Patreon Preview: Astrological Almanac

September 2, 2023September 2, 2023 ~ Salt ~ Leave a comment

Greetings, all! Ever since we released our podcast and its Patreon, a staple offering I’ve been making available to our Patrons has been the monthly Astrological Almanac & Ephemeris. It’s been a true pleasure seeing everyone’s responses to it, and how creative many of our Patrons have been with their applications of the Almanac to their own practices.

Now that it’s September, I wanted to release last month’s issue to the blog, so that our beloved readers and listeners alike can get a feel for what this project actually is and entails. We’ve received many e-mails inquiring about this offering, so without further ado, here’s the August 2023 issue as it appeared on our Patreon:

august-2023-almanac Download

This monthly e-zine is meant to accommodate those who have interest in astrology, as well as practitioners of folk magic, traditional Western and Galenic medicine, gardeners, farmers, and anyone else with a mind for the stars and the patterns of the sky on their craft. Each issue includes a number of different subjects, spanning electional astrology, articles on particular trees and herbs, monthly prognostications for particular horoscopic signs, astro-meteorology (or weather) prediction, as well as a calendar featuring daily Psalms and Saints for the particular days of the month to help you in consolidating your ritual calendars. In addition to all this, we also include an Ephemeris, giving the positions of the planets for each day of the month. Finally, we have the Voice of the Spirits, a monthly report presenting useful advice for those amongst our readers taken directly from a spirit-informed divinatory oracle on behalf of our Patrons.

Whether you want to look at the best day for a ritual purification, exorcism, what day would be best to use herbs belonging to Venus, or when the best time to administer a herbal treatment is, our monthly almanac aims to provide useful and condensed, immediately actionable advice on approaching all these topics and more. If you’d like to subscribe for access to the almanac as well as numerous other perks related to our podcast, myself and my co-authors and hosts would be honoured to have you at our Patreon. Our one (and only!) tier grants you access to our monthly magic Q&As, the ability to suggest episode topics, first dibs on new offerings at the website, and our show notes.

Thank you all so much for your continued support of our podcast, and stay tuned for new offerings and charms we’ve been hard at work on!

Podcast: The Frightful Howls You May Hear!

April 30, 2023June 11, 2023 ~ Sfinga ~ Leave a comment

Happy Walpurgisnacht! The three of us at With Cunning & Command have been working on a secret project we’ve waited for this very witch’s night to finally release out into the darksome wilderness of the hunt: our blog’s brand new companion podcast! The Frightful Howls You May Hear, whose title is an homage to the Grand Grimoire, is a bi-weekly podcast about all manner of magic, occultism, and folklore, from learned traditions of grimoires and astrology to the folkways of traditional witchcraft and herbalism around the globe. Finally putting the voices to our psuedonyms, the three of us will be uploading a new episode every two weeks, ranging from investigative deep-dives into an area of magical and folkloric research to workshopping sorcery, scrying, mediumship, and all sorts of actionable pursuits.

One of our major goals for this podcast, as we go into in our introductory episode, is to put out more content in a more casual manner. We’ve developed a particular tone in our writings on this blog which, while being authentic to our writing styles, is very much a product of both the perfectionism with which we approach what we share, as well as the constraints of privacy and secrecy enforced by our spirits and traditions. As such, what we do write on and explore here are the sorcerous results, field experiments, and magico-religious musings we can reveal, being only a small slice of what we actually get up to on a regular basis. With the podcast, we not only hope to discuss a bit more casually some of our adventures and experiments, but also connect with our beloved readers on a more personable level. We are so continually humbled by all the e-mails our readers send in, reports of your own attempts at some of the grimoiric and folk magical techniques we’ve discussed, and all the love and excitement you’ve shown our talismans, oils, readings, and other product launches (many more of these coming in the future!). The Frightful Howls is both a labour of love and a show of appreciation for your thoughtful engagement, and we hope to be able to learn together with you all on many more folkloric and sorcerous topics as we explore them in a far more casual, light-hearted setting.

We have one (and a half!) new episodes uploaded already:

Episode 0: On the Eve of the Great Enterprise: A short introduction to the podcast, what our plans are, and what to look forward to.

Episode 1: Toadmen, Horse Jading, and Leapers Between: An exploration of the toad bone rite, horse jading, toadmanry, self-initiations into witchcraft, and the Society of the Horseman’s Grip and Word. Lots of memes and laughs are had, Key wrestles with his past Chumbley phase, Salt delights us with his accents, and I lead the charge on the research while somehow bringing it all back to dragons once again.

If you’d like to give it a listen, head on over to the podcast site or our own blog’s page to see the new episodes. If you’d like to help us further expand the podcast, fund bonus episodes between weeks (available to all), and get access to some cool bonuses, please consider checking out our Patreon! By subscribing to our one (and only!) tier, you get access to our show notes and citations, exclusive monthly Q&As, Salt’s monthly astrological almanac, our herbal lore and magic of the month, and the ability to suggest and vote on future episode topics. Every patron helps us so much and we are so deeply grateful to each and every one of you!

Hail and Welcome

April 30, 2019November 27, 2019 ~ Sfinga ~ 1 Comment

Welcome to With Cunning & Command, a blog about magic, occultism, grimoires, spirit work, folk lore, and esoteric scholarship. We are magicians, karcists, necromancers, and diviners working with diverse Old and New World traditions, grimoires, and spirit courts joined by common goals, loves, and approaches to the hidden. Here, on our new website, we hope to host book reviews, snippets of ritual procedures, reflections on sorcerous practices, and a miscellany of other related writings. Our work is invested in ever furthering the transformation of the magician as a magical being herself, while concurrently deepening levels of spirit communion and mastery using the twin-forked prongs of knowledge and strength, insight and power—with sagacious cunning and authoritative command.

This blog is run by two authors, partners Sfinga and Salt:

Sfinga is a traditional witch, diviner, and spirit-worker from the Balkans. Born in Serbia, her magic is rooted in the oral traditions of zduhać and zmajevit lineages, especially surrounding ingress with dragon (zmaj) spirits. Fascinated with folk magic, Eastern Orthodox Christianity, Old Slavic folklore and mythology, and various ways of working both devils and saints, she strives towards ever refining new cunning with old wisdom. An alumna of many of Jason Miller’s courses, including Strategic Sorcery, Sorcery of Hekate, and Black School of St. Cyprian, she is also trained in rootwork and is an initiate of Quimbanda through Tata Apokan of the Cabula Mavile Kitulu kia Njila. St. Cyprian of Antioch is one of the most significant spiritual allies in her court both within Quimbanda and in her other practices. She can be most easily reached through this blog or her Instagram.

Salt (also known as Khamaiyinepu) is a magician in the vein of early modern English folk and ritual magic practices, ever cultivating relationships with local land wights while contacting angelic and demonic powers through various grimoires. He also practices Faustian magic following the German ritual praxis of the Magia Naturalis et Innaturalis. Passionate about Ancient Egyptian religion and sorcery, he is a fervent reader of all things pertaining to Kemetic ritual practices. A geomancer and student of Traditional Astrology and Scholastic Image Magic, he has recently begun to delve into the various techniques of the Picatrix. He is the author of the Hadean Press pamphlet, The Devil’s Bestiary: The Magpie.

We thank you for stopping by our new corner of the web! We’ll be updating this space with plenty of new posts in the near future, and we hope that you stay with us as we continue to write about our wanderings along the crooked roads.