kimberlysteele | The Astral Bog

Entry tags:

astral plane,
magic

The Astral Bog

I was hagged yesterday morning. I was walking down a flight of stairs in a dream. A shadowy thing was headed in the opposite direction. As we crossed paths, it forced me through itself and latched on to my back. It tried to force me to invite it into my body. Of course I said no. I called on Poseidon via my memorized Orphic hymn -- it clung on despite my invocation, though not as strongly. It was still there when I woke up, slithering around my neck and head and chattering away in my ears.

I took a hoodoo bath immediately upon rising, deeper than usual, which was a rude wake up call. (I've gotten soft due to my lifestyle of modern suburban luxury.) The bath seemed to dislodge the Thing that wanted to go for a ride. During that morning's Sphere of Protection, I saw it ushered back to the Abyss by two tall figures and a third in the background.

Despite doing the Sphere of Protection every day for nearly three years, discursive meditation for over three years, daily prayer, and divination, I still have scary bouts on the astral. Approximately three weeks ago, another entity slimed me in much the same manner as today.

I had my first vivid astral travel experience/lucid dream around the age of four. The experience was remarkably similar to this morning's hagging. Just as some people naturally draw mosquitoes more than others, I draw incorporeal entities of all sorts. This was the case when I was raised Christian, when I became Wiccan as a teen, when I discarded Wicca for a long stint of atheism, and it is still the case now as I study Druidry. Nothing has truly changed about my attractiveness to entities fair and foul except my ability to shield myself via Druid rituals and mind-strengthening, and for that shielding I am eternally grateful.

The abilities I have with unseen beings can often be of great comfort and a source of happiness: because of my natural ability to communicate with the unseen, I have been able to assist dead loved ones and friends with crossing over. I walk into the forest preserve and I get the same rush a natural extrovert gets from walking into a crowded party -- I talk to trees, houses, bodies of water, patches of air, and I'm beginning to be able to talk to certain animals. Sensitivity, I have learned, is a balance. I have always been extremely sensitive and only Druidry got through to me enough so I could learn to harness it.

I'm not alone in my sensitivity, of course, but I am one of the lucky few sensitives who was in the right time at the right place. Druidry was my saving grace; Christianity simply didn't work for me and I have no passion for Eastern religions such as Shintoism or the practice of yoga. Sensitives like me tend to get sucked into believing we are "star children" or worse, being lured into atheist demonolatry with its edgelord posturing and improvised black candle spells.

Both the Rhonda Byrne-esque positivity movement and atheist "witches" have much to answer for in the current state of the astral plane. We are in an astral cesspool. Banishing ritual or not, there is precious little between us and a boiling bog of eternal stench. The Professional Managerial set and atheist warlocks/witches have chosen to swim through without even the benefit of a raft. Antifa/BLM and the Magic Resistance gleefully slide down the chute to the sewers with their foul toxic feminism, their inability to discriminate a blunt hammer applied to public discourse (their penchant for gaslighting and foul language), protests (riots), and magic (demonolatry). On the other side, toxic masculinity bleats about the importance of reseeding and restoring Christendom, never understanding that wasting away in front of a computer screen is perhaps the best possible route to loneliness and sperm dilution. In their minds, the blame for all of the world's evils lies squarely upon slutty women, cuckolds, and the great globalist cabal. Add to this stewpot the dire reality that almost all work for pay is horrendous drudgery. Teamwork? That's Bulls**tese for a pyramid scheme designed to fool suckers into providing enthusiastic labor for a greedy fat cat who vacations in Aruba and is on his third trophy wife. Attitude? That's the term the corporate zombies who control your life use to gaslight you into believing you didn't work hard enough when you are downsized. Commitment? That's what you are supposed to give endlessly to your boss without the faintest hope that you'll receive the basics of yesteryear in return: health insurance, vacations, the ability to afford a small, modest home. If you do land a job where you are taken care of, expect to trade no less than your immortal soul for your prosperity: the more you make, the more people are gunning for your position and the more you have to spend to fit in with others of your high class.

Now combine all of the aforementioned sludge with profound religious ignorance. I truly hope Christianity of the old fashioned stripe such as Old Skool Catholicism and Greek Orthodoxy makes a big comeback, because we need all of the exorcists and Christian mystics we can get right now. I hope the yoga people who have been thrown out of their suburban studios because of silly COVID rules head to the forests and start talking with the trees. I hope the vegan atheist Instagram witches get sick of personal and political blowback and start becoming serious Manly P. Hall quoting occultists. I argue that we need people interested in non-Harry Potter, antiseptic magic and prayer more than we need permaculturists and green wizards, and we need permaculturists and green wizards quite badly.

I'm doing what I can. Though because of my business, I must keep abreast of the politics that affect me, I have largely removed myself from politics and politicking. I recently did a big double hoodoo vacuum of my Studio (not a floor wash because it's got lots of carpeting) and I'll do a series of blessings on it in the following weeks. I'm praying and playing Orphic hymns every day. I'm wearing a red bag amulet. Making charms for around the house. Cups of vinegar and bowls of salt. Please pray for me that my measures will be adequate.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Yikes! I've never heard of sleep paralysis sending someone to the psych ward before. Though to be fair, my parents came from a very, very different place where shrinks and psych meds are concerned, and would not have gone that route. But... after being told "it's just a dream" a few times, I learned not to mention it. It wasn't any use. I mean, I knew, beyond all shadow of doubt, that it was NOT just a dream, that it was a THING, that it was real, malign, and that it was personal. As in, it wasn't some bad thing out there, it was a bad thing that meant harm to me, personally.

And the thing is, that's how nearly everyone who's experienced it describes it, the world over. Materialists like to say this is evidence that the thing is just a shared neural circuit being triggered. But IMO that's evidence that it's a real thing. Not bound by cultural expectations, not primed by experience, but shared by people all over the world with remarkable consistency. It's like chickenpox: kids all over the world get it. Some are naturally immune. The immune people don't say "Oh, that's psychosomatic anxiety triggering a blister reaction". They say "oh, all these people have caught the same pathogen". And they said that even before they could test for it. Why don't they assume haggings are the result of the same beast attacking, and that we simply don't have a way to test for it yet?

I agree that the sensitivity in general is tied to diet, but have had different experiences. My parents were vegetarians, so we were mostly vegetarian growing up, and I was seriously vegetarian for four years after I moved out of my parents' house. That made me *more* sensitive. I think JMG is onto something when he says eating meat is a good way to ground yourself. Certainly, it works for me. During my vegetarian years, I was getting frequent hallucinations of cats in my peripheral vision. Mostly, I could run through the checklist of "ok, we don't have any cats, so that was a strictly visual thing", but I remember one night at work, closing up the place, when I had to go and search the lobby just to be sure there wasn't a cat (because that would be a big health code violation!). Also during that time, I felt increasingly disconnected from the material world. It was not a good experience. I remember a roommate coming back from an outing where she'd tried a little LSD, and describing how everything had looked, and being like... geez, why bother? That's what everything looks like all the time anyway. For me, at least, eating a reasonable amount of meat puts a damper on that stuff, and that's a good thing. By veg year 4, I was starting to *feel* crazy.

Now, doing things like fasting before church services lets me open it up again more selectively in a safer context where the results are helpful and make a certain amount of sense. Guardrails and protections and all that.

Even so, there's still a lot of day-to-day visual background "noise". But that's always been there, and I've had a lot of practice ignoring it. Walls still shimmer, and nothing is ever quite as stationary as physics would like it to be, and I would still love to know what the dang cloud vortex is all about. But those things don't seem to be... meaningful?

The chicken pox analogy is excellent, I'm going to pocket that one for the future if you don't mind!

I don't mention it on JMG's boards, but I think one can have serious sensitivity problems if one isn't eating enough fat, whether that is animal or vegetable. I have noticed I feel spacey, hollow, and enervated when I don't eat enough and/or if I haven't had enough fatty food. It's my opinion that sensitivity is largely a fat issue -- fat isn't the boogeyman and neither is sugar. Now that I'm older and have some extra padding, I feel like I can go longer without eating. Meaning I have some extra fat in case that which I have eaten is insufficient. I have noticed concentration being difficult when my digestion is sluggish, and one thing I've noticed that gets way worse when I'm constipated is my frustration, stubbornness, and closed-mindedness.

Oddly, even with a very poor diet, I never had trouble with constipation until after kids. The combination of poor posture, pregnancy hormones, and childbirth rearranges one's guts in some pretty unspeakable ways. I feel like I'm an expert in digestive rehab, now.

You're absolutely right that this has a huge effect on one's mental health and well-being. The only times I have ever felt severely depressed-- like everything is terrible and it will never get any better, ever-- were during episodes of severe constipation, and resolved as soon as the constipation resolved, too. They were definitely connected. My best guess is there's something to do with serotonin going on there. It's weird that nobody talks about this. I can't possibly be the only one!

I've noticed that about fat, and overall feelings of well-being. The body uses fats to make hormones, so that probably has something to do with it. Not enough is definitely a bad thing.

I know fiber works for a lot of people, but my own issues have to do with hormone-mediated (lack of) motility and some actual physical stuff-got-stretched-out-of-shape issues, and for me personally, fiber doesn't help :( I know, I tried everything. I wanted so badly for that to be the solution! So to some extent, it depends on what caused the problem. And fiber does help for maintenance, when my digestion is mostly OK. But when I'm having a problem (say, took a round of antibiotics), the only things I've found that get me through it are a complete liquids-only fast (water, salt, broth), or cutting my diet down to nothing but red meat for about a week. Neither is pleasant, but it works- kind of like hitting the "reset" button.

TMI alert: I have always had chronic constipation. It's not bad nowadays because of the aformentioned heavy fiber, but I can't indulge too many bad habits because I'm always prone to it and it is a living hell. Before I was vegan, it was normal for me to go 4 days to a week without pooping. I'm on the other side of menopause now, but I remember how intimately tied my periods were to the constipation cycle. The pain was unbelievably bad, like 4 - 5 Advil and a vodka chaser. This was when I weighed a hundred pounds. When I got my period at 12, it was so painful and heavy I literally wished I was dead. I wish I had known to quit dairy back then, but of course as a young vegetarian, I quit eating meat first -- dairy was not good for me.

I'm just beginning to get into herbs. Herbal medicine is night and day from allopathic medicine. What's interesting about it is how it crosses borders: soup is technically herbal medicine, and so is herb tea. Allopathic medicine seeks to remove or burn out the offending lesion; they always want to either amputate a body part or blitzkrieg it.

"let food be your medicine, and medicine be your food"? Makes sense to me. I fried some broccoli from the garden yesterday, to eat with my breakfast eggs. Walked away for a minute to address some crisis, and it was all scorched. I ate it anyway, and it was STILL the most insanely delicious thing I'd eaten all week. Etheric nutrition theory is the only thing I know of that makes sense of that. If anyone ever writes a treatise on the subject, I'll be first in line to buy it.

Of course, I'm not a doc and all the fine print that goes with that, but what you describe does have some elements that sound endometriosis-like. I had some of that going on as well, but with the opposite digestive problem, when I was younger. Went away with the first pregnancy and never came back. I joke that if anyone had told me that was the cure, I'd have seriously considered teen motherhood... though I've read it doesn't work that way for everyone.

I view it as a net positive: it was horrible at the time, but it was sort of a 15-year course in dealing with pain. I was forced to ditch NSAIDs due to (drumroll) digestive side-effects and tinnitus, as well as increasing tolerance. I discovered the pain-relief wonders of running water, basically invented my own meditation practice, and learned some useful tidbits for dealing with nausea. After all that, unmedicated childbirth was a breeze. I remember holding my first son, still squeaking, and telling my husband, with some surprise: "That wasn't so bad. I've had periods that were worse."

I've only ever dealt with the constipation episodically: kicked off by pregnancy and antibiotics. But episodes last anywhere from a couple months to a couple years. I can't imagine having to live with it as a chronic problem! I have definitely had to give up dairy for long stretches to get it under control. I don't know what it is about milk, but it is not kind to sluggish guts.

Ha! I always wondered if childbirth would be easier than my periods! I'll never know, but now that you've said that I suspect it might have been the case. Depends on the childbirth, I'm sure.

When I had a surgery for uterine polyps, my doctor (also my surgeon) was shocked not to find a trace of endometriosis. I did have a bunch of tendons that wound me up tight down there. Between that and my hormonal composition, it is likely what caused the excessive cramps. I do feel that kind of pain was a learning experience. I'm not afraid of pain and I have that era to thank.

The key difference between horrifying menstrual pain, and childbirth pain, is that the latter comes in waves (most of them less intense), with breaks between, and then there's a kid to show for it and a ton of nice endorphins and bonding hormones. The former, for me at least, was like 8 straight hours of relentless, debilitating, all-encompassing pain, and no reward.

Yes! There was never anything to show for the suffering! I'm glad I got wise during the last 10 years of my period and finally used a menstrual cup and cloth pads. It's weird not having to worry about that stuff anymore.

That makes a lot of sense. I've had a lot of blood sugar issues in the past (including gestational diabetes) and I need a substantial amount of fat and protein to feel physically at my best. I've often wondered if I cut back, if it might up my sensitivity a bit - but probably not worth it.

My husband has type two diabetes. I think diabetes is a form of etheric starvation. Eating less fat (in my opinion) won't help diabetes because you haven't enriched the etheric content of the food by taking the fat away. If I could completely control his diet, every single meal he ate would be handcrafted by me or another capable cook who cared about him. It's that crafting that makes food etherically rich.

I had gestational diabetes at a time when I didn't really even know how to cook because it wasn't "feminist" (ha! I must have been so obnoxious). Now I cook from scratch at least 6 days a week and I am definitely strengthening my etheric body. I've had a number of weird health issues, like being post-menopausal in my mid-30s. Too much to go into here, but I wouldn't be surprised if there were environmental (as in pollution) and/or etheric causes at root.

Well, I'm inclined to agree: my go to in order to shut down my subtle senses is a bowl of yogourt. No meat there, but plenty of fat!

I think sensitivity might be a matter of cholesterol. Vegetable foods have no cholesterol, so it would follow that not eating cholesterol would make for hypersensitivity. Not so, I think, because my husband has been vegan as long as I have been (11ish years) and he's insensitive to non-corporeal entities, etheric forces, and ghosts. He is type 2 diabetic, which in my opinion means that he suffers from etheric starvation. His cholesterol has been sky high, like off the charts high, in the 400s at the lowest, for many years. The body manufactures its own cholesterol from fat stores. You don't need to eat animal products to have high cholesterol.

I haven't done any magic outside of the SOP and natural magic, so I can't yet say whether JMG is right about veganism rendering people too sensitive for ritual magic. I am going to do ritual magic soon enough, I've just been trying to memorize the rituals before I start doing them regularly.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

The Astral Bog

Re: Sensitivities

Re: Sensitivities

Re: Sensitivities

Re: Sensitivities

Re: Sensitivities

Re: Sensitivities

Re: Sensitivities

Re: Sensitivities

Re: Sensitivities

Re: Sensitivities

Re: Sensitivities

Re: Sensitivities

Re: Sensitivities