Category Archives: General

1er Congreso Isadora

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I am starting to get just a little bit excited, tomorrow I travel to Lugo in Spain as I have been invited to talk at the 1er Congreso Isadora, a new venture aimed at respectful discourse and sharing of knowledge between different magickal and spiritual practitioners. I have chosen to speak on the Importance of Balance within our daily lives and in sacred ritual. I was rather hoping it might be Hekate free, but as per usual she has managed to sneak her way into the proceedings, I probably shouldn’t have expected anything else really seeing as the conference has been organised by a Torchbearer of the Covenant of Hekate and I think more than a few of the attendees are also members. I am so looking forward to meeting people who I’ve only ever had the chance to interact with online, I am sure its going to be the most wonderful experience. I am also going to get the chance to do something I’ve wanted to do for a long while, seeing that Lugo is only 120km from Santiago de Compostela, I intend to take a day and a rather long bus journey to Santiago and walk the last couple of miles of the Camino Primitivo.

I am a bit of a pilgrimage junkie and the energies that are generated by so many sincere souls all walking with a common spiritual purpose should not be sniffed at regardless of which faith presides over the act of devotion. Whether you are Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Buddhist, Hindu, Pagan or any other path, I believe that everybody should make at least one pilgrimage in their lives, obviously you can chose a destination that is meaningful to your own faith, you don’t have to be a complete spiritual floozy like me.

Anyway there is still time to book into the conference if you fancy listening to me talk about different energetic techniques and how to create your own. Details can be found either on the website:

http://www.portalisadora.es/congreso-isadora/

or through the Facebook page:

https://www.facebook.com/congresoisadora

Maybe I will see you there 😀

Our Lady Hekate

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At Yule I had the distinct pleasure of being able to meet for coffee with a very talented lady and member of The Covenant of Hekate. An organisation that I have spoken of before here. The lady in question was Mima Cornish and we spent a lovely afternoon putting the world to rights, thinking about where our lives will take us in the coming year and how many of our activities seem to be influenced by our work with the Goddess Hekate.

One of the topics we discussed was a project of Mima’s which had recently come to fruition in rather a spectacular manner, as it was launched at one of the biggest Mind Body & Spirit events in the UK, which rather amusingly is held at Olympia. It is collection of guided meditations on CD which focuses on working with different aspects of “Our Lady Hekate”. I know this has been a labour of love for Mima and musician Paul Landry and so I was very honoured when as we parted she gave me a copy of her CD as a gift and I am even more delighted to give it a glowing review.

The CD is split into 4 tracks each one dedicated to a specific aspect of the Goddess. They are as follows:

  • Hekate Soteria – The Saviour
  • Hekate Phosphorus – The Light Bringer
  • Hekate Einalia – Of the Sea
  • Hekate Chthonia – Of the Underworld

I like that all the meditations are drawn together in a central location around an image of the Goddess, with repeating phrases in each meditation, that allows moving in and out of the different meditations to occur easily and smoothly. The symbology of the rose garden and the Alkamenes style multifaceted statue gives a Graeco-Roman feel to the meditation but I do not think that this detracts from the overall experience if you are a hard core Hellenic.

Also the continuation of the rose symbology in the form of an offering to the Goddess during each mediation also is reminiscent of the ancient practise of hanging a rose as a sign of privacy and secrecy and harkens to the old idiom of “to know, to will to dare and to stay silent” which I am sure will appeal to many; as will the thought that Mima has put into the symbology of each aspect of the Goddess during the meditation.

From a more practical point of view the sound reproduction is excellent, and Mima’s voice is very gentle and calming and her words are well enunciated. The imagery she creates is enough to build a picture without being too detailed or prescriptive, allowing the listener to genuinely have their own experience.

I’ve immersed myself over the last few weeks using this CD as the basis for my meditations and I can heartily recommend it to anyone either beginner or old hand. So support a fellow Hekatean and go buy one right now!

Who are Mima Cornish and Paul Landry?

Mima Cornish is a healer, an artist and Oracle living in Cheshire. She has been working through artistic trance and meditation for a number of years and was recently inspired to produce this collection of guided meditations about the Goddess Hekate which can be purchased from her website : www.hedgerosehealing.com

Paul Landry is an independent musician and composer of new age and ambient music. His collaboration with Mima is sensitively done providing an excellent backdrop for her spoken word. All Paul’s work is available on CD or downloadable from: www.newagemusicgarden.com

Cover and Artwork is also by Mima Cornish and the packaging is made from recycled materials.

The Scent of a Goddess

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I am aware of how certain smells can evoke very powerful images and the use of fragrance is something that fills both my everyday and my devotional life. It doesn’t even have to be smells you particularly like very much. A couple of years ago I was lucky enough to attend a wonderful workshop entitled “Sacred and Ritual Perfumes” held in Glastonbury by the wonderful Marina.

Marina is a fantastic natural perfumer who owns The Perfume Garden and as part of the workshop we had to discuss smells we did and didn’t like. I expressed my deep disgust at the scent of  unadulterated Patchouli, it has such negative connotations. My first clear memory of it was in the late 1970’s. I cannot have been more than 7 years old and we were eating in the Vegan cafe in our local town, a treat I normally relished. But his particular day the person who was waiting table smelt terribly of body odour overlaid with another smell, the combination was so sickening that it stayed with me all day hanging around under my nose and I was physically ill on the bus ride home. The other smell as I discovered later was Patchouli.

I can recall the clothes the person was wearing, the gaudily painted walls, the ethnic hangings and the beaded curtain that separated the kitchen from the customers. I can even feel the wooden table under my hand and recall swinging my legs from the seat which was too tall for me; so strong are my memories. And every time I have smelt Patchouli on its own since then, those memories come flooding back so strongly that I have to take a moment and centre myself.

The connection with smell and the ability to recall memories is not a new concept and it is a phenomena we can use in our work with Deity. After all if smell can quite literally summon up a memory so strongly that it can physically make us sick, then imagine what we can do with our primal mind and smell, what we can connect with when we use the right smell and let our conscious minds go.

This is one of the primary reasons in my opinion, for using incense during ritual or path-working. Yes of course you can use it as an offering of sorts as we tend to blend incenses that are aligned with whichever entity you are working with and there are of course many historical references to using fine perfumes and smoke as offerings to the Gods. But when we work we want to align ourselves with and summon up an aspect of something. And there really isn’t a quicker way to evoke an image of something than through our sense of smell.

I tend to blend a lot of my own incense and I have provided recipes for a few of my own in my book but from time to time I venture into the world of prepared blends from skilled artisans, and I have to say that the Hecate Oil from Rosarium Blends is possibly one of the best ritual scents I have come across in a very long while and to me it evokes the very essence of Hekate. It is deep and rich and earthy, with a sweet undertone which stops the combinations of Oakmoss and Myrrh and Frankincense making the smell too masculine. And funnily enough, it contains Patchouli 😉

Beautiful Things

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I recently read a friends Facebook status declaring that they would start posting about the small beautiful things in their life. The idea I suppose is that perhaps if we all looked for more beauty in the world then the world would, to us, effectively become a more beautiful place.

I have in ages past considered this desire by many to always see the *good* and the *beautiful*, to be a big pile of new age clap trap. After all the world is not always beautiful, nature is not always beautiful and people most certainly aren’t always beautiful in either body or deed. I felt that this opinion of mine was even further validated because what one finds beautiful another may find abhorrent. In essence beauty is so strongly in the eye of the beholder how can the world be full of beautiful things that satisfy every perception.

Something drove me however, to contemplate and try to re-evaluate this opinion, dare I say it to find the beauty in this viewpoint so I started exploring it and came across possibly one of the earliest written forms of this belief.

“Remember how in that communion only, beholding beauty with the eye of the mind, he will be enabled to bring forth, not images of beauty, but realities (for he has hold not of an image but of a reality), and bringing forth and nourishing true virtue to become the friend of God and be immortal, if mortal man may.”
-Plato, Symposium

In my opinion Plato here is actually saying, look if you contemplate and embrace things that you perceive to be beautiful, you will be able to create a subjectively beautiful reality and in doing so you will achieve true excellence (the word virtue in Ancient Greek is actually arete which is more akin to the word excellence). By finding those beautiful things, you will further your physical and spiritual well being and in turn achieve your true purpose, your own specific union with the divine and a state of Henosis.

Something so many of us are striving to achieve. Wow would you look at that, this whole idea of beautiful things isn’t New Age at all, its very very Old Age and something I rather approve of. Well fancy that!

The Temple of Hekate

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Exploring the Goddess Hekate Through Ritual, Meditation and Divination
 
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Well it has been a long time in the coming, but my book is finally here, I got a copy in my hands a week or so ago, and I would be lying if I said I wasn’t just a little taken with it. The journey to the completion of this project has been a difficult one, yet another example of how Hekate always asks for more than you think you can give, but never more than you are capable of.As per usual, I always foolishly hope that when I complete a project in her name, it will allow me some breathing space, and as always, she always finds a way of getting just a little bit more from me, and always in the most unusual ways, but that is another post for another time.

The reason this book means so much to me, is that I am not a natural writer, it does not always come easily or readily to me; and in a world full of aspiring writers many of whom you can now find inhabiting social networking sites such as Facebook, Google+ and Twitter promoting thier skills, the idea of writing down what I had learnt and what I knew was, well just a little overwhelming, to be honest. The only thing that I clung onto to preserve my sanity was a fragment of something I had read years earlier, although where I cannot now remember; the fragment was, “there is one book in everybody”. And apparently this adage may be true.

I do hope people will enjoy my work, and I look forward to hearing peoples stories and experiences from the exercises that I have included; I always feel that we never stop learning and I hope to learn as much from those who read my work as I hope they will learn from me.