It’s my goal to one day write individual odes to 72 angels. I have been steadily, over the years, building a library of meditations written on them. I’m in the habit of revisiting and resharing the relevant ones.

The seventy two angels I’ve been writing on are linked to the signs of the zodiac. This was written after a dream I had that I was visited by Asmodel, the angel of Taurus (not to be confused with the demon of a similar name). This was our conversation.

A note from Asmodel

Asmodel came to me, a beauteous angel with the head of a splendid calf, their eyes large and twinkling, deep pools of unsullied innocence. They spoke to me of how they, the bull, the iconic symbol of Taurus throughout the ages, have always been seen as a beast of the field. Toiling, each day. A lowly, brute animal.

They trudge the rows of earth alongside us as we tuck seeds into her belly so that they might later bloom into a bounty to nurture us, for us to feast on. They are with us to help us put food on our tables and coins to jingle in our pocket.

Asmodel asked me, “Don’t you think the beast of the field who is with you as you carry out your work is an angel? Wasn’t it said in old religious books, the Bible one of them, that an angel is not only a Divine messenger, but ‘Help from God’ ?”

So, any force, any person, any creature which serves, is not beneath but above. The Bovine Divine. That’s me, Asmodel. I am the companion at your side as you work. To work, in its ideal state, is to help. Some say work is punishment. But it is not. It simply is. God worked. There would have been no rest, otherwise. There is no rest without work and no reward without work. Would you rather profit from the sweat of another person’s brow? Would you grow wealthy or fulfilled by another means? Could you even find peace without labor, or would it simply be languishing?”

“But, we are all meant to do some sort of work then?,” I said.

“Towards some genesis of truth, beauty or goodness, yes. There is none exempt. Each soul on earth harbors some beauty within, and it is their duty to excavate it. Now, there is the work that we do to sustain our bodies. And there is the work we do to sustain our souls and the souls of others. I oversee both labors, but the latter you may never retire from. Does one retire from friendship? From parenthood? From being a seer, or prophet, or musician, singer, painter or artist? No. It is stitched into your being. Irremovable. I am that force which makes it irremovable. I am that persistence. I am that constance. No matter how dormant or active the part of yourself, I am the enduringness of that role.”

“What is your nature, Asmodel?,” I asked.

“To be enduring is my nature. To be consistent is my nature. To be an angel and beast all in one is my nature. Because the things we do which are seen as low are in fact, great.

Each time you struggle to face the day, but live through it, anyways, that is me.

Each time you cry so hard that your ribs feel as though they will crack, but you still do not surrender to despair, that is me.

Each time you feel nothing, care for nothing, cannot find meaning or purpose, yet continue to search for one–that is me.

Each time you are shattered by rejection. By loss. By disappointment, by tragedy– but clamber to your feet in the rubble where your life once stood–that is me. When you rise then, it will not be triumphant, ethereal and glorious like a mystical phoenix from the ashes. It will be like me, an oxen of the field.

You’ll rise as a mortal creature, mentally fragile and unwell, battered and hurt, filled with shame, but rising, nonetheless.

I am a part of that force which animates you in spite of every trauma you endure or inflict. I, Asmodel, am present in every act of faith. I am present in the hope that staggers forward, unrelenting, even under the weight of the heaviest yoke. I am present in the strength not ofwarriors or Gods, but of the quiet resilience that goes on simply because it has to.

I am the fabric of an oath sworn and kept. The substance not of broken promises that vanish into the ether but the substance lived out in daily care. Because, no matter what, faith and hope are an integral part of the streams of time, of the mechanics of the universe. And I, Asmodel, am a feature of that time, of that universe, and of you. Just as they endure, so must you,” they answered.

“It is not so easy to endure, Asmodel. Sometimes life can be very hard, and our dreams feel very far away. Life happens and we get swept away from them. It feels easier to give up.” I replied.

“No one knows this better than me, Alejandra.” Asmodel answered. “So let me explain further. I am the consistency of a laborer who shows up and leaves according to when the work is done rather than when the clock strikes five. Don’t misunderstand me—this is not about supply and demand, commodities and class warfare. This is about the true labor of living. This is about the labor of using your life to create some sort of precious beauty–whether it is grand or quiet, modest or ostentatious, easy to understand or cloudy and uncertain.

I am the angel who whispers for you to get up when you are broken and beat. I am the angel who knows that for a genuine harvest to be yielded so too must blood and tears.

I am the angel who befriends the honest effort and the honest person. I am an angel who cares not of glory and vanity, both fleeting and pointless. Instead I search for where humiliation has rotted away egos. I till the dead carcasses of pride into the soil, transmuting it like compost, so something perennial can be reborn from the death shame and failure created. I am the angel that deals in the essential muck it takes to just carry on.

In times of war, when the canon balls roared and then stopped, a deathlike silence filled the fields. Spirits were as low as the fog that rolled at the surviving soldier’s feet. I was there, too.

I am what broke that deathlike silence–it was me, in the tap of the drummer boy’s drum. At first I was slow and quiet as the dawn broke. Then I gained strength and grew louder, and then louder still. It was me rallying the last alive to rise up again.

In fact, I am always that percussion. I am that cardiac rhythm that goes on still beating, even when your heart feels so terribly broken.

I am there when an addict relapses, unable to resist a bottle or pill or needle. When they wreak havoc on their body, on their relationships, but blink into the sober light of day and say to themselves ‘I shall try again’, that is me by their side, nudging them to go on towards the light again.

There are times when you’ve shed tears at the paramore who didn’t show up, a message left unanswered. I am the swell of hope, the butterfly in your stomach, when you cross paths with some potential new love. I am that thing which makes the sun and moon rise and set regardless of what has or has not happened.

I am the clockwork in every act of carrying on.

I cannot be stopped.

No matter how tired, no matter how weary,

I am loyal to my cause.

And, paradoxically, this deep loyalty to carrying on is the deepest act of defiance.

It is the greatest rebellion against all that would stand between you and your destiny.

I am the yearning for freedom that cannot, will not, die.

I am Asmodel, friend to the fallen, friend to all who treasure liberty, and giver of second chances.”

I answered the winged calf. “I understand now, Asmodel. Thank you.”

Asmodel nodded and then told me, “So when you speak of me to others, and share with them what I’ve told you, ask them this:

‘All you who would invoke me today–what seeds are we planting together? Do you dare undertake the challenge of not only dreaming but of working? If your courage does not fail you, I stand at the ready. I may be no friend to pride, but I am to ambition. I do not care whether it is grand or small, so long as it is true, good and honest. And when we have been consistent together, we will indulge in our bounty together. Our rest will be richer. Our reward more deeply understood, because we know its cost. Whether you wish to simply endure the hour, or build a legacy for centuries, I am ever at your side.”

“I will tell them, Asmodel.” I promised.

“Then I will be there to answer their call.”

Sigil for the angel of Asmodel pictured, from Damien Echol’s Angels & Archangels

Below is a true story dedicated to my dear and departed friend, Anna.

The Library Gnome

When I was in the twilight between girlhood and adulthood, I worked in the rare book collection of Detroit’s Main Library. The Burton Historical Collection has the sort of dignified reading room ideal for those looking for a typical romantic library experience. Oil paintings, gleaming wooden tables, card catalogs. All that kind of thing.

A clerical assistant like myself was responsible for fetching things for researchers. The miscellany of memorable items I’ve handled were abolitionist broadsides, Victorian-era seed catalogs, a photo album of Civil War soldiers with missing parts, a famous Bible with a misprint that caused the ten commandments to read, “Thou Shall” instead of “Thou Shall Not”, and a very boring journal belonging to President George Washington. He wrote about his horse a lot. Marriage, birth and death certificates for genealogists were in constant demand, of course. This was the beginning of a lifelong trend of working in book-ish kinds of positions.

My start date happened to be October 31st, so I wore a temporary tattoo of a vampire bite. I was introduced to a coworker who took the temporary tattoo as a sign from the stars we were destined to be friends, which we were. She was a wise witch, thirty plus years my senior, with a new wave haircut and the type of make up you see in silent films. Anna immediately protected me from all the petty clerical malice that grows like wild ivy in city employee positions. She and I had gone to the same high school, but with a gap of multiple decades in between our times there. We both read and wrote Latin and Greek (her much better than me). A decade later we’d meet up at the bar to do our bit translating Medieval grimoires for a library that crowd sourced translators.

Rare and antiquarian books live far away from sunlight. They sleep in climate controlled vaults or in darkened rooms so that the dappling of brown spots on their pages doesn’t worsen (“foxing”, it’s called), the binding doesn’t loosen, the inks don’t fade. The basement, subbasement and upper stacks all housed the serpentine and disorganized shelves of our collection. When Anna found the librarian put a bookplate on a work of early anime, she raised a storm, I swear.

The upper stacks had sliding ladders that felt perilous every time, and it was generally accepted the basements were terrifying and haunted. Most of the employees avoided, if not flat out refused, to go down there. I really didn’t have the luxury of not doing my job, so of course I went wherever was needed.

The subbasement was unsettling.

Long, narrow and so dark you couldn’t see your hand in front of your face.

The lights were only on when it was occupied, but it was not open to the public. It required a special key in the elevator to reach, which was given solely to people in our department entrusted with handling rare materials. When you arrived at that floor, you could see absolutely nothing but the neon red exit sign. You had to use its scant glow to navigate your way to the closest of an endless row of bookshelves, so that you could hit the switch at its end. Each shelf had one affixed to it which flickered, buzzed and struggled before reluctantly emitting a dim illumination. It was very much like using a series of night lights rather than one decent overhead.

In the subbasement I clutched a call slip in my hand, rereading the decimal number written on it over and over. The item I needed—a photograph in an archival box of other photos— wasn’t where it was supposed to be. I went to the next shelf, searching still. Then the next. And the next. The further to the back I ventured, the longer and darker the rows of shelves ahead and behind me felt. I crouched down, rifling through a box.

I paused.

Far from patrons and colleagues, underground in the most silent old building on Woodward Avenue, it was painfully quiet. So quiet I could make out the tremble of tungsten as the current ran through those old lightbulbs. A sound echoed.

Pitter-patter-pitter-patter.

Tiny footsteps.

Were they going towards or away from me?

I darted up, looking all around.

Nothing.

It was too dark to see anywhere beyond the few shelves whose lights I’d turned on.

I supposed the things everyone had said had gotten to me. I crouched back down into a squat, rummaging through bottom shelf contents once more.

Pitter-patter-pitter-patter.

Had I lost my fucking mind?

My glance raised, but I remained close to the floor.

A flash of red, moving. Someone short.

A child? Down here?

I looked at a photograph. A black and white image of a matronly woman in front of a farmhouse. Finally, I’d found what I needed.

Pitter-patter-pitter-patter.

The pointed tip of a red hat, eye level with me in a crouch, peaked over a low row of books. My heart froze over. After spending a moment paralyzed, watchful of the tiny figure in the hat, I found my guts. I moved slowly with the intent of making a break for it and getting the hell out of the basement. If I mistakenly locked a toddler dressed like an elf down there the union would defend me.

The best thing to do when you are scared shitless is to pretend you’re another person who isn’t frightened. To approach your objective matter of factly without overthinking it, I reminded myself.

When I rose, the little figure in red scurried away, back to me, disappearing into the thick black of the library stacks.

________________________

Thank you for reading this newsletter. I am so grateful for your time and attention. Years after the experience I wrote about above, I’d read about mythical creatures deemed “folkloric.” To many people, though, faeries, hobgoblins and gnomes don’t just dwell in storybooks or the imagination. While reading Castillian, Aztec and Mayan testimonies on duendes, or gnomes, it was clear the fear and wonder surrounding them arose from very real belief.

They spoke of a type of duende that wore all red and liked to live in the attics, bodegas (wine cellars)—and basements.

For more stories and pics on hobgoblins, gnomes and fae, you can find me on social media @gemineyetarot. As always, private divinations are available here.

Featured is a marsh myself and a group of whimisical and willing adventurers stumbled on during a recent a faerie walk. This marsh is not a part of untouched nature, but something regenerative and verdant that took over the sunken ground where an old community center pool once existed. Rouge Park, Detroit.

A ram belongs to itself, and Aries belong to themselves.

Centuries have passed since priests and prophetesses climbed up hillsides at dusk; forging ahead in white gowns towards their temple, a crescent moon in the darkening sky. They’d slit the throats of livestock or light incense and pray to the god of war, Ares.

Save my son.

Save my farm.

Save my country.

Save me.

All those scenes that inspired the drama of romantic poetry have died. Nothing ever stops dying, actually, and that was what had been burning me the fuck out lately. The prayers live on but wish they could die instead of traveling the same weary road from a pair of lips up to heaven and back down again.

When it was time for me to call on Malikdael, the angel of Aries, the world was in step with the spirit of the season. Double tap air strikes, panic and terror, gasoline, combustible and destructive, was more precious than water.

Fires blazing all over like Devil’s Night high on agent orange.

Malikdael, the angel of Aries, could barely hear me calling, as if the life force that sends my voice into the ether was weak. I heave theories about angels that often change. They’re a part of ourselves we call out from the heaven inside of us. It’s a world with terrain. Some parts of that land can be verdant or barren. The trick is to get this celestial little ecosystem inside of us in balance. Mine wasn’t.

My wick burned low, towards out. Usually pissed off, I just didn’t have the energy. Wherever it is Malikdael lived inside of me needed tending. I was sick of it all and started to listen to dream pop and drink tea and claim to “choose kindness instead of anger” but it was actually just choosing laziness. Most days I didn’t manage either anger or serenity, but walked around vacillating between awe at the splendor of creation and bewilderment at humanity.

We’d met before, Malikdael and I. He wore a red robe and helmet and could probably take a quiz for Saint Michael the archangel with their teacher none the wiser.

“You need me,” he said, but it was as if he was saying it from the bottom of a stone well.

“I can’t handle you,” I admitted.

He wasn’t as legible as the other times I’d called. The signal was weak on account of running low on fuel.

“You can.”

Malikdael is the angel who oversees things of a violent nature. Sport. War. Hunting. The dangerous games we play.

I didn’t want it.

I’m too used to hearing gunshots on my block.

Malikdael showed me something, as if arguing against my point instantly.

It is Malikdael, after all.

Not victory torches or swords wet with blood, like I was expecting.

It was wintry.

Black branches against a grey horizon. I was dressed for it, like the boy from A Christmas Story. I sat, near motionless in a deer blind, peering out into the woods.

Then, a chess game.

An old man was seated in the park, his mind envisioning outcomes before plucking up a rook between his thumb and index finger.

Malikdael turned to me.

“Wars are very long.

Yes, there are those infinitesimal moments when a blade strikes a neck, a blockade’s chokehold grips too tight, a tipping point erupts a festering boil in glorious carnage. Those are overblown themes, though.

I am more about giving you a sense that some things are worth the wait. And thoughtful, grounded strategy are every bit a part of me as all the flash-boom-bang of winning.

Frankly, I’m offended that you see me in such a one dimensional way.”

“Help me to understand, because a shot in the arm isn’t what I want. I want rest,” I admitted.

Malikdael waved his red cloak in a rather dramatic way, taking me to a bleak scene.

“I am in the rays that nurture the first seedling up from beneath the rubble of places laid to waste. Sunshine is the strongest of all.

I am the evolutionary intelligence that lives in the heart of a stone fruit.

I stir the reproductive instinct, turning it from refuse lying on the ground to a genus that blossoms.”

I looked to the ground and noted a baby olive tree, creeping up through debris despite its roots living in conditions that kill.

“This makes me and the whole world mad,” I mumbled.

Malikdael shifted into the strangest shape. Everything around me blackened, and a cartoonish, red neon mouth that the angel formed himself into spoke.

“When your temper breaks off the lead and snarls at danger until it retreats,

I’m unrepentant for sending composure and politeness packing.

I am the thing that harrows transgressors.

I’m the tremor of an atavistic impulse raising hell from the depths.

Yes, I’m the dangerous thing in you.

There to ward off predators by proving you’re not prey.

But there’s so much of me that is not dangerous at all, but kept in chains out of fear.”

“I can’t deny that. I thought if I called you I’d burn all up,” I apologized.

Malikdael changed again. A humanoid shape in the incandescent red color of a Macaw.

“I’m just the naked truth.

And there’s this deep fear that exists of honesty.

Second guessing all your impulses, sending them away with tricks and mantras.

Or dressing up your motives in pretty virtue and silvery smokescreens.

If all that artifice is needed, heeding shame’s warning would be better.

The naked truth is a force.

If it’s ugly or beautiful or both tells us how to react, and even a confused reaction states the simple truth—‘it’s complicated’.”

I sighed. “Sometimes ignorance is bliss.”

Whatever the name of the emotion is that goes with someone rolling their eyes, that’s what I felt coming from the angel towards me. I was used to getting that reaction from angels.

“I have range.

Not just the unlikely persistence of life surviving a death cult, or ancient instincts springing to action.

I can’t be written off as the themes you see in army commercials.

It’s easy to mistake me for determination or perseverance, or use exhausted metaphors of love and war to characterize me.

I am the parent of that gritty drive, not gritty drive itself.

I’d much rather you picture me like a sort of Rockwellian figure, rooting for their kid to pedal without training wheels, watching them crash out and get back up, bleeding from knees and elbows, dead set on making it from point A to the stop sign in one go.

That’s really what I am.

The apparatus that propels determination forward.

Desire.

Desire is a tricky thing.

They say its the root of all suffering,

But its also the root of all pleasure,

So I’m for those who choose to live and die,

Not exist in some limbo where nothing happens.

That is the sort of lie I hate.

Its not peace, its cowardice.

I am unapologetic courage.

If it feels egomaniacal for me to say ‘I am courage,’ good.

Being honest in word and deed however they land is a tenet of mine.

I’d rather be confident than falsely modest.

We’re here to go boldly into truth.”

I opened my mouth to reply, but Malikdael raised a finger, as if to tell me to shut up.

“And another thing: there seems to be some confusion about me being at conflict with peace.

Quiet and motionless is not peace.

It’s rigormortis.

The clarity of desire is its own type of harmony.

Its undiluted. The singularity of focus it engenders towards a goal, more willing to be opposed to its barriers than to abandon its prize. It is not inherently in conflict with anything unless it should stand in the way.”

I nodded just then, realizing now that I did need Malikdael much more than I knew. He softened, no longer irritated with me, and spoke again.

“When you find yourself enveloped in a grey mist, neither fulfilled or hateful of the twilight place you’ve landed, call on me.

I’ll bring you kindling, an angel modeled after a sparrow flying with twigs and twine.

You can place them beneath your cooling embers until they ignite, flaring with each little gust of breath.

Desire will heat up, fluttering and blinking like a lighthouse on the shore.

You’ll gain momentum and some direction worth moving towards.

That way you don’t accidentally squander a second of rare and finite life; catch it before it slips away into a waking coma you fraudulently christened ‘realism.’

I’ll lead you back to belonging to yourself.”

Thank you for reading A Tiny Compass. For those in Metro Detroit, I’m having an outdoor adventure at Belle Isle. A Faerie Walk, where we’ll discuss the histories of Godlings, Fae, Nymphs and other mythic creatures. You can snag tickets here. You can always find me for private appointments at Gemineye Tarot.

LVX,

Alejandra

Some of you might know that I’ve been working on meditations on the archangels of the zodiac for an upcoming book. These angels are mentioned mainly in Kabbalastic, but also apocraphyl Christian and Islamic writings. I post them whenever, stupidly unenthusiastic about following a schedule.

I’d like to dedicate this meditation to Kim Van Dyke. She was a wise, funny and one of a kind friend. Kim was the medium in one of the few seances I’ve ever been to. After attending I was convinced that her empathy for others stretched into the afterlife. She had a reliable enough gift to work with law enforcement on missing persons cases. I am sure that wheverver she is, she came to it unafraid and greeted by familiar faces.

She often had a kind word, taking care to let me know she believed in my intelligence and talent. She unexpectedly sent money for a student after I wrote in this newsletter about him being in the type of trouble none of us ever hope to be in. The other day I had a feeling and dropped her a message letting her know I was thinking of her. That evening, she passed on. Her love of Prince was legendary. When she was first diagnosed with cancer, I sent her a Cameo by Sheila E. When we see a white dove, we’ll know it’s her saying hello.

We love and miss you already, Kim.

A Tiny Compass on Adnachiel:

When I called Adnachiel, they answered right away. Gracious but perfunctory. They’d been expecting me to ring. They knew they were like a friend you call over for coffee or tea and no one else will make the cut.

Even as I sit here, tapping at my keyboard, I can feel their presence lounging around, comfortable and settled in. It’s not the same awesome-to-behold, biblically unsettling vibe some of the others give off.

Their sigil appears. A lattice of pythagorean proportions, but animated and spindly. Not at all like rigid lines pressed into graph paper. Adnachiel’s color would make Goethe’s breath catch.

Vibrant, like the gas range on a stove, but made of Morning Glory purple and midnight blue all blended together.

Adnachiel does not oversee the quiet and passive. No, they have a little court and castle in the Northern Hemisphere of the sky. All the souls of poets, priests, prophets, oracles, writers, teachers and philosophers may count themselves guests at this galactic gathering. Onlookers might spot the constellation of Sagittarius, a string of stars in the shape of an archer just beside the brightest cluster in the Milky Way. I think of it as a cosmic party, packed with guests whose intelligence and artistry is so sharp and crystalline it shines in the dark. Still uncertain of this familiar stranger, I asked Adnachiel what their nature was.

“I am for those who have questions. I prompt them to ask aloud. It makes world a more beautiful and surreal place when confusion is given a voice.

It’s wonder, but with stress.

A sense of appropriate bewilderment at the wisdom which is miles beyond the human head.

The answers are silly and profound.

They melt away the intrusive border between the two, so it sizzles like an acid made of laughter.

I am here for questions and statements like, ‘There are as many things as there are. There is no spoon. Buridan’s ass is a very cute donkey standing between two bales of hay. Each one is soft and sweet and easy to get to. He’s so conflicted about making the wrong choice between the two. He makes none, and dies of hunger.’

Hendrix’s anthem, shredded and crunching so it sounds and looks more like America really does. In fact, I’m often with the far out sorts, invested in psychedelic trip outs that show the truth by distorting reality. By questioning it, pointing a finger at its paradoxes. Not in accusation, but as a hat tip to the ineffability, a good sport about getting bested for the infintitieth time.

I create the intersection where prophecy and poetry meet, then remove the stop sign, so the two crash right into each other.

They fall back, dizzy, rise up, dusty, and find they are stuck like a ghost that’s fallen into a body. I ward off dry and dull order, infusing this realm with the truth. When you’re hunting for it, when you’re in the “I don’t know” state, you are computing, hypothesizing, puzzling, but more importantly, imagining. That part is far more powerful than the rationalizing portion.”

“When should we call on you, then, Adnachiel?,” I asked.

“Call on me when you are so confused that you need to scream into your pillow, or an empty junkyard where disorder and disruption are tolerated. It will send shockwaves through the mundane that gets my attention.

Call on me when you feel so helpless and lost that you are desperate enough to cling to clichés like, ‘you are exactly where you are meant to be’ or ‘progress isn’t linear.’

I’ll remind you that the chronology, beginning, middle, end, is a human construct pinned onto a thing of such mythic proportions you can’t even name it.

Eternity isn’t the shape of a flattened worm. Neither is your existence.

They say your lives are very short, which is true.

But they’re dense, ethereal, layered, complicated, blissful and bitter.

It’s a wild bronco of a tornado.

You’ll have grievances about where you are or aren’t, what you have and haven’t got, what someone else has got that you should too—or better yet, instead of them.

Call on me.

I’ll laugh, reminding you that you are ill equipped to call the shots on how a tornado is meant to behave.

Coveting the tornado’s of others is for idiots.

I’ll help you process the chaos, paint it, sing it, write it, ponder it, stare at it, worship it instead of complaining about it.

Because even the most fucked up life is still a life, and humanity’s gift is to think about itself, and wonder how it got there.

Even in a state of disarray, it’s worth it.

Anything at all, so long as you stop your insufferable cowering at entropy.

I’m here to help you run straight into the firefight of the illegible and illogical.

I am here, your guide through that electrical storm, murmuring for you to contemplate, muttering incantations to compel you to render, sing and worship the mess.

If you let me, I’ll shoot an arrow that leads you right into the part of it where you find presence. That’s the crossroads where questions and answers sync, like a ghost falling into a body.”

LVX,

Alejandra

Thank you for reading A Tiny Compass. I am so grateful for your time and attention. You can always find me for private divinations at Gemineye Tarot or on social media (IG/ TikTok) @gemineyetarot .

The Temperance card is associated with the astrological sign of Sagitarrius.

As the New Year dawns, we’ll paste charming images onto vision boards, collaging together the lives we’d like to lead. Little cut outs we cast as moments to symbolize the emotionally regulated, clear skinned and fit, fiscally stable era we’re stepping into. I actually have had my aesthetic Pinterest boards created for weeks in preparation for the annual rite.

As usual, I’m not writing to you as any sort of pinnacle of together-ness. I’m writing to you as someone who has spent a lifetime trying to change herself. I want to unfold the little map in my back pocket, get out my tiny compass, and show you where there’s Escher stairs that lead to nowhere and shortcuts that are actually haunted trails delivering you to a more damaged place than where you started. There’s a secret I have to tell you.

Changing ourselves is the hardest thing we can do.

Please, do me the favor I wished I’d done myself many times over. Think really hard about whether change or self-acceptance is the better option. Neither is an easy way out.

There are lots of discussions on lifestyle and daily habits in spaces devoted to the practice and study of Religion and Spirituality, Esotericism or Ceremonial Magick. I adore thumbing through the pages of books I turn to often—Hildegard Von Bingen, Franz Bardon, Thomas Merton--and seeing what types of lives their authors led and what I can try on for size. I made Hildy’s cookies. I wanted to garden by moonlight like her but couldn’t as I have no garden. I settled for lots of potted herbs and flowers on my cute little sliver of squalor. I started taking long rambles in the woods like Merton, using a loofa like Bardon suggests in Initiation Into Hermetics. Raising any of these as course corrections on the way to live is not my intention. It is really hard for us not to recontextualize the asceticism of days bygone into the service of our contemporary fixation on appearance. That’s been my reluctance to ever even bring it up, and also knowing I am a very flawed person who should think wisely about the advice I dispense.

I have a silver compact mirror I use to check my lipstick when I’m on the go. It’s got the words, “body dysmorphia” engraved on it in cursive. I joked I should get one, so every time I clasped it shut, I’d remember my reflection was lying to me. Then, my boyfriend got it for me as a little surprise gift. It used to be that my particular brand of neurosis was not quite rare but definitely rarer than it is today. I spent my entire life calorie counting and restricting despite the fact that it would never lead to results other than being batshit warped in the head. Now, though, neurosis is the norm.

I ask you to not to do what I did for years and let dysmorphia take the reins.

There’s a cacophony of voices telling you to put needles in your stomach and face. I get it. I am wearing acrylics and false lashes on most days. I got Botox injections once, but was so afraid of looking like Joan Rivers I barely let the needle touch me. True to form, I wound up paying a lot of money to look exactly the same.

I’m not, like, some deluded chick telling everyone to just be happy with themselves, as if it were that easy. I am cognizant enough to say there is something not quite right about being fed processed trash, trying insincerely to make body positivity a thing, then just giving up and stanning Ozempic. And yes, I know there’s legitimate medical uses, we deserve to feel beautiful and accepted, and all the things. Please don’t misunderstand. I am pleading for you to think more deeply than I did before volunteering to change yourself.

My point is that self awareness is at the foundation of any lasting and meaningful transformation. That includes the changes we make to our reflection, and deeper, less transparent ones. We learn so much about who we are from the changes we initiate or fail to see through. Each act we undertake alters not simply our mindset but our entire being. We learn what we are made of, where our limitations need to stretch and grow, who we are and are not.

What the maxim “know thyself” means is only just starting to dawn on me. In recent years we’ve gotten into the habit of translating individuality into taxonomies of intersections, diagnoses, privileges and disadvantages. Understanding differences and the scaffolding of normativity can be helpful for us (especially educators) to reach one another with more competency. But it can also be rather futile and generate impotent resentment if we overestimate the significance of this knowledge. DEI initiatives have altered our deeply personal relationships to our ancestors, our experiences, ourselves into something to be commodified for the institutional gaze. In the end, they function in a predictable way—as little ramshackle ghettoes attached to a great power, where radiant minds are shoved and can be disposed of as soon as the wind blows ill. Our relationship to ourselves is a very large thing to surrender for such a faulty system.

When we reduce something so unquantifiable, mysterious and singular as the Self to a lifeless census of genetic and social traits we cheapen it. Even if these things shape us greatly into who we are, it is how our soul and imaginations guide us through living within and beyond those parameters that has meaning. It is how it gives voice and tone and texture to the experience, not the experience itself.

Chivalry fades in and out of popularity and level playing fields are elusive. It is safe to put your faith in the decency of people, it is less safe to put your faith in the decency of political parties, institutions and corporations. The reality is we must know ourselves so we can navigate a harsh world. It rarely meets us where we are. When it does, it is for the briefest of times. Non profits and leftist culture tells us we’re owed something based on our positionalities so we will put our trust in them. Yet they never settle the debt and often profit from it. All the land acknowledgments and phoney gestures at representation in the world will never amount to anything lasting.

This is not to say inequality is inevitable and resisting it is futile. It is to advise there’s a long road ahead. Save your energy for something more worthwhile than the broken promises of legacy promise breakers. When it comes time to choose your fighter, your best bet is yourself. Make sure you have plenty of battery life.

Knowing the genesis of our patterns, the intricacies of our triggers and where we are positioned in society is not the same as knowing ourselves. Those things are levels of self-awareness that are helpful but overrated and incomplete. Knowing thyself means clarity on one’s values, calling, capabilities and will regardless of whether we are in a forest with only deer and foxes, among people with nothing to their name or at a cocktail party filled with CEOs and celebrities. French philosopher René Girard proposed we can only imitate the desires of others, that humans are lost without looking to one another to emulate, and that rivalries are borne from our mimesis. I do believe that desire without envy is possible, but I have yet to find concrete proof. So maybe, just for fun, you’ll undertake scavenging for originality with me.

Is it possible for us to strive towards a version of ourselves that is based on an inner and truthful understanding of who we are, rather than imitative?

I love changing.

Change is empowering.

Even just the possibility is exciting.

I hope, though, that I can change not only my circumstances.

I hope that I can also change not from but into myself.

Wishing you a New Year filled with lots of good books and conversations, conviction and authenticity.

LVX,

Alejandra

p.s.—

You can always find me for divinations here: Gemineye Tarot. On IG/ TikTok @gemineyetarot. And soon, Discord.

My sister, Elisa Gurulé, is keeper of a very mysterious type of wisdom that I do not possess. That is, aptitude in the domestic realms. She is a literal Master Gardener and kitchen witch. So many of our traditions are lost to us. They can be revived and rekindled by a special sort of person, and she just happens to be one of those people. Below is a piece on the subject she was kind enough to contribute to A Tiny Compass. Thank you for your time and attention, as always.

LVX,

Alejandra

Our calendar calls January first the new year, but that’s not really right. We know that the new year doesn’t start until spring, even if the old year has most definitely wrapped up in the winter. The winter is a time of rest. We necessarily slow down to stay cocooned away from the cold and dark. It’s a time of internal life/work/reflection.

I always feel hopeful at the start of winter: this will be the year that I learn to sew, or knit. I will read more and so will my kids. We will finally find a board game that we can enjoy as a family. We will enjoy the time as cozy, not claustrophobic. I’ll introduce them to movies that I’ve wanted them to see. I’ll watch movies that I’ve wanted to see, things I’ve been putting off while I worked in the garden. I’ve been saving them for this season of snuggling in; I’ll put records on the turntable and we will enjoy music collectively. I’ll lean into the natural rhythm of the season, and I’ll give thanks for our little, sweet life. I’ll plan a fire for the night of the solstice. I will align and I will feel like life is moving on ball bearings, not bumpy pot-holed roads.

It’s still early enough in the winter that I’m hanging onto this idyllic image, but even admitting that it exists is to expose it to the oxidizing effects of reality. My children will bicker, my spouse and I will too. None of us can get enough space, no matter how far we spread out in the house. Family conversations will become strained and uneasy, heavy with things that we’ve never been able to work out. Not because things are harder for us, necessarily, but because being alive in community with other humans is hard, and the more we love each other, the higher the stakes feel in our miscommunications. To be misunderstood is so painful; to misunderstand is almost worse. For me, it feels like I lose the foundations of my own self. Wrong-footed, wrong-headed. Just wrong.

So I’ve searched and worked to find practices of living that allow me to right that sense of being all wrong, and like many people, I have found that working a garden has given me the closest thing I can find to peace, or communion. My garden is not show-worthy, nor is it anything extraordinary, it’s just a suburban yard. Every year, I dig up a bunch of stuff, move a bunch of other stuff around, plant yet other stuff. I’ve read so much lately about different kinds of gardening: native planting, planting for pollinators, companion planting, and so on. I love reading about the ways in which people arrive at their plans and designs for their gardens.

I spend hours staring at the spaces under my cultivation, trying to figure out how I can grow a whole Three Sisters Garden* (I can’t, there just isn’t enough space without sacrificing everything else) and also a cut flower garden (I don’t think I actually want that; they’re much more rigid than bouquets lead us to believe), and also enough vegetables to can for the winter (this is pure fantasy. I think this year finally cured me of that notion. I’m sure I’ll try again next year.) but also an English-style cottage garden* (once again, I’m forced to reckon with the fallacy of “nature” when I contemplate this). I try to find the line between where ego ends and stewardship begins, or (and?) where hubris interrupts it all. Although the garden is where we often find peace, the history and theory of gardening is far more unsettling.

Going back to the earliest Enclosure Acts, during the English transition from feudalism to capitalism, gardens represented leisure and dominance over nature. Lands that had been communally farmed, allowing peasants to feed themselves became status symbols for the wealthy landowning class. Marx wrote first about enclosure being a necessary forerunner to the development of capitalism. That is, privatising resources and using violence to destroy the communities that had previously used them, forcing them into what we might now recognize as an industrialized economy. Sylvia Federici brought the theory into contemporary times with her work, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation (2004). She continues to refine and adapt her thinking on this topic as the world changes and shifts*. I find myself thinking about this as I look out over my yard, annoyed that the view out my office window is the back of my neighbor’s garage, the pile of wheelbarrows, hoses and garbage cans reminding me that the idyll I imagine is not quite possible in our shared environment. The low chain-link fence marks the property line and keeps our dogs in their respective homes, but somehow it just highlights how arbitrary “my” yard is. The gift that I have grudgingly accepted from this is to realize how much I absolutely do not control, even as I endeavor to make my little space a haven for the living.

This past year, my surprise triumph was a patch of tithonia, also known as Mexican Sunflowers. I’m pretty sure I pulled a bunch of them by mistake before realizing that they weren’t weeds. A wild-looking annual, they bloom late in the summer and they are a hit among monarch butterflies and hummingbirds. Both of these winged creatures held important positions in the cosmology of the Indigenous people who would come to be known as the Aztecs, the ancestors of Mexicans, and both are also now symbols of the resilience of migrants coming to the US from Mexico and Central America. Tiny, delicate, airborne miracles that are also important pollinators, not just extracting what they need from the flowers they visit, but participating in the cycle of creation and sustenance. Every morning, I would open my front door and just stand on the porch watching their traffic. One day, I counted five butterflies on the patch at once. They also crowded out the other flowers in the bed, their stalks & leaves creating microclimates of dry shade in a bed of full sun. Insert your own obvious metaphor here. I gloried in that tithonia bed full of monarchs until well into October, their orange matching both the summer butterflies and the Halloween pumpkins.

Again, though, I come back to the question of ego/stewardship/hubris as motivation for all this sweat. Like much of the work in the garden, and my other retreat, the kitchen, this question is one that never offers a clear answer. Instead, it’s like one of those old-fashioned galileo thermometers full of mercury weights –rising and falling based on atmospheric pressure. Ego, stewardship, hubris in a constant dance for balance. I used to think it was a fight for dominance, but I understand now that’s not the case. Balance, not dominance, is the goal. The process of the growing is the joy; there is no moment when I can look at the garden – “my” garden – and declare it “Perfect,” or even “Very Good.” Almost nothing is beyond redemption. (Except autumn clematis and english ivy. Those are true nightmares, and they kill everything else around them.)

The garden offers me a place to both think deeply and unhitch my mind and allow myself to be just an embodied part of the landscape. The kitchen offers something similar, especially in big cooking projects –holiday meals, and especially The Tamalada. For the last several years, I’ve hosted a tamalada at my house in the winter frenzy before Christmas. I invite friends and family from across the phases of my life to my home and we make tamales together. Traditionally, it is done by women, and with family. I didn’t grow up like that, though, and it is not a tradition of my mother’s family, so I’ve created my own. Tamales come from a tradition that dates back to before the Spanish came to the Americas, by people who developed the very practice of agriculture from First Principles. Even the word tamal is older than the “new world” and corn we use to make masa is proof of an extraordinary capacity for tinkering, observing, problem-solving, troubleshooting. A grass known as teosinte, it was bred over thousands of years into maize, and still persists in its primeval form in some places. However, like so many plants and animals, it is threatened by the practices of industrial farming and habitat loss.

I begin preparing for the day weeks ahead of time, procuring the ingredients that are hard to come by in my suburban grocery stores and taking inventory of my pantry to see what I’ve stockpiled over the year. I make tamales from vegan ingredients, with squash and peppers for filling instead of the traditional pork or chicken. I use avocado oil instead of lard. The feeling mirrors the January perusal of seed catalogs and wintertime pencil-chewing as I consider the upcoming season.

This year, it will be on the 13th (tomorrow, so I’m stealing time to write this, even though I’ve got a To Do list a mile long. I could have written this any time in the last two weeks, but something about that has felt too indulgent. Sitting down to write as tasks and chores pile up, blotting out the gift that it is to be able to live in a home that needs tending, with a garden that allows cultivation and all of it in safety). I climb up on a ladder to see how many bags of hojas (corn husks) I have left on the highest shelves in my kitchen. I discover I have probably enough (maybe ask Mom to pick up a couple more, though…)

Not one to completely eschew tradition, I survey the deep freezer to take an inventory of manteca (lard) for the pork tamales that I also make, and climb yet another ladder to find that I have run out of New Mexico chili peppers. All I have left are hot, and those are brutal. My dad is from New Mexico and though he spent 45 years in Michigan before returning, his homesickness never left him. He passed a few particular traits to me. One of them is the conviction that New Mexico chiles (red and green) are superior to all others, for nearly every application, but especially for making tamales. He usually sends me a big package of them about once a year or so, but I forgot to ask him for them this year.

As I contemplate the bunch of other chiles I have available to me, I despair for a moment, thinking that my perfect chile colorado is ruined, and my reputation for my beautiful, joyful tamalada will be sunk. The mercury weights of the ego/stewardship/hubris galileo thermometer bob in my mind for a few minutes before I am able to place things in their proper context.

I think about my empty bag of the specific chile peppers that I want and I can’t help but laugh at myself. As though that tiny problem can’t be Macgyvered with a simple solution. I look at my own notes I keep in my kitchen, back at the ones I’ve written on the garden, and do a quick search online, cross-referencing it all with what I remember of the flavors and heat levels of the peppers in the pantry. I come up with a very good substitution: about half guajillo and half ancho, of which I have tons. In fact, that’s probably why I have so many. I’ve run into this problem before, and solved it in the same way. The weights of the galileo thermometer drift back into balance: ego sinks, stewardship rises. Hubris holds steady as I strut around my kitchen calling myself a MexiCAN, not a MexiCAN’T while also recognizing that having to solve the same problem year after year, in the same way, should probably keep me humbler. Like I said, balance.

A Galileo Thermometer. Picture shamelessly stolen from the internet. My entire life I’ve thought these things were just decorative trinkets. When my boyfriend saw the picture, he thought it was some sort of space bong. As it turns out, science. -AV

Notes:

*Enclosure Acts: https://sites.udel.edu/britlitwiki/the-enclosure-acts/

*https://www.agrariantrust.org/enclosure-old-and-new/

*https://www.aav.org/news/615010/The-Hummingbird-in-Mexican-Culture.htm

*https://monarchjointventure.org/blog/monarchs-and-dia-de-muertos-in-mexico

*The Three Sisters is a Mesoamerican method of interplanting corn, beans and squash. First, the corn, which has the longest growing season. Once the corn is a few inches high, beans and squash get planted in the same rows with them. As the corn grows, it provides a structure for the beans to climb. The squash vines, growing along the ground, suppress weeds that would otherwise out-compete corn and help keep water from evaporating as quickly. Corn is a thirsty crop, so this is an important service. Beans help to fix nitrogen in the soil and their blooms also attract pollinators (hummingbirds love them!), which is critical for corn, as it does not self-pollinate easily.

Many of you have been hanging out with me on Substack for awhile and others are new here. Each letter I send out into the cyber void touches on the ethereal. Whether its ghost stories or grimoires, my dominion is the enchanted.

Which is why it’s difficult to admit that I have felt deeply, harrowingly, disenchanted lately. There’s a sense of alienation that ebbs and flows for most of us. I go through periods of being really pissed off and annoyed. In that time, I’m usually most grounded by doing quiet things. I’ve been fixing up a dollhouse (it is so hard to be in a bad mood when dealing with trinkets), taking walks in the woods, laughing (both with and at) my students, making squash soup and pumpkin breads as often as I can. And of course, writing, reading and reflecting on the numinous. It helps, also, to know that I will be forgiven for not being a saint. I can curse and roll my eyes and be a brat. It doesn’t mean I’m rotten to the core. Just your regular, imperfect, unenlightened human.

Some of you know that I have been working on compiling a grimoire, or book of ritual magick, for publication. It contains works on theurgy, which is divine invocation. To be included are the meditations on the angels of the zodiac I have been writing for the past few years.

These little vignettes are called angelic meditations, because everyone likes meditation. Truth be told, I don’t have a damn clue about how to meditate. My mind was never once still or empty. Contemplation, though, is another thing. Contemplation leads to transcendence, and transcendence seems very twined to presence. The idea is to contemplate the nature of God by getting to know all the angels. Here is the latest contemplation, misleadingly labeled as a meditation on Barchiel, the angel of Scorpio. It is befitting my bratty mood. I hope you enjoy. Your time and support is so valued.

LVX,

Alejandra

p.s.—On December 17th, one of my besties and I are hosting a class on fairytales and the tarot. Join us for a sickening amount of whimsy here.

A Meditation on Barchiel, Angel of Scorpio

There are times when I have to wait. The muffled flap of wings is far off. I strain to hear or see or feel them in the distance. I call out over and over, so they can follow my voice through many mansions and many realms until they land safely in front of me.

Sometimes I light a candle, so they can find me in the dark.

It takes time.

Barchiel, the angel of Scorpio, was an exception.

He didn’t pause to regard the cherubs as they bobbed through the clouds or the blazing ophanim as they wheeled through eternity. He flew as straight as a crow, settling in right away before me. Whenever any angels arrive, there’s always this funny feeling I get across my brow. Electric. Tingling. A current ran wild across it, encircling my cranium like a neon crown.

Barchiel is said to be this deep bluish green color, like the sea. This makes sense since Scorpio is a water sign. The zodiac’s iconography, stretching back centuries, includes gleaming scorpions, appearing lacquered and deadly, in mosaics and oil paintings.

Other times, it’s represented by depictions of the same type of unforgiving and tempestuous dark waters that strike fear into sailors in October through November. A cruel wind blows along The Great Lakes this time of year. They call it the Witch of November. When the moon hangs red over crashing waters, she is visiting. In Scorpio season of ’75, a crew of 29 mariners were sent to a watery grave. When the anniversary falls, we hear a bell toll for each working man who died that night.

Although there’s logic in the angel’s signature colors of blue and green color, that’s not what appeared to me. Instead, an undulating black veil, transparent but shadowy. And flooding. The images, sense, scents of Barchiel all seemed to flood in. Perhaps that’s a fitting verb for the angel of Scorpio.

In The Zohar, Medieval Jewish authors wrote something about water and the Tree of Life. “All the waters of Creation, drawn and flowing from the beginning, branch beneath it,” they said.

That tree is one half tough and the other gentle, but all love. One whole Elohim. Barchiel is not among the Sefirot, or the ten spheres of divine emanations that hang from the Tree of Life like juicy pomegranates. Still, Barchiel slaps of Sefirot. I think this is because the angels of the Shem HaMephorash are their kin of sorts. They also hail from the left side, but of the zodiac wheel. The Sefirot on the left of the tree are there to do God’s heavy stuff, like deliver justice, be righteous or majestic. The Tree of Life’s branches could not be sustained without those waters.

The waters of Scorpio, and of creation, have certainly carried out harsh acts. More than once, a deluge has come to rid the world of human life. Once I knew what Barchiel wanted me to understand of their nature, I asked him what he might tell me to share with you. This is how he responded.

“Tell them I am what vivifies life.

I can also cast it into chaos If I’m not heeded.

I am passion and intensity incarnate.

The primordial stream beneath and through all things. You may pave over it, try to plug or damn it, shove it beneath the artifice of civilization.

But always, I am there.

Listen to me calling from the deep.

I am the sound of your survival.

I am the reminder that you are not a God, nor angel like myself.

You mustn’t be too precious or holy.

Instead, surrender to temptation without being lost to it forever.

Allow the instincts you try to override run amuck when they’re on the side of Truth.

When intuition is wailing, but collides with reason,

allow it to be master and rationality the servant for a while.

In doing so, you renew your vows to faith,

and depart from self-doubt.

There are times you cannot turn the other cheek.

Instead, plot your uprising in secrecy.

I am in the un-tipped hand that allows you to carry on, until your scheme is complete.

This may sound devilish to some.

No, on the contrary.

I am the Truth.

No faux virtue or false modesty, but authenticity, laid bare.

Conviction, unrepressed.

When you fear that you’re lost and cannot hear yourself calling,

Call on me, Barchiel, to remind you of who you are and what you want.

When you are in search of the truth, whether of an esoteric sort or not, call on me.

When it is not a game but a survival strategy to play dirty, call on me.

Some argue that only those who burn effigies and murmur incantations at the equinox embrace carnal ways.

So should you all.

Call on me and I’ll assist in helping you discern between someone else’s truth, your truth, and an objective truth.

An objective truth shows goodness.

That goodness and honesty is all lit up with mysticism in what’s feral.

A great many things that don’t deserve shame get heaps of it, and other things that ought to have shame, don’t have any at all.

I help correct that imbalance.

You might find that filth and the purity often hang out, holding hands.

I am there to shine light on it so you’re reminded of the complexity of divinity.

To remind you that you are just human.

Don’t get above yourself, thinking you understand it all.

Another arrogant thing I might set the record straight on—it’s laughable that so many of you think sinlessness and self-denial are one in the same.

Whores can be chaste and the self-righteous, vile.

There is no getting out of taking a bent knee to something higher than yourself.

I am here to tell you the truth of that matter.

Martyrs and messiahs are few and far between.

It’s not likely you’re fit to be either.

The methods you’ve found to posture virtue are often so off the mark.

Humility and humiliation are not one in the same.

No use bearing the latter.

Civility is so often a cloak for barbarity.

Bureaucracy, a snarling wolf in tailored clothing.

I remind you plainly of right and wrong, truth and lie.

To oversee the art of delivering a fair and formidable counterstrike when wrong is done.

I am there to remind you that you are not alone and you are loved, even when the world forces you to give and take ugliness.

Call on me when you need the gales in your gut, the tempest in your core, the storm in your heart, to lead for a time.

The path to goodness is not always twinkling and light. Sometimes it’s a dirt road, overgrown with thorny roses and thick fog that hides nocturnal creatures waiting to pounce. If you should have to slash your blade as you travel, don’t worry.

I’ll guide you back to yourself, upright when you’ve been brought low.

I’ll vanish to a whisper, far off again, when it is time for gentility.

If you are too squeamish to own up to your savage self, take solace:

my sister angels minister mercy wherever blood is drawn.”

This piece is an interview contributed by Zoë Villegas (my twin sister), and edited by myself.

Happy Halloween,

Alejandra

Lacy Stirling is dressed in all black with red circular glasses, and speaks in a low monotone voice. He enters any room like a vapor mist. Regarded as a Detroit institution — a walking vault, full of memories of punk’s most notorious origins, he’s been a constant in the emergence and declining lairs of infamy. Since the early 1980s, Lacy has been making punk music and participating in its culture as a frontman for bands like Son of Sam, The Hillside Stranglers and Detroit 442. His song, “I Am a Bullet” is an anthem of sorts, befitting his bearing. He has been a guardian over the cobwebbed rock and roll raves lit by blacklight and candelabra, storied alleys, crypts and dancefloors. With a severe and unwavering enigma, Lacy Stirling is the best to tell the very true tale of the Detroit underground. It is this decades-long devotion that allows him to lead us on the serpentine paths of his memory, touring through a graveyard of venues since shuddered, of the goth and punk haunts that remained stalwart, or resurrected, through the ages. We met at The Lager House, a favorite bar among Detroit rockers, for our interview.

ZV: Your band Son of Sam obviously belies a fascination with serial killers. There’s a comfort and nostalgia in horror that intersects with punk. Can you tell me what the most influential horror films were for you?

LS: The guitarist for Son of Sam named the band, suggesting America’s fascination with serial killers. My favorite horror film was “Night of the Living Dead.’ That was the first time there was a Black hero in a horror movie, and in the end he was murdered by rednecks…Hammer films are also my favorite.

ZV: You’ve witnessed years of the most iconic grit of our city’s landscape in the venues that built a home for punk. These places were synonymous with a fringe element that was as full of life, as it was death. One of the most legendary examples of this, is the notoriously haunted Leland Hotel, where you have been a tenant for almost two decades. Can you tell me about it?

LS: The Leland Hotel was built around the same time as Los Angeles’ Cecil Hotel, and it feels really similar. I’ve been there. The energy at the Leland is dark. There are a lot of suicides. You can no longer go onto the roof, because there were so many people over the years who jumped off.

The parallel Lacy draws between LA’s The Cecil Hotel and The Leland makes sense to me. I’ve suspected it existed, and he confirms it. The Cecil towers over LA’s skid row, where punks and vagrants intermingle in the shadow of Hollywood’s wealth and glamour. It is often where dreams dissipate, hardened by entertainment industry rejection. Like the Leland, it is the locus of those drawn to a fast, creative and unconventional life. Both buildings have a decrepit grandeur about them, like the faded would-be starlets within them, dimming as the ravages of reality and time take its toll. Both have a high body count, with tenants dying much more frequently than they should. In The Leland, there is a palpable energy radiating from the building, as if it is sentient in some way. I picture him in the sprawling 1920s hotel, with shrouded windows, and probe a little deeper.

ZV: Even the biggest skeptics consider The Leland haunted. Do you have any stories?

LS: There are a lot of ghost stories. Lots of people have seen a woman appear on the stairwell. In my apartment, there’s a ghost cat. It’s my old cat. I feel something jumping onto my bed at night. That’s the energy there. Just so many people have died there. There are probably only 4 people left alive on my floor.

ZV: City Club, housed inside of the Leland Hotel, was founded in 1981 and is Detroit’s oldest goth club. You played there throughout the 1980s, when there was a connection between Berlin’s nightlife and Detroit. And then bands like Discharge and GBH were coming through from the UK. Can you tell me what it was like to be a part of this burgeoning scene?

LS: It was very much how it is now— again. Punks and goths coming out every weekend. There was a time where it was dead but there is definitely a resurgence in clubs now with something new to see all the time.

ZV: You are an avid show-goer who’s devoted your life to supporting the music scene. How did you find the music you love?

LS: Public Access played a documentary on TV about English punk, and I was interested right away. I wanted to find that music. My first band was called The Social Rejects and we played one show at The Freezer Theater. Then we formed Son of Sam and played at the Clubhouse, which later became 404 Willis, in November 1982.

I know The Freezer by reputation only, of course. It lived and died before my time, but is the stuff of legend. The Freezer Theater was located in Detroit’s Cass Corridor and is considered hallowed ground for its role in the birth of hardcore. It famously shut down after just a year, following a police bust during a violent riot at a Negative Approach show. To add to the mystique, the building was also a part of a metaphysical nexus of stories. It sat across from a former embalming school, where legend has it, Houdini’s body was prepared after his death in Detroit on October 31, 1926— and where his spirit is said to appear every Halloween.

ZV: When Detroit was in such a moment of dereliction, it was really the richest time for counterculture. What were some of your favorite places?

LS: My favorite was the Motor City Roller Rink. It was so open to everyone. Huge crowds. Devo played there, the Clash played there. In the summer, the shows would be about 120 degrees inside. There was Nunzio’s on Southfield. I saw Johnny Thunders play there. Nitro’s…I saw Kraftwerk there. I saw The Ramones about 30 times in Detroit. Then the hardcore scene happened here and that was amazing. Negative Approach and all those bands. The Misfits played their last show in Detroit. They loved Detroit. (Rollins’) Black Flag played their last show here. The place those bands all played was across from the Old Miami. The Freezer.

ZV: Are there any other historic places you would frequent shows that are no longer around?

LS: There was the Latin Quarter on East Grand Boulevard, which was an old ballroom. The Cramps played there.

The Latin Quarter was originally a silent film theater, which was built in 1915. It became a venue around the 1940s, closed at the end of the 1990s and sat abandoned for two decades. Preservationists working in the building reported seeing the apparition of the projector which they named “Falky.” It was demolished in 2011, and I wonder if Falky is left to wander where it once stood.

ZV: I know another place you often can be found is The Painted Lady in Hamtramck. There were lots of shows over the years, combining garage and punk. It’s one of our most beloved watering holes. Do you have any lore connected to the Lady?

LS: Oh yeah. It’s a 100 year old bar and there’s a bookshelf that opens into a secret room left over from speakeasy days.

The waitstaff and patrons have been listening in on our conversation, and at the mention of another bar, they find their opening. We descend into the basement for an impromptu ghost hunt. One of the young waitresses shows us a bullet hole, shuddering. There’s a hollow wall she claims, indetectable, on the original blueprints. Was it used for bootlegging? Something more sinister? She thinks the latter. Only the building’s ghosts know for sure.

On Halloween, we remember all the people and places who shaped our lives but have since departed. Witnesses like Lacy, there for the birth of hardcore, for the christening of what is now our oldest goth club, kindle the flame of memory. He’s been there, indefatiguable, through the scene’s many incarnations.

*Photos courtesy of Zoë and Dogs of Gore’s Tumblr*

*

Somehow this year has felt more uncertain and chaotic than my other ones. In spite of feeling entirely off course and under accomplished, I did get a lot done. My partner Mark and I just completed a print zine with the help and collaboration of good friends. It was one of many arduous labors of love. The archangel of Virgo, Hamaliel, is one who oversees the precision of surgeons, the careful calculations of karmic justice and rigor of the creatively obsessed. For the past few weeks I’ve been writing and reflecting on Hamaliel, this angel who the faithful call on for grace in matters of surgery, creative accomplishment and prosperity. At the bottom of this letter you’ll find her summoning seal, as it appeared in a manuscript called Magical Calendar published in 1619. Here is a theurgic meditation and a record of our conversations. I hope it brings you alms in the endeavors that are near and dear to your heart.

Hamaliel stands firmest in the skies at the cusp of a fading summer and brewing autumn. The archangel of Virgo, she shines between the 22nd of August and 23rd of September. The limbs of forest trees reaching out to one another, so they form a steeple above the life below, mirror Hamaliel. As the days shorten and leaves change from green to gold, so does Hamaliel. Those who are lucky enough to chance on her see these shades flickering in the flutter of her robe.

The archangels of the zodiac float beside one another, moving through the skies as a wheel turns. Hamaliel is a sibling to the others. Although they have no need for food or water, they’re like you and I—with divine origins. Just as a child takes after a parent, Hamaliel carries the flame of her father. All matters having to do with fastidious details, perfection or precision, unerring accounting and calculations to keep karmic balances in order—this is the genealogy of God. Hamaliel has the Almighty’s penchant for the exact the way some say you have your dad’s smile or your Aunt Amelia’s stubborn streak.

I called on Hamaliel to ask what I might tell you of her nature. Hamaliel appeared before me, a ringlet of light shimmering, luminous at first, then darkening to the color of moss. She smelled like tuberose and honeysuckle.

“I am a caretaker of little things,” she answered. “And you are all great, profound, little things in this big vast universe.”

“And why do little things matter so much?,”

“It matters so much because that’s how creation was intended.”

“Forgive me, my mortal mind isn’t suited to the loftier logic of angels,” I apologized.

Hamaliel glinted green to gold, understanding.

“Your kind is very fond of trying to contain the immeasurable in the measurable. Minutes and seconds, days and millennia, miles and millimeters. God can give effortless birth to perfection in a mere inkling, but you must measure for all your undertakings. Twice, thrice each time confused about where your calculation went awry as you work to build something with even a flimsy shadow of equivalence to the glory of God. The hour, the price, the distance, the temperature, the angle, the pressure, the pound! These many things weigh on your shoulders as you work. And oh, how many trinkets are there to aid you in all of this! Compasses and protractors, abacus’ and calculators, levels and yardsticks. One of them, a time piece–while its back is more useful than its face.”

“What do you mean?”

Just then my grandfather’s old pocket watch appeared in my palm.

“Go on, then. Open the back,” Hamaliel said.

I did as I was told. As I pried it open, the winds of all of space howled, the starlight and planets of all galaxies glowed, the voices of every living creature sung. My hair blew back, I lifted my hand to my brow, shielding my vision from the ethereal glare that beamed out at me. Hamaliel giggled at my astonishment.

“Look closer.”

I peered at the pocketwatch that held all of existence where the mechanical guts ought to be.

“It’s everything.”

“Isn’t it stunning?”

Alley cats and gnats. People and cells and blackholes and anthills. The whole shebang was there. A toddler inched past a comet, cooing all the way.

“It is stunning. And chaotic,” I mused, watching the infant grab at something to pull itself up.

“In your view, yes. But face the back of your pocketwatch to me.”

I held it up for Hamaliel, feeling the action was familiar. The very same as the dozens of times I’d held a compact open in my hand like an oyster shell, waiting for a bestie or sister as they used it to paint on a coat of lipgloss. Hamaliel contorted, altered herself, and unfurled into a winged mass of emerald feathers tinted yellow. Nestled in them were countless eyes as big and shiny as Christmas ornaments.

“Look at the reflection as it shines in my eyes.”

I beheld the universe in the gleam of the angel’s eye. It did not appear as the same storm of entropy. No, in Hamaliel’s vision, each blade of grass and speck of dirt fit perfectly alongside grand monuments and pompous heads of state. Vagabonds in ragged clothing were next to scalpel and syringe improved celebrities. The streams of existence wove in and out, circled each other like the cork screws and crown wheels of a clock’s interior.

“Tell me what you see,” Hamaliel said.

“Everything, great and small, orbits alongside in harmony. It’s like––I don’t know–a very pretty dance. It’s mesmerizing.”

“True. It’s in sync. Partnership. Just as the gears and cogs of your grandfather’s pocketwatch depend on one another to complete their function.” Hamaliel winked half of her thousand eyes at me. “On an ordinary day, that is.”

“A bent or missing hairspring matters?,” I asked.

“Very much. If something hurts any life, it is a painful gash in the flesh of the universe. It won’t tick the same.”

I suddenly felt the need to repent for a lifetime of bugs I’d accidentally stepped on. Then another feeling rose. As soon as one is in possession of something precious, they begin to fear losing it.

“I can’t believe I’ll never get to see this again,” I mourned.

All the galaxies and their contents, elegant and entwined in a complexity I could never dare to comprehend on my own, would vanish. I could only ever make sense of the dizzying randomness in borrowed angelic vision. It was wrong to envy celestial senses, but I couldn’t help it. Retinas, pupils and irises capable of computing the numinous. Hamaliel and I watched the child stagger to its tiny feet at the very same moment a sparrow hatched on the other side of the world.

“This is how I see the greatest minds of humanity try to decipher it all. Like a child, fumbling, but walking nonetheless.”

“What do you mean?”

“Perhaps you will never again see the universe as a coherent piece of creation, filled with intent and balance. It will be confusing and senselessly cruel sometimes. But when the mystery returns, you’ll intuit the divine blueprint beneath it all. Some of your scientists have.”

I was cautious as I answered, knowing I was not only shamefully stupid beside Hamaliel, but also compared to the people she referenced.

“You mean—-the chaos theorists?”

Hamaliel nodded.

“Bless them for taking a shot at it. Oh, look, the little one made it across the whole dining room,” Hamaliel said.

“You watch us all the time?”

“Mmm. No, not me so much. That’s what your guardian angel is for. If you call on me I will answer, of course. But I’m present often enough.”

“So, who do you look after?’

“I look after those who care.”

“For instance the chaos theorists?”

“If their calculations are off by a fraction, it matters. So of course I am with them. I am with anyone who attempts mastery in their discipline or craft. In turn, I am a master of my craft, which is overseeing the grand design of this reality.”

Hamaliel didn’t need me to ask to elaborate, she just did.

“They say that the devil is in the details, but there is an angel there, and it is me. When you must undertake anything very, very carefully, I am present.”

“As you are now?”

“In many ways. I am in the logic that whispers through the static of a mad mathematician’s thoughts. I say my piece until my voice cuts through. When they hear me their numbers add up neatly and mania gives way to clarity. I am in the findings of a combed over calculation that makes them work. You’ll also find me in the flap of butterfly wings which sets a hurricane in motion.”

“Little things with large effects.”

“Precisely. All little things have large effects. I lingered with the architects and builders when they constructed the Cathédrale Chatres in your Middle Ages, overseeing the angles and degrees of flying buttresses and stained glass windows. Centuries later, when the alchemist Fulcanelli wanted to crack the code, the mathematical secrets, hidden in its bricks and mortar, I was there; remembering its construction and acting as his unseen tutor. I kept him company often. This is how he knew that ‘atomic explosives could be built with tiny grains of metal that can destroy whole cities.’ He warned humanity at my behest.”

“The splitting of an atom is a little thing with a large effect.”

“It is,” Hamaliel murmured. “And the consequences matter. The infinite is in the infinitesimal. This is what I want you to remind others of me.”

“I’ll tell them. And what else should I tell them?”

“Tell them I am there. I am in the millimeter difference between the survivor’s laceration and their major organ. As you huff and gasp, winded as you arrive at the terminal to find your train has left the station, I live in the disappointed glance at its departing car. I’m in the tardiness which causes you to collide paths with that crush you thought you’d lost touch with forever. I oversee the immaculate scheduling that allows you to meet your fate.”

“Divine timing?”

“There is divine time and weight and distance and every other metric you can think of and many more you cannot even think of.”

“I see.”

Hamaliel didn’t have anything like a human mouth, but somehow I still know she was smiling at me.

“No, you can’t possibly. Unless it’s through me. Look closer, I’ll show you again.”

I furrowed my brow, squinting as I looked into Hamaliel’s eyes. The images from the pocketwatch changed. The red lights of an ambulance blinked, its siren blared, as it raced towards a bridge. In front of it was a rickety old truck with its back half opened, stuffed with cargo. It was one of those sad old vehicles that can’t manage to accelerate very well. Its driver still tried, panicked at the honking ambulance behind it. It fishtailed onto the road’s shoulder, a cascade of boxes flying off the bed and scattering onto the road. The ambulance swerved and passed it up, streaking towards the hospital. Neither EMT or trucker was wise to the bridge’s danger of collapsing. The offloaded cargo bought just enough time to forebear tragedy until an engineer took note.

“A million miracles like this transpire with humans none the wiser. Divine weight skimmed off to save not only the life in the back of the ambulance but also everyone who might have travelled along that doomed bridge. God was at the chalkboard quantifying how much grace he can factor into human error to nullify grief. Minus seven heavy boxes equals precious existence preserved.”

“In every conceivable form of tiny margins, huge potential lives.”

“And that is just what every person is, when you stop to think about it.”

“How do you live in us, though?”

“As I said, I am in any attempt at mastery. I suspect you know what I am referring to.”

“You are in the repeated revisions of my manuscript.”

“I am. I am in every push towards absolute beauty. For you, it’s the drive towards sonorous sentences and error free grammar. I’m in the blurred vision you have from scanning a page for misspellings and misplaced commas.”

“In spite of that, though, I’m sure there’s many on this page,” I sighed.

“It’s the act of pursuing it which changes you, which purifies your soul, which allows you to embody God. To think you can accomplish perfection isn’t only hubris, but silly. You never can. Striving towards the impossible is an act of faith.”

I let Hamaliel’s words sink in, thinking of how whenever our heart was bent towards accomplishing anything in excellence, it summoned her. Just then, she changed shape again. This time, when she unfolded her wings it was a different sort of spectacle. Dangling from them were bejeweled metronomes and silver tuning pitch pipes, incandescent measuring cups and barometers, odometers, numerous thermometers with mercury flowing to and fro inside them, dazzling seismographs and weather vanes.

“It’s time for you to close your grandfather’s pocket watch,” she said.

I nodded, melancholy.

With the snap of its hinges my vision and understanding of the harmony of the world dissolved. Once more, it was cruel and confusing. But, something lost returned to me. I felt what I hadn’t since the beginning of my meeting with Hamaliel. The mystery of how our collective human story will end, and how our individual stories will play out. That mystery gave rise to wonder at life, and wonder gave rise to desire to build some tribute to make sense of it all. Desire gave way to purpose.

If there’s no riddle to unravel, there’s no need to retrace God’s steps. There’s no drive towards mastery. Mastery, that elusive thing just a vowel away from the mystery we strain to grasp at. But of course, we always miss it by just a letter, the tiniest margin. In that little chasm between what we tried to make and what we did make, exists the whole of humanity’s imagination and achievement. It is always in progress, not divine but divinely inspired, imperfect and endearing in its modesty.

Thank you for reading A Tiny Compass. Your attention means the world to me. On Thursday, October 16th at 7:00 p.m. I’ll be hosting a workshop and class on Witchcraft, hosted by Aura Aura. You can snag tickets here. If you’d like to support my work, you can always schedule a divination at www.gemineyetarot.com, subscribe to my newsletter (for free or paid ), or just wish me good will. The full moon in Aries was crazy and I’m not accepting unhinged rants at the moment.

LVX,

Alejandra

Kazumba is not a real name or person. The story was a summer camp created lore passed off as local legend. The stone mounds which dot the campsite are not likely to have Anishnaabe bones resting beneath them. There are thousands of fictions like this across the U.S.. They’re a part of an American narrative tradition that has mythologized Indigenous people for its own ends. Ogala Sioux Tribe member and scholar Kali Simmons explains this trope of indigenous representation as so “other” to the white imagination, “they are other-worldly.” Kazumba, who is the vengeful spirit at night to campers but benign during the day, is part of a colonial rendering of tribal identity as “inevitably going to disappear, an ontological status, rather than intentionally and violently disappeared by settlers.” Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched, 1:15:45-1:17:26.

This particular tale was from the camp I attended. It resurfaced in my memory as I combed through the stories of hauntings that were shared with me online and in my records of home blessings, banishings and cleansings I’d done. There was a glimmer of familiarity in its undercurrent I couldn’t quite name. 

Our camp was favored by politically progressive, financially comfortable, white parents. In the minority were Black and Brown campers from the inner city who were chronically antagonized or blamed for things. In a short time a major divide broke out in our unit. White children ran through our section on some sort of search while others hid beneath their beds. The “junior race riot” became a punchline at the end-of-session summer play. A fucked up Lord of the Flies meets Helter Skelter, laying bare all the inclinations well meaning neoliberals breed early on.

The intention behind summer camps was always to pass on the views of an older generation to a younger one. They’re meant to fill middle and upper class childhoods with bonding, adventure, courage in the face of discomfort and good natured mischief. Scenes of first crushes, fireflies in sweet grass, skinned knees and sunshine. The mottos campers remember as a guiding moral light are things like, “God first, you second, me third,” and “the other fellow first.” A potent combination of core memories and ideology shapes privileged youth at the tenderest age, alongside inherited racial and class based biases. 

Throughout the 1930s and 40s camps cropped up with specific political agendas and leanings. Communist, socialist, fundamentalist Christian, and Zionist to name a few. The relationship between Judaism and camping is intentional, but speaks to a larger ethos surrounding immigration and assimilation. In the aftermath of the Holocaust Jewish founders used them as a way to facilitate religious community for youth. There was beauty and meaning in spaces created for Jewish children to simply be Jewish children, laughing in the great outdoors. The idea of such a thing was so far out of reach a short time before. Existing establishments had thus far excluded or capped Jewish attendance. Marcie Cohen wrote in Southern Cultures, 

Camp Blue Star, the “oldest, family-owned, private, kosher Jewish camp in the southern United States,” was founded in 1948 on 740 acres in the mountains of western North Carolina, the same year as the founding of the state of Israel. Sarna describes this era as a “crucial decade in Jewish camping,” in which Jewish education was both an expression of “cultural resistance” after the Holocaust and an American promise to build and uphold the Jewish people. (Cohen)

The communing with nature through fishing, hunting and sports was an embrace of the rugged spirit of pioneers. Adopting it was a clap back at the stereotype of Jewish people as unathletic, urban and strictly intellectual–the antithesis of virile American archetypes.  Stories about Native American hexes and curses were a part of embracing their new homeland’s tradition of colonialism. This, though, is the hard thing about the United States as a beacon of promise to immigrants. The road to the American dream paves over Indigenous people. Israel, with U.S. support, initiated its genocidal upheaval of Palestinians concurrently with a boom in Jewish summer camps. I doubt that generations of young people groomed into romanticizing American expansionist culture is mere coincidence.

After the cheerful camp singalongs of “This Land is Your Land” fade into silence, the stories are told. Vengeful chiefs, scalpers, bitter warriors. We can add a melody but the lie is no less. The land belongs to Indigenous people. Some of us or our ancestors settled here, were forced here, sought asylum here or have always been here. Where we belong is a perennial question, it nags and churns deep in our guts. Ghosts are something we try to write off as history, arcane, incorporeal as a memory. But they collide with the present and act as glitches in our plans; inconvenient presences that have not stepped aside but remain.

That far off familiarity came into focus. The rising hand from the Indian burial, the creaking door in the empty hallway of a newly purchased house. All the stories are the same. Perhaps, just when we think we’ve found where we belong at last, we sense someone else. The horror creeps in. The dispossessed will repossess. They will not go quietly.  

LVX,

Alejandra

Thank you for reading this little story in a series on American hauntings. The dynamics of migration, conquest and subjugation–and the way it permeates both our conscience and imagination–is a broad experience across centuries and nations. The idea of a Native spirit haunting settlers is hardly modern. The “genius loci” or protective spirit of a place was depicted often in Roman religious culture. Considering the breadth of Rome’s colonization, it’s understandable how its citizens would venerate a presence that can’t be killed or run off, but instead feared and honored through sacrifices. We can see these tropes in folk horror narratives from around the world. I thought about whether discussing the strange political history of summer camps was going to make non-Indigenous people think I’d chosen to piss on their childhood memories. If this is the case, think of children who are never fully seen as humans but ghosts to be cast out instead. I’m not suggesting everything under the sun needs to be problematized. I am suggesting we know thy self, including the trappings of our imagination. Where myth meets man is fraught. Interpretation is a key that opens understanding to its many realms. You can always catch me @gemineyetarot on socials or here for home blessings and divinations

.

I thought I’d begin sharing divinations with you again this month. Take what resonates and pitch what doesn’t. Don’t forget—we can all change our stars if they don’t suit us.

Cancer: The King of Swords.

In the Marseille tarot deck which I’m using, the King of Swords doesn’t grip his weapon, staring us down as the Rider Waite Smith version does. He’s not the officer who makes our blood run cold, foot soldiers of fate with a holster on the hip.

No, this King of Swords is the security guards who chat me up in airports and rare book collections, asking questions about my tattoos and telling me about the thrash shows they went to filled with blood, sweat and the kind of heavy riffs they just don’t make anymore.

This King of Swords holds his weapon casually in one hand and a key in the other. He protects by preventing, reminding us to vet who we let into our lives. Unlock the inner sanctums to those you trust, bar the ones who don’t pass the vibe check. Those close to you will have to learn to respect the law you lay down—and so will you. Be consistent about enforcing boundaries and it will serve you well. Friends and foes will learn to read the gleam of a sword and back off, reminded not to mistake compassion for weakness.

Leo-Eight of Pentacles

Leos, you’re going to hate me for this one. Your card pull is the Eight of Pentacles. This card is on the meditative nature of labor. It’s the transcendence of being absorbed by your craft, the beauty of the back-end, the cultivating part of the process. It’s the rehearsals, crumpled drafts, the crazed inspiration seizing us by the collar.

Surrender.

You can chase the high of being chronically seen—orrrr—you can have your seven minutes in heaven with a muse. Allow yourself to be ravaged by obsession and spend a moment in deep, private, intimacy with creative vision. An angel guiding your hand and mind is something you can make space for. Trust me, it’s worth infinitely more than going viral, raking in a few cheap laughs, or getting salivated all over by strangers. Performativity on pause will allow you to breathe. You’ll realize you’re looking for your own distinct way to make art (through words, images, business, living, whatever the hell it is that lights you up) . Take time to ignore the audience and be solely with your craft. At the end of your time you’ll have something to give that doesn’t simply get you noticed but truly seen for all you are. The best part is you’ll make others feel seen too—a far more rewarding gift than mere spectacle.

Virgo-The Page of Wands

There are the control freak Virgos and then there are the chaos Virgos. The latter are molotov cocktails at a black-tie event. The ones who bring a baggie to the party and its way harder shit than polite company messes with. It’s time to reconcile the tightly wound, methodical, compulsive aspect with the stubbornly impulsive aspect. Dr. Jeckel and Mr. Hyde couldn’t play nice, so we need balance, my talented, intense, darlings.

The Page of Wands is nodding encouragingly towards you. They’re telling you it’s time to be intuitive, to listen to your heart and spirit, not your to-do list. Yes, I understand how awfully corny this sounds but the tarot has its reasons.

Your attention, dearest Virgo, is nothing short of terrifying, breathtaking, pure, devotion. So allow yourself respite to look around this wondrous and brutal place. Look up from the agenda and search for awe instead—because the object of your attention needs to be worthy of it. Besides, a moment of care free exploration will lift the enormous pressure of the pursuit of perfection—and the inevitable unraveling it causes. Be gentle with yourself, your presence in this world is precious-rare.

Libra: The Page of Cups

Our dear Libras are organized, prepared and thoughtful. They place beauty at the apex of the altar, always in search for a way to embody it themselves. They have the strategy on lock to make things move towards picture perfect. Charm is their everything, and they’ve got the devotees to prove it. The Page of Cups is inviting this balance-oriented sign for a change of pace. Libras like to be worshipped, but now is the time to be vulnerable. Approach conversations with those you admire and who even intimidate you.

Sometimes, charisma is knight’s armor we wear to make sure we aren’t stung by rejection. Hang it up and return to the role of squire, which is what the Page of Cups really is. Come as you are, approach those whose talents, creativity and personalities take up space. This will grant a chance to learn and grow, to be the guest rather than the host, to warm yourself in the glow of someone else’s light rather than burn your fuel. Trust it will spark imagination in unexpected ways.

Scorpio: The Five of Swords

Scorpios, so at home in the deep water. These perceptive creatures are mermaids—-able to see clearly through the murky and shadowy things, straight beyond the glass surface. In fact, they are able to swim so seamlessly to the heart of the matter they don’t get caught in the shades of grey most of us do. Mask wearers and secret keepers beware, Scorpios will spot something amiss.

I tried to choose a cheerier card, but even after reshuffling twice, the Five of Swords just wanted to say its piece. This card is about conflict. The blades shown are criss crossed, locked, entangled, messy but interwoven.

The thing about the Scorpio’s crystalline intuition and moral righteousness is it comes at a cost. Yes, perceptiveness about others can be a weapon. But, its also a form of empathy and emotional intelligence. So, when you zero in on the Achilles Heel of those you’re in discord with remember there’s always a part of yourself that aches in a fight more than you’re willing to let on.

If conflict arises this month, the question isn’t if you’re right or wrong. It’s whether you’d rather not burn that bridge, even if you have every reason to be angry. Sometimes giving others grace is also a gift to ourself.

Sagittarius -The Chariot

Sagittarians are our most curious, philosophical friends. Now is the time to do what you do best—traversing the realms of ideas and concepts. The Chariot card is about as affirmative as it gets. Its imagery shows a crowned figure charging straight into the fray on his cart, pulled by black and white horses. So, while you may be perpetually in the learning and exploring phase, this is a green light to execute the idea, the strategy, the thing you’ve been chewing on, wondering “should I?” The symbol of Sagittarius historically is a centaur wielding a bow. It’s time to send it soaring into the skies to leave its mark. Go boldly.

Capricorn-The Ace of Cups runneth over.

This card, emblematic of compassion, brings a welcome balance to the hyper practical, guarded Capricorn. This is the heavens cracking open with good will, spilling it over like a Solo cup sloshing beer at a cramped party. Whatever offering you have or are searching to make, it feels very much like a gift from you to the collective. You’ll be received warmly. Expect signs in all forms that this is your moment. Opportunities abound from people who want to be around you and see you succeed. Our winter-born, hard working peers tend to help by being self-sufficient, not heaping on to the pile of intense need and lending fierce originality to tired tropes. Expect to feel appreciated and also to voice your appreciation for others this month. Generosity is a two way street. Soak up the softness of it all.

Aquarius-The Seven of Swords

This is another one of those, “I double checked with a reshuffle and the same card came up” situations. The 7 of Swords. Apparently its essential we listen to this message. I’ve thought a lot about this card recently.

Its imagery on the Rider Waite Smith deck shows a figure in a military encampment, carrying off a bundle of swords under cloak and dagger. It’s typically an advisory that dishonesty is at work. In the context of endless war campaigns and our struggle to undermine them, it takes on a new significance—-actively disarming those who would do harm. Sometimes, stealth is essential. Discern wisely when actions are justified and unjustified. Considering the layers of possible interpretations at work, examine the circumstances.

-Are you being dishonest with yourself or others to serve your own interests? Maybe we need to realign with our moral compass. Do a check in and see what leaves you feeling good about your choices and where you might be giving yourself the ick.

-Has your intuition been nudging you to probe more deeply into a situation you feel ill at ease with? If so, don’t be afraid to listen to your gut. Sometimes, trust needs to be verified.

-Is it time to move in secrecy for the sake of protecting yourself or others?

In a perfect world, we’d get to be above board 100% of the time. In this one, though, sometimes we need to STFU and make sure we’ve got ourself covered. Keep up firm boundaries on what is best kept private, and what needs to be shared. Take an inventory to see what resonates, toss the rest.

Pisces-Strength

Pisces are known to shed a tear or two. They’re also knows as the dreamers of the zodiac. While we should take care not to follow in Ophelia’s wake and drown in our delusions, there is something to be said for the unacknowledged gifts Pisces’ possess. They’re able to float on a stream of fantasies, far from the swamp of harsh realities the rest of us tend to lose our way in.

It takes strength to dream. The bar for how we treat others, and the treatment we expect, plummets to uncharted depths all the the time. Yet Pisces never settles. While this watery sign can tend to be on a constant mission to upgrade, their relentless optimism is necessary because let’s face it—a lot needs to be upgraded. Lean in hard to the strength it takes to kindle your dearest desires. The rest of the world deserves to see what enchanted reverie has got you so spellbound. Let us in on the daydream by building it in the waking world.

Aries-The Six of Wands

Aries are in their element this Leo season. The growth edges are gentler and the friction that builds a fire has burst into a victory torch. The stars are shining brightly on our warriors this month. The Six of Wands illustrates a conquering hero, returning home. For the time being, obstacles are slayed and the objects of our desire are won. Take a moment to celebrate and be celebrated. Fortune is favoring the brave just now, though. So cherish peace time, because you’ll be eager to pit yourself against the next worthy battle. There’s a winning streak in the ether. The one thing you won’t be fighting is the urge to get after it.

Taurus- The Eight of Cups

The starry weather is knocking at your door, Taurus, asking you to set aside what you know. One of your greatest strengths is the premium you place on provisions. Whether its the most Pinterest worthy charcuterie board or a savings account that sings, these earthy beings know how to treasure simple things.

It’s not all quiet nights in and hard work for Taurus, though. Their deep love of the sensory can be a vulnerability when it comes to overindulgence. This sign struggles to keep attachments to acquisition in check. Taurus’ can have addictive personalities that require reining in from time to time. The Eight of Cups is a call to think about how venturing away from our creature comforts might change us. The Eight of Cups is sometimes called the card of “abandoned success.” Its image shows a figure with their back turned from eight chalices, headed to a mountainside path on a moonlit night. If our appetites are bottomless, are success and fulfillment synonymous? The Taurus placements in my chart think not.

It may be time to think about how what we’re driven to acquire doesn’t always satiate us. Challenge yourself to disrupt your dependencies—whether they’re on substance, outside validation, structure or routine. Some of these things may be obviously harmful, others socially accepted but personally limiting. Don’t be afraid of creating a plan for a safe, healthy mode of strategic detachment. It may feel counterintuitive, but it will remind you of the strength you have to master your desires for the sake of authentic, rather than fleeting, gratification.

Gemini- The Two of Cups

In order for what we say to have value, it has to mean something to the listener. In order for anything we have to offer to be received it has to mean something to others. We all need to be needed. Center each other and mutuality blooms. The Two of Cups is one of the sweeter cards of the deck, with a pair of lovers or friends each extending a chalice to the other. It’s a message of true love based in understanding, acceptance and forgiveness. Care at its most authentic. The truth is we are all ragged and damaged. Sometimes the curtain slips. When we’re in this place is when we need others most. It’s also, unfortunately, when we’re most likely to push others away with ugly behaviors driven by intense need. Take care to be kind whether you’re on the end that needs care or is offering it.

This month, Geminis may find that their work is not simply being extroverted, but present, with those who need to be seen and heard. Listen rather speak and be understanding with those who need you. Then offer your piece. Trust that the time will come when you’ll need to call on a friend. You’ll feel much more understood, and less vulnerable, if you’ve stuck around when they needed you.

Thank you all for reading A Tiny Compass. Your time and attention is deeply appreciated. This month I had the pleasure of attending and introducing a screening of Alejandro Jodrowsky’s The Holy Mountain. The event gave me time to revisit the occultist’s work. I’m offering his tarot spread of the “realized self” from his book “The Way of the Tarot” until the 31st. Drop me a line if you’d like to schedule one. You can always find me here.

LVX,

Alejandra

People have commented on how I don’t get writer’s block. A reputation I earned by managing to get to the mythical place where a Google doc ends and they won’t let you write in it anymore. The thing is, I do get writer’s block very badly. I’ve been at a loss for words. I want you all to have messages of faith and hope and all of those things. But they’ve been a little out of reach lately.

My dad used to tell me this story about how Charles Addams, the creator of the Addams Family, would draw a demented cartoon of a man pushing a boulder over a cliff onto a car below (of passengers on a family road trip, to be exact). This doodle would make an appearance every time he was on the brink of going mad, so his loved ones knew it was time to cart him over to the loony bin for a tune up. I have no clue whether there’s any truth to this lore at all.

But I also have a give away for when I’m not doing very well. I start to watch the absolute worse garbage you can find on TV and just stare at it, glassy eyed, for way too long. And I don’t write. I wish I could say I was being something as romantic or even interesting as a train wreck, but its a lot more lackluster than that.

Occasionally people are curious about the things I’ve seen in regards to spiritual caregiving or advocacy related work in the carceral system. Many of the people who entrust me to sit with them (in any capacity, even as clients) are in very fragile, painful situations. There is no reason to share, unless I am also sharing something you can be empowered to do to help. Still, swallowing the sordid tales of the sadism I know is overrunning detention centers and prisons takes it toll. It feels like drinking poison slowly.

I don’t voice a lot because the thing that kills me, the thing I want to spare others from, is feeling really helpless in the face of it all. Experts call it “vicarious trauma”, that exposure to devastating circumstances, without being the person who is experiencing them directly. I don’t think that’s quite right, though. Watching people you care about get hurt and not being able to do very much about it is its own type of wound, even if it’s a lesser wound. The helplessness is not illusory, no matter how much the perennial optimists argue that’s not the case.

The things I’ve watched people far more vulnerable than me go through, while I have only a limited capacity to intercede, has started to claw at me from the inside. I have recurring nightmares. But, these dreams are not things I keep stumbling over, unable to move past. It’s my psyche, making sense out of the senseless, so I can go back to functioning properly. I am here writing, so it must be starting to work. I promise I’m not here to be a total killjoy telling everyone how depressing it is outside. Existence has always been a mixed bag, no matter how many people argue the apocalypse is nigh. Here is my real reasons for writing—a positive update.

My friend Richard, who is incarcerated in Wisconsin, has a very complicated and tragic history of being on the receiving end of institutional abuse. He has been fighting the good fight for a fair trial for many years. In the past three years, I’ve worked as his advocate and connected him with press. He is a far better advocate to himself than I could ever be, so the credit is all his. The judge presiding over his case, Ellen Berz, was recently penalized by the Wisconsin Supreme Court for bias and a slew of other offenses. She was suspended from the bench for a week. This is just a slap on the wrist, but it’s very rare for an investigation into a justice to go anywhere at all, much less vindicate the hundreds of complaints filed by dozens of lawyers that she be removed from their cases. Her history is under review and she has been publicly discredited. A comical exchange between Rick and Judge Berz was widely printed because her behavior in this instance was deemed “unbecoming of a judge.”

https://pbswisconsin.org/news-item/wisconsin-supreme-court-suspends-dane-county-judge-who-left-court-to-arrest-a-hospitalized-defendant/

I am beginning to see a light in the darkness where Richard’s case is concerned. I do believe he will be able to be released from prison. Once he is out, I have my sights set on illuminating the horrific nature of the juvenile detention center he survived. From there, I hope it will close permanently. None of these outcomes have seemed probable, especially because I’ve been waiting for them to happen for years.

Yet I know they will come to pass. Not because I’m naive enough to think that good always prevails. Because I’m old enough now to know that nothing permanently prevails, good or bad. Faith is no exception. Yet all our favorite gurus, witches, monks, professional wisdom-givers rarely speak from a place of doubt. So I am reporting live from that unglamorous ditch. Even here, with a spirit hanging low like fog at my feet, I feel Richard’s freedom nearing.

Magick is always about ignoring what is improbable and focusing instead on what is possible. Whatever fight you’re in, keep going. When you arrive, the road there will not have been a straight line of unwavering faith. If the one you travel is anything like mine, every place you want to get to takes a hellishly long time. You will have had your doubts, just as I have mine. We’ll get where we’re meant to, even if it doesn’t feel like it. The thing I’ve learned is that magick never happens in a momentous, movie montage type of way. It happens sneakily, after you’ve had to look the harshest realities dead in the face so many times you’ve started to fear that all the magick of goodness will never happen. Then, it just does. Hold fast.

LVX,

Alejandra

Thank you all for reading A Tiny Compass. I am so grateful for your time and attention. If you are in the Metro Detroit area, I’m hosting an Intuitive Tarot Class (it’s an informal gathering with snacks and card reading for each other) on Thursday, July 10th at 7p.m..Snag tix here. I’ll also be hosting an intuitive tarot hang virtually, for non-local friends, in the near future. You can always find me at www.gemineyetarot.com.

Many of you know me for writing on occultism, witchcraft and ritual magick. You’ve heard me discussing angels and demons. We’ve talked of the modes humanity has used to reach up to the celestial realms or down to the depths of hades for millennia. So much of this mysterious world of ritual stretches deep into history. The times and places of their original contexts have shifted–the buildings are ragged ruins, the languages have died, the customs faded to shadows quietly hidden or utterly distorted in modernity. 

To be in this world, I’ve had to scavenge works written in monasteries or uttered at mountaintop shrines in the mediterranean. Thumb through grimoires, manuscripts on alchemy in grand and private libraries or squint at sus PDFs in sketchy Reddit forums. To read and interpret these texts, I’ve had to gain some language skills. I’m not a quick study in languages by a long shot. But that doesn’t mean that I am not a real language nerd, with some (imperfect) proficiencies. Mine are Spanish, Latin, Greek and Japanese. 

Learning languages is the ultimate act of humility. Your tongue stumbles. You’re misunderstood and pantomime like a dumb ass. You can’t help but sound so, so stupid if you don’t have the words to match your thoughts. You’ll be laughed at by people who treat you like a fool. It’s something I’ve gotten used to, the way being ignorant of a language automatically makes you an outsider. 

To learn Greek I’ve been a girl in a leather jacket in a classroom full of priests. I’ve been a girl cramming for a Latin exam in a punk house, struggling to focus through the din of drunken house parties that don’t end even after the dawn breaks.  I’ve been a woman repeating the most beautiful Japanese word I think I’ve ever heard, so full of wonder, only to find out it means “toilet.” 

To know arcane stuff you may have to learn arcane languages. It makes sense that we use dead languages to call up spirits and angels and demons–they are things not of this life. I can and will go on about those eternal beings and share all my sidequests along the serpentine paths of research on religion and esotericism.

Right now, I want to talk to you not of angels and demons but something just as sacred. I want to talk about humanity. My interest in literature and language is applied not just to religious thought but also in education. Although dead languages are treated as the pinnacle of impressive, connecting with the living matters more. For the past few months I’ve been working with highschool age multilingual learners. English is not their first language. The juxtaposition between the state of education, immigration policies and my primary vocation of spiritual caregiving has led me to an understanding. 

The landscape of metaphysics and modern spirituality is in a state of crisis. I’m not talking about the abundance of Tik Tok scammers, cultural appropriators, celebrity politicos or wellness influencers peddling batshit ideologies. Everytime I hear someone moaning about the monetization of divination or ritual work as if it's a novel turn of events connected to social media, I think “someone’s never read Tudor English trial records on sorcery (or trial records from anywhere, actually) and it shows!”  Ritual work for money is as old as turning tricks. We’ve been charging for this labor since before the common era. These are not matters of urgency. 

The crisis of the spiritual landscape in the Western world I am referring to is its bent towards a strictly psychoanalytic framework. So many of us have shifted from religious institutions because we’ve found them overrun with corrupted bureaucrats, twisting the words of God into the shape of a gun and taking aim at us or others.  It makes sense those on the periphery would flee to the margins of belief. This is where mysticism blooms like a medicinal plant that we gather up to treat our wounded selves. It's the antidote, the thing that stitches up the devastating chasm between us and the eternal. 

We’ve been surviving beneath the long shadows of oppressive regimes. Eventually an overattachment to survivalism mutates into individualism. Now our scholars, influencers, content creators and practitioners are wholly committed to a discourse that is unapologetically self-centered or disingenuously interested in the well being of others. For a while it seemed to me that intellectualism had left the chat on mystical spirituality altogether. 

That’s not the case, though. There’s actually interest in some of our greatest writers like Hildegard Von Bingen and Simone Weil thanks to the virality of #CatholicCore, an aesthetic internet trend that leans hard into the romance of impassioned mysticism. It's not as austere as the image of barren cloister rooms gracing CatholicCore Pinterest boards. This incarnation travels with baggage. We’re negotiating the fraught territory of delusion, dysmorphia, eating disorders and workout regimes rebranded as asceticism. In spite of the flawed nature of this terrain, it's not devoid of intellectualism at all. 

There are astute narrators unpacking semiotics, symbolism and all the trappings of spirituality through video essays, Substacks, Discord channels and podcast platforms. Most of them, though, are not discussing the human condition. They're discussing the individual condition and the cultural condition as a way of either focusing on individual or national wellness.

Jungian and archetypal psychology are interesting approaches to therapy. Somatic methodologies can anchor us holistically. They allow us to investigate our capacity to self-regulate, not just have prescriptions shovelled in our faces without the opportunity to see if other options might help. Consciousness expanding plant medicines are being decriminalized because of their power to ferry us safely through the shattering scenes of our memory, recovering lost and broken parts of ourselves. 

In the end, all the inner knowledge we gain isn’t worth a damn if we use it only to be at peace, rather than working towards it. In the end, all the long form essays and philosophizing isn’t any less vain than a Botox injected iphone babe making no pretenses about caring. The latter is just more honest about who they are. There has to be a meaningful application of intellectualism or it is just another pointless brand of vanity. 

There seems to be something we’ve accepted as a core truth. For all our emphasis on positivity, we’ve arrived at a conclusion that we cannot change hearts and minds. What is meant to be a community of enlightened individuals has lost touch with its roots in alchemy and Hermeticism. We don’t act as we believe in the possibility of miracles, let alone transubstantiation, transmutation, revelation or the arrival of a messiah. We’re nihilists masquerading as optimists. I am pleading with you to understand that no part of you is dead inside. It is ensouled, it is enspirited and it is capable of making great change. Very vulnerable lives and freedom depend on it. Your life and freedom depends on it. 

For those who are just meeting me, I not only have a background in education but in prison related work. In both places, I am witness to haunting things. I am a walking library of funny, inspiring, and very heavy, sad stories. Like so many others, I am ebbing and flowing through a cycle of commitment, burn out and exiting, and recommitment. My heart goes out to those with greater resilience and fortitude than myself who remain steadfast. There are so many things I have to share, but this is the one I need you to hear and act on today. 

I’d like to preface with a comment on immigration. Those who have the privilege of citizenship in the United States are often descended from others who immigrated here. Those ancestors further distanced the landscape of this place from its Indigenous origins. Like your forefathers, people travel here not to vex and disrupt the peace of white people, but simply to live. Most of my students are terribly homesick and wish they could return home, but the conditions there are often filled with violence or poverty. Some are asylum seekers whose families aided the U.S. military during its occupation in Afghanistan. There are so many reasons, and if we knew them all, we would rethink our positions. If we want an end to a crisis in immigration, the answer is not stricter border security. It's divesting from the neo colonial economic policies that drive people from their homes in the global south. 

Immigrant children did not have the power to make a decision about being here. They were brought here, and sadly sometimes trafficked. If they make normal, teenage decisions, like going to a house party that gets busted up by the cops, they risk winding up in ICE custody. Regardless of laws that prohibit the police from colluding with ICE, there is collaboration. Because I have a background in carceral work I know what the interior of detention centers are like. They are concrete rooms, usually crammed, where detainees are on the floor with no blankets. Instances of sexual assault perpetrated by guards is a systemic issue which is continuously monitored by public health and human rights organizations. Minors in detention share space with adults who may or may not have a criminal history. They are not safe, benign places. 

A couple of weeks ago I was on a field trip. It was the least relaxing trip to a lake I have ever been on. A student who was disappointed he could not join followed the school buses in his vehicle and was pulled over by the police. The police contacted ICE and he was taken into custody, where he remains today. Maykol wanted to participate in an outdoor event, to be in nature, to learn and to socialize like any kid would. Because he is eighteen he is being treated as a criminal. Maykol’s teachers are working diligently to galvanize support to bring him home. I am asking you to sign this petition they’ve created to support him and student services that advocate for children in similarly vulnerable positions. I can and will share every incantation and ritual that resides in the nooks and crannies of my peculiar brain. But if you truly wish to be in the good graces of angels, count yourself as one who loves humanity. 

Fides, Spes et Caritas,

Alejandra

Thank you for reading my newsletter. Your time and attention is deeply appreciated. If you’d like to support me as I take time to work on my next writing and research endeavors, you can always book me for a divination at www.gemineyetarot.com or subscribe for free (or donate if you wish) to this newsletter. News of upcoming lectures, classes and offerings are here or on social media platforms @gemineyetarot. Any typos are intentional to make sure you still know how to close read. Xo.

 The belongings of students of mine who stopped coming to school in the middle of the semester. Both were impacted by personal and immigration issues that disrupted their education.

I’ve wanted to write to you all so much, but chaos has been barreling at us full throttle. A couple of newsletters ago I wrote about language and the intricate tiers of social statuses they occupy; the way some are suffocated and killed, plucked from indigenous mouths then stuffed with another. Others are cloaked and preserved in prestige. Language, religion and colonial history are so knotted and tangled these things come up a lot here. They’re integral to the study of theology, and by extension mysticism, occultism and esotericism. 

For those of you who have been hanging out with this newsletter for a while you’ve come across my writings on angelology and demonology. The meditations on angelology in particular are heavily inspired by a 16th century linguist. I’d like to share a little bit about him before getting to the heart of this writing–a meditation on Malkidael, the angel of Aries (late, I know). 

Johann Reuchlin (1455-1522) was an influential German Jesuit scholar. During this era Catholicism was especially politicized and rife with infighting. Most of this was characterized by heresy accusations arising from hermeneutic squabbles, niche satires ridiculing clergy (this is honestly such an iconically Early Modern way of handling a beef), and brutal executions the easily-offended church doled out. At this time the Inquisition was actively campaigning to inflict new modes of misery and oppression. They called on Reuchlin to write on the dangers of Jewish literature for the sake of justifying book confiscations and burnings. 

Reuchlin was an incredibly serious Hebraist (scholar of the Hebrew language) and clearly a philosemite (a kind of low key problematic Jewish fetishizer). His works on Hebrew grammar may have contributed to its survival as a classical language–the only one to be successfully revived from a dead language to a living one. When it came time for him to present his case for the Church it was his honest assessment of the Jewish literature he encountered—barely any was anti-Christian, the little that was wasn’t taken seriously by Jews. But the Kabbalah, Midrash and Talmud–they were stunningly beautiful works that Christians could gain closeness to God through, also. They should be spared. 

Reuchlin was besieged with backlash. He initially advocated for the preservation of Jewish scholarship but not the dignity and rights of Jews themselves. Ultimately, though, he did rise to the occasion and acted as an imperfect, but key, defendant against the Inquisition’s persecution of both Jewish people and culture. For his efforts he was hounded relentlessly by pissed off Catholics, until Martin Luther galvanizing the Reformation took the heat off him. He was able to teach Latin, Greek and Hebrew in peace—and devote his time to Christian interpretation of the Kabbalah. This is a really loaded topic, which I’m not sure I’m the right person to unpack as neither a Christian Kabbalist or Jewish person.

There is a lot of overt anti-Semitism present in the origins of Christian Kabbalah that should be critically evaluated. Segueing into this topic wisely is on the agenda—-it will take more research for me to do it justice, especially considering the weaponization of painful history to suppress support of Palestine. Furthermore, all Abrahamic religions have benefitted from the theological assertion that their monotheism is superior to the spiritualities of African and Native American people. 

When I talk about these things I want to do so in a way that takes a panoramic view of ideology to capture human nature as a whole–its propensity for violence and peace, the fluid roles of victim and victimizer, the beauty and brutality of it all. It's an ebb and flow, a dance from nobility to corruption, disgrace and redemption, we all partake in. 

For now, though, I’ll shine a light on Reuchlin. Even with his eyes cast skyward he was there for the humanity who needed his voice of dissent. He left us the tools he used to reach for the heavens— a linguistic ladder with rungs of ancient syntax and grammar. Reuchlin wrote about 72 angels, their natures and names nestled in the sacred and secret Hebrew words for God. This is a meditation on one of those angels, Malkidael. 

A Meditation on Malkidael

Malkidael answers his call in robes of red, a spear and helmet on hand. He is battle ready and ever in service to worthy causes. When he arrives, the fiery color of his bearing makes him seem to be a gust of flame blown in from the apocalypse–an aura of change, of frightening momentum, radiates. 

“Who are you, Malkidael?,” I asked. 

“I am an angel warrior. A defender. I defend you, and things greater and smaller than you.”

“Forgive me, but aren’t angels meant to be good, and isn’t peace, rather than war, goodness?” 

“It is. But peace has to be won. It is defended and fought for. And it is not what you think it is.” 

I paused, saying nothing. Sensing I didn’t know what he meant, he spoke again.

“When the streets are quiet and you hear neither laughter nor tears, that is not peace. When you rise in the mornings, not with awe at all you have woken to, but with unthinking duty to report to the drudgery that awaits you, that is not peace either. The little and big miseries which humanity heaps upon each other, stoically bearing them as facts of life that cannot be contested are still not peace.”

I knew what this angel, undulating heat and light before me, meant. Hard work to just exist with no particular distinction or luxury was all I’d ever known. Still, parts of it left me uncertain. 

“But don’t we have to accept these things? Isn’t it just entitlement to think we should be exempt from responsibility?” 

“You are not exempt from responsibility. But you are not to take more than what is fair. To receive it without question is not the strength you think it is. To do so is resignation. To do so without complaint is the silence of a crushed spirit.”

“Peace and quiet are not one in the same,” I said, understanding.

 The plumes on Malkidael’s helmet gleamed, sparking oranges and reds like phoenix feathers. He nodded.

“The quiet that reigns in fear is not peace, no.” 

“And are these things enemies to peace?”

“They are. Peace and terror seldom coexist.”

“I understand what you are not, Malkidael. But who are you?”

“I am you and you are me. I am an instinct. A thread, an element, in all that there is. Although you have not seen my face nor known my name, I have been with you always– through every age and every evolution–because never have you been without a need for a defender or warrior at your side. And although I come to you in strength and glory that humbles you in my presence, I am made of what resides in you. 

When you have been abandoned, neglected and left in scarcity, made to feel as if you are not worth either love or dignity, I am the voice, small at first, which refutes it.

When you have come to accept next to nothing because that’s all you’ve known from those meant to care for you, I am the instinct, inborn, that whispers. ‘You are precious.’ 

You are owed kindness.  You are owed consideration, regardless of whether you have lived in perfect virtue or unbroken sin. Based on nothing but humanity alone, you deserve to matter. No matter how troubled, how reckless, how flawed, how charismatic or celebrated, how compliant and calm, how poor or anonymous, you matter.” 

“It is not always easy to know this, though, Malkidael,” I answered, thinking of the many times I’d taken little to nothing because it was all I could be certain of. 

“I know this, and it is why I exist,” his gentle voice answered. “I am the instinct which helps you find your true worth when it is lost to you. And when I have led you there, you whisper your discovery. My voice travels through your lungs, timid and faltering at first, just for you to hear. You must learn before any others: you deserve to matter. And then, as you begin to know this, your voice may still quiver, but it rises.

Fighting against the fear humans have when they face those with greater power or standing than their own. You begin to ask of others that they treat you as someone who matters. Some will answer accordingly but others will not. It is not that you are unworthy, but rather some corrupt agenda, conscious or unconscious, hinges on your degraded status. For others, it is just brokenness within themselves.”

“Then what, Malkidael?” 

“You cower, because it is your way. You will accept it. Sometimes it will be a booming voice, or the threat of consequence,or a simple dismissiveness, that makes you feel small. You will retreat to the timid and meek place where you expect nothing more because it feels safer.

Here, though, you will not find peace. You’ll toss and turn, bitter, resentful. You’ll stare at your bedroom ceiling, sleepless and unblinking, your thoughts falling into a dark cavern. It is me eating away at you, haunting you, forcing you to account for your actions. 

You have not just violated yourself, but a higher law, from a higher place, that demands we destroy the things that enthrone some while diminishing others. Fear has forced you into complicity, in upholding a sort of scaffolding made of poisonous and worldly ideas. 

A warrior defends through destruction. So when you are not at peace, it is me who is beckoning you to fight against all that would atrophy your soul, force you into submission of the dimmed existence that is a life lived in bondage and acquiescence.”

“For some, though, the stakes of showing courage are very high,” I answered.

“I am there when stakes are highest. When the cost of fairness is life or limb, livelihood or freedom, I am the rage in your heart, the heat in your blood cells, the determination that rises from the pit of your belly and thrashes against the trappings of man that shackle and gag the defector and the defier. I am the cosmic fuel that exists in dissent. 

When your dearest Johann took the stand, stared down by ecclesiastical judges in somber robes in the grandest court, his breath quickened and he broke out in a cold sweat. But it is me who was with him, pushing him to pick up the weapons he knew: Augustine and Aquinas, scripture and scholarship, the ammunition of rationality in the absence of virtue. He stuttered first, but then, gaining courage, spoke louder. 

‘The Jews are our book-bearers, our copyists and librarians, who safeguard those books from which we take the witness of our faith.’ 

Centuries later, others find themselves still endangered for nothing more than expecting to live. I am there. In the trembling hands of renegades as they mask their faces on coastlines or at barbed wire fences. 

I am in the unsteady voice of her who, pushed a bridge too far,  finally musters the word ‘no.’ 

I am in downtrod utterances. Some defy grandiose causes of armies and governments. Others a simpler status quo that could stand to be shattered. 

There are the ones chained up in plain sight, living in a den of wolves disguised as a household. One filled with small cuts only the intimate can inflict. I am in the lifting fog of disentangled love and harm, guiding the way through darkness not into light but liberation. 

When your vision is clouded in scarlet and crimson and the brightest reds, because you have been made to suffer but did nothing to deserve it, that’s me.

I am the instinct arising, riling, snarling, snapping , grappling against the anesthesia of futility and hopeless odds.  I am in the glint of the eye that dares another to do their worst. I am there, spear raised, ready to fight back for one true thing: you matter.”   

LVX,

Alejandra

References:

Reuchlin, Johann. De Arte Cabalistica. Translated by Martin and Sarah Goodman, University of Nebraska Press, 1993.

(original manuscript edition, 1517)

Thank you for reading A Tiny Compass. Your time and attention in this fragile and fraught time means so much to me. If you’d like to attend an in person event, here is my upcoming schedule

4/26-Fortune telling at Detroit Dungeon Synth Night (Ghostlight, Hamtramck 7-10 p.m.)

5/3-Live theurgic ritual/ angelic invocation and divinations at Color Ink Gallery (Hazel Park 6-9) 

5/31- Lectures : “The History and Practice of Angelology & Demonology” , “Sigils: Construction from The Lesser Key to The Chaos Tradition”  (Boston Tea Room, Ferndale, 10-9 )

Prisons have been largely modeled after monasteries. At the onset, the days began before the sun rose. Morning prayers followed, then a bare bones meal that left the diner unnourished and hungry still. Doing the washing, gardening and repairs, tending to the cloister or hermitage, consumed their time. At dusk, evensong. 

Each moment was accounted for and scheduled, the tasks never varied greatly. Even still, life within a system is planned so no choice may unfold into a pathway for temptation. Executing one’s duties with precision was meant to mirror God’s perfection—neither the tiniest pebble or sparrow was brought into this world without great love and care. Labor. Prayer. Labor. Prayer. Labor. Prayer. Repent. Repent. Repent.

Ephemera of government institutions has a kind of anti-aura. A non-character which devours light. The automated messages. The paperwork. The dry legal tomes filling the prison library. The state-issued clothing, typically khaki or a neon orange that assaults the optic nerves due to its dramatic collision against a benign backdrop. Then, there are striped ones, most famously worn by chain gangs, the Hamburglar, Beetle Juice and Auschwitz inmates. Human misery made to look absurd.

The buildings stagger upwards, blotting out the sun, imposing to impress a sense of the enduringness of state power. This aesthetic is a monolith across schools, mental health facilities, juvenile detention centers and prisons. Recently, a friend sent a video of himself. He appeared on screen as a younger man, gesturing towards a public school in Pennsylvania that looked very much like the one I’d gone to. Being a student prepared him to be an inmate, he explains.

I poured over archival records of a different school, this one located in the town of Eldora, Iowa. It is more accurately a juvenile detention center. Some of the readers who have been with me since the beginning know all about Richard. For those who don’t, Richard has lived in custody for the majority of his life, starting at the Eldora Boys State Training School. At fourteen he was sent there for taking a friend’s bike.  

Eldora, with its Victorian-era turrets, gothic arched windows and patterned slate roofing, is an architectural gem. Its grounds are well appointed with a chapel, hospital, green house and power plant, among other amenities.  At its inception in 1876, it was a state of the art facility to house orphans and delinquents. They performed hard labor, adhering to the type of rigorous and suffocating schedule like the one described above. Nearly as soon as the building was constructed there were reports of egregious abuse within its walls. It did not quell but only edified as the decades wore on.  In the early 1900s a child was worked to death by a guard, causing others to flee in fear. The coast guard descended to restore order in this otherwise unremarkable town.

When Richard was a child in the 1990s, the school’s Catholic priest perpetrated sexual and psychological violence so graphic I cannot bring myself to detail it. Father Gehling was the central source of terror; but guards, local law enforcement, administrators and orderlies all upheld (and still uphold) a culture of trauma infliction. The self-sufficiency of this place, with its own medical center, church, and other services, suppresses any possibility of a child communicating with an outsider. They are in the eye of a web.

Each time a human rights violation makes it to trial, the school is granted additional funding to rectify the conditions which supposedly prompted torture. Richard told me that when he was there he could hear muffled cries from beneath the floor boards. Tunnels lie below, macabre catacombs the guards use to break the spirits of young men. I searched for signs of them in schematics and blueprints but they’re not really needed.  There are still headlines yearly. What are haunted memories for Richard are haunted memories in the making for current Eldora JDs. 

One of the packages I received from him recently was a miniature, handmade, mock pinball machine. This is a Ms. Pac-Man one, with a tiny wall plug, buttons for playing on the side and a “glass” case, along with everything else an arcade version might have. The legs are made of rolled up cardboard ripped from a notebook cover, the side buttons are silicone ear pads for headphones, which can be bought by the dozen in the commissary. The glass is a durable plastic— repurposed paper protector from certificates given to inmates for completing things like sobriety programs or job trainings. If detail in craftsmanship mirrors the virtue of God, then my Ms. Pac-Man prison pinball machine is a work of monastic devotion. 

After a stretch of rare silence from my primary student of esoteric traditions, who is incarcerated in California, my phone rang. AD practices angelic magick, which I passed onto them while volunteering for a prison advocacy group. After a cell raid, the guards ransacked their personal belongings, including a tablet and address book with my phone number in it. For months AD dialed my area code, the first three digits they remembered, then a random last four numbers hoping to reach me. Finally, they found a lone book that had been left behind—a copy of Franz Bardon’s Initiation Into Hermetics I’d sent. My phone number was scrawled on one of the pages. 

Today, AD called again while I was in work. I couldn’t talk long so they rushed through what they needed to tell me. Murders on the inside had spiked so all the level fours had their tablets confiscated. There’d be another silent spell. Level fours serve hard time for serious offenses. When AD is in solitary, they double down on theurgic practices. “Love you, prima.” “Love you, primx,” I answered before hanging up. 

AD has a puckish energy, mischievous and a survivor, but with a good heart. Like Richard, they are part of a national tragedy—sentenced to hard time despite zero DNA evidence or credible witness testimonies linking them to a crime. The sentences they are serving are severe. Homicide and sexual assault against a minor. The weight of accusations like this shut down even the remotest chance of empathy in the average person. For prison advocates, we’re often encouraged not to look up our penpal’s record. 

Criminals of certain calibers are treated like a sort of moral imminent domain, a place where the very thought of grace reaching is offensive to goodness. On the news, we see sentimental stories about bikers escorting children who have been hurt by an adult to court. We hear obsessive ideas about what demographics are behind harming children the most. 

I sat down with a friend recently who’d been venturing into racist and anti-Semitic ideologies. He told me that a disproportionate amount of pedophiles are Jewish, but people like me are too sensitive to allow that conversation. Like me, he was born into a Catholic family, so there is an obvious cognitive dissonance at work. Others are convinced its drag queens. The reality is that the anti-pedophilia bikers, anti-Semites, or gender-focused people don’t care about children. If they did, they’d search for the mechanisms that keep systemic abuse in place. Congregate care facilities like Eldora are one of the largest incubators of harm against children. Most of them are connected to major health insurance providers and government contracted. 

It’s easy to feel like a hero if you have a clear and single villain. There are people out there hurting innocents on their own. That is true. But there are also vast politicized and economic networks enabling abusive people and profiting off of suffering, normalizing it so that even average citizens participate in corruption. These systems are not corrupt because they are right or left, straight or gay, Catholic or Jewish. There is a financial bottom line that upholds abuse instead of holding the genuinely harmful, and their enablers, accountable. Children are not simply exploited by child abusers—they’re also exploited by those coopting their pain as a means to justify dehumanizing someone else or promote an agenda.  

I think of AD as an athanor, an alchemical furnace capable of constant and even warmth to heat raw chemical compounds into something purer. They have a sharp wit and infectious laughter, an absolutely irrepressible spirit. Bad, bad wardens and guards can never keep AD from their goal. Most lack the perseverance, self-discipline or faith to arrive at the meaningful and adept place AD has gotten with their theurgy. Then again, prisons are modeled after the hermitages and cloisters which gave rise to grimoire magick.

Richard is not a particularly spiritual person, especially given the damage the church has done to him. He is an artist, though, and artists are conjurers. In a place devoid of vibrance, he is able to make something out of nothing. Whimsical, brightly colored toys evoking a childhood he never had. 

On any given day I have spoken with someone hated. For being Trans. For being an immigrant. For being a Nazi. There are people in my world who have been convicted of hate crimes and others who have survived them. How to be near, how to follow the serpentine path of each person’s subjective experience, without violating the trust of the most vulnerable among us, is always in my thoughts. I’ve been warned a hundred times about how dangerous people who have given themselves over to hate are. There’s also a lot neither of us will ever learn if we don’t put ourselves at risk of having our worldview, or even physical safety, at risk.

“There’s no good Nazi,” is another thing I’ve been told. To be clear, I am not some anti-violent saint.  Fascism should be dealt with swiftly and decisively—I admire those who are able to keep a bottomline in focus, to protect and defend without overthinking. They also say you can’t debate a Nazi or racist. If you do, you’ll see how much bullshit they’ve shoveled into their brain. It’s not hard.

You just have to enter into punishingly superficial discourse with an interlocutor who relies entirely on passion-inducing, anomaly scenarios of a minority doing something bad to a non-minority, false equivalencies and data that is more adept at capturing the magnitude of systemic inequality than anything else. Debating chips away the singular narrative they are exposed to. Engaging feels crucial when you’re dealing with someone on the precipice of indoctination.

Racism, fascism and other forms of ideologically driven oppression are not solely physical threats. They are also emotional, intellectual, personal, political and spiritual crisis’. If you punch a Nazi, you are safe from a threat in the present and for however long the impact reverberates. But you also have a silent enemy until they resurge with renewed convictions and resources. Tactically, it seems wiser to look for what truly lies behind an issue to dismantle rather than suppress it. 

This is the reality of most current and former neo-Nazis. They begin as alienated and insecure people. They are drawn into a culture or group who give them a sense of belonging and pride. They invest more and more into this group until reaching a point of no return. They become consumed with hate. When others revile them, they see themselves as martyrs defending decaying values and national heritage. Because of how repugnant their views are, they are surrounded mostly by socially irresponsible, ignorant, overprivileged, A-political friends, loved ones who have yet to let go, and hyper politicized Nazi and racist associates. 

Eventually, group A abandons them because they become too obsessive or the fallout of association. Group B cannot connect. They are left entirely with Group C, who lives in limited opportunity, hatred and loneliness. Now they are utterly ensconced in a toxic culture, have sunk costs and no outside perspective, even as doubts begin to surface. 

Where sunk costs are is an added challenge—selling Nazism becomes profitable. The music, the clothes, the subscriptions to sketchy podcasts and channels, are all a part of its economy. White supremacists are doxxed daily for the sake of mitigating the harm they perpetrate in the mainstream world. Yet when avenues to self-sufficiency close, monetizing ideology to its other subscribers is way to keep the lights on.

I could see some of the process of indoctrination and alienation happening to friends, but they double downed on their views and vitriol towards those who rejected them. It’s not easy to empathize with someone in this place. People who could have spoken out wanted to avoid being dragged into drama or having their own past scrutinized—legitimate, if less than ideal, responses. Those who did weren’t taken seriously. Everyone should be anti-racist in my view. There shouldn’t be any kind of verification process but in the end, credibility does matter. 

Just as child abusers have opponents who are there for a supposedly heroic reason to hate, racists magnetize opponents who are there for a place to unleash their ire. The means may justify the end if it stops injury to vulnerable people. Perhaps it doesn’t matter what motivates action against those doing harm. But trust me when I say that if we create a context in which it is taboo to show grace towards anyone for any reason, we are entering into a heart of darkness we may not find our way home from. 

Recently I was helping a student take an online exam. It required him to log into a video app to submit his answer. When his image appeared on camera, he argued and covered his face, begging me to turn it off. It triggered a memory of a testimony I’d listened to of a neo-Nazi. In prison, he became suicidally depressed reckoning with his actions, with the reality of who he had mutated himself into instead of someone kind and good. He couldn’t bear to look at his own reflection. He covered the mirror in his cell with a towel for a year. 

I’ve had friendships end over petty arguments. Sometimes I don’t understand my own attitude, what makes me decide to stay or say “fuck it” and ghost. Maybe it’s just hypocrisy or some flaw in my psyche better left to a professional to decrypt. One thing I do know, though, is what it’s like to look in a mirror and not like who I see.

Shrinking away from our reflection, shrouding the ugliness we don’t dare look at, is instinctual. Sometimes when the scowl is in front of me, the slurs, the venom, is scathing, I picture them as an infant. When they were soft and fragile and their mother held them, looking down on them with boundless love. They were unwritten then, a bundle of infinite potential. I’m told all the time that you can’t change people’s minds or hearts. True, it’s not likely and it happens very rarely. But the faith of people like AD and Richard inspires me to forge towards not what is likely, but what is possible.

LVX,

Alejandra

Dear Friends,

Thank you for your kind attention. If you would like to donate to Richard’s campaign for fair legal representation, you can donate below. The judge presiding over his case, Ellen Berz, has been unseated from the bench for numerous cases of inappropriate and corrupt action. His court appointed lawyer is complicit in actions that left defendants without their constitutional right to a fair trial. One of his remarkable pinball machines is for sale to raise funds for his legal fees. If you’re interested in purchasing it, please send me an email.

Richard's Legal Fund

There was one place for me to study Koine Greek then, which was the nearby seminary. For some reason I wasn’t entirely certain of, our teacher seemed to actively dislike most of the students. He was warm to me, though, unlike the rest of the class. They avoided eye contact and acted as if I were a leper in one of the paragraphs they couldn’t say properly. 

 After reading aloud one day, he asked about my background. This didn’t support my plan to disappear into the furniture, since every lesson was an exercise in awkwardness. The Father was a fair and worldly man, though. He approved that I came from a bilingual household, even if I didn’t consider myself fully fluent in Spanish. I know enough. It turned out the thinly veiled vitriol stemmed from disdain for the American trend of only knowing one language. He’d sigh and pinch the bridge of his nose, shaking his head every time they spoke. 

I was also in Latin at the time, and have continued to study both languages intermittently for the sake of understanding primary religious texts and grimoires without having to rely on the Victorian-era men who imposed their biases into translations. Both the beauty and pain of literature, and these languages, is they work as a portal. 

There are some well founded criticisms of Ceremonial Magick. One being that it is a soup of culturally appropriative hokum born out of oppressive history. Perspective is everything, though. Grimoires, or books of magick, are an archive of complex and tangled events, weaving a thread that connects survivors of colonial violence. The books themselves have outlived burnings and authoritarian censorship. Where others see a mess, I see inextinguishable faith and unfettered imagination. 

Yes, raising spirits from the past hurts and Latin is an instant seance. This is the portal element. Later, I attended a feminist Latin class. This one was all women. I wasn’t like them, either. Columbus’ letters to the royal court were the texts for translation. They breezed over the contents but I froze, blanching, as I translated. An argument for enslaving my kin. They were godless and gullible, trading gold for bricàbrac, Columbus wrote. 

Time passed and I found myself looking through the gleaming showcases of Harvard’s rare book collection at the Houghton Library. The chandelier overhead reflected off the glass, the faded, cursive letters of Caleb Cheeshahteamuck rested gently beneath. He was the first man to graduate from the university’s “Indian College.” Cheeshahteaumuck, a Wampanoag tribe member, was educated in Latin. Upon graduation he composed the letters on display to the school’s donors in Latin, impressing the effects of their contributions. There could be no greater achievement than literacy in classical languages to symbolize the ability to civilize a savage. 

Caleb, though, was most likely multilingual from the onset. He’d have known his mother tongue and English at the very least and perhaps other tribal languages. Classical languages enjoy a problematic title in sociolinguistics referred to as “prestige languages.” While Latin and Greek carry dignity, Indigenous ones suffer hostility and eradication. Shortly after writing the letter, he died of tuberculosis. Assimilation is death. 

If we’re facing the reality of linguistic status and bypassing the hype, ancient language scholars are severely overrated. They never have to pass the true hallmark of fluency—communicating effectively with others in spontaneous circumstances. It’s not unusual for an average cab driver in Africa to know several languages, there’s parts of Asia with dozens of dialects in the span of several miles. The arrogance and elitism of only studying dead languages has always grated me. Unrecognized polyglot geniuses are laypeople and service workers. 

Transcendental connection that bypasses time, space and nationality, is paramount to magick. Transnational connection has always been a part of that search. When I see it take shape, it feels as if I am doing what I set out to do.  In a recent class on angelology I taught, we discussed Elizabethan magick. 

During Queen Elizabeth’s reign (1558-1603) she commissioned occultists to strengthen the power of the British empire. Two of these political allies were John Dee and Humphrey Gilbert. Dee famously developed the Enochian language used to communicate with angels. Gilbert, though, sought power in hellfire or the heavens. Each man had a shadowy life, but the latter was especially cold blooded. 

Gilbert ran shockingly murderous military campaigns in Ireland, starting with what’s called the “Plantations of Ireland”, a reference to the brutal land seizures of the Indigenous populations. The details are almost too ghastly to shere but they are real events that happened to real people, not fictions told in bad taste. He ordered the deaths of not just soldiers defending their homes but women and children. This man, who wanted to win the favor of angels, displayed the heads of innocent people on pikes. 

After discussing their scrying attempts and conjurations, I mentioned Dee died disgraced and destitute. As for Gilbert, he perished at sea, going mad and shouting at the sky on a sinking ship. The chat erupted in comments and champagne emojis, with one person of African heritage writing that for this colonizer to die in a shipwreck was perfect irony. Common enemies don’t just have to yield collective wounds. They can yield global comradery.  

There’s a very old expression. By old I mean from the early 1990s, not the Elizabethan era. “Broken English is the devil’s tongue.” In the early days of metal music, artists and obsessive fans would trade zines and cassettes by mail. Metal in general is very global, with an incredibly broad range of subsets, creators and audiences. The lingua franca fans used to communicate is English, hence the expression. When I began an underground label, some would adopt theatrical personas and craft evil emails to buy records. “Infernal hails, war brother,” they’d write, assuming my gender incorrectly.  Everyone had email addresses like “MikeSmith666@yahoo.com” or “Putridskeletonfucker69@gmail.com.” 

This really was an important turning point. Since 2012, I have corresponded with, bought, sold and traded records with people all over the globe. On most days I’m in conversation with friends in Japan, Finland, Mexico, Colombia or Bolivia. My bestie, who doesn’t care about punk or metal at all but has always humored my tastes, is currently living in Kenya. We text nearly everyday and call each other on Sundays. For the most part, my strongest bonds are with people in far flung places. 

The histories, people and languages I’ve spent time with have all been an endless well of inspiration. Those who know me have been punished by neverending updates on Cockroach Angels, the vampire lore I first wrote when I was a teenager, or maybe twenty (ca. 200?) and then abandoned for over a decade. Many of my friends are models for characters. I rewrote all 500 plus pages of it. Since then, it has been divided into two books.

As it turns out, all the loneliness, the persevering through colliding feelings on languages imperial empires value more than my kind, was to serve an odd destiny. The last and final piece of Cockroach Angels is the creation of a vampire grammatica, or guidebook on the undead lexicon the characters speak. The conjugations and cases would be impossible for me to construct without clocking hours in some seriously pretentious settings. Knowledge is never useless. Language is the lifeblood of imagination. Anything that can connect us to the humanity of past, present and future is magick. 

LVX,

Alejandra

Dear Reader,

Thank you for your attention. Part of the ethos of Hermeticism is to think beyond binaries. Right wing political actors seek to homogenize identity, eradicating all presences who don’t fit within a toxic and unrealistic standard of normativity. As we know, taxonomies and labels are a fascist enterprise. For political leftists, the mystique of human individuality is constantly calculated and quantified into a series of diagnoses and labelled intersections. Complexity is one of the greatest and most fascinating gifts our world has to offer us. Valuing what makes us different can serve a higher aim than separating us or centering our need to be understood. In solidarity, always. 

 Caleb’s Latin letter.

“That which is above us, that which is below us” -Nahuatl expression

In the Aztec kingdom wise men wrote poems of doubt, of uncertainty, of mournfulness at the shortness of life and inevitably of death. They wrote these thoughts in red and black ink on the pages of large, cumbersome books. They also told us of the gods and goddesses, facets of Ōmoteōl, the creator of all. 

The Nahua people, indigenous to Mexico, viewed the cosmos as divided into four quadrants, perpetually in harmony or struggle with one another.  The eastern portion incubates life, so it glows red and emits warmth. The west, land of women, is gentle and soft white. The south, beside the sun, is a deep blue. A rabbit dwells there, spontaneous and shifting directions quickly. This is where unpredictability brews. 

The north is likened to the barren night desert. They claimed it gleamed in absolute darkness like flint. The mysteries of the north are hardest to penetrate. This is where the dead go. There are fields of ghostly flowers, once living but plucked by maidens and sentenced to wilt in vases. Others were killed by frost. 

Mictlāntēcutli, lord of the underworld, gathers the pale and papery blossoms there for his bride, Mitecacihuatl. He grasps the withered stems with his bony hands, glancing upwards. Above, humanity makes offerings. Sometimes the skeletal gods below can hear the rumblings of the Mexica dancing, dying, fighting, loving.  

On earth, a blazing orange sun haloes the pyramids. A young body is splayed on a convex slab, lying in wait for the priest’s flint blade to bear down. It cracks the ribs of the sacrificed and they are ripped open. Blood spills maximally on the stone. The sun gulps the life given. 

Xolotl’s bark echoes across the cavernous nothingness. Mictlāntēcutli peers down at the dog beside him. Xolotl is also a God. He lords over fire and lightning, those born with disease and deformities, running on all fours through the heavens, around earth, down to the dank caves of hell. He chases buoyant, glowing orbs—souls—bound for Mictlān, leading them through its nine rungs.

“I know, Xolotl. I know,”  Mictlāntēcutli sighs, scratching the pup behind his ear. 

Xolotl has no eyes—he wept them out when his divine siblings sacrificed themselves to the sun. A pang of grief pierces his little canine heart every time another life is given to him. Mictlāntēcutli senses sadness in the empty sockets. 

         Mictlān is not where all the dead go. Fallen warriors and human sacrifices go to the east, where it blazes red. Women are not denied glory, either. Those who meet a bloody end not on the battlefield but in the birthing bed journey to the heavenly light of the west. Mictlāntēcutli spoke.

“Mortals are afraid of the dark. They fear the unknown. They seek answers and pray so they might better control their fate. It is the force which drives them. The eagle and jaguar warriors wield spears and daggers of obsidian pieces nestled into wood, striking down strangers and dragging them into prisons. For their troubles they can take concubines into their bedchambers, drink pulque—agave wine only given to nobles—and dine with royals. If they do not return home alive, their souls are welcomed to the eastern blaze as heroes. 

In crowds, onlookers are awed by the knights in their lavish headdresses. The teal of resplendent quetzal feathers, striking against their silken black hair, inspires children so they dream of becoming captors. When they come of age, they drag prisoners to the priests to be killed. Priests hold the slippery muscle, a still beating heart, up to the sky. These rituals are undertaken, for good or for ill, in deep, abiding, obsessive, love of light. They are tributes to the sun. 

In the anatomy of this kind of intense adoration there is always fear that what is loved will vanish. If there is anything that can poison pleasure, its preoccupation with when it will end. Xolotl, all of these acts so we will not reign over earth! They fear an apocalyptic ending means perpetual night. 

Within every warrior, fighting for honor and remembrance, to uphold the order of empire, is a frightened little boy. He fears the dark, he fears chaos, he fears being no one. He desperately seeks the light of the eastern quadrant, hoping to die with a weapon in his hand to give his life meaning. The last things he hears are cries of suffering and the last thing he feels is terror. 

His consciousness fades as dawn to dusk. He wonders what if he had chosen differently. What if he had chosen to be surrounded by the laughter of friends and family. What if he had chosen laying in the arms of the beloved he forsook for valor. So, while the sacrificed are certainly victims, I cry too, at the wasted life of warmongers.”

Xolotl barked again. Mictlāntēcutli saw his wife nearing. 

“Here comes my darling now.”

Mictecacihautl is radiant. Having once been a sacrifice herself, her muscles are skinless, raw, exposed sinews and tendons, a byproduct of being flayed. Owls, spiders, bats, serpents, a menagerie of nocturnal creatures, follow her. Her jaw is wide and between her parted lips galaxies and constellations can be seen. Comets dance around her tonsils, interstellar black holes linger at her canine teeth and molars. Mictecacihuatl’s mouth is the entrance for stars. When dawn breaks they have to slumber and take rest inside the Queen of the Underworld. She is able to speak and be silent at once, her tongue being the bed to all the splendor of night.  

Mictlāntēcutli offers her the bouquet.  In return she gives a smile that would make an astronomer blush. The king and queen settle beneath a barren tree, Xolotl at their feet. Although the king strikes fear into the living, he is gentle beside his companion.  He listens to her soundless voice, thinking contentedly of how the brutes on earth turn cold at the thought of them. They are friends to many others, though. They tend to the souls of the sickly who were not well enough to bludgeon the innocent and win the favor of either royals or the heavens. The value of life is not lost on those frail in body, their days being numbered from the onset. 

Mictecacihautl’s song is sweet as she admires the dead roses in her hands. Her lyrics are odes to poets, artists, writers, and musicians. She adores them. Magicians capable of enchanting the atmosphere, shifting its mood according to their will. She talks of how jade shatters and gold is crushed. The spirits and souls who pass them pause, listening to her refrain on dignity ending in desecration and noble names soon forgotten. 

Can prestige or honor be held in a palm, used as legal tender to buy back all the memories never made, she asks? Soldiers fight for kings who decompose and rot like any other man. Empires fall and fade, no matter how boastful, how brimming their strong boxes are with tariffs and tithes. Mighty militaries turn to dust.

The scent of copal as its smoke fades into the ether, the soft touch of moss and cool water, notes that disappear into the distance—if human days are filled only with witnessing, of losing one’s self to awe—they would be days well spent. Nothing is stable and lasting, with a single exception. Mictecacihuatl’s mouth is agape, as always, because of the necessity of this position to house the nightly universe. Mictlāntēcutli steals a kiss from her. When they part, he coughs, hiccuping a star. Amor eterno. 

LVX,

Alejandra

Thank you for reading this issue of A Tiny Compass. I am so grateful for your time and attention. I’ll be back in the classroom soon, but you can always find me here . Mictecacihautl’s song draws on Aztec codices translated from the title below.

León-Portilla, Miguel. Aztec Thought And Culture. Translated by Jack Emory Davis. University of Oklahoma Press, 1963.

Upcoming events:

1/31 Femme Night hosted by Doomvana.

2/13 Sex Magick: The History and Practice of Ritual Intimacy

Then there’s Indigofera Tinctoria, whose purple petals can be found in warm climates. In India, especially, the flowers yield a dye so vivid blue and sumptuous for the eye to behold, its people refined harvesting it to a craft. 

The British Crown, with its boundless appetites and endless henchmen, sent the dye from India across the ocean on ships manned by privateers. It must have seemed electric relative to the drab London clouds because it ignited an unwieldy demand. Perhaps the allure, and the irony, is that it’s the color of freedom. It matches the expansive horizons of sea and sky. 

They wanted silk ball gowns and parlor drapes the color once reserved for the saris of women free to bare their midriffs. Now it was swathed across the bellies of English women, who were smashed into corseted cages of whale bone and satin ribbon. The plant became a coveted commodity. One more of a million things stripped from the nation of India and sent overseas. Yet the demand still could not be met. 

In 18th century South Carolina an upper class girl by the name of Eliza used her British boarding school training in botany to guide her hand at managing plantations she inherited. After much trial and error, she created a seedling that brought forth a bounty of blue dye. Innocent nature, forced into complicity when weary, arthritic hands were forced to pull at it. Such a pretty thing to fill the coffers of American slave owners. Such a pretty thing to be a contagion of colonialism. All this back breaking misery heaped on others so the most spoiled subset alone could relish the splendor of a single hue. 

Sometimes, when I take a long view of history, it seems to me that a few barren and heartless people and places enact the worst sadism on others, pillaging resources as if the goods they yield hold the keys to the vibrancy, life and warmth they lack. We still haven’t learned that a soul can be lost but not gained through a commercial luxury.

As winter stretches on and the earth pivots on its axis to the point where days are short and long nights rule, it is easy to feel we are in a place of drudgery. Drudgery, that crushing and destructive weight that is so essential to constructing beauty. We are in the astrological season of Capricorn, home to this paradox.  

Capricornus, Latin for “horned goat.” The constellation of Capricorn, apparently, looks like a goat with a fish’s body. If you squint and tilt your head sideways, you might sort of, maybe, understand what shape in the stars the ancients were talking about. The horns and cloven hooves, its dwelling in the sharp and craggy wastelands, is why the goat is likened to the devil. Obsession, greed, cruelty, addiction, depression and bondage is the inventory in Lucifer’s storehouse. 

Whatever damage the disgraced favorite’s reputation has sustained, the devil is still a fallen angel. He deals in the desperate pleas of humans, just like his heavenly siblings. He tallies souls and sins just like them. There is an angel of Capricorn, too, not to be confused with Lucifer but certainly sharing a strand of celestial DNA. Their name is Hanael (unlike Haniel, another angel who dwells in the Tree of Life). This one, though, when summoned, is said to evoke an indigo hue and the scent of myrrh. 

When I called out to Hanael, a nervous energy thrummed through my shoulders. Unlike so many strange dreams I’ve had of angels, it didn’t appear to me in any shape I easily recognized. An undulating and sentient sigil, the very color so spellbinding it created massive hardship. The tension throughout my spine set me on edge. 

“Hanael,” I greeted them as they wafted in front of me.

I’m no mystery to them, but they are to me. 

“Hanael, who are you?,” I ask.

“I am the angel of hunger,” they tell me. 

“How can hunger be angelic? Don’t we ask God to send us manna to quiet the rumbling in our stomachs?,” I wondered. 

“Indeed. But it wasn’t your fate to ramble around Eden, napping beneath the sun, never knowing shame and only fulfillment. Though you were destined for trials instead, they too can be a gift. I bear the gift of hunger.” 

“So what is the nature of this angelic hunger we are both blessed and cursed with?” 

Hanael, not having a human visage, had some inscrutable way of imparting a rueful expression. 

“Oh, not all of you possess it. And some of you possess it in different measures. Its nature though is to impel humanity to seek. To dig, to pit yourself against reality with the determination to find something missing, to build something that isn’t there. That curiosity, that search, keeps your imagination in motion. It is meant to be in motion, just as the constellations circle overhead.” 

“As above, so below,” I replied.

“Precisely. It is only through emptiness, dissatisfaction, hunger and desire, that what’s above can manifest below. In the beginning there was only darkness. Chaos breeds creation.” 

Hanael’s words stung true, pricking at my heart. Something understanding, something kind, emanates from them. It’s pity, actually. I became aware of why they know me so well. Once the vast truths of the world were revealed to a mystic in a hazelnut. I am nothing significant compared to the world, and much less special than the mystic with her hazelnut. Yet all the same, I am granted a glance at something. Hanael shows me.

There I appear, in something like a small snow globe. My hair is unwashed and tangled, pinned up in a bun with a pen speared through it. Smeared eye makeup. Reality can be so bleak I have started to write alternate ones. All my pain, all my hope, all my loneliness, are stuffed into the characters I create like poppets. Their guts are made of every bad day I’ve ever had. When a story ends, and I am thrust back into the real world, terror creeps in that neither me or my beloved poppets will ever amount to anything at all. 

I can’t function. My own reflection becomes distorted. A near constant, demonic inner monologue of self-doubt drones on. I don’t know that I’d be able to write a single word without the bottomless sadness or the relentless insecurity that’s been with me forever. So I don’t keep still for too long. I keep moving, searching, hungering for something. Chaos, creation, an ouroboros. 

“No harmony without madness,” Hanael acknowledges. 

“You have to know how this hurts,” I answer, thinking of every tortured artist I’d been doomed to love, and everyone unfortunate enough to care for me. 

“I do. When the hunger burns so brightly it is unbearable and scorching, 

I am rallying for you to build something meaningful with that ache. 

But hunger and will have a fraught relationship. 

They are the greatest of allies and the worst of enemies. 

A strong hunger needs a strong will to support it. You are given this gift, but it takes a type of strength to accept it and use it.” 

“We’re mere humans, Hanael. What happens when the burden of hunger is coupled with a weak will?” 

Hanael shimmered in twilight tinted morse code, as if to say we both knew what happened. Hanael only knows as a witness, not as an experiencer. Angels don’t possess free will—with the exception of Lucifer. 

“It is all too easy to meet the Prince of Darkness’ same fate, not as punishment but because hell can be a thing of your own making. Impulse can be an impostor, masquerading as free will. It’s my sorrow that it is often too convincing. And so you follow it, groping in the darkness to fill the void that yawns open, fearing it will consume you if you don’t fill it up fast. Millions of brilliant minds have been lost not to the void, but their fear of it. The fear drives them towards all forms of fool’s lux that they try to stuff in the maw of hunger, thinking it will abate.”

“Fool’s lux?,” I asked.

“Oh, you know. Sometimes fool’s lux are those clichéd things the falsely pious like to condemn. Bottles, needles, black jack tables. Others are things which are celebrated. Wealth and glory. Neither are sinful or virtuous. Merely easy routes to becoming directionless in the dark, if they pull you from where you really ought to be going.”

“Is this something to be weary of?”

“At times. Fool’s lux is like a will ‘o wisp one sees. They forge towards it, thinking it is the way home. But instead are driven deeper into the wilderness. One person’s fool’s lux is not necessarily another’s. Each has an inner law of self. 

A lantern.

A tiny compass they are meant to follow. 

Intuition, some name it.

Others call it the voice of God, or their Guardian Angel, or an ancestor.

Whatever the origins, it is enspirited. 

Think of that voice as a carrier of epiphanies. 

They reveal great truth, great purpose.

But with them, a mission that often requires pain and sacrifice. 

Sometimes, you shy away from any destiny of alienation.” 

Just then, a private window into Hanael’s thoughts revealed itself to me.  Humanity has carpeted history with all sorts of renderings of celestial imagery. Chapel ceilings covered in cherubs. Dollar store shelves lined with plastic figurines in their likeness. Figures etched into crystal reliquaries. We’ve been in their thrall, in wonder at their perfection. But Hanael seemed to be curious about us—about all the myriad ways we squander free will in favor of impulse. What a privilege humans can never seem to get right! With each fumble, another chance to be forgiven and reborn. Hanael envied that gift.

“It’s never very original, how any of you get twisted and turned around, in all your avoidance of authenticity.

Some seek illusory accomplishments. 

For others it's meaningless trysts instead of meaningful ones. 

Wasted time with fair weather friends, fans, enablers, 

users and abusers

instead of true-of-heart companions and allies. 

Then there are the pursuits just as pointless,

but prestigious and smiled upon.

Yet when the applaud falters, 

the glamour and glory fades, 

emptiness always prevails.”

“And when it prevails?”

“Then we meet. I, Hanel, angel of Capricorn, who deals out hunger, dwells in emptiness. I'm there, waiting to befriend humanity. Yet you all constantly flee my friendship. Take a moment to be with me and you will find there’s radiance in my darkness.”

“Why do we flee, Hanael?” 

“When you are alone with nothing besides your own thoughts, something often happens. 

The pace of your heartbeat quickens. 

In the distance, you begin to hear 

heavy footfalls.

You strain, realizing they grow closer. 

Perhaps, once really tuning in, you notice a “tick tock, tick tock”

twined with them, coming from some far off place. 

You’ll shiver at the chill as it nears.

Your breath will spike. 

So, desperate for distraction,

You’ll grasp at your phone to scroll the dread away.

Or maybe you’ll lunge towards the first strange warm body.

Then again, it could be a painkiller or tincture that anesthetizes all feelings. 

Might as well make avoidance ecstatic, you think. 

Truly, who can blame humans for being human?

For choosing pleasure when your moments are finite?”

*(here Hanael began to gleam the most vibrant shade, as if coloring at the possibility they were about to divulge to us, they whispered conspiratorially). 

“But—- there is another choice, for those with the disposition to seek it.

When it's so silent you can hear death approaching and you seek to drown it out, terrified of your own mortality, agonized at the futility of your existence—I implore you to find romance in the notion of the ages instead. 

In that silent black where chaos reigns you are meant to hear death so that you know it comes for you. 

When it does, clasp my hand instead of gripping at every mindless stimulus that smothers the sight and sound of your time running out.” 

“When we clasp your hand, Hanael of hunger, what then?”

“Then I lead you to eternity. 

I teach you to shun fear, ravenous instead for immortality.

Let me teach you to leave a legacy so that others know you existed;  that you matter.

So that your presence never perishes."  

“Isn’t this just vanity, Hanael?” 

“It’s true. 

The things built to last, like civilizations and empires are endeavors of the ego.

No one ever said the Gods or God weren’t driven by vanity, and humanity is built in their image. 

But it's essentialto carry on with this failed experiment. 

Tragedies have abounded so far. 

You’ve only ever managed to prop up kingdoms of hell instead of mirroring the kingdoms of heaven.

But damn if there aren’t things of beauty coexisting in all that brutality! 

It’s me who guides you in producing all that loveliness for the eons, wrought out of fear of ephemeral earthliness.

Paintings, songs, poems, temples and libraries are pieces of immortal souls imprinted each time humanity deigns to make something.

It is me who urges you to find purpose in your sickness, in your psychosis, in your petty anxiousness. 

It’s me who guides your hand in the gloom, teaching you to garner your divine ember, so it might light the way for your descendants with works of truth and goodness. 

And, yes, you’ll cast the darkest shadows too, when your hunger mutates into compassionless ambition.

But this is why you must carry on trying. 

You are given endless chances.

Forgiveness and rebirth are not things to take for granted.

That awful feeling of lacking something may haunt you like a hellhound at your heels. 

The most gruesome part of the horror show is not an abject fear of death but of life.  

Fear that in your short time here you might never discover what it is you have to say.

Worse yet, to know exactly what you have to say and never given a chance to be seen or heard.

The vacuous distractions that steal the attention of your brethren will threaten to snuff out your shot.

Or you’ll never find your way into the right room at the right time.

Instead, your flesh will rot away first. 

And your voice will be shrieking in silent obscurity, with humanity none the wiser. 

That is a terrible fate. 

So keep scratching. 

Shovel through the infernal wretchedness for whatever song your spirit strives to light up the dank pits of hell with.

Do it with the fervor and persistence of a miner with blackened lungs and a crooked spine.

Carry on with bloodied cuticles, clawing in white knuckled desperation.

Do this not in some misguided attempt to flee life or death, but something more harrowing. 

Futility is the only beast worth your terror.”

Here, Hanael seemed to offer their kindness again. After a moment, they spoke. This time it was with parting words. 

“If I have an apology to offer about my nature—(which is of course yours since we are inextricable) it is simply this: desire is the root of all suffering, but it is also the root of all creation.

I am the push, the panic, the purpose.

I am the forgiveness for your failures so we might get back to work. 

Here, we leverage both your capacity for beauty and your frail fears. 

Call on me in that critical hour, when you are ready to set aside your temporary distractions.

When you are ready to craft a perennial lux, I’ll be at your side. 

I’ll stand with sword at the ready to slice the neck of futility, so that your voice rises, calling out to everyone staggering in the pitch black as you did.”

LVX,

Alejandra

Thank you for reading A Tiny Compass. Your attention and support is precious. You can always catch me at Gemineye Tarot for private divination appointments. If you’d like to join me for an upcoming webinar to Sex Magick: The History and Practice of Ritual Intimacy, tickets are here.