Dress for the job you want

Shut up and get it over with. Make your own robe.

Some time back I made a bit of noise about the importance of regular magical practice and among the notes that I hit was a bit about taking the steps to wear ritual attire when performing your daily rituals. As I enter into a new lodge — which shall remain nameless — I find myself in need of ceremonial vestments that match the tone of the operations. The old white suit from the Sothis Lodge Points Chauds operations, though it makes me look like an Athenian philosopher heavy-weight, is the complete opposite of the aesthetic that I need to present for this newer, darker current that I’m wading into. And so, here it goes. An ode to robes and cloaks.

In the aforementioned article about practice, I’m pretty quick to point out that when it comes to magical practice, things like garb and vestments aren’t a requirement and I stand by that statement. The only price tag that enlightenment carries is that you do the work. The spark is within us all and magic is egalitarian. But if you have the means to do so, I cannot stress this enough: Go the distance and make your own attire. Thats right. Make.

An anecdote

Back when I was a member of the OTA and I was presenting my work to Frater Thabion and Soror Zandria. I included a note about the elemental symbols attached to the outer edges of the altar. I bought a couple boards of this very hard, very high-quality Hawaiian wood and made several spirited but ultimately very bad versions of the symbols for sulfur, salt, and mercury. I tried numerous ways of drawing the shapes and then cutting out of the boards but no matter what I did, the wood ended up trashed. My original designs for the altar involved these symbols being offset from the surface of the table. I could have just painted them on to the table’s surface as most of the OTA altars are but I was starting to feel quite confident and wanted to take a few steps that made it my own. But this method wasn’t working. I was about to give up when a thought occurred to me. What the fuck, dude? Just 3D print them!

I designed them in a real basic in-browser CAD application that’s intended to teach elementary school students the basics of mechanical engineering in STEM classes. I then exported the files and emailed them to a local library for printing — For real, check your local library. A lot of them have FDM printers these days for use by the public for a very small fee — After a couple of weeks waiting for my objects to come up in the print queue, I picked them up, primed them, painted them, and then struggled with 2-part epoxy during the hottest months of the summer to get the symbols to stick to the altar. Then I sent the photos and journal entries to the OTA for approval.

The feedback was nice, for the most part. The only point that they felt the need to argue with me was the 3D printed components. These were my favorite parts. They stood off the surface. They set my altar apart from the other students. They felt substantial and were among some of the most clearly visualized in my head when I was designing it. It was my Will to do it this way but the pushback came in the form of reservations about whether or not 3D printing had a place in the magical world.

Fuck. Yes. It does.

The OTA’s core practices are heavily steeped in alchemy and hermetic philosophy but the entire experience is colored by Poke’s earliest occult experiences being firmly rooted in Feraferia, Fred Adams’s earthy neo-pagan outfit. So, being that these symbols were fashioned from evil plastic and not the fruits of natural plant-reproduction, Poke and Zandria didn’t care for them. But here’s the thing: Fuck that.

I envisioned them very clearly. I saw their place on the altar and had a good reason for pursuing this approach. I took great care to build them in the hypothetical space of the design program and then sent them off to have a machine magically take nothing but a bunch of mathematical expressions in a computer file and render them to IRL from a spool of plastic filament. There is no greater metaphor for the alchemical process. The traditional way wasn’t working. So I broke it down. Solve. I looked at my options and tried something new. It’s because of these liberties that I took with them that my altar feels that much more fully-realized to me. It’s a complete table and I never look at it and think it needs something else to feel finished. Coagula.

See where I’m going with this?

But I don’t know how to sew!

Neither do I! I also had no idea how to build a table when I made that altar. You should have seen my garage! I cut a saw horse in half. I tried to mitre the corners of the frame with a circular saw and accidentally dropped the saw through three inches of the table’s pristine surface. I tore the table top apart not once but twice and started from the beginning because it was garbage and knowing how rickety some of my attempts to work with wood in the past have been I would just as soon subject myself to a slow, agonizing death than compromise and use a piece of shit altar that I know I could have done better with.

The magical process is all about building and improving. You invest energy into manifesting something that didn’t exist before and you come out the other end with more than you started with. This is why our tools hold so much power. You make a wand by envisioning it, drawing it, and then taking pieces of wood and working them until the result matches your Will. All that thought and personal energy goes into it so that when you use it, it has all the personal signatures of you as you use it to direct your will. Just as we often can’t see the spirits we work with and have to depend on their symbols and signs, we appear to them in the same way and just like each one of them has little details about them that identifies them to savvy magicians, our tools work in the same way. I envision a set of robes. I design them. I do all the work to cut and join the fabric and pour all this energy into it so that when I evoke Paimon he’ll think, “Ah, Frater Pera! We meet at last!” simply by the signs and symbols etched on to the robes by my Will.

How do we go about this?

Glad you asked.

Material

Some lodges are going to have requirements for the robes that you wear. Most will not. But if you end up in an A∴A∴ or OTO type scene, colors will play a role, depending on your grade but if it’t just you, or it’s a Golden Dawn kind of thing you can do whatever you want. The GD might require white and black robes, but the design will remain the same for both since most of their grades are represented by lamens, which is a whole other thing. Think like Mayor Quimby, but his sash says Zelator 2=9. The material itself might also make a difference but for the most part, unless you’re in some sort of Opus Dei kind of group, you want to be comfortable when you wear this thing. So take some time at a fabric store and feel it out. I like things to drape dramatically and feel a little heavy on me. You might be more in the mood for Rumours-era Stevie Nicks, and I couldn’t blame you. Also, black is played out homey. Consider a seriously deep blue, instead. But be judicious. Looking like the Cookie Crisp Wizard might be worse than no robe at all.

The Pattern

Don’t free wheel it. Trust me. Get yourself a pattern, of which there’s a million available online but you’re going to end up having to take measurements of yourself and adjust it to your size anyway. Just like I measured and drew out the lines for the altar on the board, there’s all sorts of cloth pens you can to make marks on it. Do the same thing here. A simple tau robe isn’t all that hard to draw out. There’s basically three patterns for the whole thing.

A. Measure shoulder to shoulder across your back, divide by 2.

B. Measure around the base of your beck, divide by 4. Divide by 3 if doing the hood.

C. Measure around your shoulder and under your arm. Divide by 2.

D. Measure around your chest, plus 10in/25.4cm. Divide by 4.

E. Measure shoulder to floor.

You’re going to need four panels that meet those measurements.

F. Measure shoulder to wrist.

You’ll need four sleeve panels, too. Two for each arm. Experiment with the fabric and flair the end to whatever you like. The same goes for the hood. That’s the general shape of the hood panels with the neck matching the measurements of the neck on the body. You can fuck with the shape to stylize it. Personally, I want a hood that’s going to be completely ridiculous and impractical. Also, it’s probably a good idea to pad out your numbers a bit since tailoring to exact measurements is going to end up fitting a little weird and stitching the seams together is going to eat up some of your fabric, as well.

Sew it all together

This is where the rubber meets the road, and unfortunately is probably going to be the hardest part for most folks just in the sourcing of a sewing machine. If you want to get hardcore and manually stitch this bitch together, I say go for it. Shine on, you crazy diamond. There once was a time when a sewing machine was in most American homes but not so much these days. I happen to have a sewing machine since my daughter likes to make clothes, so I’m lucky but you’ll likely need to ask around to see who in your social circle has one that you can use. Hopefully they also know how to actually use it and can show you, otherwise, Youtube has a lot of very helpful how-tos that feature a broad range of personalities ranging from chirpy youtubers who talk too fast and laugh at their own jokes and robot text-to-speech voices. However you stomach that wasteland of content is up to you. But you can do it. I believe in you.

1. Sew the center seam for each pair of body panels.

2. Sew those newly joined panels together at the side seams.

3. Sew the shoulder seams.

4. Sew the sleeves at the seams, then attach to the body.

5. Sew the hood at the seams, then attach to the body.

Our first attempts at making a robe are probably going to be insane and look like something made by Salvador Dali but like I said with the altar project, I tore mine down a bunch of times before I ended up with something that I like and I’m hella proud of that thing even if it isn’t this ornate piece of ritual furniture. I still made and I love it. And you’re going to feel the same way about this robe. It’ll elevate your game in ways you never thought possible and will open up another road of creativity for you to explore. By this time next year you may even have a newer robe, with more intricacy, tailoring, and embroidery. Definitely let me know how it works out for you.

And for the love of God, if you know a better way to do this, do let me know. Like I said…