Showing all posts tagged site maintenance

In Uncategorized

A Bit of Housecleaning

Author Satyr MagosPosted on

Good afternoon (well, it’s afternoon as I type this, here in Sunrise, IN), dear readers.  How are you all doing today?

There’ve been a few changes around the Obsidian Dream since I last addressed my audience directly, and I thought it was about time to say hello to my new readers and subscribers.  I really can’t express how happy I am to have you all.  Despite changing blog services in February, I still got 411 pageviews, and I’ve already hit 300 for this month.  You folks fucking rock, you know that?

Some, particularly my newer readers, may have been startled by last night’s post.  While I do have “hedonism” in the subtitle, it’s not something I’ve had a lot to say about for a while.  This is partly because sex, drugs, and rock&roll don’t actually generally make very good telling for the people who weren’t there.  Additionally a number of people I know from the real world read this blog, and—despite my high ideals of radical honesty—I’m a little leery of sharing more than they’re comfortable with… especially if they were there, and might not want that widely known.  That said, I do plan on talking a great deal more about that sort of thing, especially as we wind into the summer.  So be prepared for the hedonism tag to blow up a little over the next 3-6 months.

Speaking of tags, I’m sure you have all noticed that I haven’t finished retagging everything after the move.  It’s kinda boring, and I just can’t bring myself to do it in one big run.  So I’ll keep updating posts tags (and their internal links) a little bit at time.  Also, as you can see, I’ve finally got the Blogroll on the side going.  The way WordPress does that is a little odd, though, so please bear with me as that goes through several permutations.  I’ve also added two new “Pages” up at the top: Resources and Statements of Belief; the latter is self explanatory, the former is intended as an index of internet resources for the more serious scholar-types among my readers.  In sum: the blog remains “under construction” as they say.

As always, your input—as the consumers of what I produce—is welcome.  How can I make this blog more readable to you?

Thank you, again, one and all, for reading.

In witchcraft

I Think I May Be Dead

Author Satyr MagosPosted on

I’d like to say I don’t quite know what happened to the last two or three weeks, but I do: stress, sleep deprivation, and school.  I’ve been sick all semester, to one degree or another, and  since the Full Moon my insomnia and temper have been so far out of control that I’ve been starting to wonder if I’ve been hexed.  I know, I know: that almost never happens.  And I’ve been checking my aura, performing banishing’s, and even trying the good Master Balthazar’s water trick, all with no signs of any attack.  So it’s probably “just” stress.  Probably.

I’m sure y’all know: stress and sleep deprivation make for a nasty downward spiral.  So nasty, in this case, that instead of just dropping a class with an abusive professor, or even filing a report, I’ve been deliberating dropping a curse tablet on him, instead.  (My school is so conveniently situated next to / on top of a grave yard … though I suspect the Quaker dead might not be very helpful in this regard.)  Don’t worry, I haven’t done it.  I know this impulse to scorch the earth and salt it is a product of that same stress and insomnia; it’s instructive in illustrating the degree, though.

This past weekend was Early Semester Break.  I got caught up on my sleep (mostly; it takes more than a few good nights to completely make up for two solid weeks of not sleeping), but I’m still sick.  (Hack.  Phlegm.)  My temper is still out of control.  Everything makes me angry.

Still, my experiments continue.  I have been performing DuQuette’s banishing/invocation in the mornings instead of the pentagram rite, to interesting effect.  I have twice more performed the rite of the Stele of Jeu the Hieroglyphist—at the Full Moon and the Dark.  My journeys to the Underworld and my Inner Temple have been … peculiar but, I think, productive.  I have completed the first round of Deb’s New Year, New You project, and am looking forward to continuing with the project.  My monthly Tarot reading looks good … except on my professional and social fronts.  And I have completed the first draft of my Personal Manifesto of Sacred Sexuality.

Posts with actual thought will be coming soon.  Also, site maintenance.  Lots of it.

In Uncategorized

Nom de Guerre: A New Self-Introduction

Author Satyr MagosPosted on

I started this blog under my real name.  It seemed like the thing to do at the time.  In November of 09 I hadn’t quite made the decision to become a professional academic, let alone begun to process everything I was going to need to do to achieve that end.  I was going to school, yes, but … I still thought of myself more as a jeweler than anything else.  As a jeweler, practicing magic in a city where I have an established base of power, I have nothing to hide.

But now I’m moving, and I have academic politics to think about.  The people where I’m going don’t know me, and I don’t know them.  And when I finish my Bachelor’s degree, I’ll be moving on to another school where I’ll have to rebuild my reputation from the ground up again.  (And, of course, there’s the whole angle where I might just join the war.)  Having this come up when you search my real name might be inadvisable.

My career as an occult author is, at best, years off.  Until then it seems prudent to adopt a pen name.  I will not name the school I am attending, or the town I live in – though anyone willing to websearch the details I do give will no doubt be able to put two and two together.  I don’t need a secret identity … just plausible deniability.  As such, I would ask friends who know me in the real world to post comments here on the blog, rather than on my facebook – as an added bonus, our resulting conversations will be better preserved for posterity.

Allow me, then, to reintroduce myself: I am Satyr Magos.  I have been studying witchcraft since 1993 and practicing since 1996.  I am deeply eclectic – the kind who can lecture you for hours on the schools of thought I’ve studied to get to where I am.  Although I do not think of myself as Wiccan, many of my rituals are based in that framework.  At the moment, I would describe my practice as Helenistic neo-Wiccan shamanic witchcraft.  I am, for the moment, the one and only Initiate of the Obsidian Dream.

For the first two-thirds of my life, I was an angry agnostic and my magic was largely theoretical – personal shields and house wards and tarot and playing magical tag.  In 2007, shortly before my life in St. Louis failed utterly, I began making offerings to Dionisos, Hephaestos, and Apollon.  The first two took me in readily; Rhea informed me of her presence in 2009.  I am still negotiating with Apollo – and now with Athena and Hermes, as I more seriously devote myself to school. 

At the same time I began working with gods, I also began to study shamanic techniques: a friend of mine took me on my first journey to the underworld.  I read Penczak’s Shamanic Temple … but it was Michael Harner’s Way of the Shaman that actually got me somewhere.

I put off studying ceremonial and Chaos magic for most of my life.  There was too much penis-waving and too many invocations of a god I don’t trust in the former; the second, as I’ve mentioned elsewhere, gave me flashbacks to playing D&D in high school with that older friend who never moved out of his parents basement.  I am dedicating the next year of my magical life to filling those holes in my magical education.  In the process I aim to develop a daily practice, and master the skills needed to aid other witches with their spells, potions, and rites of passage.

Welcome, again, to my blog.  When I started it, I never imagined that I would have over a hundred pageviews in a month.  Thank you all for coming.

In Uncategorized

Metapost

Author Satyr MagosPosted on

So, I’ve been playing with different programs to update the blog.  I usually write my draft in OpenOffice, then copy and paste it over to the webeditor, but that’s … aesthetically displeasing to me.  MS Word is pretty good for it, but I haven’t ever gotten around to buying a copy of MSOffice, and my trial ran out again.  (Grrr, poverty.)

Today I discovered Windows Live Writer, which I like a lot lo far.  It gives me a really, really good idea of what my posts will look like when I’m done (insasmuch as that even matters), and pasting images from my computer or the web is much easier.  I’m not sure yet, but I think I can even set it up to update my livejournal, too, which would be neat.  I really hate the LJ webeditor.

Today I also discovered the Stats tracker on this blog.  First: I’m an idiot and I’ve been tracking my own pageviews, so the count is practically meaningless (I only use this thing twelve times a day to keep up on my blogroll).  But!  Not wholly meaningless!  People from as far away as Russia and South Africa have visited!   That’s awesome!  Hello out there!  (::waves vigorously::)  Folks from China, the UK, and Latvia have come by!  (And of, course, many Americans … almost all of whom might actually be me.)  It’s very, very exciting to me to have had visitors from not the US.  I can’t really explain why (that whole crazy thing).

Also, most of my viewers come from Facebook (which doesn’t surprise me) and that my altar is the most interesting thing I’ve written about so far.  So there will definitely be more of that.

/spaz