There are a lot of things that can make an individual feel alone and insignificant—including resources and reading materials.
When I first started on my path, reading and researching everything I could get my hands on during my pre-teens, the materials had an isolating effect on me. While the books, magazines, and Myspace or Tumblr posts helped build my understanding of witchcraft, the way I liked to practice never really seemed to…fit.
The magick described and practiced within those pages and paragraphs didn’t FEEL quite right. Like I was trying to hike a rocky mountain trail in stilettos.
Right path—wrong shoe.
In my teen years, I gave up the search for a resource that would be a complete map of my spiritual journey. I piecemealed my craft to fit me with the traditional resources, Addams Family lore, Universal Monsters, comic books, mythology, and the witchy fiction I devoured.
The fog of isolation lifted in my college years. One of the things to help clarify my perspective was Nocturnal Witchcraft: Magic After Dark by Konstantinos.
Unlike now in the Screaming ‘20s, the late ‘90s and early ‘00s embraced magick from a place of love and light—an attempt to ameliorate the pagan community’s bad reputation from the Satanic Panic of the 80s, as well as a way to deal with the terrorism and wars that dominated mainstream media at the time. (See Episode 31: Can Deities Be Trendy?)
During these decades, those I knew to be walking a path of witchcraft or paganism all worked with different energies, or didn’t reveal who or what they worked with at all—traditional paths of witchcraft can be very secretive, can’t they?
Personally, during this period, I was working with dark entities including Persephone, Hades, Loki, the Morrigan, Shiva and Kali.
I remember going to the Diwali festival one year with my older cousin. As a practicing witch at that time, she worked almost exclusively with the God and Goddess archetypes. During our conversation, I told her about the recent energetic exchange and discourse happening between myself and the energies of Kali.
Kali Ma is the Divine Mother, the Dark Mother, the Terrible Mother with dominion over time, death, destruction and creation.
My association and willingness to work the dark goddess unnerved my cousin. She brought me to a small store and temple dedicated to Ganesh and the shop owners whom she had befriended and sought spiritual advice from.
At the time—and even now just remembering—her reaction amused me. I’m not going to lie, I was shocked and baffled as well, but the look and need to bring me to a spiritual advisor is still an amusing memory.
When we got there and introduced ourselves, she informed the proprietress about Kali being on my patheon. She meant well, honestly, and she thought that this woman would “inform” me that the dark energies of Kali Ma were best left alone. You could see it in her posture.
The woman didn’t.
In fact, the woman looked at my cousin, baffled by her reaction.
This wouldn’t be the last time I would receive support for working with my pantheon and the dark gods and goddesses on it—especially Kali. Later that year, I met a worshiper of Kali Ma during jury duty. He was a professor of engineering who felt called to talk to me about Vastru Sastra—the Vedic science of architecture and design—because I was reading a book on Feng Shui. He observantly noticed the small stack of books included a book of mantras to Kali.
We passed the time talking about my studies at college, the potential of going to graduate school after my eventual graduation, quantum physics, engineering, history, vedic sciences including Vastru Sastra, Kali and Shiva. Eight hours of jury duty disappeared without us even being aware of time’s passage.
By the end of the day, the professor had reaffirmed what the Ganesh temple store proprietress had started. Don’t let anyone tell you not to work with any entity, dark or otherwise. If the energy calls to you, wants to work with you, and feels right to YOU then that is between the two of you. He looked me in the eye and called me his sister because we were both children of Kali Ma, the Dark Mother.
I found Konstantios’s Nocturnal Witchcraft: Magic After Dark while visiting Strand, a New York City bookstore not long after either. In Nocturnal Witchcraft, Konstantinos discusses and normalizes magick done in the dark, after dark, and with dark energies and deities.
I felt seen.
It’s funny how things work sometimes, looking like a coincidence but really aren't.
Nocturnal Witchcraft influenced and excited me so much, I ended up loaning the book out. It never returned—kind of obvious now but not at the time.
Bits and pieces of the content continued to float around and slam into thoughts creating two branches of patterns and webbing—spiderweb thinker—even after the book was no longer on my shelf for me to reference and reread.
One of pieces of information that stuck and continued to play a significant role in my thought patterns around my magick and my spirituality was, believe it or not, a four-quadrant graph. Nocturnal Witchcraft built the graph in my head.
Everything under the X axis is dark, night-related magicks and everything above, light and day-related magicks. To the right of the Y axis represents magick done ethically and with morals, and everything to the left, amoral and unethical.
This graph—and eventually the DND alignment chart—helped me express my magickal and spiritual practices more concisely in the midst of isolating marketing of the light side of New Age and magick.
Nocturnal Witchcraft: Magic After Dark is a Wiccan work and so follows the guidelines and practices of Wicca. I am not Wiccan. I was never Wiccan. So even within the materials deepening my connection to dark energy and entities, there was still some isolation, but the thought process, suggestions, examples, ideas, and rituals easily allowed me to extrapolate out onto an eclectic pagan witch’s path designed without the spiritual dogma of any other practice.
If there is one criticism I have for Konstantinos’s book, it lies with the Appendixes—Appendix A to be precise.
As stated earlier, I cobbled together my craft during high school from many resources including mythology. Appendix A is a very small list of gods and goddesses associated with dark and nocturnal energies from a very small area of the world—Greece, Mesopotamia, Egypt, one each from the Celtic and Vedic traditions. A more extensive list of gods and goddesses from around the world would have been appreciated.
Overall, Nocturnal Witchcraft: Magic After Dark by Konstantinos builds a community for those, like myself, who thrive and awaken with the darkest depths of the night, the stargazers and night owls of magick practitioners. If you find yourself stumbling along a path at noon without a hint of shade to help block the light (in the wrong shoes), pick this book up and let yourself return to the folds of the night.
Don’t worry. I repurchased Nocturnal Witchcraft: Magic After Dark and it now sits happily on one of my bookshelves amongst its fellows and altar materials such as a small statue of Kali Ma dancing on Shiva Pa.
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