Mist and Moss

The light coming through the rolling gray clouds, combined with the warm temperatures and lack of actual rainfall, drove us outdoors yesterday. We went to Fires Creek, a part of the Nantahala National Forest that is cut through by a creek that comes directly out of the center of a mountain and is freezing cold.

Although I packed a basket with my tools and supplies, the only thing I got to use before we were driven away by rainfall was my tarot deck. The Page of Cups, the Hanged Man and the Page of Swords looking shady came up. I encountered all three of them between the mostly shuttered flea market and the trip to the creek. I intended to perform a simple ceremony at the creekside, but as I was lighting a stick of incense the rain started to fall. Luckily we had already been there almost an hour and had spent plenty of time following deer paths through the rhododendrons and poison laurels and walking over the creek stones.

Everything was mist and fog, with clouds lining the gorge as we drove up and back down through the park.

I sat here over the flow of the creek, on a large rock directly across from this beautiful tree, and spoke with it for a while. Its roots stretch all the way up the steep hillside that borders both sides of the water. Although we were in an area that doesn’t have many red ochre stones on the ground, this tree’s roots were surrounded by them.

Due to the short 15 minute drive it takes us to get up into the forest at the Fires Creek area, I am planning to use it as our regular spot for rituals and ceremonies that require running water. Even though we have two healthy creeks that circle our property, neither of them are large enough to bathe in, which is an essential part of the healing and cleansing rituals I do when I’m in serious need of help. They also empty into the iron-water bog behind our house, making their entire energy slightly different than that of the fast, freezing cold waters of Fires Creek.

the Temple room – Bird Altar

Ever since I left home at 18 I’ve been rambling and traveling, stopping only during the winter to hedge up in an isolated little cabin with little access to the outside world. While the 3 years of couch surfing and mountain exploring have given me more experience than 10 years of study could have, it was very tiring. But I wasn’t willing to give up my freedoms and lock myself into a lease and a commitment to earn money and all those things unless the place I was renting was right.

One of the most important things I went looking for, other than price range and at least half a mile between me and the neighbors, was enough space and walls to have a dedicated temple room. Ever since we arrived on the 1st of the year at the Yellow House we’ve had a Temple room. Unfortunately, it took until today for me to really take it from “room with all our magical stuff in it” to “TEMPLE SPACE”.

It’s not done yet, but I’ve finally given some things the space they deserve that have been circling around me for literally all of my life. My Bird Guides have finally got the altar they deserve. I received a great rush of energy when I built the first little altar dedicated just for them in the living room, which brought me a beautiful Yellow Rumped Warbler two days later. But today I knew that some altars needed to be moved out of the public space and into the Temple itself, and the Birds now have a space of their own that is proportional to how important they are to me.

I’m going to show you all the rest of the Temple room in bits and pieces, but this is the biggest and most important step for me so I’m covering it first. I’ve been gathering what I needed for this altar for years, carrying around random gifts and bits that I received as a child that I didn’t know what to do with, just that they were vitally important. And yet this altar is at best half way complete – I still have plenty of items to craft and purchase for it.

The birds have been patiently circling around me, roosting in the trees and calling me continuously down a very specific path for years now, but they’ve always been so frustratingly out of my reach. During a spirit journey to the Great Tree I took late in December the Crow let me get close enough to talk to him, but I could not go with him when he flew away. He did leave me with a promise, however, that if I was steadfast in my trance practice and took many more journeys with Rabbit to the underworld to learn the secrets of the bones and roots and hidden things, that near the end of this year I might be ready to fly.

Ritual Raven & Vulture Masks

the Underground Heart

It is the heart that grows in the darkness of the underworld, a round red root spreading silently just below the surface. When you cut it, it will bleed. As the root swells the green leaves are shot through with veins of red.

The root of the beet plant is it’s heart. You can use it in a love spell, to bind someone, or as part of a very difficult and unpleasant curse. Beet sugar is sweeter than cane sugar, but the beet has its dark side as well. Anything that comes from the underworld, that grows in the underworld, can be used to connect with that world.

Leaves of the beet are veined with the same blood red color. As the leaves reach up towards the sun, the heart root pumps blood into them. Beet leaves are edible and nutritious, and their symbolism make them perfect for healing blood or circulatory disorders in the body. Harvesting a whole beet, leaves intact, and using it as the center of a ritual can help restore the balance and flow from the heart of a situation.

Beet blood is a powerful bright pink/purple dye, and can be used as a magical ink when a thickener is added. A drop added to a potion or tea will infuse the blend with a passionate color. Carving a request – the name of a lover, a sigil or symbol or just a word – on a beet and burying it underground sends your message to the gods and spirits that dwell below the roots. You can also write your request on a live beet leaf from a faster response. Beet blood can be used as a blood substitute in some spells, depending on how you extract it from the root.

If you are scared or feel weak, a beet’s root can give you heart. Make an amulet from a whole beet, carved with symbols of bravery and surrounded by stinging nettles or thorny vines, and hang it from the ceiling in your home. Just the act of cooking and consuming a whole roasted beet will add to your personal power and strength.

I am starting my beet seeds now because they grow best in the cool weather of early spring and fall instead of the baking heat of summer. I use beets when I travel to the underworld with Rabbit as an offering, or I eat them to connect with the energy of the damp soil and hidden roots before a journey through the darkness.

a spring funeral

I found him lying down the yellow stripe of the road just up the hill from our house when one of our cats was sitting in the road and crying out to me in the kitchen. The cat wouldn’t come and wouldn’t let me catch him he has led me to the groundhog. This picture does not do his size justice – he was nearly 3 feet long and weighed over 30 pounds. He lay there so peacefully, still warm from life and the sun, with no scrapes or blood or damage to his body. It was like he had just decided to take a nap in the warm road.

I carried him home late in the afternoon, and I wasn’t up for skinning my first large animal in the dark. Luckily the creepy old shed in our backyard is perfect for drying skins, sequestering animals who are waiting for processing and generally keeping stuff that can’t go in the house. I made a bed for the ground hog and tucked him in, and went to gather my supplies for the morning.

When I pulled him back out in the morning and burnt the Rabbit Tobacco, frankincense and handmade smudge blend on the charcoal, he told me that he was glad that I did not give up on him. I had considered, in the wee hours of a sleepless night, burying him whole instead of skinning him. I worried that I would mess it up, that it was disrespectful to take his skin, or that it was wasteful that I wouldn’t be eating his meat as well. As a rule, I’ll eat strange meat without a problem if it tastes good – last night’s meal consisted mostly of frog’s legs – but I avoid roadkill unless we saw it get hit and there’s no rupturing organs. He was intact – I think a broken neck killed him because nothing else was damaged – but I didn’t field dress him when I first found him because I wanted the skin intact, so I lost out on the meat.

But as I burned the funerary incense and spoke the words of the Litany of Release with my deer bone wand, he told me that he was happy to be helping me learn how to skin animals, and that he appreciated being more useful that just crow food (that’s a jab at our local crows who are teasing and avoiding me, not at Crow).

Groundhogs are marmots, closely related to squirrels, who are omnivorous but mostly live on plant life. He had tufts of green plant life still tucked in his cheeks, and I gave him two slices of oatmeal whole wheat bread to take with him when we buried him. The skinning process was a technical puzzle that took me 3 hours to complete. The only time I hesitated or felt uneasy was during the first cut – once I started to open and undress him, his gentle nudges helped me understand where to make seams. Only at one point did Green Bear need to demonstrate how to do something, and that was how to cut the membrane holding the skin on without damaging the skin or muscle. He made a few deft cuts with the knife and tossed it back to me. He said, “I make it look easy, don’t I?” because he skinned his first squirrel when he was 6. I did not have the benefit of growing up in a hunting family.

And it does look easy when you watching someone who is practiced, or when all you see is the photos where the animal is partially or fully undressed. But between the first photo and this one elapsed 2 hours – due to my insecurity and many minutes spent puzzling out how exactly to make certain cuts and preserve certain parts. It takes so much energy to carefully and respectful prepare an animal for the grave that I can’t imagine the work an undertaker must do to embalm a human body.

The lotus bowl has beet juice and water for anointing in it, not blood, but before I could anoint the skinned body I tipped over my charcoal in the super dry grass and used it to prevent the fire. It was then that I learned my groundhog friend’s spirit has  a strange laugh, a low barking, rasping chuckling noise that is similar to the bark of a living groundhog.

Wet scraping the hide was not an option  – I tried for half an hour with a variety of tools, but the muscle and fat that was left on the skin wasn’t budging. He’s drying in the shed now, where a broken foundation moves a steady breeze around him, and his body is safely buried in a shady grove. His feet are still attached to the skin, thanks to a hacksaw and some determined sawing, but they have to be packed with borax today so they don’t begin to rot. In a few weeks he’ll be washed in the bathtub to release all the salt and tanned, with whole eggs and a slow, smoky fire. I don’t know what I’m going to do with him yet – he’s told me to keep the pelt and use it for whatever I’d like because it was my first solo project, and I’m going to sell or give away his bones in a year when they have been cleaned by the dirt and the worms.

I thought it was enough that he was so gracious and patient as I learned to skin for the first time, but he has also promised to help us with our garden by giving fertility and keeping his plant chomping relatives out. As a token of the fertility he embodied and offered to us, I skinned his scrotum as well, but I carefully left his testicles and privates intact so his body would go on intact. Once the scrotum is tanned, it’s going to be one hell of a fertility charm. A friend thought it was funny that I would go so far as to skin the testicles, but what else are you supposed to do when the groundhog literally tells you, “I didn’t get to breed this year, so could you take my scrotum and make it into a fertility charm so I can live on through it?”

But if gaggles of baby groundhogs start growing from my garden plants, we will have a totally different situation on our hands.

spring winds

There’s been a warm wind blowing that’s taken the chill out of the day, and combined with the sunlight has led to many more outdoor hours the past two days. The daffodils are crowning and all the shrews are coming out (and getting killed by Spirit, who left me three intact voles and a headless rat today on the doorstep).

My to-do list for this week includes activities like harvesting the windfall of cedar and hemlock branches, all ripe with evergreen tips, that the power company piled up around the creek while they trimmed the clearance and clearing out the wild raspberry patches so it might actually be possible to harvest all the fruit this summer. The weather is fair enough that I should be turning the soil and starting seedlings, but I’m missing the upper body strength to run the tiller myself and the money to buy my seeds this week.

The mosses and plants around the creek stayed green under the snow, but soon green is going to start showing up in other places around the property. This creek is the one that rises up as a spring, where the spring house sits and a pump brings it’s water into the house. It empties into the bog which is populated with standing white birches and dead plant stalks. The creek on the other side of the property meets with this one eventually at the bog, making a perfect V around the house.

I’m still waiting for the day when I find a piece of wood with perfect runic inscription carved out by beetles and worms.

Our shared birthday is coming up in about a month, and Green Bear and I are considering throwing a bonfire/drum circle to celebrate instead of an indoor party.  The fire pit has to be dug out further, but we turned giant log slices into seats and soon the brick grill structure will become our outdoor altar. With all the sunshine and fresh winds I want to spend all the daylight hours outside instead of sitting at my computer and working.

Not just raspberries, but the delicious soft Japanese Wine Berry.

I have been focusing a lot on our etsy store too, Hoof and Horns. I only have a few items listed, and almost 30 in some stage of production, so in the next 2 weeks to a month I’ll be listing lots of incense blends, oils, waters, powders, wildcrafted plant materials, fetishes, charms, and lots of other surprises. Tomorrow I have to take a trip to the busy post office in town so I can mail my latest order. I hope the buyer likes the hand stamped packaging.

Spiritual Sledgehammers

So, you wouldn’t use a sledgehammer to pound in a small nail for hanging your new framed artwork, would you? Instead of properly securing your painting or photograph, you’d end up with a hole in your wall.

Left Side: Good for Banishing a Single Troublesome Problem or Clearing the Air Without Disturbing Your Other Mojo

Right Side: BLOW IT ALL AWAY

It stands to reason that if you wouldn’t take a sledgehammer to your wall unless you were ready to demolish it, you wouldn’t do the equivalent in magic. When I make my special formulations, I consider the ideal strength I’m looking for. If I need a super powerful tool for completely banishing the energy of a place back to blank, I’ll add 16 or more herbs, resins, bits and things and let it steep for 10 days in the waning moon. But if I pull out this mixture to try and get rid of  a single annoying entity or to cleansing a little bit of a funk – I’m risking the chance of blowing everything else away too.

I’ve been trying to explain this idea to the two people who have come to ask for lessons in magic, and to others who are interested in buying some of my products. When I say this stuff is EXTRA STRENGTH USE WITH CAUTION, it’s the spiritual equivalent of a sledgehammer. I have other formulas – I have a banishing formula that is less powerful but still very useful for encouraging troublesome spirits or energy to leave, but that won’t blow everything away in it’s path. I’m also working on a much much weaker cleansing blend that has a few of the same ingredients as the “exorcism bomb” that won’t disrupt the other energetic patterns or spirits around you that you want to keep.

I also differentiate between love and lust when making blends. I find it’s more useful to be specific when trying to attract something, whether it’s money, lovers or spirit allies. Because my love blend will be focused specifically on higher vibration/spiritual connections that just physical ones, you could theoretically use it to attract a wider range of partners than just a boyfriend or girlfriend. It’s possible that it would be helpful in contacting your Holy Guardian Angel, spirit guides or a platonic spiritual partner. On the other hand, the lust oil is very to the point – physical attraction and sex. Of course, they can be used together as well.

Making a number of blends with varying power levels or specific focuses takes more time and materials than just putting together a general “love+lust+attraction” mix, but I feel like offering specific tools for each issue makes the solution more effective. Instead of handing someone a sledgehammer when they just need a small hammer, I can give them a tool designed for the exact job at hand.

Feathers stuck to my fingertips

When the Vulture Woman told me that I would soon be getting my first bird to work with, I thought that it would be a crow or an owl or even the turkey next door who was looking kind of shaky there for a few days. But it makes sense that the first bird who’s body I worked with would be small, perfectly intact and with hidden spots of brilliant color.

This is a fairly young yellow rumped warbler that crashed into the window right above our bed a few days ago. This type of warbler doesn’t usually stay and breed this far south, but they do migrate here in the winter. Green Bear found the bird while he was arranging the giant log seats around our new ritual fire. I was in the middle of work when he showed it to me, but I decided to drop everything so I could get this done before making it wait any longer.

My spirit work is just as important to me as my physical work that buys the groceries and pays the electricity bills, but that means when the Vulture Woman throws a tiny feathered ally at my feet I jump up to honor it immediately. I’ve always felt that I would work with birds as spirit allies and teachers, but unlike other totem spirits and deities that have shown up as soon as I gave them a second thought, birds have only recently began to show me interest.

Warbler:

Expression of ideas and self, center and focus your energies, socialize, enjoy life, movement, progression and expansion of ideals and endeavors. Warbler will teach how to diversify and expand your surroundings and feel comfortable in doing so. He can teach how to sing your soul song to achieve what you need to in order to survive. Warbler shows how to endure and use patience and tenacity for your best interests. They are noted for their songs so are you singing to the best of your abililty? Warbler shows how to raise your voice with confidence. Are you moving in the direction you need to go? Listen to Warbler, his song of the heart will guide you. Listen carefully to the music.

And these are all the things I happen to be working on right now – creating my own sacred space in this house and land, beginning belly dancing & yoga training so I can develop my own shamanic dancing skills, and staying on track with my work.

The color yellow is also tied to intuition, and when combined with the migratory nature of this bird, to the return of spring and the sun.

I didn’t do the best job, because 1) it was my first time cutting a body by myself, Green Bear did most of the fox’s skin 2) this was a small and fragile bird and I was afraid of breaking him 3) I still hesitate because I’m afraid it will hurt them when I begin to cut. Even after the Litany of Release I still wait for them to jump up and protest when I begin cutting.

I removed the tail, wings and feet intact and salted them, and then the head. I skinned the body, accidently ripping it in two pieces because I was unsure how to peel the skin from the muscle, but the breast with the beautiful dark bars and yellow coloring remained intact and the second piece has the yellow rump intact. I am soaking the head and the body in water to get the bones and the tiny, impossibly fragile skull.

I am planning on making something I can wear out of the wings, tail and feet, but I’m not sure what. My ideas about shamanic dancing are easily coalescing when it comes to Fox, Rabbit, le Loupe (who is a dog, not a wolf), and Stag – from outfits to movements to makeup  -but I think my bodywork with birds is going to be differently structured.

Altars

(I didn’t want to resort to puns, so the title is short and to the point today).

One of my favorite magical activities involves constructing, arranging, cleaning, meditating at and photographing altars. I’m a very physical person when it comes to magic – I like making tools and potions and oils and talismans, so altars are a natural extension of this.

At the cabin – The Technautilus Research Station Zero – I had to build all my altars on makeshift tables made from handy storage containers covered with cloth. In this new house there are large shelving units built into the house, making it easy to cover the place in altars.

Bast’s kitchen altar goes first because: 1. She just sent me a familiar that I’ve been waiting for since about forever now (more on that later), and 2. She helped us get the house. Not to downplay the work of obstacle clearing allies like Ganesh and Papa Legba (what a combination), but Bast appeared on her own to us offering help with those two tasks and she’s done a really good job. I have no idea why she has a small pewter statue of the Eiffel tower with one leg broken off on her altar – someone visiting put it next to her a long time ago and I’ve stuck with it. The three snail shells don’t make sense either, but the castle has been representing our house for a long time, so I placed that there as a focus when she first showed up. The statue itself was in a Christian thrift store – the same one where Green Bear found his runes – and called us over from across the store.

Green Bear’s Altar – mostly made from bits of white opaque quartz from around the mountains & other stones, as well as the traveling Pan that moves on it’s own.

Green Bear’s focus: Pisces medallion (we’re both March 15th Pisces), sun medallion, river rock I painted, piece of fire melted aluminum and quartz heart over Satyr character stand-ins.

I was very happy to finally have enough space for a separate bird altar, which means I might actually accomplish bird-work again this year if I work hard enough at all the other magical tasks on my way. Raven, Owl and Vulture are mostly honored at this altar, mainly because Swan is the only other bird I have a strong connection to and that’s mainly associated with Saraswati/my work. The silver dish is flower shaped, with the bird alighting on the petals. I use it as an offering/focus dish mostly. (P.S. – that image on the left side of the photo, of a man in a lake with Raven rising out of him, is upside down and I never noticed until now. The man is supposed to be standing and looking at his reflection, which is the bird – not the other way around.)

The little blue and white bird is a water whistle that makes bird chirps. The small plastic case next to it has a pair of dried finch feet in it.

This is currently my favorite altar – it was so inspired and I felt so creative when making it. This old dartboard, made in 1977, is part of the rental and can’t be removed without tearing out part of the wall. But as I was considering how to hide it or at least draw attention away from it, Bishop Green let me know (in no uncertain terms) that it wanted it’s altar to be in the dartboard case. On the dartboard. With darts. And so I could write messages or requests or sigils on the scoreboards with chalk, and leave dead moths as offerings like it told me to, and use the glittery red key for I-don’t-have-any-idea-direct-communication-is-difficult and Bishop Green just talks nonsense through the Tarot.

Featuring: Glass of sacred chalk, darts for pinning sigils and requests, little paper clay offering bowl, possum jaws (sacred animal!), red glittery key, paper wasp nest, old hammer from broken piano (top right corner), Bishop Green’s sigil and piece of burnt Hell Money it told me to keep.

The Little Yellow House

The new year ushered in one major life shift that Green Bear and I had not experienced up until that point – a legitimate rental agreement in our very own house. Despite months of frantically saving money for deposits, visiting untold amounts of houses and apartments and lopsided farm shacks, and talking to many many people and hearing nothing but “well, I don’t think your income is steady enough…” (I get paid twice a week) or “Cats aren’t allowed” (but dogs are!?) we finally let things develop naturally and organically…

and we were rewarded with a small, old wooden house painted a butter yellow on the outside, right next door to our best friends in North Carolina. the whole place is wood, from the white wood paneling walls to the hardwood floors to the tongue and groove ceilings. It was built for wood heat that has since been removed, and we have next to no furniture, but we’ve been cooking and cleaning and trying to repair the damage done by the previous tenants.

Surrounded by ancient hemlocks and cedars, fenced in on both sides by moss and fern greened creeks and backed by rolling hills of pasture and farm land, it’s perfectly suited to our needs. Previous renters staged epic fights and aired their mental illnesses in the front yard, to the annoyance of the goats down the road and the neighbors up, and left broken glass in the windows and oven door (I don’t even know how you break out a whole glass oven door). Short term blizzards and icy roads have left us slow to repair, but we have been burning sage and rosemary and cooking delicious food and cleaning the dust and debris away.

On the porch is a cow skull that will soon be painted with sigils in pokeberry ink and red sandalwood paste to create our new land guardian. The built in shelving inside holds 6 altars already and I’m not even done unpacking my boxes full of herbs, powders and statues. Once the snow clears again for a few short days we’ll venture out again, clean up more of the broken furniture and trash that still litters the yard, and slowly make the place ours.

Bishop Green

Sigils drawn in pokeberry ink during an intense trance session to contact Bishop Green.

 

I don’t know exactly what the Bishop Green is – deity, spirit, energy construct, egregore, powerful city made servitor set loose by a series of catastrophic events that destroyed both the physical and psychic body of a city – but it doesn’t seem to be very important. Spending too much time trying to define the nature of the being leads to missing out on the other subtle but much more important qualities.

It appeared, like so many mystical images both modern and ancient, in a dream. Me and my closest allies and friends were desperately fighting against some radical army of saber swinging, frock coated house wives with candy cane eye patches and office workers painted like Aborigines. At the peak of the dream experience, a giant silver zeppelin descended after dropping bomb loads of glitter and bright confetti to blind us. An extravagant figure, dressed in the rags of an old cream lace wedding dress, a hunter green velvet coat, black leather and decaying fur, emerged from the cab of the zeppelin, topped with a immaculate eggplant colored silk top hat. The figure was human, but it’s gender, stature, facial features and other distinguishing marks constantly changed. One moment a petite Asian woman wore the hat and coat, while the next the outfit effortlessly shifted and stretched to fit the frame of a towering pale skinned man.

The name this figure gave me was definitely not Bishop Green, but it is the name that I remembered when I woke up and the name I use now. Our exact conversation isn’t important, mainly because it contained a lot of personal information just for me, but he remained long enough to give me some information on who he was exactly.

Bishop Green is a debris god, created from the left over bits of the hundreds of saints, gods, demons and totemic spirits worshiped in New Orleans. His power resides in the radical transformation of everyday people, fully hypnotized by sickening images of fear and obedience transmitted at all times, into awakened, aware individuals. Unlike most anti-brainwashing programs, the unique pattern breaking techniques aren’t just an alternate pattern designed to restore a different control mechanism. They are ever changing and force those who undergo it to constantly re-define themselves, rather than create a new but static identify to cling to.

Closely related to the loa and ghede in ways I don’t think I understand, Green opens a very specific doorway. His form is constantly in flux and there is no way to predict in what shape he will appear. He is best recognized by his elaborate costumes created from expensive but ragged pieces of clothing and his flamboyant behavior.