N'wraenomicon

My experiences in the dreamworld are growing. I'm not at a point yet where I can fully control things, but I am more frequently able to make choices that shape how the dream flows. I remember my dreams much, much more often now. When I don't remember the details, I do usually remember that I did dream and what the overall feeling of the dream was. I'm also noticing a pattern in where dreams take place. Places in my dreams repeat. Some are clearly based on places I have known in the waking world, and some I only know in the dreamworld. Dreams will happen in the same place for a few nights, then I'll have a night or two of very fuzzy dreams that I don't remember well, then I'll be in a different place. A few nights ago, I was dreaming of being in some kind of fishing village. It was a very clear, detailed dream. There were piers and walkways, but streets were pretty much replaced with creeks, narrow rivers, and canals. The town sat at the edge of a big port. Statu...

As I mentioned before, I've got a project coming up. One of the things I needed to do as part of my preparations for the project was create a ritual icon to be used in the work. I knew the symbol and colors I should be working with, but a lot of the design for the icon was left open for my personal creative process. No problem! I knew what I wanted to do, the materials to use, method, style... all good! And then the whole house got sick. I'm two or three days into this. I'm not sure. Yesterday may have been two days long, and symptoms are having an even heavier effect on me today. I would be cutting things close, but I could just wait a few more days and make the icon after the fever has passed. But then I asked myself if that was really the best plan. Again, I would be cutting things close. It would reduce my time for consecrating the icon. I really needed to make it today. In my feverish condition? Why not?! A feverish condition can open gates of its own. This might, in f...

I want to make some notes here about a few things, and I don't really have time right now to check and see how much of this I have or haven't said before. I am participating in NaNoWriMo, and I'm trying to get my word count as far ahead as I can earlier in the month when I have the most time for writing. Perhaps it's best that I not go back and read older posts on this right now anyway. I sometimes like seeing later how my mind explored the same topics at different times. I know I mentioned reaching the point in the Lovecraft Index books where the shining trapezohedron came into play. And that spawned my doing a little bit of looking things up (not even what I'd call "light research") about garnets. I may or may not have mentioned wearing the ring I've had for many years that has an amethyst set with a small garnet on each side of it. Okay. That brings things up to where I am today. I have some work coming up that relates to the shining trapezohedron, ...

Lovecraft dug deep into history for the inspirations for his stories. Or entities that go back deep in history reached far to inspire him. It's hard to say which. We know from his personal letters that he and his circle of writing associates laughed about how seriously some readers thought he believed the things he was writing. I'll trust his word that it was all just fun storytelling...on the surface. I think it was Stephen King who once said, "Fiction is the truth inside the lie." He might have been quoting someone else, but I'm pretty sure I read it from him, and it has stayed with me for years. Writing fiction often gives an author space to work out things they haven't recognized in themself. There are many reasons to believe Lovecraft didn't consciously believe the Old Ones actually exist, but also many reasons to believe pieces of what he created were manifestations of bigger things than just his own imagination. And maybe some of it was misguided gn...

I've mentioned before that the 23rd of each month is a date that carries meaning in my practices. I consult the Temple of Abzu cards much more often than I talk about here, and I make sure I do so as part of these practices. A strange group of things came together for the 23rd of this month. The date came just a few nights after the peak of this year's Orionids meteor shower, a night before the dark moon, and during the time of year that is often described as being one of the times "the Veil is thinnest". I don't think of that Veil as being like a curtain, but more like a liminal space that cannot clearly be defined and is a boundary between worlds. A very real boundary...but not one that cannot be crossed, or that crossing it would be as simple as taking a step to go from one side to the other. It's much more than that. The Ancient Abyss An Ancestral Stargate To Stand Alone Before Eternity The Darkness Seems Light Blood Flows From The Dark Eye Dre...

I enjoyed editing the colors and lighting to turn a very plain photo of my new ring into a photo more suited to the feeling I aim for with pictures on this blog. Yes, in case you're wondering, that is a replica of the One Ring from The Lord of the Rings . It took some work to get everything situated for the photo so that the Elvish inscription would show. It isn't obvious and disappears, leaving a plain gold band, if everything isn't just right. At least I don't have to hold it to a flame. So why am I writing about a Tolkien ring on a Lovecraft blog? Well, it isn't really a Lovecraft blog. It's a Yog-Sothothery blog. We can discuss all day whether or not it's fair to identify the Mythos with the name of the man who laid the groundwork when most of the creation has been done by other authors. We can avoid that by identifying it with the most famous Old One in the mythos, but we also know Lovecraft himself wanted it identified with Yog-Sothoth. In ...

After making the notes on my thoughts of Nyarlathotep as a keyhole, I decided to see what the ToA cards might show me about this. I also wanted to see what messages I might get from the cards about something I keep experiencing in the dreamworld. To explain what I noticed in these two readings and how it may shift some things for me, I should explain the dreams first. Over the past week - ever since the ritual I participated in a week ago - I have had several experiences while asleep of spending time with someone I can't see. I can't see them because I don't look at them. I don't need to. It's like sitting next to a friend and looking in another direction while you talk. There is no doubt in my dreams that I know them. We are close, with a mental and emotional intimacy that is almost sensual or erotic just because of how very intimate it is. There isn't physical intimacy in the dreams, and no sexual tension. Nothing that feels like the intimacy is building until...

There was weird work to be done tonight. I don't talk too openly about these things. I talk more openly, and in other places, about my worship practices. There are parts that are too private, too intimate, so I don't open up about all the details. I will talk pretty openly about worship, though, and one reason is that talking about it is part of those practices. Magical practices, though? I learned a long time ago that there are good reasons for keeping quiet that aren't about asking, "But what would people think?!" I'm not concerned about the opinions. I'd be a lot quieter about a lot more things if that was the case. Unless certain things were constructed for being made public, though, there is vulnerability in revealing too much. As a side note, I will say here that the pictures I take are not of the actual practices. Social media culture, algorithms, marketability...it all encourages us to share what we're doing. Sometimes it's bett...

I drew these cards from the ToA deck on the 23rd of this month. I talk about divination a lot on social media, and I sometimes share glimpses of my Yog-Sothothery work without explaining what it is. I wouldn't say I'm hiding it. Having a link to this blog publicly available wouldn't be the way to do that. I just keep it quieter than other things. I admit I do fret over what people think of me, but I'm not afraid of being weird online and I don't think that's what keeps me quieter about it. It's personal. There are other things I do that with, as well. These things are public, but I'm not really advertising them. It's personal. Quiet.  So I didn't post the cards on social media, and I was going to do it here (that's why I took the picture), but the past few days have been hectic. Not all in good ways, not all in bad ways. Here are the cards now. Reading them in that odd back-and-forth way that I do with this deck... Eyes Forming An...

This week has tested my limits, and the worst of it may not even be here yet. I knew it would happen. I knew there was nothing I could do to stop it from happening. It's a situation too personal to write the details here, but I do want to record what I was given when I pulled out my cards tonight to seek guidance. I'm still getting familiar with my ToA deck. That process doesn't usually take this long, but I've never worked with a deck like this one before. Diving into the Eldritch Mysteries...well, it's possible I'll never truly know this deck like all the other decks and various divination tools I work with. There may always be some surprise, some new method, some unexpected twist. I pulled out three cards tonight, looking for guidance for the situation I'm currently working my way through. Reading them with that back and forth flow that I do: A Wide-Nebulous Shadow Black Wells Of Wisdom A Central Black Throne Beyond The Veil Colors And Sounds ...

Maybe I'll never tell the whole Lake Monster story here. Maybe I'll just keep referencing it as if the whole thing is already known. I seem to be in That Sort of Mood tonight, but I do need to come back to the Lake Monster because things continue to...reveal? Unfold? I'm not sure exactly what's happening, but it's something. In talking to a few trusted companions about the Lake Monster, things were mentioned about the mythologies of various Indigenous peoples who lived in our area, and stories of great horned serpents came up. I'm being a bit vague here because I don't want to make it sound like I'm claiming that my Lake Monster must be the exact same spirit that was known to these Indigenous people. I don't know that she's not, but I don't know that she is and too much has been taken from our Indigenous peoples. At this point, I'm looking at the connections as a flow of information to lead me deeper, not as any kind of evidence that thes...

I wrote before about the dreams I've been having, the songs that follow a string of multiples nights of these dreams, and the feeling that Home is communicating something to me. After writing about it, it occurred to me to put the word "home" through the ToA gematria and see what that adds to things. The number I got is 23. "Of course it is," I thought. After all, 23 is a special number for me. A lot of the things that make it a special number are tied to home. So before I went any further with this, just the number itself stood out. But let's see what I get with that number from the ToA cards. I started with card 23...the obvious one to start with. Mystically Magnetised Invoking A Quantum Gateway This sounds right up my alley! But it's not really enough for me to truly start feeling like things either do or don't line up, so I also decided to look at cards 2 and 3. Card 2:  A Trail Of Sailing Stars An Aura By The Rim Card 3: ...

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...

I'm still experimenting with the TOA cards. I'm not sure that experimentation ever will (or should) end. These don't feel like the kind of cards one gets so familiar with everything designed into them that one becomes some kind of master of using them. That's not to say mastery cannot be reached, but that it would come from a very different approach than with other decks. I decided to go ahead and try a Past/Present/Future reading and see what I get. The way I've been reading three cards each day is really working. I intend to take some time one day to think about the shape it makes when I follow the written messages that way. But the first time I tried the P/P/F reading, following it that way didn't look like it would work. Following it that way would give me: Past -  With a pandemoniac cachinnation Present -  Beyond the world of man Future -  Fire from Earth can't burn it Growing in hidden evil caves Present - Prehuman vaults of nightmares Past...

No, I will not always be writing about these cards. I'm spending time getting familiar with them, and it's been a slow few days with other projects right now because of some physical obstacles. When those two situations are put together...lots of fascination with the cards! As I've said before, the easy thing to do is lay out three cards, read across the tips, then read across the bottoms. The art makes sort of eldritch Rorschach inkblots, so finding out what I see in them each time is interesting. I haven't been doing anything to assign the positions of the cards to specific things. With tarot, I've got lists of things three cards can be for. Past, Present, Future is an obvious one. That's what I'm intending to try with these cards, but I haven't done it yet. Today, I was playing with how I read the written phrases. Doing the "read the tops, read the bottoms" thing here gives me: A dance of strange attraction Some half-imaginary di...

I have a specific set of dice I work with for divination. Astragalomancy is still a new skill for me. I'm experimenting with working with the dice in different ways. The past couple of days, I've been combining that with drawing cards. I do the 3 card thing. Then I roll dice to tell me which single card to pull out and reflect on. The dice I use for this are a pair of d10s. Ten-sided, and one is what is known as being for percentages in roleplaying games. The numbers start with 00 and go to 90, always as one of the tens. The other is single digits...1,2,3, etc. So I roll them together, add the numbers, then find the card. Yesterday, I got 20 and 5. Card 25: A dream-infested daemon-city Transdimensional shadows Today, I got 60 and 7. Card 67: Phantasms of drugs or delirium Strange dark rites I was sitting on the edge of the bed when I rolled the dice and didn't have them on a more stable surface. I reached over the grab something and they shifted a bit. When I turned back ar...

One of the three cards I pulled today from the Temple of Abzu  deck is card 52. I'm going to be experimenting with different ways to read these cards, but I'm starting with the simple "Pull three. Read across the tops. Read across the bottoms." What was written on the cards isn't what I'm focused on right now, though. I want to look at the art on card 52. None of the cards have art that looks like A Specific Thing. That's interesting to me. My start with divination was tarot. There's a lot of symbolism in the art, and I lean heavily on that. I'm a skilled reader, but I've never been somebody who can give much of an answer if you ask, "Is it bad news if I get these two cards together?" I need to see the cards. I need to see the other cards. I need to see where they sit in relation to each other, and I need to see what's going on with the art. I know the concepts associated with The Magician, but some Magicians put a lit...