I finally heard myself, as I was telling my friend A at the neighborhood farmers market on Friday about my spring travels.  It was the phrase "I broke wide open," that triggered my Coulson moment.  When I heard myself say the phrase and remembered saying it more than once just like that.  It dawned on me that this is not a "healing from," it's not going to go back to what it was before.  The materia I shifted is just that:  in a different place or arrangement.  It's going to be slow healing, like this guy I knew who had a diverticula burst and they had to let his surgical wound heal open, not sewn shut.  Yay, growth!....uugh...

I found this picture frame with an image of Mercury/Hermes at the Goodwill for $1, as you can see by the tag.  Of course I got it.  The image turned out to be a photograph, dated May 23, 2000 on the back.  A brief bit of sleuthing on the internet and I believe there is a very strong case to be made that the picture now in my possession is the likeness of the Florentine statue of Mercury located in the Butchart Gardens in Victoria, BC, Canada.  I don't know if the frame and image will remain together, but I can say that right off the bat I am just a tad more fond of the image...

from The Secret Book Of Artephius, taken from 'In Pursuit of Gold' by Lapidus

The last few days I've been walking around in my neighborhood via a series of alleyways that I've never walked on or hardly noticed in the eight years I've lived here.  Mostly you see garbage trucks using them.  I can wander most of my immediate area now on a connected set of private pathways which almost no other people or cars is using.  It's surreal.

The OSF production of THE TEMPEST was amazing.  The spellwork in the play is exemplary, and you can see how it's been a huge influence over the centuries on magickal language.  But when you really look at it, Shakespeare crafted some fantastic magick, stuff that was super-powerful and potent, and the language is amazing at the end when Prospero undoes all he's cast, and it's so fucking ethical it's a freaking benchmark when you look at magickal practitioners today, about 400 years after this stuff was written.  And there was this one part where Ariel rose up on wings and I swear to Tumblr the costuming and freaking everything was like Attack on Titan and I nearly lost it, which is to say nothing of K's reaction.  Being in the theatre, versus a dark movie theater, we controlled ourselves.  Just.

It's one of those lull-in-the-action moments of the year, a gap of quiet in the midst of some really busy times and travel.  I alternate between feeling restful and restless.  The constant light is actually now so pronounced it's making me crazy.  I'm up late at night trying to get to bed and then turn right around and wake up very early.  We've been having a dry spring, and so it was nice this past week to actually have some rain.  The garden and the barrels needed it, and you could tell the city residents actually did too.  Cool, clammy, subtle humidity is annoying and it appears to be something we will be seeing manifest more here as the climate changes.

I've been doing alchemical fire circles (alchemifires) with the Vegas Vortex and related groups for a decade now. It's been interesting to watch the process refine and change over the years, and I made the effort to go to a variety of different fires so that I could see how the various branches of the Fire Family did their own thing. Mostly I've interacted with the West Coast off-shoots. I'm glad I got to three of the Hawaii/Oahu events before that group chose to disband at the end of 2012. There were a few years where there was some really fun experimentation and exploration in terms of ritual structure and alchemical metaphors, but things seem to have settled down much more now.  Illumination is clearly the next-gen of circles but so far it's working on disseminating the established culture, or at least that's the direction it seemed to take in year two.  If I get the chance to go see how Four Quarters does their alchemifires, I'd be curious about that one.

A few years back I took Robert Bartlett's Prima class on practical lab work and seeing how all the alchemical metaphors and material applied to actual laboratory chemistry was fantastic. In turn, this inspired me to start looking at laboratory procedures and how we might find new ways to play in ritual, riffing off other processes versus sticking to just the classical seven-phase structure.  For my own ritual work, I've been working with nine phases, adding Multiplication and Projection at the end after Coagulation.  It makes more sense to me to not just be standing there holding gold, and to do something after making it as the proper conclusion.

" I, Saturn, the greatest of the planets in the firmament, declare here before you all, that I am the meanest and most unprofitable of all that are here present, that my body is weak, corruptible, and of a swarthy hue, but that, nevertheless, it is I that try you all. For having nothing that is fixed about me, I carry away with me all that is of a kindred nature. My wretchedness is entirely caused by that fickle and inconstant Mercury, by his careless and neglectful conduct. Therefore, I pray you, let us be avenged on him, shut him up in prison, and keep him there till he dies and is decomposed, nay, until not a drop of his blood is to be seen."

~ "The Twelve Keys of Basil Valentine," from Ein kurtz summarischer Tractat, von dem grossen Stein der Uralten...', Eisleben, 1599.

Having had this recurring Ripley Scroll thing, as I mentioned last week, I got to exploring the work of George Ripley more, and his Twelve Gates writings.

1. Calcination
2. Solution
3. Separation
4. Conjunction
5. Putrefaction
6. Congelation
7. Cibation/Nutrition
8. Sublimation
9. Fermentation
10. Exaltation
11. Multiplication
12. Projection

Not only do I think there could be benefit in having the metaphorical ritual/inner process not end with Coagulation (creating the gold), but I also found from my own work that having more and shorter phases across a long period of time makes for a more smoothly flowing ritual.  There's less up-and-down as far as actions which mark the time, and it's easier to give more intentional action to a shorter period of time.  Less loss of momentum.  We already have an established structure at work in the community, so introducing a variation isn't that difficult.  It's sort of like how Illumination tried something last summer that was sort of like the usual affinity group process but they changed the metaphor and didn't assign specific group leaders.  There were enough attendees who were familiar with collaborative improvisation to hold the hands of everyone else who was freaking out from never having done it before.  In my perfect world, I'd like to do this at MayFire where almost everyone knows the drill, and we'd just play the game with some new pieces.  One catch to that might be that it is such a small event, having more groups would make them too small to be practical about this.  Illumination which runs double to triple the size of a MayFire could be more suitable.

Gates one through four are standard.  Putrefaction is really interesting, because at Vortex fires rotting is lumped in with Calcination and I think it would be really interesting to have done some purification work and then take a deep dive down to see exactly what the shit is at that point.  Congelation is a thickening and slowing down.  The Cibation phase is the perfect spot for literally "feeding" the ritual or group.  I'm not yet sure how a group would enact Sublimation.  That's rare enough physically as it is.  Fermentation is standard.  Exaltation, Multiplication and Projection seem like a great way to energize and head to the end.  Bring the energy up, expand it and then connect it to the world outside the ritual space.  Seems like a natural to me.  Ripley has a section after the gates he calls the Recapitulation and that seems like the afterglow part of the ritual.  I need to research more into the phases and explore their facets.  I also think the symbolism of "gates" could be significant.  

I'm still working out the manifestation of cob house workshops and festival fires for the spring and summer.  May has the potential for one cob workshop and two potential events.  In earlier May is MayFire in Vegas and (hopefully) at the end of May will be another Northwest Alchemy Conference.  I haven't heard from Karen since late summer so I guess it's time to go poke her and see what's up.  June or July could have cob building.  June has Shakespeare in Ashland.  Early July I usually house-sit for the 'rents, later July has a faerie festival potential.  And August is Illumination.