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Kimberly Steele ([personal profile] kimberlysteele) wrote2025-06-07 12:56 am
Entry tags:

Ogham Readings on Saturdays


I am happy to read your Ogham free of charge -- that's how I hone my divination skills.  Please limit your reading request to four or fewer Ogham cards: though this can take many forms, here are some common ones (all of them are basically combos of 4 cards):
 
-a single three card reading for the week or month and a one-off, one card reading
-four questions about four separate items that require one answer (card) per item
-a one card reading to answer a specific question and a three card for a more nuanced question
-Two separate readings, two cards a piece exploring the positives and negatives of two different choices
 
I am happy to do Ogham readings confidentially via email -- just email me at k steele studio at gmail during the allotted time/before deadline.  I cannot answer health questions.  If you have a question about health or another sensitive, private matter, provide a bunch of non-identifying information and the Ogham will be able to figure it out even if I don't. I'm serious... the Ogham actually tend to "know" things without me being privy to what is going on.

Please note I take time off during Solstices and Equinoxes for Druid stuff and because sometimes I simply need a break

My next planned break is from Saturday, June 21, 2025 - Friday, July 11, 2025.

I take reading requests from whenever this post goes up on Friday night until 8pm US Central Time Saturday.  

For a more in depth look into how I read and interpret the Ogham's symbols, please visit my website druidogham.wordpress.com.

I am currently trying to minimize my use of PayPal.  If you'd like to make a donation, I would be grateful if you did it here:

http://buymeacoffee.com/kimberlysteele

Your prayers of blessing to the deity/deities of your choice are welcome whether or not you can donate.

kimberlysteele: (Default)
Kimberly Steele ([personal profile] kimberlysteele) wrote2025-06-02 11:08 pm

Y'All Need a Banishing Ritual

When I began doing a daily banishing ritual almost ten years ago, I had a feeling I would one day preach the need for it in public. Well, here I am. Within that scant decade, I came up with my nascent concept of astral pyramids, which are imaginal structures that develop their own wills and velocities and that want to expand at the base. Now I find myself fulfilling that early prophecy — I am an unpaid advertiser for the banishing ritual’s astral pyramid. From the outside, I know now as I knew then that I appear as a strange and foreign land in my enthusiasm for an esoteric practice that involves ten minutes a day of standing around, drawing shapes in the air, and crooning the names of gods. Appearing to be a weirdo is a risk I am willing to take. I hope people start taking up various banishing rituals en masse, because much like the late Roman empire our era tends to rhyme with, the people are in a state of collective astral sepsis.

 

One of the troubles with being sensitive is that my consciousness acts like a superhauler net for passing dramas and emotional dirty laundry. I cannot read anyone’s mind, but I can sense where their minds wander with an uncanny accuracy. Most average people have a slew of dark, macabre thoughts they have never once brought to the surface and dealt with in the light of consciousness. Most normies are plagued with grotesque sex and violence fantasies which of course are worse if they watch porn. You don’t need to watch porn, however, to have a festering subconscious mess on your hands — some of the worst and most hideous fantasies I have perceived came from older suburban women who are nothing but kind, pleasant, and helpful in person.

If the nice suburban lady has a snuff film series perpetually running in her subconscious, you can bet anyone born in the porn and digital media saturated generations that came after her is not doing any better.

Where does it come from and why is it like this?

Not only are we not alone when we think we are alone, we are all under constant spiritual attack. We live in a spiritual Dark Age. Never has a group of civilizations been in more profound denial and ignorance of the unseen, non-obvious (occulted) world. To the average person in our day, magic has to be Harry Potter with his fire hoses of lightning shooting from his fingertips or it does not exist. If an animal or tree doesn’t start forming sentences in American English, we claim we cannot understand its language. We are so senseless and numb when it comes to the spirit world, we pave paradise to put up a parking lot. We call an office complex “church” and presume God will give us goodies if we show up there in our cars every Sunday.

Those who think a being powerful enough to have a great deal of authority over our lives and deaths is beyond being pissed off at us would be wrong. I think Jesus has become so frustrated with what has been done in his name that he has all but left the building. He is still around, but he makes himself scarcest around the very people who claim to know him best. Their massive egos don’t leave him sufficient breathing or speaking room. The thing invoked in megachurches is neither Jesus nor God, nor anything like him. Many Christian rituals summon an array of spirits, some of which are benevolent. From what I have sensed in Christian churches, all too many of the spirits are neutral or malevolent. In any given mainstream religious service, I have sensed an array of feeder spirits who eat loosh, elementals, fairies (fairies can be as predatory and malevolent as they come), bodhisattvas, and demons. Yes, you heard me correctly, demons.

Any ritual gathering of people in an unbanished, badly designed, and unholy space is going to attract its fair share of demons. Certain human activities generate potent astral and etheric energy dumps. Religious rituals are no exception. A large group of spiritual insensitives whose members believe God himself is reaching out and touching them are not totally wrong. For those willing to live Jesus’s word via selfless generosity and the Golden Rule, ritual is a pathway to connect to Jesus via their Holy Guardian Angels and higher selves. For the rest, ritual is a socially acceptable method of getting high.

When the Catholic church discarded its traditional mass for the “new” one, it opened the floodgates for sinister spirits to take the mantle once held by the Christian God. Long before Catholics abandoned their own genius, longstanding egregore, Protestants were making a demonic mockery of Jesus via Pentecostalism. Charlatans writhing on the ground and babbling like asylum patients in public while claiming the miraculous healing powers of Jesus gave rise to both Spiritualist seances where other charlatans allegedly channeled the dead and modern televangelist “healing” shows.

By the time I was born in 1973, there wasn’t a serious religious ritual to be found almost anywhere in the world, save a few enclaves where people had instinctively preserved the old ways. Add to this a bunch of zealots who claimed every ghost sighting or non-monotheist synchronicity was demonic and it is no wonder people like me started saying “my church is the great outdoors”. They traded a living spiritual ecosystem for a broken, muted liminal space that looked a great deal like a shopping mall.

Ritual in general is like bathing and serves a similar function on the astral plane. Old Catholic and Orthodox masses were and are full of banishing and cleansing elements such as images of God, singing, chanting, incense, and demon traps in the form of repeating symmetrical designs. Not only does the repetition of a traditional mass strengthen the inner self of the person lucky enough to participate in its pageantry, it simultaneously draws and builds the ancient power of millions who have performed the ritual over time. Time and space are irrelevant on the level of spirit because spirit is so large and time and space are small. There is nothing spirit cannot “see”. Those who choose to enact the ancient mass are like radios that decide to tune themselves to a holy bandwidth. Yes, they could choose to dial in static like everyone else, or they can narrow down their actions to specifically tune into the self-improvement God channel. Of course there are many God channels and many rituals that tune into them. One of these is the Sphere of Protection. Though there are other banishing rituals, the Sphere of Protection is the one I am the most familiar with. It is also considered easier and gentler than other banishing rituals for reasons I do not understand.

Decompression mode

Someday when this incarnation is over for the lot of us, I believe we will look upon this time as very compressed, dense, and pressurized as history goes. Many have tried to cram several lifetimes worth of experience into a single incarnation: multiple marriages, houses, great hoards of possessions, compulsive travel/perpetual tourism, children with multiple mates, and careers that make it clear that nobody can serve two masters. The Sphere of Protection (SoP) is a great separator, unsmooshing disparate intentions so they are no longer tangled and confused with one another. When I first started doing the SoP, I had the instinct as most do to attract monetary prosperity to myself without considering where the wealth was coming from. As years wore on, something happened where I was no longer willing to accept unearned wealth even in the realm of fantasy. What replaced the lust for unearned wealth was a feeling of true security and the notion that my will could sustain me in far worse circumstances. The result was a deep appreciation of the small and large luxuries I have as a lower middle class American and the steady diminishing of the Wendigo to accumulate more, more, MORE.

The balanced ecosystem of the SoP

The Sphere of Protection invoke an ecosystem via the imagination and a bit of dramatization, i.e. hand gestures and body movements. The way it works is via numbers and shapes. You do a series of turns, facing one direction and tracing a circle, facing another and tracing a triangle, and so on. This seems like a bunch of nothing until you actually do it every day for about six months. I went through the motions for a long time. If you’ve ever played a musical instrument, it is a great deal like musical practice. For the first six months to a year, you sound like ass and you are embarrassed every time you hear yourself. Give it enough time and dedication, however, and you sound pretty good.
The Sphere of Protection opens with a mini ritual of essentially drawing a cross in the air. In my own case, I sing the names of the gods I invoke. There are four of them all belonging to the same pantheon. After the cross, the “real” Sphere begins and it involves turning to the East, South, West, and North (clockwise) and invoking one god per corner. The East and West gods are masculine and the South and West are feminine. This can be changed around so the North and South are masculine and East and West are feminine. Monotheists can also adapt the entire invocation to their own, single god. Again, in my case, I sing the Divine names but you can also just speak them. It’s a very adaptable ritual.

The Sphere of Protection ends with drawing a circle for the spirit above and the spirit below and imagining another cross with two extensions going up and down much like a ship with a mast and an anchor. The Sphere is complete when you imagine all the invoked forces meeting and creating a protective ball around you that extends about four to ten feet around your general person. I am a visual learner, so that is why I have made
a video of the Sphere of Protection here.

The Sphere of Protection will not make you astrally bulletproof, but it will deflect a large amount of psychic static that would otherwise make itself into a nuisance. In my own case, I am a psychopomp, which is a fancy term for someone who talks to the dead and occasionally helps them cross over. The SoP has helped me filter genuine messages from deceased people who need my help and muted the voices of malicious impersonator spirits. I would highly advise that anyone who struggles with addictive behavior perform the SoP every day. Addictions are commonly the result of being fed upon by nefarious entities who get off on the energy of addictive behavior. In large part, the SoP is a big astral pyramid that is using me to perpetuate itself. I’m fine with that, and if you give it a try, I will try to help as much as I am able.

I have a detailed walkthrough of the SoP here. Good luck!
boccaderlupo: Fra' Lupo (Default)
boccaderlupo ([personal profile] boccaderlupo) wrote2025-05-31 06:32 pm

All the Hosts and Powers of Heaven

An interesting post from researcher Sasha Chaitow on theurgy and Orthodox Christianity, tracing the impacts of Pseudo-Dionysius. This resonates with some of my own perspective and experiences, and some points I've suggested previously, namely: though there may be no real "survival of the pagan gods" per se, in terms of propagation of the ancient mysteries, it remains that—in the Mediterranean, at least—there is a transmission and syncretization of those mysteries in plain sight, specifically (in my view) in the mystery of the Eucharist. Much, I suspect, has to do with the concept of participation and its spiritual enactment in terms of communion. But perhaps that's a subject for another time.

We see this syncretization in some obvious places like Dante and, say, some Renaissance architecture (to say nothing of the magic of that period), and more blatantly in syncretic survivals like the festa U Muzzini in Alcara li Fusi. In the Italic peninsula, we see this also at certain shrines, such as the Madonna del Sacro Monte on Monte Gelbison (formerly dedicated to Hera) and St. Michael on Monte Gargano, a former location of pagan devotion. Indeed, it may be said of such "high places," as of the former: Locus iste sanctus est, et ab angelis consacratu. As even St. Augustine notes, in City of God: "If the Platonists prefer to call these angels gods rather than demons, and to reckon them with those whom Plato, their founder and master, maintains were created by the supreme God, they are welcome to do so, for I will not spend strength in fighting about words."

To that end, I offer an overview of some scriptural references that are suggestive of a henotheistic view of Christianity, for those who are into that kind of thing:

God creates the gods (Psalm 33:6, Colossians 1:16, CF "God of gods," Deuteronomy 10:17), the sons of god (Job 1.6, Psalm 82:6) and the hosts of heaven (Psalm 103:21, Psalm 148:2). They partake of divinity, but the creator remains unique and they are subject to him (Psalm 89:7-8, Psalm 95:3). He has apportioned the nations among them (Deuteronomy 32:8 (LXX), CF Judges 11:24), but selected the descendants of Abraham as his own people (Genesis 12:2), though they are to worship him alone (Exodus 20) and not to pursue other gods not apportioned to them (Deuteronomy 18:9, Deuteronomy 29.26).

At some point, the depredations of these gods and their dalliances with humankind became so extreme (Genesis 6:1-6, 2 Peter 2:4, Jude 1:6, CF pseudepigrapha 1 Enoch) that the Lord, after considering the destruction of all humankind, passed judgement upon the gods (Psalm 82:7-8, CF Hebrews 2:5), much as he executed judgment on all the gods of Egypt (Exodus 12:12), and shall gather all nations to him (Psalm 86:9-10). Those gods persist (1 Corinthians 8:5), but their worship is deprecated.

At a particular point in history, he himself would enter the sensible, material world as a human (John 1:9, John 1:14, Romans 8:3) and by his own act of sacrifice, as the Christ (Colossians 2:9), redeem the world from death (Hebrews 2:9, Philippians 3:8, Revelations 1:18), to break the power of fell spirits (Hebrews 2:14-15, CF Matthew 10:1), and thereby enable humankind to become adopted children of the Most High (John 1:12, John 3:16, Galatians 4:4-5).


As St. Athanasius writes provocatively in On the Incarnation, "For the Son of God became man so that we might become God."
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Kimberly Steele ([personal profile] kimberlysteele) wrote2025-05-31 12:13 am
Entry tags:

Ogham Readings on Saturdays


I am happy to read your Ogham free of charge -- that's how I hone my divination skills.  Please limit your reading request to four or fewer Ogham cards: though this can take many forms, here are some common ones (all of them are basically combos of 4 cards):
 
-a single three card reading for the week or month and a one-off, one card reading
-four questions about four separate items that require one answer (card) per item
-a one card reading to answer a specific question and a three card for a more nuanced question
-Two separate readings, two cards a piece exploring the positives and negatives of two different choices
 
I am happy to do Ogham readings confidentially via email -- just email me at k steele studio at gmail during the allotted time/before deadline.  I cannot answer health questions.  If you have a question about health or another sensitive, private matter, provide a bunch of non-identifying information and the Ogham will be able to figure it out even if I don't. I'm serious... the Ogham actually tend to "know" things without me being privy to what is going on.

Please note I take time off during Solstices and Equinoxes for Druid stuff and because sometimes I simply need a break

My next planned break is from Saturday, June 21, 2025 - Friday, July 11, 2025.

I take reading requests from whenever this post goes up on Friday night until 8pm US Central Time Saturday.  

For a more in depth look into how I read and interpret the Ogham's symbols, please visit my website druidogham.wordpress.com.

I am currently trying to minimize my use of PayPal.  If you'd like to make a donation, I would be grateful if you did it here:

http://buymeacoffee.com/kimberlysteele

Your prayers of blessing to the deity/deities of your choice are welcome whether or not you can donate.

boccaderlupo: Fra' Lupo (Default)
boccaderlupo ([personal profile] boccaderlupo) wrote2025-05-30 06:58 am
Entry tags:

LLMs are demonic

Conjured intelligences of questionable human provenance and ever more inscrutable intent, to which more and more people are deferring questions that would typically be handled by a person's intellect, will, and imagination...not good.
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Kimberly Steele ([personal profile] kimberlysteele) wrote2025-05-27 01:37 pm

New Podcast Dropping Tomorrow: Casual Temple with Merrily Duffy

I am delighted to announce my second podcast interview with Casual Temple's Merrily Duffy. We had a delightful conversation about my upcoming book, Sacred Homemaking (Aeon Books coming in 2026) and about practical magic in the sacred home. My cats were definitely needing some attention and there are a few cameos from them.

The podcast will be dropping Wednesday, May 28 on all the platforms.
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Kimberly Steele ([personal profile] kimberlysteele) wrote2025-05-26 11:51 pm

How the Other Eighty Percent Lives: A Snapshot of the Conscientious Working Poor in America

There are two classes in the US and possibly the world and only a single test is needed to determine which is which: there is the class of people who have had anxiety about affording groceries and the class that has never had to worry about affording groceries. In our current era of remoteness from anyone who grows a hundred percent of their own food, dependence upon the grocery store for daily sustenance is a given. On one side of the divide, we have those who have never skipped a meal for the reason they could not afford it. As much as certain people who used to fall into the Occupy Wall Street crowd want to think the upper crust is a tiny fraction of one percent who spoil outcomes for the remainder of the pyramid, the class of effortless grocery buyers that accidentally ruin everything are more like the upper twenty percent. This level is what I will call the salary class for the duration of this essay. The lower eighty percent is comprised of the lower middle class, the desperately poor, and everyone within that large spectrum. If you’ve never sweated the choice between a fast food meal and the last eighteen dollars in your bank account, it is likely you have never experienced being outside of the salary class.

Food, glorious food

Americans have a particularly warped relationship with food. Etheric starvation is especially pronounced here, hence our armies of diabetics, overweight, and obese citizens. Being dramatically overweight is a regular occurrence even among the wealthy in the US. The rich who are not overweight often go the opposite road of orthorexia, anorexia, and bulimia, enmeshing themselves in diet and exercise culture that hybridizes excessive pride in one’s physical appearance with obsessive lifestyle perfectionism.

I bore witness to an exhibit of this elite perfectionism once during a trip to Whole Foods. A mother and her young adult daughter were in front of me in the checkout line, both in a state of supermodel-esque near-emaciation. They were clothed in athletic gear that probably cost more than my monthly tax, title, and mortgage. They had a huge load of fresh produce on the conveyer belt. It took FOREVER for the cashier to scan all of their fruits and veggies, and to their credit, they were not at all impatient. The total of their groceries ended being over seven hundred dollars. The women expressed some wry amusement at the total, and the mother made a comment about the daughter being hungry.

Never in my life have I spent over three hundred dollars for groceries, and to add insult to injury, there is a supermarket down the street from Whole Foods that sells the very same brands of organic produce for a third of the cost. The two women did not have to care. They had plenty of money to burn.

The salary class

To be truly salary class, your wealth must come from sources outside of the work you do for money, if you deign to work at all. I grew up upper middle class and in my profound naivete, I did not realize that the key difference between my father and my friends’ fathers was that my salesman father earned his commission-based income in the direct, old fashioned way and my friends’ fathers provided mostly via inheritances and dividends. This is nothing new. Most of Jane Austen’s heroines end up marrying men whose “umpteen thousand a year” salaries come from investments. I have only recently come to realize this distinction on the soul level. If I had not been part of the lower classes after getting married, I don’t know that I would have truly understood the distinction.

The salary class kids are largely not OK. I have not seen many examples of salary class parents in my Generation X that have produced well-rounded, emotionally stable offspring. Severe drug addiction is par for the course as is severe depression. One boy I grew up with was obsessed with reliving being bullied in high school twenty years after the fact. His badly-managed trauma turned him into a depressive narcissist and a sex addict. A girl I grew up with name drops compulsively to this day — she has never figured out how to develop apparent self-worth. She is pathetic. Another girl has more substance addictions under her belt than Justin Bieber. Sadly two out of three of the aforementioned individuals has reproduced. These kids all had parents who gave them comfortable childhoods and a lack of financial limits that will last until their parents die and give them umpteen thousand a year from beyond the grave. It’s funny how little they’ve benefitted from never having to worry where grocery money is going to come from.

Meanwhile, back in the hood…

Most of my neighbors in the lower middle class neighborhood where I live are renters. Some of them are the non-conscientious poor, i.e. the “trash” of various races. White trash, black trash, Hispanic trash, etc. The trashiest of the trash depend on welfare, quietly deal drugs, and have lawns strewn with discarded furniture and bikes. Their loud fights are impossible not to overhear from their houses and yards. They are parasites and people like them are the primary reason the poor are so despised.

The backbone of the neighborhood (and thankfully the majority, at least for now) are the conscientious working poor. A single woman lives in a converted house apartment nearby. She has three jobs, one of which is Dollar Tree. Another is disabled and depends on her husband who works at Walmart. There is a family of Mexicans who immigrated a long time ago and raised their kids here: the whole family works. In rare cases where the conscientious working poor own property, they are typically quite house proud, pouring themselves and their strained resources into home improvement and maintenance.

To be the conscientious working poor is to feel you are always drowning. The second you believe you are getting ahead — not Lululemon and seven Ben Franklins at Whole Foods ahead but ahead in the sense you can afford you car payments for a couple of months — the System kicks you in the face and the undertow sucks you into the brine again. If you dare unclench, you are immediately threatened with losing your apartment and being forced to surrender your pets to the shelter. You are always oppressed by the specter of NOT ENOUGH MONEY, and on good days, you numb the consciousness of it by putting your nose to the grindstone and working harder or laughing it off. On bad days, it threatens to swallow you whole and crush you under its weight. It becomes much easier to hate Richie Rich and her clueless, designer-dressed entourage, but that kind of sepsis does not pay your bills so you do your best to shelve it. Besides, the trashy poor person you live next to is more of a direct threat, so any worrying time is usually spent on him. Being conscientious, working, and poor at the same time sucks ass and all of my conscientious working class neighbors know it intimately.

Cost of living is so bad that the average adult’s wage, side gigs and hustles included, equals about 1/17th of the buying power it had for a comparable young adult in 1973. I remember when a small bag of candy was ten cents and bread was under a dollar. A house that cost $150,000 was palatial and there were plenty of dumps comparable to the one my husband and I bought in 2016 that were $30,000 or less. No wonder so many adult children live with their parents: what other choice do they have? Often it is the parents who have nowhere to go. The 92 year old parent of a friend of mine is interred in a nursing home that costs $14,000 per month. Yes, what I just said probably deserves its own essay. I’ll give it some thought. At 14K per month, I have asked myself why the woman’s four children don’t just rent a house and a full-time, live in RN? Wouldn’t such an arrangement cost half the price or less? I guess nobody asked me.

Blame the rich


The rich women in Whole Foods and my salary class classmates are in many ways to blame for the current predicament of the lower eighty percent. When Richie Rich demolishes an already luxurious home or part of that home to build an executive mansion instead of making do in a more conservative, smaller house, it drives all property prices skyward and the taxes make it all but impossible for the conscientious working poor to buy the homes they deserve. When they buy seven hundred dollars worth of already-overpriced groceries, the stores raise their prices because they can. When they hire armies of questionably-documented workers to build, clean, and maintain their homes, the demand for that cheap labor makes it difficult for skilled laborers to compete. Every restaurant, warehouse, and store presents similar competition where poor illegal migrants compete for entry-level jobs. I tried explaining this to my salary class friend once and he did not get it. As Upton Sinclair said, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on not understanding it.

I am not like the Occupy people. I do not want wealth redistribution. In fact, I eschew and rebuke all wealth that I did not earn. I will never own a single stock, not only because of my lackluster math skills, but because I have grown to hate and despise unearned wealth. To my mind, money made off of investments and stocks is unearned and that means it comes at the price of me having to earn it back in future lifetimes. Nope, DO NOT WANT. You’ll never know if I hit it big (with earned wealth, of course) because I will not live ostentatiously. I hate McMansions and I make no secret of this in my upcoming book, Sacred Homemaking. If unearned wealth somehow comes my way, I will do my damnedest to give it away as quickly as possible to a reputable charity. I think if more members of the salary class were like me, they would actually be better adjusted. There are more important and meaningful things than luxury and jet travel.

All in all, I am glad I was never salary class and I am grateful for my bohemian existence, even with its constant fear of financial drowning. Being thrown into this situation gave me insight into what most people are going through and enabled me to come down to Mama Earth rather than being another bored, depressed, confused, detached, perpetual tourist. I can do cool things I never would have learned how to do if I had been salary class: I can make all sorts of tasty meals from scratch, for instance, and the cost of groceries is closer to seven dollars instead of seven hundred. Little things make me happy and grateful in ways Richie Rich will never understand. Limits are powerful forces and financial limits can be taskmasters. As always, it is up to each one of us to make the best of what we are given, and in a perverse way, that can be easier when what you are given is a bit less.