Saturday, April 4, 2020

Magick in Isolation, I


A friend posted on FB this morning that she’s finding the current liminal times to be supportive to her practices and hearing her talking about it has made me finally sit down to talk about something similar.

This past year has been a time of abrupt and mostly painful change: friction with dear friends, a professional lay-off and then a new job that is supposed to be half time in Rochester NY. I stepped down as Master of the local OTO body, had still more medical procedures, had to put down my cat Max (shown riding shotgun in my Mazda). I lost access to my martial arts group because of the time in NY. The net result was the near-complete loss of my personal practice.

Getting back on the pony has been hard work, but Josh and I are doing weekly conjurations, mostly Goetic ones, and I’m studying the PGM in a class from the Blackthorne School (more on that soon). I have magical partners in Rochester (complete with plans postponed), but I still haven’t recovered my asana and pranayama practices.

The very last thing I did before I confined myself was to perform an initiation at Leaping Laughter. We had fewer than ten people, we observed proper social distancing, those of us contacting the candidates wore nitrile gloves. Our post-initiation meal consisted of box lunches from Jimmy John’s. It actually was amazingly powerful, because, rather than in spite of, the times.

The reason I’m creating all this context is because since the advent of COVID and near elimination of social contact, scrying for me has been easier than ever. It’s not only physical sensations and auditory impressions. Now I have consistent visual encounters with spirits and can do deep and complicated visualizations when I want to, without a lot of preparation. The magics I’ve worked these past four weeks have been effective, powerful, proven.

And with it, my entire world has taken a turn to the more sensual. Light is brighter, the wind caresses me. I smell the damp earth from inside the house, Ripley’s fur is softer than velvet. For that matter, my velvet pants are orgiastic. On the other side, tap water smells loudly of chloramines and when people walking by smoke, I know.

There is an intensity to the….porosity….of my reality. I feel cracked open by things and people in a way that I would never have predicted. I am in a certain sense empty and unguarded. It’s powerful and delicious, and I love it.

There's so much more to report about this, but here's a beginning.

Blessed be Thou.