Hello Hello Hello!
First of all Happy Halloween!
It’s been quite a while since I wrote one of these and I’ve missed doing so. These letters give me a chance to speak more deeply, to ramble and wander a bit, to share what I’ve been up to, and to provide a web of connections to shore up inspiration (crucial for any magical practitioner!) I hope you enjoy!
My life has truly been a whirlwind dance since I began sharing my magic online and working it for others professionally.
Here are some updates for you all:
-I’ve just made a Lamp for Speaking with the Dead
To celebrate Halloween, the day of all things grim, and to encourage necromancy among the people, I have created a one-of-a-kind Conjure Lamp to increase mediumship, aid in communication with the dead, & add power to all workings with the shades and spirits of the deceased.
This lamp was created as instructed by Professor Porterfield, perhaps the greatest living maker of conjure lamps.
The lamp itself is keyed to a formula for calling the dead from the Sixth & Seventh Books of Moses. It will answer to the magic words written on its wick. Further instructions will be provided to the lamp’s owner.
*pumpkin and leaves not included.
This lamp is one-of-a-kind and when it’s gone, it’s gone.
I make custom conjure lamps as well. If that interests you, email me! (You can even reply to this newletter). Lamp-making is one of the areas in which I am gifted, according to my teacher in conjure Professor Porterfield. Speaking of which!
-As of Oct 13th I’ve been apprenticing with Professor Porterfield for one year.
This still amazes me to think about, but I’ve been living here and working directly under Professor Porterfield’s tutelage for over a year now. We had already formally been teacher and student for some time beforehand, but last October we both experienced a palimpsest of dream signs and animal omens that made it clear that it was time for me to deepen my studies, move across the country, and become his bona fide, old-fashioned apprentice.
Dear reader, if you yourself are considering magical mentorship, joining a tradition, or deepening your study under an elder, let me tell you that this has been the single greatest decision I have ever made for my practice. I did uproot my whole life (and several perennial plants that actually came with me to Texas!) to make this change, but the chance to study in person with a true master of the art has made all the difference in my magic. I’ve achieved so much more than I ever could have alone.
In Praise of Scary Things, and of Friendship
I recently re-read my last newsletter post from before all this globetrotting Conjurer’s Apprentice madness. In there I was wishing that more witches, conjurers, occultists of every stripe would share their experiences for the greater good.
I smiled reading it, because I realized in the intervening months I had done something about those feelings. One of the most successful projects I’ve started this year has been The New Moon Occult Salon. The Salon is a collaboration between myself, Cleo Varra of The Occult Digest, and Austin Fuller of BanexBramble.
The Salon is an informal, speakeasy style online gathering held every New Moon on our discord server. We bring together magical practitioners (and the magically curious!) from a wide variety of traditions, experiences, and even countries. We have a featured guest speaker every month, and then we open the floor for questions and sharing practical info about our topic.
In celebration of my first year working as his apprentice, I’ve asked Professor Porterfield to be our guest speaker for November. The next salon is on Saturday, Nov 2nd. Here is the flyer:
It’s Halloween season, so of course we had to ask the Professor to speak about the magic of the graveyard. This Halloween I am thinking about the power of the scary, the spooky, and the creepy to restore our faith in magic & spirits in general.
The Professor has recognized that as a conjure worker I have a special connection to the dead. He says that “The way the old time workers would have described it, you were born dead.” I guess the fact that this doesn’t freak me out, but actually delights me, is proof of its truth. It also explains my longstanding interest in spiritualism & spiritism.
I’ve been re-reading Victoria Nelson’s excellent “The Secret Life of Puppets”. In the preface she writes:
"In the current Aristotelian age the transcendental has been forced underground, where it has found a distorted outlet outside the recognized boundaries of religious expression. As members of a secular society in which the cult of art has supplanted scripture and direct revelation, we turn to works of the imagination to learn how our living desire to believe in a transcendent reality has survived outside our conscious awareness. We can locate our repressed religious impulses by looking at the supernatural in fantastic novels and films, where it is almost universally depicted as grotesque and demonic, not benign and angelic.”
I love and participate in the current occult move toward rigor, tradition, peer-review, and a general sense of self-respect. However I do fear that some of us have become a bit humorless about it all. It does us no good to be too serious, in fact we lose the conjurational power that a little laughter, a little looseness can bring. And in truth, I think that real terror, or real awe, cannot be accessed unless we let go of that self-seriousness.
May your spells and workings bring you a genuine sense of fear! Of mystery! May your magic make your spine tingle!
As practitioners of magic, we owe it to ourselves to indulge in these flights of fancy, even of morbid curiosity, to see what is hidden underneath the rocks in the garden, or in the dark recesses of the mind, of dream, nightmare, and yes, necromantic spirit vision.
Tis the season after all!
P.S. In case you missed my St. Hildegard chaplets and perfumes released for her feast day, I’ve decided to keep them in stock as part of my ongoing devotion to the Sibyl of the Rhine.
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