Magic with a Twist: Living Environments

(The second post made with the enigmatically attractive Miss Twist, sorceress, regarding the often-lauded art of magic.)

I live in a tin shed.

When I tell people that I usually get one of two reactions: the first is the simple, though a little edgy, "Why?" and the second is the vaguely envious, "Awesome!" It really depends on who the individual is in question, because living in a tin shed has both upsides and downsides to the extreme.

This topic is about my living environment and how it affects my magical work. My living environment is a reasonably unique one, and it affects how I do magic very strongly. My tin shed, needless to say, is not insulated; while I have a heater and a fan, these often don't help against the terrible temperatures which abound in nature.

I prefer to do magic naked. There's a fact you probably didn't need to know about me. Failing that, shirtless and barefoot with jeans works fine. Sometimes, however, it's too damn cold to do any magic - especially during winter and at night. Most of my sorcery goes on between the hours of midnight and five AM, and usually I'm not so fond of testicular frostbite, so when I do magic it has to be at least kind of warm. This is a downside.

In summer, in contrast, it's mostly fine - I can do magic at night without a problem in most cases. I generally don't get to sleep past nine AM in the morning, though, because the tin heats up incredibly quickly - when you've only had two or so hours of sleep this starts to be a problem. Also, on 40 Degrees Celsius days, a handful even hotter, candles melt. This is not good, especially when said candles were given as a devotional gift to say, one of the prime Loa spirits.

But there are advantages to living out in this shed. My mother knows very well just what I am - a FILTHY, DEVIL-WORSHIPING SORCERER WITH A PENCHANT FOR STRANGE THINGS - and she accepts it well enough, which is why she decided to lock me outside of the house and offer me the tin shed. I get a lot of privacy, though - as anyone who's ever lived in a home with six other people (seven, including the cat) might tell you, privacy is worth more than gold in that situation. Before I moved into the shed I was sneaking outside at four in the morning to do my rituals. This is a much more satisfactory arrangement. When one's been up for 100+ hours - while fasting - so that one can evoke a certain spirit at a certain special date and it suddenly pisses down raining one is generally not impressed.

So I have the privacy, and now I can keep all of my magical items on display without my impressionable brothers poking around with them. That was one of the catches, I guess, of practicing magic within my family's home - that my four year old brother would wait until he was, say, fourteen or fifteen before deciding to dabble in the dark arts. Four is far too young to be making pacts with the Ancient Ones was the reasoning.

My floor is made of concrete. This is good, because when I can get over my crippling phobia regarding the stuff, chalk is great for drawing seals and sigils and what have you on the floor. It's fun, it's traditional, and it gives the whole thing a sense of weight that is so important in ceremonial magic. I put a rug down - a lovely thing that my good friend Rick gave me - when I'm doing deity stuff, as I'm generally kneeling and that's not a great feeling on concrete.

I've been working more and more with The Lesser Key of Solomon the King, which is a nice, traditional spirit work involving the binding and banishing of demons and the like. Each set of demons is associated with a certain metal, according to what sort of spirit they are and what rank they have in hell. Those sealed in tin are associated with Mars and are thus the princes and prelates of Hell - these are the ones I've been working with lately.



VASSAGO, who comes in the form of an old man of good nature, is handy for finding lost things and giving visions of the future and past. SITRI, with a leopard's head and the wings of a gryphon, has power over lust and love. IPOS, the angel with a lion's head, makes men witty and bold and has knowledge of all things past, present, and future. GAAP typically comes in the form of a man, makes men ignorant as well as knowledgeable in philosophy and liberal sciences, can cause love or hate, knows all things of the past or future, can take the sorcerer to certain realms and can destroy the familiars of other magicians. STOLOS comes as a raven and can teach the arts of herbology, geology, and astronomy. Et cetera, et cetera.

These are the spirits which I've been working with. There are a handful more, but I grew tired of listing them. I only evoke those associated with tin - the others go all funny. They either don't appear, or they appear twisted and their messages are garbled. Almost like a kind of magical static. Only the tinned demons show up clear and fine. For work with the other spirits, I go outside.

I've chalked in a few protective wards on the tin, which is good, because on normal plaster walls I wouldn't be able to do that so easily. I've also been pondering for more than a while the logistics of summoning a demon prince and binding it into my shed. I don't know what would happen, but it would be pretty cool to find out.

My room is a mess. For all of my ceremonial magic and occult writing, I am after all a chaos magician and I can't keep a room tidy. Books stacked as high as they will go, clean clothes about the place, candles dripping, a mixture of salt, ash, and dust on the floor, paper everywhere, electrical cords resembling a certain ageless squid god devouring half of my room... a perpetually unmade bed tops all of this off.

This affects my magic in that I generally have to clean up my room every week for one working or another, because the spirits don't like the mess. It's generally more polite to clean up when you've invited guests over, after all. So I do that. But the mess always comes back.

The room is filled with spiders. Filled with arachnids of all shapes and sizes. They don't bother me, and usually keep to themselves, but I've heard that they're story-telling creatures (which makes sense) and Papa Legba has remarked about them on several occasions, asking me not to kill his brothers and sisters. Papa Legba isn't a spider-spirit, so at the time I was confused, but he is the Loa of gateways and I soon saw that the spider-web is one of the most intricate gateways of all. I haven't squashed a spider in a few months, and when my girlfriend squeals and begs me to kill one I simply place it outside and apologize to it for the inconvenience. They rarely come out from their hiding places though, except when it's just them and I - we have a sort of agreement, I think. I often joke that I'm leasing the hidden places of my room to them, at which my mother and girlfriend - arachnaphobic ladies both - laugh nervously.

So there we are. That's my living space in a nutshell. It's not great, it's not flashy, but it works - and it leaves a solid mark on the magic I do.