The warrior rose: first assay

Rosa multiflora on the farm
Rosa multiflora on the farm. Adorably plump farm kitty for scale.

I am not sure how to begin.

My last post on invasive plants wasn’t just random musing; I’m about to start working with one of them, Rosa multiflora. I’ve been gardening and making herbal remedies and of course cooking and eating plants for many years now, but this is an altogether deeper level of work I’m about to begin, unlike anything I’ve ever done before.

It was initiated by the rose herself.

As a garden lover, I think roses are nice, but they probably aren’t my favorite flower (I think that title would go to Japanese irises). Of course rose flowers are beautiful and I do adore the scent. But have you ever looked at the rose bush itself? They’re really not all that attractive.

But those are your ornamental rose varieties. Wild roses are something else again. Wild roses are brimming over with magic and fierce beauty. And as an herbalist, I am in love with rose medicine (I use that term broadly, encompassing the physical, spiritual, and magical). I need rose medicine. (Here’s a good monograph on rose medicine. And another.)

At the farmhouse where I used to live, there were a couple of multiflora rose bushes that had been tolerated as ornamentals–it is a beautiful species–but it grows wild everywhere here. In fact it’s extraordinarily difficult to restrict or eradicate because the gracefully arching canes that make it so aesthetically pleasing even when not in flower (well, I think so) will root wherever they touch the ground, and it tolerates many types of soils and habitats. “In Ohio, it is especially troublesome in the southeastern part of the state” <– understatement (source).

Its thorns are prolific and unusually vicious: I’ve had minor pricks that barely drew blood continue to ache for days afterwards. They can be strongly recurved and seem to reach out and grab you, snagging absolutely every part of you and your clothes. It is universally loathed by people who live or work in the countryside.

But not me. Early on I formed a certain grudging respect for this rose. Yes, she hurt me a lot. Tore up some of my clothes. But she’s a fighter and a survivor–nay, a conqueror.

And yet she’s also every bit a Rose, that millennia-old symbol of love, beauty, and sensuality. In June she is covered in fragrant heaps of little roses–white, some tinged ever so softly pink, with golden centers–beloved of bees. In fall her branches are beaded with tiny glistening scarlet hips, beloved of birds.

My favorite of her common names is “rambler rose,” but in my mind and heart I have always known her as the Warrior Rose. She has an intense female-warrior vibe that I realize I have barely begun to understand. Now she says we have work to do, and I have no idea what that is going to entail, exactly, but it starts now.


Poorly organized thoughts on absorption

I’m reading Gary Lachman’s biography of Colin Wilson, Beyond the Robot (highly recommended). I don’t know why but I’ve always had an aversion to biographies; but something told me I needed to read this one and I’m very glad I paid attention. His philosophical contributions aside–and those are exciting and thought-provoking–Wilson’s determination, sense of purpose, and industriousness are inspiring. I will never be that disciplined; I have finally realized after years of trying to force myself to be more organized in planning, executing the plans, and then recording the results that the harder I push and poke at myself, the more obnoxiously watery I become. I am prone to topic-specific brain fog, and it might sound like something you just overcome with sufficient effort, but ha ha ha ha, no. The only way to keep the phlegmatic formlessness in any kind of check is to allow it to do its thing most of the time. Damming it up leads to very bad outcomes. Huh. It’s almost like somebody in the wayback observed the behavior of actual water when drawing an analogy to certain personality types… Too bad some of us just have to learn everything the hard way.

I swear I do listen to music other than Johnny Flynn.

Speaking of water…stick with me here…I was talking to the herbalist and constitutional types maven Rebecca Altman two or three years ago, and she made a rather offhand comment about how phlegmatics have a tendency toward…well, let’s call it historical revisionism. That is, the way they feel about something now is, they say, how they have always felt about it. They might feel differently tomorrow, and then that will be how they always felt. (At least that’s how I remember what she said.) Similarly, they may be terribly indecisive about everything but once a decision has been reached, they always knew that was what they were going to do. Now to me that retrospection makes perfect sense, though I do see how it makes us phlegmatics super annoying to pragmatic melancholics and driven cholerics. Humans make meaning, it’s what we do–and meaning is subjective and thus subject to constant revision and negotiation, as I wrote when I discussed the narrative paradigm theory of human behavior. Well, one of my big lessons of late 2016-early 2017 has been that rather than revising un-self-reflectively and without purpose, it makes much more sense to just craft yourself a better narrative. The keyword there is craft: feelings and opinions are going to change and there is a lot of magic to be harnessed in taking charge of that process.

It’s harder than I expected to put into words. I’m not talking about positive affirmations or lying to yourself. It’s more a matter of trying on different perspectives deliberately, rather than as a passive reaction to events. It’s also about embracing the wibbly-wobbliness of time: changing a feeling about something that happened in the past, for example, and creatively rewriting the narrative you have been telling yourself about it changes how you feel in the present, and thus the future. In the same way it reverberates along the mycelia-like network of non-local consciousness to effect other aspects of your reality.

In Beyond the Robot Lachman discusses Wilson’s discovery that interest is dependent on attention. This means that a thing is not inherently interesting to you or not, you make it so through your relation to it. I would say the same for beauty. This kind of dovetails with something I read in a Thich Nhat Han book (don’t remember which), where he said that your boredom, impatience, or annoyance with a task is proportionate to the amount of your attention that is somewhere else. In other words, when you’re thinking about something you were previously doing, or would rather be doing, or are planning to do, chores seem to take forever. On the other hand, when you are absorbed in the chore at hand you lose your sense of the passage of time and when you’re done, it seems to have gone by quickly-but-not-too-quickly. They say that time flies when you’re having fun, and usually that’s true, but I’ve found that I can make my enjoyment seem to last much longer by focusing intently on the present moment.

Not only that but, as Wilson wrote, that level of concentration and focus opens up a perception of your immediate reality as intensely fascinating, beautiful, and meaningful–he called this perception Faculty X. You suddenly notice something you never noticed before, and all of a sudden you’re totally amazed by it. Faculty X is how you interface with non-local consciousness and then, to put it in terms of an image that came to me last night, it’s like you just reach out and scoop up handfuls of passing magic. Point is, when you start putting such attention into your narrative and your feelings, not only do your inner workings become a lot more interesting in their own right, but you gain some really powerful new tools. It can be fun to play around with too.

Because of music’s ability to stir the emotions, I find I’m able to use it to induce a state of deep absorption in a feeling, especially feelings associated with memories; and from that “place” I can kind of tinker with the feeling-memory link. That’s the best I can describe it; you’ll have to try it yourself. The risk is that you can become confused about events in the past, but then again, that is also the point of the exercise. You have to be willing to sacrifice “what really happened”–that was only ever a story anyway–for what might have been. Choose your targets accordingly and stay very conscious of what you’re doing (as that also is the point of the exercise).

In which I attempt to articulate my worldview


In Which I Attempt to Articulate My Worldview | Otherwise
Painting by Leonora Carrington

1 – Dreamworlds with no access to objectivity




2- Intersubjectivity




3 – Gnosis




4 – Magic









In Which I Attempt to Articulate My Worldview | Otherwise
Another one by Carrington

6 – A few practical implications







A glimmer of coagula

For the past year or so, it’s been all solve and no coagula for me, but I think I’m finally beginning to get a vague sense of solidity. I imagine it like the first dream of the benben stone coalescing within the chaos of Nun, just a slightly denser bit of void, or a twinkle in Atum’s eye. I don’t yet know what shape it will take or whether I will alight upon it, and whatever I write about it at this early stage will probably be embarrassingly rambling, clumsy, and naive. Yet it seems like a good time to try and thrash it out.

At this moment peace of mind is hard to come by, and I look back on easier times and think what I wouldn’t give for a little equanimity. (“Serenity now!”) But just realizing that I want peace of mind actually gets me a little closer to it. Meanwhile, I think magic is becoming more of an ontology for me than a practice per se. Being such a newbie, I never had what you’d call an intensive or adept magical practice, but at any rate, right now simply living magically in an entangled universe is enough. Spells, rituals, offerings, incantations, what have you are all complications I can’t deal with.

serenity now

A question has been bouncing around in my head, not really a question so much as a contrast, between seeking to experience and be in the world with as little abstraction or analytical overlay as possible (i.e., gnosis as I understand it) and seeking to actively participate in the shaping of the world according to one’s desires through magic. Far be it from me to tell you your business, but for me the latter is dependent on the former. My biggest struggle when it comes to magic (as a practice) is that I perceive the universe to be thoroughly entagled, an Indra’s Web, and my mind as I have always known it is a pitifully inadequate tool for navigating such a reality. When I have taken action to improve the circumstances of my current incarnation I get a lot of synchronicities in response that suggest my tiny actions are having bigger effects, and yet I suspect that it may be more due to the change in my consciousness than to the specific actions themselves. (Paging Dion Fortune…) Which is not to say that magic is only about intent or (gods forbid) vibrational level; but perhaps in spite of myself I leveled up in terms of gnosis. It’s just one metaphysical proposition among many, but the only ontology that has ever really made sense to me is that embodied human life as we know it is a virtual reality, or a dream. Occasionally we get a glimpse of the programmers’ code, or half wake up for a moment, but mostly we mistake it for the only and ultimate reality. I see no reason not to dream lucidly and make your incarnational circumstances as enjoyable as possible, but after glimpsing that code (mixing metaphors, sorry), I don’t know…it just feels a little hollow. (Cats in libraries indeed.)

I’ve been reflecting on how I got here, in case it gives me any idea of where I’ll end up next. I often read that the practice of magic is all about power, or at least about self-determination, but what brought me to this point was just the desire to see more of that Code. From an early age I sensed aspects of reality that I felt certain were real but which I couldn’t quite grasp or directly interact with. One form this took was ghosts, another was some kind of mental communication with someone or something who knew things I didn’t, another was apparently feeling others’ emotions. Mainstream ontologies insisted this unseen world didn’t exist, but I knew that was bullshit and became convinced that the unseen was realer than “reality.” I read a lot of mythology and folklore trying to learn more about this elusive Otherworld. When I was about 12 I started making an active effort to communicate with it. I got my first tarot deck. Come to think of it, it might have been some other unique cartomantic deck. I can’t for the life of me remember what it was called, but it had Egyptian deities and the backs of the cards were orange. I saw it behind the counter at Tower Books (aging myself) and eyed it furtively for a long time before finally getting up the courage to ask the cashier to get it out for me, and my mom for money to buy it. In the end I couldn’t make much sense of it, but I had been bitten by the divination bug. I tried my hand at runes, and had especially good success with Yijing (I Ching) casting. A few years later I started with astrology.

We moved to a part of the country with a mostly Latino population and I became interested in curanderismo, but didn’t have any obvious way into that community. At the same time my aunt and cousin kind of got into Wicca. It was all intriguing but I remained an outsider looking in. In retrospect I realize that what I wanted, and what I needed in order to commit, was some kind of incontrovertible response from the Other side. I guess ghosts weren’t enough. I didn’t want power, what I wanted was to have faith. All I knew was, I sure as hell didn’t want to be in the driver’s seat, but I was desperately hoping somebody was. The reality I knew as a teenager was not something I dreamed of controlling, but of escaping. Had I known more about Gnosticism at the time, I probably would have gotten really into it, as I understood the Black Iron Prison at a visceral level.

Anyway, fast forward, I found a copy of The Teachings of Buddha in the nightstand drawer in a Los Angeles hotel and kept it, delved into Buddhist and Advaita philosophy for several years, and had my first encounters with Shinto, got disenchanted by science, made a decision to re-enchant. But now I didn’t want to escape the world but to engage with it more fully. I was still trying to read the code but coming at it from a different angle. Strangely, the virtual world became more poignantly beautiful to me once I had had some incontrovertibly real experiences of the Otherworld.

Would (neo-)paganism get me closer to it? I wondered. No. It lacked an ontology/cosmology/theology that was as concrete as my experiences of the Other, and all these pantheons of gods and goddesses of this or that abstraction, or worse yet “the” God and “the” Goddess, just didn’t feel real. While I’ve always accepted polytheism as the most likely scenario, I struggle with understanding what a theos is. Even now, my experiences with “deities” take two forms–either I have a sense of something like a manner-of-being-or-doing-with-its-own-awareness, or of a very specific and usually very localized powerful noncorporeal entity, similar to the concept of kami in Shinto, which is why Shinto appeals to me so much.

To take a concrete example, Hermes. There’s much talk across these magical internets about trickster deities, among them Hermes, and if you look at his list of attributions he’s certainly a god for the modern age. But the only Hermes I have ever experienced I can sort of approximate as a conscious liminality which is also an Axis Mundi that can be traveled between worlds. Hermes to me is (for lack of a better term) a state of awareness, a mode of experience and of being-in-the-world. Not a god of thresholds, but a conscious Thresholdness. It’s very hard for me to think of making offerings or petitions to Thresholdness, to Liminality. I can’t dial “him” up like a person (I tried); the closest analogy I can think of is it would be more like temporarily plugging into another dimension. It’s that vast. This being doesn’t speak to me in words; “he” simply is present or not present in any given quality of experience. I can’t help but think that maybe people in antiquity had a similar experience, given that, as I understand it, Hermes basically means “Boundary-Marker.” Although not the same being, my experience of Shiva has been very similar in type. I realize the irony as I type this, because language forces me to render this in terms of the very abstractions I’m trying to avoid, yet the experiences are quite concrete.

This way of relating to powers feels very primitive (in the phylogenetic sense of ancestral, of the root) to me, free-form and highly individual in a way that we commonly shorthand as “shamanistic.” However, absent the community service part of the job description, I can’t call myself a shaman. Still, I find this freedom and individuality really appealing, and authentic, and grounded in a way that, for the moment, requires further exploration. It feels like Code. So in practical terms I find myself cycling back to my entry point into magic, meditation. But instead of a discipline it’s now a reprieve.

Thoughts on initiation and crossing the Abyss


It seems very appropriate that as I write this, it’s twilight and there’s a thunderstorm going on.

I recently read this post at Theomagica about “crossing the abyss”. I was particularly struck by what Frater Acher said about the difficulty of reintegrating your life afterwards:


“Wether we go through this experience as magicians or non-magicians, the crossing of the Abyss comes with the end of meaning as we knew it – and the beginning of a journey towards a new kind of meaning. The magician is supported on this path through a brief encounter of divinity as well as the fact that they chose to undertake this journey voluntarily.”

(My emphasis.) Though I have not magically undertaken anything that could be called crossing the Abyss, I was struck by how much this description resonated with other experiences I’ve had–in fact, with a pattern of repeating experiences that has dogged me my whole life.

Maybe it’s that way for everybody and other people just don’t talk about it? I don’t know.

In his interview on the Rune Soup podcast, Dr. Jeffrey Kripal said that one’s world should end at least twice before one settles on a belief system. The first time your world ends, you often simply reject your previous belief system and latch onto whatever convenient system presents itself, overzealously. The second time your world is destroyed, you realize that worlds are constructs prone to collapse, and that all belief systems are necessarily provisional and incomplete. Maybe my worlds are just especially fragile, but I’ve lost count of how many have been blown up at this point. I’ve also watched as others’ worlds were destroyed. I learned at a pretty young age that lesson about provisional beliefs.

Well, my life is once again in the process of falling apart and reassembling itself in weird, unforeseen shapes (a process that probably started when my mom died last October but which is really picking up steam now), and after reading that post at Theomagica, it occurred to me that every magical initiation is also “triggered by a liminal rite and results in a series of liminal experiences in our everyday lives”, “comes with the end of meaning as we know it–and the beginning of a journey towards a new kind of meaning”, and “it’s the process of re-integration into the world…that can be the even more problematic and painful experience.” I imagine (since I don’t have direct experience) that there is a difference of degree between these initiations and the death-within-life that is the point of crossing the Abyss. But it underscores something I do have direct experience with, which is that there is no one magical initiation–one spirals back and re-initiates over and over in one’s life. At least, that’s true if one remains involved in magic.

And initiations always come at the least convenient times, and it’s very hard to explain to non-magicians why suddenly I need 11 hours of sleep every night, have no energy, and am not all that fussed about finding a job or anything else I “should” be worried about.

As you might have guessed, I am currently going through another one of these initiations. Into what, I don’t know. First there were a bunch of synchronicities. The first ones I noticed during this go-round started shortly after I finished reading The Chaos Protocols. In it, Gordon suggests a version of the Headless Rite which can serve as a self-initiation. The result, says Gordon based on his experiences, is a sensation “almost as if you dropped a depth charge into the ocean of the spirit world. Some things get cleared away, some things get shaken loose and some things come aswimming.” During this time, I started doing two things: preparing to launch my own business, and paying more attention to my ancestors (as in physically visiting their resting places, which was formerly not an option as I didn’t live in this state). But I did not do the Headless Rite. In fact I haven’t done any rite or spell from the book. Yet right afterwards this chain of syncs started with several related to headlessness, then ones related to road-opening and to my ancestors, and then things just started to…solve (so far no coagula). Divination confirmed that I might as well strap in for the ride, because I am sure as hell not in the driver’s seat.

Jupiter: friend or foe?


I guess you’re probably aware of the debate about Jupiter between Jason Miller and Gordon White. (If not, read Miller’s Financial Sorcery and White’s Chaos Protocols, then this, then this, then this.)

Basically, Gordon argues that, unless you are a king or super-elite, Jupiter is not your god, he’s the god of people who actively oppress you. You’re better off working with one of the many civilizing trickster figures who, in spite of their rather bizarre senses of humor, seem to generally like helping a brother or sister out (albeit for inscrutable reasons of their own).

Miller, on the other hand, says that the bad acts of human elites are not a reflection on the nature of the deity, or at most just one side of that deity. With deities we are working in the realm of myths and archetypes. Jupiter is the god of abstract principles of wealth, sovereignty, and lawful gain (though these can manifest materially), not of specific people, instances, or acts, and thus is the friend of anyone who wants to have these things in their life.

Now, I have not really worked with Jupiter magically so I have no experience on which to base an opinion, and the two sides of this argument both seem reasonable to me. (Never really been drawn to Jupiter that much. I just don’t like that much beard.) But pondering where I might tentatively stand on the issue is an interesting thought exercise.

I do know enough to understand that the Roman deities were/are not the same as the planets named for them, but the personae and planets are deeply intertwined astrologically and, I think, shed light on one another. Jupiter is both my chart ruler (ruler of my Ascendant) and solar dispositor (ruler of the sign my Sun is in), as well as the ruler of the house my Sun is in. Jupiter is also exalted in the sign of Cancer in my chart, disposes some other planets besides my Sun, rules another angle besides AC and conjoins a third, and is involved in a lot of other aspect patterns. So the point is the planet has a lot of juice in my horoscope and wins a lot of essential dignity points.

In contrast, Mercury conjoins my MC and opposes Jupiter. Now Mercury is in detriment in the two signs where Jupiter is in domain (Pisces and Sagittarius), which in mythic terms makes sense as Mercury’s antinomian trickster nature (though it is much less emphasized than that of the Greek Hermes) is at odds with Jupiter’s rulership of rulership. In Jupiter’s house, Mercury can’t Mercury. Or at least not as well. My natal Mercury is essentially weak, but gets a fair bit of accidental dignity by association with other planets, angles, and so on. He too rules two angles, for example. Jupiter and Mercury are even co-rulers of the decan my Sun resides in. The polarity between these two planets, particularly as they conjoin opposing angles and rule opposing angles, is an axis that seems to organize my whole chart, and my life activities and personal proclivities have followed suit. So Jason and Gordon’s debate almost seems to re-enact the dynamics that go on in my head all the time.

I am also reminded of when I was in grade school and my stepbrothers were big into Dungeons & Dragons. They were two-and-a-half years older than me which at that age is rather massive, and they’re identical twins. When they needed a third person to play D&D, I was drafted, mostly against my will. My characters were always killed off in short order so I finally refused to participate anymore. Anyway, I don’t remember a whole lot beyond that except that you would choose your character’s orientation toward law and order and good-vs.-evil, so you would be “lawful good”, for example, “or “neutral neutral” and so on. (Ever the goody-two-shoes, I liked to be lawful good.)

Astrological Jupiter is lawful good. One of the quintessential aspects of Astrojupiter that often seems to be missed is that his domain deals with society and social institutions. That’s why you get the otherwise rather motley assortment of things he rules: law, higher education, religion, general embiggening. If you look at these things from the perspective of ancient Roman culture, they’re all aspects of Romanitas. Religion (religio) for example was not about personal faith but about participation in public ritual. And in this case we’re not talking about law in the Saturnian sense, as a set of constraints, but as the sociopolitical organization of the state. They are things that defined “civilization”.

So it occurs to me that whether you view Jupiter as a friend or foe might have a lot to do with how much social legitimacy forms a part of your personal model of success and achievement. Jupiter is all about legitimacy because he basically decides what that is in the first place. Whereas to embrace a trickster-centric lifestyle, or magical practice, means you pretty much have to be the kind of person who likes to rebel, stick it to The Man, and take risks. Not everyone is up for that. I think left-hand-path/right-hand-path is an oversimplification, but perhaps this is a more complex and nuanced version of that dynamic. It’s not to say that you can’t achieve conventionally-recognized models of success working with a trickster, but you can’t do it while wearing the white hat. You have to be alright with a grey one. Of course if you’re doing magic, you’re already halfway there. (And I should probably note, I’m not trying to psychoanalyze Miller and his approach. Just speculating on general Jupiterness.)

Time for TMI (Tell More Information!). Growing up a disabled female, frequently isolated from society at large (due to being hospitalized so much), my mother clung to two convictions–an extremely romantic, Sir Walter Scott-esque notion of chivalry, heroism and gentility to which she aspired, and a firm conviction that to show any vulnerability is certain doom. Although she was an introvert my mom achieved great success in whatever social circle she found herself in–and they were many and varied over the course of her life, from coal miners to Spanish grandees–because she would go along to get along. She never inconvenienced anyone. She never took up space. She never showed fear or sadness or weakness or ugliness that might make other people feel uncomfortable. “Never make other people uncomfortable” and “never make work for other people” were a litany I heard countless times growing up.

That’s not a criticism, by the way. My mother did what she had to to survive in a world that is very hostile to people like her. She achieved her principal goal of having an interesting life, and was a kind, generous, and warm person. She was also undoubtedly the bravest person I have ever known, because she was one of the most fearful, and she still kept getting up every morning. Not only that, in spite of her disability and constant pain and being a single mother working, in one memorable period, two full-time jobs, she achieved things that plenty of less vulnerable people find too difficult. When the going got tough, my mom sucked it up and came out the other side without a hair out of place. (Remind me to tell you about the time she was offered a modeling career while saving the life of the call-girl her husband* had just abandoned her for.) I think she had an innate knack for glamour magic and would probably have really enjoyed and appreciated Deb Castellano’s work. What I’m saying is, no trickster-lovin’ feminist witch or magician could ask for a better role model; and yet the teachings that were impressed on me were to always color inside the lines and be scared. I was wrapped in a veritable cocoon of “ladies don’t…” My mom wanted to keep me safe and protect me from the kind of terrors she faced every day just going about her life, and to ensure that I wouldn’t have to work quite as hard as she did for a little social mobility.

My point with all this, is that you can probably understand how I am conflicted about where I stand on all this Jupiter business. I roll my own eyes at what a moralizing, people-pleasing goody-goody I can be. Yet I’ve always been too much of a weirdo and an idealist to ever get social approval and I am trying to embrace and grow into my inner Persephonic-Luciferian punk witch.

There is also a very real question here: In The Chaos Protocols and many times on his blog, Gordon has speculated that the planet’s super-elites not only have a different value system than we do, but probably even a different cosmology. If that is true, it stands to reason they would have different gods. Gods of things that are important to people with a vested interest in promoting inequality and hierarchy. That sounds more archonic than godly, I suppose, but we humans don’t really grok gods so why couldn’t such unpleasant ones exist? Why would we automatically trust the word of history about the nature of specific deities, knowing that history is always just one biased point of view?

I’m planning on exploring these questions a little more in my next post, from a different angle.

*not my dad

The Star.Ships conversation

Milky Way.jpg



Recontextualizing magic and human history





Challenges to orthodoxy














Concluding thoughts




It’s go time, wizards.