From the Depths Exalted Over Every Star
From the séance parlor to the winding roots below the earth
Hello everyone
Season’s greetings, Chag Sameach, and Happy soon-to-be Solstice.
I wanted to start things off tonight by sharing a peek at the new pamphlet I’m working on. As mentioned in a previous newsletter, I’ve been studying Spiritualism (séances and all that) for the past few years.
This is combined with my experience in working necromantically in small groups, solo, and in established traditions including Mesa Blanca and Umbanda.
This new publication is going to be a mixture of my thoughts and my present conclusions on the subject of Spiritualism with heavily annotated reprintings of old Spiritualist material from the late 19th century.
I love the antiquated writing style, but really the ideas are still solid! I’ve been enjoying sourcing images from the period, and the graphic design-layout part of the work too.
Here’s a glimpse:
I’m gearing all of this toward practice. The country I live in is besotted by ghosts, we’re at war with the earth itself, we don’t know the names of the stars, but even more basic, even more fundamental we, as a whole, do nothing to care for our dead. I wrote a lot about the dead a couple newsletters back.
But in the occult, this leads to some awkward scenarios where inexperienced people are reaching for exotic spirits, gods, demons, but don’t tap the spiritual resources that are more readily available to them, like the local dead or the ancestors of their bloodlines, or even the ancestors of their practices, passions, and professions.
I blame Crowley for this ridiculous oversight in magical practice. But that’s another story.
It wasn’t always this way. Even as recently as the 19th century, when this material I’m working with was written, Spiritualism was a real force in American religious life.
It was also a hotbed of radical thought and one of the vectors for the development of ideas like abolitionism and women’s suffrage… (It’s my contention that we are much healthier as living persons when we’re in direct and regular contact with the dead.)
A lot of these writings were published as pamphlets, and that’s the form I’m rehashing them into as well. I want to share the tech that these old mediums were using, to situate it in conversation with some of what I’ve learned through working in other beautiful mediumistic traditions which derived in part from Spiritualist roots.
Other than that, I’ve been cooking up lots more new products, classes and experiences to share with you all. But it wouldn’t work if I just gave it all away now. Slow and steady really does win the race.
Here’s a shot of my desk as I fold and distribute copies of Amor Fati, the tarot-based Occult Philosophy Role-Playing Card Game you’ve heard so much about.
I playtested a dear friend and colleague’s new RPG-in-development earlier this evening (It is a fully deranged creation where all the players portray separate limbs of one body, each with a mind of their own!!)
and I’ve been reading the original books for Gary Gygax’s Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. I’ve been thinking about the similarities and differences between the Role Playing Game and the Magical Ceremony.
When I think about the power of stories to shape the world, or something like the way Grant Morrison wrote the Invisibles comics with a look-alike character of himself as a form of “doll magic” in fiction… There’s a lot more to explore there. But then, I guess you could just read Amor Fati and give it a spin yourself!
It’s cold outside! If you feel like being cozy and watching something on the topic of magic and the occult, here are my recommendations:
-These videos of traditional Hungarian Folktales are beautifully animated, and many of them feature witches, animal transformations, and spells.
-I’ve been very interested in researching Taoist sorcery lately, and Benebell Wen’s whole corpus of work on the subject is really fantastic. She goes deep, here is a good video to start with.
-This is a great documentary on German-American folk magic, with lots of interviews, mostly focused on the Appalachian region.
-Finally, this is an amazing production of Gœthe’s Faust from 1960.
Ah, I teased about “the winding roots beneath the earth” in the subtitle, didn’t I? I’m yawning now though so you’ll just have to wait til next week
I’ll be announcing some new herbal creations :)
Now to sleep, perchance to dream…