The Magic Circle Manifest
If it seems like forever ago that I Finished building my altar and started working on the magic circle element in my basement temple it's because I legit did. I look back on the dates timestamped on the earliest photos I took of the boards and can't believe that it took me this long. The process of building these boards was much simpler than building the altar but the key difference was in the sheer volume of painting to be done and man alive, do I hate painting!
I began the process back at the end of July and here I am, halfway to Yule and I'm just wrapping it up. Building the actual altar, painting and all didn't take this long, for crying out loud! Then again, a confluence of cosmic difficulty conspired against me in order to slow my roll. Once again, back in September, I found myself looking for work and in spite of a sudden increase in free time, which I had initially planned to use building out these boards, my nephew adjusted the play settings in my copy of Fortnite which suddenly made the game a lot more playable for me and therefore more enjoyable. Then I couldn't help myself and bought a copy of Dragon Ball FighterZ and struggled with it until I realized that I just can't hack the current fighting game scene. And then Red Dead Redemption 2 came out and I lost sight of practically everything that didn't involve grinding Fortnite tiers for loot or riding my horse across the plains of video game Americana. Truly a conundrum.
I kid. I was just lazy. Which is something that I seem to be copping to on the regular around here. And in spite of writing an article about my frustrations with initiation and questioning the need for such a thing, in the first place, I made a pact with myself to get on with it and in 2019 actually move up the ladder because I suspect that no matter how much Associate Members work I do, there's going to come a time when they stop me and ask that I actually get initiated. I just don't see a situation where Poke is going to hand over 7th degree course work to a 0 degree student in spite of Associate Member status. I for sure won't be able to join the inner order without formal initiation.
So, here's how I did it all.
I bought a pair of plywood sheets after doing a bit of math to figure out how many of these quadrants I could cut out of the sheet. I measured out the center of the sheet and then used a carpenter's square to find the angles and did my best to draw parallel arcs from point to point in order to craft a circle. Then I cut.
The process of cutting the plywood was nerve wracking as I have a hard time cutting straight lines with a saw. Let's make that a thousand times harder with 360 degrees of curve. The end-result, however, was pretty not bad. The number one problem being that the inner diameter of the ring was supposed to be 9 feet but ended up 8. I don't math very well, apparently. That extra foot would have been helpful but honestly, the 8 foot diameter still gives me room to move around inside of. Operations not requiring the altar will make this a non-issue.
The next step was to cut out a ring of masonite. Plywood would have been fine but it would have looked like shit. Cutting a second ring out of masonite sheets was a pain in the ass but worth it. I basically placed each quadrant on the two sheets of masonite that I bought and traced their shapes and then cut. The masonite provided a smooth surface. For each quadrant, I joined the two pieces with Gorilla Glue and then left overnight with weights to make sure nothing funny happened.
Masonite is just fiber and the jigsaw shredded the edges. There were also significant differences in the shape of the parent quadrant and its masonite top. I wanted to smooth this out and make these as even as possible so I sanded the edges a bit and then applied putty. Then I sanded some more until I had the best, most consistent surface that I could make. Then I painted.
The first step was to prime each board with the leftover primer from the alatar. Then I taped off as close as I get to one inch at the edges and painted each board with a semi-gloss black paint. The edges all ended up looking real jagged and janky so I touched up the jank with a black Sharpie. So far so good.
I wrote about it a little while back but after reading a footnote in Poke's book and then reading Stephen Flowers' book about The Fraternitas Saturni and their use of electricity and different spectrums of light, I decided that I was going to use black lights in my temple at the very least. So I bought a couple strings of LED black lights and used the remaining black light paint from the compass rose project to decorate the boards with their elemental symbol and each planetary and zodiacal attribution.
And then the boards sat untouched in the basement for months while I played video games and lost sight of my goals. It's not exactly awesome but back around Halloween I took advantage of a Fortnite bug that awarded me way too many tiers and I ended up with the werewolf skin that I'd been pining for way before I should have had it. Lacking any real motivation to play the game, I just sort of stopped. And then Red Dead 2, as beautiful as well-made as it is, was a lonesome horse riding simulator with a high tedium quotient and I just felt -- I don't know -- done with video games for a while. I took on the Weird Left Discord project and felt some real inspiration from my comrades there. So I got back at it and followed through.
Yes. It was as tedious as I thought it would be, but it was also incredibly meditative and as each board was completed I felt a certain pride in what I had made. I even found myself experimenting and finding ways to make the process easier for me to work in, which also happened while working on the altar. The process was this:
Draw the letters on the boards in pencil.
Trace the pencil lines with a white paint pen.
Fill in each outlined shape with white acrylic paint
Paint over the white in the appropriate black light paint color
Outline each shape with black Sharpie to clean up the lines and make them look neat.
At first, I tried painting with these whispy little brushes that made the process take forever. Then I found a larger brush in the garage that worked well but made a bigger mess. I cut the bristles in half with scissors to give me more control over where the paint went. After that, the process flew.
What you see above are the four quadrants, Air, Fire, Water, and Earth. Each board is painted in its corresponding color with the ruling Archangel's name in Phoenician at the left, and obviously in English on the right with their corresponding Solomonic seals, stenciled from a font I borrowed from old HP Lovecraft paperbacks.
After I'd finished painting each board, I'd go over the lettering again, edging each letter with a sharpie in order to straighten out the edges and make it less sloppy looking.
Now the whole thing is finished and I'm honestly not sure what I should do with myself. I poured a lot of energy into this project and the altar and the undertakings were so monolithic in my life that without some big hands-on creative project to work on, I'm not sure what to do with myself. I still have to set up some icons for the Archangel thangkas with candles so that I can perform a formal temple opening and invocation, and it probably wouldn't hurt to get some carpeting and drapes to surround the space with so I'm not left feeling like I'm performing ceremonies in a cement box but I've priced those things out and will probably have to wait a bit as it ain't cheap.
I'm also pretty rusty in some of my OTA rudiments so I need to spend some time in this space meditating and working on self-hypnosis and get back to practicing the Middle Pillar exercise, but I think I'll be ready to submit my formal second degree material to Frater Thabion and Soror Zandria early next year and start thinking about a trip to the Hermitage in Silverado for initiation.