Oh No, That Can't Be Good II

It’s time for another edition of “Oh no, that can’t be good,” my posts telling some of the frightening but true stories of why I specialize in defensive magick.  I’ve been doing a fair number of radio interviews lately and interviewer just love to ask, “What’s the scariest thing that ever happened to you?”  They probably expect nothing more than a ghost story to give their listeners a chill – they get a bit more than that.  These days I’m so well protected that metaphysical baddies just don’t come anywhere near me.  That was not always the case.  This story begins all the way back in 1999, when I arrived at Wellesley for First-Year orientation.

Wellesley is a venerable, old institution that has old brick buildings and clanky radiators and a tradition called “tunnelling.”  Tunnelling is breaking into the old stream tunnels and exploring the school underground.  I don’t do bugs, so I opted out of an exciting expedition in the roach filled tunnels but heard all about it when my friends got back.  One of the most interesting things they found was an entire dorm hallway that was bricked off from the rest of the building.  They had found a heat vent into the hallway and taken a look around.  It was a typical hall with a bunch of dorm rooms, except bricked off from the rest of the building and filled with dusty broken furniture.  All the rooms were unlocked except one: one room had a shiny new padlock keeping it closed.  The only way into that hall was crawling through a vent from a steam tunnel.  How the hell did it get a new padlock?

Time passed and this bit of history slipped out of my mind, but I always felt uneasy in the building with the bricked off hall.  In fact, I avoided that entire dorm complex like it was infectious.  It always felt uncomfortable to me and it was filled with stories of strange happenings and hauntings.  I didn’t start thinking about the links between that hallway and the odd stories until a friend of mine from the pagan student's group (PSG) moved into that dorm.  In fact, her room shared a wall with that strange hallway.

After my friend had lived there for a few months some of the other members of PSG and I noticed that she was changing.  It was subtle at first, but slowly the girl I knew and really liked started getting mean.  Her personality began to shift; she became cruel, petty, and arrogant.  She began alienating her friends and became a loner.  We wondered what could be wrong, but chalked it up to people changing until she started to change physically.  It sounds crazy, but her face began to change – it was sharper somehow – and if you caught her just right her eyes would change color and then shift back.  It was at this point that we realized that something seriously unnatural was happening.

The more advanced of us got together to investigate what the hell was going on.  Through divination, channeling, and a seriously messed up ghost encounter (which I might tell you all about later), we determined that our friend was being oppressed by an infernal.  An infernal is a demon...a big one.  We found out that sometime around the turn of the century a girl had come to school and brought an infernal with her.  (Don’t ever play with a Ouija board without casting a protective circle first, just don’t.)  This infernal set up shop in the girl’s dorm room and sent her mad.  After that the infernal decided to hang around for the easy pickings of stressed out young women far from home for the first time – tasty treats indeed.

We begged, threatened, and cajoled our friend about switching to a different dorm.  We knew that sleeping with her head next to that hallway was opening her up to the infernal and that she needed to get out and fast.  She refused to leave, saying nothing was wrong.  One day I was talking to her and could actually see the infernal lurking behind her eyes.  Something had to be done.  This thing had to be dealt with or we would lose our friend forever.

More easily said than done.  We were all baby witches at that point: what did we know about dealing with infernals?  We researched every spell and ritual of protection, banishment, and binding that we could get our hands on, and nothing seemed strong enough to deal with that hallway and the thing that lurked there.  We knew we had to do something and through much more research, divination, channelling, and a little divine intervention we came up with a plan.  We would do a protection ritual for ourselves, create a banishing bomb (a container of banishing herbs and stones that had been charged and blessed by every protective power that would listen to us), and then go into that hallway, place the bomb and let it do its work.  As the old saying goes, the best plan in the world only lasts until the battle begins.  Things didn’t go exactly as planned.

The first part of the plan worked beautifully.  We did a strong protection ritual for ourselves to keep us safe and free from the influences of the infernal.  We created the bomb and charged it until we could see waves of energy coming off it.  Then we went outside to make our way to the other building.  One of the odd side-effects of moving about the world while in ritual space is that sometimes it allows you to see things that would normally be invisible.  What we saw scared the pants off of us.  There were monstrous creatures everywhere, minions of the infernal, and they were looking for us.  Thanks to our protections they were unable to see us, but it was the scariest walk I’ve ever had in my life. 

We made our way to the right building and got down into the basement, to the entrance to the stream tunnels.  With our psychic awareness at full blast we could actually see waves of negative energy streaming out of the tunnel.  I was about as scared as I could possibly be, or so I thought.  I looked around at my friends and they were all standing there with blank expressions.  Zombielike, they started walking towards the tunnel.  I could see tendrils of evil beginning to wrap themselves around my friends.  At that moment I understood what real terror was.  I grabbed at my friends, physically pulling them back, but they kept moving forward.  I snatched up the bomb and tossed it as far into the tunnels as I could.  The energy vanished and my friends snapped out of it.  I got us out of there as fast as humanly possible.

Within a week our friend had moved out of that building, and within a month she was completely back to normal – she had no idea how close she came to gods know what.  The infernal was injured, but not gone.  A few years later, when we were stronger and knew a hell of a lot more, a friend and I went back to campus and finished it off.  As far as I know nothing untoward has happened there since, but the bricked off hallway is still there.

Shadow Work

I was doing a radio interview last week and the interviewer asked me to describe my personal practice.  I found myself rather stumped as to how to describe what I do in a 15 second sound bite.  I said that I focused on defensive magick and shadow work.  It was obvious that he had no idea what shadow work was, but there just wasn’t time to go into it properly so we moved on.  I feel the need to more adequately explain what shadow work really is.

Everyone has positive traits and negative traits.  A lot of popular spiritual practices really emphasize creating a positive mindset, generative positive energy, etc.  This is great for most people most of the time, but it isn’t so easy for some of us.  Some of us look at all that love and light and just feel a little nauseated.  Sometimes the only way forward is not to look at the bright side, but instead to examine the shadows – to stare in the abyss.  This doesn’t mean that you’re a negative or bad person; it just means that you need to travel a different path to spiritual growth.

The essence of shadow work is looking at what isn’t working, the things that are broken, and changing them.  For many, the hardest part of shadow work is recognizing what those shadows are: our fears, insecurities, incorrect assumptions, weaknesses, pettiness, and irrationalities.  Some people can deal with these by bringing so much positive energy into their lives that there’s no room for these negatives – not me.  I’ve found that I really have trouble finding the light by reaching for it.  Instead, I have to dive deep into the darkness and keep going down until I punch out the other side.  That’s one of the main reasons I’ve called this blog Black Sun Magick – because my light is black as pitch and it shines.

One of the fundamentals of my shadow practice is what I call “Looking in Dorian Gray’s Mirror.”  For those of you who are unfamiliar with the story, The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde is about a young man who wishes that a portrait of him would age instead of his body ageing.  Magically, this wish comes true and the portrait ages and bears all the scars of Dorian Gray’s soul.  Over the course of time Gray becomes more and more depraved and the portrait becomes so terribly and twisted Gray locks it away.  In the end Gray is confronted with the portrait, looking at everything he has become – being able to see with his eyes every twist of his soul – that he stabs the painting and ends up inadvertently taking his own life.  Shadow work is about looking into that portrait every day.  It takes time, discipline, and courage to look at oneself so honestly.  If you cannot see what you really are, how can you ever really change and grow?

Once you’ve identified the things you don’t like about yourself you’re not allowed to just sit there and moan about them, you have to do something about it.  This is where it gets really tricky, because some of those things you don’t like are genuine problems that need to be fixed and some of them are things that you’ve been taught to dislike that aren’t actually bad at all.  No one can tell you whether something you detest about yourself is something you need to change or if it’s just your way of looking at it that needs to change.  It’s something you have to figure out for yourself in whatever way works for you.  For me figuring this stuff outs is all about meditation, divination, talking to spirit guides and trusted friends, for you it could be any, all, or none of these things.

Once you’ve leapt that hurdle it’s time to forgive yourself for your weaknesses.  Don’t laugh, it’s important.  Most people that are actually motivated enough to do something about changing their lives and dark enough to do it via shadow work are really hard on themselves.  Whenever I find a new chink in my image of myself I tend to spend a goodly chunk of time wallowing in depression, bemoaning how horrible/useless/bad/etc. I am.  I allow myself a little bit of time to roll around in self-pity, and then I pick myself back and forgive myself.  Often I do this in a ritual where I call my goddess to witness my self-forgiveness and pledge to move forward – it’s hard to go back on something you’ve sworn to your god in his or her presence.

Then I will usually do some working where I work on “fixing” the problem.  More often than not it’s some kind of ceremony in which I embrace whatever the negative is.  What I mean by embracing a shadow is to allow yourself to have whatever feeling or though it is, but to then think about it rationally and not act on it unless it’s truly rational and correct to do so.  It’s really just a stylize way of reminding yourself to think before you act and to not get mad at yourself for not being perfect.  Sometimes the shadow is bad enough to really need to be excised rather than embraced, in which case I’ll do a personal banishing ritual just after the full moon and a confirmation on the new moon.

Shadow work is about being really, really honest with yourself and never being afraid to look in the dark.  Do it long enough and you end up knowing yourself really well and having a very good grasp of exactly what you’re capable of.  Sure, there are kinder, gentler ways of doing it, but sometimes you need a good drop-kick to move.  I sure do.

Proficiency in shadow work also opens up the world of shadow magick, but that’s a topic for another day.

Everyday Energy Takers

Ever have those mornings when you wake up more tired than when you went to bed?  Those odd mornings where you remember dreaming and dreaming and your body feels every ache from what you did in your dreams?  I am having one of those mornings.  I slept a good seven hours and I feel like it was minutes.  I had crazy vivid dreams all night and don’t seem to have gotten any actual rest.  It’s times like these that I wish I still drank caffeine (I’m an insomniac, caffeine = bad).  While I’m sure my exhaustion is just a random quirk of metabolism or possibly the beginning of a cold (it’s been going ‘round the office), but I can’t help but think about energy vampires.

There are lots of things out in the world that can deplete a person’s energy, most of which are perfectly mundane.  However, some of those things are not so mundane, and they’re more common than you think.  The most common energy vampire is what I call a Taker.

Takers are people who, for various reasons, feed on energy from other people.  Most people have run into a Taker at one time or another, though they may or may not have realized it at the time.  If you’ve ever known someone who made you feel exhausted just be being around them—and we all have—chances are you’ve met a Taker.

Takers are not inherently evil.  In fact, most of them don’t even know what they’re doing.  These are people whose subconscious minds have learned how to tap into the energy of people around them.  Because most of them are unaware of what they are doing, they have no control over whom they tap into or how much energy they take. They simply take from anyone who has the misfortune of being near them.

No one really knows why people become Takers.  One theory is that the taking of energy begins when the new Taker goes through some type of trauma, either emotional, such as losing a loved one, or physical, such as becoming seriously ill.  Extreme situations can drain new Takers of so much of their own energy that they need to take it from those around them, and they either consciously or unconsciously learn to do so.  Usually, a person will stop taking energy from those around him or her once the trauma has passed.  However, some people will continue taking energy, thus becoming Takers permanently.

Takers can usually be recognized by their outward behavior. They tend to be “drama queens” who engage in constant histrionics for whatever energy and attention they can get.  They crave attention and sympathy and will generally get quite upset if you refuse to commiserate with them.  These are the folks who constantly complain about being mistreated, but whenever you ask them what they’re actually doing to change things they accuse you of being insensitive and then tell all of your friends how mean you were to them.  After being near them for too long you will feel tired and irritable – not even a saint could deal with these people for long without wanting to throttle them.  Although some Takers are far more subtle, these people tend to be weak or sickly and desperately “need” your help.  These people prey on our most charitable instincts and will take all of your time and energy that they can get you to give.  Though they may seem childlike and vulnerable, they are not.  They’ve found a convincing act that gets them the attention they need and they will milk it for all its worth (basically the magickal equivalent of Munchausen Syndrome).  The hard part is separating these Takers from those in genuine need – the difference being that a Taker will keep taking long after any real need has passed.  Takers aren’t usually all that dangerous as long as you can get away from them.  They may drain some of your energy, but you will quickly recover once they go away.

Basic shielding will protect you from the short-term effects of just being in the vicinity of a Taker.  However, shielding alone can be insufficient if the Taker turns his or her attentions toward you.  If the Taker tries to get you involved with his or her never-ending crises, simply refuse to do so and walk away.  By steadily refusing to give them the attention they want they will usually move on to a more willing audience.

The best way to deal with Takers is to simply not be around them.  If you cannot physically get away from a Taker (if the Taker is a classmate or a coworker), the best thing to do is spend as little time talking to them as possible.  This minimizes the Taker’s opportunities to monopolize your attentions and therefore energies.

Pantheacon

I'm back from an amazing weekend at Pantheacon. I'd like to say a huge thank-you to all the Pantheacon organizers and staff for running a really great convention and generally being amazing. Workshops and rituals ran smoothly and almost everything was on time! Being a Virgo I kinda think pagan standard time is an abomination, so I really enjoyed things being quite punctual and fully believe the staff pulled off a minor miracle in making it happen.

I had the great pleasure of presenting a workshop on Magickal Self-Defense on Monday up in one of the big ballrooms. I had a decent number of people attend (maybe 70 or so) and was really impressed by their comments and participation. One of the most valuable comments had to do with my exercise in auric dimming.

Auric dimming is a defensive technique that keeps you from standing out. It's appropriate in situations where you're simply going about your day and suddenly the hair stands up on the back of your neck and you just get the feeling that something not so nice is nearby or is maybe even looking for you. This technique will help you to leave a place where you feel threatened without being noticed magickally – it does nothing for being physically seen.

In my exercise (listed in full below) I have people envision their aura as being made up of thousands of tiny threads originating in the center of the body and then spool them, like pulling in thread. One woman made the comment that for people who are more closely associated with water, it might be easier to envision the aura as a large calm lake flowing out into a stream. Instead of pulling threads into a spool in your core, you can envision the waters of the lake flowing out into a narrow river around the body. By doing so you end up with a very thin layer of fast moving energy very close into the body rather than a large amount of more dispersed energy. This can quite effectively shrink your aura, but you must be careful that that fast moving energy is pulled in to pretty much skin level, or else its intensity might attract attention as much as a larger calm aura would. Definitely something to think about.

Auric Dimming

This can be a bit tricky at first, but will get easier as you practice it. It can also feel very uncomfortable, like your skin feeling prickly or too tight. For starters, I wouldn't recommend doing this for more than a few minutes at a time.

• First visualize your aura. If you have learned how to see auras with either your eyes or your second sight do so now. If not, visualize your aura extending from your body out into the air by about six inches. You can visualize your aura in several ways: it can be the image of a halo of white light, the feel of static electricity, the smell of ozone, or whatever sensory visualization seems most natural to you.
• Now see/feel/smell/etc your aura going into your body as a series of individual threads that root themselves in a ball in the center of your body.
• Imagine that the ball is made up of swirling, spinning energy strands like a ball of yarn. Visualize all these strands wrapping around the ball.
• Visualize that ball turning very slowly, winding all those threads back up into the ball. Visualize the threads of your aura being very slowly pulled back in towards the center of your body, centimeter by centimeter. It is very important to do this slowly, little by little. You only want to contract your aura until its about ½ an inch out from your skin. This will feel slightly uncomfortable but won't hurt you. If you begin to feel light headed, panicky, or very uncomfortable unwind your aura immediately.
• To let your aura back out just visualize the ball of energy in the center of your body unwinding and releasing your aura back to its natural state.

It's a good idea to ground after using this technique. I would also recommend eating something connecting you to Earth, like bread, nuts, or cheese afterward.

The Dangers of Defense

First off, I’d like to thank Daniel Bautz over at The Grand Dark Conspiracy for having me on his show last night.  We talked about monsters, mayhem, magickal protections, and a bizarre zombie creating fungus.  If you didn’t get a chance to listen live, you can download the show as a podcast.

One of the points we discussed last night was the idea of the importance of intent in any defensive work.  Daniel asked the question of whether a novice could screw up defensive work to the point of making things worse, or if the power of intent/belief could make up for lack of experience.  The answer is yes and no.

Yes, focused intent and confidence in your workings can make up for a world of procedural mishaps.  If you accidentally smudge going clockwise rather than counter-clockwise while banishing you’re not going to accidentally create a portal into a hell dimension.  Wands, chants, incantations, and gestures are all just tools that help the practitioner focus their will – their intent – and the power of the will is what actually performs the magick and affects the world.  So yes, if you are truly focused on what you want to happen, know your own will, and are able to project that out into your environment magick will happen and you are quite likely to be successful, regardless of technical proficiency.  Inexperienced but strong intent can be quite effective against low level nasties: imps, pixies, most ghosts, etc. – the kind of beasties you’re actually likely to run in to.  Unfortunately, this doesn’t always hold true.

When dealing with the more rare and dangerous denizens of the dark a strong will alone is not going to cut it.  These are the creatures that, in my book, I rate at a danger level of 6+, such as red caps, the rare malevolent and powerful ghost, and infernals.  These creatures are much stronger than their less dangerous cousins and tend to be quite resistant to amateur attempts to remove them.  In the case of such strong creatures, a failed attempt to defend against them can just make them angry, making things much worse.  To use a really mundane analogy, the difference between trying to remove a weak entity, say an imp, verses a strong entity, like an infernal, is a lot like the difference between trying to remove some dust from carpet verses trying to clean up 10 gallons of spilled motor oil.  The dust can be vacuumed up by anyone with the tools they probably already have, while the motor oil is going to require professional cleaning or new carpets and trying to clean it up yourself is likely to just spread it around.

That is not to say that there’s nothing an amateur can do with faced with a big bad.  Basic shielding and self-cleansing techniques (such as basic banishing and hex-breaking) can all hold back some of the negative effects of malicious creatures and give you the time to find help.  In my book I give fairly detailed instructions for all of those techniques, as well as listing common protective stones, herbs, and oils – all of which can mitigate the effects of a malevolent entity and buy you time.  In the end, however, going toe to toe with high level nasties should really be left to advanced practitioners unless there is no other choice.  At the back of my book I have a section called “In Case of Emergency Break Glass,” which has some seriously potent protective and banishing rituals that can be used if there is no other option.  I hope no one ever has to use them.  Thankfully, the kind of entities that require such extreme removal measures are absurdly rare – we’re talking one in a million scenarios.  They happen, but unless you’re meddling with things you ought not to, you’re unlikely to ever come near them.

So yeah, do what you’ve got to do to keep yourself safe but never be afraid to ask for help.  If you have any questions feel free to comment to the blog or you can email me any time: emily at e-carlin.com.

Reflections on Imbolc

It’s been a week and a half since Imbolc and I’ve had the hardest time figuring out what to say about it.  Imbolc has never made much sense to me and I’ve always had a bit of trouble celebrating it.  For those of you who aren’t familiar with the Celtic Wheel of the Year, Imbolc is the first or second of February and it represents the transition from winter to spring.  Those of you suffering in the snowpocalypse back east are probably laughing your asses off right now at the thought.  Until today I probably would have joined you.

However, today I found a story that actually made Imbolc make sense to me.  I’ve always enjoyed surfing the Internet Sacred Text Archive and I took a break to read some Scottish folklore.  Today I found the book Wonder Tales from Scottish Myth and Legend By Donald Alexander Mackenzie on the Sacred Texts site (hooray for the public domain) and the story “The Coming of Angus and Bride.” 

This story is about the winter Hag, Beira, and the King and Queen of Summer, Angus and Bride.  The story begins in winter with Beira holding Bride prisoner because Beira knows that when Angus and Bride marry it will mean the end of winter and her time of power.  Eventually Angus manages to free Bride from Beira and they marry – Imbolc is the day of their marriage.  When Beira finds out she’s furious and vows to wage war against them, against the coming of the spring.  Beira then sends out her hags to send storms and frosts against the coming of the spring.  This battle between the winter and the spring rages on, dumping snow, killing new early growth, etc., until the spring equinox, called Ostara.  It’s not until Ostara that winter’s power is truly broken and the Beira retreats to hibernation to wait for the next winter.

Now this is an Imbolc story that makes sense to me.  Spring tries to come on Imbolc and it’s the first glimmer of hope that winter will eventually end.  Winter then retaliates with more bleak weather until it blows itself out and gives up a good month and a half later.  So, Imbolc isn’t really the coming of spring, it’s just the hope of spring in the darkness.

A Few Announcements

Hey there folks, I've got a few announcements.

On 14 February I'm going to be interviewed on the FATE Radio show The Grand Dark Conspiracy at 10pm est (7pm pst). I'll be talking about my book, monsters, and magick. You can listen to it streaming on FATE Radio or you can download the podcast a few days afterwards. I'd love to know I've got friends listening in.

Also, on 18-21 February I'll be attending Pantheacon in San Jose, Ca.  I'll be presenting my workshop, Magickal Self-Defense on Monday the 21st at 11am.  Here is the workshop description from the program:

A hands-on introduction to the basics of magickal self-defense. This workshop will include the topics of energetic awareness, shielding, magickal camouflage, and a brief introduction to protective charms. This is a hands-on workshop and participants will be asked to stand, move around, and actually do magick. All experience levels are welcome.