“Infernal demons and spirits of this world, by the grace with which you obey God and by the same Source from whence we all descend, and by the intercession and protection of Saint Cyprian of Antioch, look after us kindly and without malice, refrain from causing us harm or misfortune, and help us achieve our fate as man becoming God as God became Man in Jesus Christ. Amen. ++++”
— Excerpt from Sorcerer’s Supplication by
Sam Block (a.k.a., Polyphanes)
A new blog post on Jason Miller’s Strategic Sorcery site.
St Cyprian is just as much the Christian Bishop as he is the Wizard, and as such walks the paths between Heaven and Hell, Pagan and Christian, Holiness and Diablerie. Right now, I can’t address any magic or wisdom associated with Christianity without first acknowledging how the harm caused and evil done in the name of Christ seems to be accelerating. This effects everyone, but is of particular concern to those that these Christians have deemed enemies. LGBT communities, secularists, atheists, and of course those who practice any form of Magic or Witchcraft.
…
This year, if you do a Novena to St Cyprian, please accompany it with meaningful action against the growing Toxic Christianity or in support of its Victims.
The post also includes the following
A Sorcerer’s Prayer to St. Cyprian
A Prayer Against Those Who Do Evil In Christ’s Name
Today is the feast day for Saint Cyprian of Antioch. Let us celebrate by laying out offerings of unleavened bread, honey, and wine in honor of this Saint and Sorcerer.
In the name of the great and mighty power of God I invoke the sublime influence of St. Cyprian, in Christ Jesus. I ask that you be my mentor and my master by virtue of the grace bestowed upon you by God omnipotent who was, who is, and who will ever be.
You learned to control storms on Mt Olympus, the casting of enchantment and illusion in Argos, the mysteries of the witches craft at Taurapolis, necromancy among the graves of Sparta, and incantations in Memphis. Finally in Antioch, drawn by power, you found grace of Christ.
Oh Holy Cyprian, you who equally partakes of the Mass and the Sabbat, bless my efforts to follow you in your path. You who commingled with angels, devils, and earthly spirits, grant the power to command the spirits as you did, and as Solomon and Manasses did before you.
I thank you Lord for the many gifts of nature and grace with which you enriched the spiritual treasure house of your most faithful servant St. Cyprian. I thank you, my protector, for the special favors I have received by your powerful intercession.
Oh Cyprian Holy Thaumaturge : Saint and Sorcerer, Martyr and Magus, bless me. Take my prayers and spells and make them your own. When the Lord hears them he will not ignore them, they will cease to be my words, but yours.
Amen
The above Sorcerer’s Prayer to St. Cyprian comes from a post on Jason Millar’s blog titled, [The Call of St. Cyprian].
Unless your spellcasting paradigm is literally “what I feel in the moment is the act of magic,” you don’t have to feel anything during spellwork for the spell to be successful.
For many spellcasting paradigms, this is like saying it’s impossible to bake a cake unless you experience the metaphysical energies of the kitchen.
I can’t tell you how happy it makes me when one of y'all messages me like: “I tried something you posted about and it worked. My life is better for it. Now I have a new job/more money/a hot partner/a rare book or treasure/etcetera”. Those of you who put the work in to make your lives more enriching are actually validating the blood, sweat, and tears of goetic magicians that have gone before you. Please go out and dominate your own lives. The world is becoming increasingly worse, and rapidly at that. Cultivating magic is more than simply an aesthetic–it is becoming a crucial survival skill. There is nothing keeping you from the things you want when magic is involved.
There’s too many people out there that abstract this process, into something like enlightenment, or “being a good person”, or some vague bullshittery. Certainly if you want to cultivate your spirituality and personal ethics do so. But magic, ultimately, is about surviving and thriving. Haitian slaves used magic to kill their slavers. Slavic magicians seriously carried the weight of their town’s farmland on their shoulders. More than one woman has used magic to kill their rapist. Families on the verge of starvation and dehydration made water spring from the ground in their most terrifying hour. This is the spirit of true magic.
And your ancestors would concur. To resist being a victim of circumstance, to resist death? This is magic.
My copy of David Rankine’s The Grimoire Encyclopaedia (sic) from Hadean Press arrived today - both volumes. I knew they were going to be big … but 👀 I was not prepared 📚🤣
Please know I’m not trying to make any grand absolute statements with this post; I’m simply thinking out loud, as it were.
Some recent posts about components (both [physical] and [not]), as well as thoughts triggered through reading mountainmanhealing‘s ongoing [Folk Magic 365] series, have been making me contemplate the nature of components used in various magickal workings. Sometimes, depending on the specific working or the specific tradition it’s being worked in, there are items, tools, or reagents that are interchangeable, and some that aren’t.
I started thinking about things within my own tradition of magick, and why some things I seem to instinctively “know” are specifically necessary, and why some things are okay to swap out for stand-ins. In these self-examinations, there were three broad categories into which I noticed things falling:
Ornamental Aesthetics
Symbolic Iconography
Literal Representation
After the cut, I try to explain what I mean by each of these in a little more detail. Again, I’m not trying to say this is, unequivocally, How Things Are™; I’m just sharing some observations I’ve made through the examination of my own practice :)
(removing the “read more” tag in this reposting, in an effort to keep the information together and better differentiate this new reposting from the original where the “keep reading” link will no longer work. .:PG:.)
Ornamental Aesthetics
These are the things whose primary purpose in the ritual or spell is decorative, or simply to help put you in the proper state of mind. They don’t directly add to the power of your magick, nor do they directly influence the outcome of the working. This is not to suggest such trappings are not important, just that their importance is primarily psychological - they serve as subconscious triggers to help get you into a desired state of mind. But beyond that, their inclusion or exclusion has no direct impact on the working itself.
An example of this is Ceremonial Dress. The wearing of specific, magickal use only, clothing is a subconscious, psychological, trigger to help change your perspective - The outside influences the inside, and by having specific clothing you only wear for magickal workings, by putting it on you trigger an automatic shifting of gears in your mind. The clothes themselves add nothing to the magick; they are ornamental, and the working can be completed just as well without them.
Symbolic Iconography
These are items and components that are necessary for the success of the working, but whose magickal significance is purely (or at least, mostly) symbolic, thematic, or correspondence based. Things falling into this category represent an idea, theme, or power-contribution integral to the working, but could be swapped out for something else that meets the same symbolic requirements.
Examples of this are … well, pretty much the bulk of the material components of spell work I think. This is how correspondence tables are formed, and how many tools obtain their ritual value.
Literal Representation
Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, and sometimes an item or component being called for is important because of what it is, not because of what correspondence it holds. If things in this category are requisite for the working, they are non-negotiable precisely because of what they are and/or the place/significance they hold within a tradition.
An example of this is would be a fumigation a spiritual or ethereal entity has specifically called out as being pleasing to them. They may like it because of the way it smells, or the way it makes them feel, but it is that specific fumigation which they’ve stated is their “favorite” (for lack of a better term). Using something else would not be appropriate, because this is personal and meaningful for them in a way completely separate from any correspondences we’ve attached to it.
I think an important idea to call out is how things that are Literal Representations can sometimes, as a direct result of that literal application, take on Symbolic Iconography for themes associated with its corresponding Literal Representation. When this happens, it becomes even more important that the role of the item in your current working is clearly understood: are you using the item in a context that fits with its literal application, or are you using the item solely for it’s symbolic role?
For example, in Solomonic Magick hyssop is an important item in cleansing and purification your “temple areas” as a Literal Representation because it was specifically called out by God for that purpose. However, because of the long-standing literal application of hyssop with cleansing and purifying, it grew to also take on a role of the Symbolic Iconography of purification. So now, you see hyssop being used in a multitude of ways where themes of purification are being tapped. In some Solomonic Magick cases, it would be perfectly acceptable to swap out hyssop for another purification-themed component, but in other cases it would not. This is why I have been having such an [intense dilemma] over learning modern-hyssop may not really be biblical-hyssop.
At any rate… I think this whole thought deconstruction process has made me appreciate the nuances of magick even more, and has encouraged me to have an even stronger relationship with the tools of my trade - by getting to know them better, I can actually get to know my own magick better :)
When analyzing the work of others, and even your own work, it becomes very important to understand what classifications the components fall into. If you don’t have easy access to a particular herb or mineral what other things you’re able to successfully substitute in will be dependent on where the original component fell on this scale.
Was that herb or mineral being used solely due to its correspondence traits?
Was it a single trait being harnessed, or was that component acting as a binding agent to link influences from other components?
Does that component have cultural significance (within the context of the spell/ritual) above and beyond it’s general correspondence traits?
Is it uniquely important to this context in its own right?
That last one is the most difficult to substitute for. If you identify something as playing a Literal Representation role in the spell/ritual, you may want to find a different spell/ritual - it will probably take you less time to find a different working that fits than it would to find an acceptable substitute for a Literal Representation component.
Since I just referenced this post in [a comment on another post] on a similar topic, I figured I would revolve this 🤓
Potentially you gotta stop making all those substitutions to the spells, witch bestie.
If you’re trying to learn magic and have chosen to do so through other people’s published instructional manuals, and the magic isn’t working, consider asking yourself if you are actually following the rituals provided.
I’ve been speaking with multiple people lately who are all struggling with the same thing, so perhaps a post on this topic is germane.
Unless you understand the tradition you’re working with and why certain things have certain meanings, you probably do not have the background required to make effective substitutions.
Working within someone else’s established tradition is not the same as working within your personal eclectic path.
Imagine you go into a working group which is super into bioregional practice and they’ve developed elaborate rituals which always work for them.
They give you a purification ritual which calls for a red apple, wild-harvested cotton, and local mulberries to be worked over during a full moon.
They do not tell you why each of these things is included. They just give you the list.
We’re going to substitute a store-bought cotton ball, obviously, and what to do about the mulberries? We can google “mulberry correspondences,” find out they’re related to “healing” which is the closest thing we can figure has anything to do with a purification ritual, then pretty much figure that since chamomile is associated with sleep and purification, and sleep is a Lunar thing, right, that we can just use a sleepytime chamomile tea bag, and there you have it!
What the working group has failed to tell you is that this entire ritual is based on local mythology where the cotton wight fell in love with the mulberry dryad and they got married under the full moon by sharing an apple, and the entire ritual isn’t based on sympathetic container magic, but is a heirophany which recreates the marriage of local sacred spirits, each of whom has sworn to heal and purify those who honor their love.
A heck of a lot of witchcraft authors do not break down why every single step is taken.
And if you apply contemporary witch-lite logic to everything (“cotton is white so I’m going to relate that to color correspondences and substitute a white candle for purity”), you can end up immediately canceling out a spell.
Not understanding or connecting with certain spell/ritual steps is not a good reason to change them.
You had mulberries once as a kid and they gave you stomach cramps and now you personally associate them with hexing and sickness, so even though there is a ripe mulberry tree outside, you are going to go get a container of blackberries instead, which you personally associate with purification, and -
(You get the drift)
The spell calls for making a paper box, within which you hide the wild cotton and mulberry. Then, at a crossroads at the full moon, you unfold the box to reveal its contents, and offer an apple to the correspondences.
Which would mean we’d have to learn how to make a paper box (fun!) but also like, why this unfolding thing? Nothing I’ve read so far in my witchcraft books has explained the magical meaning behind opening a paper box. This is basically a container spell, right? I’ll just use a glass jar.
(The plant spirits who informed the local coven about this spellwork specified an opaque, degradable container)
If you’re using other people’s work, you’re more or less sacrificing yourself to the reality that they probably are not explaining everything to you, and that your assumptions about what makes that magic tick could be so far off base that even your most educated guesses will fall short.
Yeah, using other people’s traditions can mean you don’t have what’s required to do everything, and that’s kind of just the way it is.
I’m not trying to be Mr. Just Go And Buy Stuff You Moneybags, but I guess I am being Mr. If You Can’t Do It Then You Can’t Do it.
And no, I’m not saying that it’s impossible to figure out substitutions.
I’m specifically referring to a situation where a practitioner is trying to figure out magic, hasn’t been able to make strides, and then it turns out they’ve been radically modifying and altering spells from specific traditions to a point where the spell is obviously functionally DOA.
At one point I was learning some slightly advanced bit of coding. I downloaded a set of files from a code library and installed them on my website.
The thing was, at that point in my education, I had enough experience to basically understand what was going on with each file. So, I edited them as I went, modifying them to my custom specifications.
Wouldn’t you know it! When I launched the code it was broken. DOA, if you will.
I went back to the code library, and the top comment was,
INSTALL THE FILES AND MAKE SURE THEY WORK BEFORE YOU TRY TO CHANGE THEM. Everyone keeps changing things before they even test launch it and then they come back here and complain that the code is broken. IT ISN’T BROKEN.
I feel very similarly. I wrote a post a while ago titled [Musings on Components] where I explained my feelings about how I see things as (usually) falling into one of three categories: Ornamental Aesthetics, Symbolic Iconography, or Literal Representation. In which category something falls will determine the effort needed to find a substitute.
