Blog
Feast of Liber Al vel Legis
his year I made sure to attend my Thelemite friends’ annual three-day feast of Liber Al vel Legis, The Book of the Law. It happened to fall right on dark and new moons and at the full dawning of spring in her sensuous glory. Magicians and mystics came from all over the Lowermainland, each choosing to spend three week nights in a row attending the feast. On day one we eat of rich and luxurious foods; cheese, fatty cured meats, ...
A Poisoner’s Week
For the past week my home has been filled with poisons; poisons covering the dining table in the form of my black and white illustrations to be shipped out, poisonous specimens arriving at my door, and poisons infusing into oils and animal fats for new batches of flying ointments. Amanita muscaria caps, white speckled and red, smelling like the sweet rotting leaves and fallen evergreen needles of a forest floor. Henbane seed pods, crushed in my fingers like egg shells, spilling out ...
Wild Violets Taste Like Spring
Wild violets taste like green and purple; clean and fresh, they are like clover, budding leaves, and sunlight. The sun came out for a brief, warm flash and brought spring with it, suddenly, everything blooming like an unexpected orgasm. I found an expansive patch of viola adunca a short walk from my home and buried my face in the sweet purple fragrance. I picked every flower I could reach finding bright red lady bugs hugging the leaves and watching honey bees ...
Poisonous Art and Unguents
There have been late nights of infusing flying ointments in the stove, my home redolent with the scent of sticky sweet poplar buds and the fresh spring air pouring through the open windows. There have been trips to suppliers on sunny days to gather new ointment tins, fragrant beeswax, and papers as black as night. There have been long evenings spent designing and printing labels and prints of my black and white artwork full of skulls and poisons. The results ...
New Ink, New Moon
I have been busy plotting, working on new illustrations, and making plans for my art. I want to make my occult drawings available as prints, cards, talismanic ephemera, and locally screen-printed t-shirts. I will be moving away from colour and be working purely in black and white (…maybe with the exception of red sigils now and then). Thanks to the wonders of modern technology I was able to turn some of my pyrography into high quality illustrations to add to ...
Hekate Ritual Bundles
Some believe that fetishes and medicine bundles belong to Shamanism or Vodou and Hoodoo alone, but Witchcraft and fetishism have long been mixed bedfellows. We need only to look at all the artefacts and charms in the Boscastle Witchcraft Museum to see this is so. A fetish can be anything from a simple bird foot or skull to a more elaborately crafted doll, pouch, or bottle. It is any object believed to have its own spirit we can communicate with ...
Poison Allies, Amulets and Art
I’ve been busy working on poisonous amulets to list in the workshop tomorrow at 4pm PST. Here’s a sneak peek of new creations from the workbench. If anything calls to you keep in mind original pieces tend to sell out in a few hours. Mandragora medicine amulets of forest green leather and golden sinew with a bone skull closure – painted with an original mandrake sigil in gold. Each one contains pieces of atropa mandragora root. Hekate ritual bundles of ...
Life is for Adventure
It has been a year and a half since life as I knew it ended and I was reborn anew. Many things have changed since then and perhaps I have the most. My philosophy for my new life is to always choose adventure: to say yes when fear and my reclusive nature tell me to say no. One of my magical tenets is “if you’re not scared, you’re not doing it right.” In this past year I’ve done a lot ...
Poison in Black and White
For the last few weeks I have been absorbed into a world made of posionous plants, wood, fire, smoke, and stains of black and white. At last I can raise my head and heart from this world to delve into the others of writing and illustration. When I look upon my woodwork now as a whole, instead of tiny fragments inches from eyes, I see deadly Monkshood, fragrant wormwood, my beloved henbane, magic mushrooms, heavenly brugmansia, the seductress of opium ...
Wolf Moon Dreams
It is hard to forget to honour the full moon when it is tattooed on your wrist and shines down on you from a foggy night sky. I poured more water over the holey stone in the little clay bowl I keep ever-filled for Old Woman. It’s polite to always have a drink for her. My mother brought it back from Ireland, raw on the outside and the bright clear blue of glaze on the inside. I dropped in my ...
Of Serpents, Eggs, and Spiral Dances
My friends arrived from all over the Lower Mainland (witches, heathens, mystics, thelemites, hermetics, shamans…) for my Imbolc ritual Sunday afternoon. I’d decorated the hall, with its view of the forest, by setting up an altar for Brighid and the Cailleach strewn with evergreen branches and budding Indian Plum from the woods flanked at each side by wolf and bear hides. Brighid had a bottle of spring water and the Cailleach a bottle of melted snow. Brighid’s had bull and ...
Collecting the Bones of Trees
There are many books of magic, ethnobotany, and cooking in my living room, staring at my lonely unwarped loom, but hidden away in the darkness of my room is a seldom-seen collection of books. Some with ratty linen spines and some of softest leather and finest gilt, the pages filled with poetry, ancient tales, folklore, witchcraft, incantations, pagan gods, and beautiful art. All of them are old or rare, smelling of dust, attics, basements… You see I’m a collector, collecting ...
