Feather & Scale

Here during holiday season, many folks are having to confront family situations and places that’ve come to be negative or toxic. And, for most folks, they’ll be trying to navigate these environments around folks who aren’t magically operant. So, I offer to you some stealth cleansing techniques that can help you clear off the lingeringgloom and negativity from environments and try to call in some…

Weekly Notes: December 21

I decided to take a note–er–a page from @TheJaymo and figured I could do weekly-ish notes, too.

The Daily Routine

My current morning routine is a slew of business:

Acknowledge country

St. Cyprian protective prayer

Do my version of St. Patrick’s lorica (kinda sans St. Patrick)

Do a St. Columba success prayer

Do the Heptameron daily for the angel of the day

Started doing the Vedic Saturn mantra that

I was trying to describe why I found Mulholland Drive affecting, an influential film for me, and in doing so, I found myself speaking more broadly on my response and my take on David Lynch and his oeuvre. In articulating that perspective, I realized I was articulating something that was pertinent to most any experience, but Lynch afforded me an occasion that helped bring these processes into…

I have adapted this post from an attempt in other channels to offer an 10,000-foot perspective on “what are faeries?” I have thought with this question often over the years, so the following is based on my experiences and inquiries.

Firstly, I would say that faerie (or whatever variant you want to use[1]) is—like daimon, angel, and even demon—an umbrella term. It winds up including swaths of…

It’s a day that many would call “dreary.” It’s cold-ish, drizzling, with overcast light gray skies. The trees are bare of leaves or are busy casting off their summer dress. There’s a slight breeze, but I can know what a stiff wind through this would be like. It’s otherwise rather still and quiet. Partly, that’s because it’s Thanksgiving here in the States, and most folks are indoors, visiting…

One of the recurring things in magical studies—and I am broadly including strands of alchemy, mysticism, and more under this rubric for the time being—is that embodied life on Earth represents a second order existence that comes after some preceding state. From a Christian perspective, we live in a “fallen” state—we are postlapsarian rather than prelapsarian—and different traditions have…

I was talking with my Fireman friend, and St. Catherine of Alexandria came up. I’ve written on St. Catherine here before, and I very much like her. Love her name. Anyway, my friend asked me if I’d ever noticed anything “cherubim” about her. I hadn’t noticed this sort of thing before myself, but I could feel what he was pointing at.

I’ve suspected there’s something Athena-like or -adjacent with…

I first came across the idea of working with “dead magicians” via Radio Free Golgotha—Al Cummins and Jesse Hathaway Diaz. Indeed, one of RFG’s features is a discussion of a specific dead magician in most episodes, and dead magicians can include far more mythic persons than the “ghosts” of “historical” magicians. I mean, let me list the dead magicians RFG has pointed to:

The Three Magi/Kings

Roger…

Witches’ Mirror

In reading Alkistis Dimech and Peter Grey’s The Brazen Vessel, I have found myself venturing off onto adjacent tracks from where they’ve been going in the collection. One section that especially caught my attention came in “The witches’ dance” where they write of the “contrariwise” movement of many pre-modern dances, which they associate with the “law of inversion.” The idea of inversion or…

Black Seas of Infinity

In The Brazen Vessel, Peter Grey describes one of his early experiences of contact with Lucifer. He is walking in town on post office business when he encounters a man “sharply dressed, in a three piece suit with a silk waistcoat…strikingly, a black man in what was once the whitest town in England.” They try to avoid just following or crossing the other, but Grey describes what happens when they…

One of the first books on magic I remember reading when I was a baby practitioner was Donald Michael Kraig’s Modern Magick, and it got more attention from me at the time than a lot of things. It’s primarily a book going into Golden Dawn style magic and adjacent territories. However, the part that stuck with me more than anything else is a not-even-two-page little ritual in the back of the book,…

12 House Tarot Spread

Over the last couple of years, I’ve explored astrology and geomancy, and both practices have contributed to my larger practice and lifeways. Tarot remains my go-to divinatory or fortune telling method, though. I also use it often for facilitating spirit contact, especially if I need some help getting to the right headspaces at the time.

I have a handful of spreads I use. I’ve played with several…

A friend had bugged me ages ago about writing on “ritual dramaturgy,” and the idea made sense, got me thinking, but despite making an outline and starting to draft something, it fell by the wayside because it got boring. I was approaching it in the wrong way, and I was very much overthinking it or thinking at it in the wrong way. I think many folks do.

What is “ritual dramaturgy”? Dramaturgy…

Out of the Shadow: Eclipse Experiments

I’ve waited on making this post because it reflects experiments I had begun with the eclipses of January, and continued on with the July eclipse in Cancer. I began this experiment after having several brainstorms. I knew the eclipses were coming up this year, and they’re hitting pretty sensitive places in my chart. Indeed, I have been paying enough attention to what was going on in my life and in…

Out of the Silence

So, I’ve been doing a lot of star magic of late. I’m not making (astrological) talismans, though I’ve played with those in the past. No, this current spate of experimentation began with Gordon White’s “[Lunar] Mansion Game” for Q2 2019. I suspect Gordon looked at the space weather for June through August and decided, fuckit. I mean, the planets are all fucked for the usual magical shenanigans.…

On Consecrating All the Things

I’ve done involved consecrations—the Helios consecration from PGM IV.1596—1715 comes to mind—but those tend to be very specific operations. I’ve used the Picatrix for similar things, or the Hekate spells in the PGM for Hekate matters. I even used the Roman Ritualfor preparing some jail-broken holy oil very early in the morning while having the live YouTube Vatican feed for Holy Thursday mass…

Habent Sua Fata Libelli

I’ve had a fondness for books and journaling for ages, and I remember when I first got into magic, I got a bunch of little hardcover, slim journals from Walden Books in the mall and was writing my various occult secrets and such into them. (In hindsight, I did not have many occult secrets.) I gave them names with pretentious malatinous titles* and Roman numerals and little glyphs and things that…