Being an occultist requires you to dig deep into your darkest places to find the wisdom you are keeping from yourself, buried like a pearl of great price by the gods who believe you’ll never find it.
I didn’t expect that would take the form of me ending up ass-over-teakettle in my storage locker, looking for old documents and needing a Satanist to fish me out.
The treasures sought were old periodicals from grad school and from my time teaching a course on the occult for several years at UW-Milwaukee; the aforementioned Satanist, Asmodeus, is an eager… student? Apprentice? Cosmic nerd? The word hasn’t formed yet, but for sure a magical friend and learner, interested and in all this and kind enough to engage in physical labor he didn’t need to, so I didn’t get eaten alive by my locker, or whatever spooks were in it.
Two bins, still shut, we schlepped up the stairs. We took a break and while I poured ice water, Asmodeus perused my library. The books have always been out; it was the bin contents that I was shaking a bit about. I hadn’t unpacked them in almost 20 years; they were part of the rush move from Milwaukee to Paganistan back in ‘05, packed with the hope that they’d be unpacked and used for another dream occult course I’d teach again — which never happened. The closest I came was speaking of historical mythic anthropomorphism in ancient religions and using Baphomet as the mascot. The tarot artmaking was gone; the dissertation was finished and monographed; then fifteen years of adjunct drudge. And the bins stayed sealed. Well, here they were.
One that I started unpacking contained the entire back issue library of Gnosis magazine. The. Best. Magazine. Ever. Every magician and occultist I knew wailed with despair when it ceased publication in 1999. An off-the-newsstand survey magazine of Western Esoteric traditions with very high editorial standards, this Lumen Foundation publication romped monthly through Kabbalah, Alchemy, Freemasonry, New Age and New Thought, Modern Paganism, Magic, Esoteric Christianity, Sufism, the Left Hand Path… and issues on praxis as well. I drowned in it in grad school — not only was it an anthropologist’s delight, but a reminder that occult traditions were living, vital, and exhilarating to absorb.
And as I unpacked the manila envelopes, each containing an issue, in remarkably mint condition (I’m not loaning them out, don’t ask), that crazy excitement came again. LOOKIT!!… And I was struck by how many of them were post-it noted for my class planning… and the notes had my ex-husband’s handwriting on them… ghosts…
The second bin started out looking like another academic paper hoard, but inside… were old term papers I had evidently kept from a few choice courses. Cultural Anthropology; Phenomenology of Religion; Social Performance Theory; Anthropology of Women; Literature of Ecological Vision; Irish Religion and Folklore. I found a paper on Wicca and Paganism where I was already discussing generational differences in the movement. Found another where I quoted Crowley in the hope of making a connection with Buddhist esotericism. (That was a lunge, admittedly, but I got an A- anyway.) And an essay on the lessons of time and service to the earth, where I epigrammed William Blake’s “Universe in a Grain of Sand” poem; Asmodeus jumped at seeing that, and he said that was his favorite poem of all time.
Wow. Well, this is fun! It’s also clear I was a precocious punk back then.
Along with the reminders of the fire of my research days came memories of the rush move from my ex-husband, of the mean boyfriend that later followed me up here, of the worst time of my running from my toxic family… and of how much I used magic for protection and for help… I found a stack of NRM articles given to me for my dissertation proposal defense by my recently late advisor, Jim, and choked for a minute…
It all was almost too much… I was grateful for Asmodeus’s questions about magical method, of helping make him a bundle amulet, hoodoo-style, for his upcoming job interview, and venting about why occultists always seem to end up buried in nonprofit business meetings. The demon king and I chatted occult lit and winding paths, the things that drew us to what we do now, interrupted only by a text message from my friend Hexane asking if I’d keep a dead rat in my freezer for her. (I’ll explain another time.) He’s being called by a divine dark feminine, he says, he’s looking for signs of who it is. There does seem to be a draw, a collecting of omens, and it’s too soon to be specific, but enough symbolism’s been gathered to know who likely is not calling him… A breath of good air, someone else who is also passionate about this path, and such an easy one to talk to…
We both bemoaned struggling similarly with security and finances, but we both also have Jupiter retrograde in our birth charts. We both have done good works and received good messages from presences in cemeteries. I tossed a tarot spread for him to see what his path would entail… I’m known for being pretty blunt in my client readings, but there was a racket of ghosts in my head that night. Tell him this road is hard. Much will be lost. You know this yourself…
Night approached and he took his leave. I went back up to the old issues and papers, this time alone…
Looking back through all those beautiful issues, I felt that thumping heart in my ribs again, with the remembered believing that with just more digging, with just more work, with just more being in its beauty… that somehow the greatest magic of all would stop eluding me as it has…
And I reread the papers, and the written comments from the instructors. Two mentors, Boatman and Jim, gone before I could thank them. The excited heart gave way unexpectedly to the old panic I was living through then, when I suddenly had to pack and race up here to the Cities, landing in an apartment sight-unseen that my sister found for me, being so broke and so scared — a time and a pile of feelings I wanted to forget and keep buried in the locker…
And I broke. I sobbed like a lost kid. A wash of feelings came flowing out over the paper mess in front of me. Memories of a time when things were still promising and possible, when my mentors were proud, and when my divorce and move under threat of throwout filled the space, and I unraveled like badly braided hair… ghosts of a time I never properly grieved…
When I slept, I dreamed of Boatman, my dear mentor who told me I was a teacher whether I wanted to be or not… and I said to him, I tried. I tried so hard. He reached over and booped me on the forehead with his finger like he used to. We were outside Holton Hall where we shared offices, and he pointed for me to go through the basement tunnel. Back then, I would leave my office after teaching, go down to the tunnel, change out of my “teacher jacket”, and stuff it into a bag so when I came out the other end, I was a student again. This dream, I was motioned to go through the tunnel again… and the dream stopped when I walked down into it…
I woke up emptier, lighter. Something shifted. I put on a white dress and sat on the stoop in the sun for a while. I recalled my reading with my Citadel oracle deck the first time Asmodeus and I met and talked magic. The obvious tropes of Pilgrim and Astronomer, Alchemist and Seeker came up — the puzzler card in my reading was the Forgotten: the image was an earth-embedded eye staring up at a lost ghost floating above, unknown by the ground — and I was stymied at the time what it meant. It’s clearer now.
Some demons are sent to you; some are summoned; some hide in your bones and heart until you accept that they are a part of you, just like the monk in the cave who prepares them tea. Only then do you have any business thinking about helping to guide spiritual seekers…
Rose in the Retort 