One of the books I’m reading lately is King, Warrior, Magician, Lover by Robert Moore and Doug Gillette. It’s a fascinating book that explores the archetypes of the mature and sacred masculine. This is currently part of the spiritual work that I’m engaged in as I explore my own relationship with masculinity and heal the ancestoral and contemporary wounds that I’m becoming aware of as it relates to how masculinity is treated and perceived in modern times.
One of the aspects I’m exploring in particular is related to sacred kingship and the land. I am in the process of exploring the new city and surrounding areas that I live in. While I’ve lived here for a year, I didn’t have much opportunity until recently to really begin exploring the area and developing a relationship with the land. I find it fitting and useful that part of the process has also involved cultivating a relationship with the land, particularly on the basis of the relationship has with their home and how that relationship plays out in sacromagical work one does in connecting with the land.
Have you ever wondered what the benefits of working with a given astrological system could be for your magical work? Or have you wanted to do more work with celestial magic but asked how you could do it?
In this episode I share some of my own experiences with Celestial magic, including how I work with astrological currents, as well as the magic of the planets and stars.
Are you feeling stuck?
Caught up in the uncomfortable Discomfort?
I share how to turn that stuck state upside so you can get better results with your magical work. When we learn how to accept and relish the state we are in, that’s when we open the doors to potential and unlock the possibilities that we’ve been holding back because of how stuck we felt.
In my martial arts and qi gong practice there is a specific concept I’ve been learning more about and applying to my magical practice. This concept is circularity. Circularity, in this context, refers to how the body moves in a circular way. For example, the arms have a circular movement. So do legs. The majority of movements in the martial art practice I’m learning have elements of circularity as well.
I recently starting learning a specific practice of circularity that draws on Nei Gong or inner work. this practice is called circling hands and on the surface it seems simple. You are circling your hands and arms parallel to each other while causing the rest of your body also engage in a vertical circling practice. When doing this practice I feel the energetic channels of my body are activated. This activation serves to release the tension on all levels of my being, while also helping to refine and amplify the natural energetic currents.
As I’ve been learning this practice, I’ve been applying it to space/time magic. The circle is another form of the spiral, seemingly compressed into a singular line, but with the circularity practice I can spiral the qi. the spiraling of the Qi activates the energetic principles of the body, as well as the physical somatic resources. These can be applied to the benefit of our health, but they can also be applied for magical purpose, and in my specific cases, I’ve been using the spiraling of the Qi to access and work the different probabilities of time that are available to all of us.
When I spiral the Qi I can use it to activate my awareness across space and time. I can send myself back to a younger age or move forward to a possible future. The circling spiral opens the possibilities of past and future because I am present in all of those moments. What has limited me is the everyday linear sense of time that functions as a way of making sense of space and time in the physicality of our bodies. When we unlock our bodies through circularity we can embrace the non-linear sequence of the spiral of time and find ourselves in multiple moments of time.
When you’ve done a given action multiple times that action becomes a point of reference that allows you to access the action in a given moment and through that action open the door to another time and another space. Circularity practice can take this to another level because we are engaged in somatic circular actions everyday.
Try this exercise. Stand up and rotate one of your arms in a circle. Do this a few times. Then do the same action with the other arm. After doing this action, do it again, but this time do it with the intention to move across time. There are moments, not conscious ones perse, but moments nonetheless when you’ve been engaged in some rotation movement. Allow your body to guide you across its history of awareness. It knows the ways through the doors of time and it can lead you to another place, another space where you can then use that rotation to bring your forward, back, or sideways through time.
Your body knows time through and through. Everyday we engage in activities that we have done again and again and again. Let those activities lead the way and you’ll discover another way to access the hidden opportunities that await you in the potentiality of time.
My girlfriend recently told me about a short story she was reading from Sooner or Later Everything Falls into the Sea by Sarah Pinkser. In this story the main character is just one of many different versions of the same person and she is invited to a convention where she gets to meet the alternate versions of herself. I started reading the short story and it reminded me of a technique I came up with long time ago, and shared in my book Space/Time Magic.
The technique works along a similar premise, namely that there are alternate versions of ourselves and each version of yourself has something about them that is different from you. However they also have a connection to you, namely being an alternate version of yourself that is tied to you through your identity. I think its possible to connect with alternate versions of yourself utilizing magic in order to exchange information, swap skills, and otherwise interact with the alternatives of you. I have used meditation and pathworking techniques to connect with my alternate versions and this has proven to be a helpful process for skill swapping.
The way it works is that you pick a skill that you want to learn. There is an alternate version of yourself that knows this skill. For example, say you aren’t very good at managing money. You could connect with a version of yourself that has really good money management skills. That version of yourself can share those skills with you through spiritual transmission. You are already connected to each other by virtue of being the same person, albeit with some differences so the process of transmission is very easy.
You do a pathworking where you visualize the DNA spiral of the universe. The spiral contains infinite versions of the world and each version has a version of you in it. Seek out the world that has the version of you that has the skills or information your desire. Call out to that version of yourself or invoke yourself into the version.
When I connect with a version of myself that has skills I want, then I also have to determine what skills I can offer to that version that it may want. What I’ll do is a skill swap where I’ll transmit the skill I have to my alternate self in return for the they have that I want. For example a long time ago I reached out to a version of me that had really good financial skills and asked for those skills so I could become better at finances. In return I gave him some skills around spiritual work.
It can be fascinating to connect with alternate selves. I do this working every so often and I always find it insightful because it gives me a glimpse of my life if I had gone down a different path and made other choices. I still have this life I’m living but there are alternate versions of me living different lives and all of us have something to offer to each other.
Picture copyright Taylor Ellwood 2024
Recently a friend gifted me some planetary pentacles for Neptune, Uranus and Pluto. I was intrigued at the opportunity to work with the pentacles and also inspired to integrate them with other magical process and experiments I’m currently working on. In the past I’ve found that the pentacles have been useful tools for focusing planetary energies in my magical work as well as setting up specific passive magical workings that are activated as needed.
In my initial working I decided to work with two Uranian pentacles that helped inspire creativity. I set them up in conjunction with a folkloric magical working using three sticks in a pattern that’s designed to create focus. That very evening I was going through a class and I found myself feeling very creative and focused on how I could apply the learnings from that class. I started implementing some of the ideas and felt a sense of deep awareness around how the specific application pentacles, mixed with another form of magical could be used to inspire specific states of being and awareness.
In the picture above is another working, this time with a Venusian pentacle for love, as well as a Uranian pentacle for time work, a Uranian pentacle for creative balance and a Neptunian pentacle for power. Three sticks are being used for several purpose. The initial configuration of the sticks is focused on enhancing scrying work that is done for the purposes of connecting across time with younger versions of the self, or with ancestors, or other people. Once the connection has been made the sticks are changed to another pattern to enhance the work with the pentacles. The mirror and flame are used to focus the attention of the magician in a trance state that can then be applied to interface with the pentacles.
picture copyright Taylor Ellwood 2024
In this example above the tree sticks have been put into a pattern of a star. The star creates a focal point above the Venusian pentacle, drawing in the other pentacles, while also aligning the spirits attributed to each stick to aid with the scrying and in this case spacetime magic being worked with. The star serves to both amplify and focus the overall intent and energy of the work so a connection can be made to a past self with the intention of doing self love as a form of healing for the person being worked with AND with the ancestors. The healing work is around the specific traumatic patterns that are existent in both the person and their ancestors. The approach here is driven by a desired result to heal the person and extend that healing into the past while also breaking the traumatic patterns for future generations.
Combining different techniques and systems of magic can be a delicate piece of work, because the original context of the respective techniques and systems is that typically they weren’t intended to be combined with other techniques or systems. The question that always comes to mind for me is: Can I combine multiple techniques/systems in a way that either creates a new magical working or enhances an existing one?
The purpose of the working is another important factor to consider. The purpose of this working involves using scrying to connect with a past self and then applying changes to both myself as I am now and my younger self so I can do healing around trauma, while also sending that healing into the past via the ancestors. The pentacles applies planetary influences, while the folkloric magic calls in the ancestors as well as animal/plant and faerie allies to aid in the process of connecting with the past and healing the trauma. The work is also carried to the future, to future generations to promote peace and harmony in the world. At the same time, I use the pentacles, scrying mirror and candle, and the folkloric magic to also call in that same peace and harmony to the world now. My thought is that this work can apply across time and that through personal healing, using homeopathic principles, it can create a ripple effect in the larger continuum of humanity.
This is part of a larger work I’ll be continuing to work on. It is also my continued experimentation with Scrying beyond what I’ve shared in my book Scrying the Divine.
I share my latest experiment with divination and discuss the protocols of the experiment.
I discuss how to attune yourself to the spiral of time so you can connect with events in the past and future and bring them into the present in order to shape and manifest your life.
I discuss why it can be good to get a divinatory reading from someone else, in order to confirm details of a situation or get a different perspective and why an unbiased reading can be beneficial if the person doesn't know much about you.
Have you ever had that feeling, that sense of certainty, a feeling of fate or destiny when it comes to your life, where you just know that certain things will happen? I have and each time I’ve experienced it I have recognized that what I’ve tapped into is a possible future state of being, a potential maybe that could be a reality in my life. It’s an awareness of reality that transcends the present moment and the linear experience of time and aligns you with the future spiral.
One of the fascinating aspects of divination is the observer effect, where the act of observation, or in this case divination has an impact on the magical work a person does, or for that matter the mundane realities of a person’s life. In this video I share some of my thoughts on this aspect of divination and share why I use divination as an active form of magical work, instead of for the purposes of getting information.
When you think of the experience of fear, or feel the experience of fear, what comes to mind or feeling? I can’t speak for you, but what I’ve learned to do over the years is embrace fear. It isn’t always easy, but it is always empowering, because when I embrace my fear, I’m no longer letting it dictate my existence, but instead using it to motivate and drive me.
The depiction of fear, when it’s not horror movies, is that fear paralyzes us or causes us to run and hide from what we’re afraid of (for that matter, its the same in horror movies). But if we take a different approach to fear, one where we recognize how fear can be a useful ally and helper in our quest to deal with the circumstances that come into our lives then we can change how we handle fear.