Tuesday, January 18, 2011

Working Magic

Any magician will tell ya, it feels great to get back to doing magic! After some months of inaction over the past summer, L and I have been back at it full steam, working our way through the works of the Nine Moons. I mean, I’ve done all the works of that system over the years, some of them many times, and have been working with spirit allies since my days as a witch. Still, working through these new rites, and doing it in an intensive ‘retreat’-type format, is jazzing me up.

My trance-vision skills are sharpening right up. I’ve done a lot of visionary work over the years, some ‘guided’ but lots just free-form. I’ve been busily recording the scripts I’ve written for the system, and have been working them through. Those are almost all ‘launch-and-free-journey’ works, with plenty of time for free-form vision, though since they’re training exercises the free-form time is a little limited. It just points me at what I’d like to be doing once I have re-established myself at the end of the system.

The ritual magic system fits like a glove. No surprise – it’s firmly based on ADF’s Order of Ritual, which I’ve been working with for some 20 years. However, that has been almost exclusively religious work, using the skills to give to the Powers and get a good blessing in turn - all pretty safe, noon-tide sort of stuff, though really very fulfilling. The Nine Moons work, on the other hand, has been old-fashioned night-time magic, with a nicely occult feel to it. Pushes buttons I like having pushed…

The new shrine is working well. Here are pics – on the right of the set-up for the Two Powers healing rite. There are sets of the proper stones for both L and I, but only one blessing fire, which we both used to charge our wands for the Sky Power portion. On the left is the set-up for the Ancestral Ally rite – lotsa offerings! The firelit pic is the Shrine of the Dead with the offerings of apples, pork and ale before it.

The work has me growing much closer to my spirit allies – my Familiar and my Teacher. I’ve met a couple of additional spirits of the lesser, helper sort, who will now begin receiving direct offerings instead of just being part of the crowd at Kindred offerings. When I have finished this sequence, in two to three more months, itwill be spring and time to get some of this work out-of-doors to the backyard nemeton, rather than being limited to the home shrine. Can’t wait!

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