Dear Golgothites, as the calendar year draws to a close, we invite you to celebrate the Feast of Holy Innocents with us.
Here we remembrance the mythic slaughter of the children of Bethlehem under the tyranny of Bad King Herod, and consider some of the traditions and folkways associated with this day around the world – from the ill-auspices of Cross Day to the election and misrule of Boy Bishops, and much more.
Our honoured Demon King (Queen?) is Paimon, one of the ‘four principle spirits’ usually attributed to the West: surveying medieval and early modern grimoiric appearances, and some eerily similar spirits in the wider corpus of goetic manuals of spirit conjuration, reflecting on this spirit’s wider retinue of regal heralds and daimonic minstrels, and indeed consider the use of altered sigils in one recent horror film which repopularised this senior devil…
Our Herb of the hour is Fennel, from seed to root to stalk; cherished as an eye-brightener, vapour-queller, horse-protector, consumer of phlegmatic humours, and vessel of Prometheus’ stolen fire.
Our Mineral for this feast is Lead: malleable neurotoxic metal of Saturn and saturnism, plumbing the depths and undergirding the Roman empire, by which we touch on wine adulteration, gold-making mysteries of alchemy, writing on sling bullets, and the suitably venerable number squares of the Greater Malefic’s magics.
Our Beast this time is the Camel: emblem of both the Orient and orientalism, totem of trade, commerce, and Grocer’s Guilds, as well as stalwart desert-crossing, tempered choler and modesty, enemy of the horse, and of course, humble and secret-keeping steed of the Magi.
Our Daysign of Mesoamerican calendricals and cosmovisions is Ehecatl (Wind) by which we discuss the some of the facets of the Feathered Serpent Quetzalcoatl, specifically as the cardinal rain-bearer, and the gifter of maguey and the alcoholic brews of pulque and its distilled spirits; through which we may navigate the difficulties and blessings of these marked periods of cyclical time.
Our Style of Magic is Blood Sacrifice, picking our way through traditions and techniques of sanguine inks, the ritual purifications via phlegbotomy, pact-signing, apotropaic blooding, animal (mis)treatment, and ancestral remembrances of where our blood came from in the first place an to whom we owe it.
Our Geomantic Figure of the season is Cauda Draconis, Fiery figure of the twin Malefics of Mars and Saturn, signifier of swift destruction, firework health and safety, and the proper disposal of haunted objects and broken curses. In the course of this consideration, we reflect on parallels with this figure’s counterpart, Ogunda, in the Odu traditions of Diloggun and Ifa concerning the proper steering of violence into constructive – even medicinal – destruction.
Continuing our discussions of both divinatory pedagogy and art history, our featured Arcana is the Trump of the Hermit: tracing its development from saturnine Old Man Time, through emblematics of the final stage of the Ages of a human life, as the hourglass becomes a lantern via the cardinal virtue of Prudence, redefinitions of religiosity and occulture, to stand as a beacon between introspective solitudue and guiding way-shower.
Our Dead Magician is the very witches’ witch, Erictho, in whose name we celebrate this mythic figure’s examples of wonderfully monstrous Big Hag Energy: from her early mentions in Ovidian poetics, to her role in Lucan’s Pharsalia as a ghoulishly gory boneyard necromancer and force of nature, and even her later turn in Goethe’s Faust as an interlocutor on the human tyranny and war.
And so, by these topics, we honour this Feast of the Holy Innocents by cherishing the mysteries and medicines of youth and the age alike, remembering the weight and significance of bloodshed, paying homage to the vehicles of generous wisdom, the virtues and violences of the world, and the folk necromancies of grimoiric devils and ancient hags.