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Reading requests are completed for Thursday, December 18, 2022. Please be patient as it often takes me anywhere from 4-48 hours to get to all of them. Thank you and have a wonderful Solstice holiday. I will be back with more free Ogham readings on Sunday, January 8, 2023.

Dead mall in Heikintori, Finland. Image courtesy of Wikipedia.

There was a notable absence of Black Friday stampedes in Chicagoland this year. For the past twenty years, Walmart has been infamous for its Black Friday shopping debacle. In times gone by, herds of greedy humans camped outside the building in long, snaking lines, suffering the cold in order to snatch a perceived deal on the latest gaming console, big screen TV, or toy.

Not so much this year. One of my young adult students reported that Walmart did not stay open all night on Thanksgiving as it used to do and that Black Friday was underwhelming. My husband said that Sam’s Club (warehouse store and competitor of Costco) was remarkably quiet two days after Thanksgiving on a Saturday that should have looked like a mob scene. Of course lots of people are going to say “It’s because everyone is shopping online” but I don’t think so. Online shopping didn’t stop people from thronging in stores every Black Friday from 2000 until the Plandemic. I think something else is going on. The vibe is different, at least for the time being.

Perhaps after three years of being artificially prevented from seeing loved ones, it is finally beginning to dawn on some people that human togetherness is much more important than we have previously been led to believe. I certainly hope so. I am the sort of psychic who cannot possibly win the lottery or a horse race but is often tormented by my sense of whatever astral shifts are going on all around me. As Carole King once sang, I Feel the Earth Move. I sense a shift going on. I believe it is related to Saturn.

Saturn is the most misunderstood of planetary influences. As an astrological novice, my knowledge of him is severely limited and I freely admit it. For many, Saturn = Evil, which is a grotesque and hubristic misinterpretation commonly found among certain factions of Christians who dwell in constant pathological fear of their god having viable competition.

At no time does this competition become more apparent than the Winter Solstice, when ancient egregores do battle underneath the surface of the apparent and the obvious. The Christian church’s cold, dead hands are being pried off the Yuletide season one finger at a time as we speak. Christmas is reverting to its Saturnalian roots. For the Winter Solstice celebration never belonged to the Christians in the first place; they only borrowed it for a time.

Ancient Incans saw the Milky Way galaxy (much more easily visible in the sky back then) as a spiritual river that connected the worlds of the dead and the living. The bridge between worlds was most easily crossed at the Winter Solstice. They weren’t the only ones to associate the crossing of worlds with the time around December 21st. Natives of America from the frozen Arctic to the much warmer climes of the Amazon basin believed the Winter Solstice was a sacred, once-yearly chance of communing with those who had already crossed over. It was also party time. Capac Raymi was its official name in ancient Ecuador.

The last time the Incas celebrated the December rite of Capac Raymi in its full, uninhibited splendor was in December of 1533, this time in conjunction with a victory celebration of “liberation” from the hated occupying army of Quito and its now-deceased renegade Emperor, Atahuallpa. The Spanish, just then “allies”, witnessed the saturnalian spectacle, and were particularly impressed by the unending rivers of urine that poured through the city’s gutters from the tens of thousands of inebriated celebrants. -William Sullivan, The Secret of the Incas

The Faces of Saturn

Though Santa is one benevolent depiction of Saturn, there is another aspect of Saturn that appears every Christmas in the form of Ebenezer Scrooge, courtesy of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol. Scrooge is a malevolent Saturn in the beginning of the story, a Senex gone down the wrong path of penny-pinching and bitterness. After some divine intervention, Scrooge gets a taste of his own future medicine and reforms his wicked ways, returning to a balanced Saturnian state of compulsive generosity and blessing. Dr. Seuss’s Grinch is merely Scrooge re-imagined as a lanky green beast with an extended philtrum.

Santa was never a Christian deity, and thereinlies much butthurt. It irked me to see a bunch of Facebook materialist Christians trashing Halloween as a Satanic pagan holiday enough to get me to write an essay about it earlier this year. If Halloween is being cancelled for its pagan origins, Christians need to cancel Christmas right along with it for the same reasons. If Halloween is bad with its candy and costumes and sticking of heads in water for apples, Christmas is ten times worse with its Yule logs, Christmas trees, and thinly-disguised representation of Saturn riding the skies with his flying reindeer and sacks of presents. He comes through the fireplace because he is a fire god. Though Santa has been watered down to suit modern tastes, he was once a fearsome deity named Krampus who would just as soon abduct awful, bratty children and spirit them away to an unknown and distant realm where they would become crushed fodder for future universes. Re-imagining Krampus as a stupid Elf on a Shelf and attempting to neuter him does not remove his influence. I would argue it only serves to piss him off, and you DO NOT WANT to piss off Saturn.

Speaking of ways to piss off Saturn, the materialism of our ostensibly Christian nation is what created the Christmas retail monster in the first place. When I was an upper middle class child being brought up in the 70s, I acted the royal brat a great many holiday seasons and still got loads of Asian-made presents anyway. The children and grandchildren of upper middle class Generation X America are so spoiled, many only want cash or gift cards for Christmas because they already have every toy and game. Saturn is going to solve the conundrum of upper middle class entitlement in the near future, and I would argue the process is already under way. The death of retail is upon us.

Retail is the way people who have lost any viable religion go to church. It is the Church of Progress. For this reason, the formerly richest man on Earth, Jeff Bezos, is a retail giant. When people lose touch with the Divine, they shop for stuff they do not need.

Recently I was in a chain store that sells fun imported food, kitchen stuff, and some small pieces of furniture. I had the misfortune of being checked out by an extremely unhappy young woman. The first thing she tried to do was push me into buying more stuff. Since I was buying noodles, she insisted several times that I should buy a jar of sauerkraut to go along with the noodles I was buying. She asked if I had a membership to the store and I said “No, but I would like to sign up”. She nearly panicked several times when I could not successfully scan the QR signup code to my old iPhone 6. I finally figured out how to join the store’s club via text, which barely soothed her frayed nerves. I have run into some store associates who were a barely-concealed mess before; sadly this was not the first time. There is a tea store in downtown Naperville I will likely never set foot in again because the retail associate (also a 30-something white woman) was so unpleasant and pushy. I am not rude to retail associates even if they are rude to me. This is because I used to work retail.

The interesting thing about the aforementioned imports store and the clothing stores I used to work in as a young woman is that nobody who needs to work in stores like them to make a living can actually afford to do any significant shopping there. In the imports store with the rude sauerkraut-pushing associate, there was another woman, this time a shopper, who was the sort of well-heeled Karen you expect to be Christmas shopping. She was on her mobile phone, moodily demanding whoever was on the other end be informed about their “options” for Christmas ornaments.

These snapshots are how I hope to illustrate why the collective astral plane is a seething pit of festering filth. As I parlayed with the sauerkraut-pusher, I was reminded of how horrible it was to work retail. My managers at The Limited back in the day basically told us we associates were worthless unless we got people to buy thousands of dollars worth of crappy, Chinese-made clothes. A typical day at The Limited was six to eight hours of stultifying boredom, wandering through brightly lit clothing racks, straightening them, and hoping for that golden customer who would try on and later buy an obscene amount of clothing. Though nobody worked on commission, in order to be favored by management, you had to entice women to buy by acting the maid-in-waiting while the same loop of weird pop music droned overhead, repeating itself every few hours as an annoying, yet ironic score to accompany squandered time. Retail has its own toxic egregore that was munching heartily on sauerkraut-pusher’s soul. Thankfully that egregore is going the way of the dodo. Good riddance! That’s the thing about Saturn… he may represent death and dying, but all things must die in order for the new to be born.

I am happy to read your Ogham free of charge -- that's how I hone my divination skills. I take reading requests until 8pm Central Time (Chicago Illinois USA) on Sunday night. Though I am flattered that people want readings after the deadline, I decline reading requests made after 8pm Central Time on Sunday night without exception.

I will be taking off the last Sunday in December 2022 and the first Sunday of 2023 this year.

For a more in depth look into how I read and interpret the Ogham's symbols, please visit my website druidogham.wordpress.com.

I am currently trying to minimize my use of PayPal because they keep making weird threats towards opinionated creatives like myself. I have had success using a new (to me) platform called Buy Me a Coffee:

http://buymeacoffee.com/kimberlysteele

Ogham reading requests are concluded for the week of December 11. Please be patient as it can take me anywhere from 4 - 48 hours to get to all the readings.

Your prayers to the gods/God for my continued success are always welcome whether or not you choose to tip.

Scene from the film American Beauty

The opposite of one thing is almost invariably another equally bad thing. Nowhere is this better demonstrated in the opposite of Puer Aeternus, whose opposite is Senex.

Puer Aeternus as a god is symbolized by Dionysus and Mercury/Hermes in equal measure. He knows how to party, can be prone to debauchery, and suffers an airy detachment because of his cherished collection of unattainable ideals. Where Puer is dependent and childlike long after his actual childhood, Senex is all work and no play except for a few brief moments near cradle-time and near decrepit old age. Senex is ruled by Saturn, Lord of Time, and when imbalanced, he casts a warped reflection as a child who is old before his or her time, stodginess, conformity, and compliance.

The C Word

Much to my disappointment, almost every vegan I used to pal around with ended up getting the MRNA quaxxine and its multiple boosters. I have meditated many times on the Compliant, and from what I can tell, there is a direct correlation between compliance and a desire for material comfort, status, and unearned wealth. Enter the MRNA quaxxine mandates: those vegans of supposed moral fiber did not stand a chance. Give up travel by plane because it was either take the quax or forgo the overseas trip? Not them. Skip a chance to virtue signal about being quaxxed despite mounting evidence of its dangers, plus busloads of dead athletes dropping dead on the field every day? Nah. There is absolutely zero reason for a so-called vegan to get an injection that was dreamed up and pushed HARD by the same people who tortured beagles in labs by sticking their heads in boxes so their heads could be eaten by sandflies. Though mainstream media has done their level best to disown #beaglegate by fact checking it into Google oblivion, as they say on the X-Files, the truth is out there.

Puer Aeternus clings to his ideals with recklessness and would sacrifice all of his potentials for human connection, love, and loyalty on the altar of adventure and free-wheeling excitement. Senex is the opposite. Senex throws ideals under the bus, happily forgetting them as they are ground into a pulp between rubber and iron. Senex extremists cling to the notion they are the Good People and Family Men (and Women) but they only love what they can control. Senex is more than happy to hoard and it is the mark of the Senex to amass far more than what is needed or even wanted. If we are judging on deeds and not words, Senex does not do any good deed without making a minor spectacle of it. If Senex gives to charity, you can bet your bottom dollar that it will be tax-deductible and the money will flow back to him in a cycle of grift, such as the money that was supposedly donated to Ukraine war efforts and got funneled into Democratic election funds in 2022.

The egregore of Senex personified is Karen. Now, all of you who are named Karen who are outraged at the use of this name to denote a tacky, “I need to speak to your manager”, middle aged, designer leggings-wearing harpy should take a moment to consider the plight of men named Richard. Many of the vegans I used to know were Karens about food. They would go into restaurants and get mad if the restaurant did not have vegan options, or worse, they would get mad if the restaurant did not have oil and gluten free vegan food. Sure, they could have stayed home and eaten their dry baked potato (with no salt of course) and a chopped apple, but that would be too easy. Instead, one of the vegans who came to the restaurant meet ups I used to host argued for a good fifteen minutes with an underpaid counter worker how the cook should prepare her falafel without oil. If said vegan had ever bothered with the tiniest bit of self-reflection, she would have understood that she was power tripping. That is Karen’s game, which I will discuss in a future essay about toxic femininity. Karen does not care about the pittance she receives from returning her craft supplies at Michael’s or Hobby Lobby, she does not care about the oil in a falafel, and she does not actually want her child to get an undeserved A in Reading Comprehension. What Karen wants is power, and she gets it by feeding off the negative emotional reactions of the people she treats as underlings.

Senex the Witch

Senex wants to be King (or Queen in the case of Karen). Whereas Puer wishes to be free of domination, Senex wants to dominate and control, preferably forever. Puer has plenty of negative traits, but at least he does not need to be worshipped. Senex does, and her black tar of ill-will is directed at all who do not worship her. Because Senex is a cheerless scold, she hates seeing other people having more fun than she perceives herself as having. Instead of turning inward and working on herself, she thrusts her ill-will at them in the form of jealousy, bitterness, and self-righteous anger. Truth be told, Senex is an emotional vampire who gets off on stifling the free will and humor of others: misery loves company and she is hell bent and determined to suck the universe into her blackened womb. Perhaps you can tell I am more than passingly familiar with the Senex archetype. Perhaps this is because I personally hosted it for longer than I would like to admit.

Senex wants to win the game of life — who knew it was a contest? In order to be a Queen, she has to emulate Queens, and that means acting in accordance with royal dictates. Senex forms her Queendom with the accoutrements of conformity: a family made up of parents and children, an owned house or condo in the best part of town, and a tribe around her of other compliant conformists. She prefers orderliness and she will have it at all costs, including the shunning of any Puers who dare defy her or the government/corporations/TV she takes marching orders from. She believes in Law, and because at her core she believes that she is the Law, she will carefully overlook minor things such as other people’s basic rights in order to maintain her unelected holy rule.

Male Senexes

Saturn himself being male means there are plenty of male Senexes. In the 1999 film American Beauty, Kevin Spacey plays a suburban father of a teenaged girl who is in love with the boy next door. The boy next door has a domineering, control freak father who was an Army colonel and served in Vietnam. Col. Frank Fitts beats his wife and son regularly. His fixation with perceived order manifests as a virulent hatred of homosexuality and Nazi memorabilia in his private home office. In my own novel, River’s Heart, a male Senex named Nathan Yardie hosts weekly church services in his private suburban McMansion because the local church expelled him for his extremist views. Hosting his own also gives Nathan the control he desires and enables him to feel that he has power over others. In both stories, Senex’s lust for control ends in tragedy.

When I was a kid, I had the misfortune to have spent time with contemporaries who were growing up in homes ruled by a Senex extremist father. The home ruled by a Senex is a terrifying place. Though it may appear orderly and disciplined, with its beds made the moment they are exited in the morning and its meals served on-time by an obedient Senex wife, on the astral plane it is jibber-jabbering chaos. Senex-ruled homes are foul and teeming with bad feelings, repressed emotions, and parasitic entities who feed on the energy flows of psychic discord. Senex homes are essentially broken no matter how “together” they appear on the outside. Narcissistic Senex’s hatred for those who do not ask “How high?” when he tells them to jump spills over the most onto his family, and unless they are already earthly saints, his family can only react by secretly hating him back.

To be a Senex of either male or female variety is to suppress and squelch the Puer instinct, even when that instinct would lead to spiritual development, emotional maturity, and happiness. Though the Senex is mature when it comes to making a living and following orders, he or she is a vulnerable baby of unexamined urges on the inside. Puer, having rejected the automaton Get a Job/ Make Money/ Buy a House cycle, at least knows and respects himself to invoke fearlessness when it comes to a little risk. Puer runs away from responsibility on the material plane but does own himself more than Senex does, because Senex seeks control over others instead of owning his fear of not being in control of himself.

Just like Puer, Senex’s choice to get out of the monkey trap starts with Number One. Senex has the double burden of being a compliant little robot and wanting to be Ruler of the Known Universe. Since Senex loves routine, of course I will suggest that anyone who takes umbrage at their resemblance to this article gets into a routine of daily, relentless discursive meditation. Harnessing the power of Type A diligence when it comes to discursive meditation is likely to have amazing results. I know it did in my case. My autistic tendency to maintain daily routines come hell or high water has translated into performing the Sphere of Protection and discursive meditation every day for the last seven years except for the day I rescued my aunt’s cats in 2019. Like an elephant, I never forget to do Ogham readings every week, except of course that one time I completely forgot and then read on Monday instead of Sunday LOL.

In yet another future essay, I will be discussing the history of Christmas and its relationship to Saturnalia. If Senex wants to be free, he or she needs to manifest the benevolent side of Saturn, also known as Ebenezer Scrooge at the end of A Christmas Carol or modern day Santa Claus. When Senex loosens his/her wallet deathgrip and sends the stopped flow of hoarded resources of money, warmth, and mirth into the community, the result is a healed and balanced Senex who has all of the good aspects of reliability and stability with a dash of healthy, balanced Puer. Just like a healed, balanced Puer, Senex too can turn a state of stagnation and retardation into a springboard for growth and true contentment.

Your prayers to the gods/God for my continued success are always welcome whether or not you choose to tip.

Ogham reading requests are closed for the week of December 4, 2022. Thank you for your queries, prayers, and donations and see you next week for more free readings!

Hi Everyone, feel free to comment on anything and everything... but please refrain from curse words. Thank you.

I am happy to read your Ogham free of charge -- that's how I hone my divination skills. I take reading requests until 8pm Central Time (Chicago Illinois USA) on Sunday night. Though I am flattered that people want readings after the deadline, I decline reading requests made after 8pm Central Time on Sunday night without exception.

I will be taking off the last Sunday in December 2022 and the first Sunday of 2023 this year.

For a more in depth look into how I read and interpret the Ogham's symbols, please visit my website druidogham.wordpress.com.

I am currently trying to minimize my use of PayPal because they keep making weird threats towards opinionated creatives like myself. I am ABSOLUTELY LOVING the new tip jar service recommended on the Ecosophia blog, especially that I can thank people right on the platform for their donations. PayPal may soon become a distant memory!
http://buymeacoffee.com/kimberlysteele

Your prayers to the gods/God for my continued success are always welcome whether or not you choose to tip.

Ogham reading requests are closed for the week of November 27, 2022. Thank you for your queries, prayers, and donations and see you next week for more free readings!

Millions, if not tens of millions, are currently looking down the barrel of unemployment and/or underemployment as various forces crumble the already brittle economy. Anyone who follows my weekly Ogham divinations can depend on any number of people worried about losing their job, wanting to jump out of a dead end job, or inquiring about what gainful employment looks like once they are no longer employed at their current job. In my own case, the overreaction to Covid and the subsequent quaxxine mania resulted in the closure of my commercial space. I owned and operated a private lesson studio in the Midwest that offered group lessons via the local park district and an array of recording services at one point. All of the work my husband and I did to begin and maintain the place over a span of 13 years was dashed on the rocks of MRNA-quaxxine and mask hysteria. With the help of

andrewskeen horary astrology divinations as well as my own Ogham divinations, I was narrowly able to jump the sinking ship and set up shop teaching from home. There are plenty of people whom Coviditarianism has put into a far worse position. Anyone with children or grandchildren depending upon them should be terrified right now. Anyone with money tied up in stocks, IRAs, crypto, or treasury bonds should understand that money could vaporize overnight as if it was never there. Anyone whose health is not robust or who has loved ones with dire medical conditions should prepare for the slog of hard times and potentially early death because hospitalization has become a death sentence and most medical professionals are complete quacks. This is not an easy time to be alive and it is an even harder time in which to cultivate gratitude, though (like a broken record) once again I will insist that gratitude may be the only way out of the trap we all find ourselves in.

This is a time of egregores, that is to say those spirits that are formed from massive archetypes, gone toxic. One of the most corrupted and stale egregores around is the Puer Aeternus.

The Puer Aeternus or Eternal Child has become one of the most commonly manifested archetypes in modern life. I believe the eternal man-child is more pervasively present than almost any other time in history. The reason there are so many aging Peter Pans and their irresponsible, non-Wendy like female counterparts is the continued dominance of cheaply-available petroleum. One to three hundred years from now, when powering a vehicle at 50-plus miles per hour is a much more expensive and rare event, Puer Aeternis and Puella Aeterna will be as scarce as honest politicians.

What and Who is Puer Aeternus?

Puer Aeternus comes in many shapes, sexes, sizes, and ages. The term “Puer Aeternus” was originally coined by Ovid in his Metamorphoses to describe the child god Iacchus. Psychiatrist/psychologist Carl Jung later adapted the term to demonstrate the deep reasons why some people refuse to grow up, and how that can be both good and bad.

I am familiar with the Puer Aeternus archetype because to some degree I have lived it and continue to live it. Though I am financially stable for the moment, this has not always been the case. I am a musician, and that means I am acquainted with bohemian struggle.

Puer Aeternus as manifested in human beings is not all bad. My inner Peter Pan has kept me from making several horrible choices that would have led to my consummate misery. For instance, my youthful stubbornness kept me from certain mates who made me feel I was trapped inside a living hell. I briefly considered going back to school so I could enter a career as an elementary schoolteacher. Had I gone down that road, I would have had a benefits package and a retirement plan, but I also would have been saddled with massive debt and mandatory MRNA injections if I wanted to keep my job in 2021. I also considered literally learning to code so I could go into web development. This too would have meant schooling, debt, and a high likelihood of someone trying to stick me with multiple syringes in order to remain employed. Thanks to Puer Aeternus, my marriage was founded on love, not love of money. My weird job, one that I created myself for fear of being trapped in an office job, healed many wounds in my soul.

Like anything in this world, Puer Aeternus has extremes that are inherently bad and balanced in the middle. Puer Aeternus’s polar opposite is Senex (Latin for “old man”). Puer is obsessed with airy fantasies and Senex is obsessed with hard realities. Puer tries to dwell entirely in a self-made heaven and Senex insists on grinding away on Earth. Puer is pure play and Senex is all work all the time. In a future essay, I will discuss what happens when we fall into Senex imbalance. Puer imbalance is the main danger I will be discussing today, and it is a common reaction when one's livelihood is being dangled in front of or has already been devoured by economic alligators.

Though the phenomenon of Puer Aeternus becomes more common in decadent civilizations like our own, Puer has always been around, arguably long before Ovid coined the term. Puers in the negative sense become trapped by their own inner fantasy lives.

Very often you find in the puer such a rich fantasy life, but that wealth of fantasy is dammed back and cannot flow into life because the puer refuses to accept reality as it is. He dams up his inner life. In actuality, for instance, he gets up at 10:30 a.m., hangs around till lunch time with a cigarette in his mouth, giving way to his emotions and fantasies. In the afternoon he means to do some work but first goes out with friends and then with a girl, and the evening is spent in long discussion about the meaning of life. He then goes to bed at one, and the next day is a repetition of the one before, and in that way the capacity for life and the inner riches are wasted. They cannot get into something meaningful but slowly overgrow the real personality so that the individual walks about in a cloud of fantasies, fantasies which in themselves are interesting and full of rich possibilities, full of unlived life. You feel that such a person has a tremendous wealth and capacity but there is no possibility of finding a means of realization, and then the tree—the inner wealth— becomes negative, and in the end kills the personality." -Marie-Louise Von Franz, psychologist and student of Carl Jung

They Invented Slacking

I have known several slacker Puers, some female but most male. When I was in my late teens and early twenties, many of my upper middle class suburban male peers engaged in video game and cartoon marathons for weeks at a time. One in particular got fired from several fast food establishments for stealing from the registers (he was as white as a funeral lily, by the way) and spent an epic number of months wallowing in my ex-boyfriend's mom's basement. While one of my brothers was in the Marines and the other was off at college, various sons of architects in my neighborhood frittered away their useable brains on soft and hard drugs. Nowadays, the modern equivalents of these Puers chat about how much they resent Chad between yelling at their mothers to serve them more tendies.

Slacker Puers are nothing new. Prohibition itself was mostly an effort by and for women that went along with women's suffrage and the burgeoning movement of vegetarianism in the 19th and early 20th century. All three social justice movements were aspects of the battle against the male Puer Aeternus's dominant power that included his ability to wreck the life of any woman unfortunate enough to be proxy to his self-destruction. The original slacker Puer was the alcoholic father who chose destitution in his urge to escape the responsibilities of providing food and shelter for his family. Women who could vote and own property had a better shot at putting food in their children's mouths than the traditional model where the man made all the decisions and his wife did not have the right to go elsewhere. Vegetarianism was an attempt of women to assert their own dominance via the daily ritual of the table: clean eating and the avoidance of eating animal flesh was originally a women's movement.

Prohibition of animal flesh and secretions represents a form of Senex schooling the Puer Aeternus and showing him who is boss where daily bread is concerned. On other fronts, prohibition of alcohol in the 1920s was an attempt to take away another of Puer's vices and to force him into a mantle of responsibility.

In his memoir Angela's Ashes, Frank McCourt describes his post-Great Depression childhood:

Dad is out looking for a job again and sometimes he comes home with the smell of whiskey, singing all the songs about suffering Ireland. Mam gets angry and says Ireland can kiss her arse. He says that's nice language to be using in front of the children and she says never mind the language, food on the table is what she wants, not suffering Ireland. She says it was a sad day Prohibition ended because Dad gets the drink going around to saloons offering to sweep out the bars and lift barrels for a whiskey or a beer. Sometimes he brings home bits of the free lunch, rye bread, corned beef, pickles. He puts the food on the table and drinks tea himself. He says food is a shock to the system and he doesn't know where we get our appetites. Mam says, They get their appetites because they're starving half the time. -Angela's Ashes by Frank McCourt

The above examples are Puer when he runs off the rails. Make no mistake that the feminine version is just as bad. One female Puer I know is currently homeless at age 57 because she still would rather get dressed up and go out clubbing (as ridiculous as that sounds) than settle down and get a job. She was literally given a free house by someone in her family in her 20s, which she promptly squandered. Another aging Puella has been married at least a dozen times and finds her prospects dwindling as she continues to squander money and complains bitterly about her current husband. Puellas of means turn to plastic surgery in botched, grotesque pursuit of turning back the clock. The results end up eerily displayed on their faces: tight, doll-like, and perpetually surprised.

There is only one person who can shepherd the Puer into a balanced mode of taking care of himself and not vampirizing the emotions, money, and wealth of others. That person is Puer himself. Without his cooperation, Puer stays Puer, living in his little bubble of narcissistic creative anachronism. His bubble is not isolated enough, for it bounces around wrecking what it touches.

If a Puer wants to get out of the bubble, the way out is surprisingly easy. Marie Louise Von Franz has already beat us to the punch. To escape the artificial escape/trap of Puerism, the Puer must get to work. Puers hate the workaday world, and their reluctance to put up with employment may be a lifesaving attitude at times. I hated working in offices so much in 2006, I created my own career as music teacher. Nevertheless, those who are "too good" to put up with group work for any amount of time and simultaneously unwilling or unable to exploit their own talents enough to contribute to their own needs for food and shelter can still contribute, and it is this contribution that not only frees them from their prison of immaturity, but it also opens the doors of opportunity for gainful self-employment later on.

We all suffer depression at times, and anyone who hates their job or is recently jobless will likely be tempted to sink into a state of dependence as they are increasingly handicapped by circumstance. Puers claim to hate manufactured helplessness, but nobody is more immersed in manufactured helplessness than Puer. Refusing manufactured helplessness, including self-manufactured helplessness, is the key to avoiding the Puer trap. Having lost my ability to rent or own a home multiple times and moving back to my parents' house several times, once in my early 40s, was humiliating, but it was also an education as well as a cherished time of my life. I could have become a Puella, loafing and lounging and allowing my elderly parents to take care of me in every way. There was no way in hell I would do that. Instead, I cooked and cleaned every day. I swallowed my pride and made myself valuable. Any Puer or Puella can do the same thing: if you are good at cooking and cleaning, walk away from the computer right now, put the gaming controller away, and go clean the bathroom instead of leaving it for your spouse, parent, or roommate. Do something that costs zero money and is not a scheme for the easily suckered but will benefit everyone you live with. In other words, refuse to become a negative, dependent Puer with every fiber of your being and you'll be free soon enough. Get up a half hour earlier and do something, even if you are tired and under the weather. Activities like cleaning the bathroom, doing the dishes, helping the children with their homework, or figuring out how to build a solar oven may not seem like much, but everyone has got to start somewhere and every little bit helps. Small acts of work add up. They are a form of gratitude and a physical way of demonstrating how much you appreciate those who support you and enable you to live. The detachment of Puer is rooted in ungratefulness -- the Puer wants to run away at all times, to give away whatever wealth he was gifted with, and escape to a more meaningful world. I am here to say that the meaningful world is right here and right now, and you can start exactly where you are and find it.

I am happy to read your Ogham free of charge -- that's how I hone my divination skills. I take reading requests until 8pm Central Time (Chicago Illinois USA) on Sunday night. Though I am flattered that people want readings after the deadline, I decline reading requests made after 8pm Central Time on Sunday night without exception.

I will be taking off the last Sunday in December 2022 and the first Sunday of 2023 this year.

For a more in depth look into how I read and interpret the Ogham's symbols, please visit my website druidogham.wordpress.com.

I am currently trying to minimize my use of PayPal because they keep making weird threats towards opinionated creatives like myself. I am ABSOLUTELY LOVING the new tip jar service recommended on the Ecosophia blog, especially that I can thank people right on the platform for their donations. PayPal may soon become a distant memory!
http://buymeacoffee.com/kimberlysteele

Your prayers to the gods/God for my continued success are always welcome whether or not you choose to tip.

Ogham reading requests are closed for the week of November 20, 2022. Thank you for your queries, prayers, and donations and see you next week for more free readings!

I won’t pretend to be an expert on socioeconomic policy and the rule of nations: I am not. The sorts of observations I am about to make are potentially ill-informed and wrong and I fully admit it. To get straight to the point, I believe the US got the election it deserved in the last months of the year 2022. Analysts who don’t suffer from imbalances of temerity seem to agree it was a wash with neither side of the coin (notice it’s the same exact coin) prevailing, which suggests the Recession the US finds itself in may turn into the Depression I predicted after all.

Many Americans believe the 2022 elections were stolen by the Democrats in much the same way the 2020 elections were stolen in order to install Biden. I am one of those Americans. I believe Democrats tried to steal 2016, but were content to rest on the laurels of their belief in Hillary Clinton only to have the rug ripped out from under them when Trump won. When I handed in my voting sheet in the city of Naperville, two polling assistants (both women) actually looked at the paper in my hand and sneered in disgust because they saw my vote for Trump. I should have raised a stink, but unfortunately I was not of the mind at the time. Trump lost in Illinois anyway, and I have no doubt in my mind it was due to election interference by early TDS sufferers such as the two government workers who illegally viewed my voting placard before I submitted it.

I predicted that Illinois would remain unchanged because of Democratic cheating in the 2022 elections and I was exactly right. Record numbers of people showed up at the polls to vote the Democrats out in my supposedly blue state: my parents tried to go to their local church three times to vote but ended up not voting at all. The lines were too long and neither one of them can stand on a hard floor for hours at a time. In Illinois, Democrats have proved that the only way they will loosen their chokehold on the state is when their heads are removed from their bodies via an axe or a guillotine. I’m sure that can be arranged, but I’d rather not be around when it happens.

Illinois, much like the rest of the States, remains at the mercy of the creepy globalist agenda of bug eating, electric car driving, TV watching, injection receiving, appliance renting, and politically correct pod living put forth by the World Economic Forum. Callous disregard for human rights and human life in general has been imported from China along with electronic doodads and plastic-cased convenience. I have benefited from the China-ization of the economy as much as anyone. The computer I type this on has quite a bit of Chinese rare earth minerals in it. This morning I trained my cats with a plastic clicker that was made in China. I am not innocent when it comes to using Chinese made stuff in my life by a long shot.

Karma is a B*tch

The US has been meddling in the affairs of other countries since the day it was born and arguably before that date in 1776. War hero General Smedley Butler was one of those military men who saw the harsh truth. When recalling his many tours, he observed:

I helped make Mexico, especially Tampico, safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefits of Wall Street. The record of racketeering is long. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912 (where have I heard that name before?). I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. In China I helped see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested. -Gen. Smedley Butler, War is a Racket

When our own republic was raked over the coals in 2020, the US got to experience what it is to have an incompetent (and incontinent, har de har) puppet installed as its face and leader, just as it has done countless times to other countries to benefit corporate interests. If the US is a bunch of rabid chimpanzees and fascism is poop, the chimpanzees just learned what happens when you throw poop. Sometimes the other chimpanzees throw it back in your direction, and sometimes their aim is decent and they hit the mark.

Kimberly Steele, Broken Record Player

I only speak for myself here, but I am going to suggest that voting in general is a joke, at least in blue states like Illinois. When I braved a windstorm a few Saturdays ago to vote early, I engaged in an act of futility. I will still vote as a gesture, but I am now at the point where I have completely divorced myself from the idea my vote makes a significant difference.

When a family has become completely dysfunctional, if a child wants to survive to healthy adulthood, she must learn to separate from the bickering parents and make a life according to her own ideals apart from them. I cannot influence my local politicians to stop pushing dangerous injections or to expose five year olds to gay pornography in the name of tolerance. What I can do is continue to work on my group for people who want to get around the dangerous injections. I cannot stop election fraud and also do what I believe I was meant to do in this incarnation. I don't have that kind of time. I can practice my instruments, record, and arrange more music. I can plan tonight's dinner. I can figure out ways to use less energy that don’t involve shooting myself in the foot by buying new Chinese-made doodads, such as putting insulated blinds on the windows, solar cooking, and rocket mass heaters. I can tune out my narcissist elders and go live my own life, and that’s what I suggest most people should do as well. Make yourself strong and resilient. Tune them out. If they get in the way, quietly go around them.

I am happy to read your Ogham free of charge -- that's how I hone my divination skills. I take reading requests until 8pm Central Time (Chicago Illinois USA) on Sunday night. Though I am flattered that people want readings after the deadline, I decline reading requests made after 8pm Central Time on Sunday night without exception.

I will be taking off the last Sunday in December 2022 and the first Sunday of 2023 this year.

For a more in depth look into how I read and interpret the Ogham's symbols, please visit my website druidogham.wordpress.com.

I am currently trying to minimize my use of PayPal because they keep making weird threats towards opinionated creatives like myself. I am ABSOLUTELY LOVING the new tip jar service recommended on the Ecosophia blog, especially that I can thank people right on the platform for their donations. PayPal may soon become a distant memory!
http://buymeacoffee.com/kimberlysteele

Your prayers to the gods/God for my continued success are always welcome whether or not you choose to tip.

Ogham reading requests are closed for the week of November 13, 2022. Thank you for your queries, prayers, and donations and see you next week for more free readings!

I am currently trying to minimize my use of PayPal because they keep making weird threats towards opinionated creatives like myself. I am ABSOLUTELY LOVING the new tip jar service recommended on the Ecosophia blog, especially that I can thank people right on the platform for their donations. PayPal may soon become a distant memory!

http://buymeacoffee.com/kimberlysteele

Your prayers to the gods/God for my continued success are always welcome whether or not you choose to tip.

Hello! Reading requests are concluded for the week of November 6. Please be patient as it can take anywhere from 2-48 hours for me to get to all of the readings. I truly appreciate your donations and prayers! See you next week for more free Ogham readings.

Back in the roaring 90s and 00s, I casually observed how flus and colds got a little more severe every year for the kids I taught. By the early 2010s, it was not uncommon for several children in my Studio to be out of school for several weeks at a stretch and hospitalized for pneumonia. When I was a child in the 70s and 80s, there were all of two kids pulled out of school for any length of time for respiratory illnesses, and they were the ones with congenital problems such as type one diabetes. In other words, Gen X was healthier in childhood than Millennials and Millennials were healthier than Zoomers/Gen Z.

Many of us sensed something evil coming down the pipe after the turn of the Millennium. Though I sort of guessed that it would be related to one of the worst grifts of our time, Big Medicine, but I certainly did not predict that it would come in the form of a mild, clearly lab-created flu that average people would latch onto as a (false) Messiah. The same people who kept McDonalds, Taco Bell, KFC, and their ilk in business all these years while failing to see the connection between their children's worsening seasonal flus suddenly did a 180 and played along with draconian lockdown schemes, ineffectual masks, and routinely deadly shots in order to conform to the Latest Thing. Recently the Centers for Disease Control voted unanimously 15-0 to push a policy that is designed to absolve Pfizer and Moderna from liability, shoving the MRNA quaxxines onto the “recommended” childhood schedule. This means that all those parents with kids in public schools who somehow avoided allowing the US's corporate fascists to use their children as lab rats will face increasing pressure from all sides. They are given a "choice" of either yanking their children from public school altogether, which is a major lifestyle change, or dealing with schools that will wantonly coerce, trick, and brainwash their children into taking a shot that apparently cancels their future fertility if not their actual lives.

Strange times.

If I were still an atheist, I would be a great deal angrier right now. As a Druid occultist, I find that I am more easily able to forgive, even if I cannot forget. Christians have gone every which way after largely allowing their churches to be co-opted by plague fearmongers. They cannot forgive because the whopping majority of them were complicit. They are a small facet of the greater gem that was quaxxine compliance: Somewhere between half to three quarters of the world population supposedly took the MRNA shots. The number is somewhere in the billions.

From the beginning of my life, I have been intrigued by human overpopulation. As a little girl, I had a series of terrifying epiphanies about it. All of the world’s socioeconomic problems have a single root: too many people. Humans are greedy creatures by nature, present company included. We have a very difficult time separating need and want. We shove aside other species without mercy when it comes to getting something we want for our own. For some of us, and I would argue that it is more of a woman thing, the awareness of how the human race burdens the Earth leads to existential guilt. It certainly did for me. That is why by age seven I was already dead certain I would never bear my own children, because at that tender age I felt it was a crime against all that was good and holy in an age of rampant overpopulation. Unsurprisingly, my torment over my own guilt escalated to vegetarianism and being suicidally depressed in my teens.

Nowadays, we have all sorts of overgrown children who possess the same existential guilt I did in second grade and decide to project that guilt instead of dealing with it like honest brokers. Klaus Schwab, Noel Harari, and Bill Gates feel the guilt all right, but they go a few steps further by appointing themselves as God and forcing sterilization upon the unwashed masses via their brainwashed tools such as Anthony Fauci, Joe Biden, and Donald Trump. Let’s not forget that Trump has lauded the MRNA quaxxines since their debut and though he has somewhat ameliorated the damage by insisting on quaxxine choice, he is still largely responsible for legions of people who became convinced the quaxx was as safe and effective as its propaganda laid claim.

A smarter being would have seen all this crap a mile away I suppose, knowing the ins and outs of the puppet show by heart. I was hoodwinked, upset, and thrown for a loop. I clung onto my lesson studio for thirteen years in a commercial space, always throwing everything I had at it and either breaking even or sinking below solvency at various times. Finally the Coronapocalypse swept my business (at least its incarnation as a commercial space) away and decimated my ability to afford commercial rent. I still have people who got quaxxed and offer to wear a mask when I teach in my private home. I got out just in time. I would have lost everything had I not made the decision to collapse the Studio in early 2022.

I was lucky. I have never had a salary class job, and that means I have known how to be scrappy and frugal nearly my entire working life. I did not have to walk away from a big house and a big lifestyle. I was already used to demi-poverty: driving an old car, overdrawing my bank account despite being thrifty, skipping restaurant meals and fast food for three to four weeks at a time.

Every single person that got the quaxx seems to hold the fear of demi-poverty and loss of status in their mind. I have yet to meet someone who got the quaxx who is lower middle class and content to be that way. Most quaxxers are either in the upper middle class or desperately want to be there.

As an atheist agnostic, I had no hypotheses for what happens to a soul once it is released from the body. It irritated me that Christians and Muslims conveniently imagined themselves as going to heaven no matter how lacking in good works and deeds. I once ran into a Christian who boldly stated he would be in heaven with his Father for trillions of years once he popped this mortal coil. He literally said this. I noticed something very strange as he made this speech. He had a habit of stepping back and forth while he spoke, much like how horses or pigs do when they get excited. I’ll come back to this observation later.

So Very Tired

Occultists who believe in reincarnation speculate that we human souls used to have longer stints between incarnations back when there were fewer humans on Earth and therefore fewer human bodies for souls to inhabit. From my own memories of reincarnation, I believe this is the case. I believe my first human incarnation was somewhere in Europe in the Middle Ages. I had an incarnation once every 200 or so years until the recent era, where my human incarnations were much closer. I believe my most recent past life was as a wealthy American widow who lost her sons in a World War and died in an embittered, angry state the 1960s. Since I was born in 1973, the gap between incarnations was only a few short years instead of the usual 50-120. Since I believe all humans have been incarnating more rapidly, I believe that I am not the only human to have had only a quick dirt nap in-between bodies. No wonder everyone in the world, even children, feels inappropriately tired. We were all born tired and will die that way because our very souls have not had enough rest. Another part of the phenomenon is that many formerly animal souls are thrust into human bodies at the moment, long before feeling ready. I no longer get frustrated with the scourge of “stupid people” as I did as an atheist. The “stupid” person could have been a Labrador retriever or a factory farmed chicken only twenty years ago.

Now keep in mind that I am only speculating and in any of the statements I have made or am about to make, I COULD BE WRONG. I am fully prepared to meet my maker (if there is one) and laugh about how wrong I was shortly before burning in hell for all eternity for refusing to accept Jesus Christ as my only Lord and Savior. I have no dog in any fight and no need to be correct.

If there are an excess of human souls in incarnation at the present time, and I believe there are, then it follows that the wave will crest and depopulation will follow. The human race may not suffer the fate of yeast in a sugary Petri dish as I once believed, but it does seem apparent that we are headed for a world with fewer people by several orders of magnitude. Population is like sound, light, or any other form of wave. There is a crest and then a valley, then another crest, lather, rinse, repeat. To someone who believes in reincarnation, this means a return to a time without as many human souls in incarnation. It means that the few souls who are left to incarnate as humans will have longer rest times. It also points to (and again, I could be so very wrong) a bunch of former humans being incarnated as animals or not incarnating at all for long periods of time.

Where Will They Go?

One of the various reasons I was willing to fight petty bureaucrats, white biosuited goons, and neo-Stalinist neighbors to the death rather than take the quaxx was because I believe it has a severe impact on a human’s karma. If karma is nothing more than cause and effect, my primitive understanding is that if you do a thing, the repercussions of that thing will ripple around you and back at you like waves of water in a pond. If you do good deeds that help people and spread love and light, it hardly matters if you believe in God or not because you are making a cause and effect that works in waves. You will be blessed because you make blessings. Of course if you spend your time marinating in fear, consciously or unconsciously hexing and cursing those you hate out of fear, greed, and hatred, those things will return to you in kind.

The quaxx was a weapon of hatred and fear, so to take it was to seal the deal with the demon or demons running the quaxx show. Like any astral pyramid, the quaxx was a greedy, top-glorified structure that depended on a large base with benefits that trickled up and not down. The quaxx actively sought the blood and suffering of children; in fact, its whole mission was the indoctrination of as many children as possible this whole time. Many of us have a nascent awareness of the quaxx and masks and their tie-in with Critical Race Theory, drag queens waving their junk in front of preschoolers, and sex ed for kindergarteners that includes graphic depictions of intercourse. I believe these things are all symbols of the hunger of one specific demon who has been having a field day: Paimon. I also believe Moloch and Mammon play their parts in the current debacle. The demons who brought us the quaxx and its shutdowns seek an erasure of limits, specifically the limits that prevent them from infesting children. I personally have yet to understand why demons prefer to corrupt children over adults, but their lust to do so is self-evident.

I Can Has Reparations?

What lies in store for the consenting adults who sold their own kids out to masks and experimental quaxxines? What do they owe, if anything, to the children of the grandmothers and grandfathers forced to die alone and terrified while nurses and doctors twerked for TikTok? Is there a price beyond possible tribunals and Nuremberg trials for public officials who vacationed in Florida while issuing draconian orders for their constituents to shutter and lose their businesses? Is there any kind of retribution for celebrities and influencers who used their fame to push the quaxx on the naive? Is there any comeuppance for the quax-pushing newscasters who are indirectly responsible for quaxx injuries including nerve damage, graphene/lipid nanoparticle clots, strokes, tremors, pain, Bell’s Palsy, and heart attacks?

I don’t think there will be punishments in the here and now in Meat World, though it remains to be seen how the legal system could discover the guilty parties as a potential cash cow. I won’t be holding my breath for any reparations from the quaxx-pushing wealthy for getting in the way of euthanizing my cat in 2021, being mostly responsible for my business closing in 2022, or the subsequent deaths of many neighbors of mine and one relative over the years of 2020-2022.

I think the entire quaxxed population including those who faked it bear a burden of responsibility and unknown karma that I was and am willing to die as Kimberly Steele to avoid. I think they’re going to hell.

Unlike Christians, Muslims, and other people who I think are partially insane, I do not believe hell is eternal. It is temporary and is meant as a cleanser. I believe hell is that time after death that you have to face all the garbage you did while in incarnation and figure out how you could do better next time. Once a soul has gone through hell, the spirit guides bounce it up to heaven for a time so it can rest and get ready for the next incarnation. Because human incarnations are so rapid-fire in our era, souls don’t get enough time in hell and they get far less in heaven, and that is why most people, including children and babies, are tired all the time. We are not tired because we lack health or sleep so much as our souls are tired. We need our time away from incarnation in order to process, dream, and rest.

The quaxx has weighted down the souls who took it. Perhaps by not being arrogant, by spreading blessings, and by being generous, many souls who took the quaxx will not bear the brunt of its karma. There are also many who are paying their dues in suffering by dying young of quaxx-injury or quaxx-induced disease. Those who handle that suffering gracefully will have the karma of handling it gracefully: by not spreading misery around and refusing to adopt a WOE IS ME attitude, they will be an inspiration to others to stay strong in the face of horrific physical torture. Their bravery for speaking out against the Safe & Effective McNarrative counts for something, I believe.

As for the compliant who acted with Luciferian arrogance, I believe they will be rewarded by stints in hell and karmic retrogressions that would impress Arachne the Spider and Narcissus the Daffodil. Though I could be wrong, one potential outcome for the haughty quaxxed is a near-eternity spent running the mazes of the Back Rooms for untold millions of years followed by eventual incarnation as an extremely smart and devious buffalo. Such an outcome would satisfy a future world with far fewer human souls and an eventual explosion of non-human animal life after the current extinction event reaches its long coda. Though I don’t know if the arrogant Christian dude who presumed he would spend the next few trillion years in God’s playground was quaxxed or not, his prancing did strike me as uncannily porcine, as if he could depend on a not-so-distant future where he was bred and re-bred to be a pork chop on somebody’s plate.

Blah blah, OOH OCCULTISM BAD!, hypocrisy, blah blah.

Blah blah, Bible quote, OOH OCCULTISM BAD!, hypocrisy, blah blah. And green horned robots, just because they're cute!

To my own chagrin, I still have a Facebook account. Facebook disgusts me at this point and the only reason I return to it like a dog to his vomit is because it is occasionally essential or useful. I still run the group Speakeasy Illinois and to this day it helps Illinoisans to avoid places frequented by mask-wearing, MRNA vaccine pushing creeps. Nevertheless, Facebook is and has always been an astral cesspool of ridiculous censorship and toxic narcissism.

Speaking of narcissism, the latest trend among Protestant Christians is completely avoiding Halloween celebrations. This October 31 was peppered with self-righteous posts from various churchgoers who loudly and proudly advertised their avoidance of all Halloween costumes, parties, and candy collecting in the name of Christ. Though I’m a big fan of practicing what you preach, this new denouncement of Halloween reeks of hypocrisy and is yet another reason why I believe Christianity is well on its way to becoming one of many endangered fringe religions of the future. The next dominant religions are already beginning to emerge, and none of share the propensity cancelling fun in the way Christians and their communist-atheist imitators have adopted.

When Christianity was much younger, its proponents knew better than to cancel holidays. Instead, pagan celebrations of the winter solstice and Saturnalia became Christmas. The death of Christ was scheduled for the annual celebration of spring fertility called Easter, and that’s why bunnies and eggs get thrown into the great pastel soup of the celebration of the resurrection.

Now it seems regular Protestant Christians are seeking a divorce from Halloween. Funny how Seventh Day Adventists, some Mormons, and Jehovah’s Witnesses cancelled holidays and birthdays long before it was cool. My husband grew up Seventh Day Adventist and he grew up without watching movies or listening to popular music other than a narrow list of church approved artists. I would argue that this damaged him in the long run and drove him in directions he never would have went had he not been subjected to such extremism. A woman I know who grew up as a Jehovah’s Witness was subjected to unspeakable horrors and bore witness to incest. Another child of the aforementioned religions got pregnant and dropped out of school at age 14 under very mysterious circumstances. Yet another caught herpes from her first sexual experience at age 16 and went on to marry and divorce more than a dozen times. Extremism perverts and twists.

I Too Love Jesus!

This is not to say I dislike the Christian God. I love Jesus — I really do. He’s great. From my limited experience, he is nowhere near as jealous, insecure, mean, or dogmatic as many of his followers imagine him to be. Actually, I think it is highly likely that many Christians are worshiping Lucifer and other devils without realizing it. They quote Bible phrases about fools and sinners without ever looking in the mirror. They have lost their own tradition of discursive meditation and it is much to their detriment. They are thoughtless puppets on the short leash of a dying egregore.

The Christian egregore is a pyramid that knows its better days are in the past. The spirit of Christianity was co-opted long ago by materialist forces: Martin Luther recognized that and breathed some new life into the massive structure for a time. With Nietzsche’s announcement of the death of God in 1882, Christianity suffered its first of many death knells. Its greedy, angry egregore clutched at relevance through Marxists like Stalin and Mao, determined to drag to living hell all who went against the idea of a single God in the form of the State. Now the massive astral pyramid has become hideous in its last death throes. It still dominates the material world in many respects but it is rapidly crumbling in the subtler planes. Christians everywhere know it and sense it, and that’s why the average Christian church reeks of palpable desperation for new recruits. It is why crazy old men double and triple down on bitterly memorized Bible quotes instead of actually doing the mostly-silent work of Christ. It is why thirty-something women think that virtue signaling about forbidding their children from dressing up as zombie cheerleaders think they are getting somewhere.

And Mammon Held Sway Over All

Halloween is no more evil, pagan, or "occult" than Easter or Christmas. Granted, Halloween is not ostensibly about Jesus, but if you look at the ways Easter and Christmas are celebrated, it’s pretty self-evident that Mammon rules at least one of them. In fact, Mammon holds sway over quite a few Christian churches regardless of how they celebrate or do not celebrate holidays. The proof is in the pudding, or in the more Biblical sense, “By their fruits ye shall know them.”

The average Christian church in my area of northern Illinois is a palace. Churches often have entire campuses with huge, expertly-designed soundstages and auditoriums, luxurious bathrooms, and spacious hotel style lobbies. They are landscaped to the nines, their asphalt parking lots are brand new, and their roofs never leak. Despite all their amenities, not one of the churches in my area of the far Western suburbs of Chicago doubles as a homeless shelter. Many of them preach some version of the Prosperity Gospel every weekend, and there is always the watered-down notion that indoctrinating others into the fold will somehow lead to a kind of material wealth that I believe Jesus would have found obscene.

In an odd moment of synchronicity, Youtube read my mind and a video of a dude that literally makes his living as a homeless shepherd popped up on my feed. The guy’s name is Aaron Fletcher of 123Homefree.com. He has a wagon and he trades sheep’s milk and labor for temporary lodging and food. He also happily gives away advice on being thrifty and crafty. His fingernails are dirty and his sheep are happy. They follow him around like dogs. One of his mottos is FreeDIYm > $lavery. Draw your own conclusions as to who I think is more like Jesus if we compare him to any smug church member who routinely yawns through the three chord jams of the generic Worship Band at Local Fellowship Community. God is in the details.

I am currently trying to minimize my use of PayPal because they keep making weird threats towards opinionated creatives like myself. If you'd like to tip me, I would be delighted if you helped me test a tip jar service here:

http://buymeacoffee.com/kimberlysteele

Your prayers to the gods/God for my continued success are always welcome whether or not you choose to tip.

*************************************************

Ogham readings are concluded for the week of October 30, 2022. Please feel free to comment on existing threads though. Thank you and see you next week for more free Ogham readings!

I finally started the first phase of minimizing my possessions here in my Aurora house. As a short introduction, we moved to this house about seven years ago. It is a very small house, about 100 years old, and when we got here, it was pretty dumpy. Thanks to my husband's handiwork, it is much more beautiful and liveable. It's still small though, and that's why I am doing a KonMari style purge of the sort that was all the rage about five years ago or so but has fallen out of favor. In a house this size, under 700 square feet, it's minimalist or bust.

My clothing wasn't all that excessive to begin with, but there was a great deal to purge anyway. This is a Before picture of my loungewear/pajama drawer.

\\
Here is the Before of all of my tops, which include sweaters, t-shirts, and regular shirts. Underneath is my bottoms drawer, which includes pants and skirts. Mostly I wear stretch pants with a skirt on top of them, though I do own one pair of cargo pants which I am wearing at the moment, so they are not shown.

Below is another Before photo. I have the top hanging rack. The bottom one is my husband's stuff. The door houses my scarf and hat collection.

Here is the Before of all of my clothing in the world piled on the bed.

Now the after photos. I ended up with one half garbage bag of discards -- clothes with holes and other problems. The blue hamper is going to GoodWill.

AFTER

I am happy to read your Ogham free of charge -- that's how I hone my divination skills. I am happy to receive donations as well, but regardless of your donation status, I appreciate prayers for my success to the deity of your choice. I will take reading requests until 8pm Central Time (Chicago Illinois USA) on Monday night.

I will be taking off the last Sunday in December 2022 and the first Sunday of 2023 this year.

For a more in depth look into how I read and interpret the Ogham's symbols, please visit my website druidogham.wordpress.com.

Hello! Reading requests are concluded for the week of October 24. Please be patient as it can take anywhere from 2-48 hours for me to get to all of the readings. I truly appreciate your donations and prayers! See you next week for more free Ogham readings.

On my last Open Post, I fielded a great set of questions about the Sphere of Protection (SoP). For those of you who aren't in the know about what that is, the Sphere of Protection is a religious ritual performed once a day, a "banishing ceremony" in Western magic that revolves around a triangle of daily practices: the SoP, divination, and discursive meditation.

As an aspiring Druid mage, I have performed the SoP once a day, usually in the morning, for the last six years or so.

As I have mentioned quite frequently on this blog, we are currently soaking in a collective astral morass which is the result of the human race becoming exceedingly materialistic and trashy. For this reason, many newbies are seeking out the SoP and Western magic in general in order to clean up the trash in their own lives, and to discover a connection with the Divine that does not involve grinning, cap-teethed preachers with multiple McMansions or sitting for hours in ~~weekend corporate seminars~~ church services pretending that the person in the pulpit knows more about spirituality than any average Jane on the street.

From my limited experience, and it truly is limited as I was a Hitchens-quoting atheist less than a decade ago, the SoP is a way of cleaning up one's vibe and one's mind, but not in a brainwashing sort of way. It starts a process that can only be complete with daily discursive meditation, which eventually transforms your way of thinking until almost all thoughts you have (aside from OOH YUMMERS CHOCOLATE CAKE!) are a form of discursive meditation. Divination is helpful too, but it is discursive meditation that is the crucial one. Divination is more of a prosthetic way of reaching the divine to get around normal human handicaps, such as the mental chatter over chocolate cake mentioned above.

The problem is the SoP is hard. It's hard to dedicate the time every day. I am able to perform it 365 days a year for 6.5 years because I am a high-functioning autistic with an addiction to routines. I get upset if my routines are interrupted, and I often seek to keep them at a high cost. I'll do the SoP late at night if I could not get to it in the morning, which rarely happens.

Another one of my autistic tics was catatonia: disappearing into my imagination for an hour at a stretch as a child. This panicked my poor mother when I did it on a crowded ice rink at age six and could not be woken up. Perhaps this ability to enter the imaginary space is why I have not had issues imagining portions of the SoP.

The person wrote to me:

Kimberly,
having watched your excellent video on the Sphere of Protection, and attempted the SoP consistently over the course of several months, I am perplexed about this practice.

Why? Aside from the major challenge of conjuring & sustaining visualization of the many requisite images with sufficient focus, vividness & clarity, there are a couple of key ingredients I have been struggling with.
JMG has been dismissive (YMMV), so I turn to you in hopes you may have some helpful insights thru your experience.

1. Vibration. According to JMG:
"Vibrated? That's a way of pronouncing words used by ceremonial magicians. To learn how to do it, try chanting a simple vowel sound like "aaaah," changing the way you hold your mouth and throat until you feel a buzzing or tingling feeling somewhere in your body. With practice, you can focus the vibration wherever you want, inside your body or outside of it, and it becomes a potent magical method. For now, do your best, and see how steady you can get the buzzing or tingling sensation."

Am genuinely curious how many people attempting the SoP have actually achieved the level of vibration & control JMG claims is possible (and indeed essential?). "Focusing vibration [at all seems a tall order, but:] wherever you want" -- really??As you are an experienced voice/song/music instructor, I imagine you may be better qualified than most to speak to the technical possibilities here.

2.a
"imagine as intensely as possible the deep places of the Earth and the immense powers that dwell there. Engage all your senses, so that you smell and feel and hear as well as see the imagery."

What? How? Are folks just glossing over the impossibility of this? What imagery, exactly? Am I'm just lacking imagination?

2.b
"imagine as intensely as possible the realms of outer space far above you and the immense powers that dwell there. Engage all your senses, so that you smell and feel and hear as well as see the imagery. (What does space smell like? According to astronauts, it smells a little like a scorched barbecue grill -- hot metal with an odd hint of meat.)"

Smell, feel and hear... "outer space". Wait, what? smh
How? Again, is the answer just: sorry, you lack imagination?

I want to believe the SoP is not just some sort of massive trolling exercise ala "The Druid's New Clothes."
Thanks for providing this open post & to you & anyone who can provide data points to help provide clarity.

I wrote a detailed post back to him/her which I have copy pasted here but with more detail than the original response. We autistics love our details! Of course I welcome questions about the SoP or my magical practices in general in the comments. It is my opinion that we need as many people doing the SoP as possible these days because the astral is so trashy, including Christians who can do the SoP using aspects of Jesus, the angels, God the Father, etc. Just don't do it around your own kids going through or under the age of puberty, for reasons that I will do my best to explain in a future blog. Keep in mind a gazebo somewhere in a forest preserve where your kids aren't there is fine, or at a friend's house as the energy doesn't seem to affect other people's kids.
My reply with even more detail:

The SoP is a tall order! It took me a couple of years to have any confidence in doing it. Even at the time I made that video, there were many hiccups to work out.

As far as asking JMG to help with the SoP, what's funny is that it's like asking J.S. Bach to teach a remedial music class for highly-caffeinated 9 year olds. It's hard for him to come down to their level. Not so tough for me, because "highly-caffeinated 9 year old" is one of my dominant personalities, plus my magical expertise is limited to the remedial at this point, so it's not as difficult for me to talk about basics.

For vibrating a sound, I made a video about that: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H7hOUkJzcCM

I hope it helps you. Notice that the humming sound has the "color" of an accordion note. It can take a long time to make that color but once you get it in head voice/falsetto, you will be well on your way.

2.a Yeah, I remember reading that and thinking "LOL whut?" Nobody has ever been to the center of the Earth, so what that would smell like is beyond comprehension. Personally, I have never been caving or spelunking, so I don't know what those "deep places" are like at all.

As far as the imaginary component of the SoP, do you ever look at a photo/video of a place and imagine what it would be like to live or travel there? For instance, this site recommended by Princess Cutekitten is especially good for "transporting" your imagination outside of your immediate
circumstances: https://www.window-swap.com/Window

The Gate of Air

For the Gate of Air, I often imagine a birch forest at sunrise in the early spring when frost is on the ground. I imagine what it would be like to be Agafya Lykova, waking up on a spring morning alone in the Russian taiga:

https://siberiantimes.com/other/others/news/russias-loneliest-woman-hermit-agafya-lykova-to-get-new-home-in-the-wild/ Of course I imagine other scenes for the Gate of Air. It all depends.

This morning, I imagined Minnesota's George Crosby Manitou State Forest. I have never been there, but it is one of the most ancient forests in the Americas. https://www.onlyinyourstate.com/minnesota/oldest-forest-mn/ As someone who loves talking to trees, I am considering a pilgrimage at some point in my lifetime.

I imagined morning sunlight pouring through the trees and a fine mist rising off the cold ground in early April. I imagined the feeling of coming home when I talk to the old beeches, maples, and oaks. I drank in the sights of squirrels running about and the sounds of birds chattering as they gathered food and made nests. Thoughts tried to intrude, for instance rehashing the visit with a relative yesterday that disrupted my precious routine, but I put them aside to "see" the pink morning sky through the tree branches.

The Gate of Fire

For the Gate of Fire, sometimes I merely imagine my own neighborhood on a hot summer day. I imagined watching people go into Dairy Delite from my sweltering car (I don't have working air conditioning). I imagine walking by my neighbor's house. She grows arbor vitaes in earthenware pots. I don't know what her secret is but they are very healthy and she leaves them all winter long. I "see" the plants growing in mine and other people's yards -- daylilies getting ready to pop, dandelions, purslane, plantain.

This morning, I imagined a river in Guatemala. I have never been to Guatemala but I have seen lots of pictures. The river is green with algae. There are tropical birds of the kind and color you would never see in Illinois. The water of the river shines black and brown and vegetation chokes the river banks.

The Gate of Water

For the Gate of Water, I imagined a beautiful mountain-surrounded lake in Colorado in Autumn. This one was easy because it actually is Autumn right now where I live. I have never been to Colorado, again, I have only seen photos.

I'll often imagine Alaska as well though I have never been there. My recent obsession is mountains and mountain lakes, despite having very little experience because travel isn't my thing. One place I tend to return to is a mountain lake that I believe is in Anchorage. I saw a photo of it once. Someone poured sand to create a small beach. Mountains can be seen in the distance. The picture is very blue (water is the blue gate) with a blue sky, blue mountains, blue water. Sometimes I get flashes of my past lives through the water gate and it was via this gate that I "saw" my previous life as Peter the Singing Sailor, a Portuguese man who I believe lived in the 1700s and died at sea when his ship got wrecked. I also believe I have seen one of my future lives, and that is why Alaska is so strong for me. I think one day I will have a future incarnation where I will spend a great deal of time in Alaska.

The Gate of Earth

For the Gate of Earth, I imagined my parent's house on December 31, 1968. They had just moved in at that point. The house used to be a khaki green color, so that was part of my visualization. Sometimes I imagine a snowy landscape further north than Illinois. It all depends, once again.

Many, many American Indians, including Mayans and Incans, believed the Milky Way galaxy was a sort of bridge to the afterlife. The dead were able to talk with the living during the sacred time we now identify as New Years. I imagine this bridge being bright and visible on a clear winter night, allowing me to talk and hang out with my dead loved ones once a year.

The Spirit Below Earth Gate

When we get to the Earth/Spirit Below Gate, I recommend rubbing your hands together vigorously, touching the ground, and then putting your hands on your naked belly. Imagine some healing spirits from the Earth coming up to to help heal your gut and to bring pragmatism and good sense of the "I don't let perfect be the enemy of done" variety into your heart. This I find to be easier than imagining the actual interiors of the Earth, which I have only experienced as mud and rocks when I have dug in my garden. I do however imagine tree roots reaching down, drinking up water. Trees often go as deep into the Earth as they are tall, which is a factoid I've always enjoyed.

The Spirit Above Sky Gate

When you get to the Purple Gate/Spirit Above, raise your hands to the sky and imagine light beaming down and being surrounded by the All-Fathers like this scene from The Dark Crystal:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WAHhpMJbfxQ

I once had a dream where a friend of mine and I took a detour into a forest and I encountered some old, long-bearded men chanting and singing in a grove. I introduced myself to them and they were generally amused by me and a friend of mine. My friend was excited to show off his magic and proceeded to do some parlor tricks which involved shooting colored balls of energy out of his hand. I started the prayer I was trying to memorize at the time... "Grant us, O Holy Ones, thy Protection..." and suddenly they surrounded me in golden light and took me somewhere. I don't remember what happened after that.

At any rate, I assure you, the SoP is not a trolling exercise! I sincerely hope this helps.

Whoops! I missed my own deadline so I will be taking Ogham reading requests from whenever this posts on Sunday until 8pm Monday night. Please allow 24-48 hours to receive your reading.

Hello! Reading requests are concluded for the week of October 17. Please be patient as it can take anywhere from 2-48 hours for me to get to all of the readings. I truly appreciate your donations and prayers! See you next week (hopefully on time) for more free Ogham readings.

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