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In witchcraft

Working the Hekataeon: Book Two: White Flame

Author Satyr MagosPosted on

Coming to the Book of White Flame after The Call was a bit of a shock. Every move in the first book had come with a ritual: the first nine nights were strictly prescribed, and if the second nine were a little more of a waiting game, there was a chant to go with each stage of the iynx ritual. The Book of White Flame is more of a litany culminating in a ritual. Aradia and I needed more structure than that.

Our solution was to bring the general ritual format of The Call forward. That was four years ago, now, so of course my memories of the details are a little vague. But I remember that each night when we sat down to do the work, we washed our hands with lustral waters and cinnamon, lit a candle and incense, and sang the consecration song. We then drew two versions of the sigil: one on a small slip of paper that we burned at the end of the ritual, as with the crossroads sigil in The Call; and one in a notebook which we mediated on and colored over as we tried to memorize the sigil and its uses.

Throughout the month, I gathered supplies to make our Ladders. I was broke as shit, then, and had to cheep out: using thinner wire and much thinner chain than was ideal. But I was able to cast up silver talismans for use as the central “coin”, some of the first exemplars of my Eye and Six Hands devotional talisman. In the last days of the sigil-study, I brough Aradia and Chirotus (who was working the Hekataeon at the same time) together and showed them how to string the beads on wire to form the chain.

In preparation for the rite, we made a special trip out to a sacred site where we knew that we could find a honey locust tree with exceptionally savage thorns. We took garlic from our farm share for our cloves, and raided our stash of local honey that I had originally purchased to make into mead.

When we had finished our study of the sigils, and the moon waxed to full, Aradia and I went to Alvianna’s property, where we could perform the ritual at a crossroads without fear of attracting police attentions. We had made arrangements in advance, so that we could come, and do what prep needed to be done there, without breaking the silence that preceds the ritual.

The consecration was an ordeal. Keeping silent for the hours preceding the ritual. Kneeling on the concrete. Holding the ladder in our mouths while we performed the ritual. Releasing the ladder slowly when the time came, not just vomiting it out.

There’s a lot I don’t remember about the night. Partly, that’s because it was almost four years ago, now. Partly that’s because I was so deeply entranced. What I do remember is that the Ladder felt alive and powerful almost immediately, and that the garlic cloves all sprouted while we were performing our rituals.

Then I went on an epic road trip. In the midst of searching for appropriate skulls with which to begin the Book of the Red Blade, we lost track of the work. I even forgot the names I had given to both my (original) iynx and my Ladder, and lost wherever I had written them down.

Then, one day in 2020, while I was doing my daily work with my other familiar spirits, the name – or, at least A name – of my Ladder came back to me. I began working with it more extensively. And, like all my familiars, what the spirit wanted was not just offerings but work to do. So, when something was not clearly in the purview of one of my other familiars, or when I wanted Hekate’s backing for a thing, I turned to the Ladder spirit and rite. It also offered its services in other means: speciffically, it offered to aid my work with Aidan Wachter’s Black Book, as I was struggling to resume that after having stopped and started. As such, it has become a familiar spirit somewhat greater in scope and intimacy than it was intended to be, and – as I am finally incorporating the Black Book into habitual ritual practice, I am working with my Ladder spirit almost daily.

As such, I can call my Hekate’s Ladder my greatest success with the work of the Hekataeon so far.

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

Working the Hekataeon: Book One: The Call

Author Satyr MagosPosted on 2 Comments

Aradia and I began our work with the Hekataeon early in 2019. My notes, unfortunately, do not say exactly when. We made quick work of The Call, but then botched the timing for making our iynxes and had to wait for the next waxing moon. I know, in retrospect, that I was already falling apart at that point, and so it is little surprise that my memory of those months is … vague.

What I remember most clearly from those first days is a sense of dis-ease at the notion of pledging myself to a single god. I rejected monotheism thirty years ago. For all that I love Dionysos above all other gods, henotheism has never been on the table. I expected to be rejected outright, and was surprised when Aradia and I were both given immediate signs to perform the devotion ritual and construct our iynxes.

I remember that I was absolutely confident in my ability to construct the strapholos with nothing more than a poorly exposed photograph and a childhood memory for guidance. I remember being extremely frustrated that the result, however pretty, neither spun nor buzzed the way I expected. I remember that the tiny jelly jar I chose to incubate my iynx in was much, much harder to break than I anticipated. I remember struggling to name the spirit, and to remember the name I had given it (I was even worse at journaling then than I am, now.) I remember feeling, from very early on, that I had failed at that portion of the work. I put the iynx in a drawer and never used it.

In the years since then, many of our friends have acquired their own copies of the Hekataeon. Some began the work and faltered. Others made it to the end of The Call and stopped there. One or two made it as far as we had, and faltered at the same place: the beginning of The Book of the Red Blade, searching for a horse skull or reasonable substitute.

At the beginning of this June, when the Moon was right and when we had managed to carve out space in our schedules, we began (re)working the book as a group – each of us alone in our own temples, but together in spirit. Aradia, Alvianna, and I put together the materials lists and links to the recommended readings that grew into my first post in the To Work the Hekataeon series.

As before, Aradia and I took turns leading the ritual: starting the fires, leading the chants, reading the guided meditations and the recommended readings aloud. Because she still works a day job, I took point on most of the logistical preparations: designing and building the altar, making changes one night to the next to accommodate what had and hadn’t worked quite right, and what needed to change to follow the evolving ritual.

This time, though, I found the work to be a struggle … but not in the ways that I might have anticipated, if I had anticipated any trouble at all.

My ritual practices have grown a lot since I first attempted this work. I have a daily devotional practice which includes Hekate, who has her own altar – the largest of any one god in our house. We didn’t need to make a pre-ritual shopping trip: our basic stores covered everything we needed and more. I am a full time artist and witch, now: setting time aside for the ritual was no challenge whatsoever. My spirit-sight, and my ability to hear spirits and gods, has improved exponentially. I could sense Hekate there every night. I could feel the spirits of my stones awaken, grow, and change as we re-consecrated them on the seventh night, and when we put them to use on the eighth (and ninth, but that’s coming in a bit).

I understand, now, as I didn’t then, how to ancient (and modern but with different trauma than me) polytheists saw no dissonance or contradiction in addressing each god as the greatest, ultimate, and supreme creator and savior. I understand now, on a level that I didn’t then, how initiation into multiple mysteries is no infidelity. The comparison is irreverent, but it works the same as “every cat is best cat”. Or, to be irreverent in a different way, the way you engage in certain activities with one lover does not preclude in engaging in other activities with another lover.

On the fourth night, though, my religious trauma kicked in hard. I don’t know what it was about that rite, in particular, that brought it on. For that matter, I don’t know why it didn’t come up sooner. Something about the text for that night took me back to the place I was in my early teens: angry that powers out there existed, demanding our love and devotion, but offering so little protection in return. The conscious dissonance wasn’t there the next nights, but I also didn’t sleep right again until after the New Moon had come and the rites had been completed.

I struggled with the passages about finding yourself worthy in ways that I had not struggled before. What even is “worth” in a mortal sense, let alone a divine one? And, what do you mean “what do I want out of this work”? I want to know what comes from it!

I struggled with the way that, even as I sat down to do this certain work with this one god, it seemed that other gods who have had little to say to me, lately, seemed to show up in ways that they have not in weeks or months or years. I have no impulse toward hennotheism or monotheism or even monism, despite its popularity in circles I frequent, but it seemed strage that this was the time the gods chose to speak. (I will have more to say on this in a future post.)

On Night Eight (ARBITUM), I asked for permission to resume the work of the Hekataeon. I was told no. This both came as a complete surprise to me – Kraken and I had been discussing the possibility just that afternoon – and hurt my feelings more than I would have guessed had I been asked. I don’t remember exactly how I phrased the question, or the questions that followed, but the conclusion was that I was to do a ritual of penance and absolution, for which I turned to one of the sigils in the Book of White Flame: Thea Deinos. I considered doing further divination, but decided against until I had completed that penance.

At dusk on the ninth night, what would have been INVOCATIO, I began by performing the ritual same opening ritual I had done for the last eight nights: i washed my hands with lustral waters and scrubbed them with cinnamon. I burned myrrh and asperged the space. I drew the crossroads sigil and lit three candles. Then I drew the Thea Deinos sigil on my brow, my throat, and my heart. I took the pose of terror and spoke aloud to the goddess. I apologized for abandoning the work. I apologized for whatever I had done to offend her. I spoke of my frustration with the very notion of worth. I spoke of my desire to learn what lay down the path, to experience Mystery for its own sake.

When I was done, I washed my hands again. I scrubbed them with cinnamon. I went back to the rite of the ARBITUM. This time, when I asked permission to resume the work, I was given the black stone of yes. This time, I had follow-up questions prepared. Yes, I could remake my iynx. No I could not follow along with my companions who were proceeding for the first time. Emphatically no (two white stones) I should not hold back for any stragglers. Yes, I could wait for them before beginning the Book of the Red Blade, but also, yes, it would be better for me and the work if I were to go ahead on my own.

And so, when the time came, I held a funeral for my first iynx. I apologized for my failures in constructing the strapholos, and for failing to continue the work, or honor the spirit properly. I apologized to Hekate for the same, and released the spirit into her care. Maybe the funeral wasn’t necessary. I had doubts both before and during. But I had received permission and committed to the course, and for all my doubts, all that I felt as I watched over the funeral pyre was relief.

When the funeral was complete, I walked away to give the ashes time to cool. Then I came back and set up a workbench altar on which to construct my new iynx. Based on a … feeling that had been with me from when I first decided to hold a funeral for my first iynx, I included a pinch of its ashes in the making of the new, after the ashes of the sigils and before the snakeskin and feather.

Performing the funeral for my first iynx, I dubbed the spirit “child of Hekate”. In assembling the new one, it dawned on me – from the component spit – it could as reasonably be considered my child, as well. That is certainly not the relationship that I have felt with any of my other familiar spirits, but I am going to try to hold onto that thought and act accordingly as I continue the work of growing this new soul. No, I don’t know what this might mean or imply. Maybe someday I will. Maybe I wont. And maybe it’s just a delusion.

With so little ritual framework for the burial, exhumation, and re-burial of the iynx, I struggled a little to really invest myself in each stage. Burrying it, initially, felt significant. Drowning it did not. Nor, despite my best efforts to focus my attention, did hanging it. In fact, my first sense that I had performed the ritual correctly, was during my morning ritual on the final day, when I planned to complete the rite at midnight: sitting at my altar, I could feel the potential of the spirit hovering at the edge of my circle. Even so, I felt nothing from the bottle.

It was only during the final ritual, after I had named the spirit and assigned it a form, when I began to spin the strapholos that I finally felt the spirit manifest and ensoul itself in the tool. The Hekataeon tells you to wake yourself in the middle of the night and record your dreams of your iynx. I barely slept, and had no dreams to record. But that’s typical for me, and the lack of prophetic dreams is neither signal nor noise. I felt the iynx quicken in my hands. I know it lives and will serve me.

And now, with my new iynx born and ensouled within my new strapholos, I am ready to skip forward and resume the work that I abandoned in 2019: The Book of the Red Blade. My devotion to Hekate and the Hekataeon is renewed. My familiars – who now number 14, with the completion of the iynx – tell me that I am on the right path. I look forward to continuing to send you these notes from the spiritual wilderness.

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: A Daily Ritual

Author Satyr MagosPosted on

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.

To do the work of the Book, the Bell, and the Blade, does not strictly require a daily practice. But each use of the tools makes them stronger, just as each prayer offered brings us closer to the gods, and each spell cast makes us stronger and more competent magicians. And so I kindly, and with compassion, and with understanding of how difficult a daily anything can be, suggest that you make the attempt to do some daily work with the book.

The ritual that follows is the result of nearly three years of slow evolution and refinement. It did not come all at once, and there was absolutely a period of trial and error. Fuck it, let’s be honest: the trial and the error continue to this day. Your ritual will be different. Your ritual will serve your needs. This one, which you may adopt, adapt, or discard, as needed, is mine.

I begin by writing in my journal: the mundane day and date, the planetary day and hour, the position of the sun and the moon. How much and how well I slept. What little I remember of my dreams.

I clean the detritus of the previous day’s offerings, and start the coffee that will be today’s. I pray: “Hail unto you, o Baphomet, bless and consecrate (these candles, this incense, this coffee), that it may be fit offerings.”

I stand facing my altar. I scrub my hands with a pinch of cinnamon, then scrub them through my hair. I say, “Let me be cleansed and purified for the work, and energized for the day to come.”

I take up the bell and ring it over the altar, and then in each of the four directions, including a second chime over the altar. I say: “By this bell, let the space be cleansed and purified.”

I take up the knife and thrust it into the air, pointing past my altar to the edge of the property, and draw the blade through the air as I turn, casting the circle over the land. I say, “By this blade I cast the circle and affirm the temple.”

I light a candle on the altar. I say, “By this fire, I illuminate the temple.”

I light a stick of incense from that candle, and with that incense I draw an invoking pentagram in each of the four directions. As I turn, I say, “By this incense I bless and consecrate the temple.” Then I stand the incense in its bowl on the altar.

And so the temple is awakened and consecrated. I stand there, and bask in the holiness that I have awakened. When I am ready, I attune myself, body and soul, grounding and centering and awakening.

I light a second stick of incense. I gesture with it over the altar, drawing a crossroads and a circle in the air before me. I say, “Hail unto you, o you keepkers of the quarters and dwellers on the threshold.”

I turn away from the altar, toward the world beyond, and repeat the gesture. I say, “Hail unto you, o you gods and spirits of the house and of the land.”

I turn back toward the altar and gesture so that the smoke swirls widely. I say, “Hail unto you o you gods and powers who come when we call and aid us in our work. Hail unto you o you guides and allies, friends and familiars. Hail unto you, all you who live on the altars of this house, and in the pages of this sacred book.”

I place the incense upright in its bowl. Then I light an offering candle in the bowl for that. Then I pour the libations in their bowl.

From here, I honor my familiar spirits – Tsu, my natal spirits, and the spirits of my planetary talismans, each on their proper day. And then, with my familiars in attendance, I pour offerings and make my daily prayers to each of the gods who live on shrines in my home.

“Hail unto you o Baphomet, Thanateros, Infinitely Flowering God. We pray you, stoke the light of your gnostic fire within each of us. Stoke the light of your gnostic fire within those that we love. Stoke the light of your gnostic fire in the peoples of the world.”

“Hail unto you o Aphrodite, Nepherieri, Beloved and Man-Loving. We pray you, love us. Make us beloved of gods and mortals. Open our hearts so that we may love and know that we are loved.”

“Hail unto you o Eros, Phanes, Protogonos. We pray you, may your light of creation shine within us. May the wind of your wings clear away all that obscures. May we be granted all that we desire.”

“Hail unto you o Lucifer, Morning Star, Peacock Angel. We pray you, share with us your secret knowledge. Help us to throw off the chains of our oppression. Help us to stand tall in the face of the heavens.”

“Hail unto you o Dionysos, Zagreus, Eleuthereus. We pray you, save us. Free us. Fill us with your divine ecstasy.”

“Hail unto you o Hekate, Queen of Night, Mother of All Witches. We pray you, may your crossroads always be open to us. May your torches always light our ways. May we always have the keys to the doors which bar us passage.”

Then I pour coffee for myself, anouncing myself by each of my names: “I am –“

And I sit. I wait. I drink my coffee. Having called upon my familiar spirits, and my gods, each in turn, I listen for what they may teach or offer me. I try to discern what is the true voice of warning, and what is merely my own anxieties. I try to discern what is divinely inspired, what is the work of my own sacred creativity, and what is a mere intrusive thought. I hope for visions, and remain vigilant against mere fantasy.

When my focus breaks, or I finish my coffee, I turn to my journal and write down what I have felt and what I have seen and what I have heard – often only “no clear messsages”.

Then I pull out my cards and divine the character of my day. When I have made my notes, the ritual is complete, and I go in search of breakfast.

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, 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 Uncategorized

Requiem for a Dream

Author Satyr MagosPosted on 2 Comments

I first heard a rumor when I came back from Beltane, but Tuesday night I learned for a fact that this year’s Heartland Pagan Festival is to be the last. I am … deeply conflicted by this knowledge. For half my life, that festival was the axis around which my year revolved. I first attended in 1999: fresh out of high school, new to the pagan community, innocent and naïve. I only went for a single day. Twenty-four years later, the memories are hazy – the awkwardness of coming and going to the remote  location, buying my first sarong, meeting people from the townie community in a very different context – but that first daypass changed my life.

I went back the next year for the full weekend, and about every other year from then until 2006, just before I moved to St. Louis. I came back in 2008 and didn’t miss another year until 2014, which May I spent studying abroad in Greece with my Classics program. I met new friends and lovers there, some of whom I know to this day. I brought old friends from Lawrence whenever I could. I was sexually assaulted there in 2008 – an experience I now know to be frighteningly common – by a man I wanted to fuck but who didn’t want to take “later” for an answer; he was later arrested for being too disruptively high around the bonfire, and all my food was confiscated with his because we were camped too close together, and lived off the generosity of my friends for the rest of the festival. I brought my partner to HPF 2009 as a field test before we moved in together. I had profound and powerful magical experiences as a part of public rituals, there, both good and bad. One bad experience, in 2012, set off a massive public shit-fight between me and the sacred experience committee that ended up in face-to-face mediated meetings and, ultimately, an invitation to put my money where my mouth was and join the ritual crew. I was just starting college, and couldn’t commit, then, but when I came back in 2015 it was as a staff member.

My partner and I skidded in to the June 2014 post-festival staff meeting not two days after our epic road trip celebrating my graduation and her escape from her corporate hell job. We signed up to work with the Sacred Experience Committee, the same crew that we’d had our blowout with in 2012, expecting to cut wood and carry water. By January 2015, we were hosting meetings and more of our ideas were going into the rituals than theirs. Two months later, we learned that none of them had any intention of performing the rituals we were writing – all  of which required four or five ritualists – and Aradia and I were left scrambling to recruit bodies. We reached out to everyone we knew worth their salt, rebuilding bridges we’d burned to get competent witches and magicians to help us put on the festival.

I have tried before to write about those years in detail. Getting involved with the organization, getting swept up into leadership positions and being lauded for our efforts and ideas … only to have those efforts and ideas undermined at every turn. Ultimately being chased out for trying to improve the safety and experience of the attendees, and for refusing to submit to the corporate culture of “naming the problem is always worse than the problem”. It still hurts too much to go into detail, and the trauma makes some of it incredibly difficult to remember.

The short version is that we wrote and performed a series of initiatory rituals, each year sending attendees back into the world with the charge of doing more magic. Our first opening ritual was nonverbal, every action a dance, with shills among the participants to help cue their responses. Our final closing ritual was a bonfire ritual where, through enchanted masks finished at festival, we dropped almost fifty gods into various ecstatic dancers. Masks and coordinated costumes were our signature style. Prometheus featured prominently every year. None of it was perfect, but we did our very best to make our rituals as participatory and experiential as we could.

At the end of HPF 2015, I was informed that I was being nominated for chair of the committee. We had had designs on that, of course, but we’d anticipated years of work, and for Aradia to wear the title. By HPF 2016, we had found ourselves stuffed into gaps on the Board of Directors. We proposed and passed a five year plan to get the festival back on track to growth and sustainability, and to work on repairing its reputation as a drunken rape fest by fixing those problems. By 2017, I was chair of the board and she was Vice President.

But things were never quite right. I was on the edge of transitioning to gender neutral pronouns when I came back from college. The clear and abundant transphobia of entrenched leadership made me put that off, something that hurt me far more deeply than I realized at the time. As chair of the board of directors, I got to hear the then-president joke at an informal meeting about covering up the assault of a transwoman because she “had brought it on herself”. When Aradia shut down after outbursts by the malignant narcissists in the group, and I tried to reiterate her points, I was accused (in back channel discussions) of speaking over and abusing her … but no one ever tried to help her.

After 2017, though, the measures of the five year plan that the members had voted to implement were too radical, too real, and we were chased out. In particular, our desire to change security and safety policy so that records were kept of every incident and accusation, so that patterns could be tracked over time and so that the whole of leadership knew what was happening, not just the chair of the security committee, was taken as a personal threat by entrenched leadership. People were furious at our suggestion that everyone come to meetings sober. Strangely threatening was our proposal that, every few years, all staff be required to take a sabbatical year to prevent burn out, and be admitted to the festival for free as attendees. The final straw for me was in mid-2017, when I learned that both our not-for-profit status and insurance had been allowed to lapse. Chirotus had already left, as had half my crew. Aradia stuck on till November. The members of my crew that stayed on past that all repudiated me publicly.

We learned through the grapevine that new rules had been passed to prevent our return. That people believed (or said they did) that we had cursed the president and caused him to fall through a faulty ceiling. That we formed the Lunar Shenanigans Crew for the express purpose of cursing entrenched leadership. (We were not cursing anyone. We were ritualists, we wanted to ritual. The only magic we did about them was some cursebreaking and some “return to sender” work against the Evil Eye. In retrospect, I may have been flinging some Evil Eye of my own [I have an astounding capacity for hate], but I promise you, if Aradia, Chirotus, and I – let alone the three of us plus a half dozen compatriots – had been flinging curses, not a one of them would still have had a job or home.)

We were exhausted. We were hurt. We felt betrayed.

We were literally traumatized by the cult-tactics employed by senior leadership, starting with love bombing and moving immediately to trying to control the information we had available to us and trying to force us to either recruit or cut off our friends who were not a part of the organization, to ostracizing us when we could not be made to submit. I ran into one of the committee heads at the store a few months later and they literally fled from the sight of me.

To this day, I do not trust my judgment about people anymore. I am afraid to go to public events, lest I run into people who I sincerely believe want me dead. Chirotus will no longer set foot on the grounds of Gaea Retreat Center.

And yet, though I kept it to myself, I always wanted to go back. I had attended the festival since I was a literal child. I didn’t want to cede the territory forever. To my surprise, it was Aradia who brought up going back toward the beginning of April. She wanted to go bonfire dancing. We were talking about getting day passes, joking about wearing masks and claiming a vow of silence if we ran into anyone we didn’t like. I was excited to finally be able to bring Kraken to something that had always been such a huge part of my life, and whose shadow darkened the first years of our friendship.

Hearing that it’s ending has hit me hard. I got drunk and went off on twitter last night. I was already in a bad mood when tree-trimming in the neighborhood woke me up and chased me out of the house. (I’m writing this on my laptop in a park, though I’ll have to go home soon to refill my coffee.)

I don’t know who, if anyone, of the people who hurt me are still involved. I know that some of them have left because I know that someone else holds their positions. I know that one of them – the one who betrayed me most personally, and who took my place as head of the sacred experience committee – has moved on to leadership at the organization that maintains the Gaea Retreat, and runs their public rituals as badly as anyone ever has.

I find myself wishing I had the money for a whole weekend. If it’s going out, I want to be there with it. For good and ill, it made me what I am.

Some of my crew are saying “good riddance”. I can’t blame them. None of them ever loved the festival the way that I did. Maybe I should feel that way, too. But I’m not there, yet. I might not ever be.

If the end of Heartland Pagan Festival is what it takes to get those people out of power, fine.

If the end of Heartland Pagan Festival is what it takes to kill the drunken predatory culture that developed around it, fine.

Those things need to go, and I would drive the stake home, myself, if I thought I had the reach.

But, for now, I am just … sad.

Prepare yourself for some waves of Heartland memories on my various socials, and probably here, as well.

In art, witchcraft

First Vision of the Sabbat Fires

Author Satyr MagosPosted on

At the last Full Moon, my ritual crew and I began dabbling in Sabbatic Craft.

We’ve been floundering a little bit, since we reached the end of our year of Drawing Down the Moon. We have a handful of annual rituals that have kept us going – Dionysiac Beltane and Samhain, Her Sacred Fires, our August Ursa Major ritual – but my partner and I have struggled to fill the spaces.

At the last Moon, I pitched a handful of suggestions, one of which was visionary work. One of our members suggested a trip to the Sabbat Fires, specifically. Everyone else thought sounded good. My only objection was that I didn’t know the way. Alvianna was happy to take the lead.

The ritual Alvianna led us in had four phases: a crossroads-themed opening, idiosyncratic to her own work, with features that she had brought to other rituals we had done together; a visionary journey into and through the Wild to the bonfire where we met the Witchfather and danced with him; an ecstatic dance in our material ritual space, accompanied by feasting; and the journey back to reality.

My visionary experience was more physically intense than any I’ve had in quite some time. There were some entheogens involved, but while I do broadly advocate the use of such magical rocket fuel, the relative intensity of my experience is as much a consequence of my long lapse of practice than a statement on the relative merits of drugs versus sobriety in trance.

We each had our own experiences with the Witchfather. For my own part, I hesitate to say more than that, and thus feel doubly uncomfortable revealing what anyone else described after the circle. I know that we all made offerings of one sort or another, and that my offering was accepted graciously. I tried to find my compatriots around the fire. I could see them, distantly, but could never catch up to them.

What I will say is that, for me, it was a clear and positive of first contact. While I have been slow to start, I have had clear signs and messages over the last year both that I need to resume my visionary practice, broadly speaking, and to look into Sabbatic Craft. This, I think – particularly following the visionary preparations I did for last month’s Saturn talismans (which will get their own post soon) – certainly qualifies.

I will say, also, that my contact with the Witchfather was very, very clear. So clear, in fact, that I was compelled to create an image based on it.

The background is painted in watercolor, which is not my best medium. It’s really not intended for the degree of saturation that I always go for. But I think that, this time, I made it work. The figure of the Witchfather, himself is painted in black India ink. I have a scan that I took of the background before I painted him, and I might try to redo this digitally, where I will have second chances with the proportions of the figure. Or I may not.

What I will absolutely do is return to the Witchfather and his Sabbat fires.

In Uncategorized, witchcraft

In Search of A Map

Author Satyr MagosPosted on

In the earliest days of my magical exploration, my cosmology was very simple.  There was the mortal, material, world in which I existed primarily, and the energetic, spirit, world in which it was encapsulated, and which intruded into the material at whim.  The literature I was reading at that time spoke of the Otherworld, and the astral, and the Akashik … each monolithic, undifferentiated, either identical to or incomparable with the others.  Owing to my obsession with achieving astral projection, I tended to conceive of it all as the astral plane.

As I continued my magical practice, encountering spirits and phenomena that could not fit within that simple construction, and began encountering descriptions (often shallow) of other cosmologies – the Tree of Life; the Upper, Middle, and Lower worlds; competing theological visions – I incorporated these other realms as layers running parallel or perpendicular to the mortal world, or wholly elsewhere… perhaps as separate realms, floating distinct and distant in the astral sea.  In retrospect, I am embarrassed how much my personal cosmology was shaped by role-playing games.  But however ill-pedigreed it may have been, that multi-layered map succeeded in describing the world I actually saw, where no other really did.

Years passed.  My practice waxed and waned, and waxed and waned again.  I became isolated, finding few pagans practicing serious magic, and – as I became ever more queer – finding pagan spaces increasingly hostile to my gender.

I began studying shamanic visionary practice, and finally achieved the out-of-body experiences that I had craved since I first began studying magic ten years before.  And, somehow, without even noticing, I bought into the implicit cosmology: a Middle World, where mortals and land spirits dwell; an Underworld, full of the dead and demons and trickster spirits and cthonic gods; and an Upperworld, populated by angels and sky gods and archetypes and ascended masters.  It did not do as good a job of describing my own experiences, or the experiences of my friends, but the practice seemed to require a certain commitment to the metaphor, and after a couple years I forgot some of the subtitles and vagaries that had previously defined my personal map.

Then came the ceremonial experiment, and my complete inability to buy the Tree of Life cosmology, and my eventual emphasis on conjuring spirits of the planetary spheres.  The Platonic planetary spheres were even less adequate to describe my previous experiences than the “shamanic worldview”before it, but it was operationally effective.  Once again, being a terrible Chaos Magician, I bought in.

Somewhere in the temporal mess of the above two paragraphs and the decade they represent, I was shown a vision of the cosmos.  All such visions are suspect, and this one was doubly so as it conformed more closely to one of my previous worldviews than any I have heard described before: a black-skinned goddess, hair in dreads and face obscured by a wooden mask, lifted me up into the sky and showed me a vision of the Earth, made up not of tidy layers or ascending spheres, but of lines of force and raging currents and irregularly shaped planes, all jammed together around and through one another, some vast beyond imagining, some trully infinite, and some shockingly small.  In this vision,  the mortal world was formed by the places where those lines and planes and currents intersected most densely, and the Otherworlds extended outward beyond the material.

Now, almost fully extracted from the ceremonial experiment and the painfully regimented structures in which I inadvertently bound myself, I find myself going over old notes and dredging up near-forgotten memories and magical techniques which defy the cosmologies in which I have spent the last five to ten years.  I find myself in need of a new cosmology.  I need a new map.

The map is not the territory: there are subtitles of texture and meaning and contrast that a map simply cannot convey.  There are regions inadequately represented, and at some point editorial decisions of scale and significance must be made.  That does not mean it is not helpful to have one.

The world exists.  Get in your car and drive in any direction, and there it is.  Perhaps you will find yourself in Dullsville, or a Cave of Wonders.  But without a map, that experience drifts free without anchor.  Perhaps you will avoid Dullsville in the future, or perhaps you will somehow find yourself there again and again because the road looked more appealing at the outset.  Perhaps you will manage to return to the Cave of Wonders, or perhaps the angle of sun or rain that drove you down that road will never again align in your favor, and it is lost to you forever.

I recall the vision I was given with sharp clarity, and relate it often as one of the most profound magical experiences of my magical life, but I have not managed to … internalize it.  To see, it seems, is not, in fact, to know.  I need a map.

So I ponder.  I recall the times I have wound my way through magical defenses by stepping sideways.  I turn the worlds I have seen over and over in my mind.  And I keep that vision in mind.  I think of ghosts, and shadow people, and all the phenomena I have seen and experienced which never rested comfortably in the maps I have used before.  I recall, also, the experiences of others that have been related to me – ancestor works, and godspouces, and cryptids, and alien abductions – which must also be accounted for if my map is to be useful.

Art may serve me better, in this quest, than science.  But I shall pursue it with all of both that I can muster.

In Uncategorized, witchcraft

Rear View: Twenty Years of Magick

Author Satyr MagosPosted on

A few days after Samhain I will be thirty-six years old and, give or take a few months, I will have been practicing magic for twenty years.

My studies started a few years earlier, when I was thirteen.  Astrology books.  Chariots of the Gods.  But I didn’t dive in.  Not right away.  I think it was my sixteenth birthday when I bought my first Tarot deck and my copy of the Necronomicon, and not long before or after that when started trowling internet message boards and archives for non-theistic magical techniques.  But, then as now, my first and best resource was the people around me: empaths and energy workers who taught me things I’ve never, rarely, or only recently seen in books or even blogs.  I’ve told this story – all these stories – before, I’m sure; in bits and pieces, at least.

Elemental energy and crystals in the halls of Lawrence Free State High School.  Dragons and dragon-kin in the coffee shops Downtown.  The realms of the dead and otherworldly lights in cemetaries and along the railroad tracks.  Circle-casting and Ouija and aura-reading and my first group circles with the KU Wicca-Pagan Alliance.  My first adventures at Heartland Pagan Festival, as early as 1999.  My first shamanic visionary experiments in St.Louis, and my first attempts to reach out ot the gods.  Past lives and glossolia and love and lust and loss.

In some ways, though, I feel like I’m behind my peers.  I cant pretend that I was practicing dilligently that enitre time, or that my experiments were always well thought-out.  Others who started their practices around the same time have published books and are running classes and conferences.  Some have even established enire schools of thought.

In retrospect, I wish that I had been bolder.  I knew, even at the beginning, that things could get so much stranger than they already were, and the fact of the matter is that I was afraid.  One of my earliest compatriots came from a New Age family whose matriarch was hard for the White Light, and savagely against anything with the slightest risk of a neutral spirit encounter, let alone a potentially complicated or unsettling one.  Her fear, transmitted through my friend, combined with my own native sheepishness – prior to begining my magical practice, I had been a downright boring kid, however strange I might have been – to severely limit my explorations at the earliest stages.  Later, when I joined the WPA, my trunkated explorations were still the strangest thing most of my peers had ever seen, and I felt no need to push forward in that context.  All in all, I missed the prime exploratory years wherein youthful ignorance and madness overlapped with near-adult intellect and ambition.

I won’t be behind the power curve forever, though.  I’ve spent the last few years really stepping up.  My first, ill-fated student in 2008, when I first came bacck to KC after my failed life in St. Louis.  The Proto-Coven, shortly after, with Aradia and Chirotus and D and Pasiphae and Aidan.  The Ceremonial Experiment and those first workshops from the Sunrise Temple.  My work with the Heartland Spiritual Alliance since graduating college and coming back to KC – I’ve learned so much from my work with the Sacred Experience Committee already, and I’ve easily got another year or two in me before that burns me out.

I’ve started teaching workshops on spirit conjuration at Heartland Pagan Festival and Spirit Circle, hoping to spread that skill wider in the local Pagan community.  And then there are the masks.  Those experiments have barely begun, and I have no idea where they will take me, but … I know that something really, trully exciting waits down that road.  The Nine Muses multi-mask (which I still haven’t written about) at Festival this May really proved that.

It’s been a hell of a ride.  A good life, even.  I feel like I’ve forgotten more magical techniques than some people will ever know.  This is a tragedy, not braggadocio.  As I wind up my most recent Back-to-Basics programme, reading Andrieh Vitimus’ Hands On Chaos Magic (possibly the best single-volume magical handbook I have ever seen) and cruising through the archives of Deeper Down the Rabbit Hole and Aeon Byte and a handfull of other podcasts (for some reason, podcasts are easier on my madness, lately), I keep having the surreal experience of, “Oh, yeah!  I used to do that!  Why did I stop?”

Looking back on it all, it is natural for any human brain — let alone that of a novellist — to try to extract some sort of narrative or lesson.

I was “raised”, so to speak, in the heyday of solitary ecclectic Wicca, and somehow missed Chaos Magick on the first pass.  I have watched magical but ahistorical Paganism wane, somewhat, in the face of more academically savvy but often explicitly anti-magical reconstructionist and devotional polytheisms.  I have watched, albeit from a bit of a distance, the rise of the grimoir revival and an apparent resurgance of lodges, orders, and covens.

When I started, American Pagans, under the lingering influence of Second Wave feminism, were often clueless in regard to issues of race and class, and ill-equipped to deal with queer genders and sexualities, but in general were well-intended and willing to listen and change.  Over the last two decades, though, a strong split has risen between those inclined to justince across racial, class, gender, and sexual lines, and those who allign themselves, either actively or by inaction, with the White Nationalist resurgance in both the United States and Europe.  And with the rise of the “Alt” Right (that is, the “new” trend of disdaining dog whistles in favor of being openly evil), those whose chief politics are respectability are rushing swiftly towards the Nazis.

I am still young.  My political awakening has been relatively recent.  And the politics and history of the last hundred years is a mess of classified, redacted, and falsified documents.  I’m honestly not 100% sure what happened.  My inclination is to say that, after having already taken a hard body-blow from the Satanic Panic of the 1980s, the 9|11-inspired resurgeance of Christian Nationalism and the resulting death of the Anti-War and Environmental movements created an environment in which the best parts of Modern Neo-Pagan Witchcraft and Religion were severely hobbled, and the worst parts (which were always there) were given fertile fields in which to grow.

Fuck.

Twenty years.  Magic and, by extension, Paganism have been the center of my life for twenty years.  Way more than my “adult” life.  Twenty years of power and ecstacy and madness and love and lust and tears and visions.  Even when I was not actively practicing, when I was lost in depression and anxiety or the chaos of mortal life, my life was defined by magic and/or the lack thereof.

The only thing I’ve been doing longer, the only thing that means as much to me, is writing.  Did I know what I was getting into when I started?  Of course not.  Would I have done it if I did?  I like to think so.

Twenty years, now.  Four cities across three states.  Three hard resets of my practice and cosmology.  More friends gained and lost and more psychoctic breaks than I can count.

Thank you, all of you, who have been here with me on the road for any amount of time.

Thank you, even more, to those whose paths took you far away.  I miss you more than I can say, even if some of you would not be prepared for my new genderqueer polyamorous marginal life.

Let’s rais a glass, friends, to twenty years of magic.  And swill it down to the promise of at least twice twenty more.

In Uncategorized, witchcraft

Early Spirit Contact: “Daemon Wolf”

Author Satyr MagosPosted on 1 Comment

The first spirit contact I can recall was with a “totem” spirit I came to call Daemon Wolf.

As many of you may recall, animal totems (or, spirits, phenomena, and identifications we called animal totems) were a HUGE THING in the mid-to-late 1990s.  Ted Andrews was fucking everywhere.  People looked to their totems not just as spiritual guides and masters, but to explain and shape their very personalities.  For example, many “Cat totem” people I knew meowed and tried to purr and gleefully used their identification to invade (or avoid)ur personal space; people with “wolf totems” cast themselves in roles of leader or tragic outcast; “bear totem” people set themselves up as the “cuddly bouncer”.  But I digress.

In this atmostphere, as I began to transition from my earliest period of studying magic, the occult, and the paranormal, to actually practicing magic at aboout the age of sixteen, one of my first rituals was aimed at finding my totem animal and/or spirit guide.  (Other people may have been clear on the distinction between those things in 1997/8, I was not.)   I wish that I could reproduce or cite that first ritual for you here, but alas… Although I had access to a small collection of friends books at that time (I think my library still consisted entirely of the Simonomicon and maybe a Cunningham encyclopedia), I preffered the rituals I learned from people on IRC chat and in FTP archives.  Six computers later, unfortunately, those files are long gone.

The ritual as I recall it was simple.  I set myself up in a comfortable chair, with a candle and glass candle holder.  I put on some nice, quiet Celtic harp music.  I cast an elemental circle.  I carved my personal sigil, a bindrune I had designed, into the side of the candle, and imbued it with my desire to know my totem animal/spirit guide.  I dropped the candle in the holder, lit it, and tried to slip into the trance.  The candle holder, which I have to this day, was round and convex, with red dragon’s tears affixed to an inner layer by some sort of grey-green ceramic.  As I tried to enter and maintain the trance, I turned the candle holder around and around in my hands, gazing into the back-lit dragon tears and waiting for an image to appear in my mind.

This ritual would be my first firegazing, and possibly my most successful to date.  I saw the image of a snarling, black-furred wolf with flaming red eyes.  Even at that young and tender age, I could tell that this was not the spirit of all wolves.  There was a darkness about it, a savagery outside of the natural wild.  I called it Daemon Wolf.  (Yes, the penchant for high drama goes way back.)

I remained in contact with that spirit off and on for years, but I could not “hear” it.  I could tell that it was attempting to communicate, but, I couldn’t grok whatever signals the spirit was trying to send.  It began appearing to my friends in IRC chatrooms (some of whose animal spirits came to investigate me in return) and my more magically experienced local friends to relay messages and relieve its boredom.  The spirit in question also had a penchant for melodrama.

On a particularly notable evening, 31 October 1998 – one of my earliest surviving joural entries, in addition to one of my earliest clear spirit contacts – I was hanging out in the coffee shop with my friend Medea and one or two other friends.  I don’t remember what we were talking about, but as the conversation progressed the sese of someone sitting close to my right side grew stronger and stronger.  But I couldn’t see anything … not clearly, at any rate: just a vague silhoette crouched on the floor.

After a while, it was too much for me, and I interrupted my own train of thought to demand if  anyone else could see the thing sitting beside me.

“Wolfie,” Medea idetified the spirit for me, laughing and using the nickname she’d given Daemon Wolf in previous conversation.

Things changed trajectory after that.  My spirit-senses did improve, slowly.  It did become easier for Daemon Wolf to contact me.  It was clear, however, that there was a lot it wanted to convey to me that I just wasn’t picking up on.

As my practice escalated over the next few years, more spirits began appearing in my life.  I couldn’t hear them any better than I could hear Wolfie, but it … appeared to resent them.  It very clearly resented that I was not pursuing my relationship with it as dilligently as it desired.  Frankly: focus is not my strong point in the medium term.  Short term – jewelry repair, a single ritual, a lover – I am a laser ; long term – college, my novels – I am relentless; medium term … that’s where the distractions live.  And I had a lot of distractions, as I was rotating through whole circcles of freinds about every 12-18 months those first few years out of high school.  Contacts with Daemon Wolf grew increasingly sporadic.  When I did make contact – or, more accurately, when it made contact – it was increasingly cross with me.

Eventually, the spirit I called Daemon Wolf lost patience with me.   I wish I had the xact date, or could find the record  — I know I wrote about the event, somewhere, but … I’ve mentioned before that my journalling is not the best.  Some time before I departed Lawrence, KS, for what would become my failed life in St.Louis, it made final contacct and told me that it was giving up and moving on.

 

This is one of the few places where I wish I had done things differently back in the day.  I don’t think most people have spirits take that sort of proprietary interest that early.  It’s not unheard of, of course, but it’s an opportunity not everyone gets … and I blew it.  I also wish I’d kept better journals, so I would have more wheat from which to sift chaff.  Still, my relationship with Daemon Wolf taught me one essential lesson: relaitionships between mortals and spirits are opt-in, for both parties.  Either party can leave when their needs are not being met, or their goals are not being achieved.

 

In Uncategorized, witchcraft

Ouija: Spirit Contact and Controversy In The KU Cauldron

Author Satyr MagosPosted on 1 Comment

In 2001 and 2002, despite not being a student, I was heavily involved in the KU Cauldron — then the Wicca-Pagan Alliance.  Meetings were Tuesdays weekly, if I recall correctly — I seem to have too many memories from too short a time for it to have been only monthly, and I know that there many meetings I missed because I simply couldn’t bring myself to leave my apartment.  Sometimes we had topics, sometimes we didn’t.  Occasionally we had presenters.  Many nights we spent doing tarot readings, or sharing energetic and psychic techniques.  More often than I care to admit, we spent most of the night talking about anime.  Two things we managed to keep consistent, though: we opened nearly every meeting by casting a circle; and after the meetings, about half of us would stay for Ouija.

The weekly Ouija sessions were a source of a surprising ammount of contention.  There were, of course, the two or three rationalists — I’m still not sure why they were there — who believed that the whole thing was even more hinkey than everything else we were doing.  The rest, though, were deeply disturbed by the talking board.  Most wouldn’t talk about their misgivings.  Those who would — ironically, the vampire numbered among them — were concerned about the nameless evils that might come through.  No one out-and-out told us to stop, but … There was serious concern that our post-meeting sessions might begin before the non-participants had cleared whatever they believed to be minimum safe distance.

I had, prior to my time in the WPA, known a few people who had had their own experiences with talking boards.  Most had nothing remarkable to report.  A few had the usual stories of flying objects or lingering entities.  But I had never tried it, myself.  Given the lower-than average success rates my friends had reported, I was moderately skeptical.  But back then, though, before the migraines, I was much more open to wild experimentation than I often have been since.

Given all the concern and side-eyes we got over the whole thing, I was somewhat disappointed by the reality.  Most of our sessions were fairly tame.  We got positive contact more often than not.  Names and dates and details of lives and deaths that we could never verify.  All juicy enough to hold our attention, but never quite enough to convince the more skeptical participants … myself included.

Well, not never.  There were … incidents.  But I’ll get to that in a moment.

The Oija board was owned and brought by one of our members, by the name of Jason if I recall correctly, and he always took point on the planchette.  From the other side of the board, our sessions were mediated by by a spirit that called itself “Ouija”, apparently a familiar spirit to Jason.  We would open sessions on the board and the planchette would fly over those five letters: O … U … I … J … A … then, WELCOME.  We would ask this spirit Ouija to manage contacts for us, find the spirits to whom we would talk.

Some, myself included, believed that Ouija was Jason.  Not that he was deliberately guiding the planchette — though that was, occasionally, a subject of debate — but that he had some need for control, and manifested the Ouija “spirit” to exert that control over the talking board.  I was often tempted to test that theory by usurping the board from the other side, using the woven energetic techniques that were then my signature style, but ultimately never tried to pull such a dick move on someone who was ostensibly my friend.

Three particular evenings stand out in my memory, fifteen years later.

The first was the spirit of a girl who claimed to have committed suicide in the building where we held our meetings.  I don’t remember her name, or when she claimed to have lived.  I do remember that she hanged herself.  I remember the pall that came over us all as the spirit spoke.  Jason later claimed to have confirmed the story, but I never saw any newspaper articles.

The second was an attempt to make contact with a spirit that had approached me early in my carreer.  That first contact is a story in and of itself, a strange night from the days of guerilla magic in the Java Break, but the short version is that one Halloween, a spirit approached me and made … contact.  High voltage, visceral contact.  And it spooked the shit out of me.  And I rejected her.  One night on the Ouija board, some years later, I convinced the Cauldron crowd to let me reach out to her in return.  There was contact, but it was … unclear.  Staticky.  Only one thing came through to me inteilligibly: contact me again.  Spoiler alert: I never did.

The third and most dramatic session with the KU Cauldron and the Ouija board was the sort of thingthat tends to scare people off of not just spirit contact, but magical practice altogether.

We opened the board as per usual: O … U … I … J … A … WELCOME.  That was where any resemblance to our usual evening ended.  Ouija was frantic.  Insistant.  GO, it told us. GO!

“Go where?” we asked.

It gave us the name of a building on campus.  We went there, and brought the board with us.  We did not, immediately, find anything of partifular interest at that location.  We did, however, run into a member that had not been present at the meeting — we’ll call him Scott — who joined us for our mobile seance.

We attempted to re-establish contact with Ouija.  It was not a smooth transaction.  When we did make contact, the spirit was still agitated.  This time, while still identifying itself as “Ouija”, it gave us a name.  When asked to clarify, it repeated the anem.

Scott was somewhat perturbed.  “That’s my sister’s name.”

Everyone became very adgitated at that point.

Scott borrowed a cellular phone — something that not everyone had back then — and called his sister.  Her abusive ex was at her appartment, pounding on her door.  He’d been there for a few minutes.  Scott talked her down from raw panic.  Talked her into calling the police.  Called her back and waited on the line until they came.

It was some time before we broke out the board again.  I think that Jason may have left the groop not long after, though that may well be either the vagaries of memory or the natural course of the four-year graduation cycle.  The incident did leave a lasting impression on all those that were present.

I’ve been thinking about the past a lot lately.  Listening to podcasts, so many guests telling stories of their magical youths.  Writing novels set in my own magical youth.  Things I had all but forgotten floating to the surface.  This story, in particular, has come to mind in the wake of several podcasts about the myth and practice and history of talking boards.

Makes me want to use one, again.

Makes me want to make one by hand.

But before I begin the neew experiments, I need to recall the old.