Mt. Rainier

As this last weekend was likely to be the last truly beautiful summer weekend of the year, I decided to spend Saturday hiking on Mt. Rainier with a good friend.  For those of you who aren't from the Pacific Northwest and don't already know, Mt. Rainier is one of the tallest, most beautiful mountains in the world.  This is the mountain that you see from Seattle on a clear day, the one that takes up a huge vista hundreds of miles away.  I really cannot describe how majestic she is.  The natives of the area called her Tahoma and she features as a sacred place in many legends.  On of my favorite legends is the story of Komo Kulshan and his two wives.  For anyone who venerates the earth there is no more sacred way to spend a day.

The hike we did was about 5 miles long and had about 1000ft of elevation.  Apart from a few steepish/icy bits it was a fairly easy hike.

We started by hiking the Sourdough Ridge Trail towards Frozen Lake.

From there we went up and around Burroughs.

Where we found snow.

From there we found ourselves on top of the most astonishing alpine meadow with a jaw dropping vista.

Apart from a minor low blood sugar incident, it was a spectacular day.

You Know You're a Shadow Worker When...

You get The Tower in a tarot reading and you're really happy about it.

This reading was in answer to my question: what will tomorrow bring?  Of course, I get the feeling the cards took me at more than my intent and answered to a longer term definition of "tomorrow" than I had intended but I'm ok with it.

This reading is The Tower, the Knight of Cups, and the Ten of cups up in the right corner.  I take this to mean that a severe swat from the cosmic frying pan is going to smack me out of my current stagnation and release a lot of pent up energy and emotion.  It will probably suck in the short term, but ultimately I'll be really happy about it.  Gods this is such a typical reading for me.

Book Reviews – Facing Violence and The Gift of Fear

Last week I was a reading fiend.  I finished two books, one I had just found on amazon and another that I’d been meaning to read for quite some time.  The books were Facing Violence: Preparing for the Unexpected by Rory Miller and The Gift of Fear by Gavin de Becker.  Now, these books aren’t the type of magickal books I normally review in this blog but I feel they have a place here.  Both of these books are about keeping yourself safe in the mundane world against the kinds of dangers that we all face every day.  I feel that it is vital to compliment magickal defense with plain, no nonsense, physical defense.  All the magick in the world won’t stop a bullet speeding towards your heart at greater than the speed of sound.  It might help you avoid being shot at in the first place, but you’d have to be a greater wizard than I to deflect a shot at point blank.

The first book I read was Facing Violence by Rory Miller.  This book is about learning how to deal with real world violence.  Most people aren’t programmed to deal effectively with violence.  We’re taught to be nice, polite, don’t stare, don’t be suspicious.  Well guess what, if someone it coming at you with a raised fist or worse the time for politeness is over.  This book teaches the reader how to read a potentially violent situation, how to diffuse it before it gets to violence, and how to act (and not get sued or arrested) if violence should happen to you.  Anyone who’s ever been in a real balls to the walls brawl knows the feeling of frozen white noise rushing through your head when you really begin to panic.  This book gives you the tools to get out of that headspace as quickly as possible so you can do more then get your ass handed to you.  It’s a very well written book, with lots of real world scenarios to make the concepts easy to understand and relevant to anyone.  I will probably be re-reading this sometime in the very near future.

The second book I read was The Gift of Fear by Gavin de Becker.  This is a book that had been on my wish list for a very long time.  This book is all about learning how to trust your own safety instincts.  Everyone observes things that they don’t really think about.  Your subconscious mind uses those billions of observations to form you instincts, your gut reactions.  Most of the time we’re taught to ignore those instincts because acting on them doesn’t fit into a smooth civil demeanor.  This book shows the reader how to look more deeply into their gut feelings and figure out what observations caused them, making it much easier to determine what really needs to be acted on.  It shows us how to listen to our fears to keep ourselves safe.  Beyond that, it teaches something even more important – how to distinguish between worry and actual fear.  Too many people are paralyzed by worries that don’t have any basis in fact (or at least not the facts they believed them to be based in) and this book explains why and what to do about it.  It’s well written, thorough, and actually quite comforting.  I might just make this mandatory reading for my students.

Anchored Shields

Shielding is one of the first techniques new practitioners learn when they study defensive magick.  The basic shield that almost every “magick 101” book teaches is the standard bubble shield (the white glowing egg that blocks negative energy).  It’s a great beginner shield because it’s easy to visualize and doesn’t take a lot of energy to maintain.  Unfortunately, it also has a lot of draw backs.  If done correctly, the basic bubble shield will really dampen your magickal senses – to the point where you might be under psychic attack and you wouldn’t even notice it.  And no, that isn’t a good thing.  If you don’t know you’re under attack you never do anything to stop the attack and as soon as your shield goes down you get hit.  Eventually, all bubble shields have to come down.  Although they don’t take much energy to maintain, they do take some and you will eventually get tired.

I deal with this by using a series special purpose of filters rather than a single large shield for my daily defense.  Now, the more complicated your shields the more energy they take to maintain.  If I had to run all my protections of my own energy I’d be comatose by 9am, so I don’t.  Instead, I anchor my shields.  An anchored shield is centered in an object (crystals, semi-precious stones, jewellery, tattoos, etc.) that you carry on your person and runs of the energy you’ve put into that object.  This allows you to run massive shields without draining yourself dry.  Of course, those anchors need to be recharged regularly (usually 1-2x a month) to maintain potency.

To create an anchored shield I just hold the anchor in my hands and describe the shields I want it to put up.  Now, you have to be very, very specific in your description.  You need to say exactly what you want each part of the shield to do, what you want it to do with the energy it lets pass, the energy it doesn’t let pass, whether it lets you feel what it’s doing, what it does when it runs out of power, etc.  You also need to describe exactly how you want the shields to activate and deactivate - are they automatic whenever you carry the anchor, do you have to will them up or down, do they go up automatically when you run out of energy, etc.  It’s like creating a computer program – it will do exactly what you tell it to and not one iota more or less.  If you want your shields to think then you need an egregore (and that’s a whole different thing). 

Once you’ve created your anchor you need to charge it.  I like to charge my anchors by singing, dancing, or meditating – usually singing.  How you charge your anchor will affect the character of your shields.  If you charge it by burning a candle then you’ll have very firey shields, if you charge it with intense visualization and a drop of your own blood you will get very intense shields that will probably make other people uncomfortable, if you charge it by going dancing you’ll get shields with playful energy.  Be mindful of what kind of energy you use and what its effects might be.

Then all you have to do is carry your anchor and let it work.

Quote of the Day

Umegat rubbed his neck and pulled gently on his queue. “Do you understand what it means to be a saint?”

Cazaril cleared his throat uncomfortably. “You must be very virtuous, I suppose.”

“No, in fact. One need not be good. Or even nice.” Umegat looked wry of a sudden. “Grant you, once one experiences . . . what one experiences, one’s tastes change. Material ambition seems immaterial. Greed, pride, vanity, wrath, just grow too dull to bother with...personally, I think it is not so much the growth of virtue, as simply the replacement of prior vices with an addiction to one’s god.” Umegat emptied his cup. “The gods love their great-souled men and women as an artist loves fine marble, but the issue isn’t virtue. It is will. Which is chisel and hammer.

-Lois McMaster Bujold, The Curse of Chalion

And from the same book:

“The gods do not grant miracles for our purposes, but for theirs. If you are become their tool, it is for a greater reason, an urgent reason. But you are the tool. You are not the work. Expect to be valued accordingly.”

New and Improved Daily Protections

It seems that my old standby daily protections are a tad insufficient these days.  I don’t know whether it’s a shift in my own energies or the energies coming at me, but I seem to be affected more by the negativity coming my way than I used to be.  My old protections consisted largely of reciting a protective incantation on my way to work and doing my nightly protection ritual before bed.  I’d occasionally augment these with a little incense or a candle spell if I felt I needed a boost.  These days I’m having to augment them pretty much every day, so out with the old plan and in with the new.

To start off, I’m going to re-work my morning protections – they’re the least robust and have the most room for improvement.  I want my morning protections to block negative energy coming from the outside (but not so much that I don’t learn the lessons that I need to take from them and deal with the causes), ground out negativity from within (but not so efficiently that I’m not aware of them and thus never address the cause), keep me alert and aware of what’s going on around me, bolster my creativity and intuition (so that I can come up with optimal solutions for dealing with problems), and help me deal with stress.  And, this all has to be quick and easy enough that it doesn’t slow me down on my way out of the house.  A simple task, no?

I think that what I’ll do is this:

1. I’ll start by putting a little Firey Wall of Protection oil (a blend of frankincense, myrrh, dragon’s blood, and salt) on my heart chakra and envision it seeping into it to strengthen and purify it.  Then I’ll press my hand out from my heart and create an inner shield to ground negativity from within or without.  I’ll probably take an extra moment here to connect to my deity and let that connection strengthen and comfort me.

2. Then I’ll touch my fingers to my lips (probably just above or below because Firey Wall of Protection oil isn’t particularly tasty) and envision the energy of the oil seeping into me to strengthen and purify my voice – to keep me true to myself and make sure that what I send out into the world is strong and well guided.  Then I’ll press my hand outward to form the next shield out – a shield of air the swirls around me and alerts me to changes in the energy so that I can be aware when something untoward comes at me from without and when I’m generating something harmful.

3. Then I’ll touch my fingers to my third eye, envisioning the energy seeping into that chakra to strength and purify it; to keep my mind and extra senses sharp, to keep me adaptable and light on my feet, and to give me the magickal strength to deal with whatever energy comes my way appropriately.  Then I’ll press my hand out to form the outermost shield which will be a filter to ground any negative energy coming to me that will not do me any good (anything that I won’t learn something important from, anything that would tip me over the edge, anything I was completely unprepared to deal with at that time) and to keep me from unintentionally sending my stress and negativity into the world.  I would probably want to anchor this shield in a piece of jewellery that I’d put on at this time (probably an onxy or snowflake obsidian).

I think that should do it.  It should block energy that wouldn’t do me any good (but let in energy that I really need to deal with/be aware of), it will ground excess negativity, it will keep me alert, and strengthen my abilities to deal with all the crap life dishes out.  Yes, I think this will do nicely for now.  If this isn't enough, then I'll try boosting my nightly protections or maybe adding a midday boost.

Dark Arts from the Outside

Last weekend I had the great pleasure of representing the Grey School, along with the ever brilliant Rae du Soleil, at the Vancouver B.C. Pagan Pride Day.  It was held outdoors in a park just outside the city (in the suburb of Surrey).  We lucked out and had decent weather, though the wind got a bit feisty at times.  There were a decent number of attendees and we had some really great discussions.

One of the things that really struck me about this event (I hadn’t attended it before) was the diversity of immediate reactions to my saying that I was the Grey School’s Dean of Dark Arts.  The reactions ranged from “Oh cool” to abject horror.  Now, that in itself isn’t all that surprising (pagans do run the gamut on opinions on DA) but what was really surprising was just how different the bases were for those reactions.

The people who thought being involved in DA was nifty ranged from the ever present Potter fans to people who were obviously fond of the Dark Arts themselves.  By far the most common reaction to my title was to be relatively positive and then ask what the term meant at the school.  These folks took one look at my book (Defense Against the Dark) and generally assumed I was a good person and that DA at the Grey School was probably positive – as, of course, it is.  The ubiquitous Potter fans thought the similarity between my title and the defense against the dark arts title at Hogwarts was just the coolest.  These folks might not look to deeply into what I do, but at least they don’t think I’m evil.  Then, naturally, there were the shadow practitioners that performed the expected “does she actually practice what she preaches” verbal sparring that I quite enjoy. 

Then there were the detractors.  I do expect a fair number of people to hear that I practice the Dark Arts and immediately misinterpret what I do.  The ambiguity of the term makes this unavoidable.  I’ve come to expect that a certain number of the more lily-white/fluffy members of the pagan community to shriek in horror at the mention of “black magick” before they ever bother to find out how the term is being used.  I was pleasantly surprised that just about all of these folks were open minded enough to let me explain how we use the terms “dark arts” and “black magick” (which we use to mean the study of defensive magick, creatures of the night, and low magick).  Once they understood what we actually meant they accepted it as a good thing. 

What actually surprised me were the one or two people who heard what I did and assumed that I was on the far side of the light and went around indiscriminately destroying dark creatures.  That was a new one.  I practice shadow magick.  My practices are about as dark and disquieting as you get while still maintaining ethical standards.  I teach defense because there are bad things out there that would like nothing better than to tear your face off.  There is a huge chasm between blasting everything that scares you and learning how to protect yourself when necessary.  One can respect and even embrace the shadow while still keeping a wary eye. 

In reality, the Dark Arts is a practice that requires practitioners to balance personal ethics and protection with a deeper understanding of themselves and the world around them.  A practitioner that actually understands dark creatures can determine when they should be respected and allowed to go about their business and when they need to be acted against.  A practitioner that is an expert in defense can apply the minimum amount of force necessary to correct a problem without going overboard or disrespecting others.  A practitioner that truly understands low magick can apply their magick at the critical fulcrum point that will slide things their way without disrupting the waft of the universe.  Yes, rash and ignorant practitioners can wreak havoc – but that is true regardless of the flavour of magick they practice.  Any expert worthy of the title can balance keeping themselves safe, sane, and healthy, with working magick in the world.