It really upsets me that my fiendish inner children insist on calling PAN, the incarnation of my ancestral spirit and the portal through which I commune with the myriad gods, extraterrestrials, and frequencies I serve, a horcrux.
I mean, for one thing…I have pretty heavily suppressed that aspect of my personality for the last 14 years.
Which aspect, you ask? The one that uses the plot devices of Harry Potter to understand the world.
But unfortunately, I decided to do freakin’ magick with my life so my psyche is forced to use the works of Joanne r-u-Kidding-me Rowling to explain the way that I am making centuries old ritual mesh with my modern materialist brain. And “horcrux” is kind of the only label that makes sense here—it’s a journal that I have poured so much of my time, energy, and personal mythology into that it basically contains a piece of my soul.
But that’s enough preamble—if you read my last post, you’re chomping at the mf’in’ bit to understand what the hell I got up to that made me so fuckin’ powerful and legendary and awesome and unknown to most humans.
Let me tell you ‘bout my horcrux.
So I incarnated an ancestral spirit, right? And as usual, I picked incredible timing totally by accident (I just listen to the vibes, man)—I even have his astrology chart to prove it. Electing auspicious astrological timing is a really important part of this process because your spirit is going to have whatever personality you give it at the time of its “birth.” (Call this your first entry or whatever)
Oh! Because I should tell you—you don’t have to incarnate an ancestral spirit or even the spirit of anyone who has ever existed in material form.
The Greeks believed that just like people have spirits, so do families, institutions, organizations, and just about anything else that humans feed with their attention. It’s a similar concept to what some magickal folks call an egregore.
So you can treat your personal horcrux (which ur obviously gonna make after you finish reading this article) like a character you’re creating. Because you literally are.
The important thing to consider when you’re incarnating your spirit is:
What do I want my horcrux to help me with? What skills does my spiritual advisor need?
For me, I wanted my indwelling spirit to help me integrate the lessons of Pluto in Capricorn in order to pave the way for the technologies of Pluto in Aquarius.
I couldn’t explain why exactly this felt so important just yet…only that I knew Pluto in my 5th house of creativity was going to be an important teacher for me, specifically in the realm of doing fuckin’ magick. (Bc all creativity is magick, duh) I also had all these dawning realizations about the two faces of Saturn as seen through its dual rulership in Capricorn and Aquarius. I saw how important solid grounding (especially in one’s intellectual and spiritual lineage) is for maintaining your sanity and stability under the boundary-breaking, time-warping effects of Aquarius.
So I wanted my spiritual advisor to help me explore this and learn how to teach magick to all the babes like me who are…lazy…excessively mercurial and…easily uprooted.
Wtf is a hypersigil??
So you’ve incarnated your spiritual guide by writing your first ever entry (dated to the minute, so you remember their energetic signature) in the spiral notebook you picked up from Costco. Now what?
Well now you get to work making your hypersigil, silly!
A hypersigil is like a network of tiny sigils/symbols that make up one big spell. It’s a process of weaving the same story into the collective consciousness so deeply that the giant hologram of reality is forced to mirror it back down into the material plane.
There are many ways you can make a hypersigil because it’s really just a series of small actions that build on each other over time to create a legendary story. And the more exciting of a story you create for the gods and guides—who desperately crave the mess of life in all its forms—the more likely they will be to reflect it back to you in the form of cool manifestations and interesting ideas.
So here’s a shortlist of ways that I weave my sigil:
Writing about my hopes and fears in excruciating, poetic detail
Recounting successes and failures (again, making them as aesthetically pleasing as I can)
Automatic drawing/mark-making, stream-of-consciousness writing, and other means of letting the spirits and shadowed parts of myself be expressed without micromanagement
Doing fun activities or venturing outside my comfort zone and sharing at least a sentence or two about how it felt with my guides.
Recording rituals and their results
Writing both outlandishly fictional and relatively grounded and reasonable stories of my future endeavors as if they’ve already happened (sometimes called visioning work or scripting)
Bonus Points: sharing images and excerpts from my hypersigil online, making moodboards, and otherwise looking for ways to extend my spell, giving it more weight in the physical world and getting more eyes on it to boost the signal
Getting started on your hypersigil
The first thing I did to prepare myself for the magickal apprenticeship I was about to undertake with PAN was repurpose an old assignment from Carolyn Lovewell’s 2020 WEALTH program, which she called Aims & Powers.
The exercise calls for you to write out the following:
What would you like to achieve in life?
What would you like to have and what sort of person would you like to become?
Innate powers to develop — what skills or advantages do you perceive in yourself?
Hindrances to your power — what obstacles (internal and external) thwart those skills? What behaviors, perceptions, or beliefs need to change to unlock more of your power?
This might sound a bit boring and even draining. But if you can approach this exercise with levity and radical self-approval, this reflection will be an invaluable blueprint to help you navigate your spiritual apprenticeship. And it will also prepare you for your main contribution to this hypersigil—
Alchemical journaling
This is another exercise I picked up from Carolyn Lovewell. I don’t do it religiously anymore but it can be a really helpful structure for periods where your contributions to your hypersigil might shrink a little. (Bc all life is just an intermittent shrinking and expanding, friends!)
Every night (that I feel like it) I write in response to these 3 questions:
What is the most profound thought or experience you had in the last 24 hours?
What did you do today to weaken or eliminate a draining habit?
What do you plan to do next to continue to move towards your aims?
Again, these are…not fun questions. No way around that. But when viewed through the philosophy of Existential Kink, these questions are alchemical gold!
If you haven’t read the holy book, also by Carolyn Lovewell, it’s all about getting off on the things we don’t like about ourselves and our experience so that we can stop living in opposition to life and start feeling genuine, sober self-love and unbridled pleasure.
You might remember from our last chat that I’ve fought some pretty intense feelings of badness. I have spent a lot of my life believing that something is wrong with me and anticipating moments when life would inevitably reflect that low value back to me. The only way to actually interrupt that was fully embracing my own badness. Not overnight, of course—I’m still on that journey! But it certainly started with one big leap.
Once I stopped trying to enforce the stricture of goodness on myself—perceiving all of my traits and characteristics through a moral filter—I was left only with what is true about myself. Once I gave up the binary operands of “good” and “bad”, I was forced to construct a new compass. I created my own value system.
Under my value system, there is only what is useful—what increases the things I value—and what is not useful.
When I encounter a part of me that is not useful for the shape my values currently take, I resist the urge to judge and discard them. Instead, I look for ways to make kin with them. But that’s a story for another day.
What I want to get across to you here is that “good” and “bad”, “right” and “wrong”, have no place in my world. There’s too much gray the way I see things. And that’s how I can stare into my own flaws and failures without exploding in a mushroom cloud of shame.
I love myself even when I am “bad.”
And I’m inviting you to do the same.
You’re all set!
Now go make your horcrux! Go on, git!
If you don’t act fast, you might not be ready to talk about creating your new character and committing to the bit next week!
We move pretty fast ‘round here. ;)
Okay: I made one and then spirit told me that what I created was the sigil I used in recent past lifetimes to become *who I am right now*. Now I’m making a different one to represent who I’m becoming. ???!!!!
this was a wonderful read. full of absolute gold. the reflection questions are particularly stimulating!!! makes a b*tch (me) wanna ponder. (i am severely behind on my reading pls forgive me and my avoidance of long form reading)