I is for Invocation

This post is for the Pagan Blog Project.

I've always wondered exactly how they found a deserted beach in, what, LA? I lived next to beaches in Vancouver for years (Jericho and Kits) and even in the dead of night - in winter! - there was usually someone else there.

Oh, well, Hollywood.

So. Invocation. What's the deal, huh?

Uncle Al has this to say on the subject: "To 'invoke' is to "call in", just as to 'evoke' is to 'call forth'. This is the essential difference between the two branches of Magick. In invocation, the macrocosm floods the consciousness. In evocation, the magician, having become the macrocosm, creates a microcosm. You 'in'voke a God into the Circle. You 'e'voke a Spirit into the Triangle" (Magick in Theory and Practice.)

That's actually pretty straightforward for once.

Back in ye olde 1990s, invocation was introduced to many of us via the concept of drawing down the goddess (or the god) of Wicca. Books tended to stress that this was not something for just any newb to try... and of course all of us newbs routinely ignored any warnings we read. Warnings are for other people, dammit!

Our high-school 'coven' of course eventually came across a pile of invocations, and of course we decided we should totally try them out. NOTHING COULD POSSIBLY GO WRONG.

Actually, usually nothing did. There was one girl in our group - who I'll call K - who was liable to get 'possessed' but honestly it was all playacting; we'd 'invoke' a deity, she'd spout off a little, we'd say thanks, the end. It satisfied her desire for attention, and the rest of us felt very witchy indeed.

Except once.

One member of the group held a sleepover in her pool house (my sister and I were poor as shit, but almost everyone else was a fairly affluent suburban kid so a pool wasn't an odd thing to have for them) and as we tended to do when we hung out, we'd get our witch on. This time, we decided to try out another drawing-down ritual. I think we were appealing to Brigid.  Well, whoever it was, we didn't get her.

It's been well over ten years now, and I'm still not sure what to make of that night. K acted very strangely, very threatening, and whatever was inside her refused to leave when asked. She held her fingers in the middle of candle flames with no damage, chugged nasty rainwater, and spoke differently than she usually did. Eventually after much effort (and some very dry sarcasm from the girl whose house we were staying at) K lay down, we did the 'thanks, bye-bye!' ritual, and K seemed to come back to herself, albeit very groggily.

That same evening, one of the other girls had a mysterious welt appear on her leg. It was gone by morning, but while there it resembled a leering face.

K was not, to put it mildly, a mentally balanced individual. She was on some sort of stabilizing medication, which she often refused to take. She was also a huge fucking drama queen, and the main reason our 'coven' fell apart. As I said, in retrospect it's easy to see now how often she was shamming magical experiences. So yes, it's possible she was just THAT unhinged that evening. But I don't know.

Memory is notoriously unreliable, but my recollection of that night involves a very heavy atmosphere unlike anything we'd experienced before. A storm had sprung up outside, and the whole night was one giant clusterfuck of negative emotion. I remember standing on the little staircase leading up to the apartment over the pool after everything had calmed down, trying to relax. I was the oldest, and so I tended to assume responsibility for rituals and the like, and I was badly shaken. I remember confessing tearfully to my sister that I thought I was to blame, because a few days before I had prayed to Loki, possibly the most infamous Norse god. (This event actually scared me away from that particular god, whether or not He had anything to do with it.)

We never got any answers as to what exactly went on that night. The group fell apart soon after, and most of the girls grew out of their Craft Phase.

Many years later, my dear aunt would have her own 'the Craft' moment. That video posted at the beginning of the entry? Yeah, my aunt decided, in a moment of grief, to basically crib the lines there in an attempt to contact her recently deceased father and just shouted at the universe, "I invoke thee!" What thee? NO IDEA. What she got was something nasty, and eventually she called my mother, my sister and I in to clean it up.

The moral of these personal anecdotes is this: invocation really is something that can fuck you up. That doesn't mean one shouldn't do it, but to echo all those books I ignored as a kid, it probably is something you should do after you've got some real magical experience under your belt. More importantly, there are ritual frameworks that work much, much better for invocation than just reading crap you've found in a Llewellyn Wicca 101 book, and in this internet age you really can't claim you don't have access to them.

And for crap's sake, don't pretend to be Nancy.

H is for Hex

Yeah, dropped the ball last week. My work contract's been extended (again!) so you can imagine how busy that means we are. I can't say much about what I'm working on, but I will say this: there's a lot of testicles on the show. Which has nothing to do with today's post, which is for the Pagan Blog Project....  

Hexing!

There may be no bigger divide in witchcraft than the topic of hexing/cursing/whatever you call it when you magically fuck someone up. It is, after all, the stuff of fairy tales and B movies. Wiccans who adhere to the Rule of Three - and therefore countless Wicca 101 books - argue against negative magic, claiming that even if you personally don't give a shit about your intended target, you should be afraid for selfish reasons because karma apparently collects interest and has a wicked boomerang effect. My sister and I, being aficionados of terrible horror movies, sometimes like to sum up this idea by screaming a quote from The Blair Witch Project 2: "Your dick will fall off in three days!"

(Why can't I find a video clip of that scene? Sometimes the internet fails me.)

I can still remember the first time we came across a book that did not paint cursing as morally akin to raping your neighbour's dog. It was Yasmine Galenorn's Embracing the Moon, published by Llewellyn in 1998. I still have the book. It was given to me by one of my god-we-are-so-the-Craft 'coven' mates after she grew out of the phase. Galenorn was the first author I read who did not identify as Wiccan, but simply as a witch, and included in her chapter on protection and purification spells were a few that tiptoed the line between "harm none" and "fuck that guy!" Namely, there were some binding spells and a mirror spell designed to reverse energy back on a person. The book says, "do not carve a specific person's name on the candle" but of course we all agreed to ignore that instruction and let one of the girls basically hex her step-sister because of course it was deserved, why wouldn't it be? Nothing ever came of it, as far as I know. Since the spell is designed to reflect the target's energy, chances are she never did anything nasty in the first place and so didn't have to worry.

It would be a few years before we ventured into hexing territory again, and I think when we did it was a variation on the mirror spell again. I do remember being out with my mother and sister, in the middle of the night, at a crossroads in no-man's land out in Abbotsford, burying the physical tokens of the spell with a big kitchen spoon due to lack of gardening tools.

I'm sure it would be a good moral story if I could tell you about the dangers of casting curses, and then go on about how I learned my lesson and now that I'm no longer in my twenties I've matured and never see the need to stoop to such a level because I'm enlightened and awesome. I certainly wouldn't ask you to picture two women strolling through East Vancouver, looking for a relatively uninhabited intersection, carrying a bottle filled with really stanky ingredients. Which had to be broken. But bounced on the first try as one of the pair isn't all that strong. I would not ask you to picture these idiots yelling, "RUN!" when the damn thing DID break, and then them fleeing the scene like teenagers, cackling maniacally.

I have no issue with people who refuse to engage in hexing. Some people prefer to fight fair, although since magic is really about swinging the odds in your favour in any given situation it's sort of unfair by definition, but whatever! You create your own reality, and if taking the high road suits you, good on ya. But for me personally? It's another tool in the bag, and one I seem to have a bit of talent for. I don't want to lecture anybody on morals, or on karma, or any of that. That shit is YOUR business. I believe we all work out our own mess and you don't need some short mouthy broad telling you that if you do something wrong the Universe is going to fucking spank you. Personally, I've never seen evidence of the whole rule of three thing, and I've not yet come across an argument against hexing that didn't seem to depend on the idea "we should be better than that." That's my take on the situation.

Now, that's not to say I think you should summon demons every time your neighbour steals your parking space. (Although that sounds hilarious...) There are people who go too far with the whole thing, and casting spells at people who are guilty of minor offenses against you implies more that you're mentally unbalanced than that you're some great magician. But this is life, and people will fuck with you. Punching them in the face is not often a good option, and that's where magic comes in. It's the esoteric sucker-punch to the balls!

'Hexing' typically refers to several different sorts of spells, and whether or not they're called a curse seems to vary depending on the moral compass of the person discussing them. Bindings, energy reversal, and love spells are all spells I have at one time or another seen listed as 'negative' magics. I define hexing pretty broadly, in that it's a spell designed to affect the target in a way they would not be likely to volunteer for. It will hurt them in some way.

Hexes vary in severity. While pure bitch rage is a great motivator, experience has taught me you should simmer down a bit before you cast a curse so that you can logically assess the situation and see if your action is appropriate or simply the desires of a drama queen. A divination system is crucial when you plan to engage in magical shin-kicking - it can alert you to your own blind spots, and warn you if you're way off base.

Even in cursing, there is such a thing as overkill. As with the rest of magic, the best results come if you can step back and form a battle plan. Specifics matter. To use an overly geeky example... on MST3K, Mike blew up Brain Guy's planet because he asked the nanites "to take care of a little problem." Not the result he was aiming for. So you sit down with your tarot cards or whatever you use, run an overview on the situation, and then plan accordingly. Do you want someone to leave a place? Hotfoot powder, perhaps. Are they spreading gossip? You could bind them, or get out the beef tongue! Which is the better route to the desired end result?

Hexing is a part of magic that is challenging simply because if you do fuck it up? You're going to notice. While I don't believe in the rule of three, I do think magical energy can have a backlash if something goes haywire. Besides that, if you over-curse someone you'd have to be pretty hard-hearted not to feel bad about it if they, say, got into a car accident and broke their spine when all you wanted was for them to stop stealing your lunch from the office fridge. In an odd way, hexing is excellent for fine-tuning magic because the stakes are higher. (This is not me advocating you start cursing people just to improve your skills, however.)

The last thing I want to say on hexing is about the old, "you put the whammy on someone and you make sure they KNOW they've been hoodooed" concept. Yes, it is possible to scare the crap out of people. That's not news, although I think the chances are 50/50 that people will just laugh if you point at them and tell them you're cursing them. (Unless you're John Constantine.) The idea that all curses are simply created by the mind of the person who knows they've been cursed also leads to the odd claim that if you simply don't believe in the curse, you'll be safe. Personally, I don't go around telling people "I've put a spell on you.... and your little dog, too!" So I can't really claim to have tested the validity of that defense, although it seems pretty bullshit to me at a glance - like closing your eyes and going "I'm not listening!" as somebody approaches you with a baseball bat. But, still. Never tested it. Maybe disbelief has funky anti-magic properties, which is why science and magic rarely get along. I do know that if you don't tell the target, you can watch the results from a safe distance. So in the interest of better results, I stick to the secret method.

In conclusion, hexing is one of those dark arts that while sneered at has a long and colourful history, and is still very much employed today whether people cop to it or not. ...and your dick will fall off in THREE DAYS.

Too drunk to... post.

Today, we had a photoshoot at Frank's place. Frank is one of my favourite people, because he is so genuine and so all-around wonderful. He's also a great photographer, especially for someone like me who is not a born poser. My sister is a natural camera whore, and she photographs insanely well. Me? I worry about things like a double chin if I look down, looking stiff and weird, or accidental sexyface. Frank gave me wonderful direction on my solo shots, and I was thrilled with the shots he showed me. Thank you, Frankie!

Also his cat is awesome.


After the shoot, we had rehearsal for Tranny Zuko's 'Be Italia' number. I play a whorewhore madame in that one, and I lip-synch which I've never done on stage before. It's awesome. Tranny, Dame Booty Dench and I came back to my place after to clean up some tambourine work and as usual Tranny got me drunk. So I'm afraid my awesome entry on hexing will have to wait, as I am soused and instead want to share something with ya'll...



I love Pogo. 'Upular' is still my absolute favourite ever.

G is for Glamour

 (This is a response to the Pagan Blog Project. It's a week late. H is coming tomorrow.)

Tim Gunn is my spirit animal.

This realisation came to me while I was at work the other day, presented with yet another mountain of requests from our episode coordinator. But really, it's a deep spiritual truth.

Besides bestowing his chosen with the power to make it work, the Tim Gunn also imparts the understanding of the power of fashion.

"Mama, what the fuck, you drunken hussy," you may be saying. "What does fashion have to do with magic?"

Well, my darlings, I have two things to say in reply to that:

1) how did you know I was drunk?!

and 2) oh, witches, it's glamour.

I've spoken on the topic a bit already, but it's a big one and I'm going to revisit it here.

Physical appearance matters. You can argue about whether or not it should, if you like, but while you do that I'm going to excuse myself and get more gin.

In our society we have some pretty toxic beauty standards. Eating disorders and cosmetic surgery are a fact of life, and it is not my intention to encourage such things or to foster body hatred. Far from it. I truly and honestly believe that beauty is not a dress size, and women in particular need to nurture a true love for their own physical forms, no matter their perceived 'flaws.'

Style is not about hating your body. It's about dressing it to your advantage.  People will react to you based on how you present yourself, and no matter how comfortable you might feel, sometimes you need to make adjustments in order to get the reaction you want.

My favourite episode of 'What Not to Wear' is a good example of what I'm getting at. (It's a TV show in Salem. You're gonna see Christian Day, although he amuses me in this. "She looks like Joan Crawford meets the Whore of Babylon and I LOVE IT!") Here's a woman who dresses like a Halloween decoration, and while twenty-something me adores it, it really is not appropriate for someone trying to make suburban housewives feel comfortable while getting a tarot reading.

Now. The rest of the world isn't Salem. Most pagans I've met tend to be more... well. Frumpy. Big t-shirts. Jeans that don't fit. Huge ponderous piles of jewellery.

I'm going to quote old Uncle Anton, here:
"Concerning amulets, wear only one at a time, and tastefully, so it looks like a functional piece of jewellery. Would-be witches are notorious for loading themselves up with so much hardware in the form of amulets and talismans that its a damn good thing they don't really ride broomsticks since they'd never make it off the runway."

Bitch had a point.

(Although if I ever find a replica of the inverted pentagram Margaret Krusmark wears in Angel Heart? I am buying it.)


By now you might be thinking you've accidentally started reading Cosmo... although if you had there'd be a lot more terrifying sex tips that could result in severe bodily injury.

"Mama, I know what friggin glamour is. It's that scene in The Craft when Sarah turns her hair blonde via green-screen!"

You ever try that? I did, when I was a teenager. It didn't work any better than you'd expect.

But ignoring the Hollywood bullshit, lets turn our attention from the mundane tricks of glamour - waist definition, groomed eyebrows, killer shoes - to the purely magical. After all, we're witches. We don't play fair.

If glamour is, as I've said, about projecting a certain image, then it makes sense to approach it in much the same way you would ritual. First, pick your aim. Are you influencing for wealth? Sex? Staying out of prison? Next, consider your tools - in this case clothes, hair, jewellery. From there you can turn to correspondences of colour and scent.

I'm not saying you should go entirely nuts - have you ever noticed that wearing all of one colour besides black makes you look like you like a crazy person? - but incorporating a bit of colour magic into your outfit is a good way to boost your enchantment. It can be as subtle as purple eyeshadow to command respect or see more intuitively, or a tiger's eye ring to boost your follow-through and make you seem more dependable.

I read once that a lady's perfume should be subtle enough that one has to lean in to smell it. So in other words, don't drench yourself in the stuff. A subtle touch of fragrance, however, can work wonders in your favour as smell is probably the sense most likely to totally bypass the thinking portion of people's brains.

Smell of SEDUCTION.

My personal go-to for scents remains Black Phoenix Alchemy Labs, although you can find some good witchy sellers on websites like Etsy who make perfumes specifically designed for magical purposes. The key is to find something that a) doesn't reek like patchouli or Brut, and b) has ingredients that would traditionally correspond with your goal. (And I may have just shit myself because I noticed BPAL has a fucking Labyrinth Series...)

 And of course, the most important part of glamour magic is to actually charge all your various elements with your intent. Don't just get dressed - get dressed, look in that mirror, and tell yourself what you damn well mean to accomplish. Own it. After all...

"Throwing a glamour, an illusion so real as to fool an onlooker, is one of the oldest forms of magic..."

You can do that. You're a witch, darling.