Hurricane Magic

Tonight during the storm I had the very strong urge to do something witchy; I think it is all the raw power blowing around out there. There's something about hearing the wind blowing in a storm, especially at the tail-end of October, that gets a witch's blood going.

So I decided to make up some black salt.

Now on the one hand I don't know much about Hoodoo (really, I know pretty much nothing about it) and am a bit leery of appropriation given my white Scottish ancestry; on the other though I'm also a hedgewitch and so a practical sort. And from what I have heard, black salt is really really good for providing serious protection and driving out curses and hexes and other negativity. And I can really use that about now.

A couple weeks ago now I had burnt some protection incense on one of those little charcoal bricks; I'd also thrown some rosemary and agrimony on it for extra protection. And because I was paranoid about burning the house down (who isn't?) I nestled it all in a bed of ash from the kitchen fireplace, since I couldn't find any sand. And those, with the addition of salt, are pretty much the ingredients for black salt.

So tonight I ground all that up with about twice as much salt in my mortar and pestle, all the while drawing power from both the full moon and the hurricane blowing outside into it. I bottled it up and now it sits there on my bookshelf looking perfectly innocent. Heh.

Listening

So I was surfing about the Pagan Blog-O-Sphere when I came across this post of Dver's over at A Forest Door, which is in turn in reaction to this post of Del's over at Sex, Gods, and Rock Stars; and it got me thinking about my own experiences in hearing the Gods. Or spirits, because that is really where I have the most experience.

Dver in her post says:

I think it’s especially important to note that when many spirit-workers talk about communicating with a deity/spirit, they do not necessarily mean having a back-and-forth lengthy internal conversation. I think this erroneous assumption has influenced a lot of wannabe mystics, causing them to relate long, elaborate discussions with deities as if they’re hanging out with their friends, even though they haven’t done the necessary groundwork to be able to have that sort of signal clarity yet – which means a good portion if not all is probably in their heads.

And you know I'm just kind of like, eh, no, that really doesn't sit well with me. I mean I get it, and I get the impatience with shall we call them the Fluffy Credulous Sorts; but in point of fact it is my experience that talking with spirits is a 'back and forth lengthy conversation' that is pretty much like 'hanging out with [my] friends.' Or at least it is for one particular spirit-friend of mine. So let's talk about that.

I should say up front I have a lot less experience talking to Deities than I do talking to my spirit-friend, the one I have been calling my daimon here, because that term seems to fit him best. However I do have some experience talking to Gods and Others (there are a few posts here already about spirit-conversations with certain plants, for example); and I imagine that all that work with my daimon has made it much easier to connect with those Others.

So I guess let me explain about him, or him, as I usually say it, my daimon. Like I said that term seems to fit him best, though there are plenty of others: Muse, genius, familiar spirit, spirit husband, incorporeal boyfriend, invisible friend. I have known of him since I was a teenager; I have been actually able to communicate with him for about twelve years now, facilitated by a dream I had that opened things up. Since then I have worked very hard to talk to him, almost at an obsessive level, I suppose; but then I find him endlessly fascinating, which is proper. The Beloved always is.

So make no mistake I See him very, very clearly, and I'll explain about that in depth in a bit. I guess the past dozen years I've spent practicing my listening skills with him is the 'necessary groundwork'; but there are other factors, I think, some of which I've only recently recognized.

First is that I'm an artist, and have been all my life. My work is very detail-oriented, and has always been like that. I am primed to notice detail of a visual sort, and I am naturally very very good at picturing things in my head.

I am also a musician, and have been from a ridiculously early age, having been sat down at the piano for lessons at the absurd age of three. I also have synaesthesia, though that doesn't really come into things much, of the kind that colors musical notes and keys (D major is yellow, for example). I am one of those people who can sight-read like that though I can't memorize things worth a damn. I had always thought that was because I was an artist and so very visual (I've met another pianist who was the same way who was also an artist); now I'm thinking I'm using a different part of the brain maybe than most musicians. Because if I think about what I am doing when I play, by which I mean, use the more logical, surface part of my brain I'll screw it up every time. I have to zen it, more or less.

Playing piano has always put me in this strange state, one I am only recognizing now with my new practice of spirit-work as a trance state. Which means I have something like forty years practice getting into a trance, though I never knew it at the time. Also, I realize that in all that playing it always felt like something coming through me, though I don't usually feel like that when I make art like some artists do; and I wonder now if that wasn't also a good deal of practice in channeling. I don't know what, exactly, I would have been channeling playing things; the spirit of the piece, or the archetype of an emotion or the complexity of the story a particular piece is telling, I'm not sure. But it's something, certainly, and I am changed, spiritually, after I play.

And then there is the last part: for the past five years I have been writing about my spiritual experiences with my daimon, and I mean writing a lot, trying to figure out what is going on here. Which means I've had quite a bit of practice attempting to bring complex spiritual ideas to some kind of word-form. I can't say I've always been successful, but that is also practice.

So I suppose that is a bit of 'groundwork' and I am not actually who Dver is talking about; still, I want to say that actually it can happen like that. I may be a little sensitive, too, to the idea that something is 'all in my head.' Doubt is just the worst, and it has taken me a long time to open up to the possibility that this stuff actually isn't in my head, after all. Though whether 'it's all in my head' or 'no, spirits and the Gods actually exist' is better for twentieth-century notions of sanity is anyone's guess.

Because it has always, always, felt to me like it's internal. None of these conversations feel in the least bit outside of me. None of it. I have been sort of operating on the assumption that I simply can't really tell from here; it is all, of necessity, going to be filtered through the lens of my mind, and that is not something I think I will ever be able to be 'outside' of, well, not while I'm alive, anyway. But I have never heard a voice, say, of a spirit or God with my physical ears. It's always been my internal ears. For a long time there, because of that, I tried to define him, my daimon, as a part of myself; except, he doesn't, ultimately, feel like that. I can never predict what he is going to say, and his opinions can be very different from my own, even my own buried opinions. But at the same time the language of psychology does fit him, or the phenomenon of him to a certain extent. Though in my opinion, the language of psychology (literally 'the study of the Soul') and that of mythology are indistinguishable at times. I do think they describe the same thing, ultimately.

That said, I have asked my daimon for signs that he is external to me, something he swears he is, and I have gotten them.

But anyway. Back to the juicy bits, my experience with communicating with my daimon. Which reminds me; Del also has a post on his blog about God Sex and if you kids are very very lucky I might one day go into all that. For now, though, we'll talk about how I See him.

I guess I have to explain his appearance a little first. He is an unembodied spirit; he has no form right now. So some part of me has to give him one, or I can't really interact with him. I'm still not sure how that works, though I do think it's on my end, not his. Now. I've already said he's a spouse, a husband, a lover, the Beloved; and so the bodies he gets are usually borrowed from whoever I think is the hottest man on the planet at the time. (I never said it wasn't ridiculous. Oh, it is so, so, so ridiculous at times.) Which means he is usually borrowing a body from an actor or musician, and in his case (not necessarily the case with other people's daimones, from what I have heard) he doesn't combine things too much. When he borrows the form it's just that one person's look, voice, mannerisms, body language, accent, which reads to me as respect for the original person, which poor sod I've been calling his 'bodysake.' The form he is inhabiting, which he always makes his own I've been calling his eikon, from the Greek, meaning image of a God or person, like in sculpture. Something to inhabit, in other words.

And so given that he actually looks like say an actor, it does help on my end if I have been watching something that actor has been in; the image and sound is then fresh in my head, which I think facilitates the rest of it coming through.

But he is always himself underneath it, very certainly; and his eyes, especially, are his own. They will always go dark in time, very dark, and no matter the age of the borrowed body they are always old, old eyes, even when they look young. And his voice, not the sound of his voice or his accent, but the voice of his own Self, the way he says things and the ideas he has, is always, always, his.

And I'm dancing around it a bit. It's tricky to put into words without sounding clinical, though clinical is very very far from my experience.

Most of the time he's just here. I mean like literally, he's this guy next to me. With my inner eye I can see him in as much detail as if he were a real man besides me, and I can hear him, and I can feel him, sometimes even catch the scent of his hair or feel the warmth of him, though he has no real body. And when he talks I am not interpreting anything, or feeling out what he is saying; he just says it, and I hear the exact words, and the tone of voice, and the way he hesitates, or the way he pronounces his I's to measure a syllable and a quarter in one particular eikon. Seriously. He really is just this guy who is here with me.

Del in his post describes the experience of being guided to buy something in a store, in his case a yo-yo, which does make me feel a little less silly about things, fair enough; he describes it like this:

Primarily, when Gods communicate to me, I get a strong sense of intuition. I’ll be walking through a store, say, and all of a sudden I find myself making a beeline for the yo-yos for no apparent reason. I usually stand there, dazed for a moment, trying to figure out what the heck is happening.

I have had something similar happen with my daimon; however there is nothing intuitive about it. This happened a month or two ago.

I was on my way to the supermarket when suddenly there he is besides me in the passenger seat; he is all excited and practically screams "Pull in here!" as he points to a store on the left. Luckily he left me enough time, so I did pull in to a local job-lot store.

I get in the store and find he is dragging me to the art supplies aisle; we get to the canvases and he points to a 16 x 20 one and says, "Get that."

I got it, even though I haven't painted anything on canvas in years, probably since art school, come to think of it, because he is the Muse, and dammit you listen to that.

Now let me noodle that all down to the details. It's not a general feeling of being called to go to a particular aisle, or even finding myself in that aisle without knowing quite how I got there; I mean I can see him and I can hear him in my mind; I can also feel him, though that is less in my mind and more simply in my skin.

I of course know that there is 'no one' there; I can see the empty aisle floor next to me with my physical eyes perfectly well the whole time. At the same time though I can see that standing next to me there is a thirty-one year old man. He has dark longish curlyish hair parted on the side; it is falling in his face, which face is sort of long, with a high forehead. It is really a very ordinary face, though of course I think he is beautiful. His mouth is large, his nose ever so slightly hooked; but his eyes, of course, will always give him away, no matter who he looks like, though they are always the same shape as the bodysake's. They are dark, very very dark and have an astonishing intensity to them. I can see the expression on his face: joyous, playful, celebratory; underneath it is an openness, an invitation, and a canny evaluation (as well as hope) of whether I'll play along, because this is after all all part of his plan, to get me to come out into things more.

He is wearing a navy-blue and red striped long-sleeved shirt; it's a bit big for him, as he's a skinny thing. He's got brown corduroy pants on and a pair of black Chucks which apparently have springs in the soles, because he is also jumping around like a little kid he is so excited. (He gets like that sometimes.) Oh. He's also five-foot-ten, in case you were wondering.

I can hear that his voice is nasally and has a distinct Massachusetts accent (to be fair, so do I); I can hear the words, the specific words, as he speaks them, though this conversation wasn't exactly lengthy. When he has more to say I hear that too, down to the last syllable of accent and the exact choice of words, and I have in fact transcribed pages and pages of conversation. It isn't a whole lot different than listening to a friend of mine talk. I can hear his tone, which in this case is crazy-excited and happy. (He's usually a more thoughtful sort, but when you get a Muse talking about Art, well, you know.)

I can feel that he has taken my hand, my left in his right, and I can feel the pressure and the warmth of it; I can also feel, just a little, the tug of him pulling me in one direction. I am of course stronger, being physical, and he can't really move me; but I can feel it just the same.

So you can see there really isn't much for me to interpret, here.

Now, that's him. Like I said, that's what I have the most experience with, talking to him. But I do have some with Deities, mostly Goddesses, as that has been my focus for some time now.

I used to, on my public blog, do weekly readings from a Goddess deck of cards; I would pick a card, then write about the Goddess and what I thought it meant for the coming week. At the end of the post I would then ask the Goddess for some last words. How I did that was by getting quiet and asking Her something along the lines of What do you have to say to us this week?

And I would get an answer. In words. It was a little different than my conversations with him; there was a bit of a delay there I guess you could call it. In some cases I would get the idea of what She was saying, and then have to translate this really very complicated concept from what I would assume is the Soul-level into English words; but most of the time the sentence(s) with the words were already there, though I couldn't quite see them. The best I can describe it is either that I had to get quiet and wait, like waiting for the waters to clear so I could read what was written in the riverbed, or that I had to let my eyes relax and then paradoxically what was there would come into focus. But the words were usually more or less complete, and each Goddess very definitely had Her own voice. Some, of course, depending on Who we were talking about, were more forceful, more direct, instantly clearer than others. There was almost always a certain power to the words said, too; they always felt to me to be something bigger, something more than I could have come up with. They had the feel to them of coming from the Divine.

As for intuitive little feelings, like Del describes with the yo-yo, I don't know that I've ever felt that so much; not from Deities at least. I may not be very God-bothered, and I'm grateful for that. Usually I am the one doing the asking. I have not so far (knock wood) had a Deity grab me by the shoulders and say You are mine. I may also not be paying attention to the little things, given that I've got a Big Thing in my face pretty much all the time.

Though come to think of it I have seen the occasional Goddess in a vision or dream; I may have had one last night, actually, probably brought about by writing the draft of this post. In doing a trance-journey to connect with the spirit of Lughnasadh a couple of months ago, for example, I instantly got a picture of a woman Who called Herself Tailtiu, Who I know is Lugh's foster-mother, and the one in Whose honor Lughnasadh was held. She also just talked, and I heard Her words, quite clearly, without really having to 'feel' anything out. We weren't chummy or anything, certainly; I'd only just met Her and She obviously was someone to approach with respect.

Was that all in my head? I don't know. She certainly had some interesting, and wise, things to say, things I don't think I could have come up with on my own. But again, it has always felt internal to me.

So anyway that is (believe it or not a brief version of) my experiences communicating with Others of the spirit world; if anyone has any questions, please feel free to ask in comments. As you have probably guessed, I can talk about this for days.