[Warning: This gets awfully personal.]<\/p>\n
When I chose the name Satyr Magos<\/a>, it was as a literary convention.\u00a0 The name was a sort of joke, a ribald recognition of the sensuality which separates me from so many people who call themselves \u201cmagicians\u201d.\u00a0 It was a subtle warning that there was going to be some serious talk about sex and drugs on this blog, in addition to and as a part of the magic (and while there hasn\u2019t been as much of that as I originally intended, there has been enough and there will be more).\u00a0 It was an excuse to draw a mythic caricature of myself.<\/p>\n I knew that it was bad Greek, even though I hadn\u2019t studied any Greek yet.\u00a0 It didn\u2019t matter. I already had two (secret) magical names\u2014one I took at the age of 16 (and later made several unsuccessful attempts to get rid of), and one that I took upon my initiation<\/a>\u2014and while I intended to take a magical (and public) motto in the Lodge style upon my next initiation, I planned on dabbling a lot with languages and ideas and ceremonial magic before doing so.\u00a0 Rendered into actual Attic Greek, Satyr Magos becomes \u03c3\u03ac\u03c4\u03c5\u03c1\u03bf\u03c2 \u1f40 \u03bc\u03ac\u03b3\u03bf\u03c2 (saturos ho magos), which can be translated as \u201cthe satyr is a magician\u201d or \u201cthe magician is a satyr\u201d with approximately equal accuracy.\u00a0 <\/p>\n The definition of \u03bc\u03ac\u03b3\u03bf\u03c2 was just as sketchy in ancient Greek as \u201cmagician\u201d or \u201csorcerer\u201d (both of which are valid translations are in modern English) and, to the best of my ability to determine (albeit through the limited sources so far available to me), covers approximately the same range of activities and specialties.\u00a0 The most noteworthy difference is that, at least according to Pope\u2019s essay in Witchcraft and Magic of Europe: Ancient Greece and Rome, the word \u03bc\u03ac\u03b3\u03bf\u03c2 bore strong connotations of services for sale.\u00a0 And does anybody else remember what it means to be a satyr<\/a>?<\/p>\n Maybe I just didn\u2019t think it through. I have been blogging under the name Satyr Magos for less than six months, but it\u2019s already seeping into my meatspace identity\u2014both magically and in my \u201cmortal\u201d life.\u00a0 Although I\u2019m not going back to partying like I did a decade ago, I\u2019m feeling a powerful urge to escalate some from where I\u2019m at now, and I\u2019m absolutely running out of patience with people who disapprove of the way I do things now.\u00a0 While I have practiced the socially expected form of serial monogamy for my entire previous adult life, I find I simply have no patience for the dynamics and assumptions it entails.\u00a0 My sense of humor is getting more ribald, and a little bit more cruel.\u00a0 My libido\u2014for both men and women\u2014is through the roof \u2026 and my loves and lusts are well reciprocated.\u00a0 When I tried invoking the sexless servants of the God of Abraham, I didn\u2019t run into any of the trouble I expected, but I was completely short-circuited<\/a> physically (TW: semi-graphic contents which may be particularly upsetting to people who know me IRL).\u00a0 Spirits have started making some pretty wild demands of me that I\u2019m still not sure how to process, much less how to talk about without sounding even crazier than I already do.\u00a0 And I have been feeling an urge to go into business, magically speaking, which I had never felt before taking the \u201cname\u201d.<\/p>\n By and large, I\u2019m comfortable with these changes.\u00a0 Many of them are also in line with the things I have been\u00a0 working on deliberately, and\/or are also in line with the Name I took at my last initiation.\u00a0 Some of them may just be the product of advancing age and sharpening radicalism.\u00a0 Some of them are freaking me the fuck out, but that\u2019s part of transformative magic.\u00a0 And that, more than anything else, is what I\u2019m in this game for.<\/p>\n So it seems I have undergone a dedication without realizing it, and took a motto almost by accident.\u00a0 Well, so be it.\u00a0 \u03a3\u03ac\u03c4\u03c5\u03c1\u03bf\u03c2 \u1f40 \u039c\u03ac\u03b3\u03bf\u03c2 it is, at least until I\u2019ve worked my way through this stage of life.\u00a0 But, please: no one address me as Frater S.M.?\u00a0 I\u2019d take it as a kindness.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" [Warning: This gets awfully personal.] When I chose the name Satyr Magos, it was as a literary convention.\u00a0 The name was a sort of joke, a ribald recognition of the sensuality which separates me from so many people who call themselves \u201cmagicians\u201d.\u00a0 It was a subtle warning that there was going to be some serious … Read More<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-31","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p8kUcm-v","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/journeythroughtheobsidiandream.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/journeythroughtheobsidiandream.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/journeythroughtheobsidiandream.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journeythroughtheobsidiandream.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journeythroughtheobsidiandream.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=31"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/journeythroughtheobsidiandream.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/journeythroughtheobsidiandream.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=31"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journeythroughtheobsidiandream.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=31"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journeythroughtheobsidiandream.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=31"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}