A Conjuration of Sekhmet
A large portion of our magical inheritance in the West consists of attempts at symbolic explanation — of model constructions that seek to reduce (cognitive) entropy. Instead, these models promise a meaningful arrangement of the world centered around the figure and species of the human being.
I have become a rather poor student of magic. I find myself able to do less and less sensible things with this inheritance. Much of it has come to lie like clutter in the garden of my practice, overgrown with ferns and creeping vines. Once gleaming skins of arcane symbols cast in metal crossed and overrun with snail-trails and pockets of earth thick with sprouting grasses.
From Paracelsus to Johan Amos Comenius to Martin Buber stretches a lineage of seekers who began all their expeditions from the same center: the firm conviction that human beings do not find their footing in the world through interpretation, but through encounter.
In times such as these, many of us long for solace and kindness, for softness and safety. However, if we search the inventory of our magical inheritance from the last two millennia for corresponding operations, we return almost empty-handed. From the Greek Magical Papyri to the grimoires of the Early Modern Age, we find ourselves confronted with richly stocked armories of attack and coercion, of seizure and defense of power, of the accumulation of knowledge, wealth, and prestige. When we look for formulas of healing, we must already leave the arsenals of so-called learned magic and descend instead into the pantries, granaries, and cowsheds of folk practice.
It can easily seem as though many of our magical forefathers knew no weariness and no melancholy, no exhaustion before the cruelty, madness, and mercilessness of the world. Their appetite for conquest appears boundless. Every seed and thorn, all fur and flower was crushed into pastes, oils, salves, and draughts in the tireless pursuit of mastery.
How different is my experience today. What I first sense in meeting the world these days is not the impulse toward more performance, but the grief at how little we have made of the possibilities given to us. This is true on both the grand and the intimate scale: in the deeds of our species against this world, and in my own against my own. I find myself in a landscape of shards. How brittle our dreams have become.
So today, I do not long for the armor of Helios, but for solace. My magic today does not need more armories, but a stable source of hope. My practice does not require arcane systems of symbols that mistake flesh and blood for allegory. It requires encounter — eye to eye — with those powers that heal better than I do, that console better than I do, that restore faith more genuinely than I do.
This is the concern to which I have devoted my next book, The Rooted Flame. In my personal practice, which forms the foundation of all the exercises and encounters presented there, a deep connection to Sekhmet has grown over the past fifteen years — a goddess who grants both death and life, an ancient being who knows both faces of the moon, of the desert, and of the sun.
In what follows, I will share a practical exercise that did not enter the corpus of The Rooted Flame. It is a conjuration of Sekhmet, developed directly from the sources of the Greek Magical Papyri. I will first present the operation as I propose it today, and then the original passages from the PGM from which it draws.
Magic is what we make of it. Not inheritance, but voyage. Not interpretation, but encounter.
So the next time you wrap your fish in the Tabula Smaragdina or in the pages of the Liber AL, you can rest assured you stand in the company of great reformers: Paracelsus. Comenius. Buber. All their paths led out into the world, not home into books. All their paths were searches for solace and healing, not for rank and possession.
“Know the ways,” Hildegard of Bingen says, and none of us knows them. Except who has walked out and got lost.
Conjuration
Sit in darkness. If this is not possible, sit in a dimly lit room and avoid direct light. Sit comfortably and light a candle. Place it before you in such a way that you may rest your gaze upon it without straining the muscles of your neck. Close your eyes and descend into stillness. Breathe.
In vision, reach into the center of your chest where your heart-flame burns. Take from it a single spark and set it into the flame of the candle before you. See how they become one — the spark from your heart and the flame of the candle.
Open your eyes and let your gaze sink into the fire.
After a time, you will begin to discern, dimly, a face within the flame. It is at once feline and human, ancient and youthful, feminine and fierce. It hovers like a living seed within the fire.
Do not force yourself to see it clearly. Simply know that it is there. As you behold the flame, calm the space of your heart; soften your shoulders and your spine, all the way down into your seat. Come to rest in peace before the flame.
Then speak:
Let me shine in your living light, illuminate this mortal shell, luminous Mother, unfailing one, claw-crowned one, pour out your presence over me, steep me in your scent.
Guard that my body come to light intact, if not unharmed, then healed.
Enter this fire and fill it with your divine spirit; let your all-powerful house be opened unto me. I conjure you, Mother of humans, in all your breadth and depth, in all your length and height, in all your brightness and darkness, I sing your name.
Night-Guardian, Day-Guardian, blood-drinker, giver of solace, rouse your daimon in this present hour, stay with me through this night.
Now I am still. Silence. Silence.
Now I am a star, wandering with you, shining forth from the deep, where we meet, eye in eye.
Original PGM Sources:
“Come hither to me, you who are in control of the form of Helios, you the cat-faced god […]” PGM III. 4-5
“I call upon you, Mother of all men,[…]” PGM III. 45
“Guard that my whole body comes to light intact.” PGM I. 323
“Be kind to me, forefather, scion of the world, self-gendered, fire-bringer, aglow Like gold, shining on mortals, master of The world, daimon of restless fire, unfailing, With gold disk, sending earth pure light in beams.” PGM IV. 457-461
“Silence! Silence! (the prayer) I am a star, wandering about with you, and shining forth out of the deep, oxy o xertheuth.” PGM IV. 574-575
“[…] give your strength, rouse your daimon, enter into this fire, fill it with a divine spirit, and show me your might. Let there be opened for me the house of the all-powerful god Albalal , 136 who is in this light. Let there be light, breadth, depth, length, height, brightness, and let him who is inside shine through, the lord Bouel.” PGM TV. 965-972
“I conjure you, holy light, holy brightness, breadth, depth, length, height, brightness, by the holy names / which I have spoken and am now going to speak. By LAO SABAOTH ARBATHIAO SESENGENBARPHARAGGES ABLANATHANALBA AKrammachamari ai ai iao AX ax inax, remain by me in the present hour, until I pray to the god / and learn about the things I desire.” PGM TV. 979-985
After saying the light-bringing spell, open your eyes and you will see the light of the lamp becoming like a vault. PGM IV. 1105
