personal practice – Journey Through The Obsidian Dream

Book, Bell, and Blade: The Tools

Satyr Magos21/06/202319/09/2023

This post is part of a series, though it need not be read in whole or in order. You can read the first post here. You can find the rest of the posts here.

I know that you are most curious about The Book, but my work with the book cannot be separated from the bell and blade that accompany it. Nor, in truth, can I separate out the brass bowls, or the incense, or the candles, or the libations, or any of the other tools that have brought forward from the practices that preceded the book, nor the other tools that have accreted around it. You will bring your own practices with you, and find accretions of your own, but I suggest that you consider – at least for one day – starting fresh with just these few.

The Book

Find a book that is beautiful and empty. Let it be large enough to draw a triangle of conjuration on a single open face. Let the pages be of a quality and texture that you can work with in your preferred medium, be that pencil, pen, or paint. Let it be heavy and well made, so that you can carry it with you. Let it be something that you can love, because if you do not love it, you will not use it.

Once you have found your book, once you have decided to love it, hold it in your hands and understand from the beginning that it will NOT be perfect and that you WILL destroy it. Wax will spill. Wine will splatter. Your pen will slip. There might even be fire. Lines, pages, even whole folios may be ruined. Dozens, maybe hundreds of hours of labor will go into pages that are just not as pretty as you wanted them to be and which, some day, will be utterly irrelevant or even anathema to the direction that your work takes. In time, the whole book will be destroyed – perhaps by accident, or by the vagaries of time, or even by the demands of your gods.

Love the book. Know that it is mortal, like you. Know that that is what makes the book precious, and the work powerful.

When you have chosen your book, when you have decided to love it, when you have fully understood that it will be damaged or even destroyed, write in it immediately. If you wait, you may never have the courage. If you wait, it may become “too good to write in” and therefore be wasted, which is worse than ruined.

Do not waste your time and risk failure by choosing a ritual with which to dedicate it. Write immediately. Write carelessly. Draw on one page some symbol, such as an eye, and some words that have meaning for you. If you cannot find any that have sufficient meaning for you, Proclus’ Hymn to the Gods:

“Hear me, O Gods, you who hold the rudder of sacred wisdom. Lead us mortals back among the immortals as you light in our souls the flame of return. May the ineffable initiations of your hymns give us the power to escape the dark cave of our lives and purify ourselves.

Hearken, powerful liberators! Dispel the surrounding obscurity, and grant me the power to understand the holy books; replace the darkness with a pure and holy light. Thus may I truly know the incorruptible God that I am.

May a wicked spirit never keep me, overwhelmed by ills, submerged in the waters of forgetfulness and far away from the Gods and Goddesses.

May my soul not be fettered in the jails of life where I am left to suffer a terrifying atonement in the icy cycles of generation. I do not want to wander anymore.

O you, sovereign Gods of radiant wisdom, hear me! Reveal to one who hastens on the Path of Return the holy ecstasies and the initiations held in the depth of your sacred words!”

Or these, which I borrowed from my novel for the aesthetic:

“These things I have done with mirrors. These things I have seen beyond the Veil.”

Now place the book on your altar, where it can lay open with your working tools on and around it.

The Bell

Find a bell – silver, gold, or brass, steel or bronze or glass, it doesn’t matter. Let it be one that rings clearly and cleanly in your ears. Let it be one that fits nicely in your hand. Let it be one that stands on its own, and fits on or beside your book on your altar. If it does not sound good to your ears, if it does not fit well in your hand, if it does not fit well in your working space, you will not use it, and it is wasted.

When you have found your bell, let it ring in your sacred places. Ring it loud in each of the four directions.

Keep it with your book, where it will be ready when the time comes to ring it in earnest.

The Blade

Find a knife, one that feels good in your hand and that will hold an edge to cut. No athame is this, to cut only aether, but a tool with which you might cut equally the veil between worlds, the cords that bind you to your enemies, the herbs for your spells, or even a ruined page from you book. Let it be of a size with which you can travel, as needed. Fixed blade or folding, whatever is of the most use to you. Let it be a thing of sufficient beauty that you can love it.

The Bowls

You may need countless bowls for your practice, but for this work in particular you will need three. Two will need to be fireproof – brass or copper or steel, or whatever suits your style and practice and pocket best. Fill one with enough salt to hold incense upright, or gravel upon which to place a charcoal disk. Leave the other empty for the candles you will burn within it. The third can match the first two if it pleases you, but need only be suitable for libations and to that end must be easy to clean.

When your incense bowl is full of ash, store the ash and salt for use in other magics. When your candle bowl is full of wax, melt it down to make more offering candles from. When your libation bowl is full, pour it out at the crossroads, and clean it as often as is needful.

Other Tools

You will need other things, of course.

You will need pens and pencils and paints and brushes for filling the book. You may buy new ones to use exclusively if it pleases you, but if you are an artist, your tools are already sacred. Have no fear that they will profane your witchcraft.

You will need whetstones to maintain your blade. You may buy new ones to use exclusively if it pleases you, but if you use the same stones to sharpen the knives in your kitchen, they are already sacred. Have no fear that they will profane your witchcraft.

You will need candles and incense and libations by the tonne. Consecrate these when you are ready to use them. If they are good enough for you, they are good enough for the gods.

You will need the tools that you need. Your practice is your own. As you begin this work, use it as an opportunity to start fresh, and let go of tools and practices that no longer serve you, but do not fear to bring forward that which you love. Consider only, “Will this fit within arm’s reach as I sit before the book?” and, “When I travel, will this fit safely and securely with or within the book?”

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 art, witchcraft

Book, Bell, and Blade: Preliminary Thoughts

Satyr Magos19/06/202319/09/2023

This post is the first in a series. It need not be read in whole or in order, but the rest can be found here.

Like many magical practitioners, particularly those of us who are writers in some other sense, I have often thought of writing a book on magic. But, after many years of fits and starts, and despite the way in which I have always structured in-person workshops so that even the most inexperienced in my community could participate fully, I have long known that I have nothing to add to the body of introductory literature.

If I have a magical book in me, the target audience for that book is the same as the audience for this blog: the intermediate practitioner. Witches and mystics, sorcerers and magicians, who have done a great deal of magic, and seen things they don’t quite comprehend, and who are looking for ways to deepen their practice and contextualize their experiences. Experienced practitioners whose confidence is not always to the same level as their experience.

Since the beginning of the pandemic, my work has turned inward. Even as I’ve been casting and consecrating Picatrix planetary talismans to great effect, my personal work has gone in directions that, while supporting that work, is also antithetical. It is the product of no one tradition. No one spirit has pointed my work in this direction. Rather, it is a contrived synthesis of all the work that I have done so far, laid out in a big book in ways that I find aesthetically pleasing, suitable for use both in-circle and as a prop in my art photography.

But, somewhat to my surprise, as I tell stories about that work on social media and in various chat rooms, I am finding that there seems to be some interest in it – academic and comradely interest, at least, with some interest expressed in making attempts at something similar. And that seems to be enough to convince me to write it down.

But, having decided to write about this work, I have to choose a voice.

Do I want to write it as a story, this is what I did? Do I want to write it as a grimoire, with absurd archaic and formal language. Can I find something in between, a concession to the probability that this is only ever going to be a series of blog posts? A part of me – a stupid, arrogant, desperate to burn out again part of me – wants to write two versions of each “chapter”: one for the blog, and one for the “inevitable” book deal.

My Libra stellium says take the middle road. Have fun with the language, but keep it personal and informal enough for the online medium.

The Scorpio stellium says to be stylish and obscure. To write like I’m using a quill on vellum, as if only the worthy and eriudite will ever lay their hands upon it.

The Sagittarius rising says not to stress about it, to just put it out there. Run it up the flag pole and see who salutes.

For once in my life, I think that I am going to try to listen to the Sagittarius. The other perspectives will inevitably creep in, of course. This is about how I made my magical practice into a work of art, and then used that art to make more magic. Language and style are inevitably a part of that.

Some of what follows will be practical, describing how the reader can reproduce what I have done and am doing. Some of it will be autobiographical, relating intimate details of my practice. Some of it will be aspirational: waxing poetic on what I intended when I started, and about what I still hope to do in the future.

And I think that this will have to be a living document: edited on the basis of your input, and my experiences as I continue in this practice through trial and error. So if you have comments, or questions, or suggestions, please don’t hesitate to speak up.

So, without further ado, let’s begin this journey together.

In hedonism, scholarship, witchcraft

My Liberalia

Satyr Magos18/02/2013

Calendars are a problem. The more of them you have, the harder they are to match up. At this stage in my life, I’m struggling to reconcile four: the Gregorian, the academic, the lunar, and the Wheel of the Year. Sometimes, it can be a fucking mess, especially as I try to splice in ancient festivals AND keep everything relevant to the life I actually live.

So, it was very much to my delight last year when I learned of an interesting coincidence: namely that Saint Patrick’s Day (an “Irish” American drinking festival, for those who don’t live in the USA) and the Liberalia fall at about the same time. Even more fortuitous, both coincide with the beginning of Spring Break (an academic American drinking festival) at my particular institution of higher education. My celebrations last year were impromptu and (mostly) solitary. But I did start a batch of mead with this year in mind.

Now the date approaches and I watch with some curiosity as Sanion anticipates Anthesteria. I am trying to find time to do research into what “traditional” festivities would have included, and then decide / beg for divine inspiration as to which elements to maintain, which to adopt from other festivals, and what to make up whole cloth.

There will be wine, of course, and mead: both drinking the mead I started last year and will bottle in about a week, and the starting of a new batch for next year. And feasting: I never open the Sunrise Temple without providing food. Offerings aplenty to the God, and a special altar erected to him for the occasion.

But what else? I don’t really have the resources to put on a play of any kind, and playing movies in the background seems … a weak

substitute at best. (Besides which, all the appropriate movies that I own will be played for the same people three weeks prior at my Midsem party.) Perhaps I can encourage participants to declaim from the various hymns to Dionysus; a lot of them are thespians, they’ll probably get a kick out of it. And should I bring in elements of the Urban Dionysia, which falls about the same time of year (depending on the vagaries of the lunar calendar) but much less fortuitously in terms of free time to devote to worship?

I’m thinking that there may be some ritual (and playful) flogging, both to purify and to excite (though, contrary to Pausanius’ Skiereia, it will be everyone getting lashed). Possibly arts-and-crafts, especially the making and donning of masks and thyrsoi. I may encourage cross-dressing, in honor of the god’s youth spent hiding from Hera, and in memory of Tieresias and Cadmus, who donned women’s clothing that they might participate in the rites when the other men of Thebes followed Pentheus’ lead in denying Dionysus.

Hopefully everyone will have enough fun to get naked, because … Maenads and Satyrs, duh. Should that happen, face and body paint are great games.

I have numerous Tarot decks, and it might be an interesting occasion on which to employ the oracular powers of Dionysus. Also, the ouija board. (Of course I have a ouija board. Don’t look at me that way. You have one, too.)

All this would be just a little easier, of course, if I had a more concrete relationship with the god. When I do my thrice-weekly offering rites, I hail him as I pour the libations: “Dionysus, Liber Pater, Lord of the Vine, source and surcease of madness.” But if those things were all that he is to me, then I would not need to have a festival: I would simply meditate on what passes for my sanity whilst drinking until I cry. But Dionysus is more than that. So much more.

I struggle in my search for how best to honor him.

In witchcraft

Devotion and Worship: What Is This? I Don’t Even ….

Satyr Magos11/02/2013

As I have probably mentioned before, I was raised without religion. Christianity was pervasive and ubiquitous throughout my childhood, of course: on television and in the Cub Scouts, in my textbooks and in everyone else’s assumptions. I even went to church for Christmas, sometimes, and Easter. But my upbringing did not include any actual, direct instruction in Christian religious doctrine or practice.

My early explorations in religion, such as they were, were self-guided, and—ultimately—their own undoing. One hears about That God and the Bible quite a lot in Cub Scouts and in a Kansas elementary school, but always in ways which presume that one already knows what the speaker is talking about. Now, generally, this is actually a very effective indoctrination tool: the presumption of knowledge backs most people into a corner where they will agree to anything to avoid admitting that they don’t know what you’re talking about. That never worked on me. Gathering the impression that the explanations for all the gibberish could be found in a certain book, I picked up the children’s Bible my parents house. There were rules, I learned (so many rules, but mostly the Big Ten), with dire consequences promised for breaking them. But I could see that those punishments weren’t being meted out. The only conclusions that my pre-teen mind could make from this contradiction were that That God must be absent or unjust.

Thus began my decade-and-a-half “phase” as an angry agnostic. I wanted no part in any gods. I found the Neo-pagan movement (Wicca and its offshoots, in particular), and although I found a home, of sorts, for myself … I rejected their gods, too.

All of which is to say that I have no early-life framework for worship or devotion. I have, in fact, often compared worship of any sort to spiritual slavery. So…. For about twelve years I celebrated seasonal festivals to satisfy needs I can no better articulate now than I could then. Nor am I yet certain what changed in my head or why, that day in St. Louis when I suddenly called out to Dionysus, Hephaestus, and Apollo.

Six years after that sharp about-face, my altar is home to nine gods and three familiar spirits. The spirits I have solid working relationships with: although we are still negotiating the precise terms of our arrangements, we are friends and partners. The gods, though … Dionysus, Hermes, Hephaestus, Baphomet, Rhea, Athena, the Kouros, the Witchmother, and the Sun … some of them are as uncertain what to do with me as I am with them. Each has reached out to me, or me to them, and made solid contact at least one time. Rhea was the first power whose voice I could discern calling to me from the darkness; Athena found her way to my altar through a series of omens; the Kouros answered my call when I went searching for meaning in the Divine Masculine, and the Witchmother came to me through the statue I had used to search for the Divine Feminine; Hephaestus stood at my side when I sat at the bench; Hermes is the chief god of the modern Western esoteric tradition; and Dionysus … well, that’s a slightly longer story.

I recall deciding, in the strange days leading up to that first call, that if I were ever to worship the gods, Dionysus would be among them. A youthful, effeminate, sometimes cross-dressing god. The god of wine and ecstasy, of loosing yourself in the beat of the drum, and of running and fucking in the woods. The god who causes and cures madness, and who disdains the kings appointed by his father Zeus. Himself an initiate into the Mysteries of an older, more primal goddess. As long as I have made mead, I have done so in the name of Dionysus; those of you who have had my wine can attest to its improbable efficacy. Dionysus was the first god to appear before me at my initiation, and he is always the most firmly present when I perform my pentagram rite. His leopard visits my astral temple. And yet, at the same time, he is the most inscrutable of the gods upon my altar. When I seek him out, I cannot find him. Only Athena has less to say to me when I pour the libations.

I wonder, sometimes, if it would be easier if it were in my nature to devote myself entirely to a single god. Could I then count on the god to tell me what was wanted of me, and what I would get from it in my return? If that were my only dilemma, though, I could simply go the other obvious route, joining one of the Hellenistic recon communities. I could be well-loved there, as an actual Classicist. But my own UPG is too far afield, and my witchcraft too radical (to say nothing of my feminism) for those groups I’ve seen.

Each of the powers who has come to me has told me a little bit of what I need to do. Just enough that, with a little bit of luck and creativity, I have (so far) been able to struggle up to the next step. I make offerings of coffee, candles, wine, and/or mead at least three times a week. I must not abandon my visionary practice—I must, in fact, escalate it—but I must also have daily planetary ritual. But the Orphic hymns aren’t quite …. working. There’s something lacking : something maybe 25 degrees off. And while they’ve been showing me how to make masks, magically, I’m still trying to puzzle out some of the material components of the process. And I have to keep with the lunar and solar calendar I have already devoted so much of my life to.

Now, don’t get me wrong. So far, none of these are hardships (well, except for the occasional extremely hung over Saturday or Sunday dawn offering rite, and they’re usually pretty forgiving if I’m late). But … there are disparate pieces that I haven’t figured out how to smelt into a cohesive hole.

How do you obey the gods when they talk so little, and you can’t quite hear them when they do? When you have no background in “religion” as it is so frequently understood? When your knowledge of history, and the way in which the gods have been deployed to further—or, given a less charitable set of assumptions, participated in and even instigated—injustice in the name of power for as long as there have been priests and kings, makes the whole idea of “religion” more than a little suspect? When your grip on sanity is adequately shaky that you’re not one hundred percent certain you’re hearing anything but the echoes of your own derangement? And, perhaps most to the point, where do you find the missing pieces of a ritual practice that has never quite existed in the form you’re working toward?

True story, y’all: I have no fucking idea what I’m doing.