Announcing my Upcoming Appearance at Viridis Genii Symposium!
Plus some reflection on our first livestream of Amor Fati, and even a brand new video...
Hello my friends!
It is my pleasure to announce to you all that I’ll be speaking and presenting an original workshop at this year’s 8th annual Viridis Genii Symposium!
In the words of the creators of Viridis Genii:
“There is an increasing rise in both folklore and esoteric knowledge for working with plants. Our goal is to be the first to offer a holistic multidisciplinary and multicultural awareness and approach to the study of plants from the perspective of magic.”
The VGS lineup this year is fantastic and it is truly an honor to be included among some of the foremost voices in esoteric herbalism. I am hard at work in both my practice and research leading up to this event. The Symposium takes place in July, and you can find tickets here.
I’ll be presenting my research on the more glaringly magical aspects of Hildegard von Bingen’s herbal writings. Specifically I’ve been delving into the aspects of her work that are outright supernatural, the bits that seem far-fetched or “superstitious” to us moderns.
The respected medical writings of Hildegard von Bingen include far more than simple herbal cures. They also explore spell-like processes and even the preparation of medicines from the bodies of creatures commonly considered legendary, even among occultists and magical practitioners. What does it mean that these beings are present, in physical, tangible form, in her materia medica?
Food for thought, to be sure. But let’s leave Hildegard von Bingen for a moment. I’ll circle back and share some excerpts from my lecture proposal with you all toward the end of the letter.
On another note I wanted to update you all that the recording of Sunday’s livestreamed Actual Play of Amor Fati, the tarot-based RPG that you’ve heard so much about, has been added to my brand new youtube channel! Give it a look or a listen if you’ve been curious what all this Amor Fati business is about.
It was a pleasure to host some of my dear friends and our special guest, professional tarot reader and ceremonial magic educator Leonora of The Peacock Grimoire.
This is a full-length actual play, in typical RPG style. It’s suitable for listening while you walk the dishes, wash the dog, or painstakingly copy the arcane diagrams from crumbling manuscripts.
The story we told was so high-drama, you really have to see it to believe it. Within the first five minutes of play we saw Death, The Devil, and The Tower all appear in quick succession. I have run Amor Fati plenty of times but it has never before been so intense!
Our livestream experiment went so well that I’m already talking with some collaborators about doing a bigger and more publicized follow-up. I’ll be sure to share it here once the details are decided.
This has been a real link-heavy letter so far, so instead of ending with my usual array of links, allow me to share some excerpts of my VGS lecture proposal with you all so you can get a taste of this area of my research:
From Carbuncles to Basilisks to Unicorns: On the "Fantastical" in Von Bingen.
The 12th Century visionary mystic, musical composer, and herbalist Hildegard von Bingen has captured the hearts and minds of many in contemporary occulture, and rightly so. She was a fascinating polymath and a woman of deep tension, contradiction and obvious power in original thought.
In her day she achieved international fame for the efficacy of her medicine despite many barriers such as a hostile patriarchal clerical structure and harsh personal upbringing. She is gaining attention in the present era of anthropology and religious studies as a source of earth honoring, plant-based mysticism from within early medieval Christendom. Similarly, her name is growing in familiarity among the current magical revival and the culture of contemporary herbalism as a worker of curative folk magic with herbs, gemstones, animal parts, and of course prayer and song.
However, many more arcane aspects of her work remain underexplored. Her use of a constructed language, the “Lingua Ignota”, has hardly been touched by the magical culture, despite obvious magical applications and the resonance with the cipher-craft of later magical writers like Johannes Trithemius.
Additionally, and even more controversially, the presence of so-called “legendary” or “fantastical” creatures in her medical work cannot be ignored. Her book Physica is a primary source of practical information on her herbal and natural cures. Physica contains 9 volumes exploring the powers of a wide range of natural materials: plants, elements, trees, stones, fish, birds, animals, reptiles, and metals.
Hildegard was known to be an avid and discerning scholar, a woman of severe intellect who held rationality in high esteem even as she practiced fully visionary oracular trance in her vocation as a writer and abbess. On the one hand she was a mystic, but on the other she was, in so many ways, a true scientist in a time before our current ideas of scientific method and practice. She demanded proof of her cures and their efficacy in a time when the threats of disease and blight facing the human race were far more brutal than anything we face today.
How then are we to explain the appearance of creatures such as the Dragon, the Unicorn, the Basilisk, and the legendary Carbuncle, a ruby-like gemstone said to glow mysteriously from within, in what is otherwise a rigorously road-tested and practical materia medica?
What are the limits of our vision in the current magical revival? What sorts of spiritual and magical creatures were accessible to our distant ancestors? How might we work with a text like Physica in contemporary herbal practice and an esoteric saint like Hildegard to open our eyes to a greater and clearer vision of the possibilities of the arte magical?