Maybe we should let the witches out of the dungeons, after 600 years?

Last week I saw an interesting article on what makes a witch a witch, "Forging the Body of a Witch," by Peter Grey. Written in the language of a true bard, this essay is packed with rich language, complex sentence structures, and a turn of phrase that brings powerful images to the mind and heart. It was a fascinating read.

After getting past the prettiness of the words, though, I started thinking about what he was saying, and it really started to bother me.

First he was saying witches are basically broken:

My proposition is that witches are un-made by the social process, by the constrictions that distort the body of desire and are played out in a landscape of lost dreams. Witches are not only born and made, they are undone. They retreat, out of fear and out of necessity.

And the cures he suggests? Don't be fat. Move more, don't be still, society tells you to be still, but the witch's body moves (but later he says you have to be still, but it's different when he says it, because then you're tied up). Have you tried vitamins? Herbs? Be more sexual, sexually liberated, but really, it's women that need to hear that:

To celebrate the erotic furor that has always been condemned as witchcraft and that characterises female sexuality and female sexual response in particular. That is not fetishising the female but stating corporeal and historical matters of fact. Jouissance in the sense of Cixous, rather than Lacan, is the essence of witchcraft. Men can also learn these skills, though that is less common because for the most part, they do not need to.

Note he says he isn't fetishizing the female, but then he goes on to say that an active actual witch is someone who is thin, fit, lithe, erotic, and into BDSM for the spiritual aspects of it, really.

Any resemblance to an adolescent male's ideal sex slave who is somehow empowered by her submission and embrace of the icons of actual slavery is entirely coincidental, I'm sure.

And he goes on to talk about how witchcraft of this type was, after all, the product of the dungeon. The mythos, the cosmology, the entire foundation was based on a warping of the idea of the Sabbatic Goat, an idea that was created in the minds of sexually repressed Christian torturers, who then broke the bodies of women, with penetration and blood, and bondage, and pain, until the women adopted the fantasies of these psychotic men as their own, their broken psyches longing for the release of the flames.

And this is the mythos he suggests we embrace, including the methodologies. A return to a thing that never was, the adoption of a view of female sexuality that was foisted on them by men with red hot irons, who tortured, maimed, and finally killed those whose intelligence and psyches they had shattered.

I don't see how that witch is a model for today's women. Embracing an ideal that never was? That happens to be a sex slave, or sure looks like one?

I think today's witches can do better.

What if your power as a witch had nothing to do with how you look, how you fuck, or don't fuck, whether you believe new age theories of the vital importance of vitamins and herbal supplements, and whether or not you want to be tied up and spanked to enlightenment?

What if your power wasn't measured according to a standard of a 14-year-old male's ideal submissive bound sex toy? What if...

And this is kind of wild, I know...

What if you're actually already powerful?

Regardless of your body type, if you can achieve an orgasm when you want to, what if that was ok, and there's no need for you to subscribe to a narrative of innate brokenness that can only be redeemed and healed through pain? What if you weren't really robbed of a childhood of innocence and bliss and purity because it never existed?

What if you're actually fine, but you're just tired because life can be hard sometimes?

Meh.

Hermetics teaches that we already have the power to do what we will, we just forget because we get distracted. Remembering that is the point of the Work. You don't have to lose weight, take magnesium or witchy herbs, or be a nymphomaniac spewing crotch fluids on everything in sight to prove you're a strong independent human who don't need no other human, even though you're trying to live up to (usually) his standards anyway.

You're already powerful. You can change your entire life today, by making different choices. Where you work, who you work with, your career path, whatever. You can go to another country. You can leave the family and friends you've had all your life and go on an adventure. You can join a coven, take up new forms of magic, write a book, start a blog, volunteer in a political campaign, start a stand-up comedian career, clean out your basement, or order an amazing pizza. You have the power to change your entire world, every day, and the experiences you have in that day.

And you can use spells and rituals and curses and hexes and blessings and sabbats and equinoxes and solstices and community and politics and whatever you feel like to aid in that, by sitting still, or moving, as you see fit, when you see fit, as you see fit, regardless of whether anyone else sees your work as fit.

You can do other things with that mind of yours walking around in that body of yours, you powerful witch you, and it's the doing of other things that makes a difference.

So yea, if Peter's article speaks to you where you're at, and you found something valuable in it that you want to pursue because it's actually what you want, then great. You have the power to become a lean mean vitamin chewing herb taking BDSM scene queen machine, if you want that, and more power to you if you find what you're looking for in that path.

But your power isn't about your sex. It's about what you do with yourself.

A Bune Spirit Pot, and Some Bune Spirit Pot Fun

A few months ago, a client asked me to make him a Spirit Pot for an entity from the Lemegeton's Goetia. I bought the ingredients, and before I put them together, he canceled.

This morning, I was doing some Work with Bune, and I got the urge to take those ingredients and swap them out for a Bune pot to send out into the world. An inspiration, if you will.

Putting thought to word to deed, I did.

So here's a Bune Spirit Pot. It started out as a small box from Amazon, ivory colored and trimmed in brass. It received a generous amount of hyssop and high john root, some dried raisins, some amethyst, and a piece of coral I found on the beach in Florida. I was also compelled to include a raw copper ingot I had laying around, something I made a while ago before I started ordering my copper disks from online stores. Of course, it has the engraved seal of Bune (the one that works best in my experience) on a copper disk inside.

Duly consecrated, the spirit invoked and quite happy in the home I've made it, I am happy to offer it to anyone who wants it. I only have one, but I could make a couple more if there's an interest, but it takes me forever to get around to it.

These are going for $275, and I've got one made, and the stuff to make two more, but that's it. Three total available, I'm trying really hard not to do deficit selling these days:

Now for some Bune Spirit Pot fun...

I sold one of these Bune pots to a client on request, and after he'd received it, I got the following messages from him on Facebook:

I was getting ready for a ritual myself, and had to wait until later to talk more to him about it, but eventually we got to talk, and he told me about what happened after he did the rite. He had performed the evocation I sent him for the spirit pot, and had included a couple of other things in it that I don't remember now and am not familiar with anyway. 

But he had also bought the solar seal from the Key of Solomon that allows you to see spirits, and he held that in his left hand, and the Bune talisman in his right when he did the ritual. Didn't see much in the moment, shut things down and had himself some cheese bread, as one does.

About a half an hour afterwards the presence of the spirit was made apparent to him...

So yea, I've been sitting on that "testimony" for a while now, and it was difficult. There's a lot more that I'm not posting because he was really excited, and a little scared, and eventually we talked on skype about it. 

I hadn't realized he'd never conjured any spirit before when I sold this to him, but as with all this conjure stuff, it turned out fine eventually. We still keep in touch, and he hasn't had any more physical manifestations, even though he's tried. He's working on understanding the spirit, building a relationship, and learning how to go about requesting assistance in an effective way. 

Getting the language down, and learning to ask for the right amount of change at a time is key, I think. Incremental changes are easier to get than massive life changing ones, for reasons that are pretty obvious when you think about them.

Anyway, three Spirit Pots, $275 each:

Magus Dads

Hey all you dads, hope your Father's Day was awesome. I got to speak to most of my kiddos, and to my own Dad, and that was pretty great. We had "good speaks" as Harper likes to say. Connected, joyful, in-jokes, self-deprecation, the occasional ayyyyyyy, and terrible puns. It was awesome. I can die tomorrow and trust I did my part to make the world better JUST by having the kiddos I have.

But today I'm thinking about another thing.

Dads have a power we don't like to own, because it's scary as shit:

Every dad is a Magus... to their kids.

Every word we speak is a seed, and it falls on the most fertile of soils, and it stays with them for the rest of their lives. I hear my dad when I work on a car, or go fishing, or every time I screw up in life's projects because I forgot to ask, "What do I do before I do this?" But I also hear him telling me how proud he is when I do well, even if he doesn't even know what I'm up to. I got lucky like that.

I've talked to people a lot over the years about how they view the idea of "God" as a divinity, and as I've gotten to know them, I've learned that every one of them have an understanding of "God" that aligns 99.999% with their understanding of their fathers, in real life.

We shape reality with everything we do, as dads. We make the next wave of feminism with our choices with our daughters. We shape the politics of our nation by example. We lay out the framework of the next generation's experience of the Patriarchal Archetype of Divinity, just by playing shitty guitar to them when they're falling asleep, fighting the system for them when they're being wronged, believing them, listening, and loving them because they are awesome.

So dads, and father figures of any type, don't forget to be cool.

It matters.

Interview with John R. King IV, a.k.a. Imperial Arts

Below you'll find a link to an interview I did this weekend with John R. King, IV, also known on the internet as "Imperial Arts."

John and I go back about 20 years, and have had our share of shenanigans. When we met he was mostly a chaos magician, and then 20 years later when we ran into one another again, he was still sort of a chaos magician at heart, but he'd applied it to his life and his studies, as if the tenets of Chaos Magick were for real.

And it worked out really well for him.

While I disagree with a lot of his interpretations of systems, and practices, I really enjoyed talking to someone with his depth of devotion and practice. I think his real-life views on the spirit-conjure path we travel will challenge many people's opinions, and also demonstrate a thing about the people who Work with grimoires has been proven true across the course of interviews with people I've done lately:

In the end, whether we consider what we are doing to be "going by the book" or not, we all create our own system based on our experiences, and its effectiveness, regardless of the opinions of detractors, is only going to be determined by one person:

The Magician doing the Magick.

Also, whoever said I should get some music intro involved, it wasn't a lot of fun.

So without further ado, here's the interview:

We Do (and are planning to do more) Magick to Stop Things Like Orlando

Nine or ten paragraphs in, I get to the point, sorry, but there's reasons.

This post is about what is best for the good of humanity. TL;DR - What's good for humanity is Magick, the Great Work, Gnosis, Illumination, Enlightenment, and getting together as practitioners to remind ourselves that WE DO MAKE A DIFFERENCE.

And we're planning an event related to that. And it's not the royal we. So, on with the first things:

At a recent O.T.O. event, I got to hear Dr. David Shoemaker say something that has stuck with me. He was discussing the Guf-Nephesh-Ruach-Neschemah parts of the soul, and he was talking about the evolution of consciousness over time. Specifically, he said in a couple thousand years, we'll look back at the people of our time as savages who lived primarily from the Ruach instead of from the Neschemah in the same way as we today judge historic peoples who acted from the Nephesh and Guf as savages.

Our society shows records of when our laws and customs were Guf (or the physical body)-based, primarily; clan warfare for resources, marriage that treated the participants like property, laws based on preserving the property of dynasties that provided for the well-being of the bodies of the tribe, and the leaders of the tribe.

Then the concerns about the Nephesh took prominence, and it was not just property that mattered, but the affairs of the heart, the emotions, the feelings that became of value to society in the Romantic periods. Divorce became functional and useful, because the welfare of the body was more of a given as we evolved socially. Marriage became an expression of the feelings of the heart, and the emotional wellbeing and safety of the participants with the introduction of the prenuptual agreement.

Today we live in a world that values the Ruach, the intellect that analyzes and determines the value and worth of our choices rationally, recognizing the needs of the body, and of the heart, but also the consequences of pissing everything away on a poorly-thought-out emotional decision.

Sometimes, and mostly. There are pockets of hold-outs, and sometimes we still screw it up, because this is a practice, a process, not a science that works out the same way every time.

But one of these days we'll be a society that is founded on the principles and values that come from the Neschemah. We'll be operating from that image-of-god part of us, or that god-particle consciousness, or that Enlightened/Illuminated state, and we'll all still have struggles, but not these struggles.

Not people getting murdered because of what they choose to do with their genitalia.

The whole hetero-normative thing is a hold-out from the guf-consciousness. We had to pass on genes to the next generation, we had to have 6 kids to make sure 2 survived to replace us and maybe grow more of us a few hundred years ago. But the global body-consciousness is over that genetic track, and we've overpopulated, and are killing our environment in ways that will kill us all. So we have queer traits popping up to control our production of offspring. It's natural and biological, and normative behavior in most of the animals on the planet. When a species overproduces, we get fabulous gays to make up for it. It's normal Guf-stuff, really, but our culture hasn't caught up yet.

And in truth, every culture that has thrived has eventually developed a normative queer aspect to it, guys, so let's quit pretending it's unnatural, and start maybe just culling the folks with problems with this fact from the herd? I'm down for a three-strikes-and-you're-out law for homophobes, for the good of humanity.

And that is what this post is all about.

The good of humanity.

I got a ping from Tony Silvia, a Gnsotic friend who hosts Talk Gnosis regularly yesterday, asking what we can do as magicians to stop this shit. I was all "Mars, Saturn, The Lightning of Jupiter!" when I read it at first, but I stopped.

And thought a bit.

And realized STOPPING the shit that happened at the Pulse nightclub is exactly what we're trying to do on a global scale for all humanity.

Tony does it with Gnosticism.

I do it with Hermeticism, and the Ecllesia Gnostica Catholica, within the A.:A.: and O.T.O. It is the purpose of the Great Work of the Rosicrucian systems, it is the outcome of the production of the Philosopher's Stone. It is the Panacea to all ills that plague mankind upon the Earth.

The idea is that as we raise ourselves, all those we interact with have an opportunity to be raised with us. It's the same boon extended to the demons by some medieval magicians, as I am raised, so shalt thou be raised, or peace between us forever or whatever. It's the boddhisattva vow to not go on until everyone else gets it, to be the tutor until everyone manifesting is on the same page with the same short cuts as everyone else, no one left behind.

It's the compassion for everyone else who suffers brutality, and also for those who suffer being brutes.

We do magick to make the world better. For us, through us, by us, yes, but not just that. Our lives, we see eventually, are better when everyone else's lives are better. So we magick for them. We solve (Salve) their problems, and let their solutions coagulate around them. That's what we do as magicians. We Solve the problems.

Tony is working on an Event. It will be Sunday June 26th. It will be geared towards getting the planet's human population to kick things up a notch, and to be better to one another. To fix the things in us plural that result in us singular being total fucktards. Including, but not limited to the kind of things that unfolded in Orlando.

So whatever belief you are, whatever path you follow, if you think the world could use some enlightenment, a little illumination, join us on Sunday the 26th. I'll post the details of the rite I'll be doing, he's putting together more stuff.

Anyone else interested in throwing other hats in the ring with the same aim, by all means, let's do this.

Kick the world up a notch, get the rest of 'em to catch up and lap us, so we're trying to catch up with them, instead of getting them to catch up with us.

Do your part, magicians, to change this world a bit. Add some momentum to the evolution of the population.

Sunday.

June 26, 2016.

Illuminate the World.