I first performed the Stele of Jeu ritual in late January of this year, and for the last eight months it has been a regular part of my Dark and Full moon Esbats.\u00a0 At the beginning, I was advised to do the ritual outdoors, ideally at a trivium crossroads or in a vineyard, and that if I must\u2014as my circumstances realistically dictate\u2014perform the ritual within my temple, that I ought to do so within a circle of salt, as a Wiccan circle would not be adequate to keep out the wandering dead that would be drawn by the spell.\u00a0 Given that there is a graveyard next to the school I attend and live next door to, and given that Sunrise, IN is old Quaker territory, and they only started marking their graveyards when sectioning off the dead was legislated as a public health concern \u2026 well, let\u2019s just say I took that advice to heart.<\/p>\n
From January until May, it was my habit to move my rug out of the way and pour a circle of salt right out on my linoleum-over-concrete floor.\u00a0 The results ranged from spectacular to blas\u00e9, depending, I think, largely on just how much I heart I had to put into the ritual at the time.<\/p>\n
In May, at the Heartland Pagan Festival, I had my first opportunities to perform the ritual outdoors.\u00a0 Just as the semester was ending, I performed the ritual on a creek bank in he woods behind campus as a part of my Full Moon ritual.\u00a0 The results were very different, but it ways that I find it difficult to articulate.\u00a0 The spirit world did not really become more aware of me, so much as I became more aware of it: it was both comforting and disconcerting to have a visceral feel for how vast the spirit world is, and for just how few shits it gives that humans even exist.\u00a0 Then again at the Heartland Pagan Festival, to incredible results that I have already detailed<\/a>.<\/p>\n Things were a little different in Kansas City.\u00a0 Aradia\u2019s apartment has old wooden floors that would be damaged by the salt, and hard to clean afterward.\u00a0 So I took a risk and performed the ritual without the salt: the results were unspectactuar.\u00a0 A Wiccan circle may be inadequate, but the years of circles and wards that Aradia and I put up around that apartment, to say nothing of the work done with Pasiphae and Aidan and the rest of the proto-coven, were more than adequate.\u00a0 I say \u201cmore than\u201d advisedly, because the Stele of Jeu rituals I performed there were \u2026 limp.\u00a0 I actually wondered if I were performing the ritual too often, if maybe it was loosing its efficacy.<\/p>\n I moved back to Indiana just in time for the Dark Moon.\u00a0 I performed the Stele of Jeu as usual, but I had just acquired a new, heavier carpet which is too large to move readily, so, based on my experiences in Kansas City, I went without the circle of salt.\u00a0 And \u2026 things went off the rails, just a little bit.<\/p>\n I didn\u2019t get any of the poltergeist effects during the ritual, which I had been warned was a possibility, but after is another matter. One the one hand, I\u2019m fairly sure that that a lot of the weird-ass noises I was hearing that night were just the no-longer-familiar sounds of the Sunrise Temple.\u00a0 On the other hand, though \u2026. I never did identify all of those noises, and they all stopped<\/em> when I did some serious banishing work a couple days later.\u00a0 Also: the nightmares.\u00a0 That shit was out of control, and that\u2019s all I\u2019m going to say about that, except that those also chilled out when I did the banishing work.<\/p>\n Why did the Stele of Jeu have such strange and unfortunate side effects without the circle of salt in Sunrise, but not in Kansas City?\u00a0 Years of house-wards built up around the latter is my best explanation.\u00a0 But \u201cwhy\u201d is beside the point.\u00a0 The question is \u201cwhat to do about it\u201d.\u00a0 While the most obvious solution is to get rid of the rug that\u2019s preventing me from pouring salt all over the floor \u2026. The rug stays.\u00a0 It\u2019s not actually mine, I\u2019m just caring for it while the owner is doing a year abroad in China.\u00a0 So the solution, it seemed to me, was to come up with a way to have both the rug and the circle of salt.<\/p>\n When the full moon came, what I did was take three bowls and arrange them about equidistant from each other in a triangle around where I intended to sit while I did the ritual.\u00a0 I have a rock salt candle holder that lives on my altar, and I put that in the front bowl.\u00a0 After performing the first half of the evening\u2019s rituals, I poured salt in each of the three bowls, going around the circle three times in order to do so, and lit a candle in the rock.<\/p>\n That worked beautifully.\u00a0 The ritual went fabulously:\u00a0 I did my banishings afterward, and slept \u2026 well, I\u2019d say slept like the dead, but there are a couple necromancers who read this blog sometimes, and I know they\u2019ll call me out on that.\u00a0 I slept soundly, dreamed as peacefully as I ever do, and went on to do another two nights of successful Esbat rites.<\/p>\n I count this as a successful experiment.\u00a0 If one needs a circle of salt, but can\u2019t (for whatever reason) pour it directly on the ground, a simple solution is available.\u00a0 At least in this instance, the salt circle need not be contiguous; one may fill an appropriate number of vessels with salt and place them in a circle and achieve the protective effect.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I first performed the Stele of Jeu ritual in late January of this year, and for the last eight months it has been a regular part of my Dark and Full moon Esbats.\u00a0 At the beginning, I was advised to do the ritual outdoors, ideally at a trivium crossroads or in a vineyard, and that … 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":[5],"tags":[256],"class_list":["post-852","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-witchcraft","tag-stele-of-jeu"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p8kUcm-dK","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/journeythroughtheobsidiandream.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/852","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=852"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/journeythroughtheobsidiandream.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/852\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/journeythroughtheobsidiandream.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=852"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journeythroughtheobsidiandream.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=852"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journeythroughtheobsidiandream.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=852"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}