I.
The first time it happened, I was in a childhood basement. We were talking about magick; we weren't doing anything. And then, suddenly, I was.*
Suddenly the objects on the table were simply in the wrong places, and I sank to my knees and aligned them and poured some kind of charge over the cups we were drinking. I had no idea what was happening; only the urge for the physical actions was clear to me. At the time, I believe, I said that something had walked through me, because that was the only way I could explain that impulse coming from inside, right at my core.
My practice could easily be described as lazy, haphazard, dilettantish, or flaky, but for our purposes I am going to call it intuitive. I read and study and plan but most of the most powerful moments are like the one above: things I just do.
Part of the reason I've found ceremonial-ish work offputting is that there is simply no room for that sort of thing. It's like math, right? And my asking why something is done a certain way is akin to a student, when faced with a function, asking me why f(g) = g^2 -2ag + 15. (Because it is, that's why. Because it was defined for you, by the problem, and within this system, that's how it works.)
II.
And then, Saturn.
I must have said, "Saturn hates me," "Saturn is kicking my ass," and/or "I hate Saturn," (sorry) about fifty thousand times in the last few months. My Saturn return is in full swing, my life is hanging together by a few tenuous threads, and every single thing is constantly threatening to fall down on my head.**
Which is the point, I guess.
But I've been feeling like I don't know how I'm actually going to survive it for the next however-the-fuck many months. (Thanks, retrogrades!) Like, at any moment, this shit is actually going to crush me, and I will cease to exist.
And working with Saturn seemed like a logical idea, except for a few minor things:
-I was pretty sure it would bite me in the ass, because Saturn hates me. (Saturn sq Ascendant in my birth chart, for example.)
-I wasn't sure what the point was, really. I'm caught in a tidal wave. Shipwreck. Flash flood. Whatever. I'm sure as hell not turning that ocean around with a few ancient words and some candles.
-Even if I did want to work with Saturn, I wasn't sure why I couldn't just trance out and go find him and have a chat. I mean, isn't that was I always do?
So I was sitting in my car, waiting for work to start, thinking about Saturn. Thinking about going to visit him and having a chat. (Not realizing, of course, that I'm doing that thing in which thinking about visionary work becomes doing the visionary work because liminal headspace is actually my default some days.)
Because everything turned cold, and wet, and heavy. I was smaller, everything was smaller, and the coldness came from that same place, the spot in the center, that spawns instant rituals and impromptu bindings.
I felt like I had swallowed a large, cold stone that was pulling all of me down into somewhere else.
And I had a class to teach in 10 minutes. Yeah, that was fun.
III.
So it turned out that I could just go on in and say hello, but perhaps it wasn't the smartest idea. Which is something I had already been told, but I am pretty terrible at listening to people.
The most relevant conclusion drawn from the little parking lot exercise was this: I am already in it.
My fears of being noticed and thereby getting screwed over further were mostly absurd, because I am already in this particular energetic flow.***
I still wasn't sure what to do about it, though. I've been tossed from my boat, and I'm being pulled along by an impersonal current: how does magick help me again?
Satyr and I had many conversations about this whole drama over his winter break. I might even be tempted to call it one long conversation, because I'm the kind of person who rarely stops talking about myself, and all of the "about myself" things kept coming back to Saturn is kicking my ass.
So I asked him, finally, what the point of it all was. Saturn return is happening, with all of its accompanying doom and gloom and destruction. I don't see how I possibly have any power in the face of that. It's not like I can simply make an astrological event not happen. (Poor me, I'm so powerless, the forces of the universe hate me, etc.)
He suggested that the point of the type of work I was considering was not to change the flow of energy, or alter the cosmic event, but to align myself with it, and perhaps make a few friends along the way who might, you know, bat a piece of flotsam out the way before it whacks me in the head.
Which made sense in a way that the abstract concept of planetary work hadn't before. And if that's the goal - align, make allies - then I am fully capable of working within the system. I do have some Chaos background, after all.
So...I'm making it work. Today is day 6 of 10 (why 10? because that's how many candles I ended up with and the intuitive parts don't just evaporate) of daily, tiny little Saturn workings that are the subject of my next post.
And I don't necessarily get it. I guess I feel a little bit like some of my students must do. But they'd often be better off if they listened to me, and stop figuring out how certain notations developed and just work the fucking problem.
So I'm doing it, because it was defined for me, by the problem, and within this system, that's how it works.
And... it works. More about that later.
___________________________
*Talking about something only to realize you're actually kind of doing it is a thing that happens, of course, but I didn't know this at the time.
** I am really not exaggerating. Large-scale family drama, eviction notices, massive layoffs at my company, etc. etc. etc.
*** And we've all seen the clueless guy at the office bang helplessly on his computer during Mercury retrogrades while we smile smugly and reboot for the eighteenth time and just accept that things will sort themselves out, eventually. I don't want to be that guy.
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