Friday, December 21, 2018

Planning the cozy ritual and oracle room

Previous/ MasterList/ Next

Welcome to the Yule Tarot Blog Hop--gee where has the year gone?

The theme for this TBH is "cozy." Or as I like to call it, "Another chance for Morgan to talk about how he wants to remodel the house." In this particular case, how I would like to set up my upstairs ritual/oracle room.

Is this your card?
When me and my wife first brought the house, the second bedroom was to become my office with the half-basement being a ritual room. Having lived in the house for sixteen years, and having more ritual and fortune telling under my belt, along with the lingering effects of my wife's motorcycle accident, using the downstairs for ritual is not as practical as it used to be. So it is time for changes.

[The reason that my wife got into a motorcycle accident was that her biological father, an evil old man with a room temperature IQ and the stubbornness of a mule, decided that the daughter he did not know, needed a professional grade motorcycle (which she did not want) and insisted that she was going to ride it (despite the fact that a moped was more her speed and skill level). This resulted in her having an accident the very first day on it--she slammed it into the side of a car--her hip was slammed between the big-ass bike and the car. To this day, she has problems with that leg. Over time, it has gotten harder for her to make it up and down the basement stairs.]

We have decided that the basement is going to be my office and private workspace for my Golden Dawn related work...

[I no longer need as much room and "bareness" for my GD work, having left my role as a GD group leader and being completely happy to let someone else deal with the Neophytes--my future GD work is going to be done with just a keyboard and a bad attitude. The odds of me ever doing another GD group ritual--initiation or otherwise is relatively low--more so with the fact that I am far more interested in applying Golden Dawn techniques to a different symbolic framework than I am in fighting to become one of the Big Name Occultists.]

...and the upstairs room is going to become a shared ritual and mediation room instead.

Like my yard (which has been the subject for several of this year's Tarot Blog Hop entries), the vision for the ritual room is based on my vast amount of social witchcraft and magical experience. As some of my friends can guess, some of my ideas come from working with Cassandra and my time taking classes over at Herbs and Arts (when it was still owned by Morning Glory) as well as vast amounts of personal practical experience.

One of the things I have learned is that my magic and Tarot/oracle reading is affected by the atmosphere of the location that I am working in. I have done the public reading route, both in occult shops (up front, in the back room, have yet to do a reading on the roof of one, but it is only a matter of time...) and in coffee houses (that is why many of my Tarot decks have spilled tea on them) and at parties (let's call it being "entertainment"). And I have learned that public reading is just one step away from working in a cubicle, or a boiler room (hey, I seriously explored working for someone with a 1-800 number).

No, the best environment for me to do reading is lit with candles, private and smells of vast amounts of incense. Think "gypsy tent." Laugh if you will, but I think that they were onto something.

(Okay, internet police--I know that the term "gypsy" is either an insult and/or a stolen term that I should not apply to my own work--never mind the fact that me and my sisters used to joke about "being gypsies" when we were kids; only political correctness counts in today's world.)

 Basically, a "cozy" atmosphere helps me in my magical and divination work. And my wife would like us to have a ritual room upstairs...

(We also have a couple of friends who would like to see me focus more on Wicca and such.)

...so, why not make my wife happy? Besides, I need to get back into the swing of my magical work. 

As such, my wife and I have talked about what we would like to do with the room. My vision tends to be a little more grand (as in "What would I do if I had a boatload of ill-gotten gains from a wildly successful book?") while my wife is more realistic. For instance, I would like to have a fireplace in the room, but that would require a bunch of cash and the hiring of people who actually know how to do the work. There are those fake fireplace heaters, but it is not the same.

Something that my wife mentioned when I told her about the subject of this Blog Hop is that she would like a corner full of comfy pillows. So, the room is going to have a big pile of soft (and probably tasteful) pillows. And many, many gods and goddesses; it is an artist's house after all. And cats! Many, many cats. The cats will probably vote that the pile of pillows belong to them.

(The real challenge will be figuring out how to keep Anubis, our big twenty pound black cat, from deciding that everything on the altar and/or reading table is not important, and knocking all such nonsense onto the floor, so that he can take a well-deserved nap.)

Of course, all this requires me to clean out the room (it ended up being used for storage, due to the lack of enough bookcases in the house--a DIY project that has been delayed while I work on the novel--thirty thousand words and counting...) and then getting out of my wife's way.

It is totally do-able. After all, I am now on bipolar meds, and can cope with the project.

Tarot Blog Hop--all about the Tarot.
Thanks for reading my TBH entry. As always, you are encouraged to follow the links and read the other entries for this theme--there is always something new to learn.

Have a happy Yule and a great 2019. 

Previous/ MasterList/ Next