We bought a bottle of Miskatonic University, because it's our favourite, and Voodoo. We had to get the Voodoo one for Voodoo, because... durr, it's her name. I have the Mommy Fortuna one for the same reason. (Yes, my stripper name comes form The Last Unicorn.)
We got imp's ears of Dee, Jack, Elegba, the Witches Garden, Hellcat, and Herbert West. A lot of these are from the 'Bewitching Brews' collection. Jack is the perfect October scent: it's pumpkin and spice. Dee is named after John Dee, and it smells about how you'd expect.
They gave us a whole pile of free imps too: Oleander Honey, Iago, Kali, Prunella, Nanshee, Ekhinda, Antony, and French Love. The latter two aren't really our speed, so I'm going to give them away to someone who likes them.
BPAL oils are fabulous. They generally do smell like the descriptions, and they last for ages since you only need a dab. I think of them as magic oils, I really do. It's the final step before I go out the door - what am I going to smell like? It sets the tone!
There's a chapter in the Satanic Witch that's all about picking perfumes your target likes over what you like... and fuck that noise, unless you're deliberately trying to woo someone. Sometimes I want to smell like a dead magician, dammit!
A few months ago, my washer broke. There was a loud THUD noise, and then black gooey stuff started oozing out from inside of it all over my floor. It stank to high heaven. I assumed it was Amityville related, but just to be sure I google-searched it and found out it was probably oil from the motor.
I did not know how to fix the washing machine, even though there we some tutorials online for replacing the 'belt' or whatever else.
Instead, I called my landlord. ...who called someone else. And now I have a new washer/dryer.
As usual, all this ugly bullshit rambling is to illustrate a point: sometimes, you have to pay someone to do something for you. Whether you can't do it yourself, or simply don't have time, you need to ask someone other than yourself for help. There's no shame in this, either.
So, what if you're the washer mechanic? What if the positions are reversed, and other people are coming to you?
There is (or should be, anyway) etiquette when dealing with this eventuality. There may be a little bit more leeway if you wind working solely on the behalf of friends and family, but if you start accepting payment then you really need to make sure you act professionally so that you don't wind up with a reputation for being a jackass. Jackassery hurts your business.
If someone comes to you for divination or magic work, chances are they're in some kind of trouble. Most people who are not themselves practitioners don't just 'check in' with the universe that way; if it's not a birthday party or something, they're coming to you for advice on a problem.
Whether you like it or not, agreeing to help with that problem means you are mixing up your own life with someone else's. No, you're not marrying them, but you are going to act as a counsellor and even influence their life's events. You shouldn't do that if you can't do so in a respectful manner.
Speaking of that influence thing... This isn't so much an issue if you're doing divination, since divination by nature tends to work as an advice column, but if you agree to work magic on someone else's behalf? You may want to do a little checking in yourself.
We often only hear one side of a story. The absent party cannot defend herself, and there may be details unknown or glossed over. Your client is going to be biased (same as you) and so if you're undertaking anything heavy on the behalf of someone else you probably want to make sure its justified.
I don't believe that we take on all the 'karma' of our clients. But here's the thing - if you're working on behalf of someone, you're not entirely blameless. If something backfires, you're the one who is going to get the brunt of the explosion because you were the one who actually cast the spell. That just seems to be how it works. So, again: you'll want to look for any obvious "DO NOT DO!" signs.
Speaking of keeping your eyes open for warnings... you'll want to do that on a mundane level, too. People are strange. (When you're a stranger...) Sometimes that's not so bad, but other times...
Obviously, you should never do work for anyone who makes you feel uncomfortable or threatened, whether that be physically, sexually or emotionally. Money's not worth abuse. You need to know when to say no, and how to mean it. There are also people who you simply cannot help, as much as you might want to - their problems may be beyond your scope of expertise, or they may be suffering from mental illnesses. If a client is going to hurt herself or others? Don't work magic, don't do a reading: report that shit to the proper authorities. Chances are you're not trained to deal with a genuine psychiatric emergency, so don't fuck with that situation as you'll do more harm than good.
Most of your clients won't be suicidal - but they may be upset. As I said before, if someone's looking for a spell, they're probably in the middle of some shit. It will benefit both you and the client if you can really sit down and discuss exactly what it is they want, and why. This lets you get a better understanding of the situation, so you can craft a better solution.
Always be polite. Always be respectful. Be honest, and pay attention. Don't talk up your abilities, and be prepared to have to explain what the client can realistically expect from you. Some people honestly do expect you to work a miracle while they themselves sit on the couch and take no action to back up their desires.
For some more advice regarding counselling clients that can be adapted to spellwork, I recommend 'Professional Tarot: The Business of Reading, Consulting and Teaching' by Christine Jette.
Go to any pagan message board, and chances are the most active threads are in the "beginner" sections. There's a good reason for this - whenever you're new to anything, you have a million questions and boundless enthusiasm. So you look for answers, advice, and tips on how not to make a total tit of yourself.
Which you'll fail at. Consistently.
I've talked before about how amazingly dumbassed I was when I was first setting out to learn magic. In my defense, I was a teenager and all teenagers are inherently dumbassed even when they're really smart. That's the whole fun part of being a teenager.
But here's the other thing... old farts can be needlessly hard on beginners. It's like you're so desperate to prove that you're no longer a newb on the path that you develop a sort of jaded attitude about them. "Oh, you read Silver Ravenwolf? Don't you know she's like, full of crap?"
I'm guilty of doing this myself in my twenties.
Deborah over at Charmed I'm sure just posted a short piece on how many of us witches got our start, and honestly it should be required reading for anyone who would rather pretend their early years never happened.
Celts = DRAGONS!
While I'm currently considered a complete occult nerd, it certainly wasn't always so. Like I've admitted in the past, I wanted to learn about real magic because of The Craft. I read Buckland, yeah, but I also read Silver Ravenwolf and DJ Conway. That's bottom of the barrel in terms of actual facts, right there, people. 'Celtic Magic' was watered-down Wicca 101 with Celtic god names pasted overtop.But I owned it! I read it! I totally used some of the shit in it, I'm sure!
My first altar was a cardboard box I painted black. Oh, and we painted a silver pentagram on top. My incense came from the dollar store and smelled like burning diapers, and my candles were from the same place and tended to be scented. My first 'athame' was a letter opener. But you know, as ghetto as all my supplies were? I tried damn hard with them.
You can't learn everything at once. You learn through education - which takes time - and through experience - which takes even more time. Along the way you might buy into somethings that you later regard as bullshit, but that's okay. Everyone does. (I mean, lots of people apparently thought feathered mullets were a good idea in the 80s, you know?)
So. Newbs. The thing to remember, I think, is that yes, you should always use the manners your mama taught you but if someone's giving you sass just because you didn't knwo something? Remember that once upon a time they were making the exact same mistakes as you.
I watch a lot of horror movies. And I mean a lot; I was for years the video clerk who would pray for teenagers to come in an ask, "what's a REALLY scary movie?" so that I could mind rape them with cinema.
Consequently, I have seen a lot of witch movies, or movies with occult or pagan themes. There are the obvious ones, of course: The Craft, Practical Magic, the Witches of Eastwick, Bewitched, the Wicker Man, Hocus Pocus, Skeleton Key, Rosemary's Baby, maybe even Suspiria... You can basically expect these films to be on everyone's 'witch list' for Halloween viewing.
So I'm not going to bother talking about them. You've probably already seen them, and have your own opinion on how accurate or irritating they are. No, I'm going to talk about some of the more often overlooked cinematic, er, gems...
Based on a short story by Clive Barker, this is the tale of a bloodthirsty pagan god that goes on a killing spree in a small Irish village. The monster (er, god?) is basically a giant dick. No, I'm serious. In the short story it's the male principle run amok, a concept that's not really made explicit in the film, which is more concerned with having what looks like a wrestler in a rubber monster suit attack people. Also it's (spoiler) defeated by Vagina Power. No, I'm not kidding.
Why you should watch it: You'll never see another movie where a priest begs for a golden shower from a giant dick monster. I promise.
The first Silent Night, Deadly Night was about a killer Santa. The sequel is famous for forever making "garbage day!" something funny. The third... was that the one with the guy's brain exposed? Doesn't matter. The FOURTH movie in the series has jack-shit to do with Santa and instead is about a coven of witches who have sex with giant bugs on Christmas as part of some pagan worship thing.
At least, I think. I saw this movie when I was in my late teens, and I remember being fucking outraged. So naturally now I would punch an old lady to get my hands on a copy of the bloody thing. To make sure I didn't hallucinate the whole bugsex thing, I just went to the Wikipedia article (I love the internet) and saw that, nope, I was right. Here's some quotes:
"...She settles
down on the kitchen table to eat dinner and flips open the book Fima
loaned her. The page she randomly arrives at is titled "The Spiral:
Symbol of Women's Power". Kim glances at her plate of noodles and
notices that they are arranged in a vague spiral...
The page she randomly lands on is titled "The Fire of Lilith"
and it depicts a woman whose lower half is engulfed in flames. Kim
glances down at the plate of spaghetti on the floor. The spaghetti is
now arranged in a flame-like pattern."
I have no memory of the mystic spaghetti motif, but I think I love it.
Basically the film winds up being about Lilith, the 'first wife' of Adam, and female empowerment. ...with bugs. I don't know, but seeing that Brian Yuzna directed it? It suddenly makes more sense.
Why you should watch it: So you can tell me where to find a copy.
One of the best supernatural films ever made. Hands down. Not
only is Mickey Rourke still hot in it, but it's one of those movies
that's not ruined by the fact that Robert DeNiro is so obviously the
devil. It's an old-fashioned detective story that incorporates voodoo
and occultism in a very clever manner.
Angel Heart is a
slow-burn of a film that pays off beautifully at the end, one of those
movies that will stick with you long after you've watched it.
Why you should watch it: Besides Lisa Bonet's tits?
There's little nods to famous occultists (one of the characters goes by
the alias 'Edward Kelly') and a pretty neutral depiction of some
voodoo/hoodoo practices. (The DVD includes interviews with
practitioners, which is kind of cool.)
God bless Sweden. They gave us Alexander Skarsgard, and they gave us this movie. It's a silent film (making it perfect to put on at Halloween parties for atmosphere) that explores witchcraft through the ages up until what was then modern times. It's described as documentary, but I feel that term must be used loosely, mostly because of this guy:
The film covers a lot of the material from the Malleus Maleficarum, and discusses some of the brutal methods used by the witch hunters of the time. It also has crazed nuns, which is always a bonus.
Not to be confused with the shitty Nick Cage film, this is one of George A. Romero's other low-budget horror films, back before he decided to do all-zombies, all-the-time. It's not going to win any awards or anything, and the budget was clearly minuscule, but for all of that this remains a little known horror gem for fans of witchery.
The plot centres around an unsatisfied middle-aged housewife who falls into witchcraft, which is the 'hip' new thing in her circle of friends. The film was originally titled Hungry Wives in the US, and Jack's Wife in the UK. This is actually very telling, as the story is really one of a woman's loneliness as search for meaning outside of her role of wife and mother.
Why you should watch it: It has a pretty decent coven initiation scene, what with the nudity and cords and scourge. It also has a few things to say about the mainstreaming of the occult.
And the hair and fashion is faaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaar out, man.
Speaking of Nick Cage... fuck that guy. This is like a GOOD version of the recent Season of the Witch. The motherfucking bubonic plague, Sean Bean as a badass with a sword (hey, he plays it well!) a necromancer, and a conflicted priest. The movie is violent as hell and just as bleak.
It concerns a group of witchfinders sent to investigate a village that is miraculously free of the plague. Once there, they find that all the villagers have turned their backs on god... and seem to have been rewarded.
Why you should watch it: Sean Bean! Guys get hacked up with swords! THE PLAAAAAAGUE!
Alright... on that note, I guess we can't ignore the elephant in the room any longer... the just plain WRONG remake of The Wicker Man. The original is a near-perfect classic that's a blend of "what the fuck, is this a musical?" with outright unease, a favourite among horror fans and neo-pagans alike. The remake?
The remake is like if your mom died and your dad married a crack whore and they had sex on your mom's grave. WITH BEES. It is one of the single most misogynistic films I have EVER seen, and the fact it was made so recently makes me sick.
