Aspect Of The Ancients

Mother of mysteries and secret rites,

You see, some people are born with a piece of night inside, and that hollow place can never be filled - not with all the good food or sunshine in the world. That emptiness cannot be banished, and so some days we wake with the feeling of the wind blowing through, and we must simply endure it as the boy did.

My Ladye hath a sable coach With horses two and four My Ladye hath a gaunt blood-hound That goeth on before. My Ladye's coach hath nodding plumes The driver hath no head. My Ladye is an ashen white As one that long is dead.

"A Ukrainian ceremony in which an egg was used to cure fever has been documented. A Babka rolled an egg over a patients body and then broke it into water. The cure was said to be guaranteed if the healer was able to discern the cause of a fear by interpreting the egg-white formations (Podolinskii 1879, 186). In other descriptions, an egg was rolled over an inflicted person and thrown to dogs to eat (Chubinskii 1872, 42, 131)."

A problematic issue here is that many cunning folk used their fairy familiars to converse with the dead. This was natural for these people as the relationship between fairies and the realm of the dead was an intimate one where in many cases the fairies were seen as inhabitants of the realm of death or even as being elevated dead ones themselves.

Chickens were indeed sacred to Hades and Persephone and an example of this are the  terracotta votive tablets from Locri -the ones of the pictures-. There are some books about this subject like Iconography of Religions by Bianchi or Locrian Maidens by Redfield.

“Why did the chicken cross the road?”

That’s it

Throughout the scholarship dealing with magic, not just in the ancient Greco-Roman world, but for cultures in various times and places, magic is often set up in opposition to religion, but the opposition of magic to science often also appears. Intuitively, it seems, we tend to define magic as that which is not (real) science or that which is not (real) religion. Such a negative definition, I would argue, contains an important insight, but applied uncritically to the ancient evidence, as it often has been, this etic definition is not very useful, largely because the discourses of religion and science are likewise modern etic constructions, so distinguishing between them creates divisions that are often alien to the ancient emic distinctions. We must probe further. (…)

When you learn about and then work with death and the underworld, it changes you at a very deep level: it completes a loop of power while you are still in life. That loop of birth and death is a pattern of all living things, but when a magician completes that loop in life, in gnosis, it takes them out of the uncontrolled endless pattern and puts them on a very different path. Passing through death while in life as an Initiate is a deep visionary process, and is one that is essential for any serious magician to do.

To "make' a Mandrake.

do you ever use any kind of flying ointment? if so would you be okay sharing if there are any oils that you especially like to use as a base?

“The strength of a person’s spirit would then be measured by how much ‘truth’ he could tolerate, or more precisely, to what extent he needs to have it diluted, disguised, sweetened, muted, falsified.”