Hey there-
It’s little old me again, getting back in the habit. Happy to see you here!
While I was away I’ve been working hard, dreaming, practicing magic, and talking to plenty of spirits to come up with new products and services, new doors to greater enchantment to offer up to you all.
Here’s one for spring. Strange and Unusual Mystery Seed Packs.
I noted that I grow a lot of unusual herbs and flowers, even the occasional rarely seen vegetable or spice. Some of these are just uniquely pretty, as in the rarely seen strawflower or astrantia. (These flowers dry into what are called everlastings - necromantic vegetal relics that can last a very long time.) Many of them are things I grow for magic, like hyssop, which also makes a tasty tea (and it’s good for attracting pollinators). Or wormwood, my favorite herb to cleanse which also works great for a number of preventative medicinal applications. (Or, indeed, as a vermifuge).
I’ve shared plenty elsewhere about nightshades like belladonna and datura, but I have some rare varieties that I don’t hear much about online.
I love the garden as a magical toolkit (grow your own spell ingredients) but also as a liminal space that can provide food, offerings in the form of flowers, delicious tea… It’s also true that simply growing many of the more unusual or storied magical plants attracts various spirits to the practitioner and I have indeed found this to be the case.
So I created these seed packs. Each one features a different set of 10 plants chosen oracle-style from the esoteric seed library I’ve been developing for years. I specifically chose species that grow easily and they can be grown inside in containers or outdoors in situ.
Scatter and see what you get, or look inside the packs to find the species listed and teach yourself a thing or two about occult plantlore.
Speaking of spring, with all the planets in Aries right now it feels that the year has truly begun. The birds are chattering outside my window, the seeds are waking up beneath my feet, the people are out enjoying the city, fighting, fucking, dying, creating - things are happening.
I hope you too can harness this initiatory energy to start or move forward with whatever projects you will. With Venus in Taurus until April 10th, it’s a beautiful time for art, for romance, for moneymaking, or simply to luxuriate in earthly pleasures, fleeting though they may be.
I am reminded of a local lama, a refugee from Tibet with an active and necessary sense of humor, who quipped to me a few weeks ago, “Yes, we’re all trying to escape samsara, but samsara has good chocolate.”
Cacao is a heart opening herb. Of course we commonly associate it with gifts to lovers (think Valentine’s day chocolates). It’s well-documented too that eating chocolate simulates the feeling of being in love, triggering similar chemical responses. Studies also show that the theobromine in cacao stimulates increased bloodflow to the heart.
The love affair between humans and cacao is of course nothing new and it has certainly had its vicious side. Much blood has been spilt and sweat extracted in the worst ways over Theobroma cacao. Cacao has been consumed and used in rituals for thousands of years in Mesoamerica, with evidence for its use now stretching back as far as 3000 BC. Emperor Moctezuma drank chocolate daily with his meals, and the beans were even used as currency.
In the modern day the cocoa butter produced from ground beans is used in both confectionery and in cosmetics, especially in skincare where it can moisten and nourish. Cacao is beautifying.
Once again, science is simply this era’s language of mythic truthmaking. Associative and metaphorical meaning-making are alive and well.
Cacao then, is clearly a Venus herb. It’s common sense, even pop-culture to call it that. It’s also borne out by history, folklore, anthropology, even chemistry and pharmacology. And yet you’re not going to find cacao listed under Venus herbs in most of the European grimoires popular in today’s occulture. It won’t be found even in sources that were originally written in Arabic, like Picatrix.
I love the grimoires. I work with them and study them. And yet we magicians have this weird tendency to be overly literal, overly serious, when the world is out here begging for us to enjoy it and allow the common-sense and associative logic most of us actually use to make decisions to take the fore.
I am thrilled that the occult space is becoming more formal and taking itself more seriously. I actively participate in the scholarly aspects of this. However, we can lose too much of our inborn magic if we only stick to the approved sources.
Anyhow, Agrippa himself says that, “Among tastes, [Venus] has the sweet, oily, and delectable.”
And was it not Paracelsus who stated “The universities do not teach all things, so a doctor must seek out old wives, sorcerers, wandering tribes, old robbers, and such outlaws and take lessons from them.” ?
If you’re new to magic and looking for some help making sense of it all, or if you’re an old hand looking for an outside eye- I updated my services section with these new quick consults. I still offer card readings for specific questions and deeper magical consultations (which are really the heart of my work).
But sometimes you just have one quick issue to look at, or maybe you’re curious to feel out working with me without investing the time and money in a longer session.
Practical magic, for the people, like always.
Alright, let me give you some links and get back to work. Got to keep the feet on the ground and this is the time to be moving, my friends!
-I found this discussion between Dr. Angela Puca and religious studies professor Julian Strube so exciting. I’m always interested in learning from many global experiences of magic and the esoteric, in shaking the mind out of lazy and comfortable patterns of perception. Strube raises really interesting questions about the frameworks we commonly use to describe cultural and religious transmission. Is “the west” even a useful term anymore? How typical is syncretism and where do religious traditions begin and end, especially when we’re discussing the heterodox edges and practical, combinatory, magical versions of larger traditions?
-Speaking of chocolate, the fine chocolatiers at Emporium Black are making the most delectable magical confectionery. I love to see magicians working with their creativity instead of just following the books by rote. Brighid and Seamus are doing something very unique here. Home grown sorcerous herbs meet fine chocolate!
-Taking things in a more artistic and theoretical direction, deserving of the praise I’ve heaped in this letter upon the associative intellect and metaphorical ways of knowing, here is filmmaker/visual artist Chiara Ambrosio and philosopher Federico Campagna in conversation.