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In hedonism, Uncategorized, witchcraft

HPF 2012: The Blessings of Dionysus Upon you All

Author Satyr MagosPosted on

 

"Bacchus" by Caravaggio.
“Bacchus” by Caravaggio. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Flannigan’s Right Hook was playing their cover of Paint it Black as Aradia and I stumbled back from one of the furthest-flung encampments at Gaea, still high from our first shamanic journey.  That was Friday night of HPF 2009, our first year together; they played again the following year on the Sunday night main-stage, to which they returned  this year.  I missed the first part of this show, too, eventually abandoning half of my encampment to their face-painting shenanigans.

After the quiet of rest of the festival, walking up to the stage was like running face-first into a cacophonic wall of neon light and raucous sound.  A beautiful, much-needed wall, the impact with which brought me back to 2k9 and ‘10, returning to those moments in cyclical time.  The guitars, the cello, the electric fiddle … it was catharsis, pure and powerful.

I needed it desperately.  The festival, to that point, had had its ups and downs.  The main ritual, the day before, had been an utter disaster from which we were all—despite the passage of twenty-four hours, multiple cleansing rituals, and the completion of the public closing ritual just hours before—still recovering.  Even the land was stained.

So I stood there, vibrating with the music, and trying to let go.  To let go of my frustration with the Sacred Experience Committee.  To let go of my frustration with my camp-mates, most of whom had not yet made it to the pavilion[1].  To let go of my desire for the festival—which I have been attending since I was eighteen years old, to which I have introduced probably a dozen people at this point, and to which I had brought three “virgins” this very year—to be perfect, and just enjoy it as it was in the then and the now.  Perfection doesn’t exist in this world.  I’m skeptical that it exists anywhere.  …. So why, then, do I get so upset when things turn out to be less than perfect?

The music was amazing, the light show was a blast, and I was drinking thoroughly-blessed wine.  And yet, I was still struggling to find the fun.  My ambivalence must have been clear.  When Aradia asked me if I was alright, I didn’t lie.

Aradia and Aurora had been to one of the workshops I’d missed on account of my work exchange obligations.  The workshop was on aura cleansing and chakra balancing.  Together, as I stood there listening to the music, they worked over my energetic bodies until I was almost in tears.  Finally, something inside me broke loose, the tears came, my aura opened up, and I was able to let go and find the fun.  Power filled me, and a few sudden insights.

The band was clearly having the time of their lives, too.  Somehow, bottles of mead kept finding their way on stage.  At one point, the band stopped to toast the audience.  I raised my glass and toasted them back: “The blessings of Dionysus upon you all.”

My wine, as I said, was well-blessed.  Recognizing that I was not the only one in my encampment stained by the miasma of the previous night’s ritual, I took the box of wine Aurora had offered for the purposes, and called upon Dionysus to bless it so that all who drank of it would be purged of the stain and incited to sacred revelry.  I wish I’d thought to wright down the specifics, but I kinda got lost in the moment.  I completed the blessing by pouring a libation in a circle around the box; suddenly, it was “hot” to the touch.

“Holy shit,” said Aradia.  “What did you just do?”

When I toasted the band, my blessing spread to their bottles.  But one of the things about working with gods and spirits, I guess, is that once you start talking to them, they’re listening more than you realize.   And I had said “upon you all.”  Little lights started going off in the audience as the blessing spread to those bottles.  And then little bells started ringing in my head as other bottles throughout camp were lighted with the same blessing, too.

It was about that time that the rest of our encampment showed up, beaming and with faces painted.  The wine flowed liberally and, when the concert was over, we found a secluded place to load a bowl while they lit the bonfire.

The tenor of the evening was changed, radically, and for the better.

1 – I love you guys, but you can’t spend five days camped with anyone and not end up a bit frustrated at some point.

In witchcraft

IRC and an Astral Interwebs

Author Satyr MagosPosted on

When I was 16 or so, I spent my nights on IRC chat.  I didn’t really have access to other Pagans back then—if there was a witch/New Age store in Lawrence at that time, I don’t remember it; I couldn’t have afforded workshops even if there had been; and I wasn’t in the habit of driving to Kansas City at the time—so the internet was my primary access point to the Pagan Community At Large.

Damn I wish I had those log files, but they must have gotten lost three computers ago.  I can’t even remember the names of most of the people I talked to, though I may still have a few pictures of them somewhere in the archives.  SnowLeopard.  Latinius.  Tig.  My handles were ScholarMage and ShadowWolf. Don’t judge me: it was the mid-90s.  Handles making references to totem animals were ubiquitous, and there was inevitably enough overlap that most of us had two or three variations on our favorite handles on case our favorites were taken.  No one had registered or proprietary identities: that’s not how IRC worked.

These things come to mind now in part because of a recent post by the good Jack Faust.  When I think of the combination of magic and the internet, two experiences from my faunish days come immediately to mind.  Although I know I wrote about them at some point, I haven’t found these events in my very fragmentary journals from the time, so I have to rely on the hazy images of memories a decade and a half old. Both push the borders of my “adult” credulity, but this is how I remember them.

Much of the time I spent not-on-the-internet was spent at a coffee shop called the Java Break.  One night, walking home, I felt like I was being followed.  I kept looking behind me, but the streets and alleys all seemed as deserted as usual.  I was wound pretty tight by the time I made it home.  That night I woke from a dead sleep to see a large, cat-shape sitting beside my bed; this was doubly strange because I slept on the top bunk, which mean the cat-shape was just floating in the air.  I was (in retrospect, unaccountably) terrified, and I asked it to leave.  It got up, shrugged, and departed: fading out of sight as it walked in place.  When I shared this experience with my IRC friends, SnowLeopard claimed it was her spirit guide, checking me out because he was bored.  This may have been the first time I ever saw and interacted directly with a  spiritual entity.

On another occasion, someone on the chat circuit wanted to show me how to call lightning using a stone circle.  Somehow, though I had no experience or training in (or even vocabulary for) visionary/astral work (in fact, this was the heyday of my failed attempts at astral projection), this gentleman was able to transmit to me, and I was able to receive and experience, a process of calling lightning to oneself from the center of a stone circle.  The ability to so something like that is, of course, an extraordinary claim: one that I have never tested, though I can still (as with many of my visionary experiences) recall the scene with incredible, visceral clarity.  For whatever it’s worth, I imagine that a person with adequate focus and training could possibly manipulate the magnetism of a storm to that degree.  (Why not?  I’ve seen people make fire dance to their will, fuck with lights and computers in improbable ways.  I, myself, have changed the wind to keep campfire smoke out of my eyes on numerous occasions.)  I don’t, however, believe for a moment that a magician has any better chances of surviving a lightning strike than anyone else, even if he called it down.

That’s it: A spiritual visitation on one occasion, and a shared visionary experience on another.  Two anecdotal accounts from a not-particularly-tech-savvy, pubescent, magician-in-training who wasn’t even keeping coherent journals at the time.  But it makes one think.  What might be possible for someone who was fully-trained?  Particularly someone actively interested in techno-magic?

In witchcraft

Devotional Musings: Dionysus I

Author Satyr MagosPosted on

This post has already taken me too long to compose.  I started it almost as soon as I first posted about the Urban Dionysia.  The fact is, I find it difficult to write about my personal experiences with the gods.  Some of those experiences have been very, very strange—to the point where, even after a decade and a half of living a magical life and talking or reading about other people’s magical lives, I don’t have an adequate cultural framework through which to process them.  Other experiences, which may seem downright pedestrian when I reduce them to words or which I may know full well parallel the experiences of many, many others, have simply affected me so deeply that I cannot bear to subject them to public scrutiny.  (The events which comprise my previous post include some of both) And, inevitably, part of it is that I spent so much of my life being angry at the very idea of gods that I still feel like something of a chump, sometimes, for honoring them.  I’ve alluded to this last point before, and it is from there that I will begin.

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In witchcraft

Dedication

Author Satyr MagosPosted on

Sometimes you have to need to provide context before you can tell a story.  Sometimes, it’s best to tell a story first and dig into the context afterward.  This is the story of how I came to perform my re-Dedication as a part of my Beltane festivities in 2009 … I’ll get to the context in a little bit.

It was my second Beltane after my failed life in St. Louis, the first with Aradia.  It may almost go without saying tat we were at Camp Gaea, with my massive tent set up in Dava Wood.  I had big plans for the weekend, aimed at jump-starting my magical career* in preparation for the re-Dedication I intended to perform at some point over the summer, and we were partying with the KU Cauldron.  It’s tempting to break this into three different stories which coincidentally took place over the course of a single evening, but … I’m not so sure that they’re unrelated.

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In witchcraft

Dweller on the Threshold

Author Satyr MagosPosted on

I can’t find it now, of course, but I was first introduced to the idea of the magical threshold and a monster that guarded it by a ritual I found on Witchvox when I was eighteen.  I never did the ritual, of course.  I wasn’t really doing magic back then, outside of my energy work and house wards and games of psychic tag.  Hell, I don’t even remember anything about it except that it existed.

In the years since, I have encountered a number of variations on the idea, but I can’t really point to many of them because (until I started specifically researching them as I wrote this post) they were always incidental—either to the research I was doing, to the the article I was reading, or some combination of the two.  The fact is that I dismissed them—incarnations of the Dweller on the Threshold, that is—believing them to be manifestations of a Christianized anti-magic worldview.  The way I articulated that thought became more sophisticated over the years, but I never really re-evaluated that conclusion until recently.

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In Uncategorized

A Short Rant On Theft and Sharing

Author Satyr MagosPosted on

Every producer of intellectual property has some concern that their work will be stolen.  This morning, I was confronted with a reminder that many people on the internet have no respect whatsoever for the work people like me (and, I think, most if not all of my readers) do:

The Theft; The Fallout.

In the resulting conversations on a friend’s facebook account, I’ve seen a couple people talk about pulling everything they’ve ever written from the interwebs, and mourn for the “good old days” when the Craft was private and “the Grimoires were sacred and secret in the right way”.  I do, in fact, remember those days: the days when all I had access to was whatever 100-level bullshit I could find at the library or the local bookstore, with no access to community and no way of vetting sources before shelling out what little money I had.  When I thought I was going batshit crazy because none of the books I’ve ever read dared to get into the visceral experience of magic, or cop to how terrifying it is to be in the presence of a god for the first time … even one who likes you.

Having my work–which, here, amounts to a bit of artwork, a little research, and a lot of very personal stories–is something that concerns me.  But not so much that I’m going to quit.  I need the community this forum gives me access to, and I know that somewhere out there is some neophite like I was who needs someone else’s account of madness to ground them out and help give them context for the experiences that don’t ever seem to get put into print.

So, to all the fuckers: yes, I put my work out here to be seen.  Not to be stolen.

If anyone wants to use my work in their own, they’ve only to ask.  But please: fucking ask.

In witchcraft

Tradition, Technique, Appropriation, and Exploration Part 2/2

Author Satyr MagosPosted on

The last post was already in the works when when Gordon, Jason, Jow, and RO began their discussion of the simplicity, complexity, and relative eclecticism of their practices.  I seriously sympathize.  If you’ve read my previous post, I imagine you can see why: eclectic Wicca, years of unverifiable personal gnosis (both my own and that of those I’ve worked with), Hellenic gods, neo-shamanic spirit-journeys, Chaos- and Hermetic-inspired sigils, masks and hammers and things no one else has ever thought to do with a circle.

As I said before: I’ve spent years searching for a tradition.  I’ve played with Cunningham and Conway, dabbled with Crowley, Carrol and Kraig, mocked Lady Sheba and Silver Ravenwolf alike.  I am a student of Tarot and astrology.  I’ve experimented with candle magic and sorcery and astral projection, with auric healing and magically enhanced massage.  I’ve tuned myself to the elements and grounded into the astral plane – invoked the cosmic forces of the quarters and cast spells with nothing but the power of my own aura.  I have gone on spirit journeys and hung out with gods and spirits.  No one tradition I’ve found covers half these things, let alone all of them.  So, while the search continues, I’ve been working on my own: a systematic breakdown of the things I’ve done (as best as I can with my substandard journals), and maps of the things I want to do in the future.  I doubt anyone will ever want to join, but it will be perfect for me. And who knows, maybe I’ll find the perfect apprentice some day.

And yet … I still wax poetic, sometimes, about Traditions and Orders.  I share that strange jealousy for those who can name their path and have it recognized.  Envy for those who’ve found a teacher or a system that they can adopt in toto – even if they still need to look outside that system for new techniques to fill its inadequacies, addendums and appendices to a finite and discrete system.

I’m white, (apparently) cisgendered, and from a (lower) middle class family.  The list of spiritual traditions that I have any “legitimate” claim to are relatively few.  Unfortunately, none of them are to my taste.  Which leaves me either blazing trails in a dark and moonless wilderness or seeking refuge in other spiritual lands … and trying to avoid the ones where the locals would just as soon I curled up and died.  Or, as always, all of the above.

Does it sound a little like I’d like someone to do the hard work for me?  Yeah, it’s a little bit like that: I envy the people who can just accept a prefab structure.  For whom any of the existing systems have meaning.  Satyrs are not, by nature, hard workers: we like to drink and dance and fuck (nymphs, eachother, mortals, deities … I deal exclusively with enthusiastically consenting humanoids of legal age, myself, but other satyrs aren’t so picky).  So, yeah, I wish I could take a lazy rout.

But I can’t.

So I’m ecclectic.  I look to the past and to the modern Western Hermetic and Witchcraft traditions for inspiration.  I learn techniques from anyone who is wiling to share – god or mortal – and try to make sure all my sources are ethically sound.  Still … inevitably … I’m a transgressor of spiritual boundaries even as I am of social ones.  I’m bisexual.  Although I’m male-bodied and I present (mostly) as masculine, I actually identify as “fuck you and your stupid gender dichotomy”.  I am a hedonist and an intellectual in a society that simultaneously condemns both pursuits and sees them as inherently incompatible.  I am a historian in a religion that is (understandably) skeptical of mainstream historiography (a post of its own for another day), and which in its attempts to acquire popular and legal credibility is increasingly absorbing the overculture’s anti-intellectualism.

I am a queer, hedonist, shamanic witch.  The party’s at my place, and we can talk Plato in the morning … maybe hung over, maybe still smashed.

In witchcraft

Tradition, Technique, Appropriation, and Exploration Part 1/2

Author Satyr MagosPosted on

I am nothing if not eclectic.  My sacred calendar follows the Eight Sabbats of Wicca, even though those dates have nothing to do with the actual seasons in which I live.  My ritual construction is firmly rooted in the pseudo-Gardnerian Outer Court Witchcraft of the sixties and seventies – Uncle Bucky’s Big Blue Book, Ed Fitch’s Book of Shadows – and certain modern plays on those themes.  I have studied the “core” shamanism of Michael Harner and Gail Wood (to name two), and learned tech at festival workshops and from friends whose linages are dubious at best.  I am now studying the Western Hermetic tradition, and though I will not adopt it in whole, I will certainly take what’s useful to me.  I’m increasingly fascinated by Chaos Magic (only ten years late to that trend, right?), but can’t quite swallow the entire open-source, paradigm-hat-trading irreverence to tradition it seems to require.  Dionysos and Rhea were present at my initiation, and I have spoken to Hephaistos and Apollon and to gods who still haven’t given me their names.

For fifteen years, now, I have searched for a tradition – one that will have me, or even one that I want to have me.  Initiatory covens are few and far between here in the Midwest, and I haven’t ever gotten invited to their Outer Court parties (though, looking back, I might have totally missed the subtext of an invitation once or twice).  I’m  a white USian, descended from the English on one side and the Germans (and Swedes) on the other.

But the gods who are mine by right of blood have never expressed any interest in me (being ogled by Freya’s handmaidens after invoking them at a wedding so totally doesn’t count) … nor I them, to be fair.  When I must defend my devotion to Hellenic gods – a rare event, but it happens – I cite the fact that my civilization is descended from theirs, even if my family is not.

In general, I give little credence to those to whom I might need to defend my eclectic neo-Wiccan practice.  I’ve never had access to sealed rites, so I can’t possibly have stolen them, and I think the effectiveness of my rituals says all that needs to be said about their validity.  Are some eclectics idiots?  Yes.  Do I struggle with the dissonance between Wiccan praxis and my queer feminist spirituality?  Frequently: the whole Goddess-God thing fucks with me a lot.  Do I have trouble fitting sacrifice to and propitiation of my patron and matron dieties into the Wiccan frame?  Absolutely.

The biggest problems start when we get into my shamanic work, which is where Gordon’s post on ethical syncretism comes in.  Simply put, there’s a lot of problems with my pasty white ass practicing anything that I could call “shamanism”.  There are the problems with the word itself: cribbed and Anglicized from a group of Siberian nomads.  There’s the whole scholarly debate on whether or not it’s even a thing, on whether or not the category works in the real world or if it’s just a way for anthropologists to lump together things that aren’t actually the same (which is a debate to lengthy and complicated for me to point you to any one or two sources).  And then there’s the part where most of the people who practice things we call shamanism don’t like us (that is, ignorant white people) stealing their rituals.

I strive to keep to what’s called “core shamanism” – the magical and psychosomatic techniques that transcend culture – but even that is iffy.  Even if shamanism is/was the universal root of all religious experience and expression, my culture left it behind so long ago that you can’t see anything but the roughest outline of its memory on the oldest rites we have.  I strive to re-contextualize it all, to provide the cultural and spiritual meaning in which all effective magic is rooted.  I disdain ayahuasca, datura, and peyote as entheogens in favor of flying “potions” such as absinthe and marijuana – drugs that, to the best of my knowledge, no subaltern group has staked out as their own, exclusive, spiritual tool.  I claim no titles, use no names.  The fact is that a certain rhythm of drum-beet can drive the human brain into places it is much, much harder to reach otherwise.

There are those who would argue that it is wrong of me to call upon the gods of Hellas using any rites but their own.  That my refusal to participate in reconstructionism – study it though I may, as a Classicist and an historian – ought bar me from calling upon the Olympians.  In my particular case, there are fewer who would argue that lack of blood-ties forbids me – Hellenistikos are less prone to that than, say, Asatruar – but it is still an issue.  Many of the most legitimate heirs are tied to the Greek Orthodox Church and disdain attempts to resurrect their old gods – you know I’m not going to listen to them.

Still, however carefully distanced I keep myself from the worst forms of cultural appropriation, I don’t know that I can actually divorce myself from the that legacy.  And yet … I cannot help but persist.  It is through this madly syncretic set of rituals and techniques that I have had my most profound spiritual experiences.  It was in a circle cast by Wiccan rite, using Harner’s shamanic techniques, that I entered the spirit realms in preparation for my initiation, and descended until I was greeted by Briareos*, Dionysos and Rhea.

The gods are the final arbiters of whether or not our rites are acceptable.  So why can’t I stop worrying so much about this?

*I don’t actually know that it was Briareos.  Possibly one of his brothers.  Regardless: he did me a favor once, and I needed to pay him before I could descend further.

In witchcraft

I Don’t Know What It Was I Saw That Night, But It Sure As Hell Was Awesome

Author Satyr MagosPosted on

When I was eighteen years old, I saw something I still can’t explain.  Actually, I saw and did a lot of things I never quite grokked.

The one I want to talk about right now – the event came to me last night, a sudden flash of recollection while I was working on something else entirely – took place in a graveyard.  It was one of a couple such field trips with those particular friends, possibly even the first – this was almost thirteen years ago, so forgive me if it’s just a little hazy in parts.  The cemetery was hilly and a little old fashioned, with several large stone angels and little mausoleums, winding paved paths and a few rest areas with benches.  On the far side was a field with a great tree to one side, and the property was blocked in by walls of trees that hid the realm of the dead from those yet living.  Those of you who read my novels some day will recognize it … it left quite an impression on me.

As I said, the north east corner of the cemetery was open, and it seemed to us that we could see a huge, shimmering dome of light there under the moon.  One of my friends, the oldest and most experienced of us, said it looked like a portal of some kind.  Of course we went to investigate.  Wouldn’t you?

What happened next I’ll never forget.

As we approached the dome a figure of light, some seven feet tall, stepped out.  My older friend went up to greet it, while the other two of us stood and stared in awe.  We could hear it talking – or, perhaps more accurately, we could feel it talking – but only she could understand it.

Our friend came back to us, another figure stepped out of the dome of light as the first moved back toward it.  They and the dome of light vanished.

It was relayed to us that the portal had been closed because something that wasn’t supposed to come through … well, had.

I don’t know what the dome of light really was.  Portal to another world is semiplausible, all things considered.  I don’t know who or what the figure of light was – we never even speculated on that, honestly.  We had no data.  I don’t know what it actually said to my friend – not that I doubt her, per se, just … well, I couldn’t hear.  When it comes right down to it, I don’t know what happened that night.

I don’t know what happened that night. All I know is what I saw.  But I saw the dome.  I saw the dude-of-light.  I saw dome and dude vanish. And shit like this is why I’m hesitant to dismiss anything out of hand.

Gods and demons?  Sure.  Your last incarnation was a cat?  Okay.  Talking to gods, demons, or cats?  Plausible.  Fairies and dragons?  Well … I’ve sure seen some strange shit that might be best explained that way.  Otherkin?  Who am I to say who you are or aren’t; or who your parents are or aren’t?  Cause, damn, don’t I get some funny looks when I try to tell this story just as it is, even when I don’t even try to provide an explanation for it.

In witchcraft

Story Time: the Druid Dragon Lady

Author Satyr MagosPosted on

Speaking of things I saw when I was a mere fluffy faun and clueless mageling… Speaking of Otherkin and things I just don’t quite understand…  I once knew a lady – we’ll call her Medeia – who claimed that the blood of dragons ran in her veins.

I was sixteen or seventeen when I met her.  She was older than most of the people in our group – of legal drinking age before I had graduated high school, though not the only person in the circle of that age – and we bonded fairly quickly, re-establishing the brother-sister relationship we had had in the last life we’d lived together.  She had been practicing magic for longer than most of us, and claimed to have been initiated into a Druid circle.

I’ve already used it twice, and I’m going to use that word – “claimed” – a few more times as I tell this story.  I’m not saying I don’t believe her (except where I am), only that while I never thought to question her at the time, as I look back I never saw any actual evidence that I can recall.

She was there for so many stories that I can’t even recall them all, much less begin to relate them here.  She was there when I did my first past-life regressions, when I met my first spirit-guides – the one who scared me off and the one I ultimately kept then neglected.  She taught me things about auras and shielding, about manipulating magical energy and talking to spirits that – while many people I know have seen or done something like them – I have never seen in print.

I did a tarot reading for her once that broke the glass table we were sitting at.  I laid out the whole deck once, reshuffled, and laid it out again.  I was high with power.  There was a loud cracking noise.  We couldn’t figure out where it had come from, but when we cleared the cards away the glass table top was split in a jagged line from me to her.

Incredible presences followed her around – forces so huge that I did not encounter anything on the same scale, let alone greater, until I started working with gods.  Some of those vast presences – the ones she claimed were dragons – were accompanied by a particular musky smell.  I have encountered that musk and presences like those only two or three times since she passed out of my life.

We explored our past lives together, found that we had been brother-sister, lovers, and father-daughter at various times.  Sometimes she had been the elder, more dominant – other times it had been me.

I still don’t know how to make sense of her claims. From where I’m at now, literal dragon-blood seems fairly outrageous. But … things got awfully strange around her, sometimes. I don’t really know what experiences she had that were best explained as “I’m something more than human”. Or maybe she was just crazy. I don’t know.

When I was about nineteen or twenty – before I moved out of my parents house – she got pregnant and disappeared.  I’ve never seen or heard from her since, which makes me very sad.