Episode 40: The Eve of the Feast of All Hallows

Radio Free Golgotha - Radio Free Golgotha

Happy Hallowstide, listeners! We are delighted to invite you to an especially-very-special episode of Radio Free Golgotha – our 40th episode! We took this anniversary opportunity to do something a little different: rather than pick individual foci amongst the topics of our usual sorcerous Sesame Streeting, we got into the fields of the topics themselves: what and how we are continually inspired by getting to talk about Saints, Demons, Herbs, Minerals, Types of Magic, Geomancy, Cartomancy, and of course the folk necromancy of Dead Magicians. In other words, welcome to our Oops All Types of Magics episode.

In considering the Magics of Saints and Hagiography we got into (re)assessing the virtues of ritual time and liturgical calendricals of feastdays and the holy in these holidays, as well as celebrating the mysteries and meanings of the famous, infamous, and lesser-known sacred dead. We also got into – amongst other things – hagiographic blur, value centers, saint-masking, bottom-up folk veneration, and the protocols and practicalities of canonization.

In extolling the dark arts of the Magics of Demons and Demonology, we chatted about the values of grimoiric spirit catalogues not only as means for navigating infernal hierarchies, but demonstrating the interrelationalities of such ‘unclean’ spirits, and the organizational tools and perspectives that they afford the karcist working alongside their Good Devils.

In discussing the natural medicines and miracles of the Magic of Herbs and Herbalism we touched on plant allies, engagement with landscape and the natural cycles of the year, as well as what it means to conjure an ingredient – from the exorcising of unhelpful influences to (re-)baptizing our materia (and their substitutes) into that which deemed necessary for the operation.

This discussion naturally extended into considerations of the Magics of Minerals and Lapidary: from the archeo-geological blurring of names-which-are-more-descriptions in medieval books of stones, to the yes-and of working by a knowledge of both natural substances’ modern physick and their pre-modern spiritual virtues.

Turning the mirror upon itself we also got stuck into the Magic of Magical Techniques, Technologies, and Typologies, and touched on both the shortcomings of over-compartmentalizing sorcery as well as the crucial importance of celebrating the (especially differing) cosmologies of the world’s cultures and histories which underlie the common and uncommon strategies which humans (not to mention non-humans) apply in our spellcrafts and solutions when we make such horizontal comparisons and contrasts.

In highlighting the importance of the containers we develop and preserve to hold and empower our magics, conversation rather naturally turned to divination: firstly, to our beloved Magics of the Figures of Geomancy and their counterpart mysteries in the corpus of the Odu of Ifa and Merindiloggun, especially these Figures as markers of potential, “shelfmarks of reality”, patterned flavours of the cosmos, archives of befallen Fate, collections of historiolae and precedents, muster points of possibility, menus for operative sorcery, and haunted doorways.

In expanding our appreciation of divination we turned to the Magic of Tarot & Cartomancy, considering the uniting lingua franca that the grammar and shared understandings that tarot provides to find a common language with which to read for querents and help them navigate time’s meanings, the destiny of decisions, and the consequences of our actions; which included weighting the role, ethics, and best practices of diviners to communicate with their clients, and to search not only for forecasts but also strategies and forwards-motions of remediation.

Finally in turning to the appreciation and ongoing engagements with the Magics of Dead Magicians, we got far further into developing and cherishing this thing-we-call folk necromancy: further adumbrating how and why we may usefully consider the everyday encounters and engagements between the living and the dead; and how not only appreciation of the witches and wizards who came before us is good practice, but how inspiration and direct guidance from the ancestralised sorcerous dead may offer us both increased agency and efficacy, but also deeper and more fulfilling orientation, organization, and coordination of our wyrding ways.

In the course of all of this, it was wonderful to remind ourselves what we love about what we get to do at RFG, and to share some of our ideas with you all about where we would like to take our discussions and co-rambles next: especially proposing new episode Topics such as Beasts, Sky-Things, Mesoamerican Day-Signs, and perhaps more!

In all this thoroughly invigorating refreshment of our goals and lenses and ways forward, we gladly reiterate how grateful we are to our editors Mark and Cooper for all their help crafting these ramble-bouquets of topics into cohesive episodes that can appear to you in both a comely and timely manner, and once more offer our sincere thanks to all our listeners and supporters for joining us along the way. We are excited for the next forty episodes!

We wish you all a powerful Tide of the Hallows, full of as much merriment and medicine as you would have, here amongst the treats and the tricks of saints and devils and all the shades of the turning night and dawning light. Hail to the road ahead and those who walk it with us.

We will of course continue to update the website and our facebook page when footnotes become available.
This episode is also available on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, and Spotify.