Urban Grimoire: A Spell for Transformation

Close on the heels of my last post about being free to break from the constraints of ones upbringing and background, I want to share one of my favourite spells with you, since it embodies so much of the witch view of life. It is a simplified and personalised version of Dorothy Morrison's Swifting of Energy spell (see here).
The spell is based on the very simple premise that whatever is sent our way is energy of one sort and can be transformed to energy of another sort. So for example, if you are in the position of having lots of people hate you, rather than being weighed down by that, a more creative way of dealing with that hatred is to use it to manifest exactly what you want.
I personally do it slightly differently from Morrison's three -candle version, simply because I find spells which are worked over a period of time work better for me. So I personally do a standard candle spell, with just one ordinary candle, and as it burns down I visualise the undesirable gift dissolving and being transformed into exactly what I want. It is a low-hassle spell and makes good use of any shit that comes your way.

How to Treat Enemies

Without saying too much,  my enemies in my work place have retaliated against me. I was getting worried that they weren't going to - getting worried because it is plainly necessary that my workplace implodes so that it can actually be sorted out properly, rather than the issues I have raised being seen as isolated problems and the bigger problem being ignored. I foresaw that this would happen, because I know the enemy very well and predicted that they would give me this opportunity to let years of nonsense come out at once.
You will notice I don't hesitate to call these people enemies, and I'm sure that many readers of this post will be horrified by that. Well, if a cunning Fate has drawn you to my blog to expose you to a world view which you find shocking, I am delighted to be the agent of it. In fact one of the markers of a magical world view is that by placing us in difficult initiatory positions, we are made free of our existing baggage to move on to what comes next, and my arrival at my own position has been wrought by trauma over a period of years.
My position is home spun, I do not claim to represent any tradition, but here it is. I don't feel the need to love you. We are both here as part of our world's relentless evolution. I have my stuff to do and so do you. If I feel obliged to give you a good hard slap, then I'm actually helping both of us towards the future. This world view is actually about as pagan as you can get,  because it completely avoids the difficulties raised in monotheism by the goodness of God and the paradoxical presence of evil.
Of course magically all things are connected but I reserve the right to cut away at that damn verruca which insists on hanging on. And it has been incredibly liberating for me to own the simple fact that there will always be people in my life whose presence will be toxic. Freed of any obligation to understand/love/forgive them I am free to set my own priorities. It also allows me the space and freedom granted by defining some people permanently as enemies: I will usually have attempted to engage with them and it will have failed.
I am also free to see the universe's gift as an opportunity. My enemies can complain about me all they like, it just creates an opportunity to create an even bigger showdown.
I saw one of my enemies the other day. I actually didn't realise she was behind me as I was laughing and joking with a colleague. I spotted her and greeted her warmly. She looked nervous and embarrassed  rather than pissed off that I remain unbowed. This didn't make sense to her at all, but I'm fairly sure wasn't the effect she'd intended at all.

The Universe's Gift

Regular readers will recall how last year I placed Zippy my 'manager' under the judgement of the Goddess. You can read about it in this post. I have wound up being the agent of this judgement, as is usually the case.
The gift of the universe to me is that I have been moved to a part of our organisation which works closely with the police, which is pretty much a wet dream of a job for me. This comes close on the heels of having a week at home at the organisation's expense because of the difficulties sorting this out. Zippy's boss is furious, and not with me, in fact she commented on how easy to deal with i am. My union rep thinks one of my colleagues has had a final warning and has only not been dismissed because Zippy has never managed her. My rep also implied that I can't expect the big boss actually to say that my 'manager' is a tw*t. I don't need to, I said, I can see it in Zippy's face.
The 'team' i work in is disintegrating quite quickly. People have left, others haven't started, Zippy's off sick.
The retaliation has started. The one who got the warning has gone round telling people I've made things up about her. That's right, cause trouble for me, I always have more info than anyone else and whatever they try to do - Zippy's not managed me either so there's a limit to what can happen. The contents of my statement has got back to me and it should have been confidential. This is the point at which it really falls apart - would you like to give me an opportunity to roll it back at you?

Today's Wander

My work life continues unsettled for the present - I shall anyway be away from Zippy for some time,  which is a great relief. Zippy's boss is perhaps fortunate that I've taken a liking to her, since she is seeing me at my most charming, but I think is slightly unnerved by the way I keep telling her what's going to happen next then it does!
Anyway in the midst of this I went the rounds today. Starting off in the Chinese quarter I went as far as the gun quarter and took in part of the jewellery quarter. To me these wanders are an essential part of witching, since hedgewitchery is dependent on the witch's. relationship with the hedge.
I have become interested recently in the phenomenon of abandoned clothing in the street. Unfortunately I didn't have my phone with me the day I saw a whole suit of mens evening dress abandoned, including shirt and shoes, neatly folded up, on Smallbrook Queensway, which was the occasion which got me interested. I just can't think of the circumstances which would lead up to that. Of course most clothes abandonments are more easily explained by things being dropped, and so on. I plan a post on that at some point,  but it's given me an interest in the stories which can be told by what is left around.

I can only assume that a printer and an office chair had a violent confrontation in the Bath Street subway before what was left of the chair rolled off leaving the printer in pieces.

The tiny remaining traffic island outside St Chad's cathedral seems a bizarre place to engage in - presumably - solvent sniffing to such an extent.

No, I don't know.

Why witches require secrecy

I had another meeting with my 'manager's' manager today. I have been sworn to secrecy under the penalty of having my throat cut across, my tongue torn out by its roots, and my body buried in the rough sands of the sea, so I am therefore musing on witchy secrecy.
I'm going to start by revealing the biggest secret of magic, right now for free,  which is that there isn't a single actual secret in the entire universe. The whole point of magic is that everything is connected, therefore the sorcerer can never really be kept out of anything.
The act of making something apparently secret functions as a sort of competency test to separate the men from the boys. I will know your worth as a magician by whether you can know the secret: in fact this is built into some of the initiatory traditions as the tradition of the initiate being required to repeat a part of the tradition which he has not been taught.
On the other hand the people who witter on about oath-bound secrets don't know this and are plainly not very good at magic.
Image source: http://www.timeslive.co.za/politics/2011/09/16/journalists-declaration-opposes-secrecy-bill

Urban Grimoire: A Spell to Pull on Grindr

I have been bemoaning the nature of dating apps with my straight female friends. They tend to use Badoo and I'm using Grindr. Honestly, I wonder how I've managed to have as much sex in my time as I have - it certainly wasn't through social media,  and I've also made the mistake of using a screen shot from the film Performance as my profile pic. Nobody in this city seems to have heard of Mick Jagger...
Anyway I've been inspired by my need for a new duvet cover to cast a spell using the law of attraction. It's very easy,  since there are a lot of duvet covers in the shops at the moment which show cityscapes of many skyscrapers. And we all know what they represent - if you're a straight man or lesbian who isn't looking for sex with a man, well, you'll just have to make up your own spell.
It's very simple. Make the bed with intent, get in, log on, and off you go...

Witches' Hymn Book: Let the Bodies Hit the Floor

A friend sometimes makes fun of my taste in music: 'you and your pagan chanting, ' she says. Just because I once had We All Come From the Goddess as a ringtone (it was tongue in cheek). Anyway this is the ritual music for today. I am the magic,  and I am the music.

45,000 page views guest post by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, SJ

I wasn't going to have one of these 'guest posts', which for the benefit of the uninitiated are usually by someone fictional or dead, at this point. However,  rather than wait for the 50,000 page views mark I will leap in since something perfect has come up. Not many witchcraft blogs can surely have guest posts by dead Jesuits, but de Chardin had the highest compliment I can imagine paid hI'm by the Roman church :
' Admonition
'"Several works of Fr. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, some of which were posthumously published, are being edited and are gaining a good deal of success.
'"Prescinding from a judgement about those points that concern the positive sciences, it is sufficiently clear that the above-mentioned works abound in such ambiguities and indeed even serious errors, as to offend Catholic doctrine.
'"For this reason, the most eminent and most revered Fathers of the Holy Office exhort all Ordinaries as well as the superiors of Religious institutes, rectors of seminaries and presidents of universities, effectively to protect the minds, particularly of the youth, against the dangers presented by the works of Fr. Teilhard de Chardin and of his followers.
'"Given at Rome, from the palace of the Holy Office, on the thirtieth day of June, 1962.
'Sebastianus Masala, Notarius"
( http://www.catholicculture.org/culture/library/view.cfm?id=3160&CFID=123131122&CFTOKEN=66204630)
Of course one can see why he was not considered suitable food for the faithful,  since his ideas in the quote below seem to me to embody much magical theory,  and to veer more towards Paganism than Christianity:
' Where are the roots of our being? In the first place they plunge back and down into the unfathomable past. How great is the mystery of the first cells which were one day animated by the breath of our souls ! How impossible to decipher the welding of successive influences in which we are for ever incorporated! In each one of us, through matter, the whole history of the world is in part reflected. And however autonomous our soul, it is indebted to an inheritance worked upon from all sides — before ever it came into being — by the totality of the energies of the earth: it meets and rejoins life at a determined level. Then, hardly has it entered actively into the universe at that particular point than it feels, in its turn, besieged and penetrated by the flow of cosmic influences which have to be ordered and assimilated. Let us look around us : the waves come from all sides and from the farthest horizon. Through every cleft the world we perceive floods us with its riches — food for the body, nourishment for the eyes, harmony of sounds and fullness of the heart, unknown phenomena and new truths, all these treasures, all these stimuli, all these calls, coming to us from the four corners of the world, cross our conscious- ness at every moment. What is their role within us ? What will their effect be, even if we welcome them passively or indistinctly, like bad workmen ? They will merge into the most intimate life of our soul and either develop it or poison it. We only have to look at ourselves for one moment to realise this, and either feel delight or anxiety. If even the most humble and most material of our foods is capable of deeply influencing our most spiritual faculties, what can be said of the infinitely more penetrating energies conveyed to us by the music of tones, of notes, of words, of ideas ? We have not, in us, a body which takes its nourishment 6o THE DIVINE MILIEU independently of our soul. Everything that the body has admitted and has begun to transform must be transfigured by the soul in its turn. The soul does this, no doubt, in its own way and with its own dignity. But it cannot escape from this universal contact nor from that unremitting labour. And that is how the characteristic power of under- standing and loving, which will form its immaterial individuality, is gradually perfected in it for its own good and at its own risk. We hardly know in what proportions and under what guise our natural faculties will pass over into the final act of the vision of God. But it can hardly be doubted that, with God's help, it is here below that we give ourselves the eyes and the heart which a final transfiguration will make the organs of a power of adoration, and of a capacity for beatification, particular to each individual man and woman among us.'
Source: https://archive.org/stream/TheDivineMilieu/The_Divine_Milieu_djvu.txt pp. 59 - 60.

Don't you ever get tired?

- That was the question one of my colleagues asked me yesterday morning, as she commented on my battle with our manager, which of course is only personal in the sense I've had enough. Of course I knew the answer to the question at once, but had to give her the edited version,  which is that doing what is right is the entire purpose of my life and that I couldn't live with myself if I didn't do it.
Naturally I couldn't tell her the whole story which is that of course I personally get tired of dealing with nonsense. I didn't tell her that if I went to live on a desert island, some foolishness would find its way to me to be shaken up, because that is what I do and I attract nonsense. I didn't tell her that I'm in a place where I can't go back ; if I didn't pursue these things would be a violation. I also couldn't tell her that I'm - as it were - consecrated to this sort of work.
And most of all I couldn't tell her the source of this consecration and the energy I have to pursue these things. How do you explain that it is a reality for you that the magic will always be there when you need it? How do you explain that one myth of your world-view is of the oppressed gathering in the forest once a month and being taught witchcraft by the living avatar of godhead and that this power is always available?  How do you explain the trials and ecstasy of the witch to a cowan?
You can't, I suppose, although there are always those with eyes to see... And so the witch carries on, and in fact carries on through incarnations and centuries. And this will continue, until every last one of the oppressors is dead.
Image source: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Prix_de_Triathlon#