N'wraenomicon

As part of my devotional practice, I honor and commune with three groups of Kindred Spirits - the Mighty and Beloved Dead, Nature Spirits, and the Shining Immortal Ones. What do they think of my work in Yog-Sothothery? I've been guided to it by the deity I am devoted to, and the reasons for that have been touched on. I can't say it's all clear to me, but it's also not a case of, "Do it because I told you to!" It was presented to me as, "This weaves into interests you already have and, if approached properly, here's a plan for it strengthening the work you're already doing." But this isn't really about focusing on and mapping out that plan. Maybe I'll get into that another time. This is about how one of the ways they communicate with me overlaps with work in Yog-Sothothery.  I've talked briefly here before about how dreamwork is not one of my specialties. Not due to a lack of interest, but due to very weak ability. Or very strong l...

This is all going to be kind of vague. I'm writing it more for myself than anyone else. That's what I always do, but it applies even more than usual to this. Things have been recorded with more detail in other places. The way my memory works, I don't even need "more detail" to remember things, so I really just need enough here so that I know what I'm talking about. Okay, that first part alone plays into some things I've been thinking about lately. It's not time yet to write about those things, though. I did some work the other night, and one of the things that work included was the Banishing Ritual of the Old Ones I wrote up last month. There were, shall we say, Other Things involved, as well. And we weren't expecting a big storm that night. I was going to do this work outside. That seems to be a bad plan for a lot of things lately, so it works out that it's my nature to have a secondary Just In Case plan. It turned out I had to do the work ins...

Things have been peacefully busy for me lately. It's been productive in many ways, not just Getting Tasks Done, but it also means a few things have been pushed to a back burner temporarily. One of those "back burner" things has been divination work.  I can pull out a favorite deck of cards and look at Things That Need to Be Looked At pretty much anytime, but that's not what I think of when I think of the work. I've been studying and practicing divination for over 20 years. "Work" requires a lot more from me than just tossing things out there and interpreting them based on what I already know. There's a lot of deeper study, broader study, trials, reflections...a lot goes into "work". And that's why it's been temporarily removed from Top Priorities. There are times when I make sure I take at least a few minutes a day for something that I want to keep on my radar, and then there are times when things need to be put on hold until I can ...

I've been working on a project that, at first glance, wouldn't seem to be related to my work in Yog-Sothothery. A deeper dive into how the project is developing shows several connections. I'm not ready to reveal details about the actual project yet, but I will say it combines multiple forms of art, language, and storytelling. It also gets into how broad "storytelling" can be. Stories, history, information. And these things are not just influences on the development of the project, but also messages that the project seeks to put out into the world. I think of how fictional stories are born from factual events, how fictional characters are inspired by the lives of people in the physical world. I think of the stories of Cthulhu channeling all kinds of weird information through artists. The way the fictional Necronomicon has had bits of information about it added to many stories by many authors. Folklore. Fairy tales. Written stories read to and by children that were ...

After I started giving serious thought to creating a Silver Key, a key found its way to me. Of course it did. Keys like to find their way to me. Always have. This one is actually a key I've wanted for many years. I spent a lot of time as a child reading books about Harry Houdini, watching David Copperfield specials, and dreaming of someday being an apprentice to Blackstone the Magician. This is a particular type of key I eventually gave up on the idea of ever having. It had to be the right one , and after that hadn't happened for a long enough period of time, I thought it just wouldn't. Randolph Carter lost his key after he'd been an adult for too long. Maybe I found mine. I'm still going to make that very special key for very special uses. This one is special in its own ways, and not just because of the particular things it was specifically created for. Groups of occult practitioners can sometimes get a bit aggravated about wanting people to understand ...

I'm in the process of reading all the Randolph Carter stories again. I know he's pretty much accepted as being Lovecraft's insertion of himself as a character, but I like Randolph Carter a lot more than I like Lovecraft. Maybe because he is "just a chatacter". We know nothing more about him than we needed to know for the stories being told. There's also the fact that the whole Silver Key thing really resonates with me. Keys have always been very magical objects to me, going all the way back to my early childhood. I simply cannot remember a time when keys weren't fascinating and, somehow, sacred. Combine that with a lot of me seeing things in those stories as being useful to refocus as metaphors for things I have experienced, and it's probably not really a mystery that Randolph Carter is an important character for me. The key is a very important object. I would say I'm considering making my own key, but I know I'm past "considering". T...