Cantrips, or Minding the Fundamentals
A bit about Protection, Cross-Cultural Altar Stylings, and Magical Timing.
I’m starting to get the hang of these, my letters into the shrieking void of the internet. It’s essential for me to remember that is all of you on the other end, it’s not just this eerie blue screen. I love you, don’t get me wrong, but the internet itself gets me down sometimes. What with all the tentacles of empire and its purposefully addictive algorithms. It wasn’t always this way.
I’m old enough to remember the internet back in it’s wild, untamed, feral, fecund days. The thing is, it wasn’t any more dangerous then. It’s really much more dangerous now with targeted ads and data harvesting, eyeball tracking and all that. (All the more reason to be working whatever protection magics you’ve got at your disposal.)
That’s always how regulation and control works. Whoever is benefitting from the control system will tell the ones he (it’s often, but not always a him up there) is controlling that this is natural, moral, and correct, even divine. And well, some of that gets codified and handed down through the ages, becomes Holy Tradition or what have you. Some of that stuff gets mixed in with magic and we end up having to unpick it later, but magic itself lives on. Prayer, spirit contact, offerings, dream interpretation, divination, verbal charming, harnessing the power of herbs… I’m fascinated by the ways magic takes on myriad cultural forms but the techniques stay relatively conserved.
As an example, let’s look at some altars:
Three altars from three different continents. Those working them come from different lineages. They speak different languages, they may have vastly different goals and reasons for working. And yet we can observe several similarities just from a single photo of each active altar.
The use of statues to represent spirits, to give them a place to be and a form to inhabit strikes me first of all. Then I notice that in all 3 of these examples, the spirits are being fed with some kind of food offering. The food offerings are generally the same kinds of things humans or animals eat, i.e. the spirits are fed with actual fruit, meat, or beverages and not with plastic food or prop food.
I don’t see any candles on photo number 3, but I picked these and I know that that’s a Weizza altar from Myanmar and I’ve seen the Weizza use candles before. I also know it’s a press photo and it makes sense that the altar wasn’t fully being worked at the time. So we can count the use of candles or fire as another commonality in practice. I’m sure more can be found but for the sake of some kind of brevity in this letter, I’ll just point out one more. In all three photos, you can see the use of beaded necklaces, which are of course commonly used in SO many cultures to count repetitions of prayers.
Don’t mistake my cultural comparisons for universalism. The cultural details and specificities of various traditions absolutely matter. At the same time, it’s deeply instructive to compare and learn from and even respectfully adapt bits of many traditions. I live in America and the spiritual landscape is such a mess here, we really need all the help we can get in recovering and creating protocols for dynamic magical work that can start to clean things up. As we reconnect with the magic some of us lost through colonialism, tracing common threads of practice across culture can offer guidelines. If I notice that magicians or spirit workers across the world are all doing something, I should either also be doing that thing or have some really good reason that I don’t.
So then let me pose these simple questions to you, my readers: Do you keep an altar? Are there images or statues of spirits there? And which spirits, if you care to share? Do you feed them, and how? And how does fire figure into your work? Lastly, do you work with any kind of beads in your practice?
I really would love to hear from you. I almost always learn something when I compare notes in this way, with anyone from novices to elders. If you’d like to chat about practice, feel free to reply to this email.
As I intimated in a recent instagram post, I turned to magic initially in desperation. The arcane arts really did meet me where I was, providing what I needed and opening doors of perception, knowledge, and connection with beings I really didn’t think existed. I had to be badly beaten to open my mind to magic, and that’s despite some natural hereditary ability for it.
I do believe in that type of talent, by the way, but I’ll be the first to tell you that ancestral cachet is wholly unnecessary to achieve things with the occult. That’s what I love about it, it’s the weapon for the oppressed, it’s always accessible. It may mean going crazy or in my case, going against the laws of reality, decency, even sanity, with which I was raised, but… I really wouldn’t trade the sheer awareness of possibility I have now for an easy ride in my early life. An open road and the energy to walk it… it’s a good feeling.
It’s basically the end of my Saturn return, when the Lord of Consequence himself comes to shake up one’s life and recalibrate the purpose of the incarnation. I made it here with you all, and I’m writing up a storm, sharing the magical materia and tools I’ve been making for years to power my own practice, teaching classes, and working with clients. I have a lot of goals to grow this practice and the business it has become in the next year, but it feels good to be clarified and established in this work here at the end of Saturn’s return to Aquarius.
Well, speaking of sharing magical materia, I’ve crafted a few things to use in my own magical work lately as I look toward the year ahead. I’ve been really enjoying starting to make bigger batches so I can share some of what I make with you all, and just naturally letting my practice guide what I offer in the shop. I’m in the midst of a shop update now and I’m letting you, my precious Laterna Magica subscribers know before anyone else, the first of these small batch magical materials is available now! I’ll post some more over the next day or two.
First off the ranks is a Prosperity incense I made when the Moon was conjunct Jupiter in Pisces in December. Its a warming, generous smell that makes me so happy, and I’ve been using it in my own work with the spirits of Jupiter. I’ve also been potentiating a lot of my mixtures with a very special material that’s connected to my work with local fae and land spirits, see the link above if you’re curious for more info.
I’ve been sitting with my divination, my astrological charts, my spirit team, and my calendars. Plotting the new year. I made the Jupiter Incense because it’s going to be a good year for Jupiter magic. Jupiter will be relatively unafflicted and accessible for the majority of the year. Yes, there are placements where Jupiter would be happier, but as long as the Greater Benefic is doing alright and willing to hear and grant some requests, I’m happy.
The longer I work magic and study astrology, the more keenly aware I become of my own cycles, the cycles of those around me and the ways they interlock with the stellar spheres. I’ve been adding and refining timing systems for my spellwork and spirit calling for years now. It started with observing moon phases, which really can make a big difference although it took me awhile to really grok it, there’s some misinfo out there.
Eventually I added planetary days and hours, astrological transits, all the way up to doing full chart elections. I’m working with more and more fixed stars in the past 2 years. Increasingly these days I’m looking at various Vedic astrological sources and Mayan too, it’s really instructive to see where the different models do and don’t agree. If you’re curious to have a studious witch help you plan your mundane and magical year in depth, with recommendations for the arc of each quarter, for each moon, and even more finely tuned at key astrological points based on your chart, all filtered through active mediumship and full-blast cartomancy, I’m offering Year-Ahead Readings until the 31st.
Oh, speaking of magical timing, there’s an important Mercury cazimi coming up on Saturday that I wanted to mention to you all. Cazimi is one of those things that astrologers disagree about throughout the centuries. If you’ve got time, I recommend checking out some different sources and then running experiments and seeing where you stand. Or if you just want to know what I do, as of now I’m interested whenever a planet is within 1° of the Sun. You might run the charts for your location and see if you notice any boosts in Mercurial activity like communication, mercantilism, or thievery when Mercury and the Sun meet on Saturday.
As ever, here are some links to peruse:
-I’ve been enjoying the Astrology forecasts that SparklesofGold posts. He also shared some of his recent reading list and we’re really on some kind of weird wavelength with some interesting titles in common. Sometimes I think I can see the machinations of the book angels or info devils that invisibly guide our human curiosity… anyway, he’s sweet and real and his astrology is good so here’s his latest.
-Fascinated by this short documentary about Korean mudang Kim Keum-hwa. In particular I was excited by her use of performance before an audience… that line where performance and possession overlap is something I’m exploring in my personal work.
-Lastly I invite you to watch this brief interview with Georges Bataille on the subject of Literature and Evil. Bataille is very lucid and concise here. The points he makes about writing, about horror and the necessity of facing what frightens us in life, are so deeply applicable to the work of magic. And he discusses Baudelaire, so you know I’m about it.