For Casting Out Poison

I thought this might be of use to others, so I'm sharing it here.

The other day I went back to that Otherworldly On Sigils book, expressly looking for one I could use to help protect me from my emotional and psychic vampire mother (she really is just atrocious, trust me; ask me some time about a six week old kitten named Danny. He lived, just, and no thanks to her). But I was a little confused as what exactly to ask for.

That guide of mine then tells me something to dispell illusion and bring clarity would be a good place to start; after all seeing what she's doing when she's doing it has to come before protecting myself from it. So I opened that marvellous Otherworldly book and got this:

The description said, To Cast Out and Neutralize Poison. I was a little taken aback; that's not what I asked for but oh Hel yes that will work. It's a smart book, that On Sigils.

Then further it said: Draw in green ink directly on the skin over the heart; or draw with green ink on paper and wear it against the heart.

It's a little snake behind a drop; you can draw out the snake itself if you like with scales and such. The circle at the end represents the rattle of a rattlesnake and the mouth-end is actually closed, with the fang showing.

I'm pretty sure that somewhere out there I've seen little cylindrical hollow necklaces, for placing tiny rolled-up prayers within; that or I suppose an ordinary locket would work.

I drew it over my heart tonight with green Sharpie (it was what I had, don't judge me); I also traced the shape of it over my water glass and charged it with the ability to expel and neutralize poisons, of the spiritual and emotional kinds.

And not ten minutes after starting that glass of water I felt like I was just starting to come down with something. You know the feeling: a little achy, chest a tiny bit tight, aware of the lymph nodes in my throat.

I don't know if it's anything to do with it, but if it is (getting sick is a way of purging nastiness, I've found) then damn this thing works fast.

Experience

I thought maybe I was misunderstanding the concept of the astral. I had the idea that Things Astral were different from what I'd call Otherworld stuff, like what get called the underworld or the upperworld, at least in The Temple of Shamanic Witchcraft, by Christopher Penczak, the one with the year-and-a-day lesson plan I've been following. He does leave it open, so the reader/student can find their own way without being bound to someone else's version of things. Which is good; we always must make our own maps.

But no, those kidz on Tumblr are calling it all the astral. It threw me for a bit of a loop. Because my experience is so very, very different.

It's true, I come to this shamanish stuff a little late, though not because I am only just starting; rather I've only just been able to put a name to what I've been doing all along. And no, I was never 'called,' that I know of; and no, I don't recall being sick nigh unto death, unless we count something that happened to me when I was an infant. I don't know; maybe that was my 'shaman sickness.'

And true, I'm not getting visions of Tirion upon Túna, or Shangri-la, or the City on the Hill where the angels sing; really it's just little herb gardens tucked in the shadow of the Tree, stone walls that are falling down, a cabin by the side of a lake under a Sun that is always setting.

And no one there has tried to kill me, or eat me, or rip my face off, or even trick me; and no God has called me to His service whether I will or no. Everything and everyone, so far, has been reasonable, and, if not immediately my best friend, not out to get me. Like most people in this corporeal life, I've found.

So I wonder.

I've been thinking about this sort of thing for a good ten or twelve years now, ever since I have been able to See and talk to him, the one I call my daimon, my primary spirit guide I guess you'd call him but really he's so much more. My love, my friend, my, and this is a very ordinary word, but its ordinariness suits: my husband.

I am a curious sort, at least when it comes to self-awareness; and so I have been thinking about the nature of him and the nature of the things I've Seen for that same good dozen years. I've thought about it a lot. Several hundred posts worth of thinking, in another place, over the last five years. One might I suppose say I think about it rather obsessively. It is a mystery, and a beautiful, sublime, liminal one at that. And I'm an artist, and a dreamer and all that, and that sort of thing is of course irresistible, to my type.

But then there's my addiction to Work.

I think it is in part because I grew up with such an unaware family. Between my three immediate family members, my parents and sibling, there are a good five personality disorders. And personality disorders are famous for coming with a profound lack of insight into the condition. In the bad cases (like my father and mother) not only do they think there is of course nothing wrong with how they view the world, they truly believe it is everyone else who is wrong. Yes, the entire world, if it contradicts what they think, is wrong. My father had this to a literally delusional degree.

I think that is what has made me so fanatical about being self-aware. Because I have seen how a lack of self-awareness can harm others. And I won't do that. It is my responsibility to know why I do the things I do, and to face down denial, and to look at the things I don't want to look at.

So I've thought about all this, a lot. I imagine like a lot of people, good sceptical twentieth-century sorts I came in through psychology. I didn't stay there, for long, though I do ultimately think it is speaking of the same thing, the same phenomena, especially Jung, who if you'll remember had his own daimon, though he wasn't in love with old Philemon, was he.

But I think those terms, the psychological ones, do apply, a bit, even if at the same time I think my daimon is something outside of me and not a part of my own personality. The thing is, myth and psychology can be so close. How is a psychological daimon, who bridges the gulf between conscious and unconscious, a whole lot different than a psychopomp, who goes between the world of the living and the dead?

But even besides that, there is this: whatever all this is, and I do think it is another Place outside of me, or I'm coming around to believing it, I can only experience it through the lens of my own psyche. Whatever my third eye is, or whatever kind of eye I am Seeing this stuff with, my own brain must still interpret it. And that colors things.

I am prone to anxiety. It's the post-traumatic stress disorder, the complex kind, from growing up under neglect and abuse. I am much better than I used to be, it is true, and it has taken me a lot of hard work, hard Work, to get here; but I used to jump at the slightest noise, or cringe when anyone raised their voice, even characters on TV, who obviously weren't yelling at me. And yet.

I've never been anything but unafraid in these Other places. Now, probably, I am protected, very protected, by that husband of mine; it is hard to tell, as I think it's pretty subtle. But I've never Seen anything there that wanted to rip my throat out. There are things there, certainly, that are to be approached with respect, like my experience talking to mugwort a few posts down; but that is still no different really than ordinary life, save that I was talking to a plant, of course.

In my dealings with corporeal persons I am probably a bit reserved, quiet; I am by nature a hermit and very much an introvert. I'm a fan of common sense, too, and I think that carries over into the Other places. I do not think I am naive, though I'm only going about this systematically with that year-and-a-day course I'm nearly through with. I also don't think I'm really powerful, or mighty. Things aren't running scared from me. They just aren't there.

I think it comes back to the lens of the psyche. As in so many other parts of our lives, what we see before us is what we have brought with us. I think I am a decent person, and fairly calm, with a good grasp of reality (I feel I should put an asterisk there, because after all I have an Invisible Husband, don't I?). And so that is what I See before me, in the other realm, as well as here, for the most part. Now you don't need to tell me that there are bad people in this world; I do know that first hand, unfortunately, in the persons of my mother and father.

But I wonder how much of this 'the astral is a nasty nasty place and it's all fighting all the time' is because that is what people are expecting to find.

Because I've never seen anything like it. Not yet, anyway. Famous last words, maybe.

Mirror Work

A little more than a month ago Dusken at Adventures on the Dusken Path wrote a very excellent post called Spirits 101: Defense for Spiritwalkers, filled with all kinds of ideas on how to protect yourself and your home from the nasties of the Other worlds. In it, she briefly mentions the idea that mirrors and windows can act as portals to said nasties; and so that got me thinking. If there's one thing this old colonial house has, it's windows (something like thirty of them, but I may be miscounting). And mirrors, too, of course, like most houses, more than a few of them antique.

A couple years ago about this season I was Seeing stuff everywhere. Now, I may have mentioned before that I am an anxious sort; and while I never got the impression that Anyone here was a troublemaker, and while I understand the house is after all more than two hundred and fifty years old and so plenty of other people have lived (and died) here, still, I didn't need to be Seeing things out of the corner of my eye all the time. I know. It's really very pathetic being a witch who spooks easily, and I am duly ashamed. (I told a friend once that I was really easily spooked; she said, Well of course you are you grew up in a haunted house! and I was just like You are not helping.) At the time I did a simple visualization where I imagined a tap on the side of the house, labelled 'ghosts'; I turned the tap righty-tighty to the off position, until it was dry as a bone underneath. That did help. I don't imagine it got rid of Anyone, but at least I didn't have to See them all the damned time.

But even better to keep them out in the first place, I'd think, though, again, I've never got the feel that any of them are harmful (so far). But I liked the idea of keeping the nasties out, just in case.

Though I wanted to use a sigil to ward the windows and mirrors, I'm not the only one who lives here; so I didn't want to put up something that would be visible. So instead this is what I came up with. I'm sharing it here because I thought it was an interesting idea that someone else might want to try.

First I needed a sigil. I'm sure there are protective ones out there I could have looked up, but making or finding them yourself is I think that much more powerful. I've been following along with Christopher Penczak's The Temple of Shamanic Witchcraft this year; in one of the meditations/visions/journeys he guides the reader to their 'inner temple', a sort of central safe place in the Otherworld from where one can go off in many directions; mine, of course, has a library.

So I went to that library (with that husband-guide of mine) and picked out a book from the shelf, titled On Sigils. I opened it up, thinking I would scan the contents and browse through it until I found one that worked; instead when I opened it it was only blank pages. My guide laughed, of course, and told me that wasn't how it worked. He said to form the purpose for the sigil in my mind, and then open the book. Well, that did work. So there, on the page, in response to my mental request for a protective sigil to put on a mirror or window, was this:

You are free, incidentally, to use this yourself if you think it will help you.

It owes a bit to the Icelandic Aegishjalmur, I know; but that's appropriate as that's a protective sign as well. Looking at it I knew that the four arrows represented the four directions; the two horizontal lines above and below. The six middle bits took me a while, as I couldn't make out exactly what was there, but after a time I understood them to be the letters BE GONE.

When I came out of the vision I played with it a bit, trying ordinary Latin-alphabet letters (which looked really dorky), and then some runes spelling it out in English; that looked goofy too. I finally settled on Roman numerals to correspond to the English letters (i.e. II for B, V for E, &c). They ended up looking Norseish anyway. (And funny enough, the XV for the fifteenth letter O ended up looking like an othila, the Elder Futhark O.)

It is written clockwise, deosil; I was thinking at first that it needed to be backwards, because we were talking about mirrors. But then I thought, No, they need to be the right-way round. Because this is how the ritual went:

First of course I drew the sigil on a little piece of paper. Then I lit a bundle of rosemary (which smells lovely and is very good for cleansing and purifying) and held the sigil in the smoke. Then I put it, face down, on the mirror, and blew smoke 'through' the back of it. Face down, because it is intended to be read by Those on the other side of the mirror. Then I put my right hand (I'm right-handed) over it and 'pushed' energy through it, while saying, I cast out and forbid entry to those who wish me harm; I cast out and forbid entry to those who cause me harm, even if they do not intend it; this way is closed to your kind. Be gone!

I got as far as this attic floor; I will have to wait until the person I share the house with is out to do the rest. But I think it already feels better in here.