Saturday night, Harper and I performed the consecration of the Bune Spirit Pots. She drove, letting me be free to just sit back and scry.
By “She drove,” I mean she did all the conjuration aspects, while I took on the role of the seer. She wore the black robe and I wore the white. I did not do a lot of prep/opening work to receive Bune because I’ve worked with him so much in the past, and while making the copper seals, I had already felt his presence. I’d even cheated and made an offering to him Friday to help me find the words to put my contribution together for Aaron Leitch’s upcoming anthology on Offerings. In the pics, you’ll see the stain of a dried up drop of bourbon I’d placed as an offering on the seal.
Harper has taught me a lot about being a seer. The things she writes about on the Adyton of Pythia blog are extremely useful techniques, and getting to watch her in action has been a wonderful opportunity to pick up some best practices she has developed in her years of experience in other witchcraft and faery traditions. I’ve envied before her ability to let the spirits speak through her and to her without it messing up any of her boundaries.
And we’ve been together for a couple of years now, and are extremely comfortable in ritual. As a result, I was able to just let go and trust her to handle all the aspects of the rite that required consciousness, and I could just let go and say what I saw, felt, smelt, and heard. It was great. I’ve never had that kind of opportunity before. Being the sole mage/scryer, I’ve always had to hold on and not let myself just enjoy the experience.
Suffice it to say, I had a great time. Bune appeared quickly, and strong in the room. He agreed to consecrate the pots, warning me not to sell them to anyone stupid. It seems they are linked, and that ignorant people using them will make it harder to work through. Sort of like these three pots will never be stronger than the weakest link. Harper said I explained it to her in the language of hydrodynamics, which I am not familiar with, but she is. I don’t remember saying anything about that, but she assures me I did, for about five minutes or so.
Harper asked what the spirit got out of working with Humans, and he waxed long and in detail about that, and how spirits operate, and how Humans are different. We continued with the rite, and I don’ remember a lot of the details after that. Harper blessed the spirit pots in the name and seal of Bune, and he took up residence in them.
For more on the actual session, go read Harper’s account on her blog, I don’t have the same kind of approach to remembering things she does, and I was pretty gone through most of the rite.
When we closed out our workings with terrestrial spirits lately, we’ve started doing a thing Jason Miller told us about. Since we were consecrated as Priests, we have the spiritual authority to ennoble demons. We can “forgive sin,” and “loose that which is bound” and so forth and so on. I won’t pretend to understand what the metaphysics of that entail, or get into the theological implications, but it’s something we’ve started doing when we conjure the spirits, we bless them, ennoble them, and remove any obstacles or imperfections that might lie between them and the Source of us all.
I suspect this sort of makes them no longer demonic at all, restoring them to the simple chthonic state of being a terrestrial spirit, without the baggage of the belief system that made them sinister in the first place. I don’t think it makes them any less … uh, malefic, if they are of a malefic nature to begin with. I think malefic forces are as natural as anything else.
But it does remove some of the stigma I might have in working with them. I think “sins” are secretly just human constructs built of ignorance of self that serve to keep a human from the glorious conscious presence of the Most High God. Sin is not what makes a person less worthy or less noble, but it is what makes a person feel like they are less, by agreeing they are somehow bad in some way. Much of the process of the Great Work results in removing these false understandings about who we are and what we want.
So I think by ennobling the spirits we are working with, by blessing them, we are removing the perceived separation between them and their source that may only exist in our own minds.
Ok, so I went into it anyway, I didn’t mean to.
The spirit pots are now consecrated and ready for action! I’ll be writing a post on what that actually looks like next.
