She Continues
It has been a May of sun and high sky thus far, and as my schedule opens up for a couple of months, I have had the chance to venture forth again. Despite the bugs biting—the mosquitoes seem rather darker and larger than I remember when I was younger—the wind and trees and sky and […] … Continue reading…Border Crossings
Amongst other things, jinn have been near the edges of my awareness. Primarily, I mean as a concept, but then so has Malphas and St. Brigid and the Sibyl. While I wait for Scarlet Imprint to release Jinn Sorcery, I was reading Umar S. al-Ashqar’s The World of the Jinn & Devils. One of the […] … Continue reading…Hollow Vessels
Seeing More, Imagining More I tried using a scrying bowl filled with spring water the first few times I tried scrying, but it wasn’t providing the experience I needed or wanted at the time. I had acquired a small obsidian mirror a while back, and I have a small, handheld (well, finger-held, usually) obsidian orb […] … Continue reading…Imagining Reflections
I’ve been big proponent of magical journals for a while, even though historically their use seems rather rare—and limited to literate practitioners. The argument that the practice comes out of a Victorian culture with classist associations—Do you have the time to write? Do you have the thing to write in?—has merit. The occult commonplace was […] … Continue reading…Meta-Journaling
I’m going to talk about corrupting sorcery here, I suppose. I really don’t want to use terms like black magic or nigromancy or anything like that because there’s too much uncritical cultural baggage there. And I’m going to get at this through the Scottish Play. In Macbeth, the play mediates and frames how we experience […] … Continue reading…Weird Sisters, Political Theater
We imagine ourselves all the time, even if we lump that imagining in with our everyday awareness of ourselves. Our fantasies involve us imagining what we want, imagining different situations that we may (could or wish to) find ourselves. Every action is arguably preceded by us imagining doing the action: we imagine hanging up a picture before we actually enact what we have imagined. … Continue reading…Light, Shadow, Darkness (4)
After a point, I also began asking myself why directions matter in the first place. And as I pondered these questions, a constellation of ideas began to coalesce. Those ideas include sacred space, enclosure, and ultimately disenchantment & disciplinary discourse. … Continue reading…Directionality, Enclosure, Space
I remember reading Francesca de Grandis’s Be a Goddess!, and I remember coming across her notes on devotional offerings to the gods. De Grandis tells readers to “feed” the gods, that doing so is essential. And being the contrarian I can be, I stopped and questioned this need. Surely the gods don’t need to be […] … Continue reading…Gods & Devotion
I fear my pronouns will be all over the place in this one. I suspect they often are anyway. I have thought about how to get at mûl-ôl without the topic derailing and tangenting into half a dozen other topics. If the psychic censor, if halthaya and hurur distract us from the magical and from […] … Continue reading…5: Waking Up
I spend a lot of time passing—passing as a mature, responsible, knowledgeable adult, passing as a professional, passing as normal in all sorts of ways. When people talk about passing, they normally do so in the context of sexuality, gender, and orientation. We hear about people passing as straight or as cis-gendered, and so on. […] … Continue reading…4: Passing as Magical