Summoning Shadows
The system is growing up nicely! As it should, as it should...
Throwback through time into London, roughly two years ago. The Oval, Tower Hamlets. A warehouse burning down, exploding my laptop, melting my phone. I wasn't there to see the flames. My beloved almost died that day. It wasn't the fire that kept him trapped, it was his drugs. A year later, December 2024, they finished the job. I've been a mess ever since, spent most of 2025 grieving.
Now the tides seem to be turning. It was always promised that we would spend a long and happy life with each other. Five to eight kids, said the spirits, and I didn't believe them when they told me this truth. London destroys all belief that a spirit might hope to gather. It's a wretched and disgusting time-of-place to be stuck in. But now I'm out. Even my head has made the journey back into Germany, where it belongs. Time spent healing is never wasted (for real).
Back at The Oval I lived in the open loft of the warehouse. No walls, no privacy, heat gathering under the roof in the summer, the roof itself it seems made of asbestos. Brown dust everywhere, pidgeons flying in through holes in the roof, rain flooding the hallway in the autumn. Strange and broken and liminal spaces like that have the potential to produce intense visions, and that's exactly what happened. Courtesy of drugs, but not entirely.
Some of those visions keep echoing back and forth in my mind, trying to find where they belong in the present, or the future, or elsewhen. The one that's present now is the one that transitions my spellcraft from internal alchemy into external ritual. Back at The Oval there was a low shelf opposite my bed, holding my tools and my grimoires and books. And one day I saw the vision of four creatures or guardians crouching behind the shelf, each with a unique mask on their face. They seemed to be very solid figures, like statues, and I felt the urge to construct them but lacked the ability to do so.
Here in this room I'm in now there's four shelf boards high up near the ceiling opposite from my bed. For Samhain I cleared the first shelf to the left of its books and placed my 3D-printed skull Gregor there, the first of my familiars. Then I wrote down the names of my deceased friends on white pieces of paper and hung them on white strings from the ceiling. A first altar set-up, producing the labels of all four modules that are relevant in the system: Game Mythos Film Temple.
Those four words – one four each guardian, one for each shelf, four altars in the making – encapsulate most of the research that I've been working on for the last six years. It's a relief to have a modular description of the set-up at last! It'll be even more fun however to put the modules into working order and fuse them together, produce the quintessence, so to speak.
The first altar, dedicated to GAMING, belongs to dead people. Who's pulling your strings? It's been your ancestors all along. They pass you curses as well as required healing. That's the first cornerstone of The System which fuels the magic I inhabit. The second one is MYTHOS, and the shelf so far is filled with fairytale books. Germany truly is an enchanted entity – in beneficial as well as contradictory ways.
But this first step – making the transition from internal to external work – is a very large promise indeed. And after a long, long summer of studying politics and contemporary culture, catching up on what I missed during five years in London, this winter is shaping up to be magically effective and metaphysically informative. Good omens ahead! We've earned it :)
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thanks for reading love you bye!