talking to spirits – Page 3 – Journey Through The Obsidian Dream

Playing the Vessel

Satyr Magos04/11/2013

Over the course of the last week, I have twice played meatsuit to familiar spirits. Last Wednesday, as a part of my extended Samhain rites, I allowed my natal daemon, SKM, to ride me through the school day. Saturday night, I followed this up by offering the same privilege to my natal genius, ZG. Both experiences, while much less intense than I had anticipated, were equal parts surreal and informative. I required only one thing of either of them: that, in riding me, they not undermine any existing alliances and relationships, a restriction which neither found to be a burden that I can tell.

SKM, it turns out, is a huge fan of poetry (I am not): when I went to a performance with several friends Wednesday afternoon, he was moved to tears. He is very formal in his language and purposeful in his movements. When he first entered into me, it was a clear and visceral sensation—particularly odd, as I was driving at the time. He seemed especially fascinated by the experience of having hands.

ZG, I should not have been surprised to learn, is very, very quiet. She speaks only when there is something to be gained from it, and then in as few words as possible. I barely noticed when she came into me, perhaps because our ways of thinking were so similar, possibly because the copious amounts of absinthe I had consumed that night (it was my birthday party) served as a sort of lubricant.

Where SKM was content to observe but willing to act, watching from a distance was ZG’s preference. Both seem to approve of the people I surround myself with.

Tsu, my first familiar spirit, who had never expressed interest in possessing me before that I can recall, reacted jealously that ZG and SKM had had the opportunity before ze had. So I’ll be reporting on that experience at some point in the future.

In scholarship, witchcraft

Orphic Hymns: Taylor vs. Athanassakis

Satyr Magos03/11/2013

Classicist Apostolos Athanassakis recently released a new edition of his English translations of the Orphic hymns—previously released in the 1970s and, to the best of my ability to determine, the first new translation since Thomas Taylor’s in 1792. I’ve been going over the hymns and notes for the last month, and using the hymns in my rituals for the last two weeks. I must admit, that I’ve been rather surprised by the results.

Firstly, the Athanassakis translation is every bit as different from the Taylor as I would have imagined: no anachronistic rhyming couplets, no 18th century euphemisms or evasions, no substitutions of Roman names for Greek. Because Classical scholarship has come a long way in the last two hundred years, I do not hesitate to assert that the translations are more accurate for reasons other than the brutal mangling needed to turn Koine iambic hexameter into English rhyming couplets. And, to my delight, my own translation of the Hymn to Phanes ends up looking pretty solid.

For worship of the Hellenic gods, the new translation is by far superior: epithets are better preserved, and Athanassakis pointedly maintained what he felt to be the religious feel of the texts. Dionysus, Phanes/Eros, Hermes, and Aphrodite have all responded well in my private rites.

For in/evocation of the Planetary powers, however, and to my extreme surprise, I have found the Taylor translations to yield much better results. This is partly because, however I may despise them aesthetically, rhyming couplets make great magic. This may also be partly because the Taylor translations have been so thoroughly incorporated into the Hermetic tradition, and thus provide better access to that magical current. Further, the actual textual differences between the texts(coincidentally or otherwise) align the Taylor translation more closely with the Planetary powers than with the divine mythology.

Thus, while I must strongly advocate that any Hellenic-flavored neo-Pagan invest in the Athanassakis translation, as well as anyone with a scholarly interest in the hymns, ceremonial magicians have no need to do so.

In art, witchcraft

διγενὴς ἔκστασις : Queer Spirit Journeys

Satyr Magos02/10/2013

[This post was originally written ten months ago for a queer occult Zine that, to my great disappointment, seems to have gone defunct without publishing. The tone is more … literary, and the content a bit more intimate than most of my posts. ]

The void opens before me and the crystalline spire of the World Tree rises into infinity where there ought to be a horizon. The ground beneath my feet is an illusion for my convenience: there is nothing but the void and the Tree.

In the physical realm, I am uncomfortably male. Although I reject all the social tropes of masculinity, excepting only a few which are synonymous with being a decent human being, I am generally read as so butch that I am routinely mistaken for straight. While wearing a skirt. In a gay bar.

In the Otherworld, however, things are more complicated.

My most familiar spirit approaches me before I even reach the Tree. She is eager, and there is mischief in her eyes. Until recently, she appeared as a gorgon; now, just a woman. I ask if she has any adventures planned for me, and although she is one of the few spirits whose voice I can hear reliably, tonight she answers only by taking my hand.

Together, we walk to the World Tree. She places her hand on the shimmering facets of the bark, and slides into the pillar of crystal. I follow.

It is quite telling, in retrospect, that I have been fixated on leaving my body since I first began my study of the occult at the age of sixteen. Although I have never mastered astral projection, my success with Michael Harner’s visionary techniques, to which I was introduced by a friend a decade later, has been markedly greater. Enough so, in fact, that I began having experiences that my source materials could not help me contextualize almost immediately. I began seriously exploring and experimenting with visionary techniques in the spring of 2009. At first, as I imagine it is for many people, it was all or nothing: the trance would either elude me, or I would find myself in a mindscape which I could barely comprehend. Those first visionary experiences were frightening—some of them are, still, as I have no cultural context in which to ground them.

We descend, spiraling into darkness, and emerge at the edge of a stone circle. There is a drummer hiding in the shadows on the far side. Beautiful dancers writhe in the inconstant light of a small fire. I cannot see their faces clearly, or hear their voices over the drum.

I leap into the circle, joining the dance with abandon. Our bodies collide to the rhythm of the drum. There is nothing but the drumbeat and the heat of the fire and flesh. My hips and breasts sway as I dance and spin, round and round the fire.

It probably goes without saying that, at first, my spirit-body appeared as an idealized version of my mortal flesh: a little more muscular, a little less soggy around the middle. For a while, before I realized that it was irrelevant, I tried to form an “astral body” that was more “realistic”. Then I just let it be what it was: trying to dismantle that small bit of vanity was a distraction from the real work of exploring the spirit world. So, the first time it was radically different, I almost didn’t notice.

I was at a Qaballistic workshop at the local New Age store. The instructor was leading us on a visionary journey to Malkuth, the Earthly Kingdom. The path led across a bridge over a river, where we were to abandon certain symbolic representations of our mortal lives. Seeing my reflection in the river, I was surprised to see that I was a woman. My tattoos and ritual garb were what I had formed as I entered the visionary trance, but my flesh was not. For much of the rest of the journey, which was clear and productive, I was viscerally and self-consciously aware of the differences between that body and my mortal one—and of the fact that I had been unaware of those differences until I saw my reflection.

The drummer has slipped outside the fire light, and moves around outside the circle of stones, deosil to our widdershins, so that he is always just out of sight. One by one, the other dancers disappear as I make my way around the circle again and again. One turn I am a woman: my center of gravity lower, my breasts swaying and bouncing with my gyrations. The next I am a man: my cock slapping against my thighs as my center of gravity rises. Though the movements themselves are not so different—I am a terrible, unoriginal dancer, either way—the relative proportions of hip to shoulder create the illusion that it is otherwise, both visual and tactile.

The goddess I met at the end of that journey was not the Queen of Malkuth, but the Titan goddess Rhea: vast beyond my imagining, reclining nude and crowned and flanked by lions. To this day I have always-but-once been a woman when summoned to her presence in my visionary work. Other spirits, too—such as the equally vast but yet-unnamed goddess of Elemental Water—prefer that I be female in their presence. I have always been male in the Elemental Realm of Fire. My gender in the Otherworld is increasingly uncertain and malleable: male, female, both, neither. I shift at random, or at will, or at the behest of the spirits with whom I entreat.

All that remain, now, are myself and the the fire and the drummer I still cannot see. But my body has solidified in the image of Hermaphroditus: full breasts and hips, bearded and phallic. My hair is thick and glorious, from my head to my feet. Horns crown my head. A satyr’s tail sways behind me, and a satyr’s Priapism sways in front.

I leap into the fire, and we consume one another. My flesh is incinerated, then reformed, as I swallow the flames. When I emerge, the drummer has reveled himself: my Natal Demon. My Genius is there, too, and my most familiar spirit.

We dance.

* διγενὴς ἔκστασις – “Diges Ekstasis”, lit. two-kind displacement, alt. trance of doubtful sex. διγενὴς cf. LSJ.A, ἔκστασις Middle Liddel.A.II.4

In witchcraft

Genius Locii: Overseer of the Standing Stones

Satyr Magos25/08/2013

When our friend Sthenno learned that Aradia and I were going on a road trip to the Badlands, she asked us to bring her back some dirt to dad to her collection of Earth and Waters from various parts of the world. She gave us a baggie to collect the dirt in, and a vial of water and a tea-light to serve as an offering for the exchange.

Although we were happy to oblige, there was the small concern of where and how to do such a thing. After all, the removal of any rocks or plants from a national park is technically a crime (though we carried off enough mud on or shoes and gear to equal easily five times the volume that we collected for Sthenno). Further (and, frankly, more importantly), this was not a region where white people have historically covered themselves in glory with regards to the First Nations peoples or the spirits of the land. Although Aradia got a slightly different vibe off of everything, the overwhelming majority of the spirits that I could percieve in the Badlands were fundamentally disinterested in my existence one way or the other.

The one notable exception to that was a spirit near our camp site. There was a hill to the West of us that called to me. And not just me: a camp of hippies near us took it upon themselves to climb the small mountain in the dark. Aradia and I watched their lights and listened to their yells; I very much wanted to follow them—as I put it then, “carrying our jug of wine and screaming like a maenad”—but Aradia disuaded me.

The spirit knew that we needed dirt, and it called to me. The second day we did climb the hill, and found concentric circles of carefully stacked stones with a set of three piles that were clearly an altar of sorts, and two extra pairs set like gateways at the heads of two paths leading further away from the site. The spirit—who we believe called others there to erect the “standing stones”—accepted Sthenno’s offer of water and fire in exchange for the dirt (though the wind made the latter … complicated), but wanted blood from Aradia and I without making itself particularly clear about what it was offering in return. We politely declined, and—perhaps as a result–the spirit also made clear that we were not to take any pictures of the top of it’s hill, so the above picture from the road is the only image I can offer you; one can just barely see the stones rising up at the top of the hill.

Upon our return, the dirt maintained a clear and potent charge, and Sthenno was startled but intrigued to hear the story. For myself, I look forward to hearing what comes of her workings with the dirt and the associated spirit.

The site, itself, remains clear in my mind, and it is my intention to return astrally to see what I can learn from that perspective.

In hedonism, Uncategorized

Spirits of Earth and Air

Satyr Magos21/08/2013

Last Friday Aradia and I skidded into KC at the end of a nine day road trip to the South Dakota Badlands and Rocky Mountain National Park. As tempting as it was, in theory, to turn the road trip into a spiritual retreat, the fact is that I desperately needed the vacation. And what a vacation it was. Even after all the travelling I’ve done with Aradia and my family, I had never seen landscapes like the ones I saw over that week-and-a-half: the Karst cartography of central and south Missouri gave way to the Loess hills of northern MO and eastern Iowa before we set off across the grasslands of South Dakota. We came into the Badlands from the north, via I-90, and I don’t even know how to describe the feeling when the earth dropped off in front of us, only to rise back up in magnificent spires of white and red stone.

Tragically, as our visit coincided with the Perseid meteor shower, it rained on us briefly every day we were there, despite the arid climate, and every night was overcast. That unseasonable water made it all the more shocking when I tried to get a sense of the spirits of the place and sensed nothing by Earth and Air: ancient, slow-moving things from whom I sensed not just a vast indifference to human life, but to mortal life in general. My poetic nature wants to describe that indifference as “bordering on cruelty”, but I think that’s a little bit of projection and a great deal of anthropomorphization; I think the spirits that ancient stone, weathered by the wind and by water whose brief appearances is as destructive to the rock as it is necessary to the survival of plant and animal life, are simply the most alien things I have yet to come into contact with.

The Badlands were vast, alien, and austere. So far from my lands in which I have invested my power, and from the Water which makes up so much of my nature, I felt empty—sucked dry. Surprisingly, that feeling was healing and cathartic: my waters have been murky, almost poisoned for the last year, by the stresses of my personal and academic life, and by the rigid forces of the ceremonial I had been practicing. By travelling outside my own personal bog, I was able to let some of those “contaminants” (to continue the metaphor) dry out and be carried off by the constant winds of the desert.

From there were traveled south and further west, cutting through the top-left corner of Nebraska into eastern Wyoming, where we skirted the foothills into north-eastern Colorado where, after gaining elevation slowly over hundreds of miles, we finally ascended into the mountains proper. The thin air of the Rockies hit me hard, and I was nearly useless for the first twenty hours or so. The green and grey vistas of the mountains hit me as hard as the desert had, and I found the magical climate much more to my liking, but even farther from “home” and equally alien.

I don’t know if the Rocky Mountains are actually younger, geologically, than the Badlands, but they felt that way to me. More patient, and with an indifference to my passing that was somehow less hostile. Earth and Air still dominated, but Water was more familiar, perhaps even more welcome. When I finally had the opportunity to perform the Stele of Jeu on the last day—something that I had been trying to fit in for the whole trip—the local spirits wanted reassurance that I was not attempting to dominate them, but they took me at my word that I only sought to purify myself.

By the end of the trip, as we came down off the mountain to get coffee in Denver and struck off eastward for dinner and a hotel in Hays, I finally felt like a person again: scoured clean by spirits of Earth and Air.

In witchcraft

Spirits of Spirits: Conjuring Cannabis

Satyr Magos18/07/2013

Last week, Aradia and I conjured the spirit of Cannabis Sativa. No that is not a euphemism for smoking weed. Y’all should know by now that I only use euphemisms when they’re more entertaining and obscene than what I’m actually trying to say. We literally conjured the spirit who rules over marijuana.

The idea came to me somewhat at random: a way of similtaneously linking my study of ceremonial magic with my study of Chaos Magick and with the process of getting back to the witchcraft that has kept me sane. Building on my experiments with Triangles of the Art, I scribed a triangle just for the task:

Such an endeavor could not, of course, be complete without an invocation. A little bit of creativity, a couple rough drafts, and finally a bit of trial and error produced this:

We call upon you, oh spirit: You who preside over the sacred plant cannabis sativa. Oh spirit – Mercurial, Jovian, Saturnal, and Venusian by turns – We call uponyou to appear before us.

We call upon you by your various names: marijuana, ganja, grass, mota, reefer, endo. You are the diggity dank! You are the beloved mary jane!

We call upon you, oh spirit: we offer you fumigation of frankinsence and libation of blood-red wine. I evoke you, oh spirit, to appear before us in our circle that we may converse in friendship and that you may instruct us in your nature.

Aradia and I performed the conjurations jointly, first Wednesday night and then Friday. Aradia performed the incantation for the first conjuration because I was having difficulty articulating what, precisely, I had planned for the rite, itself. (The problem with listening to your Genius instead of writing out the plan.) The cats went ballistic as we cast the circle. Smoke from the fumigation curled thickly in front of the mirror. I could feel the spirit appear and caught glimpses of it moving around the room, but otherwise I experienced none of the sensations that I expected from my planetary evocations. The more magical of my two cats flopped down behind us. I retrospect, I think that my sense of time must have been distorted: I can usually sit and wait for quite a while for a spirit to answer, but that night it only took a few minutes (possibly only a few moments) before I started getting impatient. I felt that the ritual had been a failure, and dismissed the spirit (prematurely, as it turns out).

Aradia started acting very strangely almost immediately: grinning strangely, playing with the cat. Somehow I failed to imagine that her strange behavior might have been the effect of the spirit. I’ll leave her to tell her half of the story in her won time, but she gleaned a great deal of useful information, most notably that the spirit is not particularly impressed by frankincense.

We speculated that the mixed results may have been in part because the original invocation, which Aradia read, employed first person singular verbs. For the second round, we changed the number to plural and substituted patchouli for frankincense, thinking that the spirit might like it better. Also based on Aradia’s reports, we shared the libation we offered.

One or all of those changes worked wonders. Conjuring her—which we did stone sober—had a physical effect much like smoking some high-quality creeper. I never saw the spirit, or heard her the way Aradia had the previous evening, but her presence was powerfully felt. We shared the libations again, thanked and dismissed her, and went to bed.

By my reckoning, the experiment is a mixed success. I never really saw her, and never received a seal or sigil with which to summon her again. On the other hand, I strongly suspect that such formalities are a little bit funny to her. Aradia described her as a trickster spirit. She certainly has a sense of humor, and a strong interest in being in the presence of humans. We amuse her immensely, and I think there’s a relationship to be developed here.

In witchcraft

The Secret Lives of Magical Beings

Satyr Magos26/04/2013

There’s a very interesting conversation going on in the magical blogosphere right now. Riffing off a remark by Gordon, Rufus Opus has sparked a conversation on the blogs of Fr. Barabas, Jack Faust, and Fr. Acher.[1] These luminaries have years more research and hundreds, perhaps thousands, more conjurations under their belts than I do, so I will not presume to question their assessments. But, although I am more than a little late to the party, I will answer Fr. Acher’s call to share a little bit of my own experiences.

I have been conjuring planetary powers for little more than a year. So far, I am largely tapping into the “elemental” power of the Spheres to imbue my talismans, perhaps drawing the attention of lesser planetary spirits … and perhaps not. On those few occasions when I have conjured specific planetary powers, or gone on spirit journeys to visit them, I have seen little or nothing to hint at what those spirits might do when not trafficking with mortals.

I have, however, been working with a familiar spirit for a bit longer than that.

Tsu has done me numerous favors—some simply out of friendship, others in exchange for offerings. More importantly for this discussion, however, she has spoken to me, some, regarding her existence outside our contact. She has, unfortunately, been deliberately obtuse on a number of points. And, of course, one always hesitates to draw broad conclusions from such limited anecdotes; certainly one cannot draw conclusions about Goetic Demons and Elemental Kings. Further, given the nature of spirits, one even hesitates to assume that anything I was told was the absolute truth.

However, for the sake of interest and posterity:

* Very early in our relationship, she asked that I name her and create a sigil for her. She implied two things: that she did not, at that point, have a name; and that the name I was giving her was temporary, that she would eventually take another, greater name.

* In the above series of conversations, she gave me the impression that she was whatever the spirit-world equivalent of a magician. What, precisely, that entails, I haven’t the faintest idea.

* In a separate conversation, she strongly implied that spirits can produce offspring by pairing with either other spirits or with morals.

* When asked point-blank, however, what she does with herself when not conversing with me, she flat-out refused to give me an answer.

* I know that sometimes when I go to my Inner Temple she is waiting for me, sometimes she is elsewhere, and sometimes she is just hanging out there, indifferent to my presence—almost as if it’s her favorite park.

Nor is Tsu the only spirit I’ve gotten interesting hints from: I’ve a veritable lifetime of bizzare spirit encounters, many of which more closely resemble Jack’s experiences with elementals:

* There was this one thing, back in the day, that was like walking into a scene from someone else’s life.

* Way back when I first started practicing, my first spirit guide was known to get bored and go bother my more psychically sensitive friends for conversation.

* One time, during my days on IRC chat, one of my online friends’ spirit guide came to investigate me for no other reason than that it was bored.

* More recently, I had an encounter with a genius locii from which a wiser magus than I might be able to draw more concrete conclusions.

* And then there was the time this one daft kid called up the someone he didn’t really have the credentials to, and a local spirit had to intervene on our behalf. Again: someone wiser than I might be able to draw conclusions from that where I am not.

* Work with Tsu , ZG, and SKM (my Natal Genius and Demon, respectively) has made clear that the three discuss me when I am not there, and that they have planned an astral excursion for me together on at least one occasion.

* When doing my explorations of Elemental Earth and Malkuth for the ceremonial experiment, I encountered a spirit who posed as a guide but who clearly needed things from me that she could not or would not communicate. When I failed to provide them on my own, she attempted to coerce me.

Again, none of these experiences do not necessarily speak at all to the nature of spirits on the scale of Goetic Demons and Elemental kings. Conversely, however, they strongly suggest (to me at least) that those spirits which more individual than archetypal (which, from what research I have done, is a fair description of these powers) have lives and ambitions at the same time both more familiar than we would imagine, and more alien than we can possibly conceive.

1 – Others may have joined the conversation by the time this post appears. I will add them below as they come to my attention.

In witchcraft

Project Null: Satyr’s First Servitor

Satyr Magos24/04/2013

I have been planning to experiment in servitor creation since I first set out to study Chaos Magick. Unfortunately, none of my major sources treat the subject in any real detail. So I went that vast repository of knowledge, madness, and wisdom which I we all know and love: the Internet. My hope was that a variety of perspectives would allow me to identify the core techniques by triangulation, and from there come up with my rite.

Here are the sources I found most useful:

* Servitor Creation at Atreus World of Wierdness

* Pope Michae’s Basic Servitor Creation

* Servitor Creation at Spiralnation

CAVE CANEM

Between native talent and practice bordering on paranoid, protective magic has always been one of the things I am best at. Thus, it was always my intention for my first servitor to be a household guardian. Because I’m an asshat, I ignored all suggestions to start simple. I chose the form of a dog in order to tap into the “guard dog” egregore, and in order to use a foo-dog shaped teapot, which I happened to have, as a vessel. I named him for one of the great guards of myth, in order to tap into that stream as well. Hereafter I will refer to him as Cave Canem[1], or CC for short.

I wrote and sigilized ten lines of “code”, and chose its master sigil from a number of glyphs which I had produced through automatic drawing last semester. I wrote a incantation containing the servitor’s name, the instructions I had sigilized, and the terms of the contract between us. I then drew a stele-image of CC bearing his name and all his sigils.

I placed that penciled image and the vessel on an improvised altar in the middle of my temple. I banished and purified everything. I got out my Abramelin oil and the brush I use for sigils. I raised the power, declaimed the incantation, inked the sigils on the drawing, and painted the vessel with the master sigil. Then I called down an amount of power that easily put this in the top ten most powerful rites I have ever performed, possibly the top five. I anointed the vessel with the Oil of Abramelin, and the dog awoke.

His presence was immediate, almost tactile. He responded warmly to my attention. The next several times I drove, CC sat in the back seat behind me with his nose on the back of my head. When I drove to Kansas City for Spring Break, he made much of the drive with me, though he grew … thin across Illinois. Even in Kansas City, though, he appeared instantly when I spoke his name.

I would consider this an unqualified success, except that I haven’t actually seen much of him since I got back from Spring Break. But I came back from Spring Break ill enough that I probably shouldn’t have driven. I missed (another) two days of class, and ultimately ended Break even further behind than I started. So I haven’t really had time for more than a bare minimum maintenance of my spiritual obligations; I hadn’t seen much of any of my Friends Upstairs, actually, for that reason, until last Wednesday when I received instructions on how best to rearrange my altar. So one is uncertain if he didn’t “last” or if one’s head is merely stuffed up one’s own ass.

Still, I’m pleased enough with the outcome of this attempt that I’m planning a second, more ambitious servitor project: an army of flying monkeys.

1 – Classical Latin: “Kah-way ka-nem”, trans: “Beware the Dog”.

In witchcraft

Well, Then, Son … You’ve Got a Condition …

Satyr Magos24/02/2013

Back in the day, when I was fully-steeped in the energetic model of magic, aura work was how I began and ended any magic I did. Hell, more than half the time—especially during the Basement Years, when getting a finger-hold on my sanity was the main object of my magic—it was the Work. That started to slip during the Ceremonial Experiment: the banishing work had about the same effect, and the kinds of aura work I knew were actually counterproductive, as the ceremonial work was making some radical and positive changes to my aura. It’s slipped further since starting on Project Null. Actually, that’s a lie: since starting Project Null, the cognitive dissonance I’ve experienced between the various Wiccan schools I was originally trained in, the things I learned during the Ceremonial Experiment, and the Chaos Magick theories I’ve encountered on aura-work, basically amounted to a paradigmatic train wreck. I mostly managed to hold things together through the end of Christmas Break. But there’ve been some oddities.

The first oddity was a sort of psychic “sore” at the small of my back. I first noticed it while doing some banishing work with Aradia toward the end of break. As we cleaned it out, it felt like it was linked to my Root chakra. I’m not bad at doing psychic/aura healing work on other people—I can even manage a certain amount of physical healing—but I’m shit at doing it for myself. The angles are off, I guess.

Time passed, I came back to school, and the “sore” persisted, thought never as bad as it had been at first. Until I went to do my first serious banishing work at January’s Full Moon, and discovered a …. giant, black, slimy lamprey-worm-thing attached to the wound in my aura. Not really certain what it was or what to do, I pulled it off, threatened it, and threw it across town. The “sore” finally closed up altogether, and I went on with my life. I noted the whole episode, but never have been able to determine if the thing was an astral varmint, the work of one of the two psychic vampires I’ve crossed in the last six weeks, the product of my own Chaos Magick-induced delusions, or something else entirely.

Then, this last week, as I was recovering from a mundane illness I discovered a new “sore” on my aura. This one lays about where my neck joins my back, but doesn’t seem to correspond with any of my energetic centers. Squirming around in the psychic wound were a mass of writhing black worms in a sick column down to the original wound: miniature versions of the larger one I’d already thrown off. Local spirits have proven ineffectual at helping me clean out the mess—on or two smaller spirits even appear to have been injured by the things—although the manifestation of That One God who dwells at the on-campus chapel was surprisingly willing and able to help dispose of the ones I could extract (it seems to have taken it rather personally that such vermin would move into its territory).

I’m hoping that tonight’s performance of the Stele of Jeu will fix the problem. Barring that, that when I finally “create”* my guard-dog servitor tomorrow night, it will be able to deal with the problem (since that is what it’s going to be made for, after all).

In the mean time, has anyone else had an experience like this? Any advice?

*I’m not entirely certain, given the way things have been leaning, that I’m actually going to end up creating a servitor so much as recruiting a local spirit for the task. The distinction, however, is largely moot.

In witchcraft

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

Satyr Magos11/02/2013

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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