magic – Yes And Further

Canticle of the Queen Below, Part I

Silence! Silence!
Listen!

Once
there were two sisters.
Regal, entitled to thrones both.
One bright, radiant, shining, buoyant, seated above;
the other dark, hidden, shadowed, sinking, seated below.
The one greedy, drawing up into herself all that is.
The other spare, taking only that which is given.
The stories of the one are known and famed throughout the worlds
for she aimed to take all stories into herself as well.
The stories of the other, however, are mostly lost,
and those that survived did so because they also tell of the one.
But the other had many adventures and performed many feats alone.

This is one of those stories.

Hail Ereshkigal, Queen Below!
You are holy and sweet is your praise.
You are fair and modest in your consumption
though all are eventually consumed and come to you.
You speak a word that is silence and it eats all sound, eats the ears that would hear it.
You rule the no-place someplace.

Hail Ereshkigal, Queen Below!
You are holy and sweet is your praise.
You are compassionate, just, and powerful,
a keeper of the sacred silences.
A warden of the soul guests.
A sponge that soaks up and cleans away pain, trouble, and discomfort,
leaving behind only peaceful emptinesses.

Hail Ereshkigal, Queen Below!
You are holy and sweet is your praise.
Your true name is unpronounced for you are tongueless.
You cannot be tempted by the flesh for you are fleshless.
Your rotting eyes spy the spoil on the meat.

Hail Ereshkigal, Queen Below!
You are holy and sweet is your praise!
You dwell in the desert sands (speaking is forbidden there).
and in the glades of the leafless trees.
You make your humble throne in the rock caves
and your royal palace is also there.

Hail Ereshkigal, Queen Below!
You are holy and sweet is your praise!
All roads pass through your realm
All souls eventually do you homage
All flesh feeds your birds’ appetites.

Hail Ereshkigal, Queen Below!
You are holy and sweet is your praise!
I will speak one of your stories:

Once, the Queen of Hell got bored.
(Hell being a perfectly comfortable and hospitable place,
but chiefly a collection of emtpinesses
with little for diversion or amusement.)
The Queen is a good queen,
that is to say, she is good at queen-ing,
But ruling is hard work and lonely.
She surveyed her domain and said to herself,
“Am I not Queen? A slave stays bound to his master’s house never to leave.
But I am master of the house of the dead.
And I am due a vacation!”
So she commanded one of her guests, “lend me your garment!”
and buttoned herself into that fine fine soul.
Once dressed,
she packed up for herself a picnic basket
with anything she might need on her journey
and ascended.

At each of the seven gates, she further dressed for travel,
donning her gown of pale feathers
her ring of darkness and fire
her veil of gossamer
her pearl diadem
her lantern of captured moonbeams
her crêpe parasol
and she swallowed a blind serpent for a tongue
(for she is tongueless and her true name is unpronounceable).
Each of the seven gates she locked behind her with her fingerbone,
and sealed with a royal kiss.
So for a time, Hell was not admitting visitors
but went instead to visit the wide wide world.

The dead tell tales of their former lives,
but much of those memories fades quite quickly,
What remains is connections and relationships,
Who you loved, who you hated
Your granddaughter’s giggle
Your mother’s disapproval.

But the taste of lemon-honey-buttered pancakes
the snow-covered road home from hockey practice
where you buried that class ring
… these are harder to recall.

So the Queen was delighted to once again meet the fullness of the World
at whose wonders the dead could only hint
and for whose comforts yearn.

The mossy roots of the Tree disgorged her onto the loam.
On her emergence, the Queen surveyed the world
and my it really was full of things:

Spiky grasses, cold wet creek stones, cacophonous starlings
gravity,
object permanence
the convenience of telephones
but also ice cream delivery trucks,
waiting in line for concert tickets,
smog.
“Souvenirs!” she reminded herself,
and picked up a fluffy dandelion seed
a popsicle stick
a ticket stub
and stowed them in her picnic basket.

And she set forth to wander and enjoyed the wandering
letting her feet take her where they would.

She travelled through the forest
and compared it to a city park,
to a grain field,
to a pasture.
She skipped through five acres of lavender
revelling in the scent released from crushed blooms.

She toured a metropolis
making a game out of keeping always to the dark.
She decorated her parasol with poppies and chrysanthemums
stretching its little shadow around her
to keep away the oppressive sunshine.

She stepped slowly down into the docks at noon
and kept walking down into the sea’s shelf.
Seahorses darted through the gaps in her bones
and small fishes wove in and out of the loops of her hair.
The weight of the waves swallowed her laughter.

So the Queen of Hell wandered
and let her feet take her where they would, but
being as the feet belonged to the borrowed garment
the feet themselves knew where home was
and how to get there from here
and eventually the Queen turned up on the doorstep of number 227.
“I should say hello,” thought she
and being polite and well mannered
in the way of royalty
she knocked before entering.

The master of the house opened the door
and nearly had a heart attack.
He fell to his knees
for here was a ghost come back from the dead!
Someone ages and ages gone
bones and the shimmery memory of flesh
knock knock
shown up at the doorstep
smelling of lavender
and slightly rimed with sea salt.

He trembled, then,
and named the Queen a name that she’d forgot
as he backed away in fear.

The Queen reached out
to bestow a beneficent touch, but
the master of the house fainted dead away.

“One welcomes me,” said the Queen
with her serpent-tongued speech
and swept across the threshold.

Then,
the mistress of the house looked up
from her knitting and her reading
and named the Queen a name that she’d forgot
and screamed a caterwauling wail.

The Queen reached out
to bestow a beneficent touch, but
the mistress of the house parried
and riposted with her needles,
circled her way around the intruder,
and bolted out the door.

“One welcomes me,” said the Queen
with her serpent-tongued speech
and walked into the center of the house.

And from the back emerged a boy
not old; not young
who had ears to hear
the gentleness of the Queen’s words
who had eyes to see
the resemblance of the garment to others of his kin
one
whose knees bent in homage, not terror
whose voice raised in praises, not anguish
who gestured her in
and named the Queen a name that she’d forgot:

“Great grandmother?”

“I am she and yet not she,” she said.
“… Do you like tea?” he asked. “Does she?”
“She does,” said she,
and so they shared a pot.

And while they drank, she talked about her trip.
“I have travelled far and wide over this World
many are its temples,
proud edifices, architectural marvels,
but all are to my sister (or her derivatives
the many faces the morning star wears).
Does no one remember me?

Where is the respect for death?
Your ‘hunters’ do nothing with the meat of their kills;
your butchers divorce themselves from the cudgel;
your elders languish alone in sterile prisons
and I am shut out, despite their calling for me!
I am despised here, when once I was welcome.”

The Queen reached out
to bestow a beneficent touch.
The boy permitted her royal hand to grace his jawline
and sighed at the tenderness of it.

“One welcomes me,” said the Queen
with her serpent-tongued speech
and added, “and receives a blessing.”

And she blessed the boy, then.
Not a downpayment on prosperity, or security
but a blessing that’s actually useful:

“May you love life as long as you have it
and miss it little once you don’t.”

and she taught him how to visit her when he was lonely
and told him not to be a stranger.

At that time, there came a beleaguered crow, begging
“Return, my Queen, the dead pound at the gates
They seek their promised rest
And chaos reigns down there without you.
I don’t want to get into it right now
but you should probably read up on power vacuums
and delegation of authority
and creation of standard operating procedures
because this is just a mess.”

The tale of how Hell coped with the absence of its Queen is told elsewhere.
Suffice it to say that the Queen did hastily return.
Back down through the roots in the well under the Tree
Each of the seven gates
she unsealed with a silent shout
and unlocked with her fingerbone.

At each of the gates she doffed her travel clothes,
setting down her crêpe parasol
– now bleached to fading from the sun
her lantern of captured moonbeams
– brighter for having collected a few more
her pearl diadem
– sporting a few extra pearls
her veil of gossamer
– crusted with sea foam
her ring of darkness and fire
– fitting a bit more snugly
and shedding her gown of pale feathers
– adorned here and there with blossoms
and the garment she had borrowed,
she returned to its soul.

Lastly, she freed the blind serpent
(for there is no need to speak anything but silences
in the emptinesses of Hell).
But while the Queen was out in the fecundity of the world
the snake had hatched eight daughters in her throat.
The Queen sent them out and up
to go where they wished, and explore
and speak with dignitaries
strangers
sisters
and seven of them went.

But the eighth begged to stay with the Queen
and be her tongue when needed
in honor of the serpent’s mother
and share the syllables her sisters said
on all their adventures
(for members of sister snektouplets always hear the other members’ speech).

The Queen accepted the serpent’s service
and got back to the work of ruling.

And so now
if you want to speak with her Royal Lowness
the Queen of Under-the-Earth
Mistress of Silences
you can.
She is entertaining callers
and visits when she can.
Simply listen for the whispers of the serpent
and be prepared to be hospitable when hosting
and gracious when a guest.
Ask her about her trips
she likes to show off her souvenirs.

Hail Ereshkigal, Queen Below!
You are holy and sweet is your praise!

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:

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.
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.
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

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.
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.
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

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.
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.
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.
Leave the ends loops empty but overlap them. Set the last spike and the hammer near them.
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.
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.
Do your working.
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.

[Book Review] Ancient Christian Magic: Coptic Texts of Ritual Power

The problem with having a Rare Books Book Club is that by definition the books are rare and so copies are expensive

For single copies, though, my library system has so far had a copy somewhere of almost everything I’ve wanted to read. And with my borrowing privileges at through various institutions I haven’t even had to ILL stuff.

I just finished reading Ancient Christian Magic: Coptic Texts of Ritual Power edited by Marvin Meyer and Richard Smith (1994, Harper SF) and it was useful enough that I bought myself a copy. Maybe my review here will help you determine whether to borrow or buy it for yourself as well. Continue reading “[Book Review] Ancient Christian Magic: Coptic Texts of Ritual Power” →

St. Patrick’s Armor Magic

It’s the Feast of Saint Patrick, so time for us to clear something up:

St. Patrick was definitely a magic user. A Christian, sure. A Bishop even. But also a badass mage.

From my scholarship on St. Patrick (by which I mean reading several connected Wikipedia articles, and some of the websites they cite) I know that he was a 5th-ish century Brit who was a) captured and enslaved by Irish pirates as a kid who b) God saved by telling him to be ready for escape at the right time, who then c) became a Bishop and went back to the area of his captivity to evangelize.

Those bits are history, which come from his own surviving letters. The writing of his hagiography didn’t happen for like another two centuries, however, and those stories are where we get into some problematic stuff. Patrick is a difficult Saint to love what with all his being canonized for doing his best to wipe out native Irish religion and colonizing it with Christianity. The myth about his having “removed all the snakes from Ireland” could be interpreted as referring to the druidic practitioners, not the wiggly ground reptiles.

The prayers attributed to St Patrick are interesting, therefore, because they have a distinctly pagan bendt to them.

The most famous of these is St. Patrick’s Lorica aka St. Patrick’s Breastplate. You can take a look now, but I’ve also copied a modified version of the text below, with some of my commentary.

Scholars fight about whether it’s 5th vs. 8th century (quite a big gap). It gets called a “prayer”, but looking at the text it is very very obviously not a prayer. At least, obvious to me, and should be to anyone who studies Christianity or magic or the intersection of the two like I do.

Prayer is conversational. It has speaking-to characteristics. You address your petition, praise, or concern to God. This … this is a magical spell. Specifically it’s a binding to make a ward. The speaker binds God to themselves to act as a shield or a sort of preemptive exorcism.

Now, I don’t read ancient Irish Gaelic, but the translations into English still preserve the gross structure of the text: It opens with an invocation and binding of the Christian Triune God to the speaker, followed by a historiolic binding of Christ’s storied life, a binding of various virtues, bindings of the spiritual essences of various holy people, binding the elements (not just the usual fire, air, water, earth but also lightning, and the sun and moon) – all to work a thing.

The thing worked is a divine shield against “every hostile merciless power which may assail my body and my soul,” examples of which are enumerated in the next section: demons, vices, murderous intent, etc., the last grouping of which is also elements-related: “…Against every poison” (plants/earth), “against burning” (fire), “against drowning” (water), and “against death-wound” (presumably air?).

The final section is a somagram – which is a word I’ve just made up, meaning a magic you do on your body to position things spatially. Basically using your body as a map for the magic. Roman and Orthodox Catholics making the Sign of the Cross on their bodies is one example of a somagram.

In the Lorica, the speaker puts Christ not just “on” but in specific places with respect to the body: “before me, behind me, within me..” and “…on my right hand, on my left hand,” etc., building the physicality of the shield. Such proclamations are accompanied with gestures and bodily movement. I’ll speak more on somagrams in a later post.

Finally, there is a brief Latin prayer as a coda.

So the question comes up, how do you take the shield off?

Does the spell just ‘wear off’? Or was it supposed to be paired with a similarly formal “doffing” spell where (one imagines) the speaker would thank God for the protection, and ya know, go back to being an unbound human again?

Depending on how you read “I bind unto myself today” that could just mean “for just today”, which would maybe naturally lapse when the sun sets (or maybe when the sun rises again) so you’d have to renew it each day. But it could instead be a lasting spell that could end up being terribly exhausting for the speaker who hasn’t figured in a method to take God off again.

To my dismay, this concern was apparently NOT in the mind of the Victorian hymn poet C. F. Alexander who in 1890 turned the Lorica into a bloody hymn. It’s called “I bind unto myself today” and it is most familiar to Anglicans and Roman Catholics, but the the latest edition of the Presbyterian Hymnal: Glory To God has it too (#6 for those following along at home) which means you and your congregation can do a group binding (with no apparent means of taking off the armor again!) at the Sunday worship service of your choosing. Great.

I have found Armor Magics to be particularly useful, and this is a great template to use for Christian magical practitioners so I wanted to share my own recipe for how I make the Lorica:

Elroi’s Embellishments of St Patrick’s Lorica

I don’t want to go through so much effort to put on a powerful magic shield that I can’t then un-do later at my own discretion, so when I use this ward (and I use it a fair amount) I build things into the architecture of the spell that definitively give it an end time: I use “unto myself for today” instead of just “today” and I write it down on a piece of paper I tie on to my body in a way that can later be un-tied, and the paper burned so I can control when to end the work.

I write it out by hand (rather than printing out a typed sheet) as I do for much of my longer works. I find that the act of writing it is itself an intentional practice, and the work is more effective for the labor.

I personalize it to be effective only on me and to have a delayed start. One option for that is to use ink that contains homeopathic concentrations of my own blood (more than that and you risk clotting your fountain pen closed), but another is to limit the identification to certain areas on the page. Let me explain what I mean.

I don’t typically want the shield to be active at the moment I’m writing it, I want it to be effective at a later moment of my choosing. So I set it up with a fuse. One way to set a fuse is to leave out the word “myself” from the writing everywhere it appears. Sometime later, you fill in the missing word and it is at that moment that the spell completes and becomes active. I don’t tend to use that method, because I tend to want to use the Lorica while traveling away from home and don’t tend to travel with my pen and ink setup handy. Instead, I draw four hollow cross shapes at the corners of the paper (as though they could be colored in) and write the opening incantation on each of the four sides, graphically tying the two together. To activate, I speak the opening invocation plus the Latin coda aloud, adding something of me to the inside of the cross shapes (saliva, blood). This has the added benefit of identifying the target “myself” as limited to me – which my co-Workers appreciate; it’s bad form to get one’s God all over everything. But it can also mean that you can write the spell up for someone else to use, and target the “myself” to whoever’s DNA marks the crosses.

Another option for the fuse might be to reserve the final intention for the somagraphy. That is, it doesn’t activate until you both speak aloud the “Christ before me…” section with the accompanying bodily gestures.

For my base written text, I used the translation favored by the Rosary Church, which I believe most literally translates the Gaelic, and keeps a lot more of the original pagan imagery. I then modified the text to suit my own needs as follows:

I bind unto myself today
The strong name of the Trinity,
By invocation of the same,
The three in one and one in three.
I believe the Trinity in the Unity
The Creator of the Elements.

I bind unto myself for today:
The virtue of the Incarnation of Christ along with His Baptism,
The virtue of His Crucifixion along with His Death,
The virtue of His Burial along with His Descent into Hell,
The virtue of His Resurrection along with His Ascension,
The virtue of His coming on the Judgement Day.

I bind unto myself for today:
Power in the virtuous love of Seraphim,
In the obedience of Angels,
In the hope of resurrection unto reward,
In prayers of Patriarchs,
In predictions of Prophets,
In preaching of Apostles,
In faith of Confessors,
In purity of holy Ascetics,
In the deeds of the righteous.

I bind unto myself for today:
The power of Heaven,
The light of the sun,
The brightness of the moon,
The splendour of fire,
The flashing of lightning,
The swiftness of wind,
The depth of sea,
The stability of earth,
The compactness of rocks.

I bind unto myself for today:
God’s Power to lead me,
God’s Might to uphold me,
God’s Wisdom to teach me,
God’s Eye to watch over me,
God’s Ear to hear me,
God’s Word to give me speech,
God’s Hand to guide me,
God’s Way to lie before me,
God’s Shield to shelter me,
God’s Host to secure me.

I invoke today all these virtues
Against every hostile merciless power which may assail my body and my soul:

Against the snares of demons,
Against the seductions of vices,
Against the lusts of nature,
Against everyone who meditates injury to me,
Whether far or near, Whether few or many.

Against the incantations of false prophets,
Against the false laws of heresy,
Against the deceits of idolatry,
Against the harmful spells of witches, and smiths, and sorcerers,
Against every knowledge that binds the souls of mortals.

Christ, protect me:
Against every poison,
Against burning,
Against drowning,
Against death-wound,
That I may receive abundant reward.

Christ be with me:
Christ before me, Christ behind me, Christ within me,
Christ beneath me, Christ above me,
Christ at my right, Christ at my left,
Christ in the fort,
Christ in the chariot seat,
Christ at the helm
Christ in breadth and length and depth,
Christ in the heart of everyone who thinks of me,
Christ in the mouth of everyone who speaks to me,
Christ in every eye that sees me,
Christ in every ear that hears me.

I bind unto myself today
The strong name of the Trinity,
By invocation of the same
The three in one and one in three.
I believe the Trinity in the Unity
The Creator of the Elements.

Domini est salus.
Domini est salus.
Christi est salus.
Salus tua, Domine, sit semper nobiscum.
Amen.

Some of my modifications are structural (I rearranged the order of certain lines to better group the intentions; all “against”s are in the same section now, for example) and others are for style (the opening four lines of the invocation is from the hymn here, not the literal translation).

I have also made many modifications for content, such as adding the word “harmful” in front of “spells of witches, and smiths, and sorcerers” and eliminating the line about “the black laws of heathenism”. Armor that keeps your teammate from being able to heal you is a bad idea. I use gender-neutral language (e.g. souls of “mortals” instead of “man”) and expansive language (purity of holy “ascetics” instead of “virgins”) when possible. I added the virtues of Christ’s “Death” and “Descent” to the mix because a lot of what I do involves Chthonic travel, and I particularly want to call in those aspects of Christ’s life in the historiola.

It’s possible that the Latin prayer coda at the end was added much later to the text, as a Christianizing token, but it’s also quite possible that it was included in the original as foreign-sounding god-words. I do include it but I leave it off of the paper entirely, speaking it aloud at the activation right after reading the invocation words.

I hope my example encourages you to make your own modifications of the Lorica, suited to your faith traditions and your own magical practice. Have a blessed Feast of Saint Patrick!

Tag: magic

Canticle of the Queen Below, Part I

Iron and Fiber in My Diet