.

In Uncategorized

Another Year in Review

Author Satyr MagosPosted on

This year sucked.

I mean, not all of it, obviously. I’m not dead yet. Still walking and talking. I even accomplished some really amazing and important things that, in the rear view mirror, may eventually loom larger than the sucking. But for the most part, I spent this year crashing and burning after the stress and betrayals and hurts and failures of the awful year that came before.

People better known and more clever than I have been joking for months that 2018 was absolutely no less than three years long. I deeply resonate with that. Looking back at the first two thirds of this year, I can’t even say for sure what happened when because there doesn’t seem to be enough time for that much to have happened.

For that matter, the first third of this year blurs together with the last months of 2017. There was an awful lot of suck. Frankly, I don’t even know how to get into it without being accused of rumor mongering and poo-flinging, which is a large part of my radio silence over the last year and a half. The short version is that, following my departure from the HSA in November/December of 2017, I withdrew from public participation in the KC Pagan community entirely and lost a few friends along the way. I then proceeded to bleed on everyone within anime-blood-spray distance, and things only got more unpleasant from there.

Hands down, this has been the worst year for my mental health since 2004, which I spent almost exclusively hiding in the basement of The House on Shoal Lane. It even beat out Fall Semester 2012, which featured daily panic attacks and more reasons I will never trust a mental health professional. As unpleasant as it was to be around me, it was even worse to be me.

At the same time, there were some truly amazing accomplishments.

Even as other parts of my life were burning down around my ears, I spent the first three months of 2018 putting the final polish on my debut novel, getting the typesetting just right, and ultimately putting The Mark of the Wolf in print. I am now a published author. Bucket list item checked.

At some point last winter, a friend admitted to me that he was the proud owner of an under-used farrier’s forge. Over the summer, he, Kraken, and I set about teaching ourselves blacksmithing. I won’t say that we’re experts (or even very good), but I have now made three knives (mostly; I need to get a chainmail glove before I try to put an edge on them). Bucket list item checked.

(Between those two accomplishments, I have done everything that I dreamed of as a sixth-grade satyr. My childhood vision of my life is complete.)

After a year of trying and failing to get a D&D game off the ground, I launched my first 5th Edition campaign in a brand-new homebrew setting in March. The campaign is still going strong and a bunch of people I barely (if at all) knew are now my friends. While nothing compared to the preceding or following accomplishments, this is my first campaign since I stopped gaming for college in 2011, and has been one of my chief points of stability amidst the madness.

In June, the private working group Aradia and I have been hosting passed it’s one-year mark. At Samhain we came up with a motto.

At midnight New Years, as 2018 becomes 2019, I will have been with my primary partner Aradia for ten fucking years. This is an accomplishment that I did not, could not, envision as a child. Or even as an adult. Frankly, I’m struggling to wrap my head around any one putting up with me for that long even as it’s happening.

After a year long hiatus from public ritual, Aradia, Chirotus, and I submitted an application to perform a public ritual at Paganicon 2019. We were accepted, and our Classically-inspired purification ritual is currently scheduled to go just before the opening ceremony. (No pressure.)

In retrospect, regardless of how awful 2017 was, I think that a collapse this year was both inevitable and necessary. 2018 was the first year since 2011 (when I started Real Liberal Arts College in Sunrise, Indiana) that I haven’t been burning the candle at both ends. I knew since April that what I needed was isolation. It took till July or August before I got to the point where I just stopped returning messages. I should have just told (more) people that I needed to go away for a while and just done that instead of waiting until I Just Couldn’t Anymore and ghosting. I guess we’ll see in the coming months how badly those bridges are burned.

I want to end this on some clever note, maybe something upbeat. I don’t have it in me. But here we are, on the cusp of the new year. At risk of tempting fate, I’ll just take this moment to tell 2018 to fuck right off. You didn’t kill me, you fucking fuck. To the rest of you: raise a toast tonight to your own divinity, if nothing else. Raise one to the rest of us if you have it in you. I’ll see you all on the flip side.

In Uncategorized

Life Chapter N+1

Author Satyr MagosPosted on

It is a common fallacy among writers, or so I am told, to see our own lives as a narrative arc.  I am more guilty of this than most.  I know that it is a fallacy.  I know that real life is, for better and worse, much, much stranger than fiction.  I know that mortal lives are always messier than that.  And yet … the arc of a story remains the chief frame through which I experience the world.

The last chapter of my life began when, upon graduating college, I moved back to Kansas City.  I returned to the mall jewelry store where I had spent the previous six years, off and on.  I volunteered with the organization that puts on the festival that had been the highlight of my year since 1999.  I got involved in a relationship with someone who, though the romance didn’t last, has proved one of the best friends I’ve ever had.  I buckled down and finished my first novel, and successfully ran a Kickstarter to start a publishing company to print that novel.  I started producing jewelry of my own design, mostly for myself and my closest friends, but solid work that I’m proud of.  I took up a whole new art, photography, which I grow better at each time I pick up my camera.

In December of this year, I formally resigned from all my positions and responsibilities within the festival organization.  In February, I released my novel into the world.  In March I taught one of my energy work classes at the Witches’ Meet-Up, my first class hosted outside the HSA.  All this to say, I believe that these events mark the start of a new chapter in my life.  I don’t know, precisely, what the road will look like, but it is my hope that it ends with me as a full time professional Pagan.  I’m already working in a Pagan jewelry store.  I have just released a Pagan novel.  I am building a small repertoire of workshops on magical technical skills.

In the last chapter of my life, I took on too much responsibility, too quickly, without adequately vetting the people I was working with.  In this next chapter of my life, I hope to deepen my personal practice, to deepen the relationships that survived the previous chapter, and to make more art.

Thank you everyone who’s been along for the ride.

 

In Uncategorized

Season of Contemplation

Author Satyr MagosPosted on

The final months of the year are always a period of deep contemplation for me.  Samhain, Yule, New Years.  My birthday and my partner’s, and our anniversary.  Five different calendars turn over from 31 October to 1 January, plus Thanksgiving and Christmas and all the navel-gazing that goes with that.  This year, even more than most, I have a lot to contemplate.

Usually, I begin the season with a sort of revel: dressing up for days leading up to Halloween, each costume more outrageous than the last, and greeting each night with as much wine and ecstacy as I can muster.  I have pushed the boundaries of dress codes at my places of employment, unnerved the casual libertines of a residential liberal arts college, been too weird for the weirdest town in Kansas.  I have gone out into the world to be seen, to confront the squares with the life they could have if only they’d grow a soul and a spine.

This morning, however, I woke in a mental place of quiet.  I have no revel in me, today.  My thoughts circle on who I am and what I want.  I find that my answers do not come as readily as they have in the past.

Mine is not a simple life.  Much of that is by choice, but at the core it’s also my nature.  I am not now, nor ever have I been, nor ever shall I be a “get-along, go-along” kind of person.  I have always believed in things that others do not; always wanted things that were not what was prescribed for me.  I have always not pursued those desires – all other arguments aside, there are only so many hours in the day – but I have always stood up for what I believe in the face of not just convention, but actual authority.

This year has seen a great deal of both those things.  The one has left me blessed, surrounded by more love and stronger community than in many years.  The other has left me adrift as certain ambitions were broken on the rocks of my ideals, shattered by my refusal to be expedient with my ethics.

This year, I have been victorious and beloved.  This year, I have been disappointed and betrayed.  Certain magical operations have, all rather suddenly and together, born fruit: I feel like there is more of me than there has been in years, and that I can see more clearly than I have since the Sunrise Temple … or possibly even Lawrence.  At the same time, though, I feel like the world is murkier by the day, and that even more of me isn’t enough for the work at hand.

The last year has seen the rise of a new autocratic strain in US politics, and a savage resurgence of white supremacy in both the US body politic at large and the KC neo-Pagan community in particular.  Homophobia and heteronormativity are coming back like a tide, and allies are mistaking the most banal lip service for real support.

In this moment, I’m feeling mostly good.  In an hour that might change.  Looking back over the last year, I’m really not certain I can say that there hasn’t been more down than up.  So begins the season of contemplation.

 

In witchcraft

Do Magick Challenge: Beginner’s Mind Master Post

Author Satyr MagosPosted on

In the Beginning

I have intended to participate in Andrieh Vittimus’ Do Magick Challenge for some time.  My tendency to lose months at a time has resulted in me checking the web page days into each challenge and having missed the research period several times, now.  Including this month, actually, but Jason and Andrieh made it clear on the podcast that one could join at any time this month.  And so I did, posting my Statement of Intent on the second day of September and diving in head first.  I set myself a number of goals: daily meditation; magickal art three days a week; conjuring the Spirit Bune; and, finally and most importantly, the rediscovery of my sense of magical play.

Week One

On the first week, I opened strong.  On Day One, I sat down to meditate for the first time in weeks — it had been perhaps months, actually, since I last mediated outside the Esbat circle.  On Day Two I performed Andrieh’s Baphomet ritual, and then confronted the reality that the mundane world changes at its own pace.  On Day Three I made my first serious efforts at my goal to do more magical art, devoting hours to my Mask of Venus, then spent the evening in Esbat rituals attempting to rid myself of baleful influences.  On Day Four I did more magical art — working on both the Venus Mask and a number of apotropaic jewelry designs — and made myself a charm against the evil eye.  On Day Five I continued my mask-making and escalated my mediation practice.  On Days Six and Seven I coasted, only meditating, but I began to notice changes in my dreaming.  Additionally, on Day Seven Aradia began joining me for meditation.

Despite resting on my laurels the last two days, I feel like the first week was a success.  I did a lot of magic and a lot of art.  Coming from practically no meditation to meditating daily is an intense lifestyle change.  The depression and anxiety that plagued me before beginning the project did not, of course, vanish immediately.  In fact — an upside to journaling, I guess — they initially got worse.

Week Two

In the second week, Aradia and I added planetary invocations to our daily work, immediately before nightly meditations.  Days Eight, Nine, and Ten were slow days for most of my goals, but I continued to escalate my meditation times slowly and escalated the planetary magic from previous versions of our ritual by reading both the Thomas Tayor and Apostolos Athanassakis translations.  On Day Eleven I returned to my masks, and did some divination to help me decide how I wished to approach the spirit Bune, and on Day Twelve I went through with that conjuration.  Day Thirteen was meditation only and on Day Fourteen I strung myself a necklace for my Baphomet pendant but missed my daily meditation.

In this second week I continued to increase my daily meditation time and, in doing so, I began discerning changes in my energetic body.  I also particularly struggled to balance my mundane and magical lives.  I made my three days of magical arts and crafts, and achieved my goal of conjuring the Goetic spirit Bune, but failed at my goal of daily meditation.

 

Week Three

In the third week, my physical health failed me.  Day Fifteen was exhausting, and I barely managed my daily routine.  On Day Sixteen I turned a museum trip with my mother into a magical experiment, examining mummies with a magical eye, then collapsed onto the couch for the next two days (17, 18), though I was able to resume meditation and planetary rituals on Day Eighteen.  On Day Nineteen, I was feeling mostly better and went through with teaching a class on using the Classical Planets as a source of power for freeform energywork.  On Day Twenty I collapsed again, sicker than I had been yet; I went into work then needed someone else to drive me home.  On Day Twenty One I called in sick and spent the day on my couch, working on magical jewelry designs.

I managed only one day of magical art and missed a second day of meditation.

 

Week Four

I did my best to come back strong in week four, but my total collapse in week three left both me and my house in serious disarray.  It was struggle to resume even daily planetary rituals and meditation, let alone my loftier goals.  In retrospect, I pushed myself too hard, because I wasn’t really fully myself again until Day 28.

On Day Twenty Two I managed 22 minutes of meditation.  This would prove to be the peak.  It was also the second day in a row when I experienced intense sensory non-sequiturs.  See the daily records for details.  On Day Twenty Three I experimented with adding the Qabalistic cross and pentagram banishing to my daily rituals.  On Day Twenty Four I began designing and constructing a new set of house wards.  That night I gave up on my goal of escalating to 30 minutes of meditation by the end of the month and began setting my timer for 15 minutes.  On Day Twenty Five I decided to fumigate the house to clear out any lingering bad vibes.  On Day Twenty Six I meditated only, and on Day Twenty Seven I managed only my planetary ritual and meditation.  On Day Twenty Eight I succeeded in tracing an amulet gifted to me to a particular grimoire,

Overall, in that week I succeeded only at meditating daily.

Denouement

On Days Twenty Nine and Thirty, I concluded my Beginner’s Mind experiment by erecting the first two layers of my new household protective wards, invoking the Sun and Moon by Taylor’s Orphic Hymns and empowering the talismans with Picatrix invocations.  I meditated fifteen minutes each night.

In theory, I wanted to end the month of magic with a bang.  In the moment, though, I was just glad to have made it through.

In Conclusion

At the beginning of September, I chose a particular (broad) interperetation of the Beginner’s Mind challenge.  Where others cracked open grimoires,  or sought to master various forms of divination, I sought to reclaim a portion of my own mind.  Over the course of several previous magical experiments and programs, I have painted myself into various corners.  I miss the enthusiasm with which I once pursued and practiced the magical arts.  To that end, as detailed above, I set myself a number of smaller challenges.

I challenged myself to meditate daily, starting at five minutes and escalating to thirty.  I … mostly succeeded.  I meditated 28/30 days.  One day I missed in favor of a hot date.  One day I missed because I was sick as fuck.  I ultimately capped out at 22 minutes of meditation, then settled for a more achievable goal of 15 minutes.

I challenged myself to work on magical art three days a week.  I succeeded at that for the first two weeks, but failed abominably in the second two.

I challenged myself to conjure the spirit Bune.  I did so.  That conjuration has yet to receive results, but so far the spirit contact has proved positive and potentially fruitful.

I challenged myself to follow my magical whims.  They proved less, well, whimsical than I had imagined they might, but overwhelmingly succeeded in this.  I can recall only one whim I did not follow through on, and that was because the particular school of thought I wished to apply to a situation proved inapplicable in that moment, and then I forgot about it before the opportune moment arose.

All this with the ultimate goal of reclaiming my magical practice.  Of finding the fun back.  In that, I think, I succeeded.  I no longer feel so constrained by the schools of thought I have studied.  I feel like my magic is my own again.  And I’m excited to move forward with my art and experiments.

I am also reminded very viscerally of the value of daily meditation.  At the beginning of September, I was a depressed and anxious mess, despite how objectively awesome my life is.  During the first week, perhaps slowing down to confront those feelings, I actually fell down a little further.  In the weeks since, however, despite the physical illness I suffered in week three, I’m feeling incredibly better emotionally.  We can see some evidence of this, in fact, in this and my previous blog post.  I’m actually writing again, something I hadn’t done in a while.

The Do Magick Challenge came with its own requirements, chief among them daily public journaling.  The value of that has been demonstrated what I should have already known, which is the value of such journaling.   I don’t wish to spam my followers (or continue the particular self-censorship public journaling requires), so I must now challenge myself to do one of the important sorcerer’s tasks I have never quite managed before.

And with all this written up, I now look forward to the next Do Magick Challenge.  I’ll try not to be a stranger here in the interim.

In witchcraft

Beginner’s Mind

Author Satyr MagosPosted on

This month’s Do Magick challenge is the beginner’s mind.

For this challenge, you are to work with a new system, set of techniques, or use any new experience or hobby to force yourself into the beginner’s mind and use it.  Get excited about your magic again. Ideally you would use the new techniques or paradigm does as often as possible in the 30 days.

What, though, is the beginner’s mind?  What I hear in Andrieh’s choice of words and suggested activities is an attempt to return to a state Tarot describes as The Fool: curiosity in the face of the unknown, courage uninhibited by past failures or an overabundance of knowledge.

But my beginner’s mind was already full of fear.  I owned Crowley’s Goetia, but I was afraid to conjure spirits.  I had an emerging talent for clairsentience that outstripped my friends’ empathy or divination by hilarious degrees, but I was afraid of the things that I could know.  I got high weirdness effects out of goddamn Tarot readings, but never pursued them for fear of monsters.  I had an embarrassment of riches and did fuck all with it.  I had no hesitation to try things that no one else had ever heard of before, but staples of magical practice … well, besides Tarot, if it didn’t scare me too much to try it, then it was passé.

There are things, though, that I do miss about my beginners mind.  I miss how relatively few preconceived notions I had cluttering up my brain, leaving me free to invent forms of energy manipulation that I have yet to see in print and to perceive spirits and worlds with a clarity I recall now like a dream.  My home town was mine, and I could feel the pulse and flow of its life; synchronicity put me in the right place at the right time with a regularity that made it seem mundane until it stopped happening when I moved away.  Magic, in every instance but the very most terrifying in-my-own-home-apparitions,

Finding my way into this month’s Do Magick Challenge will be a bit of a challenge in and of itself: as a voracious reader, a giant art nerd, and a witch with twenty-one years of magical experience,  there is nothing left magically or artistically (which I currently know exists) that I have not put at least three months study or experimentation into already.  That’s hardly expertise, but neither does it leave much room for that uncluttered “beginner’s mind” we’re speaking of.

I’m late to the game, because I lost control of my life, but I’m going to play along at home anyway because … well, frankly, I need to.  I need to find back that uncluttered curiosity, that sense of play.  To do so, I will set myself several goals:

  • I will meditate daily.  I will begin at five minutes daily, escalating over the course of the month until I am meditating 30 minutes daily.
  • I will spend three days a week engaged in some sort of magical arts and crafts for at least twenty minutes each of those days.  Although I hope to produce many magical talismans and images over the course of the month, in particular I aim to finish my Mask of Venus and produce a photographic version of the Image of Venus as described in the Picatrix. (Anyone want to model for that one for me?)
  • I will conjure the spirit Bune to bring me riches.  In doing so, I will face my first great magical fear — the conjuring of demons — and make my first practical foray into the last major area of magic which I have studied but not practiced.  Goetia here I come.
  • Most importantly, I will rediscover my sense of magical play.  I will achieve this through magical art on the one hand, but also by giving in to every magical impulse that I possibly can over the course of the next thirty days. Decide I want something?  Make and fire a sigil on the spot.  Feel like electrocharging my lover with the spirit of Venus?  Hell to the yeah (as long as she, they, or he think it sounds like fun).  Has it come time to curse those bastards?  Let’s do it.  This building feels like it needs a little Lunar bombardment?  Let’s do some energy and breathwork and make everybody purple for the day.

This is me throwing my hat into the ring.

Today’s magical impulse coincides with magical art and the conjuration of Bune: while at work, I made myself a brass talisman featuring his seal.  Not fancy, just a hand-cut brass disk engraved using a ball but, but it’ll do the trick.  Now, let’s go meditate.

In witchcraft

Light in Darkness: A Long Unanswered Call

Author Satyr MagosPosted on

The temple space was erected in my craft room: an altar flanked by couches and sitting cusions, air thick with incense, and lit only by candles.  I stand outside over a secondary altar, lighting a bundle of sage to fumigate each participant before entering.  A line is forming behind Aradia, awaiting my attentions.

I know all these people: they trust and respect me.  I began the night by returning to the Headless Rite.  I should be at the top of my game.  I am not.  Neither the fumigation nor the anointing packs the punch that it should.

At last, everyone is in the circle.  Aradia takes charge and we cast the circle hand to hand.  She has been feeling less than herself, as well, and asks the group for healing and purification.  As she takes her position in the center of the circle, all rise and reach out to offer what aid they can.

One by one, most of us take our turn in the center.  This is not my strong suit.  Somehow, despite a couple spectacular successes, I have never devoted any real time to energetic healing.  Mostly, I try to keep the energy level in the circle high, so that our less experienced participants are not draining themselves needlessly.

At some point, I, too, take my turn in the center.  I feel everyone reach out to me, feel them brush the edges of my energetic body.  I try to let them in, to do the work that needs to be done.  I can’t.

At last, all who feel the need for purification have taken their turn in the center and it is time to move on.

I put on a drum track and don my visionary mask and we all drift into trance.  Well, they do.  I go nowhere.  I cannot even find the Void or my own Inner Temple.  I drift, aimlessly, trapped in my own head.   Finally the beat shifts, signaling the end of the track.  I take off my mask and wait for everyone to return to themselves.

Now is the time for divination.  My guests pair off quickly, trading tarot readings while I sit dazed.  There is a song stuck in my head again.  It’s been there off and on for days.  This is something that almost never happens to me, but it has happened like this once before.

I have to wait a while, and end up ignoring too many of my guests as I remain lost in my own head, but I finally get a reading from Odyssia – one of maybe a handful of witches I have met in the KC metro whose skills are on a whole ‘nother level than Aradia and Chirotus and myself.  The reading covered a lot of territory, but one thing stood out: in the wake of my experience over the last five years, I am without a worldview.  I have no system of reference by which to contextualize my experiences.  I need a frame.  I need a direction in which to explore.

Looking for something concrete to give me, rather than simply affirming my laundry list of questions, Odyssia pulled a new trick from her bag: a pack of note cards she is drafting for her own oracle deck.  At last, a clear image emerges.  A name.  Melek Taus.

I laugh.

The Peacock fucking Angel.

That song, you see, has been stuck in my head before.  My senior year of college, it was there for more than a solid month before I realized what it was: an offer; an invitation; a call.  From the one Power I had never, ever considered.  I grew up in the Satanic Panic, you see.  I spent the first decade of my practice defending against accusations of Devil Worship.  And now Lucifer is reaching out to me?

And yet …

The Yezidi Peacock Angel (who may or may not be Lucifer) features prominently in modern Gnosticism.  I have been flirting with Gnostic thought for more than a year.  It’s all over my art, and half my favorite writers and thinkers have been flirting with it for years.  The alien God who made everything and walked away is hard for me to embrace, and the desire to root itself in Christian heresy is not aesthetically or ethically appealing to me.  But the Archons and the Blind Idiot God who rule over the hologram of the Empire and everything that falls under its shadow … yeah. I can see that in the world.

Melek Taus, I learned that night, also features prominently in the Feri tradition, which I have looked into on more than one occasion.  Just to make things interesting.  Because I need another source of queer art and power.  (Actually, yes, I really fucking do.)

So here we go.  Down the rabbit hole I’ve been dodging since 2014.  I wanted a direction.  Now I have it.

I’m giving in to the Luciferian Gnostic urge.  I will write my own gospel and live my own myth.

Let’s wage war against the world.  Awaken the sleepers.  Fistfight heavenly powers.  Engage in cosmological terrorism.  Set ourselves ablaze and be lights in the darkness.

I’m in it to win it.  Who’s with me?