Tag: voodoo

Artistry in Magick

by Soror Brigantia 739

For many years it’s been my preference to undertake works of magick in a way that is aesthetically pleasing to me. While magic can be done without this and can be done without any magical tools at all, for me nothing beats the sheer joy of creating a piece of spell work that is beautiful, using tools that have been beautifully handcrafted by artisans or crafted by myself. I find that this is particularly effective if I want my heart to sing during the ritual to make use of magical items that do just that.

Having always had a great appreciation of art and spending many a happy afternoon mooching around art galleries, exploring the emotions that the art work invoked in me and how I related with the art, doing the same magically is a logical consequence.

One of my most interesting experiences in a gallery was viewing Van Gogh’s Starry Night in The Museum of Modern Art in New York and being asked by security to move along as I had been staring at the painting for too long. The reason for my length of time at the painting was due to having transported into the painting itself and directly interacting with the night sky in the painting. To me it felt as if I’d been there a few minutes but it was a couple of hours. It was a very confusing experience for my 20 year old self but nonetheless an awesome experience and only increased my love for that particular painting.

My opinion on making magick beautiful has become a tad unpopular as more pragmatic magic-on-the-go systems tend to be popular within chaos magic but I have my reasons for taking the time to make a ritual visually appealing. I have found that the beauty and artistry of some magical paradigms and rituals make a helpful counter to the ugliness that can be seen in the world today. Sadly, I cannot walk through a town centre without seeing perpetrator behaviour, arguments, people who are depressed, anxious or broken due to the pressures of life. I see alcohol and drug abuse and on occasion signs of human trafficking. This is happening within half a mile of where I am currently sitting – or perhaps even closer. It breaks my heart; I have nothing but empathy for all of the tears of Erzulie.

If I can undertake small acts, however small to create an act of beauty in this world then I will, and I will bring that into my magical practice whenever possible. What difference that may make to the world I do not know but as Gandhi said “What you do may be insignificant but it is important that you do it.”

So I have spent some of my time during lockdown doing what a lot of people are doing- making arts and crafts. Some people are making clothes, knitting blankets and doing some awesome embroidery. My crafts are of course of the witch variety and some of these have been inspired by my 2018 visit to New Orleans. People who practice Conjure and Voodoo in New Orleans are experts in making magical objects and know how to do it with beauty and grace.

Inspired by their example I have made magical objects that are physically in the New Orleans style although they would have been magically charged differently, in my own Welsh way. Some of these objects have taken months to make, which is beneficial during these very stressful times. During the making my mind is focused on my statement of intent and not on how stressful my life is being a key worker in a pandemic, so the work has a therapeutic as well as a magical value.

I find that the process of making magic a work of beauty as well as finding the beauty and joy whenever and wherever you can not only counters the ugliness that can also be found in the world but also brings the magician into the place of calm stillness where one is better able to find one’s own practical solutions to the difficulties that we encounter in the world today.

The Art of Chaos

I Believe in Miracles

by Soror Brigantia

Coming out is always a difficult process, whatever it is that you’re coming out as. Going against the expectations of your society, against the pressure of your peers and all expectations that there may be. It’s difficult to admit that there is something about you that is different. It’s especially difficult if what you’re coming out as is not cool, not well thought of and seen mostly as a stupid piece of crap.

I have come out in all sorts of ways over the years and what has been difficult, the most challenging thing to admit to not just to the world and to myself that … my favourite magical paradigm is … disco. Yes, disco. Not heavy metal not black metal, not punk, not dance. Disco!! And I don’t know anyone who would admit to liking this form of art, but go to any night club and see what happens when a disco track is being played. I think I’m not the only not so secret lover of disco. And OK it ain’t Mozart; I see no complex equations within the sounds of the disco notes … but it is the most overwhelmingly optimistic sound I’ve heard and it fills my soul.

And I also like Titania’s Little Book of Spells by the way. Since I’m coming out I may as well say it- the books are furry and pink and purple and I love them and I see nothing wrong in that.

So where did my love of disco emerge? When I did I realise that this was the sound for me? It came about due to my deep love of magick, magick for its own sake, magick for the pure joy of doing it. There are always several layers of statements of intent within my rituals and more often than not hidden in the main statement of intent is a secondary statement of intent. While I call it secondary often it is the most important statement of intent which is “to experience Joy while doing this Ritual.” It’s through this experience of the joy of magick that the disco paradigm emerged and took hold of me.

How it came about is that a group of friends and I regularly meet up to practice magical rituals, to share and swap techniques and we chose to have a number of sessions around certain themes. We could not help but see the overwhelming similarity between the great God Baphomet and John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever. From this we felt that we would do an evening of disco magick and would boogie – boogie – boogie with the gods in good ol’ disco style.

“As above, so below …”

I was working with the voodoo paradigm at the time so I undertook a great work which I called Disco Voodoo, calling upon the Lwa via song, selecting the disco tracks that I felt most summed up the qualities of the spirits. And it rocked!! The voodoo spirits loved the disco music and manifested more strongly than they ever had to me before and I knew I had found my crossroad, my gateway in to the spirits of voodoo.

But why disco? Why did the Lwa respond so effectively to this music? There are many reasons; one reason is that disco music is very much about being alive, and full of metaphors and symbols about the things that we do to create life. The highly sexualised lyrics and rhythm of the music combined with the love of life that only the dead can feel led to a merging of life and death and love and loss into a single paradigm that can be described as Thanateros.

During that temple meeting Disco Voodoo also known as Makossa Voodoo took form and is developing into a complex system of spirits some of African origin some of which are Welsh connected to my local area all of whom are called up by a number of sacred chants from the disco paradigm.