Upcoming Talks, Conferences & Classes
(Calendar updated as talks are added or have already occurred!)
September 2024
Geomancy at the Crossroads of Heaven & Earth
Speaker: Dr Alexander Cummins
Date: Friday 13th September | Time: 4.30pm (ET)
Location: Online, for the AstroMagia conference
In the Prayer of the Gnomes, the patron power of the Earth elementals is addressed as “Thou who hidest beneath the Earth, in the Kingdom of Gems, the Seed of the Stars”. We may look to this appeal as an example of how geomancy – that worldly sister of Astrology – works at a crossroads of astral and chthonic craft.
In considering foundational astral transmissions and manifestations, we may understand that geomancers do not simply borrow astrological schema (such as the sympathies of the planets or the useful taxonomy of the Twelve Houses) but also engage in drawing knowledge of an astral origin back up from the earth, precisely insofar as that earth and its denizens of plant and mineral remember and collect every ray of starlight that ever graced or instantiated them.
The geomantic techniques of marking sand or dirt with the points of figures may here be apprehended as a way of reminding the earth’s embodied spirits that they too have an astral heritage, just as Agrippa speaks of ritual action as stirring and re-awakening the indwelling occult virtues of materia.
In this geomantic manner, the world – and its spirits of stone and soil – can be approached as a treasure-house of astral knowledge and sorcery.
Cost: $160 for the entire AstroMagia Conference. Register here.
Grimorium Verum Foundation Course
Speaker: Dr Alexander Cummins
Date: Begins Tuesday 17th September (for four weeks) | Time: 7pm (ET)
Location: Online
The Grimoirium Verum – “the True Grimoire” – has been called ‘one of the most notorious handbooks of black magic’ in the grimoiric corpus. It represents on the one hand something of a late entry into this milieu of spirit conjuration manuals, and yet on the other hand is a clear descendent of a particular sixteenth-century grimoire, the Clavicula Salomonis de Secretis, and furthermore demonstrably contains a treasury of operations and approaches to spirit-work that firmly originate in the magics of antiquity.
The Verum’s methods of conjuration present instructions on the preparations, tools, and protocols for working with the spirits of its catalogue through summoning, pacting, and sending them forth. It evidences both streamlined approaches to nigromancy and complex engagements with rarefied materia and conjurational etiquette in order to navigate infernal bureaucracies, establish mutually beneficial relationships with spirits, and to deepen and develop one’s sorcerous crafts.
This course will offer students a detailed overview of the Verum family of historical texts, paying particular attention to discrepancies, variations, and even a few mistranslations found throughout the various editions of this potent and practical handbook of black magic to present a cohesive and practical guide to its work. We will study the spirits themselves of this nigromantic grimoire, presenting profiles of their offices, heraldry, instructions for calling and sending them out to work, and their appearances across other goetic works. Students new to the Verum will be given clear guidance and advice for gathering their tools, working the GV’s purifications, navigating its protocols, and preparing their first pact. Seasoned practitioners will find helpful analyses of the workings contained in the various collections of the Verum’s Supernatural Secrets and the means to adapt them to one’s own purposes, as well as deeper discussion of how GV methodologies can be employed for working with spirits outside of its specified catalogue, especially the functions and experiments of the Four Regents of the cardinal directions.
Students who take this course will learn about the historical editions as well as practical instructions of the Grimorium Verum, and will received pragmatic guidance concerning its methodologies, entities, and experimenta from course creator and guide Dr Alexander Cummins, a contemporary cunning-man and historian of magic with many years of personal and professional experience in working this particular nigromantic manual.
Cost: $160. Register here.
Chasing the Black Pullet: On Dodgy Grimoires, Mythic Framing, and Magic Rings
Speaker: Dr Alexander Cummins
Date: Wednesday 18th September | Time: 7pm (ET)
Location: Online, via The Cauldron Black
In the furthest murky corner of the grimoiric corpus – that sum total of all the arcane tomes, spellbooks, and manuals of spirit conjuration which we call grimoires – we might imagine a shelf of especially denigrated works housing those texts considered, well, dodgy even by the darkest of black magicians…
It is on this imaginary shelf we can envisage we would find The Black Pullet, an especially folkloric text bearing very little resemblance on first inspection to more formal systems of grimoiric sorcery. Cataloguing and disclosing the uses of a variety of talismanic signs and magic rings, the Black Pullet frames itself as a first-person account from a French soldier fleeing a Napoleonic conflict in Egypt who is taken in by an old Turkish man living in grand secret chambers beneath the pyramids to be taught the ancient secrets of “Ptolemy’s library”.
Yet despite the fanciful nature of this framing, and the apparent lack of many of the usual features of a grimoire, might we still usefully explore and even implement the ‘science of magical talismans and rings’ which thePullet purports to instruct? In this class, contemporary cunning-man and historian of magic Dr Alexander Cummins will attempt to answer this question in the affirmative.
For in its emphasis on an unfolding narrative of events, consequences, and lessons learned by the Pullet’s protagonist we find rich comparisons with one of the oldest texts considered truly grimoiric – the Testament of Solomon – which likewise strings its operations, secrets, and spirit catalogue along a thread of mythic storytelling. And in the Black Pullet’s appeal to ancient yet protected wisdoms thought otherwise lost to time we have a foregrounded sense of a common grimoiric literary device; of transmitting the potent arcana of the past, unearthed and made operable today. Finally, we will offer some comparison to other traditions of magical ring construction, consecration, and use to see just how “unworkable” this grimoire truly is.
So join us for this exploration and discussion of what makes a working grimoire, how we might approach one typically considered to be more fanciful than efficacious, and in what fruitful ways we can engage with the teachings of the Old Man and the Black Pullet.
Cost: $35. Register here.
September 2024
Treasures of the Sorcerers: A Guided Tour of Ritual Tools & Magic Objects
Speaker: Dr Alexander Cummins
Date: Begins Saturday 12th October (for five weeks) | Time: 2pm (ET)
Location: Online, via Morbid Anatomy
The arsenals of historical magicians include a vast array of magical tools, enchanted objects, cunning devices, and sorcerous implements. Such instruments of ritual and folk magic could require careful preparations by particular timings and rites of consecration, and could even require certain specified ways of storing and re-charging as well as wielding them.
Such magical objects include the ubiquitous magic wands, scepters of conjuration, and wizards staffs that grant authority, discharge spells, and command spirits; the range of ritual knives, swords, athames, and bolines that demarcate magic circles, protect the practitioner, and prepare ingredients; the scrying stones, crystal balls, and magic mirrors by which seers conjure visions and tutelary entities; not to mention the very robes, sorcerous apparel, and magical attire—from headwear to footwear—worn when performing magical operations; and even the magic rings that house and harness the powers of the stars and spirits, empower the wearer, and cast illusions.
In this five-part course, contemporary cunning-man and historian of magic Dr Alexander Cummins will lead us through a guided tour of these types of ritual tools and magical objects—Wands, Blades, Shewstones, Garments, and Rings—exploring sorcerous techniques of preparation, consecration, and utility for these enchanted and enchanting implements, as well as the cosmologies, intentions, and operations of their makers and users.
Along the way we’ll make contextual comparisons between historical ritual tools and ideas about the mythological items and mythic artifacts which partly informed them: from fairy cloaks of invisibility and the conjuring ring of King Solomon, to the caduceus of Mercury and the rod of Asclepius; and many many more beyond. Through this examination and celebration of magical manufacture of these material forms of sorcerous efficacy and expertise, we’ll refine our own understandings and engagements with sorcerous instruments and experiments.
Cost: $125. Register here.