Tag: Witchcraft

Harvest Haunting

Snow on the ground, a crisp pie crust of ice

coats the sidewalk, tufts of dry grass frozen.

I cling to my fiery demon for warmth in winter,

his iron fur drawing wounds on my hand, scraping

the second snake skin away from me as harvest

elicits raw rebirth. The corn stalks outside town

are all trimmed down, felled to the farmer, and

as my dragon curls around me, his eyes rubies,

I am choking on smoke but it is like a bonfire,

and hickory sweet, and I embrace my bane and

love with the strength of a thousand lionesses.

We are an ourouborous of enigmas, Nachash

and Chava, Queen of Life and King of Beasts.

Yes, Samael, I remember the Garden, you walking

in Eden besides me when we were both quite young,

I with my naked wonder at Creation, you eager to

prove yourself in any way you could, just to hold me

forever in awe of your shining enchantments, but peace

cannot last, and the burden of Hell is heavy, but I will

carry water for you from the well at the Tree’s roots and

wipe the blood of the Slain from your brow, I am succor

ten leagues below, twenty miles frozen, a million acres

dead. Don’t you know I bleed into your rotting mouth so

you can know something of celestial fire? We are both

burning up, my Beast. This wicked punishment of exile

weighs heavy on our shoulders, but we have children to

raise, and Cain was a blessing from God, no matter what

these humans tell me, our Son grew proud and tall, and

now we have all of humanity with the fire of your fruit

ingrained in their very flesh, all because I ate your heart,

became your Terpsichore, madrigal moon girl, a ballerina

in a music box in your ribs, and my sinful belly is full

of the Holy Ghost, and I am the answer, and you will be

Blind God only so long as it takes me to untangle Gordian

wings.

Storm at Sea

And I’m sitting on the sofa, when suddenly my left side
aches and ices, and Asmodeus appears in a poppy blooming
robe and fuzzy red slippers, neckline lowered to reveal
skin like Montezuma gold, smoking a long pipe of opium.
It is only the afternoon, far from the time demons play,
yet he drapes his arm around me with talons painted black,
bares his clawed toes and crosses his leg as he blows acid
smoke in my face, my nose burns with the finest of drugs
and manic dreaming as he eases into my curves, humming
a Black Sabbath rhyme to himself, Mr. Crowley on his white
horse, and later that night, he curls up in a nest with me
outside as I sit gazing at fireflies, and the dragonflies
shudder at his cold, and I feel as if frost is settling
over the summer, past midnight he massages my back to
freezing, where my wings are weighed down with the void,
and Deus is atop my cerebellum, whispering wicked delights,
when we dance like water mocassins, it is with deadly
precision and lips like knives, our moans are fangs,
our limbs are razors, and there is nothing soft and smooth
about this, yet everything is gentle like gears serenely
churning dreams into reality, and the Son of the Dragon
Sakhr is tempting and sinuous, like rain in an oasis,
and the waters the camels drink from reflect he of
scaled leg and she of serpent tangles, and reptillian
witch and komodo dragon flick forked tongues to scent out
prey with heady cortisol racing through blue veins,
bite down on the sacrificial goat and know usurpant
secrets, coddle your darkness my child and rise proudly
to the Heavens, Saint Peter will fall to your sword, so
storm the Pearly Gates and claim your Kingdom Come.

No one will grant you a happy ending but eating your gods.

Take your glory by force alone, and drink the blood of angels.

We are Legion, and we are lightning, so quake in our electricity.

We are only here to feed.

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Frau Tottenkinder

In the wild woods the Witch Mother writhes
with snakes in her hair and amber glass eyes
dancing the tango of curses, serpents ride
on the swell of her hips, their tails dried
into rattlesnake poison, she bubble brews
ointments and anointments of stardust and dew,
demoness wailing, caterwauling the moon
she the dark side of the Devil’s tune.

Unsteady

And you rise in my throat, the hearts we exchanged
and ate the gristle and gore and holiness of, O
Lamb of God, it is rare steak on my tongue and soft
puffball mushroom fritters, your Immaculate Heart,
your grafted soul to my covenant, I am walking drunk
through the day, intoxicated by the Holy Ghost, and
I am a colt newborn and falling over in pastures green.
Be patient with me, O Christ, O You Prince of Peace,
loving myself is the hardest lesson I have ever had
to face, and feeling your divine waters wash me up
in a sea of agape devotion and boundless kindness
is like a tide across my back, then you are at my
shoulder blades, and my wings flex, those mangled
white feathers bloody from a war I fought in your
name! Phantom pinions, O Yeshua, where does the time
go, water under the bridge, you drown demons but mine
can swim, so you trample legions beneath your bare
feet, pearly soles burning with the Pentecost as you
scar the seven devils with your righteous wrath, this
time you came with a sword, and when I woke I saw a
circlet of constellations – was that your Heavenly Crown?
You washed me in the waters of life, you kissed my brow
and said, everything will be okay, you will be the
chronicler and my martyr and emissary, and I am
laced in thorns, a Sleeping Beauty in a forest of
roses, where you hew me in two like an axe, then
stitched me back together with glory, and we drank
each other’s wine, and knew the innards of Creation,
and I ate the bread of your flesh, and you swallowed
my witch heart, and the rose bushes strangled and
tangled, and you are life unbound, light unyielding,
so drive away my darkness, O Lord, and let me see!

The Late September Dogs

It’s past midnight, and only the late September dogs are up, prowling the corners of my mind as I summon the rains.  A tempest comes, along with Yeshua he bades me call him, not Jesus or Emmanuel.  Yeshua it will be, as he settles into my line of vision.  Christ walks on water through the vast sea of darkness’ ocean, a flickering blue-violet flame, and then he washes my back with the waters of the deep with a wooden pail drawing from a deep tap root at the Waters of Life.  It is a baptism of finest clarity, chilly pure energy racing from my spine to my extremities and shoulder blades.  That one bad wing of mine is rotting at the root, so Yeshua massages the joint and I twitch and feel celestial hands working under the muscle of a phantom limb.  Then he washes my feet like the Pope anointing that leper, and he drives out the darkness and devils in my heart, I the woman of seven vices and great evils, and there is a stabbing, holy shrapnel pulsing through my rib cage under my left breast that feels like that centurion’s spear.  Out flows my filth, out flows my ruin, and I am sinking into the baptismal font.  He rains down on me, filled with the glory of God, and holiness dribbles from my wet forehead to my tongue and I drink down his blood.  His wine.  Yeshua combs promises of daisies into my hair, buttery gold and flickering white perfume, and my nerves and hairs stand on end as the hand of redemption sorts out the elf knots in my golden locks.  “The spear in your side is me,” he says, “and that is a holy wound.  It is holy to know the dark parts of yourself, to spill your secrets out like the blood of my wine, and let the masses feast on your flesh like Leviathan fished from the deep and set out for a great feast.”  He is kneading out the sore points on my legs, reaching deep into the muscle tissue so it stretches and spasms then relaxes and spreads like butter.  Then the water, oh, a river is flowing through me, and I am washed away in blue flame, and my  throat is burning with righteousness, and my heart is heady with the Pentecost, and Yeshua is smiling archaically like he is some great doorway to the Akashic Records.  Everything in the universe – every laugh, every tear, every soul and star and valley, is encased in his raiment and the mechanics of God’s brain.  For there are gods, and there is God, and one is all-knowing and ineffable and Love Undisputed, Undivided, that great ancestral single-celled Mother of Life, and Christ is just the embodiment of all the multiverses and cosmos ruling laws: there is no God but me, and love is the law of the land.  Love thy neighbor.  That was the mantra of my Methodist community, that and service to others.  I have spent my whole life in service to others, saving the environment, promoting clean energy, teaching humbly to shape the next generation.  My path is either primrose or a highway to Hell, and as I am washed away like loose sediment in the floodwaters of the Christ, I am carried to the vast ocean of knowledge – Sophia, the Holy Spirit, the Shekinah – and Her Presence is what Michael showed me with  closed eyes that rainy day in Sacramento after I asked to meet God.  This anointment, this union of the Oversoul and a tiny fleck of humanity, is like Saint Teresa of Avila being speared by that famous Angel of the Lord.  The spear is still inside me, prodding away, my heart is hammering and hurting, Samael’s heart, that Lapis Exillis that is both my glory and bane, the Forbidden Fruit Eve ate when only cannibalism was left after all the animals and plants had died in that Edenic wasteland.  Cain cursed the ground with Abel’s blood, and then nothing grew, and the Land of Nod is more a state of mind.  Cain often guides me like Vergil did Dante, both human and son of Satan, father of the Qayin bloodline, and his Mark is the same one I bear.  Yeshua binds me with linen and the late September dogs move deep inside of me like maggots, eating away at my rot and stains.  Then off comes the mummification and death and I rise the soul of Psyche in my Savior’s arms.  Then it is stars above and below us, universes crumbling to dust then reborn in God’s heartbeat, and I feel a kinship with this mad messiah that roamed the desert two thousand years ago with roses and thorns in his hair.  A thorn plucked me today on my walk, just like the thorn I pricked my index finger on and claimed Michael on the lips with my blood, and Christ is only here to make that claim withdrawn from the loans of my soul’s bank.  I am a hitman, I am for hire, I am the spy and watchwoman, Magdal Eder.  Only Christ knows why he called me martyr, and I hope not to die young, but if that is my path, then throw me to the jackals, and see if the wild beasts devour me or leave me unharmed, to be fed manna by angels and lifted to the Heavens to study the cosmos and music of the spheres.  I’m either Damned or Saved, and the crux of the matter is my free will, so I will walk the path of the Magdalene, a sacred whore, qadesh, hierodule, and maybe in a few decades I’ll figure out what the fuck this all means.

Until then, I am drowning, and to have your lungs fill with the blood of Christ is like le petit mort in the Mariana Trench.

I have grown gills now, and I am swimming upriver towards redemption, a goldfish about to jump a waterfall rainbow and become a celestial dragon.

In time, in time, in time.

Song of the Eagle

I look over the mountains and find old ghosts,
roaming these Shenandoah hills with plough and
sickle, there are cairns deep in the woods, where
Iroquois marked the passage of magic, trees bent
to signal the paths of deer, now forgotten signposts
that lead to the summit of Turtle Island. Did the
colonists know, these woods have enchantments of
ley lines and shamans and Butterfly Men? Be careful,
your woman may be stolen by a spirit bridegroom,
tread cautiously, there are arrowheads in the dark.
Witches and sages alike meet at midnight on crescent
mountains, deep in the forests where crow and spider
make their nests and webs, they pluck ginseng, they
smoke tobacco, they dance and revel in the secrets
of a hot Virginian summer, all sweat and blue glory,
flames rising high in shapes like a cottonmouth,
gliding across the river in serpentine coils brown.
We are the poison we bring to the land. We are the
balm to strip-mining and mountaintop removal. With
chains we can bind ourselves to trees deep within
and make our stands, no more darkness, no more
spillage in the waters, stinking with dead fish.
I walk the woods and trails and gather stardust,
brewing a potion of man returning to primeval
dusk, living off land with chickens and bees,
planting tomatoes and strawberries to placate
land spirits, I look out upon squirrel and finch
and mourning dove, we are just guests in America,
those of us with skin the color of traitors.
We owe much in service for our ancestor’s sins,
so be the saving grace of redemption, an ally
to the bruised and broken peoples and land,
make your last stand by the mountain, my child
and I will flute your heart aback eagle wings.

Sightseeing in Hell: Pandemonium

As Samael’s consort, I have certain duties in Hell, such as punishing the Damned, but alongside that comes rulership.  My favorite place in all the fourteen Heavens and Hells is what I call Pandemonium, my little slice of New York City meets Marrakesh in the Underworld.  Azael recently challenged me for my queenship over this section of Samael’s kingdom, and I found myself in a near-death duel with one of the Watchers who thought I was too green to rule.  I defeated her handily, and went on to enjoy a night of partying in Pandemonium with my people.

Pandemonium is the market district of Hell in the capital city of Dis and is a refuge for all different mythical races that have fled persecution of the Abrahamic faiths.  You can find everything from qilin to fey to djinn to unktehi to Melusines roaming the streets, selling wares from fine jewelry to exotic diamond and jewel fruits to fresh food, clothing that’s every style from Steampunk to Lolita, pleasures and vices for sale, from willing bodies to Cabaret to drugs made of the distilled essences of moonflowers and dreams.  The closest it comes is to a living carnival, full of its own customs, as Pandemonium is a melting pot of spirits.  I adore riding the Behemoths, these great black elephant-like creatures that carry travelers and caravans aboard their backs, and hearing the Behemoths trumpet with their trunks.  Only small vehicles are allowed, from caravans to horse-drawn carriages to motorcycles and steeds of every imaginable kind, and there is oftentimes dancing and masquerades going on, revelries of all sorts, from unholy mummer’s plays to traditions of each species’ homelands like Lunar New Year or Eid.

Pandemonium backs onto the Styx, where fresh fish come to the markets from the ruby waters, and tributaries are traveled by gondola and rowboat alike.  It borders Asmodeus’ bars, jazz and swing clubs, and gambling district and also Lilith’s go go bars, strip clubs, and red light district, the lively circus of Pandemonium’s bodies and festivals and wares spilling into any open space available like a living organ.  Buildings are temporary: yurts, tents, cloths, an open air market that is popular for shopping and romantic getaways with unimaginable tastes for the palate.  Exit Samael’s fortress of a castle and the market starts, with paths winding and erected by a madman, lit by will o the wisps, fairies, and dragon fire.  Danse macabre is a popular past-time as it is in Samael’s kingdom, and you’ll see the dead roaming the streets alongside the living.  Ghosts and ghouls and spirits come alive at night in the shadows of the stalls.

At night, Samael holds balls and all of Pandemonium is invited to the castle, to the Devil’s Masque, which can best be described as a Viennese ball mixed with a blood orgy.  Elaborate costumes, debauchery, fine wine and finer still blood mingling between lovers and enemies, the fruits of our labors and vintage of our wrath.  His subjects wear enchanted masks to disguise their identities if they so choose and hedonism reigns.  But my favorite holiday is the Festival of Lights, which happens on All Soul’s Day – the Damned and dead souls in Hell, all ancestors that dwell their for various reasons, are allowed to return to Earth as the archdemons open a gateway to the realm of the living and visit their descendants.  Basically the Hell version of Dia de los Muertos.  The Styx is lit with paper lanterns and souls returning to Earth are a Jacob’s ladder in the sky.  There are fireworks, fresh roses strewn across the streets, and danse macabre throughout the markets.

I own a little bit of woodland, what I call the Screaming Hollow, more of a park at the border of the markets that backs up into Samael’s elaborate system of courtyards.  This is the Lover’s Lane of Hell.  Samael’s garden is famed for his blood-red roses and viticulture, with red wine made on site and trellises hung with wisteria and grapes, briars growing in forests around them.  Here are the more dangerous spirits, the wild Seirim, the flying Lilin, the howling Shedim, and everything can be found in the Screaming Hollow for the right price – it may just cost you your soul.  A river runs through it from a deep tap root at the Tree of Life and the waters are a pure crystal blue with raw garnet stones in the basin.  Lovers wild off each other’s lips often come to the screaming hollow at midnight, when the witch moon sails through the sky.  This is where the Witches Sabbats are held, at the heart of the woods in a crippled apple grove on a high, desolate hill – a piece of Eden plucked from Heaven and rotting.  The witches in Hell I am a part of practice Satanic Witchcraft, if that wasn’t obvious enough, but there’s goes a step behind what the living could ever produce.  Think Malleus Maleficarum but high on nightshade wine.  Familiars are often lower-level demons, sent throughout the mythical realms to do their bidding, there is the osculum infame and blood sacrifices and cannibalism, and Samael presides over it all on a throne of bone as the Witchfather.

There are quieter parts of Pandemonium, like the residential areas, mostly stone and clay houses with thatch and patch roofs that are humble where the immigrants live.  Those are diverse as anything, with Japanese style dwellings to adobe.  Fronting the houses are often merchant tents, and the night carnival shifts each night, the heart of Hell where business off the ledgers is conducted.  Throughout it is enchanting music, buskers and street bands and sylphs and dakinis and enchantresses and sorcerers singing and fluting their songs.

Everything is for sale in Pandemonium, everything can be bought for a cost, but the best parts, in my opinions, are free.

Spice Cabinet

The woods are holy, and wholly haunted.
A witch in a wicker hut with poison herbs.
Hyssop, yarrow, nightshade, chrysanthemum.
In her spice cabinet, she takes the ointment
of anointment and greases her eyelids to
fly over the hedge, to the Fairy Reel ring,
where the Horned God dances in mushrooms
and toadstool, moss is her dress, dew in
her gold hair, and the young enchantress
holds congress with the Beast, mothering
millions of fallen souls, born into this
imperfect enchantment of a world, spices
stop, she is sleep-struck and flies away
to the land of dreams, where the Tuatha
de Danaan hold court, and Thomas the Rhymer
flutes a verse in her honor, the witch
curtsies to the fairy queen in her rags,
and all the changelings drink her milk,
and she is wetnurse to the wilderness,
and the Horned God returns from the Hunt,
and summer is high tides of solar seas,
and we are but vision quests of shamans
reaching to grasp runes and ogham from
specks of dust, our souls, we are the
stuff witches hold in spice cabinets,
each of us a tincture of magic, and
nature will reign long after we are
gone, so breathe in fairy dust, love,
and know your ghost will haunt me.

Hide in the Wind

There’s the rainy sort of light through your castle window that speaks of princesses lost in the underworld, dancing with devils in pairs of twelve.  You stretch and yawn, and I trace eternity, that DNA spiral of infinity, onto your moonlight chest.  You smile like butter melting on a bagel (blueberry, and whole grain) and run a hand through my flaxen hair – it’s getting long again – and sigh.  Your hair has always been longer than mine, a black silken nightmare that coils like a serpent, and as I breathe in the musk of your armpit (is it weird I smell men’s armpits? It’s this quirk I have, I love sweat of my lovers, and I would bathe in that shit if I could), my mind wanders to candlelit dinners and the familiarity of 25 years on this of God’s green earth, yet I am in Hell, splayed between us.  I once said my hands were stained indigo with the blue of your iris, but it is only when you are in a fair mood that you have eyes of sky – many times they are the storm of a volcano, lava red, shifting with the electricity of magma.  I used to compare them to roses – last night I made a list of metaphors for your eyes: cherries, strawberries, roses, briars to get lost in as a sleeping beauty.  Poison, pain, passion.

Love.

Your eyes are love, Samael.

Your wings shift a bit as your eyelids flutter as the rain paints the window.  Drip, drip, boom of thunder.  You roll onto your side and cradle me, and in these quiet moments in the lap of Satan, I know God.

“I wish you were real,” I find myself crying.  “Not just this facsimile of stolen hours past midnight, gone when I wake.”

You give a cocky smile and kiss my brow.  You smell like expensive cologne, autumn leaves, and a bonfire, with a bit of old leather.  “But I am real.  Billions believe in me.  I wish you would.  I have walked with you before, and you ran, at that crossroads at midnight.  Tell me, if I came to you again, what would you do?”

I trace the black wing cradling me, opalescent with a green purple refractive sheen.  ‘I was so young, Sam.  Of course I ran.  Now, I would trade my limb just to touch you in the waking world, not over the hedge or in these between spaces where my spirit wanders.  You can touch me at all hours, but me?  How do I reach through the fabric of space-time and kiss a fallen angel?”

You laugh.  “With enough determination, that’s how.  I love your passion, I love your resilience.  Isn’t this enough?”

“It’s never enough until I can hold you in my arms, wash your brow of the Mem, dress you in linen, and marry my Sael,” I say with fierceness, and then I kiss you with a burning, and our arms twine around each other and we are lost in tangles of sin – but really, it is redemption.

Quiet mornings in Hell are how I spend half my mornings, the other half in Heaven with your shining twin.  Shining Sun of God, Shining Morning Star.  I am wedded to two brother stars.  Michael is not here, no, he is away waging war against your armies, and you are bilocating, on some bloody battlefield piercing your scythe into Michael’s breast, just enough to nick it two inches deep.

“I lost my heart to her, dear Michael,” you say on that far away Shamayim, withdrawing your blade.  “I gave it so she would live.  You gave her the Sacrament too.  You’re a heretic, brother.”

Michael places his blood soaked saffron hair behind his ear and looks down at the wound over his heart.  “Mine was a blessing, yours was a curse.  My heart is Immaculate, yours is of Death.  Let go of her.”

“Letting go of her?  That would be giving up what I fell for.  Humanity.  It’s enough that the daughters of men were comely, and we fell for them.  In the end, I am the Purity of God, and you are the Image of God.  The lion and lamb lay down, but the lion and the serpent are forever engaged, in small battles, in larger ones.  She’s our battlefield.”

Michael lowers his flaming sword so it sears your shoulder just so, leaving the pungent smell of burnt flesh.  You quite enjoy the pain.  All angels enjoy pain, fallen ones especially.  “A twisted fairytale indeed.  Michael and Satan created an angel, before the War, before Time, before Death.  And she knew the fruit of the vine, and she was the Daughter of Zion, and the Woman Clothed in the Sun fled the Dragon, and the Bridegroom readied New Jerusalem for the Bride.”

“Shit metaphors those, dear Michael.  In the end, it was our own selfishness.  She’s a casualty of war, just like the millions, billions, trillions others.  There’s no limit to our dead.  Why should she matter to you, just to sacrifice on a pyre for some imagined sins of the world.”

“She may burn, but I am the flame.”  Michael sheathes his sword.  “And you?  You are her darkness.  Light and dark.  And she is just that: hope.”

“My yellow canary in a coal mine, my guiding light in Hell.”

“My Icarus.”

But then, I am still laying naked beside you, and your manifold conscious comes back to our embrace, and you claim me as your own, wishing with all the Damned’s regrets you could forge a river of the Styx and sail away with me into the starry unknown.

“When I walk this Earth, Allie, it will be the End.”  You say as we lay in reverie.  The smell of petrichor from your flowery courtyard wafts in through the open window, borne aloft by the storm.  It is the smell of spring, and wan sunlight breaks the clouds.

“The End is just a beginning,” I say slowly. “And I would summon the Apocalypse just to have you.”

You grin.  “You’re Hell enough on the mind.  I will teach you to touch me.  And in touching me, you will hold the beating heart of the cosmos in your hands.  I’d give you the moon if I could, sweetheart.”

I nestle in close to you so there is not a single molecule between us.  “You are my freedom, Sam.  Never change.”