Feb 10th writeup - Portland

[Ringtail]

Although Branch canceled, enough of us in the area were still interested in having the bowling event. Except we didn't bowl, but, whatever.

We think Steven chose this date because there was a penumbral lunar eclipse. It wasn't visible at our site, though, because it happened around 4:30 in the afternoon. We worked it into our rite anyway, taking place after midnight, by remembering and stating where we had been at that time.

Makeshift altar created with a piece of plywood on top of a pile of logs.
Five rubber star-patterned erasers placed in a circle or pentagram. Four blue stars, with the fifth, red one lined up with Etamin, the eye of Draco, as our designated North.

Inside the circle of stars was a three-dimensional origami ellisian generator in a clear box, next to a "dragon egg" made with red wax and an eggshell. We formed a double circle using a necklace and a bracelet, both carrying dragon associations, and inside that we placed a toy astronaut holding up a mirror shard. This cosmic vagina-mouth was decorated with small stones created when a downed power line electrified a patch of concrete.

Our intention was to use time's nonlinear nature to catch an echo of this summer's solar eclipse working. We would create an anchor for it in our current place and time, sending power both ways, amplifying and extending its reach. Our immediate goal was to soften reality in our vicinity: a marshy field that was already haunted by fae. The plan was to do so by reflecting the light of the moon with a mirror shard held by the astronaut onto the origami generator.

We each chose a quarter and called the elements using stones placed around the table. Followed with the Transvocation of Khaos, and then an evocation to Bahumet (the first dragon, carrying golden/solar associations). Here we'd been planning to do the reflection part, but clouds had covered the moon. We waited and shared wine with the fae. When it seemed like the moon wasn't going to emerge, we improvised by taking the origami generator out of its box and holding it between the clouded moon and the astronaut.

This leaves the question of what exactly we did, symbolically. The clouds came in only during the ritual and cleared up afterward. In a way, the moon was eclipsed by them, and then we eclipsed it again from the astronaut/mirror shard using the generator. Before the ritual started, I'd reflected moonlight with the shard into my hand in order to test it and some of us think this was enough to charge it. We buried the shard on location as an anchor.

Fallout:

Later in the evening while we were preparing for bed, I stepped out to use the bushes and some... thing came over me as soon as I left the house. It stayed with me all night, throwing my fears in my face, which I handled pretty damn well if I do say so. My heart rate increased to over four beats per second and stayed there for hours. I know that cannabis can raise heart rate, but I've never experienced it. I may have also been hypothermic.

While driving around the next day, I kept feeling like I was about to get a flat tire or something. It might have been an irregularity in the handling that subconsciously tipped me off. My engine died halfway through the drive home, leaving me stranded overnight until the trains started running.

Possible explanations for these outcomes:
1. It was the well-known dark aspects of 156/663 testing me, in their way
2. It was a direct result of something called up during the rite
3. It was a brush of the black cloud that's been affecting many people in the current lately, probably an extension of the cloud hanging over the whole world
4. It had nothing to do with any of this, and was just some malevolent spirit taking advantage of my vulnerable state.
5. None of the above, I was high/unlucky.
The first three are not mutually exclusive. I'll admit, at the time I assumed it was them.

The day after the rite I found a black spider, passed a street with a name that holds synchronous significance to me, and encountered this graffiti of Aelie next to a black moon.



(Aelie wasn't used in this rite, but probably will be during the summer eclipse)

Sei reports lots of dkmu-related synchronicity on his trip home. I'll let him and others speak to their own experiences, if they want.

[Seisatsu]

I wouldn't exactly say I experienced a lot of synchronicity on the way back, and I'm not very perceptive to these things currently. There was one thing that stood out though, on the bus ride home the next day. A couple hours into the trip I started thinking about the ritual, and almost immediately our bus passed on the highway a sign for a business called "WILBUR-ELLIS", and I thought that the timing was a little much to be a coincidence. Nothing huge but it reinforces in my mind that something did happen during the ritual, at least to our own timelines.

I am definitely interested to see, when the full eclipse ritual comes around, if any echoes of our own ritual will appear. It is hard to say at this point if any of the future ritual echoed into our ritual as we had also planned, because we won't know what symbols to look for until then.