Episode 41: The Feast of Martinmas
Happy Feast of St Martin and, indeed, merry Martlemas, dear listeners! We welcome you to the forty-first episode of our folk necromantic co-ramble.
On the tail end of the Hallowstide, we honour not only the hallowed hagiography of the historical St Martin of Tours – former soldier, bishop, and miraculous cloak philanthropist – but the many calendrical reasons for the season of the feastday itself: from the migration patterns of geese, the bonus ‘settling-day’ of pre-modern village-life, to the Anglo-Saxon ‘blood-month’, and various Irish and Scottish apotropaic rites of Martinmas.
Our Demon of the month is the many-aliased goetic king, Purson, lion-faced granter of familiars, who gently guides us through survey of nigromantic spirit catalogues and the roles and significances of such devilish kings, as well as affording a little consideration of European bear mysteries.
Our honoured Herb is White Ginseng, the aged and elusive King of Dreams who favours only the most eagle-eyed of root-hunters; under whose advocacy we discuss both the economics and the medicine of botany, as well as First Nations lore, Catskills terroir, and much more besides.
Our lauded Mineral this time is Aquamarine, the watery beryl of phlegmatic healing and sensitivity, harmonious marriage, tolerant communication, and sanguine amity; considering not only Neptunian and Venusian image magic, but the links between sagacious clarity, the origins of reading-glasses, and some folkloric accounts of scrying.
Introducing a brand new topic, we begin our sorcerous Sesame-Streeting of Beasts with celebration of the natural magic and folklore of Toads, discussing the watery and earthy banes and blessings of venom, traditional witch-familiar lore, and its heraldic emblematics of choler, moisture, weaponized melancholy, and storms.
Further expanding our fields of episodic topics, we pay homage to the meanings and mysteries of the Daysign of Cipactli/Imix (aka Crocodile) in Mesoamerican calendrics, delving into the leviathanesque, the Toad With A Thousand Jaws who consumes the Sun, and the nature of beginnings, as well as providing some foundational orientation in how such day-signs inform us about underlying cosmo-visions, naming practices, and the heats of tripartite souls.
Our Style of Magic this time naturally follows on the creeping heels and occult thermodynamics of toadbones to analyse the Horseman’s Word: affording us opportunity to discuss the rites of trade secrets, union initiations and hazings, the folklore of animal-handling, the uses of hippomane, the influence of Masonic oathing, and the prestige of horse-whispering in traditional witchcraft.
Our brace of divinatory topics begins with the Geomancy of Acquisitio, the Fiery Jupiterian figure of Gain, expansion, increase, as well as the strictures and loopholes of formality, the risks of overcommitting and taking too much on, and both the wealth and pressures of tradition in ancestral relations, inheritances, and expectations.
From figure to Arcana, our triumphant Tarot Trump this time is the Chariot: vehicle of Mystery itself, historical icon of military advancement and the victory parades of the polis, and indeed the qabalistic means of conveyance into the Supernal realms, by which we discuss the horses-that-become-sphinxes, the harmony of steed and driver, Ezekiel’s visions, and where the rider ends and the wheels begin.
Finally, our featured Dead Magician is both the monstrous Black Annis and her likely point of inspiration, the “denigrated” remembrances of the anchorite Agnes Scott. Considering the shades of Reformation propaganda and pagan (re)articulations of Blue Hags, we explore folkloric practices – including precautionary children’s tales, the land legends of Leicestershire, and the dragging of anise’d cats – to celebrate the potent hag-ography of both nigromantic history and myth, the queerness of monstrosity, and both the historical trauma and reclaimed power that makes witches.
We hope you get as much from listening to this broadcast of lore and legend, miracles and medicines, myths and histories, and the container-and-contained of rider and ridden – as we got from co-rambling it. May all your horses be kindly whispered, your resources carefully managed that they may be sustainably shared, your dreams ever more expansive vehicles to sensitive realisation, your venoms properly alchemized (or at least meticulously deployed), your devils delightful, and your hags potent. Merry Martinmas!
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