Tag: set

Apollonius of Tyana’s Old Serving Woman: PGM XI.a 1–40 [A Second Experiment]

~ Sfinga ~ Leave a comment

Over a year ago, Key wrote an excellent reflection on his experiences performing PGM XI.a 1–40: a conjuration of a familiar spirit that serves the household, captioned as “Apollonius of Tyana’s Old Serving Woman” in the Betz PGM collection. The three of us, along with and a few friends interested in the ritual, pitched in to procure a donkey’s skull and the blood of a black dog—the necessary materia for the consecration of the phylactery that serves to conjure the goddess Nephthys, so that she may grant the titular paredros spirit of the rite. Shortly after obtaining his own familiar, as well as additional ones for friends who happened to be visiting him at the time, Key shipped the skull along to Salt and I’s home, ready for the next installment for “The Sisterhood of the Travelling Donkey”. Our plan was to continue sending the skull around, each household obtaining their tooth (the vessel for the paredros), until it eventually made its way back to us to be permanently enshrined by the hearth at our combined home.

Since the skull’s arrival at our doorstep, Salt and I came to increasingly notice its surging awareness. While it is the teeth obtained from the old woman and the donkey that are truly the vessels and proofs of pact, the phylactery of the skull had clearly come to be endowed with its own numinous presence and alignment throughout its repeated use. Even without the conjuration being actively performed—and in the case of its use, even after the dismissal of the goddess—it was clear that some portion of Nephthys’ power remained within the skull, and that this was a holy object. When not in use, we kept it veiled in linen, treating it with the utmost respect as befitted an image of the mighty queen and her consort, the mighty lord Set. Salt and I specifically have, since before we even met and became a couple, long held fast a religious devotion to various Netjeru (Ancient Egyptian divinities), and so the phylactery had an additional layer of significance for us in our private observances.

The skull atop its linen veil by the hearth.

Over the year, we’ve hosted many friends who have visited for various lengths of time to hang out, cook incredible meals, and get up to plenty of sorcerous adventures. In most cases, we actually got up to so many different projects that I had to draft an entire Google doc itinerary of planetary hours, elections, and roadmaps for where we’d go to gather what materia and what we had to enchant for at which time. In each moment, we intentionally tried to carve out a time to allow them to have their own midnight jaunt with the phylactery, especially as these were the very same folks who helped pitch in for its obtainment from the beginning. Yet an omen always arose for why it was not yet appropriate, even if temporally it would have been convenient for us all (shipping a donkey skull around is not fun!). In one case, we were about 20 minutes to the midnight hour, all dressed up with the wrapped skull in an IKEA tote, ritual printed off and candles for illumination at the ready, when I suddenly felt a distinct and knowing pang that led me to consult one of my closest spirits with their divinatory oracle about the matter, only to be told to call the rite off. The messages varied in each instance. Sometimes it was that our comportment was not sufficiently pure, in that even if we had all showered and donned clean clothes, something about our moods, excitement, earlier festivities of partying and revelry, or even the stench of the witchcraft we had been engaging in lingered still, rendering conjuring the goddess inappropriate. In other cases, the reasoning was even more nebulous, yet still felt by all. There was never any disappointment with regards to the timing—all present agreed something was “off” and that the skull phylactery would not consent to us proceeding with the ritual.

Naturally, I decided it would be better to ship it along immediately to keep the chain going, yet even this was interrupted. I could not shake that I should not yet part with the skull, and that there was still something left to do, or at the very least that it required some fulfillment still before being sent away on its long journey around and then back to us. Divination continued to advise for patience, as well as the completion of oaths already undertaken. I meditated for some time on what this may be, and continued to feel a nagging impulse that something about this entire scheme had to do with Salt in particular. Yet, the tooth we procured is to be shared between us, for our good lady paredros serves our combined household in which we live. We knew from the beginning that he would not be soliciting another, so what exactly was missing?

The answer came to us in vision in a truly illuminating and instructive fashion. Some time ago, Salt decided that he should procure a familiar from this ritual for his mother back in England and send her the tooth to assist her. By rank, she had to be next in line before any other. In other words, while sometimes the “vibe” was genuinely too off to proceed with the purity requirements of the ritual, the reason why we kept feeling as if we could not ship the skull yet to its next destination regardless was this essential matter in household authority. Before the goddess’ phylactery could impart its next boon, its blessing must first be addressed to the very person who kept Salt’s house throughout his childhood.

With this complete, the skull is now free to travel to its next keeper, passing all the necessary checks in omens and auguries. In addition to sharing our own experiences with the ritual (and again affirm its efficacy and usefulness to those discerning karcists interested in attempting it themselves), we wanted to give an example report of how the nature of the rite itself is imprinted in the very ethics of how it is conducted. If an agreement has been made to share a skull between sorcerers, and one of its intended beneficiaries is one of their mothers, then by rank she must inherently go immediately. Since the skull is ultimately going to remain with us once it has completed its circuit, Salt and I were planning on carrying out this additional rite then and giving it to her in person when we next visited, but the phylactery’s numinous awareness was adamant that the essential order of the proceedings must honour her first. As the paredros granted participates in the domestic mysteries, it is only right to address first whomever has played an essential role in one’s own life in such a manner, if they themselves are one of the intended recipients of the rite, regardless of the temporal proceedings of our visitations.

Without further ado, below you’ll find the accounts of what our individual experiences of performing the rite are—myself and Salt together for our own assistant spirit, and Salt’s when he conducted this another time.

When the night came for Salt and I to accomplish this undertaking, we first began by ensuring we were clean, freshly showered, and wearing new clothes. I printed off a copy of the ritual as it appears in Betz from the composite screenshot in Key’s post and prepared some candles and a candle holder so that we would have the light necessary to read it in the dark. With the skull wrapped tight in hand, we made our way to the middle of a three way crossroads, unveiled the donkey at the center of the fork, and lit the candle. I had my left foot over the skull as instructed, while Salt held onto me with the same glyphs beneath him.

Key’s experience with the ritual matched the level of intense manifestations and physical omens I witnessed in my own working of PGM IV. 3086–3124: The Oracle of Kronos. While none of us are strangers to those kinds of manifestations across our individual and shared traditions, they never cease to fill us with wonder and awe when they do occur. From the beginning of the first recitation of the formula, Salt and I immediately saw the otherwise still night air whip up into a frenzy of howling winds. The more we chanted, the more it screeched, shaking the trees and forcing us to continually shield the candle flame with our bodies so that we could read from the text. We saw the goddess appear top her donkey midway through the second repetition, swiftly appearing in all her brilliance, beauty, and divine splendor. Salt and I were stunned into silence by her theophany, bowing our heads swiftly at the sight of the beautiful young maiden sat atop her steed, her skin a vibrant gold and her hair extending into the night sky in streaks of lapis, jet, and labradorite.

An image of the rite as it appears in the Betz translation, pages 150–1.

The dialogue proceeded roughly as the text describes. We stuck to the script, replying as the rite advises. When the goddess dismounted her steed (which appeared to us black with glowing red eyes, evocative of her husband Set), the light that illuminated her from within shifted, her skin sloughing to become that of an old woman, spots forming along her wrinkles, hair turning course and draining of colour. She only took this form momentarily before quickly receding into the shadows, within a blink taking on her earlier form. Scholar Eleni Pachoumi, in her article “Divine Epiphanies of Paredroi in the Greek Magical Papyri“, notes a similarity between the drama of this ritual and a scene from the Gnostic Apocryphon of John, from the Nag Hammadi library. John witnesses an epiphany in which Jesus first appears to him as a splendid youth, then as an old man, then as a servant. In this ritual, Nephthys first appears as a beautiful maiden, then takes the form of a crone herself, before eventually differentiating, emanating the old woman as a familiar spirit to be imparted upon the magician. We implored her to not leave, and that we would keep her until she grants us the old woman, at which point for the first time Salt and I saw the both of them, with the latter emerging from behind the steed of the former, pacing out from behind its tail.

At this point I felt a shift within the skull beneath my feet. While Key found a tooth already manifest outside the cloth as he was carrying the skull to the site of the ritual—somehow emerging from the tightly-bundled phylactery with a supernaturally loud clang on the pavement—we experienced a tooth visibly begin to wiggle and clatter about with the winds. As we gently moved to touch it, the howling air screeched even further, going from whipping from each direction to swirling around us, creating a visible circle of air that continued to lift higher, sending my hair up into the sky while the tunnel flexed towards the heavens. Throughout our dialogue, Salt and I continued to hear the physically audible barking of dogs and the braying of a donkey, as well as a persistent sound of bells ringing in perfect harmony. There was a moment when I thought there must have been several people with incredibly loud and animated dogs walking around at midnight in the middle of nowhere, but it was immediately obvious that there was no one around but us.

Salt knelt down to examine the skull under my foot, and carefully withdrew the wiggling tooth, which emerged easily into his hand. The rite says that the goddess will take from the old woman one of her molar teeth and a tooth from her steed and give both to you, after which it will become impossible for the spirit woman to ever leave you unless you burn the teeth. What we saw was the goddess retrieve these two teeth as described, present them towards towards us, and then merge them from physical apparitions into the body of the donkey’s tooth that had loosened and fell from the skull. Once we were absolutely certain that the pact had been signed, we scryed the tooth together, confirmed the presence of the old woman, and gave the dismissal. The goddess did not waste any time, mounting her donkey immediately and galloping off into the mists beyond the horizon. As soon as this was done, the cacophony of sounds—braying, barking, ringing, howling and all—ceased entirely, returning us to the silent and still expanse of the crossroad.

The next phase was carried out once we had determined the source of the delay. I was not present for this round, rather it was Salt alone who went to the crossroads. From conjuration to dismissal, he completed the ritual in record time, with all the same physical manifestations returning as if there had been no temporal distance at all. While in our first attempt, the tooth that wiggled forth was a molar, here Salt noted that all the teeth were completely fixed, rooted even deeper within the skull as if none of them had ever come loose, save for one incisor in the front that popped out immediately. The goddess made an additional instruction of him, as this was petitioned by him on behalf of a relative as opposed to purely for his own benefit—and especially as he had already solicited a familiar from her collectively as part of our collective domestic realm as a couple. With this agreed upon and sworn, Salt was able to complete the ritual swiftly and return to our home with his prize in hand, ready to be given over to his family.

Now with the skull freed up to go on its merry way to the next sorcerer, the three of us are even more excited to see what results will come of their own explorations. Our pool of experiences has widened to include several attempts now, each showing remarkable consistencies between manifestations, immediate proofs of power, the efficacy of the familiar spirits granted, and the entirely physical and immediately verifiable nature of the ritual’s conjuration. Not only can we vouch for the power of the ritual, we can confidently recommend its reliability through multiple tests.

Apollonius of Tyana’s Old Serving Woman: PGM XI.a 1–40

~ B. Key ~ 1 Comment

As Sfinga discussed in the introduction to her post detailing her performance of PGM IV. 3086-3124, there exists a special thrill and excitement in carrying out older spells as they were written. To invoke and participate in the strength and inspiration of the sorcerers and magicians incarnated thousands of years before our own lives is to conjure the momentum of tradition that, when skillfully applied, serves to empower and bless our own works. Inspired to walk along the road of those ancestors-in-magic once more by our friend Ivy Senna’s experiments with the PGM, our attention was drawn to PGM XI.a 1-40, Apollonius of Tyana’s old serving woman. The conjuration is a brief litany of barbarous words that serve to conjure Nephthys, from whom a pact with a familiar spirit can be won after a brief dialogue, as shown below. The execution is, however, complicated by the materials required to construct a phylactery that must be stood upon throughout the rite: the skull of a donkey and the blood of a black dog.

An image of the rite as it appears in the Betz translation, pages 150–1.

In keeping with the spirit of following the text as closely as we could, and being no strangers to hunting down the bizarre materials sometimes called for by our Quimbanda and our respective witchcraft traditions, Sfinga and I immediately began hunting for the skull and the blood. After deploying our treasure hunting allies and reaching out to our contacts, I stumbled across a donkey farmer looking to sell some skulls, and our talented friend Lethe, herself a specialist in sourcing the weird, was able to secure a vial of black dog blood on our behalf. I should note, no dogs were harmed in the making of this phylactery!

Our donkey, before being prepared as Typhon’s skull.

The skull arrived by post in short order, and I was able to pick up the blood during my October visit to Salt and Sfinga. As soon as both were in hand, I conjured the Daimon gained through PGM VII. 505-28 (which Sfinga wrote about here) to ask his opinions on increasing the potency of the conjuration and the efficacy of the rite. He recommended multiple spells and cantrips to apply by way of formulas in ash and chalk, as well as exorcisms to recite over the skull, in order to develop a throne worthy of Typhon’s presence. On performing these incantations and spells, my vision blackened, re-emerging outside of a temple of marble near a saline sea, holding the bloodied skull in my hands while a procession of mýstēs (μύστης) passed before me, each bearing censers of incense or crucibles of burning offerings. In a silent procession, they offered to the skull with prayers, blessings, and more barbarous formulae. These visions continued as my body traced the characters in blood on bone, pulling the mind and spirit further and further away until the inscription was complete, at which point I returned to myself with a choked inhale of sand and heat, followed by a sputtering exhale of scattering, disordering winds.

The skull with the glyphs adorning it, inscribed in dog’s blood.

With the preliminary work done and midnight upon me, I carefully wrapped the phylactery in layers of canvas that I had passed through a purifying incense, gathered up a bag of tools, and set off for the forest-shrouded beach that has provided me for years with a secluded space for ritual. The outstanding question of how the magician is to be given the teeth was answered shortly, with a supernaturally-loud clattering on the pavement behind me revealing a glowing donkey tooth on the sidewalk. I picked it up, quickening my pace and arriving at the shore of my destination. With a brief salute to the beach, its guardians, and my allies therein, I very carefully inspected the shrouded phylactery to see if the tooth could have somehow shaken loose or fallen out, but it remained just as tightly bound by the layers of canvas as when I had set out. I’ve since tried to recreate some circumstance through which a tooth could fall out, to no avail; it was so tightly bound and the teeth so secure that there didn’t seem to be a way for one to possibly escape. Suffice to say, I was very pleased with this physical omen.

Simultaneously perplexed and insatiably hungry for answers, I set the skull atop the canvas facing the river, stood upon it, and began the conjuration. Immediately, the winter air stilled and all became quiet, only the remaining lapping of the waves upon the burgeoning crust of river ice serving as the metronome to my incanting. After four full repetitions of the formula, I heard a rhythmic gallop drawing closer, the ice quaking as a linear set of cracks in the pattern of physical hoofprints formed on the surface. The goddess and her mount stood before me in beauty and splendor, radiating an almost crushing aura of power and brilliance.

I bowed and gave thanks for Her attendance, and we began a dialogue similar to that delineated by the papyrus. I began with my usual interrogations, testing the identity of the spirit before me, and satisfying my curiosity in a variety of matters, for I was not about to let an audience with the one wearing the mantle and carrying the mandate of a Goddess be in vain. In the course of this interrogation, I was curiously referred to as “My Dear Apollonius” and “Son of Tyana” interchangeably, leading me to further speculate on the nature of performance and deception in ritual (a topic best explored in a post all its own!), and the parallels to taking on the costume of figures like Solomon, Faust, and Cyprian as seen in other traditions of ritual magic. The Goddess affirmed that the conjuration provided in the PGM would continue to work to call Her forth for whatever purpose, simply requiring a change to “I have need of you for [x]”, noting that her offices apply especially in matters of long term financial success, protection against witchcraft, and the rousing of the dead.

My inquiries made, I finally asked for her domestic service. At this, she dismounted, aging rapidly before she hit the ground, remaining splendorous all the same. When pressed in the manner called for in the ritual, the Goddess stepped out of herself into youth, turned, and brutally ripped a tooth from the old woman and her steed alike. She dropped them to the ground, where they both appeared to meld with the tooth that had apparated earlier. At this, the old woman bowed to the Goddess, then to me, and moved to stand at my side as the Goddess retook her place atop the donkey. Satisfied, I spoke the formula to release the Goddess… and she remained unmoved. I repeated it three more times, to match the number of times I had called, in vain: the Goddess stood firm, appearing to look past and through me without speaking. I paused for a moment, and the solution struck me. As such, I beckoned the old woman to me, whispered the formula in her ear, and she strode to the Goddess, whispering in Her ear in turn. At this, she turned her steed, and rode off with the same very literal, physical cracks forming in the ice as those that heralded her arrival. I should note Ivy also experienced this delay in the Goddess’s departure, similarly encountering difficulties in her attempts to release The Mistress of the House.

I pocketed the tooth and re-wrapped the skull, reveling in the efficacy of the rite, and made offerings once more in thanks to the beach and those spirits that dwell therein. As I drove home, the old woman spoke of herself, and instructed me in the construction of a small doll that would serve as her vessel: the tooth should be clad in silver leaf and be set into the doll with an array of materia and tools for her use, then the mouth of the doll should be clad in gold leaf to seal the enchantment.

Yet the journey of this particular skull is far from over. A number of friends close to the three of us at this blog contributed to the monetary and material crowdsourcing of the rite; our goal being to eventually send the consecrated skull around, with each recipient paying their own shipping, so that each could perform it effectively. The project, affectionately nicknamed “The Sisterhood of the Travelling Donkey”, would then end up back with us, presumably with far less teeth, and reside under the hearth at Sfinga and Salt’s home. Some will perform the rite solo, others in groups as they are themselves roommates, and as such I devised with the assistance of my Daimon and Servant a simple way to carry out the rite with two to three people for the same end. In this version, each individual—surplus to the one who will be standing with their foot above the skull—is to trace out the characters written in blood onto new pieces of parchment. The “assistants” are then to stand with their left foot over the phylacteries, while the conjurer does the same with the skull, all enclosed within a circle traced on the earth. If the spirits do not appear at first, the assistants should join in the repetition of the formula. Thankfully, I was able to quickly verify that this method does indeed yield great fruit, as I was able to help oversee the same ritual for two close friends in this manner when they visited my home. But this is a story for a future post, one which we will record after the donkey has made its circuit.

The next installment of this particular PGM series will contain Sfinga and Salt’s own experiences with the ritual, as they are the next in the procession. Sometime this year, once the skull has made its rounds, we will gather a sample of the various ensuing experiences with the rite itself as well as its spirits in a collected miscellany with some concluding reflections. As this experiment is one we had all divined on previously with our spirits as being worth its while to not only individually complete, but to reuse the same skull in this manner with friends, we hope to build further insight into the nature of its spirits to the degree that we are able to share publicly, and encourage readers interested in the ritual to attempt it themselves; for it is absolutely worth the effort.

On my own end, I remain fascinated both by the physicality of the Goddess’ appearance and the potent presence of her Servant. There is much room for future experimentation, in comparing the effects noted by different magicians who perform the rite alone (as with my first attempt), and the same between larger groups. My Servant has proven herself to be a potent ally already within the short span of my knowing her and deepening our communion with offerings. Showing herself to be a powerful guardian of the door and bringer of wealth, food, comfort, and council, capable of bestowing the strength to do work and the energy to accomplish any task, the Servant finds herself effortlessly at home amongst the other spirits of the house. I am excited to compare notes with Sfinga, Salt, and all those cherished friends who will soon have the chance to petition the powerful Goddess, and take part in this collaborative working of the PGM.