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Wednesday, February 29, 2012

Twin Glamours: Burlesque and Witchcraft

Or: What glitter can do for you.

No, I don't know what I was thinking.
When I was in my early twenties, I had a brief affair with a Satanist. He looked remarkably like Marc Bolan, wore a leather jacket no matter the weather, and loved Conan the Barbarian. One night, over drinks in the world's ugliest faux Irish pub, he lent me a copy of Anton Szandor LaVey's The Satanic Witch. I'm sure I was supposed to be very scandalised and maybe a bit titillated. I read the book from cover to cover, and when I was later asked for my opinion I declared, with one eyebrow arched, “That book is about my MOTHER.”


I still have the book. It's dated, and nobody could claim it's a great work of literature, but I hang onto it because it continues to hold relevance in my life despite my disagreements with it. I will return to this fact later. But first, my mom, the accidental Satanic Witch.

Growing up, my mother always stressed the importance of 'looking nice.' This is not to say she was one of those women you see on Toddlers and Tiaras forcing her kids into makeup – she was nothing of the sort. I was a teenager in the 1990s, when grunge was king, and my mother never once questioned my fashion choices, even when they veered into the unusual; black lipstick and combat boots were my uniform throughout much of highschool, and my mother simply encouraged me no matter what my style to try and look my best in my own way. To look put together, even if that included vinyl pants. My mother knew looks mattered.


Human beings are visual creatures. We judge one another by our appearance long before we utter a word. Most would agree that this is a pretty simple fact. (Whether or not it's fair is not relevant.) Another basic truth is that physical appearance, to a large degree, is easy to manipulate, So easy, in fact, that I am constantly surprised by how many witches and magicians overlook the opportunity to do so.

During the aforementioned black lipstick phase, a friend and I once conducted an experiment for a class. We stopped strangers in the park and asked them a series of bullshit questions on camera, supposedly for a class assignment. In reality we didn't care about their answers – we cared about their reaction to the interviewer, caught handily on film. My friend was clean-cut, with brown hair and a button-down blouse. If memory serves, my hair was violent red and black at the time, and my makeup was straight out of Siouxsie Sioux's liner notes. I also wore an inverted cross necklace just to make things even more entertaining.

Not surprisingly, our hypothesis was proved correct: we got very different reactions. That silly little experiment hammered home at an early age the fact that people will assume all manner of things based on how you present yourself.


I'm thirty-years old, now, and I am a burlesque performer. Burlesque is a world inhabited by people (mostly women) of all shapes, sizes, and styles. The one thing every last professional of the art has in common, however, is the understanding that looks can be manipulated... and used to manipulate. Burlesquers are natural witches in the way old Anton would have understood.

In The Satanic Witch, LaVey discusses 'the Law of the Forbidden,' “Nothing,” he states, “is so fascinating as that which is not meant to be seen.” He has an entire chapter devoted to the correct way in which a lady should 'accidentally' expose herself! Now, while his suggestions are for everyday life, reading them I am struck by how similar they are to the art of the tease. Burlesque performers are strippers, yes, but strippers who seem to intuitively grasp the ideas LaVey talks about – simply taking off your clothes is not enough. He also discusses at length a witch's mode of dress. He suggests the aspiring witch look to the cartoons in men's magazines, as these are exaggerations of a style designed to elicit a particular response. Striptease is really no different – the corsets, false eyelashes, garters, and spike heels are all part of the act.

And that's really it. It's an act. My friend Diamond Minx, when seen at an event, is a vision in rhinestones from head to toe. You would think the woman lived in a state of constant luxury, all glitter and champagne. But here's a secret... I've seen her in sweatpants. It's a glamour. A glamourous glamour, to be sure, but as changeable as all the rest.


Glamour is not just for the stage. There is just as much a need for it in the office, at the PTA, or on your online dating profile. Your appearance is a statement, and may vary depending on circumstance: a corset in a fetish club is not shocking, but the same outfit in church is. This has nothing to do with calling out certain looks, either. This is about deliberate intent, not personal taste. Glamour is powerful everyday magic, and in my experience the witch who overlooks it is doing so out of sheer stubbornness and ego. It's as though nobody wants to believe that others could possibly judge them on their appearance, because we're special, and above such trivial things.

Uh-huh.

You can charge a piece of jewellery with the intent to draw love, but your chances are going to be better if you bother to comb your hair, brush your teeth, and tailor your clothes.

2012 is a big year for many of us. And so I encourage all and sundry to not neglect your glorious meatsack. Put your best foot forward physically as well as spiritually – take a moment to examine your style critically and make sure it's 'on message' with your goals. If it isn't, tweak it with intent. Glamour is the art of pairing the physical and the energetic. Use it!


“I advocate glamour. Every day. Every minute.” - Dita Von Teese

Oooh!

Oh my gosh, you guys, I am so excited! I have a guest post up over at Charmed, I'm Sure. It's on glamour, because, well. I've been picking glitter out of my boobs for the past two days, clearly I know glamour!

I'm going to post here as well, but you should all skeedaddle over to Deborah's blog anyway, because it's marvellous.

Hang each night in raaaaaaaaaapture...

Daily outfit post! I went shopping this weekend and got these trousers at Jacob - finally, a replacement for my broke-ass jeggings. I have very wide hips, and a bit of a tummy, so low-rise pants? Not my fucking friend. These will be perfect when the weather warms up just a little bit more - they were okay for a stroll to Starbucks but any further and I would have been too chill.

While at the mall, Voodoo and I also went bra shopping. My sister's breasts are not small, but compared to mine, well... let's put it this way - she can go to La Senza. My chest outgrew La Senza ages ago - the only shop I bother with now is Change.

I picked up two bras and some damn sexy granny panties. Three items set me back over one hundred dollars. I sometimes wonder if men had to wear bras if they'd all be thirty bucks, tops...

I've been looking at underwear online. I've fallen a bit in love with this and this. My friend Ava Lure has something similar (purely for looks - that girl is built like a whippet) and I found at the last Taboo I was drooling over it.

Photo by Greg McKinnon.
Speaking of the last Taboo Revue...

We managed to do our darling choreographer Tranny Zuko proud! I was deathly fucking ill, which you never would have guessed. Makeup hides a multitude of sins.

Pictured from left to right: me, Dame Booty Dench, Lily Lovepie, and Blush Lane.

Monday, February 27, 2012

Blast! (From the Past.)

Today was a good day for blogging. Where to even start?

Links. Let's start with links.

The crow, psychopomps and Morrigan. Weirdly, I was just thinking about The Crow last night, proving that the universe doesn't believe in coincidence, and also that I am old. 1994, people!

The other thing I was thinking of, after wandering onto a blog written by someone who is like... half my age, was what it was like to be a teenage witch.

Lo and behold, Gordon at Rune Soup posted this. He mentions this post as well, which had me smiling. Everyone was so fucking YOUNG at one point, and it blows my mind.

Nostalgia.

I found this image by Googling 'cheap tarot.'
I got my first tarot deck at age fifteen. It was on sale after Christmas at Cole's books, for like $12.99 and my mother bought it for me. It was fucking hideous. But I dragged that deck and the book that came with it everywhere, doing readings at lunch for everyone who was willing to let me practice on them.

The first occult book I purchased  was Bucky's Big Blue. From there it was a hop, skip and a jump into the Farrars, Cunningham. and then horrible dreck like D.J. Conway. Silver Ravenwolf came a bit later, although I managed to miss the 'Teen Witch Kit.'

Not that I needed one. My first athame was a letter-opener. My wand a stick, my chalice an old silver cup that my mother kindly let me borrow. A pentacle, well. I painted one on a cardboard box I'd painted black to serve as an altar.

My sister and I cast spells on the little patch of grass by the patio of our ground-floor apartment, under the light of the moon and the nearby streetlamps. With my mother's blessing, we tried to magic her out of her smoking habit. Didn't work. We did freak out the neighbours, though - we lived in the Bible Belt, and anyone chanting after the sun went down was clearly a Satanist.

It wasn't until I was in my early twenties that I started to branch out from the Wicca 101 tomes that clogged the shelves of my local occult bookshop. I remember clearly being in Surrey, in a bookshop I'd looked up online. My mother and sister were flipping through tarot cards, and I wandered over to the bookshelf marked 'Magic', not 'Wicca and Paganism'... and this prompted the clerk to come over to me.
 
"Do you ever feel... less than fresh?"
"We don't get a lot of women in this section," he said. He wasn't saying it in a condescending manner - he was just honestly surprised, and I remember I felt vaguely proud. I was looking at Jan Fries' Visual Magic, which the clerk proceeded to say was very good. He then pulled Phil Hine off the shelf and said, "Have you ever heard of Chaos Magic?"


I shook my head, and politely declined the book. 'Chaos' was something I associated with drama, and with a point in my spiritual path I'd rather have forgotten. Months later, impressed with Visual Magic, I would hunt down Condensed Chaos, and have my magical practice change even further. Suddenly magic was not limited to moon phases, and even that old devil Aleister Crowley was beginning to look accessible...

I missed out on Crowley when I was younger. I would come across the name, and everyone I knew who was into magic - all women - would mention lurid tales of sexual sadism and talk about how 'evil' his work was. One online acquaintance claimed his books were so terrible that just having one in her home was enough to cause all sorts of paranormal ruckus! Utter horseshit, really, but I was young and I believed her.

Although... my local bookshop DOES keep all his books under lock and key. (My mother, on the other hand, does not. But she is evil. ...hi, Ma!)

I have been studying magic for fifteen years now. I can look back and laugh, sometimes hysterically, at my first forays. But there is one thing that I can see now, something I see reflected in younger pagans and magicians: a deep sincerity and eagerness. The world has never again been quite as exciting as it was when I first realised, yes, magic was for real, and it was mine.

As I've said before, there's plenty of stupid things I've done. But on a self-taught path, you have to learn to allow for ignorance.

But a sense of humour also helps.

Saturday, February 25, 2012

I have no words for how awesome this is.

Via Strategic Sorcery:



The frightening part is I think I recognised 99% of the stuff in the background.
Pete, you above all others should appreciate this one.

Friday, February 24, 2012

D is for Duality. Or: Fuck you, Aristotle.

This is a response to the Pagan Blog Project.


Probably one of the biggest topics buzzing around the pagan blogopshere right now is the clusterfuck that was and is Pantheacon and its discrimination against transgender individuals. Because yes, it's discrimination.

I wasn't at Pantheacon, nor will I probably EVER be. I'm antisocial for one thing, and for another all my travel cash goes towards the BHOF Weekend. So I'm hardly qualified to discuss at length the events that transpired last year, nor do I much care to discuss the future of the convention - I don't give a shit, and other people have made points much more eloquently than I could.

The events at Pantheacon, however, serve as a reminder to me about the concept of duality in paganism and magic... and how much it burns my ass.

It seems to be an accepted fact among many in both communities that the universe in all its glory can be broken neatly into gendered parts. There is a god, and a goddess. There are four elements, two male and two female in nature. We speak of 'masculine' and 'feminine' energy. These forces are seen as complementary, but definitely mutually exclusive, and we as human beings are generally assumed to reflect the qualities associated with our biological sex.

This latter assumption is being rightly challenged. But we should take it a step further and examine why we gender energy at all. It's pretty fucking backwards, especially when you consider that the 'female' energies are very often viewed negatively.

Water and Earth are, traditionally, considered 'feminine' elements. They are associated with 'the goddess' and all of these in turn are considered to be passive, receptive, nurturing, dark, and intuitive. These are ideas that go back to Aristotle... that asshole who claimed "women cannot practice the necessary prerequisites for philosophy" because we cannot reason. Reason (associated with Air, oh look at that!) is for men.

In her excellent book The Woman Magician, Brandy Williams discusses how Aristotle's philosophy has shaped much of the Western world, and has certainly had an influence on Western Magic. We have to remember that our traditions are not that old - as I understand it, they are cobbled together from mostly Hellenistic sources that were studied overwhelmingly by white men. During the Enlightenment, women did indeed work in magical lodges, but both the framework of the rituals and the social climate contributed to the continual acceptance of the gender binary system.

Women were mediums and muses - passive receptacles. Men were the magicians.

Well. Fuck that.

Duality is a crock of shit. Yes, there's a sun and a moon. Yes, they are different. Does that mean they're total opposites? They're both big glowing things in the sky! Black and white exist on opposite ends of a spectrum, sure... but it IS a spectrum. There are many, many shades of grey as white blends into black and back again.

When I was new to the Craft, I studied my Big Blue Book and was relieved and inspired by the idea of female deity. But Uncle Bucky said there was a god, too. Okay, seemed fair... so of course you pick a god at random to match your goddess. In retrospect I can't think of anything less respectful and less divine - it's treating deities like fucking matching table lamps. "Shit, we have one on the left side, better get one for the right!"

Wicca, for all its acceptance of (and in some cases, elevation of) women still operates largely in the same terms as other magical traditions. The elements are still gendered. The Goddess is still seen in terms of human fertility - the Maiden, Mother and Crone aspects all refer to what 'stage' you are at in a woman's life, tied very much to your menstrual cycle. The typical image of the Triple Goddess doesn't have a picture of a childless woman beating the shit out of someone, does it? That's active - the God's job.

The concept of duality is not evil. It is, however, limiting by its very nature. Subscribing to a binary system means that you classify everything as either-or. 10101010101. Not 101013010101. You're good or you're bad. You go to heaven or hell. Not a lot of wiggle room, is there?

I find life is all about wiggle room. Possibly death, too.

I am a cis-female. And I'm a 'girly' woman - I wear high heels, I love makeup. I worship a female deity who has, let's face it, nothing to do with birth or nurturing and everything to do with fucking and fighting. I enjoy arguing (fuck you, Aristotle) and magic. I could sit here and make a list of how every single one of my personal traits is either 'masculine' or 'feminine' or we could simply agree that that's bull, that energy is energy, and while it may behave or feel different from other types it's not necessarily one-or-the-other. The sun is not a man, the moon is not a woman, and we as human beings are complicated creatures powered by forces that at times may seem contradictory.

We do not have to label everything in our selves and our world as opposites. We have the choice, as reasoning beings, to expand our view just a bit to allow for a lack of strict categorization.

After all, we're the ones who constructed those categories in the first place.

Tuesday, February 21, 2012

You shore do got a purdy mouth.

Last night, after I did some basic yoga, I sat down to meditate.

I'm terrible at meditation, and always have been. This is annoying, because no matter how you slice it, it's a core skill for a good magician. I can raise energy, I can focus, I can visualise like a boss, but sitting still for twenty minutes nearly kills me.

In fact, last night I only made it to ten. My body seemed to be revolting against me, which I realise is a good sign that you are in fact telling it to shut the fuck up.

After that, I hopped in bed, did a little writing, and jotted down some potential future blog topics:
- Glamour
- Teenage years/how this all started
- How does karma work?

I slept very well, having a nice dream about a gentleman friend that also seemed to involve me stage managing Elvis' return tour. (Yeah, he was still dead, I think.) There was also a giant merry-go-round involved.

This morning I awoke, tsked at my nails, and hopped online to check the blogroll. And my goodness was I ever startled to see this post.

Well, well, well.

With that in mind, have an outfit post from the other way when it was, as it usually is in Vancouver, miserable and wet.

You can see our messy sewing area behind me, there. The hair I didn't get a good enough shot of - it was just rolls on a side part, nothing fancy.


Now, the important question for today is this: do I just fix the two nails that have chipped all to shit (and really chipped, like, half the polish is gone) OR do I redo them all? /firstworldproblem.

Monday, February 20, 2012

Queen of Pain!

Here's the routine from the last Taboo Revue. Hard to believe the next one is this weekend! Many thanks to Hunter S. Johnson for being my bitch.

20120128 - Taboo Revue - 05 - Mama Fortuna - Queen of Pain from Screaming Chicken on Vimeo.

Playing catch up.

Last night was Naked Girls Reading: Bust Of!. The event was held at the Backstage Lounge on Granville Island,which was a lovely venue with excellent staff. I'm extremely excited this is the new home for Naked Girls, although I'll have to get used to actually using a microphone. Normally I just depend on my natural loudness!

I read excerpts from Good Omens, and Herbert West: Re-Animator. Diamond Minx kindly asked me to return next month, which is the Neil Gaiman night! Eeee! Whoever would have thought, the little goth girl who drew stupid comics about Mr. Gaiman would one day be reading his stuff nude on stage. I may have to e-mail him. "Hey, remember me? Guess what?!" Maggie Pie (who is a wonderful reader as well as fucking hilarious and sweet) already got dibs on American Gods, so I may do some short story stuff. The White Road and Shoggoth's Old Peculiar could be good.


Been catching up on other PBP links this morning, because I'm avoiding cleaning the house as long as possible. (Once I finish this entry and my tea, I'll get down to it, because the dust bunnies under my bed are probably sentient by this point.) Quite a few people wrote about devotional dance, which made me smack my forehead because you think I would have thought of that one!

Anyway. I'm going to share what remains one of my favourite numbers. I was supposed to actually be in this one, which was conceived by my little sister Voodoo Pixie (she's the tiny redhead, if you didn't know) but I had to drop out for reasons I can't even remember now. If she ever wants to do it again, though, I'm so there. Just watching the video makes me tear up, to be honest, although I don't think it will have that effect on everyone, heh.

Tribute to Ganesha. With our dear Franky Panky (who was the first Naked Boy Reading last night!) as Ganesha.

Friday, February 17, 2012

D is for Dipshit

This is a response to the Pagan Blog Project.


I sat down in front of my computer with a cup of tea this morning, still in my stylish orange spider pyjamas, and I said to myself, "the letter D, eh? Clearly, I should write about the Dark Side."

Because, you know. Ooky spooky. Plus possible Darth Vader references.

Or! Death! Yeah! I'll sit my ass down, discuss the dissolution of the soul, theories on what makes up the soul, the idea of the Second Death... all that good shit.

But it's drizzling outside, I have a bunch of errands to run, and other people will probably cover those topics in more detail than I would. So instead... D is for Dipshit, everybody!

It's my firm belief that everyone who chooses to go down an occult or pagan path does some really amazingly stupid things along the way. I'm talking metal-in-the-microwave stupid. Now, pagans and magicians tend to be a really well-read lot on the whole, because books are where most of us first start out. But being well-read does not mean you're suddenly wise, does it? We all fall down, especially when it comes to actually putting things into practice.

When I was younger, my reaction to acts of stupidity by others was generally outright mockery. I've noticed this is actually a pretty common thing - you point at someone else making a jackass of themselves because deep down you know you WERE that jackass before. It's a way to separate yourself from the baby!pagans... and your memory of being one.

I'm older now, and I can look back and say with certainty that I was a jerk. And I was (and remain) also really fucking dumb sometimes.

As I've probably mentioned before, I discovered witchcraft in the 1990s. My sister and I and several other young ladies naturally decided we should all totally form a coven, you guys! And you know, nothing screams intelligence like a bunch of teenage girls learning magic from the few Wicca 101 books we could scrounge up the money to buy. (Bear in mind the Internet was a much smaller place back then, populated mostly by terrible Geocities websites with embedded midis and spinning graphics. This did not help matters.)

For some reason lost to time, the process of 'Drawing Down' was explained in a few of the books we had access to. This is essentially a form of voluntary possession, and is typically preformed by a High Priestess in a Wiccan coven who has had things like experience and proper training. So of course we tried it.

Looking back, I can say that 99% of such 'possessions' were bullshit - pure play-acting on the part of the 'possessed.' But there remains one incident that to this day I can't completely write off, and it was a bad one. Nobody was hurt, for which I'm thankful, but it was a dangerous situation that spiralled out of control because we were inexperienced, and arrogant enough to think that that didn't matter.

We were dipshits.

Lest you think this affliction strikes only the young, I can relay a more recent example. A good friend of mine and practising magician was having some trouble recovering lost property a year or two ago. Fed up (and, well. Drunk.) we high-tailed it to a crossroads, with the intention of offering a sacrifice to Papa Legba, because we were free-wheeling chaos magicians and I had some prior experience with the loa. Well. My friend offered up his significator card: the Knight of Cups.

Think about that for a second.

Well. The lost property in question DID eventually get returned in an unexpected and pleasant manner, but only after a lot of heartache, stress, and personal change. The joke was on us, as it so often is.

"Hey, dipshits," seemed to be the overarching theme of that one.

But the point (I have a point?!) is simply this: you're going to fuck up. You can do all the research and planning in the world, and you're STILL going to slip. You're going to do really dumb things in pursuit of gnosis, power, and sparkly things. Show me a witch who hasn't done anything stupid and I'll show you an armchair magician.

You're a dipshit sometimes. But maybe that's okay.

Wednesday, February 15, 2012

Naked Girls Reading: Bust Of!

That's right, this SUNDAY SUNDAY SUNDAY, yours truly will be reading naked! Get your tickets, tell your friends, do whatever to make sure I'm not sitting there freezing my ass off for an empty room.

I'm going to be reading a selection from Good Omens, and some H.P. Lovecraft. You know you want in on that shit.

Sunday, February 12, 2012

Got the blues!

Why do I always have to pee right after I've painted my nails? Even if I go before as a precaution?!

Went to bed at 4:30 M. Was woken at 6:20 AM by the upstairs landlords setting off the smoke detector somehow. Then had a rehearsal for Tranny Zuko's number at eleven. After THAT, it was off to the trade show at the PNE to check stuff out with my mother and sister for the Sacred Well.

I bought a beautiful blue tiger's eye ring from one of Mom's jewellery suppliers who was there. I just googled the magical properties of the stone, and had to laugh at this:

"Allows one courage and will power to understand ideas and then to actually carry them out."

Well! Guess I picked wisely.

Okay, going to bed now. I'm freaking exhausted.

Friday, February 10, 2012

Moore.

Continuing from the last post... The Mindscape of Alan Moore. We actually had this when I worked at the video store, and I enjoyed watching it even if I had to go, "oh shit, he's talking about fucking again, are there kids/really old people around?" frequently.

Speaking of documentaries and fucking...

In Search of the Great Beast 666. I own this. On DVD. It's... words can't describe how amusing it is. My good friend Pete and I watched it while getting very, very stoned, and it's resulted in an inappropriate running gag between us about hanging prostitutes from their ankles. FOR MAGIC.

C is for Comics.

This is a response to the Pagan Blog Project.


When I was in seventh grade, our teacher asked us what we wanted to be when we grew up. "A comic book artist," was my reply. A few years later, in another class, we were asked the same question, albeit with vaguely more adult phrasing. My answer remained the same, and it remains a dream I've never fully given up on even now.

I never had an interest in drawing the Sunday funnies - my introduction to comics was my mother's old Conan collection from the 70s. The Savage Sword books, in particular, which were packed to the gills with the Cimmerian warrior hacking the shit out of monsters and battling beautiful, treacherous witches. Magic existed everywhere in the Conan books, although our hero generally mistrusted it, as did the gods. Crom, Mitra, Set, Ishtar... fictional deities named after real in some cases. This was my first brush with mythology in visual media.

After Conan came superheroes - the X-Men, with their message of comfort for outsiders. I haunted the local comic book store, and the giant used bookstore that would sell old comics for a dollar. It was in the latter, hunting for back issues, that I discovered Vertigo.

Vertigo, for the non-comic nerds in the audience, was a subset of DC publishing that was launched in the early 90s. Like the Savage Swords I'd loved as a kid, the Vertigo titles did not bow to the Comics Code Authority and so depicted scenes of violence and sex.

In that dusty, cavernous bookshop, I pulled out several Vertigo titles. One of these was Death: The Time of Your Life by one Mr. Neil Gaiman. And you know, when you were an awkward goth teenager with an interest in the occult in the 90s? Once you met the Endless, you were hooked.

Neil Gaiman's The Sandman was a long-running series that centred around seven beings, more powerful than gods, that have existed since the dawn of time and who embody powerful and basic aspects of the universe. The series mostly followed Dream, the mopey king of the realm of sleep. In the pages of Sandman, gods, angels, and the devil all moved and spoke - living forces that seemed more than just simple fiction.

Sandman was, frankly, a magical book.

Nor was it the only comic to boldly incorporate gods and magical thought. Although at the time I wasn't aware of it, works by Alan Moore were already on the shelves. Moore, best known for looking like a hobo and being a cranky English fuck, is the mind behind such influential works as Watchmen, From Hell, and V for Vendetta. He also openly declared that he was a practising magician.

Another openly working magician is Grant Morrison, the author responsible for The Invisibles. To even try and sum up this comic would take ages, and is the sort of thing I only attempt while utterly shitfaced, so if you want to get the basics I suggest you start here.

I missed out on The Invisibles when it was published. Honestly, I don't think my local shop even carried it. It wouldn't be until I was in my twenties that I started picking it up, after being introduced to Chaos Magic. (The fact that the Wicca resurgence of the 90s coincided with the Chaos Magic current is something for another post, and another thing of drunken lectures/arguments.)

Comic books have long been considered the property of children and teenage boys. Muscled heroes in tights and capes, how much further away from magic can you get? But anyone with a serious interest will fast discover this art form hides some magical treasures worth more than yet another book on Wicca 101. Grant Morrison, Alan Moore, cat yronwode... intelligent, magical people have put their energy into comic books. There are truths in four colours.

...and maybe you can conjure Superman.

Monday, February 6, 2012

Queen of Pain


This is my favourite image so far of my sister as Hunter S. Johnson and I, taken by Greg McKinnon at the January Taboo Revue.

Sunday, February 5, 2012

Bag Of Tricks.

Well. It's possible I'm losing my mind - I've signed up for the Pagan Blog Project. Belatedly, since that's how I roll. What the hell, I enjoy writing prompts and it will be a nice way to connect with other bloggers besides my usual tactic of lurking on their well-written pages.

BOOK REVIEW!

The Witch's Bag of Tricks: Personalize Your Magick & Kickstart Your Craft

I finished this one a while ago, having picked it up prior to the holidays. I was excited to have a book that seemed to go beyond the '101' level of witchcraft, and in that regard it does not disappoint - the author assumes one knows the basics of spellcraft. The aim of the book is to help the reader make her/his magic more effective, and to help the solitary eclectics get out of magical ruts.

The book, for me, started off promisingly enough. I think the first place it lost me was when it had a mini lecture on avoiding eating meat in the third chapter - I understand the horrific conditions often faced by commercially raised cattle and poultry, but I'm not sure I buy that my evil meat eating ways are fucking up my magic, sorry.

Personally, I found the entire book, though aimed at 'eclectic' practitioners, to be still very much based on a Wiccan worldview. That's really not a bad thing, but it IS something to bear in mind, as the author's personal biases creep in to certain topics. (Like the evils of meat. There's a chapter on love magic that had me rolling my eyes too - the author is of the "don't target a person" school of thought, although earlier in the book there was a section entitled "the cause for cursing." That seems sort of... contradictory?)

Some chapters are definitely stronger than others. The magical cooking chapter feels cursory, for example, but the chapter on magical mistakes and how to avoid them was interesting and useful.

So. Parts of it made my head explode, and other parts were actually food for thought. This is one of those books that you take the best from, and ignore the rest depending on your practice. I certainly didn't agree with all of it (especially if ethics or 'this is how magic works' was involved) but I enjoyed many of the questions and experiments throughout. I'd recommend it to people who are either Wiccan-esque or who have a background in such. I wouldn't throw it at a Chaos Magician or anything like that, but I think folk magic practitioners could also get some good shit out of it.


I've plunged into Protection and Reversal Magick and am enjoying it immensely. I'm only just on chapter four. I tested out Miller's offering process the other night and it was awesome. I'm not really one of those people who expects/gets a lot of paranormal phenomena - drop me in a haunted house and I'm the one busy fucking around with the camera while the real psychics are freaking out over emotional bleedthrough. But during the offering ritual, I observed my candles doing some odd things and heard a low, persistent noise that lasted the duration of the rite. It was a little spooky! I'm half tempted to wander over to his blog and be like, "dude, awesome!"

Big intellectual, me. As you can tell.

I have a shit ton more books to get through still, so I'll keep you posted on them all.

Slenderman

You want to scare the shit out of yourself?

Here.

Brrrr!