kimberlysteele | Entries tagged with sacred homemaking

I am delighted to announce my second podcast interview with Casual Temple's Merrily Duffy. We had a delightful conversation about my upcoming book, Sacred Homemaking (Aeon Books coming in 2026) and about practical magic in the sacred home. My cats were definitely needing some attention and there are a few cameos from them.

The podcast will be dropping Wednesday, May 28 on all the platforms.

Watch on YouTube

Happy news!

Only a few weeks after I had finished writing the second draft, my book Sacred Homemaking: A Magical Approach to a Tidier Home was picked up by Aeon Books, a well-known publisher of occult and herbal knowledge. Aeon has released several titles by John Michael Greer, including The Way of the Secret Temple, Monsters, and The Sacred Geometry Oracle, among others. The circumstances around this seemed like divine intervention. I had not yet sought a publisher and was considering writing a query to another publisher when I was contacted by Oliver of Aeon who just happened to like my Substack.

Sacred Homemaking is in some ways the occultist's answer to the minimalist genre, which includes Marie Kondo's book The Art of Tidying Up and The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning by Margareta Magnuson. To my mind, though both of those authors were on the right track, they missed the mark when it came to focusing on the spirits of place instead of the actual stuff being minimized.

Sacred Homemaking is a book about appreciating the spirit of place, a skill that once cultivated you will take with you far beyond a single lifetime. By learning to communicate with the spaces and things around us in a meaningful way, we learn to take off our materialist blinders and connect with the world around us via gratitude. Sacred Homemaking does include a great deal of practical advice -- much of this comes from the original Sacred Homemaker in my life, my mother -- but in essence it is a book about enlightenment. I do talk about how to fold things, including underwear, if you are into that. Today I was going to fold my underwear but ran out of time... my underwear and socks may end up crudely stuffed into a drawer if time runs short enough. Sacred Homemaking is not about perfection. In fact, one of my salient points in the book, made early on, is to appreciate the "Charlie Brown's Christmas Tree" aspects of home, meaning the imperfect being appreciated and sublimated into joy and usefulness.

I am very excited to bring you Sacred Homemaking. Fingers crossed and with prayers, my fondest hope is that it will hit shelves May 2026 or sooner. Until then, I hope it will be worth the wait.

Delegating Etheric Labor in Your Sacred Home (Excerpt from Sacred Homemaking)

The bitterest and worst of household fights occur over etheric labor: meal preparation, cleaning, laundry, bill management, childcare, and household repairs. The war between the sexes manifests itself in battles over dirty dishes and leaky roofs.

Women are generally better at daily housework and household management. Men are generally better at breadwinning and household repair. Though no woman or man should ever feel confined to a particular set of roles as no two individuals are truly alike, a sane society leaves room for people falling into their natural roles and does not diminish anyone for their choices. We do not live in a sane society. Women may work outside the home more than ever these days, but that hasn’t lightened the load of housework they do and are expected to do.

In the 1970s and 80s, women were fed a line they could have it all, a package which included a thriving career, a beautiful home, well-adjusted children, and a happy husband. This clever ploy made women into a zombie army of materialist consumers, both making more and spending more while losing happiness and well-being. There simply are not enough hours in a day to have a full-time job, play with and educate one’s children, engage in a fulfilling relationship with one’s spouse, and keep a house in reasonable working order.

Because people love to commoditize everything in our civilization, many have suggested making lists of household tasks and then giving these lists to various family members with the pat expectation they will get them done. Some wives go as far as offering sexual perks to their husbands when they perform a certain number of listed tasks within a given period. It’s a sad day when you have to prostitute yourself to your own mate in order to get him to wash dishes, change the baby’s diaper, and fix a creaky door.

As someone who has been married over two and a half decades to her first and only husband, let me reassure you that making lists of undone tasks is a surefire way to build resentment and hatred that will shorten your marriage or lessen its quality. Never build the negative by emphasizing it and giving it free reign to become an obsession. Making lists of commoditized household work cheapens the perceived quality of the work and makes it clear you don’t appreciate the work already being done. Instead of listing on paper what your spouse has failed to do every week, list in your head or in a secret diary of what he or she does every day, week, and year to keep your home up and running and cultivate gratitude for it. Thank him for these completed tasks, reminding him of the goodness he has made. If his list has nothing on it or is dreadfully short, for instance, he is a gambler and a violent drunk, then perhaps you should leave.

The moral of the story is that a husband (or wife) is not another child, nor should he or she be treated like one. A spouse is an adult who shares responsibility, not an army cadet or a personal assistant who takes orders. In a good relationship, focusing on your mate’s achievements instead of marinating in his or her shortcomings is the most difficult and necessary of tasks.

When your husband does do something right, thank him just as you thank your door, toilet, and toaster. Because he is human and not the spirit of a place or object, thank him aloud, in words. My husband almost never did the dishes in the first fifteen years of our marriage because he did not understand how much it meant to me. Over time, I thanked him every time he did dishes even when he did not thank me for doing dishes. When he was unemployed for several years, he often left dirty dishes for me in the sink despite my being exhausted from working full time and preparing most of our meals. If you think I was not fuming mad from this little habit of his, then you don’t know me very well. Criticizing him by saying he rarely or never did dishes did not work: I tried it. What has worked has been thanking him when he does dishes, which at this point is nearly every day. During those rare moments when I felt it was right, I told him how much it meant to me when he did dishes, especially when I did not expect him to do them. I also make a practice of recalling at least three of his wise decisions or actions whenever he makes me angry. I try to make a point of expressing my gratitude for him on a regular basis. He is better about doing the dishes and housework than he used to be but I still do the majority of tidying and cleaning tasks and he still does most of the home repair and construction projects. We are both working full time.

Apologies from my tongue, and never yours
Busy lapping from flowing cup and stabbing with your fork
I know you're a smart man (I know you're a smart man), and weaponise
The false incompetence, it's dominance under a guise

If we had a daughter, I'd watch and could not save her
The emotional torture, from the head of your high table
She'd do what you taught her, she'd meet the same cruel fate
So now I've gotta run, so I can undo this mistake
At least I've gotta try

The capillaries in my eyes are bursting
If our love died, would that be the worst thing?
For somebody I thought was my saviour
You sure make me do a whole lot of labour

-Excerpt from Labour (song by Paris Paloma)

The song I referenced puts a fine point on a cultural wave of resentment towards men. The video and the theme of the song itself — escaping a man who sees his woman as a “nurse then a servant /Just an appendage, live to attend him /So that he never lifts a finger/ 24∕7, baby machine” is utilized as a feminist soundtrack to many TikTok videos. Its Handmaid’s Tale vibe seems completely intentional, and like the Handmaid’s Tale cable TV series, the song drops the F-bomb and portrays a woman as a pretty, long-suffering slave. The woman-as-modern-handmaid trope is well on its way to becoming a huge astral pyramid. Like any growing astral pyramid, the Handmaid Pyramid has already been monetized.

The current system cannot function without a bunch of perpetually anxiety-ridden, confused humans to keep it going. Anxiety is big business and relaxation isn’t what it used to be. Nowadays, relaxation is synonymous with huge expenditures of money. It is a lifestyle to which we are supposed to aspire: meditation retreats, fancy meals, tropical vacations. The ideal human of this era can somehow afford life of constant leisure after having retired at age 38. We are all supposed to want what the hedonist tech bro has. Nevertheless, people who can retire at age 38 are uniformly hated because almost nobody has that kind of wealth at 88, let alone 38.

A love/hate relationship with work

We humans both idealize and resent work, whether it is the paid work of making a living or the unseen work of keeping a home. In my own case, I was so hell bent on liking what I did for a living that I forwent health insurance, vacations that involve any form of travel, and having children in order not to be enslaved. For me, enslavement meant working any job where I wasn’t in nearly complete control, and that’s why I chose my current situation of a 20 year old car and no health insurance.

Whose work is it anyways?

As we see in the song Labour, rancor between the sexes often has largely to do with the division of labor. Both sides idealize their own contributions via work and resent having to do that work. Since the Industrial Revolution, large areas of manual work have gotten technically easier or have become automated. Work of any kind has diminished to a trickle for certain well-to-do. For everyone else, we ended up soaking in a labor deluge and practically killing ourselves to keep our heads above water. A wise kid (not me) once said the invention of the washing machine did not mean less laundry. We just got more clothes and washed them more frequently. Elite Victorian bankers and kings of industry enjoyed obscene wealth without lifting a finger, stepping deftly into slots formerly occupied by monarchs. Proper Victorian ladies delegated their own woman’s work of tidying, washing, and cooking to maids, laundresses, and cooks. Most Victorian women of any status did not nurse their own babies, delegating that most sacred and intimate of duties to low paid help or slaves. The current lifestyles of the rich and famous similarly outsource any and all dirty work to peasants. This is perfectly in sync with Old Victoria.

For all her troubles, such as not being able to vote or inherit property, the Victorian lady had it much better than her modern, elite counterpart. She may have felt trapped, but she was never expected to do everything a man does while remaining a perpetually young, feminine, beautiful woman. Women, including this woman, are exhausted from trying to be all things to all people. Nurturer at home, ball-buster at work, warrior on the battlefield, mother, divine whore. Like men, women are generally hard working. Like men, modernity has taken advantage of our docility and tolerance. We are all frogs in water that is growing uncomfortably warm.

Not that men are doing any better, but women are between a rock and a hard place at the moment. We have boxed ourselves into our own corner by taking on too much freedom. In Appetites, a memoir of severe anorexia by the late Caroline Knapp, the author describes becoming anorexic in college, when her anxieties crystallized as an eating disorder.

“Starving, in its inimitably perverse way, gave me a way to address the anxiety I felt as a young, scared, ill-defined woman who was poised to enter the world and assume a new array of rights and privileges; it gave me a tiny, specific, manageable focus (popcorn kernels) instead of a a monumental, vague, overwhelming one (work, love)." -Caroline Knapp, Appetites: Why Women Want

Women tend to externalize blame in order to avoid their own culpability. In Knapp’s case, a fixation with self-abuse via starving supplanted the hefty task of narrowing down exactly what she wanted and mercilessly eliminating the rest. Anorexia became her arena for achievement; it also became the externalization of her indecision.

In Paris Paloma’s song, she describes a common scenario where a woman externalizes her own feelings of entrapment to be entirely the fault of the man, who surely tricked her into giving away her etheric labour via methods tantamount to rape.

What causes etheric starvation

The reason I enjoy lake shores, forests, prairies, gardens, and wild or semi-wild places so much is because they offer a glimpse of ecosystems where forces are balanced and in harmony. In my novel River’s Heart, the protagonist is sent out to sweep leaves in the yard as punishment. During her sojourn, she bitterly muses about having to clean up “nature’s mess”. Nature does not make any mess she cannot fix. When she visits destruction upon herself via a flood or a caldera exploding, she eventually fixes it up and makes it new again. The human project (which often looks like one of her mistakes) will peter out. Thanks to the 75% percent of humans who took MRNA vaccines, this may happen much sooner than originally expected. Whether we do it quickly or slowly, it is the lot of all civilizations to be compressed into a thin layer of carbon. This layer is not likely to be discovered or remembered by any intelligent visitors. If and when they arrive, we will probably be long gone. Nature will turn all heroes into zeroes whether they like it or not. So when I go on my long, solitary walks, I get to see the glacial process of the ecosystem correcting and balancing itself the way it did before humans and the way it will after humans are gone. 99.9 percent of species on this planet have gone extinct and I am confident humans will not be nearly as resilient as sharks or jellyfish. As a believer in the soul, I wonder if my soul will incarnate once humanity is a memory or if I will stay in the vapors and/or wander off to another universe. It’s not information I am equipped to know.

The reason working ecosystems are restorative is because they are places where the etheric or energy plane is balanced, or mostly balanced. Plants, air molecules, dirt, bugs, birds, and other animals have no other choice but to own the means of production, and the energy created of work where workers own the means of production is always more plentiful and nourishing than in areas where the means are far removed from the laborer. The song Labour is about the man stealing the woman’s energy via her work and dominion over her children, much like the cuckoo steals into a robin’s nest and kills the baby robins in order to hijack the mother and father robin’s half-digested worms.

The means of production

Every morning, I sweep the floor with a broom made of metal and plastic. The dustpan is entirely made of plastic and has a matching mini-broom that nests inside it. While I sweep, I boil water from tea on my stove. The water comes from Lake Michigan. It comes through pipes I did not lay. I filter it in a charcoal filter device that I bought online. As for the tea, I did not grow it. It is from China. I drink my tea and then go to another room in my natural gas-heated house. I burn incense imported from India and do my daily banishing ritual. I then meditate and record my observations in a notebook made of trees I did not chop with a pen made of foreign plastic.

Girl Sweeping by William McGregor Paxton

Before I turn on a single machine, I have used at least a dozen items I had no hand in creating. Compare the pioneers and those before them: they lived in what James Howard Kunstler describes in his novels as “a world made by hand”. Pioneer lives were very hard, and they starved to death more frequently than us when they were not dying of sepsis. Nevertheless, they did not have the troubles we have with etheric starvation. They did not pathologically fear death as we do. Nobody before 1940 was turned into a medical zombie of perpetual agony, with teams of do-gooders rushing to hook him up to machines and brutal infusions of drugs. There were no armies of semi-alive drones on IV drips rotting in hospital beds, crying to be taken to homes that were sold off by the adult children who abandoned them.

Prosthetics for living such as the lightbulb, the food processing plant, cars, computers, and lately AI both giveth and taketh away. We humans increased our workload with machines and etherically starved in the process.

Etheric labor shortages

As I have said, all healing comes from the etheric and the further away we are from the means of production, the higher the likelihood we will have etheric starvation. Etheric body starvation manifests itself in illness and/or compulsive and addictive behavior. Etheric starvation is endemic to our current era; it is baked into the pie. Nobody can escape. Many will try by going back to the land or traveling to places of etheric richness like Thoreau tried to do with Walden. The whopping majority will attempt to remedy etheric starvation via one or more addictions.

Women, being male on the etheric, are the primary drivers of etheric wealth of the sort that alleviates etheric starvation. As much as women are the main creators of etheric wealth, men can do it too. Cleaning and tidying are etheric male activities regardless of the sex of the person doing them. Neatening and caring for a space infuses it with positive, vital etheric energy. When someone cooks, food is alchemically transformed into sustenance, and this is why cooked food is more nourishing than raw. The more love and skill that goes into the cooked dish, the more etheric energy it will provide. Only etheric males can conceive a child, and since children are etheric males regardless of sex until puberty, an etheric male (physical female) creating other etheric males (children) is about as etherically male as it gets.

Industrialization gave rise to upper class women being trapped inside the manor or plantation. From her gilded cage, the great lady was neutered of her etheric skills, as cooking and cleaning require practice in order to get any better. Her etheric labor was done by a bunch of indentured servants and slaves. Common women were abused for their competence and their etheric labor stolen. Almost nothing has changed since the old days. Once the plantation gave way to the factory, women were hoodwinked into amassing conveniences that further took away their motivation to practice etheric wealth-formation in any way save popping out kids. Vacuuming replaced sweeping the floor and microwaving a burrito replaced patting out tortillas by hand and chopping home grown tomatoes for salsa. Much time was saved but all that precious etheric energy said “Adios, amigo”.

The most devastating blow to the collective etheric plane was dealt when women were forced to work outside the home. Just because work (i.e. housework or chores) are not paid does not mean they are not worth money. I will argue in my upcoming book Sacred Homemaking that the value of skilled housework is beyond rubies. Even upper middle class households in my area of Chicagoland feature breadwinning wives. It’s just too expensive these days to have upper middle class perks like electric SUVs and trips to Europe every year without both spouses hauling ass in salary class positions.

Covid shutdowns trained an entire generation of workers that commuting to an office was unnecessary and sadistic. Home is where we go to heal our etheric bodies and when home is taken from us by work, it is a fate worse than death. Women rule the home just as they have always done; no amount of forcing women into men’s roles will take that away. When a woman is forced to commute and spend the majority of her time far away from home just like a man, she feels etherically castrated. Some castrati are simping, willing eunuchs who lick their oppressor’s boots. Others, like me, are outraged and planning a coup.

Freedom for women, a.k.a. feminism, forgot to include a space for women who want to assume traditional roles and stay home. As long as men are expected to be women are expected to be men, we will all suffer more etheric shortages, addictions, illnesses, and existential fatigue. Convenience came at a heavy price.

The following is an excerpt from my upcoming book, Sacred Homemaking. Sacred Homemaking is a working hypothesis advocating the creation of protective magical shapes within the home from various angles: the physical plane, where experience is blunt and direct; the etheric plane, which is the plane of energy and vibration; and all of the planes above the physical and etheric, which are the astral, mental, causal, and spiritual planes. For more insight into the way I have come to understand the planes, please investigate my TikTok channel @whitewitchoftheprairie or these articles:

https://kimberlysteele.dreamwidth.org/tag/astral+plane
https://kimberlysteele.dreamwidth.org/tag/etheric+plane

The pathological fear of aging, rest, and death is prevalent in our civilization. Modern people do not have a healthy view of death and dying, to the point where certain industries' existence depends on profiting from hysterical reactions to aging, such as the cosmetic surgery industry. Nevertheless, we face a small death every night: sleep. In an age of electric lights and digital convenience, a good night's sleep is one of the most elusive prizes offered in life. Very few get it on the regular, present company included.

What is Sleep and What are Dreams? The Real Petit Mort

Sleep is a kind of small death. To sleep is to end the processes of one day and begin the next, for nothing can be born without the death of something before it. The physical body uses sleep to process its waste: the reason why it’s not advisable to eat anything significant before retiring is because the body goes into Phase 2 when it slumbers. It takes the digested food and turns it into poop and pee in Phase 2, and it can only do one job well at a time. While heart rate slows and conscious brain turns off, the subconscious wakes up so the soul may wander the astral plane unfettered from its Meatworld moorings.

The astral plane is a collective place, but just like the physical plane, it is not controlled by any single person. The rules of the astral are different from the physical world: for one, it is a world where our perceptions are even more faulty than in the physical world of sensation. A house can exist on the astral plane, but unlike on the physical plane, its location and features can change depending on the dreamer. It can flit in and out of existence. It can become large or small, adding or losing rooms, or it can morph into another place altogether. This is because the astral is dependent upon memory as far as we humans are concerned, and the way something appears depends on both our memory and the memory of others, including the spirits of other humans, animals, places, trees, and objects.

Despite the ramblings of “experts”, we cannot truly control our dreaming state at every moment, nor should we try. This is not to say we should not make an effort to cultivate balanced emotional reactions in dreams; actually, dreams can act as an effective sandbox for the way we behave in daily life. For instance, if you dream of murder or being murdered, it is a golden opportunity to look into your memories of that dream in discursive meditation to unpack the animosities behind the dream. Perhaps those animosities are coming from you or coming towards you, but once you have sorted it out, you will have a great deal more control over your waking emotions when they are inevitably triggered by Meatworld life.

The more meditation work you do on the few dreams you can remember (if you can remember your dreams at all) the better you will function during your waking life: anxiety will be put in its proper place, irritating people won’t be able to get an instant rise out of you, and you’ll gain insights into the reasons you were incarnated with your unique mind and body. That said, outside from thinking about dreams, the physical objects in your bedroom matter: they can affect the etheric and astral planes through careful choice and manipulation.

You’ve likely heard all of the physical plane suggestions to improve sleep. Avoiding caffeine anywhere near bedtime, drinking mildly sedative teas such as chamomile, lemon balm, hops, and valerian, scenting the room with lavender, putting up blackout curtains, regular exercise, wearing socks to bed, avoiding electronic screens, bathing by candlelight, fasting or eating only fruit a few hours before bedtime, and keeping the bedroom cool are all sound strategies to help the sleep process.

Bathing is one of my go-to ways of ensuring a good night’s rest. Taking a bath cleanses both the etheric and physical bodies. I usually take a bath at night, which washes off both physical and etheric grime. If I feel especially worn out or overloaded by the day’s events, I wash my hair even if my hair is not technically dirty. When negative etheric energy piles up, it often accumulates at the back of the head, the temples, and around the neck. Washing those parts cleans the slate and clears the path for better dreams.

Bedroom cleanliness and arrangement matters. When you make your bed in the morning, you are saying to it in the most direct, physical way that you appreciate it. A harmonious color scheme for your bed via its linens, throw pillows, or blankets is an important seal of thoughtfulness. Nice-looking pillows, blankets, and sheets help the bed to be proud. If the bed knows you care for it, it will care for you. Every morning, when you make your bed, thank it for its hard work as you would a team of people who fought off the evils of the world while you slept.

Arrange your bedroom in a way that feels good to you. Depending on the source, there are a million different suggestions about which direction your head should be oriented in sleep despite there being only four directions on the map. Move your bed and sleep in one orientation for a week. If it does not feel right, move it again and try another direction. It really is that simple. Far more important is the tidiness of your bedroom and the daily appreciation of the bed.

Clutter, dust, and dirt in the bedroom is visually disturbing, and the last thing you want before you enter the astral plane is images of a mess dancing in your brain. Hide or remove screens, collections, clothing, and the other detritus of life so you are not subconsciously affected by it.

Sleep is a series of dives through the layers of increasingly subtle planes. Though we exist on all of the planes all of the time, our perception of ourselves is far more limited. Perception informs consciousness. Just as light is a wave, yet it is also a particle, we perceive ourselves as particles despite also being waves.

When you sleep soundly and for an adequate amount of time, your body repairs while your Meatworld brain turns inward. The more deeply you sleep, the more your astral body is able to detach and decompress from your physical and etheric bodies. When someone is comatose, he or she is about as detached from the physical body as a human can get without actually dying. If you don’t sleep all that well, you will often find yourself trapped in the lower astral plane. Depending on your state of self-realization and development, your lower astral state can range from generic pablum to all-out war with malevolent spirits. You can improve your lower astral experience during your waking hours by doing spiritual work, discursive meditation, praying, and unrelentingly committing yourself to being the change you want to see in the world. Nevertheless, even those who do not sleep soundly dive through the upper astral planes during sleep: we all do that no matter what our spiritual situation. The key difference between a yogi (or someone who is very spiritual) and a spiritual novice is the yogi’s ability to bring the information he receives from the upper astral into his conscious mind at will. Yogis do not require as much sleep as you and me because of this ability, which is gained only one way: arduous spiritual work and balance of the inner and outer planes.

Night Terrors, Hypnogogia, and Sleep Paralysis

Aside from pragmatic, physical plane remedies to encourage better sleep and becoming a yogi, you can address the etheric plane and the astral planes while you sleep with simple natural magic. Modes of improvement in natural magic in the bedroom affect the astral plane via the etheric plane.

The word nightmare comes from Old English maere, a female spirit that was said to suffocate sleepers. The Night Hag is a common experience around the world: every culture from the beginning of time has its version of the creature that steals into sleeping rooms to sit upon the chest of the slumberer. Though the Night Hag experience may have to do with the difficulty most of us have with breathing as we sleep – apnea is as common as dirt – it is also real on the astral plane. There is an entire class of nasty creatures, mostly in the lower astral planes, whose raison d’etre is to attack sleeping humans by sitting on their chests and stealing their energy, usually in the form of breath. Most humans are assaulted in their sleep by the Hag and her co-horts (they can be male or female). Most humans have no idea this is happening, much like the leper who does not know his hand has been nearly burned off because his nerves are always misfiring. Considering modern humanity is in a religious Dark Age, it can be thought of as a leper colony of the spirit. Use of drugs, especially serotonin reuptake inhibitors, opens the gateway for these opportunistic spirits. Religious practices such as traditional mass, prayer, offerings, discursive meditation, and banishing rituals keep the Hag away on the astral plane. All are suggested whether or not you are aware of being attacked.

When we humans sleep, we are sitting ducks for astral attack, whether this is from other people (intentional and unintentional) or from any random spirit who wanders through the ecosystem. This kind of openness to astral attack occurs regardless of our age and belief system unless there is a strong routine of discursive meditation, prayer, banishing, and natural magic in place. In order to repel attacks on the astral, we can look to different forms of remedy that address different planes of existence.

Interfering with the Hag on the etheric plane is easy. Simply put up to four bowls of vinegar out near your bedside and keep them freshly stocked night after night. Vinegar scrambles malefic entities when they attempt to manifest on the etheric plane. If we could see vinegar fumes working on the chest-sitter, we would witness it penetrating it and exploding its etheric body like what happens to astronauts in space if they lose their space suit. Gods and angels, however, are free to come and go because their bodies are more subtle than the Hag’s. Bowls of salt do the same thing, as salt is protective, but because salt does not osmose into the air as readily as liquid, it tends to be combined with water – hence holy water. Sprinkling hot pepper into vinegar or salty water is also advised, as well as protective herbs such as lavender or sage, which can do double duty in helping sleep via their aromatherapy effects.

Using a weighted blanket made of tiny glass beads works to insulate the etheric body in much the same way insulation in a house’s walls keeps warmth from escaping to the outside. Glass is an etheric insulator. The tiny particles of glass inflict the death of a thousand cuts upon malefic entities that try to pierce through to the sleeper inside: think of a tasty burrito that is wrapped in broken glass. Since etheric energy is contained by glass, the sleeper’s body does not lose the energy at night and the energy goes largely unseen on the astral, also preventing other forms of interference in the world of dreams from malefic entities.

I often sleep under a weighted blanket after spraying my hair down with vinegar water and either braid it or sleep with my head wrapped in a turban. My hair benefits from vinegar water because it is much softer and more manageable. The real benefit comes from vinegar evaporating from my head while my body is wrapped in a glass bead burrito: malefic entities shrug and move on because I am not worth the trouble.

Sacred Bedside Geometrics

The next remedy crosses the etheric into the astral. Hanging or displaying a geometric shape near the bed casts a protective net around the sleeper, acting as both a guard and as a distraction to the entities who are looking for trouble around your bed. In the entity’s case, the shape appears as an alluring yet dangerous whirlpool or spiderweb. Humans and non-human beings alike are attracted to repeating, symmetrical shapes.

Common symmetrical shapes such as the Sri Yantra, Metatron’s cube, the Seed of Life (Hexafoil), the Unicursal Hexagram, and even symmetrical shapes made on the toy known as a Spirograph are suitable for placing beside the bed. Mandalas from the Buddhist tradition certainly cross-pollinate with more Westernized sacred geometry: there is an old saying that great minds think alike that may be relevant here. Furthermore, the medium in which the shape is expressed is not at all limited to ink and paper. Kitenge, a traditional African type of batik, is a form of art on fabric. The highly repetitive, symmetrical shapes and bright colors of kitenge provide a protective, demon-deterring effect in the form of cloth, which may serve to explain why kitenge are used in important life events. Kitenge are worn by African women from Ghana to Ethiopia to Botswana during weddings and funerals. Babies are wrapped in them, which puts a formidable barrier between the baby and the malefic entities who would try to hurt the baby or infest his or her space.

The Navaho tribe, among others, has its famous wedding baskets. A wedding basket, woven with love and care to symbolize the human journey through the worlds of darkness and light, provides a two-fold barrier on the etheric and astral plane. Anything woven, knitted, or stitched by hand has etheric potency as the weaver pours her etheric energy into every symmetrical knot. The Ojibwa dream catcher was first documented by settlers in the 1800s. The Ojibwa and other tribes used the handwoven objects, often made of a stick bent into a hoop and netted string, to hang by sleeping infants as a form of protection. The quilting traditions of the British Isles, Canada, and the USA are prime examples of using color and symmetry to repel evil spirits from the sleeper. Whether or not the quilt is consciously crafted with the intention of repelling evil spirits from the astral, the effect of the symmetrical design is the same as the previously mentioned bedside geometrics. The Amish hex sign spells its purpose out plainly in its name: it is meant to repel evil witchcraft. Instead of being placed near humans, the hex sign protects sleeping animals in and around the barns where they are painted.

Circling the globe again, Islam has the potent tradition of mosaics. Placing mosaics throughout one’s space basically turns it into a demon’s kryptonite. Muslims avoid the use of human or animal shapes in their artwork and there may be good astral plane reasons for this. Though malevolent beings are confused and defeated by symmetrical shapes on the astral, they seem to gain power through the shapes of human and animal forms. The haunted doll trope in horror movies exists because a doll of any sort is an easy way in for a malefic entity. What tends to happen is a child plays with a doll, often for several years, and a wandering spirit takes up residence in the doll. The child lends the spirit more energy by playing with it and doting on it. Sometimes these spirits are benign, but in today’s cruddy astral conditions, a doll can become a host for a malefic being. This can easily be avoided by asking for a divine spirit or god to bless and protect the doll when or after it is given to the child. That said, it is a good idea to put the child’s doll, stuffed animal, or action figure collection away at night or keep it out of sight in the bedroom.

Haunted Objects

One of the reasons it is so important to let go of objects, including “stuff” that needs to go to the landfill, is that objects can become haunted by malefic spirits that bring misfortune and bad luck. Neglect is a form of ignorance, that is to “ignore” or “not know”. What you do not know can and will hurt you. Just as it is not a good idea to hang out with unhappy and unlucky people, surrounding yourself with unhappy, unlucky objects in the form of neglected clutter can wreak havoc in a million and one unseen ways. Stuff that has been stolen has bad energy that will turn around and bite the hand that stole it: that’s why the homes of shoplifters and kleptomaniacs are especially grubby no matter how clean they are on the surface. Stuff that has been gotten by questionable means, such as the unearned McMansions of the conspicuous consumption elite, has a grubby feeling on a grand scale. Something will always seem off about the McMansion if you are even remotely psychically sensitive, and this “offness” is pervasive even if the space is beautifully and tastefully decorated. Whether it is in a rich or poor person’s space, a hoard is a psychically overwhelming force and not with the powers of goodness. The reason for this is that neglected stuff is a Wendigo – the more of it you amass, the more you want. The only cure is to release it into the infinite and let go of your addiction to amassing too much stuff.

Stealing objects, coercing someone into buying you objects, and subsisting off of massive unearned wealth and the wealth of others have deleterious effects both on your karma and daily personal energy. The reason I do not steal is not only ethical, it is out of my selfish interest in not attracting the diseased energy of stolen or unearned objects. If you have stolen an object, give it away and donate the cost of what was stolen either to the place you stole it from or to a charity that has the same vibe as where you stole it from. For instance, if you stole a book from the library, give the book away and donate its cost to the library itself or to a charity that helps children learn to read. If you still have a toy that you got by being a brat and throwing a tantrum as a child, give it away to Goodwill with blessings from the gods to whomever inherits it and donate its current cost to a children’s charity. Finally, if you have truly screwed the pooch and lived in a luxurious and greedy way, give up that lifestyle, physically pare it down, and consider moving into a smaller and humbler domicile. Donate whatever you can to a good charity that helps the homeless find permanent residences. Firmly resolve not to do that anymore, live more simply and thankfully, and it is very possible your terrible luck and depression will likely clear along with your conscience.

When an object is severely haunted or possessed, your best bet is to bury it in the ground, upside down if it has an upside for a face or a top of any sort. Another cure is to drop the object in a deep lake or ocean. Burial has the effect of invoking the spirits of the Earth or Water to claim the physical and etheric body of the haunted object. Burning the object is more dangerous as the instant release of the object’s body being destroyed can temporarily empower it and allow it to move to a new host, depending on the vulnerability of spaces, people, and animals in the immediate surroundings.

An estate sale. This person has (had?) some nice stuff, mainly Southwestern in theme.

The goddess of love herself, Aphrodite, does not love everyone and everything. When mated to the god Hephaestus via the will of Zeus, Aphrodite is unfaithful to her husband with one who is more her choice, Ares. Her passionate affair with the stunningly beautiful Ares serves as a welcome end to her mismatched pairing with the crippled, ugly god of blacksmiths.  The story of Aphrodite and her failed first marriage is a lesson in saying No. The legend whispers in our ear, “You don’t have time to do the things you do not love or are being coerced into loving, and furthermore, you don’t even have time to attune yourself to them.” The previous statement illustrates why it is so wrong to settle in a relationship or to marry for finances or convenience: the one who settles (let’s call her the Settler) ends up over-sensitizing herself to the wrong person in an act of bad faith. Inevitably, there is a part of the Settler that ends up hating her mate because the Settled-for can never measure up to the ideal the Settler truly desires.

How Not to Achieve Your Dream Career  

When I was younger, I suffered the common delusions of both wanting it all and thinking I could have it. My truest desire as a young person was to become a famous singer-songwriter. When I finished music college, I thought that dream life would fall into my lap. Meanwhile, I worked as a music teacher in several music lesson stores while performing small venues on the weekends, hoping to be discovered. I was easily and hopelessly distracted by various shiny carrots dangled in my general direction. I contemplated going back to school for a more secure job teaching in the schools. I tried to learn about real estate. I started writing novels. I dabbled in everything but I was best at spreading myself too thin.

By far, one of my worst mistakes was getting involved with my local teacher’s association. Flattered because I was sought as an expert, I became involved as a judge in my chapter’s music tests for children ages K-12. Judge duties grew into an appointment as administrator of an exam that saw hundreds of pressure cooker music students flowing through facilities which it was my job to procure, with teachers it was my job to recruit and organize as volunteers, with tests it was my job to get printed. This extremely demanding, often 40 hour a week job (on top of my make-a-living job) was 100 percent uncompensated. To make matters worse, there were a few bad apple teachers who were used to gaming the system. Though the agreement was that by entering students, you would be donating a set amount of hours per student in volunteer time, the richest and most entitled teachers acted exactly as you would expect. They would enter two dozen or so students and then conveniently disappear on luxury vacations when it came time to volunteer for test duties. One chronic vacationer had the gall to call me and leave an angry tirade about how awful I was to expect her to honor the agreement and keep her students out of the test as she would not be there to perform any duties. How dare I spoil her jet plane vacation with her rich husband! I wasted years of my young life on these people... I had my fill. I abdicated the administrative position and quit the organization permanently. By the time I ended my stint as test administrator, I had lost the motivation and desire to perform my own music in public as a career. Perhaps it was a mercy killing: my music never appealed to an audience larger than a few souls scattered across the globe anyway. Either way, I am glad things went the way they did, but if my goal was to become a singer-songwriter, I did a lousy job of achieving that goal. I attuned myself to goals outside of singing and songwriting and was burned out of my potential vocation by my own distraction and by allowing myself to be used up by jerks.

Hypocrisy!  

Back to gods: they don’t seem pleased with us humans when we pretend to be attuned to a noble cause and then proceed to show ourselves as the opposite of the ideals we preach. If mates of many years become a great deal like each other (regardless of passion or its absence) and if young music teachers become seasoned professional music teachers from spending years in the field, it follows that a self-proclaimed activist would become virtuous by the virtue of dedicating her time to activism. But what if there is no virtue in the activism? When vegans who proclaim all animals deserve mercy and then turn around with a merciless attitude towards other humans, who are only animals after all, the only force being sympathized with is arrogance. When the racial equality advocate tosses a pipe bomb into the local dollar store as her fellow advocates burn, loot, and vandalize the rest of the neighborhood, she is clearly not acting in the interests of the non-white people she claims to be championing. Non-white people were the ones shopping at Dollar General... Doing absolutely nothing is vastly preferable to acting as a hypocrite and then preening like a do-gooder. When the overbearing religious zealot tires the ears of anyone within shouting distance with his threats that you must either trust in Jesus or burn in hell, he is a great deal more like the devils in hell than he is like Jesus. Practice what you preach is the lesson. To become sympathetic to virtue, acting genuinely virtuous at every opportunity, even when these opportunities come with guaranteed pain, is the bottom line.

The Club of Stuff that Owns People: I'm Not Just a Member, I'm the President

To this day, I have a large collection of stuff I don’t use. For instance, I have all the supplies with which to make soap, but I’ve never gotten around to making soap. The supplies are about 15 years old. I have a box of old silverware that I used to use when I hosted potlucks. It has been sitting around for about five years.

Most of us have extra stuff, from food we’ll never eat in our cupboards and refrigerators to extreme cases of entire unused houses. Our stuff absolutely owns us. We become the extra pair of shoes that should have been thrown away years ago. We resemble our own motley collection of small flower pots. I am partially the flatware that sits unused in my office. Its potential usefulness to someone else and the privilege of owning it are part of my karma, that is to say, my causes and my effects. The "cause" of the silverware being accumulated is now done and its energy is inert. It sits unused in my office. It needs to move on, and whether it ends up being used for someone's meals or melted down for the steel, the sensible thing for me to do is to donate it.

What (Are You On About) Now, Kimberly Steele?

The exercise is to get rid of five items you no longer use. Certain rules apply: you have to let go of the item, no hiding it away or loaning it. It has got to go somewhere where it will be used or at least thrown out. The key to the exercise is to get rid of the item with sincere intention that it will not be replaced by something that will become equally useless. When you throw or give the item away, acknowledge it and thank it for how it helped you in your life. Send it away with your blessing.

For instance, by the end of this week, I will practice what I preach and get rid of five things.

1. I will get rid of a framed print I have had nearly 10 years -- I don't think it is lucky for me. I also have a tiny house without adequate wall space.
2. The second thing I will get rid of is the old cornmeal I have stored in my cabinet. It is years old and cornmeal does not tend to last that long.

3. The third thing I will get rid of is that goofy flatware. If I cannot sell it, I will give it away.

4. The fourth thing I will get rid of is some epoxy resin I bought to make a craft memorial for my cat Kiki when she died. When I bought it, clearly I temporarily forgot how badly I suck at crafts. I will get a proper memorial made (by someone else) and give the resin to someone who is good at crafts.

5. The fifth thing I will get rid of is my hand blender. I do not use it anywhere near enough to justify owning it, and if I ever find myself needing a hand blender, I will get another one from GoodWill.

What five things will you get rid of? How soon will you get rid of them?

Things in which I did invest
I send you away, may you be blessed
Go to a place where you’ll be found
Or circle the right way around
To freedom, rest, and rebirth
Adored by those who know your worth
As I align myself more perfectly
And strip away all that isn’t me

It's time to check in on the Clean Toilet Challenge! Since slightly before the 2023 Spring Solstice, I have been cleaning my toilet every day. In my house, we are blessed with two toilets -- my husband built our second half-bathroom in 2021 -- and though I don't clean that toilet as frequently, it has been well-maintained with a less-rigorous cleaning schedule. I have also deep-cleaned two of my parents' toilets and continued to keep them clean whenever I am there, which is about 2-3x per week.

As for money and health luck, I believe I have personally experienced a great deal of both with some of the money luck spilling over to my husband despite the fact I am the only one cleaning the toilets. I have seen a big increase in demand in my music teaching business; so much that I cannot accept all the prospective students that reach out to me. Overall, my statistics are better, with my self-scheduled private lessons up 7 percent from last year. I have also added work at a music school, which has boosted my income considerably. I am simply more comfortable than I was at the beginning of the year before I started the Clean Toilet Challenge. I'm still of an income level where even if I wanted to travel by plane or take hotel vacations (I don't) I could not afford to do it, however, I am able to afford to eat take-out or restaurant food up to 3x a week. This was simply not true of last year. But that's not all. My husband recently got a raise and a better employment situation. He is making 10$ more an hour, which is extremely significant in our world. I believe that keeping the toilets clean has brought good fortune.

For cleaning the toilet, I suggest putting a mixture of white vinegar and water (3 parts water, 1 part vinegar, or half and half) and cleaning the toilet top to bottom with a paper towel. Finish by scrubbing the inside of the bowl with a toilet brush. To initially deep clean a toilet, you may need a wire brush to excavate old rust scale and other nastiness. If the toilet seat is wrecked or cracked, you can buy a replacement. Once the toilet is deep cleaned, daily cleaning will most likely keep in in check. I always finish by thanking the toilet: "Toilet toilet handling waste, thank you for your saving grace."

Has keeping your toilet clean changed anything? I would love to hear your story in comments.

If you want to be treated more fairly and to be loved and adored, you must be the change you want to become in the world. You must be fair and you must emanate love and adoration, not just for other people but for places and things. I’m talking about gratitude.

We all love the grateful. Grateful people are thankful no matter what their circumstances. They take nothing for granted. You may be a jerk (here I am, the pot, calling out the kettle) but they are grateful for you. They uplift everyone and everything in their presence. Gratitude is powerful.

Think of the most grateful person you know. If you don’t know of anyone who emanates gratitude, consider the example of Jesus Christ. No matter what happened, Jesus was grateful to his father, God, for the opportunity to experience life. While on Earth, Jesus performed miracles that came from a well of power whose source was the connection forged with ultimate gratitude. Jesus knew himself to be poor but he preached gratitude nonetheless, because he was able to appreciate his circumstances and the lessons they offered while he was on Earth. Jesus had no fear of death despite the fact he was tortured to death. His gratitude overcame his fear.

We All Have to Start Somewhere

I’m not rich and my lifestyle is fairly modest. Nevertheless, I am nowhere near as poor as Jesus and chances are neither are you. We can either wallow in guilt and consider ourselves sinners, or we can appreciate our surroundings at every moment.

To appreciate is to raise in value. Value is not strictly material. A wise entity once threw me a bone. It said that genuine gratitude from the heart sublimates everything it touches by the power of seven. I have parsed this to mean that an act of genuine gratitude blesses the giver and the receiver across seven planes of existence. When a little boy gave his small portion of fish and bread to Jesus, via the power of his selflessness and Jesus’s gratitude the fishes and loaves were transformed into a hearty meal for five thousand people. The loaves and fishes example is an extreme one meant to illustrate a point. If you give everything you have out of the goodness of your heart, God will bless you and keep you no matter how bad things get. If you are compulsively generous, you will be rewarded with a kind of generosity to which no form of material wealth can compare.

Start where you are and thank the bed you slept in. If you have time or if there is not someone still sleeping, make the bed as you thank it. Making the bed is an act of appreciation and love. It restores the order of the bed and in effect “seals the deal” of the appreciation you express. A heartfelt thank you to the bed, whether or not you slept well, tells it that you don’t take it for granted that you have a soft, warm place to sleep at night. It vicariously thanks the place and time where you live for sheltering you, especially if bombs were not raining down or if natural disasters weren’t attempting to wipe your residence off the map.

The Dollar Tree Egg Roll

Another potent ritual is to thank the food you eat for its sustenance, even if it is a Dollar Tree egg roll that you cooked in the microwave for lack of a better alternative. Someone grew the cabbage, threw it into a dangerous machine for slicing, and oversaw the frying, cooling, and wrapping of the egg roll. To be grateful for the egg roll and all those who brought it to you is to accept both the benefits and drawbacks of our era. Convenience food is nice in some ways. Gratitude for it means amplifying the good aspects of the egg roll and shifting focus off the bad. Yes, the egg roll is not healthy. In an ideal world, I would be handcrafting my own egg rolls with cabbage, carrots, and onions grown in my garden. I do have the good fortune of owning a garden. I have yet to grow the vegetables and gather other ingredients to make egg rolls. Instead of focusing on the egg roll’s calorie count or its lack of nutrition, I consider how wonderful and tasty it is and how hard various forces worked to bring it to me. I could be yet another diet-obsessed drudge; those types are common enough. It’s easy to obsess about what I eat. I don’t. People love being obsessed with food because it spares them the hard work of confronting their real fears and drives in contemplation and discursive meditation. In a world teeming with toxic negativity and misery, gratitude serves to counterbalance certain forces that have gotten out of control. I cannot singlehandedly cure the collective astral plane of the nastiness it suffers right now; nobody can. There’s no way gratitude for a nuked Dollar Tree egg roll will save the world. I can, however, be grateful for small things and small acts of kindness and by that virtue ameliorate some of the black sludge of the modern collective consciousness. I can watch and observe as that gratitude bounces back at me through the planes by the power of seven or more.

Imagine being grateful to every object, person, or place that fills your life. Imagine being grateful to those you don’t like for teaching how not to be and what not to do. Imagine being grateful for your mistakes because they are a constant opportunity to learn, despite it often feeling like trial by fire. Gratitude is like a rose in the garden. If you tend to it and give it lots of care it will grow and flourish. If you are grateful to your bed every morning, you will sleep better at night. If you are grateful for the place you live, you won’t be consumed by the desire to fix every aspect of it or to run away. The consequence of gratitude is often more gratitude. If you are grateful to others, they stand a much better chance of changing into the kind of people who would earn that gratitude than if you took them for granted and got angry at them for their behavior. Gratitude builds the positive and to a degree ignores the negative.

Gratitude and the Spirit of Place

The first connection to the spirits of place happens via gratitude, not by “getting into the occult”, pulling out the Ouija board, or hosting a sleepover seance. Humans make a grave mistake when they presume that bad energy that flies in their direction is coming either from other human beings who happen to know magic or other human beings who happen to be dead. At any given moment, the subtle ecosystem around you is populated by a complex menagerie of unseen beings. Some of these beings are the spirits of the dead. Some are elementals, beings that make fire hot and whose energy is the reason snow becomes crystals. Some are the spirits of place, from huge land spirits that encompass entire provinces and give them their particular idiosyncrasies to a tiny spirit who occupies the stove in a rented apartment. Some are thought egregores you created yourself that develop lives of their own. Some are egregores created by groups of people, such as the spirit Carl Jung described and warned about in his prophetic essay Wotan. Some are larvae, the unseen equivalent of maggots. Larvae are found wherever there is sickness or death. Clairvoyants can actually see them; most of us can only sense them as an icky feeling. Some are angels and some are demons. There are some who are so beyond humans in their intelligence that they could destroy you and everything you know in a single thought, yet for some odd reason they don’t. Most of the subtle ecosystem cannot be explained at all, and it also doesn’t help that we humans cannot physically see it and that our scientists have forgotten what it is to try to understand it. Just know it is there and as humans, we are uniquely handicapped when it comes to perceiving it.

Ancient Mayans feared the age we are currently living through. It’s as if they knew how far the human race would fall from being in touch with its own spirituality. Though people of our era love to claim that humankind is at the most advanced state it has ever achieved and that the past was full of ignorant, god-bothering rubes, it is our time that is the true Dark Age. Like a person who gradually becomes blind over the span of several years, our entire race has gradually lost its connection to clear perception of the subtle worlds over many generations. The unseen world is in attack mode all the time now. I don't think it was always this way, but it is this way now. That is why it is unwise to counterhex people who you think or know are hexing you. In absence of a banishing ritual such as the Sphere of Protection or the etheric and astral shielding formed by sacred homemaking and a great prayer relationship with one or more gods, to counterhex is to paint a target on your own back. You end up calling out for the exact type of energy you are trying to repel, much like the dumb kid who took a couple of martial arts classes and makes the mistake of taking on the biggest bully in school.

The answer to the blindness of our age is to slowly re-sensitize ourselves via the appreciation of the good, and that means cultivating many gardens of gratitude.

The ancient notion of humors that pertain to the elements is utterly ubiquitous in nearly every great world culture except the modern industrial one. Unlike Western medicine, traditional Chinese and Indian medicine never discarded humoral diagnosis and treatment. The humors pertain to the spirit of place in the most obvious of ways: the weather. The spirit of place is a type of weather. It is a set of conditions that characterize the place and its ecosystem. The hot dry end of August pertains to Fire. The cool, crisp time when crocuses burst out of ice scrims in front yards pertains to Air. Nothing could be more Water than an ocean or a lake in Autumn. As far as Earth, an underground stash of apples and squash in the winter cellar as the snowstorm rages outside fits the bill.

I think one of the reasons our culture has such a difficult time recognizing the magic of humors is because it is so plainly obvious. Though it has been a few hundred years since mainstream medics understood the importance of the humors, they are still a part of our language. To describe someone as “sanguine” means he or she has a positive and uplifting outlook. “Choleric” still means irritable and bad-tempered. I would argue that we never lost the ability to sense humors; we just forgot about them for the most part. Superstitions stuck but on-the-ground analysis flew away.

It is my opinion that it is high time we westerners reclaimed our own majestic traditions, and that includes the restoration of sciences like astrology, homeopathy, and alchemy that come to us from Western occultism and provide a hand-on glimpse into Renaissance insights about the Universe.

The Tarot, whose first wide usage came about during the European Renaissance, is divided into four suits that relate to the elements. Swords for Air, Wands for Fire, Cups for Water, and Disks or Pentacles for Earth.

The Tarot are a perfect gateway towards understanding how the elements influence our daily lives. Let’s say I do a daily three card Tarot divination. For the most immediate or Me card, I get the Three of Cups ill-dignified. Cups rule the emotions, so I’ll be conscious of how emotional I am and I will look for emotional imbalances to root out. Am I snippy or butthurt when one of life’s inevitable setbacks occurs? Am I depressed for no reason, or am I suppressing the way I feel with too much force? For the Situation card, I draw the Queen of Disks well-dignified. Disks rule Earth and day-to-day dealings like making a living. From this card, I know that my material living isn’t likely to be in any significant jeopardy for the duration of the reading. I also will see that it is a day to reflect on my own past materialism. For the Outcome or Karma, I draw The Star ill-dignified. The Star is ruled by Aquarius or Air, so I will look for imbalances of my own ego: too puffy or not strong enough? The Tarot may be warning me that I’ll have a not atypical day of being an air-head where I miss obvious social cues or act like a ditz.

It is helpful to assign stereotypes – yes, stereotypes - when we are dealing with the character traits of the four humors.

For the Air humor, otherwise known as Sanguine humor, we’ll invoke the stereotype of Mr. Popularity. Everyone likes him. He’s the class clown and has been known to get in trouble on occasion, but his humor is never aimed at anyone directly and he does his level best not to make fun of people who aren’t as popular as he is. He effortlessly pulls in good grades as a young person and has no trouble supporting himself and his family when he comes of age. His problems tend to come from a puffy ego, false transcendence, and imagining that all problems can be solved if everyone in the world adopts his friendly attitude. He tends to be a solutions guy but often blunders through life situations with the assumption that one size fits all.

For the Fire Humor, otherwise known as the Choleric humor, let’s visit a tormented young artist. She dyes her hair bottle black as an adolescent. She is at once crippled by shyness and the urge to make her creative mark on her surroundings. She has an extremely dynamic personality and is a most loyal friend, but her strong approach can be off-putting. Most normal people keep her at arm’s length for fear of what lies beneath. She can be extremely socially inept. She is an artistic genius with extraordinary willpower. Because she tends to be intense and passionate about whatever she is into, it is crucial that she curates and limits the people and activities in her life with extreme care, because she doesn’t do anything half-assed.

For the Earth humor, otherwise known as Melancholic, we can imagine a high strung, conscientious, perfectionist young man with several anxiety disorders and nervous tics. He often has trouble getting along with other people, including within his own family. Though he is not a natural leader, he can be an exceptionally driven worker, especially if he is able to work with his hands. As he ages, he tends to shun other humans. He will either have one special person in his life or none at all.

For the Water humor, otherwise known as Phlegmatic humor, we have a fun-loving, vivacious, well-liked girl who suffers from frequent mood swings. She is more of a follower than a leader, but as they say, sometimes you can have too many chiefs and not enough Indians. She may have a potent desire to be the star of the show, but chances are she will always either be backstage doing the real work of production or an equally necessary member of the audience. She may have trouble that stems from her natural tendency to be promiscuous, whether or not she acts on that tendency.

Every human has bits and pieces of these temperaments. Western medicine used to employ them as diagnostic tools for treating mind, body, and spirit at once. Traditional Eastern medicine such as Ayurveda and TCM retained their holistic humorism.

Though Western medicine wisely discarded barbaric practices from its elder days such as trepanning, it has enthusiastically replaced bad with worse. Stomach stapling, tricyclic antidepressants, and MRNA hijackers mislabeled as vaccines represent complete ignorance in the classic sense of key pieces of knowledge being ignored to satisfy bias confirmation and profit motives. If you've followed the writings of this blog, you know I've railed against modern medicine any number of times, so I will nix any further ranting for now.

Humorism can be used in natural magic as a map to navigate which forces are being affected or potentially affected. If the humors fall into four basic categories of Air/Intellect, Fire/Drive, Water/Will, and Earth/Stability, natural magic can also be partitioned roughly into four humor-corresponding categories.

Natural Air Magic

The most basic natural magic practice that affects the air is burning incense. The smoke of certain resins and herbs has a purifying effect that reverberates through the planes. Ancient religions knew this, and that is why old Catholic cathedrals and old Muslim mosques veritably reeked with incense pouring from censers. Wearing any form of scent, or otherwise controlling one’s scent such as the use of antiperspirant and deodorant, is natural magic. When I prevent other people from smelling the natural pungent odor of my armpits by using antiperspirant or deodorant, that is a form of natural magic. If I wear too much perfume and cause someone to have an allergic reaction, that is also natural magic. If I boil a pot of water with orange and grapefruit rinds with a dash of lavender essential oil to make my house smell fancy, that is natural air magic.

Anything sound-related falls under the category of air magic. When I practice piano or guitar, that is a form of air magic. I am practicing in order to improve my brain utilizing sound and electrical signals traveling from head to hands. Bells are air magic. In ancient times, the sound of church bells was thought to dispel evil spirits and vampires. A common superstition about wind chimes is that they attract ghosts. I talk to the spirits of the dead all the time – I have never noticed any prevailing opinion among the dead that they are attracted to wind chimes.

The cacomagic of television is mostly air magic. Televisions create noise pollution, especially during commercials which are purposefully louder than aptly-named programming. The sound of television is designed to hypnotize and demoralize so its victims will buy more stuff.

Natural Fire Magic

Fire magic has been used nearly since the human race climbed out of trees. Candle magic is the most self-evident, which can vary in forms from simply lighting a candle in honor of a person or a god or formally dressing a candle by anointing it in oil and addressing it with one’s intentions.

Cut and clear spells often use fire with great efficacy. Fire is the ultimate cleanse of energy, which is why monotheist religions become fixated with the idea of destroying the wicked world in a ball of flame. The basic fire cut and clear involves writing a person’s name on a slip of paper and jumping over it while it burns. This is obviously better done outdoors in flame retardant clothing.

Cooking is fire magic. Whether it is by stove, air fryer, solar oven or (gasp!) microwave, the transformation of basic ingredients into sustenance is an alchemical process. The energy that goes into the growing, harvesting, chopping, heating, processing and serving of the food can all be considered fire magic.

Natural Water Magic

Any form of bath done with intention is water magic, including showering. A hot bath to relieve stress at the end of the day is magical, but so is the quick shower. The hoodoo bath with its cold, ice-temperature water, vinegar, salt, and hot-peppers is the most intentional and potent of all baths. When we stink, we take a shower or bath. Remember that the etheric body is one grade more subtle than smell, so to remove the pungent outer layer that is causing a miasma also strongly affects the etheric. Swimming in a lake or a pool is a form of bath. When I was a child and my extended family went on a hotel trip, we kids would entertain ourselves by jumping from the cold swimming pool to the hot tub over and over again. Little did I know this is a form of etheric stripping. Many cultures around the world have their own version of the etheric stripping as a health practice. In the Japanese on-sen or bathhouse, bathers scrub themselves clean with a brush in a cold shower before climbing into the extremely hot pool or hot spring. The ancient Finnish practice of sauna involves repeatedly going from heated sauna to dips in icy lakewater and rolling in the snow, potentially dozens of times. The practice is so revered that it spread to Sweden and other Nordic countries. The sauna is perceived as the ultimate cleansing ritual. Before the era of hospitals, women often gave birth in the sauna.

Home cooking also counts as water magic. The crafting of soup especially is nothing less than a magical potion formed with intention to nourish and heal. This is why homemade food is often more nourishing than prepackaged food that was canned or boxed in a factory.

Natural Earth Magic

Any activity where you work with your hands is Earth magic. Making the bed, vacuuming and sweeping, sewing and needlework, cooking, woodworking, painting, decorating, and handicrafts are all Earth magic. Gardening is absolutely Earth magic as it involves working with one’s hands and literally moving dirt around while adding blood (hopefully in the form of blood meal and not from your own mishap), sweat, and tears.

Construction, repair, and remodeling are Earth magic. All three can range from a few minutes unclogging a sink to years constructing a building, but the magical intention is often the same: manipulate the etheric plane via improvement of the physical plane.

The spirit of place as a concept falls under the realm of Earth magic. When we allow ourselves to respect material things and mundane activities that come and go in our daily lives, the result is anything but idolatry, or at least it is anything but idolatry in my personal case. As I appreciate and become grateful for my cup of tea, the result is not a worship for the cup of tea or the tea farmer. Instead, I become aware of the effort it took for the cup of tea to arrive in my hands. Gratitude is a kind of awareness. It is waking up to the divine from the shallow trance of materialism in which we take all our privileges for granted. The gratitude I put out there diffuses into other areas of my life and gently and slowly improves everything around me.

I have a few favorite go-to recipes for everyday basics. If you're familiar with crunchy granola Earth momma blogs, many of these will probably be familiar or variations on a theme.

Feel free to share your own recipes in comments!

Number 1. (green cap mini container in front)

TOOTHPASTE

The price of toothpaste is STUPID right now. I was in Walgreens a few months ago and the cheapest bottle of toothpaste, with fluoride, of course, was $7. I won't buy Dollar Tree toothpaste because there is a good chance it is made in China, and that means it's anyone's guess what kind of toxic waste is in there. That leaves making my own toothpaste. Toothpaste is number one on this list for a reason -- it's much better stuff if you make it, plus you can customize it however you like. Stronger, weaker, more flavor, less flavor, etc.

INGREDIENTS

1 part arrowroot powder... I use about 1 tablespoon
1 part olive oil or other neutral oil... I use however much is needed to moisten
Pinch of baking soda
Stevia powder to taste
A few drops of essential oil or extract of cinnamon, mint, orange, vanilla, anise, or whatever you like for flavor

DIRECTIONS

I start out by putting some arrowroot powder in a bowl and mixing it up with baking soda and my preferred amount of stevia. I find the stevia is nice in this toothpaste because it is somewhat cooling. Then I add small amounts of olive oil and mix in very well until I get the thickness I like. I tend to like a soupier toothpaste, but no matter how this toothpaste starts out, it tends to thicken over time as it is stored. For whatever reason, it lasts a very long time on the shelf -- I often only make one batch every few months. Store in a covered bowl.

DEODORANT (black lidded jar, bottom right)

I like the smell of store-bought antiperspirant but the aluminum and other mystery crap in there makes me worry. This deodorant tends to do just as good as a job, plus since it isn't a far cry from the toothpaste recipe, it's nontoxic and can be put on any stinky part of the body without concern.

INGREDIENTS

1 tablespoon arrowroot powder
¼-½ teaspoon baking soda
2-3 teaspoons melted coconut oil
Up to 10 drops essential oils of choice... I use lavender essential oil

DIRECTIONS

Mix arrowroot and baking soda well in a small bowl. Melt coconut oil and slowly add it, mixing as you go, until you arrive at a smooth paste. Mix in essential oil and transfer to a small lidded pot or empty lip balm jar.

HAIRSPRAY (metal spray bottle on right)

Ugh summer frizzies AMIRITE??? This hairspray has been a lifesaver for me, especially when I wear my hair up in a ponytail or bun. No more halo of frizz and flyaways for me, plus essential oil of eucalyptus smells great!

INGREDIENTS

1 part water
1 part white sugar
Essential oil of lavender, eucalyptus, neroli, etc.
Optional: dash of Florida water, rubbing alcohol, or vodka

DIRECTIONS

Dissolve sugar in water on the stovetop or in a microwave safe bowl for only as long as it takes for sugar granules to disappear. Yes, this is a recipe for simple syrup -- so go ahead and save some for mixed drinks later I suppose... Pour the sugar water into a spray bottle and add essential oils if desired so it smells pretty. Since I store mine in the fridge, I don't add Florida water or alcohol. However, if you want to store this at room temperature, I would add a bit of alcohol of some sort to prevent it from going icky.

ALL PURPOSE CLEANER/HAIR DETANGLER (spray bottle of glass cleaner)

You can clean your toilet with it or condition your hair... Seriously. Not that I would suggest doing both at the same time -- that could get weird. To use it as a hair detangler, spray it onto wet hair after washing for best results.

INGREDIENTS

1 part water
1 part white vinegar
Dash of Florida water, rubbing alcohol, or vodka as a preservative
A few spritzes of perfume or cologne

DIRECTIONS

Combine all ingredients in a spray bottle and shake well.

Everyday abundance in the modern era...Aren't we the fortunate ones?

Almost everyone I have ever known has had a problem with food, including myself at times. Whether it is eating too much, eating too little, or eating food that is not healthy, it is difficult to strike a balance despite modern abundance.

In this age of plenty, often the most difficult feat to accomplish is the habit of gratitude. If nothing else, it is gratitude that is most likely to change your eating habits for the better.

As I have mentioned a few times, once a random entity gifted me with the information that gratitude and generosity sublimate to the power of seven. Whatever you are truly generous with or grateful for will create a multiplication effect of energy across the planes, and everything it touches will receive some benefit. The inverse law is also true: that which we are ungrateful for or stingy with degrades by the power of seven across the planes. I believe this is why so many are trapped in the cycle of obesity and its sister diseases, orthorexia and anorexia: for many, neurosis replaced gratitude and the results were written plainly on the physical level.

I believe if you want to change your body for the better, your first and primary order of business is to be grateful for the mortal vehicle that carries your soul. It is also crucial to be grateful for the fuel you put in your body. Before every meal and potentially before every snack, give heartfelt thanks and blessings to all the forces who brought you the food. (This can be done silently or aloud.) As forces go, I'm not just talking about God, the gods, or vague notions of the universe. I believe it is really important to acknowledge the animals, bugs, birds, and ecosystems (including the animals and ecosystems I accidentally hurt or kill as a vegan), plants, the sun, the dirt, water, wind, farmers, pickers, packagers, drivers, grocery store workers, and cooks. So yes, since I cook a great percentage of my own meals, I am technically thankful to myself and compulsively bless myself every time I eat. However you bless is up to you. I use a prayer I made up that goes like this:

North, East, South, West, may all who brought this food be blessed.

Never Say Diet

Apollo said "All things in moderation". I cannot possibly stress how important the lost art of moderation is when it comes to food. Nobody should ever starve themselves on purpose, a.k.a. diet. Diets are truly heinous wastes of time. Calorie and carb counting is insulting to your soul: poring over the tabloid intrigues of Hollywood stars, weaving coasters out of your own pubes, or twiddling your thumbs until you get arthritis would be far safer and more constructive pastimes.

Often we have to eliminate a food in order to figure out if we are sensitive to it. For me, that's garlic. I love fresh garlic and would eat it 24/7 if it did not tear me apart from the inside out. My suggestion is to replace doubly what you've taken out of your diet. If you eliminate garlic, try two other seasonings over the next few weeks. If you eliminate wheat, try two new types of grain. If you eliminate alcohol, add some fruit smoothies and teas. If you eliminate dairy, try a new plant milk and make sure to eat something a little salty and fatty such as sunflower seeds to make up for the loss of cheese. Always try to make up for the absence of whatever you quit eating.

Ideally, food should be the only medicine in our cabinets. Food is medicine and medicine is food. Homemade soup has far more power to heal than most pharmaceutical concoctions. There are quite a few health nuts who know food is medicine and take it to an extreme that is just as toxic and unhealthy as junk food junkie-ism. When you obsess about food and attempt to perfect it and control it down to the last detail, you rob it of its potential for healing. Food obsessives are orthorexics who discard moderation in favor of the illusion of infinite control. On the other end of the spectrum of imbalance are the stuffers. Stuffers don't know when to stop eating, and when they do have some faint clue of when to stop eating, they ignore it. The point of eating, regardless of your level of under- or overweight, is to eat what your body needs to continue carrying your soul around. If you stop eating long before eating what your body requires or become so picky that you reject foods that you deem not good enough for the likes of you, you are choosing the illusion of control over gratitude. If you glut and gorge because it's oh so good until your body is poisoned and incapacitated, you are choosing to degrade the abundance put before you instead of sublimating it and putting its energy towards good works. Your mouth is not a garbage can. The compost pile will happily eat what you cannot; there is no need to abuse food like cocaine at a beach house bender in 1986. Food is not an escape. It is a necessity.

That Time Logic Made Sense

Whether you need to gain or lose, the material plane requires material logic. If you need to lose weight, you need to eat better quality foods and less of them. What this means is that you need to not fill your plate as much: maybe go for ¾ portions of what you ate in the past. Since American restaurant portions are usually too large for me and because I hate wasting good food, I usually bring my own covered containers and quietly scoop leftovers into the container if there are any. For the reticent, underweight eater, that means eating 125% of what you usually eat and not going to the bathroom to vomit or obsessing over feeling overly full. Grow up, move on, and think about something else once eating has been accomplished. It's not the end of the world to feel over-full or like you ate the wrong thing.

We live in an era of etheric starvation. I have talked about this before and won't go into detail about it here. The main visible side effect of etheric starvation is addiction, and this may serve to explain why so many are addicted to either eating too much or starving themselves. I could grow all my own food, eat greens at nearly every meal, and get more than enough sunlight and still starve on the etheric because etheric starvation is the scourge of our era. For this reason, there are some eating habits you might consider in order to ameliorate etheric starvation besides the usual prescription of basking in the sun, exchanging energy with trees, and generally strolling about in wild and semi wild spaces.

1. Supplementation. In an era of environmental and etheric depletion, Vitamins C and A are a must, along with the entire B spectrum and Zinc. I am at the point where I take a quality multivitamin every day rather than the fistful of pills I used to take. If you are the type who is always fighting off low-grade colds and flus, Zinc is your number one ally, and you should probably consider additional Quercetin and Bromelain to help you absorb it.

2. Flaxseeds and chia. These help digestion. Digestion comprises 70-80 percent of the immune system. Flax and chia have fatty acids you need for proper digestion and elimination.

3. Green tea, preferably matcha, at least 1x a day. Though I love matcha lattes and would guzzle them almost every hour of the day if I could, I am not talking about them here. Matcha is a green tea powder that consists of the dried and ground up leaves of the green Camellia sinensis bush. I believe all forms of tea are magically and etherically potent. I have my hypotheses that they are blessed by both Athena, goddess of wisdom, and Aphrodite, goddess of community and love.

4. Avoiding soda, bottled drinks, non-fresh squeezed juice, and energy drinks. Soda and its co-horts are fine as a once in a while treat, but much like cake, it should be saved for special occasions. Replacing soda with water is good but replacing it with unsweetened herbal tea is better. By drinking unsweetened herbal tea, you get the medicinal and adaptogenic benefits of the herb as well as the hydrating power of water in every sip. Teas/infusions have no calories. They are all superfood (superdrink?) with zero drawbacks.

5. Hot peppers. Hot peppers are superfoods. If you can stand the heat, they are almost universally healthy except in rare cases that act like allergies.

6. Mostly avoiding the microwave. Microwaving strips food of its vital etheric layer and make food taste a bit funny if you are sensitive.

7. Not counting calories or carbs and not dismissing food because it is "unhealthy". All unblessed and under-appreciated food is unhealthy in its own way and all blessed and appreciated food sublimates and becomes better than its parts. Bless your food and you'll understand why soon enough: it will taste better and though it cannot be proven by science (yet) it will be healthy.

Are you in for the Clean Toilet Challenge?

The Clean Toilet challenge is a magical experiment to see if keeping the toilet clean brings money luck and other forms of good fortune to the home or business where the toilet is located. Many cultures believe that an immaculate toilet improves your financial bottom line, and I have explained this belief in a blog post that is linked in comments.

If you’d like to be part of the Clean Toilet Challenge, starting sometime this week of June 22, begin keeping your toilet very clean and plan on cleaning it everyday until December 22. At the beginning of your clean toilet journey, make a mental snapshot of where you are financially, what the general state of your household is, and how lucky you feel. On December 22, take the same sort of mental snapshot. Since I keep a journal, I’m making a note of my bank account numbers today, though I have been keeping my toilet clean all month already, and I can say my finances have already improved considerably and I have been able to afford some luxuries I usually do without, such as eating at restaurants 4x a week when it’s usually more like 4x a month.

Every day after you use or clean your toilet, you can optionally say this little rhyme: "Toilet, toilet handling waste, thank you for your saving grace." I recommend cleaning the toilet with a spray bottle with half vinegar and half water for a safe, all natural, non-toxic clean.

At the end of the Clean Toilet Challenge, I’d like to compare notes with everyone here on Dreamwidth and at my TikTok account @whitewitchoftheprairie. Happy Solstice and see you at the other end of the Challenge.

The scene: a civilized neighborhood Christmas party in an upper-middle class home in the Midwestern US. The year: 1987. I distinctly remember one of the older neighborhood kids tell me his family was moving. Since his family's home was a perfectly adequate, roomy 4 bedroom, I asked why his family was moving away. His answer was because they "needed" a bigger home. Every 5-10 years they moved into a larger home after having enlarged whatever home they occupied. Their goal was ever-increasing real estate profits from ever-larger homes in a game that (for some people) does not end until they die and ostensibly pass the game pieces and board down to their children and grandchildren.

It Takes a Narrative

I often wonder how many memes it will take to grok the materialism of Millennials, the generation that claims to have rejected Boomer capitalism. Millennials often believe they are opting out of capitalism when the harsher truth is they've been cast out of elite circles and now lurk on the outsides, looking in. There is no opting out of capitalism -- though there are plenty of self-styled wokesters who preach about it while flipping their Thai hair weaves, eating salads of mostly store-bought ingredients off of Anthropologie plates, and broadcasting on TikTok. Nevertheless, the Millennial "I am a scrappy communist because I say I am" is a better narrative than the Office of Progress narrative, which is the idea that all functioning adults should be happy rotating from home cubicle to office cubicle, watching screens that tell them how to live at every opportunity while hopped up on injectable chemical concoctions.

Had my sex drive never asserted itself, I would have liked to have kept the trajectory I designed for myself at age 9: to work in an office, come home to a book-filled condominium on the second floor of a building in the town where I grew up, and to live my childless life between books, cats, and occasional solitary dinners outside my home with friends or family. I knew the exact place where I wanted to live. It was small consolation to realize I could not have afforded that condominium as a single spinster even if I had a much more lucrative job: the price of real estate was already soaring when I was in my teens and by the time I was in my late 20s, nobody with an income south of 60K could afford to live anywhere near my hometown in any sort of single family residence. By the time I was 25, it became perfectly apparent that if I wanted a condominium in such a nice place, I would have to marry a man in order for him to buy it for me, and that would have defeated the point as the whole fantasy was a lonely and solo one.

I flirted for a while with corporate jobs straight out of college. The pay I received was barely more than the babysitting gigs I had at age 14; it was laughable and pathetic. I wasn't willing to work my way up that degrading chain by trading all of my youthful energy for something that felt like a living hell. Plus the number of people able to benefit from the living hell was shrinking in the 1990s and is a great deal more diminutive now.

I Want You to Want Me

We are all supposed to want the elite Office of Progress lifestyle. You know the one: it involves driving the latest electric car, living in ever-larger homes, posting on social media, and drinking at least one Starbucks beverage a day. We are not supposed to think about how stupid it is to drive a car that is probably using electricity that originates from coal. Despite lip service given to greenwashing holidays like Earth Day, we are not supposed to consider the wastefulness of living in a big, mostly empty McMansion. As for social media, anyone who turns it off because it is boring or (GASP) does not have any presence at all on Insta, FB, Twitter, YT, etc. is considered a freak or an unfortunate. Those who reject Starbucks out of hand are just weird -- unwillingness to shell out six or more dollars for a mediocre calorie bomb of a drink is trés 1978, and not in a good way.

School

The point of public schooling in the 21st century is to neuter boys, often literally via the trans push, and condition the girls to work outside the home in the good old Office of Progress. My childhood was unhappy for one main reason: I did not sleep properly. Why could I not sleep properly despite having stable parents with no shortage of money? I was busy being conditioned to sit quietly in a desk dictating and absorbing elaborate orders. When I did not get along with other order-followers (who I was always being pitted against in academic and popularity contests) I was punished by ostracism. To think I could have been home actually learning for all those wasted years! 95% of my adult academic knowledge came from the 5% of free time when I could think unhindered on adequate sleep, far away from school. For instance, I learned most of what I know about plants from my mom and the books I used to identify common weeds from ages 13-19 during summers in Michigan. Cooking? That was learned from my mom and library books; the single Home Ec class I took in junior high was a farce. As far as English, the best way of getting me not to read a book is to put a deadline on it and mar it with a quiz or a test. Not that I was in any mood to learn while in school: I was so starved on every plane except the physical one, I wanted to kill myself. When etheric poverty is in full sway in the form of an ugly box one must sit in with other teenagers while being lectured by older inmates, there is nothing to improve the astral shield and hence nothing standing between the seedy lower astral and the developing mental sheath.

A Woman's Place is in the Home

If today's "liberated" woman was truly happy with working outside the home as a regular thing, we would not have seen so much outright sabotage designed to prolong the Panicdemic and to continue Zoom work-from-home schemes that are still going on to this day. The reason women want to stay home, including this woman, is because it is the magical formula of the woman to secure the homestead. Men were designed to hunt, to go to war, and to defend. Women were designed to make the home into a healing place where babies can grow into healthy adults and to give men a place worth defending. Without the healing influence of the home, we all feel more raw, vulnerable, exposed, and beaten by forces that are always getting at us. School is vile because it trains women to force themselves into the role of Atlas: winning bread outside the home and then having the double and triple roles of having the babies it is fed to and making it into sandwiches so everyone can have lunch. Anyone who thinks a woman can do all of these things and do them well is either smoking the strong stuff or has access to Supermom.

The consequences we all live down are all around us. Tired women who have nothing left after having to work all day end up with feral kids being raised by social media, or their husbands leave them because marriage is hard and it's twice as hard when there is nobody competent at home who can enchant the home into a protective symphony of astral, etheric, and physical shapes. Ugly environments of convenience attempt to replace craftsmanship and care, and though I am thankful for their gifts, I am also resentful that everything has to be so ugly and ignorant of etheric ebb and flow. I myself am an example of classic bad faith, caught between worlds while laboring outside the home and always schepping to make ends meet. I'm a long, long way from Buddha, renouncing my niceties and creature comforts to contemplate trees.

In Japan and other Asian cultures, keeping the toilet clean is thought to bring good luck, specifically in the form of earned wealth and prosperity. There is even a toilet deity known as Ususama-myoo who presides over toilet safety. Ususama-myoo is far from alone in presiding over the privy: Ancient Romans had coins and a shrine to Venus Cloacina, who also blessed sexual unions.

For whatever reason, I always appointed myself as official toilet-cleaner of our house when I was a girl and though I wasn't forced, I cleaned all the bathrooms once a week or more despite not liking the job. Nowadays, I understand the value of that sort of etheric labor, and I have learned to tolerate the work a great deal more and detach myself from the gross-out factor. Having become an amateur gardener has helped because gardening steels you against freakouts over gross things -- plunging one's hand into mud and compost has that effect.

A surprising list of fabulously successful Japanese entrepreneurs and entertainers have kept their toilets clean despite being able to afford maidservice. Soichiro Honda, founder of Honda, believed in cleaning his own toilet until the bitter end. He started his company out of a wooden shack. When his shack days were long in the past, Honda commented that he could tell a good company by the state of their toilets, and that dirty toilets were a likely indicator of bad management. Director Takeshi Kitano is rumored to have sworn by cleaning his own toilet, and J-pop singer Kana Uemura had a hit song about appeasing the toilet goddess to honor her grandmother.

Ususama-myoo... yeah, he's not what I expected either!

The Clean Toilet Challenge

I am hosting an informal experiment: the Clean Toilet Challenge. I am looking for people to join me in keeping at least one toilet in their house sparkling clean from the Summer Solstice of June 2023 until the Winter Solstice of 2023. This means that said toilet will require daily cleanings, preferably with mild, all natural cleansers: I suggest 2 parts water to 1 part white vinegar in a spray bottle. in my case, I add a dash of Florida water and a few spritzes of my favorite Eau de Toilette (see what I did there?) but use what you see fit. Please make a note of the state of your bank account, debts, and general state of neediness on June 21st. There is no need to get specific or divulge the information -- all I am looking for is the general vibe of your personal finances. When December 21 arrives, make a comparative mental snapshot of your fiscal state. Is it any better? The same? Worse? I figure the only thing we've all got to lose is a sketchy and neglected toilet, so it's a win-win no matter what happens.

Lately I have been keeping my toilet very clean, both out of the desire to live the principles of the book I am writing, Sacred Homemaking, and out of sheer curiosity. Does keeping one's toilet clean actually result in business luck and earned wealth success? I haven't hit the big time since a couple of weeks ago, but I have seen a decent uptick in music lesson clients and donations for my creative works.

One of the reasons I was a lousy Christian is I am far too eclectic to worship only one god. The colorful pageantry of polytheistic religions can seem extremely foreign and a little scary to a born-and-bred Protestant Midwesterner... not this Midwesterner. From nearly day one, it looked like the other religions were having a great deal more fun than Protestants. One of the reasons I made a lousy atheist is that even Protestant Christians appeared to have much more fun than atheists. If I had a twenty for every bitter, lonely, childless, vegan, apocalypse-immanentizing atheist I ran into in my first decade of being vegan, I could easily buy a building to house my music studio again... in cold, hard cash.

Technically I am a Druid of about six or seven years ever since starting a daily habit of discursive meditation, the Sphere of Protection, and Ogham divination. I started these practices under the aegis of the Ancient Order of Druids in America but quickly siphoned my energy into my own little corner as usual and did my thing. Nobody was more surprised than I was when the Greek pantheon entered my life via the Orphic Hymns. I still tend to think I did not entirely have a hand in it. Considerable meditation leads me to believe that my past experiences as a musician, including possible experiences in past lives, have led to this.

To make a long story short, I have come to believe it is time for a revival of the Greek gods and Greco-Roman ideals of balance, discourse, respect for nature, and beauty, including the prioritization of beauty in our built environments. We have gone too long as a civilization into extremes and the fetishization of extremes. We have allowed the collective conversation to fall into utter disrepair, and the ugly result is stark division among class lines, normalized violence, and broken families and friendships. Our disrespect for nature has rendered the average person an atheist drudge no matter how religious they claim to be -- this is why we have Catholic priests who have no idea how to banish a demon and Hindu devotees of Dhanvantari getting themselves shot up multiple times with government subsidized MRNA-hijackers at Walgreens.

Hating on all of these problems and imbalances is unproductive at best and toxic at worst, so the remedy is not to try to stop the violence but to throw energy into nonviolent pursuits. Enter Aphrodite. The benefit of multi-god worship is the specific tailoring the lowly human can use the relationship with the god to remedy his or her own particular problems. Astrology can easily pinpoint the specific troubles of any one human incarnation with laser accuracy and the human can take it from there, throwing energy into the god or goddess best suited to overcoming those issues. The gods of the Greek pantheon are reaching out to us in this demonic age of collective astral trashiness to lift us out and heal us, one by one. Just as collapse happens one person at a time, redemption happens one person at a time. Through the gods we can broaden our perspectives to include better things than the pursuit of material impulse-gratification and false transcendence. We can learn how not to be so small and petty.

Of all the gods and goddesses, including many deities outside the Greco-Roman tradition, Aphrodite is by far the easiest to work with and the hardest to piss off. This is not to say that she has no wrath: it is my opinion that Christianity and other monotheistic sects are doomed to obscure, fringe religion status in a few hundred years because of what their followers did to piss off Aphrodite over the last couple of millennia. The virgin/whore complex and the uglification of the built environment were two biggies that ensured Aphrodite's wrath, and though she is very forgiving, there is a rubicon that was crossed long ago that I believe wrote the doom of monotheistic dominance into the package. Aphrodite plays the long game. Of course I could be wrong, but I don't think Christianity, Islam, or Judaism will be the big bullies on the playground when the twilight of industrial civilization fades permanently to black.

With that in mind, I get to the point of this article, which is how I believe we humans can at least attempt to please Aphrodite.

Cooking and Cleaning

These two very mundane tasks may not seem to suit the Goddess of All Beauty, but when you scratch the surface, the alchemy of cooking and cleaning is the creation of harmony, beauty, and health within the home. All of the above are sacred to Aphrodite. Learning to cook a healthy, well-balanced meal while keeping it affordable, simple, and seasonal is no small task and I think Aphrodite recognizes the effort. The good cook has a knack for using what is on hand and improvises hearty meals and delicious snacks at a moment's notice. The energy brought to the kitchen and put into the food heals all who are lucky enough to eat it. True health begins with food and the appreciation of the etheric labor necessary to provide nourishment.

Cleaning is a form of gratitude. A spoiled child leaves his toys strewn on the floor or sloppily crams them into an overflowing closet or under the bed, not caring about them once their newness has worn off. When we leave our piles of stuff lying all over the desk and let the bathtub walls become caked in scum, we are nothing more than overgrown, spoiled children who not appreciate their wealth of toys. Everything is sentient, including the plants I eat as a vegan, the car I drive, the cats in the yard and the squirrels they chase, and the computer, keyboard, and mouse I am writing this article on. If everything is sentient, it can all be thanked and appreciated. There is no better way of thanking a door for keeping you safe than oiling its squeaky hinges and cleaning off the scuff marks and dirt from filthy human hands. Aphrodite is the queen of the sentient home. When you clean the door and put your shoes away on a special shelf, you engage in a form of conversation with Aphrodite: "I thank you, Aphrodite, for all of these wonderful gifts." Whether you say it aloud or simply put it into practice by thinking it while you clean your living space, the result is the same.

Pets

Aphrodite is the queen of domesticated animals, especially cats. I believe Aphrodite and Bastet may be the same deity or potentially have some overlap. To care for animals in your home is another recognition of non-human sentience. Anyone who has properly cared for domesticated animals knows that even the allegedly low-maintenance ones take a huge amount of energy, time, money, and love to thrive. Every time you train your dog to do a new trick or buy a new, improved sun lamp for your lizard's habitat, it can become an expression of adoration for Aphrodite.

Beauty

Modern civilization and the legacy of monotheism has earned Aphrodite's ire because of its embrace of the hideous and the ugly. From the ugliness of 20th century "art" to sprawling one story malls and office parks to the horrific results of too much plastic surgery, tattoos, body mods, and piercings, our culture has a lot to answer for. Once again, the sheer ingratitude of not appreciating what one has is responsible for the new strip mall (the old one could have been rehabbed, or never built in the first place) and the body mods (the perfectly healthy, attractive person did not appreciate intact, functioning ear and nose cartilage). Putting honest effort into improving the appearance of things in ways that don't involve massive overhauls are the domain of Aphrodite, and she is often kindly willing to help out if your self-improvement efforts come from a place of humility. The person who takes a wrecking ball to an already palatial kitchen in order to replace a builder's new $625 stove and oven range with a $5000 designer oven range is not showing gratitude for the gifts of Aphrodite. I tend to think people who do that create terrible karma for themselves, but again, I could be wrong. To my mind, it is far more appreciative to keep remodeling costs to the minimum necessary, always using what you have and only buying what you need, not what you need to show off to snobby neighbors and people on Instagram. Making the most of what you can by leaning into the good things already present in the space makes far more sense. A coat of paint or stick on tiles can work wonders, and by not going gonzo, you show that you appreciate Aphrodite by not trying to start over by clearing out all she has provided for you. When you beautify a space by cleaning it up and giving it some modest decoration, it shows you care. You aren't blind to the details of what Aphrodite has generously provided for you. You invoke her through your use of color, your creative re-use of what you have, and your eye for design.

The same conservative principle holds when it comes to improving your appearance. There are many ways to lose weight, and one of them involves reducing the stomach to a tiny pouch and getting pounds of cellulite sucked out and turned into biowaste using a cannula. The other one is eating fewer calories and exercising. I believe Aphrodite wants us to be healthy, and surgically quartering and re-routing the stomach is not a road to health. The dysmorphia of our age, once again, is the legacy of monotheism and its hatred of the flesh. When the flesh is a source of temptation that only exists to damn the soul to eternal hellfire, it follows that some will react by mortifying their flesh as they still live. This is the secret reasoning of obesity and anorexia both: they are extreme sides of the same coin of mortification. Aphrodite wants you to find a balancing force in your flesh and even take pleasure in it on occasion.

Courtesy

We live in a rough age. Since I stopped swearing a couple of years ago, I cannot help but notice that everybody swears except me. Everybody in my family swears, including the members of the tribe who are technically elderly. My husband often swears. My teenage students swear. If I listen too carefully or engage them in conversation, the store workers swear. Every time my husband swears, I silently give thanks for three things. I counter his curse with three blessings. This often becomes exhausting, but it is far less tiring than swearing myself. By carefully limiting my language, I am the change I want to see in the world. I want a more genteel world where traditions are maintained and not a source of anxiety and hysteria. I want to go back to a time when you didn't see certain things in polite society. It is easy to be rude. It is much harder to be deferent, kind, and polite. When grandma starts talking a blue streak about an old, half-remembered scene, we can either correct her (rude) or let her go on at length so she can get the benefit of whatever fractured memory she has left. When I am cut off by another driver on the road, I can either honk at them and chase them down into a parking lot somewhere in order to make them pay (rude) or I can mentally walk away from it and curb my anger, which after all emanated from the fear of being hurt. Every time I do a considerate act, such as cleaning up a household mess or doing something gracious, it is an opportunity to devote myself to Aphrodite.

Literally Devoting Yourself to Aphrodite

Sometimes the best way of working with a god or goddess is to do magic in order to get their attention. Aphrodite seems to like candles and incense, so if you want to work with her, grab a candle, preferably green, and burn it during the hour of Venus on a Friday while focusing your thoughts on Aphrodite. You could recite the Orphic Hymn to Aphrodite, or if you want to one-up your approach, you could listen to the Orphic Hymn to Aphrodite. If you want to up your approach even further, you could go full throttle and learn to play and/or sing the Orphic Hymn to Aphrodite yourself. Interestingly, the Orphic Hymn to Aphrodite is the most popular arrangement among all of the Orphic Hymns I have arranged so far. At the time of this writing, it has 39,000 views on YouTube.

Music in general is sacred to Aphrodite, and as a musician, I can guarantee that you need to make practicing a daily habit if you want to be any good at music. Music, as I will assert in my upcoming book Sacred Homemaking, is one of the easiest and best ways for a human to pray.

Plants

Aphrodite seems to love green, especially in the form of plants. Growing a garden, helping in someone else's garden, and caring for indoor plants are all ways you can beautify a space and worship Aphrodite at the same time. Being in gardens and in wild and semi-wild spaces opens the door for Aphrodite to enter your life. The Japanese have a practice of shirin-yoku or forest-bathing that uses the awareness of the plant ecosystem to cleanse the aura. Shirin-yoku is not rocket science: just go to the garden, the forest preserve, or the wild space and take a deep breath while opening yourself to the other consciousness around you.

Speaking of Bathing...

People often misconceive Aphrodite as being entirely about sex and sexuality, specifically feminine sexuality. She certainly has sexual aspects, but you don't have to be sexual whenever you are thinking about her. Dedicating your bath to Aphrodite could involve some self-pleasure, but it does not require it. All that is required is an appreciation of how wonderful it is to have running water inside the home or a clean lake or pool in which to take a dip.

All Etheric Labor is Sacred to Aphrodite

Etheric labor, often called emotional labor, is the mundane work that makes life bearable. Skeptics like to dismiss the flurry of planning, cooking, cleaning, and organizing that is mainly handled by women as unimportant, but a world that has a problem with etheric labor also has a problem with etheric starvation, and etheric starvation happens to be the most common malady of our times. For this reason, the simple act of folding clothes and linens is one of those basic etheric labors that puts you in the good graces of Aphrodite. Beautifying anything that would otherwise be disheveled, plain, and thrown in a corner shows your love for both the object and Aphrodite herself.

Steve Cutts, Evolution

At nearly fifty years old, my life has been inundated with television since I began this incarnation. My grandmother once told me that she got a TV early on (1950s era) and it attracted a fair-weather friend who came over only to watch soap operas. She was one of the few people I remember who budgeted the amount of time the television was on. My best friend's house was far different: they had cable TV in the early 80s. Cable back then did not have commercials. If regular TV was cocaine, cable was crack. We watched countless R-rated movies without any form of adult supervision. No wonder Generation X is so fond of its foul language and Facebook drama: our childhoods were chock full of both in the form of cable TV. As a teenager, I began to be bored by most TV despite my entire family remaining addicted to it. Despite my overall dissatisfaction and boredom with TV, my brother and I still fought to watch it when we went to our family vacation cottage as children, as if there wasn't an entire world waiting outside for us to break out of our trance and join it.

Approximately fifteen years ago, my salary class aspirations got flushed down the toilet when the company my husband worked for as a high level executive crumbled due to managerial infighting and incompetence. My budget tightened like a noose as I scrambled to cut costs. I played a constant game of Whack the Pop-Up Expense to fend off the forces that sought to consume the contents of my tiny, dwindling bank account. One day the incredible noise of Duck Dynasty, a reality TV show about a group of loud, redneck hunters emanated from the next room. I strongly suggested to my husband that I wanted to get rid of our TV and its accompanying package of channels; he reluctantly agreed we could do without it. We have never gone back, though this is mainly due to my status as the breadwinner of the house. My husband likes TV a great deal more than I do and would most likely pay the hefty fees per month for a package of deluxe channels if he had the money to do it.

The Astral and Etheric Poison Effects of TV

Consider a stereotype about the Boomer generation: the Boomer sits transfixed in front of the television most of his or her waking hours, slowly losing the ability to do anything except sit and watch. The characters on TV become more real to him than his family. There is more than a few grains of truth to the stereotype.

In Hubert Selby Jr.'s novel Requiem for a Dream, an elderly woman named Sarah Goldfarb retreats into television and diet pill addiction as her adult son and his friends retreat into their own parallel heroin addictions. The genius of Requiem for a Dream is its brutal portrayal of Sarah's addiction, which is just as destructive and deadly as a descent into illegal drugs. TV is designed to be addictive and the majority of American Boomers fell for it.

On the astral plane, TV creates a mess of emotional manipulation mixed with addictive dependency. The watcher’s best instincts of charity, love, friendliness, and bravery are turned against him as he becomes an inert captive, watching other people living a facsimile of the karmic lessons he should be out there having in real life. Breaks in the monotony of programming are more potent and obvious brainwashing: commercials. Again, we have an astral mess of being urged to eat “healthfully” yet being bombarded with images of processed convenience food. Is it any surprise the TV-addicted Boomer has a refrigerator that resembles a small morgue with a smell to match? Pre-packaged convenience foods seldom live up to their advertising.

TV manipulates via mixed messages. The lovely, slim actors and actresses indulge in every vice yet remain beautiful and enviable. One moment, there is an ad or a product placement for convenience food. Thirty seconds later, there are two ads for the latest pharmaceutical drug to treat a disease caused by a sedentary lifestyle that involves eating lots of convenience food.

Good Cop, Bad Cop

Despite the proliferation of emotional puppeteering designed to engage do-goodnik instincts among sedentary watchers, TV is a bad influence. The worst kind of behavior is treated with reverence and fascination on TV regardless of the fictional or nonfictional nature of the program. Crime shows about cops who run around chasing murderers and rapists are thinly disguised profiteering off of the excitement created by evildoers. Without evildoers, the chickenhawk planted firmly on the couch would have nobody to look down upon. Without the alcoholic celebrity stumbling from hook up to hook up on the reality show, the wannabe would have no darkness to use in order to compare and contrast her beige, corporation-enslaved life.

In Lionel Shriver's novel We Need to Talk About Kevin, a teenaged boy named Kevin goes on a massacre and slaughters other kids and teachers in his school. When Kevin returns home, he murders everyone in his family except for his mother, forcing her to live down the shame of having a mass murderer for a son. After Kevin goes to prison, he is interviewed by a media reporter. Kevin remarks:

"All of you people watching out there, you're listening to what I say because I have something you don't: I got plot. Bought and paid for. That's what all you people want, and why you're sucking off me. You want my plot. I know how you feel, too, since hey, I used to feel the same way. TV and video games and movies and computer screens... On April 8th, 1999, I jumped into the screen, I switched to watchee. Ever since, I've known what my life is about. I give good story. It may have been kinda gory, but admit it, you all loved it. You ate it up. Nuts, I ought to be on some government payroll. Without people like me, the whole country would jump off a bridge, 'cause the only thing on TV is some housewife on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? winning $64,000 for remembering the name of the president's dog."

The Feng Shui of the Black Box

The television is etheric poison. Even when off, the TV is an ugly black box. The only way it is ever going to blend into its surroundings is when it is either in a store full of other TVs or if it is hidden by the doors of an armoire as was fashionable in the 90s. When it is on, it perpetuates a colorful and bombastic assault that destroys entire rooms with its etheric miasma. If the average person could see the etheric plane, the television would look like a chemical spill vomiting its rainbow tinted poison in a toxic pool around itself. The only true way of cleaning up the noxious spill of the TV is by getting rid of the device entirely.

Video Games

Games or what used to be called video games are hideous astral plane polluters, replacing the normal functions of human imagination with caricatured worlds of television-like brainwashing. If you want to take a perfectly normal young man and turn him into a miserable, pale, flabby drudge who accomplishes no original works and never realizes his own unique potential, by all means introduce him to video game addiction.

Video games are expensive. The equipment and sheer computing power needed to use them cannot and will not exist in a world where server farms are no longer subsidized and where internet is expensive to the average person. As in the case of the TV addict, we have an inert captive living vicariously through a fake, prefab set of characters. Life lessons aren’t lived and learned; they are procrastinated and set aside for a “later” that will hopefully never arrive. Once again, the television dominates the living space like a black hole, and instead of providing cooked food, heat, and warmth like the fireplaces of old, it is a cold electronic eye that watches and sucks the vitality of humans even while it is asleep.

One of the reasons I chose not to have children in this incarnation was the influence of TV and games. I was addicted to PacMan by the age of 10 and by TV and movies at the age of 18. I was addicted despite knowing better and feeling in my gut that it was wrong to fritter away the hours in front of the barking, bleeping screen. If I could not resist the pull of the electronic hypnotist, how on Earth would I keep my child from becoming an addict? My hat is off to any parent nowadays who is able to sanely budget their child’s TV and game time. I don’t think I could have pulled it off and that is why I decided not to do it.

The Rise of Influencers

The influence of TV has been supplanted by the rise of influencers, but this is not to say that influencer culture is any better than TV addiction. Influencing as a career offers far more than TV because unlike the world of Hollywood, there are no gatekeepers. Though the Kardashian/Jenners and their ilk may be plagued with rumors about how they maintain their top dog status, top influencers do not need to be part of the alleged Satanic, supposedly fecalphiliac/infanticidal elite. All that is needed to get in to influencing is a mobile phone with a decent camera. Lovely young girls can stay far away from the neo-Harvey Weinsteins of the world and still make all the money. Like Kevin of We Need to Talk About Kevin, the influencer is not the watcher, she is the watchee.

The influencer is perfectly happy to leave the habits of her Boomer grandparents behind in order to embrace a new and equally fake set of images. Unlike the Boomer's worship of prettied-up celebrities, her altar is the digital mirror. Her own prettied-up, photo-edited, "improved" face and body becomes the standard by which all must be measured. The cadre of ghosts that haunt the aging Hollywood celeb become much more personal, and therein lies the rub. Influencing takes a great deal of energy across the planes: like gaming, it only exists because of subsidized internet grids. Like a TV watching habit, it is a time suck extraordinaire to create the content and to whip the avatar into apparent good shape. Last but not least, there is the pouring of one's entire spirit into the avatar and the investment in its fake karma and destiny. But that's a topic for future conversation.

TV Isn't All Bad!

I am a visual learner and I owe much of my current knowledge directly to the television. Being a visual learner means that it often takes me three times as long to learn via written instruction as it does from watching a few boring, jerky images on a screen. I have learned countless skills from television: I remember Sesame Street helping me count, Schoolhouse Rock helping me understand the functions of government, heaven knows how many origami and cooking videos, and last night's tech guy video teaching me how to use Open Broadcasting Software (OBS). As I mentioned, I don't have TV, but I do have a computer screen that functions in much the same way.

I use TV to learn but I also use it to relax. I am no stranger to movies and various series. I often watch them while I exercise on my stationary bike. Right now, I am watching a sweet series from Japan called The Maikanai: Cooking for the Maiko House on Netflix. The show is a subtle education on what the daily lives of maiko (apprentice geisha) are like and since it is in Japanese, it is a good intro/review of Japanese language. It's also a straight up entertaining show. I am grateful for TV and much like any other pastime that can turn into a vice, I believe it is fine in moderation.

Humans are weird and we can turn anything into an addiction. The moral of the story here, I think, is to recognize the good and the bad of the omnipresent screen and to do what little we can to amplify -- and be thankful for -- the good.

Nature may be trying to tell us something via disease. Heart disease is an interesting condition because it is so obviously symbolic: the sufferer of heart disease dies of a broken heart. The simplest way to avoid a heart attack is to stop eating animal protein. Simple does not equal easy.

When I was in my twenties and vegetarian, I foolishly volunteered to clean up the mess left from the Easter ham. The melted fat from the ham was extremely stubborn. After the ham’s salvageable fat was saved, the remainder stuck to the pan, utensils, and plates like ugly on an ape. After a solid thirty minutes of scrubbing, soaping, rinsing, and re-rinsing, I finally got on top of the cleaning job. My hands stank of ham for the rest of the day though and felt sticky and greasy no matter what I did.

It does not take a genius to figure out that a substance as sticky and greasy as ham will clog a human heart. Cheese on pizza often pools with grease and eggs are salmonella and fat bombs, yet that did not stop me from eating either of those for two decades after I quit eating meat. Health is never going to be a compelling enough reason to stop eating a certain way. As tiny-brained humans, we lack the intellectual wattage to do what is best for our bodies most of the time.

Ad Plantarum or Plants are People Too

Ingesting pain and suffering causes pain and suffering, not just to oneself, but to everyone in the continuous arc. All things are connected. Roughly 99 percent of animals farmed in the US are factory farmed. The “lucky” one percent of animals who are not factory farmed are sent to the same slaughterhouses as the factory farmed ones. Under the best of circumstances, the life of a chicken ends in a bloody ordeal in the back of a barn. Eating animal products means maximizing the suffering of other sentient beings. As a vegan, when I mention this statistic, I am often confronted by people wielding what I call “ad plantarum” or the “plants also feel pain” argument. I agree, plants do feel pain. Trees do not like to be cut down and if grass could talk, it would probably object to being mown, chemically treated, and transformed into a suburban lawn. The ad plantarum argument is defeated easily by the requirements to survive. The human body can survive without meat, but it cannot survive without fiber. Fiber only comes from plants; animal products do not contain it. There is also the hard fact that all animals farmed for meat, dairy, or eggs either had to eat plants or plant-eating animals to survive. When a human eats a piece of cheese or beef, he vicariously eats all of the plants (usually GMO soy in the US) that the animal ate to get to a size where she could produce milk for a calf or be slaughtered for her flesh. If plants feel pain, then the most sensible way to reduce their pain is to avoid eating gluttonously large amounts of plants by proxy.

Guilty as Charged

The most detrimental part of eating animals and their secretions, however, is neither the ecological impact nor the health problems incurred by the habit. The number one issue with eating animals is the place of ungratefulness and entitlement it comes from. When I ate animals, including when I consumed their lives as a dairy and egg eating vegetarian, it by default meant I placed myself above them in an imaginary hierarchy. Just as modern human slavery exists in the form of human trafficking, sweat shops, and organ harvesting, I can choose to what degree I partake in any of those schemes. There is no way I can completely free myself of my involvement: right now, I am wearing a sweat shop made polyester blend dress that I bought from Goodwill. Underneath the dress, I am wearing stretch pants that I bought new, meaning they were created in a sweat shop that I directly supported when I bought them for $10 at JC Penney. Only heaven knows in what other ways I have been complicit and complacent, supporting business practices I vehemently disagree with. Nobody is perfect. When I eat avocados, I understand perfectly that they most likely were distributed by a violent avocado cartel. When I drink almond milk, I do so knowing that almond farming is extremely destructive to the environment. I use and eat all sorts of products containing palm oil, which is egregiously bad for the environment, specifically orangutans. Much of the food I eat and products I use is besotted with plastic packaging. There are frequent occasions where the only difference between my carbon footprint and a non-vegan’s footprint is paltry and barely noticeable. That said, if I were to go back to eating chickens and their eggs, it would put me in a club of people who essentially do not care that animals have feelings, lives, and souls. When they were given a beautiful array of choices of vegetables and vegetable products to eat, they chose to enslave and kill animals instead. I see Mama Earth or whatever you wish to call her as a sentient being. When I eat her copious plants, in the scheme of things, it is easier for her to replenish and replace them. Some plants actually depend on animals eating them for survival, for instance fruit trees that need animals to eat their fruits and fly/walk/poop their seeds far away. Other plants need us to cultivate them: my Jerusalem artichokes would not exist in the area had I not mail ordered them from some woman in Idaho. When I eat her animals, I take responsibility for pain and slavery that did not need to happen. I can try to run away from the responsibility, but sooner or later, it is going to force me to face it. At every meal, I can choose to be grateful and make do with the bounty of vegetables and fruits Mama provides for me to eat. Yes, it means some slight deprivation. I firmly believe I would weigh about 50-75 pounds more (quite dramatic when you’re under five feet tall like I am) if I chose to eat animal secretions and flesh in my region of modern day America.

Johnny Appleseed is an interesting character. For those non-Ecosophia readers, Johnny Appleseed was a real person in 18th century America who got turned into a myth. He was a wandering preacher of Swedenborgian Christianity who taught people how to create apple nurseries wherever he went. He was a vegetarian, animal loving mystic who was said to be able to charm the birds off the trees. Native Americans and settlers alike marveled at his relationship to animals. He was like Dr. Doolittle with them; both respecting them and speaking their language.

Whisper

When I was a child, to say my relationship with animals was fractured would be an understatement. I loved animals like most children do but of course I was raised eating animals, and that put up a wall of dissonance of being able to feel for them but not able to reach them. A friend of my aunt’s gave me a beautiful kitten when I was about eleven named Whisper. Whisper was the first cat I had who I felt truly close to. She was very sweet and liked to ride around on my shoulder. I took her to bed every night and sang her songs. For a lonely, nerdy eleven year old, Whisper was a life-saver. She gave me a place to pour all of the affection I could not ladle on any other human being. Her presence was healing. One day, I went to a birthday party for a friend of mine and when I returned, my mom told me Whisper was dead. Our family dog, Lucky, had snapped her neck when she got too close to his food.

Whisper’s death sent me on a spiral of suicidal depression that got worse and worse until I finally sought psychiatric help at age seventeen. I don’t think it is a coincidence that my worst depression happened in tandem with being forced to dissect a pregnant cat in high school, nor was it a coincidence that I went vegetarian and began serious study of the occult at that time.

I am a product of my times in many respects and my warped relationship with the animals was not uncommon.

As long as I ate animals, I refused to see the similarities to a highly-intelligent pig and my beloved, dead Whisper. I understand perfectly why my mind nearly broke at age 16. Many parts of my world were coming to an end, including my childhood and my naivete about the world. I could no labor under the delusion that I did not know any better.

Veganism and Sensitivity

There's an argument that a vegan diet makes ritual magic dangerous because of sensitivity issues that can throw the body-mind into a hyper-sensitive state. As someone who does ritual magic every day while maintaining a strictly plant-based diet, it is my anecdotal experience that this is not true in my case. Instead, my primary issue as an animal-product addicted, severely-depressed young adult was oversensitivity. I was oversensitive in every way, from the most obvious ways in not being able to withstand hot and cold weather for very long without becoming profoundly irritated to a constant psychic state of acute over-alertness. From my own experience, it seems to be the intake of fat and calories that causes imbalance of sensitivity. Too much body fat plus caloric excess and the bodymind risks becoming obtuse and insensitive to any and all messages from non-physical entities. This is not guaranteed to happen, but it can easily happen and is likely. Too little body fat and caloric deficit increases sensitivity until one suffers the problems I did as a skinny, perpetually-underfed teen girl.

No matter what arguments I come up with, I have accepted that humans will eat animal flesh and secretions until the last hundred homo sapiens on Earth resort to cannibalism rather than give up one mouthful of precious meat. We began eating animals as a product of our own worst instincts (I have my theories that the stories of the Fall from Eden are symbolic where eating and enslaving animals is concerned) and to our worst instincts, we shall always return. I see myself as having a choice. I believe my choice matters. As usual, I could be wrong.

Image Credit: Malcolm Lidbury (aka Pinkpasty), CC BY-SA 3.0

Witch bottles are a classic example of a type of natural magic that is no longer appropriate and that should only be used as an absolute last resort under the careful supervision of an experienced practitioner of natural magic, if such a human can be found (highly unlikely). The witch bottle is problematic because it is a form of etheric bait. The etheric plane is the layer of energy between us and the world of images; imagine it as one plane more subtle than smell. Placing your own nails, hair, and other effluents into a jar is a way of siphoning off a bit of your etheric energy. The purpose of a witch bottle is to entice the evil person or the spirit sent by her into attacking an etheric lure. The reason it contains sharp metal objects is to trap the witch tricked into attacking the bottle. The witch or her familiar sees the witch bottle radiating etheric energy from whatever astral spying she has done upon the victim’s house and commences an astral attack on the bottle, mistaking it for the victim. When she does attack, her etheric body is bound by the magic of the bottle and punished by the pins, nails, and other sharp objects. If the witch bottle works as planned and the witch's etheric body is damaged, her physical body will also be damaged here on the meat plane.

What if the Witch is You?

The trouble with witch bottles is not their ineffectiveness. The trouble with them is the intention of the creator/victim. I have never met a miserable, unlucky person who was not at least partially responsible for their own misery and bad luck. We humans are experts at getting in our own way and making our own lives difficult and depressing. A person who fails to look at herself as a potential cause of her own problems is overlooking Prime Suspect Witch No. 1. Creating a witch bottle almost always traps the creator of the bottle. If the witch bottle’s creator is plagued by hatred and paranoia, the witch bottle becomes a literal etheric extension of that hatred and paranoia. Anyone considering making a witch bottle should first ask herself, “What if there’s no witch out to get me?” Linking yourself to fear and paranoia through your physical action of making a witch bottle means that you are prone to fear and loathing of witches without evidence, analysis, or reason. If you are indeed the cause of your own woes, then you just did the magical equivalent of walking into a booby trap that you set for your enemy.

Alternatives to Peeing in Glass Containers

In the Cosmic Doctrine, Dion Fortune set you never overcome evil by fighting it directly. Instead, you build your own strength and use evil as a stepping stone or thrust block while overwhelming it with sheer force. If you do have a bona fide witch cursing you, don’t lure her to your house by peeing in a jar! Instead, ignore her whenever possible and build your own self until you dwarf her foul influence. Vanquish her by ignoring her and leaving her to her own toxic fate.

“I Don’t Know Her”

Once upon a time, Jennifer Lopez, a celebrity known as J.Lo, decided to pick a fight with Mariah Carey, another celebrity on the same record label known for her amazing voice. Despite frantic efforts by J.Lo and her team over the course of multiple decades to engage Mariah by asking the singer for her opinion of J.Lo in interviews, Mariah repeatedly claimed “I don’t know her”, refusing to acknowledge J.Lo or their alleged fight. In one interview, a prodded Mariah commented “Singing is first and foremost, it’s a God-given talent that I’m grateful for. Her thing is something different.” Without speaking J.Lo’s name, Mariah decimated the opposition. The subtext that J.Lo’s singing voice profoundly lacked in comparison to Mariah’s was crystal clear. One could picture J.Lo fuming like Snow White’s wicked stepmother in front of her mirror while Mariah practiced pentatonic runs, even if the image was far from the truth.

The moral of the story is that witch bottles are better left to the rare expert or the rarer individual who isn’t at all responsible for her own self-sabotage. Instead of creating a potential etheric booby trap for yourself, spend time in discursive meditation getting to the root of your problems, starting first and foremost with the ones you laid upon yourself. If you have zero responsibility for causing your current set of problems and you have an expert natural magician on hand to help you craft a witch bottle, then have at it. If you don’t, consider avoiding witch bottles altogether.

The era we are living through seems particularly rough for the spiritually inclined. Any encounters we have with deities are rife with misunderstanding, whether this is in the form of aggrandizement or its opposite, wholesale denial. I have a wacky theory that we are living through the age of Peak Demon. Demons usually don't get to run roughshod through the material, etheric, and astral planes. They're typically confined to their realms of extreme density from which they can only dream of interacting with beings outside their realm. Complex rituals used to be required to summon demons. Nowadays it is as easy as surfing to most parts of the internet or flipping on a television.

In this age of interference from the denser planes, I have imagined that things are "like this" perhaps because the higher planes are at rest. In the great ebb and flow of the ages, we are living through a terrible time where angels are scarce and remote and demons threaten to overwhelm the psychic sensitives, who appear to be so many tasty snacks from the demon's purview.

Deities for Dummies in the Age of Interference

Because our age is so warped by the demonic and its milder manifestation, materialism, we tend to misunderstand the concept of the Veil that I talked about in an earlier essay on this blog. We confuse the veil for the force that it is buffering. Demonic materialism is actually a decent example. Materialism is not inherently demonic. There are plenty of times when it is appropriate and called for. For example, a little boy who is coddled and spoiled from the moment he pops out of mom's birth canal who turns into a monster brat is demonic and the material spoils that round out his lifestyle make him so. The same materialist instinct -- the one that calls us to gather and amass -- could be used as a thrust block. If the little boy has a change of heart, his materialism could morph into generosity and contemplation of material flows. He could become a man who understands why you don't spoil children from personal experience, and he will have gotten that way from his direct knowledge of materialism.

The gods are always trying to school humans from behind the Veil because we are too uncoordinated to take off the training wheels. That is why the "lesser" activities of mundane life are just as important as straight up religious practices such as going to church (I say this and I don't go to church), religious rituals, prayer, and pilgrimages. One of the hugest and most unfortunate losses in the move from polytheism to monotheism in the West was the stripping away of specialized deities in order to supplant them with the One God concept. Monoculture is boring: as an American who is used to endless strip mall landscapes sliced up by concrete and asphalt highways, I can assert this from personal experience. I don't want to see Jesus's face in everything. When I communicate with the trees in my yard, I don't want to pretend they're Jesus. For instance, you guys might remember Cedric, the Eastern Cedar I rescued from behind my work building. He's doing fine, growing straight and tall in my front yard. (Well, actually right now he's hibernating because it is winter.) The point is that Cedric is not Jesus. He is also neither Buddha nor Vishnu. He's Cedric; I'm Kimberly, nice to meet you.

Various Manifestations of Gods through the Veil

I tend to lean heavily upon the Greek gods because I'm in a phase of my life where I am working on the Orphic hymns, so please bear with me and certainly feel free to associate different gods with the forces I am about to delve into.

The ultimate force and the one most routinely associated with godhood is the Sun. Almost every world religion acknowledges the Sun as the creative force behind it all, and some such as Christianity worship the Sun (Son) to the detriment of the other forces. There's a funny blond joke about a woman so dumb that she thinks the trick to landing a spacecraft on the sun lies in traveling there by night. Elon Musk and pals have the same derpy conviction that traveling to other planets in the solar system will be easy-peasy, failing to take into account the piercing rays of our yellow star. Without the magnetic field that shields the Earth from radiation, astronauts will find themselves dying painful deaths of radiation poisoning long before they reach Mars. The story of Icarus comes to mind, but instead of melted wings they will suffer tumors and melted internal organs. It won't be pretty. For those of us who don't want to learn the hard way, we can be content with worshipping the Sun and the planets from our modest places on Earth safely within the confines of her magnetic veil, ahem, I mean field.

Hermes or Mercury as a force rules the Word, or direct communication with deities. I believe humans cannot talk with deities or angels directly because it will fry our little pea brains. Boom, short circuit, game over. Hermes gives us the kiddy version of communication with deities in the form of language. Our goal is to learn a great deal about languages so we can eventually develop the chops to receive our transmissions directly from God without frying the circuitry. One Mercurial/Hermetic manifestation of language is the joke or meme, which communicates a great deal in a small package.

Aphrodite rules love, including non-romantic love. Love is a process of uniting with another force. I love Aphrodite, but if she were to love me on the level that gods use, I would immediately perish and dissolve, game over. That's why I get the lite version and am encouraged by Aphrodite to do things that are sacred to her, like creating music, building friendships, and maintaining my marriage of nearly 22 years.

Gaia rules the material world. If I go to Gaia right now, it's an easy enough process. Taking a dirt nap requires a bottle of pills with a vodka chaser or a sturdy rope and a thick tree branch, but that isn't appropriate at this time. Instead, I reach Gaia through the buffer zone of preparing food that she generously grew for me to eat. If it is warm, I go outside my house and work in my garden, an activity otherwise known as Playing in the Dirt for Adults.

Ares or Mars rules war and conflict. Conflict is a necessary evil. Anyone who thinks it can or should be avoided usually ends up qualified to be in a funny farm. War is the ultimate conflict, but this is not Sparta and it's not the right approach for me to go to literal war with people I disagree with. Instead, I can exercise the instinct to go to war in more constructive ways, such as sports. Sports are mini-wars, which is why they were the exclusive domain of males. The ancient Greek Olympics were male only, as only males were expected to fight and die in battle.

Jupiter or Zeus rules law. In its ultimate form, natural law is simply too much to contemplate. An instant gnosis of all natural laws of our Universe would immediately dissolve my human brain. Instead I have the mild version of living under human laws and the laws of the material plane such as gravity and Murphy's law (luckily Murphy's law isn't always in effect, at least in my case). Those laws are enough for now.

Saturn is the god of time and death. As a human, I am especially impaired when it comes to conceiving geological time. I can barely grasp the hundred years before and after I will die in my feeble mind, and that is probably for the best. I can do better by studying history and by adapting better, perhaps by studying the Stoics and their approach.

Uranus is the god individuality, eclecticism, and change. Our time is supposedly the Age of Uranus or Aquarius, and that's not something I figured out by myself. Brighter minds than mine came up with the Procession of the Equinoxes. Change in its most extreme form is complete annihilation and revolution. I'm not ready for either one. Instead, I change my habits, my living arrangements, my underwear, and my diet.

Neptune or Pisces is the god of mysticism and oneness. Arguably, the Christian god is actually Pisces, and that is why we see him much diminished in the current time. The Age of Pisces is over and any hope of one world united under God has been dashed. The dying god Pisces lashed out and is still lashing out in the form of communism, that failed astral pyramid that claims to uplift the masses but instead crushes them under the weight of an elite head. In a milder and smaller form, an astral pyramid is a desirable structure -- for instance, a birthday party with the birthday boy or girl at the top of the pyramid. The masses in question are the party guests.

Finally, the god Pluto or Hades rules the underworld. Right now as we speak, miners are frantically drilling the Underlands in the desperate quest for petroleum wealth. Much like Icarus mentioned above, Plutonian ambitions land humans in a heap of misery. Wealth within strict limits, however, is the key to a good and happy life. The same natural gas that heats my small home in northern Illinois can be recklessly spent on the grotesque McMansion a dozen miles away. Like any aspect of the Veil, it's just a question of ambition.

Allopathic medicine’s primary failure lies within its dismissal of the non-physical planes, especially the etheric plane. In the occult theory of the planes, the etheric plane is the most closely linked with the physical. Anyone can sense the etheric plane. When a person, place, or thing feels right or wrong, that is the etheric plane in action. For instance, my father was recently in the hospital for the better part of a week. I visited him and brought him cookies. Hospitals, especially hospitals in salary class strongholds like the hospital where my dad was interred, are huge etheric drains that prey upon all who enter them. Nursing homes and assisted living facilities have similar functions on the etheric. I will not speculate as to why they have this function, however, I will comment that it is highly ironic that places of ostensible healing run on energy vampirism. The modern hospital doesn’t just exist to drain your bank account; it sucks the life out of the people who frequent it as a hidden bonus.

Anybody Want Cookies?

When I entered the hospital, a young hospital worker asked “Are those homemade cookies?” I said “Yes”. Homemade cookies, despite being full of sugar and fat, are far healthier than hospital food of any sort because they are etherically rich. To those with etheric starvation, homemade cookies are an all-night oasis with a flashing neon sign. If only I had the time and the energy, I would have given everyone working and staying at the hospital a batch of homemade cookies.

Etheric starvation may be one of the most common health deficiencies of our time. The etheric plane is one step more subtle than smell and one step less subtle than an emotional feeling. The reasons why etheric starvation are so commonplace nowadays are myriad: ugly built environments, magnetic radiation, tons of plastic, hectic schedules, devitalized food, and ungrateful attitudes of entitlement all contribute to the phenomenon. I suffer from etheric starvation much like anyone else, however my starvation is ameliorated by the daily practice of the Sphere of Protection (SoP) and my ability to cook decent meals at home.

Etheric starvation often manifests as auto-immune disease such as diabetes and chronic fatigue. Type two diabetes is often caused by stuffing and gorging in an attempt to alleviate etheric starvation with devitalized, etherically-poor food. The sex addict’s number one problem is usually etheric starvation, and that is why a large amount of sex with constantly changing partners cannot cure them. Sex is an etheric exchange that ends up lumpy and one-sided if one partner is more into it than the other — the lonely heart would be better off remedying their etheric starvation in non-sexual ways.

The first task of remedying etheric starvation is by recognizing that the aesthetics of one’s living space provide a primary source of etheric nourishment. In order to replenish etheric stocks, you must have a place where you feel you are home. “Home” is as individual and randomly eccentric as the people who live there. For some, home is an apartment in a big city nestled among skyscrapers. For others, home is a cookie-cutter three-bedroom suburban house. Some live in yurts, tents, boats, and vans because they have no other choice; for some, it’s exactly how they like it. For me, home is not just my tiny little house, it’s my garden or the forest preserve. The moral of the story is we all need an etherically-rich place we can regularly go where our energy is restored.

The Importance of Decor... Seriously

Decorating, like many activities that are sacred to Aphrodite, is routinely pooh-poohed as unimportant and trivial. Decorating and the cleaning and organization that usually precedes it is crucial to imbuing a space with etheric richness. Repainting a room and updating the furniture and tchotchkes may not seem like a big deal, but anyone who perceives the etheric plane in any depth will understand it is crucial to remedying etheric starvation. Not all decorating is created equal, of course. The living space that is bought pre-fab from the Made-in-the-Third-World furniture store, installed entirely by a crew who couldn’t care less about the people living in an overlarge heat sink of a house, has far less restorative etheric potency than the room appointed with lovingly-restored thrift store furniture and is regularly cleaned and maintained by the people who actually live there.

I am a big proponent of starting where you are, with what you have right now. If you have etheric starvation, and it is likely that you do, the easiest way of remedying it is to thank your space for its service to you. For instance, I sit at my desk writing this essay on a computer. I will later thank the computer, the desk, and the chair for helping me write the essay. When I do this, my gratitude will sublimate the material things I have thanked and this will return in the form of good luck for both me and the items I thanked. Another way to sublimate gratitude is to do something that blesses the environment, such as picking up trash in the forest preserve. Every little bit helps, which is why those who put effort into gardening or who decorate for holidays are blessed — those tiny bits of care and cheer go a long way in brightening a sad world and making it etherically richer.

I have said the etheric is one sense subtler than smell. Hospitals have a smell that indicates their etheric toxicity. Where there’s smoke, there’s fire, and if a place smells like you shouldn’t be there, you should probably try to get out of there as quickly as you can. Etherically-drained environments are terrible for human health. That is why you want whatever place you call home to be etherically rich. Allopathic medicine is not about to remedy itself or its approach to healing, which is why I believe the majority of it will be discarded in the centuries to come. (That’s too bad, because allopathic medicine does have an assortment of helpful protocols that shouldn’t be thrown away like the baby with the bathwater.)

The Formula

Allopathic medicine has utterly failed because it prioritizes attacking the source of disease over building up the patient. In the realm of magic, it is easier to curse what you hate than to bless what you love. Nevertheless, cursing what you hate causes detrimental blowback — if you get the destruction you want, it will return to you like the shrapnel of a grenade. If you bless your own side, you get that blowback, and you strengthen yourself enough to triumph over the enemy with overwhelming force. Hippocrates advocated the approach of strengthening the patient. Allopathic medicine goes the curse route, poisoning and/or removing the offending body part and attempting to replace it with someone else’s body part or a prosthetic. There are rare occasions where removing the body part is the best approach, like the case of me and my gall bladder. In 2002, I came within about an hour of dying because my gall bladder had become extremely inflamed and full of stones. Unfortunately, it had to go and luckily for me and my survival to the present day, it did. In most cases, however, it is preferable to strengthen the patient and err on the side of conservatism by not removing anything. The following is not health advice: If I were to be diagnosed with cancer, I would refuse chemotherapy. It is my personal opinion that chemotherapy is as barbaric as trepanning. You don’t get rid of an ornery fish by poisoning the whole ocean. Instead, I would look at my lifestyle: if I was subsisting on etherically-depleted food from the freezer, fast food restaurant, or out of a can, I would change it to homemade food. If I wasn’t sleeping enough, I would find a way to make regular, adequate sleep happen. I would decorate and thank every space I used and the objects in it. I would get lots of sunlight whenever possible. Last but not least, if none of this worked and if I still had cancer, I would accept my impending death as gracefully as possible and I would do my level best not to complain.

In some ways, alternative healing modalities are not as potent as taking an allopathic drug, and that can be a good thing. Allopathic medicine is often a blitzkrieg as it had to be in the case of my gall bladder whereas alternative healing methods are usually a gentle readjustment. When I have a sinus headache, I take white willow in the form of a capsule instead of taking Advil or Tylenol. The reasons for this are more complicated than they would appear. I often have to take more white willow than one would Tylenol — 2 or three capsules every couple of hours versus a single Tylenol for the span of half a day — because they aren’t as strong. Over the counter NSAIDS like Tylenol and Advil obliterate the endothelial single cell layer in my upper intestine, and this layer is the only thing that filters out pathogenic viruses. My headache might be solved, but I have just opened my immune system to any virus that comes my way, so if I have to be around a sick person, symptomatic or asymptomatic, I’m probably going to catch whatever virus they have. Willow doesn’t do that. Additionally, the health of my teeth is directly related to my sinus headaches, so if I have a sinus headache, I can remedy it by putting a thick paste of calcium citrate in the corners of my gums and behind my front teeth. I usually do this at night so I do not appear to be foaming at the mouth during the daytime. Calcium citrate stops my teeth from decaying. By remineralizing my teeth, which are just small bones after all, I slowly work on the root cause of the headaches, which is inflammation caused by infected teeth. Is this as instant or as powerful as popping an Advil? Heck no. Does it work? Yes. Another supplement I use if I have a sinus headache is zinc in the form of lozenges or gummies. Sinus headaches are the canary in the coal mine that say “You are at risk of catching a flu or cold”. If I get one, I supplement with extra Vitamin D, zinc, and put special attention toward improving my etheric state.

Magic Chef

If your household has a good cook living there (maybe it is you) please bless that person for me. The good cook is the most dramatically undervalued healer of our civilization. Good cooks are beyond the price of rubies in a landscape of etheric starvation, and that is why if you have etheric starvation, you should do your level best to become a good cook.

Soup is an extremely powerful form of medicine, and it doesn’t need to be chicken soup specifically. Soup is healing because our bodies need salty water with a dash of sugar in it. Soup is the human body’s preferred form of hydration and nutrition. Soup made from scratch is the most etherically potent form, however, soup from a can or box “doctored up” with additions like chopped vegetables or noodles comes relatively close. Though most soup recipes call for broth, I don’t use broth when I make soup. The basic recipe for homemade soup is to start with a stockpot, put in about a tablespoon of oil, and fry a vegetable, usually onions, at the bottom of it. Herbs or spices follow for a brief sauté, and then the rest of the vegetables get thrown in there, the pot gets filled to the top with water, and then it cooks for anywhere from thirty minutes to several hours. I salt it to taste somewhere within that time span. Noodles or rice, if being used, don’t get added until the soup is cooked or mostly cooked. Soup is not rocket science. I have not used an actual recipe for many years.

Avoid the Modern-Brutalist Approach to Exercise and Everything Else

Another spot where the allopaths get it wrong is exercise. Vigorous exercise has a time and a place: it belongs to children and young adults, and its place is ideally a bit on the wild side, in the form of copious unstructured play. Instead, we drive our cars to go to the gym, where we proceed to overwork in an etherically-deadened meat market of rubber, plastic and metal while subjected to an aural assault of nihilistic, autotuned popular music. The environment is wrong and the type of exercise is wrong. Older people are generally not designed to sprint or to powerlift — though if you can, good for you. Human bodies are designed for long bouts of mild exercise, and people of a certain age who manage this form of movement stay healthy for a long time.

If allopathic medicine ever regains its sense, hospitals everywhere will be torn down and replaced with the health spas of old where patients “took the waters” in etherically rich environments. No place of healing should ever permit a television upon its premises, and the proliferation of televisions in hospitals is a travesty that displays how far allopathic medicine has fallen from healing as a priority. Perhaps in the hospitals of the future, people of all walks of life will be able to use the healing center instead of the super-rich few. Until then, it is up to regular people to take back the modalities of healing. These days, healing must start at home.

It is hard to believe I was an atheist less than a decade ago. I was raised to be a casual Christian. I was baptized as a baby and confirmed at age 14. My parents took us to church when my brother and I were little. By the time we were adolescents, my brother and I would often walk to church unaccompanied by our parents. We were both confirmed around the same time.

I felt strung along by the Christian church. There was always the promise of being saved or “hearing good news” followed by empty posturing or rote recitation of mostly inscrutable Bible passages that I felt had no relevance to my life. It did not help that the most avid churchgoers in my life were also the most pushy, hypocritical, and obtuse. The deal breaker for me came at age 16, when the church had zero answers concerning the night terrors I suffered on a regular basis.

In my opinion, the average Protestant church has not been spiritual for a long time. By “spiritual” I mean within regular touch with the spirits/in contact with them. Catholics and Greek Orthodox have the advantage of saints and rituals items like rosary beads; casual Protestants have no such advantages. There is also the common Protestant assertion that any contact with non-corporeal entities other than Jesus himself is Satanic and/or witchcraft. Such an assertion, whether or not it is the correct interpretation of the Bible, excludes and shames anyone who seeks to experience the spirit of place. Those who develop the ability to recognize the differences and overlaps between the spirit world and our own are kneecapped by the insistence that all spiritual experience belongs to Jesus and Jesus alone.

Nah. From my experience, Jesus is truly great, however, he is far from the only god and he’s most certainly not the only spirit. To ironically paraphrase Carl Sagan, J.C. is but one of “billions and billions” in a complex ecosystem.

The Extremely-Haunted World

Most of us have been brought up to believe that if ghosties and ghoulies exist, then surely they must prove it by using their unseen hands to move furniture at night, to win lotteries for humans who beg and plead the right way, and to possess ugly dolls and teddy bears and make them prance about in a demonic yet amusing fashion. That’s not the way it works. Everything and every place is haunted nevertheless. Anyone who has ever sensed that someone doesn’t like them or that a place feels “bad” or “good” for no apparent reason is sensing the spirit ecosystem. The ecosystem is there whether the person astrally blind or profoundly clairvoyant.

Personally, I don’t usually physically see or hear spirits. Every now and then I do, for instance I saw my first full-body apparition in a forest preserve in 2020. I thought it was a man until I got close enough for it to disappear. I usually don’t see spirits. I’ll catch one of my many ghost cats out of the corner of my eye and sometimes ghosts will make a lot of racket in my house. These are not common occurrences. My usual experience is a kind of awareness. For instance, right now I have several spirits hovering nearby. One is always with me -- it’s my Holy Guardian Angel or HGA. Others come and go. Some have bad intentions and are thrown off by my daily Sphere of Protection. Most are just there, like birds in the bushes and trees and insects on the ground and in the air. No big deal. Places also have spirits. My music studio has a spirit. The piano has a spirit who I have named Rex. The desk calendar has a spirit. The elderberry lozenges have spirits. The plastic they are wrapped in has a spirit. The list is endless.

When people ask me “Is this place haunted?” my answer is always “Yes”. Haunted is the natural state of everything. What they mean is “Is one of the entities who lives here disturbed or angry?”

The key realization here is that nobody is ever alone. Manly P. Hall’s Path of the Lonely Ones is only genuinely lonely if non-human entities cannot be perceived, and most people who study the occult find that studying occultism opens the inner eye that perceives the world for all of its genuine weirdness. The supernatural isn’t all that super because it is perfectly natural; it’s just that we humans have fallen into severe blindness.

The Ancient Seers

I believe people used to be able to see the astral plane nearly as easily as we see the physical plane. Over thousands of years, humans lost the second sight. I have always been afflicted with a feeling of sadness and longing for the pre-industrial world when nobody worried about radiation, toxic dumps, or plastic garbage. I don’t feel I am anywhere alone in this or the sense that the world of fairies, angels, ghosts, and other non-corporeal entities has been beaten back. The clincher is that it wasn’t beaten back at all -- it’s just that we have beaten back our ability to perceive it. We are so vain as a species that we came to assume that because we invented our own apparatuses and systems, they can have no consciousness apart from us. The first step to perceiving entities is admitting that humans aren’t so great and special. We are cogs in the machine just like anyone else. We may be creators, but we are also the created. The second step is to try and make contact.

Reach Out and Touch Someone

The primary way to begin to sense the rich, unseen world is to thank it. Grateful people are the best sort of people: everybody wants to hang out with them, including spirits. That’s why I suggest genuinely thanking household objects as a first exercise in spirit communication. The next time you shut your front door for the night, thank it as if it was another person who was your devoted personal security guard. Say Hello when you get into your car and Thank You every time you get out of it. Say thank you to the washing machine and dryer for your clean clothes. Thank your bed after you sleep in it. Once you have started thanking the objects you used to take for granted, you might just notice they appreciate being thanked. It’s a subtle, almost indiscernible feeling, but once you start a habit of thanking objects, you’ll sense that it grows and that an aura of protection grows with it. A wise entity once told me that gratitude sublimates what it touches to the power of seven. I took this to mean that the thank-er and the thank-ee become improved and encouraged by gratitude in at least seven ways.

Bad Practices

I don’t use or recommend Ouija boards or seances to contact spirits. Ouija boards are a good way of inviting a demonic infestation, and here is why: they are like giant nets that do not discriminate in what they catch and bring through. Demons want nothing more than to get a foothold on the material plane where they can proceed to wreak havoc upon their enemies (us humans). The Ouija board is usually piloted by a group of know-nothings who seek contact with dead relatives or dead famous people. A bunch of people create an amorphous blob of astral energy that is easily detected and commandeered by demons. It’s not that dead grandma doesn’t want to get through, she cannot get through because the demons will push her out of the way.

The seance is another extremely ignorant practice that invites the demonic from portals on the lower astral plane. Once again, we have a bunch of random-intentioned people creating an amorphous blob of astral energy through which demons may happily travel. Seances are the astral equivalent of going to a seedy bar and then stripping oneself naked and taking a roofie. Though it is possible that nothing will happen, it is more probable that something bad will happen and that it will have at least one VD. To add insult to potential injury, seances are not bookended with any form of banishing rituals.

One of the types of entities I used to see in my unprotected astral travels is the Impersonator. Impersonators are spirits who form themselves into mock-ups of your loved ones and then try to get your attention by using that person’s form to torment you. Let’s say you dream of your aunt and in the dream, the nice old lady you know suddenly seems menacing and sinister. Her form seems to bulge at the edges, rearranging itself. The arms are too big, the head is too small, the eyes seem wrong. My guess is that you didn’t dream about your aunt; that was an impersonator. Impersonators love to play ghost and many ghost sightings of dead “people” are not people at all.

The Rudeness of Humans

Many entities don’t want to connect with humans because let’s face it, we can be very rude. When I was an atheist who believed in The Science, I truly believed if a demon or angel didn’t manifest as a humanoid creature and march up to me and shake my hand, it couldn’t possibly exist. When a bunch of humans sit in their stupid, unbanished seance and demand that spirits make knocking sounds in order to prove their existence, the spirits have every right to be pissed and angered. Part of me doesn’t even blame them for infesting houses and apartments and making the cupboards vomit dishes and flatware onto the floor.

Let’s say I was stricken blind and deaf. Just as I wouldn’t march into someone’s home and demand that people living there prove they existed by doing an impromptu tap dance so I could feel the vibrations, I no longer presume I can force astral beings to do my bidding, nor do I want them to do my bidding. I wouldn’t dream of thinking of contacting spirits as a game (many Ouija boards are made by Hasbro) because that’s freaking rude.

The Beauty of Talking to Trees

The Druid Tree Ritual, which really isn’t much more than an elaborate way to sit up against or hug a tree, is a wonderfully polite way to introduce oneself to the world of the unseen. Though not every tree is friendly, most trees and plants in general love to chat and exchange energy with humans. The Ritual is simple: 1.Spot a tree 2.Ask it if it wants to exchange energy 3.Sit with back against tree for whatever amount of time seems right 4.Thank tree and exit the scene.

You won’t hear a literal voice from the tree, but you’ll probably feel all sorts of unexpected and odd sensations. Paying attention to them and more importantly contemplating them later is an excellent way of opening the avenues of spirit communication. The ritual has three key elements: the asking of permission, the opening of oneself to possibility, and the all important gratitude afterwards.

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Kimberly Steele

Entries tagged with sacred homemaking

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