Magick of the Moon Priestess

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The moon priestess is a great worker of magick. She is often spied by the broken-hearted, by insomniacs and by people on ketamine. She is unearthly and beautiful, having taken something of the moon’s light for herself. Her eyes are like twin blood moons. She is attended always by moths and sometimes by ensorcelled astronomers.

Used with permission.

The moon priestess communes with many lunar deities and creatures but worship none but Her Majesty the Moon.

This is the magick of the moon priestess and the few with whom she deigns to share it.

1: Her Lips of Amber never part
This may be basic social engineering rather than magic, but the results seem quite magical. The stillness of a full moon night has a profound effect on the human animal. The stillness is too immense and loud and the urge to fill it with one’s own noise can be irrepressible. Hence the heightened aggression, the excesses and lycanthropy under a full moon.
The caster vocalizes a prayer to Hecate. Then she must remain silent during a conversation with the target. The target will instinctively seek to fill the cosmic silence with words or actions. These reveal secret thoughts and urges beyond what the target would otherwise admit to.

2: Moon dust
The caster sings  the chorus of Blue Moon and blows a kiss at the target who must be able to see and hear the caster. The target is consumed with the feeling of being on the Moon, a decrepit hull where you are alone forever.
The actual sensation lasts for an hour, but it has been seen to have profound effects on targets. These include a frenzied need for company, a ure to live as a hermit, an obsession with the Moon, and becoming a moon priestess.

3: Ah, pray make no mistake, We are not shy
The caster must sleep naked under the full moon on the pelt of a bitch wolf. Until the new moon she will be singularly beautiful when the moon is up. It is an unearthly beauty, shimmering like reflected moonlight on water. She will pull attention to her as the moon pulls on the tide.
Of course attention and beauty are both blessings and curses.

4: Ala’s child
Ala is a goddess of the underworld and the crescent moon. She keeps the spirits of the departed in her womb. The caster petitions the goddess to let her speak with a dead person, identified by name or by deed. She must offer a dish of yams and beef and a chalice of good wine .
If Ala accepts the offering, the dead soul is born into the world as a great bone-white python. The caster must have copious amounts of live food for the ravenous snake. It will ask questions to the best of its ability until the food runs out or the moon sets.

If Ala declines the offer the python will want no food but the caster herself.

5: The Labor of Wu Zhi
The caster must chop down a tree using only hand-powered tools. As the moon rises in the sky she covers her hands with tree sap. During the next lunar cycle no physical activity will tire the caster. She cannot wash her hand or watch the moon reflected in water during this time. If she does so the accumulated fatigue and pain will come crashing down on her.

6: Luna City
This short ritual must be cast within a circle of evening primroses under a gibbous moon.

The city will appear, upside down over the caster's head, the tallest spires almost touching the ground. The citizens are barely visible on the streets and plazas above, all singing wordlessly until a question is shouted. They will answer in choral unison.
The city normally floats above the Moon’s Longomontanus crater , and it has imparted much of its wisdom to the citizens, who are gloriously mad. Ask anything. There is a good chance that they will know something substantial. In return for their service the city wants a person to climb the spire and join them. If this request is not met, the city will strike the caster with lunacy. Some say they might even descend and run wild on Earth.

7: The Brief Blessing of Jin Chan
The caster invokes the Moon Toad Jin Chan with an offering of paper money. A hundred dollars worth of currency must be defaced in order for the working to take effect.
For the next hour the caster will be perceived as a person of great wealth and unassailable credit. She will not generally be expected to pay up front for anything substantial, but smaller purchases may still have to be purchased with actual coin.

8: Sina leaves for the night sky
The Hawaiian goddess Sina left for the night sky when she grew tired of her husband and his family. This invocation severs a social bond entirely. A ribbon of silk must be died in the blood of a bat, a hare, a toad and the caster under a waning moon. The ribbon must be cut with a pair of scissors owned by at least two named people before the caster.

When the ribbon is cut the relationship is severed. A spouse will forget you, an enemy will tire of hating you, a stalker will cease their obsessive pining. If the caster performs the invocation again the affected target(s) will remember again, even as the new target forgets.

9:  A sign, a sign since we were born 
The caster goes to bed with a silver coin under her pillow. She will dream of how the weather will be during the next lunar cycle.
If the caster wishes to affect the weather, she must catch and strangle a crow in her dream with a length of silver thread.

10: Moon-walk
The caster must spend a 12-hour stretch watching footage of the moon landing. During this time she must neither eat nor drink. Fot the next 12 hours she may ḿove as though affected by the Moon’s microgravity rather than the Earth’s more restrictive pull. The magic ends after 12 hours exactly, so it is best to keep an eye on the clock. More magicians than you’d think have lost track of time in the ecstasy of movement. 

11: O wolves of memory!
This summoning must be performed under a waxing moon. The caster call upon thought-forms of wolves to inhabit four willing participants into her pallid hounds. She sends them out across the world to hunt for memories among those who sleep. The hounds will continue to hunt until the moon sets, or they find the memories they have been sent to find.

12: Only dark listening to dark
At one time, according to Sir George H. Darwin, the Moon was very close to the Earth. The caster cuts herself with a crescent blade and flings the blood at the target. The target is struck by the profound loss felt as the two bodies drifted apart. It is like losing a child or a younger sibling, but raised to a cosmic scale, a solitude only amplified by time and distance.
This feeling is too great to be contained by a human psyche. Most targets run mad, or else are willing to bargain anything to be rid of the monstrous grief.

13: Calvaluna Benificience 
The calvaluna or moon calf is a name given to monstrous births, animals with significant birth defects. The true lunar calf is a creature which owes something to a carnivorous insect and something to a stillborn calf. They are born from the Earth during the dark moon (the period when the Moon is not reflecting direct sunlight towards the Earth). They wail horribly and smell like cordite and blood.

The lunar calves are disgusted by their own existence and will usually run wild, frightening livestock into throwing their calves, biting children, bash themselves to death against pickup trucks  and giving rise to stories of chupacapras and cattle mutilation perpetrated by UFOs.

In a pinch the caster may call upon the lunar calves’ self-loathing nature and use them for healing. She must summon them with an offering of fresh blood (easy if she is hurt). They will appear from dark corners, snarling at each other as they lick up the blood. As they do so the caster may cut their flesh and graft it to her own wounds.
A lunar calf leg may be grafted onto a stump where it will attach. The recipient will have an unnatural cloven hoof, but it is surely better than bleeding to death? Calf flesh pressed to wounds will grow in and often spout horns like insect mandibles.


(Apologies to Carl Sandburg, Philip Larkin, Italo Calvino, Fairport Convention, Emily Dickinson, Gilbert & Sullivan,  the religions of the world and the science of astronomy).