Category: tools

Epiphany!

At some point, Christians stopped writing Jesus fanfic, which is a crying shame.

Why?  Because mythmaking is a necessary part of how the Holy Spirit speaks reality into being, and being familiar with how to make stuff up is a necessary prerequisite for being authentically inspired.  Thus, more of us modern folks should get good at making myths.

So I’ve given it a go.  What follows is a myth I fabricated today, thousands of years later, describing the detailed events that happened during Epiphany: the visit of the Wise Men / Kings to Jesus in Bethlehem, which most of Christianity will celebrate tomorrow, January 6th.  I wrote it with the understanding that those figures were powerful magicians – mages, not just ‘wise men’.

I’ve titled it “The Secret Book of the Magi” in the style of much of the Jesus fanfic of late antiquity of which there are many examples.  Many were recovered in the Nag Hammadi dig, and others are part of collections that were not suppressed, just don’t count as Scripture.  Secret Books (apocrypha) tell things that aren’t in canon, and that often gift the reader with powerful or useful knowledge.  You can look at this one as an example of how to do that, as well as being a tool for you to use as written for your own magical practice.

There are two points I really want to underline about this myth:

1. This is Jesus fanfic, just as the Gospels are also fanfic.  That is, I am not claiming that this is a report of documentable events.  That’s not how myths work.  But the story it tells is true in very real and concrete and important ways.  And it tells the reader about who God is and who the people involved in God’s story are.

2. This myth was entirely fabricated. Not ‘revealed’ to me or ‘discovered’ by me or ‘divined’ in any way.  I made it up.  But it can certainly be said to have been inspired.  Relatedly, “epiphany” means manifestation or appearance, which is perfect for the themes of myth in general.

My myth fits in between verses 11 and 12 of the second chapter of the Gospel according to Matthew (which I’ve copy/pasted from the NRSV in red here making only a few smol edits) and it works best read aloud.  Below the ‘book’ are some suggestions for how you can use this myth in your magical practice.  Enjoy!

THE SECRET BOOK OF THE MAGI

[1] In the time of King Herod, after Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea, mages from the East came to Jerusalem, [2] asking, “Where is the child who has been born king of the Jews? For we observed his star at its rising, and have come to pay him homage.” [3] When King Herod heard this, he was frightened, and all Jerusalem with him; [4] and calling together all the chief priests and scribes of the people, he inquired of them where the Christ was to be born. [5] They told him, “In Bethlehem of Judea; for so it has been written by the prophet:

[6] ‘And you, Bethlehem, in the land of Judah,
    are by no means least among the rulers of Judah;
for from you shall come a ruler
    who is to rule/shepherd my people Israel.’”

[7] Then Herod secretly called for the mages and learned from them the exact time when the star had appeared. [8] Then he sent them to Bethlehem, saying, “Go and search diligently for the child; and when you have found him, bring me word so that I may also go and pay him homage.” [9] When they had heard the king, they set out; and there, ahead of them, went the star that they had seen at its rising, until it stopped over the place where the child was. [10] When they saw that the star had stopped, they were overwhelmed with joy. [11] On entering the house, they saw the child with Mary his mother; and they knelt down and paid him homage. Then, opening their treasure chests, they offered him gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh.

This secret book tells more of the magi and what they did that night.

These three powerful mages had come to the City of David, three kings, three scholars of the sky, for they wished to honor the Christ child and to give him a gift of surpassing excellence, a great and powerful artifact, which could only be made under that particular sky.

And they surrounded the holy babe and his blessed mother.  Each brought with him a treasure chest filled with gifts for the newborn King.  Melchior, the Persian King, opened his treasure chest, revealing a mountain of gold coins, gold ingots, bright stones, crystals, and jewels, and adornments of every kind, saying: “These I offer to you, O King – everything within – But tonight, especially this,” and from among these he chose a crown of delicate wrought gold, trapping jewels of many kinds in its spun threads and forming pinnacles that glittered and shone.  And he knelt before Mary and her son and held it forth.

And Balthazar, the Arabian King, opened his treasure chest revealing papers and scripts, writing implements and inks, linen garments and dyes, and richly embroidered cloths, saying: “These I offer to you, O King – everything within – But tonight, especially this,” and from among these he chose a decorated bottle, stoppered and sealed, marked with sigils and words of power, and containing the traditional oil for consecrating the dead – the unguent of myrrh.  And he knelt before Mary and her son and held it forth.

And Gaspar, the Indian King, opened his treasure chest and within it were herbs and spices, tinctures and distillations, pastes and gels and powders fine, and with them scrolls with all the records of songs, rubrics and procedures, spells and incantations necessary to utilize them, saying: “These I offer to you, O King – everything within – But tonight, especially this,” and from among these he chose a pouch of frankincense, an altar offering of solidified sunlight whose perfumes rise as smoke to please God above.  And he knelt before Mary and her son and held it forth.

And Mary, mother of Jesus, received all their treasures in keeping for her son.

And the mages looked to the sky and when the time was right, they took the crown of gold and placed it upon a high place saying together, “He is king,” and they dressed the crown with the oil of myrrh, saying together, “of the Dead,” and they lit the frankincense and suffumigated the crown, saying together, “and we worship him.”

And they did awesome magic and enchanted the crown, imbuing it with formidable powers for the wearer: Powers of rulership that one’s edict would prove true.  Powers over the dead such that one could command them, communicate with them, raise them, and be protected among them in their land. And powers of the sun that no darkness could obscure the truth from the wearer, but illuminate all dark places and uncover all hidden things.

And they presented the crown to Mary for safeguarding until the time when the Christ himself died and came into his royal kingship thereby.  And they bowed low and touched their foreheads to the ground, and they rose up and lifted their hands to the heavens and they praised God and sang to the Christ child songs and honored him.  And they were overcome and saw visions and heard words and fell into a deep sleep and dreamed.

[12] And having been warned in a dream not to return to Herod, they left for their own country by another road.

Here are some suggested possibilities of how to use this myth:

  1. Make offerings on epiphany (the annual feast day celebrating this encounter as it occurs in scripture) of gold (a gold dollar coin), frankincense (a few resin crystals), and myrrh (a few drops) tossed into a hearthfire, and then worship Jesus Christ as they did.  This is a purely devotional option with nothing you ‘get’ out of it.
  2. Make a magical artifact – maybe not at Epiphany, but whenever astrological/astronomical conditions favor the thing you want to make.  Bring two of your friends. Pretend to be the magi and as they did on that night, you will do on this night, making a ‘copy’ of that artifact of lore.  Instead of just reading this story aloud, you would act it out as a pageant.
  3. Tell the story as you induce a trance state in which you, like the magi, can see visions and hear words and dream portentous dreams that help you overthrow tyrants.
  4. Invoke Mary Keeper of Treasures and ask her to bestow her son’s gifts on you – whatever she thinks is appropriate – for your working, from her stores of treasures in the mages’ gift chests.

Each of these are examples of historiolic magic where you tell the mythic story as part of a magic ritual, and draw parallels from it to what you are doing now.  And you are allowed, even encouraged, to alter the myth to better suit your situation. The magi can pick different things out of those chests!  Maybe they don’t make a crown, they make a ring.  Maybe the crown protects from fever rather than giving the powers I listed.  Maybe you want to emphasize certain elements of the putative sky then – a conjunction between Jupiter and Saturn in Leo, say – and you can write that into the story.  Myths are for being modified, adjusted, retconned, augmented, and re-written over and over again.  So take this one and make it yours.

Iron and Fiber in My Diet

Earlier this month, I did a working where I expected I’d need the benefits of a good active ward but the traditional ‘casting a circle’ or ‘holding out my shields’ wouldn’t have been appropriate to do; they have several disadvantages that would have made it an unsuitable method of ward laying for this application:

  1. It is costly. It costs attention and energy from me to keep that kind of thing operating, and I needed every available erg for the hard work stuff that was supposed to be going on inside the ward and I knew I wouldn’t have the concentration or energy to keep the ward up during the working.

  2. Invisible means invisible to my co-workers.  If it doesn’t have a physical marker, my compatriots can’t see it.  And if they have no spirit sense, they can’t be sure they’re on the right side (inside) of the barrier.  That’s dangerous.

  3. The space I was working in was decidedly non-circular.  Sometimes the space you’re in is a narrow strip of hallway or just a free-form shape and not a anything-gon.  Casting a circle in both Wiccan and Golden Dawn styles generates a regular geometrical sphere, so you have two choices: make a small sphere that doesn’t encompass the whole space but that you can see all of with your mind’s eye, or make a large sphere much larger than the space you can see so that it definitely encompasses even the largest single dimension of the area but that you can’t see all of.  If one of those works for you, great, but I find that the small version is too small, and the large version is too weak.  The bits that lie outside the room’s dimensions – the bits I don’t see – are harder to maintain in my intention.  If they don’t fit my mental spatial map of the place, I get sloppy about their borders.

    In this particular case I was working inside someone’s back yard which was a narrow rectangle of a space.  Plus there was the added issue that I did not want what I was doing to cross over into the neighbors’ properties.  That’s just rude, Karen.

So I made a tool for concretizing that ward that addresses those problems.  TL;DR: I tacked a rope into the ground using iron spikes and I told it to behave like a wall.  It worked exceedingly well.  Which is why this post.

Iron being great as an anti-magic barrier is well attested in multiple traditions – Hoodoo, Celtic folklore, and Catholic traditions (such as making a cross necklace out of nails) to name just a few.

And rope as a magic anchor is also not news, as any sailor anywhere will tell you.  Community eruv lines also use this principle.

Using iron and rope together makes for an effective, lightweight, and flexible wall portable to wherever you want to work.  I highly recommend this tool.  Here’s my recipe for how I did it:

Set-it-and-forget-it Ward

This works best for a ward you’re setting outside in squishy earth. I suspect it would work under other circumstances but I haven’t tested it.  In such cases, you thread the iron spike through the loop and lay it flat rather than banging it into the ground. 

Material Components

  • Rope of natural fibers – Having the rope be made of natural fibers like jute, hemp, or cotton, is important.  There’s a directionality to the component fibers’ orientations that doesn’t exist in nylon or other synthetics; it enhances the rope’s ability to hold on to intention and transfer it down itself continuously.  Choose a length long enough to enclose the area you’ll be working in with at least a few feet left over. I used 100 feet of quarter inch jute rope which cost me under $13 online.  That was enough to surround an area of one backyard fire ringed by four lawn chairs, with room to move around.

  • Iron spikes – Railroad spikes would have been great, but I couldn’t scavenge any.  Instead, I bought eight used foot-long rusty iron nails for under $1 from the local scrap recycling joint.  In theory, tent stake staples should work too.

  • Sledgehammer – or other thing to bang giant spikes into the ground with.  I used a crowbar, for lo, it was handy.

  • Whatever stuff you use to consecrate other stuff – I used self-made chrism and holy water.

RUBRIC


PREP

  1. Learn how to make an alpine butterfly knot.  I know how to work with rope and how to tie a few useful knots because reasons.  And I do a good bit with knotcraft in my magic.  Outside of Ian’s Secure Shoelace knot, the alpine butterfly is the next most useful knot I’ve ever found.  I use it all the freaking time for many tasks.  But it’s especially suitable for this application because it can be tied in-the-bight (i.e. you don’t need to have one of the working ends of the rope free to tie it), and when it’s properly formed it leaves the rest of the rope running all in one direction without twisting, kinking, or buckling.  In short, it lets me take 100 ft of rope and turn it into a continuous rope line that lies totally flat, with loops that stick out from it, which is exactly what this application wants.

    betterl00p

  2. Tie alpine butterfly knots into the rope. One at each working end of the line, and the rest between those ends.  Pick a number of total loops that is one more than you need.  You can space them evenly between the end-loops – like if you want four spikes to go in, one toward each cardinal direction, you’ll want five loops – one close to each end, and three more evenly spaced between them.  Or you can mock lay the rope in the area you’ll be working in and mark out the exact places the loops should go for when the rope makes turns or winds around an obstacle.  I used eight loops, leaving me seven points in the line to secure with spikes.

  3. Consecrate the rope to the purpose of warding in whatever manner you like.  At minimum, this should involve telling the rope what it’s for.  I used a modified Roman Catholic rite of blessing that called for rubbing the rope with chrism and sprinkling it with holy water.  Don’t attempt to consecrate the iron spikes.  That’s not how any of this works.

AT THE TIME OF USE

  1. Check the enloopenated rope for breakages or damage, and if you find none, bring it, the hammer, and spikes with you to the area you’ll be working in.

  2. Lay the rope on the ground, orienting it such that the line of the rope lies straight and the loops point outwards.  Let the rope mark the border of where you want protection.  Importantly, the location of the rope’s ends matters: overlap the two lead-end loops with one another – this area, the place the two ends of the rope meet, will be the area folks enter and exit the space through before the ward is sealed shut and after the working is over.

  3. Starting at the overlapping ends and moving clockwise, trace the rope with your hand and your intent, banging in spikes at each of non end-loops.  By “intent”, I mean “intent to turn it into a wall” or barrier or whatever.  I forced that intention through the rope while singing a hymn setting of Psalm 23.

  4. Leave the ends loops empty but overlap them. Set the last spike and the hammer near them.

  5. Cleanse the space – I did the LBRP but whatever your normal minor banishing is goes here.  Be sure to do this BEFORE you seal the final spike through.

  6. At the end of the cleansing, bang the final spike in as shown in the top photo here.  One spike goes through the final two overlapping loops.  If you have help during your working, you can even set someone else to do the final spike, as I did, so that you can time it to just after the banishing.

  7. Do your working.

  8. When it’s time to break the ward down, pull up the final spike and let folks out.  Wind the rope up in the opposite direction you laid it down, pulling up the spikes as you go.

And that’s it.  

I have to say that laying this thing was one of the more satisfying feelings I’ve encountered.  When the last spike went through the two overlapping loops and into the ground it made an inaudible –click- like the way the air in the elevator seems muffled and too-close once the doors shut.

Being that it was a magical barrier, it was flexible – wall-like when I needed it to be a barrier, fence-like when I wanted to see beyond it, and with a gate that I could open and close with minimal effort.

And it was exceedingly effective.  I was able to work unencumbered by the energy drain that sometimes goes into such things, and it did what it was supposed to do.  Nothing came in that I didn’t call to come in.

It kept the cats out.

And the best thing is that it’s reusable.  The steps under “PREP” above only have to be done once.  You should routinely check the rope for wear and breakages, and remake it with a new rope if any are found.  But until then you have a simple, effective, and highly portable wall to carry with you to future workings.

Cross.Crow.Maps

For folks who need precision in location-based targeting in workings, I have found What3Words to be very helpful.

TL;DR: Some cartographers and coders took satellite images of the surface of the world, gridded them into 3 meter by 3 meter squares, and gave each square a unique three-word name.  Then, they made an app.

You can tell the app your address, or a set of GPS coordinates, and it will show you the grid overlay, and you can browse the squares and see their three-word names.

Or you can do lookups the other way; put in a three-word name and get back a pin on a map showing exactly where that is.  For example, I’ve always wanted to visit workbook.remote.galloping.

It’s super useful for problems of delivering mail to places without streets let alone street names.  Or showing someone what door on what wall they should use to get into your building.  Or advertising where the rave will be on social media without triggering address scraper bots.

But it’s also useful for handling problems of remote magic involving locations, because it lets you denote linguistically in a spoken work where things should happen.  Where exactly you want to draw the perimeter of a ward, for example.  And the 3×3 meter resolution means you can discriminate between nearby areas cleanly.  Say for focusing on one area of a large garden bed and not affecting its neighboring plants.

It is inconvenient in several ways, though.  One is that the grid is X,Y only; no Z.  It doesn’t differentiate vertically at all.  That is, it would have the same three-word identifier for apartment 118, 218, and 818 in an apartment building, because they all occupy the same 3×3 square on the ground.  So if you need vertical precision in your work, you need to specify that in other ways.

Another problem is that there isn’t much power behind the naming – the strings of names are somewhat meaningless (on purpose), and unlike postal addresses the name of any given square has nothing to do with the names of its adjacent squares (again, they did this on purpose), which means the three words don’t tell you anything about that square’s location relative to it’s neighbors, or to world landmarks.  For example, foam.apple.proud is right next to guest.pest.senses but you would have no way of knowing that from their names.  Nor would you have any way of knowing that both of them are in Times Square, which brings up another problem: there’s not a large egregor supported by this program. Many folks can picture “Times Square” easily but don’t have a shared collective experience of foam.apple.proud.  But as the developers say, “The what3words system is fixed and will never change.  So a 3 word address today will still be the same in 10 years’ time.” which means it should grow in utility over time, not diminish.

Regardless of these problems, I still find the grid to be useful in improving the effectiveness of location-based work, and maybe you will too.  Happy mapping!