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With Cunning & Command

With Cunning & Command

Ever Winding Along the Crooked Road

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Categories

  • Book Reviews (3)
  • Divination (2)
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  • Products & Services (28)
  • Sorcery (29)
  • Theory (4)
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@barnowl.key has been working on this episode for some time, being a love letter to his lifelong appreciation for folk magic in Illinois! He also highlights some of the African-American illustrators behind the iconic images and branding of the Valmor Products Co. Srećan Đurđevdan! Freshly baked slava bread, proja sa kajmakom, ajvar, and belmuž for the Holy Horseman clad in red and white. Happy Walpurgisnacht! As @barnowl.key and were recording tomorrow's Q&A episode we couldn't help but get all up in our feelings about how incredible these last three years have been. What a joy and a privilege it is to have such an incredible community of witty, intelligent, dedicated, heartfelt practitioners that keep us inspired, laughing, joyous, and motivated throughout the seasons. Magic is our life and our love, the very core and motivation of so much of what we do and express in this world, and to share its joy and mysteries with so many incredible people, to build community alongside them, to feature the voices and prespectives of dear friends we can confidently vouch for, and to learn from you and all the remarkable insights you share with us in turn is a privilege unlike any other. We do not wish to ever forgo our humour and our natural personalities in order to cultivate a glamour of sophistication and mystique, nor would we ever sacrifice our integrity for engagement and the "demiurge of the algorithm" as we've come to call it. In the spirit of our ancestors and the wisdom and levity they've brought us, we hope to always seek an agglutinating approach, in which all the facets of our work may have a seat at the table, and all of yours are welcome and cherished guests! What an incredible joy it is to have on not only @spiritus_arcanum once more, but also @heart_n_vine_apothecary, two of the most thoughtful and brilliant authors writing about the folk magic of effigies. This was such a fun episode to record, full of tips and tricks on this essential form of image magic and many reflections on the subtler forms of manipulating spirits using a crafted likeness. Come for the witchcraft, stay for the philosophical ruminations on the nature of witch-being! A working of luck, prosperity, and open roads for members of the Esteemed Initiate tier of our P@y🌳🔛 . I gathered a medley of key dirts divined upon ahead of time to create a compass within the crown structure, over which the saint was washed, anointed, perfumed, and placed over, triumphant. Each petitioned name was reduced to ash and added to this compass, along with a powder formula constructed to light the way forward for participants' ancestors and spirits to guide them forward into an accelerated push for fortune in the four cardinal directions. Chalk blessed in a church on St. Expedite's feast last year and scratched into its four walls during mass was used to draw out a Third Pentacle of the Sun during the solar hour of his Sunday feast, with each name of God prayed over and invoked into the consecrated pound cake slices laid over them, topped with my personal St. Expedite HODIE powder and candles anointed with @barnowl.key's Green and Gold oils of St. Expedite. Each of the four pillar candles were also placed over custom petitions, distributing the wealth-drawing and fortune-aggregating energies directly through the horizon's gates. I am thrilled to release my latest batch of charms, born of Balkan folk Orthodox traditions: a set of decoys for warding away illness, envy, malefica, and all manner of ill intent through the auspices of St. Lazarus, enchanted from Lazarus Saturday all the way into Bright Week. "Orthodox home insurance" as it's playfully called: a cross of soot made on the ceiling over the front door of the home, using the blessed flame lit from Holy Saturday church service. Bringing it home is a delicate balance; I use a lantern personally but many will use oil lamps or various containers and shields for the candle. This flame also lights the candles and vigil lamps at the icon corner for Pascha to celebrate the return of the light to the world. We had an incredible time chatting with the ever-illuminating @bloodandspicebush about what it's like to actually live within our traditions, whether embedded in a community, at a distance, or in autodidactic study. Becky's wisdom, eloquence, and heart brought so much warmth to this conversation and we can barely wait to have her on again! It's Lazareva Subota, also known as Lazarica or Vrbica in Serbia specifically. While taking place last week for the Gregorian calendar, for us Orthodox on the Julian this sacred time falls now, being the site of a number of remarkably preserved folk rituals for fertility, purification, and ushering in the resurrection of spring. I obtained my icon of St. Lazarus from the incredible Church of Saint Lazarus in Larnaca, Cyprus, a truly incredible church alleged to be built atop the "second tomb", where Lazarus died for the final time after having lived there for thirty more years. "Gledanje u pasulj," "falanje u grah," "bacanje graha" – Balkan favomancy is known by many names and through myriad cultural forms. Yet as diverse as its approaches, prayers, oral charms, and patrons may be, its predictive power as a method of fortune telling and divination endures across permutations. I have been privileged to have studied with multiple readers from Serbia and Bosnia since my adolescence, and it has been a deep honour to offer this art to hundreds of clients over the years. Divination has been and will continue to always be a lifelong passion and study, with favomancy as its central, stabilizing force of chimney, hearth, and threshold.
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