In The Hour of Jupiter, on The Day of Silcharde, the Moon a Crescent:

At the ringing of my phone’s alarm my tear watery eyes pried opened. I still sat in the arm chair looking out on the trees in the dim early morning through the screen window, Artie prancing around with on the work table in front of me.

I began to cry when I recalled what I had just felt, and the memories it welled up. It was very painful now to have to think back to such a time in my life, but the saddest part was where things had all gone since then. No, of course, Grant would never see me the way I saw him, but what hurt more was the reality of how I had changed. I hadn’t stayed selfless. I had hurt people, and I regretted the time and energy I had spent during those formative years trying to be true to myself. There is no reward for being yourself. It doesn’t get better.

As the powder blue sky began to bring pale illumination to the forest outside my window I dabbed the tears from my cheeks and quickly jotted down the jist of the dream in my journal. I guessed that just seeing Grant again the other day must have been what evoked these forlorn aspirations. When I finished I walked to the kitchen and again laid out Artie’s bowl of kibble to distract her while I began the morning’s working.

Today would be one of the most simple and ephemeral parts of the preparation cycle. I cleared off the finished materials from the work bench and withdrew the ritual knife. It was nothing fancy, just a small dagger with a straight symmetrical edge, only just sharp enough to break skin with a great deal of applied pressure.

The dagger was, of course, never intended to draw blood or make sacrifices or anything of the sort. The lancet already did that job much more efficiently, and with much less risk of unintended injury. The dagger represented the tool that the witch should use for the demarcation of sacred space, for the drawing of the circle of practice, and for the projection of her will upon the spiritual forces with which I was to interact.

As I sat beginning to paint the symbols in red along the edges of the blade, I took pleasure in how far my knowledge had come from my teenage fascination with the Goetia and conjuring of spirits. I had finally become clear on the details that had for so long eluded me thanks to my recent study of the Grimorium Verum, the most complete of the goetia spell books to survive to the present. The Verum filled the gaps that had been missing from the more well-known but later collected compendiums: The Lesser Key of Solomon, The Pseudomonarchia Demonia, and The Red Dragon.

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The Verum laid out the process of summoning the demons in a much more down to earth philosophy than the older manuals. There were no excessive prostrations of keeping the stygian forces at bay. The evil spirits, all laid out in an orderly feudal hierarchy, were not to be driven in bondage, but befriended, brought into mutual cooperation with the witch to accomplish each other’s goals.

The circle and triangle inscribed upon the floor of the place of practice, for example, which in the more well known grimoires is described as a barrier to protect oneself from any infernal suspects, is in the Verum a parlour of communion between the witch and their guest. The long screeds of prayers to Jehova and Jesus in the later grimoires, sparse in the text of the Verum, were likely just camouflage used to give cover to the conjurer whose manual of operations ended up in the wrong hands.

In any case, it was the Verum alone which detailed the tools and the proper procedures the other Goetic compendiums merely implied: The astrological schedule of the components, the construction of the tools, the primary importance of the parchment and sealing.

As I held the knife above the incense smoke, I took pride in every new step in understanding I had taken. With some free time and some careful reading I had uncovered the procedure that lay only between the lines of the arcane tomes and the skeletal mandibles of a long extinct oral tradition. Maybe my failed attempt at a degree in Classics wasn’t completely useless after all!

As I set the consecrated knife along with the other tools I sunk deep into my arm-chair and let out a deep sigh. I would be lying if I said I didn’t have doubts, if I said it didn’t feel completely infantile and stupid to invest my hopes in material outcomes for something that sounds like make believe, but things were totally out of my hands anyways. There was something therapeutic about putting my hopes in something this weird and elaborate, something that at least exhausted my sense of anxiety.

There was some anecdote from a Zizek lecture that always stuck with me when I tried to reassure myself I wasn’t completely pathological. In a certain part of Europe there is some superstition that horseshoes hung over barns bring good luck, or drive off evil spirits, or something. Anyway, a man visiting that part of the country visits his professor’s barn and looks over the entrance to see a horseshoe. The man says to his professor “Surely you’re too rational to believe in such a superstition!” and the professor responds “Of course, but I am told that it works even if you don’t believe in it!”

After spending all those years holed up in university trying to understand magic and ritual through anecdotes and deconstruction, maybe I had been missing something I’d find in the actual doing. When the inevitable would come to pass, at the very least I could take solace in trying everything and the kitchen sink.